Ghost Lights

by Lydia Millet

  “He died.”

  “He died?”

  T.’s face was in shadow. Hal tried to make out its emotion.

  “A heart attack, I think. A stroke, maybe an aneurysm. Something quiet, while he was sleeping. He was an older guy, Delonn. Maybe in his sixties. Still. There’d been this—earlier he had problems breathing, but he didn’t seem worried about it.”

  “Jesus!”

  “He was a tough guy, you know, pretty rugged. Carried more weight in his pack than I did. I found him in the morning and what I ended up doing was, I dragged the body back to the boat. I was in shock, I think. I panicked. The boat’s propeller broke after that and I ditched the boat. And the body with it. I tried to hike out on foot. Stupid, but that’s what happened. I got lost for a while. Finally I made it down to the coast. I don’t know if it was days or weeks, honestly. From there I hitched a ride to Marlo’s place and he brought me here. Short version.”

  “It wasn’t in the boat, though. I mean, the body.”

  “I know,” said T., a little vaguely. “I noticed that. Yeah. That’s a complication.”

  Hal sat for a second, waiting. He wondered if T. was lying to him. Here, though, he seemed better than he had before. Hal liked him more. Maybe only because he was familiar—after all, Hal had practically even been willing, just a few hours back, to cozy up to the bohemians.

  In a strange land you found yourself seeking. Afloat among the aliens, your standards were relaxed.

  Anyway, like him or not, T. could still be a liar.

  “Shouldn’t you probably tell someone?”

  “Marlo was going to meet with whoever there was,” said T. “He was going to say I was recovering, that I would talk to them soon. I didn’t know … anyway, but. It should be me. I should go talk to them, I should face the music. You’re right. Of course.”

  “And you didn’t call anyone. How come you didn’t at least call Susan?”

  There was a pause. T. seemed distracted, pondering.

  “You like onion? Because I can chop it fine or leave it in these big chunks.”

  “Whatever.”

  Hal watched as he tossed the onion into the tin frying pan, pushed it around with the spoon.

  “My wife,” said Hal a bit stiffly, “is devoted to you.”

  “I’m sorry for letting her down. Hard to explain. Call it a mid-life crisis.”

  “But you’re what,” said Hal. “All of, like, twenty-six?”

  He took a slug of his wine. It was nice. The guy looked older at the moment, that was true, with the deep tan, the crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes and the uneven beard that gave him the look of a homeless individual. He could pass for forty, if you didn’t know.

  “I’ve always done things too early,” said T. “When I was seven I was already thirteen. When I was in college I was already in my thirties. Youth passed me by.”

  “Please,” scoffed Hal. “Give me a break.”

  “It’s a mind-set, is all I mean. Partly.”

  “My age, now,” said Hal, “that’s when you have a mid-life crisis. Fact I may be having one as we speak.”

  T. poured the chili out of the pan, dividing it between a bowl and a can marked CHILI.

  “I only have the one bowl,” he said apologetically, and held it out. “Here.”

  Hal took it gratefully. He was ravenous. T. was eating too but more slowly, spooning his chili out of the can with a deliberation that seemed incongruous to Hal—almost graceful, even. He looked underfed but apparently was in no hurry to remedy the situation.

  Gnats landed on Hal’s neck, or maybe they were sandflies—they bit lightly—but they were nothing to the hunger. He polished off the bowlful inside a minute.

  “Bit more left, if you like,” said T., and handed over the frying pan.

  “So what are you, uh, actually doing here?” asked Hal, after he’d scraped it up. “On the island?”

  “I was having a hotel built,” said T., putting down his can and crossing his legs, leaning back. He held a scratched plastic mug with a coat of arms and some writing on it; Hal squinted to read it in the light of the lantern. There were four yellow lions on a red background. Faded words read CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY LIGHTWEIGHT ROWING CLUB.

  He rowed for Yale.

  “You didn’t row for Cambridge, did you?” Hal asked him after a few seconds, and quaffed.

  “What? Row?—Oh, this? This isn’t mine. This, actually, was Delonn’s. It was in our camping stuff. I ended up with it. I didn’t really mean to.”

