The World in Half (12 page)

“Sorry,” I say again before hanging up.

I slide my phone into my bag and stare out the windows. People on the street below are loitering on the corners. Old men sit on benches. Kids zigzag around cars stopped at red lights. Women stroll by themselves, shielded by umbrellas. My father could be anywhere. I could be looking at him that very second and not know it. He could be the man across the street buying a newspaper. He could be the man selling the newspapers. He could be the man sliding neon-colored flyers under the windshield wipers of parked cars. He could be the man driving the Toyota Tercel, his elbow on the open window frame, glowing bronze in the sun. What made me think that I could come here, to a country I knew almost nothing about, and find one person among millions? I wasn’t prepared enough. There must have been more I could have done. I never had any sort of real plan. I was an idiot.

“So?” Danilo asks, when I find him. He’s in the exact same place, lingering between the stacks.

I shake my head.

Danilo shakes his head back at me. “What does that mean?”

“They weren’t him.”

“You called both?”

“Yes.”

“You talked to people?”

“Yes.”

“What did you say?”

“I asked for Gatún Gallardo.”

“What did they say?”

“They said there was no one named Gatún Gallardo there.”

I’m annoyed suddenly that he’s quizzing me as if he doesn’t trust that I went through with it or that I asked the right things. “Whatever,” I say. “It just didn’t work out.” I pull my hair off my neck into a ponytail. “Where’s the phone book?”

“I put it back.”

I sidestep him to find it and pull it from the shelf. Danilo watches me, puzzled, as I thumb to the G’s.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

I insert the loose page back where it belongs and shut the book.

“Huh,” Danilo says. “So you’re like that.”

“Like what?”

“Nothing. Listen, I was thinking while you were gone, and I know you’re not going to like this idea, but maybe we should try the obituaries.”

“Excuse me?”

“You don’t know the word?”

“No, I know the word. But are you serious? I don’t want—”

“I knew you wouldn’t like the idea.”

“Of course I wouldn’t.” Several times over the years I’ve considered the possibility that my father was no longer alive. Thinking it made an existence without him easier. If there’s no chance of something, then it extinguishes the flicker of hope. Thinking of him already gone simply closed a door to a path that was too painful to consider treading down sometimes. I never imagined the particulars, just that he might have passed on at some point, no longer a part of this world. But now, now that I was already on the path, I didn’t want to believe that that’s what awaited me at the end of it. It’s unnerving to hear Danilo suggest it, out loud and so casually.

“But you’re not sure, are you, that he’s still alive? I mean, I think we need to find out,” he presses.

“I know.”

When we ask the woman who checked us in at the front desk where to find the obituaries, she disappears into a closed office for a moment before marching out with a librarian whose green eye shadow shimmers teal against her dark skin.

The librarian leads us to two desks in a clearing among the stacks, each equipped with a screen and a drape of black cloth for privacy. Leaning over, she turns a knob, and a roll of sepia images flies by. When she lets go of the knob, it stops. “That’s if you want to go fast,” she says. Then she presses a small white button and the images move more slowly, like a conveyer belt. She points to a magnifying glass on the desktop. “If you need to look closer,” she says. “Wait a minute, please.” When she leaves, Danilo takes her seat and taps the screen. “I thought we were going to have to look through a bunch of newspapers,” he says.

“You’ve never used microfilm?”

“I’m not as smart as you,” he says.

I presume what he means is that he’s not as educated. There’s no question that he’s smart, and there’s no question that he knows he is.

The librarian returns carrying a roll of film, which she loads in the back of the machine. “This is the obituaries,” she says. “You can start with that. If you find him, then you know you won’t have to keep looking.” She smiles as though this is a good thing. “I also brought you the lottery winners for the past ten years. Maybe if the person you’re looking for won the lottery, you can find out more about him.” She looks at me. “The lottery winners are instant celebrities here.”

Danilo says, “No shit?” in a sweetly mock-naïve tone.

“Thank you,” I say.

