Kilometer 99 (36 page)

His kids are cute, and well behaved, but they don't make me want any of my own. Alex's wife seems nice enough, but she is quiet and hard to have any sort of conversation with. She mostly minds the boys while Alex and I talk.

Alex refills my wine, and asks the waiter for a second bottle. “You still surf?”

“I've got a couple of boards,” I say. “I go if the waves are good, and if I have the time.” I take a sip from my glass. “Where are you headed to next?”

“D.C. for the rest of the year, then on to Afghanistan.” He rolls his eyes. “Two of my least favorite places.”

As the plates are cleared, Alex's second bottle arrives. It's totally unnecessary, as he and I are the only ones drinking, and we barely finished the first. Nobody wants dessert. Their mother takes the boys upstairs to bed. Alex asks me to stick around and help him with the wine.

“Think you'll ever go back there, to El Salvador?” he asks.

“I doubt it. By the end, it was so much effort to close that chapter of my life, I've never wanted to open it back up.”

He nods and fills both our wineglasses up to the brim. “I'll tell you one thing: I sure wish you'd stayed on in La Libertad, worked that site with me. What a shitstorm that town was.” He looks up at me with a cocked eyebrow. “Who knows how things might've worked out?”

I shrug. “Who knows?”

“I'm really sorry about what happened to Ben down there.”

I look at the sea and the night beyond him. The sun has set, but lights from the waterfront restaurants still light up the incoming waves. “It was a bad thing, a tragedy.”

“You think of him often?”

“Sometimes.” I still can't bring my eyes back to Alex's.

“Being married now…” He struggles for words. “I guess it's clear how easy it is to end up with somebody for the rest of your life, you know. It's almost like you have to kick and scream to keep that from happening, after a certain age.”

“I guess.”

“Did you love him? Really love him?”

I reel my gaze in, and nod. “We were in love; I know that. We were in love like only twenty-three-year-olds can be. Naïvely, recklessly. Would we have stayed together had he lived? I can't say. Would it have worked—the two of us—under any other circumstances, at any other place and time? I'm not so sure about that, either.” I turn the glass around on the table. “In a way, it doesn't seem fair to hang all those hypotheticals on it, you know?”

“Still smoke?”

“No.”

“Me, neither. If I bought some, would you have one with me, for old times' sake?”

“I'd rather not.”

He gulps down more wine. “Should we go somewhere else? I'd love to check out your place.”

“Alex.” I move the wineglass out of the way and lower my head closer to the table. “This was a nice evening. It's good to see you. Why don't you go upstairs to your family now.”

I stand up, and at that very moment a band breaks into song in the bar adjacent to this restaurant—guitar and ukulele, a falsetto singer. They play an old Hawaiian standard. And though I don't understand much of my mother's family's language, I'm sure it's a song of farewell. I want to ask Alex if he's still depressed, if witnessing all those disasters helps anymore, if he pretends to be happy in front of his kids, if he ever became a better person. But I don't know where to start, and the music is so loud, so I simply say good-bye.

He stares at me and lets out a dark smile. Some of that old intensity is still in his face, in spite of the baldness and the wine-purpled teeth. That swollen vein still squiggles down the side of his forehead. “It's nice to see you, too. Good-bye.”

It's a short trip home through an oddly beautiful night. Gusts of cool conditioned air blow out from all the storefronts along Kalakaua Avenue. I'm asked for money by cardboard signs, by steel drummers, by human statues painted silver. I pass Japanese tourists with shopping bags, mainlanders with sunburns, a local couple arguing too loudly, a pack of wet teenagers carrying surfboards. Waikiki is, in a sense, the opposite of La Libertad—a beach that everyone has heard of, perhaps the most famous in the world, the origin of surfing, rather than its frontier. But like La Lib, Waikiki's reputation is just as incapable of containing its reality.

I cross the Ala Wai, and the street turns darker and quieter. My building is only a short walk away.

Inside the elevator, two twentysomething local girls are on their way up to a party on another floor. They carry a six-pack of beer and a bakery box. The taller one gives the younger one relationship advice. Her truisms run together into a blur: All guys think
x;
all girls have to learn
y.
“I've seen it a million times,” she says.

Once the elevator stops at their floor, the shorter one and I lock eyes for a second. She breaks the gaze and hurries down the hall, as if I were staring at her in judgment. The truth is, my look held more envy in it than anything else. I hope she doesn't learn too much too fast. I hope there's a little more time for her to be reckless and innocent, in love and whatever else. The elevator stops on my floor. I get out and enter my apartment.

