“Huh,” says Robert.
The lights lower for the band’s grand finale. Antonio, the mariachi guitarist, sings a song about his melancholy amor, whose melancholy forced her, quite against her will, to be infiel. His amor, he sings, was so melancholy and so infiel that in the end she died of her infinite sadness, which until that moment he had not known could be fatal. Hugo plays a funeral dirge on his trumpet. Trey motions for the check.
~ ~ ~
Outside the wind is so strong that bits of parking lot gravel and small stones fly through the air like hail, and Robert and Trey have to shield their faces and stumble half-blind to their cars. Trey calls out what Robert assumes must be a goodbye from across the parking lot, his words twisted by the wind into a series of sounds only just recognizable as human speech. Robert yells back and doesn’t recognize his own voice in his ears.
~ ~ ~
Beyond the windows of Robert’s car, the wind seems to assume shapes, even bodies with distinct personalities, that for a moment brush past, then dissipate, and are gone. Partway home Robert realizes that he doesn’t have his wallet on him. By the time he makes it back to the restaurant the band has changed out of their mariachi outfits and is packing up for the night.
“Your wallet?” says the hostess. “Antonio found it,” pointing. “Must’ve slipped out of your pocket.” Robert checks: everything’s still there.
“Hey, what are you drinking?” Robert asks Antonio, joining him and a couple of his bandmates at the bar. He buys the guitarist a whiskey neat and asks for a water for himself. “I’m driving,” he explains.
“Here’s to driving!” Antonio says, and he and his bandmates turn their glasses up.
“You have a real depth of sorrow to your voice when you sing, by the way,” Robert says. “I meant to say that when I was here earlier. I think it’s really admirable, how you can convey that.”
“Well we’re pretty broke all the time, and it’s sad, not having money. I mean, have you tried being a professional musician? We play in these shit little restaurants — no offense, Amy,” he says to the hostess, who ignores him, “—and just scrape by. Not a lot of money to be made, playing music. Hugo here guinea-pigs on the side.”
Hugo shrugs. “I take some pills, they give me money. There are worse things.”
“He only does it occasionally, mind you.”
“One time I vomited every fifteen minutes for the duration of the study. That was a dark time. But I’m young, still.”
“So you ran away from the military?” Robert says.
“It was a stupid thing to do. I’d heard that we were to be engaged in Afghanistan. But in the end, very few soldiers went. It seems I was too hasty.”
“Do you like America?”
“Sure, there’s a lot of freedom.”
“How does it compare to Hungary?”
“About equal, in terms of freedom. Still, I have at times an overwhelming longing for the beauty of the northern Hungarian landscape.”
“Oh boy, I know all about longing,” Antonio says, giving Hugo’s shoulder a friendly punch. “Amy, over there? Jesus, the longing that I have for her. Her hair is like flax. Isn’t her hair like flax? And her eyes are like little chips of something, like something that’s been chipped off… ”
“I used to be in a band,” says Robert. “I played drums. We played the Vogue, here in Indianapolis.”
“There’s not much use for a drummer in a mariachi band,” says Hugo, frowning. “It is not the tradition.”
~ ~ ~
“I still care about you very much,” Viola says, in bed with him that night. “I think it’s important for you to know that.”
Robert continues facing the wall on his side of the bed. “I know.”
~ ~ ~
The FBI agent emails Viola. “What were you thinking about the first time you masturbated?” he writes. Viola stares at the screen of her laptop, then closes it.
~ ~ ~
Robert’s father calls to tell him about the hallucinations that his grandmother has started having. “She’s at the hospital now. But they can’t find anything wrong with her. She’s in perfect health, except for the hallucinations. They said maybe it has to do with her salt, that she wasn’t getting enough of it.”
“Salt?” says Robert.
“Apparently that can cause that. Not enough salt.”
Robert goes to visit his grandmother, in the suburbs. She lives in a lovely house in a development that began during the boom and was never completed, because the housing market tanked. Empty lots are scattered throughout the neighborhood. Still, the houses that were finished have all been sold, and her neighbors, from what Robert knows of them, are reasonably friendly.
“I heard things were a bit rough earlier this week,” Robert says.
Robert’s grandmother leads him into the living room by the arm. “They made such a fuss out of everything. I don’t think it was at all necessary.”
Robert’s grandmother sits in one of the two beautifully upholstered, uncomfortable chairs underneath a watercolor painting of trees. She seems to be confused about the salt thing. “They told me there I needed to watch my salt,” she says. “But I don’t eat hardly any salt. I’m very careful about that.”
“They said you needed more salt, Grandmother,” Robert says.
“Is that what they said?”
Robert changes into his shorts and running shoes and goes for a run. He traces the entirety of the housing development, running down each of its branches, circling around the cul-de-sac that tips each, running back. Uncompleted houses sit, half-built, an air of expectancy gathering around them, as though construction halted just an hour before and will resume at any moment. Cars slow down as they pass. The drivers, most of them elderly, wave.
Later that evening, Robert’s grandmother asks him how many people are in the house. Robert is sitting on the couch in the living room, reading the thin local paper. He tells her, carefully, that it’s just the two of them. He feels suddenly disoriented. Without quite thinking it, he gets the feeling that he might somehow be wrong, that she might have access to some knowledge he doesn’t. The skin at the back of his neck crawls.
“Where’s your father?”
“He’s at his house, in Geist,” Robert says. Robert’s grandmother peers around the room, then her focus comes to rest on a spot on the couch somewhere to Robert’s left.
“Who’s that?” she says. “I don’t like him.”
Robert stares at the empty spot.
“Him,” his grandmother says, waving her hand at it violently.
Robert’s parents arrive. “I don’t know what to do with her,” Robert says.
“Let’s get her into bed,” Robert’s father says. Robert and his father attempt to lead her from the couch into her bedroom. It goes fine for the first several steps, and then Robert’s grandmother refuses to go any further. She insists that there’s a hole in the carpet, right in front of her.
“A pit,” she moans. “A pit.”
“There’s no pit there, Grandmother,” Robert says. “It’s just your carpet.”
“What are you trying to do to me?” she asks. So Robert and his father lead her around the pit and into her bedroom.