Read Vacation Online

Authors: Deb Olin Unferth

Tags: #Fiction, #Literary

Vacation (9 page)

Well, he had the hotel home page to look at (
¡Nica Linda!
), featuring the less farfetched of the tourist destinations: Granada, a mere sixty kilometers from the capital, more tourists per capita than any town in the Americas, the most beautiful…

There was a lot to like about the job. There was the pay, the location, the copy machine (which actually worked), his office, its window, client dinners, bonuses, the nightly janitorial wastebasket service. There was the regional manager and the one over him, both reasonably reasonable people, not imbecilic dummies. The lack of outdated technology—a relief after the slide-rule days of his last job, of setting black-and-white photos of schoolrooms into templates three years old. There was being in downtown proper, not all the way over, almost shoved off the island. There was the lack of undignified, leg-numbing, IQ-depleting training sessions. The lack of humiliating pay. The lack of humiliations of many sorts.

Outside, the sky didn’t even look like sky, it was almost not there behind the smog haze, the antennae and rebar. It was just the filler between crowded objects.

At last he opened the email. It was a shot to the brain that did not stagger him but sunk in deeply and stayed.

From: HR

Subject: Termination of Employment

This is to inform you that your employment has been terminated with cause effective immediately. Given that your termination is with cause, there is no requirement for our company to give you either notice or termination pay. Company property in your possession must be returned within forty-eight hours or legal proceedings will begin. A registered letter has been sent to the home address listed in your human resources file. Please be in receipt of it. Personals to follow to same.

No way was Gray around here. Myers was the only tourist in sight. He stood, left the business room, left the lobby, packed, left. Time to find this jackass.

The capital: boxes collected in fields. Very hot out there, no kidding around. The heat was like a religion. It was like a throat closing shut. Myers took a taxi through a racket of streets and a few twirls of barbed wire. He’d get to the main tourist artery. When he heard from Gray he’d be right there, ready. He didn’t see Gray outside on the sidewalks, but he saw many others, bricklayers or statesmen or so on. And what was that walking bird-creature—a rooster? Other animalia: what appeared to be a cow. Next to it, a smaller, sprightlier version, possibly goat. He’d only worked at the place for four months. He was ineligible for unemployment. Suppose he’d have to live on the beach like a penguin now. Suppose he’d have to mime in the park. He arrived at the bus station.

CLAIRE

I arrived in Chicago and got off the train. There were a lot of us here, each in our own mortal slipcase. I walked along the freezing cement.
I wove through the buildings and came out onto a huge lake and suddenly I remembered the word “horizontal.” Where I live I never see expanse like this. The library was sixty blocks south of downtown, long ones, and I walked them all, the city on my right, a dog padding behind me. I could hear a few birds softly squeak.

I got to the library. The building was the color and material of a tombstone. The librarian inspected me.

I need to ask you some security questions, she said, reading from a card. Mother’s birthplace, maiden name, age at time of death, college mascot.

She didn’t go to college, I said.

The elevator ding sounded behind me. The librarian pulled out a folder.

Where’s the box? I said. This is it? This is what we call a folder, not a box.

She shrugged.

I opened the folder. Among the receipts, the hairdo instructions, the contracts, I found a letter addressed to me.

Myers boarded a bus. It was more than full and kept filling. It was as bad as the bus where he was from. Four people squeezed into a seat for two and more kept getting on. The windows could apparently be opened only by trained engineers. Telephone poles linked and receded. The heat was a beak on the skin. But it was fine. He’d find Gray and tangle him into the hotel bedsprings.

The man in the next seat knew a little English. How long are you here? he wanted to know.

How long am I where? Myers said.

He’d had a single bad week, plus maybe a few mediocre months. He’d had a moment of crisis, of transformation, perhaps for his better, had counted on the understanding of his superiors. Instead of support he got sand in the eyes, he got blood in the mouth, fish bones in the throat, he got pushed off the platform before he’d had his say.

This was the way of treating him.

He rode out of Managua.

CLAIRE

My dearest Claire, my mother wrote. Your real father is Mexican. I met him on a water shoot I did in Cancún. He is a respectable man with a respectable job. Nothing strange there. He trains dolphins—as most people would, given the time and inclination. He is not much different from your stepfather, the man who is raising you as his own. On a practical level, they’re nearly interchangeable. You could switch their clothes, their occupations, countries of origin, and you might confuse them.

I don’t know if it will help you to know this. I thought I should tell you. I hope you’ll be an adult about this. Your stepfather, by the way, didn’t even feel it.

There it is, folks. My mother pens from the grave. She’d signed her name the way she did autographs. I put the envelope back in the folder. Then I saw there was a picture in there. A photo.

A man, standing poolside with hoop.

I imagined them both, both my fathers, side by side, as if they were cutouts printed on a piece of cardboard that you could snip, one or the other. They looked nothing alike.

At the other end of the counter the librarian had a phone in her hand.

I put the photo into my bag.

Hey, the librarian shouted. Hey! She was rushing over.

I left the folder on the counter. I pushed the door and went back out to the street.

