Invasive (8 page)

Hannah almost drowned when she was a little girl. Her mother insisted she learn to swim, and Hannah did not want to. The water terrified her. It seemed endless and unknowable. It contained
multitudes.

But her mother had other ideas, and one day threw Hannah into the reservoir. The dark water felt like it was trying to swallow her up. Hannah struggled. She felt hands reaching for her (fish, probably, or just tangles of weeds or even old fishing line), and she took in mouthfuls of water. Her mother said she didn't almost drown, but to a little girl it sure felt like almost drowning. Eventually she learned to swim, when she got older, but not eagerly and not easily, and even now that old fear of the water rises inside her like a surfacing beast.

The ocean beneath the boat unsettles her. She imagines what lurks down there. The sea is a poorly understood ecosystem. Every year someone pulls up some creature that nobody ever knew existed—hellish jellyfish, parasitic nematodes, alien crustaceans, pyrosomes. She once saw a documentary about the Humboldt squid—a massive thing, more than six feet long, aggressive enough to attack and maul an unsuspecting diver with tentacles lined with razored suckers.

But her fear, she knows, is part of the problem. Man knows next to nothing about the ocean. And because of that, he doesn't respect it, and he is ruining it with overfishing, pollution, global warming, toxic algal blooms.

And so, as Hannah sits alone on the deck of
The Damselfish,
she fears both what the ocean is (a hungry mouth) and what it will become (a dead place). Even though the day is beautiful and the ocean is a blue like she's never seen, Hannah feels herself teetering on the edge of full-blown panic. To the right of the boat—is that starboard? she thinks so—they reach the end of the island of Kauai. There stand the swoops of the jagged peaks and cliffs of the Kokee Mountains; Hannah tries to concentrate on them instead of on whatever is going on inside her head. The shape of them calls
to mind the teeth in a deer skull grown over with moss—nature reclaiming a creature in death.
Death.
That puts her right back to it. Obsessing over the future. Over the end of all people and all things.

Instead, she just closes her eyes.

It's a long, choppy ride. Several hours in, her head starts to feel disconnected from her stomach. And closing her eyes isn't helping.

When she opens them again, she sees Ray standing over her. “Getting seasick? I can get you a bucket. Anything for a guest of Einar's.”

She frowns. “It's not seasickness.” But she doesn't owe him an explanation.

“Well, whatever existential dread you're suffering right now, you don't have to sit out here. You can go belowdecks. There's a bar. Some salads, sandwiches, wine, whatever. It's nice. You should check it out.”

“I'll stay up here.” She's not sure why. Is she paralyzed by fear? Or is she trying to face down that fear? She tells herself the latter. “What's the agenda? When I get to the island.”

“Well. We'll get you settled in. Get a meal. Give you the tour. Then it's on you. Poke around. Ask questions. Maybe just leave everyone the fuck alone and go enjoy a little bit of an untouched tropical paradise.”

“Okay,” she says, not sure how else to respond. “Will Einar be there?”

“Will Einar be . . . ? C'mon, no, of course not. He's one of the busiest guys in the world. He doesn't have time for . . .
this
.” Ray stands there, and she feels his impatience and irritation. The man makes these little noises: microsighs, the whisper of his fingertips against each other as he fidgets, a small grunt. Finally he sits next to her. “It's bullshit, you know.”

“A whole lot of things are bullshit,” she says, seeing in her mind's eye her mother wincing at the vulgarity. “So I need you to be more specific.”

“You. This. The reason you're here.”

“The murder.”

“It's bullshit.”

“Murder is never bullshit.”

“I just mean—ants? Really. You're saying ants killed this guy and that we were the ones who—”

She keeps staring out over the ocean. “I'm not saying any of those things. We believe ants were at least in part responsible for the man's death. We believe those ants were genetically engineered. And the marker genes present in those ants are the same ones present in your mosquitoes.”

“Those mosquitoes have saved lives.”

“I'm sure they have.”

“If we could bring them to Florida—or even here, Hawaii. Dengue's bad news. They call it breakbone fever for a reason.” He scowls. “You get this . . . pain behind your eyes, like someone's got their thumbs back there trying to pop them out of your head like corks. Comes with a fever, headache, chills, sweats. But the hell of it is how your bones hurt. Your arms, your legs. It feels like someone is pulverizing them. Crushing them like big rocks into little gravel.”

