War by Candlelight: Stories

absence

On his second day in New York, Wari walked around Midtown looking halfheartedly for the airline office. He’d decided to forget everything. It was an early September day; the pleasant remains of summer made the city warm and inviting. He meandered in and out of sidewalk traffic, marveled at the hulking mass of the buildings, and confirmed, in his mind, that the city was the capital of the world. On the train, he’d seen break dancing and heard Andean flutes. He’d watched a Chinese man play a duet with Beethoven on a strange electronic harmonica. In Times Square, a Dominican man danced a frenetic merengue with a life-size doll. The crowds milled about, smiling, tossing money carelessly at the dancer, laughing when his hands slipped lustily over the curve of the doll’s ass.

Wari didn’t arrive at the airline office that day; he didn’t smile at any nameless woman across the counter, or reluctantly pay the $100 fine to have his ticket changed. Instead he wandered, passed the time in intense meditation upon the exotic, upon the city, its odors and gleaming surfaces, and found himself in front of a group of workers digging a hole in the sidewalk at the base of a skyscraper. He sat down to have lunch and watch them. With metal-clawed machines they bored expertly though concrete. Wari had made a sandwich uptown that morning, and he ate distractedly now. The people passed in steady streams, bunching at corners and swarming across intersections the instant a light changed. From a truck, the men brought a thin sapling and lowered it into their newly dug hole. They filled it with dirt. Trees to fill holes, Wari thought, amused, but they weren’t done. The workers smoked cigarettes and talked loudly among themselves and then one of them brought a wheelbarrow piled high with verdant grass cut into small squares. Sod. They laid the patches of leafy carpet out around the tree. Just like that. In the time it took Wari to eat, a hole was emptied and filled, a tree planted and adorned with fresh green grass. A wound created in the earth; a wound covered, healed, beautified. It was nothing. The city moved along, unimpressed, beneath a bright, late-summer sky.

He walked a little more and stopped in front of a group of Japanese artists drawing portraits for tourists. They advertised their skill with careful renderings of famous people, but Wari could only recognize a few. There was Bill Clinton and Woody Allen, and the rest were generically handsome in a way that reminded Wari of a hundred actors and actresses. It was the kind of work he could do easily. The artists’ hands moved deftly across the parchment, shading here and there in swift strokes. Crowds slowed to watch, and the portraitists seemed genuinely oblivious, glancing up at their clients every now and then to make certain they weren’t making any mistakes. When the work was done, the customer always smiled and seemed surprised at finding his own likeness on the page. Wari smiled too, found it folkloric, like everything he had seen so far in the city, worth remembering, somehow special in a way he couldn’t yet name.

Wari had been invited to New York for an exhibit; serendipity, an entire chain of events born of a single conversation in a bar with an American tourist named Eric, a red-haired Ph.D. student in anthropology and committed do-gooder. He had acceptable Spanish and was a friend of a friend of Wari’s who was still at the university. Eric and Wari had talked about Guayasamín and indigenous iconography, about cubism and the Paracas textile tradition of the Peruvian coast. They’d shared liter bottles of beer and laughed as their communication improved with each drink, ad-hoc Spanglish and pencil drawings on napkins. Eventually Eric made an appointment to see Wari’s studio. He’d taken two paintings back to New York and set up an exhibit through his department. Everything culminated in an enthusiastic e-mail and an invitation on cream-colored bond paper. Wari had mulled it over for a few weeks, then spent most of his savings on a round-trip ticket. It was the only kind they sold. Once in New York and settled in, Wari buried the return ticket in the bottom of his bag, as if it were something radioactive. He didn’t know what else to do with it. That first night, when the apartment had stilled, Wari dug into the suitcase and examined it. It had an unnatural density for a simple piece of paper. He dreamed that it glowed.

Wari found Leah, his host’s girlfriend, making pasta. It was still light out, and Eric wasn’t home yet. Wari wanted to explain exactly what he had seen and why it had impressed him, but he didn’t have the words. She didn’t speak Spanish but made up for it by smiling a lot and bringing him things. A cup of tea, a slice of toast. He accepted everything because he wasn’t sure how to refuse. His English embarrassed him. While the water boiled, Leah stood at the edge of the living room. “Good day?” she said. “Did you have a good day?”

Wari nodded.

