Hypothermia

by Enrigue, Alvaro

  Filth

  Long smooth slow swift soft cat

  What score, whose choreography did you dance to

  when they pulled the final curtain down?

  Can such ponderous grace remain

  here, all alone, on this 9 × 10 stage?

  GREGORY CORSO

  REFRIGERATION

  After reaching a certain size, a secret generates a zone of silence around the one who carries it. Like a refrigerator, it has its own microclimate that people can poke their heads into but where no one else can remain. Every so often someone opened the door, the light would go on, and he would smile—his teeth like Tupperware containers—waiting patiently for the door to close again. What he wasn’t sure about was whether he viewed reality as he did, like some prerecorded event, because he was leading a double life, or if his divergence from the world he inhabited since moving to the suburbs had led naturally to the strange condition of his feeling as though he were hiding in plain sight, the result of spending a certain amount of each day in secrecy. The question was: had his deficiencies led him to become a refrigerator or were they one more eventuality in his destiny as a refrigerator?

  It came out during one of his first Thursday therapy sessions: The suburbs serve to protect the rest of the country from the peculiarities of the city, so those of us who live in them can’t escape our own insulated condition; we’re the martyrs of refrigeration, we cut a swath of mediocrity, and the daily commute from home to the city and back again allows the values of the rest of the country to remain exactly as they were when the Puritans stepped off the Mayflower to found the nation.

  He didn’t mention the part about feeling like a refrigerator; it was such a silly simile that he was a bit embarrassed about it, but sometimes he could feel the water pitchers, the vegetable crisper, and the slightly rancid cheese all sitting on his shelves. Nor did he mention it to Rob, his neighbor, the day when they discussed the problem of the suburbs. The weather was so hot that he felt like he was trapped inside a bubble from which it was impossible to make himself understood.

  It went like this: he was crouched down planting belenes when he heard Rob say his name—or rather, that hollow, tortured sound he was now accustomed to identify with himself. He didn’t raise his head because he didn’t feel like it. Nor would he have done so at all but for the sweat dripping into his eyes; the moment after his neighbor insisted on tormenting the vowels in his name, he happened to have to wipe them with the back of one of his gardening gloves.

  He lifted the hand he’d just used to wipe his eyes and said: Hey. Then he asked Rob how he was doing. Good, he answered him, what’re you doing. I’m planting flowers. Each one waited for the other to say something else that had not yet occurred to their heat-addled brains. What kind are they, Rob finally asked. Impatiens, he replied, because that’s what belenes are called in English. As it was obvious that his neighbor wasn’t going to move from the spot until he got what he wanted, he asked what he could do for him. Can I borrow your mower? Help yourself. You know where it is. He turned his attention back to the soil, the flowers, and the slightly ridiculous trowel he was using to plant them.

  He had always been a somewhat self-absorbed person, which is why he enjoyed the garden; during the time he spent working there he could forget about the ferocious competition at the office, the needs of his little girls, and the identity problems that so unsettled him, and which he didn’t exactly understand. But since he had begun to lead a double life—maybe he had always done so, but without any palpable proof of its existence—he tried to practice as many solitary activities as possible: he spent more time swimming, tending his plants, watching TV.

  What were you thinking so hard about, said Rob as he came back, pushing the lawnmower along the little tiled path that led from the garden to the street. I was thinking how the suburbs are the antidote we gringos whipped up for slavery. The other man thought about this for a moment then chose a noncommittal answer: You’re not a gringo, he said. I am now, was the reply. Did you apply for citizenship? Yeah. And they gave it to you. Uh-huh. You swore on the flag and all that? Along with about four hundred Koreans. Congratulations. That’s nice. I’ll bring the mower back in a while. There’s no hurry, I’m not cutting the grass today.

