Free No Way Back by Michael Crow

dates are no problem. I date them all. But after “Hey, Annie” on the very first, my pen—one of several different ballpoints and roller-balls, since I can be expected to lose pens—just hovers in the air. I’ve never written to Annie. Never written much of anything to anyone, anytime or anywhere.
    I’m stuck. I stay stuck. Not a word down, when Allison comes in what has to be hours later, looks over my shoulder.
    “That’s pathetic,” she says. “Postcards, Luther! Not an essay for Foreign Affairs , or an op-ed piece for the New York Times . Come on.”
    “Been trying.”
    “Not hard enough, that’s clear. I can’t believe this. It’s more than pathetic. I mean, you’re fine in conversation, you’re smooth enough, sometimes funny. Even witty.”
    “Talking’s different.”
    “No, it isn’t.” She sighs, picks up the Biloxi card, holds the photo side in front of my face. “You’ve been here. You want to amuse me, make me smile, also maybe impress me a little with your cynical acuity. So you say, ‘Hey, Allison, what a waste of perfectly good sand. College brats with daddy-bought BMW convertibles staying in sleazy motels side by side with seriously overfed families with vans. All of them chugging beer and shoveling down tons of barbecue. Soundtrack to this movie’s by Dwight Yoakam, about twenty decibels above the threshold of permanent hearing loss. Dominant skin color, lobster red. Most memorable scene: beautiful blonde (Ole Miss cheerleader for sure) cross-eyed drunk and puking repeatedly on the leather seat of a newBoxster.’ I’m grinning, despite the clichés. So will Annie, right?”
    “Probably. Sounds close enough to my idiom.”
    “So talk your way through the rest of these.” Allison sweeps her hand over the card layout. “Pronto. Lunch at twelve hundred hours, then a pretty crowded afternoon for you.”
    I copy down as much as I can remember of Allison’s words on the Biloxi card, find myself unstuck, and actually have a little fun with most of the rest. Akumal’s a snag. It’s the one place I’ve actually been—with Helen. We spent a very sweet couple of days there. I drift into intimate memories, savor them more deeply than I should. Lose all sense of how I might “talk” to Annie about the place, since I’m half-wishing all that sweetness had been shared with her—or, semi-guilty thought, with Nadya—and not Helen. In the end, I have to go strictly flora and fauna: the iguana, looking like a minature dinosaur but chomping down brilliantly red hibiscus flowers I fed him, the sea life—parrot fish, grenadiers in tight formation, the dark wings of angelfish, the missile rush of silver barracuda after prey, all in a jungle of staghorn, fan, and brain coral. Floating for hours over it all, conscious of each regular breath through the snorkle but free of time or care.
    Lame, I know, but it’ll have to do. The rest? Easiest to fake is a brief encounter with a machete-wielding mugger in scummy Belize City. Annie won’t like it, but she’ll believe my description of the puzzled look on the mugger’s face when he realizes both his arms suddenly don’t work anymore.
    Allison smiles when I hand her the cards across the lunch table. Nadya, who’s eating with us, smiles as she leads me up to the library afterward and starts a series of Russian “encounters.” She’s by turns an inquisitive customs agent, a cheating taxi driver, a suspicious militiaman, a very aggressive hooker. She critiques my responses: I inadvertently made the customs agent uneasy with my tone in a couple of phrases, almost got arrested for a single disrespectful word to the militiaman, and am bound to get my wallet and passport ripped off by the prostitute because I was way too light and flirty.
    “Hard not to be, when a girl as attractive as you is talking dirty to me.”
    “Rather you’d keep it businesslike, thanks very much. The hooker certainly would,” Nadya says in that upper-class English