“You've had it.”

“Damn right I have. Doing relief work in Haiti a few years ago. We're trying to do good things. And you're standing in the way.”

“I'm not standing in anybody's way. I have a job to do and that job is a fact-finding mission. I'm not an agent, as has been discussed. I'm here just to rule out involvement by Arca—”

“You're the enemy is what you are.”

“I'm sorry you feel that way.”

He shrugs. “Good luck with your investigation, Ms. Stander.” He walks off, whistling. She's about to go after him.

Instead, she pukes over the side.

Hannah is leaning over the edge of the boat. Breathing in and out. Her brow is wet but her lips are dry. It's then that she sees it. A line above the horizon. A small bump. Seven hours so far on this boat and that's what she gets: a bump.

She looks around. That island is alone. No neighboring islands to be seen.

“The Kolohe Atoll,” Dan Sullivan says, startling her. He comes up, arms crossed and chest out like all the water and all the sky is his domain. He's not a big man—average in most ways. But he's got that captain vibe about him. “Kolohe—Hawaiian word. Means ‘mischief' or ‘mischief-maker.' A trickster.”

“That's comforting,” she says, her guts plunging down when the boat goes up and slingshotting up when the boat drops back down.

“The legends about the atoll are not too dissimilar from those about the Bermuda Triangle. Boats trying to avoid it crash here. Ships trying to land here can never find it. And sure enough, there are a few wrecks out there. One on the island, too—an old Japanese Zero that went astray, got lost, and crash-landed.”

Hannah lifts an eyebrow. “Are we going to crash?”

“I sure hope not!” Captain Dan lets loose with a big belly laugh. “I don't truck with legends and stories. None of that
red sky, no bananas on board, look I see a mermaid
nonsense for me. I'm an old tour captain. I use things like
science
and
my brain
to get through each trip.”

“You give me hope for the human race, Captain Dan.”

He just laughs as the boat surges closer, cutting through the churn with great big belly flops. “You want a soda? Protein bar?”

“I'm good.”

“Just be happy we didn't hit any of the weather.”

“Weather?”

“Some coming in over the next few days. Don't worry, we'll get you out of here before it hits.”

Soon evening settles in. As if to spite Captain Dan's insistence
on ignoring superstition, the sky has an eerie red cast to it. She tries to remember if it's
red sky at night
or
red sky at morning
that sailors caution against—not that it really matters, because a red sky whenever carries its own sinister feel.

The island looms closer, and Hannah starts to get a sense of what it looks like. Flat for the most part, as most atolls are—though she knows this isn't entirely an atoll. It's part coral, but also born in part from a geological shift. The very edges are reef, but the inner ring of the circular island is pushed and bundled like the dough in an uneven loaf of bread: puffing up at the center, but burned thin at the margins. From here she can see the rise in the earth—dark stone and ground riddled with trees and white dots. Birds, she thinks. The white dots are seabirds. Thousands of them.

The boat moves alongside the edge of the ring-shaped island. Here the sea becomes calmer—and Hannah breathes a sigh of relief.

Ray emerges from belowdecks. “There it is. Kolohe.”

“You come here often?”

“You hitting on me?” He rolls his eyes. “No, I don't come here often. Couple times a year.”

“What is it exactly that you
do,
Mr. Espinosa?”

“Like I said, it's Ray. I'm a liaison.”

“With whom do you liaise?”

A cheeky smirk. “With whomever I please.” But then his face darkens. “Right now, you're my job, Hannah Stander. To make sure you don't mess things up here.”

“I have no intention of ruining what you're doing here.”

“I hope that's true. I'm sure our lawyers would be more than happy to eat you up the way you say those ants ate that dead man.”

“He was alive when they ate him.”

“All the more like lawyers.”

Suddenly, Ray is jostled aside as Dan shoves his way in between them. “Oops,” the captain says. “Sorry, Mr. Espinosa.”

“Dan, don't fuck with me. I'd hate to have to tell Einar.”

The captain shrugs. “I'd hate that, too. I'll be sure to apologize to him directly the next time we play poker. Next Wednesday, I believe.”

Ray looks suddenly humbled. His nostrils flare in anger, but he looks away.

