Turtle Island Dreaming Read online

  When it was over Marina plunged right back into the world she knew best. She seldom visited America anymore. She lived in temporary apartments, hotel rooms, with friends. She communicated with the publishing world almost exclusively through her agent and friend, Erin. She kicked the opium habit and stopped drinking for awhile, but she still found it hard to sleep, and the numbness she had sought in the drugs and alcohol now came unbidden.

  Marina began photographing herself, comparing the photographs to younger versions of herself. She was not concerned with aging, the little lines and wrinkles some women look for. She had once been attractive, even striking. Her dark wavy brown hair fell below her shoulders and was usually tied back with some impromptu scrap of cloth. It framed and softened the sharp angularity of her features. Her eyes were almond-shaped and a warm, chestnut brown in color. Her skin had a soft olive glow that was enhanced by the sun. What she looked for in the new photographs she made was the encroaching darkness around her eyes. It was as if her eyes were receding into some dark cavern of her soul. This was when she became fully aware of her slide into the darkness.

  * * *

  It was an accident that took her to Rwanda, a chance sexual encounter with a journalist in Sarajevo, made romantic by the fog of fermented and distilled potatoes. She must have lamented the lack of anything dramatic to photograph as they drank in the hotel bar. Or perhaps she cursed her own boredom and emptiness out loud while making love. Whatever the reason, before leaving in the morning he told her that central Africa was where she should be. “Things are just about to come apart there,” he told her. “Old tribal feuds. It won’t be pretty.”

  It sounded like just what she needed.

  Rwanda 1995—Executioner

  Color image: A man stands between two hospital beds. He is jet black and glistening with sweat. He wears mismatched camouflage fatigues with a rifle slung over his back. He is swinging a machete in a wide arc down at the body of a woman who is trying futilely to escape under the bed. He has struck her twice, maybe three times. There is blood on her back, blood on the machete, blood spattering the sheets and the soldier’s uniform. Droplets of blood hang in the air as a red blur behind the machete blade. The man’s eyes are open wide, his teeth are bared, threateningly white against thick black lips. If he hears the camera shutter recording his gruesome task, he gives no sign of it.

  * * *

  Marina had shot nearly a whole roll of film, spinning it off with her motor drive, before he noticed her. Afterward she realized that he had developed some sudden compulsion to leave the little hospital and she merely got in his way. If she had moved aside, perhaps stepping over one of the crying wounded or one of the corpses, he might have passed her right by. For all she knew, her whiteness might have made her invisible to him. But she kept photographing as he came toward her. She backed up and tripped. She fell over an outstretched leg and hit the wooden floor hard. Still she might have escaped injury, but she thrust a leg up at the man defensively and he swung at it with the machete. It bit into her calf muscle and lodged in bone. She was aware of the dull thud of something striking her leg, but the pain did not come until later. She twisted and wrenched her leg hard and the machete slipped from the man’s grip. Whether it was the blood on his hands or that he had suddenly lost his enthusiasm for the slaughter, she never knew. He ran past her, leaving her lying on the floor of the primitive hospital among the dead and the dying with a machete blade embedded in her leg.

  Marina pulled the machete blade free and poured some dark liquid that smelled like a disinfectant over the wound. She took an antibiotic tablet and a codeine pill (she always carried her own medicines when she traveled), and bandaged the wound in gauze and torn bed sheets. By this time others had come out of hiding to help as they could with the wounded patients. There was little she could do to help and she had not the strength to continue photographing so she limped back to her rented car.

  It was a forty-minute drive on the rough back roads between the village hospital and Kigali. She hoped she would make it back to her hotel while the codeine tablet lasted. She thought about HIV infection and other blood-borne tropical diseases as she drove, but she knew there was nothing she could do about that. Now there was only prayer and she did not know to whom to pray.

