Justin Taylor - Flings - Stories

“Yeah,” Danielle said. “Let’s do whatever we want all the time.”

Colin shut the door, put his face up to the window, winked once, then stood upright and slapped his hand on the trunk. The driver hit the gas. Danielle was drunk and alone on the wrong side of the planet, a strange city streaking past a window that might as well have been a movie or computer screen. Or maybe, she thought, the window was a camera and she was the one in the movie: The radio blares Chinese pop music. The pretty girl slumps alone in the backseat as highways yield to mountain roads curving through foreign dark. Cut to:

Danielle woke up hungover, popped a coffee pod into the Keurig, hit the button, held her head while the machine wheezed and clugged. She sat on the porch with her mug and stared out at the bay. It was late morning, hot and hazy. She took a long shower, then went back to sleep. When she woke up there was a BBM from Colin: “Heyagain. Hike this weekend if yr free?”

“Why not tomorrow?” she fired back. “Not like my old man’s there to crack the whip.”

“Touche but 2morrow no good. Could do thurs tho. Meet at Central Pier, 1230. U need directions?”

“I can always use direction,” she wrote. Thinking, If this doesn’t do it.. .

They took the one o’clock ferry to Lamma Island, disembarked at Yung Shue Wan, a village of seafood restaurants and narrow poured-concrete homes on narrow roads. Men drove puttering flatbeds the size of golf carts, hauling stacks of pressboard and sections of pipe. Frayed strips of sun-bleached tarp rose in the hot breeze like fingers. Construction dust rimed branches and fronds. They walked past cloudy fish tanks full of razor clam, lobster, eel, and prawn.

The walking path would take them south across the ridge of the island along Ha Mei Wan Bay, which was scenic despite a three-stack coal-fired power plant that, like a dark spot on the retina, occupied a small corner of every otherwise perfect view. (Colin said it powered all of Hong Kong — Danielle thought reflexively of the frigid air forever bleeding from the storefronts all over town.)

They made their way out of the village center, wound through the trees, past the mouths of cart-scale driveways that led to tucked-away bungalows. Danielle had a Nalgene in her satchel. She unscrewed the cap, took a big swig, offered the bottle to Colin, who accepted it with evident gratitude. “There’s nobody out today,” he said as he handed the bottle back to her. “I bet we don’t see another person till we get to Sok Kwu Wan.”

“Lucky us,” Danielle said.

They emerged from the forest — or was it jungle? Or were both these terms too grandiose? Was it maybe just some trees? They mopped their foreheads on their sleeves, walked over green slopes dotted with broken white stones. Danielle said that the landscape felt Scottish and when he laughed at her she faked a little pout. They took the optional detour up Mount Stenhouse and high-fived at the viewing platform, thrilled to have found a vista untroubled by the power plant. Danielle wanted to take a picture together but he got weird about it, like employing the technology of the camera phone would somehow tarnish their experience of nature. She was about to call him out on his affected Luddite bullshit when it occurred to her that he must be worried about people from the office, her father, seeing the picture, so she put her BlackBerry away and finally, finally, he kissed her. They fooled around like high school kids up there at the top of the path.

The descent took them through stinking marshes and more wooded land, then finally into a village that seemed a mirror of the one they’d set out from, though this Tin Hau temple was a little bigger and had a turtle pond. The turtles had red markings on their pointy, wizened heads. They paddled around their oval pool and swam through algae and bumped into lily pads. They hauled themselves slowly from the water. With their webbed feet and small claws they struggled for purchase, then laid themselves out on the hot gray stone.

They took the ferry back to Central, then a cab to Colin’s building. In the elevator they saw themselves reflected in the dull gold finish of the doors. Danielle thought they looked like they were trapped in amber. The elevator sighed to a stop and the doors slid open. There were shoes on a rack in the foyer of his apartment: loafers, sandals, little blue sneakers with Velcro straps, a scuffed pair of mary janes. As Danielle knelt to unlace her own sneakers she noticed a framed photograph on the far wall — Colin, a bottle blonde (the eyebrows gave her away), and a little boy. They were all wearing white golf shirts and khakis on a lawn somewhere, big grins, soft-focus lake and tree behind them.

“How old’s your son?” Danielle asked, rising barefoot.

“About to turn seven,” he said. There was pride in his voice. “That picture’s a few years old.” Then he paused, as though having suddenly remembered who she was or, maybe, who he was. “Listen,” he said, “should I be worried about something? Because just tell me if I should be.” Danielle considered his question. She could see clearly the threads of gray she’d inferred at the bar, and also that he’d missed a spot of stubble around his Adam’s apple when he’d last shaved. Had his family left yesterday or just this morning? All his scrupulous duplicity was revealed now, and her father had been the last thing on his mind.

“Oh, I’m nothing to worry about,” Danielle said. They stripped their hiking clothes off and got into his shower together. When they got out he put their things in the wash and gave her a robe to wear. It was a man’s robe, thankfully, one of his own. She liked feeling small in it. They stood in their robes and watched dusk fall over the island and the docked boats and the ones at anchor and the land on the other side. Buildings on both sides of the harbor lit up their fronts and began to beam lights off of their roofs in an elaborately choreographed sequence. This was the Symphony of Lights, a nightly public spectacle that Danielle had read about it in her guidebook but hadn’t yet seen. She thought of the power plant on Lamma, and again of those storefronts in Kowloon. But who was she to condescend, to think she knew what was best, to judge what other people had decided was right for them?

I am Danielle Melman , she thought. Long streaks of color — blue, green, red, purple, white — flashed like lightning across the black water as the show dragged on.

Danielle woke up and slipped quietly out of bed. She used the bathroom — the one in the hallway, so as not to risk disturbing Colin — then stood at the living room window. It was just past dawn. She went back into the master bedroom and woke Colin up. They were making love when his alarm clock went off. He hit the snooze with a flailing hand.

Their clothes had sat in the washer overnight but it would probably be fine, he said, to move them to the dryer now. She asked if he wanted breakfast. He showed her where they kept everything and she cooked them sunny-side-up eggs with turkey bacon and toast. She made their coffee in his Keurig. Did he take sugar? He didn’t. Milk? He did. The low-fat stuff or the regular? Either one was fine.

“So what’s on tap for today?” she asked.

“Work,” he said. “Probably till late since I didn’t go in at all yesterday. You?”

“Literally no idea,” she said.

“Must be nice.”

Danielle, still wearing Colin’s robe, got their stuff out of the dryer and spread everything out on the unmade bed. She folded his clothes and laid them on top of the dresser, then gathered her own clothes up into her arms, thinking she would go into the bathroom to change, but when she turned around she saw Colin leaning in the doorframe of the walk-in closet, wearing the same suit he’d been wearing the night they met. He gave her a thin smile but didn’t say anything. She understood what he wanted: to see her, all of her, one more time, and then to watch as she disappeared, piece by piece.