Kook

by Peter Heller

  “Ting, what? What’s the matter? Are you okay?”

  I knew what the matter was.

  “I just can’t bear it, Ting.” She sobbed. “It just—they won’t—”

  Every day she came out with me in the horrendous surf, got pummeled on the way out, flipped her board back over, got back on, and kept coming. Every day she baked under the merciless sun on a sea without shadow, this woman who always wore a hat outside at home and was so careful with her skin. Every day she deferred to everyone else on the wave and got maybe one good ride. And followed me into places that were uncertain at best and sometimes scary, where drug deals happened on the beach and riptides tugged dead trees into the circling eddies of the vortex the locals called the Liquidora. She did all this because she wanted to accompany me on this adventure and because she loved me. She would much rather be at home skiing right now, or be dressed up in a space suit and performing experiments on the Mars surface for visitors at the museum. And now she was being tortured without surcease. She couldn’t even take refuge in nightfall and sleep. It just tore me open. I felt flooded with compassion and rage. All I wanted for the whole universe was that her pain should stop. She cried. I was helpless. I didn’t know how to stop this. I felt cornered, impotent, to blame. I panicked. I sat up on my cot.

  “Do you want to go home, Ting? I think we should send you home. This can’t go on. This is unbearable.”

  “And what?” she whimpered.

  “I don’t know. This is crazy. You are allergic or something. I don’t know how you are going to be able to travel with me if you can’t tolerate mosquitoes. Everywhere I go there are mosquitoes. I mean, this is serious. This isn’t working out.”

  Wrong thing to say. I should have wrapped her in my arms. I should have taken her to a hotel, a hotel with an ice machine down the hall, and covered every inch of her with the tracings of soothing cubes. This was more like a threat, like blaming her for getting bitten. She took it as a punishment for frailty. She began to cry harder.

  “What are you saying? You want to send me packing?”

  “No, I—it’s just I can’t bear to see you like this. It can’t go on. I—”

  What a jerk. I was torn seeing her suffer, so what did I do? I took it out on her by threatening dire consequences for our relationship should she not be able to buck up and stop suffering so much. I had panicked some more. I had made her pain about me and then demanded that she assuage it. It was self-centered and awful. What the hell was I? What kind of monster of a husband? It was sordid, horrible. Suddenly I saw it. I saw her. On her back, covered with red spots and welts, and crying.

  “Oh, Ting.” I got on my knees in the gap and reached for her head and held it wet against my shoulder. “I don’t want to go anywhere without you. We go where we go together. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that. You are so game and tough. I love you more than anything.”

  She cried. I didn’t know how to soothe the itching but I could hold her and not be a jerk. I laid her back down on the cot and rubbed her shoulders and back and legs and feet, rubbing in the lydocaine and using the pressure to scratch all the itches and I did it until she fell asleep.

  So little by little, with painstaking slowness, I was learning to surf and, even less quickly, learning what it was to love another person. Kim was teaching me that part. Kim demanded to be loved well. She would have nothing less. She would guide me, nudge me, let me flounder, set me back on the right track until I got it. It was astounding. I couldn’t believe she loved me so steadily and forgave my lapses and gave me the nod to try again, better. I couldn’t believe my great fortune in finding someone willing to go the distance with me, willing to stick around till I got it right. Last night, squeezed next to me on her cot, lying on her back in a respite from bugs because we had just combed the entire inside of the tent with a headlamp and squished every mosquito pinned to the walls by the beam—she said out of the silence:

  “You know you are in the presence of a goddess?”

  She lay with her head on my arm, which was asleep. I looked at the shadows of the palm fronds in moonlight, shifting and whispering over the roof of the tent.

  Her voice skewered my heart. It was without irony, simple, musical, a statement and a question.

  Last night I guessed I learned that another definition of love was a simple negation, an opting out: when one refrained from being a jerk in situations where one has always been a jerk. Just say no.

  Is it possible to love by simply not being an ass? I don’t think so. But it goes a long way to clearing a space where love can happen.