 

Chapter Nine

So on the third day of his vacation and the first of his unemployment, Myers stepped off the bus in the tourist hot spot Granada, which his guidebook described as “colonial,” an adjective which refers to the ornamental aspects of one group coming in and removing another by frog-march or slaughter or other means of diplomacy. The town was cobbled, shingled, whitewashed. He’d overturn every cobblestone in the country if he had to. He checked in to a hotel.

At reception, a young American couple leaned over and introduced themselves as Christians. Not only that, they’d just arrived.

So what? What did Myers care?

And what did the guy beside him care either? There was a guy beside him who said he’d had enough of Nicaragua and if
he’d
just arrived,
he’d leave.

Now look, said the Christians, this is a perfectly nice town. Who wants to go for a walk?

Myers wasn’t interested in any Christian walk.

Neither was the other guy.

No, no, the Christians said. We’re non-evangelical. A secular walk.

Myers didn’t know what was so non-evangelical about saying you’re Christians in the first sentence of meeting someone.

Forget the Christian part, they said. That was just a little extra side thing. And forget the walk. If you don’t want to go, fine. Stay here in your hotel room and look at the towel rack. What do we care.

Myers wasn’t saying he didn’t want to go but can a guy put his crap down and check his email first? Jesus.

The other guy wasn’t going. He knew what it looked like outdoors.

The other guy, who had been robbed twice in Managua by kids no taller than ducks.

Who rode here on a bus that sounded like a circus.

Who hadn’t seen a single taxi with seatbelts that work.

Who couldn’t believe the piles of trash. Even in the countryside, where there was nothing, there was another pile of trash. This was the first place he’d been that was sort of clean.

The other guy, who (it occurred to Myers) actually looked Nica-raguan, who had to be Nicaraguan.

The other guy wasn’t going anywhere. He was staying inside.

Myers had no new messages.

The outdoors turned out to consist of a few locals, some bleached buildings, and many many saddish slowish herdish Americans arranged in clusters (Myers looked them over: none of them were Gray) and here and there a fully formed tour team with a loud guide. Daypacks, cameras, water bottles, flip-flops all around.

It was decided (the Christians decided) that the best way to view the sights was to follow the lines drawn in the guidebook, lines that created mazes and intersected with points of interest. The excursionist could move from spot to spot in a space/time-efficient manner. Used correctly, the system worked somewhat like a conveyor belt, or a merry-go-round, or like interstellar rotations charted from the ground.

Myers wiped at sweat with his handkerchief, nodded at the large-leaf trees, the stone benches. Somewhere nearby a church bell was going off.

Charming, he said politely. Very nice.

Certainly damn well worth losing his job over. He glanced around for Gray. Indeed.

The town lies at the edge of a beautiful saltwater lake, a Christian said. He was reading from the same guidebook Myers had, the same one everyone had, with the exception of a few Europeans walking by who had one with a title that contained the word “foot.” The Christian was saying something about sawtooth sharks in that lake. Something about bones on the beach, about four hundred islands, they all fit in the lake, plus room for water and boats.

It says there are many trees and food stalls. Also civic buildings, the Christian read. He lowered the book. Lovely! he said.

They walked over to the cathedral and stood on the steps outside. They were reading about all the people who had attacked the town and burned it to the ground—first the pirates, then the French, then the British, then one lone American on a horse, and more could be on the way.

Myers might have put off his trip a few days. He’d waited two years already. He could have finished up a few things at the office and caught up with Gray next week. That element of vacation he had failed in. Above him the cathedral looked like the slate of white in his brain, and below him the steps seemed as though they continued on down into the earth.

He and the Christians turned and went in.

The usual gowned saints. Robed saints. Saints raising objects. Saints patting the heads of saint-sheep.

He might have waited the week, done his damnedest as far as work went, then asked for an early half-month. He could have waited the week but had chosen not to. It was dark—Gray could be in here and Myers wouldn’t even see him.

But would Gray be in a cathedral?

Come on, said Myers. Let’s go.

They came back out and walked on.

This was not the most beautiful place in the world, whatever Gray had to say about it. They walked by something else that looked like something else he saw at home—house, car, billboard, shop—only a little less so, looking a little less like a house at home than usual, in regard to materials, as far as the sides of the house, and what held them down, and as far as the roof, the rounded tiles that covered the top.

And he heard sounds like any sound he knew anywhere—cicadas, rock music, honks—only a little more so, since his ears were involved in listening, not in shutting out. He didn’t see the big deal, in any case. Other country, piece of earth, a gathering of people unknown to Myers, lonely land, not so unlike his own, hotter, better lit, a different group of strangers on the streets. The sun was a knot in the sky. Myers strolling along.

Before the earthquake and all that came after, he followed the Christians to the famous museum of pre-Columbian art. Now how do you like that, clay animals and such right there in a case for everyone to see, a bric-a-brac reminder. That’s history for you. That’s the sort of thing you don’t get in a book. You have to be on the beat to see something like that. Imagine living right here and seeing this any time you want. Imagine what that would do to a person. The quiet pride that would grow in the heart. Why, one of the Christians might snap a picture of that. There’s the thing to do. Take it home. He might stand here a while. Reflect.

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