Ghost Lights by Lydia Millet (classic fiction txt) 📕

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 hair 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.

Its propeller was already whirring, there was a door open, and the pilot was seated, wearing a bulky headset. Hal put a foot up on the rim of the door to step in.

“Here, here,” said the pilot, and gestured for him to sit up front. It was tight, barely room to move.

“This?” asked Hal, raising his suitcase.

“Back there,” said the pilot.

Hal was sure they would skim the trees on takeoff. The night outside was daunting from the tiny cabin of the plane, its bottomless dark; he wore the headset the pilot had given him, but they hardly spoke. He recalled a phrase an FAA guy had once used with him on a commercial flight, discussing Cessnas just like this one: single-point failure. No backup systems in case of malfunction. As they taxied and rose up above the runway he willed himself beyond the plane, out of the frail and shaking capsule into the rest of his life.

L.A. was spread out far to the north, gray and blond and spidering everywhere—its fastness, its familiar blocky strip malls and wide boulevards with their unceasing traffic and smog and the glamorous jungly hills that rose above and housed the royalty. Everything was the same; his house was the same, even, full of the mundane objects he knew so well . . . by now Susan had told Casey T. was alive. They would both know by now, and Casey, at least, would feel affectionate and grateful. But Susan’s gratitude he had foolishly squandered. By accusing her at the very moment of triumph, the moment of revelation, he had squandered all his credit. Such as it was. It should have been a pure gift, the culmination of a gesture that quietly knighted him; instead he had revealed his petty nature, his real motivation for leaving and coming here, thus giving the lie to any idea she might have had about his minor effort at heroism.

He had to get T. out of the hands of the Belizean cops. It was imperative. Both for Susan and Casey and for him, T. himself, because actually he did not deserve it.

A short time ago, before he went to the island, if someone had told him Stern was in jail Hal would not have objected too strongly. Only mildly, for the sake of politeness. He might have held the private opinion, in fact, that a few nights in a Central American hellhole could benefit the Armani-wearing shithead. But not anymore. Now he wanted to get the guy out, partly because he seemed a painfully easy mark, now that he had gone hippie. Hal had always had a weakness for hippies, despite their free-love tendencies. Between them and the libertarians, he’d take hippies. Now—a benevolent-seeming, almost submissive individual—T. was without defenses. He would be instantly victimized, by either the thugs in the police force or his fellow inmates. It was ugly to contemplate.

Often people prefaced a stupid remark with the words “There are two kinds of people in the world,” and Hal had always been annoyed by this. The words tended to introduce a false dichotomy, an infantile reduction. At the same time he, too, felt the urge to divide and categorize, the satisfaction of separating the world into discrete parts that could be