Leaving the boys to their computer adventures, Barry wandered over to the wall-sized Acela map. There, he realized Jonah had erased parts of Long Island to make room for LAKE SUCCESS, which was identified in large capital letters and a yellow star as big as his father’s Chevy Chase. Even more touching was the amateur execution on parts of the cartography. Jonah had clearly let Menachem color in some of New Jersey. He had been flexible enough to allow Menachem to share his interests. Maybe Menachem could be a friend! “Just thirty minutes of computer time left,” Barry said, the enforcer of Jonah’s weekly limit.
“A little longer, pleeeeeeeease,” the boys said in tandem.
When Menachem left, Jonah instantly fell asleep, too tired to put his trains back on the shelves. Barry did it for him, remembering carefully where each of them went, the Shinkansen next to the ICE, the Acela next to the TGV because they were both designed by Alstom, the French multinational. Barry recalled that feeling of being deadly tired after social interactions with Joey Paramico or the Irish twins, too sleepy to let his mind run away with the usual numbers and patterns. He used to do the multiplication table to put himself to sleep, or write programs for his Commodore 64 in his head. After he had taught himself to be friendly, everything else became harder. He had to let go of his nerdy passions. He couldn’t do both at once. By his forties, watches were the only thing he had left.
* * *
—
THE STREET signs read EL PASO STREET and SIXTH AVENUE, and then the country came to an end. The border looked like a giant shed surrounded by barbed wire. Oversize Texan and American flags greeted the Mexicans crossing over. Yellow Transborde buses with Chihuahua plates were disgorging extended families. The new arrivals were soon milling around in a well-regulated shopping frenzy. Minutes ago they were in Juárez, and now they were buying Payless Shoes in Texas. Rumors had it that some of the unfortunates in the drug wars across the border had had their lower halves dipped in acid while doctors kept them conscious. Barry did not know why, but a part of him longed to walk toward that border shed and then to accept whatever would happen to him on the other side in the worst of the colonias, no matter how violent his end. To surrender himself to fate. To never strive for anything again. To finally burn that map of Long Island with Lake Success circled in red marker that he had kept stowed under his bed up until college. It bothered him that even though things with Layla and Jonah were good and he loved Chuco Town so much, he would be willing to hand himself over to the rude justice of a poor country. Seema had said he had no imagination, but sometimes it felt like all he had was imagination.
“Hey,” Layla said, poking him in the ribs. “Snap out of it, Hemingway boy. We’re almost there.” They were in someone’s ancient Nissan van, the car filled with the loud voices of Layla’s colleagues from UTEP. They were all brilliant and convivial and 100 percent funny, just like New York Jews, which more than half of them were. They had a competition as to who drove the shittiest car. Barry suggested “his” Avalon, but he wasn’t even close.
There was a Filipina woman named Gina, who was super cute and a professor of microbiology. Barry had heard of her. She was apparently Layla’s best friend. Her fiancé, Jimmy, was the dean of the engineering school. There was this other guy, Judah, who taught in the Jewish studies program and, incredibly enough, shared Barry’s love of watches. He wore a very under-the-radar vintage Longines with a coveted 13ZN movement, the dial patinated beyond legibility, real Watch Idiot Savant stuff. He had brought two guys from the Jewish studies program faculty with him, both small dudes dressed in overly hot sweaters, whose names Barry kept forgetting. This Judah was as tall as Barry and had some of the same swagger Barry used to have when he was at Princeton, only his came more naturally. He called Barry “a real New York macher,” Yiddish for a guy who gets things done, which totally charmed Barry. His father had used that term with great awe. This guy had friend moves up the ass.
On the ride downtown, Barry had locked on to one of the crowd’s academically correct acronyms, “POCs,” or people of color. “What’s the ROI on your POC students?” he asked. He thought this might be useful info if he ever revisited his Urban Watch Fund.
They all broke up laughing. “What? You can’t use the term ‘POC,’ ” Gina the Filipina said. “You have to be a POC.” Barry mentioned that his ex-wife was a POC and his son’s Filipina nanny, too. The Filipina professor asked how much the nanny earned, and when he told her she just looked at her fiancé, Jimmy the Dean, openmouthed. “That’s three times what she makes,” the dean said.
