He had more energy now. At least the water had given him that. He should stay close to the ocean so if a ship passed by, he’d see it. He needed to build a fire so if a ship did pass by, and he did see it, he’d have some way of letting it know he was there. A voice at the back of his mind told him no one would care. He tried not to listen. He’d always tried not to listen to what people told him about himself. That voice had been telling him to let go the whole time he’d been floating in the ocean, and look how wrong it had been. Look where he was. He even had fresh water.
The line of gulls stared at him and one turned her head and her eyeball glittered and he noticed that the sun was sinking low. Night was on its way, and he was hungry. He couldn’t decide what to do first. Shelter or food? Find more water or build a fire? There were too many choices; even the limited options were overwhelming. Life had always been that way for him. He’d never been able to make up his mind. He lifted his hand to the pendant at his throat and thought: this is what I do when I think. I hold this pendant. This is who I am. He fiddled with the pendant; found himself fumbling at a hinge. Not a pendant, he thought. A locket. I hold this locket and I flip its catch open and closed until I can make a choice.
He pulled the locket’s door open. Alice stared out at him, a smile on her long mouth, her light brown hair pushed back behind her ears. She was young in the picture—in her twenties, maybe. She was wearing a flowered shirt. He remembered that shirt. He’d called her his flower child when she wore it. Across from Alice, their son stared out from years ago, round baby eyes not yet a real color, a blue hat on his bald head. Otis shut the door. He opened it again. He shut it and opened it and shut it and opened it, trying to make a choice.
But there wasn’t really a choice. The rule of threes: it had to be shelter, and soon. He shoved a couple sticks together to make a kind of lean-to. It had gaps, but if he scooted his body inside, his head was covered and only his legs were exposed to the wind that was kicking up now from the water. He could sort of see the stars through the gaps when night really fell. The stars here were just as bright as they’d been when he’d clung to wood in the middle of the ocean, just as bright, if not brighter.
He couldn’t even tell himself how tired he was with that voice that chattered constantly in the back of his head—was it really telling him that his clothes were ruined? Was it really telling him he should have spent more hours at the gym? Really? Lying there, half-sheltered, half-exposed, he had the feeling of sinking into the ground. He used a nail he’d pulled from the crate in the ocean to notch a line into a board above him. A first day.
He fell asleep trying to remember methods for making fire without a match. Flint. Hand drill. Bow drill. Magnifying glass. There had to be other ways, he just couldn’t remember. The locket was cold on his skin.
From a distance, the island looked so small that ocean liners moving past described it to their passengers as nothing but an unnamed, uncharted outcropping of rock. Cruise directors announced over loudspeakers that some people said it was the island where the sirens tried to lure sailors to their death. Listen closely, they said, and you’ll hear something that sounds like a song. From time to time, a half-drunk divorcee jumped into the water and required rescue from irritated sailors. From time to time passengers gathered on deck to sigh at the dark outline the island made against the orange setting sun. But nobody noticed the trails of refuse that formed a path over the water as the ship steamed on. It was official policy never to look back. It was official policy to believe the world stopped once it could no longer be seen.
The thing was, after Eddie disappeared, nothing was quite the same. The long days waiting for garbage became long days filled with dread and guilt. Four children didn’t seem enough—there always seemed now to be an absent fifth, a silent whining presence that wasn’t quite there.
One afternoon, not long after Eddie was given and then taken away, Mimi and Natasha sat together on the hill above the hut. Natasha put her head in Mimi’s lap and wriggled from side to side. Mimi, out of habit, ran her fingers through the toddler’s curls. The kid would probably fall asleep right there. She did it fairly often, sometimes twice a week—or was it twice a day? When it happened, Mimi was stuck, afraid to move now that the baby had finally fallen asleep. She wished just once Natasha would collapse on Luisa’s lap. But she never did. The youngest found the oldest, always, as if by instinct. Natasha tugged at her skirt, and reluctantly Mimi started telling a story.
“There have always been children on this island,” she said.
Natasha hummed and sucked her thumb.
“The world wouldn’t know what to do without us. The world should be holding its breath hoping we don’t find our way out of this place. It should be praying that we never grow up, that we just stay here forever cleaning up its trash. The world should be sending us giant fruit baskets to say thank you. But nobody likes to think about it. So instead of saying thank you, the world pretends we don’t exist. And sends us its trash. And ignores the first law of thermodynamics—energy within a closed system is constant. It can be transformed, but it never goes away.” Mimi had been glancing through a physics textbook recently. It was hard to throw away books without at least taking a peek inside. She’d read a little before heaving it over the fence. “What is the world if it isn’t a closed system? Pretend for a minute that garbage is the same thing as energy. The world puts its crap out in a bucket on the street for Monday’s pickup and it says that’s the same thing as making it disappear. But it never disappears. All that crap ends up on this island, and we’re nothing more than universal garbage collectors. In a way, you could think of the pigs as transformed garbage. They get bigger and bigger and bigger, but they can’t go away. Imagine what would happen if they did.”
Natasha rubbed her cheek against Mimi’s thigh and drooled just a little bit.
Luisa walked up the hill and collapsed in the grass beside them. She’d been depressed ever since they woke up in the net with Eddie gone. And she wasn’t the kind of person to talk about being depressed. Instead she kicked things, and muttered under her breath about building a boat, and pushed other people away. Look at her now—close by, but with her back turned to them like she didn’t want to be there. Mimi knew she blamed herself. They’d shifted Eddie toward the edge of the net, sure. But what were they supposed to do? Wait around for the grown-ups to come at them with knives?
She continued with her story.
“One day, a boy arrived on the island and at first the children misunderstood. They thought the rules of the system had changed. They thought there was more the world wanted to send them than garbage. They tried to make him one of them. They showed him what to eat and where to sleep and what to do with all the trash that kept washing onto shore. They explained to him about how they were saving the world from being buried under its own vast mountains of discarded junk. They thought he’d understand the nobility of their purpose, but he didn’t. He didn’t even listen to them about the basic rules of when to keep away from the sea. Eventually they realized he was garbage just like everything else. Eventually the children realized that the world was doing exactly the right thing by throwing him away.”
Luisa shaded her eyes. She picked up a stone and threw it at her bare foot. She picked up another stone and did the same thing again. Her foot would be speckled with bruises if she kept it up. Mimi couldn’t tell whether she had been listening.
“The only mistake the children made was in thinking that if you look like a child, you also act like a child,” she said. “The only mistake they made was in getting too interested in the garbage.” Mimi lifted her hand off Natasha’s head and patted Luisa’s shoulder. Luisa didn’t look at her, but she also didn’t pull away. Mimi started humming a song. Natasha smiled and sighed and hummed a little, too, and then nestled in further.
Mimi had just reached the chorus when Natasha sat up with a start and clapped her chubby hand across Mimi’s mouth.
“I hate it when he adds too much vermouth,” they heard, then.
“You’re right, he makes terrible drinks.”
“You wouldn’t believe the hangovers they give me. It’s like someone’s stomping on my head