She was truly happy for the first time in her life, and it felt just like living in a small room painted all white, with windows looking out onto impenetrable forest. It didn’t bother her when she had to walk past strangers unwashed in the middle of the day or when she forgot a newly bought bag of groceries on the subway seat. Crossing the street, she paused to look up at an airplane etching a thin white stroke in the sky and was nearly hit by a taxi. Though it had been over a year, she staggered through the world like one freshly bludgeoned by love.
Now they were at a resort hotel by the beach, though the beach was really a five-minute drive away. All they had here was a forty-foot strip of damp sand visible during lowest tide, and a staircase that led directly into the sea. Karen looked down at the blue water frothing against the last visible stair. The water had a mouthwash color, something usually achieved through dye, making everything look unreal, retouched, staged somehow. Seeing her own hands foregrounded against this blue filled her with the sensation of dreaming, in the moments just before you wake up. Off in the far distance fishing boats floated at the horizon line, the only indication that this country had a real economy of its own, separate from the all-inclusive resorts that lined this stretch of land, which resembled utopian communes but operated secretly under cutthroat capitalist principles.
The water was cool, and looked as clear as a glass of water: you could see shells strewn on the ocean floor. But the unusually hot weather had caused jellyfish to multiply unchecked. They populated the shallows, a slight distortion in the shifting, flashing patterns of sunlight on sand. Beachgoers descended the staircase to steep their bodies in the tropical blue, but once they got out into the sea they stopped, looking down and moving around nervously, a few steps to the left, then to the right. One woman was stuck in waist-deep water, crying, her face deeply pink. She kept wiping it with short, rough motions that looked like slaps. Over and over she turned back toward the staircase, but she was too far away. The man she had come with was several feet away, doing the breaststroke in tight circles. “You have to kick their heads,” he shouted to her. “Kick them out of your way!”
Daniel had proposed to her that morning and she said yes in an instant. He went to take a shower. Karen had left the bungalow, identical to every other in the resort, and walked out into the swelter. It seemed strange to be apart from him in this moment, but it felt even stranger to wait for him there in the overly cold hotel room, trying vaguely to read a magazine while he washed each part of his body with scrupulous care. She expected the world to feel different now that she had achieved a new life state. Instead, it was deathly hot. Karen walked out to the railing and stared down into the sea. It looked beautiful enough, but the water was haunted. If you waited patiently and let your eyes adjust, it would come into focus: the faint pale outline of a jellyfish, like a ghost of the jellyfish you had seen on TV or in photographs, a bland white space waiting to be colored in.
“She stood there wailing. Every few minutes it got louder, then she’d shout out ‘I’m so scared!’ or ‘They’re everywhere!’ He just swam around. At the end he picked her up and carried her out.”
“I love how easy it is to pick people up when you’re in the water,” Dan said, tilting a small full glass of orange juice into his throat.
“What?” Karen asked.
“That’s what we used to do when we went on family vacation. Once I was a teenager, my dad used to let me pick him up and carry him around the pool. He was a big guy then, that’s when he was still training for marathons. It was hard to do, but it was still possible.” Dan smiled and stabbed at his breakfast sausage. He had chosen this resort for its high ratings on decor.
“That sounds nice,” Karen said, uncertain. Dan’s plate contained a horrifying amount of meat from all different cultures and civilizations.
“It was nice. My mom would bring us all virgin daiquiris from the bar and we’d pretend they were getting us drunk. My dad and I would use them like lances and try to joust in the water.”
“Daiquiris?” Karen asked, trying to picture it, the novelty straw pointed outward, weaponized.
“No,” said Dan, “my mom and sister. They tried to make themselves perfectly rigid and narrow at the tip.”
“Oh, I see,” said Karen. Karen had never heard of a happy childhood like Dan’s from any real person, but she had seen things like it on TV screens. When he told her about the sunny, lively experiences of his past, she often thought of them as synopses or, if there were many, montage. She tried to ask the questions that would make these stories take on mass. Was this while his mother was working in prison law, trying to stop the construction of new facilities? Were his lawyer parents troubled by their work, did it make his childhood less bright? Did his father regret training so hard when it was a marathon that had blown out his knee? She looked out the restaurant window at the perfect blue water full of stinging tentacles, then at the resort-goers crowding the omelet bar, several of them calling out their orders at once. Behind the counter, a boy no older than sixteen regarded the ingredients with terror as he cracked two eggs into a small white bowl. Karen prayed that he would not do something tragic like try to escape.
