Ghost Lights

by Lydia Millet

  “We haven’t got it worked out yet. His tour guide died—”

  “My God!”

  “—is what happened. He was on a backpacking trip and he had to hike out alone. He got lost. It was a near miss, sounds like.”

  “God! Get him to call me, then, Hal. Get him to call me right away. There are things I can still salvage, if he calls me now. I mean finances, legal situations. He would want me to, I know it. If I still can. I should try. Would you please?”

  “I’ll try. But he’s not all there, Susan.”

  “Just get him back here then. Get him back here. We’ll take care of him.”

  It irritated him somehow, the assumption that T. would prove malleable in her hands and she could automatically mold him into his former shape.

  “Who will? You will? You and Robert?”

  There was a pause.

  “I’m saying we need to have him taken care of, Hal. With access to services. Expertise and—and medication, if he needs it. It wasn’t so long ago he had his loss, you know. This is still fallout from that, I’m guessing. You know, his girlfriend—her dying was out of the blue. But he never did any bereavement counseling. None.”

  He felt resistant to answering.

  “Hal?”

  “I’ll do what I can,” he said finally.

  Selfishly she dwelled only on the functioning of her office, the linear track of returning to normal. As though normal was all she wished, all anyone would ever want to secure. It did not occur to her that normal might be flawed, might be wrong through and through—that maybe T., unbalanced or not, did not wish to be normal, did not want to go back to the steady state she apparently required for him.

  “When you get back we should have a talk,” she said, softening. “I know you’re not happy right now. And it means so much to me that you did this.”

  “I saw you,” he said. “On the floor of the office. In front of the file cabinet.”

  Silence.

  He hung up.

  •

  Lying on the bed with the television on in front of him, not watching it exactly (it was not in English anyway and seemed to be a Mexican game show involving a tacky, glaring set and flashing lights, whose sound he had muted), he mulled over the various possible effects of his words. She might be considering the option of divorce, whether he wanted it, whether she did, whether this constituted, for the two of them, a divorceable offense; she might be cold to the very core or gleeful and exhilarated, terrified or relieved. She might already have called Robert the Paralegal with the news of their discovery, might have told him what Hal had said, or might never have thought to call him. Among all these, what were his own feelings?

  It came to him gradually that he was not angry. His anger had dissipated. He had told her what he knew, and now he was not angry. There was still a sense of disappointment, of letdown—maybe for the unchangeableness of the past, the stubbornness of his unpleasant memories, which were now implanted within him permanently. Maybe for the fact that their marriage had been, in his mind, a pure union, and now it was adulterated. That was what adultery did.

  He had wanted it perfect, he thought, but wasn’t that a false want? What was perfect anyway? Possibly this new, sullied marriage was in fact more perfect than the previous innocent one, more perfectly expressed the state of lifelong union or the weather of affection. Possibly the previous, innocent marriage, uncomplicated by disloyalty, had in fact been inferior to this one, more superficial. Maybe they were achieving maturity.

  On the other hand, it could be simply that the thrill was gone, that it had been eradicated and would never return.

  Then again, he was assuming that, just because this was the first time he had caught her in an act of unfaithfulness, this was the first time such acts had occurred. But what if she had been practicing free love down through the years, ever since the Frenchman? (And Casey not his biological—paranoid crap.) What if the marriage had in fact never been what he thought it was? The real instability, real liquid …

  Someone was knocking; someone looked in the window, through the crack between the frame and the curtain. Gretel.

  He had forgotten about his own infidelity in all this. But his own infidelity was of a lower order, or a higher order, depending how you organized your judgment hierarchy. He would never have slept with Gretel were it not for the condom wrapper fragment on his own bedside table, the bad lesbian song playing on the shower radio, Susan and Robert on the floor of the office and his subsequent unmooring. It was a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder that gave him permission for misbehavior—even a broad series of permissions, airy and limitless as the sky.

  It was second-order adultery. That was it.

  He opened the door.

