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The Pacific is Too Wide // Joshua Marcus

I was born Elias Cantlie hyphen Weschler because my mother used to be a feminist.
 
The only reason I began college was because she did my application. She wanted me to be a pre-med robot, but instead of Bio 101, I plunged into Túpac Amaru, Simon Bolívar, and Che Guevara. What would these revolutionaries say, that at eighteen my initiation into manhood consisted of a fraternity and a bar mitzvah? Getting a driver’s license, getting drunk or high, getting laid at a frat party, starting college, graduating, a first job. These rites of passage are more like nails in the coffin of adulthood. During midterms I made lists of what I needed to do to be educated. Cross Afghanistan on foot, explore a sunken pirate ship, be a Potosí miner, go to prison. I accomplished the latter when I was arrested on burglary charges for freeing vivisection rats from a bio-lab classroom. Frat brothers bailed me out after only an evening in jail, but I was hooked. The next day I told my parents I was taking a ‘leave of absence’. I decided I was going to accomplish one thing on the list that seemed reasonable; interview guerillas. I wasn’t going mention the ‘G’ word but the word Colombia was more than enough to provoke the ‘T’ word from my parents; therapy. At the end of the first session, the shrink said he knew the head of the Peace Corps in Latin America. The day before I left for Ecuador, I legally changed Cantlie-Weschler to the combination Cantler. I came from my parents but I was leaving, off to start my own life, my own lineage.
 
I was assigned to work in the Amazon on “Remote Sensing for Hazard Mitigation.” But really I just did what the locals needed help with; building bridges, which I didn’t know shit about. With their instruction, I got pretty good at it. Then my supervisor stopped by and ordered me to destroy a bamboo bridge we just finished, because it was built with Corps funds that hadn’t been allocated for the project. After U.S. government bureaucracy made me do that to my people, I sought out the guerilla.
 
The closest I got was befriending an ex-Sendero Luminoso. He agreed to provide security if I acquired the essential equipment for our “Motorcycle Diaries” adventure. The Corps prohibits even riding them, so when they caught me in the act of purchase, I was escorted without a hearing to Mariscal Sucre International, gate 9, direct flight to the U.S. I was 3 months away from being the first person to graduate from the Peace Corps precisely because I dropped out of college.
 
But now, here I am, back in the land of Babylon. Even if my mother tracks me with the latest in ‘parent’ radar, I will make sure my stay here is only a blip. On the first day she brings me to our town’s pedestrian mall. The viruses of affluenza infect these sidewalks, but for the first time in my life I am immune. The ancient tierra of the Incas now embedded in my shoes and fingernails vaccinates me.
 
My mother shows me a pair of designer jeans she thinks are me, because they’re ‘distressed.’ My hands glow in their emptiness, but all that is extinguished when she buys a Coach bag, probably made from cows that grazed the slashed jungle surrounding my village. I’m ready to crawl into a wormhole that transports me back to the village, when she has to go to the car dealership and tells me, “I think you should be responsible for the grocery shopping as long as you eat the food under our roof.”
 
I spend three hours in the supermarket. If the government can do terrible things on behalf of a righteous cause, why not me? First, I line up each of the fifteen varieties of Tropicana orange juice in the cart, cross out marketing gimmicks like, “Immunity Defense” and “Healthy Kids”, and pretending I work there, offer samples to customers. The only difference anybody can tell among any of them is between pulp and no pulp. For the second hour I gape at a list with four-ply toilet paper and ground beef that my mother scribbled with the same pen she writes checks to Sierra Club and PETA. I cross everything off the list except bananas, which during the third hour, I put all the petrochemically grown ones in plastic bags and write on them, “These bags are replicas of actual ones on Ecuadorian banana plantations. If these were real, they would be filled with Dursban, an insecticide also used as nerve gas during World War II.”
 
