Most of us drive back the way we came, caught up with thick but moving traffic on the interstates.  But at the junctions of I-10 and I-12 we choke up and lose momentum, feeling farther from arrival the closer we get.  Those of us who have sought out alternate routes on local highways drive through the small towns and communities of the south, searching for reassuring signposts, hesitating at confusing forks, admiring red-brick churches and the fields where they bury people below the ground.  We are moving slow but sure that, in the long run, we’ll have outrun those fools on the interstate.  Highway 90, a rural ribbon that wraps the Gulf coast, is almost deserted.  The storm ran roughshod up the beach and onto the road, passed through the resorts and casinos, giving everything a good saltwater scrubbing.  Finger puddles spread across the highway from the shoulder to the oversaturated median.  We hydroplane and navigate around yachts and fishing boats parked on the dotted white line, then leave Mississippi behind and make the last lonesome leg through the pine marsh, snapping branches under our tires, marveling that all this impenetrable nature lies just miles from the city.

We arrive at all hours, and leftover wind runs through town like a child, slapping at everything that dangles: store signs, stoplights, peeled back shutters and the plates bearing street names strung up on wires.  In the daytime the wreckage is fully visible down every side street.  We drive slow and turn our heads from side to side—what didn’t make it, what did?  The damage is not horrible, and that’s a relief, but there are a few old buildings that survived the last dozen storms that have finally given up and caved in, their interior walls visible from the street, torn like wet paper.  For those of us arriving at night, in the dark of a city with patchy power grids, the damage has to be inferred from the debris lying face-down in our headlights.  We get the feeling of what a ghost city this could be, with vegetation creeping into our homes in the wet, hot nights, an entire metropolis no longer lit by electricity or the spirit of its inhabitants.  It’s as if our absence of only a week has accelerated the weathering of the wood and the sinking of the asphalt.  The city needs us to take care of it, to watch over it.  To occupy the houses, fight back against the flora, and beat music against the walls.  Without our custody even the wrought iron would flake away into small, airborne trash.

That’s why we return, even after this strong reminder of the potential disaster, this quick threat of a repeat offense.  New Orleans is older than the state that surrounds it, older than the nation that pities it.  It will always exist in some form as long as the boastful few who inherit it can’t comprehend living anywhere else and feel its importance mingled with their marrow.

We pull off the avenues into our neighborhoods.  The stray cats watch our cars approach and dart off through gates and underneath hedges.  They found some place to hide from the scourging winds and dominant rain, reminding us that this city will always be an easy home for the unclaimed and the scavengers.

Our neighbors are already back and are out on the porch, watching to see who comes next.  We lean across the railing and share stories, compare notes.  Throughout the city the competition is on: who suffered the most.

Took us 15 hours to get to Atlanta.  Took us six damn hours just to Baton Rouge, and the storm hit there harder.  There were eight of us in the one room, man.  I thought auntie was going to faint from overstimulation.  Two flat tires in two different states.  I had a four day migraine.  The dog ran off, just straight into the woods.  My brother-in-law is a right son of a bitch and if I ever have to see him again, it’ll be too soon.

No one wants to give up even a little token of their trauma or let it go undocumented.  As if there will be some kind of recompense for our spent emotion along with the gas and unearned wages.

Well, come on over and have some dinner then.  We already been to the store.

Our homes are hot and smelly.  They have soaked up the outer atmosphere like chambered sponges.  In our absence we have forgotten about the mess we made searching through the rooms for the precious items we would take.  Everything needs to be put back now, restacked at right angles.  We need to restock the fridge.  A few of us are lucky and have electricity.  The rest of us hurry to get everything done before sundown, then head out onto the porch.  The streets are filled with people like the old days, back before air conditioning, squatting on the stoop or rocking in swings, enjoying the ten degree difference that night can bring.

There’s a curfew on, but every place that can be open is.  If the beer has spoiled, we drink liquor.  Restaurants run on limited menus but are packed with eager adherents, all the foodies who feared their favorite places would be washed away.  People crowd the doorways and lean against the exteriors, joking and complaining, making predictions, wondering where the others are.  The National Guardsmen roar down the streets in humvees, arms and guns poking out.  Their big tires hit the potholes hard, and the soldiers go bouncing around the cabin and readjust their helmets.  They point out the windows and whistle at our girlfriends or cousins.  They’re dazzled by their first time in the big city, even if it is half dark, thrilled by this unique domestic occupation.

Within the next few days almost everyone will be back, and it will all seem like an overblown fad, a temporary panic that robbed us of a week.  We’re a little embarrassed, really.  The near miss has realigned some of us with the old mindset that we’re all better off just staying put and hunkering down.  Screw this exodus shit.  Katrina was the exception, not the New Rule.  Back to work, back to school, back to overanalyzing the Saints.  The last to arrive are the short-term wards of the state, the poor and the elderly bussed back in from up north.  We return to the projects, back to Central City, back to The East, back to our own self-contained way of life.  We feel as riled as anyone else, packed up and shipped for no good reason, then hassled twice as hard on the way back in.  We return to our corners, to our tiny kitchens, to our knowledgeable silence.  Some of us resume our interrupted revenge, and before the storm has even dissipated over the Midwest we tally a few more gangland dead.

New Orleans reconvenes.  The old arguments relight.  The graft machine whirs back to life.  We pick up the dry cleaning.  The horse carriages resume their rattle through the Quarter.  The newspaper starts to get thicker, not with news but with ads for renovation specials, clean up crews, mold busters, and insurance lawyers.  We rejoin the rest of the nation in recession worries and presidential election mania.  The river opens back up to traffic.  The ships start floating by, carrying goods up the channels or racing back to sea empty.  Flights resume.  A few tourists follow through on their itineraries, feeling lucky to see us and our city right after a hurricane has passed by, as if they are catching us in our natural state.  Maybe they are.

The work crews disentangle all the branches from the power lines and clear away the scattered splinters.  They reattach signs and sweep up glass.  They return our city to just the way it was before Gustav: half-vacant and weather-beaten.  They refurbish our semi-accomplished recovery then box up the tools and pack it in for the day.  It’s all up to the bosses, now.

Tomorrow we’ll resume the years-long wait for all our power to be restored.  Tomorrow we’ll tread a little more water.

We explode wherever we’ve landed.  The suitcases spring open and the clothes—warm, wrinkled, somehow moist—tumble out, get put into piles around the room or laid under cots.  In the guest bedrooms we stack our boxes of assorted belongings, the things we don’t feel safe leaving in the car.  The cat’s litter box goes in a corner.  Coax her out from behind the couch and show her where it is.  The dog is in the front yard, sniffing at everything and spraying.  The shared bathroom gets cluttered quickly, all the women’s tools and bottles lined up in pairs or triplets, cords and plugs strung everywhere, waiting for their turn in the outlet.  Our hosts push their food to the back and sides of the fridge, making room for ours.  Some of us want to keep things equitable, so we label everything with magic markers.  We know we are here by their mercy and fret over taking up too much space.  The worry we have contained inside us about the storm starts to overflow and redirect into small panics about hospitality and cleanliness.  In the shelters the rows of cots divide into little blocks, little neighborhoods, little family camps.  All the borders are tested, overlapped by possessions and children and demands.

Yet we find a way to settle in, find the beginnings of our new and hopefully temporary patterns.  When possible, the lives that have been interrupted by this mass migration find a way to unpause.  Young couples sneak off to make out or lock the doors to the remotest bathrooms and make love in the tub, hoping not to leave a trace.  Men with unaffected deadlines make phone calls, plug in their laptops, answer e-mails, push money around electronically.  The thieves and pickpockets get back to work.  Mom takes the kids to the multiplex (they look and smell the same in every town) to see the last of the summer blockbusters.

Yes, sure, we’d love a drink.  We pop open cold cans of beer, stir up pitchers of margaritas, decide how many ice cubes we’d like in our scotch.  The alcohol puts some of us prematurely to sleep, riles up others.  With the stress and booze in our blood, not much is different from home: we get aggravated into arguments or find ourselves exhuming old memories.  We laugh, if we can.  The trash cans fill and rattle.  The hotel halls are filled with people, unclaimed teenagers loose on disingenuous tours between the rooms, texting and chattering constantly.  The vending machines empty quickly.  We go four floors up or two floors down, searching for an ice machine that hasn’t been sapped.  The gears grind against nothing.  We wait for the water to freeze and form, for the next batch to overturn inside the chamber.

Cousins and uncles and nieces and brothers-in-law.  Grandmas and old college roommates and family friends.  These are the supergroups we’ve assembled for long overdue reunions formed under unexpected circumstances.  Some groups bring along strangers, stragglers.  Lots of kids representing the Bywater bohemians find refuge with their friends’ middle-class families.  Their Depression-era costumes and freak-folk mannerisms seem so out of place now, sipping coffee from a Donald Duck mug in the wooded suburbs.  Separated from the city, some of us for the first time, we are forced to acknowledge the different faces of America, all the strange ways a town can be arranged and operated.  We all tell our stories, memories of last time, stopping short of saying, and if it happens again… We are stunned by the nighttime silence of small towns, made uncomfortable or impressed by cities that have found a way to divide all of their differing classes from each other with invisible lines.  We taste regional food, suffer other women’s cooking, their odd ratios of spice and seasoning.  Drifting through their grocery stores we can’t find half of what we need for gumbo or jambalaya and deep inland we wonder, ain’t you got no turkey necks?

Gustav is still taking his time, moving slow.  We wait and wait for landfall, for the determination, for the result.  We fear it, but we have to have it now.  We can’t take the uncertainty too much longer.

The television is on everywhere.  The national press is torn between two temptations: stretch out the long foreplay of another possible disaster in New Orleans or give in to the immediate gratification of Sarah Palin.  We’ve all left, replaced by the famous faces of CNN and Fox News doing stand-ups in our neighborhoods, datelining weird prophecies from the tops of levees, filling in the rest of the country on what we’ve all known for years.  New Orleans has patched up the holes, but done little to reinforce anything.  We’ve waited for reports to be compiled, for budgets to be finalized, for lawsuits to settle.  We’ve seethed at the Corps of Engineers and watch them test and test and secretly loathe their own responsibility.  We’ve watched them miss deadline after deadline.  We’ve waited for someone higher up to demand more.  But these are just minor blurbs against another potential direct hit.  They don’t make for good TV.  Not as much as the images of empty streets, boarded up buildings, and the eccentric who have stayed behind.  Not as much as that quirky brunette from Alaska and her daytime talk show life eating away at the tiny bit of gravitas that remains in presidential campaigns.  We realize the people from the networks may as well be broadcasting from another country, that they understand nothing.  We stream our local stations on the internet, imagine our favorites holed up in the studio, admiring their grandstanding grit.  They know a little more, but not much.  But at least they talk in a language we can understand.  In the shelters its worse.  The news comes in on small radios, then radiates through the crowd in rumors and garbled facts.  The night before is restless, plans and scenarios criss-cross in fallible networks in our minds.  At the bottom of it, there’s just no telling, and that’s what drives us impatiently mad.

Finally, Monday morning, it hits.  Category 2 at landfall.  The storm moves northwest through Louisiana on the city’s western side.  Another near miss.  The storm eats up Baton Rouge and all the small towns to the west, turns out all the lights in the southern part of the state, and urges the gulf to rush up all along the coast for a quick skirmish, but by the evening Gustav is weak, downgraded, tagged and filed.

We don’t know the extent of the wind damage, whether our roofs are intact, whether there is wild looting.  But we know that the lake hasn’t been sent into a frenzy, that the levees have held, that we will be able to go home soon.  Most of us celebrate.  We stand over grills and pat each other on the arms.  We let loose in Mississippi karaoke bars, gone on High Life and AC/DC.  We let the kids jump on the hotel beds and order up movies on pay-per-view.

The mayor, the city council, the Jefferson Parish president, the National Guard, and the utilities companies all have differing opinions.  The city is closed off by state troopers and local police.  Any of the eager returnees are turned away.  They have to take precautions, start clearing the major streets.  They want power to be back on, mostly.  They want the lights and the safety they bring.  So we have to wait some more.  Some of us are running out of money, can’t afford another night away in the hotel, another day of eating three meals in restaurants.  We drive around and around on the highways, looking for ways to sneak back into town.  Some of us want to know badly how our street is.  The online forums are jammed with requests.  People who stayed behind are biking through the neighborhoods with camcorders and uploading the videos to Youtube.  The asphalt is wet, dirty, crowded with fallen branches and glass.  We groan when they don’t turn down our street.  We crane our heads as if we can see around the border of the frame, see through the video into unrecorded peripherals.  The soundtrack is eerie: wet tires swishing and the rider breathless in the humidity.  The city empty and exhausted after standing up to the winds.

We start getting in contact with people we know, people with advance passes (the gas station and grocery operators, the electricians and plumbers, the nurses and hoteliers) and assess the damage over the phone.  The general consensus is that Those in Charge are being overcautious.  Some of us take the news as a cue to pack up and hurry out.  The city should be open before we get back.  After another day of waiting the lines are forming on the interstate.  Our numbers intimidate the mayor.  There’s too many of us out there idling in our cars, yelling at the cops, even abandoning vehicles and walking in.  He throws up his hands and announces the free-for-all.  They remove the cones, open up the lanes.  Be careful, they say.  All right, just be careful.

For those of us with the luxury there is a self-imposed wait of another day or two.  Let the others deal with the traffic, no doubt as bad getting back in as it was getting out, maybe even worse if all the stoplights are dark.  We’re having fun, want another day with the family, want another day to transform the evacuation into a type of holiday—the Hurrication—to steal some joy from dark necessity.  We want one more dinner, a few more drinks, one more night in that bed before the strain of being locked in the car again.  We clean up after ourselves, launder our clothes, recharge the batteries.  We write notes.

