Ghost Lights

by Lydia Millet

  T. was climbing up onto the dock; Hal followed him. The cornboys were staring at them in that way children had—staring with no goal in mind, just like it was normal.

  “This is the man your father was helping me look for,” said Hal.

  “The dead one?” asked the first cornboy. He tended to speak first; probably the Alpha. Possibly he was older, but they both looked the same.

  “Exactly,” said Hal, and hoisted himself onto the dock after T. He wanted clean, dry clothes, and the sun was making him squint.

  Gretel stood at the end of the dock now, one hand on a hip, smiling quizzically; she was curious about T. already.

  “Hi there,” she said as they approached.

  “This is the guy,” said Hal. “This is him. Thomas Stern.”

  “No way!” said Gretel, and leapt into T.’s arms, hugging him. “Oh my God! You’re alive!”

  “I feel bad to have caused all this trouble,” said T., and pulled away gently.

  “Doch, the important thing is that you are safe,” said Gretel, beaming joy as though he was a long-lost friend. Hal stood by with his arms dangling, awkward.

  “Well, thank you,” said T. “I am. Thank you.”

  “I’m going to get him cleaned up,” said Hal apologetically. “We’ll see you a little later?”

  “Yes, please,” said Gretel. “I want to hear the whole story!”

  “Of course,” said Hal.

  “OK,” said T., and they left her smiling at their backs.

  “She actually means it, I think,” said Hal.

  “I can tell,” said T.

  •

  Hal lay down on the hotel bed while T. took a shower. The sound of its steady falling was a hello from the civilized world. Welcome home. He listened with his head on the soft pillow, his body on the long, solid bed. What a relief. It was so good to have them. The pillow and the bed. The lights, the air-conditioning, and the running water. He was no nature boy. T. could keep his tree-house, no matter how good the view. There was a reason their hominid ancestors first stood upright and started beating smaller creatures to death with cudgels. It was better than what came before, that was why.

  The whole atavistic thing was overrated at best.

  There had been a shaving kit in T.’s suitcase, which the manager had handed over to Hal several days ago now—a shaving kit and clean clothes, and T. had taken them both into the bathroom with him. But still Hal worried he had failed to impress upon his new friend the importance of a mainstream appearance, when dealing with authorities in a third-world country, and when there was the corpse of a local involved.

  Sure: in the past the guy had been Mr. Mainstream. In the past the guy wore Armanis and refused to get behind the wheel of anything but a Mercedes. Once Susan had been forced to rent him a Lexus, when his Mercedes was at the shop for service. To hear her tell it the guy had suffered a martyr’s holy torments.

  But he was not that guy anymore. No indeed. Now he was a guy who ate chili from a can, had long toenails and a wiry beard that almost grazed his nipples, and apparently sported a well-worn, formerly white baseball cap—now sitting humped on the nightstand next to Hal’s bed—whose inside rim was ringed with a crust of brown stain best regarded as a potential disease vector.

  He had to call Susan, of course. He was still tired, felt almost waterlogged with a fatigue that wouldn’t lift off, but he had to call her. Duty.

  He raised the receiver, then remembered he needed the phone card from his wallet and rolled slowly off the bed to reach for it. As he typed the digits, it occurred to him that she might be in flagrante with Robert the Paralegal—she might not deserve this prompt, nay servile attention. Then the telephone rang on her end, rang and rang until he hung up before the answering machine clicked in. He had to tell her this himself, wanted the clamor of it in person—his reward in the form of her stunned amazement, her astonished gratitude at the good news.

  He tried Casey’s number next, but the line was busy.

  She was probably working.

  Lying flat on his back, waiting for the shower to cut off, he considered the likelihood the authorities could be bribed to overlook the problem of a dead tour guide. Of course, to offer a bribe would imply guilt. Were they corrupt? Were they righteous? And where were they, in the first place?