I sit at the edge of the clay tile roof of my parents’ house and stare not at the light reflecting off the Pacific, but at the sun about to sink into it. It seems as though this process is boiling off steam into the dry summer air. I’ve decided to try Sungazing, which I heard about from a Peace Corps buddy, who gave me a video of this Indian guy lecturing how to do it. The guru says, that by absorbing low-angled sunlight through your irises you can eliminate or at least greatly reduce the need for food. I figure this way I won’t have the go back to the grocery store, and it’ll make things a little easier when I cross Afghanistan. Hell, maybe I can leave tomorrow by hitchhiking on a sailboat that cruises into the setting sun.
 
“What are you doing on the roof?” I hear my mother say. I’m not sure where she is because I don’t move my eyes, but after what happened with the word “Colombia,” I know better than to say, “staring at the sun.”
 
“Hold on a sec, actually ten seconds,” I say.
 
“Ten, nine, eight, I’d like you to come to the airport with me.”
 
I meet her in the kitchen and she holds up a Sun Gazing DVD disc.
 
“What is this?” she says.
 
“Why were you going through my stuff?”
 
“Is this what you were just doing? Staring at the sun? Is this what they teach you in the Peace Corps, how to go blind?”
 
“Don’t go through my stuff again, please.”
 
“I can’t believe you’re staring at the sun Eli. I’m going to take you to an ophthalmologist and a therapist,” she says. Her smile muscles tremble.
 
“Instead of grabbing random shit out of my bag and assuming you know what it is, why don’t you at least ask?”
 
“You’re right, I should. It’s just that when I checked the fridge I saw you bought practically nothing but organic fruit. That combined with this sun worshipping stuff kind of freaks me out. I’m saying this because I love you and I want what’s best for you. Promise me you won’t stare at the sun, at least not underneath or on top of this roof, where your old mother can know about it.”
 
I hug her for a moment and then we walk toward the garage.
 
“I know how upset you were when we bought an SUV,” my mother says. “Well, for your father’s birthday, it’s a surprise, I just got him a hybrid.”
 
When we enter, I see what she means by hybrid is half Stupid Useless Vehicle, half appeasement of guilt.
 
“How is your vision?” she says.
 
“I’m supposed to see purple and black monsters after staring down the sun, right?”
 
“You need this to drive it,” she says.
 
She hands me what looks like a credit card. I turn it over and see a Lexus insignia.
 
I pray that there is a credit card reader built into the car that for every mile, a dollar is given to planting trees or a windmill, or something. I tell her, “I traveled more on horseback than in vehicles in South America. You want me driving Dad’s surprise?”
 
She opens up the Coach bag and swallows a pill with a gulp from a water bottle. “I forgot my wallet with my license in my old purse. I’m too exhausted to go get it. Don’t you wanna drive after so long?”
 
A lighting sequence leads me from the door handle to the start button and I’m reminded of floor lights on airplanes that lead you to the emergency door, just in case the plane is taking a nosedive and you feel like jumping out. I press the ignition button and the cockpit-like console lights up the car like Amazonian fireflies turned into LEDs. A wave of feature fatigue consumes me. My mother presses a button and says, “GPS…Airport” and a monitor displays directions. I start the car though there’s no sound and shift into reverse. The monitor switches to a camera view of the world behind the car.
 
“I guess rearview mirrors are old fashioned,” I say.
 
“A grand is worth your father not running someone over, don’t you think?” she replies.
 
“But being aware of your surroundings is priceless.” Though the truth is that my fatigue has become dizziness and I need all the help I can get.
 
I drive into the international arrival terminal. Each car pulls up in anticipation, blitzes through the lanes to curbside, where doors swing open and car and terminal windows bounce back reflections of lips entangled, handshakes that turn into embraces, a lone tear of joy, and then doors slam shut. The only suspense left is whether they can maneuver away from the curb. My attempt to copy this is frustrated when my father is nowhere to be found. He’s missing because when he was my age, at the behest of my mother, went to school to learn how to give women a 'choice' in back alleys. After Nixon’s backlash and before Roe v. Wade, he got scared and they married. He didn’t realize though that the honeymoon was an incubation period for the creation of a third person, an ‘Us’. It was a new personality that demanded my father switch from abortions to thousands of colonoscopies until it could afford buy the Spanish Colonial house with a swimming pool, even though chlorine makes him breaks out in chicken pox. The ‘Us’ is a being whose child has become a college misfit, an idealist, a free-spirit on the fringe, all the things my father suppressed for ‘Us,’ so he tried to snuff them out in me and failed; that’s why he hasn’t showed up.
 
