Ad Infinitum

by Adam Cayton-Holland

The alternate reality he always envisioned for himself was merely the continuation of a day already lived, a thread left dormant picked back up again.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-

Stayed up nights the rest of my life wondering if I’d made the right choice.

Puerto Escondido, Mexico. 2004? 2005? Hard to remember. At the time his tattered Let’s Go considered it off-the-beaten path, but its mere inclusion in the guide hinted at an inevitable gringo discovery, rise, revival, ruination. Death by a thousand sunrise yoga classes.

But for them, then, it was the exact remote paradise the three American backpackers were dreaming about. Locals insisted The Night of the Iguana, a 1964 film-adaptation of the Tennessee Williams play starring Richard Burton and Ava Gardner, was actually filmed there, not Puerto Vallarta, and it was the allure of their beaches, not those of Vallarta further north, that put the entire Pacific coastline on the map. They didn’t know anything about that. They just knew the bars never seemed to close, and for less money than they had spent anywhere so far on their trip, they had their own cliff-side cabana overlooking a sleepy cove, with a steep but navigable path leading down to the most incredible beach any of them had ever seen.

They met studying abroad in college, España. Bonded over classes at the Prado, calimocho, snorting drugs and their own sense of self-importance. They’d gone their separate ways after that definitive semester, but they had stayed in touch, and at twenty-four each of them found themselves flirting with impending careers yet entirely eligible for one last, nomadic hurrah. They decided on a month-and-a-half in Mexico. They all spoke fluent Spanish, they’d all been to the typical vacation spots, but never anywhere real, never anywhere autentico. Why not sojourn across what they had taken to calling, “our fiery neighbor to the south?”

They reunited in Oaxaca then made their way by bus to the Pacific. They intended to traverse the coast for a few weeks up to Vallarta, before turning inland to Guadalajara, then onto Guanajuato, before eventually going their separate ways in D.F.

But Puerto Escondido stopped them dead in their tracks. An allotted two days became seven. And even then, when they were finally able to wrench themselves from this jewel they’d fallen head over heels for, it was only for a day-trip to a nearby national park; the owner of their hotel insisted they visit.

She was an ex-pat from South Carolina. Lucy. Tall, blonde, her perennially-reddened skin belying the ease with which she otherwise blended into the community. She had taken a liking to them, in an older sister kind of way, and they hung on her every word, like each sentence held the promise of the next great album that would blow your fucking mind. In her they perceived wisdom, worldliness, the real thing to their collective pretending, and though it was probably merely the vast maturity gap between twenty-something’s and thirty-something’s, Lucy felt like she had the answers.

Over drinks one night she was shocked to find out none of them knew how to surf; she insisted they learn here, the best place in Mexico, so before they moved on to their next destination she arranged for a lesson from her friend, a local surfer-cum-handyman-cum DJ.

They all piled into her jeep and drove to an empty dock that constituted the entrance to Las Lagunas de Chacahua National Park. Soon a small motorboat emerged and for a few a few pesos they loaded their enormous travel backpacks aboard and made their way to a naked strip of beach that made Escondido look cosmopolitan.

“Paraiso,” the lancha driver said, before arcing a wide U in the muddy river and puttering back down river.

The surf-lesson didn’t take—beneath the surface of the water, his leg strapped to his board, he had involuntarily executed a summersault so violent his only lingering thought from the experience was what if a rock had been in that exact spot? But it wasn’t the sport they were after down here in Mexico, it was the experience. Experiences exactly like this. This is why you travel, he remembered thinking. To befriend locals, benefit from their wisdom and deviate from your plans in a way you never would have imagined possible mere hours ago. And look at how they were rewarded. Look at where they were in the world. Where the fuck were they in the world?!

The day kept topping itself. An old, grinning fisherman emerged from the thicket of vegetation behind what they had initially taken for a closed-for-the-season palapa. He opened the door, threw out a few plastic chairs and a table, and asked them if he could interest them in what he had caught that morning. He could. He also had two beach shacks to rent if they were inclined to spend the night, nothing fancy, a couple of hammocks more or less, just beyond the bend in the shoreline. The day-trip became an overnight stay.

