On the fifth of December he moved into his new apartment. The view was good: Ship Creek, and the rail yard, and Knik Arm beyond. He brought in his few clothes, his Stratalab, his nerite shells; he taped Christopher’s drawing to the center of a large blank wall.
In the mailbox was a letter from Soma, with a Santiago postmark.
Dear David—
I’ve rented a Honda motoneta. I ride all over the place. Once you learn to be a little aggressive, things are much better. I drove it to the Moneda today. Most of the same offices are still there, with new people in them, of course. I saw where I used to work. They even let me into Felix’s kitchen, which is all redone but still very much the same. I have bought each of the boys a little model of the palace, made of plastic, but very accurately done, and I think tomorrow I will wrap them in tissue paper and mail them off.
Naaliyah, we think, will stop here before she returns to the States.
My friend who I am staying with, Violetta, has a balcony on the thirty-third floor. We sit among her ferns and drink Fan-Schops, which are half-Fanta and half-beer. They taste very good, although I’m sure Felix would call them “for women” and say he felt sorry for the beer. I drink one of them and cannot stop. I pour another, and another…
I go jogging with Violetta which is hilarious because we are both very slow and she wears bright orange shorts and hardly any top, and she makes sure we go through the Plaza del Mulato Gil de Castro where all the rich men sit and drink coffee, the two of us huffing and wheezing and stumbling on the cobblestones. Sometimes they whistle at her. I just try to keep my eyes straight ahead and not fall. The thing with running is that it feels so good afterward, when you’re in the shower and all the beat is still in your muscles.
But the Honda is the most fun, riding up and down the streets, parking meters ticking by. I love that at any time you can look up and see the sky and the trees and the tops of buildings sliding past.
As he drifted toward sleep he saw Soma on her rented moped, riding the streets of Santiago, meandering in and out of neighborhoods, the city an elaborate version of one of Christopher’s drawings: smog on the mountains, planes settling down over the vineyards by the airport, tourists streaming toward the shore, a thousand lamps going on and off in windows high in the buildings.
Did I mention that Violetta has a girlfriend? She calls her her pareja, like the other shoe in a pair. Her name is Pamela and she grows bougainvillea. She is in charge of it for several huge buildings and she took me to see it today. It crawls probably a hundred meters high up the side of one of her towers downtown. The bricks are thick with it. Pamela said to wait, and we waited as the sun moved, and when it got to the corner of the building, all that bougainvillea, starting at the left, then halfway across, and then, for about twenty seconds, every single flower, caught on fire with the light.
Sometimes I can’t believe I’ve been allowed to live this long, to see these things. After everything, after all this, I still can’t help but think it is so lovely. Isn’t it, David? Isn’t all of it so damn outrageously beautiful?