Love in the Runes of Carate, Augustus Rajah Khan, Alter-Ego of Troy Valentino

“But Corcovado is not for lovers,” Troy objects vehemently from his sandy perch on Zancudo Beach, the sunset a faded vermilion over the blackened Osa Peninsula’s bumpy horizon beyond the lapping Golfo Dulce, the stars chasing the sunset through the new night’s sky, “it’s for people that cultivate blisters and relish hardship,” he pleads. “Karina, honey, I want to drink Cabernet and eat fruits de la mer. I wanna sleep under a fan and satin sheets at Terry’s place, not battle zancudos with nothing but my stench, sweat, and Cactus Juice. Baby, I wanna lounge in the engineered comfort of paradise, not subsist in the misery of spectacular hostile surroundings!”

“Troy boy,” sighs Karina with visible disgust, taking a long drink of her cozied Imperial to compose the appropriate retort. “You are a wimpy milk-fed doughboy, through and through, that’s what you are!”

“Well. . .” Troy begins to object. “Yeah, but. . .hey look,” he points, touching her thigh, “Orion.”

“Honey, I don’t have to suffer,” she takes pains to posture, her muscles relaxing beneath his touch. “I just want to see the Park is all. I have come all the way from Nashville, Tennessee—twenty five hundred plus miles or so—to see it. You live here, and it all means nothing to you. Isn’t that Cassiopeia? This is such a different scene. . .and where’s the big dipper, anyway—way off the east I guess, coming up later. And why—I’ve just never thought about it before—is the moon on its side. . . ?” She looked him square in the eyes and lowered her voice. “It’s all so primal here, wild, woolly, and wholly wonderful, and I wanna see the park, honey. Can we?”

“Mmmkay,” Troy smiles. “I got an idea. Let’s just get where dreams begin and end. Carate, where life congeals and unravels like the gold flowing through the veins of the forest, like the night settling across the mountain, like the rain’s curtain-call across an impassive wilderness. We can take it from there.”

“I don’t know, Troyo; I never win anything.”

Next thing Troy and Karina are free of their packs, clothes, and inhibitions and up to their necks in the surf, Karina’s hands gliding along his frame as the rough surf tosses them about. “I’ve never seen a wild cat,” she kisses him, “in the wild that is,” spit dribbling down her chin in the aftermath of a slamming wave, his whole being suddenly a glob of oil in a lava lamp, the word for the world being “surf.”

She teaches Troy Tai Chi on the beach and refrains from giggling at his awkward exaggerated protestations; they get all sandy and retreat again to the water to frolic then walk all the way down to the lagoon, the sun painting their backs brown. “Honey, it’s a gator,” she whispers, pointing to the near bank of Laguna Pejeperrito at a small log with curiously spaced eyeballs near one end. “Will you be a dear and catch it for me?”

“Sure baby,” Troy swells. “But don’t let’s pick on the babies.” “It’s just a yiddew caiman, and certainly not in broad daylight. We’ll come back after dark, and with the full moon coming on, I’ll haul you out a full-on crock, a big one, and you can pet him, and he can be our new totem. Till we see that wild cat at least. Or get shark bit.” 

“And so we’ll leave it open to do the park?”

“Honey,” he feels the runway warmed for a gentle landing, and his hands travel the folds of her furtive valleys, hollows, and knolls. . . “We’ll go to the Park.”

“So, let’s seal the deal with some sashimi,” Karina suggests.

“Arena Alta’s gotta be closed by now. Carpaccio at Iguana Verde?”

“Carpaccio me, baby,” she murmurs into his caresses. “Any meat. . .as long as it’s raw!”

The Golfo Dulce Express’s schedule being what it is, Troy and Karina find themselves on the Puerto Jimenez pier at seven, one hour late for the departure of the first Carate colectivo, six and a half hours ahead of the second and final run of the day. They score breakfast at the Carolina and decide not to wait, hiking to the mango tree on the other side of the Bomba to hitch. Five minutes of waiting and they catch their first leg, a ride that drops them at the entrance to Matapalo. It takes another twenty minutes before a rental car occupied by pasty-white, fat Americans picks them up. By ten thirty:30 they are thanking their benefactors at the entrance to the Lookout Inn, the “only hotel on Carate Beach,” according to the signs along the way.

