I took a deep breath, standing in the kitchen with my knapsack and suitcase. The paper-towel-tube entrance to the City also marked the entrance from the kitchen to my old, crumbly living room. Caroline’s too, I supposed, since her name was still on the mailbox. On one side of the living room, Caroline and Carsten were curled up on blankets outside the City, big as sleeping gods, dwarfing the Lego walls. Carsten’s arm rested across my sister’s waist, his hand open on the dusty floor. My sister’s face, in sleep, was lovely. The City lay next to them, motionless. The gold and silver swans were suspended in place, necks curved and fixed, on the navy-blue surface of Midnight Lake. The cardboard headstones no bigger than dominoes tilted in the cemetery, caught and held on the brink of falling over. The citizens penciled on typing paper were frozen in midstep on their way to work and school. The castle walls were solid again, because the votive candle inside the castle was extinguished; the dark cranes on the castle walls were stopped in midflight. The ferries waited between shores in the middle of the river. The big bronze bell inside the church—it filled the church, actually—wasn’t ringing. When I got up, Janos had been sleeping on his stomach, his left knee bent, left arm crooked. I hadn’t dared kiss him goodbye for fear of waking him.
The yellowed clock on the stove said 4:38. Time to go. My hand on the suitcase was pale and thin; my pulse was light and fast; my eyes were tired. The back of my neck, where the feathers were well along now, prickled. I can’t say that I expected to find him. I didn’t know where to begin looking. I had no idea what I was doing. But I took my father’s transistor radio off the shelf anyway, as if it was a homing device that would tune him in once I got to Mexico. I put a piece of masking tape on my father’s station and tucked the radio deep inside my suitcase.
I just had to go. That was all I knew, really. Before I came in, I had to go where he went, even if the lion got me on the way. I burned for it. I leaned down, gently straightened one of the paper towel tubes at the City’s entrance. I left the jet-black Prada suit draped, empty, over the kitchen chair.
I pulled the front door shut for the last time, the door of the yellow taxi closed a few minutes later, the long looping curves of the BQE, hours of nothing in the waiting room, then finally feet up, the force of acceleration as your wings extend and your feet leave the ground, the propulsive rushing, lifting, and the air. JFK, which used to be Idlewild, below. Evening clouds coming in orange and pink. The entire sky, like being able to see, able to breathe deeply, at last. Heaven’s door opened. It pulled me in and welcomed me. I was a warrior, like Tereus, a sword in one hand and feathers sprouting from the other. I flew away. The metropolis getting smaller, every tender building and tender ghost-building, the two silver rivers like necklaces abandoned on the sidewalk, the lions frozen in front of the library, the golden seahorses eternally plunging into the air at Fifty-ninth Street, the endlessly somersaulting polar bears in the zoo, the enchanted bull on Bowling Green, the long rectangle of trees and water in the center of the island. Wings long, white, and wide. The sudden, innate knowledge, strong as the strongest imaginable smell: this way. This is where we go. Ping.
Night falls over the city.
5
The Sky Below
You descend.
I turned upside down. That was how it felt. Maybe it was the altitude. Maybe it was the wind in Ixtlan, which never stopped blowing. Maybe it was the fact that I spoke so little Spanish; being in a continual state of semi-comprehension was strange, vertiginous. I didn’t understand Mexico. Not just the language. I didn’t understand the place itself, how it worked and what things meant. Such as: Why was NEUROTICA written in multicolored, ballooning letters on a stone wall that the bus passed on the way out of Oaxaca? Why were there so many VW bugs on the road? Was it 1969? As the bus made its way up, and up, and up into the mountains, how did those little open buildings with long tables covered in red-and-white oilcloth manage to cling to the very narrow space between the road and the sheer drop down to the valley? How did the bus stay on the mountain at all?
