After the Sun

by Jonas Eika

  * * *

  —

  A cool, earthy smell of something wet gets me back on my feet and pulls me down along the ledge between bushes and low trees. Their crowns interweave in a dense foliage. Underneath, it’s dark with glowing speckles of compacted light. Feeling returns to my feet, which throb and sting where the skin has been worn off, not used to asphalt. My throat is swollen and dry, I can taste vomit on the back of my tongue. I want to lie down on the cold ground, curl up in the fallen leaves that are a salve for my burning feet, but the smell of water keeps me going. Manu isn’t at the club today or tomorrow. He isn’t in the dressing room, in the living water, in the sun, on the sand, in the big grid of plastic, flesh, lotion, parasols and drinks. Without him, there’s only all of that. I don’t want to go back, but I don’t know where else to go. So I walk, my body leaning toward the ground, zigzagging down the slope that gets steeper and wetter, interrupted by whitish rock surfaces. The protruding roots of the trees make bony stairs. The air gets thicker with a smell of something hidden and fermented. Behind a small mound or a big anthill thirty yards down, a lake appears, dark and glassy. I start running, weaving around the ridge and down the last steep part before the ground flattens into mud and low, crawling plants. I lie down on the rocky shore and drink and cry.

  * * *

  We got drunk and wanted to go clubbing, and Mateo said he knew the perfect spot. Hand in hand with Lasse and Melanie, I followed him down the boulevard. The road was jammed with people heading home from dinner or on their way out for a drink. It was like someone had shifted the gears somewhere in the resort’s control room, from the long, sluggish and way-too-bright daytime to the hectic and sensual mood of the night. The bars were playing tropical lounge music, the waiters became overly attentive, the tourists made-up and perfumed. The sun sank and muted the light to a comfortable red glow that made people’s tans look healthy and beautiful. I even caught myself wanting all the shining flesh pressing in around me, all the half-naked women and men, to rub up against them on a dance floor or in a hotel room, like it was sex pheromones being sprayed out of the fans in the bar awnings. I wouldn’t be surprised if Cancún had some furtive agreement with the northern European negative-birth-rate nations, Do it for Denmark.

  We continued to the party area at the resort’s northernmost point and went into La Vaquita. It was decorated like a strange blend of strip club and theme park: cow-print tables and movie theater seats, cow-print carpet, dark-red metal handrails leading from the booths to the bar and the dance floor with cages on raised platforms. We paid the thirty dollars for the open bar until 2 a.m. The clientele was varied, most were probably tourists from Western Europe and the US, but a lot of locals too, Mateo said. We had left the dance floor and were sitting on one of the spotted couches against the wall.

  “There are too many people staring,” I said, nodding toward the bar where people were hanging out.

  Mateo said that he needed a whole lot more to drink before he would dance. But he liked it here, he wanted me to know: the alcohol, the music, the body odor, all the anonymous people around us, to him it was the perfect setting for “a little life reflection.”

  “And what do you think about life then?” I asked.

  “I’m happy,” he said.

  “And what about Melanie?” I asked, feeling suddenly bold because of the way we were seated, both of us with our eyes on our significant others acting out on the dance floor. I felt like we were brothers and could talk to each other about pretty much anything.

  “I think she’s happy too,” he said. “But she misses home. Have you noticed how sometimes her gaze slides away, just kind of disappears, in the middle of a conversation? Or when you’re out sightseeing . . . She’s traveled too much.”

  “Yeah, but what I actually meant was how do you feel about her? She’ll have to go home at some point, won’t she?”

  He thought about it for a moment before answering. “You remember tourists in a different way than you remember other people.”

  “How about you?” he asked a second later. “How do you feel about your boyfriend?”

  “Good,” I said, “I’m happy . . . Lasse can get a little worked up sometimes . . .”

  “Yeah, he seems like the kind of guy who might explode at any minute. Poor tree, huh?”

