The Foreigners (19 page)

The city was too hot for comfort. The streets were glaring.

I saw Gabriel. He'd had to stay in town for his messenger work. He seemed languid from the heat. But he approved of my taking time to think things through. I could tell that he approved.

The botanist had gotten in touch. He was very excited about a story happening on Argentine soil, a flower, the
Iris pseudacorus
that was taking over the Argentine wetlands. This was typical of him. He'd get very excited about a particular plant case and follow it closely.

“Have you heard about it?” he asked.

I hadn't, but I promised to keep my ears open.

I turned again to my water research. I had less than three months to go before I sent in my final report. I spent a number of afternoons in the National Public Library doing research. I took a tour of the water purification plant, witnessing how the dirty water from the Río de la Plata got transformed into the clear liquid that found its way into buildings and houses.

Finally, after three weeks of this, I called.

Heyyyyy, hiiiiiiiiiiiii!” Leonarda said. “You have no idea how much you want to see me.”

I picked her up after her Chinese lesson.

She was wearing a tiny miniskirt, sneakers and her glasses. “Oh, wait, we have to put on makeup.” We stopped under a streetlight. It was dusk again. A dog was lying in the open door of a garage. “You need green, I always told you,” she said. “Close your eyes.” She put deep shimmering green shadow on my eyelids.

We came to a plaza, its pathways on diagonals, the trees enormous, benches minuscule. All that green in the darkness, hulked there, breathing.

I was trying to keep my equanimity. One part of my brain, a stronghold, wouldn't budge. But another part was buckling, even now, I could feel it. Okay, go ahead, colonize.

The point was I needed to stay in charge. Seduce, enchant, those things too, but above all take control of how the evening would unfold.

She looked over at me with a funny smile. “You're grateful to us, aren't you?” she said. “Our antics free you up.”

I raised my eyebrows. I didn't mind what I assumed to be her jealousy, her fear of losing full dominion over me.

“You're that kind of foreigner. You go somewhere exotic and start moving your butt”—she circled her little butt around; some guys hooted from their cars—“and suddenly you think you've had an epiphany, like you've understood everything about yourself and the world.”

I laughed. Oh, yeah, the butt fixation. I'd forgotten about that.

“Or at least your butt's understood. The knowledge is collected in your butt, which, by the way”—she glanced back—“is getting bigger and bigger.”

We walked on. The enchantment accumulated. Despite my wariness, stronger than me. I imagined zoo animals in wartime, having crept out of their bomb-shattered cages, wandering loose on the streets.

Suddenly, we were bumped into from behind. Leonarda skittered to one side. I fell forward, catching myself with one hand.

“Hey!” she yelled. “What the fuck?”

It was one of the
cartoneros,
the people who collect recyclable garbage. He was pushing a canvas cart suspended on wheels in which to amass his loot. It was piled taller than he was, blocking his view.

Leonarda walked around the side of the cart. “Dude, you knocked us over! What's the deal?”

“Sorry, I'm really sorry.” The guy, surprised to be addressed at all by someone like her, and especially so informally, was about her age. He did look sorry.

“Well, whatever. Get it together,” Leonarda said, turning away. “C'mon, dufus,” she called to me.

I crossed the street to where she was.

“I know,” she said, grabbing my hand in her little, hot one. “Let's go to the nerd bar. It's right near here.”

By “nerds,” she meant hackers, computer program designers, video game inventors, maybe the kind of people she most admired, because they were at the forefront of everything.

“You know Mercury fell apart,” she told me on the way. “I knew it would. It was totally passé. This is the new center of operations. Welcome to nerd world!”

The bar was dark, everything looked red, with black-and-white cow spots here and there. Leonarda hoisted herself onto a barstool and sat there, shoulders hunched.

When the bartender came, she ordered a beer. I got one too.

There was a very tall guy with a very short woman at the end of the bar.

“Shit,” Leonarda said, “sexual vertigo.”

Suddenly, her face lit up. “Ohhh, the skydiver!”

A young man with dark hair was sitting about five stools down from us. He seemed to have been waiting for her to recognize him. He got up, beer in hand, and came over.

Leonarda turned to me. “This is Mateo. He's a skydiver and a nerd. It's the best combination.”

“Oh, wow,” I said. “I'd like to try the skydiving part.”

“If you're serious, I can arrange it,” the guy said. “The one thing I would say is that you should do it more than once. You have to do it a few times to really enjoy it.”

“Like how many times?” I asked.

He shrugged. “After the fiftieth jump you begin to enjoy it.”

“Fiftieth jump? Jesus.”

“I would never do that,” Leonarda said, scowling.

“Why?” Mateo asked.

“Because I make a point of living my life so I don't take risks.”

“You do?” I asked, surprised.

“But you cross the street?” Mateo said.

“I cross the street in a way that it's one hundred percent sure that it's not a risk.”

Mateo and I laughed.

“How did you two meet?” he asked.

“I stalked her,” Leonarda said.

“You did?”

“Yeah, I began stalking her online. I found out where she lived and waited outside on the pavement. I followed her everywhere.” Her eyes had an eerie look, making her story sound totally believable.

A further group of nerds entered.

“I know that guy,” Leonarda said, pointing to one of them, her lips close against my ear. “From the university. He's a famous hacker. Like, I mean, he hacked through the U.S. Department of State's security system.”

The guy seemed to recognize her too, but was shy. Mateo went over to talk to the group.

“So anyway, where were we?” she said, turning back to me.“Oh, yeah, you as a product of Humboldt's theory.”

We were like a comedy sketch. I lifted my eyebrows, meaning “Who's Humboldt?” She rolled her eyes, meaning “Moron.”

