Ghost Lights

7

The boat was anchored on the east side, where no one would see it coming from the mainland. There was no dock there, only a narrow sandy path through the tangles of mangrove.

After a breakfast of instant oatmeal and water Hal followed T. along the path, ducking between branches. T. carried a canvas sack of his belongings slung over one shoulder. They had swum in the shallows on the other side of the island but the saltwater bath had not made T. seem any cleaner. He was still wearing the filthy painter pants, on which the pockets bulged.

“I have a razor, you can shave at the hotel,” said Hal to his back. “Before you get in touch with anyone. Because the cops, I mean if they see you like this, you know, the credibility issue.”

“You have to wade out,” said T. over his shoulder. “I recommend just leaving your shoes on. There are branches just beneath the surface, things that can cut.”

They emerged from the bushes with their feet already in the silty water; the roots of the scrub reached below the surface, long, thin vertical brown lines like wooden drips. Hal felt their knobbiness through the soles of his shoes. The cool water was around his knees now and his feet slipped in the mud beneath. He could see the boat ahead, a long, simple white shape with peeling paint.

“Here we go,” said T., and dropped his sack in. He climbed over the side and held a hand out to Hal. “Help?”

“I’m fine,” said Hal, and stepped in awkwardly, the boat rocking.

•

As the motorboat throttled down, nearing the beach, Hal realized they had an audience: Gretel. Gretel and the cornboys.

She was watching them from the swimming dock a few hundred yards away, standing on the sand in her blue bikini and shading her eyes as she looked out over the ocean toward them.

The cornboys, in overlarge sunglasses and a hot-pink double kayak, were paddling toward Hal and T.

Gretel raised her arm and waved.

“One of the Germans,” he told T., who was easing them into a slip. He waved back at her, trying to seem casual, which luckily was not difficult in the wave format.

Did she regret it? How deeply? Was she kicking herself? Seeing him now she would probably feel repulsed. Then again, maybe she would not notice him: he had T. in his company, the prodigal son. T. would demand her attention by not being dead.

“The Germans?”

“With the whole Coast Guard search thing? Looking for you? Her name is Gretel. The pink kayak? Those are her kids.”

The cornboys were bearing down. They paddled fiercely, their small mouths clamped into grimaces that indicated they were trying desperately to win. Yet there was no competition.

“Hey, guys,” called T., throwing his rope over the piling. “How’s it going?”

“Their English is rudimentary,” said Hal.

“My father went to get the airplanes,” called one of the cornboys proudly, slowing the kayak with his paddle.

“Yes,” nodded the other. Hal was still unclear as to whether in fact they were twins.

“Sounds pretty good to me,” said T., bent to his knot-tying. “The English.”

“I never heard them say that much before,” admitted Hal.

“Airplanes!” repeated the second cornboy.

“Gotcha,” said Hal. “He went to get the airplanes. Good to know.” No idea what the kid was talking about, but who cared. Wanted a shower, actually; wished he could have had one before he ran into Gretel. Not that it mattered: he expected nothing, or less than nothing. But just for the dignity.

T. was climbing up onto the dock; Hal followed him. The cornboys were staring at them in that way children had — staring with no goal in mind, just like it was normal.

“This is the man your father was helping me look for,” said Hal.

“The dead one?” asked the first cornboy. He tended to speak first; probably the Alpha. Possibly he was older, but they both looked the same.

“Exactly,” said Hal, and hoisted himself onto the dock after T. He wanted clean, dry clothes, and the sun was making him squint.

Gretel stood at the end of the dock now, one hand on a hip, smiling quizzically; she was curious about T. already.

“Hi there,” she said as they approached.

“This is the guy,” said Hal. “This is him. Thomas Stern.”

“No way!” said Gretel, and leapt into T.’s arms, hugging him. “Oh my God! You’re alive!”

“I feel bad to have caused all this trouble,” said T., and pulled away gently.

“Doch, the important thing is that you are safe,” said Gretel, beaming joy as though he was a long-lost friend. Hal stood by with his arms dangling, awkward.

“Well, thank you,” said T. “I am. Thank you.”

“I’m going to get him cleaned up,” said Hal apologetically. “We’ll see you a little later?”

“Yes, please,” said Gretel. “I want to hear the whole story!”

“Of course,” said Hal.

“OK,” said T., and they left her smiling at their backs.

“She actually means it, I think,” said Hal.

“I can tell,” said T.

•

Hal lay down on the hotel bed while T. took a shower. The sound of its steady falling was a hello from the civilized world. Welcome home. He listened with his head on the soft pillow, his body on the long, solid bed. What a relief. It was so good to have them. The pillow and the bed. The lights, the air-conditioning, and the running water. He was no nature boy. T. could keep his tree-house, no matter how good the view. There was a reason their hominid ancestors first stood upright and started beating smaller creatures to death with cudgels. It was better than what came before, that was why.

The whole atavistic thing was overrated at best.

