Paradise (pt 1)

It’s just gorgeous! the girlfriend says, and she closes her eyes and hugs herself, sticking her tits out as she leans over the balcony trying so hard to look like an ad in a magazine she saw on the plane. She’s got most of it down: big yellow flower in her hair and island skirt tied around her waist – she’d be wearing a seashell necklace from the gift shop too if the boy’s father hadn’t said fuck no.

The boy goes back inside the room and looks at the suitcase clothes exploded all over their beds, and on top of that all the crap they’ve been buying: leis and dancing hula girls and grass skirts and postcards that say Hang Loose and coconuts you put stamps on to mail back home as a joke and a stack of Polaroids of the girlfriend posing. She hasn’t noticed that the father has kept out of these pictures, but the boy has.

He goes to the wall, pressing his fingers against the rough texture of the green-and-gold paper and then through it, passing between atoms until he is in the cool, dim hallway. It hurts to move through things: wood is like skinning your knee and glass is like peeling off a nail; brick is like pulling out your hair. He couldn’t do this before he was sent to live with his father. He tried not to do it but once you know you can, it’s impossible to not.

At the end of the long, dark hallway there is an immense floor-to-ceiling picture window. Through it the boy can see the ocean from one curving end of the Earth to the other. It looks like a bed sheet with a million people fucking under it. And the boy wonders what it would be like to walk out there into it all, what all that crushing weight would be like.

He reenters the room by the door, turning the knob; the girlfriend caught him walking through walls once but she never said anything and acts like it never happened, though now when the father works overnight she stays with a sister. She’s still on the balcony, smiling to no one, one hand on her hip. She’s only five years older than the boy is.

There’s your dad! she squeals, waving frantically at the ground; the flower falls out of her hair and she tries to grab it, almost going over the side. One good push and the boy could have helped her go, a thud when she hit the cement and they get to go home. He joins her at the railing and sees his father down at the pool, kicking off his sandal and dipping in a foot; he won’t look up, even though her voice is echoing off the cement all around him. She gives up, goes in the room and turns up the television very loud.

The boy rests his chin on the railing, concentrating to keep it solid or he’d fall through it like he was nothing. The father looks up; the boy waves. His father waves back.

*