by Aya De León
“The generator is still running,” Dulce heard a woman with an American accent. She must be one of the volunteers from the US.
“But the power isn’t working,” the man said, his voice increasingly panicked.
“Could it be the machine?” the woman’s voice asked.
“It’s practically new,” he said.
Suddenly, there was a flashlight beam bobbing. “Double check that the machine is on and the power supply is properly connected,” the woman said. “I’m going to check the extension cord.”
There was a second flicker of light, and Dulce could see a beam shining on a pair of extension cords, taped to the floor with perpendicular strips of tape, like a railroad track.
Other people were stirring awake. A child nearby started to whine.
“Everything’s okay,” the woman with the flashlight said. “Go back to sleep, everybody. We’re just fixing a little problem here.”
“It’s not a little problem,” the frantic man said, his voice loud and strained. “I’ve checked the machine, and the power supply. Everything’s fine on this end. But the power isn’t coming in.”
“Just hold on, sir, okay?”
“How am I supposed to hold on?” he demanded. “My wife needs oxygen or she could die.”
Several people stood up and offered to help.
“Please,” the woman said. “Go back to sleep. I just need to . . . excuse me . . .” she pushed past several people offering assistance.
Ahead, dimly illuminated in the periphery of the flashlight beam, a mother and her young son headed to the bathroom. The boy stumbled on his way in.
The woman with the flashlight turned the beam toward them. Dulce could see the torn tape and the kink in the extension cord.
“I found it!” the woman said. “Please, everyone, back to bed.”
She came over and knelt down near the bathroom door, shining the beam on the connection between two extension cords. She pressed them more closely together.
There was a sharp cry from the man. “It’s working!”
A few people applauded.
Soon, there was a young man kneeling next to the woman with the flashlight. He had a roll of tape and they were more firmly securing the cords.
* * *
Chicago.
The following morning, as Dulce was waking up, she kept hearing one word that didn’t belong: Chicago.
She sat up on her cot and saw people walking by with bottles of water. One woman had three bottles.
As she wandered over to the kitchen area, she kept hearing the word Chicago. At the food line, she saw a woman handing out bottles freely.
“We got water?” Dulce asked.
“From Chicago,” the woman said. “It’s a miracle.”
As Dulce drank, the woman told her the whole story. For some reason, FEMA and the US government supplies weren’t getting delivered. But some Puerto Ricans in Chicago had raised a ton of money and sent a plane load of supplies on a United Airlines flight they’d secured.
Dulce smiled. Today was going to be a good day, she decided. The day would end with her getting safely to the Lumineer Hotel. Because they day had begun with her drinking miracle water from Chicago.
* * *
She waited until after breakfast to head out, as she wanted to be sure she had as much food as possible. Beside her was a woman trying to get her kids to eat more slowly.
“Not so fast,” she said. “You’ll give yourselves a stomach ache.”
At the next table over, the man from the middle of the night was retelling the story of his wife’s oxygen crisis. His voice was jovial now, and he made fun of his earlier panic, his tablemates laughing along.
* * *
After breakfast, there was no one to bid goodbye before she headed out with a bag of skittles in the tiny pocket of her shorts. She had a thirty-two-ounce bottle of filtered water in one hand and the battered umbrella in the other.
Her feet hurt. She was developing blisters. She regretted having given herself that pedicure. Right about now, she needed all the tough skin she could get.
She sat down on the cement and pulled the rags out from the toes of the shoes and tied them around her feet like makeshift socks. It helped with the blisters, but now the shoes were too big and kept flopping and falling off.
She grabbed a branch and pulled off several leaves, stuffing them in the front of the shoes. They wouldn’t last more than a day, but if there was anything in abundance right now, it was fallen branches and foliage.
She tried walking on the expressway, but there was a bit more traffic on this section, and she almost got hit.
She doubled back and walked along the road for a while, but then she got to a place that was flooded and impassable. She had to retrace her steps, but then she got lost.
She would need to ask someone. As she got further into a residential area, there was more noise. The occasional engine that might be a car or more likely a scooter or motorcycle, which could cut through the smaller open spaces on the roads.
She passed a crew that was working on one of the major roads to remove trees and branches. A truck with chains was attempting to pull a huge tree out of the road. Another man had a chainsaw, and was chopping up trunks and large branches, while a crew of others chopped with machetes and cleared the small pieces away.
There were about a dozen of them, and when she walked by with the bottle of water, they all asked for a drink. She poured it carefully into each of their mouths. By the time they had all had a mouthful, the bottle was only a quarter full.
She asked them how she could get to Old San Juan. They said that the road was impassable, and told here where to cross over the expressway to get on the side of the airport. All the supplies were coming in that way, so the clearest roads led in and out of there.
* * *
Two hours later, as Dulce passed the airport, she could see a spot where a massive tree had fallen on the chain link fence. It was leaning down at a forty-five-degree angle. Finally, a fallen tree that might actually work in her favor.
