The Navidad Incident (47 page)

Ketch and Joel are sitting at a shiny wooden table, just the two of them. Drinks before them, of course: two tall glasses of ice water, two shot glasses and a bottle of I.W. Harper's finest (though in reality none-too-exclusive) distillate. They've found their quarry.

Where can this scene be? It's actually hard to say. They could be anywhere—at the Sanur Hotel in Bali, the Ambarrukmo Palace Hotel in Jogjakarta or the Shangri La Hotel in Kuala Lumpur. Maybe even the old Raffles Hotel bar in Singapore, were not the place already gone, or the Bamboo Bar at the Oriental in Bangkok (the two men being travelers, hotel bars are the likeliest destinations).

Wherever they are, just picture them reminiscing at a small burnished rosewood table, but with no half-naked girls around to interrupt the conversation.

“Nice story. It improves with age, like our favorite drink here.”

Ketch raises his glass. “Like we once told Angelina, alcohol's a real boon to the imagination. Are you sure we didn't dream up those islands?”

“Hard to believe, but such places
do
exist.” Joel's eyes seem bluer since leaving Navidad, his hair more platinum blond.

“Finding it was a stroke of luck.”

“For us?”

“For the tale that needed telling. Good thing we happened along at the right time.”

“You said it. We can be halfway around the globe, but set some glasses down in front of us and we'd still be telling it. Though it helps having each other to remember all the details.”

“Words are such dialectic things. Two talkers are always better than one.”

“So talk we shall, till we polish off this bottle. You start this time: tell us about Matías and his women and that naughty bus.”

“Yes, and the land. The three islands. The sea and palm trees and sky. The tiny propeller plane. The Yuuka and the Elders. And Matías's unborn daughter.”

“How about it, shall we start all over again from the beginning? From the first faint hints of dawn, the part about all good stories starting at daybreak?”

“Fine by me. We've got all the time in the world,” says Ketch, casually refilling their whiskey glasses.

Natsuki Ikezawa
was born in Hokkaido in 1945. As a young man, he quit school at Saitama University to become a poet. He lived in Greece for three years in the mid-1970s. Presently, he writes both fiction and criticism and is an active public speaker. Of Ikezawa's works,
Still Lives
and
A Burden of Flowers
are available in English, and the Tanizaki Jun'ichiro Prize–winning
The Navidad Incident: The Downfall of Matías Guili
has been translated into German.

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