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Waking, Dreaming, Sleeping, Silence
by Laura Valeri Joel wears a soft purple laser light on his head. He dances in the dark before the camera and the tripod, his arms swaying like wings, the laser painting fleeting designs on the wind-wearied walls of our cottage. Joel is small, but graceful, with slender legs and thin, long arms. His dark skin fades shadows with the moonlight; his long, silver-streaked hair alights in flashes of feathery, purple halos. He photographs himself at a delay underneath the starry sky. In the night, against the steady roar of the waves, he looks like a bird doing a mating song for the moon. Cottages on Dog Island must keep porch lights turned off in May for turtle nesting season. Out here, with so few homes, no cars, and no businesses, the scarcity of artificial lights translates into a Venus that gleams like a yellow sapphire, a Jupiter so bright we mistake it for a star. There is nobody around to make noise—the cottages, the only constructions allowed on the island, are mostly uninhabited this early in May—yet Joel dances like the music is booming louder than his heartbeat, his motions fluid and uninterrupted, graceful like spring itself. The sky is so clear that earlier, we had no trouble finding the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper. iPhone can do better: Siri delivered Virgo, Leo, Scorpio, and exotic names of constellations I’ve never heard of, her tongue of ones and zeros fluent in the forgotten language of stars. I give up trying to talk Joel into turning in. When art calls, Joel answers, so I leave him there, to his starry dance, to the waves of laser light that try to rival the shimmering moonlight on the sea. Earlier this evening, we entertained ourselves declaring love to one another through the songs we selected at random from our iPhone’s playlists, but the moment is gone, our playlists exhausted, and now we have the stars, and Joel’s camera, to try to grab on to another bit of eternity. Tomorrow, late in the afternoon, we will have our first real person interaction since a few days ago the owner of the cottage dropped us off. It happens when we decide to dare a skinny dip, even though our neighbors to the east have arrived: we will know this by the loungers that appear on the patio virtually over night, the truck parked in the dirt road, and the American flag directing the faint breeze. Otherwise, our new neighbors make themselves as scarce as our old neighbors, Mr. Neon Orange shirt and his companion Neon Green, who only appear at intervals of seconds on their lookout porch, and never together. We once saw Mr. Neon Orange fishing late in the evening. He was wearing Neon Orange fishing gloves and I knew him guilty of having discarded one in the sand on this otherwise pristine beach, so conspicuously untainted by the usually ubiquitous cigarette butts and plastic wrappers that the orange announced itself from yards away. The discarded fishing glove, swollen with sand and chewed up at the fingers by curious crabs, looked at first like an exotic jellyfish. It leaked a steady stream of sand from its thumb as I picked it up. I vowed that if I found another, I would deliver it to Mr. Orange’s doorsteps with a note: Dispose properly of your trash, or I will report you. A ridiculous threat. Report to whom? On Dog Island, there is no police, no court system, no law except the laws of civility forged in silent consensus among the half-dozen or so full time residents here, who agreed on their island-care duties long before Joel and I even knew Dog Island existed. I’ve only been here a few days, but already, I feel protective of this place, like the pelicans we see offshore, guarding their fishing territories as they bob over the tranquil waves, watchful of us, ready to spread their wings and open their bills wide if we swim too close. Our first person-interaction for the day is brief. Losing my nerve on the skinny dip, I head back to the cottage for my bathing suit. From the porch, I see Joel wrapped in his sarong, standing calf-deep in the water, talking to a man in a white hat and blue shorts. The man is gone by the time I make it down the length of the walkway to the beach, the stranger’s head already turned to his sand-sweeper and to his bright yellow bucket. I’ve noticed that people here, when they’re around, like to pretend we’re not. We return the favor. The only company we crave is that of the shore birds, whose life is always only movement and song. Joel is sitting Indian style on the sand. “That guy caught four sand fleas