Hypothermia Page 4

  As I stepped off the spiral stairway on the seventh level I discovered all the university students—male and female—stripped down to their underwear, seated on benches, and chatting away as if it were the most normal thing in the world. Down here there was no adult supervision. The sheen of their bare shoulders, stomachs, and legs made me realize that I was completely soaked in sweat.

  I hurried to one of the locker rooms, bolting through the door with all the violence of my mounting desperation. Inside, the dense, acrid air reeked with a purely human decay. As I moved along the hallway leading to the lockers and showers, I thought it was an absolute disgrace to have banished the nursery children down here; they should have been upstairs where there was fresh air. The light, too, was awful, with only those sinister red emergency lights glowing on the tiles.

  I reached the end of the hallway and turned the corner, but instead of children and their teachers I found dozens of naked bodies, all intertwined, pulsing and grinding together on the floor and benches, and even propped up next to the lockers. Like some divine beast gestating and multiplying, it writhed and flowed in slow motion, some part of each body gripping and being gripped by the hands, mouth, sex, or ass of another. Their pale torsos in the red light reminded me of the tin cans filled with earthworms that we used to collect in my grandmother’s garden in Autlán before going fishing.

  I stood there paralyzed by the liquid mass of bodies, completely absolved for a moment of my personality and private anguishes. One of the young men whom I had seen chatting outside came walking past me. He was just about to lose himself inside the soft, pulpy turmoil when I came to my senses and ran to grab his arm: I asked him about the nursery school kids. He told me he didn’t know, he had just been on the tennis courts at the fifth level; there were no kids there. Let me ask, he said at last. He gestured for me to wait and approached a nearby group of bodies, all molded tightly together. They spoke among themselves without stopping work on each others’ interlocking parts. At last one young woman slipped a penis out of her mouth and told me that all the kids were in the women’s locker room, which was on the other side of the stairs.

  Feeling drowsy and overwhelmed by the poor lighting, lack of oxygen, and the accumulated shocks I’d suffered, I walked toward the women’s locker room with the lassitude of a man resigned to his fate. I had to knock on the door and identify myself before they would open up and let me in. Once inside, one of the teachers apologized, saying that they’d had to lock themselves in. When all the students began stripping off their clothes, they’d sent a father and his son to find help, but they hadn’t returned. I didn’t tell her that I had run into them enjoying a floor with fresher air. Instead, I went directly past the lockers until I could hear the sounds of children playing as though nothing unusual were happening.

  Before arriving where they’d been corralled—the kids were sitting in a circle, surrounded by fans—I came face to face with another father, a Colombian man with whom I often chatted. He was distracted, staring at the floor with his hands in his pockets, and didn’t notice me until I said his name. He looked in my eyes and for a fraction of a second didn’t recognize me, then I saw a flash of fear cross his face. Didn’t Cathy manage to get out? he asked. I don’t know, I answered. I saw her leaving with your kids when I was coming in, he told me. The tornado hit when I was signing out Jorgito. He ran his fingers through his sweaty mop of hair. Struggling to compose himself, he sent me off to talk to the principal who was further inside.

  All the teachers went silent when they saw me standing there. Aren’t Cathy and the kids with you? the principal asked without getting up from the bench where she was sitting. She opened the gigantic purse she always carried and took out her mobile phone, handing it straight to me. Call your house, she told me—maybe she was already safe when all hell broke loose.

  Cell phones were still a novelty in those days: once I had it in my hands I didn’t know how to use it. She told me I had to punch in the number then press the green button, but that to get a signal I had to go upstairs, as close to the ground floor as possible; down below, here among the furnaces and heating ducts, there was no way to get through to anybody. The pained looks that followed me as I made my way out of there made it completely clear: none of them harbored the least hope that my family had made it home before the tornado struck.