Thank you, thank you, thank you for letting us stay.  Let’s just hope we don’t have to return the favor, that no one else ever has to face our annual threats and migrations.

It’s hot as Labor Day weekend should be, summer’s last holiday, last chance to boil. We have our windows down and the music is passing between cars and mixing in the space between, pidgin notes and lyrics. The few radio stations not on a constant bulletin loop, CDs and MP3 players sucking up juice from the cigarette lighters, lighting jawlines with little green light, and old tape decks on their last legs. We represent all formats, all genres, all decibels. You could confuse us for a tailgating party. You could confuse us with a parking lot. Half a mile an hour on the interstate that dips down into our city, half a mile an hour memorizing the license plates in front of us on the overpass high above our neighborhoods. Amongst us are the showoffs, the ones who piled luggage on top of 14-inch speakers and expensive amps, bass heavy and proud. Amongst us are the classicists: we need Bach to calm our nerves. Nothing moves as fast as the beats or the trills. Even slow jazz outpaces us. We pull forward in the space between the notes.

No matter when we left that day—the day they told us there would be no help, that all who chose to remain would be on their own for days, no government chances taken for citizens who felt themselves brave enough to take all comers—it wasn’t early enough. We pulled out of our neighborhoods, turned up the avenues. We joined all the others at the on-ramps. The road refused to digest us, the interstate choked on our dry traffic. Some of us headed west, tempted by the branching highways that crossed Oklahoma and Texas. The rest of us felt we were outsmarting someone, racing towards Mississippi and all points north: surely we were in the minority. It didn’t matter. There were two million of us in a cross-country race. There is no road wide enough for that kind of contest.

A clear sky night, heat from idling engines challenging nature with its own sub-atmosphere. We are all sweating; our animals are panting in their crates or in our laps. When it became obvious, two hours on the road and still trapped inside of the city limits, that we were going nowhere fast, the practical among us turned off the AC. We were tired of watching it sap the tank. Too many of us now are on the shoulder, three miles from home and already out of fuel. We are family convoys siphoning gas out of one van to split with another, stomachs rejecting the unexpected taste of gasoline. We have to watch the poor bastards empty their water jugs and coffee cans and start walking back to fetch gas. We keep our eyes forward when we inch by someone hamstrung by a smoking radiator. We make five point turns on the shoulder to bring our cars face forward with someone else who needs a jump. We curse as we decide which belongings to lay at the side of the road to allow a relative from an abandoned car to fit in ours.

There’s no privacy on the road. Seven people in a sedan, kids in our laps locking limbs and pushing back and forth. We change diapers on the dashboard. We face the guardrail and pee; there’s nowhere else to go. We are watching ourselves, all wards, all neighborhoods, all streets represented, thrown into a jumble. We can see how the other half lives, now. We can see each others’ possessions, what we’ve chosen to preserve. We are all lit by headlights and streetlamps, on display, flirting or fighting, or giving in to the most basic human temptation to turn our heads at someone else moving past. We can see the spectrum of faces. Annoyance, anguish, fright, and exhaustion. Determination, jealousy, and laughter. We can see the fuming anger of a couple who has remembered that they left something behind and argued about going back, retrieving it, getting in the back of the line. There are no placeholders. We notice the few among us with the right skill sets, the camp counselor types who have their cabins bouncing and jiving, trading rounds of karaoke. We are a loud and crazy population, raised on open containers. We have uncorked the wine or even tapped pony kegs, mixed up punch and poured it into plastic cups. Even the drivers sip, confident that they can maintain at half a mile an hour. The only thing that can still us for a moment or two is the rush of the cyclists, clicking by between the cars or along the gritty shoulder, bearing bundles on their backs. They look straight forward, painted with sweat, somehow separate from us. Who knows what their plan is, how far they expect to get. We are not jealous of their temporary speed.

Hours and hours later we have made it to the separation point. Cars begin to pull away from each other by more than a few feet and shift into higher gears for the first time all day. We feel reinforced by speed and breathing room, by being removed from a constant audience. We pull into all night truck stops, pull open the doors and dive into the false fluorescent dawn inside. We open the refrigerated lockers filled with drinks and stick in our heads. We need sugar, coffee, salty snacks. We need the bathroom line to move faster. Some of us have never been this far out of town before, and we need maps. We need help to understand this unlit country. In the parking lot dogs are running loose ahead of their owners, exerting pent up energy. We are thankful for the break, but we know we can’t stop long. Who knows if we’re ahead or behind. The real push could be coming up behind us, the high point of the bell curve. They could arrive at any moment and wash the gridlock miles ahead of us like a swift high tide. We gather the kids and kick the tires and throw our trash on the ground and rejoin the road.

We hit the crossover for contraflow. The interstate seems mightier now that both sides are only open to one direction, as if it were a river that has flooded its banks. The kids have their noses to the window, watching the mirror image of their journey across the wide median. We grip the steering wheel a little tighter, those of us on the wrong side. We feel like we are on an amusement park track, pulled forward no matter which way we steer. We brace for someone unaware, some southbound escapee to come and split us all with headlights and horns. We pass state troopers leaning against their patrol cars with the blue lights on: guards over the frenzy, Mississippi laissez-faire. We can’t see where we are, can’t get used to the road signs with their backs to us, disowning us. It doesn’t really matter. Places don’t matter now, only mileage.

We drive all night. Dawn sneaks up on us. Even if we’ve passed turns at the wheel, there’s just not enough energy. All the stress of the previous week has come to collect its outstanding debt. We were so distracted with worry—what to do, where to go, what to pack—that we didn’t prepare reserves for the drive. We pass through rest areas filled to capacity, cars pulled up onto the grass and into employee spaces. We test the limits of the welcome centers of other states, see how far their hospitality goes. We take exits no one but the locals would recognize, pull into church parking lots, turn semi-circles behind shopping centers. Crack the windows, brace them with hot pillows. Everyone be still now. We need a nap, just a brief, full stop. We hope no one will knock on our windows, that no one will ask questions. But our kids can’t help it. They are cranky, itchy underneath their sweaty clothes, sapped by on-again-off-again sleep. And what can we tell them, anyway? We don’t know where the storm will land or what kind of destruction is on the agenda. Are we far enough inland? Will it be like the last time? How long will we be gone? Just shut up. Everyone shut up.

We can see the same self-portrait off of every exit between home and Houston, Atlanta, and Jacksonville. We leave behind the same wreck at every convenience store between home and Meridian, Little Rock, and Memphis. We are the reluctant locusts. The bathroom floors are covered in half an inch of liquid, tiled with a hundred dirty footprints. The employees have just stacked rolls of paper towels in the corner, sandbagged the walls with soap dispenser packets. We have emptied two million gallons of piss across the southeast. Trash cans overflow everywhere, filled with our wrappers, our bottles, our tampons, our broken glass. In the burger joints they are running the fryers non-stop, they are running out of fries. We bring the wait with us, we bring the lines. Clean locals stand between us, suffering through the stress-fashioned stench that we’ve gotten used to over the past twelve hours. New Orleans Funk. Some of us run cons—a few of us have to. We talk fast in local accents, confuse the used-to-idling clerks, distracting them from the gas pumps as our partners sneak away. We are emptying the soda fountains of all their ice, we are leaving mini-mart shelves bare. We say, Hey, man, I gave you a twenty, not a ten.

We bring with us old fears and cause new prejudices. Even the blossoming sympathy can’t dissuade the demographics. Outside, in the open, stretched across a thousand miles we reveal our racial ratios, the blacks far outnumbering the whites. We nominally manage in the city, we know how to dart our eyes. But far removed, it can look, to small-town minds, like an exodus, a march, an uprising. The sheriffs park cautious squad cars as they see fit. We might as well all be Section Eight. And beyond that, on a more fundamental level of good old American common sense, we catch a few proud looks of What did you expect? Why even go back to live below the sea?

Just another couple hours now, depending. We turn the keys, and the songs rejoin where they left off when we stopped the car. We readjust the luggage, the pets, the children, our thighs. But not the mirrors. We don’t need to see behind us, now. It’ll all be on TV when we arrive.

———
The Gustav Evacuation, Part 1: Preparations

We all remember what happened last time. This has all, somehow, made us experts. When the season begins, the government and the media remind us to make our plans. Buy some maps. Update your phone numbers. Gather all the right containers. We all know better. They’re not the experts. It’s us, the ones on the ground. We’ll do as we see fit.

When a storm physically enters the Gulf, it starts a simultaneous churning approach through our minds, starting at the back and boring towards the center as the days go on. We can’t help talking about it, we must talk about it: it’s there in the corner of the television screen in its own little box, spinning off bright colors. We all point at the screen indicating where it could go, where it will go. We’re all experts now, civilian advisers. All the other weather patterns we’ve survived have given us wisdom. We can draw comparisons to other storms, other trajectories, as if anything about this is predictable. We challenge the weathermen who say it is too early to tell.

It’s not a time for hospitality. We can’t wish the storm away, but we can wish it on someone else. Let Mobile have their turn. Let it bounce off Cuba, take a sharp curve for Florida. We can’t disguise our joy when the storms re-navigate, when the latest charts show, yes, we are outside of the cone of uncertainty. We have nothing against the Texas coast; we’ll be happy to help out afterward. We just can’t take it again. We’re not ready.

And we almost made it through another season. Made it through three months of the four-month marathon. But when Gustav arrived, and passed the threshold of our worried skulls, most of us know, somehow, where he’s headed. As if we were activated magnets, as if our lease on hope had just run out. It’s time to start preparing.

Many of us are overeager, leaving three or four days early. Laughed at and scoffed at, but resolute that it’s the right thing to do, that it will be so much more convenient. That the shame on the outside chance the storm completely misses or even dissipates will be easy to bear. The next day those of us left are a little uneasy, wondering if maybe we should have just made an improvised vacation out of it as well. The ones who left are already kicking their legs in the pool in Destin or trying to overpower the strange scented air of guest bedrooms by unpacking their clothes in Monroe. Maybe they were right. The state police are preparing for contraflow along the interstate, tossing orange construction markers and cones down off the trucks to the side of the road. That makes us nervous. We make phone calls, find out the status of our friends and family northward.

Still, it’s hard to say whether we will stay or go. How strong will Gustav get? How fast will he swallow up the heat of the Gulf, how wide will his spinning arms spread? This could be something we can ride out, like in the old days, before Katrina taught us an indelible fear. Those of us with the means to leave under our own power, with some savings or cushiony credit limits are schizophrenic, pulled between the temptation to survive, to beat the inevitable traffic and the voices that speak a thousand scenarios, reasons to stay behind. The belief that a little old-fashioned courage and levity will allow you to protect your home, your block, your city.

But those of us without jobs, without money, without any new earthworks, walls, or pumps in our neighborhoods have a tougher choice to make. Stay and hope for the best or register with the government and get a spot on one of the hundreds of buses they’ve commissioned from out of state. The media is begging the poor to call and register. They remind them of what it will be like after a storm again if the power goes out, if the waters encroach again. Your elderly will die. There will be no medicine. Register, please, now. Get a spot on the bus. No one will be turned away. The phone lines are jammed all day. The call center doubles its staff, then triples it. No one has all the answers, just best guesses. But we want to know, we need the details before we make up our minds: where are the buses going? What can I bring with me? Will there be food? Will there be protection? We can remember being herded before, timidly, confusingly, pointed in several directions at once. We can already feel the itchiness of the long lines. We have never forgotten the terrified queasiness of being shut into the plane, taking off, and not being told a destination. Hours on the planes, a moving waiting room, no indications. Disembarking in Denver, in Indiana, in Phoenix. Moved like cargo. We don’t want to go through all that again unless there are assurances. Don’t worry, they tell us. We have signed contracts this time. Trust in the profit motive. Things will go much smoother with money on the line.

The new Home Depot in the middle of the city that has supplied so many with the tools and materials to rebuild their homes makes an agile business turn, orders in truckloads of generators, gas cans, and tarps. Sandbags and stacks of plywood are sold right from the parking lot. It’s still so hot; we work in the late summer twilight. The noise of our neighbors hammering during dinnertime, the rattle of collapsible ladders. We make groceries. We still haven’t decided whether we are staying or going, but either way we’ll need durable food. Cans of chili, boxes of Pop-tarts, chips and candy bars. The stores are so busy the carts make their own traffic jams down the aisles. An eight-foot pallet of cartons of bottled water is being dismantled. Children follow behind their mothers, no room for them in the carts. The kids carry gallon jugs of water or boxes of cereal and whine. Some families have two carts, one for food, one for booze. Cases and cases of beer, handles of vodka, and let me get eight bags of ice. When that runs out we’ll drink it all hot. There are lines again at the gas stations. We need fuel for our cars, fuel for our generators, fuel maybe for currency. Cartons of cigarettes. And even acts of God don’t stop the Powerball.

We are all of us chattering, taking advantage of the surge of crowds, the busy-ness, the long lines. We speculate about what Category the storm will be when it hits. We pester everyone around us, asking what they are going to do, trying to find some kind of consensus we can join. We can’t stop talking about it, where we will go, mistakes we will avoid this time around, making promises and assurances if we are the brave ones who will stay. We say, Here’s my e-mail. I’ll go by your house, yeah, yeah. We shrug our shoulders, Don’t worry about it.

Some of us can’t help but go out after the stressful days. We need to meet up with our friends at the bar or sit—maybe one last time—down to dinner at our favorite restaurants, confused about where to look with the streetside windows covered over by plywood. We are attracted to this small part of the adventure, raising glasses in the darkened rooms like Parisians who know that the tanks will arrive tomorrow, like Londoners chancing a bombing raid. We can always risk a little for the nightlife.

