False War

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MIAMI BEACH

The sound of airplanes cut across the interminable sky of Mexico City. I couldn’t hang around. I caught a flight to the border and crossed over in the South, riding buses for three days through Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and part of Alabama before funneling down into Florida. I saw the sick skies. Saw the streets and the fast-food joints and the primordial gas stations of America. Looking at the map, you drift west to east across the mainland until all of a sudden you drop into this hole.

My friend Elis put me up at her place, a two-bedroom apartment on an island north of Miami Beach. She’d come to get me in Tampa, in a white Toyota. We’d been neighbors as kids and here we were together in her car, bonded by a previous life. Twenty years later, she had chosen to honor that.

“You can stay here as long as you need to,” she said.

Back then, she hadn’t moved in yet with Fanboy and she wasn’t working at a gallery. She took a few sips of coffee and set the cup in the holder between us. She was dressed in black, dark circles under her eyes, and she wore a Swatch, also black.

Windows down.

“I don’t want to get in the way,” I said. “As soon as I’m on my feet I’ll find a place to rent.”

Elis gave me a skeptical look, as if somebody of my provenance would never get on his feet, or as if there was no such thing. And what did I mean, really?

“Sure,” she said, “but for now you can stay with me. You’ll love my roommates.”

Her kindness made her even more of a stranger. I mean, she wasn’t someone I knew. We were familiar from elementary school and around the neighborhood, our families had probably done each other a favor or two, but that was about it.

“How’s your father?”

“Sick,” I said.

“Your mother?”

“Gone.”

I felt uncomfortable sitting there, far from everyone. The wind was in my face and I decided to focus on that. Elis: one hand on the wheel, the other on her coffee cup. She drove confidently. I told her so, and that was all I said for a while.

“It’s what I do most,” she said. “Drive.”

The highway split the horizon in two. The car scissored forward, slicing the surface. Then I was out cold. Elis woke me underneath her building. We took the elevator up to her third-floor apartment halfway down a white hallway. Emergency stairs at the far end.

Through the door to the right, the kitchen. A guy our age was chopping vegetables on a wooden board by the sink. He stepped toward us, knife in hand. I thought he was going to say hello, but he stopped at the refrigerator. His hair was up in a tight knot. Thick black hair, already touched with gray, a few strands loose. Elis introduced us and hurried to the bathroom.

“S’up?” asked the Instrumentalist.

“Not much.”

“Make yourself at home, bróder.”

He wiped his hands on his apron and blew his nose into the sink.

I went into the living room. Put my backpack on the floor and sat on the edge of a sofa bed along one wall. It was where I’d be sleeping. There was another guy on the balcony, silhouetted against the orange light of Miami evenings. He was staring at something.

Elis came in, zipping her jeans. She led me to the balcony and introduced me to Juan. The thing Juan was staring at so intently was a map of the United States hanging from a nail.

He turned for a second and gave me a hug. His body was rigid, too stiff to turn easily, as if run through by a rod. He was tall and powerful. I thought I would snap in his arms.

“Welcome,” he said. “A new friend. New friends are always good.”

He smiled politely and went back to what he was doing. There was something off about him. You could say the same about other people, but with him you got the sense it was worse.

“He’s autistic,” Elis told me later, sprawled on the bed in her room.

She had changed into shorts, a baggy T-shirt, and ankle socks. I was still standing. I had been standing for more than an hour, even though Elis had said I could lie down, too, if I wanted.

Then the Instrumentalist burst in. He declared that I looked a mess, I needed fixing up. He hauled me a few miles away. Barber welcomed me and cut my hair. I asked him his name and he said that was his name: Barber.

INTIMATE LOVE LETTERS

Freddy Olmos drinks a glass of milk, unsweetened, and goes to bed. Floating in the tiny, vibrant room is the smell of all the men who’ve passed through since a woman whose face he can hardly remember rented him the apartment and left without saying goodbye.

Outside, a dark green taxi suddenly zigzags and flips over in the middle of the street. On his white bedsheet, half-asleep, Freddy Olmos is neither ugly nor beautiful. In his dream a group of people he knows cross themselves and plunge into the sea.

He gets up for work at the break of day and spends the morning selling stamps at the window of a bank beneath the Telecommunications building a few blocks from his apartment.

He brings home a pack of ten-peso stamps. His eyes are stinging. He sees bare walls and a glass table with a basket of plastic fruit.

He sits at the table and starts a letter that seems to have no end, writing for more than two hours. Every so often he goes to the kitchen and drinks water from the faucet. He fills several sheets of paper, puts them in an envelope, and applies one of the ten-peso stamps. He goes up to his room and leaves the letter on his night table. Then he starts up again, but his hand gets tired and he leaves the next letter half-finished.

(…)