Bajo Control

  It remains to be seen, now that everything has gone to hell, if you can escape the past that easily.

It is there, lurking just out of sight, just beyond immediate recall, ready to strike when you least expect it to. Your escape at seven from the hovel where your father beat you even when he was not drunk while your mother, unable to offer protection, cowered in a corner, escape in a manner of speaking because then came the first rape by a bearded tourist in that Bogotá callejón, the years surviving on the streets until you were swept up yet again in a police raid and this time dragged to the reform school and that warden and his yellow eyes and bad breath and the next rape, and then the next getaway many months later, and the job picking flowers in the fields outside the city, and no more rapes until you set out for the dream country to the far North, though on that journey it was only that once, only after the money had been stolen outside a bar in Ayutla in Guatemala, no more selling your body after that, only the desert and the miracle of a friendly coyote who hid you for six days in a cave and the crossing and—but you have told the world about this already, this and so much more, that is how you got rid of the past, by telling it, over and over, in a language you were not born into but made your own, English as a way of distancing the trauma you had lived in Spanish. Writing, not to remember, as most people do, but in order to forget, in order to erase the ghosts.

And rewarded generously, by contracts from editors and praise from critics and sales from readers and prizes far and wide, till it became an addiction: writing, you had declared, was akin to breathing, but did not add that without it you would not know how to defeat the void that threatened to devour you now that you had managed to overcome violations and wild streets, betrayals and wardens, narcos and bandidos and border guards. And you tell yourself that all would be well—oh, you keep on being caught up in illusions—if you had not foolishly answered an inquisitive journalist’s query—she was a Latina, of course—about your next work, whether readers could expect that you would distill into it the recent, hazardous weeks of working as a volunteer interpreter with the migrants detained by the Border Patrol despite the Biden administration’s promise to change Trump’s policy, perhaps, she inquired, a novel loosely inspired by your report in the New York Times magazine on the blight of their internment and the torn families that still could not be reunited, those poignant stories, the father looking for the son, the son despairing of finding the father, the three year old toddler girl who didn’t even know the name of her mother, only that she was called mamá, so how to trace that missing parent if all records had been deliberately and cruelly and systematically destroyed, could that not be woven into fiction, which often forced the public to take notice and take action and take heart more than a documentary approach?

You should have simply skirted the issue, muttered something about just doing your duty, you had been in Arizona for a few days to help and decided that you could not, in good conscience, remain in New York in the safe confinement of your swanky apartment with your wife Cindy while those homeless men and women and children were in such need of support and comfort, you knew what it was like to be a stranger in a strange land with not a welcoming smile or a friendly person to translate your plight, you were all too aware of how forcible separation from parents twisted and poisoned a boy’s existence. Or you could have explained that at times it took many years for an experience to leak into literature, or simply let her query pass, but no, you had to impress that sparkling youngish brunette with something that would serve as a headline, something catchy, algo espectacular, so you plunged into the thicket of the interview, brushed aside the idea that such a subject could be immediately fictionalized, told her reality was harsh and interesting enough, no, you responded, my next novel is heading into absolutely unknown territory, it would be—and here your voice became whispery and conspiratorial, full of shared hilarity and secrets—a comic epic, a picaresque masterpiece, you boasted, something uplifting rather than depressing. And when she wondered why, with such a unique talent to recount the stories of suffering that were neglected and misremembered by almost everybody and more so after the virus had revealed even more the inequities that had always been there, why would you choose to waste your time with anything that was not serious and grave and memorable, when she suggested that she and others were expecting some narrative labor that served our community, she had used that word, our, repeating it in Spanish, nuestra, but you had ignored what was implicit and complicit in both languages, you had retreated into the platitude that serving the truth of your art was a way of serving the community and we were more in need of comedy when our nation, nuestra nación, emphasizing our and nuestra, had just climbed out from under the curse of the pandemic and the further curse of Trump trying to hold onto power as if he were some sort of Latin American dictator out of one of Gabo’s novels, not revealing that you had been tempted to write It Did Happen Here, a dystopian fable where the States is a failed country north of the border but no, let Trump stew in his endless exile of Mar-A-Lago before being jailed for his attempt to subvert the Constitution, we need some relief, we need to let go, some nightmares are dispelled by not naming them.

Better not to let the journalist know that, after the assault on the Capitol, you had spent a whole year scribbling potential scenes from that dystopian novel, sketching out an alternative history of the United States if that insurrection had succeeded. An experimental work, to be narrated from the point of view of a series of objects: the central storyline told by a pair of shoes worn by Estrella, a fifteen year old refugee girl, probably Guatemalan, carrying the child of her rapist, on the run, that adolescent, her feet wearing out the soles and the rubber as she is pursued by the migration police and traffickers and bounty hunters. Interspersed with this chronicle of a repression foretold were other voices. A long piece of wire that had been born with the innocent dream of being used by children to create figurines in the wondrous playground of a glorious city and, instead, finds itself turned into barbed wire in a concentration camp where undocumented Latinos await deportation along with Americans who have been termed traitors and await expulsion, if not something worse. And the voice of a forlorn toy duck—it once belonged to Estrella—sinking into the sea to join millions of other venomous, plastic objects. And a vaccine eviscerated, suffocated in rubbish, aware that it contains the cure to the plague that rampages through the land, as the AVC, the Anti Vax Police patrols pharmacies and hospitals and clinics and churches and mortuaries and private medicine cabinets to be rid of every last vestige of science, back to the Dark Ages. And the bitter words of a hose trying to extinguish a blazing forest fire as it berates the T shirt of the man who wields it, Firefighters for Trump, both objects to be consumed by the flames, hose and T-shirt, as water dries up, not only for them but for the planet. Fire was, indeed, the hidden protagonist of the projected novel: it burns books, explodes inside a clandestine abortion clinic, spews from guns all across the land, travels abroad in bombs that reduce to ashes foreign cities and families. And, of course, encroaching on Estrella until her sneakers no longer speak, devoured by forces she cannot control.

But no, no, no, you had sequestered those pages away, you would not let yourself—or your readers—be haunted by that gloomy vision, no, no, no, it was time to celebrate the new America that had rejected precisely the sort of hallucinatory future he had been envisioning, he insisted to the journalist that he wanted to celebrate liberation and joy and not dwell forever in caverns of terror. The future? Cakes and ale, you said to the journalist, quoting your favorite Shakespeare comedy. And, after the interview was over, off you headed, very satisfied with yourself, straight back home to start the new novel that, it is true, you had been devising since you had put away It Did Happen Here, and even so, already sweating, not because of the exercise or from the heat shimmering from the pavement on that Manhattan summer afternoon, but because you were not that sure that you could pull this off, what you, foolish showoff, had just publicly committed to producing, a masterpiece, and picaresque para colmo. Already concerned that there would be a follow-up email many months from now from that same Nuyorican reporter whose interview had been quoted ad nauseam on social media, and, in effect, there she was, here she was just yesterday, asking—it was only natural, you had given her the initial scoop—how is the new novel coming along?, do you have any idea when your eager fans might enjoy it?, and you did not answer at all, not even with some new cliché about not wanting to talk about a novel because it drained away the creativity, impossible to admit that the book is on the verge of foundering, that silence threatens to drown you…

But it won’t, that’s what you concentrate on at this moment, not the past. What worries you is the bizarre phone conversation you’re about to have this rainy April day with your friend and best cumpa, Jeremy Bronfman, the favor you need from him to salvage the novel and your reputation, that is all that concerns you, how to save it and save yourself, even if this sounds overwrought and melodramatic.

It’s not strange, then, that you’re nervous as you dial Jeremy’s number, you will have to be careful not to divulge immediately the actual reason for the call, feel your way to the moment when you let slip what you want from him and then he’ll—what? Accuse you of hiding things from him all these months, hang up indignantly? You calm down by reminding yourself that Cindy has insisted that all will be well, but it’s not her novel, not her sanity that’s at stake, is it?

Jeremy assuages your apprehension. Attentive and tactful as ever, alerted by the awkward, uncharacteristic stutter with which you’ve greeted him over the phone, he offers you an opening. As if he’s guessed you want his help and can’t bring yourself to ask for it, you’re so used to being in control, so jealous of your autonomy, nobody succeeds by showing weakness or self-doubt, the mask of life has taught you that much. It’s particularly kind of Jeremy, therefore, to say that he hopes you’re calling to tell him the novel’s advancing, not that he wants to be nosy.

“I appreciate you asking, Jeremías,”—you always unconsciously call him Jeremías when you want to make him feel he’s special—“things couldn’t be better, thanks to you the novel’s finally hit its stride. I was just waiting for the right character to come along.”

“Great news, Arcadio, tell me more, tell me more, thanks to me, you said, not that I want to intrude, but—hey, congratulations!” “Hold the congratulations until you—This character, maybe I should tell you his name.” A long pause. Long enough for both of you to hear the drumbeat of rain pouring down on Amsterdam Avenue. Then: “Jeremy Bronfman, that’s his name.”

“Jeremy Bronfman? My name? You’re giving a character my name? For how long has this been going on?”

Jeremy does not seem to welcome the disclosure that you’ve inserted him in your novel without warning or consultation. But you suspect that he’ll come around, he’s always been eager to gallop to the rescue of people in trouble. It had been like that from the beginning, ever since you had first met him a bit after you arrived in New York thirty years ago, in your late adolescence and without a penny or papers to your name and certainly no permission to remain in this country, Jeremy was the first one to listen to the stories you were bursting to tell the world about your besieged life and how it was in danger back in your native Colombia, the stories with which you bewitched him when he sat down in front of you in that immigrant detention center and said, I’m here to represent you, free of charge, get you asylum, I know I’m young but I’ll do my best, in clumsy Spanish till you surprised him with your excellent command of English, his eyes glinting with the recognition that the nineteen year old in front of him was not any ordinary refugee. Jeremy, more than a lawyer almost right away, the friend who became your first captive audience, confirming by his admiration that you had a unique talent—yes, he was the first one to use those words—for turning the trauma of your existence and the grief of a whole continent into terrifyingly beautiful tales, proof that your gift for gab would let you talk your way out of any predicament.Just like now.

“Unless you object, compadre,” you say, and a slight inflection of Spanish nestles into your voice. Again, this is not something you do on purpose, it’s just a tic that automatically appears whenever you happen to be asking for a favor, as if to remind any gringo like Jeremy of where you come from, as if to imply, come on, man, you have second thoughts about lending me a hand after all that I’ve been through? When you realize how you are subtly manipulating those close by with this strategy each time you want help, you suppress such linguistic maneuvering, are ashamed to stoop to these tactics, someone who has thrived as you have, with three best-selling novels and a raw memoir turned into a Netflix miniseries, the illegal immigrant who rose from poverty and abandonment to make it to the very top of the literary heap, with a Pulitzer and the insinuation from a trusted source that during a second Biden term you would be a Kennedy Center honoree, not to linger on the recent Doctor Honoris Causa from Harvard, no less. In that commencement speech, in fact, you resolutely counseled the graduating students to never see themselves as victims, never engage in emotional blackmail to gain an advantage no matter what terrible things happened to them, always keep in mind how privileged we are, you and me and everybody here today, you urged them in impeccable accentless English to remember that Americans like us have absolute mobility, passports stashed away so we can travel freely, credit cards so we can cross frontiers as if they barely exist, which is why I will never feel pity for myself, you vowed to the audience, or demand special status because of the misfortunes I may have endured, but choose, rather, to focus on the migrants in peril all over the world, anonymous, unacknowledged, eclipsed, with no documents to their name except the naked document of their skin, each of them a potential Arcadio Bernales, think of them as future authors of their own destiny if they were only afforded the chance, oh what stories they could tell.

Someday perhaps you will have to reckon with the contrast between that eloquent statement and the way in which, when you are in distress, you inadvertently and oh so effectively play the victim card, the hardships-of-the-past card, the past you otherwise avoid referring to or remembering lately, the past you are determined to keep out of your new novel, turn a new leaf, a decision you reached during the long purgatory of interpreting for the detained migrants, the father yearning for his son, the daughter pining for her mother, watching your own past return to bite you in the mirror that their despair was holding up, enough, you said to yourself, basta, I need to write something that has the lift and lilt of comedy in it, something that will make people chuckle at human folly rather than lamenting our sadness. As if, yes, you really could escape who you had been, who those undocumented displaced compaňeros revealed you still somehow were. But this is not the moment for such an accounting, to question your own contradictions would dilute your ability to meet the challenge that Jeremy poses, the need to soothe and assure him, as you do now with all sincerity: “If it makes you feel uncomfortable, just say so and I’ll shred the chapters with your name in them, the whole damn book.” Really meaning it. And yet, and yet…

“Well, that depends, doesn’t it? What you’re making me do.”