“The worst part of it,” said Karen thoughtfully, “was how happy he was. I watched him paddle around, do handstands, splash in the water, while she wept twenty feet away. He might as well have been whistling jauntily.”
“Who?” Dan asked, looking up.
“Nothing,” she said.
Her own parents had not known how to vacation at all. Once a year, usually in the spring or summer, they would take Karen with them on a trip to someplace similar in climate and geography to the place in which they lived. When this happened, there was always a reason: to visit a great-aunt or a friend of a relative, or to go to one of her father’s professional conferences, where archivists gathered to listen to panels on database administration. On these trips they stayed in motels or hotels some distance from the center of town, where diverse locations like Atlanta, Tallahassee, and Richmond converged in an interchangeable span of franchises and family restaurants. For years they ate the motel waffles and the croissants of the nicer hotel chains together, but since she graduated from college her parents had found a new joy in traveling without her, recreationally. Last year they traveled to Morocco and stayed in a converted inn that had once been a small summer palace. Attached to their mass travel e-mail, Karen found photos of her father looming over a bowl of dried apricots, his mouth exaggeratedly open in an expression of surprise. She found her mother grinning at a small tame falcon perched on her open hand. Her mother was wearing a huge straw hat encircled by small multicolored bells, a tourist hat. Her father had captioned the photo “my wife has all the bells & whistles!” Karen had the uncomfortable feeling that they had advanced, leaving her behind.
Dan went to the buffet for seconds, leaving behind a plate on which teriyaki chicken chunks abutted slices of smoked ham piled askew, stratified and resembling steep cliffs or canyons. The plate signaled great abundance and great waste at the same time, canceling itself out. Karen chewed at a massive piece of underripe cantaloupe and swallowed. The hard angles pressed against her inner throat, sliding. Karen thought to herself that she’d probably become a vegetarian, someday.
A few hours later, it was time to eat again: they ordered at their seats by the pool from a menu as thick as a book. Turning its huge plastic-covered pages made Karen feel like a child again, gaping at the pictures of odd-colored food shot too closely, curiously shiny. “No thank you,” Karen said to the waiter who tried to fill her water glass. “Stay hydrated,” Dan said, pushing his own glass over to her. It was too hot to move, and they sat by the pool with their laptops on, waiting for more food to come to them and be consumed. As the staff door swung open, Karen could hear several people laughing together in a language she did not understand.
Dan seemed to be working on an architecture project next to her, though he had promised that he would not bring any work along on their vacation. He stared into his screen at a contorted orange shape, zooming in and out on it, rotating it to one side or the other, sighing deeply. Meanwhile, Karen had become obsessed with reading about jellyfish. The Nomura jellyfish could grow up to two meters in diameter, and weigh up to 450 pounds. A ten-ton Japanese fishing boat had capsized after trying to haul up a load of Nomuras caught in the net. She stared at a photo of giant jellyfish clogging a water treatment plant, their heads like plastic bags full of dirty water. She clicked on one link and then back to the search screen to click on another and another. She learned with horror that a jellyfish stinger was not just a stinger: it was a sac of toxins that ruptured when touched, shooting out a ridged, wicked-looking spine. This structure, called a nematocyst, was intelligent—it knew the difference between random pressure and human skin. In the drawings of the jellyfish nematocysts, the stingers resembled harpoons shooting into the flesh and burying themselves there, lodging like insect splinters below the surface. Karen suddenly felt like she was going to throw up.
“I’m going to cancel my order,” she said to Dan, standing abruptly.
“What? Why?” he asked, looking up from his small virtual object.
“I’m not hungry,” Karen said.
“Then why did you order?” he asked, exasperated.
“Because you wanted to! You decided!” Karen replied, mirroring his tone.
“I didn’t decide anything,” said Dan. “It’s lunchtime. Time decided it.”
“You always decide,” Karen said more quietly, looking out at the sea.
Dan looked at her, then followed her gaze out to the water. A pair of kids floated offshore, clinging to a boogie board. At this distance it was impossible to see whether they were huddled in fear, or just talking. Karen sat back down.
