Lydia Millet - Ghost Lights

“Are you kidding? Hal! Seriously. Are you kidding ?”

“Different, but rational. In his way. I mean, he can still string a sentence together. He doesn’t foam at the mouth or anything.”

“Well, but you don’t even know him. I mean, from before. Hardly. You wouldn’t know the difference. You said yourself, he had a breakdown. He had a near-death experience!”

Someone was knocking at the room door.

“Just a second.”

Brady, holding car keys.

“Phone with my wife. Give me a minute,” said Hal, and stood back to let him in. “Susan? I should go. The, uh, the man from the embassy is here. I need to talk to him.”

“He was going on about animals , Hal. Wild animals dying? I’m worried. What if he does something to himself before we can get help for him?”

“He won’t, Susan. It’s OK. Just sit tight. Can you try to do that for me?”

Brady patrolled the hotel room, picked up the remote and flicked off the TV. There was something overbearing about him, it seemed to Hal. He carried himself as though it was his own hotel room.

“I’m worried. He just doesn’t sound like the same person.”

“Maybe he’s not, Suze. Maybe he’s not. But does that have to be so threatening?”

“I’m talking about mental instability. You remember Eloise? Her son went down to the Amazon on a photo safari and took some malaria drug? He was like twenty-five and getting a Ph.D. in biology. Anyway the drug or the sickness drove him crazy. Forever, Hal. Forever . He had a psychotic break. He dropped out of grad school and his girlfriend left him. Now he wanders around Malibu carrying sand in his pockets and calling people ‘nigger.’”

“In Malibu?”

“White people.”

“You should chill out, honey. Stop worrying. There’s nothing you can do, he’s safe and sound, we’re both coming home soon. And listen, I promise. He’s not going to call anybody ‘nigger.’ I’ll go out on a limb and guarantee that.”

Brady was impatient. He was not paying attention. He stood with the room door half-open.

“OK,” said Susan, in a dissatisfied tone.

“OK. I’ll call you in the morning.”

•

As they drove to the party, Hal in the passenger seat wrestling with a broken seatbelt, it became clear that Brady had an agenda for the evening. It was unclear to Hal what that agenda was, but clearly there was one. He was purposeful in his movements. He drove fast. He was out for more than just a good time; he had a mission.

“You think T.’s doing OK in that place?” he asked, as Brady lit a cigarette at a stoplight.

It was already dark and the streetlights were on, surrounded by circling insects. Staring at a single light, he could see hundreds of them, possibly thousands.

His eyes smarted with the brightness. He turned away, blinking, and saw stubborn afterimages.

“He’ll be fine, he’ll be fine,” said Brady dismissively.

Hal found him irksome. Most of his smoke went out the window, but not all of it.

The afterimages of the streetlights were fading slowly.

“You ever spent the night in a jail around here?” he asked.

“It’s a holding facility,” said Brady, accelerating with a jerk.

“But how can we know what the conditions are? There’s no transparency! What if it’s a whole, you know, bitches-and-shivs kind of situation? Bend-over, rusty-razorblades-in-the-shower-type scene?”

Brady looked at him sidelong, one eyebrow raised.

“Relax. He’s going to be fine. You know, you seem a lot more uptight about it than he was, you realize that? Guy didn’t seem that worried to me.”

The cigarette dangled and jumped precariously as his lips moved.

But it was true, seemingly. No argument there.

Hal should have had something to drink before he met up with Brady. He didn’t like him, he realized. There was something sharp about Brady, something sharp and rancid.

Suddenly he longed for the company of Gretel. He liked Gretel. She was nice.

Germans, he reflected, were possibly not so bad. Even if they were a super-race, maybe they didn’t mean to be. After all, as national arrogance went, in his recollection from traveling, the French were far worse. And people often forgot that it was the Frogs, not the Krauts, who invented fascists. When people thought about the French, they thought of wine, the Eiffel Tower, the fatuous berets and painters on streets. They forgot these were the same guys who invented the whole fascist deal in the nineteenth century, then let the Germans run with it.

It was easy to be sucked into the thrall of a European. That much was true. German or French, English or Italian, even quaint, poor and Irish, there was something superior about all of them. They valued education, for one thing, which gave them a bit of a head start. They did not cherish ignorance like his own countrymen. For that reason — recently, at least — they were less destructive, megalomaniacal and brutal, for instance. Which might be seen as an advantage for them. On the other hand, their maturity could also be somewhat boring. In America adults acted like children; in Europe the children acted like small adults. Even the cornboys, though boyish enough in their activities, were more like miniature engineering students than carefree ten-year-olds.

Also, the lack of childish, wanton destructiveness failed to stand the Europeans in good stead when it came to world domination. Being smart, educated and civilized, and having learned some fairly significant lessons from their history, they had pretty much retreated from the world-domination forum over the past half-century and now were like a small band of AARP members watching the carnival from a distance and drinking nonalcoholic beer.

But as far as super-races went, the German women, at least, were warm and generous. He liked them.

The one he knew, anyway.

“Here we go. Bit of a walk. Nice beach house. No parking any closer.”

“Your friend Cleve coming?” asked Hal to fill the space as they got out of the car.

“Should be. Yeah. You know, see most of the same people at these things. Whole city’s what, sixty thousand bodies. You got a small expat community, you got your local figures. Same old. Except for the help. The help changes.”

Ahead of them was a large, white, blocky house surrounded by waving palms. A nice breeze had sprung up off the ocean. It was good to be here, after all, Hal thought with relief, if only for the breeze. There were people milling on a second-floor terrace, which was strung with lights.

“Pool, too,” said Brady. “Jacuzzi.”

“I didn’t bring my suit,” said Hal.

“No worries,” said Brady.

He followed Brady into the house, through an atrium full of waxy-leaved plants with huge flowers, up tiled stairs onto the terrace, where the drinks were. There was music, but he could not tell where it was coming from. People around, most of them tanned and quite young. Where were all the geriatric expats? They had to be around somewhere. People retired here, after all. There should be plenty of wrinkled old crones smeared with Coppertone. But instead there were only models and athletic types. Among them Hal would not shine.

A bartender, tables with candles in the center, and there: a topless woman in the hot tub. Already. She was on the other side of the pool, down off the terrace on the first floor, but he saw her. Her shoulders were brown but her breasts floated whitely on the water like twin buoys.

He encountered a lot of nudity, in this tropical location. For years, in his life, almost no nudity, only clothing. Clothing, clothing, clothing. Wherever he went, there seemed to be apparel. Although he lived in Southern California, and not far from the beach either, somehow he did not frequent the nude locations.