Mexico City had more going on than I’d ever experienced in a single place. Traffic blared. Construction and cars and people crowded intersections, and birds lined branches like commuters waiting for a train. But Pavel’s neighborhood— La Condesa—was quiet and elegant, packed with old buildings and arched windows, a repetition of wrought iron balconies.
In the months since I’d seen him, Pavel’s hair had grown. He gave me a hug and invited me inside. I wanted a kiss, a sense of his eager interest, but he welcomed me with his usual remove. I sat at his kitchen table. A ceiling fan hummed. Pavel poured me a glass of water.
“I wasn’t sure you were really coming,” he said.
“I said I was. Nice place, by the way.”
The apartment had high ceilings and a dark-tiled floor, appliances with the round corners of a distant decade. A balcony sat at the far end of his living room, branches so close I could touch their leaves. Pavel tucked his hair behind his ears. Sunlight stretched across the floor.
“It’s big,” I said. “The apartment.”
“Compared to New York, yes.”
Paint patterned his knuckles, perhaps from some picture of me he was still working on.
We talked about my flight and the city’s traffic, the two of us stuck in a stultifying politeness. I tried to dig my way out by talking about a bad date I’d recently gone on but realized halfway through that telling this story implied that I’d moved on from him, that idea both frightening and false.
“That does sound bad,” he said. “Let me show you your room.”
A bed and chair were its only furniture. Thin curtains over the windows rose and fell with the breeze. I sat on the bed in hopes he’d join me.
“You no longer work for Philip and Nicola, I hear,” he said.
“Gossip from the gallery,” I said.
“Exploring new opportunities, is what I was told.”
“I was fired.”
Pavel looked at the bobbing curtains.
“I can’t tell if this is one of your jokes,” he said.
“Me neither,” I answered, then mentioned I was tired. “Jet lag, you know.”
“There’s hardly a time difference.”
“The lag from being thrown in the air and moving very fast.”
Pavel let out a small, high laugh. One of his arms hung at his side, the other bent to hold it. This awkwardness was new. I patted the bed in invitation.
“You should take a nap,” he said. “Get used to being back on the ground.”
He walked out, closing the double doors. I wanted to summon him back, sensed he wouldn’t come, or would, only to stay at the doorway’s safe distance. Despite the worry that thrummed through me, I fell asleep, waking up to the smell of coffee. A pot sat waiting on the stove, along with a note from Pavel telling me he’d gone to his studio and would stop by later.
I walked around the neighborhood. Though it had been warm when I’d landed, the evening turned cool. I found a small park tunneled in trees, a fountain in its center painted swimming-pool blue. A woman walked through it with a dog that looked like Philip and Nicola’s. I hoped Pavel had told them about my visit, though he probably hadn’t. I went into a small grocery store and bought a bottle of water, handing the cashier the first bill I pulled out. He smiled, imitated me shoving my money toward him.
“That is too much,” he said in English.
“How’d you know I’m American?”
The man again mimicked the clumsy way I’d handed him my money. He was thin, with a thick mustache.
“Show me what you have,” he said. I laid the bills I’d gotten at the ATM on the counter along with the handful of coins. He took two of the latter.
“You trust me?” he asked.
“I know where you work,” I answered. His mustache fell.
“A bad joke,” I said. “Yes, I trust you.”
“Gabriel,” he said, pointing to himself.
“Gordon,” I told him, pointing to me.
He repeated my name. It sounded harsh and froggy. My parents never considered its sound in foreign mouths. Neither of them had been to Europe, not Mexico either, unless Mom, in Phoenix, had taken a day trip here. I wanted bigger things, wanted them to want bigger things, too, rather than the smallness each of us treated like a map to dutifully follow.
“Gordon isn’t the prettiest name,” I said.
“Gordon is fine,” Gabriel replied, and handed me my change.
I left, drank the water, wanting to be more than fine.
Back at the apartment, I found Pavel waiting. On the wall behind him, the shadow of a tree shimmied.
