A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism

by Peter Mountford

  The cop led Gabriel to a paddy wagon and helped him inside. Gabriel sat on the bench. He took a deep breath. He noticed he was panting. He tried to calm down and catch his breath. It was no good. He could feel his pulse in his head, in his face. He took another deep breath and held it, watching as a few policemen brought over the dead man, the one who'd been holding the dynamite. They hoisted him up the back stair and laid him on the bench opposite Gabriel.

  One of the policemen entered and sat beside the miner's feet. The side with the arm that had been blown off was, fortunately, out of view. "¡Vamos! ¡Vamos!" the cop yelled and banged the metal wall behind him.

  They drove with the back doors open. The doors slammed shut and swung open at the turns, wavered in the middle at times, randomly, each door drifting one way or another. Gabriel watched everything out the back of the truck. He felt sick, sort of like the way he felt sick before he had to speak in public, but worse. La Paz rolled along behind them. The siren droned too languidly to convey appropriate urgency. Pedestrians looked at them and then vanished behind a swinging door.

  He glanced at the cop sitting opposite him. The cop shook his head, with a jeez-this-is-crazy expression. Gabriel nodded. He couldn't muster a smile. He didn't look at the miner lying on the bench. He turned and looked out the back.

  He saw blood dripping slowly from his chin onto his thigh. There was a big dark blotch on his jeans. It was dripping quickly. As they slowed at the clinic, Gabriel stole a look at the man on the bench opposite him and was surprised to see that he seemed to be alive after all. He was very pale, and he didn't appear to be looking at anything in particular, but he was breathing quickly, with an expression of concentration on his face. The truck stopped and the cop leaped out, offered Gabriel a hand. Gabriel took the hand and stood up. The cop, indicating the floor, told him to be careful. Gabriel looked down at the lake of blood under his feet.

  "Gracias," he said.

  He stepped gingerly down to the bumper. Standing there on the street in front of the clinic, he immediately felt like he was going to faint, so he steadied himself against the truck.

  Despite a rising urge to vomit, at the insistence of the policeman Gabriel took the miner's feet—one barefoot, one in a rubber boot—while the policeman took his blood-drenched torso. In that way, they carried him into the clinic, taking short quick steps, exactly as if they had been carrying a bulky piece of furniture. At one point, because of the blood on his hand, Gabriel dropped the man's booted foot, but he picked it back up, gripped it firmly, and continued. The man was definitely alive. He was mumbling as they carried him. Gabriel gazed at the exposed bone again. The stump looked false—something from a war movie, maybe. The miner's one exposed foot was enormous in proportion to his body, a big slab of half-dried clay. Besmeared toenails were overgrown and yellow.

  Inside, they set the man down on a gurney. A doctor was there. The doctor didn't say anything to them. He and a couple nurses rolled the gurney out of the room.

  Gabriel lingered. A woman behind a counter looked at him and said, "I'll get you a doctor too."

  He nodded. Saliva flooded his mouth. He retched a little, but caught himself. The policeman from the back of the truck helped him into an old wheelchair. Gabriel felt enormously grateful and patted the man's hand. He squeezed it. He said, "Thank you, thank you." He was feeling feverish now, and he was starting to cry, at last.

  The man said it was no problem.

  Gabriel sighed, wiped away tears, shook his head, and then turned and retched again. His diaphragm convulsed hard and he puked up a soupy splatter of red-and-white half-digested pizza. The brightly colored vomit pooled beneath his wheelchair. He could smell tomato sauce. He hiccupped, retched again, and drooled onto his bloodied lap. His throat felt scratchy, and his brain was not his brain. Dropping away, he groaned and blinked at the painful blur ... a sharp pain somewhere ... the room sparkled like out-of-focus tinsel, like a gauzy dream about a Christmas party ... his mind slipping, he enjoyed weak relief as his bladder emptied slowly, warmly.

  He woke in a narcotic stupor. His head still hurt. His ear still hurt, but his hearing was improved. He could hear a woman somewhere in the hospital shrieking and begging people to stop whatever they were doing to her. Her voice didn't diminish from her hollering. It seemed to grow stronger. At last, as she was exhausted or drugged, her screams dimmed to a sad howl, the plaintive and resigned braying of a cat being forced to take a bath.

