How We Are Hungry

THE ONLY MEANING OF THE OIL-WET WATER

PILAR WAS NOT getting over divorce or infidelity or death. She was fleeing nothing. She flew to Costa Rica one day, on two planes, from Champaign, then Miami, because she had time off and Hand, her longtime friend, was there, or near enough. There is almost no sadness in this story.

Pilar: she is not Latin in any way she knows, but ever since she was very young she’s heard from friends and strangers that her name is a Latin or Latin-sounding one. She is always embarrassed to admit, though she’s admitted it a hundred times, that she’s never looked up the provenance of her name, its meaning, or anything else about it. Her skin is the color of blond wood, easily tanning, and her hair is black, which reinforces the assumption of her Latinness, even though she’s been told by her parents, always, that she’s Irish and only Irish — maybe some Scottish, perhaps a jab of German. Though with her hair in a ponytail and with her long legs, very long for a woman not even five and a half feet tall, she resembles, more than anything, popular images of Pocahontas. She always wanted to have some Native American blood in her, just as everyone does, because with that blood, she thought, stupidly, would come nobility, as would excuses to do things the wrong way, or not do them at all, to do anything she wanted. But instead she is Irish or possibly even Welsh but not in any tangible sense, and thus born without any sorrow in the lives of her recent ancestors, and so she had to smile gratefully and create good things from scratch or perhaps just save people from skin disease. Pilar was a doctor, a young one, a dermatologist. Her profession does not figure into this story.

PILAR WALKED: with her toes pointing northwest and northeast, like a dancer.

PILAR LAUGHED: in a throaty way, and loudly, while her eyes devoured.

PILAR KNEW: when something would happen, and when something would not.

Hand was in Granada, Nicaragua, for six months and was encouraging all visitors. He was working for Intel, doing something Pilar could never really grasp, even if she wanted to, which she didn’t, because her brain, she believed, was meant to be filled with more colorful things. Intel had asserted itself in Central America and was rotating in young Spanish-speaking consultants like Hand for a year or two at a time. Pilar couldn’t imagine what Hand would know that Nicaraguan Intel could need, but then again, this was the sort of arrangement he always landed — well-paying, low-commitment, impossible to explain. Pilar accepted Hand’s invitation, but they couldn’t agree on what the week would entail. Hand, sick of Nicaragua for the time being, wanted a week in Costa Rica, surfing and looking at women jogging across the flat wet sand. Pilar wanted to see Nicaragua, because everyone, it seemed, had seen Costa Rica, but no one she knew had set foot in Nicaragua. Nicaragua sounded dangerous; she liked the word. Nicaragua! It sounded like some kind of spider. There it goes, under the table — Nicaragua!

Hand got his way. They’d be surfing in Costa Rica, on the Pacific coast. But Pilar didn’t mind. She would tell everyone she went to Nicaragua anyway.

In San Jose the humidity covered her with many gloved hands. She rented a car and immediately went the wrong direction, headed straight into the city’s center when she wanted to do the opposite. It was easily ninety degrees and she was in the merchants’ district, filled with cheap electronics and men selling things from white aluminum carts. Rental car agencies and banks and students. Clumps of pedestrians jogging through traffic. Office buildings of the sixties steel-and-glass Erector-set sort, flimsy and forgettable. The road was five lanes wide and was jammed but moving. San Jose looked like L.A. circa 1973, and she puttered through the city weirdly horny. The heat maybe. The volume of the sidewalks maybe. She watched women through her windshield and they watched her. She found an English-language station and on it Michael Jackson’s “Rock with You” and she thought she would burst. She was happy, and she’d been for a few years able to recognize it, just dumb happiness, when it came, whatever its cause. When people asked how she was, she said Happy, and this made some people angry. There was traffic heading into town and she was moving, legs and arms and neck, with Michael, who she knew she’d like if she met him. She would understand him and they’d laugh and laugh about nothing, standing in his kitchen.

HAND HAD: loved three of Pilar’s oldest friends, and she knew everything.

HAND WOULD: leave this world and everyone in it if given the chance to be in space for just a few minutes.

HAND CRIED: when he read about men falsely imprisoned, freed at age forty, and walking the streets without malice.