We say goodbye to those who have made up their minds, watch them join the steady current up the avenues. Call us when you get there. We feel a little jealous. Some of us still have to work in the morning.

The next day it’s do or die time, for the lower parishes at least. There is a mandatory evacuation call for the areas south of the city, the coastal people, the barrier population. Helicopters make runs to the oil rigs and bring back all the divers, welders, and pump-men. They’re all coming past us, through us, clogging the highways, all the small towns converging into a convoy: Cutoff, Arabi, Houma, Grand Isle. We know we’ll be next, probably, even if Gustav is still another two days away. This storm’s a slow giant. We’re getting weary of it a little, refreshing the webpages, watching the track move by millimeters on the screen.

We start to pack. How do we decide what to take? We know from experience that anything left behind could be drowned, so we favor the nostalgic and irreplaceable over the expensive. We know from experience that everything mundane can be replaced, that it can almost be enjoyable picking out new dishes and bedsheets—if you’ve got the money. The children want all their toys. We force them to pick favorites. Everybody gets four changes of clothes. Anything more would be greedy. And we must each have our pillows, our charms, our letters. We collect all the documents, the titles and passports and insurance papers. Some of us bitterly pack up a box full of Road Home documents: some of us are still in a battle for money promised us from three years ago from the state entity created to aid the victims of insurance shortfalls. We won’t chance losing the proof of our arguments, the written record of every inch we’ve gained towards compensation. The things we will miss but just can’t take with us get put up in the attic or lined up on the top shelf of our closets.

We push the furniture away from the windows, exposing months of dust. We empty the icebox, defrost the fridge. Some of us forget to do these things and will come home to a wet floor. We throw away good food, knowing it will spoil when the power goes out. We don’t care: we remember the wars we fought with mold. We try to pre-mitigate.

Finally, we pray.

We go to the last mass before the priests must close the doors and lock up the churches. We get together in fellowship halls, making last-minute arrangements, offering last-minute aid. We sing to our different versions of God and ask for different versions of strength. Some of us beg for mercy or a miracle. Some of us are more resigned and beg only for guidance. Some of us don’t agree with God or even think that he exists, but we feel a little envious of the invisible buffer that believers have between life and their hearts. We could all use a little divine backup in some form or another. This weekend is going to test us, going peel away all the layers of normality we’ve recovered since Katrina. So we feel the need to pray even if it’s just empty murmurs against humid air.

Tonight we light candles against an enormous wind.

V. “Ben,” I said. I was clutching his arm. The streets ran with rain; a cold wind was coming down off the mountains, and all the people we passed had their hats pulled low over their eyes.

“Ben. I’m really depressed with the Alvarezes. I can’t stand it. I’m doing everything wrong: the chocolate, the dinner—” I fluttered my free hand in the air like I could make something materialize if I stirred it enough. “I don’t know—it seems like our friendship isn’t meant to be. And that house is grossing me out. I’m afraid I’ll get electrocuted in the shower. When we get back from the mountains, let’s stay in a hostel, just the two of us. Okay?”

Ben stopped in the street and pulled his arm from mine. His face was not sympathetic or concerned or loving. It was mad.

“You’re acting like a real princess, you know.”

I felt like I’d been punched.

“Did you come to Peru to see hostels? I didn’t. They didn’t have to open their house to us, and they did, and they’ve been very kind. It isn’t nearly as bad as you’re making it out to be. Why is everything such a big fucking deal with you?”

“I don’t know,” I whispered. I can still, today, feel the shame.

“I don’t know either,” Ben said, “but I’m really sick of it,” and then he turned and walked away from me.

Fucking big deal. Princess. I knew what it meant to be a princess. Princess was a word my father had used, growing up, to describe a cousin who made trouble, who had to get her own way. Princesses wanted too much; princesses thought the world revolved around them; princesses weren’t tough enough. Princesses couldn’t stand lumpy mattresses and dirty bathrooms. Princesses were too feminine, too weak. I had never been accused of being a princess before. I had always been outwardly tough—“get tough” was my parents’ mantra, until they didn’t need to say it anymore—and since we’d gotten to South America I’d toughened up even more, at least on the surface. I’d shat in more holes in the ground than I could count. I’d slept in more lumpy beds than in the rest of my life put together, sharing a lone polyester pillow with Ben. I’d carried my backpack up and down mountains, through sketchy cities, into the jungle. I’d eaten intestine and weird indescribable meats and questionable dairy products.

I wasn’t, really, a princess. I wasn’t even a snob. I didn’t think I was better than the Alvarezes, or that I deserved something different—I didn’t even kid myself that my behavior was acceptable. I knew Ben was right; I should have tried harder, and I should have been more grateful for the generosity of people who didn’t have very much to give.

But I was incapable, at that moment, of gratitude.

Because everything was a big fucking deal. Ben had that part right. For as long as I could remember, I had struggled with worry so overwhelming it superseded rational thought, worry I was so ashamed of I never wanted anyone to see. It enveloped me, struck me at times I couldn’t predict. It had happened one Thanksgiving when Ben’s sister was visiting, and I spent the entire long weekend picking at my face, attempting to calm down, wanting to die, wondering why everything was such a big fucking deal. It had happened when I was traveling through Poland with a friend. We fought incessantly for three days over things that to him were nothing and to me were a big fucking deal. And it was happening in Huaraz. Blame homesickness, blame neurology, blame discomfort—I was falling apart, and had been since the moment we’d stepped off the bus in that town. I was scared of murderers and a hundred other lesser threats; I couldn’t do anything right; I was acting rude when I didn’t mean to; I wasn’t myself; or perhaps I was more myself than I wanted to admit. Ben was a continent away from me, because he would never understand, not then, not in the future, not ever, what it was to be afraid all the time, what it meant when everything in your life was, at times anyway, a big fucking deal. I had no way, no earthly way, to ever explain it to him, in part because I was afraid if he knew the truth about me, he would leave.

He was the only person who loved me for miles.

Standing on the street corner in that ghost-filled town, I looked at Ben’s familiar fleece-clad back ten feet ahead of me. His shaggy hair, his broad shoulders. He refused to look back, pissed, and I remembered with painful clarity the July day my little brother was born. I was six. My mother was at the hospital, and after camp that afternoon I was sent to my grandmother’s. I knew that even though my father would come and pick me up later and take me to our house that my mother wouldn’t be there, that she would be in the hospital for several days, the first time she had ever been the one not to spend the night at home. And I knew that when she did come home, everything would change, irrevocably. I sat on a stool in my grandmother’s kitchen and, at her kind suggestion, wrote my mother a letter that said, cryptically, “I kind of miss you,” when in reality I felt like little knives were pushing against the insides of my eyelids and I was going to die if I didn’t see her again soon. I didn’t know how to explain the immense hurt of her being away, the betrayal, the sadness. But I knew, though I didn’t know why I knew, that I needed to keep that feeling as tightly locked down as I could, because my grandmother had already suspected too much, that “kind of” was the safest way to modify that great, almost unfathomable missing, because the truth might tear me apart, or worse, make her think I was too much of a burden.

It was then that I realized what I was most afraid of.

“Ben,” I cried. “Ben,” and he turned, mad, prepared to argue, but I started bawling and apologizing. I stood there and wailed, crying for some old, old grief, ashamed of myself and relieved, both, and once I’d cried for a few minutes the streetlights began to take shape again, I could feel my feet on the ground, and Ben came over and quietly put his arms around me.

VI. The trip to the Cordillera Blanca flashes like a series of stunning Polaroids in my mind: me underneath a sky so close I could reach up and pull it down; Eduardo stoically chugging up a pass of 15,000 feet with my ill-fitting rented hiking boots, traded mid-day for sneakers, strapped to his pack, while I sucked on whatever air I could find behind him. The barefoot child who stared, fingers in his mouth, for forty minutes as we took down our tent one morning, until Ben went over and said, “Quieres una dulcita?” and handed the boy one of the Snickers bars we’d brought with us. The tiny gumdrop-shaped straw houses called cochas, where the mountain people lived, and their sheep, whose hoofprints had turned the hills to hot-crossed buns. Ben and me on our last afternoon, which was sunny and clear, looking down the path and seeing we were about to be overrun by fifty sheep and a herder bringing up the rear in her hoop skirt and bowler hat. I shrieked, and Ben laughed as he hopped out of the way.

And the man who came riding out of the mountains on his horse, the horse adorned with various ropes and bits of colored cloth, the man draped in a poncho, and the lower part of his face covered by a bandana, like an outlaw or a murderer. It was not dusty there. The man stared at me as he rode past, fixed his eyes on mine, and I felt my heart leap. I stared back, but of course, couldn’t tell if he was smiling or leering, frowning or laughing. We never saw him again.

In places the hills were planted to the top with quinoa, a leafy green plant with purple flowers, and with potatoes, much less ostentatious, though mostly the altitude seemed to support only a springy wet groundcover, like cropped gorse scattered with tiny white blossoms. We wondered how people survived. Eduardo told us it wasn’t easy, but answered gently, “Yes, they’re warm,” when I asked anxiously about the cochas; through the middle of each one smoke rose like a snake being charmed. There were white-capped peaks in the distance, and Eduardo had climbed several of them. He hoped to climb Everest one day, an adventure he thought might cost him as much as $20,000. He was convinced he would go. He was a quiet, old soul, but I learned one day that he was only twenty-five.

Being in the mountains was a breath of fresh air—thin air, but air nonetheless. And eventually, the time with the Alvarezes began to sound like a story I would tell someday. My despair in Huaraz still didn’t make an awful lot of sense to Ben; it might never make sense to him. But one night he turned to me in our tent, with the rain running off it in miniature rivers, and neither of us having showered since we’d left Lima, and he gave me this look I will forever think of as his look of loyalty—sad eyes, mouth turned down regretfully—a look he gives me when I break down over something small or stub my toe because I’m moving through the house in an anxious tear, the look that says, I accept you for who you are, even if I don’t always understand you—and he put his hand on my cheek and said sadly, “my love,” as though he would take away all the sadness I’d ever felt, if he could, if it were in his power to do so.

On the way back to Huaraz we visited the ancient pre-Inca ruins at Chavin, which were scattered like stones across a football field bolstered by a whole network of tunnels and caves. Eduardo and Ben ran around like boys, climbing up and down ladders. I moved through the ruins more sedately, preferring the open spaces to the dark underground. Then we had a crowded and boisterous bus ride back to Huaraz, where I struck up a lengthy conversation with two girls about Veronica’s age, who could not believe that at thirty-one I wasn’t married with several children yet. Eduardo, meanwhile, was reading the Spanish-English dictionary we’d lent him as though it were a racy supermarket novel he just couldn’t put down.

In Huaraz, Eduardo took us to return our gear. We paid him for his guidance and told him to keep the dictionary. We hugged and shook hands, traded email addresses, took a group photo. Then, ever gallant, he offered to walk us to the house.

“That’s okay,” I said quickly. “We already said goodbye. We’re going back to Lima first thing. We’ll stay in the hostel tonight.” Ben and I had come to this agreement after I’d stopped crying on the street in Huaraz—he’d finally said okay, we can do that if you need to—and when we’d returned that night I told Mami we were leaving in the morning, heading into the mountains for three days, then immediately going back to Lima. She seemed not to understand, and I grasped her hands and tried to make up for all my failings with an emphatic “Gracias, muchos gracias para todos,” and then I hugged her, and she hugged me back, and asked me to pass on her warm wishes to Rosa for a nice Christmas. She smelled good; like fires burning.

If Eduardo suspected anything, he didn’t let on. He saw Mami and Papi’s house, when he dropped us off there several days earlier, tipping his hat to Mami and standing with polite folded hands in the living room. And we’d been to Eduardo’s house, too, with its spotless tiled floors and new deck. His Huaraz was that of the tourist guide who makes his money off travelers and dreams of climbing Everest someday. It was a far-fetched dream, but having the presence to even imagine it gave Eduardo a certain wealth. Whereas the Alvarezes made their money selling guinea pigs and making photocopies on a machine that was liable to encounter another paper jam one day soon.

That night after a hot shower and a meal Ben and I slept like angels in two side-by-side twin beds in the hostel attached to the Casa de Guias. We slept so soundly that we didn’t hear anyone come into the room at 2:00 a.m., another traveler, nor did we see him early the next morning when I stole out of my bed and into Ben’s, wrapped my legs around his warm body and kissed him on the mouth. Then we heard stirring above us, and Ben stilled me.

Sometimes, by touching him, I could make the spaces between us smaller.

III. The house was quite dark, and the stone made it cold and damp, a bit like sleeping in a castle—or its dungeon. Veronica, it turned out, was going to sleep in the same room that we were, the big front room that looked out on the street. She had, though, a makeshift space behind a wall of curtains her family had made to give her some privacy. I was glad Veronica had a little corner all to herself, a place in which to play out her adolescence—and later, I felt terrible for keeping her up all night. Adolescent girls need their rest.

But the coca, which everyone insisted wouldn’t keep me up, was acting like a double shot of espresso in my stimulant-sensitive body. I was on high alert. My head ran thoughts like a film reel. Worst of all, despite the fact that I had gone once at the café and once when we’d gotten back to the house, I had to pee. After twenty minutes I had to pee so badly I knew I couldn’t wait until morning. So I rolled over as quietly as I could but I tripped a rogue bedspring: boiing! and I heard Veronica stir behind her curtains. I slipped out of the bed, tiptoed across the floor, and made it to the stairway leading down into the basement, leading to the bathroom I didn’t really want to spend any more time in than I had to. There was a gate at the top of the stairs, and I fumbled with the latch, worrying perhaps it was up to keep out the dog who had seemed friendly enough earlier but who, encountering me in the dark, might bark or bare his teeth at me. I was uncomfortable with dogs. In the state I was in, I was especially uncomfortable with dogs.

