The family was travelling to Florida by ship when, somewhere around Trinidad, Luiza and her father sat drinking black coffee in the ship’s lounge with its panels of galloping Indians and orange polyester drapes. They were discussing all the things they could do during the four months they’d be living there (though she noticed he never mentioned the reason for their trip). She had ordered as he did, even though her tongue flexed against each bitter sip, and she tried her best to listen, a pleasant, encouraging expression fixed on her face, as he delivered the most recent catalogue of research gleaned from his dense, haphazard library. All the ways in which Florida might enchant them, the adventures they could have. There were mangrove forests—trees that grew in water!—and cypress swamps lurking with ghostly, long-throated egrets, their necks impossibly stretched and sharply bent in the middle. She wanted always to be the one person who affirmed him, a safeguard between him and those who couldn’t understand his singularity, so she tried to smile as his list continued to tumble out—he was so very fond of reciting lists. There were also swamp oak branches closing over winding estuaries and growing into tunnels of vines, a thousand reaching arms, pocked with flowers.
‘We’ll weave through them with nothing more than a raft and a pole, alligators be damned. A passageway to the dark heart of America!’
His speaking like this, as if they were lost in a fairy tale—Hansel and Gretel together beset—had always comforted her father, and her as well. But lately she felt the stories, with their dark forests close and damp around her, inviting her, impossibly, back to childhood. And even he did not seem entirely convinced by his little speeches, smiling painfully as he proclaimed the Everglades, which she knew was nothing more than a poor man’s slimy tropics.
‘I have to go,’ she said, abruptly getting up from the table and knocking over her cup. Her father half stood, reaching toward her with a napkin, his large body crouching awkwardly, causing her to take a step back. ‘I have to get some air,’ she added.
She left her drink upended, its dark, grainy puddle spilling onto the table, and hurried to the doorway. When she looked back, he was driving his thumb and forefinger apart above his brow ridge, leaving a bloodless trail in his skin, his thoughts unerasable.
As she made her way slowly along the ship’s lower deck, Luiza prickled with envy as she watched the other passengers, some cheerily playing games, others reclining in canvas deck chairs, their limbs spilling languidly over the sides. Happy, relaxed bodies enjoying the ship’s distractions while her own family twanged with anticipation. The journey to Florida alone would take nearly two weeks and her sisters were already pinging off one another, bickering, then emitting high-pitched squeals, shared jokes. Her mother had told her to think of it as a family vacation: a voyage on the famous S.S. Brasil, a visit to America. Yet the few times her sisters tried to enlist Luiza in some dull activity or other—shuffleboard, swimming in the pool, a routine for the talent show—she couldn’t seem to focus for more than half an hour at a time before guiltily slinking away, saying she had a headache. The truth was her whole body felt taut, strained. She chewed at her cuticles as the base of her spine buzzed constantly—excitement or fear, she couldn’t tell. They were off to find the miracle cure that could retrieve her father from his extreme states, and return him permanently to the flat, tenable space somewhere safely in the middle. But weren’t those vagaries also his gift—the source of his pure, undiluted genius? And more importantly, weren’t they an appropriate response to life—all the pain and joy and, as he often said, the beauty and horror of existence? And weren’t they also so fucking exhausting?
Dora had first told her about the trip to Florida while arranging flowers—poorly—at the dining-room table for a dinner party. She seemed untroubled, almost blithe about the drug study, which made Luiza fight her harder.
‘You just want to make him like everyone else,’ she said. ‘Average.’
‘Up, down—we’re always being pulled behind him.’ Dora wouldn’t look at her, and instead took up a small pair of kitchen scissors, snipping robotically at the stems in her hand, cutting them too short. ‘Don’t you ever wonder what our lives could be like if we didn’t have to follow him? If we could lead our own lives.’
‘I already know. Golf at the club. Dinner at Le Petit. Dancing at the casinos. The exact same life as everyone else we know.’
‘If all that bores you so much, find something else,’ said Dora, finally meeting her gaze before shoving three stubby gladiolus tops into the vase so that they stood, bruised and too upright, above the rest. ‘You could have a completely different kind of life—whatever you want. For myself, I just want something normal! I want to know what’s coming from one day to the next.’
‘No one knows that.’
Her mother had snorted then and turned her back to Luiza to signal she was tired of her hazy philosophical truisms.
But now, on this ship heading toward the Gulf of Mexico, Luiza did wonder what a life of her own might mean. She was nineteen, but instead of thinking about going away to school (her father had always promised to pay) or dating boys (her mother was forever pointing out nice young men), she was accompanying her family to Florida as a glorified, unpaid nanny and caretaker.
