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He looked around the room. They’d all crashed.
He tipped the contents of the packet onto the table, used his credit card to divide it into two lines, rolled the one-hundred-dollar bill into a tight cylinder.
Poking the makeshift straw up one nostril, closing off the other with his finger, he breathed in gently, moving evenly along the line.
It burned.
He exhaled, slow, steady, then sniffed again to pull it higher.
His eyes watered, his top teeth went numb.
He swapped nostrils, sniffed the other line.
His heart began racing. His breath quickened to keep up as his skin flushed warm and the tingling spread outward from his chest to his fingertips, toes.
The room appeared brighter, sharper.
The breeze through the open doors magnified the crows of a rooster and swept the rush of the river from way down in the valley up, up, up into the room, swirling through the metal fish on the wall until the light blue one out front, leader of the pack, pulsated, shouted to the world, after me you losers, let’s do this.
The keys to the Harley were on the sideboard, beside the GoPro.
The security guard at the Nyalahutan resort would later tell police the young American took both helmets off the handlebars, threw them over the wall, rode off south towards Ubud without turning on the lights.
At Simpang Tohpati, he swung onto the bypass road, cranked the throttle, tilting and weaving through the light pre-dawn traffic with the wind caressing his face, the potato-potato-potato-potato of the engine streaming with nodding palms and the black-white-black-white-black-white curbing into a mesmeric haze.
A CCTV camera mounted near the entrance to the underpass on the edge of Ngurah Rai Airport recorded the Harley bellowing through the tunnel. Another on the second floor of the BNI building captured the American saluting at the statue of a surfer.
He turned off the bypass at Jimbaran, slowing only slightly as the road got bumpier and tree trunks pinched in on both sides. After the roundabout with the archer statue, he started climbing, the Harley emitting harsh, even rasps. He caught glimpses of the massive floodlit Visnu riding a garuda on the hill to his left, before the crack-crack glide down to the coast.
A woman dusting inside the Rip Curl store at Padang Padang would later tell police she saw the young American ride up onto the sidewalk beside the gateway to the temple. Another woman cleaning the windows of the ticket booth – closed that time of the morning – said the young tourist greeted her with a polite salamat pagi before shuffling down the steps and taking a small plastic bag from his pocket.
He tipped the powder onto the stone, knelt, snorted the lot in one go. Felt it trickle down the back of his throat.
Teeth flared from the smiling gargoyles guarding the entranceway, like embossed words on a book cover. The strokes of a woman sweeping the floor of the small temple rasped full noise.
His chest started pounding as he skipped down the gap in the limestone cliff, keeping his head down so the GoPro wouldn’t hit the overhang. The beach was deserted, except for a guy setting up a t-shirt stall under an umbrella.
The vendor would later describe to police how the American stole a surfboard from one of the rental racks and stripped naked before entering the water wearing only the strange benda on his head.
He paddled directly out from the beach, cruising through a gnarly rip current, the chill water caressing his balls and the numbness rising to his neck, his chin, teeth. As he approached the takeoff zone, he shut out the thundering of the surf, visualized the epic peak, paddled like fury and dropped into the perfect green barrel.
A photographer trialing a new rectangular fisheye inside the bowl where the tube opened up would later tell police a badass swell from the south-west was hurling eight-foot offshore barrels onto the shallow coral reef. He had a bad feeling the moment the naked dude stood up on the board.
