On a Beach in Puerto Rico

My beach chair sat in the shade of some kind of palm with broad green leaves. To me the tree looked alien, like a mutated fern from the Everglades that had grown abnormally large. My brother, Kevin, who’d been living in Puerto Rico for a year, could’ve told me the name of the tree in both English and Spanish. Curious by nature, his thirst for information far surpassed mine. I didn’t have much curiosity at all. Not lately anyway. I didn’t care much what the tree was called—only its shade interested me.

Here on vacation I felt alright, but back in New Jersey was a different story. Living at home with a social life in shambles, unable to talk myself into looking for work, I was lost. Being the ex-druggy brother that relatives talked about in hushed voices, the son my parents didn’t know what to do with, I had no drive, no confidence—I didn’t l know why. With four siblings and twenty-two cousins who were all doing better than me, New Jersey wasn’t big enough for all the family members I wanted to avoid. Now with the Atlantic Ocean acting as a buffer, I felt more free.

As Kevin snorkeled I stayed behind on the beach, reading Kafka on the Shore, a novel by Haruki Murakami I’d read a couple times before. In the part of the book I liked best, a fifteen-year-old Japanese boy runs away from home, meets interesting people and comes to work in a library. The boy chooses the name Kafka for himself and, not surprisingly, a lot of strange things happen to him. His story is told in the odd-numbered chapters. This time through I’d decided to skip the even-numbered chapters, about the old mentally-impaired man with the ability to speak to cats, and read only of Kafka.

To get away from the crowds Kevin and I’d driven to the west of San Juan and walked a mile through jungle to a secluded beach. The sky and water were similar shades of blue, the sand white and I hardly believed I’d been stuck in the cruddy Atlantic City Airport 18 hours before.

Drinking a grapefruit soda from our cooler bag, I read Chapter 9, where Kafka wakes up in the woods by a shrine without any memory of how he got there. With a sore shoulder and blood on his shirt, Kafka calls Sakura, an older girl he met on the bus. She takes him back to the apartment of a friend who she’s housesitting for and Kafka confides in her about his predicament.

I always easily saw myself in this situation for some reason. I’d never woken up with blood on my clothes before, or done anything really violent, but I once had a dream I murdered my uncle. In the dream he caught me embezzling from the family restaurant and so, on a desperate impulse, I did what I thought I had to. I’d been planning to take the embezzled funds to Mexico to live but I woke up before this happened. Now that I think about it, I often dreamed of ways to escape my family.

Just as I was reading the last page of the chapter, and thinking my brother had been gone a long while, that he’d found some sort of interesting cave or something out by the small island I’d seen him swimming to, the rain started. Out of what had been a cloudless day water poured from the sky with swollen droplets, larger than I was used to, striking the top of my buzzed head. In the hopes that the monstrous plants would serve a purpose and save me from being drenched, I took my phone and book and went to the edge of the jungle for cover.

It was no good. The rain struck the leaves like small metal pellets and rolled down the exotic vegetation to find me at the end of their journey. A ways down the beach, past a patch of dead exposed coral reef, I spotted a small, roofed picnic area and decided to make a break for it.

The rain streamed down my face as I ran. After fifty yards I reached the patch of dead reef and slowed to a walk to be sure my flip flops didn’t catch on a sharp piece of coral. Water slid off my phone’s water-resistant surface but the pages of Kafka on the Shore became dark and bloated with moisture. When I reached the roofed area and stepped onto the concrete pad, I found I wasn’t the only one to have the idea. A young woman was also there hiding from the rain.

My guess was she had a few less than my 25 years and something—partly her pigmentation, but also partly her style and body language—told me she hailed from the mainland too. It wasn’t a touristy beach and it wasn’t a touristy time of year, but here we were—two tourists sharing a roof in this tropical place. The situation seemed a little odd, but we weren’t at the ends of the earth after all. I smiled and said hello and she responded in a friendly way with a terrific grin.

 “The rain came out of nowhere,” I said, shaking my book and brushing drops from the screen of my phone. 

The girl casually leaned against the corner pole and watched me with a look of amusement. Even her dark brown hair was bone-dry and I felt like some absurd American making a fool of himself abroad. 

“Geeze, I’m soaking wet,” I said.

“You look it,” her reply.

I started to take off my sopping T-shirt but decided my flabby torso, almost completely void of muscle mass, would win me no points with the girl. Instead I only wrung a few drops from the bottom to an unintentionally comedic effect.

