American Innovations: Stories (14 page)

“The name is Manuel Macheko?” I confirmed quietly with the man on my right.

“Yes, yes, Manuel Macheko,” he repeated.

Up close, this Macheko was an unusually short, ugly, and joyous-looking man. I didn’t recognize him. But I had never met the father of the young Macheko. This Mexican Macheko was not as dark as the young Macheko. I couldn’t securely assign any ethnicity to the man there before me, though I can reliably say that I wouldn’t have not believed the man in front of me was native Mexican—probably mestizo—nor would I have not believed that he was Persian. All I had as a compare was a fallible memory of the cover of the Machekan correspondence book, in which the author had appeared as an inked cartoon sketch of a man with a small mustache, sitting at a typewriter with an unfurling paper scroll upon which could be made out the names of well-knowns. Not very pathognomonic. And why had I never before wondered why a Persian man had taken a Hispanic pseudonym?

“To see him alive is always like a miracle,” Annalise whispered into my ear. Macheko was standing and shouting at the little television with a raised fist. The coach of the Mexican team is a Communist! He only plays the old broken-down players! He’s punishing the young stars for their big contracts in Europe! Mexico would never go far with this asshole making decisions! Then, fatigued, Macheko sat down. I couldn’t tell if he was familiar with the result of the game or not. The musicians came by. He tipped them well and requested what proved to be a very short song. A candy vendor came by; Macheko bought a pack of mint gum from him, offered it around the table, then put it in his pocket, having taken none. In a more rapid Spanish than usual, which I couldn’t follow so well, Annalise introduced Macheko to me. She called me a brilliant journalist, I think. Macheko kissed my face several times.

I wanted to ask him if he had ever taught at the University of Oklahoma or if he had a son who played trumpet. Alice, however, did not want to ask. And I was Alice.

Macheko ordered a round of beers for the table, each one of which again came with a shot of tequila. He was reilluminated as he spoke to me. There was some notion in the air that I could be of tremendous help, though again I couldn’t really follow; the cantina had only become noisier and more crowded. Macheko had written an account about a headless something? Why it hadn’t yet been translated into English was just for some fucking reason and because people were cowards?

I said: Didn’t you write some sort of set of letters? Letters in English?

He simultaneously ignored me and kept speaking to me. He could do the English translation himself! They wouldn’t even have to pay a translator! Fuck his other projects, this was his most important work! Macheko’s Spanish sounded less Mexican, more something else that I couldn’t place, but I’m not in truth so very good at placing accents. I once asked Germans if they were Canadians. We were interrupted by a man wearing what looked like an accordion connected to what looked like two ends of jump rope with metal handles. Macheko talked the man down from thirty to twenty pesos. Then he stood up, took hold of the handles, and flexed his upper body in what appeared to be agony. This went on for what seemed to me like a long time, though probably it was less than ten seconds. The contraption was an electric shock machine. Macheko declared he felt much more awake now, much better.

“Take, take, you’re welcome to it,” Macheko then said, bringing out handfuls of little plastic bags of white powder and throwing them onto the table. “It’s also a good way to wake up.” He left the bags there as he headed to saloon-doored bathrooms in the back.

A man on my right explained to me that Mexico City had very clean, very inexpensive cocaine because everything passed through there, did I know that?

Upon his return, Macheko said to me that it was so wonderful that I was in Mexico, that I was obviously a good woman.

I did feel that he was staring at me with a kind of intimacy that exceeded the situation. Maybe he stared at me with recognition. Or with a desire to be recognized? Could he see my father’s face in mine? Maybe his look was a petition of some sort. A cry for help?

Then he said he had to go, and he was gone.

*   *   *

I stayed on awhile, past the end of the replay of the soccer game. You have to help him, Annalise said. He has a metal plate in his head. Another table member nodded in agreement. It was communicated to me that Macheko was the guy who had investigated those hundreds of murders of women in Juárez. Who else had the courage to do that? He was the guy who said to Monkey Vice: It’s not a serial killer. Not a serial killer, but part of the sick culture there. It was from him that Bolaño took the famous line in his novel, the one where the woman says,
“¡No somos putas, somos obreras!”
We’re not whores, we’re workers! Someone said there were narco kids who thought it was a laugh, or maybe it was an initiation, to shoot a woman in the head while fucking her in the ass, for a special sensation. It needed to be widely known. The metal plate was mentioned again. It was something to do with some time when Macheko was beaten to the edge of his life, left for dead.