“Good,” she said. She brought him the remote to the television, then turned into the small kitchen. Wari sat on the sofa and flipped through the channels, not wanting to be rude. He could hear Leah humming a song to herself. Her jeans were slung low on her hips. Wari made himself watch the television. Game shows, news programs, talk shows; trying to understand gave him a headache, and so he settled on a baseball game, which he watched with the volume down. The game was languid and hard to follow and, before long, Wari was asleep.

When he awoke, there was a plate of food in front of him. Leah was at the sink, washing her dish. Eric was home. “Buenas noches!” he called out grandly. “Good game?” He pointed at the television. Two players chatted on the mound, their faces cupped in their gloves.

“Yes,” said Wari. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes.

Eric laughed. “The Yanks gonna get it back this year,” he said. “They’re the white team.”

“I’m sorry,” was all Wari could offer.

They spoke for a while in Spanish about the details of the exhibit, which was opening in two days. Wari’s canvases stood against the wall, still wrapped in brown paper and marked FRAGILE. They would hang them tomorrow. “Did you want to work while you were here?” Eric asked. “I mean, paint? At my department, they said they could offer you a studio for a few weeks.”

That had everything to do with the radioactive ticket interred at the bottom of his suitcase. Wari felt a tingling in his hands. He’d brought no brushes or paints or pencils or anything. He had no money for art supplies. He guessed it would be years before he would again. What would it be like not to paint?

“No, thank you,” Wari said in English. He curled his fingers into a fist.

“Taking a vacation, huh? That’s good. Good for you, man. Enjoy the city.”

Wari asked about phone cards, and Eric said you could get them anywhere and cheap. Any bodega, corner store, pharmacy, newsstand. “We’re connected,” he said, and laughed. “Sell them right next to the Lotto tickets. You haven’t called home?”

Wari shook his head. Did they miss him yet?

“You should.” Eric settled into the couch. Leah had disappeared into the bedroom.

His host spoke to the flickering television while Wari ate.

The American embassy sits hunched against a barren mountain in a well-to-do suburb of Lima. It is an immense bunker with the tiled exterior of a fancy bathroom, its perimeter gate so far from the actual building that it would take a serious throw to hit even its lowest floor with a rock. A line gathers out front each morning before dawn, looping around the block, a hopeful procession of Peruvians with their sights on Miami or Los Angeles or New Jersey or anywhere. Since the previous September, after the attacks, the embassy had forced the line even farther out, beyond blue barricades, to the very edge of the wide sidewalk. Then there’d been a car bomb in March to welcome the visiting American president. Ten Peruvians had died, including a thirteen-year-old boy unlucky enough to be skateboarding near the embassy at exactly the wrong moment. His skull had been pierced by shrapnel. Now the avenue was closed to all but official traffic. The line was still there, every morning except Sundays, in the middle of the empty street.

Before his trip, Wari presented his letter and his fees and his paperwork. Statements of property, financials, university records, a list of exhibitions and gallery openings, certificates of birth and legal documents regarding a premature marriage and redemptive divorce. The entirety of his twenty-seven years, on paper. The centerpiece, of course, was Eric’s invitation on letterhead from his university. Eric had let him know that this wasn’t any old university. Wari gathered that he should say the name of the institution with reverence and all would know its reputation. Eric had assured him it would open doors.

Instead the woman said: We don’t give ninety-day visas anymore.

Through the plastic window, Wari tried pointing at the invitation, at its gold letters and elegant watermark, but she wasn’t interested. Come back in two weeks, she said.

He did. In his passport, Wari found a one-month tourist visa.

At the airport in Miami, Wari presented his paperwork once more, his passport and, separately, the invitation in its gilded envelope. To his surprise, the agent sent him straightaway to an interview room, without even glancing at the documents. Wari waited in the blank room, recalling how a friend had joked: “Remember to shave or they’ll think you’re Arab.” Wari’s friend had celebrated the remark by shattering a glass against the cement floor of the bar. Everyone had applauded. Wari could feel the sweat gathering in the pores on his face. He wondered how bad he looked, how tired and disheveled. How dangerous. The stale, recycled air from the plane compartment was heavy in his lungs. He could feel his skin darkening beneath the fluorescent lights.

An agent came in, shooting questions in English. Wari did his best. “An artist, eh?” the agent said, examining the paperwork.

Wari folded his fingers around an imaginary brush and painted circles in the air.

The agent waved Wari’s gesture away. He looked through the papers, his eyes settling finally on the bank statement. He frowned.

“You’re going to New York?” he asked. “For a month?”

“In Lima, they give to me one month,” Wari said carefully.

