The Mexican Year

Aldama is one of those places that makes me wonder why I ever left Tijuana and followed Nick into the “real” Mexico. Watching the high empty altiplano unfold from the passenger seat of the truck, it feels like voyaging into a dreary netherworld. First the stunted yucca and paddles of beavertail cacti die out, then even the desert grass. Only the two-lane highway is left, bisecting a vast sea of barren dirt. Craggy mountains press in menacingly from the horizon, resolving into peaks that spill into steep angry hillsides of jagged rock. Finally a dreary smog appears in a valley ahead.

“That’s gotta be it,” Nick announces, breaking our tired silence. His voice sounds like a century of stale coffee and dust. I turn toward him hopefully, eager for conversation or just a sidelong glance. He remains frozen in profile, annoying me with a favorite trick — no hands on the wheel, letting the twin ruts in the highway steer the Explorer for him. In the opposite lane is a matching pair of ruts carved by endless overloaded trucks.

We turn off the highway below an exit sign canted at such an alarming angle it almost scrapes the semi-trailers mingling into Aldama. The city is a collection of drab scenes repeated again and again. Cinderblock buildings flaking back to their natural gray. Rusted oil tanks surrounded by puddles of shiny oil. Holes where bargain-basement mechanics encourage cars to pull overhead. Decrepit bars with semis parked in long lines outside. We see the whole pathetic truckstop of a city without even trying, suddenly arriving at a sheer cliff face where the main drag dead-ends.

Our destination is somewhere behind us. The municipal jail, which supposedly contains the tax records from the Korea Textile maquiladora archive. The same tax records which were embargoed in Chirbampo’s municipal jail — then moved here, to Nick’s unpleasant surprise. He explains that practicality is the rule in rural Mexico. If you want something guarded 24 hours a day, you put it in the jail. We almost drive past it again because the building’s stucco is flaking into white powder on the sidewalk, obscuring the giant city emblem painted on the front wall. Luckily I notice a police car parked out front.

Inside is a lobby of dirty white tile surrounded by dirty white walls. A dozen cops are hanging around the front desk, braying at each other. Their conversation immediately thuds into silence when they see the two Americans walking in the front door. Nick plunges across the lobby and into their midst, towering over them. He introduces himself and shakes hands, chatting in rapidfire Spanish, sometimes laughing. I trail after him. My job is to stay in his shadow, speaking on cue, the usual lines. Their appraising stares make my skin crawl.

Within minutes the desk sergeant is leading us down a hallway to a varnished door turning amber with age. “El jefe” — the boss — he says simply, throwing open the door so it bangs off the wall. The chief of police’s office is just as dirty and crowded as the lobby, only with plainclothes officers in jeans and untucked Hawaiian shirts and clip-on holsters. They’re watching a soap opera blare from a small black-and-white television. The familial resemblance of several officers is striking.

The chief of police is an ancient withering man with a leathery sunken-cheeked face. He looks like he was born in this office and plans to die here too. He puts on foppish reading glasses to scrutinize Nick’s letters of introduction from UCLA, the University of California Regents, and the Estado Baja California Norte Departmente de Administracion. The letterheads only deepen the wrinkles in his brow.

My stomach does a somersault when Nick explains that we want access to the Korea Textile tax records. As he’s warned me, the Mexican Constitution guarantees the sanctity of the legal process. Anyone who tampers with evidence can be jailed for 50 years. If we tried this in Mexico City, he predicts we’d be arrested on the spot.

But out here in Aldama, Nick just makes a show of taking out his wallet. He offers a donation to the local constabulary, which is probably short on equipment vital for public safety…no? Suddenly the chief is our best friend, snapping his skeletal fingers and ordering a plainclothes officer to fetch us the document storage key.

“Tell me I’m good,” Nick smirks, flipping the key in his palm as we consider the plain locked door on the far side of the lobby.

“You’re good,” I say nervously, glancing over my shoulder, wondering if they can still arrest us.

“Only cost me 60 bucks.” He fits the key into the lock. “I was prepared to go up to a hundred.”

“You’re very good.” Then I quickly amend “The best!” just so he knows how much I adore him.

Nick’s smirk fades into a trapped look. “Uh, yeah. Well. Let’s see what I bought.”

