Hunter Thompson used to repeat himself.”
“Queen Anne’s dead,” Olive said.
“What?”
“An expression,” Olive said. “You’ve told me that before.”
“And what he said was often about me.”
“So you’ve said. You’re a mesmerizing raconteur.”
“Always stayed in a luxury suite, either in Waikiki or at the Kahala, half-eaten meals all over the place, bottles of brandy and his stashes of weed nearby. Coke in his shirt pocket, usually the same plaid shirt.”
Olive stared at him. He wasn’t fazed. She said, “And he always checked in under the pseudonym Mr. Joe.”
“I think you know why.”
Squinting at him as though he’d just teased her, but with a half-smile of forgiveness illuminating her face, Olive began to speak in a hot whisper of impatience. “Look—”
Sharkey cut her off, saying, “But Hunter was a fan and a recreational socialite. He didn’t know squat about surfing, but he was reckless and had an instinct for risk—for the drama of sport, for physical effort.”
“Right,” Olive said. “He looked you up.”
“He looked me up.” Sharkey was staring into the shadows at the corner of the room, as though by speaking earnestly he might bring the man to life and see him emerge from that darkness. “He’d been given my name by a big-wave rider.”
“So you told me.” Olive wondered where this was going—the urgency, the story she’d heard before. She said, “Absolutely spellbinding.”
She had a wary guarded look, watching him through heavy lids, the look she might have had for one of her patients who’d come to the emergency room with slashes on his arm and a story about how he’d fallen down—fallen down? Or the man with deep scratches on his face, in handcuffs, charged with shooting his wife, saying, “I was cleaning my gun.” But she listened rather than contradicted what was obviously a story, watching without seeming to doubt or mock, because there was no telling what the injured person might do.
“Hunter used to tell me that he envied me. His pseudonym was a kind of compliment.” Sharkey smiled in the direction of the shadow, as though meeting a ghostly gaze. “Mr. Joe.”
Listening, Olive thought, At what point will he realize that he is rabbiting on in a blatant parody, almost as though he’s testing me to challenge him? In speaking of the past, describing his surfing exploits, he had told such extraordinary stories that even the blandest retellings sounded like boasts. Yet the offense of boasters was not the oversized, obnoxious stories but that they were bores, because boasters repeated themselves and couldn’t keep their stories straight, being essentially untruthful in their exaggeration. And they never listened.
What she longed to do these days of his talking was to face him and say, “For the love of God, park it!”
But Olive was too watchful, too cautious, to make an objection to Sharkey, because that was the other trait of boasters—their insecurity, their thin skin. Yet Sharkey had seemed to her to have a healthy ego, and she wondered at this monologue about Hunter Thompson that she had heard before.
“‘Writers are surfers,’ he said. He was a great guy, a kind of tragic figure really, who liked being around stronger men—outlaws, pirates . . .”
“Bikers,” Olive said. “Gun nuts.”
“You got it,” Sharkey said, and seemed to relax, though he did not look at her, was still peering across the room.
What was going on? Didn’t he remember?
That was all he said that evening. But it was enough—too much.
Out of the blue another day he began to talk as though someone had flicked a switch. They were at the table, using chopsticks to eat the bowls of ahi poke and rice that Olive had brought from Foodland on her way home from work. Sharkey put his chopsticks down and sat forward and stared past her.
“I was at this surf meet at Mavericks,” he said. “When it was over—I came second, a money prize—I drove up the coast and had an urge to look up an old girlfriend. Not just an old girlfriend but a great passion, the kind that makes you wild and irrational. I’d been divorced for about a year—my wife never watched me surf.” He made a resentful face, pushing out his lips. “‘People don’t care about me. I’m nobody to them. All they want is to get close to you.’”
Olive said, “San Francisco.”
He nodded. “Mission District. You’re going to think she was some airhead surf bunny I’d known years before that I’d nailed in the back of my van.”
“I don’t think that.”
“She was a college professor I’d met in a coffee shop in Santa Cruz. She was small and kind of sallow, with one of those drowsy, hungry faces, pretty in a girlish way but not unusual, with greeny-gray eyes, the sleepy kind. She looked like a grim little monkey and she was combing her hair at the table when I saw her.”
“Without a mirror.”
“I mean, what woman combs her hair without looking in a mirror?” Sharkey said. “I sat at the next table, and there was something”—he sniffed, twitching his nose—“in the air. She seemed to give off a warm damp odor of sexuality. Maybe a pheromone, but it smelled to me like bark mulch, something of the earth, something swampy. She seemed to be freaked by my leaning into her space and she went to a table outside. I followed her and pestered her—teased her, that was always my method.”
