Austin Bunn - The Brink - Stories

“Have I told you today how much I love you?” Mac said. He clutched her kneecaps under the table and opened her legs wide. “I love you this much.”

While they were still working on their second cocktails — these mai tais really were juicy and sinister — a waiter came around with fresh fish on ice in a metal bucket, and they pointed out the pieces they wanted.

“When I went to the Internet cabana, I got an e-mail from Saul,” Mac said. “His thing in Aspen didn’t work out. He asked if he could stay with us again.”

Saul’s name plummeted inside her. He had left for Colorado and she hadn’t heard from him, thank God, until the wedding, where he’d appeared in a red velvet suit. In the traffic of congratulations, Haley remembered hugging him and feeling his dampness, the sweat coming through the heavy material. In a flash, she remembered how much he perspired when they’d been together, the slick of his back. She thought he was over. She wanted him over.

“What do you think?” Mac asked.

“I don’t think it’s a good idea,” she said.

“It wasn’t a problem last time, was it?”

He held her eyes, studying her, and she felt like vomiting up the whole experience, get it out and get done with it. She had been waiting for the right time for the honesty, but it had not come, would never come.

“We need our space,” she said. “And he’s a grown-up. He can rent a place.”

Mac nodded. “He was screwing girls left and right in Chicago, anyway. It’d be weird energy to have in our place.”

The news gripped her throat. “Wait, he was?”

Mac took a big gulp of whatever oversweet garbage they were drinking. “What do you think he did all day?”

So Saul was a cad. That was not new information. And yet she’d made the obvious error of believing she was special — if only so that it gave her power over him in her memory. Haley took Mac’s drink and finished it.

The light in the restaurant dimmed, and someone turned up the music, which had triangles and gamelan and the sound of bamboo in trouble. Haley saw that islanders and grizzled sailors with scary tans now packed the bar. The women, in cutoff jeans shorts and miniskirts, had no hips. They snuggled in between the middle-aged Europeans, risking their fingers through the last redoubts of the men’s hair.

“Are those girls?” Haley asked. “Or guys?”

Mac spooned up the last of the mango dessert. “Lady, if you gotta ask you’re never going to know.”

A striking brown-skinned woman entered, wearing a wig of perfectly straight, platinum blond hair. She eyed Haley for an instant before sauntering to the bar. She wore glass teardrop earrings, a dark blue dress, a cluster of loops at her wrists.

When the waiter delivered the bill, Haley asked about the men and their women at the bar.

“Yes, waria ,” the waiter said. “Bali specialty. Boy-girls. Pretty, yes?”

Haley stared at the blonde until she made sense. It was the tall young man from the hotel. Langy, the thief transformed. He wore nothing on his fingers, no ring, Haley made sure to examine the fingers. She watched as Langy shook hands with an older man with shaved brown hair, most of it on his neck, wearing Bermuda shorts and a tank top, criminal at his age. She stared long enough that, eventually, Langy looked back.

“Who wants to have sex with a transvestite?” Mac said, polishing off his fourth cocktail. “If you’re straight, you want vagina. If you’re gay, you don’t want lipstick. Is every transvestite a lonely hag?” His head bobbed in the light.

“I think they just want to be beautiful,” Haley said.

They paid the bill and Mac leaned on her to make it outside. He was in no shape to drive the moped. “I think I’m going to puke,” he said. “I have that over-salivating thing.” Haley led him to the shadowed side of the restaurant, near a dumpster. She stood by while he yawned up the fish and cocktails.

“It’s probably sun poisoning,” Haley said, rubbing his back.

Mac stared into his puddle. “Fucking sun.”

Haley’s eyes followed the sandy path that led behind the restaurant. She could hear the dinner conversations and laughter fanning out over the water and wondered if this was what the terrorists hated. The joy of paradise-seekers. Had their pleasure brought the bombs? What would be here without them?

Further up the alley, a shape leaned against the wall. She could make out the middle-aged man’s Bermuda shorts even in the dark, halfway down his legs. At the man’s waist, a head pistoned, hands stretching upwards underneath the Hawaiian shirt. Haley saw the blond wig, whisking back and forth. The man against the wall moaned and thrusted, holding Langy’s head in place with both hands. The wig got out of place, and Langy, without stopping, brought a hand up to shift it back into place. The man sighed, pushed Langy off, and drew his shorts up.

A cab beeped in the drive and Mac stumbled off toward it. “Haley, come on, come on,” he said.

Langy wiped his mouth and looked at Haley, straightening his wig. The older sailor passed Haley, head down shyly, beelining his way back into the restaurant, and Haley felt an exhilarating pulse of desire, of need, whatever it was that got her out of her head.

“Haley, please .”

In the cab, Mac leaned against the window, groaning at every turn. Haley opened his zipper and slid her hand in, holding him in her hand. She wanted to console him. He had just retched his guts out and still it stiffened.

“Oh, Haley,” he said. “That feels so fucking nice but please don’t.”

She could have stayed with Mac, in the cabin, listening to him sleep. There was a guidebook that she had not read, had not even opened. But Haley felt restless and charged up, so she left Mac passed out on the bed in the bungalow, champagne tin at the side, in case.

Out on the lagoon, beyond the raft, a three-story cruising yacht had anchored. The lights through the portholes blazed across the water like low, close stars. A boom box played on the empty rear deck, a soundtrack of tinny pop radiating out and breaking the quiet.

Haley walked along the beach, past the neatly arrayed fleet of outriggers dragged up on shore. A handful of French couples had brought beach furniture to the edge of the surf, where they smoked and argued. She looked for the wounded one, from the foyer, but she was missing, maybe gone. Haley knew she looked suspicious, a newlywed alone on the beach, and she turned back up toward the entrance hall. A boy with a bag of laundry on his shoulder passed her. He kicked open a swinging door marked “Private,” and before it swung shut she saw it led to a path into the palms.

This was it, the edge of the bubble, and Haley walked through.

On the other side, a short sandy path lead to a resort van with its rear door wide open. A shirtless Balinese man lay on a stack of white linen, nodding off. He righted himself when Haley stepped from the shadows, but she moved her hands to let him know that she didn’t care. She tried to look like she knew where she was going. He rested back against the bleached sheets.

Haley came to a row of rooms, like a roadside motel. Ripped rattan chairs and small tables had been set on the walkway, with ashtrays on the ground nearby. One of the doors was open, and she peered inside at a thin cot covered with mosquito netting, a bedside table, and a television with the sound off. A blue waiter uniform hung on a clothes hanger, notched on the windowsill.

Somewhere nearby, a motorcycle approached and then idled. Haley backed around the corner of the building, out of view. At the far end of the walkway, a metal gate swung open. Langy, still in his dress and blond wig, stepped through, pulling his heels off his feet. He walked toward her and opened the door to the last room on the row. She heard the crisp static of fluorescent lights coming on.