Vacation (10 page)

The other Christian might step outside, light a cigarette.

Should you be doing that? Myers said. Isn’t your body your temple?

Fuck off, she said.

One of the Christians might wander into the museum courtyard and stare sadly at a monkey on a chain who lay panting on a square of cement.

Myers found him. What’s the matter with your girlfriend?

She wanted to go to El Salvador, where the real martyrs are. She wanted hardship. I told her being a Christian is hard enough.

Myers scoffed. Come off it. What’s so hard about it?

Faith is hard.

What’s hard? All you have to do is think something.

It’s a lot harder than staying alive, which is all
you
have to do.

True, but that’s because what you have to think is so weird. Of course it’s hard to believe a thing like that.

This isn’t a Christian walk, remember? said the Christian.

Funny, the first place we went was a church.

Even if he wanted to, he couldn’t search all the towns. Look at this map. The towns dotted the page in casual disorder. And he wasn’t going to be able to inspect every tourist. There were hundreds of them, limping around with their sissy bottles of water, Myers among them, one of them. The Nicaraguans were all right, not waving the tourists away like stray dogs or chasing them off with sticks. Everybody seemed to get on fairly well. But the whole experience was inconvenient for one thing, lots of getting up and sitting down, lots of staring at the pages of the guidebook while trying to walk without bumping into anything and pitching over. And the entire affair was too hot, as if a madman had come along and heated the place up—really outrageous—and everyone walking around as if it were normal, as if the heat were the least interesting outrageous experience of the day.

So the plan was: Find Gray, go home, apply for employment, continue to function. In that order.

So far it had been more or less a successful day for the majority of U.S. citizens present. No one had gotten hurt or fallen down. No one had lost their money or been left behind. There had been no bizarre conversations or accusations. No one tried to block a tourist’s path and said the tourist looked suspect. No tourist spoke beyond the required niceties and strained efforts to make themselves understood. All was in order. Only Myers was not getting his money’s worth. But he still had nine more vacation days left on his plane ticket, nine more days to disjoint this country and shake out the man.

They made a right. Continued down another stretch. Fine business! a Christian said approvingly. Their sewer committee seems to be in friendly relations with each other, which is more than I can say for our hometown.

The other Christian did something with her eyes.

Hey, said the first Christian. Why do you have to do that?

Do what?

He turned to Myers. Did you see what she did?

Um, Myers said. I’m going to check my email. He walked away down the street, leaving them standing at odd angles from each other behind him.

He ducked into an Internet café, sat down, and clicked Retrieve.

Now, he had read all the earthquake advisory materials he had come into contact with in the guidebook, on the cathedral wall, in the
¡Vamos, Nica!
brochure in his room—information about collapsing walls, flying glass, fore- and aftershocks, doorways, falling objects, utility wires, exterior structures, ground movement. Don’t panic. Stay in bed. Put a pillow over your head. Go to your Department Evacuation Assembly Point. Stay as safe as possible. But there was hardly time to take private measures. When the earthquake came, Myers found himself on the floor of the Internet facility.

Before falling out of his chair, he checked his email, snipped three spams from the stem, and then saw it: Gray had responded at last.

Got your note, Myers. Where the hell is Granada? Seems to me that’s in Spain. Here’s a hard rock for you—right between the blades. The head is a difficult object, Myers. I’ve been giving it some thought. The worst is when you can’t get the thing off, though it looks like you yourself may have tried a time or two...

The mention of the head didn’t make much sense. He had never told Gray about his childhood accident.

…Glad to hear you’re joining me, Myers. Once you’re here the true vacation begins: two college buddies hit the sights, eat foods that seem strange to them, have moments they’ll always remember, buy trinkets—I have seen exactly zero in the trinkets regard, by the way. Where are the trinkets? The painted bowls, the woven shoes, the bird whistle?…

At that moment the Granada earthquake hit, but compared to Gray’s email, it seemed pretty minor. The earth could crack in half for all Myers cared. It would barely race the bland rhythm of his heart. Gray’s email was the real business going on. But it was so odd and so far from describing the experience Myers was having that it made him wonder if there’d been a mistake, if Myers had confused the thing, ended up in the wrong country, on the wrong continent, following the wrong man, separated from the right one by time and ocean, if there were two Nicaraguas.

…Oh, we’ll have enough to do, Myers. We’ll dust off the old Esperanto dictionary. Dig out the grammar and tapes, do our part for world unification. Let’s spend an evening at the local food bank, hang out the blocks of cheese, stir up the spaghetti. By God, I talked about solutions back in the day. Brick in the toilet, union strike, Marshall Plan. The world’s not going to end but it sure is going to slow down, my friend.

You might hurry a bit. I need you just now. I asked my ex to send my little girl, but the poor thing’s barely into panties. I don’t think she’d be much use in any case…

A little earthquake. Not as small as a tremor but nothing to get all clobbered over. A sideshow earthquake. The five-and-ten kind. Flea fair.

The first he knew he was on the floor. Not the first. The first he knew the desk had wheels because it was moving. This desk has wheels, he thought, because it is moving, but he could see very well that it had no wheels because he was looking at its feet. Then he was on the floor with a heavy thing on top of him. No, first the wheels when there were none, then the sound (what he would later recall as the earthquake sound, no other sound like it in the world, he would say to whoever was listening, and no one would be), then the floor with a cement block crushing one side of him. So wheels, then sound, then him falling over, because the ground was buckling. The ground shoved him up in his chair and then over. So wheels, sound, ground, the crack of his own bone. End to end it couldn’t have been more than twenty seconds.

