Hypothermia

1. AIR

The first things that went flying by the window were newspapers and plastic bags. This wouldn’t have been unusual for autumn, but we were sitting in a third-floor classroom at the time. We were talking about how Rubén Darío had been abandoned as a baby, and I interrupted the discussion to comment on the disgusting weather found on the East Coast of the United States. My students just sat there, staring back at me with hostility — for my own sanity I’ve decided that they always look that way — so I simply continued with my lecture. By now we were talking about Darío’s arrival at Valparaíso, when something else went flying by the window; it might have been a tarp from a construction site, the hood of a car, or a calf. Instantly, the Wizard of Oz file in my mind clicked open and I proposed that we head downstairs to the basement and finish class in one of the lecture halls there. They followed my instructions — for the first time — with military discipline.

The Foreign Languages building where I teach usually empties out around three o’clock each afternoon. The hallways end up littered with garbage, like in the aftermath of a summary execution: open notebooks, disposable cups rimmed with lipstick traces, a sweatshirt or cap flung into the corner. The hastily abandoned classrooms exude the same feeling one must get while staring at the charred, smoking remains of a massacre. The whole place smells like a bombed-out city. To avoid further distractions, I chose a windowless classroom, and managed to get as far as Darío’s move to Buenos Aires. I told them that as soon as the Nicaraguan poet stepped off the boat, the Spanish language was never the same, that the known world ended right then and there, and that another one — possibly better, but certainly different — began. Darío, I declared, in a rapture of lyricism that earned me a variety of odd looks, from hostile to confused, was the writer who’d flushed all the old crap down the toilet.

After that, we managed a fairly decent review of several of Darío’s poems, with time still left for me to discuss the details of an assignment they had to turn in for the next class. As always, I thanked them for their patience. Nobody said you’re welcome, so I figured they’d had enough of me.

After class, I took my time gathering up my papers and books to avoid running into one of my students at the bus stop or, later, on the Metro. I never really know what to say when I do. I feel as though I’m going to end up sounding like a pervert, no matter what I say. Adjusting my glasses on the bridge of my nose every few moments, I pretended to be absorbed with my roster. I briefly looked over my notes again and then, with exaggerated care, packed everything into my briefcase. I left the building only when I was sure they’d all melted away into the sprawling campus.

Outside it was odd to see no one sitting on the patio. Thanks to its comfortable tables in the shade right outside a building frequented by foreign exchange students, it’s usually populated by packs of smokers. A heavy, humid breeze, more appropriate to August than the end of September, was stirring the astonishing amount of sodden trash left by the storm in the corners of the patio and all around the legs of the chairs. Then I heard the sound of sirens in the distance, and realized how uneasy I was already feeling.

Ever since the mournful days of the Mexico City earthquake in 1985, the sound of ambulances fills me with an anxiety that I’m always slow to identify. For the better part of two weeks, sirens provided the only soundtrack to our paralyzed lives. I’ll never forget the mornings I spent as part of a team of senior high school students hauling and delivering food in Tepito, a neighborhood that had been completely destroyed. This is what Mexico City will look like when the gringos declare war on us again, El Pollo said to me. He was hard at work playing the role of emergency driver in the improvised ambulance we’d made out of his truck, sticking giant crosses of red tape to its sides. Afterward — as with Darío and tradition — nothing in Mexico was ever the same: we flushed the toilet on sixty years of half-assed tyranny. Although the older generations have a hard time accepting it, we had ourselves a real revolution, a la Hemingway: by carrying stretchers.

To get to the street that runs through the center of campus you have to traverse a long meadow bordered by oak trees. Normally this walk cheers me up when I’ve had enough of being an insignificant foreigner: teaching classes in Latin American literature at a gringo university is like cutting trees in a deserted forest with no one around to hear them fall. As I walked, I felt increasingly sure that something ominous was afoot: not a soul in sight on the paths, and the whining sirens were growing more intense as I approached the university’s main road. At that point I was still sufficiently unaware of events to be annoyed by the idea that, whatever had happened, the road would be clogged with terrible traffic and I’d end up taking forever to reach the Metro. I checked my pocket and made sure I had enough change to call my wife from a pay phone. I wanted to let her know that she should go ahead and give the kids dinner. I’d be home as soon as possible.

