My cellphone rings, if you can call it that anymore. Now I have a ringtone that plays an insipid electronic jingle. Back when Nooshin became my research assistant I got her a phone that had a similarly generic ring. No big deal when we were spending workdays apart and only calling each other, right? But the more the outside world intruded on our Tijuana idyll, the more we became confused whenever a cellphone rang — “Is that your phone or mine?” and “Oops, that’s you, not me!” — until she finally downloaded some identifying ringtones to tell our incoming calls apart.

Of course, this is Nooshin we’re talking about. The girl who’s such a goofball I nicknamed her Nooshball. Now we hear the first few bars of Tammy Wynette’s “Stand By Your Man” whenever her phone rings. Because that’s what she’s doing in Mexico, culture-shocked and sick with Montezuma’s Revenge and recovering from a nasty concussion. Standing by her man. A man who isn’t her husband, although we prefer to ignore that inconvenient detail.

Me, I get “Jesus Loves You”. And muffled giggles from the passenger seat. She’s cupping a hand over her mouth, those mocha eyes slitted with amusement.

I shoot Nooshin a faux-menacing just you wait until later look, and she comes back at me with a come-hither just YOU wait until later look, and I get all distracted by her effervescent beauty, which should be memorialized on the wall of a pharaoh’s tomb. Although I know she’s Persian now, not Egyptian.

“Well?” she says, turning down the radio. “Aren’t you going to answer it?”

Nah, I’m not. The caller ID reveals it’s Hercules. Professor Emeritus Hercules Gutierrez, my dissertation advisor. I can picture him perfectly — a craggy Hispanic staring through aviator shades at the parking lot known as Sunset Boulevard, killing time on his commute home from UCLA, calling for a status report on the missing half of the Korea Textile maquiladora archive.

The status is, there is no status. Or worse, the status is that I haven’t even reached Aldama yet. Which will just return the conversation to Mazatlan. Hercules could care less about our pause for Nooshin’s recuperation. He isn’t paying $16,000 for me to vacation in a beachfront tourist trap, or digitize half an archive, or duck his calls. But I’m doing those things anyway. Except digitizing half an archive. It’ll be a whole archive — if I’m lucky.

I tuck the cellphone into my denim shirt and turn the radio back up. The boppy Caribbean strains of meringue fill the cab, about the last kind of music you’d expect to hear in a hard-bitten ranching state like Durango. Outside the altiplano is streaming past, an empty vista of scrub that stretches between mountain ranges.

Nooshin fidgets with her long inky bangs. “Do you really think the tax records will be in Aldama?”

“That’s the wrong question. The right question is, what’s really going on with Senor Reyes?”

The mention of Chirbampo’s creepy silver baron — and founder of the Korea Textile maquiladora — makes her shiver. “I’d say Senor Reyes is going to prison.”

“Sure. But why? He bribes anything that moves. We know that from our half of the archive, right? The maquiladora’s Finance Department even had a budget line item for mordidas! And I assume he handled the Prieto mine the same way.”

“Even that fake strike he set up with the mineworkers?”

“Especially that fake strike he set up with the mineworkers. You can’t sustain a stunt like that without bribes. Lots and lots of bribes.” I concentrate on a typical Mexican driving maneuver — slaloming around an overloaded donkey cart that found its way onto the autopista. “So the question is, why did the bribes stop working?”

“Maybe he ran out of money.” Nooshin pins her bangs behind her ears. “What? Why are looking at me like that?”

“Damn. I never thought of that. Maybe Senor Reyes didn’t have the cash flow to keep paying all those bribes, year after year.” I tap fists with her across the cab, a you-go-girl moment. “I was thinking some political shit went down behind the scenes. A reversal that money couldn’t fix.”

“That still doesn’t answer my question. Do you think the tax records will be in Aldama?”

“They fucking better be,” I sigh.

I stop hearing the meringue and start hearing Hercules’ voice. I already know what he’d say, because he said it yesterday. Just punch the clock and come home. Get a head start on that dissertation he’s advising. Save the Department of Latin American Studies some funding, which can be given to next year’s crop of doctoral candidates. Because it isn’t his straight white male dissertation. Because he doesn’t need to attain perfection just to get a shot at a tenure-track position somewhere. Because in the end, he doesn’t give a flying fuck about some Iowa farmboy who probably doesn’t have a future in this racket anyway.

“I know what you’re thinking — ” Nooshin starts to say.

Her words push the big red button hidden inside my chest. “Can you just, like, not tell me what I’m thinking for once? I don’t know why you’re always trying to read my mind. Phoebe, I was with her for four years and she never obsessed about what I’m thinking like you do.”

In my peripheral vision Nooshin assumes a defensive posture, folding scrawny arms across her flat chest. “Maybe she didn’t care about you like I do.”

That shuts me up.

After another 10 minutes of meringue songs and mind-numbing views of the high sierra, she risks saying, “I don’t know why you’re doing this to yourself.”

“Doing what to myself? Putting up with you and your mind-reading act?”

Nooshin sighs with palpable irritation. “I’m talking about your master plan, Nick. Graduate school. Getting your Ph.D. Finding an academic job.” She sighs again. “All I hear from you is how much you hate it! You hate Hercules and his hypocrisy, and you hate teaching, and you hate applying for grants, and you hate the publish-or-perish thing, and you hate the bureaucratic games you have to play, and it just goes on and on and on.” Her hands have balled into fists. Trying to hide her frustration, she quickly makes them into hands again. “It’s not making you happy, you know. Not like I make you happy.”

“Sometimes make me happy,” I sulk.

I’m expecting some kind of snappy comeback, but there isn’t one. She’s in a place where I can’t reach her, tilted away, sagging against the passenger door. Her reflection is barely visible in the glass, a stricken girl superimposed on the desolate landscape.

“Maybe it’s like you say, and we won’t always be together. Maybe you don’t even really want that. So when I think of the future without you, I — ” Nooshin’s skinny shoulders begin to tremble under her loose tanktop straps, and her voice suddenly heats with emotion, and the window fogs with every word. “It breaks my heart, because I know I make you happy, and I could keep making you happy, I really could!” Then she quiets again. “But even if I’m not with you anymore, I still want you to be happy. Happy in your career, happy with…someone else. I want you to find the happiness you deserve.”

“Hey. Nooshball. Quit talking like that.” I reach across the cab, turning her chin toward me. Her delicate features are aligned in brave misery, and she tries to smile but not even close, and that crooked eye is slowly sinking down, down, down — and all of it, everything about her, wraps me in haunt and attraction and defenselessness.

Does love always make you feel like you’re a mosquito being sucked into a jet engine?