After the Sun

by Jonas Eika

  We kneel and lay Ginger’s body down in the sand. A little while later, Jia and the other boys join us with six buckets of water from the pool in the changing room. We dig out the shape of a body in the sand where the boyfriend split Ginger’s head with the rock, and fill it with the water from the buckets. Hundreds of small white squirts swim around in it like living water. We grab his arms and legs and lower the body into the hole. The water splashes a little before it calms down and covers it fully, a thin layer over his face and stomach. Steam rises in the cool air. In a pentagon around the hole, we plant five parasols upside down in the sand, twist them down into the viscous layers. The last three inches of the shafts sticking out of the sand we grease with after-sun before getting on our knees and letting our assholes slide slowly down around them. We look at Ginger’s body as Manuel sings monotonously:

  We believe in Ginger / working honestly and patiently / many hours in the hole inside ourselves / Our desire for Ginger breaks loose / from Ginger / and travels through the hole over the greatest / distance / until it no longer belongs to us / We believe in Ginger . . .

  Manuel repeats the verse, and we join in one by one, rocking on the shafts. We sing while looking at Ginger’s body. It lasts for hours. Once in a while, the steam takes on colors, fluorescent blue, red and purple. Now and then a squirt of thick white juice that comes to life in the water. And when the after-sun and our secretions run dry on the shaft, the pain and the blood begin to run. White squirts in the water gather around Ginger’s skin and coalesce into a suit of jelly: the lines of his body blur, the body flickers. I can’t separate my own voice from the others’ assholes from the hole deeper inside me where the pain and foreign blood run down hollow parasol shafts soaking the sandy soil below the basin. A pool of color whirls at our knees. Then Manuel’s voice stands out from the choir, dissonant. The rest of us join in tentatively, one sound at a time, until the words take shape and we sing in unison:

  Desire for Ginger comes back through us / Desire for Ginger / as he is: the desire to create him / Ginger / as he is / to create him / The two become one . . .

  The water lights up and changes from blood red to purple to orange teeming with pink dots. A slimy fog the same colors rises and condenses in the vague outline of a body webbed with veins. A glowing creature is now visible, hovering above the basin. Suddenly it hits me that I’m thinking about dead Ginger, not that he should live again, and in the same second the creature becomes flesh and falls into the basin with a splash.

  * * *

  —

  Later, we walk into one of the early-morning spots with dirty tiles and white light, where the concrete workers and taxi drivers are drinking their coffee. I like the people who work at night. We pour our tips into Jia’s hands, and he goes up to buy eggs, toast and orange juice with all the money. The liquid is very cold and pulpy in my throat. In a bowl on the table, there are wrinkly oranges that Manuel cuts into little corals. “This one is Ginger!” yells Ginger, and mashes one of them with the ashtray, squirt of thin yellow juice turns gray in the electric light lands on the tiles. We laugh and stick our fingers between the tentacles of our corals, pull the long white strings to see who has the longest and laugh again. Afterward, we play a game where we take turns impersonating people from the club.

  “Manuel?” I say into the darkness on our way back home.

  “What’s up?” he says. “And just call me Manu, it’s so much with that last syllable.”

  “Manu, how did we do that to Ginger?”

  “It was Ginger who decided to come back.”

  “But how?”

  “I don’t know, that’s just how it is. Most people want to come back, even though they forget everything they saw while they were gone. That’s the contract they signed . . . Anyway, this is me.”

  He lays a hand on the back of my neck and gives it a squeeze before turning down a dusty road with concrete buildings like mine. He says good night and winks, and as he’s walking away with his back to me, he shrinks into a little cat and lopes away, and I would like to run after him, so we could be two small cats lying together talking in his bed.

  * * *

  —

  Afterward, I keep walking, looking up at the sky between power lines. It’s a very dark blue, and at the same time lit up by a secret little light because the sun isn’t here yet, but whispers up over the sloping of the globe that it’s on its way. My face hurts a little. A thin memory of something important that’s supposed to happen on the beach. A room behind another room. I can’t make it home anyway, so I find a bench near the club and sleep for an hour and a half. I dream that night has fallen, but the guests haven’t gone home yet. They’re still lying there, immobile, with their eyes closed or sunglasses on, as if they haven’t realized that the sun has gone down and it’s cold now. Then all the big cats get a whiff of the fried skin steaming in the cool night, jump out of the trees on the boulevard along the beach and flay all the guests into little pieces. Streamers of flesh and guts hang over the beach chairs, 24 rows of 20.

