The Mexican Year

This guest bedroom in Don Fidel’s centuries-old casa is a respite that seems impossibly far away from the real world, like my own private Shangri-La. The stucco walls are whitewashed and latticed with cracks, making the room bright and sparkly. An old wooden chair that looks more like a medieval torture device takes up one corner. The other corner is filled with a gigantic Christmas cactus spilling out of its pot. Sunlight filters in through the interior courtyard window, framing a verdant jungle of fan palms and bougainvillea and gorgeous flowering orchids. I can smell their fragrance seeping through the open doorway, which is tall enough for Mexicans but forces Nick and I to duck.

The IV drip is gone now, and so are my headaches. The only reminder of my brief freefall is a lingering knot on the side of my head, just above my left ear. But Dr. Samesh still has me on a steady diet of pills. Bactrim to kill anything causing Montezuma’s Revenge. Decadron to end the nausea and help me eat and drink again. Lomotil to stop everything from leaking right out my bottom.

Chirbampo seems to be inhabited by people with huge hearts, or just an abiding fascination about the fate of a wayward gringa. I’m a story arc in the local paper, pushing the new mayor and his inauguration off the front page. Schoolkids make get-well-soon cards filled with crayon scrawls and neophyte English. Kind faces suddenly appear at the foot of the bed, saying fast things in Spanish that I almost-but-not-quite understand, then vanish again.

There are a couple fixtures in the bedroom. Like Don Fidel, whose bellylaughs wax and wane depending on how I’m feeling. And Tia Dotela, his elderly and widowed sister, who knits entire wardrobes in that wooden chair. Also Maria, the slinky teenage secretary from the mayor’s office — the one Nick claims is really just a glorified ho, doing anything to get away from her new boss.

I’m in the habit of studying her surreptitiously, peeking out from behind my veil of bangs while she flips through avant-garde fashion mags from Spain or Italy or whatever. She must be five years younger than me, but she’s way more experienced in life and love. I can see it in her jaded eyes, her bored gaze, her cynical slouch. Nothing can threaten her anymore. She’s already been to all the bad places that frighten girls like me.

But something complicated happens whenever Nick walks into the room. Then Maria watches him more than me, a subtle but appraising stare that ripens into flirtation whenever they interact. Not the fakey on-demand flirting she employs with Mexican guys, but something more earnest. Even her hair-flips become a little desperate, which sounds stupid when I write it down but that’s what I observe. I think she has a crush on him.

Maybe I should feel threatened, but I don’t. And not just because everyone in Chirbampo thinks I’m married to Nick. There’s something easy and special and most of all genuine between us, something Saman and I don’t have and never will, not even if we waited for death to finally part us. The way Nick pierces me with his undivided attention, it’s like entire conversations happen without speaking and the world glimmers with our connection and heaven isn’t something you have to wait for. I could survive on his look of…

…well, I was going to say love, but that isn’t the word he wants to hear. In fact I suspect that’s the word he runs quickly from. So I’ll just say I could survive on his look of intimacy. Life is a happy thing when I melt the arctic oceans of his eyes, and talk about anything and everything with him over a meal, and bask in the warmth of his kisses and friction, and feel him shudder inside me. That’s all I want, really. Him. Life with him, instead of my husband. Is that so much to ask on Valentine’s Day?

Interviewing Senor Reyes in the gloomy chapel, I heard — literally heard — Nooshin thump to the ground outside. I don’t know how to describe the creepiness of that dull impact, echoing off the sad-eyed icons that hung in the murk. It was just like a keeling body in a movie or TV show, a sound I never expected to hear for real. Wondering what the hell happened, I bolted into the morning starkness. I raised my forearm against the angry sun, casting a bar of shade across my eyes — and that’s when I saw her, a crumpled unmoving figure, half-rolled onto her side with a thin arm flung across the gravel.

Now I stare at her beautiful face, unnaturally still and sheened with sweat. What I’m feeling, oh god — it’s emotional torture, the pain sharpening every memory that floats behind my eyelids. This is the girl who got under my skin, into my head, through my ribcage. The bravest person I know. My Nooshball. And I brought her here, to unconsciousness in a dying pueblo in bumfuck nowhere Mexico. Hanging above the bed is a solitary crucifix. I hope Christ doesn’t care if he’s watching over a girl who happens to be Muslim.

