The Infinite

by Nicholas Mainieri

4

  JONAH WOKE TO LUZ’S GRANDMOTHER SCRUBBING A POT IN THE kitchen. She was watching him. She shut the water off and shuffled down the hallway and returned with a satchel over one shoulder and a wooden pole in her fist. She went to her workbench and loaded her wares into the satchel. She held up an ornate belt for Jonah to see and then dropped it into the bag. She said something in Spanish that Jonah didn’t get.

  “Can I help you carry your stuff?” he asked.

  She blinked at him.

  He gestured at her things. “Can I help you?”

  “No, no.” She walked to the front door and said, “Gracias, Jonás,” before exiting.

  He drew a glass of water from the cooler in the kitchen and drank it and brushed his teeth. He stretched, yawning, thought of Luz in her bedroom.

  He eased the door open. The sun rising through the canvas shade colored the walls peach. A single bar of sunlight slipped between shade and window frame and lay across her brown shoulder. He watched the subtle rise and fall of her breathing, and he stepped into the room and shut the door with great care. He got into bed with her and held her. He closed his eyes and dreamed of the evening in the French Market with Luz, her laughter, her words resounding in his head: We will be responsible for each other.

  5

  LUZ FELL THROUGH THE DREAMLESS DARK AND WOKE LIKE SHE hadn’t slept a minute. She was very warm. Thirsty. Where? Somebody’s arm lay heavily over her.

  She shrugged the arm off and sat up, and there was Jonah waking up next to her.

  “God,” Luz said, pressing fingers into her eyes.

  “I didn’t come in till after your grandma left.”

  She had a headache in addition to the persistent dull throb in her abdomen. Sore muscles. “We’re really here.” The plaster ceiling looked like some sharp moonscape.

  Jonah snuggled closer, but she got up and slid over him and went to the kitchen for a drink. Then she took a shower and returned to the bedroom with a towel wrapped around her. Jonah watched from the bed.

  Luz opened the wardrobe and took out one of her mother’s dresses. Something light. She let the towel fall and stood with her backside toward Jonah as she slipped the dress over her head and then smoothed it over her stomach. It fit well, and she was dizzy.

  “You look beautiful,” Jonah said.

  Luz turned to him. She was on the verge of breaking apart. She had the deep urge to tell him everything that had happened, but she didn’t know how to say it, how to begin.

  “I’m hungry,” Jonah said, saving her.

  They walked down the hill to the church and then down to the roundabout, which was much busier today. A pickup laden with boxes of produce fumed around the circle. A green taxi. A policewoman in a black uniform held a rifle and lounged against the jamb of an open doorway. They passed a grill, corn husks blackening on the grate. Stray fibers glowing orange like wire filaments. A woman with a wilted face stirred chicharrón in a greasy, smoking pan. Pork fat sizzled and popped.

  The garage door of a warehouse was open, and Luz led Jonah into the crowded space, her eyes adjusting to the shade. There were stands of avocados and lettuce, mangos and bananas and melons. Vendors hawked shoes, straw hats, luchador masks, cheap electronics. There were woven rugs from Oaxaca. Silver jewelry from Guanajuato.

  “This is like the French Market, sorta,” Jonah said. “Remember that day?”

  And Luz did, feeling a stab of guilt. She wondered if Jonah was here, in Las Monarcas right now, because of what she had told him that day. She realized, suddenly, where those words had come from—her grandmother’s old advice and the story of her father and his stray puppy. She had indeed heard that story as a little girl. A sensation came over her, like her being itself was unfolding, flattening, lengthening. There was too much to remember and too much to get a handle on. Her grandmother called out to them.

  Abuela had suspended the wooden post between two large flowerpots and looped the leather bracelets and belts around it, some already with designs branded in, others that were plain and might be customized upon request. Luz asked if she could borrow some money for lunch. Her grandmother opened a tin box, took out a handful of ten-peso coins, and gave them to Luz.

  “Thanks,” Luz told her. She looked up and down the crowded market. Some girls sat on a step making cloth dolls by hand. “Is there a daily Mass?” Luz asked.