Which turned out to be the last ordinary worry I’d have, that evening: I got to the main drag only to find it closed off and deserted. The bus stop was encircled by yellow police tape. The ambulances sounded farther away now. Seized by a ferocious dread, I walked toward the student commons where the cafeterias, bookstores, and post office were located. All deserted. I walked the hallways, climbing and descending staircases. Everything was closed and lonely. In the main dining room the tables were covered with dozens of abandoned meals: half-eaten hamburgers, full cups of soda, plastic spoons navigating melted sundaes. At the reception desk, I rang the visitors’ bell over and over in a sort of hysteria.

Before going back outside and starting my long walk to the Metro station — I’d had to do the same thing once before, when a snowstorm shut down bus service while I was busy in the library — I stopped at a bank of pay phones to call my wife and ask her what was going on. The line was dead. Then I heard the unmistakable sound of a whole crowd of people walking together in silence.

I ran upstairs and came face to face with a huge line of students shuffling along in a tight, orderly, disciplined column, following a volunteer wearing a florescent orange vest over his everyday clothes. In the crowd, I recognized a woman from Panama who was a former student of mine. I pulled her out of line and asked her what was going on. There was a tornado, she told me in a stupefied voice that seemed to come not from her throat but from somewhere deep inside her.

What happened? It hit the dorms by the football stadium. I felt a new surge of fear: the university nursery school, which my children attended, was in the same complex of buildings. What time had it happened? I asked her. She wasn’t sure. I’d just come out of psychology class, she said, and they locked us inside the first-floor classrooms. I was on my way to my next class, it must have been about four o’clock, right now they’re rounding everybody up because there’s another one coming. But the rest of the school’s deserted, I told her. They’re underground, she said, they’ve got half the university in the basement.

Without saying good-bye I ran toward the outer doors. Another volunteer blew his whistle when he saw me go past. I ignored him: Cathy picked up the kids at five o’clock, which meant they would have been evacuated with everybody else.

I often had to swing by and grab the kids when my wife’s job at that insurance company required her to work into the evening. I also had transportation duty on Fridays, which was my only day off. The nursery school — a low, wide building, with a tornado watchtower on the roof — was located on the flattest, most open part of the campus, between the sports complex and some Soviet-style dorms that provided cramped housing for most of the undergraduates. When there was bad weather — in this country it’s always either too hot or too cold, or it rains or floods or freezes or hails — I’d take the campus loop bus; otherwise, I’d make the half-hour walk, generally arriving late. The principal would greet me with a reproving stare, all her stereotypes about Mexicans confirmed as I came through the door dripping sweat, a good ten or fifteen minutes past closing. In the three years my kids had spent at the school, the only expression I’d ever seen on her, even when I arrived on time, was that of the Protestant matron enraged at the world’s immorality.

The day of the tornado I covered the last five hundred or thousand yards by cutting across lawns and meadows. The police had all the roads and sidewalks blocked off and I didn’t want them to pick me up for evacuation before finding out if the kids had been taken to a safe location in time. The damage got worse as I neared my destination, going from upsetting to catastrophic. I finally found my way blocked by a massive tangle of uprooted trees and chunks of asphalt; the only way forward was to scramble over it all. An entire lamppost had been plucked from the ground and coiled like a corkscrew around the trunk of an oak tree. The image of that hideously twisted metal is burned into my memory, I fear, forever.

