While Olive worked every day at the hospital, Sharkey sat as though immobilized, yet smiling his sleepy smile—repeating his stories and imagining that his days were full of sunlight and big waves. She could not convince him that his life was emptying, narrowing, closing in on him—closing in on her too. He was unworried, yet she felt the onset of uncertainty that extended to her body as a physical imbalance, at times producing dizziness, a feeling at moments of vertigo. Was it loneliness that provoked the sensation that she was toppling forward?
Often in this mood she was weakened by a wave of nausea passing through her. She wanted to tell him, “I am not feeling well. Therefore I’m alive.” In the house with him she became mournful—lonely, a feeling she seldom had when she was alone—and at times she went outside or back to the hospital to cure herself of loneliness among her friends.
“You stay okay?” Luana, the shift nurse, asked.
“A little pukey.”
Luana hugged her, big warm damp arms and hair thick with coconut oil. “You take something, sister. It’s a shame.”
“It’s a sign of life,” Olive said, thinking of Sharkey’s delusion of health in his weird confinement of repetition.
But Luana’s question had startled her—she had not thought she’d looked so obvious in her discomfort. Olive’s nausea was unusual. She had arrived early so that she could meditate awhile before she signed in. But life goes on, she thought, emptying her mind, and was heartened: if she was sick, she’d get well.
She sat in a lotus posture under an awning on the roof, with a view of the sea, and she inhaled the day, using her breathing exercises to clear her head and settle her stomach. It seemed to work; a sensation of weightlessness lifted her. But when she lay flat on her back in a corpse pose a new thought intruded: there was nothing like this variation in Sharkey’s day-to-day—no friend, no yoga, no questions. He sat smiling. Was he holding his breath? His past crowded his present, and the rest was a void. She knew that much of what he’d claimed he’d done was boasting or invention, but that was how heroes lived, inhabiting their own myth with such conviction that other people were persuaded. Yet most people’s lives, no matter how humble, were marked by incident, the rise and fall of hope, the swelling of self-belief, the looking for more, and always the waking to a new day.
Olive saw that Sharkey’s repetitive life, more serious than a delusion, was like a terminal illness.
Yet the man was functional. He ate, he slept, he limped in his garden, feeding his geese and chickens, plucking blossoms, squinting at the sun. Perhaps this was how prisoners or monks lived their lives, shuffling in narrow spaces, pausing often, adjusting themselves to their confinement, like animals in zoo enclosures, learning how to repeat their small steps: pacing, drowsing, blinking, head-bobbing, vegetating—functionless behavior, with the shallow breathing and slowed heartbeat of someone buried alive.
And if you interrupted them in their pacing, asked a question, you got the same answer, and perhaps a monologue—something circular, the thought that had been stewing in their mind.
Or was she imagining his condition, exaggerating his passivity and drowsy routines? He was an energetic surfer, but he was a panting animal too. A lion pounds after its prey across the savannah and seizes it by the haunches to devour, roaring and tearing with its teeth, and gorges itself, and then lolls and naps, yawning under a tree, days of this, long periods of grunting repose. The monk seal on a wave, the water dog of the Hawaiian coasts, tossed in surf, diving for food, rolling in the swells nipping at fish, until at last exhausted, noses to shore and bumps up the hot sand above the tidemark and sleeps. He was that lion, he was that seal.
Tending to his chickens, he seemed himself: gathering eggs, feeding his geese and ducks, picking lilikoi and avocados, making his meals. Something might not be working inside him, a nerve circuit might have died, yet he was alive. But the stories, the smile, the head-bobbing—her worry was their sameness, and her anxiety wearied her.
He took no notice of her. He was asleep when she set off for work; he was tired on her return, so she saw only the limp man, doddering in his fatigue, and was often grateful, because she was tired too and hadn’t the strength to rouse him, even less to listen to another story she already knew.
