Are We Almost There 3

When I came in that evening I was full of forgiveness: My father, mother, even the bugs, were no longer a problem.sale Snowman Inflatable I was finally, thoroughly warm. My eyes were warm. My body was perfect. I was a gift, a free-floating charm, gold and silver and ready to go. I floated through dinner at the hotel restaurant, smiling at the Spanish-speaking waiters and busboys, who smiled back as though we shared a secret, and I smiled at my shiny face and hair in our bathroom mirror over a sink full of beautiful glittery slow-moving gnats, and I fell into sleep between starched white sheets, still smiling.
I dreamed that a train was trying to run over my finger, and I woke up vomiting. She overdid it, my mother said, somewhere behind me, and I let loose again and was wiped with clean towels and wrapped in clean sheets and when I woke up later the first thing I saw was a small green bottle of Wink soda, which I had never heard of but which I drank and which was so alarmingly good that tears came to my eyes. I was freezing cold and dying of thirst. "You overdid it," my mother said from the doorway. "We're going birdwatching, see you later."
I ate a salty ham sandwich which had been left on a paper plate beside the Wink and decided to be gone when my parents returned. I was shaky getting into my clothes, but I looked great. My face gave off an unearthly pink glow, making my eyes appear greener in contrast, and my legs, coming out of white cutoffs, while not as brown as I'd hoped, seemed animated from within. They moved friskily against one another in the elevator as though of their own accord.
The lobby shocked me. The elevator doors opened, and it was as though I'd been sleepwalking and was now shaken awake, the way people aren't supposed to be, mid-stride. Pillars I hadn't noticed before rose up whitely around me, larger than any pillars I'd ever seen, leading up to the stucco ceiling a hundred miles away. Tinted glass walls let in the blue glare of ocean and sky and the painful silvery flash of cars parked in the lot. But I'd been through here a dozen times already, so why were my ears ringing, my stomach dropping, at the sight of these things? The elevator, I thought desperately, the sunstroke, but neither was it. Mexican people moved around me at a regular pace, wearing pants and shirts and speaking Spanish to one another in ordinary tones, as though nothing unusual were happening. No one glanced at me, which made the sensation worse.
I was having a flashback of a dream I'd had the year before, perhaps even precisely one year ago, I thought, and my stomach dropped deeper. In the dream I'd been in the white-and-glass lobby of a hotel, this lobby or one exactly like it, my mother and father somewhere in the background, and it had been a bright, still day just like this one, with crowds of people milling around, guests of the hotel and workers carrying stacks of clean white towels, and then word came that the nuclear bomb had been dropped. The news did not come over a radio or by anyone announcing it, it just came, as things do in dreams, and although the day was continuing brightly and evenly on without smoke or noise, the people began quietly dying all around me, guests and workers alike lying down on the carpeted platforms near the check-in desk or sinking into the bland lobby armchairs, giving in to the invisible radiation or poison that was everywhere. Nobody screamed or reached out to each other, they just lay down, one by one, everywhere I looked, and just as it occurred to me that I was still alive, my stomach began to ache, and I knew that meant the end. I got down on the floor on my back and closed my eyes, hoping the end would come quickly or miss me altogether, thinking I was already dead, but there was no tricking the end, no getting around it. It was not a person or even in any way personal. A siren of two alternating tones came on in my head, my hands and feet began to tingle and burn, and I felt myself shrunken and translucent, moving upward through my body, then coming up like a sweater over my own head. Then there was just darkness, and the siren over and over for what seemed like forever.
It had taken me weeks to recover from that dream, my stomach clenching and my hands and feet burning whenever I heard a police siren, and now it was finally upon me. My head filled with an awful rushing pressure, some enormous wave rising and breaking before my eyes, but then, just as I surrendered to it, a voice off to my left said, "Hey." I blinked and opened my eyes and there you were.
A skinny brown-haired boy about my size was sitting in one of the armchairs. He was very dark—might have been Mexican but his eyes were blue—and he was staring directly at me. But unlike the boy at the singalong, this boy didn't appear needy. He appeared unalarmed, expectant. He was just looking at me, expecting me to say something.
"You know that song, `The Tide Is High?'" I said.
"Yeah," he said. His voice was deep, like a teenager's, though he looked no older than me.
"I love that song," I said and immediately felt my face burn, though he did not seem taken aback. "I mean I like it, it's cool," I said quickly.