They closed the palapa down. The fisherman sold them all the beer he had left and let them know that should they need further provisions there was an old lady who sold cualquier cosa just up the way. He motioned further ashore, deeper into the jungle por alla, todo recto. An hour later, the three backpackers had tracked her down, a concrete shack enveloped by growth. They shouted timid holas into the darkness until a back-window opened spilling stale light across their drunken faces. The ancient woman inquired as to what they were after.

Bebidas, they told her. Cigarillos.

She plunged one of their empty two-liter plastic water bottles into a bathtub half-full of brown liquid, filled it to the brim with moonshine mezcal, then capped it back off. She told them to feel free to grab as many limes as they wanted from her tree and sold them two packs of Marlboro Reds.

“We’re either going to go blind or have the best night of our lives,” he said as they made their way back to the beach.

“Why can’t it be both?” his friend said.

They rejoined Lucy and Surf DJ triumphantly, and the group proceeded to get as fucked up as physically possible. Surf DJ produced some weed, one of the trio fished into his backpack and pulled out his portable CD player with a little speaker that plugged into the headphone jack, and they sat there on the beach listening to mix CD’s. A storm moved inland toward them, bright flashes of red and blue and yellow lightning flaring like tentacles across the sky.

A teenager in a Cuauhtemoc Blanco national jersey appeared out of nowhere, his blushing girlfriend trailing a few feet behind him. They had heard the music, the clamor of their raucous conversation. He asked if they could join. Of course. They offered them their cigarettes and beers and they were grateful and asked them to translate the lyrics to every song.

This is life, he thought, feeling like Anthony Bourdain.

That’s when Lucy casually informed him that she was adding a pool to her hotel. If he wanted, she would pay him him to help her work on it, let him stay at the hotel during construction. It would be enough of a foothold to get him started in Puerto Escondido, to see what an ex-pat life in a sleepy, coastal town in Mexico had in store for him.

And there, right exactly there, is where he wished he could pick the thread back up. Right there is where he wished he could un-pause the movie and rewrite the second act.  

He’d take Lucy up on her generous offer. Finish out the trip with his friends, part ways at the Mexico City airport, then board a bus back to Puerto Escondido and get to work on that pool. It seemed so feasible. He had an offer of work. People made entire lives on further longshots. And even if building pools was not the vocation he envisioned for himself, Oaxaca was nearby. There was a sizable ex-patriot community there. They had to have an English-language newspaper. Maybe he could start submitting articles, like he was at the alt-weekly back home in Denver. The paper had published a few of his submissions and even begun assigning him occasional short pieces. They saw something in him. Surely whatever far-flung rag that covered Escondido had to as well. And if not, well then so what? There were other paths.

But even in that euphoric moment on the beach, as the mezcal pulsed through his veins like the promise of something infinite, he knew he could never accept her kind offer. The whole idea was too…far flung. What was he going to be some wannabe Hemingway? At 24? Rock a Tommy Bahama shirt like a cheeseburger in paradise? Sure people did such things, but really? Him? Was he going to grow dreadlocks next? Get his tongue pierced? He fucking hated the Grateful Dead, he’d never fit in a beach town. For every beautiful woman and sunset he envisioned, he foresaw entire days cringing at conversations about surfing, flip flops on concrete the new soundtrack of his existence. It wasn’t for him. He wasn’t laid-back enough for that life. He wanted to be, but he wasn’t that big of a risk-taker. He could never be so bold.

Plus, the alt-weekly back home. That was a serious lead. He’d probably had ten pieces rejected before they’d cracked the door for him. The editor told him to get in touch when he came back. She didn’t have to say that. Should he just throw that away?

“Think about it,” Lucy said after his polite rebuffing.

Which he did. For the rest of the trip, nearly every waking second. His friends didn’t help. They were in his ear about it constantly, relentless like only friends can be.

Go. Give it a try. Worst case scenario you come home in a few months. You want to write? Write here. Write about Mexico.

They didn’t understand. Their paths were more rigid. One to a finance job in the city. Another to med school. Puerto Escondido came to represent their collective wish fulfillment, a bucking of the status quo, the opportunity to live an exotic, interesting life, the type of life they had all envisioned for themselves. There was a golden ring right there in front of him, in front of them, and all he had to do was grab it, not just for himself, but for the spirit of adventure that had defined their friendship. But that spirit was fading, the pragmatism of age was setting in, and he was too afraid.

It affected their morale, altered the group dynamic. Among any group of friends traveling a pecking order emerges; after Escondido he was kicked down to third. Zihuatanejo didn’t help.

