After the Sun Read online

  BAD MEXICAN DOG

  There’s something special about the beach because I’m a beach boy. Something’s supposed to happen down at the beach. I remember the beach in Essaouira, Marseille, San Juan, where it didn’t happen, and every night I looked up at a sky so blue between power lines it made my face hurt. Not because there’s anything special about the sky, only that it’s sometimes a very hard blanket stretched tight over my head, making me feel an impassable distance. If I was in heaven I’d be looking up at Earth, blue between power lines. I’m a fifteen-year-old thin and brown-haired boy with green eyes. I move with a little curve in my back like a panther, small and bashful because no one notices me. Now I’m in Cancún, Mexico, and I’ve been standing in front of the counter for a while without being seen. It’s early in the morning, and the owner is fighting with his wife about a boy who quit without notice just today. I picked this beach club because the lion on its flag reminded me of an English tourist with a full beard who gave a big tip in Essaouira, Marseille, San Juan. The owner turns to look at me with short-fuse eyes, but before he gets the chance to tell me off I say this:

  “Word is you need a boy?”

  “We always need boys,” the owner replies, “but are you a real beach boy?”

  I say yes, I’m made of the right stuff, and list my previous employments.

  “All right then, follow me,” he says, and walks around to the back of the square bamboo hut, which is also the club’s bar and reception. He opens the door to an elongated storage room. Towels, fans, sunscreen, after-sun. Half-liter bottles of mineral water naturelle in a cooler. The morning sun makes spots on my skin through the bamboo wall. The owner throws a pair of black swim trunks and a white undershirt on the bench and tells me to get changed. Then he leaves the room, and while I undress, I can see, past the bar through a chink in the wall, the sky and the ocean so blue between beach chairs it tickles my crotch. There’s something I’m here for, there’s something I have to do. In the sand in front of the bench, an elongated pool has been dug and covered with pool-blue plastic. The water is full of small jellyfishy blobs swimming around like living water. My legs are too short to reach, but I can feel the slimy dampness under the soles of my feet.

  “You know the deal?” shouts the owner, and opens the door as I’m pulling the swim trunks over my hips. “You keep your tips. The rest is mine.”

  I agree, and he straps a fanny pack over my swim trunks. There’s a pouch for lotions on one side, and four round pockets that’ll stretch for water bottles. I can feel the owner’s chest hair against my shoulder as he suits me up. He says the other boys will tell me everything I need to know about life on the beach.

  * * *

  —

  There are 480 beach chairs total, 24 rows of 20, and we’re 6 boys, that’s 4 rows or 80 chairs for each. If you’ve got your own section under control, if none of your guests need anything—beverages, lotioning up, a little shade or face fanning—then you can try your luck up by the entrance. It’s on those twenty meters of boardwalk that stretch from the reception desk down to the beach chairs that you have to make the right impression. This is where I get to see the other boys in action, get to know their style. This is where I see Immanuel.

  When the French lady in the sun hat is halfway down the boardwalk, he lifts one foot and takes aim with a decisive gait. But he does it cool, and the way he makes his hips tilt as he walks, long waves of bone and tawny brown skin pulling him across the sand, makes it happen in slow motion in front of me: each step reveals all of its stages, from the heel strike to the sole worming toward the pads of his toes, and the sand jumps little angel hops around his heel. My eyes slide up to his hips again, and I can see his pelvis tilting with each step from side to side, and I think of crustaceans and mottled fish swimming around in the shell of his pelvis, in the light blue ocean lapping against his pubic bone. It’s very powerful, Immanuel’s groin, rocking up the boardwalk as everything else about him fades, his long black hair and tawny brown skin, and when he’s ten feet away from the lady in the sun hat something ashen has come over him, like an old waiter at a French café.

  “Welcome to the beach club, madam. What if I were your personal boy for the duration of your stay? Shade, sun, sunscreen, massage and cold drinks, whatever you need?”