Chirbampo’s only doctor bustles around the room, changing the saline drip. He checks the tiny droplets of fluid leaking down the tube and into the bruised crook of Nooshin’s arm. His waxy face is immobile with focus. A graying ponytail spills out from underneath his straw cowboy hat. He’s wearing a Western-cut sportcoat with doublestitched trim and his jeans are too short, revealing more of his shit-stained cowboy boots than I care to see. The rancher garb isn’t an act. When Dr. Samesh isn’t busy saving lives, he runs a herd of 2,000 longhorns in a valley outside town.

I’ve never met an Asian Indian in Mexico who didn’t speak English, but I have to switch to Spanish to make him understand my frustration. “Well? Why isn’t she waking up? Do you think she’s in a coma or something?”

“Senor, please calm down,” Dr. Samesh says. His advice just ratchets my blood pressure even higher. He clasps Nooshin’s wrist gently, as if it might snap in half, and checks his watch. The minute hand creeps. “Hmmm.” He lays her wrist down again and stares off into space for a while. A forefinger taps his bloodless lips. “Hmmm,” he says again.

Jesus fucking Christ. I glance down at Don Fidel for support. This is a guest bedroom in his family’s 400-year-old casa, after all. But the diminutive figure seems even more diminutive, shrunken by the crisis, a sweaty horseshoe of gray hair fringing his scalp. All his bluster and guffawing have evaporated like spit on a hotplate. He feels the weight of my scrutiny and shifts uncomfortably.

“You say she was suffering from a stomach ailment?” Dr. Samesh asks. I’m about to mop the tile floor with his mask of cool professionalism, but then he tacks on an observation. “She appears to have lost a significant amount of weight recently, no?”

I smile faintly. “Nah. She’s always been like that. Super-skinny.” I Spanglishize the term — superflaca.

“I delivered some Bactrim and Lomotil to her the other day,” adds Maria, the teenage secretary from the mayor’s office. Her youthful curves are tucked into the wooden chair in the corner, where she flips idly through one of her glossy fashion magazines. She’s acting as the mayoral liaison, or so she claims. Any excuse to get away from the mayor-elect and his three unshaven chins.

“Did she take the medications?” Dr. Samesh asks me.

“Yeah. She was taking the recommended dosages of both.” I remember translating the labels for Nooshin, double-checking to make sure she read them correctly. Small print is even worse in Spanish.

He screws his waxy features into a musing look. “Hmmm.”

“What’s your diagnosis?” My impatience carries me closer to him. Menacingly close, even. “You can’t just stand there and go hmmm — ”

“She’s concussed, of course. But I suspect the fainting was caused by dehydration. She probably stopped drinking fluids because it made her vomit or worsened her diarrhea. Combine that with the heat stress of being outside on a hot day, and some orthostatic hypotension — ”

“Ortho what?”

“Orthostatic hypotension. That’s the medical term for faintness caused by changing position, such as when you stand up and feel lightheaded. You said she’d just gotten out of the car…” Dr. Samesh loses his train of thought. He tips back his hatbrim and considers Nooshin the same way he might consider a longhorn cow. “Like I said before, I’ll need to know some aspects of her medical history if — ”

Suddenly my cellphone plays a warning ringtone — the theme from Jaws. Everybody in the whitewashed room startles a little. Everybody except Nooshin, anyway. In my peripheral vision the willowy figure beneath the bedsheets doesn’t even twitch. She programmed that ringtone for a reason. The caller is Nasrin, Nooshin’s older and very controlling sister in San Diego. I only reached out to her because I had to.

“Nick” The word is frostbitten and lightly accented. “I got your voicemail, but I didn’t understand it. What happened to Nooshin?”

I already rehearsed this conversation — just the facts, and in reassuring language — but my mouth forgets the script. “Uh, she got sick…”

“Sick? What do you mean? Is she okay?”

“Well, not exactly.” My eyes flicker to Nooshin, so frail that she barely makes a dent in the bed. “She’s unconscious right now.”

“She’s — what?” Nasrin almost screams.

“Look, she passed out and hit her head. We’re at a friend’s place now. A doctor is taking care of her. She might need to be hospitalized in Los Mochis.”

“Los…Mochis? Is that a hospital?”

“It’s the nearest city, down on the coast. We’re in Sinaloa. A Mexican state. Where Mazatlan is.”

