The Mexican Year

I came out of rural Iowa like a bullet from a gun. I was done with Worth County High School, reached after five hundred years on the bus. I was done with all 43 members of the Class of 1999, including my ex-girlfriend Ruthie Krenzel who was done with me first. I was done with our family business of farming, which was always more business than family. I was done, just fucking DONE, period. Anybody got in my way or tried to stop me, I would’ve killed them. And bullets don’t look back.

Or so I promised myself.

Nine years later this bullet is back where it began. At the crossroads of Flyover and Drivethru, if you want to find it on a map. The straitjacket of agrarian life hasn’t changed much. Every day — every goddamn day — is the same ritual. Get up before the buttcrack of dawn, wring a living from dirt and animals, do more chores. Wash rinse and repeat.

A pounding interrupts the white noise of my box fan. The bedroom door shudders in its frame. “Nick, you in there? Get up if you ain’t already. You got milking duty this morning.”

Dad’s voice is a cracking whip. I blink at the ghostly digits of the alarm clock. 5:13. It’s already late. My parents are up and making their luck. I reach for the nightstand lamp. Around me the guest bedroom is a horror show. The walls are sky blue with clouds daubed on. Shelves groan with the weight of Hummel figurines. Hand-crocheted doilies are breeding on the furniture. This was my bedroom growing up, but Mom has obliterated every trace of me.

More pounding. “Nick? You hearing me?”

“I’m not here to do Brian’s job.”

“I said you got milking duty this morning.” Even more pounding. “You forget how to get up and work for a living?”

I roll out of bed and throw open the door. “Work for your own goddamn living.”

Dad is caught in mid-pound. His fist is poised to keep going, right into me. “What’d you say, boy?”

“And don’t call me boy.”

He’s pushing 60, but still rawboned and mean as a drunk. It takes about a quarter-second for his finger to stab into my chest. “You are my boy, in case you forgot. And this is your family. Everybody pitches in around here. Now shut up and do your part.”

I spin on a heel and slam the door behind me.

At first there’s silence. No storm of epithets, no shit-stained boots pounding down the hallway. Then bones creak and he sighs. “You know I can’t hold this place down by myself. I need your help. Just for a couple days, until I can hire somebody.”

“I’ll work around here for a hundred bucks a day.”

“You shitting me, boy?”

“What are you bitching about? I’m giving you the friends-and-family discount. Anybody you hire will want twice that.”

“Goddamnit! You ungrateful piece of shit! I ought to — ” His tirade recedes down the hall, through a slamming door, and out into the barnyard.

The vanity mirror is rimmed with Easter cards. My reflection hovers inside colored eggs and bunnies. I’m grinning in bleak triumph. The first education I got was in how this family works. And this family is a business. Dad doesn’t see a son when he looks at me. He sees free labor, no taxes, dollar signs. If I cover for Brian, he doesn’t have to hire a replacement.

The Roberts family, fucked up as ever. Oldest child missing half of his head and we’re fighting over unpaid labor. But that doesn’t disturb me as much as my next realization — I haven’t thought about Nooshin yet.

I feel a rush of guilt, right beneath the spot where Dad poked me in the chest. The guilt instantly sharpens into worry, then helpless abject fear. My pregnant girlfriend is alone on the roads of Mexico. In a truck with Iowa plates and 165,000 miles on it. Few pesos and fewer dollars in her purse. Anything goes wrong, anything at all… What the hell was I thinking when I left her on her own? Jesus fucking Christ.

I try to call Nooshin, but she must not have a signal. The phone doesn’t even ring. “Hi. This is Nooshin’s voicemail. Leave a message and I’ll call back soon as I can.” She’s trying to sound serious, but giggling a little. Because I was pawing at her while she recorded the message.

I wait for the beep, groping for calm and reassuring words. “Hey, babe. I miss you something fierce. Are you back to Tijuana yet? Let me know. I can’t wait to hear your voice.”

Afterward I dress in sweatpants and a QUE VIVA MEXICO! t-shirt. My cellphone goes into a sweatpants pocket. Every stride down the hallway I hope it rings. But it doesn’t, and then I’m in the kitchen with a stomach on full growl.

The smallish kitchen isn’t a perfect fit with my memory. All the appliances are new, but still almond-colored. The cracked and warping formica countertops are gone, replaced with slabs of some plastic laminate. Inside the pantry is new shelving — racks that slide out, revealing deep trays of cans and boxes.

I open all the cupboards without finding any breakfast cereal. “Mom? Where’s the cereal?” My voice echoes through the house. I look out the window over the sink. The barn and milking parlor are islands of gauzy light. Between the towering silhouettes of grain silos is the eastern horizon, bloody with dawn. Parked in the mud are two generations of Ford F-150 pickups — Dad’s 1982 and Brian’s 2007. Mom’s car is missing. She must’ve run into town for something.

I take an apple from the fruit bowl and retrace my steps down the hallway. I’m headed for the bathroom, but I pass Brian’s bedroom first. I pause at the closed door. This is why I’m here. To comprehend the incomprehensible — why did my brother put a .40 caliber handgun to his temple and pulled the trigger?