“Not you, the character.”

“But it’s my name. People will think it’s me. They know I’m your best buddy. They’ll think I’m the one who—listen, Arcadio, wouldyou mind telling me what the Devil this character with my name has beenup to in the novel?”

“You know I never tell anyone but Cindy and my editor what I’m working on—golden rule—, still, I can reveal this much: my fictional Jeremy, like you, he’s an upright lawyer, a thoroughly moral kind of guy. The kind of guy my readers would be ready to trust with their lives. Just like me, I’m putting my life—well, at least my novel, which is like my child, really, given that Cindy and me, well, you know…—putting life and novel, as I said, in your hands, using you because—There’s just nobody I know that comes even close to embodying what I need: innocent but also smart, the typical good American, un gringo bueno, we used to call people like you back home, back then. The reason why I have faith in this sinful land, people like you. Is it my fault if you have such a great name?”

Jeremy gives a little grunt—a sign that he’s pleased, but that doesn’t mean—oh, you can read him like a book, poor Jeremy, he’s so transparent—, that doesn’t mean that you’ve got his consent, far from a done deal, and even if he agrees that you can employ his name, well, worse is still to come, he has no inkling of the obnoxious adventure you’re planning for him, he hasn’t got a clue.

“I don’t get it. What if you use some other name, think of me as you write but call him, whatever, Bentham Pérez or—”

You barely suppress a snicker. He’s gracioso, your pal Jeremy, you smile because that’s the sort of lame joke that the character based on him would have made, not even grasping it was a joke, asking everyone why they were tittering as he looks around the room with blinking, uncomprehending eyes, but joining in anyway, not wanting to be left out. Bentham Pérez! Nobody is called Bentham Pérez. And certainly not someone who acts like Jeremy Bronfman and eats and argues like Jeremy Bronfman and pisses and waddles like him. Totally inimitable.

“Unless you’re a writer of fiction, it’s hard to—listen, characters, once you baptize them, once they’ve been born a certain way, you can’t just pretend they’re someone else. Calling this benevolent, kind man anything other than Jeremy Bronfman, I’d sooner give up this novel and start another one.”

“Well, seeing as you’re not willing to share exactly what this Jeremy Bronfman does, maybe, you’ll just have to start another one, Arcadio.”

This hardening of tone, this, you had not expected. Why wasn’t Jeremy like his counterpart in the novel, obediently acquiescing to the role conferred upon him?

At this point your wife tiptoes into the room. Her last client must have just departed, in unmitigated, angelic bliss, suffusing Cindy herself with the joy of having healed some supposedly incorrigible sinew or soreness or sorrow. And now she has come to your rescue, yet again, yet again—though maybe she is not aware of what is going on, as she glances at you, perplexed. She silently mouths the word “Who?”, as though she hadn’t been the one to cajole you into this call, not that you want your friend to know it was her idea, so you mumble into the receiver, “Espérate, Jeremy, Cindy just walked in.” Covering the phone, you say to her: “He doesn’t seem to like the idea much, is resisting it, is what.”

“You’ve told him what you want him to do?”

“Not yet. If he doesn’t even like that I’ve been using his name, how can I…? And he demands to know the plot.”

“Oh,” she says.

“So now what?”

“Here, let me speak to him, give it a whack.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, I’m the one who suggested the whole scheme in the first place, right? I might as well try. And he trusts me, right?”

Everybody trusts Cindy.

You certainly had, a scant few seconds after her slender, miraculous fingers had touched your body for the first time. Nothing sexual about that initial contact—though later, oh later, that early exploration of his aching muscles remain as something foundational, reverberating through the years and beds and sighs and rumpled sheets. Utterly professional, Cindy was, just as Jeremy had promised when he had steered you towards her, every Thursday this massage therapist works, free of charge, with victims of abuse, domestic and international, in the Healing Center for the Disregarded—that was what it was called, incredibly, making you even more wary. Such a pretentious, paternalistic title.

But it wasn’t the name that really fed your misgivings.

Nobody had touched your body in the last three years, not a man and definitely not a woman, understandable, Jeremy had said when coaxing that intimate information out of you, understandable for someone still suffering from the aftereffects of a trauma yet to be acknowledged, and the first step, the easier one, before going on to the mind and the heart and the memories, was to recover the body as a vessel of health rather than a bundle of nerves and pain that had betrayed him, that still induced paralyzing panic attacks. And Jeremy knew the right person for the job.

That inaugural encounter, between Cindy’s artful hands and your aching muscles, her wisdom and your needs, the way in which she immediately guessed where it hurt most, digging ever deeper, where no one had ever ventured, not even, and especially, yourself—and nevertheless, sin embargo, so respectful of what your hidden distressed cells had witnessed and been forced to ingest and accept in order to survive.

You always claimed that you were the one who first fell in love, love at first touch, you confessed to her when both of you eventually met in a different position, not you face down on a cot each blissful Thursday afternoon when she kneaded your shoulders to relieve them of the burden of too many wrong turns and treacheries, but once she had found herself a month later, on that Saturday night of their first love-making, beneath your gentle weight and discovering an appendage she had not, till that moment, handled or even seen, had not regarded, what was entering her as she had entered you before with her hands, after that nighttime excursion of yours into her depths, after that apparent reversal of roles, she had told you that most male patients, and many female ones, made similar romantic and incantatory assertions but that only in his case had she reciprocated, she was the one who had begun to make love to him with her hands from the very start, this man who had trusted the soft lightening of her fingers, the promise that she would never hurt or deceive or betray you, a temporary refuge she created on that first occasion and that would grow until it encompassed a home that you both could share. And, thanks to her advice on how to deal with those recurring panic attacks, you had learnt to control them, let them know who’s the boss, you’re in command of your body and your existence, until they had simply ceased, it had been years since even a hint of that hyperventilation, dizziness, dread had dared to make an appearance.

More the reason for you to hold back now that she demands the phone to speak to Jeremy. It’s not fear, of course not, but you don’t want to admit that you’ve failed miserably, admit to any vulnerability, lack of what she calls command, though it doesn’t take long for you to acquiesce as you almost always do. Because she answers your hesitation with a snap of her delightful therapeutic fingers, and it’s a good, clean, nice snap, nothing aggressive behind that gesture, just the way she expresses herself when she doesn’t have the time to explain anything at length to her stubbornly obtuse husband. You allow her to dislodge the phone from your hand. You’re sorry that it is so clammy with sweat but she doesn’t seem to mind, she’s an expert in sweat and sweet flesh.

“Jeremy?” she says. “It’s me, Cindy.”

They’re on speaker phone but even so, you draw closer, afraid that the April rain that is beating against the window panes will make you miss the nuances of Jeremy’s response. “Oh. Hi, Cindy.”

“I just wanted you to know that you have, without being aware of it, done a great service to Arcadio.”

“How? If it’s because he’s used my name without -”

“Do you remember when I sent you down to Arizona to retrieve him, enough was enough, he’d done his bit and it was time to come home…?”

“Only fair as I was the one who got him to publicize the plight of those kids still separated from their families, so –”

“Well, nobody else could have convinced him, so we’re already in your debt, but what I wanted to get at was that on the plane back youtold him a story that—do you remember, Jeremy?”

“Of course I do,” Jeremy answers.

You had sketched out for him what would be your Times Magazine report on those kids ripped from their families at the border and Jeremy had been enthusiastic, adding, however, that there was a far less visible and yet more urgent question, a theme worthy of a novel, what about the unaccompanied minors with no families at all who were still entering the States without documents. Despite the efforts of Vice-President Kamala Harris, some of those kids continued to be unaccounted for, being delivered, it was rumored, to fraudulent, non-existent foster homes… You were chilled by the idea: kids disappearing without even God knowing what’s happened to them, probably being abused somewhere, maybe victims of a pornography ring, maybe even being tortured for some sick pervert’s delight. And you said to Jeremy: “For those kids,” you said, “I’d do anything, anything and everything, except put them in my novel, it’s supposed to be a fucking COMEDY, Jeremy, for Christ’s sake. I’m tired of darkness and narcos and dysfunctional families. Enough tragedy already. I’ve got as much right as anyone in this country to reinvent myself, where else than in America can you begin all over again, as if from zero, which is what I damn well am going to do. And not you, not Cindy, not anyone else, is going to stop me—it’s going to be an epic comic picaresque masterpiece, like I’ll tell the first journalist who asks me, you’ll all see, I’ll surprise you and all my readers with something different and unexpected, no fierce backlands of Latin America, no magic fucking realism, no violence as a way of life, I’ll write something that makes people double up with laughter instead of crying, something jubilant, you’ll see, wait and see.

And you added, you really did, the idiotic phrase was already buzzing in your head, what you’d lob at that Nuyorican journalist, that it would be “an epic masterpiece, my best book ever.”

But then Jeremy had mentioned that a source of his at Homeland Security—couldn’t reveal the name, confidentiality, and all that—said that reports were circulating about a Homeland Security agent who was gaming the system, he and his wife, so the story went, had hidden away a large group of kids in their home, given them false identities as a way of protecting them from predators, or from being deported. No real evidence that he and his wife even exist, Jeremy observed glumly, an urban legend. You had not responded—or rather, responded by growing quiet, eerily so after your long, earnest diatribe of mere minutes ago.

Because the wheels of your imagination were churning like mad on that plane, the main threads of the novel were already weaving themselves into place, and by the time you arrived at your Amsterdam Avenue apartment you told Cindy in a non-stop dance of words the skeleton of a plot, though not quite uninterrupted, as your wife intervened from time to time, encouraged you, goaded you on, but mainly it was a one- person bravura performance. Two hours, that’s all it took for the story to be mapped out.

You turned that mythical, probably made-up Homeland Security agent that Jeremy had briefly mentioned, into Charlie, a widower with vaguely Latino origins, who brings one of the lost kids home with him on a visit, just to give the little tyke some relief, play baseball or whatever, but this childless, lonely man is so enchanted with the lovable scamp that he can’t bear to part with him. And now, Charlie is hooked. If one, why not two? Why not another one? Why not more? Until he ends up with a house full of mischievous brats, like waifs in Dickens—or John Irving, Cindy had enthusiastically intervened—, former street kids—like you, like you, Arcadio, she said, and you had agreed, yes, yes, like the ones I met and left behind, imagining they made the trek north like I did. And like me and my mates, experts at conning people, playing tricks, looking innocent but dedicated to extricating money from adults, conning them, but this time directed by Charlie, that good-hearted Fagin. Using the funds they scurry back to him to bribe agents so they’ll look the other way, these ever more elaborate scams allow Charlie to accept still more kids and feed and clothe them, cheaper by the dozen, madcap mayhem. Oh, you were happy, laughing like a little lad, as you designed each incident, as happy as Charlie himself, who was brought up in a foster home and never knew his parents and is now taking care of kids as desperate as he once was. Each niño, you informed Cindy—you were still pacing up and down—each niño from a different nation in the hemisphere. Where else than in the United States could representatives of so many Latin American republics gather under a single roof? Orphans, you exclaimed, making a journey like mine so long ago, fleeing from poverty and violence, as resourceful as I used to be. As hesitantly open to what was jubilant and raucous about the land of jazz and opportunity that was adopting them, even if the adoption was fragile and accomplished by a sham parent. Don’t Latinos have a right to something other than misfortune and sob stories and catastrophes?

And over the next seven months you wrote chapter after chapter of your roguish, picaresque novel, full of fun and pratfalls, until the day when you read those first hundred pages to Cindy and you realized, by how she reacted, you realized by how your voice was faltering, you both realized that there was a problem.

Not only that such antics risked becoming monotonous and repetitive, but that these playful adventures entailed no consequences. What was lacking in the novel was some sort of peril, Cindy noted, and agreed with you that it shouldn’t be too dark and dire, but the suspense had to be ratcheted up as to whether Charlie and his brood would be caught and exposed. Someone in the shadows has a scheme to destroy this wonderful family. Or maybe, Cindy suggests, fascists take over the U.S. government and start mass deportations, and you shook your head, that couldn’t happen here, the Democrats might not be perfect on immigration but they would never do anything like that, and as to Republicans, they were toast, Trump could not survive all the court cases and investigations and lawsuits, no, there was a reason why he had abandoned the novel, It Did Happen Here, the threat has to be credible, breathe some verisimilitude. Okay, okay, Cindy conceded, nothing drastic, simply a moment when Charlie and the niños are in danger, then the question arises: who can they turn to?

