§ § § -- March 4, 2006
He heard footsteps, and a few seconds later Leslie handed him a glass. "Here," she said and sat in the other chair. With shaking hands Christian drank the entire glassful of water without stopping even to breathe; he felt a few drops spill onto his shirt but ignored them, trying to find some normalcy to grasp. When he had finished, he lowered the glass and stared fixedly at it, thinking how familiar it, too, looked from all the meals at which he'd drunk from it and its identical fellows. Everything was the same, yet nothing was. He had somehow landed in a world where he was a nonentity.
"Are you sure you're going to be all right?" Leslie asked. Concern filled her voice, but it was professional concern; there was no alarm. She was merely worried about the well-being of a guest, not frightened for her husband. Christian's heart beat madly within his chest, as if it were a captive bird trying to escape.
He chanced a glance at her. "I don't know," he murmured helplessly. "I…I'm sorry to have intruded on you like this…I really thought…"
When he hesitated, afraid of the reaction his tumbling thoughts would receive if he gave them voice, Leslie leaned forward a bit and said gently, "Well, first things first. What's your name? Where are you from?"
"I'm from Lilla Jordsö," he said, and couldn't help studying her closely when he added, with precise clarity, "My name is Christian Enstad."
She only nodded and extended a hand, a welcoming but impersonal smile on her face. "Welcome to Fantasy Island, Mr. Enstad." The formality gave him another vicious jolt, but he managed to at least partially contain himself and took her hand to shake it. "I'm Leslie Hamilton—I'm Mr. Roarke's assistant and his adopted daughter."
"I know," said Christian before he could stop himself, but she just grinned.
"Guess our fame precedes us. I always forget about those damn brochures. Well, anyway…so you say you're here for a fantasy?"
Christian hesitated before he spoke, unsure he should stick with that story. "I…uh, thought so, but perhaps there was a mistake." Carefully he picked his words, groping for something that would sound plausible to her. "In fact…I just arrived this morning…on the ferry, from Coral Island. I…need a job, if you happen to have anything open."
She sat back in her chair and considered his words, while he stared hungrily at her, yearning for some sign of recognition in her. After a moment or two she looked up, and he saw her stiffen again; he cleared his throat and looked quickly away, realizing he was going to have to deal with this altered reality whether he wanted to or not. Painfully he said, "I apologize for my…familiarity a few minutes ago. It was out of place, I'm afraid. It's only that you…look like someone I…someone I'm very fond of."
Leslie's features softened and she smiled with sympathy. "Oh, I see. Well, that's all right, no apology necessary. Is your wife with you?"
Christian had honestly forgotten about his wedding ring, and he stared stupidly at his finger for a minute or two before coughing self-consciously. "Oh, I don't…I mean—" He had no wish to create some hole-filled backstory for the ring, and instead stripped it off and dropped it into the pocket of his denim shirt. "That was…another life." And how! he thought.
"Oh," she murmured, looking as if she wanted to ask questions. He was grateful when she didn't, instead turning the conversation back to business. "Well, as far as a job is concerned, we don't have anything open here in the main house. That is, unless you don't mind a temporary job. We're a little short of workers for the weekly luau, and if you're interested, we could use your help."
About to accept, he caught himself, noticing the computer behind her, the one he himself had set up there. Or did I? Determinedly he banished that train of thought and drew in a breath, then ventured experimentally, "As a matter of fact, I'm very knowledgeable about computers. If yours, or anyone else's around here, needs service, I can provide it."
She smiled. "Thank you for the offer, but there's a computer shop on Coral Island that takes care of all that for us. You know, if you want to work with computers, you might try applying there."
For some reason the thought left him cold. "No…I appreciate your suggestion, though. Well, as to the luau job, I'll take it."
