The Insulin Express

by Oren Liebermann

  Felix tells me to give the horse a bit of a kick with my heels and make a clicking sound. The horse, reacting instantly, breaks into a gallop.

  A galloping horse can move at about thirty miles an hour. To put that in perspective, I have driven three times that fast, flown my own airplane six times as fast, and flown commercially twenty times as fast. In other words, in the grand scheme of things, it’s not all that remarkable to gallop on a horse.

  Yet the sensation is unlike any other I have ever experienced. The sense of speed is exhilarating. I won’t use any trite clichés like the wind was blowing through my hair (it is) or we were moving like a bat out of hell (we are), but I am so excited by the sensation of galloping on a horse that I instantly smile the sort of smile that can only be described a shit-eating grin. And I am absolutely okay with that.

  Felix snaps a picture of me as I go by. It’s an absolute mess. It’s out of focus, blurry, and looks like his horse was at a full gallop as he took the photo, yet the shit-eating grin is plainly obvious.

  That picture still makes me smile every time I look at it.

  I am crouched low over the horse, holding the reins tight, trying to keep my nether regions from smashing into the saddle in ways that will permanently limit my ability to have children, and I have a smile from ear to ear. I didn’t think riding a horse would be one of my favorite experiences of the entire trip, but it absolutely is.

  Back at the ranch, we sit down with our host for lunch. To say that Enrique is rough around the edges would be an understatement. He is the guy who roughed up the edges. He introduces himself with, “I am Enrique. My English is shit.” I like him instantly. He is blunt, offensive, and honest, in much the same way that he is hilarious, warm, and genuine.

  “No hay sexa en la mesa,” he yells at me when I put my arm around Cassie at lunch. There is no sex on the table. Then he breaks into a cackling laughter and refills everyone’s wine.

  Enrique has grilled every meat available within a two-hundred-mile radius, which is mostly a dozen different cuts of Argentinian beef, with a chicken breast thrown in for good measure only because Cassie prefers not to eat red meat. He speaks disparagingly of chicken, and when he says pollo in Spanish with an Argentinian accent that makes it sound like po-jo, the j in particular is dripping with contempt, as if the chicken breast has profaned his grill by taking up room that could have been used for yet more beef.

  He has also grilled an assortment of peppers and tomatoes, and whatever he couldn’t grill, he pickled.

  “I learned English in Texas. I worked on a horse ranch there when I was young. It was awful. The cowboys called me Mexican all the time.”

  He searches for the word. “Racism.”

  “A cowboy is a gay gaucho,” he spits as an afterthought.

  We have another ride after lunch. Then we enjoy a late, lazy dinner with Enrique and call it a night. In the morning, I decide to do something I’ve done only a few times on this trip. I shave.

  As a general rule, I hate shaving, though I have done it almost every single day of my adult life. There is nothing enjoyable about it, but it has been a professional requirement ever since I started working. Liberated from this never-ending burden to remove my facial hair, I limited my shaving to once every two weeks or so on our trip. I always last about eight days before it starts feeling like fire ants are mauling my face. That’s how I know it’s time to shave.

  The moment Enrique sees me clean-shaven, he starts calling me “Top Model.” At first, I think he’ll only do this for a few minutes. But he keeps it up throughout the day.

  “Buenos dias, Top Model!”

  “Como estas, Top Model!”

  “Salud, Top Model!”

  Apparently, the idea of being clean-shaven on a horse ranch is a bit of a novelty. Enrique himself sports a pepper-gray goatee.

  In return, I start calling Enrique “Mi Amor.”

  We keep the nicknames going through lunch and as we say our goodbyes.

  “I will return, Mi Amor.”

  “I hope so, Top Model.”

  It’s a promise I intend to keep.

  Two days later, we catch our final overnight bus of our trip—eighteen hours from Salta to Mendoza, where we do our best to drink all the wine in Argentina’s best known wine region. We mount a noble effort, but are ultimately unsuccessful, though not for lack of trying.

