The Mexican Year

In my subway car everybody looks like a professional athlete. Their physiques bulge under flame-red tracksuits inscribed with a snorting bovine logo and the word Toros — Bulls. Muscular arms are wrapped around duffel bags, protecting their athletic equipment from snatch-and-grab subway gangs. Black and mestizo and Indian faces are stoic under cheap meshbacks. The Toros must be some kind of low-rent baseball team, I guess. But I never find out for sure, because they get off at the next station, leaving behind an odor of muscle balm and moldering jockstraps.

Other riders pile into the car. A gang of tattooed punks is arguing about their next move — get off at Trincondero, or keep going to El Centro? Several day laborers are drinking their way somewhere, passing a plastic bottle of tequila around. A full-skirted senora rides herd on five — no, six — cherubic kids. Threading down the aisle, a pair of shady-looking businessmen in guayaberas search for a quiet nook. A subway cop in body armor stomps after them and drags one away. What the hell did he do? Nobody knows — with the possible exception of his flop-sweating partner.

On my bench a Panamanian chemist, seeking work in Mexico City, asks me questions with delicate persistence. He seems troubled by my nationality. Why is an American like me riding the subways alone? Aren’t I afraid of getting mugged or kidnapped? How did I get this Spanish and my knowledge of Mexico?

Only a weird-ass chica distracts him. The girl wedges herself between us, ranting. Her language is an angry diatribe of half-Spanish, half-gibberish. I can’t tell whether she’s high or mental. Maybe high, since her hair is a glossy tangle and she wears a goth amount of eye makeup.

Perfect timing for my exit. I stride through a subterranean colonnade of antiseptic white tile and brushed-aluminum doors, one of the cleanest stations in the world’s busiest subway system. The passenger lounge is tucked behind a sweep of robin’s egg plexiglass, like a giant aquarium filled with people. I’m stuck with a taco wrapper in my hand, searching for garbage cans that don’t exist — until I notice a Japanese tourist feeding trash into the wall. The receptacles are recessed, almost invisible.

Up a flight of granite steps is the smoggy glare of Polanco, the longtime address of Mexico City’s uber-rich. The district is a posh triangle of glassy office towers, honey-colored condo highrises ringed with balconies, Depression-era mansions in California Colonial style, baroque foreign embassies with obscure flags waving. You can’t jump out a window without landing on a luxury sedan. Overhead is a canopy of elm trees, genus and species unknown to me. Back home all the elms — ulmus americana — are deceased stumps that fell to Dutch Elm Disease, but this type is thriving in the Darwinian crucible of Mexico City, an arboreal cockroach.

Soon I find myself at the address of an office tower that isn’t very towering at all. The lobby is so generic I feel like I’ve walked into it before, in Des Moines, in La-La Land, somewhere else in Mexico City. A security guard is standing like a statue, unexpectedly Caucasian, a sidearm holstered on the belt of his merle uniform. He has small heartless eyes. I’m waved through a metal detector while another security guard — also white — roots in my backpack. They chat like old women in a language that could be Russian.

Eventually I’m allowed to ride the elevator up to the 16th floor. My destination is a spacious corner office with a smoked glass view of Mexico City’s dreaded “beltway”, as the Circuito Interior — interior highway loop — is called. The office is lined with display cases almost bursting with the flotsam of suburban American life — bowling trophies, books that have never been read, a framed shot of doughy men in waders pinching together for the camera.

The gringo rising from the desk is fat and oatmeal-faced and blinking through wire-rimmed glasses. He’s dressed business casual in a horizontally-striped polo shirt that exaggerates his girth, black jeans, and patent leather tasseled loafers. He beckons me across the plush carpeting, hand extended. His shake is soft but enthusiastic. “Elliot Parner. Got my doctorate from the program in 1986.”

I spot the framed diploma in his proud collection of life memorabilia. Yep, the date says 1986. “I’m Nick Roberts. Great to meet you. I should get my Ph.D. later this year, or maybe in 2009 — if I don’t take my M.A. and bail.”

Parner nods, understanding my dilemma. I’ve already explained it over the phone. I discovered him while researching the UCLA Department of Latin American Studies alumni directory. Former hotshot in the Ph.D. program, now working as a research analyst for an elite Mexican bank. Just the dude I need to talk to.

“You want anything?” he asks, retrieving a Gatorade from a small fridge. “A sport drink? Coffee? Soda?”

“Nah. I’m fine, thanks. Are you usually in the office on Saturday mornings?”

“Four times a year. That’s when I produce our copper industry report. I release it during the first full week of every quarter.” Parner opens his Gatorade and points at a wall decorated with framed magazine covers. Banco Commercial de Ciudad Mexico - Quarterly Mexican Copper Industry Report. “That’s my baby, right there.”

I think of my own baby, riding around in Nooshin’s bulge. “You have a family?”

His face clouds over. “Three kids, two boys and a girl. They’re back in the States with my wife. She doesn’t want to raise the kids in Mexico. Too dangerous, she thinks. So I fly back every couple weeks to see them.” He plays with his wedding band, sliding it on and off, then forces himself to brighten. “What about you?”

“I’ve got a girlfriend, and we’ve got a baby on the way.”

“Ah,” Parner says. He leads me over to an L-shaped couch in a corner of the office. He takes the side with the window view.

I’m left with the side that looks across his office at the wall of magazine covers. I wonder if he’s insecure, always needing to remind his visitors of what he does for the bank. I ask him how his academic career ended and his corporate career began.

“I never had a career in academia. There was no future in it for me. I figured that out after knocking around for five years. The only jobs I got were temporary teaching contracts. Never anywhere good, or I might’ve held on longer. Imperial Valley Community College, University of Montana at Dillon. Those kind of places.” Parner gives me a lopsided grin. A couple decades of living well has tempered the pain of those memories. “So I told Palmerston I was hanging it up, and I took a job as a — ”

“Palmerston was your dissertation advisor?” I interrupt. The alumni directory only lists dissertation advisors going back to 1992.

“Yep. Lord Palmerston, everybody called him behind his back. He must’ve been 80 at the time. Semi-retired. But still collecting a six-figure paycheck. I wanted to land a tenured position like that.”

“Was it tough for white grads back then?”

“In the job market, you mean? It sure seemed tough to me, although the old boy network was still around. Palmerston and his cronies. The jobs I got, I got thanks to him. But things were changing fast. Hercules and the other Hispanics were already throwing their weight around.”

“Hercules is my dissertation advisor.”

“Really? I never would’ve guessed it. He didn’t even have white students back then. We avoided him like the plague. Hercules was…” Parner raises his palms in a shrug.

