habit

Heat fills the thin air around him. As hot and bright as it is outdoors, there is no humidity. This is not the climate in which Esau had grown up, he had never felt such dry heat in Louisiana. There is no heavy sweat hanging from the most uncomfortable parts of his neck and back; only the feeling that the sun is cooking, or directly evaporating, the moisture out of him. Wind stirs, high above the apartment buildings: he can see the laundry that hangs out of the highest windows flutter, but the bright, hot air around him moves only in waves of heat rising from the sidewalk. Ahead of him, the apartment-lined kalea opens onto a boulevard, and across the boulevard the Bay of Biscay stretches off into an indistinct horizon. His steps feel slightly arrhythmic against the shush and crash of the waves.
His thoughts slip deeper within him, and his glances above doorways he has already passed grow fewer and farther between. He doesn�t remember last night, but I will tell you: The taxi driver was exasperated, and the hotel clerk was annoyed, and the busboy the most irritated of the three. Between them, they spoke enough English to understand a man, but not a drunk man, and Esau was drunk. It was clear enough however, as you might suppose, what a man with a suitcase wanted with a hotel, and they obliged, and his wallet was no hard thing to be found.
This morning he went, still inebriated, and without thought, out into the city. The young daylight exaggerated the haze in front of his eyes. He wandered to the left, towards apparitions assembled at tables, paired ghosts clinking white ceramic mugs on white ceramic plates. �Ghosts,� thought Esau, �I should join the dead now: if only for coffee.� So he sat, and he

drank cafe ole, and he decided to go back to the hotel. But this is where we found him to begin with.
Every street looks the same in Spain. Every dumpster is marked with graffiti, every shop says �carnicer�a � and displays mangled animals hung from hooks, every tile in the sidewalk is a dirty white octagon with a crushed cigarette butt lying in the groove beside it. There is but one difference: every other street opens onto the bay, and the streets between these open onto other streets.
Finally submerged within himself, lost not in reflection but in the perpetuity of the kaleas and in silent, irritated self-chastising, Esau ceases to look up at doorways. He has no aim, but walks, chasing his toes toward a road that leads to the bay, across the boulevard. Relieved to recognize a distinguishable landmark, he smiles at the huge ocean and the small island within it, and stands with his feet spread apart and his elbows on the metal railing that cages in the beach. His hair follows the wind, and his tired eyes follow the crescent shape of the beach, looking still for the hotel. The sun no longer bakes him. His first thought is �rain�because there are dark clouds overhead.� But there are no dark clouds, only a darkening sky. The enormity and beauty of the Atlantic feel useless to him now, and the dark purple and red lines in the sky worry him greatly.

Habit

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