Jessica Winter - Break in Case of Emergency

“Metaphor — okay, if you want to get fancy-highfalutin about it.”

“To be honest,” Jen said, “it doesn’t look like a metaphor.”

“What, this?” Baz asked, waggling the machete. “Makin’ you nervous?”

Jen sigh-laughed. “A little!” She smiled while raising her furrowed eyebrows to telegraph apologetic anxiety, as if to ask pardon on behalf of her own neuroses for any implied criticism of Angler’s hosting skills.

“So you see this and you sense — fear? You see a threat?”

“It’s a machete,” Jen said.

“That’s just a word,” Baz Angler said. “What is the thing you’re obscuring with language? What does it consist of? What does it possess? How does it act upon the world?”

“I mean, yes, it’s threatening,” Jen said.

“But a threat to what? Your safety? Your flesh? Or just your sense of decorum?”

“Lunch is ready!” said Ram brightly, emerging from the kitchen with a cooler. “For our trip, I mean. We’ll have it later.”

“Our trip?” Jen asked.

“But why do you see a threat?” Baz was asking. “If that’s in fact what you see. Because you could choose to see so many things. You could choose to see history. You could choose to see a practical implement for clearing undergrowth — the very kind used to create the clearing for this very compound where you are sitting right now. You could choose to see it as a simple and reliable tool for any number of agricultural tasks, like cutting sugarcane.”

“I could choose!” Jen said. “Are we going somewhere?”

“You are proceeding on a conjecture. A presumption. A hypothesis, at best. In doing so, you believe yourself to be in control of your reality. But in fact, I’m controlling your reality — and what you think is your reality doesn’t account for that. You granted me the right to control your reality the instant you started projecting a false reality onto an inanimate object.”

“I’m bored, ” Unity keened. “Let’s go already.”

“To be continued,” Baz said. He smiled, Jen thought, like a wolf.

“Where are we going?” Jen asked.

“In so many ways, that’s up to you,” Baz Angler said over his shoulder as he loped toward the front door. “When you come face-to-face with reality, with real life, that’s the first step toward conjuring your own reality, your best and brightest reality, which is really what we’re talking about when we’re talking about making a life for ourselves, achieving our dreams, making a difference in this world.”

“I can see how you and Leora would have hit it off,” Jen said to the retreating figure. She looked at Ram, who gave her a double thumbs-up.

“We’re going to a desert island!” Ram exclaimed, and Jen put up her hand to return his high-five.

“I think I can get LIFt to pay for this call,” Jen stammered into her hotel-room phone, comforter thrown over her head, her lips numb and trembling.

“Are you okay?” Jim was asking.

Jen wriggled beneath a phantom prickling sensation that dotted her entire sheath of skin. “It started out fine,” she said. “It started out fine. ”

“What started?” Jim asked.

“I followed Baz in Eva’s car to the coast—”

“Who is Baz?” Jim asked.

“—and then we were going to take the ferry. We were going to take the ferry to Caye Caulker. From Caye Caulker they said we were going to the quote-unquote ‘island.’ ”

“Who is ‘they’?” Jim asked.

“There was a graveyard of golf carts,” Jen said. “I remember this. I passed them driving Eva’s car. There was an empty yellow bus, abandoned by the roadside. There was a tin shack, all on its own, painted orange and blue, with a handwritten sign out front that said SILVER FOX GUEST HOUSE. There were whitish-gray pools of water in the roads. The roads were sandy and uneven. Nowhere for the water on the ground to go. Poofy white-gray clouds shrouding everything.”

“What is the island?” Jim asked. “Let’s go back to the island.”

“On the ferry, Ram was having trouble sitting still. Star and Unity were like a big tangle of limbs, all wrapped up in each other, but — resentfully so.”

“This is Baz’s entourage?” Jim asked. “Where is Eva?”

“When we reached Caye Caulker, the pier was covered in garbage and missing chunks of wood. There was a big hunk of concrete, half submerged, next to the pier, and it looked like maybe an earlier attempt at a pier. There was broken glass and bottle caps bobbing in the turtle grass. The water was shallow and smelled of garbage. A few tourists were trying to snorkel in it. We all climbed into a small boat with two men who — I didn’t catch their names. As we get in, Baz thumps his chest with both fists and he yells, ‘These sacs are big and clean, thanks to the same air that bears the quetzal’s wings!’ ”

“I’m suddenly feeling better about this story,” Jim said.

“There are no life jackets.”

“Oh,” Jim said.

“The next thing I remember is — we’re speedboating into a storm cell. The sea is rising under a deep, dark cloud cover. The rain starts. There are buckets of salt water, stinging, flying into the boat and into our faces. The wind is like a knife and the water is zigzagging around it. We are freezing and, for some reason, we are laughing.”

“Ha, ha!” Jim said.

“It’s like this for a long time. Maybe it was hours. And then we arrive at ‘the island.’ The winds seem to be reaching gale force. The island looks like leftover shards from Bikini Atoll. We huddle under what looks like a bus shelter made of bamboo. Star is saying things like, “I think it might be one degree warmer over here.” Unity is saying things like, “Look, that might be a patch of blue sky coming out.” Ram gets restless and goes out to try to snorkel in the water, which is only ankle-deep. Even far away from shore, it’s only ankle-deep. Ram comes back with a bleeding gouge in his knee. He is laughing and Star and Unity are laughing.”

“It is funny when you think about it,” Jim said.

“And Baz says something like, ‘Shallow water so far out means a surge is coming. The pressure is sucking all the water out.’ Then the two men whose names I haven’t caught serve us fish and grilled onions and white bread. The fish still have the heads and eyes attached. We drink lots and lots of rum punch and Belikin beer. I drink two enormous rum punches and don’t feel a thing. Ram has two big rum punches and four beers and doesn’t feel a thing. Ram says, ‘I don’t feel a thing,’ and he laughs and then I laugh, too. We are shivering violently and don’t feel a thing. Star and Unity are chugging from flasks. I don’t know if they feel anything. Later on, Star and Unity disappear for a while on the other side of the bus shelter with Baz, and Ram tries to snorkel again.”

“Ram has gumption,” Jim said. “Ram should write memos for LIFt.”

“So then after we enjoy the island for a while, we climb back into the boat. Baz and Star and Unity are back and everyone is laughing. Time starts to get very weird here. I don’t know how long we were on the island. I don’t know how long we were in the boat. There is no sense of time because the storm cover — it wipes away the shadows and you can’t track the movement of the sun. On the way back to Caye Caulker, we are sure that every caye we see is Caulker, but it never is, and then every time it becomes clear that the caye is not Caulker, we laugh more. Caye Caulker is no longer a place — like, we’ve been there, but it doesn’t exist anymore—”

“Wait, are you still alive?” Jim asked. “At this point in the story?”