I know the feeling. It’s hard to put the old reptile into words. “Anyway, sorry I interrupted you. You were telling me about your first corporate job.”

“Right. I was.” He glugs down more Gatorade, the bottle slowly emptying of neon-green liquid. “You get a Ph.D. in Latin American Studies, that’s instant credibility with any company dealing with the Hispanic market. They assume you can walk the walk, talk the talk. And back then redlining and community lending was a big deal in LA. Banks were legally obligated to lend to Hispanics, and the regulatory agencies were cracking down. So I got a job as a compliance officer at Wells Fargo, making sure we did enough business with Hispanic homeowners and businesses. I did that for a couple years, then transitioned into research. It’s similar to graduate work. You do profiles on markets, on companies.”

“It pays well, from the looks of it.”

“Don’t even get me started about compensation. Compared to the best teaching contract I ever had, my first job at Wells Fargo was a 300% raise. Now I make more than any academic ever will.” Parner tosses the empty bottle at the wastebasket, halfway across the office — and misses. He heaves himself off the couch and goes after it.

Not sure if I’m being dismissed, I rise to my hiking boots and drift over to the smoked-glass wall. The view of downtown Mexico City is stunning, a forest of glittering mirrored shafts rising out of the haze. At this height the cityscape seems ethereal, the skyscrapers filled with reflections — ghostly clouds, the dull orb of the sun, other skyscrapers. Hard to believe the largest city on earth is hidden somewhere behind this idyllic backdrop. 25 million souls are grubbing an existence out of the squalor, inhabiting slums that coat the valley floor like a fungus of cinderblock and plastic tarpaulins. Out of sight, out of mind.

500 years ago it was Montezuma looking down from the massive Templo Mayor, the double pyramids dedicated to Tlaloc the god of rain and Huitzilopochtli the god of war and death. 1 million Aztecs grimed the canals and “floating islands” of Tenochtitlan, as the city was known then. They probably seemed like ants to Montezuma, if he ever noticed their pathetic lives at all. Maybe there’s nothing new in Mexico, only the past repeating. Maybe Mexico is just a wheel of shit spinning round and round.

Parner joins me at the window, a portly figure in my peripheral vision. “You haven’t told me much about yourself.”

I keep the backstory simple, focusing on my trajectory through academia, the only thing we have in common. When that seems to bore him, I switch to highlights from my solitary treks across Mexico, especially the near-calamities I’ve survived — corrupt federales demanding bribes, machete-wielding robbers, blah blah blah.

“Driving all over the country like that, weren’t you…worried?” he asks, more intrigued than concerned. “It’s not hard for an American to get kidnapped down here, or worse.”

“Yeah, I worry sometimes,” I admit, and my gaze falls to the plush carpeting. “My girlfriend…” I start to say, but the words die out. This conversation is beginning to tread on my soul.

Parner is telling me that it didn’t used to be dangerous. “Back in the early 80s when I was doing my dissertation research, nothing bad ever happened. I think I paid two, maybe three bribes the whole time. And driving around was safe back then. My Mexican girlfriend, we used to jump in her old Bug and go touring for weeks on end. The only thing we ever worried about was a flat tire.” He says it with a hint of disbelief, as if doubting that such a Mexico could’ve existed. “Now there are bandits on the roads. Pickpockets everywhere. Christ, the government is even declaring martial law in places. It doesn’t feel safe to leave the condo, not even with a bodyguard assigned to me.”

“You have a bodyguard?” I ask jealously. I’ve always wanted a bodyguard.

“Well, he’s my driver too. A driver-bodyguard. Don’t get the wrong idea. I’m not that important. The bank’s insurance requires it. All the research analysts get a bodyguard.” It’s a weak attempt at false modesty. His voice still drips with pride. “So what do you think you’ll do? Take your M.A. and leave the program?”

“Hell if I know.”

Parner spins clumsily and jump-shoots the bottle at the wastebasket again. It bounces off the rim. “Hey. Are you doing anything tonight? You could come over to my condo for the game.”

“The game?” I blink at him. “What game?”

“The UCLA game! They’re in the Final Four again. This is going to be our year.” Noticing my lack of enthusiasm, he nudges me with an elbow. “Aren’t you a basketball fan?”

“Yeah, sure. I usually watch the games. But I kind of lost touch this season, I don’t know why.” A lie. I do know why — because I don’t watch Bruin games with Hercules anymore. That was our time-honored tradition, my secret visits to his house to watch football games during fall semester, basketball games during spring semester. It was a convenient fiction. Neither of us wanted to admit the real reason I was there. I was his eyes and ears among the grad students, a glorified spy. Lacking brown skin, I could only suck up to him by trading on gossip.

“The last two Final Fours broke my heart too. To get so close, and then — ” SMACK. Parner pounds a fist into his palm. “But I’m not kidding. This is going to be our year. I know it, man. I just know it.” His eyes are glazing over, dreaming of another banner hung from the rafters of Pauley Pavilion. Then he refocuses on me. “So what do you say? Come over for the game tonight, Nick. You’re the only UCLA alum I know down here. Bring your girlfriend if you want.”

“Yeah. Thanks, dude. We’ll take you up on that.” I try to disguise a sigh. Nooshin and I were supposed to do something with Inez later. Given her emotional state it won’t be easy — or pleasant — to spring a cancellation on her. And for what, really? A night of watching genetic freaks, scarfing down nachos and salsa, and boozing while Nooshin can’t. But still, it’s a no-brainer. Inez doesn’t have the juice to find me a job, inside the ivory towers or outside of them. Elliot Parner, research analyst for Banco Commercial de Cuidad Mexico, just might.

“Shit!”

The word is a primal groan. I almost jump out of my skin, then glance wildly across the cab at Nick. He slumps over the steering wheel as if he’s been shot — except he hasn’t, thank god. My boyfriend straightens up, his face a mask of frustration. Then he slumps over the steering wheel again, smacking his forehead into the hard plastic with an audible thump. I watch the ritual uncomprehendingly. Thump thump thump.

We’re idled at a traffic signal, waiting for the horizontal bar of lights to turn green and usher us deeper into the urban canyons of Mexico City. Sunbeams drown in the afternoon smog, so thick I can barely see five blocks. Electric-powered buses sizzle and spark beneath a canopy of overhead wires. A streetkid darts between the paused vehicles, trying to sell copies of La Jornada that he scavenged from coffee shops and park benches. Sexy two-dimensional giantesses float in Fendi and Banamex and Range Rover billboards, staring down at sidewalks carpeted with beggars. The stereo is playing a bootleg copy of an Kaiser Chiefs disc, filling the Explorer with a hoarse refrain:

Oh my god, I can’t believe it
I’ve never been this far away from home
And oh my god, I can’t believe it
I’ve never been this far away from home

My gaze is drawn to the movement of an oncoming figure. Whoever he is, he’s larger than the streetkids. And wearing a bushy mustache. And…uniformed? The cop is jogging toward us, one palm raised in an imperious HALT gesture, a whistle shrieking in his mouth.