The street leading to the nursery school’s front entrance was blocked by cars crushed by fallen trees. I was clambering over the debris when I felt someone grip my shoulder. It was a policewoman in full riot gear. She shouted at me that the whole area was off limits. I realized then that I’d managed to tune out the hellish racket of sirens and hammering combined with the sound of the wind, which was starting to pick up again now. I pulled away from the woman without answering, but only made it a few yards before she caught me again. I told her my kids had been inside when the tornado hit. Everybody was very worried, she said, but she could not, unfortunately, let me through. I asked if she’d heard about any victims. She said there were some casualties but didn’t know how many or if any were from the school. The children and teachers had all been evacuated to the sports complex. This time I escaped by scrambling over the roof of a car, but in a few moments she collared me again, twisting my right arm up behind my back. She threatened to arrest me if I tried running again, and in that case I certainly wouldn’t find out about my children any time soon. She frog-marched me away and turned me over to a volunteer with a blond crew cut who weighed at least 450 pounds. Without releasing my arm he more or less carried me into the gymnasium. I remember scanning the scene in desperation and noticing that the whole roof had been peeled off the daycare building. My last sight of the emergency zone was two firefighters cutting open a car to remove the passengers, their only available light cast by the spinning beacons on nearby rescue vehicles.

Gringos are an obedient sort of people: in full compliance with the authorities they were now organized into assigned groups and distributed throughout the gigantic subterranean sports complex. The ground floor, with its swimming pools under glass domes, was off-limits. The huge volunteer dumped me into a human river flowing downstairs to the lower levels. I asked a number of people if they knew the whereabouts of the kids from the nursery school, but nobody had news.

I left the spiral stairway on the first floor below ground level and went looking for the gymnasiums. Large tribes of young people seated in big circles were playing cards or talking and shouting to one another. One group told me they had seen a woman with a bunch of little kids on the basketball courts on the fourth floor, two more flights down.

As soon as I got back into the river of people heading downstairs, I noticed that the lower levels were much warmer: the electricity must have been knocked out; what little power we still had was thanks to the university’s generator. That explained why there was no air conditioning. The crowd advanced slowly, like a mob of sleepwalkers.

The basketball courts filled an immense cavern. All the times I had made the walk to the nursery school, I’d never imagined that such a space existed beneath my feet. Students were camped out in groups, reading, sleeping, or doing homework. A volunteer signaled to me, index finger raised to his lips, that it was forbidden to make noise there. I couldn’t imagine that they would try to keep children there, under such conditions, so I kept moving.

In the hallway I ran into a Korean professor of economics I knew, an acquaintance from some of the Fathers’ Nights at the nursery school. He was leading his son by the hand so I latched onto his coattails and asked him where the other kids were. At first he looked disconcerted, as if staring at me from inside a thick bubble. Then he seemed to recognize me. In one great rush he began to give me a scattered account of how a falling tree had smashed the hood of his car. He and his kid had waited quietly inside until the storm passed and then run to the school, which by then had had its doors ripped off and windows shattered, and was missing part of its roof. He kept saying that he didn’t know what he was going to do: he had just bought a house, and his insurance wouldn’t pay for the car because he hadn’t gotten any coverage for Acts of God. It took some effort to snap him out of it so that he could give me some more pertinent details: everyone at the school had been evacuated, they were in the women’s locker room down on the lowest level. It was pretty dark down there, he said, and really hot, so he was looking for someplace to buy his son a cold drink.

I headed downstairs, leaving him to his monologue about the irrationality of a culture that attributes natural phenomena to God, as if he were chief clerk in charge of the weather. Past the fifth level it grew noticeably darker: only a few lights were on, and the red emergency lights gave the place a twilight atmosphere. The heat was so intense that there were only a few students still moving around.

As I stepped off the spiral stairway on the seventh level I discovered all the university students — male and female — stripped down to their underwear, seated on benches, and chatting away as if it were the most normal thing in the world. Down here there was no adult supervision. The sheen of their bare shoulders, stomachs, and legs made me realize that I was completely soaked in sweat.

I hurried to one of the locker rooms, bolting through the door with all the violence of my mounting desperation. Inside, the dense, acrid air reeked with a purely human decay. As I moved along the hallway leading to the lockers and showers, I thought it was an absolute disgrace to have banished the nursery children down here; they should have been upstairs where there was fresh air. The light, too, was awful, with only those sinister red emergency lights glowing on the tiles.

