Vacation (24 page)

These bad boys are mine, he said. I taught them how to do somersaults.

I’ve seen some do cartwheels.

They can do a jig in the air on their tails.

Pretty neat trick. If all you’ve got is a tail.

They came here wild as sperm, he said. I’ve been with them since day one. They know my voice. I know theirs.

This place is shutting down, I said. I walked a little closer. What’s going to happen to them?

Stop right there, he said.

I stopped.

What are you doing here? he said.

They began to slow down. Nobody was fine. How far is it? they said. They were squinting and sweating. The filmmakers were putting down their bags, sitting. How much longer, do you think?

You goddamn people, the untrainer said. He threw his hat in the sand. The stupidest people I ever saw in my life.

Oh, we’re very sorry. They got to their feet.

The untrainer picked up his hat. He passed around his bottle of water and so did Myers. They all resumed the walk, crowdedly, quieter, until they arrived.

Other articles to track: what’s not there—the indentations in beds, on seats, empty spaces where Myers once had been, spaces not yet filled by another, the space in a particular corner of the bus station where he had stood for one hour and twenty minutes, the space under a tree where he had sought shade for a few moments while he looked up a fact in his guidebook. Myers is gone but the air still bends around his shape as air does around all shapes that once lived in it. Also spaces on shelves from where he removed objects, such as the pack of batteries he bought for his razor, the sunblock, the food off the plates, the hole in the hen’s heart for the egg he ate for breakfast.

So how do you feel? a reporter asked the vet.

Well, I’ll tell you, said the vet. There’s always tension about moving an animal, but we have a plan for everything and an alternate plan for everything else.

A few poles stuck out of the water. It was taking a while to see even a little bit of dolphin. It hardly surfaced anymore, just to catch a breath.

The coast guard was handing out life jackets and people were putting them on. Myers couldn’t fit his over the sling. He carried it around and then set it down and lost track of it. One of the sea divers had his equipment on upside down. Nobody wanted to tell him.

Film me, said the sea diver. Why aren’t you filming me?

This is about protocol, said the vet. That is the essential part. You have to meet with the navy, the army, the government. You have to look at the supplies, the nets. But the main thing is the protocol, how to move the animal, how to hold the animal.

The film equipment was sinking in the sand.

CLAIRE

What do you want? said the man. You have business here?

For a moment I couldn’t speak.

My father died, I peeped.

So what. Fathers die.

He wasn’t my real father.

Nobody raises their own kids anymore.

I know who my real father is.

Everyone has a father.

No, it’s him, I said. I opened my bag and found the photo. I stepped forward, held it out. What do you think of that? This man is my father. How about that? The one with the hoop.

He set down his bucket, removed a pair of glasses from his jumpsuit pocket. Put them on and looked at the photo. He took them off and looked at me.

You’re meeting him here? he said.

It seemed to Myers that everyone had to be there by then, what with all those people milling around, but everyone wasn’t. Some people were still on the coast guard boat because they sailed by, waving and pointing at themselves so they would get filmed too, and someone was in a truck because it came riding over the sand and stopped. Then another boat showed up full of mattresses and the soldiers dragged the mattresses out of the boat and dropped them, first in the water, then in the sand. They put the mattresses in the back of the truck. Then they took out a yellow stretcher and entered the water. They slid the stretcher under the net. They moved forward bit by bit, closing the net—the dolphin swimming back and forth, and the untrainer too, swimming back and forth—until the net was a small bubble and the dolphin was thrashing and not getting in the stretcher like he was supposed to.

What are we going to do? the soldiers said. We’ll never get him in the stretcher.

The untrainer said, Would you idiots get out of my way? And he took the dolphin and put him in the stretcher.

Nobody had ever seen anything like that in their life, they all agreed, the way he put that animal there.

Meanwhile, it started to rain.

On Myers, if anyone is interested: If he were to survive this and not die in deep water, he would eventually find his way back to New York, would eventually let curiosity burn in through the crack in his skull and he would wander back to her apartment, the suspended box that they had once shared. He would stand outside in the cold and look up and see a light in the window. Instead of strolling away or ringing the bell, he would sneak around the back, climb the fire escape. He’d have to jump to grab the ladder, would twice fall in the snow. But the third time he’d make it, would pull the ladder down and hoist himself up. He’d walk up to their floor and peer in the window. He’d be ready to run or ready to break in the window shouting, the choice depending on his own unknowable reactions, not on whatever he saw there—he would assume he would see her with Gray (an absurd idea, since she hadn’t seen Gray in years and anyway he was dead, but Myers, also dead by this time, would never know that). None of this will happen, but if it did, she would be there alone, curled on the couch, a single lamp lit, the TV flashing blue on her face.

If he had seen that, it would have proved nothing to him, of course. She could have been living with Gray or another man who could be out for the evening, at his own supposed meeting, following someone else, coming home any minute. He could have already gone to bed and she, sleepless, had stayed up a half hour longer. It could mean the man had rejected her and now she was lying there, lonely and sad, missing him, not Myers. Myers would watch as long as he dared, fog the window, twice raise his hand to knock, twice lower it. He would crawl back down, drop into the snow.

