The Infinite

by Nicholas Mainieri

  4

  SHE STAYED A DAY IN ZACATECAS. SHE WAS SITTING IN A CAFÉ having an espresso when shots rang out in the street. They were loud and close enough, through the open-air front of the shop. Single reports, pistols. A few people whimpered in the café, and the waitress ducked behind the pastry counter. Minutes later, Luz placed pesos on the counter and left. In the street there was no sign of violence at all. A motorbike fumed through the intersection.

  5

  TWO DAYS LATER SHE WAS IN THE CITY OF GUANAJUATO, STATE of Guanajuato. The city was built on the slopes of opposing hills. It was beautiful. Not just another place, Luz felt, but one to really look at. Impressive cathedrals. Old musicians played guitars on corners where the streets bent and turned at ridiculous angles and couldn’t accommodate vehicles. She bought a container of sliced mango and wandered, pausing to read the signs denoting the city’s history. She stopped at the hulking square Alhóndiga, and considered the corner once festooned with the head of a man also named Hidalgo. She followed a hiking trail out of town to an abandoned antique mine. This city had been Spain’s cradle of silver. The entrance to the mine gaped in the ground. A guide with a group of Canadian tourists offered to take her a kilometer down the lightless column for only twenty pesos, but she refused the offer. What she wished for was the knife; she wished she could hurl it back, send it clattering down the mine shaft to the place of its birth as though this might undo something. Fall, slashing, to sever the knot where all borders are anchored.

  6

  IT RAINED FOR FOUR DAYS AND FOUR NIGHTS STRAIGHT. HER wrist and her ankle had begun to feel better. The cut on her triceps itched as it healed, and she washed it each morning and evening. During the deluge she holed up in a youth hostel while the Guanajuato streets flooded. She met a European traveler, a young German named Lukas. A mop of curly sun-bleached hair. He spoke some English. He claimed to be an artist. Lukas wanted to know a lot about her, but she deflected the questions and asked about him. He was overly willing to discuss himself. He was on a pilgrimage to some bizarre sculpture garden in the jungle. He hated his family, and he had been in Mexico for weeks. He rolled joints and continually offered her tokes, though she always declined. He hadn’t been to the art installation in the jungle yet and he couldn’t say when he’d finally get there, but he claimed it was near enough. After the rain passed, Luz split a cab ride with him, east to San Miguel de Allende.

  7

  THE DRIVER POINTED OUT A LOW SKY-BLUE LAKE ON THE WAY in. “It is only there when it rains.”

  Luz translated for Lukas and watched the city assemble in the hills. Dusty red structures, some buildings she could identify as churches from the highway.

  Lukas had the address for another hostel. The cab dropped them in a working-class barrio, on a street named for a military school. The neighborhood contained a chapel, a few discreet liquor stores, a small school. Roosters crowed in the morning. Lukas slept all day in the hostel room—a small space with sets of bunk beds in which two American college students were also staying. Luz came and went through the hostel’s iron door. She read placards in the jardín at the center of town. Mexican independence had grown from here. There were a lot of foreigners in the city. People who sat outside the restaurants and conversed in Spanish, English, French, Italian. Artists sat in the jardín with canvases and easels, painting the red stone cathedral. She told Lukas about them, but she never saw him trying to create any art himself. He was a listener, not a doer.

  One night she accompanied Lukas to a bar full of hard looks. Not another woman in the place. Poor erotic paintings hung on the walls. Ratty couches. Men wreathed in cigarette smoke. She heard the malevolent whispers around them, and she worried more for the abrasive blond foreigner than for herself. Lukas drank shots of tequila and refused to get up until Luz attempted to leave alone.

  They walked through the quiet city. The streets were steep, cobblestone. Channeled with rain gutters. It reminded her of Las Monarcas. She thought about her grandmother and she thought about her father.

  A series of dim pops punctured the stillness. Firecrackers somewhere in the barrio. Lukas, however, thought they were gunshots. He wanted them to be, it seemed.

  “I am glad,” Lukas slurred, “that I see this country before it all goes to fucking shit.”

