American Innovations: Stories (13 page)

Once, for a weekend debate tournament, he and I were assigned to be partners, to be a team of two set to debate other teams of two. The debate topic was “A person has the right to die how and when he or she chooses.” We had to argue both Affirmative and Negative. For Negative, we focused on what we decided was the overlooked “how” of the proposition; it was a silly argument—as if the issue were people’s right to kill themselves by stepping into the middle of a freeway or by drowning themselves at a city pool—but a technically sound one, and we won all four rounds that day, easily. We knew we had to come up with a new set of rebuttals for what, by the second day of the tournament, would be premeditated counterarguments, and so late into the night, over fried okra and many teas at the local diner, we worked out ideas and arguments, at first about the debate topic and then slipping toward this, that, and the mark of Cain. “Innocent Abel has no descendants,” Macheko-son said, as if someone had inquired. “We forget that we’re all descendants of Cain, not Abel. It’s like each of us wears the mark of Cain, like each of us has killed our brother. And people think God marked Cain to shame him, but that’s not it.” Still no one was inquiring but he was responding. “The mark was to protect him. The mark meant that anyone who punished Cain would be punished by God sevenfold in return. It’s not for us to judge!” Macheko said. “Something like that.” We moved on, to other topics. Talking was easy. In some sense, we had a lot in common. Then, at around one o’clock in the morning, I don’t know how to describe what happened except to say that young Macheko gave me a look. Not a romantic look; it was more awful than that. He gave me a look that seemed to signal an imminent confession of Machekovian isolation and misery. A confession that, if I heard it, would draw me into an obligation I could not come even close to fulfilling. I would be a passing meal for an eternally starving golem, and I would be nothing else. “Whoa, I am so tired,” I said. “Jesus. It’s like somebody just hit me over the head with a club.” I left.

At the tournament the next day we lost the Negative rounds and won the Affirmative ones. For the rest of high school I avoided young Macheko, and I tried not to think of him in the twenty years following. I did hear that he hadn’t had the means to leave town for college, but that eventually the Macheko family had moved away—to somewhere, or to a few somewheres. I myself had also left and not returned.

*   *   *

Then last year I was down in Mexico City for a couple of weeks. I was going through an intense bout of fearfulness that is too irrational and stupid and elusive to explain, and I had done what my husband termed pulling a geographical. I realize it isn’t common to think of Mexico City as a haven from fear. Anyhow, there I could in conscience afford things I couldn’t normally afford because life was cheaper but not so very much cheaper that one felt awful all the time (though one felt somewhat bad). I found myself getting a manicure and a pedicure, which was weird for me, I don’t even like the look of manicured nails, and having a stranger attending to my cuticles with sharp and blunt objects: it just all feels very wrong. As I was engaged in this incorrectness, I found myself in conversation with a Mexican woman who was, she said, a television news reporter. Or rather, she used to be a television news reporter. Until she had gotten into a bad car accident. Followed by a long recovery period. She had become very depressed in that period and put on a lot of weight. Forty pounds! The television station told her that if she wanted to keep her job, she would need to take the weight off; they said they’d give her four months to do it. I was American, right? Oh, she knew my neighborhood in New York! because she had dated the grandson of Norman Mailer, and Norman Mailer had lived there, hitting on her, yes, even from his deathbed, no, that relationship had not worked out, neither the one with Norman Mailer nor with the grandson of Norman Mailer. She was soon going to be covering the Mexican midterm elections, if all went well with the diet. She might have to go to Sinaloa, or Chihuahua, in any case to a place where the narco wars were very much alive. Her friend was in Juárez; he saw bodies in the streets. Well, that’s the North!

The young woman handling my feet tenderly asked me what color I wanted my toenails painted. The TV reporter asked me what was I doing in Mexico City.

I wasn’t feeling like myself, and the light was lumbering through the extra-thick window, bending into a bright diadem, which maybe explains how I found myself getting lime green toenails and saying I was writing a culture piece about Mexico City for a magazine. For
The New York Times Magazine.
I hadn’t really figured out what I would focus on; I was a little lost, to be honest.

