1 #9
No, I was thinking clearly. This was the right place. I felt Felix’s recent presence here, then saw him. He was floating face down in the water, far below.
There was a sound behind me on the path. When I turned I saw Soriano.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
I stared at him for a moment before I shook my head.
“No,” I said, “not at all.”
“I followed you from the hotel,” he said. “You seemed distressed.”
“Felix just died.”
He blinked. “I’m sorry. Listen, could you do me a favour and come in off that diving board? You’re making me nervous.”
I walked in from the diving board, and then, because I didn’t know what else to do, sat on the cracked concrete of the platform. I felt weak. He was looking around in a casual way.
“Is this a setup?” he asked.
“If it’s a setup,” I said, “then I’m being set up too.”
He stood for a while, surveying the terrain, then eventually came to sit near me.
“Why did you come here,” I asked, “if you thought it might be a setup? Who takes that kind of risk for a stranger?”
“I do,” he said. “Depending on the stranger. I’m Bill Soriano, we met last night.”
“Ari Waker.” Giving him my actual name was a reckless move, but I had a sense that the name he was giving me was real.
I was surprised to realize I was crying.
I hadn’t cried in so long. I was thinking of the nights with the militias in the motel rooms, Felix’s grace as he moved through the cigarette smoke.
Felix’s impeccable dives, his strength as a swimmer.
“You saw it happen?” he asked.
“No,” I said, “but he’s floating down there.”
He walked to the edge, looked down, and winced. “Not a good swimmer?”
“He was an excellent swimmer. I don’t know what happened.”
Soriano sighed. “Did he have enemies?”
“Not here. Back in Texas.”
“Then I’d bet a thousand dollars someone just wanted his wallet,” he said. “I’ll help you bring him to shore.”
Felix had been stabbed and his wallet was missing. I want to set this world on fire and burn it to the ground.
I had a cousin named Anton. We were close as children, less so as teenagers, in business together in our twenties, then I tried to have him killed and that was the end of our association.
I’m not sure where he is now, if he returned eventually to New York or remained in Europe, what became of him after my attempt on his life.
But whether alive or dead, he belongs in the past tense.
When I knew him, in the vanishingly distant part of my life before I went to prison, he was a passably intelligent person who talked to himself.
This habit was generally more annoying than interesting, but sometimes, and I very much enjoyed this, he would address an invisible jury: “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” I once heard him say, toward the end of our time together in New York, “allow me to explain. Some things weren’t possible by normal channels.
There were certain shortcuts I had to take. ”
It turned out the imaginary jury was contagious.
They followed me after that, a little congregation of invisible witnesses, and I addressed them too, on occasion: Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, of course I knew that gunrunning was wrong, but I was out of money and everything was collapsing, and there were no jobs to be found in that disastrous time.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I no longer loved Felix, or I loved him but didn’t love him enough, or our love was on its way out and had entered a half-life stage—the particulars were confusing—but I didn’t want him to die.
I wasn’t sure at first where I wanted to go, and I’d been lingering at the hotel for another week before I noticed that Soriano was lingering too.
After the initial shock, after the coroner was called twice and failed to arrive, after I helped two housemen bury Felix behind the hotel—a task they performed in an unnervingly bored way that I didn’t want to think about—and after a few days on my terrace staring out at the sea, I began to notice Soriano.
He was drinking orange juice in the lobby.
He was doing push-ups in the middle distance when I went for a walk.
He was birdwatching when I passed him on the path to the village, where later, when I doubled back—I often walked for hours—I would see him leaning on an outdoor bar with a beer.
On the ninth or tenth evening, when I came down to the nightly party on the terrace for the first time since Felix’s death, Soriano was dancing.
But not, I noticed, with any dedicated partner.
One woman after another, and the women didn’t adhere to any particular type.
They were tall, short, older, younger, larger, smaller, of different races, and I recognized that I was looking at a man who also knew about avoiding patterns. After a while he came to sit with me.
“Evening, Ari,” he said. “Beautiful night.”
“Can I ask what you’re doing here?”
“Dancing,” he said.
“I mean at the hotel.”
“Same thing as you, I suppose. Waiting for clarity on the next move.”