  Her grandmother smiled and confirmed and told her the time.

  They walked away, and Jonah hollered good-bye back at her grandmother.

  Out in the circle, Luz selected two ears of corn from the woman with the grill, and the woman peeled back the burned husks and rolled the ears in mayonnaise and chili powder. Next Luz bought a plastic container of fresh, sliced melon.

  After she finished the transactions, Jonah said, “I shoulda learned Spanish.”

  Luz shrugged.

  “Novia.” He smiled. “I know that one.”

  And Luz wanted to be there, present in the moment with him, but she heard her own laugh and it was a distant, automatic sound. As if it came from someone else.

  They ate on a bench near the church. Jonah tried to feed a piece of melon to a stray dog, no luck. They didn’t talk, and Luz watched the questions like living things beneath the surface of Jonah’s face. After they ate, she asked if he’d go to Mass with her.

  “Sure,” he said. “Whatever you want.”

  The church was cool and empty, and it fit her memory of the place almost precisely. The graphic dioramas. The lifelike crucifix. The grotto where, for all Luz knew, her prayers for her father still lived on in the candle flames, in the smoke drifting heavenward. Jonah made a noise. He was looking at the crucifix, the gleaming blood. Luz felt compressed between this place out of her past and this boy out of her present. She ran her fingertips over the smooth grain of the pew, trying to steady herself.

  “I almost forgot to tell you,” Jonah whispered. “I saw the Good Friday parade in San Antonio.”

  “You did?”

  He turned his face to her. “I wanted to see the place you loved.”

  “Did you like San Fernando?”

  “It was neat, yeah. The parade looked pretty real.”

  “Yes,” Luz answered.

  The daily Mass began in silence, no music. An old priest walked out from the sacristy, flanked by altar servers hefting tall candles. The priest’s words diffused into the big, muted space, and Luz’s mind wandered, stumbling back across the highways and the hills and through the nighttime sky to the farmland and those trees and that cliff face.

  A woman shuffled to the lectern to commence the first reading. She spoke in a monotone voice, never pausing for emphasis or pace, but something about the words gathered Luz in. The woman read the epistle of Santiago straight through:

  “Be doers of the word and not merely listeners who only deceive themselves. If any are listeners and not doers they are like those who look at themselves in a mirror and upon going away immediately forget who and what they are . . .”

  Luz’s breath shortened. The muscles in her legs twitched. When she had seen herself in the mirror, finally, in the Monclova barracks room, her face stared back from some ancient place. How many people had told her who she was and what she must do and how she must live? All the thoughts and words of others. Panic clogged her lungs, and the woman continued:

  “But those who look into the perfect law and persevere—being not listeners who forget but rather doers who act—they will be blessed in their doing.”

  Luz ripped her hand from Jonah’s and got up and ran to the doors, and the last thing she heard were words concerning bridled tongues and self-deceived hearts.

  6

  JONAH SAT THERE IN A STUPOR WATCHING HER EXIT THE CHURCH before he got up to follow.

  She was outside, hunched with her hands on her knees. The way he’d seen her at the end of a race. Worn down, nothing left. He approached timidly, and hated his fear.

  Slowly she straightened. She drew a deep breath and exha
led as she collapsed to sit on the church steps. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

  “Was it something in that reading?” Jonah sat next to her. “I couldn’t understand the Spanish . . .”

  Luz shook her head, and Jonah waited for more but the wordless space between them hardened. He still needed to talk to her about his intentions to make a life together in New Orleans, but he’d never felt so nervous around her. A cab smoked in the street. Sun-blasted faces passed, eyes focused only on the bricks ahead of their feet. Jonah didn’t know what to do with his hands and he crossed his arms and then uncrossed them and gripped the hard edge of the stone step beneath him.

  “I’m just,” Luz began, and relief leaped inside Jonah. He found himself leaning toward her, grateful for whatever she was going to say. “I’m just—” She paused again and shivered. She seemed like she was fighting something.