“Nick!” I hiss through clenched teeth, trying to act casual. “There’s a cop — ”

“I know,” he sighs. “Hoy no circula.”

“Hoy no circula? Today we can’t drive?”

“Today is Monday, which means nobody with a 5 or 6 as the last digit of their license plate can be on the roads.” Nick points at a sign dangling from the traffic signal, which explains a cruel transportation math:

Lunes - 5 y 6
Martes - 7 y 8
Miercoles - 3 y 4
Jueves - 1 y 2
Viernes - 9 y 0

“Doesn’t matter if you’re a foreigner or not. My license plate number still ends in 9,” he shrugs in resignation. “Squeeze in.”

I unbelt myself — my tummy, really, considering it pokes through the triangle formed by the shoulder and lap belts — and slide against Nick’s hip. The cop climbs in next to me, just like that. His eyebrows are hairy caterpillars above the much bigger hairy caterpillar of his mustache. We make awkward eye contact and decide it’s better to stare straight ahead.

Spanish sloshes from one side of the cab to the other. Nick’s tone is contrite but amateurish. His perfect Spanish is nowhere to be heard. He’s playing the American farmboy adrift in the Mexican bright lights, big city. The cop sounds irritated. He points dramatically using his HALT hand, which was made for emphatic gestures. See that sign right there? The sacrosanct traffic laws of Mexico City have been broken.

The light finally turns green. More Spanish sloshes around. Nick yanks the steering wheel to the right, banging into my elbow. The windshield fills with sidewalk vendors, straggly boulevard trees, graffiti-defaced political posters, entryways to apartment buildings. Then he hangs another right, and another, and finally another…until we’ve completed a circumnavigation of Inez’s block. The parking spot we just abandoned is still there, a gap of curb between a dilapidated pickup and a shiny midnight-black Lexus.

“It’s an innocent mistake. You’re Americans,” the cop is saying in Spanish, turning benevolent. Forgiving.

Nick doesn’t miss the cue. “Now that I understand the law, I don’t want to trouble you with any paperwork. The citizens of Mexico City, they need you back on duty. Right?”

A modest shrug jostles my shoulder. “I live to serve the people.”

“Then please, accept this as a token of my appreciation.” Nick’s arm juts in front of me, flaunting a $20 bill.

“Yes, yes,” the cop is nodding. The money disappears as quickly as it appeared. The Explorer rocks one way, then the other, and the car door slams. The cop hustles down the sidewalk, back to the intersection and his next bribe. We’re alone again. The Kaiser Chiefs are singing you and me, we’re made…

My voice is a nervous exhalation. “I didn’t think you’d get rid of him for only twenty bucks.”

“At least we’ve got the money,” Nick points out. A couple days ago we didn’t. But there isn’t any triumph in his profile, just a wan distance.

“You’re a million miles away,” I say gently, letting the closeness between us linger, squeezing the contour of his thigh.

His nuzzling is the forced kind, a brief indulgence to keep the pregnant girlfriend happy. Then the far-away look comes back. His icy blue eyes are focused on something impossibly distant. Like the future, maybe. Our future.

My heart flutters into despair. “You don’t really like Afshar for a boy’s name, do you?”

Arctic oceans blink at me.

“You know. Afshar?”

Suddenly Nick is chuckling. “Nah, that’s not it. I love the name Afshar.” He pats the slope of my tummy absentmindedly. “Let’s walk over to Chinatown.”

The segue loses me. I slide out after him, squeezing past the wheel — the closest I’ll ever come to driving his truck, probably — and follow his broad shoulders down the sidewalk. “Chinatown? Mexico City has a Chinatown?”

“Yeah. A small one. The barrio chino.” He slows his pace, letting me fall into stride beside him. “There were widespread pogroms against the Chinese a century ago. Not many Chinese left to make a Chinatown.” A hand loops around my waist, the palm rocking on my hip. “Some of the Chinese were merchants, but most were coolies imported by the American railroads during the Porfiriato. The Mexicans, they murdered them by the hundreds.”

“God.” The word sounds lame when I murmur it, incredibly insufficient. But I don’t know what else to say.

The barrio chino is far enough away to make my feet hurt, even in my powerwalking Nikes. Finally we’re wandering through a plethora of gaudy signs in Chinese and the occasional bank in Chinese architectural style — timber framework, bright primary colors, multi-storied pagoda roofs with flaring upturned corners. The Spanish I overhear is sprinkled with sing-song Chinese. I feel like an utter giraffe on the cracked and heaving sidewalks, crowded by people even shorter than most Mexicans.

I pull Nick into a touristy shop crammed with odd merchandise. Giant painted-wood buddhas. Strange posters for Hong Kong movies I’ve never heard of. A hundred different kinds of chopsticks. Chinese wedding blessing scrolls. Silk kimonos with elaborate brocaded designs. Suddenly I feel the impulse to buy everyone a gift — Mom and Dad, Nasrin and her hubby and my niece and nephew, even Saman and my in-laws — but as quickly as I feel it, the impulse falls and breaks on the floor. There’s only Nick now. Nick and the baby boy we made.

Back on the sidewalk he discovers a hole-in-the-wall bar. It’s the kind of place that would’ve been invisible if the door wasn’t wide open, revealing a thatched canopy over the bar and Chinese calendars on the wall, the kind with traditionally-attired models posing with Western products. There are only two people inside — the bartender, a loud shock-haired Chinese who greets us in horrid Spanish, and a lone patron who resembles Mao if Mao had ever worn a t-shirt that said KISS ME I’M IRISH. They’re a little surprised to see a pair of towering gringos wander in and duck beneath the thatched canopy, but then Nick orders baijiu and a Tsingtao chaser and they aren’t so surprised anymore.

I’m tempted by the Tsingtao — I haven’t had a beer in several weeks — but my What to Expect When You’re Expecting book is militantly anti-alcohol. Never mind the fact that pregnant Mexican women drink all the time, and this isn’t a nation of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome citizens. I sigh and ask in Spanish, “What do you have for non-alcoholic beverages?”