  The next morning Kim and I paddled out in the near-dark a good half an hour before anyone else, so that she might have a decent chance at catching a wave. Which she did. A nice long ride almost to the beach. I took out the fish, the short, fat brick, and wiped out again and again. I just couldn’t get stable on the takeoff. But I spent a lot of time sitting, with Kim maybe thirty feet away. We let the swell lift us and set us down and we watched the gray over the mountains soak up color from a sun that was still below the horizon. It was a bit like sitting in rockers on the front porch. A sea turtle stuck up her black head nearby. An inconsistent breeze blew off of the river.

  Sitting there at peace with Kim and the whole breathing circle of the dawn, I thought that this trip wasn’t really about surfing. How could it be? By all accounts the ocean beneath our surfboards was dying.

  Lifting and falling on our boards, I thought of all the certified genius economists who believed an economy could only be healthy if it grew over 2 percent a year.

  I wanted to tell them, Take off your thick glasses and come out on the waves with me one morning. I will show you how many less birds there were this morning than there were ten or even five years ago. I will paddle with you over to this dawn fisherman casting a hand net and ask him what his take is like this morning compared with twenty years ago, ten, five. I will take you to the harbor in town where the fishing pangas pull up with their daily catch and ask the same. And watch while they dump the plastic boxes into the tubs, and watch your eyes as you register the heap of eight-inch-long tuna and redfish where years ago twenty-pounders were more common. We’ll go snorkeling off the islands to the north where the coral reefs used to be brilliant with the colors of myriad coral species and thousands of tropical fish and are now bleaching from rising temperatures and nearly dead.

  The oceans are dying. The oceans die, we die, too. It’s that simple. Sixty percent of the world’s population live on the coasts and derives a significant portion—at least 60 percent—of their protein from the sea. The oceans and their phytoplankton produce the majority of our atmospheric oxygen. It is just being understood that the oceans play a large part in regulating the earth’s temperature through a complex interaction between biology and atmospheric chemistry (plankton and other ocean plants consume and then shelve for long-term storage vast amounts of carbon dioxide), and currents of both air and water are influenced by the ebb and flow of species.

  I was thinking about this and watching the sunrise and keeping an eye out for sets on the seaborne horizon, and now and then looking over at Kim. I was thinking about the ocean, the mother of life, on one hand, and about this woman on the other. My slowly dawning realization was that if this journey was to be any kind of success, if my life was to have any real peace or joy, I needed to learn to love Kim. To really love her. And I needed to learn that much more than I ever needed to learn to ride any kind of a wave.

  We got a call from Sergio, our friend from the town that wasn’t on our map. He didn’t ask, he told us: “Yo voy. Llego Sábado.” Sergio arriving, here, Saturday. I had to shake my head to make it compute.

  “Wow, really?”

  “Sí, Peter, sí. Yo voy. Yo voy a surfear.”

  “You want to surf?”

  “Claro que sí! Porqué no?”

  I couldn’t think of any reason other than that the whole concept of Sergio on a surfboard wasn’t fitting into my head. “Wow. Oka
y. Venga. We’ll pick you up.”

  On Saturday the sliding glass door into the customs area of the airport opened and there was Sergio. He was wearing blue shorts with an orange floral pattern, white sneakers, the official NFL John Elway shirt we had bought together in Escuinapa, and he carried a small green gym bag. He was bigger than anything in the airport except the jet; bigger than life. His eyes searched the rope line of greeters and when they found us his face lit up like a junkyard sun. I thought he might break bones when he hugged me.

  “Sergio, you have to get your bag back in that hall.”

  He patted his little gym bag.

  “That’s all? How long are you staying?” I figured the weekend.

  “Cinquo, seis dias. Ah, qué regalo ver a ustedes! Vamos a comer!” Let’s go eat lunch!

