Yanquis del Chaco

You can’t walk out of Asuncion, well, you can but it would take you all day. Depending on the direction, you probably still wouldn’t make it much further than the dusty periphery of a market suburb: the kind they set up on the outskirts of all cities now for the people coming in from the countryside. You would’ve walked all day, just to reach an area of sliding aluminum doors with product logos painted on them, where the streets break down into highways and the sun is still obscured by the roofs and the things piled on top of the roofs, scrap metal mostly, but who knows what else is up there.

This was my problem with, not only Buenos Aires, but all of Argentina. As long as I was in a town, no matter how small, I couldn’t walk out of it. Rosario, Jujuy, Resistencia, they all had nice parks and some trees but on occasion, you want to just walk off the map and not look at any more grey buildings or broken sidewalk tiles. I never cared about the outlying landscape. I’d be just as happy in mountains as forest or a valley. But it was impossible to find your way out. It didn’t help that the streets all have the same names in Argentina. San Martin, Sarmiento, I don’t know how many Rivadavias I walked down. I often thought there was probably just one long Rivadavia that stretched all the way across the country and that I had never escaped it.

The only place that I found that was any different was the north-eastern part of the country, the tiny Missiones province. After crossing the Parana River we seemed to leave the great, endless Rivadavia street behind. There were walls of forest on either side of the highway. The earth shown in large, tiger-orange patches through the grass. The towns were smaller, you took a few turns off the main street and you were out in the fields, in the campo, walking past occasional one-room school houses and grapefruit orchards.

Asuncion is at, roughly, the same longitude as this province and the climate is very similar, but as the original capital of the Rio del Plata area, the city has built its own Rivadavia that spins in hectic circles way out past the suburbs and their dusty warehouses. You’re practically back in the Missiones of Argentina before the city seems to end. But one flank was left unguarded and the cities developers with their blueprints and their T-squares were never able to entire subdue the lands across the river. So, although Asuncion puts up a good fight and hurdles concrete and iron and dust and old peeling advertising posters right to the edge of the river, it has yet to manage to get anything past its waters other than a bridge and then the green takes over.

It was here were we aimed our bikes one Sunday afternoon, looking for an escape from the city, a region called the Chaco’i. The’i means small in Gurani. The small Chaco is a little part of the Great Chaco that hangs down from the great desiccated mass of land that begins on the other side of the river and goes all the way into Bolivia. Paraguay and Bolivia fought a war over the Chaco in the 1930s. One of the ideas about the war over this patch of inferno verde (green hell) is that a rumor of oil in the Chaco was started and both countries rushed in to formally claim the land that, until that point, had about as solid a border as that between Saudi Arabia and Yemen. After the Paraguayans won the war, it was soon discovered that the Chaco was utterly empty of black gold. Most of it looks very much today as it did then: totally empty. In this sense the Chaco is utterly pristine. Although the Chaco makes up a little more than half the countries landmass, 98% of the population lives on the other side of the river.

As much as I would’ve liked to retire to such desolation, the actual Chaco is much further away than the Chaco’i, there’s no border between the two places, but due to the Chaco’i’s proximity to Asuncion, it is more populated than any other region of the Chaco. Who wouldn’t want to live in a jungle just a ten minute drive from the capital city’s downtown? Still, the Chaco’i is nothing like being in Asuncion. There are still more cows than people and the buildings are small and rough-hewn. The only street is the highway that stretches out to Bolivia or down to Argentina. When there is no traffic, there is nothing to hear but birds singing and cows lowing.

As a result of Paraguay’s victory in the Chaco war, there are myriad Asuncion streets names in honor of a group of people that fought in the Chaco war: Aviadores del Chaco, Musicos del Chaco, Defensores del Chaco or Choferes del Chaco. I’m still trying to figure that last one out. I can’t help but to picture tidy mustached guys driving Rolls Royces out onto a battle field. To get to the Chaco’i and the Remanso Bridge we were looking for Avenida Trans-Chaco. Unless you know the city really well, looking for any street with the word Chaco in it is a little confusing.

“Meet me on Aviadores del Chaco.”
“I’m on Choferes del Chaco.”
“Ok, walk over to Cruz del Chaco, if you hit Capellanes del Chaco you’ve gone too far.”
“Is that by the Estadio Defensores del Chaco?”
“No…del Chaco.”

I wrote the directions on my hand. I have a problem with maps: it’s not that I can’t read them or don’t like taking them out, it’s when I have one, I can’t stop looking at it. I want to keep referencing where I am to see what’s around me and I also want to constantly check and make sure I’m still going the right way. Normally, I’m not at all anal about directions. I like to wander and get lost, but there’s something about the color-coded areas and place names about maps that drives me nuts. I get seduced by the mental image Parque Mbuicao conjures up and before I even get over there, I’m looking for something else on the map.

I keep my directions simple: R on this street, L on this street. Although it had been a little breezy the evening before, it was warming up fast. We hadn’t been on our bikes long before I started to sweat off the directions on my hand. Luckily they weren’t too complicated, but there were some unexpected turns in the route that I hadn’t seen on the map and after following all these signs, I started to get confused. After about half an hour of riding, we came to a fork in the road and I had to confess to Gina that I had no idea where we were, let alone which way to go. Instinct told me left and after asking some guys on a corner for directions, we found our way to the Trans-Chaco. From there it looked like it would be nearly a straight shot to the bridge.

The Trans-Chaco is an incredibly wide street. Technically, I think it’s a highway, but the stretch through Asuncion, looks like the area at the edge of any medium-to-large-sized town in the States where there is an abundance of fast food places and gas stations and a median strip between the streets which are about 5 lanes wide in each direction. The Trans-Chaco is like this. There’s a McDonalds and a Burger King and a bunch of (hourly) motels, but there’s also a few malls, and a makeshift market set up outside one of them where people sell fruit from wooden crates. Sometimes the sidewalk disappears into drifts of sand that have been blown up from the river banks. Kids ride by on Honda scooters with flat tires. The innumerable parillas all seethe with that charcoal and wood smell. Normally, this would be a very crowded street and we would have a difficult time navigating it on our bikes without being hit, but on Sunday, nobody goes anywhere. Everybody stays home or visits someone nearby and fires up the grill. Sunday in Asuncion looks like Memorial Day in the States.

I’m a little nervous getting on this road with my bike. The other day Gina was coming home from a babysitting gig with her employer driving with two kids in his lap while he talked on the phone. I see a lot of driving as a peripheral attention-type of activity and there’re very few posted speed limits. People everywhere drive with reckless abandon, but here the system actually seem to favor it.

