Ghost Lights by Lydia Millet (classic fiction txt) 📕

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, because 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