“You got a job for me?” Gina asked. “I can teach your kid microbiology. Maybe he’ll get into Hunter.”
Before heading over to Juárez, they steeled themselves with a round of drinks in a cheap hole-in-the-wall in the art deco part of downtown, the kind of place where a homeless man wearing a green LEGALIZE GAY T-shirt might walk in with a watermelon under his arm to meet his similarly situated friends. At first, Layla’s friends seemed to be scanning Barry carefully, which he liked, because it meant they were protective of her after the divorce. But eventually Barry seemed to do just fine by them. They liked that Barry had no “gating,” that he said almost anything that came to mind, but his mistakes were made out of ignorance not meanness. He didn’t tell them that he was a “moderate fiscal Republican,” but almost felt like he could.
“Did you know Barry’s into maps and trains, too?” Layla said.
“Whoa, Jonah’s got a friend for life!” Gina said. They all toasted to Barry like he was the best thing that had ever happened to the kid. When Layla had gone to the bathroom, Jewish Studies Judah leaned into him and said, “That’s very important for Jonah to have a role model. That would take a whole load off Layla’s shoulders.” Barry felt the glow of Judah’s support. He really did want to be a macher in his eyes.
“I taught him how to swim,” Barry said. “And make friends.”
“He’s a sweet kid,” the dean said, “but he’s very alone.”
“You’re very alone,” Gina said. They drank to lonely weirdos, which likely each of them had been as a child, Barry included.
Their trip hadn’t even begun, but already he didn’t want the day to end.
* * *
—
HE THOUGHT they would cross down the Paso del Norte Bridge, the one running off of El Paso Street, but they couldn’t find parking and ended up on the Stanton Street Bridge a few blocks east. Around them lay a jumble of railroad tracks, oil refineries, desert. The wind blew dust into his hair. The men jabbered away about how scary and fun this was going to be, how badly they needed an adventure. Some were wondering whether or not they should have taken out traveler’s insurance. They walked up the bridge to a sign that read LIMITE INTERNACIONAL EUA-MEXICO. Barry looked down to see the Rio Grande, trapped like an animal in a concrete trough.
At the end of the bridge was a sign that read MEXICO in chili-red letters. Barry noticed some Mexican government vehicles, tiny orange Volkswagens bearing the legend “Grupos Beta” arranged in a lot below. “What are those?” Barry asked Layla.
“They give medical aid to migrants trying to sneak across the border,” she said. “Mostly Salvadorans and Guatemalans.” Barry thought of the faux Guatemalan Luis Goodman ensconced in his 4.1-million-dollar Zestimate apartment on Madison Park while he, Barry Cohen, was crossing into this inferno. An image of the one-eyed Mexican man who had rested his head on Barry’s shoulder on the bus to Baltimore came to mind. Gina and Layla were wearing T-shirts and shorts and looked sun drenched and beautiful. Barry was proud of the company he kept. His life couldn’t be better. He leaned in and pecked Layla on the cheek.
No one checked their papers and, just like that, they were in Mexico. There were pavements and parking lots and mini-parks to be sure, but everything looked cracked and swollen to Barry. Signs called the city HEROICA CIUDAD JUÁREZ, perhaps in reference to the recent drug w
ar and the toll it had taken. The group whipped out their phones and tried to figure out where Avenida Benito Juárez, the main drag, was located. Barry pointed out a street vendor selling grilled corn. He was wearing a brim straw cowboy hat and had a scar across one cheek. The man took a very long look at the crew, Barry in his Georgia Aquarium whale-shark T-shirt, and behind him Jimmy the Dean talking hermeneutics loudly with Layla, while Judah, dressed in a sharp blazer as if for a faculty meeting, sang an old Jewish Bund anthem with his colleagues, who looked like freshly shorn sheep in their cardigans.
“Gringos, be careful,” the corn man said.
Gina stepped forward and asked him directions in surprisingly fluent Spanish. The man waved west, his eyes still traveling over the American posse. “Gringos, be careful,” he repeated.
