Her friend Pili told Amelia she was an idiot. Pili had been snared in raids four or five times. All she did was pay the fine. But then, Pili did all kinds of crazy things. She sold her blood to old farts who paid for expensive transfusions, thinking the plasma could rejuvenate them.
“Could be. Do you have her number?” Amelia asked.
“She’s in a great-super-cool women’s temazcal retreat right now in Peru. All-natural, no contact with the outside world. Just meditation. But she will be back for the art show. You should just show up. I know someone at the gallery. They can put you on the list.”
“The temazcal is Nahua. What’s she doing in Peru?”
“I don’t know, Amelia,” Fernanda said, sounding annoyed. Amelia’s geographical objections were clearly pointless. She supposed people organized whatever retreats rich fuckers could afford. Tibetan samatha in Brazil, Santería ceremonies in Dublin. Who cared?
“All right, put me on the list,” Amelia said.
Fernanda seemed very pleased with herself and paid for the lunch after all. Amelia assumed she considered this her act of charity for the year. For her part, she felt stupidly proud for not mentioning anything about a loan, although she was going to have to figure something out soon.
Amelia picked her nieces up from school and, after ensuring they ate the food she had cooked, she made a quick escape from the apartment as soon as Marta arrived. This was Amelia’s strategy: to spend as little time as possible in the apartment when her sister was around. Marta made a room shrink in size and Amelia’s room already felt the size of a desk drawer.
Amelia hated sleeping in the same room she’d once shared with Marta, who’d moved to the master bedroom their mother had occupied. Each night, she looked at the walls she had looked at since she was a child. Stray stickers glued to her bed years before remained along the headboard. In a corner, there were smudged markings she’d made with crayons.
Not that it was an unusual set-up. Mexican youths, especially women, tended to live at home with their parents. These days, with the way the economy was going, even the most cosmopolitan people clustered together for long periods of time. At 25, Amelia didn’t raise any eyebrows amongst her peers, but she still hated her living situation. Perhaps if they’d had a bigger apartment, it wouldn’t be so annoying, but the apartment was small, the building they inhabited in disrepair: a government-funded unit, modern at one point when a president had been trying to score popularity points in that sector of the city. They were in one of four identical towers, built in a Brutalist style with the emphasis on the brute. An interior courtyard joined them together. Bored teens liked to gather there, while others held court in the lobby.
She loathed the whole complex and fled it every day. Her hours were spent navigating through several coffee shops. There was an art to this. The franchises used kiosks to sell coffee and tasteless bread wrapped in plastic. You pushed a button and out came your food. These were terrible places for sitting down for long periods of time. Since everything was automated, the job of the one or two idiots on staff was to wipe the tables clean, and to get people in and out as quick as possible. They enforced the maximum one-hour-for-customers rule with militaristic abandon.
Amelia hopped between two spots, three blocks from each other. One was a cafe and the other a crêperie. They were on a decent street, meaning they both had an armed guard standing at the door. But who didn’t? Any Sanborns or Vips had at least one and similar cafes employed at least a part-time one for the busy times of the day. The guards kept the rabble out. Otherwise, the patrons would have been shooing away people offering to recharge cell phones by hooking them to a tiny generator, or shifty strangers who would top up phone cards for cheaper than the legit telecomm providers. Any other number of peddlers of services and products could also slip in, to the annoyance of licenciados in their suits and ties, trendy youths in designer huipiles, and mothers leaning against their deluxe, ultra-light strollers.
Amelia walked into the coffee shop, ordered a black coffee — cheapest thing on the menu — and, with the day’s Wi-Fi code in hand, logged on to the Internet and began reading. First, the news about Mars, then botany items. She drifted haphazardly after that. Anything from celebrity news to studying English or Mandarin. Those were the predominant languages on Mars, German a distant third. After an enthusiastic six months trying to grasp German, though, she’d given up on it. Much of the same happened with Mandarin. English she spoke well enough, as did any Mexican kid who’d gone to a good school.
