Before coming to Toronto he’d never seen people from so many different places — Trinidadians, Tobagonians, Kittitians, Jamaicans, Dominicans, Antiguans. Back home, apart from tourists, Martine was the first person he’d met who wasn’t from Barbados. He was driving the journalist who had come to write a travel story, and he had taken him to Harrison’s Cave. Martine had come from St. Lucia to visit an elderly aunt. At the coffee bar in the visitors’ centre, where Calvin and the journalist stopped before taking the tramcar down into the cave, Calvin was explaining how the whole island of Barbados was made from coral, how each piece of coral was made up of hundreds of thousands of little polyps, each with tiny invisible arms that reached out and grabbed plankton as it floated by. Martine had been sitting at the next table, on her day off, pretending to read a book but listening to him telling the journalist how the island’s limestone base had once been thrust up from the sea by a volcano, with the coral stuck on top of it, and now there was a foot of soil on top of that, no more than a few feet anywhere, and all the sugar cane grown on the island, all the human history of Barbados, came from just that thin layer of topsoil. Calvin had found he was talking to both of them, the journalist and this beautiful young woman at the next table who was no longer pretending to read her book. Like your hair grows only from the top of your scalp, he’d said, but underneath your scalp there’s your skull and your brains, the real person you are, and so beneath the thin layer of soil there’s this beautiful, intricate, complex system of coral caves and rivers and underground lakes, the real Barbados, and when the journalist went off to view the display of Arawak and Carib artifacts beside the gift shop she remained at her table, not because she’d found him attractive or interesting, she said later, but because she couldn’t afford a regular guide. But then she admitted that he hadn’t looked that bad and she had not forgotten what he’d said about her hair. In his first email to the journalist, Calvin told him about Martine, whom he would surely remember, and their three young children, and that they were now living on St. Clair Avenue, and asked him about the travel article. In his second, or maybe third, he mentioned his job as travel editor at the Bajan News, a newspaper now unfortunately defunct.

Martine looks over at him when he enters The Store Famous. She is busy with a customer. Under the store’s tube lights her skin looks grey and drawn. Mr. Chakra Biswas is also in the store, standing behind his cash register with a fly swatter in his hand. Once, when Calvin was working up a resumé for a job as assistant manager at Knob Hill Farms, he’d interviewed Mr. Biswas at great length about managing a grocery store, so that in his resumé he was able to say he had experience in all aspects of inventory development, computerized stock assessment, shelf loading, perishable goods management, and customer service, not to mention checkout supervision and pricing, and to list Mr. Chakra Biswas, Owner, The Store Famous, as a professional reference. He sent a copy of the resumé to thirty-seven grocery stores in Toronto. He also gave one to Mr. Biswas. “Would you hire this man?” Calvin asked him the next day. “Oh yes,” Mr. Biswas replied. “In fact, I think I will fire my present assistant and hire this fine fellow at half her wages.”

Calvin tries to chat with Mr. Biswas while Martine moves up and down the narrow aisles, showing her customer where the tinned ackee and bottles of coconut oil are shelved. But Mr. Biswas is too busy swatting flies and taking in money to pay him much attention, and soon Calvin drifts out to the sidewalk, where he stands with his back to the store looking up and down the street, as though trying to decide whether to go left to Timothy’s for an espresso, or right to the pool hall, called To Hell and Back, for a Banks, the Beer of Barbados. He consults his watch. It is already two o’clock. In one hour Barnard will be bringing round the taxi and he will have to fetch the children from their school. He goes back to the apartment to see if there have been any emails.

Before pressing the space bar to awaken his computer he sees that the man on the island is digging a hole in the sand with his hands. Calvin watches him work at it, fascinated. So lifelike. Light blue sky, dark blue water, sandy sand, green palm leaves shaking in the wind. He can almost hear their dry rattle. The man’s colour is ambiguous. He might be a white man tanned by the sun, he might be a light-skinned black man, it’s hard to say. The facial features are too roughly drawn to settle the matter. First, the man scoops the dry surface sand away, like an open-pit miner, then he jumps into the depression to dig it deeper, throwing the sand over his shoulder. What is he searching for? Buried treasure? Fresh water? Does he think he can tunnel his way off an island? Soon the hole is knee deep, then chest deep, and now the man has disappeared completely. All Calvin can see is sand flying out of the hole, then not even that. The man is under the island. But what’s he doing? Are there caves down there, as on Barbados? Like Harrison’s Cave? Where is he putting all that sand? Is he just scooping it behind him, closing in the hole as he goes farther into the earth? He should be spreading it out on the floor of the tunnel, so that he can escape if something goes wrong, if the roof caves in or he runs out of air. How deep is he prepared to go?