The mystery door opens into a cavern of blackness — which turns into a converted broom closet, when he finds the lightcord for the solitary dangling bulb. Cardboard fruit boxes are stacked on shelves that reach to the ceiling, some broken-sided and spilling paper everywhere. At the back of the closet files are heaped in a pile like a burial mound. Something small and dark scampers away.

Nick’s broad shoulders almost span the closet, so I wait in the doorway while he pulls boxes off the shelves and riffles through them, doing a quick inventory. His face doesn’t light up like a Roman candle, but it doesn’t twist into a frustrated scowl either. “Some of the tax records are here, but not all of them,” he announces, standing up and smacking his head into the lightbulb. There’s a faint crack and the closet plunges into darkness again.

We go back outside and stand by the Explorer in the stark afternoon sunshine, revising our plan of action. “Divide and conquer,” Nick proposes, slapping his palms together eagerly. “You get started on the digitizing, I track down somebody in the city attorney’s office.”

My eyes stray past his handsome face to Aldama, clinging to life in the high sierra. “The city attorney’s office? Why?”

He jerks a thumb at the fading CARCEL DE ALDAMA sign. “This is a city jail, not a district or state prison. That means all paperwork is kept in the city attorney’s office. Including the paperwork for the disposition of the Korea Textile maquiladora’s tax records. That’ll tell us where the missing documents went.”

“Uh, Nick? It’s Sunday afternoon. How are you going to find someone in the city attorney’s office?”

“Have some faith in me.” His grin is utterly confident. “When a gringo makes a nuisance of himself in rural Mexico, asking for help, guess what? People help.”

“You should just wait until tomorrow.” I put the tips of my Nikes together.

“You want me to hang around?” There’s a pause. “Well, yeah. I suppose I could do that.” Nick’s weight shifts from one hiking boot to the other. “This splitting up, maybe it’s not such a good idea after all. You know what? I’m just going to stay here with you — ”

“No!” I erupt in dismay, then quickly soften my protest. “No. You go off on your own. I can take care of myself.” Suddenly I need to prove my independence to him — and more importantly, to myself.

“Nooshin.” The word is a dangerous peak he wants to summit.

“You’ll be back in a couple hours. Tonight at the latest. Right?” I’m willing him to be gone — and missing him before he even leaves. “But you don’t have to go right away. How about we get a hotel room first?” I’m surprised by the abject need in my tone.

Something unusual is happening in Nick’s icy blue eyes, in the angular planes of his face. An uncharacteristically nervous look. It’s like he’s noticing me for the first time, wondering why this dust-streaked girl with the mooning face is following him across Mexico. Except he’s looking at my tummy instead of me.

“Fine. I’ll get the hotel room, then. You, you just call me…when you’re done finding someone from the city attorney’s office.”

An uncomfortable silence hangs between us in the cacophony of the busy street. I mourn something deep inside. The idea of us, I suppose. We must be over. He’s never turned down sex before. Maybe he’s planning to get it from someone else. Somewhere else. I make a mental note to check the Explorer’s odometer when he gets back.

I grab my backpack out of the truck and sling it over my shoulder — and almost collapse under the weight of the laptop and scanner inside. Nick steadies me while I stand there expectantly. Finally he rewards me with a kiss, but his stubbled lips only brush my cheek. The gesture is oddly paternal. Another uncomfortable silence envelops us.

I look back toward the street again. “Well, I suppose you should get going.”

“Yeah.” Nick moves incrementally towards me, then hesitates. “You sure you’ll be alright on your own? For a couple hours? Until tonight?”

He seems disappointed when I nod. The gesture launches him into motion, folding himself behind the steering wheel and slamming the door and merging into traffic. I’m left on the curb, a girl in his rearview mirror, waving goodbye.

I glance around at the tired buildings flanking the pockmarked avenue, looking for a hotel. Nothing bears a resemblance, not even when I walk a few blocks in the direction of the mountains. Then I ask an elderly woman shuffling by, knotted hand holding a shawl around her shoulders. She gives me directions to the nearest hotel, out by the highway, a Mexican chain for business travelers that Nick and I can’t afford. There has to be something closer and older and most of all cheaper. Finally she relents with a disapproving look, pointing down the street to a blighted strip.