We get on the road and begin skirting the tarry drifts of blacktop and sand that pile up on the shoulder. Traffic is greatly reduced on Sunday, but there’s still a few people out here racing past us. Luckily, there are so many lanes, they give us a wide berth. We ride past the fruit stands and the desultory crowds at the bus stops. Since the malls are some of the only places open on Sunday, a few people have come out to do some shopping and probably just socialize somewhere that isn’t their front steps. On the left side, we pass what looks like an entire apartment complex—about six buildings, all over 10 stories—empty and sitting in a field. There are cows grazing at the bases of these empty monoliths, so utterly empty that you can see through one into the other. There’s a dirt road that runs alongside of them.

“Looks like a place that you’d be driven to in a car trunk,” I tell Gina, gesturing to the dirt road that runs through the field, along the abandoned hulks.

We take a left at a roundabout and climb a gradual hill toward the Remanso Bridge. The buildings here are pushed back farther from the street. There’s an Aloha Café across the street from either a vet clinic or a place that sells pet products. The distances between things and the random way they’re mixed together gives the appearance of a place no one lives in. The buses drive without stopping on their way to the bridge.
The bridge looks like the old Ottoman design that’s made Stary Most and other bridges so famous. The parapet looks like a book someone set down halfway through reading. The water is chocolate milk festooned by floating green vines. At the apex of the bridge, a bunch of kids have scratched their names into the railing. It’s a long bridge and at the middle, looking to the west, the skyline of Asuncion looks distant and metropolitan. Amongst all the palms and lapachos, the city looks like a jungle metropolis. It is the true image of Latin America that people flying into Lima or Buenos Aires, are disappointed not to see immediately.

The opposite bank of the river, which we can see far into from the height of the bridge, is green and endless. There are two roads, narrow and made of the friable concrete that is always crushed and grassy-looking at the edges. We go west, initially heading toward the village of Remansito. The traffic out in the Chaco’i was faster than it had been before crossing the bridge and there’s very little shoulder on the road. There are cows grazing right up to the edge of the road. They blink their long bovine lashes and assume curious looks as we pass by. There’s a white Brahman standing by a derelict bus shelter with skin so loose it looks a wrinkly blanket.

We turn around by the end of the village and ride back toward the Argentine border. We pass a ceramic factory on a road of shards of red pottery. We have to walk our bikes over the clay shards. They make an iron clanking sound as we pass over them, like heavy chains dragging over concrete. There are also lots of work gloves, leather, cotton and the kind with a field of rubber dots on the inside for grip. Gloves everywhere, mixed in with the pottery. I could almost hear some foreman yelling out.

“Ok, boys, listen, we don’t have enough broken pots for the whole road, so we’re going to have to use this here bag of gloves to fill in the rest. Try to mix ‘em in so it doesn’t look too obvious.”

But it was obvious and also, ancient-looking, this road of terra cotta and hands.

After the pottery shards ended, we got back on our bikes and rode past a couple of clapboard cantinas with cage-fronts. We continued down the road and large-leaved plants that seem to prefer thin trickles of water crept from the creeks on either side seemed poised to overtake the road. The dogs barely lifted their heads as we passed. They blinked and returned their heads to nest of their paws. But there was one dog who watched us intently. He looked from across a field where he stood among a flock of birds, large birds like turkeys. I looked at them, trying to understand the reason for this strange tableau. The dog looked back at me, with that apologetic look dogs have when they’re doing something they’re not supposed to. He was standing next to something white. A cow, no, a dead cow. A swollen white cow, surrounded by a black dog and a field of vultures, with the sun nearing the horizon and all the red dust in the air it was a haunting scene, like a landscape painting that for no obvious reason is unsettling to look at.

We decided to turn back at this point. The late afternoon streets were quiet and we didn’t say much. When we got back into the city, people seemed to be waking up from their seistas. Buses roared past, horns honked and the people of Asuncion yelled to each other, unaware that their world abruptly ended only 15 minutes away where the chocolate milk river cradles the buildings, but also holds them back.

Backyards

On the bus, I start thinking about the ultimatum they gave me.The driver shifts after slowing down to avoid a huge pot hole. He uses a pole about four feet high, like something a boat swain would use to unmoor a raft. He cranks the pole around and the gears grind together. I can feel them grinding under my feet. For the second time this week, I’m coming back from San Lorenzo. San Lorenzo is one of those suburbs that makes going into the city unnecessary for anyone who doesn’t live there. In San Lorenzo, you can buy anything you could possibly want. The town resembles a soq of the Arab world, only much more impatient. Nothing is meticulously stacked. There is very little assemblage at all. Almost everything, from shoes to herbs to faucet fixtures, is spilled out like hot laundry on a table. An old woman stands by a table of pink and white cotton and taffeta. It looks like she’s running a confectionary and is sorting pink taffy and cotton candy and bubble gum. She’s got a cigarette in her mouth that’s burned all the way down to the filter. There’s a tiny corona of ashes at the tip. It looks like she’s been holding it that way for a long time. She’s got a hook out and she’s trying either to secure a little pink shirt at the top of her tent, or take it down. The bus passes before I can tell which.

The ultimatum they gave me was to decide if I want to stay here for another year. They told me I had until April 18th to make a decision. I’ve barely been here a month. April 18th is a month away.

The bus’s gears bite together again. The metal floor shutters. I notice that I’m seeing the same stands and advertisements I saw when I came into San Lorenzo a few hours ago. I idly wonder if we’re going in circles. I find it doesn’t really matter much. It’s nice to be sitting on this bus, looking out the window, after so many days spent sitting in my office wondering what to do with myself, staring at the reproduction of a mountain cottage painting. There’s snow on the roof of the cottage and the two-track that winds past is muddy with thaw. I look at that painting long enough and I can feel the weight of the mud on my boots and hear the crow of the roosters in the distance. The smell of burning dried manure hangs around the fringes of that fake painting.

The bus is moving quickly now, but a passenger appears from nowhere and hails the bus. The brakes lock in a way they wouldn’t do in the States anymore and everyone is thrown against the seat in front of them. No one says anything; everyone lowers themselves back into their seat and returns to their preoccupation at the window. We’re passing the woman with the cigarette again. It looks like she’s hung up a pink nightgown with a picture of Spongebob on the front.

We were driving through Oregon when I got the news that I had been accepted to work in Paraguay. We had stopped in Corvallis because I had been thinking about trying to find some adjunct work at the university there. We walked around a little. It was warm that day, warmer than it had been that summer in Costal California. There were fires to the south in places like Medford and you could smell the burnt pine in the air. We stopped into one of those cafés that something seems off about, but you can’t tell what it is. It’s always the carpet. Carpeted cafés are quieter and seem cultish, especially if the carpet is new, but it always takes a while to realize it when I walk into one.

After I had read the welcome e-mail from the US Embassy in Paraguay and we paid the bill and left the quiet cafe, Gina and I were driving past fields of mint. The sun was setting and the scent of the mint actually seemed to cool the air. We stopped to camp by a little lake, black with the boughs of an inverted forest. The water was cold.

