The Infinite

by Nicholas Mainieri

  In the mirror she narrowed her eyes like a hawk. There was a flash, nothing more than a glimmer, of the old warrior. She could use the right words with Oziel, she could make him understand with all possible respect and without giving offense. She’d sit with him and eat his food and hear what he had to say, and then she would thank him for his generosity, thank him for getting her out of Las Monarcas, and then firmly indicate that she intended to move on soon, to be on her own.

  The thickening tension in her gut, the anticipation tingling in her fingertips. She grinned sardonically at herself and went through her prerace stretching routine, twisting her trunk and loosening her back, touching her toes and warming her hamstrings. She finished, raised her face.

  Mamá, she prayed. A breath. And you, too, señora McBee, if you can forgive me.

  She had no nice shoes to wear with the dress, so she descended the stairs barefoot. Oziel was in the kitchen, scraping green meat from charred chile skins.

  “You look lovely,” he said, dicing the chile meat and adding it to a large pot on the stovetop. He untied his apron and hung it on a hook. His dark shirt was open at the neck. His sleeves were rolled. He wore charcoal slacks and gleaming black shoes.

  “I will make you a drink,” he said. It wasn’t a question, but Luz wanted to reply as if he had asked whether she wanted one, so she said, “Sure.” He sliced limes and made vodka cocktails and suggested they sit outside on the porch while dinner finished cooking.

  The guard got to his feet. Oziel told him to go somewhere else and gestured for Luz to take his rocking chair. Then he dragged the other chair over and sat next to her. The guard had stopped in the shadow alongside the smaller cottage. His cigarette glowed. Oziel said, “Go somewhere where I cannot see you,” and the man dragged his feet out of sight. Oziel exhaled and settled, rocking chair creaking. “Pretty night,” he said.

  The pines walled off her view of the valley. The stars bobbed close on their unseen tethers. The porch light, a single bulb in an enclosure meant to look like a lantern, buzzed overhead. A slight tapping. A trapped moth juking against the bare bulb.

  “You wanted to tell me a story,” Luz said.

  He crunched an ice cube in his teeth. “I will save that for dinner. Let’s talk about you for a moment.”

  Luz politely put her glass to her lips but didn’t swallow. “What do you want to know.”

  “What happened in Las Monarcas?”

  “More or less what you suggested,” she said. “I worked for my grandmother, walked around town. That’s about it.” She’d keep Jonah hidden; he was hers alone.

  “And that was all it took for you to call me.”

  “No. The last thing was something I heard.”

  He asked for more by raising his eyebrows.

  “The reading at Mass.”

  “Really.”

  “Yes.” Overhead, the moth fluttered, clicking against the glass fixture, not realizing it could simply escape out the bottom. “From Santiago.”

  Oziel smiled to himself, sipped his drink. He hummed. “Be doers of the word.”

  They sat in the quiet, and something screeched out in the valley.

  “Well,” he said, “I believe it is time to eat.”

  “Sure.”

  As they got up, Luz felt something soft on her head. She ran her fingers through her hair and came away with the moth, the life burned out of it.

  6

  JUST THE TWO OF US TONIGHT,” OZIEL SAID AS HE SET PLACES AT the table off the kitchen. The music played in hushed tones. He set out a bowl of rice and a plate stacked with tortillas, and then he ladled them bowls of the chile verde. Luz smelled the spice and the roasted pork. He sat against one of the alcove walls, and Luz sat with her back to the open expanse of the kitchen. It made her feel a little exposed, but nobody else was around. She crossed her legs beneath the table.

  Oziel scooped a bite, halted. “Do you wish to say grace?”

  “No,” Luz said, “thank you.”

  His features registered slight surprise but he only said, “Okay.”

  The food was good. The heat eased something in her skull. She was careful not to eat too much or too quickly, though. In each moment she tried to remember to measure her own actions, thoughts, and words. “Your story?” she prodded.

  “Yes.” He swabbed the rim of his bowl with a tortilla and tore a bite with his teeth. “You will appreciate this.”

  “I’m waiting.”