The agent shook his head. “You don’t have the money for that kind of stay.” He looked at the invitation and then pointed to the paltry figure at the bottom of the bank statement. He showed it to Wari, who muffled a nervous laugh. “Two weeks. And don’t get any ideas,” the agent said. “That’s generous. Get your ticket changed when you get to New York.”

He stamped Wari’s burgundy passport with a new visa and sent him on his way.

At baggage claim, Wari found his paintings in a stack next to an empty carousel. He made his way through customs, answering more questions before being let through. He waited patiently while they searched his suitcase, rifling through his clothes. His paintings were inspected with great care, and here the golden letter finally served a purpose. Customs let him through. Wari felt dizzy, the shuffling noise of the airport suddenly narcotic, sleep calling him to its protective embrace. Ninety days is a humane length of time, he thought. Enough time to come to a decision and find its cracks. To look for work and organize contingencies. To begin imagining the permanence of good-byes. It wasn’t as if Wari had nothing to lose. He had parents, a brother, good friends, a career just beginning in Lima, an ex-wife. If he left it behind? Even a month spent in meditation — ambling about a new city, working out the kinks of a foreign language — might be space enough to decide. But two weeks? Wari thought it cruel. He counted days on his fingers: twenty-four hours after his paintings came down, he would be illegal. Wari had imagined that the right decision would appear obvious to him, if not right away, then certainly before three months had passed. But there was no chance of clarity in fourteen days. Wari walked through the Miami airport as if he’d been punched in the face. His feet dragged. He made his flight to La Guardia just as the doors were closing, and was stopped again at the jetway, his shoes examined by a plastic-gloved woman who refused to return his weak smiles. On the plane, Wari slept with his face flush against the oval window. There was nothing to see anyway. It was an overcast day in South Florida, no horizon, no turquoise skies worthy of postcards, nothing except the gray expanse of a wing and its contrails, blooming at the end like slivers of smoke.

Leah woke him with apologies. “I have to work,” she said softly. “You couldn’t have slept through it anyway.” She smiled. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail. She smelled clean. Leah made jewelry, and his bedroom, which was actually the living room, was also her workshop.

“Is okay,” Wari said, sitting up on the couch, taking care to hide his morning erection.

Leah grinned as Wari fumbled awkwardly with the sheet. “I’ve seen plenty of that, trust me,” she said. “I wake up with Eric every morning.”

Wari felt his face turn red. “Is lucky,” he said.

She laughed.

“Where is? Eric?” he asked, cringing at his pronunciation.

“Studying. Work. He teaches undergrads. Young students,” she said, translating young, in gestures, as small.

Wari pictured Eric, with his wide, pale face and red hair, teaching miniature people, tiny humans who looked up to him for knowledge. He liked that Leah had tried. He understood much more than he could say, but how could she know that?

He watched her for a while, filing metal and twisting bands of silver into circles. He liked the precision of her work, and she didn’t seem to mind him. Leah burnished a piece, filed and sanded, bent metal with tools that seemed too brusque for her delicate hands. She held a hammer with authority, she was a woman with purpose. It was a powerful display. “I’m finishing up,” she said finally, “and then you can come with me. I know a Peruvian you can talk to.”

He showered and ate a bowl of cold cereal before they left for downtown. The Peruvian she knew was named Fredy. She didn’t know where he was from exactly, though she was sure he’d told her. Fredy worked a street fair on Canal. Leah had won him over with a smile a few years before, and now he let her sell her jewelry on consignment. Every couple of weeks, she went down with new stuff, listened as Fredy catalogued what had sold and what hadn’t, and to his opinionated take on why. He lived in New Jersey now, Leah said, and had married a Chinese woman. “They speak to each other in broken English. Isn’t that amazing?”

Wari agreed.

“It must say something about the nature of love, don’t you think?” Leah asked. “They have to trust each other so completely. That window of each other that they know in English is so small compared to everything they are in their own language.”

Wari wondered. The train rattled on its way downtown. But it’s always like that, he wanted to say, you can never know anyone completely. Instead he was silent.

“Do you understand me when I speak?” Leah asked. “If I speak slowly?”

“Of course,” Wari said, and he did, but felt helpless to say much more. He noted the descending numbered streets at every stop, and followed their subterranean progress on the map. A sticker covered the southern end of the island. They got off before they reached that veiled area. On Canal, only a few blocks was enough to remind Wari of Lima: that density, that noise, that circus. The air was swollen with foreign tongues. He felt comfortable in a way, but didn’t mind at all when Leah took his arm and led him swiftly through the crowds of people. He bumped shoulders with the city, like walking against a driving rain.

