Glimpses

by Lewis Shiner

  The reef brought us up to thirty-five feet. The coral slowly sank into the sand and within a few hundred yards everything turned white. The heads of gnarled brain coral had begun to crumble and the bottom was flat in all directions. Except for the clarity of water we could have been in the harbor. I looked for Tom and couldn’t see him. Ahead of me, Hector swam next to Allyson, touching her arm, pointing and nodding. Dr. Steve huffed along behind them, blowing huge clouds of bubbles out of his regulator.

  The cool, dry air from the mouthpiece left me parched. I took it out long enough to rinse my mouth with Caribbean water. The salt only made it worse. It was like being lost in the Sahara, trudging through endless plains of sand.

  Not sand. Ashes.

  Just before I ran out of air, the reef came back to life. It was like the glimpse of heaven that the revived dead are supposed to see. The sand fell away to the left and the drop-off was back. The coral turned gray and then purple again. There was a fan with an angelfish behind it who looked at me with mild contempt. There was an anemone, waving rubbery tentacles.

  Dr. Steve was already headed for the surface. Another of my father’s macho obsessions was to use less air than anybody else. It was supposed to prove how fearless he was, because if you’re scared you use more air. Here I was empty, a disappointment to his memory. I wanted to be alone down there, to have a few minutes to sort things out, but it was already hard to breathe. I looked up and saw the boat overhead, like a knife blade slicing the dome of the sky. I pulled my reserve lever and swam to the edge of the drop-off and looked over.

  There it was. X marks the spot. There was nothing to see but empty blue. I didn’t feel much of anything. I turned around and Tom was right behind me. He looked at my air gauge and stuck his thumb toward the surface. I signaled OK and started up.

  Pam and Richard broke open the cooler. I can’t explain why I took a mineral water instead of a beer. The beer looked good and I felt okay again after a night of abstinence. Knowing the feeling would go away once the alcohol hit my system had never stopped me before. I sat on the aft rail and drank my mineral water and wondered if I was trying to sober up, and if I was, why I’d picked this of all times to do it.

  The old man driving the boat dropped anchor. He was Hector’s father, if I understood right. A few seconds later Hector and Allyson came up the ladder. Allyson went first and Hector gave her the assistance of both hands on her firm, adolescent ass. I don’t think Dr. Steve saw it or there might have been a knife fight right there on deck. Hector stowed his gear and then came over to me, drying his black hair with a towel from the Presidente Hotel.

  He pointed to a spot off the stern. “Your father come up there.”

  I nodded.

  “He was good man, your father. Very funny guy, you know? But too old. Too old for this, I think.”

  “Lo creo también,” I said. I think so too.

  Tom was the last one up. He made a show of counting heads and then he came over to us. “You okay?”

  “Fine. What was the deal with all that dead coral?”

  “Yeah, I forget how long that seems. It’s only a few hundred yards, really. Listen, we’re going into town for dinner tonight, party down a little after. Maybe go down to Scaramouche. Local disco, pretty corny. It’s what passes for a good time around here. What do you say?”

  Hector did a little two-step on the deck, arms around an invisible partner. “Dancing…nice girls.”

  “I’m kind of beat. I better pass.”

  “We can talk about this if you want. I know it can be tough. Nobody should ever have to go through something like this. But everybody does.”

  “It’s okay. I’ll get to bed early, maybe look around the island some tomorrow.”

  “You’re welcome to stay as long as you want. Seriously.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  “Okay,” Tom said, and squeezed my arm. The kindness made my eyes sting. “Let me know if you change your mind about tonight.”

  “Think about it,” Hector said, raising his hands head-high and snapping his fingers. “Very nice girls.”

  “Forget it,” I said. “I’m married.”

  It sounded lame even to me.

