Dave Eggers: How We Are Hungry

This story is not about Pilar and Hand falling in love.

Once close to Alta, the road devolved from two lanes paved to one lane dusty and everywhere potholed. The cars each way weaved and ducked, passengers inside with their hands braced against the roof. It was ten miles of this, and it felt like hours before the trees and farms gave way to the shanties and shops that announced Alta. A combination juice bar and art gallery called Forget It, Sue. Then a recycling center. More plots for sale. The place was still raw, the road still dust. Barefoot boys on bikes and mopeds outsped the cars, better navigating the road’s holes, while women let groceries in blue-striped plastic bags pull their arms earthward. Just past a Best Western and on the right side of the road, a thin line of trees hid the beach, wide and flat, rippling into a delta berthing small boats of rotting wood.

The hotel where they’d agreed to meet was called the Shangri La, above the main strip, nameless. The town titled none of its streets, but there was a primary artery, the length of three city blocks, with most of the town’s shops and restaurants attached. The Shangri La, on the hill, was white, and shone like a monument against a teal blue sky. It overhung a small garden full of iguanas, snakes, and mice, its deck jutting its strong chin toward the ocean.

The owner, a fit and sunburned German named Hans, gave Pilar keys and directions to the room, No. 5, and while walking up the steps and then along the deck, past the pool, with a preposterous view of the big ridiculous Pacific to her left, the sun teetering above, the waves blithely carrying surfers in, she actually had the feeling, momentarily, that this was not, actually, her doing this, that in fact she was still in Chicago, or even Wisconsin, and was imagining this — that she was just inhabiting a daydream concocted during, say, a dimly lit afternoon salad-bar lunch at Wendy’s. It really seemed more plausible than the reality of her in this moment, actually walking barefoot around a pool shaped like a curling kitten, bordered in hand-painted tiles of orange and blue, now stepping over two teak-brown surfers on straw mats, on her way to a room, down a long white hallway with geckos scampering on the ceiling above, in a hillside seaside hotel in Costa Rica, which holds Hand, whom she’d known for seventeen years, who was still alive, and not only still alive, but here .

Pilar was worried that her back was oversoaked from the drive, that Hand would feel her moisture and be appalled. But when she opened the door and they grabbed each other and hugged, he was just as wet as she was. He smelled like pineapple and sweat. His chin was hot on her shoulder, his hair damp.

“No air conditioning here,” he said. He said it in a guttural Spanish accent. Pilar hoped he would stop.

“Oh,” she said.

“Jesss, eeet eeez veddy hot here, jess,” he said, and then sighed, giving up.

The room was high-ceilinged and open, with a kitchen, a breakfast nook, a bedroom a few steps up. A fan spun overhead, its pull string ticking with every two or three turns. The deck overlooked the pool and the town and then the ocean. She couldn’t believe it all.

“This is crazy,” she said.

“I know,” he said, now speaking like he normally spoke. She had known him since seventh grade.

The floor was tile. The whole place was tile. She had come to expect carpeting in hotels.

“That’s pretty normal down here, the tile,” Hand said. “Anywhere south of Texas is like that.”

There was a plunger in the corner of the room, with a handle that looked precisely like a dildo. She made a note to joke about it later. Hand was standing in the corner. A gust jumped through the open window and jumbled a chime over the doorway.

She stepped over to Hand and slipped her arms around his waist and smelled his smell. She closed her eyes and pictured her old kitchen and the wallpaper there, a pattern of Disney dwarves bubbled from heat and humidity.

They left her things in the room and bobbed down the white stone steps. Outside, in the sherbet light that soon enough, with a shrug, would relinquish the day to night, there were horses. Four, just downhill from the hotel: one standing still in the road, two sitting nearby in the long gray-green roadside grass, the fourth one, white (the others were black), standing by the hotel’s straight hedge, just west of the hotel’s cherry door. Pilar and Hand looked around for the owners of the horses. They were shod but had no saddles, no bridles. Four horses, all gaunt, alone. Every horse stared at Pilar and Hand, two people from Wisconsin.

“I almost forgot you were coming,” Hand said.

They were standing and talking while the horses watched.

“What does that mean?” Pilar said. She was scratching the top of her head with one finger, in a circular motion.

“I don’t know.” He stumbled for a minute, backtracking, explaining that he’d been looking forward to her coming, but that in the past twenty-four hours he’d spaced her arrival.

“You forgot it was today, or forgot completely?” she asked.

“Your hair is dark,” he said.

“It was winter where I was. You’re not going to answer.”

“Did it used to be so dark?”

“I don’t know. Didn’t it?”

They walked by the horses; the horses watched with mild interest. Pilar didn’t know what to expect from the horses. There was nothing remarkable about their appearance, but they gave her a chill and she wasn’t sure why. She had rarely seen horses unaccompanied or unfenced and they looked huge and sinewy and tightly wound. She was enchanted by them, the novelty of having them so close to their hotel, but at the same time she wanted them gone. The size of their eyes implied a wide but focused intelligence, and she imagined that they would take the first opportunity to break into their room and kill them both.

“There’s a woman here who runs on the beach every night,” Hand said.

Pilar waited for something else from Hand about the woman, or the running — some point to the story. Nothing came. He looked at her, then down.

“There are some rocks near shore that you have to watch for when you swim,” he said. “You want to swim now?”

Pilar didn’t. She wanted to eat.

The dirt road was barnacled with small rocks, and huge rocks, and where it was not it was dusty and uneven. It was not a long walk to the beach, but it was too long. After thousands of miles of travel to reach water, even this, a five-minute stroll, felt cruel. The beach, once they ducked under a tangle of trees, was wide and flat; the tide was out. A woman jogged by the shore as her dog ran near her, jumping suddenly, as if jerked upward like a dog-marionette. But otherwise the place was empty, which was good.

“Is that the woman?” Pilar asked.

“I think so,” Hand said.

“Are there other women who run on the beach at night?”

“I don’t know. But it’s dark.”

Pilar wanted to cut stomachs open with glass.

Hand was tall enough, and built well, with flat strong pectorals and arms that were toned and brown. He’d been a swimmer in high school. But he also had a look of country madness that everyone who knew him noted. It wasn’t there all the time — just when a subject had grabbed hold of his mind and he was trying but failing, like Lassie and the well, to communicate its urgency. His was a nimble mind, sleeping shallowly when sleeping at all — but there was a raggedness to his brain that contrasted strongly with his attention to what he thought were facts and numbers of great import. Handsome in a way that sometimes looked bland, but there was character there— a faint cleft in his chin, earlobes that drooped though had never been pierced, some gray lines in his blond hair — that gave him advantages and he knew it. The sideburns had come and gone and now were back, and this was a mistake.