Ghost Lights by Lydia Millet

Author:Lydia Millet [Millet, Lydia]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2011-09-29T05:00:00+00:00

• • • • •

As he trudged up the dock to the hotel he had the dawn at his back, bands of pale pink over the sea. Exhaustion was making him woozy, unsure of himself; it took over everything. He might still be dreaming. There was a crick in his neck. Old man. The palm fronds dipped a little in the breeze off the ocean, almost bowing . . . he and the palms deferred together, it seemed to him, his bent neck and their dipping fronds.

The beach was deserted except for a short wide guy in a baseball cap, raking sand. Hal went by him and pushed up the hill, passing beneath a coconut palm. A falling coconut could kill you if it hit you on the head. The neurotic bohemians had said so. Everywhere there were hazards, waiting.

He turned and looked back at the sea but there was a mist above the surface and he could barely make out the powerboat anymore. Was he losing his vision? A ridiculous thought. But there was something unreal about all of it. As though eyesight could be stolen, like an object . . . he felt a sudden panic and rubbed his eyes. It was a mist, that was all. Fuzzy whiteness.

He kept going toward the buildings. He’d been jolted awake a couple of minutes before by the harelip cadet, who put a small, hesitant hand on his shoulder as the engine throttled down in the shallows. He was groggy, having slept, almost reeling from it, but at the same time there was an edge of anxiety. If he lay down in the hotel bed he was afraid he would toss and turn and have to get up again. The morning light might seep in.

He wanted to talk to Casey, but what would he say to her? His exhaustion, the blur of it . . . first he needed more sleep.

Passing a fence he heard the light, plastic tic tic tic of a ping-pong ball hitting the table. He knew who it was. The cornboys were early risers, and this did not surprise him. He would not talk to them, though, he would avoid them neatly. No question. Their English was limited to single words they pushed out with a kind of belligerence. The last time he’d encountered them all they did was jab their fingers at items they were holding or wearing and assert the brand name. “Coca-Cola.” “Swatch.” “Nikes.”

The more he pondered it the eerier it got.

He brushed past clusters of pink flowers on vines growing over a white trellis—stapled there. Wait: he leaned in close and saw the tendril of vine was stapled to the wood. Was it plastic? He had the suspicion the whole place was fake, was a façade—now that he thought about it, the cornboys in their eeriness were a little unreal, as all of it was turning . . .

The tic tic tic of the ping-pong ball, no one at all on the beach but the man raking sand, scritch scritch scritch.

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