I reached the end of the hallway and turned the corner, but instead of children and their teachers I found dozens of naked bodies, all intertwined, pulsing and grinding together on the floor and benches, and even propped up next to the lockers. Like some divine beast gestating and multiplying, it writhed and flowed in slow motion, some part of each body gripping and being gripped by the hands, mouth, sex, or ass of another. Their pale torsos in the red light reminded me of the tin cans filled with earthworms that we used to collect in my grandmother’s garden in Autlán before going fishing.

I stood there paralyzed by the liquid mass of bodies, completely absolved for a moment of my personality and private anguishes. One of the young men whom I had seen chatting outside came walking past me. He was just about to lose himself inside the soft, pulpy turmoil when I came to my senses and ran to grab his arm: I asked him about the nursery school kids. He told me he didn’t know, he had just been on the tennis courts at the fifth level; there were no kids there. Let me ask, he said at last. He gestured for me to wait and approached a nearby group of bodies, all molded tightly together. They spoke among themselves without stopping work on each others’ interlocking parts. At last one young woman slipped a penis out of her mouth and told me that all the kids were in the women’s locker room, which was on the other side of the stairs.

Feeling drowsy and overwhelmed by the poor lighting, lack of oxygen, and the accumulated shocks I’d suffered, I walked toward the women’s locker room with the lassitude of a man resigned to his fate. I had to knock on the door and identify myself before they would open up and let me in. Once inside, one of the teachers apologized, saying that they’d had to lock themselves in. When all the students began stripping off their clothes, they’d sent a father and his son to find help, but they hadn’t returned. I didn’t tell her that I had run into them enjoying a floor with fresher air. Instead, I went directly past the lockers until I could hear the sounds of children playing as though nothing unusual were happening.

Before arriving where they’d been corralled — the kids were sitting in a circle, surrounded by fans — I came face to face with another father, a Colombian man with whom I often chatted. He was distracted, staring at the floor with his hands in his pockets, and didn’t notice me until I said his name. He looked in my eyes and for a fraction of a second didn’t recognize me, then I saw a flash of fear cross his face. Didn’t Cathy manage to get out? he asked. I don’t know, I answered. I saw her leaving with your kids when I was coming in, he told me. The tornado hit when I was signing out Jorgito. He ran his fingers through his sweaty mop of hair. Struggling to compose himself, he sent me off to talk to the principal who was further inside.

All the teachers went silent when they saw me standing there. Aren’t Cathy and the kids with you? the principal asked without getting up from the bench where she was sitting. She opened the gigantic purse she always carried and took out her mobile phone, handing it straight to me. Call your house, she told me — maybe she was already safe when all hell broke loose.

Cell phones were still a novelty in those days: once I had it in my hands I didn’t know how to use it. She told me I had to punch in the number then press the green button, but that to get a signal I had to go upstairs, as close to the ground floor as possible; down below, here among the furnaces and heating ducts, there was no way to get through to anybody. The pained looks that followed me as I made my way out of there made it completely clear: none of them harbored the least hope that my family had made it home before the tornado struck.

With more resignation than anguish, I walked back through the outlandish scene in the hallway. Now it came to me that I had needed to go to the bathroom for ages now, but all the pent-up tension in my body had prevented me from paying this any mind. Not wanting to run into another orgy, I went up to the next floor to find a men’s room. I had to wait in a long line to take a crap in an overtaxed toilet. As I flushed, I had my first clear inkling that I might well no longer have a family; that my whole emotional universe had been shot to hell while I was reading a handful of poems by Rubén Darío that none of my students would ever remember.

I walked on upstairs, no longer in any hurry, thinking over, for example, how difficult it was going to be to break the news to my parents that I was suddenly a widower and their grandchildren were no more. When I reached the spot where a phalanx of volunteers blocked the way up to the surface, I was already feeling the first stirrings, inside me, of an unexpected sense of freedom.

