John Miguel Shakespear
A New Island
In the summer of 2013, I was convinced I needed to be alone. For some years, I had been living like a libertine, but all along there had been another voice inside me: a tiny, discontented monk who was prematurely balding, passive-aggressive, and generally ornery. The monk and the libertine bickered a lot over whether I was going to go out and what substances I was going to consume, but the libertine was louder, and he usually won. The monk wasn’t much for arguments; still, he knew how to bide his time and nurse a grudge, and by that summer, I couldn’t ignore him any longer. I wanted nothing more than to go to sleep sober and early, rise with the sun, and spend my days in thoughtful silence. Then, maybe, I’d be able to put together the pieces of my life and write something I could be proud of.
It was this line of thinking that led me, after a year spent teaching English in Phnom Penh, to apply to an online posting for a volunteer position at a hotel on Koh Thmei, a remote and scantly populated island off the southern coast of Cambodia. After exchanging a few brief emails with the German couple who owned the hotel, Hans and Klara, I took a bus full of caged chickens from Phnom Penh to the fishing village of Koh K’chaang, where I’d been told that one of the hotel’s Cambodian staff was going to meet me at the dock. I lingered there on the splintered dock, sitting on a plastic jug of gasoline, until a long teal fishing boat appeared around the bend in the mangrove trees.
The ride across the placid bay took the better part of an hour. With what little Khmer I’d learned in Phnom Penh, I tried to hold a conversation with the young man who was piloting the boat. His name was Dua, and he said that he was twenty-two, a year younger than me. He told me proudly that he had four children, the most of all his brothers and sisters, and that Allah had blessed his family.
As we passed the shoreline of a mountainous island, I pointed at it.
“Koh Thmei?”
“Another place,” Dua said in English. “Vietnam.”
He steered the boat toward another island, a sliver of green mangroves growing taller in the afternoon’s haze. Gradually, I made out the shape of two rather diminutive white people on the shore, waving their hands in the air: Klara and Hans. When we reached the shore, Dua leapt out of the boat and tied it to a small stone mooring on the beach, and Klara pulled me into an embrace. She was wearing a sarong and a t-shirt from Billy Joel’s 1998 European tour, and her husband wore salt-soaked dress pants and no shirt whatsoever.
“There he is!” she said, gripping my shoulders. “The savior of our vacation.”
We went up to the hotel’s open-air restaurant and lounge, which was a wide wooden structure that overlooked the water. Over platters of fried shrimp, raw ginger, and rice, Klara and Hans went over my responsibilities as a volunteer. In exchange for bungalow and board, I would watch the hotel while they took their first vacation in the three years, to Bangkok. I would also feed the animals—two dogs, two pigs, and a horse—a duty that Dua could not perform because his Muslim faith forbade it.
“Don’t worry about working very much,” Klara said. “Just make sure the dogs don’t bite the customers. If they try to bite you, just smack them!”
She swatted the air to demonstrate proper form.
“Dogs love me,” I said, although I had never spent more than a few hours with a dog. “Is there anything else I should know?”
Hans ran a hand through his thinning hair. “There’s whiskey under the sink in the kitchen, for quiet nights. Oh, and there are some fascinating snakes.”
“Snakes?”
Hans smiled in a way that made one of his eyes much larger than the other.
“Only the pit-vipers are deadly,” he said. “The big brown ones, you know. But those ones only come out when it rains, and the other ones are fine!”
“Does it rain much here?”
Klara patted my forearm. “Don’t worry. If you see a snake, just kill it!”
“There are machetes hanging in the kitchen,” Hans added, as if that explained everything.
* * *
After dinner, Hans walked me down a sandy gravel path to the bungalow that would be my home for two weeks: a simple but elegant bamboo structure with a mosquito net hung around the four-poster bed and a western toilet in the back. Before I even unpacked my clothes, I took my tattered notebook out and tried to write. I jotted down a few details—the bus ride, the conversation with Dua—but my focus kept drifting. Every breeze that rustled the branches behind my bungalow conjured a vision of snakes darting through the fallen leaves. I kept thinking of Hans and Klara and Dua. What were they doing here, alone? For that matter, what was I doing here, alone? It had been easy to fantasize about a solitary life on the island as I leafed through a torn copy of Walden in Phnom Penh’s air-conditioned expatriate cafés, but now that I was here in the unbroken darkness, I felt afraid.
In the books I had loved as a boy, the heroes always left home in search of a goal, and the goal imbued every step of their journeys with meaning. These books taught me that life was supposed to be a kind of quest. First you have to set sail, and then your destination will come clear. But in the years since I’d left home, the destination had not come clear. I’d found no rings to destroy, no villains to fight or saints to follow, no passion strong enough to lend my life a shape and a direction. There were individual flashes of wonder, yes, and they shone brightly enough to keep me searching, but they hadn’t added up to anything—no mantra, no revelation, no novel. Life, it turned out, did not so closely resemble the plot of Eat, Pray, Love.