‘And what kind of life could that be if I’ll always be stuck babysitting?’ Luiza had asked her mother’s back. ‘Why can’t we bring the maids? Why should I have to look after the girls?’
Dora clutched a handful of wilting stems in one hand and wiped the other on Maricota’s old apron. ‘What else do you have to do?’
As her mother’s question came back to her, Luiza was struck by the realization that soon she might be able to—might have to—live on her own. Her breath caught in her chest. Would she even know where to go, what to do, how to be, if not in proximity to her father? If she didn’t have to be his echo. What would it be like if she wasn’t tethered to him, always calculating his distance from earth’s flat surfaces, predicting when he might next wheel away or plummet. Then retrieving him, reviving him. Taking crusted dishes, stale underwear, empty pill bottles off his bed, unfolding his clean socks. Hope and dread—could there be a life in between?
You’re not responsible for him. Even now she could hear her mother’s voice. It’s chemical. Stop mythologizing a disease. Dora always made it sound so simple, as though he was nothing more than the competing chemicals in his brain, which, if acted upon by some magical drug, could restore him to a neutral, unmodulated self. Without moods, without mercury. But to Luiza, the moods were him. His mind, his soul—could a drug act on those, take them too? Maybe it would leave him transfigured, a Frankenstein version of himself, patched together and only half alive. Or maybe it would take just the damaged parts, the suspicion and the glassy eyes and the worst, dead days. The part that could cut through them so casually; the part that had, on Dora’s birthday a few years before, made a toast at dinner to her glorious cunt. (Dora should have known what was coming given the way everyone kept imploring him: Slow down, Hugo. You’re wearing us out, Hugo. Now she and her mother have an arrangement, and such entreaties are Luiza’s cue to make excuses, get him away before things requiring morning apologies are said.)
Later that infamous night, after their dinner guests had long gone home, she woke to find her father in her room, his eyes ferociously alive.
‘I’m going to take you to the mountains and show you snow!’ he said. It was three a.m. ‘We’ll drive for hours.’
But then he backed the car into a cedar tree on the sidewalk, so instead they rifled through the garage until they found their musty old roller-skates and skated down the street in the dark, Luiza shrieking with happiness because her body couldn’t contain the feeling, and it spurted out of her in shrill, almost painful sounds that she hadn’t known she could make. Then her mother came out, pleading in her see-through nightgown: a neighbour had phoned and said someone was screaming outside their house. But her father just took Luiza by the hand and they skated away. Outside the gates, she wasn’t afraid as long as she was with him. That was back when she still loved him unequivocally.
But just a few months later he grabbed her wrist when she reached for one of his cigarettes, thinking he was asleep. ‘You cost enough to clothe,’ he said, his eyes barely open. Amphibious. Then he took away her mother’s chequebook because he said she was giving the maids extra money for food, and Luiza had to steal the cheques back from him. Sometimes it was almost a relief when he sank so low he had to go into the hospital. She missed him, but at least she could breathe again. For a time. As much as she wanted to be absolved of him, she soon regretted it. Because when he’d taken her hand that night in the driveway and they skated away, when he described for her what snow would feel like, and she felt it, that was him too. What if the doctors stripped away his moods, then found there was nothing left?
Beyond the railing where Luiza stood leaning, gulls rose above the water, then dove, and for a moment she thought she saw something awful in the water—a grey, waving hand. Just a fish. Of course it was. And yet she shuddered, turning her back to the sea. Next to her, a couple had appeared, beautifully dressed and murmuring to each other, hushed and inward. The sun was setting and Luiza imagined they must be on their way to dinner, then maybe dancing in the ship’s ballroom. Some part of her longed to join them, to be satisfied with fine meals and parties and conversations as light as soap bubbles. Shimmering, then popping, then nothing. But her mother’s exasperated remark came back to her: she could have a completely different kind of life. Whatever she wanted. The truth was, she couldn’t imagine what that might mean.
For years growing up had meant going downtown to Copacabana, attending parties, dancing at the casinos. But already the whole neighbourhood bored her, its contrasts harsher than she’d pictured, a simulacrum of her parents’ photos from twenty years before, though those images seemed more real to her. Now, downtown was papered over with billboards, colonized by girls in short shorts, boys in rubber flip-flops. Where had she read that? A poem. ‘Ai de Ti, Copacabana’: Be woe to you, Copacabana. Dark fish will swim through your streets and the fetid swell of the tides will cover your face.… Woe to you, Copacabana! The people from your hills will descend hollering over you.