So my mother and I wait. In the rearview I see headlights gallop toward us, a light bar flares and its siren blows so I press the ignition button, but the car doesn’t move and a hand with a piece of paper clacks against the window. I fumble for the switch but it doesn’t work, so I press the ignition again, the window goes down, and the hand and the paper are shoved in my face. A voice bellows, “Here’s a citation. This is a No Stopping Zone unless a passenger is loading or unloading.” So I don’t unload myself out of the car or at the cop, I let loose on the two engines and jet away from all the curbside commotion.
 
Not very far though. At a short-term airport parking booth a robotic dispenser spits out a card that reads “9:17 P.M.” I hand it to my mother expecting I won’t be the one to use it on the way out. She places it in her Coach bag.
 
Before I pull out of the booth, I see a guapita by an exit booth. She has dark sultry bangs and wears a parking uniform altered for steamy weather, which highlights her curves in tight places. Our eyes grapple. Those legs protect an amusement park and I swear her finger moves in a ‘come here’ motion at me as she walks away, probably toward somewhere cramped and torrid. I am going to follow her there and turn it into our fantasy ride out of here.
 
As my mother and I are leaving the parking garage elevator, she turns around and walks back in.
 
“Where are you going?” I say.
 
“Do you remember where the car is?”
 
“G3.”
 
“I’ll double-check. You can meet your father.”
 
“No, let’s go, I’m sure he’s waiting by now.”
 
She burrows through her Coach bag, pops another pill and chugs from the plastic bottle.
 
When we come up to the curbside, my father doesn’t recognize us until we’re close enough that I can see fresh wrinkles and new hair too tired to dye itself.
 
“Hi, where’s the car?” his voice is upbeat like a sugar coating over mustard.
 
“Parked,” my mother says. Their brittle lips touch. “How was the flight?”
 
“Uneventful, but long, couldn’t sleep. Wouldn’t it have been faster to pick me up?”
 
“I don’t get it. What’s the rush? Aren’t you glad we came to meet you in person?”
 
“Of course, I just thought it’d be quicker in the car.”
 
“We were going to, but Eli was driving and he’s not used to all the commotion.”
 
Among the paraphernalia of our greeting is a diluted hug. He pats my back as though he’s trying to burp me.
 
“So, you’re home,” he says. “Welcome back. How does it feel?”
 
“Okay. A little hard to adjust,” I say.
 
“Busy planning your next step?”
 
His gaze pumps blood away from my extremities. “Starting to.”
 
I wheel his enormous suitcase and we walk into the parking garage and my mother produces the Lexus card from her Coach bag.
 
“Where'd you get that bag?” he asks.
 
“Today with Eli.” She hands him the card. “This is for you.”
 
“What’s this?”
 
“You’ll see,” she says.
 
“That’s a nice bag. How much was it?”
 
We’re only steps from the surprise. “What do you think of that car?” she asks.
 
He glances at it. “It’s nice. What does a bag like that cost?”
 
“Don’t worry about the bag. Open up the car.”
 
“What? Where is our car?”
 
“You’re looking at it, surprise!” Her last word echoes through the garage. I can see she’s waiting to pounce because she can’t believe he doesn’t understand what’s happening. I don’t know if she realizes it, but she sets him up in situations to make him look out of it and dense and then criticizes him about it. I don't blame him for being like that. If my job made people fart all day, I’d also stop paying attention to everything around me, visual, olfactory, etcetera.
 
