Dude, Read the Room

I look to my left, towards my neighbor on the shore. He’s a writer I recognize from the mainland, the author of Abuelita’s Ashes. It was well received, shortlisted for a few awards. He sees me. “Negrito! No pens, no paper. That’s the real punishment!”

“I feel you!” I tap my chest. “Writers without readers, am I right?”

He nods at me, at this grinning figment of his imagination. He doesn’t think I’m real. He thinks the island’s a prison of the mind, but he would, he’s all twist endings and unreliable narrators. No. This island’s as real as you.

I lie on the beach, I see ya’ll across the bay. Your cooking fires browning the marine layer. Your windows winking in the sun. Your used condom rolling in the surf, half-filled with seaweed, like flotsam from some kind of responsible merman. You know my work. You know this isn’t the type of thing I make up.

First thing I did was try to escape, who wouldn’t? No trees, no bushes of any kind, took me about five minutes to figure out I was trapped on an island. So I ran for the water. But the ground just… kept going. Like one of those dreams where you’re running in caramel, but much more boring. So I’ve stopped running.

Six months, two weeks and three days later, here I am. Lying at the water’s edge like a used condom. I dribble sand through my fingers, a human hourglass. Counting means there’s a beginning and an end. The author of Think of the Children! walks by, muttering in a language he constructed here on the island. Now that’s the look of a man who’s stopped counting.

I need to get this out. I’ve tried rock pens, I’ve tried crab paper. But it never goes anywhere. I need something heavy enough to escape the swell, light enough to float, sturdy enough to make it across the bay, to you. I have no choice. A writer’s gonna write.

My YA novel, Whose Bathroom Is It Anyway? Yeah my agent warned me. “Do you like your front door, the way it hangs right now? You know? On its hinges?”

Would I do it again, knowing what I know? I’d very much like to think so. But I’d also very much like to not be here.

Not far from where I’m lying there’s a gate and a welcome sign. A motto, painted in bright yellow: X is the key. It doesn’t actually say X; someone must have scratched the word out. The sign’s at least twenty-five feet off the ground. It would’ve taken him years to source the sharpest clam shells, to whip them just so.

The author of The Color Black: A History appears behind me. He bends, grabs me by the collar of my uniform, spit-screams in my face: “What is the key? What is the key? What is the key?” Those glassy eyes. I know what he’s thinking: if he nails the correct emphasis, a door’ll open and he’ll be allowed out, like some kind of team-building escape room.

I try to shake loose, but his grip! He must write longhand. “My brother,” in my most soothing tone, “if I knew, do you think I’d still be here?”

The late afternoon winds pick up. I’m looking up at him and I can see the clouds skeeting across the sky. I get it. Of all the writers on this island, I feel the sorriest for him. His book is literally a history of the color black. But these are interesting times.

We all found ourselves on the island dressed in almost identical drab green uniforms. I assume that’s part of the punishment.

I say almost identical: veterans have been issued pants, the recent arrivals show up in shorts, like a bunch of weirdly old nerds in a grade-school gym class. I wonder what it means. Is the state running out of material? Have the workers destroyed the means of production?

Both the pants and shorts come with pockets, like they’re rubbing it in. There’s nothing to put in them, besides rocks, which some have tried.

The island runs about ten acres. It’s volcanic rock, mostly, the pointy uncomfortable kind, like maybe obsidian or whatever they used to make arrowheads out of. The rocks are covered in green finger-like plants that seem to thrive in what little soil there is. There are a few within reach, so I stretch and pluck one. Bitter but edible. We get our water from a well.

The island’s featureless except for a mound near the middle. A former military bunker? Ancient burial ground? The author of But This Is Home keeps announcing that he’s spearheading a dig, but I’m starting to think that he’s one of those writers with five half-finished novels gathering dust in various drawers.

We sleep in the open like dogs.

Like all the writers here, I read the Governor’s proclamation. Like all the writers here, I failed to comply. He accused us of confusing the children. Sending us here should really clear things up.

“They want to destroy us,” the author of Go Tell It on the Mountaintop, Lollipop! tells me in that earnest way of his. “But they can’t destroy our ideas!”

But they can, my brother. I have no more ideas.

About a year ago, my child left me a letter, about how being neither boy nor girl was like being marooned alone on an island where everyone hates you. After they transitioned, they made me promise to destroy the photos of them in a dress. And I did, except one, which I kept taped to the underside of my bed like prison contraband. That photo, that look in their eyes, as though an angry adult had been compressed into a small ball of rage. It took me too long to understand why.

