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8





The Columbus Day Regatta


Second week in October—and so what? That great tropical skillet in the sky still boiled your blood, seared your flesh, turned your eyeballs into aching migraine globes if you insisted on staring at anything, even through the midnight-black sunglasses they were both wearing.

In the front seat of Dr. Lewis’s convertible the wind blew through Magdalena’s hair. But the air was warm as soup. Letting it stream through your hair was like filling your glass from the HOT tap. Norman had the side windows up and the air conditioner on as high as it would go. But all she got out of it was an insipid wisp of cool breeze on her shins every now and then :::::: Forget the maximum air-conditioning, Norman! Just put the top back up, for God’s sake!::::::

But she knew better than to say it out loud. Norman had a thing about… panache—a white Audi A5 convertible with the top down… and the top had to be down… had to have hair streaming in the wind… his longish light-brown hair and her very long dark hair… miles of hair streaming back from the shiny wraparound black shades they both wore… had to have the shades—all that, she deduced, must be panache.

Norman had given her a little discourse on panache two months ago. At the time she hadn’t known why. For that matter, she hadn’t a clue what panache was. But by now she no longer came right out and asked him what new words meant. Now she waited and looked these terms up on Google. Aha… panache… the gist of it seemed to be… at this moment… that if you weren’t driving a Mercedes, a Ferrari, or a Porsche at the very, borderline least… you had to compensate for it with panache. And if a humble Audi A5, such as he possessed, were to have panache, it had to be startlingly white, had to have the top down… had to have a really good-looking couple in the front seat wearing big shiny bug-eyed black sunglasses… dazzling one and all with youth and glamour. But to have that panache, you couldn’t leave out any element, and keeping the top down was one of them.

Right now panache was a killer out here on the MacArthur Causeway. Magdalena was burning up. Just before the causeway reached Miami Beach, a sign said FISHER ISLAND. Over the past two days Norman must have told her a dozen times that he docked his boat at the Fisher Island Marina and that they would be stopping off at Fisher Island Fisher Island Fisher Island to board it for today’s cruise way out to Elliott Key for the Columbus Day Regatta. Obviously the significance was supposed to register on her… so obviously that she didn’t dare admit her ignorance of Fisher Island, either.

Norman turned off the causeway and headed down a ramp that led to a ferry slip. The great white hulk of a ferryboat, at least three stories high, already docked, dwarfed everything else. In the immediate foreground three lines of cars were forming for inspection, apparently by guards at booths just ahead. Why was Norman pulling up at the rear of the longest line? Should she ask him—or would that merely betray some spatial dimension of her ignorance?

She needn’t have worried. Norman couldn’t wait to tell her himself. “See that line over there?” He extended his arm and his forefinger as far as they would go, as if the line were a mile away rather than fifteen feet or so. The mammoth midnight shades obscured the upper half of his face, but Magdalena could see a small smile forming.

“They’re the servants,” he said.

“The servants?” said Magdalena. “Servants all have to take that lane? I’ve never heard of anything like that.”

“Servants and masseuses and personal trainers, and hairdressers, I guess. The island is private property. It belongs to the people who own real estate on it. They can make any rules they want. This is the same as a gated community, except that it’s an entire island, and the ferryboat is the gate.”

“Well, I never heard of a gated community that had a lane for the lower class,” said Magdalena. She didn’t know why the whole thing riled her so much. “How about a nurse? Suppose I was assigned to a case on Fisher Island?”

“You, too,” said Dr. Lewis, smiling even more broadly. He seemed to be enjoying all this… especially the fact that he had gotten her goat.

“Then I wouldn’t do it,” said Magdalena, a bit haughtily. “I wouldn’t take the case. I’m not going to be treated like ‘the help.’ I’m just not. I’m a professional. I’ve worked too hard to be treated that way.”

This caused Norman’s smile to move up to the chuckle stage. “But you’d be breaking your vow as a nurse.”

“All right,” said Magdalena, “then what about you? If you had to make a house call on Fisher Island, would you get in that line?”

“I never heard of a psychiatrist making a house call,” said Norman, “but it’s not totally improbable.”

“And you’d get in that line?”

“Technically,” he said. “But of course I’d drive right to the head of the line and say, ‘This is an emergency.’ I’ve never heard of anybody yet with the guts to tell a doctor he has to abide by the protocol when he says it’s an emergency. All you have to do is act like you’re God. That’s what doctors are when it’s an emergency.”

“The problem is, you actually believe that,” said Magdalena rather crossly.

“HahhhHHHockhockhock hock hock! You’re funny, Magdalena. You know that? But you don’t have to worry. Every time you come to Fisher Island you’ll be with meeeeuhuhhuhock hock hock hock!”

“Haha,” said Magdalena, “I’m having a convulsion, I’m laughing so hard.”

That made Norman even merrier. “I’ve got you going, haven’t I, babe…” She hated that. He was mocking her.

“If you want to know the honest truth,” he said, “I don’t have to play God in the servant’s line. You see that little medallion up there?” It was a round thing, about the size of a quarter but not as thick, stuck to the inside of the windshield on the upper left. “That’s an equity owner’s medallion. This line is for equity owners only. You’re in the upper class now, kid.”

Magdalena grew still more irritated. Suddenly she didn’t care anymore whether Norman thought she was uneducated or not.

“So what’s equity owner supposed to mean?”

Norman was grinning right in her face. “It’s supposed to mean, and in fact it does mean, you own real estate or real property on the island.”

Magdalena grew aggravated on top of irritated. He was mocking her—and at the same time he was burying her in words she didn’t know. What the hell was a medallion? What the hell did real property mean? Was that different from real estate? What the hell did equity mean? And if she didn’t know that, how was she supposed to know what equity owner meant?

She couldn’t keep Resentment on its polite behavior any longer. “So I bet now you’re gonna tell me you have a place on Fisher Island. You just forgot to tell me, right?”

The good doctor’s antennae seemed to sense real anger this time. “No, I’m not gonna say that. All I’m saying is I have a medallion, and I have an equity owner’s ID card.” He pulled a small card out of the breast pocket of his shirt, showed it to her so briefly, and put it back in the pocket.

“Okay, then, if you don’t own a place, then how come you have all this stuff… these IDs… and you’re so ‘upper class,’ as you call it?”

The convertible advanced a few feet, then stopped again. Norman turned toward her and gave a sly smile… and a wink with a glittering eye. It was the sort of smile that intimates, Now I’m going to let you in on a little secret.

“Let’s just say I made certain arrangements.”

“What kind?”

“Oh… I did someone a very big favor. It’s a quid pro quo situation. Let’s just say this”—he gestured toward the medallion—“this is the quid for the quo.”

He was very pleased with himself… quid pro quo… Magdalena vaguely remembered hearing the term, but she had no idea what it meant. It was reaching the point where every new term he sprang on her inflamed her resentment. The hell of it was, he didn’t think he was springing anything on her. He seemed to assume she knew them because every educated person did know these things. Somehow that made it even worse. That really rubbed it in.

“All right, Mr. Upper Class,” she said. “Might as well hear it all. What’s this line right next to us?”

He apparently thought she was now making light of things. He smiled knowingly and said, “That’s what you might call the haute bourgeoisie.”

That really rankled her. He was starting in again. She more or less knew what bourgeoisie meant, but what the hell was oat supposed to mean? The hell with it! Why not blurt it right out?!

