Stephen Baxter - Coalescent

He backed away, his tunic rustling softly. “Now we share a secret.” He laughed, and his feet clattered on the stairs. She followed him into the daylight, but when she reached the ground, he had gone.

Miami Airport was a thoroughly unpleasant place. The queues of grimy adults and unhappy kids before the immigration barriers were as long and slow moving as I could remember in any American airport.

I’d taken many trips to the States over the years, for work, vacations — and in pursuit of my sister. After going to work in America some fifteen years before, Gina had come home only a handful of times, most recently, and even then grudgingly, for our father’s funeral. Her two boys were the only kids in the family — that I knew of, I reminded myself, thinking of Rosa. They had quickly become precious to me, no doubt through some mixture of sentiment and genetic longing. But to get to see them, every time I had to endure these red-eye flights and the ferocity of U.S. immigration controllers.

Outside the terminal, the weather seemed unseasonably humid and hot for October. Nobody was there to greet me, of course. I took a cab from the airport to my hotel in Miami Beach. I was only maybe twenty miles from my sister. But taking a hotel room was my habit. I’d long learned not to put unnecessary pressure on Gina by actually having her put me up, despite my having flown around the world to see her.

I generally stayed at Best Westerns, but for this trip I’d decided to spend a little money, and had used the Internet to find a room at a big spa hotel on the coast. The hotel’s air-conditioning was merciless, of course, and the temperature must have dropped twenty degrees as I stepped through the sliding doors to reception. But I was pleased with the plush, sweeping interior, the atrium done out in tiles of chrome and purple, the huge sunken bar, the glimpses of chlorine-blue pools beyond wide glass doors. Meeting rooms in bays clustered around the atrium; evidently the hotel relied a lot on corporate business, and I wondered if Gina got much work here.

My room was on the twelfth floor. I turned on the TV and briskly unpacked. The room was big, expansive, with a balcony that gave a view of the sea — at least it did if you crowded right up against the rail, and peered past the flank of the building and across a busy highway. It was late afternoon, but as always after a transatlantic flight it was eerie to see the sun still stranded so high above the horizon. I’ve always found flying tough.

I knew I should shower, have a drink, sleep as long as possible. But I felt restless, vaguely disturbed; right now my life seemed to be too complicated to let me relax.

I put on a fresh shirt, grabbed a handful of dollars, made sure I had pocketed my magnetic room card, and went out to the elevator.

I walked through the bar, through those big picture-window glass doors, and out to the pool area, a complex miniature landscape of white concrete. The heat was heavy, steamy, and my English trousers,

shoes, and socks felt ridiculously heavy. For sure I wished I had brought a hat.

There were only a few people by the pool. A group of thirty-something women, bronzed, in bikinis, a little overweight, had gathered on sun loungers and were cooing over images in a digital camera — housewives attending the hotel’s health club, perhaps.

There was an ungated gap in the rear wall of the pool area. I passed through and walked down a short path edged by long grass. I found myself on a boardwalk, a long wooden walkway standing over the sand and grass on low stilts. It stretched to my left and right, to north and south. Before me, beyond a broad stretch of pale gold sand, was the sea. There was a breeze in my face, hot but blustery. I could see nobody swimming, and a red flag fluttered over a small stilted structure, maybe a Coast Guard station. Hurricane Jonathan was rattling around the west Atlantic; it wasn’t expected to touch down on land but was creating swell and wind.

I wasn’t planning to swim anyhow.

I knew that if I walked south I would approach the town center, so I turned that way and set off. I walked briskly past a series of gargantuan hotels, great art deco confections of concrete in shocking pink or electric blue, like spaceships parked along the Atlantic coast. The boardwalk was easy on the feet, but I seemed to be the only stroller. A few people passed me, or overtook me, joggers or speed-walkers, mostly young professional-looking types, dressed in Lycra or sweat suits, tiny headphones clamped to their heads, their faces closed, unseeing. At regular intervals there were little open kiosks, with big buttons you could press to call for police help.

This was my first time in Miami Beach. Gina had moved here only nine months earlier. She ran a small company in partnership with her husband of fifteen years, a New Yorker called Dan Bazalget. They had met in New York during an electronics product-launch event; they had both been working in PR, for the same company on different sides of the Atlantic. They had already been in their forties, with the complicated pasts you acquire by that age; Gina had a childless divorce behind her, and Dan actually had a twenty-year-old daughter, whom I’d never met. But once they had glommed onto each other they had soon gone into business together, and then sailed into parenthood, producing two fine boys as easily as shelling peas, despite Gina’s age. Now, based on Gina’s Florida inheritance, they sold something called “conference visioning and management” — coordinating probably unnecessary conferences for senior business types.

My father the accountant had always mocked Gina’s job title. “I mean, can you take a degree in ‘conference visioning’?” he would ask. Well, actually, yes, you could. I didn’t begrudge Gina her thoroughly modern choice of career or her commercial success — not much, anyhow, given the usual sibling-rivalry envy for a sister who in every aspect of her life had always seemed to do better than I ever had.

When I had passed most of the big hotels I cut inland, passing through an alleyway. I crossed Ocean Drive, where even the police officers wore skintight shorts, to reach a main street called Collins Avenue. I bought a small tourist map for a few dollars from a drugstore and briskly toured Miami Beach’s highlights. There was an art deco area, a small district peppered with ornately decorated buildings — hotels, private homes, banks, bars, some set behind heavy security gates. The most beautiful building of all seemed to be the town’s main post office, a pointlessly grand edifice across whose magnificent floor queues snaked desolately.

I couldn’t quite get the city into focus. There was a faint sense of sleaze about the place, of a past of dirty money and menace — and yet somebody had made a determined effort to clean it up, as witness the alarm buttons on the boardwalk. And I knew my sister well enough to know she wouldn’t bring her kids to a place she couldn’t make them safe. Still, I was relieved to get back to the boardwalk, and the huge physical presence of the sea.

I never watch American TV. Those constant ad breaks make me feel hyperactive, as if I’ve been taking too much sugar. I ordered up a movie, a comedy, and a room service “snack,” bigger than most Sunday lunches back home, with a half bottle of Californian Chardonnay. I was asleep before the movie was over.

“George. Lovely to see you, et cetera.” She took my shoulders and actually gave me an air-kiss, her left cheek brushing mine, her lips missing me by a good couple of inches. Automatically I shaped up for a second kiss on the right, but I’d forgotten that’s the European way — in America you get just the one.