Near-Death in Paradise

"And here's another one," I said. I wondered if Marcela would want to switch to Spanish. I admire her crisp fluency in Englishshe always sounds posh but unpretentious in a way that I never will with a Baltimore accent that likes to sneak out after a drink or just when I'm tired. It's easier for me to gossip in English, but easier for us both to gossip in front of the other tourists with a privacy that Duolingo hasn't yet cracked. How could you teach someone to chismear in 5 minutes a day? They planted themselves far enough down the beach and downwind for us to continue as before, in English, eager to pick apart another couple in our holiday game. "Straight people really do like to date people they hate," I said.

It was an easy, unfair game that we had played all weekend, two single women, with money and time to jet off for a weekend, young enough to want to be seen but too old to worry about bikini lines or cellulite, looking for petty specks in the eyes of the partnered up parties on the beach. The couples eating in a dull silence in the restaurants. The couples taking endless, art-directed photos of each other instead of enjoying the views. The couples burdened by children, in-laws, or both. The couples who were still young and beautiful but more interested in their phones. It was our last breakfast, and I hadn't expected to see anyone that we hadn't already made fun of in the sleepy little town.

"Look at his board! It looks right out of the shop. There's not even any wax on it," I said. The board was as fresh as the man's smile, wide and empty and gleaming white the both of them.

"He's never going to catch a wave today," said Marcela. I nodded, trusting that Marcela knew better than I did about both surfing and this part of the Pacific.

Our plates had long been cleared away, but we still had enough hours before our flight back to the city and nothing better to do than watch the waves and our fellow vacationers. The next day, a Monday, was a national holiday in Mexico, but it was also the season for surfing and whale-watching, and the whole year felt like the season for traveling anywhere at any time just to get away from wherever you had been for 2 years of a pandemic. The weekend crowd had been a mix of Mexicans like Marcela on their three-day weekend, foreigners in town for the waves, older foreigners in town for the whales, and foreigners like me who had lived in the capital long enough to care about spending the national holidays with their friends.

That day the water was too cruel for anything but a quick splash after sunbathing. I had gone out early to swim alone and felt stupid and scared when I was knocked so hard I didn't know what way was up. I held my breath and tried to tell my heart to slow down, slow down, until I knew where the light was and could swim up into the air. I thought of that time in the public pond in England when I thought I might panic and die just from the cold. I knew better than to swim alone, but the water had been so calm the day before that I took a stupid risk and scolded myself all the walk back to meet Marcela for breakfast at the little restaurant on the sand.

Even the local kids on their boogie boards had given up after flipping and tearing out of their wristbands too many times and had gone off to do whatever else there was to do on a Sunday in a small beachside town. The shoreline was still dotted with a few tourists standing far enough in to wet their knees, but no farther. The beach's volunteer lifeguard, the sort of mythical small-town figure who might be 70 or might be 170, whistled at anyone who crossed his forcefield line. He could see exactly where a wave might knock them down and pull them out towards the rocky barriers that had only yesterday created a gentle little inlet where even the smallest children could safely play. There was nothing magic about it, just his 70 or 170 years in the town, watching the sandbars shift with every hurricane and the hotels pop up overnight like fungus along the shore.

"I can't believe he's going out," I said. I stumbled into Spanish for a moment to ask a passing waitress for another coffee. "He's going to get himself killed." I fussed with a new piercing, rotating the surgical steel ring through the flesh and hoping it had been long enough to be safe from infection in the ocean waters. I'd seen a post on Reddit about someone who had lost a leg from swimming in the ocean too soon after a tattoo.

"And she doesn't even care," said Marcela, nodding to his abandoned partner. The man's other half, maybe in her early 30s judging by her demure but clearly expensive one-piece suit, and even paler than me, adjusted her oversized hat and covered the rest of her face with a crisp paperback. The cover was brightly colored, neon pinks and oranges, with unreadable but clearly avant-garde typography. Maybe a trendy American novel or a pop feminist manifesto. She was too old to have heard of it on TikTok, but she might have seen it placed carefully next to a cup of coffee or glass of wine on Instagram. I wondered if the hat was the kind that was made in a factory that pressed the fibers into shape, or if it was the kind that someone had woven and shaped by hand in some little taller. I wasn't close enough to tell.

