***
Only narcissists and Heroes stood unwavering against the odds. Most rational people got a clue and found their bearings. Amelia found the blood clinic. She’d been putting it off, fabricating ex-cuses, but truth was, she needed cash. Not the drip-drip cash of her Friendrr gigs, something more substantial.
The clinic was tucked around the corner from a subway station. The counter was a monstrous green, with a sturdy partition and posters all-round of smiling, happy people.
“Who’s poking us today? It’s not Armando, is it?” the man ahead of Amelia asked. He must have known all the technicians by name, who was good with a needle and who sucked.
The employee manning the reception desk asked for Amelia’s ID and eyed her carefully. She was told to sit in front of a screen and answer 25 questions, part of the health profile. Next time, she could just walk in, show a card, and forget the questions.
Afterward, a technician talked to Amelia for three short minutes, then handed her a number, and directed her to sit and wait in an adjacent room.
Amelia sat down, sandwiched between a young woman playing a game on her cell phone and a man who rocked back and forth, muttering under his breath.
When they called her number, Amelia went into a room where they pricked her finger to do a few quick tests, measuring her iron levels. Then it was time to draw the blood. She lay on a recliner, staring at the ceiling. There was nothing to do, so she tried to nap, but it proved impossible. The whirring of a machine nearby wouldn’t allow her to close her eyes.
Space flights were merely an escape, a fleeing away from oneself. Or so Carl Jung said. But lying on the recliner, thinking she could listen to the sloshing of her blood through her veins, Amelia could envision no escape. She could not picture Mars right that second and her eyes fixed on the ceiling.
On the way out, Amelia glanced at a young man waiting in the reception area, noticing the slight indentation on his arm, the tell-tale mark that showed he was a frequent donor. Pili had it, too. They crossed glances and pretended they had not seen each other.
Walking back to her apartment, Amelia realized the courtyard kids were in full festive mode: They had built a bonfire. They were dragging a plastic Christmas tree into the flames. Several of them had wreaths of tinsel wrapped around their necks. One had Christmas ornaments tied to his long hair. They greeted her as they always did: with hoots and jeers. This time, rather than slipping away, Amelia slipped closer to them, closer to the flames, intent on watching the conflagration. It seemed something akin to a pagan ritual, but then, the kids wouldn’t have known anything about this. It was simple mayhem to them, their own version of a posada.
A young man looped an arm around Amelia’s shoulders and offered a swig of his bottle. Amelia pressed the bottle against her lips and drank. It tasted of putrid oranges and alcohol. After a couple of minutes, the boy slid away from her, called away, and Amelia stood there, holding the bottle in her left hand.
She stepped back, sitting by the entrance of her building, her eyes still on the fire as she sipped the booze. Sparks were shooting in the air and the tree was melting.
She knew she shouldn’t be drinking, especially whatever was in the bottle, but the night was cold.
At the clinic, they’d told her plasma was 90% water and she mumbled that number to herself. When she closed her eyes, she thought of Mars, black-and-white like in Lucía’s movie, seen through a lens that had been coated in Vaseline. Bloated, disfigured, beautiful Mars.
When the phone rang, she answered it without even bothering to check who it was, eyes still closed, the cool surface of the screen against her cheek.
“Amelia, I think you called yesterday,” Elías said.
“I think your girlfriend answered the phone,” Amelia replied, snapping her eyes open.
“My fiancée,” he said. “My father picked her for me.”
“That’s nice.”
“Can you come over? I want to explain.”
“I’m busy.”
“What are you doing?”
“Something’s burning,” she said, staring at the bonfire. The teenagers running around it looked like devils, shadow things that bubbled up from the ground. It was the booze, or she was tired of everything, and she rubbed her eyes.
“Amelia —”
“Pay me. Send me a goddamn transfer right now and I’ll go.”
She thought he’d say no, but after a splintered silence, he spoke. “Ok.”
