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strolling—the best surfers could join their hands behind their backs and stroll up and back, up and back, considering the issues of the day, so sturdy was a longboard on a good wave, they could set up a nice chair and a rug and sit in front of the fire—
    She wanted to turn left, to follow the still-curved glass away from the mulching glass, and so she leaned back a little, she weighted her ankles into the board’s left side, pushing its edge slightly—
    It was done. The board was behind her, gone. She dove into the foam and was under. Her ears exploded with the sound of underwater. It was dark and all was violence. She shot up and surfaced in time to see the board, wanting to be free but attached to her ankle, rearing, bucking straight into the sky before it fell again and rested into the now-calm sea of blue-green gel.
    But she’d gotten up. A good thing, a bad thing—the rest of the day would be an anticlimax. She’d have two or three more good chances at most, no matter how long they spent out here. She paddled through the foam and into the calm again, the sun drying her back almost instantly. Hand was straddling, his feet kicking the water, waiting for her.
    This story is equally or more about surfing. People are no more interesting than waves and mountains.
    In the afternoon, on the hard beach, with the wind snaking at them, hissing and sending sand into their sandwiches, Pilar and Hand squinted into the sun to see the water. They’d been in the ocean all day and now were watching it like actors would a play going on without them. The ocean didn’t need them.
    Hand started clapping.
    “I’m gonna clap every two minutes for the rest of the day,” he said.
    There was a man out in the surf, wearing a cowboy hat.
    “What do you do for that company again?” Pilar asked.
    “I consult. I brainstorm. They like my brain.”
    “But why here again?”
    “My Spanish. And I volunteered. Down here money goes a long way. We get paid American wages but the costs here are half of what they’d be anywhere else.”
    “Okay, but why Intel here at all, and not Korea or something?”
    “We are in Korea. A big setup there.”
    “Did you just say ‘we’?”
    “No.”
    “You did!”
    The cowboy surfer was riding a perfect wave, hooting.
    Hand had forgotten to clap. Pilar debated whether she should note this, knowing that she might just be bringing on more clapping.
    “You forgot to clap,” she said.
    “Listen. I have no problem with them as a company. They make chips. Chips are good. They’re in Granada because the workforce is educated, in the city at least, and they’re good workers. The infrastructure’s good, airport’s good, roads work, communications are fair, banks are sound, inflation’s fine, conveniences are decent, at least in Granada. And because here Intel avoids the unions on the floor and in trucking, all that. A lot of companies are leaving Puerto Rico, for one because the union activity is getting big down there. Same workforce, basically, as here, but no one sets up in this part of the world to get mixed up with unions.”
    Pilar couldn’t decide if she found this interesting.
    Hand, remembering himself, clapped for a full minute.
    The horses were outside again, but were loitering down the road, in front of the bucket-blue house with the German woman, no relation to Hans from the hotel, watering her rock garden. One black horse was scratching at the road, nodding, as if counting.
    “Looking for water,” Hand said.
    Pilar went back to their room and filled a bowl with water. She came back; Hand’s face was skeptical. She walked toward the horse. It backed away and trotted up the hill. She held the water at stomach level, dejected.
    Hand walked over to comfort her. But when his arms were supposed to wrap around her shoulders, he knocked the bowl from below, overturning it deliberately, soaking her shirt.
    “Oops,” he said.
    She slapped him hard across the mouth and the crisp flat sound of