Turtle Island Dreaming Read online

  The bright light was the sun. It was directly overhead in a vivid blue sky. She was staring right into it and could not seem to look away. She closed her eyes. If sight was a sense that one still needed after death she did not want to jeopardize it. She had not spent much time imagining what death would be like, but she was sure that she did not like the idea of being both dead and blind.

  She concentrated on looking away. It took a great deal of effort, much more than it had taken to open her eyelids, but with time she found she could move her eyes and bring other things into her field of vision. To the right, there was more blue sky and the wisp of a cloud high up and bannerlike. Further to the right, and this took even more effort, the sky met a horizon—part water, part land. Sand. She was on a beach. The distant pulsing rush she had heard were waves, though they still sounded oddly distant, as if her ears were plugged, or, more likely, filled with water.

  When she looked down all she could see was the familiar out-of-focus abstraction that was her nose. When she rolled her eyes back she saw more sky and a line of something darker, perhaps the tops of trees.

  She looked left and realized that her head must be inclined slightly in this direction because she could see the sand and the ocean and one of her arms stretched out away from her. The arm was an angry shade of red and blistered, but it did not hurt. She realized for the first time that she could not feel it at all. She tried moving it. She tried wriggling fingers, clenching a fist, but nothing moved. She tried to feel other parts of her body but they were equally lost to her. She could see that she was lying on sand, but she could not feel the sand. She felt some warmth from the sun on her face, but felt none in other parts of her body. She could control no muscles. She felt no pressure against her skin, neither the ever-present resistance to gravity nor the places where her body must be coming in contact with other matter. Even her somatic sense, the understanding of where her body was in space, was confused. She had no idea how her body was arranged on the sand.

  She closed her eyes again.

  She would not have imagined death to be like this. She had hoped it would be a liberation, that her spirit would fly free of her body and she would move on to some beautiful peaceful place. But this seemed more a punishment than a liberation.

  Was this what death was really like? Would her spirit remain trapped in her body while it decomposed? Would she spend long nights on this beach while crabs tore the skin away from her body and birds pecked out her organs? Perhaps this was hell. Once her body had been dried, devoured, and bleached clean by sun and salt, would her spirit then be free? Or was this all there was? She was not a Catholic, but she knew that Catholics believed that suicide was a mortal sin. Were they right? Was she condemned to this for taking her own life?

  * * *

  Marina slept for a while, or at least a period of time passed that she recalled neither thinking nor dreaming.

  Something firm but gentle pressed against her right cheek and a hard edge touched her lower lip. Something cool ran into her mouth, a few drops of sweet fresh water. There was a pause and then a few more drops trickled in, not a lot, but enough to make her cough because her tongue and throat were not working in unison. She closed her lips and concentrated on learning to swallow again. After a moment she parted her lips again and more of the cool water poured into her mouth. She swallowed better this time. She repeated this ritual several more times and, like a child nursing, found that water was always available when she opened her lips.

  She felt a shadow pass over her face and carefully opened her eyes. The sky had been replaced by a face. It was a woman—an old woman with thin, tangled black hair streaked with gray. She had the features Marina associated with South Pacific Islanders—a mélange of ethnicities—delicate European nose and mouth, honey-toned Asian skin, and deep-set, dark, jade green eyes, perhaps the blood gift of some Jewish merchant or Spanish sailor. She would have been beautiful as a young woman. She was, in fact still beautiful. She looked at once familiar and foreign. Marina felt as if she had seen this woman before, but she could not remember a place or a time.

  Marina tried to speak, tried to say “thank you,” but all that came out was an unintelligible, hoarse whisper. The old woman cocked her head to the side like an animal that knows it’s being addressed without understanding the message. She studied Marina. The old woman had thin lips, and it did not take much of a smile to expose shining white teeth. She said nothing but held up the shell with which she had been pouring water into Marina’s mouth, offering more. Marina tried to shake her head no, then tried to say the word no, and finally settled for closing her lips.

  The old woman seemed to understand. She leaned back and Marina could see that she was sitting cross-legged in the sand. She was bare-chested and her breasts hung low and pendulous. She was a small woman, tight and compact, but she looked strong. She wore a short, ragged skirt of dark green grasses or seaweed that looked more decorative than protective. Her hair, Marina noticed, was more than just tangled. There were things in it—feathers, twigs, leaves, a piece of shell. She wore a necklace of beads around her neck—polished white coral, and black pearls threaded on a cord of twisted fiber.

  Marina watched as the woman surveyed her from head to foot. Slowly, the old woman scanned with her eyes. Sometimes she squinted and pursed her lips, other times she made faces, poking her cheek out with her tongue, closing her lips and blowing both cheeks out while bulging her eyes. Marina wanted to laugh, but the old woman seemed to be concentrating intently on what she was doing. She put her hands over Marina’s face, not touching her but several inches away, and bounced her hands as if against some invisible barrier. She made some noises in a high singing voice, but Marina could not tell if they were words, prayers, or simple vocalizations.

