The Suit

by Kathryn Nolan

  Three more months on the largest hotel project I’ve ever been given—fuck, one of the largest hotel projects the Bella View had attempted in the past decade—and I wouldn’t be able to sneak down here and spy on a lone surfer at sunrise. Because in its place would be a 300-room luxury hotel. Golf course, tennis courts, five-star restaurant. A lazy river water park that gave guests a perfect, 360 view of this gorgeous beach.

  The Surfer was resting between sets, straddling his board. He bobbed up and down in the water like a sailboat. No place to be. No rush. Just the steady push-pull of the waves against his legs. I closed my eyes, remembering. I used to love that feeling.

  These past two years had been a whirlwind of heartbreak and achievement. Hotel development was like that, I’d learned. Every piece of the building—the bricks, the mortar, the tiny, pale starfish painted on the bathroom tiles—became a living, breathing entity. It wasn’t mine, but over time, that’s what it felt like. The first time a hotel I’d worked on broke ground, I felt that shovel strike deep in my bones. A deep, calming sense of satisfaction—of plywood and nails and screws slowly growing upwards. A permanent mark on the land.

  But in my most stressful moments, I thought of The Surfer. I thought of him like this, resting. I thought of him riding the waves. His laughter. The total body-high you could just tell he was experiencing. It was soothing—like hot tea on a rainy day.

  My toes snagged on something sharp. Wincing, I picked up the conch shell, peach-colored in the tepid morning light. On instinct, I held it up to my ear, listening. A memory slid in, of digging up shells with my brother on the beach back home. My mother must have been nearby, cautioning us over and over again to put them back. But every conch shell I found went right to my ear, simulated wave sounds drifting in. “It’s the ocean!” I kept exclaiming, until my oldest brother pinched my elbow and said, “No way, dummy. Shells can’t make sounds.” I’d looked at my mother for confirmation, but she’d been staring at the sunset dreamily, her dreadlocks turning a pale orange. I ran ahead of my family, still holding the shell, listening. My arm ached—I must have pulled weeds for hours that morning.

  I had imagined another girl, continents away, grasping a similar shell between her ear and her shoulder. Straining to hear the sounds of waves—not the ones in front of her, but faintly, miraculously, the waves of a foreign, beautiful place. I imagined that girl living a normal childhood. Indoors. Her arms aching from jumping rope or curling her hair or any number of things I imagined little girls doing.

  I threw the shell down the beach, shifting myself back into the present moment. Although now I was remembering I hadn’t gotten a letter from my parents in a few months. I made a mental note to give them an update on the hotel, knowing they wouldn’t care. Or, worse, my mother’s handwriting would come back, stark with her disappointment.

  The Surfer was paddling again, a larger wave cresting like a bolt of lightning behind him. He caught it and dropped down the face of the wave. I couldn’t see, not really, but I knew he was smiling. Had to be.

  I looked at my watch, the office beckoning.

  Three more months.

  The offices for the Bella View Hotel chain were in downtown San Diego with a million-dollar view of the beach. It was an international chain of luxury hotels, catering to the kind of rich and famous clientele that cared about things like thread counts and fair trade caviar.

  The Bella View Hotel proposed for Playa Vieja would be the very definition of a luxury hotel. The golf course would be first class— I drooled, daily, at the mock-ups I had of rich, rolling green set against a Playa Vieja sunset. The five-star restaurant would embody the Southern California that Americans dreamed about—palm trees threaded with twinkle lights, open fire pits, glamorous people sipping high-end liquor overlooking a beach so beautiful it looked fake—only it wasn’t, simply untouched. The Playa Vieja community was old, and traditional and grouchy when it came to tourism. But it meant their beach was a sparkling paradise just waiting to be mined for hotel gold.

  Until the City Council vote, there wasn’t much more I needed to do except maintain the progress I’d already made these past two years. The design and architecture was done. I’d gotten it completely financed. I’d prepped the marketing, secured an environmental analysis, finished every single type of revenue and expense projection there was. If (really, when) San Diego’s City Council voted to approve the building permits, all I had to do was click “send” on a flurry of emails and my job would be done.