Every time we rounded a sharp corner, the sky below us appeared through the windshield. I thought I was going to be sick. And it wasn’t as if the other people on the bus—the short, indigenous men in cowboy hats and women in knee-length skirts and long black braids—didn’t mind. They braced their feet against their bundles on the floor, looking worried. One stout middle-aged woman crossed herself every time we made it around a curve. CONSERVA EL BOSQUE said a sign nailed crookedly to a tree. Beginning with that one, maybe. PARCO ECOTURISTICO LUVI. COMEDOR “ELI”. Convoys of soldiers rattling past. A woman cooking by the side of the road. Light shooting off a CD tossed in a ditch. A smiling woman with a Chicago Bulls hat on and good balance walked up and down the bus aisle selling walnuts, tortillas, and cans of Pepsi.
I didn’t understand how the hyperreal, glowing colors on everything from billboards to the sides of gas stations to the bedspreads I’d seen hanging in the big mercado in Oaxaca could coexist with the dirt. They seemed to be made of such different stuff, woven of dissimilar atoms. How could one place hold them both? I felt as if I was in a dream. But the weight of my own body rocking back and forth on the curves as the bus climbed reassured me that this was real, I was real. This was Mexico, a real country. The other people on the bus were probably going to work or coming from work. The road was the road. We seemed to be making it up the mountain without dying. The bus pulled over at one of the open buildings, Comedor “Luisa.” The middle-aged woman who had crossed herself gathered her thick plastic bag that said Refresquería Rosita; colorful plastic bracelets clacked on her arm as she lowered herself down the bus steps. Maybe she was Luisa.
I didn’t know where I was going, but as we continued up the mountain, the feeling grew in me that I was revolving, that my head was turning toward the earth and my feet toward the sky. Have you ever woken up in bed and been unsure, for a minute, where your body was in space? That was what it felt like. As if gravity was ambivalent: it might hold me or it might let me go. For the time being, it was turning me upside down, as if to empty my pockets. The blood rushed to my head, though I was still rocking gently against the soft, dark blue bus seat, trying not to look out the window at the drop.
Begin with Julia. To remember. I know that now. There are times, now, when I’ll be doing something or going somewhere, seeing the Taj Mahal for the first time, crossing the street on an ordinary day, breathing the air, noticing a slant of light, and, pierced by it, I think, Remember this. Remember this moment. Now. As if all of this was for that, in the end.
I remember Julia.
When I got off the bus in Ixtlan, I heard that roaring, echoing wind for the first time, the wind I would come to know so well. It sounded like the wind at a beach, though we were far from any coast. Was it the wind from the arroyo in Arizona, had I followed it to its source? The roaring wind in Ixtlan snapped the flags in front of the municipal building, blew the skirts of the elderly Mexican women against their legs as they lined up to get on a school bus painted dark blue, wrapped around the enormous church on the hill above the bend in the road where the bus stopped, tumbled along the concrete basketball court in the center of town. Michael Jordan gazed soberly over the empty court from a glowing red and orange mural painted on the concrete wall at one end. A rooster crowed. There was the smell of something burning. The town wasn’t very big. I could see where it trailed off into stone steps going up the side of the mountain to the north; the highway was its southern edge. The tallest object on the eastern limit was a satellite dish on a low rooftop; on the western edge the town tilted slightly downward, revealing a patchwork of red roofs. Ixtlan seemed to be deserted; I didn’t understand that, either. A tan dog trotted by, looking purposeful. The dark blue school bus full of elderly women pulled away. The emptiness of the town made me feel as if I was inside a balloon. Ixtlan had a tympanic quality. That wind roared through it.
Had he come here? Why would I even think that? But I felt quite strongly that
he had gone somewhere like here—maybe a little farther up the mountain, or up a different one, or maybe a town along the coast. He wouldn’t have stayed in a big city; he’d never have lasted in Mexico City. He would have ended up, I thought, in a place like this. Wherever this was. He would have put his bag down, sighed, rubbed the back of his neck the way I was rubbing mine now, although I was feeling my feathers. He would have looked around for a place to eat, maybe a bar.
