by Aura Xilonen
“That bookstore owner is a real creep, isn’t he?”
“Sometimes . . . Why?”
Aireen doesn’t answer. I figure she’s referring to the way Jefe is always going around ogling any girl who walks past the bookstore windows. All at once, like an obstacular ox, I realize that scruffs and yups are ocularaking Aireen up and down as we go by, but because I’m with her they move on past, pasturing their virility inside their erect pants.
* * *
[“Look at that ass coming this way. Fuck, I’d like to sink my teeth into that, you lubricious loser.”
“What about your missus, Jefe?”
“What about her, you flailing bozo? Love is one thing and desire’s something else entirely! You can screw a filly without kissing her! Of course, what would you know about this stuff—you’re all besmitten with the girl next door.”]
Finally we reach the fucking Mall Center. It’s a shopping center with four thousand five hundred thirty-two LED lamps and stores of all kinds: shops with lacustrine clothing for hypodermic horses; stores with athletic shoes, in the infinitive, autarchical; stores with white sales, black sales, gray, iridescent pink, and daltonic sales; bakeries that are epigastric, gourmet, Italian, Chinese, French; car dealerships with sports cars, Pontiacs, Mercedes, fucking BMWs; shitteriffic Western Union and Adolac; UPS and FedEx carcamating their shoulders to shrug off their boxed customers; a travel agency for the international airport: Traveler Quick, United Airlines, droopy-winged American, Lufthansa and Air France, Aeroméxico and Mexicana. There are two huge signs for banks: City Bank of America and Chester Bank Inc. Along one side of the parking lot are a McDonald’s and a Border Onion, whose reek of grease and French fries smacks us as soon as we enter their viral orbit. It’s Sunday, so lots of cars are coming in and out. More toward the equator, you can see two large movie posters for the 3-D cinemas surrounded by blisters of lights flashing to a psychotronic beat. Aireen and I cross a wide bridge covered with a chocolate-colored wooden pergola; planters and lanterns are built into the floor and beams. When we reach the main doors, they open automatically before us and we enter a space station in another galaxy, beyond Taurus and asteroid B-612. A number of stores—Cartier, Gucci, Tiffany, Louis Vuitton, Lazlwiu—are lined up across from a fountain spitting multicolored water and framed with natural vegetation. There’s a glass waterfall, and under it you can see two large underwater screens projecting the images of fish and coral, dolphins and whales, rocks and diamonds. To the left is a three-level escalator, and a right-hand turn takes you to the three glass elevators that glide up toward the ceiling like transparent eggs. A little farther down is a Starbucks inside a Barnes and Noble, something called Hawaii Cup, and two or three high-end al fresco bars surrounded by palm trees and white decorative stones: Ollin Bear’s, the Alone Dream, and Forever Young, where they play prehistoric music from the fucking nineties. Scattered about are benches occupied by couples sizzled by fatigue or, more eruptically, by love, kissing and hugging each other. There are also chairs where people are reading things on paper or luminous things on their cell phones. Aireen heads straight for the entrance to the Super Center, past the hypoallergenic tables where a bunch of gringo families are sitting strapped to their food, troglodyting anything edible with their eager teeth. Hanging above these tables is a large screen displaying ads for massive corporations: Coke, Apple, Google, Ford. We walk under it and keep walking a long ways till we reach the Super Center, where Aireen grabs a shopping cart with orange trim and we go inside.
“Here, I’ll take that,” I say so she’ll let me push the shopping cart the way I used to for Jefe’s missus when she needed me for a shopping spree.
“It’s weird,” she says after walking a few yards. “I almost always come by myself.” And she lets go of the cart so I can push it.
