Chapter 5: The New Island
The flight from Tel Aviv to Port of Spain was a seventeen-hour limbo, a pressurized tube where they dozed fitfully against each other, their shared silence now a familiar, worn-in thing. The Trinidadian air that hit them as they exited the airport was a physical entity, thick and warm as broth, laden with the smells of wet earth, exhaust, and something sweetly floral. It didn’t feel like a pilgrimage. It felt like an escape hatch.
The villa was perched on a hillside in Maracas, all terracotta tiles and cool, shadowed interiors that opened onto a staggering view of the northern coast. The Caribbean stretched out below them, a relentless, dazzling blue that made the walls of Jerusalem seem like a dream from another lifetime. The sound here wasn’t prayer or traffic, but the ceaseless sigh of waves and the distant, rhythmic tap-tap-clang of steelpan practice floating up from the valley.
“We should learn to cook,” Charlene announced on their second morning. She was standing on the sun-drenched terrace in a silk kimono, her coffee steaming in the salt-kissed breeze. “Like, proper local food. Not just ordering in.” It was a practical suggestion, a brick in the foundation of the normal life they were pretending to build.
Jose, barefoot and wearing only linen drawstring pants, looked up from his phone where he’d been scrolling through nothing. “You can’t boil rice without burning it,” he said, a faint, real smile touching his lips for the first time in days.
“That’s why we learn,” she said, undeterred. “It’s a thing people do. They go to markets. They buy things. They make meals.” She said it like she was describing the rituals of a newly discovered tribe.
So they went to the market in Port of Spain that afternoon. The Queen’s Park Savannah was a blur of green, but the market was a universe. It was sound and smell incarnate. The moment they stepped out of the air-conditioned car, the humidity wrapped around them like a second skin. The air vibrated with a melodic, laughing creole—English words danced to a completely different rhythm, chopped and musical. The smells were a layered assault: overripe mangoes and sharp Scotch bonnet peppers, the earthy funk of fresh curry leaves, the clean scent of piled cilantro, and underneath it all, the smoky perfume of jerk chicken cooking over coals.
And the people. Jerusalem’s divisions had been ancient and worn deep into stone. Here, the mix was vibrant, immediate, and alive. They saw East Indian women in vibrant saris, their gold nose rings glinting, bargaining fiercely over bundles of bandhania next to Rastafarian men with dreadlocks piled high under tam hats, selling root vegetables and hand-carved calabashes. A Chinese shop owner called out prices for fry pans, his tone flat and efficient, beside a stout Afro-Trinidadian woman with a voice like rich molasses, singing, “Doubles, hot doubles right here, darlin’!”
Jose felt conspicuously massive, a tall, broad-shouldered Puerto Rican amid the flowing crowds. Charlene, though, seemed to dissolve into it, her eyes wide, taking it all in. She was approached by a smiling vendor with skin the color of dark roast coffee. “For you, pretty girl,” he said, holding out a slice of golden fruit on a knife tip. “Pommecythere. Try.”
She took it, bit into the tart, crisp flesh, and her face lit up. “Oh, that’s good.” The vendor beamed, launching into a rapid explanation of how his wife made the best chow with it. Jose watched, his translator’s mind trying and failing to keep up. He paid for a bag of the fruit with a handful of multicolored Trinidad and Tobago bills, the transaction simple amidst the beautiful chaos.
They found a stall dedicated entirely to pepper, the source of the market’s underlying heat. Rows of Scotch bonnets, plump and deceptively sunny, sat beside smaller, darker, sinister-looking “congos.” The vendor, an older Indo-Trinidadian man with a wise, crinkled face, saw Jose looking. “You know peppers, sir?”
“I know they’re hot,” Jose said.
The man chuckled. “Is not just heat. Is flavor. Is history. The bonnet there,” he pointed, “she sweet first, then she burns you slow. The congo? He just angry from the start. Like my first wife.” He laughed at his own joke. “What you cooking?”
“We don’t know yet,” Charlene admitted. “We want to learn.”
