Second day in, feeling lucid for the first time in three months, his head as clear as the sky beyond the manila-colored soot-canopy, maintaining his expansive mood, Cubby commandeered a cab and headed toward a business meeting at the Crowne Plaza, across town. He was utterly tuned in to every moment during that cab ride, the minutiae of every moment. Born again. He could subdivide each moment into an endless series of increments. Each passerby seethed, an individual metropolis, an infinite sequence of glittery contractions. Broad, perpetual, counterfeit grins hung on everybody everywhere, big as the one on the Cleveland Indian mascot. Everybody was teeth! So vibrant, extant. So wise. The men all wore green and red flags in their lapels and cast Cubby looks of: 'Don't think I'm not on to your game.'
Cubby's game was extremely complex, far more elaborate than he himself understood. It was an obscure, subterranean performance; it welled from a mystery fountain, like the one from which Samuel Coleridge dredged Kublai Khan while sleeping; and in Cubby, it made itself manifest three or four times each year, when VelCor Bearings (his employer) sent him to Mexico to sort out hysterical quality blips. VelCor manufactured guts that animated automotive driveshafts throughout the civilized world, but there were several insulating tiers of sub-assemblers between VelCor and the big players, the car builders, so these trips were basically meant to offer a show of commitment and a bit of technical support, and were not particularly difficult to handle. Otherwise, Diller would not have gone. He would not have been capable. But the small VelCor office was in Akron, and everybody else in it, chalky, tubby, naive Caucasians, had an irrational fear of Mexico. Cubby Diller, for a number of reasons, did not suffer from this particular phobia, this aversion, at least not to the point of physical debility. So Diller was the body that went to represent the VelCor viewpoint during the hysterics. Every time.
Other than that, he was a pea for the thrust-bearing industry pod: fifty-six years old, overweight, half-blind, hypnotically unambitious; he'd spent the past thirty-five years doing a sad rustbelt manufacturing ladder-climb, going from an existence of intolerable brutality to one of tolerable dullness, from twelve hour stamping-plant shifts, through union ultimatums, seniority default promotions, mercy raises, to a floppy, non-vital, and largely undeserved white-collar engineering gig with an office and a Palm Pilot. He considered himself both untalented and tremendously fortunate to earn what he earned, and he was right: he did nothing throughout the course of his days but give occasional, unsound, ultimately ignored advice to much younger CAD designers. He had a ghastly wife who corrected his grammar, two grown children to whom he hadn't spoken in a long time, a Lawnboy, a split-level in Cumberland Heights, a mobile home on Northern Michigan acreage, a 401k worth maybe a hundred thousand. He had a low-def, but expensive Magnavox and a preference for A&E shows on Vietnam (an engagement from which he'd been exempted: lousy eyesight); he kept an old list of MIA's in a bureau drawer, and on occasion, he pored over the names with a peculiar, ineffable rapture, perplexed and intrigued by a system where men could melt away, dissolve, leave no trace. Otherwise, his existence moved forward without the slightest tint of technicolor. He rambled through each of his allotted increments, a dutiful myrmidon. He had no particular dreams. No gifts, no outrageous passions. He coveted nothing, neither his neighbor's goods nor his wife. (In fact, he hadn't thought about poontang subjectively since 1984). All his shirts had armpit ovals. He attended weekend Christian Fellowship retreats at Lake Lavigne. The only Byronic, non-predictable, exciting thing he'd ever done was to drunk-drive a blue Dodge 150 into a service transformer at six o'clock one morning and emerge without two of his teeth. From the hospital, in lieu of jail, he'd headed to a series of court-mandated, VelCor-financed, personally-welcomed AA moments, and since then, he'd mostly steered clear of hooch and transformers.
In fact, AA moments were little and late; his career was very nearly over by then and his position would evaporate with the next fiscal downsizing. If he sensed it, he didn't let on. In the meantime, he'd go eagerly to the altar when the automotive Aztecs wanted a sacrifice. From Cleveland to Columbus to Dallas to Mexico, a long day up and down. He spent every minute of it in a kind of Pavlovian dipsomaniacal frenzy, waiting for the final touchdown: he'd worked out his suburban alcoholism so effectively that he scarcely found any temptations in Akron, not inside familiar bars, not inside Vat 69 billboards, not inside hi-tech Miller ads; but these occasional business trips to Mexico had become his pressure cock, and since nothing much was required of him at the meetings, where the reports were generally given by overdressed men from Japan, he didn't find anything even slightly perplexing in himself falling off the wagon with both feet, several times a year, directly onto the dusty Aeropuerto tarmac.
