XENITH

Gardening
by Becky Roth

I.

One day. And a day of rest. Two days. You do not count unless you are waiting. Cam counts against every single impulse that his body owns. Of course he wants to be rescued, who wouldn’t. But how to weigh rescue against an empty stomach, chilled bones.

Jim wants to take the life raft and gun it as far as they can go. Cam say that’s stupid, and Jim wheels his arms into an air-punch.

“What if it can kill you, Jim?”

“Fuck you, Cam. If we were on Lost you’d be Evil Ben.”

“The people on Lost got screwed when they used a life raft, Jim.” Cams spits back at him. Jim always called Cam a pussy for watching Lost, and now he compares everything on the island to it.

Sallie clings to Jim as he talks, but her feet are in the sand. The crystals are like a warm bath in the daytime, a cold soup at night. She puts her lips up to his ear and maybe calls him something under her breath.

If she’s faking her orgasms they’re all in trouble. You can hear everything, even over the surf. Cam thought it wouldn’t be so bad to hear them. The first night, when the sun hit the horizon like a doomsday clock. He thought it wouldn’t be that different; the apartment always had thin walls. But she doesn’t giggle anymore, she screams. Who knows if she loves him but she screams for him. And if you were stuck here, and you were in love, then maybe it wouldn’t be such an imperative to be rescued.

So why am I the only one who wants to fish? Cam’s credulity stretches. They ate the chalky MREs from the plane already. Little more than the prefab fragments of their former existence. The three castaways are the sum total of civilization the island has seen, and the fish are complacent. It’s as if they don’t even know they can be caught and cooked and delicious. There are some berries that can be pounded into sauce.

Jim volunteers for life raft duty again. The raft sags on all sides. If he gets in it alone he will do exactly what he couldn’t convince Jim and Sallie to do. But Sallie and Cam aren’t really an us. Her no works. She has to dress it up a little though. She drags him back into the bushes, sucking her cheeks in in preparation.

Cam walks the circumference of the island looking for kindling. The trees are dense and generous. On first pass he picks up the twigs. The next the foundation stumps that can keep a fire going all night. Cam needs a fire all night. If they were three people who didn’t know each other they would all huddle together for warmth, but they do know each other. So Cam needs a fire.

He hefts a prime chunk of dead tree back to their little settlement. Had to kill six spiders to get it clean. No bites. He calls himself a natural so quietly the neighboring trees can’t even hear. Around the last bend, he catches Sallie squatting and pulling down her pants. He’s seen her naked before. Once, furtively, back in the apartment, in bulb light. The sun has changed her. Created a dividing line between red and white where her pants have been rolled up.

“Cam,” she startles at first. She collects herself, and starts to pee. Her elbows rest on her knees and her eyes lock into Cam’s.

“He’s sleeping,” she says. She bounces a couple times and gets back up. “Let’s go fish.”

*

“I wasn’t even supposed to come,” says Sallie. “I begged him to come.”

Cam begged him not to let her. The trip had been his psychiatrist’s suggestion. To flatten his anxiety better than the pills or the pot he was always trying to quit. But Cam was frightened of the word “alone”, and Jim had a most expansive definition of it.

Until the plane went down they were just two buddies and some chick with vacation days and frequent flier miles. So they packed up some duffels and a fucking Louis Vuitton and tried to go halfway around the world. Those duffels, the Louis Vuitton, are all gone now, and they are maybe only a quarter of the way around the world. On an island. It would be beautiful if there were a means to leave it and come back at their leisure.

Sallie shucks another curl of wood off the top of her stick. They’ve re-appropriated some of the kindling. She wanted to try something she saw on TV. Cam thinks he saw it too. Probably different shows, they agreed. Sallie clamps the knife between her teeth and uses her free hand to test the sharpness of her point. She tests too hard, and blood blots her fingertip.

Cam wishes she would focus on the rod. It’s crude to watch her carve. Sallie sticks her finger in her mouth. “Stop feeling sorry for me, Cam,” she says around it.

Jim’s footsteps snap twigs as he approaches. He has one of the empty MRE tins in his hand. He holds it up like an idol.

“I can use it to dig for water,” he explains. He saw it on TV too. He thought this would be a good spot to dig, right here between Cam and Sallie. She seems to assess him.

“Are you sure you don’t want to fish?” she suggests.

He drops the tin to rub her knee.

*

Sallie and Cam are in the shallows when they hear Jim’s fist-pumping “Yes!” He pants out to the beach with a loud smile on his face. Sallie’s kicked-up heels splash Cam as she gets carried away in the embrace.