  Back at the room I showered and changed. I started to play the Smile tape and then decided I would save the magic for another time, when it might do some good. I had Celebration of the Lizard in with my CDs and I took it out and looked at it. Graham is selling the hell out of it, and I’m not surprised. Rumors of a Doors movie are only part of it. It’s the times, crack and AIDS and global warming, something desperate and final that Celebration is perfect for. I can’t get away from the idea that it’s more than background music, that it’s somehow contributing. In any case I sure as hell didn’t want to listen to it. I put on Soul Carnival and punched up Don Covay’s “Mercy Mercy.”

  I stretched out on the bed, pleasantly tired from the dive. My head was clearer than it had been in a while even if I didn’t have any answers. I came, I saw, I didn’t get a goddamn thing out of it. Give me one good reason not to change my flight and go on home.

  Elizabeth.

  I thought about the dry peck on the cheek she’d given me when she dropped me at the airport, the long aching silences in the house whenever we were both there, like we added up to less together than either of us alone.

  It was four in the afternoon. I was in Cozumel, for God’s sake. It was time for a swim.

  I splashed around in the lagoon for a while. I could hear the wind rustle the palm trees, hear the sea birds shout at each other. The ocean felt alive, even there in the dirty harbor, the waves picking me up like giant hands and then dropping me again. I could have been a cork or a piece of seaweed. Everything around me was white or green or blue and that was all I thought about for half an hour or so.

  When I came out, Lori was on the front step of the dive shop, drinking Tehuacán water. She had on a one-piece swimsuit flowered in blue and green, with one of Tom’s long-sleeved shirts over it like a jacket. She had the sunglasses on, reading a paperback romance with a red cover and an oval picture in middle. I nodded to her and she nodded back. I started to go to my room and then changed my mind and crouched next to her in the sand.

  “Listen. Did I say something to piss you off? I mean, I don’t want to be an asshole or anything, but I can’t understand why you dislike me so much.”

  “I don’t dislike you at all,” she said. I heard a trace of an accent, Southern, that I hadn’t noticed before. “Au contraire.”

  “I guess I have to believe you. You have this thing about the truth, right?”

  “Maybe that’s part of the problem. I don’t hide my feelings too well. It’s just that most of them have nothing to do with you.”

  Another stunner, even when she was trying to make nice. She was right, of course. Why should I be the center of her universe?

  She sighed. “I think you’re attractive and everything, but you’re married. It’s obvious you came down here looking for trouble. I don’t want to be the trouble you find.”

  “Me? Looking for trouble?”

  She studied my face, still half-smiling, and said, “Maybe you don’t know it. I could believe that.”

  “I’m down here because of my father. That’s all.”

  “Really? How’s your marriage?”

  “It’s fine, what’s that got to do with it?” She didn’t answer and after a second I said, “Okay, it’s not fine, it sucks. I still don’t see your point.”

  “I’m just saying I don’t want to get involved.”

  “Nobody asked you to.”

  “Okay, okay. I’m sorry. I’m way out of line, as usual. How’s this? We drop the subject, and you can come with me and see some of the island. Unless you’re going into town with the others?”

  I shook my head. “Aren’t you?”

  “I got to see everybody drunk last night. Anyway, I’ve got errands this afternoon. I’m headed out to the commune.”

  I made an intere
sted noise and she said, “Bunch of neo-pagan kids, mostly Northamericans. The locals hate their guts. They have a pretty tough time of it—not enough food, lots of hassles with the cops. You can come along if you want.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Why not?”

  I took another shower, playing it all back in my head. Looking for trouble, she said. Am I? And what was it she said about finding me attractive?

  I put on khaki pants, a black T-shirt with a pocket, moccasins. Lori was loading a green plastic trash bag into the back seat of the VW. She told me they were cans from the boat, and from the bar next door. The commune kids sell them to a guy on the ferry from Playa del Carmen.

  I got in and we roared away. She revved the little bug to a high squeal before she shifted, came right up on the bumper of anybody in front of her. There didn’t seem to be any malice or impatience in it, she was just totally into the act of driving.

  “Tom hates the way I drive.”