  He chuckled. “You must remember your meddlesome federale friend, Garza, the one from the base?”

  Luz did.

  “How shall I put this . . .”

  “He’s dead,” Luz finished.

  Oziel looked at her. “I was going to say something more clever, but yes, he is.”

  “Is that the story?”

  “No. As you know, I have people in his outpost.”

  Luz placed her spoon in her bowl and crossed her arms on the table.

  “I order them to study Garza, so they do. They can tell me when he takes a smoke break, a coffee break. When he goes to the latrine, when he arrives, when he leaves every day. I have my eye on him because he is a pain in the ass. And you must understand this now, Luz—in this business it is no longer a matter of simply removing obstacles from the path ahead. Certainly uncreative brute force still has its place—as you have seen—but methods must now be found in order to distinguish oneself. So. I learn that Garza takes his cigarette breaks outside the garage on the base, and I engineer an accident with some gasoline.” He winked, spooned a mouthful of chile.

  “And that killed him?” Luz asked. She thought of the moth on the porch.

  “I confess it would have been more elegant. I understand he was burned very badly, but as he rolled on the concrete, some mechanic managed to douse him with a fire extinguisher. Still, he was critical.”

  “So he’s not dead?”

  “No, he is dead. I sent a sicario to the hospital to finish him.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yes.” He shrugged, ripped another tortilla in half. “When the departed is someone of his stature, people naturally assume that something more than an accident has taken place. This works in our favor. We hang a banner from a Monclova bridge, stating, ‘Righteous flame consumes the unrighteous,’ and sign it, and then there can be no mistake. The people, the plaza—they know we are resolutely in charge. Any memory of Cicatriz and his minor run of terror is forgotten. Good, no?”

  Luz stirred her chile, watched pink bits of pork emerge and submerge. “You consider yourself to be righteous?”

  He cocked his head and didn’t immediately answer. “How do you mean?”

  “I mean—” She paused. Think, Luz. “I suppose that I am confused. I saw you pray with your men. But your faith cannot be why you do this.”

  Oziel mopped the bottom of his bowl with his tortilla, smiling again to himself. “You are a smart woman, I have told you this before.” He lifted his eyes. “Much of my aesthetic is mere posturing, for the sake of my men and for effect in the plaza. Many of them need this baseline, you understand. But do not trap yourself, Luz, with such antipodal strictures. This game is a business like any other. I provide for many families with what I earn—is there no element of righteousness in that? And surely there are degrees of, oh, call it evil if you must. There are many who are worse than me, who offer nothing to those whom they should protect—I speak of those we war with, for example. There are degrees, and there are always counterweights, and righteousness falls somewhere on this spectrum. My own righteousness is something I determine, no one else.” He paused, teeth gritted. “And yourself? Are you righteous?”

  “No,” Luz answered. “I have done things that prevent it.”

  He waved, as though batting away a fly. “If that is what you believe.”

  “I thought,” she said, “maybe you didn’t believe in God.”

  “I have no tolerance for atheists,” he started. “Liars, cowards. Who else would argue with you concern
ing the existence of something they deny in the first place? But it is not their unbelief that I hate, Luz. It is their cowardice. The denier and the blind believer are one and the same to me. It is cowardly to refuse complexity. One must not be afraid of the unknown. I believe that you get my meaning. If I am at all right about you, then you understand what I am saying.”

  “I do,” Luz said, but she was being pulled into a conversation she could not have. She needed to tell him she was leaving. It did not matter whether he was right about her.

  “God,” Oziel said, “can be either very cruel or very sad. If he does not intercede when Cicatriz opens fire on a street crowded with the innocent—”

  —the dead woman, the old man screaming, the life still inside Luz—

  “—then God’s failure must be in his own refusal. But if God’s absence is not by choice, then there is no such thing as his omnipotence. He may only watch from afar and hope we make the right choices. If God is not here, then we must therefore say that the devil exists at a remove, as well. That leaves Man to stand alone. All the evil and all the good, it belongs to us. It is up to the individual man to mete out the portioning. Are we agreed?”

