Jessica Winter - Break in Case of Emergency

Jen watched Karina waiting just outside the gate at the Belize City airport, clasping and rubbing her hands together. It was bizarre, Jen thought, to glimpse Karina — however briefly — in a public place as if she were alone, unguarded, amid her excitement and her private thoughts. Virtually everything Jen knew of Karina amounted to an interpretation of a performance, consciously acted out in front of an audience. Jen thought of the tactic that Pam said she sometimes used on her more ill-at-ease photographic subjects, when, after twenty or so minutes of holding themselves stiffly before her camera, they would hear Pam call out, “That’s it, we’ve got the shot,” and the subject would either crack a grin of merry reprieve or sink and sigh into pensive relief — and that would be the moment when Pam squeezed off a few more frames, when she really got the shot. It was a trick, yes, but one that the subject almost always instinctively understood. The trick, of course, was to forget yourself for just a few seconds, to allow yourself to be safely alone before a documenting eye.

“He’s just in the gents’,” Karina informed Jen by way of greeting. “Usually Travis would charter his own flight, obviously,” she added, “but this time around, you know, he’s gotta run with the plebes.”

Jen wondered if running with the plebes meant that LIFt was footing the bill for Travis Paddock’s trip as well as hers and Karina’s. Jen had wondered about the financial arrangements behind their itinerary as she and her fellow coach passengers had inched past the first-class cabin, one of its rows occupied by Karina and an unidentified man, presumably Travis Paddock, their faces obscured by copies of Grazia and Men’s Health, respectively, elbows pressed together across armrests.

Now a bronzed figure emerged from the men’s room closest to their exit gate, his wide-legged carriage seesawing like a cowboy’s. In person, Travis Paddock was smaller and wirier than the image of him that Jen had extrapolated from the homunculus staring out from the box-top of his smoothie starter kit. His stride accelerated as he grew closer to Karina, who called out, “Mr. Paddock, I presume!” in a preemptive tone as she glanced anxiously in Jen’s direction. He stopped a few feet short of Karina, pivoted 30 degrees toward Jen, and reached out to grip her hand with all the power invested in him by BodMod Nutritionals™.

“Travis Paddock, BodMod Nutritionals,” Travis Paddock intoned, pumping Jen’s arm like a cable pulley in a weight room.

“So Travis has an SUV waiting for us,” Karina said. A custardy singsong lapped around her voice. “Out here, most people would hire a driver, but not Travis,” Karina added. “He is pure-cut DIY.”

Jen realized that her mouth was hanging open. “Yeah,” she said. “I bet you built that SUV, Travis.”

Outside, the air hung like damp wool, a chilly undertow kicking at a steady breeze. A sooty cloud cover was dissolving the pale blue sky, as if the day were aging in time-lapse, its pigments drained by pollutants, tomorrow’s colors already muted by today’s subtle epigenetic changes. The city’s specific sleepiness felt almost suburban to Jen, as if the rows of nineteenth-century colonial structures, tin-roofed and weatherproofed and raised on stilts, hosted an absent bedroom community of daily travelers to some mysterious island location, accessible only via passport and password.

“Look at the huge line outside that — is that a shopping mall?” Jen said inanely from the backseat. Travis and Karina had kept an eerie silence since pickup.

Travis, behind the wheel, glanced out the window. “That’s a sort of security checkpoint for the cruise ships that dock here,” he said. “Way to keep out the riffraff.”

“Capitalism, huh?” Karina said from the front passenger seat.

They headed southeast along the coast, the gray haze obscuring the shoreline, then cut straight west toward their hotel in Cayo District, near the Guatemalan border. As they passed through the outskirts of Belize City, the landscape turned both greener and more desolate. The houses on their rickety stilts became fewer and farther between. Discarded auto parts languished in the yards. Chickens rooted in piles of garbage. A rooster and a pelican happened past. Dogs and coconut palms everywhere. They passed a graveyard of golf carts (“Did you see that graveyard of golf carts?” Jen asked, to no reply), an abandoned school bus, and three little girls stacked on one purple bicycle: one whose legs dangled from the front basket, one perched precariously on the edge of the seat, and the biggest girl in the center, pedaling steadily. Jen leaned out her window to snap a photograph of the girls — two of whom looked up in stoic accusation — and she immediately regretted it. She turned her camera’s attentions instead to the region’s residential aesthetics: The houses were bubblegum pink or spearmint or baby’s-room blue, salmon and racing green and magenta.

“They paint them that color so they can watch them fade,” Travis said.

“I can see what attracted you to this place, Travis,” Karina said. “It’s a paradise, and yet there is so much good to be done.”

“Paradise in progress,” Travis said.

“Very well put,” Karina said.

“So, uh, you’ve got your work cut out for you the next day or so, huh, Jen,” Travis said over his shoulder.

“Oh, ha, yeah, tell me about it,” Jen said. “Hiking through paradise-in-progress, in search of nature’s next great elixir. Under these conditions, we should unionize.” She caught herself. “Not that what you do isn’t really hard work, Travis. I’d love to hear more about what you do — everything about what you do, actually!” She giggled without knowing why.

Travis caught Jen’s eye in the rearview mirror and peered at her curiously, nose tilted upward, as if he’d caught the elusive scent of a precious particularizable herb at the exact second that a breeze across the highland scrambled the direction from which it came.

“You’re not — coming with us?” Travis asked.

“Oh! Sorry,” Jen said. “I didn’t mean to make any assumptions.”

Jen felt oddly allied with Travis as they both glanced over at Karina. Karina looked out the window serenely, even though the route was growing bumpier all the time, the road at turns rutted and beach-soft. Then she stirred in her seat in an overdetermined way, as if she were robotically playing out the eightieth take of a movie scene for a demanding director. “Oh, goodness,” Karina said, making a diphthong out of good, “I was lost in a world of my own.” They had just passed a mile of marshland, and now they were coming up on a soccer field, empty save for plastic bottles, its midfield buckled under several inches of stagnant, milky water.

Karina turned her head halfway toward Jen with some effort, as if she were wearing a neck brace. Her movement expressed not physical discomfort but the psychic pain of relocating from the flow state.

“So, Jen, I’ve been thinking,” Karina said. “If you do the cost-benefit analysis of our little adventure, it really doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for the two of us to double up with Travis — I mean, one of us can take notes and observe the action just as well as the other can. But it just so happens that, in this tiny little country, there’s another amazing opportunity for LIFt just waiting to be fulfilled, if one of us will be so bold as to accept the mission.”

“What are the odds,” Jen said.

“I know, right?” Karina said. “So, remember when we were talking about integrating our board, being more inclusive of everyone in our mission to empower women?”