Beyond the enclaves of the beautiful, Mexico City is like a dingy basement arcade, sticky and loud and prone to testosterone rages. He’s never been anywhere either so vast or so claustrophobic. The place is impossible to fathom more than a block at a time, the ruins of the Aztecs choking in the fumes of motorbikes and VW microbuses. The markets are cities unto themselves, with every imaginable flesh cleaved and hung without modesty for all the world to see. More seemingly endless supplies, all of it false. Brooding in judgment over everything are cathedrals more magnificent than anything he’s ever believed to be within the power of man to conceive. And yet what seems to tie all the disparate pieces together is not faith but its exact opposite, chaos.
He awakens with chills every few minutes, every few hours. Sometimes in these moments, he imagines himself as a child back home in Minnesota, watching the snow sifting past his window, feeling the cold at a cellular level.
Sergio never shows at the club. The beautiful person Dobbs thinks might be named Polanco is so drunk afterward he can hardly stand, but he has no trouble driving, and they wind up Los Lomas to a hillside mansion of stucco and glass, where a guard holds open a gate for them to pass through. The beautiful people tramp upstairs, collapsing onto a white leather sofa, and Dobbs goes alone out to the balcony. Removing his shoes, he stands there, barefoot on the terra-cotta tiles, staring down at the hovels stapled to the hillside below as thick as a forest. As for actual trees, virtually none. Something like twenty million people live down there. At his back, the beautiful people are taking turns guiding their shaved, perfect noses toward a mirrored tray, and Dobbs can’t help marveling at the seemingly endless absurdity the world seems able to accommodate as it hurls toward collapse.
His childhood in St. Paul has not prepared him for chaos. He’s grown up accustomed to heated buses stopping precisely at every block, to the efficient choreography of front-end loaders and dump trucks disappearing mountains of snow, to the humane practicality of skyways, connecting together the tidy burrows of civilization. Until his arrival in Mexico, chaos has been for Dobbs just an anomaly, a temporary condition, the rule of law broken down. But here he’s discovered chaos is not an aberration, not a consequence of failure. Chaos is an entity, a living system, a force. Chaos is the sea upon which the raft of civilization floats. And the future, Dobbs now believes, will belong to those who strip themselves bare, enduring the sting of the water, and swim.
A week after the club, a week before número diez, another meeting with Sergio is scheduled, this time at the Palacio de Bellas Artes. But once again Sergio doesn’t show.
For days, he’s not sure how many, the proprietress is Dobbs’s only company, her hollow, distant voice visiting him clandestinely from the vent above the toilet. The even hollower reverberations ring around the tiled bathroom, singing to him while he hunkers in the shower, trying to keep cool. Sometimes the vent makes her voice rumble like a stadium crowd. She multiplies exponentially. In his delirium, Dobbs imagines applause each time he moves his bowels, cheers when he empties his stomach. He sits on the porcelain for twenty minutes. He sits for an hour. He falls asleep sitting.
He dreams he’s in a grocery store, selecting a box of cornflakes with the help of an old friend. For the first time in days, he wakes up in número diez and he isn’t sweating.
Slowly his head is clearing, his body parts gradually coming back into focus. He is thirteen again, awakening from a long sleep in his hospital bed, his broken leg still in traction. He is alone. It is daytime, or so the clock says, but the summer sky outside his window is inky gray, radiating angry swirls of violet. The wind is louder than the night janitor’s vacuum, and each raindrop lands upon Dobbs’s windowsill like a water balloon. What awoke him, he realizes now, are the emergency broadcast tones and the staticky, officious voice emanating from a radio in some neighboring room. If Dobbs rolls his head all the way to the right, he can see the trees at the edge of the hospital grounds do things he didn’t know trees could do. There is a pine in the distance taller than the hospital itself, and Dobbs watches it bend like a noodle. On the news lately he’s been hearing more and more about violent storms like these, how they once were rare but are becoming ordinary. Dobbs watches each bend and swerve of that one tall pine, high up above all the rest. He’s witnessed such storms before. He’s seen his mother’s car crushed in the driveway by a fallen limb, and yet there’s something about this particular tree that makes Dobbs swell with sadness. He can’t look away. Even through the roaring wind and the pounding rain, he can hear the very moment the trunk — three-quarters of the way to the top — finally snaps. All the green needles arrayed at the canopy, all at once, fall away, hitting the ground with a crack and a thump. Just then a shadow expands upon the wall — someone approaching his open door, and Dobbs closes his eyes, not wanting anyone to see what’s happened to him. He knows he wouldn’t be able to explain. And in the morning, when at last the traction comes down and he’s free to go, the landscape all along the route home is littered with branches and twigs and even entire trees. Silent corpses. The power is down throughout his neighborhood, but all Dobbs can think of are the losses, that new seeds — at least as far as the span of human existence is concerned — will never catch up with what’s been destroyed. The coming end only quickens, Dobbs thinks — it never slows.
His fever subsides, and the next day the proprietress comes upstairs and hands Dobbs a note. He puts on a set of clothes from his backpack, wrinkled but clean-smelling clothes, and he emerges unsteadily from behind the steel door, into the blistering daylight.
§
Sergio meets him that afternoon in a dingy playground in San Pedro el Chico. Sergio is not one of the beautiful people. He is unshaven and wearing the half-apron of a waiter.
“I just quit,” Sergio says in English as they shake hands. Dobbs’s palm feels like a damp sponge.
“Quit what?”
Sergio says, “What’s it look like?”
It looks like there’s been some mistake, is what Dobbs is thinking. Or is he still in bed in número diez, feverishly dreaming?
“I need to find a new direction,” Sergio says.
Dobbs says, “Me too.” He can feel the sweat gathering along his brow.
“I used to live in California,” Sergio says, wandering over toward the swing set. “Right on the bay. I was a waiter there. That’s where I made most of my connections.”
And Dobbs wonders if there’s been some misunderstanding, if he’s mistakenly been led to the kingpin of busboys.
“The nicest people I’ve ever known,” Sergio says, “were the friends I had at that restaurant. We used to go out drinking together, smoke weed together. It was nice.”
They’re walking side by side, and when they reach the teeter-totter, Sergio offers to buy him a beer.
“Sure.”
“Let’s go this way,” Sergio says, turning away from the main road. The cafés, he says, are too expensive.
They head north, past a school. Dobbs’s heels seem reluctant to lift off the sidewalk. Balance is suddenly not something to be taken for granted.
They’re in a residential neighborhood, small concrete boxes with gates and courtyards just off the street. It’s pretty and quiet, but it’s nothing like where the beautiful people live.
“I had a good friend named Sammy,” Sergio says. “He had the most beautiful girlfriend I’d ever seen.”