The man’s eyes softened. “Start with curry. Everybody finds themselves in a pot of curry.” He began piling things into a brown paper bag: bright yellow turmeric root, knobby ginger, a bundle of wiry cumin stalks, fresh cloves of garlic. “You need a chicken too. Go see Miss Betty. Tell her Mr. Basdeo sent you for a good one.”
They drifted through the crowded aisles, their arms gradually filling with produce. They bought ochre from a woman who explained its use for color and earthiness. They picked up a coconut, and the seller whacked it open with a machete in one fluid motion, handing them the sweet water to drink straight from the shell. The sheer abundance of it, the effortless fusion of Indian, African, Chinese, and European influences in every stall, made their own tangled history feel both monstrous and oddly small. This was a culture built on centuries of collision and fusion, surviving and thriving in the mix. It was messy. It was alive.
Back at the villa, the kitchen was a battlefield of unfamiliar ingredients. Charlene had Mr. Basdeo’s chicken pieces in a bowl. Jose was clumsily grating turmeric, his fingers staining a brilliant yellow that felt irreversible.
“The man said to make a paste,” Charlene said, frowning at a recipe she’d pulled up on her phone. “Garlic, ginger, cumin, all of this… mash it.”
“With what?”
“A mortar and pestle, I guess.” They looked around the sleek, rental-property kitchen. There wasn’t one.
Jose found a heavy-bottomed glass and a bowl. “Improvised.” He started crushing the garlic and ginger. The pungent, sharp aroma filled the air, cutting through the jasmine scent from the terrace. Charlene heated oil in the deep pot, the way Miss Betty had demonstrated.
The curry came together in stages, a chemistry of fragrance. The crackle of cumin seeds in hot oil. The sizzle of the yellow paste Jose had muscled into existence. The rich, deep smell that bloomed when he added the curry powder—Mr. Basdeo had insisted on his own blend, toasted and ground that morning. It smelled nothing like the dusty powder from a Bronx bodega. This was complex, warm, a story in scent.
They added the chicken, the ochre, the coconut milk. The pot bubbled, a low, comforting sound. They stood side-by-side at the stove, watching it, as the sky outside turned fiery orange. The steelpan music had stopped, replaced by the chorus of tree frogs and crickets.
“It feels very normal,” Charlene said quietly, stirring the pot.
“It is normal,” Jose replied, but the word felt strange in his mouth. Normal was a language he’d forgotten.
He reached for the rum bottle on the counter, pouring a healthy shot into two glasses. He handed her one. They clinked, the sound soft.
“To learning,” she said.
He drank, the rum smoothing the edges of the day. “To not burning the rice.”
She laughed, a real, unguarded sound that seemed to startle her as much as him. For a moment, it was just a daughter and a father making a mess in a kitchen, thousands of miles from anywhere they knew.
The meal was a shocking success. The curry was fiery, layered, profoundly good. They ate on the terrace, the food sweating on their plates in the humid night, their fingers stained yellow. They didn’t talk about the video, or the money, or the wall. They talked about the pepper vendor’s joke, about the weight of the coconut, about the way the woman selling chives had braided Charlene’s hair into a quick, intricate plait for a few extra dollars.
Later, the dishes sat stacked in the sink, a testament to their first collaborative, non-destructive act. Jose was on the wide veranda, looking at the black silhouette of the mountains against the star-cluttered sky. Charlene came out, holding two more glasses of rum. She handed him one, then didn’t move away. She leaned her hips against the railing beside him, her shoulder brushing his arm.
The physical ease between them now was the most surreal thing of all. It wasn’t the charged, performative tension of the penthouse, nor the desperate cling of Jerusalem. It was just… proximity. A shared humidity.
“It’s different here,” she said after a long while. “The past feels heavier there. Here, it’s just… now. The noise. The heat. The food.”
“It’s a good distraction,” he said.
“Is that what we’re calling it?” she asked, her voice soft. She turned her head to look at him. The neon glow from a distant bar lit half her face in a pale blue sheen. “A distraction?”
He didn’t have an answer. He looked at her mouth, at the curve of her neck where the pulse beat steadily. The memory of her taste, which had haunted him in the Bronx, was now just another sensory note in a world overfull with them—jasmine, curry, salt, rum.