Her man stumbled down the shore with the board, giving the few families playing in the surf five or 10 meters of space before wading in. "He shouldn't go in so far down that way. Remember the hotel owner said that's where the riptide pulls out east," said Marcela as she passed her empty juice glass to the waitress.

"There are signs for it too. They're in Spanish but they're obvious. They look the same on any beach. You know, they're meant to be universal. He just doesn't know what he's doing," I said. I thought of the hotel owner, a real Tom Waits-type who had probably come to surf one week when he was young and 10 then just never left. These places pull you in and grow around you if you let them.

"I thought it was funny when he said that the riptide starts at the end of his property. The beaches are all public here, you can own the land up to the beach but not the beach itself," said Marcela.

The lifeguard blew his whistle and scolded another older man who had waded in up to his shoulders. He didn't leave the water, but he did finally shrug off the whistles and wade back to hip height.

"Really? But when André and I went to Tulum that one time it was so awful. We had to pay a hotel fee just to get onto the beach, and then we had to order a minimum from their bar. I remember thinking we could never spend 800 pesos each, but then that turned out to be just 2 glasses of wine and ceviche or something. What a shitty day. We had been to all these lovely little beaches in Yucatan, and Tulum was the only bad one," I said. I hadn't even enjoyed the water. Even after just 2 glasses of wine, André didn't want me in the water past my knees.

"That's because it's all run by cartels in Tulum. It's illegal, but no one is going to try to go after the cartels that run the hotels. The beaches are meant to be for the people here. It's a whole thing. It's a national heritage."

"It wasn't even a nice beach. Or a nice ceviche."

"That's why I always come down here instead. It's changed so much, but there are still nice places. There's still a vibe. It's still quite hippy."

I broke my lock on the flailing surfer to glance back to the lifeguard. He was still periodically scolding the lone man standing out in the surf but was also gesturing and speaking to two younger men, maybe only teenagers, who huddled around his jet ski. Marcela looked over too. "He might be training them."

"He looks about a thousand years old, but I guess he won't live forever. Like, someone has to take over," I said.

"Yeah, look, he's showing them how to hook up that stretcher. It's good for business. The hotels don't want anyone to die."

I turned back to the surfer. "Look at him. It's only been a minute and he's already pulled so far down the shore. He's out past our hotel now." I watched him paddle around once again to try and catch a wave that knocked him flat in seconds. He looked so pink and far away against the blue of the sky and the waves as he struggled to straddle the board again. Marcela still followed the jet ski. "Wow, they're actually taking it out in the water. I guess it's a good day to practice if you really want to practice in bad waves." The two young men shoved the jet ski down the shore and into the surf. One straddled it and fumbled with the engine while the other tried to hold the stretcher tethered straight behind it. The old man yelled to them as the engine revved, and the second young man jumped on behind the first. They spun in donuts in the shallow water before catching a moment to cut out past the break. The old man yelled.

As they skimmed back and forth on the cresting waves, I could see them yelling into each other's ears and laughing. From a distance, you might even mistake them for tourists who had paid to be painted up with their tans in a salon back home instead of coming by it naturally, if it wasn't for the stretcher. I'd been on a jet ski once and hated it, but for some people, it must be a joy.

I sipped the last nasty bit of coffee and dregs. I wanted another, but I also wanted to sleep on the plane. I felt the sun pricking at her legs and wished for once my tan would even out. But even 3 days on the beach couldn't give me more melanin than I had, and it certainly couldn't hide the clear lines around my thighs from biking in the city. 12

I looked back down the beach and felt my stomach slide somewhere down below my pelvis.

"Look! He's gone!" I yelled. I scanned the waves, but the figure of the man and his bright white board had vanished. I told her heart to slow down again and scanned until I saw the pink dot of his head, barely above the surface. No arms. No board. No sound. Just the blurry, desperate dot of his sunburned face. "He's drowning. That's what it looks like." I felt the acid from the coffee in my throat.

