After the Sun

by Jonas Eika

  * * *

  We were on our way out to get breakfast when the receptionist with the narrow, tired eyes, who had given us recommendations for restaurants and things to do in Cancún, and let us know at least once a day that he was at our service, came running after us with an envelope. Lasse’s face stiffened when it was placed in his hands, and he asked who it was from. “Don’t know,” the receptionist said, “it was on the counter when I got in this morning.” But what about the security cameras, Lasse asked, they must have gotten it on tape? The receptionist shook his head, no cameras, and was already on his way back down the sea-blue carpet that led to the reception desk. “No cameras!?” I said, hadn’t thought of that before, but now I felt unsafe and angry that there wasn’t some form of surveillance, “so anyone can just barge in here with gross white envelopes, without being caught on tape?” and there weren’t any guards either, anyone could just walk in here and start shooting. Lasse fished a DVD and a typewritten letter out of the envelope. If we wanted to stop the video from being posted online, we would have to drop a fairly large amount of cash in a mailbox at the specified address before midnight, and going to the police would cost us more than money. Remember this is Mexico, the last line read.

  It’s just like in the movies, I thought, but not for long, because when we were watching the video in bed on Lasse’s computer it was like it contained a clone of me. I felt the boy’s warm dry mouth when he licked my foot on screen, and the electric shudder his tongue sent up my body from my toes. The shaking voice abusing him in my throat. I felt it exactly in time with it happening on screen, which convinced me that the woman in there was a living, sentient creature who was somehow connected to me. The video was paused, and Melanie’s hoarse voice was in my ear: “You should have never followed him to that hotel, that’s rule number one: Never let yourself be isolated. You should be glad you weren’t mugged.” I felt her sarong against my leg and realized that she was sitting next to me in bed. “It’s not that bad, is it?” Lasse asked on my other side, placing a hand on my shoulder. “Won’t people be able to tell that we were tricked into doing this?” He played the video again, and I couldn’t tell how we would come across, could only feel that I was living a life of my own in there, which made me afraid that would also be the case in the mind of anyone else watching, whether they knew me or not.

  “We’re paying the money,” I said.

  “But honey, they want 30,000 pesos,” Lasse said.

  “I don’t want this video getting out,” I said.

  * * *

  —

  While we were taking out cash, Melanie went to the bike rental place to ask Mateo, her local flirtation, whether we could borrow his car. The drop-off spot was a bit inland, ten or fifteen miles west of town, on a secluded street in the light-green landscape of my GPS. Sighing, stubborn, unnecessarily slow, Lasse entered the PIN code to our shared bank account, which we had to use to make the full amount. He felt screwed over, I knew, after having spent weeks planning our trip to be as cheap as possible. Maybe that’s why he asked Mateo, who had insisted on coming with us, to stop at a roadside café in the old city. It was one of those places—dirty, almost empty, with white plastic chairs and menus in Spanish—that always appealed to Lasse: not because of its possible authenticity, but because the food was probably cheap. I’d never understood his stinginess, at least not when it came to money. He made a good enough salary as a high school teacher, and his parents gave him money whenever he needed it. It was more like he was walking around inside a computer game that he could win if he came back from the other side of the globe having actually saved money. No one could think for a second that they would get money out of him.

  And then he ordered the most expensive dish on the menu anyway, with extra coffee and freshly squeezed orange juice. I wasn’t hungry, but I should eat something, Melanie said, I was pale, and bought me a plate of huevos rancheros. The salsa jump-started my system, making me sweat through the shell that enclosed me. The air was cool beneath the awning and full of dust from the road that sloped down to the porch, the cars rushed past at eye level. I kicked off my flip-flops and rested my feet on the tile floor. It was sticky and smelled like synthetic citrus. Melanie lit a cigarette and looked at me like she was examining me.

  “What?” I said when her gaze started to feel greasy on my neck.

  “There’s no reason to be afraid, darling,” she said, and a second later, when I didn’t respond: “I know, it’s not nice to see yourself on tape like that . . . but now it’s just about money. Nothing else is going to happen.”

