The Mexican Year

I came out of rural Iowa like a bullet from a gun. I was done with Worth County High School, reached after five hundred years on the bus. I was done with all 43 members of the Class of 1999, including my ex-girlfriend Ruthie Krenzel who was done with me first. I was done with our family business of farming, which was always more business than family. I was done, just fucking DONE, period. Anybody got in my way or tried to stop me, I would’ve killed them. And bullets don’t look back.

Or so I promised myself.

Nine years later this bullet is back where it began. At the crossroads of Flyover and Drivethru, if you want to find it on a map. The straitjacket of agrarian life hasn’t changed much. Every day — every goddamn day — is the same ritual. Get up before the buttcrack of dawn, wring a living from dirt and animals, do more chores. Wash rinse and repeat.

A pounding interrupts the white noise of my box fan. The bedroom door shudders in its frame. “Nick, you in there? Get up if you ain’t already. You got milking duty this morning.”

Dad’s voice is a cracking whip. I blink at the ghostly digits of the alarm clock. 5:13. It’s already late. My parents are up and making their luck. I reach for the nightstand lamp. Around me the guest bedroom is a horror show. The walls are sky blue with clouds daubed on. Shelves groan with the weight of Hummel figurines. Hand-crocheted doilies are breeding on the furniture. This was my bedroom growing up, but Mom has obliterated every trace of me.

More pounding. “Nick? You hearing me?”

“I’m not here to do Brian’s job.”

“I said you got milking duty this morning.” Even more pounding. “You forget how to get up and work for a living?”

I roll out of bed and throw open the door. “Work for your own goddamn living.”

Dad is caught in mid-pound. His fist is poised to keep going, right into me. “What’d you say, boy?”

“And don’t call me boy.”

He’s pushing 60, but still rawboned and mean as a drunk. It takes about a quarter-second for his finger to stab into my chest. “You are my boy, in case you forgot. And this is your family. Everybody pitches in around here. Now shut up and do your part.”

I spin on a heel and slam the door behind me.

At first there’s silence. No storm of epithets, no shit-stained boots pounding down the hallway. Then bones creak and he sighs. “You know I can’t hold this place down by myself. I need your help. Just for a couple days, until I can hire somebody.”

“I’ll work around here for a hundred bucks a day.”

“You shitting me, boy?”

“What are you bitching about? I’m giving you the friends-and-family discount. Anybody you hire will want twice that.”

“Goddamnit! You ungrateful piece of shit! I ought to — ” His tirade recedes down the hall, through a slamming door, and out into the barnyard.

The vanity mirror is rimmed with Easter cards. My reflection hovers inside colored eggs and bunnies. I’m grinning in bleak triumph. The first education I got was in how this family works. And this family is a business. Dad doesn’t see a son when he looks at me. He sees free labor, no taxes, dollar signs. If I cover for Brian, he doesn’t have to hire a replacement.

The Roberts family, fucked up as ever. Oldest child missing half of his head and we’re fighting over unpaid labor. But that doesn’t disturb me as much as my next realization — I haven’t thought about Nooshin yet.

I feel a rush of guilt, right beneath the spot where Dad poked me in the chest. The guilt instantly sharpens into worry, then helpless abject fear. My pregnant girlfriend is alone on the roads of Mexico. In a truck with Iowa plates and 165,000 miles on it. Few pesos and fewer dollars in her purse. Anything goes wrong, anything at all… What the hell was I thinking when I left her on her own? Jesus fucking Christ.

I try to call Nooshin, but she must not have a signal. The phone doesn’t even ring. “Hi. This is Nooshin’s voicemail. Leave a message and I’ll call back soon as I can.” She’s trying to sound serious, but giggling a little. Because I was pawing at her while she recorded the message.

I wait for the beep, groping for calm and reassuring words. “Hey, babe. I miss you something fierce. Are you back to Tijuana yet? Let me know. I can’t wait to hear your voice.”

Afterward I dress in sweatpants and a QUE VIVA MEXICO! t-shirt. My cellphone goes into a sweatpants pocket. Every stride down the hallway I hope it rings. But it doesn’t, and then I’m in the kitchen with a stomach on full growl.

The smallish kitchen isn’t a perfect fit with my memory. All the appliances are new, but still almond-colored. The cracked and warping formica countertops are gone, replaced with slabs of some plastic laminate. Inside the pantry is new shelving — racks that slide out, revealing deep trays of cans and boxes.

I open all the cupboards without finding any breakfast cereal. “Mom? Where’s the cereal?” My voice echoes through the house. I look out the window over the sink. The barn and milking parlor are islands of gauzy light. Between the towering silhouettes of grain silos is the eastern horizon, bloody with dawn. Parked in the mud are two generations of Ford F-150 pickups — Dad’s 1982 and Brian’s 2007. Mom’s car is missing. She must’ve run into town for something.