I walk further through the dust and diesel fumes and discover the hotel is more like a flophouse, complete with prostitutes hanging out under the huge weatherbeaten eaves. They’re a startling flash of color in this drab place, hooting at the semi-trailers that rumble past, trying to entice the truckdrivers into a quickie.

My gaze is immediately drawn to the only one standing up, at first because she’s the prettiest, then because she’s the youngest. She has a bright welcoming face and hair dyed copper and the lustrous skin of Indian ancestry, probably Otomi in this part of Mexico. She’s still blessed — or cursed — with the lithe body of a teenager, plainly evident from the skintight polka dot dress she wears that barely covers her butt. Mexican men prefer their women with curves, so she’s working harder for business, flirting recklessly.

They all fall silent and stare at me as if they’ve never seen a freakishly tall gringa with the evil eye before. “Buenas tardes,” I mumble politely, making my Nikes slap faster across the concrete. “Buenas tardes,” they chorus back. Then I reach the scarred double doors leading into the hotel.

I’m stopped by a hand on my elbow, a paralyzing touch. The youngest prostitute, asking me for money. To her I’m a rich American like on TV. She wouldn’t believe it, but she probably has more money than me. I shake my head and shrink from her touch and escape inside. As the doors swung shut I hear her mutter “puta!” — bitch! — and resume bantering with the other prostitutes.

The desk clerk is a washed-out man showing off his tattooed arms in a wifebeater. He has deliberate trouble counting my multi-colored pesos, testing me to see if I know the currency. I do. He waits until the room key is in my hand to tell me this is a bad part of town, especially for an American. Only go out during the day. Always keep your door locked at night. Blah blah blah. It takes me a few heartbeats to realize he’s serious. I nod gravely, giggling on the inside. Who knew there was a good part of town in Aldama?

My room isn’t much different than the cells I saw in the jail, except that it has a window overlooking a trash-strewn alley, and it doesn’t have a toilet and sink squatting in the corner. There’s a single communal bathroom at the end of the hallway. I carefully inspect the bedsheets to make sure they’re clean. They’re not, of course. I can’t find any fresh stains, but they stink of B.O. when I hold them to my nose. I plan to sleep in my clothes on top of the bedspread, wearing an extra sweatshirt at night for warmth.

The prostitutes are gone when I return to the street. The massive wooden benches beneath the eaves look even larger without anyone to fill them. I retrace my steps back to the jail, slowing my pace to enjoy a routinely spectacular altiplano sunset and buy some dinner from a street vendor. He’s assisted by his adorable twin daughters, maybe 9 or 10 years old. They’re still dressed in their Sunday best and eagerly practice their nascent English with me, all dozen phrases, while he swells with pride.

Afterward I stop in a claustrophobic store literally bursting with merchandise. Colorful boxes jam the shelves like a vast marketing kaleidoscope. Barrels are stacked in some aisles, others are lined with bikes and trikes decorated with chrome and streamers. Pinatas hang from the ceiling so low I have to duck. I manage to find a three-pack of lightbulbs and haggle with the shopkeeper for a single one.

Back in the jail I return to the converted broom closet and replace the broken bulb myself, not wanting to owe any of the cops a favor if I ask them to replace it for me. Then I sit crosslegged on the cold tile, my arms casting stark shadows as I work. Peeking behind shelves I find an electrical outlet for the laptop and scanner. I dig through each cardboard box painstakingly, one after another, making notes as I digitize the yellowing sheafs.

I’m just starting to find my rhythm when everything is interrupted by a boisterous gaggle of prostitutes — all ages, all sizes, all wearing too much makeup and not enough clothes. They’re here for visiting hours. An odd ritual to me, but common in Mexico according to Nick. Prisoners with money can buy sex in their cells, or trade for it using something like cigarettes or tequila. The cops take a cut for making it happen, escorting the hookers to the cells and back, even though prostitution is technically illegal. Once I asked Nick about it, and he explained the Mexican viewpoint is men have needs and prey on each other if women aren’t around. Better to tolerate a minor crime than foster worse ones.

