Copper drifted deep into the night, bouyed by a much-patched innertube printed with faded images of Xcaret. Her red mane trailed from under her red ball cap into the soft-lapping water of the lagoon, her naked ass drooped into the cool water, a length of hanky ski rope moored her to Winston’s floating island, about as attached as she ever got to anything.

Her mind was addled beyond cognition, a situation of her own doing. Addle-pated was her vacation from the tyranny of detail, the persecution by memory. IWhen the past eats at the emotions and the future looms ominous and arbitrary there was just nothing she’d found like the eternal present of Ketamine. A little present for herself.

She’d just taken another massive hoover of the white flake she’d cooked out of the liquid she’d bought from the veterinary in Cancun where she was an old, if not exactly cherished, customer. She’d promised herself she wouldn’t do it all up this time because she needed the money if she was going to get to Boston and twirl her flames in that Aerosmith comeback video. She’d turned cat softener into a cottage industry in her past sweeps from Mexico to The Excited States, as she called it. Hitting critter pharmacies where she knew they could bet the stuff by the liter and not ask any recriminating, if not incriminating, questions. Then chaperoning it on a flight to the Big Scrapple, an innocent clear fluid in a water bottle carefully resealed with a soldering iron. True, tougher since 9/11, but she could still inject it into Kahlua bottles in her checked luggage. For the same old markup of several thousand percent. Precise numbers weren’t her forté at the moment, riding a rubberduck bob in the perpetual “Vitamin K” nulltone and watching the moon stutter along like a film jerking along at the quirky half speed of K’s noted freezeframe presentation.

She always felt at home on Winston’s floating folly, as good a metaphor for her itinerate life as anything. She felt swaddled and inviolable in the warm tropic night. No need for clothes here, for technology and gimmicks, for anything other than tepid water and holy fire in the damp black air. She leaned her head back until her ears were underwater, sang a few bars of her favorite healing song, “She’s got all that I need, pharmacy keys…” The water closed in on her hidden membranes, softening them and massaging them with a dull roar that grew more and more insistent, a throbbing tremor that contained with in it a high-pitched, bitchy whine.

Chimi, nee Agosto Cesar Ronchel, leaned forward over the grips of his JetSki pointing in irritation, “¡Por alla, pendejo! Right over there by those mangroves.” Chango was a dumfuk, all right, couldn’t even see in broad moonlight.

Chango (known to his rich, dickhead parents as Aquiles Dominquero or even “Quichi”) squinted into the darkness, revving his Kawasaki JS750 compulsively. He wasn’t really into scoping things out, by nature. More of an action toy. He didn’t see any floating island and had serious doubts there was such a thing. Wouldn’t an island just sink? He gave up and plaintively whined, “Why don’t we just go over there, then? Have a good look?”

Chimi, by far the most intelligent of The Lords of Xibalba, always stressed the need for reconnaissance and prior plotting, but thinking things out wasn’t exactly the long suit for his band of monied, hedonistic scions. And the growling chorus around him made it clear they were all into immediate gratification. He shrugged. “Time to run that pinche hippie out of our ocean, chavos. And teach that redhead twat why to respect what a man has hanging.”

A group howl answered that address to the troops, followed by the deep thunder of Corcho’s glasspacked Yamaha Superjet, then the ear-splitting screams of tweaked motors driving after-market impeller pumps to blast the gang across the lagoon, a dozen white roostertails of spumed water flickering in the moonlight as the pack loped greedily towards Winston’s hand-crafted homeland.

It was occurring to Copper, in that syrupy fuzzbrain K way that things were getting rather loud. And the water was being uncharacteristically rambunctious around her. And that therefore, she should take a look, or (ha, ha) think about these things. In some way, in other words, react. No hurry, was her feeling. And yet…

Then the boisterous action of the water increased dramatically. The main drama being that it tossed her little plastic/air donut violently into the air. The tube flipped, flashing her soggy bare ass to the moon, and as her head came briefly out of the water before crashing back in again, her ears were boxed by a cacophony of demonic shrieking in a piped-up, two-cycle mode that hammered at her so hard even the K couldn’t modulate it.

In fact, as she broke surface, grasping frantically for her non-approved flotation device, the Ketamine got mean on her, all pretense at psychic shelter vanishing in her frantic perception of what was causing the hellish choir of internal combustion overload. With her eyes exactly at sea level and her monkey-prune fingers clinging to the slippery surface of the tube, she was buffeted and buggered by the jet banshees, and horrified to see the dark shapes darting in from the night like an avenging posse of killer whales on crack.

