See You in Paradise

Brant Call was a pretty nice guy. He lived in a small rented house on a quiet street in the town where he went to college. He always shoveled his walk when it snowed, and he always said hi to passing neighbors, and through he was young (he'd graduated only a couple years before), he acted like he was 37, and everybody liked him for it.

And Brant liked that everybody liked him. When somebody told him how much they liked one or another of his good qualities, he reacted by striving to enhance that quality so as to become nicer still. Nobody ever pointed out his bad qualities—which included gullibility, impatience and a creeping smugness—because they thought it might upset him, and in this they were right. In Brant's world, people did not point out others' bad qualities. He grew up in the suburbs, took out old ladies' garbage and was named after a beach in New Jersey. He was not introspective. It didn't occur to him that being universally liked might be a bad thing, or even illusory.

He still worked at the college he'd attended, as managing editor of the alumni magazine of the business school. The year Brant started working there, the magazine had been rated one of the top five business school alumni magazines in America, and he took pride in this honor, though he didn't have much to do with it. He referred to the magazine as "we," as in "We gotta up our donations this year," and occasionally when he did this the person he was speaking to became confused and had to ask whom he meant by "we." He said this very thing once to a woman about whom the magazine was running an article, and the woman titled her head, smiled microscopically, tucked a blonde lock behind a pink ear and said, "We you, or we who do you mean?"

The woman was named Cynthia Peck. She was a senior at the collage, and her father owned one of the 50 largest corporations in America. The article was to be a rich-heiress's-eye view of the business school, in which Cynthia would be portrayed as being in training to assume her rightful position (as Leyton Peck's only child) at the helm of Peck, Inc. Brant had volunteered to write it himself because he hoped to secure a big, honking donation for the magazine, and the editor in chief agreed because the thought Brant's niceness might actually cause diis to happen. And so, at the end of an hour-long interview during which it became clear that Cynthia Peck was not going to be at the helm of anything complicated in the near future, he made the comment about having to up the dona-dons. And when she said, "We you, or we who do you mean?" he said, "We me, or I mean we us. The magazine. I was wondering if you, or rather your company—or I mean your dad's company—might consider donating some, you know, money, so we can go on doing what we're doing in terms of work, which is being one of the top five business school alumni magazines in America."

Cynthia Peck's tiny smile became a slightly larger smile and then a kind of smirk, and when the lock of hair fell over her eye again she didn't move it. Instead she peered around it, discreetly licked her lips and said, "Are you trying to ask me out?"

Brant almost said no. Instead he tried to blush and found that, to his surprise, his face was already hot and his head already half turned away, and he said, "Well..."

"Well what?"

"Well, I guess I am. You want to go out?"

"Be more specific."

"To dinner?

"More specific."

"My place?"

"Try again."

"A restaurant."

She raised her eyebrows.

"Seven Sisters?" he said, because this was the only place in town anybody could conceivably take the daughter of one of the richest men in America, a Frenchy sort of sit-down place up on the hill with turrets and flags and prices that could make your hair stand on end. And indeed the name made her sit up straight and nod her head in congratulations, and she asked, "When?" and he said, "Uh, tonight?" and she said, "Friday," and he said, "Friday." He asked if he should pick her up around eight, and she said eight-thirty, and he asked if she wanted to go anywhere afterward, and she said, "We'll see." Then she handed him a little card with her name, address and phone number printed on it and walked out the office door.

Later on, the editor in chief asked him how it went and would they be getting the money, and Brant, in response to both questions, said, "I have no idea."

•

Looking at her over dinner, Brant realized that he found Cynthia pretty attractive, though she was generally known on campus as the General's Horse because of her bulky frame and equine features: a broad nose, an elongated face and wide-set eyes. But her face was open and expressive, if not entirely intelligent, and she had nice hair, a sexy walk and a terrific bosom, the exposed cleft of which, invitingly peeping out from behind two unbuttoned folds of silk, he tried the entire evening to keep his eyes off. They talked about the colleage, about roommates they'd had, about New Jersey, where both of them had grown up (vastly different New Jerseys, sure, but they both used to drive an hour to visit the same mall). In fact, they got on just great, and after dinner they went back to her place and mashed on the sofa, and Brant got to stick his hand down her bra and the back of her underpants.

