Part 1, Chapter 8

 

VIII: The Sea

The following day, it occurred to Paula that they had no calendar or device with which they could track the passage of time. In fact, they had no idea what time of year it was at all—for all they knew, the hot, sunny days were characteristic of the middle of winter in such a tropical location. And still worse: they had no conception of what year it was.

              Their sense of time, then, was calibrated around the night they woke up in the abandoned stadium. Paula took one of the sticks of chalk from the board in the bedroom and, as the chalkboard itself was now reserved for deducing their pasts, made short strokes on one of the grey bedroom walls, each tally representing a day that had passed since the first night. Ray laughed to himself, feeling like they were prisoners counting down the days until their release.

              It had been only six days since they’d woken up in the stadium; not even a week, and yet already Ray felt as though he could tell stories and reminisce about things they’d experienced. He was beginning, he felt, to build a more complete image of Paula in his head—she was no longer a stranger, and he was becoming accustomed to what was typical of her behavior. Naturally, as he got to know Paula, he lent less and less weight to any critique that escaped her mouth, so great in breadth were her verbal treatises on how things should and shouldn’t be. Over the course of six days, she had completely transformed in his eyes. He remembered (sometimes, regretfully, with fondness) the time during which she’d said not much of anything. But then he’d snap out of such terrible thoughts—Paula was critical, and held herself at times like a bird of prey, but she was in any case wildly entertaining to him, and had her moments of kindness. He was aware, now, how the bizarreness of their situation bore down on her mental state, and hesitated to think ill of her. Besides, Ray was of such a tolerating disposition that even if she were indeed someone whom most people would find insufferably irritating, it would likely pass right over him. Though this configuring of Paula as a person, of course, and for that matter of Ray’s own temperament, had only occurred in those past six days.

              “Six days… That’s a six-day minimum since I last took a shower,” Paula said, horrified. She pulled nervously at her hair, which she’d tied into a ponytail that fell over her shoulder.

              Oh, showers! Ray had forgotten about those.

              Unfortunately for Paula, a shower was not among the features deemed essential by whoever had been living here before them; the extent of bathroom-like facilities in the underground chamber were the ominous hole of a toilet in the corner of the bedroom, and the little basin sink in the kitchen, neither of which were choice candidates for a full-body wash.

              “What if we go swimming?” he said.

              “I don’t have a bathing suit.”

              “I mean, yeah, we’d have to be in what we’re wearing now, but then our clothes’ll get washed too, so not all bad.”

              Paula raised an eyebrow. “You think seawater will clean your clothes?”

              Ray’s mind was already elsewhere. He was watching Hitchcock, who was standing before the final door of the chamber they hadn’t gotten to unlock—the door had remained untouched in the past days, with its ugly electronic lock. The bird’s attention was so fixed on the door that he didn’t notice as one of his claws began to scrape backward, sliding on the cement floor, before he corrected it and snapped back into his stance.

              Ray clicked his tongue at the bird beckoningly. Hitchcock broke his pose, peered back at Ray, and then fluttered over to join him on the sofa.

“We’re goin’ swimming, little dude.”

The bird pecked at his cheek, fluffed its feathers, then huffed a reluctant agreement.

             

 

The seawater did not clean their clothes. The water was dark with seaweed blooms and sediment that had been stirred up into the water by strong winds earlier in the day. The scent of salt was strong in the air, and if he let his feet touch the seafloor as he floated, his soles brushed against slimy patches of seagrass that seemed to try to grip his ankles.

Though it was daytime, and the sun was so bright there was no way anyone would notice any sort of glow from Paula’s sunglasses, Ray wasn’t in the mood to surround himself with blasting reggaeton music and the booming voices of beachgoers; so they hung back in an unpopulated stretch of beach, where the only movement on the shore came from laughing gulls and the odd skitter of a lizard.

