Ghost Lights by Lydia Millet (classic fiction txt) 📕

wusses that would sue them if anything happened. The risk is like nothing.”

“It can also hurt your brain. Or you can choke on your own vomit. You know who choked on their own vomit?”

“I’m getting the Belgian waffle. What are you getting?”

“Hermann Goering. Little-known fact.”

“What are you talking about? The guy took a pill! Believe me. I saw it on the Hitler Channel. He was going to be executed like a few minutes later.”

“May I take your order?”

“I’d like the egg-white omelet? With mushroom and tomato?”

“And I’d like the Belgian waffle.”

“Very good, sir. Coffee?”

“Wait. Does that come with like just regular fruit or that jelly-ish, bright-red fake-strawberry stuff? Know what I mean?”

“Seasonal fruit, sir. Today it is fresh blueberries.”

“OK. Yeah. OK then, I guess I’ll get the waffle.”

The woman addressed the waiter.

“Sorry. We’re on our honeymoon. He’s not usually so picky.”

“Are you kidding me? Picky? That stuff is like fluorescent. It’s full of Red Dye Number Three. Erythrosine. Heard of it? It’s a known carcinogen. It causes cancer in mice. They feed it to those little tiny white mice and then the mice sprout tumors the size of a cantaloupe. Man. They can barely even walk lugging those things around.”

When Hal got up to leave he saw they were pale and thin and black-haired—out of place in the resort, where most of the families were blond, overweight and Midwestern-seeming. Temporary refugees from SoHo, possibly. In fact he had not been to SoHo since the early 1970s but he imagined young people there might resemble these two.

•

“Excuse me,” he said to the clerk at the front desk. “You have a Xerox machine, right? I’d like twenty copies of this, if possible.”

He passed across Stern’s photo.

“One moment, sir,” said the clerk, a lofty woman with prominent cheekbones and beads in her hair, and went through a door. He would be expected to check in periodically with Susan—every couple of days, he thought, and wondered how he could get around it. He would fax her reports, that was it. Cheaper than international calls, was how he could justify it, and people liked to receive or send a fax. They liked to say the word fax, said it with abandon. No doubt its moment would be brief.

Personally he preferred telegrams and mourned their passing. He could remember getting one from his father when as a college student, traveling in Italy, he had called his parents in a panic and asked for money. His father had wired it to an American Express office and sent a telegram to Hal’s youth hostel to tell him this. It contained only the AmEx address and the words Next time beg sooner.

“There you go,” said the clerk, and smiled with white straight teeth. “Twenty.”

“Bill it to my room, would you? Thanks. 202,” he said, and as he went out thought she resembled an African queen.

It flashed through his mind that he, too, should have an affair, if only to prove he could, but then he knew this for a juvenile impulse.

He stopped in at the manager’s office and left a message with the secretary. He wanted to hear what the hotel knew about Stern’s trip up the river and what had become of the belongings from his room. He handed his business card to the secretary as he was leaving and she smiled at him sweetly.

At home the card struck fear, or if not fear a kind of casual contempt.

In the hotel gift shop he bought a local map, a baseball cap against the noonday sun, and what appeared to be a child’s backpack—they had none for adults and damned if he was going to carry his briefcase like a stodgy old fucker. The backpack was emerald green, festooned with frogs and lizards. He slid the photographs into the pack and ordered a taxi at the front desk, where the queenly woman had been replaced by a thin man with a pencil mustache. He had the address of Stern’s foreman in the papers Susan had given him and he gave this to the driver when he stepped in.

The road was deeply rutted and the jeep had no suspension, so he bounced on the hard seat as they drove. Out the window he could see restaurants in rickety buildings on stilts, named after animals and painted in pastel colors. They had a temporary, slipshod appearance and were often combined with homes or small convenience stores; faded soda logos graced the storefronts and fluttering laundry hung on clotheslines out back. The thin walls would only suffice in this warm, mild place, where no protection from the cold was needed.

There was a garish, yellow-green color to the palms and other trees, gaudy and somehow translucent. He did not believe in the permanence of the trees any more than the buildings. He had read that many of the trees and flowers here had been shipped in from far away—Tahiti and Australia.

The peninsula was a glorified sandbar, he thought, waiting to be washed away by a towering swell.

As the jeep jerked along in the ruts he saw debris collected against the base of palms, clustered along hedges—food trash mostly, cardboard and plastic, but also netting and newspaper and old shoes and wrinkled pieces of mildewed rug or fabric. They turned left at what seemed like a construction site, many small shacks going up all over the place on the slick, muddy ground.

It was like a minefield of outhouses, he thought.

“Seine Bight,” said the driver.

“This?” asked Hal, before he could stop himself.

“Rebuilding,” said the driver, nodding. “You know: it was all knocked down. In the big storm last month.”

They drove between the shacks, not on a road at all as far as Hal could tell—bumping over the corrugated curves of culvert pipes, weaving and tipping sideways. A white bird, duck or goose maybe, flapped out of the way and children ran alongside the car. He was enraptured by this, stared out the window at the flashes of light on skin, the kids’ stretched and laughing