Cracking the Sky (7 page)

RIDING in MEXICO

My host, Valeria, barely noticed
the Mexican sun sparkle on the Caribbean, gold on brilliant blue. The salt scents of the sea and her sweat sat thick in my head, laid over with unfamiliar flowers, and a trace of animal—pig? She barely reacted to heat that made it hard for me to breathe. Her right knee sent shooting pains up her back whenever she stepped on an uneven patch that turned her foot inward. A chronic injury? She didn’t let the pain slow her. She turned from time to time, looking back over her shoulder. The thick wooden handle of a machete rode loosely in her fingers, like I might carry my car keys or all-in-one, like part of her. We rode host’s senses, not feelings, not true emotions. That’s what they told me, anyway. But right now, I felt her. I felt what she felt. I
knew
she was frightened of whatever it was she kept turning to look for, frightened of something or someone who could leap out of the jungle at her.

I had been told that it would be hard to ride a far-host, but no words had told me how foreign another woman in another place could smell and move and even see. And yet how close she would be to me, how much I felt like she and I walked through the heat and the thick scent of green and rot and dust all together.

I faded slowly away from Valeria’s senses, trading the Mexican Riviera for the plastic chairs and scuffed tile of a small classroom on the University of Washington campus. For the first few breaths I felt as if I were still in Valeria as well as in me, Isa.

I still felt fear. Not my own.

I had wanted Indians. From India, like people who rode dromedaries and lived in the Thar desert near the border with Pakistan. To feel heat, and the rolling gait of the camels and see the women who still travelled veiled and help them understand how modern women lived, help them see how they didn’t have to submit to anything they didn’t want to. But my friend Kay got the Indian desert women, and I got Mexico. Probably that was a result of choosing Spanish in fifth grade instead of Punjabi or Hindi. Not that Kay spoke either.

Kay and I shared everything, so I’d learn about the desert anyway, even if I didn’t get to ride in a caravan across it. Besides, now that I’d ridden her, I wanted Valeria. And hey, at least they gave me the Mexican Riviera and not someplace awful on the border like Tijuana. Dr. Peters, who oversaw our trips, told Kay and me we’d see poverty, but probably not senseless violence. He sent the male students to places like Darfur and Columbia. No women to anyplace scary or unsafe. Prig. Not that I wanted Darfur, even though the enemy had transformed from the Janjaweed to simple poverty and drought.

The small room felt crowded with ten of us, five teams, me and Kay together, all of us blinking uncertainly. Besides us ten, there was Dr. Peters and the paramedic the school insurance required for this class, a tall drink of cuteness who sat in the corner and ignored me completely.

After ten minutes with Valeria, I worried about her. Exactly like I’d been told not to. I couldn’t say anything for fear of Dr. Peter’s legendary wrath-of-god-look.

A slender blonde puked into her coffee cup in the back row, her face red with pain and maybe also embarrassment. The paramedic didn’t respond, so apparently puking was a normal reaction.

Dr. Peters ignored her, too. He stood calmly, hands clasped in front of him, his incredible blue eyes calm. “Remember, these people are doing a job. They barely knew you were there. You felt what they felt—sensually. Taste and smell and touch and hearing. They feel you as a weight, a buzz of electricity. Starting tomorrow, you will ride them daily. If you think twenty minutes was hard, wait until you’re on for two hours.”

Hosting students and tourists paid enough for them to live. It had made me shiver at first, but during orientation Dr. Peters told us, “It’s easier than whoring or picking bananas.” That eradicated my guilt. Besides, I’d suffered through a background check and an NDA just to get into the Good Doctor’s scariest course. I wanted a job in the diplomatic corps too bad to drop, and the other option had involved remoting drones in the Afghan/Indian war.

And now that I’d been once, I
wanted
to ride Valeria again. To smell the Caribbean and feel the strange, slight differences between our senses. To fix whatever made her afraid. Even so, I heard my father’s words in the back of my skull: “Diplomacy can’t fix everyone. Some days it breaks hearts.” Knowing that had never stopped him from trying.

After an hour of lessons and questions, even puke-girl had stopped and become quiet. I think we were all too disoriented to pay exact attention. I know I was.