  Luz felt like hitting the fool, but she tamped down the urge. She thought about Jonah and felt very alone.

  8

  SHE WOKE IN THE PITCH DARK, ON THE BOTTOM BUNK AGAINST the hostel wall. Someone was hunched over her in the compressed space, touching her breasts. Warm, rank breath. She was in the shed again, heard the voice in the dark, her arms were heavy and bound behind her. No. She reached and grabbed the groping arms and flung them away. Lukas said, “Baby, baby,” and his pale hands floated out of the shadow.

  She grabbed him by the bicep and threw her weight, and Lukas banged into the concrete wall, grunting. She rolled out of the bed.

  “Hey—”

  She hissed at him in Spanish: “I could have killed you.”

  “Luz, hey.”

  She needed to get away, to keep on the move. She’d kept her clothes packed, and she knew where the bag was in the dark. She slipped on her sneakers and left the hostel. She started jogging on the damp cobblestone. Her ghost runner kept pace.

  9

  OUT OF THE SIERRA, INTO THE TROPICS. STATE OF VERACRUZ. She had a backpack now, containing several changes of clothes, a toothbrush, a stick of deodorant, and some travel-sized soaps and shampoos, and she shouldered her pack and disembarked from the bus into a beachside community that seemed as right a place as any other. Night climbed from the east on the shoulders of rain clouds. She was thinking of Jonah, and she bought a postcard from a stand in a little snack shop. She wanted him to know she was all right, and she wanted to believe he could hold this postcard from her in his hands and be all right, too.

  Luz received directions to the nearest youth hostel from the shop’s cashier, but first she wanted to see the Gulf. She had never seen the sea before. The air smelled like a storm and saltwater. Orbs of humidity gathered to the sodium-vapor lamps. There were no stars, no moon. The wall of cloud silently pulsed with lightning, teasing out its depths. She crossed the final street and took off her sneakers and squeezed the cool sand beneath her toes. She could just begin to see the white spit of foam in the black gulf when torrential rain began to fall.

  Luz ran to shelter beneath a wooden gazebo. She sat at the picnic table beneath it and watched the storm. Luz had seen the news, knew what was happening off the Louisiana coast. Thinking about Louisiana made her think of her father. She hoped he was okay. She hoped he was finding his way. The cardboard and glass detritus of people’s lunches lay scattered across the picnic table, and Luz reached and spun an empty pint of whiskey, watched it come to rest parallel to the shoreline, pointing south.

  10

  IN THE MORNING, THERE WERE EGGS AND COFFEE IN THE HOSTEL’S kitchen. The owner of the place, a youngish man who lived in an upstairs apartment, promised to mail Luz’s postcard for her. He nodded to her drawing on the card as she handed it to him.

  “¿Una mariposa?” he asked.

  “La mariposa monarca,” Luz told him with a shrug, “en su jornada.”

  The young man nodded with appreciation. He wished Luz well on her own journey. She thanked him and left the hostel. The day was bright and clear.

  She made her way back to the beach to see it in the light. She took off her sneakers and tied the laces together and hung them from one of her backpack straps. The sand was white and glaring and soft underfoot. Warmth that spread from her soles up through her body. Small waves rolled in. There were distant container ships and tankers. Nearer were the fishing vessels and party barges for vacationing tourists. One Jet Ski chased another, tossing tall spumes of water. There were families on the beach, children screaming with glee. Sunbathers and couples walking hand in hand. Near the water, two young girls—Luz guessed they were sisters—held a footrace.
Their brown legs churned, and the spray of water and sand sparkled as they went. Somewhere, dance music beat from a stereo, and everybody everywhere was going on with their lives. It was a beautiful day. From a certain vantage point the day existed by itself, independent of the days before and not yet leaning toward the days to come, and Luz saw this and made herself at home in it, now and now and now again in the spaces between her breaths.

