“Did you get to say something to him this time?”
“I mouthed that he looked dashing, and he seemed moved, but he didn’t reply.”
Laura’s eyes were closed in the scarce light, the expression of her face hard to read. The room smelled like soy sauce and ammonia; her skin, like Downy.
“I wouldn’t have the nerve to do that,” I said after a while.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“Leave the people I love behind without notice. Run away from them.”
“I’m not saying he did,” Laura said with a hint of exasperation in her voice. “But if he’d done that, I wouldn’t blame him.”
“Why would you want to escape from those you love the most? I don’t know if I could forgive someone who did that to me.”
“You’re such a puppy, Mr. Mills,” Laura said, and reached for the sushi. She ate it slowly with her mouth open, making unpleasant noises, as though she’d suddenly become a brat.
“Why would you like to hurt someone so close to you like that?”
“C’mon, Mr. Mills. That’s irrelevant—you know that. We’re raised to fulfill our big fat last name’s expectations, not to make sense of ourselves. But time is unforgiving. And when your belly sags and your skin turns orange, everything else is left to rot. When you grow older and you start realizing that this is it, you don’t want to hear things like I love you and Family is everything. It’s okay, but not enough to keep you alive. You want to hear I want to fuck you, you want to hear Life would be meaningless without you, but you stop hearing that. You wonder whether someone will still find you attractive, whether there’s something more exciting than what you settled for, and you want to find it, you want to make sense of yourself, but now you have kids, people whose so-called happiness depends on you, the same people you’re now teaching to believe in things like love and loyalty and family.” The sexy voice was gone, replaced by a jaded drunken old man’s. “You’re young and romantic, and you’re the owner of a beautiful cock, Mr. Mills.” She gave me a gentle squeeze between my legs. “Honor that cock. Don’t wait for the second chance.”
I remained silent, mortified for her and afraid of her all the same. Naïvely, I believed she was wrong—that life passes slowly, serving up chances every step of the way. But both happiness and misery are fleeting—longing and regret are all that remain—and I didn’t know that then. I only knew I wanted her to stop. I drove my hands in the dark toward her breasts.
We fell asleep, scooped against each other, in the eerie early hours of the morning.
• • •
Laura and I spent the weekend in my apartment, going from bed to dryer—we discovered I could fit in as well, albeit tightly—to the kitchen, where we consoled our rapacious appetites with leftovers of week-old takeout and frozen pizza. Sunday was particularly noisy. I heard movement in the building, and also far away, down the street; the kind of sounds you hear when someone’s moving in or out, mixed with a cacophony of sirens.
It was around midnight on Sunday when Laura approached the window, pulled the curtains open, and gasped.
“Mr. Mills!”
We hadn’t watched TV or checked our phones in more than forty-eight hours. We’d disconnected ourselves from the world, and the world was reporting back to us. The Hill Country wildfires had reached the city, and the hills of Westlake, where Laura lived, were raging in the background, a hypnotic wave of burning drapes framing in orange the summer dark.
We turned on the TV. The wildfires trumped any story related to Michael Jackson’s death, but the information was vague and chaotic. A mandatory evacuation of the city would be enforced the following morning. Military planes carrying evacuees were departing every few minutes. I asked Laura how I could help, make phone calls, get in touch with her family in Mexico or elsewhere, but she ignored me. She sat on the bed and stared vacantly through the window. I didn’t know what to say.
“Please turn off the TV, and the lights,” she asked. I closed the curtains and made to leave the room, but she waved me closer. She went back to bed and asked me to join her.
“We can’t stay here, Laura. We have to go.”
“I don’t want to talk about that right now.”
The sense of peace and separation from reality in the room had vanished. The sirens howled like a mother lamenting the loss of her children; they had been all weekend, but now that I understood why, I could no longer ignore them. Laura snuggled next to me as if an endless summer of love still lay ahead, but the skin of her butt felt dry against my stomach, and our toes remained freezing cold, even after they tangled.
“Have you ever read José Emilio Pacheco, Mr. Mills?” Laura asked after a while.
“A little bit.”
“Would you happen to know any of his poems by heart?”
“I don’t, ma’am; I’m sorry. I vaguely remember a couple of lines; something I read in college.”
“How do they go?”
“Let me see . . . There was one about how you only really meet the sea once in your life, and another that said, When you turn forty / you become everything you despised / when you were twenty. Something like that.”
“Mr. Mills?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Your phone.”
I gave it to her, and she took one last picture of us—her back resting against my chest, both of us looking away. To this day, the image remains obscure and out of focus.
• • •
I fled Austin the next afternoon. The Mexican government provided a plane to evacuate the consulate personnel to Houston, where I spent the following weeks. Despite the efforts of firemen and the National Guard, the Hill Country wildfires swept through the city’s ever-expanding limits. The state capital had to be temporarily reinstated in Houston. The consulate in Austin never reopened.