She found her way out of the city and drove straight west, through the tolls by the airport and then around the two-lane bends, hundreds of turns through the hill country, waiting behind so many trucks, everyone so slow. The countryside was neat and green and lush and everything was for sale. At the airport they had been selling real estate; at the car rental place, at every gas station, slick posters and handmade flyers of properties for the taking, beachfront or lowland — everywhere along the road, plots and properties available. The Costa Ricans were proud of what they’d created — the most sturdy, the most predictable, easily the most tourist-amenable nation in Central America — and now that it was ripe, they were bringing it all to market. The highway was tumored with SUVs and buses. Pilar had expected jalopies and wood-fenced fruit trucks, but they were rare. This country was singing with space and sky and bright smooth new cars with clean black tires. There was heat, but between the sun and the treetops were quick-moving clouds, and they dragged black shadows over the leaves.

LOW-FLYING, QUICK-MOVING CLOUDS: I haven’t long to live.

TREETOPS, ROUNDED AND ROUGH: That’s probably true.

LOW-FLYING, QUICK-MOVING CLOUDS: I won’t even make it to the sea. I can already see where I’ll end.

TREETOPS, ROUNDED AND ROUGH: I don’t know what to tell you.

LOW-FLYING, QUICK-MOVING CLOUDS: But the thing is, I really love moving like this, though I know I won’t even make it.

TREETOPS, ROUNDED AND ROUGH: There are advantages to flight.

LOW-FLYING, QUICK-MOVING CLOUDS: But thought is its unfitting companion.

Pilar was meeting Hand at Playa Alta, because there, Hand said, the waves were forgiving and not too big, the water warm, and the beach almost empty. Even when it’s crowded it looks empty, this beach, he said. A big flat playa, he said, and she cringed, because Hand, she knew, would say playa when he meant beach, if that beach was located in a Spanish-speaking country. She loved him. He was ludicrous.

There is no way or reason to be subtle about why Pilar was in Costa Rica. At thirty-one she was still unmarried and Hand was one of her few old friends also still unmarried, and the only attractive old friend she’d never slept with. So she knew, when she hung up the phone with Hand five weeks prior, that she would sleep with him in Alta, and she knew it on the plane and on the drive to the coast.

Was she in any way saddened by the predictability of the outcome? Was it unromantic? She decided that it was not. Sex and things like sex — things people pretend they regret— weren’t about a decision made in a heated moment. The decision is made when you leave the house, when you get on a plane, when you dial a number.

She would arrive and hope that he still looked the way she liked him to look — lean, bigmouthed, clean. They would spend the first day pretending to be friends only, barely touching arms. The second night they would drink at dinner, and drink after that, amid shirtless and dreadlocked surfers, and then would sleep together in a tentative and civilized way. That much was assured, because Pilar had done this kind of thing before — with Mark in Toronto, with Angela in San Diego — and there was never variation in the setup; only the aftermath was alterable. Afterward, with Hand, there could be very little change in their affection and respect for each other: she was too careful, and he too loosely strung. Afterward, with Mark, she’d had to tolerate his frequent references to their weekend, both the almost-funny—“I saw you naked!”—and those helping him achieve a personal sort of release—“What were you wearing that weekend? Tell me again. Wait, hold on…”—but again, with Hand, she knew it would be mild, perhaps even forgotten, if it didn’t grow into something else. But would they want to continue having sex? That’s the simple and only question. And that depended on so many things: Would he do something strange with his tongue? Was his naked body odd in any disastrous way? Was he awkward-moving when nude? Would he cry (Mark) or become callous (Angela)? His legs might be too thin or pale, or his penis purple, or too narrow, his mouth too—

This story is not about Pilar and Hand falling in love.

Once close to Alta, the road devolved from two lanes paved to one lane dusty and everywhere potholed. The cars each way weaved and ducked, passengers inside with their hands braced against the roof. It was ten miles of this, and it felt like hours before the trees and farms gave way to the shanties and shops that announced Alta. A combination juice bar and art gallery called Forget It, Sue. Then a recycling center. More plots for sale. The place was still raw, the road still dust. Barefoot boys on bikes and mopeds outsped the cars, better navigating the road’s holes, while women let groceries in blue-striped plastic bags pull their arms earthward. Just past a Best Western and on the right side of the road, a thin line of trees hid the beach, wide and flat, rippling into a delta berthing small boats of rotting wood.

The hotel where they’d agreed to meet was called the Shangri La, above the main strip, nameless. The town titled none of its streets, but there was a primary artery, the length of three city blocks, with most of the town’s shops and restaurants attached. The Shangri La, on the hill, was white, and shone like a monument against a teal blue sky. It overhung a small garden full of iguanas, snakes, and mice, its deck jutting its strong chin toward the ocean.

