Angels of Detroit (15 page)

Myles took the lead, with McGee a few steps behind, the others straggling at the rear. Fitch had brought a flask, but he couldn’t seem to get either Holmes or Kirsten to take any interest in it. Many of the townspeople turned to watch them come, as if seven haggard, unshowered kids off the highway were a stranger sight than a winter carnival in the middle of nowhere.

April and Inez laced their fingers and swung their arms, imitating young girls instead of lovers.

“What are we doing?” McGee said to Myles’s back.

“We’re having fun,” he said, and he led her to a booth where dozens of fishbowls had been arranged in a flat-topped pyramid. For a dollar, a fat man with hands like tarantulas traded Myles four Ping-Pong balls. Myles offered two of them to McGee.

“You first,” he said.

She shook her head.

“All right,” he said, stepping up to the railing. “I’ll go first.”

He pitched his ball forward, and it bounced from bowl to bowl before coming to a rest in the snow.

“Your turn,” he said.

But she didn’t want to play. The games were rigged. Everyone knew it. So she passed the balls back to Myles, and he tossed another, and it landed again in the snow.

But on the third try, he nailed it, the ball clipping the rim and swirling down, as if through the mouth of a drain.

Myles threw up his arms and shouted, his breath exploding outward, and Fitch and Holmes and April and Kirsten and Inez closed in around him. McGee watched the carny reach under the counter, and in a moment of panic, she pictured a goldfish frozen in a block of ice. But it was only stuffed animals, a blue bear and a green dog. The carny held them in his outstretched hands, and Myles took his time considering them, examining the animals front and back, touching their shiny, fluorescent fur, each in turn. What was he looking for? What did he see?

In the end, Myles took the green dog, handing it to McGee with a satisfied grin. He’d made a decision about her. Ever since then, she’d wished she knew what it was.

When he thinks back on it, the trip to Mexico feels like a beginning. But it is also an end. Six years past, but he remembers every detail, as if part of him were still there now. A long, narrow side street submerged in the murky darkness. The tall brick walls on either side funnel exhaust from the boulevard, and he coughs into his sleeve. Somewhere within his body, it’s as if a lever has been pulled. Something, he’s not sure what, has been set in motion. He can feel the sensation even now in his memory, almost like vertigo. He stands in front of a nondescript steel door. A single light burns on the outer wall. Shadows move about on the sidewalk, closing in. The door suddenly grates open. An elderly woman in large, pirate-like hoop earrings looks Dobbs over skeptically and steps aside.

Número diez
, she says. Number ten contains a narrow bed and a wobbly table balancing a cloudy water pitcher. The carpet looks like matted dog fur. The ceiling is low, and upon stepping into the room,
Dobbs immediately ducks, mistaking the brown stains overhead for some falling object. Even in his memory, he can smell the dampness seeping from every surface.

The proprietress is slight and stern, and one of her eyebrows seems permanently arched. “You wait,” she says in English. No one ever expects him to speak Spanish. It’s his hair. Wild, curly red hair. Hair that doesn’t inspire confidence. In his own unnecessary pidgin, Dobbs says, “I wait.” Already his body is leaning toward the bed like a divining rod. His bones feel hollow, his veins bloodless. The proprietress backs out into the hallway, and Dobbs recalls his descent toward the mattress, lightheadedly trying to remember what he might have eaten to make him feel this way.

He has just turned twenty, still a young man. Since neglecting to register for his junior year of classes, though, he’s been feeling a great deal older. He was never really going to be an environmental engineer or an ecologist or a marine biologist. Those were his parents’ dreams, efforts to translate his fears into intellectual ambitions. So far in this unofficial and thoroughly unsanctioned year abroad, he’s been questioned and scrutinized, sniffed and swabbed. And every moment of it has been exhilarating, the German shepherds and border guards bringing him closer than he’s ever been to understanding what he’s been seeking: the stripping away of false reassurances, the discovery of a path through the world to come.

But first comes the sweating; first Montezuma must have his revenge. If Dobbs concentrates hard enough on gathering his strength, he can remove a single blanket during a single round of consciousness. This he does three times, until the blankets and the coarse, heavy sheet slip to the floor. He’s never expended so much effort to achieve so little, but the practice is important. Soon, he knows, though he doesn’t know exactly when, he’ll be called upon to get up out of this bed and
go somewhere, and somehow he’ll need to do it. The man they call Sergio will be waiting.

Sometimes, in his fever, he feels as if he’s stepped outside himself, watching himself on film, but either his brain is working too quickly or the film is playing too slowly, and all he can see are the blurs between frames. His shirt comes off in three stages—a sleeve at a time and then once over his head. It’s as though he’s wearing mittens when he tries to unbutton his pants. The sun has only just risen when he makes his first tentative tugs at the zipper. By the time he’s kicked off his second pant leg, the room is filled with light.