  And the lady with the sun hat says thanks for the offer and hands her bag to Immanuel, and he winks at me as they walk by. He’ll make good money on her, sure as the ocean is blue.

  Then it’s my turn, I strut straight ahead with a little feline curve in my back toward the English couple on the boardwalk so they can’t not see me, but they don’t see me until we’re a few feet away from each other and I say, “Good morning, what if I were your personal boy—” but by then I’ve already missed my chance to make a natural break in their path and offer myself, so they know they want me without knowing I want them—I didn’t hit the beat like Immanuel—and the man waves his hand disapprovingly.

  Getting yourself a side gig and some extra cash: you get one shot a day. So I trot restlessly up and down through my 4 rows of 20 and offer to lotion them up and fan their faces. I change their towels and adjust the parasols to follow the path of the sun in the sky, getting bored at the zenith. In the afternoon, the guests start to fry, and I rub sunscreen and after-sun all over their bodies. As I’m straddling a Swedish man lying on his belly with two belts of flesh over his loins, I see Ginger, the English boy, giving it a go up on the boardwalk. He’s whiter than the sand, though the sand is white as the coconut filling in a Bounty bar, and his hair shines copper in the sun. He’s beautiful, Ginger, but his gait is a bit too bovine, very thin knees, he doesn’t exude that supple, light-on-the-toes feeling you look for in a boy at all. A beach boy can’t look like he’s obeying gravity too much, I think. The Swede’s flesh belts slip between my fingers. As I’m holding them tight and pulling them apart so I can rub the sunscreen deep into his back, I see Jia, the Chinese boy, heading toward two German women, waddling carelessly, like his bones and joints aren’t fully formed. With his bulging round belly and small hips, he’s a real boy, maybe the most boyish of us all. The Germans take the bait right away. One of my hands has disappeared between the flesh belts closing around my wrist. I rearrange the organs in there, pull out a kidney and fling it across the sky, and see myself trailing behind it like a shooting star or just a seagull maybe, but I’m a beach boy. That’s the contract I signed.

  * * *

  —

  Then it’s nighttime, and I’m sitting on the bench in the changing room next to Immanuel. His skin is hard and smooth like stained wood. He peels an orange and slices into the flesh with his knife, and orange fills the room. The sun is in front of me now because the sun sets in the ocean. He feeds me the sliced-off flesh, raises the hunks to my mouth on the blade of the knife: a hard metallic flavor beneath the fresh sweetness. In his other hand, he’s holding the sliced wedges together in a bouquet, the long white string lying flaccid in the center, held together at the bottom by a little circle of peel. He loosens the wedges and spreads them into glistening tentacles, a coral, he says, and pulls the white string erect. “See, that’s the dick,” he says, laughing, and I laugh too, and he shoves the whole thing into his mouth, juice dripping down his chin. Afterward we’re silent, and Immanuel takes my dick in his hand. I rest my arm on top of his arm and do the same to him, up and down. Through the chink in the wall, the sun makes a window of light on his stomach. I can see the ocean in it. It’s throbbing in my hand. Squirt of thick white juice, first Immanuel and then me, turns orange in the sun lands in the pool-blue pool under our feet, as if the horizon is emanating from our groin, and for a second I remember a room behind the ocean. There are things I have to do, things I have to get done while I’m here.

  “Immanuel?” I ask.

  “What’s up?” he says. “And hey, just call me Manuel, it’s so much with that first syllable.”

  “Manue
l, how do you do what you do up on the boardwalk?”

  “I take a guess. I guess where they’re from and how much money they have and then I try to imitate the waiters they know from back home. But you have to make yourself completely blank on the inside. If you want to look like their idea, you have to become the thing.”

  “Does that always work for you?”

  “If they’re old anyway, then they like the comfort of it. But if they’re in their twenties or thirties, they’d rather not know you’re doing it for their sake, they don’t want you speaking English to them in their own accent and all that crap. So whenever I see them with, for example, SKINNY MEXICAN BOY in their eyes, I say LET ME AUTHENTICATE THAT FOR YOU, but I say it inside and just do it.”