After class, Kay and I had two hours free, so we wandered through the grounds, taking paths between buildings aimlessly, passing the big Suzzallo Library and dodging smart-boarders as we walked down the steps to the Quad. Kay was tall and red-haired and fair, and so surely nothing like her host, Bani. “It’s too bad we can’t hear thoughts,” she mused.

“How would we keep two sets of thoughts free of each other?”

She hugged herself, bent slightly over. “I just felt lost. Almost dizzy.”

“The Caribbean Sea is prettier than I thought it would be.”

“The desert smelled like dust and sun and oil.”

“Valeria is scared of something.” We went up a short flight of stone steps. “Maybe the drug lords? Or the federales?”

“Remember not to jump to conclusions.” Kay wagged a finger at me and stuck her neck out, a fair imitation of the good Dr. Peters. “Be an observer, not a participant.”

I shrugged. “It’s not a conclusion. I know it. She’s scared.”

“Maybe she was scared of you.”

“Maybe. But she kept looking over her shoulder. It didn’t seem like a reaction to me.” A bicycle whipped past us and we stepped aside. “How did Bani feel?”

“Like her mouth was dry and like she was tired and a little sweaty. But it’s not her first time. Hosting is like walking for her.”

“I’m Valeria’s first.”

That night, I dreamed I swam naked in that warm sea, and floated out on the low bob of the water past the shallow waves and felt the sun on my belly and breasts.

The next day, class started at seven in the morning. I sat in my hard chair sipping a latte and feeling anxious. Dark circles under Kay’s eyes suggested she’d slept about like me, but Dr. Peters was already pontificating in front of the class and I couldn’t ask her.

Had Valeria spent a good night, or a bad one? Had she been scared?

Her picture was the background for my all-in-one. She looked about twenty-five, with long dark hair that fell to her waist in thick curls that wanted a comb. In the picture, she had on khaki pants and a white shirt with buttons and a pocket over each breast. Thin sandals supported sturdy feet. Something glinted in one ear, but it was impossible to tell if it was silver or gold against her nearly-mahogany skin. Except for shorter and thinner hair, I might look like that if I lived in sun instead of rain. What frightened her? How different were the two of us? I had travelled of course, summer vacations in Europe and Canada and, once, a week on the Cuban beaches. But that had not been intimate, the people curiosities or helpers or simply confusing.

We’d had transmitters slipped under our scalps. For now, our rides started at the same time, Seattle. Kay would fall into an Indian evening and I would land in Mexico’s late morning. They’d split us later, four classes, but for the first few days the hosts just had to deal with it. Not too bad for Valeria. With a push of a button, Dr. Peters turned on the fields that sent our normal senses to sleep, fading the room we sat in into the very barest back of ourselves and sending a jolt of new senses into our brains.

It was three hours later in Yucatán, and already hot. Clouds piled on the horizon. The air felt thick with impending rain. Yesterday, I hadn’t been acknowledged at all, but this morning, Valeria spoke out loud. “Hello, Isa.”

I could not, of course, reply.

“I will treat you to coffee and we will walk on the beach today. It will be a tourist day for you.” Valeria’s English had the barest accent. She took me down streets where more people were local, although we passed a pair of pale-skinned men in Hawaiian shirts and two fat white women chattering in German, and a skinny man with red hair and a big laugh. Valeria didn’t seem to like any of them much, and kept her distance.

I had started to adjust to the ways Valeria’s walk was different than mine, with longer strides and less hurry. She stopped for coffee so dark and bitter I wanted cream in my mouth to cut it down.

“We are in Playa Del Carmen. East of the stinking resorts.” For two hours, she walked and pointed out an old ruin, a shop that had been selling sweet cakes and Coca-Cola on the same corner for fifty years and had kept it up even after Hurricane Mallory, the house of a rich French man with an aviary so close to the crumbling sidewalk that Valeria’s eyes could see brightly colored birds darting through lush plants with green leaves and red stems. Many of the things she pointed out were new, of course, post storm, and post investment. But Playa had not been damaged beyond repair, and old and new mixed with rich and poor.

Other than the wondrous raw scrape of a stranger’s senses cutting through my brain, I might as well have been wearing museum headphones. Unlike yesterday, she felt more resigned than afraid; cool and distant. So why? Was it part of the class exercise to figure out how to get actual information from your host?