And as you and Cindy mulled who the perfect sidekick could be, a friend who’d defend the family through thick and through thin, en las duras y las maduras, she came up with a name, someone who fit the role, and that is what she is now trying to explain to Jeremy over the phone, how that had allowed Arcadio to keep writing, it was indeed a masterpiece, well on its way. “There is only one possible mystery man,” she whispers throatily to him now, waggling the receiver, “who can save Charlie, the kids, the novel, save my husband.”

And then zany Cindy starts singing, “It had to be you” over the phone.

You conjure up Jeremy at the other end of the line, smiling at the screwball situation, his misgivings melting away, his buckeye teeth protruding as he grins, and then trying to suppress that grin because he is so overly conscious and shy about his appearance, about his jutting front teeth. Oh, he was just born to play the role Cindy has saddled him with—and yes, in effect, he’s now joining in from his side of reality. It had to be me, nothing but me, getting the lyrics all garbled, the tune a bit askew, oh yes, with all his faults you loved him still/ and always will, that’s what the character would have done as well—sing how he had wandered around/, had finally found/ somebody who could make me be true/ and no longer blue,/ it had to be you,/ nobody, nobody else would do. One of the oldies you had listened to as a kid on the radio in reform school back in Colombia, that made you dream of emigrating to the States, stirred you to learn English later from an elderly gringa evangelical missionary who took a fancy to your charms, study it like a maniac night after night, determined to become an American before even setting foot on American soil, already planning to write in the language of the country you were bound for, where you would be recibido like a younger brother by someone like Jeremy, a fledgling lawyer who would offer you shelter when all the odds were against you, manage to get you asylum and then a green card and, eventually, citizenship. Suddenly, hearing him warble along with your wife, you are so grateful for Jeremy’s clumsy existence that you grab the phone from Cindy and say:

“Gracias, gracias, gracias. I really can’t thank you enough, Jerónimo.”

“Wait, wait, wait! I didn’t –”

“It had to be you, it had to be me, it was meant to be, you and me, a marriage made in heaven.”

Your euphoria is contagious and he says yes, yes, of course, he accepts that he’s the godfather of this novel and responsible for its future and well-being, he agrees, it had to be me, even if he has no idea that this is merely the first step, nothing compared to the trap you are setting for him.

And that’s when you get cold feet again,

Relieved as you may be that he’s agreed to allow his name, his every trace and tic and quaintness, to be flaunted for the public to gape at in a comical romp of a novel over which he has no control, you’re painfully aware that this was the easy part of this ordeal and that you have still not figured out how to present that other service you require from him, that crazy idea, and here you are, tongue-tied, still unable to articulate the words that will persuade him, and here he is, saying good-bye, the opportunity is slipping away, and you look at Cindy in dismay and she realizes that you’re not going to add anything, you’re not going in for the kill, and she grabs the phone and says:

“Hey, Jeremy, Cindy again. Janet’s away, right?”

“Yeah, won’t be back till Sunday. The Clean Energy Conference is—”

“What say you come over for dinner and we celebrate that you’re such a good sport.”

“Oh, Cindy, there’s really no need to thank me for—really, I’m just glad to help you guys out, you know that.”

“Tomorrow. How about tomorrow night? You’re alone and Arcadio was going to cook anyway, and it’s one of your favorites. What about it?”

And he says yes, your gluttonous friend says yes, without suspecting—Jeremy is so naïve—that it’s not just his name you need from him, he has not a notion of what your hidden agenda might be, that you’re about to ask him for yet one more sacrifice—a big one—on the altar of friendship.

You spend the next day preparing the meal, cooking him an ajiaco, a dish that you had told him, somewhat stretching the truth, was based on a recipe your abuela had sent you and Cindy before she died, more than stretching the truth as you never met that grandmother, barely care to remember the faces of your parents whom you never returned to once you’d fled into the ambiguous freedom and pain of the streets of Bogotá at the age of seven. But better that Jeremy assume that there’s something enchanted and legendary about that savory stew he loves so much, soften him up for the moment when you’ll pop the question.

You wait for the dessert—a special, clandestine treat now that Janet has him on such a strict diet, he had been pigging out as soon as the long self-isolation imposed by the virus was over—before you gather enough courage to broach the real reason for this invitation Cindy has concocted. “There’s something,” you say, so softly it is almost as if someone else is speaking these words, “I didn’t tell you about yesterday. Something I’d like you to do. For me. Really, for us.” Jeremey doesn’t blink at all in his usual way, just keeps savoring a chunk of the torta de mil hojas you had acquired, fresh, with caramel bursting from the sides, at La Querencia bakery on Broadway though you told him you had made that delicacy yourself, layer by layer.

“Sure,” Jeremy murmurs, not wanting to interrupt the feast, as if he might suddenly wake up and find out he’d been dreaming.

“Good man.”

He finishes swallowing. “Anything to be of assistance.” “Well, you’ve already contributed so much that I hesitate to… First that anecdote on the plane and then allowing me to use your name and -.”

Jeremy beams. “Glad to be of service,” he says. Adding, as he reaches for another slice of mil hojas: “Hope you don’t mind.”

Again, he’s paving the way for you, helping you to inch towards the revelation that—

“Remember the threat Cindy told you about last night, in the novel, I mean?” you ask. “Promise you won’t tell anybody about this, right, not even Janet?”

“My lips are sealed,” Jeremy answers, though they are not really sealed at all, crumbs are dribbling from his mouth.

“Well, there’s this villain—name’s Moreno—who’s hunting down Charlie and his family. It seems he’s running a corrupt network inside Homeland Security, has his own plans for migrant youngsters, not to reunite them with their families or place them with good folks but to traffic with them. Very noir-ish, a man in the shadows. And now…”

“And now?”

“He’s found him, he’s cornered Charlie, has enough evidence to put him behind bars, abduct the children, unless…”

“And that’s where I come in,” Jeremy says, his eyes shining with the elation of fighting evil, “the character with my name, I mean.”

“Yes, you end up being the real hero of the novel. This Moreno dude seems angry that Charlie is siphoning kids out of the system, but the one he really hates is Jeremy Bronfman.”

“What did I, the fictitious Jeremy, do to him?”

“It’s not only what he did. It’s what Jeremy is. The opposite of Moreno in every way. But now that this nasty piece of work has Charlie as a hostage, under his thumb so to speak, he can get to Jeremy.”

“What? Like, kill him?”

“Probably not. This is a comic epic, not a tragedy. But at this point in the novel, all Moreno wants is to exercise power over Jeremy, play with him.” You lower your voice intensely, as if the characters could hear you. “There are some twisted people out there, with a perverse sense of humor, who enjoy putting someone like you, pure, innocent, loyal, putting this guy Jeremy in a difficult position, push the limits, you know. A sort of sick revenge against the gringos, against the most gringo of the gringos. Moreno sets up an experiment, a test to see how far you-”

“The character, you mean.”

“How far Jeremy Bronfman is ready to go in his devotion to his friend.”

“So what do you need him—need me—to do?”

You take a deep breath and then: “Go into a bar and pick up a woman there and take her home with you.”

There! You’ve spat it out! Finally!

Jeremy sputters, he literally goes red, hard to tell whether because he’s choking on your demand or on that third slice of Mil Hojas. You make a mental note to use his reaction for your next chapter, but that doesn’t stop you from simultaneously pressing your case.

“Trial by fire, man. Is this squeaky clean American—known for being super tímido—is he ready to hit on a stranger in a bar—she has to be a Latina, that’s the only condition—, buy the woman a drink, convince her to leave with him, out of sheer friendship?”

“Not going to happen. I don’t go to bars. I don’t even drink. And ever since my mother told me to never speak to strangers—”

“Okay, okay, if it’s so traumatic, if you’re invoking your santa madre, no need to go all the way through with it. Once you’ve approached her, you tell this woman you pick up, sorry, you’re married, you—I don’t know what you’d say, if I knew I wouldn’t be begging you to—the mere attempt is enough, enough for you to start a conversation, no matter how awkward. I can observe the experience-”

“You’re going to be there, lurking nearby?”

“Yeah, soaking up your words, your body language, you know, when you’re forced to do something so contrary to your nature. God, it has to be realistic, right, no false notes.”

“You must be really desperate. Cindy, is he, is Arcadio that desperate?”

She has been quiet up till now, but now she nods, earnestly. “Arcadio is screwed, Jeremy. That’s the truth. He has no idea how to write the next scene. He’s been staring at his screen for hours, days on end. Not a word coming out. Everything sounds—well, phony. No matter how much he tries to imagine someone like you seducing—”

“He can’t because I can’t. Something else, anything else, let’s figure out what I might, he might– something outrageous but that—”

“Like sneaking into a Border Patrol facility,” Cindy says, “and stealing some dossier or whatever, because —”

“No! Hell no!”

“Because that, now that would really get our friend Moreno salivating,” Cindy continues, warming to her subject. “Get you to do something totally illegal, so he could blackmail you in the future, have you in his pocket.”

“Well, he’s going to have to find something else to salivate over. Because not you, not Arcadio, certainly not this Charlie character, are going to convince me to become a criminal. I mean, I’ve been approached— hush, hush, nobody knows it—for a major post in human rights in the Biden administration, the next one, you can’t ask me to jeopardize that, my whole career, reputation.”

“Hey, count your blessings,” you chime in, “nobody’s asking you to steal anything. But a bar, a girl, oye, hombre, what’s so hard about that?”

“I wouldn’t know what to say, that’s what. And Janet would kill me.”

“Janet? You’re worried about Janet? When I spoke to her she—”

“You spoke to her?”

“Before she left for Frisco, and she thought it was hilarious, didn’t she, Cindy?”

“A real lark,” Cindy interjects, “that’s what she said. As long as Arcadio is at the bar too, nearby, to make sure my man doesn’t get into too much trouble—she even wondered whether we couldn’t wait until she returns so she can also watch.”

“She wants me to do it?”

You look at Cindy, shake your head, warning her not to push too hard, Jeremy is a delicate sort of guy, always lamenting that he lacks the overwhelming self-confidence of his younger friend Arcadio. He’s probably not too pleased that you and your wife have gone behind his back and talked to Janet—and Cindy could be making it worse by telling him everything his wife had said: that the very idea of Jeremy being unfaithful turned her on, the idea that he could become somebody else, that inside him there prowled a would-be Don Juan, a Latin lover, Cindy insinuates that Janet thought it would spice up their life a bit, as long as he didn’t follow through with the lady at the bar, which Janet knew he wouldn’t, just as you did, nobody called Jeremy Bronfman, esquire, would do anything like that to his wife.

Jeremy is flabbergasted, though also, you sense, slightly gratified. “And she thought I could do it, I’d agree without a second thought?”

“Not without a second thought. I mean, your name is Jeremy Bronfman. With a name like that, you give everything a second thought and a third and a millionth thought. You think each coming event over so thoroughly that by the time the event has come, it’s gone, you have always anticipated the future minutely, exactingly, you would never do anything like this without infinite, perpetual consideration.” Not strange that these words flow to you so effortlessly. They come straight from a description you wrote in the novel itself.

“But,” Cindy adds, “you’d do it, ultimately, just like the character in the novel, the good gringo, will end up doing it, no matter the risk.”

“Though how you’d do it,” you can hear yourself speculate out loud, “now that’s an enigma because I’ve never seen you backed up against the wall like this, not even when you were, you know, engaging in, skirting, you know, irregularities when you got me asylum here and I was in real danger of being kicked out, sent back home where -”

“Enough about the past,” Cindy says, firmly. “This new novel is precisely a way in which Arcadio wants to stop dwelling in the past, leave it behind once and for all. His ultimate therapy. And the point is, for that, he needs you now. If you can pull off the bar scene, it will be a moment of high comedy, just what the novel is crying for.”

“High comedy? Me?”

“Comic relief.” You can feel him relenting and press on. “Just when the novel, towards the end, cries out for it, when the atmosphere is getting heavy with dread, so thick you could cut it with a knife. The knife they’ll use to slit Charlie’s throat if—”

“Hold it, hold it, I thought Charlie was going to jail, but no violence, you emphasized the word comic, remember?”

“The only way to avoid violence is for your character to cooperate with los malos. Otherwise, I can’t vouch for what Moreno and his thugs will do. Unless Charlie’s best friend comes through.”

“Me.”

“Who else can I turn to?”

One week later you witness the transformation of Jeremy Bronfman. He is brilliant at that bar. His pick-up line! That he recognized the sultry brown-skinned brunette morosely sipping a martini, recognized her as an extra in a movie, and when she said no, curtly, you’re not my type, much too overweight, never been in any movie, never want to be, a rejection delivered with just a hint of a husky Dominican accent, Jeremy had come back with a suave retort: that she deserved to be, that he was a pixel artist, inserting people’s faces into films, something like a digital casting agent. The girl perked up, like a wilted flower responding to finally being watered, began to warm to him, accepted his offer to pay for the next round.