The warning just made the men of the group bolder. “Let’s win this one for the shtetl,” Judah said to his crew.
Gina reminded them of the recent killings in Juárez, five men shot in a barbershop, one just over the Santa Fe Bridge, and so on. But Barry, for one, felt invincible. “Safety in numbers,” he said. “I used to make bets for a living. Let’s do this!”
They crossed over to the Avenida Benito Juárez. The street that, according to Judah, had once catered to generations of drunken, horny Americans was all but empty. The few people strolling past looked at them with wonder and concern. A pack of stray dogs ran by, brushing against their legs as if desperately seeking warmth. A freight train fresh out of El Paso rumbled parallel to the avenue. Other noise came from the plentiful farmacias, which had set up large speakers along the avenida and were blasting bad global dance music. The music echoed off the façades of the silent bars and dental clinics. The pharmacies were offering free packs of Viagra if you bought pain medicine without a prescription. Gina and the dean went in to buy some oxycodone for their impending marriage, and they came out with cartons of free Viagra for everyone.
“There it is!” Barry shouted. “The Kentucky Club! Where Hemingway went.” The establishment was slotted into a nondescript one-story building with the words WORLD FAMOUS and SINCE 1921 in English. Barry wished the signage had been in Spanish. They went inside, and he pointed out the trough around the bar. “Did you know that, in the old days, men would just relieve themselves from their stools?” he asked.
“You’re sounding more and more like Jonah,” Gina said. “Did you know…?”
The gang laughed, and even Layla seemed cool with it. “Jonah’s kind of a role model for me,” Barry said proudly. “Maybe we can find him a Mexican train set.”
Everyone ordered drinks. The bar was dark and green lit and festively somber in a post-drug-war kind of way. Well-dressed young locals sat around the bar talking shop and drinking slowly; the prices weren’t cheap. Barry ate two heaping plates of shrimp al ajillo, feeling his breath go from bad to worse, but not caring. They were all drunk on smoky tequilas. “This is really great!” Barry shouted. “Except for those flat-screen TVs. Hemingway was here! This place should be a shrine.”
“Okay, honey,” Layla said to him. “Calm down.”
“Honey?” Gina said. “I’ve never heard Layla call anyone that.”
“I’m very lucky,” Barry said. There was a collective Awww. This was just the permission Barry needed to start talking loudly about how he had taken a Greyhound across the country to find Layla. He stressed the parts about running out of money and not having enough food, trying to burnish his credentials as a down-and-out romantic. “My dream is that one day Layla and Jonah and I can finish the trip as a family. We can take a bus to San Diego and visit my dad’s grave. He really liked Layla.”
“He kept calling me Lay-lur,” Layla said. “And then he told me I was too pale but had great Sabra hair.”
“Here’s to eugenics, Jewish-style!” Judah shouted.
“L’chaim!” his colleagues slurred. They splash-cheered with their drinks. Was there anything more convivial in the world than a Jewish studies department? Why couldn’t they teach the Holocaust class instead of Layla?
Two hours later, after they had talked through a hundred scholarly topics including the decline of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party (“I lost a hundred million dollars in yen trades last year,” Barry confided to his new friends), they finally exited the bar hooting and hollering. Barry and the profs continued down the avenida, each step taking them farther away from the border and their terrific lives. A crisp-looking grandpa in a white fedora walked past Layla and whispered in passing, “Oye, señorita, un joven?”
“Holy shit, he just tried to sell you a little boy!” Gina said.
“Does the joven come with female Viagra?” Judah said.
Layla was not amused. “That was pretty messed up,” she said. “We can’t forget there’s another human being at the end of that transaction.” The men looked slightly abashed.
The farmacia music continued to blare at them from up the street, but the avenida was getting gloomier. A row of Polícia Municipal trucks surrounded by cops with semiautomatic rifles took up half a block. They began shouting at a young man in a Texas Spurs T-shirt and torn sweatpants who was making his way toward them, eyes darting around, muttering something rapidly under his breath. “Let’s go in here,” Gina said, pushing Barry and their friends into a bar called Don Beto. It did not have the same high-end clientele as the Kentucky Club; there were white plastic chairs and tables, an abandoned-looking drum set, and lots of canoodling old-timers drinking big mugs of Sol beer.