  “Come for a paddle with me and the boys. Won’t you?” asked Gretel, cocking her head and smiling.

  It was late afternoon. Hans had not come back yet and neither had T., clearly: and Hal was sick of the silence of the hotel room, the static of his own body laid out on the bed.

  He turned around, grabbed his sunglasses and bottled water, and followed her out of the room, down the stairs and onto the beach to where the hotel’s bright kayaks were arrayed on the sand. They pushed two of them into the placid water, the cornboys in a double kayak ahead of them, and scrambled in.

  They were going to head out toward a mangrove caye, said Gretel, and pointed to it. A quick trip before sunset. It was about a half-hour’s paddle to the southeast, and on the other side there was supposed to be a small reef. She had extra snorkeling gear, if Hal wanted to use it. She handed him a hat to wear—one of Hans’s, no doubt. It was emblazoned with the single word BOEING.

  The two of them lagged contentedly behind the boys, who raced ahead, locked into their perpetual battle of speed and strength. Once more they fought an imaginary opponent. Hal paddled at a leisurely pace.

  “They have found some kind of rebel camp,” said Gretel after a while. “Hans did what they call a flyover. In a plane with someone from the Marines, or something.”

  “Rebel camp?” asked Hal.

  “Guatemalans, I think.”

  “Correct me if I’m wrong,” said Hal, mildly alarmed. “Isn’t the army the bad guy, over there? Doesn’t it do genocide?”

  “I don’t know about the politics,” said Gretel apologetically. “Hans just said they were guerrillas. He said it was an armed camp of guerrillas that came from over the border.”

  “Over the border is Guatemala, right? And if it’s the Mayans, they’re probably escaping a fucking massacre! I mean there are official refugee camps for them in Mexico. You haven’t read about this? There was a genocide going on, a couple of years ago. Civil war. All this shit with the CIA propping up the military there, the generals that are smuggling cocaine through to the U.S. from Colombia or somewhere—remember that woman who won the Nobel Peace Prize? Rigoberta Menchú?”

  Gretel shook her head.

  “What the hell,” said Hal, and mulled it over, making deep, slow strokes with the paddle. What were they up to after all, those toy soldiers? Rigoberta Menchú: in all the pictures she wore bright, printed clothing. Cloth tied around her head, typically, and she had a brown, broad face, smiling. The smiling face was at odds with the reports of various family members of hers, shot dead or burned alive. He only half-remembered.

  The Marines, or the Coast Guard, whichever branch of the armed forces they had been: while he was with them he had been pathetic, reduced to childishness. They were strongmen; he was nothing but a victim. What felt like a death march to him had been a pleasant day hike for them. You could be brought down to that—to contests of strength, to the brute force of physical superiority, if you put yourself into the situation. And it was a plain situation, a simple one, the situation of survival. That day, on that walk, nothing but the basic, primitive unit of the body had mattered. His unit had failed him.

  But now he was thinking of those same Marines with condescension, as they must have thought of him, bec
ause their subjugation was permanent and far worse than it had been, briefly, for him. They were muscular windup dolls, forced to do the bidding of men of greater ambition. It was their job description.

  The cornboys pulled ahead, further and further away from Gretel and him. There were powerboats on the water, though none were close at the moment. He thought of the jellyfish the boys had seen, the sharks, the rays—a great sea beast rising from the depths and lifting their kayak from below, capsizing it. Their small bodies splayed and sinking … but Gretel was relaxed. He looked over and saw her bronzed limbs, lazy but perfect in the sun, as she lifted and tipped her paddle. She looked up and smiled at him. He felt lulled, the awkwardness between them evaporated. They had started in water, in the cool blue, and here they were on the water again. It was all right. Gretel had her boys up ahead of her and him by her side—a temporary companion, sure. But then they all were.

  That was it: that was it. She let her sons go ahead, and she was not worrying. He too had freedom, a strange freedom in this adultery, this strange and half-lonely honeymoon. The dissolution of everything. Because he had forgotten Casey this trip, he had been emancipated from her—Casey, who since he arrived in this foreign place had not, for the first time in years, guided his every impulse. For a time he had left her behind; the weight of carrying her had been released.

