Prime Meridian

by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

  A guy she knew vaguely, a rare animal trader, sat next to her for a while. He was carrying an owl in a cage. The owl was dead, and he told her he was taking it to a guy who was going to stuff it right after the party.

  “Am I boring you?” the guy asked. Amelia did not even try to pretend politeness. She drank from her plastic cup and utterly ignored him, because last thing she needed was this guy trying to sell her a fucking dead owl and it was obvious where his monologue was going.

  Owl Man got up. Another guy sat in the vacated space, his friend hovering next to the sofa. They complained that Soviets (fucking FUCKING REDS, were their exact words) were sending fake tequila to Hamburg. One of them had made money exporting the liquor to Germany, but that was over and the man who was standing up was now reduced to something-something. She didn’t catch the details, but she knew the story. Everyone had a story like that. They’d all done better at one point. They’d run better cons, done better drugs, drunk better booze, but now they were skimming.

  The guy sitting next to her was trying to elbow her out of the way so his friend could sit down. Amelia knew if she had been cooler, more interesting, more something, he wouldn’t have tried that. But she was not. The appraisal of her limitations provided her with a defiant stubbornness. She planted her feet firmly on the ground, did not budge an inch, and both of the men walked away, irritated.

  She dozed off, thought of Mars. Black-and-white, like in Lucía’s movie. Rayguns and space pirates, the ridiculous Mars they’d dreamt in a previous century. Far off in the distance, blurry, out of focus, she saw a figure that had not been in the movie.

  There are only two plots, Lucía had told her one evening. A person goes on a journey and a stranger comes into town. Amelia couldn’t tell if this was one or the other.

  What do you do in the meantime? she wondered. What do you do while you wait for your plot to begin?

  The stranger’s shadow darkened the doorway, elongated. The doorway of the bar. The space bar. It was always a bar. Western. So, then, this was A stranger comes into town. Fate knocks on your door.

  She woke curled up on Pili’s couch. Many of the partygoers were still around, passed out on the floor and chairs. Amelia took out her phone, wincing as she looked at the time. It was past noon. She had two text messages and a voicemail. The voicemail and one of the messages were from her irritated sister, who wanted to remind Amelia she was supposed to babysit that night at seven. The other text message was from Elías. What are you up to?

  Amelia hesitated before slowly typing an answer. Woke up with a huge hangover.

  A couple of minutes later and her phone rang. Amelia slipped out of Pili’s apartment and answered the phone as she walked down the stairs.

  “How huge of a hangover?” Elías asked.

  “Pretty massive. Why?”

  “I have a great trick for that.”

  “Oh?”

  “If you stopped by, I’d show you. It’s an effective recipe.”

  “I am a mess and I am on babysitting duty at seven o’clock.”

  “That’s ages away. Should I send a car?”

  Amelia emerged from the building and blinked at the sudden onslaught of daylight. She really shouldn’t.

  She accepted the offer.

  ***

  Amelia reeked of cigarette smoke and booze, but part of the pleasure was swanning into Elías’s pristine apartment and toss-ing her stinky jacket onto his couch. She was a foreign element introduced into a laboratory. That was what his home reminded her of: the sterile inside of a lab.

  She leaned on her elbows against his white table and watched him as he chopped a green pepper in the kitchen.

  “Was it a good party?” he asked.

  “Does it matter?” she replied with a shrug.

  “Why else go to a party, then?”

  She did not reply, instead observing him intently. It was funny how you thought you remembered someone. You sketched their face boldly in your mind, but when you saw them again, you realized how far you were from their true likeness. Had he always been that height, for example? Had he moved the way he did, long strides as he reached the table? Had he smiled at her like that? Maybe she’d constructed false memories of him, fake angles.

  “Here.”

  “I’m not drinking that,” Amelia said, pointing at the glass full of green goo Elías was offering her.

  “It’s just vegetables, an egg and hot sauce,” he told her.

  Amelia took a sip. It was terrible, as she’d expected, and she quickly handed Elías the glass back. He chuckled and brushed a limp strand of hair away from her face.