“Cancel it,” Dan said, “and you can eat later, when you’re hungry.”
Karen nodded and stood back up, looking for the waiter. When the waiter saw her, he disappeared for a moment and then walked toward them, carrying a large tray. He went to Dan’s side and set down a beige-colored pad thai. Then he came around to Karen’s and set down a large, puffy pizza. As Dan ate, Karen regarded her unwanted pizza. It had the shape and pattern of a pizza, but the cheese on top was creamy like brie, the tomato sauce had a deep burgundy color. It was as though somebody who had never known a pizza in real life had created one based on a vintage photograph and a dictionary entry. Several feet away, a family of French tourists sat drinking tall blue drinks and eating cheese sandwiches. The children played a game that involved slapping each other’s hands; sharp smacks cut through the drowse of the waves and of buzzing insects.
When she first met Dan, a graduate school classmate of her friend Naomi, she had called him “fun,” which was not the same thing as “exciting.” Most of the people Karen dated had pushy personalities and visible insecurities: when she soothed their worries, it created a serene feeling in her, like petting a cat. When the two of them experienced worries simultaneously, huge fights would develop and last anywhere from one to three days. Dan’s emotional life was sturdier: Karen admired how he shrugged off smaller offenses and articulated his disagreement with larger ones in simple, practical language. He had experienced few conflicts in his life, and those he remembered were strange to her. Once he told her about a graduate school rival, Paul Mitchell, who had stolen his idea for the semester’s final project. They had been assigned to come up with a concept and suite of renderings for a public library proposed in downtown Los Angeles. Dan’s idea had been an elegant oval with a large, open central space where patrons could gather and socialize, with stacks and quiet study spaces radiating outward. The building would have a natural “hearth” to it, and visitors could choose what type of “heat” they wanted to experience by placing themselves in relation to it.
Two days before his presentation, Paul had come to class with the same building, identical down to the colors used and the key terms bolded on his slides. He looked straight at Dan while giving his talk, smirking. Dan ended up having to design an entirely new library, this time conceived as a honeycomb of adaptable nooks that could become spaces for private reading or cozy group interaction. In the end, his two-day project received the highest score in the class, he told her: the story ended there. But had he confronted Paul Mitchell afterward? Why was Paul so bent on fucking him over? Had Dan been angry, and if so, how did he exhibit it? Karen couldn’t understand how these encounters had marked him, and she had always believed that a person without trauma was dangerous in some way, untested. Also bizarre: in all of his stories, Dan ended up succeeding.
The health and robustness of his mind were compelling to her: like an alien or a hero, she believed him capable of anything. At the same time, she felt useless in the face of his decisions, which she believed were stronger than her own. She didn’t understand why he had arrived at the decision to propose to her today, rather than some day earlier or later. Now, as she watched him staring at his computer, outlined in sweat and brilliant sunshine, the air around them so hot that it almost seemed to wobble, Karen felt an urgent and acrimonious feeling rise in her.
“What’s that?” Karen demanded, pointing to the ugly form on-screen.
“It’s the first concept for a hybrid gallery-gym,” Dan said. “Victor’s firm got the commission, and he wants me to help out. He actually wants to offer me a job. I’m just trying to look at the idea and figure out what he’s thinking.” He spun the shape around casually. It slowed and settled on a slant, looking cheap.
“Where would the job be?” Karen asked. “Don’t you think you should have told me?”
“Boston,” said Dan. He looked at her. “But there isn’t even an offer yet.”
Karen stared into the shallow pool. Jellyfish are a gathering of protein, water, nerves—no brain. The bungalow they had paid for cost over two hundred American dollars a night, times four nights. They still had two nights to go. It was embarrassing to be here, seeing into the lives of so many strangers: for the first time, she missed the generic motels of her childhood, where people were kept safely stowed away from one another. She wished she had never seen the swimming couple, whose discord had ruined the morning’s fragile new feeling.
“It’s not a big deal,” he said, reaching over and squeezing her arm.
“Don’t you think,” Karen said in a wavering voice, “that we should talk about the engagement?”
“Because of this?” Dan asked. His voice was flattening, the way it did when he was angry. “Are you serious?”