If it wasn't for a string of brightly-colored souvenirs he'd returned with, over and over and over again, to the utter horror of the ghastly wife . . . that would have been the end of that.
Now, the second day in, from the window of the commandeered cab, soundly drunk and outrageously happy, he surveyed the swirling morass, the maelstrom of perpetually congested Reforma Boulevard. There were all sorts of nightmares to be scrutinized here, countless strata: tragic trumpets drilling through thick air, smothering yellow smoke settling on the strange little suede-colored people, each of whom, if you cared to key in on it, had some serious flaw or another, an oozing burn, disproportionately large ears, a lousy toupee, a gimpy leg, a missing finger, a clinging, deformed, half-naked child sucking on a way-ripe mango. Who the fuck were these people, anyway? That's what Cubby wanted to know. Quality was the problem down here, not productivity; there was tons of street industry: bicycle carts spinning through traffic, miniature chewing-gum salesmen asking a peso per pop, a fire-eating clown-faced windshield-washing beggar in a counterfeit CK Jeans cap, who at night became a window-smashing robber. . . . Idiotically inappropriate census figures insured that here in reality-land, no job was too menial, no pay scale too obscene; everywhere, somebody with a rag or a squeegee was cleaning something; actually, they were mostly cleaning the same things over and over and over again, and yet in the aggregate, in their wake, there was a profound sensation of filthiness.
Not so remarkable, actually. Because the function of these cleaners was to work, not to make things clean. You could reach a similar conclusion over an anthill, watching particle-shifting vermin skittering mindlessly, purposefully, through losing battles against grains of sand. On that level, both human and insect, the real insanity was the fear, not of failure, but of final subsumption, of total disappearance into the concept, which far from being irrational, was probably inevitable.
So, where was the significance in considering, over the course of a day or two, ten thousand complicated individuals you would never see again? That's what else he wanted to know.
Cubby's mood was more fragile than he'd admit, and he cackled at the Latin freak-show with growing uneasiness until his smile went suddenly bankrupt. An old stake truck filled with leafy green things and dour, shiny-trousered campesinos had edged suddenly in beside the taxi, cutting off his view of the sidewalk; and on the truck's door, opposite his face, a foot away, someone had written 'Chucky Ley' in small, careful, orange letters. He scribbled down the weird, gringo name in his Franklin Planner, then deflated. The juxtaposition of events, possibly unrelated: the swarm of fucked-up mortals, the industrious preschoolers, the palm trees, 'Chucky Ley' in small, careful, orange letters, caused such a melancholic eruption of emotion within Cubby Diller that he broke down and wept while the cab driver eyed him carefully in the mirror.
Later, on the television in the hotel room, there was a local channel running snapshots of missing persons, all sorts of missing persons, all ages, all social castes; evidentially, nobody in Mexico was immune to sudden disappearance. He watched in bleary fascination, for an hour or more. The Missing Persons Channel. What were the demographics? Either you were missing, and knew it, or missed someone, and knew it; either way, how did this help? Still, face after face appeared, reappeared if you stayed tuned long enough, some of desperately pretty teenaged girls with glittering teeth, whose potential for a new life of sexual bondage was heady and erotic; some of little kids, who for all he knew, were bought and sold like ripe mangoes in the fairs and markets; some of middle-aged, out-of-focus, unshaven men such as never seemed to go missing in the states, if you believed the milk cartons; some were drawings of people who had vanished and looked like nine of the next ten strangers you'd pass on the boulevard; but all had genuine lives, individual cycles, distinct circulatory systems, private disgraces, personal passions, dreams, talents, and most had three or four names that somebody had, with circumspection, bestowed upon them once, not suspecting how badly it would turn out. Now, that was the biggest mystery; that was the sort of realization that made Cubby want to vomit.
And he couldn't get enough of it. He jotted down the funny, polysyllabic Mexican names with a Jena pen on a Jena pad. He drank tequila until he fell asleep, and when he woke up, the grainy, unfocused, funny-named individuals were still flashing across the screen in an endless loop, each one of them still MIA; he'd been out cold for at least six hours, during which not one of those poor people had turned up.