Well, of course it was. My brain ran down that path while she meandered on, dragging me back with a vengeance when she stepped into the water and waded through sand. My legs felt wet like hers even though my feet were still and dry. She looked out, pointing at the sea. Resentment clogged her voice. “The reef has been bleached by excess, by pigs who burn too much gasoline and tourists with sunscreen. It is filled with dead coral that stinks when you pull it out of the water.”

I wanted to tell her it wasn’t me, or even my parents. To say we were helping her now. But of course, I had no mouth in Mexico. She stood and looked out at the beautiful water with the sun splashing it, an offshore break the only sign of the dead things buried in the waves. I couldn’t hear her thoughts, but what I thought was how things often looked one way, like the calm, warm water looked inviting. But really, they hid something else.

A soft buzz filled her ears. The timer on her watch. She turned it off. “Thank you for choosing me,” she said formally. “I’ll talk to you this evening.”

I returned to the shuffle of metal chair feet on tile and the sounds of the same woman who’d retched yesterday retching again. Sweat ran down my forehead, as if my body really had been in a tropical ninety degrees instead of the cool northwest summer near an open window. In the corner, one of the men looked straight ahead, his eyes wide and damp and his tongue licking his lips frantically.

Dr. Peters called on him. “Mathew?”

“The . . . my hosts’s baby died. Now. I saw it.”

Dr. Peters didn’t even soften his voice. His words were clipped. “The poor choose to let us host.”

Sanctimonious bastard. Easy for us to assume the poor
let
us host. Even though Sensory Wireless Ride Chips weren’t supposed to be available to the public, rumor said they were big in the sex trade. I didn’t say that even though I wanted to. Mathew closed his eyes and put his long-fingered hands over his face.

Dr. Peters continued. “Write. Now. Write down what happened without talking to each other and then we’ll discuss your next assignment.”

So pens scratched paper and fingers tapped all-in-ones and the puking girl had the hiccups and one of the women in the front had an experimental table-topper that let her just write on her desk with her finger. Even though she made the least noise, most of us sent fascinated glances her way regularly. Kay, true to her nature, was completely absorbed in her bamboo-paper journal, crabbing out tiny lines.

Me? I wrote the following:

Why is she so pissed? How do I get to her? We know nothing of each other except this business transaction. We have each other’s pictures. That’s so . . . surface. I know what she feels but I don’t know why! I hate this. I was afraid, being in her. What is she afraid of?
And then, as an afterthought,
What am I afraid of?

Then I figured I best have a whole page at least, just in case the Good Doctor came by and peered over our shoulders, and so I described the things I’d seen (crumbling bricks and sidewalks, dirt paths, children with patched clothes but clean faces, houses like mansions next to houses with leaning walls and tin roofs), the smells (the sea, the sea, and the sea, and the bitter coffee), and what I’d heard (tropical birds, with voices twice as pretty and ten times as loud as our little northwest finches).

I felt like a tourist. I wanted . . . to learn about Mexico and Valeria. If I couldn’t have camels I could actually learn about the drug wars and the tourist tensions and how it felt not to be American. What did someone like Valeria think of people like me, richer by a factor of ten or twenty even if I was only upper middle-class?

Dr. Peter’s voice startled me. “Turn your responses in.” I twitched and looked up. He was glaring at me, and probably repeating himself. So I sent my paper, kneejerk good behavior, and soon as it was sent I wished I’d removed the dorky lines about fear and feelings. He was going to give me a lecture and mark me down. Students called him the Good Doctor because you couldn’t get away with anything in his class. That made us like him and not like him all at once. He’d told us to be impartial observers, like scientists. Like junior scientists. No attachments.

Outside, Kay leaned down and whispered at me. “You looked downright pissed.”

I shook my head. “Just not what I expected. What was your ride like?”

“I bet I can ride a camel now. We were part of a caravan, like fifty camels and fifty people, although some men and boys walked. Did you know camels fart? Bani has to ride veiled, but she barely notices it. I’d rip the damned thing off.”

“You have her picture, right?”

She nodded and peeled off her coat. “Thank god it warmed up. This morning was so cold, then the desert was so hot, and now it’s perfect.”