Great White Shark

There (no, there, a bit further to the right) sits the coral reef. Beyond it swims the great white shark.

Matthew exits the water, snorkeling mask and air tube in hand. There are red marks all over his face from the rubber around the mask, which hurts him or fits too tight. He’s happy, his face conveys exuberant happiness. A happy face, on Matthew and certain other people, though not everyone, is the face of a moron.

I saw it, I would swear I saw it, he says in agitation. First it’s I saw it, then it’s I would swear I saw it. I don’t believe a word of it. I look at Pablo. I would be surprised if you saw a great white shark, Mr. Hooper, he says, if you really saw one you wouldn’t be here to tell the tale, no sir. Matthew is panting heavily, like a ten-year-old boy after a soccer game. I can’t tell if it’s from the fatigue or the excitement. I sincerely hope it’s from the fatigue; the thought that he could still be excited after someone has just told him that the very thing he’s excited about is impossible would simply be too pathetic. Matthew, listen to Pablo, I say. I’m sure it was just a dolphin, Mr. Hooper, Pablo explains. There are dolphins here and they come near shore sometimes. Or a horn shark. Do you know what a horn shark looks like? They’re brown and they swim low, by the sea floor, and they eat small fish. Some people say they’re blind because the position of their eyes keeps them from seeing the sunlight. Horn shark, Matthew murmurs. Maybe I saw a horn shark. Matthew’s got four diopters in one eye and nearly five in the other, and he doesn’t wear his glasses in the water. God knows what he might see through that mask, the poor fool, or what he might imagine.

Pablo is our guide. It may be an exaggeration to call him that. To be more accurate, he’s our point of contact here: he helps us with the language and local currency, and most of all, he provides us company. All part of the travel agency bundle. I go to bed with Pablo almost every night, or rather, I go to bed with Matthew, and as soon he falls asleep I make my way down to Pablo, who has a small room on the first floor of the hotel. We’re together for the time it takes to have a quick fuck, then I hurry back up the stairs. I don’t stay to watch Pablo peel off the condom. I don’t speak with him; I don’t smoke with him. I climb into bed and wrap my arms around Matthew so that he’ll feel my presence. He never wakes up, not ever. If he did, I’d tell him I hadn’t been able to sleep and that I’d gone for a walk around the pier to see the moon, the stars. I’ve never had to, though. He doesn’t wake up until six-thirty in the morning, but when he does he bolts up like a legionnaire, fresh-faced and happy, and everyone has to wake up with him, buy a newspaper in a language that he doesn’t understand, or can hardly understand, or bring him up a coffee. Lately, he’s been having leg spasms at night. In his calves. It’s from all the exercise. It’s also obvious when he’s having a nightmare; he twitches all over and whimpers. I always think he’s dreaming that he’s drowning and that he’s found the great white shark and that then, and only then, does he realize that seeing the great white shark means he’ll be floating in the water twenty seconds later alongside his guts, which will also be floating in the water, and that that’s the end of it. 

There’s a dance tonight. A small party for the hotel guests. Nothing too fun: some colorful lights, oppressively erotic music, and a handful of retired couples and earnest-looking newlyweds dancing to this noise like it’s “The Blue Danube.” I would guess that the hotel can afford a bit more of an elaborate affair, I don’t know, disco balls, confetti, but I would also guess (and it horrifies me) that this is the party tourists expect and desire deep down, and that fancier decorations would awaken suspicions that they aren’t having a completely authentic experience here. It’s hard to wrap your head around all the mechanisms a person has to deploy, all the hurdles they have to overcome, all the deceit they have to self-impose in order to be a credulous tourist. At the bar, Pablo smokes a cigarette with his friends or colleagues, other guides for other couples. I watch him out of the corner of my eye and see him use his hands to draw a wide shape in the air which, though it would be somewhat exaggerated, could be meant to be my hips. I think maybe he’s regaling his friends with some sordid tale of our sessions, and I’m not sure whether to be flattered or irritated. I’m not worried, in any case. These guys hold their jobs in too high esteem to jeopardize them by spilling their clients’ secrets. I imagine that the most they do is masturbate when they arrive home because the married couples they work with are, in all likelihood, too old or too faithful, and that their respect for Pablo will be somewhat augmented after tonight.