  “My dad used to tell a story about his first field trip, when he was in college. Anybody who complained about the cooking had to take it over. So whoever got stuck with it would put rocks in the eggs and cardboard in the pancakes and stuff like that.”

  “So you think I drive like this to piss Tom off?”

  We weren’t communicating. “I just meant I’m not that crazy about driving. So I try to let other people drive however they want.”

  “You talk a lot about your father. I mean, for supposedly not liking him.”

  I didn’t have an answer for that. We were headed south, away from town and the airport. We passed the Chankanab Lagoon with its resort hotel and park and within a few hundred yards there was only the road and the scrub brush and the empty ocean.

  “The commune’s in this abandoned hotel called El Mirador. You speak Spanish?”

  “It means window or something, right?”

  “Right. Only there’s no view there at all, you can’t even see the ocean from it. Which was why it went broke in no time and this brother and sister from Amsterdam were able to cash a decent-sized inheritance and buy the place. Then once they had it they invited all their Wiccan friends to move in.”

  “Their what friends?”

  “Wiccans. Witches. Pagans, you know.”

  Alex had always talked about being a witch, back in high school. She never called it Wicca, though, and I’d never taken her very seriously. “Are we talking Aleister Crowley and sacrificing animals and all that?”

  “Basically they worship the Goddess and keep a low profile. They’re trying to kick technology.”

  “What about you? Are you into all this Goddess stuff?” I had a sinking fear that this woman, who had started out so interesting, would end up having some prefab belief system.

  “If you’re going to have a religion, it seems better than most. It reveres women, for one thing, instead of being terrified or hostile like most of Western culture. It respects life and doesn’t believe in fucking up the planet. I’m not real comfortable with the supernatural parts, but the here-and-now agenda sounds okay.”

  I couldn’t argue with it either. After a few seconds she said, “When I got sober, a lot of things changed for me. That’s when I gave up meat and all that. I started to come here once a week to do yoga. And I got interested. At least interested enough to learn some more, if not to…”

  “Commit?” I said.

  “Something like that.”

  The Mirador is pink stucco, with thorny gray-green vines that grow up over the walls. It’s a featureless square, two stories high, with the outside windows boarded up. I guess the boards keep out hostile rocks and bottles.

  We parked on the side of the road. Lori took the cans and I carried a canvas tote bag with groceries in it. There’s an arched entranceway that opens into a patio with haphazard landscaping: fruit trees, tomatoes, corn. A veranda runs all the way around the ground floor, with half a dozen hammocks strung between the posts. Two were occupied by dusty men in their early twenties. A woman of about the same age was weeding in the garden, along with an older man with gray in his pony tail and a blond boy of maybe seven. A couple of toddlers chased each other down the veranda, one in makeshift diapers, the other naked.

  We took the stuff into a kitchen near the front gates. The place was clean enough, and smelled like earth and spices. A few flies circled lazily, unable to find anything worth landing on. The refrigerator and stove were both hooked up to what looked like a propane tank. “I thought you said they were getting away from technology.”

  Lori saw where I was looking. “They burn methane. You can make it out of garbage, so it’s renewable.”

  I picked up a heavy, Swiss-made butcher knife. “And steel? Just curious.”

  “Recyclable.” She gave me a look. “You can always beat it into a plowshare.”

  A guy in his late thirties, black, with short dreadlocks, came in. He was bare to the waist and had that kind of hairless and glossily developed chest that, if I had one, I wouldn’t wear a shirt either. “Hello, darlin’,” he said to Lori, and hugged her. I could see her hesitancy, and so could he. It seemed to surprise him. He looked a question at her, which she ignored.

  “Ray, this is Walker, the local shaman.”

  We shook hands.

  “Who else is here?” Lori asked.

  “Everybody. Joost and Debra are upstairs fucking or something.” He pronounced Joost like it started with a Y and rhymed with ghost. Lori unloaded celery, cheese, eggs, and a tub of tofu from the tote bag.