I knew it was wrong that I judged these people, mostly negatively, for being both fashionable and emanating flashily unflashy wealth and being interested in “real” life—but it was also real!—in this way; Macheko, the trumpeter and debater, was telling me across the years that there was no place for judgment, not of any kind. Is Macheko from around here? I asked. Oh, he had lived everywhere. He had even lived in Texas, someone said, but something had gone wrong with his green card. Macheko had a secret hideout in his home; the hideout was wall-to-wall books; it could be the home of Edward Said, that was the quality of the books; you could live there for a hundred years. He does so much work! He won’t survive if he stays here. Eventually they’ll decide to get him. You can help him, I was being told. You’re the one who can. You’ll bring attention to him. Then he’ll get his work published in English. They’ll celebrate him as a hero; they’ll give him a job and a green card and everything. That was the power of those American magazines. They already love Bolaño in America. They respect Monkey Vice. You should go north with him. You can report on his reporting. It can definitely work. Alice, you can make this happen.

Alice said, Yes, you’re right. It’s important, I’ll do whatever I can.

*   *   *

Back in my plain-walled Mexican room, I tried to search for the person I had encountered. My initial Internet searching yielded no Machekos teaching in a chemical engineering department, which was the department from which the corresponder had been fired. I did find a soccer player with the name. Also an empty LinkedIn profile. Not only am I an ineffective Internet searcher, but clicking through a few pages on the Internet makes me feel as if I haven’t slept for days. My husband is immeasurably better at such things.

It was three o’clock in the morning. I called him.

To my joy and surprise, he answered.

I explained about the original Macheko book. Then I described, in a limited way, this other Macheko—some Mexican journalist, I said.

“I’m looking,” he said. My husband couldn’t find Macheko books of any kind. But then, no, he found a copy of the self-published correspondence book on a used books site. It was listed for ninety-one dollars.

I asked if there weren’t any other books by the same writer? Or a writer with a similarly spelled name? Had he looked, specifically, for books written in Spanish as well?

“Don’t you think,” my husband said, “that this being what makes you pick up the phone is a little bizarre? You basically vanish, you don’t explain yourself, we don’t know when you’re coming back, and then, when you do call—”

I thought for a moment to ask after our daughter at that point, but I knew that would just seem defensive, probably even be defensive, seeing as I felt pretty sure about how she was doing; children, I remember this from my own experience, are, I think, very resilient and flexible, and one shouldn’t let people tell one otherwise.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I guess I panicked.”

“It’s not just me you should talk to,” he said.

“I get it,” I said.

“You must get it and then forget it.”

“I can only panic so many times. It’s not fair to you.”

“It’s not really about fair or not fair. I need you. I really do. But eventually my body will figure it out, that it’s no good to need you, and then I won’t need you anymore. It’ll be like a terrible cure.”

I didn’t have anything to say to that.

After some quiet, maybe with or without shuffling, he said, “You know what I can do for you? I can contact the seller. There’s a way to do that. Who knows, maybe pz21147 can answer all your questions. Do you want me to contact him?”

I said that yes, I would really appreciate that. I said, “They have this thing here, these orange slices that they serve with paprika; it’s really tasty; I’ll prepare it for you when I come back.”

“I’m tired,” he said.

