Alabaster Walls

Puerto Ángel pt 1

"His eyes were as a flame of fire...and he wasclothed with a vesture dipped in blood."

   The bus ride to Puerto Ángel left an uneasiness in Nicolas's stomach. It was the switchbacks and a meandering highway that hugged the Sierra Madres all the way down to the coast. He looked out the bus window to a setting sun—a fiery crimson orb that retreated behind the clouds. Bands of pink, yellow, and orange stretched across the sky, filling in the gulf created by the mountains on either side. 

   Nicolas tried to memorize the image before sitting back in his seat and waiting out the journey. He left everything behind. The years of depression, of moments hating everything and of others rejoicing in what seemed like a worthwhile endeavor. But the duplicity was too much. The cocaine, something he could never live without, would be smothered with the past.

   He closed his eyes and could only see the crimson sun suspended in darkness. A red disk surrounded by black. He followed it, stayed close to it, watched it as it travelled over a vast barren landscape that reminded him of childhood camping trips through southern Utah and northern Arizona. He watched the stars as they would orbit the earth's sky, passing behind the sun, not at all intimidated by its burning glow. As Nicolas followed the sun, he could see a house on the horizon, perched on the edge of a cliff at Horseshoe Bend. As the sun travelled closer to the house Nicolas could see that it was his, the one he grew up in eastern Texas. He saw the clapboards, the screen door that he would always sit at to watch the summer storms as they would approach. Sitting on the edge of the porch where it meets the steps he saw his childhood friend Kyle, the half of his body which was charred and shredded, a piece of rotting flesh as the flies ate away at it. Parked in the driveway next to the house was the Jeep that killed him with its bloodstained windshield. As he got closer to the house he could see Kyle staring at him, waiting for him to come home. A full moon began to hover above the house. It climbed up into the sky until it met the sun and they became one. Everything turned black.

   When Nicolas opened his eyes there was no one on the bus. A sudden chill overcame him, and he put on his sweater. 

   Outside, everything was dark except for the streetlamp that brought light to where Nicolas was standing. The air felt musty, and he could hear the waves tumbling onto the shoreline nearby. Nobody was out in the streets. 

   He asked the worker at the bus terminal, a tired-looking man dressed in white with a black vest and whose breath wreaked of alcohol, where the nearest motel was and was told, in a slight stumbling of words, to walk two blocks into the darkness and make a left toward the shore. His only company during his walk was the occasional dog, curious of Nicolas's American smell.

   The uncanny familiarity of the night drove questions and some doubts into his mind. He was told to come here, but was this where he needed to be? Was this, a soporific coastal town, his answer? 

   He had his reasons to believe and others to doubt. What he doubted more than anything was life, and he was ready to leave it all behind. He just wanted the answer to a question. A question that's troubled him most of his life. 

    And he believed that his answer would be found in Playa Boquilla, at least, that's what he was told.