Strange words are pooling in my ear. Farsi, but spoken more harshly than Nooshin does. Her big sister is probably cursing me. Looking around I see everybody is eavesdropping on the conversation, reading the pained look on my face, sensing the hostility. I escape out of the bedroom and into the lush foliage of Don Fidel’s courtyard.

Nasrin is drifting back to English. “I hate you! I hate everything you’ve done to our family! I hate — ”

“Just shut the fuck up and listen, okay? The doctor needs to ask some questions about her medical history. You’re the only one with answers. Are you going to help Nooshin, or what?”

There’s a pause. A long lingering pause. A fuck-you-with-a-bargepole pause. “Let me talk to the doctor,” Nasrin finally says.

“He doesn’t speak English, so I’ll translate back and forth.” I return to the bedroom, ducking a little to fit through the Mexican-sized doorway. Every face tracks me expectantly. I flap a wrist at Dr. Samesh, motioning for him to get started.

The translation goes slower than I want, maybe because of the distracting inflections — Indian-accented Spanish in one ear, Iranian-accented English in the other. But eventually the questions and answers are strung together to make progress, and –

“Nick?” says an unmistakable voice.

I almost drop my cellphone in delighted shock. Nooshin is looking at me, the screen of her eyelashes raised, her mocha eyes dull but open. For a painfully elongated moment they’re twinned, staring in tandem — then the right orb begins wandering toward the potted Christmas cactus in the corner.

Dr. Samesh stiffens in concern, but I just slap him on the back. “Don’t worry. She’s always been like that. Evil-eyed. Evil-eyed and super-skinny.” I plop down on the bed next to her hip, smoothing her dusky tresses across the pillow, my fingers catching on a piece of gravel.

She squirms weakly on the bed. “That tickles!” The doctor is testing the sensation in her extremities, running a fingernail back and forth along the arch of her bare foot. Tendons in her neck stand out like piano wires as she cranes for a better view. Her eyebrows flare when she sees the IV dangling into her arm. “What’s going on?”

“Nasrin, good news — she’s conscious again,” I say into the cellphone, then lean down to plant a kiss on the tiny scars ghosting across Nooshin’s forehead, reminders of the awkward truce between a little girl and her crooked wandering eye, a little girl who grew up to be my valentine tomorrow.

I hover in a thick bubble of semiconsciousness, vaguely disturbed by rustles in the background — the creak of mattress springs, a toilet flushed, bootsteps on tile — but never waking up, never sinking back into sleep. My mind is filled with shadows and shifting light, a queasy tumbling nothingworld. Eventually the background noises fade away, stranding me in my nausea.

Until they’re back again. Louder. More insistent. Clarifying into sentences like “Come on, Don Fidel is waiting for us!” and “Don’t you wanna meet the notorious Senor Reyes?”

The voice belongs to Nick. And so does the hand shaking my hip.

“Mmmumph,” I groan into the pillow.

The shaking just intensifies.

Finally I capitulate and rouse myself. It takes a superhuman effort because my limbs are leaden things, responding sluggishly. I blink at the too-familiar hotel room. Clothes are lying on the bed next to me. He already chose my outfit in hopes of hurrying me along. I struggle into hiphuggers dotted with tiny yellow lemons and my nice pair of jeans, then pull on my boucle crewneck sweater. The bra I ignore.

In the bathroom I try to brush my teeth, but the taste of toothpaste just makes me gag. I rinse out my mouth, then the sink. Straightening up I encounter my reflection. The girl in the mirror looks like she’s been violently ill for several days. No amount of face-scrubbing or hairbrushing improves her appearance. Even her crooked wandering eye — the left one in the mirror — seems wan and ill. It barely strays in its socket.

I’m halfway downstairs, carefully aiming my Nikes at one step, then the next, when I realize I shouldn’t be wearing my Nikes at all. I should be wearing the only dressy pair of shoes I own, my wedgie heels. But the prospect of turning around and fighting gravity back upstairs, that’s just too much. I keep descending.

Pulled against the curb outside is a mafiamobile, as Nick calls it — a black Lincoln Town Car, and one that’s probably older than me. The windows are all rolled down. Don Fidel and Nick are seated in the vast expanse of the back seat, laughing up a storm. Behind the steering wheel is a vaguely familiar face. He says “buenos dias” and something about how it’s good to see me again. I try to place him — is he one of Don Fidel’s son-in-laws, maybe? — but all the introductions to his relatives are just a blur now.