  With more resignation than anguish, I walked back through the outlandish scene in the hallway. Now it came to me that I had needed to go to the bathroom for ages now, but all the pent-up tension in my body had prevented me from paying this any mind. Not wanting to run into another orgy, I went up to the next floor to find a men’s room. I had to wait in a long line to take a crap in an overtaxed toilet. As I flushed, I had my first clear inkling that I might well no longer have a family; that my whole emotional universe had been shot to hell while I was reading a handful of poems by Rubén Darío that none of my students would ever remember.

  I walked on upstairs, no longer in any hurry, thinking over, for example, how difficult it was going to be to break the news to my parents that I was suddenly a widower and their grandchildren were no more. When I reached the spot where a phalanx of volunteers blocked the way up to the surface, I was already feeling the first stirrings, inside me, of an unexpected sense of freedom.

  I punched in the number for my house and nobody picked up, not even the answering machine: the power was out. I dug around in my briefcase, looking for my in-laws’ phone number. They live farther away from campus, so their electricity was probably still working. I dialed and my wife answered. In a perfectly relaxed voice she asked if the lights had come back on at home yet. She said she’d left me a note on the table explaining how she couldn’t cook anything so she’d taken the kids to have dinner at her folks’ house. I told her where I was calling from. She simply couldn’t believe it. Yes, she’d noticed how strongly the wind was blowing when she left the school but she’d made if off campus without any problems. In the car they’d been listening to a tape of children’s music, and at her parents’ house they’d put on a cartoon video, so she had no idea what was going on. We agreed that they should spend the night there. That way she would be able to pick me up in the car when the authorities finally allowed us to leave. I had to control my voice so that she wouldn’t pick up on how annoyed I was.

  Back downstairs—the cell phone burning in the palm of my right hand—I stopped at the bottom of the stairway. The question was, should I go into the women’s locker room or the men’s?

  2. NATURAL DISASTERS RECORDED SINCE I MOVED TO WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Three tornados.

  An eighteen-month drought.

  Six ice storms.

  Hurricanes Isabel, Cecilia, and Laura.

  Two floods on the Potomac from winter thaws. Three complete closures of the city due to snowfall. Threat of anthrax contamination.

  A jetliner crashing into the Pentagon.

  One divorce.

  3. LIGHT

  Thy gift sets a spark within us and we are raised up.

  Our souls ablaze, we walk forward on the path.

  ST. AUGUSTINE, Confessions, XIII, 9

  It was the end of August. I had developed the annoying habit of brooding over the storms of volcanic ash that covered Mexico City with thick gray dust during the last spring that I lived there. In those days, when we were preparing to move from D.F. to D.C.—that is, from the Distrito Federal to the District of Columbia—I thought that the ashes were some kind of message from on high, urging me to get out. Now I understand that they were rather more admonitory in nature, but this realization only comes now, as I sit here writing, sketching out such a pleasant yet constricted scene, which has nothing to do with the disjointed flow of reality. Telling a story means tracing your finger through the ashes left by the fires of experience: the touchstone of all tragedy is our inability to remember the future.

  Midsummer in the District of Columbia brings some of the most intense, sweltering weather in the northern
hemisphere. Between July and August there are days when you can’t even wear rubber-soled shoes because they start to melt the moment you set foot on the pavement. Unlike in other latitudes, the first whisper of autumn comes not with the crisp northerly breezes of October but instead with the heavy rain clouds left by hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico at the end of August and beginning of September.

  That morning we decided to take a bicycle ride down to the airport. It makes for a quiet family outing. It’s been years since weekends have felt the least bit restful: running the gauntlet of all the arbitrary, obligatory leisure activities here is even more exhausting than the hardest days at work. However, the ride out to the National Airport has its rewards. Cyclists are treated to a lengthy stretch along the banks of the Potomac. There is also the intensely strange experience of picnicking in the park that the airplanes fly over just before they land. The park’s meadow is so close to the landing field that the planes fill the sky as they descend, drowning out all other sound as they pass within a stone’s throw.

