Picture yourself, now, on film. Shadows flit across your smooth skin as you walk. There are bruises forming underneath your clothes, but your hair looks excellent. You’re armed with gadgets, thin shards of metal that perform outrageous feats of technology and assault. You carry poisons and antidotes.
You are the center of the story. You and no one else. You’ve got that interesting origin tale, that unusual education. Now you’re ruthless, you’re brilliant, you’re practically fearless. There’s a body count behind you, because you do whatever’s required to stay alive—but it’s a day’s work, that’s all.
You look superb in the light from the Mexican bar windows. After a fight, your cheeks are flushed. And oh, your clothes are so very flattering.
Yes, it’s true that you are criminally violent. Brutal, even. But that’s your job and you’re uniquely qualified, so it’s sexy.
Jule watched a shit-ton of movies. She knew that women were rarely the centers of such stories. Instead, they were eye candy, arm candy, victims, or love interests. Mostly, they existed to help the great white hetero hero on his fucking epic journey. When there was a heroine, she weighed very little, wore very little, and had had her teeth fixed.
Jule knew she didn’t look like those women. She would never look like those women. But she was everything those heroes were, and in some ways, she was more.
She knew that, too.
She reached the third Cabo bar and ducked inside. It was furnished with picnic tables and had taxidermied fish on the walls. The customers were mainly Americans, getting sloshed after a day of sport fishing. Jule pushed quickly to the back, glanced over her shoulder, and went into the men’s room.
It was empty. She ducked into a stall. Donovan would never look for her here.
The toilet seat was wet and coated yellow. Jule dug in her suitcase until she found a black wig—a sleek bob with bangs. She put it on, wiped off her lipstick, applied a dark gloss, and powdered her nose. She buttoned a black cotton cardigan over her white T-shirt.
A guy came in and used the urinal. Jule stood still, glad she was wearing jeans and heavy black boots. Only her feet and the bottom of her suitcase would be visible at the low edge of the stall.
A second guy came in and used the stall next to hers. She looked at his shoes.
It was Donovan.
Those were his dirty white Crocs. Those were his nurselike Playa Grande trousers. Jule’s blood pounded in her ears.
She quietly picked her suitcase up off the floor and held it so he couldn’t see it. She stayed motionless.
Donovan flushed and Jule heard him shuffle to the sink. He ran the water.
Another guy came in. “Could I borrow your phone?” Donovan asked in English. “Just a quick call.”
“Someone beat you up, man?” The other guy had an American accent, Californian. “You look like you been through it.”
“I’m fine,” said Donovan. “I just need a phone.”
“I don’t have calls here, just texting,” the guy said. “I have to get back to my buddies.”
“I’m not going to steal it,” said Donovan. “I just need to—”
“I said no, okay? But I wish you well, dude.” The other guy left without using the facilities.
Did Donovan want the phone because he had no car keys and needed a ride? Or because he wanted to call Noa?
He breathed heavily, as if in pain. He didn’t run the water again.
Finally, he left.
Jule set the suitcase down. She shook her hands to get the blood moving again and stretched her arms behind her back. Still in the stall, she counted her money, both pesos and dollars. She checked her wig in her compact mirror.
When she felt certain Donovan was gone, Jule walked out of the men’s room, confident, no big thing, and headed for the street. Outside, she pushed through the crowds of partiers to a corner and found herself in luck. A taxi pulled up. She jumped in and asked for the Grand Solmar, the resort next to Playa Grande.
At the Grand Solmar she got a second taxi easily. She asked the new driver to take her to a cheap, locally owned place in town. He drove her to the Cabo Inn.
It was a dive. Cheap walls, dirty paint, plastic furniture, plastic flowers on the counter. Jule checked in under a false name and paid the clerk in pesos. He didn’t ask for ID.
Up in the room, she used the small coffeemaker to brew a cup of decaf. She put three sugars in. She sat on the edge of the bed.
Did she need to run?
No.
Yes.
No.
Nobody knew where she was. No one on earth. That fact should have made her happy. She had wanted to disappear, after all.
But she felt afraid.
She wished for Paolo. Wished for Imogen.
Wished she could undo everything that had happened.
If only she could go back in time, Jule felt, she would be a better person. Or a different person. She would be more herself. Or maybe less herself. She didn’t know which, because she didn’t any longer know what shape her own self was, or whether there was really no Jule at all, but only a series of selves she presented for different contexts.
Were all people like that, with no true self?
Or was it only Jule?
She didn’t know if she could love her own mangled, strange heart. She wanted someone else to do it for her, to see it beating behind her ribs and to say, I can see your true self. It is there, and it is rare and worthy. I love you.
How dark and stupid it was to be mangled and strange, to be no particular shape, to have no self when life was stretching out before her. Jule had many rare talents. She worked hard and really had so damn much to offer. She knew all that.
So why did she feel worthless at the same time?
She wanted to call Imogen. She wished she could hear Immie’s low laugh and her run-on sentences spilling out secrets. She wished she could say to Imogen, I’m scared. And Immie would say, But you’re brave, Jule. You’re the bravest person I know.
She wished Paolo would come and put his arms around her, telling her as he had once that she was a top-notch, excellent person.
She wanted there to be someone who loved her unconditionally, someone who would forgive her anything. Or better, someone who knew everything already and loved her for it.
Neither Paolo nor Immie was capable of that.
Still, Jule remembered the feel of Paolo’s lips on hers, and the smell of Immie’s jasmine perfume.
Wearing the black wig, Jule went downstairs to the Cabo Inn’s business office. She had thought out her strategy. The office was closed this time of night, but she tipped the desk clerk to open it for her. On the computer, she booked a flight out of San José del Cabo to Los Angeles for the next morning. She used her own name and charged it on her usual credit card, the same one she’d been using at the Playa Grande.
Then she asked the clerk where she could buy a car for cash. He said there was a dealer who worked out of a backyard who could sell her something in the morning for American dollars. He wrote down an address, on Ortiz off Ejido, he said.
Noa was tracking credit cards. She had to be, or she’d never have found Jule. Now the detective would see the new charge and go to LA. Jule herself would buy a car for cash and drive toward Cancùn. From Cancùn, she’d make her way eventually to the island of Culebra in Puerto Rico, where there were loads of Americans who never showed their passports to anyone.
She thanked the clerk for the information about the car dealer. “You’re not going to remember our conversation, are you?” she said, pushing another twenty across the counter to him.
“I might,” he said.
“No you won’t.” She added a fifty.
“I never saw you,” he said.
The sleep was bad. Even worse than usual. Dreams of drowning in warm turquoise water; dreams of abandoned cats walking across her body as she slept; dreams of strangulation by serpent. Jule woke up screaming.
She drank water. Took a cold shower.
Slept and woke up screaming again.