Fredy turned out to be Ecuadorian, and Leah couldn’t hide her embarrassment. She turned a rose color that reminded Wari of the dying light at dusk. Wari and Fredy both reassured her it was nothing.

“We’re brother countries,” Fredy said.

“We share border and history,” said Wari.

The Ecuadorian was all obsequious smiles, spoke of the peace treaty that was signed only a few years before. Wari played along, shook Fredy’s hand vigorously until Leah seemed at ease with her mistake. Then she and Fredy talked business, haggling in a teasing way that seemed more like flirting, and of course Leah won. When this was finished, she excused herself, and drifted away to the other stands, leaving Wari and Fredy alone.

When she was out of earshot, Fredy turned to Wari. “Don’t ask me for work, compadre,” he said, frowning. “It’s hard enough for me.”

Wari was taken aback. “Who asked you for work? I’ve got work, cholo.”

“Sure you do.”

Wari ignored him, inspected the table laid out with small olive forks bent into ridiculous earrings. At the other end, there were black-and-white photos of Andean peaks, silvery and snowcapped, and others of ruined fortresses of stone and colonial churches. The scenes were devoid of people: landscapes or buildings or scattered rocks carved by Incas, unified by their uninhabited emptiness. “There’s no people,” Wari said.

“They emigrated,” sneered Fredy.

“This shit sells?”

“Good enough.”

“That’s my girl, you know,” Wari said all of a sudden, and he liked the tone of the lie, the snap of it, and the way the Ecuadorian looked up, surprised.

“The gringa?”

“Yeah.”

“I bet she is,” said Fredy.

Then two customers appeared, a young woman with her boyfriend. Fredy switched to English, heavily accented but quite acceptable, and pointed to various objects, suggesting earrings that matched the woman’s skin tone. She tried on a pair, Fredy dutifully held the mirror up for her, her distracted boyfriend checking out the photos. Wari wondered where Leah had gone off to. The woman turned to him. “What do you think?” she asked, looking back and forth between Wari and Fredy.

“Is very nice,” Wari said.

“Like a million bucks,” said Fredy.

“Where’s this from?” she asked, fingering the lapis lazuli stone.

“Peru,” said Wari.

Fredy shot him a frown. “From the Andes,” he said.

“Trev,” she called to her boyfriend. “It’s from Peru! Isn’t it nice?”

She pulled out a twenty and Fredy made change. He wrapped the earrings in tissue paper and handed her a card. The couple walked away, chatting. Wari and Fredy didn’t speak.

Leah reappeared and Wari made sure to touch her, thoughtlessly, as if it meant nothing at all. He could feel Fredy watching them, studying each of their movements. “Did you tell Fredy about your opening?” she asked Wari.

He shook his head. “So modest,” Leah said and filled in the details and, to his delight, exaggerated its importance and weight. Wari felt like a visiting dignitary, someone famous.

Wari put his arm around Leah. She didn’t stop him. Fredy said it would be difficult to make it.

“Okay, but maybe?” she asked.

“Please come,” added Wari, not worrying about his pronunciation.

Leaving is no problem. It’s exciting actually; in fact, it’s drug. It’s the staying gone that will kill you. This is the handed-down wisdom of the immigrant. You hear it from the people who wander home, after a decade away. You hear about the euphoria that passes quickly; the new things that lose their newness and, soon after, their capacity to amuse you. Language is bewildering. You tire of exploring. Then the list of things you miss multiplies beyond all reason, nostalgia clouding everything: in memory, your country is clean and uncorrupt, the streets are safe, the people universally warm, and the food consistently delicious. The sacred details of your former life appear and reappear in strange iterations, in a hundred waking dreams. Your pockets fill with money, but your heart feels sick and empty.

Wari was prepared for all this.

In Lima, he rounded up a few friends and said his good-byes. Tentative, equivocal good-byes. Good-byes over drinks, presented as jokes, gentle laughter before the poof and the vanishing — that Third World magic. I may be back, he told everyone, or I may not. He moved two boxes of assorted possessions into the back room of his parents’ house. He took a few posters off the walls, covered the little holes with Wite-Out. He encouraged his mother to rent out his room for extra money if he didn’t come home in a month. She cried, but just a little. His brother wished him luck. Wari offered a toast to family at Sunday dinner and promised to come home one day soon. He embraced his father and accepted the crisp $100 bill the old man slipped into his hand. And in the last days before leaving, Wari and Eric exchanged feverish e-mails, ironing out the fine points of the exhibit: the exact size of the canvases, the translated bio, the press release. All the formalities of a real opening, but for Wari, it was so much noise and chatter. The only solid things for him were the ticket and the runway and the plane and the obligatory window seat for a last, fading view of Lima. The desert purgatory, the approaching northern lights.