There had been a shaving kit in T.’s suitcase, which the manager had handed over to Hal several days ago now — a shaving kit and clean clothes, and T. had taken them both into the bathroom with him. But still Hal worried he had failed to impress upon his new friend the importance of a mainstream appearance, when dealing with authorities in a third-world country, and when there was the corpse of a local involved.

Sure: in the past the guy had been Mr. Mainstream. In the past the guy wore Armanis and refused to get behind the wheel of anything but a Mercedes. Once Susan had been forced to rent him a Lexus, when his Mercedes was at the shop for service. To hear her tell it the guy had suffered a martyr’s holy torments.

But he was not that guy anymore. No indeed. Now he was a guy who ate chili from a can, had long toenails and a wiry beard that almost grazed his nipples, and apparently sported a well-worn, formerly white baseball cap — now sitting humped on the nightstand next to Hal’s bed — whose inside rim was ringed with a crust of brown stain best regarded as a potential disease vector.

He had to call Susan, of course. He was still tired, felt almost waterlogged with a fatigue that wouldn’t lift off, but he had to call her. Duty.

He raised the receiver, then remembered he needed the phone card from his wallet and rolled slowly off the bed to reach for it. As he typed the digits, it occurred to him that she might be in flagrante with Robert the Paralegal — she might not deserve this prompt, nay servile attention. Then the telephone rang on her end, rang and rang until he hung up before the answering machine clicked in. He had to tell her this himself, wanted the clamor of it in person — his reward in the form of her stunned amazement, her astonished gratitude at the good news.

He tried Casey’s number next, but the line was busy.

She was probably working.

Lying flat on his back, waiting for the shower to cut off, he considered the likelihood the authorities could be bribed to overlook the problem of a dead tour guide. Of course, to offer a bribe would imply guilt. Were they corrupt? Were they righteous? And where were they, in the first place?

He called the front desk to ask. The nearest police station, said the receptionist, was twenty miles up the peninsula to the north. It was connected to an outpost of the Belize Defence Force, apparently. The cops and the military, in an ominous conjunction. But maybe the young harelip cadet would be there, take pity on them, and intercede with his superiors on T.’s behalf.

Was there a problem? asked the receptionist, still on the line. “No,” said Hal, “none at all, thanks.” He hung up.

Possibly they would be ill-advised to contact the police after all. Asking for trouble. If T. told Delonn’s brother how the guide had had a heart attack, probably the brother would not bring charges. He wasn’t the suspicious type. And anyway what motive could T. have for murder?

He must have dozed off then, because when he woke up T. was standing over him with light around his thin, nut-brown face. The eyes were a piercing blue. Cleaner, wearing a white collar shirt and gazing down at Hal with what appeared to be compassion, he also seemed sanctified. Beneficent.

But he had omitted to shave, just as Hal feared. The long beard still stuck out stiffly from his chin like a useless appendage. He looked like one of the Hasidim. Or even a saint or Jesus.

Although Jesus was seldom pictured in collar shirts. They had not been popular at the time.

“Sorry,” said the Jesus-T. softly. “I didn’t mean to wake you. You can go back to sleep. I’m taking off for a while.”

Hal sat up, jolted.

“Taking off? Taking off where?”

“Headed to Monkey River Town. With Marlo. Sit down and talk to Delonn’s brother.”

“Good, right,” mumbled Hal, rubbing his eyes. “You’re coming back here after, right?”

“Should be back by sometime around dinner,” said the Jesus-T., nodding. “Don’t wait on me though. Time runs slow in these parts.”

“All right then,” said Hal weakly, and lay back as the Jesus-T. receded. The room door closed softly.

The Jesus-T. left the scent of soap and toothpaste. At least he had used them.

•

A short time later Hal made his way to the hotel restaurant for lunch, himself freshly washed. He was spooning up soup and halfheartedly reading the paper when someone jostled his elbow: a cornboy, probably the Alpha.

Both of them were hovering, shirtless and dripping, in wet shorts. They held fluorescent boogie boards under their arms.

“Hey,” said Hal, wiping his mouth with a napkin.

“Where’s the dead guy?”

“He went to a meeting.”

“You finished?”

“You mean — my lunch? No,” said Hal, mildly astonished. “I just started it.”

“My mother wants to see you.”

“Uh. .”

“You talk to her. OK? Then we go snorkel.”

The waiter leaned down and removed his soup plate.

“She gets bored. She likes friends. You talk to her.”

“Where’s your father?”

“In the airplane.”

“Im Hubschrauber,” intervened the Beta, shaking his head.

“Yeah, right. A helicopter,” said the Alpha. “He took a helicopter to get to the airplane.”

“Dolphin HH-65A,” nodded the Beta, enunciating perfectly.

“I’ll be happy to talk to her,” said Hal. His club sandwich had come. He took a sip of iced tea. “Right after I eat. OK?”

“We are in front. We are by the ocean.”

“OK,” said Hal. “I’ll come find you. Promise.”

He watched them jog away, picking up a fry and dangling it over the small paper cup of ketchup. Were they actually concerned for their mother? Or was the snorkeling more the point? Or had Gretel sent them? Hal thought not. Their expedition had seemed self-directed. Gretel would have come to talk to him herself, if she wanted to. He might go over to her and then she might not be glad to see him. She might not want to talk to him at all, at least without T. in the mix. Possibly he could tell her T.’s story to cover up the awkwardness.