"Okay." Leslie reached halfway across the desk for a scratch pad, and Christian watched her as a starving wolf watches an unsuspecting rabbit, following her movements as she made some notations on the top sheet. "Here's how to find the luau clearing. I'll tell Chef Miyamoto you'll be there, and you should report to work at three o'clock this afternoon. They'll keep you busy, but you'll be paid well for your efforts."
"Thank you," Christian murmured, watching her tear the sheet off the pad and taking it when she offered it to him. Dear fate, but he wanted to touch her… The impulse grew too strong for him to resist and he blurted out, "Are you married?"
She blinked rapidly a few times and stared at him in surprise. His heart sank at the new caution in her voice when she replied, "No, I'm not."
"At all?" he said, then realized just what an idiotic response that had been. To his surprise, she chuckled softly.
"Oh, I was married once, a long time ago, but he passed away. I just never met another man I really felt I could connect with." The words seemed to brand Christian's soul, but she smiled and shrugged, as if the subject were of little importance. "I guess I'm just not cut out to be a wife."
"That can't be true," Christian said helplessly, staring at her again. He couldn't seem to control his own words. "Will…will you be at the luau tonight?"
"Mr. Enstad—" she began.
"Call me Christian, please," he broke in. Even he could hear the thread of neediness in his own voice, and couldn't blame her for the odd look she gave him.
But she capitulated. "Okay…Christian. I probably will, but I'll be working—and so will you." Her voice was firm, a no-nonsense, don't-mess-with-me tone that told him he'd better back down before he lost whatever little ground he'd gained with her. "As I said, you can report at three o'clock. Chef Miyamoto'll be on the lookout for you. Is there anything else you need, while you're here?"
He seized the line she'd thrown him. "I…don't think I have a place to stay," he said, for some absurd reason hoping, even half expecting, that she would offer the spare room upstairs. Anything, he thought, to stay near her… He dug into his pocket and got still another shock when he saw that he held a grand total of thirty-four dollars in his hand.
Leslie noticed it too and peered at him. "It sounds," she said delicately, "like you've had a rough time of it lately, Mr. Enstad."
Oh, you don't know the half of it, he thought, but instead mustered up a half-shrug and a sheepish smile. "Quite so, I think. I'm sorry for imposing like this."
"It's no imposition. We still have one empty bungalow. Why don't you stay there." She reached across the desk again and this time extracted a key from the gold box there, handing it to him and briefly brushing his fingers with hers in the process. Christian's heart lurched, but the minimal contact clearly had no effect on her at all. "Do you need someone to show you the way there?"
"If you could…" he began, feeling like a child asking one too many favors.
Leslie smiled. "I think I can spare that much time. Just follow me." He got up in unison with her and trailed her out of the house, a devoted puppy attached to an indifferent mistress, his head still awhirl and his stomach doing back flips. Nothing here was normal, nothing at all. He needed a chance to come to grips, even if only a little bit.
‡ ‡ ‡
He dropped his duffel on the bed in the North Shore Bungalow where Leslie had left him, trying not to cast glances back at the door or search for her retreating form through the front window, and sat down on the end of the bed with a heavy thump that made him bounce once or twice. Releasing a long sigh, he pondered in depth for the first time just why things were going the way they were. Anonymous, yes; nonexistent, no! This has gone too far, he thought, shaking his head hard a few times to dispel a shudder. Sometimes I think Mr. Roarke is a sadist. And did Leslie go along with this willingly? Did she know beforehand what he was planning to do? Is that why she's pretending she's never seen me before today, and has no reaction to me—none at all?
The thought gave rise to another question: would Kazuo know him either? He was supposed to go and work for his friend this evening. Would any of their other friends know him should he run into them? Christian arose and ventured into the bathroom off the bedroom, staring at himself in the mirror. He didn't look any different from usual; he still had the same glossy, straight, deep-chestnut-brown hair, the same hazel eyes, the same flawless nose his mother had bequeathed him, the same lips and smile (hesitant though this last might be at the moment). He was unquestionably still Christian Enstad; it was only that in this peculiar version of his life, no one knew who he was. Worse, it seemed no one cared.
