Vacation (13 page)

He took the phone and said, I am having a credit card mis-understanding.

I meant to tell you about that, she said.

SPOKE

There was obviously something wrong with the man—and I mean besides the head, which wasn’t so bad as Elephant Man, but noticeable. He seemed friendly enough, but I wasn’t about to pay his way or have a financial liability along. This week has been trying enough. I felt a little bad leaving him there, but one cannot care for every stone on the path. It was a pretty sad affair.

Did you cancel the credit cards in the middle of my vacation?

Cancel, no. I did not cancel them.

Did you phone and say, “Please cancel”? I believe there is a word for that and that word is “cancel.”

I’m sorry, really I am.

You’re sorry? Did it happen by accident? Did you trip over the credit card plug?

Your plane ticket cost a fortune, she said.

And no, she said. I did not cancel exactly.

SPOKE

People are fakers—that’s all we do. Can you think of anything you do that’s not done for the precise reason of pretending to be something you’re afraid you’re not? Still, I don’t believe he was lying, that it was all a scam. He seemed genuinely surprised. But then, one never knows. Either way, that is not the sort of person to wait around for, what with so much wrong with him just pasted on like that for all to see, and then to find more lurking below within ten minutes of meeting him. There are limits.

Who buys a same-day ticket out of the country? she said. I’m sure
I never heard of that, and if I did I would laugh.

I’m on vacation.

Vacation doesn’t begin the same day you decide it.

Sometimes.

No, never. Nobody does that. You wait, you suffer.

I waited, I nearly died of pain.

Nearly dying is not vacation.

As it happens… said Myers and stopped. (No sense in looking like a wimp about it.)

And it’s certainly not a vacation if you don’t have a job to go back to. The receptionist called, by the way. They’re sending over your personals.

Then it hit him as if his mind were a small round hollow place into which a ball could come flying and here came that ball.

Oh no, said Myers. You reported
the credit cards stolen.

Immediate tragedies not about Myers: the tragedy of the light in the room, the tragedy of the lit things, and the lit people, the tragedy of the movement in the building, the tragedy of the slow drip somewhere dripping, the tragedy of time, the tragedy of two voices, the tragedy of sound, the tragedy of…

You just had to make your point. You just had to buy the most expensive ticket anybody ever heard of.

Do you understand that now my return ticket is no good?

You yourself wouldn’t blame me if you were in your right—

Do you understand that now I can’t go home?

I ask you, who pays three thousand dollars just to get off the ground?

…the tragedy of the sidewalk outside, the tragedy of the rooster (unseen but heard), the tragedy of the sun, the tragedy of many motors, many, passing and passing on the street, the tragedy of the many lives running around out there, the tragedy of the buds that fight through the hard earth and of the rain that crushes them, the sun that burns the leaves…

He hung up the phone and he could hardly face Nicaragua.

That was his first thought:
I can hardly face this country.
His face was turned to it, yes. Any way he turned, his face was pointing at this country, some piece of it, but hardly, and then the second thought, which followed like a rolling bead, was not a thought, but a feeling, so overwhelming that it took over. He felt like a verb, not a man—like falling water, emptying houses, slowing heartbeats, something thickening, drying up, or wetting down, getting heavier or scaling off, stripping away. He felt himself coming off in strips, becoming matted, smelly, dense, and the sound inside him was a shout and he could feel it around his ears and eyes, the tingle of it, this knowledge: she wanted to leave him here.

…the tragedy of air, its emptiness, its abundance, its decay as it enters and exits bodies, the tragedy of water, its weight, its aimless wanderings over the world, the tragedy of its scarlessness, of being unmarkable, unremarkable.

Now the management was all over there discussing what to do about him. They were going to have to do something, they certainly were. They were buzzing away, shaking their heads and nodding. They’d have to get this one squared away all right. He sat where they put him, on the other side of reception, his belongings in a heap beside him. They stood in their huddle, had never heard of such a thing. Oh, the people they’d call about this one. He’d tried this one out on them: Bill me. Ha. Did he think this was communism? Free holidays for all? We don’t have any communism here anymore. The gringo pays. The gringo always pays.

Meanwhile Myers took up his briefcase and walked away.

Ran.

THE UNTRAINER

Corn Island, yes, I’ve been here for, what, six weeks. What’s it like? Well, it has a sea full of oysters and a tow like a lung, that sort of pucker and suck. Down by the coral and reefs, there’s the usual battery of fish swatting up and down. Above the sea? Sand, that’s about it. Nobody’ll find any ancient civilizations under these dunes. No old pots and pans, tablets, no bus fare. No one used to be here who isn’t. Other than this dolphin, there’s not much to look at. There’s nothing here worth wadding up and bagging. Nothing I’d want to pluck off a tree.

A few pieces of information Myers would like to have about Gray:

Is Myers the only goddamn person on the planet stupid enough to be looking for Gray?

(No.)

Is anyone lucky or unlucky enough to know where goddamn Gray is other than Gray?

(Gray does not know where Gray is.)

Just what did the guy think he was doing, leaving the country like that anyway?

(Sometimes a man seeks a runway.)

Myers did not know this, but Gray was not on Corn Island the day Myers fled his bill. Gray had never been to any part of Nicaragua and never would. He would die not having seen its wet sky.

On the day Myers found himself at the edge of an earthquake, Gray was installed in a very hot town named David, pronounced “Dah-
veed
,” second syllable stressed. The town was two countries away, in Panama of all places.