Now, Matthew has started to dance like a buffoon. Like an absolute buffoon. He wiggles his butt, jiggles his legs, and claps his hands. I don’t know where to look. Some of the other couples start to form a circle around him and clap too. He takes my hand and tries to cajole me into joining him in the buffoonery. Sometimes it feels as if we only met a week ago, Matthew and me. I let go of his hand, I don’t want to dance, and certainly not like that, calling attention in that way. Frankly, I don’t much like being seen with Matthew. He’s sixty-six. I’m twenty-seven. When we’re together, we look like a cow and one of those birds that exist to eat the parasites off the cow. It must be due to their modicum of second-hand embarrassment that the other tourists don’t whip out their cameras and take photos of us to post on their social networks, to show how the human race can be, at times, so grotesque in its behavior, so impenetrable in its reasonings.

I make my way to the bar, trying not to look at Pablo, and order a rum with pineapple juice. Matthew has gathered a sizable troupe of other fools around him. All of them acting like clowns, all of them in the kinds of garish floral or palm-tree shirts that Matthew insists on wearing unbuttoned all the way down to his belly button. I don’t think they’re drunk. These people don’t seem to drink much, despite the open bar. The waiter even seems bored. When I order my second rum (which will be my last), he looks at me with reprobation and some disgust, as if I’ve just ordered my tenth. I decide that I’m going to take a stroll, to stretch my legs and breathe. I bring the glass of rum with me. The last thing I see before I walk out is Matthew at the head of a conga line, or some hybrid of a conga and a bunny hop, though the music is too aggressive for a conga and too jarring for a bunny hop. 

I walk along the pier for a while. I think about how I can’t let myself be so affected by Matthew’s behavior because it comes as no surprise and I already knew this was more or less how the trip would go. I also think about pelicans. I stop and sit on a bollard, where I smoke a cigarette and read old text messages on my cell phone (I can’t get service, but I generally leave it on because the guidebooks said that wearing a wristwatch could be a signal to thieves, though we have yet to encounter a thief and I haven’t heard of anyone being mugged). Pablo appears. We walk in silence. I have to pee. I go behind a stack of crates. Pablo watches as I pee and I don’t much mind. He pins me against the crates. I don’t know if he’s wearing a condom and in the moment I don’t much care. Anyway, if he’s wearing one, he would have had to have put it on earlier. 

I return to the party before Pablo, with a fear that I’ll find Matthew and the whole troupe of tourists waving their shirts in the air or something of that sort. But no. The music has stopped playing, a few tourists are ordering drinks at the bar, and the dance floor is practically empty. Pablo’s friends are in the same spot as before. They look at me with perverse smiles that must, at heart, be smiles of admiration for Pablo. I don’t see Matthew. I sweep the area with my eyes and spot him by the pattern of his shirt. He’s sitting in a chair with his head buried in his arms, silently weeping. I’m not concerned, it’s categorically impossible that he would have seen me with Pablo. Or that he suspects anything: let’s just say, the art of suspicion doesn’t fit his temperament. The reality is, Matthew cries every time he drinks. I’m not sure if he’s been drinking, he’s not a big drinker, but I approach him and his breath smells of rum. I comfort him on our way back to the room. He doesn’t provide any explanation for his weeping, he never does; I’m sure there is none. He’s not drunk, either, at least not in the common sense of the word. It’s like a spell of vertigo that clutches at his heart after a moment of intense euphoria, a kind of diabolical chute into the miseries of the real world.

I get into bed with him and stroke his back for a while. He murmurs: these are the springs where I lay my eyes (or ties, I can’t quite understand him), and not ten seconds later he’s begun to snore. I think Pablo thinks that I’m still going to go down to his room tonight: there was something in the way he fucked me earlier that felt as if he were saving energy for later. Anyway, I decide not to go down. The two glasses of rum have made me sleepy, and Matthew’s sadness has left me feeling sad, too. 