  Bells crashed in Luz’s head. Tell him you’re leaving. Thank him, be polite, try to get out. She said: “I see only the absence of God’s vengeance in the world.”

  “Yes.” He grinned. His gold tooth blazed. “There have always been men like me. There are more every day. But at this juncture, Luz, God’s vengeance is beside the point, and I must deal in practicalities. I know our enemy well. I must gather those who are capable, those who are not cowardly, those who understand. I must rally them to my purpose. And you are talented, Luz. You are special. I could use you.”

  Luz’s heart murmured in her chest. She clenched her fists, felt feeble. She looked at them and saw her mother’s hands and willed them to be strong.

  “Voices rush to fill the void,” Oziel said. “So many of them, clamoring to be heard, that they create a void of another kind. To be heard, you must silence those others.”

  And Luz understood, in this moment, what he wanted with her. There was nothing sexual about it, as his workers assumed, and neither was he after her skills—whatever they were—no matter what he said. In Luz, Oziel saw somebody who was strong. He saw somebody who was unafraid. He saw a voice. He saw a voice, and he needed to silence it.

  Tell him now. If you are going to get out of here, you need to tell him right now that you aren’t staying. Do it now.

  “Who,” Luz whispered, “silenced Cecilia?”

  Oziel blinked. He furrowed his brow. A confused kind of smile crossed his face.

  There was no music playing. There was no sound at all.

  “Did I hear you correctly?” Oziel asked.

  Luz stared at him. “Your niece’s tongue. Who cut it out?”

  He looked like he was waiting for a punch line. Then, “You must know the answer to your question, Luz.”

  She gave no reply. She was not who he would have her be.

  “You are smarter than this, or I have misjudged you.”

  She didn’t reply. Oziel’s end-of-the-day stubble stood out sharply. The pores in his skin. Excruciating detail.

  Luz thought: I am not Mexico and I am not America. I am something else, and my voice will be infinite. She smiled at him sadly and said: “I am no mute woman.”

  His eyes narrowed. The room was trapped in warped miniature, twisting in the gold veneer of his tooth. His lips closed, and that version of the world ceased to be.

  Her lungs filled with oxygen. Adrenaline fizzed in her limbs. As if she were crouched at the starting block, awaiting the sound of the gun. The lanes arced ahead, stark and white, ending where they began. The track seemed inescapable.

  Oziel’s eyes opened wide. They shined with revelation. Luz gripped the hilt of the knife where it was strapped to her calf beneath the table.

  Oziel lunged from his chair, arms outstretched, hands seeking her throat.

  She jerked the knife free. It was a heavy thing. Too heavy to bring up in time.

  He hurtled over the corner of the table, smashing into her. They went backward in the chair. Her head slammed against the floor. Stars detonated. His weight compressed her ribcage, and breath left her. And then he somersaulted past, and she lay in a dully throbbing bubble, all the world sparking and roaring at its fringe. She could have lain there forever, mind afloat. She found herself, tiny and untethered, somewhere in her own skull. Swim, she thought, and she surfaced into the bellowing world.

  She was wheezing, great involuntary grabs for breath. A hot and sick feeling spread beneath her navel. She rolled to her side, pushed to her hands and knees. Her wrist burned cold, and the thought that it might be broken flitted through. But she still clutched the knife. She couldn’t feel her fingers, and she couldn’t sense how much strength remained in them. With her good hand she shoved the toppled chair aside and got to her feet. Her bare soles slid in the spilled chile. An ankle also seemed to be injured. She wrapped her good hand around her knife hand and squeezed, gripping the hilt with both. She put her weight on her uninjured leg and gathered what breath she could.

  Oziel was on the kitchen floor, rocking to his hands and knees. Dinner was splattered across the varnished floorboards. Ceramic lay in shards. It would only be moments before Cecilia came running. Oziel got to his feet, facing away from her. Luz leveled the long knife. He turned, eyes down, hands to his stomach. When he took them away, his palms were slick. The wet fabric of his shirt clung to him. Luz looked at her blade. Red, as was the belly of her own dress. But it was his blood, not hers.

