Call Him Mine

by Tim MacGabhann

  ‘Sure, yeah,’ said Maya, pouring herself another cup of coffee and holding her hand out for my mug.

  Motita slammed herself against the cupboard, knocking the door open.

  Maya pointed. ‘But you’re feeding her this time. She and I are done.’

  5

  Maya took her laptop down the hall while I fed Motita and took a shower, the tiredness seeping from between my back’s bones like the silt-heavy waste water pumped out of Poza Rica’s drill sites. The bathroom mirror made me wrinkle my nose. Thirty-one, I was then, but the deep insomnia caves around my eyes meant I didn’t look a day under forty.

  If I looked bad, I felt even worse. The curdled, sour grogginess of being up since dawn sloshed in my blood, and my belly was knotted with worry for Carlos. Behind my eyes, with every blink, Julián Gallardo’s empty red eye-sockets loomed up at me.

  Outside, the sky loured with brassy storm light and boiled with smog-brown clouds. Days like that, the hallway was the coolest place in the house, and so that’s where I kept my desk, in a cave of taped-up pages, printouts, maps, scraps of transcript.

  Maya was lying down on the red and gold scroll-backed chaise-longue in the corridor with the Semefo book when I came out of the bathroom and sat down to work at my big metal desk.

  ‘Is that a picture of Díaz Ordáz on your noticeboard?’ she asked.

  ‘This?’ I unpinned the sheet and handed it to her. ‘Oh, it’s just an acid blotter.’

  She ran her fingers over the cut-out squares. ‘Weird choice of picture.’

  ‘Carlos bought it for me. Said the picture fit, since human history’s such a bad trip. It’s like a joke.’

  Maya looked at me the way I’d looked at my snails. ‘Díaz Ordáz did the Tlatelolco massacre,’ said Maya. ‘It’s a bad joke.’ She handed back the blotter. ‘Anyway, didn’t you … like, quit? Like, everything?’

  ‘Yeah, I mean, it’s not like I’m going to take any.’ I pinned the A4-size sheet back in place. ‘It’s just funny is all.’

  Maya recoiled a little. ‘There’s nothing funny about Díaz Ordáz.’

  The arms of my office chair clunked against the desk as I pushed aside the snowdrift of printouts and sat down to work. Huge and rust-flecked, the desk had belonged to some Mexican Communist Party guy. Its drawers were why I’d bought the thing: their locks were as close to uncrackable as you could get, and so that’s where I kept the only stuff it would kill me to have stolen – the tapes and notebooks built up over my years with Carlos.

  A floral altar stood beside my iMac, a skeletal Santa Muerte wrapped in a blue boa and a starred black cowl that hid her bone grin. After lighting a couple of candles for Carlos and a cigarette for myself, I cracked into the story for Dominic, Maya napping while I typed, until the chugging of the printer woke her.

  ‘Anything from Carlos?’ she said through a yawn.

  On WhatsApp, his Last Online status read ten forty-five in the morning.

  ‘Not a peep.’ I collected the pages from the printer and walked up and down the hall checking over them. My sternum itched with sweat. The story in my hands, I wanted to feed it to the snails. The hook was buckled, the body in tatters, the tail measly, wizened, tapering. Before the paragraphs had dried on the page I could see Dominic’s red editorial biro slashing through every line.

  Maya batted the air. ‘Jesus, how many cigarettes do you need?’

  ‘Have to get in character.’

  ‘As?’

  ‘A Pemex refinery.’

  She pulled a face. ‘All this smoke hurts to look at.’

  I flicked the pages. ‘So does this draft.’

  A legacy of pollution and violence in Mexico’s former oil capital looks likely to deter future investors in the ailing industrial city of Poza Rica, eastern Mexico, I read. Despite sitting on a treasure trove equal to around fifteen billion barrels of crude, the people of Mexico’s former oil capital remain cynical as investors circle those areas of the country which have been earmarked for privatisation and resale.

  ‘It’s a corrupt deal,’ said former wrestler and restaurant owner Gilberto Herrera, 52, at the fonda which he runs with his wife and son in the city’s gritty centre. ‘The companies build shiny new headquarters, the hotels get a bunch of new extensions, and then the investments fall through and we all wind up unemployed.’

