by Dave Eggers
He had traveled widely in the past few years, since a trip with a mutual friend of theirs, now dead, had brought him halfway around the world in a week.
They shuffled down the main strip looking for dinner. There was a tiny bodega selling Miami Heralds from the previous Friday. Some small homes. A shop offering only towels, most featuring birds and monkeys. They found a restaurant with Christmas lights strung from the roof, full of American teenagers, all of them large, the boys bigger than the girls, huge T-shirts draped over their fleshy chests. Pilar and Hand sat down and in response a cat, gray with luxuriant hair, scooted from their feet and onto the tin roof.
The waitress came. She said Buenos nochas. They said Buenos nochas back. Hand said something in Spanish that made the waitress laugh loudly. As she was laughing, Hand spoke again, in Spanish, and the waitress laughed more. She leaned against the table for a second with her hand. She looked at Pilar; she was having a great time. Pilar had no idea what was happening. What had Hand said? Hand was a riot.
“What did you say to her?” Pilar asked, after she left.
“Who?”
“The waitress. What was so funny?”
“Nothing, really.”
“You were killing her. What did you say?”
Hand wouldn’t explain.
They ate dinner, chicken and rice, and wiped their mouths with the tiny triangular blue napkins provided. The cat returned and rubbed against Hand’s shin, back and forth and again, in a way that began to seem inappropriate.
UNSUNG SONG TO HAND: There are things about you / Like your wide waist, which repel / me, but your lips, smiling / shake me, and your brown shoulders / pick me a few inches off the ground / I want to slap you across the face in the loudest way. CHORUS: I want to jump on your back and ride you like a mule / I want to jump on your back and ride you like a mule / I want to jump on your back and ride you like a mule. SECOND VERSE: You’re someone who would lead almost any small nation / if you wanted to, but you don’t / because half of you is odd / but still you have the charm of a leading / man, of an actor who was first a carpenter / someone who still plays lacrosse on the weekends / with the friends he’s always had / I think your lips are too thin / your eyes too closely set / our children might be ugly / but you are a man, and there are so few men in the world. CHORUS: I want to jump on your back and ride you like a mule / I want to jump on your back and ride you like a mule / I want to jump on your back and ride you like a mule.
After they’d eaten but before they left the table, Hand said, “I think I want to make sausages.”
Pilar pretended to be watching the cat on the tin roof.
“There are small machines you can buy that make sausage,” he continued. “You buy the casings and then you stick the meats you want in there. Beef, pork, fat, spices. You ever made a sausage?”
Pilar shook her head. Hand fixed her with his look, brilliant and insane and grabbing.
“There are a lot of things like that, things you can just learn how to make. Like pretzels. Or doors. Regular people can learn how to make those things. Pillows. My mom started making pillows last year. She’s made about eighty so far.”
They walked back through the strip. Americans and Canadians and Swiss crisscrossed the street; some stood and watched the TVs positioned above the open-air bars, fuzzy college basketball happening, though soundlessly. Sunburned couples in white cotton fondled baskets in the souvenir shops. Surfers waited on benches for one of the two pay phones. Twelve-year-old locals sped by on ATVs, three on each bike, huge white smiles.
She counted the reasons she should sleep with Hand: because she was curious about sleeping with him, curious to see him naked; because she loved him; because sleeping with him would be a natural and good extension of her filial love for him; because there existed the possibility that it would be so good that they would change their ideas of each other and then think of themselves as a pair; because to deny one’s curiosity about things like this was small and timid, and she was neither and didn’t ever want to be either; because he had really wonderful arms, triceps that made her jangly in her ribs and tightened her chest; because she was not very attracted to him when away from him—she’d never thought of him while in the tub or flat on her bed—but in his presence she didn’t want to walk or eat, she wanted to be nude with him, under a dirty sheet in a borrowed house. She wanted to hold his shoulders; she wanted to go snowshoeing with him; she wanted to go to funerals with him; she wanted him to be the father of her children, and also her own father, and brother; she wanted all this while also to be free; she wanted to sleep with other men and come home and tell Hand about them. She wanted to live one life with Hand while living three others concurrently.
At the hotel, the horses: two were sitting in the grass, as if they’d been waiting, patiently but with pressing business, the white one glowing faintly, like a star on the ceiling of a child’s bedroom. The third and fourth were standing on the road, by the hedge, their dark hair shining.
HORSES: It’s never like we planned.
HORSES’ SHADOWS ON DIRT ROAD: I wish I could do more.
HORSES: We want violence, so we can kick and tear the world in thirds.
HORSES’ SHADOWS ON DIRT ROAD: I’m helpless to help you.
HORSES: All we need is the spark.
HORSES’ SHADOWS ON DIRT ROAD: When it happens, tell me what to do.
“Jesus,” said Pilar.
“Maybe they live here,” said Hand.
The horses had no symbolic value.
