Luck and Death at the Edge of the World, the Official Pirate Edition (20 page)

“Constructively?  Buddy, are you sure you don’t use pharmaceuticals?”

“My name’s David, not Buddy” he said, grinning at me, as if we were just two normal people talking about normal things.  “It was the most terrible time in your life, right?”

“Yes, absolutely.”

He leaned over a little.

“Ask yourself this: do you 
really
 think it’s the worst time in 
anybody
’s life 
ever
?  Do you 
really
 believe that there’s never, ever, in the whole world, been more cruelty and more sadism and more suffering than in Tijuana?”

I hadn’t looked at it in that context before.

“No, there’s probably been worse somewhere, sometime.”

David was emphatic.

“A 
thousand
 times, over and over, all through history, and those people found a way to live with it—at least some of them did.  And the ones who did, taught others.”

I thought I caught a whiff of where this was going.

“Look, I’m not big on religion.”

“Religion?  Pshhh.” He laughed. “Look, I have a dharma practice, that’s a meditation practice that’s rooted in Buddhism, but the way I come at it is entirely secular.”  He waved a hand in the air, as if he was warding something off.  “I’m totally agnostic on the question of anything mystical—I just put all that stuff to one side.  This guy Siddhartha Gautama, who some people call Buddha, I think he was a thoughtful man who came up with a very sensible way of examining yourself and your relationship with the rest of the world.  But he did it at a time when the normal way to talk about things like that was in spiritual terms, religious terms.”

“So you just casually gut Buddhism of all its religious content?”

“No, if people want that, that’s fine, but it’s not essential.  In the Kalama Sutta, Gautama warns against believing in dogmas, and that includes dogmas based on what 
he
 said.  Some traditional Buddhists will disagree with me, but the way I read it he says that you should assess any proposition, any system of thought, in light of your own experience.  
Then
 you decide whether to accept it or not.  That just makes sense.”

I was still skeptical, but looking at David, who’d actually been where I’d been, and who seemed to have recovered so much more of his sanity than I had, I thought I’d better keep an open mind.  We talked about it for the remainder of the trip.

David was staying with his girlfriend, who lived in Mexico City.  She met us at the airport and they offered to give me a ride to my hotel, but I didn’t want to intrude so I sent them on their way and took a cab to the San Marino Suites, where I had a reservation.

It was night by the time I got there.  After checking in, I crossed the road and bought a bottle of tequila in the corner store and some street food at a stall.  On impulse I went back to the store and bought a couple of packs of Faro cigarettes and a lighter.  I don’t usually smoke, but it was going to be that kind of night.

My room was on the third floor and didn’t have a balcony.  I opened the large sliding window and pushed the dining table over next to it, pulling a chair after me.  I sat down, put my feet on the table, leaned back, and uncapped the tequila.  After a swig or two I lit a Faro, looking out at the city, listening to the traffic and the people walking by below.

I sat and drank and thought about what David had said.  Practicing meditation wasn't going to come naturally for me, no matter how secular it was supposed to be.  At the same time, I really couldn’t continue the way I was.  I decided to try it for a month, once a day.  I toasted Siddhartha Gautama and spent the next few hours killing the bottle.

The next day, David arrived at my door around noon to take me to meet some other vets who were part of an informal group of godless meditators that met on Saturdays.  After some orange juice from room service we set out on a meandering route heading southwest, crossing La Reforma and passing the Ángel de la Independencia, winding our way to the Cantina Nuevo León.  That section of the city has always been heavily policed to protect the staff at the banks and embassies along the Reforma, so unlike in some neighbourhoods we could relax and move pretty freely.

“This place has been a meeting spot for expats for over two hundred years,” David said when we arrived, pulling the door open.  “Even before there was an Empire.  Most of them come in the evening, the journalists and so on, but we usually show up earlier.”

I followed him in.  The coolness was refreshing.  Waiters dressed formally in black pants and vests, with crisp white shirts and black bow ties, served drinks and food to two groups of customers at tables draped in peach-colored tablecloths.