"Yeah," he said. He turned and gazed out the window at a family with several children getting out of a station wagon, but he didn't seem to be in any hurry to leave. His skinny arms rested on the fat arms of the chair.
"Is that your family?" I asked. "Do you have to go?"
He shook his head. "I'm here with my high school. We have chaperones, but they don't care what we do. They let us party in their room. We went to a disco, and they were dancing on the tables."
"Chaperones?" I said. "What is that, is that Spanish?"
"No, they're just teachers," he said. "From my school. But it's not illegal or anything, there's no drinking age here, you know? So they can't get in trouble. It's cool, I guess." He looked tired, suddenly, almost sad. "You take one of those motorbikes yet?"
"Motorbikes, no," I said.
"We can rent one," he said and seemed to perk up a bit. He sat up in the armchair and leaned forward, wringing his hands together between his knees, his eyes fixed on mine. "It only costs a dollar for the whole day, and you can ride to the end of the island."
"We're allowed to just go and rent one?" I said. "How long does it take to get to the end of the island? This is like a motorcycle?"
"No, motorbike," he said. "It's smaller than a motorcycle. It's fun. Let's go, come on." He jumped up and stood there, waiting, apparently only for me.
"They just let kids rent them?" I said. I wanted him to give me a sign, though I could not have said what kind.
"Yeah, it's safe and everything," he said. "I'm fourteen," he added uncertainly.
"Really?" I said. It was amazing. Fourteen was so old, but he didn't look old at all. It was as if he had just been sitting there waiting, perhaps refusing to move or get any bigger until I got there, but how could he have known me, or known that I would arrive at that moment? I wanted to ask, but he had turned and was already heading for the sliding glass doors.
I hurried up behind him. Already I couldn't picture his face. "Where are you from?" I asked.
"New Jersey," he said. "My name's Jamie."
"New Jersey," I repeated tonelessly. I didn't know anyone from New Jersey, New Jersey meant nothing to me, I got no mental picture whatsoever. I felt fine, though, oddly. The day held still all around us, silent and almost unbearably bright as we stepped out into it.
But the ride was loud and fleeting; we could not speak over the motor, and I had to concentrate on too many things at once. Jamie seemed happy steering us along, his hair blowing back against my cheek, but I was kept busy hanging onto his wiry torso and holding my feet up and figuring out where to position my head. Scenery whipped greenly, gloriously by around us, but I was missing most of it. At one point something large and white tumbled suddenly into our path, and I shut my eyes, waiting for the crash, but there was just a hollow thumping sound and we kept going. "What was that?" I screamed. "Lamp shade!" Jamie yelled, in his deep voice. Then he said something else, but I couldn't hear him.

"What did you say?" I shouted. "It made you nervous?"
"No, I said I ran over it on purpose!" he yelled.
When we got to the tip of the island we just turned around, unceremoniously, and started back. The wooden heel of my platform sandal nicked the ground on our turnaround and got a chip taken out of it, my fault for not lifting my foot in time.
"Some of the other kids are going swimming tonight," Jamie said, back at the El Presidente. We were idling in the parking lot. I got off the bike, my legs vibrating.
"You're inviting me," I said. "When?"
"Later," he said vaguely, looking off at something across the road. His eyelashes were the longest I'd ever seen on a boy, black and perfectly straight, and I suddenly remembered the squirrel boy but thought, No, couldn't be, his eyes were brown. I looked where he was looking, following an imaginary line in the air that started with his eyelashes, but I didn't see anything out there in the brush. When I looked back at him, he had already turned around and was pushing off with his foot, wobbling a little as he pulled away.
Everything I touched back in our room—the light switch, dresser handles, even a glass—gave me a small, audible shock, though the room was too humid for static. The vibrating in my legs had not stopped. I tried to imagine his face again, but already it was fading, and the more I tried, the more elusive it became, like trying to picture infinity. Yet I sensed more strongly than ever that we were almost there, I only had to wait a little longer. I put on my bikini and sat on the edge of the bed, shivering with sunburn. There were only a few more hours to go. The room hummed; I was ready.
"Are you ready to go to Chichén Itzá?" my mother asked. We were at dinner; I'd had to get dressed again. She took a large bite of mole chicken, her cheek bulging out as she chewed it. I watched the bulge, disgusted, uncomprehending. Chichén Itzá. What was she saying, was she speaking another language? But then I remembered. We were going to see the Mayan ruins— important rocks. We were leaving that evening, renting a car.
