The Return: A Novel (31 page)

But, in the event, Marder never became a member of the tribe, because that very night a reinforced battalion of the 174th Regiment, People’s Army of Vietnam, attacked Moon River.

*   *   *

Marder snapped out of the reverie to find his daughter regarding him with a peculiar expression.

“What?” he said. His mouth felt clotted and sour, as if he had just finished a gourd of Hmong beer.

“You were mumbling and making funny noises.”

“Was I? I guess I drifted off … some dream or other.”

“No, your eyes were wide open, but you weren’t here.”

“Well, I’m here now,” said Marder brightly, and then changed the subject. “Look, Carmel, I’d like to inter your mother’s ashes in the family tomb at La Huacana as soon as we can catch a break in all the construction work. I assume you’ll be coming.”

“Of course.”

“And I intend to invite your uncle Angel and his family. He’s not in a good way, and I’d like to help him out if I can.”

*   *   *

Statch said nothing to this but felt something close to irritation, and some shame as well for feeling it. What was so bad about trying to help people, after all? But what her father appeared to be doing seemed a little off, this extraordinary desire to improve the lives of others. It irked her, and she recalled feeling something similar as a child, trying to warm herself on the edges of the great romantic furnace that was her parents’ marriage. And even now that death had ended it, her father was still not quite present. He had not rebounded into another romance, as did so many men in similar situations, but had turned instead to this almost hectic philanthropy.

When she was back in her room at Casa Feliz, after the landing and the convoyed journey—El Gordo was certainly providing good service so far—Statch got out her cell to make some necessary calls. The first call was to Karen Liu. Statch asked what was going on in the lab. Liu’s responses were flat, tinged with what seemed like embarrassment. At last Statch extracted the information that Schuemacher was preparing to pull her off the grant; he had an Indian boy genius on tap as a replacement. Statch got off the line as soon as she decently could and decided that she could not bear talking to any of the other people she had thought of calling. Instead, she opened her laptop and composed a long email to Erwin Schuemacher. She thanked him for all the help he’d given her and wished him success in his vision. She said she was resigning because she didn’t think it was fair for him to hold her assistantship vacant while she was away for an indefinite period. She paused here. Should she try to communicate why she was staying? Did she even know? Dr. Schuemacher was, of course, an expert on every one of the forces known to physics, but she doubted if he would understand the forces now working on her. He would think she had gone crazy.

As she had, in a way, but not like the people who dropped out of MIT engineering because they had
actually
gone nuts, the kind who stayed in their rooms and never bathed and wrote in tiny letters on the walls. She wasn’t crazy in that way. If you looked at it from a slightly different angle, you could even say that she had gone sane. In an effort to justify herself, to explain herself to her professor, she kept typing, and as the letter became longer, as it turned into something close to a Unabomber screed, she found that she was talking not to Dr. Schue but to Carmel Marder, whoever she now was. The burden of this was that, all things considered, she no longer thought that the future of manufacturing was the development of self-contained factories that could forage for raw materials and shit appliances. People, she had recently learned, could get by with many fewer appliances, or none at all. She wanted to try to use engineering in service of modesty, of scarcity, of getting by with less.

She read this email over. Sweat started on her forehead and trickled down her flanks. Did she really believe this? She recalled Dr. Schuemacher exploding the whole small-is-beautiful worldview, what he called hippie-dippie whole-earth crapola. The future belonged to automated factories using solar and nuclear power, making everything anyone could conceive of essentially for free, distributed by automated systems. Physical labor would become an anachronism, like slavery and religion, and people would increasingly become one with their machines. No one would die, and humanity would reach out to the stars in virtual form at the speed of light.

Carmel believed this as an intellectual proposition, but somehow she’d lost her
faith
in it, and she couldn’t understand why. There appeared in her mind now the concept of “conversion experience.” She was having one of these, she thought; it had taken her over and had destroyed the life she had known, even though she didn’t really believe in conversion experiences and didn’t know what she was converting to. She didn’t even know whether she believed in the stuff she just wrote. The one thing she knew for sure was that if she pushed the button with the cursor on the send icon on this particular email, it would end forever any chance of getting back into Schuemacher’s kind of engineering.