  The capital city of Kigali was in chaos, but the little hotel that catered to western journalists maintained an illusion of safety. She redressed the wound, took more codeine and antibiotics, unloaded her cameras, and labeled her film cassettes—all before falling asleep. She spent a week in her hotel room, drifting in and out of feverish sleep, clutching her film cassettes like charms.

  When she was well enough to travel she left Rwanda.

  Her pictures were published, somewhere. She didn’t even keep track of these things anymore. Her few remaining friends began begging her to slow down and take some time off. She renewed her self-portraiture with a particular interest in the healing of her wounded calf. She had seen a specialist in England and, aside from the scar, was expected to make a full recovery. It hurt her sometimes, but mostly she was fascinated by the numbness she experienced as she ran her fingertips across it.

  She began to fantasize about other wounds she might experience. She traveled to Russia, shot a piece about the Russian Mafia, selected and slept with dark men named Yuri or Boris, half hoping they would hurt her, but not knowing how to ask them to.

  Chechnya 1996—The Hands

  A series of images, all black-and-white, all stark and empty: Most of the images are of solitary trees, bare and leafless, almost black against a gray sky. With a quick glance they might all appear to be trees, but one image is a detail of a hand reaching up from a shallow dirt grave. The hand and the trees are similar in shape. They all seem to be reaching up to something, perhaps pleading. They take up the same space in the composition of the images. They are mournful and yet in some way transcendent.

  * * *

  Chechnya was where Marina found the edge she had been circling—found it and crossed over it.

  She had been photographing the advance of the Russian army from a little village on the outskirts of Grozny. She was with a mixed group of Russian and western correspondents, some of whom she knew well. It was near dusk, but she was photographing the way she once had. She called it “tapping in.” It was that feeling of being connected to something bigger, as though she couldn’t make a wrong move or frame a bad image.

  They were traveling in a pack, this small cadre of photographers and journalists, shuttling from one area of fighting to another, drawn by the sound of gunfire, down first one alley, then another. They were moving cautiously. They were all veterans of this sort of reportage. They knew the dangers.

  There were times, she had learned long ago, when it was good to blend in with a crowd, and times when it was deadly. She knew this rule, had learned it from hard experience, so she knew they were in trouble when she saw the frightened crowd of villagers heading toward them. They were unarmed, as near as she could see, and they were stampeding in the dying light of day. In the narrow alley there was no place to run but back the way they had come, so she ran. Peter Burdett, a stringer for the international wire services, was beside her, but the others were soon lost in the crowd that overwhelmed them. She went down on the cobblestones once and felt sharp pain shoot up from her knee. Peter grabbed her arm and pulled her up, keeping her from being trampled.

  There was no fighting the flow of the crowd so they went with it. Marina heard the popping of automatic-weapon fire behind her and the occasional screams of the wounded. She and Peter held onto each other as they ran. Marina’s cameras banged against her chest and hips. She felt like she was in a maze. It seemed as if they were running downhill.

  Then they stopped.

  It was as if the crowd was a wave striking a seawall. The energy of the panicked mass continued to surge forward from the back for a few seconds while the group in front flowed backward. They met in the middle in a crush of people unable to move
in any direction.

  Then the popping report of automatic weapons sounded louder. It came from the front and the back. A low dull moan grew from the belly of the crowd. It was not a shriek of panic or pain, but an acknowledgment of the inevitable.

  A head exploded near her but the body was wedged in too tight to fall. It merely slumped. Other bodies slumped or jerked around her. When enough bodies in a given area had been hit, they sank to the ground under the weight of their mass, leaving others all the more exposed and vulnerable.

  She felt a slam in her shoulder, as if someone had punched her, then a burning pain. She felt it again lower in her side and she doubled over. Peter wrapped himself around her, pushing her head into his chest. He held her for a moment. She felt more of the punches, but they did not reach her, and there was no burning pain that followed. Peter began dragging her down to the ground and she let him. She did not know whether he was already dead or mortally wounded when he slumped over her, but there was little she could do for him anyway. He covered her like a heavy blanket, still and unmoving. Then there was more weight on top of her as more bodies piled up. Her leg was twisted underneath her and uncomfortable, but the way Peter had fallen created a kind of shelter over her so, though she lost consciousness, she was not crushed.

