The World in Half (20 page)

My mother gasps. “There’s a bug on the window.”

“Mom?”

“It’s a really big bug.”

The front door clicks. Someone going out or coming in? Or did I imagine it? The air folds into silence again. I wish it were him, knocking on my door like he did that first morning, standing there with his arms crossed, inviting me to go somewhere even if both of us had no idea of the destination.

“Mom, I think I need to go.”

“Time to get on with the day!”

“I’ll talk to you soon.”

 

 

 

Danilo isn’t at the hotel.
I haven’t been back to it since Hernán offered me a place to stay, and as it comes into view now, it’s like glimpsing a structure I haven’t seen in decades. It’s part of another lifetime, one in which I didn’t know anyone in Panama and believed that finding my father would be much, much easier than it has turned out to be.

Dressed in his uniform, Hernán is standing stiffly at the foot of the front steps, his hands clasped behind him, his hat pulled low on his forehead. He seems lost in thought, and when I first wave as I approach him, he appears not to recognize me.

“Hernán,” I call.

He swings his head in confusion, like someone awoken from a dream, and when he spots me, forces a smile. I wonder if he’s still upset that I intruded on his television viewing the night before.

“You’re at work early,” I say.

He unclasps his hands and gives a firm tug to each of his shirtsleeve cuffs. “Not really.”

“I’m looking for Danilo.”

Hernán rolls his eyes. “You are always looking for him. I do not know where he is.”

“He’s not here at the hotel?”

“No.”

“Have you seen him today at all?”

“I saw him last night, but he wasn’t there when I woke up this morning.”

“What time did you wake up?”

“Seven.”

“And he wasn’t in the house?”

Hernán shakes his head. “Your mother, at home. Doesn’t she miss you?”

The question catches me off guard. “What?”

“Your mother. Doesn’t she want you to come home?”

“How do you know about my mother?”

“What do you mean? I was only asking. I was wondering how much longer you’re planning to be in Panamá.”

His tone is innocent enough. I don’t think he knows about my mother’s illness or that I left her behind like I did. Nonetheless, I can tell—I can see it in the uncomfortable expression on his face—that he hopes I’ll leave soon. I doubt he’s mad at me, but maybe I’ve stayed too long, or maybe I’m just in his way, or maybe he regrets ever inviting me in the first place.

Danilo isn’t at Mi Pueblito,
where we went once even though he deemed it a huge swamp of quicksand for tourists. It took us a long time to struggle through the language of that one. But eventually I got his meaning: It was a tourist trap. “Even so,” he said, “there’s something cool about the fact that people are trying, you know, to hold on to something.” He told me he liked going there sometimes when he needed to take a step back from his life.

Mi Pueblito is the Panama City version of Colonial Williamsburg, an assortment of replica buildings—an old town store, a gazebo, a church, residential huts where life-sized clay people are hunched forever over a fake fire—made to reflect what life in Panama was like in earlier days. When we went, Danilo shepherded us past all of it and led us up Ancon Hill, through the dense and overgrown grass and foliage, until we reached a reasonable plateau where we could sit in the heat.

“There’s a Kuna Village down there,” he said.

I didn’t want to tell him that I had read about it in my guidebook. He made fun of me anytime I said that.

“I know. You already know. But what you
didn’t
read”—he smiled—“is that they build the floors of their huts so that they’re creaky. It’s kind of like a tradition, you know. When a man wants to be with a woman in their tribe, he’s supposed to sneak into the hut in the middle of the night when the woman and her whole family are sleeping. If he makes it all the way across the floor without waking anyone up, he gets the woman. If he doesn’t . . .” Danilo made a slicing motion across his throat with his hand.

“They kill him?”

“They kill him.”

“Shit,” I said, and Danilo sprang up.

“Miraflores! Such language!” He looked positively gleeful, amused by my transgression.

“What?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“I’m not always good,” I said.

“Yes you are.”

“Well maybe I’m not anymore, then,” I said.

We spent nearly four hours that day at Mi Pueblito, and of course, we asked everyone we laid eyes on about my father, and of course, no one even recognized his name. Now, when I don’t see Danilo anywhere on the premises, I ask some of the employees if they remember him, but they offer no recognition of him, either.

 

 

 

He isn’t at El Dorado,
the mall where he took me the one day it rained since I’ve been here. It wasn’t supposed to rain. I had learned that during the dry season in Panama, no matter how threatening the sky looked, no matter how low and full and dark the clouds, rain would not actually tumble from the sky. I knew that because of the myriad times I, glimpsing a purplish-gray sky, remarked to Danilo,
We should bring an umbrella with us,
and Danilo, with a lifetime of experience to back him up, would tell me not to worry because there was absolutely no way it was going to rain. Not until April. I would eye him skeptically and he would say, “Trust me. It’s not going to happen.”

But it did. One morning I woke to a minor cacophony composed of the sound of rain spitting against the windows and Danilo banging on the bedroom door.

“Miraflores! Are you awake? It’s raining.”

I was groggy in bed.

“Get dressed,” he ordered. “We’re going out.”

I should have known he wouldn’t bring an umbrella.

“I swear to you,” he said, “this is the only time it will rain for you in Panamá. You could stay here for the rest of your life and it would never again rain during January for you.” He shook his head. “I can’t believe it’s fucking raining now!” He was giddy about it. “So there’s no way you’re going to stand under an umbrella for it. This is a historic event, Miraflores. You need to experience it.”

