The Mexican Year

How the hell does somebody like Nooshin just disappear into thin air in Mexico? She’s almost 6 feet tall, a giantess among mexicanas and mexicanos alike. Her right eye is crooked and wandering — and half the country is superstitious enough to recoil in horror from it, crossing themselves against the Evil Eye. Tiny scars ghost across her forehead and down the bridge of her nose. She’d have trouble hiding in the WNBA, let alone Mexico.

I’m going to find her.

That’s what I keep telling myself as I grind through these hours, fizzling with stress and exhaustion. The cellphone is welded to my ear. I’m probably racking up a zillion dollars in roaming charges and overage minutes, but what the fuck.

I’ve called every goddamn hotel in Guanajuato. Twice.

I’ve talked to that supercilious prick Beto — and just in case he was lying to me, the front desk secretary at the Baden-Powell Institute, the semester-abroad school where he teaches.

I’ve even enlisted the tourism director for the City of Guanajuato, a liver-faced Irishman named McMurphy. His #1 priority is making sure there’s enough green cervezas for St. Patrick’s Day tomorrow. But he made time to issue an emergency bulletin to every tour guide in the city, instructing them to be on the lookout for Nooshin.

All that, and still no trace of her.

Nooshin left Guanajuato. She left me. As incredible as that seems, it’s the only possibility left.

She has enough money for a bus ticket. I picture her face pressed against the glass of a sleek rumbling Greyhound bus — except in Mexico it’s Estrella Azul or Aventa, not Greyhound. She’s heading back to the house we rent in Tijuana, or maybe even America. In fact she could be across the border already. Those buses haul ass on the ultramodern toll highways.

That’s why I’m telling sob stories to disembodied voices on the phone, using a mix of perfect English and pretend-bad Spanish. My wife and I got separated…did she purchase a ticket on your bus line recently? Guanajuato to Tijuana, or just Guanajuato to anywhere? The customer service reps speak in calming tones. They’re used to dealing with lost and stranded Americans. But no matter how much they double-check and triple-check, they can’t seem to find Nooshin’s name in their passenger manifests.

After I run out of bus lines to call, I begin testing other mental images. Maybe her face is pressed against the glass of an RV, because she caught a ride with American retirees visiting Guanajuato. Or maybe she’s staring out the cab window of a semi-trailer, because she got robbed and now she has to hitchhike across the map. Or maybe…

Too much of this shit and I’m going to lose my fucking mind.

In the bathroom I try to avoid the Nick in the mirror. My reflection is haggard, with sunken eyes that have darkened into ultramarine and the makings of a helluva beard. I’m wearing my t-shirt inside out because I spilled on it and it was my last clean shirt and doing laundry, for chrissake — who the fuck thinks about doing laundry at a time like this? Some handsome portrait of true love I’m turning out to be. If she could see me now, she’d just keep going.

There is no sleeping on the ride across the Manzanares Mesa, not on the so-called roads that meander through the scrub. We bounce around violently in cracked vinyl seats as the old schoolbus rattles across washboard sections and potholes. The windows are down and dust is blowing in, turning our faces strangely pale and chalky, red-rimming our blinking eyes, burning our lungs with every breath. The floor of the bus is piled with garbage up to our ankles, mostly empty Coke cans and food wrappers. A relic of a woman leans against me, smacking her kerchiefed head against my shoulder with every jounce. Glazed with exhaustion, I try to stay upright but keep getting knocked into a young father balanced in the aisle like a surfer, a baby wailing inconsolably in his tattooed arms.

Eventually the endless expanse of scrub is interrupted by a few cinderblock huts with corrugated aluminum roofs, then more. Soon we’re grinding past stucco buildings that look a hundred years old. I ask the young dad if this is finally La Ceja, the end of the line. He motions to his ear and makes a face. I repeat the question, shouting this time. He gives me a sympathetic look and tells me no, it’s Ahorcada. La Ceja is the next pueblo up the road, still one more bus ride away.

The bus creaks to a halt in the plaza, just a big empty swath of dirt, and we spill out unsteadily into the blazing heat. My body feels like it’s been shaken to pieces and only loose scraps of skin hold me together. The driver climbs up on the roof and begins unceremoniously heaving luggage off the rack, starting with an old Samsonite hardshell. The suitcase almost hits me and bounces off the ground, indestructible. I step back out of luggage-heaving range, then yell stuff at the bus driver in Farsi until I feel better.