I take an apple from the fruit bowl and retrace my steps down the hallway. I’m headed for the bathroom, but I pass Brian’s bedroom first. I pause at the closed door. This is why I’m here. To comprehend the incomprehensible — why did my brother put a .40 caliber handgun to his temple and pulled the trigger?

As a kid I was always jealous that Brian got the biggest bedroom. As a grown-up it feels claustrophobic. You couldn’t cram three Holsteins in here. The furniture is shoehorned in — twin bed with plaid bedspread, chest-high dresser with a combo TV-DVD player on top, bookcase spilling things onto the berber carpeting, folding desk with a Dell flatscreen workstation and faux-leather office chair. Navigating to the bookcase I bang my shin on a milk crate of magazines, mostly Guns & Ammo and Four Wheeler. The bookcase itself is dusty with memories, like Where the Red Fern Grows and John Deere Service Manual. None of the spines is more recent than copyright 20th century. The closet doesn’t hold any surprises either, just a bachelor farmer’s wardrobe straight off the rack at Fleet Farm.

The incomprehensibility deepens — why did my brother live in this sardine can for 37 years? He could’ve rented an apartment in town anytime he wanted. Hell, he could’ve bought his own place. But this is where he remained, too afraid or obstinate or whatever to live off-farm, dug into our familial dysfunctions like a tick.

I check the combo TV-DVD player. No disc inside. The screen flickers to life, but the high-definition satellite channel is wasted on it. An arena football game is miniaturized almost past recognition. The sound is muted, which makes me think of music. I rubberneck around for a stereo, tapes, anything. Did Brian deny himself music the same way he denied himself breathing room, emotional distance, a life of his own?

No, he didn’t. I spot an mp3 player on the desk. I scroll through its musical selection with sad nostalgia. This farmhouse used to reverb with Brian and Wendy’s war over music, turning up boomboxes in their bedrooms. He was into stoner rock, she liked depressive alt-angst shit. His playlist is mired in the Reagan era. There’s some Nickelback and U2, but that’s about it for newish stuff. The rest of the tunes are heavy rotation classic rock.

I settle myself into the office chair — and immediately sink to the lowest position. Its hydraulic cylinder has been pulverized by Brian’s weight. The computer awakes from sleep mode with a nudge of the mouse. I’m staring at a Windows desktop with a hot rod wallpaper. One of the headlights is distorted by a World of Warcraft icon. Checking the installed programs, I find more computer games. A lot more. My brother must’ve killed his spare time in gamer land.

I click on the Internet Explorer icon to launch a web browser. Brian’s homepage is SI.com, the online site for Sports Illustrated. Typically messy, he hasn’t bothered to organize his Favorites. The links are random jumps to redneck male sites — NASCAR World, Rate My Bitch, Truck-N-Trailer.

No porn sites are bookmarked, but that doesn’t mean anything. I find plenty in History. My brother’s tastes are heterosexual and blandly predictable — blond, big-titted, 18 years old, avidly bisexual. I click through pages and pages of chicks who meet that job description. My dick barely stiffens.

Also in History but not bookmarked is Gmail. Brian is still logged in. I watch the interface load with trepidation. According to Ruthie this is partly how he provoked a restraining order — by cyber-stalking her older sister Kimmie, his lifelong crush.

The inbox contains 2,192 messages. 78 are new and unread. The most recent is only a couple minutes old. I click on it:

Thanks for visiting Right Makes Right. A new response has been posted to your comment on entry #8492 (Illegal immigration is destroying America):

Bri-Dog, thank you so much for putting my feelings into words. Why should Congress grease the path for 30 million wetbacks to become citizens to destroy the chances of anything but a Democrat President for the next 50 years? You’ve been in Mexico to see firsthand how these spics live. It’s obvious your politics rule & what talent! –RedStater76

I read a couple more, enough to groan in dismay. Brian was appropriating what I told him about Mexico. Pretending to be me, even. A jaundiced observer with firsthand knowledge of the borderlands. And he was getting away with it! On the internet nobody knows you’re a dog — or a shut-in who hasn’t left the family farm.

A dozen pages later I reach Brian’s correspondence with Kimmie. I’ve traveled months into the past. It doesn’t end well. Her responses are increasingly terse and hostile. Finally they collapse into a single all-caps subject line: RESTRAINING ORDER.

I keep clicking further into last year. First Kimmie’s hostile tone melts away, then her replies become more frequent. She emotes desperation. Separated from her husband, but not divorced yet. Four little girls dependent on Mommy. They’re all sheltering with a friend, because her parents finally lost the farm and live in a single bedroom rental.