She heads back in to fill up some of the canteens from the life raft. “And start a fire,” she adds. She notes how the sun has traveled since she looked at it last. Jim takes her spear.

If they swim a little ways there’s a flat rock where they can wait with the rod in. Jim spears the ground as they wade out to their necks. “Just seaweed,” he shrugs. Cam knows Jim so he can’t tell if Jim is actually afraid of how unreal the seaweed feels under his feet, or if he’s just stab-happy.

Cam perches on the edge of the flat rock and casts the rod. Not that there’s much casting to do with shredded pant legs as line. Jim stretches with the spear. He seems to know the feel of it by now. He tosses it from hand to hand. “Water, water everywhere,” he starts, in what has become an oft-sung refrain, “But not a drop to drink!” He used to seem pleased with himself but he doesn’t anymore.

They wait. They can’t tell time by the sun and their watches have been water-logged. He starts to tell Cam he’s made mistakes. Besides the off-brand airline. He starts, and then tells Cam that now the character on Lost he’d be is the hobbit. “Or former hobbit, whatever. He never gets any either.”

“I wouldn’t say that if I were you,” says Cam slowly. “Sallie’s looking pretty bored lately.”

Jim snorts. Cam doesn’t mention he saw her peeing earlier. He decides only perverts watch girls pee and like it. And doesn’t tell Jim. And Sallie is looking bored.

The rod bends at the top. It swoops into a full curl and almost out of Cam’s fingers. He pulls the rod and the load back to the center of the rock. Jim yells that he can see it. The silver glint comes bouncing toward them with every tug of Cam’s arms. Cam gives one hefty drag and the little guy comes flopping up onto the surface of the rock.

Jim hovers over it for a moment before jabbing the tip of the spear into its eye. He grinds its head into a pulp on the rock. While the tail still flops and the gills still try. It dies slowly. Fish are ugly.

*

Jim wraps the fish in a live frond, and dangles it over the fire from the fishing rod. He actually knows how to clean a fish. Tonight is his first time, but he used to watch his father before he moved to Seattle with his stepmom.

Sallie and Cam bundle up all the bits of litter from the MREs and the life raft. They dig a hole to stow it where it won’t get taken by the wind in the night. The debris grows less useful by the day, and when they let it go they may never touch plastic again.

Jim yanks the fish back from the fire. It bounces off the sand, still covered in its frond. It’s done.

They eat with their hands, watching for bones. Maybe one fish isn’t enough for three people. They thought they were so clever to have reeled one at all. It would have been enough at a restaurant. Where there is always the possibility of dessert.

*

Cam points out the berries to Jim as they’re picking up new firewood in the morning. Jim squints at them. He plucks one and tosses it away. “I don’t know, Cam,” he says. “Some shit’s just poison. What if you could die?” Cam picks some anyway. He makes his hand into a cup and fills it. Jim watches Cam as he carries them back to Sallie at the fire pit. “Sure you’re sure,” Jim says.

They drop the last log next to the rest. Sallie has laid out all the foil lids from the MREs. She sat rocks on their corners to flatten them. “I’m making a frying pan,” she grins. “Hey, have you seen any coconuts? Don’t islands have coconuts sometimes?”

“Gilligan’s maybe,” snorts Jim. He rifles through the kindling until he finds a clean stick less than a foot long. He gives it to her like it’s a ring for her finger. “A handle,” he offers. “Maybe we can get one for the other side.” He does a circle around the fire pit. “Maybe I can make a stand.”

“Sure, honey,” she says. Her nipple pokes out of a hole in her shirt. Jim takes it under his thumb and smiles. He kisses her on the neck. Cam heard them only furtively last night. Just commands and grunts. Maybe they’re getting more efficient. They all are, as people, in an eat-and-shit sort of way.

“Cam brought some berries for you.” They’re not for her. Tangentially at best.

“C’mere Cam, show me.” She takes a red berry from his hand, rolls it back and forth between her fingers. She sniffs it. Then she starts to pop it in her mouth.

“Whatifitcankillyou!” Jim’s hands on her shoulders like a tined cape creeping over the curve.

She gags a little and spits it out. Not having really bitten it. He turns her around. “Don’t scare me like that.” She didn’t know what she did wrong. She sucks in her cheeks like this is the life raft again.

“Jim thinks the berries are poison,” Cam explains.

“Why the hell did you say they were for me then?” She complains just to Jim. “What do you think they really are, Cam?” Her cheeks are still sucked in, so he doesn’t know how to answer.

