The Mexican Year

The world is becoming water again in a heavy and unrelenting deluge. The 18-hole golf course designed by Jack Nicklaus is turning into 18 floodplains, with sand traps like miniature lakes. Waves of rain lap across empty tennis courts. The outdoor pool is overflowing onto its concrete apron and threatening rows of patio chairs. But somehow I prefer the resort this way — denuded of people, sinking into a jungle sea. These watery vistas fill my head with fantasies. I see a place where schools of fish jet across the fairways, where mermaids beach themselves on the tennis courts, where Atlantis sleeps in the swimming pool.

Humanity has retreated into the great indoors. Many guests are enjoying the spa and its various treatments, like “hydro-active mineral salt scrubs” and “aromatherapy contour masques”, which I read about on a placard outside the smoked-glass entryway. Other guests are torturing themselves in front of mirrors in the gym, or doing yoga with some kind of celebrity instructor named Vikram, or sitting in semi-darkness in the soundproofed meditation room. And there’s always the restaurants — three of them — with double-digit entrees and triple-digit wines, and the disco that pulses from noon until dawn, seven days a week.

I’m alone in the open-air tiki bar next to the tennis courts, surrounded by four walls of rain sheeting off the rectangular pole roof. The wind is tossing plastic chairs around and misting me with droplets. I sit with one bare foot tucked underneath me, the other disappearing into the rising water. First my toes were underwater, now my arch. Suddenly I’m filled with apprehension. Leeches! I hastily fold my legs Indian-style in the chair.

The pose creates an uncomfortably pleasant wind tunnel, right under my robe and up my thighs. I shift the terrycloth folds of a men’s size XXL monogrammed with the PUJAL RESORT AND SPA logo. Blame it on my freakish height — their women’s robes don’t even reach to my butt. Meanwhile the t-shirt and jeans and hiphuggers I’ve been wearing for the last two weeks are drip-drying after I handwashed them in the bathroom sink. Tomorrow I’ll have clothes again.

Tomorrow. The word is a chilling reminder of my poverty. It costs $250 a night to stay here — and that’s for the cheapest room at the resort! Every tomorrow costs me 1/4 of what I make in a month as Nick’s research assistant. I can’t afford to linger in Pujal. The realization is a dull thud somewhere inside me. I need to start moving again, before I’ve even completely stopped.

Maybe because I’m leaving here tomorrow, I gaze at the brightly-lit windows of the resort in desperate attention. Who are those figures inside? Their shifting silhouettes make me feel as if they’re slipping from my grasp, and with them the only loved ones I’ve ever known — my family, Saman, Nick. Especially Nick. But I don’t know whether he slipped from my grasp, or I slipped from his.

A figure presses against one of the windows, hands cupped around face, peering out into the rain.

I throb with the relief of connection, even just an imaginary one. Someone is lonely. Someone is lonely like me. I wonder if –

Then the figure vanishes back into silhouette, rejoining the crowd of shadows lost to me. My despair is a long useless feeling. Overhead the rain tattoos the metal canopy in a violent beat.

A door bursts open in the back of the resort, spilling light across the watery surface of the tennis courts. A tall poncho-clad figure splashes through the bright reflections, beelining toward…me? I glance over my shoulder in confusion. Nothing back there except a half-drowned golf course.

He’s running now. Definitely right at me. I slide my feet into the water swirling around my chair, ready to flee, my heart palpitating, he looks scary, he looks like…

“Nick?” I whisper tremulously, not daring to believe it, omigod omigod, but it’s TRUE, it’s really HIM, and suddenly I’m yelling “NICK!” at the top of my lungs as he arrives beneath the canopy’s shelter in a splashing rush. “What on earth are you doing here?”

He strips off his poncho and tosses it aside, incredulous. “What the hell do you think I’m doing here?” His fervent embrace almost breaks me in half, and I don’t mind at all. “I finally caught up to you!”

I’m clinging to him, almost crying, still happily stunned. “But — but how did you find me?”

Nick dips into his breast pocket for a polaroid, the rarest kind — a picture of me snapped in defenselessness, my veil of bangs pulled back in a ponytail. “Usted ha visto a esta gringa?” — have you seen this American girl? — he says, with a practice that matches the dirty fingerprints around the edges.

I snatch the polaroid away and hurl it into the rain. The motion causes my robe to sag open.