  She woke up in an impromptu Red Cross hospital. Peter was dead. He had probably died quickly, she was told. The other journalists were also dead. She learned later that Russian soldiers had continued to fire into the crowd long after no one was moving. Then they had blown up a building on one side of the alley and bulldozed a thin layer of dirt over the rubble to bury the evidence. Fortunately, they had been in a hurry and had not done the job properly. The Chechen fighters pushed the Russians back the following morning, but still it had been almost twenty-four hours before all the bodies had been exhumed from the mass grave. She was one of five survivors. She had been shot in the shoulder and the side and taken an additional bullet in the thigh, but her prognosis looked good. Even her cameras survived, though this was most likely because they were strapped to her body.

  Later she would find the solitary hand image on a roll of film still in one of her cameras. She could not have taken it herself. She was unconscious when they pulled her from the pile of bodies, and she could not imagine anyone stopping to take a picture with the camera while it was still tangled around her. Her best guess was that it had fired accidentally as they pulled her free of the dirt and rubble.

  She could not bring herself to publish any of her pictures from Chechnya, but she did allow “The Hands” to be made into a poster. It sold well considering its gruesome subject matter, but she asked that the proceeds from the sales go to Peter Burdett’s wife and daughter.

  * * *

  There were no pictures after Chechnya, but there was no relief, either. She went on pilgrimages to holy places, read ancient sacred texts, sought answers, tried turning inward, but all she felt was empty. There was nothing romantic or exciting about death now, but there was nothing exhilarating or important about being alive, either.

  When Erin, her only remaining real friend, recommended this cruise, Marina had gone along with it out of apathy and exhaustion—not knowing anymore what to do. “You could shoot some landscapes or people,” Erin had prompted enthusiastically. “It’ll be fun.”

  Marina had not yet decided to end her own life, but the thought was with her. She could just disappear in the night, slip back into the great dark womb. There would be no mess, no chance of complications, no body for family or friends to identify. It seemed clean.

  And now she had done it. The letter she had left in her stateroom was for Erin. Within that letter was another letter, this one to her parents. It was not a kind thing to do to Erin, giving her this responsibility, but Marina was afraid the letter might be lost if it wasn’t entrusted to her agent. In the letter she had tried to explain why this really was the best thing to do. She wasn’t happy with the suffering she would cause her family, but she could no longer go on as she had been. She’d once taken pride in her own hidden resources, her inner strength. Now she was tapped out.

  On the cruise she had searched as much of her soul as she could find. She had asked, pleaded, begged for an answer. She wanted a sign from a god she didn’t really believe in—but there was nothing and no one, and she was alone.

  She opened her mouth and let the water in.

  There was no time to taste the salt, for she was coughing and gagging reflexively. Her lungs hurt first, then quickly her face, and the inside of her head burned. She kicked and clawed at the water for a moment, then relaxed. She was floating now. How odd, she thought. It had only hurt for an instant.

  She opened her eyes and was surprised that she could see—not far, but a little way around her. There was a light above her, but beyond a few feet she could see nothing. It was like being in a fog or heavy mist. Fish seemed to materialize in front of her, swim past, and fade away. Fish with stripes, wide fish.

  What were they called? she wondered. Angel fish? Would she see angels soon? she thought. She seemed sleepy, dizzy. So this is what it feels like, she told herself. But she couldn’t remember what “this” referred to.

  She thought about sharks and things that might eat her. She wondered if she could still feel a bite or tear. Would she even know if she was being devoured? She was not afraid, but she was curious.