“Oh…I get it,” he says at the last moment. “I had no idea. Thank you, Thank you!” He clasps her face and brings their lips together. “Thank you,” he kisses me on the cheek. It’s the first time I’ve felt his stubble scratch against my own.
 
“Sure,” I say.
 
¨Will you drive?” he asks me.
 
I can see the gift leaving tire marks on my mother’s face.
 
“I’m tired. Jet lag,” he says. His clean confession wipes them right off.
 
Two years ago he would have never admitted to exhaustion. Even after fourteen hours of looking at polyps through a colonoscope, he would say that only his eyes are tired, but inevitably conk out before could say anything else to her. All day he would investigate other people’s physical ailments but would ignore or deny his own basic needs of food and sleep, as though he were punishing himself for the work he did. My mother’s guilt at having initially pressured him into this lifestyle brewed over the years into a blizzard of abandonment. Now, to see him admit that he is mortal, worried that he might fall asleep at the wheel, probably warms her heart.
 
On the other hand, she knows that he has reached the autumnal stage of life and the leaves of his fatigue have fallen and suffocated the little excitement he has about the car. A long time ago, he learned that luxury cars and wine cellars could keep down his wife’s complaints, even though his taste buds don’t allow him to discriminate between chardonnay or pinot gringo or grigio or whatever. But like any good husband, he has tried to make himself happy with what makes his wife happy, the ‘Us.’ He constantly flexes his fiscal muscle to keep her away from anti-depressants, but all the time he’s away exercising it, just spirals her down further.
 
My father found digestive system pathology too engrossing to think much about why he did it all the time. Maybe he stayed away from home so much because the only time he felt the agony of detox from his workaholism, was when my mother told him that he was missing my youth. I made him miss me once when I skipped out on two weeks of doing paperwork at his office one summer, so I could go to Burning Man. When I got back, I’ll never forget the shards of glass in each one of his syllables as he threatened to send me to boarding school.
 
My father’s luggage partially eclipses the rear window. Their bodies block the other windows and I am funneled into using the rearview camera. The car is like the hotel prison of amenities in the last American movie I’ve seen, Lost in Translation.
 
“So Eli,” my father is sitting next to me, “What kind of skills did you learn in Ecuador that you think can apply for adult life back here?”
 
I put the car in reverse and point at the screen. “Mom had a camera installed…so you don’t run over any children.”
 
His laugh comes out in a hobble.
 
I back up, put car in drive, and then press the same button on the console my mother did and say “GPS…Home.” The screen displays directions.
 
“Wow, that’s so cool,” he says. The icon, a hollow triangle that represents the car, starts moving as I slowly accelerate.
 
“That’s us,” I say. “Fiddle with the buttons, have fun.”
 
I hear the roar of a jet and curse how much I rely on expensive technology to keep me disentangled from my parents, but then again what else is it good for?
 
We arrive at the tollbooth and I can’t think of any technology, save for a jetpack that’ll get me out of this situation. We’re the fifth car lined up behind the only open tollbooth, the other one is red-lighted. From my SUV perch I can see an automatic paystation and a gate arm striped yellow and black. The guapita is nowhere to be seen. When the car shuts off automatically, there's a silence of quenched spark plugs.
 
The airport landscape becomes a still life of surveillance and paranoia. I turn up the fan on the climate control system until it sounds like it’s straining to sober the stupefying air. “What’s your plan now that your home Eli?” my father says.
 
Stomach acid shoots up to the back of my throat. This conversation is being regurgitated from two years ago when I left school. I wish that acid would come out and make a mess on the virgin leather.
 
“Work,” I say.
 
“What do you plan on doing?”
 
“Whatever I can do to save up money.”
 
“So you wanna do something that pays a lot in a short time?”
 
“If you’re talking about being a guinea pig for one of your gastro-intestinal drug trials, my duodenum is just fine.”
 
“The people who sign up for those rarely have a college education.”
 
My dilated pupils and swollen eyeballs make it unthinkable to look anywhere but through the windshield into nothing. “Where are you going to live while you work?” he asks.
 