“When boys tease you it’s usually because they’re attracted to you.”
“Someone told me that once.”
“I know.”
“It worked. It wasn’t love, it was desire, an animal urge to possess her. I hung around, I told her I was single, I talked about places in the world I’d been surfing—Cornwall in England got her attention, South Africa too. We had sex that night and the next morning. That great swampy smell got stronger. I wanted to eat her, I felt like a cannibal. We left bite marks on each other. I was half mad. I couldn’t leave her. I almost cried when I had to fly back to Hawaii, and I’d wake up at night and smile, thinking of her. I went back two weeks later. By then we’d talked a little on the phone, but I hated the phone. When we were together she said that she’d found out who I was, that I was married, that she was angry. I told her I was divorced. But she was demented too, the same desire. We had this full-on physical thing, fastened to each other, thrashing, insane. Later she called me, she cried, she wanted me, she threatened to kill herself, she raged at me. I needed to surf, yet I was still obsessed with her. I began to understand what addiction is like, how meaningless it is when people say, ‘It’s bad for you. It’ll kill you. You’ll have to give it up.’ No—I wanted to devour this woman. Crazy, I remember the obsession more than I remember the woman.”
“Then it ended.”
“In the worst way,” Sharkey said. “And a long time afterward I saw her in San Francisco. We had lunch. She was pinched and disappointed, a little old woman with white hair. I barely made it through the meal. I thought—”
“No magic.”
Now Sharkey raised his eyes to her. “You’ve had that experience?”
“You’ve told me that story before.”
“When?” He looked bewildered, as though she’d tricked him into talking.
“The thrill is gone. No magic.”
“So you know?”
“You left out the part where she was going to drown herself in your swimming pool.”
“Motel swimming pool. I told you that?”
“The cure for an unhappy love affair, ‘Wait twenty years.’ That’s what you said.”
“Sunny Jim” Olive sometimes called him, and had often said that his great surfer smile and his beautiful teeth and sunburned and satisfied face, even the scar on his cheek from the old dog bite, showed he didn’t worry—she meant he didn’t reflect, but that seemed like an accusation. He would have said himself that he wasn’t a worrier and not reflective but active. All he wished for were sunny days and big waves.
“I’m not into sitting around, man,” he’d said. But he was sitting now, and in his enforced idleness, resting his back, allowing his sore foot to heal, he became reflective, remembering vivid images rather than stretches of time that involved his saying, “And then . . . and then . . . ,” which he hated.
“I had two boards in South Africa. I asked the African guy who drove me to the beach to help me with the second one. He says to me, ‘I don’t carry.’”
Olive said, “Sometimes a whole year or a whole trip or a whole relationship is summed up in an image, or an injury, or a something someone says. ‘I don’t carry.’”
“One thing that stands for everything.”
“But you told me about that too. Your African driver. It was Jeffreys Bay.”
His fingers flew to his cheek as though he’d been slapped. He’d told her those stories before? It was bad enough to repeat yourself and be boring, but the look on Olive’s face was one of pity, as though she was hearing an old man blab about the past. Repetition was the trait of the bore, and it was lazy-minded, arising from indifference, or contempt: to the bore, all listeners were the same, and repeating a story meant that it didn’t matter whom he was telling it to, filling the air with his talk was a sort of compulsion, the bore being above all an impatient listener, whether a celebrity bore or a hero bore.
But the other implication, that he hadn’t remembered telling the story before—that shamed him too, as much as his being a bore. He had been quietly proud of his memory. His good memory had made up for his poor education, and no one knew or cared that he’d dropped out of high school. Travel had taught him, and he could recall the peculiar curl in the contour of a barrel and the slope on the face of the wave that drove him to go left on the heavy wave at Teahupo‘o in Tahiti, and the soft lips of his first lover, Nalani, whom he’d kissed in the darkness of an old van after school, and the down, like golden leaf fuzz, in the declivity in the small of her back. He remembered names; his memory for details he’d been told was phenomenal. He often said, “I forget nothing” or “I am cursed with total recall,” when he felt his head was buzzing with trivia, his whole life and all its sounds and images crowding his brain. Some memories he would have been happy to delete, many things he wished to forget—scenes and accusations that visited him at night—but he was burdened with them.
Or so he thought. Now it seemed that by some obscure puncture his memory was leaking, as Olive was reminding him, and that he had no access anymore to his memory. He associated the smiling droning bore with the celebrities he’d known. One characteristic of the celebrity—so many of them idolizing surfers—was that he or she was on familiar, even intimate terms with the whole world.