Dulce looked around the part of the airport she could see. Nothing going on at this end, but the work crew had definitely said that the relief supplies were coming in through the San Juan airport. If she showed up here, she would eventually be able to find the area where they had the food and water they were distributing.
At the top of the fencing was barbed wire, but the fallen tree was taller than the fence, so she had a safe path to scale the tree and then climb down the branches that led to the ground.
At the top of the tree, she looked around. She had entered on the far end of the airport from the terminals, and there was no one around here, but she saw some activity in the distance. She carefully climbed down from the tree. The ground was covered with debris like the rest of the island, but the wide, treeless tarmac meant that there were far fewer branches, foliage, and fallen trunks than she had seen most places.
But the lack of trees also meant lack of shade. She crossed over to the closed hangar buildings, her arm fatigued from holding up the broken umbrella.
* * *
By the time she had crossed to the busier side of the airport, she was especially exhausted, and slightly faint. So when the truck being loaded full of dead bodies first came into view, she thought she was seeing things. Dulce blinked and rubbed her eyes.
She was walking in between two hangar buildings. There was a narrow strip of shade back here, out of view of the road.
Two men were pulling a tarp off the back of a flatbed truck. The men reached in to take out the cargo. At first she thought they were long sacks of food. Maybe rice or beans, but then an arm swung down from one of the sacks.
Her eyes were vaguely focused in the distance. And what had been an ordinary, daily sight—men unloading a truck—became something surreal, macabre. Dulce shrank back toward the hangar, and stared. The men were loading corpses from the flatbed into a much larger truck.
Five. Six. Seven. Eig
ht. Nine. As Dulce walked toward the apparition, she expected it would somehow dissipate, but instead it became clearer.
Yes.
Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen. Fifteen. They were definitely loading bodies. By this time, she was close enough to see which looked thicker, thinner, male, female.
They were loading into a larger truck that was connected to a rumbling generator. Was the big truck refrigerated?
Eighteen. Nineteen. Twenty. Twenty-one.
She had counted thirty-five before she was stopped by a US soldier, who pushed a hand hard in her chest.
“This is a secured area. No civilians allowed,” he barked in English.
“I—” Dulce said. “I heard I could get supplies here.” She looked around. “Water or maybe some food.”
“You were misinformed,” he snapped.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’ll leave right away.”
“How did you even get in?” he asked.
“There’s a fallen tree on the fence, maybe a mile back,” she said.
He shook his head. “Not for long. And you won’t be leaving the same way you came in,” he said. “You’ll have a military escort out of here.”
“I came from a shelter,” Dulce said. “I don’t exactly know the way back.”
He narrowed his eyes. “Look, I’m not fucking stupid. You’re obviously a journalist.”
Dulce dropped her eyes. “Okay, you caught me,” she said, thinking quickly. “I’m staying at the Lumineer Hotel.”
* * *
For several hours, she sat on a bench outside one of the empty hangars. She couldn’t see much of what was happening, but at least it was in the shade.
“Excuse me,” she said to the man who had stopped her. “Can I get a bottle of water, please?”
“I told you,” he said. “This isn’t a distribution center.”
“Come on,” another military guy said. “The last thing we need is some journalist dying of heat exhaustion on our watch.”
“I don’t give a fuck,” said the man who had stopped her. “You deal with it.”
The good cop military guy came over with a bottle of water.
“Am I being detained?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said.
Dulce drank the water as her anxiety rose. She didn’t see anyone for another hour or so.
Then one of the trucks moved, and she had a better view of what was going on around her. She saw military trucks, a few large semis with giant shipping containers on them, and lots of military personnel sort of standing around.
Occasionally, she’d hear their laughter or playful shouts.
What the hell were they doing so leisurely?
Another truck pulled up and blocked her view, and the driver and passenger got out. She called to them, but they ignored her.
The spot where they had her sitting was between the hangar and several trucks. Had they forgotten about her? Should she could crawl out underneath one of the trucks? She was thinking about it.
Finally, the bad cop came within earshot.
“Excuse me,” she said. “Am I being detained?”
“Not that I know of,” he said with a sneer. “Should we be detaining you? Are you confessing something?”
“No,” Dulce said quickly. “But you said you needed to escort me out of the airport, and I’ve been waiting for hours.”
“Oh I’m sorry,” he said, his tone saturated with contempt. “Is your military escort moving slowly? Your transportation is such a high priority in this total disaster.”
Dulce felt like someone was blowing up a balloon inside her chest. She wanted to defend herself, to say she had never asked for any fucking escort, but she kept quiet.
“Well?” he asked, baiting her.
Dulce just blinked up at him.
He turned and stalked away. “Fucking entitled Puerto Ricans,” he muttered quite audibly.
* * *
Half an hour later, the good cop came by.
“Excuse me,” she said. “Do you have any idea when I can leave? I never asked for an escort out. I’m glad to leave anytime.”
“You need an escort for safety issues,” he said. “And we don’t have extra personnel or vehicles to send. But a patrol goes out after curfew. I assume they’ll send you along with them.”