The first group consisted of three well-dressed men speaking in quick, colloquial Spanish, drinking beer while keeping an eye on a soccer game on the holo.  Definitely not our people.

The second was a motley bunch mostly dressed in guayabera shirts and Forces fatigue pants.  They were circulating a large bottle of tequila, doing shots.

“Aren’t you guys supposed to give up intoxicants?” I asked David as we approached.

“Ideally, sure.”  He shrugged.  “But we’re not monks, gringo.”

“Gringo?  Since when are you 
not
 a gringo?”

“Amigos!” David called to the others, who looked up.

There was a chorus of hellos.

“Hey David,” said a young guy with wispy facial hair and a hesitant smile.

“Hey Miller, you okay?”  David put his hand on Miller’s head, the way you might do with a nephew.

“I’m all right,” he said, nodding, but he looked a little delicate to me.

“So guys, my friend Gat here just asked me why I’m not a gringo anymore.”

At this the entire table erupted in cheers and applause.  Miller stood up and shook David’s hand, then quickly sat down again as several of the others got to their feet and wrapped David in big bear hugs.

“I’m a little lost,” I said to no one in particular.

Miller spoke up, blushing for some reason.

“It means that Nieve said yes,” he said.  “They’re getting married.”

“That’s right gringo,” David said, finishing with the hugs and turning my way.  “You’re going home alone, my friend.  I’m staying right here.”

A blonde woman in dark military shades sidled up to him playfully.

“Too late to change your mind, Halldórsson?” she asked.

“Keep your hands to yourself French,” he said, grinning.  “Your boyfriend will have my guts for garters.”

A well-dressed Mexican guy who had remained sitting at the table grinned and made a gun of his forefinger, miming a killshot.

We all sat down and began an afternoon of serious drinking.

I don’t remember everything we talked about.  I do remember that people opened up more as they got drunker.

Hutch, a Black guy who’d served in the Texas forces, had been honorably discharged after five years of service, but he’d alienated his family with his foul moods and waking nightmares before fleeing across the border, as though maybe his demons couldn’t follow him. They did, but he also found some people like himself and slowly started to pull himself together.

Veronica had been in the Cali forces.  She hadn’t been in Tijuana, but she’d helped put down the San Diego uprising, as I had.  After admitting that much, though, she refused to say anything more about it.  Now she was permanent here:  Mexican boyfriend, passable Spanish, forged identity documents. She was never going back.

Miller, the blushing guy, was also from Cali, and he 
had
 been in Tijuana.   He talked about it a little, in his quiet way, detailing atrocities on a par with anything I’d seen, most of which he’d been part of.  He blushed about this, too, as though slaughtering people had been bad manners.  I could tell that underneath the surface he knew exactly what he’d done—the meaning and magnitude of each thing—but his time in the Forces had scrambled his outward reactions.

We stayed until late that night and others came and went, but I drank too much to remember their names and most of what we talked about.  Eventually David and I stumbled into a cab and went to Nieve’s, where I passed out on the sofa.

I was tempted to stay in Mexico—I might have made a place for myself in that makeshift family, that sangha—but I couldn’t do it.  I had a goal and I couldn’t reach it living there.

The thing I needed most in life was to avoid dying again for as long as I could, preferably forever.  For that I needed money, and the money was in Cali.  And as it turned out I had already been given the one indispensible thing that David and his crew could offer me anyway: a mechanism for grounding myself, for getting some control over my nightmares.  Not completely, but enough to be able to execute the rest of my plan.

That was three years ago.  As my plane approaches Mexico City, I think about finding David and the others, but I’m not sure I want to.  He was exactly the right person to meet at that moment in my life, but the moment has passed and it seems better to leave things the way they are.  Besides, I have an appointment to keep and no real idea where it will lead me.

The Mexico International Airport lies to the east of Mexico City proper but within the 
Distrito Federal
, in an area where cheap land prices allowed the developers to maximize their bottom line. Bright and sparkling clean, it is avidly policed by guards in khaki whose primary mandate is to ensure that no tourist is harassed, accosted, or even approached by a Mexican, unless it is one of the legion of licensed porters and other aides. Everyone is either a tourist or in a uniform.