As a kid I was always jealous that Brian got the biggest bedroom. As a grown-up it feels claustrophobic. You couldn’t cram three Holsteins in here. The furniture is shoehorned in — twin bed with plaid bedspread, chest-high dresser with a combo TV-DVD player on top, bookcase spilling things onto the berber carpeting, folding desk with a Dell flatscreen workstation and faux-leather office chair. Navigating to the bookcase I bang my shin on a milk crate of magazines, mostly Guns & Ammo and Four Wheeler. The bookcase itself is dusty with memories, like Where the Red Fern Grows and John Deere Service Manual. None of the spines is more recent than copyright 20th century. The closet doesn’t hold any surprises either, just a bachelor farmer’s wardrobe straight off the rack at Fleet Farm.

The incomprehensibility deepens — why did my brother live in this sardine can for 37 years? He could’ve rented an apartment in town anytime he wanted. Hell, he could’ve bought his own place. But this is where he remained, too afraid or obstinate or whatever to live off-farm, dug into our familial dysfunctions like a tick.

I check the combo TV-DVD player. No disc inside. The screen flickers to life, but the high-definition satellite channel is wasted on it. An arena football game is miniaturized almost past recognition. The sound is muted, which makes me think of music. I rubberneck around for a stereo, tapes, anything. Did Brian deny himself music the same way he denied himself breathing room, emotional distance, a life of his own?

No, he didn’t. I spot an mp3 player on the desk. I scroll through its musical selection with sad nostalgia. This farmhouse used to reverb with Brian and Wendy’s war over music, turning up boomboxes in their bedrooms. He was into stoner rock, she liked depressive alt-angst shit. His playlist is mired in the Reagan era. There’s some Nickelback and U2, but that’s about it for newish stuff. The rest of the tunes are heavy rotation classic rock.

I settle myself into the office chair — and immediately sink to the lowest position. Its hydraulic cylinder has been pulverized by Brian’s weight. The computer awakes from sleep mode with a nudge of the mouse. I’m staring at a Windows desktop with a hot rod wallpaper. One of the headlights is distorted by a World of Warcraft icon. Checking the installed programs, I find more computer games. A lot more. My brother must’ve killed his spare time in gamer land.

I click on the Internet Explorer icon to launch a web browser. Brian’s homepage is SI.com, the online site for Sports Illustrated. Typically messy, he hasn’t bothered to organize his Favorites. The links are random jumps to redneck male sites — NASCAR World, Rate My Bitch, Truck-N-Trailer.

No porn sites are bookmarked, but that doesn’t mean anything. I find plenty in History. My brother’s tastes are heterosexual and blandly predictable — blond, big-titted, 18 years old, avidly bisexual. I click through pages and pages of chicks who meet that job description. My dick barely stiffens.

Also in History but not bookmarked is Gmail. Brian is still logged in. I watch the interface load with trepidation. According to Ruthie this is partly how he provoked a restraining order — by cyber-stalking her older sister Kimmie, his lifelong crush.

The inbox contains 2,192 messages. 78 are new and unread. The most recent is only a couple minutes old. I click on it:

Thanks for visiting Right Makes Right. A new response has been posted to your comment on entry #8492 (Illegal immigration is destroying America):

Bri-Dog, thank you so much for putting my feelings into words. Why should Congress grease the path for 30 million wetbacks to become citizens to destroy the chances of anything but a Democrat President for the next 50 years? You’ve been in Mexico to see firsthand how these spics live. It’s obvious your politics rule & what talent! –RedStater76

I read a couple more, enough to groan in dismay. Brian was appropriating what I told him about Mexico. Pretending to be me, even. A jaundiced observer with firsthand knowledge of the borderlands. And he was getting away with it! On the internet nobody knows you’re a dog — or a shut-in who hasn’t left the family farm.

A dozen pages later I reach Brian’s correspondence with Kimmie. I’ve traveled months into the past. It doesn’t end well. Her responses are increasingly terse and hostile. Finally they collapse into a single all-caps subject line: RESTRAINING ORDER.

I keep clicking further into last year. First Kimmie’s hostile tone melts away, then her replies become more frequent. She emotes desperation. Separated from her husband, but not divorced yet. Four little girls dependent on Mommy. They’re all sheltering with a friend, because her parents finally lost the farm and live in a single bedroom rental.

Brian’s side of the e-conversation breaks my heart. At first he responds with caution. This is the same prairie Ophelia who broke his heart into smithereens in high school. His decade-later emails clank with that wound. The more she presses him, the more he capitulates — an awkward hesitation, then a reluctant opening, finally a headlong plunge. I never stopped loving you. I click again. How can I help?.

An ache seeps through my face. I’m grinding my molars into powder. Kimmie was playing every dude she knew. Brian was just a backup plan. Backup plan #2 or #3, probably. But he was too stupid to know that — or didn’t want to know that. His dream girl needed him. A summons from the center of his sad mooning universe.

