Naked in Dangerous Places - Cash Peters [14]
The guy's eyebrows shoot up. “He said that?”
“… but I'm damned if I can find it. And I don't want bugs crawling in. Or midgets.”
“Midgets?”
But mainly bugs.
Rather than engage in further argument, I thank him for his attention and, ignoring his continued quizzical expression, stroll off in search of the sundeck.
Despite the hotel being a mere few feet from the water's edge, where you'd think there'd be a breeze, there isn't. The air in the main bar-lounge is unbearably hot and sticky, another harbinger, I suppose, of what lies ahead. Seriously, you could steam broccoli in here. And of course, that makes the place a magnet to flies. Bluebottles especially. Big chubby ones carve a zigzag path between tables, coming in to land like ghastly winged tumors in my hair and on my bare arms to get at my sweat.
Settling down in an angular slatted chair on the deck, I order a margarita from the bar, to be followed over the next couple of hours by three more, then break open The Da Vinci Code and thereafter divide my time equally between plowing through a dozen cliff-hangers in as many chapters, and, when that gets old, watching the sun slide dramatically into the ocean in a tantrum of citrus hues, before finally throwing itself over the horizon like a hysterical soprano. In its wake a dense, hostile darkness descends, the likes of which I've never encountered before.
Once the light fades in Vanuatu, you're as good as blind. It's coal-shaft black out there. Ghoulishly, back-of-your-closet black. Convulsing flames in small kerosene lamps distributed among tables in the restaurant do their best to provide occasional golden pockets of reassurance, but it's not enough to make the slightest dent on the monolithic emptiness of the world beyond this one.
At my feet, a lazy surf gurgles and eddies into rocky inlets barely visible through the gauze of night. After that, several yards out and just below the surface, lies a ring of coral one hundred meters deep. Then nothing. You don't touch land again for another four thousand miles—four thousand!—not until you hit the Great Barrier Reef.
That fact alone has me totally creeped out.
For the first time, I'm beginning to appreciate how difficult it must have been being an explorer three centuries ago.
The only reason Captain Cook found Tanna at all, I hear, was because Mount Yasur happened to be erupting on the eastern side of the island that particular night, tossing orange fireballs into the sky like distress flares. Otherwise I'm sure he'd have missed it entirely, the way he so often did, sailing merrily by in his ship The Resolution, and running aground on the Great Barrier Reef months ahead of schedule.
With the onset of night, I feel a slight chill skitter across the back of my neck. A fleeting, barely perceptible breath, like the icy touch of winter.
A kiss from Cook's ghost perhaps?
A warning? Telling me I've committed to something I shouldn't have.
“You idiot, signing that goddamned contract! You know you didn't want to. Now look—look at the mess you're in.”
Suddenly, the world I'm used to and feel comfortable in—of leafy suburbs, celebrity neighbors, of food stores open around the clock, movie theaters, Starbucks on every corner, my beautiful home, my relationship—feels like it's in a different galaxy.
Once, when I was a little kid in England, I lost my parents in a department store. They walked off in one direction and I got sidetracked and ran off in another. Before I realized I couldn't see them anymore, it was already too late; they'd gone and I was lost.
Every child has moments like that. Most, by the time they get to be adults, have assimilated them and moved on. For some reason, I never did. That sense of abject abandonment, the helplessness, the distress I felt sitting in the rug department crying my eyes out that day, has stayed with me all these years: the dread of going unmissed, the fear that nobody knows I'm here, nobody cares, and nobody's coming back for me. And that same thumbprint of anxiety returns to haunt me once again now, as I look out