She knew the poem was overblown and humourless, that liking it only confirmed her earnestness. And yet the city felt that way to her sometimes, as though they were all thoughtlessly drinking Coca-Cola and smearing on lip gloss, playing futebol while somewhere—invisible for now but not far at all—a wave was swelling. It wasn’t to her these angry words were written. She shrank from the new Copacabana, its radiant patina and too-bright sherbet hues.
These days, she preferred to stay home and read most nights to remind herself of the world beyond the eight-foot walls that surrounded her family’s property. During the evenings, she often wandered outside and liked to sit against the wall farthest from the house and listen to the tinny sounds of her parents’ parties—her mother’s ukulele, aggressively jovial three-drink laughter, a glass shattering, family friends dancing. The same people she’d always known. Up close it all scraped, rang atonally in her ears, but from out in the garden it sounded almost joyous. Then, one evening Mr. Carmichael appeared from out of the gloom. He was gripping a book in both hands, pale-knuckled, his stance almost like a boy’s. He was a friend of her parents’, though not an especially close one—he and his wife occasionally came to their parties, or met up with them at the casinos, though Luiza had never made more than passing small talk with either of them.
She put her book down, suddenly worried. ‘Is everything all right? Is my father—?’
‘Oh, he’s fine. He’s quite happy, in fact.’
Quite happy. Such euphemistic kindness. And always the sense that others knew more about her, and her family, than they ought. She swallowed, the hairs on the backs of her arms rising into tiny barbs. ‘Then is there something you need?’
‘I just had to get out of there,’ he said, looking beyond her now, smiling vaguely even as his eyes seemed to darken with a forlorn dissatisfaction she found immediately familiar—she’d felt it a thousand times. He stammered for a few minutes about the crowd and the heat, and how he was growing tired of it all—the nights out, the drinking. Was it a kindness? She had the impulse to reach out and touch his brow, smooth its crease, then was grateful he was too far for easy contact.
‘I also wanted to give you this,’ he said, holding out the shabby, leather-bound book. ‘I’ve read it dozens of times, and I always see you out here with your little lamp, reading. I thought you might appreciate it.’
Grand, ancient myths free of irony. Overwrought, self-important, bloody. Beautiful. All these things Mr. Carmichael had given her when, a few weeks before she walked aboard this ship, she’d taken Ovid’s Metamorphoses from his hand.
‘This time in your life won’t last forever,’ he told her, barely smiling. ‘I know it’s hard to imagine now, but you won’t always be here, feeling the way you do.’
‘And where will I go?’ Luiza asked, still trying to hide how startled she was by his attention. Though he seemed as aware as she was how unusual it was for him to be out there, talking to her.
‘You seem like a clever girl. Where would you like to go?’
At the time, she couldn’t answer, but the question kept coming back to her.
After he returned to the house that evening, she sat in the dark for several minutes longer holding the book he’d placed in her hands, warm from the substantial weight of it, and from the heat of his skin. Silly girl, she thought to herself now. She shouldn’t be distracted by a brief conversation with a disaffected, older man. She should be thinking about what to do with herself, her life.
Girdled by the ship’s railings, she climbed now onto the upper deck and scanned the horizon. Maybe she would be a writer—hard, faceted sentences that would arrange her turgid, nagging thoughts into something manageable and serious. Worthwhile. The way stress or fatigue deranged her senses, convinced her the natural world was encroaching on her selfhood, her psyche. How bright sunlight became a snaking shimmer across her vision, temporarily blinding her; how the dissonance of particular words—slice, hiss, place—turned everything red, their reptilian sibilance shooting a current into her neck. Imaginary bodies in the ocean. Couldn’t she turn these into something beautiful?
And the persistent impressions—of places she’s never been, people she’s never met, snatches of conversations she’s never had—writing them down was the only way to stop them repeating in her mind. It was how she kept herself company as a child, how she generated for herself the sense that someone else was always there, listening. She lays out her dress. The light dances in her hair as she smooths the creases of its rustling fabric. She did it almost unconsciously, without thinking it unusual. To remember that this other, the unseen listener, was imagined made her feel lonely. Nothing else was hers alone. Not faith (ruined), or madness (Hugo’s), or beauty (Dora’s).
But still, she couldn’t quite see it, this other life. Surely it was dangerous to hope that her father might be helped by the treatment he’d receive in Florida. Wrong, even. Hope meant she wished for him to change, to be something other than the exceptional, beautifully alien man who never settled, never accepted a half-life. A man who couldn’t hide from the full breadth of human feeling, no matter how agonizing or exalted. Who experienced everything.
But her own longing was a nuisance, turning her body to face south, to look over the open water, and to wonder how far they had travelled since leaving Brazil. A nagging calculation she couldn’t fathom: How many miles between her and Mr. Carmichael? And how many hours, days, weeks before that distance would close?