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  TURTLE ISLAND DREAMING

  A Novel of Sanctuary

  Thompson Sayer Crockett

  TURTLE ISLAND DREAMING. Copyright © 2000 by Thompson Sayer Crockett. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage or retrieval systems without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review. For information address iPublish.com, Hachette Book Group, 237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017.

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  ISBN: 978-0-7595-2022-6

  First eBook Edition: October 2000

  Cover design by Chris Standish

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Descent

  Chapter 2

  Passing Within

  Chapter 3

  An Intimate Koan

  Chapter 4

  Mirror Dance

  Chapter 5

  A Quality of Light

  Chapter 6

  Dark Circle, Stone Circle

  Chapter 7

  Turtle Dreams

  Chapter 8

  Theatre of the Bardo

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  I’d been thinking of pain and death and loss when the turtles first came to me. I’d been seeking some sanctuary of the spirit—asking for guidance. When I closed my eyes I’d see them—great, graceful sea turtles gliding through the blue waters of my dreams. They came not once, but many times. To understand these visits, I read about sea turtles, photographed them, studied them. But when, in dreams, they still floated up before me, I had to listen to them—to hear the story they would tell. . . .

  A woman walks out onto the deck of a ship. It is a cruise ship—the Blue Pearl—famous for its level of luxury. It’s filled with happy couples, people escaping, people paying for an illusion of the exotic. But it is early morning and still, and she passes no one as she pads softly on bare feet from her stateroom to the lowest of the outer decks—the one that offers no obstructions between the railing and the sea.

  She is calm, perhaps more tranquil than she has been in a very long time. Her stateroom is in order. Her small suitcases and camera bag are packed and sitting on the still-made bed. There is a tip for the woman who has cleaned her stateroom each day and arranged for fresh flowers to be delivered. There is a letter for a friend on the dresser, stamped and addressed and ready to be posted. The bottle of complimentary champagne in her stateroom is unopened. She has avoided her prescription sedatives and antidepressants. She has not been crying. The few passengers who might later recall meeting her will not have observed any particular sadness or air of melancholy about her. Mostly, she will not have been noticed at all, as if the light by which we are able to see each other in her had been snuffed out.

  She finds a point along the railing more in shadow than the rest. She drags a deck chair into the shadow with her but does not sit. She looks out across the moon-sparkled night sea. It is warm, and the only breeze seems to come from the ship’s forward motion. The wind is barely enough to lift her dark curly hair from her shoulders. Except for the humming vibration of the ship’s engines, all is quiet. She breathes in the salt scent.

  She unties the belt of her silk robe and lets it fall from her shoulders as if casually shrugging off a skin. Naked, she steps up onto the deck chair and swings first one leg then the other over the railing. She finds a ledge, just wide enough for her heels, on the outboard side of the railing and stands up. She steadies herself by holding a vertical brace and takes a deep breath. She is not nervous or frightened. She does not regret. She feels only a primal urge to return to the sea from which her ancestors once crawled.

  Her compass spins.

  She has strong legs and they carry her surprisingly far from the edge of the ship before she begins to drop. It is a long way down, but she enters feet first, slicing into the water. She is drawn through the curtain of ocean. It is strange and enveloping. The warm darkness wraps around her like a shroud.

  Time stops.

  CHAPTER 1—DESCENT

  Stopping time—living in the moment—is a sorcerer’s trick. But between me and the magician there is an unspoken agreement. I choose to see the fantastic. I assume that sea turtles find their way through thousands of miles of open sea. I invent their navigation from seaweed fields off protected coasts to breeding beaches washed by unrestricted waves. But when I see through this illusion, the turtle whispers, “There is no navigation, no finding. There is only one place, one moment in the life of a sea turtle—here and now.”

  Marina was quite prepared to die as she hit the water. She had been courting death with increasing abandon over the past several years. She had flirted with death in Bosnia, but no bullet or bomb fragment had so much as grazed her. She had danced with death in Rwanda and gotten only a now-pale scar from the blade of a machete to show for it. It had not frightened her. It had not sobered her. She had gone on to sleep with death in Chechnya, but not even so intimate an acquaintance—lying close to death, in death’s embrace—had satisfied her.

  There had been countless little moments, obsessive self-assignments, casual brushes with death. She had the photographs to prove it. But each morning she woke up alive.

  At first she had lied to herself about this preoccupation. Photojournalists, at least the good ones, she told herself, were expected to put themselves in harm’s way. She was just “pushing the envelope,” she told herself. It was the images that mattered, and she specialized in suffering. Her passport read like a chronology of conflict: Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iran, Tibet, central Africa, the implosion of the former Soviet Union. She was good at what she did—wars, famine, natural disasters, holocausts. Her photographs had a passion and a humanity that elevated them beyond the merely voyeuristic. At least that was what was typically written on the dust jackets of her books.