After swimming out a ways, you could sink down until you felt the pressure building and see the peach color of light through your eyelids turn to grey then black. The water got very cold. The cold would climb up around your feet and ankles until it became a panicky feeling in your chest and you’d race back to the surface. That night, sitting by the fire with the feeling of well-being that comes with being warm and dry after swimming, ten months seemed like very little time.

The bus has been on an unfamiliar street for a while. I check each street sign, hoping to see something familiar. The buildings are all low warehouse-looking places with brand logos painted on their doors. I can’t tell if we are going farther out or coming back into the city. We’re driving toward a ferric raincloud. It’s gotten noticeably cooler. Instead of flip-flops and unwashed hair, the bus is beginning to smell like wet stone. “Another year,” I mutter.

The gears bite together again and there a smell like the singed tooth smell at the dentist’s office. As the bus drives faster, the engine roars louder. For the first year, the idea of going back to the States is appealing. It’s not until the second year that a place, no matter how foreign, begins to feel comfortable. The idea of home becomes mutable. Something keeps pulling me out here. I think I owe it to myself to really follow it this time, to stay long enough to find some new stories here. I’ve been telling the old ones for a little too long. But there are those wearisome afternoons when a cheap reproduction hanging in an office begs you, absolutely begs you to give it up and move to Bozeman or Moscow, ID and build a house, get a dog, cut a lawn, pay bills, drive a car, meet neighbors and plant a tree. It sounds like a sweet litany even now.

The bus finally reaches an area I know, down by the municipal market. I pull the cord and jump off. The streets are already becoming familiar to me, and as I make my way home it begins to rain these big silvery quarters of rain. The sun is shining just above a cloud. A single beam of light is focused right here, almost at my feet. The raindrops are so big and bright and the ground is so dry, the splash of each one is visible. I feel like I’m walking between them, watching the ground all around me dampen. It’s like walking through a room of grey curtains. I push them aside and for a moment there is stillness, like the stillness of being underwater. I can feel the cold around my ankles. I look up and see the trees like I am looking up at their reflections, but instead of being grey, the leaves are verdant with the rain and sun.

You've got to know what that's like by now.

Some Place to Believe in

Gina and I are sitting in a little Peruvian restaurant-cum-bar. There are two Peace Corps volunteers with us. It’s our first weekend in Asuncion. The PCVs have come to the capital to take their GREs and finished a few hours before I called one of them. “Yeah,” she said, “come over and see us. We’re at a bar on the same block as your hotel.” It was Saturday and Gina and I had nothing planned. We could always have taken another walk, but we’ve been taking walks all week. We decided to go to the bar. I didn’t know what the situation is here, but I decided to warn Gina anyway. “PCVs,” I told her, still in our beige hotel room, “drink when they come to the capital. Not always, not really even often, but sometimes, it’s like the capital is too much for them, maybe it reminds them of too many things they’ve nearly forgotten about. I don’t know. Somehow, it seems to remind many of them that they used to be college students and that they used to go out on Saturday night with their friends, friends that, mind you, that haven’t seen in, like, 14 months, friends they’re not entirely sure they still have. They get nostalgic and critical and it’s then that I think they realize they have no idea where they really belong anymore. Rather than think about it too much, I think it’s easier for them to keep socking away the booze and limp back to their sites in the morning, cursing the brashness of the capital and the former home it’s so rudely reminded them of.”

“You think they’re going to be drunk?” Gina asked.

“No, not at all, but I just wanted to mention it, just in case. But, we’re not in the CIS; these PCVs are probably much more accustomed to drinking terrere. They wouldn’t have the same nonchalant approach to booze that we did. I’m sure it won’t be a big deal. You about ready to go?”

I turned off the horizontal air conditioner, scraped the key card off the table and we walked downstairs on the slightly plush red carpet.

We know the guy who runs the restaurant-cum-bar, we’ve been here two or three times this week and spoken with him about his business, the Peru that he left and Paraguayan politics. He’s happy to see us and says ‘hello’ when we all enter. We sit down with the PCVs and order a liter of beer. For four people, this only permits about an eight-ounce serving. The beer tastes good and we continue our conversation where we had left it when we came in and ordered. We talk about Paraguay and listen to the PCV’s opinions. I feel a closeness with them. God, I feel like I’m back in Yerevan, talking with the new group that’s just arrived. Except, somehow, I’m part of the new group. I don’t know what’s ahead for myself in Paraguay, but I know what’s ahead for the PCVs when they return to the states, or leave after their Close of Service to spend their readjustment allowances travelling. I know how it’s going to feel when they step off the plane, or bus and see something they had nearly ceased to believe in and how long they are going to talk over that first meal at home and that first drink with friends and how, when they are alone, pouring over graduate school applications or looking for a job on the internet, they are going to have pangs, literal pangs remembering Paraguay and how for a moment, they will stare into space, remembering their first host family, the idiomatic expressions they learned and used in another language that don’t work in English and the sounds made by birds they might never hear again. These volunteers have five-months left; I remember exactly what five-months-left felt like. I let them tell me about Paraguay, because they tell it so well and with so much love and I don’t tell them a thing about what’s coming at the end of those five months.

We have a few more 8-oz. glasses of beer and a big plate of rice and fish appears on the table. The conversation has lost its focus; we’re at the point which comes in any conversation that’s gone on long enough in which we’re talking about anything that comes to mind. “Where’re you guys from in the states?” One of the PCVs asks. I love how we’ve gotten the special addendum reserved for people living outside the country ‘in-the-states.’ Travelers ask each other where they’re from. Expats have to specify what they mean. I tell them my California/Michigan thing. I’ve been going back and forth to California for too long to not consider it some kind of home, but I was born in Michigan; my family still lives in Michigan.

“Where in Michigan?” one of the PCVs asks.

“Jackson, it’s about 70 miles west of Det— ”

“Yeah, I know it; I’m from Michigan, too.”

We have our Michigan conversation. The same Michigan conversation I’ve had in in San Francisco bars, Chicago music stores, cheap European flights. I know this is a conversation everyone has, but I think people from Michigan come to expect it more, especially when meeting anyone under thirty. I’ve never looked into the statistics, but I would imagine more young people have left Michigan in the last thirty years than any other state.

“You know,” the PCV tells me, “I know someone here from Jackson; he’s a friend of mine you should meet him.”

Look, I’m used to meeting people from Michigan, but from my town, a sleepy, blue-collar place, set at the confluence of a river and a highway, well, it just never happens. Once it happened in San Francisco, only once, but here, in Paraguay? It didn’t seem possible.

“Oh, yeah,” the PCV continues. “He’s been here forever, came in the 60s or something. I guess he just really liked it.”

I ask a little more about the guy from my hometown, but we’re beginning to feel the heat and the conversation turns lackadaisical. Sweat drips into our empty beer glasses. No one makes a move to order more. Flies buzz around the few grains of rice left of the plate. The fish is so completely gone; I find myself wondering where the bones went. A few moments later, we’re awkwardly standing up and telling each other how nice it was to meet. Gina and I walk back across the street to our hotel. I shower and drop off to a nap immediately.