I managed to get the latch open and tiptoe down the stairs, where I did run into the dog, who panted and wagged his tail and let out a short bark. “Shhh!” I said. And then the guinea pigs starting shrieking “cuy! cuy! cuy!” rustling about in their straw. I pulled aside the bathroom curtain and yanked the light cord, crouched on the cracked seat and relieved myself. The floor was still wet, and cold; there was no mirror or window, just the electric showerhead and a small roll of toilet paper, and as I turned to look at the curtain walling me in from the cuy I noticed it was stained with brown.

Upstairs, I latched the gate, tiptoed across the floor again—creak, went the floor, and Veronica turned over again. Ben whispered “You okay?” and I lied and said yes. I wasn’t okay; ghosts were flitting about in my head. I wanted them to go away. I didn’t want to be in that dark town in that dark bed in a house full of strangers, with Ben calmly going off to sleep beside me like he always did. I began to panic. I thought I might cry. I told myself to stop it, that I was being ridiculous.

I repeated the process twice more that night: disturb Ben, disturb Veronica, fumble with the gate, encounter the dog, crouch while holding my breath, wonder whether anyone had ever died of electrocution in that shower, and think to myself: there’s a clothesline and a washtub five feet away—can’t they wash this curtain? And back upstairs. I was blessed with short periods of dozing in between, but my dreams were dark and twisted and drew me up gasping. I was sweating, and my head throbbed.

The next morning I felt like I’d been run over by a truck, but I guess in the daylight things felt a little less grim. The house was bustling: some neighbors came by to use the bathroom. In the kitchen, the Alvarezes offered us a cup of maté, which despite the past evening’s machinations I accepted gratefully, suspecting it was the only thing likely to get me through the day. We sat drinking our tea and chatting. I forced cheerfulness. Then, with a start, Papi turned to Dani.

“Well, what are you waiting for, man? Bread! Go get some bread!”

“No, really, we’re fine,” I protested quickly, because I knew they were poor, and I didn’t want them spending their money on a couple of gringos. But we were hungry, and another day I might have conjured the grace—the decency—to say, “We’d love some bread. Will you let us buy some for all of us?” We could have picked up some eggs, some fruit. It could have been a nice moment, a nice meal. But I didn’t. I might have been worried about offending them; I might not have been thinking very clearly. I’d had very little sleep. And Papi, visibly relieved, said, “Oh, you’re not hungry,” and changed the subject.

A cat hopped on the table and nosed around, looking for scraps, and if they were there before, I hadn’t noticed the chickens ducking about on the dirt floor. I recalled, then, the Thanksgiving turkey we’d roasted for our friends in Lima the week before, and how, reaching into the bird’s cavity to remove the giblets I withdrew not only a purplish sac of internal organs, as I would in the States, but the whole head and neck of the bird, encapsulated in wet plastic. The eyes shut, like a stillborn. The surprise of it. It was somehow so like a birth, pulling that wet head from the bird’s cavity.

Now, that visceral memory embodies Peru for me, and I wonder if one primary difference between “developed” and “developing” countries is the distance at which we stand from the corporeal: from our meat, from our animals, from our own bodily waste, and whether the reason I was so squeamish in the Alvarez house had to do with the fact that I had spent too long in a place like the United States, where everything dirty is hidden behind plastic and Styrofoam and disinfectant.

I couldn’t put words to it then, though. I just knew that nothing fazed the Alvarezes: not that bathroom; not the chickens; not that pen of cuy; and not the odd gringos. A bit later that morning, it hit me that Papi and Mami had allowed Ben and me to share a bed in their house. But, over maté, I had told everyone that we weren’t married. Were they shocked? We were in a Catholic country. I felt I needed to say something. So I found Papi in the living room, sitting in the easy chair, dozing.

“Papi,” I asked, “Is it okay that Ben and I are sleeping together in your home?”

“Is it okay with you?” he asked sleepily.

“Of course! I just mean—since we aren’t married.”

“We all pretty much sleep where we want,” he said. “Sometimes Veronica sleeps in that room, sometimes she sleeps in with us, you know, the boys, they sleep with us mostly, but maybe one of us would sleep in that bed where you’re sleeping if we wanted…” He waved his hand in the air and trailed off, and I realized sleeping was clearly a matter-of-fact activity in their house, and so, I guessed, was sex. So I said again, three or four times, how grateful we were, and how much I enjoyed sleeping with Ben, no I meant, um—and stammered my way out of the room, feeling a fool.

Mami stopped me.

“Do you think you could help us with something?” she asked. She looked very hopeful. She and Papi led Ben and me downstairs and out the front door, and in through another door. A very old, very massive photocopier presided over a pleasant, barn-like room that was only accessible from the outside. It smelled a bit of hay.

“It’s been broken for weeks,” Papi said. “We’ve tried everything.” He pantomimed pushing different buttons, opening trays. Apparently all the instructions were in English. So Ben leaned over the machine, where the little screen that normally tells you how many copies are coming out was flashing a message.

“Oh, I see,” Ben said, speaking in English as though they could understand him. “I need to pull out this side compartment”—he did—“and clear out this piece of paper in here”—there it was, right where he knew it would be—“and close this door again”—he did it gently—“and you should be in business,” and the thing stopped blinking and began to whir again.

“Oh!” Mami cried, clasping her hands together. “Oh! Thank you!”

“Nice work, man!” Papi said, slapping Ben on the back.

“No problem,” Ben said, smiling at them, and I wished I could have been the one to fix something broken.

IV. The sky was gray but it wasn’t raining yet. At the Casa de Guias, the House of Guides, we sat with a man and discussed various trip possibilities for the Cordillera Blanca. I liked the man. I liked his surety, his professionalism, his mountaineer’s body. But he wouldn’t commit to being our guide, kept saying “me or someone else” when I asked who would take us. I didn’t want to go on a three-day trek in the Andes with some guy I’d never met—in fact, the idea made me positively unhappy. So I told him we’d think about it, dragged Ben away, and pursued another avenue: we called a friend of Rosa’s. He took us in a taxi cab to meet Eduardo, a guy we were assured was the best mountain guide around.

Eduardo stood in his doorway, waiting. He was quiet, fortyish, I guessed, with a mouthful of gold teeth. His house was being renovated. There were tools lying around on the deck outside, and in the living room a tile floor and a fireplace. We discussed the particulars: we would pay him $35 per day, not including meals and gear. He could meet us late that afternoon at the Casa de Guias to fill out paperwork—I wanted to make it official, just in case, though Ben didn’t care—and then we’d rent tents and sleeping bags, and go to the store and buy food and supplies. We’d leave early the next morning, six a.m., catching a ride up into the mountains. We shook hands and left, accompanied by the friend, whom I let pay for the taxi when it dropped us off back in town.

Then we caught a bus out to the thermal baths Papi had recommended and spent some time in a private stone tub that stank of sulfur. We got caught in a deluge as we left, though, and as we walked along the dirt road towards town the rain seemed to be getting colder. No buses were going our way. After twenty minutes or so a car came rollicking along, and Ben turned backwards and stuck out his thumb.

“What if it’s not safe?” I asked him, grabbing his arm.

“Susie, please,” he said, his voice keening, not gentle, not understanding, just frustrated. “Please stop worrying so much. You’re soaked, I’m soaked. It’s cold. Let’s just try to get this ride, okay?”
The people in the car, a woman and a couple of men, squeezed in a little tighter so Ben and I could fit. When they dropped us off in town without hassling us, without a single moment when I even felt like they might, without having said a word to us besides buenas, de nada, and adios, I nonetheless fought an unfathomable urge to weep.

By the time we met Eduardo I had settled on a new source for my worry. We’d met the Alvarezes; we’d found a guide; the rain had arrived; we’d survived several rides with strangers; and we had a plan to get our gear and our supplies. There was nothing else to anticipate but murderers in the mountains.

This wasn’t pure delusion on my part. Several years earlier some travelers like Ben and me had been murdered in the Cordillera Blanca. We’d heard from fellow travelers and bulletins at the South American Explorers’ Club—Internet news sites told us nothing, so I can’t say how much is urban legend—that a bunch of Israeli guys, who’d been Special Forces soldiers in their own country, had been held up. The banditos—relics from the Shining Path, perhaps, or just some desperate locals—asked for their wallets, their passports. Because of their training, the Israelis didn’t turn over their stuff. They attempted to fight. But the bandits overpowered them, killed them with knives, with guns, with their hands, I don’t know. No one really said.

So when we met Eduardo at the Case de Guias, and he pulled out the map and showed us the route he thought we should take, I raised a question.

“Eduardo,” I said, “is this the same area where those people were killed?”

Eduardo looked at me with serious eyes. I was used, by then, to the South Americans—particularly the men—treating questions lightly. They had decent senses of humor, but sometimes they laughed at things I didn’t find funny: Ben cracking his head on a ticket booth in Bolivia; Ben being pursued by a shark in the Galapagos Islands; my anxious questions about flooding, terrorism, murderers.
But Eduardo didn’t laugh at me.

“No,” he said. “Promise.”

“Okay,” I said tentatively.

“Promise,” he said with finality, smiling this time, and the three of us walked together toward the grocery store. It resembled Safeway, totally: the same layout, the choices of bread, fifty kinds of peanut butter to choose from, a whole aisle of candy bars we recognized and candy bars we didn’t. We chose bread and cheese, peanut butter and jelly, dried potato flakes, instant soup. We bought Snickers bars for energy, dried fruit, a couple of apples. And then I turned to Ben.

“Ben, we still haven’t gotten the Alvarezes a gift of any kind. Let’s find something.”

“What should we get?” he asked, scanning the aisles. We looked at wine; we didn’t know if they drank. There were no flowers in the store, and buying groceries seemed wrong, though I suspect they would have been grateful for them. There was a long packed aisle of chocolate, fancy chocolate in bars, boxes of truffles.

“What about something like this?” I asked, grabbing a giant foil-wrapped bar with a fancy label.
“Yeah, that could work,” Ben said, and then Eduardo poked his head around the aisle. “Listo?” he asked, and we said si, and proceeded to checkout.

The chocolate bar, it turned out, wasn’t as fancy as I’d thought. It cost about forty cents.

Eduardo brought us back to the house, walked with us through the cellar. He lugged our groceries up the stairs and deposited them in the room where we were staying. Mami appeared in the doorway in her skirt with an apron over it and Eduardo took off his hat, nodded at her.

“Buenos tardes,” he said formally, folding his hands, and she asked him some questions about his family and his children, his plans for Christmas. Then Mami turned to us.

“Have you eaten?” she asked kindly.

“No,” I said, thinking, this might be our moment: Mami will feed us, we’ll bond over food, everything will be fine.

“Oh,” she said, her lips tightening. “Well,” and then I realized what she’d actually asked me was “Would you like to eat?” It was a simple mistake; I had merely misunderstood; I just had to fix it.

“I—” I began, my mouth gaping—it was the easiest thing in the world, really, to say, “Wait, no—we would love to eat,” even in Spanish—but somehow the words were getting caught in my throat.

“We—” I tried again, and then Eduardo interrupted me and the moment was forever lost.

“Okay! Well, tomorrow morning then?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said sadly. “Tomorrow morning.”

Mami left the room, and we told Eduardo we’d walk him out. But first we went and found the chocolate bar and put it under the Christmas tree, where it looked small and meager, like the lamest present I’d ever given. I think it was. I still don’t know why it ever seemed like enough. But because I didn’t know how to fix it, I just turned to Ben, asked, “Do you want to go get some food?” and he nodded. Ben’s Spanish wasn’t great; potentially he didn’t even see the full extent of what had happened, didn’t even realize that Mami had offered us a meal and that I had refused with no explanation or apology. Instead I’d given her a shitty chocolate bar.

We chose the upper deck of the bus. It was a Thursday afternoon in late November. I sat by the window—I always did. Ben liked to read on bus rides but I would not risk carsickness. And besides, I wanted to look out the window. On this day, traffic, road blocks, and detours made the latter part of Lima stretch on for an hour, the city spread out below us like a South American market on grand scale. We eventually inched past an area where sand was piled twenty stories high by the side of the road. Hundreds of people had fabricated dwellings up to the very top of the hill, makeshift houses of cardboard and tin and spare tires. Here and there burned oil drums of garbage. It was, of course, a shantytown, a squat, what in Brazil would be called a favela, and I could not help but wonder what kinds of crimes took place on that hill. I counted 37 dogs running through the gutter at the bottom, a trough clogged with offal and puddles of stagnant water.

That morning, in Lima, a man had come uninvited to the house where we were staying and tried to swindle us into an overpriced trek in the Cordillera Blanca. He must have gotten word through a friend of a friend that we were headed there. Eight hundred dollars, he said, for three days, and when my jaw dropped he added hastily, “well, give or take,” and that’s when Ben asked him to leave. But his visit had delayed our morning’s plans; we arrived at the post office, where we had to pick up a package, an hour later than we’d hoped and found ourselves at the end of a very long line. And when my number was finally called, I was told to wait, and wait, and wait—even though I could see the box, addressed to me, waiting on the counter behind the thick glass that separated the mortals from the post office employees. They loved making people wait. We missed the early bus to Huaraz, and in my frustration Peru had seemed full of crooks and gratuitous bureaucracy.

But that shantytown made me ashamed of my sanctimony. I knew Lima was rough, but those dwellings showed a level of poverty I had never seen before, not even on the streets near where we were staying, in one of the poorest parts of town. In a way I was relieved when the bus passed. And in another I wanted to be invisible, to fly up there and see up close what that shantytown really looked like, to walk around in it, to smell it, to taste it.