She read it over, revised it, and paused for a long sweaty moment with her finger over the fatal Chiclet. These irrecoverable acts! She thought about how nice Cambridge was in the autumn, the leaves crunching underfoot, the crisp days, going to the pool and swimming her limbs off, the intellectual stimulation of the labs, the steamy coffee bars, the unforgiving competition, the convenient sex. She sighed, she pressed.

And it was as if the button were also connected to her sympathetic nervous system: chill sweat popped out all over her skin, her belly roiled, her limbs trembled, her heart tripped. Depression descended like a gray mist, and crazy thoughts flitted through her head—write another email, drive to the airport, get on a bus, shoot herself in the head …

She ran out of the room, out of the house, and down to the beach. The beauty of the scene, the balmy air, seemed mocking, demonic, void of comfort; the water itself cried failure, all those countless hours of training a cruel joke.

“What’s wrong, kid? You look like your cat died.”

This was Skelly, encountering her on an aimless ramble down by the boat harbor.

“My career died,” she responded. “Is that worse than a cat dying? If a museum was burning down and you could save only a cat, the
Mona Lisa
, or your career, which would you choose?”

“The cat. Seriously, though.”

“Oh, I don’t know, Skelly. I just resigned my assistantship, and I feel miserable and liberated at the same time. Does that mean I was fooling myself, doing the work I was doing? I mean, why else feel the liberation?”

“Yeah, I know what you mean. I felt like that when I declined re-upping in 1975. The army was my life and then it wasn’t. I was supposed to be a command sergeant major, crusty, covered in privilege and perks, and then when I saw myself doing that it was a little puke-making.”

She was all attention: a personal confession from
Skelly
?

“Why?” she asked, when he didn’t continue. “Why did it stop being your life?”

He gave her a look that was for an instant terribly sad; then it changed and he slipped back into his persona, like a gecko scuttling behind a rock.

“I don’t know—the dry-cleaning bills are huge, for one, and, two, I stopped being sure my country needed to be defended in the way I was trained to defend it. We’re going to the market in a while. Want to come?”

“No, thanks. I want to stay here by myself and obsess and be miserable. I might even have a cry.”

Skelly patted her shoulder and walked off. She watched him go, then stared out at the sea. I could just walk into it and swim out toward Asia until I sink, she thought, and entertained a short stack of similar moronic thoughts. She had her cry, then had a mildly hysterical laugh at her own expense. She waded into the clear water and washed her face in the sea. While she thus engaged, she heard a high voice saying, “Are you coming? It’s time to go.”

Oh, terrific, I’m hallucinating voices now, she thought, and then she felt a small hand clasp hers. She yelped and jumped half a yard backward.

The boy Ariel was standing there, smiling uncertainly. “Señorita? It’s time to go. We’re all going to the market. Don Eskelly is driving us in the truck.”

Don Eskelly? Oh, right, him. It was Don Ricardo and Don Eskelly now around the
colonia
, and she was La Señorita, or sometimes La Marder, everyone slotted into semi-feudal roles, her new fate. The boy’s smile resumed its joyful blaze, he reached out his hand again and she took it and allowed herself to be led. It was curiously comforting, she found, to be led by a child, she felt that the horrendous decisions were behind her now,
no importa madre
—a deplorable take on life, perhaps, but one with hitherto unexpected benefits. So she walked along and climbed onto the bed of the Ford, along with a dozen or so other people—Amparo and Epifania, Bartolomeo and Rosita—with the boy chattering away, explaining to her that this was the market where they would buy necessities for the Day of the Dead, the decorations and masks and toys, and the
candies
! But they were not to eat any of them until the day itself. The last one to board was Lourdes, who did not climb into the back but into the shotgun seat with Skelly. No one commented on this, and Statch, in her new version, did not register it as significant.

