A squat, sweaty man with close-cropped hair approaches our table with staggered steps. He’s introduced as Bence, a Hungarian with a title I don’t catch, but he’s only interested in Charlie. He pinches Charlie’s shoulder roughly.
“You took my dock,” he slurs. “That’s where I wanted to park my boat, and you took it.” He sounds furious, but he offers Charlie his hand to shake.
“There are plenty of spaces in Grikos,” Charlie replies.
“Business,” he huffs. “How much did you pay off the monastery for that business?” He grins at Sonny, as if he could kill her with his wrecked idea of charm.
“It was a fair deal.”
“It didn’t, no, I didn’t say it wasn’t, did I?” Bence stumbles in place. One hopes he’ll have the decency to fall down. “But it stinks. I know a few captains. And to think those monks are getting a cut. Now here’s what.” He kneels, trying to catch his elbow on the table. Louise scoots toward the diplomat. “You need another backer? I can come in on it. I’ve got the money for that kind of operation. You’ll never lose on yachts. What do you say about me coming in? A few million? One phone call. I own dogs worth that much.”
“I’ll consider it,” Charlie says in a tone that works as a sobriety test: he won’t.
“Good,” Bence retorts. “I expect a call. You’d hate me as competition.” He wrestles a business card out of his pocket and holds it between two manicured nails. The card hangs there for several seconds as vulnerable as a rose, before Louise plucks it to hurry him away.
Sonny and Miles stand to dance, Miles slipping his arm around her waist.
“Should we call a taxi?” Louise asks me. She begins to dial on her cell phone.
“But what about our bikes?”
“Helios can bring them to the cabins in the morning,” Charlie says, offering a smile before standing. He lights a cigarette as he watches Sonny and Miles drift into the crowd. Sonny glances back at him, touching her chin to her shoulder, before she begins to sway in slow, narcotic movements. “Sorry, Ian,” Charlie says, rolling his eyes at the evening. “It’s August. What did I tell you?” He seems to understand the inherent problem with people: more of them only increases the loneliness.
“I can’t hear the dispatcher,” Louise reports, and she too gets up. “I’ll be right back.”
I sit at the half-deserted table while all around me are bones and noise. My chair looks upon the quiet, black alley that leads to Charlie’s house, and I see a face stashed in the darkness, a face I recognize from the rooftop bar in Athens with a shaved head and a scar running from its mouth. Not all insects are attracted to the light. Some must wait to feed upon the ones that are. Several purses and wallets litter the remaining tables, waiting to be rounded up.
The interior designer finds herself alone and rubs her neck uncomfortably. She looks at me and, with a brave sigh of acceptance, leans forward to engage.
“Ian, isn’t it? You haven’t said a word all evening. Tell me about yourself. Who are you? How have you kept yourself busy all these years?”
CHAPTER 4
Google Ian Bledsoe. Insert my name into a search engine. Every potential employer since my time in Panama has. There for the record, in the collective historical cesspool, is the story of my offense. It follows me, haunts me, steps in front of me as I walk into a room, lingers long after I’ve fled offices and beds. It eats and eats and can’t be killed—or if it can, it can only be eclipsed by something even more horrific. As with a cephalopodic alien monster in a sci-fi horror film, any attempt to destroy it simply makes it stronger. A response, a clarification, or an even-keeled defense written in a comments section will only piss it off. In some ways, in all ways but the one that really matters, it is me. It’s the weather I live in now.
Type IAN BLEDSOE. Press SEARCH.
SON OF BABY-FOOD EXEC LINKED TO FOILED BOMB PLOT
SPOILED SCION TURNS RADICAL IN CENTRAL AMERICA, BETRAYS FAMILY BUSINESS
THE PRIVILEGES OF PRIVILEGE: BABY-FOOD HEIR AVOIDS CRIMINAL CHARGES IN CONNECTION TO DRUG CARTEL
These weren’t headlines in national papers. They were small, fleeting, feel-bad items on page eight or ten of local rags, crammed alongside reports of George Washington Bridge jumpers or the dangers of owning a pit bull. As with the presumed motives of those jumpers or the savageness of those pets, the journalists realized what few facts they had in hand and misconstrued the details as sensationally as their editors allowed. The truth is simple and unworthy of note. There were no charges to avoid; I “turned radical” only in that I turned my back on the corporate offices of Kitterin Inc. and tried to help its working poor; the bomb plot consisted of a single rambling conversation at a party of which I took no part; scion? heir?