  That’s what we did. We went straight to one of the fish restaurants that ring the stone harbor and I broke my taboo and ate commercially caught fish because Sergio didn’t give me any choice. He took one look at the menu, ordered us both pan-fried fillets with garlic, and asked if we wanted lemonade. He ordered a Sprite for himself and appetizers and sat back in his chair surveying the beach and the harbor, the fishing pangas pulled up in the shade of the almond trees, the long sport-fishing wharf with the big hooks for hanging swordfish and marlin, and he smiled the deep, satisfied, unadulterated smile of a man who has realized his every dream and has just added fresh ceviche and shrimp salad.

  “Salud, amigos.” He raised his green can.

  We had bought Sergio a guesthouse. It was a pop-up dome tent that we set up in the sand next to the big house, the twelve-foot screen room. We got him a light nylon sleeping bag and a pillow with Spider-Man on the case so that he would think of little Sergito. He was delighted. I don’t know if he’d ever camped, but we knew he slept well, because his snores tore through the grove, competed with the roar of the building swell. In the morning he was up and at ’em, refreshed, drinking instant coffee like it was Starbucks. We couldn’t be troubled with ice, with a melted pond in the cooler every day, so we had powdered milk for cereal, peanut butter and honey, crackers. Powdered sugarless Kool-Aid. Sergio called it comida de bunker. Bunker food. He liked it. He confided to me that if the end of the world came, we would be set. He held up a cracker and hard cheese with a big smile.

  “Peter, Kim, Comida de bunker fantástica.” He toasted us and downed it, settled back in the hammock slung between two palms, where it seemed he could not imagine being happier.

  “Pura vida,” he said. “I would have to work for forty years to live like this. Una vida magnífica.”

  One morning Sergio announced that he was ready to try surfing. Kim and I exchanged glances. “That can be arranged,” I said.

  We decided that the best person to teach Sergio to surf would be my old mentor, Leon, King of the West Coast. His shop in Ixtapa was quite a haul from where we were camped, but I figured we could do it in three or four hours. I wanted to see my old friend anyway and we could spend the night with him. The next day, we woke Sergio up in the predawn dark and drove down there and treated Sergio to a late-morning lesson with Leon’s brother Edgardo. We had warned Edgar of Sergio’s dimensions. Edgar showed up at the beach with an eleven-foot foam board sticking over the tailgate of the shop’s truck. He didn’t have any booties big enough for Sergio’s feet.

  “No problema. No te preocupes, I am fine.”

  Sergio and Edgardo waded out into the whitewater. Edgar explained that he would push him, all he had to do was stand up. Sergio bellied onto the board and it sank. I blinked through the viewfinder of Sergio’s camera. There was no way a mere person could submerge this board; it was a cargo ship. The nose broke the surface like a breach, like an animal struggling for air, and Sergio pinned it to the water with his flailing mass. For a moment it looked like he had succeeded, and then both the board and Sergio capsized. The big man struggled up out of the foam and without pause tried again. Edgar braced the board. I had never seen Edgar look scared.

  Sergio bellied and wriggled onto the board. Here came a terrific surge of whitewater. Edgar shoved. In one of the greatest gestures of athletic willpower and courage I have ever seen, Sergio managed to bunch his entire being, his bulk, his mind, heart, massive shoulders, ham hands, expansive feet, into one animal lunge. He lunged. Upward. He landed with his feet on the board. The whitewater cascaded in a wall behind him. The nose of the great board lifted out of the water. I snapped the picture.

  One of the luckiest action photographs ever snapped. I mean, I believe it to be on par with Robert Capa’s picture of the shot Spanish loyalist.

  No one need know that all the movement was on a trajectory of disaster. In that split second Sergio was a man standing on a surfboard with a wall of crashing wave behind him, his knees bent, a dazzled expression, hands thrown out for balance, and the nose of the board angled stylishly up out of the foam as if he were about to execute a classic longboard bottom turn. In that split second he was a surfer. Which was all he really wanted. We had the photo—enough of surfing. It was time to eat.

