Blood Price (Dark Places Of The Earth 1) (18 page)

“I’m coming with you into Mexico,” she said eventually.

I knew from her tone there was no point in arguing. “All right.”

She nodded, satisfied that she had gotten at least one concession. We fell silent, but it was the most comfortable silence we had enjoyed since her arrival. Our dispute seemed to have broken some ice. I wondered if this was a good time to bring up the subject of Us. Sooner or later we had to have a serious talk. But this, I decided, was too soon.

“So how’s sunny California been?” I asked.

She looked relieved. I think she knew I had been considering a Serious Conversation and dreaded the prospect. “Bring me another beer and I’ll tell you all about it,” she said.

The two-beer drowsiness hit us at about the same time our conversation began to falter. We went up to our room and I followed her in. There were two twin beds. Talena sat on the bed to the left. After a moment I took my cue from her constricted body language and sat on the other. We looked at one another.

“Okay,” she said. “Um. Good night?”

“Good night.”

“I’m sorry I can’t be –” She stopped.

“Don’t be sorry,” I said. “I understand.”

We stared at each other a little longer. Then she sighed, shrugged, smiled wryly, and wordlessly began to remove her outer layer of clothes. I did the same. We crawled under the covers of our beds and I reached up to switch out the light.

“Sleep tight,” I said. “Sweet dreams.”

She smiled at me and my heart thumped.

“Back atcha,” she said.
* * *
   It took me a long time to get to sleep that night. I couldn’t help but think of our last reunion, six months earlier, the day Talena had come home from Melbourne, and every time I did, I squirmed with guilt.
Talena had been gone for two weeks, for work. The day she returned home, she found me sitting on her couch, amid stacked pizza boxes and crushed beer cans, in an apartment that stank of unwashed dishes and old laundry, playing video games on her XBox. Her smile wilted. She dropped her bags, shut the door, and looked at me.

“Love what you’ve done with the place,” she said.

“Sorry.” I shrugged disinterestedly. “I meant to clean up. I thought you were coming later. How was the trip?”

“It was fun. Met some cool people. What have you been doing?”
   “I don’t know. I had a couple interviews, but they didn’t go too well.”
   “A couple interviews,” she said. “Okay. Paul, what are you doing?”
   “I’m playing Halo.”
   “You want to get off the couch and maybe come say hello to your girlfriend who just got home from halfway around the world?”
   “Sure. Yeah. Sorry.”
   I paused the game, came to her, and gave her an awkward welcome-home kiss.
   “You’ve just been sitting here playing video games the whole time?” she asked incredulously.
   “Not always,” I said, stung. “But what else do you want me to do? I’m pretty much out of money. I went walking around earlier.”
   “If you needed more money you should have just called me.”
   I shook my head, avoiding her gaze.
   “Come on, Neanderthal man.” She said it fondly. “I know you hate me supporting you. But that’s just how we live right now. You have to try to get used to it. At least until you get a job.”
   “Get a job,” I said bitterly. “You think I haven’t been trying? Maybe you lost track of reality down under, but we’re in the middle of the worst depression the tech industry has ever seen, and I’m not even allowed to flip burgers on my visa, and even if I tried there’s eight million illegal Mexicans in line ahead of me. Get a job? Did you bring a fucking job home from Australia with you?”
   “Easy,” she said. “Easy. I wasn’t accusing. Honest. But, Jesus, Paul, you’ve got to do something. I don’t know what, but look around. No wonder you’re depressed if you sit around here all day.”
   “Depressed? I’m not depressed. There’s nothing wrong with my brain chemicals. I’m unemployed. You know what happened when you were gone? I hit my anniversary. It’s a been a year since I had a job. It’s been a whole year. That’s my only problem.”
   “Other people,” she said softly, “seem to manage it better.”
   “Other people. Easy for you to say. Didn’t you go scuba diving in Australia? Weren’t you going on some corporate feelgood camping trip along the Great Ocean Road? You come back from that and tell me it’s my fault I’m no good at being poor?”
   “No,” she said. “No, I come back all excited to see my boyfriend again because I missed him so much, and I walk in here and he doesn’t even get up to come to the door. And all I feel is disappointed. Two weeks, Paul. You could have, I don’t know. You could have done something.”
   I just looked at her, feeling gut-punched. I’d been ready for anger. Disappointment was a hundred times worse. I knew it was only a short hop from there to pity.
   “Never mind. Never mind. I don’t want to fight. Let’s,” she looked around the apartment, “let’s go out for dinner. Get a bottle of wine or something. I’ve got a few more hours in me before I pass out. Let’s start this great return home all over again, what do you say?”
   “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” I said, angry now, at myself more than her. “It’s always the same way. You get your digs in and then you say ‘I don’t want to fight’ so all of a sudden I’m the bad guy if I don’t leave it alone. I have a better idea. You go have dinner. I’ll stay here and clean your fucking apartment. At least I can be good for that.”
   She had looked at me silently for a moment, on the verge of tears, and then she had turned and walked out without a word. And I had been glad. That was what made my stomach writhe with guilt, looking back on it, that some sick corner of my mind had counted driving her away as a victory.
   We had made up, eventually. We had always made up. But as I looked over to Talena, sleeping peacefully in our shared Hotel Mopan room, I knew it was amazing she hadn’t dumped me already. I couldn’t blame her if she decided she didn’t want me back.
* * *
   The boat trip from the mainland was gorgeous. Our open-topped motorboat, its  passenger demographic split about 50-50 between backpacker tourists and Belizeans, crossed ocean water calmed by Belize’s barrier reef, went through a narrow gap between two uninhabited cayes dense with mangrove forest, and half an hour later reached the east coast of Caye Caulker, a strip of land three miles long and a thousand feet wide, built up with one- and two-story clapboard buildings. A dozen muscular touts waited for our boat, eager to carry backpacks to hostels that gave them kickbacks in exchange for new customers. We ignored their entreaties and walked to Popeye’s, past restaurants, stores, guest houses, dive shops, Internet cafes, all the comforts of home for the thousand or so backpackers who inhabited Caye Caulker at any given moment and formed the majority of its population.