The story drifted from print as fast as a storm promising record snowfall and delivering a drizzle of rain. To their credit, Kitterin’s PR flaks worked semi-assiduously to dismantle the coverage, releasing a single-sentence statement that read, “An internal review found that Edward Bledsoe’s son had no participation in the alleged criminal events that unfolded in Panama City, and any reports to the contrary should be treated as libel.” My father was given a one-month leave of absence to deal with “familial strife”—a blow he didn’t take lightly and which finalized our estrangement. And that was it, except for me. Kitterin’s official statement appears nowhere in the top Google searches of my name. There are only those blue radioactive headlines, clickable, linkable, a cloven-hoofed footprint visible from anywhere under the digital sun.
Infamy on the Internet is eternal. It has no sense of time. It eats backward—photos of me from college and my first years after graduation at charity benefits or food drives are tagged with anonymous comments. “Nice try handing out sandwiches to make amends for TRYING TO BOMB A FACTORY FULL OF INNOCENT WORKERS”; “look at that fucking, self-satisfied rich-brat smile. I hope the ‘underprivileged youth’ he’s next to pulls a gun.” And it eats forward, biting through every online outreach for donations I posted at the single job I managed to find, as operations manager at a Bronx-based drug and homeless nonprofit called We in Need. “Die, Ian, just go away. You made your bed and you’re done.” “This employee should be fired yesterday.” “WTF? This guy is asking us for donations? Why doesn’t he ring up his cartel friends? I hope he chokes on a spoonful of baby food.”
Friends, I had some. Baby food, the Bledsoe specialty. Ironically it was in that processed, choke-free slurry where all my troubles began.
I FLEW ECONOMY on an MD-88 to Panama City in the rainy season. In this season, in the crooked intercontinental arm of Central America, the rain doesn’t have an On and Off switch but only gradations of soft and brutal. Green is the dominion color here: the city is surrounded on all sides by stalled sea and jungle. And the real green, of course, is the reason for the nation’s existence: the swamp-green money, collected and counted and flowing all hours through the world’s most famous shortcut. The Canal passes through the city like a knife through a ghost. It seemed, after a few postcollegiate years struggling in the nonprofit sector, a good place to start a career in business.
My father arranged the assistant’s job at the Panama headquarters of Kitterin Inc., but there was no special treatment for the vice president’s son besides that solitary penny-loafer in the door. I was given a cubicle in a windowless office in one of the dust-green high-rises of the New City. My boss was an efficient, chinless executive who preferred to speak to me in English although I responded in Spanish to bolster my conversational skills. Her only individualizing traits were the two Harvard diplomas hanging in her office and the ritual reading of her horoscope in the mornings before the numbers came in from the factory. My job was specific and deadening: check the daily manufacture totals of 2.5 oz., 4 oz., and 6 oz. baby-food jars in its various flavors and varieties; oversee the weekly export shipping docket to North, Central, and South American suppliers; “liaise” via e-mail with jar, label, and package wholesalers (the jars were imported from V
enezuela, and for that first month the parent company shifted almost daily from private to national ownership, wreaking havoc on the export price of glass). All of these responsibilities were actually conducted by corporate higher-ups; I was merely a second or third set of eyes, scanning for irregularities. When I missed aberrational spikes and dips, a computer program caught them and I was given a human-oversight warning. For the first month that I worked at Kitterin I never touched a single jar of baby food. However, the office was decorated with giant headshots of white, chubby babies, their lips twisted in digestive satisfaction and their eyes staring hungrily into your heart. Even the bathrooms with their automatic-flush urinals and automatic hand dryers weren’t safe from these ravening eyes and ecstatic mouths. I had a joke—“baby brother is watching”—but I had no one to tell it to.