The superstore has everything, infinitesimal, true: from bat wings to stoppers for plugging up oceanic whirlpools; from elephant trunks to dinosaur teeth. It sells everything from reptilian furniture to clothing in every style and fabric. Toys and pharmaceuticals. Medicines and steaks. Canned and frozen chickens. Bread, hot and cold. Tortillas and chiles. All kinds of fruit. Sausage made from pig, swine, hog, porker. Three million products to meet every need. A person could live for two hundred years off the stuff in the dairy and produce aisles alone. They sell all sorts of alcohol, of every proof and in every kind of champagne, wine, tequila, and vodka. They sell everything from car tires to post-hole diggers for the hanging gardens of Babylon. Tools for building pyramids or carving the stone flowers that crown Precambrian Venuses. Aseptic, with white light methodically illuminating all of the merchandise. Our route takes us through the electronics section first: screens in every size, computers, radios, home theaters, cell phones, video games. The gringos are lording it up with all that technology at their fingertips. You can see it on their faces, in their dreams, how badly they want it, how they’re dying to have a screen as vast as the Colossus of Rhodes so they can feel like they’re alive and their lives aren’t a fucking waste.
* * *
[“Jefe, why did you accept the bet with that Argentine jerkwad when you don’t like soccer and you don’t watch television?”
“I don’t care about the fucking reason for the bet, I’m just interested in the bet itself. I’ve already taken that walking flatulence for so much money that one of these days he’s going to up and have a heart attack—he always bets on fucking losers. Like you, you pint-sized prophet, hoo-hoo-hoo!”]
Aireen picks up a package of tilapia filets and checks the price sticker. I try to calculate how much we’ve got so far with the loaf of bread and a small jar of mayonnaise, but all Father Terán taught me was how to use an abacus. I was slowly learning at the bookstore because Jefe left me on my own and I had to add things up to charge customers and subtract to give them their change.
“Hmm,” Aireen muses to herself, “we’d better take this one instead.” She trades it for a package of sea bass that has fewer filets and I think is cheaper. She tosses it in the cart and we move on to the produce section. She grabs a head of lettuce and a cucumber. Then she gets a clear plastic bag and fills it with six or seven carrots. “We can make a delicious cream soup. We need butter and cheese. You like cream soup, right?”
I nod as I push the cart.
We walk toward the giant refrigerators with creams, butters, yogurts, cheeses with holes, cheeses with green and blue mold, six-string cheese, Camembert, fresco, Gouda, cheddar, Parmesan. Aireen opens the glass door and grabs a quart of transgenic cream and four ounces of preterit cheese. She places them in the cart.
“Hmm. What else? Oh, yeah, wait here. Don’t move.”
Without saying anything else, she starts walking swiftly down the aisle. I don’t know what to do, so I trail after her. I follow a little behind her to the pharmacy section. I see Aireen go up to the counter. I hover a couple of yards back. Aireen says to the clerk, “Clopidogrel 100, please.” The employee looks at her and then goes to a shelf that contains a bunch of different medicines. He examines two or three and comes back with a small green-striped box and puts it on the counter.
“Anything else?”
“Oxitorine 500.”
The employee moves off, and just then I see Aireen open up the box of Clopidogrel, remove one blister pack with pills while leaving the other in the box, and tuck the one she’s removed in the front of her leggings. She turns her head and sees me watching her. She looks into my eyes for what seems like an infinitesimal eternity. Before I demagnetize our peepers, I see she’s trying to smile at me, but I think a sudden wave of shame must inundate her, because her beautiful cheeks go pale around the edges, leaving an iridescent whorl in the center.
The employee returns.
“Sorry, miss, we’re out of Oxitorine. Is there anything else I can help you with?”
Aireen shakes her head.
The employee swipes the m
edicine box over the optical scanner.
“That’ll be five hundred twenty-nine dollars.”
She stands thinking for a moment. I have no idea what. Finally, after a few seconds of inflexible uncertainty, she tries to take the initiative again and regain control of the situation. Her voice trembling and barely audible, she tells the employee:
“I’ll come back later . . . because . . . uh . . . ummm . . . I’m sorry . . .” She turns around, and I see that her eyes have crystallized into a pair of burgeoning droplets. She walks rapidly past me toward the home appliances aisle, leaving the puzzled employee standing there with the plundered box in his hands.
Aireen walks so quickly that I can hardly catch up with her till we’re almost to the line of cash registers.
“Aireen,” I say to her for the first time. My voice sounds weird saying her name. I leave the cart with all our things in front of the registers. “Aireeeen!” I say again more loudly.
“Leave me alone!” she shouts, speeding up and pushing through the line of yups, chickadees, rubes, and gringa dudettes waiting to pay.