The author of The Holey Sari’s looking at me again, as he does. I turn to meet his stare, if only to convince him that I’m not dead. The way he’s studying me, I think he’s figuring out how to retrofit me as a raft.

We call the new arrivals ‘fresh fish.’ That’s what they call new inmates in normal prison, according to the author of Man Boy Woman Girl Father Mother. He was a police reporter. He only wrote on the side, for fun. He says he toyed with a pseudonym, but—a wry smile—his wife talked him out of it.

The author of Barney at the Border squats to match my eye level, like he’s talking to a kid. “That guy’s okay, a few foreign prizes. That guy’s serially shortlisted. Never heard of him. Him? Self-published. No way, man! You know?”

I’m not sure I do. He believes there’s another ward where they keep the great writers, the ones who can bring down a state with a flick of their pen. The Governor’s scared their ideas will infect us mid-listers, that we’ll start some kind of artistically mediocre literary movement with enough mass appeal to make it viable. So he’s keeping ’em hidden on the island.

“I’ve gotta find them,” he says.

“Okay,” I say.

He nods, stands up and walks away.

The flies.

Their probosces are nozzles. They guzzle our blood in exchange for a particularly active venom that keeps us hopping. We fall asleep swatting. We wake, bloody from scratching, covered in corrugated nodules that throb and pinch.

The author of Gods Darn It says it’s proof that we’re all actually in a facility somewhere on the mainland, lying in an induced coma, getting our blood siphoned. The flies are just figments of our unconscious, warning us that our life is being stolen from us, drop by drop. Thanks, but that’s not really actionable information, is it? He was unlucky. They usually give these swords-and-sorcery types a pass. Who cares what funny business they get up to in the Kingdom of Ypalgea or on Zolton 7, right? But then a reputable director bought the rights, a few names were attached, and now here he is, going on about mosquito blood banks and all sorts.

Acts are performed sometimes, in the dark, in the open.

When my novel appeared on the Governor’s list, my agent begged me to flee to Canada. “I’m sorry, but dude, read the room.”

Those were the last words I’d hear on the outside. Dude, read the room. I write it in the sand. It has title potential, no? I thought the tide was going out, but a renegade wave washes my words back into sand.

Earlier today, we discovered that the author of A Frog Named Freedom disappeared. Imagine the ruckus. What does it mean? A pardon from the Governor? Are we in purgatory, did he achieve enlightenment and rapture? Or was he extradited, to face an even more poetic form of rehabilitation?

What we think happened to him reflects our outlook on the world. I’m a pragmatist. I think he’s at the bottom of the well.

There’s at least one way to leave the island, that we know of. Cadavers float away in the sea, eventually to be dragged under by the riptide or sharks or coelacanths or whatever patrols these waters. The mouths under the waves have learned to be patient.

Writers are a moody bunch.

I snag the used condom with a reed. Swollen with water, it’s as thick as an anaconda, but it won’t hold the weight of a human body. This I know.

I dream of blowing it up into a cartoon balloon, of floating across the bay and over the authorities’ heads, laughing as they shake their fists at me. But obviously the Governor would have minions with countermeasures, ready to blot out the sun with hat pins and bees that fly backwards, stingers gleaming like rapiers.

The sand hoppers buried beneath me protest by leaping this way and that as I shift in the sand. I’m always a little wet and a little itchy. I pick up a clam shell and shear the sand off my legs like I’m shaving. The shell’s sharp as a can lid. That’s gonna leave a mark.

A flash of inspiration. I’ve watched the dead, I’ve studied their properties. Hearts sink. Bones float. What do the cartoons always say? It’s so crazy, it just might work.

For a bunch of writers, our theories are a surprisingly derivative litany of clichés. This prison with no roof has us thinking inside the box. The author of Steve the Mermaid believes we’re all his guards, that he’s the only real prisoner. But his work is mostly autofiction, it comes with the territory. The author of A Coffee in Keffiyeh and Other Stories believes the Governor’s men are spiking our water supply with psychotropics. The author of The Youyest You was convinced that this was all a test, that if we actuated our potential energy, we’d free ourselves. He never got a chance to self-actuate because the author of The Holey Sari thought it was a different kind of test and tried to prove it with a rock.

My theory? It hasn’t caught on but here it is: we’ve been sent here to entertain y’all on the mainland. You line up on the shore every morning to watch us argue and run for it and pleasure ourselves and stone each other to death. Without us, without the writers, this is all you’ve got.

The minute the fresh fish clears his throat and proclaims that the island is actually a metaphor, we hard timers boo and throw stones.

