The soldiers guarding the far door were still children, Indians drafted out of the mountains, kids with bowl haircuts draped in uniforms that were far too big for them, that ballooned at the shoulders, reached past their fingers, covered up their shoddy boots. They showed Ethan their teeth as he passed. They all carried several guns. From somewhere overhead there was a snap and then a low, sighing drone, like a passing flight of locusts, and the power in the hangar failed as Ethan reached the far exit. The guards threw open the gate to let light in and the throng of waiting Copalans on the other side rushed forward. The soldier-children began to shout and fire their guns into the roof and Ethan stepped out into it, the sudden clamor, the pandemonium of the street that disappeared immediately under the hundred hawkers’ tables, the clouds of diesel smoke and hands grabbing at his arms, children selling melons and gum and cabbages, men shouting taxi, taxi, the migrants, surgical masks pressed to their faces, charging the border, falling and tangling themselves in the razor-wire security ditches, wrenching themselves free, and scrambling toward the airplane hangar, bleeding and shouting and holding their passports over their heads, giving their skin to flee the country Ethan now entered—Copal.
Somehow Ethan found the bus station, boarded another bus where everyone wore surgical masks—there were often rumors of some new flu—and waited as the bus turned away from the border and into the landscape suddenly green and silent, improbably flowered. As they crested hills or rode the mountain ridges, he stared down at the tips of Mayan pyramids above the jungle. He could imagine the wreckage of the bus moldering there at the base of those pyramids, unnoticed, scavenged by jaguars. The bus began to descend. They turned toward the sea and Mara de Leon.
His first night in Copal he spent in the heart of the city, just north of the docks, in the Port of the Duke Hotel. He arrived with one bag, with his clothes smelling of the bus, carrying no camera for the first time in years. He buzzed the outer door and waited for it to open, waited, and when it did, he stepped into the marble-floored lobby and then waited for the clerk to look back up from her ledger. He approached the desk but did not speak because he did not know what language to address her in. Here, on the northeast coast, they spoke Spanish and English, Indian and Creole—all, if he even recognized them, in dialects he could not follow. He waited and inspected the lobby so as to seem that he was not waiting—and then waited some more. Slowly, after a time, he placed his hands on the counter. The marble was wet with a warm film of condensation, but he did not draw his hands back, did not wipe them, as he wanted to, on his jeans. The room smelled like disinfectant and mold and fried fish. Above him an electric fan cut a slow circle in the stale air. In the corner, by the wide staircase, a potted palm tree drooped brown bug-eaten fronds toward the floor. Farther back, down the hall and across the terrace, he could hear the static burr of a radio from the hotel bar.
In the morning, Ethan sits on the bed and looks out through the window’s wooden louvers. There’s nothing to see. Green ocean sloshing up against the shore, fishing boats in the far distance. Everywhere, even from within the hotel, cocks scream in the morning. Ethan stands and puts on his shoes and then realizes that he didn’t remember to check them for insects. He waits a moment. If there’d been a scorpion he’d know it by now.
He pulls the fan chord but the fan doesn’t do much. It spins and clatters and doesn’t look like its bolts will hold and the room remains hot. He unlocks the slatted folding wooden doors and steps out onto the balcony. Now he can see the streets that lead down to the boardwalk, the red tile roofs, the sickly palms and the white haze on the western horizon. He smells coffee from downstairs, a bell rings in the maid’s quarters. Yolanda had sat on the chair in her kitchen and put her hair down. Ethan remembers the way she watched him, her eyes suddenly wide like a child begging to be believed. He remembers the way she spoke: slowly, as you might, in a different world, tell a story around a campfire. Rehearsed and careful, whispered first to herself, voiced to the empty hours. Please, she’d said. It is important that you understand how things were.