Most of the little stores around the zócalo were closed except for a storefront with air conditioning and wall-to-wall carpeting that offered Internet access. I sent an e-mail to Janos and cc’d it to Caroline, Carsten, and Sydnee. The e-mail said, “Dear loved ones, Due to my health crisis, I have decided to take a short trip to try to get my head together. I have arrived safely and will be in touch soon. Please do not worry. This is just something I have to do. Sydnee: the section has tons of stuff, just run it. Caroline: I hope you’re back in Germany. Don’t hang around waiting for me. Janos: I love you. I’ll be home soon. (All of) yours, Gabe.” I hit the send button.
Then I headed up the hill toward the massive church. It dwarfed every other structure in sight, organizing the landscape around itself. The vast churchyard was dusty. A man was leaning idly on the open church door. Five men in cowboy hats ambled past, talking and laughing. An Å 1734 was carved on the stone arch above the door. I went in.
Even inside the church I could hear that wind. Otherwise, it was hushed. A cricket chirped. The altar was a gilded extravaganza, a hundred times the wattage of Fleur’s divan; it seemed to be not 3-D but 5-D, with elaborately worked figures and faces everywhere, huge carved wooden doors, and saints in glass cases, like Barbies. A Jesus standing nearby wore a long brown wig and what looked like gold lamé hot pants. Some of the cherubs carved into the wall behind him had on the same hot pants. These hilarious elements didn’t make the church any less imposing. Oddly, they made it more imposing. The church had its own idea of the order of things, what went with what. I had to admire that—the saints in glass boxes were fantastic. I approached the altar to get a better look.
In a pew toward the front, a little girl of perhaps eight was kneeling, head bowed, in a torn Communion veil. The rip began in the middle of the veil and ran straight down. The girl’s bare feet stuck out of the veil’s hem, her soles and smudged heels edged in white lace. Sort of white lace. The veil, in addition to being torn, was smudged and stained. It might have been a tablecloth, saved from the rag bin. The little girl was murmuring fervently, her folded hands pressed tightly against her forehead. Her dirty toes wiggled. Her ankles and forearms were pocked with insect bites. Besides the veil, she was wearing several variously patterned and wildly colored skirts and shirts, piled on haphazardly. She looked like a piñata.
She raised her head. “Qué quieres, señor?”
“Alice?” I said, in shock, because this girl looked so uncannily like the Alice of Pineapple Street: the same tawny skin, the same loosely kinky brownish-blackish hair, the same guarded, slightly regal expression in her eyes, the same small point to her chin.
“No. No Alice. Americano?”
“Yes,” I said.
She adjusted her veil, peered at me, first skeptically, then confidently. She nodded. “I know who you are,” she said in English that was barely touched by an unlocatable accent. “I dreamed you were coming. I dreamed all about you.”
I peered skeptically back at her. “Oh, really? Then what’s my name?”
She stood up. “You don’t have a name yet. My name is Julia. Come on.”
As I say, I had been turned upside down. So I simply followed her, torn veil fluttering, up the aisle and out of the church.
The truck shuddered out of town and up the mountain. My suitcase banged from side to side in the truck bed. Julia, still in her veil, sat next to me. Next to her, driving, was an old man wearing shorts held up with a length of clothesline and filthy huaraches. His bare chest was narrow, ropy, and mahogany from the sun; his mahogany arm, shifting gears, was strong. He had a full head of shaggy white hair into which were wound feathers, tinsel, troll dolls, small bones, a headless baby doll, fern leaves, and several brightly colored model cars.
“How did it go?” Julia asked.
“Not too bad,” said the old man. He had no Spanish accent, but he did have a Chicago timbre to his voice. “I think they’re beginning to understand the vision.” He turned to me. “Jabalí.”
“What?”
He pointed to his ropy chest. “That’s my name. Jabalí.”
“Oh, okay. Nice to meet you.”
Julia giggled, pulling her veil over her nose. “A jabalí is an animal. It has tusks.”
“What?”
“Wild boar,” said Jabalí. “A jabalí is a wild boar.”
“It’s his name,” said Julia.
Jabalí smiled, shifted gears as the road got steeper. “We’ll explain later.”
“I dreamed him already, Papi,” offered Julia, putting her dirty bare feet on the dashboard. “I told him he can’t have a name yet.”
Papi? Father? That word I knew.