Ambergris Caye to the north was where the wealthy package-tour vacationers went. Caye Caulker was one of the world’s cozy backpacker paradises, like Pokhara in Nepal, Dahab in Egypt, Goa in India, Yangshuo in China, Essouaira in Morocco, Krabi in Thailand, or any of dozens of other once-sleepy small towns that in the last few decades had morphed into mainstays on the international backpacker trail, places where rooms were cheap, pot was ubiquitous, government oversight was minimal, and half the population was young, white, relatively rich, extremely transient, and often intoxicated. Fun, laid-back places where you could easily spend a couple of weeks, day-tripping to the local ecotourism adventures or dive sites, passing the nights drinking and smoking with all your newfound temporary friends. I had not previously realized that their transient population, well-established transport links, and no-questions-asked attitude also made them ideal havens for smugglers.
   We spent most of the next afternoon and night and day on the patio at Café Rasta Pasta, a pleasant place with a cool ocean breeze and good food, relaxing as best we could, reading and drinking beer and chatting with various other backpackers, mostly European but a few Americans and Canadians. We bought bathing suits and went swimming a few times. The water was warm and buoyant but the shallows were thick with seaweed. Talena and I were amused, and Saskia a bit scandalized, by the envious looks I got from male backpackers who did not have the good fortune to be escorted by two pretty bikini-clad women.

The evening we arrived, Saskia, overcome by too much Belikin, retreated back to Popeye’s to sleep, and Talena and I stayed to chat with a Norwegian dive instructor named Torsten, a man built like a barrel, with a constant infectious grin plastered on his face.