Karen spoke carefully, in clipped phrases. “I mean, it just happened this morning. Why aren’t we talking about it? Why aren’t we happy? Shouldn’t it change this whole day? Make it better? Shouldn’t it be present in everything we say or do?”
“I’m having a great day,” he replied stiffly. “Aren’t you?”
She stared at him reproachfully.
“This is ridiculous,” Dan said.
Karen felt confused and angry. She was only trying to communicate, and she felt that nothing should be off-limits on the day of their engagement. If anything, she wanted to delve more deeply into their relationship, learn about it, immerse herself.
“You know what,” Dan said, standing up. “Let’s take an hour to cool off. I’ll be in the room. You can find me whenever you want.”
As he walked off toward the rows of indistinguishable cottages, their shapes modern but boring, Karen tried not to cry. Alone among vacationers, she closed her eyes and tried to will away the people around her, playing, laughing, sucking drinks through convoluted plastic straws. With her eyes closed, their presence only grew louder: she could hear mouths squishing around bread, mucus unclogging deep within a head. The ocean sound was everywhere, close and encroaching, coming to carry her away. Then, at some point, she was asleep.
She awoke to the sensation of a damp towel being draped over her face, one was already on her torso. It felt like a funeral ritual, gently conducted. She pulled the towel away and blinked into the impossibly bright light. The ocean had come up almost to the railing: now it was only a few feet of tile that separated her from the sea and everything in it. To her right stood a man about her age, wearing navy blue shorts and a black T-shirt, some outfit that said nothing about who he was. He had picked up the towel she had thrown on the ground and was holding it out to her.
“You’re burning,” he said flatly, in a completely normal American voice. He looked at her expressionlessly, waiting. He was dramatically handsome.
Karen reached for the towel, pressed it against her face. There was an insistent feeling on the surface of her skin, like her face was falling asleep and blushing at the same time. She felt thirsty, or maybe faint.
“Thank you,” she muttered. She looked around. The French family was gone, and so were the sunbathers strewn on the hurricane wall. It seemed shameful to sleep out here, in public. Karen thought of someone, a strange man or woman, watching her unconscious face, her slack, open mouth. The sun was in a different place now, but it was no cooler than before.
“It’s okay. People here do this all the time,” he said, gesturing at his own face. Karen supposed he meant getting as sunburned as she must be right now.
“Well, thank you,” she said. “I usually pay more attention.” She lay stiffly beneath the towel he had placed on top of her body. “Have you been at this place for a while?”
The man nodded. “Years,” he said.
Karen didn’t know whether he was joking, so she laughed uncomfortably.
“I work here,” he explained. “I’m the director of culinary services.”
“Oh, wow,” Karen said. “How did you end up here?” Though he seemed strange—stiff, or boring—she was glad for the distraction of talking to him. There was no place on this resort for her anymore: the sun, the water, and her fiancé had all turned against her.
“Well,” he said, “I’m a world traveler. That’s the first thing. I’ve been all over the world, and I’ve tried everything they have to offer, in terms of food.” He grew more and more animated as he talked about himself. “You name it. I’ve eaten live squid in Tokyo-cho and fresh chicharróns in Mexico City. I have a good handle on what’s authentic, and how to achieve it. So when my buddy came to me and said he didn’t need a chef, he needed someone to run the chefs, I put my hand up.”
Karen glanced at the lamentable pizza she had ordered, whole and wet-looking on the table to her left.
“Plus, to live in a gorgeous place,” he added, “like all of this.” He held his arms out in front of him, palms up, gazing into the bungalow village.
“It is very beautiful,” Karen said, though she wasn’t sure. Each bungalow had an identical porch with a gate on the right or left side. Each bungalow had a small, intensely groomed tree blooming with fragrant white flowers and a small kidney-shaped pond populated by frogs that you sometimes saw dead on the path, crushed by feet. The effect of so many small, identical details multiplied and extended into the far distance was nightmarish, an optical illusion made suffocatingly real. She imagined herself running forever into the far distance and remaining somehow in the same place.
“You have no idea,” he said, deeply emphasizing the word no.
“I just wish,” she said, “that it was safe to swim. I’ve never seen so many jellyfish at once.”
