*
It’s already evening and he’s been dozing in the town car for hours, dimly aware of the rush of traffic, the gathering darkness, the few lights visible over the clinic’s wall across the street. He programmed the car to alert him if another Mitsui Talos comes within fifty meters but even so he startles when it announces, “Target in proximity.” Through the darkened window he sees the same filthy town car that had followed him to the St. Mark, and he holds his breath as it crawls by the clinic like it’s looking for something and then as it speeds away he tells his car to follow.
39
Lost Coast
There’s nothing on the coast but the hotel’s ruin, though the tsunamis are ten years past. The shoreline must have changed when the water came, because now the waves break on the hotel’s west wing. There’s a swimming pool with breakers rolling over it; in the moments of the water’s stillness Kern sees patches of aquamarine tile under the green weed and fragments of coral, and there, in the middle, the hotel’s logo, a mermaid with a conch at her lips.
The tide is out, so he goes exploring among the dripping, recently flooded rooms. Tide pools, stark shadow, the resonance of water rushing, anemones, purple-shelled crabs scuttling into the cracked masonry. The rooms nearest the sea are buried entirely in thick strata of wet sand, hot where the sun reaches it, trembling at his touch like a living thing. He imagines the old life of the hotel preserved, somehow, in this wet, labile tomb, the laughter and clink of glasses buried, compressed, becoming geology.
It’s midday, and all the other farang are asleep. He clambers up a ruined wall to the hotel’s highest surviving eminence; nothing on the sea but a few fishing proas, nothing inland but jungle, no dust hanging over the one road in. He takes out his old cell, the one without the ghost, and sees, with relief, that there’s still no signal. He wears a hat, because the sun is hot, and he doesn’t know how much the satellites can see. He sits there a long time in the rattle of palms, the stroke of surf.
His discipline is in abeyance; he takes his morning runs slow, toys with his sparring partners, doesn’t punish the heavy bag. (The one point on which he is disciplined is not thinking of Kayla.) He wonders if anyone has found his room, back home, whether it would still be there if he ever got back. The favelas change fast; miss a month and you can’t find your way, would wander ever deeper into the alleys, a lost tourist disappearing.
*
He shares a room with four other fighters in the mirror image of the drowned wing. There are chunks of rotting carpet still glued to the floorboards, strips of silk wallpaper on the crumbling plaster. They have a bathroom, but its pipes are long dry; there’s a translucent plastic keg of water, mounted above the filthy tub, with a desalinator on top, and a sticker that’s supposed to turn blue if bacteria start growing. Every morning one of the trainers comes in with two big buckets of seawater, pours them into the desalinator, and takes away the last day’s white lozenge of salt. Under the keg, the water has washed away the tub’s grit, sand and accumulated hair, revealing a veined, pale marble.
In the afternoons the centipedes come out, thick, black and glossy, falling from the cloth canopy under which they train. The heavy bags, soft from innumerable blows, are more duct tape than leather. The trainers are cheerful Thais, most of them little bigger than children, all retired pro fighters. The farang are mostly Australian, with a smattering of Europeans. Bulging, steroidal muscle is the rule; there’s a Belgian who looks like a small bull, who must have had that gene mod that makes your muscles keep growing till they run out of protein. For all their tattoos and attitude, Kern considers them mere bruisers—sloppy, bulky, angry and untechnical. The Thais are better, but he has the sense that fighting does not comprise their beings, that they’re no more than mere professionals.
Once a week the farang pile into the camp’s van and make the ten-mile trip to town for the fights. Kern went once, but there had been too many westerners taking video on their phones and it made him nervous, his image going out there into the ether, so since then he’s stayed in the camp. It’s warm enough that he can lie on the beach at night and lose himself in his sense of distance and the unexpected profusion of stars.
*
He sits by the ocean and counts his money, which is going fast; there’s enough left for another month, if he’s careful. He wonders if he could pay less if he slept on the beach, but can’t bring himself to ask.
Bo comes down from the hotel, surfboard under his arm. He has a tattoo on his ribs that at first Kern had taken for spiky tribal symbolism, but finally recognized as a violently energetic cursive spelling out Genesis 1:2. Kern thinks of the nocturnal revivals in the favelas, the celebrants manic with the holy spirit, babbling and frothing at the mouth until, glazed and spent, they finally trickled out into the morning. Kern had seen Bo on his knees on the beach at dawn, praying next to his surfboard as the sun came up, but whatever variant of Christianity Bo espoused was apparently consistent with a life centered on surfing, muay thai and women. Bo’s said he’s been on the bum for a long time, moving between Southeast Asia’s fight camps and its gnarlier break points.
Bo drops the board, sprawls on the sand beside him. “You sure you don’t want to learn to surf? I’ll teach you,” he says.
“No thanks,” says Kern. “People don’t go in the water where I’m from.” Then, “You fighting tonight?”
“Nah. I like to train but I don’t get in the ring. No point.”
“Don’t you get paid if you win?”
“Here? Sure—somewhere in the vicinity of sweet fuck-all.”
“So if I needed to make money fighting, how would I do it? And say maybe I didn’t want to show up on image searches.”
“Someone trying to find you, mate?”
Kern hesitates, says, “I didn’t know she had a boyfriend!”
Bo laughs and says, “If you want to fight for money, you could try Bangkok, or, better yet, outside of Thailand altogether—all they have here is boxers and poverty. If you’re really game, you could try the interior—Kuan Lon, or someplace like that.”
“Is that in Thailand?”
“You might say it’s between sovereignties at the moment. So if a person wished to avoid notice, or the rule of law … A lot of money there, and it’s the kind of place where discretion is encouraged.”
“What’s it like?”
“War zone,” says Bo. “From what I hear. Markets black and grey. I’ve always wanted to see it but you can’t surf if you’re dead. Think you might actually go?”
“Might. Might stay here a little longer.”
“You watch your ass, mate. Me, I’m going surfing,” says Bo, and does.