  I can move with a little curve in my back like a panther, but I rarely do it because I’m a beach boy. I’ve sort of taken Manu’s place, because he’s taking care of the French lady with the sun hat, like he’s done for the last three weeks. She pays him a fixed salary, and they’ve started to develop what I think you’d call a personal relationship. He learns ten new French words a day. She asks about his life, also about the time before he started at the club. She’s like a pool in your backyard, says Manu, that you can’t use anyway, so you might as well throw your trash and old furniture in it. When the guests come walking down the boardwalk from the entrance, I make myself blank and approach them. LET ME AUTHENTICATE THAT FOR YOU, I say if I see them with, say, SKINNY MEXICAN BOY or SCANDINAVIAN SIMPLICITY in their eyes, but I say it inside and just do it. I’ve gotten good, maybe as good as Manu, and I know that the owner has noticed. He’s hired a new boy and pulls me aside one night to ask if I want to make a little extra. Obviously I say yeah. He gives me a bag with a video camera and some official-looking documents. He shows me pictures of a young couple and tells me play-by-play how it’s supposed to go down. He’s printed it in typewriter font on a piece of paper, which I read over and over in bed before I fall asleep. The next day, when the couple shows up, I make sure I’m their personal boy, and I do exactly like the owner said, and it works, I get it all on tape.

  When I get back later that afternoon, there’s chaos at the club because Manu is curled up in fetal position on the French woman’s belly, so the new boy has to cover two sections by himself. I jump in right away, and the next hour I rub sunscreen and after-sun onto so much skin that my hands get tired of impressions: Smooth, hard skin like stained wood. Elastic, speckled, suntanned skin, falling like curtains around my fingers. Or a gooey, vaguely greasy pelt, but it doesn’t mean anything to me. The skins are sticky, the sand is burning, the woman’s foot tasted like orange peel. My nerves are shaking and I don’t have the energy to respond to them. The other boys disappear behind parasols and suntanned hands hanging in the air and waving me over: I run around and fan faces, give massages, fetch drinks. I’m exhausted. The sun is shining.

  * * *

  —

  As we’re sitting on the bench in the changing room, glittering knife in orange sun falling in wedges and the ocean, Manu gets up and pulls me down into the pool. There’s a different light, a fluorescent blue fog that makes my skin tight and slimy.

  “I’m not mad,” he says, and hugs me from behind.

  We spoon, the water covering half my face. Manu holds me, but at the same time pushes against me in a small way, his face between my shoulder blades, his knees against my thighs, so maybe I’m the one holding him. We stay that way for a long time. I can’t make out the different parts of his body anymore, his chest, arms, feet, forehead, he’s just a little shrimp on my back. The other boys are somewhere in the pool too. We’
re all very small. I want to cry. I breathe in through my left nostril, which is above the water, and breathe out through the right. I close my left eye and keep the other open, so the surface of the water becomes a lid on the world. The bubbles of oxygen coming out of my nostril look like cats jumping up and down, exploding the second they hit the surface. As if they can only exist at a distance from it. But at least there they’re wild and agile, and kind of funny too. Suddenly I get water in my left nostril; the water level has risen, and I cough. I sit up and look at Manu lying there, crying silently.

  “Manu,” I say. “Manu, shouldn’t we just go home, together? I’m so tired.”

  “You go,” he says without looking at me, an eye on either side of the surface of the water. “I want to stay here a little longer.”

  * * *

  We were about to leave the club when the boy with the pretty green eyes, who had been bringing us water and snacks and asking if we needed anything, came running after us with a bag on his shoulder. He politely asked whether he might be able to tell us something from his heart and if we didn’t want to listen he would let us go. Obviously, we said yes.

