The next morning, Jen’s eyes opened slowly, with excruciating care, encased as they were in a drying full-body mold of papier-mâché. Charred flat on her back, she was positive that if she didn’t move quickly, the adhesive would solidify completely and bury her alive in her bed, but at the same time, if she did move quickly, the adhesive would tear her skin from her bones in clumps.
Jen lifted her hands to her face, pressing the pads of her fingers to her cheeks. Some diabolical prosthetics-maker or deranged plastic surgeon had experimented on her in the night, razoring off her flesh and applying some leathery graft in its place. She rolled, grunting, onto her side onto the hot metal of an iron and bolted upright, the flesh of one shoulder searing red. In the bathroom she flipped on the overhead light. What she saw, briefly, was crustaceous, dull red, a blistering exoskeleton. She twisted around to peer at her back and cried aloud, and flipped off the light.
She found a bottle of aloe and a water pitcher, filled the water pitcher with lukewarm water from the tap. She spent the next twenty-four hours sitting on the edge of the enormous canopy bed, naked, watching sitcoms in syndication and Judge Judy, eating salted nuts and M&M’s from the minibar, drinking from and refilling the pitcher, and rubbing the aloe into all the crustaceous regions. Two angry patches on the backs of her calves. An enraged red line that parted her hair.
When she ran out of aloe, she put on first a pair of cutoffs and then a T-shirt, stifling a screech when the flaming tonnage of the T-shirt fabric slammed into one bright-red shoulder, and pushed and slapped the flaming tonnage back over her head, her mouth mewling through the cotton. She took an elastic-banded short skirt and pulled it up over her hips and under her armpits as an ad-hoc halter top. Her hand on the doorknob, she turned back to fish out her bottle of Animexa from her bag.
“For courage!” she said aloud to herself, breaking off half a tablet and popping it between her chapped lips.
Outside the bungalow, the clouds had diffused and parted company and the sun had traveled closer to the earth in the night and now took up the whole sky. She started to jog to the main house, but the jostling further tenderized her skin. She walked rapidly on her toes instead, until she reached Eva at the front desk. She showed wide-eyed Eva the empty bottle of aloe and asked for more.
“Oh, no, no, you’re cooking yourself alive in this,” Eva said. Thirty minutes later, Jen had in her hands a prescription tube of shiny translucent goo and a larger store-bought tube of thick white cream, which she was to alternate applying every two hours.
On Jen’s last day in Belize, she tearfully pulled on her swimsuit and a long-sleeved T-shirt that sawed at her ground-beef flesh, popped half an Animexa tablet, took the ferry back to Caye Caulker, and, still teary under her wide straw hat, purchased a spot on a group snorkeling tour of the nearby reef. Manning the boat were two men whose names she didn’t catch.
The rest of the group in their snorkel gear kicked and splashed near the surface, peering down on the reef. Jen, her shirt still on and her thick, wet hair splayed protectively over her neck, plunged in as deep as her lungs and cumbersome snorkel mask would allow. The lumpy ocean floor stirred and heaved upward, mutating into a manta ray. Brain coral pulsed. Rainbow formations of fish fanned and feinted. The mask cut and bit into her scorched face like a machete on a picnic table. After a while she tossed her gear into the boat. She filled her lungs and dived down to the shallow ocean floor again, eyes wide open, hugging her knees, watching a turtle float by. She laughed, and watched and listened to her breath turn into bubbles until she ran out of breath.