On the first day of the rains the Australians walked to the ocean, surfboards in hand, and threatened to go in. The drifter walked down too, with the Brazilian guys because they wanted to get a look at the girls soaking wet in their bikinis. They were already pretty messed up then, so he knew that he was imagining it, but he could hear the sea howling. The waves were chaotic. They weren’t washing towards the shore or back out to sea, but diving at one another, a swarm, swallowing each other, cannibalistic. There was no horizon. The beaches were closed and blue jellyfish were being spat out onto the shore looking like trash after a party. The rain was getting heavy, flogging the ground, flogging them. They could barely see. They all headed back to the hostel and haven’t been out since.

The Ninth Wave, 1850
(Oil on canvas, 221 × 332 cm)
BY Ivan Aivazovsky
The Russian Museum

It is a vicious storm; merciless rain, days of rain, weeks, until it is only a rumor that the sky was ever anything less than a torrent of water. Everything is heavy. Of all the things that the drifter will partially remember and partially forget, he will best forget and remember that storm; not so much what happens that one afternoon, but the black rains like an army and feeling that his skin is saturated; the water filling up around his organs and sloshing through his insides.

For months he’s been holed-up in the international hostel with three Brazilian guys, a German girl and a tribe of surfers from Australia drinking, smoking African pot and eating these strange yellow pills like candy. They are sitting on the beaten couch on the fifth or tenth or eighteenth day of the storm. The rain is infectious, vaporous, ghostlike; it breathes into their crusted lungs and sweats out of their pores. No one is talking, or maybe everyone is talking. The drifter can’t hear anything anymore except the beating of the rain on the cheap, tile roof. “This is the last of it,” one of the Australian guys says, tipping a bottle of vodka upside down over his open mouth.

It is a vicious storm; merciless rain, days of rain, weeks, until it is only a rumor that the sky was ever anything less than a torrent of water.

Everyone is silent. Even the rain quiets for a moment. The German girl is devastated. The storm is never going to end. They’re going to be stuck in the hostel saturated with the stink of the rain, and sober.

One of the Brazilian guys has a car that he bought for two hundred American dollars. Everyone looks at him, but he is non-responsive. It is obvious that he is unaware of the problem.

The German girl looks intensely worried, desperate as though it all may end right here and never be the same again; and the drifter feels like he’s not really there but just a superimposed drawing, two-dimensional and without substance, and that at any moment someone might turn him off with a remote control and everything will disappear and be forgotten, and he will forget himself. He isn’t even real enough to care. “I’ll go,” he hears himself say.

There is a universal sigh.

The rain is punishing again. Everyone digs into their pockets, pulls up bills and coins and shoves them into the drifter’s palm. Someone digs the keys out of the pocket of the nearly comatose Brazilian and hands them to the drifter.

Outside the drifter can’t see anything. It’s overwhelming. The water is ravaging; the very earth is being wiped out beneath his feet; washed away; decimated to a thick, sulfur-smelling slurry. He swims to the car. Later, on the news, he is going to see that the whole city is being destroyed. Hills are caving in, mudslides filling buildings and burying people alive, ships lost at sea, and a little girl watches her family drown on the first floor of their house while she clings to the second story porch. The natives, whoever they are, chant in the hills. To stop the rains or to keep them coming — no one knows. They are dying too. Everyone is dying. He climbs into the car.

It is only three o’clock in the afternoon, but the sky is black. The headlights only illuminate the flood of rain, drawing out the details of each droplet. He thinks that he remembers where the road is.

The truth is that he has hated every godforsaken place he has been in those years: it is all filth and deprivation, but cheap — on his severance he has camped-out all over the world for years. He had big dreams at the outset, but once he landed somewhere moving-on felt like climbing out of a hot bath and into an Eskimo winter: he only left when it became impossible to stay. He had standards of course: only places with toilet paper, hot water and electricity. But the radio stations were always crap, there was never anything good on TV, it was harassing to go into town and have the native kids beg him for money, he always had to watch for pickpockets and the old ladies in the market clawed at him with dirty hands and pleaded with foul breath. It was unbearable.

He was never a part of any of these places anyway. He lived on the outskirts — hostels and cheap international hotels. They were their own universe; a gap, a non-place that appeared again and again exactly the same no matter how many oceans he crossed. He reached outside these liquid boundaries only in dire situations, which is why he is out on this damned afternoon. He knows that somewhere there is a highway, and about a quarter of a mile down the highway is a bottle store. He is hills and curves away from it, but he peers past the furiously beating wipers looking for the pink and blue neon sign in the distance.