The owner, a fit and sunburned German named Hans, gave Pilar keys and directions to the room, No. 5, and while walking up the steps and then along the deck, past the pool, with a preposterous view of the big ridiculous Pacific to her left, the sun teetering above, the waves blithely carrying surfers in, she actually had the feeling, momentarily, that this was not, actually, her doing this, that in fact she was still in Chicago, or even Wisconsin, and was imagining this — that she was just inhabiting a daydream concocted during, say, a dimly lit afternoon salad-bar lunch at Wendy’s. It really seemed more plausible than the reality of her in this moment, actually walking barefoot around a pool shaped like a curling kitten, bordered in hand-painted tiles of orange and blue, now stepping over two teak-brown surfers on straw mats, on her way to a room, down a long white hallway with geckos scampering on the ceiling above, in a hillside seaside hotel in Costa Rica, which holds Hand, whom she’d known for seventeen years, who was still alive, and not only still alive, but here.

Pilar was worried that her back was oversoaked from the drive, that Hand would feel her moisture and be appalled. But when she opened the door and they grabbed each other and hugged, he was just as wet as she was. He smelled like pineapple and sweat. His chin was hot on her shoulder, his hair damp.

“No air conditioning here,” he said. He said it in a guttural Spanish accent. Pilar hoped he would stop.

“Oh,” she said.

“Jesss, eeet eeez veddy hot here, jess,” he said, and then sighed, giving up.

The room was high-ceilinged and open, with a kitchen, a breakfast nook, a bedroom a few steps up. A fan spun overhead, its pull string ticking with every two or three turns. The deck overlooked the pool and the town and then the ocean. She couldn’t believe it all.

“This is crazy,” she said.

“I know,” he said, now speaking like he normally spoke. She had known him since seventh grade.

The floor was tile. The whole place was tile. She had come to expect carpeting in hotels.

“That’s pretty normal down here, the tile,” Hand said. “Anywhere south of Texas is like that.”

There was a plunger in the corner of the room, with a handle that looked precisely like a dildo. She made a note to joke about it later. Hand was standing in the corner. A gust jumped through the open window and jumbled a chime over the doorway.

She stepped over to Hand and slipped her arms around his waist and smelled his smell. She closed her eyes and pictured her old kitchen and the wallpaper there, a pattern of Disney dwarves bubbled from heat and humidity.

They left her things in the room and bobbed down the white stone steps. Outside, in the sherbet light that soon enough, with a shrug, would relinquish the day to night, there were horses. Four, just downhill from the hotel: one standing still in the road, two sitting nearby in the long gray-green roadside grass, the fourth one, white (the others were black), standing by the hotel’s straight hedge, just west of the hotel’s cherry door. Pilar and Hand looked around for the owners of the horses. They were shod but had no saddles, no bridles. Four horses, all gaunt, alone. Every horse stared at Pilar and Hand, two people from Wisconsin.

“I almost forgot you were coming,” Hand said.

They were standing and talking while the horses watched.

“What does that mean?” Pilar said. She was scratching the top of her head with one finger, in a circular motion.

“I don’t know.” He stumbled for a minute, backtracking, explaining that he’d been looking forward to her coming, but that in the past twenty-four hours he’d spaced her arrival.

“You forgot it was today, or forgot completely?” she asked.

“Your hair is dark,” he said.

“It was winter where I was. You’re not going to answer.”

“Did it used to be so dark?”

“I don’t know. Didn’t it?”

They walked by the horses; the horses watched with mild interest. Pilar didn’t know what to expect from the horses. There was nothing remarkable about their appearance, but they gave her a chill and she wasn’t sure why. She had rarely seen horses unaccompanied or unfenced and they looked huge and sinewy and tightly wound. She was enchanted by them, the novelty of having them so close to their hotel, but at the same time she wanted them gone. The size of their eyes implied a wide but focused intelligence, and she imagined that they would take the first opportunity to break into their room and kill them both.

“There’s a woman here who runs on the beach every night,” Hand said.

Pilar waited for something else from Hand about the woman, or the running — some point to the story. Nothing came. He looked at her, then down.

“There are some rocks near shore that you have to watch for when you swim,” he said. “You want to swim now?”

Pilar didn’t. She wanted to eat.

The dirt road was barnacled with small rocks, and huge rocks, and where it was not it was dusty and uneven. It was not a long walk to the beach, but it was too long. After thousands of miles of travel to reach water, even this, a five-minute stroll, felt cruel. The beach, once they ducked under a tangle of trees, was wide and flat; the tide was out. A woman jogged by the shore as her dog ran near her, jumping suddenly, as if jerked upward like a dog-marionette. But otherwise the place was empty, which was good.

