The Path of Most Resistance

by Russell Wangersky

  The hummingbird keeps moving, but only to hover and start threading his beak into a flower that looks like a long red tube. If you were here, I know you’d be transfixed, that you’d just sit here, perfectly still, and watch him slipping his narrow beak into that thin tube until he finally finished and flitted away.

  I mean, that’s the kind of thing we talked about during all that planning, isn’t it? Finding the flowers we’d never see except in photographs and spotting the birds that only live in guidebooks? It’s everything we talked about doing. It’s the world we were going to see.

  When we’d sit on your bed in the apartment — and later our bed, after, well, you know, after — taking turns reading travel stories in the paper or in magazines. We were always trying to figure out the places with the best climate and the best prices, trying to figure out where we could go so that the money we’d saved would last the longest and where we’d have the most time to find work teaching English or lining up work with aid agencies. We spent more time on the where than on the how, because that part was more fun.

  I remember when we looked at Africa and South America, one too far, the other too scary, and it was like Goldilocks and the three bears, both of us looking for the place that we could turn to each other and say, “This one’s just right.” Eastern Europe? The Middle East? Thailand? We considered and quickly dismissed them all for this small Mexican town, its name caught up with letters and sounds from a culture that only barely managed to survive the arrival of the invading Spanish.

  Down in the valley, I can see smoke hanging over the tops of all the trees, white smoke that smells more like burning paper than anything else, but with a hint of resinous piney-ness, too. I know this particular haze is the start of everyone’s breakfast, the charcoal braziers started for breakfast — “car-bon,” stronger emphasis on the second syllable — brought to life with pine kindling coated with hard resin that glistens like a brown gem. We would have looked at it together and wondered, just for a moment, if someone’s house had caught fire. I know you would have thought that — because that’s what I used to think, too. But I’ve been here almost three months now, and I’m starting to know what’s what.

  I know I didn’t leave any hints when I left. I didn’t think I’d have to.

  I flew into Mexico City and I made my way alone through customs and out of the city. That first lonely night in the hostel I remember thinking that there was no way that I would be able to even walk around here because it was just too frightening. The bus coming into town was packed, and through the window, I’d watched the heavily laden men and women trudging up the highway, and noticed the occasional water stops with AGUA all in white block letters on a water-blue background, as if the colour of the backing was every bit as important to its prospective users as the spelling was. Coming down into the town, all I could think was that it all looked so grim and dangerous, that no one even looked up, that they were carefully turning their faces away. There was no way I wanted to head out into it alone.

  But when the sun came up in the morning, I had no choice but to go out on my own, because I needed to find something to eat.

  It’s eight a.m. now, and they just played the national anthem through the big aging loudspeakers downtown. They do the same thing every weekday morning. I didn’t know it was the anthem, the first time I heard it. I was looking around, trying to figure out what the fuzzy, slightly martial serenade was that I was hearing and that stopped almost as quickly as it began.

  You would have figured it out by now if you’d gotten here the same time I did.

  You were supposed to be figuring it out.

  I remember when it was all falling apart, watching you shake your head like this trip wasn’t ever really in the cards, that all of our plans were never more than a game to you.

  But it was always our plan, that was the deal, travelling together, “the two musketeers,” you used to joke, and you even said we’d both be safer because of it.

  So when I bought my ticket and you said, “It was a stupid daydream, Nell,” I couldn’t believe it.

  Really?

  It was no daydream for me.

  I thought you were just afraid. That if I gave you a few days, you’d settle down and buy your ticket and we could laugh about it on the plane. Then you said that it wasn’t that simple, and that you’d gotten involved with Josh, throwing that elephant into the room without any warning at all.

  Even then, I thought it was just cold feet. Cold feet about the trip, cold feet about us, cold feet about explaining everything to our families. I thought that wouldn’t last, that you’d come to your senses. We’d been planning this trip for three years, at least. Our last two years in college and then one whole year when we were working and putting away a nest egg to fall back on. Then, just when we were supposed to be heading south together for good, you bailed. You bailed on us.

  I know you thought staying put was the sensible thing to do. I thought you were just taking the easy way out.

  I regret some of the things I said that night.

  I’m sorry that I said, “You start getting some cock and it turns your head right around, doesn’t it?”

  You know I don’t usually talk that way. It sounded harsher than I’d meant it to. But I was angry, hurt, even if that doesn’t excuse what I said. I was really angry — and I think I had a right to be. Six months earlier, if I’d said the same thing to you about some other guy, we would have gone to bed angry, and in the morning, we would have laughed about it.

  And then you said, “A couple of times doesn’t mean anything,” putting it in the class of “just drunk and experimenting.” I know we started slow and we’d only been sharing the room for a month or so, but was folding up my futon and using it as a TV-room couch most of the time just a better use of space and not really any kind of commitment? I shouldn’t read anything into us sharing a bed?