I get the impression it’s a slow night, since there don’t seem to be many trips back to the cells. Instead the prostitutes mostly hang out in the lobby, chatting with each other and the cops who joke around with them, breaking up the monotony of their shifts. Naturally I become a focus of their attention, the gringa working in the broom closet. I keep my back turned, discouraging interruptions, but I can hear them talking about me.

Later a potty break takes me to the only women’s bathroom in the jail, a neglected place of stained sinks and grimy toilets and a floor littered with cigarette butts. I’m mortified when I walk in on the youngest and prettiest prostitute, washing herself after a detour into one of the cells. Her polka dot dress is hiked up around her waist and she isn’t wearing any underwear. She finishes unselfconsciously and pulls down her dress and introduces herself as Marta, watching me while I pee without letting my butt touch the dirty seat. Then she fixes her makeup and hair in the mirror, shifting her eyes to look at my reflection, chatting as if our encounter is the most natural thing in the world. What am I doing in the broom closet and Mexico? Am I a lawyer, or maybe a journalist? Do I have a husband or boyfriend? We emerge from the bathroom together and the cops standing in the hallway frown at me in disapproval.

After that I overhear her describe me to the cops and other prostitutes as her “nueva amiga” — new friend. She tells them I’m doing extremely important work and shouldn’t be interrupted. Except by her, of course. If they have any questions for me, they’re supposed to tell her and she’ll ask for them. Not that I’m complaining. It’s nice to have someone to talk to after a stony day of near-silence with Nick. I look forward to her brief interruptions, when she lingers in the doorway and smokes, extending her arm into the lobby to ash on the floor. I feel a little sad when visiting hours are over and she waves goodbye, making circles with her palm like she’s cleaning a dirty window, her face split with a jaunty grin. Then she and the other prostitutes are gone and the jail falls silent behind my back, cops muttering at the front desk, an occasional clank from the cells.

Eventually I lose myself in a repetitive series of motions, taking documents out of the boxes and loading them into the sheet feeder and putting them back, scribbling notes, repeat. My brain is on autopilot, then it isn’t on anything at all.

“Senorita.” Then louder. “Senorita!”

Dumbly I twist around and look up at the cop standing in the closet doorway. I can barely see past his jutting belly. His lips are moving beneath a walrus mustache. It’s always so hard to understand Spanish when I’m exhausted. After a while I gather that he’s asking me if I want some coffee, and maybe an escort back to my hotel.

I’m not wearing my runner’s watch with the oversized digits — just one less reason for a desperate Aldama streetkid to mug me — so I ask the cop for the time. 1:30 AM. Just hearing it makes all the remaining energy fizzle out of my body. But there’s no way I’m letting him escort me back to my hotel. If there’s anything I’ve learned so far in Mexico, it’s the cops you worry about, not the criminals.

I debate calling Nick. And decide not to, when I see that he hasn’t called me.

Outside the streets are empty and moonlit, the buildings full of shadows. My Nikes sound like bomb-slaps on the sidewalk. Multiple shadows of me stretch in all directions, one shadow-me leaning away from the hovering moon, others running from streetlights and neon beer signs. If I stand in the lights a certain way one of my shadows becomes a Quasimodo, hunched and misshapen by my backpack.

I have to let myself into the hotel, working the locked front doors beneath a humming bulb that’s attracting moths. I pause to consider their ghostly flitting shapes, wondering where they live. This stretch of altiplano seems so barren and desolate by day, but at night becomes a dreamscape filled with life. In the mountains I can hear the drifting echo of coyote yips, and bats wheel overhead snapping at moths, and in dim alleys I’ve seen the flash of eyes — probably rat eyes, although I tell myself they’re just mice.

To my astonishment the tattooed clerk is still behind the desk, ghastly in the pall of a green lampshade and flickering TV. And he’s awake, even. His bejeweled fingers are wrapped around the neck of a half-empty tequila bottle. I don’t see a glass anywhere.

To his astonishment the solitary gringa is strolling the bad part of town in the middle of the night, not barricaded in her hotel room praying for the safety of dawn. I want to giggle at him. Nick and I live in a crime-ridden border city in the midst of a drug war, where on average 2.1 Mexicans die nightly from unnatural causes, and the house we rent is decorated with barred windows and deadbolts with chains on all the doors and dead cats strewn across the “lawn” of paver blocks. Aldama feels as safe as a mosque compared to our life in Tijuana.