“Kitterin Baby Food®, made from the finest natural ingredients, organic and nutritious, tested on tiny taste buds, mom approved.” It was a billion-dollar conglomerate. It fed the diapered future. The Spanish commercial showed a mom piloting a spoon of goop onto the pink landing strip of an infant’s mouth.
I stayed in an eerily nondescript long-lease motel called the Royal Decameron Arms. It was located in the New City five blocks from the Kitterin offices and it shared a parking lot with a KFC. The room’s walls were mint, its curtains sage, its heavy-breathing air conditioner the only new amenity. On my first day, the elderly American who ran the establishment gave me a map of the city with parts of the southern half x-ed out in red. “Red is for red zone,” he informed me. “That means if you so much as walk those streets you’re liable to be shot on sight.” They were gang-owned, drug- and poverty-ridden, and rumor had it morgue vans cleared dead bodies off the streets with more regularity than garbage pickup.
“I thought the country was stable and prospering,” I said to the landlord, who wore a hunter-green U.S. ARMY T-shirt.
“It is stable, and it is prospering, because it leaves the gangs alone. The last time the government interceded, Noriega became the leading drug trafficker in the Western Hemisphere. The day the government disperses the gangs is the day corruption starts. Don’t worry. The rest of the city is as safe as a retirement home.”
I kept to the un-x-ed areas of his map, wandering the rainy streets and admiring the sad Spanish haciendas with gated gardens pruned by teams of laborers. Catholic churches sang on Sunday with their wooden doors ajar. Occasionally I taxied out to the ruins of old forts and pirate prisons, the moss invading the stones as the jungle tried to reclaim its stolen ground. Every time I took a cab in Panama City, the first question the driver asked me was “when are you leaving?” The drivers would strike their palms together and let the top palm glide away like a plane. I knew they wanted the fare to the airport, but it became a constant chorus. When are you leaving? What time is your flight? When will you go?
At night I usually stayed in my room, masturbating to my computer. It’s odd to travel so far to perform the same whipping ritual alone in a rented room—porn sites become as familiar as family photo albums. There she is again, that girl, as memorable now as a distant cousin, with the black bob and shamrock tattoo; she’s switched private schools again, her pleated jumper plaid instead of navy; same manicurist though, French tips. Those were the most fulfilling ten seconds of my day, my body seizing, my mouth a volcano, my fist slowing in the aquatic glow of the monitor. Once a week I’d eat dinner with my father’s only Panamanian friends at their mansion in the posh San Francisco district. They owned the national airline and told stories of the night in December 1989 when the United States invaded, how the American soldiers appeared at their gates in the fog of dawn, and how the couple brought food and drinks out for them. The soldiers only accepted cans of soda, as they were forbidden to consume anything unsealed. “In case we might be poisoning them,” the wife told me. “I took down their names and phone numbers and called their families for them back in the States. We all cried that morning, me for my country and those parents for their sons.”
I had the sense that real events were still taking place in Panama, just not in the parts that I knew. It was the same feeling that must befall those curious pockets of the United States that don’t observe daylight savings—time moving peculiarly all around them, jumping forward and back, shifting and reacclimating, while their own clocks ticked on, dull and untouched. I had no plans to continue my career in food manufacturing, no intention of remaining at Kitterin longer than the minimum six months I’d pledged my father. I was lonelier in my cubicle than I was jacking off at night or drinking rum in an American ex-pat bar located next to the national airline’s travel agency. My few sexual encounters—a shipping inspector from Gothenburg; a Texas grad student documenting the migration of surfers along the western isthmus—ended on my sage bedsheets with me repeating the taxi refrain. When are you leaving? What time is your flight?
Never underestimate the catalytic power of boredom. We put so much faith in the role of chance—the barely caught subway on which one’s future wife sat reading last week’s New Yorker; the yellow light, which resulted in a family of five crushed in the intersection. But boredom is the archangel of afternoon suicides and Craigslist affairs. Boredom places our heads in ovens, pushes us between stranger’s legs, makes hobbies out of pharmacy aisles, and, if left untreated, turns solid floors into swamps of quicksand. Chance exonerates us, but boredom reveals us—the little flaws flower, urges itch.
