Quarantine Island Read online

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  CHAPTER ONE

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  Read more of Thalia’s adventures at The Escape Hatch Series:

  Ya-ya’s Return: The Prequel

  Pigeon in the Canaries: Volume One

  Copyright © 2021 K. A. Keener

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law. For permissions contact: www.escapehatchseries.com

  CHAPTER TWO

  THALIA’S FLIGHT TO Thailand took one day but landed her there two days later. Her first call on arrival was to Toula, her boss and family friend.

  “How’s the future?” Toula asked wryly, knowing that the time in Phuket was eleven hours ahead.

  “Rainy,” Thalia replied. Arriving in the island’s humidity felt like being suspended in the micro-climate of a bathroom, post-shower. She found herself looking for a door to open to let in some air, though she was already outside. The pandemic rules here required her to quarantine in her hotel or on “approved routes” around the island for a week before she could join her friend Cadi at a smaller island, Koh Phaghan.

  While she napped in the crisp air-conditioning of her room, the front desk called to say that her required COVID test from the Phuket airport had come back negative; she was now allowed to leave her room. It was only 4 p.m. local time, and she figured she needed to stay awake at least until 9, her first chance to beat back the jet lag.

  She made her way down to the hotel bar. The space was all frosted glass, orchids and marble Buddhas. At the bar, a few middle-aged men sat spaced apart, drinking coffee. Besides the Thai woman behind the bar in a crisp white uniform, Thalia was the only woman in the room. She felt the extra gravity of the men’s gazes as they landed on her bare arms and the neckline of her black knit tank dress. The bartender approached, hands folded in prayer at her face, offering a greeting that had a strong uplift of vowel held two beats long at the end. Thalia found herself reflexively mirroring the woman, gently tenting her fingers in front of her own face and bowing slightly. The bartender abruptly switched to a strongly Australian-accented English that was so unexpected, Thalia almost laughed out loud.

  “What can I get you, miss?” Her eyes squished together at the corners, one of the few ways left to tell if someone was smiling under their mask. When Thalia asked for a menu, she was pointed to a QR code. Scrolling through the photographs of colorful frozen drinks, she could feel both the male gaze and the pull of the fluffy, queen-sized bed back in her room. A man in a straw fedora with pale, flushed skin, perhaps 50 years old, was the first to approach.

  “You just arrived?” Thalia placed his accent as American, Southern perhaps. As a New Yorker, she had always thought of such an accent as gentlemanly but also a bit old-fashioned—maybe a bit closed-minded in how its syrupy vowels spoke of a suspicion of all things quick or forward.

  “Yes, from New York,” she volunteered just as the bartender returned to take her order. Thalia looked over at the Southern gentleman’s coffee cup and noticed that it contained what looked and smelled like rum-and-coke on ice.

  “COVID restrictions,” he explained, noticing her glance. “The island still prohibits alcohol sales in bars. I prefer it; makes me feel like we’re in some sort of Prohibition-era black-and-white film—secret menus and under-the-bar liquor bottles.” The bartender refilled his cup from a silver shaker underneath the bar.

  “Did you decide? I make an excellent mojito,” the bartender offered. Thalia ordered a coke, for both the caffeine and the sugar. She was the only one at the bar with a real glass. To pass the time, she began to chat with her Southern companion. He was a retired electrical engineer, ex-military, and now an expat living in Phuket. Divorced twice. No kids. Thalia wondered how he could possibly be entertained by the island: retired, walking the beach and drinking covertly at hotel bars. He talked a lot and didn’t really ask any questions. He was full of meandering stories about contract work that he’d done on computer servers and infrastructure throughout China and Singapore. Thalia began to question her strategy of engaging him in conversation to stay awake.

  Just as she was about to give in and return to sleep, a group of four Thai women arrived. They were all short, wearing tight, brightly colored dresses that had bits cut out of them—a hole in the back, a bite taken out of one torso’s side. She felt the energy in the room shift towards them. They walked on blocky heels to a high-top table a few feet from the bar.

  She’d read about Thai prostitution and seen a few prostitutes in New York, late at night, on corners in neighborhoods with busy exits off the parkways. But she still wasn’t sure if these women were selling something or were just looking for a sugar daddy. Thalia began to consider what the difference was between the two, besides time and all the things that came with time—connection, attachment. The women were certainly beautiful and bore a lacquer of effort on top of their natural charms: their immaculate hair, glossy and full to their mid-backs, their breasts cupped and pushed forward, their eyes visually lengthened by beautiful stripes of glossy black eyeliner.

  Looking down at her own hands, with their destroyed cuticles and the skin dry along her arms from the artificial air of her day-long flights, she vowed to book the Traveller’s Spa Day special with the front desk before she went back up to her room. Her black hair was straight and full—part of her Greek inheritance—and her skin remained clear, despite the traveling. She knew she was attractive enough, her own body still young and a sensitive digestion keeping her careful about what she ate and, thus, thin.