The only room Terry has left is the bungalow by the pool, what Troy has had in mind all along. “Got a party tonight, you’re in luck,” Terry announces in the straightforward manner that only he can ever live up to with such penetrating and disarming frankness. “Ninety kilo pig’s been in the ground 10 hours, and your predecessors just got in this terrible fight and stormed off in different directions—without even paying—which is the only reason the Bung is available. Count your blessings.”

“How’s about I throw you a few lottery tickets on the side and you cut us a sweet deal, like a bro thing?”

“Do let’s,” she kisses him, shoving him toward the warm brackish shallows where the reptiles rule.

Back at the Lookout there are like a thousand people gathered for the immediate beer and the eventual pig, though maybe it’s just twenty people and the tricks Carate plays on the mind, even without having harvested the fruits of the cattle-fields along the way. Troy and Karina split them down the middle and set off on different trails to wade their way conversationally through the pack, meeting up at the other side as more roll in from the southwest, Matapalo resident ex-pats sniffing the air all squinty-eyed with guilty smiles.

Two hours after the howlers bring in the new day with a call to lovemaking, six-thirty, genitals incandescent but holding their own, birds and insects an orchestra rising before the sun scaling the far side of Terry’s Mountain. . .descent and despair, self-doubt and resolution. “Sugar Bear, I gotta clean myself out!” Karina collapses in tears against Troy’s chest, a world of half-digested pork populating all the twists and turns of nearly her entire digestive tract. “I’ve become a profligate, and it’s so far from the true path. . .I don’t want to despair!” she despairs, grasping desperately at some drying swimwear in her peremptory flight to the Pacific

"Baby, wait!  What's the matter. . .?”

“No more cigs,” she lays her head against his chest and hugs him as they bob in the warming surf. “No more booze. No more pot. Not today. I’m not yet where I need to be. And no more sex either, not yet sweetie, not while I am this depraved. I know you understand.”

Understanding being an action, he understood. Comprehension being a state, he dis-comprehended. This was a problem of leviathan dimensions for the pilgrim Troy, who pondered the irony of the situation. Who the hell ever heard of a lottery ticket vendor that wasn’t a chain-smoking alcoholic looking to get high at next corner? It’ll never work. . . “Karina.” But this was Carate, where destinies reside and dreams fulfill and no one really ever seems to notice too much or get too close to anything out of bounds. “Let’s get clean, baby!”

“Not you. Me!”

“Not me. . .we!”

“You don’t have to,” she sounds ancient and tired, an omniscient sacrificial virgin thrown throughout too many incarnations to the deep solitary cenote of her interminable mortality.

“Oh but I insist,” he kisses her. They return to the Lookout bungalow to ready their packs and push toward the boundary of Corcovado, the crown jewel, if you would believe the Escondido Trex rhetoric, of the Costa Rican National Park System.

All watered up at Pulpería Carate, they pound the fine sand and collect the monumental sand dollars in the fierce sun as the sea-spume tickles their feet, new resolve and purity rising inside them like Adonis following the sun, Artemis hot on the blood spoor of a stricken stag. . . “You should return to Rita,” she postulates, “I could feel from her energy that she is wholesome and fecund.”

“Look,” Troy lays down the law with a sand-slapping stride along the primordial shoreline, Charlton Heston on the verge of the Statue of Liberty, the story nearly done, the sequel un-composed. . . “Your quantum mechanics and first principles of physics can plot reality along the super-numerous pathways of the Tao, along the reticulated folds of the fractals of non-linear mathematics and chaos theory. We can walk and walk the finer path of existence along the non-integer power of the mathematics describing our blessedly random setting and never ever reach our destination, but yoga always makes my knee hurt.”

“Yoga will strengthen your knee, and the sooner the better. Remember your own words: ‘No ends, only means.’ She would surely think the same.”

“We can drift and float in the current along the wall of a reef imagined,” he scrambles.

“And exert less energy in our plodding advance upon the park,” she counters.

“Or we can settle on the right lottery number and retire to Bali, Nepal, Katmandu, Timbuktu, Kalimantan, or Siskiyou County to count the profiles of sasquatches sauntering in profile along ridgelines under the illumination of a moon swollen with child.”

“The lottery,” she reminds him with doleful respect, “is simply a tax on people who are bad at math. By the way, would that be our destination?” she points to the row of shaded tents perched on platforms on a rolling knoll overlooking the Pacific.”

“How ‘bout that,” Troy replies, “La Leona Eco-Lodge. Wonder if the Bog-Trotter is here yet.”