The bartender hovers at the rail, staring at me expectantly. It’s as if I haven’t said anything at all.

“Something without alcohol? Alcohol-free?” I try again.

More expectant staring.

“Um, Coca Cola?”

Those two words are a universal language. He bustles into motion.

Nick and I nurse our drinks through a bizarre conversation. The bartender turns out to be a former Communist Party cadre who left China and the Party for reasons I don’t really understand. He launches into a rambling tirade about China and Hong Kong and Taiwan and even Tibet — almost yelling at us, he talks so loud — and his best Spanish phrase is a perfect “like, fuck this shit!” which he uses liberally to describe pro-capitalist policies and the Tiananmen Square protesters and Fulan Gong and god only knows what else. I can’t tell whether he hates those things, or hates the Party for hating those things. Meanwhile the Mao lookalike interjects seemingly random things in Chinese, causing the bartender to nod vociferously and exclaim “just like that!” as if they’re somehow talking about the same thing, which I’m convinced they aren’t.

The bartender wants us to stay for another round, since no one else has showed up. Nick is game, but also drinking on an empty stomach. He keeps leaning into me for abrupt kisses, acting warm and tipsy — too warm and tipsy, really. So I leave a generous tip for the bartender and wave goodbye to Mao and drag my boyfriend outside.

We stand outside on the corner for a while, watching the sky swirl with pollution. Pagoda lamps bleed into the murk. Past the rooftops of the barrio chino is a forest of hulking shadowy skyscrapers. Then a hostess shilling for business presses a paper menu into Nick’s hand, urging us to visit her restaurant. Only then do I realize that I’m starving.

I’m clueless how you choose a good restaurant in Chinatown if you don’t have a recommendation or guidebook. Do you go with the tiny dimly-lit place where a few Asians are bent over their tables? Or the big brightly-lit place that’s packed with Asians and some non-Asians too? The latter, we decide, hoping all those people can’t be wrong. Nick orders the special, some kind of cold squid-and-pasta entree. I wind up with salty deep-fried frog legs, which are delicious although still on the bone. We share a metal decanter of green tea.

I find his knee under the table. It’s pistoning relentlessly. “Hey,” I say, calming the motion with my palm. “Just tell me what’s on your mind, okay?”

The sharp angles of his face keep changing. He doesn’t know how to feel. Suddenly he leans across the table at me, banging plates aside. He pauses to wipe off his elbow. “I’ve been thinking about quitting grad school.”

“Wh-what?” I manage to gasp.

“I’ve met all the requirements for an M.A. So it’s not like I’d quit empty-handed. I’d get something out of it.”

“But you’re almost done with your Ph.D.!”

“That’s easy for you to say. You’re not the one with two more flaming hoops of bullshit to jump through.” Nick counts on fingers aimed sideways. “First, my dissertation isn’t done until my committee says it’s done. Second, I still have to defend it.”

“So? ”

“So that could take another year or more, for chrissake. And…” He stirs uncomfortably, his forearms flexing on silverware. “The baby will be here before then.”

“Just because we’re having a baby doesn’t mean you have to quit. Think of all the grad students you know. A lot of them have kids, right? They’re still pursuing their Ph.Ds. They make it work.” I feel myself glowing with hopeful enthusiasm. “We can make it work too. Haven’t we figured out how to make it work in Mexico?”

“But…” His voice tails off.

“This is what you’ve always wanted to do. You’ve dedicated what, four years of your life to studying Mexico? UCLA gave you a full ride, and you have me as a research assistant. You can’t throw this away, Nick. I won’t let you.”

Nick flinches when I say “research assistant.” But that’s his only reaction to my hopeful pleading. Otherwise he remains silent, hiding beneath his Kangol hat.

“What?” I finally say.

He sighs. “You’re such a Nooshball.”

“Now you’re patronizing me.”

“Christ. Can’t we just let this drop? I’m not in the mood. I’m really not.” He leans back and shovels a forkful of squid into his mouth.

Something breaks inside me like a dam bursting. Tears stream down my cheeks. I hide behind a napkin, trying to staunch my misery.

“Hey. Come on. Stop crying.”

That only makes me cry harder. “You’re treating me…like Saman did. Shutting…me out,” I say around sobs.

His voice becomes cold. “I’m not shutting you out, goddamnit. I’m being honest with you – I don’t feel like talking about this right now. Maybe tomorrow, alright?”

I’m trying to compose myself. It doesn’t work very well. The entire restaurant is stealing glances at us when I return the napkin to my lap. I play with my bangs, arranging them into a protective curtain. Only a sliver of my face is exposed. The left side, over my good eye.

Nick is confronting me across the table, hands balled into fists, his expression almost tortured. “You know how hard I’ve struggled to survive on my funding? Really fucking hard, Nooshin. And that’s when there was only me. Now there’s you and the baby. The economics don’t work.” He waves off my rising protest. “Shut up and just listen, would you? You wanted me to talk, so I’m talking. You’ve only got a high school education. So realistically, you’re going to be taking care of the kids. Any income you brought in wouldn’t offset the cost of daycare. That means I need get a job, a real job, to support you and the kids, and…why are you looking at me like that?”

“You keep saying ‘kids’,” I say in a daze.

All the frustrated anxiety drains out of Nick. He thinks about it, then laughs. And blushes a little. “Well, yeah. I mean…I’ve always figured we’d have two. A boy and a girl, you know? Afshar will need a little sister.”

I try to snuggle into his embrace across the table, but my swollen tummy catches on the edge. The surface tilts, clattering things. He pulls his chair around the cluttered surface, coming closer. He drapes me in a muscular arm, polishing the ribbed contours of my back with an open palm. A stupidly passionate noise boils up my throat. I already want to make another baby with Nick, and I haven’t even delivered our first yet.

Ahhhhh. This is how every morning should begin, with a nice relaxing shower. Sure, the water is bone-cold. And so freaking calcified that it takes half a bar of soap just to get some suds. And polluted enough to paint weird smelly rings around the drain. But if you can ignore all that — and I can, after living out of a tent for the last week — then ahhhhh.

From beyond the shower curtain, a single gasped word. “Omigod.”

I pause in the freezing deluge, inadvertently striking a disco pose — one arm upraised, the other cocked at my armpit with the soap. But the only noises are water splashing and the faint roar of traffic down on the street. Shrugging, I go back to my shower.

Then three more words shrieked in delight. “Omigod omigod omigod!”

This time I poke my head out, holding the shower curtain tightly against me so I don’t leak polluted water onto the bathroom floor. “What the hell’s going on?”