“Where’d you go?” he asked.
I lifted up my bottle of water.
“I have water here,” he said.
“I wanted to see what there was to see.”
“And?”
“I found a grocery store.”
“Come,” he said. “I want to show you something.”
As we walked, I noted the church we turned left in front of, the gas station we passed, a used bookstore with stacks of dusty merchandise crowding its window. The medians on larger streets brimmed with plants and trees. Pavel unlocked a gate and walked me through a bird shit–splattered courtyard, then up a narrow flight of stairs.
His studio was large. Drop cloths blanketed the tables and floors. He showed me a new series of paintings. I’d hoped for more of me, but these showed strangers in kitchens and restaurants. Some had food in front of them, others cups of coffee or glasses of wine.
“You’re done painting me?” I asked.
“The gallery has those paintings now.”
“How am I selling?”
“Look at these,” he said.
People never answered my questions.
“I am,” I said.
“Not carefully.”
In one, I noticed the wallpaper from a restaurant we’d gone to in Munich. In another, seeds scattered on a plate.
“They’re good,” I said.
“You don’t see it.” Pavel pointed to a painting of a bearded man in a restaurant, wine in hand. At a table in the background, so small I could have covered it with my fist, was me.
“Special guest star,” Pavel said.
“What’s that?”
“What I thought you’d say. That or some comment on how I’d painted your hair.”
“What’s wrong with my hair?”
Impatience widened his eyes before they retreated to their customary indifference. I wanted to turn him around, to do things to him to wipe that blankness away.
“What are we doing tonight?” I asked.
“There’s food in the fridge you can warm up.”
“What about you?”
“I was surprised to hear from you,” Pavel said. “Pleased of course.”
I looked more carefully at tiny me in the background, with hair longer than I wore it. He’d also made the teeth perfect, unlike mine, unruly without the stern early guidance of braces.
“I’m saying this,” he said, “because there’s someone. I probably should have told you before you got here.”
“Like you’re dating?”
“A boyfriend,” he said.
Pavel picked up a rag, folded it, and told me the boyfriend was an anthropology professor he’d met through his Spanish tutor, Araceli. Foolishness flooded me. I thought to return to the airport and see about a ticket home. But I’d traveled all this way, leaving so soon a waste, so I said, “Your Spanish tutor and the boyfriend are serious people then.”
“Nothing wrong with serious,” Pavel said.
My tiredness vanished. I pinched my arm so that pain beat out any possible tears at the idea of Pavel’s boyfriend, or the Spanish tutor, whom he told me had quickly become one of his dearest friends.
“Thanks for leaving me food,” I said.
Pavel picked a scab of paint off his forearm.
“He’s in love with the paintings,” Pavel said. “The ones of you. They helped woo him, he likes to say.”
“We wooed him together?”
“The paintings and I,” Pavel clarified.
“How does your boyfriend feel about me being here?”
A quick smile rose before Pavel told me that Francisco was a bit jealous, that maybe a bit of jealousy was good for them.
“Do you ever call him San Francisco?” I asked, then wished I hadn’t. The two of them probably had serious conversations about aesthetics and anthropology, the conjugation of a verb.
“I don’t call him that,” Pavel said. “But he has a nickname for you.”
I thought of the nicknames Janice had given me, she and Meredith now driving a U-Haul through rectangular-shaped states. I took out a cigarette, asked if Pavel wanted one. He answered that he’d quit. This felt like an indictment, though I couldn’t parse out why.
“What’s the nickname?” I asked.
“The muse.”
Pavel stayed at Francisco’s. He left me a list of places to visit and maps to use. I visited the anthropology museum, Frida Kahlo’s house, several churches. It was the week before Easter, churches packed with flowers and people. Outdoor markets sold every new and used thing imaginable, and pictures of Jesus hung everywhere. Some days, I got to a church and, rather than head inside, I’d find a tree and sit under it. Or I’d go into a museum, find its quietest room and stare at a painting, willing myself to see more. Sometimes I did and wished I could tell Philip. Other times I didn’t but sat so still that a security guard came up, about to shake my shoulder until he realized I wasn’t sleeping. Stillness became a game of sorts, the closest thing I had then to an occupation.