  I was grating cheese with my back to the door when Debra came in. Something made me look around. I looked back at the cheese, then turned again to see her smiling at me. She’s nearly six feet tall, broad in the hips and shoulders and chest, with a narrow waist and thin ankles. She had on a black cotton skirt to midcalf and a black leotard top. Her feet were bare, the toes curled against the concrete floor. With the light behind her, her hair made a golden haze around her head. She wore round wire-rimmed glasses and a silver belt. “Hi there,” she said.

  I nodded. “I’m Ray.”

  “Hi, Ray. I’m Debra.”

  Lori said, “Or Moonflower, as she’s sometimes known.”

  Debra didn’t react. “That too. Are you at the dive shop, Ray?”

  There’s a Germanic lilt to her voice. If I looked at a photograph of her I would probably think she’s overweight and kind of plain. In person she was magnetic. “That’s right,” I said.

  “How long are you down for?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t decided yet.”

  “We’ll just have to keep you amused, then, won’t we?”

  Whatever it was, she knew about it. She spun around theatrically and her skirt swirled up. “What are we making?”

  “Enchiladas,” Lori said coolly. “We could use some green onions.”

  “Walker knows where they are.”

  Walker clearly didn’t want to make an issue out of it. “Right,” he said, and went outside.

  Debra moved next to me, close enough that I could smell her faint, musky-sweet perfume. “I’ll help you chop,” she said.

  There were ten of us for dinner. We ate at a long table in the courtyard, under the last of the sunlight. Debra sat next to me and somehow Lori ended up across the table and down toward the far end. Joost, dark-haired, with the same magnetism as his sister, sat at the head of the table, Walker at the foot, by Lori.

  There was a French couple, both dark and thin, and a broad-hipped girl from the United States with protruding eyes and a raucous laugh. There was Jeff, the guy with the gray ponytail, and an eighteen-year-old runaway from Veracruz.

  Debra wanted to know “who I really was.” She seemed sincere enough, so I told her about the stereo business, that I’d made a lot of money in computers but it didn’t mean much compared to music.

  I said, “Lori told me you guys are witches.”

  Her “yeah” sounded like “jah.” “Pagans, witches, whatever you want to call us. We worship the Goddess, wh
ich basically is Gaia, the Earth. We see her as a living being. We try to live according to her rhythms. To be clean and peaceful and reverent.”

  Jeff, on the other side of her, said, “Sounds like the Boy Scouts.” Then we had to explain to her what Boy Scouts are and how they’re different from Hitler Youth, which turned out to be tricky.

  There wasn’t enough dinner to fill me up. The French boy had talked about how Americans eat three times the calories we need, so I didn’t ask for more. When everybody was done I started to help clear the table. Debra grabbed my arm and said, “We cooked. We don’t have to clean up.”

  “What do you guys do at night? What’s for fun?”

  “Sex is popular,” she said, smiling. Okay, maybe she was flirting a little. I found myself embarrassed and erect. “Joost plays guitar, sometimes there’s drumming and dancing.” When I looked interested she said, “We have congas, timbales, lots of kinds of drums. You look like a drummer.”

  “I used to be.”

  “You’ll have to come help us out.”

  “I don’t know. It’s been a long time.”

  Walker and Lori were standing behind us. “It’s a great high, man,” Walker said. “People been getting fucked up behind it for hundreds of thousands of years. The drums get into a groove, people start dancing, they can dance themselves to death and never feel it.”

  “We need to go,” Lori said. She sounded very cool. Debra looked at her with a kind of cocky smile. Bad blood under the bridge between those two, no question.

  I stood up. “Thanks for dinner.”

  “Come back,” Debra said. “Any time.”

  On the road Lori said, “I can take you back there and leave you if you want. She’d like that. Fresh meat.”

  “You’ve got me wrong.”

  “Do I?”

  Without meaning to, I saw myself in one of those crumbling stucco rooms with Debra, both of us sweating, her bare skin moving against me. “I don’t understand what you’ve got against her. She seemed like a pretty okay person. All we did is talk.”