Eto stirs his coffee slowly and with his left hand. Eto is what he goes by now—the remnant of a grander name that has been whittled down against the contours of many grating decades. Like sawdust, the powdery traces of the past settle in a fine layer over the polish of his navy blue suit. 

Here you are, dwarfed by the enormity of this man. He is slight but tall, narrow-faced with full features, looking ever-so graceful as the sun dips behind his shoulder and embalms the sheen of his midnight-blue skin in gold. You shift in your chair and squint, still clutching the cassette tape recorder you’ve set on the center of the table. Eto has to lean in to make himself heard above the din and clink of the diners around you.

“I shall start now, yes?”

“Yes, please. I think we have enough in the way of introductions.”

“All right, then. Let’s see.” He snuffs out the thin cigarette he has been nursing with his digestif, then swiftly pulls out another. “What do you know about the Pineapple Harbor Crisis?”

“The basics. I know the Americans were involved.”

“Bad thing, that. They took everything from us. You would only know it if you grew up on the island-–to the tourists, it all looks the same—but I saw good families, very good ones, devastated. My schoolteacher’s nephew had to move his people from their nice house on the coast to a little tin shack. Bah! Greedy ones, the Americans.” Eto’s eyes gleam terribly and his cheeks are drawn in, full of smoke and rage.

“Can you explain to me exactly what they did? Something people might not know about?”

“Well, they brought in their people and started banging on our doors in broad daylight, asking who owned the land. Then they bought it from you for less than a month’s wages. Or, if you said no, they burned all of your things and took it for free. Anybody who fought back they dragged off to who knows where, hammered nails into their feet, sold off their children.”

“And this is how you got started with your work?”

“This is why we started, yes. Maria and I.” For the first time today, you see Eto’s glare soften. 

“Tell me more about that.”

Dusk has settled over the both of you in the form of a broad, violet cap. With the rooftop gradually becoming clear of other patrons, Eto drapes his arms over the back of his chair and lowers his voice, letting his words drift softly to the streetlamps below. 

“When I started working for the civilian militia, the last thing I expected was to run into Maria, but I did. We had known each other for a very long time. Her mother knew mine, so I saw her quite often when she was just a young thing, quite frankly not very pretty back then. Ha! She would come for my neck if she heard me say that. But she was a smart one, as smart as they come. And she grew up to be very beautiful.

Remember, I was maybe twenty-two, twenty-three at this time. She couldn’t have been older than twenty. We were both quite young. Young people like yourself, my friend, are much like firewood: desperate for anything to keep them alight. Revolutions, tragedy, love, whatever it may be. We chased it all. 

I was able-bodied. I wanted to fight, but no. They told me I was more useful behind the front lines, seeing as I was one of the few who could read and write, so they had me making pamphlets. I asked Maria to help me. Anytime I finished an original, I stayed up late tracing copies while she sprinkled in her own illustrations. It was a good arrangement, her using her right hand and me using my left, so that the ink didn’t smear. Then in the daytime, while she attended to her fruit stand, she handed out the copies by hiding them in the false bottoms of her crates. We sent out all sorts of messages like that. 

Like you said, this is how we got started. Later on, they assigned us to intelligence operations. Those duties I cannot say as much about.”

“But the conflict is over.”

“Is it? Perhaps for some of us.”

“Not even off the record?”

“My apologies. In my line of work, you quickly learn there is no such thing.”

You think of the empty hotel room waiting for you after the dessert plates have been cleared, a €15 per night shithole that, over the past few days, has steadily been eating away at you and your time. The thought of watching TV gives you a headache. This interview is the first you’ve done since your arrival, and even if it is a dud you are fond of having some company for a change. You gingerly attempt to approach the conversation from a different angle.

“What happened to Maria, then?”

Eto delicately flicks the ash from his cigarette and looks away. “She most likely died a very long time ago. At least for her sake, I hope so.”

You do not say anything. Any good reporter recognizes the turning point at which someone is about to do the divulging of their own accord. Eto continues. 

“We were always careful, but with the island being as small as it was, there were only so many suspects. Of course they caught us.”

—-

The docks are mercifully cool this time of year. It is a welcome respite from the sticky clamor of the taphouse. The unrelenting heat of this place makes everything worse, sharpens the ire of having to slink back home before curfew like an unruly child. The liquor pooled in Eto’s stomach warms his temper. He does not notice the men who have been stalking him down the last block, lit only by the gleam of their holsters. 