She was very fortunate they didn’t see her in the water; something she figured out hours later. But her thoughts were hardly happy as she watched the Lords of Xibalba reducing Winston’s floating idyll to ruin.

The Lords were frustrated that there was nobody in residence at the moment. They had verified this by the simple, if uncouth stratagem of leaping their craft out of the water, skidding them across the deck and painstakingly created “garden”, and barging through the house itself, plunging back into the water in a chorus of catcalls and a shower of flindered belongings and building material. A couple of entrance/exit wounds of that nature and it was pretty obvious nobody was around to enjoy the spectacle. Pissed off that the hippy and uppity peliroja weren’t available to accept complaints, the Lords redoubled the deployment of their considerable talent for vandalism.

The demolition of Winston’s Isle became a competition in excessive reductionism. Lords circled the island, skipping sideways in tight turns that generated wakes that provided liftoff for their comrades to get a little sky. JetSkis soared up off these wavelets then pounded down onto the funky, flimsy beauty of Winston’s soverign nation of homegrown, smashing anything that presented under their plunging hulls.

Corcho rocked forward as he spun around his prow, the aft jet blasting the shattered remnants like a firehose. Chimi took three tries before he managed to leave the water sideways, cutting a broadside swath of wreckage through the rapidly disintegrating superstructure. Chango got the highest jump of the night by caroming of the slanted front end of Ojo’s Yamaha, actually topping the entire palapa roof, then falling through it like a cartoon anvil. The yahoos snatched up flotsam from the water, flaunting pieces of furniture and female garments as they circled like ampthetamine sharks, muching big bites out of the hated hipilandia.

Bobbing in their wakes, her head now tucked protectively inside the innertube, Copper watched horrified at the elimination of her haven. The K puppeted the waterbikes into jittering, frenetic motion freighted with limbic evil. She shuddered at the piston-powered hiphop and manic warwhoops of what she was perceiving as a troop of flying android monkeys, perhaps with a touch of armored pterodactyl. She would get around to lamenting the damage later, her present was now overdosing on a screaming, smoking, wrenching clamor of terminal velocity and ill-will. Somewhere deep inside her absent mind there was a whispered hope that sooner of later the Ketamine would wear off and the monsters would morph back to something normal. Hanging naked in the water, trembling with fear and revulsion, her heels moved unconsciously, driven by a memory from her disturbed childhood: click those red shoes together and get the hell back to Kansas.

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Just because Yanche floated adrift in the ebbing surf of time didn’t mean that all moments were equal. For one thing, her consciousness was definitely attracted and bound to the Yucatan, and seemed mostly to involve the experiences of young women. Like a person awakening in a dark space, she could sense greater dimensions around her, but didn’t feel any urge to explore the darkness in search of walls and limits. It wasn’t that she couldn’t exist in earlier time, or in the old age of the lives she browsed through as idly as a jellyfish pulsing along on the tide; it was that her attention was elsewhere. Or elsewhen.

One limit that she was well aware of was the end of time itself. She knew where it was and what was happening there, but felt no attraction to the final taper, no impulse to savor the ultimatum.

There were even certain ephemeral moments that drew in her attention the way a lantern draws a moth across wide, dark fields: little nexi of consciousness that held her gaze and riveted her perception even amid the raucous sweep of jungly centuries.

One moment she constantly returned to (as if she ever really left) was simple, even humble, but evidently exercised some powerful esthetic for her. So much of her attention hovered just above a mosquito coil burning on a battered wooden table. It filled her “eyes”; she couldn’t look away as the glowing end of the black spiral moved steadily inward, a ruddy ember circling patiently inward, consuming it’s fuel in a measured march towards the center.

There was something about the hot red point eating its way along its pre-destined helix, turning the toxic incense into smoke and dropping a fine line of ash on the table below it, forming an after-image, a chalk shadow commemorating it’s cyclical passage to the center, where it would expire from lack of fuel and further destination.

Why that particular burning coil held her gaze, rather than the thousands of them all over the peninsula, had a lot to do with one of the few males that focused and enabled her attention: Puch Pop. She was grown very fond of Puch, as anybody would understand if they shared her timeless point of view.

