* * *
They entered Mexico at Presidio, a little-used border crossing in the Chinati Mountains. Marder was driving at the time, and when he handed the passports to the Mexican border agent, he could not help noticing that Skelly’s was in someone else’s name. They drove south on the two-lane, through Ojinaga, a typical Mexican borderland town, bustling, American-looking, but clearly a different country. They filled the gas and water tank here and had a meal in a taquería near the gas station.
Skelly said, “Well, we’re in Mexico.”
“What was your first clue?”
“You know, guys in serapes, señoritas with flashing eyes. My point was, now we’re here, did you have any particular place in mind?”
“Yes, I’m going to stay in my house. It’s in Playa Diamante on the Pacific coast in Michoacán.”
“Where Chole was from.”
“Right. I’m going to bury her ashes in her family crypt.”
“And…?”
“And I hate these commercial flour tortillas. I’m really looking forward to getting some handmade corn tortillas.”
“You’re being mysterious again, Marder. It doesn’t suit you. I’m the mysterious guy. You’re the solid family guy, with the straight job and the loving friends and family. Have you called Statch recently?”
“Recently enough.”
“I doubt that. Your phone’s been off since Pascagoula. I haven’t heard a beep from it, no text, no mail, no calls.”
“I don’t see why the state of my cell phone concerns you.”
Skelly shrugged. “Suit yourself, chief. But if you’re not going to use it, I’d advise you to get rid of it. They can trace them when they’re turned on, and since you’re behaving like a man who doesn’t want to be traced, that would be a good move. I speak as a man who knows a little about hiding traces.”
Skelly finished his beer and walked out of the taquería. Marder took out his iPhone, looked at it for a while, and felt a pang of regret. The silly thing had grown on him, had become almost a part of his brain, another organ. Yes, his brain: it would continue to maintain a record of his family and friends, his musings, his tastes, his curiosities, long after he was gone, and when he thought this he all at once could not bear the sight of the once-dear glassy slab. When he followed Skelly out the door, he shrouded it in a paper napkin and slipped it into the trash.
* * *
They drove southwest on Highway 16 through the sere countryside of Chihuahua state, past the scarce straggling towns, over the lizard-backed violet hills, over the few grass-green watercourses. They didn’t speak much or, rather, spoke only in spates and then were silent for a while, in the manner of men who know each other very well but have very different lives. Skelly smoked, occasionally smoked marijuana, and Marder remarked that he must be the only man in history to import marijuana into the Mexican republic, and Skelly answered that a man couldn’t have too many distinctions.
Marder found that Mexico had not changed all that much since the last time he’d been down this very route, thirty-odd years before. The cities they passed through were somewhat more Americanized, more cars traveled the streets, the public spaces appeared in somewhat better repair, but this surface modernization seemed to him like a scrim over a deeper Mexico, which had not changed, which nothing could change, or ever had.
“Did you ever read The Plumed Serpent?” he asked Skelly as they drove west out of Durango.
“D. H. Lawrence? No, not that I recall. Does it have dirty parts?”
“No, but it’s about Mexico, about Michoacán—not the coast, where we’re going, but up north, around the lakes.”
“Any good?”
“Oh, it’s a little dated, with a lot of that racist horseshit they went in for back then. He thought men in western civilization had all lost their balls because of Christianity, and he thought Mexicans were in contact with the dark, fertile forces and that made up for them being dirty, lazy, and corrupt. Chole hated it. The book, I mean. All that stuff about yearning for Quetzalcoatl and the return of the dark and powerful gods. It’s about an Englishwoman who despises the men of her own culture and falls under the spell of Mexican machismo. Lots of purple language about true manhood and true womanhood and how materialism and reform have poisoned Mexico and how Christianity is the worst poison of all. Chole used to say it was typical gringo colonialism: it’s okay for the darker people to be brutalized and poor and stupid, because they still have something the white man has lost, animal power, plugged into the natural world, full of the true juice of life, open to the old gods of Mexico.”
“And it’s not true?”
“What do you think?”
“Makes sense to me and will make a lot more sense when I finish this fat joint. So, besides the ashes, is that why you’re going down there, to get in contact with the old gods and the juice of life?”
“No, and to talk about why that stuff is bullshit, I’d have to mention my religion, and then we’d have to have fight number three thousand four hundred and twenty-seven on the subject. But I recall you making similar comments back then, about the Hmong.”
“The Hmong are gone,” said Skelly. “All that’s over.”
He took a deep drag on his dope and closed his eyes. It was one of the many subjects Skelly did not care to discuss.
Outside, the sky was darkening and blushing toward the horizon, preparing for yet another gorgeous desert sunset. The pale tan of the land was going mauve in response, and the isolated yucca were entering their nightly transformation into the shadows of mythological creatures. Marder didn’t buy the whole Lawrence agenda, but he knew that something was indeed sick in his culture and he knew that Mexico, while itself sick almost unto death, had within its own sickness the possibility of a cure.