  He waited until his neighbor had moved on before going into his house so that he wouldn’t have to invite him in, and then he ran to the kitchen. The soft gust from the air-conditioning felt like a blessing. He was home alone—his wife and daughters had gone to a children’s party and wouldn’t return until the afternoon—so he slipped the cell phone out from his briefcase by the front door where it had been sitting since Friday evening when he got home from the Bank. He punched in the number he had decided not to store in its memory to avoid uncomfortable questions if his wife happened to find it. The answering machine took the call; as usual, she had her phone switched off whenever her husband was around. He didn’t leave a message. He cracked open a beer and stood sipping it, staring out the window: the whole world outside wilting from the heat and him watching it like it was something on TV. He decided he couldn’t stand another brush with reality, so he made himself a sandwich, then ate it, with a second beer, while watching baseball.

  It wasn’t until several weeks later that Rob reminded him about the suburbs and slavery. They were in the park, eating roast chicken at the picnic that the neighborhood school’s parents association had organized to celebrate the start of the new school year. As always, the early September heat made it impossible to think clearly, and so killed any appetite for conversation he might otherwise have had. Each picnicker balanced a paper plate and plastic cup in one hand while trying to eat with the other.

  What you said about slavery and the suburbs seems like a generalization to me, Rob said to him. At first he didn’t understand what he was talking about; when his neighbor reminded him about the day he’d borrowed the lawnmower he tried to explain himself: It just seemed to me that white people have taken refuge in the outskirts of the cities to build themselves a world where there’s no difference between themselves and the descendants of the people they kidnapped in Africa to work for them for free. In the suburbs, everything is sweet, middle class, and homogenous. Out here the original sin of slavery doesn’t count; every little white house with its yard is an Ark of the Covenant. Rob put down his chicken leg on the paper plate and wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his T-shirt. He said: Although you’re an American now, your grandparents weren’t slave owners, mine weren’t either; they were Quakers, from Pennsylvania; I moved to the suburbs because the public schools are good and I couldn’t afford the tuition for a private school in the city. He shrugged his shoulders and thought that despite what everybody else thinks, gringos aren’t so simple: they prefer never to commit themselves to any particular position. He told himself, as he did whenever he was having a hard time at the Bank: The essential thing for surviving in this country is to never say what you’re thinking and then do whatever it is you feel like doing. He decided to act accordingly, so he held up his chicken breast and asked Rob what he thought about how the Orioles were doing. I’m not done yet, his neighbor told him: The other thing is, you’re not white. Yes, I’m white. No, you’re not. And you aren’t black. You’re Latino. I’m Mexican. Not anymore. You’re Latino now. Slavery is none of your business and you’ve got nothing to say about it.

  THERAPY: CHINA

  I was born in Ciudad Satélite, a suburb of Mexico City, which doesn’t in the least resemble what you folks call suburbia: for one thing, it’s highly urbanized, and it actually has fewer trees than you find in the capital.

  Although the continuity between Mexico City—el Distrito Federal—and Ciudad Satélite is never interrupted geographically, the two areas are completely different, because Satélite, like Washington, D.C., is a preplanned community, one designed with vaguely utopian ambitions, the product of a shady real estate deal.

  Of course it is. Read your American history: having retired to his V
irginia plantation, General Washington decided to resolve the dispute over where to build the capital, placing it next to the village of Georgetown, in Maryland, where his brother-in-law had a swamp for sale. He bought it for a song and sold it for a fortune to the federal government, which was then headed by his soul mate, President Jefferson. Then the two bastards, quite proud of themselves, their pockets stuffed with dollars, went to see John Adams inaugurated in the brand new city that, on top of it all, was named after the general. Well, that would even make them blush in Ciudad Satélite.

  Anyway, I was born and raised in Ciudad Satélite. I went to school there, my girlfriends were from there; that’s where I shopped at the supermarket and went to the movies.

  Mexico City, which I didn’t start to get to know until I went to university, always seemed wild, complicated, and snobbish to me, so I never suffered the excessive identification with my native soil that residents of the capital have. I visited Disneyland for the first time when I was six years old, and when my father’s business was going well we took trips to Brownsville where we bought everything we had in our house. I never owned one single LP with songs in Spanish—in Ciudad Satélite listening to Mexican music was for servants—and I didn’t know until I was twenty years old that there were movies in other languages than English; at the neighborhood video store the Mexican movies were catalogued in the Foreign Films section, alongside ones by Fellini or Kurosawa. I spent fifth grade as an exchange student at a school in New Orleans, and my MBA is recognized by Harvard but not by the Universidad Nacional in Mexico.