  “It’s okay,” Jonah tried. “It’s okay, Luz.”

  “Something bad happened to me,” she said.

  The words were sudden. She glanced at Jonah and her eyes were red and ringed with water, and she looked quickly away.

  “When I was on my way back. That’s why it took me so long to get here.”

  “What happened?” His windpipe constricted with the dread that sails ahead of tragic news. “What do you mean?”

  She crossed her arms on her knees and pressed her forehead against them. “I’m all right now.” She lifted her face. “Please, Jonah. You need to know that. I’m all right.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  She shook her head and reached, taking his hands. And he looked down at them and saw again her healing fingertips and the yellow-purple bruising around her wrists and then he met her eyes, trying desperately not to cry himself, though he had nothing to contend with yet but his own imagination and the suggestion that the woman he loved had been wounded.

  “My cab from the airport,” Luz said, “got caught in a shoot-out.”

  “Jesus, Luz,” Jonah whispered. “Like a drug war thing?”

  Luz nodded. “The car wrecked. Really bad.”

  “The miscarriage, is that when . . . ?”

  “Later. But maybe. I don’t know.”

  Jonah waited.

  “I saw—” she said, closing her eyes as if she was still seeing whatever it was.

  She was holding her breath, it seemed. She exhaled slowly. And again. She didn’t finish describing what she had seen. She gripped Jonah’s hands and he felt her rough fingers sliding over his palms. She opened her eyes.

  “Some men, they took me. They tied me up.”

  All the world drained away from them, all sound and sensation, where they sat on the steps.

  “I’m okay,” Luz said. “All right?”

  “Okay,” Jonah heard himself.

  “They didn’t do anything to me. Not that, you know? They wanted to sell me to somebody, I think. They locked me in a shed.”

  “Christ.”

  “I got away,” she told him. “I ran.” A long, granite silence ensued. There was more there, Jonah could tell, much more there, but finally she said, “The military found me.”

  Luz let go of his hands and rubbed her palms on her thighs and sighed. She looked off up the hill, away from Jonah. He thought she started to say something more, but her voice clotted. She wasn’t looking at him.

  “Luz?”

  “I don’t know how to explain the rest,” she said, turning toward him.

  “What do you mean?”

  She shook her head, lowered her eyes.

  “It’s fine,” Jonah said, scooting nearer and putting his arm around her. He thought she meant that she didn’t know how to tell him what it all felt like, how it had changed her. He wanted her to know that he was with her, that he could help her bear her pain, somehow. “I understand,” he said. He knew it must be hard for her to talk about because it was hard to listen to, as well. “I do.”

  Luz leaned into him.

  “I’m so sorry, Luz.”

  She sniffed. He felt her ribs rise and fall. They sat for a long time.

  When the church doors opened behind them, Luz stood as though she’d been startled. Parishioners began to exit, and Jonah got up and followed Luz down the steps. He wanted to pursue the conversation, but what to say?

  Luz halted and Jonah stopped alongside her.

  “Can I show you something special?”

  “Okay,” Jonah said. “I’d like that.”

  They passed her grandmother’s building and climbed the street. Jonah glanced over his shoulder, where the steep grade sank away, offering the illusion that the city existed on the summit of some collisional world. Luz led them into a park, a shaded trail switchbacking through the trees. All quiet. Not even the thrum of insects.

  “I thought I’d forgotten the way,” Luz said.

  Jonah noted that her tone had changed. There was something breathless in it, something excited. It was a comfort, a sense of healing.

  “Remember when we went out to the levee the first time?” Luz asked him.

  “Yes.”

  “You said your family used to go out there, that your mother took you.”

  “Yeah.”

  “This place where we’re going. It’s like that. Mamá took me here, when I was little.”

  The path climbed a hill and the trees fell away and the trail narrowed to a scratch through the dry grass. This, Jonah realized, is it. This was the truth he’d sought in the dark of his bedroom with Luz, and this was what he’d searched for in San Antonio. He had come to Mexico to find this. This was what they needed between them. This would carry them together into the future.