Brian’s side of the e-conversation breaks my heart. At first he responds with caution. This is the same prairie Ophelia who broke his heart into smithereens in high school. His decade-later emails clank with that wound. The more she presses him, the more he capitulates — an awkward hesitation, then a reluctant opening, finally a headlong plunge. I never stopped loving you. I click again. How can I help?.

An ache seeps through my face. I’m grinding my molars into powder. Kimmie was playing every dude she knew. Brian was just a backup plan. Backup plan #2 or #3, probably. But he was too stupid to know that — or didn’t want to know that. His dream girl needed him. A summons from the center of his sad mooning universe.

Brian never had a chance. His primary competition — the owner of the local Kwik-E Mart — offered his home and heart and finances to Kimmie. She and the kids moved in overnight. The email chain breaks down from there. Kimmie tries to explain, my brother responds with confusion and dismay and rage. His words are raw with pain. I’d feel the same way if Nooshin ever slipped away from me. And just like that, I can’t read anymore.

This wing of the Mayo Clinic is a bright malignant spaceship manned by aliens in face shields and surgical gowns and puffy bootie-feet. All the doorways are disturbingly wide, and inside them are machines pumping stuff in and out of prostrate victims. Every door that isn’t open is hung with a garish sign warning of radiation and biohazards. Roaming the hallways I feel like a UFO abductee between appointments. Done with the anal probe, waiting for the mind control implant.

Then my tense circumnavigation of the ICU unit is complete. I’m right back where I started, hovering at an extra-wide doorjamb, ladled in sorrow. My fingertips trace the room number — 1157. This is where Brian will officially die sometime, if you believe there’s still life in that flaccid husk. An overhanging monitor lies about that fact, counting electrical impulses which masquerade as human existence. But the heart is just a muscle, like froglegs that twitch when hooked to a 9-volt battery. The ruin above his eyebrows is the real death.

At least the hospital room is empty of Mom and Dad’s stony rage. They obviously wished their first-born son had made it all the way to the obit page, instead of getting stuck halfway in this hospital bed. Then they left, just like that. Back to Iowa and the family farm where Brian lived and toiled for 37 years. Back to the bloodstained mats in the milking parlor. For them his botched suicide was the ultimate validation of their loveless disdain. I’ll never forget the rawboned silhouette of my father, looking down on Brian’s shattered body, muttering “He couldn’t even kill himself right.”

That was the closest I’ve ever come to patricide in a lifetime of near-patricides. But close never counted for shit with me — this time, same as all the rest. I retreated to my emotional periphery, an outsider looking in. Life in my fucked-up family is a reality TV show, and I’m watching just like you. Time for a commercial break. Change the channel and never click back.

“Mmmph a mmmph mmmph?” Wendy says, a pixie dissolving into the recliner next to our brother, next to all the blinking beeping machines.

“Say what?” I ask.

She adjusts the wad of chewing tobacco in her mouth. A chainsmoker’s coping strategy for the bedside vigil. “You done pacing around for a while?” There’s something plaintive and damaged in her expression. She looks the way I feel.

I cross the threshold and collapse into the other chair, a punishing relic of steel and black vinyl. It’s a century-old anachronism from the old wing of the clinic, where patient files are still sent through pneumatic tubes.

Wendy is saying, “I can’t believe our grief counselor is named Bree.”

“I can’t believe our grief counselor is named Bree spelled wrong. At least spell your name B-R-I-E. Christ.” I fumble in a pocket for her business card. Bree Hundevader — MD, Ph.D. — Grief Counselor. Apparently you can make a career of surfing from one death to the next. I don’t know whether to be disgusted or envious.

“Why’d you come back, anyway?” My sister’s tone darkens. “When I called you, I didn’t think you’d come back. Not even if it was for a funeral.”

“Why are you here?” I snap. A typical exchange in our family. Answer every question with a question.

Her eyes are hard enough to smash atoms. “Because I wanted to see Mom and Dad’s reaction to all this. I wanted to see them suffer.”

“For how they raised us? For everything they did to us?” The noise welling up my larynx is a sitcom laughtrack.

Wendy hunches into a defensive posture, pulling knees under her pointy chin. It takes a while for her to speak. “Why do you think he did it? To get back at Mom and Dad?”

“Nah. If Brian wanted to get back at them, he would’ve shot them and then himself. Or blown out his brains in the kitchen or living room. Someplace that would’ve made a mess.” For a moment I’m transfixed by a vision of the living room, all the Hummel figurines and doilies spattered with skull fragments and gray matter. “Instead he walked out to the milking parlor. He wanted to die among friends.”

“The cows,” Wendy says, a little incredulous, a little sad.

“Yeah. The cows.”

