Hunched over the steering wheel, Grant was a wide-eyed creature roving Miami Beach scanning the corners he scored at years ago. No one he knew. No one that could help. No one but tourists.

Everything around him had this quality of not really being there. The group of girls that crossed the street in front of him on the way to some club, they were as real as a projection on a screen, extras in some summer movie. If he’d flattened the accelerator, he wouldn’t crash into them. He was pretty sure he’d stay right where he was, like an actor behind the wheel on set. There’d be no screams, no blood, no bones broken. All that was real was his naked need to disappear—it was undeniable, insatiable, it had him—the usual AA self-talk was no use—he was an animal tracking the scent. He started to bang his palm against the wheel. Hitting the meat on the outside of his hand just right made this warm buzz travel up his arm. The light turned green. He waited for the crosswalk to clear before moving on.

This could be the last night ever. That was an option. If offered, he’d go up in a shuttle never to be seen again. To hurtle through nothingness until the end of his days.

The search was turning up nothing, no familiar faces. But there had been a couple of guys standing on the corner of 9^th and Washington—by the bus stop but Grant knew what they were really up to—so he returned there with his hazards on, and cranked his passenger side window down keeping his foot on the brake.

“Hey there.”

One of them gave the other a look and approached the car. The guy rested his elbows on the door, glanced at the backseat and was evidently reassured by the mess back there.

“What do you need?”

“You have any, uh, what do you have?”

“What do you want?”

“You wouldn’t have any K, right?”

“You want what?” the guy asked, his eyes clocking something behind Grant, who noticed the other guy wasn’t by the bus stop anymore.

There was motion in the side mirror, and it must’ve been obvious what Grant was thinking because the guy on the passenger side yanked open the door as Grant slammed on the gas—horns blaring and headlights filling the car as he blew a red light with the guy hanging on, sprinting, trying to jump in but finally tripping and hitting the asphalt hard.

Going way too damn fast down Washington Avenue, he narrowly avoided an idling cab, hit the brakes hard at the next red light and took a sharp right turn, heart beating in his throat—what the fuck was he going to do now?

That’s when the answer to it all revealed itself.

A big smile spread across Grant’s face, alive with the warmth of an epiphany. He saw the light—the big, bright 7-Eleven sign stood tall and upright like a disciple of a loving God. Beer! Of course! Cheap, everywhere, and as good a ticket to paradise as anything else.

He parked his car and walked in, like anyone else on a regular Wednesday night, but he felt chosen, guided by something special, brought in from the storm, happy to be under those familiar white lights and see those sweaty hot dogs slowly rolling until kingdom come. Aisles eternally stocked and coffee just as hot and burned as always. Come to think of it, he had never met another person—learned someone’s name—in a gas station. It might be the most anonymous space in American life. He wished he could trade his name, his identity—the whole exhausting charade—for a studio apartment atop a desert gas station where he could just read and watch TV and go downstairs whenever he ran out of stuff. Sweets, snacks, beer, coffee, cigarettes—what else could you possibly need?

There were a few men perusing the refrigerated wall of beer. But Grant knew what he wanted. He walked out of there with a big cup of black coffee, a bag of beef jerky, and two six-packs of Yuengling.

***

Grant wished he could leave a lipstick stain on every one of his cigarettes.

Whitney Houston’s “How Will I Know” played from the radio on the motel nightstand cranked high. He couldn’t stay out of the body-length mirror on the wall. Again and again he found himself shimmying past it in his too-tight stilettos and caramel slip dress, a dress he hadn’t yet worn for Vera, a dress he felt so beautiful in—was about to throw away after all that nonsense last weekend—but thank God he didn’t because it was like this song was made to sing aloud between drags on a Marlboro and swigs of beer while running your hands across this smooth little number.

Tears came easy—and not sad ones—waves of joy, prickly on the skin, rolled up his body as he belted out the words to the chorus—stomping his feet and pointing and swaying in the mirror like a pop star on camera.

