Wokokon

By Douglas Nordfors

This novel is a coming of age story minus the usual dramatic foibles and telegraphed plot twists. It traces the path of a young man struggling to come to terms with how to use his mind, and for what purpose. This struggle, subtly comic, hypnotic, and poignant by turns, is set on the island of Ocracoke (Wokokon was the Indian name) in North Carolina, where the young man moves to after dropping out of college, and partly involves local history—specifically, the Lost Colony, which the young man latches onto as an object of study and contemplation, to the point where fantasy and reality nearly mix. The other major dimensions of the novel are a love story complicated by the young man’s developing sense of himself as an individual, and the young man's friendship with a much older woman, which originates out of his imagination and his newfound need to "create" his life, but which eventually begins to grow into something concrete and genuine.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Douglas Nordfors
• Release date: Sep 3, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301344680

Douglas Nordfors

Douglas Nordfors was born in Seattle in 1964, and currently resides in Charlottesville, Virginia. He has degrees from Columbia University (BA) and The University of Virginia (MFA), and has taught writing and literature at Milton Academy, James Madison University, The University of Virginia, Germanna Community College, and WriterHouse. He has published poems in many journals, including Poet Lore, The Iowa Review, Quarterly West, California Quarterly, and The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, and in new online journals such as The Stickman Review, and The Monarch Review. His book of poetry, "Auras," was published in 2008 by Plain View Press, and a new book of poetry, "The Fate Motif," was published in December 2013.

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WOKOKON

A Novel

Published by Douglas Nordfors at Smashwords

Copyright 2013 Douglas Nordfors

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CONTENTS

PART ONE—THE BOOK

PART TWO—THE OLD AND NEW WORLD

PART THREE—THE END

PART FOUR—THE SEA AROUND US

THE BOOK

Years ago, in 1988, I was wandering through The University of Virginia, trying to come up with reasons why I was twenty-two and had never finished college, when I saw her.

I held my head up high for a moment and there she was, walking several yards ahead of me along the concrete path, her coat purplish in the February dusk, her matching hat hiding her hair.

I slowed down, so she could get even farther ahead. The last thing she needed to know was that some guy she had never met was following her. She passed the Rotunda and the statue of Thomas Jefferson, and continued on toward the business district.

She paused at a crosswalk, and I had to slow down even more. I had never seen her before in my life. I was going wherever she was going.

She crossed the street, and then turned right. I could see now that her coat and hat were blue. One block down, she turned left, and disappeared behind a building. As I turned the corner, I saw her entering a small bookstore. So that was where I was going. I slowed to a complete stop. My instinct was to sprint to my old Subaru and drive as fast as I could back to Norfolk.

I'm not sure how long I stood there, waiting for her. It could have been two minutes. It could have been fifteen. Without a book, she came back out, and didn't hesitate to turn and start walking toward me. I came alive and started walking toward her. We were magnets that by law would meet mouths and cling. I still couldn't quite see her face. Closer and closer we dived. No doubt she was twenty-two. No doubt she had the same vague opinions as me about everything. Whoever invented sympathy never dreamed it could be so precise. Her bangs were free of her hat. I declared her eyes almond-shaped and saw that they were good.

The next thing I knew, her shoulder was not quite grazing my shoulder, she was behind me, I was in the bookstore, I had forgotten the color of her bangs.

The books were all used, except the ones lying face up on the tables in front. With a single ounce of passion, I decided that my place was among the used, handled, dog-eared, yellowed, underlined, written in. My life was suddenly divided up into sections. History had a room all its own. No, not quite. A few of the shelves were devoted to books about Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina, past and present.

It's extremely safe to say I was badly read. I avoided the Literature and Philosophy sections, for fear the shame buried in me would rise and reach such a fever pitch that I would have to get out of the store. But the books about the State I was in, and the States right above me and right below me, suggested that I had read them, though I hadn't. One made perfect sense as soon as I looked at the front cover, though I had yet to work out in my head what that meant. Superimposed on a cloudy sky in--I guessed spring--was the title: Ocracoke Island, and the author's name: Francis Thorne. The black letters were designed to look weather-beaten. Below the letters and the sky was the rest of the drawing: two trees, wooden houses, wooden boats, no people, a wave smashing against a pier, a bird fleeing from the spray. Behind the pier, the water was calmer, but not much. If it was spring, it was early spring. Winter hadn't quite been put to bed.