“My sister says it rains at least once a day here,” said the girl. “But it usually doesn’t last long. It pours like crazy for a few minutes and then just stops as if nothing happened.” She sighed, pushing out her bottom lip. “It’s both convenient and inconvenient, I suppose.”

“Convenient?” I said, eyebrows raised.

“From a gardener’s perspective, I mean. It must be easy to grow things here. At least, you probably don’t have to fill up too many watering cans or spend a lot of money on some elaborate sprinkler system just to keep your grass green.”

I’d been trying to talk my parents into buying just such a system for their lawn for the past two years and now the idea felt stupid, unnecessary. As I tried to think of something to say, out past the surf a large white bird flew low over the water. I studied the girl from the corner of my eye.

She wore a striped, white and teal bikini top with a patterned yellow wrap around her waist. Young but not annoyingly so, she appeared at ease with herself, intelligent and, it wouldn’t be much of a stretch, I thought, for her to be more mature than me. As I’d always been lightyears behind my classmates, it’d be no stretch at all.

“Did your book get wet?” she asked.

“A little. But it’ll survive.”

“What are you reading?”

“It’s a Murakami novel.”

“Really? Which one?”

Pleased to hear she knew Murakami, I told her. I didn’t mention I’d read the book several times and that this time I was skipping the odd-numbered chapters because I didn’t want to sound like too much of a nerd. In my experience, being a little bit of a nerd was cool in many circles but being a serious nerd was cool in only a very limited few.

“Which is your favorite?” she asked. 

“It may be premature but I think I like Kafka On the Shore best. Even though the main character is only fifteen, in some ways I really look up to him.”

 “I think I get that,” she said. “I usually feel much younger than I am—like I’m way behind. I’m probably the only 22-year-old in the whole United States without a credit card. Or the only one in the Bay Area anyway.”

For some reason I pictured the trail back to the parking lot and from there the short drive back to my brother’s Old San Juan apartment. There was beer in the fridge and a chair on the balcony overlooking the cobbled street, I recalled.

“Do you ever wonder,” began the girl, “if the world isn’t actually like Murakami writes it? You know, with a lot of unexplained coincidences and strange happenings, like leeches falling from the sky and old men who can talk to cats?”

I nodded. “Sometimes I like to tinker with the idea.”

I pulled my arms inside, spun my T-shirt around and wrung out the bottom like I did with the front. A splash of water landed on the concrete by my feet.

 “Sometimes I like to think we can meet people in our subconscious minds,” she said. “Take you and me. Don’t you think it’s possible we already met on some other plane of existence?”

“Before now?”

“Right. In some other reality we already met before happening to meet here on this beach by chance?”

I scratched the back of my head and glanced up at the wooden crosspieces of our roof. The structure seemed well-built but I worried about its integrity all the same.

 “If we did that, I suppose we’d have a déjà vu feeling of having met before,” I said.

 “Exactly. That’s what I’m saying. That way we could skip all the pleasantries, not wasting time with formalities and already behave like friends. Maybe it’s just me but I sorta feel that way about you, like I recognize your voice and your sort of crooked nose.” She bit her lip and looked thoughtful. “Are you getting that at all?”

“Maybe,” I said. “You do seem a little familiar.”

In truth I didn’t feel anything. I only thought she was nice and interesting and cute. I had a few brief thoughts about logistics and calculations of how I might bring her into the fold of my simple, quiet life. The chances seemed very, very, very slim. The more I thought about the chances, the slimmer they got.

“I have an idea,” she said. “Let’s have some boring get-to-know-you conversation to see if anything is familiar. Maybe something will strike a chord or feel eerily right. Who knows? Maybe we’ll remember all about each other.”

How could I refuse?

“OK,” I said. “Let’s give it a try.”

The rain lasted for fifteen or twenty minutes while the girl and I chatted. We exchanged a lot of personal details—like how she worked in a clothing store and lived with her sister in San Francisco—but nothing felt familiar to me, other than maybe her name, which was “Elise.”

 For her part, Elise claimed some of the things I told her sounded familiar, like my big family, but she didn’t seem overwhelmed with recognition. She did appear to like me for whatever reason though. It may have been normal for her to smile and blush a lot, but either way I was feeling upbeat—for a change—and really into her.

The temperature cooled slightly after the rain and everything was quiet, calm and pleasant. I looked back in the direction of my beach chair and saw my brother walking out of the ocean. He’d been snorkeling this whole time, likely deciding to wait out the rain out in the water. The logic there being you can’t get any wetter if you’re mostly underwater.