They rented snorkeling equipment and plunged into the water one day, his two friends—one from San Diego, the other Long Island—slithering off like native coral species. But something was wrong with his mask. He kept putting his head underwater but he couldn’t breathe. He’d come up after thirty seconds or so, gasping for air, sputtering, hacking, exhausted by the effort. His friends kept looking back after him, wondering what the holdup was, but after his third or fourth unsuccessful attempt, he waved them on. His equipment was defective. He treaded water and adjusted and readjusted his straps but it was futile. He gave up and made his way back to the beach where he collapsed in a soggy heap. When his friends returned, full of encounters with spinner dolphins and leatherback turtles, he demonstrated for them the faulty equipment, showed them how he tried and tried but could not breath through that damn thing. The friend from San Diego reached out and lowered the mask down his face. He hadn’t been covering his nose. Their laughter was audible all the way down the beach. They even told the guy they rented the snorkels from.

“Jacques Cousteau!” he said.

The name stuck.

*

His instincts were right about the alt-weekly. He reached out the day he got back from Mexico and the editor sent him an assignment that night. Then another, followed by a more substantial piece. Soon he was reliably writing two pieces an issue, blurbs for the most part, fifty words here, 250 words there, but his name in ink regardless. And he was proving his reliability. He kept his head down and paid attention, learned what the paper was interested in covering; and he got better at writing. After a few months a position opened. Assistant Calendar Editor. It was the bottom of the pecking order, but it was a staff position nonetheless. He was a paid regular. No more freelance. This is what he had always envisioned for himself. He felt on his literary path. He emailed his Mexico buddies. They were genuinely happy for him.

“Nice work, Cousteau!”

He had made the right choice.

He started writing essays, leaning hard into being from Denver and how rapidly the city was changing, the feelings of disorientation, the feckless outrage.

My favorite place from my childhood got torn down and they put up mixed-use condos!

Click, like, share, letter to the editor.

It struck a nerve, each column a “Don’t Californicate Colorado,” bumper sticker on an ever hazier highway. They gave him a column. A weekly forum to spout off on whatever he wanted. He started to feel like a legitimate voice in the city. Not a week went by that someone didn’t recognize him. At an event sponsored by the paper someone introduced him to the mayor and the mayor said he liked his column. They fist-bumped.

The weeks passed quickly, an issue at a time. Four meant a month, forty-eight a year. He hardly felt the aging, just kept pumping out copy. It was fun to be in your twenties, with swopping bangs and a press-pass. During the week of the 2008 Democratic National Convention his entire assignment was to get into every event that he could and blog about it. He watched Barack Obama accept the democratic nomination before the Greek columns erected at Mile High Stadium, then partied till dawn with the cast of Mad Men.

Still, it was an alt-weekly, their bread-and-butter was long-form, and he wanted in on it. Wanted his name on the cover. He saw the way the old guard at the paper got all the respect. The J-school graduates who took on lengthy investigations, pieces that mattered, pieces that exposed the writers at the dailies for the hacks that they were and racked up the awards. Those were the writers who mattered. And he wanted nothing more than to matter.

A mobile vendor stopped by work most mornings to sell everyone their breakfast burritos. Hilario. He was a sweetheart, beloved by the entire office. He typically used his bi-weekly burrito purchase from Hilario as an opportunity to dust off his Spanish, but one day he got to wondering what his story was. Where did he go after this? Was this his only job? He asked Hilario if he could tail along with him some morning and Hilario peeled back the foil on a vast network of mobile burrito vendors supplying every corner of the city, from construction sites to City Hall. Some operated without licenses, others rented industrial kitchen space, and proudly displayed their peddler’s permits. He went off-record with illegal immigrants afraid of exposing their non-citizenship and told their story too. It was his first cover story and it won a James Beard award.

The next piece was about gypsy cab drivers. Then he tried his hand at a harder-hitting article about a murder at a night-club. Interviews in a prison with the suspect, pulling criminal records and court documents. He felt like a real journalist, like All the President’s Men. More cover stories followed. After awhile a writer left the paper and the job was his. Staff writer, one of the chosen few.

All the while the column was growing in readership.

They had him meet with the corporate brass when they blustered through town in a volley of executive credit cards. Maybe they should think about syndication, they said over drinks. Maybe they should.