When he finished he took a chocolate-mint from the dish next to the cash register, popped it in his mouth and made a side trip to the bathroom in the lobby, where he splashed cold water on his face and combed his hair with his fingers. Nothing between them, in a linear sense: no future, no expectation. But still.

And he should call Susan again. Soon.

In the sun his eyes smarted. He had left his sunglasses in the room. He walked through canvas beach chairs, umbrellas, both with white and blue stripes, matching; hammocks were strung between tree trunks, his fellow hotel guests lying on them unmoving, fleshy and naked like human sacrifices. Mostly fat. Or fattish. He saw brown bottles of lotion with palm trees on them, dog-eared paperbacks splayed open on towels. One man had on a Walkman, and a tinny beat issued forth.

Shading his eyes, he looked for the cornboys. They were easy to spot in a crowd, typically.

“Hal!” cried Gretel. She was still excited, apparently, about the nondeath of T. She smiled happily.

She wore an orange and brown sarong below her floral bikini top and looked beautiful, though maybe a little older, he was noticing, or more tired than he had thought previously. Her face was shaded by a straw hat. She held her arms open. He leaned into them. She reminded him, suddenly, of people who mourned celebrities — celebrities they never knew, of course, people who were nothing but symbols to them. Fans at Elvis’s grave, for instance. People swaying with candles, or gathered at monogrammed gates holding armfuls of flowers. He had never understood it. The mourners had not even met the celebrities, never seen anything of them but a constructed public image, yet they wept, they swayed, some did violence to themselves.

Clearly the celebrities were symbols to them, and these symbols carried weight. He knew about symbols and their weight, their mystical eminence and power to enthrall. But that did not explain it. If the famous people were symbols, why did it matter when they died? Symbols went on forever.

Gretel had not known T., did not know Susan. How could she care, really? Her beaming happiness. For all she knew T. was a swine, yet she was visibly rejoicing.

“Tell me how you found your friend!” she exhorted, and pulled him underneath her umbrella. The cornboys were in the water. He plumped down on the canvas beach chair beside her, which turned out to be wet. The seat of his pants was instantly soaked and clammy.

“I went to an island,” he said, wondering how much credit to take. “An island he owns. He was building a hotel there, before the storm hit.”

As he told the story she gazed at his face attentively, nodding and smiling eagerly as though he, too, must feel overjoyed and brimming with triumph. In fact he felt unsurprised, he reflected; T. being dead had never been a foregone conclusion to him. It was Susan who had been so convinced of the worst-case scenario. To him the question of T.’s deadness had been, in fact, basically a matter of indifference — which shocked him, now that he thought of it. His former indifference rattled him slightly, he realized. Now that he liked T., now that he had appointed himself T.’s protector and ally, how automatic, how thoughtlessly callous the former indifference seemed.

At the same time he was noticing Gretel’s breasts, a caramel, tanned color, the scoops of them smooth and perfect where they emerged from the fabric of the bikini. He regretted his former indifference to whether T. was alive or dead; he was mildly astonished to recognize it. But he was more astonished at the beauty of the breasts, barely covered. They hid their light under a bushel. Men were not queued up beside Gretel’s beach umbrella, for instance, rubbernecking for a gander. The breasts were here, and yet their presence had not been widely broadcast, though it would clearly be of interest to the general public. He thought of crowds along city streets, waving and straining for a look at the Pope in his Popemobile.

Not so in this case. The breasts were unsung heroes.

Incredible that his own hands and mouth had been on them such a short while ago — a few hours, a couple of days’ worth of hours, anyway, many of them passed quickly in sleep. In geological time, it was a second ago — an instant. The sense memory of it. . no one was mentioning this. Neither he nor Gretel said to each other, right away, we are people who fucked, you fucked me and I fucked you, or made-fucking-love, or whatever. Instead it was as though this fucking had never taken place, and here they were discussing the status of a third party, one basically irrelevant to the fucking and its memory, in a separate compartment. Neither of them was bringing up her tits, her ass, how he had been all over all of them and also in the deep interior of her personal and individually owned body, to which he had no right at all but had been granted, for a few fleeting minutes, a provisional entry.

Neither of them was bringing up this list of items, these glaringly real items whose reality was greater, in fact, than most other realities, at the moment. At least for him. While genuinely regretting his callousness — which no one else knew of, and which was therefore a secret even more than what had passed between him and Gretel was a secret, because in that case she, at least, knew of it also, whereas no one at all knew how indifferent he had been to the alive- or deadness of T. (he was so grateful, as always, for the privacy of the mind) — he was far more interested in the fact that he did not want to escape from any of them, Gretel’s tits, her ass, even the softness and sweet, almost babyish smell of her inner-thigh skin. He wished it had not all happened in the dark, so he could have better recall, could see things as well as remember the feel of them. . but now the tits and the ass, the soft, musky thighs with their hideaway — or at least the darkness that had surrounded all of these during his only contact with them — were added to his list of regrets. Which was ridiculous. Regretting his indifference, which had actually hurt no one, and now regretting the darkness, which he had not chosen.