“Climb in!” Don Fidel throws open the door and slides over to make room for me. His cowboy boots don’t touch the floormats. I endure a cheek-peck from the diminutive figure, whose leathery face is creased in a welcoming grin. “I’m glad you can join us!”

The car shudders into motion — and almost immediately stops again. You can walk from one end of Chirbampo to the other in 15 minutes, or drive through the crowded streets in twice that.

Nick leans forward so he can look past Don Fidel, who’s sitting between us. His angular features are poignant with concern. “How are you feeling?”

“I’m okay.” I hope saying it makes it come true.

“Your wife is sick?” the shrimpy man booms. “Which end is it coming out? I’ve got a great remedy for — ”

“Don Fidel. Please.” Nick’s voice is half-plea, half-command. Then he covers the awkward moment by suggesting, “How about if you tell Nooshin where we’re going?”

“Oh! Right. Well…” He proceeds to give me a story instead of a destination, beginning with a protracted explanation of why rich Mexican families often have a private chapel. Apparently it’s like a direct phoneline to God in Catholicism. Senor Reyes has a private chapel too. In fact the only thing that’s been in his family longer than their private chapel is the Prieto mine. Today he’s commissioning a private mass in hopes of persuading God to bless him with the dismissal of all charges keeping him incarcerated. Somehow, don’t ask me how. Maybe the Catholic God likes to meddle in legal proceedings.

“If Senor Reyes is in prison awaiting trial, how does he get out?” I ask in confusion. “Do they give him a day pass or something?”

“Day pass? Day pass?” Don Fidel laughs uproariously, as if that’s the funniest thing he’s ever heard. “No my friend, I vouched for him!”

“Vouching is a common practice in rural Mexico,” Nick explains. “If Senor Reyes doesn’t return to prison, Don Fidel will be held responsible. It’s, like, a means of institutionalizing trust.”

“Institutionalizing trust! Did you hear that, Ramon? The way these Americans talk!”

I don’t know whether the son-in-law driving the car speaks English or not. Right now he’s preoccupied with trying to keep the car in forward motion. Traffic is bumper-to-bumper, and pedestrians dart through the few remaining gaps.

We creep past a sidewalk vendor making corn tortillas. They darken on a piece of metal with an open blue flame below it. I’m impervious to their aroma — I’m breathing through my mouth to stop smells from making me nauseous — but just the sight of their browning circular shapes…

“You okay?” Nick asks, noticing the way I’m holding a hand over my mouth. When I feign okay-ness and nod, his icy blue eyes narrow in suspicion. Apparently I suck at lying.

Don Fidel is pointing with a liver-spotted hand. “Ah, we’re here.”

Here turns out to be a tiny chapel nestled in a grove of silvery-leaved Russian olives. Even though it’s right in the middle of the colonial district, I never noticed it before because it’s set behind a tall stucco wall topped with broken glass. The architecture is a mishmash of old and new. The modest dome and archways are gothic and gently curved, but the facade has been jazzed up with faux-doric columns that rise sharply and straightly.

I don’t know what I’m expecting, but the man who emerges from the dark interior of the chapel isn’t it. He’s bearish and slumping and potbellied, with a graying beard and pin-eyed stare. He wears a blue-and-white striped t-shirt and baggy khaki shorts. His huaraches are ready to fall apart on his feet. For some reason I’m saddened by the fact that his thick wrists and pudgy fingers and fleshy neck are completely bare. Not a single item of jewelry, not even a wristwatch. This is the most powerful man in Chirbampo, owner of the famed Prieto silver mine, and he doesn’t have a single token of his greatness.

Well, except for the brand-new Mercedes parked next to the chapel.

The usual ritualistic greeting occurs. Don Fidel scuttles over and embraces him, the kind of hello that involves an odd mixture of macho backslapping and dainty cheek-kissing. Then he extends a shriveled arm toward us. “These are the Americans I was telling you about. The talk of the town!”

“The talk of the town,” Senor Reyes echoes coldly, running that creepy gaze over us.

“Senor,” Nick says, turning on his megawatt grin. But even his enthusiasm can’t make their handshake more than tepid. “I can’t tell you what an honor — ”

“Don’t look at me again!” the silver baron snarls, crossing himself.

It’s painfully obvious who he’s talking to. Me and my mal ojo — evil eye. “Sorry,” I murmur in the direction of my Nikes, feeling even worse than sick and tired now.