Ocracoke is an island off the coast of North Carolina. I knew the name from a vacation my family and I took once to the Outer Banks. Ocracoke is several miles below where we stayed. I had never been there in my life. I worked out in my head why the book made perfect sense. I was slowly climbing down. I was born in Maryland, just outside of Washington, D.C....I grew up in Richmond, which is south of Washington D.C....I lived now in Norfolk, which is south of Richmond...Ocracoke was the next rung down on the ladder.

I couldn't open the book. I put it back on the shelf and wandered around the small room, stopping once to gaze at a few shelves devoted to World War II, feeling a sense of belonging so false it hurt to be alive, standing there, breathing dust. I went back to Ocracoke Island and took it back off the shelf. I still couldn't open it, but I held onto it. I paid for it, and left the store.

With no cash now for dinner, I drove back to Norfolk. It took forever. I was mad at myself now for not opening the book, and madly impatient instead of madly reluctant to do the deed.

When I finally arrived back at my ground floor apartment near the edge of the city, I went into the bedroom and tossed the book onto my pillow. Then I made some rice and tossed some pieces of cold cooked chicken into it. I ate it all so fast I didn't realize until several minutes after I finished that my hunger was satisfied. I also realized I was incredibly thirsty. I drank two full glasses of water. Then I went back into the bedroom, swept the book onto the floor and, fully clothed, fell asleep.

_________

I had a job at a health center for low-income people, which was appropriate, since the job supplied me with a low income. I took care of all the small tasks, checking forms to make sure they were complete, re-filing files, etc. I liked the people I worked with, though I had nothing in common with them. They were all women. They were all several years older than me. None of them had even tried college. Their idea of a perfect night on the town was to go bowling and then catch an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie—they called him Arnold, as if they knew him. They spent as much time as they could trying to know me. They were certain I was heavily, or at least mildly troubled, but they couldn't put their finger on why. They needled me and I fought not to respond.

One November day, a few months before my impromptu visit to The University of Virginia, Dotty dragged me to the diner down the street from the health center for lunch. With her black hair and pale skin, she was like two people. At one point, she leaned so far across the table she appeared to want to climb inside me and prop me up. I laughed at her question. "Who isn't unhappy? was my reply. She frowned and, to my astonishment, wiped her mouth on the sleeve of her peach blouse. I decided to protect her from her belief that I was unhappy. What I meant was, I said, who isn't happy deep down?" She stopped frowning and apologized for not using her napkin. I said I was glad she didn't because it meant she was as unselfconscious when with me as she was when alone. She looked me hard in the eye and smiled. She was certain she was helping me, and she was, a little.

At work the day after my impromptu trip, as I was re-filing a stack of files, I asked myself Dotty's question—was I unhappy? I didn't love my job, my apartment, my surroundings, myself. But I honestly believed, or my parents and sister and friends and girlfriends had drummed into my thick skull the belief, that self-pity was taboo. So I failed to make Dotty's question really live in me. I pictured the houses on the cover of the book on the floor by my bed. The windows looked like they were made out of dark air. I told myself there was only one way for me to get to the island: love myself as a Laughing Gull or a Common Tern and fly low over the water. No, it wasn't until much later that I learned the names. What was I made of, that I spent my imagination on eliminating my self and rising up as a plain bird? I felt like I had committed a sin, like someone healthier and stronger than me was asking me to choose my own punishment.

I feared my longing for a distant heaven. I feared disappointment. Every blessed day I would tell myself that Norfolk, wishing to someday be streets of gold lined with crystal palaces, willing to be persistent, was where I had always belonged.

Now, as I re-filed files, what I kept telling myself was far more complex, wildly abstract, impenetrable: if I couldn't take one of my ribs and hand it to a distant star, my last hope was the line on my face that had disappeared with age.