  Sal, had all but assured me the permits would go through, although it hadn’t stopped my nights of incessant, heart-pounding insomnia. Something about being the sole person in charge—not a project assistant—made the weight of their decision rest heavy on my shoulders. Sal had been my boss for the past four years, ever since I got my MBA and was snatched up by the Bella View just a few weeks later. He’d taken a liking to me almost immediately, and was the person who spoke out most strongly in favor of me taking the lead on the Playa Vieja project.

  “You’re the hardest worker I’ve ever met,” he’d said to me, two years ago. “And I believe in you. Plus, this City Council will never say ‘no’ to the ridiculous amount of money this hotel is going to make for them.”

  That was the second half of the mantra I’d been repeating to myself recently. Three more months. The City Council loves money.

  I couldn’t wait until this damn thing was over. Although in a lot of ways, insomnia and stress were the two constants of my life ever since I arrived in San Diego a week after my high school graduation. I’d put myself through college and then grad school—attending classes during the day, working as a waitress at night—and I couldn’t remember a time when I wasn’t stressed, exhausted or both.

  Watching The Surfer helped. But I was worried about growing too attached to the mystery man in the wetsuit. The surf culture here was rampant. It wasn’t hard to deny myself romance the past two years. What few men I’d dated in college were hard to find, since surfers had never been my type. I hated their mellow highs; sunburned noses and rippling laughter. They’d doze on the green between classes, worn out from early mornings on their boards. Meanwhile, except for the five or six hours I struggled to sleep, I was working, moving, hustling. In constant motion. Forward.

  I parked my car and walked towards the office doors, running through a mental check-list of what I needed to do today. I was looking down at the ground, lost in thought. Distracted.

  I almost walked right past him. The protester.

  I stopped, did a double-take.

  Yep.

  He was a protester. He was standing in front of me with a large sign that said “Bella View Hotels: Destroying Our Environment Since 1966.” He was surfer-shaggy, with a scruffy beard and wild, unmanaged hair still a little wet from the ocean (presumably). Around his neck was a shark-tooth’s necklace. He was barefoot and reeked of sunscreen.

  I walked right up to him, neck straining. He was at least eight or nine inches taller than I was. He arched an eyebrow at me, silent and disapproving.

  My eyes narrowed. “Who the hell are you?”

  Finn

  A half-ton of water was currently holding me under the waves.

  Usually, my thoughts are centered on not drowning. Feeling for, and focusing on, the crescent of light I knew would lead me towards the air I desperately needed to breathe.

  But sometimes, before the discomfort and the mild panic sets in, I relax under the waves. The absolute quiet. The force of the ocean can leave you in complete awe if you let it. A living, breathing, wild world we almost never see.

  A dangerous one, for a surfer.

  My head popped out, the sudden rush of oxygen making me feel faint. Rico’s hand reached for mine, dragging me onto his board.

  “Fuck, that was nasty,” he said as I caught my breath. I could feel the leash of my board tugging on my ankle.

  “Yeah,” was all I could cough out. I hadn’t taken a hit like that in a long time, not since
training to surf Titans of Mavericks. And the wave that had just slapped me out of the air was minuscule compared to the waves I preferred. Big waves. Giant waves.

  Tsunami-sized.

  The set calmed down and I found my board, pulling myself up and on it.

  “How much longer are you going to stay out?” I asked. Since the day my dad gave me my first surfboard at nine-years old, I’d surfed, by myself, in the early hours of the morning. Every day. But Rico—my oldest friend—merited an exception.

  “Wish it could be all day,” he said wistfully, gazing at the shore. I knew the feeling. Unlike other beaches in San Diego, this beach was for locals only: surfers and families, dogs and joggers. San Diego wasn’t the groovy, surfer’s-paradise it had been in the sixties and seventies. This beach was all we had left.

  Rico and I had grown up here, but ever since he moved to Costa Rica he made it a special point to come back, a few times a year, and ride the waves with me.