Darkness sank down on the bus. After a few hours we pulled away from the coast and headed inland, into the mountains. I felt us get higher and higher, and the bus cooled down and it became harder to breathe. And then around nine we stopped in Huaraz, where at 14,000 feet the simple act of removing my backpack from the hold underneath the bus stole the breath from me. It was cold, the air thin; I shivered, wanted to get moving. I felt rude to be showing up so late at Rosa’s relatives’, strangers to us, and at the same time I wanted to prolong getting there because I felt shy and a little anxious about arriving at the home of strangers at all.

On first glance Huaraz wasn’t unlike mountain towns in the U.S. There was a little green where kids hung out, cafés, gear stores on the corners, tourist restaurants. But Huaraz had a darker quality to it as well, a sense of ghosts I felt immediately: the streets were narrow and poorly lit, and much of the architecture was new and shoddy. The entire town had been rebuilt after a devastating earthquake in 1970. It looked like it had never gotten out from under the destruction, somehow, like it might just crumble again at any moment.

But to me, the whole day had felt as poorly constructed as Huaraz. Traveling days were the hardest for me, because I was anxious about bus rides on winding South American roads, because I worried my passport in its security pouch wasn’t strapped as tightly as it needed to be to my leg, because invariably my worry caused Ben to snap at me, or me at him. That day had been particularly bad: the swindler at Cara’s house; the two hours in the post office, which I had finally ended by batting my eyelids at a male post office worker; my impatience there, which was met by a scowl and a “chill out” from Ben; the shantytown; and now, Huaraz, ghostly town filled with strangers whose house we were walking towards.

The streets off the main drag were dark and deserted, calm, the air smelling like mountains, and I reminded myself, for the fortieth time since we’d gotten to South America, that I was safe, that nothing was wrong, that things were just different.

“Okay?” I asked Ben, and he nodded. I took his hand, and he squeezed.

II.  We knocked at an old wooden door until a slender girl pulled it open. When she saw us she smiled broadly, as though white people with enormous backpacks came to stay at her house every day.
“Buenas,” I began, prepared to explain who we were, but apparently word had gotten to the Alvarezes that we were coming.

“Mami!” the girl hollered, and a short, plump, dark-haired woman quickly appeared behind her.
“Buenos noches,” she said, and she shuttled us into the house in front of her and closed the door behind us. We had to crouch to get through the hallway, and I felt huge—so huge, everywhere in Peru, at five-foot-six-not-counting-the-backpack. Ben, at 6’ 1”, was in another category altogether, and he wore glasses, small square ones like Peter Fonda’s. I always thought they made him seem even weirder.

“Bienvenida,” Mami said once we’d emerged from the hallway into a spacious room whose ceiling ran the entire height of the house, twenty or thirty feet up. As I inhaled in that space, I was hit with a sickening stench of animal. It made me gag, and I cleared my throat as unobtrusively as I could.

“Rosa—” Mami and I began, simultaneously, then blushed as we each stammered and looked at one another.

“Rosa says hello,” I said eventually, and Mami smiled at me. “Good,” she said. She put her hand on her daughter’s shoulder. “This is Veronica.”

Veronica stared at me with a small smile. I knew I was a strange bird in that house. My practical short hair, rapidly growing shaggy, my pants, my sneakers and fleece jacket, my massive backpack, all made me feel clunky and boyish, unlovely. By contrast, Veronica and her mother emanated a femininity that seemed easy, natural, like something they were born with. They both wore skirts and shiny, gorgeous long hair; Mami had on the traditional layers of skirt that touch the floor and look like they house a hundred things: animals, pots and pans, a petticoat or two. I could count the things we had in common on one hand: breasts, reproductive organs, brown eyes, Rosa.

“So this is our house,” Mami said as we looked around. The house was made of stone: stone walls, stone ceiling, dirt floor. I couldn’t find the correct word for where we stood, tossed around “cellar” and “great room” in my head and found neither quite accurate. I turned behind me as Mami chattered away about the house, very old, almost historic, and how was our bus ride?—“fine, just fine,” we said—and I saw a sink and a clothesline and then a curtain across a doorway that must have led to the bathroom. Then I located the five-foot high pen of guinea pigs in the corner. They rustled and shrieked anxiously, strewing dirty straw, and every movement of their claws stirred up that musky scent. It was so awful I sighed with relief when Mami said, “Come, come!” and led us up a set of wooden stairs and into the living room, where the guinea pig smell was very faint, almost overpowered by the bouquet of something stewing, cabbage perhaps.

The rest of the family was sitting in there, waiting.

“Buenas,” Ben and I said, smiling at the people in the room.

“Buenas,” they said back.

“Por favor.” Mami gestured at a couch propped up on one leg by a brick. It sagged so low my butt nearly touched the ground. Ben sat beside me. There were spider webs of cracks leading from floor to ceiling, and the entire room seemed to slouch. A skeletal Christmas tree presided over the corner with a few odds and ends of presents underneath it. It reminded me that in the chaos of the morning’s events we’d forgotten to bring them a gift.

The family consisted of Veronica’s older brother Dani, who had a kind face and was nearly as tall as Ben. There was a younger brother, too, Pedro, about seven, with pools of chocolate sauce for eyes and a long brown body he draped over the arm of a shabby easy chair. In that chair, nestled deep, sat Papi, and his posture is what first gave me the impression he was kind of a deadbeat. He had a broad smile and giant aviator-style glasses. Papi punctuated his speech with big belly laughs, showing very white, maybe false, teeth, and he liked my name, saying Susi in the way only the Latins can, so it trickles from the mouth like honey.

We made small talk for a few minutes before I asked about the guinea pigs.
“Are those for eating?”

“Of course!” Papi said, teeth blinding me. “Do you like cuy?”

“I’ve never tried it,” I said, glancing at Ben, hoping I wouldn’t have to.

Ben offered: “In our country, they’re—” he fished for the word, looking at me.

“Mascotas,” I said. Pets.

“Mascotas?” Wise Veronica asked, incredulous, shaking her head like she’d never heard anything so silly. At that point it seemed silly even to me: if you didn’t plan to eat them, why would you want those odious creatures around?

“Would it be a crime?” Papi asked, his face very serious.

“A crime?”

“To eat cuy? In your country?” Ben and I looked at one another. My Spanish wasn’t good enough to say, I don’t think it’s come up.

After twenty minutes of chatting about Christmas plans and trekking guides, things to do in Huaraz, Ben and I asked whether it would be okay if we stepped out for a bit. We wanted to get some tea, maybe a little something to eat.

“Go get yourself some maté de coca,” Papi said. “For the altitude.” He tapped his head, and I realized mine was throbbing.

In a little café, Ben and I each ordered a cup of coca tea, and shared a piece of pie. Ben was the love of my life; I knew that. But traveling together for a year was elongating the spaces between us. His face that night was calm, whereas, I suspected, I was tensing and releasing my eyebrows, an unconscious habit I had gotten into in South America.

“What do you think of the Alvarezes?” I asked.

“They’re nice.”  He chewed his pie.

“I think Papi is pretty funny,” I said.

“Yeah.” He took another sip of tea.

“And that house is intense, eh? With those guinea pigs? And that bathroom?” Please, I thought. Please find their house as horrible as I do. Before we left I’d stepped into the bathroom hidden behind that soiled curtain: wet floor, cracked toilet seat, curtainless shower and one of those electric shower heads that terrified me. It smelled of stale pee, of stale shit. It was like nothing I’d encountered in a house before.

“I guess,” Ben said, noncommittal. “I think it’s fine. They’re very nice,” he said again.

“Well, yes, of course,” I said quickly, feeling small. “I’m grateful to them,” and we chewed in silence. “I wonder what they’re saying about us right now,” I ventured after a minute, and Ben looked at me and just shrugged. “Want to go back?” he asked, and thinking, not really, I nodded yes.

————

Susie Meserve is a 2007 Literary Awards Program finalist.

by Ayun Halliday

The assistant manager left us alone to get dressed in a store room. “Don’t dawdle though. Doors open at nine and some of those people have been waiting since seven.”

Nate and I knelt to unzip the footlocker-sized bags that we’d found in the trunk of the car his agency had rented for us for the long drive to the suburban mall. I found myself wishing that we’d stopped for coffee on the way.

“Holy shit,” Nate whispered as we contemplated the impressive, eerie contents. “Which one do you want to be?”

“I have no preference.”

“I’ll be Ernie. You be Bert. Are you going to leave your underwear on?”

“Yes, aren’t you?”

“I don’t know. If Janet had told me we were going to be wearing tights, I’d have brought a jockstrap.”

“The tights are just so your own skin doesn’t show,” I said, sitting down on a box to stretch a mustard-colored pair over my bare feet. “You’ll have his pants on over.”

I suited up in a long-sleeved leotard the same color as the tights, green trousers and a perfect copy of Bert’s ubiquitous vertical-striped jersey. For shoes, I had two toaster-sized soft sculpture high tops that swaddled my feet like miniature sleeping bags.

“Look, Nate, four fingers,” I said, showing him my fuzzy mustard-colored glove-hands.

“Put your head on.” The moment I did, Nate whooped in delighted recognition. “Oh my god, that’s insane! Can you see okay?”

“Not too good.”

“What?” His voice sounded very far away.
“The mesh is like six inches from my eyes.”

“What?”

“God, I hope this isn’t going to activate my claustrophobia. What if I freak out?”

“I can’t understand a fucking thing you’re saying.”

“Man, it’s really stuffy under there,” I gasped, shucking the head.

“Seventy-five bucks an hour for two hours,” Nate reminded me, before plopping Ernie’s head over his own, as determined as a Titanic-era deep sea diver.

The limited visibility became disorienting almost to the point of motion sickness as the assistant manager, Nate and I slowly threaded our way through the children’s department, holding hands. Racks of play clothes rocked crazily in and out of frame as I tried to steal a peek at the multitudes. I was experiencing a strange hybrid of stage fright and that hopeless god-I-wish-I-was-finished-instead-of-starting feeling I used to get clocking in at the Children’s Museum.

“Now remember, don’t say anything, not a word,” our handler coached as we drew closer. “If a child asks you a question, just give him a hug or something. Okay, we’re about two feet from the platform. Excuse me, boys and girls, Ernie and Bert need some room to get through!”

I was aware of the sensation of wading through small bodies, but all I could see were mothers, grimacing with false excitement and/or extreme irritation. The racket the kids were making reached me as the roar of the ocean heard in a seashell. I tried to remain calm, taking yoga breaths so I wouldn’t hyperventilate inside my giant head. What if I passed out from lack of oxygen? I dearly wished the licensing people over at the Children’s Television Workshop had let Bert wear regular old tennis shoes. Walking in those squashy high tops was like navigating the surface of a marshmallow planet … on acid.

The department store woman abruptly let go of my hand and turned to face the crowd. “Does anybody here like Sesame Street?” she screamed coyly. The children and their mothers howled in the affirmative. Several startled infants wailed in terror. Something that felt like a monkey’s paw seized my thigh at crotch level.

“Honey,” the department store woman cooed, “Bert’s going to want to say hello to you, but you have to wait your turn.” Whatever was gripping my leg was pried loose, as an adult hand, presumably the assistant manager’s, spun me around by the shoulder and propelled me toward the stage. I immediately barked my shins on the edge of the platform and pitched forward, dislocating my missile-shaped head on the folding chair that was to be my throne. Given the bumping and thrashing to my left, I deduced that Nate was having similar trouble.

The assistant manager yanked Bert’s head back into alignment and got me into the folding chair where I sat, waving like an ignoramus, until Ernie had been dragged into position beside me.

For the first dozen kids or so, I worked hard to channel the spirit of Bert. I didn’t want to destroy anyone’s illusions, though it was kind of depressing how readily the little tykes accepted as the real thing an overgrown, mute imposter who avoided answering their questions by patting them in what he hoped appeared to be a kindly, non-lecherous way. Many of them had brought along Sesame Street dolls. I couldn’t help noticing that the Ernie’s far outnumbered the Berts.

In fact, I got the distinct impression that some of these kids only deigned to sit in my lap because Ernie’s was occupied. Nate was eating it up. I could hear him attempting Ernie’s signature snicker and humming that rubber duckie song.

“Remember what we said about talking, ‘Ernie,’” the department store woman chirped threateningly.

Chastened, Nate reverted to patting and waving.

“Pick up the pace,” the department store woman hissed, her face pressed against the mesh panel in Bert’s throat. We tried to step up the assembly line, but failed miserably thanks to the universal parental impulse to photograph their young. I could count on four fingers the number of children whose mothers had made this pilgrimage sans camera. Having waited hours to capture the moment, these women would be damned if they’d see their children leave our laps before they’d fired off enough shots to satisfy themselves that a winner lurked somewhere in the batch. By and large, the subjects seemed ready to call it quits long before the photographers.

“Smile,” the mothers hectored. “If you want that Orange Julius Mommy promised you, you’ll pull that tongue back in your mouth and smile, Mister!”

For the first half hour I too smiled on command, but as the muscles surrounding my temporal mandible joint started to seize up, it occurred to me that I could assume any expression I felt like and no one would be the wiser. Good thing Shaggy and Scooby weren’t around to unmask me. After playing around with a variety of psychotic leers, I realized that I’d better buckle down and protect my eyes from all those automatic flashes. The mesh absorbed some of the ocular shock, but who was I to say that all those strobes wouldn’t bring on a seizure of some kind?

“Is it okay if I take a picture, Bert?” a diaper-bag toting mommy shouted as she cradled her infant in the crook of her arm.