“I’m living at home. Where’d you think I am?”
 
Out of my periphery vision his stare grates into me, but before I start to crumble he says to my mother, “Have you talked with him about what we were discussing?”
 
Through the rearview mirror it’s relieving to look into her hypnotized glassy eyes. “No, I was waiting for you,” she says.
 
“Eli, your mother and I both agree that we’ve spent quite a bit of money on an education that up to this point, you’ve thrown in the garbage. From our combined more than one-hundred years of living, we know that the only way you can be successful is to reach into that trash bin and fish it out.”
 
“We’re happy to help you do that,” she says. “But if you’re going to live with us and not go to school…” She’s fading.
 
“We think it’s appropriate for you contribute to household expenses,” my father says.
 
“You want me to pay the mortgage?”
 
“I think you should consider that living with us is like living anywhere else.”
 
“There’s no rent in the woods.”
 
“And board,” he says.
 
“Then I guess I have to sungaze.” ‘Woods’ slipped by, but I can’t believe I let out the ‘S’word.
 
“Have to what?”
 
“Eli thinks he can stare at the sun and live off fruit,” my mother says. “I’m willing to pay for his food as long he doesn’t sun gaze.”
 
“You wanna starve yourself so you don’t have to pay for food?”
 
I put the car in drive, but its hundreds of horses lay tame and it glides ahead one spot.
 
“Have you taken LSD?” he asks.
 
“Have you?” I reply.
 
“In college, I heard about kids sun gazing while on acid. I can almost understand that, except I’m sure they destroyed their retinas.”
 
“They were tripping, probably at noon, the hell you expect?”
 
“You brought back a twenty five-year old memory. I’ll never forget this. We admitted this man with a long history of bipolar disorder who admitted to sun gazing to ‘catch a ray of hope’.”
 
“I know you think I’m crazy, or depressed, or…just another one of your patients,” I say as my mother slides another pill down her throat. “I just don’t know why you need my money, unless mom went into debt to buy this…” I slap the steering wheel and the horn blows, “whatever. It’s like giving charity to Bill Gates, I won’t feel bad about not doing it.”
 
“Eli, we don’t want it to come down to that. Neither of us would want to--.”
 
“Kick me out? I’ll be gone before I let that happen.”
 
“As difficult as that is sweetie,” she murmurs, “I guess that’s what we’re trying to encourage you to do.”
 
“Maybe I’m wrong,” my father says, “but I think you’ll find it exceedingly difficult to save up enough money for your adventures with the kind of work you’ll be able to get, which will make you realize that you need to go back to school.”
 
“I’ll stay with friends.”
 
“Have you spoken with any of them since you’ve been back?” he asks.
 
The answer was ‘no’ but I couldn’t say it aloud. They had become googlites, graduate students, and engineers. In the last two years I had searched for Golden Headed quetzals, been educated by shamans whose powers have diminished due to receding Andean ice caps, and built a bridge from bamboo that I watched grow.
 
“I don’t think they’re going to appreciate you leeching off them for too long,” my father continues.
 
I thought of my Corps friends. None of them had any money either, except most of them seemed okay with taking over their father’s landscaping business or going into debt to listen to a professor drone on about economic liberalization under Pinochet. My mother succumbs to her drowsiness. We’re the next car in line. A parking sign reads “Up to 1/2 hour $3.00” “Up to 1 hour $6.00.” It’s 10:44.
 
“When did you get here?” he asks.
 
“10:17.”
 
He produces a money clip too stuffed for the magnets to attract and hands me three singles. A minute later the gate still hasn’t opened and the driver ahead pushes a button on the machine. The guapita comes out to help the driver.
 
My father sticks his head out of his window, “Is there any reason the other toll gate isn’t open?”
 
She gives no acknowledgment.
 
I repeat my father’s gesture and am scared that just by copying him she’ll ignore me. “Good evening Miss, would it be possible to open the other gate?” It’s the first time I’ve spoken Spanish since I’ve been back and already English coarseness has invaded my Spanish pronunciation.
 