There’s a pause filled with sidelong flickers from the recliner. I watch her watch me in tentative glances. Every once in a while she spits tobacco juice into an empty styrofoam cup.

“What?” I finally ask.

“So why’d he kill himself, then?”

“Because of Kimmie, I figure.”

Now Wendy’s face is a mask of disbelief. “Kimmie? Kim Krenzel?”

The Krenzels were our closest friends growing up, a Catholic birth control experiment that resulted in five boys and three girls. They were one of those families perpetually on the brink of losing their land, mailbox stuffed with FINAL NOTICE envelopes, every harvest maybe the last. Kim — Kimmie in the Krenzel family nicknaming convention — was the center of Brian’s sad mooning universe. She broke his heart into smithereens when she married the owner of the Kwik-E Mart and had three kids with him.

“Back at Thanksgiving he was telling me how Kimmie finally divorced that asshole. She got the house and snowmobiles and child support and everything. It was going to be Brian’s second chance to get with her, right? Except — ”

“She’s out of his league.” The words are dismissive and cruel, but true. Kimmie is a pale cornfield Ophelia. Brian is — was — a boorish farmboy.

“She got tight with a new boyfriend. Some dude with money, surprise surprise. Brian couldn’t deal with it. He started stalking her. Calling her, watching her house, shit like that. It was bad enough for Ruthie to ask me to warn him off. Finally Kimmie had to get a restraining order against him.”

“No fucking way,” Wendy says.

“She was really afraid Brian would kill her boyfriend. Apparently he made some threats…” Suddenly I’m too exhausted to finish. My veins are silting up with remorse. All the things I’d change if I could do it over again.

“Brian? Is that why you killed yourself?” Wendy slips out of the recliner and pauses at his bedside, a hand perched on the bedrail. She looks like a grown-up Tinkerbell. “I hope it doesn’t hurt anymore, wherever you are.” Her shearling boots recede out of the room and into silence.

I spend a long time staring at the near-corpse in the bed. What a fucking way to shuffle off this mortal coil. Head wrapped in bandages, tubes snaking into nostrils and mouth, dark bags beneath half-open eyes. Nothing moves when I touch it — not the feet jutting beneath the covers, not the pale arm with elbow crook exposed. I can even scrape a fingernail across the dry mush of his dilated pupils.

My poking finger turns into a palm, laid gently against his cheek. Every heartbeat is a riptide of emotion. I bob and drift, not knowing what to feel. But after a while my emotions coalesce into poignancy. There is no denouement to Brian’s life — no wife and kids to leave behind, no family to mourn him, no nothing. His suicide is the exclamation point at the end of a long run-on sentence that nobody ever bothered to read.

The world is beveled with rain, an angular downpour that slants under the terminal canopy, grasping wetly at my cargo pants and hiking boots. I stand there indifferently, gazing into the headlights that slow and pause and speed up again. Beside me is a businesswoman in a black tailored pantsuit with gangsta pinstripes. She’s trying to keep her Manolo Blahnik ankle boots dry, bending at the waist like a cheap stripper, poking her head into the rain to spot her ride. I watch her antics with a smile ghosting through my facial muscles. If Nooshin was wearing those stiletto heels, she’d bump her head on the sky.

A tricked-out 4×4 veers to the curb in a growl of wasted horsepower. The dude behind the wiperblades is wearing a cowboy hat and a hundred-mile stare. Nothing flickers in him. I play to imagine the cause of his boredom. Maybe the traveler who’ll climb into his passenger seat. Maybe the kind of relationship that reduces a man to glorified airport taxi. Or maybe he’s just sick to fucking death of the face that greets him in the mirror every morning.

An airport cop saunters through the traffic. He’s wearing a rain condom over his hat. A Batman utility belt jiggles on his meaty hips. It’s reflex to duck behind a pillar, glancing at his sidearm — still holstered. I unclench my body slowly, one muscle at a time, talking myself down from the culture shock. Dude. Get a grip. This is America, not Mexico. That cop might give a Big Mac a hard time, but he isn’t roughing up citizens for bribes.

Finally I spot the antiquated Ford F-150 in all its two-toned glory, white and aqua velva. Wendy’s hand-me-down from Dad, same way he gave me the keys to the Explorer when I graduated from high school. But the pickup isn’t gliding through traffic in her usual style. It progresses in a series of leaps and halts. The pale visage behind the steering wheel is on a nervous pivot, jerking between the curbside mob and the taillights in front of him. It must be Glenn, my sister’s longtime boyfriend. He hates to drive stick. I trot into the rain to intercept him before somebody’s bumper gets dinged.

