Chapter 3
James couldn’t be mad at Steve for cancelling. It’s true that he only committed to booking a ticket when Steve said that he would go with him, but Steve was the one missing out.
That’s what James told himself, anyhow.
This is a vacation. I’ll see some shows and get tanned and maybe hookup with a guy. One of those Island X employees, maybe, he thought to himself.
The dormitories weren’t even bad. They weren’t nearly as luxurious as the tent he planned to get with Steve, but they were at least something he could stay in.
The dimly lit hallways gave him second thoughts about this whole situation as soon as he entered the building, but the room itself was nice.
The window faced the ocean and allowed sunlight to pour into the room.
It had a twin sized bed with a plush comforter, a white bedside table with a sleek metal lamp on one side, and a small white dresser on the other.
Below the flatscreen TV sat a wooden desk with a single chair.
The bathroom was small, but he thankfully had it to himself rather than the communal bathroom he shuddered to recall from freshman year in New York.
He opened the window, inhaling the salty, warm ocean air as it wafted over him and sank into the corners of the room.
and took a step backward to fall into the puffy comforter on the bed.
Steve was definitely the one missing out.
James sat up quickly, feeling invigorated just by the fact that the room wasn’t a dilapidated closet.
He unzipped his suitcase and changed out of jeans and into swim trunks.
His was one of the last flights, and, according to the Island X app, most of the services were already open.
He could get a massage, lunch, a surf lesson, or visit the petting zoo that claimed to have a Komodo dragon.
He scrolled through the list of instructor names and solo attractions until he found what he wanted, grabbed a pair of sunglasses, and headed out.
Another group of gorgeous Island X models in Hawaiian shirts ran the jet ski rental shack.
James could see that the back wall of the shack was still lined with the yellow life vests that should have been affixed to the dozen or so people already out on the water.
Near the surf, one of the models struggled next to a pair of unimpressed guys in board shorts to try and get one of the jet skis working.
He didn’t need to worry about himself and on second thought decided that he didn’t need to worry about anyone else, either.
Everyone here was an adult, and if they got into anything on the island that they couldn’t handle, that was their fault.
Still, if some drunk assholes collided with each other in the ocean, someone was probably going to drown.
But James wasn’t the fun police—no, the fun police were still back home in LA and had let him come here by himself.
Well, he was here now and was determined to make the most of it.
A bleach blond woman handed him an ignition key on an elastic spiral band told him to have a good time. Then she reached beneath her counter and took a sip of something topped with a tiny pink umbrella.
“Oh, I definitely will,” James said, giving her a wink. She smiled warmly and let her eyes linger on him for a long moment before turning her attention to the next person in line.
As James neared 40, he prided himself that a Patrick Bateman-esque skin routine kept him from losing any boyish good looks.
He kept clean shaven, cut his fine hair short, and made a point of going to the gym at least five days a week to play basketball or lift weights.
At one point early in his online career, he went through a breakup that still hurt to think about and as a result relied a little too much on Starbucks for lunch and stopped going to the gym as often.
He put on maybe 15 pounds and lost a little muscle mass, but the response from viewers absolutely devastated him.
What does it even matter what I look like?
Don’t they watch the videos to see magic tricks and illusions?
he asked then. None of his friends at the time could relate to concerns about what two hundred and fifty thousand people thought, but he saw the flaws in that logic.
He had talent, charmed on camera, and was easy on the eyes—all part of the package.
Take out any one of them and the likes and watches began to drop.
Ironically, changing his platform briefly to focus more on his ensuing weight loss journey also saw a drop in viewers.
Even worse than that were the racists who said disparaging things about the size of Asian men and how trying to bulk up and lift weights wouldn’t do him any good.
Then the gay guys, in his own community, accused him of just trying to post thirst traps.
The whole thing was a zero-sum game that resulted in James feeling pigeon-holed into the level and type of success he already managed to achieve.
James put his shirt and phone into the rental locker and walked around the shack to the beach where the jet skis awaited drivers.
He sped away from the beach out into the deep blue of the ocean.
Birds circled in the cloudless sky above, and the sun beat down as he bounced over the cool waves that sprayed his arms and legs as he throttled toward the horizon.
He loved the feeling of skimming across the water and wondered if he could rent a wakeboard.
Once several hundred feet from the beach, he turned around to get a look.
It was much larger than any other private island he’d ever been on which, he supposed, wasn’t saying much.
He watched swimmers hanging out in the cove, where the water had a paler blue hue, and he could almost see the beach through it just before the waves hit the sand.
Steve would love this, James thought. The idea made him feel suddenly isolated and alone on the water.
The people on the beach looked like miniature figures, and they probably couldn’t even see him.
I could disappear out here and no one would even know.
What a morbid thought. He set his shoulders back and looked up toward the sky, feeling the warm sunshine on his face.
He was here and going to make the most of it, which meant scoping out all the good spots for filming magic tricks and looking for locations similar enough for video edits to make it look like he teleported.
People loved those videos, mostly kids, but the algorithm doesn’t discriminate and a like on a video was still a like, even from a child.
James took off north, away from the rental shack, toward the cove.
He saw people walking and biking along the beach, tanning, and having their friends take photos and videos.
Behind them, the trees were thick and dark and the leaves quaked in the light breeze.
As James skipped like a high-speed rock across the waves, he watched the foliage and buildings get fewer and farther between.
Then, just past the dormitories, they opened into a wide channel in the middle of the island where two coves nearly touched.
On the hot white sand, a group of guys threw a frisbee and chased after it like their lives depended on it.
Beyond them, the dark blue ocean reached out to the horizon, where it blurred in the heat of the sun meeting the cool water.
The beaches on this side of the island were completely empty.
In the woods he saw a group of buildings several stories high clustered close together.
Even from the distance, he noticed that these buildings weren’t as nice as even the dorms. They looked older or poorly constructed out of wooden planks curving at the edges and rotting in the middle.
Small windows sat high above the ground, and the exterior appeared covered in dirt from heavy storms. The trees also crowded the buildings and little effort had been made to clear away vegetation as was done with the buildings on the south side of the island.
As he slowed to get closer, he concluded that the buildings were much older than the dorms or the huts on the south of the island, and maybe they were already here when the Island Xperience came through with their building contractors.
Something like this will be perfect if no one else comes up here when I do. He slowed to a stop and floated on the waves as he continued to brainstorm options that his kind of set offered him.
Underneath the steps leading to the porch on one of the buildings, James saw something move in the shadows and quickly disappear.
Too quickly, though. It stood in one spot and half a second later darted impossibly far away, like an object in a video struggling to buffer. James rubbed his eyes and felt the heat from the sun beating down without mercy on his bare back.
Maybe he only witnessed someone doing some much-needed maintenance, but why had they run when he’d come around? It was so quick, if James blinked he would have missed them completely.
His stomach turned anxiously while the jet ski bobbed on the surface of the water.
I’ve come too far, he thought. Somehow the thought felt too existential, so he forced himself to add for finding a good place to film. I should check out the other side of the island.
This side of the island looked much the same as the side he started from.
The same group of guys were playing a life and death game of frisbee in the cove at the center of the island.
People swam in the ocean and tanned on the beach, and someone drove one of the blue bikes directly into the water while their friends laughed and filmed it from behind.
“Idiots,” James said out loud.