The phrase echoed back from the last year of his life. Always, he’d begged Samantha to explain herself to him. To allow him to understand. As if once he comprehended all the pieces of their lives he could scoop them up and rematch and compile them, reframe them into whatever form they’d been lacking. Life reduced to an exercise in composition. So he’d say to her, let me understand. He’d say it when he’d find her alone at home, drinking and drawing the same pictures she always drew, the ones of the little girl lost among the wolves in the dark forest, the falling sun throwing the huntsman’s shadow across the piney floor. Or, if he could, if he could say anything, he’d say it on the mornings following the nights when she didn’t come home at all.
Samantha spent a day and a half in the hospital. When she came home she was wearing the clothes Ethan brought her—a blue button-up work shirt, cargo jeans—baggy clothes, her favorite clothes to wear around the house. She said, “I don’t feel safe here anymore.”
“Don’t worry,” Ethan said. “We have a doorman.”
He was staring out the window, but he heard her walk into the kitchen, stop at the doorway.
“I’m just telling you how I feel,” Samantha said. “Is there something wrong with that?”
He heard the freezer open, ice clink into a glass. The glug in the bottle of poured liquor like the sound of a car filling with water, the air pocket escaping.
THAT NIGHT WHEN they went to bed he kissed her on the forehead and tucked the covers up tightly around her as he would a little child. He slept as far to the edge of the mattress as he could.
“I’m right here, Sam,” he said.
SHE WOKE IN THE NIGHT, shaking. They had rolled closer to each other in their sleep. Her pillow was wet and her feet had pulled all the sheets from the corners of the bed.
“I wake up,” she said, “and I think you’re him.”
“You think I’m him?” said Ethan.
“For a moment, when I wake up, I can’t tell the difference.”
Ethan tried not to wonder what difference she had seen in the bar.
“I’ll sleep on the couch,” he said.
“You don’t mind?”
He pulled her hair back away from her face and kissed her forehead, her temple.
“I’ll be right here if you need me.”
THAT NIGHT, Ethan slept with the blinds to the balcony door wide open. He did not sleep for long. The lights of the city blurred through the glass in the smoky purple of an underground bar. He saw Samantha sitting at the table, the light, the frail, chemical light, bruising the Cosmo in her glass, and her fingers curled around the stem, lifting it to her mouth, her mouth barely opening and then in another second she’s standing, touching the man’s hand as she leaves, walking to the door the way she always walks—without looking back.
From the couch he heard her twitching into a dream from which he knew he could not wake her. He lay there and listened and stood and went to the threshold of their bedroom and watched her and closed his eyes and heard as if from a great distance, as if coming through a bad phone line, someone opening and closing doors, opening and closing them while Samantha shuddered in her sleep, shuddered and moaned as he stepped into the room and reached for her but stopped his hand short of her skin, stopped his hand and closed his eyes as her teeth chattered like something crackling on an empty line.
Evening. Ethan’s second night in Mara de Leon. A breeze off the sea through his slatted windows. Gone now the continuous revving of trucks—just music starting up in the discos on the shore, and farther back, behind the hotel and the winding, rising streets of shotgun houses and plywood slums, the incessant insect drone of the jungle humming into night. Ethan watches the last reflected light recede over the water until it is just a thin line, a vein of sandstone, on the horizon. The sudden adrenaline of purpose is waning. He’s lost here, in this country; he realizes this. It seems such a perfect, simple thing that he must
do, but he’s come to know the impotence of hopeless charity. Samantha. Samantha. He says her name until it means nothing, until its syllables echo hollowly about the small, warm room. Outside, past the descending rows of sloping red tile roofs, a lone tug chugs and glints on the metallic waves. The clock tower in the cathedral at the base of the mountains tolls the hour, but Ethan does not count the strikes. Still he has not bought a watch. There are some revels on the shore, laughter and shouting, the distant pulse of reggaeton, but otherwise the city seems remote and desolate in the tropical quiet.
Ethan walks across the room barefoot and picks up the phone. The line buzzes and clicks but does not ring. Then a voice on the line.
“Yes. Okay. What?”
