During the day, everything in the village is closer together. At night, the walks are long. But not nearly as scorching hot. As I walked home from the waterside bar after meeting Chapman, I was very high, it had to be 2 a.m., and I was seeing snakes everywhere. Many of the snakes turned out to be only iguanas, but still…

Walking past the long, unmarked soccer field back into ‘downtown,’ I was sure I would be killed as two snakes approached. They turned out to be only two brown men. But people can be much worse than animals so I veered, possessed by marijuana, out of their path and onto the vast green. I couldn’t help it. Everyone telling me not to trust anyone; days of not speaking the language and never really knowing what’s going on; long dark walks home through masses of iguanas; this Costa Rican pot; if paranoia were a rug, tonight I had laid at one end, grabbed the edge and rolled to the other side and I was trapped in the center: a paranoid pig in a blanket with my arms pinned to my sweaty sides. Alana would come home tomorrow to find my body laying face down, center field. If she didn’t find it by noon, the heat would melt my body into the worst thing imaginable.

Somewhere in there I knew this thought line only ran because I hadn’t smoked for a week, but when you feel like there’s a chance you really might be hurt, you just go with that, rational or not. So I kept walking across the field and thinking about something Milton had told me at the bar; he knew a lot about the history of this village and he said that it’s only become even this metropolitan in the last ten years. "Ten years ago it was all gold panning and guns and fights," he’d told me before we’d smoked, when he was expressionless except for that bleeding lip. "And now suddenly they live in a town with two internet cafés, and tourists. The people here are really wonderful, really, but many of them are still standing around with guns in their pockets wondering what happened to their village all of a sudden."

I could still hear the men’s feet slapping the gravel road as I reached center field and I looked back over my nighttime shoulder as I stepped over my own imaginary body. The men were policia. A hum of comfort reflexively leaked up and out my nose and mouth, the same way it does in my sleep.

Soon, I was across the field and on the dirt road by the jungle where Alana lives. I had her key in my pocket. I missed her more knowing she’d be here tomorrow. She’d said I could sleep in her bed, "Just don’t wake my sisters." Actually, she’d urged me to stay in her room the entire time. "You stay at my house. You don’t pay for a hotel! You fix things with my mother. She will have to accept you," Alana’d said, and I knew she’d be pissed that I hadn’t tried to sort things out with Ilka yet. But I really believed it to be Alana’s responsibility. I suspected it would be the subject of our first fight ever, tomorrow morning.

Whenever we would mop the floors at PIZZA DIVE, I’d finish first and then sit and watch her pumping her section clean and I’d stare at her brown knuckles turning white around the broom handle and I knew that if we ever fought, she would grab me by the throat. I was attracted to the image. Excited by it. Though I knew she could destroy me.

But as I trudged the length of the soccer field, it felt strange and wrong that that we hadn’t slept in the same bed yet, and I decided I would, indeed sleep at Alana’s; I wanted to wake under the weight of her in the morning. When I was sleeping on the couch in San Jose I’d been so worried that Alana wouldn’t tolerate my humming when we slept in the same bed for the first time, but the parrots fight loud in the trees over her house nearly round-the-clock, and they’re much louder than I am. I was ready to sleep with Alana.

I picked up pace and soon I was on the precipice of the steep incline leading down into her yard. It was so dark in the trees that her rusty house was invisible. The white and pink, little-girl’s bicycle catching moonlight on the roof gave away its location. I wondered how the bike got up there. I imagined it belonged to one of the little sisters and had been thrown up on the roof. I wondered, by whom.

My new flip flops were carrot scrapers across the tops of my feet as I inched slow down the side of the incline. I heard ducks mumbling in the darkness beyond the fence in Alana’s yard. At the bottom, by the edge of the fence I was, like the house, out of view. It felt great. Then a light blossomed on inside the house.

The light didn’t scare me as much as walking the open dusty road at 2 a.m. I could easily run from big fat Ilka, though I hoped she didn’t have a gun. I crouched and watched the lit window and soon a wide drape eclipsed the light.

I put my feet in the barbed wire like comfortable stirrups (I’d always been very good at climbing barbed wire - even in flip-flops – I’ve never been hurt or even torn my clothes) and I heard the ducks’ mumbling turn into disturbed grumbling as I glided over the fence into the yard, where I saw the outline of the house much clearer. It was an amazing mansion of a shack. Much more beautiful than my parents’ condo with its careful and pale, teal green guts.