“What the hell is—”

“These people are renters and hotel guests and visitors”—Norman’s exuberance, his joie de Fisher Island codified status rankings, ran right over her voice. He had never heard her say a profane word before, not even a “what the hell,” and he didn’t hear it this time, either. “If any of them can’t produce an ID card—let’s say they’re just arriving to go to the hotel—they won’t let them through until they call ahead to the hotel to see if they’re expected.”

“Norman, do you have any idea how—”

Rolls right over her: “They’ll take his picture and a picture of his license plate, even if the guy has an ID from the hotel. And I’ll tell you something else. No guest of the hotel can pay cash or use a credit card. Nobody on the island can. You can only charge things… to your ID card. The whole island’s one great big private club.”

Magdalena made an exaggerated angry panoramic gesture, taking in the entire scene, and that so surprised Norman that he paused long enough for her to get a word in.

“Well, isn’t this nice,” she said. “We’ve got upper class, middle class, and lower class… bim, bim, bim… and people like me would be in lower class.”

Norman chuckled, mistaking the irony for joking around. “Nahhhhh… not really lower class. More like lower middle. If you’re really lower class, like a repairman, a construction worker, a gardener, let’s say, or anybody with a truck or one of those vehicles with lettering on it—I don’t know… pizza, carpets, a plumber, whatever—you can’t get on this ferry at all. They have one that comes in over at the other end of the island.” He motioned vaguely to the west. “It leaves from Miami itself. I’ve never seen it, but I gather it’s kind of a big old open barge.”

“Norman… I just don’t… know… about your Fisher Island—”

They were moving again. This time they arrived at a booth. A black-and-white arm blocked the way. A uniformed guard with a revolver!—no, it was a scanner—stood in front of the Audi and aimed it at the license plate and then at the medallion. When he saw Norman behind the wheel, he broke into a big smile and said, “Hey-ey-ey-ey, Doc!” He came over to the driver’s side. “I saw you on TV! Yeah! That was great! What was that show?”

“Probably 60 Minutes,” said Dr. Lewis.

“That’s right!” said the guard. “Something about—I don’t remember. But I saw you, and I said to my wife, ‘Hey, that’s Dr. Lewis!’ ”

The good doctor put on a serious face and said, “Now let me ask you, Buck—I hope you called Dr. Lloyd, like I suggested.”

“Oh, I did! It cleared right up! I can’t remember what he gave me.”

“Probably endomycin.”

“Hey, that’s what it was, endomycin!”

“Well, I’m glad it worked out, Buck. Dr. Lloyd is tops.”

Norman produced his equity owner’s ID card from his shirt pocket, but his pal Buck scarcely glanced at it. He waved them through the checkpoint and sang out, “Have a good one!”

Dr. Lewis slipped on what Magdalena by now recognized as his smile of self-satisfaction. “You’ll notice Buck didn’t even look inside the booth. He’s supposed to look at a screen in there. It’s supposed to show the picture of the owner that’s in the system side-by-side with the picture he takes with the scanner. Likewise the number on the medallion and the one in the system. You’ll also notice that our line is boarding the boat first, which means we’ll be the first ones off on the other side.”

He glanced at her as if waiting for a commendation. She could think of no fitting response. What earthly difference did it make? This ferryboat ride to the island of his dreams would take a little over seven minutes.

“Buck and I are buddies,” said Norman. “You know it doesn’t hurt to learn these people’s names and talk to them a little. They interpret it as respect, and a little respect goes a long way in this world.”

But Buck meant something else to Magdalena. No Latino was ever named Buck. It was americano through and through.

On the ferry they were parked near the head of one of the equity owners lines. To Norman, this was exhilarating stuff. “If you lean out and look past that car ahead of us, you can see the island.”

Magdalena, by now, couldn’t have cared less about the damned island. For a reason she couldn’t have put a name to, the whole subject was rousing her hostility. Fisher Island… if it suddenly sank to the bottom of Biscayne Bay, it wouldn’t bother her a bit. But she leaned out anyway. Mainly she could see the fender of the black Mercedes in front of them and the fender of the tan one at the head of the line next to them. Between the two fenders she could see… something. She took it to be Fisher Island… what little she could make out… It didn’t strike her as anything remarkable.

She pulled her head back in and said, “I gather Fisher Island is very”—she was dying to come up with some more cutting word, just to shake up Norman’s status bliss, but she constrained herself and said—“very Anglo.”

“Oh, I don’t know…” said Norman. “I guess I don’t think of things in those terms.” ::::::The hell you don’t.:::::: “I hope you don’t, either.

“It’s not as if we’re in some place where you have to go around counting Anglos and Latinos to see if there’s diversity. Latinos run all of South Florida. They run it politically, and they’ve got the most successful businesses, too. It doesn’t bother me.”

“Of course not,” said Magdalena. “Because you people run the whole rest of the country. You think South Florida is a tiny version of… of… of… Mexico or Colombia or someplace.”

“Oh ho!” said Norman. He flashed another big smile. “So now I’m ‘you people’!? Have I ever acted ‘you people’ to you?”

Magdalena realized she had gone out of control. She was chagrined. In the sweetest voice she could come up with at the moment: “Of course not, Norman.” She nestled her head against his shoulder and caressed his upper arm with both her hands. “I’m sorry. You know I didn’t mean it that way. I’m so lucky just to be… be with you… Will you forgive me? I’m really sorry.”

“There’s nothing to forgive,” said Norman “We’re not taking any heavy baggage along on this trip. It’s a lovely day. We’re heading off to something that’s going to amuse and amaze you beyond anything you’ve ever seen.”

“Which is what?” She quickly added, “Darling.”

“We’re off across the waters… to the Columbus Day Regatta!”

“What am I gonna see?”

“I’m not going to tell you! This is something you have to experience.”

Sure enough, their line, the anointed equity owners line, disembarked first on the other side, onto the legendary Fisher Island. Norman couldn’t help calling it, the anointment, to her attention again.

::::::Well, that’s all right. I’m not going to make an issue of it. He has a little boy’s excitement over these things, these social things. And on 60 Minutes he looked so self-confident. On national television!::::::

From the ferry slip they headed east on an avenue called Fisher Island Drive. Norman enjoyed explaining that this was, in fact, the only street on Fisher Island. Yeah! The only one! It went all the way around the island in a great loop. Oh, a lot of roads led off of it, as she could see, but these were all private roads leading to private property.

The scenery was not the lush tropical show she thought it would be. There were plenty of palm trees… and plenty of sea views… but where were all the estates she had pictured? There were a handful of small houses, which Norman had said were called “casitas”—casitas! She had to come to exclusive Fisher Island to see casitas!?… although she had to admit they were a bit more elegant, if a casita can ever be called elegant, than the ones in Hialeah.

They came upon a few large houses with nice green lawns and big banks of shrubbery and gorgeous flowers—bougainvilleas?—but the island really seemed like a big compound of apartments. There were a couple of boring modern apartment towers glass glass glass glass sheer facade sheer facade sheer streaked facade, but there were also lots of lower apartment buildings that looked older and more elegant… painted white… lots of wood… You could imagine them to be part of a tropical paradise, but it would take some doing. Then—

Wow! Now, there was an estate! A huge manor house—wasn’t that the term, manor house?—at the top of a hill, with landscaping too grand and too glorious to take in from a moving car like this… huge banyan trees, the ones that looked absolutely prehistoric, with their twisted multiple trunks and immense limbs reaching up higher than any tree’s she had ever seen—

Norman clearly enjoyed knowing it all. The place had been a “Vanderbilt estate,” but today it was the Fisher Island Hotel and Resort. Norman motioned toward it as if it were his. The pleasure he took in this stuff got underneath Magdalena’s skin. It was all part of… something… she couldn’t stand.

