The Man on the Island

“No boat? Perhaps he’s going to use his body as a boat. Bodysurfing, you know.” Barnard takes his arm off his forehead and swings it in the air, as though he isn’t lying on a sofa in Toronto but floating on his back in the warm salt water off St. Lucia.

“He’ll drown, then,” Calvin says.

“I don’t know why he want to leave that island anyway,” Barnard says. “He got everything he needs right there.”

“He has nothing on the island. What are you talking about?”

It had been Barnard’s idea to emigrate. He sold his travel business, telling Calvin and Martine he wanted to build a big house on a hill, with a fine view of the ocean and cool breezes at night. He had plans for the house all drawn up, he said, and now he had the money, if only someone would sell him a hill. But no one would. All the hills were taken. The tourists he had shown around the island in his taxicab had bought them all up. Remembering the journalist, Calvin had suggested they go to Canada.

“He don’t need anything,” Barnard says, “except maybe a woman for company. But you say there is a monkey in that tree? A monkey can be good company.”

“No food. No water.”

“He can fish. He can eat coconuts. He can cut the bark of the coconut tree and drink the juice.”

“He doesn’t have a knife.”

“No bills to pay, no sister telling him to remove his clean shoes from the sofa.”