  The clouds looked like solid steel, but as the seasons change they frequently remain that way for days on end without raining a drop. We set out around ten in the morning and followed our normal route: from the house to the playground around the corner, and from there along the path to Rock Creek Park, the spine of the city. There we stopped so that the kids could climb and swing and bounce.

  It hadn’t rained for several weeks, so the benches where my wife and I sat were covered with a fine layer of grit, an automatic reminder of the ashes from Popocatépetl in Mexico City seven years earlier. I mentioned this to Cathy but she told me that those ashes had a different consistency, with larger granules. She remembered when they first covered the windows of our apartment in Coyoacán; she had tried to brush them off with her hand but they stuck to her fingers. Everything’s like that in Mexico, she said: tougher, harder to shake off.

  Although it was hot and the humidity was outrageous—as always, in the summer—a southerly breeze made the second leg of the trip pleasant as we cycled to the zoo. We rode along in quasi-military formation: Cathy in the lead keeping an eye out for any obstacles, then our two kids on their mountain bikes, and me covering the rear of the pack to make sure no one got left behind.

  We ate lunch at an open-air restaurant. Before continuing our ride, Cathy and the children visited the primate exhibit. As usual, I stayed outside to have a smoke: the chimpanzees and gorillas in their glass boxes reminded me too much of myself: despite being in exile, they lived a better life, now safer and better fed than in the miserable forests where they’d been captured. When we got back on the bike paths, the sky was already painted like an ominous stage scrim. The breeze was picking up, turning into wind. We considered the situation while we struggled to help the kids strap on their bike helmets. Since we were already closer to the river than home, we figured it was better to keep going. If necessary, we could always take the Metro back from downtown.

  The truth is that we continued our outing only at my insistence: Cathy’s memory of how the ashes from Popoca-tépetl clung to our hands when we tried to clean them off made me think of my grandmother—her ashes were the stickiest I’ve ever encountered. I felt for some reason that riding into the wind would cleanse my conscience of them.

  My father’s family, from whom I surely inherited my habit of constantly moving around—from one house, country, or spouse to another—has deep roots in the teaching profession: to this day, many of my relatives live likewise peripatetic lives, off in countries where producing or reproducing knowledge is actually a well-respected job. Several years ago, my paternal grandmother made the stupid mistake of dying suddenly, and on Holy Thursday eve, in the rather remote village of Autlán. Because one of her sons, and several grandchildren, were unable to make travel arrangements in time to attend the funeral Mass, it was decided to postpone the interment of her ashes in our family crypt until the following Monday. I managed to arrive on Saturday afternoon, just in time for the cremation. I also got to witness the very strange moment when my father and my uncles, after arguing about whether it was better to leave the ashes in the car until the ceremony began, or else bring them inside the house, finally decided on the latter. With a discomfort bordering on the ridiculous, they placed the urn on the sideboard by the table as if it were going to preside one last time over a family meal. It was decided by everyone that the youngest of us cousins would sleep in the house. Not having grown up there, we wouldn’t find it so depressing to spend the night and stand the final watch.

  It’s not often that my family has so many relatives gathered under one roof, as we were that night under our grandmother’s. The mournful atmosphere in the room, still so heavy when we sat down at the table, receded after the first couple of whiskeys, especially because more relatives kept knocking on the door, sometimes simply to pay their respects and sometimes because they were just arriving from the bus station. Our vigil didn’t exactly turn into a party, not quite, but considering both the occasion and the fact that the ashes of its guest of honor were in attendance, the night was surprisingly relaxed.

  Around midnight, or maybe one in the morning, my father and his brothers said goodnight, and headed over to our relatives’ houses to sleep. It was then that my sister, Nena, raised her eyebrows at me with a conspiratorial look. She glanced toward the sideboard where my grandmother’s ashes had stood watch over the excessive number of cocktails drunk in her honor.

