The railroad tracks divide Mazatlan into two cities. Go west toward the beachfront and Mazatlan almost lives up to its over-hyped reputation. English-language signs guide the herds of drunken sunburned face-stuffing tourists. Gorgeously pristine beaches are cleaned nightly to keep them that way. Luxury hotels jut into the sky like fangs, cruise ships tower over the tallest antenna-studded hill. Overhead the parasailers mix with flocks of seagulls and the occasional dive-bombing pelican. Perfectly good asphalt streets have been torn up and repaved with distressed cobblestones to achieve an Old Caribbean feel, buildings have been repainted in the Miami Vice palette — fruity pinks and greens and yellows. Funky open-air Volkswagen taxis known as pulmonias careen around like thrill rides. Entire city blocks consist of pulsing clubs, tropical-themed bars, sex emporiums with attached hourly-rate hotels. Dining options range from Michelin-worthy restaurants to every American chain restaurant imaginable. The colonial district is slowly disappearing into a morass of shops selling memento crap. Golf courses like giant astroturf welcome mats wind through condo timeshares. Recently concluded is the world’s third-largest Mardi Gras celebration, after the annual blowouts in New Orleans and Rio de Janeiro. Across the bay is Deer Island, a mecca for tidepool wading and horseback riding. Private villas dot the hillsides, with nude sunbathers fringing their obligatory pools. There’s even a bowling alley and a pint-sized zoo/aquarium combination.

Go east past the coastal hills and Mazatlan is a bedroom city of workers lured by tourism jobs. This is the Mexico I know, where all the signs are in Spanish and most of the faces are brown — or black, in the case of Mexicans with slave ancestry. I’m steering my truck through barrios of cinderblock apartment buildings that sprawl into the jungle, many so new they haven’t even been painted. At ALTO signs we wait for schoolkids crossing in grubby uniformed packs. Catholic churches rub up against strip malls and junkyards. On every streetcorner is a tortilla cart or other form of cheapo meals-on-wheels, always beneath a huge draping canopy. I fill up the Explorer at a Pemex that’s just some pumps and an oil tank. Bleary hookers contemplate the daylight, staring out from whorehouse windows. The asphalt streets are freshly laid and crowded with overloaded trucks, along with the occasional donkey-drawn wagon. Plumes of factory smoke drift inland and pile up against the mountains. And everywhere, waitstaff and housecleaners are queuing for the hotel shuttles that transport them to and from their paychecks. Their employee access cards evoke the subservience of Mexico’s colonial past — Royal Villas, Oceano Palace, Hotel El Rey de Sol — even as they wait on streets named after patriots who fought and died to ensure no Mexican would ever kowtow to a foreigner again. Driving down Calle Jose Maria Morelos, I try to explain the contradiction to Nooshin.

“Why do you always have to get political about everything?” she complains, scrunching her brow in irritation. “Once, just once, I wish you could enjoy Mexico like a normal ignorant person.” Then she turns a bare shoulder to me, a SHUT UP AND DRIVE gesture while she contemplates the view.

Mazatlan is unfolding like an aerial postcard as we rocket up a series of switchbacks, climbing toward the gated hilltop and El Jardin — The Garden — a private arboretum owned by a wealthy Russian. The sign says BY APPOINTMENT ONLY in Spanish, English and Cyrillic because it really is a garden, a couple acres surrounding an estate-style home that overlooks the city. The guardhouse is buried in morning glory vines and totally invisible, until a shotgun-wielding gatekeeper materializes to block the way. Balmy heat fills the cab when I roll down the window and flash my California driver’s license. Over the gatekeeper’s shoulder is the sun, a molten orb pinned to the cloudless sky.

The arboretum’s parking lot is tiny, only five slots big, and empty until the Explorer arrives. We’re the only tourists in Mazatlan who know Don Fidel who knows the wealthy Russian. “Check out these poinciana trees,” I say, exiting the truck and pointing overhead at the foliage and flame-orange blooms. “Usually poincianas don’t flower until spring.”

“It is spring, you silly!” Nooshin’s profile is joyful as she stretches, giraffe-like, for a bloom and tucks it behind her ear.