“Whoa. Are you…?” He moves in close, nuzzling me and peering down the front of my robe. “You are!” His hands slide down the lapels to the knotted sash, untying it.

“Nick!” I giggle, trying to hold my robe closed.

“Nobody’s going to see.” He tugs my arms out of the way.

My robe falls open, letting in the cool moist air. Letting in his gaze. I hover awkwardly, blushing, naked for him. He cups my cheek, pulling me into a gentle kiss, then lets his palm slide down the flat contours of my body…

“Look,” Nick says quietly. “You’re showing.”

“I am?” I stare down past my boobs — the part of me I want to get bigger, although they’re still just bumps — to the gentle swell of my tummy. Wait a sec. Gentle swell? Where’d that come from? I swivel my hips around, experimenting with the angle, and try sucking in my stomach. But the swell doesn’t go away. “Wow,” I murmur. “I didn’t even notice.”

He makes fists and presses them to his eyes, breathing deeply. “I thought I lost you, Nooshin. I thought you were gone, you and the baby, oh god…” For a painful heartbeat he seems to hover on the verge of tears — but then he drops his fists, and his angular features align into exasperation, and he’s harping on me. “What the hell were you thinking, anyway? Just taking off like that? And walking through the fucking jungle? The jungle, Nooshin! Look at all your mosquito bites! How many goddamn times have we talked about malaria — ”

“I got so hungry I almost ate a grub,” I say, pulling my robe closed.

He blinks at me, defused. “What?”

“A big juicy one. Except only almost.”

Nick collapses into a chair, making a noise that could be anything at first, but then turns into laughter. “All this shit goes down, and what’s the thing you remember? You almost ate a grub. You’re such a Nooshball.”

I pull a chair next to his and settle myself, snaking a hand into his lap. Our fingers entwine, a gesture which feels utterly and completely perfect. Together we watch an ocean sluice from the darkening sky.

“Nick — ” I start to say.

“No, it’s my turn,” he interrupts.

His knee pistons, that hiking boot heel splashing water. Minutes drag off the Corona Light clock hanging above the tiki bar. Our grasp starts to become clammy, then downright sweaty.

Finally his knee stops pistoning. “Alright, here’s the deal — I’m not leaving you, and you’re not leaving me.”

I nod and repeat after him. “I’m not leaving you, and you’re not leaving me. Got it.” Then I start to think about it. I find myself squeezing his hand a little tighter in excitement. “Like, we’re not leaving each other…forever?”

“Yeah.” Nick grins lopsidedly, half-confident, half-terrified. In the murk his eyes are cerulean and bottomless and I just want to fall in. “You cool with that?”

“Okay,” I say happily.

So this is what it’s like to plod through the jungle. I’m trapped on a featureless treadmill of rainforest, putting one Nike in front of the other, again and again and again, never going anywhere. Hours later I’m still plodding the same dirt road, still swatting aside the same thick undergrowth. The heat is stunning. My nostrils are filled with the gross smell of rotting vegetation. Mosquitoes swarm around me in a bloodthirsty humming fog. During cloudbursts I try to catch rain to drink, since I don’t have any water. It works when I use a big leaf as a funnel. If only the cloudbursts lasted long enough to wash me clean of mud and grime. I haven’t showered since Guanajuato, and I’ve been wearing the same clothes for a week.

My facial muscles are sore from frowning. It hurts to remember those wonderful day hikes and camping trips with Nick, back in San Diego. I always thought his careful prepwork and safety precautions were kind of anal. Bringing a couple day’s worth of food and water on an afternoon jaunt into Canyon Sin Nombre? Treating a weekend camping trip in the Laguna Mountains like a Victorian expedition to the darkest corner of the globe? Like I said, kind of anal — right?

Now I know better.

Note to my stupid self — never again plunge into the Mexican rainforest with no map and no water and no food and no mosquito repellent and almost no money, only the clothes on my back, carrying a backpack full of dead useless weight, like a laptop computer that can’t possibly survive this heat and humidity. Because being cotton-mouthed and starving and bone-tired and stinky and coated in mosquito bites like this, it just plain sucks.