  She believed that her photographs had once possessed a certain quality, a grace or an honesty that made demands on the heart. But that was before the slide into darkness. Her photographs had been a part of what made her whole, and it was now through her photographs that she saw her illness.

  She had not always felt so cut off, so disconnected from what it was that made people want to be alive. She’d had family, friends, causes she had believed in, underlying truths. But it seemed to her that those ties, those things that had once anchored her, had been cut, frayed, or worn away over the years, with nothing to replace them. All she had now were her photographs.

  Marina saw those photographs as she expelled the air from her lungs and sank into the warm ocean. Time had been stilled for her in this moment, and she contemplated the irony, smiled at the idea of seeing her life in her own photographs. She had heard people talk about having their lives flash before them in moments of near-death experience. She saw her life now as a slide show. Images that had changed her life or images that reflected her changes appeared to float before her. Only they weren’t really her life. Her life was behind the photographs, attached to them marginally, like so many captions and cutlines—black marks on a page.

  Lebanon 1978—Refugee Camp

  Black-and-white image: A woman in a dust-caked black robe cradles her dead son in the dirt. He is shirtless and slender, perhaps twelve or thirteen years old. There are dark holes in his chest, but not much blood. He lies across his mother’s legs, arms splayed out and limp, head back, a Madonna and child. The woman looks up at the camera, but it is not grief that penetrates past lenses and film stocks,
papers and printing processes, it is bewilderment. Perhaps later the woman would come to despair or hatred or bitterness. But at this moment, captured in Marina’s photograph, the woman simply, silently asks why.

  * * *

  It seemed like an eternity since she had made images that held that kind of power. That image was from her first assignment as a photojournalist. She had made other powerful images on that assignment, but this was the photograph that had won her the respect of her colleagues. She had interned at two newspapers and one magazine during her summers, and even gotten some of her photographs published, but to get a foreign assignment like this, just out of college, was rare. Her editor had hoped that because Marina was a woman she might get access to the closed society of Muslim women. She’d gambled that Marina might be able to put a human face to the suffering in Lebanon, and that gamble had paid off.

  Marina had been too young, too inexperienced to be afraid. She was open to the pain of others. She had no defenses and no need for them. At that point in her life the act of photographing had been a kind of connecting force for her—one she came to call her heartline. It ran from her heart to the hearts of her subjects. It was her gift, to reveal a moment of humanity in silver halide. She had a way of getting people to open up to her, to relax and forget that they were being photographed. She could make herself, if not invisible, at least insignificant. She could slip between the cracks, observing and photographing as if from another dimension.

  Marina spent three years in the Middle East. She learned some of the language, a lot of the culture, and, thanks to her olive complexion and dark hair, could pass for an Arab woman. She made the images that an insider might have made. She showed how the constant fighting of Muslims and Jews, Muslims and Christians, Muslims and Muslims affected the lives of women. She had the ideals of a liberally educated young woman, but she kept her opinions to herself when she was working. Inside, however, she grew frustrated. The conflict made no sense to her. She found no side to claim her moral indignation. No party or group seemed much superior to the other.

  In the end she turned her attention to another conflict—one further east—a conflict she thought she could believe in.

  Afghanistan 1983—Christophe

  Black-and-white image: A young man and a young woman sit side-by-side on an outcropping of rock. They are both dressed roughly, as peasants, or bandits, or pilgrims. A camera sits on top of a leather bag at her feet. A rifle leans against the rock on his side. She wears no shoes, and her head rests on his shoulder. The camera angle is odd and the image is not well framed, but despite these technical faults, the photograph reveals that some secret thing has passed between them. One knows, without understanding how, that these are lovers.

  * * *

  This image had won no awards, had never been published, was not even a photograph Marina shared with friends. It was the only photograph she had of Christophe and herself together. It had been made with a timer so that they would both be in the picture. They had slipped away from the guerilla group they traveled with, to make love, and Marina had desperately wanted a photograph of the two of them together.

  Christophe was a French photojournalist. First he was a comrade in the heart of the conflict, then something much more. Their affair was made more intense by the circumstance of constant risk. They made no plans, lived wholly in the moment, and loved always as if there might be no sunrise. For Marina it was her first and only great love. Before Christophe she’d had relationships—some which claimed her body, others which claimed her soul, but never both at the same time. After Christophe she never again allowed herself to give both body and soul.

  Christophe died in a helicopter raid, killed by machine gun fire. Marina had been there; she’d photographed it. His death confirmed her almost-sacred belief in the prohibition against carrying a weapon. Christophe had carried a rifle as well as a camera. Her camera was her shield. It created an inviolate bubble of safe space around her. As long as she trusted it completely, it would make her invisible. If even for a moment she placed her trust in some other form of protection, her bubble, her shield, would crack and fear would slip in.

  But her shield had a price. She began to see her camera—her photographing—not so much as a channel to her subjects’ hearts but as a barrier around her own. It wore away at her heartline, fraying the subtle connection she had always been able to make with her subjects. It was a little thing at the time. She hardly noticed the change.

