The Condition

by Jennifer Haigh

  Gwen. For the first time it dawned on him that she could be in actual danger, kidnapped, held hostage. That he could be walking into a dangerous situation, for which he was—face it—tragically ill equipped. Now, for instance. Getting into a car with a total stranger who’d want to be paid for his trouble. How much? Scott hadn’t even asked.

  “Hey, man,” said a voice. “My brother say you need a ride.”

  Scott looked up. Standing in the door of the café was the little businessman, the kid with the fragrant bag of weed.

  “Yeah,” said Scott. “That’s me.”

  “Come on. I got a car in the back.”

  “You’re not old enough to drive.”

  “I’m eighteen, man.”

  “Bullshit,” said Scott.

  “Okay, sixteen.”

  “Fourteen, tops.”

  The boy laughed. “Thirteen, but it doesn’t matter. On Saint Raphael you got a car, you allowed to drive.”

  Scott doubted this was true. “This is a terrible idea,” he said.

  The boy shrugged elaborately. “You don’t want to come with me, you don’t come. But you want a taxi for the whole day, it cost you two hundred dollars. If you can find one. It’s Sunday, man.”

  “How much do you want?”

  “Fifty,” said the boy. “Less maybe, if we do some other business.”

  Scott pondered this. He was persuaded by the boy’s logic. And by the memory of his emerald weed, its haunting skunky smell.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  They sped across the island in the boy’s Plymouth Reliant, its bench seats covered in wooden beads that vibrated Scott’s sacrum in a way that was not unpleasant. It was late morning, the sun nearly overhead. They stopped briefly in the parking lot of a barbecue joint, where Scott purchased a quarter ounce of weed. An eighth would have been plenty, but the boy, whose name was Gabriel, seemed disappointed. He’d been hoping for a bigger sale. He brightened visibly when Scott twisted up a joint.

  “What, you not going to share?” he asked, outraged.

  “You’re just a kid,” said Scott.

  The boy laughed. “I been smoking this shit since I was six.”

  Afterward the morning took on some jingle. The sun burned. The sky blued. Scott rolled back his sleeves and stretched his arm out the window. He hadn’t done a wake-and-bake in years. Penny claimed that it polluted the whole day—Penny who thought nothing of firing up the television at dawn, fouling her clean sleepy brain.

  As they drove he explained his mission. “No problem,” Gabriel answered—brisk and professional, like a concierge at an upscale hotel.

  They crossed over what seemed an immense mountain, the cheesy little engine huffing mightily. Scott remembered his father laughing at these wrecks, Lee Iacocca’s K Cars, back in the eighties: the bargain-basement parts used interchangeably on sedans, convertibles, and coupes, the square bodies designed, it seemed, by an unimaginative child asked to draw a car.

  “How old is this piece of shit?” Scott asked.

  “Same as me,” Gabriel said.

  “How many miles?”

  “Whatever I say. Look,” he said, pointing to the odometer, which read 514.

  A moment later they were whizzing down the mountain. Scott leaned back and closed his eyes, recalling the Speed Racer cartoons of his childhood, the car that could swim and leap and fly.

  “We coming to the big resorts.” Gabriel gave a low whistle. “Fancy, man. You not going to believe it. You can’t see them from the autoroute.” He pointed to a turnoff, marked by a stucco archway, a jauntily painted sign that read SUNSET POINT. And, in smaller letter: GUESTS ONLY. PRIVATE ACCESS.

  Scott frowned. “I don’t think that’s it.” Shit, he thought. He’d been so shaken by his conversation with Penny, so moved and humbled, that he’d forgotten the name of the hotel.

  “You don’t think? You not sure?”

  “I can’t remember the name exactly.”

  They passed another a second turnoff, then a third. BREEZES RESORT. CALYPSO BREEZE. BIMINI BEACH CLUB. MONTEGO CAY.

  “They all sound the same,” Scott said.

  “Come on, man.” Gabriel seemed to be losing patience, so they pulled onto a dirt access road and smoked another joint.