  We find ourselves in Argentina during the semifinals and finals of the World Cup. I will not go into great detail about what it’s like to watch World Cup elimination games in the country that’s playing in those games. Suffice to say there is nothing that even comes close in the United States. In the largest sporting event of the year—the Superbowl—two cities go wild for a game that’s being played in a third city that doesn’t care about the game.

  In the World Cup, entire countries celebrate, cheer, and go crazy together. When Argentina won the semifinals against the Netherlands, we could hear the celebrations from our sixth-floor hotel room, and they went on all night. Even after the finals, which Argentina lost to Germany, there was about an hour of silence before the country collectively realized it had just finished second in the world.

  The celebrations began anew.

  The day after the World Cup finals, we make our way back to Santiago to catch a flight home. Or at least we try to. Cassie’s brother is getting married on Saturday, and it’s fairly critical that we be there.

  Mendoza is a short bus ride away from Santiago, so we book tickets for the six-hour ride.

  When we arrive at the bus station, my suspicions from Japan are confirmed. We will never have an easy trip home. Our flight from Santiago to Philadelphia is still on time—at least it should be since it’s not for another two days. But our bus from Mendoza to Santiago, without which our flight from Santiago to Philadelphia does us absolutely no good, is cancelled. A snowstorm in the Andes has closed down the road and made the mountain pass impassable.

  In fact, every bus that left before our bus made it through the pass. The 8:30 and 9:30 buses are well on their way to Santiago. But the 10:30 is stuck in Mendoza, on the eastern side of the pass, while our destination is on the western side. Naturally, the pass will open again when the weather warms and the snow melts, but with the worst of the blizzard still to hit the Andes, it won’t open in the two days that we have before our flight.

  Once again, our seemingly simple plans to get back to the US have run into an imaginary yet solid wall that I can’t help thinking someone intentionally planted there.

  We have a few options, but none of them are easy and even fewer are cheap. Unfortunately, waiting for another bus is not one of these options, which means the money spent on bus tickets is probably lost to us forever, if my understanding of Argentine business practices and return policies is correct.

  We can try to fly to Santiago, which seems like a great option, except the only airline that flies direct abuses the monopoly and extorts passengers to the tune of $650 for a one-hour flight that should cost $200 at most. One of Argentina’s main airlines stopped flying the direct route a couple of months ago. If we want to fly with that airline, we have to pay just as much money as the direct flight and go 615 miles east so we can end up 90 miles west. I like flying, but not that much.

  We end up rerouting our Chile-Philadelphia flight through Buenos Aires instead of Santiago. We will get in a few hours later, but still within plenty of time for the wedding. Our path now takes us from Buenos Aires to Toronto to Philadelphia.

  Now we only need to get to Buenos Aires. A bus from Mendoza takes some twenty hours, so that’s almost immediately out of the question. Buses that long are almost always overnight, which doesn’t give us enough of a margin of error in case something goes wrong again, which it seems to do every time we try to get back on American soil.

  Our best bet is to fly, which is easy enough. The Argentine airline offers a whole bunch of daily hops between the two cities. We hop online, place our reservations, and promptly run int
o the strangest problem I have ever encountered in an online transaction. The company website acknowledges that we have a reservation, tells us we have to pay, and then won’t let us pay. We try three different credit cards, and the airline’s website keeps telling us to try later, while simultaneously telling us we only have an hour to pay before the reservations are thrown out.

  We close out of the window, hoping to try again, but our confirmation email contains no link or mention of how to pay. It only tells us we have yet to pay without telling us how to accomplish this task that’s at the core of every business transaction in the history of mankind. Whether buying a car or bartering for a log canoe, one person sells something and another person buys it with some form of payment. Apparently, the airline’s business development unit missed this basic lesson when designing their reservations website. We have a product we want to buy and a set price that we have agreed to, but no means of offering compensation in return.