Her weakness was like a reproach—her need to sit down to look at her laptop (she’d always done it standing), or bracing herself to clutch her tablet to look at a patient’s history, or to read a temperature or a heart rate or bloodwork. She’d climb a flight of stairs and feel lightheaded and need to steady herself on the handrail—and then the griping in her gut and the intimation that she was about to heave, her mouth filling with saliva.
Just as quickly it would pass and she’d regain the confidence that it was nothing, or something she’d eaten, a chunk of bad ahi, or—powerfully—that it was a visceral reaction to her worrying about Sharkey; how nothing had been the same since the accident. But she was cautioned too, and thought, I’m probably in worse shape than he is.
With her it was physical, and these days laid her low, napping in the nurses’ room at the hospital; with him it was a dropping of his spirit, a diminishment, seeming like obstinacy, the great flame of his being reduced to an afterglow, like the ocean after sunset, blackening, going cold. There were no words for his condition; for hers there were plenty: she was weak and nauseous and easily fatigued, she felt disgusted and sad and futile.
She was no use to him; he said he didn’t need her. She was superfluous, except at work.
And that was the great thing about a job, the sustaining illusion that you were necessary, and if you didn’t show up, the work would never get done. It was the conceit of your being essential. Except for a spell as a lifeguard, Sharkey had never had a job. He knew nothing of deadlines and emergencies, nothing of budgets, of money. He lived in his passion for the water: if the surf was up, he was up, in his car or on his board, all other promises were broken, all other urgencies faded into insignificance, his whole attention was fastened onto his being on a wave, even in rain and wind, sometimes in starlight, sometimes in moonless darkness.
So the conditions of the water had always determined the rhythm of his days. The tidal variations were so small—a few feet at most in Hawaii—they hardly mattered; but the swell and the shapes of the waves were the pulse and beat of his vitality. And when, between the big swells, the surf subsided, Sharkey swam, he free-dived off Shark’s Cove or spearfished; he did not sit. Either he was active in the water or else he lay in the sand, chewing air or lightly snoring, the coarse grains clinging to his skin, the sand heating his back. And when he was rested he rolled himself down the beach to the water and flashed into the bluey-green depths among the parrotfish and shoals of manini and the needle-nosed sea eels.
He ate what came to hand—the sweet eggs from his chickens, mangoes and avocados and lilikoi from his trees, breadfruit when it was in season. He drank green tea in the morning, one strong coffee after lunch, beer at night. He browsed when he was hungry, yawned and dozed when he was tired, and when he was aroused he rolled against Olive as though body-surfing a warm wave, entered her, and rode her until they both lay ashore on the bed.
But since the accident he’d shown no interest, as though the shock to his system that had made him repetitive and forgetful had also short-circuited his libido. Once, when she mentioned this, he said, “We made love yesterday.” But they hadn’t.
These days he was asleep when she returned from work; he’d drunk a few beers, he’d eaten, the house was frosted with moonlight and skeletal in semidarkness. When he saw that the surf report was for clean conditions he was up early; otherwise he was unresponsive when she left for the hospital.
Nor had he noticed that she was wakeful, sometimes retching, and it annoyed her that she could not get his attention with her seemingly fragile health. Scrupulous in taking precautions, sometimes a pill, sometimes a patch, she knew she could not possibly be pregnant. She wanted to scream at him (as patients sometimes howled at the hospital), “Don’t you see I’m sick!” But really she wasn’t sick enough, and didn’t want to be so sick that she needed him, because what use would he be? He’d been no help at all to his aged mother. He told her, I saw her losing it. He’d say, When I get like that, hit me with a brick—shoot me.
One morning when the surf was up and he was alert, moving quickly, slapping the pockets of his shorts for his keys, his board already on the car, she said, “Joe—wait.”
“Yeah,” and rattled the keys in his impatient hand.
“You’re better off alone.”
He looked at her, irritated, deaf with detachment.
“Can’t find my new sunglasses!”
As soon as he started to swear, she left. And driving to the hospital, always the same road, feeling the potholes with her hands on the steering wheel, she repeated the sentence she’d practiced, the tactful farewell—You’re better off alone—then thought, No.