In his delirium, his mind wanders backward, coming to rest in his body seven years before. He knows the number precisely because it is the summer he turns thirteen lying in a hospital bed, his arm tethered to an IV drip. He feels a fuzzy, floating sensation, as if he were a piece of pineapple suspended in Jell-O. His femur rests in a sling of wires and pulleys, and he recalls feeling as if the leg were no longer attached, as if the pain his broken bones radiate is no longer his. He remembers wishing, more than anything else, for the morphine to fade, for a taste of the pain to come back. And along with the pain, that brief but tangible feeling of truly flying—his own birthday gift to himself—leaping off the roof of his parents’ garage and into the neighbor’s wading pool.

He’s been assured that Sergio is eager to meet him, that Sergio is a man of the world, someone who understands that even young men from stable homes can be awakened, can come to see past the comforts upon which they’ve been suckled. Dobbs senses that despite the different worlds they come from, Sergio will understand him. Perhaps he will understand even those things that Dobbs does not, for which he has images but not words. For instance, a butcher’s case, its thick, glistening tiers of animal parts nestled in shaved ice. And how the sight always makes Dobbs’s own internal organs ache. He is not
squeamish, but there’s something about the magnitude of the slaughter. The numbers make no sense. Two dozen cases of meat and fish and pig and bird in every average town, a thousand towns in every state, fifty states and hundreds of countries and seven continents and seven billion people. He does the math emotionally, the only way he knows. How could any of this possibly be made to last?

Dobbs is eager to meet Sergio, too, but the time has not yet come. Here in número diez, when he’s finally ready to remove his undershirt and boxers, he feels as if he’s peeling skin. He doesn’t bother with the socks. His feet might as well be on the other side of the room.

His first attempt to meet Sergio, two weeks before his arrival in número diez, comes when Dobbs is left in the care of the beautiful people, friends of friends, contacts of contacts, none of whom he knows. He’s not even sure of their names, although one might be called Polanco, or maybe that’s the name of the place they’re taking him, these friends of friends, these beautiful people driving him down a lovely tree-lined street past embassies and art galleries and windows draped in thousand-dollar handbags. There are five of them in Polanco’s Mercedes, everyone so thin it feels as if they could fit three more in the backseat. The beautiful people are all his age, college kids, but that’s the only thing they have in common. The girls wear shimmery blouses that look as though they’ve been woven with precious metal. The beautiful people call him Red.
Rrred
is how it comes out. He doesn’t call them anything at all, except in his head, where he thinks of the beautiful people as a rare sort of ethnic tribe. The beautiful people speak perfect English. They are the children of oil and telecom tycoons, and when the Mercedes reaches the club, the beautiful people tow Dobbs past a battery of bouncers, and inside there are still more beautiful people, stacked chest to sweaty, beautiful chest. The drinks all come with enormous straws, and standing on the edge of the dance floor beneath strobing spheres of light, Dobbs
feels as though he’s basking in the rapturous glow of a UFO. Women in half-shirts and other nearly invisible garments pause in their bumping and flailing to marvel at Dobbs’s hair. When the searchlights hit the long red curls dangling before his eyes, his hair looks even to him as though it’s on fire. The women’s fingernails clatter across his scalp, and sometimes he feels a tug, as if they’re testing to see if it’s real.

But here in the bed in número diez, all he feels are the chills, and he can do nothing more than roll onto his side and gaze at the pile of clothes and bedding just out of reach on the floor. The sun burns through the gauzy curtains, thin as the knees of old jeans, and Dobbs gives in to the waves of shivering and shuddering as he crawls in and out of consciousness.

His mind sways like a kite, and once again he is thirteen, at the center of a crowd of doctors and nurses, his parents and Jess in his small hospital room, balloons and candy, his leg in plaster from hip to toe. And a moment comes, by some strange chance, when everyone seems to forget he’s there—the nurses having finished what they came to do, the doctors leading his parents out into the hallway to discuss his condition, his sister flipping through the fuzzy channels on the small TV bolted to the ceiling. Suddenly it’s just Dobbs and the bottle of Percocet he’s been refusing, which someone left behind on the side table. The two dozen pills fit neatly into a tissue twisted and stuffed into the top of his cast. His only thought: Be prepared. Someday you might need them.

Two weeks later, out of the hospital, even the memory of his earlier pain eludes him. In frustration, he flushes the pills away.