  * * *

  —

  So, the next morning I’m standing there looking at the beach with its 480 beach chairs, 24 rows of 20. The rows look like giant tapeworms, each chair its own segment, or they’re running through the sand like rivers of meltwater trickling into the ocean. They’re the ribs of the coast. Then I get what Manuel meant, and I say it to myself up by the entrance when the German woman comes walking backlit down the boardwalk. I make myself blank and let her eyes wander over my front, which gets very hot while the wind cools my back, and when I greet her, it’s with a fresh Mexican accent on my tongue, and she says yes, certainly I can be her personal boy.

  During the next five hours, I lotion her up and fetch her cold drinks from the bar. When she gets too hot, she raises her hand and points at her face: I get down on my knees and fan it. Then she tells me to get lost and come back in ten, and as I’m walking away I can feel the cold in my back, as if that side of me has withdrawn, turned away from her and the sun. I jog up and down my 4 rows of 20 and tend to the other guests while I can. Fortunately, Jia and Ginger are helping out with my section. Manuel is taking care of the French lady with the sun hat. Today she asked specifically for him. At the zenith we’re all really busy, everyone wants water and light breezes and sunscreen for their bodies. Ginger stumbles in the sand with both hands full and lands on a young woman, his face between her butt cheeks. She screams and her boyfriend jumps up and grabs Ginger by the neck. He’s gotten up and is saying sorry with his hands above his head. I start running toward them, screaming that it was an accident, but the boyfriend doesn’t hear me; he only sees PERVERTED ASSHOLE STICKING HIS NOSE BETWEEN MY GIRLFRIEND’S LEGS. He forgets that Ginger is a boy and boys aren’t interested in that kind of thing. Ginger falls onto his side with blood coming out of his mouth; long red squirt turns orange in the sun lands on white sand. The boyfriend straddles him and lets it rip on his face. In his rage, he grabs a rock, thick red pool next to Ginger’s head. Then he gets up and turns, flees along the water, and she runs after him. Me and Jia hurry to bring Ginger’s body up into the changing room before the other guests see the hole in his head.

  After the zenith, our work rhythm falls into sync with the sun and my sleepiness. My head is throbbing like the temples of the beach, blood is pumping under the sand. The German woman says goodbye and gives me a nice tip, but by now the cold has crept into my back, which she can’t see, and turned into a hole inside me. During the last hours of the afternoon, I stop multiple times to look at the things I think are beautiful: the beach chairs, 480 in 24 rows of 20. The parasols that we move with the chairs to follow the path of the sun in the sky. The other boys wandering up and down along the rows in their sections, offering their services. The ocean topped by waves, and it’s like the beauty of all these things goes into my body and turns into a pain that keeps the hole open. I’m thinking: The ocean is beautiful without the power to keep itself blue and postcard-like all the time. It’s beautiful without the will to spare the ships sailing on it tonight. A massive pool of complete obedience. The contract it’s signed. And at the same time, I know there are sides of the ocean I can’t see, there are sides of the beach chairs and parasols that withdraw and turn their backs to me, and there’s a hole in every boy.

  * * *

  —

  When me and Manuel have gotten changed, orange in the room and the sun a window to the ocean squirt of thick white juice orange in the pool-blue pool, we carry Ginger’s body out to the beach. The sand, the ocean and the sky are the same shade of black. The wind is cold against my face and makes the flagpoles groan, and things we don’t know make sounds that mingle with the ocean’s. The beach chairs appear as we pass them one by one. The sand laps against our bare legs. I’m holding Ginger’s arms, Manuel his ankles, and as we’re walking down the beach with the body between us, I get a strange feeling. It’s not romantic or tender because it’s not concentrated in any one place, like my stomach or my crotch, but spread all through my body. As if in the changing room I put on a nice new dress, an imperceptibly tight dress made of the knowledge that I’m here with Manuel and that I’ll be seeing him again tomorrow.