Hitchcock wasn’t sure what to think of the water. He had been perched on Ray’s shoulder as he entered the water, but then Ray had begun to move into deeper water, where the water reached his shoulders; so Hitchcock had sought higher ground in the form of the top of Ray’s head. When Ray dove forward and submerged himself completely in the water, Hitchcock spazzed and flew to the dry security of the sand, in which he promptly buried himself.

When Paula entered the water behind him, Ray heard a light fizz, and he saw that the water around her hands was, almost imperceptibly, bubbling.

(Was that really possible?)

He squinted through the bright sun, thinking perhaps it’d only been a product of her hands stirring air into the water as she moved, but the effervescence was much too consistent. Maybe the bubbles were rising from somewhere in the seafloor, then—some creature or pocket of air in the sand. But Paula waded deeper, and the bubbling followed her hands as they moved through the water.

“This is kind of nice, actually,” Paula said, and Ray could see that her lips had curled into a smile. She was floating face-up, bobbing softly up and down with the swell of the ocean. Her skin was glowing in the warm sunlight. Ray was cast into a momentary shadow from a flock of brown pelicans gliding overhead.

“Bubbles,” Ray said ever-so-eloquently, and raised his index finger at her.

Paula lifted her head and noticed the tiny pockets of air rising to the surface of the water. She propelled herself backward, but saw that they followed her.

“I think they’re from your hands,” Ray said.

“What?” She fidgeted with her hands, opening and closing them. “Do I have something on my hands or something…?”

She rubbed them together as if trying to clean them, but as soon as they were back under the water the simmering started again.

Ray waded closer. “I think it’s safe to say a fever wouldn’t do this.”

She outstretched her arms in the water. “How is this even possible?” She turned to Ray frantically, voice rising. “That’s boiling. I’m boiling the water? Is this gonna hurt me?”

“Uh—,” He paused. Of course, he had no substantial answers. “I mean, it doesn’t hurt, right?”

“No, but—my hands don’t even feel that hot, look—” She stretched a hand towards Ray and tried to touch it to his arm, but he jumped back.

“Maybe don’t do that. Just—hold your hand in place for a sec.”

Paula’s arm was still, palm facing him.

Slowly and carefully so as not to accidentally touch her skin, Ray held up his hand close to hers. Even with a gap between them, he could feel the heat radiating off of her palm.

“No, your hand definitely is that hot. It just doesn’t bother you, for some reason I can’t even begin to get.”

She stared intently at her hands as if they’d tell her something. But on the surface, they looked perfectly normal—the same tone as the rest of her skin, and certainly with no signs of burning. She lowered them back into the water, then reclined onto her back and floated gently on the murky waves.

 

 

As the sun rose and set over the mangroves, and the moon continued its dance through its phases, The Hole—the name they’d given to the underground chamber—became less a shelter and more a home for Ray and Paula. With the dilapidated building blocks of a barely-surviving and progressively rotting kitchen, trips to the dumpster in search of anything worth salvaging (which Paula protested every time for the sake of decency and hygiene), and walks along the beach, they’d managed to build themselves somewhat of a routine, and with it a sense of normalcy that both comforted them and numbed them to the prior urgency of solving their pasts. Days passed during which the chalkboard remained unamended and virtually forgotten as their progress on investigating what had led them to the abandoned stadium slowed and tired under the beating humid heat.

But what did remain one of the central objects of their attention were Paula’s hands, and whatever thing within her seemed to painlessly create heat from nothing. With every passing day, Paula became more confident in whatever was causing this, and learned that her hands weren’t perpetually so hot—in fact, she’d somehow figured out a way to calm or inspire the heat herself, which she described as feeling like using some invisible muscle. As she grew comfortable with the heat not seeming to harm her, her anxiety over it began to fade.

There came a day when the stove refused to lend its heat to the pot of uncooked pasta Ray had put down on it. Paula, having been watching the culinary expedition from her spot leaning against the wall, moved to the stove and cupped her palms around the pot, and at once Ray understood what she was attempting. In moments tiny bubbles appeared at the bottom of the pot, then fizzled up to the water’s surface. Then the bubbles grew in size and quantity and intensity, vibrating with heat until the water had risen into a rolling boil that pulsed steam into their faces. Hitchcock, during that meal and many others, ate with them, plucking tiny bits from Ray’s plate.