Nooshin is aglow in the other half of the claustrophobic space, a rail-thin girl with a tummy that juts out. She’s standing in profile and half-dressed, wearing her jeans unbuttoned at the top and tugged below her pregnant bulge. An unhooked bra is dangling loosely from her shoulders and across her flat chest.

“Nick! This bra is really tight!” To demonstrate, she twists her back toward me. She has to torture the clasp shut across her protruding ribs and vertebrae. “I think I’m finally getting boobs!” Then she twists the other direction, showing me her front. “Ta-dah!”

I almost burst out laughing. Nooshin is one of those girls who never needed to wear a bra, and usually didn’t. But now she can strain proudly against the panels of her 32AA.

I shut off the water and peel open the shower curtain. “You’re so sexy,” I say — and the proof is pointing right at her.

“Nick, don’t you dare!” she starts to say, giggling. Outside the bathroom door are the loud sounds of Inez and her mom clattering around the apartment. Nooshin points at a small pile of folded laundry on the toilet lid. “Your clean clothes are right there.”

I towel off and shrug into my clothes. Boxer shorts, white tube socks, cargo pants, gray ribbed t-shirt — all freshly laundered in the stacked washer/dryer in the hallway closet. One more thing we’re getting out of this stop. A free laundromat.

Nooshin is contemplating herself in the mirror above the sink. Her gaze is downcast at her shirt, which is actually my shirt. The largest t-shirt I own, a plain white expanse dotted with a tiny UCLA logo above the heart. She spreads her arms. “Look, I’m a kite!”

I join her reflection, embracing her from behind. My hands slide beneath the billowing shirt, feeling the silky bulge of her tummy. Our son.

Her dark gaze locks on mine. In the mirror her left eye is the crooked wandering one. “I really need to get some maternity clothes. Just a pair of jeans with a stretchy front and some shirts, that’s all.” She sighs dreamily. “And one cute outfit, just one. Like, a new maternity sundress. Or maybe a skirt with an adjustable waist.”

“We don’t have the money right now. Only your paycheck came through. Hercules put a hold on mine,” I admit sourly. Some provider I’m turning out to be. I can’t afford to buy her lunch, let alone maternity clothes.

Nooshin lifts my hands to her mouth and kisses the knuckles, one after another. “That’s okay. Once he gets your dissertation and the archive, he’ll change his mind. Right?” My stratagem to avoid dismissal from UCLA for knocking up my research assistant, repeated until we can almost — almost — believe it’ll work.

The bathroom door shudders with knocking. “Hey! You guys done in there or what!” Inez yells in Spanish. “Come on, I’m going to pee my pants!” Her voice is more ragged and hoarse than I remember. The breakup with Julio has precipitated a decline into chainsmoking, among other things.

We enfilade past each other in the cramped spaces of the apartment, which belongs to Inez’s mom, a fiftysomething patrician-looking woman with a coiffure like a coppery jetstream. She glides around in a svelte black catsuit, her attractive features screwed into an unattractive expression. She’s permanently dismayed by life, taking it — and by “it” I mean everything — very, very personally. I treat her like a minefield. Circle warily, and never cross.

Of course, somehow Nooshin has intrepidly struck up a friendship with her. Which is another way of saying things haven’t clicked between Nooshin and Inez. I was hoping they’d be best buds, like Phoebe and Inez during her visits to UCLA. Those two raised more hell on Sunset Boulevard than should be legal. But none of that feminine chemistry is evident here. Nooshin and Inez interact like two bricks rubbing together.

Inez’s mom is searching for her purse and bitching loudly about the bus. Surprise, surprise — according to her it’s usually early, frequently late, and never on time. The purse is a patent leather rectangle dangling on the back of the apartment door. I debate whether to betray its hiding place, then decide to see how long it takes her to discover it on her own. My fun is spoiled when Nooshin calls out “Alli es!” — there it is! — and earns an indulgent smile.

“Where are you guys going?” I ask in plaintive English, realizing their silhouettes are filing out the apartment door and into the stark light of the hallway.

Nooshin pauses to peck me briefly on the lips. “Inez’s mom is taking me to Vip’s for breakfast, then Chapultepec Park. We’ll be back sometime this afternoon.” She leans in close, throttling her voice to a whisper. “No being mean to Inez today, promise?”

“Promise,” I sigh.

She spins on a Nike and resumes her momentum goodbye, all skyscraper height and tossing inky hair and tragic ad-hoc maternity wardrobe. I’m already missing her before the door closes on the oddest couple in Mexico City.

Behind me the toilet flushes, really more of a flaccid draining noise given the lack of water pressure. The bathroom door opens. Inez squeezes around my hands-on-hips pose, a lit cigarette smoldering in the corner of her mouth, and disappears into the kitchen.

“They’re going to Vip’s and Chapultepec Park,” I gripe jealously in Spanish. “Did you know that?”

“Yeah, Mom said something about it.” Cabinets bang open and shut. She emerges from the kitchen in a tired puff of smoke, dressed in black leggings and a long-sleeved t-shirt with some sort of complicated political cartoon on the front. Her silvery hair is spiked haphazardly with gel, like an aluminum can that lost a fight with a blender. She’s carrying a alcoholic-sized bottle of tequila.

“Whoa. A little early for that, isn’t it?”

Inez pointedly ignores me, collapsing onto the couch. She stabs out her Lucky Strike in an ashtray, then wrenches open the bottle and takes a gaudy swig. Tequila and cigarettes. What a lousy breakfast.

I pace restlessly in the small living room, a couple strides one direction, a couple strides back. “So what are we doing today?”

She takes another swig. “I don’t get the attraction. With Nooshin, I mean. I just don’t get it. Unless it’s because she needs rescuing. Her screwed-up eye and all that.” And another swig. “Is that it? Are you her knight in shining armor? Does she make you feel like a hero?”

I don’t stop pacing. “You’re just jealous because you and Julio broke up.”

“No I’m not!” Inez smacks the tequila bottle onto the coffee table hard enough to rattle the ashtray. The reflexive violence of the gesture seems to chasten her. “Okay, fine. I admit it. I’m jealous. But I still think you’re just trying to live out some stupid rescue fantasy with her.”

I’m watching the rhythmic progress of my hiking boots, but my eyes are seeing Nooshin, a whole collage of her. Her delicate beauty and shy beaming smile and octopus-ink hair. The way she always sits with one foot tucked underneath her. Her rampant silliness and atrocious accents. How she melts into me when we embrace, and the way I can feel her heart flutter just beneath the skin. The poetry scribbled in her secret notebook in fervent purple loops, with our initials in arrowed hearts. Her antique Polaroid camera snapping at weird sights, never what you’d expect. That crooked wandering eye, a window to her soul meant only for me, and the new life we made — our family — swelling her tummy.