And Jeremy nods, hits the ground running, not blushing even once, creating a whole new unblinking persona for himself, creating it for your exclusive use, a revelation, the very unvarnished scene straight from reality that you needed. More than a scene. A spectacle. The performance of his life. Because once the lady is hooked and ready to abscond with him anywhere, ready to be immortalized on some nonexistent screen back in a nonexistent studio, that’s when Jeremy accuses her of being an impostor, he turns in your direction, you’ve been smirking at the end of the bar, like the villain in your novel, enjoying the sheer absurd theatricality of it all, Jeremy signals with a fat finger for you to approach and you’re ready to play along, get close to the action, and then Jeremy says, this is my buddy Arcadio and I bet he’s paid you to play this role, come on, admit it—and he grins with his protruding teeth, enjoys your astonished answer, hey, I don’t know this guy, he must be drunk, and the girl looks at him and then at you, and slaps him—not hard, more like a pat, a good-bye pat, and heads to the door and waves from it. “You’re a bit old, but sweet, más dulce que la guayaba,” she says, in that husky voice from la isla, “sorry that I don’t do threesomes.” And vanishes into the night, a cliché, but one that is literally true and will play well when you write the scene, even if the next scene has your character rushing out after the girl and convincing her to visit his studio, you don’t need Jeremy anymore to imagine how that could happen.

“So how did I do? Did you like how I managed to interest her and then make sure I wouldn’t have to follow through?” You tell him he was flawless, a candidate for central casting, words you will retain when reporting back to his wife and Cindy. And that you’re beyond proud of him, so proud you’ve decided to call the novel Amistad: The Proof of Friendship as a way of thanking him, thisencounter was just what the novel was hungry for. “So you don’t need any more help?” Jeremy asks.

You tell him you aren’t sure about the next steps, whether this Moreno is nursing the idea of forcing the Jeremy character to undergo other trials, another sort of sacrifice. “Only thing sure,” you say, “is that in the novel Jeremy is so intrigued by the furtive Latina, that he ends up in bed with her, which will bring other complications.”

“What complications?” There is genuine alarm in his voice, verging on panic, he seems to have forgotten the pride of just a few minutes ago, preening about how he had aced the scene. And that flustering look in his eyes makes you feel… What? Shame at having used him in this way? Or is it something else, more disturbing, that you should be wary of how much you have relished watching him sweat and suffer, a cruel streak in yourself that you dislike?

You reach out and touch his arm, then draw even closer and give him one of your infamous Latino bear hugs.

“I’m not gonna ask you for anything else, Jerónimo. That’s a promise. Let me work with what you’ve given me so far, see what my editor thinks, here’s hoping that bastard Echols feels that I’ve hit the target. But this collaborative process, for the good of us both, is over.”

Two weeks later, your editor offers his verdict: he loves the scene in the bar and where it led, sex and blackmail and such, but feels that the stakes should be raised a bit higher, this Jeremy Bronfman –what a mentsch!—hadn’t been hassled enough. His legendary Echols eyeglasses glint in the murk of his Knopf office and you decide that you’d give Moreno a pair of glasses just like those, reflecting the last light of day as if they could kill it, that light and all light.

“I don’t know about that. My character’s beginning to crack under the pressure. If things end badly…”

“No tangos, no boleros, no whining,” Harry Echols smirks, just like you had at the bar, just as Moreno would have. “That was our agreement when I read your stupid interview with that stupid reporter, announcing that you were going to do something comic, funny, riotous, a masterpiece no less. You had a niche, Arcadio, readers who buy your books because they want more of the same. But no, you didn’t want your fans to think of you as a magical refugee from mayhem in Latin America, you were bent on remaking yourself. After the hell you went through before coming here, the hell you went through when you arrived, throw your brand away just like that. What did I say back then? You want to blow it, didn’t I say that, it’s your funeral, don’t come asking for mercy, didn’t I? Anyway, suffering is good for artists.”

“But not for my friend, he’s the one who’s in turmoil. I mean, I really love this guy. And you should never betray the people you love.”

It comes out sounding so melodramatic, so embarrassingly latino, that you blush. Maybe Echols perceived how theatrical your words sounded, maybe not—why the hell did he not brighten up his office more?

“Love is also enhanced by suffering, Arcadio, that’s how it gets taken to a different level.” He leans in towards you. He has onions on his breath, not that you mind. Where you come from, everybody is born reeking of onions and garlic, straight from the womb, and no amount of Americanization is going to change that. “Remember: whatever degree of anguish you’re feeling it’s nothing compared to the stress the real migrant kids in the real world are going through, what migrants everywhere keep enduring—and they’re still out there, fucked up. And nothing you can do about it. So the more you swelter, the more you pay your dues—and the bigger the creative payoff. Raise the stakes, now that the novel is coming to an end, that’s what I’m telling you.”

You feel like giving him a good coscorrón, see if he liked that, if that sort of suffering made him feel more love. And what the hell did he know about stress and anguish, life-threatening affliction? Instead, you simply say: “This is my novel and I’m in control. So it’s up to me to find a way to finish it on my own, no more help from anybody. Jeremy’s done too much already. Enough is enough. I’m not asking him for one more thing.”

You didn’t need to. When you arrive home, Cindy has just hung up the phone. “That was Jeremy. He says to meet you down at the Starbucks on Worth Street, the one near Federal Plaza, Arcadio. Says he’s got something to show you.”

Jeremy is so excited that he doesn’t even greet you, almost spills his Diet Frappuccino, stands up from the table making wild flourishes like a maddened Houdini.

“Guess what’s under that napkin?” It isn’t a napkin on the table. It’s Jeremy’s sweater, but if he wants to pretend it’s a napkin…—and you’re curious as to what he might be hiding, something bulky, so you just shrug, no idea. “Guess, just guess, please, man, give it a try.”

Before you can indulge his latest whim, he withdraws the sweater, twirls it in the air, revealing a thick manila folder bursting with papers, some of which peek coyly out, and again, he pleads with you to guess, what do you think is in the folder?

He’d never been this manic before, Jeremy isn’t letting you breathe a word, stops you peremptorily with the other uplifted hand like a demented traffic cop. He insists you seat yourself and then, still standing, intones, as if he were in a court room: “Your honor, I present as evidence of friendship…. Your file, Arcadio. The one that contains all the details of your case, when they were going to deport you.”

“My file?”

“I stole it, Arcadio.”

“You what?”

“I stole it. For you. For the novel. Remember what Cindy said and I answered hell no, that I’d never, well I did, I did, I went into the ICE facility, right here, next door, at Federal Plaza, and I managed to nab it, not that difficult after all.”

You are so astonished, with so many questions tumbling through your brain that you can’t begin to choose which one to pose first. For me? For me? He committed this crime for me? Risked screwing up an appointment at the Justice Department? This was preposterous. How had he pulled it off? Did he realize the consequences? Was he out of his mind? What would Janet say? Hell, what should I say?

Not that you have a chance to say any of this. He is too excited, eager for you to understand that this was not an act of insanity. He had ended up falling in love, he soberly declares, with this character out of your novel, Arcadio, the one based on him, had drawn inspiration and courage from him—had got to thinking that maybe the bar scene had not been enough to make sure the villain would leave the protagonist alone, that something more drastic was required. And that’s when he recalled Cindy’s remark about stealing a legal file and had decided that this sort of devotion would provide an impeccable finale to the book, his character is prosecuted, maybe they implicate this upright lawyer with the criminal and his mafia, this fictional Jeremy’s reputation is ruined, but nothing of that matters if it allows him to, yes, prove his friendship, his amistad and, of course, bring down Moreno with him, unmask the son of a bitch. It also felt good, really good, Jeremy as a sort of Robin Hood of immigration lawyers, he says, stealing from Homeland Security to offer safety to a rogue agent like Charlie who defends the kids instead of imprisoning them, Jeremy doesn’t repent of what he did, stealing the file. Breaking the law he had sworn to uphold made him feel… alive.

“You have to return it, Jeremy, right away. They’ll catch you and—”

“It was so easy. Of course, I needed Janet to be my scout while —”

“Janet’s in on this? Have you all gone stark raving mad?” Jeremy looks crestfallen. “I thought you’d be delighted, that it would inspire you. Isn’t it a great plot twist? Isn’t this what you wanted—to push me to the limit, see how I would react?”

It is only later, when you get home, once you had convinced him to return the file—no, you said, I don’t want to even look at it, I don’t want my fingerprints on the damn thing, it was only after you had acted as his lookout down the hall from the office housing the archives in the Federal building, only after you had seen him emerge without the folder but with a buckteeth grin lighting up his face, that’s how pleased he was with himself, with the new Jeremy that had emerged like a monster from your novel, it was only once you have wandered in a daze back to your apartment do you realize that, just as he had foretold, you are indeed stimulated by his act of grand lunatic larceny, that it was pointing the way to a resolution that had been eluding you, in spite of all your assurances that you had everything under control. Not that this Jeremy Bronfman character would get indicted, but that rather his decision to sacrifice himself for his friend could conceivably be the key to a redemptive ending, that’s what you talked over with Cindy that evening after reporting what Jeremy had done. Maybe Moreno, Cindy suggests, was secretly the long lost father of Charlie, and not really the dreadful scoundrel in the shadows that the novel had suggested he was for purposes of suspense, something like the convict character in Great Expectations. Better still, Moreno could be a father who got separated from his son at the border many years ago, thought he was dead, and now, all these decades later, this Moreno, now a multimillionaire, has tracked Charlie down, what if all these attacks were tests to make sure that he and his friend Jeremy could be trusted to head a major financial operation that would help orphans all over Latin America, keep them from emigrating– sounds so sentimental and clichéd and Hollywood, but it was the sort of ending that would tug at the hearts of your readers, would startle them by its simplicity and drama, the whole reunited- reconstituted family sprinting forth to buy Christmas presents and stuff themselves with hamburgers and fries and ketchup galore, a last minute reversal of fortune, that a country called friendship –the last words in your text—still exists in this miserable world. The only country we have left in these dire times when patriotism has become a dirty word and hatred and walls of all sorts divide us. Your fans would forgive the fact that you had changed what Harry Echols called your brand, and as for Harry himself and his editorial advice, he’d been hinting for ages that your work tilted too far to the dark side, so he wouldn’t complain either, hadn’t he crowed that inserting Jeremy Bronfman into the novel was an act of sheer comic genius, terrific how this friend of yours, he tells you when he has read the complete manuscript, has taken over the book with his enormous heart and innocence, he’s like Huck to your Jim, an American classic with a Latino twist, Saul Bellow in the barrio. You listen to his praise and can already smell the way he’ll promote the book. Though you are apprehensive when Echols adds: “A few small changes, though, Arcadio, if you don’t mind.”

Before you can bristle and answer that maybe yes, maybe no, he goes on: “There’s sure to be some son of a bitch, and more than one, who will yelp that you’re exploiting the plight of undocumented kids for your own benefit, they’re living hell while you’re milking their plight for laughs and plushily collecting royalties, so we need to nip that sort of reproach in the bud. Maybe if you offer to donate ten per cent of your royalties to some cause, Lawyers For Sanctuary, for instance. And we’ll match your donation. That should shut them up.”

You almost tell him no, you don’t want to do anything that would suggest that you are somehow guilty of turning your back on your community, why should you offer even the hint of an apology for having created this epic comedy, is anybody demanding that authors from Alabama and Mississippi contribute part of their royalties to anti-lynching memorials, why should you—someone who’s adamantly refused to ask for special treatment because of his past, someone who’s written incessantly about the tragedies that beset the Latino inhabitants of the Americas and proven that he cares by those weeks as an interpreter in the most extreme circumstances—why should I be singled out? Even so, you say yes to Echols, because you have to concede that he’s got a point. It’s best to avoid trouble, not be forced to engage in a protracted debate in this noxious environment about art and responsibility and identity politics, sidestep anything that could damage the novel whose birth has already been much too arduous

“But also…,” Echols says.

“Also?”

“We don’t want you only identified with the Latino cause, boxed into that category. I’m not sure if I ever told you what Herbert has been up to lately…?”

He had told you at least ten times, maybe twelve: his husband had created the Meltdown Foundation, an NGO dedicated exclusively to making the public aware of the Artic and Antarctic and mountain glacier ice thawing so that soon several billion coast dwellers would have to evacuate, head for the hills, as the waters rose—displacing the poor, of course, as always. You saved Nichols the ask.