  Luz walked to the damp sand where the water slid ashore and rushed away. She followed the shoreline south. She shielded her eyes and watched the families where they kicked footballs or dozed in the sun or molded sand castles. She came upon the two young girls who had been racing. They were breathing with their hands on their knees, and now they were lining up to race again. They were deeply tanned and shining in their bathing suits, their black hair braided into long pigtails. They waved to Luz and called to her to race against them, laughing, not thinking she would. Then they were off and Luz leaped to run alongside, and the girls seemed both pleased and surprised, not saying anything but grinning and pushing themselves all the harder. They were running for no reason other than the pleasure of it. Luz’s backpack bounced and she loved the burning in her calves as her feet recycled through the wet sand. She kept her pace close to that of the laughing sisters, falling ahead, falling behind, pulling even and making a race of it. There were no lanes here—just the open beach stretching on, knitted with the continual surge of the sea, relentless even as it was dependable. Luz kept running, pulling past the sisters as they tired and slowed and shouted to her. Luz spun and backpedaled and waved to them where they stood, smiling and waving after her. Luz spun forward, focusing on the way her hamstrings stretched, the way the muscles in her lower back loosened. She settled into a rhythm. She thought she could keep it up for a good long while. She reached to find her ghost runner, and it was only now that she realized he was not there.

  EPILOGUE

  MOSES HIDALGO TOOK HIS TALL BOY OUT TO THE FRONT STEPS and sat, resting his guitar on his knee. He lifted the can and sipped, cold and good. Rodrigo had been the only one to get a job that day, and he’d kindly purchased the evening’s six-pack. The sun fell behind the overpass, funneling the light up the street. Moses closed his eyes against it and played, striking the nickel strings with calloused fingertips and feeling the notes resound in the body of the guitar. He hit the strings harder, playing louder in order to drown out the voice that sang, rising in his skull. The sinking sun warmed through his eyelids.

  “Yo,” said a voice.

  Moses kept playing.

  “Yo.”

  Moses didn’t stop, but he squinted at the speaker. Nothing but a shadow with the sun at his back.

  “Where the girl?”

  Moses plucked a last note, rested his palm on the strings so that nothing lingered.

  “Where yo’ girl at, the one who sings?”

  Moses stared at the haloed man for a moment, then sipped his beer.

  “Speak English, bruh?”

  Moses shrugged and started to play again. The shadow marched away, toward the overpass. Moses stopped after another bar. He sat for a breath. He rose and went inside, screen clacking behind him. Rodrigo sat on the futon, watching the news in a language he couldn’t understand.

  Gripping the guitar by the neck, Moses swung it like an ax into the wall. The body splintered. The strings groaned, whipping out of whack. He swung it again, smashing the guitar to pieces. Wreckage fell and scattered.

  Divots in the drywall. Moses’s heart rattled. He glanced at Rodrigo, and his friend’s eyes swiveled back to the television.

  THE IRON BARS OF THE FENCE OUTSIDE THE HOME IMPROVEMENT center’s parking lot pressed through Moses’s wet shirt where he sat against them. Next to him, Rodrigo snoozed in the heat, cap over his eyes. Moses watched a stray dog panting in the shade of a palm out on the neutral ground between lanes. He feared that it might run into traffic. Push the thought away. No room for it here in the heat, the unimpeded sun. The day wore on. No work. Men spoke into prepaid cell phones or drew in the dirt with sticks or sat in silence, praying, perhaps. A righteous Honduran paced and shouted to them in Spanish as he read from the Bible.

  Moses had lived all over northeastern Mexico—Nuevo Laredo, Reynosa, and Matamoros, for a little while. He met his wife, Esperanza, at a dance in Piedras Negras, and after they were married he took her home to Las Monarcas and they moved into his mother’s house. By the time he left for El Norte it had become necessary, and he did it with a full heart because it was for Esperanza and it was for their young daughter. Moses argued with his personal torment—I loved them. I loved you, Esperanza, I know I did.

  He closed his eyes and faced the sun. Too much time. The border between their hearts had turned his to stone, and all these years later he had trouble recalling Esperanza’s face. Luz looked like her, though, and reminded him, but now Luz was gone.