Glenn is a misanthropic software geek who resembles a velvet Elvis painting, the few heroin addicts I’ve known, a used-up dishrag. He greets me with a pallid smile and a handshake like melting wax. His wispy black hair sticks out in a ratty halo, and his eyes are round and thin-lashed. A goatee straggles down the lower half of his face. He raises an open packet of beef jerky. “You want something to eat?”

“No thanks,” I mutter, tossing my backpack on the seat and belting in. “How is he?” I don’t have to specify the pronoun.

“Still alive, last I heard.” Glenn pulls away from the curb with excruciating slowness. A spacious gap in traffic floats past. His Doc Marten stays on the brake pedal.

“You want me to drive?” I offer.

“Uh, sure.”

I wait for him to fumble the old Ford into park, enduring a wan rant about stickshifts and Wendy’s stubborn refusal to upgrade to something new and automatic. That’s the thing about me and my siblings — we’ll drive our hand-me-downs until they shred into rust. You can take the kids out of the parsimonious Roberts family, but you can’t take the parsimonious Roberts family out of the kids.

Then it’s back into the rain. Glenn and I pass each other in front of the headlights, two cones of drenched light. We brush shoulders like strangers on a crowded sidewalk. I feel like I should apologize — for the harsh thoughts in my head, his exposure to my fucked-up family, everything. But the moment vanishes with his face, and I’m looking across a shuffling line of wet cars and Somali-piloted taxis drowning in wait and a massive cement parking garage swimming into the sky. He and Wendy have been together for 10 years and I can’t even remember his last name.

Behind the pickup’s wheel I’m a teenager again, flashbacking to the driving lessons Wendy gave me when she was home from college. It was a boiling summer day with heat waves rising off the gravel road. The windows were rolled down and locusts flitted in and out of the cab like tiny crashlanding helicopters. She was wild and ponytailed and laughing, even when I stalled out for the bazillionth time.

It should’ve been Brian who taught me how to drive. I wanted it to be my big brother. I didn’t idolize him — there was nobody worth idolizing in my family — but I still craved his approval, since approval was always in short supply. I could lay down a perfect weld and Dad would find something wrong with it, Mom would turn up her nose at my straight A’s and give me shit about not being valedictorian. But Brian was already a distant figure even across the breakfast table. Losing himself in the daily rituals of farming. Making friends of dusty cropland and feed animals. Rejecting us in his own way, I suppose.

I start to imagine him flat on his back in an intensive care ward, hooked up to a mess of tubes and wires, missing half his head, unmoving –

No. I push the vision away.

Glenn munches contentedly on jerky while I guide the F-150 through a maze of twisting access roads to the highway beyond. Jets scrape overhead in a blaze of noise and lights. Exit signs announce our transit through a bucolic suburbia — Fort Snelling State Park, Mendota, Mall of America, Apple Valley, Minnesota Zoo, Lakeville. I know 25 million people in Mexico City who’d give their right arm to live here.

“I always thought it would be Wendy,” Glenn says suddenly, staring at the hypnotic motion of the windshield wipers. “You try as many times as her…”

His secret fear is the most depressing thing in the world. A decade with my sister and he still doesn’t understand that her tentative suicide “attempts” are just another form of communication. Pleas for attention. Notice me, Mom and Dad. But Wendy doesn’t hate them — or herself — enough to really want to die.

I blow a long sigh into the windshield. “Thank god for SSRIs, huh?”

He glances sideways at me. “What?”

“SSRIs. Selective seratonin reuptake inhibitors. Prozac, Paxil — ”

“Zoloft. She’s on Zoloft now.” Glenn splays fingers across his shirt, absentmindedly wiping a greasy hand. “Me too, actually.”

That’s it for conversation for a while. We’re past the last tendrils of the Twin Cities and into the darkness of farmland. My gaze flicks between mileage signs and my speedometer. Six months of everything in kilometers and it’s like I’ve flipped an invisible switch. I wonder why the reverse culture shock isn’t bad this time. Probably because I didn’t lose myself in Mexico the way I usually do. I’ve been with Nooshin, speaking English every day, playing cultural tour guide.

As if reading my mind, Glenn stirs from his reverie. “Wendy told me that you and your girlfriend are going to have a kid.” He sharpens his tone — at himself, not me. Trying to remember. “This is a new one, right? Not the girlfriend you had in LA.”

“Yeah. Her name’s Nooshin. She’s my research assistant. We got, uh…” The F-150 is cruising in fifth gear, so I can shrug with my right shoulder. “We got…involved.”

“Sounds messy.”

“Nah, it’s cool. We’re in love.” The word feels strange in my mouth. I’m not used to saying it. Not even to Nooshin.

“Me and Wendy, we’re not going to have kids. That’s just not where it’s at for us.” He folds his pale arms across his chest, a gesture that could be defiant — or defensive. “Who wants to bring kids into a world like this? Everything is so fucked up.”