They gave him a trial run of three months, twelve columns, to be run in all eighteen papers, from New York to Seattle. He poured his heart into those columns; he knew this was an opportunity reserved for the select few (no one else at the paper had gotten an opportunity like this during his tenure there). This was the chance to become an author of national renown. After that, who knew? Book deals. Book tours. Anything, everything.

Then nothing.

It didn’t resonate. The numbers were okay, but nothing impressive, no literary splash worth doubling down. They pulled the column from syndication. Just like that. Door open. Door closed. It still ran in Denver, but as far as reaching that next literary golden rung, no go.

And the spark inside him died.

To be fair, it was a fizzle, a lengthy limp through New Yorker rejection letters, a failed book proposal, then a stubborn first draft of that book anyway, summarily rejected. But looking back over his career the moment they pulled the plug on syndication was when his life finally gave way to the limits of what he could actually achieve. He was a writer for a local alt-weekly. Nothing less but certainly nothing more.

The years ticked by; he kept writing. He transitioned from emerging to established, part of the city’s literary old guard. Young writers came and went and they reminded him of himself and he resented the fact that he resented them. When did it all get so bleak? When had he turned so sour?

It felt like he had poured his personal world into a desktop computer while the actual world had blown right past him. His backpacking buddies from Mexico were so different from him now, so foreign and adult. They’d reply to his emails a few weeks after he’d written them, dutifully, never understanding the inside jokes from their sojourn that he was calling back to, or if they did, never acknowledging them. They were so far away from that place. They spent their weekends working on their houses and bullshitting with other paunchy dads at kids’ birthday parties. He closed down the bar chasing after girls with too much eye shadow, and lived in the apartment he’d rented when he first moved home.

He felt old. Bored. Hopeless. The very definition of an ink-soaked wretch.  He ceased to hang his hat on anything aspirational, relied instead on consolatory inner monologues.

You’re making a living writing. Be grateful. Few are this lucky.   

But the luck ran out. He got laid off. After fifteen years. He should have known. He’d watched the paper limp for the last ten years, heard the death rattle of print media. So many of his colleagues had been let go. Still, when it finally happened to him, it was a shock. He may have been letting the air out of his ambition, but at the very least he thought he had job security. He was the paper’s star! Emphasis on was.

The editor took him out and got him shit-canned. It was the least she could do. At the end of the night when she picked up the tab it struck him that that was exactly what his literary career had amounted to. A thousand nights of drinks paid for by people better off than him. By protagonists. He’d spent his entire adult life following the interesting people around instead of becoming one himself.

“What are you going to do now?” she asked.

He didn’t know. All he could think about was that swimming pool in Mexico.

*

The road from Oaxaca to Puerto Escondido seemed different, improved, not as bumpy as he remembered, sleeker. Back then, he and his friends had taken the journey in the dead of night, switchback after loopy switchback through the Sierra Sur mountains that left them holding their stomachs with every lurch. But this. This was a goddamn superhighway. And when his bus pulled into the city, it was nearly unrecognizable. Years ago they had arrived at dawn, shaken, stray dogs trailing behind them menacingly as they wandered empty backstreets in search of a hotel. Gone was the sleepy outpost he remembered. The city had grown like a gleaming cobweb.

Upon his arrival, outside the bus station a small army of taxi drivers catcalled him.

Amigo! You need hotel? Right on the beach! All-inclusive! Aire-condicionado!

It felt perverse. In his mind he envisioned the same block or two of sleepy bars; this was a spectacle. Disoriented, he headed for the water, certain he’d be able to get his bearings there, find the hotel they had stayed at by looking back up at the cliffs. But there were dozens of luxury hotels now, all glass and sharp angles and sleek sight lines, like a maze of private yachts tumbling down the hillside. He walked the beach in a daze, sweating profusely. He didn’t know what he was doing. He didn’t know why he was here. This was Tulum. This was Cabo San Lucas. Disneyland.

A waiter in black and white was suddenly beside him.

“Senor, no puedes caminar por aqui,” he said. “Es una playa privada.”

The name came back to him in a whisper.

“Villas Loma?” he asked.

The waiter pointed to the far end of the beach, a collection of thatch roofs huddled together between the palms.