Brian never had a chance. His primary competition — the owner of the local Kwik-E Mart — offered his home and heart and finances to Kimmie. She and the kids moved in overnight. The email chain breaks down from there. Kimmie tries to explain, my brother responds with confusion and dismay and rage. His words are raw with pain. I’d feel the same way if Nooshin ever slipped away from me. And just like that, I can’t read anymore.

The coastal highway isn’t living up to its name yet. I’m still landlocked in these winding lanes of asphalt. Around me is a blurring tedium of truck traffic and road signs in Spanish and little crosses that memorialize the victims of fatal accidents. 12 hours of driving has foreshortened my perception. I don’t even notice the landscape anymore — maize plots ringed with beavertail cacti, verdant forests cut through with footpaths, little hills turning into big hills and back again, Indian villages that pass like glimpses of the 19th century, extinct volcanoes topped with crater lakes. Good thing I have a baggy of polaroids from the last time I was here.

This is my second trip through the state of Nayarit. Nick and I followed this autopista two months ago, but going in the opposite direction. Funny how everything becomes strange and unfamiliar when reversed. Even the smoldering hump of Sanganguey is only vaguely itself. If I didn’t know I was retracing our route, I’d suspect a wrong turn back in Guadalajara.

These hours were shorter with Nick. The odometer tracks my exhaustion. I stare at things from behind my sunglasses, especially the oncoming traffic. Why can’t I be going the other way again? That’s when I was happiest. Me in the passenger seat, him behind the wheel. Grinning beneath his Kangol hat. Regaling me with another of his stories about Mexico. Squeezing my thigh occasionally, as if to remind himself that I was real. Love was a wide-open horizon. We traveled into it lighthearted and silly. My pregnancy was just a hope then, a fear.

Now that Nooshin — his Nooshball — seems as bygone as the 18-year-old who married Saman with dread in her heart. Those versions of me flicker like old home movies from Iran. A toddler moving jerkily in too-vivid colors. Lips moving but no words to hear. Right eye frozen sideways in her face. Mom lingers in the background, inhabiting that lost country of haftseen tables and flowered courtyards and views of the Alborz Mountains. She tilts down at me with glowing affection. It’s a look I haven’t seen since grade school, when I was still an Iranian like her.

My tummy is getting pinched by the seatbelt. I adjust its diagonal strap, beaming into the rearview mirror at the trucker I just passed. The pregnant bulge is everything right with my life. Then I crest the next hill, where thunderheads are stacked like pillows, plunging the interior of the Explorer into shadow. The same pregnant bulge is everything wrong with my life. Still a wife, but also a mother-to-be — with a man who isn’t my husband.

My cellphone rests on the passenger seat. I long to call Nick. The day’s loneliness is wearing on me. But his distance is further than geography and the crappy signal on my phone. He’s receding into the family he ran away from. The father and mother who injured their children. The sister who lives on cigarettes and anti-depressives. The brother who lies in a hospital bed between worlds. All that suffering, all that tragedy. It claims him a little more every time we talk.

I turn on the radio for distraction. The Spanish of the djs and commercials is too fast for my tired comprehension. I find some music, but it doesn’t suit my mood. Too much crooning about drugs and heartbreak. I reach into the backseat for a tape instead. My music collection is a shoebox of bootleg tapes acquired from street vendors. The ones on top are the newest. My Mexico City purchases. Most were chosen at random. The music rarely matches the label anyway.

I settle on a plain white cassette with Las matas / Auge de la medianoche scribbled on it. I’m expecting the usual. Narcocorridos or the latest Mexican pop sensation. Instead the Explorer fills with the minimalistic stop-start rhythms of an American band. Something dark and affected, from a world of nightclubs that I’ll never know. I fast-forward through the songs, sampling the female singer’s lyrics, the male singer’s backing vocals. I’ve never pictured my life that way. Woman in front, man in back. It’s always the other way around.

Deciding this isn’t my kind of music, I push the EJECT button. I frame the cassette with dirty fingernails and try to translate its Spanish. Las matas — The Kills — must be the name of the band. Auge de la medianoche is something Of The Midnight. Or maybe just Midnight something. But I can’t complete the translation. I don’t know what “auge” means.

I drop the tape into my trash container, an empty Hipermart bag. I could’ve just tossed it out the window. That’s the way most disposal is accomplished on Mexican roads. The ditches are full of litter and other discarded junk. Even though Nick’s rule is do as the Mexicans do, in this case I refuse. Their country is already polluted enough.

A Pemex sign hovers over a canopy of willows. I check the gas gauge. The truck doesn’t need to stop, but I do. My eyelids are leaden, the muscles in my arms are cramped from gripping the wheel. I scan the turnoffs for a possible dinner. My choices are limited. Taquerias or fruit and vegetable stands. The thought of healthy food makes my stomach turn an unhappy somersault. Guess it’s the Mexican version of fast food for me.

Danny’s Tacos is just like every other taqueria I’ve seen along the highway. Painted brightly to grab your attention at 110 kilometers per hour– red roof, yellow walls, blue lettering. The building is open on three sides, with rolled-up tarping to keep out inclement weather. Ordering takes place at a long counter. The seating is cheap patio furniture. There’s enough gravel in the parking lot to accommodate semi-trailers, but only cars are scattered around right now.