  “But he would never actually hurt anyone!” I looked insistently, and maybe also a little angrily, at Mateo, but couldn’t tell whether or not he believed me. “It’s himself he’s mad at . . . Don’t tell anyone I said this, but sometimes he hits himself.”

  “Okay,” Mateo said, a little skeptical.

  “Like, he just lets loose on his own face, until he can’t take it anymore. Like he’s trying to exorcise something.”

  “But how are you supposed to say anything to him then? I mean, if he gets violent toward himself, when you’re having a fight for example, is it when you’re fighting that he does that?”

  “Yeah, most of the time. Or if I tell him that he hurt my feelings—”

  “But then it’s impossible to reason with him! How can you even get angry at him then—if you want to?”

  Well, fuck you, Mateo, I thought. What did he know about Lasse’s shame? In reality, its source wasn’t Lasse but me, or at least his awareness of having put me in an uncomfortable situation. Really, shame was social or interpersonal or whatever you want to call it, but somewhere on its way into the body, it cut all ties and ended up seeming like it was all about you, yeah, that’s exactly what he did, made everything about him! I was sick of the sympathy I felt for Lasse when he hit himself, I was done with it, he should try to get out of himself for once.

  “You know they all hate him at the hotel, right?” Mateo asked when I didn’t respond. Something rude and arrogant had entered his voice. Maybe he was drunker than I thought.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “The receptionists, the cleaning staff, they think he brings bad luck . . . It’s just something about him, his nervous energy, it puts them on edge.”

  “What would you know about that?”

  “A lot, my friend Cristo is the receptionist at your hotel. Obviously we talk about work.”

  “Okay, ‘hate’ is maybe too strong a word,” he said a moment later, and told me that what was draining, what was, to put it bluntly, destroying the locals of Cancún, was the lack of seasons. Of course, there’s the rainy season and the ten days at the end of April when the jellyfish approach the shore to mate, but there’s no winter when the tourists stay away and let the locals find themselves.

  “But our lovers have found each other,” I said, nodding at the dance floor. Mateo looked indifferently at Lasse and Melanie wriggling around each other laughing, and shut down my attempt to reestablish our connection. Now they were taking turns leaning their heads back and shaking their bodies with closed eyes while fanning each other with their hands. The bar was smoky and full of red beams of light that made their wet faces shine. They danced themselves out, came over and gave us a kiss on the cheek, took a sip of their drinks, left to dance some more and showed up with new friends, and so on for the rest of the night until I couldn’t recognize them anymore. The drinks were strong and brought out to us in half-liter cups with plastic lids and straws. I sank deeper into the couch, Mateo became increasingly incoherent. At one point, he started talking to me like we didn’t know each other:

  “So what do you think of Cancún?” “Which beach is your favorite?” “And what about the Mexicans, what do you think of them?”

  “They’re sweet,” I answered, “so welcoming!”

  “Totally! But also a little too forward sometimes, don’t you think? You’re walking down the street and there they are, trying to shepherd you into one of their restaurants. You’re lying on the beach and they come over to offer you something. Or you’re at your hotel, on your balcony, even in your room, and they’re just th
ere, somewhere. But you know what? We’re not the ones who are everywhere. It’s the tourists . . .”

  And then I didn’t get to hear anything else because of Melanie, who fell on top of me and shouted into my ear, “He’s the perfect dance partner, your boyfriend!” I looked up at Lasse trying to pull Mateo onto the dance floor, and asked her why. “He keeps all the other guys away!”

  * * *

  —

  After Lasse fell asleep, I went out on the balcony. There was no sound of traffic, only a few muted voices and a faint clattering of dishes. I could just make out the distant corner of the terrace where Cristo the receptionist was having a drink with two other men, probably friends keeping him company on the night shift. Had Mateo sat there too? Could he see up into our room? Beneath them, the boulevard stretched for a few miles to either side, a glittering strip of hotels, clubs, tattoo parlors and restaurants in the dark sea. A few hundred yards farther down the beach was the Big Cat Beach Club, where we had met the boy who tricked us into being in his movie. I could sense him like an animal senses another animal in the dark. I went back inside and sat at the little desk, with my back to Lasse in bed, plugged the headphones into his computer and pressed play.