Introductions over, gear stowed in a commodiously immaculate tent, a quick dip in the surf for Karina, bellies replenished with pancakes and pinto, a final cup of joe downed, our feckless heroes set off in the company of Mike Boston, aka the bog-trotting snake man, owner/operator of Osa Aventura and the foremost Corcovado National Park guide on the face of the planet. “Too bad you just have one day budgeted,” he smiles through a friendly Irish brogue. “One day, Troy, come on man?” he laughs, the pace brisk along the searing beach.

“I only have so many tickets to trade,” Troy bemoans. “One day is about all I can justify right now.”

“Your tickets are worthless, anyway, mate. I’ve never won balls,” he laughs. “Why don’t you stay at the tent camp,” he offers, “and I’ll take Karina all the way to San Pedrillo, no charge for her,” he winks. “You’ll like the Madrigal,” he assures them. “Nice and cool in the forest.” The distant bellows of howler monkeys drift down from the mountain like rolling thunder, an eerie melody line to the rhythmic percussion of the pounding of the Pacific on the deserted shoreline.

At the mouth of the Madrigal they turn inland and within five minutes, Mike’s eyes widen and he stops, pointing into the trees where a marauding toucan is being dive-bombed by scarlet-rumped tanagers protecting their nest and young from the big-beaked predation. “Bastards eat flesh as well as fruit,” he comments with a grimace, “chicks when they can get to them. Not many people realize that.”

“I want to see a harpy eagle dive-bombing a three-toed sloth,” Troy requests.

“Only one left in the Park,” Mike repies with visible pain. “Was a mating pair till ____ shot the male. Irony how ____ himself got shot and killed the next year by a gold miner.

Don’t know if there’s a relation, but you can never underestimate karma. Without a transplantation program, the harpy belongs to the peninsula’s archive of memories. But there remain 26 jaguars, and they seem to be doing alright. There we go!” Mike pauses, peering into the crotch of a scrubby small tree. “Come to papa.”

“It’s a snake,” Karina observes.

“Becker’s boa,” he replies, swiftly dethroning the startled reptile and calming him with smooth handling. “Beautiful specimen, dose in isn’t he, all of two meters in length. Here try him on for size; he won’t bite.” Karina freezes as Mike places the animal on her shoulders and his ropy coils wrap around her right arm, the large head moving around and licking the air next to her face.

“I don’t know about this,” she states very softly, not moving a muscle. “But he does feel kind of nice I have to admit. But I’ll let you try him on now, Troy, here you go.”

“How ‘bout something with a little more teeth, Mike,” Troy suggests.

“Fer de lance? Might can do.” Fifteen minutes farther up the river he finds the habitat he’s looking for, a log jam in the canyon of a tributary. The snake senses the threat and spits enough poison out to foul the air with its rank stench. Mike’s hand is lightning around the snakes neck with the help of a little forked stick. “Now you’re mine you big monster,” Mike laughs, squeezing the mouth open to reveal the two inch long fangs and their drops of venom oozing from the syringe-like points. “Don’t recommend that you hold this one,” he winks at Karina, who keeps her distance but studies the malevolent foul-smelling creature with studious fascination. “Seven feet if he’s an inch,” observes Mike. “Enough poison in this head to kill five men, though mature terciopelos never exhaust their entire dose in one bite. They gage the dose in relationship to the size of what they’re biting; the babies don’t do that, makes their bites considerably more threatening. You’d probably have eight hours or so to get to some antivenin before your respiratory system failed. Nasty poison, these little buggers pack. Has a component that immediately begins to decay the flesh. Leaves a gaping wound on anybody that is ever stricken, unlike the considerably more toxic coral that barely even leaves a tiny scar on victims that survive.”

They cool off in the pool formed at the base of a waterfall and break out the grilled chicken and avocado sandwiches that Tracy has so graciously prepared for them, Karina and Troy uncomfortable afterwards as Mike smokes and eager to push on to escape the rising hunger. An hour farther upriver, they all smell it at once, and Mike freezes, his finger to his lips to command silence. “Peccaries,” he mouths without sound, his eyes a little wider than normal.

