The World in Half

by Cristina Henriquez

  “That’s okay.”

  “Really?”

  “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

  “So I could help you. Fuck,” he says, throwing his hand in the air. “You’ve never even talked to him or anything?”

  I shake my head.

  “I mean, my parents are all the way in Brazil but I could call them if I wanted. I just never want to. But Christ. You have a little bit of information on him at least?”

  “I have his name.”

  “Anything else?”

  “I have an address. He might still live there but he might not. I don’t know. And I know he used to work at the canal. Maybe he still does.” I turn down one corner of my mouth. I know it’s not a lot to go on.

  “You don’t know much, huh? I guess we have somewhere to start, though. I mean, if you want my help. I know the city pretty well.”

  This isn’t the sort of offer I normally would accept. When I was growing up, my mother taught me to be wary of strangers, especially those who seemed willing in any way to be helpful, to be nice, to be of use. But then again, coming here in the first place wasn’t the sort of thing I normally would do. And what if he really can help me? I don’t have that much else to go on at this point.

  “Okay,” I say.

  He smiles wide, evidently pleased. His chipped tooth is uneven against the others. “We should know each other’s names,” he says. “I know yours.”

  I nod.

  “Mine is Danilo.”

  Every inch of the bus is elaborately spray-painted and air-brushed. The driver’s name is scripted in blue near the grill and there’s an image of Fidel Castro in fatigues on the side. Before I even get on, I can hear music with a backbone of thumping bongo drums coming from the radio inside.

  Danilo and I share a double-wide seat, and he taps his knees to the beat of the music while we ride. He brought his flower bucket with him because, as he explained to me as we walked through the hotel lobby, he never knew when he might make a sale. He keeps it in the aisle beside his feet.

  The bus is crowded and hot and, between the voices and the music, loud. The driver keeps shouting for everyone to move back, move back. He hollers over and over, “Péguense que tienen ropa.” A young boy crouched on the floor beside the driver stands periodically and echoes the same remarks. Danilo shouts back once, “¡Gracias, pavo!” and then turns to me and says, “Those guys are the worst.”

  “Who is he?” I ask.

  “Probably the driver’s nephew or something. They’re on all the buses now. Like helpers.”

  Danilo acts aggravated, but for me it’s invigorating to be on the bus and to feel like I’m really, truly, in Panama at last. Not just in the hotel or in a taxi or in a restaurant, but here among the people who call it home. I clutch my bag on my lap and look at everyone while a sort of giddiness fizzes inside me like a firecracker, a series of warm pricks bursting against my chest. Outside, palm trees hover overhead as we, along with hundreds of other vehicles, lurch and crawl and bump over the city streets. The driver doesn’t stop at intersections. Instead, he honks twice—two little bleats to announce that we are coming through—then barrels ahead. Traffic lights are rare. On side streets, there are stop signs, and elsewhere traffic is regulated naturally by the halting ebb and flow of vehicles pressing slowly ahead, edging around each other, making their own lanes, turning where they want, stopping in the gravel along the side of the street.

  “I’m glad I don’t have to drive here,” I whisper to Danilo.

  “Eh. It looks like a fucking mess, but it’s so slow that people never get in accidents,” he says.

  We pass stout white buildings with wavy red-clay roofs, restaurants with their names painted in block letters onto the façade, strip centers, uniformed guards with machine guns slung over their shoulders pacing the street corners, a man selling Coca-Cola and Orange Crush in bottles from a cart, apartment buildings with laundry hanging over the balconies, huge cathedrals, people holding umbrellas on street corners, kids selling fruit stuffed into long plastic sleeves, covered bus stops, wild tangles of plants in every open space. This is it. I’ve been staring at the photographs in my guidebook for weeks. But now, this is it.

  Danilo asked me the address before we got on. I told him: Ave A. Casa 822. He clucked his tongue and grimaced.

  “What?” I asked. “Do you know it?”