“I hope you don’t think badly of me,” he blurted, interrupting his own droning and semi-vacant narration of the events associated with T. He was bored of it.

“Of course not!” said Gretel. “What do you mean?”

He shrugged, awkward. Maybe there had been a tacit pact between them never to mention the sex, the adultery, whatever you wanted to call it. Now broken.

“Your friendship is important to me,” he said, lying. It was a lie, and yet not in spirit, because she was important to him — just not her friendship, per se, which was, given the logistics of their situation as well as the marital pairings, unlikely to the point of sheer impossibility. Could they be friends in theory, separate but aware? And what would be the point? “That’s all.”

“You don’t have to be embarrassed,” she said, and put her hand on his knee.

“It’s not a problem, then?”

“No problem,” she said, and smiled. She squeezed the knee lightly. It was as though she had nothing to hide, and nothing immoral or illicit had ever passed between them.

But the touch of her hand made him want to have sex again, with sudden desperation.

“Mutti! Mutti!” called a cornboy, and the two of them were running toward the umbrella, kicking up sand.

Gretel removed her hand, but not too hastily. Somehow her every movement was both graceful and casual. He wondered how she managed it.

“Der hat eine grosse Qualle gefunden!”

“A jellyfish,” she explained to Hal, and turned back to the boys. “Use your English! Did it sting anyone?”

“No.” They shook their heads.

“Good.”

“Coke please.”

“Me too.”

“How many Cokes have you already had today, Stefan?”

“Two.”

“Three,” tattled the Beta.

“That’s enough, then.”

“Please?”

“Please?”

She sighed.

“Look in my bag, then.”

They rummaged for money in her purse while she laid her head back and stretched her gleaming legs out beyond the umbrella’s shadow. “We haven’t lived in the States for that long, you know? They are still learning.”

“T. thought their English was very impressive,” said Hal, as the cornboys ran uphill again toward the poolside bistro. As he said it he felt the dynamic between them returning to normalcy, to the politeness of regular behavior. In the shift whatever had been intimate was lost, the raw, open thing between them was covered up and buried.

Which was an ending, but also a relief.

• • • • •

He tried Susan again from the telephone in his room, and she picked up on the third ring.

“Susan? I found him,” he told her, in a voice that was carefully solemn. Suspense.

“Oh my God,” said Susan, low. He heard her fear and felt a remorseful pang.

“He’s fine,” he said quickly.

“What?”

“He’s fine. He’s grown a beard.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No. Really.”

She screamed on the other end. It sounded like she’d dropped the phone. It was a minute before she came back.

“I can’t believe it,” she said breathlessly. “Hal! I can’t believe you found him!”

“Seems he had an experience,” said Hal. “He has a new opinion about capitalism. He’s a changed man.”

“But he’s in one piece. He’s all there?”

“He’s physically fine. Thin though. You can see his ribs sticking out.”

“But so, so why didn’t he call me? What is he doing?”

“I think he had a breakdown, or something. He may need help. In the readjustment process. He’s been living in the middle of nowhere like a hermit. No running water. Or electricity.”

“T.? My God. I can’t believe this. So when is he — is he coming home soon?”

“We haven’t got it worked out yet. His tour guide died—”

“My God!”

“—is what happened. He was on a backpacking trip and he had to hike out alone. He got lost. It was a near miss, sounds like.”

“God! Get him to call me, then, Hal. Get him to call me right away. There are things I can still salvage, if he calls me now. I mean finances, legal situations. He would want me to, I know it. If I still can. I should try. Would you please?”

“I’ll try. But he’s not all there, Susan.”

“Just get him back here then. Get him back here. We’ll take care of him.”

It irritated him somehow, the assumption that T. would prove malleable in her hands and she could automatically mold him into his former shape.

“Who will? You will? You and Robert?”

There was a pause.

“I’m saying we need to have him taken care of, Hal. With access to services. Expertise and — and medication, if he needs it. It wasn’t so long ago he had his loss, you know. This is still fallout from that, I’m guessing. You know, his girlfriend — her dying was out of the blue. But he never did any bereavement counseling. None.”

He felt resistant to answering.

“Hal?”

“I’ll do what I can,” he said finally.

Selfishly she dwelled only on the functioning of her office, the linear track of returning to normal. As though normal was all she wished, all anyone would ever want to secure. It did not occur to her that normal might be flawed, might be wrong through and through — that maybe T., unbalanced or not, did not wish to be normal, did not want to go back to the steady state she apparently required for him.

“When you get back we should have a talk,” she said, softening. “I know you’re not happy right now. And it means so much to me that you did this.”

“I saw you,” he said. “On the floor of the office. In front of the file cabinet.”

Silence.

He hung up.