After she leaves, I ask, “So are you going to look for me, or are you going to let me look?”

Danilo is still sitting at the desk. “We can look together, can’t we?” He drags over the chair from the adjoining carrel. “Have a seat.”

With the black fabric hood over both of us, we peer at the screen together, me operating the controls. I have my orange bag on my lap. Our eyes skim the boldface words for my father’s name as the images slide through like credits rolling up a screen at the end of a movie. Twice we stop because one of us thinks we glimpse him. The first time is for Gatún Velásquez, who was eighty-six at the time of his death from illness. That’s all it says—illness. My father couldn’t have been that old. The second time is for S. Gatún Tiburón, age twenty-two, who died during a deep-sea dive when he ran out of oxygen. We keep going. Scanning, scanning, hoping not to find any Gatún Gallardo.

Three hours later, we’ve made it through five years and there’s no trace of him. Danilo hasn’t once asked for the time or complained that the whole endeavor is taking too long. Later he even volunteers to get up to ask the librarian to load the lottery film, but there’s no record of my father there, either.

 

 

 

You never know
where you might find something. The history of the world is buried in the layers of the earth. My mother has been excavating magazines from the basement, pulling faded back issues out of forgotten nooks and crannies, like tissues from a box, stacking and arranging them all just so and still she complains that there isn’t enough order in her life. She complains that she can’t find things, that disorganization is tripping her up, that just at the moment she needs something it seems to vanish. “The frustrating thing,” she told me once, when she was looking for a spatula, “is that I know it hasn’t vanished. I know it’s here somewhere. It has to be. I feel like God is looking down on me at this moment and he has X-ray vision and he can see the spatula in a drawer or under a pile of clothes and he can see me spinning around like a moron looking for it and missing it. I almost wouldn’t care if I knew it was gone. I mean, if I knew I had thrown it out by accident and there was no way to get it back now. But it’s so goddamn frustrating to know that it’s here, somewhere, and I just can’t find it!” She opened a drawer and slammed it shut. She was so agitated that we searched all afternoon for a spatula we never found. She may have inadvertently thrown it out. It might have been in the attic or buried in the yard. Who knew? In the end, I went to the grocery store and bought her a new one.

The key to finding lost things, though, is knowing where to look. And when you don’t know that, sometimes you just have to hope that something will break wide open.

The seam where separate tectonic plates meet, where they kiss beneath the ground, is a fault line. Surrounding every fault line is a mass of country rock that soaks up energy over hundreds of years. It stores as much energy as it can handle, and usually it can handle a lot. But when the supply of energy exceeds a certain threshold, the rock begins to quiver. The fault line slips. It releases all that pent-up energy at once. An earthquake occurs. In an instant, the surface of the earth is remapped. In an instant, everything can change.

 

 

 

Danilo persuades me
to go to the canal.

“You said your father worked there, right?”

“He did once.”

“Then you know where we’re going.”

What I know about the Panama Canal is what I learned in school. I had flipped ahead in my world civics textbook and read all about it long before the teacher got to it in her lesson plan—every year I checked the glossary as soon as I got my books to see if there was anything about Panama—but it was still thrilling when she lectured about it in class.

The French were the first to attempt to construct it. A man named Ferdinand de Lesseps, who had been in charge of building the Suez Canal more than a decade earlier, directed their attempt. The French failed miserably. Their equipment was old. They were crippled by disease. When they ran out of money, they sold the project to the Americans. The Americans, thinking maybe geography had been the problem, toyed with the idea of situating the canal in Nicaragua instead. Finally, they were convinced to forge ahead in Panama. But then there was another problem. Panama at the time was still part of Colombia, and Colombia didn’t want to let the United States build a canal on its land. So Theodore Roosevelt came up with a solution to that minor inconvenience. If Panama was no longer part of Colombia, Colombia would no longer have a say in the matter, and the United States could build their canal. The Americans encouraged the Panamanians to rise up, stage a rebellion, and demand their independence from Colombia. They sent military support. They fought on behalf of the Panamanians—but really for themselves—for a grand total of three days before Colombia let Panama go to become a sovereign country. The Americans promptly started digging their big ditch. They devised a lock system, which turned out to be a better plan than the French ever had. They discovered ways to deal with diseases like malaria and yellow fever that had killed off the French in droves. And in 1914, after ten years of toil and sweat and innovation and fighting, they unveiled the Panama Canal to the world. There was supposed to be an immense celebration to commemorate the occasion. But the unveiling occurred without much fanfare, since, by then, World War I had started, and the collective attention of almost everyone on the globe had shifted to a very different part of the world.