“Is that the woman?” Pilar asked.

“I think so,” Hand said.

“Are there other women who run on the beach at night?”

“I don’t know. But it’s dark.”

Pilar wanted to cut stomachs open with glass.

Hand was tall enough, and built well, with flat strong pectorals and arms that were toned and brown. He’d been a swimmer in high school. But he also had a look of country madness that everyone who knew him noted. It wasn’t there all the time — just when a subject had grabbed hold of his mind and he was trying but failing, like Lassie and the well, to communicate its urgency. His was a nimble mind, sleeping shallowly when sleeping at all — but there was a raggedness to his brain that contrasted strongly with his attention to what he thought were facts and numbers of great import. Handsome in a way that sometimes looked bland, but there was character there— a faint cleft in his chin, earlobes that drooped though had never been pierced, some gray lines in his blond hair — that gave him advantages and he knew it. The sideburns had come and gone and now were back, and this was a mistake.

He had traveled widely in the past few years, since a trip with a mutual friend of theirs, now dead, had brought him halfway around the world in a week.

They shuffled down the main strip looking for dinner. There was a tiny bodega selling Miami Heralds from the previous Friday. Some small homes. A shop offering only towels, most featuring birds and monkeys. They found a restaurant with Christmas lights strung from the roof, full of American teenagers, all of them large, the boys bigger than the girls, huge T-shirts draped over their fleshy chests. Pilar and Hand sat down and in response a cat, gray with luxuriant hair, scooted from their feet and onto the tin roof.

The waitress came. She said Buenos nochas. They said Buenos nochas back. Hand said something in Spanish that made the waitress laugh loudly. As she was laughing, Hand spoke again, in Spanish, and the waitress laughed more. She leaned against the table for a second with her hand. She looked at Pilar; she was having a great time. Pilar had no idea what was happening. What had Hand said? Hand was a riot.

“What did you say to her?” Pilar asked, after she left.

“Who?”

“The waitress. What was so funny?”

“Nothing, really.”

“You were killing her. What did you say?”

Hand wouldn’t explain.

They ate dinner, chicken and rice, and wiped their mouths with the tiny triangular blue napkins provided. The cat returned and rubbed against Hand’s shin, back and forth and again, in a way that began to seem inappropriate.

UNSUNG SONG TO HAND: There are things about you / Like your wide waist, which repel / me, but your lips, smiling / shake me, and your brown shoulders / pick me a few inches off the ground / I want to slap you across the face in the loudest way. CHORUS: I want to jump on your back and ride you like a mule / I want to jump on your back and ride you like a mule / I want to jump on your back and ride you like a mule. SECOND VERSE: You’re someone who would lead almost any small nation / if you wanted to, but you don’t / because half of you is odd / but still you have the charm of a leading / man, of an actor who was first a carpenter / someone who still plays lacrosse on the weekends / with the friends he’s always had / I think your lips are too thin / your eyes too closely set / our children might be ugly / but you are a man, and there are so few men in the world. CHORUS: I want to jump on your back and ride you like a mule / I want to jump on your back and ride you like a mule / I want to jump on your back and ride you like a mule.

After they’d eaten but before they left the table, Hand said, “I think I want to make sausages.”

Pilar pretended to be watching the cat on the tin roof.

“There are small machines you can buy that make sausage,” he continued. “You buy the casings and then you stick the meats you want in there. Beef, pork, fat, spices. You ever made a sausage?”

Pilar shook her head. Hand fixed her with his look, brilliant and insane and grabbing.

“There are a lot of things like that, things you can just learn how to make. Like pretzels. Or doors. Regular people can learn how to make those things. Pillows. My mom started making pillows last year. She’s made about eighty so far.”

They walked back through the strip. Americans and Canadians and Swiss crisscrossed the street; some stood and watched the TVs positioned above the open-air bars, fuzzy college basketball happening, though soundlessly. Sunburned couples in white cotton fondled baskets in the souvenir shops. Surfers waited on benches for one of the two pay phones. Twelve-year-old locals sped by on ATVs, three on each bike, huge white smiles.