I punched in the number for my house and nobody picked up, not even the answering machine: the power was out. I dug around in my briefcase, looking for my in-laws’ phone number. They live farther away from campus, so their electricity was probably still working. I dialed and my wife answered. In a perfectly relaxed voice she asked if the lights had come back on at home yet. She said she’d left me a note on the table explaining how she couldn’t cook anything so she’d taken the kids to have dinner at her folks’ house. I told her where I was calling from. She simply couldn’t believe it. Yes, she’d noticed how strongly the wind was blowing when she left the school but she’d made if off campus without any problems. In the car they’d been listening to a tape of children’s music, and at her parents’ house they’d put on a cartoon video, so she had no idea what was going on. We agreed that they should spend the night there. That way she would be able to pick me up in the car when the authorities finally allowed us to leave. I had to control my voice so that she wouldn’t pick up on how annoyed I was.

Back downstairs — the cell phone burning in the palm of my right hand — I stopped at the bottom of the stairway. The question was, should I go into the women’s locker room or the men’s?

2. NATURAL DISASTERS RECORDED SINCE I MOVED TO WASHINGTON, D.C

Three tornados.

An eighteen-month drought.

Six ice storms.

Hurricanes Isabel, Cecilia, and Laura.

Two floods on the Potomac from winter thaws. Three complete closures of the city due to snowfall. Threat of anthrax contamination.

A jetliner crashing into the Pentagon.

One divorce.

3. LIGHT

It was the end of August. I had developed the annoying habit of brooding over the storms of volcanic ash that covered Mexico City with thick gray dust during the last spring that I lived there. In those days, when we were preparing to move from D.F. to D.C. — that is, from the Distrito Federal to the District of Columbia — I thought that the ashes were some kind of message from on high, urging me to get out. Now I understand that they were rather more admonitory in nature, but this realization only comes now, as I sit here writing, sketching out such a pleasant yet constricted scene, which has nothing to do with the disjointed flow of reality. Telling a story means tracing your finger through the ashes left by the fires of experience: the touchstone of all tragedy is our inability to remember the future.

Midsummer in the District of Columbia brings some of the most intense, sweltering weather in the northern hemisphere. Between July and August there are days when you can’t even wear rubber-soled shoes because they start to melt the moment you set foot on the pavement. Unlike in other latitudes, the first whisper of autumn comes not with the crisp northerly breezes of October but instead with the heavy rain clouds left by hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico at the end of August and beginning of September.

That morning we decided to take a bicycle ride down to the airport. It makes for a quiet family outing. It’s been years since weekends have felt the least bit restful: running the gauntlet of all the arbitrary, obligatory leisure activities here is even more exhausting than the hardest days at work. However, the ride out to the National Airport has its rewards. Cyclists are treated to a lengthy stretch along the banks of the Potomac. There is also the intensely strange experience of picnicking in the park that the airplanes fly over just before they land. The park’s meadow is so close to the landing field that the planes fill the sky as they descend, drowning out all other sound as they pass within a stone’s throw.

The clouds looked like solid steel, but as the seasons change they frequently remain that way for days on end without raining a drop. We set out around ten in the morning and followed our normal route: from the house to the playground around the corner, and from there along the path to Rock Creek Park, the spine of the city. There we stopped so that the kids could climb and swing and bounce.

It hadn’t rained for several weeks, so the benches where my wife and I sat were covered with a fine layer of grit, an automatic reminder of the ashes from Popocatépetl in Mexico City seven years earlier. I mentioned this to Cathy but she told me that those ashes had a different consistency, with larger granules. She remembered when they first covered the windows of our apartment in Coyoacán; she had tried to brush them off with her hand but they stuck to her fingers. Everything’s like that in Mexico, she said: tougher, harder to shake off.

Although it was hot and the humidity was outrageous — as always, in the summer — a southerly breeze made the second leg of the trip pleasant as we cycled to the zoo. We rode along in quasi-military formation: Cathy in the lead keeping an eye out for any obstacles, then our two kids on their mountain bikes, and me covering the rear of the pack to make sure no one got left behind.

