“Is it far? Actually, I have a car with me.”
“I’m sure you do. But—and please don’t take this personally—I’m thinking some foot-based locomotion would be a smart tactical choice for you right now. Certainly before attempting to steer a large chunk of metal back to the mainland.”
I thought for a moment. Okay, weird idea, but she was right—I was too drunk to drive, however slowly and methodically. Short walk, charge phone, get car, head home. That could work. It even kind of rhymed.
“That would be great,” I said.
I went indoors and found my waitress, paid. I caught a glimpse of the other waitress, the one from our anniversary night, on the other side of the room. She recognized me and gave a small, distracted nod. I thought about making my way over and asking if she’d seen my wife—you know, the woman I had dinner with upstairs the other night—but the room was crowded and I knew it would look drunk and strange, so I did not. I thought I’d got the drunk/strange look nailed pretty well already, without going to any extra effort.
Cassandra was standing on the sidewalk under a streetlight. She looked like the cover from some 1950s novel about an innocent in the big city, or would have if the Circle looked even slightly urban, and if they’d had emo chicks back in those days.
“Follow me, sire,” she said.
We walked up the road onto Lido Key. From there it was a long straight stroll along Ben Franklin Drive, past the car park for the beach and the looming hulks of condo developments. Lido is small, intimate, with a crescent moon of white sand beach about half a mile in length. At the far end, the key abruptly becomes much wilder, acres and acres of trees, bush, and near swamp around a couple of large, natural (and hence flyblown and unattractive) stretches of water. One day the whole key would doubtless be covered in opportunities for fractional ownership, but for now the southern quarter wasn’t that much different from the way it had been when dinosaurs roamed the earth.
It was dark, but the air felt soft and warm. At one point, halfway along the drive, I stopped for a moment, frowning. I turned around. I almost always did this when I came along this way, but had never been able to work it out before.
“Aha,” I said, however, feeling a flip of recognition deep in my gut. “This is it.”
“Yeah, I heard they kept the secret of life along here somewhere. So you found it, huh?”
“The Lido Beach Inn,” I said. “That’s where it was.”
“Excuse me?”
I turned to look at her, feeling old. “We came to Florida a couple times when I was a kid,” I said. “We always used to stay on Lido Beach. Back then this key wasn’t so developed, in fact it was the budget option—though it had been a big deal in the distant past. There was a huge old hotel back on that last corner, where the Sun Palms is now, but it was abandoned all the years we came. And along here . . .”
I indicated the row of finished and nearly finished developments that now lined this stretch. “I think there were already a couple of smaller condos back then, but it was mainly old motels. They’re all gone now, but every time I’ve been along this road since we’ve lived here, I’ve tried to work out where the Lido Beach Inn was. And I’ve finally realized, it’s here. Or it was.”
I pointed into the heart of a small, upscale development, and suddenly I could actually feel it, situate myself on the planet and in my memory and know this was the spot that had held a scruffy old U-shaped motel where you drove under an awning and turned right or left to park in front of two parallel blocks of rooms. There were perhaps a dozen rooms on each of the two levels, a swimming pool in between—and a walkway that led out to the beach. The motel had a laundry room, a Ping-Pong area with a table whose net never stood up, and whirring ice and soda machines. No restaurant, no bar, no store, no child-care facilities or concierge service. Just a place for families to hang out while they soaked up some rays (back in the days before it was determined that sunlight was cancerous poison and to be avoided at all costs). For a moment it all seemed totally real, as if those family vacations had been only a year or two ago.
I saw, however, that the building that had replaced the Lido Beach Inn could itself do with a lick of paint, a chunk of render missing up on one side. The next generation was already getting old. I recalled, too, that only two days ago I’d been caught up in lobbying Tony Thompson to refresh The Breakers, and found it hard to remember why. I knew I would do so again, at some point, but right now it seemed far less important than the fact that a gangly kid with my name and DNA had once passed over this stretch of sidewalk without realizing that twenty years later an older version of himself would be weaving there, drunk, missing a wife, his life in disarray. It seemed strange that we can do this, stand in a place and not be able to feel the breeze of a future self walking past. We wouldn’t be coming back, after all, had we not been there before—so the events must be conjoined. How had he not been able to see my shadow standing here? Had he not happened to look in the right direction? Or not listened hard enough? Or had I in fact caught a glimpse, and was that why I was back here now, to try to find my way back to that self? I thought about asking something like this out loud, but guessed I probably seemed drunk enough already. I let my hand drift back to my side.
“Come on,” Cassandra said. She stepped closer and looped her arm through mine. “I think you need to sit down for a while, big guy.”
It was only another ten minutes’ walk, down at the far end of the drive. Just before the road abruptly downsized to a single lane before winding off into the palms and scrub of the undeveloped part of the key, there was an old and dilapidated apartment block, a little back from the road on the nonocean side.
Cassandra led me through the metal gate. The building was three stories high and arranged in a horseshoe, an empty water feature in the middle with a long-dead fountain at the center. It was all straight lines and semicircles and looked like it might have been kind of a big deal in the 1930s. Giant grasses were running riot around the courtyard now, obscuring it from the road. Patches of once-white render had fallen off, revealing a pinkish layer underneath. I’d vaguely noticed this place many times before, assumed it was derelict and waiting a wrecking ball under the control of one of the local developers. Most from that era had already vanished, including the old Art Deco casino that older locals still spoke of with pride.
“You live here?”
“For now. It’s mainly empty, which is cool. Nice and quiet. Got kind of a vibe, too.”
“It’s an abandoned ship, is what it feels like.”
“Adrift, and far from home.”
She led me up some spiral stairs at the end of the right arm. As we came out onto the top floor, I tripped on a chunk of plaster that had fallen off the wall.
“Sorry,” she said, as she got out her keys. “The maid hasn’t been in a while.”
“Maybe the rats ate her.”
“The only major rodents I’ve seen are roving packs of developers—wondering if the time is right to pull down something fine and throw up something cheap and profitable in its place.”
“Touché.”
Feeling seedy, I followed her along the balconied walkway to a door halfway along the arm. I peered down into the overgrown courtyard as she undid the three separate locks in the door to apartment 34.
“Welcome,” she said, as the last one gave a thunk.
A short corridor beyond led onto a living room. Cassandra flicked a switch and three small lamps came on, shedding yellow-orange glows in the corners. There were two doors on the right-hand side of the room, a frosted glass one at the end. A single bed had been pushed against the other wall and piled with cushions. There was a desk fashioned out of cinder blocks and an old door, a set of shelves made of bricks and short planks. The walls had been painted some dark color. There were a lot of computing books and magazines and bits of computer hardware and in general quite a lot of stuff, but it would be hard to find an object that looked out of place or as if it wasn’t designed to go exactly where it was.