FANZINE

At night, paradise is a wilderness. I’m in Maui for a friend’s wedding, staying in animal heaven—a hotel where birds, fish, mongoose, snakes, butterflies, lizards, and housecats converge. During the daytime it’s sort of like Edward Hicks’s friendly painting “Peaceable Kingdom.” At night, huge turtles skim the sandy ocean bottom for algae and sharks lunge from the water to catch flying fish. I’m lying awake between crisp sheets, paralyzed by underwater fantasies.

All my friends are out skinny-dipping in the surf. I’m starring in The Shining. I’m Shelley Duvall, running down the halls trying to escape my psychotic husband. Bloody flash floods and door-choppings are my future.

When I stay in nice hotels—not the roadside kind—I get terrified of walking the dark halls alone. Too many living beings have dwelled in them, or have died in the rooms. For this reason, I have a tendency to drink too much once I’ve checked in.

Everyone returns from the starlit swim.

“You should’ve come,” Heidi says. “It was awesome.” Of course it was awesome. Everything’s awesome because she’s about to get married. I sip my rum and coke.

“I’m not getting in that water at night.” I remind her about the clownfish, pufferfish, brain coral, sea bass, and purple spiked sea anemones we saw while snorkeling yesterday.

“It’s the same fish whether you can see them or not,” she says.

Do you ever dream while you’re awake? I couldn’t sleep on the red-eye out here, nor last night after six piña coladas on the beach, following hours of floating through the reef.

The dream: I swim out to meet Heidi, who’s treading water under a rocky arch that protrudes from a deep forest of coral. Crystalline turquoise water carries honeycomb-shaped rods of sunlight hundreds of feet down. I have my snorkel and mask around my neck, but I don’t want to put them on to see how far we are from the bottom. It’s deep enough for whales to pass beneath us.

“I’m tired,” she says. “I’m swimming back.”

As soon as she turns into a black speck on the blue horizon, animals start congregating below.

First, the monk seal, whose whiskers tickle my toes as he decides whether I’m something to eat or hump. While he sniffs me, I wonder would it be more food-like to paddle my legs in a scissoring motion, or coast with no movement as if I were already dead? Next, a school of barracudas arrive to circle under him, their teeth ready to use on his brown leathery flesh. Down below the barracudas appear a pod of gray, rubbery things. And hovering below them, a massive white shadow. There’s no way I’ll put on my mask. I want to know, but I don’t.

The next morning, I put on a sundress and flip-flops, then stop at the café for a muffin and a glass of guava juice— No rum today, I think. Must sleep. In the chaise lounge area I ask the man sitting next to me what seals eat, and he tells me they eat lots of things.

“They wouldn’t eat you, though, unless you were attacking their babies,” he says, rubbing coconut oil onto himself.

The bride to be, my best friend, takes the chaise lounge next to mine—I reserved it with my muffin wrapper and sandals—and tells me my feet were twitching while I dozed on the sofa last night.

“A monk seal was about to attack me,” I say.

“They don’t eat humans,” she says, not moving her head from sunbathing position. So the man was right. Heidi knows it all now that she lives on Maui.

“The only predators out there are jellyfish,” she says, “and they’re clear, so there’s nothing you can do.”

I hadn’t thought of jellyfish.

“I can’t sleep,” I say. “I keep thinking of that part in The Shining where she opens the bathroom window to escape and the snow’s blocked her in.”

“You’re in Hawaii,” she says.

When I’m home on the mainland, I go out to the desert sometimes and rent a room by myself. One time I was sitting naked on the bed watching Three’s Company. It was hardly visible due to bad reception. Green and red lines streaked across Jack and Chrissie’s faces. I snacked on some saltines then opened the dresser drawer to check for a Gideon Bible. I read the instruction card for making outside calls, just in case. The air-conditioning froze my stomach as I stood in front of the unit.

I put on my bra, panties, and stockings, to increase my vulnerability. If a pervert were spying on me through my curtains, he would be more likely to strike if he saw me in lacy undergarments, or so movies would have you believe. Naked, I’m pale and blubbery.

When I was in elementary school and first learned about the realities of rape, I remember riding home on the bus from a field trip to Disneyland and wishing I had been dragged into Adventureland then raped behind Thunder Mountain. Gazing out the window of that reeking, nasty bus, I felt rejected by the imaginary rapist. I wasn’t cute or slutty enough. Being slutty was what I aspired to. Bouncing up and down on the black seat helped me imagine being forcibly fornicated by some hairy-chested man. The girl sharing my seat didn’t think the rape idea was as sweet as I did; she told me no one ever wants to get raped. I felt stupid for not knowing that. I’d thought it could be fun.

Maybe the monk seal had raped me. He’d sucked on my toes as if they were calamari.

Late in the afternoon, I still haven’t fallen asleep. I call my boyfriend back home in California. “Do you ever feel like killing someone?” I ask.

“Of course not,” he says. “What are you talking about?”

“I’m so tired I feel like a shark, if that makes any sense. I look around at all these women wearing diamond rings and Gucci sunglasses, and I think they need a little poke. Sharks poke things, right?”

“I guess,” he says. “You mean you want to attack them?”

“Yeah, I wish I could shred some people up. But isn’t it weird to be scared of attackers when you want to attack?”

“Every man for himself,” he says.

I’m assigned bartender duty because at dinner I announced I wasn’t going to drink. Why they need a sober drink-mixer is beyond me. I make strawberry daquiris, papaya margaritas, and mai tais. Another girl pushes maraschino cherries and triangular pineapple slices onto toothpicks. We’re in the honeymoon suite, which has a bar built into the mirrored wall. Every time I make a new blender full of fruity stuff, I test it and add more rum. After a while, I have three drinks going on the side at once. I check out my tan in the mirror, thinking, I like being tan.

The groom’s best man gets out three huge joints. We pretend they’re champagne or something and make a toast. The ceremony is tomorrow. To your life on the island, we say. To your life with the monk seal, I say to myself. There’s so much I could learn: is a seal’s penis barbed?

I excuse myself to go pee, but I head down to the ocean instead. I step onto the sand and kick my flip-flops off into the bushes. The supply rental booth’s windows are boarded up but the door is unlocked. I go inside and steal myself a pair of flippers. Flippers will make me more attractive. Maybe seals turn one another on by slapping each other on the ass. Maybe getting slapped feels like a massage. I turn my feet out to the sides to move across the sand without tripping. It’s time to swim to my husband.