•

Lying on the bed with the television on in front of him, not watching it exactly (it was not in English anyway and seemed to be a Mexican game show involving a tacky, glaring set and flashing lights, whose sound he had muted), he mulled over the various possible effects of his words. She might be considering the option of divorce, whether he wanted it, whether she did, whether this constituted, for the two of them, a divorceable offense; she might be cold to the very core or gleeful and exhilarated, terrified or relieved. She might already have called Robert the Paralegal with the news of their discovery, might have told him what Hal had said, or might never have thought to call him. Among all these, what were his own feelings?

It came to him gradually that he was not angry. His anger had dissipated. He had told her what he knew, and now he was not angry. There was still a sense of disappointment, of letdown — maybe for the unchangeableness of the past, the stubbornness of his unpleasant memories, which were now implanted within him permanently. Maybe for the fact that their marriage had been, in his mind, a pure union, and now it was adulterated. That was what adultery did.

He had wanted it perfect, he thought, but wasn’t that a false want? What was perfect anyway? Possibly this new, sullied marriage was in fact more perfect than the previous innocent one, more perfectly expressed the state of lifelong union or the weather of affection. Possibly the previous, innocent marriage, uncomplicated by disloyalty, had in fact been inferior to this one, more superficial. Maybe they were achieving maturity.

On the other hand, it could be simply that the thrill was gone, that it had been eradicated and would never return.

Then again, he was assuming that, just because this was the first time he had caught her in an act of unfaithfulness, this was the first time such acts had occurred. But what if she had been practicing free love down through the years, ever since the Frenchman? (And Casey not his biological — paranoid crap.) What if the marriage had in fact never been what he thought it was? The real instability, real liquid. .

Someone was knocking; someone looked in the window, through the crack between the frame and the curtain. Gretel.

He had forgotten about his own infidelity in all this. But his own infidelity was of a lower order, or a higher order, depending how you organized your judgment hierarchy. He would never have slept with Gretel were it not for the condom wrapper fragment on his own bedside table, the bad lesbian song playing on the shower radio, Susan and Robert on the floor of the office and his subsequent unmooring. It was a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder that gave him permission for misbehavior — even a broad series of permissions, airy and limitless as the sky.

It was second-order adultery. That was it.

He opened the door.

“Come for a paddle with me and the boys. Won’t you?” asked Gretel, cocking her head and smiling.

It was late afternoon. Hans had not come back yet and neither had T., clearly: and Hal was sick of the silence of the hotel room, the static of his own body laid out on the bed.

He turned around, grabbed his sunglasses and bottled water, and followed her out of the room, down the stairs and onto the beach to where the hotel’s bright kayaks were arrayed on the sand. They pushed two of them into the placid water, the cornboys in a double kayak ahead of them, and scrambled in.

They were going to head out toward a mangrove caye, said Gretel, and pointed to it. A quick trip before sunset. It was about a half-hour’s paddle to the southeast, and on the other side there was supposed to be a small reef. She had extra snorkeling gear, if Hal wanted to use it. She handed him a hat to wear — one of Hans’s, no doubt. It was emblazoned with the single word BOEING.

The two of them lagged contentedly behind the boys, who raced ahead, locked into their perpetual battle of speed and strength. Once more they fought an imaginary opponent. Hal paddled at a leisurely pace.

“They have found some kind of rebel camp,” said Gretel after a while. “Hans did what they call a flyover. In a plane with someone from the Marines, or something.”

“Rebel camp?” asked Hal.

“Guatemalans, I think.”

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” said Hal, mildly alarmed. “Isn’t the army the bad guy, over there? Doesn’t it do genocide?”

“I don’t know about the politics,” said Gretel apologetically. “Hans just said they were guerrillas. He said it was an armed camp of guerrillas that came from over the border.”

“Over the border is Guatemala, right? And if it’s the Mayans, they’re probably escaping a fucking massacre! I mean there are official refugee camps for them in Mexico. You haven’t read about this? There was a genocide going on, a couple of years ago. Civil war. All this shit with the CIA propping up the military there, the generals that are smuggling cocaine through to the U.S. from Colombia or somewhere — remember that woman who won the Nobel Peace Prize? Rigoberta Menchú?”

Gretel shook her head.

“What the hell,” said Hal, and mulled it over, making deep, slow strokes with the paddle. What were they up to after all, those toy soldiers? Rigoberta Menchú: in all the pictures she wore bright, printed clothing. Cloth tied around her head, typically, and she had a brown, broad face, smiling. The smiling face was at odds with the reports of various family members of hers, shot dead or burned alive. He only half-remembered.

The Marines, or the Coast Guard, whichever branch of the armed forces they had been: while he was with them he had been pathetic, reduced to childishness. They were strongmen; he was nothing but a victim. What felt like a death march to him had been a pleasant day hike for them. You could be brought down to that — to contests of strength, to the brute force of physical superiority, if you put yourself into the situation. And it was a plain situation, a simple one, the situation of survival. That day, on that walk, nothing but the basic, primitive unit of the body had mattered. His unit had failed him.

But now he was thinking of those same Marines with condescension, as they must have thought of him, because their subjugation was permanent and far worse than it had been, briefly, for him. They were muscular windup dolls, forced to do the bidding of men of greater ambition. It was their job description.

