Chapter 1 CHAPTER 1 I escaped to a resort of extraordinary beauty. This way when the news stories appeared, I''d be in such an otherworldly place I could act like I had only been dreaming. I pitched it as a vacation to Moans, a way to get away before our impending wedding. I showed him the site for The Monarchs, a luxurious oceanfront hotel in Florida, and we booked a room. Before we departed, I took a sedative to ease the journey, and I returned to consciousness outside the wooden gates. Scores of palm trees concealed a pool, two hot tubs, and dozens of naked men. The owner stood with his hands on his hips and surveyed his territory, telling us that he had planted these trees forty years ago; he hadn''t expected the foliage to grow so wildly, but with coastal life came onslaughts of rain and all that sustenance had shifted the foundations. "Nothing can prevent the course of nature," he said, so I took off my clothes and wandered the property until I found a spot in the shade to be alone.
The world felt very far away. No matter how hard I studied the jacaranda petals, I couldn''t shake the feeling that I didn''t completely exist. I placed my feet on the hot stone patio and searched for three red items: the second hand of the hot tub clock, the limp resort flag, the rusty fractured stones lifting from the earth. Sweat dragged down my chest as I followed a blue hummingbird to a feeder. "Would you like a bottle of water?" a pool boy asked, watching me lean over the railing into the trees. "You don''t have to drink like the birds." We would stay for a week. We kept to ourselves at first and spent afternoons by the pool, reading and lifting our sunglasses to flick our eyes at certain men''s conversations, or when, despite the casual nudity, a man seemed particularly naked, even if he wore briefs or a cap.
Moans belonged to that category. He wore navy trunks. Piercings, tattoos, the way men walked up the pool steps, reaching for a towel before it was within their grasp: all contributed to a taxonomy. They were uninhibited, curious but ashamed, and some of them introduced themselves as Nudists while touching their chests as a priest might grasp his cross. Among them were men who had been denied what they wanted for half a century, men so old they felt unseen. Some questioned if they could be desired. Others knew. One idiot in his fifties flopped around on a floating pool chair, attempting to use his dick like bait and tackle.
Moans'' thirty-four to my twenty-seven, and I was covered in tattoos and silent--the men even commented on this, like you''re a quiet one , after they''d tried to get the meaning out of certain ink. I offered nothing. Mostly I kept to my novels. I woke the second afternoon on a lounge chair to a pool boy handing out Popsicles on a silver platter, unwrapping the plastic to tease the guests with a purple tip. What simplicity, what luxury. I asked for a newspaper. There was the story of a man who had just taken his life after what happened to him as a child, his wife crying and screaming on the steps of a courthouse. A quote from a lawyer about the flood of cases to come.
That was enough for me. The third afternoon, I checked the closet and discovered a sampling of adult films above the safe. Skin flicks. Warped DVD cases, the plastic lifting and torn. They were dated, and I loved the anachronism. I held one in the air and said to Moans, "I honestly wouldn''t know how to use this." "You grew up with cassettes and VHS." "I haven''t used one in years.
" I opened the case and held the disc upside down, where my breath caught each scratch along its mirrored surface. We were naked, otherwise I would have wiped it off on my shirt. "Blow on it for luck?" Moans pulled my wrist to his face and exhaled. He smelled like vodka, and my hair stood on end. I kneeled in front of the DVD player and pressed the Eject button. A tray slid out. I put the DVD in the slot and pushed it inside. The box gently whirred, and the blue screen switched to black.
I really hadn''t seen machinery like this in years. Nobody tells you that you will outgrow your own life as you live it. I didn''t know how to say this exactly to Moans, so as I kneeled before him I said, "The world ends in a thousand ways." Moans laughed and ran his finger along my chin, as if I were just talking drunk. I sat on the floral quilt and waited for the show. Moans sat right behind me, his knees grazing my back. The title screen gave us options: Arabian Nights, Treasure Island, Around the World in Eighty Days, Journey to the Center of the Earth. I chose the last one, pressing the sticky remote twice.