I took several steps in and I heard iguanas in the brush. Discerning the delicate sound, I realized the duck grumbling had ceased, replaced by an unnerving quiet. Then a I felt something swat the back of my arm on a downward stroke. I was able to not cry out in surprise, and it didn’t hurt, but I almost tripped as I sidestepped like lightning. Alana had told me that sometimes iguanas fell out of the trees and it sounded like paratroopers crash landing on the tin roof of her house. I calmed. Then I was smacked the same way on my other arm, harder.

Inverse to earlier, the pot now kept me calm and I simply back-stepped and stared up into the trees. I even planed the side of my hand across the top of my forehead as I stared up, as if that might improve my night vision. I saw nothing, but as I brought my eyes back down they landed on something wide and white against the dark. It was as tall as myself. Some strange tree? The grumbling and quacking started again. It came from the white tree. I stared hard until the tree took the shape of a giant white duck, but then I stared too hard and it blurred away. As I blinked to regain focus there was quick, loud rustle and a then a smack to my face as if with a ping pong paddle.

The smack surprised more than it hurt but the sound that followed, a sharp, continuous sine wave inches from my ear, hurt much worse and I finally did cry out, and continued crying out, covering my ears as whatever it was screamed along with me. Our voices together were like two loud ambulances racing through the quiet village. Several notes into it, a third screeching came into my other ear. I got louder. Then they stopped. A second later I stopped. And then two ping pong paddles to the sides of my face, one very close to my eye. This time it hurt like hell so I whipped my arms in arcs at my sides as fast as a hummingbird’s wings. I felt my hand connect with a feathery head. They were giant ducks! I heard them retreat several feet away, one to my right and one to my left. They grumbled and breathed heavily and every few inhales they hissed at me like giant cobras in stereo. A team. They waited, like velociraptors.

As they caught their breath I gained enough composure to remember that I am not scared of birds. I was also able to gain ground toward Alana’s part of the house but when the grumble stopped again, I took the silence as a sign that they were again ready to attack. I didn’t want that to happen, so I turned, preemptive, and walked, straight legged and strong like a confident general at the tall stretch of white to my right. As I suspected it would, it flapped and backed up frantically and tripped into the brush. I didn’t bother to look over my shoulder for a surprise attack. Pussy ducks. When I was upon the struggling duck it made a final brave lunge at me and I grabbed it by it’s beak, which closed around my thumb so that I could feel the soft pink inside of its throat. I tried to find its eyes. I almost let go, for some reason, when I realized it was actually a swan.

Why is it worse to beat up a swan than a duck? Is it a matter of elegance? I didn’t know, but I couldn’t hurt the bird. Even when another ping pong paddle cracked the back of my head, I just yelled, "Ooooooow!" and put my foot out in the attacker’s direction to ward it off. The bastard deserved my foot. But I couldn’t give it to him.

The swan lunged at my shoe as if it were separate from me. It was mad at my shoe. So I continued wiggling it in the air as bait and the swan concentrated its attack on my mocking foot, distracted from the war by the battle with my shoe. It missed target a couple times and its wooden beak broke the skin of my shin as I hopped on the other foot toward the house, still holding one swan, gently by its lips.

As the three of us inched toward the house, I noticed light around the top edges of the window where I’d seen the curtains shut. The thin, lighted space shifted back and forth and I knew it was Ilka. Her girth blocked out the sun. Had she seen the whole spectacle? Things can always get worse.

Inches from what looked like the door into the house, I inhaled deep, counted to three and tossed the swan’s head to the side as I brought forth a loud wash of hiss from my throat, the hiss I’d planned for muggers. The swans back up. I hissed again so hard that it was almost painful and I reached for the handle of the door, but couldn’t find it. In that same moment the swans screamed again even louder than the first time and they whipped open their wings in tandem, full out, a good sixteen feet of white feathers like a movie screen. Like a cave of white around us. They should have used that move earlier on in the battle; it was terrifying, I almost wet myself. But I found the door handle and I was in.

The empty bed was just inside the door. As I laid down, I heard little girls somewhere else in the house, their soft, slow talking, reverberating off the insides of the metal walls. Raphael was in here somewhere too. I went to bed dreaming that the house was Ilka’s stomach, and we were all inside, safe.