  Strands of hair hung in Oziel’s face. His skin was pale, glistening. He glared at her and brushed his hair away, leaving a red swipe on his forehead. His eyes darted around the kitchen. The counter ran parallel to where they faced off, and the sink yawed between them. Inside the basin, the wooden handle of the chopping knife leaned against the chrome. She was still closest to it but her ankle howled, pulled like an anchor.

  He charged for the chopping knife. Luz shuffled to intercept, propelling her knife ahead of her. The thrust was sluggish and inept, with the same terrible feeling as in the nightmare when her legs wouldn’t work well enough and her ghost runner gained. Oziel opened his hands as if to catch the blade rising toward him, but his fingers let it pass and he clamped onto her wrists. He swung her to the side and drove her into the kitchen cabinets. They were glass, crosshatched with wood. Everything—inside and out—burst, bright and soundless. She threw herself sideways, trying to get around him. A shard of glass stuck in its frame bit into her triceps—pain lanced from there to her brain stem. Oziel had her wrists in a vise grip, and he swung her back, pressed her into the broken cabinets. He forced her arms to bend, directing the blade toward herself. Her wristbones wailed. She was going to have to drop the knife. That was the only way, the only turn offered, and then it would be over.

  She lunged one last desperate time, and her injured ankle gave out. She went down around Oziel’s foremost leg, spinning as she fell and pulling him on top of her. His full mass pinned her, and a wide smile split his face. She couldn’t move. Then blood spilled through his teeth, the ivory and gold alike. Luz turned her head. It splashed hot along her cheek, her neck, her earlobe.

  Her arms were trapped between their chests, and the blade had sunk into the underside of his jaw and gone through the roof of his mouth. His entire being, the unfathomable weight of it, trembled around the knife blade. His grimace widened. A soft squalling in his mouth. His eyes were large and clear, quaking in their sockets. A viscous mixture of blood and drool slipped slowly from him. Words scuffled in his throat. They never made it out.

  Luz rocked on her shoulders and rolled Oziel onto his side. She got up, and her fingers wouldn’t unclench from the knife. It slid free from his jaw. A spurt of nearly black blood. He twitched, fell onto his back. The heels of his shoes clicked against the floorboards. He was staring at her. Then he wasn’t t
here at all.

  The blood on Luz’s skin plunged from hot to cold. She shivered uncontrollably. She saw shards of glass glinting on the floor and she would have to be careful not to step on them, but she thought she’d fall over if she tried to take a step. Then Luz saw her.

  Cecilia stood in the kitchen’s entrance. Her rifle hung across her chest. The mute sicaria looked at her dead uncle. Now she looked at Luz and the wet blade in her hands.

  There was nothing Luz could do. Thought blazed, phosphorescent, but her muscles were utterly unreachable. Nothing to do.

  Cecilia wore a flat, indeterminable expression. She reached and lifted the rifle’s strap off over her head. She set the rifle down, barrel against the kitchen counter. She looked once more at Luz, turned, and walked through the front door.

  Feeling came back. Pain like thawing flesh. Luz slipped carefully through the kitchen and hobbled upstairs, leaving red footprints. She clutched the knife in her good hand. Her other was unresponsive. Blood ran from the back of her arm, trickling past her numb wrist and fingers.

  In the bedroom she moved as quickly as possible. She took off her mother’s dress and held it out before her. Sweat-damp and bloody. Her breath came in nearly hysterical respirations and she squeezed back tears and dropped the dress to the floor. She took the towel from earlier and wiped her feet clean. In the bathroom she wet another towel and cleaned off the rest of her as best she could, but she knew she couldn’t wipe it all away, rushing. The laceration on the back of her arm wouldn’t stop bleeding. She probed it with her fingers and retched, nearly vomiting. She returned to her grocery bag and removed her dirty jeans and T-shirt. Getting dressed was difficult with one hand, but she managed it. She slipped one sneaker on easily, yelped when she had to put the other on. The knife lay bloody on the bedspread. She thought about leaving it, but instead she took the towel, wiped the blade clean, and sheathed the knife again against her calf. She tied shut the grocery bag containing two more of her mother’s dresses and exited the room.