Outside my bungalow, the island kept its own counsel. Cicadas whirred, geckos issued their wind-up-toy mating calls, waves scraped at the shore. The din this ragtag orchestra made was cousin to silence, and gradually, my thoughts began to unspool and flow together, until they too went quiet.
* * *
I woke to a knock on the door and the press of bright sun through the bamboo slats. Fumbling my way out of the mosquito net, I put on a shirt and went to the door. Klara was standing on the porch with a leash in her hand, grinning. The leash led to the smallest horse I had ever seen. Two dogs were chasing each other in circles around the horse, whose entire slumped posture seemed to say: fuck this.
Klara handed me the horse’s leash and said: “Now we walk the animals!”
We set off down the beach, which stretched as far as I could see in either direction. The bay shimmered to our right, dotted with long green boats and the gray wooden fences of shrimp farms. A wall of tangled mangrove trees rose on our left, their root bulging out of the forest like the muscled legs of weightlifters. As we walked, Klara gave me tips.
“If Lena tries to kick you,” she said, pointing to the tiny horse, “please do not take it very personally. She is the only horse on Koh Thmei, so she is, how can you say, sexually frustrating. Also, if the big dog tries to fight with the ocean, just let him fight.”
In a small, rocky cove, we passed a pair of rotting docks and the moss-covered slope of a concrete bunker with boarded windows, and her tone grew somber. “That’s where the Khmer Rouge came to party,” she said. It hung there in the air—the image of young men and boys lifting rice wine to their lips here, drunk and happy, and the image of other boys and men under the rice fields, killed with stones and farming tools and American guns and simple hunger—as Klara quickened past the bunker and led us through a gap in the mangroves, away from the beach.
At a clearing in the forest, she stopped short and sat down beside a small stream, patting the ground beside her. “The animals love this place,” she said.
While Lena munched on weeds and the dogs flopped around in the sand like beached fish, Klara told me about her life before the island. At eighteen, she told me, she’d been framed by a boyfriend, a guy she’d only known for a couple of months. They’d been traveling on the night train from Amsterdam to Hamburg, and the boyfriend had had several pounds of marijuana on him. Klara had no idea. When the German police came in and searched their luggage, the boyfriend had pointed at her and said he’d never seen the weed before. Klara spent eleven months in prison. When she got out, she married another man, had a daughter, got divorced. Her daughter grew tall, she said, and maybe too kind for her own good. She’d gotten Klara through the long, empty years before Hans, when she worked in shoe shops, pawn shops, computer repair outfits, call centers. Just the thought of her daughter made things make sense, Klara said. But toward the end of high school, her daughter had developed a rare congenital lung condition. It was chilly in the hospital on the day she died, Klara said, and there was nowhere good to drink in Hanover.
“I’m so sorry. That’s horrible.”
Klara stood up abruptly. “Now we go back. Any questions?”
* * *
The sun that fell into the sea that evening was a fat, hard-edged disk. I stood on the beach beside Dua, watching it paint the world a hundred shades of red. He leaned on his machete, looking out at the sea, where the fishing boat we’d taken the night before rocked on its anchor in the gentle surf. While we waited for Hans and Klara to bring their luggage down to the beach, he pointed at the ocean and said, “Samout.”
This was a word I knew: “Ocean.”
“Mekh,” he said, lifting his finger toward the crimson clouds overhead.
“Sky.”
“Koh Thmei,” he said, turning toward the mangroves and the hotel.
“I think it means New Island.”
Dua gave a closed-lipped smile. “Sat p’sa,” he said, making a thin hissing noise and wriggling his arm.
“Ah,” I said. “Snake.”
Hans and Klara emerged from their bungalow with their matching travel packs strapped tightly to their backs. Hans was wearing the Billy Joel t-shirt Klara had worn the previous afternoon, and he looked suddenly boyish, the bounce in his step overruling the flecks of gray in his hair. After they deposited their packs in the boat’s cargo hold, Dua yanked the engine’s ripcord, and Klara waved as it sputtered to life. The boat turned away from the beach and merged into a stream of identical vessels that slid slowly towards the mainland in the last of the sun, and part of me wished I were on it: bound for Phnom Penh, and then for home.
* * *
The hotel was closed for the week that the Germans were away, so Dua and I had the premises to ourselves. Quickly, I settled into a routine that could be summarized via montage in some bad independent film about confused young people with romantic leanings: Each morning, I got up around 7:30, walked the horse and the dogs, ate rice and eggs in silence, and fed the pigs. I spent drowsy afternoons in the rattan chairs on the porch, staring at empty Word documents, smoking the Vietnamese cigarettes that Dua kept in his cabin and brought me. Every day, I waited for my masterpiece to arrive for an hour or so, and then I got bored and went to play the guitar. If the horse ate a ramen wrapper or one of the dogs pooped on the porch, it constituted a major event in my week.
