1 #8
“I love you too,” I said into his ear, very softly.
It wasn’t a lie but also it wasn’t enough, I understood that even as I was saying the words.
The moment passed; we swam to shore and climbed up on the rocks, walked back by a different route through the sun-blasted landscape, and I didn’t notice until the hotel lobby that I’d skinned my knee in the manoeuvre and had blood on my leg.
I didn’t care. That night I wore a longer-than-usual cocktail dress and we danced to a jazz quartet on the terrace, languidly because the music was slow.
Try to think of the dive, I told myself, try to think of the dive and not the ruins of the shantytown near the diving cliff. Try to rest in the music.
I was thinking of the spring of 2031, Los Angeles, that moment just after the formation of the Republic of California, when the foreign soldiers were gone from the streets and the curfews had been newly lifted and war seemed temporarily at bay.
I’d returned to instability shortly afterward, in that zigzagging drift through Ohio and Phoenix, but what I’d learned in the disorder was to recognize good moments.
The party at Kareem’s place was a good moment.
This was a good moment, here on this terrace at this Peloponnesian hotel.
Try to think of the dive, not the diver.
Looking at Felix’s face made me sad, because I loved him but also I felt that the ending was very close.
We would go back to Paris in a week or two, I decided, and then I’d break things off with him.
He was too much of a burden and I was afraid he was going to get me killed, so he’d have to face this harrowing world alone.
We returned to the diving cliff almost every day for the four days that followed.
On that fourth night I woke at three a.m., and knew immediately that I was alone in the room.
I rose and dressed quickly, made my way down to the hotel lobby and along a candlelit stone corridor to the bar.
Felix was there, drinking with two other men.
One was a bulky individual in his sixties, his shaved head gleaming in the dim light; the other was much younger, perhaps in his thirties, dressed all in black with a military haircut.
“So then we just peel out,” Felix was saying. “My wife, Ari, god bless her, she’d procured us fake passports. So we just drove like hell to the Houston airport, and—”
“Felix,” I said quietly, since apparently we were using real names.
“Oh hi, babe,” he said. “I couldn’t sleep.”
“Me neither.”
The bald man shifted over one stool, and I sat between him and Felix.
“Ma’am,” the bartender said.
“A Coke, if you have one.”
“I have an excellent local equivalent.”
“Perfect,” I said.
“Bill Soriano,” the bald man said. I shook his hand. His sleeve rode up a little, and I saw the AB+ tattoo on his wrist. Only one kind of man requires a blood-type tattoo. The thought made me tired.
“American?” I asked.
“Canadian.”
“Chris Jasper,” said the younger man. His accent was Australian.
Both men were dangerous but Jasper was dangerous in a specific way, it seemed to me.
Something in his gaze. This was a man who liked to hurt women.
The bartender set a glass of some fizzy brown liquid before me.
The taste was a rough approximation of Coke, with a bitter aftertaste that could be negated only by continuing to drink it.
“How is it?” Soriano asked.
“Small miracle we can get soda of any kind, I suppose.” I felt a familiar vertigo in the contrast between this life—Felix and I had enough money to stay for some time in this beautiful hotel—and all of the lives I’d lived since prison.
My life as a dishwasher in Los Angeles, my life working for a militia in Ohio, the months I spent selling weapons on the outskirts of Phoenix.
“I’m grateful for soda, but more grateful for scotch,” Soriano said. “Actually, I’m grateful for everything. Forgive me, I’ve had one too many drinks. Ignore me.”
“I’m grateful too,” Felix said. He smiled drunkenly at me. “I’m grateful to you,” he said to me. “I was just telling them how you got us out of Texas.”
“Is that wise?” I asked, as lightly as possible. “Telling our story to strangers at a bar?”
“Absolutely fucking not,” Jasper said warmly. He was in a good mood. “You’ve married a careless man, darling.”
“Are you careless?” I asked Felix, in a tone intended to be mistaken for flirting.
I sensed a shift in Soriano’s attention.
He was watching me closely, less drunk than he’d seemed a moment earlier.
“Let’s get you to bed,” I said softly, to Felix, “before you tell these gentlemen our entire life story.” He was too drunk to protest in any serious way.
