How We Are Hungry (4 page)

With one eye she could see Hand, still upright, scanning. To the right of the beach, to the far right, a mountain, the color of heather, lay like a broken body.

“Are you going to take one of these or what?” Hand asked before dunking his head into the sea, coming up again so good, a mannequin’s perfect head soaked in cooking oil.

“Right. Sorry,” she said.

“Do you need a push?”

“Ha. Yes. Ha.”

She had to try. She sat up again. They waited, both straddling, watching the blue horizon for a bump.

A bump was on its way.

“Take this one,” he said.

“I know,” she said.

She turned the board and laid her chest on it and began paddling. Three strokes and she was at the same speed. She let up and allowed the wave to overtake her. The wave came with the crackle of crumpling paper. She and her board rose above the land, one foot, three feet, five. The water brought her into its curved glass and she paddled harder as it drew her up and sharpened itself under her. Then two more strong strokes, both arms at once, and she descended. She knew the descending was key. That if she was not fast enough or her timing was off, the wave would speed below her and she would watch it leave, very much like watching the shrinking back of a missed bus. But if she were fast, or pushed at the right time, she would go down into it, and her board would speed up quickly, become a car, and she would jump to her feet and the board would become solid like a girder of steel, cream-colored, smooth, and doublewide.

This wave she took. The board was strong, she jumped up, was standing and traveling toward shore—she had gotten on the bus. Beneath her was all bedlam, foam and noise, the rush of white pavement. She had one moment of rapture—up! standing! look at the sun, the mountains like a body reclining or broken—and then she knew she had work to do. The wave was crashing from her right and she knew she only had a second if she didn’t try to turn left, to ride the break. If she made the turn she could go for a minute, a full minute maybe, just stand and stand and stand. She had seen people ride these longboards for minutes, just standing, walking up and back, strolling—the best surfers could join their hands behind their backs and stroll up and back, up and back, considering the issues of the day, so sturdy was a longboard on a good wave, they could set up a nice chair and a rug and sit in front of the fire—

She wanted to turn left, to follow the still-curved glass away from the mulching glass, and so she leaned back a little, she weighted her ankles into the board’s left side, pushing its edge slightly—

It was done. The board was behind her, gone. She dove into the foam and was under. Her ears exploded with the sound of underwater. It was dark and all was violence. She shot up and surfaced in time to see the board, wanting to be free but attached to her ankle, rearing, bucking straight into the sky before it fell again and rested into the now-calm sea of blue-green gel.

But she’d gotten up. A good thing, a bad thing—the rest of the day would be an anticlimax. She’d have two or three more good chances at most, no matter how long they spent out here. She paddled through the foam and into the calm again, the sun drying her back almost instantly. Hand was straddling, his feet kicking the water, waiting for her.

This story is equally or more about surfing. People are no more interesting than waves and mountains.

In the afternoon, on the hard beach, with the wind snaking at them, hissing and sending sand into their sandwiches, Pilar and Hand squinted into the sun to see the water. They’d been in the ocean all day and now were watching it like actors would a play going on without them. The ocean didn’t need them.

Hand started clapping.

“I’m gonna clap every two minutes for the rest of the day,” he said.

There was a man out in the surf, wearing a cowboy hat.

“What do you do for that company again?” Pilar asked.

“I consult. I brainstorm. They like my brain.”

“But why here again?”

“My Spanish. And I volunteered. Down here money goes a long way. We get paid American wages but the costs here are half of what they’d be anywhere else.”

“Okay, but why Intel here at all, and not Korea or something?”

“We
are
in Korea. A big setup there.”

“Did you just say ‘we’?”

“No.”

“You did!”

The cowboy surfer was riding a perfect wave, hooting.

Hand had forgotten to clap. Pilar debated whether she should note this, knowing that she might just be bringing on more clapping.

“You forgot to clap,” she said.

