Vacation (23 page)

I’d prefer not to stay.

I’m just saying. Things are going to heat up a bit around here.

It’s already plenty hot.

All I’m saying, he said, there’s going to be additional action around here tomorrow.

What are you talking about, tomorrow? said Myers. This place is a salty grave.

Tomorrow. The untrainer thrust his chin toward the huts. This place’ll be packed. No room for anyone. They’ll be doubling up. Better reserve your room.

A cruise ship is coming?

A cruise ship, ha! Run for your life. No, no goddamn cruise ship comes through here.

Then what?

Government.

Is that all? said Myers. They’re already here. They’re somewhere, they’re everywhere.

Even without the Internet, Myers could still hear his wife, could still call to her, and could still receive her declarations, though they came blown in, downwind, delayed, bony, full of dust:
My dearest husband, On holiday some hear better than others, some see better than others, some move by touch alone. Sometimes in large churches, people are crushed beneath them and can’t pull themselves out. Sometimes people tumble into the sea and are drowned. Whether they choose to call this vacation or salvation depends on their own hearts and conscience.

Your wife yet

Gray’s small daughter went from place to place in a country she had no idea her father had never seen. As it happens, she went to the same places Myers had visited. She favored the tourist spots first because it seemed reasonable: what else could her father have intended other than the trip as vacation, the chance for some sun and some sea? She walked through Managua, rode on day trips out of town, and later visited the tourist islands, the larger ones of the lake and one of the ones in the Atlantic. She didn’t carry the two photos for comparison and she didn’t ask anyone if they’d seen him because it had been so long by that time, no one could have remembered him. She walked around with her pack on, her sandals on, her bottle of water in a bag, her mosquito hat, her mosquito net. She had all the proper equipment that Myers had lacked. She stopped at regular intervals and thought about her father, tried to know him by looking at things she believed he might have seen. She stood in spots Myers himself had stood, Myers also thinking of Gray and also of another person whom he too had once known and had lost.

So it wasn’t quite what anybody expected or wanted but still in a way Myers was followed by Gray (or at least his daughter) (albeit years later), and still in a way Gray’s daughter followed her dad (or someone who knew him, sort of).

Well, anyway.

Look, I’m wondering if you’ll take me with you on the boat that’s coming. I hear you’re the man in charge.

You know where that boat is going?

It doesn’t matter.

Nowhere. Not to any destination you could plant your feet in. That boat is going out into the sea.

That’s okay.

It’ll be crowded too.

I have no luggage. Okay, I have a little luggage.

No luggage.

I’ll leave it.

SPOKE

Yes, I did go to that island. I arrived one day and left the next. And I only stayed that long because there was just one plane a day.

When I got there, I stepped off the plane onto an apocalyptic landscape. I don’t know why that should have surprised me. Not one thing has been like anyone described it and that is partly understandable, but you would have thought they’d get at least a little close on some counts. There was nothing in sight. I thought I’d been dropped off on the moon. Dry grasses, spreading landscape, the most vacant scene of a lifetime. I wish I could say it was a relief after the mainland but it was awful. I felt like they’d dumped me, the whole country. Didn’t want me there so they made me leave, talked me into it. One might almost suspect they were playing a trick on me or a game involving many people and pieces and places and an enormous amount of coordination and even specially printed papers, fake machines with lights on them, coded bills passed by my own hands into those of a player that would direct him to the next move. And I was foolish. I’d believed every word they said. I’ve been listening to people for so long my ears hurt. Anyone can see that Corn Island is a practically deserted island, not a romping tourist spot. I was so tired of having to explain the sounds and pictures in my head. All I did was look astonished at the sky, look astonished at the ground. I picked up my suitcase. I was the only passenger on the airplane—that should have been a hint. I walked through the grass toward what seemed to be a mud road. I arrived at the road and kept walking.

I suppose I can always use a spare gringo, said the untrainer. Now and then I need a hand.

I’ve got that. Myers lifted his good one.

So the untrainer and Myers walked off over the hot sand, over kilometers of it, under the sun that split the clouds, to the secret hiding place, which turned out to be the sea, and who knows why they had to come out this far, all the way to the edge of really nothing from what wasn’t much to start, who knows, and Myers said so.

You could have brought the whole operation a little closer, he said.

It’s for safety. From theft.

Theft of what?

The dolphin.

My God, what paranoia, said Myers. What does anyone want with a dolphin? Then he said, Oh look.

And he said this because he could suddenly see it, there in the water. Its fin skirted the surface, then dove below.

My dearest wife…

My dearest husband,

Some vacations end when we least expect it. Some vacations are a matter of taking matters into one’s hands and stopping it right there. Some operate like the moon, waxing and waning. Vacations come in all sorts: the overdue, the one-stop, the unlikely. You decide when it’s done.

Your loving wife

Gray’s small daughter never came close to Panama, never learned about her father’s demise and about the woman who closed his eyelids, which she herself should have closed with her own hand. She had, for the rest of her life, a longing for the man she recalled only as having played airplane with her every other weekend, lifting her up off the floor, until he disappeared. She’d smiled fiercely as he zoomed her around. She had felt the power of flight.

