Christine Hale

from the prologue of Basil’s Dream:

From the air, through the plastic porthole of a descending plane, Bermuda appears improbable. The sea, clear and vibrant turquoise, stretches unconstrained all the way to the curve of the globe in every direction, yet—here is this thin tailing of land parting the waters, a nattering of limestone lace raised from the ocean floor on a solitary spindle of volcanic rock fourteen thousand feet tall. Lucy Langston tries imagining from the airline seat into which she’s buckled the force of the eruption that formed the cone that created the island. She tries to account inside herself for the anomaly of chance that placed this island here and nowhere else, so completely alone, six hundred miles from the nearest land, North Carolina’s Outer Banks, and a thousand miles from the Caribbean islands to the south-southwest with which she, like most Americans, would have lumped it until there arose in her life the circumstances that place her—and her husband Darrell on the aisle, and their twelve-year-old son Peyton between them—in these seats on this flight on their way to open a new chapter of their lives as expatriates in this tiny, isolated, insular British colony.

Lucy knows no one in Bermuda, and she did not want to come. Peyton has left a best friend, and a soccer team, in Darien, Connecticut; he, also, did not want to come. Darrell, whose new job brings them to the island, wanted to come: they are his family, so here they are. The three of them, about to reach the place he is taking them. To Lucy, the island below resembles a scar—a dry, definite ridge stitching up the dead lips of an old wound—that rip in the earth’s skin through which lava had once poured boiling….

As the jet’s tires strike the runway, bounce once and then bite, Lucy Langston…stares out the window, at heat shimmer rising off tarmac, white roof lines and blazing pink oleander. Her hand rests on Peyton’s arm, to comfort him, she thinks. She does not notice that her touch is a squeeze, that she’s leaving reddening half-moon nail marks in her son’s fair and nearly hairless skin and that he stares resentfully at the offending hand but does not remove it. Darrell has his cell phone on already, checking voicemail, punching notes into his digital planner.

She leans her cheek against the window. The plastic is warm; it is mid-July and the air outside will steamy. She replays her dream one more time. Rummages inside it without success for what makes such a dreary dream so profoundly troubling.

In it she runs in slick, flat shoes all wrong for the job, causing her to slip and fall hard and skin her knees, and digging blisters, and blisters on top of blisters, into her heels and the tops of her naked toes. She runs on a dirt road—red dirt rising up in gritty puffs at each footfall, sticking to her sweat—and the road is endless. She runs all alone, in the dark, very tired, exhausted really, always, always in a desperate hurry, but always too with no sense of where nor why. Hurry, hurry, where? Where? She runs and runs, thirsty, hungry, her mouth full of dust and her stomach gnawing its own lining bloody, and she never sees anyone, ever, not a soul, although she remembers now—for the first time, seated on this plane that has just taxied to a stop in front of a low white cinderblock terminal, the windows and the rooftop railing of which are lined with a sea of black faces—that the whole time she runs she hears a crowd she never sees. A crowd. Not cheering. Seething. Sometimes howling and hurling. This rising and falling of the sound of the unseen crowd is like the restless suspiration of the sea.

She stands up because everyone around her has already done so. Quickly she peers back out the window, to see if the ocean is in view. It is not. She sees tarmac and baggage and baggage carts. Thick green vegetation, palm trees and flowers, bright blue sky and houses painted pale Easter egg colors. And people, so many people, every single one of them a stranger to her.

Heart racing, feet moving, she follows her family—her son, her husband, their familiar shapes, the familiar-shaped troubles her mind makes of them—down the aisle toward the jet’s wide-open doorway. The shoes she’s wearing, she sees, are the ones from last night’s dream. Old and nearly worn out. Royal blue with a parrot, green wing, red body, stitched large on each toe. The heel of a wingtip not Darrell’s lands solidly atop one of her birds and she cries out in pain. The man, backing from his seat into the aisle with cell phone clamped to his ear is big, jowly, black, wearing a Brooks Brothers suit, a Wall Street yellow tie and suspenders, and a half-carat diamond sunk deep in one fleshy ear. Without really slowing down, shoving past her and her family who’ve stopped at the sound she made, he says, unctuously, “Madam, excuse me. How clumsy. Forgive me.” And in the very next beat into his phone, he says curtly, “You know better than to call me here, this line’s not secure.”

Lucy watches Darrell’s lips purse while his ears redden. The man, tailed by a scurrying assistant, is gone—not even noticing Darrell’s intention to face him off. She puts a hand on his hand to suggest he not follow, that he let it go. Darrell turns on her, flinging her hand off and saying vehemently to her what he hadn’t said to the black man. “What an asshole.”

She steps back, knowing suddenly what she runs from in the dream. It is Darrell.
She follows him off the plane. Peyton has bounded ahead; she locks eyes on his blond head so as not to lose him. Now at the top of the stairs, she hears the sea. Breathing, and breaking on the shore.