__________

To say my thoughts were far less complex as I arrived at my apartment that evening, would be a gross understatement. I was too tired even to eat. I went into the bedroom to see if the book was still there. It lay on the floor like the only stepping stone in the whole pond, the bed like a life raft. I went back out, sat down on the couch in the living room and read the newspaper I always stopped on my long walk home from work to buy. Disasters, scandals, sports scores, movie ads, comics...I ate it all up, too tired to feel the disasters, too tired to be outraged by the scandals, tired enough to regard the sports scores and movie ads and comics as supremely important.

I swept it all off my lap, leaned back, closed my eyes and tried to sleep. I couldn't. Like a robot, I got up and walked on water to get to the stepping stone. I took it to the living room, sat back down and, like a robot with nerve, opened it.

The first thing I did was look at the publication date: 1955. 1965 would have been nice, 1975 wonderful. They say the heart sinks. Mine dived off a cliff. I began flipping through the pages. It was like a children's book, with pencil drawings and easy-to-read print. The first out of many short chapters, titled, Getting There, mentioned ferries. I immediately put them out of my mind. I didn't want to regard moving to the island as an easy-to-perform stunt. In fact, all boats, large and small, were tossed out. And planes. And I was a rotten swimmer. Anyway, how would a newcomer fit in there? What would they do? How would they eat? I flipped back to the beginning, double-checked the publication date, and then started reading the contents. I stopped at In The Event Of An Emergency. I figured that once someone got it in their head to move there, it wouldn't matter what miserable little job they might have to get to make ends meet, or how lonely they might become. That someone wasn't me.

I closed the book and set it down beside me. I knew, of course, that they had phones in 1957, but I saw mine as a brilliant new invention, a new lifeline to replace whatever the old one was. I went into the kitchen and called my old high school friend, Mark, who still lived in Richmond. He was the one who had suggested I go to Old Dominion University, in Norfolk. He himself went to The University of Virginia, and then moved back to Richmond after graduation to be with his sick father. We never discussed whether he was disappointed that I had dropped out of Old Dominion. He liked to concentrate on the positive. What I suspected was a vague happiness in him he always made out to be an absolute happiness. And so I was surprised when, a few minutes into our conversation, he said, God, Keith, I'd really love to move down there. I've got to get out of here.

I was afraid to ask him about his father. You mean I'm lucky? I said.

Of course you are. He never could resist the opportunity to give me a boost.

I was afraid to ask him, specifically, why I was lucky. The rare occasions when Mark hemmed and hawed unsettled me. As he talked about running into an old friend of ours, I toyed with the idea of telling him, absolutely, that I was moving to Ocracoke, just to hear what it sounded like. I wasn't afraid of how he would respond. He always said everything was good for me. I gave up the idea. I put my forehead on the edge of the counter. I was lying face down on sand. I was just another grain. I had sifted through Mark's or anyone's fingers. I stood up straight. A child's bucket, black with white stars, like a witch's hat, slid down over my eyes. My cage was locked from the outside. I refused to let the coincidence-—Mark wanting to move, too-—strike me. We laughed over our friend who still wanted to be president of the United States someday. Then we exchanged a few more little details, said goodbye, and hung up.

I drifted back and forth from the couch to the bed, saying goodbye in my head again and again. I had made the decision when the magnets failed to meet, when whoever she was was behind me, gone, when I first set eyes on the wave smashing against the pier. As I drifted back and forth, my decision came back to haunt me, then broke through my protective aura and got in my blood. I was going to do it! I was going to move to a peaceful little island. Human beings had even believed the moon would want them. I didn't have to be a bird. There were ferries.

_________

As I drove off the ferry and onto Ocracoke, I opened the window, stuck my head out and breathed in a blast of early spring air.

All I had to my name, besides my body and my car, were sheets, blankets, a tape player, five tapes, a T.V., two books, $1, 225.00, the clothes I had on, and as many other clothes that filled a large cardboard box.

I started down the two-lane highway leading through the State Park that takes up three quarters of the island, wishing there was someone in the passenger seat so I could oooh and aaah out loud without feeling crazy. I glanced over and over again out the window clear through empty parking lots to dunes and plant life, hearing whispered hints of waves meeting shore, at least once ooohing and aaahing out loud, feeling pretty much all right about feeling crazy.