  A few of the men made their way over to the women’s table and then paired off. Thalia’s own companion continued to drone on about Y2K, which she had heard of but was too young to really remember.

  “Did you really not know beforehand? As an insider, did you actually think that maybe everything would crash?” she asked him. It was so easy to keep him talking; it was like kicking a ball along that was already in motion. There was only one woman left at the high-top table now, and she was staring at Thalia and her companion. What did the woman see in Thalia’s simple dress and lack of makeup? Competition? Wealth? Privilege? As Thalia glanced over at her again, the woman swung her hair, a thick braid, over her shoulder. It rested like a glossy rope against the sharpness of her clavicle.

  “Do you know her?” Thalia asked, interrupting the man mid-sentence, mid-story.

  “Yes, she brings women here every night,” he said. Thalia glanced around at the tables of pairs then. The men wore the smug smiles of people being flattered. She could see the appeal of receiving this kind of feminine attention. It was a kind of ego-soothing that she’d never been good at providing, though she’d watched other women do it all her life. Her friends Maddy and Sam were particularly adept at it and had advised her to “just give them lots of compliments” and “touch their elbows and their knees a lot.” Thalia had watched them employ these techniques seamlessly in high school, but it seemed sort of cheap to her. Did men really want to just be told they were desirable, over and again? A
tinkling of laughter erupted from one of the tables, and Thalia saw the woman lean in and give a playful shove to her companion’s shoulder, then knee.

  Following three cokes, two bathroom stops and one booking at the front desk for a body scrub and massage the next day, Thalia returned to her room’s refrigerated coolness and white noise; it was going to be a long week on quarantine island.

  CHAPTER THREE

  BY THE TIME Thalia took a flight and then a ferry to meet Cadi, she’d already grown accustomed to the May-December romantic pairings that always appeared on the edge of her perception in every public place she entered. Always a white foreign guy, old enough to be retired, paired with a young Thai woman. As a solo woman traveler, she was an outlier. That is, until she got to Koh Phanghan.

  Koh Phanghan was an island in the Gulf of Thailand, famous in the region for its full moon parties. Thirty thousand people arrived each month just before the full moon, by boat, ferry, yacht, to Haad Rin, a beach on the southern tip. The influx was twice the island’s population during the rest of the month. It was felt not only in numbers but in live-wire energy. Scooter accidents splattered across the mountain to the north of the beach like bugs against the front windshield of a car on the interstate.

  The locals in the area lived the rest of the month on the profits from selling beer, shots, weed, acid and mushrooms foraged from the woods. In front of every convenience store, there were women living in crocheted bikinis and flip-flops, hopping on and off the backs of scooters, zipping from pool villa to beachfront bar. At least, that was what people had told Thalia about Koh Phanghan before she arrived.

  But by the time Thalia was met at the ferry by Cadi, the island had returned to its 1980s self, wiped clean of tourists by COVID, leaving behind shells of stores, empty except for dust and geckos.

  Thalia had met Cadi in the Canary Islands just a few months before. She was older by maybe ten or fifteen years, but you couldn’t tell by looking at her. She had one of those yoga bodies with striated shoulders and a flat stomach. She wore her hair long and in loose braids, the brown streaked with blond from the sun. Only her eyes, creasing from sun damage at their corners, revealed her age, and most of the time she was in sunglasses. She’d designed jewelry in a past life and had even launched and later sold a few jewelry stores in New York.

  She rushed forward and squeezed Thalia in a tight hug just as people yelled out “taxi” around them. The taxis were sort of tricycle scooters with domed roofs—tuktuks—and Cadi rushed them both into one, along with Thalia’s luggage. “I’m so glad you are here.” She pushed forward, bracing herself against the metal shell around them as they navigated potholes. “I’ve been so bored.”

  Cadi was in training to become a yoga teacher at one of the many training programs on the island. As they passed empty storefronts and massage shops, she gushed on. “I’ve booked you in such a cool place. It is a bungalow with the best porch, right on the beach. The American guy who owns it runs meditation classes in his garden, and his wife is a genius with plants. The grounds are amazing.”

  Right away, Thalia felt a bit queasy. She thought maybe it was the ride, but she also thought that she might find herself living amid one of these May-December, cross-cultural romances that made her so uneasy.

  She was dead wrong.

  The American guy, Aarush, was an Indian-American, born in D.C., who had partly grown up in Mumbai. He and his wife, Beam, were probably around Cadi’s age, Thalia guessed. His wife was Thai, but with a toddler on her hip and baby weight around her middle, she seemed less the trophy wife than the nurturing aunt type. And he seemed less like someone in the throes of a midlife crisis than an entrepreneur displaced from Silicon Valley.

  The bungalow was beyond expectations. A large room on wooden stilts with a porch that faced a stretch of bright turquoise water. A hammock hung across one side and a series of plants were hung across the front railing, each an exotic knot of roots and fern-like tendrils. In the view from the front railing, tiny green islands across the bay dotted the horizon. It was like something a location scout would find for a spy movie. The cost for a month was the same as the cost of a night in a New York airport hotel.

