on
1/12/2002
There is an island with no name that anyone today is aware of, on which a group of about twenty-five men hold out against an unknown menace. The youngest of the men is 15, and the oldest is in his fifties. There were originally two women with them, but they both have died. Eight people have been killed in total.
The island is only a few miles around. The sea around it is full of krakens. There are no other islands within view, and the highest point on the island is shrouded in trees. There is a wide tidal pool that exposes itself at low tide, which serves as a makeshift weir, on one end of the island. Lobsters and fish, as well as strange three-headed slimy creatures that no one dares determine to be edible, can be found there. The gatherers must be careful, however, not to go too near the drop off at the sea end of the pool. That's where Bothran was pulled under, to his death.
The men only stray from the compound by day, and never, by a general rule, in groups of less than five. They go to cut lumber, and collect dry wood for the nighttime fires, as well as to collect food on the seashore and in small traps near the compound. They talk quietly, and tell jokes, laugh and watch out for danger. Make no mistake that the men live like men; they have cards, whittled gameboards and pieces, stories to tell, meals well improvised from what (if anything) is available, and rotations in the cleanup duties.
They have a radio set, too. On clear evenings, their faint signal is picked up by the tower atop an old inventor's house in the city of Nagaan. His daughter watches over the inventor, as his health and mind are failing. She is the only link between the men on the island and the hope of rescue. She hears, every night the signal arrives, about their day's work, and their night, which she always hopes has been without event. She's heard all about their nighttime attacks. She was there five hours after Bothran was killed, in the second week. She knows the names of everyone on the island, including the dead. She worries when the signal doesn't come.
She's been told what the creatures look like: big, scaly things with long hind legs, like kangaroos. She knows how much damage they do to the compound when the darkness breaks open and spills them out, every few nights. She imagines their sharp claws and teeth, sees them jump and scramble over the barriers, hears the bullets thud against their thick hides, or chance to break into their thin skulls. In her nightmares, swarms of them tear through the house, shattering windows, clawing through cabinets, bashing down doors, and entering her father's room....
She's been up on the windy fourth-floor roof, to reconnect the cable to the antenna after a storm blew it loose, and she's been downtown, to the senate chambers, to petition for a rescue of the men on the island. She's sat at the open window of her father's room, watching Nagaan's great flying machines pull the air under them, and make loops around the city, to make sure they can still fly. On fair mornings, she walks through the forest of monolithic buildings, each devoted to the pursuit of a different kind of pleasure, on her way to the neglected market where outlanders sell fresh fruits and bread, rather than waiting for the door to door vender.
Her only ally is the past. In the past, the flying machines flew more frequently. In the past, the buildings had been occupied with building the machines. When she was a girl, the library had contained old books, in which she might have been able to learn more about the creatures. Once, the city's cartographers had drawn maps with no black places on them, not even on the other side of the world. In the past, as all the old senators knew, Nagaan's light had shone outward.
So the woman sits at the radio, nurses her father, begs the people downtown, calculates the signal's strength over distance (according to her father's old books), hopes, prays to gods she doesn't believe in, sleeps when she can, and cries when she can do none of these things. Hers is a private drama on which hangs the lives of two dozen men and the meddle of a city.
Touch the Toast