“Give me the Nordic climes,” he’d told Carolee when she sputtered awake, and told her again and again, through all these years, making a routine of it, a joke, but a joke that wasn’t funny, not in the least. “Oslo,” he’d say, “Helsinki, Malm?, Reykjavik, what’s wrong with Reykjavik?”
And then he wasn’t thinking anymore, he was dreaming. He was alone, hiking up a trail deep in the redwood forest, everything cool and dim in the shadow of the trees, his legs working and his heart beating strong and steady so that he could see it there out front of him, at arm’s length, beating, beating. He kept going, up and up, till he wasn’t walking anymore but gliding above the ground, sailing on stiffened wings, and that seemed perfectly natural, as if all his life this was what he’d been meant to do. He might have been a bird. He was a bird. But the strangest thing was there were no other birds out there with him, no creatures of any kind, no people even, nothing but the trees and the sky and the earth unscrolling beneath him in silence absolute, dream silence, a silence so profound it could be broken only by the mechanical squawk of a loudspeaker—Doctor Hernández, venga al teléfono, por favor—that sheared off his wings and dropped him down here in the hard wooden seat of the Red Cross Clinic, awaiting judgment.
“You were asleep,” Carolee was saying. “I didn’t want to wake you.”
It took him a minute, so much harder at his age to come back to the world, and then he sat up and gazed blearily round the room, his eyes shifting from Oscar’s face to Carolee’s before dropping to the watch on his wrist: 6:15. Was that right? He blinked at Carolee. Blinked at Oscar. “Jesus,” he rasped, “they going to make us wait here all day?”
Oscar—he’d been asleep too—rose from his chair, stretching. He was wearing shorts, plaid shorts, and below the hem of them his kneecaps were discolored, smudged still from where he’d knelt over the dead man in the mud. “I’ll go check at the desk.”
“No, don’t bother.” He was on his feet now too, a sudden jolt of anger searing through him as if he’d touched two ends of a hot wire together. “Come on, Carolee,” he said, reaching a hand down for her, “we’re out of here.”
“But Sten, they haven’t come yet. The police. They’ll think—I don’t know what they’ll think.”
He just shook his head, took her hand and pulled her up. “Sorry, friend,” he said, nodding at Oscar, and then he was guiding Carolee back across the waiting room, out the double doors and into the scorching stink of the evening, charcoal and dogshit and the fumes of the cars, fish, dead fish, and if he brushed by the pair of policemen in their pleated blue uniforms with the Fuerza Pública patches on their sleeves and their faces of stone, he really didn’t give a good goddamn whether they’d come to pin a medal on him or haul him off to Golgotha. He was out in the street, that was where he was, striding through traffic, calling—no, yelling, bellowing—“Taxi! Taxi!”
3.
AND THAT WAS ALL kinds of fun too, trying to communicate to the cabbie just where he wanted to go, and how did you say “boat”? Barco, wasn’t that it? He all but shoved Carolee into the backseat, then slammed in himself, twisting his neck toward the cabbie and in the process catching a glimpse of himself in the rearview. His eyes, furious still—burning, consumed—were sunk in a nest of concentric lines like pits on a topographic map, the eyes of a seventy-year-old retiree pushed to the limit. There were red blotches on his cheeks. His nose looked as if it had been skinned. And his hair, not yet gone the absolute dead marmoreal white of the rest of the duffers on the ship, but getting there, hung limp over his ears. But his eyebrows—his eyebrows were exclusively and undeniably white, and how had he never noticed that? White and pinched together with the glare of the sun that picked out the two vertical trenches at the bridge of his nose and ran them all the way up into the riot of horizontal gouges that desecrated his forehead. He was old. He looked old. Looked like somebody he didn’t even recognize. “Barco,” he announced to the driver. And then, to clarify, added the definite article: “El barco.”
The driver was dressed in shorts and sandals and the ubiquitous flowered shirt open at the collar and he wore some sort of medallion dangling at his throat. He didn’t have an iPod, but he sported the same wispy goatee as the bus driver and the two thieves in the lot—in fact, and this came to him in a flash of ascending neural fireworks, the guy could have been the bus driver’s twin brother, and if that wasn’t an irritating thought he couldn’t imagine what was. All right. They were in the cab, that was all that mattered—but the cab wasn’t moving. The driver—the cabbie—was just staring at him.
“El barco,” he repeated. “I want to go to el barco.”
“The boat,” Carolee put in. “The cruise ship in the harbor. The Centennial?”