Robert Stone - Bay of Souls

Michael turned and saw that there were indeed people waiting to pass Emigration.

"I flew into Rodney. I don't think they ever gave me the thing," Michael said. "I've got to get on that plane." In fact it was absolutely the only thing on his mind and he was ready to kill, or to die, in the process of boarding it.

He was at the point of losing control when he saw Colonel Junot enter the terminal. The colonel saw him and came to the window.

"Pass this man," the colonel said. "This is my messenger."

Baron Samedi had departed from the customs officer, who mildly stepped aside. It had been a farewell message, a little game typical of Ghede.

Colonel Junot had come into the unadorned departure lounge with Michael. Shaking hands, he quickly turned aside.

"Uh-oh," he told Michael. "I see someone I don't wish to meet." He hurried out through the customs gate where he had come in.

Making his way to the last bench in the departure area, Michael saw Liz McKie standing beside the ladies' room. She looked extremely angry. Two island soldiers were with her. The soldiers by contrast looked happy and well entertained.

McKie saw Michael and called to him.

"Jesus Christ! What are you doing here?" she demanded.

"I guess I'm leaving."

"You guess you're leaving?" She stared at him for a moment and then said, "Watch this stuff." She was surrounded by computers, cameras and recorders, all packed away in cloth, Velcro-banded cases. "I have to go to the john and I'm not leaving my stuff with these bozos."

"We're insulted," one of the soldiers said, laughing at her. "We don't steal."

"That's right," the other one said. "We never steal from a friend of Colonel Junot."

"Where is Colonel Junot?" the first soldier asked. "Not coming to see you go?"

"Fuck you," McKie told the soldiers. "Watch that stuff like it cast a spell on you," she told Michael. "Don't let these characters near it."

"We have to come in the lavatory with you, miss," the first soldier said. "Orders!"

Before she could react, they were doubled up with laughter, dapping.

"I mean," Liz said to Michael, "keep an eye on it."

While Liz McKie was inside, the soldiers tried to decide whether to pretend to steal some of the equipment, drawing Michael into their game. In the end — probably, he thought, because he looked so disheveled and unhinged — they let it pass.

When she returned to her possessions, Michael wandered out to the veranda of the departure lounge, which was the only place to get fresh air. It was a restricted area but the sentry there let him out. He took in the wind of the island and of the ocean, the jasmine and burning husks, a touch of the rubber stench. From ever so far away — although it could only have been a few miles — he heard the drums. He tried to understand whether it was his life he heard beating there, and if it was his life, his heart, where it might be inclining. But the drumming was only itself, only the moment. In the flickering lights beyond the airport fence, he thought he saw the wheelbarrow, the tongue of the goat.

They boarded the plane and Michael saw that one of the Special Forces soldiers was a woman, bespectacled, pretty, with man-sized shoulders.

When Liz McKie tried to address the woman soldier, the soldier stared straight ahead and addressed her as "ma'am."

"Ma'am yourself, troop," Liz McKie said to her.

To further McKie's humiliation, she was seated just behind and across the aisle from Michael on the flight to Puerto Rico. The impulse to explain it all was too much for her and she had not added up the emotional tokens yet.

"I cannot believe this," she told him. "I mean, it's all so typical I can't believe it."

She had been persona non-ed out.

"I mean, not with paper, not to the State Department, but my ass is flung out. I mean, my friend — my friend, my lover." People stopped their own conversations to hear her.

"I mean, this is your U.S. Third World hype — screwing of the classic type, right. So there's corruption. And some right-wing official Americans are in on it, right, and their Argentine, Chilean colonel friends, the worst cabrones, but hey, that's cool. It's cool because they're rogue elements, they're not really us. Us are the good guys, us are the girl Green Berets, and we fix everything and we throw the bad guys out. Except we don't quite get the bad guys out and the good guys turn out to be not very different from the bad guys and, hey, it's all looking kind of the same as it was. And when you look, the rogue elements are gone, vanished, except not quite. And some idiot reporter buys into the good guys' scenario and what happens to her? I mean, I knew it! You know when I knew it? When I saw you! I thought, Who the fuck? And I knew things were screwed."

"Sorry," Michael said.

"And my friend Junot, your friend…"She shook her head, out of words for it all. "And that woman."

"Lara."

"Her."

Without whom, he realized all at once, he would live a life suspended on the quivering air, the beat of loss, moment by moment.

When they were coming down at San Juan, McKie spoke to him again.

"So maybe you got rich, huh? Maybe you'd like to talk about it?"

"No," Michael said.

"I saw the drums got to you," Liz said. "I know about that. Did you find God?"

"No," he told her. "It was the same, understand? What happened to you happened to me."

She shook her head, looked at her watch and began to cry.

ROOMS WITH BATH were available at the Student Union during the summer. Michael Ahearn rented one. Every day he used the pool at the athletic department. Often he swam hour after hour, amazing and finally unsettling the young lifeguards. After his swim he would go to his office and read himself to sleep in a chair.

Some floors of the Union building contained dorms. When term started in late August, the leaden quiet of the place exploded in adolescent riot. Sometimes, in the dead of night, the screams would make him think he was on the island again. The place he was afraid to name, even in his thoughts.

Arriving home the previous spring, he had immediately sensed Kristin's simmering anger. After three days of empty politeness she found the boarding passes for their flight to Puerto Rico, his and Lara's.

Then she permitted herself rage. In Paul's hearing, she said things to Michael he would not have imagined her saying. Her passion was startling, even to him. Crouching like an assassin, she delivered calculated, scalding, phosphorescent anger. It hurt to the depths of him.

"Conniving son of a bitch," she said. "You do not maintain a mistress on me, fella. Maybe your pals will think you're a sport. But I don't think you're a sport, I think you're weak."

She went on and he had nothing to deploy but grief. He had had time to realize what he had done to Lara. What he had done to Kristin seemed not nearly so bad but she seized it like a whip and beat him lame.

"Do you think I came to you with no dreams of my own? That all I wanted to do was plant roses? But finally I gave you everything. And everything involved you. Oh yes, I thought you were hot shit, fucker! I thought you were the beginning and end and nobody really knew how great you were but me."

"I wanted more," he said.

"Oh yes," she said. "Maybe you think I don't understand such desires? But I had a life to complete here. Our work and our child. And I thought when we got that taken care of — with a little luck — life would provide. And we would learn the trick of getting more. You and me. That was a key thing, ya? Us."

She put a wad of paper towel under the kitchen faucet and wiped her face.

"I thought, wait, it will come. Then you humiliate me with that creepy greasy whore. The Latin bombshell."