The voice is heavily accented, Creole. The receptionist, maybe.
“I’d like to make an international call,” Ethan says.
“Yes. Okay. Miami is ten dollars, American. By minute.”
“No, I don’t want to call Miami.”
“What, buddy? Okay. Dallas is eight dollars.”
“I want to call New York,” Ethan says.
“New York?”
“Yes, New York.”
The line cuts to static and a child’s voice down the hall calls Tuesday Tuesday, or maybe it’s not a child, but a parrot, and suddenly there’s a car horn sounding in the street as a hundred dogs start to bark. And then Ethan standing barefoot in the darkening room, Ethan saying hello, hello, Ethan putting down the phone and picking it up again and nothing but electric sound, a hinge or a valve clicking on the broken line.
ETHAN WANDERS INTO THE STREETS of the mountain city. He’s looking for a phone card. The heat slaps like a wet palm against his face and the mountains behind the hotel settle into a susurrant hush. He steps off the raised concrete sidewalk and into the ruined street; he walks the turning way to the sea. Nothing remains open around the hotel. The restaurants and cantinas are barred and dark, the pulperias only selling beer through cut wire windows. On the shore, a nearly empty disco blasts punta music into the coming dark. Its open dance pavilion faces the water and several people, drunk already, stagger and dance and lean on the tables and never once look out to the sea. Under the vapor lamps, the palms around the disco glow purple and swarm with insects. Ethan continues down the boardwalk, past closed empanada stands and stores, long abandoned, that sold beach gear to tourists. He sees another open pulperia in the distance and he walks toward it. He steps over two drunk men as he goes, and women leaning against the seawall whistle and call, “hey, guapo,” and he ignores them and walks on past the abandoned stores and desiccated coconut carts and everything here is salty and wet with heat, everything reeking of sudden loss: the windbreak palms twisted against the shore, the groveling men too stunned by drink to stand. Paradise just after the fall.
He knew when he first met Samantha that his circumstances had changed beyond his control. The hopeless banality of meeting in a bar quickly gave way to something altogether different. At first basic city life: he was sitting in a terrible bar waiting for several terrible coworkers who always arrived late. He sat and drank and waited and didn’t notice her at first. This was hard for him to believe later, when he looked back on that moment and tried to sever it from all its attendant mystery. How could he not have noticed her? She sat a foot away, perched on the barstool with her right leg curled under her, leaning onto the bar with one arm, letting her black hair fall forward over her shoulder and into the flat glow of dusty bar lights. He knows that now, remembers it now. Then, it was just the bartender reaching for his empty pint glass, reaching and asking him, can I get you another? And Ethan, not knowing how long he would have to wait, how much he’d need to drink, asking a question he never asked—”Do you have any specials?”
“Tequila mixers.”
“Great. It’s a goddamn frat party,” Ethan said. Then: “Sure, I’ll have one.”
The bartender grabbed a tumbler, a bottle of well tequila.
“And the mixer?”
“I don’t know,” Ethan said. “How about air?”
“Air?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t think I can do that.”
“How about ice? Ice and lime. Is that allowed?”
That’s when she rocked her head back, tossed her hair out of her face, smiled at him.
“Did you just order tequila and air?”
“About now they’re the two things I need most,” he said.
“I know just how you feel.”
NEED. LIKE A SUDDEN THIRST. As a child Ethan had seen first-hand with his mother that what passed for passion was usually mania. Passion was isolated, its own storm, and in its eye there was no room for anyone else. But then there was Samantha. Samantha who seemed to reshape the world with the gravity of her desire. She stepped out of a room and the room seemed suddenly bereft, empty as a just-picked pocket. Ethan was used to city women who would banter with him, compete for power, allow him to limn the margins of their lives. Women who would give, but not give too much, who would be careful, also, what they took.
Not so with Samantha. She wanted him, it seemed, beyond any of his merits. She grabbed him once by his shirt while they were sitting in the park and said, “I could drink you like wine.”
