See You in Paradise (8 page)

“Ya see the chick with the giant thatch?”

“Hell yeah!”

“What’d’ya get today?”

“Ham.”

“Everybody got ham.”

“I got yesterday’s Molson if anybody wants it. I hate Molson.”

“Hell yeah I want it.”

“What’ll you give me then?”

It took Brant a couple of days to find the courage to jump in, but once he did he was one of the guys. He caught a few names—Ron, Kevin, Pete. Pete was a cheerful man of thirty, thick around the middle, with dark eye bags that seemed genetic, rather than circumstantial. He held down the fort for an agribusiness conglomerate. One afternoon Brant was left alone with him after the others had gone home. He said, “So, does anybody go to the beach? Like, on breaks?” For he was allowed breaks, one hour out of every eight, and he had Sundays off. Sunday was tomorrow, his first here.

“There’s a path out back. But it isn’t much of a beach. Like ten feet, the rest is rocks.”

“Is there a bar or something? In town?”

“No town. But there is a bar.”

“Wanna go sometime?”

The question seemed to send shooting pains into Pete’s head. He winced. “Ah, it’s kinda far, and there are no girls.”

“Oh.”

So on Sunday Brant went to the beach, and Pete was right, it sucked. The rocks were sharp, and everything stank of fish. He went home, dejected. It had only been four days, and he could feel himself, his personality, shrinking to more or less nothing. He was Friendly Brant! He needed to greet passersby, to shake their hands! He wished there were some leaves to rake, some weatherproofing to do. But there wasn’t any weather here. A little rain, a little sun. A little rain, a little sun. By noon he had already jerked off twice and played forty games of Donkey Kong. He decided to go visiting. He washed his hands and walked down to Kevin’s place. Kevin had seemed okay to Brant, he told a joke once after Breakfast Truck, he had a nineties beard.

He knocked. “Yo, Kev!” he said.

From behind the door came sort of a muffled mumble that Brant thought was an invitation to enter, but when he opened the door Kevin was busy covering his and another man’s (Brant hadn’t gotten his name) naked sweating bodies with a sheet.

“Buzz off, asshole!”

“Sorry, dude!”

So much for dropping by. He had begun to prepare himself mentally for another encounter with his girl of the hour, Mandy Mounds, when he heard an unfamiliar noise coming from inside his cottage. What the hell was it? He opened the door and found that the noise, a kind of urgent, grating buzz, was the sound the phone made when it rang. The phone! It was ringing! Brant cracked his knuckles. Showtime!

“Hello?”

“I got a surprise for you!” The voice, though drunk, was recognizable as Cynthia’s. It was coming to him through a haze of crackling interference.

“Hon bun!”

“I am having something delivered to your door,” she said. Something about her tone seemed almost sinister, like the duplicitous sexpots in James Bond movies. He had to admit he liked it.

He said, “Where are you? You sound so far away.” Duh!

“I’m on my cell. In a—whoop!—car.”

“Isn’t it illegal to talk on the phone while driving?”

“It’s illegal to drive drunk, too, dummy. But I’m not driving.”

“So what are you sending me?”

“Sposeta be a surprise.”

“Is it delicious?”

“Yyyyes!”

“So you eat it?”

She snorted. “No, dipshit. You do.” And with that she hung up.

Well. That was unproductive. He figured if she was sending the present now, he’d get it in what, two weeks? He opened up his browser and a couple minutes later Mandy Mounds filled the room with her delighted squeaking. He’d just got his shorts off when his door flew open and Cynthia came roaring in, hiking her sundress up to her waist. “You got yourself all ready!” she said, climbing on, and for ten or so minutes it was difficult to distinguish the sounds she made from the ones coming out of the speakers. Then they were finished and lay on the bed, unable to stop perspiring. At the computer desk, Mandy Mounds said, “More! More! More! More!”

“’Scuse me,” said Cynthia, and she staggered naked across the room to switch off the computer. But first she paused, turning her head this way and that, checking out the competition. “I got better legs,” she said.

“Sure.”

“And her boobs look like saddlebags.”

He didn’t have much to say to that. She turned everything off. “I bribe Daddy’s people. They bring me down here whenever I want.” She hopped back onto the bed, sending him several inches into the air.

“But this is the first time you’ve been down here.”

“Right. Hey, you wanna go to town?”

“There is no town.”

“Who told you that?” she said.

They went to the other side of the volcano. The fat white guy drove them there. The little jeep shuddered and rumbled around lava flows and fallen trees, tossing them from side to side, against the doors of the jeep and each other. Cynthia laughed the entire trip, until they arrived at a little tent pavilion at the edge of what would have been a tourist paradise, if any tourists were there. Instead there were handsome black people in loose-fitting clothes, dancing to the music from a little amplified calypso band, and beyond them was a bar that was little more than a rusted metal cart covered with bottles and plastic cups, and beyond that was a dirt road leading to a lot of little houses. Cynthia paid the driver with a thick stack of bills, which he folded and stowed like a pro, and told him to wait. He said, “I’ll be easy to find,” and lurched into the fray.

They danced and drank all afternoon, and then ate parts of some kind of giant pig roasting on a spit, and they ate some kind of spicy thing wrapped up in leaves, and some sort of reeking but impossibly sweet fruit, and then they danced and drank some more, and the people, the villagers, didn’t seem to mind them being there. Cynthia paid for everything and then some, handing people money at the slightest pretext, the band for playing something more up-tempo, the bartender for giving her a clean cup, a random bystander for letting her get ahead in the roasted-pig line. Soon after dark she took Brant by the hand and led him into the woods, where she fell to her knees at the base of a palm tree and puked, and then when Brant bent over to help her up, he puked as well. Then they sort of fell over on their way back, then they seemed to be asleep for a while, then they got up and found the jeep, which the driver was asleep in. They woke him up and he drove, drunk, back to the cottage row. Cynthia and Brant stumbled into his cottage and collapsed on the bed and woke up at noon. They tried sex but were too queasy to finish.