In my wandering one afternoon, I stumbled upon a religious performance. People packed the streets to watch. Someone played Jesus. He was good-looking, though he had on a terrible, shiny wig. I watched his mouth as he talked, his beard shining in the sun. They acted out the miracle of loaves and fishes. The performance was overblown, full of large gestures and shouted dialogue. I lingered afterward, hoping to see Jesus in street clothes, but he didn’t appear. I returned to the apartment, took a nap that went so long it was dark by the time I woke up. Realizing how late it was, I went right back to sleep.
One night, Pavel took me to dinner. He ate quickly, looked at his hands or out the window as I took time between each bite. He went back to Francisco’s after, said he’d stop by the next day, though when he did, I was out trying to find the Palacio de Bellas Artes, finally giving up and flagging a young woman with the phrase “Lo siento.” On the map she showed me where we were, where I was trying to get to. Though there was a subway station right there, I walked to pass the time.
I went to the grocery store I’d found on my first night. Gabriel saw me, beamed, and said my name. I bought a can of soup and some tortillas, cooking them in Pavel’s kitchen, a room almost the size of the apartment I’d lived in until a week before when Janice packed her things and I’d left the furniture she didn’t take on the street for strangers to claim. I smoked on Pavel’s balcony, watched people through the skein of leaves, thrilled when a woman looked up at me, though when I waved, she kept walking.
The next day, I went to Pavel’s studio without being invited. When he opened the door, he smiled deeply, resting a hand on my back as he walked me inside.
“I’m glad you’re here,” he said. Pavel dropped a brush into a jar of water. Paint’s disinfectant stink singed the air around us. “Tomorrow night it’s Araceli’s birthday.”
“Your Spanish tutor?”
“She is that, too, yes. But for her birthday there’ll be a dinner.”
He repeated the story of how Araceli had quickly become a dear friend. “Like you and that woman, with the tattoos and the boobs.”
“I can’t believe you’d talk about your mom that way,” I said.
He shook his head. “You’re invited.”
I wanted him to kiss the space behind my ears, grab my hair as he sometimes had, telling me that what he was doing was for my own good. To fuck me and say afterward that I couldn’t tell Francisco about it, for me to ask after how to say secret in Spanish and Czech and any of the other languages he knew.
“Araceli doesn’t know me,” I said.
“She knows your paintings,” Pavel said, then asked if I needed help walking back to the apartment. He wanted me to leave, but I leaned down instead, lingered in front of one of his new paintings before I answered, “Two rights and a left.”
“Good boy,” he said.
“I’m not a boy,” I told him, but Pavel had already gone back to the painting he was working on.
I found an internet café so similar to the ones I’d used in Geneva and Munich and Brooklyn that they felt less like particular places, more like their own sad dimension. I wrote Janice a long, chatty email about La Condesa and the dinner I was invited to. I added a line on how Mexico City and Los Angeles weren’t that far apart, how easy it would be for me to swing by (though that wasn’t actually true), but our reconciliation was newborn, fragile. So I deleted that and wrote instead how when I asked Pavel if he’d nicknamed his boyfriend San Francisco, he hadn’t found it funny. There was an email from Dad, too, with a story I had no recollection of, where the two of us planted zinnias in a garden he claimed we once had. You were so happy when they started to grow, he wrote. So sad when fungus browned their leaves and petals.
The next evening, I showered until the hot water ran out and tried on three different outfits, settling on one of Nicola’s former button-downs that sat perfectly across my shoulders. I felt powerful wearing it, though that power stalled without its former owner’s money or know-how. I tried to think of how I should talk to Francisco and their friends, whose English, Pavel told me, was good, though not perfect. “They won’t understand your jokes,” he’d added, which felt like a scolding.
