In the bleak overcast morning I see Guanajuato as I’ve never seen it before, a pastel maze becalmed in desertion. Most of the storefronts are shuttered and hung with hand-lettered cardboard signs that say CERRADO POR LA HUELGA — closed for the strike. Nobody likes it when the cops stage a one-day work stoppage. The entire population seems to have disappeared, escaping into steeply-terraced residential blocks or outlying pueblos or the mountainous countryside. All the tourists have disappeared too, shuttling away on tour buses that shroud the city in diesel exhaust. The narrow streets seem wider with nobody to fill them, and the cobblestones beneath our feet aren’t humming with the rattle of underground traffic.

Nooshin and I are weaving through an alley that scrapes at our elbows, and turns blindly at sharp angles, and sometimes dives under buildings like a miniature tunnel. Once upon a time I needed a map to find my way around Guanajuato. Now I’m taking a surreptitious shortcut that only the locals know about. Surreptitious because it will dump us onto the plaza in front of the Museo de las Momias — Guanajuato’s legendary Museum of Mummies — a surprise that will transform Nooshin back into her usual outgoing and talkative self. I hope.

She’s a withdrawn skyscraper of a girl, neck bent forward, contemplating the cobblestones that roll beneath us. The bangs veiling her face aren’t enough of a shield against the world. She’s also wearing her sunglasses, even though it’s overcast and there’s nobody around to impress. Her backpack seems to sag on its bony shoulder. When I reach out to hold hands, she takes evasive action and jams both hands into her jeans pocket.

“Hey, check out that cool balcony.” I slow a little, pointing at a curving sheaf of stucco that wraps around the corner of a mint-green building.

Nooshin barely raises her pointy chin, then quickly drops it again. “Yeah,” she murmurs. Her long strides haven’t shortened at all. They’re carrying her down the alley, away from me.

It’s been like this for a couple days. All our wide-ranging conversations about anything and everything have shriveled into terse exchanges, and her shyness is back. Last night she couldn’t even look at me when we made love. Normally I’d just give her the space she obviously needs — a couple weeks or even months of it — but this isn’t Phoebe or my prior girlfriends anymore, and I’m not the selfish and detached Nick. I’m trying to have a relationship here, goddammit. And it was easy with Nooshin, so easy there was never any trying involved, until suddenly –

“I thought you might be taking me here,” she says in a halting voice, as we exit the alley into openness.

“Ta-dah!” I announce tardily, waving an arm at the rectangular plaza leading to the low facade of the Museo de las Momias. “First thing on a morning when there’s a police strike? We’ll have the museum to ourselves!”

A statement of fact instead of hyperbole, maybe. The plaza is even emptier than I expected, a vista of desolation. A fringe of benches wait for tourists. The central fountain spits into the air without a single person ooohing and aaahing. In front of the museum are roped-off ticket buying lines with nobody in them. A plastic Fenix pharmacy bag is the only thing moving as it blows across the plaza.

Then vendors begin to swarm out of the tent-shops that flank the plaza. We’re hit with an onslaught of desperate Mexicans — old men with canes and limps, meaty women in shawls, surly teenagers and not-surly teenagers, little kids almost trampled underfoot. Mummy-themed crap of endless variety is waved in our faces. Mummy hats, candy mummies, keychains with mummies dangling, mummy doorknockers and windchimes and statuettes and kites. Everything but mummy panties, basically.

We shake our heads and say “No, gracias!” and make shooing gestures until they get the message — we’re not buying jack shit. The swarm dwindles away in defeat.

Nooshin is watching a little girl in pigtails toddle back to a tent. The mummy t-shirt she’s carrying drags on the ground. It’s decorated with a silkscreen of the tiniest mummy on display, a baby propped in fetal position.

Reading weakness in Nooshin’s profile, I clear my throat in warning. “That’s the shitty thing. Buy from one of them, you buy from all of them.”

She doesn’t say anything, but the sideways move of her dark iris prickles me.

I’m stuck hovering next to Nooshin, unnerved. It’s not an emotion I’m used to feeling. In acute discomfort I loop an arm around her slender waist, settling my palm on the jut of a hipbone. “A peso for your thoughts?”

Her tresses ripple more intensely in the breeze. She’s shaking her head.

“Come on. Tell me,” I almost plead.

After a while she quietly announces, “I’m not going to let you throw your life away on me.”

I stare at her ear, which disappears and reappears as the wind rustles her hair. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“You need to forget I even exist. I’m just going to go away and — ”

“Nooshin, seriously. What the fuck. Is this some kind of pregnancy mood swing?”

She evades my grasp, pirouetting away. We freeze in our positions, me half-reaching in confusion, her standing with arms hugged tightly around herself. The pose causes her tanktop to ride up, exposing a sliver of caramel skin and the whorl of her bellybutton. Somewhere beneath it is –

“You didn’t choose me, Nick. We just got thrown together and now look what happened. Someday you’ll wake up and realize this isn’t what you wanted. I’m not what you wanted.” Nooshin sighs, a ragged mournful sound. “You’ll just dump me someday. You know you will.”

The accusation thuds through me, a painful tumbling trajectory down down down my mind and throat and heart, until it comes to rest in the pit of me.

Her sunglasses are aimed at a point between my hiking boots, but behind the smoky plastic she’s hanging on my reaction, waiting for me to say something. Anything. But I don’t. I’m paralyzed. This isn’t really happening to me. This isn’t my life.

Tears leak down her steep cheekbones and drip off her jaw. “Goddamn you,” she whispers. It’s only the third time I’ve ever heard her swear.

Suddenly Nooshin breaks into a dead sprint away from me, her Nikes slap-slap-slapping across the plaza, backpack jouncing wildly. She’s running so fast and frantically that her sunglasses fly off and smack the cobblestones, fracturing into pieces.

I think about stopping her or not stopping her, decide I want to stop her, try to find words that will stop her and halt this instant accelerating devolution, but she’s already traversing the plaza and disappearing into a side alley. That’s my last glimpse of her, Nooshin glancing over her shoulder in heartbroken beauty, all long scrawny limbs and flat chest and octopus ink air, that crooked eye wandering over me. And then the alley swallows her up, and she’s gone.