A sort of courtship followed. Brant and Cynthia were seen around together, holding hands and kissing on benches. The magazine got its donation, and Brant asked for and received a raise. Six monthis went by and graduation was coming, and Brant considered buying Cynthia an engagement ring. Ultimately he decided against it: He had to prove to her, somehow, that he didn't want her money. The probalem was, of course, that he did want her money, and this seemed wrong to him, though he was certain he would want her wheather she was rich or not. This was entirely different, this elasticized guffaw, and he didn't much care for it. She looked like Seabiscuit, for crying out loud. Of course, her being rich was part of what made her who she was and was the reason he met her in the first place, and so trying to extricate her wealth from his affection was pointless—and yet he tried it anyway. Of course.

In May Brant got his suit dry-cleaned and went to her commencement. It took place in the football stadium. The speaker was Ellen DeGeneres. This had been a controversial choice for many reasons, but she didn't talk about being a lesbian or about being on TV, and everyone seemed very calm and attentive. For most of the speech, Brant scanned the rows of seniors with the binoculars he'd brought along. When he finally found Cynthia, she was whispering and giggling with her friends. He watched her whishper and giggle for the rest of the ceremony.

That night her father threw a party at Seven Sisters. Brant had rented a tux, but when he arrived he realized that nobody else was wearing one. So he went home and put his suit back on and arrived late to dinner. There were 10 large round tables filled with people just getting started on their glasses of wine, and one of them contained an empty chair. Next to the chair was Leyton Peck, and on his other side sat Cynthia, looking not just attractive but pretty, her skin ruddy from the sunny commencement, her eyes subtly made up, her lips lipsticked. She saw him and motioned him over, and he took his place next to her father.

Peck was in the middle of a story to which everyone was intently listening, their shoulders thrown forward over their plates, their faces frozen into expectant grains. Peck spoke in a cigar-roughened baritone, his hands curiously out of sight beneath the table, which Brant felt privileged to know was the result of prematurely blossoming liver spots. This small bit of inside information enabled him to listen to the story with something approaching the appropriate level of attention.

"And so I say to the guy, 'Look, I know this task sounds boring, but the reason our company has the number one industrial-coatings division in America can be summed up in two words: quality control. So what I need you to do is keep your eye on each patch of paint through every stage of the drying process." The guy nods, like he's getting it all, so I keep on talking. 'Drying doesn't just happen; there are a series of crucial aridity thresholds that are passed, and any number of microscopic fissures can appear. These fissures close quickly, but they negatively impact the long-term stability of the coating. So I want you to get your face right up on there and make sure no cracks appear and disappear. If any develop, you mark it there on your patch diagram, and below each crack you detect I want you to mark its duration. Have you got that?" Okay, sure, the guy's nodding, nodding, it all sounds very important to him, right? So I tell him, 'Each of these cans behind you represents a production run. I need you to test every one of them; the paint dries hard in twon and a half hours, so you'll be able to do three a day. So get to work.'"

Peck looked around the table, faintly smirking, for several seconds before he delivered the punch line. "The guy watched paint day for two and a half monthis!"

Brant laughed along with everyone else, but mostly he watched Cynthia laugh. He was shocked to discover that he had never seen her laugh before (not with true abandon, anyway—giggling didn't count), which is to say that he himself had never made her laugh. Well, why not? He was funny, right? Couldn't he do a wide range of voices, including Old Jewish Lady, Old Black (countinued on page 146)Paradise(continued from page 86) Guy and Duck? Wasn't he good at sneaking up on squirrels and then shouting "Booga-booga-booga"? Didn't the own the entire run of Monty Python's Flying Circus on DVD? He could, he was, he did! But he had never seen Cynthia like this: her hands clutching her cleavage, her mouth gulping air, her eyes wrinkled shut like a prizefighter's. She looked...indecorous. He was loath to imagine what kind of hideous air-guitar faces he made when they were porking, but as for Cynthia, she always looked serene, sleepy, disappointingly pleased, as if there might be a hidden camera somewhere recording the moment for inclusion in some kind of X-rated home furnishings catalog. This was entirely different, this elasticized guffaw, and he didn't much care for it. She looked like Seabiscuit, for crying out loud.