Or such was his hope, now near the unpredictable hour of his death. He realized that he had started to think of Mr. Thing as a Mexican, with a stony face and indifferent, merciless black eyes, a D. H. Lawrence figure perhaps, careless of death but possessed of a heedless, violent, passionate life. Mr. Thing had a wide Villista sombrero and crossed bandoliers and a big revolver stuck in his pants; he was drinking and brooding in his cantina, but soon he would rise and do what he was meant to do. Marder smiled inwardly at Mr. Thing, or Sr. Thing or Don Thingado, and he thought that Mr. Thing smiled back. They understood each other now.
He switched on the radio and fiddled with the search button until he found the kind of music he liked, the Mexican equivalent of an oldies station, playing straight ranchera, not the pestilent cumbia, the Mexican version of rock, or, worse, pathetic rap derivations.
He glanced at Skelly, who was stone-frozen, the dead joint poised in his hand, a silly smile on his face. Marder actually preferred Skelly when he was a little wasted on dope, when the sad, ruined boy emerged from the depths of the man and occupied his face, softening the grim lines cut by war and worse things than war.
They listened for a while; the sun sank down in flamingo hues; the road rose quickly and grew serpentine as they climbed into the foothills of the Sierra Madre Occidental.
“What’s he singing?” Skelly asked.
“I thought you knew Spanish—you can’t get the lyrics?”
“I can barely get the lyrics to songs in English. My Spanish is entirely concerned with making money, eating, and fucking.”
“Okay, this is a famous song by Cuco Sánchez. It’s called ‘The Bed of Stone.’ It goes, ‘Let my bed and headboard be made of stone. The woman who loves me must love me truly. I went to the courtroom and asked the judge if it’s a crime to love you. He sentenced me to death. The day they kill me, may it be with five bullets, and I will be very close to you, so as to die in your arms. Give me a serape for a casket, give me my crossed ammunition belts for a crucifix, shoot a thousand bullets into my tombstone for my final farewell.’ And the chorus—”
“Yeah,” said Skelly, “I got that part: ‘Ay yay yay, my love, why don’t you love me?’ Nice song. He sounds like
my kind of guy.”
The rancheras played on; they drove upward into the dark, into the sierra. Marder felt a lightening of his spirit. He saw, as from high above, as on a cosmic GPS map, the dot of his being climbing into the mountains of Mexico, and he had the thought, for the first time in many years: I am in the right place; it’s okay if I die this very minute. He waited in this state for what seemed like a long time, but life went on.
5
“Where are you going?” asked Kavanagh out of the torpor that followed this latest bout of sexual congress. He could see her white shape moving from place to place in the room, vanishing once and then returning.
“Nowhere,” she answered after a moment. “I just needed my notebook.”
“How did I do? Do you have, like, a star rating system?”
“If I did, you’d have three stars, Kavanagh. No, I had an idea I wanted to sketch out before it disappeared.”
“What kind of idea? And who gets four stars?” He watched as she fell into an armchair and arranged her long, flexible legs over its arm, forming an intriguing sort of desk.
“What kind of idea?” he asked again, and she said, “For work,” in a tone that did not encourage further inquiry.
Carmel often received ideas from her unconscious in the spacey moments after particularly rewarding sex, and she had removed from her life those men who objected to women who leaped out of bed to tap upon their laptops immediately subsequent to the ultimate moist spasm and tender cry. Or a paper notebook in this case. Kavanagh was thus not an objector to such shenanigans. He rolled over and drifted off. When he awoke in the morning, she was gone, leaving a note instructing him to send you-know-what via encrypted email, if possible during the current day, because she planned to leave that evening for New York, to try to trace her father’s movements. “Thanks, love,” she wrote, and signed the note with a smeary pink lipstick kiss.
Kavanagh decided on a couple of things after he read this. The first was that he would call his telecom pal and get the logs he’d promised. The other thing was that he was going to stop seeing Statch Marder. He was starting to fall in love, which he thought was like starting to mainline heroin after a period of enjoying an occasional snort. He wanted to be in love, but he thought that falling in love with this particular woman would lead to a life fraught with sorrow, possibly including violations of the penal code. He did like them a little crazy, true, but this one was over the line. And the thing with her father too. He sighed, regretting his loss, and made the promised call.
* * *
Carmel got to the lab a little after six a.m., made a pot of coffee, drank a pint, and set to work on her computer. Liu came in at eleven-thirty, caught the vibes, sniffed the odor of her roomie, and decided to spend the morning at the library. The lab director, Erwin Schuemacher, dropped by around noon, as he usually did, to kibbitz with his students and to receive the sort of informal progress reports upon which the reputations of graduate students (and the progress of science) largely depend. He had heard rumors all morning that Ms. Marder was onto something and he wanted to see what it was.
He knocked, heard a half-snarled rejection of human contact, opened the door, and studied the girl and her screen.
“What’s up, Statch?” he asked after a few moments of staring.
She looked over her shoulder and blinked at him, as if in her concentration fugue she didn’t immediately recognize the trim, tanned fellow with the gray ringlets as her boss and mentor.
“Oh, sorry,” she said. “I was really into it.”
“So I hear. What is that thing?”
