Free Ghost Lights by Lydia Millet Page A

where nothing grew but bald tires and garbage, smoke rising from ashcan fires, and no cars or trees or vegetation outside the hovels either, only bare expanses of soil with an occasional weed. Sometimes a woman or child or dog could be seen wandering through, emaciated; one old woman he saw through a fence with a ragged, open sore on her calf. He caught a glimpse of some skinny kids playing soccer outside what was probably a schoolhouse, which cheered him a bit until he also noticed, beside the stretch of baked earth where the boys were playing, a corrugated-metal rooftop. Underneath it two other boys were carving up a dead animal. He could not tell what it was.
    Here and there a bedraggled brown palm tree struggled to look exotic. Forests must have been felled, for sometimes he caught sight of a clump of shiny-leafed bushes and trees in brief straggles of green against the backdrop of dirt and rust, with stumps around them that looked like they’d been hacked at with machetes. Once he saw a column of smoke on a low hill in the distance.
    “When will we get to Placencia?” he asked the driver.
    “Not too long, not too long,” said the driver unhelpfully.
    The peninsula had been hit hard by the storm. There were still power lines down, and here and there a telephone pole lay tumbled in wire beside the road. It was strange to him, the poles left where they fell—as though there was no machine here to move them and make the roads safe again, no vigilant authority.
    The sky faded into a velvety dusk as he watched it through the window, thinking: I came here to escape my wife. My wife who may not love me after a quarter of a century.
    Now he was far away from her, in a strange place. He was almost nonexistent; he was nowhere and known by no one.
    • • • • •
    I t was only the next morning that he got a look at the hotel grounds. Out his window he could see the ocean, a few small boats without sails, and near the dock white-skinned guests sitting atop the glittering water in colorful kayaks. The water, he thought, was gray-blue, not what they led you to expect in commercials for Hawaii or the Bahamas—not the emerald or turquoise transparence of a kidney-shaped pool. The color was less stunning, more familiar. Crews worked in the gardens, making flowerbeds, laying turf and digging. There were many of them, men in straw hats with shovels and wheelbarrows.
    He would eat, take a walk. It was safe to admit it, since no one was listening: he was not here to find anyone. Not here to exert himself, but rather here to melt down, settle, coalesce, and rise in a new form . . . still he could occupy himself a few hours a day with a search of some kind. That was fine. It would give him something to do.
    At his table in the restaurant, which overlooked the pool and beyond it the sea again, he gazed out the window. Children played in the pool, spitting long gouts of water out of their gap-toothed mouths. He watched a little boy bounce on the diving board and could not help seeing the boy’s head split open as it connected with the concrete bottom, spinal trauma and then, as usual, Casey. It was a sign of his partial recovery that he was falling back into his old habits of thought again, the worn ruts of his neural circuitry—back to Casey and her injury instead of Susan.
    But then even this flicker of Susan opened up the whole scene again. She and Robert in the bedroom or on the floor of the office; himself, papery and sad in the blurry distance.
    So there was no recovery yet, after all.
    He should not think too much. As a rule he set too much store by thinking. Or at least, complacent in the knowledge that thought was the most useful tool available to men—and one so often neglected by his fellow Americans—he relied on it to the exclusion of other ways of filtering information. Thought was the act of conscious cognition but there were alternative processes of the mind that could work around or alongside it, processes of slow