I got there early, so I went to a bar across the street and nursed a beer. Through the bar’s window, I saw Pavel arrive at the restaurant with a man identically narrow and tall, though his hair and beard were dark. It was the man from the painting I sat in the background of. The man said something. Pavel smiled and looked around before giving him a quick kiss.
When I arrived at the restaurant, I found Pavel and Francisco and a half dozen other people at a table by the door.
“I keep getting lost in this city,” I lied, to explain my lateness.
“A maze,” Francisco said.
He stood to shake my hand. He had hollow cheeks and a muted smile, seemed older than me by a good bit. “So nice to finally meet you,” he said.
Araceli, short with thick hair and in large jewelry, said something in Spanish to the rest of the table, then translated: The one from the paintings.
Someone, in nearly accentless English, asked if I was a painter, too.
“Just a warm body,” I answered.
I’d been the last to show up, so I sat at the end of the table. A woman with the sour seriousness of some of the paintings I’d recently seen at the contemporary art museum spoke to the group in fast Spanish. Pavel answered in what sounded like competent Spanish, though he’d told me his grasp of that language was too basic to even count. But he’d been fluent in three languages before the age of five, a new one an easy addition to his roster. I poured myself wine.
During a pause, Pavel translated. The rest of the guests sipped their drinks or folded their napkins as he went on about some article that had caused a fuss, one researcher refuting the work of another. “A bit of a scandal,” Pavel said. With nothing to add, I nodded.
We ordered food. Every once in a while, Pavel or Araceli translated. Even in English, there was little in their stories for me to hold on to, so I poured myself more wine and noticed Francisco watching me. Candles bobbed on the table.
I wanted to brand these people as selfish and mean, though they talked about what they knew, just as Janice and I chatted about sex and music and the dares we said yes to so we might feel something. As conversation heated up, translation fell away. When guests remembered me, they translated what had just been said, while everyone else waited, politely bored, for them to finish. “Yes,” I said, or “I see,” like a foreign exchange student, or an aging grandparent, their hearing diminished so what comes to them is murmuring more than words.
“How do you know Pavel again?” one of the guests asked me.
“He painted me for a time,” I said.
“A hired model?”
“I worked for his gallery sort of, its owners anyway.”
“You’re not the one who was fired? For having wild parties and things,” the friend added, a look on her face suggesting she knew I was.
“Bingo,” I said. “Though it was one party. I guess it ended up being a little wild. In any case, wild hadn’t been the plan.”
“But it was at the house of Philip and Nicola?” This came from Francisco. “Why were you staying there?”
“I watched their dogs for a while,” I said.
“Why?” he asked.
Francisco’s earlier politeness fell away, replaced by an expression that asked Why are you here? I wanted to answer with the story of Pavel taking me blindfolded on the subway, the snow and the abandoned pool, but it would sound childish, a grasping at straws. To say that being painted by Pavel had come with a larger promise, though no promise had been made. Pavel put his hand on Francisco’s forearm, in warning or appreciation. I was at a dinner with people I had nothing to say to, even when they spoke my language. Defeat’s familiar weight returned to me, and I welcomed it, almost, like the sweaty relief of giving in to a fever.
“Because I was their dog walker,” I replied.
Guests talked about how dog walker was such an American job, then switched to other jobs that existed only in the States, like life coaches and traffic reporters. I sat at the table’s end, sometimes smiling, sometimes sipping, more often as still as the paintings of me, with as much to contribute to the conversation.
I understood then what Philip meant about Pavel’s affect as a performance, felt foolish for not seeing it before, for not realizing he must have heard the story of my firing and shared it liberally. The goodwill I felt for this group sank to self-pity, a sense that this was done, that what I wanted now was another finale, a burned bridge a relief and a fuel, at least for a time.
Two people at the end of the table whispered, eyes darting in my direction, perhaps filling each other in on my delinquency, or gossiping about how Pavel had only said yes to my visit because two paintings of me had just sold. In the silence as waiters took plates away, I said, “Philip thinks Pavel’s a great painter.”