In the morning, Matthew wakes up at six-thirty with his widest smile, as if nothing out of the ordinary happened last night. He’s always like this, though I’d hoped he’d have shown even the barest consideration and let the rest of us sleep in a bit. My head is throbbing. I’m hungover. I haven’t been drinking much lately, and two glasses of rum were enough to give me a hangover. The quality didn’t help either, because most of these tourists would feel like impostors if the hotel stocked a better rum. I go down to the café to have a coffee and an ibuprofen and Matthew heads off to buy a paper. Pablo is at the café eating toast. I’m sure he didn’t sleep at all last night, but you would only know it from the fact that he’s wearing yesterday’s shirt. I sit at his table (if I sat at another it would be proof we’re sleeping together; I know what I’m talking about). He asks me how I slept, and I say nothing. The question strikes me as impertinent, overfamiliar. Anyway, it’s obvious from the ibuprofen that I didn’t sleep well. Matthew totters over jovially with the paper in the crook of his elbow. He greets Pablo with a pat on the shoulder. It looks like the papers are talking about the great white shark today, he says as he plops the newspaper on the table. Pablo picks it up and flips through the pages. Here, says Matthew. It’s a photo of whales. A mother and her two babies. I can’t understand what it says, but it’s clearly a photo of whales. This isn’t a great white shark, Mr. Hooper, says Pablo, these are whales. It’s a story about a family of whales that was spotted three-hundred meters off the coast yesterday. Matthew points to a word in the headline. But doesn’t this word mean shark? No, Mr. Hooper, that word means family. Matthew has been caught out yet again. Pablo takes a napkin from the table and writes the word shark in his language. This is shark: if you see this word, then they’re talking about a shark. Matthew orders himself a coffee by way of hand gestures.

At mid-morning, a taxi drops us off at the place that Pablo (or the agency; it can be hard to tell sometimes) suggested we visit today. It’s a waterfall at the mouth of a river, which means that the water falls directly over a cliff into the sea. The itinerary that Pablo or the agency has planned for us is to see the waterfalls first from above and then to follow a series of paths down to the beach and look at the falls from below, which is the truly spectacular sight. Matthew picks a branch up off the ground to use as a walking stick and strikes out ahead of us on the path, his chest puffed. We’re going to visit a place that dozens of tourists pass through on a daily basis, yet he fancies himself an explorer. All he’s missing are the compass and the canteen. Matthew can be so preposterous sometimes. I walk in the middle. Pablo hangs back. He’s acting very strange today. Very taciturn. I guess it’s to be expected, he’s bitter that I didn’t come for our nightly tryst. It occurs to me then, with a genuinely nauseating feeling, that he thinks there’s a chance I’ll leave Matthew and marry him, or something along those lines. But I have no plans of leaving Matthew, even though he so often deserves it, and anyway, marrying Pablo is the last thing on earth I’d do. Fucking is one thing, love is another entirely. Pablo tries to take my hand. I retract mine. It’s risky because Matthew stops every thirty seconds to take a photo of the landscape; he’s stopped using his eyes since he bought this digital camera. Pablo tries to take my hand again and I stroke his for a brief second with my thumb so that he won’t think I want nothing more to do with him, so that he knows the vacation continues. And then the waterfalls are nice. They’re nice the way these things tend to be nice: they’re pretty and two minutes later you don’t know what to do with them.

At night, Pablo asks me to marry him. Concretely, he asks me to move in with him. He didn’t bring a ring, thank God, or anything else that would have made the situation more intolerable than it already is. I reply that I’m married to Matthew, but I mutter it so weakly that I’ve made it plain this isn’t the real reason, or at least not the only, and certainly not the most important reason. Then he bites my nipples, but it’s obvious to me his biting of my nipples has no value in and of itself, he does it as if to say: here’s how I’d bite your nipples if you moved in with me. And then everything starts to seem so artificial and in such poor taste that I feel like I’m being buried alive on a plate heaped with liver and boiled potatoes. 