He straightened the denim work clothing he had worn particularly for this weekend and left the bathroom, pocketing the bungalow key that lay on the coffee table before going back outside. Something else had occurred to him: would he find the house he and Leslie shared, standing opposite Grady and Maureen Harding's place as it had done for the last five years or so? He suspected not, but human nature demanded that he find out for himself, see it with his own two bewildered eyes. Until he knew for sure whether the house was still there and whether their friends would know him, he couldn't decide if Leslie was just pretending she'd never heard of him, or if this was some scary altered reality.
He remembered Taro Sensei talking about a shuttle bus that ran on a regular schedule around the island; he made his way out to the Ring Road and walked down it till he came to a sign designating a regular bus stop. A few native girls were waiting there, their arms full of leis perhaps left over from the guest-welcoming at the plane dock that morning, chattering among themselves like magpies. An African-American man waited there as well, standing a bit apart from the girls, his hands in his pants pockets and his suit jacket open so that his tie sometimes waved in the breeze. He nodded to Christian as the latter joined the group there, and Christian nodded back; but neither spoke, and there was no sign of recognition on the other man's part. Christian was surprised to find he was getting used to that.
In a little more than ten minutes the bus rumbled around a bend in the road, coming west from the hotel, and Christian filed aboard after the others, sidestepping his way to the last empty seat near the back. He would be here awhile; it would take more than an hour for the vehicle to get around the island to Christian's destination. The nearest stop to the Enclave was at its nearby marina and beach, so he planned to get off there and walk the rest of the way. It should help ease his restlessness.
He almost dozed off several times along the route; when he finally awoke fully and got a good look around him, it took him a couple of minutes to figure out where he was. He managed to pinpoint his location to somewhere on the western end of the Ring Road's southern leg. From then on he watched carefully till his stop came up, and he got off the bus alone while a gaggle of vacationers streamed aboard. He paused at the stop, watching the bus lumber away to the east and then vanish around a gentle curve in the road, before he began to walk. Only then did his apprehension catch up with him and start to burgeon.
It was a good mile up the access road and another two down the little dirt lane where he and Leslie had built their house soon after marrying. His periodical beach runs had given him enough stamina that, as long as he didn't push himself too hard, he would be just fine. The six-mile-total walk, there and back, would do him good, he thought. But it didn't do his brain much good, and he worried all the way there about what he'd find.
It unnerved him how everything was just the same as he had grown to know it during his years on this island. He caught sight of the strange A-frame/Tudor castle amalgamation where the stars of Leslie's favorite TV show, "King's Castle", lived; occasionally they caught glimpses of Damian Mullawney out front doing yard work, or Carson Howland Casey taking a little sun in his wheelchair, and would wave in neighborly fashion. It gave him a pang and he tried to stuff thoughts of Leslie back into a dusty corner of his mind.
He picked up the pace a bit on their own little dirt lane, and in about fifteen minutes he could see Grady and Maureen's house set back on their gently sloping front lawn…and nothing but a grassy meadow where his and Leslie's house should have been. Christian stopped short and gaped for a moment, reeling almost as badly as he'd done back at the main house a while ago, again struggling to grasp this new development. "I'm going to go crazy," he said aloud. "I'm sure of it."
For a moment he wavered there, not sure what he should do; then he heard a door shut and looked around. Maureen Harding had just emerged from the house and was heading for the car that sat in the driveway, with Brianna trailing her holding April's hand. He watched Maureen secure April in her rear car seat, watched her and Brianna get into the car themselves, and belatedly debated hiding or at least resuming his walk back down the lane before they saw him.
But he'd taken perhaps only a dozen steps before the car pulled up alongside. Brianna had rolled her window down, and Maureen leaned over. "Do you need a ride somewhere?" she asked.