Now something seems to be happening in the hole. It’s filling up with water. Of course it is. Calvin has dug enough holes in the beaches along the coast of Barbados, on the leeward side, where the sand is white and raked daily (or rather nightly), to know that the holes always fill with water. Salt water. He could have told the man not to bother. Now bubbles begin to appear on the surface of the water filling the hole. Then a hand thrusts out, followed by the man’s head. He has floated to the surface of his tunnel! He is gasping for air as he crawls out of the hole, then he lies on the beach, chest heaving, beating the sand with his fists. He has failed to get off the island.

Calvin wakes his computer and checks for emails: You have no new messages. He thinks about composing a new resumé. What should he be this time? He wonders if he would enjoy retail. In Bridgetown he played cricket with a fellow who sold reconditioned automobiles for a company called Pegasus. He doesn’t have the wardrobe for it, of course, but that is no problem. To Whom It May Concern: My name is Calvin Braithwaite etc, etc. In my native Barbados I worked for two years for Pegasus Auto Sales Ltd., Spring Garden Highway, St. Matthias, where I attained the level of master sales representative before emigrating to Canada one month ago. At Pegasus I sold many makes of automobiles, including Porsches, bmws, Maseratis, Fords, and GM cars and lorries. I worked hard at this job, sir or madame, attended training sessions and sales conventions in Puerto Rico and Miami (where I met my present wife, who is a social worker; we now have two children, Molly . . . ). Two children? Can’t a used-car salesman have three children? But he has written two. Is it better for a used-car salesman to have two girls, or a girl and a boy, and if the latter, should the boy be older or younger than the girl?

While he is pondering which of his three children to jettison, the computer goes to sleep and the screen saver reappears. This time the man on the island is weaving palm fronds together to make a large mat. Perhaps he intends to make a shelter from the sun. Or a sail. Calvin wonders how the man got to the island in the first place. On a ship, obviously, or a sailboat. Perhaps he was a fisherman lured too far out by the promise of the catch of a lifetime, like that Cuban in The Old Man and the Sea, which he studied in fifth form. There is no sign of wreckage on the island, so his boat must have capsized and sunk, or else he fell or was pulled overboard by the fish, after which the boat sailed off on its own and the man swam to the island. Calvin has heard of that happening. He heard of a fisherman once from one of the windward villages who found a sailboat drifting in the ocean, sails reefed, no one aboard, no sign of anything, so he tied a rope to it and towed it back to his village. Then he thought perhaps the boat belonged to a scuba diver, and he was so tormented by the thought of the diver coming back up to the surface to find his boat missing that the next day he towed the boat back to where he’d found it and left it there, and never fished in that part of the ocean again.

He hears the downstairs door open and soon Barnard comes into the apartment. Barnard drops his keys on Calvin’s desk and stretches out on the sofa with his shoes on, sighing wearily. He has been driving the taxicab since midnight, and now he will sleep until eight, have a plate of food, and then go down to the pool hall to play dominoes until it is midnight again. Until then, the cab is Calvin’s. In a few minutes, Martine will come upstairs and tell Barnard that he must not lie on the sofa with his shoes on, he must get undressed and sleep in his bed like a proper man. This isn’t a chattel house, she will say. Then she will begin preparing their tea, still yelling at Barnard, who will not have moved from the sofa, while Calvin fetches the children home from school in the taxi. The apartment will be full of tea and bedlam until Barnard leaves for the pool hall and the children go to bed, so from four until eight is a good time for Calvin to do his driving. Then he will come home and resume his resumés.

“What that crazy fool on the island been up to today? ” Barnard asks, his eyes closed and his arm draped over his forehead. In St. Lucia, Barnard owned a travel business. For complete guided site-seeing, transfers, shopping, tours of St. Lucia, his card read, call Barnard Henry (Proprietor), Barnard’s Travel. He had one taxicab, two buses, and a storefront on Bridge Street in Castries. Martine had been his dispatcher until she went to Barbados to attend to her ailing aunt and met Calvin at Harrison’s Cave with the journalist. Calvin returned to St. Lucia with Martine and drove Barnard’s cab and his fourteen-seater transit bus from the airport to Castries, and he and Martine were married in Castries’ Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, even though Calvin was Anglican. The priest was a tall, thin, bearded man, white but dark skinned, like the screen saver man. He wore long white robes, and he read the service from a large book held up like an umbrella by a small black boy in a red cassock. His boy Friday, Calvin thought.

“He’s making a sail,” Calvin says. “But I don’t see any boat.”