“I’m better off alone,” she said in the mild mumble she used in the car, talking to herself—talking, because saying something aloud helped her remember, filled her with resolve.
Luana always asked how she was feeling, and because Olive said, “Fine,” and Luana didn’t believe her, Luana kept asking, as on this morning.
“I was wondering,” Olive said, instead of replying directly, “is there still a vacant room in the nurses’ quarters?”
Approaching her, arms out, Luana smiled in sympathy, almost in gratitude, and she embraced Olive in a motherly hug, her whole soft body pressed against her, as if to give her warmth. Their foreheads touched, Luana’s sweetened with soap, her thick arms enclosing Olive.
“Yes, got one for you,” Luana said, and seemed sure that this request for a room meant that what she suspected was true: Olive was ailing.
“Because I’m going to start working nights.”
“Sure,” the woman said, and hugged her closer, feeling that this was an excuse for the ailment—or was it the guy?—and she did not want to give any details.
Olive moved some of her clothes from Sharkey’s closets and drawers on a day of big waves, and as she was putting them in her car he texted her that he was all right—reassuring her, as though she might be worried about him. He did not ask about her.
He never asked. On the high-surf days she drove to Sunset or Waimea, or farther down the road to Alligators or Leftovers or Marijuana’s, and found him with her binoculars. It was as though he were not a man at all—certainly not one who’d been jarred by an accident (“I ran into a drunk homeless guy”). No, he was like a rare form of marine life, a sea mammal in the foam, the water dog he claimed to be, slipping down the face of a wave and riding it nearly to where it broke, and instead of crawling to shore, cutting across the lip and paddling and diving beneath the waves until he was out to sea, in the lineup again, preparing to drop in.
At the end of the day he would go home, drink a beer, make himself an omelet, and sit, lit by the sunset, inhaling the last of the light into his body. He was fine. He said so in his occasional messages, telling her he’d had a good day, less like a text to his lover than an announcement to an anxious world, eager for the latest bulletin from Joe Sharkey.
He didn’t ask, but she was not well, with a sourness in her gut, fatigue, and lightheadedness. Her being among other women was a comfort, for their sympathy and gentle manner—and most were nurses, trained to be healers. She knew they were scrutinizing her out of concern for her well-being, not out of nosiness—niele, as Luana called it. Luana, in the room next to hers, took to sizing her up and putting a motherly arm around her when, in the evening, they headed to Emergency for the night shift.
Olive felt compelled to say, “You mustn’t fuss. I’m really all right, you know.”
But her denial made her self-conscious, and Luana’s smile seemed an understanding that something was wrong.
“You never eating nothing.”
“I eat enough.”
That seemed lame too. All the nurses ate together in the hospital cafeteria; it was impossible to hide anything from them, especially from their nurses’ watchfulness.
One night, admitting a woman who showed signs of having overdosed—limp, nauseous, dizzy, with depressed breathing: all the signs; she’d been left by a man who’d hurried away—Olive struggled with the woman, who was heavy, her flesh cool to the touch. She put her on her side in a recovery position and went faint. She staggered, but she was caught in her fall by Luana, who took over, urging Olive to lie down, then sped the woman to the doctor on duty. She soon returned to Olive, who lay doubled up.
“I’m better.”
Luana frowned. “I’m thinking for a long time, Ollie—how you know you not hapai?”
They used the word all the time at the hospital. That thought had occurred to her, that she might be pregnant, but her periods were often irregular or late, so she’d kept an open mind. And what was this? Only a week or a little more of nausea and fragility. And she related it to the disturbance she felt, provoked by Sharkey’s strangeness.
“I don’t know.”
“Let’s we do one test,” Luana said, pulling open a drawer and poking at small plastic boxes. “You need to make shishi.”
They did the test together, Luana manipulating the test tube and the litmus paper while Olive sat watching, wondering, listening to the clatter outside the room, keenly aware of the anxious questions of the injured, the smells of illness and disinfectant.
“You hapai,” Luana said, and hugged her.