"I don't want to go," I said.
"You have no choice," my father said. He had already finished and was pushed back a few inches from the table, his eyes half-closed, his napkin wadded on his empty plate. You have no choice.
I've often wondered if what I did at the ruins was in some way responsible for how things turned out between you and me, but there doesn't seem to be any logical, scientific way of proving it. I stole a rock. Not a regular rock from the ground, but a reddish, gumball-sized fragment of the ruins themselves. I picked it up for no reason and put it in my jean-jacket pocket, where it rode, forgotten, back home with me, and I saved it for years, though it was not impressive or even significant-looking. Still, taking it had definitely been against the rules. Signs had been posted everywhere, in Spanish and English, but I had paid no attention to the signs. The ruins were so enormous, after all, unfathomably large, and the red stones and pebbles covered everything as far as a person could walk or see, like snow. And the piece I took was so tiny, I could not see how it could be considered stealing. What were they worried about, anyway, I wondered—whoever "they" were. That eventually, stone by stone, the entire Mayan ruins would be taken away? That was simply not rational.
Nevertheless, I didn't mention what I'd done to anyone until college, when, drunk one night, I confessed to a guy I knew who majored in anthropology and kept his deceased Border collie's skull, which he'd boiled and cleaned himself, in his truck's glove compartment—he seemed like someone who might not be bothered by certain things. "That's it?" he said when I told him. "Everyone does that."
"Really?" I said. I felt suddenly and inexplicably relieved. I had not believed myself to be genuinely concerned.
"Absolutely," he said. "Every single person I know who's been there has done that." He stared at me then, considering. "You are the only person I know who took it so seriously, though," he said.
Either way, cursed or not, when we returned to Cancún, Jamie was gone. We'd been away only three days, but it seemed like centuries. I looked for him everywhere—by the pool, in the lobby, up and down corridors on every floor, my heart pounding and my hands sweating so badly I had to keep going back to the room and washing them, but there was no evidence of him anywhere. Nothing even looked familiar. After a while, I wasn't sure whether it would be more of a relief to see him or not to see him. I couldn't imagine how I would act if I finally found him, what I would say. The motorbike ride now seemed a brief, hazy dream. I was working myself up into a tizzy, my mother would have said. Yet I couldn't believe it was over so quickly, that he hadn't left some sign.
Finally, I remembered the high school, the chaperones—they had to be real. But the clerk at the front desk was Mexican, and it would be difficult to communicate with him; I hadn't paid attention when my father had checked us in, and now I was sorry. I didn't know Spanish but was prepared to use a kind of sign language: I would hold my hair up and away from my face so I resembled a boy, Jamie. He was writing something in Spanish in a ledger as I stepped up. I spoke loudly, clearly, and slowly. "I'm trying to find someone I know," I said.
"Yes, can I help you," he said, snapping his head up. He spoke perfect English; it was my own voice that sounded broken, unfamiliar. It was hard to get the words out.
"Those kids from New Jersey. . ." I said.
"They left," he said. He scratched his head and glanced around as though he expected to see them floating past in the air. I waited, not breathing. "They were good kids," he said finally. He smiled quickly, almost wistfully, and looked back down at his ledger, nodding after a moment as though confirming something. I backed away and stumbled over to the armchair and sat, lining my arms up evenly on the chair's arms as Jamie had done. I looked out the window, trying again to see whatever it was he saw, but there was nothing to see, only the green land around the reservoir across the street, and the blue sky over that, stretching endlessly away behind the water. I thought of the last thing he'd said to me: Later. When? I thought, but no answer was forthcoming.
After that I was in high school and took no more tropical vacations with my parents—I fought to be allowed to stay home, in fact, the fights sometimes ending with my mother and me literally chasing each other around the house. She was beginning to drive me crazy. "We're going to the Kakamega Forest, don't you want to go to the Kakamega Forest?" she would scream, and I would think the rip-your-face-off forest and slam my bedroom door in the nick of time as she rushed up the stairs behind me. As if to placate both of us, the Chicago winters grew preternaturally warm, apparently a result of El Niño, which I had never heard of. The TV newscasters loved it. "Birds don't know which way to fly, flowers are fooled into blooming," they announced. "Blame it on `The Child'!" I took melancholy walks in December through melting snow under a sun that seemed weary, but I never ran into you. I had begun having a recurring nightmare in which I could not turn off the clock radio by my bed. The knob would come off in my hand, and then I'd pull the plug out and hurl the radio onto the floor, but the cord would rise up like a cobra and wave menacingly in my face. The radio would be playing some stupid song, something by Elton John, or "Listen to the Music" by the Doobie Brothers, a song which was not in itself scary, though it was scary that I couldn't make it stop.
