The Instant When Everything is Perfect

by Jessica Barksdale Inclan

Because he can do nothing else, Robert sits in his living room, numb and still. The sun moves a little, settles behind a tree, the living room shaded and full of shadows.

  When he was finishing second grade, his teacher wrote on his report card, “Robert needs to engage more with the class. Learn to share what he knows.”

  His teachers and attending doctors in medical school said the same thing. “God damn it, Rob,” Jack said. “If you’d just talk, you’d have it all. Show them what you can do. Show them what you know.”

  What does he know? He’s failed on so many fronts, let so many people he’s liked and loved leave, as if too much connection could kill.

  But he wants to share something with Mia. He’s told her more than he’s ever told any woman, never discussing the story of Joyce with anyone except for Jack. He’s moved into her body—her body took him in. He’s looked into her eyes and seen some part of himself come back—reflected, refracted—through her gaze. And he liked what he saw. He didn’t cringe or run away or pull back. Until that day in Emeryville, all he wanted was more.

  When the door bell rings again—the sound jarring in Robert’s head, his heart pounding—he jumps up, adrenaline pumping into his legs and he runs down the hall. She’s so brave, his Mia. She’s the one who can come back, start over, give him a second chance. He’s going to tell her he finally understands. He knows what it means to love. She’s taught him. She’ll walk in the house, and he’ll hold her, press her against him. This will be it, the instant when everything is perfect.

  Robert pulls open the door, wanting to say it all to her. But it’s not Mia. It’s Monique, the teenaged cat sitter from down the street, smiling, her pants low cut, a turquoise jewel glinting in her belly button.

  “Sorry I’m like late,” she says, and moves into the house.

  Robert lets her in, blinks into the brightness of the empty street. And then he shakes his head, looks back at Monique, who is already in the living room, and closes the door behind them.

  

  If Robert thought he was going to have time to sightsee outside of Tegucigalpa, he was mistaken. After landing at Tegucigalpa Toncontin Airport at seven in the morning, he went immediately to San Felipe Hospital, where he met the staff—doctors, nurses, dentists, med students, college and even high school students—in an overwhelming, long, intense two hour meeting that detailed the entire two week process. Then they were broken up into teams—students and nurses and translators to screen the patients; doctors and dentists paired with nurses and translators to examine the patients to determine the types of procedures necessary.

  After each screening, the patients went to classes the students had prepared—lectures on proper dental hygiene and the importance of fresh vegetables and fruits in a country where eating—for many—was a daily miracle.

  And now, dressed in one of the lab coats he brought with him, Robert stands by an exam table with a nurse and a translator. The line to reach him and the other doctors is enormous, whole families slumped together against the hospital corridor walls, seeming to have walked for miles to get here, carrying almost all their household goods.

  “They have walked that far,” the translator Manuela said when Robert made a comment earlier. “Sometimes, the families, they walk for sixty miles to bring their children here. One man tried for three years to get here on time, traveling by foot and by cart with his three year old boy, and each year he made it too late. Someone heard about it, and flew him to the States. But most . . . ” She moved her arm to indicate the line. “They leave early and they stay until it’s finished.”

  Ramon wiggles on the table, his mouth and palate open, yawning, glistening red. His mother watches Robert with serious, steady black eyes, flicking her gaze away only briefly when Manuela translates.

  “Next week,” Manuela says in Spanish. “Surgery to the lip, here. And inside the mouth, here. Maybe more than one procedure, Señora. Maybe you will have to come back next year for more.”

  The woman nods, doesn’t smile, even though Ramon tries to. In all his time as a plastic surgeon, Robert has never seen a cleft lip and palate this horrible, and as he looks quickly down the hall he sees one after the other, open mouths leading wide into the body.

  “Surgery,” he agrees, writing down Ramon’s age and weight and his mother’s name: Elena Maria Garcia de Torrez.

  Manuela tells Señora Torrez where to sign the forms and how to schedule the appointment, and then there is another patient and another. Dasha, the nurse, takes vitals and then Robert exams them all. Most are like Ramon, cleft lip, cleft palate, or both. But one woman’s mouth is twisted and melted from a cooking fire; a little girl with a nasofrontal enceophalocele—a bony defect that allows brain material to push out from the skull—has to be referred to the surgery team back in the states; two little identical twin girls hide identical facial hemangiomas—benign facial tumors—behind their small brown hands.

  Mostly, the stream of children has cleft lips and palates, operations that in the states are done when the child is ten weeks old. During his internship and residency, Robert performed a number of these procedures on infants, their clefts smooth, seemingly small. How different those American babies looked in comparison to these children, who grew from infancy to childhood with these holes in their faces. These clefts are developed and deep, Robert imagining he can look forever into the welling darkness.