  “Unbelievable,” was the word she murmured to Cadi as she climbed the steep stairs to the porch. “I owe you a drink.”

  “No time like the present,” Cadi said, and they were off to a bar on the other end of the beach. They sat in excessively upright wooden chairs and nursed local beer while the sun went down. Already, Thalia was calculating how much a month’s expenses might be on the island and for how long she could sustain that amount before she’d have to get a job. She was living off the savings her grandmother left after she passed away from COVID, and Thalia had quit her job as a travel agent. Even working remotely, the time difference between New York City and Thailand made the position untenable. Cadi caught her up on how her yoga training was going and how completely blissed out she had become since she’d come to the island three weeks earlier.

  “You came on the absolute best night of the week,” Cadi said. “On Thursdays there’s a kirtan at Sunset Hill.”

  “What’s a kirtan?” Thalia asked, ready to agree to just about anything.

  “It is sort of a chanting, singing, dancing circle.”

  “Sounds way too hippie for me.”

  “Puh-lease. Have you seen where you are living? Your whole look is going to have to change to be worthy of that beach bungalow vibe back there.”

  The kirtan was a sort of a goodbye-for-now celebration for a beloved yoga teacher who was leaving the island to study in India for three months. They could hear the drums from a few blocks away, even above the engine of Cadi’s scooter. Out of the deep black, on the other side of the cone of light from the front of their scooter and a frenzy of insects kamikazi-ing into their path, Thalia saw what looked like a party floating on the ocean.

  As they got closer, she could see the party was actually happening on a wooden platform built out over a cliff that led to the beach. The border of the space was lined with lanterns and marigolds strung along poles. Inside this boundary, a few dozen people, all foreigners, were dancing or sitting. They rang out in a call-and-response chant, accompanied by a small group of musicians with instruments Thalia didn’t recognize. Everyone, men and women, was bronzed and long-haired and draped in knits or flowing sheer scarves. It felt both modern—as a few people had their phones out and were taking videos—and like a dreamscape from the ’70s.

  A woman approached her with glassy eyes and a lopsided smile. She handed both Thalia and Cadi a percussive shaker made from a long, flat, dried bean about the size of her forearm. Cadi hit it against the outside of her thigh in rhythm with the music, and a sound like cracking firewood burst from its hard shell.

  The smell of incense was thick in the air. Cadi grabbed some cushions near the musicians and gestured for both of them to sit down. On the other side of the platform, a young woman with a long braid of bright, pale yellow hair sat on a cushion and sang in a voice so clear and loud, each syllable sounded like its own chime. She called out in Sanskrit as one long string of words without pause. The group returned her words in a cacophony of out-of-tune notes and shouts, their necks stretched up to the open air above them.

  Cadi quickly joined in, laughing and smiling. Thalia sang along in a small voice that she could not even hear in her own head amid the din. The drummers’ pace quickened, and everyone who was seated began to stand and stomp along with their call and response. Thalia joined them, at first pretending, going through the motions, and then feeling the electricity of their full abandonment quickening her own pulse. The music continued from one melody to another without pause. A stray dog with short, yellowish brown fur slipped into the crowd, and a slim man dressed only in shorts, his shoulders plastered with fallen marigold petals, picked the dog up and began to sway with him as the dog’s tail beat against his belly.

  Before this, the most ecstatic crowd Thalia had ever been a part of was
a runaway mosh pit at an illegal rave in a light-industry park in Brooklyn, which she’d been thrown on top of to crowd-surf. She had been pretty sure then that she was the only one there who wasn’t on something—the energy desperate, angry, ready to burst.

  Here, at the edge of this island, she was sure some of these people were on something, but not all.

  Thalia stepped to the margins of the throbbing group of singers and dancers. A few children were playing with shells at the steps where the platform went down to the sea. Their mothers sat braiding each other’s hair on the steps. No, the energy here was more celebratory. No one was about to break anything, but somehow there was a sense that things could boil over.

  A woman handed out sparklers to the kids and offered Thalia one. She joined them along the sand, where the stars seemed brighter, away from the platform. The kids giggled as they used their sparkling wands as swords or watched them from arm’s distance as they ran along the beach. The air smelled like salt and seaweed and sulfur from the sparklers’ controlled burn. As she watched her sparkler throwing unpredictable light, she wondered how everything could exist at once: how New Yorkers could be waking up, waiting for trains, arriving at offices—or leaving them, if they were on the overnight cleaning crew—and at the same time, here, knots of people could be swept up in incantatory chanting at the edge of the sea.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” A man’s voice spoke out from behind Thalia. She turned to its source. A man whose age she couldn’t place stood a few feet behind her and three whole heads taller. His curly, chin-length hair and dark blond beard gave him the look of a lion.

  “Yes,” she said simply, holding her sparkler up to his face to make him out more clearly. He was wearing a loose gray tunic and shorts. His eyes were light-colored but hard to make out in the dark.