Vacation (19 page)

My loving husband,

What can you mean that you follow him too? All I know is that like all people who try to justify their stand, you do what you want to do and then you say your way is right. You exaggerate the morality of your position and the immorality of mine. If I were to follow such a man, I couldn’t tell you why because you wouldn’t understand. But I can tell you that any man who lied to me, who kept vital information secret, would not receive my admiration.

Your gentle wife

And his briefcase got soaked, of course, as did his leather shoes, his pant cuffs, his seat. Well, what was he going to do about it. You can’t protect everything. Water, mud, earth. Eventually everything returns to the same color.

My dearest wife,

Lie? What lie?

The lie about your head.

I never told you anything about my head.

Hello? I never told you anything about my head.

About the time you jumped out the window. You never told me.

Fell. I fell out the window.

Jumped. You jumped. There were witnesses.

I fell.

All right, let’s say “went.” The time you went out the window.

Each time he toppled out onto a dim brackish shore, he got on the next boat, and the next, and the next. Who could have known a lake could be so large and contain so much in it? But he couldn’t stop to rest. He got up and sat down when people pointed and told him to and he picked up his briefcase when it was in the way. He moved from island to island across the lake, each spot winging him a little farther from one side and a little closer to the other.

Gray, Nicaragua is driving me crazy. I’d do anything to make it out of here. The woman I love is far away and the town I’ve stopped in sells only a gross drink called Rojita. I’m almost out of money and I’ve got the police after me now. My ribs are cracked. My arm is broken. My fingers have numbed. Look, can we meet someplace else? Corn Island is a bit tricky just now. How about San Juan del Sur? Five-dollar lobster, turtle days, two for one, southern sun, Peace Corps singalongs. What do you say?

Myers

Myers! Get up on those legbones and hobble over here. I’m in some kind of overgrown maze, enemy planes above. But you can get in on the highway and lead me out—bring the binoculars.

Gray

Okay, Gray, Corn Island it is. I can see San Juan is out. I’ll get there somehow, but be ready to make a run for it. Get out your best sunhat, pocket the lotion. Stay where you are. I’m coming to get you
.

Myers staggered up the shore. He was so worn out, he wanted to lie down in the water. He made it over to the men. I’m looking for a boat, he said.

Looks like we’re looking for you, one said.

How’s that?

You fit the description, more or less.

Goddamn it—Myers must have really been a slowpoke to move so slowly across this country and to so slowly register just how far these hotel people were willing to go for their few hundred bucks. They would enlist boat police, boy scouts, strangers from far-off lands. They’d send out a fleet to float through a mosaic of islands. Myers stood there awhile, considering running, though these guys looked pretty tough, and where was he going to run? He was so tired.

Fine, Myers said at last. Toot the horn. Whistle the dogs. I give up. I’m done.

About time, they said. What a fuss you’ve made.

What’s going to happen to me?

You tell us, buddy. We don’t know what you’ve done.

I don’t care. Just take me in.

Take you? they said. Are we a taxiboat? A busboat? You go yourself.

Where?

For God’s sake, man, you go by the name Gray?

Gray? Myers said.

Your wife wants you home, one said, crooking a finger at him.

My wife?

Better get moving, he said. You know how the ladies are.

All right, Myers said, carefully.

On the double, buddy. That way’s the boats.

All right, Myers said again. He limped off.

My dearest wife,

All right, I’ll tell you from the beginning but it won’t change anything now. It began long before our marriage, long before I ever held your hand. It began on a day not unlike this one. Warm, sunny, clear. I was following a bird and the next thing I knew I was out the window. I suppose there was agency in it, yes. I could have stopped at the ledge but I didn’t. I chose not to. So what? It’s what I did and in some way it makes me who I am. I am the man who went out the window, dropped five stories, and landed on his head. I didn’t intend it or see it coming. That is, I didn’t see the pavement coming up fast. I do recall the framed sky, a bird sliding through a slot in it, my hand reaching as I approached the window. The outside was nothing but posterboard. Then the foothold, the tailspin, and my head crushed like a cantaloupe.

Sometimes we act without reason. Sometimes we have only the dim conviction that we have expressed ourselves vividly.

Since that fall, I have felt apart from others. Misaligned. As if somehow that contact with cement knocked me off course, steered me astray. I have lived a half-life, a papery existence. Except in my best days with you, I have felt morbidly alone and uncertain. I can’t say I wish I had died because I’m not certain I’m not dead. I can’t say I wish I had lived because I seem to be alive.
I feel a little more dead than yesterday though, a little less alive. Today I’m on my way to Corn Island. I have only the vaguest idea of where it might be and the name itself means nothing. But I have one more thing to take care of.

Your adoring husband

THE WIFE’S CONFESSION (APPENDIX)

I gave him a rock once. I dug it out of the sand with a stick and wiped the dirt off with my thumbs. We were at the beach, just married. It was our honeymoon. We hardly knew each other back then—I’d like to know how many people look at their spouses and think that. I’d bet quite a few.