“Good idea,” you said. “Let’s set aside a percentage for the Meltdown Foundation.”

“And one more thing.”

What else could there be? Give money to his ailing mother? Or to a fund for all ailing mothers? For trans rights? This Echols really was implacable.

“The name. Jeremy Bronfman. Call him something else. He’s carried you this far, you don’t need his name anymore. Change it, man. If you’re a true friend.”

Why not? Jeremy had been so generous, why not reciprocate, save him any potential embarrassment, why require him to spend the rest of his life explaining that he wasn’t the character of a best-selling novel, imperil his chances of a position in the next presidential administration? And that’s how this story should end, it should end with the four of you, Jeremy and you, Cindy and Janet, celebrating a year and a half later in a dinner hosted by Echols and his ecological husband Herbert, the novel’s publication and glowing praise for “this comic epic of the new America after the coronavirus and the end of Trumpism” on the front page of the Times Book Review and the feature on All Things Considered and a film option and the first check to Lawyers For Sanctuary and the Meltdown Foundation, that’s how this story about loyalty should end, but things in life and history, as in fiction, at times they just don’t go according to script, never turn out the way we plan them.

Now that you know how it all ended.

Now that it is you who must find a way to tell the story.

Not that you will ever write it nor would anyone be interested in publishing such a transgressive tale.

Still…

                2

I’ve never been good at faces.

It’s a sort of neurological disorder that I share with many another sorry soul, though seldom will those afflicted admit to it. We’re to abashed when we fail to recognize our dentist, our neighbor’s daughter, our wife’s nephew or, as happened to me, the border guard who cut me a lucky break and approached me years later to ask for an autograph at the Miami Book Festival. In extreme cases, people with this disorder don’t remember what their parents or spouse look like, there are some sick victims who pass their loved ones on the street and don’t even say hello, let alone goodbye. That’s not my case. Fortunately, I suffer from a mild variety of this condition, but still tenacious enough to determine my very style of writing, the fact—remarked upon by critics and scholars—that rarely are any character’s physical attributes described in my fiction or even in the memoir, a literary trait, Oliver Sacks told me one night at dinner a number of years ago, to be expected, given your condition.

I had done my best to alter that stylistic quirk in the new novel, circumvent the ghostly quality of the men and women who had up till then been populating my world. It appeared I had not been entirely successful. One reviewer had noted, perhaps not critically, “the author’s propensity to draw features that are blank, as if erased by the eye before they have the chance to be recognized.”

So Cindy was surprised—nonplussed, really—when I timorously suggested in the intermission of “The Last Song of Pancho Villa,” a musical we were attending at the behest of the producer who’d optioned my new book, that maybe I’d seen one of the girls in the chorus before. A fuzzy recollection, but that face somewhere, somehow, recently.

“Impossible,” Cindy said. “You don’t ever—which one? Which one?” Maybe she was so obdurate because she clearly wasn’t gratified by the musical’s first act that ended with Pancho Villa enforcing every stereotype of the Mexican bandido as he fell for a floozy blonde bitchy spy sent to entrap him. I had warned her it was a dud, but she had insisted on the need to butter up the producer so we could get some more bread and butter on our own table and sing our own favorite songs without worries, but that was no reason to compulsively demand—for the third time—which one?

I vaguely tried to pinpoint the minor actress in question, just one of the pack. I muttered something about her being the third from the right when the chorus stomp-danced a zapateo, in a vain effort to awaken the hero who was deep into his siesta, but once she pressed me further I couldn’t specify any salient trait, and still I was sure, still I, I—I scrambled for words.

“Impossible,” Cindy repeated, calmer now, less agitated.

The producer’s portly wife was as surprised as I was by Cindy’s reaction. “What’s so impossible about that?” she asked, sipping her Sauvignon Blanc with delectation.

I briefly enlightened her and her husband about my ailment, so it was natural, I said, that my wife should find this sudden flare of facial recognition odd, she was probably right, she always was, she knew everything about ailments and medicine there was to know, better drop the whole thing.

“No, let’s find out,” the producer said. “We’ll head back stage after the show and clarify the mystery. I love mysteries, Arcadio. Especially dealing with Latinos. Or I wouldn’t have optioned Amistad: The Proof of Friendship, right?”

“That’s really not necessary,” I said, “don’t go to the—”

“No trouble at all. I’ve sunk a bucket of cash into this musical fiasco and seeing that I’m not getting any of it back, I might as well take advantage of whatever prerogatives my investment affords me.”

I was about to accept his generous offer when Cindy intervened authoritatively.

“Certainly not,” she said. “He could pass you tomorrow on the street and not know who you are. So definitely not worth wasting our time on a wild goose chase, arriving late for dinner.”

I did not mention the matter again, not at dinner at Joe Allen’s, not in the cab back home, not that night before bed or next morning at breakfast.

But the peculiar vehemence of her refusal to accept that I had indeed spotted a face among the multitude of dancers stomping on that stage, her veto of the innocuous offer from the producer– well, all that slapped at the walls of my mind, more like a remote pat, really, and suddenly that was it, those words, slap, pat, that image, I didn’t need anything else to know, think I knew who that chorus girl might be.

I didn’t tell Cindy. If she didn’t want to get involved—well, I’d carry out this quest on my own.

Two nights later it was chess night at Jeremy’s place. Once a month, he gathers a group of us—none of the others are foreigners like me, they played chess with him at high school—and we bang away at the board and at each other’s queens for a few hours, while they wax nostalgic and I listen in, always intrigued by people who have lived in their homeland all their lives, who were brought up by normal parents in normal circumstances, still speak the language they first gurgled as infants. And that evening I should have been particularly interested in snatching up some anecdote for my next project, because I had decided that people like them—a researcher for an AIDS vaccine, a judge who was not letting prosecutors railroad vulnerable defendants into plea bargains, an actor celebrated for exploring gay love, an owner of a grocery store—would be at the center of the new novel I was planning, a work that wouldn’t, I thought, have a hint of anything Latino in it, not even a word in Spanish, ready to take that risk, I vowed, tired of being caged, pursued by a past and an ethnicity that I no longer wanted to exclusively define me, time to astound my readers all over again.

Nevertheless, I left the games early, pretending that I had to rise at dawn to work on a short story (not to worry, I murmured to Jeremy, you’re not in this one, you’ve done your jail time with me and now you’re free) and instead made my lonely way to the Broadway theatre, calculating that the musical must have just reached its predictable climax: Pancho’s specter crossing the border, guiding some refugees to an America that, perhaps, would someday be ready to understand that we should live together in peace and harmony. I took up a prime position outside the stage door, glad that I didn’t have to endure the desultory, sentimental second act like those who had paid top dollar for a seat that night. Soon enough the fans began to trickle out of the lobby and into the alleyway, a small crowd was gathering behind me, enthusiasts who didn’t care if the show was mediocre and schmaltzy, they wanted an autograph or better still a selfie with one of the stars or manage to catch a glimpse of their idols before they slipped into one of the limos lining up on 44th street. Not me. I was waiting for her. Praying that my memory had not played tricks on me, that I’d be able to pick her out from the chattering flurry of extras filtering out of the theatre’s stage door. And there she was, unmistakably the young actress I had noticed in the chorus, unmistakably—or was I wrong?—the Latina woman who— I approached her, opting for directness as the best tactic. “You were an actress all the time,” I said. “Señorita.” “Excuse me?” “Una actriz,” I said switching to Spanish. “En el bar.” And then going on in English. “My friend tried to enthrall you with all sorts of lies that night, said he was a pixel artist, recuerde, you—” She looked genuinely puzzled. Maybe she suffered from the same condition of not recognizing faces as I did. “I think you’re confusing me with someone else, sir. Now, if you don’t mind—”

It was her! I can’t recall a face to save my own wife’s life, but I have been compensated by an uncanny ability to evoke voices—and I could hear her now, in my memory, huskily deriding us, she didn’t do threesomes, that same flirtatious, throaty inflection. Era ella!

“I do mind,” I said now. “He accused you of being an actress, hired by me, and it turns out he was right. About your profession, I mean,not about me hiring you, because I’d never seen you before.”

“If this is a pick-up line, it’s not getting you anywhere. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

She brushed past me. I followed her, careful not to touch even the tip of the sleeve of her coat.

“Cien dólares,” I said. “One hundred dollars says that you do.”

That stopped her. “A hundred? For what?”

“No need for a twosome or a threesome. Just confirm it was you.”

“Why do you want to know?”

Why did I? Did it matter that Jeremy had nailed her, had discovered that she acted for a living, while I had not the slightest clue? Was I disturbed that he had been smart enough, more perceptive than me for once, to figure that out? Or was it that she was, after all, a character in my novel, someone who had wandered into it inadvertently, by pure chance, and I wanted to know more about her, compare what I had written about the fictitious woman in the bar with the real-life Dominican upon which she was based, and whom I had only been able to imagine thanks to Jeremy’s willingness to make a fool of himself?

Or was it something else, the dawning of a suspicion I couldn’t name yet, but that had started to stir in my depths due to Cindy’s flustered response to my off-hand comment about recognizing a girl in the chorus. If my wife had merely treated my tentative association as a quirk, something to be ignored or pandered to or even mocked, poor Arcadio, his malady so upsets him that once in a while he tries to pretend he’s cured, if she had played along with me, if and if and if, quizás, quizás, quizás, as the bolero goes—but Cindy hadn’t. She’d over-reacted, and her avalanche of denials regarding something so trivial, bueno, that intimated that something had to be wrong.

“Cien dólares,” I repeated to the girl. “And another two hundred if you tell me what’s really going on. Hey, the show’s about to close any day now, believe me. You probably could do with a little bonus on the side, eh?”

Lucía—that was her name—spilled the whole story over some drinks at a nearby bar, not far from where I had seen her with Jeremy almost two years ago. She spilled, that is, as much of the story as she knew, enough to allow me to keep digging. \

She had, in effect, been hired, she said, but not by me, of course, but by a man who’d been her acting coach when she was younger and who’d always, well, liked her. He’d called up, was looking for a Latina, and wondered if she’d care to score a couple of hundred bucks, maybe a bit more, bird-feed but still, all she had to do was pretend to be seduced by a man at a bar—the guy was a total nerd, her former mentor added, bashful and totally harmless. Just trying to impress a pal who had wagered he couldn’t do it. She just had to play along, act fascinated no matter how silly his pick-up line. That was the deal: no need for kisses or cuddling or anything awkward. This bore, called Jeremy, last name Grossman or something like that, promised that the evening would end abruptly, without any sexual consequences.

“And you’re confessing all this because…”

“Because you’re paying me fifty dollars more than they did.”

She extended her dainty hand and I placed three hundred dollars in it. Then I took out another hundred-dollar bill and let it settle on the table.

“The name,” I said. “The name of the acting coach.”

She pursed her lips and asked, for the second time that evening: “Why do you want to know?”

And like an echo, also for the second time, she was forcing me to wonder: Why did I? Was it only because I was interested in discovering how Jeremy had brokered the deal? Could my innocent friend really have sought out someone like her to hoodwink me? Jeremy Bronfman? He had grown the balls to—? Or was it Cindy I was worried about? Was she part of the scheme? It sounded more like something she’d arranged behind my back to get Jeremy to cooperate. Had she known? Was that why my perpetually self-composed wife had been so rattled during the intermission, rejected the offer to go backstage? Concerned that I would smell a rat?

Well, Zachariah Belkis would know—that was the man’s moniker, another great name for a character—, I should wander down to the East Village and confront him.

But I didn’t.

Not right away.

Perhaps I did not want to know the answer, did not want to upset the tranquil flow of my life, have to deal with Cindy and her deviousness, though I hoped not, I hoped she had not been stringing me along all this time. It was easy, in any case, to put off el momento de la verdad, the moment of truth, because it was the last days of the campaign and, having already voted, I had volunteered to help in Pennsylvania.

Trump’s fascist rally in Madison Square Garden—and a comedian who had called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” had opened up the possibility of tipping that state—with its hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans—for Kamala, and the campaign needed Spanish speakers to canvass, go door to door in Allentown and Reading and convince la gente to vote, avenge the insult, assert their pride. And in my case, act as a surrogate, someone celebrated in the community who could go on Spanish speaking radios and pummel Trump on his hostility to Latinos, his accusation that we were responsible for poverty, crime, poisoning the pure blood stream of America. Degenerates. And add that if we elected a climate change denier we would all soon be floating on islands as the sea rose and swamped so many of our major cities, he was the one treating anyone he despised as if they were garbage.

