Adeline the AirBnB manager showed us around briskly, garbage is through that door over there, someone left a popsicle in the freezer and you can have it. Keys, shower, towels. The washer’s here and the dryer’s there. She said a woman thought the dryer was the washer and put in soap, wide eye roll, what a disaster that was. Try to clean soap from a dryer, I am telling you. I’m here for you entirely, je suis entièrement à votre disposition, she said before leaving in that way French people say things and you know they don’t mean it.

We ate at our favorite place that night, the two sisters, and clumsily I asked if they have ice when there was ice obviously in the drinks so the younger sister looked at me and smiled and said of course we have ice, exclamation mark.

The air conditioner appeared to work and then it didn’t and I stood below it for half an hour, working the remote, putting it on fan only and back again, turning it off, turning it on, dialing the temperature down in desperation, Googling the force reset and the meaning of a blinking green light. I futzed with the vent by hand, knowing it was a bad idea. Finally I gave up and went to bed. In the early morning I had a happy dream I was somewhere that an AC worked. When I awoke Sara told me she got up at two o’clock when it was way too hot to sleep and pressed the button and it worked and it never stopped working after that.

I was inattentive and unadventurous for most of the trip, losing at online chess, leaving the freezer door wide open. I tended toward the uncolorful gelatos, the salted caramels, the chocolate family, though I knew the fruity ones were better, the mango and the passion fruit. But maybe this is what vacation is. A respite from trying.

Sometimes it just feels good to be in a different jurisdiction, a place where copyright laws prevent the playing of your favorite streamable media.

Margaritaville is quieter this year, no “Five O’clock Somewhere” seemingly on the hour, every hour. And no Jimmy tunes at all. It had seemed for years that they were mandated to play the one about the lost shaker of salt at a certain frequency, at a certain volume, perhaps by the fine print of the franchise agreement. And now nothing. Are they in mourning? No. They’re liberated.

Being on vacation really just means three things: being in a different place, doing different things, and seeing different people. Though you’re also seeing the same people—your family. But seeing them in a different plane and doing different things with them makes them different people. And you too. It’s also about slowing down your brain, even to the point of idiocy. Thinking things like toast is better than a bagel. It has a certain lightness. And things like vacation means three things.

I lay face down on the floatie, wondering what side of the pool I was bumping against. My mind drifted toward sleep. I considered Kim Jong-un. Was it his uncle he had killed? The ashen-faced man in his military garb, being escorted from a party meeting and to his death. The image I conjured of the supreme leader was of him greedily inhaling a cigarette on the platform where his official train had stopped somewhere on the way to somewhere else. He’d had a personal attendant light it of course. His sister maybe? Keep ‘em coming and he might not turn on you. 

On the terrace the black birds descend on plates of leftover food moments after diners get up, their brittle feet clambering over forks and plates like nothing, their beaks stabbing at breakfast sausage and crusts of French toast. You can shoo them away but they come back immediately. They hide in the bushes and wait for people to leave, the waitress tells me.

It occurred to me while reading by the pool today that I never realized womb rhymes with tomb. Am I the last English speaker on planet earth to discover this?

I fell asleep very briefly and woke up breathing fast, adrenaline flowing, fight or flight. I examined my surroundings. Sun, attendants in polo shirts and khakis. The looming concrete facade of the hotel building set against a partly cloudy sky. All was as I’d left it a minute or two before. I picked back up the book.

Day 8

While up in the parasail I observed to Jackie that it almost looked like you could see the curvature of the earth. It was a dumb remark but we were up high, higher than I’d noticed on previous rides. We approached a tiny island with a boat moored nearby. There was no one on its patch of beach. In the distance were the curving white shapes of resorts, Sandals, Hedonism II. I was aghast at how easy it might be to unhook myself from the harness. Or maybe it wasn’t easy. Perhaps safety features were in place, an autolocking mechanism. I didn’t try to find out. It was better to look down.

Day 7

I must have lost consciousness for twenty seconds or so on that floatie. I found myself on the other side of the roped-off area. In the neighboring zone, with its different swimmers and different beach. I propelled myself back with my hands. The sky looked the same.

In a land far away they’re lining up for rifles to shoot at the rampaging invaders from the East.

They’re playing The Song now, I’ve heard it twice. Everything goes to hell eventually.

Day 5

Back on the beach again, It’s Five O’clock Somewhere and Cheeseburgers in Paradise. It’s interesting that I haven’t yet heard The Song played a single time. And the volume seems to have gone down. Might there have been some sort of emergency arbitration between Margaritaville and the nearby businesses that resulted in a series of edicts? 

Out beyond the buoys Captain Moses’ One Love bobs softly with the Giant Bubba in tow, awaiting a clutch of drunken, sunburned tourists to rake across the waves.

Day 4

I dove down to touch the canon and tried to appreciate something of its antiquity. It really just felt hard under a veneer of moss. Like an old stone wall in the Connecticut woods. The anchor veiled in seaweed looked like a crucifix someone had escaped and discarded. And yet the fish and the coral and everything else is alive.

On the way out some others on the boat, maybe Eastern European, Russian, asked if it was okay to smoke. Nods all around. A mother and son pulling from the same pack. He lit up right after he got out of the water, too. Cigarettes as a means to delineate events.