Elise looked back over her shoulder in the opposite direction.

“I better get back,” she said. “My sister gets anxious on her own.”

The phrase “on her own” stuck to my ribs and I felt a pull in the direction of the anxious sister. What if I simply followed after them and never left their side? Making myself useful, I’d let them call the shots. We’d share an apartment, support each other and not look back. It was a big ‘what if’ but was it really so farfetched? I wondered.

In reality Elise was going back to California in the morning and my return flight to New Jersey was the following week. Meeting up back on the mainland would be even more unlikely than finding each other on a quiet beach in Puerto Rico in the first place.

“I guess there’s not much of a chance of us ever finding out if we already knew each other,” I said.

“I’ll tell you what, take my number just in case.”

“In case of what exactly?”

She offered one last terrific grin.

“In case you ever find yourself on the West Coast.”

 Elise turned very practical in the end, and must’ve thought this a bold invitation, but, to me, the term ‘West Coast’ sounded like something out of a fantasy. The Kafka from Kafka On the Shore probably would’ve leapt at the prospect, but, at the time, I only felt unsure.

When I told Kevin about Elise he razzed me. He asked a few penetrating questions and I kept smiling. He was rubbing suntan lotion on the back of his neck but stopped, straightened up in his chair and said: “Wait! Hold the presses!”

I craned my neck around to see what he was talking about when, in the tone of a voice over actor, he said, “This just in, Joey falls in love on a beach in Puerto Rico.”

I laughed and he tossed the bottle of lotion to me.

“Unfortunately, I’m not sure she’s of this world,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“She lives in San Francisco for one.”

“Ouch,” he said. 

Dabbing some lotion on my nose, I asked, “How much do you think a flight from Atlantic City to San Francisco is?” 

“It ain’t cheap,” was my brother’s only response, which was more or less what I’d figured on my walk back across the dead coral reef.

We looked at the gently lapping waves and I thought it strange the ocean showed no sign whatsoever of the additional water that came from the rain. The larger body had swallowed the smaller ones in one giant gulp and receded from the shore.

“What do you think? You wanna go out once more?” Kevin asked. “I’ve got something to show you.”

“Sure. Why not?”

I tossed the lotion in my pack and reached for my fins, snorkel and mask.

Kevin led the way. A novice snorkeler by comparison, I fell behind after I stopped to get water out of my mask but caught up again soon. I swam up to where Kevin floated to see him pointing down. On the sandy ocean bottom, a large, unmoving sea turtle rested.

Eight feet down, the turtle looked to be the size of a welcome mat. Its green shell and black spots on its head stood out like fashion accessories and its face looked like a predecessor of E.T. Another lost alien, I thought.

The turtle didn’t move but, somehow, I knew it was alive. Large eyes were serenely closed but agency remained in its flippers and beak as if they’d spring into action at any moment. Knowing nothing at all about sea turtles, I decided this one was either sleeping or in some deep turtle-meditation.

The turtle never moved for as long as my brother and I floated there. Under the surface, with water plugging up our ears, masks over our faces, snorkels in our mouths, reality was muffled and distorted. I felt we were at least one degree removed from the usual dimension, same as the turtle.

Small fish hovered in underwater current, darted out from rocks and flitted around in synchronized schools, showing off their colorful fins, tails and sides. The fish were a dime a dozen, like finches and sparrows in a tree, but the turtle was larger, much older, solitary, symbolic somehow.

Keeping my breathing shallow, I thought about returning to New Jersey and it struck me as the wrong reality—a thought experiment gone wrong. I wanted to wake up and find myself in paradise each morning, or almost anywhere besides New Jersey. The West Coast maybe, where palm trees lined the streets and winter didn’t exist. But it still sounded too fantastical.

What I most wanted to do, I realized, was what the turtle was doing. Resting Zen-like there on the ocean floor, for however many hours, alone and unmolested, feeling the pulse of the sea on its skin with all sound coming from down a long, narrow tunnel. After a rest like that, I thought, I’d be more like Murakami’s Kafka, possessing the strength to run off to any place in the world.

Pete Able’s stories have appeared in Literally Stories, Philadelphia Stories, Blue Lake Review, Spillwords Press, Johnny America, Idle Ink, The Fiction Pool, and Thorn Literary Magazine, among others. He lives in southern New Jersey.