Читать книгу Sunsets of Tulum - Mr Raymond Avery Bartlett - Страница 13

The Murakami Book

Reed stood there for a moment looking at the book the way a drunk might pick a winning lottery ticket out of a trash barrel. The colorful cover had blurred and the pages had thickened to nearly twice their normal size, the color and texture of papier-mâché.

“Waiter!” he called. “Can I get some help?”

Carlos came running over.

“I dropped my book,” he explained.

Carlos looked at the sodden mess Reed was carrying.

“I can call bookstores. We find you another copy?”

“No,” Reed said, shaking his head. “This one, um, it has sentimental value. But is there a way to maybe dry it out somehow?”

“I give it to Housekeeping? They, how you say, heat the pages with a hair dryer?”

“Wonderful.”

When Carlos had left, Reed stretched out again in the chair, replaying the scene with the three girls, seeing that third girl’s face, the way she’d mouthed the word “drama” to him.

He’d never see her again. The thought of having her book, of reading the same pages she’d been absorbed in, gave him a strange feeling like he was doing something improperly intimate with her.

Reed ordered another cocktail and another one after that, and as the sun turned the hotel structure into a sundial he watched the shadow as it lengthened and stretched across the triple clock face of the giant pool.

He picked up the abalone ashtray and again wondered how it was possible that a lowly mollusk could create something so beautiful. As the shadows reached the seawall a mange-ridden mongrel appeared at the stairs and began scouring beneath the empty tables for crumbs. Reed remembered the girl tossing tortillas and wondered if this were the same dog. It looked a little like his dog from childhood. Part beagle, part shepherd. He hadn’t thought about that dog in a long time. Poor thing, he thought. He could see its ribs.

Reed tried to toss peanuts for it but it was too far away, and then a waiter noticed and shooed the hungry mutt with angry claps of his hands. The dog skittered away, rounding the corner of the stairs so quickly that it slid on the tile before dashing down the stairs to the beach below. Just hungry, he thought. The girl’s scraps might have been its only meal the whole day.

The last thing Reed remembered about that evening was a glimpse of the moon suspended above the terrifying vastness of the ocean, a white thumb-smudge careening in wide circles around the inky paper of the night sky.