  “Same,” I replied, and we sat in companionable silence for a moment, enjoying the untouched paradise in front of us.

  “You think you’ll surf at Pipeline in the winter?” he asked, turning over his shoulder to glance at the set of waves coming our way. They looked small, and through a kind of shared, silent, communication we decided to let them play out. We were big-wave surfers by nature. We needed a wave that stunned.

  “Definitely,” I said. “The day after Mavericks, they called to invite me. Plus Billabong wants to do a shoot in Hawaii during that same week, so it works out perfectly.”

  Pipeline Masters attracted some of the most elite big wave surfers in the world, all vying to drop down the face of forty-foot waves.

  Rico rolled his eyes—hard—in my direction. “How many bikini-clad models will you be surrounded with this time?”

  “Dozens,” I said, grinning. “Maybe hundreds.”

  “Good,” he said. “Keep them in mind while I share some bad news with you.”

  I turned towards him, concerned. “What?” I asked. “What happened? Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” he said, hand on his chest. But then he nodded towards the beach. “This place though? Not so sure.”

  I tilted my head at him and he sighed, paddling closer. “Look, when I was home this morning, my parents told me they saw a posting in the local paper about community feedback for a new building in Playa Vieja.” He paused. “A hotel. A luxury hotel. Built right on the beach.”

  “Fuck me,” I said, then immediately regretted it. I wanted to say something inspirational. Or at least witty. “Are you serious?”

  “As a heart attack,” he said. “Which means this place is done for.”

  “Wait, let me get this straight. A hotel company—”

  “—a hotel chain—”

  “—is planning on building on Playa Vieja? But we…we don’t have hotels on this beach. It would ruin everything.” Not to mention, bring the kind of smoggy, noisy infrastructure San Diego was now known for. And the beach wasn’t huge. A luxury hotel would dominate every square inch.

  “I think it would have a golf course too. A tennis court. Some kind of restaurant. You know the kind.”

  “Jesus.”

  Rico’s expression looked pained. He knew how much I loved this place. He know how much our neighbors loved this place. “I’ve been dreading telling you all morning.” He paused. “Are you still thinking about those bikini-clad models?”

  “I’m…I’m, I don’t know dude, I’m…angry?” Rico had known me since I was a child. I didn’t do anger. In fact, there wasn’t much that even irritated me.

  “First time for everything,” he said, staring again at the shore. “I’m pretty fucking pissed too.”

  “What can we do?” I asked, suddenly feeling nostalgic. I’d witnessed this conversation before, hundreds of times. My parents, feverishly discussing some societal issue, the relentless sound of my dad’s feet, pacing back and forth. The click-click of spray cans as my mom painted protest signs in our hallway.

  “Finn,” he said, “you think there’s something we can do? You know the deal. Been this way since we were kids. Rich people spot a paradise they can’t have. A year later, a big ugly hotel is there.” He shrugged. “I’m not saying it’s not wrong. I just don’t think there’s much we can do against the machine, man.”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “No, no. I can’t accept that.”

  “You sound like your dad,” Rico said, smiling back at me. “Or, actually, my dad too.”

  “You think they’d get involved?” I asked, feeling the gears of my mind whirring into action. Something else, not anger but close, was fluttering in my chest.

  Rico laughed. “Wait, you’d really do something?”

  “Why did you tell me if we’re not going to do anything about it?” I asked.

  “I want you to seriously think about what you’re saying,” Rico said. His parents and my parents had been activists our entire lives. We’d marched together plenty of times. I wasn’t sure why it seemed so bizarre to him.

  “Tell me the name of the hotel again?” I asked, my mind snagging on something.

  “Bella View. They have that huge one in La Jolla.” I hated that hotel. Once it had been built, La Jolla had flipped from a sleepy, seaside town to a paradise for millionaires. But it was something else entirely that had me hung up.

  “Wait,” I said, snapping my fingers. “Do you remember that dinky little surf competition we did in Cabo San Lucas when we were seventeen?” Rico and I had been new on the international scene, although we’d been competing in San Diego for a couple years at that point.