I’m tired after climbing the stairs with my heavy backpack, so tired I can’t even finish stumbling to the hotel room door. I rest on a carved wooden bench, which sits in front of the only clean thing I’ve seen — a window overlooking the main drag. My cellphone’s battery claims to be dead, but I try it anyway, dialing Nick’s number. The call goes through and rings three times before I get his voicemail.

I rest my forehead against the cool glass, listening to my boyfriend’s voice tell me I should leave a message. I tell him our hotel information and provide a staccato update, afraid the battery will run out any word now, but it doesn’t and I’m left listening to the roaring silence. I debate whether to fill the static with “I love you”, and open my mouth, and start to say the words — but that’s when the battery dies, stranding me alone in Aldama.

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?

We splash across the muddy cobblestones of downtown Mazatlan, sandals dangling from our hands, feet bare in the muck. Around us rain is sluicing from the sky, a black deluge, lashing our skin hard enough to hurt. We beeline for the cafe’s open doorway, a misshapen rectangle of light cast across the torrent of mud and garbage washing down the street. Beneath the shelter of its eaves we balance on ancient tiles, sticking our feet into the rain, washing them clean.

Next to me is Rosalinda, Don Fidel’s daughter and part-owner of the condo complex where we’re staying. “Mira!” — look! — she points in alarm. “That is a…how do you say? Lapa!”

“Leech,” I say reflexively, and wonder where I learned the translation. I bend to examine my legs — and discover the small shape, purplish and wriggling. With a brutal flick of thumb and forefinger I send it flying back into the darkness. The mouth leaves a blood trail on the back of my calf. “Ewww! It was already latching on. Did you get any on you?”

The mere suggestion causes the forty-year-old mexicana to shriek a little. Her sandals clatter on the tile, dropped in the rush to slap at her legs. Frantic movements make her hair undulate, dark and shiny as wet mink.

I slip back into my wedgies, immediately adding another 3 inches to my towering height. Every face tilts at me in surprise — even Rosalinda, who should be used to it by now. Oh well. At least I can see better over the oriental screens. The cafe is filled with them. They form a gilded maze around the candlelit tables. “I don’t see Nick.”

The maitre d’ harrumphs to get our attention. He’s glowering at the floor, dotted with puddles by our arrival. Rosalinda smiles apologetically and says something in Spanish too fast for me to understand. Whatever she told him, it doesn’t work. His glare just deepens.

I’m grabbing handfuls of my wet sundress and holding the fabric away from my body, trying to air it out. “The tall American?” I ask simply, but only get a blank stare from the maitre d’. Every American in Mazatlan probably looks tall to him, especially me. “Really blue eyes? Kind of muscular? Handsome?”

That word finally stirs the maitre d’ into motion. He turns aside and waves us toward the back.

Nick is folded into a corner booth, impatient in the flickering candlelight, a knee pistoning beneath the table. He’s dressed in khakis and a yellow oxford, untucked, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. The top three buttons are unbuttoned. Even when I manage to dress him up, it doesn’t really work.

“Finally,” he says, sliding out of the booth to embrace me. I take the hug happily, going limp, and he recoils in laughter. “Jesus! You’re soaked! And you too!” he adds, noticing that Rosalinda is just as drowned-looking. He pulls out the table while I inch along the cushioned curve. “What the hell happened to you guys?”

“What happened? It is raining out there!” Rosalinda says, standing on her tiptoes to greet him with kisses Mexican-style. “Wait, I made a mark.” She reaches up and rubs lipstick off his cheek. “Okay.”

Nick settles himself next to me, hip touching mine. “Why didn’t you take a cab or something?”

“We did. But Rosalinda wanted to show me the cathedral on the plaza.” I fluff my damp hair and try to remember the name. “San Vicente de los…what was it again? Innocentes? Anyway, it was amazing! The pillars along the nave were gorgeous, mahogany inlaid with — ”

“Tell him about the lapa,” Rosalinda interrupts, blotting at her blouse with a linen napkin. When I just roll my eyes, she leans across the table in excitement. “She had a lapa on her leg. And did it scare her? No!”

Nick beams at me approvingly. “She’s brave, this one.”

“‘Brave this one’?” Rosalinda’s face turns quizzical. “What is that?”