More than a week later, I’m at work, popping into the teacher’s room to see if there’s any coffee made. There’s an older man in the room alone. He looks like he wants to talk.

“Hola. Que tal?”

“Bien, y vos?”

“Bien, gracias, vos tenes clases aqui?”

I’m not sure if what I hear is an accent or just some kind of dialect. After he answers, I ask him in English where he’s from.

“A town in Michigan called Jackson.” The man says wistfully.

“Me too,” I say and he looks up at me with a slightly confused look and I fire out the next question before he can beat me to it.

“What part?”

“Fourth street.” He says with one eyebrow way up on his forehead.

“Me, too.” I say and it’s the most poignant, ‘me too’ of my life.

There but for the grace of God…me too.

Warm-Soda Sunset

It was Sunday, so there wasn’t much traffic. Before noon there is virtually none, but it was much later in the afternoon, probably around 4, by the time we left. We had been out briefly before, with our bikes, to the super market. I had been so hungry, that I decided I’d rather set the bikes up than walk all the way over to the Super Seis. There hadn’t been much to the ride. We went down along the embassy walls, which stretch for three or four blocks. Nothing goes through the embassy, so there are no cross streets and the ride is all angled slightly downhill. It hardly took any effort.

Now, we were going to take a longer ride. We planned to go across town to the botanical gardens, which for some reason straddle the border of Asuncion and the suburbs to the north of the city. Perhaps their central placement wasn’t deemed necessary because of the riotous flora everywhere in the city. In Buenos Aires, most of the city was grimy concrete walls and loose and broken paving tiles until you got to the botanical garden where the verdure seemed to wash over you. A palm-fringed refuge full of cats, I often found it hard to exit back into the dirty slab of a city after spending some time in the botanical garden. Here, where the primary difference is only the existence of houses, the contrast between parks and the city is often negligible.

There was some traffic, but no great deal of it. I was surprised at how many hills we encountered since Paraguay has a reputation for being so flat. Unlike San Francisco hills, they were all very gradual so that they were not very hard to ride up and could be coasted down for blocks. In the gutters, were large quantities of the red earth that is so common here. Along the streets, there were torn billboard advertisements, huge, dead palm fronds and squealing kids with no shirts or shoes. The passengers in cars and the people on the street turned their heads when we passed, but did not stare outright. We looked different, but there are other people on bikes in Asuncion, though none probably as odd-looking as Gina and me.

We went down a steep hill that entered another major street. Here, the tarry blacktop had been warped by the heat and pressure of the traffic. Where the lanes were, the tar and stone and been pushed away, but on the shoulders and, to some degree, in the middle of the street, there were great heaps of the stuff. Along the shoulders, the tarry blacktop eddied and ebbed in dark currents. In a great wave, it would bring you up on its back, with some difficulty, you tried to stay on its crest, until eventually, the whole thing would diminish into a gummy whirlpool, bringing you back down to the street. We must’ve looked ridiculous to the traffic behind us, trying to straddle that drifting ledge of tar on our bikes, our shoulders absorbing the shock and lifting up and down and our front wheels constantly tacking back and forth.

The botanical garden was a park and nothing like a botanical garden with its different biomes represented. There was no cactus garden, no Mediterranean garden, no succulent plot, not even any labels that I could see. It was just a place where no one had chopped down any trees for a while, so they put a fence around it and called it a botanical garden. Despite the misnomer, it was a nice place, a large leafy forest that, on Sunday, hosted all kinds of kids playing soccer and amorous couples sitting on blankets, terrere’ thermoses between them. There was a cobbled road that made a loop through the front part of the park. It was solid enough to ride a bike on, but the cobbles were hard on the wrists and thighs. We bounced down the road past families buying little bags of popcorn and empanadas and trees that I don’t know the names for. The sun was shining through the canopy of leaves overhead and dappled the cobblestones in a pleasant way. We followed the road past a paddock of goats and ostriches and stopped to watch the younger animals stumble around, the baby ostriches looking oddly like shaggy footballs from our vantage.

The serenity of the scene ended immediately at the exit gate. The park was placed at busy intersection and the petulant cars moved quickly and erratically. We got back on the melted road and road the crest of the tar wave for a while, but we didn’t stay on it as long. We took a side street most of the way back home where the neighborhood was nicer and the streets were quiet with Sunday languor: hoses dripped in front yards where people had abruptly stopped watering the flowers to take a siesta and the hoarse and pensive conversations that follow afternoon naps issued from back patios and plastic chair porches. The dominant sound on the street was the sound of bare feet idly tracing designs on dusty concrete floors.

…
“Yeah, I figured it out,” I was telling the woman in the office where I work. “It’s says 2,400 and a name.” At first, I thought it was some really obscure graffito. Something like what you always see in Latin America, the overlap between futbol and politics; two things foreigners seldom understand. In Argentina, if the writing on the walls wasn’t about Kristina, Messi or the Malvinas I had no idea what it meant. Just names and numbers, but this one I figured out.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah, so I heard someone talking about the buses. How the fee used to be 2,000 Guarani, but they raised it to the obscure amount of 2,400, which is really annoying because no one ever has four 100 coins, it’s about as likely as having four dimes in the States. Then I realized, ahh, 2,400 that’s the number I saw on the wall. Now the name above it, something like Japero or Japiro I don’t know who that is, but I’m assuming he (or she) has something to do with the increase in the fare, or maybe they’re going to lower it. I noticed from the way you winced when I said the name you must really dislike this person, too.”
“Japiro,” she whispered. “Japiro isn’t a name. It’s the Guarani word for ‘fuck.’”
“Ahhh, well, I guess it’s a good thing I didn’t go around asking who Japiro was.”
…

Yesterday, I had no idea what to do with myself, which is something that always happens on Sundays when you first move to a country. You sleep in, eat breakfast, read a little and around noon it becomes apparent that there’s a lot more day left that you’re completely unequipped to handle. You set your book down and look around the room for something suggesting a diversion. At this point you realize how very little you actually have in your apartment, given that you’ve just moved into the place. Ideally, you’re looking for a little project. It would be wonderful to knock together a birdfeeder or put some shelves up or even just organize a bunch of stuff you haven’t looked through in a while. But you’ve practically just finished unpacking. Everything is stowed neatly away and nothing has been able to degenerate into anything that would need organizing. It becomes clear that your apartment is not going to meet you half-way on this and the only other option is to attempt to make use of the city. Ah yes, the new sprawling city, right outside your door! All those avenues and alleys just waiting to be seen and strolled, all those interesting little shops, run by grandmothers who are waiting to have a long chat with you, all the bridges to pass over and restaurant menus to peruse, fruit trees to discover and vista points to climb. You pull down the maps and look them over carefully, trying to find a place that isn’t too far away that you haven’t seen yet. To the southwest, it looks like there’s an unexplored area, where a number of major streets go. There’s a hill way down at the end of it, too: Cerro Lambare’. I rouse Gina from where she’s sprawled out after just finishing her third book in a week, watching the Sunday sky drift by in the balcony window.