She counted the reasons she should sleep with Hand: because she was curious about sleeping with him, curious to see him naked; because she loved him; because sleeping with him would be a natural and good extension of her filial love for him; because there existed the possibility that it would be so good that they would change their ideas of each other and then think of themselves as a pair; because to deny one’s curiosity about things like this was small and timid, and she was neither and didn’t ever want to be either; because he had really wonderful arms, triceps that made her jangly in her ribs and tightened her chest; because she was not very attracted to him when away from him — she’d never thought of him while in the tub or flat on her bed — but in his presence she didn’t want to walk or eat, she wanted to be nude with him, under a dirty sheet in a borrowed house. She wanted to hold his shoulders; she wanted to go snowshoeing with him; she wanted to go to funerals with him; she wanted him to be the father of her children, and also her own father, and brother; she wanted all this while also to be free; she wanted to sleep with other men and come home and tell Hand about them. She wanted to live one life with Hand while living three others concurrently.

At the hotel, the horses: two were sitting in the grass, as if they’d been waiting, patiently but with pressing business, the white one glowing faintly, like a star on the ceiling of a child’s bedroom. The third and fourth were standing on the road, by the hedge, their dark hair shining.

HORSES: It’s never like we planned.

HORSES’ SHADOWS ON DIRT ROAD: I wish I could do more.

HORSES: We want violence, so we can kick and tear the world in thirds.

HORSES’ SHADOWS ON DIRT ROAD: I’m helpless to help you.

HORSES: All we need is the spark.

HORSES’ SHADOWS ON DIRT ROAD: When it happens, tell me what to do.

“Jesus,” said Pilar.

“Maybe they live here,” said Hand.

The horses had no symbolic value.

Pilar wanted to describe, to Hand, how she felt, every twenty minutes or so, about being there with him. They were together in the room, which had a roof and was warm. They were alive, though neither of them could have predicted with certainty that at their age they would both be alive — people flew on airplanes and drove cars after so many drinks, and every time they were away from each other or their family or friends, it seemed very likely to be the last; it was more logical, in some ways, to die or disappear. She had not grown up — her parents stayed home always — thinking that people could go far away, repeatedly, all over the earth, starting and finishing lives elsewhere, and then see each other again.

She wanted to rub herself in bananas. She wanted to open umbrellas into the faces of cats, make them scurry and scream. How could she sleep with Hand in this room? If it would be the only time, she wanted mirrors everywhere, so she could remember it a dozen ways.

But it would not be this night because he hadn’t kissed her on the forehead yet. But this would happen. Tomorrow one of them would find a reason to hug the other, and they would hold each other for too long, making sounds about how good it was to be here, and then he would pull away a few inches, to kiss her on the forehead. And the rest would come soon after. She pictured his penis flying across the room and into her, and then shooting in and out. His head on the wall, mounted.

Hand took the couch and Pilar took the bed and they slept to the pulse of crickets and, above, the overeager tick-ticking fan.

The morning arrived with applause and they made toast. In the sun the dirt road was white. All was white. As if Pilar’s eyes had been scrubbed free of pigment.

In a dark shop built to simulate a thatched hut, they rented two surfboards and the woman, orange-haired, oval-faced and Australian, pointed them to the nearest path to the water, across the street and beyond the blond sand.

They carried the boards across the white dirt road and onto the path, the sand soft and ashy. Through thin twisted trees and past a tin-roofed house, the beach spread left and right, flat and hard, at low tide a brown-gray parking lot. Close to the water the hard sand was wet, reflecting a blue sky, wide and musical with huge white flat-bottomed clouds.

There were dozens of surfers out already, ten just in front of them, another ten a few hundred yards to the right. The waves were small, with children playing in the shallows. Rocks to the left, body boarders close to shore. Pilar rubbed lotion on Hand’s back and he did hers. Look at him, she thought. His face is strong. What would a man do, she wondered, without a chin! The skin on his back was taut and smooth. His neck aquiline, if that were possible. There was, she felt, a world full of beautiful future leaders, each with a thousand fulfillable promises, in Hand’s neck.

Pilar couldn’t surf well. She could paddle. She could lie on a board and balance and lay her face on its smooth cool wet fiberglass surface and rest. She was good there. And when the waves came she could do a few things. She could get up. She could stand, turn a little (only to the right), and keep herself steady for a few seconds.

But everything closer to shore for her, this day, was more difficult. She worried if she was holding the board correctly. She worried if when she drew the rented board from the rack, she did so correctly. She wondered if she was supposed to carry the board with its slight concavity out, away from her hip, or toward it. She worried if she should attach the Velcro ankle strap, which was in turn attached to the board and prevents the board from flying away after surfer and board fail, while in the surf shop area, once she hit sand, or when her ankles were wet with water. She didn’t know if the board, when not in use, should be set upon the sand bottom-fin up, or down. She was concerned that if she did any of these things wrong she would be laughed at or pointed at and removed.