She’d also given up on a job search. Once she had updated her CV, she had taken new headshots to go with it. Amelia, black hair pulled back, looking like a docile employee. But with her schooling interrupted, what should have been an impressive degree from a nice university was just bullshit. And every time she looked at the CV, it irritated her to see herself reduced to a pile of mediocrity:
Age: 25
Marital status: Unmarried
Current job: Freelancer
Freelancer. Euphemism for unemployed. Because her gigs didn’t count. You couldn’t put “professional friend” on a CV, any more than you could “professional cuddler.” God knew there were people who did that gig, too, hiring themselves out to embrace people. She remembered seeing an ad for that explaining “99 percent of clients are male.” Fuck, no.
Freelancer, then. Ex-university student, ex-someone. Her job applications disappeared into another dimension, swallowed by the computer until she simply stopped trying. She lived off gigs, first the marijuana operation, then odd jobs; for the past two years, the Friendrr bookings had constituted her sole income.
Freelancer. Fuck-up.
No more CV. Amelia focused on Mars, played video games on her cell, drew geometrical shapes on the napkins, then clovers for luck, and stars out of habit. When she knew she’d spent too much time at the coffee shop, she switched to the crêperie, where she repeated the process: black coffee, another couple of hours lost in mundane tasks.
When she was done, she took the subway back home.
It was always the same.
That night, a woman boarded Amelia’s train and began asking people for a few tajaderos. The most popular cryptocurrency folks used since the peso was a piece of shit, jumping up and down in value faster than an addict dancing the jitterbug. You could tap a phone against another and transfer tajaderos from an account. A few people did just that, but even if the lady was old and rather pitiful, Amelia couldn’t spare a dirty peso.
To be frank, just a couple of bad turns and Amelia would be begging in the subway right next to the old woman.
The doors of the car opened and Amelia darted out. On the walls of the concourse, there were floor-to-ceiling video displays. A blonde woman danced in them. RADIOACTIVE FLESH, she mouthed, the letters superimposed over her image. A NEW COLLECTION. A tattoo artist sat by one of these video panels. He was there every few days, tattooing sound waves onto people’s arms. A snippet of your favorite song inked onto your flesh. With the swipe of a scanner, the melody would play. At first, she couldn’t believe he lugged his equipment like that around the city, not because it was cumbersome, but because she expected someone might try to steal it. But the man was quite massive and his toothless grin was a warning.
“Hey, I’ll give you a discount,” the man told her, but she shook her head, as was her custom.
Amelia took the eastern exit, which was rarely frequented by the gangs. She was in luck; they were nowhere to be seen. Now there was a choice to make. Either follow the shortest route, which meant walking through the courtyard and encountering the young louts who would be drinking there, or take the long way around the perimeter of the complex.
Amelia picked the short way. In the center of the courtyard, there was a dry fountain, filled with rubbish. All around lounged teenagers from the buildings. They were not gang members, just professional loafers who specialized in playing loud music and yelling a choice obscenity or two at any girl who walked by.
; Although the kids had nothing to offer except, perhaps, cigarettes and a bottle of cheap booze, when Amelia had been a teenager, she’d peered curiously at them. They seemed to be having a good time. Her mother, however, forbade any contact with the teenagers from the housing unit. Mother emphasized how Amelia was meant for bigger and better things. Marta was a lost cause. She’d gotten herself pregnant her last year in high school and married a man who ran off after a handful of years. It didn’t matter. Marta possessed no great intellectual gifts, anyway. She’d flunked a grade and barely finished her high school through online courses. Amelia, however, was a straight-A student. She couldn’t waste her time crushing beer cans with those kids.
