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My sister rented a small white castle to celebrate her twentieth wedding anniversary with fifteen of her closest friends and family members. The fortress was built on a cliff above quiet grazing fields where aging sheep and emaciated goats lived their last months under the expectant gaze of endangered black vultures. The Balearic Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries set aside three hundred hectares to replenish the population of these sick, balding birds. Nobody got me any hectares when I lost my hair.
The sheep walked around with intricate wooden bells around their necks, each with a slightly different configuration of beads. I got sick of reading, sleeping, and listening to the gentle tinkering of cowbells. My wife Svetlana's stacked necklaces used to clink together as she made her way around the house. She took them all off to swim in the island's rough surf and left them in a little jar by the bathroom mirror. Now I never know where she is.
I didn't know what that little metal box near my bed was for until I found myself reaching for it in the middle of the night when I heard my wife coming up the stairs. I closed my hand around the object, which was shaped like a small house with glass windows surrounding a thin metal spoke whose sole purpose was to impale bright white candles as they guided us to the bathroom after sunset. I only realized what it was when I heard an intrusive voice in my head, a cop asking me, "Why did you do her with the lantern?"
The castle had hot running water, but no electricity. I spent most of the trip in the shower, or in bed nursing hangovers and avoiding my parents. I drank too much in Port de Soller. Who was buying me drinks? I remembered a guy named Hartwell. I kept hearing it as Part-well. My wife was upset at me. I wanted to buy her a kimono-style dress I had seen on a lot of women around the island. They were cheap, colorful, and something for her to remember the trip by.
"It looks like they're hiding something," she sneered.
"Like a passport holder?"
"No, like fat armpits."
Instead, I bought her something backless on our last day in Palma before we drove an hour north to the nature preserve. My sister's vow renewal ceremony took place in the white brick courtyard in front of three long wooden tables. The cypresses were too small to provide shade, and the ceremony left everyone sunburnt. Svetlana had to cancel her half of our couple's massage.
The next day, it was nearing six p.m. when I pulled a pair of heavy black binoculars out of their velvet box on the bookshelf. A large yellow strip of tape reminded me that they were PROPERTY OF THE BALEARIC ISLAND BIRD CONSERVANCY. The label was neatly smoothed on, nary of air bubbles. I pictured a proud ornithologist in khakis admiring his hard work and taking the rest of the day off.
I crouched by my window, taking forever to get the binoculars focused. Svetlana was in the backyard serving fruit in a large glass bowl on a gingham tablecloth. She wore a red sleeveless linen blouse tied at the waist and tight white pants. I zoomed in to see if she was wearing underwear and saw a thin black line crawling up the back of her leg. I dropped the binoculars on the bed and walked downstairs.
A smile crossed my face as I saw them up close— a single file of bootblack bodies, a fascist line of ants that marched up my wife's leg to pillage her fruit plate. I was enthralled. I watched the loyal unit crawl up her midriff as she tore grapefruit with her nails, digging into their navels thumb-first to break them open. Svetlana was too proud to acknowledge the ants, and subtly pressed her stomach against the edge of the table to crush them.
"Nobody's going to eat your fruit salad," I told her. "They're not eating dinner until eight. You're just feeding the flies." I was feeling dirty, spitey, and drunk. The lantern. Back to the lantern. I'd have to use my bare hands. She'd judge me for using a tool. I should be a man. I grabbed an orange and started squeezing it, watching my forearms flex. Svetlana's eyes narrowed, and her upper lip threatened to give way to a laugh. I threw the bruised orange back into her bowl.
"No, we don't need business class. He's five foot seven," she had said on the phone with my sister while booking our trip. I watched her break more fruit with her sharp thumbnails.
"You're wasting so much pineapple," I said, pointing to all the yellow meat on the rind. She kept ignoring me. "I think you broke the binoculars," I said. "The left side won't focus all the way. I left them on the bed. You should fix them when you go back up."