  He called the front desk to ask. The nearest police station, said the receptionist, was twenty miles up the peninsula to the north. It was connected to an outpost of the Belize Defence Force, apparently. The cops and the military, in an ominous conjunction. But maybe the young harelip cadet would be there, take pity on them, and intercede with his superiors on T.’s behalf.

  Was there a problem? asked the receptionist, still on the line. “No,” said Hal, “none at all, thanks.” He hung up.

  Possibly they would be ill-advised to contact the police after all. Asking for trouble. If T. told Delonn’s brother how the guide had had a heart attack, probably the brother would not bring charges. He wasn’t the suspicious type. And anyway what motive could T. have for murder?

  He must have dozed off then, because when he woke up T. was standing over him with light around his thin, nut-brown face. The eyes were a piercing blue. Cleaner, wearing a white collar shirt and gazing down at Hal with what appeared to be compassion, he also seemed sanctified. Beneficent.

  But he had omitted to shave, just as Hal feared. The long beard still stuck out stiffly from his chin like a useless appendage. He looked like one of the Hasidim. Or even a saint or Jesus.

  Although Jesus was seldom pictured in collar shirts. They had not been popular at the time.

  “Sorry,” said the Jesus-T. softly. “I didn’t mean to wake you. You can go back to sleep. I’m taking off for a while.”

  Hal sat up, jolted.

  “Taking off? Taking off where?”

  “Headed to Monkey River Town. With Marlo. Sit down and talk to Delonn’s brother.”

  “Good, right,” mumbled Hal, rubbing his eyes. “You’re coming back here after, right?”

  “Should be back by sometime around dinner,” said the Jesus-T., nodding. “Don’t wait on me though. Time runs slow in these parts.”

  “All right then,” said Hal weakly, and lay back as the Jesus-T. receded. The room door closed softly.

  The Jesus-T. left the scent of soap and toothpaste. At least he had used them.

  •

  A short time later Hal made his way to the hotel restaurant for lunch, himself freshly washed. He was spooning up soup and halfheartedly reading the paper when someone jostled his elbow: a cornboy, probably the Alpha.

  Both of them were hovering, shirtless and dripping, in wet shorts. They held fluorescent boogie boards under their arms.

  “Hey,” said Hal, wiping his mouth with a napkin.

  “Where’s the dead guy?”

  “He went to a meeting.”

  “You finished?”

  “You mean—my lunch? No,” said Hal, mildly astonished. “I just started it.”

  “My mother wants to see you.”

  “Uh …”

  “You talk to her. OK? Then we go snorkel.”

  The waiter leaned down and removed his soup plate.

  “She gets bored. She likes friends. You talk to her.”

  “Where’s your father?”

  “In the airplane.”

  “Im Hubschrauber,” intervened the Beta, shaking his head.

  “Yeah, right. A helicopter,” said the Alpha. “He took a helicopter to get to the airplane.”

  “Dolphin HH-65A,” nodded the Beta, enunciating perfectly.

  “I’ll be happy to talk to her,” said Hal. His club sandwich had come. He took a sip of iced tea. “Right after I eat. OK?”

  “We are in front. We are by the ocean.”

  “OK,” said Hal. “I’ll come find you. Promise.”

  He watched them jog away, picking up a fry and dangling it over the small paper cup of ketchup. Were they actually concerned for their mother?
Or was the snorkeling more the point? Or had Gretel sent them? Hal thought not. Their expedition had seemed self-directed. Gretel would have come to talk to him herself, if she wanted to. He might go over to her and then she might not be glad to see him. She might not want to talk to him at all, at least without T. in the mix. Possibly he could tell her T.’s story to cover up the awkwardness.

  When he finished he took a chocolate-mint from the dish next to the cash register, popped it in his mouth and made a side trip to the bathroom in the lobby, where he splashed cold water on his face and combed his hair with his fingers. Nothing between them, in a linear sense: no future, no expectation. But still.

  And he should call Susan again. Soon.