Not far beyond the hotel they arrived at the Fisher Island Marina. Now, this place was impressive. More than a hundred boats, many of them real yachts, were docked in slips—Norman called them slips—many close to a hundred feet long, and some much bigger. The whole scene radiated… money… even though Magdalena couldn’t have begun to break it down into categories. There were so many employees going onboard the boats and coming off and walking along the wooden… wharfways?… between the slips. There were so many flags, so many playful names lettered toward the front of the gleaming, grand white hulls, Honey Bear, Gone with the Wind, Bel Ami, so many plump, smooth, buttery, bejowled owners—or that’s what she took them to be—whom Norman greeted ever so casually, ever so amiably, with his Hi Billys and Hi Chucks and Hi Harrys and Hi Cleeves, Hi Claibornes, Hi Claytons, Hi Shelbys, Hi Talbots, Hi Govans—::::::but they’re all Bucks and Chucks, aren’t they—americanos! The whole lot of them!::::::

At that moment Norman said, “Hi, Chuck!” Another Chuck! Chuck and Buck! A big, meaty, red-faced man came over… clad in a work shirt, sleeves rolled up, and a baseball cap, both bearing the legend FISHER ISLAND MARINA.

“Hi ya, Dr. Lewis! How you hangin’? Oh, I’m sorry, ma’m.” He had just noticed Magdalena, who was standing behind Norman. “Didn’t mean that like it sounded.” Didn’ mean ’at lack it sayundid.

His big face turned even redder. Magdalena had no idea what he was talking about.

“Chuck?” said Norman, gesturing toward her. “This is Magdalena, Miss Otero. And Magdalena?… Chuck. Chuck’s the dockmaster.”

“Real pleased to meet you, Miss Otero,” said Chuck.

Magdalena smiled faintly. This Chuck was not just a plain americano. He was a thoroughbred. He was a real cracker. Her hostile feelings rose again.

Chuck said to Norman: “You goin’ out?” Ayot?

“Thought I’d give Magdalena her first cigarette boat ride,” said Norman. “Come to think of it, the tank may be low. We’re going a long way.”

“No problem, Dr. Lewis. Just take her on over there by Harvey on your way out.” Jes taker on ovair by Harvey on ya way ayot. His voice got on Magdalena’s nerves.

::::::There has never been a Latino named Harvey, either.::::::

Chuck turned about and shouted, “Hey… Harvey!”

Norman chuckled and puffed out his cheeks and brought his arms out to the sides and rounded them at the elbows and made two fists and said to Magdalena, “Chuck’s a monster, isn’t he?… and about the nicest guy in the world.”

When Magdalena saw Norman in that monster pose, it gave her a queasy feeling. ::::::Yes, and you’re brothers, aren’t you?:::::: She wondered whether the two of them, so different in many ways, realized they were members of the same tribe… yes, a queasy feeling. She just wanted to get away from Fisher Island.

Norman led her out onto a narrow wooden dockway and pointed at a boat in one of the slips. “Well, that’s it… It’s not the biggest boat in the marina, but I can guarantee you one thing. It’s the fastest. You’ll see.”

It appeared small next to all the other boats, but it was sleek, modern, very streamlined. It looked like speed. It reminded her of a convertible. It had no top. And the cockpit was small, like a convertible interior. Up front were two bucket seats. What did they call the driver? She didn’t really know. The pilot, maybe? The captain? Behind the driver there were two rows of tan leather seats with white and dark-red piping. Or would they put actual leather in an open boat like that? It looked like leather, anyway. The small cockpit made the hull seem much longer than it was. The hull was white with a six-or-eight-inch tan streamlined stripe outlined in red sweeping from front to back on both sides. Up near the front, within the tan stripe, some bold but no more than three-to-four-inch-high white letters, outlined in the same red, said, HYPOMANIC. The letters were slanted sharply toward the front.

“That’s the name of the ship—the boat—Hypomanic?”

“That’s a kind of an inside joke,” said Norman. “You’ve heard of manic depression, right?”

Tersely: “Yes.” That really ticked her off. ::::::I’m a registered nurse, and he wonders if I know what manic depression is.::::::

“Well,” he said, “I’ve had lots of patients with manic depression, bipolar disorder, and to a man—there’ve been some women, too—they’ll tell you that when they’re in the hypomanic stage—hypo means lower” ::::::Oh, thank you so much for letting me know what hypo means:::::: “when they’re in the stage before they start doing and saying crazy things, they say it’s absolute ecstasy. Every feeling is magnified. Anybody says anything remotely funny, they’re off into gales of laughter. A little sex? One little orgasm, and they think they’ve experienced the kairos, the all-in-one, ultimate bliss. They feel like they can do anything and walk right over anyone who tries to give them grief. They’ll work twenty hours a day and think they’re achieving wonders. They reign in traffic, and the guy behind them starts blowing his horn, and they’ll jump out of the car and shake their fists at the guy and yell, ‘Why don’t you stick that horn up your ass and play “Jingle Bells,” you faggot!’ One of my patients told me he did exactly that, and the guy didn’t dare confront him, because he thought he was dealing with a maniac—which of course he was! The same patient told me that if you could bottle hypomania and sell it, you’d be the richest man on earth overnight.” He gestured toward the lettering on the boat. “And there you have my ‘cigarette boat’… Hypomanic.”

“Cigarette?”

“They’ve been around a long time. There are all these stories about how they used to use them to smuggle cigarettes because they’re so fast. But I don’t know what idiot would go to the trouble of smuggling cigarettes.”

“How fast?”

Norman gave her that smile. He was pleased with himself. “I’m not going to tell you—I’m going to show you. But you see how far the hull extends beyond the cockpit? That houses two Rolls-Royce engines, and each one has a thousand horsepower, for thousands of pounds of thrust.”

Long pause—

::::::But that’s like two thousand pounds, and two thousand pounds is a ton… I wonder if that boat even weighs a ton… and there’s something about Norman that’s… not very stable. Why am I letting myself get into this? But how to ask him… ::::::

—finally: “But doesn’t that make it hard for the… driver?—is that the word?—to handle all that—I mean, so much power?”

Norman gave her the sort of twisted-lip smile that says, “I already know the bottom line. You don’t have to go through a whole lot of indirect questions.”

“Don’t worry, kid,” he said. “I know what I’m doing. If it’ll make you feel any better, I have a captain’s license. I couldn’t give you a number, but I’ve been out on the bay in this boat lots of times, scores of times. I’ll make a deal with you. We’ll go out, but the moment it doesn’t feel right, we can turn right around and come back.”

She wasn’t reassured, but like most people, she didn’t have the courage to say she lacked the courage. She smiled in a sickly manner. “No, no, no. It’s just that I’ve never heard of such a powerful… speedboat?” ::::::Is speedboat too puny a word? Will that annoy him?::::::

“Don’t worry,” he said again. “Just hop in. We’ll take it easy.”

Norman hopped in first, with a single vault over the railing, into his hypomanic vessel, then gallantly supported her as she climbed over the edge. He took the wheel, just behind the windshield, and she sat next to him. Sure felt like leather…

He turned on the ignition, and the engines came to life with a terrifying roar before he throttled them back. It reminded her of boys with motorcycles in Hialeah. The roars seemed to be what they lived for.