Troy’s scrotum begins to retract, and he cases the ground for the most negotiable tree within reach. They follow Mike’s lead to the other side of the river and proceed slowly, studying the underbrush, hopeful it does not break like the levy with a flood of charging, squealing, red-eyed little people-manglers. “There they are,” Karina whispers, pointing. A group of 30 or so white-lipped peccaries lounge in a clearing in the floodplain scrub they have trampled. A single standing guardian peers fruitlessly through his beady eyes at them and lifts his snout to catch their identity, but they were downwind. He begins clicking his teeth to warn them of their imminent peril, but Mike is no longer concerned about their danger and they proceed upriver, giving the herd a wide enough berth to avoid opening a can of equine whup-ass.

A good ways yet from the headwaters, the Madrigal is about one quarter of the size as it was farther below when they reach a plateau of sorts where the trees are enormous, the woods alive with the song of cicadas, a troop of spider monkeys chattering from their luncheon in the top of a mango tree. “Look,” Mike points to the ground on the bank of the river. “Tapir tracks. Never seen a tapir this far up. They mostly prefer the lowland forest, though they range up to an elevation of nearly 2000 meters in other parts of Central America. Now there’s a fine creature to spot: the gentle giant of the rain forest, he is.”

The trip back seems shorter than the trip out, and they break onto the beach with an hour of daylight remaining and find the hard wet sand for their walk back, the surf somehow smaller and farther out at low tide.

They cool off in the pool formed at the base of a waterfall and break out the grilled chicken and avocado sandwiches that Tracy has so graciously prepared for them, Karina and Troy uncomfortable afterwards as Mike smokes and eager to push on to escape the rising hunger. An hour farther upriver, they all smell it at once, and Mike freezes, his finger to his lips to command silence. “Peccaries,” he mouths without sound, his eyes a little wider than normal. Troy’s scrotum begins to retract, and he cases the ground for the most negotiable tree within reach. They follow Mike’s lead to the other side of the river and proceed slowly, studying the underbrush, hopeful it does not break like the levy with a flood of charging, squealing, red-eyed little people-manglers. “There they are,” Karina whispers, pointing. A group of 30 or so white-lipped peccaries lounge in a clearing in the floodplain scrub they have trampled. A single standing guardian peers fruitlessly through his beady eyes at them and lifts his snout to catch their identity, but they were downwind. He begins clicking his teeth to warn them of their imminent peril, but Mike is no longer concerned about their danger and they proceed upriver, giving the herd a wide enough berth to avoid opening a can of equine whup-ass.

Here in the headwaters, the Madrigal is about one quarter of the size as it was farther below when they reach a plateau of sorts where the trees are enormous, the woods alive with the song of cicadas, a troop of spider monkeys chattering from their luncheon in the top of a mango tree. “Look,” Mike points to the ground on the bank of the river. “Tapir tracks. Never seen a tapir this far up. They mostly prefer the lowland forest, though they range up to an elevation of nearly 2000 meters in other parts of Central America. Now there’s a fine creature to spot: the gentle giant of the rain forest, he is.”

The trip back seems shorter than the trip out, and they break onto the beach with an hour of daylight remaining and find the hard wet sand for their walk back, the surf somehow smaller and farther out at low tide.

They arrive back at La Leona tent camp in time for another swim before sunset and cozy up against a log as the mighty orange orb sizzles in its descent into the sea.

Other lodge denizens emerge onto the beach to enjoy the sunset, and the air is penetratingly clear. The colors progress from the yellows through to reds and just as the final piece sinks into the primordial stew, the horizon flashes a preternatural green. “I can’t bloody believe it,” Mike bellows. “A green flash. We got the green flash! A truly brilliant day indeed!” The echoes of his words fall away and all the observers remain silent, each stunned in his or her own particular way as the progression of colors proceed through mauve, vermilion, deep purple giving into the night.

Showered and coiffed, deliciously tired and hungry, red-cheeked and happy, the camp denizens gravitate ever nearer the potent smells emanating from the cookhouse, straying to the coolers to grab beers, sodas, juices. . .Karina pours two tamarind frescos, and they drink them greedily, without much of a thought to the imperials that some of the other guests are busy imbibing. Everyone compares their day and talks of the morrow as the curried fish and fixings emerge plate by plate from the kitchen, Tracy and Greg dishing up, servers delivering. Words cease, and the sounds are those of forks glancing off ceramic as even the cicadas seem to grow sleepy.