I’m already braced for the soundtrack of America — privileged diatribes woven out of shocking ignorance — but Glenn spares me. His sallow face stretches in a yawn. He goes back to his windshield trance, only humming this time. The noise is tuneless and irritating as hell.

Pointedly, I flip through a sleeve of Wendy’s CDs, searching for something to play on the only upgrade she’s made to the pickup — a sleek Blaupunkt audio system half-hidden under the dash. Her musical tastes don’t really map to mine. Most of the discs are MTV rap crap. Finally I grab something by a band called LCD Soundsystem and pop it into the stereo. The beats are downtempo and remixed and overlaid, with atmospheric hoarse-throated vocals on top. I find myself hanging on every lyric:

What we want
Sex with TV stars
What you want
A career in the
HA-HA-HA-HA
HA-HA-HA-HA

I tap the back button, playing that passage again and again, letting the cartoonish laughter mock me in waves. The lead singer was envisioning me, standing at a fork in my life. In one direction, a career in academia — now there’s a hardy-har-har. In the other direction, a career in whatever happens after you drop out of academia. Maybe that’s what an M.A. in Latin American Studies buys you in Corporate America. A big round of derisive laughter and a paycheck to match.

“Are you excited for the new Indiana Jones movie?” asks Glenn, and the pilgrimage to my brother’s shattered body wears on.

I’m the last passenger to board the plane, banging down the aisle and sweating angrily under my UCLA t-shirt and cargo pants. I just finished sprinting through Mexico City International Airport, a surprisingly plush obstacle course of queues and ticket counters and armed security checkpoints and terminal corridors that seem even longer than they really are. “You’re too late for a seat assignment,” complained the airline employee manning the gate, waving me through. “Just get on board before it pulls away.”

Pulse still racing, I cram my backpack into an overhead compartment and take a window seat in row 26. A chubby Hispanic girl sits in the aisle seat, staring fixedly at a magazine picture of a supermodel in a bikini. She notices me noticing her and glances across the empty middle seat, breaking into a grin. I make smile movements with my face and look away. The stewardesses are doing their parody of a suffocating person reaching for an air mask. Soon the pilot mumbles over the intercom, declaring his intention to assert our unnatural presence in the air.

“I’ve never been to Houston before,” the girl says in Cuban-accented English. “I usually fly into Miami. That’s where I live, where my family lives. I was born here, but we came from Cuba originally.” She’s older than I guessed, maybe thirtysomething, and gabby as hell. “I have an aunt and uncle in Houston, so I’m going to visit them and see my cousins too.”

The plane charges and tears a hole in the air. I watch the smoldering summit of Popocatepetl dwindle and fade. From this height the Valley of Mexico is filled with a chaotic patchwork of humanity. The upscale districts are easy to spot — more swaths of green for yards, public parks, even golf courses. The slums are solidly earth-toned. They flash with reflections from corrugated aluminum shacks. Nooshin is down there somewhere. I can picture her with unnerving precision. She’s a pooch-bellied scarecrow in a Gap hoodie and jeans and Nikes, right eye twitching madly behind her veil of inky bangs, confused — maybe even scared — but trying to be brave.

Suddenly I’m a torch of remorse. I should’ve waited for her at the internet cafe, rendezvousing as planned. I should’ve given her a crash course in Mexican driving. I should’ve said goodbye…

“I was in Mexico City for business,” the Hispanic girl is saying. “Well, mostly business. I managed to have some fun. The company I work for, it has a Mexican subsidiary. Every April my department performs a site audit. This is the first year I’ve been assigned to the site team. Usually I just do remote support during the audit. What about you?”

I stir from my unhappy reverie. “Say what?”

She leans closer, bulging over her armrest. “What brought you to Mexico City?”

How the hell do I answer that question? Admit I got stuck there, waiting to grow a pair of balls so I could UCLA — tell Hercules — that I’m dropping out of the Ph.D. program? Confess that I have no fucking idea how to be a father? Admit my terror at the prospect of whoring for a real job?

Instead I just mutter “I’m a tourist…” and lose myself in a copy of the in-flight catalog. It’s full of Sharper Image crap, like monogrammed golf tees and shiatsu massage chairs and keychain self-breathalyzers. If only Marx was parked in the middle seat next to me, witnessing the future. This is how capitalism triumphs — not by giving people what they need, but by giving people what they want.

“Hey. Mr. UCLA t-shirt! You want something to drink?”

The Hispanic girl is the type who interjects herself into everything. The stewardess hovers in the aisle, slightly annoyed with her conversational antics. Just like me. But I take the pretzels and ask for a Diet Coke anyway.