So she watched. She watched when others rented their boards to see how they drew them from the rack. She watched to see how they held them, carried them, when they strapped on their ankle bungees. And she did as they did, even though, as often as not, they didn’t know either. Everyone was an amateur, everyone pretending at grace — that’s why they were renting boards and did not own them, and that’s why they were surfing here, at Alta, where the waves were small and forgiving and the water was warm, like the inside of a plum.

GOD: I own you like I own the caves.

THE OCEAN: Not a chance. No comparison.

GOD: I made you. I could tame you.

THE OCEAN: At one time, maybe. But not now.

GOD: I will come to you, freeze you, break you.

THE OCEAN: I will spread myself like wings. I am a billion tiny feathers. You have no idea what’s happened to me.

Pilar and Hand walked into the water, same temperature as the air, and Hand bent himself in half, dropping his face in the foam and coming up headsoaked. He pushed the hair back from his face and looked at Pilar and Pilar knew that some people, implausibly, look better wet.

“The water’s so warm,” she said.

“It’s the greatest water I know,” he said.

They paddled out past the breaks. The waves were not large but the process was more tiring than she had remembered. She was knocked back six times and by the time they were on flat water again she was exhausted, her triceps aching, shuffling their feet, children in museums.

Pilar and Hand were straddling their boards, watching the horizon for coming waves.

A good swell came, five feet high, and with two quick strong strokes Hand was up. Pilar watched him depart for the beach. From behind, it looked like he was riding a very fast escalator. Or a conveyor belt. A conveyor belt being chased by a wave. From behind she saw only the round of the wave’s top, and this obscured Hand’s lower half. She was watching and he was going and going. He had a nice longboard stance, standing straight up, knees only slightly bent, leaning back, his whole frame one perfect diagonal line.

Then he was back, paddling quickly, smiling. He settled next to her and sat up on his board.

“That was nice,” he said.

“It looked nice,” she said.

Pilar liked what he had done, but for the time being she was content to sit. Or even to lie down. She had been in this town for half a day, awake this morning for an hour, and was prepared to do more resting, even if it was here, on the water. She stretched out on the board, resting her cheek on its wet cool creamy white, the wax, sand-encrusted, rough on her face. The water came over the board gently and kissed her. It said shuckashucka and it kissed her. She could sleep here. She could probably live here, on this board, her shoulders burning. There was no difference between resting her face here and resting her face on her mother’s stomach when she was younger, no difference between feeling her breasts flattened against the board and feeling these breasts flattened against the backs of men. She liked to sleep that way, with men on their stomachs and her breasts on their back. It never worked — she never actually fell asleep in this position, but she liked to try.

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.

Pilar and Hand had woken up facing opposite walls but their ankles entwined. They smiled at each other and he reached over and grabbed her nose, as if to pluck it off. She knew that they would continue to sleep together because the night before had been good, and nothing wrong had happened. It would be this way: at night they would brush their teeth and sit on the bed and pull their legs around and under the thin blanket. They would scoot toward each other, their hands searching like those of children pretending to be blind.

To Pilar’s left came three small sharks, striped, built like jets. They were headed for her. She was calm and knew she could make it safely. She pointed her head toward the shore and with her flippers gave the sharks a flurry of waved good-byes, the fins like handkerchiefs in a breeze. Close to shore she stood in the warm shallows, feet slipping over the mossy rocks, and looked for Hand. He wasn’t anywhere. She wanted him not to be attacked by sharks. She wanted to sit on him, on this island, facing the sunset — it was all the colors of a bloody wound.

But there was a man on the island. She hadn’t seen him before. Or he’d just shown up, and Hand was not visible but the man, not far away, waved to her and stepped toward her. He was about forty, and wearing a small swimsuit and sunglasses, neon-framed, reflective lenses. She jumped back into the water, not fearing the sharks. He followed her to the water and then screamed at her, slapping his chest.

On the way back to shore, after she recounted the episode and described the man — Hand had not seen him — Hand scolded her for wearing clothes that invited the attention of men in the town whom the two of them didn’t know enough about and couldn’t necessarily trust.

“I’ve always wondered what it would be like to be seen as prey,” he said.

He went into great detail about what the men in the town had been doing when she’d been walking by. There was the guard in front of the bank, who carried a semiautomatic rifle and, according to Hand, looked Pilar up and down and inside out each time they went into the bank or passed by. How does she decide not to wear a bra? Hand wanted to know this. Not to alarm her, he said, but men covet certain women, women they see every day. So perhaps it would behoove her — he used this word — to do more to disinvite the gaze of these men.