  We keep ending up on the same itinerary page that taunts us mercilessly with its ceaseless countdown until our reservation expires without providing us a means to stop the countdown. Someone at the airline is playing a cruel joke on us.

  Cassie is very close to tears of frustration. I run down to the front desk to get help from the receptionist, who calls the airline immediately. He, too, is just as perplexed as us, especially when the woman who answers the phone at the airline’s corporate phone number insists that the website is working fine, notwithstanding all of the growing evidence to the contrary.

  She acknowledges our problem, understands our problem, even tries to solve our problem for a brief moment, then denies that there ever was a problem and hangs up. I am no expert in Spanish, but I know enough to understand that there is a large, unbridgeable gap between making progress and whatever it is that we’re doing right now.

  I end up walking to the office in person to pay for the tickets, trying to explain to them that their website seems to have been designed by flailing madmen who either don’t understand the need for satisfactory payment or have chosen to forgo it entirely. The clerk shrugs, takes my credit card, and hands me our tickets.

  We spend one more night in Mendoza before catching a flight to Buenos Aires, where we have a short day to explore. The Buenos Aires metropolis has thirteen million people, which means we spend less time here per capita than in any other city we have visited.

  But we will be back.

  Chapter 24

  July 19, 2014

  40°36’21.3”N 75°32’06.6”W

  Allentown, Pennsylvania

  Iwake up in the United States. This is a minor surprise, since I’m not supposed to be here yet. It is even more of a surprise since I have no memory of swapping South America for North America.

  I remember absolutely nothing about the flight from Buenos Aires to Philadelphia. There was a layover in Canada, but I don’t remember that either. I only know there must have been one because my tickets insist on it. I think I was shell-shocked—emotionally numb and mentally switched off as we made our way back home.

  When we started traveling, it was almost impossible to believe that our first month had passed. Then our second month. As we said goodbye to Europe, it was unreal to us that we had already knocked off one continent. Even if we savored every moment of every day, time still flew by in large blocks of weeks and months.

  To wake up one morning and discover we are on a flight home is difficult to believe. So difficult, in fact, that I don’t remember the flight home.

  Our trip isn’t over yet. We have three more weeks planned in Buenos Aires and southern Argentina to explore Patagonia, but I suspect these three weeks will have a far different feel to them. In a sense, they are not part of our incredible journey. They are a regular vacation before we go back to work, and I can’t shake that thought from my mind.

  It is without a doubt financially idiotic to fly home for a wedding, then fly back to the same place we left to resume the last little bit of our trip. Yet, for once, we simply don’t care about the finances. We have budgeted our entire trip, and we saved this last bit to make sure we could finish what we started. Six months ago, diabetes forced me to take a month away from our travels. I promised Cassie that I would not give up any more of the trip. We will finish this trip on our terms.

  Two days after returning home, we are at Cassie’s brother’s wedding. The wedding is a blast, and I get to wear the suit I had custom-tailored for dirt cheap in Hoi An, Vietnam. The bride and groom put cards all over the tables that say “Instagram! #AlainaAndAndy.” I am very tempted to log on and send out “Upload your amateur porn pics! #AlainaAndAndy.”

  From the wedding, we head straight for the beach for Cassie’s family vacation at the Jersey Shore.

  Given how close our trip is to officially being over, Cassie and I both decide to take advantage of the time at home and begin the job hunt. A corporate headhunter we befriended in Seville in October sets me up with an interview at a public relations firm in New York City. I steal a day away from the beach and drive into the city for the interview.

  The questions naturally turn to why there is a one-year gap on my resume, which quickly becomes a fun conversation about our trip. At the end of the interview, I am given a proofreading quiz. My interviewer looks over my editing skills briefly, then gives me homework. I haven’t had homework in nearly a decade, so the idea of doing serious work while I’m not at work doesn’t appeal to me, but this means the interview went well, so I oblige.