  A nurse came around and put a tray of food beside him. He was sozzled on pain medication, and food didn't interest him. Then she explained that she was going to give him a tetanus shot. The serum came in a glass vial with a narrow neck that could be snapped off, thereby exposing a jagged glass opening. It was into that opening that the nurse carefully inserted her needle. The technology seemed positively Edwardian.

  He was not upset. He was not upset about much, thanks to whatever opiate they'd spiked into his IV. He felt, instead, a light euphoria, bolstered by the thrall of posttraumatic bliss, and the knowledge that he'd managed to survive. He gazed at the nurse when she inserted the needle into his arm. The needle prick came at a remove, like a description of a sting rather than a sting itself.

  She was flirty, or wanted to be, but he was too doped up and confused to know how to really engage. She smelled strongly of soap and had a face quite like a dagger: the chin participated as much in the impression as her nose and cheeks; it was all blade. Beneath, her neck was pale and elongated, swanlike—it looked precarious next to such a face.

  He asked what had happened.

  She explained that there had been shrapnel, of a sort. Fragments of the man's hand, of his bone and tendon, had been hurled into the left side of Gabriel's face. Gabriel's ear had ripped, horizontally, and his cheek had several deep puncture wounds. His skull had done its job as built-in helmet: it had prevented the shards from piercing his brain and killing him.

  He'd been in shock when they brought him to the hospital, she said. But he was not in any danger now, she added. They had removed the shrapnel, such as it was, from his face and stitched up each of the three punctures. The doctors had stitched his ear back together again too. The ear had been pretty well mangled, though, and they were not sure it would hold together well. He had to take it very easy on the ear for the next few weeks, at least.

  "Will I have a permanent scar?" he asked.

  "Yes," the nurse said matter-of-factly.

  She added that although he had bled a lot, it had been more or less all surface damage. Still, they had swaddled the left side of his face in bandages. They had given him a powerful antibiotic, which would precede a two-week barrage of oral penicillin. The biggest threat was infection, she said. She didn't elaborate. She didn't have to. Gabriel knew that there was nothing hygienic about having someone else's bone blasted like buckshot into one's face.

  Incredibly, the other man—who had at first looked so dead—was actually alive. He was in serious condition, the nurse reported, but he'd probably survive. Apart from losing his arm, he would be blind in one eye, deaf in one ear. He had lost several teeth too, broken two ribs, and his lip had torn badly. The skin on half of his torso had been ripped and burned. He was, however, in the parlance of doctors, "lucky to be alive," as if luck had anything to do with it. There was bad luck all around, and maybe some good luck too; but mostly Gabriel saw a lot of madness.

  The sun was low. He didn't know if it was dusk or dawn. The clinic took up three floors of an old building. The machinery and instruments were bulky, chrome and dreary teal. It was all cheap—hand-me-downs from hospitals in wealthy countries.

  Measuring poverty has always been difficult. According to the theory of purchasing-power parity, in a perfectly operating market, the cost of a given thing should be the same everywhere. But markets are, it turns out, decidedly imperfect. Gasoline can change price from one block to the next. A Big Mac in Norway costs twice as much as a Big Mac in Mexico City. The cost of things makes a problematic barom
eter, so economists have had to look elsewhere to quantify comparative wealth and poverty. Life expectancy is one effective measure of so-called real wealth, as is a country's infant-mortality rate. Death, it turns out, is a symptom of poverty. From the inside of that dilapidated clinic, this made sense. In the world's poorest countries, death is everywhere. If civil war doesn't get you, famine, cholera, or a pinkie-toe hangnail that gets infected and then goes haywire will. A sixty-five-year-old Rwandan is as statistically improbable as a one-hundred-year-old Canadian—such is the danger of poverty. And, although Bolivia was nowhere near as afflicted a place as Rwanda, there could be no escaping death's proximity. People were aswim in it.