It takes me a while to decode the menu. Apparently you buy a plain taco, then top it yourself. This is confirmed by the elderly Indian ahead of me. He receives a pair of tacos on a paper plate, then shuffles down the counter to bins of salsa, guacamole, tomatoes, onions, even cabbage. Not that I’m allowed to get any toppings. Everything has been tainted by tap water. The vegetables have been washed in it, the salsa and guacamole made with it. The baby doesn’t need any nasty microbes, and neither do I.

I eat my plain beef taco at the farthest table. Once I’m seated no one pays much attention to me. My height is obscured, my tummy hidden. Even my sunglasses fit in. The sun has retreated enough to reach underneath the roof. Hatbrims are tilted down, eyes are shaded beneath hands.

Afterward I return to the Explorer and my long sojourn to Tijuana. My sudden burst of energy seeps away once I’m behind the wheel. The interior is the perfect temperature for basking — the heat of the day is dissipating, but the sunshine is still warm. Basking quickly leads to yawning. I recline my seat, tempting sleep. Do I start driving again, or take a nap first? Another yawn makes the decision for me. I lock the doors but keep the windows cracked for fresh air.

That’s how I overhear the teen boys. Their Spanish carries on the wind. They wake me into an evening grown overcast and threatening.

“I smell a girl,” one teen says in a reedy voice.

“Are you high?” his older friend sighs. “There aren’t any girls around.”

“Maybe it’s a whore, then. In one of the semi trucks.”

“You’re such a retard.”

But they start looking for the girl anyway. I can hear them scuffling around on their bikes in the gravel. After a while the scuffling stops. Their voices are close now. The topic changes from smelling girls to thunder rumbling in the distance. How much rain will come? The teens make bets.

I’m almost asleep again when the younger teen suddenly says, “It’s back again.”

“What? What’s back again?” The older one sniffs audibly. “Hey. Do you smell that?”

“I smelled it first, you butthole.” His reedy voice is triumphant. “I told you there’s a girl around here.”

“Come on. Let’s follow the scent.”

It dawns on me that they’re smelling my perfume, which I apply liberally when I haven’t bathed. In rural areas like this only unmarried women wear perfume. The teenagers must think they’re on the trail of a senorita not much older than them.

I listen to their bikes scuffle closer on the gravel. First one face appears in the window above me, then another. They’re peering straight across the shadowy interior. I’m invisible in my reclined repose.

“This is it,” says the younger teen. “It’s definitely coming from this truck.”

“There’s nobody inside,” the older one says in disappointment. Then: “Did you hear that?”

I’m groping in the backseat for Nick’s camping flashlight. When my hand closes around its plastic bulk, I click the flashlight to life and sit up. The teens look like shined deer in the beam, staring at me open-mouthed and motionless. They have broad Indian features and skin darker than the dirt stains on their t-shirts. Then they swear into action on their BMX-style bikes, pedaling so furiously that gravel pings off the side of the Explorer. My antique Polaroid camera isn’t fast enough to catch them.

This wing of the Mayo Clinic is a bright malignant spaceship manned by aliens in face shields and surgical gowns and puffy bootie-feet. All the doorways are disturbingly wide, and inside them are machines pumping stuff in and out of prostrate victims. Every door that isn’t open is hung with a garish sign warning of radiation and biohazards. Roaming the hallways I feel like a UFO abductee between appointments. Done with the anal probe, waiting for the mind control implant.

Then my tense circumnavigation of the ICU unit is complete. I’m right back where I started, hovering at an extra-wide doorjamb, ladled in sorrow. My fingertips trace the room number — 1157. This is where Brian will officially die sometime, if you believe there’s still life in that flaccid husk. An overhanging monitor lies about that fact, counting electrical impulses which masquerade as human existence. But the heart is just a muscle, like froglegs that twitch when hooked to a 9-volt battery. The ruin above his eyebrows is the real death.

At least the hospital room is empty of Mom and Dad’s stony rage. They obviously wished their first-born son had made it all the way to the obit page, instead of getting stuck halfway in this hospital bed. Then they left, just like that. Back to Iowa and the family farm where Brian lived and toiled for 37 years. Back to the bloodstained mats in the milking parlor. For them his botched suicide was the ultimate validation of their loveless disdain. I’ll never forget the rawboned silhouette of my father, looking down on Brian’s shattered body, muttering “He couldn’t even kill himself right.”

That was the closest I’ve ever come to patricide in a lifetime of near-patricides. But close never counted for shit with me — this time, same as all the rest. I retreated to my emotional periphery, an outsider looking in. Life in my fucked-up family is a reality TV show, and I’m watching just like you. Time for a commercial break. Change the channel and never click back.

“Mmmph a mmmph mmmph?” Wendy says, a pixie dissolving into the recliner next to our brother, next to all the blinking beeping machines.

“Say what?” I ask.

She adjusts the wad of chewing tobacco in her mouth. A chainsmoker’s coping strategy for the bedside vigil. “You done pacing around for a while?” There’s something plaintive and damaged in her expression. She looks the way I feel.