  My head was literally still spinning about that when, to drive the point home, you called Josh and he came right over and you guys went to the bedroom and closed the bedroom door like you planned it that way, just to make the point abundantly clear. There wasn’t even a place left for me in my own apartment. I sat in the kitchen and I could hear you both talking, the back-and-forth murmuring low and indistinct through the thin door, and I heard you having sex before I finally left the apartment and started walking. I thought you were being deliberately cruel, and you were. It was my home, too, and you pushed me out. But maybe that was the only way you could see to break it off — maybe the best way to end any sentence is with a really obvious period.

  Before I left, I gave away some of my stuff and I put the rest in my mom’s basement for storage — I remember thinking, “Good luck looking for the big pot the next time you want to make spaghetti,” and that made me smile a little. Just a little.

  My mom was upset about all the room my things would take up, the mess of it all, the mattress and the box spring leaning up against the wall near the dryer, but I think that she wasn’t really upset about that at all. I think she knew how upset I was, even if I was still putting one foot in front of the other.

  I didn’t think I would have to leave hints for you. I held out hope here for a long time. I thought you would be angry and scared and stubborn and then you’d realize that you’d made a mistake, think about what we had, and join me.

  Find me.

  It wouldn’t be that hard. I’d be exactly where we were supposed to be.

  I went right to where we put the red push-pin in the map, Sara, right exactly there, and stopped and waited.

  Do you still even have the map on your wall? Do you have the same apartment? Is Josh opening your mail, especially any envelope with my name on it and a Mexican stamp?

  I made it here, Sara. I got here and I’m doing just fine, with or without you. Just fine.

  I don’t know enough Spanish to teach English as a second language, but I’ve got enough to get hotel shifts at a small residencia that has occasional unilingual tour
ists and needs someone to answer questions and help them escape the regular, sometimes dangerous, shoals of mistranslation.

  I have very little money, but I have a cheap place to stay and I’m learning Spanish faster than I ever could otherwise.

  I figure six more months here and I’ll be pretty much bilingual — and I figure, by then, I’ll be ready to move on. The light will be familiar by then, the birds and their songs all expected and lost in the regular, the everyday, the routes to market as plain and average as your walk to the convenience store back home.

  And Sara, if you still haven’t turned up in six months, I think I’ll move further south, and my terra will suddenly be incognito, at least as far as you’re concerned. But I’m willing to give you that much time.

  Even the buses don’t scare me now, though I’m sure you’d be too terrified to even put a foot in one — the speed, the narrow roads — but I got used to it all, even though I know it’s a dangerous ride every single time.

  My plan is to go down the isthmus and maybe over into South America by June, just me and the small amount of stuff I can carry. Over into that continent we used to lie on the bed beside each other and shudder about, the names of the countries dark and strange-feeling on our tongues — Ecuador, Paraguay, Bolivia.

  I realized, Sara, that I don’t need you any more than, I guess, you need me.

  But sometimes, when it’s evening here, the last of the sunset has disappeared from the rock clifftops and the heat is evaporating out into the open night sky, and the dogs are barking and there’s music — I mean, seriously, real mariachi music — and the sound is blowing up the hill to my apartment on the night breeze, I sit up in front of the open window, smelling the strange air, and think, “This is exactly what we were waiting for. This is what we wanted to have.” Then something new catches my eye, and I can’t help but want to nudge you with my elbow, just to make sure that you see it, too. Sara, you’re like my ghost itch from my most recently amputated limb.

  We were the constants, Sara, you and me and our three years of planning the future. The safety we knew in each other’s arms.

  I’d still be willing to try and find a way back.

  Even if I can’t figure out what the hell happened to you.

  Love, Nell

  The Revolution

  The newsroom was dark — the automatic lights worked the same regular hours that most of the reporters did, shutting off exactly thirty minutes after their shift ended and most of them left. Even the technology makes the point, Barry thought, the point that he was on the outside.

  Barry could override the system, but he didn’t. He liked the half-light of the place, only the fading sun coming in through the shadows, all of the computer screens dark, the pinpoints of the LEDs flickering brightly on the other machines that never slept.

  Barry knew he’d been hired for exactly that shift: overnights, three evenings and always weekends. It had been in the job posting, one that almost no one applied for. Barry Keilly had been ready to pass up on it himself until the producers on the hiring board had suggested — without ever really saying it in so many words — that nights and weekends would be a good jumping-off point, a foot in the door for bigger things.

  His foot was still caught firmly in that door. It had taken Barry a full year to realize that, desperate to fill the post, they probably would have told him almost anything. Filling nights-and-weekends was even harder than filling the posts in Labrador, and once they had a warm body in the job, they weren’t likely to shoot themselves in the foot by letting him out of it. And then he’d failed at the negotiation, too. If he hadn’t jumped at the possibility when they’d raised it, he might have been able to sweat an extra week of vacation or more money out of them before agreeing to do it.

  But he’d signed on with the very first carrot — the vague possibility of some future offer.