  The interviewer tells me to put together a marketing plan for the Food Bank of New York City’s announcement of a new program. I shake his hand, say thank you, and make my way to the car, pondering what is now the most important question I have to answer.

  What the hell is a marketing plan?

  I have read countless press releases and been the target of marketing plans aimed at drumming up media attention, but I’ve never written a plan myself. I also, as a matter of habit, delete press releases the moment they arrive, with the unfortunate consequence that I have read very few of them.

  For the next two days, I hunker down in the ice cream and coffee shop near our rented apartment at the beach. The coffee shop has Internet and, more to the point, coffee. My first mission is to figure out what goes into a marketing plan, which takes most of the first day. The second day is devoted to writing one of my own.

  In order not to overstay my welcome at the shop, I keep ordering coffee every hour or so. I drink the first three coffees, leisurely sip the fourth, then stop drinking them altogether. I order the coffee, let it sit on my table until it’s achieved a completely unpalatable degree of lukewarmth, take one sip, make a horribly disgusted face, and order another coffee. By the third time I do this, the nice young girl in the purple shirt operating the cash register thinks I am patently insane, wondering why I persist in ordering coffees that I have no intention of drinking.

  Cassie comes in, sees my thirty-dollar bill, and asks, “How many coffees did you drink?”

  “Three.”

  I send in the marketing plan on a Thursday morning. Over the weekend, Cassie submits an application to a charter school in Harlem. The school emails Cassie the following Sunday to ask her to come in for an interview.

  Less than twenty-four hours later, an email pops into my inbox.

  Monday, July 28, 2014 at 7:43 p.m.

  Michael Smith

  To: Oren Liebermann

  Subject: RE: Checking in

  Hi, Oren,

  Having reviewed your writing sample, we’re pleased to invite you back for a second-round interview to meet with Jason Gelnovatch and some other members of the team. Are you available, by any chance, this Thursday at either 10 a.m. or 4 p.m.? Just as a heads up for your scheduling, these interviews often take a few hours.

  Looking forward to it,

  Michael

  I am supposed to be elated. I have another interview with a public relations firm in New York City. I am one successful afternoon away from a j
ob offer, and I have barely started job hunting. In ways that I cannot quite explain, life seems to be falling back in order.

  Instead, I feel numb. The interview came faster than I expected, which leaves us with no choice. I have to call off the rest of the trip.

  For the second time this year, I have forced us away from what we love most. I have taken us off the road. The reasons are entirely different—the first time was for my diabetes; the second is for a job—but the end result is the same. Because of me, we are not traveling. Because of me, we will put our passports away again.

  Because of me.

  We planned to travel for a year. I have cut that down twice now. We lost a month in the middle of the trip and now we’re losing our final month. I have robbed us of the ability to finish the trip on our terms.

  Cassie and I unpack our backpacks for the final time and start figuring out where we’ll live and how we’ll buy a car and all sorts of tasks we haven’t thought about in a year.

  I schedule a follow-up doctor’s appointment for one of the most important tests used in long-term treatment of diabetes, called HBA1C. In technical terms, HBA1C is glycated hemoglobin. It develops when hemoglobin, a protein that carries oxygen throughout the body, joins with glucose. Because these red blood cells renew every three months, measuring HBA1C is a way of measuring your average blood sugar over the last twelve weeks. In non-technical terms, your HBA1C needs to be between 5 and 7. A normal person’s HBA1C is 5.6 or lower.

  After I was diagnosed in late February, my HBA1C was 12.1. That is well above the dangerous mark. An HBA1C of that level will guarantee severe long-term complications from diabetes, and those complications will come quickly and irreversibly.

  So it is with a fair amount of trepidation that I march myself back into the doctor’s office to find out how I’ve been doing in the six months since my diagnosis. I have been strict with recording everything I eat, my blood sugars, and how much insulin I take with each meal. If, having done all this, my HBA1C is still dangerously high, I don’t know what more I can do. Then my disease will truly have broken me.