  But for the years before that, what had he been doing? He felt a sudden panic. Wasted. He had wasted them.

  He had lost them, and only realized the loss now, like a bolt, shocking. Like a nightmare: time shifted and the years of your life were gone. The light shimmered sideways over the water.

  He had forgotten his wife, mostly. He loved her, but all this time he’d practically forgotten she was there. Susan had been left to her own devices, alone and in the cold while he dreamed his soft dreams of regret. That was what had happened to the two of them, nothing mysterious. He had drifted away to his memories of his daughter as she had been, the cycles of blame, remorse, longing. He had been somewhere else all the time, in spirit if not body—not with his actual daughter, for the time he spent with her in the course of a day or a week was normal, regular time, not a nightmare or dream, but the daughter he once had, or the daughter who might have been. He was like an enchanted man. That was who he had been, all these years, a man under a spell, a man absent without knowing his own absence. He had been gone, but he had not noticed. He had not noticed himself or Susan, had noticed neither of them. All he had known was remorse. He spent his life knowing it.

  And so Susan had disappeared too. Of course. Even her job was a form of her disappearance. The job, her allegiance to it, the affair—it was all the stuff of her life, while he was not.

  Susan had vanished for a simple reason: she had nothing better to do.

  It was his fault. And here on the long, blind road he had been blaming her.

  • • • • •

  He used Hans’s snorkeling equipment, his blue mask and fins. Putting them on he thought fleetingly that he was borrowing everything from Hans.

  But Hans did not register its absence.

  The corals were not so bright here as they were further out, toward the barrier reef—dying, he suspected, some of them dead already. He had read at the hotel that this year, suddenly, corals were quickly bleaching in Belize. But fish still moved among them, their bright bodies flashing among the worn gray humps like the Mohawks of teenage punks drinking in a graveyard. He saw small fish, mostly, but it felt good to follow them for a while and watch them disappear.

  Gretel decided they should go up when the sun began to sink and the water was darkening around them. It grew harder to see. After they surfaced he held her kayak steady for her while she clambered in, treading water with his free hand, and then she leaned over and held his.

  The cornboys, blue-lipped, were already waiting, eating half-unwrapped chocolate bars and jiggling their legs, feet braced against the footrests. Without a wetsuit the coldness of the water had sunk in; Gretel’s golden skin was goosebumped. The end of day cast violet shadows on her, on all of them. Quickly the surface seemed almost black.

  •

  When they put in at the hotel beach again people were eating dinner at the outdoor tables, beneath the bistro’s palm-thatch awning. Citronella candles were burning on the tables and Hal could smell their bitter lemon edge as he walked up the beach.

  “Bring T. and join us for dinner, won’t you?” urged Gretel, and he said he would, as soon as he showered and changed.

  But T. was not in the room, and there was no message light blinking on the telephone. He took his shower quickly, anxious, and was bent over his open suitcase with a towel around his waist when Marlo knocked at the door.

  “Mr. Tomás had to go with the police,” said Marlo. “He wanted me to tell you.”

  “Go with them?” asked Hal. “What do you mean?”

  The towel fell as he lurched forward. He grabbed it and held it up tightly.

  “They took him to detention,” said Marlo solemnly.

  “Detention? They arrested him?”

  “First to Dangriga, then Belize City.”

  “I mean—why? Is it serious?”

  “Because of the death. You know?”

  “But it was an accident!”

  Guests passed behind Marlo, a family with long-haired young girls. Self-conscious, Hal stepped back and waved him in.

  “The brother, you know? He did not want to press charges. But then there was a neighbor who asked them to come. This lady—she does not like Americans. The soldiers, the other day, I think one of them was rude to her daughter, you know? So then they came. There will be an investigation.”

  “Jesus!”

  Central American jails did not boast a good reputation for client services. He would have to leave right away for the city.