One thing to admire: he used his real Mayan name. Unlike his brother, Juanito, who relished his Spanish name and would just as soon have forget that he had an Indian name at all–like so many Mayans with a shot at assimilation. Not that much of a shot in Mexico, where the world indio is a racial slur meaning “stupid” and “inferior”, where the spectrum of skin color blended up from dark to white by the blur of mestizaje amounted to a de facto caste system. But not all indios lived like ghosts in the jungle or wore huipiles to work cleaning hotel rooms or labored as construction peons for minimum wage. And the ones who did were called by Jorge or Maria, not Itzel or Kisin or Yum.

Even the once-great Mayan surnames were disappearing, thrust away into dark attics, buried under tiers of stone. Cham, Pook, Chal, Itza, Mams, Miss, Ek, Pop: these had been great names, royal names. Many were the names of glyphs carved into stone steles and calendars and temple walls. Now they were an embarrassment to those who tried to morph into a new mutt tribe of Gomez and Martinez and Sanchez. Or translated Ek into Estrella and moved on into bureaus or auto ownership. Was the next step moving to Florida and glossing Estrella into Star? Was that how stars were born?

And it got weirder than that. The Pop kids (the boys anyway) had gone to school at upper-middle class liceos and colegios: the result of parental scrimping and part-time jobs in Cancun, a tradition among Mexicans who pay for private rather than government medical care if they can possibly afford it, and sacrifice to give their kids a shot at being citizens of a real world rather than the illiterate burros the public school system coughed up. Where they ran into monied white kids who thought it was a hoot to troop off the Mayan settlements along strand north of town, slumming and eating salbutes and panuches they found tastier and more risqué than the normal fair in town. The more money and social pretense, the more likely for the offspring to be lolling under a palapa munching green tamales and tasty Kash Keken or Poc Chuc at “Mayami Beach”, the Harlem of their class.

Juanito would go along, unaware of or perhaps nervous about the irony of it, but Puch had only gone once. He’d ordered a beer from the Mayan girl, in her own language, and fallen into a short conversation with her about what school these people went to. He turned back to his friends and caught their stares. His race was not a secret, written all over his wide face and stocky build. But he had pulled it out and brandished it. They reacted as if twenties socialites in emeralds and pearls might have if one of their party at the Cotton Club had suddenly wiped off his grease paint to reveal himself as a Negro. It was at that point when he ended his social contacts with his schoolmates with the sole exception of faking their butts off on the soccer field.

There had been another episode he remembered and shelved next to the day he stopped “passing”, also sitting next to a pretty school girl–who wasn’t exactly blonde, but definitely not an indita–and ordering beer. Their middle-aged busboy’s heavy nose, squat hunched shoulders and blocky legs announced him as almost grotesquely Mayan. He came to their table looking down at an order pad and when he turned his eyes up to them expectantly, they were a deep, shocking violet. The girl showed nothing, but grabbed Puch’s thigh under the table and squeezed it in delight. Communicating a little delight to him, as well. When the lavender-eyed mozo left she turned to shaking with laughter. “Did you see that? Oh my god, que bárbaro!”

Her friend, lighter-skinned with aspirations to being a preppy fresa twit and in total disapproval of her amiga running around with bush trash like Puch, snickered knowingly. “He saved up all his tip centavos then blew them on those contacts. Pathetic.”

“But why?” Puch’s date asked, genuinely bewildered. She didn’t look at Puch though. Neither one of them did. The last thing they wanted was any insight into the “Mayan don’t-wanna-be” syndrome. “Who’s he trying to kid?”

“Probably himself. Or just doesn’t get it.”

“Or maybe he knows what the deal is,” Puch said as he stood up, laid a hundred peso bill on the table, and picked up his book bag. “And just likes looking that way.”

It was the last time he dated a Mexican girl. He’d couldn’t articulate why, but he’d had it with the race-conscious Mexicanas and didn’t find the uneducated Mayan girls all that interesting. Fortunately, Cancun was a magnet for foreigners and he lived in a tourist attraction.

When Yanche’s viewpoint widened up and away from the eternal smoking spiral of the mosquito coil to include Puch’s hundred pesos on the table beside it, she saw the incident as though through a gold filter, the soft light of gas flame lanterns in the little “Mayami Bich” taco bar that did business without electrical or water hookups. It was one of many moments in the Pop boy’s life that she particularly cherished. Floating loose and rudderless in the whorling eddies of time, Yanche had come to see him always in a sort of golden light, the ecstatic coloration of what he would eventually realize he had become. And her overly-distributed consciousness would pulse with ineffable love for the stout, handsome kid. If you were looking for a savior of your race, you couldn’t do much better than Puch Pop.