The cornboys pulled ahead, further and further away from Gretel and him. There were powerboats on the water, though none were close at the moment. He thought of the jellyfish the boys had seen, the sharks, the rays — a great sea beast rising from the depths and lifting their kayak from below, capsizing it. Their small bodies splayed and sinking. . but Gretel was relaxed. He looked over and saw her bronzed limbs, lazy but perfect in the sun, as she lifted and tipped her paddle. She looked up and smiled at him. He felt lulled, the awkwardness between them evaporated. They had started in water, in the cool blue, and here they were on the water again. It was all right. Gretel had her boys up ahead of her and him by her side — a temporary companion, sure. But then they all were.

That was it: that was it. She let her sons go ahead, and she was not worrying. He too had freedom, a strange freedom in this adultery, this strange and half-lonely honeymoon. The dissolution of everything. Because he had forgotten Casey this trip, he had been emancipated from her — Casey, who since he arrived in this foreign place had not, for the first time in years, guided his every impulse. For a time he had left her behind; the weight of carrying her had been released.

But for the years before that, what had he been doing? He felt a sudden panic. Wasted. He had wasted them.

He had lost them, and only realized the loss now, like a bolt, shocking. Like a nightmare: time shifted and the years of your life were gone. The light shimmered sideways over the water.

He had forgotten his wife, mostly. He loved her, but all this time he’d practically forgotten she was there. Susan had been left to her own devices, alone and in the cold while he dreamed his soft dreams of regret. That was what had happened to the two of them, nothing mysterious. He had drifted away to his memories of his daughter as she had been, the cycles of blame, remorse, longing. He had been somewhere else all the time, in spirit if not body — not with his actual daughter, for the time he spent with her in the course of a day or a week was normal, regular time, not a nightmare or dream, but the daughter he once had, or the daughter who might have been. He was like an enchanted man. That was who he had been, all these years, a man under a spell, a man absent without knowing his own absence. He had been gone, but he had not noticed. He had not noticed himself or Susan, had noticed neither of them. All he had known was remorse. He spent his life knowing it.

And so Susan had disappeared too. Of course. Even her job was a form of her disappearance. The job, her allegiance to it, the affair — it was all the stuff of her life, while he was not.

Susan had vanished for a simple reason: she had nothing better to do.

It was his fault. And here on the long, blind road he had been blaming her.

• • • • •

He used Hans’s snorkeling equipment, his blue mask and fins. Putting them on he thought fleetingly that he was borrowing everything from Hans.

But Hans did not register its absence.

The corals were not so bright here as they were further out, toward the barrier reef — dying, he suspected, some of them dead already. He had read at the hotel that this year, suddenly, corals were quickly bleaching in Belize. But fish still moved among them, their bright bodies flashing among the worn gray humps like the Mohawks of teenage punks drinking in a graveyard. He saw small fish, mostly, but it felt good to follow them for a while and watch them disappear.

Gretel decided they should go up when the sun began to sink and the water was darkening around them. It grew harder to see. After they surfaced he held her kayak steady for her while she clambered in, treading water with his free hand, and then she leaned over and held his.

The cornboys, blue-lipped, were already waiting, eating half-unwrapped chocolate bars and jiggling their legs, feet braced against the footrests. Without a wetsuit the coldness of the water had sunk in; Gretel’s golden skin was goosebumped. The end of day cast violet shadows on her, on all of them. Quickly the surface seemed almost black.

•

When they put in at the hotel beach again people were eating dinner at the outdoor tables, beneath the bistro’s palm-thatch awning. Citronella candles were burning on the tables and Hal could smell their bitter lemon edge as he walked up the beach.

“Bring T. and join us for dinner, won’t you?” urged Gretel, and he said he would, as soon as he showered and changed.

But T. was not in the room, and there was no message light blinking on the telephone. He took his shower quickly, anxious, and was bent over his open suitcase with a towel around his waist when Marlo knocked at the door.

“Mr. Tomás had to go with the police,” said Marlo. “He wanted me to tell you.”

“Go with them?” asked Hal. “What do you mean?”

The towel fell as he lurched forward. He grabbed it and held it up tightly.

“They took him to detention,” said Marlo solemnly.

“Detention? They arrested him?”

“First to Dangriga, then Belize City.”

“I mean — why? Is it serious?”

“Because of the death. You know?”

“But it was an accident!”

Guests passed behind Marlo, a family with long-haired young girls. Self-conscious, Hal stepped back and waved him in.

“The brother, you know? He did not want to press charges. But then there was a neighbor who asked them to come. This lady — she does not like Americans. The soldiers, the other day, I think one of them was rude to her daughter, you know? So then they came. There will be an investigation.”

“Jesus!”

Central American jails did not boast a good reputation for client services. He would have to leave right away for the city.

“I’ll go up there. I’ll pay his bail, or whatever. I’ll get him a lawyer. Can you get me a car to the capital? Or a plane?”

“Tonight?”

“Tonight. Right now. I mean he’s in jail, right?”

