COUNT ZERO

“You worked your way through most of a bottle of Herradura last night,” she said.

He nodded. Her hand, in his, was warm and dry. He was watching the spread of her toes with each step, the nails painted with chipped pink gloss.

The breakers rolled in, their edges transparent as green glass.

The spray beaded on her tan.

After their first day together, life fell into a simple pattern. They had breakfast in the mercado at a stall with a concrete counter worn smooth as polished marble. They spent the morning swimming, until the sun drove them back into the shuttered coolness of the hotel, where they made love under the slow wooden blades of the ceiling fan, then slept. In the afternoons they explored the maze of narrow streets behind the Avenida, or went hiking in the hills. They dined in beachfront restaurants and drank on the patios of the white hotels. Moonlight curled in the edge of the surf.

And gradually, without words, she taught him a new style of passion. He was accustomed to being served, serviced anonymously by skilled professionals. Now, in the white cave, he knelt on tile. He lowered his head, licking her, salt Pacific mixed with her own wet, her i

Sometimes, then, he’d talk, long spirals of unfocused narrative that spun out to join the sound of the sea. She said very little, but he’d learned to value what little she did say, and, always, she held him. And listened.

A week passed, then another. He woke to their final day together in that same cool room, finding her beside him. Over breakfast he imagined he felt a change in her, a tension.

They sunbathed, swam, and in the familiar bed he forgot the faint edge of anxiety.

In the afternoon, she suggested they walk down the beach, toward Barre, the way they’d gone that first morning.

Turner extracted the dustplug from the socket behind his ear and inserted a sliver of microsoft The structure of Spanish settled through him like a tower of glass, invisible gates hinged on present and future, conditional, preterite perfect. Leaving her in the room, he crossed the Avenida and entered the market. He bought a straw basket, cans of cold beer, sandwiches, and fruit. On his way back, he bought a new pair of sunglasses from the vendor in the Avenida.

His tan was dark and even. The angular patchwork left by the Dutchman’s grafts was gone, and she had taught him the unity of his body. Mornings, when he met the green eyes in the bathroom mirror, they were his own, and the Dutchman no longer troubled his dreams with bad jokes and a dry cough. Sometimes, still, he dreamed fragments of India, a country he barely knew, bright splinters, Chandni Chauk, the smell of dust and fried breads

The walls of the ruined hotel stood a quarter of the way down the bay’s arc. The surf here was stronger, each wave a detonation.

Now she tugged him toward it, something new at the corners of her eyes, a tightness. Gulls scattered as they came hand in hand up the beach to gaze into shadow beyond empty doorways. The sand had subsided, allowing the structure’s facade to cave in, walls gone, leaving the floors of the three levels hung like huge shingles from bent, rusted tendons of finger-thick steel, each one faced with a different color and pattern of tile.

HOTEL PLAYA DEL M was worked in childlike seashell capitals above one concrete arch. “Mar,” he said, completing it, though he’d removed the microsoft.

“It’s over,” she said, stepping beneath the arch, into shadow.

“What’s over?” He followed, the straw basket rubbing against his hip. The sand here was cold, dry, loose between his toes.

“Over. Done with. This place. No time here, no future.”

He stared at her, glanced past her to where rusted bed-springs were tangled at the junction of two crumbling walls.

“It smells like piss,” he said. “Let’s swim.

The sea took the chill away, but a distance hung between them now. They sat on a blanket from Turner’s room and ate, silently. The shadow of the ruin lengthened. The wind moved her sun-streaked hair.

“You make me think about horses,” he said finally.

“Well,” she said, as though she spoke from the depths of exhaustion, “they’ve only been extinct for thirty years.”

“No,” he said, “their hair. The hair on their necks, when they ran.”

“Manes,” she said, and there were tears in her eyes. “Fuck it.” Her shoulders began to heave. She took a deep breath She tossed her empty Carta Blanca can down the beach.

“It, me, what’s it matter?” Her arms around him again. “Oh, come on, Turner Come on”

And as she lay back, pulling him with her, he noticed something, a boat, reduced by distance to a white hyphen, where the water met the sky.

When he sat up, pulling on his cut-off jeans, he saw the yacht It was much closer now, a graceful sweep of white riding low in the water. Deep water. The beach must fall away almost vertically, here, judging by the strength of the surf. That would be why the line of hotels ended where it did, back a long the beach, and why the ruin hadn’t survived. The waves had licked away its foundation.

“Give me the basket

She was buttoning her blouse. He’d bought it for her in one of the tired little shops along the Avenida Electric blue Mexican cotton, badly made. The clothing they bought in the shops seldom lasted more than a day or two. “I said give me the basket.”

She did. He dug through the remains of their afternoon, finding his binoculars beneath a plastic bag of pineapple slices drenched in lime and dusted with caye

“Turner, I -”

“Get up.” Bundling the blanket and her towel into the basket. He took a last warm can of Carta Blanca from the basket and put it beside the binoculars. He stood, pulling her quickly to her feet, and forced the basket into her hands.

“Maybe I’m wrong,” he said. “If I am, get out of here. Cut for that second stand of palms.” He pointed. “Don’t go back to the hotel. Get on a bus, Manzanillo or Vallarta. Go home -”

He could hear the purr of the outboard now.

He saw the tears start, but she made no sound at all as she turned and ran, up past the ruin, clutching the basket, stumbling in a drift of sand. She didn’t look back.

He turned, then, and looked toward the yacht. The inflatable was bouncing through the surf. The yacht was named Tsushima, and he’d last seen her in Hiroshima Bay. He’d seen the red Shinto gate at ltsukushima from her deck.

He didn’t need the glasses to know that the inflatable’s passenger would be Conroy, the pilot one of Hosaka’s ninjas. He sat down cross-legged in the cooling sand and opened his last can of Mexican beer.

He looked back at the line of white hotels, his hands inert on one of Tsushima’s teak railings Behind the hotels, the little town’s three holograms glowed: Banamex, Aeronaves, and the cathedral’s six-meter Virgin.

Conroy stood beside him. “Crash job,” Conroy said. “You know how it is.” Conroy’s voice was flat and uninflected, as though he’d modeled it after a cheap voice chip. His face was broad and white, dead white. His eyes were dark-ringed and hooded, beneath a peroxide thatch combed back from a wide forehead. He wore a black polo shirt and black slacks. “In-side,” he said, turning. Turner followed, ducking to enter the cabin door. White screens, pale flawless pine; Tokyo’s austere corporate chic.