A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism (21 page)

"
Weird?
" She shook her head, admonishing him for this lack of verbal specificity that she had been endeavoring to rid him of.

He thought it over, tried to find a better way of saying it. He had a sip of wine. "They're eager to seem white, for one thing."

She shook her head lazily, in the way she did when she had hoped he'd be more interesting. She said, "Aren't you too?"

"What? Eager to seem white?"

"Yes."

He laughed. "I
am
more or less white," he said.

"You look maybe seventy-five percent white," she said, shrugging. She was prodding him now. "Eighty percent? Do you think that white people, when they meet you, round up?"

He sighed noisily, as if she were just being silly now.

"Well, it's probably easy for you to scoff at them," she said, "but you don't know what it's like to live here. People, you know, they come
down
here. You hear that? What's the operative word?"

He groaned. "Down," he recited, rolling his eyes. He'd heard this one before. He'd grown up with a world map on the wall of the kitchen that was "upside down," with the South Pole above the North Pole, because, of course, the universe did not actually have a top or bottom, so neither would the planet. The map was also a Peters projection, which, unlike the more common Mercator projection, did not distort the world horizontally and enlarge the Northern Hemisphere. In the Peters, which was slightly more accurate than the Mercator and which was stretched more vertically, South America was enormous, steamrolled long and narrow, while Greenland, that frosty behemoth in the Mercator, was
petite.

"What if you had grown up here?" she said. She was working him into the kill zone. He had to evade or fight back, but he'd never done well fighting back with her.

So he went for something between honesty and humor and said, "If I'd grown up here, I guess I'd be like the cousins: Drakkar Noir cologne, shiny black shoes, designer jeans, and"—he winked at her cheesily and popped his hip—"a lot of salsa."

She laughed, threw her arm around his shoulder, grabbed the scruff of his neck, and shook him firmly. He knew he had said something very good that time. Still smiling, she said, "Is that really what you think of them?"

He shook his head. "C'mon, Mom, have you
met
them?"

She laughed again, shaking her head.

When Gabriel arrived at the Lookout, he recognized no one. Fiona was not there yet, so he made his way to the bar. Severo poured him a Pisco Sour de Señorita Fiona as soon as he sat down, and Gabriel thanked him, aware that Severo was staring. The nurse had unceremoniously, if effectively, affixed a huge piece of gauze to the ear with a couple of yards of white medical tape. It looked bizarre, like an enormous homemade earmuff. Underneath it, his face was swollen and bruised, several puncture wounds had been sewn up with black sutures. His ear had been more or less ripped in half horizontally. They had sewn it back together with black sutures, which now looked like tiny crushed spiders in the moist red lesion.

"What happened to you?" Severo waved a hand around his own face.

"An accident," he said.

Which was true, in a sense, but so much seemed accidental or arbitrary. Of the many overly simple assumptions built into economics, the most egregious, as Gabriel saw it, was the idea that individuals were rational and aware of the costs and benefits of their decisions. It simplified the mathematics but could not allow for reality's madness. All the integers were shimmering, skewed in ways no one could comprehend.

Fiona entered and crossed the room briskly, stopping to greet a table of journalists on her way. When she sat down beside him, she said, "Yuck."

He didn't say anything.

"That's dynamite?" she said.

"Sort of." He didn't feel like talking about it with her. He didn't feel like dealing with her reaction. "So, how did your meeting with Evo go?"

"What did you say?"

"What did I say?"

"Yeah, what did you say?" she repeated. Severo put a cocktail in front of her.

"I said, what happened with Evo?"

She slapped her hand on the bar and laughed a bit too hard. "Wow!"

He looked away from her. This wasn't starting well. He'd known it might get messy, but he hadn't expected her to get punchy so quickly.

"Well, that's my Gabriel!" She patted him on the back, very friendly, very sarcastic. "He may be wounded, but his focus is laser sharp!"

He wasn't sure how best to proceed. It would be fruitless to backtrack, since he planned to break it off with her anyway. The best way forward, the only way, was to plow ahead with cold honesty. "Fiona, I have to ask—"

"Right, right, right, right, okay, I know, my little darling. It's fine, please don't get sensitive. Really, of all things:
sensitivity?
It doesn't suit you, Gabriel." She lit a cigarette. "The truth is that I didn't get anything for you. It slipped my mind. Sorry! Maybe next time. No, actually, I won't. I don't know why I'd ask something on your behalf."