Amelia believed this narrative. When her mother learned she was going out with a good boy from the university, she was ecstatic. Elías Bertoliat, with his pale skin and light eyes, and his fancy car, seemed like a prince from a fairy tale. Every time Amelia floated the idea of Mars, her mother immediately told her Mars was unlikely and she should focus on marrying Elías. After he broke up with Amelia, her mother insisted they’d get back together.
Glancing at the boys kicking around a beer can and laughing, Amelia wondered if she wouldn’t have been better off partying with them when she had the chance. If she was destined to be a loser, she could at least have been a loser who had fun, fucked lots of people, enjoyed her youth while it lasted.
She looked at the girls sitting chatting near the fountain, in stockings and shorts, heavy chains dangling against their breasts, their nails long, the makeup plentiful. Then one of the boys hollered and another followed.
“Were you going? I’ve got something for you, baby.”
Laughter. Amelia looked ahead. There was no point in acknowledging their displays. The faint fantasy that she might have once enjoyed spending her time with them vanished.
They called the days on Mars “sol.” 24 hours, 39 minutes, and 35.244 second adding up to a sol. Three percent shorter than a day on Earth. She reminded herself of this. It was important to keep her focus on what mattered, on the facts. They could scream, “Show me your pussy!” and ask her to give them a blowjob, but she did not listen.
When she reached her building, she climbed the five flights of stairs up to her apartment — the elevator was perpetually busted. A dog padded down the long hallway, which led to her apartment. Many tenants had pets and some let them roam wild, as if the building were a park. The animals defecated on the stairs, but they also kept the indigents away. The teens who held court downstairs also provided a measure of safety.
Amelia paused before her door, fished out her keys from her purse, and stood still. She could hear dialogue from the TV, muffled, but loud enough she could make out a few words. Amelia walked in.
“Let’s see what’s behind Door Number One!” the TV announcer yelled. Clapping ensued.
Mars, Scene 1
It’s nothing but sand dunes. Dry, barren, quiet. When she bends down and picks up a handful of sun-baked soil, and wipes her hand against her pale dress, it leaves a dark, rusty streak.
There is air here. This is Mars but the Mars of EXT. MARS SURFACE — DAY. And she is a SPACE EXPLORER, a young woman in a white dress now streaked red.
SPACE EXPLORER has no lines of dialogue, not yet. The camera hovers over her shoulder, over tendrils of dark hair, which shift with the wind.
There is even wind, in EXT. MARS SURFACE. And the dress is far too impractical for any true ‘space exploration.’ It reaches her ankle, shows off her arms, although no cleavage. Instead, a demure collar that reaches the chin indicates SPACE EXPLORER is a good girl. The white might have clued you in, but it never hurts to place the proper signifiers.
SPACE EXPLORER looks over her shoulder and sees a figure coming toward her, glinting under the sunlight.
Hold that shot, hold that moment, as the HERO steps into the frame.
3
Amelia avoided her sister for three days, but on the fourth, Marta caught her before she could slip out of the apartment, cornering her by the refrigerator, which was covered with draw-ings made by the youngest girl. Amelia’s niece had a good imag-ination: The sky was never blue in Mexico City.
“The rent is due,” Marta said. “And you still owe me that money.”
Two months before, Amelia had bought a pretty new dress. It wasn’t a bargain, but it seemed she was getting another steady Friendrr client. Every week, like the arrangement with Lucía. Four hours. She bought the dress because she thought she deserved it. She hadn’t bought anything for herself in forever and she would be able to afford it now. Then that client canceled a booking, and another, and Amelia had to pay for the layaway or lose all the money she’d ponied up. So, she asked Marta for enough to make the final payment.
“I have the rent money, not the rest. Things are slow right now,” Amelia said. “I’m sure bookings will improve as we roll into December.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Marta said, sending a magnet in the shape of a watermelon slice flying into the air as she slapped her hand against the refrigerator’s door. “You need to get a real job that pays on time.”
“There are no real jobs,” Amelia replied.
“Then what do I do every day?”
