Hypothermia

REFRIGERATION

After reaching a certain size, a secret generates a zone of silence around the one who carries it. Like a refrigerator, it has its own microclimate that people can poke their heads into but where no one else can remain. Every so often someone opened the door, the light would go on, and he would smile — his teeth like Tupperware containers — waiting patiently for the door to close again. What he wasn’t sure about was whether he viewed reality as he did, like some prerecorded event, because he was leading a double life, or if his divergence from the world he inhabited since moving to the suburbs had led naturally to the strange condition of his feeling as though he were hiding in plain sight, the result of spending a certain amount of each day in secrecy. The question was: had his deficiencies led him to become a refrigerator or were they one more eventuality in his destiny as a refrigerator?

It came out during one of his first Thursday therapy sessions: The suburbs serve to protect the rest of the country from the peculiarities of the city, so those of us who live in them can’t escape our own insulated condition; we’re the martyrs of refrigeration, we cut a swath of mediocrity, and the daily commute from home to the city and back again allows the values of the rest of the country to remain exactly as they were when the Puritans stepped off the Mayflower to found the nation.

He didn’t mention the part about feeling like a refrigerator; it was such a silly simile that he was a bit embarrassed about it, but sometimes he could feel the water pitchers, the vegetable crisper, and the slightly rancid cheese all sitting on his shelves. Nor did he mention it to Rob, his neighbor, the day when they discussed the problem of the suburbs. The weather was so hot that he felt like he was trapped inside a bubble from which it was impossible to make himself understood.

It went like this: he was crouched down planting belenes when he heard Rob say his name — or rather, that hollow, tortured sound he was now accustomed to identify with himself. He didn’t raise his head because he didn’t feel like it. Nor would he have done so at all but for the sweat dripping into his eyes; the moment after his neighbor insisted on tormenting the vowels in his name, he happened to have to wipe them with the back of one of his gardening gloves.

He lifted the hand he’d just used to wipe his eyes and said: Hey. Then he asked Rob how he was doing. Good, he answered him, what’re you doing. I’m planting flowers. Each one waited for the other to say something else that had not yet occurred to their heat-addled brains. What kind are they, Rob finally asked. Impatiens, he replied, because that’s what belenes are called in English. As it was obvious that his neighbor wasn’t going to move from the spot until he got what he wanted, he asked what he could do for him. Can I borrow your mower? Help yourself. You know where it is. He turned his attention back to the soil, the flowers, and the slightly ridiculous trowel he was using to plant them.

He had always been a somewhat self-absorbed person, which is why he enjoyed the garden; during the time he spent working there he could forget about the ferocious competition at the office, the needs of his little girls, and the identity problems that so unsettled him, and which he didn’t exactly understand. But since he had begun to lead a double life — maybe he had always done so, but without any palpable proof of its existence — he tried to practice as many solitary activities as possible: he spent more time swimming, tending his plants, watching TV.

What were you thinking so hard about, said Rob as he came back, pushing the lawnmower along the little tiled path that led from the garden to the street. I was thinking how the suburbs are the antidote we gringos whipped up for slavery. The other man thought about this for a moment then chose a noncommittal answer: You’re not a gringo, he said. I am now, was the reply. Did you apply for citizenship? Yeah. And they gave it to you. Uh-huh. You swore on the flag and all that? Along with about four hundred Koreans. Congratulations. That’s nice. I’ll bring the mower back in a while. There’s no hurry, I’m not cutting the grass today.

He waited until his neighbor had moved on before going into his house so that he wouldn’t have to invite him in, and then he ran to the kitchen. The soft gust from the air-conditioning felt like a blessing. He was home alone — his wife and daughters had gone to a children’s party and wouldn’t return until the afternoon — so he slipped the cell phone out from his briefcase by the front door where it had been sitting since Friday evening when he got home from the Bank. He punched in the number he had decided not to store in its memory to avoid uncomfortable questions if his wife happened to find it. The answering machine took the call; as usual, she had her phone switched off whenever her husband was around. He didn’t leave a message. He cracked open a beer and stood sipping it, staring out the window: the whole world outside wilting from the heat and him watching it like it was something on TV. He decided he couldn’t stand another brush with reality, so he made himself a sandwich, then ate it, with a second beer, while watching baseball.

It wasn’t until several weeks later that Rob reminded him about the suburbs and slavery. They were in the park, eating roast chicken at the picnic that the neighborhood school’s parents association had organized to celebrate the start of the new school year. As always, the early September heat made it impossible to think clearly, and so killed any appetite for conversation he might otherwise have had. Each picnicker balanced a paper plate and plastic cup in one hand while trying to eat with the other.

What you said about slavery and the suburbs seems like a generalization to me, Rob said to him. At first he didn’t understand what he was talking about; when his neighbor reminded him about the day he’d borrowed the lawnmower he tried to explain himself: It just seemed to me that white people have taken refuge in the outskirts of the cities to build themselves a world where there’s no difference between themselves and the descendants of the people they kidnapped in Africa to work for them for free. In the suburbs, everything is sweet, middle class, and homogenous. Out here the original sin of slavery doesn’t count; every little white house with its yard is an Ark of the Covenant. Rob put down his chicken leg on the paper plate and wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his T-shirt. He said: Although you’re an American now, your grandparents weren’t slave owners, mine weren’t either; they were Quakers, from Pennsylvania; I moved to the suburbs because the public schools are good and I couldn’t afford the tuition for a private school in the city. He shrugged his shoulders and thought that despite what everybody else thinks, gringos aren’t so simple: they prefer never to commit themselves to any particular position. He told himself, as he did whenever he was having a hard time at the Bank: The essential thing for surviving in this country is to never say what you’re thinking and then do whatever it is you feel like doing. He decided to act accordingly, so he held up his chicken breast and asked Rob what he thought about how the Orioles were doing. I’m not done yet, his neighbor told him: The other thing is, you’re not white. Yes, I’m white. No, you’re not. And you aren’t black. You’re Latino. I’m Mexican. Not anymore. You’re Latino now. Slavery is none of your business and you’ve got nothing to say about it.

