by Marin Sardy
I compensate by looking great. I am tan and lean and my long hair is streaked with blond, and I walk around in bikini tops and short shorts. Carlos at the Rasta bar keeps coming on to me, but for some reason I resist him. It has something to do with the fact that he sells weed to my brother, that my brother went and found him before I found him, so now they are attached in my mind.
* * *
—
There’s no pot left. Tom’s getting ready to go find Carlos to score some more. He has killed the whole stash, minus the few puffs I took when he offered.
Tom tells me he has recently become much more disciplined about his athletic training. When I ask what he means, he says he’s planning to swim from Alaska to Japan. He has been preparing for this by thinking about swimming, extensively, by visualizing swimming across the Pacific for hours at a time.
Now when I go out to the beach I usually go alone. Tom surfs occasionally but goes out by himself. More often, he stays in our little room, smoking pot in the dark. I fetch him at dinnertime. When I switch on the lights, he sits up and looks at me with a Cheshire cat grin and starts telling me about what he’s been doing all afternoon.
“I’ve been building matrices,” he says. “I’m getting good at it. This one I did today! Wow. It was so cool.” He shakes his head in disbelief. “It was so amazing.” I ask him what the matrices are like.
“Well, this one today, it started out as just a cube. I always start with just a cube. And then I made it glow, like neon, green. And I expanded it into two cubes, and then I multiplied those, and then I gave the cubes more angles. And it turned blue. Then I, like, added another matrix to that one, started forming this pyramid, and then I started turning it around, and as it turned it changed colors, like the whole rainbow. It was amazing. So cool.” He’s smiling inwardly, chuckling to himself as he speaks, rolling his eyes in awe. He has spent the whole day in here, doing this.
“So you’re imagining these matrices?” I ask. And he says “Yeah,” but in a way that’s not quite convincing. It makes all the difference: Either the matrices seem real but he knows they’re not, or they seem real and he does not know, no longer knows, that they’re not. I’m trying to discern whether Tom has crossed a line, into the mental territory to which he is pressing so near. What I’m trying not to do, on the other hand, is acknowledge what I’ve known for weeks—that I already have the answer. That I had seen and heard enough to know it even in Anchorage, before we headed down here, and have since just been telling myself that I can’t be certain, I can’t say for sure.
* * *
—
I am beginning to notice the crackheads. They linger at the roundabout and the bar where Carlos works. They are all ticos in their twenties and thirties, twitchy messes. I try not to stare, but I’m fascinated by them. One guy, everyone calls him Mono. Monkey. He’s lanky, with cropped hair, and the form of his mouth sticks way out. When I sit on the café patio that faces out toward the water and read my ridiculously out-of-context novels—Edith Wharton, Henry James—he taps his temple, nodding approvingly. “Inteligente,” he says. “Qué bueno.” I sink at the thought of my stalled life, and his stalled brain.
Lining the road near the roundabout are all kinds of blankets where people sell trinkets and other stuff. I peruse them with a girl I’ve befriended, who has a tattoo of a flowering tree that climbs all the way up her calf. There’s one crackhead whose merchandise delights her. He sells paintings. He’s got dozens of them, unstretched canvases that he keeps in a big roll and flips through for you. He can apparently get his hands on only three colors of paint, and those colors are green, yellow, and black. Everything is in green, yellow, and black. The scenes seem to be the kind he thinks tourists will go for. Lots of dolphins, leaping out of limpid water and catching the moonlight.
The paintings are amazing. They are ugly beyond ugly. They encounter new, distant continents of ugly. My friend wants one. We walk up and she asks how much.
“A hundred dollars,” he says. She blinks.
“Oh,” she says. “Well, thank you.” We turn away and he leans forward.
“Five dollars!” he says. She turns back, considering, then decides that five dollars is too much, and we leave.
* * *
—
Melvin, the tico from the rodeo, doesn’t notice me until he notices that I want him. I’m at one of the big bars with some people I’ve picked up somewhere. Tom is at the motel. I almost feel like I’m traveling solo now, like I didn’t come to this town with anyone but myself, except that I often end up hanging out with people Tom befriends by offering them a toke. Every evening after dinner a streak of panic runs through me as I head out, wondering if I’ll have companions or if I’ll end up alone. During the day I prefer to be alone for hours at a time, to read and surf and lie in the sun. And I seem to be incapable of making plans, relying instead on just showing up and finding acquaintances in the places I’m likely to come across them. It’s easy, because travelers befriend each other instantly.
I meet a lot of Americans who come for only a week. They stay at the nice hotels and think Tamarindo is great fun, and they make shocked observations about things like the brothel and the crackheads, or they laugh about things like the brothel and the crackheads, and I despise them. I try to find the people who are making their way down the continent or have been here three times before. This works well most of the time, but occasionally there is no familiar face anywhere and I find myself trolling the streets at nine at night. Then for a moment the static coheres, and I feel myself suddenly—thickly, insistently—desperate for somewhere to land. I cannot go back to the motel room and sit there with Tom. Not when it’s dark out. If I sit in that room with him when it’s dark out, then the darkness begins to eat me alive and the bare yellow light bulbs begin to glow sulfurous and mean, and my whole life appears cruel and sad.
