The World in Half (7 page)

“We call it Panamá Viejo,” he says. Then with considerable amusement he asks, “What else do they tell you in that guidebook?”

I shrug, feeling embarrassed, offended, something.

We walk across the soft, patchy grass to a small collection of ruins: crumbling stone half-walls no more than two feet high, weathered and blackened; windows without roofs; rooms without floors; buildings that are skeletons without flesh. Weeds sprout in between the rocks. Stones are hidden beneath matted grass. At the edge of the bones of the ancient city is a three-story-tall stone bell tower, still fairly intact.

Danilo says, “It was part of the cathedral.”

I follow him inside the hollow tower and stand on the grass floor. Faint sunlight runs through the tall rectangular window openings and scatters down on us as we gaze up, our hands cupped like visors over our eyes. The smell is musty and warm.

“What do you think?” Danilo asks. His voice echoes a bit.

“It’s nice,” I say. I’m trying to come up with a reason why he brought me here, of all places.

Danilo takes a few steps and runs his palm along one of the walls, covered with gnarled moss. “I think it’s fucked up.”

“What?” I drop my hand and look at him.

“This place. It’s fucked up. There were pirates who came here and torched it.” He turns to me. “Did your guidebook tell you that?”

“Who? They did what?”

Danilo cups a hand over one eye and pumps his other arm as if he’s doing a jig. “They set it on fire.”

I can’t help laughing at his pantomime. “Pirates?” I say in English.

“Isn’t that what I said?
¿Piratas?
”

“Henry Morgan, right?”

“That’s the dude who fucked everything up.”

“But I thought I read . . . I thought when he was attacked, this was a Spanish city.”

“So? It was here, wasn’t it?”

“But it belonged to Spain.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he says. “It was still here. It belonged to us, even if the name of here wasn’t Panamá at the time.”

“The boundaries of a place are always changing,” I say. He stares at me, puzzled. I’m not sure I used the right word in Spanish for “boundaries.” “I mean that you can’t say a place belongs to a country just because of the land it’s on. A long time ago this land was Spain’s, so the city would have belonged to Spain. Now the land is Panamá’s, so the city belongs to Panamá. In a thousand years it could be China’s, so it would belong to China.”

He looks unconvinced.

“I’m saying it’s all political. They’re just different names for the same place. The land doesn’t belong to anyone. It only belongs to itself.”

Maybe my Spanish is shaky, because he still looks perplexed. But then he says, “Geography is an illusion? Is that what you mean?”

Exactly. I tried to explain the same concept to my mother once, but she didn’t understand. Even Beth accused me of sounding “philosophically nonsensical” the time I tried to get into a discussion with her about it while we were waiting for the TA to post the grades for our physical oceanography class.

Danilo runs his thumb along the uneven groove at the meeting between two stones. “I’ve thought that before,” he says. He keeps tracing, brooding a little while I stand still in the center of the square tower. Then he says, “I still think this place is ours, though.”

When we step out into the full wash of daylight again, we walk past more rubble and crumbling walls, the foundations perfectly undisturbed, as if the buildings were once little more than tiered cakes, the tops of each simply lifted off. Not far in the distance, white gulls circle over the muddy brown-blue water in the bay.

We walk until we reach a small arched stone bridge. When Danilo strides out to the middle of it and sits, placing his flower bucket behind him, I sit down, too. The sky above us is absolutely clear, although across the bay, a thick swab of pale gray clouds hangs placidly. Our feet dangle nearly thirty feet above the narrow green stream that runs under the bridge, foamy as it curls around the rocks. A plastic grocery bag wound around a tree branch flows silently below us and, after it, the small body of a dead frog, splayed like an open flower. An old mini-refrigerator is lodged in the silt on the bank. Bits of mica schist glint in the sun.

I feel light sitting there, buoyant, the panic that surfaced earlier entirely gone. I have a strong sense of being close to something, even if I don’t know what. Of being on a precipice. As if sitting on the side of that bridge is the same thing as being perched on the edge of my life.

Then, out of nowhere, Danilo says, “You know, you probably shouldn’t take the bus alone while you’re here. The bus system in Panamá is hell. No real routes, no schedules, buses going all over the place. They’re called
diablos rojos
for a reason.”

“I take buses at home.”

He makes a face. “I don’t know. You should probably just take taxis from now on.”

“How do you know the buses in Chicago aren’t just as bad?”

“People just say it’s crazy here. They say that no one who doesn’t live here would take the bus in their right mind. Do people say that in Chicago?”

“I guess not.”

“Okay,” he says, satisfied. Then, “In Chicago, you have the bears, right?”

It takes me a second to realize he doesn’t mean animals in a forest. “For football, yes, the Chicago Bears.”

“And for baseball?”

“The Cubs.” I say it in English because I don’t know the word for it in Spanish.

Danilo wrinkles his nose. “What is that?”

“A cub is a baby bear.”

He shakes his head. “Lots of bears.”

I laugh.

After another minute, he says, “You know, there are supposed to be treasures in the water. When the pirates came, everybody panicked and dumped all their gold and shit in the river. You know, to hide it. But then most of the residents got killed, so all their stuff is still supposed to be buried down there somewhere.”

I don’t catch everything he says. “
Tesoros
means ‘gold’?”

“Could be gold. You know, just valuables. Treasures.”

“It’s all under the water?”

“That’s the story. No one’s ever found anything, though.”