THERAPY: CHINA

I was born in Ciudad Satélite, a suburb of Mexico City, which doesn’t in the least resemble what you folks call suburbia: for one thing, it’s highly urbanized, and it actually has fewer trees than you find in the capital.

Although the continuity between Mexico City—el Distrito Federal—and Ciudad Satélite is never interrupted geographically, the two areas are completely different, because Satélite, like Washington, D.C., is a preplanned community, one designed with vaguely utopian ambitions, the product of a shady real estate deal.

Of course it is. Read your American history: having retired to his Virginia plantation, General Washington decided to resolve the dispute over where to build the capital, placing it next to the village of Georgetown, in Maryland, where his brother-in-law had a swamp for sale. He bought it for a song and sold it for a fortune to the federal government, which was then headed by his soul mate, President Jefferson. Then the two bastards, quite proud of themselves, their pockets stuffed with dollars, went to see John Adams inaugurated in the brand new city that, on top of it all, was named after the general. Well, that would even make them blush in Ciudad Satélite.

Anyway, I was born and raised in Ciudad Satélite. I went to school there, my girlfriends were from there; that’s where I shopped at the supermarket and went to the movies.

Mexico City, which I didn’t start to get to know until I went to university, always seemed wild, complicated, and snobbish to me, so I never suffered the excessive identification with my native soil that residents of the capital have. I visited Disneyland for the first time when I was six years old, and when my father’s business was going well we took trips to Brownsville where we bought everything we had in our house. I never owned one single LP with songs in Spanish — in Ciudad Satélite listening to Mexican music was for servants — and I didn’t know until I was twenty years old that there were movies in other languages than English; at the neighborhood video store the Mexican movies were catalogued in the Foreign Films section, alongside ones by Fellini or Kurosawa. I spent fifth grade as an exchange student at a school in New Orleans, and my MBA is recognized by Harvard but not by the Universidad Nacional in Mexico.

The United States was always familiar territory for me and I always thought it was a place very similar to Mexico, except better. Even so, when, as an adult, I moved to Atlanta for my brand new job at AT&T, I had the impression that I’d moved to China or Romania; that’s how little I really understood my new environment. I never got used to life in Georgia. So, as soon as I could, I found a job at the World Bank and moved to Washington, D.C. I’d been told that the East Coast is a little more traditional and laid back, more like Mexico.

On my first weekend in D.C. I drove up to New York City to see an old high school friend who’d been living in the United States for seven or eight years. It didn’t take more than one tequila for me to start telling him about my troubles. He sat there thinking about it for a minute, then said to me: What do you want me to tell you, ’mano? The USA is a country where soccer is a sport for little girls.

SALIVA

Out of all the connections he’d made at the World Bank, that city within a city, Malik was the closest thing he had to a friend. They’d shared a tiny cubicle when he started at the organization, and they developed an open, easygoing working relationship: they chatted at break time, strolled out together for a midmorning coffee, and shared part of the commute home to the suburbs on the Metro. Their conversations always had something of the comic routine in them, which the other employees in the Development Projects office found a little shocking.

The difference between his relationship with Malik and those he had with the rest of his acquaintances at the Bank lay exclusively in what they talked about. Malik had been born in Sri Lanka and raised in Boston. He was intelligent, cultured, progressive, and nobody among the few who knew him understood very well why he worked there. I’ve got four little savages to feed, was the most he offered as an explanation. The extent of his erudition regarding almost everything showed that he was essentially a reader: between the ruckus from his children and his wife’s Hindu relatives, about whose endless visits he never stopped complaining, he must have spent his afternoons and evenings in some armchair in a little white house with a yard and garden, reading up on world culture.

The problem with gringos, Malik said to him one day, is that they don’t know how to make conversation. They share their opinions when they feel authorized to do so, but they don’t know how to sit down and talk about anything just to talk about it, without getting impatient. In Boston I used to live in the Hindu neighborhood, which is really something else, but since I came to the Washington suburbs, I’m like the deaf-mute of Sidon.

He recognized the Biblical sound of this deaf-mute reference, but he preferred not to ask: on a previous occasion when he’d shown his ignorance about Christian tradition, the Sri Lankan had worn himself out laughing at him. He waited until Malik went to the bathroom to make his ablutions — he was notoriously slow about it — to look up the reference on the Internet. He found it in a moment: it came from the Gospel of St. Mark.

Jesus departed the rich, illustrious, and orthodox region of Tyre, where he had been preaching in synagogues to his own class. He entered the poor Gentile region of the Decapolis, on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, where the people who had heard tell of him were more interested in his shamanic healing powers than in his reputation as a rabbi. During his first day staying in the Decapolis, a large crowd brought to him a man who was a deaf-mute. Resigned to his fame, Jesus drew apart a little from the spectators; he took the man by the shoulders and violently pushed him down onto his knees. He vigorously thrust a finger in the man’s ear. With his free hand he forced open the deaf-mute’s mouth, and in a single motion stretched out the man’s tongue, letting fall on it a drop of his own saliva. He shouted at him Ephphatha! — which means Be opened! — and he tugged on the man’s hands for him to rise. The man thanked him with perfect diction then asked what he could do to repay him. Jesus told him to keep his cure a secret. St. Mark doesn’t say whether or not the man lived the rest of his life in the paradox of pretending to be a deaf-mute, although he relates that the man’s companions didn’t pay much attention to the Nazarene’s orders.

When Malik returned from the bathroom, he was waiting for him with a joke: Ephphatha!, he shouted when he saw him walk through the door, and in case his friend didn’t remember the evangelist’s exact text, he translated: Be opened! The Sri Lankan smiled. I’ve tried to, he added, but it always turns out worse: to be open you need someone who feels like listening, and gringos have enough problems being gringos without trying to listen to others.

A few days after talking with Malik about Jesus curing the man from Sidon, and his paradoxical destiny, the telephone on his desk rang. A secretary informed him that the Bank’s Director of Communications wanted to speak with him, that he should come up to the third floor right away. It was then nine or ten o’clock in the morning and by lunch time he was already cleaning out his desk. He said goodbye to the Sri Lankan, who accompanied him to the elevator carrying a small box, and who did not once stop talking about the relationship between medieval mendicants and the modern day globalophobics who made their lives impossible with their demonstrations and protests.