Surely that was more important than finding out what scheme Cindy and Jeremy had cooked up behind my back. And it was a good excuse to distance myself from our home, not have to meet her eye—oh, that all-seeing eye! -, avoid them, those Cindy eyes, really, not allow one of her heavenly massages to penetrate into my most secret aches, she would be able to tell by my very muscles that I was suspicious, best to abscond for some days.

My Pennsylvania puerta a puerta yielded encouraging results. Seven of ten respondents were firmly for Harris—I had even managed to convince several recalcitrant—or were they lethargic?—voters to stop sitting on the fence. That percentage augured well for the election, though gnawing at me was that other 30 per cent. Men who did not think a woman, any woman, was tough enough in a crisis. They should see Cindy, dare to say that to her face!, if she were President the country would soon be on the right track, healing from our ongoing traumas, those hands of hers would rub down the sore joints of those who were damaged and assuage the muscles of those fearful and resentful.

“Women not reliable in a crisis?” I had responded to one particularly angry Latino macho. “How do you think you came into this world, except because a woman brought you here enduring pain that you and I would flinch at– and now will bring you to the finish line again, no matter what you think.”

“I think women are fine—in bed, at home, cooking, taking care of the kids. It’s my job to protect my wife—and she agrees with me.”

And she did. Or said she did. And was fooling him—this Esteban from Ecuador—, the vote was secret like Julia Roberts had said in the TV ad, Esteban would never know who she really had chosen, perhaps she was as conniving with him as Cindy had been with me, though I really had to stop coming back to what she and Jeremy appeared to have perpetrated, it was affecting my performance, my ability to be transparent and unclouded when I pressed my points.

Still, disturbing to see how many compadres and comadres repeated the fake news and absurd memes, how many lied to me that yes, of course, Kamala hasta la muerte, but I could tell it was just to get me off their backs, please me, their guest, oh, Latin hospitality.

And what stayed with me was above all a conversation with a twenty-something, early twenties probably, young, black-haired vixen improbably called Melody, the daughter of Colombian immigrants who could not induce her to vote for Kamala as they intended to, invited me to give it a try.

Melody was unmovable. She didn’t trust Kamala or the Democrats, they’d done nothing, cero, nada, for her. Trump, at least, would shake things up.

Not a doubt in her mind, even when, as my five minutes with her ticked towards an inevitable conclusion, I floated the names of Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Bad Bunny, didn’t she want to vote for their candidate?

“Oh, I’m a Swifty,” she said, “her music keeps me sane, kept me sane through the pandemic, you don’t know how awful that was, those years are lost and never coming back. But what does she know about who I am, what my problems are? Cero, nada. What do you know about me, someone like you?”

There was a ready answer growling in my throat. I’ve been through hell, young lady, I’ve paid all my dues, what you’re going through is nothing compared to what I’ve endured—and if you have it bad now, wait until Trump comes roaring back into power and takes away your right to choose and destroys your semi-clean water and devastates the health system and gets us into World War Three—but none of that made sense to tell her. She was right that I had no notion of who she was now, right that all my experiences were in the past and I could not keep banking on them to feel superior, look where it had landed me with Cindy and Jeremy, I had nothing to say to Melody. Let her learn the hard way. Let her fuck some guy and then not be able to get an abortion or die trying to get rid of the fetus or bring it up as a single mom or entice the guy into an unhappy marriage where he knocked her around and she slapped him back and—fantasies, what did I know about her, her future, how could I be so vindictive because she was stupid and desperate enough to vote for a man who would deport her parents if given half a chance, if she wanted someone as vile and pathological, abhorrent and narcissistic and yes, vindictive himself, go ahead, ruin your life and everybody else’s.

But that, of course, was not going to happen. We would protect Melody despite her own destructive, ignorant impulses, pobrecita.

I swept her—or tried to sweep her—out of the debris of my mind, I managed to purge myself at Kamala’s rally at the Museum steps in Philadelphia, where Rocky had proven that the underdog can win. I had rejected an offer to be among the VIPs up on the stage, though I wouldn’t have minded cozying up to Lady Gaga and shaking Ricky Martin’s hand, better to bathe in the warm waters of everyday people and shout with them the chant that I most loved about the campaign: We’re not going back. The words I had lived by since leaving Colombia, really since leaving my horrible home and abusive father and cowardly mother, the words that were now becoming the anthem of a nation determined to leave the past behind.

Looking around me at all the shades of complexion and hairstyle and hope, I felt so at home: Kamala refused to be boxed in, didn’t want to be chosen because she was colored or female or the daughter of immigrants or South Asian or whatever—to be judged on her own merits, break out of the vocabulary that pressed her into this or that exclusive, exclusionary category. Like me. I had broken free and would never be trapped in categories determined by others.

By the time the rally ended, there were no more fast trains to New York, so I checked into the Four Seasons—I had been there when Terry Gross had interviewed me, twice!—and slept fitlessly, till the rising sun of November 5th, election day, woke me up. I wolfed down a larger breakfast at the buffet than was advisable—and taking more time than necessary—eh, Arcadio, basta, you’re postponing the encounter with Cindy, you should be helping her to prepare for this evening’s gathering, all the friends and many acquaintances determined to celebrate as the results came in and, also, I had organized the election night pool predicting the electoral college vote. I’d astounded everyone by forecasting that Harris and Waltz would sweep not only all the swing states but add Iowa, Kansas and Ohio to the tally. Counting my electoral chickens way before they were hatched, I had rashly reserved a table at Balthasar for November 6th (Masa Masa was full for weeks, the pretentious bastards), where I would spend the earnings from the prophetic optimism of my pool results. But maybe we would not go there, maybe I would cancel—not because Harris would lose, no possibility of that!—but because who knew where my confrontation with devious Cindy would lead. Perhaps in no mood to sit dolefully in front of each other staring at our soup à l’oignon, I was certainly not looking forward to accusing her of treachery.

It was almost with relief, therefore, that the noon Amtrak was delayed. I left a message for Cindy not to worry—she wasn’t picking up, probably shepherding voters to the polls and didn’t want to be disturbed. Fine by me. I used the occasion to visit the long lines of Philadelphians at one of the polling places near the 30th Street Station and was conveniently enthused, confident of my predictions and the future and determined that there would be, in my life with Cindy as with the life of America, no more lying, no more dissembling, no more conning others, a new era was beginning tonight, we’re not going back.

I’d have it out with Cindy before the guests arrived, a clean slate, that’s what I needed, what she needed even if she didn’t know it.

So when I finally arrived in the late afternoon at the Moynihan Train Hall on West 31st, I gave the taxicab driver my address on Amsterdam Avenue and then, as soon as he began weaving up Seventh Avenue, surprised myself by asking him to change course and head down to the East Village, gave him the house number for Zachariah Belkis. Better to have all the information at my fingertips before I challenged Cindy, I had plenty of time before everybody arrived, Jeremy and Janet, of course, but a ton of others, even my editor and his Meltdown husband, I might even arrive to help Cindy arrange the spread she’d ordered from Zabar’s along with enough wine and rum to toast Kamala and Tim and happy times are here again, I didn’t want to ruin tonight’s victory party by pouting sullenly.

My phone buzzes. It is Cindy. Wanting to know, of course, if I’ve arrived safely. I hesitate. If I answer, she’ll be puzzled, why am I not on my way home and there’s not a chance that I’ll tell her that I’m checking out what she and Jeremy were plotting, enough deception, I’ll respond once I’ve talked to this acting coach, better to clear the air when we’re face to face.

The air, however, gets foggier, murky, as soon as I ring the bell and am admitted into Zachariah’s sanctum, once I have told him—that’s right, keep lying, Arcadio, never tell anyone the truth if you can help it, weren’t we supposed to enter a new era of transparency as of today?– that I wanted acting lessons, some such nonsense.

But the one who had taken acting lessons had been Jeremy and the chump turned out to be me. Desperate, Jeremy Bronfman, I supposed, because he needed to play a role in real life he was unsuited for, eager to please and save a friend in trouble. The first lesson had been pathetically, achingly slow, but by the second one he had shown himself to have enough natural talent to handle all the complications of becoming someone entirely opposite to his own nature. And then, at the end of the third and final lesson, one last service had been asked of Mr. Belkis: could he also provide the name of some penurious actress? All she had to do—as long as she was Latina—was meet Jeremy at a bar and pretend to be charmed by his good looks and wit.

“And how did you coach him, what did you say to get him to -?”

“He had a script he was supposed to follow, so it wasn’t that difficult. He did have to improvise a bit, but he seemed on the ball, they felt he would do passingly well.”

“They?”

“The two women who brought him to me.”

I asked Zachariah Belkis to describe them, though I guessed their identity before he opened his mouth.

One was Janet. And the other—oh, my cunning lady love—was Cindy.

It was worse, therefore, than I had expected.

I grew pale, felt faint, was offered a chair by Belkis, some water or maybe something stronger but no, no, I said to him staggering out, staggering down the stairs, staggering into Tompkins Square Park.

I had been so convinced that I was the protagonist and agent and enforcer of my own novel, my own destiny, while all the time…—All of it, all of it planned by…. And the file? The supposedly stolen file? Some pal of Jeremy at ICE had to be in on the scam, or Jeremy may have had the file in his possession for years, case closed long ago, or maybe it was full of who knows what useless information about somebody else, Jeremy might have assumed I wouldn’t want to get near its contents, risk a felony charge and get my citizenship revoked, who knows what he had been thinking. What was certain was that if he had got a buddy in the Federal Plaza building to play along, he must have included others in the plot. Harry Echols, probably, with his smirk and those glinting eyeglasses I’d slithered into my book, not that he seemed to mind. Demanding, the bastard, that I squeeze Jeremy. When I was the one they had all squeezed. Like an immigrant just off the boat, or a pobrecito wading across the Rio Grande, stranded, crying out for help.

So much, so much that was pivotal in the novel, since Jeremy’s off hand comment on the plane back from Arizona and then Cindy’s suggestion to model a character on him and use his name, and even more so during my phone call months later as the April rain poured down, and Jeremy’s fabricated resistance to cooperate, his dithering next evening as he devoured the dessert, everything fraudulent, from the very beginning, organized by someone else, scripted, as Belkis had called it, by someone manipulating me. Cindy, that’s who.

I started to wander across town, towards the West, dazed, unable to fully come to terms with what was happening to me, emptying my brain of thoughts because they were too dreadful and revolting and destabilizing and I must have been catatonic—like a war victim with shell shock—because suddenly I find myself in front of the bar where Jeremy had falsely seduced false Lucía acting under the orders of false Cindy. I slouched in, ordered a Dos Equis, eyed the television screen where the first results were pouring in—looked promising, Kamala was ahead in North Carolina and Pennsylvania, even in Ohio. So, no worries about the nation—it would do fine, I was the one getting screwed—badly—by my own wife.

I tried to reproduce the sequence of events. Cindy must have intervened way before I had got bogged down week after desultory week, unable to write the comic epic I had arrogantly declared would be my next masterpiece, the novel that was to be my triumphant escape from the past I had been forced, yet again, to confront in the detention centers and torn families on the border, that pain it was time to leave behind. With that seventh sense of hers, listening to me over the phone, despairing and wearied by that experience of translating those lives, investigating those lives, aware that I was floundering after having abandoned my dystopian novel about America’s fascist future, desperately in need of a new direction for my work, that only writing would rescue me from the onset of a new depression, she had sent Jeremy to bring me back from Arizona, feed me the sort of situation that would get my creative juices flowing. I could see her persuading Janet first and then the two wives had pressed Jeremy to make up that anecdote—untrue, unverified, how could I have believed him?—about the rogue agent at Homeland Security, they had appealed to his loyalty over and over again, appealed to his loyalty in order to betray me. For his own good, they must have said, all three of them. Poor Arcadio, they must have said. As lost as when he first arrived on these shores, in need of some vigorous humanitarian, liberal, paternalistic intervention.

I ordered another beer, glanced at the TV screen. Trump had just taken Florida. To be expected, even I had not put that in my optimistic poll, and Kamala was winning New Jersey, which had seemed sort of wobbly in the first results. No worries.

Back to Cindy. How could she be sure I’d take the bait, accept the whole bogus façade, one lie after the other? Because she knew me better than I knew myself. Supplying the right ingredients so I could fool myself into baking the cake, fool myself into thinking I was the one doing the baking, and had come up on my own with the recipe and the oven and the right temperature. Why hadn’t she just started and finished the damn novel herself, instead of hiding like a damn ventriloquist? No, that would have deprived her of enjoying herself, all of them enjoying themselves immensely at my expense, watching me play out the role Cindy had assigned me—the immigrant husband saved by his gringa wife, but unawares, unawares.