I cross the threshold and collapse into the other chair, a punishing relic of steel and black vinyl. It’s a century-old anachronism from the old wing of the clinic, where patient files are still sent through pneumatic tubes.

Wendy is saying, “I can’t believe our grief counselor is named Bree.”

“I can’t believe our grief counselor is named Bree spelled wrong. At least spell your name B-R-I-E. Christ.” I fumble in a pocket for her business card. Bree Hundevader — MD, Ph.D. — Grief Counselor. Apparently you can make a career of surfing from one death to the next. I don’t know whether to be disgusted or envious.

“Why’d you come back, anyway?” My sister’s tone darkens. “When I called you, I didn’t think you’d come back. Not even if it was for a funeral.”

“Why are you here?” I snap. A typical exchange in our family. Answer every question with a question.

Her eyes are hard enough to smash atoms. “Because I wanted to see Mom and Dad’s reaction to all this. I wanted to see them suffer.”

“For how they raised us? For everything they did to us?” The noise welling up my larynx is a sitcom laughtrack.

Wendy hunches into a defensive posture, pulling knees under her pointy chin. It takes a while for her to speak. “Why do you think he did it? To get back at Mom and Dad?”

“Nah. If Brian wanted to get back at them, he would’ve shot them and then himself. Or blown out his brains in the kitchen or living room. Someplace that would’ve made a mess.” For a moment I’m transfixed by a vision of the living room, all the Hummel figurines and doilies spattered with skull fragments and gray matter. “Instead he walked out to the milking parlor. He wanted to die among friends.”

“The cows,” Wendy says, a little incredulous, a little sad.

“Yeah. The cows.”

There’s a pause filled with sidelong flickers from the recliner. I watch her watch me in tentative glances. Every once in a while she spits tobacco juice into an empty styrofoam cup.

“What?” I finally ask.

“So why’d he kill himself, then?”

“Because of Kimmie, I figure.”

Now Wendy’s face is a mask of disbelief. “Kimmie? Kim Krenzel?”

The Krenzels were our closest friends growing up, a Catholic birth control experiment that resulted in five boys and three girls. They were one of those families perpetually on the brink of losing their land, mailbox stuffed with FINAL NOTICE envelopes, every harvest maybe the last. Kim — Kimmie in the Krenzel family nicknaming convention — was the center of Brian’s sad mooning universe. She broke his heart into smithereens when she married the owner of the Kwik-E Mart and had three kids with him.

“Back at Thanksgiving he was telling me how Kimmie finally divorced that asshole. She got the house and snowmobiles and child support and everything. It was going to be Brian’s second chance to get with her, right? Except — ”

“She’s out of his league.” The words are dismissive and cruel, but true. Kimmie is a pale cornfield Ophelia. Brian is — was — a boorish farmboy.

“She got tight with a new boyfriend. Some dude with money, surprise surprise. Brian couldn’t deal with it. He started stalking her. Calling her, watching her house, shit like that. It was bad enough for Ruthie to ask me to warn him off. Finally Kimmie had to get a restraining order against him.”

“No fucking way,” Wendy says.

“She was really afraid Brian would kill her boyfriend. Apparently he made some threats…” Suddenly I’m too exhausted to finish. My veins are silting up with remorse. All the things I’d change if I could do it over again.

“Brian? Is that why you killed yourself?” Wendy slips out of the recliner and pauses at his bedside, a hand perched on the bedrail. She looks like a grown-up Tinkerbell. “I hope it doesn’t hurt anymore, wherever you are.” Her shearling boots recede out of the room and into silence.

I spend a long time staring at the near-corpse in the bed. What a fucking way to shuffle off this mortal coil. Head wrapped in bandages, tubes snaking into nostrils and mouth, dark bags beneath half-open eyes. Nothing moves when I touch it — not the feet jutting beneath the covers, not the pale arm with elbow crook exposed. I can even scrape a fingernail across the dry mush of his dilated pupils.

My poking finger turns into a palm, laid gently against his cheek. Every heartbeat is a riptide of emotion. I bob and drift, not knowing what to feel. But after a while my emotions coalesce into poignancy. There is no denouement to Brian’s life — no wife and kids to leave behind, no family to mourn him, no nothing. His suicide is the exclamation point at the end of a long run-on sentence that nobody ever bothered to read.

If I could do it all over again, I’d tell Nick sorry, forget it, I’m staying here forever. I don’t care if I give birth on the air mattress on Inez’s mom’s floor. Anything is better than risking the traffic of Mexico City. It wasn’t bad an hour before dawn, when I said goodbye to Inez and her mom. The streets of their neighborhood were deceptively quiet then. But the further I drove in Nick’s truck, the more taillights appeared in front of me, the more headlights filled my rearview mirror. Now the sun is up and the streets of Mexico City are half parking lot, half race track, and all war zone. If Nick loved me even a little bit, he’d fly back down here and drive me out of this mess, the same way he drove me into it.

My cellphone shrieks to life, a plain ringtone at max volume. Otherwise I can’t hear it over all the honking and engine noise and traffic cop whistles.