He lived on the outskirts — hostels and cheap international hotels. They were their own universe;
a gap, a non-place that appeared again and again exactly the same no matter how many oceans he crossed.

When he hits the highway he does see light, a tremendous, bright orange that bleeds out into the rain. It seems to billow, to dance and jump. Then he hears howling again. A figure is standing at the side of the road waving, a flapping blur in the shots of rain, birdlike. The drifter pulls over. It’s a man with a beard like a fat, gray animal curled up under his chin. The bearded man is yelling at the drifter through the window and the drifter rolls the window down with great effort. Rain floods in. The bearded man is as gray as the sky. He has a strong accent that is only further jumbled as it is drowned out by the thrashing of the storm against the car. The drifter jerks the car into park and slides out.

The light comes from a truck behind the bearded man. It has tipped over and caught fire. It’s not just a truck, but a road train pulling three regular sized slick-silver, cylinder tankers. “They’re all gonna blow,” the bearded man tells him. The drifter nods. He’s wondering what the hell the bearded man is doing driving an explosive road train in this weather, but he doesn’t ask. They stand together by the Brazilian’s car, far from the orange glow. The drifter smells gasoline. He can’t make out the road train at all, just the sprawling red diluting like liquid into the haze between them and the bottle store. After awhile he asks the bearded man if he wants to get in the car. They both climb in and sit until their breath fogs up the windows and their clothes feel warm and sticky.

The first tank blows. It’s magnificent. A burst of light cuts through the deluge and the drifter sees the road train clearly. The blast happens in slow motion, and when he shuts his eyes he sees it again and again on the insides of his eyelids: the yellow bulb growing like a flower, shooting seeds into the air. It settles to the same dull red and keeps burning, blowing a spray of smoke into the air.

They are at the top of a hill. The highway is visible as it winds down, around the burning road train and to the bottle store. The rain rinses over them, cleansing them, washing the mud from the high road and spilling the gasoline down the hill in a trail of fire that flows beyond where they can see, eventually making its way to the house where the little girl is watching her family drown. The bearded man is talking to the drifter in his heavily inflected English, saying things about what a terrible storm it is, and where the drifter is from, and how he should have taken the frontage road. Then the bearded man says, “There’s a car coming.” He points down the hill to the highway where a green blur is creeping towards them. In it are two girls. Sixteen and Eighteen. They are on their way home from checking on their grandmother. They will be on the news the next day.

The bearded man jumps out of the car. He looks as though he might attempt to run down the hill towards them and the rest of the highway. But they are far off, inching their way past the bottle store and towards the explosion. The bearded man gets back into the car and rolls down his window. Now the rain splashes off of him and onto the drifter. The drifter thinks about telling him to close his window if he wants to sit here in the Brazilian’s car, but then decides that it isn’t worth the confrontation. Instead, he leans back and shuts his eyes for a moment. He thinks about how this would have never happen at home. How he would still be dry, the roads clear, businesses open, people drinking at the bars.

Then he really does dive down the hill, into the mud, towards the rest of the road; but after a couple of steps he’s already buried up to his waist and can barely move.

Then the bearded man yells something in another language and jumps out of the car, jolting it. The drifter opens his eyes. The bearded man shouts into the wind, “It disappeared.”

“I can’t see anything,” the drifter tells himself, leaning out over the now empty passenger seat towards the window. Then he must say something else and the bearded man jumps all over him.

“I saw it. It dropped.” The bearded man peers long and hard in the direction of the winding road. “There’s a sinkhole. I can just make-out the edges of it. Can you see it? I didn’t notice it until… God!” he yells. Then he really does dive down the hill, into the mud, towards the rest of the road; but after a couple of steps he’s already buried up to his waist and can barely move. He climbs out, paces at the side of the car, looks hard down the highway, then climbs back into the car caked with mud. The drifter wonders what the Brazilian is going to say.

The bearded man looks crushed and the drifter repeats, “I can’t see anything.”

The bearded man swears at him in the other language and adds, in English, “There’s a sinkhole over there. I bloody well saw it. The car fell right in.”

Later the drifter would wonder what they had talked about, if they had talked at all. He would try to remember what he had talked about with the bearded man…

The drifter can’t think of a response to either defend himself or comfort the bearded man.

There is a sinkhole: ten feet deep, fifteen feet wide. The drifter will see it on the news a couple of days later. It will take months to repair. A detour to the bottle store will need to be created.