All day Brant lay half-in and half-out of sleep. At some point he opened his eyes to find Cynthia staring at his face, as if looking for something she’d misplaced. When he woke again, she was gone. Brant noticed the voicemail light blinking on his phone. He picked up the receiver, supporting himself with a trembling hand, and punched in his code.

The first message said, “If you aren’t there in fifteen minutes, you’re fired.”

The second message said, “If you aren’t there in ten minutes, you’re fired.”

The third said, “Five minutes.”

The fourth: “You’re fired. Your ride leaves at seven PM. Miss it and you’re stranded.”

It was 7:35.

Back home, behind his desk at the alumni magazine, the sounds of neighing, whinnying co-workers interrupted his concentration, causing him to forget the phone numbers he was dialing, to fumble his pleas to donors. He had to stand up in his cubicle and address the crouching, tittering crew in a strained voice: “Look, you guys, it isn’t funny, okay? I was stranded for almost a week with no home, and I don’t think I would be laughing right now if it was you it happened to.” He thought about quitting—that would show them—but the thoughts never got much past the vengeful-fantasy stage. Besides, you never got anything out of losing your cool. People respected you for taking their shit. He just decided to take it, and he took it, and eventually, though when, he couldn’t have told you, the whole thing would just up and blow away.

The day after she left, he was awakened by his replacement, a man, or rather a guy, about his age, deep-voiced, clean-cut, sweating respectably little in his white oxford shirt. “I beg your pardon,” he said. “I was under the impression that this was to be my cottage.”

Brant had not given his next move much thought, beyond stopping by one of the other cottages and asking how often the plane came. Not very often, he learned. Now, he gathered his things and shoved them into his bag while the new guy checked out the computer. “May I erase these files?” he said, clicking around aimlessly.

“No,” said Brant. “If you do, the computer will melt.”

He took his suits—never removed from their garment bag—and slung them over his shoulder. Then he walked around the volcano to the pavilion, looking for the locals’ party. It took all day to get there, and when he arrived he found that the tent had been taken down, and everyone was in their houses. He sat on the paving stones where he had danced a few nights before, and panted, his tongue thick and dry as a towel. He almost cried, he was so sad. Eventually he got up and knocked on somebody’s door and blurted out the whole story, and the family that lived there gave him a drink of water and let him sleep on their floor.

They were nice, this family—a man, a woman, two little girls. They spoke English but rarely spoke. They sat around all day making things—the man, thin and dark and thickly bearded, carved driftwood into interesting little sculptures, and the woman, who might have been the hottest human being Brant had ever seen, embroidered miniature tapestries that served as the facing for the macramé shoulder bags that the girls made. Every once in a while they all paused for a meal—fish and fruit, delicious beyond imagining, which they shared with him—and in the evening they watched the sun set, visited their neighbors, drank banana homebrew, and generally had a good, solid time. Each morning a man burdened by giant army duffels arrived on a bicycle, and forms were filled out and exchanged, and the things the village produced were stuffed into the bags and taken away to be sold to tourists.

Through all this, Brant did basically nothing. He had a fever and the shits, slept in the daytime, and lay awake nights gasping for breath. He slept on the floor next to the girls’ bed and listened to their indecipherable whispers, to their quiet laughter as they talked themselves to sleep. Eventually, his host told him that the plane would come the following day, and the jeep would only go as far as the cottage row (he called it the Business Village), so he had better get back. Brant thanked the family profusely; he told them he would repay their kindness. “Like, in money I mean,” he added. “American dollars.”

The man smiled. “No need for that.”

“Seriously, no, I will.”

The man shook his head. “Don’t worry. We are rich.”

“Yes, of course,” Brant said, shaking his hand, “I can see that your lives are very rich here. Thank you.”

“No,” the man said. “I mean, we are rich. Your corporations pay us money. The cottages are ours.” He smiled. “I could, what is it you say, I could buy and sell you many times over.”

“Oh,” Brant said, dropping the man’s hand.

“Oh,” the man repeated in apparent mockery, though his voice, his face, retained their earnestness.

Brant walked all the way back, fortified by a canteen of water the family had provided. When he got to his old cottage, he knocked and entered. His replacement was sitting in the swivel chair, watching a Mandy Mounds video. His hand shot out and turned off the screen. “What do you think you’re doing!” he shouted.

“Relax.”

“This is my cottage!”

“I’m just gonna sit here by the fan until the jeep comes, all right?”

“No you’re not!” the replacement said, his arms flailing. He had cut off his chinos and the sleeves of his shirt.

I should have shat on the floor, Brant thought, while I had the chance.

In the end, he sat next to the road and dozed. The sound of the jeep woke him up. The fat guy unloaded the sack dinners and demanded money for the ride to the airport. Brant forked over what he had left. He was back home by morning, his house (thankfully, he had retained the lease) exactly the way he had left it. He took a shower, curled up in the hot and musty bed, and slept until the middle of the next day.

And that, he decided, was that. He got his job back, having after all secured the magic donation from Leyton Peck—who had not, contrary to Brant’s worst fears, reneged on the deal. He reclaimed his cubicle, endured the jokes, and tried to forget about Cynthia. He stayed off the internet and enjoyed the cool fall weather.

At some point guilt got the best of him and he tried to write a thank-you note to the family who had helped him through that terrible week. He managed a few lines about how grateful he was and how maybe someday they would meet again and stuffed it into an envelope, and then sat at the kitchen table trying to figure out how the hell to address it. He got as far as—