The town of David stood halfway between mountain and beach (as one always is in Panama unless one is already sitting on a mountain or a beach). One of the town’s few distinctive features was the variety of clocks tacked to the wall of the bus station. Another was the scatter of public Internet cafés. A dollar an hour. Not bad.

Gray had not deliberately deceived Myers. He believed he was in Nicaragua, and he waited for Myers as one waits for spring, with eagerness but skepticism. The mix-up arose from an innocent mistake. Gray had always meant to see the sights of Central America—a place not so far that the season flipped over or the time went askew, but not so close as to not be foreign (Canada ought to be a little ashamed of itself, really). So one fine Sunday afternoon Gray landed in Panama City (home of the historic canal and other celebrated graveyards, nice holiday spot)—that much he had straight. He disliked the city comprehensively, took a bus to a town called Boquete, where it rained and shined at the same time like a scene from the endtimes and the wind blew like a threat. He disliked it too and decided the next day to go to Nicaragua (fine place for any former socialist, he’d had his Lenin days in college). He traveled to the border (two buses), crossed legally into
linda
Costa Rica, with plans to ride on to Nicaragua. He went into a border store with the intention of buying provisions for the next leg of the trip. The store happened to be very large and long. It straddled the border, one end opening into Pana, the other into Costa, like two ends of a fish, and Gray spent so long picking through the shelves that he got turned around and wound up walking out the wrong door into Pana again, a slip he never discovered. He simply got back on a Panama bus, rode to the end of the line, got off in the town of David. He checked into a hotel and called it Nicaragua.

He knew it wasn’t Costa Rica by simple deduction. The hot, cramped town he found himself in couldn’t be in Costa Rica—no tourists for one thing, and everyone knows you can’t go to Costa Rica without stepping on a tourist and seeing it skitter off. Plus, the place wasn’t beautiful. It had its charms, as Gray discovered over time (the top half of the town: the sky, what one could see of it, and the bird-filled trees in the
centro
). He’d never been, strictly speaking, an observant fellow, but it looked nothing like the brochures of Costa he’d seen.

Gray didn’t figure out his mistake, not because he spoke no Spanish and never learned more than a few words (which happened to be the case), but because, unknown to Myers or even to Gray himself, Gray was suffering from a massive and growing brain tumor. His functions were deteriorating, the flow of oxygen slowing. He was becoming widely disoriented. The happiness he thought he felt may have been pain, and his longings had likely been fulfilled long ago.

Few people knew about the cancer. Gray and Myers did not number among them. Gray’s ex-wife did. She still had the privilege of being listed as the emergency contact in Gray’s medical files, so it was she who received the call from the doctor, after the doctor tried to reach Gray at home two days after he had (quixotically, blurrily) left the country. Gray had gone to the doctor because of his symptoms (hearing loss, dizziness, confusion), but it was the ex-wife, not Gray, who heard the results of the MRI.

So this was known to the ex-wife and eventually to Gray’s small daughter, who would one day grow up and go to Nicaragua in search of her father.

SPOKE

I was settling into a taxi—this was about twenty minutes later. I had to wait outside on the steps. This is the kind of place where any time, day or night, you put out your hand and there’s a taxi at the curb. In this one way it is like New York (except you don’t raise your hand like a Nazi salute, you keep it low and you point to the spot where you want the taxi to be), and it is also like New York in the fact that in any emergency there is no taxi anywhere ever. As soon as the quake hit they were gone and had to be coaxed back like kittens. So I waited for twenty minutes or so and when I finally got one, I slid in my suitcase, I slid in beside it, everything was fine. I had an elbow up on the back of the front seat and I was just saying, Get me out of here immediately, Managua airport, please—because I was going home, forget it
.

Suddenly I saw that crazy man run out of the building.

Nobody else saw, I don’t think. He broke from the hotel, pushed out the doors, went down the steps, charged off, broken arm and all. In his other hand he carried what seemed to be an honest-to-God briefcase. Amazing. A photograph or a painting, say, might capture the heroism or cowardice of that moment.

On this trip so far I have seen many strange things. Each step, there’s a new stone on the path to choose not to care for. So when I saw that man run out of the building and into the trees, I leaned back in the taxi, let the air-conditioning cool my mind.

Wait, scratch that, I said. You know this place, Corn Island? How do I get there?

Look, there are hundreds of other people, thousands, really, all over town and beyond, all over the world even, millions of them, billions. They’re just lying around or propped up somewhere, or they’re trying to get in at the gate, so many they can’t all fit in one place and they can’t get enough ceilings or roofs or tarps to cover them. There are too many people and not enough tarps, you hear about how the tarps keep blowing off and there’s not enough food or the food is in the wrong place and people can’t figure out how to move it and people are starving. You wouldn’t believe what some of these people are doing. I don’t see what the difference is if one man isn’t where he’s supposed to be. He just cleared a little space. One fewer body to tend and shuttle. I wasn’t going to be the one to tattle. What did I care when I was headed to the most beautiful island in the world? That’s how I see it.

In the case of a man in water (Myers or someone else), it might be hard to distinguish play from strain. The man’s busy hand signals could be in fun, not panic. Frenzied gestures—much like a fish flapping on the pier—could be in jest. It only becomes clear once the long sink begins, the down-going, the drowning, the getting to the bottom of it. From above it is simply what we see every day: objects dropping, shrinking, fading, just another thing getting away from us, so what. From underneath it looks like the body is not falling but like it’s coming on, bearing down, shooting off bubbles, one arm swinging, the entire gathering speed, closing in, growing larger, should be put a stop to.