It wasn’t difficult to draw him off his bar stool and toward the elevator.
In the elevator he kissed me, but in a slack-mouthed drunken way that made me flinch.
“You can’t tell stories to strangers,” I said. “That and your general incompetence are going to get us killed.”
“They’re strangers,” he said. “We’ll never see them again. What’s the harm?”
We’d reached our floor. “How have you made it this far?” I asked.
“There’s so much luck in the world,” he said, “even now. I’ve been so lucky.
” We were in the corridor. I unlocked our room and led him in, sat him on the edge of the bed, and began unlacing his boots like he was a child.
But I’d never once in my life wished for a child, that was the problem here.
“Look at how we escaped from Texas,” he said.
I stopped midboot to stare at him. “That wasn’t luck,” I said. “That was me. I procured two separate sets of passports and kept them in the van in a go bag.”
“You’re my luck,” he said. He fell back into the bed and was snoring within seconds.
When I finally fell asleep that night I dreamt of Los Angeles again, for the first time in a while: walking with Gloria in the Silver Lake hills at twilight, talking about something that I couldn’t remember when I woke.
Felix had opened the curtains, and the room was violently bright. I covered my eyes.
“Morning, love,” he said. “Join me for a walk?”
The dread I felt wasn’t the dream, I realized. The dream had been benign. The dread was premonition.
“I don’t think I’m awake enough for a walk,” I said, and as I spoke, the dread solidified into understanding: if Felix went for a walk this morning, he would die. I knew it in the same way I knew the name of the hotel, the day of the week, the colour of his eyes. It was just a fact.
“Why don’t I order you some coffee,” he said. “I’ll be back before you know it.”
“Thank you. Yes.” I watched him pick up the room phone and order a latte for the last time, the sunlight on the side of his face. His hand on the phone, his beauty, his eyes when he turned to me.
“You okay?” he asked.
I knew that if he walked out of the room, he wouldn’t come back.
“I’m fine,” I said. “Enjoy your walk.”
“Enjoy your latte,” he said, and was gone.
Even after he closed the door, it still wasn’t too late.
I could have run after him, explained that I had a bad feeling about the walk and endured his skepticism to bring him back into the room, or dispensed with the truth and just used the promise of sex to pull him back into bed.
Instead I lay still, staring at the ceiling, for enough time that he must now have been at the elevators, now down in the lobby, now gone.
Out of reach. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, what is a murder?
A knock on the door startled me, but it was only room service with the coffee.
I showered and then went out to the terrace, where I sat staring at the water beyond the village rooftops.
There were a few bursts of gunfire far out at sea, but the morning was tranquil, until it wasn’t: I had dropped my cup, I was standing, I was watching coffee spread in a pool around my feet.
Felix was dead. There was no external sign of this truth in the world around me, but I knew it was true.
I ran down five flights of stairs to the lobby, where people stared.
I must have looked frantic. Some of the guests in the lobby were vacationing mercenaries and others were more innocent, old-school tourists of a breed that hardly existed here anymore and had disappeared altogether on the other side of the Atlantic.
I saw the two men who’d been drinking with Felix last night, sitting separately, staring at their phones.
The older one—Soriano, I remembered dimly—rose with a look of concern as I ran past him into the hot still air.
Outside, the sky was cloudless and I was aware in a way I hadn’t been before of how scorched this place was, how the orderly lines of cypress trees and the cacti were the only things alive in a landscape of rocks and dry grass.
“Felix!” I shouted, although of course I was too late.
Behind the hotel, two security guards were playing dominoes at a folding table in the shade; one of them called out half-heartedly as I passed, but no one stopped me from running down the path to the staff quarters, then behind the staff quarters to the chained-off road.
I jumped the chain and sprinted past the burnt ruins of the shantytown—a nightmare blur—and up to the villas.
As I ran past, en route to the diving cliff, I dimly noticed that the second villa was occupied now, white curtains billowing in an open window.
Down the empty path to the diving platform, which was of course deserted, because Felix was dead.
I wasn’t thinking clearly, I realized, but how could anyone.
I walked out to the end of the diving board, and stood very still.
It felt like standing on the edge of the world.
The only movement was water, and the ripples of dead cliffside grass in the wind.