My face is almost tortured with a huge smile. “You want to know what it is? She’s the coolest person I’ve ever met. Seriously.”

“You think she’s cool?” The question is poisoned with sarcasm.

I stop pacing and stare at Inez, hard. “Why don’t you like her?”

She can’t hold my gaze. Her shadowy eyes drift to the amber bottle, full of escape. “I like Phoebe better, that’s all. Liked. Whatever. Now SHE was cool, man.” She makes an off-handed gesture. “What happened to you and Phoebe, anyway?”

“Nooshin happened,” I shrug. It’s really as simple as that.

“That’s like me and Julio. Another chick happened.” Inez’s hoarse voice breaks, like concrete cracking into pieces, but her eyes only moisten. Knowing her, the tears ran out shortly after the breakup — if she ever allowed herself to cry at all.

“Enough of this?” I ask, leaning over to tap the open lip of the tequila bottle.

Before my hand can close around the neck she asks, “Why didn’t we ever hook up?”

It’s a good question. A long time ago we almost got together — a few times, now that I think about it — but for some reason it never happened. The buzz wore off and we retreated from each other, back into ourselves. But it’s just easier to say, “You met Julio and I met Phoebe.”

My answer is a door slamming shut, assuming it was ever open in the first place, and Inez of all people knows it. She steals away the bottle for a final gulp, then wipes her mouth with a shirtsleeve. “So anyway, let’s go find some trouble,” she says while teasing up spikes from her silver hair, doing her best impression of the Inez I used to know.

Mexico City, omigod, it’s so…so super-incredibly overwhelming, there’s just no other word. I can’t cram this place through my senses and fit it all into my head. The visual overload of 25 million different faces coming at me in an endless crush — street vendors with plaster Venus de Milo statuettes and handwoven sarapes and chiclets, scruffy hustlers with desperate standoffish eyes that crawl all over you, businessmen in pinstriped suits trailed by bodyguards with earjacks whispering secrets, Indian beggars plucking at passersby with sore-weltered hands, school groups of adorable rioting kids in uniform, muchachitas like anime fashion plates in their un-clothing and teeter-totter heels, cops slouched in a mind-boggling variety of disinterested postures, camera-toting tourists as slack-jawed as me. Past the faces are broad avenues of slow honking traffic bleeding around traffic circles, kaleidoscope billboards blinking SEGUROS COMERCIAL AMERICA and TELEFONICA MOVILES and BANAMEX, winged statuary taller than buildings, slums stretching forever in a grim parade of wastage. Overhead jets are screaming across an invisible highway, everybody shout-talking, mariachi music and alternativa death metal and earsplitting operatic arias. Inhalations are a sickening invasion of exhaust fumes, reeking garbage spilled everywhere, body odor and cologne and hairspray, too-sweet baked goods on sidewalk carts. I’ve never been jostled this much in my life.

And now I’m being washed away in the torrent of students pouring out of UNAM — the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico — and across the campus plaza. I’m buffeted by elbows and shoulders and backpacks. “Nick!” I cry desperately, my hand outstretched in his, losing my grip –

His Kangol hat turns my direction. He’s standing like an oak in a flood, the crowd breaking around his unyielding profile. “What are you doing, Nooshball?” he laughs, as if I’m goofing around or something. “Get over here!” With a muscular effort he yanks me back alongside.

I shelter in his lee, arms locked around his waist, my pregnant tummy pressed into the small of his back. Our shapes fit together like puzzle pieces. Then I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to block out the overwhelming stimuli, retreating into happy thoughts, yeah, that’s it, happy happy happy, floating on an inflatable seashell raft in the middle of a sun-spangled ocean…

Suddenly the jostling stops and we’re standing alone. Mostly. A few students trickle past carrying placards that read Partido Verde Ecologista de Mexico — Mexican Green Ecological Party. Somewhere an amplified voice is booming. Looking over my shoulder, I see a street demonstration swirling. At the vortex is a mohawked student with a megaphone, shaking an upraised fist. He’s urging the milling crowd of protesters into motion, toward a ragged line of riot police. The cops are strung across the street in wait, helmets unbuckled, leaning on their plexiglass shields. Students approach with banners and green bandanas and Diet Cokes. The cops respond by buckling their chinstraps and hefting their shields. I assume both sides are yelling at each other across the 10-yard divide, but I can’t tell for sure. Angry drivers trapped on either side of the impromptu gridlock are blaring their horns in a hellish symphony.

“Wow,” is all I can think to say. In a couple minutes the street we walked became a conflict zone, just like that.

“I don’t know much about the PVEM,” Nick shrugs blithely, as if we’re watching TV instead of real life. “I think they’re a bunch of Green anarchists, but I could be wrong.”

I’m trying to decipher the slogans spray-painted on banners in big dripping letters. “What are they protesting?”

“Who the hell cares?” He’s already lost interest. No Mexican civics lesson for me. He tugs me in the opposite direction, bouncing his icy blue eyes around. “Inez has got to be around here somewhere.”

I clatter along in my strappy sandals, gazing up at the Aztec-style motifs that seem to cover the buildings like skin. I saw similar murals growing up in East LA, but nothing of this size and complexity. A giant fanged snake writhes out of a lake of fire. Ears of corn explode in vibrant symmetry. Naked dark-skinned men with melting limbs struggle toward a ghostly two-faced sun. Overhead the real sun is a dim bulb swimming through the smog.

“Nick!” a woman calls in Spanish, inflecting his name into Neeeeek!

“Inez!”

They rush together in a collision of hugs and cheek-kissing. The woman is tall for a mexicana but barely up to my collarbones. Her mop of aluminum-dyed hair is styled into a jagged bob, the kind of haircut that looks self-administered. She’s wearing a black t-shirt that says “I (skull-and-crossbones) YOU” and too-long jeans turned halfway up her shins and black Converse hightops. A camo backpack dangles from a shoulder.

Nick steps aside with a polite wave of his arm. “Inez, this is my girlfriend Nooshin. Nooshin, Inez.”

She swarms me in another bout of hugging and cheek-kissing. At close range her stink of cigarette smoke almost makes me gag. When she breaks away, her muddy eyes triangulate between my belly and Nick and me. “You guys are…pregnant?” My proud blush is all the confirmation she needs. “Ay ay ay! Pregnant!” She throws her arms around his neck in a violent hug, then repeats the embrace more gently with me. “Congratulations, Nooshin! When are you due?”