She starts walking away.
 
“Excuse me ma’am,” Edward says.
 
She disappears from my view.
 
“Will you see what’s going on Eli?”
 
I see this as my chance to be wrapped up in her luxuriousness. However, when I grasp the door handle it’s as though its sculpted mahogany burl electroshocks my arm, my whole body, into the paralysis of embarrassment and timidity. When the adjacent tollbooth finally becomes green-lighted I follow its promise for escape. I feel like a mutated moth that is attracted to green instead of white light.
 
The paystation is a vending machine morphed with a bank vault. Like a corrupt cop, a little money and it’s supposed to let you free.
 
“The card is in mom’s purse,” I say.
 
My father yanks the Coach purse from her lap but she is conked out.
 
“How much did this cost Eli?
 
“More than my villagers make in a year.”
 
“Well I hope it lasts a long time.” He fumbles through the purse and finds the parking citation I just got.
 
“It would have been cheaper for me to take a cab home.”
 
“The cop was an asshole,” I say. He puts the bag in the backseat and hands me the mag-stripe card and I feed it into the machine. The LCD displays $6.00. It’s 10:58 P.M. I pray that the singles divide or transform from an image of Washington to Jefferson, but the machine drops no further than $3.00 after I put them in.
 
“Dad, I need three more bucks.”
 
“How come?”
 
“That’s what it says.”
 
“You just gave it three dollars.”
 
“Umm…I guess it ate the bills.”
 
“I’m not giving this place more money, not after this wait. Press the service button, will ya.”
 
“Whatever dad, its three bucks.” I look to the back seat at the Coach bag. The paystation however, has become a genie’s lamp.
 
I caress the button and it summons a voice. Its romantic accent purrs from the speaker grating. All I can manage to say is my one wish, for her to come over. The guapita fulfills it and stops in-between the machine and leans over to talk to me. I breathe in the vapors of her honeysuckle sweat that radiate off the canyon her bra deepens, ooze from the crevice where lipstick never leaves, and spew out of the depression of the birthright scar revealed by her crop top uniform. Tiny hair follicles permeate her cocoa skin and make her menacing like a porcupine, cuddly like a teddy bear, and so high on the volcanic explosivity index that I almost can’t help myself.
 
“Where are you from?” I say.
 
“Ecuador.”
 
“We gave the machine three dollars, but the gate didn’t open,” my father says. “Can you open it?”
 
“One moment please,” the guapita says.
 
She spins around to face the machine and a wave of her long hair ripples across the tip of my nose.
 
“I was just in Orellana, in the Amazon.”
 
“I hear the river is beautiful there. How long do you park sir?”
 
“No more than half an hour,” my father says.
 
“Escuse me, sir. Not more than thirty minutes,” he says. An infection begins to drip down my throat.
 
“Where’s your card?” she asks.
 
“Eli?”
 
“In the machine,” I say. She starts fiddling with it. “That looks pretty complicated to maintain,” I continue in Spanish.
 
“Given how long we’ve been waiting, I think we’re entitled to free parking,” my father says.
 
She swings around and stares past me, “Escuse me sir.”
 
“Free parking, you know like in Monopoly.”
 
She deliberately shakes her head.
 
“Why are you being mean to her dad, relax, will you?” I tell her in Spanish, “Monopoly is a board game, but sometimes my father thinks it is reality. He is a little crazy.” The guapita finally smiles. “When do you get off work?”
 
“Six,” she says.
 
The card ejects from the paystation. She turns back around and looks at it.
 
“If you want,” my Spanish tongue is loosening up, “I know a good breakfast place.”
 
“I usually go to sleep.” The muscles that have kept my neck out the window go limp. “The card say thirty-one minutes. It’s six dollars, sir.”
 
“Thirty-one minutes. One extra minute,” my father says. “Jesus Christ! That’s cause we were waiting for ten minutes.”
 