"Fair enough," he said.

"No—really,
why
would I?" She put the cigarette down. It smelled good. Gabriel had never liked the smell of cigarettes before, but he liked it that night. Normally, it was as though he could smell the poison in the smoke, but that night it smelled soothing, satisfying.

"I don't know," he said. "You might ask something on my behalf because maybe, one day, you'll want something from me."

"I would have laughed at this a month ago," she said. "Now, I don't know." She tapped her cigarette firmly, had a drag, looked around. "With you—I wouldn't be surprised if I did end up asking you for a favor one day."

"Okay. Is that it?" he said.

She shook her head, had another drag. She seemed keyed up, pugilistic, and he wanted to be away from her. "What is your problem?" he said.

"What happened to your subtlety, Gabriel? Everything is so—since you met Lenka, you've been just ignoring me. That's fine, but it's blunt. And now
this?
"

He hadn't realized she'd expected to hear from him. "Look," he said, hurrying after this opportunity to transition to the more unpleasant business at hand, "I have to tell you that this—" He shook his head, hoping that she would anticipate his direction and settle down.

"Wow!" she said, not settling down. She put her cigarette in the ashtray, ran her fingers through her hair. "If this is how you treat friends—" She stopped.

"I'm sorry if it seems blunt, Fiona, but I had bone fragments blown into my face yesterday, and I don't want to act out some verbal tango with you tonight. I don't want to joust it out. And I'm not going to snort a couple lines, make nice, and then let this slip later. You want the truth. This is the truth. I'm sorry, but I can't do it anymore. I've got a girlfriend here, and things in my life are a little crazy right now, so"—he shook his head—"and they've got me on these pills, so I'm pretty—" He stopped and looked down at his cocktail.

"Okay. That's fair enough. I'll chalk this up to your injury and your medicine," she said.

He glanced at her, unsure of what she meant by that. "Look," he said, "I accept that I could have handled this better, but the message remains the same. I'm sorry, but I'm serious."

"Oh, I know you're serious, Gabriel, please don't feel like you have to reiterate that." She had a drag, glared directly into his eyes. Her face was pinched. He hadn't realized that she cared about him. Not that it was the first time he'd missed such a signal. The way women cared for him, it was easy to miss the message. He had no idea why, but their affection was forever cloaked in a veil of indifference.

"Are we done here?" she said.

He nodded.

"Good," she said. She gestured to Severo for her check.

"I don't want to hurt your feelings," he said.

She leaned in and, with her breath warm on his ear, whispered, "I get it, Gabriel: you don't want to fuck me anymore because you're fucking some woman who's something more useful for you. That's fine. I get
that,
believe me. We all have that day at some point, and maybe it's kind of shocking to you at first, but I promise, Gabriel, it's completely normal. The thing you've got to realize is that this is just a sea of bullshit—I'm bullshit, you're bullshit, and even she's bullshit—we're all full of bullshit and we're all swimming in bullshit."

"I get that," he said, staring at his cocktail again.

She leaned back and looked at him. "Yeah, good. There you go. There's the bullshit. And don't worry, by the way, it wasn't special for me either." Severo brought her the check and she stood up. She patted him on the shoulder hard, like he was a good chum, then she bent down and signed the check. "My treat, " she said.

He nodded, glanced at her.

She drained her cocktail. "And, by the way: merry Christmas." She walked away, leaving her cigarette burning in the ashtray.

Gabriel took a deep breath. He hadn't been told off in years and it was an alarming experience. It took a moment for the warmth to drain from his face.

He glanced at the cigarette. It smelled good at the Lookout that night, so he lifted it and had a drag. The smoke scorched his lungs and they seized. He stifled a cough, exhaled slowly. The smoke scraped his throat. His bronchi tingled as the nicotine slipped through the unblemished membranes. He downed the rest of his pisco sour, took another short drag, and then stubbed the cigarette out ineptly, so it broke in half and continued to smolder. Then he stood up quickly and waited for the dizziness to overcome him. It didn't take long.