  “Yeah, is there even anything to worry about?” Lasse asked, looking at Mateo. “I mean, he’s just a boy. What’s he going to do if we don’t pay?”

  “Post it on the internet,” I said.

  “You don’t know who he’s working for,” Mateo said. “I doubt he’s on his own.”

  “But isn’t this supposed to be one of the safer parts of Mexico?” Lasse asked.

  “Yes, the cartels have other things to take care of, I’m sure.” Mateo couldn’t help laughing, but stopped when he met Lasse’s eyes. “If that’s what you’re thinking . . . It could be anyone, though, people who need the money. And hey, sorry to tell you, but you’re pretty much on your own here.”

  “You don’t say,” I snorted.

  “Think of it as protection money,” Melanie said, “a kind of tax you pay to be safe. Just like back home. Except here it’s not the state you’re paying . . . And you can afford it, right?”

  “That tax is almost as much as the whole trip,” Lasse said, looking down at his plate, angry and a bit ashamed. He hated when people asked about his personal finances.

  * * *

  —

  Am I scared? I thought, as we left the city, driving past supermarkets, garages, concrete apartment blocks, ranches behind stone walls and wrought-iron gates—is it fear I’m feeling? The boy appeared before me, on all fours on the balcony, on the beach with his school papers in his bag, and I realized that all of my feelings were directed at him, at him and at Lasse who was clucking behind the camera as it captured me. Not at some shadowless boss who might/might not come after us if we didn’t give them the money, that didn’t mean a thing to me right now. The sky was getting darker. The palm and plantain trees along the road looked more evergreen, less tropical, in cloudy weather. “Now it’s raining,” I said, nodding toward the back window. Over Cancún, the sky contracted into a gray-black mushroom with a whitish stalk of rain. “Only on the tourists,” Mateo said, and he was right: the clouds seemed to be moving across Isla Cancún, the long sandy isthmus that the resort was built on. The old city was sort of sheltered by the skyline of hotels and the lagoon. Lasse was drawing circles on my shoulder with his finger. The soft dip of the power lines between telephone poles calmed me. Mateo followed the GPS’s instructions and turned down a narrow road paved with pale, grainy asphalt, a stone wall on our right and a few low wooden houses on our left. “I’ve never been here,” he said. A sharp, electric jab shot through my thighs and again I recalled the sensation of my foot in the boy’s mouth; for me that was all there was: his tongue touching the skin under my big toe, the touch that bound us against my will, and which repeated in the electric quivering in my nerves and the computer’s circuit every time the video played. For a moment, it seemed irrelevant whether the film came out or not. In a sense, the bodies and movements inside it would exist whether or not it was watched, slumbering in the CD drive of Lasse’s computer.

  The asphalt stopped and turned into gravel. The pale-green overgrowth grew denser and higher, completely obstructing our vision. After a few more miles, here and there a little garbage or scraps of metal in the ditch on the side of the road, Mateo stopped at a yellowed white mailbox mounted on a wooden pole between the trees lining the road. “Here,” he said, glancing in the rearview mirror. “You better hurry.” Lasse got out and walked over to the mailbox,
lifted the lid and looked inside. Then he straightened up and squinted into the forest, and I recognized the aggression in his body: his limbs tensed, his jaw and lips twitching, like he was about to shout at the trees, the bushes and the grass, “Well, we’re here! Come and get your money!” “Just do it, babe,” I yelled out the window in Danish. He looked at me through the front window and threw the envelope into the mailbox. On his way back to the car, he kicked a tree at the edge of the ditch, a half-stripped tree about as thick as his own leg, and kept kicking, relentlessly, his arms swinging at his sides, adding a little extra force, maybe seven or ten times until finally the trunk split and he stopped to catch his breath.