  “I’ll go up there. I’ll pay his bail, or whatever. I’ll get him a lawyer. Can you get me a car to the capital? Or a plane?”

  “Tonight?”

  “Tonight. Right now. I mean he’s in jail, right?”

  “They are taking him there.”

  “Then I need to go right now. I have to get him out.”

  “The flights from the airport in Placencia? They go in the daytime.”

  “Can’t I charter one or something? It’s what, to Belize City—a half-hour flight?”

  “I will see. I can see.”

  He dressed in a hurry after Marlo left, stuffed his clothes messily into the suitcase with a sense of growing urgency. Anything could happen. The guy was non compos mentis, and they had arrested him. It often happened to the mentally ill, even in the U.S.—since Reagan anyway. They were let out onto the streets, wandered there, and were promptly arrested for the crime of existing. Then jail, insult added to injury. He would not let prison violence happen to T. Just when the guy was acting human for the first time in his life and abandoning his Mercedes-Benz fixation, they went and arrested him.

  A man turned away from the path of Mamm on and that was what he got—thrown into the hoosegow.

  In the lobby Marlo was talking to someone in Spanish, a bald guy in a satiny red windbreaker. The guy was shaking his head—a bad sign, surely.

  “Is it going to happen?” asked Hal, and thankfully Marlo nodded, consulting his watch.

  “He will drive you to the airfield,” he said. “Five minutes.”

  He had to say goodbye to Gretel before then. Who knew if he would ever be back. He headed to the restaurant and stood in the doorway looking, but could not see her at the tables. No cornboys either. Their white-blond hair was a beacon. He would have to go to the room. It disturbed him, but it could not be avoided. Up the sandy cement of the stairs—was it 323? 325? He knocked at the first one. He had three minutes left. He hoped Hans was not there. He had no time for avionics experts.

  A cornboy opened the door, video game in hand.

  “Your mother in?”

  The door opened further and the cornboy faded. Gretel had her h
air twisted up in a towel but was fully dressed. Thankfully.

  “Listen, I have to go,” he said. “They arrested T. The local authorities. They took him to Belize City. I have to go get him out. I’m flying.”

  “My God,” said Gretel. “Arrested? Him?”

  “Because of the tour guide dying. The heart attack. Remember? But now they want to investigate it, apparently. I have to fly to the city, try to meet them. Post his bail or bribe someone. We can’t have him in there.”

  “Yes!” said Gretel, nodding hastily. “Of course. You should go.”

  “So,” he said. “I guess, goodbye?”

  He leaned forward to embrace her, awkward as usual.

  “You’ll get him out. I know you will. You are a good friend,” said Gretel with her arms around him. She smelled like cinnamon.

  “Thank you,” he said. He was late now, for the driver.

  He smiled at her again. Should he ask for her phone number, or something? Cheesy.

  “Wait,” he said. “In case you ever come to Los Angeles.” He slid his messy wallet out of his back pocket, slipped out a business card. “This is me.”

  “Thank you, Hal,” said Gretel softly.

  He backed out of the room, turned and took the stairs two at a time. When he glanced over his shoulder she was braced against the railing of the balcony gazing down at him, face in shadow, the towel standing tall on her head like a crown.

  •

  The airport was a small trailer with a dirty linoleum floor, fluorescent lights overhead and a desk at one end with a few papers piled on it, an olive-colored metal lamp on a bendable arm and a stained paper coffee cup. The lights were on but no one was around, yet Hal was supposed to meet his pilot. He went to the bathroom, the size of an airplane toilet, and when he came out he saw a light through the building’s glass door.

  On the airfield—all grass and weeds with a single thin, short runway that looked more like a driveway—sat a small plane. He pushed the back door open and walked over the grass toward it, suitcase in hand, slapping against his leg. It was almost completely dark out; a couple of lights on the runway had halos around them, and then there were the small lights of the plane itself and the squares of yellow that were its windows. The plane was small and white with a blue stripe on the side—a four-seater, he saw when he got close.