That was the oddity of fame, not that everyone seemed to know you but that you were always confiding to strangers, speaking in general, everyone a potential ally or well-wisher, as though on a lifelong campaign, the guest of honor at every table, the brightest light at every party, always the talker among rapt admiring faces—it seemed that way. You were everyone’s friend, holding conversations with the multitudes, and so you had no real friends, but that didn’t matter, because the intensity of one intimate friend, or a loving wife, was an obstacle to talking to the world. The world was your friend.
The surfer celebrity was the sort of hero who strode into a room, smiling, with confident eyes, and a hush fell, and the celebrity spoke to the room and did not linger; after the talk—no questions—the celebrity departed. Because of being known so well as a power figure, the celebrity was like a visiting friend—his history in everyone’s mind, no introduction needed, and he launched into his talk so self-assuredly that it could pass for the authority of preaching. No one answered back, there was no defiance or disrespect; the celebrity’s presence indicated agreement, since he was the superior elder brother, not to be challenged.
Sharkey had spent his big-wave-riding years as one of these golden men, and though he’d become over time friendlier and more detached, he was sought out by other celebrities, surfers, or visiting musicians or writers—rockers and names.
One of these was Hunter Thompson, himself a talker—a shouter when he was drunk—and seldom a listener, gravelly voiced and unpredictable, attracted to the recklessness and tribalism of surf culture, the available drugs and the drinking, the stew of hangers-on, the promise of sex—sex was like a handshake here, a way of getting acquainted. When there was no surf there was nothing to do except raise hell.
Hunter had become Sharkey’s friend. Everyone in Hawaii knew Sharkey; everyone elsewhere knew Hunter, it seemed. In the fractured days after the accident, in what he thought of as his convalescence, Hunter Thompson was often in Sharkey’s thoughts—he mentioned him to Olive, he talked about the derangement of celebrity, the famous person, known to all, looking for listeners.
“In actual fact,” Olive said again, with as much tact as she could, “you’ve told me that before.”
The softened words still stung Sharkey, especially as Olive had listened to an hour or more of his talk, and he realized that he’d bored her, as Hunter had often bored him, telling the same drunken stories in a hotel room or over the phone from Woody Creek at three in the morning. But his embarrassment was brief; he quickly forgot what he had told her and how she had responded.
“He liked me. We had plans.”
She nodded and decided not to say, “So you’ve told me.”
She was surprised by his solemn, reflective tone, as though he’d just remembered these incidents and was imparting them with reverence for the first time. She knew they were old settled memories that he’d told her before. Why he was repeating them she had no idea, but if she commented too often he’d be self-conscious; so she listened, as though hearing them for the first time, because he spoke in tones of discovery and wonderment.
Sometimes her patients, stunned by a drug or waking from surgery, behaved in this muddled way, and so she listened to Sharkey, trying not to seem clinical or detached, to his earnest recollections as he walked her backward through his memories, as though on a path they’d traveled together. He seemed to believe that everything he said was a stark revelation, while she squirmed, pitying him for his obvious repetition. None of it was new to her.
At what point would he realize he’d told her all this before?
“Earthquakes,” he said, and a smile flickered on his lips. He did not hear Olive’s shallow sigh. “Great occasions for meeting girls—I mean, hooking up. They run out of the building and cower in a street or in a doorway. I get next to the chicks, hugging them during the tremor. There’s no rush on earth like it—better than a wave. ’Quake foreplay, ’quake sex.”
“San Francisco,” Olive said.
“We were in the doorway”—he hadn’t heard her—“and the car alarms are going off and the windows breaking—glass shattering in the street—and we’re snatching at each other, insane, like it’s the end of the world. And that’s how the world will end, destruction and orgies.”
“And you spent the night with her.”
“Another time,” he said, gabbling now, his eyes fixed on his sore foot, which he was flexing, “I’m in a hotel in Bali—surf meet at Uluwatu—and there’s a fire alarm. Everyone is evacuated and standing in the dark in their bathrobes, seriously worried, except me. I put my arm around this gorgeous woman and reassure her, and she thanks me as I stroke her. There’s no fire. But the sudden event, maybe fear, has bonded us. I head back to her room with her and we get it on—panic sex.”
It gave him such pleasure to relate these ridiculous stories, as though for the first time, that she stopped saying she’d heard them before.