  “I don’t know the house, but that address is in a bad area.”

  “How bad?”

  “It’s just . . . Look, it’s not terrible. But it’s a good thing you’re going there with me. Let’s just say that.”

  I didn’t press him about what that meant exactly. I don’t know, maybe I should have. But what would have been the point? The address was the address, after all, and no matter where it was, it was where I needed to go.

  Another fifteen minutes into our ride, the bus stops. I don’t think anything of it at first. Outside, a dog sniffs at a styrofoam container of food open on the sidewalk. But by the time the dog wanders away, we’re still stopped. Two cars in the intersection in front of us start honking at each other. I glance at Danilo. He’s gazing out the window across the aisle, totally unconcerned. Behind us, two men start talking about how a month earlier one of the city buses caught fire and how the passengers rushed to the back exit to get out but the door was sealed shut, so they changed course and surged toward the front of the bus instead, but with everyone scrambling and pushing and screaming and climbing over one another, most of them got trapped inside the bus and died when it went up in flames. The woman across the aisle from us is holding an ivory-colored rosary in her lap, working her fingers from one smooth bead to the next.

  “Danilo,” I say. “Are we close?” If we are, maybe we can just get out and walk.

  “Not really.”

  “How long have we been sitting here?”

  He surveys the deadlock in front of us. “Who knows?”

  A bubble of panic rises inside me. What am I doing here, on this bus, with someone I hardly know? He could be taking me anywhere. He could be anyone. I’ve heard the stories about tourists who are kidnapped or murdered when visiting a foreign country, and yet here I am, trusting him. Why did I talk to him in the first place?

  I look at Danilo again, at his soft earlobe and the fine hairs that gather in a little curl just below it, the buttons of his spine peeking out over the stretched, droopy neck of his T-shirt. He grips the back of the seat in front of him with one hand outstretched and, as I’m staring at him, drops his head to wipe his forehead against his arm. Then he turns to me again.

  “You okay?” he asks. “You look, I don’t know, strange.”

  I laugh in spite of myself. “What a compliment.”

  “I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “Maybe this wasn’t a good idea,” I say.

  “What wasn’t?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You mean going to find your father?”

  I think I mean all of it: taking a leave of absence from school, lying to my mother, coming to Panama, talking to Danilo, getting on the bus, and yes, going to find my father. But what I say again is, “I don’t know.”

  Danilo straightens and focuses his brown eyes on mine. “Miraflores,” he says. “What do you want to do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You keep saying that.”

  “Well, I keep meaning it. I just don’t think I’m ready yet.”

  Danilo doesn’t say anything at first. “Where do you want to go?” he finally asks.

  I brush my knuckles over my lips. “Back to the hotel?”

  He shakes his head. “You can’t spend your whole time in Panamá in the hotel.”

  “I’m not. I’m on the bus right now.”

  “But we haven’t gotten anywhere yet. No. We have to go somewhere.”

  I know where we are before he tells me. Panamá La Vieja. Old Panama. The vestiges of what the city used to be. Danilo acts surprised when I say it. I
tell him I read about it in my guidebook.

  “We call it Panamá Viejo,” he says. Then with considerable amusement he asks, “What else do they tell you in that guidebook?”

  I shrug, feeling embarrassed, offended, something.

  We walk across the soft, patchy grass to a small collection of ruins: crumbling stone half-walls no more than two feet high, weathered and blackened; windows without roofs; rooms without floors; buildings that are skeletons without flesh. Weeds sprout in between the rocks. Stones are hidden beneath matted grass. At the edge of the bones of the ancient city is a three-story-tall stone bell tower, still fairly intact.

  Danilo says, “It was part of the cathedral.”

  I follow him inside the hollow tower and stand on the grass floor. Faint sunlight runs through the tall rectangular window openings and scatters down on us as we gaze up, our hands cupped like visors over our eyes. The smell is musty and warm.