  “Did it help at all?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I tried.”

  She placed the glass on the table and walked around the living room, looking at the blank walls.

  “You have no photos at all, no decorations.”

  She didn’t mind. Her room — Could she even call it hers when she shared it with her niece? — was littered with scraps of her past. She knew it too well, every crack on the wall, every spring on the bed. It reminded her of who she was and who she’d never been. Elías’ apartment was a soothing blank slate, a pale cocoon.

  One might molt and transform here.

  “I don’t know if I’m going to stay long. Besides, I don’t take photos, anymore,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “Grew out of it, I suppose.”

  But not, perhaps, out of her. Amelia allowed herself to be flattered by that thought and smiled at him.

  He slid next to her, slid across that fine line she was trying to draw between affection and desire. There was that irresponsible wild feeling in her gut, all youthful need. Amelia had not felt young in ages. She was about fifty-five in her head, but he reminded her of her awkward teenage years, things she’d forgotten. It was exciting. She thought she’d lost that, that she’d outgrown it. Even if this was just horrid déjà vu, it felt like something. It was pleasant to remember she was 25, that she wasn’t that old, that it wasn’t all over.

  Her hair smelled like tobacco and she guessed her makeup was a bit of a mess, smudged mascara and only the faintest trace of lipstick, but he wasn’t complaining. She supposed it might be part of the appeal.

  Slumming it, Elías style.

  She truly did not know what he was getting out of this. Best not to dig too deeply. Best to just fall into bed with him.

  ***

  His arm was over his eyes when he spoke, shielding himself from a stray, persistent ray of light peeking through the curtains.

  “Do you really still think about going to Mars?” he asked.

  On Mars, they would be cold. His breath would rise like a plume. They’d huddle under furs. They’d fight space pirates and save the world. Well… not on the real Mars. On the Mars of that black-and-white flick she’d watched.

  “Is it that shocking?” she replied.

  “No,” he said. “I think you loved that planet more than you loved me.”

  “You can’t be jealous of a hunk of rock.”

  “I was.”

  “Planets keep to their orbits,” she said tersely.

  He looked at her and she thought this was going to end quickly. That he wouldn’t put up with recriminations, exclamations. The amusement might be over, already. She headed to the shower. But when she came out of the bathroom, he grabbed her hand.

  She reached home at quarter past seven to a very furious sister, but fortunately Marta had somewhere to be and she did not have time to quiz Amelia about her whereabouts. Once the door to the apartment slammed shut, Amelia sat on the couch next to her nieces. The TV was on and an announcer was laughing.

  Mars, Scene 3

  EXT. MARS BASE — NIGHT

  SPACE EXPLORER, holding future goggles, spots marauders near the outpost. She hurries back to alert her father and THE HERO about this. It must be the SPACE PIRATES who have come to ransack the outpost and steal THE SCIENTIST’s invention.

  Ther
e is a discussion about how to hold them off. Montage of preparations, then a battle. Despite THE HERO’s best efforts, the outpost is overrun and the SPACE PIRATES break through the defenses. The survivors are surrounded by bad guys, but THE HERO has managed to escape.

  ENTER EVIL SPACE QUEEN. Maximum sexiness in a dress that does its utmost best to show tits. She taunts the good guys and demands THE SCIENTIST hand over the gizmo he’s been working on, which will give SPACE QUEEN incredible powers, yadda-yadda. THE SCIENTIST refuses, but SPACE QUEEN thinks some time in a torture chamber will change his mind.

  SPACE QUEEN decrees THE SPACE EXPLORER will be wed to her brother, who doubles as the EVIL HENCHMAN, therefore ensuring absolute control of the planet. Three exclamation points.

  THE SPACE EXPLORER — the girl, this is nothing but a girl, diminutive and frail — faints. SPACE QUEEN’s evil laughter.

  7

  “The biggest problem, of course, was that Nahum kept changing things,” Lucía said. Her turban was silver that day. It looked like she had wrapped tinfoil around her head. And yet, Lucía man-aged to appear regal as she sat on the couch, with a few pages from her memoir on her lap.