  As in so many areas of Mexico – locked in a decade-plus war against its major organised crime groups – unemployment in Poza Rica is linked with a spiking crime rate. The elite Guardia Civil police unit has been active in the city since 2014, but they continue to struggle against the notoriously brutal Zetas cartel.

  ‘All that brought us was bloodshed – not safety,’ said local opposition leader Janiel Vizcaya, 57, at his home on the city’s leafy outskirts. ‘We’re years and years on from that operation and still people are shot on the main boulevard.’

  ‘This is awful,’ I said. My eyes felt baked in their sockets.

  ‘What, Carlos or the story?’

  ‘Both.’

  ‘Carlos’ll be OK,’ said Maya. The brightness in her voice was fake. ‘He’s resourceful.’ She sat up and stretched. ‘Anyway, look, I better go. Date tonight. I look like deep-fried shit.’

  I squinted at her. ‘It’s more of a light sauté.’

  She glared at me and slung the strap of her bag over her shoulder.

  ‘Hope it goes well.’ I stooped over the draft, crossing out a line about how even the police looked scared. ‘Good you’re getting back out there, after – well, you know. That whole thing.’

  Maya made a fist and pulled a heroic face. ‘Thank you, yes, I am a brave motherfucker.’ She hitched up the strap of her bag. ‘But yeah, so, text me if you hear from Carlos, OK?’

  ‘Shall do.’ I pushed back my hair, sat down with the pages spread out and my red pen stabbing at the words.

  Mexico City’s pollution content is measured in something called imecas – an acronym for índice metropolitano de la calidad del aire.

  Imecas are a parts-per-million measure of all the carbon monoxide and ozone and sulphides hovering in the air on a given day.

  At fifty, you can’t taste them. Up at a hundred, though, you’ll get a dry throat, blood in your snot. Past a hundred and twenty-five, the air smells like a swimming pool, your snot goes black, and your eyes weep and tack at the corners.

  That night, the levels tipped a hundred and fifty, the sky was dirty yellow cotton wool, and my headache was louder than the bass-drum of the hip-hop blasting from the apartment behind mine.

  The taste in my mouth, and the noise, and the heat, and the headache all made me crave a rain big enough to chase the parties in from the terraces, to dissolve the smog, to douse my windows in a cold roar that cancelled all thought, all worry, all fear of what might have happened to Carlos.

  My red drapes were shut, and my windows, too, but that didn’t make much of a difference against the noise and bad air. On the altar, the candles I’d lit for Carlos’ safety guttered out in blue pools.

  I’d gone all out trying to bribe my saints’ statues. On top of the bookcase, the Santa Barbara shrine I’d bought in Cuba was uplit by flickering black candles that bathed her pleading ceramic face in a feverish pallor. On a baby-blue shelf, between the old cocktail glasses I collected, stood Saint Jude with his quiff of fire, his hand resting on the large medallion of Jesus in profile that hung around his neck, a spray of bird-of-paradise flowers at his feet. The Jesús Malverde icon peered out, unimpressed, while I cooked something nobody would flatter with the word dinner.

  After wedging that down, I went over to my indoor garden, knelt on the pallet loaded with giraffe orchids, and pata de elefante, begonias and ferns, wetting their leaves with a damp cloth. Then I fixed the corners of the cowhide draping the chair – my favourite one, late-’60s, steel-framed leather, made in Frankfurt – and sat down, headache-friendly light pulsing from four orb-bulbs behind the screen of leaves.

  None of that calmed me
down, though, and I knew it wouldn’t.

  Me and Carlos, we’d done stories about missing people. That’s a story you never stop having to do in Mexico. Feels like every lamppost on every street wears a peeled lagging of ‘Missing’ posters. You see photocopied hair banded with white lines. You read the name, the sex, the age, the stature. You read the complexion, the hair type, the nose type, the jaw-shape. All that scattered data, it’s debris flung by the blast of a vanishing, all of it jumbled, all of it lost.

  My cupped hands held faces I’d known. My breath became their voices.

  In my hands I saw Mario, the pool-hall owner in Cocula, with his pencil moustache and his wide-brimmed canvas hat, toting a metal rod whose end he’d drive down into the red earth, pulling it out to check for the molasses-black stain of human rot that might be the brother of his, kidnapped eight years before.