My only human companions was Dua, who made trips to the mainland every other day to see his family. If I stretched my Khmer to its limits, I could hold the shadow of a conversation with him, an exchange of basic facts. I had no siblings, Dua had twelve. I was from Boston, Dua was from a small village on the other side of the island, past the bunker and the cliffs. His wife, Marii, had grown up in the same town. My favorite food was chicken, Dua’s favorite food was chicken.
When in doubt, I said the Khmer word for yes.
Do you like the food? Baht.
What time is it? Baht.
The time is yes?
Yes, very much.
Sometimes, after lunch, Dua lay in his hammock while I tried to write, trailing his fingers idly along the floor. Mostly he worked at a wood carving he was making of a fishing boat, but every once in a while, I looked up and caught his eyes on me.
“You, writing,” he asked one afternoon, a week after the Germans left. “Why?”
“When I go back to the United States, I want to write.” I said. “For work.”
Dua frowned. “Only sit? And write?”
“I guess, yeah. And go places.”
Dua mulled this over for a moment, and then he said. “Easy.”
“You’d be surprised.”
“Baht.”
“Writing not so easy,” I clarified.
“Sit all day,” he said, smiling. “Very easy.”
Stubbing out his cigarette in a gecko-shaped ashtray, he picked up his machete and disappeared into the forest.
* * *
In the mornings it rained, and in the evenings it rained. Rough waves carved the beach into cliffs and canyons; whole mountain ranges appeared in the morning and disappeared overnight. I wandered in the forest, fed the animals, and waited for a story to materialize out of the humid air, the mud between my toes, and the grit in Lena’s mane. On good days, I knew that my life would soon take on the arc and scope of the lives in the books I read. The sharp ginger in the stir-fries Dua and I cooked was a gift, the rain was a gift, and the horse’s awful attitude was funny. On bad days, though, I watched myself through mainland eyes—talking to the dogs, finding transcendence in a slice of papaya, treading water alone in the rain—and wondered if I was losing it.
Unless there was lightning, I went for a swim every afternoon. Dua found it strange that I should want to throw myself around in the ocean like a fish. He had lived his entire life by the water without once seeing a human being reduce himself like that. Usually, he kept to himself while I swam, but one afternoon, while I was treading water in the rain, he appeared at the top of the beach, waving two large tree branches and shouting: “Running! Pigs!”
“What?”
He hurled a large tree branch down the beach in my general direction and sprinted off into the jungle. After a moment’s hesitation, I swam to shore, grabbed the branch, and ran after him. The situation quickly became clear: the pigs had head-butted their way through some rotting branches in the back corner of their pen and barreled off into the forest.
What ensued was like a tennis match, but without boundary lines and with pigs. The strategy was fairly simple: I would position myself in the path of one of the pigs and smack the earth in front of it with my stick, sending it squealing in a new direction, where Dua would be waiting to slam his branch into the ground, volleying the pig back towards me, back and forth, triangulating the pigs, driving them ever closer to their abandoned pen. Dua flew through the trees, leaping over branches and slicing through the tangled brush with his machete, moving with confidence and speed However fast the pigs ran—and pigs are not slow—Dua was already in their way.
After half-an-hour’s chasing and earth-smacking, we succeeded in driving the pigs back into their pen. Rain was falling in sheets, and the pigs squealed and snorted shotgun blasts of mud out of their snouts, running happy circles around their pen, grey stomachs glistening. They seemed to feel free, even though they were back in captitivity.
Dua and I went back to the restaurant, where he gave me a blanket to drape over my shivering shoulders. We fried some fish for dinner and stayed up late playing foosball. Bright green dung beetles kept falling from the rafters onto the table, zapped out of the sky when they flitted too close to the lightbulbs. Again and again, Dua beat me, his thin wrists flashing against the blue table. While I stomped my feet in frustration, he smoked and smiled calmly. After handing me my seventh consecutive loss, he bid me good night. I watched him go, upright and graceful, switching off the lights along the beach as he went.
There was a damp wind blowing in off the bay, and the night was full of the wind-up call of geckos and the high whine of cicadas and the endless rain. Something, a windblown mangrove or a watchful ancestor, creaked mournfully in the dark, and the world seemed to expand by the minute. I began to see what an idiot I’d been. Who cared if I had a story? And who was I to come here, to this place I knew so little about, and demand one? Dua was right: writing was easy, and all of my worries and ambitions were born of idleness and plenty. I missed cereal and milk, escalators and stoplights. I missed the comforting illusion of success that high school and college had lent me. I missed corner stores and mega-malls, Facebook and cold cuts, everything I had come here to escape from. I longed for the familiar, treacly patter of soft rock in a dentist’s office, for the flat and toneless march of American English, for the tedium of a rush hour commute. The monk in me called out the libertine’s name. He wanted to apologize; to confess that he’d been wrong about the city, wrong about people, wrong about solitude. He cried out for company, but the only answer was the cawing of a creature somewhere in the dark, like the swinging of an ancient door on its hinges. I knew then that I would never find my place in the world; that I would always be here, alone at the edge of the unknowable ocean.