Nothing on Pavel’s face registered the compliment, though someone at the far end of the table agreed. I looked at Pavel. He didn’t return the favor.
“Thinks, too, that his false modesty, the way he acts like he hates attention, that it’s as pretend as the painting of me in bed,” I went on. “I was lying on the floor. Even had pants on. He made it look entirely different.”
People stared at their plates. A woman at the far end of the table laughed. Pavel opened his mouth, reconsidered, and closed it again.
“Could someone pass the wine?” I asked.
Ice clattered as a waitress refilled water glasses. Pavel’s face soured. In the lines etched across his brow, I could sense what he might look like as an old man. “Maybe your friends need translation,” I said. “About me needing more wine. Also about the act of yours. Maybe you’ve even fooled yourself. That would be something, right? You fooling even you?” Wine was passed, but I changed my mind and drank water instead.
From the restaurant’s far corner, the halo of a lit birthday cake floated toward our table. People sat straighter, relieved at the cake’s distraction. But Araceli looked pained. At her party, I’d wrestled the attention toward me. I leaned forward to apologize, but she crossed her arms, her hard look deepening. Soon the cake was in front of her. Soon people were singing.
Back at the apartment, I smoked on the balcony. When morning began to break, I went to bed, but couldn’t fall asleep. I flipped through images of Francisco in that bed with me, dark beard and serious eye contact, the efficient flick of his hips. Pavel moved in and out of those imaginings, too, also one of my mom’s ex-boyfriends, skinny and mean, a man who walked with his hips leading the rest of him as if his dick were some national treasure.
I slept until the sun baked the room, then went to the grocery store where Gabriel always seemed to be. Getting back to the apartment, I found Pavel waiting for me. My jeans from the night before hung over a chair, my socks and underwear puddled on the floor.
“Wild night?” he asked.
“A giant party,” I said. “Invited all my neighborhood friends.”
“Have you had people here?”
“I haven’t,” I said, and picked up a sock.
He looked around the apartment, sighed, and said, “You were a lot last night.”
I folded the sock. Pavel waited for my answer. When it didn’t arrive, he said, “For the Easter weekend, we’re going to Araceli’s family’s place. A few hours outside the city, in the mountains. Leaving early tomorrow morning.”
“That sounds fun.”
“So,” Pavel said. “I probably won’t see you.”
“Why not?”
“A week will have passed.”
I must have looked at him stupidly, because he said, “I thought you said you were staying a week. Or I’m misremembering. A week is standard for this sort of visit.”
“Right,” I said. “Well, thank you for having me.”
Pavel picked at paint under one of his nails.
“Would you have started anything up with me if you weren’t moving here?” I asked.
Surprise overtook his face. Maybe boldness was what he’d wanted from me all along.
“I’m not good with hypotheticals,” he said.
“That’s a no, I take it.”
“This feels like a question with no good answer.”
“Why did you tell all of your friends I’d been fired?”
“You were fired,” Pavel said.
I dropped the sock onto the table.
“I’d told them before I knew you’d be visiting,” he said. “The parties you had. How you’d finagled an extra night in Munich to spend more time with some waiter you’d picked up. The things of Nicola’s you took. Quite a story.”
“I only took what no longer fit him,” I said, and tried to organize my thoughts into a point about wealth redistribution, but they stayed scattered, so I added, “But you knew I might come. You’d invited me.”
“A thing people say.”
“That’s nice.”
“I suppose not,” he said. A sliver of paint from under his nails came free. He flicked it into the sink.
“When I heard about why you’d been fired,” Pavel said. “The party you’d had. The men you’d brought to their house and the things you’d taken. When I heard about all that, you know what I thought?”
“Why would I know?” I asked.
“I wasn’t surprised,” he said.