“They are taking him there.”

“Then I need to go right now. I have to get him out.”

“The flights from the airport in Placencia? They go in the daytime.”

“Can’t I charter one or something? It’s what, to Belize City — a half-hour flight?”

“I will see. I can see.”

He dressed in a hurry after Marlo left, stuffed his clothes messily into the suitcase with a sense of growing urgency. Anything could happen. The guy was non compos mentis, and they had arrested him. It often happened to the mentally ill, even in the U.S. — since Reagan anyway. They were let out onto the streets, wandered there, and were promptly arrested for the crime of existing. Then jail, insult added to injury. He would not let prison violence happen to T. Just when the guy was acting human for the first time in his life and abandoning his Mercedes-Benz fixation, they went and arrested him.

A man turned away from the path of Mamm on and that was what he got — thrown into the hoosegow.

In the lobby Marlo was talking to someone in Spanish, a bald guy in a satiny red windbreaker. The guy was shaking his head — a bad sign, surely.

“Is it going to happen?” asked Hal, and thankfully Marlo nodded, consulting his watch.

“He will drive you to the airfield,” he said. “Five minutes.”

He had to say goodbye to Gretel before then. Who knew if he would ever be back. He headed to the restaurant and stood in the doorway looking, but could not see her at the tables. No cornboys either. Their white-blond hair was a beacon. He would have to go to the room. It disturbed him, but it could not be avoided. Up the sandy cement of the stairs — was it 323? 325? He knocked at the first one. He had three minutes left. He hoped Hans was not there. He had no time for avionics experts.

A cornboy opened the door, video game in hand.

“Your mother in?”

The door opened further and the cornboy faded. Gretel had her hair twisted up in a towel but was fully dressed. Thankfully.

“Listen, I have to go,” he said. “They arrested T. The local authorities. They took him to Belize City. I have to go get him out. I’m flying.”

“My God,” said Gretel. “Arrested? Him?”

“Because of the tour guide dying. The heart attack. Remember? But now they want to investigate it, apparently. I have to fly to the city, try to meet them. Post his bail or bribe someone. We can’t have him in there.”

“Yes!” said Gretel, nodding hastily. “Of course. You should go.”

“So,” he said. “I guess, goodbye?”

He leaned forward to embrace her, awkward as usual.

“You’ll get him out. I know you will. You are a good friend,” said Gretel with her arms around him. She smelled like cinnamon.

“Thank you,” he said. He was late now, for the driver.

He smiled at her again. Should he ask for her phone number, or something? Cheesy.

“Wait,” he said. “In case you ever come to Los Angeles.” He slid his messy wallet out of his back pocket, slipped out a business card. “This is me.”

“Thank you, Hal,” said Gretel softly.

He backed out of the room, turned and took the stairs two at a time. When he glanced over his shoulder she was braced against the railing of the balcony gazing down at him, face in shadow, the towel standing tall on her head like a crown.

•

The airport was a small trailer with a dirty linoleum floor, fluorescent lights overhead and a desk at one end with a few papers piled on it, an olive-colored metal lamp on a bendable arm and a stained paper coffee cup. The lights were on but no one was around, yet Hal was supposed to meet his pilot. He went to the bathroom, the size of an airplane toilet, and when he came out he saw a light through the building’s glass door.

On the airfield — all grass and weeds with a single thin, short runway that looked more like a driveway — sat a small plane. He pushed the back door open and walked over the grass toward it, suitcase in hand, slapping against his leg. It was almost completely dark out; a couple of lights on the runway had halos around them, and then there were the small lights of the plane itself and the squares of yellow that were its windows. The plane was small and white with a blue stripe on the side — a four-seater, he saw when he got close.

Its propeller was already whirring, there was a door open, and the pilot was seated, wearing a bulky headset. Hal put a foot up on the rim of the door to step in.

“Here, here,” said the pilot, and gestured for him to sit up front. It was tight, barely room to move.

“This?” asked Hal, raising his suitcase.

“Back there,” said the pilot.

Hal was sure they would skim the trees on takeoff. The night outside was daunting from the tiny cabin of the plane, its bottomless dark; he wore the headset the pilot had given him, but they hardly spoke. He recalled a phrase an FAA guy had once used with him on a commercial flight, discussing Cessnas just like this one: single-point failure. No backup systems in case of malfunction. As they taxied and rose up above the runway he willed himself beyond the plane, out of the frail and shaking capsule into the rest of his life.

L.A. was spread out far to the north, gray and blond and spidering everywhere — its fastness, its familiar blocky strip malls and wide boulevards with their unceasing traffic and smog and the glamorous jungly hills that rose above and housed the royalty. Everything was the same; his house was the same, even, full of the mundane objects he knew so well. . by now Susan had told Casey T. was alive. They would both know by now, and Casey, at least, would feel affectionate and grateful. But Susan’s gratitude he had foolishly squandered. By accusing her at the very moment of triumph, the moment of revelation, he had squandered all his credit. Such as it was. It should have been a pure gift, the culmination of a gesture that quietly knighted him; instead he had revealed his petty nature, his real motivation for leaving and coming here, thus giving the lie to any idea she might have had about his minor effort at heroism.