Pilar wanted to describe, to Hand, how she felt, every twenty minutes or so, about being there with him. They were together in the room, which had a roof and was warm. They were alive, though neither of them could have predicted with certainty that at their age they would both be alive—people flew on airplanes and drove cars after so many drinks, and every time they were away from each other or their family or friends, it seemed very likely to be the last; it was more logical, in some ways, to die or disappear. She had not grown up—her parents stayed home always—thinking that people could go far away, repeatedly, all over the earth, starting and finishing lives elsewhere, and then see each other again.
She wanted to rub herself in bananas. She wanted to open umbrellas into the faces of cats, make them scurry and scream. How could she sleep with Hand in this room? If it would be the only time, she wanted mirrors everywhere, so she could remember it a dozen ways.
But it would not be this night because he hadn’t kissed her on the forehead yet. But this would happen. Tomorrow one of them would find a reason to hug the other, and they would hold each other for too long, making sounds about how good it was to be here, and then he would pull away a few inches, to kiss her on the forehead. And the rest would come soon after. She pictured his penis flying across the room and into her, and then shooting in and out. His head on the wall, mounted.
Hand took the couch and Pilar took the bed and they slept to the pulse of crickets and, above, the overeager tick-ticking fan.
The morning arrived with applause and they made toast. In the sun the dirt road was white. All was white. As if Pilar’s eyes had been scrubbed free of pigment.
In a dark shop built to simulate a thatched hut, they rented two surfboards and the woman, orange-haired, oval-faced and Australian, pointed them to the nearest path to the water, across the street and beyond the blond sand.
They carried the boards across the white dirt road and onto the path, the sand soft and ashy. Through thin twisted trees and past a tin-roofed house, the beach spread left and right, flat and hard, at low tide a brown-gray parking lot. Close to the water the hard sand was wet, reflecting a blue sky, wide and musical with huge white flat-bottomed clouds.
There were dozens of surfers out already, ten just in front of them, another ten a few hundred yards to the right. The waves were small, with children playing in the shallows. Rocks to the left, body boarders close to shore. Pilar rubbed lotion on Hand’s back and he did hers. Look at him, she th
ought. His face is strong. What would a man do, she wondered, without a chin! The skin on his back was taut and smooth. His neck aquiline, if that were possible. There was, she felt, a world full of beautiful future leaders, each with a thousand fulfillable promises, in Hand’s neck.
Pilar couldn’t surf well. She could paddle. She could lie on a board and balance and lay her face on its smooth cool wet fiberglass surface and rest. She was good there. And when the waves came she could do a few things. She could get up. She could stand, turn a little (only to the right), and keep herself steady for a few seconds.
But everything closer to shore for her, this day, was more difficult. She worried if she was holding the board correctly. She worried if when she drew the rented board from the rack, she did so correctly. She wondered if she was supposed to carry the board with its slight concavity out, away from her hip, or toward it. She worried if she should attach the Velcro ankle strap, which was in turn attached to the board and prevents the board from flying away after surfer and board fail, while in the surf shop area, once she hit sand, or when her ankles were wet with water. She didn’t know if the board, when not in use, should be set upon the sand bottom-fin up, or down. She was concerned that if she did any of these things wrong she would be laughed at or pointed at and removed.
So she watched. She watched when others rented their boards to see how they drew them from the rack. She watched to see how they held them, carried them, when they strapped on their ankle bungees. And she did as they did, even though, as often as not, they didn’t know either. Everyone was an amateur, everyone pretending at grace—that’s why they were renting boards and did not own them, and that’s why they were surfing here, at Alta, where the waves were small and forgiving and the water was warm, like the inside of a plum.
GOD: I own you like I own the caves.
THE OCEAN: Not a chance. No comparison.
GOD: I made you. I could tame you.
THE OCEAN: At one time, maybe. But not now.
GOD: I will come to you, freeze you, break you.
THE OCEAN: I will spread myself like wings. I am a billion tiny feathers. You have no idea what’s happened to me.
Pilar and Hand walked into the water, same temperature as the air, and Hand bent himself in half, dropping his face in the foam and coming up headsoaked. He pushed the hair back from his face and looked at Pilar and Pilar knew that some people, implausibly, look better wet.
“The water’s so warm,” she said.
“It’s the greatest water I know,” he said.
They paddled out past the breaks. The waves were not large but the process was more tiring than she had remembered. She was knocked back six times and by the time they were on flat water again she was exhausted, her triceps aching, shuffling their feet, children in museums.
Pilar and Hand were straddling their boards, watching the horizon for coming waves.
A good swell came, five feet high, and with two quick strong strokes Hand was up. Pilar watched him depart for the beach. From behind, it looked like he was riding a very fast escalator. Or a conveyor belt. A conveyor belt being chased by a wave. From behind she saw only the round of the wave’s top, and this obscured Hand’s lower half. She was watching and he was going and going. He had a nice longboard stance, standing straight up, knees only slightly bent, leaning back, his whole frame one perfect diagonal line.
Then he was back, paddling quickly, smiling. He settled next to her and sat up on his board.
“That was nice,” he said.
“It looked nice,” she said.