He nodded deeply. “They’re responding to the critical upheaval in the climate. The jelly blooms are destroying us. Not only that, but we lose beach every season to erosion, and storms.” Little creases formed at the outer corners of his eyes: he seemed genuinely troubled.
“I was watching one couple this morning,” Karen said, looking up at his face. “His girlfriend was bawling for maybe thirty minutes straight. She was terrified of them, the jellyfish. He just swam around, having a great time.”
“That’s ice-cold,” he replied, shaking his head firmly. He looked off toward the horizon line, where a yacht cut through gray haze. Karen smiled up at him.
“You know,” he said suddenly, looking down at her, “I know some bloom-free beaches. It’s a lot better farther down the coast. Different currents, colder ones—the ones the surfers chase.”
“Oh wow,” said Karen.
“It’s maybe ten or fifteen minutes away, if you have wheels.” He shrugged. “I could give you a ride.”
Karen looked down at her stinging, reddening arms. If she went back to the room, would she find Dan angry with her still, fiddling with shapes and abstractions? When she saw him, would she feel relief or just a return of that rigid feeling? From the long, flat rectangle of the shallow resort pool she could see the man-made water close by, empty and painted blue, and the wild water farther off. This handsome man with the convincing feelings seemed benign. Just because he was attractive didn’t make him dishonest: it could even turn out to be the case that his attractiveness had made him more honest than other people since he hadn’t had to lie to get what he wanted. It was then that she realized, like an epiphany, that all the employees around her were significantly more attractive than the average guest. But what was the strategy behind this hiring practice? Was it to make the guests feel young and attractive too? To make guests feel that this was a beautiful and clean place? Or to show the resort’s power and high standing, as evidenced by its ability to recruit such good-looking people from the towns nearby, people who conceivably had more opportunities than average? Karen felt a headache coming on. The director of culinary services looked impatient as he stood before her, watching her make up her mind.
“Are you going now?” she asked, not sure how his answer would affect her decision.
“If you’re ready,” he replied, looking her up and down as if for the first time.
Karen thought of the cold, tense bungalow, set behind the eerie pond and tree. “Okay,” she said, turning to grab her bag.
“Hold on,” he said, a little sternly. Karen froze. He pointed at the terrible pizza, still perfectly intact. “Don’t you want to get that boxed up?”
“Oh, right,” Karen said. She walked to the bar and asked for a box. She walked back to the table and began the process of shoving the terrible pizza into the too-small Styrofoam container. It fit: folded over twice, with a chunk of crust torn off.
“Great,” he said.
His name was EJ, and the vehicle he owned was an old motorbike painted construction-cone orange. The rattle of its worn-down motor clashed alarmingly with the deep, serene green of the jungle around them. When EJ slowed down to avoid potholes or clear a curve, the engine sputtered a deeply unwholesome gray smoke.
“I’m Karen,” Karen said, shouting into the rush of air.
“What?” EJ shouted. “I can’t hear you!”
The groves of palm trees and bananas were a broad smudge around them, as EJ made alarming decisions about when to barrel through piles of palm debris and when to swerve suddenly, wrenching around them. Absolute time and absolute speed were difficult to gauge on a motorbike, Karen thought as she tried to cling to EJ’s sweat-soaked back without digging her fingernails into the flesh, but it seemed as though they could die on this ride. In her left hand, she clutched the Styrofoam box packed with awful pizza: she would have dropped it, but it was still possible that EJ would turn the bike around and make them go back for it.
“Where is it?” she shouted.
“Soon!” he shouted back. “Can you try to sit still?” They were both visibly annoyed, and annoyed with the other person for showing it. Each time she shifted on her piece of the seat, EJ let out a grunt and made a big show of correcting for the wobble Karen had created as she struggled to rebalance herself.
“Stop wiggling around!” he shouted over his shoulder.
“What?” Karen shouted back.
Out of nowhere, EJ made a sharp left turn onto a dirt road. Gravel crackled beneath motorbike wheels as they barreled down the narrowing path. And then, abruptly, the ocean splayed out before them, gray-blue in the deteriorated light, more real and less pretty than the toothpaste water the resort was built to exploit. EJ dismounted and kicked his thong sandals off in the sand. “Holy shit,” he said, “glad that’s over!” He did a couple cursory stretches of his hamstrings and went into a downward dog. Now it was like Karen wasn’t even there: he pulled off his shirt and jogged toward the water with an easy stride. From time to time, she saw him punch at the air with his right fist in a gesture of triumph.
