1 #11
The car stopped by the pier, and the driver—a dockworker, or a man dressed as one—got out, left the driver’s door open, opened the back passenger door, and walked away.
Then, as I watched, a woman emerged from some other part of our ship, walked briskly down to the car, and climbed into the driver’s seat.
“That’s Pilar,” he said. “I trust her.”
“She’s been working for you for a while?” I couldn’t see the woman’s face, but assumed she was watching us. The windows of the car reflected the sky.
“Yeah,” he said, “and also she’s my cousin.”
“Same as before, then?” I wished I’d slept longer. I wasn’t well. I could feel the beginnings of a fever, dull heat behind my eyes.
“Yes. No matter what happens, walk straight to the car. What will you do if I’m shot on the pier and fall dead beside you?”
“I’ll walk to the car.”
The outside air carried oil and saltwater brine, indistinguishable from the Port of Houston.
I wished I could stay outside for longer, but in a moment I was inside the car and Soriano was closing the door behind us.
The door cut off sound in a way that made me understand that the windows were bulletproof.
It was like being encased in a hermetically sealed pod.
I had to fight off claustrophobia as we set off.
Pilar’s gaze flickered to mine in the mirror.
She was younger than me by at least a decade.
“Soriano,” I said, “what exactly is your business?”
“I have several,” he said. “My main business is, I transport people. It isn’t human trafficking. I’m talking about willing individuals who desire to start over in an entirely different place, with a different name and different identity papers.”
“That sounds expensive.”
“Very,” he said. “I’m good at my job, and I charge accordingly.”
“I did that without you,” I said. “The name, the place, and the identity papers.”
“Yes, but you weren’t in the Mafia,” Soriano said. “I’m using the Mafia as an example. There are countless people who’ve sworn fealty to organized crime, and the only way out of that is death, usually.”
“Death or you?”
“Death or me,” he said. We were leaving the port, through a steel gate that closed behind us, then out into a larger territory of warehouses and parking lots, huge trucks passing.
“We’re a good match for several reasons,” he said, “and one of them is that you understand how to operate in this environment. Felix’s story about your flight from Texas made that clear. ”
“Why do you travel like this? Is someone specifically after you?”
“Not that I’m aware of, but I’ve learned to be careful.”
“I can operate in this environment, but I dislike it,” I said. “Don’t you wish life were easier?”
“Of course. Doesn’t everyone?” He looked at me. “We don’t get to choose the world we’re born into. But you either learn to navigate that world, or you don’t.”
I nodded. I was very tired. Pilar merged onto an expressway, and we lapsed into silence.
Time collapsed and I was six years old again, drifting toward sleep in my mother’s arms in the back of a yellow taxi, steel girders of the Williamsburg Bridge sliding past overhead, suspended between and above the lit-up shores of Manhattan and Brooklyn.
I had a sense of blurred borders, of having travelled in so many cars between so many places that I was somehow in all of the cars at once.
I drifted in and out of sleep through the grey hours between the ocean and Paris.
“Not much longer,” Pilar said. It was the first time she’d spoken, and I was startled by an American accent.
Who were these people, actually? I closed my eyes for a moment, trying not to sink too far into exhaustion.
Thinking, How did I land in this life. Or How did I land in yet another life, how often do I get to blow my life up and start over, how many completely separate lives am I going to get to live before I run out of chances.
We were passing through a neighbourhood of narrow streets, somewhere near the city centre.
The car came to a halt in front of an elegant apartment building.
“Welcome home,” Soriano said, and looked confused when I laughed.
I married Soriano quickly. He needed a wife for social events.
I could have built a new life on my own, in a new city, but the thought was exhausting.
I would attach myself to Soriano’s life for a while, I thought, and see what came next.
It was a life of dinner parties, for the most part.
At some point in the evening, the party would divide: a selection of guests—mostly men—would withdraw into another room to talk business, while the rest of us—mostly women—talked about everything except what our spouses were up to.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I am not a monster.
I don’t think I’m a monster. I held considerable doubts.
But the world changes and you have to change with it, and it was that understanding that propelled me from one life into the next without dying.
Our street was on a popular route for anti-dome demonstrations, and I woke some mornings to the howls of protesters and the metallic clash of pots and pans in the street below. I liked watching the surging crowds from Soriano’s bedroom window.
“It’s adorable that they think they have problems,” I said to Soriano, and this struck me at the time as a reasonable stance for an American to take, but also it was true that I was floating through a city that I didn’t understand.
On our last night together, we went to a dinner in the 5th arrondissement, not far from the river.
I’d slept poorly the night before, and had drunk too much espresso to compensate.
When we left at eleven, I felt almost manically awake.
Pilar was waiting with the car, but I hesitated on the steps.
“What is it?” Soriano asked.
“Could we walk a little? I’m overcaffeinated.”
“Of course,” he said. He leaned into the car window and said something to Pilar, who drove away. A small crowd had gathered by the curb, people in extremely expensive clothing waiting for their cars, and there was something mildly subversive in walking away on foot.
“I feel like we’re getting away with something,” I said.
He laughed, and I took his arm. “Living in this city feels like getting away with something,” he said.
“Let’s walk along the river a little ways.
” The Paris dome wasn’t going to be a dome, exactly, so much as a series of giant soap bubbles.
One of the support beams was quite nearby, just on the other side of the river, a massive square tower rising improbably into the night air.
“Are you worried about the protests?”
“A little,” he said. “But I’m more worried about the dome.”
This was interesting to me. He’d been working long hours while I studied French and wandered the city, and we hadn’t spoken much about it.
“Why?”
“If you’re talking about a structure,” he said, “then operationally speaking, being protected by a structure can easily turn into being trapped by it.”
“I suppose you have a point.”
“The dome will protect us against the heat and the storms,” he said, “but what if something happens inside the dome?”
We’d reached the river. We descended a walkway down to the bank, and walked in silence for a few minutes. I was admiring the beauty of the river at night, lights sliding over the surface. All my life I’ve loved dark water.
“What are you thinking about?” he asked.
“New York,” I said, and registered his mild surprise. I never talked about the past. “I lived by the river as a kid.”
“In Manhattan?”
“Brooklyn. Near the Williamsburg Bridge.” When I was twelve—after my mother was deported, after my father followed her back to Ecuador, after there were no more parents—I used to slip out of my aunt and uncle’s apartment at night and go down to the water.
Why? To stare at it. There were places on that industrial waterfront where I never saw another living soul, and I liked inhabiting a secret night world that was only mine.
“Something’s wrong,” he said softly.
I snapped back to the present, and I saw it too.
A small dark ship was moving down the river.
A passing shadow, no lights. I glanced over my shoulder.
Two dark figures had materialized at the top of the walkway we’d taken.
There was something in the way they stood, side by side, watching the boat.
They were dressed in black, dark masks over their faces.
Something glinted in the streetlight and I was certain they were armed.
“We have to go forward,” I said, and we increased our pace.
Just ahead, the river path diverged. To the left, rough cobblestones continued along the water.
To the right there was a pedestrian tunnel, lit with blue lights.
I took Soriano’s hand and led him into the tunnel, still at a strolling pace.
If we ran, I feared the spell could break and the night dissolve into gunfire.
“Why the tunnel?” he asked. Not afraid, just curious. Soriano had nerves of steel.