“Cool,” said Jabalí.
On our right as we slowly chugged up the mountain there rose a spectacular estate at the end of a long, tree-lined drive. It was a mansion, low and rambling, with an expanse of undulating red roof. The walls were composed of stones so large I could make out their irregular shapes from the road. The entrance to the estate was an enormous curved door; a fountain burbled on a grassy oval in front of the entrance. To one side of the main building stood a small stone chapel with a cross on the steeple. Tennis courts were visible, as were the aqua squares of three swimming pools set into terraces on the mountainside, one above the other. Water flowed from the edge of the pool at the top into the one below, which spilled in its turn into the pool below it. A white horse, sunlight winking off the silver on its saddle, stood riderless near the fountain. A discreet wooden sign at the beginning of the tree-lined drive said LA HACIENDA.
The truck rolled to a halt as Jabalí fussed with the gearshift.
“Jesus,” I said. “Is that where we’re going?”
“Hah! Those motherfuckers,” said Jabalí. He wiggled the stick and we jolted forward. “Assholes.”
We left La Hacienda behind us and continued for perhaps a mile, where we turned off the road and drove down a much smaller, pitted one, past a few cinderblock buildings. Raucous music pounded loudly, permeating the air, but there were no people in the street.
“Benito Juárez Day,” said Jabalí.
I didn’t understand anything, but the sensation was curiously pleasant. In fact, it made me feel hopeful. Upside down, so much was possible that might be impossible right side up. I might see my father’s face in a pool of water, come upon him sitting in a meadow. Did Mexico have meadows? Could Jabalí really be Julia’s father? Who was her mother?
We left the cinderblock buildings behind as well and bumped down a long, quiet road with fields on either side. We stopped at the tall iron gates of a church. Jabalí got out of the truck and Julia scampered after him in a blur of colors and lace. Slowly, I climbed down from my side, got my dusty suitcase out of the truck bed. “Here?” I hesitated by the truck’s rear bumper. Dusk was coming in; the air grew chilly. From far away, I heard traces of the pounding music. I looked back down the long road. No cars in sight. A white dog loped along the empty field. The wind wound itself around us.
Julia jumped on one of the tall gates and rode it as it swung open. “Aquí! Sí!”
Jabalí, the headless baby doll and feathers and model cars bouncing in his shaggy white hair, was standing at the open gate. The church rose behind him. He held out his hand to me. “Come on,” he said. “It’s all right.”
Now, here, any reasonable person might well ask, Why did you go in? What were you thinking? The answer is, I don’t know. I wasn’t thinking. You might say that the echoing wind made the decision for me, carried me through the tall gate into the stone cour
tyard. That’s not quite right. It’s more like the wind had entered me long ago in Arizona; it was part of me. It had already happened. I had already gone in with Jabalí and Julia, gone through the little sanctuary where a clutch of local women were praying aloud in unison in the pews, gone back behind the gilded altar, gone down the hallways with broken plaster walls, past the stone rooms stacked with boxes, past the radio playing softly on a card table (a rhyme with mine, good sign), already gone into the interior courtyard, sky-roofed, ringed with the small, wood-beamed stone rooms that felt, even after I’d been there a while and understood more, penitential.
Jabalí led me to a room in the corner. I put my suitcase down. It smelled dank. There was one little window at the back, a bare bulb hanging from one of the beams, a single bed, a few open wooden crates stacked on top of one another. I looked around as if I were deciding, but the wind had already nodded my head, the wind had already said, Thank you. Gracias.
Here’s the odd thing. No one ever called it anything but “the ex-convento.” Which means what it sounds like—the small, crumbly rooms that ringed the church’s interior courtyard had once been a convent, and it wasn’t one anymore. Behind the church was a ruined library that was also a chicken coop; a compost heap; and a small stone building that had been an ice house, then a fallout shelter, and was now a toolshed, and most of the tools were rusted and broken. The church was built in the sixteenth century, so many generations of nuns had slept where we slept, ate where we ate, passed through the halls we passed through. The last nun to live in the convent had died there in 1943.
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