The Infinite

by Nicholas Mainieri

  A slight smile. “I remember that.”

  “Colby was pretty proud of himself.”

  “Feels like a long time ago.”

  The street lay deserted now, quiet like there’d never been a parade. “I dunno,” Jonah said. “It was only, like, two months ago. No, not even.”

  Luz shrugged. “Feels like a long time to me.” She gestured in the direction of the departed campaign parade. “She was saying the guy she’s running against is connected to the CDG.”

  Jonah had heard that before, CDG. It took him a moment to remember. The graduate student who gave him the ride. The initials meant a drug cartel.

  Luz turned and started up the sidewalk. “She’ll be in trouble, talking like that.”

  Jonah watched her pull away from him. He was stunned by her flat voice, by the dispassionate way she had delivered such a grave declaration.

  He marched after her, uphill, working hard to catch up.

  4

  HER GRANDMOTHER STARTED DINNER WHILE THEY SAT IN THE living room. Luz seemed withdrawn, no longer the person who had opened up to him. He was furious for her, for what had happened to her. But it was an impotent fury, anchored with a deep and abiding sadness. He watched her chew on her lip, watched her think. He wanted to understand. Let me try. He wanted to scream it.

  Luz stood up and said she was going for a jog. “I need to burn some energy. I’m jumpy.”

  “I’ll join you,” Jonah said.

  “No. That’s all right.”

  “I mean I want to,” he said. The needy edge to his own voice pissed him off.

  “I’d better go alone. Just to think about some things.”

  “Sure,” Jonah said. “Sure.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right,” Jonah answered. The words were automatic. He didn’t feel all right about anything. Luz gave him a quick hug, and she said something to her grandmother and left.

  Jonah wandered into the kitchen. Luz’s grandmother raised her eyes from the onions on the cutting board and arched an eyebrow.

  “Can I help?” He went through a chopping charade.

  “No,” she answered, smiling.

  He lingered, listening to the blade strike the board. Then he said he was going to go for a walk as well. Her grandmother looked at him, and he made a walking motion with his fingers. She nodded and waved, and he left, passing through the courtyard into the street. He looked one way and then the other, but he didn’t see her anywhere.

  He entered the park, trudged up the path. The sun fell among the slopes to the west. He reached the hilltop. There was the massive oak. It took him a moment, however, to realize that almost all the monarchs had gone, and it took him another moment to realize where they’d gone to: their forms lay across the hilltop, tangled in the grass or scoured by the sand or blustered up against the trunk of the tree, crammed between the roots. Lone monarchs here and there still rose, but they seemed so much frailer on their own, winging jerkily above the rest of their expired migration. They weren’t long for the journey themselves.

  Jonah squatted and examined the dead things all around him. Slivers missing from wings like panels punched from stained-glass windows. With a breeze, the dead monarchs tilted and settled. Jonah imagined that this was a place where the journey ran aground, where a fraction of the larger migration corralled itself, disoriented or mistaken in some way. Misled by the shape of the oak or the taste of the air, and by the time the monarchs realized this was not the place they had thought it to be, it was too late. Year after year, he imagined, they arrived and they circled and they never left.

  Jonah brushed a wing with a fingertip.

  The dry thing broke apart into weightless flakes, like a dead leaf.

  5

  THE EVENING DARKENED, AND LUZ JOGGED CAREFULLY ALONG the steep Las Monarcas streets. She slowed her pace, feeling the stress of the decline in her shins. She was good and warm, sweating and breathing hard. Her head cleared. Some perspective wasn’t far off, and the events of the past few days settled into their proper context.

