From Paul Theroux’s latest, “Blinding Light.”
What he had hoped would be an adventure to be there more than a school outing. Yet, he was determined to see it through. The drip had just begun. The others might panic and bail out. It happened. Luxury cruise ship passengers got seasick. A woman on a press trip in Mexico was raped in her hotel room.
And on the Trinidad junket, a male travel writer from New York handed a woman travel rider from Seattle and enveloped full of clumsy Polaroids. He had shot of himself nude in a full-length mirror. And then the man had threatened her when she said she would turn them over to the police.
Drama was still possible on this trip. Puts Dead and doubted that it would serve him. That time is being with Ava. In this state of Detachment was like being alone, for she had insisted on being a stranger, and that was an unexpected help to him, even a thrill for her pretense, and her manner of Seduction.
He hoped the trip might result in a book, and perhaps he could make it one. Part of the novel he had planned. An insert your exaggerating the dangers profiling the people. Attributing the sexual experiences he had already unexpectedly enjoyed, masked, and blindfolded in the keto hotel to someone else who perhaps he could say had bear his soul to him.
Or coming completely clean using his relationship with Aiden. This travel book as fiction would include food drugs, sex, exotic Landscapes, remoteness. Snow-Capped Peaks rising above the green heat, the jungle in the shadow of corapaxi. Romantic failure disillusionment. Disappointment. A breakup. More about trespassing than trespassing had been. All this, he reflected on during the long, silent trip to papayata.
The only words that had been spoken since breakfast were Manfred’s de fries. Everyone but Stedman and Manfred had fallen asleep. Just before papayakta, the van wobbled and swerved. A flat tire. They had no Jack and had to flag down a car for help. The hour it took to fix it and then get the spare repacked.
Put them behind. Lunch was late, just peeled fruit and warm beer in a parking lot near the hot springs at papayaka. Aguascalientes, Nestor said. Stedman watched and non-approach, a tall Bush in bloom at the edge of.