He had to get T. out of the hands of the Belizean cops. It was imperative. Both for Susan and Casey and for him, T. himself, because actually he did not deserve it.

A short time ago, before he went to the island, if someone had told him Stern was in jail Hal would not have objected too strongly. Only mildly, for the sake of politeness. He might have held the private opinion, in fact, that a few nights in a Central American hellhole could benefit the Armani-wearing shithead. But not anymore. Now he wanted to get the guy out, partly because he seemed a painfully easy mark, now that he had gone hippie. Hal had always had a weakness for hippies, despite their free-love tendencies. Between them and the libertarians, he’d take hippies. Now — a benevolent-seeming, almost submissive individual — T. was without defenses. He would be instantly victimized, by either the thugs in the police force or his fellow inmates. It was ugly to contemplate.

Often people prefaced a stupid remark with the words “There are two kinds of people in the world,” and Hal had always been annoyed by this. The words tended to introduce a false dichotomy, an infantile reduction. At the same time he, too, felt the urge to divide and categorize, the satisfaction of separating the world into discrete parts that could be identified. If T. had once been a person who thought chiefly of himself and his shining Mercedes, he was now something else — if only on a temporary basis.

For it was entirely possible, as Susan had suggested, that he would revert to his usual form once the trauma of the hiking misadventure was past. People tended to settle back into their old routines. Returns to form were standard. Fundamental character change was all but impossible.

Still, for now he more closely resembled the pet lovers, for instance, than Donald Trump or Leona Helmsley. He was like the post-hippie nomads that drove around in painted vans, let their children grow dreadlocks and lived on pennies. He had the beard and the hygiene, anyway. But the key distinction was this: he had gone from being consumed with his own life and advancement to looking outward. Whereas Hal himself, once youth had passed, had gone the other way.

For there had been an interval, while he and Susan were both young, when he too had thought of the rest of the world quite often. He had often thought of justice and liberation, of the good of mankind, etc. But then he had forgotten it.

Except for his job, he had argued to himself over the years, but he had to admit it: even the job had become little more than a sinecure. He could not argue that in going to work every day he made a sacrifice of himself. It was more like a well-fitting shoe that was worn all the time but was never noticed.

If there were in fact two kinds of people in the world, those who faced inward and those who looked out, he had been the latter and turned into the former, whereas Stern, or T., had been the former and turned into the latter. It was T. who was taking the road less traveled, whereas Hal, with all his ideas about a government that protected and sheltered the people, with his lifetime of civil service, had in fact become a typical domestic drone, a man wrapped up in the details of his own life and only his own.

He had acquired the habit of blaming the accident for this. And yes, the accident had made it easier to shelve the concerns of the world, to relegate them to the back burner. But if he was honest, the patterns had been worn into him years before the accident, possibly even from the time when he manipulated Susan into abandoning her commune. He had manipulated her away from her youthful Eden Project ideal out of a sense of desperation, true, but that did not excuse his cynical calculation. He had been desperate to keep her and had reassured himself that love was enough reason for manipulation. But it was selfish and nothing else. Love had been an excuse, more than anything, for greediness. Love and self-interest had coalesced.

And separated from her Mendocino ideal — from the future of fresh air and the fields of organic strawberries — in time she had given up public high-school teaching, with its long hours and low pay and frequent disappointments, and become an assistant to a real-estate guy. This was after the accident, of course. . she had taken an office job, become an office worker. He himself was an office worker too, nothing more than a glorified clerk, really, but still: who knew what she might have become if, back in 1967, instead of manipulating her he had just let her go?

And it might still have worked out between them. In due course he might have sought her out again, might have followed her to the commune, gotten down on one knee, and humbly asked Rom to give him a free lute lesson. After a potluck dinner, around a bonfire, Susan might have played the tambourine and sung songs about the giving spirit of trees while he and Rom accompanied her on twin lutes.

And Casey: Casey might have been born in a yurt with a midwife attending, instead of by emergency C-section at the UCLA Medical Center. When she was seventeen she might not have gone driving at all, in that snowstorm in the suburbs of Denver. She might have had different friends, might not have even have decided impulsively that she wanted to learn to ski, wanted to take her turn on the baby slopes, and therefore never have asked Hal and Susan if she could go on a Colorado ski trip with her L.A. friends, who in addition to skiing enjoyed drinking games and fast driving. She might have been, say, more of a horseback-rider type, competed in horse-riding meets in a black velvet cap and tall boots, and had different friends entirely, who knew, friends who did Outward Bound courses or line dancing, friends who won prizes at the county fair for growing outsize tomatoes.

But instead he had followed one urge, a single urge. What was an urge but a quick pulse of energy through the brain? He had followed a jealous, self-protective urge and consecrated his behavior to persuasion. For two or three weeks his attention had been focused entirely on preventing Susan from leaving — on preventing his future wife from realizing her dream.

And that petty urge of self-protection, that small urge that passed through him in seconds, had determined the future for all three of them.