  In the sun his eyes smarted. He had left his sunglasses in the room. He walked through canvas beach chairs, umbrellas, both with white and blue stripes, matching; hammocks were strung between tree trunks, his fellow hotel guests lying on them unmoving, fleshy and naked like human sacrifices. Mostly fat. Or fattish. He saw brown bottles of lotion with palm trees on them, dog-eared paperbacks splayed open on towels. One man had on a Walkman, and a tinny beat issued forth.

  Shading his eyes, he looked for the cornboys. They were easy to spot in a crowd, typically.

  “Hal!” cried Gretel. She was still excited, apparently, about the nondeath of T. She smiled happily.

  She wore an orange and brown sarong below her floral bikini top and looked beautiful, though maybe a little older, he was noticing, or more tired than he had thought previously. Her face was shaded by a straw hat. She held her arms open. He leaned into them. She reminded him, suddenly, of people who mourned celebrities—celebrities they never knew, of course, people who were nothing but symbols to them. Fans at Elvis’s grave, for instance. People swaying with candles, or gathered at monogrammed gates holding armfuls of flowers. He had never understood it. The mourners had not even met the celebrities, never seen anything of them but a constructed public image, yet they wept, they swayed, some did violence to themselves.

  Clearly the celebrities were symbols to them, and these symbols carried weight. He knew about symbols and their weight, their mystical eminence and power to enthrall. But that did not explain it. If the famous people were symbols, why did it matter when they died? Symbols went on forever.

  Gretel had not known T., did not know Susan. How could she care, really? Her beaming happiness. For all she knew T. was a swine, yet she was visibly rejoicing.

  “Tell me how you found your friend!” she exhorted, and pulled him underneath her umbrella. The cornboys were in the water. He plumped down on the canvas beach chair beside her, which turned out to be wet. The seat of his pants was instantly soaked and clammy.

  “I went to an island,” he said, wondering how much credit to take. “An island he owns. He was building a hotel there, before the storm hit.”

  As he told the story she gazed at his face attentively, nodding and smiling eagerly as though he, too, must feel overjoyed and brimming with triumph. In fact he felt unsurprised, he reflected; T. being dead had never been a foregone conclusion to him. It was Susan who had been so convinced of the worst-case scenario. To him the question of T.’s deadness had been, in fact, basically a matter of indifference—which shocked him, now that he thought of it. His former indifference rattled him slightly, he realized. Now that he liked T., now that he had appointed himself T.’s protector and ally, how automatic, how thoughtlessly callous the former indifference seemed.

  At the same time he was noticing Gretel’s breasts, a caramel, tanned color, the scoops of them smooth and perfect where they emerged from the fabric of the bikini. He regretted his former indifference to whether T. was alive or dead; he was mildly astonished to recognize it. But he was more astonished at the beauty of the breasts, barely covered. They hid their light under a bushel. Men were not queued up beside Gretel’s beach umbrella, for instance, rubbernecking for a gander. The breasts were here, and yet their presence had not been widely broadcast, though it would clearly be of interest to the general public. He thought of crowds along city streets, waving and straining for a look at the Pope in his Popemobile.

  Not so in this case. The breasts were unsung heroes.

  Incredible that his own hands and mouth had been on them such a short while ago—a few hours, a couple of days’ worth of hours, anyway, many of them passed quickly in sleep. In geological time, it was a second ago—an instant. The sense memory of it … no one was mentioning this. Neither he nor Gretel said to each other, right away, we are people who fucked, you fucked me and I fucked you, or made-fucking-love, or whatever. Instead it was as though this fucking had never taken place, and here they were discussing the status of a third party, one basically irrelevant to the fucking and its memory, in a separate compartment. Neither of them was bringing up her tits, her ass, how he had been all over all of them and also in the deep interior of her personal and individually owned body, to which he had no right at all but had been granted, for a few fleeting minutes, a provisional entry.