  At first he grits his back teeth, trying not to see how the defect has twisted the face, turned the smile into a sneer, the mouth into a sieve. But then, as he studies his patients, he focuses on how the cleft in the lip flows into a nostril, the skin red and full and slightly glistening. Almost ripe, welling thickly around exposed, white front teeth. With gloved fingers, he presses gently on the full flesh, and imagines the lips like flowers, the folds of lip like puffy petals.

  Even with the congenital defects, these patients smile, their eyes hopeful, their need so great, so desperate. Just like his.

  Despite the six teams that are evaluating patients, the line in the hall stays long. And even though he stops for lunch and takes a short break late in the afternoon, Robert is exhausted by six, his feet sore, his back stiff. Manuela looks at him, her eyebrows raised, when he asks at what time they stop for the day.

  “When you can’t go on any more,” she says flatly.

  And so they work together with Dasha until eight, when Robert’s eyes start to blur and all the patients seem to have the exact same problem, without variation.

  Manuela clicks her tongue and straightens the pages on her clipboard. “Tomorrow, then,” she says, walking toward the people who still slump against the wall.

  Back at the hotel, Robert unpacks, orders up some room service, and then showers. Under the water, his body feels weightless, his consciousness seeming to float above him in the tiled shower stall. Afterward, he isn’t sleepy, but wired, anxious, nervous, and he keeps having to flick away at memory. Mia under him, Mia loosening his ponytail, Mia laughing with him. Mia all the time.

  So he puts his key and wallet in his pocket and leaves the room, heading downstairs to the bar that is filled with mostly international people, businessmen, foreign officials, and probably hidden CIA folk amongst the tables. He nods and waves to a few of the doctors he met at the early morning meeting, and then sits at the bar and tries to think of a drink that doesn’t require added water. Finally, he looks at the bartender and says, “Bourbon solamente, por favor. No quiero hielo.”

  The bartender nods, pours Robert’s drink, doesn’t add ice, and then Robert stares at the brown liquid, wondering if it will help.

  “Did you know drinking is the worst thing of all for travel fatigue?” Manuela says, taking a seat next to him.

  Robert puts down his glass and looks at her. She has become another woman, her long brown hair loose on her shoulders, her face relaxed. She wears a pair of pants and a soft blouse, and now, without her white lab coat on, he can see the smooth column of her neck.

  “I’m
sure it isn’t,” he says, taking another sip, letting the sting of alcohol fill his mouth. “I thought I would fall into bed, but I’m so wired.”

  “It’s exciting work, in a strange way,” she says, nodding as the bartender hands her a drink.

  “You don’t even have to order,” Robert says. “You must not be on your first tour of duty.”

  “No.” She shakes her head. “I first came down about five years ago, and I can’t stay away. I come twice or three times a year.”

  “So you know all the sites to see,” he says. “Your way about town.”

  She shrugs, sips her drink, something clear and thick in a small glass. “There are only so many times you can go to the Iglesia de Nuestra Señora de los Dolores or the Comayagüela market. Even the jungle has lost its charms. Mostly I know this hotel and the hospital.”

  “What do you do in the real world?” Robert asks. He feels the bourbon already, the reaching, electric hand of potential intoxication.

  “You and I don’t live in the real world.” She shakes her head, her gold necklace glinting on her chest.

  “How do you know that?” he asks. “Why is what I do at home or how I live there not the real world?”

  “The real world? With all that we saw today, how can you even imagine that anything in the States is real?” She licks her lips, runs a finger on the slick side of her glass.

  “Because of Maslow and his hierarchy of needs.”

  “Do expound,” Manuela says, crossing her legs.

  Robert breathes in, glad to talk about steps and stages and levels, anything to take himself away from the lightness in his body and the memory of Mia. “All humans are motivated by unsatisfied needs. Basic needs need to be satisfied before higher needs can be satisfied. I want to eat and sleep before I’d worry about what I was eating and where I was sleeping. But once I was full and rested, I’d move to a safer place with better food and cleaner water. Then I’d want someone to live with me at the safe place. Next I’d want to feel really good about this place where I was living. Finally, I’d want to understand my choices for living there so I could understand who I was.”

  “Interesting.”

  “This is real and home is real. I’d want my cleft lip repaired so I can eat before I’d want to buy a new house in a better school district. But it’s all the same thing. The same need.”

  The bartender drops a glass, whispers a string of curses that make Manuela smile wide, her teeth luminous in the darkened bar. She reminds Robert of something that has been warmed all day in the sun.

  “So,” she says. “When you are home, the nips and tucks and tweaks you do on people’s noses and necks and breasts are the same need as having one’s mouth whole.”

  Robert shakes his head. “I don’t perform elective surgeries. Mostly breast reconstructions.”

  “Why?”

  For an instant, he’s on the bed in the Bakersfield hotel room, Mia watching him. The words come out then, the whole story. Robert bites his lip, turns to Manuela.

  “I lost a couple of patients. I only want to work where there’s physical need.”