The Communications Office was much more demanding than the catacombs of Development Projects, so much so that he was forced to alter his habits completely. He had no news about Malik for more than a year, until one day they happened to run into each other at the Middle Eastern kiosk in the Bank’s food court. I haven’t heard a thing about you, he said to his old office companion, a little bit embarrassed because it was obvious who had been the master and who the apprentice, and who should have been the one to call whom. I’m in the same place as always, in the asshole of the building, at the bottom of the ladder. And you? Moving right along: a few months after they called me up to Communications they promoted my boss to be regional director, so now I’m on the fourth floor, in an office with a window. And you must be delighted. Delighted. In this company, the higher up you go the more sinister it gets, so I don’t really envy you. That’s why you’re my hero. I don’t want your admiration, I want money. That’s what I need so I can quit this shitty job. As they walked to a table they caught up on the details of each other’s lives. You’re really skinny, the Sri Lankan told him when they were seated, I’m sure they’ve got you working morning, noon, and night. They do, he answered, but that’s not why. Then it’s from chasing skirts. More or less. Ephphatha!

Since I first accepted the job here and they put me into Development Projects with you, he told him, I was aware that a woman with whom I’d had a very intense relationship many years ago was living in D.C., married to a Bank employee. That was the only thing I knew, and it was only secondhand gossip because I hadn’t been in touch with her since we split up. Then, one day, added the Sri Lankan as if to speed up the story, you ran into her buying milk in the shop on the first floor. No: the day after they promoted me to Communications she just showed up at my office out of nowhere and told me that I hadn’t thanked her. When I recovered from my shock I asked her what for. She explained that she’d spoken about me to her husband and for that reason he’d had me promoted. She sat down in one of the chairs facing my desk and added: I told him that we’d been very close friends. And what are you doing here? I asked her. We’ve got tickets for the opera, but he’s in a meeting. Shall I grab a couple of coffees so we can chat while we wait for him? Go get two coffees. Malik interrupted him, saying, with his eyebrows raised very high: She’s your boss’s wife? Yes. Now I don’t know if I want to hear any more. You sound just like a gringo now. He half closed his eyes and conceded: Ephphatha! then continued: So, then you invited her to have lunch another day. No, I didn’t see her again for two or three months: working in Development Projects leaves you no free time, but in Communications you basically have no personal life at all. So, then? So my boss got promoted to be director for the Pacific Basin and we threw a cocktail party in his honor, at Old Ebbit, a place he really likes because he used to work in the Treasury. On the way to the official appointment ceremony he stopped by my office and told me: I’ll see you at the party, bring your wife along. Is yours coming? I asked him. He raised his hands as though praying to heaven and answered me: She’s been driving me crazy for weeks, telling me how nice it was to see you, and how she’s dying to meet your wife. By now Malik had finished his kebab, and said: So you hooked up with her right in front of everybody. No, it wasn’t me: it just happened. We ended up chatting, and before I knew it we were sharing the same glass. Then she told me that she had a message she’d been keeping for me. What? I asked her. It’s a message that can only be passed through the saliva, she answered. And she pushed you down on your knees, finished Malik, standing up from the table, and she opened your mouth, and she let fall a drop of her holy water on your tongue. That’s a little much, but I guess you might put it that way. The Sri Lankan glanced at his watch and said: I don’t have to leave yet, but the truth is, I don’t want to hear any more.

THERAPY: GRINGOS

Australians were the dregs of British society; their country was a penal colony that became a nation. Besides there being something heroic in that assertion, there’s also a real identification between the land and its occupiers: Australians are from Australia. We gringos can’t even boast that much: we’re the scum of the earth, the leftovers from all the other countries that came looking for a second chance.

It’s nothing to laugh about. You were born here and they convinced you in school that it’s the best country in the world, but sure enough, your father or your grandfather didn’t think that way, did they, because they came from somewhere else.

Isn’t that right?

This country is nameless, and we as its inhabitants have chosen, consciously and consistently, to have no patronymic: Salvadorans are Salvadoran, Chinese are Chinese, and the French are French. Gringos? We’re African Americans, Mexican Americans, Native Americans, German Americans, Irish Americans. A woman at the Bank defines herself as a Bohemian American, and nobody remembers anymore, not even in the Czech Republic, that Bohemia was once a nation under Austro-Hungarian protection. We’re neither an empire, nor a republic, nor a monarchy. We’re nothing: it’s every man for himself because no one wants to belong to the world of second chances. We’re whatever slipped through the cracks of history: pure ambition without any ulterior commitments — a ragtag band of pirates. We’re gringos and we urgently need some national therapy.

Don’t laugh. Think of it as a business opportunity and you’ll see that I’m right.

SAINT BARTHOLOMEW

He told her that he’d gone to church one day and that the Polish baritone had just disappeared, his wife and all their children too: now they hadn’t been to Mass in three weeks.

He said it apropos of nothing, simply to fill up a moment of silence, perfectly aware of the fact that this was the first she was hearing about the singer. It was an incidental sort of anecdote, and he probably thought to bring it up just for a laugh, but it pulsed with something sadder and less explicable: talking on cell phones made him tense because — he thought — it conjures up a frustrating and illusory sense of nearness; information is accelerated but nothing is communicated, at least not in the strict sense of the word. No matter how much you want it to, an empty, disembodied voice does not represent an act of communion. He felt that their calls were like some exam that he had to pass, or simply survive.

Sometimes they talked for a specific reason — to agree on a cover story, to avoid some careless slip — but most of the time they called each other just to call. It was a ritual, an act of acquired, gratuitous risk, something that had begun one day and quickly acquired a life of its own: at one time it would simply have felt right now and then to call, but now it was a ritual, something they’d come to expect. Sometimes it was a good call, sometimes not, but it formed a strand in a vast web of expectations and anxieties to which they were now well accustomed. Perhaps those ten minutes plundered from the wasteland of the day helped them — like going to church — to show each other that they weren’t gringos, not yet, not completely.