A hipster ape sticks his arm out in front of me, blocking my path.
“Are you harassing the young lady?” he says, showing his teeth. Aireen is already heading around the corner toward the exit and disappears from view. I see that several women are staring at me disapprovingly, knitting together their blond, black, blue, violet eyebrows.
“That Spic’s bothering her!” shouts an obese normcore old bag.
“They should kick all the wetback good-for-nothings out of this country,” shouts another ninnified, ballyhooing brouhaha.
I step back with my hands held high, not looking for any more trouble, and try to scuttle away via another cash register. There are so many people, it’s hard for me to be intrepid. I finally break free of the clustered crowd of choleric flesh and move past register 22. I walk quickly, my heart wobbly and my breath steaming. I turn toward the exit and its automatic doors and run straight into a burly security guard who’s clutching Aireen.
“Let’s go see the manager at the pharmacy,” the guard salivates, sulphorous with bile, trying to keep Aireen from reaching the exit.
Without thinking about it, like that, in the blink of an eye, I deliver a fucking epicrastic wallop to his jaw and the officer collapses as if a giant pair of scissors had suddenly severed all the strings keeping him upright. He tumbles down, smitten by my tenebrous clobber. I grab Aireen’s arm and yank her toward the door.
“Run!”
We run, throwing off sparks, oregano seeds, volcanic exhalations, feathery diatribes. At that speed, I figure we’re going to get a horseache pretty soon, the kind that squeezes your chest and makes your liver whinny. Aireen is running almost right next to me—sometimes she falls behind and at others she moves away or moves closer. I sail over a planter full of cacti while she swerves to one side, dodges a few large pots with a flying leap, and then straightens out again. I don’t look back, but I can hear a lot of noise and shouting growing increasingly loud. Aireen and I look like jet-propelled rockets that are breaking the sound barrier, leaving only a murmur between their wings. Up ahead of us I see another security guy getting ready to grab us with his beefy hands. Aireen sees him too and slows down to reduce the impact of the collision—but I speed up, and a couple of yards before I reach his muscular arms, I drop to the ground and slide under him, giving him a massive punch in the stones with my right hand. The disjointed hulk doubles over toward the ground just as Aireen leaps over him. Having been in so many fights, I’ve got a sixth sense for keeping an eye out, as if I had a positronic radar system installed in my noggin. We sprint under the escalators and I catch a glimpse of the fountain of virtual fish. The shouts are still in hot pursuit, now deafeningly loud. I pass under one of the platforms supporting the screens of water. The shouts increase, multiply. Aireen gets ahead of me and in an instant has reached the exit to the trellised bridge. I once read the phrase divide and conquer—I don’t know what that means, whether I should divide them or us, but to give Aireen a chance to escape I start dividing; I turn in the opposite direction from her. I hear the voices turn with me behind my back and remain in pursuit, hot on my heels. I lead them to the other end of the corridor, to the elevators that go down to the underground parking lot. I race down the indigo marble stairs, taking them two or three steps at a time. My breath is strangling me. My heart is leaping and diving like a kite. I reach the first level and charge out toward a line of parked cars. I zigzag between them to cross to the other side and, with a spring of my equine hooves, jump down to the first landing and manage to climb up onto a wall of the parking garage. I keep looping back on myself like a tangle of hair to elude them. I emerge at ground level near the edge of the mall parking lot. The voices palpitate behind me, echoing off my sweat-damp back. I take off running again until I reach the chain-link fence that separates the mall from the outside world. I grab on to it and leap over, scraping my hands and thighs. I crash down on the other side and keep running, crossing the main street, which is busy with cars whizzing in both directions. When I get to the other side, I’m gasping for air; I stop and put my hands on my knees to try to catch my breath and get more oxygen into my lungs. I turn my head to look back at my pursuers so I can figure out how much time I have to get myself together before I’ve got to take off running again, but my surprise swells and stumbles with an enormous clatter. There, with my own eyes, I see there’s nobody on the other side of the chain-link fence. Nobody’s chasing me. I must have lost them at some point. And then anguish drills into me right down into the marrow of my fucking bones: what about Aireen?