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Read the Episode Leading up to this one

Nobody at the table seemed very happy, but that was often the peculiar case in resort fun spots. No joy on the faces of Fric and Frac over there, two metrosexual urbanoids who thought dressing down meant wearing Hawaiian shirts under their unstructured cotton Miami Vice blazers. Certainly none on the stolid countenance of the beefy, amoral cop type on their side of the table with “federales” scrawled on him as vividly as “crooked bodyguard”. Across the table, the slim, lovely brunette seemed to be visiting a personal tragedy. And the beefcake beside her, who should have been exhilarated to have a woman like that leaning against him and touching his arm, was nothing but a brochure on operational readiness pose.

And at his elbow, the small leather backpack swarming with a golden sheen of bees. Winston let the waiter glance askance; he plowed towards the table with Xchab in his wake, her faser set on Maximal Gawk. His thoughts on the nature of the gathering at the bee-anointed table were confirmed as he drew close enough to hear:

“Look, you told me you’d go as high as quarter mil,” the big muscley guy was saying. “And here it sits for two hundred grand. Just what are you sniveling about?”

“Nothing, nothing…” This from the sleeked-back weasel who looked like sniveling was probably his main function in life. “I just figured a guy like you would be resourceful enough…”

“Resourceful? You sent me out on a snipe hunt for some magic crystal skull, no idea where it was but fairy tales and Hollywood scuttlebutt. And there you sit with a nice glass of Argentine Chablis and I’m laying the thing right on your table. How much more resource you want?”

Winston had been waiting to see if the other semi-suit sounded as gay and supercilious as he looked and was rewarded beyond his expectations. “Liiiiisten, Butchy. The world lives on negotiation and wiggleroom.”

“Glad you’re aware of that.” The big guy looking for a waiter, scribbling on his hand to signal for the check. “I’ve already had more attractive offers.”

That lit up the two straights just the way Winston, who’d renegotiated many a stinky deal in his time, expected it would. Boiling down to the most useless question, but always the one they bleated out first: Offers from whom?

The honeypie in the tipica outfit broke off their sputtering with a soft comment, “I think he’s talking about me. Please pay no attention.”

“I dunno,” Winston stuck in from his peripheral hover around the table. “As offers go, you’re damned attractive.”

They all turned to look at this new voice in the jam-up; gnarly old Mr. Natural with a cute little Indian trick who squirmed under their stares.

“And just who,” lisped Frac, the gay one, “Might you people be?”

“Well, I might be the Ghost of Christmas Pretend to Come,” Winston answered solemnly, “But what it is, he called me so I came.”

The producer turned on Bannock with a gaze a little too watery to be the Eye of Flame he hoped for. “You called somebody to meet us here?”

“No. Duh.” Bannock rolled his eyes. “I’ve never seen this codger before.”

“Not him,” Winston said, getting the same dismissive quality without having to do an eyeroll. “Him.”

He pointed at the backpack.

That pronouncement nailed Loris’ attention right to the wall. Xchab stared at Winston, ready to hike up her skirt and sprint for the kitchen door.

“What? Who?” So Fric, the nominally straight dork, wasn’t any sharper than the gay one. “Who called you?”

Winston just stared at the backpack for so long that everybody started fidgeting, Xchab was edging towards thataway, and the straighter jerk was nodding significantly to the bodyguard, who folded his napkin slowly as Bannock came on full alert. Then he said, “oXo.”

Leaving Loris intrigued, Bannock flabbergasted, and the straight arrows aghast. “What the fuck is going on here, Bannock?” they bleated in unison.

“What’s going on is this.” Bannock crunched out the tone he hoped would carry complete finality. He wasn’t above just grabbing the money and dealing with the ramifications–as previously demonstrated–but would rather not. “You sent me to get something. I got it. You owe me money. I have no idea who George Carlin’s ghost is but after a few days around that skull I’m prepared to believe about anything. Maybe oXo got a cell phone and hailed the freak so he could score. Nothing to do with our deal, so don’t try to use it as an excuse to welsh.”

“Know what I’m wondering?” Winston said mildly.

“What you were just talking about?” Frac minced out cattily.

“Nope. What the hell I’m doing here. Is this some sort of reality show?”

“I doubt you’ve showed anywhere near reality since Altamont, Mister Natch.”

“So everybody’s wondering the same thing,” Loris put in. “Do you have any hunches?”