“What? Oh. The phrasing…” His gaze ticks back and forth, impatient for the waitstaff. “I’m just saying Nooshin is really brave.”

“Ah,” she nods.

A harried-looking waiter arrives with menus, then rushes off again.

“Agua mineral, por favor!” Rosalinda implores after him. “Y la mejor botella de merlot!”

“Anybody want something to eat?” Nick is asking “The oysters here are fucking incredible. Nooshin? Some oysters?”

I make a face, holding my menu loosely, not reading it.

“My husband says I can only eat oysters when he is with me,” Rosalinda chuckles. “So I choose the lamb.”

I make tiny adjustments to my silverware. “How did the call go, Nick?”

“Calls plural. First I talked to Hercules, then I talked to Frankie. And both calls officially sucked ass.” His shoulders jostle mine in a tired shrug. “What can you do?”

“Is that what’s really bothering you?”

Nick stiffens in alarm. “Yeah. That’s what’s really bothering me. Bothering the shit outta me.”

“Because I thought that, maybe…” My voice falters. I shouldn’t bring up my maybe, maybe not pregnancy.

“You thought what? Frankie forgave me for stealing his TV time at the US-Mexico Border Symposium? Or Hercules doesn’t blame me for losing the other half of the Korea Textile archive?”

“Losing the other half? What is Hercules talking about? The tax records are in Aldama now. They’re not lost at all. Right?” I add, just to make sure. The Mexican legal system seems to shuffle evidence around a lot.

“You know how Hercules gets.” Nick mimicks the gravelly rumble of his dissertation advisor. “This isn’t academic research, it’s a scavenger hunt. I didn’t pay $16,000 for half an archive. Blah blah fucking blah.” He spreads his hands on the tablecloth, a closing-off gesture. End of conversation.

Dinner is watching Nick and Rosalinda dawdle over their entrees while bemoaning the state of Mazatlan — luxury hotels gobbling up the beachfront, pristine estuaries threatened with development, ever-bigger cruise ships that require the harbor to be dredged, the traffic snarls caused by a tidal wave of workers commuting to hotels and construction sites. I’m content to be on the periphery of the conversation, occasionally stealing a bite from their plates with a furtive stab of my fork.

For dessert, Nick offers to share his chocolate mousse, a splendid caramel-drizzled wedge. Rosalinda and I shake our heads vehemently. Glancing at his watch, he excuses himself to make some phone calls, lining up a visit to our next destination — Aldama. His broad shoulders recede into the murk of the cafe, but not before he casts a final glance over his shoulder at our table. At me.

“He is worried about you,” Rosalinda observes, fingering the silver necklace dangling from her slender neck. “Worried about how you do not eat, yes?”

“Well, yeah. I’m still getting my appetite back. And…” I crumple a little. “I might be pregnant. But probably not, though.”

The mexicana’s face turns poignant. She reaches over to squeeze my hand. “Is that good news? Bad news? Do you want to be pregnant?”

I pick up Nick’s spoon and lick it clean. “I haven’t given it much thought. Being pregnant, oh god… I don’t know. I just don’t know, really.” Except I do know. Hoping that I’m pregnant — stupid, pointless, insane hoping — makes something ignite in my veins.

Rosalinda is quiet for a while. “He loves you?”

“Maybe.” Reflected in the spoon is an upside-down girl with a wilted, mooning look.

“He is with you, not someone else. Why is that, do you think?”

“Because we’re good together. Really good. Like, incredible.” I pop a crumb of cake into my mouth. “But I don’t know what he really wants.”

“From a woman?” Rosalinda smiles vaguely. “I could tell you if he was Mexican. American men…you’re the expert, not me.”

Years of futility slosh in my head. I wasn’t allowed to have boyfriends or even just boy friends in high school. After graduation I married a traditional Iranian man who put me under house arrest, basically. And Nick is the only other guy I’ve ever been with. What I know about American men couldn’t fill a thimble.

“What do Mexican men want?” I ask her.

She holds up her necklace. A tiny silver Virgin of Guadalupe glints in the candlelight. “This is what Mexican men want. This, and…” She drops the necklace and makes a circle with finger and thumb, then slides it up and down a forefinger.