She shot me a fake little smile and kept cubing the pineapple for her famous pork skewers. Dinner was tense, but delicious, and Svetlana did the dishes to avoid me. When she finally came up to our bedroom, she spent a long time over the old porcelain bedside sink, washing her face and using a small pipette to drop lactic acid on the high points of her cheeks. She wordlessly twisted her pillow ninety degrees and put on her black silk eye mask, lying next to me with her arms by her side, corpse-like. I could hear her trying not to breathe.
The next morning, my sister's friends flew back to the States, leaving us in the final stage of the trip: three last days dedicated to immediate family. Svetlana woke up before anyone else and made a decorative breakfast that got cold by the time anyone else got out of bed. We were all too tired to join her at the table. We sat in various corners of the house holding mugs of coffee to our chests and yawning.
"DID YOU HEAR THAT CRASH?" Svetlana ran into the living room, a kitchen towel still balled in her fist. "Did that sound come from the driveway? Is someone hurt?"
My sister dug her face into the arm of the couch, but I heard it too. A few minutes later, we started to smell burnt rubber and smoke. Svetlana was baffled by our lethargy, her face red and contorting into emotions I had never seen before. A small chunk of watermelon fiber was stuck on her face, cupped by the corner of her yelling mouth. I relished seeing my wife's poker face dissolve into hysterics. I ran upstairs to grab the binoculars.
"There's a plane!" I cried out. "It crashed into one of the cliffs. I see one of its wings floating in the ocean!"
"I think that's just white surf," my sister's husband replied, without getting off the couch or looking out the window. "I didn't hear anything."
"We need to go over there," Svetlana said, putting her shoes on.
"We need to go help them," I agreed.
I was excited to walk up the cliff and be part of an adventure. I didn't even need to bring the lantern. The plane had crashed into the black rocks that loomed above the dark Balearic Sea, the Dardanelles that protected the tender island of Mallorca. Lots can happen in emergency situations like this. I thought about people with the presence of mind to loot during hurricanes. I tried to channel them as I made small talk with my wife, struggling to keep up with her white sneakers up the steep rocky cliff.
We speculated about the pilot's sobriety, agreeing that we never would have gotten into a Cessna ourselves. We talked about celebrities dying in helicopters, and speculated about which ones used the accidents to fake their own deaths to avoid lawsuits. When we got closer to the plane, we realized it was a Hop! commercial airliner, the same kind of plane we took from Paris to Mallorca.
"It looked smaller from the house," I said, disappointed.
She straightened her mouth the way she usually hid her reactions to the obvious things I say. I turned around to see how far we had walked. The castle was barely visible, disappearing into the forest canopy. In a few hours, the fog would return and the tower would be completely obscured from our vantage point. I suddenly became very frightened about the possibility of being alone with my wife.
"Everyone knows I'm prone to migraines," I told her. "Every day I'm in bed from two to four p.m. with the blinds drawn. My sister will know something is wrong if I'm not in bed by two."
I repeated myself when she didn't react. She wearily recited the Jesus prayer under her breath, moving luggage around to check for pinned, conscious survivors.
"You're brutal," I told her. "You're heartless, poking around these bodies like a mushroom hunt."
I followed her to the main cluster of the plane's wreckage. All around us were suitcases and skulls that had been split open on impact. The human figures we could make out were completely unmoving or in a death twitch. Svetlana took a rock the size of a sheep's head and stared me straight in the eye as she straddled one of the twitchers.
I started making my way down the cliff, backwards, afraid to take my eyes off her. The trip down was steep, gravelly, and took much more time and precision than going up. The ornithologists asked us to tread lightly when hiking up the rocks to avoid damaging vulture nests or the moss that took years to grow. I grabbed handfuls of it for leverage as I made my way down.
"You won't get away with this," I yelled up at her. "People know my patterns. I won't just go missing. People will look for me."
Svetlana ignored me to pray over a man whose misery she had just put an end to. After she finished the prayer with a long Slavonic ah-meen, she stuck her arms straight out and put them under the dead man like a forklift. She kept singing a repetitive hymn as she rolled him onto his side and pushed him down the mountain, bursting out in laughter when his feet grazed my shoulder and almost knocked me down to my death.
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