— 

The cell they give him is penned in by high white walls. The guards—Eto has decided to call the tall one Beanpole and the stout one Barrel—do not do much more than loiter around with their rifles perched lightly on their backs. They only deliver small platters of dried fish with a thin soup every few days, and the food is laced with something that makes him sick. For the first few weeks, he eats as little as he can get away with. Eventually, hunger compels him to stop caring. 

—

Over the next few months, however many there are, Eto feels the steady blurring of previously sharp edges: day blends into night, reality blends into imagination and back again. On one occasion, he finds himself sitting underneath a tree and reading a poem to his grandmother’s corpse, which teems with the bodies of many shiny black bottle flies. On another, he and his people are clustered in his cell, all of them scrambling towards a pinhole-sized exit as the walls push in around them. Some days, he is simply flirting with Maria at her fruit stand. In between his visions, men drift in and out of his periphery. He does not know how many of them are real, but the dull ache in his ribs after he sees them always is.

He is just about to be lulled into another haze when Beanpole and Barrel come wordlessly to take him in the middle of the night. As they lead him down the corridor, through a set of bars he catches a glimpse of a young woman with large, empty brown eyes that do not follow him as he walks by. It is only a glimpse, but it is enough to know. Maria. Somehow, they have found her. Sweat breaks out on Eto’s forehead. He thinks back to his soirées at her fruit stand and prays to God that they stayed in his head, that the men did not hear.

The guards drive him towards the docks, and the car’s headlights reintroduce Eto to the outside world in measured slices as it rumbles ahead. Imari, the trusting fool that he is, keeps his boat keys hidden right there on the boat. Eto knows this from many fishing trips with him, and he recognizes the Lucky Crown’s glossy red stripe even from a good distance. His heart is pounding. He knows that, whatever they want from him, if they have kept him alive for this long they will not kill him. He also knows that these guards are nothing more than laymen plucked from their suburban domiciles because they wanted a pathetic taste of island luxury and power. The Americans had only bothered to send their mean, brutish men here, not the skilled ones. His hands are not even bound, and the black of the night will not lift for a while. 

They let him out of the car and march him, barefoot and bare-chested as he is, to their own boat. As soon as they are within a few meters, he twists free of Beanpole’s coarse grip and takes off sprinting toward Imari’s vessel, but in a flurry his sprint is over and even more hands are on him, tighter now, his cheek aching from its impact with the ground. They heave him onto the deck, and, cursing the whole time, tie his hands behind him. Barrel keeps an eye and a muzzle aimed at him while Beanpole starts the engine.

Eto is made to sit on a crate with his back against the railing, which allows him to silently tease apart the haphazard knot at his wrists. Just as the boat pulls out of the harbor, he sends up his second prayer of the day—quite possibly, of his life—and launches himself over the side of the boat into the frigid embrace of the water. This time, he does not head for the Lucky Crown. In the stygian pith that he is flailing about in, there is no chance of even finding the right boat if he tries. Instead, Eto remains at a safe depth below the surface and swims back towards the harbor, guided only by the dim shadows above him. Either by divine intervention or sheer luck, his hand soon brushes against one of the wooden columns propping up the pier. He gropes his way upward and breaches the membrane of the water’s surface. Only half of his head is exposed to the open air. Still clutching the column and sucking in slow, deep breaths, he waits, ears prickling at the racket of the guards whooping and shooting blindly into the water.

It is an eternity before the cough of the car engine sounds to relieve him. Knowing he does not have much time, Eto homes in on the Lucky Crown’s cherry-red stripe, swims toward it, and clambers aboard, barely steadying his hands long enough to unmoor the thing. In a few wretched minutes, he turns the engine on to its lowest setting and sneaks away from the harbor. Only from a safe distance does Eto dare to look back on the island. The waves cast pearly nets of sea foam against its farther shore; the wind stings his lips with salt. On it, he can hear the faintest hint of someone calling his name. 

__

“I never went back for her. I tried. I made it as far as Barbados, but by the time I got my bearings there and made my calls, there was no mention of her.”

Eto suddenly stiffens and glances at his watch. You can tell he has given up more than he had bargained for, both time- and content-wise. “I’m afraid I must leave soon. I hope this is enough for your paper.”

“More than enough. You’ve been very generous. Thank you.”

The two of you tacitly navigate an instinctual dance as you sign the check, then get up from the table and descend the narrow stairs to the exit with Eto in tow. The city’s nightlife is just beginning to crawl out from its slumber and infuses the streets with a sweet, musty odor. It is a clear night, teeming with movement and flesh and blood and possibility.

You shake hands, then watch him turn into the crowd and disappear.

– Thordar Han