She was speechless. She was furious and confused and ashamed and wanted to club him and kick him and jump on his head.

“I care about you, Pilar,” he said. “Don’t get pissed. And don’t make that face.”

Her lower teeth were jutting out, like a piranha’s. She knew she did this. She was angry that it was now this way with them, and so soon: she was not free. She would be given advice, or whatever it was. They paddled and she focused on the broken hillside. She put Hand in a new category. He was that. This was this, and nothing more.

In the evenings the sun dropped through the ocean and the sky would darken quickly. Armadillos scurried below their deck, under the streetlamp, their shiny shells sniffling through the high grass. Under the bed where Pilar and Hand slept, platoons of ants circled around crumbs and moved them to the door, under, and on to parts unknown. Geckos squiggled up and down the wall above the screen door, heading to and from what appeared to be their home, in the beam in the center of the room. The dusty white light during the day never wavered. There were three or four clouds all week.

For a few days Pilar and Hand were married. They surfed and rested their boards fin-up on the hard sand, sat on the flat beach, ate round crackers and drank Fanta. They watched the water, eating nuts and cookies. After they finished eating they would nap, her head in his stomach, and in an hour they would paddle out again. They would stay in the water until the water became black, and then stay until the sun set into it and the black water was striped orange loosely.

At night the surfers roamed the streets barefoot but with hair fluffy from having been finally washed. Couples walked, leaning into each other while glancing at people they found more attractive. Or maybe not. There was no way to know what they were thinking.

Every night, after dinner, Pilar and Hand bought ice cream from a man who had been burned on half of his face. Burned or perhaps it was coming from below — his face had great growths on it, oval and coarse, like the ass of a boar. Usually the moon was yellow behind Vaseline. Sometimes there was hay on the street.

One night they went to see the huge migratory turtles huff ashore and lay their eggs, hundreds of eggs, all of them soft and slathered in gel. They stood behind one enormous one as it swept sand into its hole, sprinkling each group of eggs.

Some days they could hear people playing tennis, but they could not see the court, and even looked for it one day and could not find it. They watched a man painting a picture of the beach; he welcomed their watching and talking. He was from Philadelphia and had had a bad year, a litigious divorce and a friend dead, killed driving to Tahoe.

They slept together once sober and it was awkward — they were not lovers but friends playing Twister. They went back to their original plan the next night. They drank a bit, and then went to bed, just under the surface of consciousness, feeling no edges. Someone watching them from afar might ask: How did they speak to each other? The answer: With the warmth of very old friends, though they were not yet old. How did he touch her? Clumsily, for he was clumsy and she was critical. How did she kiss him? Desperately, pulling and pushing, like a woman trying to get to the bottom of a deep pool.

When they walked usually there were stones in their shoes, because the road was dotted with pebbles and their shoes were loose.

They were leaving Alta the next afternoon — Pilar for home and Hand for Granada and there were no future plans — so they rented boards early and were in the water by nine. It was an uncomplicated day.

Hand was out in the sea before her and she watched him until she was too hot to stay dry. She paddled past the breaks, which meant pushing through four full waves collapsing, like drunks, onto her. Each time she would have to either push the board’s nose into the wave and hope she stayed on, or would preemptively surrender, diving off, waiting for the board to bungee away and come back to her. She had never been so tired.

Hand soon shot past her, on a bigger wave, one that would have crushed Pilar had she tried it. She watched him speed into the beach, looking like he was going faster than the wave. She noticed that people riding waves seem to be moving much faster than waves do when they’re traveling without passengers. Hand had caught this one at the perfect moment and was riding it left, on and on, as it sped away and toward the estuary. It seemed endless. He waved to Pilar. She waved back. It’s weird, Pilar thought, to wave to someone while they’re standing on water. She maybe loved him.

She sat up again, watching the flat blue for growths.

If there were a question that needed to be answered in this story it would be not one but many, and would be these: How can a world allow all this? Allow these people to live so long? To travel all these miles south, to a place so different but still so comfortable, and in that place, meet again? To allow them to be naked together for the first time? What would their parents think? What would their friends think? Would anyone object? Who would plan for them? How many times in life can we make decisions that are important but will not hurt anyone? Are we obligated — maybe we are — to say yes to any choice when no one will be hurt? We use the word hurt when talking about things like this because when these things go wrong it can feel as if you were hit in the sternum by a huge animal that’s run for miles just to strike you.