They’d been chatting about how the big, full congregations seen at the Spanish Masses were so moving: the preposterously criminal in the same throng as the faithful, he said. Then he explained how, in spite of that, he preferred the cosmopolitan coldness of the nine o’clock Mass — in English: with Filipinos, Lebanese, Irish, Koreans, Italians — because, for one, it was progressive and distinguished; then, for another, it provided him with the opportunity to witness the weekly skirmish in the Polish baritone’s ongoing battle.

Either the singer and his wife were the last gringos attentive to the Vatican’s stance on reproduction or they had learned from the Irish that all triumphs are, in the end, statistical; the Protestants would have to be beaten through sheer numbers. At the Hispanic Mass, their seven unwashed children wouldn’t have seemed such a terrible disaster, but compared to a typical English-speaking family — a few adults and a single child — they were absolutely scandalous. Seven? she asked him, thinking he must be exaggerating. Seven, he answered, five boys and two girls.

Before the watchful eyes of the parish, the clan had grown to an uncontrollable size, and the children’s disarray had naturally increased in direct proportion to their quantity: the younger ones’ clothing had already been worn threadbare by their older siblings, who were also better fed. The mother, a beanpole of suspiciously Calvinistic propriety and severity when times were good, had gone flabby, swollen, and purple beneath some dresses that were, by now, quite snug. The baritone was still red-faced and robust but his beard was badly trimmed and his tennis shoes were a disgrace; the alterations stitched into the underarms of his shirts gave notice of a sudden, unhealthy increase in weight. They would have been a normal enough family in the 1970s, a time when modesty was not yet considered a defect, but among the perfectly trimmed and outfitted congregation at nine o’clock Mass they seemed more like a band of castaways.

There was a time — by now a part of the parish mythology — when the baritone attended Mass from his place on the musicians’ risers, to the right of the altar, his back to the organist, lavishly pouring out his implacable voice alongside a Ugandan woman draped in curtain-like dresses. His proliferating offspring, however, obliged him to move down to mingle with the multitude: his wife found it impossible to maintain order among the children herself. There were three or four unbearable Masses before the singer decided to leave stardom behind, urged forward — it was murmured — by the priest, who could no longer continue casting the pearls of his religious office before a herd of swine being distracted by a bunch of little brats fighting over some completely wornout toy.

The opening section of the first Mass that the baritone spent back on terra firma felt something like a surrender: likely prompted by resentment, he didn’t allow himself to be tempted by the music, and the truth is that he was missed: his singing talent was far too good for a church like that. His children still behaved quite badly, only tempered now by a certain shyness; it seemed that the fat man, who did nothing to control them, only barely commanded their respect. The Ugandan woman sang alone up to the Acclamation, when the Pole couldn’t stand it any longer and quietly, humbly joined in singing with the rest of the faceless congregation. To hear his voice again amid the Hosannas was like a soothing balm: in the end, the main reason for attending Mass during eras when faith seems to be on the wane is to demonstrate that, regardless of how prodigal he has been, the son can always return home; that one is permitted to follow a little in the footsteps of his parents and grandparents.

So, are you taking the girls? she interrupted him. He’d been so focused on sustaining the flow of his narrative that he didn’t see her curveball coming. Where? To church. Of course, he said, it’s good for them, a civilizing influence: the Mass is the story that explains all the other stories, even if I don’t believe in it. I do. I’m jealous. And does she go? Who? Your wife. He hesitated a bit before answering. Sometimes. Isn’t she Lutheran? Yes, and that’s why.

The duet remained stable for a few more Masses: the Ugandan woman on the riser — a goddess in drapery — and the Pole in the pews below, an exiled Romeo. But nothing lasts forever, he said; bound by duty, the Ugandan woman heeded her community’s call, becoming the regular soloist in the choir at the twelve o’clock Mass with its congregation composed of recently arrived African immigrants.

Then the war began. Probably angry because the priest, until he found a different singer, preferred to conduct the ceremony solely with organ music, the baritone began to use his whole voice — trained in who knows what conservatory to fill theaters of Soviet dimensions — with the goal of blowing away the other worshipers who, sparse and timid, tried to follow the organist in their blue psalm books. On the two Sundays that it took the priest to place a substitute on the riser, the Pole launched the same string of provocations. He opened by intoning the antiphon at a barbarous volume that he only increased following the Gloria. By the offertory he had become the lord of all the air in the church, such that he raised or lowered his tone just enough to throw the priest off course — even with a microphone clipped to his cassock, the priest had a very hard time competing with him.

When the moment arrived to exchange the sign of peace, the priest and the congregation had already surrendered, so that the last man standing was the organist, who was also the toughest nut to crack. The baritone’s strategy, nevertheless, was infallible. He faithfully followed the keyboard’s tempo up to the point when he felt that he could flatten it, then unleashed the full power of his voice box, and once he had the melody in his pocket, he slowed or accelerated the time at will. The organist’s bald head glowed red with fury when he discovered — thanks to a slight delay on the parts of the other faithful worshippers — that he had lost control of the music. So that the ceremony wouldn’t lose its solemnity, he had no other remedy but to follow the enemy.

This was the fat man’s moment of glory. Although he and his brood always occupied the front pew on the right-hand side of the nave, they waited until the paterfamilias had won his duel to the death with the organist to stand up and receive Communion. Their approach to the chalice practically stopped the show. The baritone walked slowly behind his wife, bearing the whole rite in his throat, luminous from the effort, and surrounded by his entire retinue of seven children. When his turn came, he cut off his singing, regardless of their place in the psalm, and bowed his head with a sincerely peaceful gesture that he maintained until finishing his prayers. That, in some way, revealed the irreproachably Catholic quality of his mettle: his body, liberated in full triumph over the banality of its earthly battles, was a perfect lesson on the redemptive power of a god supposedly incarnate in human flesh.

When he finished praying, he rose to his feet like a triumphant bullfighter and, before sitting down, gave the congregation a happy look — he supposed they were on his side. The organist received a malevolent smile; although he had already recovered his preeminent position, for the time being, he knew that he’d lost his weekly opportunity to show off his middling flights of virtuosity.