Marta was an end-of-life planner, helping arrange elaborate funerals, memorials and euthanasia packages. And yes, it was a job, but guess what? She only had it because she sucked good dick for the boss, a smarmy little man who had made a pass at Amelia the year before, when Marta took her to an office party. He had suggested a threesome with the sisters and when Amelia complained to Marta about her vomit-inducing creep of a part-time boyfriend/supervisor, Marta had the gall to tell Amelia she shouldn’t have worn such a tight skirt.
“You need to look into the private security company I told you about,” Marta said. “They are always hiring.”
“Do I look like I can shoot a rifle?”
“Fuck it, Amelia, it’s just standing on your feet for a few hours holding the gun, not shooting it. Surely, even you can manage that?”
Amelia swallowed a mouthful of rage. She couldn’t afford a place on her own and so, she swallowed it, bile and resentment making her want to spit.
The phone rang. She almost didn’t hear it because the kids had the television on so loud and the kitchen was smack next to the living room/dining room area. It was Miguel, her broker. Friendrr called him that: Junior Social Appointment Broker. Amelia thought it was a weird, long title.
“Hey Amelia, now, how are you doing today?” Miguel asked in that oddly chirpy tone he employed. She’d never met him in person, but Miguel always sounded like he was smiling and his profile featured multiple shots of him grinning at different locations. The beach, a concert, an assortment of restaurants.
Miguel was an extreme positive thinker. He had told her he liked to read self-help books. He also took a lot of online courses. In the beginning, they’d bonded a bit over this, since Amelia was still trying to learn German. As the months dragged by, they both grew disenchanted.
Amelia simply wasn’t the kind of girl who could secure many clients. There were some people who were booked solid for gigs, but most of them were very good-looking. She’d heard one young woman got booked exclusively to pose for photos. The kind of ‘candid’ shots where friends gathered for a social event. Nothing candid in them. Then there were others who did all right with weddings and funerals. Both of these required an ability to cry.
Amelia wasn’t a crybaby and she wasn’t gorgeous. Her biggest issue, though, was that she simply did not inspire friendly feelings. People did not want to meet her and if they did, they did not want to meet her again. Whatever warmth or spark is required to inspire a desire for human interaction was lacking in her. She wasn’t compelling.
Miguel had told her she needed better photos, more keywords. They tried a bunch of things, but it didn’t work. Miguel, who had been excited because her science background gave her a certain versatility — some of the folks on Friendrr could hardly s
pell ‘cat,’ the glorious, underfunded public education system at play — grew underwhelmed.
Miguel hadn’t phoned her in weeks and Amelia feared he was getting ready to drop her from Friendrr. She was probably driving his stats down.
“I’m good,” she said, turning her back to her sister, grateful for the interruption. She headed to the room and locked the door. “What’s up?”
“I have a booking for you, you have a new client. That’s what’s up. The only thing is, it’s short notice: tonight at nine.”
“I’m not doing anything tonight.”
“Good. It’s in New Polanco. I’m sending you the address.”
“Any special items?”
“No,” Miguel said. “He wants to have dinner.”
Most clients wanted ordinary things, like watching movies, as Lucía had asked, or walking together. Now and then, an oddity emerged. There had been a man who asked that she wear white gloves and sit perfectly still for a whole hour. But most baffling had been the time a client hired her to pretend she was someone else. Amelia bore a vague resemblance to an old lady’s favorite daughter, who had passed away many years before. Or perhaps Amelia bore no resemblance; perhaps any young woman would do. The old woman wept when she saw her, confessing a small litany of sins. They had parted on bad terms, then the daughter died.
Amelia was unnerved by the experience. She wondered if this was the first time a young woman had been brought to meet the old woman. She wondered if other people had worn the green sweater she had been asked to wear. Had it belonged to the dead girl, or was it merely a similar sweater? Were there many girls dressed in green sweaters, each one ushered into the room on a different day of the week?
Prime Meridian Page 2