In two hours, she found two waves. Waves were something she cared about now. But she began to care more about seeing them than catching them, and more about catching them than riding them, and above all she wanted to simply stay out beyond the breaks. Because after each ride, the trip back, past the breaks, was too much.

Her arms seemed so thin, like narrow dowels being pushed through syrup. The ache at her shoulders brought her near tears. It wasn’t right that it should be so hard, especially here. The waves would crash ahead of her and the tall strong foam would roll at her, and would then run over her. Knocked off the board, she would scrape the water off her face, spit, expel snot, jump back on the board, paddle twice, achieve maybe ten feet of progress out, and then get knocked over again. Her spirit was broken many times.

She closed her eyes. Opened them, closed them. She could end this world or allow it. This was a moment when a believer, a thoughtful believer, would think of God’s work, and how good it was. The waves were perfect to the right and perfect to the left. Far away there were loud long hoots from the man in the cowboy hat, riding a long low slow breaker all the way in. Pilar thought of the man at her church group who taught everyone how to win at pinball. She thought of curved penises. For a while she was enchanted by those who proposed that God was in nature, was all around us, was the accumulated natural world. “God,” they would suggest, “is in all living things. God is beauty, God is in the long grass and the foam finishing a waterfall.” That sort of thing. She liked that idea, God being in things that she could see, because she liked seeing things and wanted to believe in these things that she loved looking at — loved the notion that it was all here and easily observable, with one’s eyes being in some way the clergy, the connection between God and—

She saw Hand, almost at the estuary, finally end his ride, nimbly stepping off his board and into the water, as if descending from a chariot. He stood for a second, knee-deep, and adjusted his bathing suit. Then he doubled over again and dumped his head. Had his hair had gone dry during his ride? Incredible. He wouldn’t be back for a while.

But a single contained God implied or insisted upon a hierarchy that she didn’t accept. God gave way to a system of extremes, and implied choices, and choices required separations, divisions, subtle condemnations. She was not ready to choose one God, so there would not be this sort of god in Pilar’s world, and thus the transcendental deity—

But then why God at all? The oil-wet water was not God. It was not the least bit spiritual. It was oil-wet water, and it felt perfect when Pilar put her hand into it, and it kissed her palm again and again, would never stop kissing her palm and why wasn’t that enough?

Her board was pointing almost directly toward the now-dimming sun. The dimming sun made the water seem even more like oil, and where the sun did not highlight the water, the water was black. The sun was large and was more three-dimensional than usual. The water was black where the sun wasn’t making it gold. The water was getting warmer and the surfers around her became with each passing minute more abstract, closer to silhouettes, moving in slow motion.

She sat up on the board, straddling it. She didn’t want to surf. She wanted to sit here for a long time, the waves behind her, ridden by the vague black figures. She wanted only to sit and stare ahead and wait for more of the water to go golden.

When the sun fell and the water turned black she would ride the last wave in and sleep. She felt that she knew how her old age would feel. She would be too tired to move. She knew that if she rode in she would not be able to ride out again.

They left the town at dusk. The roped road was potholed completely, full of slow-driving tourists in SUVs, so careful with their rentals, like elephants stepping gingerly around puddles. Pilar and Hand passed and left them and drove away from a dusk gaudy with purple. The road went from dirt to gravel to finally pavement unpotholed, but remained two lanes, winding back and forth over hills and down hills and always under a perfect canopy of trees with long fingers overhead laced.

When the night went black they realized their lights were too bright. Passing cars thought their high beams were on, and flashed them. They flashed them back, showing them their real brights, and then, to retaliate, the cars would flash theirs again. It happened a hundred times. They hated the implication of their thoughtlessness, and the strain on their eyes was terrible, all the flashing, all that quick bright anger.

The night before, it was windy and restless outside, and Pilar and Hand had recently fallen asleep and were still lying front to back, Hand’s knees behind Pilar’s knees. There was a loud thump. Hand sat up and when Pilar moved to investigate, he gestured her to stay in bed. She did because she wanted to see what he would do. Was she scared? She was. Hand had made her convinced — more when she thought about it than when she didn’t — that the man from the bank would come, with his gun, and kill Hand and then rape her.

Hand was at the front door of the room when Pilar looked up and found the origin of the sound. It was a hole in the roof, over the bed, where the skylight once was. The wind had pulled the skylight off, and Pilar could see the clear black night through the square in the ceiling. Hand came back to bed and they were friends in bed together, nude. Hand said he liked going to the door to look for invaders and Pilar said she was glad it was a hole in the roof.