It was a ridiculous line. If someone else had used it, he would have laughed, asked her what type, asked her, perhaps, what she had planned for the cork.
But Samantha was serious. There was nothing about him that she didn’t want, and at first Ethan said to himself, to his friends, she’s a perfect combination: always in need of satisfaction and so easy to satisfy.
That first night, then, when he awoke in her apartment to an empty bed and stood there in the bare room half drunk and all naked and wondering what to do—he could have left. Afterward, often, he’d wonder what might have happened if he had, if after he’d pulled on his pants and buttoned his shirt he had just crossed the empty living room, made it to the door, and if he could figure the locks—she had many—stepped out and away into the night. Perhaps, he thought at the time, that was what he was supposed to do, what she expected of him. He didn’t know—he didn’t have much experience picking up women in bars. Usually, he’d meet women, they’d date, there’d be the slow courtship and the faster farewell. In a world demanding love, Ethan saw the opportunity only for loss.
But he didn’t leave. He stood at the door and watched the night moving beyond the far window. Outside, wind heaved—he could hear the dent of it on the glass. He stopped. Beyond the kitchen there was a door that he had taken originally, when they came in hours earlier, for a closet. Beneath it, leaked a thin, low line of light. Ethan was not impressed by wealth; it was commonplace in New York. It was the sort of thing that his mother had valued beyond measure and which he had found simply a pragmatic necessity. Without wealthy people or grants or ad agencies he would not have a job. Still, he wondered, how large is this apartment? He found himself feeling faintly ridiculous. He had woken alone in a stranger’s bed wearing only his argyle socks. Fine, that was the state of things, the way the evening played out, but it was a hard state to ignore.
He could not leave. The night had presented itself to him as a sort of marvel: the perfect ease of their meeting and the more surprising ease of everything that followed. The way her fingers traced the rim of her glass, the way she told him that she quit piano at age twelve, the way she instructed him, finally, to wait, went into the bathroom, and stepped out of it wearing nothing. It was performed, yes, synchronized, but he didn’t mind that. There was something to be said for perfect composition, after all.
So he knocked and turned the handle and crossed the threshold into the room hung with hundreds of drawings, pencil and charcoal, of a girl alone in a bare wood, tree trunks thin and long and leafless, a denuded forest or a forest of pine—he couldn’t tell. In some, the girl stood, or walked, or hunted, it seemed, for berries through thickets of thorned brambles. In all, in the shaded distance, the diamond eyes of wolves gleamed a
bove their snouts which, when he could see them, were low and slavering between the elongate trees. And she turned to him, Samantha, turned away from her easel where she sketched, and laughed when he said, for whatever reason, “I thought you were in advertising,” and covered his mouth with her hand. She pushed him back, like that, with her palm over his mouth, walked him out of the room and into bed and said, finally, when she drew her hand away, “Let’s get you out of those socks.”
That night when she came to him, and pushed him back on the bed and covered his face and his shirt with charcoal streaks, she was strange and sweet and something to be reckoned with. She held him into morning and traced words onto the nape of his neck with her fingers—she wrote and wrote and he could not read the words. As the months followed, she seemed to ask nothing of him but that he slake some thirst he didn’t mind slaking. She held a position at an advertising firm, she got him and his friends contracts, flushed him with work and love and it was easy to ignore the rest—the force of her affection whose other side he’d never seen, the nights where she’d retreat into her strange room, what she called my tower, to work on Annie and the Wolves, the children’s book she’d been writing and illustrating for ten years. She’d spend hours there, and when she’d leave she’d be numb and quiet and wouldn’t speak, but beyond that their lives were easy. They lived well off her inheritance, and when she asked him to marry her—only seven months into their relationship—he could not imagine any way to deny her. So certain was her desire, so incommensurate with any of his merits, that it seemed she could not fail to charm his life. They married and he felt sure his future was not going to resemble his past.
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