As compensation for our having lost everything, the Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores offered to transfer us anywhere we liked. After visiting my parents in California, I moved to Paris, where I spent the next five years working for the embassy in the mornings, wandering the wobbly cobbled streets of the Rive Gauche and the Rive Droite and Place Vendôme and rue de Saint-Honoré and the Champs-Élysées in the afternoons, looking for Laura. I was later transferred to São Paulo, where I spent five miserable years, and then promoted to consul in Zürich, where my hopes of bumping into Laura on the street reached their lowest point, as I was sure she’d never pick such an aloof place. In all those years, I resisted the temptation to climb into a dryer again. In my fourth year, I learned about an opening in the Protection Department at the consulate in New York, an infamous middle-rank position that would force me to pretend once again that I cared. I wanted it regardless, because I wanted to be back in America.
Shortly after my arrival in Manhattan, an invitation to the opening of an exhibition by a Mexican artist at a SoHo gallery arrived in the consulate’s in-box:
People Bleeding Firecrackers is a series of 3D holograms in which Nicolasa Gutiérrez-Arteaga (Chimalistac, Mexico, 1991), recreates the cities where she was born and raised, Mexico City and Austin, Texas, as she blends them together into a single homeland, transient and elusive.
I recognized the name of the artist immediately. I looked her up online. When I found her picture, the hairs on my arms curled. The image showed a young woman whose features looked familiar. Her eyes were her mother’s, but Nicolasa’s looked unfathomably sad. It was like seeing a version of Laura’s distorted by water and memory and make-believe. The invitation said the exhibition was to open in a couple of days, but I couldn’t wait. I dashed out of my office and grabbed a taxicab.
The gallery was located on the grounds of a nineteenth century building with a cast-iron facade, overlooking a quiet, cobbled street. A young red-haired man greeted me ceremoniously at the door. Old-school manners were en vogue once again.
“Ms. Arteaga is not here at the moment, sir,” he said, and my heart prickled. “May I ask who’s looking for her?”
“Plutarco Mills. Mexican Consulate. Is she coming back today?”
“She is, indeed.”
“Do you mind if I wait?”
“Not at all, sir,” he said, looking startled. “Please make yourself at home.” The gallery was a large white empty space flooded with bright light that didn’t invite me to stay, but I didn’t want to leave. I was anxious and filled with anticipation. I was convinced Laura would arrive any minute, trailing behind her now prominent daughter, playing her role of proud and submissive Mexican mother.
An hour later, a woman burst into the gallery, her arms full of shopping bags. It was her. The young man took the bags swiftly away from her, and whispered something in her ear. Nicolasa looked at me warily. The guy left us alone. As I approached her, I cleared my throat.
“Plutarco Mills, Mexican Consulate,” I said, trying not to stammer as I offered Nicolasa my hand, my palm embarrassingly moist and shaky. “Very nice to meet you, Ms. Gutiérrez.”
She was slender and tall, and wore an upsetting citrusy perfume I didn’t recognize. She was dressed all in black. In person she wasn’t nearly as beautiful or intriguing as her mother.
“It’s actually Arteaga. Nice to meet you too,” she said. I could tell she didn’t mean the latter.
“I’m here to let you know that everybody at the consulate is very excited about the opening of your exhibition,” I said in Spanish. Beads of sweat broke out on my scalp. “Anything we can do for you, just let me know. It will be my pleasure.”
“Thank you. That’s sweet of you,” she replied, switching back to English, and this broke my heart. She offered me a diplomatic smile, but still looked unsettled. The word sweet a product of mere courtesy. I searched for echoes of Laura’s fierceness, but I found none.
“It’s funny,” Nicolasa said, “I know some people at the consulate, but your name doesn’t ring a bell.”
“I’m new here,” I replied. “I just moved back to the States after many years abroad. My last position in the country was with the Austin consulate.”
“Really? I lived there for a while,” Nicolasa revealed, as if I didn’t know. Her face lit up. I imagined her mother back in Austin as I never had, shopping for groceries at H-E-B, driving the girls to soccer practice and art class and medical appointments and birthday parties, attending endless PTA meetings, picking her husband up at the airport, driving her Cayenne listlessly along Highway 360, all on her own, a world away from home, making stupid miles up and down a beautiful, meaningless place, looking for something, anything, that gave her a reason to keep on living. “It was my second home. Austin used to be such a gorgeous place.”
I wanted to tell her I remembered the city the same, but her reasons and mine would have collided. I wanted her to repeat that word, gorgeous, for when she said it, she sounded like her mother.
Gorgeous.
“In fact, I think I met your parents there,” I said. My stomach cramped. “How’s your family doing?”
“Everybody’s fine, thanks for asking.” She looked unnerved. “They’re flying in from Houston for the opening. I hope you join us, Mr. Mills.” I knew she wanted me to leave, I knew she didn’t mean to extend any invitation. I was scaring her, but she was forcing herself to say things she didn’t mean out of pure Mexican-bred politeness. She was one of us, after all. I imagined Laura feeling proud of, and miserable for, her daughter’s exquisite, self-destructive manners.
“I wouldn’t miss it,” I said, my voice trembling. I saw this pale, foreign girl in front of me, a complete stranger, and realized how absurd my presence there was, how disturbing and creepy my visit must have been to her. Excusing myself and leaving immediately was the right thing, the only thing, to do. But I couldn’t help myself.