He had the Sci-Fi Channel on mute and happened to look when, a quarter of the way through the movie, the researcher doubting the monster’s existence peered into the murky river—Grant had seen this one before—only to lose his head to suddenly clamping jaws, arms flailing as the giant croc’s teeth crushed what was obviously a watermelon painted like a human head. Grant laughed so hard he couldn’t breathe. It brought him down to his knees, and then onto his back. Fresh tears fell off his face to the motel carpet. Holy shit, the kills in those monster movies were so over the top, so bad but so good. This was good. Living was good. Figures appeared in the popcorn ceiling before quickly disappearing—a chicken, a man standing over someone, the shape of a country.

The knocking startled him. Someone was pounding on the door.

“Cut it out! You’ve been making a racket for long enough now!”

By then, Bananarama’s “Cruel Summer” had come on.

“Turn it off!”

Sounded like a short man. Grant smiled. He could smack him around he was sure, send him home with a good lump in his jaw. It was hereditary, this barroom strength he got when he drank. His father had it, his grandfather too—all those stories he overheard them pass back and forth, of the men they’d knocked down wherever they were stationed, embellishments added here and there over time—a gun on the guy’s hip where there wasn’t one before, scuffles that became one-punch knockouts, eight or nine guys waiting outside where before only one had mouthed off in a foreign language.

But the knocking at the door continued. It wouldn’t stop. Dread took all the moisture out of his mouth—he couldn’t answer the door like this. He was too drunk to even get back up to turn the music off—but he didn’t wanna turn the music off! Fuck this guy—but what if he broke in? 

God fucking damn it all. Why couldn’t he do so much as answer a fucking door in these clothes? The man should die. He wished he could shoot him, right through the door, for interrupting, for ruining this night. The lousy fuck. He should answer the door just as he was, beat him senseless, stomp his head in with these heels.

Staying on the ground, he took a big breath and bellowed, “Fuck off!”

“What!” the man shrieked. “Come out here then! Asshole!”

Grant lifted his head off the carpet to point his voice at the door, “Sir, I promise I’ll be the last thing you ever see.”

The knocking stopped. “Tell that bitch to stop stomping around, Jesus Christ!” Then the man scurried away.

That bitch. Ha ha. You’re lucky this bitch doesn’t kill you. A beer, a beer would be nice.

Reaching for the bed on his right only got him a fistful of sheets. Reaching left for the chair by the desk got him to his feet. There she was, there in the mirror, eyes glassy and lipstick in need of a touch up, but there she was. That moment was something he wished he could freeze, live in. He wanted to walk, talk, and fuck like the person in the mirror, but he didn’t even know her name. It wasn’t “Grant.” At some point in the night, that name had snuck off, lost who it referred to, like a road sign pointing drivers to a town that’s been swallowed by wind and waves.

“Cruel Summer” was coming to an end, and on the TV some pickup truck stopped at the lip of a dusty cliff, the price big but blurry for Grant, before cutting back to the movie. The researcher’s wife was looking for him now, asking around town. This was the part where people started getting hip to the fact that maybe the natives were right, maybe the monster was real.

“Alright, party people. That was Bananarama. I know the night’s far from over for many of you, but it’s over for me. Here’s one last one before I go, courtesy of Neil Young. You know, what’s a night out without some regret? Drinking in some dark corner, thinking of better times, rehearsing what you’d tell them if you could. If they’d answer. You know who you are. Anyway, this is ‘Harvest Moon.’ Neil Young. I’m Dave Turner, and as always, keep it locked on WAXY 106.”

At the first sound of those languid chords, Grant yanked the radio from the nightstand, pulled it out of the wall so it would go silent. What was going through Vera’s head right then? Was it over? Was she still asleep? Maybe he could just shower, go back, slip in next to her in bed, and everything would be alright. But he stunk of beer and he knew it. It came out of his pores when he drank like this. There was no going back that night. He’d have to figure something out—Goddamn it, always the lying, it felt like he was lying all the time. He grabbed the last beer out of the minifridge and drank it fast. The song was still in his fucking head. He grabbed the radio again and spiked it against the floor. It wouldn’t break against the carpet so he hurled it at the door so it would come apart. The crash of the radio quieted the song in his mind. He needed more beer.