She set her glass down on the railing. The click was definitive. She reached up, her fingers tracing the yellow turmeric stain still smudged on the back of his hand. Her touch was deliberate, exploring. “Mr. Basdeo said everybody finds themselves in a pot of curry,” she murmured. “What do you think he meant by that?”
Jose’s breath caught. He turned his hand over, capturing her fingers. They were sticky from the coconut milk. “I think he meant it’s all in the mix,” he said, his voice low. “The sweet, the sharp, the fire. You can’t separate it out once it’s cooked.”
She moved then, closing the small distance, not into an embrace, but into a shared space of decision. Her forehead rested against his collarbone. He let go of her hand to wrap his arm around her back, feeling the familiar, potent curve of her beneath the thin cotton of her dress. They stood like that for a long time, listening to the tropical night, two ingredients in a pot that was still on the boil, the future’s flavor impossible to predict.
In the kitchen, a single drop of water fell from the tap into the stained curry pot with a quiet, metallic ping.
The sound was isolated, a full stop in the lingering warmth of the kitchen. Jose stirred, the spell broken. He released his hold on Charlene’s back, his hand lingering for a second on the curve of her hip before falling away. “We should clean that pot,” he said, his voice rough. “Or it’ll stain forever.”
“Let it stain,” she replied, but she pulled back anyway, picking up her rum glass from the railing. The air between them still vibrated. “Tomorrow, let’s find that temple.”
“What temple?”
“The one the lady selling chives mentioned. The Hindu temple up in the hills. She said they have a festival soon. For light.” Charlene took a sip, watching him over the rim. “I want to see it.”
The next morning’s heat was already dense by nine. They drove inland, leaving the coastal breeze behind, climbing narrow roads choked with brilliant green. The directions were vague—“past the blue house where the parrots nest, then left where the breadfruit tree splits the road”—but Jose navigated the turns with a focused calm. The rented SUV kicked up red dust that settled on the lush ferns lining the route.
The temple appeared suddenly around a bend, a shock of color against the emerald rainforest. It wasn’t large, but it was frenetic with detail: tiers of ornate, cream-colored spires covered in a riot of carved figures—gods, demons, dancers locked in stone. Bright flags in saffron and pink fluttered from poles. The air smelled of marigolds and something smoky-sweet.
A man was sweeping the pink concrete forecourt with a long broom made of twigs. He looked up as they approached, his eyes sharp and assessing. He was older, his face a roadmap of lines, dressed in simple cotton trousers and a vest. “You lost?” he called out, his English melodic but direct.
“We heard about the festival,” Charlene said, stopping a respectful distance away. “Diwali, right? We wanted to see the temple, if that’s okay.”
The man leaned on his broom. “Tourists usually go to the big one in Waterloo. Not this one.”
“We’re not typical tourists,” Jose said.
A faint smile touched the man’s lips. “I am Ramesh. This is my family’s temple. My great-grandfather helped build it with his own hands, after the indentureship.” He said the word plainly, a historical fact, not a grievance. “Come. You can look. No shoes.”
They left their sandals on the steps. The marble floor was cool underfoot. The interior was dim, lit by ghee lamps that made the gold on the statues of Vishnu and Lakshmi wink softly. The silence here felt older and more intimate than the echoing vault of the Holy Sepulchre.
“Your people are from India?” Charlene asked quietly, her eyes on a vibrant painting of the goddess Durga slaying a buffalo demon.
“Port of Spain,” Ramesh said with a soft chuckle. “But our stories are from India. My ancestors came on the Fatel Razak. A ship of broken promises. They cut cane for the British for five, ten years. Sometimes they were treated like animals.” He spoke calmly, dusting a lamp with the edge of his vest. “When their time was done, they had nothing. No money for passage back. So they stayed. They bought this land when nobody else wanted it. They built this.” He gestured around the small, glorious space. “They held onto the prayers, the food, the lights. To remember who they were in a place that tried to tell them they were nothing.”
Jose felt the words land in his gut. He thought of the penthouse, of Leo’s camera reducing his own history of faith and failing to a slick commodity. He’d sold his story. These people had fought to preserve theirs for pennies a day.
“Why the lights?” Charlene asked.