As they settled into their lives in The Hole, they also became less fearful of the island’s many visitors, having learned the patterns and locations of their visits, and having grown accustomed to the fact that under the sunglasses Paula’s eyes really were unobtrusive—and soon they had become perhaps too comfortable, with Ray’s collection of items having escalated from things people had discarded or left behind, to things people had simply taken their eyes off of momentarily. It was in this way that Ray had begun to partake in what he and Paula called “shopping”, during which he stealthily perused and took from the buffet of items lying on beach towels as their owners bathed in the warm turquoise seawater.

The first item Ray acquired was a navy hoodie, whose theft he virtuously excused by reminding himself of its uselessness to anyone in the subtropical heat of the island. Its owner had thrown it onto the sand next to a backpack (which Ray had graciously left there, despite how stupid it was for his owner to have left it behind so carelessly) while he visited a taco truck. Of course, he couldn’t leave Paula without new clothes, especially considering how image-conscious she was, so after stashing the hoodie in a bed of cocoplum, he resumed his shopping.

              Paula had set her eyes on a denim jacket and pointed it out to Ray. The only issue was that its owner, a woman reclining on a towel and reading a book, was somehow still wearing it through the heat—so Paula, suddenly inspired by her desire for the piece, sat down near the woman and dug her hands into the sand. Ray had stayed back, unsure what she was attempting.

In a few moments, the woman shed the jacket and skirt covering her bikini, and left to cool off in the water. At once Ray understood, with something between uneasiness and wonder—Paula had heated the sand around the woman with her own hands, and had made her grow too hot to keep the jacket on.

              She and Ray pulled this stunt many times, though nearly every time it was for an item of clothing or an accessory that Paula wanted. In time she had accumulated the equivalent of a whole wardrobe, which she organized as neatly as possible by folding the clothes and arranging them in little stacks in the corner of the bedroom—all of the clothes aggressively feminine, many of which included some form of pink and begged with their flashiness for the admiration of onlookers (which Ray thought made them questionable choices of clothing, considering how much effort they’d been putting into keeping her eyes away from passerby’s attention). Ray, meanwhile, though Paula had forced him to commandeer a couple of extra t-shirts for the sake of hygiene, was perfectly content with his navy hoodie, somehow even through the burning sun. It didn’t look particularly high-quality, and it wasn’t new (the outer fabric had already started to pill), but there was something about the bagginess that just felt right—or maybe it was while wearing something so dark a color, it would be harder for Paula to spot patches of dirt or mud that had flung themselves onto the fabric and tell him to wash it.

              With the food and running water of The Hole having pushed them out of their state of survivalism, suddenly they found themselves with an abundance of free time—most of which they spent on various daytrips around the island, lounging on the beach and climbing structures they were certainly not supposed to climb (some abandoned, some still in use) to get views of the dusk sky. A favorite became a decidedly unattractive beige cube of a public restroom, which had a trash can just the right height from which to bound onto the roof and bask in the dying light of the day. Sunset, more than any other time of day, had become a ritual meeting time between the two of them; it was the time at which Ray and Paula’s energy overlapped, with Paula sleeping in a couple of hours and Ray only beginning to feel revitalized, and it was the time at which the diffusion of light over the world was enough for Paula to see, but not enough for Ray to shield his eyes with his hands.

The final locked door of The Hole, sitting quietly untouched to the right of the bedroom’s entrance, had come to be ignored by Ray and Paula for some reason neither of them considered tangible nor could explain. It was as if there was some shroud shielding it from their vision; on the few occasions that he did notice the door, he couldn’t help feeling some small, distant call of dread within himself that kept him from acting on his passing curiosity, and each time he soon would abandon the door for some other task or for Paula calling to him.

