1.
The night is alive with the cries of flying foxes.
Potus is asleep in his experimental gardens.
He has dreamed himself onto this island, this golden core. A tired kind of ecstasy to be alive, the Spirea in bloom and the oily seabirds back again. Nurse Talbot to take care of him, plodding over flagstones with eggs and coffee. She sleeps in Hut Number Three, the one haunted with echo-children.
On the veranda overripe bananas drop to the floor, peeling as they fall, and are attacked by a stream of green ants. Outside a plant crawls around, filled with vegetable fluid of powerful magnetism. If Potus does not act soon the flames will be licking his door by daybreak.
It is the hour when black beetles take possession of kitchens and white worms are busy mining the woodwork. Despite an after dinner infusion of citronella his sleep has been troubled, and Potus falls from his hammock bathed in sweat as one drowned.
Hung on the wall is an old fishing net weighted with stone. Potus grabs it, drags it behind him as he stumbles toward the beach and into the surf. He walks in a fugue of secondhand perfume with a scent of decaying hyacinths manured with a generous ladling of self-pity and regret.
Waist deep in the water, waves slapping his ambitious genitals, Potus casts the net, arms arcing in the moonlight. The throw is perfect–divining is in his blood–and the flora erupts, literally expanding the perimeter of the island.
In his dreams Potus is a handsome man well under forty, with vigorous silver hair, square chin held high. He wears a plain blue sarong and walks barefoot. His is a finely muscled torso.
Nightly he reads from the diaries Nurse Talbot sets on his pillow. What entity penned these thoughts? he wonders, burying his nose in the pages.
Potus likes to write in the margins using ink harvested from the sea, and always in the wrong hand and always in a tortured, giddy scrawl: I’ll eat my bars of soap and speak the truth I will!
When Potus sleeps the Child of the Moon, crouched over his short broom, enters to sweep the floors.
In the morning he awakens with the sun as is his wont, dreams of whoredom and banquets evaporating into salt.
While relieving himself he spots a body washed upon the shore.
2.
Potus conceals himself in the pepper vines for all of a week watching Eleanor orchestrate her life to fit the flow of the island. She busies herself with debris from the shipwreck, dragging chests and crates into a dry cave overlooking the cove. She avoids the jungle, keeping mostly in the shade of a baobab tree, reading from a crate of atlases.
Every evening after a dinner of something in tins Eleanor makes her toilette and Potus watches and hungers. When the bats begin to sing she retires, succumbing to sleep with guttural chants in unknown tongue.
Worried that without the proper preparatory measures the nature of his loins, such as they are, might challenge Eleanor’s constitution when first she lays eyes on him, Potus designs a means of hinting piecemeal at the nature of his Priapic condition. Each night as Eleanor talks in her sleep Potus scratches a drawing of himself in the sand outside her tent. On the first night he draws a stick figure. On the second he fleshes out the limbs, on the third he adds facial features, his sex and so on, more details each day until on the seventh night when he renders a life-size figure unmistakably aroused, the organ tied against his stomach with palm cordage, a protective necessity when diving in the coral reefs. As an afterthought, and perhaps as much to fraternize with the luminescent mole shrimp, Potus presses his body into the wet sand, making a perfect frontal mold.
But on the day of his scheduled appearance he fails to show and Eleanor finds him dreaming in a fetal position under the bougainvillaeas.
He extends his palm.
Name’s Potus.
Eleanor opens her mouth but no sound comes out. It is as if a blackboard eraser has been wiped across her mind. Frightened, she takes her bag of candy and stuffs it down the front of her dress.
We’d been up late on the boat the night before while Father gave us astronomy tests, she stammers.
Time drags by in dull, unhappy days.
Name’s Potus, he says. You’ve just arrived.
Today the island weeps, she answers, biting a knuckle to stifle a sob.
I was cleaning my revolvers, Potus says.
If you’re expecting the Hollywood hula-hula stuff I’m afraid you’ll be let down with a bang. Dinner’s at dusk.
Eleanor is a white witch, more to be feared than toothless Fetish Women on the dark side of the island.
Dinner is shark’s fin soup with crabmeat, a prawn mayonnaise, and a couple of roast ducklings.
You know, I’ve dreamt meals like this. Potus looks as if about to sing.
She meets his eyes, then murmurs drowsily: I trust you enough to feel afraid.
Name’s Potus, he says, extending a hand.
That night Eleanor stands in the doorway splattering droplets that turn to liquid moonstones. Her hair is enormous and awry as if a family of toucans had assembled there overnight.