The war of the Polish baritone, he said to her, as if reforming his own front line in preparation for the final assault of the enemy that was the same senseless story he was telling, is the ritual within the ritual found within the walls of Christ the King church. With a certain relief, he heard what sounded like a nasal tone of approval, although it might have just been interference: he usually phoned her from the Starbucks on H Street, two or three blocks from the Bank, to avoid the discomfort of watching her husband walk past while he was trying so hard to make her laugh.

The priest tried various recourses, each time with worse results. He hired a tall old Puritan woman, clean and ugly, hoping that her persistent, piercing high notes would drill through the baritone’s bulk. She was steamrolled during the Kyrie. This woman returned the following Sunday, better armed: the sacristan had set up a microphone for her on the podium, one even better than the priest’s own. When the poor woman began singing the penitential rite, the Pole raised his eyebrows then pulverized her without removing his hands from his pants pockets. The organist’s bald head turned purple as an archbishop’s mantle. After the Puritan woman’s failure there was a very young Jamaican man whose angelic flight through the world was inevitably brought to ground by a flailing plunge from the ethereal heights of the Responsorial Psalm. Then came, in succession, a rosy giant of a man, pink as a pig; the rabid Dominican woman who directed the choir for the Mass in Spanish; and three unflappable Filipino señoras, fearless because they knew no one had any idea what they were singing. Three risers had to be stacked up for them to reach the microphone. It was no use. The Pole continued tyrannizing the Mass with his lungs of steel. Surrounded by his swarming progeny during the slow, majestic procession toward the altar and host, he was the full, vigorous embodiment of Slavic tenacity, destroying tempos and pushing notes to the breaking point.

Then he disappeared. It wasn’t until he said this to her that he really and with clarity saw that he was telling a story with no ending. How? she asked, sounding very intrigued. For a moment this gave him the hope that something real was flowing along those microwaves, same as when they were guided only by the inscrutable, magnetic wisdom of the flesh, with nothing else in between them.

He disappeared, he said, that’s all, nothing else. And? Well, we ended up stuck with the Filipino ladies — they’re frightful. It can’t be. The truth, he answered, is that I really miss him, so much that I went looking for him at Our Lady Queen of Poland. It’s pretty close by. I went to all three morning Masses but there was no sign of him. He disappeared. Maybe he went on vacation, she said. Or he defected to Poland, he responded. Her laughter on the other end of the line made him feel that, in spite of everything, he might be able to save himself.

THERAPY: DUPLICITY

I have the strange and terrible habit of confessing offenses I haven’t committed.

One day, for example, in my hour of deepest sincerity, beweeping our own incarnation of mankind’s fall from grace, I told her that she had not been my only extramarital affair, that I’d had two other lovers. The number I decided on is of particular interest, because I’d never really had any.

But it would be more interesting still to know why I bother doing this. The fact is that, while confessing to these affairs, I was convinced about the veracity of the events in question. But they made no sense: we’re both adults and we’ve been around the block enough times to be freely admitted to the ranks of the “experienced.” My bragging, therefore, was unnecessary. But that’s what I said to her and now I don’t know how to take it back, because my fictional jadedness isn’t consistent with my fears of our being found out.

It’s something I’ve done ever since I was a kid: I pretend to have a secret life, all to myself. Well, now I’ve got it, all right, and nobody else can get in. I’m like the blind man in the Bible: although his sight was restored, he had to pretend that he couldn’t see anything because Jesus Christ himself ordered it.

No, I don’t even know if what I’m saying here is the truth.

FATHER

It was by no means a noteworthy event, but it came back to him whenever he allowed himself enough perspective to consider the more practical than admirable scale of values according to which he had always operated, and that had lately, for lack of opportunity, fallen into disuse. During a New Year’s Eve celebration he’d gone out to the garden to have a smoke. He was with his wife and little girls at his father-in-law’s house in Raleigh — a minor, tepid, nondescript city composed almost entirely of suburbs. A fine frozen rain was falling, which in the southern United States can begin at the end of November and not let up until March or April, without ever turning to snow. He had not yet removed his cigarette lighter from his jacket pocket when he spotted an opossum on the garden fence, just above eye level. It was very young, soaking wet, watching him with a hard, unsettling stare.

As was generally the case, the opossum story came back to him during a peaceful interval: she’d accompanied her husband on a business trip to Hong Kong, a trip he had helped to organize, so his days at the office crawled lazily by, without his boss’s demands for action or his boss’s wife’s need for attention. During that time he checked his e-mail constantly because he knew that a message from her might arrive at any moment. He responded with long, intense letters that always made him feel less lonely while he wrote them, but which ended up being counterproductive. Perhaps because of its visual and sonic potency, the Web made him suppose that he had the world in the palm of his hand, and he was always somewhat disappointed to discover it was not so: despite his being able to read the news from Mexico with the intensity of someone who could still be directly affected by it, she was, in reality, in a Saigon cybercafé, and he was stuck inside the white monster of the World Bank — an air-conditioned Moby Dick — and what lay outside was the District of Columbia.

The story probably wouldn’t have significance for anyone else, even if they knew its secret. There was no way to know, really: he’d told it to his father one day, many months after it had happened to him. He did so in response to a message in which his father had reported that he’d taken his other grandchildren to the zoo in Chapultepec Park, where he’d noted an air of unbearable servitude in the animals’ eyes. As he supposed, the story of the opossum didn’t arouse any reaction: the next message from his father, which arrived almost a week later, was short on animal lore. Perhaps — it had occurred to him while expounding on details completely inappropriate in a letter to the world’s busiest man — he was telling all this to his father as a cry for help: he would have loved to sit down and have a drink with him and ask if he’d ever been in the same situation, but there was an insurmountable protocol separating them, according to whose rules male relatives may not share any information about their emotional lives.

It’s not really unusual to step outside at night and see one of those animals — he wrote his father — but at the same time it’s not so common as to be unworthy of celebration. During the warm seasons of the year, opossums live near some creek or gully; during the cold months, they occupy the blind spaces of the neighborhoods. They’re the cats of the cold, the digestive system of suburbia when it’s freezing out. Big and clumsy, they do their duty with the furtive dignity of the very ugly: they’re the phantoms of an ecosystem sustained by trash cans, the filth in an impeccable white world which is played out in little houses, each with its own garden, that go on and on, perfect and identical, into infinity.