I got into town and there was no one there to welcome me. How awful it was to be surprised by the inevitable. The fact that my car would be my bed for the night struck me as an offense that would get me touched by the beam of a flashlight and thrown in jail. Of course, I wasn't sure the island had a jail. I hadn't read about one in the book. Of course, as I had trouble admitting to myself, I hadn't read the whole thing. I could have stayed in a motel—one open all year around--but I didn't want to spend the money. In the morning, I would begin looking for a permanent place to live, in a stranger's house, I was sure. I couldn't imagine there were any apartment buildings.

Before I got far into town, I pulled into the empty parking lot of what I guessed was, at least at night, the local hangout, a fairly new wood structure, a little larger than the average summer house, raised high enough so that it had a view of the water. The only customer, I sat in a booth by the window, though my impulse when I first entered was to sit at the bar. The woman behind it, the only employee, it appeared, was obviously overjoyed to have something to do. She whisked over to the booth. I wanted to say to her, We must be the only two people in the world. Then I realized I had said it. Her small mouth smiled. The smile spread to her eyes. The sky was the limit. Her hair, brown like her eyes, was so short her neck must have been cold. The outside air was breaking through the window with remarkable ease. As she handed me a menu I didn't need---I knew what I wanted--I apologized, and said I was giddy from the long drive. She asked me where I was from. I said I was from Maryland. She asked me how long I would be staying. I said I was there to live. She frowned a little and tipped her head to one side. I lied to myself that I would come back the next day to see her. She asked me what I would like. I said fish and chips. In no time, they lay sizzling in front of me. They were the best I had ever tasted—no joke.

As I gave the woman the money over the bar, I was struck by her silence. After I turned my back, I was struck by her amazingly sincere, Thank you! I turned back around and waved. She waved back.

I toured the rest of the town. There wasn't much to see--a few stores, several houses, a few motels, the more modern ones along a small bay with a few small docks crammed with boats--half work boats, as far as I could tell, half pleasure. In no time, the tour was over. I went back to the State Park, passing the hangout, waving to my friend inside, feeling crazy, and parked in one of the empty parking lots bordering the dunes concealing the beach and the ocean.

It was getting dark fast, so I stayed inside my car, gazing out the windshield at a dim small grass area with a picnic table. When the darkness was complete, I stopped seeing my fear as irrational. Flashlights pointed at me from all angles, all on the blink but all with an actual, working person behind them, ready to put me away. I closed my eyes, but it was just like having them open. I opened them again. Constance was with me, as she always was. Two weeks into my freshman year of college, we became lovers. Then, a year and a half later, we turned into just friends. Not long after that, I dropped out. I closed my eyes again. Love and intellect flashed their dim lights at me, their nonexistent lights. I had reached the bottom of the ladder.

__________

I woke the next morning not thinking of her, of her red hair she never covered with a hat, of the light freckles on her face, of her un-almond-shaped eyes. My torso was numb. I got out of the car and ran in place like an old man.

I had breakfast at a large old house transformed into an inn. I had glanced at it on my tour the previous evening. For about twenty minutes, I was the only customer. Then a few strangers, like aunts and uncles I would never learn I had, began to trickle in. I knew I didn't look clean, but I tried to feel clean. My waitress' insincere thank you made me doubtful I had succeeded, though she could have been having a bad morning and was therefore mercifully self-involved and blind.

A side door led to the lobby. As I approached the front counter, a man with gray hair and a matching cardigan popped up from behind it and looked at me as if he couldn't believe I was on time for my appointment. I asked him if he knew of anyone who had a room or rooms to rent. The singular and plural together seemed to confuse him for an instant, as if he couldn't determine whether I was looking for a hovel or a palace. As if, as if... Metaphor and simile are devices I use first and foremost simply because I'm free to. But for this story, the double world they suggest is particularly relevant, as will be obvious later. Did I really feel like I had an appointment? Did the words, hovel, and palace really enter my mind? As everyone knows, some creativity must be put into describing the past.

Slowly, the man came up with three possibilities. One was right down the street from the Inn. The other two were on the other side of town. I thanked the man as sincerely as I could without sounding false.