Norman slowly backed the boat out of the slip. The engines made a low growling sound. Now Magdalena thought of a woman who lived near her in Hialeah. She used to take a pit bull out on a leash. The dog seemed to be as heavy as she was. It reminded Magdalena of a shark. It had no brain at all—just a pair of eyes, a pair of jaws, and a sense of smell for blood flowing in human beings’ arteries. It eventually killed a five-year-old girl by ripping one arm clear out of the rotator cuff and gnashing half her head off, starting with a cheek, an eye, and an ear, and proceeding to drive its teeth through her skull. Afterward, many neighbors confessed that they were just as terrified of the mindless beast as Magdalena was. But no one, including her, had the courage to come forward and say she was deathly afraid of the brainless pit bull.

And so it was again with Magdalena as the motors of the brainless Hypomanic growled a low growl a low growl a low growl a low growl a low growl on a leash on a leash on a leash… and the Hypomanic slowly headed toward the marina’s exit and Harvey the cracker Harvey the cracker Harvey the cracker…

So Harvey the cracker pumped fuel into the cigarette boat. Even just listening to the engines idle, Magdalena could tell they must consume gasoline at some astounding rate. She shuddered. The beast was brainless. Harvey the cracker was brainless. The licensed captain of the vessel, Dr. Norman Lewis, was not brainless. He was unstable. She had sensed that in his behavior before the 60 Minutes interview—but he proceeded to be a rock on the show itself and a brilliant tactician. But now fear had dismantled his record in her eyes. If he did something unstable in this ridiculous overpowered rowboat, he would not be able to talk his way out of it.

The mouth of the marina, leading out into Biscayne Bay, was actually a space between two walls built of rock that rose up six feet out of the water and stretched across the entire marina. As they passed through it, ever so slowly, Norman turned toward Magdalena, pointed at the walls, and said, “Anti-surge!”

It was close to a shout. Even at this speed the noise of the engines, plus the noise of the boat traffic on the bay, plus the wind, even though it wasn’t much, meant Norman had to raise his voice pretty high to be heard. Magdalena hadn’t the foggiest notion of what anti-surge might mean. She just nodded. By now the blank spots in her vocabulary were no longer very high on the worry ladder. She had no fear of venturing out on the bay. Her father owned one of the motor craft that were mounted so proudly upon boat trailers all over Hialeah. She gazed out over the water through her dark glasses. It was the usual great sunny-day Biscayne Bay waterscape, with tiny glints of dazzling sun dancing ever so lightly across the surface in swarms… and yet her spirits were sinking sinking sinking… She was at the mercy of a… hypomaniac! That was what he was—at the very least! He thought he was invincible! That was how he had demolished the Grand Inquisitor! But the sea was no place to feel invincible. And she had let this happen! Pure weakness! She had been embarrassed to say, “I’m afraid—and I don’t want to go.”

At that very moment Norman, both hands on the wheel, gave her a devilish look and cried out, “Okay, kid—HANG ON TIGHT!”

With that the growling engines broke into an explosive roar. The roar wasn’t a sound—it was a force. The force went through her body, rattled her rib cage, and shook her from the inside out. No other sense could register. She had the feeling that if she cried out, the cry would never be able to leave her mouth. The nose of the boat began to rise. It came up so high, she couldn’t see where they were headed. Could Norman, at the wheel? Would it do any earthly good if he could? She knew what was going on, even though she had never been on a boat like this before. This was supposed to be the… great moment. The entire boat was riding on its tail. Well, whoopee. This was supposed to be exhilarating. Girls were supposed to scream from the thrill. Magdalena felt the way she had in her early teens when boys insisted on showing how daring they were at the wheel of a car. She had never felt anything but nervous because of the drivers’ blank and empty youth and the pointlessness of their goals as hell drivers. Norman was forty-two, but she felt exactly that way. Oh, blank and empty middle age! Oh, pointless goals! When would this be over? Didn’t Nestor’s Marine Patrol go after fools like this? But the thought of Nestor left her empty, too.

Finally, Norman let up and the nose came back down. He yelled to Magdalena, “How about that?! Seventy-two miles an hour on the water! Seventy-two!”

Magdalena didn’t even try to say anything. She just smiled. She wondered if her expression looked as feigned as it felt. The main thing was not to show so much as a hint of exhilaration. One little hint—and he was bound to try it again. The nose was back down, but the Hypomanic didn’t cut through the water the way other boats out here did… It didn’t glide the way the sailboats did… Look at that one! So big! Could it be a… yacht? In Magdalena’s imagination, a yacht could only be a very big boat with huge sails… On this dazzling day, all sailboats were flashes of white cloth upon a bay… a-dazzle with sun explosions off every little chop on the surface from here to the horizon… not that she could dwell upon any particular part of it for long… Norman’s idea of cruising in his cigarette boat was to go fifty-five miles an hour instead of seventy… still so fast, the boat twitches and skips… and skips along… hypomaniacally bounces… and bounces… The hypomaniac at the wheel skips and bounces over the surface of the water… whips past every craft Magdalena got a glimpse of. A smile of self-awe took over Norman’s face. He kept both hands on the wheel… He loved turning the boat this way and that way… this way to pass oncoming boats… that way to pass the boats he kept overtaking.

Nobody they went past in any direction seemed as exhilarated by the Hypomanic’s wild rush as Norman was. His passenger wasn’t, either. Only Norman… only Norman… People on other boats squinted, glowered, shook their heads, gave the hypomaniac the finger, the forearm, up, up, the thumbs-down, and shouted angrily, judging by the expressions on their faces. The crew of the Hypomanic could not hear a word they said, of course. Certainly not Norman, there at the helm of his cigarette boat. He leaned forward in his upholstered pilot’s seat, living out a happy fantasy.

Then he could resist no longer. Two more times he turned toward Magdalena and shouted, “HANG ON!”… grinning as if to say, “Want more thrills? You’re with the right man!” Two more times he let the throttle out as far as it would go. Two more times the nose went up and the sudden forces drove Magdalena back and deeper down into her seat and made her feel like a fool for getting into this in the first place. Two more times the boat shot forward with hypomanic lust for superiority and showboating. Two more times they shot past anchoring boats with speed blurs. The second time, the speedometer hit eighty miles per hour, and Norman thrust a fist of triumph into the air and shot a quick glance toward Magdalena. Quick, because not even the hypomaniac dared keep his eye off where he was going any longer than that.

When he finally throttled down and put the nose back on the water, Magdalena said to herself, ::::::Please don’t turn toward me and break into your big grin and say, “Guess what speed we hit!” and then make a face that begs for an awed reaction.::::::

He turned toward her with his self-awed grin and said, “I can’t believe it myself!” He motioned toward the gauges in front of him. “Did you see that?! Am I kidding myself?! Eighty miles an hour! I swear, I never even heard of a cigarette boat reaching that speed! I could feel it! I bet you could, too!” He beamed another awed-reaction opportunity her way. ::::::Give him anything but that, or he’ll do it again. He’s feverish with Pride.:::::: So she gave him a compulsory stillborn smile, the kind that would freeze any normal man. To Norman it was nothing more than a cool breeze.

The cigarette boat covered the twenty miles to Elliott Key just like that. They knew they were there, not because they could see the key… but because they couldn’t. The key itself was obscured by a promiscuous congestion of boats, reaching out at least a half mile… appeared to be thousands of them—thousands—some of them anchored, some of them somehow lashed together side by side, as many as ten in a row. Little dinghies motored about amid the bigger boats… What was that? It turned out to be a kayak, with one boy standing at the prow, paddling. A boy and a girl reclined behind him, each holding a plastic cup.

