The Infinite

by Nicholas Mainieri

  Restless, Luz wrapped a blanket around her shoulders and returned to the window. There were islands of light down there, monuments and statues in the plazas and the roundabouts. Heroes hedged in by darkness. Of course, the heroes would merely have been enemies to many others in history. That was how it worked. Luz could remember some of the monuments in New Orleans—statues of men she’d learned about in school, men who had been traitors. She looked again to the glaring blue cross and recalled the tiny blue cross she’d held, quaking, in her fist before the race at that Uptown high school. So much had happened since then. The blinking lights of a jetliner crawled down the sky, slipped toward the airport behind the mountains.

  Luz turned away from the window. Cecilia was sitting up in bed and watching her. The sicaria spread her arms then jerked her thumb toward Luz’s bed. She put her hands together, placed them along her cheek, and closed her eyes, pantomiming sleep. Luz had admired Cecilia for the quiet kind of confidence she possessed, her calm and resolute bearing, but for the first time, this charade gave Luz pause. She realized:

  “You never speak.”

  Cecilia sat there a moment, staring at Luz. She sighed and waved Luz over. Luz sat on the edge of her own bed, facing the woman. Cecilia rubbed her eyes. She sighed one more time and then opened her mouth, wide. She had no tongue. There was the stem of it, not raw or painful looking but smooth where it had been severed from her mouth.

  “Who did that to you?” Luz whispered.

  But now Cecilia chuckled. Silent, sardonic. She put her head on the pillow and rolled again away from Luz.

  4

  LUZ FLOATS ON THE FRONT STEPS, BUOYED WITH THE NOTES HER father draws from his guitar. The words to old songs travel through her, though they originate somewhere else—from the place her mother learned them, and from somewhere deeper than that, too. The old street lies in shadow. The light posts are charred candlewicks. The wind tumbles down the street, something dark and granular in it, whorling like silt. And the people, the crowd now passing by, their faces smear when the wind touches them, like a tongue wiping their features away. Dust that cannot be reconstructed, whipping away in the flow. The faceless drone, plod. But when the first old words leave Luz’s throat, the wind recoils. It twitches like a struck nerve. Now the wind again reaches for the marchers. Luz sings. The wind parts, folding into itself like a murmuration of starlings. It is your voice, Luz. It is your voice. The wind that is shadow whirls and descends, relentless in its effort to blind the sojourners. To nullify them, each in turn. And Luz sings, so that they may pass in safety. The wind bends a finger toward her with the sound of a freight train. The words stumble in her larynx, and her father’s guitar grinds to powder. The silver tuning pegs hover for a moment, then spin into the wind like six wayward nickels. Her father is eaten, too, granulating into nothing. Gone. The music ceases. The lyrics lodge in her throat. The wind-shadow licks a face clean in the street. And now Luz sees them: there is Jonah, there is Colby. There is Felipo, and there is the mute Ignacio riding on his shoulders. They shuffle in the midst of the crowd. And in the crowd are more faces she recognizes: there is the dying man in the desert to whom she could not give her water, and there is the uncle who made her drink the water. She calls to them, but they don’t hear her; she must sing. She sings to protect them. She understands that she cannot stop. My voice must be infinite. The wind gropes toward her, and she sings against it, and the crowd of people marches. She must keep singing, and so she tries she tries she tries—

  5

  CECILIA SHOOK LUZ AWAKE. LUZ WAS CHOKING ON SOMETHING, but there was nothing in her throat, and she sat up with her windpipe burning and with water in her eyes. Cecilia sat on the edge of the bed and tapped her own throat to ask what was wrong. “I’m okay,” Luz said, and wiped the spaces beneath her eyes.

  The room was bright. It looked hot and clear outside. Cecilia was dressed in black, packed and ready to go. Luz went to the washroom and showered. She hefted the knife, slid it from its sheath. It shined in the fluorescent lights. Luz looked at herself in the mirror, holding it. She tried to imagine the warrior but only saw her flicker, and then she felt ridiculous. She rolled the knife in her clothes and stowed it in the grocery bag.