What’s this, a rock? he said. What’s so neat about that?

He put it on the towel, had his crossword back in his hand.

No one’s ever touched it before, I said. Except me. And now you.

He picked it up again. It had a glint in it like an emerald.

It does seem ridiculous but what I meant was that no one had ever touched
me
before. I didn’t want to have to say it and I knew with him I didn’t have to say it. He knew my heart was a rock and that was okay with him. That was something about him: in some deep way and despite all else wrong with him, with us, he accepted me.

He kept the rock. It’s still here.

MARIA

Did he fall out of bed or did he just climb onto the floor? I came for the light and he was on the floor, the sheet with him, tangled. If he was going to fall on the floor, I wasn’t going to be able to watch every minute and make sure he didn’t and I told him so. After that he stayed in the bed. Only once he got up and tried to walk around the room. Four days ago was the last time he went out by himself. He went to the Internet café two doors down and had to be helped back. He won’t be doing it again.

He’s dying, that’s all. I’m just watching.

I’ve been the owner of the hotel since my husband left eight years, seven months ago.

Yesterday I called my neighbor because she was once a dancer in the U.S., will never stop talking about it and how she speaks English and had such beautiful legs and how all the men of Miami sent her blooms. So she came over to be an interpreter. We went up to his room and stood over him in the bed. What do you want me to say? she said.

I said, Ask him does he know he’s sick.

She did and he said, Yes, by force if necessary.

Okay, I said, ask him does he want some soup.

Of course he wants soup, she said. Look at him, he always wants soup.

Ask him does he know where he is, I said.

So she did and he lay there thinking. He clearly didn’t know.

Okay, ask him if he’s in an airport, a hotel, or at home.

He thought about it and then said airport, which, okay, because there was a rumbling noise out the window that was a truck but could have been a plane.

Ask him where he’s going, I said.

Don’t play him for dumb.

Ask him does he know why he’s here. Ask him what he wants us to do. Does he know he’s dying? Ask him that. Does he want to live?

Leave the poor man alone, my neighbor said. She’s bringing you soup, she said to him.

We went downstairs to the kitchen and we said together, Oh my God, can you believe how messed that man is in the head as well as the body? He is doomed, we said, doomed, doomed.

Today he is worse and I know it because his eyes are glossy and his breath is coming in gasps and I know it will not be long. I call the doctor over and he says days now. Is his family coming? he wants to know.

Family? I say. Am I supposed to find his family?

Write a letter to the U.S. Embassy, woman.

So I write the letter and I mean to post it but it’s too late, the next day he dies.

Chapter Seventeen

Myers had already had it by the time he took his life jacket and sat where he was told. But he knew by the map that he didn’t have much farther to go. Then the man said they were short two people and without them they couldn’t go on.

The man said they would wait. So they sat, jammed in and lined in rows, low in the muddy water, the jungle around them darkening by degrees. Maybe they sat for two hours. At last people began to stand, pull their life jackets over their heads, climb out of the panga.

Where are you going? Myers said.

Someone will come, he said.

But no. No one was coming. The hot wind blew. They would all reassemble in the morning at five and try again.

In the morning he and the others reassembled in the panga. Someone else had arrived in the night on a boat, or a bus, or a horse, or a cart. Now there was one space left and they sat in their life jackets waiting. The sun was an unfriendly arrow. Finally three people came walking down the dock with their boxes and nets and suitcases. To Bluefields? they said. Bluefields?

Nobody knew what to do.

At last they had to admit they were going there too. And everyone took off their life jackets and climbed out of the panga, one by one, and walked across the dock to a bigger panga and put on other life jackets and sat back down. Everything was fine. Until the man who owned the first panga came walking over in a slouch.

It was all right with him. His feelings weren’t hurt. He didn’t mind if they wanted to take the other man’s panga. Even if he had bought the gas. Even if he had sat with them for hours one day and hours another. He didn’t mind. But no way was anybody getting their money back.

Myers wanted to say, For God’s sake, let’s just all pay again, but even he needed his cash.

So they all took off their life jackets and lined off the bigger panga and got back on the smaller panga and put back on the other life jackets and sat back down. Somehow they managed to squeeze all three of those men on too.

And then the owner said, We can’t go on, the boat is sinking. And indeed it was, water spilling over the sides. So two of the three men climbed out of the panga and stood on the dock with their luggage in a pile beside them. The town spired behind them. And then the panga was off.

They told Myers to sit in the middle. Get in the middle, they said, but he wouldn’t budge. He wanted to look at the jungle as they passed or some such thing, some remnant of “vacation” torn off and left hanging in his mind. But as soon as they started going he could see why they said to get in the middle. The water lifted like a wall and sprayed into the boat, and then it began to rain and everybody at once pulled a giant piece of plastic over the boat, which the people not in the middle had to hold down with their fingers. Which with an arm in a sling it was very hard to hold. Myers’s side kept flying up and everyone yelled at him and finally they made him crawl over someone and get in the middle like they’d said in the first place.