“For the victory of light over darkness,” Ramesh said. “For knowledge over ignorance. Simple things.” He looked at them, his gaze lingering on their similar features, the unspoken tension that trailed them like a scent. “You two are running from a darkness.”
It wasn’t a question. Jose stiffened. Charlene, however, just tilted her head. “How can you tell?”
“Everyone who comes here is looking for a light. Or running from a shadow.” He turned back to his sweeping. “The festival is next week. You should come. The whole valley will be here. We light deyas—small clay lamps. The hillside looks like the stars fell to earth. It is a good thing to see.”
They drove back down in a saturated silence. The vibrant temple, Ramesh’s calm narrative of survival and identity, lay heavy in the SUV’s cabin. It made their own exile feel petulant, indulgent.a1
That night, Charlene couldn’t settle. The villa felt too quiet, too temporary. She found Jose on the terrace again, staring into the black where the sea met the sky. “He knew,” she said, joining him at the railing.
“Knew what?”
“That we’re a mess. That we’ve done something… irreversible.” She hugged her arms against the warm night. “He didn’t judge it. He just named it. Darkness.”
Jose sighed, a long, weary sound that seemed to come from deep in his bones. “We have our own version of indentureship, I guess. We signed a contract. Got our payment. Now we’re stuck on an island of our own making.”
“But they built a temple,” she whispered. Her hand found his on the cool wrought iron. Her fingers were tight. “What do we build, Papi? A glass house on a dune? Is that our temple?”
He had no answer. The question hung there, mingling with the salt air. Her touch shifted, her palm pressing down on the back of his hand, pinning it to the railing. It was a claim.
“Maybe we don’t build anything yet,” she said, her voice dropping to a raw murmur. “Maybe we just learn to see in the dark we bought.” She turned to face him, her body blocking the faint light from the villa. “The way he talked about holding onto things… about knowing who you are…” She reached up with her other hand, tracing the line of his jaw. “I know who I am when I’m with you. It’s the only time I’m not pretending.”
Her confession was a key turning in a lock. He moved suddenly, his own hand lifting to cup the back of her neck. It wasn’t a tender gesture; it was primal, full of the fear and the truth of the last weeks. He didn’t kiss her. He just held her there, his forehead resting against hers, their breath mingling.
“This is what we have,” he growled, the preacher’s cadence gone, replaced by a man shipwrecked. “This goddamn darkness. This mess. Each other.”
She nodded against him, a sharp little movement. “Then show me,” she breathed.
He did. He led her not to the bedroom, but to the deep, cushioned lounger on the open terrace. The night was their only witness. There was no satin, no chandelier, no director’s eye. There was the coarse texture of the outdoor fabric under her back, the distant crash of waves a rhythmic counterpoint to their ragged breath.
It was slower this time. Less a performance, more a mapping of territory. He was devastatingly careful, his hands remembering her, his mouth leaving a trail of silent reverence on her throat, her collarbone. When he finally entered her, it was with a shuddering groan that was half prayer, half surrender. She cried out, but it was swallowed by the vast, indifferent night.
Afterward, they lay tangled on the lounger, slick with sweat, coated in a fine mist of sea spray. The silence was absolute. In the distance, up in the dark hills, a single, small light flickered—a lone deya on a porch, perhaps, a private victory against the encroaching dark.
The deya’s light seemed to pulse once, then was swallowed by the deeper black of the mountains. A shudder ran through Charlene, separate from the cool sea breeze on her skin. “I’m cold,” she whispered, though the night air was like bathwater.
He helped her up, his hands impersonal now, guides rather than claimers. They didn’t speak as they walked inside, as they rinsed off the salt and each other under the outdoor shower’s lukewarm stream. The water pooled at their feet on the terra-cotta tiles, swirling with the evidence. They slept in the same bed, backs turned, a canyon of cool sheet between them.
The week unfolded in a strange, domestic pantomime. They woke late. They returned to the market, mastered the curry, attempted to make sada roti on the flat iron tawa they bought, laughing when the first ones came out like brittle Frisbees. They swam in the cove below the villa at dusk, the water a silken black around their bodies.
They did not mention the temple. They did not mention the terrace. They talked about nothing with a focused, cheerful intensity. It was exhausting.