He'd drained the minibar of all the brown liquor, for which he had a preference but not a requirement, and now, he started in on the rums and vodkas, then polished off the Tecates and Sols along with the remains of the American Burger that room service had delivered prior to calling it a night, and by the time the rest of the hotel was stirring, showering, tightening ties, setting out, hitting the breakfast buffet, Cubby was bombastically boiled and unreasonably ecstatic, ready for another round.
That morning, third day in, his coterie toured a chassis assembly line for a hands-on session. At the factory, they were on to Cubby immediately; it was impossible to disguise forty hours worth of marathon imbibing; Cubby's exhalations alone could have powered the generator. But, all the contacts were solicitous to him, overbearing and ingratiating-- ". . .we happreciate jore help, Mr. Deeler, we hope chu like Mexico . . ." as he stumbled grandly over pallets, dropped handfuls of thrust bearings, jibbered Taco Bell Spanish, took occasional sips from the tequila fifth stashed inside his sports coat. At the midday break, they converged upon a famous beef restaurant in Cuatitlan, where Cubby tried to play host. The group allowed him and his gregarious stupor all the space he wanted, especially the Orientals in their fierce blue suits, who couldn't drink their way into anything resembling self-confidence or find much on the menu that didn't intimidate them. They all drank beer, wine, scotch, but Cubby was miles ahead, thirty feet over them. When lunch ended, one of the entourage, a Harvard-educated Mexican named Hervin Araiza, suggested that Cubby and he repair to the cantina and let the Japanese jitterbugs carry on at the plant. Araiza was a slender, boyish-looking man in his mid-thirties, an expert on tulip plunging joints, and Cubby joined him gladly, flattered, assuming that Araiza was impressed with him. In fact, Cubby Diller was the cut of American that Araiza most despised, despised with the sort of serene totality reserved for old-school Latinos and the mentally ill. Together, they fired up Cuban Cohibas and drank and drank and drank, neat shots of some oily, sweet liqueur made from mandarin oranges.
Araiza spoke in measured tones, and nothing he said made the slightest reference to driveshafts. It turned out that he was obsessed with politics, politics being the easiest and most profitable job in Mexico, and though he was ideologically vague, spouting the party-line of a leftist intellectual while dressing in the imported loafers and slick technofabrics of the Mexican bourgeoisie, his true agenda cropped between the second and third Mandarin: "Mexico's a myth; you've heard that said? But, it's a cohesive myth. That, combined with a crude sort of realism makes up the legendary dichotomy of the people. Determination and patience, those are our two greatest virtues; and you see, they are not necessarily contradictions . . ."
He sat facing Cubby, who had no idea what he was talking about. Araiza removed several five-by-seven photographs from his briefcase and laid them on the bar in a careful line, facedown, with only the Kodak logo showing. "How strong's your stomach, Mr. Diller?"
Araiza's sinister tone was lost on the goofy, shit-faced American, who grinned, as though his companion were performing a card trick. Araiza continued, calmly: "There's six gentlemen pictured here and one lady. Can you pick her out, without looking?"
Diller screwed up his face and pointed to the last shot. "Not bad," said Araiza, flipping over the photograph. "Most people would have pointed to the middle one."
The girl in the photo was about fifteen, wearing an expensive party dress. She'd been dead for at least six months; there was a bloodless bullet hole in her forehead, and her face was completely mummified, striated and black; her mouth was gaping open. Cubby stared down her surrealistic maw and counted her teeth. Araiza said, "They find these kinds of girls in the desert all the time; they're party dolls from the traficantes, used up and quickly discarded; we came upon this one when we were searching for a manufacturer's rep from a sintered metallics company out of New York. The rep was kidnapped on a business trip to Mexico. His name was Manfred Muller, he was from Syracuse. Here he is, number six . . ."
Cubby took the snapshot obediently, shocked into mechanics by the mummy girl and her beautiful white teeth. The second picture showed a hooded man holding a mini-Uzi equipped with a silencer; he was standing over the body of a fat, dead executive-type who was still wearing his peculiar blindfold, Rayban sunglasses painted with nail polish. Here, there was plenty of blood, and some plump blue sausages that were probably intestines. Araiza flipped the other photos one by one. Each showed a corpse, all well-dressed, some hog-tied, some dismembered. One hung from the window of a blue Mercedes 190 with a bullet-riddled face. "Rental car; 9 mm. damage is not something normally covered by Avis."