“Getting married? Big mistake. ‘Why should I have to share you?’ ‘Why doesn’t anyone talk to me?’ Good thing we didn’t have any kids. Her family wanted them, so they could have them to themselves. Big pressure, because her family was involved. Women in Hawaii live close to their families, so they’re always making bad decisions, and the family sorts it out. Kids, bills, all the crises. They ended up hating me.”
“You were young.”
“And I was young.”
Olive withdrew, she took refuge in her work, but on her return home Sharkey was glad to see her so that he could lead her back into his past, all of it known to her now.
“We used to paddle into the big waves. Then they towed us. These days the young guys paddle into bigger and bigger waves. It’s the boards. Smaller, lighter. And the guys are more intense.”
He had wooed her with his stories once, and now she was near to being repelled, except that she was so sorry for him in his plodding in circles.
“My mother wanted me to stop surfing. She saw me lose a contest—I was just a kid—and she mocked me. But when I became successful she boasted about me to her friends. She was weak and hypocritical. Yet I was so sad when she died.”
Olive was surprised by his solemnity—it seemed stagy and forced. But he was frowning, as though he’d just remembered these things and was speaking about them with reverence for the first time. Why he was repeating them now she had no idea, but if she mentioned that, he’d be self-conscious.
When he’d wooed her with stories, he’d held her attention, because all of them were fresh, and her eyes had brightened as he spoke. He was a good talker, and it surprised her that, storyteller that he was, he had never written a line—he was stumped with a pen, he’d doodle a little, then crumple the paper. But it didn’t matter. He had stories.
Testing him, because she’d suffered all day with the memory, she said, “You killed a man a few weeks ago. You don’t even know his name.”
He shook his head, as though correcting her. “Ran into a drunk homeless guy.”
She roused him early the next morning, before he could protest. She said, “You’re coming with me, don’t eat,” and he sat stunned and sleepy in the car.
“‘Nobody heard him, the dead man,’” she said on the road.
“Which one?” Sharkey said.
“It’s a poem. We learned it at school.”
“Poem,” he said, expelling the word in a flat breath, as though it were meaningless.
“The dead man moans,
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.”
“Dead men don’t moan,” Sharkey said. “Dead men are gone.”
Olive looked sideways at him and, seeing that they were near the emergency entrance of the hospital, decided not to reply. Sharkey allowed himself to be checked in, Olive doing the talking. He was booked for an MRI and assigned a cubicle. Olive left him in the care of a nurse, and glancing back, she saw him being handed a flimsy hospital gown and cloth slippers. When she stopped in after lunch he was cross-legged on the bed; and the next time she looked in he was being wheeled back to his cubicle, a big man in baby clothes but still smiling.
After the long day he crept to the sofa on the lanai and, like a cat folding itself, curled into a ball of repose. He resumed staring at the setting sun, in the posture of the previous day.
He began to speak.
Olive said, “Park it,” and then quickly, “I think you’ve told me that before.”
Waiting for the results, because Olive asked for the specialist at Queen’s to read the scans, Sharkey sat, sometimes curled and catlike, sometimes in his yoga posture.
“The doctor cleared you,” Olive said in a disbelieving whisper two days later.
“What doctor?”
Instead of answering that, she said, “I’m worried about you.”
“Olive—the fretter.”
His lazy boast, always, was that he never fussed, and he was contemptuous of anyone who claimed to care, as though they were revealing a weakness.
“The best doctor at Queen’s read your MRI.”
“What doctor? What MRI?”
“‘He’s good to go,’ he said. You’re fine.”
Sharkey smiled as though at a child too small to understand and needing to be humored. He said, “Of course I’m fine. Listen, there was no hospital, okay? I’ve been surfing awesome waves.”
Was it the conspicuous humiliation of the hospital gown, having to submit to the tunnel of the machine, or the long, almost all-day delay in Emergency? But he remembered nothing of it.
She said, “Except for the hospital and the tests, you haven’t left the house.”
He began to laugh, but softly, and then he stopped and nodded, as though he’d become aware that he was mocking her for inventing the trip to the hospital and the scan.
He glanced at Olive in pity for not understanding him, as though she were someone adrift in a sea of uncertainty and seeming to believe she was safe, just bobbing in circles and liking the rise and fall of the swell and never realizing she was lost. All this time, his soft, accommodating smile.
The sun was setting again into the seam of the horizon, the last of the light flashing on his face. He was remembering the barrel of a wave. Olive was watching him. When he turned to her, she was horrified by the sight of him: his wide-open eyes were unlit, dull, and disappointed, his face waxen, no light behind it. She remembered the man on the road, his martyr’s death mask of surrender. Then Sharkey resumed talking in the darkness, another story she’d heard before.