We ate lunch at an open-air restaurant. Before continuing our ride, Cathy and the children visited the primate exhibit. As usual, I stayed outside to have a smoke: the chimpanzees and gorillas in their glass boxes reminded me too much of myself: despite being in exile, they lived a better life, now safer and better fed than in the miserable forests where they’d been captured. When we got back on the bike paths, the sky was already painted like an ominous stage scrim. The breeze was picking up, turning into wind. We considered the situation while we struggled to help the kids strap on their bike helmets. Since we were already closer to the river than home, we figured it was better to keep going. If necessary, we could always take the Metro back from downtown.

The truth is that we continued our outing only at my insistence: Cathy’s memory of how the ashes from Popoca-tépetl clung to our hands when we tried to clean them off made me think of my grandmother — her ashes were the stickiest I’ve ever encountered. I felt for some reason that riding into the wind would cleanse my conscience of them.

My father’s family, from whom I surely inherited my habit of constantly moving around — from one house, country, or spouse to another — has deep roots in the teaching profession: to this day, many of my relatives live likewise peripatetic lives, off in countries where producing or reproducing knowledge is actually a well-respected job. Several years ago, my paternal grandmother made the stupid mistake of dying suddenly, and on Holy Thursday eve, in the rather remote village of Autlán. Because one of her sons, and several grandchildren, were unable to make travel arrangements in time to attend the funeral Mass, it was decided to postpone the interment of her ashes in our family crypt until the following Monday. I managed to arrive on Saturday afternoon, just in time for the cremation. I also got to witness the very strange moment when my father and my uncles, after arguing about whether it was better to leave the ashes in the car until the ceremony began, or else bring them inside the house, finally decided on the latter. With a discomfort bordering on the ridiculous, they placed the urn on the sideboard by the table as if it were going to preside one last time over a family meal. It was decided by everyone that the youngest of us cousins would sleep in the house. Not having grown up there, we wouldn’t find it so depressing to spend the night and stand the final watch.

It’s not often that my family has so many relatives gathered under one roof, as we were that night under our grandmother’s. The mournful atmosphere in the room, still so heavy when we sat down at the table, receded after the first couple of whiskeys, especially because more relatives kept knocking on the door, sometimes simply to pay their respects and sometimes because they were just arriving from the bus station. Our vigil didn’t exactly turn into a party, not quite, but considering both the occasion and the fact that the ashes of its guest of honor were in attendance, the night was surprisingly relaxed.

Around midnight, or maybe one in the morning, my father and his brothers said goodnight, and headed over to our relatives’ houses to sleep. It was then that my sister, Nena, raised her eyebrows at me with a conspiratorial look. She glanced toward the sideboard where my grandmother’s ashes had stood watch over the excessive number of cocktails drunk in her honor.

The door had barely closed behind the older mourners when all of us cousins who had stayed behind made an urgent — and frankly ridiculous — dash for the urn. We all held back a moment until Nena herself, the devious ringleader of our riskiest childhood expeditions, stepped forward. She placed the urn on the table and removed the lid, revealing the deep, terrible void within. Suspended in a hallowed silence, we reverently gathered our heads around the receptacle as Nena reached her hand inside. She withdrew a fistful of our grandmother’s remains and held them on her outstretched palm. They were not, as we had imagined, like the fine dust left behind after burning wood or paper; they were shiny little black stones, like pellets of obsidian, and we all crowded together to touch them. It was then that we discovered just how sticky they were: once you had some of Grandma’s ashes on your fingertips there was no way to remove them. We ended up shaking and brushing off our hands over the urn — with pretty lousy aim — and at last had to remove the tablecloth and toss it into the garbage with my poor grandmother stuck all over it. Upon returning to D.C. I told Cathy all about it. In a rather serious voice, she told me that when she died I’d better not invite Nena to her funeral.

