Fiction. Near-future literary speculative story. A foreigner on a small island, a debt, an ocean-monitoring float, and a kiosk about to land.
The Video
i watch the video again before meeting the man i owe money to.
forty-three seconds. the voice calls the island nalo, which is its name, though the voice says it like a word it just made up. the road bends left from the jetty past the place that sells coconuts. smoke off a grill. palms leaning. a woman in a green dress carrying two yellowtail by the gills. the brothers’ bar — i didn’t know it was theirs then — with the blue plastic chairs and the bulbs on string, and the sign that said fresh fish today in english under the local word. and in one shot, half a second, behind the woman with the fish: the float. white, low, blinking.
i open the archive copy. the float’s in the archive too.
i remember the original without it.
i can’t tell if i’m watching the same copy or a repost or a cached version or my own bad memory of the first time i saw it eighteen months ago in a flat in a city i no longer pay rent in. i’ve watched it maybe four hundred times. i used to write ad copy for ferry companies. i know what forty-three seconds is supposed to do to a person. it did it to me.
i close the phone. the screen’s cracked from the night i nearly drowned. the crack runs from the lower left up through the green dress so when she carries the fish she carries them through a small lightning.
the bar’s half empty at this hour. i eat slowly. one fish and rice. a bowl of broth i didn’t order and will be charged for. i make the meal last because i don’t know when the next one is. suriadi — the restaurant brother — passes my table twice without looking at me, which is how i know he’s already decided to let me eat on credit. i don’t thank him. you don’t thank suriadi. you eat slowly and you pay when you can.
the lender comes in when he said he would. his name doesn’t matter. clean shirt. he sits down without asking. he asks about repayment in the voice you’d use to ask about somebody’s mother.
i tell him work is coming.
he asks if it’s real.
there is a float, i say.
he looks at me for a long moment. then he laughs once, not unkindly, and orders a beer, and pays for it himself, and leaves without finishing it. suriadi takes the half-bottle away without looking at me either.
Karya
karya is forty-six.
his hands are the colour of the inside of a coconut shell. he’s been on the water since he was nine and he knows the current at the south point at every state of tide. he can tell you which way the wind will turn an hour before it turns. he loves a particular yellow he sees in the sky maybe two mornings a year, just after the rains end, and he has told no one this because there is no one to tell. he doesn’t know what a dashboard is. he saw one once on a tourist’s tablet and understood it was a picture of something the tourist thought mattered, and he didn’t ask what.
he pulled the foreigner out of the water on a tuesday in the second week of the wet season. the foreigner had gone swimming off the south point at the wrong hour. everyone on the island knew about the current there. the foreigner didn’t. karya was coming in with a small catch when he saw the arm. he turned the boat. he got a rope under the foreigner’s chest on the second pass. the foreigner coughed salt water onto karya’s deck for a long time and then he cried, which karya pretended not to see, and then he was quiet.
karya took him to shore. he gave him water. he sat with him until he could stand.
he said: the video didn’t show the current.
then he went home.
Seed Packets
the woman with the seed packets came off the morning ferry the day after my first rescue.
i was sitting on the wall by the jetty because my legs didn’t trust me yet. she had a clear plastic bag with maybe thirty paper packets in it. she asked the boy who ties the ropes where she could buy land or soil. he didn’t get the second word. she said it again. soil. she scuffed the dust with her sandal. he pointed inland, vaguely, and went back to the rope.
she walked off in the direction he’d pointed, holding the bag in front of her with both hands like a lantern.
wednesday. bad signal. the woman on the phone is in a city i can’t place from her accent. she says they won’t hire me for the role we talked about in march. they hired someone in singapore. however. however, since i’m already there, and since the pilot needs someone on the ground for the first weeks, would i be interested.
the voice breaks up. no catch function yet, she says, about something. i don’t know what. the phrase sits in my ear.
i say yes before she finishes the sentence about the rate.
the second time i see the woman with the packets she’s rented a strip of land inland from the bar, behind where the road bends. maybe twelve metres by four. she’s cleared it herself. she’s on her knees with a trowel, planting things. i’m walking to suriadi’s to eat on credit and i don’t want to think about it. she looks up. she smiles at me without wanting anything. i smile back. i don’t stop.
the soil is salt. anyone could tell her. nobody has.