“Humboldt, you know, the Austrian explorer naturalist,” she said. “Bolívar, like the friggin' liberator of the continent, called Humboldt the true discoverer of America. He traveled around here for, like, five years, doing all kinds of tests, describing everything, from ocean currents to volcanoes to magnetic fields to plant life. It's not exactly that he came up with original ideas” (at this, I smiled—I knew how much she prized the “original idea”) “but he had, like, an astonishing capacity to synthesize knowledge. One of his essays called ‘The Geography of Plants' is about how the geographic environment influences plant life, in which he pretty much laid down the foundations for ecology.”

I nodded. I felt extremely happy to be sitting here in the nerd bar, listening to Leonarda talk about Humboldt, the nerds in the background, the couple with sexual vertigo at the far end of the bar.

“So I was saying that obviously this geographical location is having its effects on you. Really, I think it's great how you're interacting with your environment.”

She stopped for a second and stared. She looked sad. And then suddenly she was crying.

“What? What is it?” I asked.

“No, forget it. You didn't want to see me.”

She had taken off her glasses. “My face looks wrong without the glasses, doesn't it?”

“It looks beautiful,” I said. “The glasses are protection.”

“Yeah, you're right”—putting them back on—“the glasses are protection.”

The night was getting away from me. It acquired a slant. Next we were dancing, then climbing across the red-and-black furniture, chasing each other. She made a wrong turn. I caught and kissed her.

The night cracked open further. We were in a car, speeding along dark roads outside the city. The star hacker who had broken into the U.S. security system was driving. Two other nerds were with us. We stopped, stepped out.

“Where are we?” I asked.

“By the river,” Leonarda said.

“I don't see it.”

“It's over there.” Leonarda pointed ahead. We were walking across a plain lit by tall lamps that gave off a greenish glow.

“It's like a sports field,” I said.

The air was full of moisture, soft and white. I looked over and saw the star hacker and his friends at a slight distance advancing in tandem. They looked ghostly, otherworldly, as if enveloped in a haze of light. Ahead was darkness, where the river was supposed to be. The river, I would finally reach it, stand on its shore, put my toes in that water. But instead of a shore, we arrived at a barrier of black, asteroid-shaped chunks of debris.

“What's this?” I asked.

We stepped up onto the debris. There was a wall of it that toppled down as far as the water.

“This is so the river won't devour us,” Leonarda said.

I looked down the coast. The massive debris was sprinkled along it as far as the eye could see.

“If this weren't here, that whole field behind us would be deep in water,” Leonarda continued. “And not only that, but water would be creeping down those streets beyond it, filling all the alleys and basements, rising slowly to higher ground.”

I looked at her. I drank in the old enchantment, yet with a grain of salt.

Next we were alone, in a trucker joint, eating chorizos. Leonarda was starving.

“Your nails look nice,” I said. They were bright orange-red against the chorizo sandwich.

“Yeah, my mother did them.” Her mother, the glowering monster?

We were in a cab, going back to my house, passing the zoo. She leaned forward to talk to the driver. “Can we stop here for a second?”

The taxi pulled over. We were in front of Miguel's house.

“Why?” I said. “What are you doing?”

“There's a book I need. It'll be quick.”

“Wait.” I looked at her intently. “If you're not ready to go home, we can do something else. We can go dancing.”

She shrugged. “Yeah, sure. But let's go in here for a sec.”

This was the moment to keep my head. “I'm not interested,” I said, not budging from the taxi seat.

Leonarda sighed with exasperation, reached over and grabbed my hand. I resisted, feeling at the same time that everything was slipping out of my grasp again.

“Hey, girls, what's going on?” the taxi driver said.

“Nothing,” she answered, then turned to me. “I have to go in for two minutes. I swear, it's important.”

We rang the bell. It was late, like three in the morning. He was awake. Or rather, it seemed he had been dozing, but was still fully dressed. He didn't seem that surprised to see us.

We stepped inside. It was strange. Leonarda's pink jersey minidress was bunched up on the couch under the hospital light. Then I saw what looked like her computer. She loved her computer like a human being, never left it anywhere, slept with it by her bed at night. I looked at her.

But she had turned away, down the hall. Still groggy, Miguel had lit a pipe, was standing by his desk. I followed Leonarda.

“This apartment's fine,” she said, “but the bathroom's horrible, small and dingy. I've told him it's horrible. He has to fix it.”

She turned off into the little room where his son slept when he stayed there. I followed. The last thing I wanted was to be left alone with him. More of Leonarda's things were here. The bed was unmade. Her notebooks were spread around amid the rumpled sheets.

“What the fuck?” I whispered. “Are you staying here?”

“Shh,” she said, whispering back. “No, I was just sick. And my mother was so horrible. She threw me out.”

“And so you came here?”

“I had nowhere else to go.”

I was looking down at the little bed, at her notebooks full of small crabbed writing, impossible to decipher though I'd tried more than once. Too dumbfounded to think, I sat down on the bed. “I can't believe this.”

She went and closed the door. Oh, that's right, I thought, to make matters worse, there was that horrible creature out there listening.

“Have you forgotten the Master Plan?” she asked.

“The Master Fucking Plan says you're supposed to live with him?”

“I'm not living with him. I'm just staying for a few days in the kid's room. How do you think they poisoned Roman emperors? Someone has to be on the inside. I told him you were my girlfriend and that would never change.”

I laughed an awful-tasting laugh. This girlfriend thing was new too.

But she was enthusiastic. “Listen, it's really working.” By now, she'd sat down beside me and was whispering heatedly into my ear. “He's getting more and more dependent on my mind. It's like he can't think without me. He can't even write his shitty little articles without asking me first what I think.” She laughed. Then a second later withdrew her lips from my ear. She was suddenly wan-faced, staring off into the corner of the room. “If things go on like this, it'll soon be over.”