I shook my head, hoping to ward off the sense that he was right, that despite hardly knowing me he’d been able to spot the thoughtlessness I brandished like a polished diamond.
“That’s not very nice either,” I said.
“No,” he answered. “I’m not a nice person, per se.”
“Truer words have never been spoken.”
He stared at me. I couldn’t tell if he’d kiss me or hit me or tell me to leave right away. I had no money for a hotel, wasn’t sure where to look for one.
“But Gordon,” Pavel said. “I don’t pretend to be.”
He told me to slide the keys through the mail slot when I left.
I walked through the apartment, with its empty walls, sparse furnishings, and wondered if Pavel had removed paintings and valuables before I’d come, sure I’d take whatever wasn’t bolted down. I picked up and folded my clothes, washed the sink’s derelict dishes.
I wandered outside, kept going as darkness fell and I turned hungry but didn’t eat. A single chime from a church I passed told me it was one in the morning. I moved into the middle of the street and lit a cigarette. Two men walked toward me, stepping into the middle of the street, too. Being mugged felt sad and correct, so I kept going. As their heads bobbed with equine ease, I wondered if I was about to get my ass kicked or worse. Their eyes were hollowed out by shadow. I didn’t run, though. Years before, at a barbecue with my mom, for a reason I can’t remember, the grill tipped over. Burning coals hissed onto the ground; a patch of grass began to burn. Someone ran over with ice, spread it across the fire so that it sizzled and died. On our way home, Mom said to me, “You were the closest.” I’d assumed she was blaming me, so I told her I had nothing to do with it. “But you didn’t do anything after,” she said, adding, “You would never have survived as a pioneer.” “I’ve never wanted to be a pioneer,” I answered back. Her expression suggested that I’d missed her point completely.
The men were twenty feet away. I thought of the pain they might inflict, and realized only Janice and Pavel knew I was in Mexico City. At fifteen feet came the terror of being injured and in a foreign hospital, doctors telling me what they were doing in a language I knew only a few words of, the treatment I had no money for. “Pioneers,” I whispered, waiting for fists or weapons.
The men said hello. “Lo siento,” I answered, trying to relax into whatever was about to happen.
“Oh,” one of them said. “Cigarette?”
“This is a cigarette.”
“Yes. Can we have, too?”
“You want one?” I asked.
He held up two fingers.
I handed a cigarette to each of them, lit the first man’s, the second’s. I hoped they were lovers, though their offhand ease suggested they weren’t. Still, I was glad for their lovely, manly faces, that they’d wanted some small thing from me rather than to rough me up.
“Hippy Easter,” one of them said.
“Happy smoking,” I answered, then moved out of the way of an approaching car.
The next day, I returned to watch another passion play. The crowd stood several rows thick. At its far edges, vendors sold snacks and holy trinkets, the pavement damp from overnight rain. A man playing Pontius Pilate shouted at the same Jesus from a few days before, still in his terrible wig. He stood proud and calm and on trial for blasphemy. I hoped to spy an amused face in the crowd, but the audience watched the proceedings with identical, pained worry. Then came a procession, donkeys included. A few of them shit as they clomped down the street, its smell so acute it burned my eyes. A woman next to me prayed. I closed my eyes, too, hoping to feel something other than a camera’s detachment.
I stopped by a student travel office to ask about the cheapest flights back to the States. The salesperson told me about one to Houston.
“Who wants to go to Houston?” I said, and thanked her for her time.
I visited the internet café, logged in to check my bank balance, what credit I could still squeeze from my cards, and became so overwhelmed that I went outside to smoke with the other café regulars. I nodded to one. He either didn’t notice or chose not to respond. I couldn’t blame him.
Back at Pavel’s apartment, I smoked more cigarettes on the balcony, my stomach riled up with hunger and nicotine, and tried to remind myself that this corseting loneliness was temporary, that I’d look back at me on this balcony from some future place and remember it as terrible, beautiful, too, the trees outside with their round, hard leaves and the men who stood close when I lit their cigarettes so I could see the flame reflected in their eyes. But as I looked around the apartment I’d have to leave soon, with no plan as to where I’d go next, the idea of some future ease kept losing out to the times I’d gotten through difficult days by imagining a warmer tomorrow that hadn’t appeared, moments I managed loneliness by pretending it would pass like some short, acute infection.