Beyond the glow of the porch, I could hear the dogs barking at the waves, gnashing their teeth. I shook myself out of the chair, flicked on my flashlight, and went into the kitchen. Rain was pouring in through the open windows, soaking the floorboards, filling the empty vases along the windowsill to overflowing. I opened the cabinet under the sink and found the bottle of Mekong Whiskey, right where Hans had said it would be. It was surrounded by Ziploc baggies full of pill bottles, each labeled with blue marker. Nardil, Nyquil, Xanax. I shoved the bags aside and grabbed the bottle and found a glass tumbler in the cabinet. With bottle and tumbler in hand, I went back out onto the dark porch. It was then that I saw, with the cold lucidity that attends terror, a coiled form in the beam of my flashlight.
The snake lifted its long brown neck and eyed me with mild interest. A forked tongue flicked in and out of its lipless mouth. I stood in the doorway and stared at it, and it stared back at me. We stayed like that for what felt like minutes. At some point I realized I had dropped the tumbler of whiskey, and that the pit viper was sliding leisurely towards me across the floorboards, back and forth, like a skier traversing a steep slope. I focused all my energy on the thought of moving, but an invisible weight pressed against me from all sides. Then, as if in a dream, I heard steps in the dark, the rustling of leaves. Saw the beam of another flashlight cutting across the porch, a body flying up the steps, the arcing shadow of arms and lifted machete. The machete came down on the snake and cut it clean in half, sending the severed halves of its body spasming wildly across the wooden slats.
Dua looked up at me, grinning. “Snake,” he said calmly in English.
“Holy shit,” I said.
He came over to me. “It’s okay,” he said, putting a hand on my shoulder. “Younger brother, it’s okay.”
Slowly, from the bottom of my stomach, a wave rose through me. It came on like nausea, vibrating in my chest and shaking my shoulders. When it reached my mouth, though, it exited as a laugh. “Snake!” I shouted.
“Snake!” Dua shouted back. “Snake! Snake! Snake!
* * *
On my last night on the island, Hans and Klara returned from their trip with four new guests in tow. There was a Spanish couple—a philosophy professor and the director of communications for a non-profit—and a pair from Singapore, a zoo owner and a stockbroker. As the sun seeped into the sea, I mixed cocktails for the newcomers, who lingered after dinner, gazing out at the blood-orange sky. I tried to let them be, placing their drinks lightly in front of them and retreating to the kitchen, but they kept talking to me. Maybe the couples had spent too much time alone together, or maybe they saw that I was alone and pitied me; in any case, before long, I was mixing myself drinks, too. The distance that might have existed between us elsewhere did not exist here, and the newcomers talked candidly about their lives. The director of communications confided that he’d always wanted to be a screenwriter, and something of this dream lingered in his unbuttoned shirt, in the way his curly brown hair licked around his collar. His wife liked her work as a professor, but she sometimes thought that it had nothing to do with the real concerns of the world. The zoo owner, meanwhile, was sick of owning zoos, which smelled.
At some point in the evening, I retrieved my guitar from the bungalow and played all the songs I could remember, faking half the lyrics. The couples snuggled happily on the hammocks, singing along softly to the ones they knew. Eventually, the Spanish couple turned in, and the Singaporean zoo owner stood up not long after, yawning with her whole face. Her stockbroker boyfriend had barely spoken all night, but now he said that he wanted to keep listening. He stayed for another hour, requesting Beatles song after Beatles song. My voice grew hoarse, and I kept trying to politely excuse myself, but his appetite for the Beatles was insatiable.
“Strawberry Fields Forever!” he shouted. “In My Life!”
In the soft lamplight, toward midnight, I saw that he was crying.
“It’s so lovely to be here,” he said, wiping his eyes. “Suddenly, I am no-one.”
Out on the beach, at the far edge of the pool of fluorescence that radiated from the restaurant, I saw Dua strolling towards their bungalow with his wife and children, laughing and talking quietly together. He glanced up and saw us on the porch, surrounded by empty glasses and ashtrays. He met my eye, gave a brief nod, and passed out of the light.
John Miguel Shakespear is a writer and musician from Massachusetts who bears no known relation to William Shakespeare. His fiction has appeared in Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, and Cincinnati Review, and his debut record Spend Your Youth drew praise from NPR and American Songwriter. He serves as the prose editor for Bull City Press's Inch series and lives in New York City.