  7

  THEY CRESTED THE HILL, BOY AND GIRL HAND IN HAND. THOUSANDS of monarch butterflies orbited the solitary, enormous oak. More blanketed the tree in a shivering veil. She closed her eyes against everything, both reality and memory, and stepped forward into the delicate cloud, extending her arms with care. And the boy understood—it would be a crime against something unseen to move about too heedlessly. He joined her, closing his own eyes, and eased into this gentle and inborn sway of the world. In this moment they could brush together against the vermiculated tapestry woven by every living thing, boundless when encountered by a single human mind. The thread of each life approached every other infinitely, so that they seemed to touch or intersect but never did, and yet still they made one thing. Of the shape it was in the beginning, the size it will always be.

  XIII

  . . . the border will always be there.

  1

  THEY HAD A GOOD NIGHT, WALKING THE CITY. JONAH KISSED Luz and she kissed him back, there on the street against the brick facade of a building. He felt her opening to it. He felt his hopes coming into focus. He determined that what Luz had been through—the ordeal with the men and the loss of their baby—shouldn’t change what he hoped for, shouldn’t alter his design. He wouldn’t let it. They kissed against the brick until she had to pull away, smiling, saying, Come on, and pulling him toward the apartment. Not here, not yet, she seemed to say, but there will be time. There will, Jonah believed.

  2

  THE NEXT MORNING JONAH WALKED THROUGH THE APARTMENT, glass of water and toothbrush in hand. He entered the bathroom. He was rehearsing in his head, considering how he would frame his plan to Luz, when something small and dark on the tile caught his eye and the words flew from his mind. It was a scorpion, little and brown but scary looking—he’d never seen one before. He chucked the water from his glass into the sink, and, moving quickly, he dropped the glass over the scorpion and trapped it. The thing’s legs flailed in a blur as it circled and tried to climb. Jonah watched its stinger striking harmlessly against the glass. He called for Luz, and she came running with the urgency in his voice. He was holding the glass down and saying, Look! She stopped in the doorway. Then she came forward and knocked his hand away and lifted the glass. The scorpion shot out, and Jonah yelped, leaping away. The arachnid bolted behind the toilet and disapp
eared. Jonah looked at Luz, but she had already turned and walked out.

  3

  THAT AFTERNOON, HER GRANDMOTHER ASKED THEM TO DO something and handed Luz money, and Jonah followed her out. Luz explained that they needed to pick up something from the carnicería, the butcher shop. They walked over the cobblestone in silence, and Jonah couldn’t figure out what he’d done wrong, what had happened, with the scorpion. Luz didn’t talk as she trudged ahead. Please, Jonah thought.

  They turned a corner, and the sounds of a parade entered the street. It was led by a flatbed truck crawling down the hill, and the speakers latched to the roof of the cab blared music and cracked and hissed. Wooden slats fenced in the bed, where people stood, waving and dancing. Some of them held cardboard posters, portraits of a smiling woman, over their heads. A small mob danced alongside the truck, and children ran after it, playing some kind of game in which they ran forward and slapped the bumper and fell back. A man in the bed hung over the tailgate and launched bottle rockets from a glass bottle. The rockets screeched and popped in white puffs among the cable lines tangled over the street. People came out onto their roofs or balconies or front steps to watch. A stray dog howled and flinched.

  Jonah and Luz backed against a building. The marchers chanted, punching the air with emphasis. Jonah spied the woman from the posters standing in the truck bed. She braced herself with one hand atop the cab and shouted something into a megaphone she held with the other. The music, the chanting, the shouting, the bottle rockets. Jonah knuckled his ear and grinned at Luz as the parade grated past.

  “She’s campaigning for mayor,” Luz shouted.

  Jonah tasted the acrid smoke. “Wild.”

  The parade turned off the street and the music broke up. A dim final pop and a drifting wisp. The need to reach for something good swelled in Jonah’s belly.

  “Hey,” he said, “remember Zulu? When Colby caught the coconut?”