Tropical heat. The buzz of a fly. A close, dark room. Close. Closed in. Dark. Claustrophobic.
Picking up his pen, Dieter recalls the opening lines of Sartre’s Troubled Sleep . . . An octopus? He pulled out his knife and opened his eyes, it was a dream. No, it wasn’t.
Angelina wakes in a close, dark room unsure where she is or whether that really matters. Climbs out of bed, crosses the floor, and eases open a pair of wooden shutters painted the color of old denim, faded blue. Some of the paint has flaked off the slats and as she brushes the scales with her bare foot, an image of a man doing something awful to her the night before slides through her mind.
It was a dream. No, it wasn’t.
Blue shutters, blue hills, a belt of gum trees. Flat savanna. Broiling sun. And of course the hacienda. In memory the rooms were cooler than this but perhaps she was last here in what passes, in Mexico, for winter.
He puts down his pen and refocuses on the unadorned study where he writes. Desk and a chair, futon where he sometimes naps when the words dry up. The walls are bare, the furnishings spartan except for an elaborate throw rug, a detailed representation of a tropical garden he brought home from Mexico the year he returned to Bloomington with Jen.
Angelina wakes, flings open the blue shutters, and sees a savanna flat as the winter cornfields of her childhood stretching away from a hacienda darkened by the shadows of calabash trees, the hacienda where the nightmare started; and where, perhaps, it must end.
A soft knock then Sanchez, the bodyguard with the gentle demeanor and mournful grey eyes, steps into the room carrying a breakfast tray. She isn’t really hungry—she rarely is these days—and after a few bites of a warm tortilla she pushes the tray away. Only the black coffee, strong and potent, is savored.
The first sip jogs her out of a mental fog and kindles a brief spark of optimism. Maybe today there will be no filming. Maybe today Mestival will let her rest. The bodyguard lifts the tray, inquiring in broken English if she would like anything else.
More coffee, por favor.
With a courtly nod he leaves the room and returns a few minutes later with a second cup. The straw hat he’s wearing looks out of place, it doesn’t jibe with his holstered gun.
Gracias, she murmurs. De nada, he replies.
The other bodyguards project coiled violence—given the chance she’s certain they would harm her—but Sanchez is different. Not for the first time she senses the embarrassment he feels for the things Mestival makes her do.
Dieter floats, daydreams, stares out the window at the unruly Indiana meadow he cuts down once a year with an old-fashioned scythe, his deltoids loosening with every swish of the blade, a sound that always reminds him—a writer can’t help it—of the chuck chuck chuck of Cash Budren’s adze in As I Lay Dying.
After breakfast Sanchez takes her out for their usual morning walk in the low hills that circle the savanna. His gait is loose and easy, and even though he has little to say this morning, the seed that was planted a few weeks ago when he turned away from her in modesty as she was getting dressed blossoms once again, a tiny flower of hope. If she’s bold enough to propose such an outrageous idea, would he help her escape? The possibility is exhilarating, but what if she’s mistaken? What if his deference is merely part of his job? What if he’s just as loyal to Pablo Mestival as all the rest of them?
It’s like receiving a sacrament, an unholy sacrament, the way the bodyguard delivers the hypodermic on a small silver tray. Every day Mestival, or one of his associates, calculates the dosage down to the final drop and personally cuts and cooks the exact amount of smack he wants her to inject. It’s a fine science, a changeable arithmetic, the geometry of junk.
She taps the inside of her arm to wake the vein then slides the needle in while Sanchez, in apparent distress, turns away to stare out the window at the distant belt of gum trees losing their definition in the last seven minutes of light.
The initial jolt before she freefalls, muscles collapsing, into a dark canyon, deep space. Then a wave of sudden heat neutralizes the skin chills as she opens her eyes and sees the empty needle lying on the tray and the bodyguard on the hardback chair solemnly watching her. She asks for a glass of agua. Nodding, Sanchez moves toward the sink.
The pen lies on the page, the page on the desk. The writer paces the floor. He feels like a vulture circling a kill, circling Angelina the way he keeps circling, year after year, book after book, a small cadre of expats lifting shot glasses of mescal to the wonder of the world as the waves crawl up the Yucatan sands and the wind clicks in the palm fronds and someone picks up a guitar and strums the opening chords of a song they all know. Emboldened by drink, Dieter mouths the words of the familiar chorus while the others glance over at him with affection. Soon another voice joins in, then another, then more, creating a choir, a shared narrative, the story of their lives.