He didn’t want to miss the privilege of having a smoke while contemplating such a strange animal, so he went ahead and lit his cigarette as cautiously as he could. He stood motionless, at a distance, smoking, his gaze fixed on the creature, which never took its eyes off him. When he had only a couple of drags left he decided to move closer: that it might get startled and run away was no longer so important: the cold rain was going to force him back inside the house soon anyway. Cautious as ever, he took a few steps; the opossum remained motionless. It was so young that perhaps it had not yet learned that fear is the basis of experience. He exhaled a final puff of smoke, tucked the cigarette between his thumb and index finger then flicked it away, far from the animal, which barely took its eyes off him long enough to see the burning tip of the butt fly through the air.

Until getting closer, he hadn’t realized that the opossum was barely larger than a rat. He extended his hand, with the palm outstretched, as if it were a puppy. The animal uncurled, shook itself off, and waddled along to the other end of the fence, where it settled down again without once looking away. By now he was trembling from the cold, so he went back into the house.

Inside he found all the nervous preparations for dinner underway. His wife told him to set the table, his regular chore at family celebrations: Latin Creole and Catholic, he had, in the family’s Lutheran landscape, an undisputed touch for livening up the whole presentation; there’s nobody like him when it comes to arranging the instruments of our prosperity, his father-in-law liked to say, with the slightly worried look of those patriarchs whose daughters have moved beyond their reach. The first time he’d set the table, his father-in-law’s wife had stared suspiciously at the splendors of her own board, but over time she’d learned to enjoy the fleeting excess. Shortly after a spring vacation they’d spent in Raleigh, it was her turn to host a meeting of her book club. After setting the table in her own gringo fashion it seemed like a paltry offering, so she redid it, imitating his Creole arrangement: no concealed weapons, everything in sight: the oil, vinegar, salt, pepper, and sauces, the dishes overflowing, the sliced bread laid in its basket, the bottles like gun barrels — one for every three guests — aimed straight up at the ceiling and heaven beyond, and the menacing sugary desserts laid out on the sideboard. Perhaps it was a coincidence, but this dinner turned out to be the most successful one so far. How exciting, said a neighbor, feeling caught between the abundance and her own embarrassment.

When he wrote to his father, he was aware that what he’d be looking for in his son’s messages were stories about the girls — he adored them because they were gringas but also never stopped worrying that they were too gringo. He knew that his father printed out his messages and took them home to read to his mother, and that she fantasized for days over the paragraphs about how her granddaughters were growing. For this reason he took special care to mention how the older girl, who was about to turn five years old that New Year’s, helped him as best she could with the unbreakable table utensils. The younger girl was still just a baby, and really didn’t do much of anything, so at the end he added a paragraph about an imaginary cough that she’d just gotten over.

Their New Year’s Eve celebration went on as usual, as he related in the e-mail: they ate dinner, and after putting the little girls to bed, turned on the television and sat down together to watch the countdown to midnight. As the year’send special didn’t look very promising, they made a strong pot of coffee to help them stay awake and keep the party going for three more hours. He took the last of his coffee outside with him when he went to have another smoke. The opossum was still there, trembling from cold and fear.

When he went back inside he mentioned his discovery. The first time he hadn’t said anything, but this second encounter now struck him as odd. With his in-laws he didn’t take the same perverse pleasure in reflecting on recycling and the filth in the suburban ecosystems as he did several months later in his e-mail to his father: in English, in the provinces, musing without specific meaning sounded like intellectualizing, suspiciously lacking in sincerity and simplicity. He said that there was an opossum crawling on the fence, that it was very young, that it had probably come down from a tree and couldn’t get back up to safety in the branches. Hardly looking away from the screen, his in-laws mentioned that there was plenty of wildlife in the neighborhood thanks to the creek nearby. The presence of opossums was a good sign because they ate snakes. His wife appeared a bit more interested: she was moved by the idea that it was a young animal. Are we going to help it get down? she asked him, but he had already surrendered to the spell of the TV and didn’t feel like getting wet again. It’s just got to get up the nerve to jump down to the grass, that’s all, he said. His father-in-law observed that, no matter what, it would be neither safe nor hygienic to try to trap it, not just like that, without any preparations. If it was still there in the morning, they would go outside with the necessary equipment to help it.

That exchange, on the other hand, he chose not to share with his father because it wasn’t his habit to complain. He kept writing, explaining how, with just twenty minutes remaining until midnight, he got up for the third time. He knew that he wasn’t going to have another smoke until just before going to bed because of what was coming up — they would wait for the clock on TV to strike midnight, followed by a very awkward round of embraces, then share a bottle of champagne so slowly that the glasses got warm while watching the stars on this or that TV special.

As he came back into the room, his wife asked him if the opossum was still stuck on the fence. He said yes. Partly out of genuine curiosity — all recurrent history is always noteworthy — partly because the slow, pleasant moments of letting their meal settle had passed, and partly because the mounting series of commercials at midnight, one after another, made the programming unbearable, the problem now received the whole family’s attention. His wife thought that all the fireworks at midnight were going to give the poor animal a fatal heart attack, and that was reason enough to spur them into action. His father-in-law accompanied him back outside and confirmed that the opossum was still trapped by the height of the fence. He disappeared a moment in the direction of the toolshed and returned carrying a board. He’d put a cap on his head and had some yellow, wool-lined, waterproof overalls covering his clothes. It’s my winter gear, he said, leaning the board up against the wall so he could zip himself up to the neck and put on his gloves. He had another pair in the back pocket of his overalls. He held them out to his son-in-law in case he needed help. Between the two of them they carried the board and propped it up to make a ramp from the top of the fence down to the grass. That’s it, said his father-in-law with satisfaction, it can get down by itself, nobody needs to touch it. They got back in the house with more than enough time to drink their toast and share that hug.

He smoked his last cigarette a little before one o’clock in the morning. The opossum had disappeared, so he removed the board and put it back in the toolshed. Once in bed, his wife looked up for a moment from the pages of the enormous biography of John Adams she was reading and asked him about the animal. He was touched that she thought to ask about the little drama in which he’d played the starring role. It crossed the bridge we set up for it, he responded, and it’s free. She smiled and kissed him. See, you were a hero. She turned back to her book. He’d started to concentrate on the case study about Ecuadoran fishing disputes that he’d brought to read when his wife looked up again. Poor animal, she said, it must be thinking that it made such a great escape.