Our laughs echo in the booth and drift across the cafe, where tables are slowly emptying as the night wears on. Nick carves through the murk, summoning us from behind a pasted-on grin. He jams the cellphone into his pocket angrily, as if a conversation has disturbed him. But I know better. He’s already worrying about me again.

Outside it’s still pouring. We bundle Rosalinda into a taxi, one of the expensive ones for tourists and wealthy Mexicans. She’s going back to the condo complex.

“Hasta manana!” Nick calls, raising an arm in goodbye.

I watch the taillights swim off. “I had so much fun with her today. She’s super-cool.”

“Yeah.” He seems to be hesitating, about to stride briskly into the sheeting rain after her.

“So what club are we going to? Bora Bora? Senor Frogs?”

“How about we just go back to the condo instead?”

“Sure!” I gaze forward with relief. “You see another cab?”

Traffic splashes across the cobblestones. I spot an open-air Volkswagen taxi and dash across the street to intercept it — but it’s already plunging out of sight. I stay on the opposite side. Across from me, Nick is a lanky silhouette under the cafe eaves.

A microbus stops in front of him. He waves to me and ducks out of sight. My heart leaps and I start to go to him. A pair of headlights honk, swerving, and send me back to the curb, gasping a little. Finally I cross when there’s a gap in the traffic.

He left the microbus door open for me. Inside he fills a one-person seat, staring into a window lashed with downpour.

“Did you see that?” I say in belated terror. “I almost got run over!” I brush aside my wet bangs — and feel my purse disappear from beneath that untucked elbow. “Oh no,” I groan and bend down for the small beaded shape. It floats in a dirty puddle.

“You asked me if I’d want to have it taken care of. If you’re actually…you know.” Nick’s voice is tense. He doesn’t look over. “Well, I would. The timing is all wrong. Years from now, maybe. If I finish my Ph.D. and find a tenure-track job. If you go to college somewhere. If we stay together.”

I stand up slowly, gazing at him through the open microbus door. A strange thrill of despair runs through me. Mexico is a bottomless place and I’m falling faster and faster.

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.

Growing up I always wanted to be like the girls I knew from the basketball team and schoolbus stop, who transformed the humble act of eating into dramatic relationships with food. I longed to feel their baffling latenight passion for greasy bags filled with Taco Bell and Fatburger. I was secretly jealous of their protracted flirtations with dieting, the way they made it a staple of conversation and basked in the attention. I wanted to act coy like them in the presence of snacks and desserts, drawing attention to my figure with comments like “That’ll just go right to my butt!” Except I never got a butt. Or boobs. Or any curves at all, really. I just grew even taller and even skinnier, and nothing I put in my mouth made any difference to the scale in our bathroom. Finally I resigned myself to liking food enough to eat it, the same way I liked Saman’s picture enough to marry him when I was 18.

But nothing has been the same since Chirbampo, when I got sick and passed out and hit my head.

Now food and I have a relationship with a capital R. A prickly dysfunctional passive-aggressive relationship, like something worthy of a Dr. Phil intervention. Meals have devolved into culinary dating. I read about an entree in the menu, and discuss it with Nick, and get a personal reference from the waitron, and risk ordering it, and push the food around my plate, and sample a teensy weensy bite, and push it around my plate some more, and if my nose likes the aroma and my tongue likes the taste and my stomach likes whatever it is that non-nauseous stomachs like, then I finally — finally — swallow a couple mouthfuls.

That’s why I’ve gotten in the habit of playing with my food. Especially at breakfast, when my newly problematic relationship with food is at its worst. The plate just stares up at me like an accusation. I need to do SOMETHING to distract myself, you know?

So I paint my crabcake patty with ketchup, and garnish it with papas fritas — french fries — and steal two tortilla chips from Nick’s bean soup breakfast, and voila:

I like today’s masterpiece so much that I memorialize it with a click of my antique Polaroid camera. Flapping the picture to develop it, I push the plate across the table proudly. “See? Proof of my artistic genius!”

Nick pauses with a spoonful of soup halfway into his mouth. “What is it?”

“What is it?” I echo, surprisingly wounded. So this is what it feels like to be a misunderstood artiste. “It’s a kitty, duh. A kitty…with kind of a butterfly body. Like, half-kitty, half-butterfly.” I yank the plate back.