He found the path up to the hotel easily, like muscle memory, though it too was different – more navigable, far safer. There were actual steps instead of boards; the rickety railing that kept them from plummeting into the sea now a low cement wall. He summited the staircase and walked out into the communal courtyard where he and his friends had killed seven straight nights in another lifetime; there were several more cabanas now, one with an impressive second-story patio that looked out across the entire Pacific. An enormous, stainless steel barbecue dominated the entire north side of the courtyard, and a large, sand volleyball court was occupied by a family of four, kids versus parents, laughing without a care in the world.

He walked into the reception area.

“Esta Lucy?”

Miraculously, she was. She had to be roused from some back office but suddenly there she was, the same woman who had taken them surfing all those years back, the woman who seemed so wise and gracious, who kindly insisted that they get to know this special part of Mexico better before moving on, and then offered him a thread that he should have taken hold of and never let go, a thread he hoped still lingered. She was there standing before him like the older sister he had always wanted. And she looked confused.

“I’m Lucy. May I help you?”

There was one of her, thousands upon thousands of guests like him, of course she didn’t recognize him. But he jogged her memory. Desperately. Told her how he and two friends had rolled into her hotel so many years ago all testosterone and visions of grandeur. They intended to stay two nights, he said, but they loved it so much they stayed a week. He reminded her how she had taken them surfing at Las Lagunas de Chacahua, with her Surf-DJ friend, and they had stayed up drinking moonshine mezcal with the kid in the national team jersey and his shy girlfriend. He was laughing recalling the night, nervous laughter, desperate and pleading. He felt like he wanted to cry all of a sudden but he couldn’t allow himself to because he needed to get through this; he needed Lucy to remember it the way he remembered it. He needed to communicate how important it all felt. He reiterated her offer from then, the one she had made on the beach that night, the one that had meant so little to her and had come to mean everything to him. The offer to help her build the pool.

“Remember?” he said, out of breath.

“Oh yeah, I remember it now!” she said. “Wow crazy. That was years ago! You were from…Colorado, right?”

“Yes! That’s right!” He was shaking.

“So you’re just, like down here on vacation?”

The flight from Denver to Mexico City, a puddle-jumper to Oaxaca, the bus here, all those hours, he had never thought of what he was going to say. He just knew he had to get here, to this specific spot on the earth, and the rest would take care of itself.

“I’m thinking about moving down here,” he said.

“Oh wow, crazy,” she said, slightly concerned.

Neither one of them knew what to say next. The children on the volleyball court erupted in celebration, their parents felled.

“Would you like to see the pool?”

She led him down an overgrown dirt path to the neighboring lot. The pool was enormous, bigger than he had imagined it. A tile mosaic at the bottom depicted a tortoise swimming alongside an electric coral reef. The pool stretched to the edge of the property, then appeared to drop off the side of the cliff entirely.

“It’s an infinity,” she said. “Back then it was one-of-a-kind. Now everyone has them.”

Suddenly he could see himself there in that pool, all those years ago, perched with his elbows over the edge. He looked lean and strong, and he sipped from a Bohemia as he stared into a sea as bright and hopeful as the future he knew he could never get back. 

*

He stayed at Villas Loma for the night but everything felt wrong. He felt exposed, like he was guilty of something and it was only a matter of time before everyone found out. He hadn’t seen Lucy since she said left him alone at the pool. What was he expecting? A job offer? Another pool to dig? Did he think Lucy was just perpetually adding pools in his Mexican fantasy-life by the sea? He could tell that he had creeped her out. How could he not? He was a mess. He oozed chaos and desperation. At dinner in the courtyard a security guard with a gun on his waistband appeared and held vigil the entire night. He didn’t know if that was normal or if Lucy had arranged for it after his arrival.

There was no thread for him to pick up here. It had been cut the day he left that beach in Chacahua, when Lucy and Surf-DJ dropped them on the side of the highway and they flagged down a bus bound for Acapulco.

He left before the sun rose. Dragged his roller bag through the sleeping town and purchased a one-way ticket on a bus heading south, the opposite direction he and his friends had taken all those years ago. He was down here, might as well see something new before he figured out what the fuck to do with the rest of his life. Still, as he boarded the bus, he had to admit he felt good. The thought made him laugh aloud. The other passengers looked at him, tried not to look at him. He’d never been more lost yet he actually felt pretty great all things considered.

How about that?