Pilar liked what he had done, but for the time being she was content to sit. Or even to lie down. She had been in this town for half a day, awake this morning for an hour, and was prepared to do more resting, even if it was here, on the water. She stretched out on the board, resting her cheek on its wet cool creamy white, the wax, sand-encrusted, rough on her face. The water came over the board gently and kissed her. It said shuckashucka and it kissed her. She could sleep here. She could probably live here, on this board, her shoulders burning. There was no difference between resting her face here and resting her face on her mother’s stomach when she was younger, no difference between feeling her breasts flattened against the board and feeling these breasts flattened against the backs of men. She liked to sleep that way, with men on their stomachs and her breasts on their back. It never worked—she never actually fell asleep in this position, but she liked to try.
With one eye she could see Hand, still upright, scanning. To the right of the beach, to the far right, a mountain, the color of heather, lay like a broken body.
“Are you going to take one of these or what?” Hand asked before dunking his head into the sea, coming up again so good, a mannequin’s perfect head soaked in cooking oil.
“Right. Sorry,” she said.
“Do you need a push?”
“Ha. Yes. Ha.”
She had to try. She sat up again. They waited, both straddling, watching the blue horizon for a bump.
A bump was on its way.
“Take this one,” he said.
“I know,” she said.
She turned the board and laid her chest on it and began paddling. Three strokes and she was at the same speed. She let up and allowed the wave to overtake her. The wave came with the crackle of crumpling paper. She and her board rose above the land, one foot, three feet, five. The water brought her into its curved glass and she paddled harder as it drew her up and sharpened itself under her. Then two more strong strokes, both arms at once, and she descended. She knew the descending was key. That if she was not fast enough or her timing was off, the wave would speed below her and she would watch it leave, very much like watching the shrinking back of a missed bus. But if she were fast, or pushed at the right time, she would go down into it, and her board would speed up quickly, become a car, and she would jump to her feet and the board would become solid like a girder of steel, cream-colored, smooth, and doublewide.
This wave she took. The board was strong, she jumped up, was standing and traveling toward shore—she had gotten on the bus. Beneath her was all bedlam, foam and noise, the rush of white pavement. She had one moment of rapture—up! standing! look at the sun, the mountains like a body reclining or broken—and then she knew she had work to do. The wave was crashing from her right and she knew she only had a second if she didn’t try to turn left, to ride the break. If she made the turn she could go for a minute, a full minute maybe, just stand and stand and stand. She had seen people ride these longboards for minutes, just standing, walking up and back, strolling—the best surfers could join their hands behind their backs and stroll up and back, up and back, considering the issues of the day, so sturdy was a longboard on a good wave, they could set up a nice chair and a rug and sit in front of the fire—
She wanted to turn left, to follow the still-curved glass away from the mulching glass, and so she leaned back a little, she weighted her ankles into the board’s left side, pushing its edge slightly—
It was done. The board was behind her, gone. She dove into the foam and was under. Her ears exploded with the sound of underwater. It was dark and all was violence. She shot up and surfaced in time to see the board, wanting to be free but attached to her ankle, rearing, bucking straight into the sky before it fell again and rested into the now-calm sea of blue-green gel.
But she’d gotten up. A good thing, a bad thing—the rest of the day would be an anticlimax. She’d have two or three more good chances at most, no matter how long they spent out here. She paddled through the foam and into the calm again, the sun drying her back almost instantly. Hand was straddling, his feet kicking the water, waiting for her.
This story is equally or more about surfing. People are no more interesting than waves and mountains.
In the afternoon, on the hard beach, with the wind snaking at them, hissing and sending sand into their sandwiches, Pilar and Hand squinted into the sun to see the water. They’d been in the ocean all day and now
were watching it like actors would a play going on without them. The ocean didn’t need them.
Hand started clapping.
“I’m gonna clap every two minutes for the rest of the day,” he said.
There was a man out in the surf, wearing a cowboy hat.
“What do you do for that company again?” Pilar asked.
“I consult. I brainstorm. They like my brain.”
“But why here again?”
“My Spanish. And I volunteered. Down here money goes a long way. We get paid American wages but the costs here are half of what they’d be anywhere else.”
“Okay, but why Intel here at all, and not Korea or something?”
“We are in Korea. A big setup there.”
“Did you just say ‘we’?”
“No.”
“You did!”
The cowboy surfer was riding a perfect wave, hooting.
Hand had forgotten to clap. Pilar debated whether she should note this, knowing that she might just be bringing on more clapping.
“You forgot to clap,” she said.
“Listen. I have no problem with them as a company. They make chips. Chips are good. They’re in Granada because the workforce is educated, in the city at least, and they’re good workers. The infrastructure’s good, airport’s good, roads work, communications are fair, banks are sound, inflation’s fine, conveniences are decent, at least in Granada. And because here Intel avoids the unions on the floor and in trucking, all that. A lot of companies are leaving Puerto Rico, for one because the union activity is getting big down there. Same workforce, basically, as here, but no one sets up in this part of the world to get mixed up with unions.”
Pilar couldn’t decide if she found this interesting.
Hand, remembering himself, clapped for a full minute.
The horses were outside again, but were loitering down the road, in front of the bucket-blue house with the German woman, no relation to Hans from the hotel, watering her rock garden. One black horse was scratching at the road, nodding, as if counting.