He wound up in Plaza San Francisco later that night, plumb drunk. There had been other bars. He'd flirted for a while with a startlingly attractive Bolivian woman, who'd been pleased with things all in all, as she should have been. She flirted in a Catholic way, leading him on. She wanted to see his wounds and he let her peek under the bandage. She clearly had no intention of sleeping with him, and he couldn't have faced her by the light of day. The problem was her joy. He'd have relished that joy a couple years ago, but now he wouldn't have known what to do with it.

Later, he stumbled along the lines of low-wattage light bulbs that hung on black wires between vendors' booths in Plaza San Francisco. In the plaza, the smell of stewing chicken intermingled with the heavy odor of frying pork and boiling corn and grilling river fish. It was revolting, delicious, and he wanted to hug someone. It was Christmas Eve!

Weaving around the thicket of pedestrians, angry with them for being so plentiful, so in his way and in one another's way, he found that he wanted to levitate above them all, wreathed in flames, and dish out Old Testament wrath on them: pulverize the bodies and turn the moist pulp into pale ash.

"This is depressing," he said in English to a man with a coppery face who was also visibly drunk and who was trying to sell blue and pink balls of cotton candy. The cotton candy was threaded, puffy and pastel, on a white lance twice as tall as the man himself. The cotton candy man didn't hear Gabriel and wouldn't have understood anyway. Gabriel nodded firmly at him. "I'm sorry," he said, again in English, and trundled along.

Well, was it Christmas? Yes. It was Christmas. It had been Christmas Eve before, and now it was after midnight, so it was Christmas.

Gabriel's face hurt, despite his steady ingestion of Percocet. There was a war of attrition under way between his pain on one side and his painkillers on the other. He retrieved the bottle of pills from his pocket and popped another. Too huge to dry-swallow easily, the pill got lodged halfway down his esophagus. His throat muscles churned, trying to massage it downward. There was no bottled water nearby, none that he trusted, so he tried to work up some saliva. He stood there amid all those warm bodies, smelling their breath and feeling their thick muscles brush against him, focusing on the pill. At last it settled in an esophageal nook just above his stomach. Close enough. It'd get there eventually.

He shook his head and thought about what would have happened if he'd choked. Would anyone have noticed? Maybe, and maybe not. He might have lain there dead, his maimed face locked in breathless surprise, while Bolivians wandered around, stepping over him.

In front of him, the centuries-old church of San Francisco was grand, the color of parched bones, terrible against the sky. If divinity did exist above, he might be seeing it now. La Paz was so high it might have punctured the purplish sheet hiding the heavens, and now he was seeing the real thing, a hollow chasm, all limpid negative space. The depth of the space, up there; it began to make sense. There was nothing. Up there, he saw an
infinity
of nothing.

A crudely drawn sign indicated that midnight Mass was under way inside the cathedral. Gabriel pulled out his phone, checked the time—it was 12:33; he had missed thirty-three minutes of midnight Mass. The church had been designed by missionaries in the 1600s for the purpose of luring nonbelieving heathens into the fold, which explained why it was decorated with such a curious hodgepodge of Catholic and Inca iconography, including images of the goddess Pachamama carved into the exterior walls. He saw flourishes from Tiahuanaco side by side with details borrowed from the Almudena Cathedral.

Gabriel bought a cigarette from a young boy, lit it, and had two puffs as he walked up to the giant doors, but it didn't taste that good, so he flicked it away. He entered as the beginnings of a headache started at the back of his brain.

He stumbled up the narrow stairs that cycloned up beside the door to the small balcony at the rear. It was not so crowded up there. A small wooden cot had been planted, awkwardly, by the top of the banister. A plaque above it explained that it was where a certain infirm monk used to lie in the 1700s in order to hear the day's Mass. Gabriel stood at the banister beside a transvestite, who was kneeling, pinching and twisting her rosary ardently. Below, at the far end of the great yawning nave, a broad-shouldered Franciscan monk with a long white beard and long white hair, light alb, and flowing white chasuble stood with the Eucharist, chanting. He had a thin leather band wrapped around his head. He didn't look like anything Gabriel would have expected from a priest, to say nothing of a monk. He looked like an extra in a movie about the life and times of Christ.