“Tomorrow’s dive is the Blue Hole,” Torsten said. “The most famous dive site in North America. One of the most famous dive sites in the whole world.” His grin widened. “Of course it helps that every dive country has its own famous dive site called the Blue Hole. Australia, Egypt, Thailand, everywhere. Sometimes, when I dive a Blue Hole, I ascend and it takes me a minute to think, what country am I in? Where is this Blue Hole?”
   “Have you worked in all those places?” Talena asked.
   Torsten nodded and began ticking names off on his fingers. “Australia. Thailand. Malaysia. Mauritius. Egypt, for almost six months, that was where I qualified to teach new instructors. They called me Torsten the Torturer.” He chuckled. “Greece, but only for a week, a bad company. The Andaman Islands. Papua New Guinea. Micronesia, Truk Lagoon, the greatest dive site in the world, I worked there for only one month, not long enough. Then the Galapagos, then Costa Rica, and then here.” His grin stretched even further, its corners reaching towards his skull earrings. “And three years ago, only three years, I was an accountant in Trondheim. An accountant!” He raised his black bottle of Belikin high into the air. “To the death of accounting! Skaal!”
   We drank. He drained his bottle, called for another, and lit up a Colonial cigarette, cheap local filth but Marlboros and Camels were nearly impossible to find, as with all former British colonies. I wanted to bum a smoke but remembered Talena’s presence and refrained.
   You hear stories like Torsten’s at all the world’s diving meccas. Scuba diving grows more popular every year and the demand for instructors always outstrips supply. Qualified dive instructors can show up in any of a wide variety of exotic tropical places and easily find work for cash under the table; the laid-back counterculture types you find running dive shops in backpacker havens such as Caye Caulker, Dahab, Krabi, even Cairns, are rarely interested in immigration paperwork. A dive instructor can travel around the world, living a frugal but decadent existence, for however long he or she wants. It’s the next best thing to being paid to travel, that oft-cited ultimate goal of the backpacker set.
   “Doesn’t it bother you not having a home?” Talena asked.
   “Home?” Torsten asked. “What is a home? People tell me Norway is my home. I say, yes, maybe it was, but not is. Do you know what we say about our country? It is a place where a man gets on an empty bus, he sits in the back left corner. Another man gets on, and he sits on the front right corner, as far away from the first man as possible. Another man gets on, and he sits in the middle, as far away from all the others as possible. Norwegians are cold people in a cold country. I am a warm person, I belong in a warm country. So I ask you, how is Norway my home?”
   “You’ve never thought of basing yourself somewhere? Buying a home here on Caye Caulker or something?”
   “Why would I do that? I ask you, in all seriousness, who needs homes? A serious question. For what kind of person do homes exist?” He paused dramatically. “I will tell you. Homes are for children. If you have a child, yes, absolutely, they must have a home, they must grow up in a home. But for me? I am not a child, not for a long time. And no children for me, not for Torsten Klug, not ever if I have a choice. There are too many people on this little ball of dirt already, any fool can see that. Why should I need a home? A good money investment? No, money is a drug, worse than heroin, and I am not addicted, not yet, I hope never. For staying in one place with one group of friends? All my friends today, they do the same thing I do, they move and move and move, we know where each other are from email, if I made a home somewhere most of them I would see less not more. I ask you in all seriousness, what good is a home for Torsten Klug?”
   We had no answer for him.
   “My home is anywhere, everywhere. Wherever I may roam, wherever I lay my head is home.” He chuckled. “Just like Metallica sings. To Metallica. Skaal!”
   “Do you think he was right about homes?” Talena asked, after he left.
   I thought about it. “I don’t know,” I said. “These days I feel pretty homeless. I guess, you know, I have for years. Never really felt rooted. I used to be like him, you know, I never used to care, but these days…I think I’d like a home. Maybe I’m getting old.”
   “You’ve felt pretty homeless for years? I kind of thought you lived in my apartment.”
   “Exactly. Your apartment.”
   “What – what are you saying? Are you saying you feel like you haven’t been welcome?”
   “No,” I said. “Not at all. I’m just saying that it’s always been your apartment and it’s never felt the slightest like my place. Also – let me finish – also I lived there during the most miserable period of my life, which has nothing to do with you or your apartment, it would have been a lot worse without you.”
   “Well,” she said. “I’m sorry my home never felt like your home. I never knew that.”
   We stared at one another.
   “Maybe we should go have a nap,” Talena said.
   I took a deep breath. My heart was pounding. I felt like I was about to jump out of an airplane without knowing whether the backpack I wore was a parachute or a load of bricks. “No,” I said, looking straight into her electric blue eyes. “I think we should talk.”
   “I don’t know if now is the –”
   “I think we should talk.”
   We looked at one another silently for a little while, both of us breathing hard.
   “Okay,” Talena said. ” Okay. Um, anything you want to say, or…?”
   “Yeah. You wanna break up or what?”
   She looked at me. I swallowed.
   “I don’t know,” she said. “I know that’s, like, the worst possible answer, and I’m sorry, but I still don’t know.”
   “It’s not the worst possible answer,” I said.
   “No?”
   “Definitely not. Definitely not.”
   “Things have been so fucked between us for so long,” she said. “I don’t even know how long, that’s how long. I don’t know if we can fix that. Maybe I want to try, but… but not if it’s impossible, you know? If it’s inevitable we may as well get it over with, right? I know that sounds, I don’t know, cruel, but, God, Paul, I don’t want to go through it all again. It hurt too much the first time.”
   “Aw,” I said. “Jesus. Talena. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I never wanted to hurt you.”
   “I think sometimes you did,” she said very quietly. She was trembling. So was I. I wanted to reach out and take her in my arms but I didn’t dare move. “You treated me so badly, Paul. You have been such a total shit. I have tried so fucking hard, so many times, and for the last year you have been such a self-obsessed, self-torturing, fucked-up
asshole
, lashing out at me so many times for such no good reasons… I’m sorry but I get livid just thinking about how you treated me. For a year, Paul, for a whole fucking year. I didn’t even realize, you know, it was so, like, just accepted that that was how you were, until I got back from Bosnia and you weren’t there and I started to think. You behaved so badly for so long I don’t know if I can forgive you.”
   I didn’t say anything.
   “I guess that’s not how you see it, huh?” she asked. “Well, that’s how I see it.”
   I closed my eyes for a moment.
   “All right,” I said when I opened them. I was angry. Not with her. Not at myself, not exactly. Angry at the universe, I guess. Maybe I just needed to be angry right then even if there was nothing or no one to be angry at. “Okay. Yes, I was a shit. You know how it feels to me? It feels like I fell into…I don’t even know what to call it. A pit. A fucking abyss, whatever. And this last couple of months I fell out of it again. I guess you can see that much. And I will not be going back in. There is nothing I am more sure of in all this world. And I am sorry, I am so sorry, I am…I’m as sorry as the ocean is deep, I really am, for however much I hurt you when I was there. I love you, Talena, it rips my guts up to think that I hurt you at all, ever. I love you. But here we are. And, and, and you know what? I’m not even going to ask you to stay. I hope you do. And if you do I will try so hard to be the man you deserve. And I will never, ever, ever, do anything to hurt you again. But I’m not even going to ask. Do what you need to do. That’s all I have to say. I mean it. That’s what I want for you, that’s what I want for both of us, that’s all. Do what you need to do. But don’t say it’s inevitable. Please don’t say that. Nothing is inevitable.”
   I realized my speech was finished and fell back in my chair, panting like I had just sparred five full-contact rounds with Zoltan.