“You’ll have to send a car, too. I am not taking the subway.”
“Ok.”
She gave him the necessary info. When the driver appeared, it was ages or mere minutes later and she had forgotten about the deal. Cinderella going to the Ball, escorted into a sleek, black car instead of a pumpkin. She wondered if this was Elías’ regular driver, his car, or just a hired one. When they’d dated, he’d owned a red sports car, but that was ages ago.
Amelia tossed the bottle out the window once the car got in motion.
8
There was an expiry date to being a loser. You could make “bad choices” and muck about until you were around twenty-one, but after that, God forbid you committed any mistakes, deviating from the anointed path, even though life was more like a game of Snakes and Ladders than a straight line.
Amelia realized that anyone peering in would pass easy judgment on her. Stupid woman, too old to be stumbling through life the way she did, stumbling into her ex-boyfriend’s apartment again, shrugging out of her jacket and staring out the window at the sign in the distance, which advertised Mars.
She could almost hear the voice-over: Watch Amelia act like a fool, again.
But not everyone got to be the Hero of the flick.
“What is that?” Elías said, pointing at the bandage on her arm. She had not even realized she still had it on.
“I went to a clinic. They drew blood,” Amelia replied, her fingers careless, sliding over the bandage.
“Are you sick?”
“I was selling blood. Old farts love to pump young plasma through their veins. Hey, maybe some of your dad’s friends are going to get my blood. Wouldn’t that be hilarious?”
“You should have told me if you needed money,” he replied.
“Do you think I’m on Friendrr for fun? Of course I need money. Everyone does.”
Except you, she thought. She wondered how the transaction he’d performed would show on his account. Two thousand tajaderos for the ex-girlfriend. File under Miscellaneous.
“Do you have any water? I’m supposed to stay hydrated,” Amelia said.
He fetched her a glass and they sat on the couch.
“Amelia, my fiancée… it’s what my father wants. I don’t care about her. I don’t even touch her,” Elías said. He looked mournful. Sad-eyed Elías.
“It’s going to be difficult for you to have children that way,” Amelia replied. “Or are you thinking of renting a womb? Would you like to rent mine? It’s all for sale.”
“Amelia, for God’s sake!” he said, scandalized.
“You are an asshole. You are a selfish, entitled prick,” she told him, but she said it in a matter-of-fact tone. There was a surprisingly small amount of rancor in her voice. She sipped her water.
“Yes, all right,” he agreed and she could tell he wanted to say something else. Amelia did not let him speak.
“Where did your girlfriend go? Or is she coming back? I’m not willing to hide in the closet.”
“She’s headed back to Monterrey. She just came to… my father wants me back there permanently. He sent her to pressure me and I spent all my time trying to avoid interacting with her. I —”
“What’s your girlfriend’s name?”
“Fiancée. Amelia, you are avoiding me.”
“How am I avoiding you? I’m sitting here, like you wanted. You’re telling me you’ll get married. Congratulations.”
“Listen,” he told her. “Nothing has been said; nothing has been done. I’m here.”<
br />
I’m here, too, she thought. I’m stuck. Not only in the city. Stuck with him. She considered leaning forward and slapping him, just for kicks. Mostly, because she wasn’t even mad at him. She thought she should be, but instead she lounged on his couch while he was fidgeting.
“I lied to you, ok? I didn’t find you on Friendrr by chance. Fernanda mentioned you were there one day; Fernanda and I, we keep in touch. I went looking for you. Every goddamned day, I looked at your profile, at your picture, telling myself I wasn’t going to contact you.
“I should have gone to New Panyu with you,” he concluded. “My dad wouldn’t give me the money, but I should have done something.”
There was that scalding feeling in her stomach. Amelia loathed it. She didn’t want to be angry at him. She’d been angry and that was what had started this ridiculous train of events. If she could be indifferent, it would all collapse.