  “Yeahhh,” Rico said, with a lopsided grin. That smile had convinced me to do a lot of dangerous things in the past. “I remember riding a perfect wave to third place. Beating you, my friend.”

  “Not that part,” I said, “which is a lie by the way. We all know I won.” Rico flashed me his middle finger. “Do you remember the party we had afterwards in that little town, just outside of Cabo? We went to that bonfire on their beach, and there was this huge construction going on.” I remembered so clearly—a handful of surfers huddled around a campfire, flush with underage drinking, exhausted but happy. The beach had been beautiful, empty except for us. And the giant pit of bulldozers and forklifts. In the moonlight, the skeleton of the hotel rose from the sand. A behemoth, completely out of place. And a sign, whimsical and happy: Welcome to The Bella View Hotel. Paradise Has Arrived.

  The fucking Bella View.

  Rico cocked his head. “A little. I remember the guy we were with talking about how much everyone hated it.”

  “More than hated it,” I said, the memory rushing back now. “Everything was more polluted. The air was getting worse. Trash in the ocean. It didn’t feel like their home any more. It felt like someone else’s. I remember sitting there with you, thinking about Playa Vieja.”

  “Because we’d always say ‘not here’.”

  “Never here,” I echoed Rico, and the sentiments of countless community meetings we’d attended over the years. Playa Vieja was special. Different.

  “Can you imagine that happening here?” I asked, suddenly spotting the most beautiful wave in the distance. Rico saw it too—a surfer’s sixth sense. Under our feet, the roar started.

  “I mean no…but also, when I saw that ad in the paper, I just remember feeling completely hopeless. It all gets taken dude, in the end,” Rico said, although he was already positioning himself. It was hard to deny our true nature.

  “Take the wave,” I said, laughing now. “You want it.”

  “I don’t want to come home to find my parents are riled up. They don’t need that in their old age.”

  “I can’t—” I started to say, but the wave was suddenly on us and I watched my oldest friend glide under the swell. This was our home. My home. And while I wasn’t the type to get that angry, I also hadn’t been raised to be complacent. To let the machine of capitalism and consumerism run me over.


  No. I had been raised to fight back.

  Avery

  Bongo drummers were outside of my office.

  It was Monday. One week after the tie-dyed, barefoot protester had shown up in our courtyard. Since then, every day their numbers had grown, just a little.

  It was alarming. Just a little.

  My boss, Sal, had sent out an email a few days ago strongly encouraging us to “just ignore it.” To many of my coworkers they were a joke—a merry band of Grateful Dead fans who’d wear themselves out before any actual damage was done.

  I wasn’t so sure. And now they had bongos. I had grown up on the sound of bongos. And hated it.

  “And you are?” I asked warily, stepping over the legs of the elderly drummers. She had long, gray hair. He had a long, gray beard. They would have been cute if they hadn’t been playing the bongos incessantly for the past hour.

  “Marla and Jack,” the man said, extending his hand to me. I shook it, still unsure. “I’m guessing you’re not here for the protest of the Bella View hotel on Playa Vieja.”

  “No,” I said, “I’m not. In fact, I’m the person in charge of the project.”

  “Ah,” Marla said, nodding at me. “So you’re the enemy. It’s nice to meet you.”

  “Um…” I said, fighting back a deluge of curse words. In times like these, my sailor’s mouth worsened. “Let me guess. You’ll be out here, bongo-ing away, for the next three months or so?”

  “Of course,” Jack said, cheerfully, pulling Marla into a half-hug. “This is our favorite thing to do.”

  “Great,” I said, with as much sarcasm as I could muster. Which was a lot. “And just so you know, I’ll be calling the cops on you every day.”

  “Wonderful. We haven’t been arrested in a while,” Marla said.

  Sweet Jesus. I turned from them to bump smack into the shaggy surfer. The Protester. I stepped back quickly, embarrassed. I didn’t know how to feel about him—the Patient Zero of this daily idiocy. I’d seen him every day for the past seven days, and our interactions had been minimal, but heated. I didn’t even know his name. But I did know I wanted a dart board of his face.