Diary

June 26

A MAN CALLS FROM the mainland, from Ocean Park, to complain that his kitchen is gone.

It’s natural not to notice at first. After you live anywhere long enough—a house, an apartment, a nation—it just seems too small.

Ocean Park, Oysterville, Long Beach, Ocean Shores, these are all mainland towns. The woman with the missing closet. The man with his bathroom gone. These people, they’re all messages on the answering machine, people who had some remodeling done on their vacation places. Mainland places, summer people. You have a nine-bedroom house you only see two weeks each year, it might take you a few seasons to notice you’re missing part. Most of these people have at least a half dozen houses. These aren’t really homes. These are investments. They have condos and co-ops. They have apartments in London and Hong Kong. A different toothbrush waits in every time zone. A pile of dirty clothes on every continent.

This voice complaining on Peter’s answering machine, he says there was a kitchen with a gas range. A double oven in one wall. A big two-door refrigerator.

Listening to him gripe, your wife, Misty Marie, she nods yes, a lot of things used to be different around here.

It used to be you could catch the ferry just by showing up. It runs every half hour, to the mainland and back. Every half hour. Now you get in line. You wait your turn. Sit in the parking lot with a mob of strangers in their shiny sports cars that don’t smell like urine. The ferry comes and goes three or four times before there’s room for you on board. You, sitting all that time in the hot sun, in that smell.

It takes you all morning just to get off the island.

You used to walk into the Waytansea Hotel and get a window table, no problem. It used to be you never saw litter on Waytansea Island. Or traffic. Or tattoos. Pierced noses. Syringes washed up on the beach. Sticky used condoms in the sand. Billboards. Corporate tagging.

The man in Ocean Park, he said how his dining room wall is nothing but perfect oak wainscoting and blue-striped wallpaper. The baseboard and picture molding and cove molding run seamless and unbroken from corner to corner. He knocked, and the wall is solid, plaster drywall on wood-frame construction. In the middle of this perfect wall is where he swears the kitchen door used to be.

Over the phone, the Ocean Park man says, “Maybe this is my mistake, but a house has to have a kitchen? Doesn’t it? Isn’t that in the building code or something?”

The lady in Seaview only missed her linen closet when she couldn’t find a clean towel.

The man in Ocean Park, he said how he took a corkscrew from the dining room sideboard. He screwed a little hole where he remembered the kitchen door. He got a steak knife from the sideboard and stabbed the hole a little bigger. He has a little flashlight on his key chain, and he pressed his cheek to the wall and peeked through the hole he’d made. He squinted, and in the darkness was a room with words written across the walls. He squinted and let his eyes adjust, and there in the dark, all he could read were snatches:

“... set foot on the island and you will die ...” the words said. “... run as fast as you can from this place. They will kill all of God’s children if it means saving their own ...”

In where his kitchen should be, it says: “... all of you butchered ...”

The man in Ocean Park says, “You’d better come see what I found.” His voice on the answering machine says, “The handwriting alone is worth the trip.”