"Why that one?" Moans asked. "I can figure out all the others." At first, on the small grainy television, a middle-aged man and a guy around my age receive a secret letter describing the entrance to a remarkable destination. The scene cuts to the boy carrying a torch through the wilderness, excited and terrified, turning to the older man to ask a question. "I''ve seen enough." "You don''t want to know what happens next?" Moans lay back on the edge of the bed as I turned onto my knees. I couldn''t tell if he followed me or the film, if the cicadas called from outside the room or the jungle, if the laughter surrounded or came from us, or why as he lifted me onto his lap and covered my mouth with his palm the way he fucked me felt as if it had originated from somebody else. Moans fell asleep after he came inside me.
The sun went down. For a while, I lay in the crook of his arm, and then, without disturbing him, I used my phone to light a path to the patio outside, a novel in hand, to read. A guest from the adjacent room had done the same. He eyed me as I sat beside him, turning off the single overhead light in the umbrella. He untied his robe and let the wind blow it open. We whispered for a while with our novels spread-eagle on the glass table between us. The man had come to the coast to reset his mind to work on a play. As he told me this, he ran his fingers down my thigh.
Pleasure is the only true escape, he said. I sensed the playwright believed what he was telling me, even though it sounded like the bullshit artists say before they suck your cock. I stood. The playwright drew his finger down my navel to the tattoo. " Paradise ?" "Yes," I said. " Paradise ." "How was it?" "You mean how is it?" He looked at me the same way I looked at him. He wanted to believe me.
The night encased us as the ocean breathed on our necks. We could hear the dying parties, and we kissed as a breeze guided my lips to his. I put my fingers in his hair and felt my dick hit the back of his throat. He stayed there, his core contracting, trying to be quiet as he choked and slobbered and worked until he retched. At the sound, a light turned on in the window above him. I watched a man lower his shaved head into a running sink. When he stood, water dripped from him like a melted silver crown. The man opened the window, saying, "I see you''ve met my husband.
" With teary eyes, the playwright said, "We lost our youth." "Where''d it go?" "It was here until you arrived, and now the mosquitos are taking it from you as we speak." "They don''t bite me." Now, the playwright became sad, as if I hadn''t reached the age to stop believing my own lies. "Who are you?" the husband asked. "A neighbor," I said. "Our neighbor without a name," the playwright said. The husband opened the patio door and stepped out fully clothed.
We drank, they smoked, and neither kissed the other. They wanted me to spend the night, but I felt my time with them was over. I''d forgotten my key and had to climb through the open window and slipped into bed with Moans. He draped his arm over me and asked where I had been. I hesitated. He briefly opened his eyes and said, "You always look like you''re gonna say something, but you never do." Within moments, he was asleep again, and I was alone as the birds began to sing. At dawn, I had a cup of coffee by the pool.
I waited for the New York Times , checking to see if more stories of the men were printed. A doctor who cried in the break room spoke about what happened to him as an Eagle Scout, how he learned what he could achieve under extraordinary pressure. A man whose grandmother used to creep down the stairs when everyone else in the house slept. A woman who never knew what had happened to her was haunted by nightmares. I could hardly admit to myself that this was why I was here. As the ink paper bled over my fingers, the guests drifted across the pool on neon floats. They crumpled their speedos and tossed them to the deck. I felt my skin start to burn.
This was an invitation to get off the chair and spray sunscreen over my body, feel the spritz on my neck and my boyfriend''s hands on my back, or even a stranger''s, but the world in front of me fell flat. The more my skin burned, the less capable I became of disrupting the moment. The drifting strangers slowed. The wind died down. The sky was as blue as any other perfect conspiracy. For years, I wondered if I was alive. I lived in the alleged world. I thirsted and hungered for and craved other people, who recognized I was there, but every now and then, often without notice, I disappeared deep into my body.
I would enter a scene just like this, so cured of my own presence, with this heart buried deep inside the moment, that I could have been erased from it completely. Even.