Off they went, swaying and laughing as the truck bumped over the rough causeway road. By the time they reached the plaza, Statch was herself again, although it was a different self from the one who had pressed the send key. Now she wandered through the market in this new self, not in a daze but in the opposite of a daze: a heightened awareness in which the anti-engineering portions of her brain seemed to have regained control. She stood transfixed for long minutes before pyramids of papayas, sapotes, cherimoyas, mangoes, and
aguajes
, before fans and stacks of bananas in all their varieties, red, mauve, yellow, and green; she walked through the butchers’ aisles and saw the heads of cows and hogs, their violet tongues lolling, their clouded eyes crawling with flies, and felt the absence of gringa disgust; she stopped at a stall and ate a tortilla filled with
jumile
sauce—a delicacy of the season, made with tomatoes, serrano chilies, onions, and the ground bodies of mountain beetles; it tasted of iodine and cinnamon—something she would not have done in her former being, something even her mother had never served.

The hilarious aspects of death seemed to be a theme of this market, as the boy had foretold: skeleton masks in cloth and papier-mâché, sugar skulls, and elaborate dioramas of the dancing dead, all done in sugar and cake; costumes and shirts, flags, and ornaments, all marked with bones and grinning skulls. Statch bought a straw bag and filled it, buying almost at random—toys, garments, confections—and finished with a present for Skelly, an unlabeled long-necked tequila bottle half full of a habanero chili sauce guaranteeed by the old gentleman who made it to be the hottest in Mexico. One drop, Señorita, please, one drop only; she would be interested to see what Skelly made of it. As she strolled, she sampled foods from the various stalls, resonant of her childhood but in a major key, meat of uncertain provenance and unwashed fruits, knowing the consequences of this but not caring much, then having to find a public toilet and finding herself glad of the urgent evacuations, as if some part of her needed to be washed out; and she thought, irrationally, that this was the last bout of
turista
she would ever have, that she wanted to go back and eat and drink the foods of this country until she had re-created her physical body to fit her new Mexican self.

When she emerged from the toilet, she cut through an unfamiliar alley, seeking a shortcut back to the plaza, and came upon Lourdes. The girl was leaning against a green Navigator, talking to two men. The men were both in their late twenties and dressed in dark suits and white shirts with open collars, the uniform of La Familia
sicarios
, and of a superior grade.

Statch stopped, observing the scene. Lourdes seemed happy, joking with the taller of the two men, a good-looking fellow with that ever-attractive bad-boy smirk, and the other one, a squat toadish number with a wide leering mouth and an overhanging brow, an especially unfortunate look when coupled with the shaved-side buzz cut that his kind favored. Statch didn’t usually think in such terms, but she now understood that she was looking at an evil face.

This man said something to Lourdes, bending over to say it into her ear, and Lourdes jerked her head away and responded loudly and with passion. She started to walk away, but the toad grabbed her arm.

Statch slung her bag across her chest and strode toward them. “Oh, hi, Lourdes,” she called out. “I’m so glad I found you. We’re just about to go home.”

“Who’s this?” asked the handsome one.

“That’s the daughter,” said Lourdes. “From the gringo who bought the house.”

“Come on, Lourdes. We have to go,” said Statch.

“From the gringo who bought the house,” repeated the toad, looking Statch up and down in an unpleasant way. “You know,
chica
, your daddy shouldn’t have done that. I think he should leave that house and go back to
El Norte
where he belongs.”

“Lourdes—” said Statch.

“But since you’re here, we were just going to have a party. The two of us and Lourdes, but now you’ll come along too. It’s a better number, don’t you think, more interesting combinations. Salvador, put your girlfriend in the car.”

The other man looped an arm around the girl’s waist from behind and reached back for the rear door handle. The toad grabbed Statch’s left arm.

But Lourdes, without warning, screamed and heaved forward. Her captor was off balance and let slip his grip, and Lourdes cannoned into the toad, who cursed, let go of Statch, and turned slightly, raising his hand to slap Lourdes. The other man recovered his balance and moved a step toward Lourdes. He grabbed at the back of her blouse. Lourdes twisted and ducked down and tried to squirm away between the two men.