“You were not enjoying this?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“It is only a little kindness between friends.”
“I’m sorry. You’re right.”
“We were laughing beautifully.”
“Right. Okay, sure. And I fuckishly said averse. And you forgave me.”
“I do not know what you mean, now. I wish you would not use that language. It is impolite and unladylike. Not worthy of you.”
“Hey, fuck you, sarge.”
“Sarge.”
“Forget it.”
He leaned over and lightly kissed the side of her face, then moved a little farther away. “I mean nothing unfriendly. I have some other things to take.”
“No,” she said.
“Do you know about Special K?”
“The cereal?”
He smiled. “It is called that. Is there a cereal? I have it in pill form.”
“The cereal?”
“Ketamine. It makes things happen.”
“No,” she said.
They went on smoking. She felt the drug moving through her, numbness running along the nerves of her face. Time seemed to grow elongated and strange. She let him talk, and he was very willing to describe for her everything he was going through. It occurred to her that he was just an insecure, nervous boy.
In a little while they were talking about the day, the trauma of it, and the way everyone seemed to tumble off some private deep end. “I do not even drink,” he said. “I like other things. But now I think I am drunk.”
“You keep talking about your big drug habits. Are you trying to impress me? Because it’s not working.”
“I was not trying to impress you. Only to help relieve your worry.”
“That’s sweet. Thank you for it. But I really just want to sit here by myself.”
He was silent. Perhaps a full minute went by.
“It has felt a little less awful,” she told him.
“I’m glad.”
Another pause.
“Suppose we are on a deserted island,” he said. “From a shipwreck.”
This seemed very amusing. There was a bleak something in the laughter now, and the fact that the laughter itself felt so mirthless made it all that much deeper. “Deserted desert island, right?” she said. “Oh, that’s perfect. That’s rich.”
“Not a desert, no.”
“That’s hilarious. Not a deserted desert island?”
“The dope is making you hysterical,” he said.
“Yeah, perfect. Hysterical.” She saw moving light on the water. The clouds were opening again.
“I think we should be as if no one else will ever come here. This is the first place. Adam and Eve’s garden.”
“Adam and Eve’s deserted desert island.”
“I am drawn to you. Very much. You are very beautiful. May I simply touch your face?”
She watched his hand come up to her cheek. The touch was tentative and gentle, and she felt a little sorry for him. He let his fingers move carefully, slowly down to her chin, and under her chin. He turned her face up and leaned down to kiss her. She let him and then watched him sit back and regard her. The world was coming to an end. And then once more everything shifted: there was not the sense of this being anything but a small, desolate pass, one of the nights of her life before. She had no sense of a self, of herself, as more than a set of floating impressions. She wanted sleep. The effects of the alcohol and dope she had ingested seemed to be growing more profound. She lay back, and he was leaning over her, supporting himself on one elbow. I am not the type, she thought. What type. Why is it a type? The words went through her mind. You are, she thought. You are, now. You were, then. What were you? She thought of Faulk. She saw him riding home on the train. He was probably all right. All her irrational fear was leaching out of her as the night cooled.
“Michael,” she murmured.
“What?” the other said.
“They don’t let people in before nine-thirty. That’s the hours. You wouldn’t stay and wait for an hour. Not in New York.”
“I do not understand you,” Duego said, gazing down at her.
“Please leave me alone now.”
“One kiss?”
She let him, opened her mouth with the tactile pleasure of it. “There,” she told him. It was as though Faulk, so far away, were a child, and she belonged to the world of adults.
Duego put his mouth on hers, caressing her breasts, and then her lower abdomen, moving his hand down. His touch was insistent, and there was something hurried about it, as though he expected to be stopped or was afraid he would be. She was dizzy, eyes wide open, looking at him. His breath smelled of the dope and what he’d had to drink, and there was the thinnest displeasing redolence of fruit in it, too. She had a sensation of sudden clarity: this was actually happening. It was as though what had begun to unfold had just now become visible to her. She pushed on his shoulders as he got over on top of her.
“No,” she said. “Get off.”
His weight was stopping her breath. She protested with as much force as she could muster, and he rolled off, making a sound she thought at first was more laughter. He was crying.
“Don’t cry,” she said, and patted his arm. The little smoldering roach lay between them. She threw it off into the night, then leaned down and kissed him. The kiss lasted a long time, and he put his hands on her lower back, pulling her closer. She was falling through some field of being that was far from herself, spiraling down, a darkness born of the waste of everything that this day had been. Some part of her — off in space, despairing — watched it all, believing that she was alone, that Michael Faulk was gone, that everything was gone.
They stopped for a moment, lying there out of breath, and for a while that was the only sound — their breathing, mixed with the low roar of the surf.
When he bent to her, she put her hands on his shoulders and pushed and made the word no out of the movement of his tongue in her mouth. She pushed hard. Repeatedly. And at last he lay over on his back, making the sound she now knew was crying.
“Please go away from me,” she heard herself say. “I’m sorry to hurt your feelings, but I don’t want this. I do not want this. I’ve told you. Please. Please leave me alone.”
He didn’t answer. He was passed out, mouth open, eyes squeezed shut as if he were facing into high winds. He looked to be suffering some kind of pressure inside, the veins of his neck showing.
Getting shakily to her feet, she stumbled to the water, splashed in, and pushed out to where it was up to her thighs. Then she dove under, suffering the shock of it like a slap to her face. She swam for what seemed a long time, away from shore, into the rising and sinking surf, feeling the pull of the tide and the weight of her jeans and blouse. Suddenly the tide gripped her. The thought rose to the front of her mind that she was going to drown. She swam parallel to the beach, working it, near exhaustion, keeping on, until the ocean began to let go.
At last, turning, going under, and coming up to gasp for air, she made her way back in and reached the shallow water, where she could get to her feet, standing while the waves pulled and pushed at her knees. She coughed and sputtered, shaking, then got down in the water and urinated, looking around at the sand, the sea and sky. The water jostled her. She finished and rose and walked, splashing and reeling, out of the waves and on up toward the line of palm trees bordering the wide half circle of the beach. Lying down in the sand, still out of breath, she looked up at the moonlit clouds in the sky, the sparkle of the stars across which they sailed. It felt as though the beach were moving. She lay there shivering. In a moment, she would get up and go back to the resort, to her room, and lock the door. In a moment. But it was good here, too, being alone. The waves came in with their shuddering, murmurous whoosh, and the sound lulled her. She felt a strange, empty kind of deliverance; that nothing, finally, had taken place. She looked down the beach in the direction of where she had left Duego but couldn’t see him. Lying back, staring at the shapes in the silvery mists over the moon, she began to feel almost pleasantly sleepy.