  She remembered the late nights spent washing dishes in the chrome kitchen of that New Orleans restaurant. The scalding water and the sauces crusted to the plates. And she remembered how Jonah would wait for her outside the service entrance. A smile, a laugh, a pair of arms. She remembered it and knew it had been real. But she could not summon the way it had felt. She could not summon the good feelings as she could summon past sorrows and fears. Those she could call forth. She could sink into despair. Cold breath in her lungs, a prickling in her fingertips, a frightening voice in the darkness. It was as if the good moments had happened to a person who no longer existed. How could she reconcile the fact that good things had indeed happened with the fact that there was no longer any evidence of them? Maybe Jonah, here in Las Monarcas, was the evidence of those good times. Then again, if she couldn’t react in the same way to his presence as she believed she once had . . . But that, she knew, was no failing of his. And so she slowed when the street leveled out at the town bus terminal. She leaned against the wall, stretched her calves. She shook her legs out and let her breath slow before she went inside.

  It was a small place full of Formica chairs. The windows were smudged. Luz took a pamphlet from the ticket counter and looked at the destination and fare charts. The ticket agent, a bored young man with acne-scarred cheeks, watched her. There was no one else in line and he didn’t say anything to try to hustle her along. She turned. A pay phone, its black receiver shining with grease, was bolted to the cinder-block wall.

  6

  WHEN LUZ RETURNED TO HER GRANDMOTHER’S, JONAH WAS waiting in the wash of a streetlamp, sitting against the wall adjacent to the gate. He got to his feet when he saw her.

  “Hey,” he said. He put his hands in his pockets. “I went to the hill again.”

  He didn’t have to say it because Luz remembered. “It happens every year,” she told him. “It’s like they get lost here.” And that was part of the problem—when it came to God’s vengeance and its dispersal, the worst were spared but the simply lost were not.

  Jonah bounced on the balls of his feet, and Luz sensed the words piling up. She wanted to tell him that she had killed a man, wanted to describe the wet slap of the rock against his eye, the final sound of it. She needed Jonah to understand that she had orchestrated that finality, and for that knowledge to help explain, in turn, the gathering distance between them. But she didn’t think he’d be able to understand—she didn’t think anybody ever would—and so what she said instead was, “One day we’ll look back, I think, and see that all this made us who we are.”

  He sighed. “I love you.”

  “I know.” And Luz still loved him, too—she thought she always would—but not in the sense that he meant or wanted. Her love had become a kind of fossilized thing. She would never be able to deny the love’s existence. She would never wish to deny it. But it was no longer something she felt capable of acting upon.

  “I still want you to come back to New Orleans with me,” Jonah said. “I want to take care of you. I want to build a life with you.”

  Luz averted her eyes because there were no tears in them.

  “We can make it work. I’m serious, Luz.”

  “I believe you.”

  “But you don’t think I can.”

  “It’s not that,” Luz said. She remembered well Jonah’s despair the evening they’d been robbed at gunpoint in the French Quarter. She knew that the losses in Jonah’s life made him feel incapable, but he wasn’t that. “I’ve never believed you were helpless, Jonás.”

  “Let me prove it. Come back with me. Or let me bring you back soon.”

  “It’s not about that, either,” Luz said. She met his look, then cast her eyes up the quiet street. Her ghost runner had arrived, heavy and cold, and the soles of her feet began to itch. Luz thought through their origins, through their histories. As she had done times before, imagining their love in older, improbable eras. T
he millions of things that had to happen over the millennia just to bring them together for a little while in New Orleans. It was good fortune, and she was grateful for it. She really was. But that period was at an end, and she could not separate them each from the places they came from or the places they had yet to go. “I’m a runner,” she said. “I think I’m always going to be.”

  “It doesn’t have to be that hopeless,” Jonah tried.

  “Hopeless isn’t the right word for it.” Luz had been pregnant, and the landscape that would have been her future had formed and forced itself to her feet, and she had prepared herself for the long journey because there was nothing else to do. But now that it was over, it was as if that landscape had eroded. It was still there, only unrecognizable.

  She had placed her hand over her stomach; she let it fall back to her side. There were no more cramps. There was no physical reminder left at all.

  “We can make something good happen. I’m going to go into the army—”

  “Oh, Jonás,” Luz said, hearing her voice rise in spite of herself, “you don’t want to join the army. I know you don’t. And you don’t need to, now.”

