Sole Survivor

placing bets on how fast it would complete each lap.
        Bending over the sink, Joe splashed handfuls of cold water in his face. The astringent taste and smell of chlorine was in the water, but any sense of cleanliness that it provided was more than countered by a stale, briny stink wafting out of the open drain.
        The building wasn't well ventilated. The still air was hotter than the day outside, reeking of urine and sweat and disinfectant, so noxiously thick that breathing it was beginning to sicken him.
        The kid seemed to be taking a long time.
        Joe splashed more water in his face and then studied his beaded, dripping reflection in the streaked mirror. In spite of his tan and the new pinkness from the sun that he had absorbed in the past hour, he didn't look healthy. His eyes were grey, as they had been all his life. Once, however, it had been the bright grey of polished iron or wet indulines; now it was the soft dead grey of ashes, and the whites were bloodshot.
        A fourth man had joined the cockroach handicappers. He was in his mid-fifties, thirty years older than the other three but trying to be one of them by matching their enthusiasm for pointless cruelty and sophomoric humour. The gamblers had become an obstruction to the restroom traffic. They were getting rowdy, laughing at the spasmodic progress of the insect, urging it on as though it were a thoroughbred pounding across turf toward a finish line. “ Go, go, go, go, go! ” They noisily debated whether its pair of quivering antenna were part of its guidance system or the instruments with which it detected the scents of food and other roaches eager to copulate.
        Striving to block out the voices of the raucous group, Joe searched his ashen eyes in the mirror, wondering what his motives had been when he sent the boy to scope out the men in the Hawaiian shirts. If they were conducting a surveillance, they must have mistaken him for someone else. They would realize their error soon, and he would never see them again. There was no good reason to confront them or to gather intelligence about them.
        He had come to the beach to prepare himself for the visit to the graveyard. He needed to submit himself to the ancient rhythms of the eternal sea, which wore at him as waves wore at rock, smoothing the sharp edges of anxiety in his mind, polishing away the splinters in his heart. The sea delivered the message that life was nothing more than meaningless mechanics and cold tidal forces, a bleak message of hopelessness that was tranquillising precisely because it was brutally humbling. He also needed another beer or even two to further numb his senses, so the lesson of the sea would remain with him as he crossed the city to the cemetery.
        He didn't need distractions. He didn't need action. He didn't need mystery. For him, life had lost all mystery the same night that it had lost all meaning, in a silent Colorado meadow blasted with sudden thunder and fire.
        Sandals slapping on the tiles, the boy returned to collect the remaining twenty of his thirty dollars. “Didn't see any big guy in a green shirt, but the other one's out there, sure enough, getting a sunburn on his bald spot.”
        Behind Joe, some of the gamblers whooped in triumph. Others groaned as the dying cockroach completed another circuit either a few seconds quicker or slower than its time for the previous lap.
        Curious, the boy craned his neck to see what was happening.
        “Where?” Joe asked, withdrawing a twenty from his wallet.
        Still trying to see between the bodies of the circled gamblers, the boy said, “There's a palm tree, a couple of folding tables in the sand where this geeky bunch of Korean guys are playing chess, maybe sixty-eighty feet down the beach from here.”
        Although high frosted windows let in hard white sunshine and grimy fluorescent tubes shed bluish light overhead, the air seemed yellow, like an acidic mist.
        “Look at me,” Joe said.
        Distracted by the cockroach races, the boy said, “Huh?”
        “ Look at me .”
        Surprised by the quiet fury in Joe's voice, the kid briefly met his gaze. Then those troubling eyes, the colour of contusions, refocused on the twenty-dollar bill.
        “The guy you saw was wearing a red Hawaiian shirt?” Joe asked.
        “Other colours in it, but mostly red and orange, yeah.”
        “What pants was he