  Something circled her. She caught glimpses of it at the edge of the misty range of her vision. It was big and graceful. She thought it was round, then it seemed like a woman, then it was round and almost glowing yellow green in the water again. It rolled and did pirouettes. It had a halo. It’s an angel, she thought. It’s my angel.

  Her angel drifted close to her, studying Marina. It had the face of a woman. It probably had the body of a woman as well, but Marina could not see beyond the gentle face.

  “Why?” Marina heard the question without hearing it. It seemed to go straight inside her head. She wanted to give this angel an answer. She had a hundred answers and a photograph to go with each one of them, but her brain would not make her mouth work. She tried thinking the answers she wanted to give, but this was too much work, required too much concentration. It was all she could do to keep her eyes open.

  “Dreams?” The word came to Marina, but she was not sure if she had heard it or if she thought it.

  Yes, she thought, take me into dreams. Let me dream one long dream and never wake up.

  The woman before her, her angel, she supposed—though something inside her balked at the idea and did not believe in angels—turned in the water. As she turned, her back became rounded. There was a pattern, like a map of interlocking islands, painted on her skin. It was beautiful. Marina had never seen a painting more beautiful. It was alive. It undulated and moved. It was like the shell of a large sea turtle, but it was also more. It was green and blue with hints of accents of red and golden yellow.

  The painted islands became the continents of a watery planet, and she saw them drift together and apart, accelerated as if through some kind of time-lapse photography. Mountain ranges pushed up, lowlands filled with water. She drifted close to it.

  Once while visiting her sister in Washington, D.C., she had seen a film at one of the Smithsonian’s theaters. It had been shot from one of the space shuttles and showed the planet Earth as a beautiful blue, cloud-stroked orb. It seemed so incredible, this vantage point. She recognized places she had been, but they appeared so different from just a matter of miles up in space. None of the scars showed. She had paid to see the film three times in a row. When her sister finally dragged her from the darkened theater she felt oddly at peace.

  She felt this way now as she hovered over the painted planet—the turtle shell islands. She was in low orbit. It was sweet and serene from this distance. There could be cultures and civilizations being born, fighting their wars, dying off, and evolving on those island continents, but from here it was an elegant ballet. She reached out to it, not with intention, but by let
ting her arms drift to embrace it. Her hands found a hard, smooth edge. She could still move her fingers so she held onto it. She wanted to lie over this planet, wrap her skin around it, become a mother goddess for this beautiful little planet.

  She felt herself being pulled through the water—faintly aware of momentum. She clung to the edges of the turtle’s shell and laid her cheek down among the island continents. Her eyes closed and she surrendered to angels, and turtles, and islands, and currents, and dreams.

  CHAPTER 2—PASSING WITHIN

  There are competing theories to explain how sea turtles navigate over great distances. It has been posited that they use celestial navigation to find their way—that each time a turtle surfaces for air at night it studies the stars—that there are, perhaps, certain turtle constellations that mean “steady on for food,” “this is the path,” or “this is the place from which you came and to which you must return.”

  I once dreamed that I saw pictures in the stars, but in the moment of my waking the pictures fell apart like a puzzle. Now when I look to the night sky, I’m only aware that there is something I’ve forgotten.

  * * *

  When you die, you move down a long tunnel, drawn by an intense and beautiful light.

  This was the thought with which Marina awoke. Surely this was the light. It was a golden light, intense and burning. There was an irregular but dull rhythmic throbbing that sounded both close by and distant at the same time. Marina’s eyes were closed and still the light was blinding and warm. Should I open my eyes? she wondered. Can I open them? What would it mean to look into the light? Would I cross some line that I could not step back over? Wasn’t there some test about looking or not looking in the land of the dead?

  Marina opened her eyes, blinked, closed them, then tried opening them once more. There were colors at the edges of her field of vision. Blue. She could see blue around the edges of the light. A pale blue that ran to brighter, almost turquoise, shades. Sky blue, she thought, almost immediately aware that she was, in fact, looking at sky.