Except for the bit about being lost, what I’d said was not true. I’m a molecular biologist, for one thing. I study epigenetics, things that alter expression of the genetic code but that aren’t themselves in the genetic code. It’s actually pretty interesting, I think, but it’s difficult to find a way to “chat” about it with strangers, it being difficult to chat about methylation and histones.

I know the perfect thing! the TV reporter said. You should write about me and my friends! She could show me a real circle of artists and writers. When she said circle—she had switched to speaking English; her colloquialisms were good—I thought for a moment she said circus. It sounds narcissistic, she laughed, but American readers would be very interested, and it would be very easy and fun for me, she explained, and it would really be a help to her, too, because she wanted to get a different kind of work, work in the U.S., work that she knew she’d be great at, and it was very difficult to live in Mexico just now; she loved Mexico, of course. There were enough negative stories about Mexico City, this would be a positive one! She just needed to lose a little more weight. And establish herself in the U.S. She was so lucky that she had met me. This was really going to be great.

I said that I, too, thought that sounded great.

I imagine that there are those who, even if it was misdirected, might at least briefly enjoy being an object upon which esteem and hope are projected. There are those who can be lighthearted about a basic deception and/or error and either correct it or just go with it and then even do whatever little thing they can do to give the people around them what they want or need and who can then handle whatever disappointment ensues. Some people might not find that even someone’s minimal excitement about them provokes imaginings of that scene, which may or may not be in Dante but is certainly somewhere in my education, where the narrator is in some boat, crossing some river into the underworld, maybe the Styx, or Lethe, and the dead souls in the river are clamoring to get aboard, though of course they will not be able to get aboard, because they are the damned, whereas the narrator is still alive and not yet judged. When heading out to meet Annalise (that was her name) the next day, I might even have thought briefly of Manuel Macheko. Or at least of that gold-jacketed book, of those letters obliquely asking for help, and setting out on journeys from which news might or might not return.

Or maybe I didn’t think of Macheko’s book. Maybe it was only in retrospect that I thought of the Machekos.

*   *   *

I arrived at a crowded cantina in the Condesa neighborhood. People were gathered to watch Mexico versus France in the World Cup. “This is my great friend Alice!” Annalise said, introducing me around a table crowded with good-looking people, a number of them wearing glasses with “personality.” She then followed up with further biographical details about me, most untrue, some of which I was not even responsible for having related to her. My name is not Alice, but to be fair, I had told Annalise that it was. Someone at the table ran an art gallery; someone was studying architecture at Yale; or maybe his girlfriend was doing that, and he was in a rock band; someone had on a very nice suit jacket over a seafoam-colored shirt. The cantina was noisy with cheer and chatter. A corn and cream snack showed up at the table, looking somehow luxurious in little tumblers, with a sprinkle of hot pepper. A round of mescal was ordered! A goal was scored! The cantina patrons stood up and cheered. Little kazoos were being blown.

“The narcos don’t want Mexico to win,” the rock musician or architecture student explained to me. “It makes the people confident. They start expecting things.” The woman next to him, who looked maybe one-quarter Indian and was tiny, under five feet—this made her otherwise straightforward beauty otherworldly—had recently finished an art project called
Canned Laughter
, cans that said “laughter” on them.

“This is what Uribe did in Colombia,” a drunk older man said to me. “He killed every single one of them. Not just the narcos, but anyone associated with the narcos. A narco accountant. A narco driver. A narco nephrologist. All of them. You have to kill them all. Then you can let them come back, slowly, because of course there will always be a narco business. But you can’t let them think they own the country.”

“You can’t just put them in jail?” I asked.

“Jail is like Club Med for them,” he said. He had wide-set brown eyes, and upon reflection, he was kind of handsome. There were more drinks. I started not to mind whatever was said, including “It’s so important for people to know what’s what. I wrote a poem about it.”

“It’s so good that you can show how involved the arts are here with the real world,” Annalise said to me. “About the situations in which we produce, our means of production. I’m so, so happy that you’re here.” Even more snacks came to the table. I felt bad for Annalise, trying to lose weight in a drinking and snacking culture.