I leave Pablo’s room more or less rudely and take a walk by the pier. The pier isn’t the best choice because it’s doubtlessly the first place Pablo will look for me. Everything is quiet. Three enormous black men walk past and very politely greet me. I’m not sure what delinquency these guidebooks are referring to. I sit on a bollard to smoke. I don’t know if I want Pablo to come or not. He doesn’t, anyway. After my third cigarette, I return to the hotel and go up to the room. Much to my surprise, Matthew is awake. He’s sitting up in bed, chest bare and glasses on. I tell him I’ve been walking along the pier, which isn’t a lie, and looking at the moon, though the part about the moon is; I didn’t look at it once. He tells me he’s just had a nightmare and that the nightmare startled him awake. I was in my father’s home, he says, except it wasn’t my father’s home because it was the Louvre, but all the paintings were turned around. And I asked my father, who was in his robe because, in a sense, he was at home, why the paintings were turned around. And he replied: because they’re the centuries. The centuries. Odd, no? It doesn’t sound all that awful, but it was terrifying in the moment. It sounds like a relatively anodyne dream to me, but I don’t say that to him, of course. What I say is: how strange that you didn’t dream about the great white shark. And he looks at me as if I’m out of my mind and he’s never once in his life mentioned such a thing. All he says in response is: no, no. Then he turns over and goes to sleep.

Pablo doesn’t show up the next day. The receptionist says that he called in to say he wasn’t feeling well and couldn’t accompany us today. Not feeling well, indeed. Sick with sheer resentment. Matthew and I go to the beach and then to the market. We buy tropical fruits for five times the price locals pay for them. I make sure we only buy unfamiliar or mostly unfamiliar fruits, or ones we’ve only experienced in shampoo. Matthew, buffoon that he is, wanted to buy a coconut. But the market is pleasant. There are lots of colors and lots of music. Matthew tugs on my sleeve. Look, look. I don’t see anything. Look, look. He points. I don’t know why he has to behave this way. He’s pointing in the direction of a stall selling clothes. And beach towels. As I don’t seem to be seeing whatever it is he wants me to see, he approaches the stall and points at the word shark on one of the towels. Shark, he says. Remember? Shark. I don’t know how he can act so ridiculous. Just as he said, the towel shows an image of what is very clearly a shark (a shark with a patch on its eye and a pirate hat, but a shark nonetheless). Everyone stares at us. The lady in charge of the stall even tells us how much the towel costs. I want the earth to swallow me up.

Later, a heavy rain starts to fall. Matthew spends the afternoon downloading photos onto his computer and updating his Facebook. He also takes the opportunity to respond to some emails from his doctoral students. I pretend to read one of the books he brought, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures, written by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, but really I’m only using it to cover my face so that he can’t see that I’m crying, so that only Bill and Gareth and Helen can see that I’m crying.

I go down to the pool. It’s still raining but it’s hot outside. A hotel employee says I shouldn’t get into the water in case lightning strikes. I think what he says, word for word, is that the pool is the most dangerous place to be in case of a lightning strike. I gather that his warning isn’t prescriptive and get into the water. I lean my head against the cement edge and gaze at the sky like a sword-and-sandal film. Lightning bolts look beautiful from hotel pools. 

When Matthew gets into bed I go down to the bar and order a whisky. Everyone is drinking rum but I order a whisky. I can see in the bartender’s eyes that he loathes me, but there’s no way for him to show it: he’s the bartender and I want whisky. This is how things work. I take my time drinking the whisky. Then I go to bed. I’ve never been one for excess. 

It rains softly in the morning. It’s the last day before our departure. Pablo is waiting for us at the café. He acts normal; everything is normal. He apologizes for his absence yesterday. Matthew says that in any case it rained too much in the afternoon to do anything. Yes, it rained a lot, Mr. Hooper, Pablo says, and we’re not even in the wet season yet. After breakfast, the three of us take a taxi to the other end of the island. There’s a beach which for some inexplicable reason strikes me as tremendously sad (it could be due to the rain having fallen shortly beforehand; the sun has come out now but the sand is wet, as are the leaves on the mangroves and coconut palms). On the shore is a man with a launch who takes tourists to a tiny island with a lighthouse and a couple of beaches. We walk around the tiny island, but there’s not much to see. The lighthouse is actually quite ugly. Matthew takes something like two-hundred photos of it. Then we go down to one of the beaches. Officially, it’s a nudist beach, but no one is here and we don’t remove our bathing suits. I imagine that none of the three of us considers removing ours, each for our own reason. Matthew’s is modesty. He takes out his mask and air tube and marches off towards the water. I ask Pablo to rub sunscreen on my back. The sensation is simultaneously pleasurable and tedious. He spreads the cream over my back in a kind of massage. When I think the massage has drawn on too long, I tell him to stop. He stops. Then Matthew exits the water and announces that he hasn’t seen a single fish. There are no fish here. I imagine Pablo should give him some kind of explanation, but he doesn’t. It looks like he’s staring at Matthew, but it’s the sea behind Matthew that he’s staring at, I think. Matthew looks infinitely more intelligent when he’s disappointed.

