Hermatia

The doctor tapped Meeka’s symptoms into the computer. A game of FreeCell was minimised in the taskbar of the screen. He rifled through a display of flyers and pamphlets on his desk and handed one to Meeka. She took it and laid it on her lap. In bold white block letters on a dark blue background, it declared SO YOU HAVE HERMATIA?

Meeka missed the early train home. When the doors opened on the platform, she took a deep breath and stepped into the barely human-sized space amidst the other passengers. Against all odds, several other people got on behind her. Her skin grew warm, and her face twisted into a grimace. She squeezed her eyes shut, hoping not being able to see the bodies meant she wouldn’t feel them either. It didn’t work. She counted the stops and finally pushed back through the throng and out onto the open platform. She could feel tears prickling the corners of her eyes, but she pushed them back down into the dark place she kept most things.

Meeka paused at the front door of her apartment, the key hovering before its hole. Silence permeated the thin walls. Her housemates were out. Inside, she made an instant coffee and took the pamphlet to her bedroom to read in greater detail. What Is Hermatia? asked the pamphlet. A chronic and incurable social virus was the answer, though it took the pamphlet half a page to say so. Symptoms include avoidant and antisocial behaviour, lethargy, lack of interest in other people and activities, staying home. It was manageable in early stages, some crackpots even believed reversible, but once advanced, as it was for Meeka, it became highly contagious. Carriers needed to be isolated on restricted island colonies they called hermitages. Everyone knew about the hermitages. When the initiative first began seven years ago it was all over the news. Two years ago, someone had made an exposé on the living conditions of the infected. Meeka never watched it; some old movie had been on, Hunger Games maybe. Everyone had been talking about it at work the next day though. Apparently, the documentary had likened the island retreats to leper colonies.

It wasn’t even a treatment, though the pamphlet tried to pretend it was. CSIRO still hadn’t found a cure. Presumably they were still working on it, but it had long since ceased to be headline news.

Carriers were allocated a section of the island. The sections were separated from each other by tall bamboo fences, and the patients were not permitted to pass between the lots. It was just some place to put them, so they didn’t infect the remaining healthy populace. Meeka threw the pamphlet at the wall; it stopped short and floated to the floor. Wasn’t this what she’d wanted all along? To be alone? She got up and scrunched the pamphlet into as small a ball as she could before dropping it in the bin. She didn’t know what she wanted.

That night, after Meeka’s housemates had come home and gone out again, Meeka left for quarantine. She’d sent off a quick email to her boss, left a vague note on the kitchen bench, but otherwise hadn’t contacted anyone. She hadn’t talked to her mother for the last six months, her old school friends for even longer. She took a small duffel bag of beachwear and books and just left.

Meeka spent two nights in quarantine before the next ferry came to take her and the other carriers to the island. She had expected a whitewashed, sterile building, but it was just an old warehouse at the docks lined with cots and portaloos. There were only three other patients. When the virus had first been identified, there had been an influx of thousands, too many to manage. Most were only in the early stages and had to be turned away until adequate facilities could be arranged.

Meeka and the others didn’t speak to one another and spread themselves out so that the maximum number of cots lay between them. The mere prospect of conversing with another person exhausted Meeka; it was a relief to be with similarly minded people. It had taken months of Meeka declining invitations and sequestering herself in her room before her housemates had got the hint.

When the time came to board the ferry, she felt she was simply setting off on holiday, some sort of tropical cruise like those her old friends went on. Perhaps all she needed was a getaway.

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Meeka enjoyed her time on the island. It was like being incarcerated in a resort. She had a small beach shack with a kitchenette and proper plumbing. Her bed was separated from the living space by a bamboo screen, and the toilet had a closing door. She was glad to have received a beach lot rather than one further inland; she loved to swim. She had also been provided with a ukulele and drawing supplies, so she had plenty to do all day. After the first month, she stopped missing her phone and TV; she barely remembered what she’d used the internet for all day. She didn’t have any work except cooking and cleaning, but her mind didn’t wander to unpleasant things like it had when she was alone in her old apartment. Everything was simpler here.

That morning, Meeka waded out into the water with a fluoro green net to collect fish for her tank. She’d requested the equipment through the intranet system that was built into the front wall of her hut. The next delivery day it was parachuted into her sector along with that week’s food supplies.

She stood perfectly still, her sheer white beach dress tied in a knot above her hips. She tried to walk without disrupting the water, slowly easing her leg out, then back down, toe pointed like a knife. She was not as ninja as she felt, and every time she moved, the fish darted out of reach. They drew her out into the water until she was thigh-deep. Her steps grew more impatient, and the fish dashed away again. She threw her fists into the water in frustration, overbalanced, and toppled face-first into the water. She came back up, disorientated, and pushed her bedraggled hair out of her eyes. She was facing the bamboo fence. It was a lot sparser here than on the shore. There were whole gaps big enough to see clean through to the next segment. And there was a man standing on the other side wearing a baseball cap and holding a fishing rod.

Meeka tensed, afraid to move and draw his attention. For a second, she thought he looked at her. She looked down and stared at the tiny fish slowly gathering around her. She screwed her eyes shut, then blinked them open again.

He was gone.

Meeka rolled over, covering her head with the pillow. It completely smothered the banging noise coming in from outside. She sat up. She had thought she was back on the mainland with the constant construction. Developments going on all around the city like boxes of Barbie dolls stacked on top of each other.

But no, she was still on the island in her little hut, and the noise was just a distant hammering.