Dulce nodded. “Thank you so much.” The last thing she wanted was to be stuck on a makeshift military base after dark.
* * *
Around seven PM, the good cop came back and walked her across the dark tarmac to a waiting jeep. The driver was a pale military guy with a sour expression. Dulce tensed at the sight of him. There was no record of her in their custody. He could take her anywhere. Do anything to her. These US military guys would rape the women in their own units, let alone the random Dominican chicks they caught in the wrong places.
She was about to say something to the good cop, but what? Make him take her name? Demand some kind of reassurance of safe passage? But as she climbed into the back of the jeep, she saw that the driver’s partner was a woman. She thanked the good cop and her new escorts and they headed out.
* * *
From what she could see in the headlight beams, they drove through a ruined city.
At one point, she realized where she was, riding along Doctor Ashford Avenue. They drove slowly, because the traffic signals were all out, passing the wrecked upscale bars where she had gone, the ravaged Cartier jewelers across from the Condado Vanderbilt Hotel. This road in the heart of the neighborhood had been her playground for so many weeks. Most of it was shut down. So many buildings damaged.
At one intersection, they stopped to let several military trucks pass along the cross street. In the jeep’s headlights, Dulce could see one of the dress boutiques she had visited with Phillip. The display window was smashed now, the plywood hanging askew. The empty mannequin inside was naked and fallen, one leg laying beside her on the waterlogged boutique floor.
* * *
Two hours later, the jeep pulled up in front of the Lumineer in Old San Juan. She walked carefully across the cobalt blue bricks to the hotel’s front door. Inside, the lobby was illuminated with utility lamps clamped precariously on to various fixtures. Reporters were charging their phones and camera equipment in a bay of outlets, and all the cords were connected to a rattling generator.
The lobby was large, but everyone who was talking on a cell was clustered over at one end where, presumably, the signal was better.
Dulce stepped forward to plug in her phone.
“Sorry, this is for press only,” the woman said in English. “Do you have credentials?”
“I’m not—” Dulce began.
“Are you an interview subject?” the woman asked. “Are you supposed to be meeting someone?”
“Zavier Mendoza,” Dulce said, recalling his last name from his business card. “From El Planeta.”
“I know him,” she said. “El Planeta? He’s here freelancing with the New York Times. But he’s out in the field. You can wait here, but the outlets are only for reporters.”
Dulce sat down on one of the plush sofas on the no-signal side of the room. She had stayed at the Lumineer with one of her dates. Will? Gil? He was a businessman from the Midwest.
“Yulin-Cruz is about to speak,” one reporter yelled, and everyone seemed to jump up to go out to see the mayor of San Juan.
Several of them left half-eaten plates of food.
Dulce walked over and discreetly consolidated beans, rice, and bread into a single plate. Then she drew herself back into the shadows to eat it. The beans were cold. The rice was hard. The bread was soggy. And it was the best food she’d ever tasted.
* * *
The next thing she knew, someone was tapping her shoulder and calling her name. She stirred and felt the velvet sofa under her cheek. She blinked her eyes open to see Zavier looking down at her.
“Dulce,” he said, his face blazing with a grin. “I’m so glad you’re okay.”
“I’m fine,” she said in Spanish. “I’m just ready to get out of here. To get back to New York as soon as I can.”
“It’s easier for press to get in and out,” he said. “If you want to assist me for a few days, we’ll probably be able to get you out.”
“Of course,” Dulce said. “How can I help?”
“Tomorrow, you can join me in going around doing interviews,” Zavier said. “But right now, I need to go file a story.”
“Okay,” Dulce said. “Uh, should I meet you here in the morning?”
“Yeah,” Zavier said. “Where are you staying?”
“Well, uh,” Dulce began. “I was staying in a shelter—”
“Oh shit,” Zavier said. “I wasn’t thinking. Did you—”
“My place got flooded,” Dulce said. “I lost all my stuff. I can’t go back.”
“Of course,” Zavier said. “You can stay with us.”
“Us?”
“Yeah, we have a suite. Sort of sleeping in shifts, but mostly people are out in the field twenty-four seven. I’ve been going for three days straight—just napping on the fly—so I’m definitely crashing tonight, but there’s plenty of room for you. Come on, you can rest while I file this story.”
“I haven’t had any access to news beyond the grapevine,” she said. “How bad is it?”
“Most of the island still has no power or running water,” Zavier said. “The president finally made a visit yesterday. It was a total circus around here.”
“Sorry not sorry I missed it,” Dulce said.
Zavier’s attention was caught by a tall, black man with graying hair who walked in the front door.
“There’s our medic,” he said. “Do you need to get checked out for anything?”
“I’m fine,” Dulce said.
“It’s free,” Zavier said. “We call him Obamacare because he actually looks like Obama.”
Dulce laughed. “There’s nothing wrong with me that a night of sleep won’t fix.”
“What am I thinking?” Zavier said. “You must be exhausted. Before we go up, are you sure you’re not hungry? This is it for food. No room service.”