  Hal was feeling the wine already.

  “You go to Yale?” he asked.

  “I went to a state school. Where my father went before me.”

  A relief. Somehow it had seemed to Hal, back in L.A., that Robert the Paralegal was a pale imitation of T.—that maybe Susan saw in him a reflection of her employer, to whom she gave such fealty. Maybe Robert was only a standin for T., had hovered at the far edge of his suspicion. Now he found out even T.’s WASP credentials were nothing much. Somehow it was consoling.

  In point of fact he himself was a WASP, if he wanted to be literal about it, and specifically a WASP with some recent German background. His mother, long ago, had flirted with genealogical research and once told him the branches of their family tree sprouted nothing but Englishmen, Germans and a few glum, dead Swedes.

  Still, it was the WASPs and the Germans that most alarmed him.

  “Sorry,” he said, “digression. You had a hotel here?”

  “It was under construction. The storm destroyed it, though.”

  “Oh, wow.”

  “Half-destroyed it, technically, but it was totaled. So I’ve been demolishing it.”

  Hal watched as T. poured wine into his plastic mug, emptying the bottle. Luckily Hal’s own vessel was still nearly full.

  “Didn’t know you were quite so hands-on,” he said jokily. “What Susan said, you were mostly the brain trust. Not so much on the brawn side of things.”

  “I’ve been giving it to the ocean. Piece by piece. I figure it could be an artificial reef. You know, like the old tires they sink in some places, or the wrecks, and then the fish come and inhabit them.”

  Hal looked at him. He seemed sincere, but maybe there was something absent about him. Maybe he wasn’t all there. Like mother, like son, finally. It made perfect sense, of course, with the sunburnt castaway look and the whole tropical island, spurning-society deal.

  “Wait. So this is why you haven’t called anyone? This is what you’re—you know, with your business losing money and all that this whole time? So you can personally, like, lug the wreckage of your hotel into the water?”

  “Well, when you put it that way,” said T. lightly, smiling, and then gazed past him. “I mean, losing money—so yeah. It’s OK, finally. All my life I thought that was the worst thing that could happen to you.”

  “Uh huh,” said Hal. He waited.

  “I thought money was real.”

  Poor guy.

  “Well, I tell you,” said Hal mildly, as though speaking to an infant. “Admittedly I’m biased, being an IRS man. But I can’t think of a lot of things realer than money. I mean, to most people money is life and death.”

  “So that’s two things right away. Life. And death.”

  “I don’t really follow you.”

  “They’re both more real. Living for money is like living for, I don’t know, a socket wrench. Unless you’re going to do something specific with it, it’s a complete waste of time. Obvious to some people, I realize. But I just now figured it out.”

  “Sure. Hey, I get it. You’re talking to a civil servant here. So obviously I’m no high-earning capitalist. I’ve seen what money can do, though. Take income tax revenues. Social programs.”

  “That’s not what income tax revenues do,” said T. softly. “Social Security has its own—”

  “Not primarily, maybe—”

  “Primarily, taxes pay for weapons. Weapons and war. Always have, always will.”


  A straw man. Statistically, it was far more complicated than that. Hal could break it down for him. Basic protester stuff.

  “Well, tech—”

  “I know. Weapons, war, and please don’t forget the D.O.T.”

  “As a percentage of—” started Hal, but the guy was shaking his head.

  “Hey. Can I show you something?” he asked. “I’ve also been building the tree-house. I’m using some of the hotel materials for that. This is an island caye, palm trees and sand, which is what made it buildable in the first place. You know, some of the cayes around here are only mangrove, no real ground to build on. Mostly water. This one is island but it has a lot of mangrove vegetation too, kind of a mangrove-swamp thing on the east side, and the west side is solid ground. Right here we’re phasing into mangrove, and those are mostly scrubby. But I found one tree that was tall enough, that was it. Come here,” and he rose and Hal followed him, both with their cups of wine in hand.

  There were rough steps up the tree with the lean-to beside it, pieces of wood hammered clumsily onto the narrow trunk. Whatever else the guy was, he was no carpenter.