Sprinkler mist hangs all around us. We leave footprints on grass that’s wet and matted. I look around for a pole-mounted map or handout box or something, planning to orient myself, but the arboretum just begins and we’re already in it. She brushes past me, a soft friction of bare skin. “Come on, let’s see what’s over there…”

We enter a circle of sea-grape trees, which surround a reflecting pool dotted with lilypads. A bronze archer-girl rises out of the water on a mossy dais. Her shooting breast is bared.

Nooshin considers the statue warily. “This is one of those cultural things I don’t get, right? Like Martin Luther and libraries named after Benjamin Franklin.”

“You’re such a Nooshball,” I laugh, playfully slapping at her bony ass. “That’s an Amazon, a warrior from a mythic all-female tribe. Except they cut off their shooting breasts to make it easier to draw their bows. This sculptor must’ve preferred his Amazons with two boobs instead of one.”

“If they were an all-female tribe, how did they reproduce?”

“Hell if I know. Mitosis, maybe. Hey — what’s the matter?”

Nooshin is crying out unintelligibly and plunging deeper into the arboretum. She weaves through palm trunks like colonnades, sprinting in and out of shadows. I finally catch up to her in a clearing, where’s she’s doubled over, hands on knees, beneath the swaying fronds.

“Relax,” I say in my calmest voice. “I didn’t get you pregnant.”

“But what if you did?” She straightens up, blushing in that way that makes me melt and harden at the same time. “I keep thinking about that time in the shower, back in Tijuana. Maybe you didn’t pull out in time.” Nooshin takes my hand, seeking closeness. Reassurance. “If I actually was pregnant, would you want me to…get it taken care of?”

We wander through the last of the palms, then cross over to the bamboo and juniper of a Japanese garden. “You’re really fixated on this, aren’t you?”

“Yeah. Sorry! It’s just that…” Her unplucked eyebrows are knit together. “I thought about it a lot with Saman. Especially the last couple years, when everyone was pressuring me to start a family. I used to have these horrible nightmares about it, where he got me pregnant even though I was on the pill.”

Past the Japanese garden is a narrow path fringed by tropical flowerbeds. The blooms swish against our knees. “Would you want to get an abortion?” I ask.

She yanks her chin side-to-side in a silent yet screaming NO. “I couldn’t end a life inside me, not even if Saman was the father. I couldn’t go against God.”

Her words are an undertow ripping me away. God? There is no God, only a cold unfeeling cosmos — and the cosmos definitely doesn’t give a shit about you or your fucklife. In that context abortion is pragmatism, not a sin against some imaginary bearded dead-white-male type with a voyeuristic streak.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Nooshin is saying. “You’re thinking there’s no God, and I’m just a stupid girl for believing — ”

I break our handhold, angered by her presumptuous tone. Angered because the presumption is right on target. Angered because she has a disconcerting talent for reading me like a comic book.

She considers me from across a couple feet of sunlit gravel trail, our symbolic chasm of different beliefs, different worlds. “Every time I see myself in a mirror, I wonder why God made me this way. I used to think he gave me this eye so I could see the world differently, experience it differently. And sometimes it’s hard for me, and I get tired of having this eye, and I wish God made me the same way he made everyone else, with two eyes that keep looking at the same thing, but maybe, just maybe…” Her voice trails off into the torpid afternoon.

“Just maybe what?” I ask, more curious than irritated.

“Maybe God didn’t make me this way for me. Maybe he made me this way for someone else. Because you know that saying, about how eyes are the window to the soul? Maybe God gave me a really special window, one that only my true love could see through.” Nooshin lays a chipped pink fingernail on her right cheek, pointing at her crooked wandering eye — which is nervously hyper in its socket. “Maybe this window is just for you, Nick.”

Suddenly all the distance I felt is gone. There she is, right in front of me, the beveled sunlight casting shadows across her anxious face, poinciana flower sagging behind an ear, lips slightly trembling. A whole new terrifying vista of desire, with belly swelling and the maternity ward and a baby coming out of her body and Jesus fucking Christ — but I’m kissing her anyway, and she tastes like the chicles that she calls a meal, and I’m confronted with my own set of maybes. Maybe she’s pregnant. Maybe I’m going to be a father. And maybe I couldn’t hope for a better future than the one I’m discovering with her.