Mud-Red Rum

The Guyana coast, dusk. Slate sky streaked with stratus clouds, red-grey and low over the horizon. Turquoise water shimmers in the pre-storm light; the mud-red clouds darken and expand, invade the slate-sky-cool. We walk barefoot, Justin and I, stepping from smooth rock to seaweed to shell-ruins on the damp shore-sand. Slow. Lime-green seaweed, slimy between my toes and foreign. Prehistoric.

The clouds dissipate outward like smoke—fade; the electric sky-light dims to night. Justin slips his hand under my arm, grabs my arm. Squeezes it, playful. I smile, pull away. Undress.

“What are you doing?”

“Nobody’s here,” I say.

“What?” Justin picks my t-shirt up, shakes out the sand. He throws it at me, expecting me to catch. I let it hit me. I’m cold.

“Let’s get married here,” I say.

“What?”

“Let’s get married in Guyana.”

Justin looks at me—at my eyes. “Will it count?”

“Think so,” I say. I shiver.

Justin smiles, picks my shirt up again.

“I love you,” I say. The whole plane ride—the whole week—I hadn’t told him. I normally tell him every day. “Why’d we come here?”

“I love you.”

I exhale, long and necessary, put my shirt on. My skin is cold. I feel like I’ve won the lottery but don’t want Justin to know. Justin is the jackpot, he doesn’t know.

We walk, hand in hand, to town.

Through town. Rum and gold. Molasses and diamonds. No, I don’t want to buy anything. I’m sorry I’m a tourist—Guyana would be cleaner without tourism.

I’m embarrassed I’m a tourist.

At the end of a residential street we find a club, loud and colorful. Regina Spektor sings “Fidelity.” El Dorado Rum here! The song ends. We enter—cologne and beads and alcohol—and Dispatch plays now, “Flying Horses.”

Justin buys rum.

I drink rum.

I dance, alone and without Justin and with a man with beads in his hair, dark and thirty-something. I have no idea what he is. He speaks Guyanese Creole. I wish I could see a thirty-minute film: His Life Condensed. The beads blur like colored gas.

He slips his hand up my skirt, into my underwear. He fingers me.

I pull away. “Justin!” I am cold and tight.

The beads are gas, then cold gems, gleaming in the slow-club light. “Marco!”

I listen.

No Polo.