“Oh, you couldn’t. I was just another girl. I’m still just another girl,” she told him, unable to keep her mouth shut, although at this point, the less said, the better. She had a headache. The booze she’d imbibed was probably a toxic chemical. Radioactive flesh, she mused. Radioactive everything.
But it was Elías who looked a little sick, a little feverish, and Amelia pressed cool fingers against his cheek, her mouth curving into a not-quite-smile as she edged close to him.
“You’re just another guy, you know?”
He caught her hands between his and frowned.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know how to live with you. I never did.”
“I don’t want you to be sorry.”
“What do you want?”
You used to mean something to me, she wanted to tell him. You used to mean something and then you used it all up without even giving it three seconds of your time. And I want to walk out and leave you with nothing, just like that, in this beautiful apartment with your wonderful, expensive things.
Amelia looked aside.
“Let’s go to sleep. I’m tired,” she muttered, moving from the couch to his bedroom, as though she lived there.
She was exhausted. This was true. But it was also true that she could have called a car and stumbled home. Sure, she assured herself it was a safety matter, that she might collapse outside her building or pass out in the car. And yet, she could have called someone, perhaps Pili, to pick her up.
She didn’t want to leave. She wanted to act the part of a fool. As simple and as complicated as that.
***
He wanted to make it up to her, her said, although he did not specify exactly what he was making up for: his callous ghosting or his most recent omissions. He proposed lunch, then he’d take her shopping: He wanted to buy her a dress so they could go dancing on New Year’s Eve.
Amelia looked at her text messages. There were five from her sister. She was not worried because Amelia had never come home the previous night. Instead, the messages were castigating her because Amelia needed to take the girls to school and cook lunch.
Amelia deleted the messages. She grabbed his arm and they went out.
She’d never taken advantage of Elías’s social position when they were dating. A dinner here and there but no expensive presents. Of course, back then, he’d been playing at bohemian living. The nice car was his one wealth marker. He kept it tucked in a garage and they took it for a spin once in a while. Once in a while, there had also been an extravagance: the sudden trip to Monterrey where they partied for a weekend, the ability to sail into a popular nightclub while losers waited outside for the bouncer to approve of their looks, but these were random, few events. He wanted to be an artist, after all, an artist with a capital A, long-suffering, starving for his creative pursuits.
Now he had shredded those pretenses and now she did not bother telling herself things such as that money did not matter. In the high-tech dressing room with interactive mirrors, she made the outfits she wanted to try on bounce across the slick, glass surface. She could take a selfie with this mirror. She wondered if anyone ever did. She assumed some people must, people who did not look at the fabric on display and wished to wreck half a dozen dresses, leaving a man with an immense bill to cover as they slipped out the back of the store.
The so-elegant employee packed her dress in pale, pink tissue paper and handed her a bag. She was on Mr. Bertoliat’s account now. And though Amelia supposed ‘Mr. Bertoliat’ meant well, she hated him when he smiled at her as they stood by the counter.
But by the time they sat down at the sushi restaurant, with its patio and its pond full of koi fish and its impeccable white plastic furniture made to resemble bamboo, she wanted to do anything but fight. Whether the blood siphoned from her veins had also drained another part of her, or she simply had latched on to a new type of debilitating obsession, she did not know.
“I heard, soon, there will be nothing but jellyfish in the seas,” she said, looking at the pond. “All the fish will be gone.”
“I find that unlikely,” he said.
There was a restaurant in the city, run by a Parisian chef who charged $800 for a three-course meal cooked with ‘Indigenous’ ingredients, plated on large stones. He had thought to take her there, but reservations were required.
When your credit card could afford such meals, she supposed many things were ‘unlikely.’ She supposed, with the hefty allowance he received, he could ask that a polar bear be dragged to rest on his plate after being stuffed with a dolphin. And not a cloned bear. The real damned thing, too.
“I guess it won’t matter when it happens,” she told him with a shrug. “Not to you.”