Diwali arrived. The entire hillside, Ramesh had promised, would be lit. As dusk fell, they heard the first pops of distant firecrackers, like far-off gunfire. They stood on their terrace, looking inland. One by one, then in clusters, thousands of tiny flames appeared against the dark green, pinpricks of unwavering orange light defining the contours of homes, roads, the temple itself. It was a galaxy rooted in the earth.
“Victory of light over darkness,” Charlene said, her voice flat.
“It’s pretty,” Jose offered, the words hopelessly inadequate.
She turned from the spectacle, facing him. The reflected glow from the hills gave her face a warm, hollowed look. “It just makes our darkness feel thicker, you know? Like we’re standing outside a party we weren’t invited to.” She kicked at the leg of a lounge chair. “I can’t do this anymore.”
“Do what?”
“This… vacation. This pretending we’re just… healing.” She shoved her hands in the pockets of her shorts. “We’re not healing. We’re marinating. In rum and guilt and whatever the hell this is between us. I need noise. I need something so goddamn loud it drowns everything out.”
He understood perfectly. The solemn beauty of the flickering hills felt like a judgement. “What do you want to do?”
She pulled her phone from her pocket, her thumb darting across the screen. She’d been scrolling for days, a digital lifeline. “WrestleMania is in Las Vegas this weekend.” She showed him the screen: a garish, explosive promo for the sports entertainment extravaganza. Forty-eight hours from now. “Let’s go.”
He stared at the graphic, a wrestler frozen mid-air, muscles corded, face a mask of theatrical rage. It was the absolute antithesis of the deyas’ quiet endurance, of Jerusalem’s weighted stone. It was all scream, no substance. A perfect, beautiful distraction.
“Wrestling?” he asked.
“It’s a spectacle. It’s stupid. It’s loud.” Her eyes were bright, almost pleading. “It’s the furthest thing from a temple on a hill I can think of. Please, Papi.”
He thought of the edited video, ‘A Modern Penance.’ That, too, had been a spectacle. A performed violence. Maybe this was the only language they understood now. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go be loud.”
They were on a red-eye to Las Vegas by midnight, leaving the glow of the hills and the scent of jasmine behind. The plane was a tube of recycled air and murmuring passengers. Charlene slept fitfully, her head on his shoulder, while Jose watched the flight map, a tiny plane icon crawling over the blackness of the Caribbean and the Gulf. They were chasing the sunrise west, toward a city that never slept.
McCarran Airport hit them with a wall of sterile, chilled air and the cacophonous symphony of slot machines, even in baggage claim. The transition was violent. The humid, organic weight of Trinidad was gone, replaced by a dry, artificial chill. The smells were perfume, beer, and antiseptic.
Their hotel was on the Strip, a towering monument of glass. Their room was on a high floor, all sleek surfaces and a window offering a panoramic view of the absurd, glittering skyline. The replica Eiffel Tower, the dancing fountains, the giant LED screens screaming with messages. It was a billion watts of voluntary blindness.
“This is more like it,” Charlene said, dumping her bag. She walked to the window, her reflection superimposed over the neon chaos. “You can’t think here. Your brain just… short circuits.”
He ordered room service—a burger, a club sandwich, things that required no memory, no cultural translation. They ate in silence, watching a pirate show erupt on the Strip below, the fake cannon blasts muffled by the thick glass.
The next afternoon, they joined the river of people flowing toward the stadium. The crowd was a mosaic of jerseys, foam fingers, and elaborate face paint. The energy was a tangible, buzzing thing, fueled by beer and collective anticipation. A man dressed as a luchador bumped into Jose. “Sorry, brother!” he boomed, his breath smelling of cheap tequila.
Inside, the scale was monolithic. Seventy thousand voices converged under the closed dome, a roaring ocean of sound. The air conditioning was arctic, struggling against the heat of so many bodies. The ring, far below, looked like a perfect, lit square of comic-book violence.
“I don’t know any of these people,” Jose shouted over the pulse of the opening pyro.
“It doesn’t matter!” Charlene yelled back, her eyes already glassy with the overload. She had a beer in one hand, her other tucked into the crook of his arm. “Just watch!”