  * * *

  When we’re done getting dressed, shrimp shell on Manu’s dick in my spine soft jelly with eggs in the sun on the sandy ground, we spend all our money on bread and cheese and orange juice and head over to Jia and Ginger’s. They live on the outskirts of the old city behind the lagoon. Their narrow room is cool and wet in a stone building with cracked tile floors and peeling walls, but cozy and warm when we’re all there. We walk through the door and throw ourselves on the double mattress to the left, except Bill, who stands in the middle of the room, surveying his boring surroundings: in the opposite corner there’s a set of hot plates, a sink and a toaster, and on the one wall a shelf with a radio that he turns on. “Let me make those grilled cheeses,” he says after a while, and walks stiffly to the kitchen. When ten minutes later he serves up a heap of grilled cheese sandwiches, sliced and swollen and shining with fat, Jia looks up at him and says, “Bill! That’s one gorgeous mountain of cheese!” “There’s egg in there too,” Bill says, smiling down at the floor. “Come here, you old boy,” Jia says, grabbing his knees so he falls on top of us, and we tickle and nip him gently, rolling around in bed with an old, stiff-legged man—a little afraid that his frail limbs might break, until the warm and the jelly begin to spread through them. He laughs and spreads a little into us.

  So we eat and drink on our bellies in bed, the juice very cold in my throat. Manu pulls the melted cheese out of his sandwich in a long string that he winds around his fingers, making different animals that we have to bite if we want to be them. His hands are supple and salty. Afterward we play the game where we impersonate guests from the club: the Canadian businessman, the Italian women with the golden fans, the Burn Victim, the Mermaid, Bloody Gary. We imitate their body types and their gaits, the way they sunbathe and wave us over, and when someone guesses right, it’s time for the telepathy round. Then you have to choose someone who’s supposed to read in your mind what you want to do to the guests. Rip out their insides and use them to tie a bunch of beach chairs into a raft, pour acid into their after-sun, things like that mostly. But you never know for sure who is thinking what. It’s pulled out of your body and planted inside it at the same time, just like at the beach club, except that here we’re together and cheering and laughing whenever something sounds funny. Ginger is tuning through empty frequencies on the radio, making a soundtrack for the telepathy. A man with a full beard and dead-tired watery eyes pokes his head in to ask if we can quiet down. And we should really open a window, you can’t see your own hand in front of you. The voices of two excited kids reach us through the door, and a woman trying to calm them down. A bit farther away, a television and a crowd of mumbling male voices. Fatigue buzzes in all my joints and pulls me to the throbbing ground, deep beneath the building. Manu puts a frying pan on his head and pulls on his skin so it hangs like curtains off his bones. “The French lady with the sun hat!” I yell, and I’m right, and he picks me for the telepathy round.

  I stand in front of him on the cool tiles. The air between our bare bellies is full and bulging with our warmth. Manu’s hair clings to his temples and cheekbones and frames his eyes: dark and sad and a little afraid but also radiating a hardness that holds me back. A glittering shrug of stone, sun and sand spreads a mile-long resort across the elongated island behind the lagoon. At one of the hotels, a room on the eighth floor lights up in the light-blue night. The French lady, in an unbuttoned silk shirt with the duvet on her lap, is reading in bed with pills and wine on the nightstand. Manu comes out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around his waist and walks toward her. “What’s in his head?” Bill asks, whooping. “What is he going to do to her?” “He . . . he’s going to lay next to her in bed,” I say, and I see it: the French lady putting down her book, lifting the duvet, giving Manu a determined smile. Something despairing runs into his eyes along with a little water. He shakes his head. “Nooo,” says Ginger, “it’s not like that!” Manu curls up in her arms, with his hands folded in his lap and his face in the mattress. “Yeah, but no, it’s because he wants to . . .” I try to come up with something, that’s how the game works, the other person is the only one who knows what’s true, as I see her take his hand and make it caress her hip. “He wants to fill her bed with jellyfish!” I say. “That’s why he’s snuck into her room!” Manu nods and tries to regain control of his face, but the water is spilling over his eyes. The others can’t see from the mattress, and laugh. “So when she gets into bed,” I say, “then all the jellyfish will sting her with their poison through the sheets, that’s where he put them, inside the mattress—so she’ll be numb . . . and then the crabs will have free rein.” “The crabs?” asks Bill. “Yeah, the carnivorous crabs under the bed,” Manu confirms, and turns his scalp to me while the other boys shout with joy on the mattress.