I see Melvin across the bar and lock eyes with him a few times. Then as I’m leaving with a couple of other people, wondering whether to drink or smoke a little more, he appears from behind us and starts talking. He’s asking us where we’re going. It’s late but not late. I know another place, he says. Then the other people go on home and I’m with him at this other place, a large, square bar I’ve never been to, where he buys me a beer and I stand and watch while he plays pool. I find myself wishing his name wasn’t Melvin. How awkward, I think, that I’ll have to tell people I hooked up with a guy named Melvin. I’ll have to apologize for it, say, Yes, well, in Spanish the name doesn’t sound as bad.
* * *
—
Strangers don’t see what I see happening to Tom. He doesn’t talk to them about matrices and jaw detachments. He has bought one of those shirts with flames up the sides, and his brown hair is growing longish and reddish and thick. On the bench facing the dusty street, he offers new arrivals a toke, and then instantly they’re his friends. He mostly befriends men, probably because that doesn’t require as much talking.
“Your silent brother,” the girl with the tattoo of the flowering tree calls him. I can tell she thinks he’s cute, and when he ignores her, her appetite for pursuit surfaces. At lunch at a long wooden table on a café patio, she makes a game of trying to get him to speak to her. But he just doesn’t. She laughs about it. I feel the need to offer an explanation.
“He’s a genius,” I say when Tom turns away, and half believe it myself when I hear it come out of my mouth. How amazing that would be if it were true. If that were the reason behind his behavior. In my mind, extraordinary intelligence somehow becomes the answer, the solution to this awful problem.
My friend is impressed. So are the two Canadians we’re with, a blond hippie girl and a weird guy with a guitar and a bright yellow T-shirt. I love that they are impressed. They peer over at him, thrilled. I can see the wheels turning in their minds as they consider the implications of his genius. What might be going on ins
ide that brain. Things they could never imagine.
* * *
—
At some point I begin to allow the word to reside in my head, and a thought that becomes too insistent: The thing about schizophrenia is that once it happens, it just keeps happening.
Every day, Tom is there in that motel room, getting stoned and hallucinating. He surfs less and less. Mostly he lounges in the motel courtyard and in the room. He does little more than watch the visions in his head. When he’s not stoned, he talks about the visions. They’ve been happening for months. They happen whether he’s stoned or not. The pot just makes them bigger, cooler, prettier.
His face is changing, has been changing. He smiles less than he used to, when he was still lively and alert, which already seems so long ago. And when a smile is there it’s indecipherable. His eyes look inward. His expression is often blank, that strange, disconcerting flatness I’ve seen on our mother’s face. I find myself picturing the brain behind that skull, trying to imagine what’s happening in there, what’s making his emotions slip away from his face. Sometimes his whole body is stiff, his spine almost like a board when he sits. When he stands, his arms hang straight down, palms inward. And when he moves, his gestures are too simple, too plain, too lacking the inflection of personality. It looks so obviously unnatural to me that I can’t believe other people don’t notice it. But they don’t. Or they just think he’s really stoned.
* * *
—
Melvin and I are outside a bar, closing time, and he buys a skewer of chicken from the man with the big grill at the edge of the road. It is warm and there is a light breeze that makes the tops of the dark palms shimmy beneath the stars.
“Pura carne,” Melvin says to the man at the grill, smiling slyly. I’m standing a few feet away, not part of their conversation. He thinks he has pulled it off until we make eye contact and he realizes I was listening. He panics, leaping toward me, saying, “No, no! I meant this!” He’s holding up his skewer. I nod and he knows I don’t believe him, which is fine, but he doesn’t seem to grasp that I want to pretend I don’t care.
He’s waiting for me to say something. I just look at him. I do that now. I’ve stopped acknowledging that I have seen the things I have seen. I look at Melvin, how pretty he is, how little he knows about me, how hard he’s trying to get me into his bed. Tom flits into my awareness and I blink him back out. I feel a profound sense of the pointlessness of reacting to anything.
I smile and step close to Melvin, and suddenly he pulls me in and takes my hand and begins to lead me up a gravel hill. The road is lined with bougainvillea that grows high over our heads. Near the ground their leaves are coated with dust, but up higher the branches swoop in grand arcs over and over themselves, and the flowers are hot pink and everywhere, and some part of me rolls away from my body and on into the bougainvillea, nesting there, tangling up in the greenery and the colors, holding tight to the vines, remaining behind as the body walks on toward the block of concrete that he says is home.
* * *
—
Another night I show up at a party and look for Melvin, hoping for a repeat encounter. He doesn’t look for me, but once I find him he smiles and kisses me and wants to dance. I know sometimes at parties he doesn’t want me there, but if I put myself in his way, he seems to decide why not? and then ends up taking me home. I’m dancing with the gringos I came with, in a group on the dance floor, drinking Cerveza Imperial. He comes and goes, bringing me beers, working the party and coming back to me between rounds. The gringos step aside to take a break and someone pulls out a joint. I’m aiming for the sweet spot I’ve discovered, working my way toward the right level of drunk/stoned that I can ride all night without crashing. I’ve been perfecting my approach, and I have this very finely tuned by now.