Torn between taking the offer to spare himself the long walk back to the bus stop and avoiding the discomfort that he feared would arise, he hesitated again, then gave up and smiled at her. "I'd appreciate that, thank you," he said.
Brianna got out and joined her little sister in the back, and Christian took her vacated seat up front. Maureen smiled at him and sent the car forward. "What brings you all the way out here? We're pretty isolated, after all, and not too many people get this far back into the boonies."
"Ah, well…it's a perfect day, and I just decided to wander wherever the whim took me," Christian said, surprised to find that he sounded fairly normal when he said this.
"That's some pretty serious wandering," Maureen commented with a laugh. "You must be a visitor here. Us natives are probably too blasé to bother exploring the island to that extent. Where are you from?"
Christian had to swallow before he could reply. "Lilla Jordsö," he said.
"Wow," said Brianna from the back seat. "We never get anybody from all the way over there. That's really cool."
"It is interesting," Maureen concurred, actually sounding interested. "I guess you must have been looking for a real change of pace, to find yourself on the opposite side of the planet from Europe like that."
"You could say that," murmured Christian faintly, beginning to wish he'd opted out of the ride after all. He barely managed to maintain his façade, making conversation with Maureen and Brianna as he might do with a stranger who came into his shop to wait for him to put the finishing touches on a computer repair, having to consciously remember not to call either of them by name. He couldn't talk much about himself, either, so the conversation felt a little stilted to him. It was a relief when Maureen dropped him off in front of the hotel at his request, wished him luck, and drove away.
Christian's frustration, anger, bewilderment and even a trace of fear had him so agitated by now that he took refuge in the familiar: he began to run, as he sometimes did on the beach. He pounded across the hotel grounds, found a jungle path that he knew would lead to the bungalows, and let his thoughts pulse through his head to the beat of his sneakers thudding onto the hard-packed earthen trail. He'd worked up a pretty good sweat when he got back to the bungalow, but his emotions hadn't been settled at all. If anything, they'd only been stirred up all the worse. He stripped his clothing off and climbed into the shower, wishing he could wash his cares away so easily.
He had just donned jeans and a T-shirt from the duffel when he sensed he wasn't alone, and looked around. Sure enough, there stood Roarke. Wary, Christian stared at him; but Roarke smiled and said warmly, "Hello, Christian, are you enjoying your fantasy?"
Relief enervated Christian and he collapsed into a seated position on the bed. "Thank fate, someone actually knows me around here!" Roarke's brows popped up, and Christian suddenly saw the irony in his remark.
Before he could react, though, Roarke asked, "Is it so bad?"
Christian stood up and glared at him, resentment boiling over all at once. "I'd like to know exactly what you had in mind when you agreed to grant me this fantasy. I feel as if I dropped in here from another world. A stranger in a strange land, a man without a country. What are you trying to do, Mr. Roarke, destroy my sanity?"
"I beg your pardon?" said Roarke, looking surprised.
Christian began to pace the floor. "Look, it's one thing for me to be just a common, ordinary man in the street. It's quite another when even those you know have no recognition of you at all! Damn it, Mr. Roarke, what's going on around here?"
"Your fantasy was to be completely anonymous, was it not? To achieve that goal, it was necessary for me to make certain…adjustments to reality. Otherwise, you would not have achieved your objective."
"I don't understand. Was it necessary to erase my existence from the memories of everyone on this island?"
Roarke settled his stance and smiled slightly. "You insisted on being a nobody. In order to accomplish this, I had to alter everything. Any person, any part of this island that your life had touched in some way, had to be changed so that you could in fact be the common man you so dearly wished to be. And that meant no one knowing you at all. If you had been allowed to retain contact with those you know, you would never have gained the full experience you were searching for with this fantasy. You would be no more a common, ordinary man than I. You would still be Prince Christian, famous since birth, seeing his name in every magazine and newspaper on earth, bemoaning his notoriety—because your friends would still have known who you really are, and would have treated you accordingly."