  ‘One person is missing for you,’ he’d said, leaning on the pole, his eyes aimed up at the hot blue sky, ‘and that’s your whole world empty.’

  There was Guadalupe, the bank teller in Ecatepec, with her prim lilac suit, and her Princess Diana hair, and her photos of the caved-in skull and two thigh-bones that had belonged to her daughter and had been dredged from the Río de los Remedios by the police.

  ‘That’s all they found, they said,’ she’d scoffed, refilling her camomile tea, rolling up her sleeves. ‘After three weeks in the river? Sure, it’s polluted. But to dissolve a body that quickly? Nonsense.’

  Next came Priscilla, the beekeeper from El Salvador whose son had been kidnapped by immigration agents two nights before she and I had spoken at the refugee shelter in Ixtepec.

  ‘Usually when we slept, we belted ourselves to the upper branches of trees,’ she’d told me, showing me pictures of her son on her cracked smartphone. ‘Marvin went down to go to the toilet. He didn’t come back. Soon after, I saw the migra coming through the woods with their torches. They have to have him. Who else could it be?’

  A psychoanalyst I interviewed once, she told me how a disappearance hurts worse than death.

  ‘Freud says that mourning is a loss of hope,’ she’d said. ‘In mourning, you accept that the hope for permanence is false. But when you can’t accept that somebody’s dead – when you have no body, no confirmation – that hope can’t burn out. You can’t let go. You can’t mourn.’

  The hope burned in Mario’s eyes, in Guadalupe’s voice, under the mask-like calm of Priscilla trying to keep it together at the migrant shelter in Ixtepec.

  ‘There’s a chance she’s still out there.’

  ‘One of these days, we’ll find my brother’s body.’

  ‘The cops said they were my daughter’s bones, but they’re too long to be hers.’

  ‘Any day now, my father will call to say Marvin’s home.’

  That clenched-gut dread, that burn in my veins, that feeling was how their stories had all begun. Like Mario’s brother, like Guadalupe’s daughter, like Priscilla’s son, Carlos had gone from a solid body to a message that wouldn’t come, a door that wouldn’t open, a phone set to ‘Loud’ that never rang.

  How long I stayed there gripping the arms of my chair, smoke clouding around me, the rain seething down, I couldn’t tell you. From my window the other apartments around me looked like the dark wood cabins of a huge ship, while my own was a raft lost in a black nowhere. It was just like the nights when he’d stay out doing whatever, except also totally not.

  At some point I shut my eyes, so lost in the storm’s lull that I full-on fell asleep, dreamed of me and Carlos on a cinder beach in Uruguay, Carlos dipping kelp into mercury-coloured water, mopping a dark red headache from my skull while Julián Gallardo’s body rocked in the near-shore waves. Until the dream thinned to an unease with pictures, cops in ski-masks chasing me and Carlos through a forest of my lungs’ blackened inner tubes, Gallardo’s body toted on our shoulders.

  When my phone buzzed, the clock on screen read six a.m., and I lurched up, alert, from the sheepskin rug on the floor to see four messages, all from Carlos.

  ‘I’ll text,’ he’d said.

  That thing where they say My heart leapt, they’re not wrong: it really does feel like something of you has upped and ripped free of your chest.

  Then I saw his first message, and my heart slammed flat against my ribcage.

  Delete this number.

  My chest was an empty lift-shaft.

  Don’t go to the house.

  My heart kept dropping.

  You’re not safe.

  My gut was a dusty basement.

  Andrew.

  That’s when my heart stopped its freefall, hit the dirt and grit, and I grabbed my jacket and keys and went running for the jeep.

  6

  No sirens when I got to Carlos’ apartment: just blue lights and silence.

  Meaning me, and the ambulance, and the forensics technician – still wearing her loose white Hazmat – we’d all arrived too late.

  Mineria 45 was all heavy coral-pink brick and barred windows. Whenever you went through the front door, it’d slam behind you like a bank safe.

  The paramedics pulled the door back, way back, so the trolley’s belts didn’t snag on the handle. The body on the stretcher was covered by a red blanket patched with darker red, brown hair overhanging its edge, each curl stiff with blood.