But now I was—aware, I mean, extremely, dangerously aware. And that gave me, for the first time, an advantage. They hadn’t anticipated that I would ferret out the truth, nobody had written out ahead of time how I would respond once I had discovered their subterfuge. We were in new territory.

And I’d make them pay for having humiliated me.

I’d—what?—I’d take them all out to this very bar for cocktails and then dinner at Joe Allen’s and oh so slowly sneak in one insinuation after another, watch them squirm, imply I had been conscious of their tricks all those months. Mortify Jeremy by suggesting that I had seen through his bad acting, his preposterous performance, from the kickoff and had frolicked along to see how far he was prepared to go, out of pity for him, porque te tengo pena, carajo. Show them I had been in crafty control throughout, the conspiratorial trio had not duped me. Gesture to the waiter –snapping my fingers as if I were Cindy—to bring on the best champagne so they could toast my omniscience. Put one over on me?

Never!

I ordered yet another Dos Equis, animated by a cheer that had gone up: later voters seemed to be flocking to Kamala in droves. I added my voice to theirs and the communal glow of this semi-drunken celebration helped to dissipate my anger.

A bit past eight. I needed to head home. Time to stop acting like a spoiled brat. I was ruining the victory celebration for Cindy and our guests—they were my community, after all. Once they’d departed—or tomorrow morning, calmly, gently, we’d figure out what harm, if any, Cindy’s humiliation of me had done to our partnership.

I paid the bill, lurched towards the door and, as I was about to leave, noticed that Trump had just secured Ohio—so much for my predictive skills, somebody else would win tonight’s poll, someone else would take his wife to a swanky restaurant, my fellow celebrants would all laugh at me as soon as I walked through the door of our apartment, this isn’t a novel, Arcadio, where the characters do what you want, Ohio was never in play.

That was fine, if they wanted to laugh, that was fine. They were only imitating, without knowing it, what Cindy and Jeremy and Janet had been doing for quite a while now. How could they? No, I am really not ready to face her or them or anyone.

First, sober up, Arcadio. Walk uptown for a bit, clear your foggy head, don’t flag that taxi crawling by my side, tempting me, calling out to me, home, home, home.

If I had taken that cab or another one, arrived to mourn with my wife and best friend and all the others, if I had been there as the catastrophe closed in on us and the country, this would have been a different story, this would have had a different ending.

Instead, Jeremy found me many hours later leaning against a lamppost a few blocks from our apartment on Amsterdam Avenue, shivering, panting for breath, clutching my chest, traumatized, certain I was going to die. How did I get there? What happened to me on the way?

Ask Jeremy. I told him once I had recovered enough, as we sat on a bench overlooking Central Park, I told him then and later, as we strolled until dawn, I told him what I remembered. What I would not tell anyone else, though if he wanted to fill Cindy in, yes, he should do that.

Whenever he got a chance.

As for me.

As for me.

                3

Jeremy had been looking for Arcadio since early evening, had started to roam the streets as soon as Cindy had the brilliant idea of phoning Zachariah Belkis.

She had been frantic for several hours. The Amtrak train that Arcadio had mounted had arrived but his iPhone had been turned off, he was not answering, she had started to call the hospitals, she had only desisted from contacting the police because Jeremy had assured her they would not even listen to her until 24 hours had passed. So when Belkis confirmed that Arcadio had indeed come by and extricated the truth of the plot—nobody had suggested that he, Belkis, should lie about something that seemed innocuous, yes, Mr. Bernales had left looking rather dazed but otherwise seemed okay, no, he had no idea where the man had gone–, and Cindy had hung up and stuttered, He knows, he knows, Arcadio knows, I never expected him to flush this out, but that it should be now, on election night, what are the chances, oh my God, what are we going to do….it was then that Jeremy had volunteered to scour Manhattan for his friend, I’ll grab a cab to the village and retrace what were probably his steps. This was not in the cards.

He’s pissed off, nursing a drink somewhere, dipping into a deep well of resentment, Jeremy had said, and who’s to blame the guy? I’ll find him. By the time Kamala gives her victory speech I’ll be home with our man. Trust me, it’ll be alright. And I really don’t mind skipping the fun. Arcadio is more important than watching the slow leak of results, state by state. Don’t tell anyone else what’s happening. Why alarm your guests—make up some sort of excuse, he’s interviewing people all across town, preparing a story or a report or whatever, maybe an op ed, they’ll believe it’s what he might do on a historic night like this. Fill himself and the world with words. Though I suspect that he won’t be able to write a word until he’s fully processed what he’s learned about himself just now. And that may take some time, so… patience.

Jeremy checked in with Cindy periodically, every half hour or so, to see if Arcadio had surfaced. And to give her a sense of what progress he was making. His instincts about Arcadio’s itinerary had been unerring. He had managed to trace his friend’s slow progress uptown, along Broadway, bar by bar, as the states had been called, he had even managed to establish that Arcadio had booked himself into the Empire Hotel, apparently leaving his carry-on bag in his 800 dollar room and then ascending to the Upper West Side Rooftop Bar where he had spent a couple of hours, ingesting a considerable amount of Gin and Tonics as he gazed out onto the skyscape of the city. At some point, he had left the hotel—North Carolina had just been called for Trump—without the carry on, according to a bellboy who had recognized the famous author and even asked for his autograph. Jeremy was sure, he had told Cindy, that Arcadio was headed home or in that general direction and, indeed, discovered a watering hole farther up Broadway where the wayward writer had stopped, this time ordering a tonic without liquor. After that, Jeremy had not been able to discover his whereabouts until the encounter under the lamppost a bit past two in the morning, when he called Cindy and set her mind at ease: Arcadio had suffered a panic attack but the worst was over, not to expect him for a while.

So here’s what I’ve been able to piece together from his entangled tale, the ebb and flow of his aggrieved movement, Jeremy says, doing his best to fill in Cindy the next day.

Basically, Arcadio was punishing us by disappearing like that. And as he wandered, soaking in alcohol and soaking in the results, he veered wildly between anger and… I guess you could call it admiration and gratitude. Angry at us and yet having to admit that we had only been trying to help him, buffeted back and forth, should he come home and celebrate or should he spoil our night, bar by bar, block by block, drink by drink, despairing and then buoyed by more reports that late voters had been breaking for Kamala, there was hope in Pennsylvania, he kept speaking about a girl called Melody and her parents, it would all depend on them, didn’t make much sense. And then…

And then? Cindy asks.

And then things got more complicated as state after state began to fall to Trump, it was clear that Harris was underperforming, that only a miracle could save her and the nation, but if anyone believed in miracles it was him, this waif, Arcadio said to Jeremy, I had to believe there was still hope. And yet, the worse things went with Kamala, the more difficult it became for him to join us at your apartment.

Because…, Cindy says.

Because he had been so wrong. There, at one of the bars, staring into his glass, suddenly, he said to me, a groan was vomited from the entrails of others watching the screen, lit up demoniacally with the words: Trump wins Georgia! Followed by some nerdy analysis showing why it was probable that he would also take the blue wall—Pennsylvania—Pennsylvania where young Melody, Arcadio complained, would idiotically carry him to victory—and Michigan and Wisconsin, no blue wall for us, only a wall at the border that this time he would build if he… but it couldn’t be, it had to be a mistake, Jeremy, Arcadio said, thinking back to that moment. But the sounds of sorrow and indignation and sheer shock indicated that no, there was no mistake.

Except for mine, Arcadio said. I had been wrong.

About Kamala and Tim, obviously, about Trump and Vance even more obviously. But basically wrong about… about America, my dreams for this country, wrong, wrong, wrong. My fellow citizens—citizens? What fellowship did I share with them, with these fools?—who had voted, with full knowledge of who this monster was, how could they be so gullible? Arcadio looked at me with so much pain that I thought, Jeremy says, it would swamp me, swamp Central Park West where we were sitting on that bench, it must have been three in the morning by then, maybe later, swamp the city and the universe.

Gullible? he said to me. I was calling them gullible? Me? The man who had been fooled by his wife and best pal, who couldn’t tell the difference between what is fake and what is true, me? I’m condemning them?

Then, at some point, Arcadio had drifted into a Duane Reade store—the one on 72nd street, open all night—to buy some cigarettes, yes, he’d stopped smoking but he needed one and more than one and too bad if Cindy is upset, better still if she’s upset, better still if I die sooner rather than later.

He wants to hurt himself? Cindy asks. A fear she had not expressed till then, as if not voicing it could limit its possibility.

No, he’d had a wake-up call.

Earlier that night, Arcadio had crossed Broadway, not at the stoplight, and was almost hit by a pickup truck jammed with several young men in the back prematurely hollering themselves hoarse with joy at Trump’s victory. He gave them the finger, cursed them, but then, cursed himself. Really stupid, he said to me, did I really want to commit suicide just because so many of my countrymen and countrywomen have decided to commit collective suicide, do I want Cindy to be a widow, is that where I’m hoping the night will end, punish her with my death, is that what I want?

He imagined you, Cindy, at that very moment. That you’d be worried at his absence and silence, unable to fathom the reason, he has no idea you called Belkis and know what’s ailing him. I thought of Cindy and all of you, Arcadio said to me as we rose and began to walk along the perimeter of the park, taking in the fresh, sorrowful air of Manhattan, the sullen glow of the city, the breeze with its slight metallic tinge, Arcadio described the scene to me as if I were not also living it, he was narrating what we were living, that, at least, had not changed, his ability to evoke atmospheres. I thought of all of you up there, groaning like an evil echo of what had been pervading all those bars as Trump advanced inexorably towards total and absolute power. And that I had to share this dire moment with my family and friends.

But he didn’t.

Because he feels guilty.

We all feel that way, Cindy says, we all feel, like he did, that we could have done more.

Confused. Not just him, Jeremy. All of us, we’ll have to figure out, all of us, who we really are.

Yes, yes, Jeremy says, in a land we no longer recognize as our own. But Arcadio was at a particularly vulnerable moment, Jeremy reminds her, way more than you or me. He ranted about how he had embraced a happy ending for his Amistad novel instead of writing an apocalyptic wake-up message to the world, he had discarded the fiction of a fascist future that was now turning into the nightmare of historical reality. He had failed, he said. I didn’t summon the courage to deploy my fears, he told me, what in the caverns of my soul I knew could come to pass. So during the years that Trump was planning a comeback, I was imagining Charlie’s family and his friend Jeremy, you, Jeremy, sallying forth to shop and munch hamburgers and celebrate that America does have room for everybody. A false vision, Arcadio said bitterly, he had been trying to escape the darkness that was now catching up to him, to us. And it wasn’t even my own idea, Jeremy, it was yours and Cindy’s.

And then, deriding himself again: Not that anything I wrote could have made a difference, can make a difference now. Would my prophetic, stark novel have changed one mind, added one vote? Not one. Cero, nada. That’s me. Mr. Nada. Señor Nada.

I’m not sure, says Jeremy, but I think that’s when, in that dark mood, he enters the Duane Reade pharmacy to buy cigarettes.

It was senior discount day, the place full—mostly old people buying diapers and Cheerios and Hallmark cards, but also a young couple, he was getting a condom while his girlfriend waited expectantly, and Arcadio felt a wave of tenderness towards them, he wished them well, he was glad that someone would be making love tonight, that’s the way to push back the darkness, but that thought was soon replaced by contempt for all these people who were going about their business and their lives as if nothing momentous was befalling them, as if the world were not about to burn. Maybe that was the ultimate truth about life, people normalize the largest catastrophes, absorbed in their petty, minor dilemmas. Like me, Arcadio spat out at me, I spent the last hours worried about being conned by my wife and best friend while Trump was conning America, I had only cared about my own trivial troubles. What right did I have to condemn those consumers engaging in America’s favorite pastime, shopping, even at midnight!—when I was far worse than any of them.

Feeling helpless, pathetic, full of self-loathing. Because instead of pitying himself he should have been concerned,he said to me, for those who were really in danger, who really had to worry about the consequences of this catastrophe, above all the undocumented, the men and women and most of all the children, who were at this very moment trying to figure out how to survive. They flashed before his eyes. One by one, so many that I had known and interviewed and defended, promised to retrieve from oblivion, Arcadio insisted. A flood of those migrants. Wondering, right now, right now, Jeremy, where to hide, which states should I move to that might be safer though they’ll come for us anyway, can I get my DACA status renewed before ICE breaks down the door, will my employer ask for a special visa, can I get in line for asylum so it will take many years before my case comes up and by then maybe we’ll have a different government, what provisions should I make for my children born here in case.,.. One by one, like phantoms. But with names. I could tell, I have told, their stories. The ghosts of the past and the future.