It took a couple of seconds for the hilarity to wane and for the guests to realize that they would now be expected to amuse themselves. During this awkward silence, Peck turned to Brant and, loudly enough so that others should hear, said, "You must be that Brant."

"Yes!" Brant replied brightly.

The two started at each other for a moment, and in that moment Brant saw his chance with this man roar past—flag-waving revelers shouting out of bunting-underslung windows—and recede into the distance. It was gone before he even knew what it was, a distant speck leading a dust cloud.

Peck was smiling at him. Brant had seen this face before, of course, in flash photographs in magazines or pen-and-inked onto the front page of The Wall Street Journal; it was familiar but unmenorable, like a second-rate old pop song. And the eyes: You'd expect the eyes of a man like this to be direct, penetrating, alive, but instead they were furtive, blurred, facing in slightly different directions. The skin was sallow, blotched, creased; the cheeks cadaverous. But the forehead! This, Brant thought, was what did all the work, this gleaming hemisphere that looked like it had been dragged here by a glacier. It bore neither hairs nor pores, this wall, and behind it the killing thoughts cozied up against one another. As Brant gazed at it, the mouth beneath it opened and words came out: "Perhaps we ought to shake hands, Brant."

"Oh, sure!"

Peck took Brant's hand but took it limply, making Brant's strong grip, intended to express a marriageable massculine confindence, instead seem like a withering critique of the old man's waning virility. Peck acturally winced, and Brant jerked his hand away. "Uh, I ought to thank you, sir, for the----"

"Please," Peck said, secreting the hand back under the table, "there's no need to grovel. Now, Brant."

"Yes, sir?"

"You're diddling my daughter."

"Yes, sir."

"You're thinking of marrying her, right?"

"Uh, yes."

"Getting yourself a piece of the family fortune?"

"Well, that's----"

"Don't be ashamed, Brant. That's how I got started on mine. I took one look at Cynthia's mother, at that stunning horse face and that glorious udder, and I said to myself, 'There's a 24 karat cunt if I ever saw one.' You can believe I got in there but quick."

There was nothing Brant could say to this. If he protested, he would be branded a liar; if her agreed, he would be a prick; if he said nothing, he would be a weakling. He said, "Uh-huh!"

"But I'm not a pussy, Brant, and neither are you. I had to work for my supper, and so will you.I did my time at her father's company, and so will you."

"I will?"

"Yes. You're going to man the home office."

"I am?"

"Yes. You're going to become chief of operations at headquarters."

Brant didn't get it. He said, "In New York?"

Peck laughed. It was what he wanted to hear. "Guyamon."

"Guyamon?."

"It's a Lesser Antilles. A tax dodge. We have to have an office there. Staffed by a staff of one. The job is currently occupied, but if you say yes, he's fired." Peck removed a cell phone from his pocket—a rather large one by present standards, late 1980s vintage, a charming affectation. "If you say no, you can get the hell out of my daughter's graduation party, and if you ever again so much as fondle a tit I'll have all your arms broken. And don't think I can't do it."

Brant looked past him to Cynthia, who, though theoretically engaged in a conversation with an avid middle-aged couple, was glancing his way, her eyebrows, expectantly arched, her mouth tilted in a hopeful, nervous smile. To be honest, for the whole night up until now, he was not feeling super about Cynthia. The entire affair had cast a tawdry light on her; she did not seem worth all the hoopla, which in turn felt excessive. She had begun to seem like a passing fancy, unfair as that was. But now, after staring at her father's creepy mug for minutes on end, Brant experienced a loosening of critical faculties and saw Cynthia as lovely and strong, and remembered her playfulness, her sexual enthusiasm and her beautiful car, and suddently he felt that he could not do without her. Something about her laught, the one her father had drawn from her, made him hesitate, but it wasn't enough. He wanted her. Hell, he loved her! He turned back to her father. He said, "I'll do it."

"Great," Peck said without much enthusiasm and pushed two buttons on the phone. "Serkin? Peck. You're fired. The plane leaves at seven P.M. Thursday. Get on it or you're stuck. Good-bye." He pushed another button and then two more. "Book Brant's flight," he said and hung up.

"Go home," he said now to Brant, tucking the phone back into his jacket pocket.

"Home?"

"To pack. You're leaving tomorrow. A car will pick you up at eight. Good luck." He cleared his throat and fell upon his meal, which had been placed before him by a napkin-draped arm.