  Leon’s surf shop was the same as I’d left it—a riotous island of palms and bougainvillea, a covered patio hung with shells and driftwood mobiles, primitive paintings of surfers on waves. It occurred to me again what a strange town was Ixtapa. It was not really a town at all, but an insta-resort dropped onto the coast in the late seventies, a constellation of towering hotel zone, plaza, restaurants, condos, golf courses, marina, all mostly built within a decade over a filled-in tidal swamp and wetland, and with the sole purpose of attracting tourism. Leon, who spent part of his youth five miles to the south in Zihuatanejo, remembered when it was all wild swamp and mangroves, filled with crocs, waterbirds, raccoonlike coatimundis. When he and his friends were exploring the coast northward for new surf spots they had to wade and paddle across much of what was now covered in concrete, gift shops, Señor Frog’s, a dolphinarium. Sitting at one of Leon’s outdoor tables, I looked across the tourist plaza, with its gazebo in imitation of real towns like Escuinapa, and wondered about the trade-off. The estuary and swamp where Ixtapa now stood in its glory was once home to countless species of birds, crustaceans, mangroves, and fish. The problem wasn’t so much this one resort, but that the same kind of development had occurred up and down the coasts of Mexico, was still occurring wherever there was a pretty river mouth, a bay, and financing; and the phenomenon was being replicated all over the coasts of the world. It was the reason we had lost, by some estimates, 70 percent of the world’s vital mangroves, and it left precious little habitat for the littoral species, the crabs, fish, herons, willets, crocodiles, that depended on them. The same was true for beaches. People can’t stay away from a beach, as we had seen. The sea turtles of the world need undisturbed beaches where they can wallow out of the sea and lay their eggs unmolested. Vacationers, surfers, beauty seekers everywhere were one of the reasons sea turtle species worldwide were in a precarious struggle for survival. Drinking a cold orange Fanta with Sergio and Leon and Kim, I thought about these things, and how I was part of the problem as a surfer who wanted a campground to sleep in, or a surf camp, a restaurant or two, an airport to fly in to.

  I took a deep breath and shook myself off, looked at Sergio, who I’d bet a million pesos wasn’t thinking anything about any species at all except what fish to eat for lunch. He was beaming.

  “Did you like surfing?” I asked him.

  “Oh, Peter, esta lindisima.” Beautiful. Sergio lived in the brutal, shadowless light of the complete positive. The Corona he held looked tiny in his big fist. He gazed around—for lunch. There wasn’t any in sight, so he began to orchestrate a meal for us, seamlessly assuming the role of host in Leon’s home.

  He sent Lili, Leon’s elegant sister, to the supermarket. He peeled off a couple of five-hundred-peso notes and gave instructions for some type of fish, chilies, onions, tomatoes. Lili came back from the store and Sergio asked for a knife, plates, cutting board. Leon called other sisters and
brothers. He sent a boy for more Coronas. Sergio began chopping. He chopped while he talked. He cut and squeezed limes. He sprinkled in diced chilies. he spooned a dollop onto the back of his hand in the pocket between thumb and forefinger, tilted his head to the sky while his palate absorbed it as if asking God for guidance. He added salt. By now there were fifteen guests. Sergio was in his element as the host. He asked one person for hot sauce, another for a bowl, a spoon. People came in and out of the kitchen in the back of the shop bearing whatever he needed.

  “Oye, otro plato, por favor.” He pointed his fat finger like a magic wand. He spread his hand wide to signal enough. I sat amazed. Now he and Leon were doing shots of Don Julio tequila, comparing it with Don Porfirio. I didn’t even know Sergio drank. But no one, nadie, could party like Leon. He was still El Tigre. The music poured from the outdoor speakers and the levels in the bottles dropped like a lowering tide.

  And then, two hours later, Sergio served everyone ceviche. It was superb. He had made enough for twice as many people, which made everyone happy because it is easy to eat twice as much ceviche. We cleaned the platter. I looked around. Leon’s expanded family—sisters, brothers, cousins, nephews—Sergio, Kim. Ruddy faces, laughter. The little niece who liked to sweep around everyone’s feet. For a minute life was so simple and sweet.