And still I plod on my jungle treadmill, wondering when it’s going to stop. I just want it to stop, please god, just let me get somewhere already. “Argh!” I groan in miserable frustration, then scream it — “ARRRRRRGH!!!” My voice is smothered by the thick foliage. I struggle into an awkward sprint, rushing down the dirt road, my backpack jouncing on my shoulder…

…but I only have the strength to run a couple dozen strides. Then I collapse into a panting ball, blinking away sweat. I stare at the jungle. The jungle stares back. There’s probably a veritable supermarket out there, pitcher plants of water to drink, fruits and berries to eat. I just don’t know how to identify them. Only banana trees and coconut palms, and I haven’t seen any of those.

A big juicy-looking grub is wriggling in the dead leaves nearby. At first I think ewww! Then I think hmmm…

But when I reach for it, I notice my bare arm is hairy with mosquitoes. Time to get on the jungle treadmill again. Standing up is a tiring process, like dragging myself into the air, and when I finally get there I’m lightheaded for a few moments. Meanwhile my lower body is moving all by itself. Panic flares in my chest. Did I get turned around when I stopped? Am I going the right way? The treadmill looks the same in both directions. Through the canopy I can only catch glimpses of the sunlight filtering down, not enough sky with the sun in it to orient myself. Finally I realize I’m leaving footprints behind me, not walking into them. This must be east still.

After a while I fixate despairingly on Nick, a dizzying out-of-control spiral of scenes in my head that suddenly and jarringly stops, freezing into focus before starting again. The handsome icy-eyed stranger on Avenida Revolucion who invites himself into my life. Waking up next to Nick in the rippling fabric of a tent in the Laguna Mountains. Following him to a dusty heat-wracked house in a country where I don’t know the language or the customs or the money. The slick heaven between us as he finally — finally — plunders my desire. His awkward joy when I show him the pregnancy test.

I need to cry until I’m absolutely finished. But I won’t. I refuse. Because crying until I’m absolutely finished means we’re absolutely finished. A finality that will break my heart.

Instead I keep plodding on my jungle treadmill.

And just like that, the road dumps me into a clearing. I find myself wandering into a village of good omens. The streets are lined with whitewashed buildings instead of wooden shacks. Wires are strung overhead, maybe for electricity, maybe for telephones. Animals live in fenced corrals instead of roaming free. The faces staring at me are still Indian, but I can overhear conversations in Spanish, not just the impenetrable strains of Nahuatl.

Then I lurch to a halt, staring.

At a Hummer. The monstrous SUV is parked at a jaunty angle in front of a rustic stucco-walled store, shining brilliantly in the hot sun. It has an opalescent paintjob and Texas license plates and two kayaks, neon-red and neon-blue, strapped to the roof. The staging is so perfect I feel like I’ve stumbled into a commercial.

The Hummer is the first vehicle I’ve encountered since the converted schoolbus washed off the road. No one can afford cars or trucks here. The Indians don’t have two pesos to rub together. Besides, what happens when you run out of gas? I haven’t seen a Pemex station all week.

“It’s nice, huh?” a cheerful voice calls in English. A curly-haired man showing a lot of sunburned skin emerges from the store. His arms are filled with several lumpy bags. Looks like he stocked up on handwoven blankets or throw-rugs. “I bought it a couple months ago. Got a great deal.”

“Yeah. It’s…nice.” I can think of a million other words for the SUV — otherworldly, jarring, escapist — but nice works too.

His approach falters. He looks me up and down, scrunching his lean face into an expression of distaste. “Is everything okay? You look like you got lost in the jungle.” At least he’s kind enough not to say I smell like I got lost in the jungle.

The story gets jumbled up in my throat. “The bus, it went off the road during that huge thunderstorm a couple days ago, and I had to walk the rest of the way…”

The man’s wariness is beginning to melt into concern. “Where’s the rest of your tour group? Are they still out there? Do they need help? Did anybody get, uh…hurt?” He blanches meaningfully.

“No no no, it wasn’t that kind of bus. It was just a local, for the Indians. I’m not with a tour — ”

A woman’s voice cuts me off. “Adrian! Help me with this!” Her drawl is coming from behind a tall bulky statue wrapped in two arms.

Adrian explodes into solicitous motion, dropping his bags and hustling over to help her. Together they muscle the statue — a weird polychromed Christ — into the back of the Hummer. I hover uselessly, hoping I’m downwind.

When they’re done loading everything into the SUV, Adrian gingerly reaches out a hand toward me — then thinks better of it. “I’m Adrian, and this is my girlfriend Wendy.”