"But don't I----"

"Go," muttered Peck through a mouthful of broccoli. "Don't worry about the details. A packet will be waiting for you in the car. Go ahead, kiss your honey and vamoose."

He rose, went over to Cynthia. "I have to go," he whispered in her ear.

"So you said yes?"

"Yes."

"Oh, Brant!" she said and craned her neck to kiss him. When he hazarded a glance at her father, he could see that he was paying no attention at all.

•

He left a message for his boss on voice mail. "I'm sorry," he explained. "Peck's making me take this job. I'll send you an e-mail." But he wondered if there would even be e-mail on Guyamon, or restaurants, or television. He would miss restaurants and television—would miss delivery food, football. But surely Guyamon had these things—it was the Antilles, it was a tourist destination. Probably there would be cool mixed drinks served at rattan taverns on the beach. There would be friendly natives in colorful shirts and drunk Americans and crazy birds that made crazy sounds. "Don't worry about your house,"above your house," a voice had said on his ansering machine when he got home from the commencement dinner. "Don't worry about anything. It will all be taken care of. Bring only those things you can't do without." For Brant, these were: his property of shirt from the business school, his Bob Marley CDs (and wasn't Guyamon near Jamaica? maybe he ought to have an atlas), a picture of his mom, a picture of Cynthia (presented to him on his birthday, it was taken by a famous fashion photographer Brant had never heard of and tucked into a neat silver frame) and a toothbrush. He brought along three suits and seven shirts, as well. All the next morning he tried to get in touch with Cynthia, but she wasn't home. He left five messages. His boss called him and pleaded. He called his mother and sister, both of whom told him he was nuts. That was okay. In fact it was great! He felt, briefly, as if he were on the threshold of a fabulous future. "We thought he was nuts, but in the end Brant was right."

A dented Lincoln picked him up; the driver wore an old-fashioned driver's hat and called him sir. He checked in at the airport, got on a plane and flew first to New York, then San Juan. There, a gangly black man wearing aviator sunglasses (and why not? he was an aviator) led him across a steaming tarmac to a little four-seater with a picture of a turkey stenciled on the side.

"What's with the turkey?" Brant shouted over the buzz of the engine, a buzz that seemed somehow insufficient.

The pilot pointed to his ear, shrugged. In an hour they were above Guyamon, Circling what appeared to be a volcano. Smoke was issuing from it in long windless streaks. The air was hot as hell, even inside the plane. Brant was pitting out big-time. It was evening. They landed on a cracked strip of concrete, the pilot searing all the way in. Brant shudered in his seat and conked his head on the roof.

"Hey, man," he asked the pilot as he got out, "that thing's inactive, right?" Meaning the volcano.

The pilot laughed good and long.

There was a car here, a jeep actually, U.S. Army issue as far as Brant could tell, repainted with what looked like yellow latex house paint. The driver was a fat white man wearing a spotless white shirt and a gigantic straw hat.

"You gonna need a hat for that bald patch," he said.

"I don't have a bald patch," said Brant. "Do I?"

The drive took half an hour. They traveled a mudded and potholed road to the base of the volcano, then turned right and edged around it. There were a lot of trees and ferns, except in the areas where fresh lava had mowed them down. In places, the lava covered the road, and the jeep bumped jauntily over it. At last they arrived somewhere—a small stretch of paved cement before which stood a long row of cinder-block huts, about 15 in all. They'd been built 20 or so years ago and since then had been treated variously, some clearly abandoned and the windows and doors removed, some dolled up like vacation cottages. The jeep stopped in front of a middling one, its terra-cotta roof cracked and mossed, its walls in need of paint. The driver didn't bother turning off the engine. He handed Brant a key. Brant took it, then waited for instructions.

"You're supposed to get out," the driver said.

"What then?"

"Then I leave."

When the jeep was gone, Brant stood before the door, sweating. He put the key in the lock and turned it. The door creaked open.

The place had been ransacked. The mattress was slashed, stains that appeared to be red wine covered the walls. A dresser that stood at the foot of the bed seemed to have been urinated in. And in the middle of the floor sat a small pile of human feces, holding in place a hand written note that read, "Enjoy the tropics, whore!"