“I’m an accountant,” the Hispanic girl is telling me, looking older with every word. She rolls a pretzel between her fingers. “This is the first time I’ve been to Mexico City in…five, six years? That’s when we bought the company that became our Mexican subsidiary. I was part of the execution team back then, you know.”

“Execution team,” I echo, contemplating my plastic cup of Diet Coke and ice. “That sounds like fun.”

“Well, actually…” She proceeds to fill my left ear with a litany of corporate gossip — infighting, gross mismanagement, Sarbanes-Oxley violations. From the sounds of it, Enron was nothing compared to her employer.

Outside my thick oval of plexiglass is a field of clouds. If Nooshin was sitting next to me, she’d be marveling at their gossamer beauty. Finding imaginary shapes — “Look, that’s a bunny rabbit!” Laughing in contentment. But I couldn’t take her with me. We only had enough money to buy one last-minute plane ticket, not two.

I glance sideways at the Hispanic girl, whatever her name is. Maybe she gets her paycheck from a corrupt and dysfunctional global megaconglomerate, but I bet she could buy two last-minute tickets if she wanted. And all the geegaws in the in-flight catalog. And a house with rooms aplenty for children.

Her hands are poised above a laptop keyboard, tap-tap-tapping away. There’s no ring on her ring finger. I don’t know what that means — never married? divorced? — but suddenly it’s poignant. She gropes for connection on airplanes and visits her relatives across distant geography. She’s the inverse of…

Brian.

Somehow I managed to block out his name, our awkward brotherhood, everything rushing me back to the same family that drove me away — until now. The Hispanic girl really is the inverse of him, a man who dispensed with connection entirely and isolated himself on the familial plot of corn and soybeans.

The stewardess makes a sweep with a gaping white garbage bag and clears our trays of ripped packaging and plastic cups. Trying to distract myself from this raw and gaping wound, I focus on the breasts jutting beneath her nametag. They’re full, probably C cup, and…not big enough for Brian. My brother was gonzo for chicks with big tits. A boob man.

Flinching, I lean back and close my eyes. Desperate for a distraction, I summon a vision of Nooshin. Sprawled in bed beneath me, wherever that bed might be. Sensual and caramel-skinned and melting into my shape. Giving herself to me like no girlfriend I’ve ever had. Giving herself to me in a way that redefines “girlfriend”, suffusing the word with more power than I ever intended to give her, upending the project plan of my life.

The pilot rouses me with a command to fasten my seatbelt and shut down my electronic devices.

“You don’t like to talk?” The half-statement, half-question drifts across the empty seat between us. The Hispanic girl is putting away her laptop, a pierced annoyance showing in her chubby face.

We descend, ears popping. The plane halts in a flurry of baggage-grabbing. She stands, trying to get into the aisle, but it’s too crowded. She sits back down. Not being able to leave makes her feel like she has to say something else. “Look, I’m sorry to bother you — ”

A dam breaks inside me. “I’m flying home to see my brother. He shot himself in the head trying to commit suicide, and lived. He’s in critical condition at the Mayo Clinic.”

Her eyes flare into dinner plates. She opens her lipsticked mouth to say something…but no words come out. Then she bolts into the crowd of shifting, lunging, grabbing people from all over the hemisphere. Meanwhile I stare out the oval plexiglass at Houston, which hides behind a sleek concrete-and-glass airport terminal. Next stop, Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport in Minnesota. I don’t know how long it takes to drive down to Rochester and the world-famous Mayo Clinic where Brian is clinging to the same life he just tried to end, but it’ll be too fast and not fast enough.

Things I Love About Mexico City is a very short list, but here’s something right near the top — even in this gargantuan frenzied dystopia, you stumble across pockets of unexpected beauty and calm. And I’m not talking about the well-known retreats, like the lush glades of the Bosque de Chapultepec and the sunny gondola-choked canals that crisscross Xochimilco. Any tourist with a guidebook can find those places, to say nothing of 25 million locals. I’m talking about the offbeat stuff. Like the pristine and silent Leon Trotsky Museum, ignored by all the crowds flooding to the Frida Kahlo Museum further down the street. The agricultural research station in San Angel, with its endless open-sided greenhouses and humid rows of tropical plants. That spectacular English country garden in Polanco, hidden behind the ivy-leafed walls of an imposing compound — but accessible, if a dude like Elliot Parner shows you the secret door buried in the vines.

And now, this small sleepy cathedral a few blocks from Inez’s apartment in Coyoacan. It hides in plain sight, camouflaged by its sleek 1930s-era architecture. The Catholic Church of that future — all layered lines and sloping corners and squat height, like a stubby cement spaceship waiting to rocket to God. Driving past I assumed it was a private residence or maybe a hip new store, but pausing on the sidewalk its true nature becomes apparent. Crosses are indented into the lintel, and a cobblestone path leads around the side to an octagonal chapel, protruding from the side of the cathedral like a fuel pod.

