Free Ghost Lights by Lydia Millet Page B

and growing awareness that did not register until they were complete, or the accretion of vague ideas that suddenly produced a form.
    Thinking alone had not given him an answer to Casey’s situation and it would not give him an answer to his and Susan’s either. That was his prediction. He should walk on through his day and let the passing of time mold him; time would go by and he would see what to do. This was a vacation—and after the four long years of aggravation that Stern had given him, all the grating secondhand descriptions of his mini-malls and cookie-cutter subdivisions, it was right that Stern should receive the final bill.
    Eggs arrived, with a slice of papaya to remind him of his location. Lest he mistake them for Hackensack eggs or eggs in Topeka, the papaya came along to announce they were tropical eggs, to remind him that congratulations!—he was on a tropical vacation.
    He ate the eggs and even the papaya, which had an overly luscious, sweaty taste. He went to a rack and picked out a newspaper, then came back to read and drink his coffee. It was a day-old copy of USA Today . This was not a newspaper he chose to read at home—too many colors on the front page, for starters—but it was nice to let his eyes rest.
    Sometimes he glanced out the window, past the pool at the stretch of beach: a few of the ubiquitous palms, a hammock, some beach chairs and umbrellas, flapping a bit in the breeze, a pile of upside-down red and purple kayaks and a man raking sand. This was less opportunity, he thought, than the simple end of something. Pebbles and sand and waves softly lapping. For their vacations, people liked to arrive at the end.
    He himself would have chosen something with height, cliffs or mountains—something with grandeur and scale. Sure, the water was mild here, and there had to be a coral reef or two. But he saw mostly a blankness, a place that was less a place than an erosion into nothing. That was what he had seen when he stood on the shore that morning—the flat ocean lapping, the flat sand beneath his feet. Maybe tourists came here because they actually missed flat blankness in their daily lives. The flat blankness was possibly a reminder that there was an end to everything, a reminder they lacked while they were going to work and running errands in their suburbs and cities, where they were constantly required to answer the stimuli. Maybe they yearned to be in a place where there was little to see but a line between water and air.
    He went back to the paper and listened to a conversation behind him as he scanned the headlines. He could not see the speakers, a man and a woman, could not turn to look at them without being noticed, but he could tell they were young.
    “You can do the scuba class but I’m not doing it. No way.”
    “Come on! Come on . Do scuba by myself?”
    “This one guy I read about who’s a diver in the Marines or something? He got the bends and he ended up with these little pockmarks all over his face. Like bad acne. Plus he got double vision.”
    “You won’t get the bends, OK? This would be at maybe twenty feet deep. They call it, like, a resort dive or something. To show that it’s basically for wusses that would sue them if anything happened. The risk is like nothing .”
    “It can also hurt your brain. Or you can choke on your own vomit. You know who choked on their own vomit?”
    “I’m getting the Belgian waffle. What are you getting?”
    “Hermann Goering. Little-known fact.”
    “What are you talking about? The guy took a pill! Believe me. I saw it on the Hitler Channel. He was going to be executed like a few minutes later.”
    “May I take your order?”
    “I’d like the egg-white omelet? With mushroom and tomato?”
    “And I’d like the Belgian waffle.”
    “Very good, sir. Coffee?”
    “Wait. Does that come with like just regular fruit or that jelly-ish, bright-red fake-strawberry stuff? Know what I mean?”
    “Seasonal fruit, sir. Today it is