Mr. Troels looked into the space above my head. “This has been a terrible misunderstanding. I was most very clear.”
“Things don’t always translate.”
A very long silence followed. Then, “So long as you are here, you still must see the natural resources and beauties of Playa Amazonia.”
I considered but wasn’t really sure what to do. I was here. Maybe I should at least document the great potential that Mr. Troels saw in this place. The decision was Mr. Slattery’s, not mine. “May I use your phone to call Mr. Slattery? My smartphone is useless.”
“The desk phone doesn’t work. It’s a... decoration.”
“Then I will go home early.”
He sat back, diminished. He cleared his throat quietly. “Perhaps since you are here you would at least see our beautiful and someday famous beach.”
I felt badly for him, but more badly for myself and my failed mission. “I’ll go see the beach while you find a way to make my travel arrangements. Please, this language is insurmountable for me.”
“Take this y’ap. I bought it especially to welcome you to Playa Amazonia.” He brought the thatch umbrella from the floor beside his desk, stood, and presented it to me with a sad sigh. It was larger than the one in my hotel room, and surprisingly heavy.
I walked the streets to the main boulevard leading down to the beach. The thoughtful gift umbrella was in my hand but my heart was heavy with the whole unnecessary mess. “I have a good feeling about this place,” Ivan had said. I took some pictures, as if this justified something. The boulevard was wide and covered in pavers and closed to cars. Pedestrians kept left and right like vehicles, most of them with y’aps (at least I felt more like a local now), heads up, looking often toward the beach where I was going.
The boulevard was long but as I finally came closer to the beach I saw that it was tawny sand, the color of a lion. From here, the beach stretched as far as I could see. There were dramatic outcroppings of dark rock along the shore, spires and arches and plateaus sculpted by centuries of wind and water. Beyond, the ocean was turquoise-blue and flat as a mirror. Above it sat puffy white clouds with flat bottoms, reminding me of the last few pastries in the bakery racks. I stepped out of my lane and stopped to macro-behold Playa Amazonia. Mr. Troels had been right: it really was the most beautiful beach I’d ever seen. I had seen Laguna Beach. And La Jolla Cove. And Pebble Beach. And the Mendocino Headlands. But this beach, even at a distance, had their world-famous features — all in one! I decided right then that I should stick to my original plan, stay the five nights, and see if any other of Mr. Troels’ claims about Playa Amazonia, even if they were future-specific, might potentially be true.
Then the oncoming pedestrians were no longer just walking along, but running.
They broke rank, rushing past me on both sides, fumbling with their thatch umbrellas. Many of them were looking behind them, back at the beach. I dodged them and climbed onto a sidewalk bench for a better view of whatever had spooked them. From there I saw what looked like canoes landing on the beach, an entire flotilla of them! Fifty? A hundred? Figures sprang from the beaching craft, several per boat. Up the tan beach they charged, brandishing long slender spears. Even from here these people looked large. It looked like an invasion of warriors of some kind. I felt paralyzed, not with fear but with fascination. The first wave of invaders was already halfway up the beach to the boulevard. The flood of Playa Amazonians continued past me toward town.
What followed happened faster than I could understand. First a flock of birds darkened the sky between the invaders and me. The frightened people of Playa Amazonia stopped and looked up toward the birds. In they sailed, slender and speedy. They dove gracefully in unison, hurtling with dizzying pace. The men and women and children all raised their y’aps toward the birds and huddled under their heavy thatch canopies. The birds whistled down, louder and louder. I scrambled off the bench and raised my y’ap, fell to my knees, and scrunched under it. Through a crack in the umbrella fronds I could see the skinny suicidal birds hitting everywhere at once, fast and close together, like raindrops in a thunderstorm — smacking into boulevard and sidewalks and against the thatch domes under which the people of Playa Amazonia and I had tucked ourselves. And I saw that these birds were not birds at all, but arrows. I held my camera up, just above the protective canopy of my y’ap, and used the motor drive option.
When the first storm of arrows had passed everyone stood up and ran for town again. You can bet that I did, too. We had made it maybe a hundred yards when a second wave of arrows began their deadly descent upon us. Again we fell to the ground and brought our knees to our chests and hunched our shoulders and brandished the y’aps at the arrows. I shot more pictures, randomly, camera held above the umbrella like a periscope. An arrow cracked into the thatch and I felt its power. This second deluge of arrows lasted longer than the first. Then, suddenly, like fish in a school darting together as one, we were up and running. We had only gone maybe fifty yards before we fell and covered up again. I could hear the archers’ footsteps on the boulevard behind us. I was astonished to hear someone laugh.
The warriors were among us. I lay curled and trembling behind my y’ap, peering out through one of the small square openings in the thatch at the carnage likely to come. I thought of my mother and father, and my younger sister, Mary Ann, all back home in the greatest country in the world, in California no less. I told them I loved them. It was hard to get perspective through such a small aperture, or to see more than the condensed, hyper-zoomed images you might see in a badly filmed battle scene. But this is what I saw through the tiny square that jumped and shifted with every rapid beat of my heart: large bronze women; brief leather dresses; smoothly muscled legs and arms; hair pulled up high, spilling over like fountains; handsome faces elaborately and colorfully painted; wild eyes shining through; high cheekbones and straight teeth; knives and bows; scabbards on belts and quivers over shoulders; bare feet.
Suddenly a dark shin blotted out everything else, my y’ap was wrenched away, and I was left fetally positioned and looking up at my own certain death. From my lower elevation she seemed gigantic, a towering she-form glaring down at me. She held the knife — handmade flint, I saw — in her right hand. Her bow was slung over her left shoulder. Her eyes were dark and her expression, even through the vivid facial paint, was singular and unmistakable: she was looking for something. Her fountain of dark straight hair spilled forward as she looked down at me. Similar interviews seemed to be taking place all around but I was too afraid to take my eyes off her for fear she would run me through or slash my throat. She stared at me for a long moment. I wanted nothing more than to understand what she wanted, and to give it to her. Then she crouched and offered me her free hand, which I took, and she helped me to my feet. My legs quaked and my knees quivered. To maintain eye contact I had to look up. I guessed her to be six-foot-three. In one of those daft inspirations that often overtake people under great stress, I said, “I’m Austin.”
She set her hand on my shoulder and turned me around. I feared that knife. I had often read about terrified people losing control of their bowels and/or bladders but I did not. She had a smell that was musky but not offensive, like a patch of wild gourds. She continued turning me. When I came back face-to-face I saw that she had a questioning, analytical expression. As if she were measuring me. Or maybe trying to read my mind. Searching. She stepped back and made a circling motion with her knife and I turned around again on my own power, then, at her order, once again. When I came back to face her she grunted softly and a pained look crossed her bright, meticulously painted face. She put her knife-hand on my shoulder and eased me back to the ground. Then she trotted up-boulevard, toward town, through whole and broken arrows, where she joined her fellow warriors rousting Playa Amazonians, some of whom were standing and waiting for the procedure, while others still lay hunched behind their y’aps, bodies drawn up tight. I crawled under the sidewalk bench, pulled my umbrella closer up to cover myself, and waited.