Music from God knows how many amped-up speakers rolled across the water—rap, rock, running rock, disco, metro-billy, reggae, salsa, rumba, mambo, monback—and collided above a loud and ceaseless undertone of two thousand, four thousand, eight thousand, sixteen thousand lungs crying out, shouting, shrieking, caterwauling, laughing, above all laughing laughing laughing laughing laughing laughing the stilted laugh of those proclaiming that this is where things are happening, and we are in the heat of it… There were motorized boats with two and three levels of decks, enormous boats, and you could see, far and near, the forms of people hopping up and down and flailing this way and that—dancing—and—

Norman had now steered the cigarette boat deep into the regatta’s helter-skelter and was trolling slowly, ever so slowly, with the thousand-horsepower engines growling growling growling growling ever so lowly lowly lowly… around this boat… between those two… along the lineups of boats tethered together side by side, closely, ever so closely… looking up at the people… who were dancing and drinking and squealing and laughing laughing laughing laughing—we’re here we’re here where things are happening! happening! happening! happening! to the beat—always the beat—of octophonic speakers electro-thunging out beats, beats, repro-beats, and the singers, always girls, became nothing more than beats themselves… no melody… only repro-beats… stringed bass, drums, beat-girls…

The closer they got to the key—they still hadn’t laid eyes on it—the more boats they found lashed together, side by side, at the widest part of the hulls. It turned the boats into one big deck party, despite the different levels. A girl in a G-string bikini—so much blond hair!—teeters upon the narrow juncture where two boats are joined together and squeals with—she squeals with what? fear? coquetry? flirtation? the sheer exuberance of being where things are happening?—as guys hurry over and reach up to steady her. Another girl in a G-string bikini leaps over the juncture and lands on the other deck. The boys cheer with slightly ironic gusto, and one keeps yelling, “I would! I would!”… and the speakers boom boom boom with a beat a beat a beat a beat.

::::::and what does Norman think he’s doing?:::::: In front of the lashed-together lineups Norman would unleash a sudden burst of fuel, and the thousand-HP engines would ROAR and everybody on the decks would peer down and cheer drunkenly and ironically. There were many small boats also weaving in and out of the boat mob… dinghies, motorboats, and every so often the kayak—that same kayak!—the paddler in the front now drunkenly singing… something… and the guy and the girl in the back drunkenly extending one leg and then the other… and Magdalena can look over and see the girl, lying on her side… and her bare bottom has the woven stringlike thong of a G-string bikini in the cleft and the boy, wearing baggy board shorts, has one arm under her head with the hand grasping her shoulder. It looked damned uncomfortable, trying to lie down in the bottom of a kayak… Half the girls dancing on the decks, all the decks, had on thongs… cleaving their buttocks into pairs of perfect melons just ripe enough for the picking… and that girl right there, not ten feet away, climbing out of the water up the ladder of that two-deck motor launch—her buttocks, her backside, her… her… her ass—no other word comes right out and says it—her ass has swallowed her sling-low red thong so completely, Magdalena can hardly see that it exists at all… The water has furled the girl’s hair into a wet mass that hangs down her back far below her shoulder blades, and the water makes it dark, but Magdalena would bet anything that it’s actually blond—las gringas!—so many of them on those decks! Their blond hair bounces when they dance. It flashes when they throw their heads about to squeal… to flirt… to laugh laugh laugh laugh on the decks where things are happening… at Elliott Key… at this sexual regatta she finds herself enclosed in, making her want, despite sane thinking, to show them all—all those gringas!—what she’s got. She makes herself sit up very erectly in her cigarette boat chair and pulls her abdominals in and flexes her shoulders back to make her breasts stand up perfectly, and she wants all esos gringos y gringas to stare at her and she wants to catch them staring… that one!… that one?… that one over there?—

Norman feeds another gulp of fuel to the engines, and they really ROAR this time, and he starts smiling a comradely smile and pointing at nobody in particular and waving at—empty spaces, so far as she can tell, and gunning the big engines with a bigger louder roar than ever, then cutting back as quietly.

Magdalena said, “Norman—what… are… you… doing?”

A knowing smile: “You’ll see. You just keep looking luscious, the way you do right now.” He thrust his own chest out in an admiring pantomime of hers. Magdalena was pleased in spite of herself.

They were trolling ::::::for what?:::::: along the biggest lineup yet. Magdalena counted thirteen boats—or was it fourteen?—all of them on the large side, and at one end, two sailboats, one of them a schooner with enormous sails. This huge lineup excited Norman. He began going all out with the sound-offs, from growl to ROAR… the broad confident grins… the waving at imaginary people…

They were halfway down the lineup when a boy up on a deck shouted, “Hey, man! Didn’t I just see you on TV?”

Norman put on a big congenial smile and said, “Could be!”

The boy shouted, “60 Minutes, right?”

Now Magdalena could see which boy. “You were on fire, man! You really had that little f*cker… you had him like I mean all f*cked up!”

From what Magdalena could tell from down here, he was a good-looking boy—early twenties?—with a head of long, thick hair brushed back into great sun-bleached brown leonine locks like Tarzan’s and a perfect tan that made his long white teeth light up every time he smiled. He smiled a lot. He was tickled pink to have a noted TV schloctor doctor looking up at him… whatever his name might be.

“I got it!” shouted the boy. “Dr…. Lewis!”

“Norman Lewis!” shouted Norman. “I’m Norman… and this is Magdalena!”

“I would!” said the boy. He sounded drunk. He had a jumbo container in one hand.

“Me, too!” said another boy.

Magdalena didn’t go for that. It came across as mockery.

Ironic whistles… Quite a little cluster of people had gathered at the railing. The suntanned boy with the teeth shouted down, “Hey, Dr. Lewis—Norman—why don’t you and Madelaine—”

“Magdalena!” said Norman.

“I would!” said the boy. Obviously he was very proud of this rhetorical leap of vaguely sexual logic.

“Me, too!” said the other boy, and all the kids laughed. There was a real throng of them up there on the deck.

“Why don’t you and Magdalena—”

“I would!” two of the boys at the railing shouted in unison, and others took up the cry, “I definitely would!”

“—come up and have a drink!” the first boy continued.

“Well…” Norman paused, as if such an invitation had never occurred to him… “Okay! Great! Thanks!”

The suntanned boy told him to just turn about and swing around the end of the row and double back to the stern of First Draw, where there was a ladder.

“Great!” said Norman. He turned the cigarette boat about and started off with a big ROAR of the engines, quickly cut back to a growl growl growl growl. “As long as they saw you on TV, you’ve got an aura,” said Norman. He was very happy with Dr. Norman Lewis. “Memory tends to decay rapidly, but I knew I’d have a little mojo left—and I was right.” He paused a moment. “Of course, it didn’t hurt to have the mighty Hypomanic. They love cigarette boats, all these kids. Cigarette boats have… water cred! I knew revving up those thousand horses would get their attention. And you, kid”—he stuck out his lips as if he were about to give her a big comic kiss—“you didn’t hurt, either! Did you see them? They were eating you up alive with their eyes! Didn’t you love that I would business? I would! I would! I would! There’s nobody on that boat who’s even in your league. Face it. You’re gorgeous, kid.”

With that he put his hand on the inside of her thigh.

“Norman!” At the same time, she didn’t object to his interpretation of the catcalls.

His other hand was on the wheel. Intently he stared straight ahead, as if there were nothing on his mind other than steering this growling cigarette boat around the bend.

“Norman! Stop it!”

So he removed his hand from her thigh—by sliding it up toward her hip… and then walking his fingers down her lower abdomen and under the band of her bikini bottom.