* * *
[“Jefe, if you’re an atheist, how come you believe in the Virgin of Guadalupe?”
“You tiresome tenderfoot, how the fuck do you know I’m an atheist and how the fuck do you know I believe in the Virgin of Guadalupe?”
“You take your missus to church every Sunday, don’t you?”
“Going to church doesn’t mean you believe in God, you heretical hieroglyph.”
“So you don’t believe in the Virgin of Guadalupe?”
“I don’t just believe in her, I trust in her.”
“So why are you always going around cursing God?”
“Because the Virgin’s not to blame for the sins of the Father or the Son or the Holy Ghost, you iconoclastic midge.”]
After my breathing eases to a less superlative level, I cautiously approach the other side of the bench near the main entrance to the bridge and chocolate pergola where I last saw Aireen. From my vantage point, I don’t spot any unusual movements at the Mall Center. Cars coming and going, entering through the access points of rising and lowering arms, yups and addos rattling the automatic doors with their movements. Nerds entering and leaving an Apple Store. Vagabond hipsters in their Ferragamo shoes and their rectangular Clark Kent Lacoste glasses. Geeks nesting on fricative technologies. Many, very many glued to their WhatsApp, to their intrauterine networks, as Jefe always used to call Facebook and Twitter.
* * *
[“Boss, I want to buy a smartphone—which one do you recommend?”
“Don’t be a moron, you virtual dumbass; buy a book and read that instead. Smartphones! Ha-hoo-hoo-hoo! What do you want one for, little bastard?”
“Well, to talk.”
“And who the hell are you going to talk to? You’re more alone in this world than your goddamn mother! Go out and sweep the sidewalk, and when you’re done with that, go pick your ass!”]
I don’t see Aireen anywhere. A guard posted in the access booth turns to scan the area where I’m standing. I immediately hide, crouching behind a car, and wait, like a fugitive, for his straying eyes to roam elsewhere.
“Dude.”
I turn my head and find myself inches from Aireen’s face. I feel her boiling breath cut through my perspiration. She’s dripping too, damp,
beads of glass pearling her forehead. I look into her eyes, so close that I can see her iris full of green, yellow, brown flecks surrounded by a bluish gray, almost ocean, almost sky, almost water.
I blink, incandescent.
“Are you O.K.?” I ask to check that I haven’t hallucinated her with all this fucking running around.
Aireen pulls back and I can see her chapped lips, which she’s nibbling with her teeth. She’s shaking—I know it because her eyelashes are fluttering.
“I’m sorry. I never . . .”—and without warning Aireen hugs me just like that, hard, like a typhoon, like a nuclear tsunami. Her arms embrace me and she buries her head in my neck. The scent of her hair dampens all my ganglions. I wrap my arms around her and perceive every bit of her. Eternity comes to a halt and, apocalyptic, I feel how, all around me, every object in the universe is racing past at an extraordinary speed, everything except her and me. I feel how the crepuscular light changes the humus color of the universe, how the Earth is spinning like a top and we’re going from day to night, night to day in the blink of an eye, again and again, insistently. Everything around us seems sped up except Aireen and me, embracing there, squatting down, outside of time, hidden behind the cars in the middle of the fucking world.
Aireen lifts her head from my chest and I see her swollen eyes, which look like two doors trickling downward. I plunge into them in an effort to calm our nerves, which are crackling all over. Actually, I don’t know about her for sure—it’s just my intuition since I feel her chest sinuously trembling. I definitely know about me, though: I’m trembling at her nearness, at her embrace so frankly enveloping me, at her eyes looking at me.
When was the last time somebody hugged me? Was the mollusk’s hug a hug? Was Aireen’s grandfather’s hug so he didn’t totter sideways a hug? The Border Patrol agents’ hug as they dragged me out of the shit in the bathroom? The black woman’s hug so I wouldn’t get stung by wasps? My godmother’s hug when she used to hold me down so I’d keep still and she could beat my ass properly? Mr. Abacuc’s hug? The hugs that all those vatos tried to give me when I was beating them up and they couldn’t defend themselves from the pounding I was giving them? Jefe’s hug to keep from falling down drunk?