“It isn’t already?” Miranda shook her head. “Okay, just give me a few minutes.”
She explored the grove, savoring the mesmerizing intricacy of tessellated life. This moment. No, this one. This one. Each was a seed she would plant in prose, in the all-too-likely-vain hope that they might sprout and produce fruit of their own, pollinated by readers. She would walk a razor’s edge. People were born. People had a succession of sensory experiences. People died. All the highs and lows and angst of life was nothing but an extended effort of wrangling meaning from step two. That’s why art was dangerous. It was beautiful, it felt true. But the universe didn’t conform to what humans found convenient to feel to be true. The universe was the universe. In trying to divine its secrets, humans projected themselves onto systems that transcended them. When DeLillo’s astronaut gazed back at Earth, he saw himself reflected in it. How to inspire people to look beyond themselves and their petty squabbles, to see the beauty in the vascular patterns of this leaf, hear the music in the pitter patter of rain, imagine the dazzling scale of the cosmos and the quantum extending infinitely in more directions than there were words for?
“Doña León?” Gilberto’s tentative voice intruded on her reverie, and she followed it back to the present as Theseus did his string out of the Minotaur’s lair.
“Yes, of course. Let’s go.”
Climbing back up the ridge was a slog. By the time they reached the lookout, even Gilberto was sweating. Miranda was so taxed she felt like she might not be able to go on. Fantasies of being trapped in this sweltering forest invaded her thoughts. Insects crawling up her sleeves. Jaguars stalking in the shadows. A frog the size of a dime with enough neurotoxin to blow even Timothy Leary’s mind. It was fucking hot—a sauna draped in vines.
“When we get back? AC baby!”
Gilberto was trying to cheer her up, and she was tanked enough to need it. He mimed drinking and Miranda took another deep pull from her water bottle. She was losing water, that was for sure. The heat and humidity and exercise were wringing her dry.
Then, onward.
Onward over hills, across streams, down gullies, and through thickets that Gilberto had to hack apart with his machete. Her joints ached. Her muscles bathed in acid. The blister grew and burst. Her vision narrowed and swam. Pain. The pain of creation. Zia would not exist but for the insufferable pain of Miranda’s thirty-seven hours of labor. Miranda still remembered her astonishment when the doctor handed her the screaming, bloody infant. Another human. Another life. Santiago’s hand on her shoulder promised that he felt it too, that their dreams, their desires, their fears, had suddenly found a center of gravity outside themselves, had transferred into this strange and wondrous being that was the farthest thing from cute.
Miranda belatedly realized that she was lying facedown in the mud. She pushed herself up and replayed the last few seconds. Her boot had snagged an exposed root. The world spun when she stood up and she pressed her eyes shut until it subsided. Gilberto was coming back up the trail, fear painted across his genial face. She waved him off, looking down at herself.
Bloody palms. Wobbly knees. Mud everywhere. Nothing serious.
“I’m fine,” she assured him. “I’m fine.”
Onward.
Up, down. Up, down. Up, down.
How much farther to the village? Miranda had lost all sense of direction. Trees leered at her. Spider webs laced her face in sticky strands. A waterfall roared and she looked around for it wildly before realizing that the sound was the rush of blood in her ears. The heat was a physical thing, a blanket that wrapped itself around her and squeezed, stronger than the four-meter boa constrictors that slithered through these woods. The air was thick and viscous. The leaves whispered to each other and Miranda could almost understand them, as if they were speaking a language with the same root as her mother tongue. She caught herself giggling and pressed her hand over her mouth before Gilberto could hear.
And then they stumbled out into brutal sunlight and there was the village with its huts and its bundles of electrical wires and its stray dogs and its abject poverty and Miranda looked up at the infinite, murderous blue and wondered if any of her husband’s satellites were overhead right now and then she was the satellite looking down at herself from above and only then did she realize that Gilberto was the only thing holding her up, that he’d been half-carrying her for kilometers, that she was wasted and angry and dying and missed her family more than anything and that she wasn’t the only one, there were people huddled in whatever shade they could find, there were men screaming at each other but no one was on the streets under the enormous cascading fusion explosion that dominated the sky, that nearest and dearest of stars whose thermal embrace was sucking the life out of her and—
“I’m freezing.”
She was lying in the corner of an earthen floored room, mercifully dark, shivering violently.
“I’m freezing,” she repeated. “Turn down the AC.”
“No AC,” said Gilberto.
He mopped her brow with a wet rag. There was terror in his wide brown eyes.
“No electricity, no AC.”
Miranda tried to prop herself up, irate. “But I’m telling you I’m freezing.”
Waves tumbling up the beach at her childhood home in Guanacaste, the one the bulldozers had demolished to build yet another cookie cutter resort. Santiago ending every argument with a ridiculously detailed plan for identifying and fixing the precise problem that had sparked the fight. Zia at sixteen, home on break from school in Switzerland, admitting to her horrified-but-trying-so-hard-to-hide-it mother, complete with air quotes, that yes, she was “sexually active.” The curiously empty feeling inside Miranda whenever she completed the rough draft of a new book, a hollowness that was at once satisfying and tragic. The taste of trigonometry. The smell of pink. The color of jazz. The coruscating sheen of the amorphous shapes that were right here all the time but separated from us by the thinnest of membranes, that liminal, invisible something that was everything and nothing, impermanent and eternal.
By the time the medevac team arrived, it was already too late.
+
1
+
The Border Security Force officer exhaled a lungful of smoke at the perfect angle for the wall-mounted air-conditioner to blow it straight into Zia León’s face. This was the man she was missing the reunion for. She wanted to cough. She wanted to snatch away the cigar and extinguish it on his forehead. Instead, she smiled.
“TCI informs me that you’re refusing to release our containers,” said Zia, careful to keep her tone neutral. “Is there some kind of problem?”
“Mrs. Lion,” he deliberately used the wrong title and mispronounced her name, “there’s no need to be concerned. We aren’t refusing to release anything. This is standard procedure, nothing more.”
“Standard procedure? Bilaspur Junction doesn’t have any borders nearby. This is heartland.”
“When it comes to protecting India, there is no such thing as too thorough,” he said with an expansive smile.
Himmat shifted in the seat beside Zia. “The shipment has a verified chain of custody and already passed BSF inspection at the Port of Kolkata,” he said. “You have all the paperwork and authorizations. Give us what we came for.”