  “Listen, man,” the boy said, his equilibrium restored. “We running out of resorts. We got one more up ahead”—he pointed—“and that’s it.”

  They approached another turnoff, another flowering hedge, another stucco wall. The sign said WELCOME TO PLEASURES.

  “That’s it,” said Scott.

  They turned. Halfway up the drive was a booth manned by a uniformed attendant. At the sight of the K Car he shook his head and frowned. Scott motioned for Gabriel to roll down his window. “Hey there,” said Scott.

  “Are you a guest here?” The man was brown skinned and built like a linebacker. His calves looked stuffed with softballs. His thighs were cased in bright green shorts.

  “Um, not exactly. I’m trying to find my sister.” He glanced over the guard’s shoulder, as though Gwen might appear from behind him. “If I could just talk to someone at the front desk. Reservations, or whatever.”

  “There’s a phone number for that,” the man said.

  Scott nodded energetically. “Okay, good. But since I’m already here—”

  “I can’t let you in,” the man said. “You’re not a guest.”

  “What about visitors? Surely you allow visitors?”

  “This is private property. If you don’t get that thing out of here, I have to call security.”

  Gabriel threw the car into reverse and backed up squealing. They veered onto the autoroute.

  “Motherfucker,” he said. To Scott’s surprise he seemed truly rattled. “He was just doing his job,” said Scott.

  “No, man.” Gabriel turned his head and spat savagely out the window. “He’s light skin. He take one look at my black face and treat me like shit. That’s how it work on this island. You light skin, you a Frenchman. You dark skin, they treat you like shit.”

  Scott blinked. If asked, he’d have described them both as black. The world seemed suddenly more complicated than he’d ever imagined. He’d had this feeling before, at the birth of his daughter, or watching “Jens” Jensen solve a calculus equation. It was a crushing awareness of his own idiocy, all that he would never understand, or even see.

  They turned back to the service road where they’d smoked the joint, and settled on a plan. Gabriel would wait in the car. Scott would approach Pleasures on foot.

  Scott checked his reflection in the rearview. His eyes were red and heavy lidded, his hair wild from the wind. He ran a hand through his hair and set out walking.

  Half a mile later, he found a break in the hedge and shimmied through it, the branches scratching his arms. He felt buoyed by this small success. Before him stretched a manicured lawn. He crossed it with an easy stride, as though he belonged here, a carefree tourist on vacation. He heard squeals and laughter in the distance, the thwack of a volleyball. The sounds of leisure, of wealthy white people—he thought of Gabriel in the hot car overlooking a power plant—enjoying themselves in the sun.

  He headed in the direction of the sounds, following a path through a grove of mangrove trees. He stopped a moment to admire them, their trunks long and swanlike, the arching necks of primeval creatures half buried in the earth. He was grateful for the momentary coolness, the soft sandy path beneath his feet.

  Ahead was a sunny patio, paved in flagstones. Scott stopped short.

  Everybody was naked.

  Naked people stretched out on chaise lounges, bubbled in the hot tub, tiptoed barefoot across the hot flagstones. Naked breasts wobbled invitingly. Dicks and scrotums danced and dangled. A naked girl careened down the water slide, bouncing and squealing. In the vast swimming pool naked volleyball was under way.

  It appeared to be naked lunchtime. A waitress in a green bikini served sandwiches to naked diners. The chairs, Scott note
d, were thoughtfully padded. The prudent had laid napkins across their laps.

  A hostess approached him. Like the waitress she seemed overdressed in her green bikini. The three triangles of Lycra looked as incongruous as a parka.

  “I’m sorry,” she said with a smile. “This patio is for nude guests only. You can leave your clothes in the locker room”—she pointed to a white stucco building behind her—“or dine on the main patio, if you prefer.”

  It struck him as very funny, the businesslike way she’d asked him to shuck his pants.

  Scott smiled stupidly, grateful for the dark glasses that hid his roving eyes. “Actually, I’m a little lost. I’m looking for the reservations desk.”

  “The main building is right up that path,” she said, pointing. “And please come back later.” (Or was it come buck naked?) “We serve lunch until three.”