I walked to the other side of town. My first possibility, a woman in her mid-40s, said the extra room was tiny--also, she and her husband had decided to stop renting it out a year and a half earlier. Given the momentous second fact, why did she bother to tell me the first fact? ...Stopped renting it out a year and a half ago to the likes of me, with my slightly long dirty blond hair, eyebrows that one day stopped growing (little dots of skin left uncovered), non-hawk, non-streamlined nose and a scar to the right (my right) of it, like a pine needle buried just under the skin, lips too big, too fleshy, eyes as green as that pine needle but braver, out in the open. My second possibility didn't answer the door. In fact, the house looked deserted.

I went back to the inn, and walked past it toward my third possibility. Most of the houses on the street also looked deserted, clearly only occupied during the summer. Others looked less cared for, and more lived in. The man at the Inn said the house was light green. Actually, it was more dull green. The wooden front steps creaked. The porch was deserted, like an open wing only used during the summer. The house was tall enough to have a kind of basement room in the back. I sensed I had hit the jackpot, the meager jackpot everyone has a more than reasonable chance of hitting. The screen door squeaked. My knock rang hollow in my ears, but it did the trick.

An old woman opened the door. All I saw was her white hair, drawn up in a neat bun. She told me the room was around back, after I told her what I was looking for. Instead of going directly there, she ushered me half-heartedly inside and asked me where I was from. I said I was from Richmond. After a few more plain questions, she said I seemed fine. Can I see it now? I said. She murmured an apology and set out down a dim hallway toward the back of the house. I figured there must be some stairs leading down to the room. Did that mean I wouldn't have my own entrance? At the end of the hallway she stopped, and slowly turned around. Still all I could see was that white hair. What am I doing? she said. We have to go out and around back.

As I turned around, I glanced through a half-open door into a room with a short wooden bookcase, half-filled. That some creativity must be put into living the present had never really dawned on me. I decided the old woman was a retired teacher, the kind of teacher I wanted in my life, the kind of teacher I both needed and didn't need, the kind of teacher who would encourage me to learn everything on my own.

We went around back, and I saw the room—at that point, it didn't matter to me what it looked like. She told me what the rent was. I said that seemed fine. She told me to slip the April rent under her door. I said O.K. I told her my full name. She told me hers.

__________

Goodnight now. The two words popped into my head. It was my first night in my new home, no bed in it. It had a dull yellow couch with no armrests, a stove, a refrigerator, a Formica dining table, two chairs, and a big wooden bookcase filled with old National Geographics. I lay shirtless on the couch. A neatly folded red sweater served as my pillow. The room was so dark I couldn't see anything. My mother, wearing a white flannel robe, closed the front door behind her.

And I was a wave that reaches shore and is gone, or slides back and rises and falls again. I could have been waiting for my soul, thicker than water and blood combined, to take the same route to the island my old Subaru had taken and climb back inside me, or climb inside me for the first time.

I liked having my shirt off. Someone—faceless, nameless—pulled up a rocking chair, the only thing, in my humble opinion, the room seemed to be missing, and gazed at my naturally tan skin, feeling pleased, almost cheered. As they rocked and rocked, I waited for those brave eyes of mine to be overcome with sleep. I wasn't tired. And I was no insomniac. Constance had never rolled over and seen me through half-open lids standing by her bedroom window (we always stayed at her place), staring down at the dead street. The floor in my new home was wood, much closer to trees than carpet is to grass. I almost wished it was the middle of winter, so I could prove to myself that nothing could stop me from the pleasure of walking barefoot over a wood floor, not to mention sleeping outside the covers with no shirt on.

I wasn't worried that I didn't have a job. But I admitted to myself that soon the spell would end, that soon I would be washing dishes for a living, which seemed to me like begging without pleading or demanding, without speaking. It was the price I would have to pay for the absolute quiet, the peace. For a moment, I saw myself as a fisherman, a fisherman who hated the smell, the rusty knife, the act of slicing open, the convoluted guts, but who loved the ocean, the sitting idle as if in the middle of it, the reaching out and touching the distant lighthouse with the tip of my finger, the numb tips of my fingers from which hung hooks, like jewelry no one from another culture would see the beauty in. I wondered what I would name a boat. Not the Alpheus Drinkwater, which was the name of the ferry that carried me over. Maybe just: Drinkwater. Maybe just: Water. Water was minutes away. I could have run to it,