Lydia Millet - Ghost Lights

“I’ve been drinking too much lately,” said Hal. He downed another two cups of water before he reached for the wine.

Slopping cup in one hand, the folding chair in the other, he went around the propane tank and the cooler and plopped the chair down in the sand to sit facing T. It seemed polite, though awkward.

In the trees around them there were the slight sounds of birds, maybe crickets. An insect landed on Hal’s arm, a mosquito, possibly, and he slapped at it. He could hear the faint plash of waves through the screen of trees. They were low, scrubby trees not much taller than he was — more like overgrown bushes, really. He let his head fall back on his neck: above him the sky was huge. The stars were more visible tonight. They went on and on.

“So how did you end up down here?” asked T. He was slicing an onion.

“I should be asking you the questions,” said Hal. “Are you kidding? I came looking for you, of course. To help Susan. And Casey. You vanished into thin air. Your business, you know — it’s not doing so well. You’re losing money. For starters. What gives?”

“You know,” said T., and shrugged, “the usual.”

“The usual ?”

“Change of priorities. I went on a river trip.”

“I know all that, the Monkey River. That guy who you were with? The guide or whatever? Dylan? His brother is worried sick about him. We found his watch at your campsite, maybe.”

“Delonn. Not Dylan. But yeah. That’s — I need to talk to his family about it, sooner or later. I’ve been keeping myself to myself. Marlo’s brought me some food and supplies while I lay low. Maybe not the best idea. Tactically. It looks bad, if anyone’s looking. But what happened was, our first night out, he was in his tent, I was in mine — we each had our own tent, you know? — and I must have been asleep when it happened.”

“What happened?”

“He died.”

“He died ?”

T.’s face was in shadow. Hal tried to make out its emotion.

“A heart attack, I think. A stroke, maybe an aneurysm. Something quiet, while he was sleeping. He was an older guy, Delonn. Maybe in his sixties. Still. There’d been this — earlier he had problems breathing, but he didn’t seem worried about it.”

“Jesus!”

“He was a tough guy, you know, pretty rugged. Carried more weight in his pack than I did. I found him in the morning and what I ended up doing was, I dragged the body back to the boat. I was in shock, I think. I panicked. The boat’s propeller broke after that and I ditched the boat. And the body with it. I tried to hike out on foot. Stupid, but that’s what happened. I got lost for a while. Finally I made it down to the coast. I don’t know if it was days or weeks, honestly. From there I hitched a ride to Marlo’s place and he brought me here. Short version.”

“It wasn’t in the boat, though. I mean, the body.”

“I know,” said T., a little vaguely. “I noticed that. Yeah. That’s a complication.”

Hal sat for a second, waiting. He wondered if T. was lying to him. Here, though, he seemed better than he had before. Hal liked him more. Maybe only because he was familiar — after all, Hal had practically even been willing, just a few hours back, to cozy up to the bohemians.

In a strange land you found yourself seeking. Afloat among the aliens, your standards were relaxed.

Anyway, like him or not, T. could still be a liar.

“Shouldn’t you probably tell someone?”

“Marlo was going to meet with whoever there was,” said T. “He was going to say I was recovering, that I would talk to them soon. I didn’t know. . anyway, but. It should be me. I should go talk to them, I should face the music. You’re right. Of course.”

“And you didn’t call anyone. How come you didn’t at least call Susan?”

There was a pause. T. seemed distracted, pondering.

“You like onion? Because I can chop it fine or leave it in these big chunks.”

“Whatever.”

Hal watched as he tossed the onion into the tin frying pan, pushed it around with the spoon.

“My wife,” said Hal a bit stiffly, “is devoted to you.”

“I’m sorry for letting her down. Hard to explain. Call it a mid-life crisis.”

“But you’re what,” said Hal. “All of, like, twenty-six?”

He took a slug of his wine. It was nice. The guy looked older at the moment, that was true, with the deep tan, the crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes and the uneven beard that gave him the look of a homeless individual. He could pass for forty, if you didn’t know.

“I’ve always done things too early,” said T. “When I was seven I was already thirteen. When I was in college I was already in my thirties. Youth passed me by.”

“Please,” scoffed Hal. “Give me a break.”

“It’s a mind-set, is all I mean. Partly.”

“My age, now,” said Hal, “that’s when you have a mid-life crisis. Fact I may be having one as we speak.”

T. poured the chili out of the pan, dividing it between a bowl and a can marked CHILI.

“I only have the one bowl,” he said apologetically, and held it out. “Here.”

Hal took it gratefully. He was ravenous. T. was eating too but more slowly, spooning his chili out of the can with a deliberation that seemed incongruous to Hal — almost graceful, even. He looked underfed but apparently was in no hurry to remedy the situation.

Gnats landed on Hal’s neck, or maybe they were sandflies — they bit lightly — but they were nothing to the hunger. He polished off the bowlful inside a minute.

“Bit more left, if you like,” said T., and handed over the frying pan.

“So what are you, uh, actually doing here?” asked Hal, after he’d scraped it up. “On the island?”

“I was having a hotel built,” said T., putting down his can and crossing his legs, leaning back. He held a scratched plastic mug with a coat of arms and some writing on it; Hal squinted to read it in the light of the lantern. There were four yellow lions on a red background. Faded words read CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY LIGHTWEIGHT ROWING CLUB.

He rowed for Yale .

“You didn’t row for Cambridge, did you?” Hal asked him after a few seconds, and quaffed.

“What? Row? — Oh, this? This isn’t mine. This, actually, was Delonn’s. It was in our camping stuff. I ended up with it. I didn’t really mean to.”

Hal was feeling the wine already.

“You go to Yale?” he asked.

“I went to a state school. Where my father went before me.”

A relief. Somehow it had seemed to Hal, back in L.A., that Robert the Paralegal was a pale imitation of T. — that maybe Susan saw in him a reflection of her employer, to whom she gave such fealty. Maybe Robert was only a stand-in for T., had hovered at the far edge of his suspicion. Now he found out even T.’s WASP credentials were nothing much. Somehow it was consoling.

In point of fact he himself was a WASP, if he wanted to be literal about it, and specifically a WASP with some recent German background. His mother, long ago, had flirted with genealogical research and once told him the branches of their family tree sprouted nothing but Englishmen, Germans and a few glum, dead Swedes.

Still, it was the WASPs and the Germans that most alarmed him.

“Sorry,” he said, “digression. You had a hotel here?”

“It was under construction. The storm destroyed it, though.”

“Oh, wow.”

“Half-destroyed it, technically, but it was totaled. So I’ve been demolishing it.”

Hal watched as T. poured wine into his plastic mug, emptying the bottle. Luckily Hal’s own vessel was still nearly full.

“Didn’t know you were quite so hands-on,” he said jokily. “What Susan said, you were mostly the brain trust. Not so much on the brawn side of things.”