Chalk and Crystals

The litter index mapping walk had been my neighbor Kourtney's idea, and I still don't fully understand how I let her talk me into it. There were nine of us, most of us retired or nearly so, and we walked the coastal road with clipboards and tally sheets, counting cigarette butts and bottle caps in numbered grid squares. It was meant to be civic. It was mostly gossip with a clipboard. By the time we finished the last grid square, the sun had dropped behind the western ridge of Graciosa and the light had gone soft and gray, the kind of evening light that makes white buildings look blue.

I had checked my phone a few times during the walk, which nobody noticed, or if they noticed nobody said anything. The message from Farah was still there, short as a receipt. The quarry, off the old access track past the windmill. Sunset. Come to the entrance and wait if I'm not visible. I had read it maybe a dozen times since the morning, and each time it produced the same small drop in my stomach, which I suppose is the point of a message like that, if you are the sort of person who wants messages like that.

I am, it turns out. Forty-six years old, a pharmacist until three weeks ago, when the pharmacy chain I had worked for eleven years decided my position was being eliminated, a phrase I have come to hate with my whole being. Nothing to do with my work. Everything to do with a regional restructuring and a spreadsheet I was never shown. I came to the Azores with savings, a rented house near Carapacho, and a hollow feeling I couldn't name, and within a few weeks I had done something I had thought about for years and never done, which was to put the truth of myself on a dating app. Not the pharmacy truth. The other one. The one where a man who has spent his adult life being the careful, competent, reliable one, the one who counts the schedule-two inventory twice and signs in triplicate, wants very much, in specific and well-developed private imaginings, to hand the whole load to somebody else for a while.

Farah was forty-four, a steeple restorer, which sounded so improbable that I looked it up, and it turned out to be a real trade and she was really in it. She worked scaffolding and lime mortar and had hands like someone who works with her hands. Her profile was spare. She stated plainly what she liked to give, and she stated plainly what she did not do, and she asked questions in her first message that no woman had ever asked me before, careful ones, almost clinical ones, about what I wanted and what I could not take and whether I understood the difference between wanting something in fantasy and standing in a room where it was actually going to happen. I answered everything honestly, which took three long evenings, and at the end of it she wrote, all right. We'll start small.

The quarry is a twenty minute walk off the road, on a track that isn't really a track anymore. The gypsum works closed years before I ever came to the island, and what's left is the open cut, a bowl of excavated white stone with terraced walls showing the old pick marks, thousands of them, ranks of short curved scars like handwriting nobody reads anymore. Even in fading light the place glows. The stone is so pale it holds the daylight long after the fields above have gone dark, and the air inside has a mineral tang, dry and chalky, a taste more than a smell, like the memory of dust.

She was already inside. I saw her silhouette from the entrance before I saw anything else, a dark figure standing in the wide lower chamber with the pale walls behind her, and even at that distance the shape of her was unmistakably the shape from her photographs, broad-shouldered, steady, waiting. I walked down the loose ramp with my heart doing unprofessional things and my mouth dry, and I remember thinking, absurdly, that I had prepared better for inventory audits than for this.

She didn't call out. She let me come to her, which I understood, later, was deliberate. When I got close enough she nodded, once, and looked me over from head to boots without hurry, the way you'd inspect a delivery. She was wearing work trousers and a heavy shirt with the sleeves rolled, and her forearms were exactly what you would expect from a woman who hauls timber and fights with scaffolding clamps for a living, and I confess that more than anything else about her, it was those forearms that made my knees feel informal.

"You came," she said.

"You said sunset."

"I said sunset to see if you'd actually walk down here alone in the dark. Different test." She almost smiled. "Come on."

She led me to the middle of the main chamber, where a worn canvas tarp lay spread over the chalky floor, and beside it a single electric lantern on a stand, throwing a warm circle of light that made the white walls look like the inside of an egg. She set down a canvas backpack she had apparently stashed earlier, and I stood there like furniture while she arranged things, and the waiting itself was already doing something to me, already telling me who was in charge of the evening, and I noticed that I liked it more than I had expected to.

"Here's how this goes," she said, crouching at the backpack. "Nothing tonight happens that you didn't agree to in writing. You have your word, which is porcelain, you have this," and she held up her open palm, flat, "and you have no. All three of those work any time, no explanation owed. Say any of them and everything stops and we have a normal conversation like two adults on an island. Nod if you've got it."

I nodded. She watched me nod, taking her time about it, then reached into the backpack and brought out a porcelain doorknob.

I want to describe this properly, because it mattered. It was an old doorknob, white porcelain with a faint crazing across the glaze, mounted on its brass keyhole escutcheon plate, the kind of fixture you'd find on a door in a house a hundred years dead. She had cleaned it but not polished it, and the brass was dull, and the porcelain had a hairline stain near the base like a ring left by old paint. She held it up in the lantern light and turned it slowly.

"This is your focus object," she said. "You'll keep your eyes on it when I tell you to. Not on me. On this. It's smooth, it's cool, it doesn't move, it doesn't ask you anything. When your head gets loud, you go to the knob. Understood?"

"Why a doorknob?" I asked, and my voice came out rougher than I intended.

"Because I found it in a salvage yard in Angra eight years ago and I like it, and because a good focus object should be beautiful and completely indifferent to you. This is both. Kneel."

I knelt. The tarp was stiff and cold through my trousers, and the floor under it was hard, and the chamber was so quiet I could hear the faint hiss of the lantern and nothing else, no wind reaching down into the cut. She came around behind me. "Hands behind your back," she said, and I did it, and I heard the sound of jute rope uncoiling, a dry whisper of a sound.

"Work rope," she said, wrapping it. "Same fiber I lash with on the scaffolds. It's honest rope. It holds or it doesn't, and it never lies about which." Her hands were quick and completely certain, two turns around each wrist, a crossover, a locking hitch, checked twice with a tug. The fiber was coarse and it itched faintly and I loved every scratch