  Then, as if satisfied, the old woman stood up abruptly and walked away. Marina tried to call out, tried to say “Don’t go!” and “Please stay!” but her own voice was unrecognizable to her and barely more than a whisper. Left alone again, Marina tried moving her head, tried moving some part of her body, but felt nothing. What is this place? she wondered. What is happening to me?

  But this time Marina was not alone for long. Soon the old woman was back. She set two carved wooden bowls down in the sand and sat next to Marina again. She cradled Marina’s head with her right hand and slipped her left hand under Marina’s shoulders. When she lifted Marina into her lap it was almost effortless. She held Marina’s head gently at an angle so that she could see her surroundings. The sea was in front of her, as was the setting sun low on the horizon. She was, as she had thought, on a beach. Her feet were in the water and the waves surged as high as her thighs, but she could not feel this. She noticed that she was naked, but this bothered her less than the color and condition of her skin.

  Every inch of skin that she could see was an angry red. In some places the skin had bubbled and broken to create open sores. Her legs were splayed and twisted unnaturally. She could have seen the machete scar on the back of her calf if the rest of the skin around it had not been so burned from the sun. She wondered if one or both of her legs were broken. In some places—her right knee, her right hip, her left ankle—she noticed swelling. On her abdomen she noticed a dark bruise, purple-black beneath the burned skin.

  She felt panic rise up within her. Her breath quickened. She saw her burned breasts rise and fall on her chest, but she seemed, at the same time, disconnected from the source of her breath. She was, she realized, disconnected from her whole body. She felt none of the pain she would expect from such injury. In fact, she felt nothing. Her pain, her panic came from a different place.

  Again she thought, Is this death? Am I watching my body die? Now she was truly living in her head. If she was living at all.

  Something cool dripped onto her forehead and ran into her eyes. The old woman dipped her fingers into one of the bowls and let more of the liquid drip onto Marina’s forehead. The liquid was soothing and smelled faintly of flowers. Marina realized that
her face must be as burned as her body, but she felt no pain, only the cool liquid that the old woman first dripped then painted on with light strokes of her fingers.

  Marina closed her eyes. The old woman hummed to herself and rocked gently from side to side. This is what angels must be like, Marina thought.

  Sleep or stillness came over her again, as though it required great effort even to maintain awareness in this place. When she opened her eyes it was twilight. The sun had dropped into the ocean and the sky had hissed red, orange, and then pink, before shifting to evening blues. There was still enough light to see and the first thing Marina saw was the turtle’s shell.

  It was close to her, upright and almost heart-shaped in the sand. The pattern of interlocking plates was a deep green and blue with details in red and yellow. There were five on either side and five down the center. The outer edge formed a border of smaller plates. Where had she seen this pattern? She balanced on the edge of recognition. She tried thinking backward. She had seen this shell in a dream, her dying dream. She recalled it now. Her angel had been there, but her angel had been a sea turtle. It didn’t make much sense to her, but she recalled clinging to the turtle’s shell.

  Slowly, the shell she was watching began to move, but it did not move the way she expected shells to move. This shell undulated, bent, twisted to reveal arms instead of long reptilian flippers. A human head rose up as if from within the shell itself, but as it continued to turn Marina realized this was no shell but a picture of a shell. It was painted, no, it was tattooed on the back of the old woman who had given her water and cooled the burn on her face.

  It covered all of the old woman’s back, from her neck to the base of her spine where the seaweed skirt hung. It spread out to wrap halfway around her sides. It covered so much of her that when she sat, head hunched down and arms pulled in, all that showed was the beautiful shell design.

  The old woman turned to look back at Marina as she stood up. Marina was surprised to see that she did not look as old as she had seemed earlier. Her face was less lined, her skin tighter, her breasts sat higher on her chest, and her waistline was more narrow. She still wore the same necklace and her hair, while a bit more lustrous, was still tangled with the detritus of the sea.

  She also seemed to step more lightly as she walked up the beach out of Marina’s line of sight.

  For a long time Marina was alone. She did not sleep or close her eyes. She watched the sky go from cerulean to navy. She watched stars come alight in the night sky, forming patterns she did not recognize. She looked for clusters of bright stars and made patterns of them as she had when she was a girl, before she knew that there were such things as constellations. She named them silently to herself. There is a ship, and a bear, and an arrow.

  “A sea forest, an egg, and the north stone,” a voice added. It seemed to come from above and behind Marina, though she could not tell for sure. It seemed so much a continuation of her own thought that she wondered for a moment if she had heard it at all. She could see each of the shapes she had heard spoken. There was a sea forest, and an egg shape made from seven stars low on the horizon. She could even see a single bright star in an irregular cluster of stars, like a diamond glinting from a rock. Somehow she knew this was the north stone, though she did not know what this meant.

  “The north stone is the way there and the way back,” the voice answered. It was a woman’s voice, almost familiar. In tone and pitch it sounded like the singing of the old woman, but it also seemed lighter, more youthful. The words were accented strangely and assembled with the precision of someone not used to speaking English.

