Cherries, pawpaw, mangoes, and watermelon render apples, bananas, and oranges the most banal-tasting objects ever to set foot in a human mouth; waves foreclose on children’s sandcastles; shopping-center Christmas decorations hang tackily over swarthy Santas with heat exhaustion; bushfires rage out of control and everywhere is ash, and a burning red moon of a bushfire night hangs over the city, over the ocean, over Aldo ripening like garbage on his dreary rock. Magic Beach is overrun, blighted with onlookers who stumble down the hazardous descent to gawk at the muse, the paraplegic, the poet, the rapist, the murderer, the religious entrepreneur and false prophet sequestered on the rock; his congregation is made up of girls tanning their fake tans, hirsute men so incurious they don’t know what their own tattoos mean, flaxen Scandinavian backpackers with actual snouts, Chinese tourists, nudists splayed limply on the sand as if they’ve been blown out of a whale’s spout, members of the Association of Sex Workers, spliff-smoking truants who have biked unhelmeted down the near-vertical slope, occupational therapists and their clients, tween sexual autodidacts, bloggers, reality-TV stars, septuagenarian snorkelers, the unemployed and underemployed, white and off-white supremacists, PR companymen attempting to persuade Aldo to endorse this or that brand of energy drink, stoners, locals, local politicians hoping for photo opportunities, and parents scrambling to reclaim children who dared each other to swim out and touch the hermit in an increasingly popular game called Escape from Pedophile Island.