  So Barry came to work when the rest of the newsroom was packing up and heading for home or away for the weekend, full of chatter, and ignoring him almost completely in the hand-off. There would always be an email from the news desk about the things they knew were happening and the stories that would have to be updated, and a handful of scripts for him to read in the five-minute, top-of-the-hour newscasts. He knew that it hadn’t always been that way, that once there’d been a technician in the booth as well, so at least there had been someone to have coffee with, but since full automation, everything was done in master control in Toronto. The only thing Barry had to do was walk into the booth, sit down in front of the microphone, watch the second hand tick to the top of the clock, and wait for the red light to turn green.

  Barry would read five minutes’ worth of news and a snippet of weather, and then head back upstairs to see if the police had sent any updates about car accidents or forest fires so that he could at least re-top a piece or two.

  There was never enough time to actually leave the building and cover a story. That was for the weekday reporters, out doing full stories, the interesting work.

  He’d never thought of himself as a journeyman, not even when he was doing early morning traffic. He certainly never thought he’d be on the other end of the graveyard, either.

  Seven o’clock came and the cleaner rolled through while Barry read the newscast, “and in international news, military forces in Egypt fired on …” Afterwards, he went back upstairs to do a slow, strolling circumnavigation of the newsroom, once a pure blue ocean of industrial carpet squares, but now a sea that had developed darker pathways of wear.

  They’d brought in the new desks with the carpet when they’d started using the newsroom as the backdrop for TV news as well. The modular layout was more like a set than a real newsroom, reporters doubling as extras in someone else’s story. But Barry wasn’t ever part of the backdrop.

  It was a slow night, as they often were. There was a highway closure that would almost certainly be updated before eight, but Barry wasn’t in any rush. He could have an update put together in five minutes at the most. The highway would either be open, opening soon, or still closed, and there were only so many ways to describe that. Everything else would just be repeated, hour after hour. He’d check the main email in case the police had sent in a release in the usual officialese — “officers apprehended the alleged suspect” — but that was only a quick retype.

  So instead of writing the updates, Barry wandered.

  He counted up the desks of at least four dayside new hires since he’d taken the weekend job. He’d applied for every single one of those positions, had gone through the courtesy interviews, the ones where the interviewers seem almost bored but duty-bound to interview him because he was already in the bargaining unit. He’d known the outcome even before they’d emailed the “thank you very much for your interest, but …” He could tell the way the interviews were going by the way the interviewers broke off all eye contact with him, like they felt bad about deceiving him.

  He sat down at one of the desks, the one where a perky television reporter named Melissa now sat. Barry knew she was waiting for her chance at a bigger job at national news. He knew her type: she was biding her time, keeping her stories tight and, thanks to regular exercise, he thought, her ass tighter. All mercenary, all the time.

  He was so used to reporters coming and going that it was a wonder he could even hold onto any of their names. They were the movers, focused on that next crucial career step, every newsroom, every big story another important stepping stone. Proving grounds: a nice regional station to demonstrate how well rounded you were. There were pictures on her desk: parents, a couple with Melissa and female friends. One of her in a race bib, a marathon, of course; nothing less than a marathon or a triathlon was going to do, Barry thought.

  She had no pictures of boyfriend or kids. Nothing to get in the way of being called out for the all-important forest fire or big-time downtown murder story. News stories with motorcycle gangs, especially Bandidos or Hells Angels, or better yet, a flood or a storm that would get her a litt
le national exposure before the A-team got airdropped in. There was a script from her last story on her desk, but nothing else — not even a pen or a paper clip.

  Barry reached down and tried the top desk drawer. It was locked. No problem, he thought. Seven and a half hours of shift, an hour for a meal break, a ruler and a letter opener, and there was nothing about the cheap locks he couldn’t solve. The desks looked great on camera and hadn’t been picked for security. The hardest part was leaving just enough of the tab up so he could catch it with the letter opener and pull it halfway locked again.

  He’d be able to do it. He’d opened pretty much every desk in the newsroom already once or twice. He had gotten into the senior producer’s desk so often he was worried that he might be permanently damaging the little tang on the top of the lock. But he didn’t have to do that desk anymore: he’d managed to harvest the senior producer’s email password (every time he changed it, the producer would write it in the same address book on the “P” page for “password”) and it was much more interesting reading the producer’s already-read email — and the whole “sent” file, too — than it was digging around in a fifty-year-old guy’s pencils and old coffee stir-sticks.

  Barry figured he was the only reporter in the newsroom who knew the station’s entire budget, and the only person who knew that the last weather guy to leave hadn’t really been dealing with carpal tunnel syndrome but with an entirely different problem about where he placed his hands. And not on the keyboard, either.

  From his desk drawer explorations, Barry was the only one who knew that the senior producer ate his morning yogurt with the same spoon every day, before licking it off and throwing it back in the drawer until the next day without washing it, the bowl of the spoon constantly streaked with puréed fruit and dried yogurt.

  Thank goodness for the open-concept newsroom, Barry thought. In the old days, the producer would have had an office and a locked door, and that would have been much more difficult.