One of the more frustrating traits of my husband was how well he understood me. I had long thought of Macheko as someone seeking contact. But maybe not. Maybe those letters were part of building a hermitage. Maybe Macheko wrote to glittering strangers not with the unreasonable hope that they would see and know him but, rather, with the really quite reasonable hope that he would make contact with people who would almost certainly
not
know or truly see him, even if they did respond. I understand how that might appeal. I remember when I discovered that my father had kept secret from us years of working at a campus suicide hotline. He was always late coming home on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and one day I saw his car parked and went and investigated. I kept his secret a secret. I accustomed myself to the idea of my dad’s listening to girls at slumber parties prank calling, and to lonelies who had lost jobs and lovers, and to those energetic people who must have abused him as heartless if he suggested that they visit an emergency room or accept an appointment to see a therapist the next day. I later also learned that my dad offered free tax advice for the poor in a booth set up every spring outside the Wal-Mart. He helped get green cards for students from China who really had no relationship to his field. I had known none of this. After he died, I found among his papers all sorts of elaborate thank-you letters he had received. Also a grievance list, by him, of ways he had been misunderstood and underappreciated by us, his family. Most of his complaints seemed valid; we had criticized him for eating more than his share of a bowl of almonds set out as a snack at a neighbor’s dinner, for example. In person, my dad could barely make eye contact, and took his dinner while watching PBS at high volume in the living room. But I remember going to the Denny’s with him once and the waitress there calling him by his first name and putting unasked-for whipped cream and strawberry sauce on my waffle. The approval and gratitude of near-strangers can be a kind of drug; or maybe it’s fair to use the term “medicine.”

Anyhow, there were four more days of Annalise and her crowd. Annalise had a sick mother to support. The architecture student confessed to a fear of being kidnapped a second time. Macheko did not re-surface; no one was sure of his whereabouts. Maybe he had gone back north. Alice eventually flew back home and was not heard from again. I judged her, but I also told myself that I shouldn’t judge; I said to myself that Macheko’s friends could put together a Wikipedia page for him on their own, if attention was what was needed. I continued with my more objective researches. Pz21147 turned out to be a bookseller in Springfield, Missouri, whose books were priced by an algorithm, and who knew nothing about the origins of his copy of
The Collected Correspondence
.

*   *   *

About a year after the Mexico episode, I learned something of the fate of the original young Macheko. The wife of a colleague of mine met him. In fact, she worked under him. Young Macheko, it turned out, had gone to graduate school in music at Juilliard. For trumpet. He had married a woman who sang opera; on weekends he rode long distances on his motorcycle; he was the energetic new dean of the arts at the university where this wife of my colleague taught.

These were happy-sounding details; I recognized young Macheko’s metabolism in them even if the particulars surprised me. “He’s a great guy,” I was told. “He’s one of those makes-things-happen people. Maybe a little Teflon-y, sure, like you never feel like you can make genuine contact. But fun. And generous. He says to say hi. I told him maybe we could all get together. He was a little weird about that. He told me an interesting story, though.”

In the eleventh grade the English classes at our high school spent three weeks studying Ralph Ellison’s
Invisible Man
. Ellison is said to have been aloof toward aspiring black artists and intellectuals, and to have been charming with and beloved among whites. That’s what they say. Ellison was from Oklahoma, from a town not far from where Macheko and I grew up. Ellison’s father worked delivering ice, and died from a work accident—impaled on a cleaved ice shard—when Ellison was just three. His mother then worked a miscellany of jobs, of which little Ellison was ashamed. The “battle royal” scene near the opening of
Invisible Man
, in which the young black boys are set up to fight one another blindfolded in order to entertain a gathering of white community leaders who are giving them small scholarships, is roughly autobiographical. At eighteen Ellison jumped a freight train to Alabama to attend Tuskegee University, where he was a music major and played trumpet. In later life Ellison became nostalgic for his home state. Turn of the century Oklahoma—Ellison’s Oklahoma—had at least twenty-eight all-black towns, with their own newspapers and schools, and many of those communities were prosperous. Those towns have since vanished; when a book of Oklahoma ghost towns was put out, those towns were absent even from that book. Shortly before Ralph Ellison himself died, young Macheko, having just studied
Invisible Man
, went to the public library, took out a New York City phone book, and found a listing for “Ellison, R.” He called. A woman answered. The sixteen-year-old asked to speak with Mr. Ellison. She said to hold on a moment. Macheko and Ellison then spoke for more than two hours. About all the things they had in common.