“Hi.” The only greeting I can manage. I’m focused on everything all at once — the huge golden -RONA- of a Corona delivery truck boxing me in, street vendors pushing carts through the idling traffic, all the street signs and their stupid contradictory arrows.

Nick’s voice is deliberately calm. “Heya babe. Where you at now?”

“Not much farther than the last time you called.”

“How much farther?” he asks, still calm. Soothing. “Got a cross-street for me?”

“There’s a gigantic traffic circle up ahead. Avenida Insurgentes, I think. It’s got a 10-story winged statue thing in the middle.” My heart sinks. Vehicles revolve around the statue’s base in brutal honking combat. Omigod, I hate traffic circles. Hate hate hate them! “Who invented traffic circles, anyway? Who could’ve possibly thought traffic circles are — ”

Suddenly all the vehicles around me lurch forward. I’m only a heartbeat late on the gas pedal — but that’s all the delay it takes. A green-and-white Volkswagen Bug taxi angles in front of me. Then another one, darting after the first. My hood and its passenger door are on a collision course. I brake and yell at the driver in Farsi until I feel better.

“What’s going on?” Nick asks, trying to keep the concern out of his voice. And failing, mostly.

“Taxis just cut in front of me! Again!”

“Remember what I told you.”

I slump in defeat. “I know, I know. Stay on the bumper in front of me.”

“And what else?” he prods.

“Anticipate. Or…be an asshole? Something like that.”

Nick’s laugh is forced. “Close enough.”

The next time traffic moves I’m ready. Anticipating. Ready to be an asshole, just like all the assholes around me. I snap forward in a 20-yard drag race — that turns into wide-open asphalt, when I drive through a gap between two electric buses, dawdling in a shower of sparks from the overhead wires. There’s nothing between me and the traffic circle ahead, yaayyy! Go me, go me, go –

STOP!!!

A kid carrying a shoulder-rack of pinatas darts into the street RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME. I stand on the brakes and yank the steering wheel hard left, away from the curb and into oncoming traffic, tires squealing, omigod omigod…

Then I’m past the kid and yanking the Explorer back onto my side of the boulevard, but too sharply, the cityscape goes all wrong, the truck tilting, I must be on two wheels — and then a jarring impact, the seatbelt grating across my clavicle, back on all four wheels again.

Holy crap! I’m already at the traffic circle, plunging right into the slowly-rotating wall of vehicles, the stink of graphite and burning tires filling my nostrils, but not stopping fast enough, another green-and-white VW Bug taxi dead ahead, there’s nowhere to turn, I can’t avoid —

A sea parts for me. I screech to a halt in the milling traffic, prompting a few tepid honks. In my rearview mirror the taxi driver is busy chatting with his passengers. They just witnessed an out-of-control SUV almost kill a street vendor, then almost swerve into a head-on collision with onrushing traffic, then almost flip over in a flaming ball of metal and flesh, then almost plow into a jam-packed traffic circle. Just another day on the streets of Mexico City.

My cellphone is squawking somewhere on the floor. I lean down to pick it up, squeezing around my pregnant tummy. I pin the silver clamshell to my ear, breathing heavily.

“Nooshin! What the hell happened? Are you okay?”

Tears are blurring my vision. “I’ve almost run over so many people, they just, god…”

“The street vendors. I know. They’re fucking maniacs. Are you using your horn?”

“Um…” I start to say. Truth is, I’ve forgotten all about it.

“Come on. You gotta use it. Anytime you go fast — ”

“Okay, okay! I’ll remember to use it next time. Promise.”

He gives my right ear a pep talk while I paw at my cheeks, wiping them dry. The Explorer goes into a vehicular spin cycle, revolving in the traffic circle. Instead of the convenience and sanity of a stoplight, four oncoming streams of traffic have to jostle around and through and past me. Forget progressing down the boulevard — it’s all I can do just to avoid an accident! I make one trapped circumnavigation, then another. Everywhere I look bumpers are millimeters apart. Not even a glimmer of space, no hope of escape whatsoever. I feel my pulse flutter in panic. I’m going to die of old age in this stupid traffic circle.

“No you’re not,” Nick chuckles, and I realize I was thinking aloud. “Find somebody going your direction, somebody big, and tuck in behind them. Let them do the dirty work.”

Hmmm. I glance around the traffic circle, four lanes huge but crammed with five lanes of vehicles. The biggest thing I see is a riveted silver hulk with tiny bulletproof windows. Looks like that Banamex armored truck is going my way. It bulldozes around the traffic circle, honking incessantly, even tapping a bumper or quarterpanel every now and then. I veer after it desperately — and so do about 20 other cars, thinking the same thing as me. At first none of us are going anywhere. Then suddenly we’re a jailbreak from the traffic circle.

“Nick, I made it! I made it. Omigod…” My body fizzles with relief. I briefly peel the phone away, wiping my brow with that forearm.

” — knew you’d do great,” he’s saying, when I clamp the sweaty clamshell back to my ear.

