Cats are pleasant, inquisitive, and joyful creatures. Anita doesn’t quite feel that way. When does pragmatic discipline unleash scorn?

Also, islands are not easy to understand. Dean Weatherly said they were like stars.

He also said there was something special about 100 billion, like, one hundred billion stars in the galaxy, galaxies in the universe, and neurons in the brain.

He’s never counted 100 billion of anything. He can be discounted. He is on strange Peruvian drugs. He lives residually.

I’m stupid, sad, and scared enough to believe anything.

First there is ignorance and fright. Time solves fright but not ignorance. We’re living in the space behind that ignorance.

Continents are just as strange as islands. They float and inside the earth it’s hot and things bubble up into land that we travel dozens of hours to get to.

Chile is east. Antarctica south. The United States of America is far to the north. The radius of the earth is 4,000 miles.

At a cavernous hall in Berkeley a grandfather asks a touring astrophysicist who pauses, smirks and answers: finite; yet with horizons forever-expanding.

Anita is a mid-40s divorcée with brown hair and placid blue eyes. She is a biologist. I told her she was too passionate. Anita gives a skittish look and snarls yellow teeth. She has lost it, refusing the ship again and again.

“I’m saving this one last piece of Earth!” Anita said. She had come for her PhD and stayed for a mental collapse. She trapped cats and ate them. She had crates of canned food stored in her small shelter but she ate the cats like a 19th century opium-crazed Chinaman.

Benji is a writer and a lover of mine. Dean is a photographer and he, too, was a lover of sorts. Islands like this can, however, remove the capacity for love.

An anthropologist once came to campus and rolled out his theory of human evolution in islands. The larger ones could be ruled from the top down. The smaller ones could succeed with tribes. That left the middle-sized terrains to evolve into anarchy. Easter Island was his example. Anthropologists confirm the rock we sleep on has never been inhabited. I’m not positive if we count, or Anita.

There is nothing for Benji to write. Anita is a paragraph. We’re waiting. There is plenty for Dean to photograph.

It’s getting colder at night but it’s still rather tropical. It’s a bipolar island. One side whipped by winds and thrashed by waves. The other side is stagnant and rotten. Berries fall from bushes and soak the dry earth.

Cats were brought from Egypt to Europe, then from Europe to this chunk of rock in a roundabout way. I came from Europe and Northern Africa a very long time ago. I was born in Oakland. Benji is from New York and, like many urbanites, carries a misunderstanding of nature’s kindness.

The cats have killed nearly all of the cute flightless birds. The remaining few roost on the highest, craggiest pinnacles above us. Anita sighs that the plump bird’s genes will soon be so pure that disease will cough them out of existence.

I find the choruses to be the best portions of songs. I wish to sing along before the conclusion.

We brought many gallons of rum and that has kept our sanity. Dean brought pounds of cannabis and ounces of Peruvian roots that cause the mind to mutter and manufacture outrageous geometric images.

I had never smoked and rarely drink. I fell in love and it was powerful. I have fallen out. The sky sets the mood: dark, jagged, and misleading. Dark angry waves nearly as tall as the island surge from mist and shake our rock, belittling everything.

The sun dips low and hangs too long. There has been a rapid transition within the last few days. I ate a small root some nights ago and then a few more the next morning and evening. I have no role here although I could do any of theirs much better.

The billboards in Time Square scream and dance, blink and speak. Soldiers fight, rape and sacrifice. Presidents adulterate. We look out into wilderness confusing it for nothingness. There is a heavy sadness more poignant for its sabotage of what was once the only truth.

To the west there is a ridge and we stand on it at night. The cat lady follows us sometimes as we sip rum and the boys smoke and chew. “The waves are too bright,” Dean says.

“You’re on drugs,” I tell the boys.

“It glows.”

The cat lady approaches. “It’s plankton.” And then bounds out of sight.
There are special grasses here. Anita the cat lady thinks they are special and the Smithsonian Institute has agreed. They have secured the genetic information from this grass and refrigerate it within a concrete dungeon deep beneath an eastern foothill.

Somehow the European brought grass and it displaces the natives. The cats help this process. Hooks latch to fur and travel.

My mother told me to move home and save money. “Carrie,” she pleaded.

I met Benji Oleander the year before in Sydney. It was my first year out of undergrad and my first summer off at Nancy Sessions High School teaching calculus to minority students. When I returned they said there was a recession and my position was cut.

Benji published a book everyone heard of but no one bought. He wrote a grant and was called a “genius” by the correct people and they gave him 5,000 dollars to retrace Steinbeck’s steps in The Log from the Sea of Cortez. He made it as far as Cabo San Lucas and called me. I joined him and he called Dean Weatherly and, from the advice of a gnarled tuna fisherman in a tattered Mexican bar, we flew to Chile and sailed west.

Anita sharpened a canoe paddle and places skulls of each slain feline upon this. This stake marks her campsite.