already,” he tells me about the spurious visit with the yellow bucket man. “I told him I couldn’t find any.” Joel heads back to the cottage for his bathing suit but returns moments later with his own sand sweeper and a bright neon yellow bucket all his own. I’m also in the mood for scavenging. The tide has sculpted some interesting formation with the shallows, and I’m walking over the edges, looking for shells in the shallows formed by the sand. There are so many here, it’s not even a challenge. The cottage is lined with a collection of hundreds picked out by previous summer-time visitors, some bearing painted initials, others years and occasions, winter break 2007; Easter 2012. Bleaching in the sun, the shells attain a dazzling white color, like crumpled hospital sheets. They are piled in the front yard, too, and in the shrubby, creeper-crawling grounds that presumably make up the house’s backyard, which is really a bone yard of bleached dead wood, branches clinging like claws to the sunlight. I find a whelk, faint blue. Blue is the color of the throat chakra, the energy center that the Hindus dedicate to communication, a color for writers, poets, and singers, and Joel and I spent hours last night declaring love to one another with other people’s melodies, from Harvest Moon to Moondance. I’ve been reading a book about mantra-yoga, the mystical arts of sound vibration. To those who practice this form of yoga, the mantras, or chanted phrases and syllables, have the power to create, preserve and destroy, like the three godheads of the Hindu, Brahma, Shiva and Vishnu. I hold the nautilus to my ear. When I was little, my father told me that it’s not the ocean you hear in the spires of a shell, just the trapped wind. I hold the trapped wind in the palm of my hand, and I suck in my breath, heady. Yogis tell us that AUM is the Word of the original creation. It has no meaning of itself, but each of its letters, and the silence at the end, represent the four state of consciousness possible to sentient beings: the waking state, the dream state, deep sleep, and the silence, which is Infinite Consciousness. I gently rest the whelk back in the water where I found it, where I imagine it really wants to be. If I were a shell and I made my way to this quiet beach from the depths of the ocean, why would I want to be anywhere else? Then again, don’t we all come to a point in time when we wish to leave home? When we say to strangers, please, take me away. I’ll be a small stowaway in your suitcase. Later it changes. Later, all we want is to go home to a place we’ve already lost to time. I remember an island I once knew in my childhood; it has been eaten over by condos and luxury hotels, exhausted by inadequate sewage facilities and strenuous water consumption. The place I knew exists only in time. Though I can visit its bones, so hastily buried beneath cookie cutter bungalows, most times I’d rather not even mention its name. Instead I search for that lost island of long ago in unfamiliar landscapes, driving along coastlines of states I’ve never been to before. Joel has fared better in his shell hunt. He shows me a pale green shell that spirals inwards counter clockwise, so small it’s barely the size of a pinky phalanx. “I’m going to keep this one,” he says, proud of this tiny treasure. Later, he tells me the shell has a hermit crab in it. “Smallest hermit crab I’ve ever seen,” he says. “Did you put it back in the ocean?” He shakes his head no, says, “I put ocean water in a bucket, and some sand. The hermit crab will probably eat stuff that’s in the sand, the same stuff that shore birds eat.” I don’t insist, but moments later he gets up to restore the hermit to the ocean. “I really liked that shell,” he grumbles, settling back into his hammock chair, huffing. “I’m sorry. It was somebody’s house. It was already taken.” “I know,” he says. I too am disappointed. I had hoped to find my own special shell, one different from all the ones that are piled by the dozens in the bone yard beneath us and on the railway. I wanted the perfect Dog Island shell, formed of Dog Island sand, bleached by Dog Island sun and holding in its spirals the Dog Island breeze. Suddenly, I am annoyed with myself, and with humanity at large. The birds and the fishes leave nothing behind that doesn’t belong, and they take nothing with them: even the shells are recycled homes. “Why do we need so much?” I cry out. Joel reaches for my hand and squeezes once. In his silence is another love song, one that is best shared on this hour, between us. |
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