  Neither of them was bringing up this list of items, these glaringly real items whose reality was greater, in fact, than most other realities, at the moment. At least for him. While genuinely regretting his callousness—which no one else knew of, and which was therefore a secret even more than what had passed between him and Gretel was a secret, because in that case she, at least, knew of it also, whereas no one at all knew how indifferent he had been to the alive-or deadness of T. (he was so grateful, as always, for the privacy of the mind)—he was far more interested in the fact that he did not want to escape from any of them, Gretel’s tits, her ass, even the softness and sweet, almost babyish smell of her inner-thigh skin. He wished it had not all happened in the dark, so he could have better recall, could see things as well as remember the feel of them … but now the tits and the ass, the soft, musky thighs with their hideaway—or at least the darkness that had surrounded all of these during his only contact with them—were added to his list of regrets. Which was ridiculous. Regretting his indifference, which had actually hurt no one, and now regretting the darkness, which he had not chosen.

  “I hope you don’t think badly of me,” he blurted, interrupting his own droning and semi-vacant narration of the events associated with T. He was bored of it.

  “Of course not!” said Gretel. “What do you mean?”

  He shrugged, awkward. Maybe there had been a tacit pact between them never to mention the sex, the adultery, whatever you wanted to call it. Now broken.

  “Your friendship is important to me,” he said, lying. It was a lie, and yet not in spirit, because she was important to him—just not her friendship, per se, which was, given the logistics of their situation as well as the marital pairings, unlikely to the point of sheer impossibility. Could they be friends in theory, separate but aware? And what would be the point? “That’s all.”

  “You don’t have to be embarrassed,” she said, and put her hand on his knee.

  “It’s not a problem, then?”

  “No problem,” she said, and smiled. She squeezed the knee lightly. It was as though she had nothing to hide, and nothing immoral or illicit had ever passed between them.

  But the touch of her hand made him want to have sex again, with sudden desperation.

  “Mutti! Mutti!” called a cornboy, and the two of them were running toward the umbrella, kicking up sand.

  Gretel removed her hand, but not too hastily. Somehow her every movement was both graceful and casual. He wondered how she managed it.

  “Der hat eine grosse Qualle gefunden!”

  “A jellyfish,” she explained to Hal, and turned back to the boys. “Use your English! Did it sting anyone?”

  “No.” They shook their heads.

  “Good.”

  “Coke please.”

  “Me too.”

  “How many Cokes have you already had today, Stefan?”

  “Two.”

  “Three,” tattled the Beta.

  “That’s
enough, then.”

  “Please?”

  “Please?”

  She sighed.

  “Look in my bag, then.”

  They rummaged for money in her purse while she laid her head back and stretched her gleaming legs out beyond the umbrella’s shadow. “We haven’t lived in the States for that long, you know? They are still learning.”

  “T. thought their English was very impressive,” said Hal, as the cornboys ran uphill again toward the poolside bistro. As he said it he felt the dynamic between them returning to normalcy, to the politeness of regular behavior. In the shift whatever had been intimate was lost, the raw, open thing between them was covered up and buried.

  Which was an ending, but also a relief.

  • • • • •

  He tried Susan again from the telephone in his room, and she picked up on the third ring.

  “Susan? I found him,” he told her, in a voice that was carefully solemn. Suspense.

  “Oh my God,” said Susan, low. He heard her fear and felt a remorseful pang.

  “He’s fine,” he said quickly.

  “What?”

  “He’s fine. He’s grown a beard.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No. Really.”

  She screamed on the other end. It sounded like she’d dropped the phone. It was a minute before she came back.

  “I can’t believe it,” she said breathlessly. “Hal! I can’t believe you found him!”

  “Seems he had an experience,” said Hal. “He has a new opinion about capitalism. He’s a changed man.”

  “But he’s in one piece. He’s all there?”

  “He’s physically fine. Thin though. You can see his ribs sticking out.”

  “But so, so why didn’t he call me? What is he doing?”

  “I think he had a breakdown, or something. He may need help. In the readjustment process. He’s been living in the middle of nowhere like a hermit. No running water. Or electricity.”

  “T.? My God. I can’t believe this. So when is he—is he coming home soon?”