Trip Through Your Wires. Sarah Layden

She explained vaguely, He asked me to get something for him. The clerk slid the key across the counter. A book, Carey added, but the man gazed beyond her to the street. The campus had been inhabited by zombies. The city, with so little crime, paused in shock over the American’s death. Es muy tranquilo, every Mexican resident and tourist had said of Guanajuato. Es tan hermoso.

      Then there was a blank period of time, like erased tape. She remembered when Mike entered the room, where she waded through piles of ruined jeans and t-shirts. Her hands were stained with black from the fountain pen she’d cracked, spilling everywhere. His boxer shorts were snipped into pieces, and she’d plunged the scissors into the mattress. Only the blue handle was visible. It looked like a neatly tied bow. Five iron bars covered the screenless, open window. She held Mike’s laptop, still plugged into the wall socket, and she gave a violent tug to release it. The freed wires lay a few feet from where Mike stood at the door, his eyes widened.

      “Please,” he said.

      She raised the computer to the window’s vertical bars, perfectly spaced. Three days earlier, she’d stood in the same doorframe with him. For a split second, Mike’s eyes reached her. The pain of what they had shared. Mike suffered, too.

      The brief damp rot of sadness passed, replaced by anger. Maybe Mike called her name, issuing a warning to calm down. She couldn’t remember. He lunged quickly across the room, stepping on the power cord. Carey released the machine. The laptop dangled for a moment before unplugging. The computer was only seven pounds of plastic and parts, and the crash was anticlimactic. Below, a handful of keyboard letters popped off and clattered into the gutter. Had she not been running out the door, down the stairs, and across the street, she might have paused over the cubes lying on the uneven stone. All consonants, no vowels. A word that made no sense.

      They didn’t send her home for that, though they could have. Andrea Cunningham and Don Hernando spelled out her situation. There was the memorial service to attend. There were marvelous grief counselors working with the students. Maravilloso, they said, reminding her of an elementary Spanish textbook, of boy and girl characters in everyday situations.

      She did not go to the counselors or the service. Perhaps the Williamsons were disappointed, perhaps not. They were Northsiders; her family lived on the West side. She and Ben had grown up in the same city yet never knew each other. Or rather, he had not known her. How maravilloso, she had first thought, to become involved with a man from her hometown. To become involved with this man, in Mexico of all places, in a city wedged between mountains. Her mind fast-forwarding: brunch at Edna’s, marriage a few years after graduation, a good story to tell their tall, green-eyed children. Now, thinking of home made her already-edgy stomach churn.

      She did not want to return to Indianapolis and spot Ben’s mother in the cereal aisle at Kroger. She did not want his family looking her up. When Lupe and Andrea explained that the Williamsons not only wanted to meet but had asked her to read scripture at Ben’s memorial service, the movie projector in her mind sputtered to a stop. She knew she would regret her behavior. She knew skipping the service was like cutting a cord, even if she didn’t know what the cord connected to. She knew all this and still stayed away, eyes trained on her digital travel clock, ticking off the minutes until the end of the memorial mass at the Basilica.

      It was not just about Ben’s parents. She did not want to see the body. She did not want to see Mike. If she could avoid seeing, if she could live with her eyes screwed tight, then it might be as if that night had never happened.

      Chapter 4

      This is how it was. Labyrinthine Guanajuato’s steep cobblestone streets wended and branched, split into new avenues, reunited under different names. The blacktop roads, soft in the sun, circled around cool, leaf-canopied parks, around old buildings of earthen stucco and new ones of chromium steel. Between the buildings, alongside back-door taverns and apartment fire escapes, were narrow, dank passages—shortcuts through the maze.

      At Banco Federal, two uniformed guards flanked the door to the columned building, machine guns cradled in their arms like babies they wanted to toughen up. Hat brims shaded their dark, inscrutable eyes. The sun cut a swath through the cool mountain air and burned Carey’s white skin pink. Hot and cold at once. Ben instructed Carey and Mike to wait for him.