It’s warmer outside that it was yesterday, in fact, it’s gotten hot this morning. My legs still feel a little stiff from their first bike ride in months yesterday. My jeans start to cling to my tired muscles and my feet begin to swell. We’re walking down a street we know pretty well already. That’s probably why I haven’t really begun to enjoy this yet. It’s because I’m not looking at anything new. When we get off this street and head into the new territory, I’ll have so much to look at I’ll forget all about my aching legs and the general damp feeling that’s already developed. But the new area is a continuation of the area we already know, if anything it’s less comfortable because we don’t know anything about it. There a number of hospitals crowded together here. Motorcycles and dirt bikes and cars made across the Atlantic kick up dust and rev their engines. Fruit vendors sit humbly next to their wares on overturned buckets and various cashiers stand outside the small shops where they work to talk and drink terrere’ and pretend they’re free to go and do whatever they want. Maybe they watch us walk by and envy our freedom. I want to ask them what they would do if they could leave the shops, I’m sure they’d have some good ideas, but it seems like an impertinent question, because we’ve got the day off and they’re at work.

After the hospital, everything starts to repeat itself. There’s the same trio of moldering mangos kicked off the sidewalk. There’s the same empty house that’s on a raised level and has a wildly overgrown lawn. There’s the same peluqueria with the paintings of hombres and mujeres with very tight and neat-looking haircuts and very inept-looking faces. There’s the same white and brown little dog dozing in the sun. There’s the cheap-looking shoe someone has discarded. There’s the hedge in bloom with beautiful and fragrant white flowers. There’s the auto-servicio with refrigerators that don’t work full of warm 3.3-liter Pepsi bottles. There’s the red earth and the broken sidewalk tiles and the hot car exhaust.

After we’ve walked about a mile and a half down the street, we cross to the other side and turn back. The discursive loop has ended because we’ve stopped paying much attention. The walk is better this way, there is no expectation and we’re on our way home. Our fingers feel tight with dust and the heat. Everything that’s exposed feels hot and dry, everything that’s not feels like something that’s been in the microwave for too long, but I feel more carefree on the walk back. The sidewalk is a little less even on this side of the street and we repeatedly have to step over places where tree roots have broken through the tiles or where diffident neighbors have remodeled their section of the sidewalk, building directly over the old one, thus raising the level. A nicer home is obvious from the street by the fact that the sidewalk is always new and therefore raised. When there are several nice homes in a row, it’s like walking up and down a series of little ziggurats.

When we’re nearing our neighborhood, we pass before the fruit stands we saw earlier from the other side of the street. They have a pencil shaving and sucrose smell, like the moving boxes I get from the grocery store’s produce department: empty apple or waxy banana boxes, with the smell of the fruit still so strong inside. They’re selling ensalada de frutas from Styrofoam coolers. They give you a reusable cup, a stack of which stands near the cooler, none of which look very clean. Macerated fruit seems like too porous a thing to eat from a dirty cup; it seems like it would absorb all the dried flakes and dead seeds already in there. Still, as we pass by, I ask Gina if she wants to try some, I can’t pass any kind of street food that I can eat without at least contemplating purchase.

It’s a relief to get home. Our damp, microwaved clothes clinging to us, we turn the air on and collapse onto the couch. The all-white room of our brand new apartment is calming, it has the look of an airy cottage on Corfu or some place. We sit on the couch and read for a while, letting the fatigue drain from our swollen calves and sunburnt shoulders. We glance up from our books to look out the balcony doors, projecting ourselves out over the visa of thick-leafed Spanish Plum and willowy Lapacho. When the sun starts to go down we go out to the balcony and look out over the direction of where we walked earlier. We try to use the reference to feel a little more comfortable and familiar with our surroundings, but there’s nothing to be seen but trees and the tops of one or two buildings.

Whited Lilies

Sunday, we went to the Recoleta cemetery. The walk was long down Mariscal Lopez in the sun, under the partial shadow of the security walls surrounding the villas, all with the same red clay tile roofs and white walls. Little purple flowers struggled through the security fences and dropped their petals into the piles of refuse, sand and plastic cups that had blown up against the wall. We had brought a bottle of water from the hotel. It was warm within minutes. I carried it in my back pocket and the water sloshed a little with every step. Every time I took a drink, I wanted to gulp down the whole bottle, but there wasn’t very much and very few places are open on Sunday.

We had to climb up a few stairs, Recoleta stood on an elevated block, like a platform. At first, I thought this was out of reverence, to raise it from the level of all the other city blocks around it; to set it apart as something that contained the mortal remains of the city’s former inhabitants, then I realized that it was probably just the accumulation of graves and material that had raised the area up, like the churchyards in England rising up around the church like leavened dough.
From the street, the Asuncion Recoleta looked more like a New Orleans graveyard than its Argentine counterpart. What could be seen over the concrete wall was nothing like the flights of angels and weeping maidens the guard and adorn the resting places of the Porteño elite. There was no solemnity. Even in the sun,the Recoleta in Buenos Aires, manages to look grey and somber. It induces reflection even in the casual tourist only there to find Evita’s grave between shoe store visits. What we were looking at as we approached the cemetery was an amalgamation of different tastes and designs, all of which were cruelly useless to the dead. The canary-yellow vault and the stained glass crucifix all the chiseled ‘cariñoso’s and the plastic flowers and ribbons were all too weak to form a sufficient façade to cover the reality of the aftermath of death; not what happens when the body dies, but when the very memory of that body dies as well.

At the entryway there were a few tired-looking people reclining under the shade of the trees selling small, withered bunches of flowers. On entering the cemetery, I found it to be bigger than I had imagined, probably near the size of its counterpart in Buenos Aires. There were even signs, made to resemble street signs that marked the lanes that led between the crypts. These were simply labeled Calle ‘A,’ ‘B,’ etc. if horizontal or Avenida ‘A,’’B’ etc. if vertical. The central Avenida, was wide and paved with flag stones. It led to the middle of the cemetery where a large yellow-ish crypt halted its progress.

This main thoroughfare was very nice. The crypts were in good repair on either side, the flags were even and there were a few trees growing among the crucifixes. We walked a little ways down this path, looked at some of the regal graves, such as that of Eliza Lynch’s daughter and then turned on to one of the calles.