Meeka threw on a floral dress and sunnies. Outside, she could tell the sound was coming from the fence that separated her section from the man’s. She marched over to it then stopped abruptly and sat cross-legged a few metres away. She listened to the uneven thud, rock on wood perhaps. She leaned forward then crawled towards the fence. She closed one eye and peered through the hairline gap between bamboo shoots. She couldn’t see anything but a sliver of sand and jungle. The banging had stopped. She rolled back into a sitting position just in time to see an eye pressed against the same small gap. It stared at her, and she stared back, then it was gone. He had grey eyes.

That afternoon she went for a swim. Slowly, and both meaning to and not meaning to, she swam towards the fence. There was a gap, waist-deep, that she could see almost his entire sector through. He was out of sight, presumably in his hut. The heat wasn’t for everyone; he may have preferred a jungle section. She put her hand out and slowly put it through the gap. It was wide enough to fit her arm to the shoulder. It occurred to Meeka that this was a gross oversight in security, and she should report it on the intranet ‘concerns’ form. She wondered if they were relying on the patients’ symptomatic aversion to human contact to stop them from breaking into each other’s sections. Come to think of it, why was it only a bamboo fence separating patients? Was it merely to maintain the illusion of a resort like all the other tacky tropical artefacts that populated her current habitat?

She refocused and saw the man standing ten metres away watching her. She withdrew her arm from the gap as though something had bitten her and backed away. Pushing her legs through the water, she moved as quickly as she could to shore. The back of her neck burned, and the edges of her vision blurred. She needed shade. She needed her hut and cool, calm isolation.

Meeka couldn’t sleep. Her whole body was alive to him. She imagined him lying in a bed just like hers in a hut exactly the same, down to the rough woven rug under the bed and the barrel-turned-bedside table. Picturing that was almost like touching him. Like if she wriggled her hand out just a little, if she stretched her pinky finger, she might find herself lightly grazing his skin. She skimmed the rough grain of his palm, and he took hold of her hand. A cold shiver swept over her body. She pulled her hand tight against her chest and rolled away.

Other people. That had always been the problem for Meeka. High school parties where fear of saying something dumb led to not saying anything at all. Watching her friends making new connections at uni while she could barely introduce herself at tutorials. The thought of a boy holding her hand sending her blood pressure so high she had to go and hide in the bathroom with her head between her knees. Her shoulders shuddered. She sobbed, cradling her head like the fragments of her broken brain.

Meeka watched the fence all morning. She half expected it to fall down under a stampede of the socially competent. She pictured herself cowering under the bed as they hammered on the walls.

After lunch, when nothing had happened, she walked down to the gap. She stood there until her toes turned to prunes but didn’t see him. Of course not, he was Hermatian too, he was probably avoiding her. She was just about to leave when he emerged from his hut. He saw her straight away and began walking over. Meeka was frozen watching his purposeful gait. He stopped an arm’s length away. She thought of saying hello but couldn’t open her mouth. He could and did, open and shut, but made no sound. She was shivering a little but unwrapped her arms and put a hand on the cross beam of the fence in the middle of the gap. He stepped forward and, in the manner of someone approaching a strange dog, put his hand on top of hers. It was warm and wet from the ocean. He had calluses on his palms and fingers. Skin on skin. Rough and gentle. She remembered being touched; it filled her up and overflowed. Pins and needles without the numbness. She snatched away her hand and dragged her legs through the water until she reached the sand and scrambled up the beach to her hut, where she shut and bolted the door. How strange it was that they gave her a lock. She climbed into bed, still wet, and lay in a ball under the covers. His eyes were grey, but only the outside, the centre was blue like the ocean.

It was worse that night. Meeka’s skin rippled with the aftershocks of being touched. Seeping warmth across her body. She couldn’t relax. She slid her hand over her breasts, her nipples stiffened, and she let her eyelids float shut. She ran one hand down her body, over the thin cotton dress she wore as a nightie and pulled up the hem. She caressed her inner thigh, moving back up, slowly. She stopped. She suddenly felt very tired. She rolled on her side and pulled her knees up to her chest. Her limbs felt heavy, but she didn’t sleep. She swung herself out of bed with a huff and went to the window. She looked at the silver ink stains the moon spilled on the ocean. She turned to the fence and saw a black silhouette moving near the gap. He was on her side of the fence. The silhouette grew bigger as he walked up the beach towards her hut.

Meeka rushed to the intranet panel, her face and neck flushed hot. There was an emergency button on the bottom left of the touch screen at all times. She should press it. She wanted to press it.

Meeka let her hand fall. She waited, but nothing happened. She returned to the window and saw him stepping back through the fence to his side of the wall.

Meeka fetched some bacon and eggs from her icebox and fried them on the gas cooktop. She ate them on the small porch, staring adamantly out to sea. After breakfast, Meeka peered through a smaller gap in the fence closer to shore. He was sitting just close enough to the water for the waves to lap his toes. His arms were resting out straight on bent knees, and his head hung between them. She went to the larger gap. Once big enough just for an arm, the bamboo poles beside it had been broken away to create a hole big enough to fit a person. She stepped through. He was looking at her but was too far away for her to read his expression. She walked to shore, not too far from the fence.

When the sun was high overhead, he stood. Meeka tensed but turned her gaze to the sea. When she looked back, he was sitting again, but closer.

When the tide was low, Meeka followed it out at an angle, digging her toes in the wet sand as she moved closer, then sat down.

They drew towards each other in bits and pieces like broken seashells, and when the sun kissed the horizon, sending out wings of red and yellow, they found they were sitting side by side.

And it was alright.