Maybe it’s more than the average person knows. It’s just that anytime Panama came up in any context of my life, I paid attention more than the average person.

 

 

 

The bus deposits us
in a vast parking lot at the base of a hill. The air is thick and steamy when we step off, and the heat from the sun drips down.

“It’s your building,” Danilo jokes, pointing.

At the top of the hill is the visitors’ center, a modernist concrete building with the word “Miraflores” on the front. For a girl who was never able to find a key chain with her name on it, or a personalized pencil, or a hat with her name stitched in above the bill, it’s a shock. But a welcome shock. My name is familiar here. If it belongs here, maybe I could, too.

We start up the long path of steps that leads from the parking lot to the building, my legs burning by the time we reach the top. Inside, the lobby sparkles and gleams with newness. There’s a gift shop in the back corner and, to the left of the front doors, signs on placards advertising, in Spanish and in English, a film about the construction of the canal that runs every twenty minutes in the auditorium.

I’m standing in the middle of it all, clutching my bag.

“This isn’t it,” Danilo says. He pulls me through a wide door straight ahead of us, out into the open air, and leads me to the railing at the front of a broad concrete deck.

“This,” he says, “is it.”

Two long horizontal waterways stretch lengthwise before us. Across the lanes is a small building, squat and rectangular, with a series of arched doorways and a red-clay roof, and the words “Miraflores Locks” in spaced letters across the front.

“Is that the control tower?” I ask, pointing.

“Don’t point,” Danilo says. “You look like a tourist.”

“I am a tourist.”

“You almost seem like you live here. If you don’t talk too much, people might believe it.”

“If I don’t talk too much?”

“You don’t talk like a Panamanian.”

I look away so that he won’t see how that stung. He knows, though.

“It’s nothing about your Spanish. Your Spanish is the best I’ve ever heard from an American. But you don’t say things how a Panamanian would.”

“Like what?”

“Like you say
‘¿Qué pasó?’
but that’s textbook. People here say
‘¿Qué xopá?’
”

“What’s that?”

“
‘¿Qué pasó?’
backwards. Sort of.”

I scan the smattering of other people on the viewing deck. “I’m pretty sure everyone here is a tourist.”

“Sure. Point if you want. Whatever. I was just trying to help.”

“I mean, do any Panamanians really come here?”

Danilo takes a step back and looks at me. “I pissed you off, huh?”

I cross my arms and press my fingertips against the sides of my ribs. “Maybe.”

“Well, you’re right anyway, I guess. Panamanians only come here if they work here.”

“Or unless they’re showing me around.” I smile. My hair flips loosely in the breeze. I wiggle my toes against the canvas backing inside my sneakers. “So where are the ships?”

Danilo walks to the front corner of the viewing deck and leans his torso over the railing. “Out there. You can see them.”

Under the beating sun, I lean out, too, twisting my body, and am greeted by a mass of bobbing ships, freckling the expanse of water past the end of the concrete lanes.

“They have to wait for clearance to come in,” Danilo explains. “It’s always backed up like this.”

A flock of birds scatters up from the trees in the hills around us, making a sound like applause. I have to stand very near Danilo in order to see. The faint scent of sweat, delicate and salty, lifts off his skin in the hot air. Once, the front of my thigh brushes the side of his and though I’m sure he’ll startle and jolt away, he doesn’t.