Senor Reyes’ shadow is motioning impatiently for Nick to follow him. “Let’s get this over with.” Their shadows merge into the bigger shadow of the chapel, and I hear ancient floorboards creak under their weight. The shadows on the ground begin revolving around me, slowly and then quickly, and I squeeze my eyes shut tight to make the spinning stop, except it’s the sounds that stop instead, and suddenly I’m weightless — but only for a moment, until I thud to the gravel.

The morning after the mayoral election I stride out of the Hotel Independencia and make it halfway down the block before I realize something is wrong with the weather. My skin is flushed beneath my jean jacket and chambray shirt. The cold? What the hell happened to all the overcast and rainy cold? I crank my neck skyward, where distant thunderheads are skulking over the eastern mountaintops. The leading edge of a warm front that slipped in unnoticed last night — in the high sierra, there’s no humidity to produce the telltale mugginess that signals one front pushing into another. To the west, the sky is cobalt blue and flecked with clouds blowing in from the Pacific coast.

“Senor!” a female voice yells. “Wait up, senor!”

I turn around, discovering the teenage secretary from the mayor’s office. She’s on an intercept course, clacking across the cobblestones in her high heels. “Hi,” I say when she arrives.

“Hi yourself, senor,” she says breathlessly, looking delectable in a man’s dress shirt and the obligatory miniskirt. The wind shifts and her cheap perfume hits me like a sucker punch. “The mayor would like you to join him for breakfast. I’ll show you to him.”

Last week in the mayor’s office she could safely ignore me, a mere petitioner. But now that the acting mayor ordered her to bring me to breakfast, she’s obligated to shower me with attention. How am I? How is my visit going? Do I need anything that the mayor’s office could provide? Does my so-called wife?

“Actually, I’m on my way to the farmacia to buy some Bactrim tablets and Lomotil for her,” I say leadingly.

“Your wife is suffering from a little Montezuma’s Revenge?” Not the most politically correct way to phrase it, but she’s all smiling teeth, unable to resist. “I’ll have some Bactrim and Lomotil delivered to your hotel’s front desk.”

It doesn’t take much to keep my end of the conversation going. I let my attention wander from the idle banter to her, a desperately ambitious muchachita trading on the only thing she has — her sex. She probably expected to be a fixture in the mayor’s office for as long as her looks held, a loyal sycophant hoping to grace his arm someday. Like their counterparts in America, Mexican politicians rarely leave their wives for their mistresses, although it’s been known to happen. But the former mayor took her future with him when he plunged off that hairpin curve.

“Who do you think won the election?” I ask. It’s a politer version of who do you sleep with next to keep your job?

“The acting mayor.” She says it with pissed-off certainty, striding briskly into the heat.

“You don’t sound too happy about it.”

“He’s a fat pig. Nothing like Juan.”

Juan is the recently deceased mayor. I’ve seen pictures of him in the local paper, a grinning weak-chinned figure often flanked by his wife and children. Even in grainy black-and-white he looks better than the acting mayor ever will.

I grope for an upside. “Well, at least you weren’t with Juan when, uh…”

“I might as well have been.” She pauses to wave in the direction of a too-enthusiastic truckdriver, honking at her, then turns back to me darkly. “Two years with Juan, and for what? I’m right back where I started.”

The teenage secretary refers to the Hotel del Coronado as the “new” hotel, which just means it was built sometime in the last century. The furniture in the lobby is scarred, the stucco walls are cracking. I stumble on a broken floortile on the way to the elevator — elevator singular, since the other elevator’s doors are hung with a NO FUNCIONA sign. After a shuddering ride we’re emptied onto a balcony littered with potted palms and metal patio furniture.

“The mayor,” she announces, and steps back.

“Acting mayor today, mayor-elect tomorrow,” he gloats, waving me over with a flabby arm. “Have some breakfast. There’s plenty for both of us.”

He isn’t kidding. The spread in front of him would feed several ordinary appetites — chorizo, Mexican omelettes, refried beans with cheese, you name it.

I seat myself next to the fresh fruit platter. “This is an unexpected honor, senor,” I tell him, and pop a slice of mango into my mouth. Delicious.

“Do you know why I asked you here?”

I slide my eyes from the fruit platter to him, carefully concealing my alarm at his tone. “No idea,” I lie.