The change wasn’t immediate, we walked for a long way among modest crypts, some of them made a little decrepit by time, but the corpses inside seemed to be in peaceful repose. We came to one in which a few errant bones were visible on the floor of the crypt. Somehow, they had been shaken loose, probably when the coffin had been moved for some reason, or perhaps it wasn’t clear to which coffin the bones belonged. We took in the momento mori . Each of us thinking about the bones in our own bodies and how some day they would be divested of their sapient attire. Bones are the easiest permutation of death, probably because they are the farthest removed from us. In life, we are aware of our bones as things that break or get weak or need fillings. They are a sort of reliable hardware. The skeleton is subservient to the viscera and the brain which are more human and more alive. We don’t think of the skeleton as that which will outlive everything else: our final corporeal presence in the world in the form of a pile of bones.

As we walked on, the crypts appeared older, broken down and even vandalized. Gina pointed out a few burnt logs surrounded by ashes here and there which seemed to imply that people stayed here at night, weather they were keeping vigil, squatting or grave robbing wasn’t clear, but from the look of some of the graves, I gathered it wasn’t entirely wholesome. Further down, we came to a very large crypt, which we mistook for a small chapel until we noticed a tiny coffin concealed inside. On the outside, the crypt had been splattered with paint. It looked as if someone had tested many different paint brushes on its walls. It didn’t look like deliberate malice but rather like a gross form of incompetence. There were also carbonized streaks where someone had rubbed ashes and charcoal onto the walls of the crypt. In some places, it looked like they had attempted to write something, but nothing could be made out. The door of the crypt was hanging open and under the shelf that held the tiny coffin there was a disordered pile of bones. Some of them about the size of a large grapefruit and rounded: skulls. Once I realized that I was looking at one, I noticed them all; there was even one next to the tiny coffin facing out. It looked very deliberately placed. I heard Gina gasp behind me and she pointed to one that still had a few locks of matted air clinging to it.

I began to feel somewhat unnerved by the spectacle; I didn’t think it right to keep peering into this grisly resting place. The long hair on the skull made it unmistakably a woman which took the psychological distance out of the experience. I was no longer looking at bones, but into the hollow remnants of faces.

In these kinds of situations, it’s always either drizzling rain or the moon is illuminating everything with a haunting sepulcher light, but now the sun was dazzlingly bright. The lack of mystery made the experience much more unnerving. It was like an encounter with death himself rather than with one of his tired ghosts. I took one more look at the pebbly orbital bones and the deliberate shape of the eye sockets and suggested that we go. I was beginning to feel like I was standing around the scene of an accident and my sudden lack of thoughts unnerved me. The only thought I had was death, even with the birds swooping overhead and the sound of the flower vendor’s radios outside the cemetery.

The other crypts now seemed to me artifices of fear, meant only to belie inevitable decomposition. The more ornate the crypt, the stronger the fear of physical death. As if by creating an inhabitable place to rest in after death would actually keep you alive somehow, like an old woman forever tottering around a one room apartment, never actually dying, but preserved by the cold marble walls around her.

We walked off the main ‘calle’ to a more remote part of the cemetery, where the crypts were smaller and disregarded. The friable walls seemed to close in around us, sometimes forcing us to squeeze through a crevice or confronting us with a dead end. Time had opened many of the doors here. The old locks had rusted off, the stained glass had grown brittle and shattered and the coffins inside had splintered and disgorged their contents. Inside each one of those ornate marble kilns there was a glow of exposed bone. Walking between the crypts was like walking between rows of bored spectators. I glanced about here and there, but tried not to let my gaze rest too long in any one place. There were no longer bodies, everything human and familiar had been effaced, what we were confronted with was limited to remains, remains and effects, the sloughed off and empty of personality.

Crypts doors stood partially if not entirely open, the windows were broken; everything was out in the open, in the sun. Gina and I were particularly thirsty and as we traversed the tumbled plots and tombs we occasionally encountered the shade of a grapefruit or mango tree. We slowed down to walk under the restorative leaves and the global fruit hung suspended before our faces, although not completely ripe, it was a temptation to break one open and suck out the juice, but when I unconsciously traced the branch back to the trunk of the tree, I found them all growing at the junction of several graves. I knew this to be the natural order of things, but I didn’t want to think of having the juice of those grapefruits all over my hands and dribbling down my chin.

Curiously, there was very little smell. I assumed that everything in this older cemetery had decomposed long ago. Everything had ossified and evaporated. Until we stepped between two crypts and the smell of decay seethed into the still air, like a drop of dye in a clear glass of water. I had expected people to smell like animals after death, but even in this they remain apart. Human decay has a greater sweetness, which is what makes it so much more choking. The smell is like ordinary decay combined with the smell of singed hair. It is a smell that is pre-cognitive; you might not know what it is, but there’s something incredibly unnerving about it. The further we proceeded down the calle, the stronger the smell became. Eventually, we came upon a crypt that seemed to be leaking a mixture of oil and melted candlewax. It looked like the marble structure was weeping out its resident.

We wandered around a little more after this, but after all we encountered, it began to feel ghoulish. I wasn’t there to look at the crypts and read the inscriptions anymore. There were only corpses and decomposition, everything else was flimsy scenery. Behind all the marble and candles, there was only one thing happening here and I was intruding upon it.

As we walked back to the street, I thought of the beautiful cemetery we’d stopped into before walking into the grisly one we had just left. How beautiful the place had been with narrow, green strips between the tombs and so many of them with large beautiful plants growing directly out of them. These people had accepted death and had peacefully gone back to the earth. Despite being a graveyard, the place had a feeling of being alive. It was like a riotous garden, where the bodies had lain a foundation for everything to fructify. By contrast, the marble and iron crypts of Recoleta had been perverse and morbid. They sought to convey their cargo directly to heaven but instead inextricably bound it to a grey limbo with neither the green of earth nor the white of paradise.

Mask of a River

I had forgotten about the uproar of the Sao Paulo airport. There are multiple terminals there serviced by buses. The gates are ground level doors. Outside, the concrete reflects the heat and bus exhaust directly up your nose. From the reading I had done, I imagined that most the people flying back and forth between Asuncion and Brazil would probably all be dealing in some kind of contraband, but the people on the bus with us looked much less adventurous. There were middle-aged women in large sun hats. Men freshly shaved with attaché cases. It may have all been to allay suspicion, but Gina and I looked like the most suspicious people boarding the flight; scruffy foreigners, but not tired-looking or sun burnt enough to be backpackers. The lingua franca on the plane seemed to be Portuguese rather than Spanish. It was comforting to be heading into a country where it seemed everyone else knew less of the language spoken there than I did.

When we began our descent, I turned across the aisle to look out the window. Everything underneath us was a deep forest green or a light clay-red. There were a lot of open fields and dirt roads. The sun beat down on everything mercilessly. The panoply reminded me of a park on a hot July afternoon, when all the kids have given up their games to go home and stand in front of their open refrigerators. There were people out, but things looked desolate. I turned to Gina and said “looks kinda’ boring, huh?” “Yeah,” she confirmed without saying anything else. There were no hills, no extensive-looking forests and all the rivers were turbid with mud. It didn’t seem like the greatest beginning. Landing only confirmed what we had seen from the plane. The runway looked like a baseball field; the airport like an old office building. The kids had all gone home for the day.