“They’re probably not as bad for us as we are for them.” Cam watches Jim’s reaction. Jim’s calm because he thinks he knows.

“Here.” Sallie holds out the ends of her shirt into a flat basin. Cam lets the handful of berries out. She stares down at them skeptically. “Jim, if they’re not poison, what are we gonna do? Just eat fish until the gangrene gets us? Catch crabs?” She giggles, because the rest of the world is still with them.

“What if they make your head swell up? Remember when we were watching that movie, and the girl got all puffed up at the neck like a toad before she died? You said that if you were an actress you would never let yourself get ugly like that onscreen. Swelling is ugly, Sallie! Is that the last way you want to see yourself?”

She’s slow to answer. The rest of the world isn’t so with them that she can still fantasize about contract stipulations.

“There are no mirrors on the island, Jim,” she says. There are no mirrors and no perverts and no doors. There is nothing you can open to the measures of your old life, except the emptiness you can trace to your belly, the weariness you can tie to your bones.

She backs away. The berries are nestled in her shirt, so she doesn’t get very far. She wants to know what Cam thinks. Discovery gives him an intuitive and erroneous kind of ownership.

Cam thinks you can’t declare war on berries. And if they’re delicious Jim will forget about poison.

“Don’t be a pussy, Jim.”

“You’re the pussy Cam!”

Cam admits he has been, yes. Because this never would have been a vacation for him anyway. Especially because it was handed down to him like a prescription for Lexapro.

Cam doesn’t think Jim understands what it means that it has been three whole days since they dumped themselves out of the life raft. That Cam has been listing his regrets that long. He has sworn to add to the list only with the past. And if there’s no future, there’s also no list.

Cam looks up and it’s Sallie he sees. She comes nearer to him reluctantly. Her eyes are curious and sad. Cam scoops up a few berries from her shirt. She drops the rest on the sand.

“You guys don’t have to watch me.” Cam turns to face the ocean. He knocks the berries down his throat and swallows. There’s no point in savoring. He won’t taste anything.

He watches the sun, waits for it to go dark. It multiplies. Two then three, until he’s staring at six spots of light in the sky. And as they start to glimmer and flicker and widen, they spike downward. They beam straight for him. He waits for a crash but it’s more like a fusing. He feels the light pouring into his acme and out through his points.

Cam’s aware that he’s on his back. More starfish than star. He lifts his arm like it has suction cups on the bottom. The sand and sea mix up. Become each other intermittently. The waves crash up the beach and the sand crests and splashes down into the water. They eat each other but it’s a peaceful chew. Gravity settles Cam down toward them, and he starts to feel the teeth at his feet.

II.

Cam tripped his face off for a little while, but he didn’t die. He barfed in the ocean just like the fish. That was three weeks ago. He has taken to working on the berries.

After he regained his normal consciousness, Cam took his cup, his MRE tin, and his share of the foil and cutlery, and moved to the other side of the island. Not that the island has sides. Sallie said the three of them all needed each other to survive. Jim said they didn’t have enough stuff to go divvying it up. Neither one could say Cam wasn’t right.

Cam started chiseling a tally of days into a rock. Captain’s log, he called it. No one listened. He knows weeks now. He’s sure months will come. It’s too much for him to try to understand the stars yet. He hopes that will come too. If he stares at them.

Survival is less of a burden than Cam thought. Sometimes you feel like a genius when you just feed yourself. Like with the crabs. He just started spearing them and roasting them like marshmallows. The flavors together, smoke and meat. It’s so simple.

Cam still sees Jim and Sallie. They all used to share a watering hole. It filled up with spiders so now they just share a knife. Jim and Sallie can hear Cam pounding rocks together to make his own. It’ll never be as good as the knife from the life raft. Jim sleeps with it in one hand and Sallie in the other.

*

Sallie comes to Cam in the early morning. The sun burns blue through the fog. He would have expected this a while ago. Before they started to take to the island almost as well as he. When Jim would end up cleaning twice as many of Cam’s fish. Cam would always give them some. It’s not about hating Jim, he repeats frequently, under his breath, to no one.

Sallie rolls Cam over. She looks into his eyes to make sure he’s awake. She unfolds his hand from a fist, and places something cold and sharp on his palm.

She’s shivering and pale, aren’t we all in the dawn. Cam offers her some water. She sucks from the cup. Her haste sends half the water sluicing down her cheeks and chin. She wipes her mouth when she’s done, though it seems she’d rather not be done. “Be careful.” Cam refills the cup.