“Come on, Nooshin!” barks Inez’s mom, peeling open the front doors, a pair of massive concrete shutters that must pivot on hidden counterweights. Her mom resembles Jackie O, looking back at us in those goggle-eyed sunglasses and white silk scarf tied around her head.

I feel Nooshin’s hand slip from mine. “Well, I better go get blessed…” But she hesitates, tall and pregnant and conflicted in my peripheral vision.

“You still haven’t told Inez’s mom that you’re Muslim.” A statement, not a question.

“Well…” She elongates it, we-lllllllllll.

I turn to look at her. The clouds gap and sunlight washes over us, highlighting the tiny scars that ghost across her forehead and down the bridge of her nose, casting shadows under her steep cheekbones. Her right eye jerks nervously when Inez’s mom barks “Nooshin!” again.

“I’ll wait outside,” I decide. I lean in for a quick kiss, then watch her traipse up the flattened steps to the cathedral entrance. She pauses to wave at me, like a traveler bound for deep space, then the doors swing shut.

I wander the grounds, following the cobblestone path around to the octagonal chapel. Seven sides are enclosed, one is open. Inside is a forest fire of votive candles and a scaffolding matrix. A half-restored fresco looms overhead. The face and flesh tints of a crucified Jesus are missing, as if the artist is afraid to tread on divinity, and pots of pigment line the scaffold.

“Will you shoot me?”

What the — ?!? I whirl around and discover a young mexicana holding out a digital camera. She’s silent in crepe-soled pumps and wearing a demure blocky dress the color of charcoal.

“Will you?” she asks, gesturing with the digicam again.

“Uh, sure.”

I take the minuscule thing and peer through the sight, expecting her to stand smiling. Instead she flushes her long hair out over her shoulders, then kneels down on the cobbles. In profile she remains praying and crossing herself for long minutes, while I snap a couple gigs of pictures.

“Thank you, thank you.” She takes the camera and then my hand. “Beatriz.”

“I’m Nick.”

She sends me a disconnected smile, then stares around us. “Look at this, look at this.”

I glance around at all the icons, dancing in votive flames. “Uh, yeah.” I grope for the conversational thread. “Just, uh…look at this.”

Beatriz has produced a taper and is searching the chapel, moving from one bank of icons to the next. She pauses in front of a framed picture of John Paul II contemplating the Virgin of Guadalupe during his last visit to Mexico.

I feel obligated to comment. “I hear the new pontiff, Ratzinger, put John Paul on the fast track to canonization.”

She flares angrily. “He is already a saint, already a saint! He heads the saints in the cathedral of heaven!” Her voice is lilting with passionate certainty. “He and the Virgin of Guadalupe send all our prayers to God. Direct.”

Jesus fucking Christ. Praying action shots and talking in double and hotlines to god. I start backing out the door.

“Why are you here?” Beatriz asks suddenly.

I freeze. Her tone is almost accusatory, as if she can see right through my ribcage to this atheistic heart. “My girlfriend, uh, she’s pregnant, and she’s here to get blessed.”

“Then may God bless you too.” She considers the taper wrapped in her fervent hands, then dips it into a flame. “I will pray for both of you, I will pray for both of you.”

I watch her park the taper in front of a sheaf of flickering lights. Beatriz bows her head and clasps her rosary and begins praying to…Hispanic Barbie? I peer at the doll in fascination, at its handmade garments and slippered feet. Somebody has painstakingly crafted it into a miniature replica of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

The slur of praying stops. She raises a placid face and beams at me wetly. “Soon, Nick, soon the Church on earth will be united with the Church in heaven. A celestial union. Soon, very soon!” Her voice is a hypnotic music. “Light for the future of the world! Very soon, very soon!”

I’m looking at her like bats are about to burst forth from her eyesockets. “When?” I ask dully.

“When?” Beatriz tilts at me oddly. “Did you ask when?”

“Uh, yeah. That’s what I asked. When. When is all this going to happen.”

“Very soon!” she repeats. Like, duh. Wasn’t I listening?

Very soon also seems like a perfect time to get the hell away from her. I thank her for praying for us, edging toward the door, hey I think my girlfriend is calling me…

Every stride back toward the street is an escape building momentum — and not just from Beatriz’s rapture of Catholic belief. A famous anthropologist once said that if you want to know a Mexican, you should ask him about God. But I want to be done with Hispanic Barbies made into icons, and superstitious mexicanos who cross themselves to ward off Nooshin’s evil eye, and a country sinking into a morass of drug cartels and beggars and snarling dogs. For the first time in my life, I want to be done with Mexico.