The Cold Boat
karya’s brother is suriadi and suriadi wants a freezer.
six years now. a real one, that holds the catch at temperature. not the secondhand chest with rust at the seal that hums in the wrong key. with a freezer he could buy when the price was low. he could feed the bar through a bad week without sending karya out in weather karya shouldn’t be out in.
he doesn’t have a freezer. he has the chest. on slow nights he watches empty plates come back to the kitchen and counts them. not because counting helps. it’s just what his hands do when he’s worried.
on the slow nights he started buying fish from the cold boat. the cold boat had been coming since before the float, or so people said. only when the weather is bad. only for now. on bad-weather days karya wants to go out anyway. karya does not believe in weather. if there is fish on ice already in the kitchen, karya stays in. that’s what suriadi tells himself. the price is fair. karya doesn’t need to know. suriadi tells himself this in the same words every time, which is how he knows the words have started doing work for him.
the cold boat is bigger than any of the local boats. it comes in from somewhere up the coast, has a refrigerated hold and a winch on the back, and a man at the wheel who never gets off. two crew unload crates onto the jetty in twenty minutes and the boat is gone again. it never buys.
i saw the cousin once. his name is edi, he’s twenty-two, he’s unloading a block of ice the size of a car battery off the back of a scooter, the block sweating on his forearm, laughing at something his friend said. he sees me watching and lifts the ice in mock salute. a strong man, knowing it.
he calls something over to me in the local language. i don’t catch it. his friend translates: he says, government rubbish, that thing. his friend points out to sea at the float. edi laughs again.
then he asks me what work i do, in english, with effort. i tell him i write for companies. he nods. he says he wants to drive a truck on the mainland someday. then he says the trucks on the mainland don’t have drivers anymore. his friend says something to him in their language and edi shrugs. he carries the ice into suriadi’s kitchen.
there was a night before edi died when the bar made more money than it had in a week the year before. the road crew from the south end came in, twelve of them, and stayed for hours. after the last table left, suriadi brought the cash out to the porch and they counted it under the bulbs with the charcoal still red in the pit.
suriadi talked about the freezer. karya talked about a bigger boat because that was what he knew how to want. the float blinked white in the chop.
suriadi said there’d been a box on the ferry, a white one, same week the float appeared.
karya said there were boxes every day now.
they went back to counting.
the crate’s on the jetty on a thursday. i’m walking back from the south end where i’ve been pretending to look for somewhere cheaper to sleep. wooden, stencilled, same blocky font as the crates that come off the cold boat, same small unfamiliar logo in the lower right corner. taller than the fish crates. wrong shape for fish. one of the boards has a label fragment stuck to it, half torn off, and i read it sideways as i pass: — iosk unit 1 of —
i keep walking.
i don’t turn around. i pass karya coming the other way and he nods and i nod and we don’t speak. when i get back to the caravan i sit on the step a long time and i don’t look at my phone.
the dashboard is on my phone. it was supposed to be on a tablet they were going to ship but the tablet didn’t arrive so it’s on my phone, the cracked one, the one i look at my children on. i log in at night because the signal’s better. the dashboard shows the float and two others further down the coast i didn’t know existed, and the catch data from the cold boat, and a column called readiness with checkmarks against most rows and one empty box. the empty box is labeled local operator. above it the rows are labeled network handshake and service window. both are checked.
i look at my children on the same screen. i mean i look. i don’t describe the photo to myself, i just look.
then i close the photo and the dashboard’s still there underneath.
the third time i see her she’s at the water seller’s, buying two twenty-litre jerricans. the water seller’s charging her the foreigner price and she’s paying without arguing. her hands are dirty in the way of someone who’s been trying. she sees me and this time she speaks. she says: do you know if anyone here sells compost.
i say i don’t know.
she says: the soil is strange.
i say: yes.
she nods, and pays, and carries the jerricans away two-handed, walking carefully because they’re heavy and she’s small.
the first money lands on a thursday. less than i expected. two parts; this is the first. i send some home before i do anything else, less than i wanted to send.
i find the lender at the bar. he counts what i give him. it isn’t the urgent part of the debt yet. it’s a piece. he nods. he says he’ll see me friday of week three for the rest.
i eat that night at suriadi’s and pay for it. suriadi takes the money and counts it and doesn’t say anything.
the next week i rent the room above the dive shop because the caravan rent came up and i can almost afford the room. i move my one bag.
The Headlamp
karya goes out on a saturday in weather he shouldn’t.
he goes because edi went out, and edi hasn’t come back, and the cold boat is already on its way to where edi’s last signal was, and karya won’t let the cold boat be the one to find his cousin.
he goes drunk. not falling drunk. the drunk of a man who’s been ashore for four days and whose hands need something to do.
i hear about it at the bar in pieces.
the boy who ties the ropes says the cold boat found edi’s headlamp floating, no edi.
he says edi had been going out further every week. that the close water didn’t have fish anymore. that the cold boat had it.
a woman whose name i don’t know says the coast guard came from the next island over but came too late.
a man at the next table says the float saw everything. that thing out there, he says, gesturing. it sees. it’s for seeing. his friend tells him to shut up.
suriadi isn’t at the bar. suriadi’s at the hospital on the next island, on a boat someone lent him, going to be with karya, who’s alive. someone says karya was found by the cold boat. someone says he was found by a fishing boat from the next bay. someone says he came in on his own engine, two hours after edi’s headlamp was found, and he didn’t speak when they pulled him onto the jetty.