“Listen. I have no problem with them as a company. They make chips. Chips are good. They’re in Granada because the workforce is educated, in the city at least, and they’re good workers. The infrastructure’s good, airport’s good, roads work, communications are fair, banks are sound, inflation’s fine, conveniences are decent, at least in Granada. And because here Intel avoids the unions on the floor and in trucking, all that. A lot of companies are leaving Puerto Rico, for one because the union activity is getting big down there. Same workforce, basically, as here, but no one sets up in this part of the world to get mixed up with unions.”

Pilar couldn’t decide if she found this interesting.

Hand, remembering himself, clapped for a full minute.

The horses were outside again, but were loitering down the road, in front of the bucket-blue house with the German woman, no relation to Hans from the hotel, watering her rock garden. One black horse was scratching at the road, nodding, as if counting.

“Looking for water,” Hand said.

Pilar went back to their room and filled a bowl with water. She came back; Hand’s face was skeptical. She walked toward the horse. It backed away and trotted up the hill. She held the water at stomach level, dejected.

Hand walked over to comfort her. But when his arms were supposed to wrap around her shoulders, he knocked the bowl from below, overturning it deliberately, soaking her shirt.

“Oops,” he said.

She slapped him hard across the mouth and the crisp flat sound of it made her laugh in one great burst.

There were animals everywhere. Underfoot there was always something moving—lizards, crickets, mice. There were iguanas. They could see them scurrying through woodpiles and through the forest. In the thin trees below their hotel they saw an iguana being chased by a yellow truck plowing away the underbrush.

The woman at the mercado had dirty blond hair, like margarine full of crumbs. Pilar and Hand bought ice cream from a freezer in the market. They tore the thin shiny plastic and ate the chocolate coating first, then the white cold ice cream. The sun made it soft.

At night they jogged through the alley behind the neighboring hotel, El Jardín del Edén, and down the dark dirt road to where the loosely strung Christmas lights smiled between columns, and techno taunted from speakers hidden in the armpits of trees. Most of the restaurants were still open, their attached bars ill attended. At the end of the road, past the pay phones and the surfers waiting patiently in line next to the local women, toddlers at their feet, they stopped into the Earth Bar, its half-heart-half-globe logo hung low over the open doorway.

Inside, people holding drinks. Shirtless thin tan surfers and white men, young, with black dreads, were barefoot or wore sandals, always with woven bracelets, beaded necklaces. The women were more varied. Plenty of the surf-girl sort but also backpackers of the Scandinavian breed—white-blond hair and bikini tops, plastic digital watches, reckless sunburns.

Pilar and Hand stood hip to hip by the bumper-pool table and drank very cold Imperials. The first two went quick— they realized how hot it was and how thirsty they were. They took their third bottles onto the deck, facing the black ocean. The darkness was close and concrete. They talked about the babies their friends were having, about Pete and April and their triplets. The last time Hand had seen April and Pete, they’d left the kids with the fifteen-year-old babysitter and stayed out until 3 a.m., refusing to let go of the night. They’d come home to find the babysitter asleep in their closet, their shoes piled up on the side. One of the babies had a bruise on his back the size of a wallet.

“In the closet?” Pilar said, and Hand didn’t say anything, or maybe he hadn’t heard. The story was missing many details and it made Pilar angry. But the music was suddenly loud and they didn’t say anything for a full minute. A dog ran in circles on the beach, chased by a smaller dog.

Hand pulled Pilar into his body and held her.

“It’s good that you came,” he said. She murmured her agreement. He kissed the top of her head.

In front of their hotel room there was an anteater.

“It’s not an anteater,” Hand said, crouching down. “It’s a sloth.”

“Sloths don’t have noses like that,” Pilar said, “long noses like that.”

It wasn’t moving, but from its side they could see it breathing, the rise and fall of its coarse fur.

“They sometimes do,” Hand said. “Down here they do. Look at his toes—they’re three-toed, like—”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Hand opened his mouth then closed it.

“Maybe it is an anteater,” he said.

It was bleeding. From its long snout there was a viscous substance that connected to the tile hallway, a stream of blood and mucus.

Pilar brought a saucer of milk. The animal made no movement toward it.

“It’s dying, isn’t it?” she asked.