  Cecilia led her back to the parking garage, but this time they got into a midnight-blue Silverado. The truck roared out of the garage and into the sunshine. They left the city and angled farther into the highlands. The city haze sheared away. Cecilia kept both hands on the wheel and eyes firmly on the road. She was a diligent driver.

  Luz ventured, “You’ve worked for your uncle for a long time?”

  Cecilia nodded.

  “What do you think he expects of me?”

  Cecilia raised her eyebrows, glanced.

  Oziel had tried to tell Luz she was special, but he had also told her she was beautiful, and that was perhaps the easiest explanation. It would make sense. Still, it felt somehow more complicated to Luz than something merely lustful, but she didn’t yet see how. “I only needed a ride out of Las Monarcas,” Luz said. “I told him that.”

  Cecilia huffed. Luz turned to watch the unbounded air beyond the edge of the mountain highway. She caught a glimpse of the narco slipping from view. To her palm she summoned the weight of the rock. Its sharp edge. And—Luz thought—I need to make sense of some things. I need to figure out where I’m going next.

  6

  THE HIGHWAY CONVERTED TO SIMPLE TWO-LANE BLACKTOP. IN the middle of one cinder-block village a gaggle of children blocked the road. They danced and made obscene gestures. One of them mimed firing a gun at the Silverado. Cecilia gunned the engine and stopped short to make them scatter. Later, she turned through a gate onto a rocky path. The suspension groaned. Pebbles banged against the skid plate.

  They rumbled over a cattle guard into an old ranch. Stone buildings, grim among the cholla. The path climbed. A pasture, a solitary horse. As the unpaved road plateaued along a ridge, the vantage sloped and bottomed out. The cordillera shaved the afternoon sun into the valley, where down in the distance stood a brown pyramid. Hazy, like an apparition. Luz’s heart pumped. She imagined horses racing in the valley. A young boy rode the lead animal, but he fell back to let the others win. It was a world that once existed, gone the way of those versions before it. Those who trained horses and those who built pyramids.

  The trail switchbacked up a forested slope and evened out into a clearing. There was a big adobe house with a red tile roof. The windows glowed. Another smaller house squatted alongside. Several vehicles were parked out front—trucks and SUVs. Cecilia parked and turned off the ignition. The mountain air was a little cooler, a little drier. Luz smelled woodsmoke. A man sat on the porch in a rocking chair, creaking back and forth while he smoked. He held the barrel of his rifle, its butt resting on the porch boards. He nodded to Luz and Cecilia as they went inside.

  Someone was cooking, and it smelled very good. An antelope-horn chandelier hung in the entranceway, and the heads of white-tailed deer stared from their wall mounts. Black marble eyes. A woman wearing a grease-stained apron appeared from the kitchen, smiling, wiping her hands with a rag. Gray wisps of hair frizzed around her face. Cecilia gestured to the woman, then briefly gripped Luz’s shoulder and left the house. The cook introduced herself as Ninfa, the help around the house. Luz followed Ninfa upstairs, the old woman’s slippers shuffling against the oak floor. Paintings filled the walls, icons of saints with gold halos.

  Luz’s room contained a four-poster bed and windows with a view over the treetops to the sweep of the valley beyond. Another door opened into a bathroom of white tile. A folded towel had been set atop the bedsheets. Ninfa told Luz that señor Zegas was away on business. Luz was free to come and go as she pleased. If she was hungry, something would be prepared. Luz thanked her. Then Luz stood at the window and watched the light fail over the valley, over the pyramid.

  XVI

  Tell us what happened.

  1

  WHETHER YOU’RE AN AMERICAN CITIZE
N IS NOT THE ISSUE AT hand.” The speaker was a big man called Connelly. The light twisted and ran in his pink scalp.

  “Quit hassling me, then.” Jonah’s stomach groaned. They’d kept him waiting a long time, and he was exhausted. He needed a shower and he needed food and he needed sleep, but he was still so far from home.