“Two kinds of gossip spread like wildfire in a small town like Chirbampo. The first is when a man is sleeping with a woman who isn’t his wife.” He laughs all mano-a-mano with me, then casts a lecherous glance at the teenage secretary, standing in attendance at the elevator doors and chatting on her cellphone.

You can almost see her skin crawl. She drops her gaze to the patio tile.

His amusement is long gone when he says, “The second is when an outsider shows up and starts asking a bunch of questions about Senor Reyes.” He stabs a link of chorizo with his fork and points it at me. “You told me you wanted to interview Senor Reyes, not half the goddamn town!”

“You never even told me he was incarcerated, and Don Fidel only said he was on trial for tax evasion. How was I supposed to know the government finally caught up with Senor Reyes for prolonging the Prieto mineworkers’ strike and cashing in all those federal subsidies?” When the mayor’s eyebrows rise at my candor, I quickly add, “Senor.”

The fat man pops the chorizo into his mouth and chews stonily, staring past the balcony railing at a town of countless poor families and a few rich ones. His town, at least until the next election. “Senor Reyes is a pillar of this community, a hero to the people here. The mineworkers’ strike was his idea, you know. Imagine encouraging a strike against your own mine! But without the strike benefits for his workers and the federal subsidies for his idled mine…”

He doesn’t have to finish the sentence. Silver has been the raison d’etre of Chirbampo ever since the Spanish sunk the first mineshaft here in 1552. Ending the strike means facing up to economic reality — the Prieto mine is played out, and so is Chirbampo. Last one out, turn off the lights.

“So why are you upset at me for the field interviews?” I complain through another mouthful of mango. “I was only asking about the Korea Textile maquiladora in Tijuana that Senor Reyes owned, way back in the 1970s and 1980s.”

His beady eyes narrow. “That’s not what gets back to me after a couple iterations of gossip.”

“Good point,” I acknowledge. Now I’m sampling the chorizo. The homemade sausage links almost melt in my mouth. Too bad Nooshin can’t keep anything down or I’d bring some back to the hotel for her.

“Besides, I can tell you’re the kind of gringo who’d rather apologize later than ask permission first.” He uses pudgy fingers to scratch his chin, all three of them, and stares at me blandly.

The implication is clear. He’s giving me a chance to redeem myself. I can promise to keep him in the loop, in effect giving him veto power over my activities in Chirbampo. Or I can just blow him off and keep doing my own thing, in which case he runs me out of town. He wins either way. I don’t.

“It won’t happen again,” I finally sigh. “I’ll clear everything with you first.”

Just like that, the tension ebbs out of our conversation. The acting mayor gets to his feet and lumbers around the table, grinning broadly, a meaty paw extended. “I’m glad to hear it,” he tells me, pumping my hand. “What do you say we celebrate with a drink?”

“Sounds good to me.” So does a bullet between the eyes.

“Maria! Tequila!” he bellows, even though she’s only a couple yards away.

The teenage secretary clip-clops over to a side table, retrieving a bottle of Andres Mesar and two glasses on a silver serving platter. She pours the tequila and hands a glass to each of us.

“To Chirbampo,” the fat man toasts, reaching up to clink his glass against mine. Then he tosses the yellow liquor down his throat.

“To Chirbampo,” I echo. Tequila shots with the mayor before 9 AM. Only in Mexico, man.

A strangled beeping comes from the general vicinity of his waistline. He fishes beneath a lovehandle for his cellphone. “I need to take this. I’m sure it’s somebody important calling with congratulations,” he says, then puts his glass back on the tray Maria is holding. “Set me up again, alright?”

She watches him waddle to the far end of the balcony, then looks at me. Her gaze is unreadable, her eyes like dark mirrors reflecting me back to myself. She lifts the tequila bottle to her lips and tilts her head back, swigging deeply, before refilling the mayor’s glass.

My concentration is broken by an insistent tapping. I look up from the sheaf of yellowing papers in front of me, a census document with numbers going back to the 1930s, and glance at the rickety stairs. But the tapping isn’t coming from upstairs. It’s coming from the lone window, all the way at the far end of the library’s basement. I weave through the storage shelves and use my sleeve to rub the grimy window clean.

The tapping intensifies into pounding. I can’t see who’s standing outside because it’s…dark? I glance at the oversized display on my runner’s watch. 8:30 PM already?

“Hey! Nooshin! Let’s go!” Nick’s voice is almost unrecognizable through the glass.