“Hi,” Wendy says from a distance, looking up at me with wideset hazel eyes beneath a shag cut that’s supposed to be bouncy, but just flattens in this humidity. She’s a fireplug of a girl, wearing a tube dress that shows off her broad shoulders and thick muscular body. Her diamond earrings and matching diamond pendant necklace are grotesque amidst this poverty.

“I’m Nooshin,” I say, and turn to Adrian. “Are you a paleontologist?”

He stares quizzically at me. “What?”

“She’s talking about your tanktop, dude,” Wendy snaps.

Adrian glances down at his tanktop — emblazoned with a stylized fossil dig and the slogan GET DOWN AND DIRTY FOR A LIVING - BECOME A PALEONTOLOGIST. “Oh. This! My brother teaches paleontology at Montana State.” He preens a little. “Me, I’m a lawyer. A junior partner already.” When I don’t react, he adds, “At Meyer Schlusskind Farrell.” When I still don’t react, he shrugs in disgust and mutters, “They’re a very prestigious national firm.”

Wendy is back to scrutinizing me. “What happened to you? You look — ”

“I know, I know,” I interrupt tiredly. “I look like crap. I’ve been walking through the jungle for a couple days.”

“I don’t know why anybody would hike the rainforest when you can kayak it instead,” she says disapprovingly.

“Her tour bus got swept off the road during the storm,” Adrian explains, with a sympathetic glance in my direction.

“I wasn’t on a tour — !” I start to say, then just give up. This conversation is making me feel even more exhausted than I already am. Several Indians in white peasant garb stroll by, chickens slung over their shoulders. “Hay un banco?” — is there a bank here? — I call out to them, already guessing the answer. They wag their heads no.

“Banco is bank, right?” Adrian asks.

“Duh!” Wendy is rolling her eyes.

He glares at her, then turns back to me. “There are lots of banks in Pujal, just down the road. Some ATMs too, if you’ve got a cash card.”

Lots of banks out here in the jungle? Even some ATMs? It’s almost incomprehensible to me. “Is Pujal a big city?”

“Uh, not really. It’s pretty small, actually. But it’s the tourist mecca around here.” Adrian jerks a thumb at the neon-colored kayaks on the Hummer’s roof. “You know, for all the kayaking and rockclimbing and eco-tours.”

“How far is it to Pujal?” I ask.

“Only 50, 60 minutes,” he says brightly.

“We’d offer you a ride, but we’re going in the opposite direction. Up to Conechilco for the Easter festival there.” Wendy checks her diver’s watch. “We should probably get going. The guidebook said the festival starts at one o’clock.”

“Today is…Easter?” God, I’ve lost all track of time. I even forgot about Norouz, the Persian New Year. I wonder if my sister or parents tried to call me. Probably not.

“Enjoy the rest of your tour. I hope you get back with your group soon.” Wendy speaks in a tone of voice like washing her hands. She climbs into the Hummer, taking the driver’s side. I’m reminded that Nick has still never let me drive his truck.

“It was cool to meet you, Nooshin!” Adrian is calling out, in retreat around the SUV’s opalescent flank. Soon I can only hear his voice. “Good luck with everything!”

I watch the Hummer lurch into a cacophony of motion — engine roaring, kayaks rattling on the roof rack, hip-hop booming out the open windows. A chorus of village dogs bark in response. The calm seems utterly and irreparably shattered…but it isn’t, of course. Silence returns after the Hummer disappears into the jungle, heading north on a slightly wider version of my dirt road. It occurs to me to wave goodbye about the same time it occurs to me that Adrian probably meant 50-60 minutes of driving time to Pujal, not walking time.

This tiny huddle of unpainted wooden shacks has a name, but I can’t pronounce it. Tlacoteotalpan or something like that. The Nahuatl syllables come out all wrong when I try to mimic them. The pueblo nestles into the horseshoe bend of a lazy river, its surface roiled by the neverending rain. Overhead is the leaky umbrella of a high canopy of trees. Water pours down in isolated torrents, and the road — just a dirt track, really — is still an impassible flow of mud dotted with puddles. Impassible to vehicles, anyway. I squelch along in my Nikes and jeans that are slimy from the knees down.