  Connelly chuckled. The door opened and the other agent, Gonzalez, reentered bearing three Styrofoam cups. He set one down in front of Jonah, steam snaking out from the coffee. Gonzalez was the younger of the two. A smooth and serious face, sculpted black hair. He sat and folded his hands on the burnished silver tabletop. A slender digital recorder sat on the table between them.

  “You”—Connelly consulted his notes—“left New Orleans to visit a woman named Luz Hidalgo in Las Monarcas, Coahuila.”

  “She was my girlfriend.” Jonah wiped grit from his eyes. “That’s like the fourth time I’ve said it. Please. Either tell me what the hell is going on or let me go home.”

  “Okay, here’s the hang-up.” Connelly was slate-colored eyes in a pale face. “A Luz Hidalgo from Coahuila recently blipped on our radar. Nothing significant enough for us to worry about, but it seems she helped some cartel boys pull off a massacre. Bunch of bodies, a face stitched onto a soccer ball—an instant classic. We’ve got her name on a little list of narcos now and everything.”

  Jonah looked at the two agents and started laughing. “Come on, man. I saw that face thing in the news down there.”

  Connelly grinned. “Unmentioned in a newspaper doesn’t mean her name hasn’t gotten around.”

  “You’re joking. You have to be.”

  “Not in the slightest, Mr. McBee.”

  “It’s fucking impossible. I just saw her. I mean”—Jonah shook his head—“there’s gotta be millions of Luz Hidalgos.”

  “I’ll grant you that.” Connelly spread his hands. “But understand, I don’t give a sincere rat’s ass what your girlfriend is into. I care about you showing up at my border looking—well, let’s just say it—looking like shit. You’re flustered by harmless questions. And the first name out of your mouth is a girl hooked up with a drug gang.”

  Jonah exhaled and looked into the corner of the room. White painted cinder block.

  “I don’t want to make this a bigger production than it has to be, but I need some answers first.” Connelly tapped his pen on his notepad. “Show me how this all adds up.”

  Jonah sighed.

  “I’m going to read you some names,” Connelly went on, “and I want you to tell me if they mean anything to you.”

  “Fine.”

  “Juan Luis Medina.”

  “Nope.”

  “How about Cicatriz?”

  Jonah waited for more. “Is that a name?”

  “Cecilia Garcia.”

  “No.”

  “Oziel Zegas y Garcia.”

  “No, man,” Jonah said. “Look, I just want to go home. I haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “Help us believe that.” This was the other one, Gonzalez. A measured tone. “Earlier, you said Luz lived in New Orleans but she recently moved back to Mexico. Tell us what happened.”

  I’m not afraid—Luz had said that to him in the dark of his bedroom that night. When all the possibilities began to chip and fray. I’m not afraid. Jonah understood less now than he did then about Luz, though her fearlessness seemed to remain. She couldn’t have done the things these men were saying, but there was the matter of her kidnapping. At best these men had it backward, and that was a stretch. But Jonah didn’t tell them so. It wouldn’t matter, and they didn’t deserve it. Jonah just had to get out of here. He had to keep going. He had to get home and start building something. The lights in the room sizzled and swelled.

  2

  HE BEGAN WITH HER FATHER SENDING HER HOME, TELLING them the facts, sparing what detail he could. Here and there, the men interrupted with questions—serious questions about the timing of the trip and the places he’d been, and lighter questions about the things they simply didn’t understand.

  “Never heard of a nutria,” Connelly said.

  “Neither have I,” Gonzalez echoed.

  “Maybe Texas doesn’t have ’em.” Jonah was weary. They’d brought him a glass of water and he slugged some, cold and numbing.

  “I wouldn’t know,” Connelly said. “I’m from New York.”

  “New Mexico.” Gonzalez shrugged.

  “People hate them, but they’re not bad,” Jonah said. “You think about them long enough and you start to feel bad for them.”

  “The nutria?”

  “It ain’t their fault where they are.”

  “Sounds to me,” Connelly answered, “like that’s got nothing to do with it.”

  Jonah looked at the man, then lowered his eyes. With a fingertip he traced a line on the metal tabletop. A smudge of condensation spreading. He wiped the heel of his palm across it, but the smudge remained.