“Are you interested in zoology, now?” he asked. “Fisheries?”
“I’m hardly interested in anything. I spend about three hours every day drawing things that don’t matter and another three fiddling with my cell phone.”
“That sounds the same as me. Sometimes, I take photos. But not too often.”
“You had a good eye,” she admitted and he smiled at that.
Elías looked rather fine that day, very polished. She’d always loved looking at him. She knew it was bad to enjoy somebody’s looks so much. After all, the flesh faded. But when she’d been 19, she had not been thinking about what 69-year-old Elías would look like and now it seemed equally preposterous to self-flagellate because he was still handsome.
If she was shallow, that seemed the least of her issues.
“I should mention this right now. I have to go to Monterrey for Christmas. I can’t get out of it. I’m not going to disappear, I swear. But it’s Christmas and my father wants to see me. I’m his only kid. I’ll be back for New Year’s.
“And I’ll break it off with my fiancée while I’m there,” Elías added.
“Don’t start making promises,” she muttered.
“I want to do it. For you.”
In the pond, the koi swam and she wondered if they were authentic koi, or if they had been modified. They could be mechanical. They could even be holograms. She’d seen things like that before.
Elías held out a plastic card. “Here. This is a spare key to my apartment. You can hang out there while I’m gone. Ask the concierge to get you anything you want: food, drinks. Ok?”
She toyed with the card, thinking she could lose it in the subway, toss it into the sewer. But when he bid her goodbye and put her in a car, he leaned down for a kiss and Amelia allowed it.
***
Amelia went up the stairs to her apartment. There, on the fourth landing, she found a glue trap with a squealing rat. She had chanced upon such sights before and they did not bother her.
She stared at the rat. Before she could figure out a proper course of action, she attempted to peel the vermin off the trap. She managed to rip the board off the rat, but the animal bit her. She pressed her hand against the wound and hurried into her apartment, looking for the rubbing alcohol and the cotton amongst the mess of expired prescriptions (these had belonged to her mother; nobody bothered tossing them ou
t, shrines to her memory), hair clips and makeup, which were scattered upon a small shelf.
“What the hell happened to you?” Marta asked.
“Rat bit me,” Amelia said.
“You better not have rabies.”
Amelia opened the bottle of alcohol and soaked a cotton ball in it, then carefully cleaned the wound. Her sister was by the door, but had not offered to assist her. She merely stood there, arms crossed, staring at Amelia.
“Where were you?”
“I stayed with a friend,” Amelia said.
“You fuck up my routine when you don’t take the girls to school.”
“I don’t do this regularly.”
“Sure, you don’t.”
“Look, you want to make sure your kids get to school on time? You take them,” Amelia said, wondering if they had any damned Band-Aids, or if she was going to have to wrap a towel around her hand.
“I pay the bulk of the rent.”
Amelia opened a cardboard box and placed two Band-Aids on her hand, forming an X.
“I pay for the bulk of the groceries,” Marta added.
Amelia slid her thumb across the Band-Aids, smoothing them down. Maybe she could have the bite checked out at the sanitation clinic, although that would mean arriving early and waiting forever.
“I paid for Mother’s medicines,” Marta said, holding up three fingers in the air.
“And I took care of her!” Amelia yelled, turning to her sister, losing her shit, unable to keep a middling tone of voice, anymore. “I was here, every day and every night, and where were you when she was pissing herself in the middle of the night? Two years, Marta! Two years of that. I threw my whole career and every single chance I ever had out the window because you wouldn’t help me take care of her!”
They had never discussed it because it would have been bad to say such things, but it had to be said. Amelia was tired of pretending that what happened to her had just been bad luck, bad karma. She might have been able to finish her degree, she might have kept the scholarship, but Marta had been way too busy playing house with her then-husband to come round the apartment complex. But when he left her and Mother died, then she came real quick to take possession of the shitty little apartment.
Prime Meridian Page 6