I don’t try the cocaine. I don’t really know why. I think I’m afraid of it. But more than that, I’m beginning to see the way it moves through the world. I am beginning to understand the symbolism of expensive white powder in a country whose people are mostly poor and mestizo. Melvin has started to tell me things. He points when the DJ ducks behind his turntables for a few minutes, music pumping on a brand-new song, then reappears. “Cocaína,” he says. He points out the crackheads, has known Mono since he was fourteen, says hello when he calls out to him, waves, shakes his head like he’s a poor stupid fool.
The topic of my brother comes up and I say, “He’s a genius.” Melvin glances at me sidelong. He leans back slightly and looks me over and shakes his head.
I just watch. I notice when he steps behind the DJ booth. I see the communication by flicks of the eyes, with the guys who buy. Tan white guys a foot taller than him, cheerful to his übercool. Germans, Italians, Americans, Brits. The way he slips off to the side of the dance floor, places a cigarette in his mouth, reaches in his pocket for a lighter and then reaches farther, down past his long shorts to his sock, pulling up a small packet with his raised hand as he lights his smoke. He’s smooth, makes everyone like him, acts like he’s got their backs, speaking one of the languages he’s taught himself, picked up on the beach and in bed with foreign girls. The young American guys are the most trusting—surfers from Bay Area bedroom communities. They think he’s their pal.
I devour the look I see in Melvin’s face as he chats them up, reaches to light their cigarettes and hands over his little packets, takes their money. He hates them more than I do. I can see this in his flashes of white teeth, his glistening eyes, and he knows I can see it and that’s why he tells me things. He hates their money and the cluelessness it buys them and that they have so much more of it than he does, and for that I hate them even more because I know it means he hates me too.
* * *
—
Tom is getting worse, right before my eyes. I can’t believe I’m actually watching it get worse. Hallucinations and blank expressions are taking over. The Tom I know is receding into a distant inner space. He doesn’t ask where I go during the day, or at night. He doesn’t see the fear on my face, the sadness in my eyes. One last time, I get angry at him—it’s over nothing, nothing at all, but I cry like a girlfriend, upset by some offhand comment. He offers a baffled smile, says I’m making an awfully big deal out of it. It’s like I have a volume knob and someone has turned it way down. He can still see the show, but he can’t follow what it’s about. This is the worst kind of betrayal.
I hold in some dark corner our lessons from childhood, from life with our mother, who never got help, never took meds, remained delusional for decades as her life slowly collapsed around her. Memories unfurl inside as I watch Tom. It is as if I already know that doctors and medications and hospitals and our efforts will all fail him. His personality is disappearing in front of me, and time has collapsed. I can’t see beyond the edge of the day.
I say nothing directly. I can’t bring it up. I ask a few questions, but I never say what I really think. Nothing could be more impossible. I can’t stand here, in this dirty little town where people don’t even speak my language, and tell Tom I think he has schizophrenia. I don’t know what I would possibly do next. I don’t know how I could live past that moment. I can’t seem to understand that such a moment could occur and we could continue to exist beyond it. I arrive at the point of picturing myself saying, “I think you have schizophrenia,” and then it all falls off the edge, like a ship on an ancient map.
* * *
—
Melvin’s apartment is a large room on the second floor of a cube of concrete. The tin roof creaks above us, and mosquitoes get in through open vents near the ceiling. He has a bed in the corner, a TV on the shelf, and a dividing wall between apartments that rises to about four feet short of the high ceiling, so that when we make the bed bang against the outside wall, some neighbor with a middle-aged voice shouts at us to cut it out. Melvin hollers back, snarky, that he’s almost there. I’ve never had sex before
while knowing someone is listening. And I don’t care, can’t make myself care.
Afterward, as I watch him moving around the room, I have the thought that this is like I’m in a movie. It’s not just the scene, its foreignness. It’s a feeling that I’m not actually here. There is a glass between me and everything. There is glass inside me. Inside me something important and delicate has fallen and broken. Even when Melvin’s talking to me, I’m in a separate universe that witnesses his but does not touch it.
He begins pulling things from his pockets and his shelves, setting them on a small, beat-up table. The packets of coke that were in his socks. A roll of cash. A scale. He sits down to do his work, scooping from a large bag into small bags on the scale, tying them off. I watch.
Melvin tells me things, mostly in English because he’s noticed I have trouble following his Spanish. I’m embarrassed by this, but I let it be. Years ago I could speak Spanish well, but now when the words come into my head, they just sit there. The language won’t move around in my mind. So Melvin sticks with English. His stories come out amid the rest of his chatter, random asides. His drunken father. Days without eating. Coming to Tamarindo as a teenager. One time, he cries. His mother, who left for New Jersey. Teaching himself Italian, English, German, trying to get out of here, always. He looks at me as if I’m a question in his head. “I don’t know why I tell you so much,” he says.