“Coming!” I yell back, suddenly aware that I’m starving. Lunch was a long time ago.

Hurriedly I clean up the desk where I’ve been working all day. I put the census documents back in their leather-bound folios and restack them on the shelves, fitting their shapes into the dusty outlines where they stood undisturbed for decades. Then I shovel everything into my backpack — laptop, power supply, notebooks, Spanish-American dictionary — and sling it over my shoulder, wincing at the weight. Finally I bounce up the uneven wooden stairs two at a time and bang through the door at the top.

The library is strangely dark and deserted — strangely, because last time I came upstairs to pee the library was being used as the town polling place. The slovenly policeman from the government building was milling around a table with a locked box on top. Voters bustled through the front doors, and scribbled diligently at tables with heads down, and shuffled through the aisles to the ballot box. Apparently everyone forgot about the gringa working downstairs and left for the night.

Nick is waiting for me in the truck, a pair of headlights stabbing into the twilight, idling with the heater on. “I can’t believe the fucking weather at this altitude,” he complains, kissing me quickly. “It’s gotta be cold enough to snow.” The truck shudders into motion. “Did you eat dinner yet?”

“Nah. I got busy and forgot.” I watch darkened buildings slide past, quiet beneath the stars. “Looks like everything is closed already. I thought restaurants in Mexico stayed open late.”

“In cities like Tijuana, sure. But this is rural Mexico. Here the restaurants are for businessmen socializing, and most women cook dinner for their families 365 days a year.”

“What about that bar up ahead? Could we get dinner there? Huh?” I twist in my seat, watching the bar’s entrance go by, a pair of swinging half-doors beneath a harsh security light. Inside is a flash of pool tables, pot-bellied mexicanos in straw cowboy hats, squiggly neon signs that say CERVEZA and BUDWEISER.

He gives me a look that could freeze water. “If you’re an American, the only thing you’ll find in a Mexican bar is trouble. Besides, the last interview I did tonight, the dude said there’s a restaurant that stays open late. It’s on Avenida Obregon, up by the old stamping mill.”

In the dashboard glow Nick’s face is changed, underlit and ghoulish, like something out of The Wizard of Oz. I study the greenish angle of his jaw, trying to tell if it’s clenched or not. He spent the whole day interviewing ex-workers of the Korea Textile maquiladora and their families. A frustrating exercise, sometimes. “How’d the interviews go?”

“We can talk about it later,” he sighs, running a red light through a deserted intersection. “How was your day? Better than mine?”

“I guess so. I think I got all the info you wanted. The demographic profile, or whatever. The census data on how many people left town to go work in the maquiladora and never came back. You were right, Chirbampo lost about a third of its population. Mostly the people our age. Men first, then women too.”

“Husbands sending for their wives,” Nick nods. “The demographic death spiral. Lose the people of reproductive age and you also lose their kids, the next generation. Game over in 30 or 40 years, when the middle-aged folks get older and start dying off. Chirbampo is about halfway there.”

I’m thinking back to the name carved on the library’s lintel in a classical font. “You know how the library is called the Biblioteca Franklin? Well, who’s Franklin?”

His eyes narrow into garish reflective slits. “This isn’t one of those Martin Luther King Jr. things, is it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Have you ever heard of Benjamin Franklin? Almost every town in Mexico has a public library named after him. They were all built back in the 1890s and 1900s, part of the social engineering of the Porfirio Diaz dictatorship. Diaz was trying to transform Mexico into another United States by giving every town a library stocked with translated books — Greek classics, math and science textbooks, you name it.” The shoulders of his corduroy jacket rise and fall in a shrug. “A nice plan, but Diaz hung onto power so long he provoked the Revolution in 1910.”

“You mean that library and its books are, like…” I have to do the math, which is shocking. “A hundred years old?”

“Most of the books, yeah. What’s so surprising about that?” Nick aims a lopsided grin at me. “They still work, don’t they?”

Swimming through our headlights is a whitewashed building corner, painted with a pointing arrow and the letters AVENIDA OBREGON. The windows begin to fill with hulking shadows that squat on the sides of the road. I glance around in confusion. “What does a stamping mill look like, anyway?”

“Hell if I know.” He’s staring straight ahead, hands shuddering on the wheel as the Explorer bounces over broken cobblestones. “You keep looking around. I gotta concentrate on driving. I don’t want to break an axle on this goddamn road.”