Like all the villages in this part of the jungle, Tlacoteotalpan is Nahuatl-speaking and way too small to have an inn. The moneypouch dangling from my neck is almost empty, so instead I barter in pantomime with an amiable gap-toothed wife. Together we root through my backpack, trying to find something to trade in exchange for food and lodging in her shack. Not the laptop with the PROPERTY OF UCLA security sticker, wrapped in thick layers of banana leaves. Not the antique Polaroid camera and its film, zipped in a plastic bag. Not this notebook, or my favorite purple swirly pen. Finally there’s nothing left but my bra, which I shed hours ago in the wet heat. The scrap of underwear passes between us like an unwanted thing. She’s probably a D cup, and I don’t have any boobs at all. Neither of us has any use for it.

Unable to make conversation with anyone and unwilling to wade back into the mud, I sit in the shack’s doorway and watch chickens scamper around. They cluck noisily, pecking at ants and bugs that are apparently being knocked off trees by the rain. Naked little kids are trying to feed grass shoots to piglets. Through open windows I can see their moms hanging up laundry on lines strung indoors.

Darkness is crashing down when the husband returns from the river, where he’s been netting. Two gangly boys — their sons, I slowly realize — help him carry in several slimy-looking fish with foggy eyes. The fish are laid on the plank floor of the kitchen, where they occasionally gulp. The wife squats to descale and fillet them with a knife rusting at the hilt. Meanwhile the husband and sons banter. Once it’s apparent that I can’t speak Nahuatl and they don’t speak Spanish, my presence is barely acknowledged.

The fish are mouthwateringly delicious when baked with pineapple. I’m embarrassed to find myself competing with the boys for second helpings of the fish and rice. But that doesn’t stop me from gorging myself. I’m eating for two now, and this is the first meal I’ve had all day.

In the morning I awake before dawn, shivering despite the heat, my t-shirt and jeans plastered to my skinny limbs. I tiptoe past curtained doorways with snoring figures, the wife and her husband in one room, the sons in another. Squishing through the mud toward the outhouse, my Nikes are sucked right off my feet. I complain tiredly in Farsi and retrieve them from the muck. Puddles still quiver with the impact of raindrops, but it’s only sprinkling now. Through a gap in the ghostly clouds I can see the sky, velvety and lustrous with stars.

In the outhouse I pull down my jeans and hiphuggers and settle myself on the well-worn wood. Great. Diarrhea again. Last night’s fish and rice went right through me. I slump into a comfortable position and breathe through my mouth, trying to ignore the stench. Tickling sensations dance across my buttcheeks. Cockroaches are welling out of the latrine and across my butt and down my muddy pantslegs. Normally I’d freak out, but I’m just too exhausted to care. I drift in and out of a twitchy shallow sleep. Every once in a while I hear a door rattle or a bird scream, but the sounds barely rouse me.

Eventually I emerge into morning, squinting against the harsh low glare of the sun, a flaming vermilion orb climbing over the forest canopy. My toes tickle in the mud. But I discover that my body is a leaden thing, too heavy to drag all the way back to the shack. I sit down on a convenient stump instead.

Rubbing my eyes into focus, I stare at a different part of the village, one hidden from my limited doorway view yesterday. Corn grows in plots that have been clearcut, then burned. Several burros stand in a crude corral, chewing grass. A homemade swing hangs from a tall gumtree. The details are banal and fascinating at the same time, and I try to memorize them, hoping I’ll never be back.

Someone is calling in Nahuatl. I turn around gingerly on my stump, trying to avoid splinters. The younger son is wading towards me, all smiles for the gringa, and carrying something in an open palm. A thick slice of fresh bread slathered with something green. Avocado, probably. Up close the aroma is so enticing my jaw aches. Then a reflex goes wrong inside me, and I retch long and emptily into the mud between my bare feet.

I feel like I’ve fallen into a hole in the map. This swath of Mexico is a blank nothingness of faded yellow that cuts across the states of Guanajuato, San Luis Potosi and Veracruz. No roads are indicated, no villages, nothing. Even the usual contour lines of the Sierra Madre Occidentals are missing. I’ve disappeared from the world known to cartographers.

Granted, the map isn’t very good. It’s a government freebie from the Pemex station back in Tanquian, a humble crossroads of quonset huts and mud-brick shacks that calls itself “la entrada al Mesa de Manzanares” — the gateway to Manzanares Mesa. That’s where I switched buses, arriving on a local headed back to Guanajuato, departing on another local that’s grinding eastward across mountain ridges. I don’t really know where I’m going. I just think it would be cool to experience the tropical rainforest and stroll the beachy fringe of the Gulf of Mexico. Better do it before my tummy swells into awkwardness. And before my money runs out.

