Tourists Go Home

Ringed by twinkling, white beaches and blanketed by dunes and rainforests, the island city of Florianópolis offers everything an American would expect from Brazil: Plentiful caipirinhas, beautiful locals, and a non-violent native monkey population. Indeed, if a person were to spend just one weekend in Florianópolis, they would consider their life utterly complete. And yet, the three American digital nomads lingering outside Timothy Kosta’s Florianópolis apartment looked about as happy as if they had just landed in Milwaukee.

Josi, her dark brown hair tight in a bun, rocked on her heels. She was tall and tan, with pleasing features, but now she pursed her lips anxiously. Muscular Levi, whose tight jean shorts offended common decency, sported black hair in the military style. Currently, he made a show of inspecting the tailpipe on Timothy’s car, even though he did not know what tailpipes were or how they operated. Finally, there was Kristi, Short and Pretty Kristi, who had recently been injectably enhanced by a local aesthetician. She possessed a small, round face elevated by perky cheeks, honey-brown eyes, and freshly plump lips. A brisk, salty breeze swept in from the nearby lagoon, teasing her long, auburn hair and ruffling her turquoise and violet floral sundress.

The lot of them were meant to be back in the United States, back in the office. However, they had each evaded the Great Post-Covid Return and had emerged from 2022 as “location-independent” remote workers. In the years since, they had embraced their new identities so zealously that they hardly remembered ever being normal. Of course, it helped that they were now on a massive island where the exchange rate made even the least successful of them feel like millionaires. The wild toucans, the glimpses of abject poverty, the constant threat of mudslides: it all felt like a tailor-made adventure. They hardly noticed that the local tap water gave them volcanic diarrhea.

Even this one neighborhood, with its mismatched styles and hodgepodge of colors, felt exotic. On just this one unevenly paved avenue, the three nomads spotted a brick bungalow, a Brutalist concrete split-level, and a pink, sprawling mid-century modern. It all sloped downward past papaya trees and bougainvillea hedges toward a sparkling lagoon.

Timothy Kosta, however, was nowhere to be found — and this had seriously killed Kristi’s buzz.

Kristi raised her front-facing camera to an angle that accentuated her hyaluronic acid-filled lips. “You guys,” she droned to her 12,321 Instagram followers. “You will not believe what’s happening right now. My good friend Timothy Kosta is missing. And this is what we just found on his rental car.”

She switched to her back-facing camera and panned over to Timothy Kosta’s rental car, a nondescript, forest-green sedan. Across it, massive red letters blared:

TOURISTS GO HOME

To be continued…