I’m ready, he thought.

And if no one questioned him, it’s because the logic was self-evident. What would he do there? How long could he live at home? A divorced painter, sometime teacher — what does an artist do in a place like that? In America, you can sweep floors and make money, if you’re willing to work — you are willing to work, aren’t you, Wari?

Yes, I am.

At anything? Outdoor work? Lifting, carting, cleaning?

Anything.

And that was it. What other questions were there? He’d be fine.

Only his mother gave voice to any concerns. “Is it about Elie?” she asked a few days before he traveled. Wari had been expecting this question. Elie, his ex-wife, whom he loved and whom he hated. At least there were no children to grow up hating him. Wari was relieved it was over, believed she must be as well.

“No, Ma,” he said. “It has nothing to do with her.”

So his mother smiled and smiled and smiled.

In Eric’s apartment, Wari daydreamed. He dressed up the lie about Leah. He lay on the couch, composing e-mails about her to his friends back home, describing the shape of her body, the colors of her skin. The solution to his fourteen-day quandary: marry her and stay, marry her and go. Marry her and it would be all the same. He imagined falling in love in monosyllables, in nods and smiles and meaningful gestures. Telling Leah the story of his life in pictograms: His modest family home. The drab, charcoal colors of his native city. His once-happy marriage and its dissolving foundations, crumbling from the inside into a perfect parody of love. It was early afternoon and Leah readied herself for a wait-ressing job. The shower ran. Through the thin walls he could hear the sound of the water against her body. Her light brown hair went dark when it was wet. He closed his eyes and pictured her naked body. Then Elie’s. Wari turned on the television, let its noise fill the living room. Almost a year from the attacks, and the inevitable replays had begun. He changed the channel, his mind wandered: Fredy on a train home to his Chinese wife, wondering if what Wari had boasted of was true. Elie, somewhere in Lima, not even aware he was gone. Leah, in the shower, not thinking of him. On every channel, buildings collapsed in clouds of dust, and Wari watched on mute, listening hopefully to Leah’s water music.

Wari rapped twice on the wooden door. This was years ago. “Chola,” he called to the woman who would be his wife. “Chola, are you there?”

But Elie wasn’t there. She’d left the music on loud to discourage burglars. She lived in Magdalena, a crumbling district by the sea, in a neighborhood of stereos playing loudly in empty apartments. Fourteen-year-old kids cupped joints in their palms and kept a lookout for cops. They played soccer in the streets and tossed pebbles at the moto-taxis. Wari knocked again. “She ain’t home,” someone called from the street. Wari knew she wasn’t, but he wanted to see her. He wanted to kiss her and hold her and tell her his good news.

He was a younger, happier version of himself.

My good news, baby: his first exhibit in a gallery in Miraflores. A real opening with wine, a catalogue, and they’d promised him press, maybe even half a column interview in one of the Sunday magazines. This is what he wanted to tell her.

Wari knocked some more. He hummed along to the melody that played in her apartment. He pulled pen and paper from his bag and composed a note for her, in English. They were both studying it at an institute, Elie with much less enthusiasm. English is tacky, she’d say. She mourned the passing of Spanish, the faddish use of gringo talk. It was everywhere: on television, in print, on the radio. In cafés, their peers spoke like this: “Sí, pero asi es la gente nice. No tienen ese feeling.” Why are you learning that language, acomplejado, my dear Wari, you just paint and you’ll be fine. She made him laugh and that was why he loved her. On a piece of paper torn from a notebook, he wrote:

I come see you, but instead meet your absence.

It’s perfect, he thought. He put a W in the corner, just because — as if anyone else would come to her home and leave a note like this. He tacked it to the door and walked down to the street, music serenading the walls of empty apartments. Music that slipped out into the street. He had nothing to do but wait for her. A kid on the corner scowled at him, but Wari smiled back. It was late afternoon, the last dying light of day.

The show went up, but the reception was sparsely attended. “It’s a bad time,” said Eric, with Leah on his arm. “The anniversary has everyone on edge.”

“On edge,” Wari asked, “is like scared?”

“Just like that,” Leah said.