I drift down the street, impervious to a swelling chorus of honks. In my rearview mirror I can see the giant concrete calves and sandals of the winged statue in the traffic circle, forever poised to stomp us all to scrap metal. Another green-and-white taxi cuts in front of me, then another. It’s not worth racing ahead to stop them. It’s not worth it, period.

I risk a glance at the map of Mexico City lying on the passenger seat. Even though Inez illustrated my route with a fat yellow hi-liter, I’m still pretty clueless about my progress. All I know for certain is that I haven’t reached the highway yet.

Luckily I have Nick, my distant navigator in Minnesota. “If I just passed Avenida Insurgentes, how much farther is it to the highway?”

“Not much farther,” he says cheerfully. “Just stay focused on the driving. The distance will take care of itse– ”

“Nick. How much farther.”

His voice wavers. “Uh, a little ways. Not too far.”

“Nick! Just tell me!”

“Well, you’ve probably got another hour to the highway, maybe two, then…” A pause elongates in my ear. In the background I can hear beeping, raised voices, a tinny intercom — Dr. Lavell to the ICU, Dr.Lavell to the ICU. Then Nick’s voice again. “I gotta go. Call you later.”

The Explorer is stuck in gridlock again. Exhaust fumes boil up like heatwaves into the cool morning sky. A middle-aged street vendor knocks on my window, holding up a churrito in wax paper, startling me. “Desea el desayuno?” — do you want some breakfast? — he asks through the glass.

I’m left holding the phone to my ear, still listening to the buzz of my severed connection with Nick. I try to imagine him saying goodbye to Brian, but it doesn’t work. In that hospital bed there’s no Brian left to say goodbye to, just a shell of the big brother Nick used to know. Instead I imagine his memories of Brian growing truncated and gray, stretching out over a span of years, slowly dissolving into broken moments of sentiment.

I toss the cellphone aside and close my eyes, as if doing so will finally bring the experience — his and mine — to an end. I want to cry, but the sobs stay locked in my ribcage. From the sidewalk I can hear schoolgirls twittering about cute boys. “Seguro, el es TAN especial” — oh sure, he’s so special — a voice chirps. The girl is being sarcastic, but she also means it.

The world is beveled with rain, an angular downpour that slants under the terminal canopy, grasping wetly at my cargo pants and hiking boots. I stand there indifferently, gazing into the headlights that slow and pause and speed up again. Beside me is a businesswoman in a black tailored pantsuit with gangsta pinstripes. She’s trying to keep her Manolo Blahnik ankle boots dry, bending at the waist like a cheap stripper, poking her head into the rain to spot her ride. I watch her antics with a smile ghosting through my facial muscles. If Nooshin was wearing those stiletto heels, she’d bump her head on the sky.

A tricked-out 4×4 veers to the curb in a growl of wasted horsepower. The dude behind the wiperblades is wearing a cowboy hat and a hundred-mile stare. Nothing flickers in him. I play to imagine the cause of his boredom. Maybe the traveler who’ll climb into his passenger seat. Maybe the kind of relationship that reduces a man to glorified airport taxi. Or maybe he’s just sick to fucking death of the face that greets him in the mirror every morning.

An airport cop saunters through the traffic. He’s wearing a rain condom over his hat. A Batman utility belt jiggles on his meaty hips. It’s reflex to duck behind a pillar, glancing at his sidearm — still holstered. I unclench my body slowly, one muscle at a time, talking myself down from the culture shock. Dude. Get a grip. This is America, not Mexico. That cop might give a Big Mac a hard time, but he isn’t roughing up citizens for bribes.

Finally I spot the antiquated Ford F-150 in all its two-toned glory, white and aqua velva. Wendy’s hand-me-down from Dad, same way he gave me the keys to the Explorer when I graduated from high school. But the pickup isn’t gliding through traffic in her usual style. It progresses in a series of leaps and halts. The pale visage behind the steering wheel is on a nervous pivot, jerking between the curbside mob and the taillights in front of him. It must be Glenn, my sister’s longtime boyfriend. He hates to drive stick. I trot into the rain to intercept him before somebody’s bumper gets dinged.

Glenn is a misanthropic software geek who resembles a velvet Elvis painting, the few heroin addicts I’ve known, a used-up dishrag. He greets me with a pallid smile and a handshake like melting wax. His wispy black hair sticks out in a ratty halo, and his eyes are round and thin-lashed. A goatee straggles down the lower half of his face. He raises an open packet of beef jerky. “You want something to eat?”

“No thanks,” I mutter, tossing my backpack on the seat and belting in. “How is he?” I don’t have to specify the pronoun.

“Still alive, last I heard.” Glenn pulls away from the curb with excruciating slowness. A spacious gap in traffic floats past. His Doc Marten stays on the brake pedal.

“You want me to drive?” I offer.

“Uh, sure.”

I wait for him to fumble the old Ford into park, enduring a wan rant about stickshifts and Wendy’s stubborn refusal to upgrade to something new and automatic. That’s the thing about me and my siblings — we’ll drive our hand-me-downs until they shred into rust. You can take the kids out of the parsimonious Roberts family, but you can’t take the parsimonious Roberts family out of the kids.