Cubby blinked rapidly. His head was spinning: despite the gory pictures, Araiza appeared to be making jokes. He gulped at his drink. Incongruously, Jethro Tull came up on the sound system, punctuating the tearful boleros. Araiza's voice remained steady, unruffled. He went on: "This is the handiwork work of the Union Patriótico; a Tzeltale Indian group intending to be the first post-Communist ethnic uprising of the twenty-first century. They're headquartered in Chiapas but operate mostly here in the D.F., where the hunting's better. You see, they abduct and execute foreign businessmen, Americans mainly; that's their 'thing,' their 'statement.' These assassinations are not viewed as a long-term political strategy, but rather, redress for five hundred years of exploitation. Already this year? Sixteen. Six of the bodies were found by local army units. The rest are still out there somewhere, turning to leather in the desert. Being from Chiapas, originally, I am obviously in a position at least to know what's going on, though the guerrillas tend to distrust anything having to do with civil society. Not that one can't understand their viewpoint, as I say; the President's credibility is not very high . . . most recently, in an attempt to pacify the rebels, the federals spent almost sixty million pesos building them basketball courts." Araiza shook his head, bemused. "Thousands of concrete basketball courts, all across the country, each with a ten-foot, regulation hoop. Only thing, Mexico's Indian population averages five-foot-three. They work fourteen hours a day, on hardly any food. And if that's not sadistic enough, the only sport the Indians understand is soccer! That's the only sport they want to play! They don't even know the rules of basketball; you should watch them try to play it sometimes! On their new, regulation-sized concrete courts! They all throw underhanded, like grandmothers!"
Now, clearly, slender Ariaza was trying to lighten things up. He mugged and demonstrated the peasants' grandmotherly free-throw, over and over again, until Cubby was pole-axed into the new mood and began to chortle, mimicking Araiza's motion, tossing an imaginary ball, upsetting the drinks and scattering the corpse photographs onto the cool Saltillo tiles. Araiza gathered them up quickly, patted them dry, and slipped them inside a soot-colored envelope. He passed the envelope to Cubby, murmuring gently, "I would like you to take these images back to your directives, please, Mr. Diller. They must understand that a world exists down here beside cheap labor and talking Chihuahuas."
Araiza promptly paid the check, and at the door, smiling, turned to Cubby and said, "You know what I'm thinking? I'm thinking I should make a business, negotiating with these terrorists, these U.P. What's your opinion? Being from Chiapas, I grew up with some of them. I'm Harvard educated, and they respect that. They won't listen to reason, but like all men, they'll listen to money. Me, I'm a free-market crusader. Mexicans have a saying, Kindness is free, but it's not cheap. If companies will continue to send top executives to Mexico, they might someday need a mediator to save their lives. God forbid, VelCor might wind up as my first client! Here, I will give you a card to include with those terrible photographs, in case it should ever become necessary. Who knows?"
Araiza handed Cubby his plunging joints business card, but on the back, he had written a private number with the words: "100 k, US, per negotiation."
###
Evening, last one in, Cubby sat inside a vintage Volkswagen cab while the driver, palming directions in his steering-wheel hand (a well-worn address, many times folded and unfolded), wended through narrow, rutted side streets and unpaved alleys, as deep into the inferno as one could get. In the rear, Cubby was bug-eyed; his face, puffed and distorted with drink and misdirected energy, was contorting into deformities, even worse than those of the passersby. The taxista discharged him before a block of battered storefronts. At one time, when the tumble-down street had been busy, the fronts had been painted like a fun-house, sharp pink against yellow. Now it was solid gang graffiti. Cubby knew where he was, and found a staircase leading up, hit a landing, passed through a metal gate with an unlatched asylum lock.
