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Part One

Lisa has rules: a movie, but that’s all; a dinner, but that’s all; a walk somewhere, a show, a drink out, but that’s all. I’m trying to find a way to break her limits. Tonight she wanted to swim. We’re on the bay side of the island where the waters are easy and the sand thick as mud. You can step in spots and lose your legs in a minute, sinking up to your knees. We’ve been here an hour and I’m out and dry, but she’s still skimming the surface like a bug, pulling herself farther and farther out and then dipping from sight. I’m in sinking sand trying to sink as far as I can. The lights of town blink on and off in the water’s reflection. The smell of fry oil dwells in the air. You going to Pacheco’s after this? she calls, treading far out, her voice thin against the wind and carried away. I tell her no, I’m going to her house. I saw him trying to surf last weekend, she says. He got so pissed off he broke his board. On her back, she begins a slow swim in. I wasn’t with him, I say. He’s kind of stupidly violent, she says. Are you two still going to the empty houses? Sometimes we go, I say. You should come. It’s fun. A salty wind sticks to my body and I watch her going under and coming up. A few minutes later she gets to shore cast in orange-brown light. A quiet splashing. The sun’s like a dying bulb seen through a bottle of whiskey, cloudy and flickering through clouds. I’m gone, she says, stepping through tide pools warm and clear. 


Time’s up, she says. This is ridiculous, I say. She stands in one large tide pool and sinks down some and I toss a towel and watch the way her reflection is continuously sliced and rebuilt on the rippling water. Pacheco has three new surfboards and can barely stay up. He lives in this bungalow near the beach and is selling the house he and his wife lived in. She’s been gone two years and is so much less than a memory for me, only a name; for Pacheco, I can’t say. The wind here whips off the sea, the sky a raucous hot summer blue with blooming blue clouds, but the waves are shit. Pacheco goes out every day and tries. He shows me the bruises, the sand-scraped skin. He tells people he lives in a beach house and surfs and smokes pot because it’s better than having a life. I don’t know what this means, but I go see him. It’s what I’m supposed to do. This is what we do: we find who’s vacationing, then we break in. We don’t steal, we only use: their food, their cable, their computers. We get to live some other life a minute, be who we want to be. Pacheco’s stretched out on a leather sofa, sunburnt and thin. We’re playing Scrabble in the Parkers’ home, an older couple who’re up north for the summer: it’s a dark, damp place, with condensation on the windows and no air-conditioning so it feels and smells like being in a crotch. Out the back windows is a deck, and beyond, the ocean, a full moon above it. People shuffle by on the beach, flashlights lighting like holy lamps, searching out sea turtles. I’m here and abiding until I leave for home and get to think about how to break Lisa’s limits. Tofu, I say, arranging the squares on the board. Fifteen points. I need something very definite and dramatic to happen, Pacheco says. I need to throw these Scrabble pieces across the room and yell, You all fucked my life. Please don’t, I say. I’m winning and this isn’t your house. Two years ago, he told me his wife fucked some other guys. I later found out she just started playing racquetball and going swimming. I told Pacheco this and all he said was, Is that really what you think of me? She lives alone now; she could be anywhere.  I need a new mountain bike, he says, disregarding Scrabble. I think that would fill some need. Your turn, I say. If not a mountain bike, then watching someone drown. He’s brought a speed bag and has it hanging from a doorframe and he goes to it and smacks it with quick punches, running it against his fists. Outside, the flashlights move up and down the beach. He has the bag thrumming, humming quick to his hands. With a hard right, he smacks the bag so it clutters and viciously bounces. He’s mixed martial arts; my father tried to teach me to box when I was younger and then tried to watch boxing with me when I got older and I now get to regret not doing either. Pacheco turns and comes back to Scrabble. He flings a pillow from the sofa which I block. It hits the coffee table and nearly knocks over a vase. Be careful, I say. I have a smoothie machine you can borrow, I say. A smoothie fills many of my needs. Letting me borrow your truck will do it for me, he says. 


Sold, I say. Your play. Do other people want to see other people ruined? he says. You like making us something we’re not, I say. Later, with the house still dark and humid and outside great palm leaves shuffling in the wind, he says: Look at me. Thirty years old. I have sixty dollars in the bank. Do you realize we’re still children? Outside, the ocean’s a constant hushing echo. The flashlights have stopped and the moon hangs above the ocean, a sick cloudedness. I want you to bring that Lisa girl around, he says. Can’t, I say. She dislikes you. She more than dislikes you. She doesn’t know me, he says. I can’t be around him more than a few hours. I tell him I have to go and he tells me he wants to test our balance, which means he wants to do this kind of wrestling: he clears out the Parkers’ living room so nothing breaks; we match right feet up, each with a left foot back, a wide stance for balance; our left hands are free, our right hands joined; low to the ground, calves and hamstrings burning. Go, he says. We try to throw each other off balance. First to move a foot loses. His right hand crushes mine, pushes me back, and my weight swings to my back left leg, then he pulls me toward him, my whole body shifting to my front right leg and I’m done and down on him and we’re in a pile on the floor. Again, he says. You can do better than that shit. I lose, lose, lose, and after each time I go down I want to break a vase across his face. When I get up to go, I’m sweating and he gives me a Gatorade from the Parkers’ fridge. He says, I do need to borrow your truck on Tuesday. I’ll give you money. I hold the sweaty Gatorade; he feels he has to pay and I agree he probably does. I give him what he wants.

21 Février 2017 12:56 0 Rapport Incorporer Suivre l’histoire
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