I’m despairingly familiar with converted schoolbuses, the cheapest transportation in this part of Mexico. They’re obsolete rusting castoffs from school districts in America, identifiable by the graffiti carved into their fiberglass side panels — “Class of 87″ and “Joe + Kristi” and “Iron Maiden Rulz”. Their Mexican owners bolt luggage racks onto their roofs and repaint them in vibrant rainbow colors and give them weird names, like Triste y Abandonado — Sad and Abandoned — and El Pollo Loco — The Crazy Chicken. Torn vinyl seats are reupholstered with duct tape, and any busted springs protruding are just ripped out. Then they’re put into service on these single-lane dirt roads, bouncing violently and making a horrible racket and spewing a dirty black fog of diesel smoke.

Outside the bus windows a ruggedly beautiful world is lurching into view. The flat earth-toned scrub of the Manzanares Mesa is gone, replaced by a hilly riot of greenery — bottle palms, the woody vines known as ojite, cedars spreading their canopies in the muggy air. We stop in picturesque Indian villages. Men loiter in campesino outfits of straw hats, white long-sleeved shirts and pants with huarache sandals. Elderly women in traditional hand-embroidered huipiles sweep the dirt streets, while chickens and dogs wander past their ankles. Conversations are filled with a mixture of Spanish and a language I’ve never heard before, probably Nahautl, the mother tongue of the Nahua Indians.

I’m still angry about my unplanned stay in Ahorcado, where the stupid bus driver left me behind during a break. So I don’t get off the bus when we stop. Instead I just gaze out the window, carefully draping my bangs over the right side of my face. But my crooked wandering eye comes in handy when an inebriated Indian climbs aboard and crowds into my seat, all groping hands. A toss of my hair to reveal the Evil Eye and he stumbles away in horror.

Thunderheads are boiling into a sky that’s the color of Nick’s icy blue eyes. Lines of palm-covered hills rise out of a pooling fog. The humidity becomes cloying, then almost unbearable. There’s so much water vapor in the air it feels as if I could drown. I pray for rain — for relief — but there isn’t any, just an elongation of sweat and panting. The bus grinds on.

Then all the world seems to thicken and blur. Fog is swirling into the darkening sky, whipped by a sudden cool wind. Thunder rumbles closer. A jagged bolt of lightening arcs overhead, followed by an ear-splitting craaaaaaackle-BOOM!!! Small children on the bus erupt in wails, and their tears seem to provoke the sky. A few raindrops dot the windshield, then more, then a lashing torrent.

Passengers struggle at the twin lines of windows, trying to work mechanisms that are old and rusty and clogged with dust. Only a couple windows actually close. The rest remain stubbornly open, letting in sheets of rain that pour down the roof. My window refuses to budge and within minutes I’m drenched, a soggy backpack in my lap.

A drowned-looking rooster escapes its owner and begins jumping from seatback to seatback, squawking and flapping and pecking. When it lands in front of me I raise my backpack defensively, terrified the crazy bird will peck my eyes out. Suddenly the bus lurches and we’re both thrown violently against the side. I bang my temple hard and elbow harder. The rooster disappears out the window in a blizzard of wet feathers.

Around us the torrential downpour is turning the single-lane dirt road into a river of mud. The steady straight-ahead grinding of the bus becomes increasingly erratic, punctuated by fishtailing and enormous pothole splashes. Sometimes the bus driver curses louder than the thundercracks. The wind is blowing so hard that branches are reaching through the open windows and trees are caving away. I notice the Indian woman sitting across from me is bracing herself with one hand and fingering her rosary with the other. Something in her calmness makes me panic. Suddenly my life — my dumb pointless life — is flashing before my eyes, a slideshow of memories that I won’t miss…until I get to Nick, and omigod, I don’t want it to end this way, buried in a mudslide or crushed underneath fallen trees, not when I’m pregnant with his child, not when I’m so in love with him.

The sensation is dull at first, a vague disembodied irritation that seeps into my dreamland of shadows. I try to push it away and sink back into darkness, but the sensation is insistent. It hovers at the periphery of consciousness, calling me to morning. I’m already surfacing through a sleep like tar when the sensation intensifies into acute discomfort. Something is pinching me.