Later, we argue over whether it’s appropriate to treat Pablo to dinner. Matthew thinks we have a moral obligation to treat him. As if Pablo isn’t earning money. As if he isn’t sleeping with your wife every night. Poor Matthew. I think that’s the only argument that would convince him, and naturally, it’s the only one I can’t use. I lie in bed. Matthew gets into the shower and I try not to think about anything. Once I think I’ve managed it, I realize that thinking that I’ve managed it is a form of thinking. Then I think about human credulity and about the world as a representation of itself, and fortunately, Matthew turns off the water before I reach the point of thinking that my entire life is a cheap imitation of a life.

At dinner, Pablo tells Matthew the names in his language for all the sea creatures on the platter in front of us. He also provides a brief explanation on how each of them is fished, or hunted, or what have you. Because it’s nighttime and we’re on a terrace and it’s hot out and Matthew and I are quite sunburnt, I feel, for the tiniest fraction of a second, happy. It’s stupid. The wine is terrible and Pablo shouldn’t be here with us. An emaciated man (probably the closest thing I’ve seen to a delinquent here) approaches us and asks for a coin. I think. Maybe he’s asking for a cigarette, or something else entirely. A shrimp. Matthew gives him a few coins, more coins than he should, and Pablo caresses my ankles with his sandaled foot. 

Later, I leave Matthew to sleep off his digestion and go down to Pablo’s room and we have a wild fuck. I ask him to sodomize me before he can ask me for the same, at which point my pride would obligate me to refuse. I don’t know why being sodomized after a seafood dinner makes me feel like a circle closing in on itself. It makes no sense, but the first thing that comes to mind is the thought of a circle closing in on itself, and then the image of a circle closing in on itself, and then many more circles that are also closing in on themselves or are already closed. When I go out to the vestibule, my head is fuzzy and I return to my room taking tentative steps, transported by pain and pleasure and the boundless desire to be many people at once. 

Pablo accompanies us to the airport the next day. He helps us with our luggage and acts as an interpreter as we retrieve our boarding passes. The airport isn’t too large. Matthew stops at a kiosk to buy an American newspaper from yesterday and I see that there are souvenirs on sale here, too, an awful athletic shirt with an image of a shark, and I cross my fingers that Matthew doesn’t see it, or at least that he doesn’t buy it, or at least that he doesn’t go to the bathroom to put it on right away. He doesn’t see it. Or maybe he sees it and doesn’t pay it any attention. Or maybe he’s lost interest in sharks. It also occurs to me that planes, with their aerodynamic shape, aren’t so different from the bodies of sharks. Great white sharks on the runway.

We say our goodbyes to Pablo before security. Matthew extends his hand and then gives him a hug that’s a bit out of place. I give him two languid kisses on the cheek. Just before we turn to go through security, Matthew removes all the bills we didn’t use and stuffs them into Pablo’s pocket, every single one. I can’t understand why he does it, why he does these things. Why he doesn’t go to the currency exchange and exchange it like everyone else. Why he has to pay this man much more than he earns, which is plenty. Why he doesn’t know how to exist in the world. Pablo leaves and we go through security and I try to picture Matthew’s face if I were to turn around right now and take off running and climb into a taxi with Pablo, and I burst out laughing, I walk through every corridor to the boarding gate still laughing, and I think, I keep on thinking, about the airport growing smaller in the distance from the taxi window, and how Matthew would weep on the plane and wouldn’t eat a bite of his dinner or even his breakfast, and I feel a touch of pity and a touch of disgust and a touch of hunger until, moment by moment, my laughter dies away.