  At the top there was a platform, several layers of plywood with holes cut in them for the topmost limbs, which stuck out like grasping arms. Hal pulled himself up behind T., unsteady.

  “Is this thing safe?” he asked.

  T. shrugged. “Enough.”

  They both stood looking out over the mangroves, over the low tangle of vegetation eastward to the open ocean. Nothing around them but air; at only twenty feet up they were the highest point for miles.

  Hal saw a huge ship far out on the water, dazzling with light.

  “Cruise ship, huh,” he said.

  “You can see from here to the utter east,” said T. softly. “All the world ends in sea.”

  The wind picked up the branches of the trees that ringed their clearing, swept through and subsided again.

  “Right,” said Hal.

  So the guy was maybe not doing too well, mental-wise. It happened. He had been in an extreme situation—lost in the jungle, pretty much. He had a little breakdown, or maybe an epiphany; he found God, he saw the error of his ways, he renounced the accumulation of capital. Good, fine, and even excellent. More power to him. Let him become ascetic, live in a small hut with zero Armanis. At last Susan could stop working for him.

  Hal’s new fondness was a pleasant enough sensation. The man who used to be Stern had a gentle demeanor now, or that was what it felt like. Maybe Hal could even serve as his advocate with the Belize authorities, if it turned out he had committed a crime. If he had, for instance, murdered the tour guide, say, and that was why he had spiraled out of control and was building tree-houses and forgoing personal grooming. Hal could stand beside him like a brother.

  He drank his wine and felt the cool breeze on his face and the warmth in his throat.

  “Not a bad place to be,” said T. “Is it?”

  But wait, maybe this was why Marlo had asked if he was a lawyer. When he first woke him up by the pool, Marlo had asked if he was a lawyer. Maybe the guy knew he needed a lawyer. Maybe Marlo had already called for one.

  “Not at all,” he concurred, and looked up into the dark blue. It was light up here, the wind lifted you as though you could soar or fall, and let it, you wouldn’t mind. Stars were visible, but soft and washed out by the water in the air, not like infinite separate pinpoints he’d seen once in the desert.

  They had gone camping in Joshua Tree one weekend, Susan and he, not so long after the accident, because they had to get out, they had to go anywhere, they had to escape, and it was the closest empty place they’d heard of. Casey was in rehab then—the physical therapy kind, not the drug-using. They’d driven east on the interstate out of L.A., through the miles and miles of industrial sprawl and car dealerships flying their advertising blimps in the gray, smoggy sky along the crowded freeway. Finally they pulled up outside the visitors’ center and sure, there was concrete, just like at home, the concrete parking lot; but beyond it there was sand and sand and mountains and sky, and there was air all around them, plenty of room to breathe. The spiky cactus-trees were everywhere, the low mountains, the campsites with gigantic boulders.

  What he remembered now from that trip, besides the stars, was how they hardly spoke, he and Susan, they hardly talked at all. But it was not bad, it was not a measure of distance, or it hadn’t been back then. It was restful and good, peace in the wake of a long struggle.

  Their borrowed tent had a transparent window in the top of it. He had lain there on his back at night, on top of his sleeping bag, and gazed out at the stars while Susan slept beside him. He thought they’d never looked so clear, and there had never been so many.

  Casey would like this tree-house, he thought; Casey would love it here. She had looked into flying, flying in a glider. There was a program that could take her up in the sky. She hadn’t done it yet, but she still could. He would call her and say do it, do it. To know that lightness … it was not the running, not a vision of her once in a race, say, her slim young legs flying, though there had been times like that and he remembered them well enough. Field Day at school, when she was in the hundred-yard dash: he loved to watch her but she complained both before and after the race, even holding her purple ribbon. She did not like running. Hard to believe while he was watching her go, it so closely resembled joy … or flying a kite once, on a beach in Cape Cod, her feet kicking up sand on him. There were cliffs near them and the water was far too cold for swimming.

  But that was not what distressed him, the memories of running. Only the simple memory of her face—her face without tension, without strain or grief.