And he did. He watched the lumbering giants, the acrobatic smaller men, the storylines of betrayal and revenge played out with choreographed slams and melodramatic promos on the titantron. It was all so openly fake, so proudly artificial. The stakes were fictional championships, not souls. The pain was a performance, the blood often contained in a hidden capsule. It was a ritual where everyone knew the secrets, and the joy was in the collaborative belief in the illusion.
Halfway through the main card, during a particularly brutal-looking but technically precise table spot, Charlene leaned into him. Her mouth was close to his ear. “It’s cleaner than what we did, isn’t it?” Her voice was thick. “They have a script. They have a safe word. They walk away afterwards.”
He didn’t answer. He just watched a man being put through a table, the wood splintering with a satisfying crack. The crowd roared its approval. It was a sanctioned demolition. Theirs had been a private collapse.
The final match, the main event, was a whirlwind of aerial moves and last-second kick-outs. The crowd was on its feet, a deafening, unified animal. Charlene was jumping up and down, screaming herself hoarse, completely lost in the fabricated glory of it. Jose stood beside her, feeling like a ghost. The sound was so immense it became a form of silence, a white noise that hollowed him out.
The victor’s hand was raised, confetti cannons erupting, his theme music blasting. The spectacle reached its crescendo. Jose looked at Charlene’s illuminated face, streaked with happy tears for a fictional outcome, and felt a pang of something worse than guilt. It was envy. She could still turn it off and on. He was stuck in the permanent, silent reel of their own making.
As the crowd began to shuffle out, buzzing and spent, she turned to him, breathless. “That was amazing!” She was vibrating, keyed up on the collective high.
He nodded, forcing a smile. “Yeah. Something else.”
They spilled out into the Vegas night, now hotter and thicker with the press of bodies. The crowd moved like a sluggish beast toward the Strip. Someone jostled Charlene hard from behind. She stumbled, her beer sloshing over her hand.
“Hey, watch it!” Jose snapped, the protective instinct flaring hot and automatic. He turned to face a group of three large, visibly drunk men in matching tank tops.
“Relax, Grandpa,” the one who’d bumped her sneered. His eyes, bleary and mean, slid from Jose to Charlene, lingering on her body in the tight WrestleMania t-shirt she’d bought. “We’re just celebrating. Your daughter’s a big fan, huh?”
The way he said ‘daughter’ was a leer, an injection of filth into the word. Jose’s vision tightened. The noise of the Strip faded into a low hum. He saw, with perfect, chilling clarity, the man’s nose breaking under his fist.
Charlene’s hand clamped onto his forearm, her nails digging in. “Papi, no,” she hissed, her previous buzz gone, her voice razor-sharp with fear. “It’s not worth it.”
The drunk man’s friends were gathering close now, smelling conflict. “Yeah, listen to your girl, Papi,” the main one mocked, puffing out his chest.
Jose stood perfectly still, every muscle coiled. He was taller, broader than any of them. The old violence, the kind from Bronx streets he’d left behind decades ago, sang in his blood. It would be so easy. A release valve for everything—the penthouse, the video, the temple, the deyas, this entire gaudy, hollow night.
But her grip was an anchor. Her fear was real, a cold splash against the heat of his rage. He wasn’t a preacher. He wasn’t a performer. He was just a man who could ruin everything, again, in a different way, in a different city.
He took a slow, deliberate breath. He unclenched his fist, finger by finger. He said nothing. He just stared at the man until the drunk’s smirk faltered, a flicker of uncertainty in his bloodshot eyes.
“Let’s go,” Jose said, his voice low and gravelly. He turned, putting his body between Charlene and the group, and guided her into the flowing crowd, not looking back.
They walked half a block in a tremulous silence. The adrenaline drained from her, leaving her shaky. “You wanted to hit him,” she finally said.
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Because you were scared.” He kept walking, his gaze fixed ahead on the neon abyss. “And because he was right.”
She stopped walking, forcing the stream of people to part around them. “About what?”
Jose finally looked at her, his face a mask of weary concession under the pulsating casino lights. “I am your Papi.” The word hung there, awful and true in this new context. “And you are my girl. And that’s the only real story we have left in this whole fake fucking city.”