"It wasn't necessary to include Leslie!" Christian shouted, his remembered horror at Leslie's blank reception finally overcoming him. "When I first began to get an idea that I wasn't really me any longer, I came to her looking for help—and all I got was a blank stare and a 'who are you?' For a moment or two I thought I would faint!"
"Oh…I am terribly sorry," said Roarke sympathetically.
"Sorry," Christian scoffed, rolling his eyes. "I'm nothing, don't you see? Nothing and no one. I don't even exist! My friends, my family, my wife—swept away as if they had never been. What the hell am I supposed to do?"
Roarke straightened himself and met Christian's glare with a hard look of his own. "Deal with it," he said flatly. "Deal with it as every other common person on the street deals with it, every day of their lives. Find your place in the world. Forge your own identity. Carve out a niche for yourself—as everyone else must do."
"But…I know no one now…I have no contacts, no friends…"
"Make new ones," said Roarke.
Christian checked himself before letting his temper have its way again, slowly coming to the understanding that Roarke had had good reasons for doing what he'd done after all. But he still felt lost without his wife. "All right, Mr. Roarke, all right…but what about Leslie? Why must I do without her? There's no memory whatsoever of me and what we have together. Not even some vestigial recollection that might trigger something between us in this…this alternate universe. You seem to have forgotten that even the common, ordinary man in the street begins with a set of parents at least, and often siblings. Some manner of family in any case. Perhaps I could have understood the loss of memory in our friends, but damn it, why Leslie too?"
"Every child leaves home sooner or later and attempts to find his or her own place. Some remain within walking distance of their parents; others move across the country, or even around the world." Roarke paused a moment. "This may be difficult for you to hear, Christian, but friends or none, you rely entirely too much and too heavily on Leslie. Even you yourself just now admitted to it. When you needed answers, you instantly turned to Leslie. You can't expect her to be your gateway to the entire world. You two may be married, but each of you still has a life of your own to lead."
"But…" Christian began, flabbergasted.
"There is no 'but' about it, Christian. Before you knew Leslie, you were your own man, very independent, determined to make your way in the world no matter what obstacles your father, and later your brother, tried to put in your way. Oh, you still have that spirit in you now; but you haven't expanded into new horizons. Just after you and Leslie were married, I recall your wonder at realizing that here, for the first time, you had friends—real friends, the sort of friends you hadn't had since your early school years. Yet you see far too little of those friends. Your first, and often your only, choice for companionship is Leslie. Carving that niche for yourself means not only leaving family, but making new friends, finding new companions. This is your chance to do that. Take it."
Slowly Christian sat down again, going over Roarke's words and wondering uneasily if they were really true, and whether Leslie thought the same way. At last he said, "I know better than to ask you to end this thing—you won't." Roarke grinned, and he relaxed a little bit. "But I'd like to go on the record as saying that I don't care much for your method."
"May I remind you of Leslie's words before you insisted we launch your fantasy. She advised you that you would either 'sink or swim'. The choice is yours."
Christian rested his elbows on his knees and dropped his head into his hands, massaging his forehead a little with his palms. "What a hell of a way to teach me a lesson," he muttered. "Just wait till this ends and I—" As he spoke he looked up again—and Roarke was gone. He let his hands fall to his sides and cursed wearily in jordiska. "I suppose that's my signal to get started."
He arose to pick up the discarded clothing he had been wearing that morning and, when he lifted the shirt, his wedding ring fell out of the pocket. Slowly he picked it up off the bedspread, studied it, then frowned with determination and extracted his wallet from the back pocket of the jeans. He found a space among the few bills he had there for the ring, then shoved the wallet into the pocket of the jeans he now wore before stuffing the dirty items into the duffel. Whether he saw Leslie or not, he didn't want anyone asking him questions about that ring. The less impromptu backstory he had to come up with, the better. He decided to see about some lunch before reporting to the luau clearing.