Discretion in lovemaking is the order of the day in a group of tents owing to the poor muffling qualities of mosquito netting, and by eight thirty, deliciously exhausted, Karina is suddenly exasperated by the gentle snores rising from her somnolent partner. “Not again!” she bemoans. But then there’s a snort, the snoring slides into deep breathing, the surf pounds, and Morpheus nets and seduces her into his dreamy realm.

Coffee at dawn after morning love, the roaring surf tickled by a brisk offshore breeze that raises gooseflesh, they discuss the merits of Tai Chi on an empty stomach and conclude that it will be best that way, retiring to the beach to go through the sequence of exercises. They bathe and return to camp to wash the salt water off and sit down warmed and cooled and thoroughly invigorated to eggs scrambled with onions, peppers, culantro, and garlic, gallo pinto, homemade bread with butter, fresh orange juice, joe, and smoked sausage, to tank up for the next leg of the adventure.

“Day two of purity, dear,” she squeezes his hand as their bare sand-slapping feet encroach happily upon the mouth of the Carate River. “How do you feel?”

“Does a million bucks mean anything to you? They got smokes and brews at the pulpería, you know,” he flirts, surprisingly comfortable in his newly found monkish asceticism. “Something in the air makes it easy, or easier anyway. I don’t know. Your girlfriends are going to hate you for your tan.”

“They can eat their little hearts out. I wanna go horseback riding.”

“Yeah? Hmm. I bet we can figure that one out.”

At the pulpería, Troy borrows the radio to call Lana to relay a radio message to Jimenez to Troy’s girl Friday to go and pay for Karina’s Travelair flight out the next day. Business half done, they are next directed to Abdelí’s finca. Abdelí tells them that the Gordo is in the mountains working but that they can hook up with Benito at Carate Jungle Camp, who has three horses. They hike the mile or so, past Lookout, past the Burgess’s place and into the Jungle Camp, but Benito turns out to be off to Jimenez for spare parts for the generator, and his wife Delia sends Troy off to the creek where her daughters are washing clothes and can be dispatched to the fields to find and retrieve the horses. “For the budget traveler,” Troy muses across the table back inside the place where dinners once were held.

“This place has a strange energy,” Karina concurs, “not entirely wholesome.” Decaying vegetable matter litters the ground beneath the three or so hectares of oil palms, the buildings all wearing the cloak of progressive decay, the feeling of a thousand scorpions inhabiting each structure. “She says the owner hasn’t sent money in years.”

“Lee’s quite a character,” Troy flashes back to the monster truck he once sported and the poker game all those years ago in which Lee’s squeeze served the boys and got ten percent of each pot and wasn’t even topless though she did keep them in beer and bocas and was the big winner of the night, pocketing a good three hundred bucks or so. “Combat training at the Carate Jungle Camp. Lee? Commando Dave? Where are you now. . .now Benito gets no pay and no money for upkeep but may have the last laugh because his family lives here and has for a long time. Lee won a couple times off my tickets. Dollars to doughnuts they’ll ultimately own it, prime beach front real estate. Accidental squatters. . .” The diatribe is broken by the daughters’ appearance with two horses in tow, a foal following dutifully behind.

The country girls saddle up the horses with one tico saddle and one gringo saddle, tying ropes around noses in a tico bridle. The horses are fine-looking and strong, unlike the last ones Troy rented out of La Palma. “Let’s go do lunch with Lana, up in the mountains.”

The ghosts of mines past lurk along the banks of the Carate River, pieces of D-8’s and wash plants rusting gaily in the pounding sun. Less scrap than in years gone by, every last vestige of what was once the largest economic engine on the peninsula destined in time to complete erasure. Troy shudders and nudges the gelding to a gallop. Upriver they follow the road first on one side, then the other, of the mighty braided stream, impotent in the sweltering dry summertime yet a burbling brook nevertheless that no less than the likes of Siddhartha himself would have found every bit as metaphorical as his own River or any of the mythical and actual rivers that have fascinated mankind from the start. Inland away from the roar of the surf it is just the burble of the water, the squawks of ibises, chirps of cattle egrets, and the silent stalking hunt of the tiger heron—all peopling the rich shallows to gorge on freshwater prawns. The road turns up into the mountains, and the horses labor stridently up the steep clay driveway, the foal dallying to graze then catching up. Up, up, up, wouldn’t want to lose your brakes coming down or it’s lights out if you can’t bail quickly enough, wouldn’t want to meet a vehicle and have to back down, a little scary

After all the up, a gentle downward turn and a wooden bridge with a hole in it that Troy’s steed flares his eyes at and snorts about. Troy dismounts, and reins the reluctant mount out to the bridge. “C’mon baby, just miss the hole. It ain’t that hard.” He does and seems quite pleased to be on the other side, and Karina’s mare follows right along without any encouragement whatsoever. It was like there was something up there, something he couldn’t see but knew was there, and Troy trotted ahead of the gelding instead of remounting, topped the hill and contemplated Shangri-la.