  The next day I’m a personal boy for an American businessman who tells me that life is full of opportunities, your brain is full of products, most people think thoughts every day that could make them rich, but don’t dare to pull them out of their foreheads. “Let’s say you’re out fishing, for example. You’re walking down a trail through the woods, that stretch you have to walk, from the parking lot to the edge of the lake. Insects are flapping, birds are singing, a dragonfly hangs for a moment in the sun between the trees, and you’re struggling with your fishing rod as usual. It’s too long to carry horizontally across the path, it’ll get caught in the branches if you put it in your backpack, it won’t balance in your hand, and regardless there’ll be a tangle of straw and leaves and dirt and shit in the line. Why the hell don’t I have a holster for my fishing rod? you ask yourself. Why don’t I have a fucking bag?”

  The man is getting red in the face from the sun and his talking and he looks at me like I should be too. He lifts his head off the beach chair so his neck gets veiny and swells. I lather him up and look like I’m listening, the whole time aware of Manu sluggishly sauntering between beach chairs three rows over. This morning he stepped out of a cab wearing sunglasses, a shirt and sandy-white pants that showed off his ankles.

  “So that’s when you’ve got two options,” the American continues. “Either you keep asking yourself that same question or you give the world an answer. And then you invent that case. What do you think I did?”

  “You invented that case.”

  “Yes, impact-resistant, with a horizontal closure and all!”

  I can’t see Manu anymore, he’s disappeared between the beach chairs that shimmer and quiver and capture everything in their grid: the guests’ glistening skin, the parasols, our lethargic steps across the sand, the sun’s steps across the sky. The sun is a service we offer the guests.

  “Think about a kid like you,” the American says. “You must get tons of good ideas running around here all day.”

  “Well, yeah,” I say, and see my chance to score a good tip. “Maybe some shoes or lotion to get rid of the pain in my feet.” Most people will give you a little extra if they feel bad for you, and even more if they feel a bit guilty. But you can’t just tell it like it is, out of the blue, my body hurts, it’ll cramp their mood. “Sometimes I think about how far I’d get, if I walked the miles I walk in a day, in a straight line down the beach.”

  But this guy is untouchable, all business, he says, “That’s a fine thought, but you
’re not gonna sell that to anyone but yourself. You need to look at the big picture. Can you do my back?”

  Meanwhile, he keeps talking, about market segmentation and behavioral economics and the small computer he recently built into the case so you can upload your catch on location, and his excited voice makes me rub the sunscreen in way too fast, which gives him that piece-of-meat feeling, and they don’t like that, so I get a bad tip.

  In the middle of the next back, which I remember to lather slowly and deeply, massaging like I want to get to know all its knots, I see Manu step out of the changing room and over to the bar. He tightens his watch in an arrogant way, outstretched wrist and face turned to the ground out of contempt for the sun. The clothes don’t fit him right. He grants the beach a quick glance and starts in a slightly hurried stride up the boardwalk. At its end, the French lady in the sun hat is waiting by a cab, accompanied by the owner of the club. I drop the bottle of lotion and start running through the grid, weaving between guests and boys, as Manu gets into the back seat. The owner and the French lady exchange a handshake, and he closes the door after her. As the cab swings out and slides into the stream of cars on the boulevard, I bolt past the owner on the boardwalk. I run down the sidewalk with my eyes fixed on the pink vehicle disappearing and reappearing between the other cars, almost fifty yards ahead and gone. Then Manu’s hand appears in the back window, pressed against the glass, his fingers stretched slightly apart. I run after his hand as everything around me blurs and flickers. The sound of traffic gets more and more distant until I can hear the blood pulsating in my temples in time with his hand swelling. The road slopes and snakes into a two-lane mountain road: dry brown walls of earth on both sides, brownish overgrowth speckled green, pale and yellow, bare rock here and there. In the middle of it all, Manu’s colossal, furrowed palm retreating up the mountain, simultaneously luring me in and refusing me entry. I want to give it a kiss. And then it disappears around a rock face, and I collapse on the side of the road and throw up.