  At the end, after trying to inhabit the role, kicking the boy and humiliating him, I looked desperately into the lens and said I wanted to stop. In the five seconds that followed, I could feel Lasse’s passive presence behind the camera, his sweat and heavy breathing, a strange, ghostly satisfaction that made him hesitate a little too long before turning it off. Something made me rewind and watch those five seconds over and over again, until finally, I identified what it was: a short glitch that sliced the image into a blurry grid. As if the particles that composed the image moved for a moment in a way that couldn’t be read by the computer circuit. It gave me the strange sense that the particles were living their own life and really remembered us, the waves of light that we reflected in exactly that moment, me and the boy and the things around us: the sky, the sea, the streetlamps and the palm trees, the plastic chair and the tiled floor that he was lying on with a dull and distant expression, like a plastic film covering the disgust in his eyes, and my foot in his mouth.

  I went online and searched “beach boy licking tourist feet,” “young boy pushed around by tourists on balcony,” “tourists using Mexican boy as a table,” and found a website full of images of young boys in swim trunks. I clicked on one of them and was prompted to log in, was about to give up when Lasse’s email address and a password were automatically filled in. He swelled in the bed behind me, his eyes sliding wet over my neck and back. Behind the log-in wall, the videos were waiting. There were clips that resembled mine, but also a few where the boys were alone on the shore with a beach ball or some other toy. It felt like I was lying next to Lasse in bed and couldn’t move. As the sun crept up from the ocean and into the room, I watched the videos, one by one. Some of the tourists were more violent toward the boys than others. All of the boys had the same dull expression in their eyes. I found the kid from the Big Cat Beach Club, and later me with my foot in his mouth. But there was only one of me and many of him, maybe twenty or thirty videos.

  There’s nothing special about the beach because I am a beach boy, there’s only longing in the sky and the sea. Bill told me why: he says their deep blue is the light that’s spread when the sun’s rays hit the atmosphere, light that never arrives to touch me, but fills the distance. He walks across the sand in a series of sober movements, straight-backed and in full control. He knows the weight of each object and the strength needed to lift it: parasol, lotion bottle, towels, drinks; in his hands they all leave the ground at the same speed. The owner sacked two other boys a week after hiring him. Now Manu is gone too, and we run around exhausted, trying to keep the guests in our sections satisfied. I never have the time to stop and look over the big grid, reach for the other boys with my eyes, and when I do they’re gone behind a swarm of suntanned hands suspended in the air, fanning me over: I take orders and deliver drinks, adjust parasols, apply sunscreen and after-sun, without faking anything for anyone. I understand what Jia means when he says the club is one big economy of the sun: everything that is part of it, from the beach chairs’ shining grid to the lotions we offer the guests, is derived from the sun and constitutes its house. When the tourists come and lie in it, they become sunbathers. By now we aren’t enough hands for more than two at a time to be someone’s personal boy, so we pool our tips and divvy them up at night. And of course I say yes to the extra gigs that come my way: cleaning bits and coffee table bits, dog and cat bits, and in all of them I’m on all fours in front of the tourists who order me around, kick and scold me, in the way the owner has instructed me to instruct them. I miss Manu most of the time. Other times it’s just me, early in the morning before the club opens, in the still, glittering water I slip around and play. I find the big red beach ball, lift it over my head and watch the water drip from its underbelly. “Ooo, there you are, my favorite! So big and round . . .” I say it with my voice at the very front of my throat, and with a lot of air. “So much bigger than my head.” I say, “You’re all bloated, you’re so tight and smooth,” rubbing it across my belly to make that squeaky plastic sound. Then I wrap my arms around it with a giggle and try to keep myself afloat until it spins me around and throws me off. When I’m standing up again, cuddling the ball, I take the needle out of my pocket underwater. That’s the hardest part: separating myself from my arm driving the needle into the ball, from my fear of the pop in my ears and the plastic’s pop against my skin; I’m supposed to play with it and fondle and enjoy it till the very end. Not show that I am, with my whole body, afraid of the next second. And when it happens I’m only allowed to say “ooff” and laugh a goofy laugh, not so much as granting the flaccid plastic in the water a look.