We came into the concourse and things were a little more hopeful. Everything was much more peaceful than it had been in Brazil. The people didn’t seem to be in a hurry. Even the security guards looked like they were going to fall asleep. There were two lines for immigration. One line was for nationals, which was short and single-file and the other was for extranjeros which was about five-times as long. “Damn!” I thought to myself. “Doesn’t anyone actually live here?”

While waiting in line, I heard someone call ‘hello,’ but thought nothing of it. My contact at the embassy told me she would pick me up, but I didn’t expect to see anyone until we had cleared customs and gotten our bags. I had, apparently underestimated the abilities of US embassy employees.

My contact introduced herself, while Gina and I stood there, quite baffled. We still had to wait in line, but they breezed us through customs and in a moment we were out on the roaring hot concrete, the dry palm fronds froufrouing in the hazy sirocco.
…
After we checked into our hotel and slept for the afternoon, Gina and I awoke to a much more languorous place of incarnadine skies and a smell like sweet, dried chili in the air, as if the sunset had a smell. We walked up Avenida España and compared Asuncion with the slightly baroque barrio of San Telmo in Buenos Aires; the city was like an extended version of San Telmo, only with more open areas and a lot more trees. All the houses had a look of faded grandeur to them, the columns were crumbling, the fences were rusting and from the look of the plants growing out of some of the roofs, there must’ve been several living rooms that had had their chandeliers replaced by dangling roots. Everywhere, plants had other plants growing off them: epiphytes grew from the trees, parasitic vines entwined around each other, toppled to the ground and lifted themselves lazily up from the red earth toward their photosynthetic goal and orchids grew like colorful explosions from the ashen bark of palms. After walking around for the evening, I felt good about beginning the program the next day. I felt like I had to earn my right to stay in such a beautiful place. Teaching, it seemed, would be even better considering where it would permit me to stay.
…
At the end of the week we went to Mercado Cuatro, the main outdoor market for the city. I had heard varying reports of this market. They had recently made a movie detailing the activities of the criminal underworld in Asuncion. I think the movie was shot entirely in Mercado Cuatro, so many people held the opinion that it was a dangerous place. Most of these people, when questioned further, would admit to never having gone anywhere near the place. When I talked to one of the drivers for the embassy, he told me we’d be fine, the only problem we should expect would be higher prices for everything based on our accents. Since everything is closed on Sunday and most businesses only stay open until noon on Saturday, I thought late Saturday morning would be a good time to go; the place must be at its most frenetic by then, and when you’re not going to a market to buy anything, you want to go when things are at a fever pitch.

The market was even more ad hoc than I had expected. It gradually began with a few stray tables on the outskirts, carried over into a few streets and then burrowed down a number of plywood and plastic tarp alleys. The heart of the market was easy to miss. It was an aperture nearly choked with bright Chinese clothes, ropes and the heavy smell of chicken grease and dust. We circled the area a few times in the larger, open areas of the market where there were palates of beer, 50-gallon drum barbecues and motorcycles weaving quickly through everything. The traffic, auto and pedestrian, bore down from every possible direction. Almost unconsciously, we made for the edge of the chaos and soon found ourselves out of the market. From the quiet, green borders we circled back around, caught our breath and then sought out one of the claustrophobic alleys from which the life of the market seemed to issue.
Do you remember the forts you used to build as a kid? Those blanket and chair constructions that you always had such great plans for, but somehow always turned out the same? The same comforter from your bed, draped over the same living room chairs; you were limited by your materials. If you had owned enough comforters and chairs, maybe you would’ve eventually created something like Mercado Cuatro. The market opened on a corner, almost by accident. It looked like someone had forgotten to put a wall in and seal the thing off entirely. We squeezed through the gap between the boards and stepped into a place wallpapered with t-shirts and bras with a dirt floor and a plastic roof. The structure was loose enough to seem to breathe with each gust of air that assaulted its plywood walls.

The market was full of people looking just as confused as us. Everyone’s eyes seemed to be darting around, looking for a way out, or a cheap, but quality pair of socks. Plastic shopping bags and items on display swept over us as we walked through the market, as the long, cephalopod brushes sweep over cars in the carwash. We stopped for a second to glance at a shirt. There was no place to move out of the stream of human traffic. The vendor called to us in vain as we were pushed along to another stall. Near a table, there was a dog’s bowl on the ground. Something furry dashed beneath the table cloth. “Did you see that?” Gina asked after we had been pushed beyond the stall. “A dog?” “No,” she glanced back longingly. “A monkey.”

There was no up, nor down, forward nor back; the same displays and tarps and packed dirt greeted one from every direction. We could’ve been moving in a straight line; we could’ve been going in a circle. Eventually, we came to a larger, midway-like section of the market. A little sun shone through the gaps between the tarps and the packed dirt was hard, like concrete. What extra room the opening afforded was quickly cancelled out by more people seeming to rush towards us to fill any free space. The smells were changing every few paces. The fading perfume on the people rushing by suddenly broke and grew sour-smelling, old basement-smelling. A new type of stall appeared the deeper we went into the market, a medicinal herb stall. Behind each sack of dried flowers or crushed leaves, sat an old woman. While everyone else in the market was talking, these women all seemed lost in their own thoughts. None of them paid the slightest bit of attention as we passed their stalls, even if we stopped to see what manner of roots and minerals they purveyed, we never even got a glance. Perhaps sitting among such rich medicinal scents, year after year in the sweltering heat has an analgesic property yet undiscovered.

The earthy flower smells faded and, from somewhere unseen, issued a dull whacking sound, like a heavy knife sinking into cork. The flies were increasing. They buzzed past your ears like someone offering an illicit product. My eyes followed their drunken flight pattern towards a large stool heaped high with what looked like necks, or maybe something’s floppy legs, cut into sections. Each had a sort of white rind on the outside. The inside was bleeding and wrinkled-looking meat. Mercilessly, there seemed to be more sun in this part of the market than elsewhere. The smell was gastric and hot. The blood seethed out of the meat, dripped down the stool and onto the packed dirt beneath it. People stepped into the blood and carried off a little bit of the smell, which seemed to crowd the senses. Even when I held my breath the bruised smell was there, I could taste it in my mouth and feel it like a pressure against my ears. The flies buzzed around frantically after being disturbed, before settling down again. I found myself wondering why gangrene only forms in living things. It seemed the pile of necks I passed and the other troughs of meat around it would be ideal receptacles for something so foul. Indeed, the smell that followed us into another sundry section of the market seemed to have a pestilential air to it, the same smell, I’d imagine that haunted battlefields and terrorized medieval villages.