  Miners set off dynamite in the middle of the day on the capital city's main drag, yes, but there was more to it than that. To Gabriel, the shadow of death was implied, somehow, in the beggars' diseased eyes, and in the vintage equipment at the clinic, it was there too in a lurid old bus's shaky rear wheel, and in the lack of expiration dates on perishable food. The threat tried to be flippant on the Death Road between La Paz and Coroico, a popular destination for daredevil mountain bikers who were supposed to be delighted by the fact that more than a hundred people were killed on the road every year. Death, in that ubiquity, seemed to beg for intervention by a sense of humor. Take the oft-encountered carcasses of street dogs, furry legs protruding from bloated torsos: cold nightmare or black comedy? A person's response might depend on how many times he'd seen one. The first time he might retch, the second time he'd probably just avert his eyes. Eventually, after he'd seen enough, laughter would seem like the only sensible answer. To take it seriously, to give it that much meaning, would be unthinkable.

  Amid such violence and chaos, death came to seem an impatient mistress. The danger had never bothered Gabriel before. When he fell in love with Bolivia, he didn't consider himself a potential object of death's caprice. A common misbelief in the young, and one inevitably corrected. Now Gabriel was afraid. It wasn't just the obvious things, either, that spooked him. He worried about contaminated water, feebly constructed buildings, nests of live wires that teetered atop telephone poles—the precariousness of everything astounded him.

  In January of 2002, his mother had sent him a clipping from the Los Angeles Times about how on the last day of 2001, a vendor inside Lima's fireworks market had demonstrated one of his wares for a customer and the whole building had ignited in a multicolored inferno. Within an hour 276 people were dead, and the whole market, the size of a city block, had been reduced to ash. Scores of people had been incinerated in their cars as they sat in gridlock out front.

  Gabriel and his mother had been to that market when they went on their tour of the region the previous year. Lima had been their last stop, after Chile and Bolivia, and they had stayed for only two days. On the second day they took a tour of the city, during which they stopped at the fireworks market, where eager salesmen lit matches and ignited fuses to entice the gringos. That they might be in danger did occur to Gabriel, in a way, but it seemed theoretical.

  His mother had not recoiled either, although he'd expected her to. She had wanted, he understood, to be close to the danger. Or, more to the point, she didn't want to be seen as afraid. So they lingered, standing stiffly to the side, their nostrils full of the sweet, nostalgia-laced smell of burning black powder, paper, and sulfur, their eardrums tickled by arrhythmic explosions. They watched until a bandolier of crackers began rattling off nearby and she suggested—pretending to be bored by it now, or mildly annoyed by the racket—that they might step outside and wait for the others in the fresh air.

  He'd never deliberately enter such a place now. Now, he liked his fireworks to have prominent warning labels. Exclamation points were a plus. He liked seat-belt laws too, and rules about air bags. He liked his Food and Drug Administration, with its random sanitation checks and obsessive rules. He liked his milk thoroughly pasteurized. All of this would have seemed priggish to him once, but now it made so much sense.

  More than anything, he liked that in the developed world, even though it was equally voracious finally, death appeared less indiscriminate. Death made sense. It was, as it should be, an orderly, rational affair.

  When he called his mother from the hospital to tell her what happened, she said, in Spanish, "I'll be there tomorrow." Gabriel had opened the conversation in Spanish, in order to communicate to her posthaste that things were not okay.

  "Don't come down tomorrow, Mom. It's not an emergency. The doctors tell me I'm going to be fine. I'd love for you to come, but—please don't come tomorrow. If you want to come, what about, I don't know, maybe later in the week. I have obligations."

  "Obligations? Why do you need to prepare for me? What are you doing down there?"

  "I'm working."

  "Working? BellSouth?"

  He held the phone against his good ear and waited. Gaping silence sometimes had a way of registering as a cautionary note with her. It gave her time to collect herself and realize that he had a reason for his position, whether or not she understood it.

  At last, she pulled back, saying, "Well, I'm going to call you twice a day until I see you next. If I'm not allowed to come down, at least let me do that."

  "Okay," he said. "You can do that."

  "I'm worried about you, Gabriel."

  "I know." He didn't have the heart to lie to her that night, so he didn't tell her not to worry. "I'll leave soon," he said. "In a week, I think. I have to go now. My batteries are dying."

