After a while the sound of retching dies away and the toilet flushes. Then I hear the gurgle of a water bottle, spitting noises, liquid trickling down the sink drain. Finally there’s a single defeated sigh — the sound of Nooshin contemplating herself in the reflective tile that serves as our bathroom mirror. Pobrecita — poor thing — I think to myself, the same way I’ve been thinking it since her first trip to the bathroom early this morning. I know she dislikes having to look at herself.

She emerges at a miserable gait, managing to seem disheveled even though her octopus-ink hair is pulled back in a ponytail and her face is freshly-scrubbed. She’s a loser at both ends, vomiting from the sangria she drank and shitting diarrhea from the fish tacos she ate. Welcome to Mexico. Enjoy your stay. Come again soon.

“I didn’t think you could get this hung over from sangria,” Nooshin mumbles, a hand held delicately to her forehead.

“Not a few sips of it, anyway. You going back to bed?”

“Nah, I think I’ll try staying up. Is it okay if I watch some TV?”

“Yeah, that’s cool,” I say, putting aside a sheaf of research notes that are begging to be put aside. “Just promise you won’t yack on the couch.”

Nooshin comes over to join me on the “couch” — actually just my brand spanking new queen-sized bed with pillows propping us up. She’s wearing her new sleepshirt, a hot pink v-neck number emblazoned with a Marie Antoinette crown and the words REAL SECRETO — royal secret. I prefer her old sleepshirt, which had faded into semi-sheerness from years of washings. It turned translucent whenever she walked in front of a window or light, and pulled tight against her body I could see right through it.

She flips aimlessly through the channels, all eight of them. Five English-language channels from San Diego, three Spanish-language channels from Tijuana. This house didn’t come with a satellite dish. “So? You see anything interesting?”

“Are you kidding me?”

“Me neither.” The bed rocks underneath me as she adjusts position. “You feel like watching a movie instead?”

I’m staring at her slim legs, which seem to go on forever when she stretches them out, from the mid-thigh hem of her sleepshirt to those cute unpainted toenails.

“Um…Nick?”

“What?”

“You want to watch a movie instead?”

“Oh. Yeah, sure. One of the ones you rented?” I raise my hand in the universal STOP command when she sits up in slow motion, wincing at the discomfort. “You just relax. I’ll get the movie.”

I slide down to the foot of the bed, which is only a short reach across the bare concrete floor to the TV and DVD player. There are three DVD containers to pick from, all dirty white and stamped with the logo of the local pseudo-Blockbuster. I pry them open and peek inside, one after another, discovering…

“Uh, Nooshin? These are all Bollywood movies. Old ones, from the copyright dates.”

“I know. I thought the titles sounded cool.”

“Say what?” I turn around to look at her and — goddamnit, eyes straight ahead Nick! This is the wrong time to peek up the tempting junction of her sleepshirt and thighs. “You can’t actually read these titles, can you? They’re in Hindi, I think.”

“I said they sounded cool. Like, the way I imagined the words should be pronounced. I didn’t say I could read them.” Nooshin blanches a moment, as if an invisible wave of nausea is cresting through her. “Just pick one and let’s see what it’s like.”

That’s how we find ourselves watching a cheesy black-and-white musical featuring a cast of hundreds of bejeweled midriff-baring Indian women. The sets are fantastical simplicities of endless steps and ramps to nowhere and towering deity-statues. At the end of musical numbers dry ice fog billows up to swallow the performers. There is no dialog whatsoever, only songs in what I presume is Hindi, and zilch dubbing or subtitles.

Nooshin abandons the “couch” periodically for bathroom breaks, always begging me to pause the DVD. “I don’t want to miss anything!” she complains when I make threatening noises about letting the DVD play. I’m clueless how she’s getting anything out of the viewing, except maybe an appreciation for Bollywood stagecraft. But then I hear her humming tunelessly on the toilet, and I realize she’s probably just enjoying the unique musical numbers.

The movie is over faster than I expect, even with long vomiting-and-shitting pauses. Afterward we linger like a couple of strung-out dope fiends, watching a blank screen as we sink deeper into the cheap denim bedspread, her in that hot pink sleepshirt, me fully dressed.

“How come didn’t you get Montezuma’s revenge?” Nooshin asks after a while. “You ate the same fish tacos I did.”

“Hell if I know. I’m probably more used to the microbes down here than you are.”

“I can’t wait to get to know them better. Like you do.” She manages a faint giggle.

I lean my cheek into the pillow, looking over at her profile. Smiling despite my concern. “You’re such a goofball.”

Nooshin turns her face toward me, not stopping until her crooked wandering eye is buried in the pillow. “Goofball?”

“Renting movies that way, just because you like how the titles sound? Goofball.”

“I’m the goofball, you’re the buddy.” She’s laughing now.

I start cracking up too. Hopefully her laughter is the only thing that’s contagious. “Nooshball,” I find myself saying, then exclaiming. “Nooshball! You’re the Nooshball!” And for some utterly inexplicable reason that word scores a direct hit on our funnybones, until we’re laughing so hard we’re almost choking with mirth, which can’t be a good thing for her gastro-intestinal tract — and isn’t, when she suddenly dives off the bed and sprints into the bathroom, a girl-shaped blur moving fast.

But not fast enough. A new sound to file away in my memory — the wet splat of vomit on concrete.