At some point, we found ourselves back out on the street under the open sky. The difference between being inside the market and on the street outside was negligible as even on the street the thin strips of sky were crowded with tenuously-balanced towers of packing crates and there were still tarps strung out just about any place where one could be strung. It looked as if the goal of the neighborhood had been to blot out the sun and in some places that work had not yet been finished. You can always tell how much a group of people have to be in the sun by how hard they have tried to blot it out with whatever comes to hand.
Two or three blocks away from the market, the green clouds of mango trees drifted out from vacant property lots and the trammeled and bird-pecked fruit lay all around fermenting in the bright and unchecked sun.

The Static and the Trees

The night before in Lansing, the rain froze into wet ice. The drops fell through the cold sky with a nucleus of ice gradually spreading outward. Far above the streetlights, there was a haze of rain and mist, but about 25 ft. up, the sound of freezing was audible, a sound like the squeak of biting into a soft ice cube. The rain lost its wavy momentum, stopped and fell straight down. Ice drops fell like tacks, but the earth was loamy and damp from the rain. The tacks hit the ground with a sound like a collective sigh. I watched it for a very short time. I’d seen an ice storm in Lansing before. I walked around all night in one once, shifting my perspective so the light would run through the ice on a branch or a frozen McDonald’s cup. It was beautiful to see the ice again, but, for once, I was able to see in one ice-covered tree, what I would see in an entire avenue of them; I didn’t need a profusion of ice and light, just an example of it. The whole picture was right in front of me. From the trunk, to the tiniest ramifications, the tree was insulated with ice, like it was protected, but the mass of the ice was pulling the branches to the ground. Just a small gust of wind shook the thing awkwardly; it moved all the way down to the roots and did not sway but jerked. One of the frozen branches scraped the frozen roof of a car. The house behind me shifted and crackled in its ice casements. It sounded like the world was gratefully coming apart.

I woke up dazed the next morning. I haven’t been moving around very much since I’ve come here and I wake up every morning feeling dazed. It’s 11 degrees outside. I sit there for a while with the blanket around my shoulders and my head in my hands. Tired and cold, I want to go back to sleep. I don’t have anything to do. Just as I am about to lie down again, I change my mind and reach for my shoes. They feel like they’ve been sitting on the floor for decades. They’re cold and dusty and look like someone with huge boots has been stomping on them. I’m glad I don’t have to touch the shoelaces. I want to go to the QD and get a big, watery cup of coffee right away to justify getting up, but I decide I need to go back to Theio’s: my old favorite diner down the street. It’s a Sunday, there’s no one in the house and everything’s covered in ice. I really couldn’t pick a better time to go down to the diner to read, drain a few cups of coffee and listen to the snow melt from everyone’s boots.

I have to walk lightly outside with my arms out like a tightrope walker and my feet shuffling along. The streets are empty save for the heavy branches that fell: shattered remnants of ice and bark. Icy twigs from these fallen branches lie as far as 100 feet away from the crash. They all must weigh hundreds of pounds. I look up nervously at the creeping canopy of frozen branches. There’s a power line draped over a car as if the storm meant to use it for something, set it down and forgot about it. Everything is closed. The storefronts are all dark behind the wavy sheets of ice on the windows. The QD is open but the parking lot is empty. The tire tracks are still frozen from the night before. At the bus stop there’s a diagram of a frozen and impatient dance.
The Theio’s parking lot is barely visible through all the exhaust. There must be seven or eight cars idling out there, most of them large vans. I can imagine the inside of those things, smelling like cold exhaust and wet carpet, cold and humid with wads of pale pink gum tucked under every arm rest. The thought makes me shiver. The heat in those kinds of cars never reaches the back where the kids sit. At least it never did in my mom’s suburban. I shuffle to the Theio’s door. The front of the place looks like an atrium; it’s all wet, fogged glass. There’s a rumble outside the place the explodes into the combined sound of laughter, clattering dishes, scraping chairs and cash register clangs when I open the door. Outside the door, the icy world was still and empty. There’s something surreal about walking into a place surrounded by so much silence and crackling ice and to find it so alive. I imagined that temporary shelters set up during a disaster would have this feel—the outside world dark and broken, the inside full of light and humanity.

I was glad that I had come. At first, I didn’t want to go back to Theio’s. They remolded it some years ago. I hadn’t been back since. I wanted to maintain my memories of it and I knew they’d clash with the present state of the place. I hadn’t expected to be drawn back into the place, to be swaddled by it again. Apparently, it’s not possible to wake up alone, with nothing to do on an icy Sunday morning on the east side of Lansing, and not automatically start making your way down to Theio’s. I tried to avoid it, but there was nothing else to be done. I had to get some coffee and be with the people.

I’ve been away long enough now that it doesn’t feel strange to not know anyone here. There’s no smoking section anymore, so I take a seat by the window to get out of the way. A lot of the same crap is still up on the walls. By that first booth on the right, my favorite place to sit, the decorative, wooden mailbox is still there. We used put stuff in there on cold Saturday nights: pencils, notes, transit cards from far-off places and whatever junk we found in our pockets. I doubt there’s anything left in there now. When I looked in the mailbox the last time in 2010, everything was gone, even all the stuff Ramen put in there. It’s better to let myself think it’s still in there. I can’t imagine them dumping the stuff he put in there. But, I knew a waitress here who died suddenly and there’s no reminder of her either. When they told me she had died, I rode off to the florist on Grand River and rooted around in the dumpster until I had the makings of a nice bouquet. I went back and gave it to someone to take to her memorial service the next day. I didn’t go. I had to sit there, drink coffee and stare off into space like I did every night. That was my memorial. I did the same thing for Ramen.

I don’t remember the coffee being so watery. It’s hardly got any flavor, but this is probably a good thing, given how easy it is to drink 30 cups of the stuff. They never even used to ask me. Every time the waitresses would come around they’d splash a little more coffee in my cup. Now, they ask me, “you want a warm up?” I love how they call it a ‘warm-up.’ “Yeah, thanks,” I say and hold my cup up like I’m trying to toast the pot of coffee the waitress has. I keep my book open but I look up at her. She’s young, still just on coffee duty. She’s got a pot of coffee in each hand, regular and decaf. She reminds me of someone who used to work here. Everyone does. All the waitresses, the cooks, even some of the customers look and sound so familiar. I have to give them second looks to make sure they aren’t who they would’ve been, years ago. If I started coming here regularly again, I could connect with all these people, the way I did years ago. It wouldn’t be right. After all the places I’ve lived that were so far away from here, how could I be the one who ended up staying? How could I be the only one who’s still here years later?

When I look up and notice that there are no more seats and people are waiting by the door, I get up and give my seat to someone else. I’ve sat here long enough.
After the hum of 40 different conversations and all the nylon winter coats shrugged off and shrugged back on, the spoons stirring the coffee, the outside is like a vacuum. There is no sound. Even the idling vans in the parking lot are turned off now. I walk back to the house, but I forget to reminisce for a moment. The illusion is shattered; I see everything for how it really is and, much as I expected, it looks exactly the same. Even all the new stuff looks old and I leave as soon as possible.