  “What do you think?” Danilo asks. His voice echoes a bit.

  “It’s nice,” I say. I’m trying to come up with a reason why he brought me here, of all places.

  Danilo takes a few steps and runs his palm along one of the walls, covered with gnarled moss. “I think it’s fucked up.”

  “What?” I drop my hand and look at him.

  “This place. It’s fucked up. There were pirates who came here and torched it.” He turns to me. “Did your guidebook tell you that?”

  “Who? They did what?”

  Danilo cups a hand over one eye and pumps his other arm as if he’s doing a jig. “They set it on fire.”

  I can’t help laughing at his pantomime. “Pirates?” I say in English.

  “Isn’t that what I said? ¿Piratas?”

  “Henry Morgan, right?”

  “That’s the dude who fucked everything up.”

  “But I thought I read . . . I thought when he was attacked, this was a Spanish city.”

  “So? It was here, wasn’t it?”

  “But it belonged to Spain.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he says. “It was still here. It belonged to us, even if the name of here wasn’t Panamá at the time.”

  “The boundaries of a place are always changing,” I say. He stares at me, puzzled. I’m not sure I used the right word in Spanish for “boundaries.” “I mean that you can’t say a place belongs to a country just because of the land it’s on. A long time ago this land was Spain’s, so the city would have belonged to Spain. Now the land is Panamá’s, so the city belongs to Panamá. In a thousand years it could be China’s, so it would belong to China.”

  He looks unconvinced.

  “I’m saying it’s all political. They’re just different names for the same place. The land doesn’t belong to anyone. It only belongs to itself.”

  Maybe my Spanish is shaky, because he still looks perplexed. But then he says, “Geography is an illusion? Is that what you mean?”

  Exactly. I tried to explain the same concept to my mother once, but she didn’t understand. Even Beth accused me of sounding “philosophically nonsensical” the time I tried to get into a discussion with her about it while we were waiting for the TA to post the grades for our physical oceanography class.

  Danilo runs his thumb along the uneven groove at the meeting between two stones. “I’ve thought that before,” he says. He keeps tracing, brooding a little while I stand still in the center of the square tower. Then he says, “I still think this place is ours, though.”

  When we step out into the full wash of daylight again, we walk past more rubble and crumbling walls, the foundations perfectly undisturbed, as if the buildings were once little more than tiered cakes, the tops of each simply lifted off. Not far in the distance, white gulls circle over the muddy brown-blue water in the bay.

  We walk until we reach a small arched stone bridge. When Danilo strides out to the middle of it and sits, placing his flower bucket behind him, I sit down, too. The sky above us is absolutely clear, although across the bay, a thick swab of pale gray clouds hangs placidly. Our feet dangle nearly thirty feet above the narrow green stream that runs under the bridge, foamy as it curls around the rocks. A plastic grocery bag wound around a tree branch flows silently below us and, after it, the small body of a dead frog, splayed like an open flower. An old mini-refrigerator is lodged in the silt on the bank. Bits of mica schist glint in the sun.

  I feel light sitting there, buoyant, the panic that surfaced earlier entirely gone. I have a strong sense of being close to something, even if I don’t know what. Of being on a precipice. As if sitting on the side of that bridge is the same thing as being perched on the edge of my life.

  Then, out of nowhere, Danilo says, “You know, you probably shouldn’t take the bus alone while you’re here. The bus system in Panamá is hell. No real routes, no schedules, buses going all over the place. They’re called diablos rojos for a reason.”

  “I take buses at home.”

  He makes a face. “I don’t know. You should probably just take taxis from now on.”

  “How do you know the buses in Chicago aren’t just as bad?”

  “People just say it’s crazy here. They say that no one who doesn’t live here would take the bus in their right mind. Do people say that in Chicago?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Okay,” he says, satisfied. Then, “In Chicago, you have the bears, right?”