  “My daughter would like this,” he said.

  “She would,” nodded T.

  “I wish I could just take her—take her anywhere,” said Hal, with a rush of agitation. He saw Casey in flight, swooping. “Anywhere she wanted to be.”

  He was staring out at the cruise ship. Its lights were like the lights of the ballroom in the resort—was it last night? No, the night before—dancing with Gretel. The nearness to the water made the lights blur and shimmy, part of the very same liquid.

  “You know,” said T., and Hal realized T. was looking at him, reaching out to rest a thin hand on his arm, “she’s going to be all right.”

  “I don’t know,” said Hal, but it came out like a sigh. Something about the guy’s bearing reassured him—his confidence, his certainty. He said Casey would be all right. So she must be.

  “I promise.”

  No need to move.

  Only around the cruise ship was the water dappled with light; other than that it was blackness. Hal did not want to take a step, in case the platform broke beneath him or he fell off the edge, but this was fine for the moment. This was where he was now.

  7

  The boat was anchored on the east side, where no one would see it coming from the mainland. There was no dock there, only a narrow sandy path through the tangles of mangrove.

  After a breakfast of instant oatmeal and water Hal followed T. along the path, ducking between branches. T. carried a canvas sack of his belongings slung over one shoulder. They had swum in the shallows on the other side of the island but the saltwater bath had not made T. seem any cleaner. He was still wearing the filthy painter pants, on which the pockets bulged.

  “I have a razor, you can shave at the hotel,” said Hal to his back. “Before you get in touch with anyone. Because the cops, I mean if they see you like this, you know, the credibility issue.”

  “You have to wade out,” said T. over his shoulder. “I recommend just leaving your shoes on. There are branches just beneath the surface, things that can cut.”

  They emerged from the bushes with their feet already in the silty water; the roots of the scrub reached below the surface, long, thin vertical brown lines like wooden drips. Hal felt their knobbiness through the soles of his shoes. The cool water was around his knees now and his feet slipped in
the mud beneath. He could see the boat ahead, a long, simple white shape with peeling paint.

  “Here we go,” said T., and dropped his sack in. He climbed over the side and held a hand out to Hal. “Help?”

  “I’m fine,” said Hal, and stepped in awkwardly, the boat rocking.

  •

  As the motorboat throttled down, nearing the beach, Hal realized they had an audience: Gretel. Gretel and the cornboys.

  She was watching them from the swimming dock a few hundred yards away, standing on the sand in her blue bikini and shading her eyes as she looked out over the ocean toward them.

  The cornboys, in overlarge sunglasses and a hot-pink double kayak, were paddling toward Hal and T.

  Gretel raised her arm and waved.

  “One of the Germans,” he told T., who was easing them into a slip. He waved back at her, trying to seem casual, which luckily was not difficult in the wave format.

  Did she regret it? How deeply? Was she kicking herself? Seeing him now she would probably feel repulsed. Then again, maybe she would not notice him: he had T. in his company, the prodigal son. T. would demand her attention by not being dead.

  “The Germans?”

  “With the whole Coast Guard search thing? Looking for you? Her name is Gretel. The pink kayak? Those are her kids.”

  The cornboys were bearing down. They paddled fiercely, their small mouths clamped into grimaces that indicated they were trying desperately to win. Yet there was no competition.

  “Hey, guys,” called T., throwing his rope over the piling. “How’s it going?”

  “Their English is rudimentary,” said Hal.

  “My father went to get the airplanes,” called one of the cornboys proudly, slowing the kayak with his paddle.

  “Yes,” nodded the other. Hal was still unclear as to whether in fact they were twins.

  “Sounds pretty good to me,” said T., bent to his knot-tying. “The English.”

  “I never heard them say that much before,” admitted Hal.

  “Airplanes!” repeated the second cornboy.

  “Gotcha,” said Hal. “He went to get the airplanes. Good to know.” No idea what the kid was talking about, but who cared. Wanted a shower, actually; wished he could have had one before he ran into Gretel. Not that it mattered: he expected nothing, or less than nothing. But just for the dignity.