Wari didn’t care. He was scared too. And not because the world could explode, or because Manhattan could sink into the sea. Real fears. His paintings were glowing beneath the bright lights. A handful of people filtered in and out, sipping champagne from plastic cups. Already there was something foreign about his paintings, as if they were the work of someone else, a man he used to know, an acquaintance from a distant episode in his life. There was nothing special about them, he decided. They exist, as I exist, and that is all.

The grandiose illusion of the exile is that they are all back home, your enemies and your friends, voyeurs all, watching you. Everything has gained importance because you are away. Back home, your routines were only that. Here, they are portentous, significant. They have the weight of discovery. Can they see me? In this city, this cathedral? In this New York gallery? Never mind that it was nearly empty, and a hundred blocks from the neighborhoods where art was sold. Not for himself, but for their benefit, Wari would manufacture the appropriate amount of excitement. Make them all happy. I’m doing it, Ma, he’d say over the static. It’s a bad connection, but I know now everything will be all right.

Afterward, Eric and Leah took Wari out for drinks with some friends. He could tell they felt bad, as if they had let him down. Eric complained about student apathy. Lack of engagement, he called it. His department was in disarray, he said, they hadn’t done a very good job of advertising. Leah nodded in solemn agreement. It was all words. Nothing Wari said could convince his host that he really didn’t care. I used you, he wanted to say. I’m not a painter anymore. But that seemed so cruel, so ungrateful, and still untrue.

“Is no problem,” he repeated over and over. “We have good time.”

“Yes, yes, but still…I feel bad.”

Americans always feel bad. They wander the globe carrying this opulent burden. They take digital photographs and buy folk art, feeling a dull disappointment in themselves, and in the world. They bulldoze forests with tears in their eyes. Wari smiled. He wanted to say he understood, that none of it was Eric’s fault. It’s what had to happen. He took Eric’s hand. “Thank you,” Wari said, and squeezed.

The bar was warm and lively. The televisions broadcasted baseball games from a dozen cities. Eric’s friends congratulated Wari, clapped him on the back. “Muy bien!” they shouted gregariously. They wouldn’t let him spend a single dollar. They bought round after round until the lights from the beer signs were blurred neon arabesques. Wari felt it nearly impossible to understand a single word of their shouted conversations. There was a girl, a woman who kept making eyes at him. She was slight and had a fragile goodness to her. Wari watched her whisper with Leah, and they looked his way and smiled. He smiled back.

“I liked your paintings very much,” she said later. The night was winding down. Already a few people had left. Leah and Eric had separated from the group. They kissed each other and laughed and, by the way they looked into each other’s eyes, Wari could tell they were in love. It made him feel silly.

He was ignoring the woman in front of him. “Thank you,” he said.

“They’re so violent.”

“I do not intend that.”

“It’s what I saw.”

“Is good you see this. Violence sometime happen.”

“I’m Ellen,” she said.

“Is nice name. My ex-wife name Elie.”

“You’re Wari.”

“I am.”

“How long will you stay?”

“I have ten more days on the visa,” Wari said.

“Oh.”

“But I do not know.”

There were more drinks and more intimate shouting over the cacophony of the bar. Ellen had a sweet smile and lips he could see himself kissing. His hand had fallen effortlessly on her knee. In the corner of the bar, Leah and Eric kissed again and again. How long will you stay I do not know. HowlongwillyoustayIdonotknow. Wari wanted to drop his glass on the floor, but he was afraid it wouldn’t shatter. He was afraid no one would applaud, no one would understand the beauty of that sound. The days were vanishing. Then he was in the street and Ellen was teaching him how to hail a cab. You have to be aggressive, she said. Does she think we don’t have cabs? he wondered, shocked. Does she think we ride mules? Just as quickly, he didn’t care. She meant nothing by it. He could feel the planet expanding, its details effaced. Who is this woman? What city is this? The evening was warm, and the sky, if you looked straight up, was a deep indigo. They were downtown. His head was swimming in drink. I should call my mother, he thought, and tell her I’m alive. I should call Elie and tell her I’m dead.

They stood on the street corner. Cab after yellow cab rolled past Wari’s outstretched arm. He was no good at it. Wari turned to find Ellen in a daze, gazing down the avenue.

“They were there, you know. Just right there,” Ellen said. She reached for his hand.

They were quiet. She pointed with two fingers in the direction of the southern horizon, toward the near end of the island. Wari stared at the yawning space in the sky, a wide and hollow nothing.