And not much later that was the end of it. That was the afternoon. Mexico won the game. I was drunk.

I took a long nap. In my dream, I walked into some sort of cantina or bar or pool hall or all of those things, and my father was there, though his face was that of my husband. I had two young boyfriends, or just young male companions, with me. The thing that was weird about my father’s being there was that he is dead, and this was true even in the dream, and so what was he doing there, mobile and breathing? I went ahead and approached him, in the middle of his pool game. He had his own face now. “Why didn’t you at least call to say you were still alive?” I asked. “At least a phone call. A letter. Something.” He didn’t really say much in return. In (dream) fact, he said nothing. Nor did my manifestation or questioning appear to startle or disturb him. His face—now it was my husband’s face again—was pale, and he shrugged his shoulders and went back to his pool game. I wondered if he was mentally well. Then I called my mom and my sister, from a public telephone that was there in the bar, to tell them the news—that the head of our family was alive. They already knew; they had always known. Why hadn’t they told me? “He was dead to us. We were hiding nothing.”

I woke up not sweating, but very thirsty. I saw that my husband had called, but I didn’t return the call.

*   *   *

Around 10:00 p.m., I arrived at another cantina. A smaller group was gathered. Annalise spotted me at the entrance, got up from her seat, ran over to hug me, and also gave me three cheek kisses. The physical affection made me feel companioned and safe in the world, even as in my heart I was supposedly very skeptical of her affection, or really, of late, anyone’s affection. And even as her affection was directed to a falsely named and attributed me. The crowd was already rowdy. A plate of limes was accidentally knocked over. I ordered just a single beer; it arrived alongside a free shot of tequila. Someone was shouting angrily about peccaries. Or about Gregory Peck movies? Someone patted my knee. Over the bar, a small television was showing a rerun of the soccer match from earlier in the day. The patrons still cheered at the game’s key moments, as if the game were live, its outcome unknown. I cheered, too. Ordering another beer, I wondered about both my own and Annalise’s waistline. Perhaps this was the start of a genuine empathy?

There was a three-man band—two large guitars, a washboard with an attached harmonica—that came by the table, sang a corrido, took their tip, then went back to hanging around closer to the bar itself, watching the tiny television. When a new group of patrons arrived, the band went over to them, not immediately, but soon enough, to play again.

I heard shouting at the entrance.

The entrance doors were saloon doors, though I hadn’t noticed that when I myself had entered.

Annalise ran up to a man there at the entrance. To stop him? Was he angry? Dangerous? They kissed one another’s cheeks, maybe ten or fifteen times, although not like lovers, or like former lovers, or like anything like that.

“You know who that is, right?” someone sitting near me said.

“No,” I said.

“That’s Manuel Macheko,” he said.

Or at least I heard him say Manuel Macheko. I felt sweaty, and afflicted by a ringing sound that no one else seemed to register, and also as if someone I long trusted had revealed his willingness to throw me to the dogs. Was it just the remnants of my dream talking to me? Was I really haunted by Manuel Macheko? “Who did you say that was?”

“You know, he was a great friend of bunuelos. And also of monkey vice.”

Or, again: I heard him say bunuelos and monkey vice. I was pretty sure
bunuelos
was Spanish for “little doughnuts.” Then I realized, no, he had said Bolaño. I had at least heard of Bolaño. As for Monkey Vice, I made no progress in rehearing that into a more reasonable name. Instead, I just heard monkey vice, monkey vice, monkey vice. I was able to deduce that this Monkey Vice was a relatively recently dead intellectual of considerable stature. Who had loved cats. Someone very beloved. Whom everyone now wished they could say that they had known well. It became obvious to me that I would seem like a loser and perhaps a colonialist if I let on that I had no idea about the venerable Monkey Vice, and only a dim rumored sense of Bolaño—these men who cast, even from their graves, a glow upon the Manuel Macheko with whom Annalise was walking back to our table. Whose life was this? Not mine.