•

A few days later, thought, Brant was feeling pretty good about the whole thing. The cottage was equipped with a telephone, a computer, a fast Internet connection and satellite TV. He had spent most of his time so far watching baseball games, talking to friends in America and enjoying soft-core pornography. He'd never liked pornography before. He hated to cave in to such base desires, but there didn't seem to be any girls here, and nobody he knew was likely to burst in on him, and so from the computer's tiny speakers could be heard, at all hours of the day, the quiet moans of nude actresses as they masturbated before the masturbating him. Three times daily a little truck came clanking by, and the denizens of the cottage row—six in all—would amble out of their dens and eat the food their respective companies had paid for. There were burgers and french fries and imported beers. There were omelettes and apples—apples! in the Antilles!—and DoveBars and club sandwiches. The six men were always in because they all had to answer the phone if it rang, although the phones never rang. After the truck left, they would stand around and talk, clutching their brown paper bags of loot. They didn't introduce themselves to Brant but acted like he'd been there for a hundred years.

"See the Yanks?"

"Nah. Drooling over Nudie Village."

"Ya see the chick with the giant thatch?"

"Hell yeah!"

"What'd ya get today?"

"Ham."

"Everybody got ham."

"I got yesterday's Molson if anybody wants it. I hate Molson."

"Hell yeah, I want it."

"What'll you give me, then?"

It took Brant a couple of days to find the courage to jump in, but once he did he was one of the guys. He caught a couple of names—Ron, Kevin, Pete. Pete was a cheerful man of 30, thick around the middle, with dark eye bags that seemed genetic rather than circumstantial. He held down the fort for an agribusiness conglomerate. One afternoon Brant was left alone with him after the others had gone home. Brant said, "So does anybody go to the beach? Like, on breaks?" For he was allowed breaks, one hour out of every eight, and he had Sundays off. Sunday was tomorrow, his first here.

"There's a path out back. But it isn't much of a beach. Like 10 feet; the rest is rocks."

"Is there a bar or something? In town?"

"No town. But there is a bar."

"Wanna go sometime?"

The question seemed to send shooting pains into Pete's head. He winced. "Ah, it's kinda far, and there are no girls."

"Oh."

So on Sunday Brant went to the beach, and Pete was right, it sucked. The rocks were sharp, and everything stank of fish. He went home, dejected. It had been only four days, and he could feel himself, his personality, shrinking to more or less nothing. He was Friendly Brant! He needed to greet passersby, to shake their hands! He wished there were some leaves to rake, some weadherproofing to do. But there wasn't any weather here. A little rain, a little sun. A little rain, a little sun. By noon he had already jerked off twice and played 40 games of Donkey Kong. He decided to go visiting. He washed his hands and walked down to Kevin's place. Kevin had seemed okay to Brant. He told a joke once after Breakfast Truck. He had a 1990s beard.

He knocked. "Yo, Kev!" he said.

From behind the door came sort of a muffled mumble that Brant thought was an invitation to enter, but when he opened the door Kevin was busy covering his and another man's (Brant hadn't gotten his name) naked, sweating bodies with a sheet.

"Buzz off, asshole!"

"Sorry, dude!"

So much for dropping by. He had begun to prepare himself mentally for another encounter with his girl of the hour, Mandy Mounds, when he heard an unfamiliar noise coming from inside his cottage. What the hell was it? He opened the door and found that the sound, a kind of urgent, grating buzz, was emanating from his phone.

"Hello?"

"I got a surprise for you!" The voice, though drunk, was recognizable as Cynthia's. It was coming to him through a haze of crackling interference.

"Hon bun!"

"I am having something delivered to your door," she said. Something about her tone seemed almost sinister, like the duplicitous sexpots in James Bond movies. He had to admit he liked it.

He said, "Where are you? You sound so far away." Duh!

"I'm on my cell. In a—whoop!—car."

"Isn't it illegal to talk on the phone while driving?"

"It's illegal to drive drunk, too, dummy. But I'm not driving."

"So what are you sending me?"

"S' Posta be a surprise."

"Is it delicious?"

"Yyyyes!"

"So you ear it?"

She snorted. "No, dipshit. You do." And with that she hung up.