Lumbering toward the door and fumbling with the knob, he managed to get it open but tripped on a piece of radio. Once he was on the floor, there was nothing he could do about it. Moving his body felt like fighting against muck, so he fell asleep in the doorway, the humid night invading the room, overwhelming its shoddy A/C.

Biscayne Bay pushed and pulled at itself in the dark. Water slapped against the rusty seawall lining the International Inn.

***

The sun glittered on the choppy bay. An elderly woman pushed her housekeeping cart down the hall. She stopped to look at the water, making a visor with her hand. It was beautiful—she thanked God she was on this side of it—but it wasn’t Matanzas. Those waters where she skipped stones with her brothers and fished with her father, God rest his soul, were far away now.

The workday was long and all ahead of her, so she went back to pushing her cart, humming a church song until she saw Grant, laid out in the doorway to his room. Shaking her head, she grabbed a broom and poked him with the stick end.

“Señor…Señor…ño que clase de loco…¡Señor!”

He woke up with a taste like death in his mouth and a scraped knee, and this woman looking down at him.

“Hello,” he croaked.

She pushed her cart past him, not without saying a quick prayer for his salvation and—in case that was too much to ask—that she be far away from him in the afterlife.

He hadn’t had one of these mornings in years. Last time he felt this bad was, shit, before he and Vera even started dating. It was poison really that he’d filled himself with, and it felt like it. Head pounding, tongue like sandpaper, innards in motion. He took off the one heel he still had on and got inside.

It was already past the time to take Clark to Pre-K, but he tried calling. It was ringing. What if she answered? What would he say?—What was there to say? I’m sorry? Lost my head a bit? Who wants to hear that from their husband?—No answer. Voicemail message, but he didn’t want to hear what she said to people she may or may not know—mechanically reproduced for future callers—“Hello, you’ve reached the Coopers. We’re not home right now but—” He called her at work. She might not want to hear from him, but he needed to hear her speak to him again. “Hello, you’ve reached Vera Cooper. I’m not at my desk right now but—” The phone in his hand, he almost struck it against the nightstand—he wanted to break everything—but the room was already such a fucking mess that he just showered and got going—throwing up at some point, which helped, and finding a wrinkled shirt in the trunk to wear for the day.

The Denny’s near the beach was half empty. He got a booth with a view of the street. Collins Avenue swelled with traffic as he asked for a second cup of coffee, ashing his cigarette before any of it landed on the Herald. Kurt Cobain shot himself at home. Cuba was forcing office workers into farm labor amid post-Soviet shortages. At the Hyatt Regency Coral Gables—ONE DAY ONLY—there’d be a public auction of property seized by U.S. Customs. Cuban exiles in fatigues doing conditioning and firearms training in the swamps outside Miami declined to answer a reporter’s questions. Using your American Express to fly American Airlines could save you up to 40% off domestic fares—“Two Great Americans. One Great Sale. Call your travel agent!” The daily paper’s hodgepodge of ads and violence usually annoyed him, but that morning it made him feel better. The news was proof that he was not the only one completely losing his footing in the wild American rip current.

Tonight, things would be fixed. He’d explain, he’d talk about the call from his brother and leave it at that. He’d admit to drinking—What else are you up to when you disappear in the middle of the night?—and the admission would make her feel like he was being honest with her. It wouldn’t be easy, but as he made his pancakes sopping wet with syrup, he was confident he could talk his way back into the role of sober husband and father.

about the author

Lucas Baker is an Uruguayan-American writer born in Miami. His work has previously been featured in Mangrove Journal and he currently studies law at UC Berkeley. When he’s not reading or writing, Lucas is usually spending time with his wife and their rescue pup.