It was a week before their attention had been properly called back to the door, and it was not the door itself that drew their interest; instead, it was Hitchcock. The bird, once again, had taken to standing before the door. In the past few instances since the first, Ray had called to his bird and the bird had forgotten the door in favor of perching somewhere by Ray. But this time, Hitchcock seemed unaware altogether of Ray’s voice.

“Hey,” Ray said, “dude.” He waved his fingers in front of the raven’s eyes, but the bird did not move. “Y’okay, little guy?”

“Maybe he’s having a seizure,” Paula said.

Ray tisked. “Don’t say that. He’s okay, he just…really likes that door.”

They waited in tense silence for the bird to make any sort of movement, but Hitchcock was still for several more minutes.

“Hey, look, come play with your sand,” Ray said, sifting his hand through the little pile in the corner of the main room (To Paula’s dismay, Ray had decided, after Hitchcock had made it abundantly clear of his love for the material during their nightly walks along the beach, to bring a pile of grey sand into the underground chamber—it was for enrichment, he insisted.)

Finally, Hitchcock ruffled his feathers, cocked his head at Ray, and then flew onto the top of Ray’s head. He gave Ray’s scalp a sharp peck, then bounded towards his pile of sand and buried himself.

“Look, see?” Ray said. “He’s fine.”

But the bird’s relentless interest in the door was enough to push Ray over the edge, and finally he decided he would resist his avoidance and inspect it. It was plain and grey, like the other two doors in the chamber. The door had an electronic lock with a raised keypad; there was no sort of lockpicking he knew he could attempt on it. Additionally, unlike the other two doors, this door had a little glass window at eye level. Internally, he berated himself for having avoided the door. How had he not been curious enough to peek through the glass? He could tell even from the other side of the room that it was dark past the window, but there still could’ve been something visible. He stepped closer to the door pressed his face against the window.

As he peered into the darkness past the door, his insides turned cold. On the other side was a long hallway with a low ceiling, which made him feel confined only by looking at it. There was no source of light in the hall apart from the weak beam that entered through the window from the main room. Along one side of the wall, there were two doors, and Ray could see the faint outline of another at the end. The door at the end was identical to all the others, plain and grey, but above its frame was spray-painted in an industrial font:

CONTAINMENT

Ray strode into the bedroom and snatched a stub of chalk. Paula looked up from the desk in the bedroom, where she was playing a game of solitaire with a damaged pack of cards he’d scavenged. She looked up expectantly as he entered the room, awaiting an explanation for so purposeful an entrance.

“Maybe we can actually use some of this board for stuff about The Hole, too,” Ray said. “Y’know, just weird things we notice. ’Cause it’s kind of intriguing, right?”

“Sure.” Paula tipped her head thoughtfully. “But not with your handwriting.”

She rose from the desk and erased all the words they’d on the right half of the board and rewrote them on the left side with the others, then drew a line down the middle.

“Okay,” she said. “Left side will be things about us. Right side, the Hole. Give me things to write.”

“Weird journal,” he said. “And the hand hurting thing…manhole in the middle of the woods, with no path to it or anything…that locked door…”

“Why the door?”

“Have you looked past? The hallway?”

“No.”

“There are more doors down the hall. And at the end, it just says, ‘CONTAINMENT’.”

She furrowed her brow. “CONTAINMENT?”

She walked to the door and looked through the window herself for a long moment. He worried for a moment that the hall had reinspired her distaste for living down there, and dreaded a comment about how they ought to leave.

But quietly, Paula nodded, returned to the bedroom, and added ‘locked door’ to the board. “Food stock and bed, and a whole kitchen, like someone was legitimately living down here…” she added.

After rewriting some letters so that they matched the cleanness and clarity of the others, Paula nodded at the board, satisfied with her work, and returned to her game of solitaire at the desk. Ray sat at the edge of the pathetic bed and stared at the words on the board, chin resting in his hands, until the first sting of hunger—or frustration at having no revelatory theories concerning the words—drove him into the kitchen.