“Dad, you make six dollars in less than a minute. Is this really worth any more of your time? I think there are more important things like--”
 
“It’s the principle of the thing. I don’t charge patients for waiting room time, why should they charge us.”
 
“This is not a office. Please just give—.”
 
“Give what, we already paid.”
 
The infection pours down my throat into my gut. “Do you mind if I hang out here tonight?” I ask her. “I’m digging this airport scene, kind of reminds of Mariscal Sucre.”
 
“I’m sorry sir,” she says in incomprehension.
 
“I don’t know why you didn’t open the gate earlier,” my father says. “I think you should be responsible for the three dollars.” He makes no effort to hide the wad of cash.
 
“I’m sorry sir. I cannot do that.”
 
There is a man standing on the other side of the gate, wearing the same uniform, a yellow vest and white top, but without her cheerleader alterations.
 
“Then get your manager.”
 
“Escuse me one moment sir.”
 
She walks over to the other employee. I pore over each wink, each tilde that ricochets off her palate.
 
“What are they saying?” my father asks me.
 
I fish through my pockets, the only place my hands won’t cause trouble right now. Before she parts with the guy, he smooches her. The coins I dig up are as cold as the blood flowing through the organ that demanded I caress the service button in the first place.
 
“I’m sorry, but there is nothing I can do,” she says when she returns. “I cannot change the time or the machine.”
 
“Come on,” my father says. “Just open the gate.”
 
I turn around, grab the Coach bag, and first come across my mother’s pill bottle. It’s Xanax. The label says, -Take one tablet as needed -Do not use more than directed -- -Alcohol and sedatives may increase drowsiness –Be careful when driving a motor vehicle. I twist off the cap of her water bottle and smell gin. Her wallet isn’t in the bag, but I find a five-dollar bill, which I give to the parking attendant and toss the purse in the back.
 
“The machine has no change,” the parking attendant says.
 
“Fine, keep it,” I say. I put the car into drive.
 
She inserts the card and then the bill. The gate doesn’t move and the LCD screen now reads “$1.00.”
 
“One more dollar sir.”
 
“What? I told you we already put in three.”
 
“It asks for one more dollar.”
 
“You saw it before,” I say. “It said three dollars.”
 
“When you put in three dollars?”
 
“Right before you got here.”
 
“The machine has a program to reset after three minutes. It’s for security.”
 
“Security? When you were busy bullshitting over there with your boyfriend to bring you a Two Piece Chicken Meal at El Pollo Loco, is that what you call security?”
 
“Escuse me, I do not understand. There is nothing I can do--.”
 
“Nothing, c’mon, the machine reset because we were waiting for you.”
 
“You can talk with the manager for a refund tomorrow.”
 
I turn toward the last possible antidote, for the poison has spread all over my body. “Dad, gimme a dollar so we can get the hell outta here.”
 
My father stretches his torso across the car, toward the woman and pins me to the seat. “Lady, if you don’t open up that gate right now, I’m gonna have you fired and deported.”
 
His livid voice crawls back from my childhood and inflames the malignant infection until it blows up my insides.
 
A surge of gasoline throbs through my leg. The one more dollar I need is buried under a pile of money that has amputated my father’s soul. Border patrol and the cramped booth have confiscated the guapita’s verve for life, so to compensate, she has made the gate arm too heavy to open its sesame and flash its lights. All I have left is my lead foot and two tons of steel. They incite the thunder of the bumper to seize and then hurl the barricade into the vacuum created by its destruction. The whole world follows me into the vacuum, all the explorations of mountain wilderness, all the valleys of people, their dreams and their nightmares. Everything is trying to escape. Let me treasure the quetzals, the rivers, the guerillas and the motorcycles before they’re all gone, for our history began a long time ago on the opposite shore and it has spanned across land and sea to this side, but here and now the sun is sinking into the Pacific, which is too wide and too hurt for us to fathom and all the creation it has nurtured is going to drown, so rejoice in the breath of life before it’s too late.