The airport is surrounded by a cocoon of luxury hotels and beyond that by razor wire. The towers rise high into a perfect blue sky, each one painted adobe white, the only color permitted by the Independent Airport Authority. There’s no beach since Mexico City is landlocked, but everywhere you look in this village of hotels the impossible turquoise of the tropical ocean is reproduced in swimming pools that glitter in the sunshine. Here there is no crime, no begging, no trouble. It is here that conventions and international meetings are often held, business men and women relaxing in the ample, air-conditioned boardrooms.

If you want to enter the city itself, you can rent a car, but you will more likely take a taxi or one of the reliable, timely shuttle buses. In any event, your vehicle will leave by the only route available: an elevated highway that leads directly to a similar cluster of hotels downtown, with no off-ramps along the way. Ostensibly the reason for a raised highway is to allow tourists to travel quickly into the heart of the city without being bothered by traffic. In reality it has a second goal, which is to prevent any non-Mexican from seeing the slums that form a ring outside the cluster of airport hotels. Beyond the airport grounds the only electricity is pirated and there is no running water. The sewer system is unreliable and regularly floods into the streets. The streets themselves are mostly unpaved, alternately baked hard in the sun and turned to muck by the rain.

Vicente Suarez’s headquarters, the home of the 
Suerte
, is in an area called 
Paraíso Perdido
—the lost paradise, and it’s located in these slums. Originally the name had applied to a government-planned community that was built to house a large population of squatters who were forcibly removed from dangerous, earthquake-damaged buildings downtown, ostensibly for their own protection. The overblown poetry of the title was supposed to suggest Shangri-La, or Eden, or some such thing. It was to be a place of refuge where the poor could at last find peace.

The grand plan foundered for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that the government’s real intention had simply been to vacate valuable downtown land upon which the poor were inconveniently situated. The model community was deliberately placed in the area just outside the airport, already a slum. The community was built cheaply and, once built, was abandoned to its own devices. There was no follow-up, no funding for maintenance, no employment for the residents, nothing. The buildings soon deteriorated and the slum reasserted itself, growing up through the cracked pavement like an unkillable weed.

Soon the area was as poor and crime-ridden as the surrounding neighborhoods. Those with a literary bent took to calling it not just 
Paraíso Perdido
, but 
El Paraíso Perdido
. Adding that one small “el” turns it into the Spanish title of “Paradise Lost,” Milton’s classic tale of Lucifer’s fall from heaven into hell. It was an appropriate bit of black humor that took hold, but was eventually abbreviated. Now almost everyone simply calls it 
El Paraíso
. The obvious irony of referring to this bleak area as “the paradise” wore off a long time ago and now 
El Paraíso
 is simply a name, nothing more.

Even though my destination is less than three kilometers from the airport, I can’t get there directly. I take a shuttle bus from the hotel along the obligatory path to the downtown cluster of hotels. Once off the bus, I wander away from the hotels and into the streets. A boy of ten or eleven is doing a fire-eating act, much to the delight of some gringos, who throw money into his hat. There are stalls selling sim decks and bootleg recordings, underwear, folksy blankets and pottery, roast corn, T-shirts, and a thousand other things. The prices are cheap and so is the quality. As I get farther from the hotel, there are prostitutes, mostly young, some vaguely pretty, some just forlorn. All of them smile and try to talk to me—a lone gringo is potentially a big score. I smile and pretend not to understand what they’re talking about. One girl lifts up her shirt and flashes her breasts at me to make sure I get the message, but I move on anyway.

Once away from the hotel I find a cab and climb in. I take the headpiece for my kaikki from my pocket, unfold it, and slip it on, fitting the earpiece into my right ear and adjusting the mic so it’s an inch or so in front of my mouth. I activate the translation program and direct the driver to begin backtracking toward the area of the airport but not to the airport itself.