  It takes me a second to realize he doesn’t mean animals in a forest. “For football, yes, the Chicago Bears.”

  “And for baseball?”

  “The Cubs.” I say it in English because I don’t know the word for it in Spanish.

  Danilo wrinkles his nose. “What is that?”

  “A cub is a baby bear.”

  He shakes his head. “Lots of bears.”

  I laugh.

  After another minute, he says, “You know, there are supposed to be treasures in the water. When the pirates came, everybody panicked and dumped all their gold and shit in the river. You know, to hide it. But then most of the residents got killed, so all their stuff is still supposed to be buried down there somewhere.”

  I don’t catch everything he says. “Tesoros means ‘gold’?”

  “Could be gold. You know, just valuables. Treasures.”

  “It’s all under the water?”

  “That’s the story. No one’s ever found anything, though.”

  There seems something final about the way he says it, as though he merely brought up the subject for the sake of idle conversation and now is annoyed that the discussion has gone on. I wouldn’t mind asking him more about it—the idea of treasures somewhere beneath our dangling feet is intriguing—but I get the sense that he’s far less academic about exploring topics than I am. He’s more impetuous perhaps, flitting to whatever captures his attention next. I push my bangs off my forehead, but they fall right back down again, rebellious in the humidity.

  “Thanks for bringing me here,” I finally say.

  He gazes out at the water and shrugs. “Now you can say you’ve seen something.”

  I call Beth as soon as I get back to my hotel room. The reception is terrible.

  “I can barely hear you,” she says.

  “I know. Is this better?” I’m standing by the window.

  “Not really.”

  “Okay, tell me if it gets better. I’m just going to keep talking and talking and I’m walking around my room and I’m walking by my bed and I’m talking and I guess I could go out into the hall but I don’t really feel like doing that and I’m still walking and I don’t know what to say but I’m still—”

  “There! That’s good. It got clearer all of a sudden.”

  “Beth, I’m standing in the shower.”

  She starts cracking up and I just roll my eyes, smiling at myself in the mirror.

  “How are you?” I ask.

  “Forget about that. How are you? You made it there okay, obviously.”

  “Yeah, no problems. I got in last night.”

/>   “And what’s it like?”

  “It’s . . . I don’t know. It feels like I went really far away, but it also sort of doesn’t. I mean, there are all these familiar places, like Wendy’s and McDonald’s and Costco, overlaid on this completely unfamiliar landscape. There are plants running wild everywhere.”

  “There’s a Costco?”

  “I know! It seemed so out of place when I saw it.”

  “But it’s not totally Americanized, is it?”

  “No. It still feels like its own place. And it’s bigger than I thought it would be. I mean, the city itself is huge.”

  “Bigger than Chicago?”

  “It feels like it. It’s definitely more crowded at least.”

  “And your hotel’s okay?”

  Beth is from the sort of family that books the Four Seasons everywhere they stay. Not that she’s pretentious about it. She has never once given me the impression that anything I do—going to a dumpy bar, taking the el, looking for bargains at Village Thrift—is below her standards. Even so, I have the notion that “okay” means different things to the two of us.

  “It’s nice,” I say.

  “That’s good.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Mira?”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. It sounded like you were going to say something else.”

  “Well, I met this guy.”

  “What! Mira, you’ve been there for one day! You met a guy? I’ve known you for two years, and you’ve never met a guy.”

  “It’s not like that. He’s going to help me find my father.”

  “Oh, so is he older?”

  “I think he’s about our age.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Danilo.”

  “I can’t believe this. Do you mind if I tell Juliette and Asha? All those times Juliette tried to set you up with guys in her classes. She practically had the wedding planned for you and that guy—what was his name? Jamison or something ridiculous—in her pottery class. And I know you went out with some of them, but since it never went anywhere, we knew you were just sort of scared of the whole concept of getting into a relationship, but now this!”

  “What do you mean, you knew I was scared? I wasn’t scared.”