  A dizzy whirl lurched me against the fender of my jeep as the stretcher rattled through the door.

  Back when I was a teenager, playing football, I broke my toe so far out of shape that it had curved from my foot like a crab’s leg. A red bell of pain had clanged in my skull all the way to the hospital, where a nurse stuck in an anaesthetic needle and yanked my toe into line, my bones jerking back into place, but in a way I could hear rather than feel.

  Seeing Carlos come down the stairs was the same. You knew what was happening. You just couldn’t feel it.

  A cigarette that I didn’t remember lighting stung my lips, and a cop watched me from the curb, smiling at me, his hair thinning and chestnut, the silver caps on his front teeth winking all the way over to where I knelt beside Carlos’ body, as it shunted into the ambulance. He looked away when the forensics technician cuffed him in the back to get him to turn around, but he just leered at her.

  ‘No photos,’ said the paramedic when he saw my press lanyard.

  My back teeth bit a notch in the wall of my cheek.

  ‘What happened?’ I said around a salt upwell of blood, getting to my feet.

  ‘We’re not authorised to say.’ The paramedic slammed the ambulance doors, the engine roared, and Carlos was gone.

  The dawn was loud with birds. Two street-sweepers across the road kept their eyes to the curb, and a tamal seller studied the fire starting to lick the base of her battered steel olla. The commuters hurrying toward Metro Patriotismo kept their eyes averted from the blue flicker of lights outside Carlos’ apartment.

  ‘Who was the first responder?’ the forensics technician said to the cop, her hand chopping the air.

  The cop with the teeth just shrugged.

  ‘Show me your badge number.’ She grabbed his shoulder. ‘That’s a Veracruz State number – you’re not supposed to be here.’

  He shouldered her away and looked toward me.

  ‘Go home, gringuito,’ said the cop with the teeth, and threw out his hands, let them clap by his sides, backward-walking towards his squad car, laughing, his eyes on me, like two drill-bits boring through my navel.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ The forensics technician’s hands rose like she wanted to strangle the air, but the cop ignored her.

  ‘We won’t tell you again,’ he said to me, then slammed the door and revved out of sight, heading along Avenida José Martí.

  Once he was out of sight, the technician stood at her car and picked up her phone again. I headed around the corner to an abarrotes to buy a Coke through the grille. The fifty-peso note I’d handed through wagged back at me and the owner said, ‘I don’t have change.’
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  ‘Keep it.’ My voice was a winded croak, and it could have been the white clouds of smog turning in the air, but it probably wasn’t.

  The forensics technician walked towards a white Toyota Camry with the Mexico City prosecutor’s logo on the side of it.

  ‘Actually, give me two,’ I said, and took the cans and ran towards the technician before she could get into her car.

  Carlos’ portero, Don Jesús, stood at the door, his paunch straining against his blue plaid shirt and twisting his faded Chivas baseball cap in his hands, a poor Edomex campesino adrift in the big concrete roar of Mexico City, eking out an income, watching Futból Azteca repeats, seeing nothing, staying out of trouble.

  Yeah, well, you know.

  Trouble moves.

  When he saw me, he put his cap on, then crept back to the security booth’s smoky den of escape and TV. In front of him the football commentary rose in volume, became a yell, became the long delighted vowel of the word ‘Goooool!’

  The technician was sitting half-in, half-out of the car, still on the phone, saying, ‘A Veracruz State cop at a Mexico City crime scene. You believe that?’ Her black hair was tied back in a bun, and the ventilator mask around her neck hung under a weary lined face. I put her at about forty, but tired like she was older. She ground a cigarette out with the toe of her shoe and gave me the pinched-finger gesture that means ‘Hold on a second’ in Mexico.

  ‘Alejandro, you know that’s not the point,’ she snapped. ‘This is our jurisdiction.’ She put another cigarette in her mouth, but her lighter didn’t work: she kept flicking the wheel too hard, so I stooped in with mine and lit it for her.

  ‘Right. Well, see you at the precinct.’ She hung up, breathed out a long plume of smoke. ‘Can I help you?’ she said to me.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, and held up my press lanyard again.