They sunbathed, swam, and in the familiar bed he forgot the faint edge of anxiety.
In the afternoon, she suggested they walk down the beach, toward Barre, the way theyd gone that first morning.
Turner extracted the dustplug from the socket behind his ear and inserted a sliver of microsoft The structure of Spanish settled through him like a tower of glass, invisible gates hinged on present and future, conditional, preterite perfect. Leaving her in the room, he crossed the Avenida and entered the market. He bought a straw basket, cans of cold beer, sandwiches, and fruit. On his way back, he bought a new pair of sunglasses from the vendor in the Avenida.
His tan was dark and even. The angular patchwork left by the Dutchmans grafts was gone, and she had taught him the unity of his body. Mornings, when he met the green eyes in the bathroom mirror, they were his own, and the Dutchman no longer troubled his dreams with bad jokes and a dry cough. Sometimes, still, he dreamed fragments of India, a country he barely knew, bright splinters, Chandni Chauk, the smell of dust and fried breads
The walls of the ruined hotel stood a quarter of the way down the bays arc. The surf here was stronger, each wave a detonation.
Now she tugged him toward it, something new at the corners of her eyes, a tightness. Gulls scattered as they came hand in hand up the beach to gaze into shadow beyond empty doorways. The sand had subsided, allowing the structures facade to cave in, walls gone, leaving the floors of the three levels hung like huge shingles from bent, rusted tendons of finger-thick steel, each one faced with a different color and pattern of tile.
HOTEL PLAYA DEL M was worked in childlike seashell capitals above one concrete arch. Mar, he said, completing it, though hed removed the microsoft.
Its over, she said, stepping beneath the arch, into shadow.
Whats over? He followed, the straw basket rubbing against his hip. The sand here was cold, dry, loose between his toes.
Over. Done with. This place. No time here, no future.
He stared at her, glanced past her to where rusted bed-springs were tangled at the junction of two crumbling walls.
It smells like piss, he said. Lets swim.
The sea took the chill away, but a distance hung between
them now. They sat on a blanket from Turners room and ate, silently. The shadow of the ruin lengthened. The wind moved her sun-streaked hair.
You make me think about horses, he said finally.
Well, she said, as though she spoke from the depths of exhaustion, theyve only been extinct for thirty years.
No, he said, their hair. The hair on their necks, when they ran.
Manes, she said, and there were tears in her eyes. Fuck it. Her shoulders began to heave. She took a deep breath She tossed her empty Carta Blanca can down the beach.
It, me, whats it matter? Her arms around him again. Oh, come on, Turner Come on
And as she lay back, pulling him with her, he noticed something, a boat, reduced by distance to a white hyphen, where the water met the sky.
When he sat up, pulling on his cut-off jeans, he saw the yacht It was much closer now, a graceful sweep of white riding low in the water. Deep water. The beach must fall away almost vertically, here, judging by the strength of the surf. That would be why the line of hotels ended where it did, back a long the beach, and why the ruin hadnt survived. The waves had licked away its foundation.
Give me the basket
She was buttoning her blouse. Hed bought it for her in one of the tired little shops along the Avenida Electric blue Mexican cotton, badly made. The clothing they bought in the shops seldom lasted more than a day or two. I said give me the basket.
She did. He dug through the remains of their afternoon, finding his binoculars beneath a plastic bag of pineapple slices drenched in lime and dusted with cayenne. He pulled them out, a compact pair of 6 X 30 combat glasses. He snapped the integral covers from the objectives and the pad-ded eyepieces, and studied the streamlined ideograms of the Hosaka logo. A yellow inflatable rounded the stern and swung toward the beach.
Turner, I -
Get up. Bundling the blanket and her towel into the basket. He took a last warm can of Carta Blanca from the basket and put it beside the binoculars. He stood, pulling her quickly to her feet, and forced the basket into her hands.
Maybe Im wrong, he said. If I am, get out of here. Cut for that second stand of palms. He pointed. Dont go back to the hotel. Get on a bus, Manzanillo or Vallarta. Go home -
He could hear the purr of the outboard now.
He saw the tears start, but she made no sound at all as she turned and ran, up past the ruin, clutching the basket, stumbling in a drift of sand. She didnt look back.
He turned, then, and looked toward the yacht. The inflatable was bouncing through the surf. The yacht was named Tsushima, and hed last seen her in Hiroshima Bay. Hed seen the red Shinto gate at ltsukushima from her deck.
He didnt need the glasses to know that the inflatables passenger would be Conroy, the pilot one of Hosakas ninjas. He sat down cross-legged in the cooling sand and opened his last can of Mexican beer.