The sky outside was perfectly blue and clear, slender needles of rain lit by the sun.

“So that means getting wet?” I asked.

“Exactly.”

I wiped my soaked bangs off my face and twisted my hair into a rope that uncoiled almost as soon as I let go.

“Look, you can always dry off later and you’ll be good as new. Humans are well designed that way. We have this thing called skin, and it’s fairly waterproof. Not waterproof like a fish, because you know when you stay in the bath for too long, your skin starts to wrinkle. That shit is crazy. But waterproof enough, you know, so that when you dry off your skin just goes back to how it was before. So there’s no harm in getting wet, okay? I wouldn’t do this to you if it were dangerous.”

I smiled sarcastically. “Thanks.”

We walked four blocks, the rain pattering down on us. We looked ridiculous, strolling as if immune to the fact that long dashes of water were falling from the sky. Other people walking by with their umbrellas hoisted in the air or plastic grocery bags tied over their heads looked at us with puzzlement or derision. But Danilo didn’t seem to care or notice, and after a time, neither did I. Maybe he was right. Maybe this was the only time in my life I would get to experience Panamanian rain soaking into my skin and drenching my hair and the fibers of my clothes. Maybe that was something.

“So this is what we’re doing?” I asked, after we had passed several more street corners. “Walking in the rain?”

“This is what we’re doing first. But we’re also going to the mall.”

We ended up at El Dorado, a fairly typical-looking mall, not terribly unlike one in any town in the United States. As we cut across the parking lot, I saw a McDonald’s and a sporting goods store and something called Collins that looked like a department store. The hallways were covered, but there were no doors, blurring the division between inside and out. At the mouth of each corridor opening, elderly people sat behind wooden folding tables lined with small square papers that, I later learned, were lottery tickets. The papers were in rows, secured by long rubber bands that had been snapped around the tabletop. Each time a breeze swept through, the bottom edges of the tickets fluttered up like a swarm of butterfly wings.

Danilo and I walked inside and sat on the ledge of a fountain in the middle of the mall. Surrounding us were shoe stores and clothing stores and a store that sold embroidered linens being billed as authentic handicrafts, a fluorescent-orange piece of posterboard in the window advertising a sale,
“Venta.”
I looked at Danilo. He was sitting with his hands folded in his lap, an expression of contentment on his face. His soaked T-shirt clung to the slender contours of his chest. His wet hair was sideswept over his forehead. I remember I wanted to lean forward there, in the middle of the mall, and nuzzle my face against his slippery neck, but I turned away instead and stared, through a passing group of girls in flimsy dresses, at the neon Gran Morrison sign down the way, the rose icon blinking every few seconds. Then I noticed it: how loud it was in there. The longer I sat, neither Danilo nor I speaking, the louder it seemed to get. I looked back at him and pointed toward the ceiling. He nodded. I understood why he had brought me there. Without his having to say anything, I understood. Covering the mall was a zinc roof, which was high and spread over an area as large as a cavern. When the rain pounded down on it, the inside of the building thundered so deeply that I swore a herd of horses was stampeding over the roof. The sound swelled and boomed and echoed and reverberated in my chest, and unless it had rained and unless Danilo had brought me there, it was something I wouldn’t have experienced.

 

 

 

On one of these outings,
I can’t remember which, Danilo had, out of nowhere, claimed that there were eight continents spread over the earth.

“Are you trying to sound stupid?” I asked. We’d fallen by then into a sort of teasing camaraderie.

“I usually don’t have to try.”

“Come on. There are seven continents,” I told him. “You know that.”

“List them.”

“Asia, Australia, Antarctica, Africa, Europe, North America, and South America.”

“And what about Central America?”

“What about it?”

“Central America is the eighth.”

“Central America is part of South America,” I said.

He balked. “What? Here we learn in school that Central America is its own continent. Everyone here thinks that. And if we all think it and we live here, then it’s true.”

“I don’t think that’s how it works.”

“People here believe it in their hearts, Miraflores, and the heart is a fucking stubborn thing. It makes true what it wants.”

“I’m pretty sure there are only seven continents,” I said again, and he let it drop after telling me that I was being narrow-minded.

But the heart is a stubborn thing, I think now. It must be or else I should have given up by now. I should go back to the apartment and start packing my things. I should call the airline and book a return ticket back to Chicago. Because I’m tired of looking for people—of looking for Danilo, and for my father, and for my mother underneath everything, and for myself. But something won’t let me stop.

 

 

 

The only other place
I can think to check is Panamá La Vieja.

I wait at the bus stop for half an hour. Everyone—nearly twenty people have gathered by the time the bus arrives—grumbles in the heat about the wait. I sit toward the front, next to a bald man with a gold lightning-bolt earring in his left ear. He glances at me, then turns away. As the bus growls away from the stop, he swivels his head back around. I’m staring straight ahead, but I can feel his eyes on me.

“Buenas,”
he says.

The bus is crowded, packed with people of all ages, and steaming hot despite the fact that nearly every window is open. A woman standing at the front flicks a paper fan in front of her face while she gazes impassively at the city as it slips by.

“You ride this bus a lot?” the man asks.

My neck tenses and I clench my toes in my sneakers. “Not usually.”

“I’m trying to get to a restaurant called Firenze. Do you know it?”

And all at once, I think I might laugh. He wants directions? And he looked at me and thought I could provide them?

“I’m sorry. I don’t know it.”

He squints. “You’re Panamanian?”

“Yes.”