  “Well, okay, I mean—maybe now there’s just no hurry. I can start working on McBee Auto, I’ll get it working . . . We can go back to how things were.”

  “I don’t want to go back,” Luz said. “There’s no going back for me, Jonah, that’s what I’m telling you.”

  “Forward, then!” Jonah cried. “We used to talk about it. I know you dreamed about it, too. I’ll reopen the shop—damn it, you made me start thinking I could!”

  “You still should,” Luz said. “But you don’t need me to do it.”

  “Then what’s the fucking point, Luz?”

  “Think of your mother, Jonah. Your father. Your brother. Speak to them. Do it for them. Do it for yourself. Build the life you want.”

  “You are part of the life I want,” he answered.

  Luz was sorry. More sorry than she’d ever been. Sorrier than when she didn’t give the dying man in the desert her water. Sorrier than when she’d brought Felipo home, beaten and battered, to his grandmother and brother. But perhaps it was merely the same old guilt. The same guilt regenerating into new spaces and new regrets. Here was Jonah, standing before her in Las Monarcas, waiting for her to speak.

  Luz said: “I can’t go with you. Not anymore. I’m sorry I can’t explain. I do love you, Jonah. I’m glad I know you. I’m glad I met you. But I don’t belong in New Orleans.”

  “Luz,” Jonah said, “you can’t want to stay here, not after what’s happened.”

  “That’s what I’m saying, Jonah. I don’t even belong here anymore. I don’t know where I belong. I’m sorry. I don’t know what else to say.”

  “You told me I was responsible,” Jonah said, teeth clenched. “Remember?”

  “I meant it when I said it.”

  He looked at her. “What were you saying to me that day out in the street, in Spanish, when you were saying good-bye?”

  “I was telling you to forget about me.”

  “No, you weren’t. That’s not true.”

  And it wasn’t true. But they were where they were, now and only now. What she had said to him then didn’t matter. It was better for him to not even know.

  “Forgive me, Jonah.” And she went in through the gate.

  7

  HE THOUGHT HE WOULDN’T BE ABLE TO SLEEP, BUT HE DID eventually. He woke up on the couch, early in the morning, and he could hear her grandmother speaking loudly and rapidly from down the hall. He got up. Luz’s bedroom door was open. The old woman was in there, talking to the sky, shaking a handwritten note she clenched in her fist. There was another piece of paper folded on the bed with his name written on it, and more words written on the inside. Luz had left in the night.

  8

  Jonah—I will always care for you. I’m sorry. It isn’t your fault. We are like our countries, you and me. It doesn’t matter how close we are to each other, the border will always be there. I don’t know what I’m looking for. I don’t even know where to find it. But I’ve got to keep going. I will let you know that I’m okay. Promise me you’ll keep going, too.

  —Luz

  XIV

  . . . sometimes you come back with less.

  1

  HE READ THE LETTER AGAIN AND AGAIN. HE REFOLDED THE note and put it in his pocket. Her grandmother was sitting in the living room, slumped, hands clasped against her breastbone as if she was praying. The look on her face said she blamed herself. She said something in Spanish, her tone suggesting she wasn’t completely talking to Jonah.

  “Thanks for letting me stay,” Jonah tried. “I don’t get what’s going on, either.”

  She looked at him.

  “I wanted to help. I wanted to protect her.” He wouldn’t let himself cry in front of the old woman, but he couldn’t help the words, knowing she couldn’t understand: “But I should know better than to think anyone cares what I want.”

  She couldn’t answer, so she lowered her face and watched her feet.

  “Sorry,” Jonah said. He felt lousy for feeling sorry for himself. He shouldered his bag and drifted to the door. “Adiós,” he tried.

  Luz’s grandmother unclasped her hands and opened a creased palm in farewell.