I nodded “my” head by rocking back and forth at the waist, wondering what she planned to do with this solo shot. Paste it into the baby book as proof that the great and powerful Bert had once deigned to visit the mall near their home? Timmy, you don’t remember because you were just a baby, but look, there’s Bert and see, the very same platform Santa sits on when he comes to Penney’s!”

Without warning, she thrust the infant into my arms. To say I was ill prepared to receive this bundle grossly understates the situation. I hadn’t held anyone this small since high school, when the neighbors, reassured by the presence of my mother right next door, indulged my desire to earn a dollar an hour babysitting. The giant felt-and-papier-m’ch’ Bert head obscuring my vision did nothing to make me feel more confident that I would remember how. Equine in its ability to sense fear, the baby started to shriek and buck, twisting its muscular torso in its mad desire to get free of the monstrous creature who had taken it from its mother. It was like trying to haul a healthy young sea bass into a rowboat with my bare hands. Actually, bare hands would have come in handy right about then. The accuracy of my Muppet gloves put me at a distinct disadvantage for going the distance with this thrashing mass of fragile human tissue. As the horrifying possibility of the baby torquing itself loose of my grip seemed more and more likely, its mother fumbled with her instamatic.

“Oh, darn it, I forgot to turn the flash on,” she cursed.

“Pleasepleasepleaseplease,” I whimpered inside Bert’s cranium, as I struggled to keep the baby from doing a triple gainer. Unable to see the increasingly desperate little creature pushing against my lap with all its might, I kept my eyes fastened on the mother’s camera.

“Oh, come on, you, turn on,” she chided, addressing the small indicator light beside the viewfinder.

Oh my god, her batteries were low.

“Turnonturnonturnon,” I begged. “I can’t hold on much longer!” Where was the department store woman? Couldn’t anyone see that I was in trouble? Or that this baby had zero interest in getting its picture taken?

I wonder how many minutes that shaved off my life, waiting for the light on the back of Mommy’s camera to glow orange. Finally, she held the camera up to her eye, snapped the shutter, then frowned. “Did the flash go off?” she asked uncertainly.

Palming the baby, I davened frantically, praying that no one in the crowd would dare contradict Bert.

The baby sapped my energy so badly, I was unable to appreciate the one hardcore Bert fan to cross my lap. He was a little older than the others and chattered on about Ernie’s and my twin beds and Mr. Hooper and I don’t know what the fuck else. He showed me a long length of paper clips he had hooked together. I patted his thigh absentmindedly.

“Wrap it up,” the department store woman mouthed, twirling her index finger in exasperation. I tried to hand the kid off to Nate, but he returned, paper clips in hand.

“He brought that for you, Bert,” his mother stressed, her expression conveying that management would most certainly be hearing from her. Given the baby, the pesky exhortations of the department store woman and my inability to swab the sweat from my eyes, nothing would have felt better than knocking that nasty mother down, butting her square in the chest with my pointy Bert head, but instead I writhed my way through all sorts of hokey mimed gestures. For me? Really? Paper clips? My heart’s beating like a captured sparrow! I love you! I love you some more!

“Just put it by his feet, Jason,” the boy’s mother scowled, when it became clear that the big mustard dummy lacked the manual dexterity to pick up the gift. Only later did Nate tell me that Bert collects paper clips, a trait that must have eluded me when I was a regular viewer between the ages of three and six. I never was part of the college gang that liked to fire up the bong and sing along with Big Bird every afternoon.

We’d been processing kids for well over the stipulated two hours and still the line snaked back into menswear. Nate’s agency hadn’t mentioned anything about overtime when they hooked us up with this gig. The department store lady was losing what little cool she’d had to begin with, barking things like, “Time’s up, sweetheart!” and “Decide which one’s your favorite because you can’t sit on them both.” This last edict was repealed when it resulted in a stampede toward Nate. So help me if he gloated about this when we got home.

“Uh uh, sorry, the new rule is you sit on whoever’s lap becomes available first,” the department store woman snapped, hoisting a blubbering Ernie fan onto my thighs.

Mercifully, this arbitrary legislation was amended almost immediately. I didn’t think I could take that many crying kids when with every passing minute, the oxygen in my cranial chamber seemed less and less likely to sustain life.

“Boys and girls, Ernie and Bert have to go back to Sesame Street now.” An outraged gasp from the mothers made me question the sanity of this decision. What if the angry mob tried to prevent us from leaving? It would be like that scene in To Kill A Mockingbird where a terrified Scout blunders through the woods as best she can, her progress grossly impeded by her papier-m’ch’ ham costume. How would I ever find the storeroom? Maybe better to head toward the light. If I could make it to the parking lot, I could ditch my Bert gear behind the van and become just another shoeless shopper in mustard colored ‘tard and tights.

“Oh, all right!” the department store woman conceded as mutiny threatened. “They’ll come down the line and shake hands, but that’s all!” As a bottom rung actor, I’d never been able to muster much in the way of sympathy for celebrities who bitched about the hardships of public adoration, but running the low-speed gauntlet past all those grasping Sesame Street devotees and their pissed-off moms changed all that. The department store woman was hustling us along way faster than was prudent. Nate and I kept falling down on top of each other, ending up in the sort of bend-over-boyfriend sprawl the Children’s Television Workshop takes pains never to depict.

There were cries of dismay as the familiar strains of Sesame Street’s opening theme issued from the PA, signaling the event’s conclusion. Waving in a sort of general farewell, we waded through the racks of tiny coordinates, the department store woman blocking the groupies. I couldn’t be sure, given the mesh, but I think she was zigzagging us back to the storeroom along an alternative route, the same tactic State department employees utilize to avoid ambush. It didn’t work. A mother lay in wait behind a pedestal full of mannequins, camera drawn.

“My child has been waiting for hours to have his picture taken with them,” she fumed. “How dare you cut the line before his turn?”

“Ma’am,” the department store woman countered in a tone more martial than customer service-oriented, “There were more than a hundred people in that line and I’m afraid Ernie and Bert have a very full schedule today, isn’t that right, Ernie?” Nate rocked from side to side like a dancing bear.

“What kind of people are you to disappoint a child like that,” the mother spat. “You’ll never see another cent of my business, do you hear? Baby, turn around so Mommy can get a picture of you with Ernie and Bert!”

“Ma’am, I’m afraid I can’t let you do that. It’s wouldn’t be fair to the others who waited in line’”

“Fair!? You talk to me about fair?”
As the combatants faced off, I felt a pair of small arms encircling my waist. By arching my back and forcefully tucking my chin, I was just barely able to get their owner in my sights. Untouched by the fury that consumed his mother, he gazed up with the radiant expression of those little kids flocking around Jesus in illustrated volumes of children’s Bible tales.

“I love you, Buwt,” he announced, contentedly burying his nose in my foam rubber. Oh, suffer the little children to come unto me. What a little lamb, inadvertently absolving me of guilt for the photo his mother would not be permitted to take.

What was wrong with him that he didn’t prefer Ernie?

Blanche Dubois always depended on the kindness of strangers. Me, I’ve always depended on strangers thinking I’m someone else.

I’m referring, in my case anyway, to getting sex.

I know it’s weird, but the assumption some women make that I’m one or another of a certain group of actors and musicians has been, from my early adulthood to what’s now my middle age, how I get my pipes cleaned more or less regularly and for free.

It’s also made it possible for me to have (however briefly and if you’re willing to stretch the definition) an actual relationship.

I should make it clear right away that on my own terms I’m not someone you’d describe as spilling over with attractive qualities. For one thing, a future with the second towel man in a car wash certainly isn’t something a lot of women lie awake at night fantasizing about. No, it’s not that I’m dumb; it’s a problem that I have with applying and executing. I’m not good at those things. In fact, I’m terrible at them. I think this is because I’ve never been comfortable with the whole business of living. There’s something unnatural about it that I find unsettling and I tend to lose my concentration in the least challenging of situations. You might want to indulge a generous impulse and remind me that anyone, on a given day, can screw up the Post Office test. But when I tell you that I also failed the New York City Transit Authority’s dispatcher quiz, you’ll have to agree that the condition of ineptitude here does for sure have a stunning dimension.

And if my level of achievement and corresponding financial circumstances aren’t enough to give a lady pause, there’s my appearance. Although I’m of Greek ancestry, the figure that I cut is something less than Greek. Just under average height, more skinny than slim, and with long, usually unkempt hair hanging over my ears and forehead and down the scruff of my neck, I also have heavily lidded eyes, sunken cheeks and a pallor that’s cadaverous. While we may not be talking Elephant Man, this still isn’t a picture I’d want to keep in my heart-shaped locket.

But here’s the thing: When I look in the mirror I see (if a likeness is to be drawn at all) Ratso Rizzo or Sonny, the pathetic loser in Scarecrow. But a number of women, when they look at me, see Dustin Hoffman or Al Pacino. Or, for that matter, Bob Dylan and Lou Reed, among others.

Typically, and on an average of once a month, I’ll be in a bar, seated alone in a corner and nursing a beer when, just like that, a woman will be at my shoulder.

“I know this is rude,” she will say, “but I couldn’t help myself. I had to come over to tell you how mesmerizing you were in Godfather II.”

Or: “‘Positively Fourth Street”it changed my life.”

I realized some years later that the “strange thing” (as I came to call it) surfaced for the first time when I was only twelve. A dozen or so teenage girls were exiting a theater that was playing A Hard Day’s Night. As I passed by on the other side of the street, one shouted something and then three or four of them broke from the others and began to run in my direction. I can recall my sensory equipment registering a small blip that this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. But terrified by their shrieks and the predatory way they were licking their lips, my reaction was to flee.

Nine years would pass before anything remotely comparable happened again, but by then, though no less mystified by what was taking place, I was at least ready to respond more appropriately.

Two weeks after my twenty-first birthday (and just one week after my graduation from high school), I was working as a messenger and in a cab on a summer morning with a package to deliver. Heading across town we were paused at a light when an incredible creature materialized. Wire thin, without a curve or a bump in her entire torso, and all arms and legs (especially legs’in my memory, doubtless distorted by time, her skirt is hemmed at just under her chin), she had to have been seven feet tall, and I’m not even counting the fuck-me heels and tendril-like spikes of hair that, drooping just a bit at the ends and gently waving as she moved, erupted from the top of her head. Factoring in the enormous sunglasses she was wearing on an oval face, she resembled nothing so much as a giant insect.

Coming alongside the cab, she did a broad double take, exclaimed, “Holy shit, I don’t believe this,” and yanked the door open. The light was still red when, tucking me back into my pants, she said, “Say ‘hi’ to Miss Baez for me, Bobby.”

(I remember that my driver was holding both sides of his head with his hands and that his eyes were popping out like cartoon eyes on springs. When we arrived at my destination he not only refused to take any money, he actually gave me a roll of quarters.)

I still had no reason to regard this incident as anything more than a bizarre and isolated case of mistaken identity, until I encountered, a couple of weeks later in a bar, another woman who was under the impression I was Bob Dylan’and then another who was thoroughly persuaded that I was Al Pacino. With these events I could hardly fail to recognize the pattern that was developing.

Of course it would be awhile before I got a handle on the amazing gift I’d been handed and was able to realize something like its full potential. But in much the same way that I finally achieved respectable levels of competency in toilet procedures and at masturbating by myself, determination, practice and a willingness to learn from my mistakes paid off and I became increasingly proficient at utilizing it.

In the first of the instances I’ve just noted, for example, my response to the woman who approached me was to thank her for the implicit compliment and then to correct her. But when I observed that being truthful didn’t just dampen her interest in me but provoked a discernible hostility’when, that is, she put her cigarette out in my drink and called me an “asshole”‘I understood that denying the identity a woman assigned me was not the way to go and that I’d do well in the future to stifle the reflex to be honest.

And bearing this lesson in mind on the second occasion, I did get the girl to come back to my place.

Now before I go on I should point out that my place isn’t exactly a showplace. It suits my budget, but it’s in an old Lower East Side building where the facilities aren’t in their conventional locations. (We’re talking bathtub in the living room, toilet in the kitchen, that sort of thing.) Plus, I share the joint with several legions of cockroaches, an ever-extending family of rodents and an apparently unprecedented and aerodynamic hybrid of the two. (The biologists who’ve come from everywhere to investigate this phenomenon always leave with very concerned expressions on their faces.)

So as you’ve no doubt gathered, bringing a woman home was a really bad move. I’d go into detail about what took place when we arrived at my apartment, but since the matter is still in litigation it’s probably wise to say only that (as I got it explained to me later) it was almost certainly the sudden presence of a total stranger, especially one with red hair, that precipitated the attack. (Apparently the creature was acting on some primal imperative to protect its young.) Okay? In my judgment it was more of a menacing and hovering thing than what you’d call an attack. But I think that’s all I’d better say about it.

Despite the unpleasantness, however, this episode was an important learning experience, and when yet another woman who believed I was Al Pacino presented herself I not only made no protest but insisted that we repair to her place. Well, a few hours later I was cheerfully extracting my shorts from a tangled mix of hastily discarded clothing at the foot of her bed (and promising that first thing in the morning I would instruct my agent to forward a signed eight-by-ten glossy from Bobby Deerfield).

But my education was hardly completed. If, at this point, I had two basic rules to follow’never volunteer the truth about myself and never let a woman anywhere near my apartment’I would soon recognize the need for a third: Never even think about initiating a hook-up. I’m referring here to events that took place on an evening when, horny enough to jerk off to a postcard of the Statue of Liberty but attracting no attention, I approached a woman and boldly introduced myself as Al Pacino. The loosened retina I sustained (and which makes everything get like very white for a second) has served to keep me mindful of just how critical to my success, not to mention my well-being, is the discipline of laying back.

Yes, I did feel a little guilty at first but I got over it.