“I don’t know. It doesn’t look hurt anywhere. Just the blood coming out the snout.”

They decided to leave the animal outside. There was no animal hospital in Alta, and there was nothing they could do for it inside.

“But how the hell did it get here?” Hand asked. “It can barely move. How’d it climb all these stairs? It must have started weeks ago. And why’d it stop at our door? This is too strange. There has to be a reason. We have to bring him inside.”

So they brought him inside. Hand did it.

“Like lifting a very fat cat,” he said.

Now the anteater was lying under a chair near the door. Pilar put the saucer of milk near it again, and added another saucer of water. The animal looked dead.

“If it dies tonight, it’ll smell,” Pilar said.

“It won’t die,” Hand said.

Hand sat on her bed and Pilar stood before him. For a moment, Hand continued to watch the anteater. Then he looked up, grabbed her shorts from the front and pulled her toward him. She sat on his lap and leaned into him, but when she wanted to put her mouth all over his, he spoke.

“It’s resting. It came here to rest.”

The only graffiti Pilar had ever found thought-provoking was the line she’d seen again and again in bathrooms:
Sex invented
God
. Each time she saw those words, for hours afterward, it was the way she saw the world, as stupid as she felt about it. She loved her life, but the only transcendent experiences she’d had began with provocation of her skin.

The animal unmoving, Pilar and Hand were side to side, and kissing slowly. Pilar wanted to kiss him harder and push him onto his back and stand on his chest and dance, but she didn’t, because now they couldn’t talk and they were strangers. She continued to kiss him quietly as they lay on their sides, facing each other. They waited for judgment, they wondered if this was working, they hoped they would get excited.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hey,” he said. “We should leave the door open. In case he wants to leave.”

Hand got up, opened the door a crack, and jumped back to the bed. Pilar swung her leg around him. She was above him, straddling, and from her vantage point Hand looked so far away, so old and dead. She leaned down and held his face in her hands. “This face,” she said. It was like holding a rock painted gold.

They took their clothes off and she lay on top of him, placed her ear to his sternum, and the water inside him went shuckashucka and kissed her again and again.

Where had she been snorkeling before? Florida, near Pensacola—another place where everything was for sale. It had rained all day and she and her father had gone in anyway, with rented equipment and just a few hundred yards out.

They hadn’t seen anything then, everything so murky there, close to the breaks. But this, here, is what one wanted from snorkeling. The coral was dull colored, and there were no schools of fish. Here the fish traveled alone, loud blue ones, and very orange ones, small, and there was one with black and white stripes from stem to stern, and red on the hull. There was an especially bright yellow one that wanted to join Pilar inside her mask. It followed her, almost perched on her nose.

They had paddled a shoddy two-person inflatable kayak out to an island in the bay, hoping to watch the sunset here, closer to it. They’d pulled the kayak onto the island, which was not, as expected, covered with sand, but was made of shells. All of its white—the island was white when seen from the beach— was shells. Millions, edges and distinctions worn irrelevant. Pilar and Hand broke a dozen of them with each step. The outermost Pacific-facing side of the island was settled by what seemed to be pelicans but weren’t; they were more elegant than pelicans, and numbered about fifty. The surface was lavalike, but was more cartilaginous than that. It was the consistency and color of burned flesh.

From the kayak they retrieved the snorkeling things, putting their mouths on plastic mouthed by hundreds before. With the cold fins snug they fell in.

All the fish on the floor were being pushed and pulled by the tide. And though this was their home, it didn’t look like they were the least bit accustomed to the underwater wind. They seemed baffled and cautious, like Californians driving cars through rain. Pilar’s hands, propelling her forward, appeared in front of her mask, glowing in the sun, angelic. She was an angel, she thought. But what were these fish doing here, where they were pushed and pulled by this bastard tide? This was nowhere to live. But these bright fish, existing only to be looked at, or pushed around, or eaten. She thought of people she had known. She forced metaphors. The sun shot through the surface like God imagined it, in straight and fabulous rays. The water was full of fish she’d seen in pictures and pet stores.