There seems something final about the way he says it, as though he merely brought up the subject for the sake of idle conversation and now is annoyed that the discussion has gone on. I wouldn’t mind asking him more about it—the idea of treasures somewhere beneath our dangling feet is intriguing—but I get the sense that he’s far less academic about exploring topics than I am. He’s more impetuous perhaps, flitting to whatever captures his attention next. I push my bangs off my forehead, but they fall right back down again, rebellious in the humidity.

“Thanks for bringing me here,” I finally say.

He gazes out at the water and shrugs. “Now you can say you’ve seen something.”

 

 

 

I call Beth
as soon as I get back to my hotel room. The reception is terrible.

“I can barely hear you,” she says.

“I know. Is this better?” I’m standing by the window.

“Not really.”

“Okay, tell me if it gets better. I’m just going to keep talking and talking and I’m walking around my room and I’m walking by my bed and I’m talking and I guess I could go out into the hall but I don’t really feel like doing that and I’m still walking and I don’t know what to say but I’m still—”

“There! That’s good. It got clearer all of a sudden.”

“Beth, I’m standing in the shower.”

She starts cracking up and I just roll my eyes, smiling at myself in the mirror.

“How are you?” I ask.

“Forget about that. How are
you
? You made it there okay, obviously.”

“Yeah, no problems. I got in last night.”

“And what’s it like?”

“It’s . . . I don’t know. It feels like I went really far away, but it also sort of doesn’t. I mean, there are all these familiar places, like Wendy’s and McDonald’s and Costco, overlaid on this completely unfamiliar landscape. There are plants running wild everywhere.”

“There’s a Costco?”

“I know! It seemed so out of place when I saw it.”

“But it’s not totally Americanized, is it?”

“No. It still feels like its own place. And it’s bigger than I thought it would be. I mean, the city itself is huge.”

“Bigger than Chicago?”

“It feels like it. It’s definitely more crowded at least.”

“And your hotel’s okay?”

Beth is from the sort of family that books the Four Seasons everywhere they stay. Not that she’s pretentious about it. She has never once given me the impression that anything I do—going to a dumpy bar, taking the el, looking for bargains at Village Thrift—is below her standards. Even so, I have the notion that “okay” means different things to the two of us.

“It’s nice,” I say.

“That’s good.”

“Yeah.”

“Mira?”

“What?”

“Nothing. It sounded like you were going to say something else.”

“Well, I met this guy.”

“
What!
Mira, you’ve been there for one day! You met a guy? I’ve known you for two years, and you’ve never
met
a guy.”

“It’s not like that. He’s going to help me find my father.”

“Oh, so is he older?”

“I think he’s about our age.”

“What’s his name?”

“Danilo.”

“I can’t believe this. Do you mind if I tell Juliette and Asha? All those times Juliette tried to set you up with guys in her classes. She practically had the wedding planned for you and that guy—what was his name? Jamison or something ridiculous—in her pottery class. And I know you went out with some of them, but since it never went anywhere, we knew you were just sort of scared of the whole concept of getting into a relationship, but now this!”

“What do you mean, you knew I was scared? I wasn’t scared.”

“You just don’t have a lot of experience.”

“Neither do you.”

“I know. But Juliette never finds guys who are right for me. If she did, I would take her up on it.”

“You could find your own guys, you know.”

“I’m just saying, I’m open to at least having the experience if I could find some experience to have.”

“I’m open.” As soon as the words are out of my mouth, I think of my mother. “I’m open,” I say again.

“Apparently.”

“Come on. I just met him, Beth. I mean, I’ve known him for less than twenty-four hours. And all he’s doing is helping me find my father.”

“I’m glad someone’s helping you,” Beth says. She sneezes. “Sorry. I think I’m getting a cold.”

“It’s eighty-eight degrees here,” I tell her, and I see myself in the mirror giving an impish grin.

“That’s the cruelest thing you’ve ever said to me,” Beth says.

“No, wait,” I say. “This is worse: it’s also sunny.”

“Sunny!” Beth wails. “I’m in the middle of a Chicago winter here, Mira! I don’t even know what that word means anymore.”

“It means everything over here is going fine.”

I call my mother
after that, as I told her I would, but Lucy informs me that she’s already in bed.

“She’s okay?”

“She’s great. And you? How are the volcanoes?”

“The what?”

“Isn’t that where you are? At a volcano observatory? Am I getting the name of it wrong?”

“No, that’s right. It’s—They’re very . . . volcanic.”

“I should think so.”

Then, I don’t know what makes me ask but I say, “Lucy, do you think it was okay for me to come here?”

“You have to live your life,” she says.

“I know. But I think maybe it was bad timing.”

“There’s no good timing now. It’s only going to get worse. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do what you need to do.”

I press my tongue into the back of my teeth. “Yeah.”

“Mira, it’s okay. She’ll still be here when you get back.”

“Yeah.” I feel like crying now.

“She’ll still be here for a long time, even if you have to look harder to find her.”

 

 

 

No one said
the word “Alzheimer’s” until the third doctor. The first dismissed the symptoms as depression, assuring us that my mother, at forty-five, was far too young to worry about “other possibilities,” as he put it. The second, we stopped going to after my mother deemed him unacceptable because of the poor quality of his teeth.

“Am I going to die?” she asked me on the way out of the parking garage after our visit with him.

“What?” I asked. I was driving.

“I have no idea what he said to me. He could have said I was going to die tomorrow, for all I know.”

“You weren’t listening to him?”

“Did you see his teeth? They looked like corn on the cob. How could I concentrate with corn on the cob yapping in my face?” She shook her head and rolled down her window as we snaked through the aisle toward the exit.