island, you’ll walk past this building. Past my cell. You’ll know it: the concrete block wall. It’s the last building before you go down the hill to the dock.”
“If you say so.”
“When you pass by, I want you to let me know that you’re there. Don’t say anything. Just whistle ‘Anak.’ Make it loud so I’m sure to hear it. Will you remember that?”
“Sure, I’ll do that,” he said.
“Please don’t forget. It’s important.”
“Like a last good-bye. Until we meet again.”
“Something like that,” she said.
They came for him before dawn. The light went on in his room and she heard his door opening, the low voices, getting him up.
He said, “Good-bye, Marivic. Don’t worry, I remember. ‘Anak.’”
From outside the building, somewhere in the sky, she heard a noise. It sounded at first like the snapping of a flag in a hard wind. It grew louder. A white light briefly swept through the grille above the wall.
She knew from the sound that it was a helicopter, coming in to land.
“You see, Marivic?” Junior shouted. She could tell that he was out of the room now, in the short hallway outside the cells. “That’s for me. They’ve come for me.”
The helicopter’s beating grew louder and lower, until it was no longer dropping. The noise began to subside. It was on the ground.
Marivic moved the table to the corner of the room and placed the chair on the table, its back against the wall. She climbed up and looked over the top.
The helicopter had landed in the flat clearing about halfway down the hill. Floodlights bathed the area.
She wondered if they had really come for Junior. Was it possible?
A door opened on the helicopter as the blades did a last slow turn to a stop. From the shadows outside the floodlights came a man pushing a wheelchair. He helped someone down from the helicopter, into the chair, and he began to push the chair up the path. Who was this? Was some new occupant being brought in to fill the cell that Junior had left?
As they got closer, she saw that the figure in the chair was a white man, plump and jowly. She ducked her head down so that she wouldn’t be noticed, and when she looked up again the chair was gone, out of sight. He didn’t come into the cell, and she knew that they must have brought him back into the unseen buildings.
For the next ten or fifteen minutes she waited for Junior to come by, whistling “Anak” as he passed, on his way down to the helicopter. But Junior didn’t appear. Down in the clearing, someone was refueling the helicopter from a cylindrical tank that sat on pipe-stand legs at the edge of the clearing. After a while he removed the nozzle from the helicopter and wound the hose back on a reel beside the tank, and he climbed into the helicopter and shut the door.
Still no Junior.
The helicopter whined; the blades began to turn. The helicopter lifted off with a clatter, airborne and climbing. When it was gone, the lights went out in the clearing.
The hillside was dark and still.
Marivic climbed down, took the chair from the table, and returned the table to where it belonged.
She stayed awake, stretched out on the cot, listening. She waited to hear “Anak” floating over the wall, telling her that all was well and that the prisoners in these cells really did leave the island.
Daybreak: no “Anak.” In the morning, the two attendants came in as usual, then left. As the day wore on, a couple of times she heard low voices outside, and she hurried to climb up and look over the top of the wall, thinking that maybe Junior was being escorted down to the boat and that he was so excited to leave that he had forgotten his promise. But each time it was just foreigners on the path, faces and bodies that were now becoming familiar.
By midday she was sure that something was wrong. A small island, a few buildings. Where was Junior, if not here?
In the afternoon she heard another pair of voices outside. Two men, foreigners, speaking their foreign language. She didn’t understand the words, but she recognized the tone. They were complaining.
She climbed up to look. It was the two men who tended to her cell every day, the mismatched pair. They were walking down the hill. They carried large white buckets, one in each hand, four in all. The buckets were deep and were