  He couldn’t remember the feeling of right and well-intentioned purpose with which he had first left Mexico. Acknowledging this failure—this shortcoming that he had foreseen and taken futile measures to avoid—made him feel weak. The only solace to be found, if one could call it such, came in pushing forward, numbing his mind, working. Yet the truth built inside him all the while. You can rebuild a place, but that does not mean it becomes your home.

  He had lived in Arizona and in Texas. For a month he had lived in Oklahoma, but nobody knew of that save himself because he had done some things there—after Esperanza died—that he would never be proud of. He went back to Texas then, and eventually came to Louisiana with Luz. But more than by location, he saw his past categorized into periods: with his family, without his family; with people he knew, without. And dreaming back through his life, he saw that his existence had merely been those different periods smashed up against one another. And so who was he, this anchorless being? He couldn’t even say he knew himself.

  THEY WERE UPTOWN, CLEANING OUT AN OVERGROWN BACKYARD. It took all day. They ripped vines from trellises, sprayed against wasps. They uprooted hackberry saplings and trimmed dead palm fronds. It felt like the height of summer, though the calendar still read April, and in the afternoon the lady who owned the house brought them glasses of iced tea. It was an unusual occurrence. Rodrigo told Moses to thank her in English, tell her how he appreciated it, and Moses did. At the end of the day the lady paid them better than Moses had expected, and so even though this had been their only job of the week they ducked into a po’boy shop a block down the street to spend their few extra dollars.

  The place wasn’t cool, but the respite from the sun was nice. They sat at the bar and ordered draft beers and perused the paper menus. A small television hanging in the murk over the bar flashed an aerial image of an oil rig engulfed in flame. The vantage rotated, revealing other craft tossing ineffective streams of water into the fire. Moses had watched this on the news every night for the past week. The rig had already sunk, but the news continued to show this image.

  Rodrigo trailed a finger over the menu. “Where are the fried oysters?”

  Moses reached and tapped the oyster po’boy. On both of their menus, the oyster price had been crossed out by hand and rewritten as ten dollars more expensive.

  The bartender, a young woman with red hair and freckles, noticed where they were looking. “People are worried about the oyster beds with the oil, ya know?”

  Moses frowned. Rodrigo whispered for an explanation after she had moved on. They both ultimately ordered fried catfish. The bartender set to wiping the bar top, and they sipped their beers and watched the television.

  Rodrigo began: “Has she—”

  Moses cut him off. “She hasn’t called. My mother has not heard from her, either.”

  The screen flashed another aerial shot, a nacreous slick on the Gulf’s surface. Moses knew what the coming weeks would bring: he remembered beaches drowned in tar, asphyxiated dolphins washed ashore, docked fishing boats, a crippled seafood industry. He had been a young man when the Ixtoc I well
blew. Thirty-one years ago. He’d been seventeen or eighteen. A few years before he’d begin making trips to El Norte, and long before he’d see Esperanza dancing in Piedras Negras. After the oil spill, he had traveled to the state of Tamaulipas with his own father, worked on crews, slogged through fuming sweeps of sludge. His nose going stuffy like it was plugged with oil. A feeling that wouldn’t wash from his skin for days. He remembered all of it.

  Next to him, Rodrigo shook his head, frowned at the television.

  “If the oil comes ashore,” Moses said, “there will be work.”

  Rodrigo already knew it.

  “Do you want that?” It was the young bartender. She asked it in poor Spanish. She dropped the rag on the bar and crossed her arms. Moses was momentarily taken aback. “I study Spanish in school,” she said in English. “You want oil to wash up in our wetlands? Is that right?”

  Moses replied in Spanish, a flinty edge to his voice. “It will happen with or without my blessing. I have seen it before and I see it again now. But if my wishes truly matter to you, then let me say I hope for work only. It is just a shame that when there is work, it often means something terrible has happened. I never forget that, if it matters.”

  She stared at him. He had gone too fast, and she didn’t comprehend. Rodrigo glanced around the room, as if somebody else in the restaurant might have understood.

  Moses spoke again to the young bartender. This time in English. “I am sorry,” he said, attempting a smile. “No. I do not hope for oil to come ashore.”