“Stop it, Norman! Are you insane?!” She grabbed his wrist and jerked his hand up. “Damn it, Norman—”

She suddenly fell silent. His fingers creeping under her pants, in plain view of everyone—so gross! And so juvenile! Such a plunge into naughty-boy exhibitionism! All that, on top of his open admission that he, Dr. Norman Lewis, nationally known psychiatrist, had trolled a whole line of boats in a humiliating, self-debasing way calculated to achieve such a small, retarded goal… crashing the deck party of a bunch of kids—a bunch of kids! A bunch of boys still speaking in teenage slang, a bunch of girls scampering naked over boat decks with thongs cutting their bottoms into two fresh melons and disappearing into God knew what—and yet it excited her. She could feel… the onset of a heedless bacchanal starring her own gorgeous body. A stirring in her loins… until she regretted not wearing a thong. Was this black bikini where Norman went exploring small enough to consummate the concupiscent urge to… abandon… every conscious thought that held her back? But Conscious Thought was tougher than she imagined. It hoisted her up erect. ::::::Stop it… and now!::::::

“Stop it, Norman!” she said. “Everyone can see us!”

But she had allowed his hand to remain there for a beat too long, and her Stop it had no moral strength, merely social decorum. By the way Norman was eyeing her, with a little smile playing on parted lips, she knew that he had detected every neuron of her conflicted feelings and realized what a weak and vulnerable state she was in.

When the Hypomanic reached the stern of the First Draw, there was quite a contingent of gawkers waiting at the top of the ladder. Magdalena climbed up first, to another chorus of “I would!” “I would!” “I would!” “I would!” She could feel their eyes cupping her breasts and massaging her lower abdomen, which was bare all the way down to her mons pubis and swelled out ever so slightly, just enough to give it a little curve. They couldn’t take their eyes off her!

“I would!”

“I would!”

“I would!”

It was hard to hear even that much. Here on the boat itself the BEAT the BEAT the BEAT came POUNDING POUNDING POUNDING POUNDING out of the speakers. She could see girls on the deck up front, dancing with one another… next thing to naked. A whole flock of G-string girls!… with thongs disappearing into their buttocks’ clefts… They rode their pelvic saddles bareback, they jerked their heads and sent their blond manes flying—blond americanas!—suddenly she felt trapped… in a vulgar horde of aliens…

Now young guys in bathing trunks… their skin that looked like custard, like flan… Latin guys had muscles you could see—but she realized she was thinking about Nestor—so she dropped that subject. A guy, maybe what?—twenty-five years old?—a guy with skin of flan was standing right in front of her, and he said, “Hey, you with him?”

She knew he meant Norman, who was coming up the ladder behind her.

Norman took Magdalena by the hand and went straight to the guy who had invited them aboard in the first place. He turned out to be a tall, slender man, in his early twenties, probably.

He was wearing a pair of the au courant extralong board shorts. They had a go-to-hell Hawaiian print all over them. Nevertheless, up this close he seemed to rate promotion from boy to young man, in nomenclature at least.

When he saw Norman, his mouth fell open, his eyes popped open, and he said, “Dr. Lewis! This is so cooool! I just saw you on 60 Minutes—and here you are… on my boat! It’s soooooo cooooool!”

The awe seemed to be genuine—and Magdalena saw genuine gratitude spread over Norman’s face in the form of a smile that said, “That’s more like it.” He put out his hand, and the young man shook it and felt compelled to say, “Actually, this isn’t really my boat, it’s my father’s.”

Norman said in the friendliest possible way, “Please tell me your name!”

“I’m Cary!” That was it—Cary. He was part of this, the first generation to have no last names. Using a last name was considered pompous… or else too much of a tip-off as to your background… ethnic, racial, sometimes social. Nobody used a last name until he was forced to fill out a form.

Norman said, “And this is Magdalena, Cary.”

Cary flashed those incomparable teeth of his and said, “I would! Honest, that’s a compliment!”

Laughter and “I woulds” broke out among the crowd that had gathered around them to see the supposedly famous Dr. Lewis, whoever he might be.

“I would!” Laughter.

“I would!” Laughter.

“I would!” Laughter.

“I would!” More laughter.

“I definitely would!” Whoops of laughter over that one.

“That’s a big compliment,” said Cary. “Honest truth!”

A wave of embarrassment… and bliss… Cuban girls were no different from americana girls in most things. They spent half of every day asking themselves… or their girlfriends… “Did he notice me? Do you think he did? What kind of look was that, would you say?”

Magdalena couldn’t dream up a single reply that wouldn’t… kill the bliss of it. If she openly took it as a compliment, she would sound like an unsophisticated little Latina, and if she tried some becomingly cool and witty piece of self-deprecation, she would come off as an awkward creature who had a fear of being envied. Wisely, she did the only safe thing. She stood there blushing and fighting off the smile… and what bliss it was!

The sun had sunk a bit, but it couldn’t have been later than 5:30 when Magdalena heard a chorus of those ironic whooooops that young men seem to enjoy… They were on the deck of the next boat over… and there she was… a blond girl who had just removed the top of her bikini. She had her back arched and her arms out wide… with the bra dangling from one hand… and her breasts popped out in a way that said, “No more hide-and-peek. Now we… live!”

“Come on!” said Norman… with a lewdly happy face. “This you’ve got to see!” He took her hand and hurried her over to the railing to get a better look. “Now it begins!”

The blonde with the breasts did a few mild shimmies with her hips, showing her chorus of admirers how taut her pectoral glories were… how they stuck out, defying gravity…

“What begins?” she said.

“The regatta is essentially an orgy,” said Norman. “That’s what I want you to see. You have to see something like this once anyway.” But he wasn’t looking at Magdalena when he said it. Like every other male on the boat, he only had eyes for the sprung-free naked breasts. She was casting glances this way and that, vamping, like a comedienne playing the coquette, urgently trying to convey the message: “Oh, I’m just having fun… just using sex as irony… you can’t take this seriously”… as she switched her hips this way and that… comically, of course, because this was not serious… but enough for everyone to see her body in her tan thong, very nearly the color of her skin.

The girl suddenly stopped her little performance, crossed her arms over her breasts, and doubled over laughing and then rose erect, still laughing, dabbing her eyes with the backs of her hands, as if it had all been so funny. But then she straightened up and shook her breasts… but without the shimmies… and now smiled broadly as she approached three of her americana girlfriends who were laughing their heads off. One of them kept thrusting both arms up in the air the way football referees did when a team scored. The blonde no longer tried to cover her breasts with her arms. She posed with her hands on her hips and kept smiling as she talked to the three girls—didn’t want anybody to think she was embarrassed by what she had done.