Beyond was a small apartment and a studio; every inch of wall was hung with flash, a weird array of sketches and photographs and wooden grape-crate slats decorated with abstract black tribal shapes, stark Catholic images: the Holy Infant and Our Lady of Perpetual Mercy and various miracle-working saints. The room reeked of hydrochloric acid, but it wasn't coming from the tattoo equipment, it was coming from the proprietor's skin; his sweat smelled like a car battery. He was perched on a grungy, mealy sofa in a vague lotus position. His feet, wrapped in heavy woolen socks, jutted over the edge; he was almost six and a half feet tall, and didn't fit the couch. Still, he had a settled look. A Parcheesi board sat on the floor beneath him, next to a grocery bag filled with reefer and some gems of local cuisine, three days old, half-eaten in a plate.
Cubby stood in the doorway, supporting himself, dumping perspiration. Swollen capillaries gave his eyes a severe, lusterless look; he focused them on the lotus man's chest. A scapular with a plastic cross hung there, and below that, on the skin, was a single, huge picture of a beautiful young Hindi boy, with his foot on the head of another beautiful young Hindi boy, who was dead.
The lotus man considered Cubby through fluttering eyelids. His name was Darius, but he went by 'Ant.' A joke, of course, referring to his size. Cubby could appreciate jokes like that. Ant looked like a marble carving; an intense pallor delved into the hollows of his cheeks, his lips were almost white. He was a junkie, and a certain lucidity arises in the skin of junkies, growing more intense in the weeks before they die. They begin to resemble sculptured shells, since the corrosion is moving from the inside out, like a corpse decomposing within a vacuum chamber. At the final stage, they fairly glow. Prevailing wisdom suggests that, since they are so close to death, the light is supernatural.
It was dusk, but a rooster was screaming somewhere. Ant unwound his limbs, pushed himself up, using a crutch cut from an acote branch. Acote was supposed to be spiritual wood, channeling potent energies. Barring intervention from one of the flash saints on the wall, he needed all the help he could get. He was from Oakland and was still a bit California cosmic; he'd come to Mexico chiefly for the dope. Cubby hovered in his doorway, briefly confused by the odd light and the smell. "Am I drunk?" he asked.
"Yeah, you're drunk, all right."
"Good; I fucking deserve to be."
An old dentist chair sat in the center of the room. Cubby lurched in, plopped down into it. He tore away his shirt and pants, sat naked. He handed Ant a pad of paper from the Jena hotel. "How hard would that be?"
Ant glanced at the pad, at the bloated, pasty, drying skin, but not too closely. "Easy or hard, that's how; like everything else. Depends on what you're willing to settle for."
Cubby displayed five thousand pesos in hundred-peso notes. That's what he was willing to settle for. Ant had no qualms about it; no matter the details. This was Cubby's seventh trip to the studio; his seventh session. He knew the situation; it never changed. Cubby was a good customer, and this would be the final visit; neither one needed a Harvard education to work that out. Still, it took Ant a little while to fire up his enthusiasm; it took a candle, some brown dust, a red-capped syringe to establish telepathic contact with his muse; but finally, eyebrows knit, he knuckled down with his needle bar, inscribing strange, polysyllabic names from the Jena pad onto Cubby's skin, one by one, in odd, but precise calligraphy, up an arm, down his back, the nape of his neck, on his leg, on his crotch, winding between past souvenirs, other names he'd scratched there in other sessions, names of young girls, of expendable children, of men with beard stubble. Names that drove the grammatical wife to distraction every time Cubby disrobed. Cubby couldn't care less; these names were more real than life. This time, Cubby wanted one on his hand, and Ant balked a little, though not too much: he'd lost that argument with clients before. "It's what you show the world, you know; and who knows what you're gonna have to do someday? Like, you wouldn't get one on your face, would you?"
"Yes," said Cubby.
Despite his chronic state, Ant worked with consummate skill; there were no stencils, and his strokes were long and relaxed and deep and decisive. It took nearly three hours to get everything down, every name. During that time, there was no sound but the hum of the tattoo machine and the demented rooster shrilling in the alley.
###
Last day in, at check-out time, the desk boy kept his eyes averted; the Jena manager grinned, ". . . I hope chu enjoyed chore stay, Mr. Deeler . . ." with a big mouthful of Chief Wahoo teeth, far too polite to mention the bloody bandages swaddling Cubby's bare, haggard arms, much too ingratiating to mention Cubby's forehead, where 'Chucky Ley' was scratched in scabbed-over orange letters; nor was there any fuss made when Cubby performed his customary dry-out ritual, killing his seventh hotel goldfish; pouring the remainder of his Don Cuervo stash into the aquarium in the lobby.