Well. That was unproductive. He figured if she was sending the present now, he'd get it in what, two weeks? He booted up the computer and a couple minutes later Mandy Mounds filled the room with her delighted squeaking. He'd just gotten his shorts off when his door flew open and Cynthia came roaring in, hiking her sundress up to her waist. "You got yourself all ready!" she said, climbing on, and for 10 or so minutes it was difficult to distinguish the sounds she made from the ones coming out of the speakers. Then they were finished and lay on the bed, unable to stop perspiring. At the computer desk, Mandy Mounds said, "More! More! More! More!"

"Scuse me," said Cynthia, and she staggered naked across the room to switch off the computer. But first she paused, turning her head this way and that, checking out the competition. "I got better legs," she said.

"Sure."

"And her boobs look like saddlebags."

He didn't have much to say to that. She turned everything off. "I bribed Daddy's people. They bring me down here whenever I want." She hopped back onto the bed, sending him several inches into the air.

"But this is the first time you've been down here."

"Right. Hey, you wanna go to town?"

"There is not town."

"Who told you that?" she said.

They went to the other side of the volcano. The fat white guy drove them there. The little jeep shuddered and rumbled around lava flows and fallen trees, tossing them from side to side against the doors of the jeep and each other. Cynthia laughed the entire trip until they arrived at a little tent pavilion at the edge of what would have been a tourist paradise if any tourists were there. Instead there were handsome black people in loose-fitting clothes, dancing to the music from a little amplified calypso band, and beyond them was a bar that was little more than a rusted metal cart covered with bottles and plastic cups, and beyond that was a dirt road leading to a lot of little houses. Cynthia paid the driver with a thick stack of bills, which he folded and stowed like a pro. She told him to wait. He said, "I'll be easy to find," and lurched into the fray.

They danced and drank all afternoon and then ate parts of some kind of giant pig roasting on a spit, and they are some kind of spicy thing wrapped up in leaves and some sort of reeking but impossibly sweet fruit, and then they danced and drank some more, and the people, the villagers, didn't seem to mind their being there. Cynthia paid for everythink and then some, handing people money at the slightest pretext—the band for playing something more up-tempo, the bartender for giving her a clean cup, a random bystander for letting her get ahead in the roasted-pig line. Soon after dark she took Brant by the hand and led him into the woods, where she fell to her knees at the base of a palm tree and puked, and then when Brant bent over to help her up, he puked as well. Then they sort of fell over on their way back, then they seemed to be asleep for a while, then they got up and found the jeep, which the driver was asleep in. They woke him up and he drove, drunk, back to the cottage row. Cynthia and Brant stumbled into his cottage and collapsed on the bed and woke up at noon. They tried sex but were too queasy to finish.

All day Brant lay half in and half out of sleep. At some point he opened his eyes to find Cynthia staring at his face, as if looking for something she'd misplaced. When he woke again, she was gone. Brant noticed the voice mail light blinking on his phone. He picked up the receiver, supporting himself with a trembling hand, and punched in his code.

The first message said, "If you aren't there in 15 minutes, you're fired."

The second message said, "If you aren't there in 10 minutes, you're fired."

The third said, "Five minutes."

The fourth: "You're fired. Your plane leaves at seven P.M. Miss it and you're stranded."

It was already 7:35.

•

Back home, behind his desk at the alumni magazine, the sounds of neighing, whinnying co-workers interrupted his concentration, causing him to fumble his pleas to donors, to forget the phone numbers he was dialing. He had to stand up in his cubicle and address the crouching, tittering crew in a strained, pleading voice: "Look, you guys, it isn't funny, okay? I was stranded for almost a week with no home, and I don't think I would be laughing right now if it was you it happened to." He thought about quitting—that would show them—but the thoughts never got much past the vengeful-fantasy stage. Besides, you never got anything out of losing your cool. People respected you for taking their shit. He just decided to take it, and he took it, and eventually, though he couldn't have told you when, the whole thing would just up and blow away. The day after Cynthia left, he was awakened by his replacement, a man, or rather a guy, about his age, deep-voiced, clean-cut, sweating respectably little in his white oxford shirt. "I beg your pardon," he said. "I was under the impression that this was to be my cottage."

Brant had not given his next move much thought, beyond stopping by one of the other cottages and asking how often the plane came. Not very often, he learned. Now he gathered his things and shoved them into his big whìle the new guy checked out the computer. "May I erase these files?" he said, clicking around aimlessly.