I nodded. This sounded right.
“What brought you here?” I asked.
“Business. A client was at the hotel a day or two ago.”
“What kind of business?”
“Sales.”
“Of what?”
“Discreet arrangements,” he said.
I laughed at him and we watched the dancers.
“It’s no good being alone,” he said.
“I wasn’t, Soriano.”
“Yes, but I’m talking about now, not a week and a half ago.” He looked at me sharply. “I’m not talking about loneliness, to be clear. I’ve been alone for years at a time, but pragmatically, operationally, it’s not ideal.”
“It’s easier than being with a person, though.” Earlier in the day I’d brought flowers to Felix’s grave and wept beside it, but I wasn’t too grief-stricken to recall his incomprehension, his total inability to absorb shocks, the feeling of being the only adult in the room.
“True,” said Soriano, “but it’s more dangerous. I used to be a soldier.”
“Obviously. You’ve got a blood-type tattoo.”
He smiled. “The thing is, one person can only do so much. When you’re out on patrol, you need another person with you, so you can take turns keeping watch.”
This did make a kind of existential sense to me.
If Felix hadn’t been alone at the diving board, then probably my thoughts at the present moment would be occupied by the logistics of breaking up with him, not by grief.
Beyond the lights, beyond the dancing couples and the musicians, the ocean was a black abyss.
“I’m not getting down on one knee,” he said. “But I’m available for a partnership, should you so desire.”
“Romantic,” I said.
“You know we don’t live in a romantic world.” He was leaning forward, speaking softly. “One of several reasons I’d like to be with you, Ari, is you seem to understand that. I think you understand what kind of world we live in.”
“You did prison time,” I said, testing a theory.
“Yes, we have that in common.”
“How could you tell?”
“Something in the way you carry yourself.”
I watched the dancers, considering this. I never thought about prison anymore, or rarely. It was terrible but it ended. It was terrible in a way that didn’t break me. If it had marked me in a manner visible to others, well, there are worse scars a person can carry.
“What do you want?” he asked, after a while.
The question unfurled into a dozen other questions that he didn’t have to ask because they were all implicit—What are you doing here, what will become of you, etc.
—and I didn’t tell him because I didn’t know him well enough to try to express this, but what I wanted, actually, the thing I most longed for, was to get to live in a different kind of world.
Soriano was watching me, then I watched him give up on waiting for my answer.
He rose, smoothing his jacket. His smile was unreadable.
“Well,” he said. “You don’t have to tell me what you want. I’ll ask again later.”
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, perhaps we can agree: this is a bad timeline.
I didn’t have to do what I did. I want to wake on that last morning with Felix, but instead of waiting on the balcony while he goes for a walk, I want to make love to him, eat lunch, maybe go swimming later so I can watch one last dive.
Later that day or the day following I want to board a series of trains and return him safely to Paris, where I wish to separate from him in some mildly-sad-but-not-devastating way, because it was obvious to me by the time of his death that he wasn’t a person I could stay with forever or, if we’re being honest here, probably not even for another month.
But then, post-breakup, after a little time has passed, I want to meet him for drinks at some quiet bar and reminisce about the time we fled a collapsing country together.
I want someone to get drunk with who was there in my past.
“Let’s dance,” said Soriano, and I took his hand.
We boarded a flight from Athens to Barcelona, then a night train to Paris the following evening.
The train was heavily fortified—steel plates on the outside, two men with heavy weaponry posted outside the door to our private carriage—and it took me a moment to realize that this was how Soriano habitually travelled.
“I had to clean up after an exploded train once,” he said, by way of explanation.
“It gave me a lifelong appreciation for armour plating and armed guards.”
“It seems expensive.” Our carriage had an air of faded luxury. There were plush seats upholstered in threadbare velvet, gilt wallpaper peeling. I took a seat by the window. The glass was so thick that it warped the station, the lines of the platform curving at the edges of my view.
“The alternative is too stressful. One’s nerves get frayed in specific ways,” he said, “in my experience. Most kinds of stress I can manage, Ari, but I struggle with travelling in a train carriage with other passengers, wondering which of them might suddenly set off a bomb.”
“Fair,” I said.