The girl’s success did not lead to a wave of breast baring. It started off randomly. Magdalena and Norman kept touring from boat to boat… deck to deck… thirteen different decks… some this high off the water, and some that high, and some not even that high, and a few not much higher off the water than Norman’s cigarette boat. Norman kept stopping to yakyakyakyakyakyakyakyakhockhockhock with fans—not exactly fans… more like people who had just been told he was important—and Magdalena would stand there with a smile of interest and involvement on her face but then become so bored that she would look about, and… see that some girl over here or over there… or over there—five or six hundred yards away, even, on some deck on another tethered row of boats—had taken off her bikini top… without benefit of whoops whoooops and woo-ooOOOs… and the sun would sink a little further… and the boys would get a little drunker… so drunk or so inflamed with lust that they worked up the courage to join the girls dancing on the deck. ::::::And there’s that kayak.:::::: It was still coursing among the boats, reappeared below. The oarsman stood up in the front with a paddle, as if this were a gondola. The couple still lay together in back. The girl had removed her string bikini top and lay on her back, flaunting her big breasts. She had opened up her legs. A wisp of G-string bikini cloth barely covered her. The boy, who still had his board shorts on, lay on his side with both legs around the lower half of one of her legs. Todo el mundo seemed to be staring down to see if he was aroused. Magdalena, for her part, couldn’t tell… and then they were gone… in order to present their exhibición to other boats. Here on deck… ripe melons… ripe… By now, late afternoon, all the decks were filthy… littered with every imaginable form of trash and garbage plus, here and there, pools of vomit, some of it still wet, some of it sun-dried vomitus… and everywhere discarded beer cans and beer bottles and big plastic beer cups… iconic Solo cups… favorite at keggers and tailgaters… hundreds of them discarded on every deck… Solo cups… in their traditional tool-and-dye-works red… and in every other imaginable color… pale pink, corn yellow, royal blue, navy blue, aqua blue, viridian green, puce, fuchsia, cellar-floor gray, garbage-bag brown, every color short of black… strewn, crushed, split, or lying sideways, intact… and every time a boat rocked, usually thanks to the rolling wakes of speedboats, the bottles and the beer cans would roll across the deck… the beer cans with a cheap junky aluminum rattle… the bottles with a cheap junky hollow moan… rolled rolled rolled over the flat garbage, the stamped-out cigarettes, the cheap plastic beads, the spilt-beer slicks, the used condoms, the puke fritters… canted canted canted over a pair of glasses with a ruptured temple hinge, an abandoned flip-flop… collided collided collided with the plasticized cups, and soon the decks were GRINDING and HUMPING and the sound systems were getting louder and the BEAT thung BEAT thung BEAT thung BEAT thung BEAT thung BEAT thung and more girls were taking off their tops and were left only with little thongs disappearing into the crevices of their only just now! at just this very taut swollen labial moment ripe melons… ripe melons… and they got down to it… no more steps, no more Lindys and twists such as the girls did with one another… no, get down to it… to GRINDING…

She looks up at Norman. He is transfixed by the sight… absorbed, consumed… leaning forward… His smile curls from amusement to hunger… Hungry he is! He wants some—

“Oh, shit!” It sounded like something he meant to say under his breath… It was an Oh, shit of excitement. Excitement had so overcome him, this choked croak had become an exclamation forced through a husk of a throat. He certainly was not talking to her… His smile had turned into a pulse… amusement arousal amusement arousal amusement arousal… His eyes were pinned on a couple barely three feet from them—this americano, tall, sandy haired, with an athletic build—this americano was behind a girl BEAT thung BEAT thung BEAT thung THRUST hump THRUST hump THRUST hump hump humping BEHIND her HUMP thung THRUST the turgid crotch of his trunks in her buttocks RUT rut rut rut… so hard, the front of his trunks all but disappeared into that ripe gulley… She was leaning forward to make the gulley wider, causing her bare breasts to hang down… with each THRUST they swung forward THRUST hump THRUST thong thong thong thong they lurched forward and swung back—

The americanos! Not that Cuban boys are so—but the americanos are… dogs in the park! The thought of a whole deck full of young men and women doing what was so close to the real thing BEAT thung BEAT thung BEAT thung BEAT thung THRUST hump THRUST hump THRUST hump THRUST hump dogs in the park THRUST hump THRUST grind grind grind grinding their distended cocks albeit held down by their trunks into the girls’ crotches GRIND GRIND GRIND… these gringas might as well have been totally naked!… bikinis? Breasts rampant GRINDING. All you can see is the band of the thong bottom BEAT thung BEAT thung BEAT thung barely visible at the hips… otherwise naked girls with guys thrusting humping GRINDING them BEAT thong BEAT thong…

Getting darker… but light still glowed on the edges of the western horizon—a band of purple backlit by a fading gold. She could barely see any light to the north where Miami was… somewhere… or east and the ocean beyond… but still enough light to make Magdalena think this motley corona of—what?—a thousand boats?—was in the world… enough to make her believe Miami actually was… up there… and the ocean was actually out there… and they really were near a known piece of geography, Elliott Key… even though there was such a jam-up of boats. She had only barely laid eyes on it by looking between boats… and this was Biscayne Bay they were on… She was still able to gaze out over the bay, although the light was getting dimmer and dimmer. There was a party on every boat…

Great whoops. People were hurrying. People dancing suddenly began hurrying to the rear deck.

Norman pulled her in that direction.

“What’s going on?” By now you had to shout to be heard even at close range.

“I don’t know!” shouted Norman. “But we’ve gotta go see!”

Magdalena found herself stumbling behind Norman, who held tight to her hand and pulled her along.

Much excitement on the aft deck. Cell phones were going off. Two of them were programmed with LMFAO’s “I’m Sexy and I Know It” and Pitbull’s “Hey Baby.” The beep beep be-beeps of incoming text messages were going off all over the place.

A young americano cried out above the general hubbub, “You won’t believe this!”

BEAT thung BEAT thung BEAT thung BEAT thung—yet now Magdalena could hear it… From down that way, cheers, shouts, two-fingers-in-the-mouth whistles, whoops and woo-woo-woooos—always mockery, the woo-woo-wooo, but this time so very loud. The ruckus was heading toward them like a tide… finally so close, it beat back the sound system… the ruckus and the sound of the speedboats… bearing down—

The crowd against the rail was so thick, Magdalena couldn’t see a thing. Without a word, Norman clamped his hands on either side of her waist, just below her rib cage, and lifted her straight up until she could put her legs around his neck and dangle them down over his chest like a child… Grumbling from behind, “Hey, you’re rumble rumble rumble rumble!” Norman ignored it. In the next instant—

—the speedboats… Behind the first, three water-skiers on long towlines… three girls… three girls towed at a furious rate by one speedboat… all three stark naked… three girls without a stitch on, two blondes, one brunette… tall americana bodies! Starved to near perfection!… Reaching the lineup of thirteen tethered boats turned them on… All three took one hand off the towline, turned their upper bodies almost forty-five degrees, and threw their free arms up in the air in a gesture of abandon… tremendous cheering and laughing from every boat in the line… mocking woo-woo-wooooos—but even the mockery was exultant—and deliriously happy—Another speedboat. This one towing—

—Christ Jesus!—a young man naked as the day he was born—presenting the Columbus Day Regatta… a huge erection… so gorged with blood, it curved upward at a fifteen-degree angle… three naked maidens, with tits rampant!… the god Priapus, the gorged cock of Youth rampant!… all of it lit by the brief domed glow of dusk.

The cheering from the tethered boats rose up in a primal scream not from the heart but from the groin, feral whoooops, woo-woo-wooooos, hoot hoot hooooots, arrrrghs, ah haaahhs arrrghhHHHock hock hock—that last rut rut roar unmistakably Norman’s…

“Did you see that? Did you see it, kid? That guy broke every known rule of the central nervous system! No man can endure the taxation water-skiing weighs on his legs, the quadriceps, the hamstrings, the latissimi dorsi, the brachialis—and maintain an erection like that… it can’t happen—but it just did!”

::::::Ah, the scientist, the scholarly research analyst, keeps his eyes fixed upon the very outer boundaries of the human animal’s existence.:::::: Magdalena wondered if Norman himself was aware of how often he tried to hide his own sexual excitement behind these thick walls of theory… while even now he scans the bay for one last receding glimpse of the nice young cloven bottoms of the water-ski girls in the sexual water show.