  A while later, Connelly went to take a leak. Jonah pressed his thumbs into his eyes until he saw stars. He leaned over the table. An impression of himself reflected in the metal, striated with the residue of some kind of cleaning product.

  Gonzalez suddenly spoke. “Your oldest brother, where was he in Afghanistan?”

  Something clenched and twisted in Jonah’s chest, but the feeling had no temperature and it didn’t hurt. It was a rote reaction, one that reminded him, as always, of how he used to stare at his sneakers and try to imagine the places Bill walked. All the videos on the Internet Jonah had watched, hoping to discover something, some answer. Jonah folded his arms on the table and rested his chin on them: “I never could remember the name of the place.”

  “He was there in oh-two?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He must have been one of the earliest guys we lost.”

  Jonah shrugged.

  “I was there,” Gonzalez said, “in oh-three. Less than a hundred dead by that point, I think.”

  “How many by now?”

  “I don’t know. A lot more.”

  The door swung open and Connelly reentered, buckling his belt. “So,” he said, “tell me about this drug-dealing pal of yours, Colby. Why’d he need to get to Mexico?”

  “He’s just my friend. He’s got nothing to do with any of this.”

  “The drug dealer doesn’t matter?”

  “He’s not here. He’s never been here. He’s a kid in New Orleans who doesn’t know about any of this.”

  “I promise you,” Connelly said, “he connects. Maybe not directly, and not in a way that matters to us in this moment. He’s probably got no idea, but I promise you he’s connected in some way to everything that’s happening south of the border. Where else you think that shit he’s selling comes from?” Connelly looked at Gonzalez and seemed to be searching for something. “What do they call it?”

  Gonzalez raised his eyebrows.

  “Degrees of separation.” Connelly snapped his fingers. “That’s it. Anyway, go on, Mr. McBee.”

  Jonah sighed and kept talking.

  3

  JONAH WAS WORN OUT BY THE TIME HE FINISHED. HIS LIDS WERE heavy. The two agents exchanged a long look before Connelly shrugged, reached, and turned off the recorder.

  “Well,” he said. “You’re either a magnificent liar or a certified idiot. Either way, you must have a horseshoe up your ass.” He lifted his big frame out of the chair. “You handle him?” he asked Gonzalez.

  “I will,” the subordinate answered, and Connelly walked out, saying no more.

  Several breaths passed, as if Gonzalez needed time for the story to settle.

  “All right,” he said. “Come with me.”

  Jonah followed him to a room with a couch, a vending machine, and a coffeepot. Gonzalez gestured at the couch.

  “You just wait for me a minute here, okay? Let me finish up a couple things.”

  Jonah didn’t have the energy to question what was happening. He sat down, and the next thing he knew, Gonzalez was shaki
ng him awake.

  Jonah grunted. Gonzalez had keys and a pair of sunglasses in his hands. He beckoned for Jonah to follow.

  They walked out into the searing morning light, and with it came a headache. Jonah recalled a time when he and Colby had snuck into a Bourbon Street bar and stayed longer than they had intended, drink after drink. When they exited, the sun had covertly risen and it made him feel disoriented and strange. Like he’d left himself and everything he knew behind and been reborn as an aching, awkward, and dumbfounded thing.

  Gonzalez led Jonah through a fenced-in concrete parking lot packed full of official vehicles, to a black SUV. Jonah asked where they were going.

  “Well,” Gonzalez said as he cranked the air-conditioning. “You’re out of money, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And your truck, you said, is back in New Orleans?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then I better help you get home, don’t you think?”

  “Oh.” Jonah blinked, didn’t know what to say.

  “You got a cell phone?”

  “The battery’s dead.”

  Gonzalez removed a smartphone from his pocket and passed it to Jonah. “Call your brother,” he said. “Tell him you’ll be on the next bus to—what’s the closest city Greyhound will get you to, you think?”

  “Baton Rouge, probably.”

  “All right, tell him that.”

  The camp phone rang four times and the answering machine picked up. No recording. Just the beep.