  The United States was always familiar territory for me and I always thought it was a place very similar to Mexico, except better. Even so, when, as an adult, I moved to Atlanta for my brand new job at AT&T, I had the impression that I’d moved to China or Romania; that’s how little I really understood my new environment. I never got used to life in Georgia. So, as soon as I could, I found a job at the World Bank and moved to Washington, D.C. I’d been told that the East Coast is a little more traditional and laid back, more like Mexico.

  On my first weekend in D.C. I drove up to New York City to see an old high school friend who’d been living in the United States for seven or eight years. It didn’t take more than one tequila for me to start telling him about my troubles. He sat there thinking about it for a minute, then said to me: What do you want me to tell you, ’mano? The USA is a country where soccer is a sport for little girls.

  SALIVA

  Out of all the connections he’d made at the World Bank, that city within a city, Malik was the closest thing he had to a friend. They’d shared a tiny cubicle when he started at the organization, and they developed an open, easygoing working relationship: they chatted at break time, strolled out together for a midmorning coffee, and shared part of the commute home to the suburbs on the Metro. Their conversations always had something of the comic routine in them, which the other employees in the Development Projects office found a little shocking.

  The difference between his relationship with Malik and those he had with the rest of his acquaintances at the Bank lay exclusively in what they talked about. Malik had been born in Sri Lanka and raised in Boston. He was intelligent, cultured, progressive, and nobody among the few who knew him understood very well why he worked there. I’ve got four little savages to feed, was the most he offered as an explanation. The extent of his erudition regarding almost everything showed that he was essentially a reader: between the ruckus from his children and his wife’s Hindu relatives, about whose endless visits he never stopped complaining, he must have spent his afternoons and evenings in some armchair in a little white house with a yard and garden, reading up on world culture.

  The problem with gringos, Malik said to him one day, is that they don’t know how to make conversation. They share their opinions when they feel authorized to do so, but they don’t know how to sit down and talk about anything just to talk about it, without getting impatient. In Boston I used to live in the Hindu neighborhood, which is really something else, but since I came to the Washington suburbs, I’m like the deaf-mute of Sidon.

  He recognized the Biblical sound of this deaf-mute reference, but he preferred not to ask: on a previous occasion when he’d shown his ignorance about Christian tradition, the Sri Lankan had worn himself out laughing at him. He waited until Malik went to the bathroom to make his ablutions—he was notoriously slow about it—to look up the reference on the Internet. He found it in a moment: it came from the Gospel of St. Mark.

  Jesus departed the rich, illustrious, and orthodox region of Tyre, where he had been preaching in synagogues to his own class. He entered the poor Gentile region of the Decapolis, on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, where the people who had heard tell of him were more interested in his shamanic healing powers than in his reputation as a rabbi. During his first day staying in the Decapolis, a large crowd brought to him a man who was a deaf-mute. Resigned to his fame, Jesus drew apart a little from the spectators; he took the man by the shoulders and violently pushed him down onto his knees. He vigorously thrust a finger in the man’s ear. With his free hand he forced open the deaf-mute’s mouth, and in a single motion stretched out the man’s tongue, letting fall on it a drop of his own saliva. He shouted at him Ephphatha!—which means Be opened!—and he tugged on the man’s hands for him to rise. The man thanked him with perfect diction then asked what he could do to repay him. Jesus told him to keep his cure a secret. St. Mark doesn’t say whether or not the man lived the rest of his life in the paradox of pretending to be a deaf-mute, although he relates that the man’s companions didn’t pay much attention to the Nazarene’s orders.

  When Malik returned from the bathroom, he was waiting for him with a joke: Ephphatha!, he shouted when he saw him walk through the door, and in case his friend didn’t remember the evangelist’s exact text, he translated: Be opened! The Sri Lankan smiled. I’ve tried to, he added, but it always turns out worse: to be open you need someone who feels like listening, and gringos have enough problems being gringos without trying to listen to others.