Back in his hut Myers wrote another email in his head, sent it through the crack in his skull. Notes of apology, of absolution. He wrote another, and another, wrote emails in felt-tip, in highlighter, wrote to everyone he could think of whom he’d disappointed, not shown up for, failed, or who had failed him.

CLAIRE

I watched the dolphins in the tank. They scooted around. I tried to feel something. I knew I was supposed to feel something—jealousy, maybe, that my father had chosen them over me. But I didn’t. I was lighthearted. They spun in the water like flexible metal sheeting.

A spiral staircase was cemented to the side of the tank. I walked up it, holding onto the handrail, a motor purr under my feet. I stepped up into a huge room with the waxy appearance of the moon. Across the surface of the pool sat a set of white bleachers and between them was a small man in a green jumpsuit. He was the first person I’d seen inside the aquarium. He had a bucket in his hand. He took a fish from it and hurled it into the water.

He saw me and looked disgusted. Who let you in here? he said.

Myers still had a few more items he had to decide what to do about, and those included the contents of his briefcase, which he dinged into the wastebasket, and then the briefcase itself, not too hard, he just opened the door and threw it out into the sand. Some other fool might come in having dropped out of the sky with things to hang onto and nowhere to put them and this case might be of use.

There.

The song of Myers’s heart thudded on the fretboard.

He went out and got the empty briefcase and brought it back inside.

He opened the door and threw it out.

Chapter Twenty

The part about the people coming: In the morning an airplane brought four taxis-full bumping up the road. Then a second plane flew in overhead and the owner said she couldn’t believe it. What is more amazing than more than one plane a day. Myers saw that indeed there was going to be no empty beach today. More taxis and more taxis came, bringing sea divers and vets from Costa Rica, newspaper reporters with computers and microphones, and one poor local with a notepad and a pen. Then a helicopter landed, blowing the palm trees and plastic chairs, and a film crew and photographers from
Discover This!
got out. They began setting up their boxy equipment and shooting photos of everything in sight—the dogs, the plants, the sand. Some of them flapped around in wet suits, holding underwater cameras.

Where’s the dolphin? they wanted to know. What are we here for if not the dolphin?

Another helicopter landed, and then another, one carrying the Nica-raguan minister of the environment and the other the minister of the sea, stylish men in loose suits, along with their bodyguards and advisors. Then another landed and several women in bikinis stepped out. They stood neatly on either side of the ministers and fed them bits of fish for the cameras. Then the skinny dolphin trainer who had originally plucked the dolphin out of the sea appeared and was arguing for his rights. Finally the Nicaraguan coast guard pulled up in a ship and rode a fleet of tiny boats to shore and suddenly the place was crowded with military.

How were they going fit all these people on the boat and Myers too? He didn’t know.

Overhead it was a solar eclipse or the end of the world or maybe just a clouded-over sky.

Besides the obvious—the coats, the suitcase, the minor luggage—there were other things to track as well, if anyone wanted to follow him, which no one did, apparently. Things mostly made of paper—the dollars and córdobas spent, the bills picked up and put down on tables, torn bus tickets, receipts, brochures that described the way to one place, the way away from another, a couple of English-language newspapers. And the trail was made up of other materials too. Footprints in mud, his password entered into computers, his passport number in registers, plus pieces of the body—hair strands, nail parings, saliva on pillows.

A shout went up. Where is the dolphin? We want to see the dolphin.

All right, I’ll show you, said the untrainer. But you have to promise not to get in the water.

What are you talking about? said the men in wet suits with cameras, said the women in bikinis, said the vet and the coast guard. All had brought their swim trunks. Swim with the dolphin. Set the dolphin free.

Forget it. No one’s seeing him.

All right, they said. We promise not to get in the water. Really, we won’t. We swear. May we see the dolphin now?

Not, he said, unless I have everyone’s word on their life.

On our lives, they said. They each had to say it, one by one.

Then they began the long trek over the sand. They started out proudly like a procession, some of them marching at the front, the ones at the back singing a song. Myers walked in the middle.

Where are your hats? the untrainer said. Put on your hats. Bring water.

It’s not even sunny, they said. It’s going to rain. We’ll be fine. We’re fine. Just bring us to the fish.

They went on.

CLAIRE

Well? said the man with the bucket. Who let you in?

The woman in the ticket booth, I said.

Show’s over. Shoo.

These are business hours, I said. You’re open.

He made a sound in his throat. He was looking at me, carefully. He was about the same age as me. My mind ticked: Nope, not my father.

Are these yours? I said. I walked forward, pointed to the tank. Are you the ringmaster?

He overhanded a fish into the water, watched me.

I leaned over a plastic plaque. I see one of them won an award, I said. Which one is Sunbeam?

Stupid name, he said. Not my idea.

A dolphin came up for air and upset the water between us.

So someone else named them? I said.