My eyes snap open. The dawn sky is pinkish and opaque with haze, like cotton candy dissolving. The silhouette of a bird is circling overhead. Several of them, actually.

To my right, the sensation happens again. A very sharp and painful bite. “Ouch!” I cry, and instinctively try to pull away.

But I can’t. I’m lying half-buried in a shallow bed of sand, and wedged against my backpack.

Feathers whirl. There’s another bite to my right hand. I flap around in panic, tossing sand everywhere, screaming a little, convinced a river of vultures are descending from the sky to plunder my carcass.

But when I sit up, I discover my attacker is actually a tiny brown bird. A sparrow of some kind, or maybe a wren. It hops around the nearby underbrush in an excited flitter, whistling at me. Meanwhile bottlenose flies are buzzing around me in a reflective storm that shimmers…and settles on my right hand…and shimmers into motion again when I shake them off.

In a heartbeat my panic turns into curiosity. I spilled beer on that hand the other day, a foamy pop-topping explosion — thanks to that stupid jerk of a store owner, who surreptitiously shook up the Budweiser I bought before sliding it across the countertop to me. Having some fun with the gringa. Ha ha ha. I hang my hand in space and watch the flies coat it…and the bird hop closer, eyeing the flies. It was snatching breakfast off my right hand in big juicy pecks.

Eventually I struggle to my feet, leaking sand like a sieve. The stuff is thick in my hair, trickling into my ears, turning my clothes into sandpaper. Worse, my skin is beginning to disappear beneath a grime of dust and dried sweat. No wait, this is the worst — that horrible odor I’m smelling? It might be me.

I need a shower, and a laundromat to wash the only outfit I have, and a store where I can buy a change of clothes, and breakfast for this growling stomach, and a bus ticket out of here, and a destination worth going to, and and and…

My head becomes a whirlpool of thoughts, all of them sucked down the drain called Nick. Because it’s so wrong that I’m alone in this Mexican nowhere. I shouldn’t have fled from him like this, and he should’ve stopped me, and now everything is ruined with truth — he’ll leave me someday. Not because he doesn’t love me. He does. He even said it once. No, he’ll leave me because he loves me.

I used to think love was something Nick feared, something he ran quickly from, but now I know better. He’s not afraid of love, he’s afraid of falling for a girl who can’t measure up to his rarefied ideal. He wants everything I’m not — an intellectual equal, someone whose life is built around a career, a sophisticate who knows things about wine and politics and alternative lifestyles, a bedmate who looks like the girls in Saman’s hidden porno magazines. Nick doesn’t want to be trapped by me, because he knows his love won’t last. He can’t stay with a stupid boobless crooked-eye girl like me, not forever and ever. Someday he’ll leave me, and with a child.

Beneath this dirty t-shirt, the heart that beats only for him is breaking into pieces, into countless grains of sand, into an entire desert.

Oh stop it, Nooshin. What will crying do? Just make your face look even worse, probably. And get a grip, girl — your heart beats for the baby too! Not much of a motivating peptalk…until I’m struck with an odd thought. What would Nick do?

When I think of my situation that way, I almost laugh out loud. Nick wouldn’t be caught dead sleeping in the open. He would’ve ingratiated himself with a stranger in town, or just knocked on doors and boldly asked to spend the night. And if for some inexplicable reason he actually did spend the night outdoors like this, he’d impose on someone for their bathroom and clean himself up and get invited to breakfast. He might even talk them into letting him use their phone — or omigod, giving him a ride back to civilization.

To me, those are just possibilities sheafed together. To Nick, it would all be part of a plan. He always has a plan. A couple dozen of them, percolating in his Machiavellian head, and he picks the best one.

Well, today I’m going to have a plan. I’m going to stride Nick-like into this decrepit falling-apart town, and I’m going to knock on every door I encounter, and I’m going to hide my crooked eye and flaunt my functional Spanish, and I won’t give up until I’ve had a shower and a chance to rinse out my clothes and even a free breakfast!

An hour later I trudge back into the general store on the plaza, my backpack leaden, rivers of sweat carving through the grime on my skin. The owner is just as stoic and unblinking as ever, although his eyes narrow and his nostrils flare at my atrocious smell. Neither of greets the other with “buenos dias”.

“Give me a beer,” I sigh in Spanish, reclaiming the same wooden bench where I spent most of yesterday and the day before. “A Budweiser. And don’t shake it up this time.”