"No," said Brant. "If you do, the computer will melt."

He took his sutis—never removed from their garment bag—and slung them over his shoulder. Then he walked around the volcano to the pavilion, looking for the locals' party. It took all day to get there, and when he arrived he found that the tent had been taken down and everyone was in their houses. He sat on the paving stones, where he had danced two nights before, and panted, his tongue thick and dry as a towel. He almost cried, he was so sad. Eventually he got up and knocked on somebody's door and blurted out the whole story, and the family that lived there gave him a drink of water and let him sleep on their floor.

They were nice, this family—a man, a woman, two little girls. They spoke English but mostly said nothing at all. They sat around all day making things—the man, thin and dark and thickly bearded, carved driftwood into interesting little sculptures, and the woman, who might have been the most beautiful human Brant had ever seen, embroidered miniature tapestries that served as the facing for the macramé shoulder bags the girls made. Every once in a while they all paused for a meal—fish and fruit, delicious beyond imagining, which they shared with him—and in the evening they watched the sun set, visited their neighbors, drank homemade beer made from bananas and generally had a good, solid time. Each morning a man burdened by giant army duffels arrived on a bicycle, and forms were filled out and exchanged, and the things the village produced were stuffed into the bags and taken away to be sold to tourists.

Through all this, Brant did basically nothing. He had a fever and the shits, slept in the daytime and lay awake nights gasping for breath. He slept on the floor next to the girls' bed and listened to their indecipherable whispers, to their quiet laughter as they talked themselves to sleep. Eventually his host told him that the plane would come the following day and the jeep would go only as far as the cottage row (he called it the Business Village), so he had better get back. Brant thanked the family profusely; he told them he would repay their kindness.

"Like, in money, I mean," he added.

"American dollars."

The man smiled. "No need for that."

"Seriously, no, I will."

The man shook his head. "Don't worry. We are rich."

"Yes, of course," Brant said, shaking his hand. "I can see that your lives are very rich here. Thank you."

"No," the man said, "I mean we are rich. Your corporations pay us money. The cottages are ours." He smiled. "I could, what is it you say, I could buy and sell you a hundred times."

"Oh," Brant said, dropping the man's hand.

"Oh," the man repeated in apparent mockery, though his voice, his face, retained their earnestness.

Brant walked all the way back, fortified by a canteen of water the family had provided. When he got to his old cottage, he knocked and entered. His replacement was sitting in the swivel chair, watching a Mandy Mounds video. His hand shot out and turned off the screen.

"What do you think you're doing!" he shouted.

"Relax."

"This is my cottage!"

"I'm just gonna sit here by the fan until the jeep comes, all right?"

"No you're not!" the replacement said, his arms flailing. He had cut off his chinos and the sleeves of his shirt.

I should have shat on the floor, Brant thought, while I had the chance.

In the end, he sat next to the road and dozed. The sound of the jeep woke him up. The fat guy unloaded the sack dinners and demanded money for the ride to the airport. Brant forked over what he had left. He was back home by morning, his house (thankfully, he had retained the lease) exactly the way he had left it. He took a shower, curled up in the hot and musty bed and slept until the middle of the next day.

And that, he decided, was that. He got his job back, having after all secured the magic donation from Leyton Peck—who had not, contrary to Brant's worst fears, reneged on the deal. He reclaimed his cubicle, endured the jokes and tried to forget about Cynthia. He stayed off the Internet and enjoyed the cool weather.

At some point guilt got the best of him, and he tried to write a thank-you note to the family who had helped him through that terrible week. He managed a few lines about how grateful he was and how maybe someday they would meet again, and stuffed it into an envelope and then sat at the kitchen table trying to figure out how the hell to address it. He got as far as

"The family, First cottage, behind the volcano, Guyamón"

before muttering, "Fuck it" and tossing the whole thing in the trash. And then he had a change of heart. He reached into the trash can, picked out the crumpled paper and smoothed it flat, then he dropped it into the recycling bin. After that he felt a lot better.

This was entirely different, this elasticized guffaw, and he didn't much care for it. She looked like Seabiscuit, for crying out loud.

"Don't worry about the details. A packet will be waiting for you in the car. Go kiss your honey and vamoose."