  Besides being a beach boy—which was just a way of getting by—he was studying film here in Cancún, and had a big exam coming up. He took some papers out of his bag—an ID card, some official-looking documents—and said that if he did well, he could get a scholarship to one of the best film schools in the United States, I think in Los Angeles or New York, I can’t remember. Texas, maybe. Calmly, he told us about the exam, that he had to film a few tiny scenes of everyday life and he was supposed to play the lead role; it would take an hour tops. He just needed a few extras.

  Lasse and I looked at each other and burst out laughing. “Um, do we want to?” he said. “No, of course we don’t. C’mon, Lasse,” I said. “But don’t you think Melanie would say yes?” he asked. Melanie was the coolest woman, about thirty years old, whom we had met on our trip and loved right away. She didn’t have a job or a place to live, she did nothing but travel. We were just so fascinated by her life.

  Then the boy said that of course he would understand if we were thinking, Why don’t you just get some of your Mexican friends to help you, but they’d just make fun of him, whereas Europeans are way more open to this kind of thing and just get it when you have a passion for something. I smiled and said yes, what’s the worst that could happen.

  We followed him to the hotel on the other side of the road. It didn’t look very inhabited, a large, cracked stone house with moisture in the walls, a little cold and desolate. I was actually pretty scared, but I didn’t want to say anything to Lasse, so I just giggled a bit. But now I know that you should always trust your intuition, even when it’s made of fear, because otherwise you might end up getting into a car headed somewhere strange. And even though you can’t keep up—maybe you’re still standing on the sidewalk—your body is in the car, and then afterward, every time you’re reminded of what happened, it feels like somebody else’s bad feelings, but you’re the one who has to feel them, you can never leave your body all the way. So we followed the boy up to the third floor and into his room. He went out on the balcony and set up two white plastic chairs with a view of the ocean. I was relieved that we were supposed to sit out there because at least I could just jump off and get away if he turned out to be dangerous. The boy took out his camera and set it up on a chair inside the living room, to film me and Lasse through the sliding glass door.

  The boy pressed record and got down in front of us on all fours. First, he was going to play the table, he said, we were just supposed to put our feet up on his back and talk about our time here in Mexico. We spoke in English while looking at the ocean. Afterward, he wanted to be a dog. He went behind the camera and said we should call him a dog’s name—Tikki, I think it was—and then he came in on all fours and crawled around between our legs. We were supposed to act natural, to push him a little with our feet and keep talking. Then we were supposed to call him again and ask him to clean the floor. He came in with a wet rag and rubbed our feet too, the tiles were shining.

  None of the scenes lasted more than two to four minutes, and after each one, he went back to the camera and told us what was going to happen next. Then he asked Lasse whether it was okay if he licked our feet, because that’s what dogs do to clean them. “Um, yeah,” said Lasse, and the boy started to crawl again. First he licked Lasse’s feet, slowly up and down the arch of his foot, but when he got to me, it was like he was going to eat my whole foot! It was really warm and tickled between my toes. I couldn’t stop laughing and couldn’t stay in character. He gave Lasse the camera and asked if he wanted to give it a try. Next, I was supposed to walk him on a leash (made out of a T-shirt he had tied around his neck, I was supposed to hold the other end) and make him do things, dog things. He kept licking my toes and sucking them. I kept pulling my foot away and laughing to Lasse, though I couldn’t see him behind the camera. The lens looked like a peephole in a metal door. Now the boy wanted me to use him like a table even though he was a dog. I was supposed to scold him and say all these mean things. “Bad Mexican dog.” I tried to get into character, but he stopped me and said I should kick him harder and say that I didn’t like Mexicans. I didn’t want to do that, and I was on the brink of tears, so I said to Lasse, “Babe, I can’t do this anymore. Tell him we’re done.” Lasse kept filming for a few seconds before he handed the camera to the boy and said we had to go, that the shot was probably good enough as it was. Lasse was about two heads taller than him and calmly laid a hand on his shoulder. The boy said thank you very much, and that he would come join us in two minutes for a cup of coffee.