The descent to the Potomac was, at the very least, enjoyable: the cool steady wind blew straight into our faces as we rode down along the riverbanks. Also, we could ride without stopping: the kids still had all their energy, and nowhere on the route is there an uphill stretch that isn’t preceded by an even longer descent, so you never have to get off and walk or push your bike. By the time we were approaching Watergate and had the river in sight, every cell in my body felt refreshed, as if I had been scrubbed clean.

Riding a bicycle is more a state of mind than hard work. Although it hurts at first to stretch your muscles and get warmed up, once the lungs and legs naturally and miraculously sync up, the body works automatically. Unless some sudden change in the terrain requires a shift in speed, there’s no need to stop and rest. Though the banks of the Potomac slope downhill on the Capitol side — D.C. is built on swamps that once served as a drainage for Appalachian thaws — on the Virginia side they’re as flat and green as soccer fields. We crossed the bridge, skirted Arlington Cemetery, and followed the riverside path toward the airport.

Before we even reached our destination, though, the sky began to roil and erupt. The storm hit with such violence that we heard it before anything else: we were by now very close to the landing field. When the lightning flashes and exploding thunder announced an imminent cloudburst, we stopped beneath one of the freeway bridges with another group of cyclists and some runners who’d also been counting on those imperturbable, late-season cloudbanks. Cathy took our picnic blanket out of her backpack while I removed sodas, olives, and potato chips from the cooler in my basket. We spread out our little sheltered camp and from there we watched the river churning with the rainfall in the distance until the storm front reached the bridge.

Although we got a bit chilly — rain always carries an icy presence that clings to your shirt with all the tenacity of human ashes — we entertained ourselves by calculating how far away the lightning was striking: reason is the only human defense against our primal fear of the elements. At one point the rain was so heavy that we couldn’t even see the river, which was barely ten yards away from our picnic blanket.

The storm passed as nimbly as it arrived. We had finished our olives and were still nibbling on potato chips when a small but promising ray of sun broke through the clouds.

Children — like Mexico, like ashes — are sticky: for parents, some ridiculously simple tasks, like getting into the car or choosing a movie at the video store, become endless, herculean tasks. The runners and other cyclists sheltering beneath the bridge had long ago returned to the path when we felt ready to resume riding with all our gear, once more in strict formation.

We had only gone a few hundred yards when I became aware that my bicycle and I had penetrated into a different reality, as though we were at the center of a cone of silence. I looked ahead at Cathy and the kids and saw their faces distorted by a spasm of fear: whatever was going on, it was happening only to me. Looking down, I saw a glowworm devouring my handlebars in slow motion. As it touched my hands, they turned the very shade of blue they’ll become when I’m dead. My wedding ring, on my right hand, flared molten green. In spite of the intense pain produced by the burning ring, I couldn’t let go of my bicycle: my body was trapped in a surging vibration, as if a magnet was drawing me up by the hair to some paradise I don’t deserve. I’m dying, I thought. Cathy and the children were shouting something at me — who knows what — from the world of sound they still inhabited. In return I gave them a smile more resigned than sad.

Then thunder shattered the silence. It wasn’t the usual deafening sound as it might be heard by ears outside my electric womb, but a soft, precise crack, like a handclap. Still, I was able to see the two trees nearest the path get blown to pieces before collapsing in clouds of smoke. Blackened and burning from the lightning, their limbs fell around me in a perfect circle. Dismounting from my bicycle I sensed, for the first time in my life, the astonishing firmness and solidity of the ground. I touched one of the branches and felt its embers burn my fingertips. Hoisting my bike to my shoulder, I removed the leaves, bark, and branches, and checked to make sure it was all in one piece. Then, despite having been just struck by lightning, I proposed that we keep riding toward the airport.

Once we reached the meadow we were disappointed to see that the stormy weather had forced a change in the runway patterns. Now we couldn’t watch the planes landing. Instead, as we lay on our backs in the wet grass, we could only see their departures, which are always anticlimactic.