There is no dock. When the rusty Chilean ship arrives it backs into a cliff and the passengers jump off as the waves surge in and out. They disembark with wide eyes as the captain throttles off, yelling about the winter months, disappearing into a bank of fog. We stood there shocked, listening to the bright silence.

It took an afternoon to walk from the vertical rock to the beach to the bluffs and around the chimney of the ancient volcano. We had missed Anita’s tent and it took a week until she chased a wounded cat into our camp.

Dean was playing a harmonica. Anita stopped dead and inched back like an offended animal. We were puzzled, rose and extended hands.

She was offbeat but we figured it was the eccentricities of the scientist and the miles of solitude she had endured. Her mask either fell off or she put it on; she spoke well, telling us her objectives and rationale.

She returned to our camp that night with strange meat wrapped in tortillas sprinkled with pasty chunks of tomato sauce. We gave her rum; she refused to smoke. She had to wake the next day to work.

Without crowds there is less to prove. The earth chips and withers and explodes up and eventually crumbles into ooze at the bottom of the sea. Then there is stagnancy and a fireball. Then there is silence and movement, tremendous movement.

It’s been days since I’ve slept. The moon is mistaken for the sun. I shut my eyes but there is no cessation. I am scared to mention the Chilean boat.

“I haven’t slept either.” Dean answers unasked questions. We sit in chairs facing the moon. There are no longer enough supplies to wantonly burn. I am fuzzy. I smell. I have recently had intercourse with Benji. The joke of Dean and the cat lady sharing a tent has subsided. Cats moan late at night.

“I wonder how she kills them?” Dean ponders.

We chew root like there is a climax ahead. We age without changing.

“I’m, like, cooked, man. I think I got a good one. I’m like… you know?” Benji says. He has stood. His hands reach to aid his speech. “I’m like, you know?” He begins to undress. We watch him curiously until he is naked. We look around and nothing has changed. It seems normal. I like how I smell; there is fragrance.

A bulb has risen from the collision of rock and water and floats past the moon. By the time it is clear I am naked. Hair is grown, a silly patch. There is a root in my mouth. I hug my chest then lower them.

Dean is naked too. He is strange and red and it’s in these conditions that you can tell with whom you are capable of long-term breeding. With the games removed there is no need for a game.

“Fucking cats,” Dean says as they moan.

“We have to liberate the cats,” Benji says.

I do not need another suggestion. I walk. They follow. We march. We descend the ridge toward the south. No fires burn, no credit from the earth’s past, nothing but animal consumption and respiration.

We are silent; moon rays penetrate skin. The cats squeal then it’s silent. A slope causes hands and knees and I feel cool air as Benji follows close behind.

The tent is visible. The stake of cat skulls glows. Another cat screams, it raises a pitch and hollers like a wolf. As we move closer we see her silhouette. The tent is behind her and the craggy pinnacles are before, clouds drift and hang against stone.

“What… are you doing?” Benji asks.

Anita looks up at him, at us, she pauses. “You’re naked?”

“We’re liberating this population,” Dean says.

She tells us she’s liberating the island. Benji takes a step closer. She backs away.

Benji reaches down in curiosity of the small guillotine-like device Anita has rigged. We watch and then watch her move, reaching forward and grabbing Ben between the legs.

“Ow, ow, OW, OW!” Benji screams as Anita says, “Not another step, back off!”

Dean doesn’t listen. He takes another step as Benji screams louder. The scream eases into rapid panting as the cat lady thuds dully to the ground. Benji writhes in a circle, and a cat meows somewhere in the short distance. Anita is motionless on the ground. The scowl is gone from her face and she looks peaceful. Her tent is near. Dean pushes the flap open and we enter.

Her space is nicer than ours, a cot, lamp, stove, the best and most expensive gear. There is a small solar dish, a laptop and what looks like a large GPS unit. I reach for the laptop and attempt to turn it on. It remains black. The GPS as well does not seem to function. Stashed in the corner are several small crates.

“Peaches!” Dean exclaims. There are tears in his eyes. Benji moans from outside and we take some cans and leave.

↓

In the morning we walked down the ridge to check on Anita. She wasn’t on the ground and she wasn’t on her cot. We ate peaches until our stomachs hurt and walked around the ridge looking down onto the black sand beach. A day passed and we put on shirts to protect our skin. Another root that night and we were drained and excited in the morning. Anita was still nowhere to be found. We saw cats leap and hide under tall English grass.

Dean found footprints and we followed them to the stagnant beach. The footprints led to the water.

“What are these ones?” Benji asked. On each side of a broad swath there were small depressions that looked as if a paddle had stumped down.

“Sea turtles,” Dean said.

“I think she’s gone,” Benji looked up at us.

Things changed after that. We were always waiting. A few days later Dean came back from a walk and told us her body had washed ashore on the other side of the island, bloated and busted from rocks.

I looked at Benji. The roots were almost gone. There was some rum. That night we finished strong. Dean held four chunks of the chalky strings in his mouth. In the morning we were naked on the east side, sitting in our chairs, and silent. For the first time since we first arrived, we all sat together in silence, looking to the east, waiting for the Chilean ship.