By college I had given up on you altogether and occupied myself with substitutes—poor substitutes, and I'm sorry for what I did with some of them, but I'm only human. Everyone was as lost as I, it seemed. "You know, you have a kind of sly dignity," a guy I dated once commented. "You know what I like about you?" another said. "You walk loudly and carry no stick whatsoever." I liked that guy, actually, but he didn't want to date me, it turned out; he was just amusing himself before going off on an Alaskan fishing boat with his real girlfriend, a basketball player named Hikmet, which was Turkish for "all things come from God." It seemed hopeless.
"When is someone going to take care of me?" I asked the dog skull guy one night, but all he said was, "Maybe you should let them."
"That's the dumbest thing I ever heard," I told him. "Would you tell the starving children in Africa to let someone feed them?"
"Well, maybe someone is taking care of you," he said.
"What does that mean?" I said. But he just shrugged and would say no more. He had his skull, all he seemed to need.
I even tried an Eagle Scout, thinking those regimented types might be onto something, after all: service, steadfastness, and mundane but integral survival tricks—starting fires, tying knots, recognizing important constellations. "You know, `Smoke on the Water' is my favorite song to get a blow job to," the Eagle Scout told me, as though he were sharing a wildly exciting secret. And even he was a good soul, always patting me nicely on the head before I left to go back to my dorm; certainly he meant me no harm. We were all muddling through, doing the best we could, supposedly. I comforted myself with the words to that old song: If you can't be with the one you love, honey . . .
But now it seems to be getting later and later, the memory of you more and more distant, and I'm finding it hard to recall what you even look like, if I ever knew. Sometimes when I'm in some waiting room, at the doctor's or the Department of Motor Vehicles, I'll think I see you suddenly out of the corner of my eye—the toe of someone's loafer or cuff of their pants, an arm or leg flashing by in the doorway—and I jump up, knocking ashtrays and magazines to the floor, making people stare. But it's never you, and sometimes no one is there at all.
Where are you, and why haven't you given me some sign? I imagine you still a child, a boy sleeping somewhere on pale sand, desert or beach, camped out in a faded sleeping bag beneath your favorite star (it kills me that I don't even know which one it is), unaware that you're late for someone else's life, or even that someone else is waiting, always waiting, still waiting for you after all these years. But nothing will wake you, no nightmares trouble that kind of sleep, the honest sleep of children or those in time with their own lives.
The other night, I dreamed you ran over me with your skateboard. I heard you coming up the street but I couldn't move, I was just lying there on the sidewalk under the orange tree outside my apartment, the gravelly roar of your wheels growing louder and louder in my ears, the night sky black and still and starry between the branches of the tree, and though I kept trying, I couldn't turn my head to see you finally coming, to let you know I knew, so I just tilted it back as far as I could, exposing my throat, and shut my eyes, waiting for your wheels to hit my jugular vein. I surrender, I thought, but I was not scared, only weak and exhilarated, your grinding, crescendoing roar rattling my whole body—and then I woke up, and you still weren't there.
I couldn't bear to open my eyes, so I thought of something totally unrelated, a mental trick I've learned. I thought of a movie I hadn't seen in years, Snoopy, Come Home, the one where Snoopy runs away from home and stays with a sick girl in the hospital, cheering her up. She was his original owner, or maybe she just thinks she was, I don't remember exactly. Maybe she just wants to adopt him. She may be the same person as the little red-haired girl, or a character later known as Lila—it's unclear. Anyway, the whole time Charlie Brown is going out of his mind looking for Snoopy, Snoopy and this girl are sitting around on her hospital bed feeling sorry for each other, for sale Slides Inflatable eating candy and listening to sad music. The girl is pretty, of course, and very nice to Snoopy, but she's slightly annoying. She has no sense of humor, she's just kind of sugary sweet. In the end, Snoopy makes the right decision and goes home with Charlie Brown. The girl only wanted him for consolation, the movie implies, because she was so weak. Still, she behaves well when Charlie Brown comes to pick Snoopy up, and all three of them are weeping by the time they say their good-byes. When I saw this as a child, I remember, I too was weeping, but I couldn't seem to get up and turn off the TV, my body was stuck.