  She offered Amelia the bowl with pomegranate seeds and Amelia took a couple. “He was an insomniac, so he’d wake up in the middle of the night, find a problem with the shooting script, jot down some notes. Then he phoned the writer at around three am and the writer would promise he’d make changes. Which he did. But then, Nahum couldn’t sleep again, and so on and so forth.

  “He was on drugs. I was so young I couldn’t even tell if this was a normal shoot or not. Convent-educated girl. A friend of a friend of my father was the one who got me my first audition and it all happened quickly, easily. A fluke.”

  Lucía frowned, her eyes little, tiny polished beads staring at Amelia. She was a Coatlicue, an angry, withered, Earth Mother goddess, her forked tongue about to fly out of her mouth and demand blood. Amelia’s mother had been hard, too. She watched over Amelia like a hawk and did not watch over Marta at all because Marta was too rebellious. Malleable Amelia was subject to all the commands of their mother. As in, obtain straight As, no social life, no boyfriends until there came that rich boy her mother approved of. Then she’d gotten sick and it had gotten even worse.

  Amelia swallowed the pomegranate seeds.

  “And now this bitch says I can’t mention any of that.”

  “I’m sorry?” Amelia asked.

  “Nahum’s daughter. Some meddlesome fool informed her I was typing out my memoir and her daddy is included in it. Would you believe she had the audacity to phone me a couple of days ago and threaten me with a lawsuit if I say her father did drugs? He ate mushrooms out of little plastic bags, for God’s sake. He was lovely and he was a mess. Who cares at this point? They’re all dead.”

  Lucía leaned back, her face growing lax. She lost the look of a stone idol and became an old lady, wrinkles and liver spots and the flab under her neck, like a monstrous turkey. The old lady squinted.

  “What do you intend to do on Mars?” Lucía asked, but she glanced away from Amelia, as if she didn’t want her to discern her expression.

  “Grow plants,” Amelia muttered.

  “You can do that?”

  “Hydroponics. It’s the same technology you’d use for a marijuana grow-op on Earth. Everything is inside a dome. They are terraforming with microbes, but it will take a long time for anything close to farmland to exist outside a biodome.”

  “I suppose it’s not like in my movie. You can’t walk around in a dress without a helmet.”

  “No. But the suits are very light now, very flexible.” Modern-looking suits, strips of luminescent thread running down the leg. Amelia had pictured herself in one of those suits one out of each seven days of the week.

  “And you can fly there. Just like that?”

  “Not quite. If you get a Class C visa, you can go as a worker, but they garnish your wages. They pay themselves back your fare. Half your pay goes to the company that got you there and they play all kinds of tricks so you owe them even more in the end. But if you get a Class B visa, it’s different. You are an investor. You pay your passage and you do whatever you want.”

  “You never do what you want, Amelia. There are always limits. I should know. I got my Mars. It was made of cardboard and wire, and the costume designer stabbed me with pins when they were adjusting my dress and it wasn’t nearly enough.”

  There’s no comparison, Amelia wanted to say. No comparison at all between a limited, laughable attempt at an acting career that ended with a whimper, and Amelia’s thoughts on crop physiology and modified plants that could survive in iron-rich soil. Amelia, staring at the vastness of the sky from her tiny outpost. Amelia on the Red Planet.

  “Why Mars? You could grow crops here, couldn’t you?” Lucía asked.

  Amelia shrugged. It would take too long to explain. Fortunately, Lucía did not ask more about Mars and Amelia did not steer the conversation back toward Lucía’s memoir. When she got home, she lay in her bed and looked for photos of Lucía. Gorgeous in the black-and-white stills, the smile broad and wild, the hair shiny. Then she looked for Nahum, but there were few of him. It was the same couple of photos: two headshots showing a man with a cigarette in his left hand, the other with his arms crossed. His life was a short stub. Three movies. As for the scriptwriter, she found he’d used a pen name for his erotic novels and you could buy them used for less than the cost of a hamburger. But at least they’d all left a trail behind them, a clue to their existence. When Amelia died, there would be nothing.