It had rained pretty hard in the afternoon.The flagstone terrace of Rick’s ran with rivulets of dirty water that amassed in little pools. We watched the cliff jumpers, saw the sun set through the remains of the storm. The DJ played loud, punctuating the music with birthday shout-outs. Goddamn if it isn’t always someone’s birthday. A young couple, well-dressed, sat facing each other romantically at the corner of the bar. They were daintily eating dishes of penne pasta, one marinara, one cream. She lifted her phone and gazed into it as though it were a mirror.

Day 3

I should avoid all news while here, let it be an intriguing, unpleasant surprise upon our return, the aftermath of a brutal invasion depicted on the array of CNN screens at JFK immigration. But instead I’ve been compulsively checking the Times and the Post.

We went to the mini mart this morning and there were stacks of Red Stripe cases, so now there will be two eras of this vacation: the bottle and the can.

An older guy on the beach came up to me pulling a baggie out of his pocket. What do you need mon, that rap, and I said yeah but I don’t want to spend much, what can I get for ten. He wanted to sell me two for thirty, two for twenty-five. I said twenty, he said fine. A light rain began to fall and he led me to a covered space nearby. He ground a bud into a paper and made small talk, where you from, who you with. At the mention of the word wife he said it’ll make you real hard mon and I said you don’t need to tell me that and he laughed but what I really meant was, you don’t need to tell me that. You don’t have to sell this shit. It’s fucking marijuana. It sells itself.

I rejoined my family buying trinkets from a woman displaying her wares from a scarf in the sand.

Day 2

In one of my last dreams of the night I had a strong feeling it was 1:07 in the afternoon and I felt the requisite guilt of oversleeping, wasting half the day. When I awoke and asked Sara the time it was seven something. I lay in bed awhile trying to remember. 

A jogger ran past on the beach, winding up and delivering in a cricket bowler’s motion every ten paces or so.

Supply chain disruptions have made odd things scarce. At the supermarket there was no beer in cans. No plain Red Stripe, only apple, melon. Someone told us we’re lucky, they couldn’t find chlorine for the pool until a couple days ago. I lie back under the sun drinking Guinness Foreign Extra, twice the usual ABV. I guess the Irish can’t handle it.

I got up out of the hammock to watch the sunset and caught the three seconds when it goes from a sliver to nothing. 

I finished my short book about the end of the world. 

Day 1

I marveled at the blue sky, mouth agape like an idiot. Two birds thrashed in a nearby palm. Were they special birds, I wondered? Special Jamaica birds you don’t see back home. Are they somehow aware of their own identity as such, their splendor? I watched them dart around the fronds. Just a couple of birds.

I decided to roll off the floatie face down as though someone were trying to dispose of my corpse. To cast me adrift hoping I’d never wash ashore. I fell gently below the surface.

At poolside I took pains not to drip on my book. I lay on the chaise and read and drifted off to sleep and read again. At one point I remained conscious just long enough to read two words: the game.

I ate a small bag of hot and spicy banana chips and turned the edges of the pages crimson.

Music blared from the bar over the fence. Footloose, Night Nurse. You could hear the DJ’s patter but nothing else, no giddy, drunken crowd. 

I had to fashion a bookmark from a corner of paper towel.

I peered at a young couple at the swim-up bar from my position on the side. They were waiting to order, engaging in small talk with another couple beside them. The woman idly splashed a little poolwater onto the bar. Moments later he took the menu card and methodically raked the water back into the pool. She didn’t seem to object or even notice.

Part of being on vacation, if you’re not on a cruise ship or an all-inclusive I guess, is the pleasure and relief of trading one set of problems for another. The things you find irritating and uncomfortable at home are gone—or at least transformed, mostly because they’re temporary—and instead you have a new set: bad lavender hand soap, dust and grime under the bed, baffling television technology. These inconveniences are in fact worse than those you’re accustomed to. They’d be intolerable if you were working, getting your kid ready for remote learning, straining for the end of another day. But because they’re here—next to a lake, next to a little town with an ice cream stand, nothing special even, just somewhere else—they’re perfectly OK.

This is why we go on vacation, really. To temporarily trade our cares for other ones. Also for the pleasure of going home.

On our second or third day at the lake shots rang out somewhere on the far shore. They weren’t pops or cracks like from a handgun, more like booms, maybe a rifle or shotgun, but who knows what the water does to sound. Every five or ten seconds for a long time, so it wasn’t hunting. Target shooting I guess. It didn’t happen again but every day out on the water I imagined some malevolent presence over there. Would I hear the evil whistle of a bullet over my head, or skimming through the gentle waves, or piercing my donut floatie to lodge into my hip? Some bored teenager, thinks he can take a few shots at strangers, no one the wiser. I’d tell the kids turn around, head back to shore. Fast! Single file to make a smaller target. And when they were close enough to stand: run!

I heard a roar in the kitchen of the vacation home, unfamiliar, insistent. Then I saw it was the electric kettle someone had put on and at once the sound became comforting, reassuring, almost like something remembered from childhood. But I don’t drink tea.