The show was over, but the americanos, like Norman, were inflamed by lust. Their hands trembled and they had serious trouble trying to text on their smart phones’ tiny keys. Their phones were ringing in a dysphony of “Hips Don’t Lie,” “On the Floor,” “Wild Ones,” Rihanna, Madonna, Shakira, Flo Rida, recorded laughing jags, whistled Brazilian salsas, all of them riddled by the abrupt beep beep beeps and alert alert alerts of incoming TEXTS thung TEXTS thung BEAT thung HUMP thung THRUST thung BEAT thung DANCING thung AGAIN thung the DECK thung DECK thung INFLAMED thung LUST thung LUST WHOOP WHOOP! WOO-WOO!—and all at once todo el mundo is mad to reach another deck… down that way! Norman grabs Magdalena by the forearm and is pulling her, dragging her, into the stampede. Such commotion—

“Norman! What’s—”

He didn’t wait for her to complete the question. “I don’t know! Let’s find out!”

“What earthly good—”

“We have to see!” said Norman. He said it as if that were the only rational choice, given the surge of the crowd.

“No, Norman—you’re crazy!”

She tries to pull back and go the other way, turns —¡ALAVAO! A horde of them are climbing and vaulting over the railing onto this deck and WHOOP WHOOP! WOO-WOOOO! charging past her and clambering from this boat to the next and from the next to the next—going that way, HORDES of them! Magdalena gave up and rushed with the rest and ravenous Norman, struggling up over railings and dropping onto the next deck and struggling up and dropping down and stampeding across deck after deck until at last they could see a crowd in slices that was gathering, sliced and diced by lights streaming over them, in the very last boat in the row, the only sailboat, the schooner with the two towering masts. But why?

Magdalena didn’t want to think of Nestor, but Nestor intruded. ::::::God, that first mast is so tall… the height of an office building… and Nestor climbed to the top hand over hand.::::::

“I think I know what this is all abouuuut hock hock hock!” said Norman. In a very jolly way, too. So jolly, he just naturally put his arm around Magdalena’s shoulders and drew her close to him. “Ohhohoho, yes, I think… I… do… know,” he said. Obviously, he wanted her to say, “What?—my all-knowing one.” But she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction. She hadn’t forgotten their swelling contretemps before they boarded the boat.

Some mock cheering broke out among the boys and girls crowded onto the schooner’s foredeck. The boat’s huge mainsail had suddenly lit up like a lamp shade—no, like a screen. The sail had been swung about ninety degrees until it was like a screen facing the people on the foredeck, and the lights, Magdalena now realized, came from a beam projected from the prow. An image appeared on the sail—a slice of part of a person?—but a little gust of wind rippled across, and Magdalena couldn’t make it out. In the next instant, the wind calmed down, and a huge image appeared—an erect penis six or seven feet long on the huge schooner sail and nearly two feet thick. But where was the end, the glans penis? It had disappeared into a cave—but that couldn’t be the entrance to a cave, because it kept expanding and contracting around the glans and moving down and up and down and up… ¡Dios mío! It was a woman’s lips! Projected onto the mainsail! Her head was twelve feet from brow to chin.

Magdalena’s heart took a nosedive… porn!… a porn movie projected at gigantic scale onto a gigantic sail… turning these hundreds of americanos into pigs, stampeding pigs squealing eeeee uh eeeee uh thanks to what? Porn.

And one of those americano pigs was Dr. Norman Lewis. He was right beside her, on this mobbed deck… trying to resist the drooling adoration that wants to creep across his face… eyes pinned on a schooner sail that reaches from here… to way up there… as porcine body parts pop up, drift, and invade one another, oozing and sliding and drooling and sucking and lapping… a woman’s legs the size of office towers, spread open… wide open… the labia majorae are three times as big as the entrance to the Miami Convention Center… the porn doctor Lewis is transfixed… he wants to enter that portal or is it he wants his eyes to enter… transfixed by the alternate galaxy of pornography?

“I don’t know about you, Norman, but I’ve had enough!”

He doesn’t even hear her. He’s drooling in his own world.

She grabs his elbow and shakes it… hard. Norman is startled… but more than that, bewildered. “How could anybody—”

“Let’s go, Norman.”

“Go…”

“Back. I wanna go back to Miami.”

Bewildered. “Back? When?”

“Right now, Norman.”

“Why?”

“Why?” says Magdalena. “Because you look like a drooling three-year-old standing here… a slobbering porn addict—”

“Slobbering porn addict”—but he’s not really absorbing the words. He’s so far gone, his eyes wander back to the sail… the twelve-foot-high head of a woman trying to nibble the foot-long *oris of another woman with her yard-wide lips.

“Norman!”

“Uhhh, what?”

“We’re going! And that’s that!”

“Going? The night is just beginning! This is part of the experience!”

“They”—Magdalena swung her head about to indicate the rest of the crowd—“are going to have this awesome—pathetic—experience… without you. You’re leaving!”

“And going where?”—but he obviously had no real comprehension of what the two of them were saying… His eyes floated back to the sail—

“WE’RE LEAVING, NORMAN, AND I MEAN IT!”

Norman’s expression granted her marginally more attention, but not a lot. “We can’t,” he said. “We can’t take the boat back in the dark. It’s too dangerous.”

Magdalena stood there with an I can’t believe this expression, staring at Norman. Norman’s eyes were already back on the magnified body parts. An immense… cleft buttocks… was on the screen. A giant’s hands were spreading the cheeks apart. The anus itself filled the vast screen. It was deep as a gorge in the mountains of Peru.

“Norman, if you want me,” she said in a tense, clipped voice, “I’ll be in the boat, trying to get some sleep.”

“Sleep?” said Norman in the voice that said, “How can you even think of such a thing?” Nevertheless, he was at last focusing upon her. He spoke sternly. “Now, listen to me. Tonight is an obligatory all-nighter. All night is what this experience is all about! If you keep your eyes open, you will witness things you never thought possible. You will have a picture of mankind with all the rules removed. You will see Man’s behavior at the level of bonobos and baboons. And that’s where Man is headed! You will see the future out here in the middle of nowhere! You will have an extraordinary preview of the looming un-human, thoroughly animal, fate of Man! Believe me, treating porn addicts is not a narrow psychiatric specialty. It’s essential to any society’s bulwark against degeneracy and self-destruction. And to me, it’s not enough to gather data by listening to patients describe their lives. These people are weak and not very analytical. Otherwise they wouldn’t let these things happen to themselves. We have to see with our own eyes. And that’s why I’m willing to stay up all night—to get to know these wretched souls from the inside out.”

Jesu Cristo… this was the thickest wall of theory she had ever heard Norman concoct! An impenetrable fort!… and an inimitable pulling the rug out from under any critic.

She gave up. What use was it to argue with him? There was nothing to be done about it.

But giving up on the war brought her no peace. In the darkness she looked in every direction. Before the sun went down… Miami had been up there, to the north, even though all you saw on the horizon from here was something the size of a scrap of your little fingernail. You couldn’t see Key Biscayne from here, but you knew where it was in the northeast. Florida City was way over there to the west… and all around, the immense sea was black as night… no, blacker… invisible… the most famous expanse of ocean in the country… vanished. She hadn’t the faintest idea where north was, where west was, no sense at all of where she was. There was no rest of the world—only this flotilla of depraved lunatics. And she was a prisoner here, forced to watch the rot, the pustular oozing of complete freedom. Even the sky consisted of complete darkness and a single beam of light on an immense stretch of canvas upon which filthy body parts oozed and slithered… all that was left of life on Earth, boiled down. Magdalena felt more than depressed. Something about it made her afraid.