“You’re such a Nooshball,” he says lightly, but his angular face is concerned. “So in other words, you’re not eating that, huh?”

“I’m sure I’ll be hungry for lunch.” But I can’t imagine how, glancing down at my breakfast. The ketchup is suddenly a stench assaulting my nostrils, and the crabcake is a yucky texture I can already feel sliding down my throat, and –

“Nooshin? You okay?”

I’m staring up at the fly-specked ceiling and panting through my mouth, trying not to vomit. A dangling fan thrashes the humid air. I count the revolutions of its dust-streaked blades in multiples of ten — 10, 20, 30, 40…

“Hey. You okay?” Nick tries again, but with less urgency this time. The risk that I’ll become a fountain of barf is steadily diminishing.

Finally the nausea passes and I risk lowering my chin again. The restaurant levels back into view, an open room with crustacean husks nailed to the dirty walls. They seem oddly alive in the pinkish dawn pouring through the windows. Sitting across from me is an alarmingly handsome man, staring at me with eyes the color of frozen swimming pools. His head is almost shaved, a stubble that falls into dagger-like sideburns across his cheekbones. Muscles coil beneath the tight skin of his shoulders and arms, and his gray ribbed wifebeater is contoured over a chest bigger than mine. Out in the aisle his bare knee is pistoning.

“What if this is morning sickness?” I ask Nick plaintively, hating my tone of voice. “What if I’m…” I don’t dare utter the word. Emotions will coalesce around it, from my diffusion of miserable hopes and dark fears, all the feelings I hide from myself in the space between heartbeats.

He’s waving away my panic like batting a fly. “You know, there was this time I thought I had thyroid cancer. Back when I was an undergrad. I knew the symptoms, and I got so fixated on — ”

“You’re just lying to make me feel better,” I sigh.

His face is a slide show of emotions — confusion, then eye-widening surprise, and finally profound annoyance. “How the hell did you know I was lying?”

“What?”

“You heard me. How’d you know I was lying?” When I just blink at him, the corners of his mouth start twitching. “Can you read me that well? Or — I gave it away somehow, didn’t I? How?”

My cupped palms seem like a good spot to rest my face. “I can’t believe this. I’ve got morning sickness, maybe, and my boyfriend is more worried about whether people can tell he’s lying.”

There’s a silence broken only by the whirring fan — and Nick’s exasperated sigh. “You don’t have morning sickness! You’ve got a gastrointestinal infection. A bad one. But keep taking your antibiotics and you’ll be just fine.” Another exasperated sigh. “Give it a month. You’ll see.” And another sigh.

I peek through the bars of my fingers at him. “What’s on the agenda today?” I ask, hoping to distract him. Both of us, really.

Nick isn’t a vacation person. At all. His idea of relaxation is a day choked with activities — poking the speedboat into every inlet and estuary, horseback riding on the pristine Cerritos beach, exploring the picturesque streets of Old Mazatlan, swimming and snorkeling and jellyfish evasion, watching matadores and picadores train in the bullfight ring, trying new restaurants and coffee shops and internet cafes — and since I still tire easily, letting me nap while click-click-clicking on his laptop, churning out chapters of his dissertation thesis.

He sips his coffee. “Okay, here’s what I’m thinking — I’d like to take the boat around Stone Island, past the cruise ship docks, and explore all the lagoons along the Estero de Urias…”

Something we discussed yesterday. Stone Island isn’t really an island at all, just a jungle-covered peninsula that elbows toward Old Mazatlan from the south, forming a giant inlet. Beyond its mouth is a narrow navigation channel dominated by humongous cruise ships that reach 10 stories into the sky, then a sprawling rickety dockwork for the shrimp fleet, and finally vast lagoons teeming with wildlife, like wintering osprey and saltwater crabs.

But Nick is already past my mental picture of the lagoons, roughing out an itinerary that includes a stop on Isla de Venados — Deer Island — for a picnic lunch, a hike inland to ancient petroglyphs, and swimming in a waterfall. Then it’s back to the condo complex to dock the speedboat, followed by a tee time at the El Cid golf course with some Australians he met in the elevator, and after that drinks with them in the clubhouse, and and and…