“I saw him in a dream. Big gold, glowing skull hovering right over this very table. He told me to come see him. Bring shrooms.”

Everybody goggled a bit except Loris, who purred, “And did you?”

“Wouldn’t you?” Winston shrugged. “A summons like that?”

“Won’t you sit down?” Loris pushed out a vacant chair and caught the waiter’s eye. “You and your friend?”

“For Christ’s sake, Bannock,” Fric remonstrated. “Did I miss a sign out front: Welcome Rainbow People Conventioneers?”

But by then it was pretty obvious to everybody, even their own sneering bodyguard, that it was time to cut the crap. Talk turned once again to money as the waiter laid glasses of sangria and bowls of chips and guacamole in front of the newcomers. Xchab was on the edge of her chair, inhaling the sound, look and smell of money, power, and self-satisfaction.

Winston leaned towards Loris, who met him halfway. “Excuse me, but do you happen to see anything kind of, you know… hovering… around my faithful Indian companion? Like, buzzing her, maybe?”

Loris took a measured look at Xchab, not breaking it when the girl turned to spot her gaze and twitched away like a mouse caught in the pantry. Finally she told him, “Nothing but the clouded aura of a seeker in turmoil. Why do you ask?”

Winston’s turn to stare. He cruised her shamelessly, then smiled and patted her arm. “Ah. I believe we might be family.”

But it was time for the backpack to be proffered within reach (straps tight in Bannock’s husky grip) and the stereotype briefcase nudged forward to be inspected. Loris watched Xchab as Bannock satisfied himself that the stacks of green bills were for real: the girl irradiated by the sight of the money. Garcon, a glass of water and defibrillator for the muchacha, please. She willed a quick mental message to the Indian girl: greed is self-defeating, honey. Sit in your own skin.

But when she saw these two L.A. jackals peering into the pack, gloating over their possession of one of the world’s four coveted authentic crystal skulls, she also strained to will a missive to Bannock, wishing she could speak into his head like oXo could: Remember the pistol trick, big boy? Walk out with the money and The Love?

Then caught herself. Possessiveness, grasping, force: the primordial roots of our self-immolation. Take your own advice, woman: tread the path, trust the path, be the path. She breathed deeply, in a healing cadence.

She had wondered how strongly she would feel the impulse to walk out behind the yoyos, stalking oXo. And heard his voice in her head. Not saying goodbye, but bidding her look to her left. Where Bannock sat, motionless as he watched the Californians and their goon walk out. Life’s a trade-off, she thought.

Aware of her look, he turned and murmured. “I’m really sorry. But a deal’s a deal.”

“Life is a circle,” she whispered to his ear. “I love it that you knew what I was feeling. And cared.”

She heard a sigh behind her and turned to see Xchab seething with an almost religious avidity for the briefcase and Winston meeting her look with a sad kindliness. “The wheel turns,” he said.

She gave him a wan smile and he reached to her ear, did a magic flourish and zippity-zap, held a mushroom between his fingers. “Think we oughta eat these babies and go for a swim?”

Bannock glanced at the darkness outside the cunning colonial windows and asked, “Swim? Where?”

“Punta Nizuc.”

Rang a bell. Oh, wait. “Isn’t that where Club Med is?”

Winston beamed. “Can you stand it?”

Read the Episode Leading up to this one

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The spectrum of Cuevones who pass their time here is a measure of the uniqueness of Isla Mujeres as a place to live, vacation, or lam out. One day might bring Slovenian artists, Minnesota tourist families, old salts crazed by sailing over from Cuba in a hurricane, Japanese businessmen, Italian models, French guitarists, fugitives from injustice, misguided writers, or local bricklayers who just want a buzz. A guy who lives in Alaska, works in Antarctica and lives for cribbage. A Burmese couple just checking the maps. A chistoso who plays piano–reggae on the beach, chamber music for a dinner club, then hard rock at night. A Scotch dynamiter who prods everyone in dangerous diving. Ski racer, turned fashion model, turned DJ, turned CPA touring Latino graveyards. Danish writer fresh out of concentration camp. Pervo beach photog. Cute martial artist from Uruguay. Insane Israelis. Grouchy Gringos. Then there’s you.
Seagull, in The Blasé Sojourner.

Curtsy had to martial up a major gut check before marching into Café Cueva. Damned if she go around wearing a shame merit badge for the duration. And of course it was Del who made the first allusion. And somehow that softened the whole thing up, put her back in charge. Must be that famous cockney charm.