If he had made it back, he would have done it once more—not to his wife, not her (his) apartment, but someone else’s, another woman, two years after that, and this time she, the other she, the new she,
would
be with someone else, a man, also normal-looking like Gray, but not Gray, and the two of them would be sitting side by side, also on a couch, also watching TV, and the moment would look so drab and unintimate that it would be almost impossible to be jealous but Myers would manage.

Despite these behaviors appropriate only to grief, even Myers would not have spent his life alone.

But none of this happens. Myers never winds up alive on dry land again.

So the untrainer slid the dolphin into the yellow stretcher and then the soldiers carried the stretcher to the truck bed and put it on top of the wet mattresses. Then they slung their machine guns onto their backs and got in. Myers got in too because the untrainer waved at him and yelled for him to through the rain. Because it was now raining hard.

And then they were off.

Or not quite, because the truck wouldn’t start. It stalled—the driver trying to turn over the engine, the dolphin whistling, everyone screaming through the rain. Then it started and people cheered and they were off. Or not quite, because then the truck got stuck in the sand, which was turning into mud. The police and the soldiers and the bystanders and even the vets and the sea divers from Costa Rica and even the minister of the environment and the minister of the sea, even the wicked dolphin trainer himself pushed the truck, and it moved at last. They cheered.

CLAIRE

What do you mean? You know where he is?

He won’t be here for a few hours, the man said. You can wait. There’s a chair over there.

I should go, I said, alarmed. I walked back toward the stairs. I have to go, I said.

Suit yourself.

Okay, goodbye, I said. But I stopped. Under the windowpane of water, a dolphin went by like a submarine.

I turned back. What’s he coming for?

He gave a laugh. They think they’re going to send my two buddies to a water park? Not my Sunbeam. Who knows what kind of jerk’ll be in charge at a place like that. No, I need to bring in a specialist. Someone I can trust.

You’ll get in big trouble for this.

He picked up the bucket. You don’t surrender what’s yours, he said. He lifted a fish over the pool.

I didn’t move. Would you introduce me? I said.

A daughter doesn’t need an introduction.

We’ve never met.

That’s no way to treat your old man.

A handsome dolphin leapt and crisply removed the fish from his hand, slid back into the water.

Sit, he said. I’ll introduce you.

You believe me? I said. That he’s my father. Why?

Lady, you look exactly like him.

Oh, I said. I looked at the photo in my hand. It was true. The fact of it came skidding around the bend. I put down my bag. I sat down to wait.

At the last moment she must have heard him. Somehow his call entered her mind because early that morning Myers’s wife woke having dreamed of water. She walked through the apartment. It had a soaked look, drenched, as if it had been long dunked. Her own things looked unfamiliar, wetter. A submerged thought rose to the top. There is some-thing wrong with me, she thought. Something that is not wrong with most people.

It turned out that Myers knew his wife better than most would give him credit for, because that morning she sat down at her computer and booked a three-pronged flight to Corn Island (Houston, Managua, Corn), leaving a few minutes later for the airport. Why? Because in the moisture the stone of her heart had eroded into sand, which is softer. She saw herself without him, saw her nights in front of the TV. She had a chance to go after something. And if it wasn’t the perfect thing for her, for either of them, at least it was an attempt. She charged $2,399 to her credit card, packed a change of clothing in her purse even though she could already see what would happen. With the first snowflakes of winter in the sky, she headed out in a taxi.

The dolphin whistled in the busted truck. The rain came down. The photographers and the reporters ran behind the truck in their life jackets, waving pieces of foam. A line of taxis came behind. The truck drove to the end of the dock. The soldiers and the untrainer hoisted the dolphin off the truck, onto the boat, and into a large foam container.

The photographers got on the boat.

The reporters got on the boat.

The vets and sea divers from Costa Rica got on the boat.

The soldiers from the coast guard got on the boat.

The minister of the environment and the minister of the sea got on the boat.

The sexy women in bikinis got on the boat.

Some people who looked like waiters got on the boat.

Myers and the untrainer got on the boat.

The skinny dolphin trainer was not allowed on the boat. He stayed on the dock, his hands opening and closing.

In the category of regrets: Mostly vague and imprecise, having to do with his childhood (window, head, ground) and adulthood (wife, man, briefcase), mostly a cloud moving over the waters, darkening it section by section. There were also the regrets about his abilities, about his activities, the regrets about his injured mind. Also sentences he had said and ones he hadn’t, blocks he had walked in certain directions, a man he wished he’d been, a woman he wished he’d understood, demands not made, promises kept, a raincoat he’d pulled from taxi doors.

You couldn’t say he was going out after the dolphin, that he was the sort of man who couldn’t keep his seat, had to go flinging himself out after any animal that happened to be leaving, since that would require that the dolphin went first and it didn’t. He was very particular about that.

There were a lot of people on the boat, plus the dolphin, and the boat was not that big. People were screaming because the rain was really coming down now. It was thundering. It was a storm, maybe a very big storm. People were screaming because they couldn’t be heard, because they were getting wet, very wet, because they were scared to go out on the ocean in a storm like this. What were they, crazy? Look at it out there. It looked like hurricane. Was it a hurricane? Look at those waves.