“There! Over there!” I point in famished relief at small misshapen rectangles of light spilling across the road.

We ease to a merciful halt, nudging close to the back bumper of an ancient VW Bug with Sinaloa plates. Outside the night is brittle with cold and I can see my breath, little puffs of fog that glimmer and dissolve. It takes me a moment to realize the restaurant is a converted mining building of some kind. The bank of rectangular windows gives the impression of a diner, but up close the silhouetted roofline is too tall and complicated with angles, as if a couple sheds have been grafted together.

Inside the restaurant is warm and welcoming, with delicious aromas wafting from an open kitchen. It’s nicer than the other places we’ve eaten in Chirbampo, which isn’t really saying much. An attempt has been made to decorate with potted lime trees. The rusty metal beams overhead have been painted black. Old fluorescent light fixtures have been covered with wax paper, softening their glare.

Behind a makeshift wooden podium is an elderly hostess. She beams at us with mossy teeth and exclaims about our visit and height and American-ness. We have to pause at every occupied table so she can show us off to her other customers. It’s a series of opportunities for me to practice my hairflip technique — a quick snap of my neck counterclockwise, then a gentle downward tilt of my head tipped slightly to the right, letting my bangs settle in a veil across my crooked wandering eye.

Finally she leads us to an unoccupied table. She wraps knob-knuckled hands around my chair and pulls it out for me. “Senora,” she beckons, using the Spanish title of respect for a married woman. Not senorita — an unmarried girl. Senora.

I glare reproachfully at my supposed husband. “Did you tell everybody that we’re married?”

“This is small-town Mexico. Word gets around.” Nick lifts his laminated menu like a shield and hides behind it.

I’m getting better with Mexican money, but when I’m tired sometimes I do the math wrong. That’s how I wind up ordering the shrimp Veracruz. The currency converter in my head told me it was dirt-cheap. Nick drags a hand across his face and makes a snide comment about how it’s coming out of my paycheck, not his.

“Well, at least we’re finally past the mayoral election,” I say, trying to shift his attention to happier topics than my slow acculturation. “Now you can have your meeting with Senor Reyes, get his owner’s perspective on the maquiladora.” My brow wrinkles. “I’ve never been in a prison before, though. I wonder what that’ll be like.”

“Forget it. Way too risky. If we visit him in the prison, you’ll stay in the truck.”

“But women are allowed to visit, right? Because that would be really cool! In a bad way, I know. How ugly it probably is inside. But still — Nick? Please?”

A smile flits across his exhausted face. “You’re the only person on earth who wants to get into a Mexican prison.” His kinder, gentler way of saying no f-enheimer way.

“What did the people you interviewed say about Senor Reyes?”

He looks away sharply. That topic is still off-limits, apparently. I watch an artery pulse in his neck and wonder what he’s not telling me.

Our food arrives on plates that are more like big shallow bowls. Nick starts wolfing down his pork chili without preamble, ladling spoonfuls into his mouth. Meanwhile I’m staring down at my entree and wondering where my appetite suddenly went. In its place is a vague nausea, as if all the aromas turned into odors. I poke at the food with my fork, bemused. It still looks appetizing…

He stops gorging himself long enough to wipe his chin and consider my hesitation. “What’s the matter?”

“I, um…” I smile miserably. “I don’t know.”

Nick leans over to inspect my plate. “Omigod,” he recoils. “Those are, uh…”

“What?” I ask warily. “What are they?”

“Damn. I don’t know how to say crayfish in Spanish. Anyway, they’re crayfish. Not shrimp. The restaurant probably caught them in the stream that runs through town.” He shakes his head, making reflections dance in the bald spot. “Shrimp Veracruz my ass. You just paid $25 for some rice and crayfish!”

I wait for Nick to explode into dusky guffaws and slap his pistoning knee. “Only in Mexico, man!” he’ll say. Except he doesn’t this time. Instead he sops up the rest of his chili with a flour tortilla, the eating motions a busywork to finish, attention somewhere else. Behind my eyelids I glimpse Saman, slouched and uncommunicative across the dinner table, thinking about anything except me. The faster I blink, the more they seem to fuse into a single mystery called men. I’m beginning to shiver, as if a draft was blowing up the back of my sweatshirt. The only warmth I can count on is the still-hot plate of rice and crayfish that I’m pushing away, so I stop and wrap my arms around the bowl, hugging it close.