  Marina tried to look behind her, but she still could not move her head. She rolled her eyes back, but stars were all she saw. “Hello,” Marina said. Her voice came out a little clearer than it had earlier in the day. “Who is there?” There was no answer. “Hello,” Marina tried again. She used more breath this time and spoke a little louder. “Is someone there?”

  “Why are you here?” the woman’s voice asked softly.

  “I don’t know where I am,” Marina answered, though this was not an answer to the question.

  “Why are you not knowing where you are?” The construction was awkward but Marina understood the question. What she did not know was how to answer.

  “I don’t know where I am because I’m dead.” It came out more sharply, more impatiently than she had intended, so she softened it by adding, “I have died, haven’t I?” If she wasn’t dead, but merely paralyzed below the neck, well . . . she didn’t even want to contemplate it further. It was quiet for a long moment, then the woman spoke again.

  “What is dead?” she asked, emphasizing the word dead in her question.

  “Dead is not living.”

  “You were not living before?” The way the woman made a question of her response confused Marina. She was not sure if it was a comment on her life or a misunderstanding of her explanation.

  “No, I was living before, now I am not living. That is being dead.”

  “I know death, but not dead.”

  “Then I am in death,” Marina answered. This made the woman laugh and made Marina feel like she had miscommunicated. “This is death, isn’t it?” she added. Again there was a moment of silence.

  “Death is out there,” the woman said. A shell or stone plopped in the water down by Marina’s feet. “Death is a . . . ,” she seemed to search for the correct word, then found it, “current.” She was pleased with her choice of words. “It carries you here.”

  “Then I am dead?” Marina asked. She disliked having to belabor this point but this was not what she had expected death to be.

  “You are not . . . living.” She said this slowly and carefully and Marina wasn’t sure if it was because the woman was not certain herself or if she was just being careful of Marina’s feelings.

  “So this is what death is like,” Marina whispered, more to herself than to the woman.

  “This is what death likes,” the woman pronounced, as if it answered Marina’s question. Again Marina suspected that this was not simply a miscommunication. Either the woman was deliberately not answering her question or she honestly did not know how to answer it. Something about the woman’s voice made her doubt dishonesty, so she tried a different approach.

  “Then who are you?” Marina asked. By way of answer, a head moved into her field of vision. She knew at once, even in the darkness, that it was the turtle woman she had seen before, but now she seemed even younger, almost girlish. She wore the same necklace, had the same wildly festooned hair, but she had the glow and aura of youth about her. Marina knew that this young woman, the older woman she had seen at sunset, and the old woman who had given her water and cooled her forehead, were one in the same. And now she began to recall seeing this woman before. She had seen her in water, in a dream of water. She had been the angel that had come to Marina. “Are you an angel?” Marina asked hesitantly.

  “An-gel.” She drew the word out, playing with it, almost tasting it. The young woman moved to sit beside Marina. She laughed and said the word again, “Angel.” Even in the dark Marina could see the young woman’s eyes glisten as she tried the word on. “Angel. Turtle,” she added as if comparing the two. “Angel.” She held out her left hand as if holding something in it. “Turtle.” She held out her right hand and appeared to be gauging the weight of an invisible object.

  Marina watched in silence. She was struck by the quality of play in the young woman, as if everything was fresh and new to her. Vaguely, through a great mist of time, she recalled possessing that quality herself. When she looked up, the young woman was studying her with that same head cocked to the side, that same almost animal curiosity that she had shown earlier in the day when she had seemed so ancient.

  “What will happen to me now?” Marina asked. Once again the woman did not answer right away. She looked up at the night sky as if looking for an answer or, at the very least, searching for the right word. She put a hand on Marina’s che
st, covering her heart.

  “Healing?” The way she accented the end of her words made everything she said sound like a question, or, perhaps this was meant to be a question.

  “Healing?” Marina repeated, intending for it to be a question. “If I am dead, why must I heal?”

  “Dead?” the woman asked. She looked confused.

  “In death,” Marina added impatiently. “If this is death, if I am in death, why must I heal?” Again, the woman looked confused. Her forehead wrinkled and she brought her hands up to her face.

  “Death . . . is a current,” she was speaking slowly and deliberately as though Marina was were a child.

  “I know, you said that,” Marina interrupted. “Death is the current that brought me here. I understand that. This is where you go, this is what happens to you when you die. I know I am dead. I know I am in death. What I want to know is what happens now?” The woman nodded her head, smiled, then began again.

  “Death is a current, there.” She gestured out to sea. “Life is a current,” she looked around, then gestured in the opposite direction, “there.” Marina closed her eyes in frustration. “Current brings you here in death. If you heal, you may find your way, there.” Again she gestured in the direction she had assigned to the life current.

  “Do you mean that I can live again?” Marina asked. There was a tone of bitterness she heard in her voice that she had not intended.

  “Maybe.” The woman smiled, but did not seem certain.

  “Do you mean that I will be reborn, reincarnated?” Marina asked.

  “Re-in-car-na-ted,” she rolled the word slowly out of her mouth and laughed. “Reincarnated.” She seemed pleased with the word, but Marina had no idea whether they shared an understanding of its meaning.