Marisela Nuñez appeared one Monday morning in the cubicle bank of Kitterin like a Goth babysitter determined to stick to an undesirable job. She was an intern in our department and a fourth-year economics student at the university. Her hair was dyed fuchsia—an eccentricity that would have deterred me in New York—and her eyelids were so wide she looked permanently frightened. I explained spreadsheet procedures and invited her out to lunch. We sat under the rain-beaten umbrella of an outdoor KFC table, picking at deep-fried animal bones. “I thought you’d like food from your home country,” she said. I decided our affair wouldn’t extend beyond Panamanian borders. With twenty minutes remaining in our lunch break, we crossed the parking lot and had what I still consider one of the best sexual experiences of my life. Marisela single-handedly rendered my cherished porn sites irrelevant. Her breasts were wobbly teapots with long, impractical stems. My body was also a discovery for her. “I’ve never seen orange there before,” she said, pointing to my pubic hair. We had sex standing, against two mint walls. After that first encounter, Marisela returned to the office first, me following five minutes behind, and the weekly shipping dockets took on a magical allure.
After three dates, I went with her to visit her family. Marisela said she was “middle class,” but that term didn’t carry the same overbroad designation that it does in the States nor the same promise of dependable comforts. She drove twenty minutes out of the city, into the muddy, humid outskirts where dogs and naked children ran across diarrhea-brown roads. Palm trees waved their fronds in stranded roadside emergency. Her tan Honda lacked the ordinary luxury of shock absorbers. “There are two classes of untouchables in Panama,” she told me. “The poor and the rich. You never touch either if you live by honest means.” There was a strangled sense in this visit of a lesson being taught. She pulled up in front of a single-story house painted the same color as her hair. It had fresh aluminum siding, indigo stained-glass windows, a covered above-ground pool, and a vegetable garden teeming with an exploded war chest of children’s toys. Inside were many tidy linoleum-tiled rooms with plastic-wrapped sofas and plastic nosegays. If there was a lesson, it was one sweetened with kindness. I met her father—a moist, gentle hugger and the owner of a nearby mechanic shop—and her three younger brothers (her mother was away in the north visiting her sister). We ate goat stew and drank beer and I watched her brothers in the backyard perform endless choreographed dances. The rain abated for the afternoon, and neighbors drifted over, adding their radios and trays of ice to the picnic table. I was neither a curiosity nor an intruder
, just another set of hands clapping to her eldest brother’s impressive somersaults.
Marisela observed my enjoyment. “This must be different from what you’re used to,” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “We don’t have anything like this in New York.”
“Like this,” she repeated sarcastically and began to clear the dishes with vicious efficiency. I had passed her test by failing it, and while the Nuñez family seemed like the warm cultural entente I had been seeking in Panama, I decided right then to discontinue my daily post-KFC fuck-fests with their daughter on our lunch breaks.
“I’m sorry,” she grumbled on the way back into the city, staring irritably through the slashing windshield wipers. The rain had returned and so had Marisela’s thoughtfulness. I later wished she hadn’t apologized. If only she hadn’t muttered those two grudge-erasing words. Worse circumstances would always be avoided if we never lent those words any credence. But I did and kissed her knuckles as we jiggled and jolted back to the New City. It was that very night, in a move as spontaneous as her brother’s somersaults, that Marisela asked if I had ever visited Kitterin’s baby-food factory.
“No.” We were lying naked in bed; the air-con provided the exotic necessity of a blanket.
“Don’t you want to see it? I’d like to. Surely the vice president’s son could arrange a tour.”
The factory sat halfway between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. A mile before our approach, the roar of machines blurred the twin acoustics of slapping rain and mating insects. The entire building was barricaded in chain-link fencing, and yellow school buses and white shipping trucks gridded the parking lot. In the visitors’ hall, lined with portraits of babies I could now identify from a book of infant mug shots, Marisela and I were given plastic hairnets and escorted through one of several connecting facilities. “You’ll find we observe the strictest sanitation codes,” the tour guide, a short, middle-aged man in a white lab coat announced in exclamatory English. “I trust you’ll report what you see here back to your father.”
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