“October 22,” I beam. It’s already my favorite day of the year. “We’re having a boy.”

Nick loops an arm around my waist, pulling my hipbone toward him in a brief squeeze. A seam in the side of my sundress rips audibly. Argh. Maternity clothes. I need to buy my first maternity clothes.

He’s oblivious, focused on Inez again — and the way she’s radiating sadness at us in an emotional doppler shift. His voice is a half-octave lower than usual. “Sorry we went to Julio’s place last night. I didn’t know you guys broke up.”

“Yeah. About three, four months ago.” She flutters a hand dismissively. “He was cheating on me. I suppose he didn’t tell you that.”

“Actually, he said you were cheating on him.” I want to elbow Nick in the ribs for saying it, but too late.

“That was revenge,” Inez laughs. But the sound is hollow and aching. To cover it, she quickly adds, “I’m living with my mom now. She’s got an apartment in Coyoacan. You guys are welcome to stay with us, if you want. Neither of us have a double bed, but there’s an inflatable mattress big enough for two.”

“Awesome!” The word is an item crossed off his to-do list — talk Inez into letting us stay with her tonight.

“You and your mother are too kind,” I say in an apologetic tone, becoming irritated with Nick’s single-minded focus. What is he, emotionally tone-deaf?

But he’s already working the rest of his list. He makes a show of considering the Anthropology Building looming over us, where Inez is a graduate student. “Hey, can you smuggle me into a professor’s office? I need to make some phone calls back to the States.”

“Nick — ” she begins to say warningly. Knuckles whiten around her backpack straps.

His megawatt smile is blinding. “Come on, Inez. UNAM will never notice.” He boxes her gently in the shoulder. “Please? We’re trying to save money for the baby.”

“Ay ay ay!” the mexicana snaps, but angrily this time. For a long dragging moment her muddy eyes seem to be congealing into solid rock…but then she spins on a Chuck Taylor and starts marching toward the louvered doors. Her backpack’s zipper fob is a noosed Barbie doll.

My mouth is halfway open in reproach when Nick shoots me a shut-up-and-sit-down look. I fall into clattering stride next to his almost-silent hiking boots. I’m trying to stay quiet, but his treatment of Inez is still raw and right there in front of me. Finally I turn to him again and start to — but I get another look. The same one, only harsher. Shut-the-bleep-up-and-sit-the-bleep-down.

She leads us into a lobby that’s part hospital waiting room, part ethnographic pawn shop. Cold linoleum tile and formica countertops are offset by colorful huipiles tacked to the walls, hand-fired pots on display stands, a carved wooden mask in a picture frame. If it was up to me, I’d put everything on Ebay and hope for the best. A crowd is waiting at the single elevator door, so she darts into the stairwell. We circle upward through landings pressed into service as closets, squeezing past cardboard boxes and dusty unused furniture and obsolescent dead-screened computers. Eventually we exit onto the 4th floor, a warren of narrow cinderblock hallways studded with metal doors. She uses a key from her backpack to unlock one of the doors.

“Your advisor, huh?” Nick guesses.

“Yeah. My advisor’s office. He’s in Nicaragua right now.” Inez flings the door open, revealing a scarred wooden desk crowded by metal bookshelves. Yellowing papers and dog-eared books are piled everywhere. The window shines weakly behind a drawn shade. “Just don’t fuck with anything, got it?”

“Got it.” Nick keeps his face perfectly serious. But I can already picture him chatting on the phone, hiking boots kicked up on a stack of papers, idly picking through desk drawers to amuse himself.

The claustrophobic office isn’t big enough for all three of us, so Inez and I retreat to the end of the hallway, a glassed-in observation overhang — also tiny. We have to take turns standing in it. First she points out a noteworthy campus landmark, then we squeeze past each other and I try to spot where she was pointing. My Spanish is the functional kind, not well-suited to conversations about the identifying characteristics of buildings and parks, so the exercise is frustrating for both of us.

I get tired of it before she does. Kicking off my wedgie sandals, I brace my back against the cinderblocks, planting a bare foot on the opposite wall and stretching my leg — and riiiiiiiiiip, the half-torn seam of my sundress is now fully-torn. God I’m so stupid! Feeling totally humiliated, I grope for a conversational distraction. “Nick told me you’re a DJ?”

Inez studies me for a while, compounding my misery. I feel like a puzzling and slightly gross bug under her microscope. Finally she shrugs. “Yeah, I dj every couple weeks. But I’m not so into the music part of it anymore. Now I mostly play fundraisers for orphanages and stuff. I want to feel like I’m doing something with my mixing.”

There’s another uncomfortable silence — broken by Nick’s laughter, amplified by the echo chamber of the hallway. He’s laying it on thick for somebody, don’t ask me who.

“Is he going to marry you?”

My gaze flashes to her. Muddy eyes are blinking at me lizard-style. Her t-shirt logo rises and falls placidly. I decide she’d look cuter with a different hair color, something more natural than tin-can silver.

“Well?” Inez prods.

There’s a meanness to the word, because she already knows the answer. She already knows Nick, longer and maybe better than I do. She just wants to hear me prove I’m an idiot, my voice hopeful and fluting, a girl deluding herself. That, or I admit the truth — marriage is a word that frightens other words off, or even makes them stop entirely.

I refuse to give Inez the satisfaction either way. Instead I slip back into my sandals, rising even higher and farther away from her, and clatter down the hallway into the unisex bathroom. I lock the door behind me and kneel over the toilet, thinking that I might be sick. But I can’t discharge the bad feeling so easily. I sit on the tile and hold my face in my hands. I utter a soft animal moan. Eventually there’s an insistent knocking, and with it Nick’s voice, strident and concerned. “It’s alright,” I call through the door, through my splayed fingers, through my misery. “I’m okay…”

In Mexico the heat wakes you up in the morning, lulls you back to sleep in the afternoon, and torments you all night. That’s why the tent is a sauna shot through with dawn, lighting up the multicolored fabric panels in a rainbow of hot misery. I’m a soggy spreadeagled lump on a mattress pad that’s slimy with pooling sweat. Next to me Nooshin is half-curled on her side, tendrils of damp inky hair spilling everywhere, a sweat-darkened spaghetti tanktop riding up on her belly. The empty water bottles are stacked in a small pyramid nearby.