i don’t know which version is true. by morning there are four, by evening there are more, each person tells the version that lets them sleep.
edi is buried later that week. the box is closed because there’s nothing in it but the headlamp.
karya wakes in a room that isn’t his. the ceiling is white in a way ceilings on the island aren’t. there’s a tube in his arm. he’s alive. he understands this slowly.
his brother’s in the chair by the bed, asleep with his mouth open. suriadi looks older asleep. karya watches him.
he tries to remember what saved him. he remembers the engine cutting. he remembers wind from the wrong direction. he remembers seeing where edi’s boat had been, the wake already gone but the foam pattern still wrong. he remembers shouting. he doesn’t remember a rope or being pulled.
later, when he’s home, people will tell him versions. the cold boat. the fishing boat from the next bay. his own engine. the float. he’ll listen to each version and he’ll say yes, thank you, and he won’t believe any of them, and he won’t say so. he’ll go back out on the water within the month because not going out is worse than going out. he won’t drink before going out. he’ll drink after.
he won’t say his line about the video again. not the line, not any line like it. he’ll get quieter in a way only suriadi notices.
Yes
i get the call about the kiosk on a tuesday morning.
the same woman. better signal somehow, briefly. she says the unit is on-island — she uses that phrase, on-island — and installation is scheduled for the eleventh. she says they’ll need someone local to maintain it. she says my contract is up on the ninth but they’d be open to discussing an extension. she says the brothers’ place, by the way, has exactly the foot traffic we model for.
i say nothing long enough that she asks if i’m still there.
i say i’m still here.
the fourth time i see her she’s at suriadi’s, at the corner table, sunburnt across the nose and the tops of her shoulders, drinking a beer she’s not finishing. she’s telling the man next to her — who isn’t listening — that she’s going to try a different bed further from the road and she’s ordered something called a soil amendment from a city on the mainland and it should arrive next week. she says i think the problem is just that i started in the wrong place. the man nods without hearing her. she doesn’t seem to mind. she’s talking to keep something alive that isn’t the plants.
a caravan came in two days ago with an espresso machine in the doorway. a la marzocco. it sits in the doorway because there’s nowhere else to put it inside, and the man who owns the caravan hoses it down every evening with fresh water against the salt. he is thin, sunburnt, doesn’t speak to anyone. the machine hasn’t made coffee yet. the sign outside the caravan is hand-painted in a script too thin and clean for here. it went up this morning over the old hand-painted one for the fruit stall that used to be there. the old sign is leaning against the back of the caravan, facing the wrong way.
the urgent part of the debt clears on the friday of the third week. i hand the lender an envelope at the bar. he counts it in front of me, not to insult me, it’s just what he does. he nods. he says we’ll talk again in a month about the rest. he buys me a beer. he leaves.
i sleep above the dive shop. fan on, window that doesn’t quite close.
on the saturday i go to dinner at suriadi’s.
i see the freezer first. through the open front of the bar, against the back wall of the kitchen, gleaming white, new. someone has plugged it in. there’s a cardboard box on the floor next to it with the styrofoam still in it.
inside, the place is full. full in a way it hasn’t been for a long time, and there’s no reason for it, it’s just a saturday that’s decided to be generous. the bulbs are on. the charcoal smells right. karya is at the table by the kitchen door where the regulars sit and he’s telling a story with both hands, leaning into it. the men around him are laughing. suriadi is moving between the kitchen and the front the way he moves when the night is good — his shoulders are down. he has the look of a man whose hands are doing what he wants them to do.
i sit at a small table by the wall. suriadi sees me and lifts his chin. he brings me a beer i didn’t order. i didn’t need to order.
i carry the kiosk in my head. it’s on-island. eight days. they don’t know yet. the woman in the city said the site would be ideal.
the fish comes. it’s good. i eat slowly. i was eating slowly the first night too, in this same room, at a different table, because i couldn’t afford to finish. i can finish now.
karya, at his table, refills his own glass without looking. he doesn’t look up at me.
suriadi passes my table on his way back to the kitchen with empty plates stacked on his arm. he slows for half a second.
another beer, eh? he says.
i look up.
the woman with the seed packets is at the corner table again. her shoulders are still pink. she’s laughing at something. the man next to her, a different man this time, is laughing too. her hands are clean tonight. she’s given up on the plants, or she’s about to, or she will by tuesday. i won’t know.
out past the boats, through the open front of the bar, i can see the float. it blinks. the chop’s picked up.
yes, i say.
i pay the bill in cash without checking the amount. suriadi takes the money without counting. he’s never not counted before.
karya laughs at his own story, the loud single laugh of a man surprised by his own joke, the men around him laugh after him a beat behind.
my mouth opens.