He had nothing to look forward to, but he had also stopped looking back. Puerto Escondido, literary ambition, they were all fading into a past that was fading into black. He felt untethered and aimless, but also, he noticed with a halting sense of unfamiliar calm, he was no longer at war with himself. His brain had let him off the hook. He had accepted and escaped himself. There was no dwelling, no obsessions, no shortcomings or mistakes or inferiority complexes rattling around and around until he wanted to fucking scream. He was just allowed to be. And the simplicity of that was thrilling, ecstatic, manic. His senses were on overload. Every fruit stall exploded in color, every squawking parrot was deafening; the ranchera music billowing out of the roadside cantinas hurt his heart it was so somber and pure. He was overcome with euphoria, a pulsing avatar of rapture.

In a beachside town in Chiapas the ecstasy overcame him. He clambered off the bus, ignored the entreaties of the swarming herd of vendors and headed directly to the beach. The town was victim to the same overdevelopment as Puerto Escondido but he didn’t clock any of it now. It was the most beautiful place he had ever seen. It was a paradise, a hidden jewel, a reward waiting for those few sojourners intrepid enough to seek it out.

He took off his shoes and socks and buried his feet into the sand. The sea-water flecked his face; he stared into the sky and felt the sun on his skin, electric. A memory bludgeoned its way into his throbbing neo-cortex, crystal clear as the day it happened.

A beach, just like this beach. On that trip with his buddies. He took to the the water to body-surf but stopped short when he noticed a fifty-peso bill floating on the surface. Funny, he thought, that’s the exact amount I have left. He checked his swimsuit pocket. Empty. He had forgotten to zip it. Fuck. That was his last fifty. He dove after the bill, frantic, but the churning of the waves sucked it beneath the surface where it was caught in the undertow and wrenched cruelly out to sea. He swam and swam after it to no avail. The money was gone. His friends mocked him. Fucking Cousteau. They were in the middle of nowhere; where was he going to find an ATM to right this ship? He cursed himself, felt like an idiot.

But after sulking on the beach for a few hours pondering his fate, he noticed something bright and small in the surf licking the shoreline. A fifty-peso bill. He lunged after it, caught it just in time. His rightful money was returned to him. Jubilation.

He and his friends couldn’t believe it. They laughed and celebrated with beers. It was a kiss on the forehead, a blessing from the good and kindly god of the sea, or maybe the god of wayward travelers, the one who looks after you if you’re pure of heart and earnest, and leave more than you take, and don’t let your hurts and losses define you, and try to live a kind and decent life. It was a moment out of those folk-art retablos that he saw everywhere in Mexico, the small, hand-painted thank-yous to the various patron saints of minor miracles.

Gracias a Ud., nuestro Santo de los Viajeros, para el regreso seguro de mi ultimo cincuenta. Sin eso, no podia viajar mas y explorar mas de Mexico, nuestro vecino ardiente al sur.

That fifty represented everything to him. A meal that night, a place to stay, the continuation of the greatest trip he had ever taken in his life.

And here he was now, sitting on the beach, pulsing with an energy that frightened yet thrilled him, a severance package sitting in his bank account large enough to give fifty pesos to every backpacker who reminded him of himself without thinking twice. He wanted to do something kind like that. He could see Lucy doing something like that. Something noble and anonymous. He was suddenly filled with love. For his fellow man, for mankind. He wanted to meet them all, everyone, all over the planet. And he could now. Nothing was stopping him. He had nowhere to go except anywhere he wanted. He could see it all in front of him. He would continue along the coast into Guatemala to see the ruins at Tikal. Then on to Honduras, then Nicaragua, then the rest of Central America all the way into South. Maybe in Chile he could snag a flight to Antarctica. Or a boat. The entire world awaited him like a promise. Threads were everywhere, waiting to be picked up. He just had to grab one and hold tight. Maybe he would write about it all someday. Write something important for once, something true.

A man with a face like a Goya painting approached him carrying an impressive array of beach accessories. Before he could launch into his sales pitch he asked the man his name.

“Hilario,” he said.

Hilario. The same name as the burrito vendor who had once led him to his James Beard award. In a different life. He shrieked at the serendipity. Connections were everywhere, you just had to look for them, had to be open to them. His synapses were cannon blasts. He vibrated in the sand.

They negotiated the terms of a snorkel, goggles and a pair of fins. The man told him he would watch his bag for him, that the ocean was especially calm today, perfect conditions, absolutamente perfecto.

He pulled the snorkel down over his nose and slipped into the water like an eel.