  2

  HE WALKED ALL MORNING. NO SIGN OF LUZ, THOUGH HE hadn’t held out much hope of seeing her. He found the bus terminal by the afternoon. It sat on a cracked concrete patch at the edge of town. After some difficult discourse with the ticket agent he handed over most of his dollars. Then he sat and waited, numb. He thought: This is the end of it. An utterly listless feeling, both spiritual and physical. How the hell was he going to get home once he reached the border? He supposed he could call Dex, but he reflected on his brother’s intimations that this was a fool’s quest and he dreaded it. Jonah hated that he had failed. He hated that Dex had been right.

  A man in sunglasses with mirror lenses drove the bus. He smiled around his toothpick. Nearly every seat was taken. A lot of blank stares. Men with sleeves rolled to biceps. Women with whimpering children. A man had propped his snakeskin boots across the aisle, and Jonah waited for him to put his feet down so he could pass. The bus lurched and he stumbled, but he found a seat near the back. With his backpack on his lap, he stared out the window, sinking into himself.

  The tangled sheets of his bed. The quiet light falling through the window. Church bells from St. Charles Avenue, clear and beautiful. She stops him with a hand placed on his bare chest and says the border will always be here.

  3

  AFTER THE LATE-NIGHT TRANSFER HE WAS RESTLESS. EXHAUSTED and uncomfortable, a continuous smog of half-lidded stupor.

  He dreamed of a burning car on the roadside. A blackened frame smoldering within. He dreamed of masked men with rifles, and the bus lurching to a stop, and a man coming aboard, his cloaked skull turning and his eyes glaring from the eyeholes. His mouth hung open and his cheeks puffed with breath as he stared at each passenger, one at a time, and Jonah waited for those eyes to fall on him, alone and lost in his seat.

  When Jonah awoke, the bus was silent and frigid with air-conditioning. They sped through the dark. He had a headache, and his dream had frightened him.

  4

  JONAH DISEMBARKED FROM THE BUS IN NUEVO LAREDO, UNABLE to latch onto coherent thoughts. Another passenger approached, an American. He wore a T-shirt and cargo pants and hiking boots. A large camping bag rose above his shoulders. The man had combed brown hair, sunburned skin, and a scruff of beard on his square jaw. He stood in front of Jonah, a grin on his face, and said, “We’re a couple of lucky gringos, dude.”

  Jonah’s skull throbbed as he stared back and waited for the words to mean something.

  “The narco and the bus driver knew each other.” The man shook his head with wonderment. “Can you believe that shit?”

  Jonah blinked. The burning car, the man in the mask. It came to Jonah’s recollection truly as a dr
eam. But he hadn’t dreamed it; he had witnessed it. Past and present shimmered. What was real leached into what was not. The burning car was impressionistic in his mind, and as he tried to grab detail, more slipped away.

  “Christ, we’re lucky sons of bitches.” The man turned and beckoned. “Come on, let’s get a cab together. Better that way.”

  Jonah hardly spoke. The man said he’d been down south, attempting to climb a mountain. He’d had a friend with him who’d become ill and had to fly home. But Jonah’s mind wandered as the cab ferried them to the border. He would have liked to tell Bill about this trip. He imagined that his brother could have told him something that would help, but Bill wasn’t anywhere. A small voice—Luz’s voice, maybe—told him to reach, to pray, but instead he silenced his mind and knuckled his tired eyes.

  The cab stopped in a turnaround near the bridge. Jonah had only three dollars to contribute to the fare, and the climber picked up the rest. When Jonah said thanks, the climber replied: “I know a thing or two about going down old Mexico way. Sometimes you come back with more, sometimes you come back with less. Don’t sweat it.”

  Jonah followed the climber into the foot traffic returning stateside. Fencing rose high overhead, hemming in the pedestrian lane. Jonah trailed his fingers along the chain-link and looked out at the river below. There were the city lights ahead and the city lights behind. It was not as dark as the night he had first crossed, but much of the river lay in interminable shadow. Except for the marker on the bridge, the border was still invisible.

  Jonah wondered about Luz crossing the river as a child. He believed she’d swum across with her uncle, but he didn’t know the whole story. It was a memory she had never fully shared, and the way she guarded it made him too hesitant to ask. Perhaps with that memory resided an answer, something that would now remain forever unknown.