She got the owl eye from behind the counter heaped with fresh baked goods and shell jewelry. And all the dripping insinuation he could put into, “Hellooooooooo.”

“Heard you got the tin tack.” With, of course, the Groucho-bouncing eyebrows.

She grabbed the counter copy of Mexican Slang 101 and leaved through it with knitted brow. “Why doesn’t this thing have any of that stupid London gutter slang?”

“The sack, as you yanks would have it.” Del drawled back. “Dropped like a sack of shite, is the implication.”

“Yeah that was pretty much the subtext.”

“And we heard why, as well.” By now the leer was a pronounced as any Japanese demon’s, almost covering over the redeeming twinkle behind it.

Monica turned from the espresso machine and socked her hubby on the shoulder. “Shut up, Del,” she explained. She looked Curtsy towards a seat by the bookshelves and came over with a cup of Americano. And, uncharacteristically, slid into the opposite chair.

“Del’s hardly Mr. Discreet Empathy,” she said softly. “But for guys around here, he’s probably in the top two percent. And all of them know.”

Curtsy nodded glumly and sipped her coffee. With a faint taste of the Almendrado tequila Monica knew she liked.

“Frankly,” the dean of Isla’s baristas went on, “I think they over-reacted. But my point’s this. You know Del and I both like you, but you should consider relocating. Any guy you talk to from now, you can assume he’s some rough beast cruising your reputation. You’re in for a load of chaff and there’s no way you’re going to get another job.”

Curtsy nodded. This whole thing was making her feel better and worse at the same time. Pretty much the story of her whole career on Isla. “I don’t know where I’d go from here. I’m just about broke and Dolphin Dis was my life dream.”

“That’s rough, honey. But you’re never going to get another job in the dive business on this coast.”

Monica stole a look around, Del all wrapped up in serving/ogling a tall black beauty who’d come in for some complicated frappuccino variation. She leaned close and went way sotto voce, far from her usual style. “So, listen… How was it?”

“Just like with men,” Curtsy said quickly. Then gave it a beat and said, “Except they’re clean and you don’t have to listen to them talk shit.”

Monica giggled and started to rise, but the black customer had come over to their table, looming over them like the figurehead of the Narcissus. Saying, “You pretty sure of yourself, there?”

Curtsy and Monica, unsure who was being addressed, gave her nonverbal Huhs? so she hooked her exquisite espadrille from some duty-free in the Outre Mer under a chair rung, hauled it up and slid down into it like the fall of tropic night. And said, “No diving jobs around here, she was saying.”

Curtsy wasn’t in the mood to care who this Beyonce-looking broad was, just shrugged and said, “I’m sure she’s right.”

“Now don’t be so sure of that,” Aphra said, pursing hibiscus lips to waft breath across the surface of her coffee confection. “See that cute little Chinagirl over by the door?”

And sure enough, just inside the door on one of the metal chairs, was a really nice-looking Chinese woman. Del should be more frisky than normal tonight, Monica was thinking, after getting a load of these two. Curtsy just nodded to Aphra, afraid to hope.

“Well she… and I, you understand… are equal opportunity employers.”

Curtsy stared at her a moment, then glanced at Monica, who was beaming. And suddenly the bombproof California girl was back, laughing out of blue skies and slapping Monica a resonant high five.

“We need a diver for a short-term venture. Pays good though. And we’re just loads of fun.”

Del, who’d been following it from behind the counter put in, “Oy go down a bit me ownself. Right conditions and what.”

“Well, they did say short-term,” Monica said, standing and heading over to him. As she passed Curtsy she gave her shoulder a friendly pat.

Aphra, sizing up the blonde diver at close range also felt a strong patting impulse. But all things in their own time, as the Good Ol’ Book puts it. She motioned and MeiMei Chiang got up and headed over with her cup of Earl Grey.

“That’d be the good Doctor Chiang, there,” Aphra nodding her head towards the mayanologist with whom she and her awesome powers of credit were now partners in a fairly nefarious scheme for the ultimate Benefit Of All Concerned. “I’ll let her tell the tale.”

“I’m Curtsy. Which apparently everybody on the island is way too aware of these days.”

MeiMei nodded and sat in the chair Monica had vacated. “And I’m MeiMei. This is Aphra. But before we get into it, I’m supposed to tell you that Puch Pop misses you and sends his wishes.”

Curtsy stared at her.

“And from what I saw, I’d say you should take it to heart.”

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