Beyond the enclaves of the beautiful, Mexico City is like a dingy basement arcade, sticky and loud and prone to testosterone rages. He’s
never been anywhere either so vast or so claustrophobic. The place is impossible to fathom more than a block at a time, the ruins of the Aztecs choking in the fumes of motorbikes and VW microbuses. The markets are cities unto themselves, with every imaginable flesh cleaved and hung without modesty for all the world to see. More seemingly endless supplies, all of it false. Brooding in judgment over everything are cathedrals more magnificent than anything he’s ever believed to be within the power of man to conceive. And yet what seems to tie all the disparate pieces together is not faith but its exact opposite, chaos.

He awakens with chills every few minutes, every few hours. Sometimes in these moments, he imagines himself as a child back home in Minnesota, watching the snow sifting past his window, feeling the cold at a cellular level.

Sergio never shows at the club. The beautiful person Dobbs thinks might be named Polanco is so drunk afterward he can hardly stand, but he has no trouble driving, and they wind up Los Lomas to a hillside mansion of stucco and glass, where a guard holds open a gate for them to pass through. The beautiful people tramp upstairs, collapsing onto a white leather sofa, and Dobbs goes alone out to the balcony. Removing his shoes, he stands there, barefoot on the terra-cotta tiles, staring down at the hovels stapled to the hillside below as thick as a forest. As for actual trees, virtually none. Something like twenty million people live down there. At his back, the beautiful people are taking turns guiding their shaved, perfect noses toward a mirrored tray, and Dobbs can’t help marveling at the seemingly endless absurdity the world seems able to accommodate as it hurls toward collapse.

His childhood in St. Paul has not prepared him for chaos. He’s grown up accustomed to heated buses stopping precisely at every block, to the efficient choreography of front-end loaders and dump trucks disappearing
mountains of snow, to the humane practicality of skyways, connecting together the tidy burrows of civilization. Until his arrival in Mexico, chaos has been for Dobbs just an anomaly, a temporary condition, the rule of law broken down. But here he’s discovered chaos is not an aberration, not a consequence of failure. Chaos is an entity, a living system, a force. Chaos is the sea upon which the raft of civilization floats. And the future, Dobbs now believes, will belong to those who strip themselves bare, enduring the sting of the water, and swim.

A week after the club, a week before número diez, another meeting with Sergio is scheduled, this time at the Palacio de Bellas Artes. But once again Sergio doesn’t show.

For days, he’s not sure how many, the proprietress is Dobbs’s only company, her hollow, distant voice visiting him clandestinely from the vent above the toilet. The even hollower reverberations ring around the tiled bathroom, singing to him while he hunkers in the shower, trying to keep cool. Sometimes the vent makes her voice rumble like a stadium crowd. She multiplies exponentially. In his delirium, Dobbs imagines applause each time he moves his bowels, cheers when he empties his stomach. He sits on the porcelain for twenty minutes. He sits for an hour. He falls asleep sitting.

He dreams he’s in a grocery store, selecting a box of cornflakes with the help of an old friend. For the first time in days, he wakes up in número diez and he isn’t sweating.

Slowly his head is clearing, his body parts gradually coming back into focus. He is thirteen again, awakening from a long sleep in his hospital bed, his broken leg still in traction. He is alone. It is daytime, or so the clock says, but the summer sky outside his window is inky gray, radiating angry swirls of violet. The wind is louder than the night janitor’s vacuum, and each raindrop lands upon Dobbs’s windowsill like a water
balloon. What awoke him, he realizes now, are the emergency broadcast tones and the staticky, officious voice emanating from a radio in some neighboring room. If Dobbs rolls his head all the way to the right, he can see the trees at the edge of the hospital grounds do things he didn’t know trees could do. There is a pine in the distance taller than the hospital itself, and Dobbs watches it bend like a noodle. On the news lately he’s been hearing more and more about violent storms like these, how they once were rare but are becoming ordinary. Dobbs watches each bend and swerve of that one tall pine, high up above all the rest. He’s witnessed such storms before. He’s seen his mother’s car crushed in the driveway by a fallen limb, and yet there’s something about this particular tree that makes Dobbs swell with sadness. He can’t look away. Even through the roaring wind and the pounding rain, he can hear the very moment the trunk—three-quarters of the way to the top—finally snaps. All the green needles arrayed at the canopy, all at once, fall away, hitting the ground with a crack and a thump. Just then a shadow expands upon the wall—someone approaching his open door, and Dobbs closes his eyes, not wanting anyone to see what’s happened to him. He knows he wouldn’t be able to explain. And in the morning, when at last the traction comes down and he’s free to go, the landscape all along the route home is littered with branches and twigs and even entire trees. Silent corpses. The power is down throughout his neighborhood, but all Dobbs can think of are the losses, that new seeds—at least as far as the span of human existence is concerned—will never catch up with what’s been destroyed. The coming end only quickens, Dobbs thinks—it never slows.