…Get over here, Myers. Do you understand? Sway this way. Approach. Fleet leg. Meet me on Corn Island. The most beautiful island in the world. I’ll see you at the hotel.

Gray

It was not the only time he’d felt the ground move. There was the time he and his wife went to the ocean—who says they’d never taken a vacation? They’d had a terrific time. They went floating on a raft, drifting, the ocean belly below them. Behind them the land looked like ash. But after a few hours this way the sky darkened and the raft turned in circles and they had a small struggle making it back. He swore that it was the earth bucking them out farther. No, she had said. The world spinning around the way it does, she said, of course the soup is going to stir.

His eyes opened and he blinked through the grit. He went over it again, did not understand. Gray needed him? He raised his head slightly. His arm was bent the wrong way under the cement partition. Corn Island? What was that? Did he mean Coney Island? Was the damn man back in New York? His breath stuttered out of him. He felt nothing, then he did.

His closing thought: Why did Gray get on that bus two years ago? Why had he left their lives?

DAUGHTER

I don’t know if he was ever here, on this spot in particular. I have no information about where exactly he was, only that he did come here, that small bit is certain, and that he was never heard from again. There’s hardly anybody on this island. I can’t imagine what it was like all those years ago, since it seems like places get more crowded as time passes, not less so. There may have been no one at all. As I walk, I treat each place like a place he saw: My dad was here on Corn Island and he was thinking of me as he walked along the beach. He wanted to bring me with him but I was too young. Mother wouldn’t let him. I look into each face—not just here but everywhere—and I wonder, Could that be him? I have pictures but he could look like anyone by now. He could be somewhere doing the same thing, looking into the faces of young women and asking, Is it her? He could have gotten treatment, may still be alive, could have lost his memory, and could be sitting on the beach a kilometer away, knowing that he’s missing something (me) but not knowing what it is, not able to put a word on it precisely, or an image. If there is anywhere he is, it is probably here, because time seems to have slowed on this island, so if he had a month to live someplace else it could have easily stretched into years and years on this island. I am standing with my feet just touching the water. I can imagine him.

In an earthquake, if trapped, the experts advise, do not light a match, do not move or kick, do not shout. Use a whistle or tap on a pipe.

Yes, one should always carry a whistle in earthquake country because you might be crushed under a building and not able to holler for help but only able to breathe lightly into your whistle. Or you might be buried alive under the bricks and have just enough air to toot, while your voice, should you have the strength to scream, is absorbed into the dust and paint. Or you might be flung far from civilization and have two broken feet so you can’t walk back and two broken arms so you can’t drag yourself over the dirt but you do have this handy whistle which, if you are too far to be heard and rescued, can be used as solo entertainment while you wait to slowly die.

So bring your whistle. Of course it is always possible that you wind up with your arm stuck under a slab of concrete so you can’t reach the whistle (as Myers’s arm is now), so it is best to keep the whistle in your mouth. No one with a whistle cuts an odd figure, though it may be difficult to speak with a whistle in your mouth. Not to mention, how are you supposed to eat with a whistle in the way? Or take a drink? Or sleep on your face? Advice: make someone else hold the whistle. But what if you don’t have anyone else? What if you’re all alone? In that case, sit with your whistle in your mouth. Don’t eat or sleep. Don’t examine the celebrated contents of your surroundings. Don’t do anything. Wait for the earthquake. The earthquake is coming.

Chapter Ten

My dearest wife,

Today I saw collections of documents, works of art, phenomena described in books. I walked through the fields. I went to a town filled with more tourists than citizens—tourists sitting in seats, tourists rising to occasions, large tourists, small tourists, tourists frozen in an arabesque on the stairs.

As I am alive, I am your husband.

…was one way Myers could put it. Under the partition, tacked to the floor, he moved one finger as if to press Send.

More about Gray:

Did Gray reconcile with his wife when he left the city after spending some months at the bachelor’s?

He didn’t.

Where did he go?

Back to Syracuse. He settled down seventeen blocks from the spot of his original departure.

Why did he do that?

In order to stand by and take advantage of the rights bequeathed to him by the court: ninety-six hours divided in two and renewed monthly to visit with the product of his strife, a very small child, whom he first bundled in a blanket and carried home in the car, later picked up from the floor where she sat sucking her arm, and later led out by the hand.

His life was unsatisfactory. Sort of a half-life, really, decreasing in predictable segments, but he didn’t complain because he loved the child in that wide, unknowable, impassioned, parental manner. It was for the sake of this small child that Gray saved his salary, purchased one squarish house (which Myers later sat in front of in vain, in rain), two welcome mats (front and back), one swing-set apparatus (sort of a federation of tubing and slats, which he unfolded, reconstructed, and depressed into the backyard in a spot where he could glimpse from the window the child tipping around on it if he was inside preparing a pudding snack). So it was.

Now Myers found he was in a conveyance, skirting the sides of walls, retreating. He couldn’t recall what had happened. The accident had been shaken from his head. Patches of people and trees sucked away from him as if slingshot. Military trucks stood at the side of the road, dozens of soldiers milling around, growing smaller. His thoughts felt wrapped in blankets. What was he doing here? A straight line of green stood across the sky.