  After five or six uninterrupted takes, the owner sends me to the changing room. I get to lie down in the living water that soothes my swollen skin for ten minutes before I hear the other boys arrive, and I rush out of the pool. The door opens, and they walk in on a fan of light that disperses them across the bench and folds back together in a golden string along the doorframe.

  “You’re up early today,” Ginger says, pulling off his jeans.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” I say, “just sat by the lagoon until morning.”

  “What?” Ginger says. “I can’t even get out of bed these days, and I collapse as soon as I get back home. Everything’s so much harder since Bill arrived and made the rest of us unnecessary.”

  “It doesn’t have anything to do with Bill,” Jia says from the corner. “Don’t you see, this is the owner’s way of trying to pin us under the sun. Just like the parasols. He’s trying to exhaust us.”

  “You and your fucking sun economy,” Ginger says, and turns to me and Bill.

  “The owner is trying to lock us up in the house of the sun,” I say, less because I know it’s true than to shift the conversation away from Bill, who’s breathing nervously at my side. His dry shoulder rubs up and down against mine. He can probably tell that I’ve been lying in the pool.

  “Yeah,” Jia says. “He doesn’t want us to see the sunscreen and after-sun as anything other than before and after the sun, or the guests as more than sunbathers. Or the sun as more than . . .”

  “Fuck the guests,” Ginger says.

  “Yeah, fuck the guests. But the parasols . . .” Jia says, and places a hand on Ginger’s inner thigh. “Para-sol, Para-sun,” he says, almost sings, in a light voice that’s simultaneously playful and powerful, drawing circles between Ginger’s legs. Ginger is about to protest, but falls silent and gives in, leans his head back and thrusts his groin into the bowl Jia is making with his hand. The sun rises and shines through the bamboo wall. A fluorescent orange fog lifts from the pool in front of the bench and turns into jelly on my feet.

  “Para-sun.” I say it how Jia said it, and the word takes the shape of a funnel
in my mouth. “But what does it mean?”

  “How am I supposed to know?” Jia laughs.

  “Do you want to?” I ask Bill, nodding, and he nods too, and I hand him a shrimp shell from the pile we’ve been collecting under the bench. We make the best of the things that are. Bill and Jia push me and Ginger headfirst into the pool, follow us laughing and feed our assholes with eggs in the living water, while we all sing in chorus: “Para-sol, Para-sun . . .”

  * * *

  —

  When we’re done getting dressed, shrimp shells on Bill’s and Jia’s dicks in our spines soft and transparent with eggs in the sun on the sandy ground, we go down to the beach. The beach chairs, the sand and the parasols are all equally white, shining like a vast blob of sunscreen. The flags with the lion logo droop on their poles along the boulevard. The planks of the boardwalk caress the soles of my feet as I cross them one at a time, smooth with soft furrows. Ginger’s hand is flat on Bill’s lower back, Bill’s hand on mine, and my arm draped over Jia’s shoulder, and when we let go and disband I register a heaviness at the base of my back: a sack of eggs, one for each boy, as if in the changing room I absorbed us inside me to avoid having to go through the workday by myself. As Jia and Ginger walk in their boyish rocking swagger toward their respective middle-aged couples farther down the boardwalk, I make myself harmless and small-hipped in the eyes of the three young, muscular men walking toward me. Bill hangs back to let two Scandinavian women come to him, as if of their own accord. We have to take advantage of these early hours before the club fills up to make some good money.