“I always give money to bad street musicians.” He says, after dropping a few coins in a drunk guitarist’s case. “Good music on the streets is depressing.”
I roll my eyes at him, visibly. My sandals are filled with sand, sandwiches of it between foot and blue-foam bread. The heat is not unromantic. I blink peacefully and adjust my bathing suit bottom, hooking two thumbs into the back and undoing a wedgie. He watches my hands do this. Stepping onto the beach, I walk out of my sandals. I try to accept that the sand makes me slower, eating my footsteps and refusing to burp. How far down does the sand go? What’s underneath it? He sets down beach towels, one for each of us, and we sit down. I scoop up a handful of sand, trying to look at individual grains to compare them. It is already in my hair somehow. If I scratch my scalp I can feel grains coming out like tiny painless scabs. When I get home I will wish that it won’t ever stop coming out of my hair, showing up in my shoes, forming little piles under me where I sit.
“Do you want to move over one beach?”
“Why would we?” I ask.
“I don’t know, that one seems a little nicer.”
“This one is nice.”

We are here because he has run into a lot of money, very quickly, by writing a computer program. He will tell you: Every video camera, tape recorder and digital camera in the world is linked now. Surveillance cameras, home movies, all transmit to one network as they are used. Of course, they can’t all be watched, or even recorded. To make use of this network, we need programs to analyze the images and sounds, and show us the ones worth watching, like search engines. The one he designed detects fist fights; the way crowd noise swells, the rapid flailing of limbs. All afternoon you can watch fat kids and skinny kids take a beating on school bus cameras, he says. The truth is, even watching everyone on the network who’s laughing at any moment is traumatizing. It’s too much.
“It feels weird to have a vacation with no time limit.” I say.
“Yeah. My life is basically paid vacation time.”
“We don’t really belong here. We’re somewhere in between real people and tourists.”
“Do you want to head over to Disneyworld? That’s what’s so great about it over there.” I sense that he’s about to launch a diatribe, so I put on a face like I will laugh at him regardless of what he says.
“It’s not about costumed animals and roller coasters. It’s about signing yourself over to a place designed for you.” He quickens his pace and becomes more animated, like he has rehearsed this. “It doesn’t matter that you are sitting in a rotating room and pretending to navigate an adolescent boy’s intestines. So long as you stay in the park, you can’t see a single real person, and that’s what you’re really paying for.”
“They have a fireworks grand finale every night,” I say.
“So are we going?”
“No thanks.”

Later that night we go out to a bar, after changing our clothes in our twin suites, with the connecting door not quite closed between us. We see a new beer that has been relentlessly advertised back home, with strangely dated graphics, their billboards bleeding mentally into billboards about credit cards on beaches. We decide to try it, even though it makes the world seem too small. We lock eye contact, and slowly raise our bottles for the first sip in history. As soon as the generic taste settles, we both burst out. We laugh for minutes, maybe because the anticipation became very real in the last couple of seconds. We don’t know what to say afterwards.
“You’re doing the writer thing.” He says to break the silence. “Processing everyone into sentences and reading them aloud in your head.” He says this partly to make me feel like a writer, but also to show how closely he watches me. “If you pull out a pad, I’m throwing it in the ocean.” He boasts. I smile, annoyed by the compliment.

We are now walking on the beach. “The city is where you imagine other places,” He muses. “It makes it seem like you are still imagining the places when you get there.” The night is very cool, clear and bright. It makes the sand look like snow, except that it doesn’t crunch under our feet. It reminds me of an adolescent fantasy of becoming a vampire- being able to see perfect clarity without light, everything in ghostly sharpness, devoid of fuzziness or pixelation. He likes thinking about pixels so much that I consider telling him about this juvenile fantasy. I don’t say anything.
Our walk ends at our gigantic hotel, and we saunter back up to our rooms. We sit together on my bed and he turns on the TV, then hands me the remote. I pick a late night Spanish talk show. We talk about how it looks different than American talk shows; different cameras, different makeup, different lighting maybe. Would it seem less silly if we spoke Spanish? We watch the whole show. When it is over, he stands up quickly, says goodnight very cheerily and slips into his room. I’m surprised, relieved, and depressed.
I wake up to him crying out in his sleep. My blood chills for a second, but I am suspicious that it is a subconscious ploy to get me I his room, like a little boy would do. I pretend to be asleep, like a little girl.
In the morning we go to a café, and his order gets misunderstood. He says “fried eggs,” and the waiter repeats back to him “frijoles”. He doesn’t try to correct it, and ends up with a plate full of beans. I can’t tell if it matters to him. We decide to leave the next day.
From the plane I look down at the glassy glistening ocean. “Why do the waves appear to be frozen in place from up here?” I ask him.
He pauses. “The waves are never actually moving, except up and down. From up here we all we see a tendency of waves to be there. Just like subatomic particles.”
While he is telling me this, my ears pop, although I didn’t realize they needed to. I hear the second half of his sentence very clearly, and the feeling is like waking up when you didn’t realize you were sleeping.