Feeling dizzy from the wine, I pour myself a tall glass of water and walk over to the window. In the moonlight, small waves form on the reefs just past the shore. The surf fills in and recedes along the tide line: that place where one enormous, constantly moving thing meets another enormous, constantly moving thing—and the two of them take from each other and give to each other and change each other all the time.

I wonder if the taller girl from the elevator could distill my relationship with Ben down to a single bite-size lesson. And if so, what would it be?

I'd like to say that—when it comes to remembering Ben—I think of all the good times: the sunset surfs, the long, lazy meals, making love in a sandy rented bed. Unfortunately, my mind's eye most often zeros in on his burial at sea. I can't help but see it every time I look out at the Pacific Ocean: the chemical flames that rose up around him like a ghost, the tide that ripped him finally away from dry land and all its misery.

Perhaps it was that image that taught me the lesson I'd needed so badly to learn, the point that I'd missed all along: In a fallen world, you're not always free to choose. Our way of life, it turns out, wasn't entirely up to us. All my doubts, all my second-guesses, they were like little affronts to fate—fistfuls of sand hurled toward an indifferent ocean. The truth is that—in a fallen world—all one can do is stand up often, and with grace.

Nowadays, I find I'm grateful to live in a city like this, with good waves and my family nearby. It's funny: All the plans that were kicked around back then, and pretty much all I ever saw of the world was La Libertad—that place called freedom, which, like freedom, could be both beautiful and terrible all at once.

 

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Kilometer 99 does not exist. It's an imaginary surf spot drawn from aspects of several different breaks in El Salvador, Peru, and Mexico. Most of the larger locations in this novel—La Libertad, San Salvador, Santa Ana, Los Planes de Renderos, Sunzal, etc.—are depicted realistically. Though there are places called Cara Sucia in El Salvador, the one in this novel is fictional (which is also the case with El Vado and El Cedro).

Most of the details regarding the earthquakes that hit El Salvador on January 13
th
and February 13
th
of 2001 have been rendered more or less as I recall them or as they were recounted to me by friends and associates. The greatest fictional embellishment in this story is the severe damage to La Libertad caused by the February quake. (La Libertad survived both earthquakes with relatively minor damage.)

It's also worth mentioning that El Salvador's beaches now draw a large number of traveling surfers. It was much less of a destination in 2001. Many of the beaches described as empty and desolate in this novel are now booming with hotels, restaurants, and tourist shops.

Technically, El Salvador had switched their official currency to dollars just before the time in which this novel is set. However, I preferred to use colones, the former currency, for issues of both clarity and aesthetics. It's also come to my attention that there probably was no ferry service around the Darien Gap during the time Ben and Malia considered driving to South America. However, I chose to keep that detail in as I recall many travelers suffering from the same misunderstanding.

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I could never have written this novel without all the kindness and generosity I received along the way. Thanks to Jennifer de la Fuente for her help, candor, and resourcefulness. Thanks to Hilary Rubin Teeman for her incredible feedback and guidance; I can't imagine the book without her input.

Mahalo
to my invaluable early readers: Malia Collins, Stuart Holmes Coleman, Kristiana Kahakauwila, Paul Diamond, and David Fogelson. Thanks especially to J. Reuben Appelman, the brilliant writer and critic, whose honesty, insight, and enthusiasm have been indispensible to my work.

The bulk of this novel was written in a four-hundred-square-foot apartment that's always hot, often loud, and occasionally overrun with ants. There's nobody on earth I could share it with other than Dabney Gough. Thanks for her patience, her support, and her constant inspiration.

Most importantly, I owe a great big
gracias
to all of the wonderful friends with whom I shared my time in El Salvador. My superiors in the country office were the best bosses I've ever had. My fellow volunteers were the greatest colleagues I'll ever know. I'm particularly indebted to the many wonderful Salvadorans who accepted and looked after me—particularly those from the Ayala family of Cantón Palo Grande. The beauty, warmth, and resilience of that country and its people have never stopped affecting me.

 

ALSO BY TYLER McMAHON

How the Mistakes Were Made

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tyler McMahon is the author of
How the Mistakes Were Made
. He teaches fiction writing at Hawaii Pacific University and is the editor of
Hawaii Pacific Review
. He lives in Honolulu with his wife, food writer Dabney Gough.

 

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

 

 

KILOMETER 99.
Copyright © 2014 by Tyler McMahon. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

 

www.stmartins.com

 

Cover design by Lisa Marie Pompilio

 

Cover images: background and woman © Kangah/Getty Images; man © Vast Photography/Getty Images

 

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The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

 

ISBN 978-1-250-04708-3 (trade paperback)

ISBN 978-1-4668-4745-3 (e-book)

 

eISBN 9781466847453

 

First Edition: June 2014