Through the tent’s mesh door is a sliver of church courtyard — crumbling stone wall, an overgrown Russian olive tree, what used to be a garden but is now just straggly weeds. I unzip the door and stumble out into the morning, wearing just a pair of jeans. The angry pink sun immediately heats up my bald spot and bare shoulders. I glance around, using the old whitewashed Catholic church to orient myself. The truck is right where I left it, parked just inside the closed gate and invisible from the road. On the other side of the small courtyard is a padlocked rectory and a pump with a frozen pumphandle. This parish hasn’t had a priest in decades.

I need to piss, but I can’t go far. The rocky ground is slicing at the tender soles of my feet. I manage a couple hobbling steps, then unzip and aim away from the tent.

“Camping is more fun when you don’t have to camp,” Nooshin sighs behind me.

“Better than sleeping in the truck,” I point out, shaking once…twice…three times.

Her laugh is a wan sound.

“What?” I ask, zipping up my jeans.

“You, that’s what. You always find the upside, even if it’s only not the downside. Or whatever I’m trying to say.” I can hear a long exhalation, probably Nooshin trying to blow the bangs out of her face. “I’m so hot I can’t even think. You done out there?”

I turn around gingerly. “Yeah, I’m done. Wear your flip-flops. This ground is hell on bare feet.”

She straightens up too quickly coming through the tent flap. It catches on the backside of her track pants, pulling them down her skinny thighs in a fabric tangle. Losing her balance she flails wildly, catching herself, teetering, then falling again — until I grab a scrawny arm and yank her upright.

Pulling her track pants back up again, Nooshin considers her pregnant tummy in dismay. “This baby is really starting to mess with my balance.”

“You need to go to the bathroom?” I ask, preparing to recommend a spot where she can brace herself against the courtyard wall.

“I need fresh air. And breakfast. I’m starving.”

“We’ve still got green peppers,” I grin.

Her delicate features screw into a blech! “That was yesterday. Today they make me want to throw up.”

“Don’t worry. We’ll get breakfast in Mexico City. It’s just over those mountains, about a half-hour away.” I point at the weathered humps that fringe the Valle de Mexico — Valley of Mexico — a giant shithole of 25 million people covered with a lid of smog.

Nooshin is pinning limp and tangly hair behind her ears. “Any chance I’ll get a shower first?”

“A sink shower at a gas station, maybe.”

She lifts her bony shoulders in a shrug. Good enough. I’m reminded of her vast adaptability — plunging into a foreign country where she barely speaks the language, discovering she’s pregnant, going days without a real bed or a shower. And to think I’ve had girlfriends who wouldn’t even leave their apartments without makeup. But those girlfriends were nothing like Nooshin. They didn’t come to America as a little immigrant girl, or grow up skyscraper-shaped with a lazy eye, or leave an arranged marriage with a controlling Muslim asshole.

A gust of hot wind blows away Nooshin’s bangs, revealing the multitude of tiny scars that ghost across her forehead and down her nose. For a moment her mocha-dark eyes don’t betray the cause — then the right orb drifts away, more interested in the Russian olive behind me. My heart thumps with adoration. I want to fold her perfect imperfections into my arms and kiss her until the sun transits back into night. But my breath could probably kill, so I settle for the hugging part instead.

She tries to nuzzle into my shoulder, but the baby is complicating our clinch. Finally she twists her hips to the side, aiming her belly away from mine, and we bake sweatily in each other’s arms.

After a while I break away. “The sooner we get packed up, the sooner we’ll get to Mexico City.” I crawl into the tent and began passing stuff out to her — mattress pads, some stray clothes, the pyramid of empty water bottles.

“Do you think you’re ready to talk about a name?” Nooshin asks tentatively, in between trips to the Explorer.

“A name?” I’m remembering my spyjob on her secret notebook and the baby names scribbled hopefully inside it. “Sure. Do you have any names you like? Come on, you go first.”

Her face lights up like a Roman candle. She’s been waiting to have this conversation since before the pregnancy test. “Do you like the name Finn?”

“Finn?”

“Yeah. With two n’s.”

“Nah, not really.” I scramble out of the tent, handing her the last item — a bottle of cheap cologne she’s been using to mask her body odor. “You don’t think I’m Finnish, do you? Because I’m not. I’m a mutt. German and Swedish and Dutch.”

She pours cologne into her palm and splashes it on herself, first one underarm, then the other. “Okay…what about Iraj?”

“Nah. Too much like Iraq.”

That’s worth a reprimanding glance. “They’re nothing alike if you speak Farsi.”

“Which I don’t,” I remind her, squatting to pull the tent stakes.

In my peripheral vision I watch her shadow pour another palmful of cologne, then dip into the front of her tracksuit. “Simon?”

“Like the American Idol limey with all the putdowns? No way.”

“Namdar?”

“Wasn’t that an alien species in the Star Trek metaverse?”

“Ha ha.”

“I’m being totally serious here. The Namdar. I could swear — ”

“Nick Jr.” She’s standing hands on hips and looking annoyed.

“Well, I have to admit it has a certain egocentric appeal.” I grin playfully, testing Nooshin’s reaction, just in case her sense of humor is vanishing in a hormonal mood swing. “Too bad it’s a cable TV network.”

“What?”

“You know, Nickelodeon Junior. The kids’ network on cable TV?”

“Oh. Right.” The bottle of cologne tumbles around and around in her writhing hands. “I remember my niece and nephew watching it. Especially Saturday mornings. Nasrin would sleep in and Farid would let the kids do whatever they wanted.”

The past tense of her remembrance is piercing. Being cast out of her family is a harsh, fresh wound. The familial severance I would’ve welcomed is killing her. Maybe literally, if all this bullshit about honor killings is true.

“Hey,” I say gently, pausing with the tent half-collapsed. “We’ve got five months to pick a name, you know.”

That’s a happier topic. Nooshin lifts her chin and fixes on me with a hopeful expression, looking ahead now, not back. “Yeah, 5 months. Plenty of time…” Her flip-flops scrape on the ground, turning inward shyly. “What about…Afshar?” The name hangs like a sparkle between us.

Instantly I know it’s her favorite. I squint into the beveled morning, taking in her nervous pose, silent and frail as a cattail…except for that incongruous belly, sticking out between her tanktop and track pants in a caramel bulge. Then somehow — don’t ask me how — I understand why it’s her favorite. Afshar was her grandfather’s name.

I only know her grandfather as a faded picture in her backpack, a stubble-jawed man with kind eyes. She once described him as a simple Iranian farmer buffeted by the overwhelming strangeness of America, trying to hold their family together across hemispheres, doting on her the way nobody else did. A memory trace fires and I hear her voice breaking into sobs again — my grandfather always said that God made me this way, that I’m perfect just the way I am…

“Afshar,” I nod in approval. “Now there’s a name I like.”