Karen walked slowly up to the water. She had no idea whether she was supposed to follow him in, but she didn’t care. EJ was only a fleck in the distance at this point, bobbing among waves. If she squinted her eyes into the shifting surface she could see the notion of his head or arm or leg as he swam around in the deeper water, among the cold currents or other such bullshit. She set the Styrofoam box down on the sand, dropped her tote bag. She slid off her sandals and piled some sand onto them, so they wouldn’t blow away: Dan had taught her to do this, last summer at Fort Tilden. She walked into the sea gingerly, step by step, the water lukewarm and smelling of brine and tar. Once when she was eighteen she had done something like this: she let an art professor from the college next to her own drive her in his car to a beach she didn’t even know the name of. He wore a black, full-body wetsuit; she had walked waist-deep into the waves fully clothed. As he dove and surfaced like a seal in the clear water, she had realized that she knew almost nothing about him. She had looked down at her skirt swirling around the dim, disappearing legs and hoped that she’d make it back to the car, back to town, to live free of mistakes like this one. And now, almost a decade later, she had made the exact same mistake.
Knee-deep in the surf, Karen willed herself to take another step, and another. She would move to Boston if she had to. She would get back to the bungalow, somehow, and she would say all of this to Dan: they had made the right decision, she was happy, she was ready to become even happier. Waist-deep in the warm gray water, she saw something wobbling beneath the surface. It was Styrofoam-white and resembled a piece of trash, suspended between the surface and the sand. She looked to her left, to her right. As she stared into the water, the floating shapes came into view all at once: like constellations they were there, venomous and drifting, more numerous than she could even have imagined.
In the summer between high school and college, Karen’s father was diagnosed with cancer. The cancer was malignant, but not incurable. Curing it would, however, involve a great deal of pain: the pain of incision, extraction, and then days of radiation battering the flesh invisibly. Her father underwent the course of treatment almost without comment, so that the only visible trace of its effect was his body lying on the couch for most of each day, silently watching baseball on a dizzyingly colorful TV screen. That summer, Karen stayed away from the house as much as possible. She walked for hours around their town and the banks of the creek, picking up pebbles and putting them in her pockets, emptying them out someplace different but equivalent. And when she came home for dinner she joined her parents in choosing not to speak about the cancer, though it wasn’t clear what else there was to speak about.
Even while it was happening, she sensed that she was living in disaster and failing to make herself adequate to the situation. What she wanted to say to her mother and father she couldn’t say, what she wanted to ignore she couldn’t ignore. After the remission, Karen promised herself that she would be ready for the next true disaster, she would identify it and react appropriately. She was haunted by the feeling that, even though her father had lived, she had let him die.
Since then, Karen had looked for disaster at every step in her life, but had discovered that each disaster she thought she had discovered was inadequate to the concept. This walk home, alone, on an unlit foreign road lined by deep, rock-filled gutters could end up being a true disaster—but it unfolded so slowly, so ponderously, and out there on the dangerous peaceful street the air smelled ecstatically of blooming plumeria. There were no clear signs to react to: peril was everywhere, intermingled with the mundane. Karen felt that all her life she would be moving from positions of perceived danger to positions of perceived safety without ever knowing which impressions were correct. And as she had this thought, her mood abruptly inverted: now she was feeling relief, joy, even something close to euphoria. Inhuman calls echoed through the vegetal thick; a siren went off far away.
On a road like this one, with no shoulder and no speed limit, any car that came along could hit her. If she was on the right road, she wouldn’t be back at the bungalow for hours. Poisonous animals lived in this area—snakes, scorpions, centipedes. The moon was large and bright overhead, and smooth like a stone. She didn’t know what she’d tell Dan when she got back to him, but she knew he’d be there, passed out on the bed with his laptop still open and his teeth unbrushed. He’d have fallen asleep believing she’d be back soon. On the table there’d be some cake or a cookie as an apology for whatever had happened by the pool that afternoon. And on her nightstand, there’d be a fresh glass of water.