And above all, the children.

The children held hostage. His own younger self, held hostage. The ones he couldn’t defend anymore, because he was so weakened, so full of self-doubt, so… No community of his own to fall back on. The image he had built of himself over decades was damaged beyond repair– by us, Cindy, by us, with the best of intentions, but by, us, he felt incapacitated. And the more he sank into the bottomless bottom of his anger at himself, the more he felt guilty about letting down those in need.

But that’s normal, Cindy says. Overlapping crises. Just last night, I had two calls from patients. One is a major environmental activist but she was concerned not with the fact that water would be less safe and the glaciers would melt at a faster clip, but that she’d discovered—yesterday of all days—that her husband was cheating on her. With her best friend! And that betrayal was devouring her, even more because she should be organizing grass-roots resistance to Trump’s plans to kill any mitigation of climate change. But she couldn’t. Like Arcadio, she has to deal with her private life and failings, her personal tragedy, no matter how insignificant it may be compared to the immensity of what will happen to the world. And the other client, he’s the head of a local labor union—with chronic back pain—and he should be organizing and strategizing and figuring out with his mates how to withstand the storm, even the persecutions. Instead: his favorite uncle, the man who raised him when his parents died, fell down the stairs early in the morning and they’re at the ER, and he feels rotten that he’s not doing his job. So Arcadio…

I understand, Jeremy says. Look, when I was fourteen, my grandfather died. I loved the man, I was heartbroken, but you know what obsessed me for hours and hours? I had a grit under my eyelid and it would not wash out, it kept cutting into the lower part of my eyeball. It was driving me crazy, I really didn’t have the tranquility to mourn until a doctor friend of my uncle’s who had come by to offer my aunt his condolences, slid back my eyelid very effortlessly, got rid of the grit with a tissue, that was it. Done. Arcadio will also be better once he washes away whatever is eating away at him.

But, Cindy says, but you didn’t have a panic attack when you were fourteen—nor did either of my clients. Something more serious was happening to Arcadio—and you’re taking an awful amount of time to get to his panic attack, how you convinced him to come home.

First, you have to understand, that he began to have hallucinations.

Hallucinations?

Or maybe not. He was slouching back down Amsterdam—coming from the Caledonian, they close at 2, and he’d just seen Trump take Pennsylvania, so no hopes left, he remembered that he had a room at the Empire Hotel, his carry-on is still there,—and then… A sparkle of golden haze shimmers down, dissecting the gloom, a mild, pale reflection that is not from the streetlamps.

What was it? Cindy asks.

A yellow black striped butterfly, just the one, fluttering here and there in the dank New York air. Transporting me, Arcadio told me, back back back (we won’t go back? we’re not going back?) to a moment in my childhood, when flocks of these same messengers from the blue sky descended on the fields of flowers where I worked and then soared off and I swore I would follow them one day, one day escape that life and find another one, their palette of hope keeping me company when nothing warranted such dreams. His reverie is interrupted by a growl or is it a snarl but now definitely a bark, more than one and an almost nipping at his heels and he turns and lands a colossal kick on the snout of a dog panting on the sidewalk.

Arcadio avoided my eyes as he recounted what happened next: I can feel in the tip of my toe, he said, the soft sensitive nose bud injured by my foot, and it retreats, something between a whimper and a wail arises and I think, it’s an accident and then say it aloud to the dog—it’s a shaggy, lovely mutt—, sorry, an accident. But is that it? that fury, that savagery, that pain inflicted coming from the perverse depths of whoever I am or was or fear I used to be or can become, was it really an accident and is this really an apology?

With this rage still simmering, choking his throat, he’s convinced more than ever that he’d better return to the hotel—he really is sick, he thinks, as the yelps faded and yet somehow continue in a different, more piercing register, a wail from our own condemned species, the sound picked up as in a relay race, as if from a baby. Somewhere in the street. And then another baby answered, a chorus of grief in the night. Or was that cry inside me, Arcadio wondered out loud as we gazed on the trees of Central Park, a future generation lamenting that there would be no more future, no more generation or regeneration.

I begged it to cease, that wail, cease and desist.

And mercifully, it does.

A mother, maybe a father, has gathered the child into enfolding arms, pacified him, her, me, them, the silence was full of grace, a menace avoided.

But if so, where now had the butterfly gone?

Unless it was an apparition and was never present, on tonight of all nights, a haunting to make things even more spectral and derelict. Because what is a yellow, black striped Bogotá butterfly doing in New York precisely now, when I have not seen one in all these years, not one, not even remembered it since ever and ever, that flock of bright messengers with a black streak along the wings that promised a flight to a faraway promised land.

And then.

And then? Cindy asks.

A man passes by. He glances at Arcadio, smiles, says: God fuck America.

Arcadio shakes his head, as if the man was also an apparition, a counterpart of the butterfly. The atmosphere is hazy, the street lights barely glowering, Arcadio cannot make out this stranger’s face: swarthy, hefty, a shock of black hair. And adept as he is at accents, difficult to figure out whether Indigenous, or Middle Eastern, maybe a Latino with Lebanese blood?

The man turned, again he smiled, as if in recognition, squints at Arcadio and: God fuck America. C’mon, say it. You want to, I can tell, say it, man, c’mon. God fuck America.

I can’t. I want to, I could, but I can’t. Jeremy, I can’t. This polluted, toxic nation. Let it go to hell, let Trump destroy it so it will not plague the world anymore, call to strangers to come to its shores with its siren songs. Some demon in him whispers that he shouldn’t have come here, should have stayed in Colombia and become a narco and flooded this country with drugs and guns and prostitutes. We’re not going back? Well, this Colombian could go back, of course I could. All I need is to grab my passport and my wife and board the first plane to Bogotá.

But this is my land now, Arcadio said to me, grabbing hold of my hand. Fervently. These are my brothers and sisters, the ones who will be hunted down, the ones who will do the hunting, who have celebrated the hunt that is about to begin. I came here with such hope, was welcomed so kindly, by you, hermano, will not give up on this terrible, beautiful land. If we are going to get screwed, I want to be screwed here. Meet the challenge here or die.

And in one of the savage mood swings that have been veering him in one direction and then the other all through his odyssey—his word, not mine, Jeremy said, consulting the notes he’d scribbled—, Arcadio set out for home, it’s with Cindy he needs to be, face with her whatever reckoning awaits him and the country.

There’s a brownstone looming ahead. Each time he had passed by it in the past one of its ground floor windows was invariably open and, as an inveterate voyeur, he had made a habit of peeking inside. And this time, through the perpetually open window of that building, he glimpsed a gigantic flickering TV screen, he saw himself reflected in the window pane itself, his image viciously superimposed on the screen showing Trump’s face as the former and future president approaches the magic number of 270, both faces mingling horribly—and then it hits him.

The panic attack, Cindy says.

The typical symptoms—I know them, Jeremy said, from when he first arrived, but it’s been years and years since even a hint of one has descended on him, the hyperventilation, his heart going like a locomotive, like a thousand insane dwarfs, Arcadio told me later, are inside me, pounding, pounding, my head, my head, the dizziness is overwhelming, and the dread, the fear, he can’t breathe, he keels back from the building and the window and the screen, and he would have fallen if his body had not edged up against a lamppost to steady it, he would have fallen, even then, if I had not chanced by, if I had not found him there, precisely at that moment, talk about miracles.

And I know what to do, Jeremy says. Arcadio, I said. It’s me. Jeremy. Listen to me. Listen. Breathe in, breathe out.

He nods, still panting, still dazed.

You are in control. This is happening to your body. Not to you. Listen. You’re in charge. Tell me, tell me what happened, where, why this began.

Took possession, Arcadio said. On the screen, over there. Pointing towards the still open window, the still triumphant leering image of Trump. And then I turned and saw Trump there, Cindy, these eyes of Jeremy Bronfman saw him as Arcadio had seen him, really saw him, Cindy. Felt terrorized. A predator. A bully. With those wide shoulders of a wrestler, the eyebrows, the florid face. Someone who could do anything he wanted. Without paying the price, never held accountable. No law to contain him. A rapist. For Arcadio, returning. Like before. And I understood. Again at the mercy of those men on the streets of Bogotá and in the reformatory and on the road North, exposed and torn apart. Vulnerable, defenseless, a mere vermin.

I said to him: Arcadio, I need you to concentrate and think. What real danger are you in? Remember, you’re in charge. Say it.

In charge, I’m in charge.

No real danger. Say it.

No real danger.

Trump will not come and rape you. Trump will not take away your citizenship, he will not deport you. Say it, think it, believe it.

Cindy, Arcadio said. But the drumroll of his heart was already diminishing.

He won’t hurt Cindy. I won’t let him. You won’t let him, Cindy won’t let him. You’re in control. Say it.

In control, he said, dubiously. Not true, he said, more forcefully.

Not in control.

Say it, even if you think it’s not true. Say it: I’m in control.

Not since this afternoon, Arcadio said. Not in control. That’s why now, that’s why tonight of all nights, again, again. What I learned about myself tonight. Too much.

Tell me about it. Let me ring Cindy up so she knows you’re alive and then you’ll tell me about it.

Nothing to tell.

You always have something to tell, brother. Always.

And the next four hours, Jeremy said, freezing our asses off, that’s what he did, he told me as much as could be hoped for from someone in his condition.

One constant: he did not want to go home. What do I tell her, what do I say to Cindy? I know her, Arcadio said, she may have been sick with worry but she will be the first to start planning how to resist. She won’t abandon her patients, if the police come for them they’re coming for me, she’ll have said, I’ll defend them with my life. And how about you, that’s what she’ll ask me, what she expects from me, what everybody expects from me. And I have nothing to give her. Or anyone else. Tomorrow or the next day they will seek me out thirstily, all those people now turned into exiles in their own land, wagering that I will bring some sort of salvation, a voice from the Global South, from domains that have survived, like I have, far worse plagues than the one that is already wreaking havoc in these United States. They expect me to perform. A burden I don’t want, can’t honor, not anymore. Not one more word that I feel is a lie.

Think of something then, Jeremy says that Arcadio said. Something that is not a lie.

Nothing. Empty, Jeremy, I’m empty.

Something, anything. Let your imagination flow. Something big, crazy, ambitious. You’re in control.

I’m not in control.

But then his eyes lit up for the first time in the last four hours. A wild idea, madness to be sure. A call for all unmarried followers of Kamala to offer marriage to the undocumented strangers among us, to flood the country and courts and registries with a tidal wave of weddings, drown the bastards in a deluge of paperwork and copulation galore. The birth of a new nation, no? Madness, oh yes, and still I’ll write it before dawn breaks and send it to my editor at the Times.

As he spoke, Jeremy says, I was reminded of the Arcadio I met when he had first arrived on these shores.

I’m inebriated, of course, Arcadio said to me—that’s undeniable, but the idea’s brilliant, isn’t it?

And I said yes. Indulging him. Adding: go, go and tell Cindy. And armed with this vision of orgasmic apocalypse, he wove his way towards where Cindy awaited him, already relishing the esteem with which you would greet his idea, Cindy. I was delighted to witness the re-emergence of the hubristic, arrogant, attention grabbing Arcadio. Oh, he was going to prove to Cindy and Janet and me that he could come up with virtuoso brainstorms without our assistance.

And then, Cindy, at the entrance to your building, he said, touching my arm, suddenly sober and improbably deflated, but you know and I know that we won’t survive him. Not four years of his carnage and stupidity.

It’s only four years, I said to him.

American optimism. In Colombia, we know better. Still paying the consequences of our civil wars, back in the 19th century…

We’ll survive Trump. Say it.

I won’t say it. I won’t lie. Not to you. Not anymore. No, we won’t survive Trump.

Alright. You know what? I have work to do. Soon as I get back to my own apartment. Calls. With other lawyers. Prepare for the deluge. So we won’t be doomed.

We looked at each other as if across a tender abyss.

After a minute, I said to him, Admit at least this. There will yet be cakes and ale.

Cakes and ale, Arcadio said, hazarding a smile. Maybe.

Go.

He nodded, no need to accompany him, he said, he was fine. And then disappeared into the building,I saw him call the elevator, enter it, must have pressed a button because the doors closed and it was mounting, the numbers were racing by, then the damned thing stopped before reaching your floor, I could imagine him up there, suspended, orphaned in mid-air, staring at the stop-button, staring at the button that would set him in motion again, I could not imagine what he was going through, what he was mercilessly saying to himself, a blind minute passed, and then, and then, the elevator started again, he was on his way to you, I called to let you know that all was well.

The rest, I guess, you know.

                   —December 10th, 2024