He holds up the tiny silver object. It looks like a hook. “Jim didn’t buy them for me,” she explains. “The rest of the earring rotted off back on the life raft, but they can still be useful.” She’s still waiting for something from Cam. “How did you think we started catching all those fish?”

“Practice,” Cam replies. It’s more like repetition. What you do again and again because if you stop you die.

She laughs softly. Her fingertips rest on his arm. He takes the cup from her and drops the hook inside.

“Hey, Cam, how do you. . .” She doesn’t want to ask. “How do you keep the spiders out of your water? I just, I get so thirsty.” She looks at the cup.

Cam points to a charred trench around his watering hole. You dig a shallow hole around your water. You fill it with kindling and make sure it’s lit all around. You burn some berries on the fire. It’s like prayer–you don’t ask how it works. The spiders stay away, and if you sit still in the fumes for a minute a tingling starts in your limbs. A body high, like they used to say in college.

She runs her hand down his face. She looks like she wants to leak out through her eyes. “Thanks Cam.” She lets her hand rest on the crook of his elbow. He shakes the cup and listens to the ping of the hook against the sides. “Thank you, Sallie.” If she doesn’t leave soon this could get embarrassing. She traces just her thumb up the inside of his bicep toward his armpit. A perceptible lean. His pants start to tent from the pressure. She notices. She retracts her hand sheepishly.

“Do you want me to go so you can take care of that?” No, he wants her to stay and finish what she started. She smiles as if she has read his mind. She gets up and leaves nonetheless.

*

When Cam takes Jim his new catch to clean, Jim asks how Cam’s liking the hook. Jim brags that it was his idea to send Sallie. He would’ve come himself if he thought he could. He never wanted to end up as rivals. Cam doesn’t see why Jim needs a rival: there are enough fish for everyone. Jim says he always knew that it would have to be this way. It’s not his fault. Blame this godforsaken island.

“I don’t know, Jim. Island life isn’t that bad.”

Jim snorts, “And you’re not even getting laid.”

“I’m getting high,” Cam offers.

“Oh yeah, your secret weed plant in the jungle.”

“No, Jim, the berries. The red berries.”

“Um,” says Jim.

“I think I’ve figured out a way to make tea out of them,” Cam enthuses past Jim’s indifference.

Jim passes Cam back his gutted fish. As Cam ties it to the rod, Jim starts to recede back toward his fire pit.

“Wait, Jim!”

Jim stops. He doesn’t want to wait around if it’s an apology Cam expects. Cam shakes his head.

“Don’t you want to try the berries?”

He doesn’t, he never has. They still mean death to him. “I think, Cam,” he responds slowly, “that it’s a very good idea that you have your side of the island and we have ours.”

*

Cam can see Sallie clomping through the shallows like a giantess from his fire pit. She has the skittish feet of someone hunting for crabs. Cam could hear them a couple nights ago, not having sex. They don’t have so much sex lately. He smelled burning berries on his side of the island, and heard Sallie whinnying along with the winged smoke. Jim didn’t seem so pleased. Cam heard his barking, saw him as he made sullen laps around the island. And Sallie’s laughter in his absence.

Cam rests a gentle hand on Sallie’s back. It catches her off balance, but when she sees him, she lets go a little smile.

“You won’t catch a crab like that, Sallie. You can’t just go stomping around. The crabs around here, they’re getting to know what it is to be hunted. We’re both learning how to do this. You just have to—“he guides her hand down the spear to a spot with better leverage “—stay delicate.”

Cam walks Sallie over to a rockier area. Where the stones jut out of the water enough to give the illusion of a footpath. They balance their way out to where the shallows border a small pool. Sallie starts to topple, and Cam lunges to catch her. She braces herself against a big rock, and catches Cam. She wraps her arms around his body. Her eyes read concern. He props himself up against the rock. She cautiously keeps her hold.

He sinks down with his back against the rock until his feet touch the ground. The water is up to Cam’s center. He pulls her down with him. His hands moving over the contours of her bare waist as her shirt rides up in the tide. He brushes a strand of wet hair back behind her ear with the dry rest. Her eyes can look golden in the daytime. She closes them. He does the same.

He finds it strange to feel her lips at first. As chapped and salty as his. Cam hadn’t been kissed since long before he landed on the island. He wends his tongue into the hot part of her mouth and she meets him. Every time he pushes she pushes back. He’s surprised by her force.