“You think they’re going to shoot?” Judah asked, straining his ears in the direction of the street.
“Now that would be something to see,” Barry agreed.
“Do you know how corrupt the Polícia Municipal is?” Layla asked. “During the wars between the Sinaloa and Juárez cartels, they had to send in the federal police to clean them up.”
Barry was proud of how much she knew. “Maybe if there’s a shoot-out we can testify about police brutality or something,” he said.
Layla rolled her eyes at him. “Oh, my God,” she said, then, looking over his shoulder, “That’s Jose! That’s my gardener, Jose Luis.”
“Wait a second,” Gina said. “He’s talking to my gardener.”
“Are you kidding me?” the dean said. “How much yanqui privilege are we going to have to check this evening?”
This incredible coincidence soon led to the two gringas waving at the gardeners, who were equally shocked to see them. Having little choice, Jose Luis and his friend walked sullenly over to the table. Both wore back braces and were on the older side, walrus mustached and callused all over, as if they worked with their foreheads as well as their hands. “Hola, Jose!” Layla shouted. She put on her best Hayes smile, then spoke rapidly in broken Spanish to the two men.
Jose Luis bent over and said, “Be careful in Juárez, señora.”
“Stay on this street,” said the other gardener. “Don’ go away from this street. Actually, even on this street, be careful.”
“Come drink with us!” Layla said. “¡Siéntate! ¡Siéntate! Por favor.”
“I don’t know about this,” Jimmy the Dean said, and Gina also looked unsure, but Layla coerced their workmen into sitting with them. She loudly ordered new pitchers of Sol beer from the barmaid.
“Now you are in my country,” Layla’s gardener tried to tell her. “So I pay.” But of course she wouldn’t let him. The gardener sighed and looked down at his feet.
“I think that’s not cool for him,” Gina whispered. “In his culture—”
“He’s got five kids,” Layla whispered back. Once the gardeners were among them there was absolutely nothing to talk about in any language. They sat there on opposite ends of the table looking at each other. Someone turned up the music, a mournful corrido, and a man and a woman, both in cowboy boots, got up to dance as if this were their last moment on earth. “You guys are
n’t even trying,” Layla hissed at her UTEP friends.
“I don’t really speak Spanish,” Barry said, and others voiced similar sentiments. Gina, who did speak Spanish, tried to talk, ostensibly about El Chapo and the Sinaloa cartel, but that didn’t go very far. Barry felt bad for Layla. The painful silence of the gardeners continued. He noted the soil on their fingertips as they hoisted their American-bought beers. They took out their phones and he imagined they were desperately texting back to their loved ones about their kidnapping at the hands of their employers. Layla took a cue from them and angrily whipped out her own phone and started scrolling through Twitter. “Honey, don’t do that right now,” Gina said. “The roaming charges alone.”
“Look at what these fuckers are saying.”
“Not that GoyToy again?”
“Yes, that GoyToy again.”
“You’re drunk. Maybe you should take next semester off.”
“Work is all that keeps my mind off it.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t be teaching a class on the Holocaust until the election is over, huh?”
Layla slammed her hands on the cheap plastic table. Startled, the gardeners looked up from their phones. “This election will never be over!” Layla shouted. “Can’t you see that?”
She stood and walked out of the bar. “What the fuck?” at least three people said.
“Outside very dangerous,” said Jose Luis.
“I got this,” Barry said. He jumped out of his seat and was out the door, into the florid sunlight, onto the alien street. Layla was there, running, running, in the opposite direction from the border. The Polícia Municipal trucks were nowhere to be seen. “Layla!” Barry shouted. But she didn’t look back. He ran after her down the remaining desolate blocks of the avenida, toward a large square. There was a Scotiabank here that he found oddly reassuring, and a big red sculpture of three small cap letters JRZ, presumably a civic-pride thing. Layla hung a left and ran through a book market full of college students that looked to Barry like slightly shabbier versions of her UTEP students. “Layla!” he shouted again. The college students stared at him. He was a gringo blur sprinting through their world.
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