I smack dust off my clothes and tighten my backpack straps and walk over to the plaza store, a cinderblock building painted pee yellow. Even though it’s probably 90 degrees inside in the shade, it feels cool and refreshing compared to being outside. I buy a Budweiser — more plentiful than water in Mexico, and safer to drink — and sit down on a wooden bench with a view out the window-less window, really just a framed-out hole in the side of the building covered with bars.

Visions ripple in the heat waves. Kids playing soccer with a homemade ball. Two rear ends sticking out from underneath the hood of a pickup. A shabby-looking hut in the slow but sure process of keeling over.

The bus’s engine roars to life way sooner than previous experience has led me to expect. I gulp the rest of my Budweiser and trot back outside, where the sun beats at me with hot fists. The bus driver sees me coming, making eye contact as I run across the plaza. I raise my arm in a “wait for me!” gesture but he doesn’t, he closes the door and the bus shudders into motion. I take a few desperate strides after it, reaching a hand down my t-shirt for my moneypouch, realizing only a bribe might stop him now. But the bus is already rumbling away and disappearing behind a whitewashed church, giving me a brief glimpse of the old woman who was leaning against my shoulder, now looking out the window at me impassively. Then I’m standing alone in the plaza.

I return to the plaza store and its wooden bench and sit there with another can of beer, grimy and exhausted and thinking about absolutely nothing at all.

A couple hours later my butt has fallen asleep but the rest of me hasn’t. I wander outside and circle the plaza, which is only fringed by a few buildings with wide spaces in between — the store, the church, what must be the town hall although I forget the Spanish word for it. An entire side of the plaza is empty, filled only with a view of the mountains that have been creeping closer all day. I find myself wishing I still had my sunglasses. I encounter a few people, but they notice my crooked eye and turn away, making the sign of the cross.

After a while I return to the plaza store and reclaim my bench. The heat dissipates with the sun, which slowly ebbs behind the whitewashed church across the plaza. I buy a corn tortilla for dinner. It sits in my stomach like a stone. The store owner, a stoic unblinking man, shoos me outside and closes up for the night. He just laughs when I ask him if Ahorcada has a hotel.

I walk in the dusty gravel streets without knowing where to go, my backpack feeling impossibly heavy even though there isn’t much in it. I begin to wonder if I’m being followed. The pueblo is falling into shadows that become whatever my imagination makes them. Almost no windows are lit.

Then I’m at the edge of town, an undergrowth of ruin. A disembodied gateway arch is jutting from ocotillo blooms, which are almost luminescent in the moonlight. Barbed wire plucks at me, tearing a hole in my jeans. The remains of a fence disappear crookedly into the dark, the poles still standing. Cacti spill over a heap of something.

A shallow pool of sand becomes my bed. The residual heat of day seeps through my body, lapping at my alertness. Noises seem far-off even when they’re not. Every once in a while I stir, opening my eyes into tired slits. The moon is always in a different place than I expect, stealing across the sky in leaps.

Have I ever told you how much I fucking hate relationships? They’re like being trapped in an absurd Kabuki play of coupling and artifice, where no means yes and yes means no, and stop is an invitation to keep going — unless it actually isn’t, of course — and running away means you want to be chased instead of given all the distance you apparently need, and “love” is a word that counts for everything and nothing at all. No wonder my most enduring relationship is with my right hand.

I thought it was different with Nooshin. Our relationship happened as easy as breathing. She was born without an inner bitch. Snarkiness and mood swings never afflicted her. Our conversations didn’t veer into the female dead zone of trash TV and celebrities and shopping and diets. And she put out.

Yeah, I should’ve said something right away, when she hit me with that accusation in front of the Museo de las Momias. “You’ll just dump me someday…” Standing there like a dumbstruck idiot wasn’t very rico suave of me. Where was the patented Nick Roberts comeback, the witty disarming line that makes her forget what she’s thinking? Or just an earnest denial?

But still, it was her fault for fleeing. Her fault, not mine. She should’ve talked it out with me, whatever it was. That’s what mature responsible people do, talk it out. Not madly sprint across a plaza like your boyfriend is trying to kill you and your unborn child. I mean, come on. What’s up with that shit?

That’s why I didn’t call her cellphone right away. The girl obviously wanted her space, duh. Let her call me — when she’s good and ready.

By noon she wasn’t good and ready yet.

Hours dragged off my watch. The sun turned into a bloody ball and sank behind the western crags. Sitting on the hotel veranda I finished the seventh half-assed chapter of my dissertation and began the eighth.

Finally I broke down and called her. I was half-expecting voicemail and half-expecting a tirade, but some Mexican kid answered. He claimed a tall gringa with the evil eye had come running along — “corriendo”, literally running — and paused just long enough to fling money at the neighborhood. Supposedly she also dropped the cellphone. I was like, nice try asshole. You pickpocketed her purse when she was guilt-stricken and doling handouts.