Look, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that what I do isn’t nice, that I take advantage of the women I connect with. Do you know what I want to say when I hear that? I want to say “FUCK YOU!”‘that’s what I want to say. I’ve given the matter a great deal of thought and I’ll explain this just once. The women I attract are not what you’d call off the top shelf. Though they all qualify as women in the technical sense, are all, that is, in possession of the crucial anatomical components (which, more often than not, are in something like a normal configuration), they are not exactly achingly beautiful, beaming with mental health or candidates for a Star Fleet Academy scholarship. In fact, and without exception, they are pretty desperate people, sick puppies and three-legged cat types. Many of them suffer horrendous hygiene problems and are also myopic to the point of posing a serious threat to themselves. They are usually very drunk as well. Given their condition the service I provide them is every bit as valuable as what they do for me.

Now don’t understand me too fast’I'm not talking about providing them with sex. I’m talking about helping them satisfy another need, a need that’s just as real and urgent as the need for sex. I’m talking, of course, about the need to feel special. By physically connecting to my celebrity these women can feel that they are sharing in my anointment.

But that’s not all. After suffering the consequences of being truthful, and noticing over time that what questions they would ask me could, for the most part, be readily answered by any faithful viewer of “Entertainment Tonight,” it gradually became clear to me that somewhere in their brains these women understood that I wasn’t the luminary they were taking me for. But given how pressing was their need to rise above their abject circumstances, even for a minute (and something’whatever it was’about my physiognomy enabling them to use me to this purpose), the fact that they sort of knew they were delusional wasn’t about to interfere with their pursuit of me.

So, as you can see, there’s no exploiting going on here’not from my end anyway. I mean the very last thing these women wanted me to be was straight with them. On the contrary. They were counting on me to help them finesse a trick they were playing on themselves.

A trick they were playing on themselves! Get it?

Okay. I didn’t mean to get vicious there, but since it’s never really me who gets laid, I suffer a pretty large indignity myself. So I think people might find it within themselves to be, you know, a little less judgmental.

In any case, with the recognition that my role in the process was just to show up and play along, other methods of procedure I would over time develop are fairly simple, intended only to make sure that I’m presenting myself in a way that’s as amenable to distortion as I can get it and then to forestall the possibility of ruining things.

My manner of dress, for example. To try and stay apace of what some half-dozen affluent and more or less fashion-conscious men might be wearing at any given time would have been out of the question even if I’d been able to afford it. And since I never know who I’ll be before I venture outside, whose wardrobe would I choose? So in the summer I wear jeans and a work shirt (cleaned and pressed to be sure) and either sneakers or boots. In the winter I add a sweater and a pea coat. I might very well be the complete non-entity and total loser that I am. On the other hand I could just as easily be a Master of the Universe in a casual mode.

My demeanor is informed by the same psychology. Once a woman has established contact I try to limit my responses to those rare questions I have no answer for, to an ambiguous smile. Or, when I think it’s best, I become silent and expressionless. Real actors will notice that, in the latter respect, I avail myself of a rudimentary device of their craft. Taking on a poker face, I let the woman read into it what her wishes and expectations dictate and require.

And, of course, no matter how agreeable the experience and melancholy the break, I always make it a point to disappear after one night.

With just one notable exception, I’ve scrupulously adhered to these rules and they’ve helped to assure me a fairly decent range of experiences.

I’m thinking now of a woman who despite an irritating quirk that she had of blowing her nose with her hair, kept my interest by taking me through not just every position in the Kama Sutra but more than enough new ones to justify a supplementary volume. (It being Lou Reed’s turn to get lucky I was serenaded all the while by her tape of my ” Greatest Hits.”)

I’m thinking as well of the time identical triplets, appropriately sharing the same delusion and built like middle linebackers, invited Leonard Cohen to a cluster fuck and wound up breaking two of my ribs.

It’s a little off to the side, but I’m also thinking of a period that lasted several months during which I was continually approached by men. “I really enjoyed your work in Cocks ‘n’ Cocks,” they would say. And they would go on to tell me how impressed they were by the way I took “full occupation” of my “space.” That sort of thing.

It was puzzling. I’d never heard of this film, or of the actor’Johnson something’they were taking me for. At first uncomfortable with their advances, it dawned on me one evening that my chances for scoring had suddenly doubled and that I’d be a fool not to take advantage of this turn of events. (I mean where’s the problem? It’s just friction, isn’t it?) But sad to say, not much would develop for me in this area. Before anything happened these guys would erupt in fits of incapacitating laughter, get really nasty or become crestfallen and disconsolate. It turned out that they’d decided I was Johnson Johnson, a porn actor who (within his discipline) was having his fifteen minutes. Curious, I found Cocks ‘n’ Cocks in a theater on 42nd Street and checked him out. To my surprise there were real and striking similarities between us; many more in fact than was usually so. Unfortunately there was also one significant difference. I had barely qualified for the “Woman’s Home Companion” category in the old high school joke. When Johnson Johnson used the urinal in a men’s room he probably had to stand in the hall.

And then there’s the “relationship” I spoke of, which was also the time I broke most all of my rules. We’re going back a dozen years here, but there are still nights during which I’m abruptly awakened by the sound of my voice calling her name. When I’m not alone these outbursts cause my bedmates to awaken rather abruptly themselves, but I think at least a part of what they find disconcerting is that the name I call is “Roger”‘her father wanted a boy and he hadn’t taken no for an answer.

A sparrow of a girl, no more than four-foot-ten and alarmingly skinny, Roger had thick black hair that, falling over most of her face, also fell nearly to the floor. The first time I saw her, from the other end of a long and crowded bar, I thought she was a half-opened umbrella standing on its handle.

We were introduced later that evening by a casual acquaintance of mine she turned out to be with who knew nothing about me except my real name (and who was obviously trying to dump her). But when he said, and quite clearly I thought, “Roger, I’d like you to meet Pete Papadoupolous,” her reply was: “Mr. Hoffman! What an honorary and spectaculated phenomination. This is peerless even.”

Now the thing was that when I saw what was happening normal procedure in this circumstance went out the window. I think I knew immediately that Roger was a keeper and at once recognizing how much she wanted me to be Hoffman and deathly afraid that she would turn away at the slightest hint that I wasn’t (which would have been difficult to tell since her hair made it all but impossible to know in which direction she was facing), I went out of way to nourish and perpetuate the “misunderstanding.”

What can I say? I was in love for the only time in my life, and when, in our initial embrace a couple of hours later I must have squeezed her too hard and she urinated all over my sneakers, I just’I guess it was the intimacy of it’went over the top. Indeed, before the sun came up I had invited her to live with me and she had accepted.

“I’m so excrutiated,” she gushed. “I’m besides both sides of myself. And yours too!”

Yes, of course I knew there was no way it could work, that it had to end badly. But I couldn’t help entertaining the fantasy that if I drew her in really tight before she discovered her error, we might achieve a depth of bonding that would make my true identity (or lack of one) irrelevant.

The following morning (and amazed by the soothing effect her presence was having on my flying roommates’who’d stopped fluttering around so much and were making sweet cooing sounds), I was more than anxious to know everything about her.

She hadn’t, I learned, had an easy time of it.

Her father, she said, had been a profligator of languigistics at a presticated universalment but had quit his tender position and dissipated’ just, and poignantly, a day after Roger, then a toddler, had spoken her first paragraph.

No less heartbreaking, her mother, on whose insurance policy she’d been living for the last twenty years, had tragicastically electrified herself when she inexplaciously dropped a George Foreman grill into the bath she was taking’this on the evening of the day she’d come to Roger’s first grade class to hear her recite “Mary Kept A Smallish Lamb.”

But at this point (and apparently wrestling with her delusion’which was something I’d never known any of my women to do and which, I thought, said something about the quality of her character, though I’m not sure what exactly), she began to ask some questions of her own.

“How come you don’t seem to have the majority of cash I respected?” she said. “How come you don’t habituate in a nice place? How come you don’t have a phone if Steven Spielberg and Sidney Pollack want to hand out some rings? How come your closet is only fulminating with jeans? Also, how come you don’t keep your birds in cages?”

Considering that I wasn’t used to such an interrogation’and that I was obliged to think on my feet’I came up with something that I thought wasn’t bad.

“Honey,” I said, “you’ve entered my life at the worst possible time and while I know that it’s asking a lot, I can only hope you’ll find it within yourself to bear with me. I’m afraid that I may be afflicted with what’s called the ‘J.D. Salinger Syndrome’. It’s a condition of creative paralysis that sometimes develops in artists who have achieved a legendary stature. Owning the prospect of a fame that will survive their demise, they live in terror of losing that prospect by producing work that might be inferior to what they’ve already accomplished. Rather than risk tainting their image, they cease to function and, in the worst cases, to even appear in public where the possibility of a clumsy or mediocre utterance could alter and diminish the way they’re perceived. What happens is that they effectively sacrifice the remainder of their lives to their immortality. I may or may not overcome this disease and I’ll understand completely if its something you want no part of. All I can say is that I’m deliberately staying out of the public eye right now and that I’ve cut myself off from even my closest friends and associates who, meaning well but not understanding, would only make light of my problem and encourage me to work. This unfortunately includes my accountant who happens to be the only person with access to my bank accounts. As for the apartment, it’s my hideout. It’s perfect as a hideout because no one would ever think to look for me in such a crummy place. You’re the only one who knows about it, the only person I’ve trusted enough to bring to it. But again, I’ll understand if this isn’t something you want to involve yourself with because it won’t be a whole lot of fun and I don’t know how it will end.”

And it worked. Roger said nothing, but in addition to breaking out in a really hideous rash as I spoke, her chest swelled noticeably, almost expanding into something like a bosom. She must have felt five feet tall to be deemed worthy of sharing in my time of trial.

But her obvious uneasiness with the situation in which she found herself would periodically surface. A couple of days later she wanted to know why more people didn’t notarize me on the street.

“Really good actors,” I said, “have the ability to be anonymous when they want to be, sometimes even invisible.”

I remember that when I said this it made her giggle.

But even putting aside the considerable tensions caused by my charade (and the always frazzling necessity to invent places I was going to when I left the house for the car wash every day), living with Roger was nerve-racking all by itself’like being tuned to two radio stations at once in a room with the light bulb loose in its socket. Periods of incessant chatter, for instance, would suddenly be interrupted, often in mid-sentence, by a dead silence, as though her plug had been pulled from the wall. At such times she might become motionless as well. Although her eyes would remain open I couldn’t be sure if she was actually conscious. In fact, on several occasions, I’d have been ready to believe she’d expired were it not for an odd clucking sound, the origin of which I was never able to locate, and something unattractive that she did with the muscles around her mouth.
Still, as enormous as the problems were, the moments of bliss I experienced in those first weeks more than compensated for them.

Spring was beginning and, celebrating its arrival, we did the things new lovers do when spring is upon them. We went to a windswept beach where we romped and frolicked in the sand. Locked in an embrace we rolled over and over down a steep hill in Central Park. In the evenings I washed her hair and she gleefully folded my penis into woodland animal shapes.

I’d have to say that, all things considered, life was pretty good.

Then it went bad.

Roger read in a newspaper that Hoffman was going to shoot a film somewhere in the Midwest and that he’d be on location for two weeks.

“Why didn’t you push my head up?” she said, showing me the article.

Even though I’d known all along that such a development was inevitable, I was nonetheless shaken by this news. It took no small effort to collect myself sufficiently to say: “I was going to tell you, but I thought I’d wait until the last minute because I wasn’t sure the part would work out and because I knew how painful a separation now will be for us. I didn’t want to make you sad before I had to.”

But she was happy. Clapping her hands she said, “I’m so glad to know you lastly clambered over your jaded salanjastiker hippodrome.”

“Well let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” I said. “It could be just a fleeting thing.”

Needing a place to get lost for two weeks, and with nowhere else to go, it was left for me to seek accommodations at the car wash. And the night before I departed Roger helped me pack my things. When we were done she went to the kitchen and brought back a bottle of cheap champagne she’d concealed in the back of the refrigerator.

“This is a time for jubilating,” she said, pulling the cork herself. Then, touching my glass with hers, she said, “Breakfast with eggs, Duster!”

As you can imagine, the following days were either bad or worse than bad. Sleeping in various vehicles in a lot adjoining the wash, I showered and did my laundry standing behind cars on the conveyor belt. And missing her terribly, the fact that I couldn’t reach her because the apartment had no phone was torture for me. I could only hope that she was okay.

Finally, mercifully, the two weeks were up and I went home.

Hearing my key in the lock, Roger came to the door with one of my “birds” perched on top of her head and holding another newspaper. Without a word, she shoved the paper at me before I’d even crossed the threshold. It was open to a story about Hoffman. Some kind of budget issue had arisen and production on his film had been suspended. During the hiatus Hoffman was staying in New York. The paper had been printed on the date he arrived.

He’d been here for a week!

Putting the paper down I met her eyes and saw that they were red and swollen.

“Where were you?” she said. ” A whole plus seven’and twenty-four as well.”

When I had no quick answer she said, “You’re doing an exquisite triathlon, isn’t it?”

You will appreciate that, as heart wrenching as her question was, my principle emotion at that moment was relief.

“Darling, Darling,” I said, “No way. There’s no way I would ever betray you like that. No, I’m not having an illicit liaison. How could you think such a thing? I’m playing an unhappy man and to stay in character I deprived myself of your company’for as long as I could bear it anyway. It’s just a coincidence that it was exactly one week.

Roger stepped toward me and buried her face in my abdomen.

“I was frightful,” she said

She was trembling and so was I. We stood holding each other for a very long time.