THERAPY: THERAPY

Meanness and selfishness are the only values that count in a society that prides itself on being composed of immigrants. That’s why, sooner or later, all of us gringos end up going to therapy. In a world like this one, the only way to get someone to listen to you is by paying them to do it.

WHITE

During Major League postseason playoffs, time all across the country comes to a halt when a game starts. The one that evening wound up in a tie at the top of the ninth inning, and ended up going on until well after midnight. The twelfth inning was so tense that he didn’t even take a sip of the gin and tonic he’d mixed himself to drink while he watched. When the game ended, he added some fresh ice and stayed up a little while longer, enjoying the singular freedom that comes from being awake in a house where everyone else is asleep. There was nothing else worth watching on TV, so he switched off the set and reached for the bookshelf to pick up the video camera he’d bought last winter.

He turned it on, rewound the tape a little, and pressed the play button. On the plasma screen a pure white color appeared, then a blue strip in the upper part of the frame. The vibration of the strip made it clear that the camera was moving, although the big white patch remained static. After a few seconds some vertical bars that he was slow to recognize as trees moved in and out of the frame. At last his own face appeared, talking about the snow and the cold. It was part of a documentary that the girls had filmed on a visit downtown during the record snowfall, which was the very reason for their buying the camera.

Those were unusual, noteworthy days: his wife was out of town, gone to be with her mother in Philadelphia where the latter was recovering from an operation. He was left to contend with their two young daughters and the heavy weather alone.

The snow began falling around noon on a Tuesday already filled with anticipation. He was seated at his desk editing a report, blinds drawn to block the light reflecting off the computer screen, when his boss appeared: It’s already started snowing, he told him, and it’s heavy. I’m gonna stay late because I’ve got a conference call with the consultants in San Francisco, but I can walk home if they close the Metro. You should head home now. You can send me the report by e-mail.

When he found himself alone in his office he opened the blinds wide. What he liked about the beginning of a snowstorm was the fact that the enormous agitation produced by people getting their errands done before all the businesses closed kept the streets completely full. The panorama offered a fleeting illusion: the sky above dissolving into a ferocious whiteness that threatened all the colors of life down below. Getting up, he made sure that his boss had gone back into his office then discreetly closed the door to his own. He called her number on his cell phone; she was just leaving a benefit luncheon nearby. He looked at his watch: it was a few minutes after one o’clock. They arranged to see each other, even though it was just for a short while before he headed back to the suburbs. Then he called his house and told the Argentine woman who looked after the children that he had to attend a business meeting, but that he would be home early.

It snowed heavily without stopping all through the night — all of Wednesday, and half of Thursday. The snowflakes were the size of walnuts, at times. The temperature stayed well below freezing, so that the snow piled up steadily without slowing down.

What was at first celebrated as a blessing — in Washington, D.C., schools, banks, and the federal government all shut down at the slightest threat of inclement weather — became, after the first twelve hours, a cause for concern: the first morning he had to climb out of the house through the windows to shovel away the snow that didn’t stop falling, and then keep clearing it away every little while to keep open their only exit. He dug an exhausting system of tunnels out from the front door so that they could reach the trash cans — the kitchen door remained blocked — and to get to the toolshed, where he kept the sleds and other snow toys. The car, which they never parked in the garage, was completely buried, and the whole street was a snowdrift that reached up to his chest and was well over his older daughter’s head.

On Wednesday, starting early in the morning, they had a fantastic time, sledding down the hills in the park. The forced break brought on by the snow put the whole neighborhood into a mood unlike any he’d seen before. All his neighbors gathered on the slopes, in such a way that the upper part of the hill looked like a beach: dozens of adults and their dogs watching children sliding down deep into a white sea. In the afternoon, back at the house, they raised an igloo and built a giant snowman, then glutted themselves on hot chocolate. After putting the girls to bed he spoke on the phone with his wife: he was getting worried that the county workers had not yet begun plowing the streets.

On Thursday they took things easier: they watched cartoons all morning before going out to play. Then they opened up the igloo, whose doorway had become buried during the night. They tracked, without much luck, the paw prints of some hungry raccoon that had been foraging in the yard for food. After lunch they noticed that it had stopped snowing and the sun was just peeking through, so they went to go sledding again. Lacking the energy of the day before, they soon returned to the house, where they watched cartoons the rest of the afternoon. The girls were delighted to have sausages for dinner a second time, but he wasn’t so thrilled: he was getting fed up with his own lousy cooking. They didn’t hear the roar of a snowplow that day either.

On Friday he spent the morning digging out the car, possessed by the hope that they would soon be clearing the street. In the afternoon they dragged the sleds to the hill, but after sliding down the first time they noticed how difficult it was to climb back up because the snow had turned to a sheet of ice. They made snow angels on the park’s basketball court, then almost got hypothermia pretending to be Eskimos living in the igloo. They watched all the cartoons on TV. For dinner, he thawed out some hamburgers.

They were out of juice, but still had enough things for breakfast, lunch, and dinner through Sunday. If the snowplow didn’t come by then to clear their street, on Monday he and the two girls were going to have to make a big supermarket run on the bus. The very thought of such a trip seemed nightmarish: the emergency route used by public transit was four blocks away, a distance he would not normally have minded walking, but the idea of hauling the shopping bags through such deep snow struck him as actually frightening.

Sunday morning was, frankly, abysmal. After lunch — he was washing the dishes from their lunch of tuna and saltines — his older daughter realized that they had not taken any pictures of the igloo to show their mother, so they got out the camera only to discover that it had no film. Let’s go buy some, he told them, with the joy of one surprised to find himself set free. He dressed them as if they were going on an expedition to the North Pole and they walked to the Metro station; even though it was a little bit farther than the bus stop, it took them right to the shopping mall.