  A few days after talking with Malik about Jesus curing the man from Sidon, and his paradoxical destiny, the telephone on his desk rang. A secretary informed him that the Bank’s Director of Communications wanted to speak with him, that he should come up to the third floor right away. It was then nine or ten o’clock in the morning and by lunch time he was already cleaning out his desk. He said goodbye to the Sri Lankan, who accompanied him to the elevator carrying a small box, and who did not once stop talking about the relationship between medieval mendicants and the modern day globalophobics who made their lives impossible with their demonstrations and protests.

  The Communications Office was much more demanding than the catacombs of Development Projects, so much so that he was forced to alter his habits completely. He had no news about Malik for more than a year, until one day they happened to run into each other at the Middle Eastern kiosk in the Bank’s food court. I haven’t heard a thing about you, he said to his old office companion, a little bit embarrassed because it was obvious who had been the master and who the apprentice, and who should have been the one to call whom. I’m in the same place as always, in the asshole of the building, at the bottom of the ladder. And you? Moving right along: a few months after they called me up to Communications they promoted my boss to be regional director, so now I’m on the fourth floor, in an office with a window. And you must be delighted. Delighted. In this company, the higher up you go the more sinister it gets, so I don’t really envy you. That’s why you’re my hero. I don’t want your admiration, I want money. That’s what I need so I can quit this shitty job. As they walked to a table they caught up on the details of each other’s lives. You’re really skinny, the Sri Lankan told him when they were seated, I’m sure they’ve got you working morning, noon, and night. They do, he answered, but that’s not why. Then it’s from chasing skirts. More or less. Ephphatha!

  Since I first accepted the job here and they pu
t me into Development Projects with you, he told him, I was aware that a woman with whom I’d had a very intense relationship many years ago was living in D.C., married to a Bank employee. That was the only thing I knew, and it was only secondhand gossip because I hadn’t been in touch with her since we split up. Then, one day, added the Sri Lankan as if to speed up the story, you ran into her buying milk in the shop on the first floor. No: the day after they promoted me to Communications she just showed up at my office out of nowhere and told me that I hadn’t thanked her. When I recovered from my shock I asked her what for. She explained that she’d spoken about me to her husband and for that reason he’d had me promoted. She sat down in one of the chairs facing my desk and added: I told him that we’d been very close friends. And what are you doing here? I asked her. We’ve got tickets for the opera, but he’s in a meeting. Shall I grab a couple of coffees so we can chat while we wait for him? Go get two coffees. Malik interrupted him, saying, with his eyebrows raised very high: She’s your boss’s wife? Yes. Now I don’t know if I want to hear any more. You sound just like a gringo now. He half closed his eyes and conceded: Ephphatha! then continued: So, then you invited her to have lunch another day. No, I didn’t see her again for two or three months: working in Development Projects leaves you no free time, but in Communications you basically have no personal life at all. So, then? So my boss got promoted to be director for the Pacific Basin and we threw a cocktail party in his honor, at Old Ebbit, a place he really likes because he used to work in the Treasury. On the way to the official appointment ceremony he stopped by my office and told me: I’ll see you at the party, bring your wife along. Is yours coming? I asked him. He raised his hands as though praying to heaven and answered me: She’s been driving me crazy for weeks, telling me how nice it was to see you, and how she’s dying to meet your wife. By now Malik had finished his kebab, and said: So you hooked up with her right in front of everybody. No, it wasn’t me: it just happened. We ended up chatting, and before I knew it we were sharing the same glass. Then she told me that she had a message she’d been keeping for me. What? I asked her. It’s a message that can only be passed through the saliva, she answered. And she pushed you down on your knees, finished Malik, standing up from the table, and she opened your mouth, and she let fall a drop of her holy water on your tongue. That’s a little much, but I guess you might put it that way. The Sri Lankan glanced at his watch and said: I don’t have to leave yet, but the truth is, I don’t want to hear any more.