The jet ski's engine blasted against the waves, and the two young men shot down the shore. It was almost too fast to see. He was drowning, and then he just wasn't. One of the boys had hooked around his shoulders enough to pull him onto the stretcher. I could see that he was alive by the way he clings to the sides of it, his hands white with the pressure of his grip and the cold of the morning water. My mind flashed to a TikTok about how babies are born with the reflex to cling, as though we still would need to cling to our mother's fur in some jungle. "Look. They have him," I whispered.

They pushed past the break on the jet ski and helped him walk from the stretcher up to dry land. Somehow, que milagro, his brand new board had washed up, and someone had it ready to hand to him. He accepted it under his arm, his face flat and red and still gasping for air. He had landed maybe 50 meters, maybe half a football field to him, from where he had entered the water. He walked slowly up the beach towards the restaurant, towards his other half who was still hidden in her book.

"She didn't see it. She didn't see any of it," I said. I wondered what he was reading. I'd struggled all weekend with a novel before giving up and flicking through Tumblr on my iPad. Easier to work out the best spot under the palapa to catch a bit of sun on my legs without getting glare on the screen than to read something real. "Like, what book is so good that you don't see your boyfriend dying?"

"No mames. She really hasn't noticed. I can't believe it," said Marcela.

"No mames, guey." I rotated the ring through the piercing again, trying to make it hurt to prove to herself that it had healed. "I think he's in shock. Like, that's totally, totally shock. He might even have a concussion."

He crouched slowly to place the board on the sand and sat down next to his partner. I wondered if he had broken a rib, he seemed afraid to bend. The woman jumped when she finally noticed him and took out her AirPods. Why would you go to the beach at all, if you didn't want the sun, or to hear the waves, or to swim, or to look at anyone?

He said something, and she hugged him. "I think he has a concussion. Look, he's sort of wobbling even sitting down. She should take him to a doctor," I said. He was smiling and trying to laugh. "There's this thing called dry drowning, where it gets in your lungs and you can go home and die later. There was this thing I read on Reddit about a kid in Florida who died like that. But even if it's not that I think he has a concussion. She should get a doctor." "He does look like he's in shock," Marcela agreed.

"Can you imagine? Can you imagine if you almost died and the person you were seeing didn't even notice? Someone should make him see a doctor." I always felt like talking big in these moments, but I hated that I couldn't make myself stand up to talk to them. I wanted to wait, and I wanted the girlfriend, maybe the wife, to do the right thing. I wondered if I was blushing. "Like, why would you even be with someone if they didn't care if you died? He could die later. She doesn't know. What if you died because your girlfriend couldn't be bothered to call a doctor."

Marcela nodded.

"Like, you should never go out in the water like that if someone isn't spotting you. People die. I don't know. He needs to see a doctor. I know it's Sunday, but all the clinics on the road have their WhatsApp numbers painted on the fronts. Maybe he doesn't want to move, but she should ask the waiters for a number, or she should walk up to the road and call someone. I would just walk up to the road and call a number."

I wanted another coffee or a drink.

I watched them talk. The woman's face looked solid and heavy like dough. She helped him stand, and he managed, wincing. "Sometimes broken ribs can puncture a lung. You never know until you see a doctor."

"He doesn't look well." Marcela's agreement made my heart pound harder. The woman packed up her book and the rest of their things, including one of those steel water bottles, of course, in her tote bag. He tried to pick up the board but she took it away to carry it herself. They turned to walk up the beach, up towards the road. I relaxed back into the awkward shape of the chair.

I felt myself turn red for sure, redder than I could be from the sun, as they passed. I wanted them to overhear us talking, to feel as ashamed as I did, and then go call a doctor. I wanted them to fly back to a city tonight and go to a hospital, and for them to waste all that time and money to know that he was fine anyway, just a little shaken up.

They turned left and sat at an open table in front of the restaurant. The waitress brought them a menu.

He rubbed his side. "I really think he must have hit the board. He might have cracked a rib," I said. I pretended to stare at the waves while watching the waitress bring them two beers out the side of my eyes. Maybe I'd have a beer at the airport, maybe that's how I'd sleep.

Marcela sighed. "Well, should we get the check? We should make sure we can get a car to Huatulco on time."

"Yeah, let's do it. I'll get this one.”