Estevan’s third eye might have caught the light, or it might have been coincidence, but by the time Karina sidled up, he was there taking the reins to settle the horses in, ushering our sun-worn subjects into Luna Lodge where the day and the night seem to collide in a commingling sphere.

“You made it,” Lana appears like Venus rising from the sea from behind sweet ginger. “I thought you might have sense enough to come visit. Come on in.”

“You’re in and out, obviously,” she smiled. “Check out the little waterfall, that’s closest. Lunch is at one, but we’ll hold something for you seeing as it’s after twelve already. Estevan will show you. Let me go get you some mud. I’ll be right back.”

“What’s the mud all about?” Karina turns to Estevan.

“Ees good. Wat jew do is go to the catarata. Jew take off jew cloze. All jew cloze. Den jew spread de mud ole ober jew buddy. Jew let dry. Den jew wash in de catarata. It ees cozmik. Jew will see.

“Sounds good to me,” replies Troy as beaming Lana reappears with a Ziploc bag FULL of naked-spreading MUD.

“The mud is making waves,” Lana beamed.

“Yeah,” Troy acknowledged, “Turbo’s been buying some tickets lately. I think he thinks he’s gonna hit big.”

The only downside was they walked all the way downhill to the waterfall, mud burning a hole in Troy’s pocket. It was going to be a non-trivial hike out. . .all uphill. But the waterfall, the little one, is divine, a master-massaging machine of nature, and the smooth creamy mud spreads so well on Karina’s breasts and buttocks and feels so nice on Troy’s thighs and chest. The wait for the drying seems interminable, but the cleansing is transcendental, and they help one another freely in the pool of jungle water. And the hike back is somehow less exerting than the hike down, every footfall born on a helium pillow pushing upwards, a spring in the step like no one ever got before, preternatural to be sure. “I think it’s the mud,” observes Karina. “The mud,” concurs Troy. “It’s gotta be in the mud.”

The watermelon and red wine salad notwithstanding, the brimming burrito in a bed of watercress discounted for the moment, the fresh mora frescos that seem to magically replenish themselves relinquished from consideration, the fresh-baked bread and butter be damned, lunch is spectacular first and foremost for the setting and second for the air. The food is a close third. Open air in the shade, boxed in by primary montane tropical rain forest, a wedge of pure-on Pacific Ocean staring them always in the eye, Lana from the moon ensuring comfort. Dorothy’s definitely not in Kansas anymore.

Later, after returning the horses, recharging in the Carate surf, cleansing off the salt in the Lookout pool, reading, in the colectivo in the late afternoon yellows, Troy scours the passing trees in vane for that elusive sloth, the animal that Karina most wants to see in this wild. He doesn’t spot one not even from the Piro River all the way to Bar Buena Esperanza, and he is forced to face the possibility of loser-hood. The mood never really fails, however, and Jimenez is fun that night, the Iguana Iguana hopping, an excellent place to berth. Then the fateful phone-call.

“You see,” he explained to her, not fully seeing himself, “I sold these lottery tickets during the elections, which is technically against the law, and I got denuncia-ed for it, and tomorrow I gotta go to court, because it’s something that I have to take seriously. It could mean a little jail time if I don’t. It’s pretty important. I think I can make it back before your flight, but I can’t be sure. It’s on the far side, a boat ride, and Golfito makes a strange sucking sound. Once you’re there, you just don’t always come back as planned. It’s strange that way, I don’t know how else to put it.”

“You go do what you have to,” Karina replies. “I’ll see you if you get back before my plane leaves.”

But Troy doesn’t make it back in time to kiss his baby good-bye, and she’s gone, one leg at a time, Jimenez-the hose, the hose-tegoose, tegoose-DF, DF-San Diego, Diego-Frisco, Frisco-Nashville, Nashville-Munich, Munich-. . .leaving him once again and perhaps forevermore in an eerie limbo and jonesing hard for a cigarette.

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