Determined from then on to be more careful, I made a special effort to monitor what she might read, see or hear. But I couldn’t cover everything. Just a few days later we were awakened by the radio alarm clock and immediately heard on a newscast that the budget problem had been resolved and that Hoffman was back on location. Fleeing to the kitchen to find something to kill myself with, I could feel Roger right behind me. I expected flying dishes. What I got was a juicy kiss.

“You didn’t have to submit a misleader about being Dustin Hoffman,” she said. “Why did you think you had to be duplicacious with me?”

I was stunned. Had my wildest dreams come true? Was it possible that Roger had come to love me for myself after all? I couldn’t believe it. Nor could I believe the sex that was
to follow.

I always knew Roger was hot when (it was her signal to me) she lay down on the bed on her stomach, raised her skirt and floated an air biscuit. But that morning’s air biscuit resonates for me to this day. Indeed, it will be forever etched in my memory, not only for its remarkable housekeeping application (it worked to clear the apartment of all vermin for almost a month), but because it served to set the stage for the most incredible orgasm I’ve ever had.

I’ve never been able to faithfully describe that orgasm. If I report that before it I’d had no idea how much sheer joy there was to feel in sex, that never in my life have I known so pure an ecstasy, I don’t begin to do it justice or to convey how, in the throes of it, I felt myself transported to a place beyond time and that, floating free as something like total spirit, I was privy for an instant to the deepest secrets and most puzzling mysteries of creation. (In that apocalyptic moment I actually understood, for example, why Chuck Norris was on the planet.)

And I can say this notwithstanding the fact that the orgasm was somewhat premature’I was still standing over the bed and fully clothed when it happened.

Anyway, when it was done and I lay down next to her, happily exhausted, basking in the afterglow, I was ready to drop my guard and reveal my true self to her in all its emptiness. Brushing away her hair to find her face, which took a awhile, I was about to speak when she said:

“You’ll never assume the crush I had with you.”

“?”

“I saw ‘Our Picnics in Needles Park’ six times and ‘Bobby Dearest’ eleven times. God, Alfredo, how I wanted to sit on your head!”

If, only minutes earlier, I’d discovered what it must feel like to win the lottery, now I knew the depths of despair. Even to think about commencing a new deception was beyond my strength.

I didn’t know what to do.

The very next day, and too weary at this point to bother checking the TV listings, the matter was taken from my hands. Pacino suddenly turned up on a live talk show we were watching. When he came on, Roger looked at me, then back at the screen and then at me again.

“How are you doing that?” she said.

When I could only shrug she bolted from the room and was gone for twenty minutes. She must have lapsed into her semiconscious thing because I could hear that strange clucking sound (which was a lot louder than usual). When she returned she stood directly in front of me with her arms akimbo. (I could tell her arms were akimbo because her elbows were sticking out of her hair at the same 45 degree angle.)

This time there was no mistaking it, she was pissed.

“You haven’t been Al Pacino either,” she said.

“No, Honey, I haven’t.”

Where once Roger had contemplated me with an unabashed reverence, as though an aureole surrounded my face, now she looked at me as though I was the lowest form of nature’s creepy crawly creations.

“I’ve known it,” she said. “You’re a pathoprecocious person. You’re a hypothetical liar. Well, don’t bother to make up something improved because it’ll be too little and without much else.”

“Sweetheart…”

“I mean it,” she said. “I’m cognisacious of the person you really are now. I’ve been expectorating it for days.”

Yes, I was ready to say ruefully, I’m Fred the Fraud. I’m Sid the Shit. I’m Deforest the Deceiver.

“You’re Emilio Estevez,” she said. “You’re Emilio Estevez and you’re ashamed of yourself. Why? Why, Emilio? I know you aren’t a word that people keep inside the house, but yesterday when my suspicionings aroused me and I said to myself, ‘Roger, you’re a chimp, this can’t be broccoli you’re smelling’, I went to a laberarium and found you in a book. It said you were a ‘thirdly ratinated thespassian who sometimes didn’t stink up the place’. Wouldn’t I co-habituate with Emilio Estevez? Am I so stuffed-up, or what the fuck is this?”

“Rog…”

“If only you’d had the retegritude to level yourself for me. But now…. Oh Emilio, I could never stay with a man who has so weenie an esteement for his aural fibers. Nor I myself.”

I pleaded with her not to go. I had no way to pull it off, of course, but I promised to take her backstage to meet the cast of “Cats.” I know she agonized over the proposal, but this lady was not without principles. Indeed, she looked at me then as though it was a few years after Watergate and I was Richard Nixon wondering aloud to Republican Party officials if they might, you know, consider nominating me again.

A few months later Roger took up with a guy she’s been with ever since. I think she thinks he’s Danny DeVito and I’ve often wondered, since they have a phone, how he handles it when Jack Nicholson and Michael Douglas never call.

And while I’m on a sour note anyway I might as well tell you of a period in which the celebrity connection women make fo

It’s my last Friday ‘Muslim day of communal prayer’ in Iran. After a twenty-six year absence from the country, my first return is coming to a close. I gaze out the window that overlooks the city of Shiraz and I’m filled with memories of my time here as an exchange student. Raw emotions make their way to the surface, as I wonder if I’ll ever make it back again. I feel a strong need to leave my fellow tourists behind and head to a sacred site’one of the city’s many shrines’ where I can be alone with my thoughts; alone in a crowd of fellow believers. I don’t try to understand this need. I just recall the words of my grandmother; ‘Listen to the voice within you. It’s the voice of wisdom.’

Although I dress in traditional Islamic clothing, I know that my blue eyes and light skin reveal my western origin. With a touch of trepidation about how Iranians might react to a foreigner in their shrine, I force my hands to open the drawer that holds my veil.

I leave the hotel wrapped in a black shroud that enables me to fade into the world of the sacred, as if I had surrounded myself in eternal prayer that keeps the touch of the profane away from my skin, my face, my heart. I can’t help but chuckle at the western feminists who will never know the delicious anonymity one gains under a veil. As they speak of rescuing me from the ‘oppression’ of becoming a drop in a sea of black fabric, I luxuriate in the freedom from trying to be someone special, someone different, a person who seeks everyone else’s admiration and approval. I turn away from this world and focus on God.

The shrine arises like a glistening mountain of gold and blue. The ceramic tiles of the minaret call me to a higher place and my spirit’ which is so fragile on this day’ rises to the sunny sky above me while clouds drift by as if they have all the time in the world. ‘They do,’ I tell myself, and lower my head, humbled by their beauty. My heart beats to an ancient rhythm as I walk through the shadow of the minaret that lays prostrate across the central courtyard and points toward the door of the inner shrine.

I follow the other women and enter the door only to encounter a man who’s quietly telling the men to continue straight, while the women are directed to walk through a black curtain to the right. All is dark for a moment as I stoop forward a bit and make my way through the layers of fabric that separate the men’s area from the women’s. For a short moment I have the sensation of traveling through a womb, wrapped in warmth and heading toward an exit that will lead me to unknown territory. Then I gasp as I emerge, enshrouded in shimmering lights that seem to come from another world. I can’t help but gawk at the ceiling; a domed structure completely covered in mirrors with delicate chandeliers swaying in a slight breeze. Light is everywhere.

Women engulf me in a sea of prayer and tears as they sweep me along their river of movement toward the tomb. Though I want to stop and look, I can’t fight the flow. I surrender and touch the wall to my left to steady myself as the crowd pushes toward their ultimate goal: the final resting place of Sayyed Amir Ahmad, brother of one of the twelve Shi’a Imams, saintly men who are direct descendants of the Prophet Muhammad.

The tomb is enclosed in walls of gold and silver that are decorated with Qur’anic verses and arabesque filigree. In the center, several arched openings become windows to the world of the afterlife where the grave sits in silent repose. Each window is filled with metal lattice that women cling to in devotion as they pray for their loved ones who are suffering from illness, sorrow, or the inability to conceive that greatest gift of all, a child. Their hands hang on to the grid as their bodies shake with sobs, filling the room with an intense longing for God’s mercy to be shown to those for whom their hearts ache. I’m suddenly overwhelmed with thoughts of my brother’s daughter who had just been in a car accident, and had held on to her best friend whose life quietly flowed away and drifted to a place unknown. Tears stream down my face and I find solace in holding on to the bars of the shrine, feeling the hands of the other women pat mine gently before moving on.

I think of the Iraqis who are burying their children in between bombing raids that drop from the sky as if heaven and hell have been reversed, making death come down like rain. An overwhelming weight comes upon me and I have to sit before I succumb to its power and fall to the ground.

Making my way to one of the marbled walls of the shrine, I slump to the floor and cover my face in the safety of my veil. All else drifts away and I beseech God to help my niece and all the other people who have suffered the final gaze of the ones they love. I have no concept of how long I’ve remained there, wrapped in my own world when a soft touch on the shoulder brings me back to the room that glistens with rays of light bouncing off the ceiling and showering us with its grace.

‘Khanoom, Ma’am.’

I look up to see the rugged, sun dried face of a village woman who had obviously spent much of her life toiling in a field.

‘Who are you crying for?’ she asks.

‘The daughter of my brother.’

‘What happened?’

‘Her friend died, and she was hurt,’ is all I can say before crying again. The woman stands up and walks to the wall that separates the men from the women. It’s just a couple feet taller than the top of our heads, and she must have heard her husband’s voice on the other side of the wall. ‘Hossein,’ she calls.

‘Yes?’

‘Tell all the men to pray for the foreigner’s niece.’

I hear the sound of a stranger telling everyone to pray for my brother’s child. The voices of at least a hundred men begin humming with prayer. On our side of the wall, the other women look at me, raise their palms in the air and pray. It is then that I realize that I’m the only person who came to this shrine alone: everyone else is with family and friends. They sit in tightly knit groups and comfort each other, sometimes laughing, sometimes crying and I feel an enormous loss for not being part of a group of women that day. As I’m surrounded by their loving prayers, I feel threads of destiny weaving us together in an endless tapestry of mothers, daughters and sisters who have shared this blessing of life since the dawn of time and my loneliness drifts away like embers in the night.

Those seated along the wall slowly move toward me till I’m embraced between the shoulders of two women I would share this moment with, but never get to know. They have powerful shoulders that speak of strength: of lifting rocks and sowing fields before the setting sun allows them to surrender to the day’s exhaustion.

I find comfort in our shared silence as we wrap chadors over our faces and peer out at the crowd that moves past us like moments in eternal time. Because I’m seated on the floor, what I see first is the women’s feet moving along as their veils open up, revealing to me their life stories. There are ancient feet with bony lumps bulging from the side; feet that have walked so many miles of life that they seem weary and ready for eternal peace. There are delicate city feet with golden bracelets resting peacefully on the ankle. One woman hobbles along with a wrinkled clubfoot covered in the brown-black skin of southern Iran where Arab tribes have lived for centuries. Beautiful shimmering fabrics in red and green swish past me as Qashqai tribal women take time off from their mountain migrations to seek the blessings of the venerated man whose body rests a few feet to my left. The gold threads that are woven into their skirts flash rays of light across space and time as the women seem to float along the marble floor, and I’m in awe of their ability to maintain traditions in the onslaught of our televised McWorld. Enormous silver bracelets jingle around their wrists as they move to the back of the shrine to perform their prayers.

The women next to me slowly drift into a gentle slumber and I rise to say goodbye to this mystical place before heading back to the outside world. I wander in silence and take in the sights for the last time. Prayers are engraved in marble slabs along the walls that women touch as they recite the Qur’an. Ceramic tiles in brilliant blue and white reflect the flood of light that pours down from the mirrored ceiling, filling the room with a blaze of white. I watch two little girls in blue jeans and pink sweatshirts dancing in front of a floor fan as their grandmother looks on affectionately. There are grown women lying with their heads on their mother’s laps. Their heavy eyelids rise and fall in an effort to take in all the sights and sounds before it’s time to depart. I understand their need to make it last.

I head slowly toward the door and recall one of my favorite verses of the Qur’an, the verse about light:

God is the Light of the heavens and the earth
The parable of His Light is as if there were a niche
And within it a lamp: the lamp enclosed in glass
The glass, as it were, a brilliant star lit from a blessed tree
An olive, neither of the East nor of the West
Whose oil is well-nigh luminous though fire scarce touched it
Light upon light! God doth set forth parables for people
And God doth know all things.

I take one last look at the women who surround the tomb and bend down to re-enter the black cloth that leads to the outdoor courtyard of the shrine. Suddenly a clap of thunder shatters through the air and shouts of ‘Alhamdulli’Llah! God be praised!’ echo through the crowd like a wave of joy. I step into that enchanted mixture of sunshine and rain that has puzzled me since I was a child. Laughing, I wrap my chador around me and run across the glistening pavement to the columned portico on the other side of the courtyard. The delicately carved wooden pillars have eagerly absorbed the rain and are already filling the air with the musky scent of their ancient lives.

I turn around and feel a joy like I’ve ever encountered before. It seems to rise on wings from the horizon of my soul and embrace the sunlight, the raindrops and the whimsical scene before me where people are laughing and covering each other with jackets, chadors and oversized purses. I feel the touch of God’s plan for our salvation and it is Love.

It’s time to leave, and yet I feel no remorse. I feel only a content serenity as I quietly call for a taxi. A young Mullah jumps out from the passenger’s seat to open the back door for me, hesitating momentarily when he notices my foreign features. Smiling sheepishly, he waits till I’m in and then jumps back into the car. In typical Iranian fashion, we’ll share a taxi through this wonderful city and then never see each other again.

I smile behind my veil as I see the taxi driver and the mullah trying to make sense of me without staring: the rear-view mirror seems to hold a new fascination for them. They give each other puzzled looks and then we joyfully splash through puddles of God’s mercy as we pull away from the shrine, listening to the comforting rhythm of the rain on the roof of our car.