  On her napkins at the coffee shop, she now drew faces. Lucía’s face in her youth, the hero’s face, the Space Queen. She sketched the glass city of the movie, the space pirates and a rocket. Amelia had a talent for drawing. If she’d been born in another century, she might have been a botanical illustrator. Better yet, a rich naturalist, happily documenting the flora of the region. An Ynes Mexia, discovering a new genus.

  But Amelia existed in the narrow confines of the Now, in the coffee shop, her cell phone with a tiny crack on its screen resting by her paper cup.

  She was out of coffee and considering phoning Elías. It was not love sickness, like when she’d been younger, just boredom. A more dangerous state.

  She bit her lip. Fortunately, Pili called right then and Amelia suddenly had something to do: Go to the police precinct. Pili had been busted for something and she needed Amelia to bribe the cops. Amelia cast a worried look at her bank account, at the pitiful savings column she had ear-marked for Mars, and got going.

  The cops were fairly tractable and they did not harass her, which was the best you could say about these situations.

  It only took Amelia an hour until they shoved Pili outside the station and the two women began walking toward the subway. On Mina, the romería for the holidays was ready for business, with mechanical games and people dressed as the Three Kings. Santa Claus was there, too, and so were several Disney princesses. Tired-looking parents dragged their toddlers by the hand and teenagers made out on the Ferris wheel.

  Pili had a busted lip, but she was smiling and she insisted they buy an esquite. Amelia agreed and Pili shoved the grains of corn into her mouth while they walked around the perimeter of the brightly lit assemblage of holiday-related inanities.

  “The bastards didn’t even bother giving me a sandwich,” Pili said. “I was there for eight-fucking-hours.”

  “What did they nab you for?”

  “I was selling something,” Pili said. She did not specify what she’d been selling and Amelia did not ask. “Hey, the posadas start tomorrow.”

  “Do they?” Amelia replied. She was not keeping track, did not care for champurrado and tamales.

  “Sure. We gonna go bounce around the city, or what?”

  “Depends if I have any dough.”

  “Shit, you don’t need no dough for a posada. That’s the whole point. We’ll crash one or two or three.”

 
Amelia smiled, but she felt no mirth. She thought of snot-nosed children breaking piñatas while she tried to drink a beer in peace.

  Before they separated, Pili promised to pay Amelia back the money. This swapping of funds was erratic and pointless, they both simply kept deferring their financial woes, but Amelia nodded and tried to put up a pleasant façade because Pili had just had a rough day.

  Once Amelia was alone, all the things she hadn’t wanted to think about returned to her like the tide. Thoughts of cash flow issues, the vague notion that she should visit the blood clinic, her musings on Mars.

  She wanted to visit Elías without any warning, just crash on his couch.

  She wanted to go to a bar and buy over-priced cocktails instead of sipping Pili’s counterfeit booze.

  She wanted to look for an apartment for herself and never answer her sister’s voicemails.

  She wanted so many things. She wanted the Mare Erythraeum laid before her feet.

  Between one and the other — between Scylla and Charybdis like Sting had sung in an old, old song she’d heard at a club in Monterrey, a club she’d visited with Elías in the heady, early days when the world seemed overflowing in possibilities — between those options, she picked Elías.

  She had not dialed him, but now she pressed the phone against her ear and waited.

  The phone rang two times and then a female voice answered. “Hello?”

  Amelia, sitting in the subway, her hand on a bit of graffiti depicting a rather anatomically incorrect penis painted on the window pane, managed a cough but no words.

  “Hello?” said the woman again.

  “I was looking for Elías Bertoliat,” she said.

  “He’s in the shower. Do you want to leave a message?”

  “It’s about his Friendrr account,” Amelia lied. “We’ve closed it down, as he requested.”

  She hung up and lifted her legs, gathering them against her chest. Across the aisle, a homeless kid, his hands blackened with soot, chewed gum. A woman selling biopets — lizards with three tails — hawked her wares in a high-pitched voice. Amelia let three stations go by before switching trains, back-tracking and getting off at the right spot.