His fingers trip over the buttons on her pants. They seem so out of place. She lifts his hands away. He indulges in a wounded look as she starts undo them herself. “We can’t have you breaking things, Cam,” she laughs. The water swirls around her hips as she slides onto Cam. Her breath shortens as they jostle into a steady rhythm. Eddies comes and go where they meet.

She makes noises Cam has never heard from her. She sounds like something unleashed. Cam moves further into her, faster. She grits her teeth in his ear and purrs. When he looks he can see down her curved spine to his hands cupping the starkly defined cheeks of her ass, haunch-like in motion. Something warm rises inside her like a radar pulse dispersing. Her wet hand slaps the rock. Sensation condenses in him and floods out to her. She shudders into Cam as he comes. She mewls once more. Not exactly in ecstasy, but as if for the record.

*

They take off their clothes after they’re done, let them dry on the rocks while Cam boils some water.

“I didn’t know it was that easy,” Sallie says. “To brew them into tea.” She stabs a stick into the fire. “Does it still make you trip?”

“Not exactly.” He kisses her shoulder tentatively. She flits her eyes up to his.

“What does it do then?”

“Well, first you relax.” Cam kisses the other shoulder. He starts to circle her without letting his hands leave her hips. “And then after a minute, it feels like the world is pulling back her robe and letting you see her as she really is.” Cam stops in front of Sallie. They’re completely naked in the sunlight. She looks up at him with guilt and glee unsated on her face.

“Is it ready yet?”

“A few more minutes.”

So Sallie takes the step, pressing her sun-baked body into Cam’s. She lets her cheek linger on his shoulder. They sweat together by the fire.

*

They separate from each other as they near Jim and the fire pit. Cam didn’t want to go through the pretense of pretending it never happened. Sallie thinks that lie is worthless too. Anyone can hear everything on the island. Especially splashing and moaning, if that’s what you listen for when you’re alone.

Sallie’s still a little shaky after tasting the berries for the first time. After they kicked in she stayed in Cam’s arms just long enough to tell him he was right. She had never seen anything more real. It almost didn’t matter that it was beautiful, though it was. She slid away from him, to be fully at the mercy of the back of her mind. She returned when it wore off, her eyes with a newborn acceptance behind them. She had the idea that Jim would be happier to see her if she killed a couple crabs for him.

The sun is sinking, and Jim preps for night. He’s off fishing when they reach the fire pit. Sallie plops down in the sand far away from Cam. “Maybe I should be here alone,” she says. Cam can already see Jim further down the beach. Jim can already see Cam.

Sallie stands when Jim walks up with fish in his hands and the knife in his mouth. He spits the knife to the ground.

“I brought you some crabs.” She hands him a stick with two crabs skewered on it, ready for the fire. He drops it next to the other logs. He wouldn’t want to know Cam taught her how. “I brought you some berries too.” She wrestles a handful out of her damp pocket. She throws a thwarted glance at them, as if to admit they look unappetizing.

“Did you eat the berries too?” His voice shakes.

Sallie sighs. “They didn’t kill me, Jim. Look at me, I’m alive.”

Jim looks. He doesn’t seem to care either way. “I’m not even going to ask what you did first.” He tosses a branch into the pit. The unbuilt blaze looms.

Sallie plants herself in front of him. She grabs him when he tries to walk around her. “And what if it wasn’t Cam here on the island with us? What if it was one of my friends, what if it was a woman? Where would reason begin then?”

Jim pushes past her with his head down. “As long as we’re pretending, you could pretend we’re not on this island.”

“For all the good it would do.”

For all the good it would do,” he repeats for smug emphasis.

“Jim, I’m sorry.” They both turn to Cam. Sallie nods, apology in her eyes. “Sallie’s sorry too.”

“I am.” Her lips spilt into a smile. “In fact, it’s impossible for me not to love you.” He looks pleasantly jarred. They hadn’t been tossing around that word with too much frequency before. “Now, if only there was some way for it to be impossible for you not to love me?” She holds out the berries again. They are still soggy. They will still taste a little like human hand.

Jim takes them like an adherent collecting on a rite. “We all have to live together, right?” Jim looks at Cam with drooped eyes, as if saying good-bye. Cam wonder what he believes will happen to say good-bye with his eyes. Jim downs the handful with a wince.

Cam knows Jim’s starting to see six suns and Jim drops to his knees. Bawling and laughing at the largeness of it all. To watch a man in the middle of a revelation, it looks as if he has been peeled away to his brutally pink bits. The six suns, the melting clouds, the shifting sea.

***

Becky Roth tried to write an author bio and they all came out sounding like a Facebook status. More of her writing can be found at penandpaperblog.com.

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