Then it’s back into the rain. Glenn and I pass each other in front of the headlights, two cones of drenched light. We brush shoulders like strangers on a crowded sidewalk. I feel like I should apologize — for the harsh thoughts in my head, his exposure to my fucked-up family, everything. But the moment vanishes with his face, and I’m looking across a shuffling line of wet cars and Somali-piloted taxis drowning in wait and a massive cement parking garage swimming into the sky. He and Wendy have been together for 10 years and I can’t even remember his last name.

Behind the pickup’s wheel I’m a teenager again, flashbacking to the driving lessons Wendy gave me when she was home from college. It was a boiling summer day with heat waves rising off the gravel road. The windows were rolled down and locusts flitted in and out of the cab like tiny crashlanding helicopters. She was wild and ponytailed and laughing, even when I stalled out for the bazillionth time.

It should’ve been Brian who taught me how to drive. I wanted it to be my big brother. I didn’t idolize him — there was nobody worth idolizing in my family — but I still craved his approval, since approval was always in short supply. I could lay down a perfect weld and Dad would find something wrong with it, Mom would turn up her nose at my straight A’s and give me shit about not being valedictorian. But Brian was already a distant figure even across the breakfast table. Losing himself in the daily rituals of farming. Making friends of dusty cropland and feed animals. Rejecting us in his own way, I suppose.

I start to imagine him flat on his back in an intensive care ward, hooked up to a mess of tubes and wires, missing half his head, unmoving –

No. I push the vision away.

Glenn munches contentedly on jerky while I guide the F-150 through a maze of twisting access roads to the highway beyond. Jets scrape overhead in a blaze of noise and lights. Exit signs announce our transit through a bucolic suburbia — Fort Snelling State Park, Mendota, Mall of America, Apple Valley, Minnesota Zoo, Lakeville. I know 25 million people in Mexico City who’d give their right arm to live here.

“I always thought it would be Wendy,” Glenn says suddenly, staring at the hypnotic motion of the windshield wipers. “You try as many times as her…”

His secret fear is the most depressing thing in the world. A decade with my sister and he still doesn’t understand that her tentative suicide “attempts” are just another form of communication. Pleas for attention. Notice me, Mom and Dad. But Wendy doesn’t hate them — or herself — enough to really want to die.

I blow a long sigh into the windshield. “Thank god for SSRIs, huh?”

He glances sideways at me. “What?”

“SSRIs. Selective seratonin reuptake inhibitors. Prozac, Paxil — ”

“Zoloft. She’s on Zoloft now.” Glenn splays fingers across his shirt, absentmindedly wiping a greasy hand. “Me too, actually.”

That’s it for conversation for a while. We’re past the last tendrils of the Twin Cities and into the darkness of farmland. My gaze flicks between mileage signs and my speedometer. Six months of everything in kilometers and it’s like I’ve flipped an invisible switch. I wonder why the reverse culture shock isn’t bad this time. Probably because I didn’t lose myself in Mexico the way I usually do. I’ve been with Nooshin, speaking English every day, playing cultural tour guide.

As if reading my mind, Glenn stirs from his reverie. “Wendy told me that you and your girlfriend are going to have a kid.” He sharpens his tone — at himself, not me. Trying to remember. “This is a new one, right? Not the girlfriend you had in LA.”

“Yeah. Her name’s Nooshin. She’s my research assistant. We got, uh…” The F-150 is cruising in fifth gear, so I can shrug with my right shoulder. “We got…involved.”

“Sounds messy.”

“Nah, it’s cool. We’re in love.” The word feels strange in my mouth. I’m not used to saying it. Not even to Nooshin.

“Me and Wendy, we’re not going to have kids. That’s just not where it’s at for us.” He folds his pale arms across his chest, a gesture that could be defiant — or defensive. “Who wants to bring kids into a world like this? Everything is so fucked up.”

I’m already braced for the soundtrack of America — privileged diatribes woven out of shocking ignorance — but Glenn spares me. His sallow face stretches in a yawn. He goes back to his windshield trance, only humming this time. The noise is tuneless and irritating as hell.

Pointedly, I flip through a sleeve of Wendy’s CDs, searching for something to play on the only upgrade she’s made to the pickup — a sleek Blaupunkt audio system half-hidden under the dash. Her musical tastes don’t really map to mine. Most of the discs are MTV rap crap. Finally I grab something by a band called LCD Soundsystem and pop it into the stereo. The beats are downtempo and remixed and overlaid, with atmospheric hoarse-throated vocals on top. I find myself hanging on every lyric:

What we want
Sex with TV stars
What you want
A career in the
HA-HA-HA-HA
HA-HA-HA-HA

I tap the back button, playing that passage again and again, letting the cartoonish laughter mock me in waves. The lead singer was envisioning me, standing at a fork in my life. In one direction, a career in academia — now there’s a hardy-har-har. In the other direction, a career in whatever happens after you drop out of academia. Maybe that’s what an M.A. in Latin American Studies buys you in Corporate America. A big round of derisive laughter and a paycheck to match.

“Are you excited for the new Indiana Jones movie?” asks Glenn, and the pilgrimage to my brother’s shattered body wears on.