  We got out of there as fast as we could. Lasse was laughing and said it was nice to have such clean feet. I said I felt a bit violated and would rather not talk about it. In the lobby of our hotel, we ran into Melanie and actually didn’t want to tell her about any of it, but I couldn’t keep it inside, so I said to Lasse, “Tell her what just happened to us.”

  Melanie was totally shocked. She would never have done such a thing in her life!

  RACHEL, NEVADA

  And then she turned her cheek to him. Even before the train left the platform, she let her waving hand fall into her lap and stared at the empty seats of the compartment in front of her. He remained on the sun-bleached wooden platform off Nevada 375 and watched her disappear into the desert toward Alamo, and he said to himself: She is always in the company of loved ones. He was frustrated because he, for almost seven years now, had only been able to live in the loneliness of their daughters’ absence. While she, even when alone and full of grief, always tried to be part of something. I’m really looking forward to being among mothers and daughters, she said back when she bought her ticket for the show. And as soon as the train started moving, they were there with her, her face radiating the same light he knew from her daylong meditation sessions in the living room. A raving look of bliss would come over her, as if her organs were being replaced one at a time by small pieces of sunlit glass. She was eighty-three and you would have thought her bones were corroding.

  Antonio’s bones were corroding; at least that’s how he felt, as if he had been lying dormant in this alkaline desert since the last ice age. He walked with slow, truncated steps, carefully lifting each foot to avoid tripping over a loose rock or the roots of a desiccated saltbush. His knee crackled and sent a dry stab of pain into his hip. With the highway at his back and the yellow setting sun in the corner of his right eye, he walked by the Little A’Le’Inn and past each of Rachel’s forty-two homes, most of them mobile, which always made him think of the town as a kind of camp or settlement, somewhere that still bore traces of arrival. Six years ago, after they buried their daughters—who had both, within a year and a half, died of cancer—Fay and Antonio sold their apartment in Boston and bought a camper to drive across the country in. It was Fay’s idea: If we’re going to go on without them we need to figure out where to g
o, she said, pulling Antonio out of bed. He was depressed and afraid of falling asleep at the wheel, so she ended up driving most of the way, through Ohio, Indiana, Kansas, Colorado, until the road became itself a kind of sleep across the long stretches of Nevada desert. Something about Rachel, not so much its isolation as its peculiar and elastic time—which you could sense on the endless bush steppes and at the local UFO club where everyone, eager for new sightings, would mostly just wait and see—something about its protracted present, had told them that they had to pull over here, that they had to spend their final years here. Fay went to the Little A’Le’Inn and joined the club right away, and Antonio walked into the desert, as he was doing now. At the end of the gravel road, instead of going home to wait in their camper for Fay to return from the concert, he wedged a note in the mail slot and continued toward the dry steppe, which stretched dull brown from Bald Mountain, diagonally ahead, to the next mountain range twenty miles west. Out there, the mountains were black in their own shadows, the sky above them still orange between gray-purple clouds, and behind them, another steppe was flanked on both sides by mountains running parallel from north to south. The desert continued like that all the way to the Sierra Nevada, ribbed by streams and salt lakes but without any outlet to the ocean, reaching back to the Rocky Mountains five hundred miles to the east. The thought made Antonio dizzy and defiant, like the explorers who, in their journals, which he had read with enthusiasm, relentlessly rode through the desert in search of the Buenaventura River that was believed to cut across it. There was something unyielding about that image of the Great Basin, the wide-open desert devoid of a single trade route; it refused to settle in their brains.

  He opened his eyes and didn’t know he had sat down on the steppe. It was happening all the time lately—at any moment he could be drawn to the ground in a daze. A mineral darkness would bubble up inside him and begin to harden and crystallize. He got back up on his feet and shook the images out of his head, put Rachel farther behind him and turned on his flashlight. The soil was pale and rocky, sporadically covered in yellow straw, mugwort and snakeweed. It was silent, only the wind moving across the steppe, cold on his face and neck. Some nights, you could hear the small planes transporting military personnel to and from Area 51, another twelve miles into the desert. Or jet fighters in training broke the sound barrier, sending thunderous shock waves through the air. Occasionally, rays of light would shoot into the sky from LED flashlights in the hands of UFO enthusiasts signaling hope of contact. The truth was out there.