In the storm the two girls probably didn’t see the opening until they were inside it. The girls turned the engine off, but the headlights continued to glare blindly into the wall of earth; the radio stayed tuned to the local station that only played knock-offs of real songs. The bottom of the hole was full of water and mud. They tried to climb out at one point, or at least one of them did, and left a thong sandal stuck deep into the mud. Then they crawled back into the car and listened to more knock-offs. Later the drifter would wonder what they had talked about, if they had talked at all. He would try to remember what he had talked about with the bearded man, if they had talked, or if once the bearded man had seen the sinkhole he was too obsessed to consider anything else.

Just then the second tank blows and scares them both. It has a tremendous boom that the drifter doesn’t remember from the first one. It shakes the highway. For a while the drifter thinks the continent might cave in and swallow itself. He tries to imagine what may be going on back at the hostel. Everyone is probably sobering up and becoming belligerent, picking fights, wondering where he is, cursing his name and assuming that he’s run out with all of their spare change and never coming back. The bastards are probably divvying up his things. He doesn’t know how long he’s been gone, but he knows that he should have been back by now. Maybe he really won’t go back. His head is starting to ache and he wants something to drink. He sucks the rain out of his shirt. It tastes like salt and feet. He wonders if he can abandon the bearded man after the third tank blows. But there is no way that he can get to the bottle store anyway, and he can’t return to the hostel empty handed. He decides to wait. It will all be over soon.

The bearded man is yelling, but the drifter can’t hear him. He’s gotten out of the car again and is pacing in a frenzy. “Toot your bloody horn!” the bearded man yells through the door.

“Why?” the drifter ask calmly. His eyes draw the bearded man in and hold him still. The bearded man’s face explodes. “Just bloody do it.” He reaches across the drifter violently and slams on the horn. The drifter rears back from the insufferable noise. “Keep on it,” the bearded man yells at him and the drifter can tell that he means it.

He is screaming into the obliterating rain, the wind snapping his voice back into his own face. His arms are slicing the air like machetes.

The bearded man is hysterical. His eyes are as desperate as the German girl’s. The drifter slams on the horn, although he can see no point to it.

Outside the car the bearded man has made another run towards the rest of the highway. He is screaming into the obliterating rain, the wind snapping his voice back into his own face. His arms are slicing the air like machetes. The drifter is hitting the horn again and again, then he looks out in the direction where the bearded man is yelling and sees a large black blur making its way down the road past the bottle store. It’s a truck. The fires from the exploding road train reflect off of its distant roof. It seems to slow, but keeps moving.

The bearded man is swimming in the mud but not moving. His voice is devoured by the storm. The rain is laughing at them, and the drifter feels like laughing too. He has no idea what the bearded man is so worked up about, not even when he watches the oncoming truck dive into the sinkhole to crush the two sisters in the car. Not even when he sees the bearded man fall back in the chest-high mud as though he himself has been shot in the head and only rise much later and float back out and onto the highway.

‘Why me?’ the drifter asks aloud, his words floating on the smoke of the explosions. But, why not? And this was what the German girl knew when she stared so intensely into his dark eyes.

For a moment the bearded man seems to be crying. He has seated himself in the shallow water on the high road. The drifter is aware of them being on a sort of island in the middle of all this chaos, the rain purging their plot of all the sludge and debris and casting it out on all sides in graceful waterfalls. The bearded man smashes his hands down again and again like a child playing in a puddle, and then just stops, sits there, still. He has lost his shoes and the mud coats his bare toes. He peels off his shirt and crawls out of his pants. A calm comes over his face. The rain trickles from his forehead over his beard and hair covered body revealing streaks of flesh through the dirt. He stares off into the distance, but at nothing. Then he looks over at the drifter and smiles, almost smiles. He might laugh even.

The third tanker blows and throws the drifter back against the car, or maybe he jumps, flies. He feels the heat of the fire on his face. His skin hurts from all the rain, drinking and drinking more, flushing through his system until everything is so purified and diluted that it is recognizable no more.

The bearded man is still smiling at him after the blast and the drifter walks towards him, and asks, “Are you okay?” He bends to help the bearded man up, but when the drifter touches him he feels nothing but rain. The drifter can see that the bearded man has been almost completely washed away, his face contorting as it melts, getting tangled in the clump of hair beneath his chin. The drifter feels bad for him, but even with all of his great efforts the man could never have saved them all. Then, “Why me?” the drifter asks aloud, his words floating on the smoke of the explosions. But, why not? And this was what the German girl knew when she stared so intensely into his dark eyes.

The drifter is still watching the road where the truck is halfway submerged in the hole like a sunken ship, the car flattened beneath. Because he can’t help but to be pleased for himself, the drifter smiles as the water fills up around him feeling both the heat from the fire and the cold from the storm entirely.