  She buried Christophe on a mountain in Afghanistan. She had no way of getting his body home. She couldn’t even dig into the rocky ground. She piled stones over him, finding it increasingly difficult to breathe as she placed the stones on his chest.

  She won a Pulitzer for her work in Afghanistan. She got an agent, produced the first of her books, Killing in the Sun, and had her pick of assignments around the world. It was a good time for her. She was well known and well respected. No one, least of all Marina, could yet see the cancerous little shadow that had begun to grow inside her.

  She photographed in China, Tibet, and Cambodia. Many images strobed before her in a blur. She could have picked any one and unfolded the story behind it or related it to a moment in her life. She loved the east, but she came halfway west again to photograph both sides of the war between Iran and Iraq. Then came Baghdad and the Gulf War.

  Baghdad 1991—Aerial Bombing

  Black-and-white image: An old man and an old woman lie in one another’s arms. Masonry, plaster, concrete, and steel beams bury their legs. Daylight from a newly cleared section of the bombed apartment building slashes the darkness to illuminate them. Dust hangs in the air like a mist. It is quiet and still. It is hard to tell if the old man and woman are asleep or dead. There are little details that one notices in the photograph after the initial bouncing of the eye between the peaceful repose of the upper bodies and the carnage below. He has pulled her close to him to cradle her. Her hand covers his heart. His lips are still pressed to her forehead.

  * * *

  Her bubble—her barrier—had protected her throughout the long night of an aerial bombardment. The building she took shelter in crumbled around her, but still she was unharmed. She clung to her cameras. Her film cassettes were her rosary beads. The walls around her toppled. The floor beneath her gave way and she fell. She was bruised, the wind knocked from her, but she was not more seriously hurt. She spent the night in darkness, trapped as much by the total lack of light as by any material restriction. She heard the moans and cries of the injured echoing eerily through the collapsed ventilation shafts.

  When morning came and the first shafts of light penetrated her temporary prison, Marina began to photograph again. She did not leave the building immediately, but went in search of those pained voices she had heard. She refused help for herself—after all she had her magic camera—but led rescuers in the direction of the injured. She photographed what she saw. She found the old man and old woman this way. They had not lived through the night. She photographed them, then turned back to the world of light.

  Marina was a well-known and respected photojournalist with an international reputation, but no American newspaper or magazine had wanted to publish these pictures. Marina had spent very little time in America in the preceding nine years. She returned only occasionally to visit her parents in Seattle, her sister in Washington, D.C., and to meet with her agent or publishers, but she still thought of herself as an American. While not overtly patriotic, she was by no means ashamed of her country. She was out of touch with popular sentiment and had no idea that the Gulf War had taken on a life of its own back in the United States as some kind of national healing ritual for Vietnam. Now she began to question her country and it showed in her photographs.

  Marina felt that she was simply doing what she had always done—looking for the heart and soul of conflict and capturing it on film. But her family and others questioned her. After all, they had argued, the people of Kuwait had suffered and American soldiers had died in a war w
e didn’t start. Her photographs seemed to imply that America was the aggressor, the heavy-handed power. This criticism incensed Marina and made an expatriot of her.

  Cut loose from family and country, she became even more of a gypsy than she had been. Nothing anchored her, and she let the work she did toss her about as an ocean might toss drifting wood.

  Haiti 1993—The Tonton Macoute Aftermath

  Close-up in color: A brown-black hand extended in a puddle of blood across a plank wood floor. The index finger points like the hand of God in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling. But instead of passing the spark of creation, this hand gestures in futility to a long, narrow strip of paper soaked in blood. It is a voting ballot. It is marked crudely in pencil, but it will never be counted.

  * * *

  “You should be working in color,” they told her. “There are very few publications that print black-and-white photography anymore.” Marina knew they were right, these well-meaning friends, her editors, her agent. So she began working in color. It frightened her at first, but she got used to it. She found herself looking at the world differently. Or was it that she was already looking at the world through different eyes and her shift to color film followed her shift in perspective?

  The world that had seemed alive and vibrant in black-and-white seemed dull and lifeless in color. She began to look for graphic evidence to photograph. Sharp vivid colors, contrast, blood and viscera. She had misplaced her ability to see in subtle terms. If she could not whisper and suggest with her photographs, she could still make them scream.

  When she wasn’t on assignment she was miserable now. She sabotaged every relationship in her life. She sought out shallow and superficial people because they did not challenge her. She lived on the surface of her photographs. She took an assignment to shoot fashion against the backdrop of a burned-out Cambodian village. It paid more than any assignment she had ever done and it cost her twice as much. For the assignment she traveled with a small army of fixers, arrangers, editors, gaunt, beautiful women, and style mavens. She drank heavily, slept little, and smoked opium just to numb herself for the work.