The women writers must be on a different island. I reach out, actuate my potential energy, focus it under the whitecaps, under the kelp and the corals and the shipwrecks, down, down, under the coelacanths and into the deepest trenches. I actuate the tectonic plates, I move the women writers closer en masse.

One so tires of the male voice.

Waves break on a line of reefs. Sea lions frolic in the kelp beds. One of them raises a flipper out of the water. It looks like it’s waving at me, but the author of Please Don’t Eat Me happens by and explains that it’s just thermoregulating, warming capillaries in the sun.

I wave back at the sea lion and the author walks off, shaking his head. No wonder Please Don’t Eat Me didn’t make it to a second printing. Please Don’t Buy Me, am I right? I go for a high-five but the sea lion’s disappeared, he left me hangin’.

The author of The Holey Sari often insisted that in a place like this, it’s vital—vital—to maintain one’s sense of humor. But he’s become a less credible source in recent days.

The crabs.

Once a year, long-legged yellow crabs come to our island to mate. Oh, they see us lining the beach, salivating, our sharpest dinner rocks at the ready. But they can’t help themselves. They have no choice.

So they do their thing, and we do ours. We gorge ourselves until the juices run down our faces, until we swear we’ll never eat crab again. Until next year.

The baby crabs that survive the gauntlet will be back here to mate. They can’t help it. Wrong place, wrong time. I can’t help but feel a little guilty. We’re eating our brothers.

Birds have learned not to land here, for obvious reasons.

These popular movements come and go. The pendulum’s gotta swing back eventually. Why, I can already hear the ferry. The feast! A tasting menu, the crispest linens, lime-cucumber water! A parade! Streets lined with flags bearing symbols that these days can only be spray-painted on walls, in the dark.

All the state’s leading metallurgists will be busy forging keys to the Capitol.

All our books will simultaneously vault to #1.

Maybe the author of A Frog Named Freedom buried himself in the sand from head to toe, like a kid. And then just… never stood up. Maybe one of these days someone will trip on him, if the crabs don’t find him first. They think I’m depressed, the way I lie here on the beach, day after day, like one of the sea lions might’ve done before we took over their island. Maybe I was depressed. But now I have something to look forward to. I’m focused. Figuring out the mechanics. Working out the math. I wish I’d studied something a little more applicable, like fluid dynamics, or shorthand, at the very least. A Master of Writing degree? What even is that? It sounds about as real as a Doctor of Breathing. But maybe I’m exactly the right person to pull off this cockamamie scheme. The rest of them have something to lose.

I dedicated Whose Bathroom Is It Anyway? to my child. It’s there in black-and-white, fifth page of the front matter. You never asked for this, but here it is. I didn’t use their name. I figured they’d know who I was talking to. But the copy sits on their bedside table, Condition: Like New. Not a mote of dust on the dust cover, I made sure of that.

When the troopers finally busted down my door I was cleaning their room again. I don’t know why I bothered. Nothing ever moved.

My child will never read my book, on whatever island we all go to in the end. They’ll always be out of reach.

Who was it that wrote that it’s only when you open your veins and bleed onto the page a little that you establish contact with your reader? None of us, probably, or we’d be on the other island, the island of great writers. And so.

The condom makes a poor tourniquet, the clam shell cuts like a trowel, but there isn’t as much arm meat to get through as there was six months, two weeks and three days ago. I have so much to say but my clam shell pen is medium-tip at best, and my page count has congenital constraints. The average man’s arm bone is twelve inches, but I have long arms so I might be able to chisel in a few more graphs. I’ll use contractions and abbreviations like ‘graphs’ to save space.

You never asked for this, but here it is. I see that twinkle on the shore. Put down your opera glasses! Find us, in a library across state lines, maybe, or at the bottom of a remaindered bin somewhere. Otherwise no one will ever escape their island.

The earnestness, the naivety of this last sentence makes me cringe. I scratch it out. Dude, read the room.

I’m getting lightheaded. I’m floating like a bone. Waves break on a line of reefs. Sea lions frolic in the kelp beds. One of them raises a flipper out of the water. It looks like—no, it is, definitely, waving goodbye.

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Kim Brunhuber is a journalist based in Atlanta. His novel Kameleon Man was excerpted in an anthology of Black Canadian writing. His nonfiction has appeared in newspapers such as the Globe & Mail, Toronto Star, and National Post. He is completing a degree in Writing at Johns Hopkins University. This is his first published short story. @kimbrunhuber on X, @kimbbrunhuber on Insta, kimbrunhuber.com