  He turned and headed through another grove of mangroves, blinking. His mind had stalled, the gears jammed at the sight of so many bodies, the ripples and nipples and hairy flesh. When the machine finally restarted, a stunning thought occurred to him: his sister had stayed at a nude resort. The idea was so mind boggling, so completely at odds with his notion of Gwen’s character, that he wondered if he had the wrong hotel. Again the feeling overwhelmed him: his instincts were worthless, his perceptions skewed. The trees themselves seemed suspect. Nothing was as it seemed.

  Pot could make you paranoid. He’d heard this for years, from so many different people that there had to be some truth to it. Scott, who’d smoked more weed than most people on earth, had dismissed this as user error, a hidden psychic weakness in the smoker himself. Cannabis was not to blame, any more than you could blame a car if you drove it into a wall. Yet now, for the first time, he felt frozen with paranoia. A disastrous development for a man on a mission.

  He scolded himself to stay focused. To stop looking at those freaky trees.

  He found the main building, took a deep breath and approached the front desk. It seemed rude not to remove his sunglasses, rude but necessary. Who knew what paranoid gleam flickered in his eyes?

  “Excuse me,” Scott said pleasantly, in the voice he assumed on such occasions. It was a deep, courtly voice, manly and charming. His father’s voice. “I’m looking for my sister, who was a guest here recently. Can you tell me if she’s still staying here?”

  The pretty desk clerk regarded him quizzically. “I’m sorry. I can’t reveal any information about our guests.”

  “Of course,” he said smoothly. “But this is a family emergency, and I need to find her. Her name is Gwen McKotch.” He took his driver’s license from his wallet and laid it on the desk. “See?” he said, pointing to his name. “I’m her brother. Scott McKotch.”

  The girl looked worried. “Wow,” she said. “I hope it’s nothing serious. But Pleasures has a strict privacy policy. I’m not allowed to tell you anything.”

  “Not even if she’s staying here? If she’s ever stayed here?”

  The girl smiled sadly. “My manager is off for the weekend, but he’ll be here tomorrow morning. If it’s really an emergency, maybe he can help you then.”

  “Tomorrow?” Scott repeated. In twenty-four hours he would be on a plane to Connecticut.

  At that moment, a plump middle-aged couple crossed the lobby, sunburned and wet haired. The man was carrying two heavy tanks.

  Scuba tanks.

  Scott jogged across the marble floor. “Excuse me,” he called in his Frank voice. “Are you going scuba diving?”

  “We just got back,” the woman said.

  “Well, can you tell me the name of the—instructor, I guess? The guy who took you out.”

  The two looked at each other, frowning.

  “I can’t recall,” the man said in an English accent. Another English accent! This seemed ominously significant. Scott’s paranoia flared. Deliberately he tamped it down.

  “I’m drawing a blank,” the woman said.

  “There were several of us.” The man glanced behind him. “The others should be coming any minute. We were the first ones off the boat.”

  Scott headed toward the door, nearly colliding with two middle-aged blondes showing freckled cleavage. The women toted vinyl duffels. A pair of blue rubber fins poked from one of the bags.

  Scott repeated his question slowly, in his most resonant Frank voice.

  The women looked at each other and grinned broadly. “Rico!” they shrieked in unison, and dissolved into giddy laughter.

  His heart kicked up. “Can you tell me where to find him?”

  The taller blonde pointed. “The dock is that way.”

  Outside Scott broke into a run. He raced across a wide lawn toward a sign marked BEACH ACCESS, then clattered down a boardwalk toward another sign: BOAT RAMP. In the distance he saw a motorboat, spanking white, roar away from the dock. A brown-skinned man, shirtless, coiled a rope around his elbow.

  At the helm, her red hair flaming, was his sister, Gwen.

  “YOU SERIOUS, man? You find this guy, and you don’t even talk to him?”

  Gabriel spoke slowly, incredulously, though he didn’t look especially surprised. He didn’t look especially awake. Scott had found the car, to his immense relief, just where he’d left it, on the sandy access road overlooking the power plant.