  The door had barely closed behind the older mourners when all of us cousins who had stayed behind made an urgent—and frankly ridiculous—dash for the urn. We all held back a moment until Nena herself, the devious ringleader of our riskiest childhood expeditions, stepped forward. She placed the urn on the table and removed the lid, revealing the deep, terrible void within. Suspended in a hallowed silence, we reverently gathered our heads around the receptacle as Nena reached her hand inside. She withdrew a fistful of our grandmother’s remains and held them on her outstretched palm. They were not, as we had imagined, like the fine dust left behind after burning wood or paper; they were shiny little black stones, like pellets of obsidian, and we all crowded together to touch them. It was then that we discovered just how sticky they were: once you had some of Grandma’s ashes on your fingertips there was no way to remove them. We ended up shaking and brushing off our hands over the urn—with pretty lousy aim—and at last had to remove the tablecloth and toss it into the garbage with my poor grandmother stuck all over it. Upon returning to D.C. I told Cathy all about it. In a rather serious voice, she told me that when she died I’d better not invite Nena to her funeral.

  The descent to the Potomac was, at the very least, enjoyable: the cool steady wind blew straight into our faces as we rode down along the riverbanks. Also, we could ride without stopping: the kids still had all their energy, and nowhere on the route is there an uphill stretch that isn’t preceded by an even longer descent, so you never have to get off and walk or push your bike. By the time we were approaching Watergate and had the river in sight, every cell in my body felt refreshed, as if I had been scrubbed clean.

  Riding a bicycle is more a state of mind than hard work. Although it hurts at first to stretch your muscles and get warmed up, once the lungs and legs naturally and miraculously sync up, the body works automatically. Unless some sudden change in the terrain requires a shift in speed, there’s no need to stop and rest. Though the banks of the Potomac slope downhill on the Capitol side—D.C. is built on swamps that once served as a drainage for Appalachian thaws—on the Virginia side they’re as flat and green as soccer fields. We crossed the bridge, skirted Arlington Cemetery, and followed the riverside path toward the airport.

  Before we even reached our destination, though, the sky began to roil and erupt. The storm hit with such violence that we heard it before anything else: we were by now very close to the landing field. When the lightning flashes and exploding thunder announced an imminent cloudburst, we stopped beneath one of the freeway bridges
with another group of cyclists and some runners who’d also been counting on those imperturbable, late-season cloudbanks. Cathy took our picnic blanket out of her backpack while I removed sodas, olives, and potato chips from the cooler in my basket. We spread out our little sheltered camp and from there we watched the river churning with the rainfall in the distance until the storm front reached the bridge.

  Although we got a bit chilly—rain always carries an icy presence that clings to your shirt with all the tenacity of human ashes—we entertained ourselves by calculating how far away the lightning was striking: reason is the only human defense against our primal fear of the elements. At one point the rain was so heavy that we couldn’t even see the river, which was barely ten yards away from our picnic blanket.

  The storm passed as nimbly as it arrived. We had finished our olives and were still nibbling on potato chips when a small but promising ray of sun broke through the clouds.

  Children—like Mexico, like ashes—are sticky: for parents, some ridiculously simple tasks, like getting into the car or choosing a movie at the video store, become endless, herculean tasks. The runners and other cyclists sheltering beneath the bridge had long ago returned to the path when we felt ready to resume riding with all our gear, once more in strict formation.

  We had only gone a few hundred yards when I became aware that my bicycle and I had penetrated into a different reality, as though we were at the center of a cone of silence. I looked ahead at Cathy and the kids and saw their faces distorted by a spasm of fear: whatever was going on, it was happening only to me. Looking down, I saw a glowworm devouring my handlebars in slow motion. As it touched my hands, they turned the very shade of blue they’ll become when I’m dead. My wedding ring, on my right hand, flared molten green. In spite of the intense pain produced by the burning ring, I couldn’t let go of my bicycle: my body was trapped in a surging vibration, as if a magnet was drawing me up by the hair to some paradise I don’t deserve. I’m dying, I thought. Cathy and the children were shouting something at me—who knows what—from the world of sound they still inhabited. In return I gave them a smile more resigned than sad.