  "Fine. Be careful."

  Later, the pain sneaked up on him, and the nurse upped his dose of painkillers. Then Lenka arrived. There was a television in the corner, up high, and it played a fuzzy local channel. He'd faded in and out, watching dubbed Saved by the Bell and The Simpsons. Lenka sat down and he gazed at her, blissed out on Percocet. She kissed him on his good cheek. The bad cheek pulsated. It felt hot under the bandages. "Te amo," she said.

  "Te amo a tí," he said and nodded, opened his eyes. He hadn't even realized they were shut. The opiates had made him itchy all over. They muddled the boundary between consciousness and unconsciousness so that he could drift in and out of his nods without ever quite knowing he was one way or the other. It was all just easy. Still, despite his creamy beatific feeling, his gentle sweetness, his airiness, he began to cry a little. He whimpered feebly and tiny teardrops formed, just big enough to blur his vision. He frowned at her. "I want to go home," he muttered in English. He'd never spoken to her in English before and didn't know if she spoke the language well enough to follow.

  "I know," she said, also in English. She held his hand, kissed him on the cheek again. She was, of course, used to ministering to tearful boys. And if it hadn't quite been clear to him before, he could tell then, even in the blur of that moment, that he was in love with her.

  A little later he opened his eyes again and looked up at her. Some time had passed, he didn't know how long. He held her hand firmly so she wouldn't move. With his free hand, he reached over and had a sip of water from a plastic cup. His mouth was pasty, his tongue thick and awkward, coated in salty foam. He put the water cup back. He didn't know if it was tap water or bottled water but he didn't really care. His eyelids drooped shut and he forced them open.

  "Are you going to leave?" she asked in English. Her English was good, apparently.

  He shook his head. "I can't. It was..." He closed his eyes for a while. His mind flickered, dodging shadows that ran along in dark spokes, clicking as they passed. The spokes of a bike he'd owned when he was young—he saw them spinning in shadow on the asphalt in the setting sun ... An itching area crept up his arm and he scratched it, opened his eyes again. "This was such a mistake," he slurred in Spanish.

  "You couldn't have known—" she said, also switching to Spanish.

  "No, no, no—no, not that," he said. "Not the dynamite. You. You are the mistake. You're going to ruin this for me."

  She blinked slowly, fanning him with her eyelashes. She grinned in a way that h
e didn't recognize. "You too," she said. "You are my mistake." She kissed him on the nose, and brushed his hair off of his forehead. She kissed him on the temple.

  He closed his eyes.

  "Do you want some tea?" she asked later. His eyes were still closed.

  He nodded, but didn't bother opening his eyes. He felt queasy. He had too much saliva in his mouth. "Please," he said. He opened his eyes and saw the outline of his own legs in the blanket in front of him. His knee itched. He scratched it. Then he turned and saw, to his tremendous relief, that she was still there.

  8. Them

  Saturday, December 24, 2005

  A TAXI DROPPED GABRIEL OFF at the hotel the next morning and he went up to his room and took a shower, careful not to get his head wet. They had replaced his bandages before he left the clinic and the new ones would be good until that night, when he'd have to change them himself. He plugged his phone in—the batteries had died—and lay down on his bed, turned the television on. He watched CNN International for a while before one of the anchors, a pretty Indian woman, mentioned in passing that it was Christmas Eve. It hadn't occurred to him.

  Once the phone had charged, he turned it on, dialed the office. Markets were closed, but he was pretty sure that wouldn't stop Priya from showing up.

  "I had a problem," he said.

  "Got drunk and spilled champagne on your laptop?" she quipped.

  "Uh." He was too wiped out to cope with her weirdly cheerful tone. "No, I—"

  He was about to explain what had happened when he heard a knock at the door. "Can you hold on?" he asked, and answered the door. It was Alejo, slouchy in the cheap black blazer with satin lapels. It looked like an old recycled tuxedo jacket. It was his uniform, along with a white shirt and a battered burgundy bow tie, black slacks. Very grand.

  Alejo said, "Mrs. Lenka Villarobles called. She wanted you to have this." He held out a bottle of Bolivian wine. "She wanted you to know that she would be around later tonight."