  “I tried.” He had run to the end of the dock waving his arms, shouting Gwen’s name, then Rico’s, at the top of his voice. They hadn’t heard him over the roaring engine, but everyone else had—including two green-suited security guards who’d escorted him off the property and dumped him at the gate.

  He sat a moment pondering. He would meet this Rico; in noble, masculine fashion he would take the measure of the man. He tested the feel of the words in his mouth: What are your intentions regarding my sister? Then again, he wasn’t sure the answer mattered. The goal was to bring Gwen home safely, to put an end to this foolishness, as his mother said. Paulette, after all, had financed this mission, and only one outcome would satisfy her.

  Define success at the outset, Dashiell Blodgett counseled. Set your compass, then keep moving.

  Tomorrow morning he would return to Pleasures and wait at the boat ramp—all day, if necessary—until Gwen and Rico reappeared. He had memorized the letters stenciled at the helm of the boat: 2STE. Recent experience had proven his memory unreliable. Before he twisted up another joint—which he needed to do, immediately—he was going to write it down.

  “Gabriel,” he said. “Buddy. Do you have something I can write with?”

  Gabriel opened one baleful eye, like a sleeping cat unhappily disturbed.

  “Pen and paper,” Scott said.

  Gabriel reached beneath his seat for a notebook and ballpoint pen. He flipped through the book—the pages filled with neat columns of figures—and tore out a clean sheet.

  “What are all those numbers?” Scott asked.

  “What you think?”

  Scott wrote down 2STE, folded the paper and slipped it into his pocket. “All right. Let’s have a smoke.”

  He reached under his own seat and felt around for the plastic bag. Nothing. He turned to Gabriel, whose heavy eyelids were fluttering.

  “You’re kidding me,” he said. “You smoked the whole bag?”

  “You were gone a long time, man.”

  “How long? An hour? Two?” A long walk each way, the mangroves and naked people, the front desk and the boat ramp. It hadn’t occurred to him, then, that he’d left Gabriel alone with his stash.

  “There’s a little left,” said Gabriel, taking the bag from his pocket. “We can roll one more.”

  “That was a quarter, man. You smoked a quarter in two hours?”

  “We smoked two joints before,” Gabriel reminded him.

  “But still.” Scott had had this conversation a hundred times, in cars and back alleys, dorm rooms at Pearse and Stirling, shitty apartments in La Jolla and Portland and Oakland and San Berdoo. He had lived most of his adult life in a pot-based economy—which, a
s it turned out, was not so different from the other kind. In their attention to price and quality, their obsessive tracking of profit and inventory, potheads were not so different from Carter Rook and his Wall Street friends, the most fervent capitalists Scott knew.

  “Okay. Fine.” Scott took the bag from Gabriel and set to work rolling. He managed to scrape together two joints, the second composed of a disemboweled Marlboro from Gabriel’s pack and the ganja dust at the bottom of the bag. Scott slipped the joints into the bag and returned it to its place beneath the seat.

  “You don’t want to smoke?”

  “Later.” Scott got out of the car and circled around to the driver’s side. “Move over,” he said, taking the keys. “I’m driving.”

  Surprisingly Gabriel did not protest. They headed back over the mountain, Scott at the wheel, Gabriel offering occasional directions. They wove through the back streets of Pointe Mathilde and parked behind the Ambrosia Café.

  “You owe me fifty dollars,” said Gabriel.

  “You smoked fifty dollars,” said Scott. “Come on. I’ll buy you dinner.”

  On the front porch of the Ambrosia they ordered two steak-frites, a Fanta for Gabriel, a Red Stripe for Scott. Revived by the sugar, Gabriel looked alert and bright eyed. He waved and called out to acquaintances in the street.

  “Salut, mon pote!” he called to a boy on a bicycle wheeling swiftly down the street. The boy braked, turned, broke into a smile. He was a handsome kid, smaller than Gabriel. He leaned his bike against the porch rail and came to shake Gabriel’s hand.