I took a rain bath to remove the sheep taint, Potus stutters.
Eleanor sketches signs in the antediluvian sand, her beetle wing earclips flashing in the candlelight.
Potus kneels, touching the swirls, the loops and herring-bone directives.
She has breached the rules and Potus is defeated. Afterwards the two talk medical jargon in bed.
I’m as peaceful as a twice-shriven monk and blithesome as a petted puppy. And you, cara?
Same, says Eleanor.
3.
Criminals among the alligators!
The arrival of Refugio is presaged by the arrival of a child on the beach, a growth the size of an orange on his forehead, a hollowed and bleeding corruption. Nurse Talbot dresses the wound with hot pomegranate poultice.
The following morning a strutting dwarf with cruel eyes and pointed, perfumed beard hoists himself onto Potus’s bedroom windowsill. His eyes have a shocked, insane radiance, unblinking as a lizard. Tubes have been attached to every one of his orifices, including several new ones recently drilled by surgeons.
His voice is tender. Wifely, even.
Hope I didn’t get you all waked up.
Eleanor is out of the hammock standing in the first rays of dawn, peach light harmonizing her splendor. She stands shivering, a slim vanilla figure that might have escaped from a Roman fountain.
Your skin may be soft but your lips are blue and your hips jut out too sharply. You’re not one of us. Go now to your own people.
Refugio suppresses a shudder as his pale hands pour a glassful of hogwash.
You have a strong sense of drama, Mrs. Potus. Two runnels of blood flow down his neck. Somewhere a cockatoo greets the arrival of the morning sunblaze.
Eleanor knows from the audible click in her head that some inner secret drawer has been invaded. She knows too well from her years in New Orleans that the gris-gris Refugio sheds about him levels discord and disease, his dangling ancient amulets too powerful for even Potus’s oneiric shields. It is only a matter of time before Refugio has completely usurped the gratitude of his hoodwinked hosts.
Eleanor and Potus eat their plates of Chinese spaghetti, which have been fried with prawns, slices of chicken liver, onion and crabmeat, egg and a few green leaves in a rich sauce of undetermined origin.
Hot work, Potus snorts, with all this sun.
Gosh it is hot, Eleanor observes. She forms sentences elegantly, pinching words from the atmosphere between thumb and forefinger.
Potus feels as if a lariat is being thrown over his head.
A slight figure in a sharkskin dinner jacket bounds up the veranda steps.
Still no bun in the oven? Refugio’s hands are shining with a film of oil.
Potus gives him his straight go-to-hell look. You do know that it is illegal to threaten Potus.
Eleanor acts out a funny scene from one of Mr. Moliere’s plays and then reads a sharply biting passage from Candide. Nurse Talbot brings anchovy sandwiches with saucers of milk for the cats. Before the party is over Potus has torn off his skirts, what with his mad dancing and too much punch.
Potus awakens to find Refugio standing by his hammock with an armful of frangipani flowers. Eleanor, gagged and bound with banana leaves, moans feverishly, hands clasped in prayer, a single white floweret of jasmine in her disheveled hair. The whites of her eyes glow like ice.
A second later he and Refugio are rolling across the floor, half mad with hate and fury. Potus realizes at once that Refugio’s is a better body than his–younger, harder, quicker, suppler. His attempt to seize a stranglehold on the naked little bastard is a bad miscalculation, greased as he is.
Refugio places his boot heel against Potus’s Adam’s apple.
To think I pitied you!
Pity being halfway to love, I will accept that, Potus says before passing out.
The infants in Hut Three commence their wailing.
4.
Potus and Eleanor awake in a canoe surrounded by a thousand miles of empty ocean. Their hands and ankles are bound. They are naked as jaybirds and regard each other, shameless as pagans.
You must reteach me everything, Potus says.
You’re full of piss and vinegar, Eleanor says. Just like mother.
That night Potus dreams of pie and being forced to swallow a black string.
In the morning their canoe is beached on some brand new island!
There are pineapples, and limes and sapodillas, papaya trees, slim and unbranched, spreading an umbrella of leaves above the orange-gold fruit. Tamarinds, prickly pears, and melons lying among the rocks. Small green pumpkins climb trees and hang like human heads.
We’ll just have to go through the alphabet, Eleanor says.
He makes as if to shake her hand.
Name’s Potus.
Their world is fun.
5.
Potus spits in disgust. All those diaries, gone!