“We're ready to pull up and dock,” Captain Dan says.

A
narrow dock framed by sea-licked rocks leads to wood decking lifting across the flat beach and up toward the rise of swollen island that rings the center of this not-quite-atoll. As Hannah pulls the wheels of her carry-on over the lip of the catamaran, someone comes down the dock to meet them.

She knows his face from the research materials: Dr. David Hamasaki, a small man with round cheeks lifted by a beaming smile. One thing the photos didn't quite show: he has a mullet. He walks like he's perpetually falling forward, or like maybe the world is forever dragging him from place to place.

“Hi, hi, hi,” he says upon reaching them. He grabs Hannah's hand and gives it a warm shake. “I'm Dr. Hamasaki—David, David, you can call me David.”

“I'm Hannah Stander. Consultant for the—”

The man waves her off. “I know who you are, no need for that kind of introduction. We don't get many guests out here. Particularly ones with your . . . request.” His accent is a little bit New York. He sounds like a Jewish guy from Columbia she dated once.

Before she can respond, Ray steps up next to her. In a droll, disdainful voice, he says, “Hey,
Dave
.”

“Fuck you, too, Ray,” David says. His eyes tighten, and the smile gets broader, almost a little feral. “You finally gonna pony up or what?” He puts out his right hand and pats it with the back of his left.

“I got your money. Can we get off the dock first?”

“Don't think I'm going to let you forget.” Hamasaki turns to
Hannah: “Sorry about that, sorry, sorry. Ray over there is a Miami Dolphins fan. I, on the other hand, know that the Dolphins are a worthless agglomeration of wasted football talent and that the New York Giants are supreme. We had a little bet as to who would finish the season stronger and, well . . .” He starts heading up the dock and across the beach. As they walk, he asks, “Who's your favorite team?”

“I don't really follow sports.”

From behind them, Ray says, “Of course she doesn't.”

Anger flares in her, but David waves it off. “Ignore Ray. If I said that Ray was a Neanderthal, actual Neanderthals would thaw themselves from glaciers just to make me pay for the insult. Neanderthal man was actually quite smart. So, careful of your step here.”

The walk gets steeper and the flora gets thicker as the decking ascends up through a copse of barrel-bellied palm trees. Even the brief shade from the sun is welcome.

They get to the top of the hill, and Hamasaki steps off the walkway and into the underbrush. It's cooler and shadier, like a rain forest. Not far away, Hannah spies a small wooden fold-up chair sitting between two palms. She remarks upon it: “What's that?”

“That's my spot,” David says. She can't tell if he's being defensive about it or not. “I like to come here, drink my coffee, and just sit for a little while. Because look, look.” He sweeps his hand. “You can see the whole island from here.”

She steps forward. He's right—from here, you can get a good look at the island. In the middle of it all: a bona fide blue lagoon. So blue it looks fake, like Windex. Out past the beach, she sees dark mottled shapes beneath the water.

“Are those whales?” she asks.

He gives her a look, like,
Please don't insult my intelligence
. “That's the fringing reef. Makes it hard to bring boats in—where you came in is the only place that works unless you've got yourself a little shallow raft or something. But that's good, it means this place isn't, you know, all that spoiled yet. We still have some species that you can't find anywhere else on this planet. The Kolohe finch, the Kolohe
duck, the alkali noctuid moth.” His fingers fritter in the air like he's trying to pick the point out of the ether. “This is a special place. A pure place. And it's kept that way by being unfriendly. Paradise is precarious. Just one little thing . . .” He mimes a little shove. “Can push it into imbalance. It didn't take much to screw up the Garden of Eden. Do you understand?”

He's telling her the same thing that Ray did:
You're not welcome here
.

“Let's remember,” she says crisply, “that Eden wasn't disturbed by outsiders. The destruction of paradise was from within. I'm not here to hurt anybody or destroy the company. But someone is dead and something strange is going on, and right now, it connects here.”

He sighs. “Of course. I will help you in any way that I can.”

“The way you say that sounds like it comes with a caveat.”

“It does. I don't know that anybody else here will.”

“I can deal with that.”

“Good.” His smile—which has never wavered, which has remained plastered to his face not in a pedantic or sardonic way but rather in an almost avuncular manner—broadens. “Let's go get you a room in the dorm, see the lab, meet the team.”