Life there seemed to be following its normal routine. They spent the afternoon buying snacks, thankful for the novelty of the scene. At some point they sat down to have an ice cream and he realized that he had not seen a black person since Tuesday, nor any Arabs, Hindus, Asians, or Mexicans: only his own neighbors, whiter than ever for the wintertime lack of sunshine. The folksy look of the gangbangers at the next table sporting their NFL jerseys and clownish sneakers was comforting to him. As the afternoon wore on, the girls proposed getting a video camera to tape a report. So they went to buy it. Tomorrow, he told them as he was paying, we’re going skating at the rink, if school’s still out, and we’ll do our shooting then.

He didn’t like watching himself on the screen — his face looked wider and flatter than it did in the mirror and he couldn’t even recognize his profile — so he rewound the tape until he found a part that he had shot himself. He located it right away and then kept rewinding. He saw the girls walking backward into the door of the skating rink at the sculpture garden, the confusion of the people skating backward and the girls among them, holding hands, cracking up laughing and picking themselves up from the ice every now and then. He saw them taking off their skates and putting on their sneakers in reverse order, leaving backward through the entry and saying hello to the camera. Then followed random sequences of the white capital.

The shots stopped their dizzying advance at an unusual moment that he had completely forgotten: in the middle of one frame there was a pickup truck perched whimsically on a snowdrift about three feet tall, high enough so that the truck wouldn’t have had enough traction to drive over it. He took his finger off the rewind button and listened to his own voice discussing with the girls the impossibility of what they were seeing. He heard himself say that it was so strange it seemed as if the truck had been lowered from a helicopter.

By that time he had spent several days meditating on the spectacle of the snow and the purification ritual it performs in a society that believes itself born to rule by virtue of race. With the snow just starting to fall, he had glimpsed in the distance, from a room on the fifth floor of the Washington Hotel, the snowy landscape of Pennsylvania Avenue, ostentatiously white by nature: the White House and the Treasury building in the foreground, the narrow, foreshortened canyon between the museums along the Mall, Congress at the far end — all marble. Seen from above, it had occurred to him, the city had the quality of a poisoned dessert. What? she asked — they were leaning on the inside sill of the closed window, their hips, shoulders, arms touching, nothing in between. He said that for the rest of the East Coast it was just a big blizzard, but in the capital it was Mother Nature’s affirmation of Manifest Destiny. She laughed and asked him when he’d stopped being pro-Yankee. Since you started working at the World Bank? Since I became a gringo, he replied. She added that he was imagining things. Why had he bothered to become a citizen if he was just going to complain about it? The only thing wrong with you, she concluded, is that you work too much. Just like my husband. Then she sent him home: You’ve got to go; the girls will start to worry.

Now down in the Metro, nearly deserted, he found a little folded paper inside his eyeglass case. It was a note written on a tiny white circular sheet, like a communion host, perhaps slightly larger. He unfolded it, knowing that it was a message from her: she always left him notes written on her own delicate stationery. He read the words, printed in a Catholic schoolgirl’s writing: Tonight I’ll step out on the balcony and open my mouth, each snowflake a drop of your semen. He considered it for a moment, folded it back up and ate it: he usually disposed of the evidence immediately, even when, as in the subway car, there was no trash can.

By five o’clock in the afternoon it was completely dark and he was already back home — his house felt increasingly like a shirt that was out of fashion. Between the girls’ excitement and the TV news announcement that buses throughout the county would stop running at nine o’clock, the Argentine babysitter was hysterical. He sent her home with a generous tip.

He played the video to see if he could recognize in the shots taken at the skating rink the men they would later identify as the owners of the pickup stuck on the snowdrift. The screen was too small and the throng of skaters too thick for him to spot them. The one thing he was sure of was that they had filmed the moment when they freed the truck from the pile of snow, so he pressed the fast forward button.

The owners of the truck had caught their attention before they even knew who they were. At the shopping mall they would have passed by unnoticed, but at the skating rink filled with white people coursing over the white ice among the white monuments, they stood out scandalously. They were four heavyset guys who looked very much alike and called each other güey—“dude”—something only a Mexican would say.

When the girls got tired, long before the two-hour skate rental was up, actually a little too quickly, considering the long ride on public transit from the suburbs, he took them to have some hot chocolate at the cafeteria across from the skating rink. They waited until they warmed up again before heading back to the Metro. On their way there, they saw the fat guys again, walking along like four giant penguins in their high-visibility jackets.

In a low voice he mentioned to his older daughter how clownish the four men looked. It was thanks to people like that, she told him, that kids at school gave her a hard time for being a Mexican’s daughter. The fat men kept walking until the next block where they stopped in front of the pickup truck. One of them took the keys out of his pocket with boyish pride while the others joked around. It can’t be, he said to his daughter: my Mexican brothers are the owners. God only knows how they got it up on that snowbank, but there’s no way they can get it down and drive it out of there. His youngest daughter had gotten a little bit ahead of them; he shouted her name so she would stop: he wanted to enjoy the spectacle of the fat guys watching the traction fail on their cowboy pickup.

He pulled out the video camera and shot the scene, which he now watched again with disbelief: without any of them having to give orders, the four tubby figures soon stopped fooling around and separated; each took up a position at a corner of the pickup. The one with the keys in his hand — who had stayed in front, on the driver’s side — counted to three and they began to rock up and down in the snow, first raising the truck’s front bumper for a brief instant, then the rear: after each bounce, they whistled to signal the next movement. In less than ten seconds — he counted them as he watched the video — the truck had been freed from the snowbank and was back on the pavement. The four Mexicans took off their jackets and got into the cab, where the driver had already been running the heater. It was obvious that, once, inside the truck, they went off having just as much fun as they’d been having outside: they were what they were.

In that moment the image went all shaky for a few seconds before he himself appeared in the frame. It seemed that his daughter had asked him for the camera, or that he had handed it to her, because he could see himself searching through his wallet for their Metro tickets. When he looked back at the camera, his face wore a bitter expression; he said that he couldn’t stop thinking about his Odyssey, stuck fast in the pristine suburban snow.

He took a swallow of his gin and tonic, thinking that if they were already onto the third game of the World Series, it was just a question of weeks, a month and a half at the most, before it started snowing again. He watched himself with disgust, gesturing within the plasma screen, and said: Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince. He shut off the camera.