Vacation (22 page)

Across the boardwalk, the sea was a dull tin plate. Shards of glass and rocks washed up onshore. A stubborn decay had lodged in the sand.

I came to a white wall, an entry gate, a building of postwar cement. It was pushed back from the boardwalk. A kid out front was trying to sell me his bottle of water. What is that? I said, nodding at the building.

The aquarium.

Oh. I had forgotten it was there. I went over to the kiosk.

Tickets half-price, said the lady. Half-price or less. Make me an offer. Seahorses. Spiderfish. Get your last glimpse.

Why last?

Condemned. They’re tearing down the whole town next month. Taking away the Ferris wheel in crates.

I checked my pockets. I’ve got two dollars, I said.

Isn’t that the dog from the freak show? she said.

I shrugged.

She stamped my ticket. The dog stays outside, she said.

Consider. At this point Myers could wind up in many possible positions (as one winds a watch or a top and then lets go). Many futures were still possible, if he managed to live beyond the falling-curtain end of his vacation, if he turned up alive, didn’t throw himself off a coast guard ship sixty knots out into the sea in the middle of a hurricane.

One possible future was that his wife could come to Corn Island and they’d have the loveliest vacation yet and then go back to New York on the same plane. This option hung on a wall hook in Myers’s mind, though he knew it was not hanging anyplace else (her mind, for example). If he continued to live, he’d move through his days, wondering if they’d reunite, creating scenarios in his mind, in the same way some people wonder if certain buildings will collapse or keep standing, or if the person sleeping beside them is the person they married and not some cheap replacement brought in and forced to pretend. Each morning Myers would rise and ask the following: Had he glimpsed her in the past [week, month, year] (check one)? Or if not her, someone who knew her? Looked like her? Had he spoken to anyone in the past [week, month, year] who had ever spoken to her? Did she have any direct impact today on anything having to do with him or affecting him, say, political events or new discoveries? What did she have to do with the weather today? Were there any other miscellaneous mysteries that joined them—had they both opened their takeout Chinese cookies at the same moment last night perhaps and found the same lucky number printed on the paper inside?

So the possibility would exist in his mind and questions such as these would fill his nights.

The roads were oceanic. The taxi rode up the crests and slid down the other side. They went to place after place. They drove through pockets of trees, came out onto water and falling sun. Here and there, a house on stilts. They didn’t see any downtown but they didn’t stop trying.

Here is the downtown, said the cabman.

This isn’t downtown, said Myers and he knew he had to be right. A worn façade of battered wood. No one in sight. coca-cola read a sign, bleached and shot.

Keep going, said Myers. We’re almost there. The next one is it.

If you say so, said the cabman.

Second option. He could meet someone else, marry again. Someone he could fight with more fully and be left by more fully. This time she might leave in a direct fashion—no puttering around with hesitations, vacations, the mewling of emails and phone calls. She’d be gone by dawn, reinstalled elsewhere, a note left behind on his desk. So instead of stretching out of this shape of despair, Myers could curl further in.

CLAIRE

I wandered in. I walked through a twist of rooms filled with water and bright staring creatures trapped in cubes of light. The place was empty of people. The fork fish were sunk in the coral. A turtle was paddling against the glass, churning, making a slow getaway. The octopus had skin like folded cloth.

I stepped around a corner and came upon a pair of animals ricochet-ing off the walls of their seabox. A piece of food came down as if dropped from the sky and one of them swooped in and snapped it. Dolphins.

Of course. I couldn’t just let it go. Not me. I had to go straight to the only ones in New York, as far as I knew. Tendencies like this have a name. I’m a plant turning toward light. A leaf of me will always reach for my father. It was okay. I stepped right up to the glass. The dolphins slid by my face. In fact, they were kind of appealing. Hi guys, I said. What are you doing in there?

Third option. His wife could wind up with another man.

Which man? Gray, or someone else?

Whoever. There are plenty of men.

Finally he got out. Had to. They’d been twice across the island and still had found nothing Myers wanted and the cabman had to go home. We came close, said Myers. They had. A small string of stores selling plastic battleships, encyclopedias, limes.

Not close enough for you to get out, said the cabman, which was true.

(What had Myers wanted?)

Fourth option. He could wind up alone. Its own great tragedy, that.

He paid and got out. He had forty-eight dollars and a collection of córdobas and coins that he wasn’t sure what to do with exactly, how to offer them, how many of them to hold out or withhold.

He was at the far end of the island, a few huts set up by the water. Loud sea, landslide of sand. He leaned in the window. Don’t leave me here, he said.

Why not? said the cabman. He gestured. It’s beautiful.

I don’t know that word, said Myers.

The taxi thumped off.