“I can’t wait to see your mother again, Nicolasa,” I heard myself say, as if the words had been uttered by somebody else. “After all these years, I haven’t been able to forget her.”
“My mother won’t be here,” Nicolasa replied quietly. “She died in the big Austin blaze of 2009.”
“Oh,” was all that came out of my mouth.
And then, as if she knew the right thing to say, she added, “I’m very sorry, Mr. Mills.”
• • •
That last day I ever saw her, Laura woke me up with a whisper. It was very early in the morning.
She said she was leaving. I asked where she was going. She said she didn’t know. I wanted to go with her, flee Austin together.
She said no.
She said she wanted to do this alone. I said we were a sphere, we were an elephant that had found its own lightness on the moon; we needed to remain a sphere.
She laughed as if she were a hundred years old, and her face darkened with sadness. She said she wished me luck, and that she hoped I would find someone who thrilled me.
I insisted, and she cupped my face in her hands. She came close to me, as if there were more people in the room.
“Goodbye, Mr. Mills,” she breathed in my ear as if she were telling me a secret.
I CLENCH MY HANDS INTO FISTS AND THEY LOOK LIKE SOMEONE ELSE’S
“Wait, Homero. Did you hear that?”
“Did I hear what?”
“That noise. Listen. There. In the kitchen.”
“What does it sound like?”
“Like a scratch.”
“Letting you try that shit was not a good idea, Ximena. It’s frying your brain.”
“I’m serious, Homero. There are noises in the apartment. For real.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, chimp.”
“Wait. It stopped.”
“Whatever.”
• • •
“Anyway. You were saying—”
“Oh, yeah. Imagine yourself gliding for five hours straight. Imagine you could fly anywhere you want, free of everything and everybody, without having to worry about shit. Like, if you had wings.”
“Like an eagle, all majestic and menacing? Or like a monarch butterfly? Frail and cute, but totally unbreakable?”
“Like an airplane. Like you had steel wings, but they were a natural part of your body.”
“Whoa, dude. This shit’s kind of scary.”
“Like me.”
“Yeah, you wish.”
• • •
“Ximena?”
“What’s up.”
“What are those things on the curtains?”
“Those cute little bugs printed all over them? The blue ones look like flies, no? And the other ones—aren’t they like, ladybugs?”
“That’s gross. And super gay. Who’d put curtains with bugs in their living room?”
“They’re kinda cool.”
“You don’t have to like everything just ’cause we’re here, Ximena. We’re not offending Philippe by not liking his apartment. He can’t hear us, you know? They’re awful.”
“I’m just trying to like something about this place, okay?”
“Don’t look at the windows, then. Those curtains are ugly as shit.”
• • •
“Homero?”
“What now?”
“Remember that time we all came to New York?”
“For Christmas?”
“Where did we have dinner?”
“At the Plaza, I think. Or the Waldorf. One of those places near Central Park.”
“When Mom and Dad said we could stay in Philippe’s apartment, I imagined something like that, around the park, with a doorman and everything. Not this.”
“At least we’re not in Harlem, chimp. Or Brooklyn.”
• • •
“Did Grandma and Grandpa come with us on that trip?”
“Oh, yeah. On Christmas Eve, Grandpa took you, me, Nico, and Fer to FAO Schwarz while everybody else got ready for dinner. He bought us Tamagotchis. Mom and Aunt Laura were so pissed, but Grandma told them to chill, like she always did.”
“I barely remember Grandma.”
“You were too young, chimp.”
“Do you think she’s looking?”
“From above?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Nah. Better for her, though.”
“Why do you say that?”
“’Cause it would kill her again—knowing about Grandpa.”
• • •
“Homero?”
“Yes, chimp.”
“There’s this girl thing I used to talk about with Carla and Michelle?”
“If it’s what I’m thinking, don’t even go there.”
“Just got it today. And it’s like, alive, man.”
“TMI, dude.”
“Who am I supposed to talk to about these things now?”
“Not to me. That’s gross. Talk to Mom when she calls.”
“Are you out of your mind? ‘Hey, Mom! Guess what? I’ve got my period! Five days late. Isn’t that a relief?’ ”
“Ximena, stop. I mean it.”
“Easy for you to say. You guys fool around and everything’s cool. We girls mess around a little bit, and we’re screwed. It’s depressing. And unfair.”
“Maybe, but I’m not fucking Doctor Ruth, okay? Read my lips: T.M.I.”
“How old are you? Nine? ‘Mo-om, Ximena said the word va-gi-na in front of me!’ ”
“Fuck you, chimp.”
“No, Homero! Fuck you!”
• • •
“Homero?”
“Not here, dude.”
“It’s that noise again. Did you hear it?”
“It’s those ladybugs and flies. They’re coming for you, chimp.”
“Shut up, Homero. I’m serious.”
“Forget it, smarty pimples. Not talking to you unless you apologize.”
“Don’t be a dick.”
“Good luck finding someone to listen to your shit here. Not talking to a young lady from Virreyes who behaves like a truck driver from Neza.”
Barefoot Dogs Page 5