“It’s a … I don’t know. A new kind of actuator system. I’m not sure yet, but I think it’ll work.”
“What’s it for?”
“Well, I think it’s a solution to the internal transport problem. We’ve all been screwing around with designing custom arms and spoons and pincers to move parts inside the machine and each one is a bear and each one practically has to be unique and they don’t fit in the available corridors and—well, the whole general problem is a pain in the ass. So I thought why not just carpet all the internal transport corridors with a zillion of these things. Look, I did an animation of how they would work.”
She pressed keys. A wire drawing appeared of an arbitrary brick resting on a bed of what looked like tapered nails. In the animation that followed, the nails elongated in complex waves; the brick moved back and forth, was rotated by the tiny fingers, was stood on end, was deposited into a hatch.
“Each unit is real simple—it’s basically just a fancy solenoid; they’d be cheap as shit to mass produce—but the beauty part is we can adapt the same programs we use in animation, I mean to populate a screen by flashing pixels. Each of them is like a pixel or a voxel, a sort of moving voxel—”
“A moxel,” said Schuemacher, naming the thing henceforth and forever, as was his right. He was nodding, his eyes alight. “Well, well—that’s actually extremely interesting. The problem, obviously, is will it work on the manufacturing end? Let’s get a meeting together, like today. I want Sepp and Chandra and the other team leaders to see this stuff and get their ideas, and we’ll talk about it at the regular lab meeting this afternoon, and then tomorrow we can try to set up some initial manufacturing runs. We need to find out if this is real, because if it works, it changes practically every subproject.”
“Right, well, I don’t see why it shouldn’t work. It’s just a basic principle—like the assembly line. But I can’t come tomorrow—I have to go to New York. And I’m not sure when I’ll be back.”
Schuemacher had kindly bright blue eyes that could become unkindly under certain conditions, as now. “Uh-uh, kid, you have to be here. This is your play. I’m not going to tell fifteen engineers to rethink all their designs because you had a passing thought that’s not even worth attending a couple of meetings for. What’s so important in New York that you have to go there?”
“It’s a family thing,” she said, knowing that it was not an acceptable answer, that science at this level and her junior status precluded family things. She felt her face flush; it was like saying you didn’t do your homework because your grandmother died.
He gave her an unkind glare, twiched his mouth, shrugged, said, “Well, at least you’ll finish the concept presentation. Maybe you can get Liu to work on it while you’re out.”
* * *
On the train to New York that evening, Statch turned this conversation over in her mind, as well as the day’s other interactions with her colleagues. It had been a horrendous day, a ruin built on what was certainly the most important breakthrough in her career and probably, if it proved out, the most important idea she would ever have. Moxels. Everyone was calling them that now; the news had flowed like AC throughout the Escher Project. People she barely knew were stuffed into her little office, asking to watch her animation, asking her questions she couldn’t answer, essentially stealing her idea, going back to their machines to run with it, to do the development she should be doing. And, of course, Schue was encouraging this process, spreading the word, maybe even starting to squeeze her out of the development work. No, he wouldn’t do that, but he had two divorces to show the world that the work came first, that when an idea was fresh was the time to go balls to the wall on it, because if one doctoral drone had come up with it, it meant that somewhere in China, or Germany or Japan, a similar drone would be thinking along the same lines.
And she was not there, not in the center of the most exciting part of engineering, turning the sketch into working substance, otherwise known as Changing the World. Instead, she was on this fucking train to New York, because her father had somehow, after a lifetime of being sane as toast, gone batty and disappeared.
At Springfield, she actually jumped off the train and stood on the platform for a dreadful minute, then jumped back on as the door slammed shut, transported by guilt as much as by the contraction of her bountiful fast-twitch muscle fibers. She’d been in Cambridge when her mother died.
She’d been busy, she had let the messages pile up in her voice mail, because parents were supposed to be grown-ups, they were supposed to handle their own shit; she hadn’t realized what the woman was going through, hadn’t seen the signs of derangement, of increasing desperation. She was the daughter, she was supposed to have this cosmic relationship with the mother, but what she had now was ineradicable shame, and so fuck the career right now, and fuck the sort of nice relationship with Kavanagh too, because it was obvious from their last conversation, when he’d told her the phone logs were on their way, that this one little illegal favor was the kiss-off; he wouldn’t be around for the next one.
And she hadn’t had her swim; stupid thought, but there it was. She felt her muscles turning into useless flab as she sat in the tickly plush seat, watching America’s industrial wasteland roll by, borne at a pathetic sixty miles an hour on century-old technology. Maybe people like her could turn it around, maybe the country could leap a generation in manufacturing, maybe she’d be one of the saviors, but not now, not this week.
* * *
Marder and Skelly stood on a peak in the Sierra Durango, looking out at the clouds below, not exactly with a wild surmise but with deep appreciation, for they were both people who liked the mountains, and these were nice ones.
Skelly said, “This is pretty cool. I didn’t think Mexico had anything like this. It looks like Oregon or western Kashmir, the Hindu Kush foothills.”
The Return: A Novel Page 9