The part about the money: He managed to rent a cabin for eleven dollars a night, which meant he had four nights and four dollars leftover before ruin set in for good—four nights if he didn’t want to eat anything or go anywhere or spend more than a dollar a day, which he might not have to do because the island had no Internet and no phone and nothing else to do. And the owner made him a little soup because there were no restaurants within walking distance and anyway there were no lights on the road and you couldn’t walk in that unless you wanted to fall into a hole, and no taxis came out this far without prior arrangement, which had to be done by some secret means—word of mouth, sky signals, fax—a day in advance since there was no phone and anyway no restaurant would be open this time of night or open at all without prior arrangement and the owner explained all this and then made him some soup or gave him the soup that she had and he started to eat it but then he did not because unfamiliar, once-living things floated in it and came up with the spoon. So he just sat by the water.

What are you doing here? the owner wanted to know. She came out to ask him, wiping her hands on her skirt.

The sky looked like a kite blowing away.

Myers would rather not say.

He could wind up in other ways too. Most he imagined involved him ruined, him waiting, trying to get somewhere and never arriving, trying to convince someone, failing. But there were other possibilities too. Some leaky but seaworthy. There were some good ones, more hopeful, blinking on in the distance. They floated around like tin ships.

It was that night that for the final time Myers saw himself finding Gray. Although his conscious mind had given up, his dream mind held out a slim hope. Gray came to him in his sleep. He showed up in the cabin doorway, leaned in, and flicked on the light—which would not have been possible, of course, since the lights worked on a generator and switched off at ten.

I knew it had to be you, Gray said. What other gringo would show up on this island and dance the Bus Stop all night?

He wore an old-style grin.

The owner was doing her part, she really was, and he knew it because after the soup, she came out again. She held up a cassette player and a tape. Dancing? she said. Anyone for dancing?

Myers waved her off.

Oh, he doesn’t know how to dance,
pobrecito
. What with all those bandages.

Doesn’t know how to dance, excuse me? Hadn’t he danced at his own wedding for four hours straight? He had, thank you very much. The wedding had been a real one, if anyone wondered. They’d had ice sculptures and centerpieces, a photographer, a videographer, an extra hour of open bar. They’d had seventy witnesses, most still alive today. People who had seen him dance and applauded.

Myers stood, bowed.

So she put in that tape and they danced in the sand. She had only one tape and it had only one song but it happened to be the Bus Stop, which Myers knew and even with his bad arm could do. They rewound and rewound and she ran and got her kids and her husband and they ran and got their cousins and uncles and friends, and other people came wandering over, came into the circle of light, raised their hands. And they all danced the Bus Stop.

In the dream, Gray said the bit about the Bus Stop, then he grinned, then he did a little stepping around himself, right around the room, Myers, laughing, up on an elbow, in bed. And there were no trinkets, no sights, no birding, no language class. Nobody got onto water skis. But guess what.

The true fun began.

Walk up and down. Dip.

Step to the side, step back. Clap.

Chapter Nineteen

The true fun did not begin, however. In the morning Myers woke, examined his smarting arm, his bruised ribs, left his room.

The true fun did not begin because Gray was in Panama nearly dead by that time and soon completely dead, and the closest Myers would come to him was years later, long after Myers was completely dead himself. It wasn’t Gray he came close to in any case but Gray’s small daughter. Years later she set out on her search.

The true fun did not begin that morning or ever. Not for Myers. He walked off down the beach.

So.

The only boat that seemed to be leaving the island and not going back to the mainland was a coast guard boat that no one could see because it wasn’t there. It was on its way, coming through the waters, heading toward the island. Myers heard about it and thought he should look for it, or actually look for its future spot of departure, and for its leaders, those in charge when it would strike for open sea, because he wasn’t going to turn around and go back the way he’d come. And he wasn’t going to just stand there and dry up like a crab—he’d come this far already. He’d go all the way.

He heard about the boat because someone was walking around making promises about it, and while he didn’t see anybody making the promises, he did hear the promises themselves. The owner of his residence told him and she said the promises were deep and long, like the wake a ship cuts as it steers away from shore.

How do I find this man?

The owner didn’t say, and it was another piece of information Myers wasn’t going to get, but then she said, Look, here he comes now, and there the man was, walking in the sand.

It turned out Myers had seen him already, early in the morning, but he had thought he was dreaming, thought he was still sleeping and thinking of Gray approaching for his last step-around. The man had been coming over the sand in white clothing. He had come from far away and he was walking in a ray of light shooting through an edge of the clouds. A string of dogs followed behind.

The man took a seat at a table made of straw. Myers went over to him. May I talk to you?

Okay, you got me, he said. He raised his hands as if in surrender. You want an autograph? A picture?

Myers thought about it.

What are you famous for?

I’m an untrainer.

Fourteen years later, Gray’s small daughter, still small but less small, bought a plane ticket and went to Nicaragua to look for her father, though she had barely known him and had not seen him since she was four. She wouldn’t have recognized him if she came on him unless he looked exactly as he did in the two photos she had of him, that is, if he wore a striped, collared shirt and was turned to the right, or if he had on roller skates and was holding her, miniature-sized and also on skates, by the hand.

I steal dolphins, said the man.

Good idea, said Myers.

I put them back in the sea.

That way they won’t run away, Myers said. Hey, I’m here about a boat.

What do you want a boat for? the untrainer said. Land’s fine. Beach, sand.

I’d like a little more than sand.

You want more, stick around, my friend.