I hung up in frustration. It figured. Nooshin got out of my sight and started trying to save the world, one handout at a time.

Eventually moths swarmed the veranda lights and my laptop screen, and I retreated to our hotel room, and panic ate at me like acid. I was remembering her other bombshell — “I’m just going to go away” — and wondering if she meant it, honest-to-fucking-god meant it. Because there’s no telling with her. She’s the kind of brave that hovers between utterly fearless and just plain stupid.

This morning I woke up alone with a splitting headache and the Sahara in my mouth. After wading through empty Tecate cans to the bathroom and back, I called every hotel in Guanajuato, inquiring about a beanpole American chick with a crooked eye. Just to give myself something to do, you know? But her disappearance is sudden and complete and baffling, my own private Amelia Earhart.

That leaves me wondering if she slept outside on a bench somewhere, or found shelter with a sympathetic local, or hooked up with Beto…

I crack open a leftover Tecate from last night and contemplate our suitcase, lying in a corner. Her clothes are spilling onto the garish hexagonal tile, including the bras she doesn’t need. The plastic bag of dirty laundry is half-full of her stuff. Those strappy high-heeled sandals are waiting for her, just like me.

I marinate in remorse.

Nooshin. I said I loved you. Don’t you remember?

He never said a word.

I keep replaying the scene in my mind, again and again and again, hoping against hope that I’m just remembering it wrong, that I’ll blink away my tears and we’ll be standing in the plaza of the Museo de las Momias again, except this time he opens his mouth and says…

But he didn’t. He just stood there, posed in mute disdain, his face smooth and tanned and invulnerable. The shock hasn’t worn off yet. I’m carrying his child, panicked with anxiety about our future, and he looked right at me. Right through me.

Remorse dilates my heart. I should’ve turned with an impulse to explain myself, from the beginning all the way to the end, because then he’d want to explain himself too. I should’ve gone back to him.

But when I paused to look over my shoulder Nick was still standing there, watching me recede. He hadn’t advanced a step in pursuit. He wasn’t raising an arm to stop me. He didn’t utter my name.

Afterward my flight took on the flat urgency of a trance. I ran and cried and ran some more on a treadmill of cobblestones. The overcast tableau of Guanajuato became a gray backdrop for the disembodied heads of Mexicans, turning to stare at the tearful fleeing gringa and her evil eye. For no reason I paused to toss money from my purse, a shower of green dollars and rainbow-colored pesos that delighted every brown face. Then my hand closed around the cool metallic shape of my cellphone, the twin of Nick’s. I tossed it away too.

That hour and all the rest were torrents of sadness. I pictured my cellphone ringing, a street urchin listening to a repentant Nick, all his words of apology and tenderness filling the wrong ear. Maybe, just maybe…

But I’m already sick of maybes. I can’t live on maybes, and neither can my baby.

Later I glimpsed a phone kiosk inside an open storefront. Smothering my sobs with a tiny impotent fist, I locked myself in the glassy enclosure. In its confines I felt my hope intensely, a guilty furtive thing. But after feeding a pound of coins into the slot I still couldn’t make the stupid phone work, and my heart began fluttering in frustration, and I just gave up on that.

My own words keep ringing in my ears. You need to forget I even exist… And especially I’m just going to go away…

I imagine trying to scoot to the far side of the hotel room bed, but it’s so cramped that I’d still be touching him. I need to move farther away, into memory and beyond. For both of us. For all three of us.

Past the Teatro Juarez I discover a line of buses that look stunned and abandoned in the dusk. A converted school bus shudders in the wind. Its rusty dented body sticks out amongst the tourist buses, proud and devastated. I mount the steps in a dream. I’m wearing my only clothes, and toting a backpack full of nothing much, and carrying a new life in my stomach. When I hand over a fistful of pesos I don’t even bother to ask where the bus is going, and the driver doesn’t tell me.

I sit silently amongst the locals in the vinyl seats, worn through to the springs and patched with duct tape. The driver works to make the engine turn over, grunting loudly as if lifting an impossible weight. Outside the dirty windows Guanajuato is sinking into twilight. Eventually the streetlight vista lurches into motion, grinding slowly and then quickly into a murky blur.

The silhouettes in the bus begin disappearing one by one. Eventually I join them. I lie down on the seat and use my backpack for a pillow, closing my eyes. Wishing I could leave myself behind instead of Nick. Wondering where I’ll be when I wake up.

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.