I found pasta in a cabinet. I cooked then ate it until I moved past full to discomfort and had to lie down.
On Easter Sunday, still with no ticket back, I watched well-dressed people fill the streets. Pavel and his friends were in the mountains, maybe talking about the mess I’d made of Araceli’s birthday dinner, though even the thought of that didn’t get a rise out of me. A crowd funneled into a church. I followed, hoping Easter mass might rouse me from my days of wandering and smoking and skipping meals. An intricate mural crowded the church’s domed ceiling. Statues of saints and virgins lined the walls. Bells tolled, and a choir of guitarists played and sang, sometimes in harmony. I found a seat next to a family several generations thick, small children squirming on old people’s laps, women pulling cough drops and Bibles from their purses. I tried to find something in this family to admire, but noticed only their garish clothes and overly strong perfume, the giant wads of gum their brooding teens chewed. The service proceeded in a routine of standing and sitting. I tried to will myself to appreciate these people and this place, the priest’s deep-voiced Spanish. But even with the music, the people packed close, what I felt most was a separateness, a sense I was barely there. I’d felt the same thing at that dinner a few nights before when I’d said what I’d said in an attempt to return to earth. It had grown stronger on Pavel’s tiny balcony as I watched morning light creep across walls and tree trunks, as people headed to work or to church on some planet I observed through a million-dollar telescope. The man next to me sang loudly, saw I wasn’t singing, and handed me a hymnal opened to a particular page. I tried to sing, my throat dry from smoking and not talking. I wished I’d never left Food Land. Thor/Vince might have warmed up to me, Marcy settling into her role as a reliable friend. As the song ended, I let that Bay Ridge fantasy drift out to sea and wondered what people would do if I moved into the aisle then and lay down. My neighbor cleared his throat, and shoes shuffled as people moved into the aisles, parishioners greeting one another with the Spanish equivalent of “Peace be with you.” The priest shook hands, put his wrinkled palm on the head of a baby. The man who’d given me the hymnal shook my hand, then pointed to others waiting to shake hands as well. I held the hands of a dozen strangers, nodded to the few who offered hugs. I tried to appreciate this human contact, but felt the dread of returning to Pavel’s apartment, the worry that, though I was meant to be out by tomorrow, I wouldn’t find the will to pack my bags. An old man came up to me. “La paz sea contigo,” he said, and opened his arms. I leaned against his shoulder. And though I don’t know that anything shifted, when I opened my eyes and saw the man’s warm smile, I decided to pretend I felt better, pretend, too, that what was difficult would pass, that I wouldn’t always be in this place or someplace like it, Bay Ridge and Mexico City and Minneapolis’s gridded suburbs all rooms in a single house I mistook for different places. I would pretend, I thought, and moved back to where I’d been sitting. The congregation started to sing again.
After mass, I went back to the internet café, those crouched over computers my people more than Pavel or Philip or most others. I checked my email, found one from Janice with news about her Los Angeles life. Next came a new message from my father. Unlike the meandering nostalgia of his previous emails, this one talked about the heart bypass he was scheduled for in a week. Quadruple, he wrote. Maybe more once they see how bad it is inside your old father. He explained that though he knew he wasn’t meant to be afraid, fear stayed with him. I’m sometimes mad that it’s such a holdout. Though I’m not afraid of what’s after all this, but what I’ll leave behind.
The student travel office was closed for the holiday, but there was a number I could call. Back at Pavel’s, I dialed. When a representative answered in Spanish, I said, “Lo siento,” and she switched to English without pause.
“I need a ticket to Houston,” I said.
The representative worked quickly, wished me a good trip, then hung up before I could thank her.