  “So,” she says, ignoring, it seems, what he said about all the death. “Your work doesn’t always fit in with Maslow?”

  He wants to ask her if she heard him, but from the bright look in her eyes, he knows she did. “Touché.” Robert raises his glass. “So, back in the States where some things are not as important as here, what do you do?”

  “That’s better.” She smiles again, her lips lightly coated with a soft red color and the liquor. “I’m a professor of Spanish Literature at the University of Texas at Austin,” she says.

  A professor, Robert thinks. Like Mia.

  He nods. “So this work fills the . . . “

  Manuela laughs, pushes her thick hair back with her hand. “The blank. The void. The gap.”

  “Married? Kids?” He turns to really look at her. She can’t be more than thirty-five.

  “Once. Divorced. No kids. You?” He can see a faint blush on her cheeks, and his heart pounds, feeling Mia’s hot skin under his palm.

  “Never for both.”

  She raises her eyebrows, smiles. “You plastic surgeons. What is it? Are you all perfectionists?”

  “I guess you’ve made a study of us,” he says. “You’re on a mission to save us from our own profession.”

  Manuela doesn’t say a word, waiting for the answer to her other question.

  Robert takes another sip and pushes away his empty glass. The bartender refills it. “No. Not a perfectionist. An idiot.”

  Manuela nods. “What’s your void?”

  Now Robert laughs, imagining a game show, contestants full of a special, secret emptiness they slowly reveal during the half-hour contest. The one who catharts the most wins whatever is behind door number two. A washing machine. A stove. A brand new car!

  “Mia.”

  She sits back. “What?”

  “My girlfriend. My—“ There is no word for what Mia is to him because there just isn’t. Lover? Paramour? Friend? Soul mate? All of the above? Or none of the above because he let her go? Because he was a coward who watched her close the door?

  “It means mine,” Manuela says. The blush has paled on her cheek, and her face is closed to him now, the easy bar openness folding back into the tough translator stance of earlier in the day.

  “What does?”

  “Mia. Spanish for mine.”

  Robert tries to hold back, but the liquor and the jet lag and his exhaustion since the reading in Emeryville slip over him. His eyes start to water, and he rubs his eyebrows.

  “Of course it does,” he says finally. He said Mia’s name so often without remembering his seventh grade Spanish, the few small sentences he’d learned from Señora Bernal. Or he just never thought in the feminine, his nouns, everything that was his, mio.

  “So is she?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Is she yours?” Manuela asks, her dark eyes on him. Her pulse beats in the sweet brown hollow of her neck.

  “Not yet.” And there Mia is, walking away from him. There is his front path, empty, again, just like always.

  Manuela leans forward. “If you have a way to fill your gap, you are an idiot if you don’t. I’m sure Maslow would agree.”

  She finishes her drink, puts a couple of bills on the smooth wood, and stands up. “You should get to sleep. We’ll be doing what we did today for another six days. And then you’ll start to operate. It doesn’t really get any easier.”

  Robert nods, hands her the lempiras she put on the bar. “My treat.”

  She shakes her head but takes the bills, and he can see that if he were the person he’d been before Mia, he would want to be with Manuela, feel her body under him, let her run her hands through his hair. But now, in Tegucigalpa, he knows he has changed. He’s found something, someone, he wants for his own, someone he can love even though he knows that one day he will lose her, in the way that everyone loses everything in life.

  He doesn’t care about loss now. He wants her. Someone he can say is mine. He just didn’t know he was saying it before. He’d ignored the word that long.

  “Goodnight, Robert,” Manuela says.

  “Goodnight,” he says back, and she walks away, but not from him. She’s not angry or upset or disgusted with anything he’s done. In fact, he knows that Manuela was looking for something to fill the void. His body, his attention for two weeks. And even though he’s rejected her, he hasn’t hurt her, hasn’t said anything wrong. He hasn’t ignored her. So this walking away from him seems true, real, just a walk away from him in general.

  Robert follows her with his eyes until she disappears into the lobby. He’s going to have to learn a walk—but another kind, the kind that moves toward, near, closer, in. The kind that will lead him to what he needs and wants. To what is his.

  Sixteen

  Mia

  “Did they get to the airport okay?” Dahlia asks on the phone, a slight
crackle of static between them. “Did Mom make you take her there about four hours in advance?”

  All their lives and long before extra security requirements at airports, Sally has believed in being at the terminal at least three hours in advance. For days and then hours before her flight, she would call the airline, double checking on the time of departure and the gate. Earlier this week when Mia told her she can confirm any flight on the internet, Sally didn’t care, wanting to dial up British Airways herself, over and over again.

  “I like to speak to a human,” Sally said. “Humans are better than machines.”

  “Maybe in some ways,” Mia said, knowing that at least machines were predictable.

  Now Mia smiles at Dahlia’s question and then sneezes, holding the phone away from her mouth as she does.