Yo se bien que estoy afuera
Pero el día que yo me muera
Se que tendras que llorar
(Llorar y llorar, llorar y llorar)
I know I’m out of your life
But the day that I die
I know you are going to cry
(Cry and cry, cry and cry)
On Sunday morning, they bid good-bye to the hotel staff and headed in another speed streak back toward home; this time, they made it in eleven hours. Weary and dazed, young Arthur Less was dropped off at his apartment building, where he stumbled in for a few hours’ sleep before work. He was deliriously happy, and in love. It did not occur to him until later that during the entire trip, he never asked the crucial question—Where is your wife?—and so decided never to mention the weekend around Robert’s friends, fearing he would give something away. Less grew so used to covering up their scandalous getaway that even years later, when it can’t possibly matter anymore, when asked if he has ever been to Mexico, Arthur Less always answers: no.
The tour of Mexico City begins with a subway ride. Why did Less expect tunnels filled with Aztec mosaics? Instead, he descends, with wonder, into a replica of his Delaware grammar schooclass="underline" the colorful railings and tiled floors, primary yellows and blues and oranges, the 1960s cheerfulness that history revealed to be a sham but that still lives on here, as it does in the teacher’s-pet memory of Arthur Less. What retired principal has been brought down to design a subway on Less’s dreams? Arturo motions for him to take a ticket, and Less duplicates his motions of feeding it to a robot as red-bereted police officers look on in groups large enough to make futbol teams.
“Señor Less, here is our train.” Along comes an orange Lego monorail, running along on rubber wheels before it comes to a stop and he steps inside and takes hold of a cold metal pole. He asks where they are going, and when Arturo answers “the Flower,” Less feels he is indeed living now inside a dream—until he notices above his head a map, each stop represented by a pictograph. They are indeed headed to “the Flower.” From there, they switch lines to head to “the Tomb.” Flower to tomb; it is always thus. When they arrive, Less feels gentle pressure on his back from the woman behind him and is ejected smoothly onto the platform. The station: a rival grammar school, this time in bright blues. He follows Arturo and the Head closely through the tiled passages, the crowds, and finds himself on an escalator gliding upward into a square of peacock sky…and then he is in an enormous city square. All around, buildings of cut stone, tilting slightly in the ancient mud, and a massive cathedral. Why did he always assume Mexico City would be like Phoenix on a smoggy day? Why did no one tell him it would be Madrid?
They are met by a woman in a long black dress patterned with hibiscus blossoms, their guide, who leads them to one of Mexico City’s markets, a stadium of blue corrugated steel, where they are met by four young Spanish men, clearly friends of Arturo’s. Their guide stands before a table of candied fruits and asks if anyone has allergies or things they will not or cannot eat. Silence. Less wonders if he should mention make-believe foods like bugs and slimy Lovecraftian sea horrors, but she is already leading them between the stalls. Bitter chocolates wrapped in paper, piled in ziggurats beside a basket of Aztec whisks, shaped like wooden maces, and jars of multicolored salts such as those Buddhist monks might use to paint mandalas, along with plastic bins of rust- and cocoa-colored seeds, which their guide explains are not seeds but crickets; crayfish and worms both live and toasted, alongside the butcher’s area of rabbits and baby goats still wearing their fluffy black-and-white “socks” to prove they are not cats, a long glass butcher’s case that for Arthur Less increases in horrors as he moves along it, such that it seems like a contest of will, one he is sure to fail, but luckily they turn down the fish aisle, where somehow his heart grows colder among the gray speckled bodies of octopuses coiled in ampersands, the unnamable orange fish with great staring eyes and sharp teeth, the beaked parrotfish whose flesh, Less is told, is blue and tastes of lobster (he smells a lie); and how very close this all is to childhood haunted houses, with their jars of eyeballs, dishes of brains and jellied fingers, and that gruesome delight he felt as a boy.
“Arthur,” the Head says as their guide leads them on between the icy shoals. “What was it like to live with genius? I understand you met Brownburn in your distant youth.”
No one is allowed to say “distant youth” but you, isn’t that a rule? But Less merely says, “Yes, I did.”
“He was a remarkable man, playful, merry, tugging critics this way and that. And his movement was sublime. Full of joy. He and Ross were always one-upping each other, playing a game of it. Ross and Barry and Jacks. They were pranksters. And there’s nothing more serious than a prankster.”
“You knew them?”
“I know them. I teach every one of them in my course on middle-American poetry, by which I don’t mean the middle America of small minds and malt shops, or midcentury America, but rather the middle, the muddle, the void, of America.”
“That sounds—”
“Do you think of yourself as a genius, Arthur?”
“What? Me?”
Apparently the Head takes that as a no. “You and me, we’ve met geniuses. And we know we’re not like them, don’t we? What is it like to go on, knowing you are not a genius, knowing you are a mediocrity? I think it’s the worst kind of hell.”
“Well,” Less said. “I think there’s something between genius and mediocrity—”
“That’s what Virgil never showed Dante. He showed him Plato and Aristotle in a pagan paradise. But what about the lesser minds? Are we consigned to the flames?”
“No, I guess,” Less offers, “just to conferences like this one.”