“Ah, good. How lucky... Hey, what’s the name of the night manager at the Majestic?”
“Melecio. Carlos Melecio.”
“Ay! It was you with the con artist. Damn, loco, everyone in the industry knows that story, dude.”
“What? Don’t mess with me, man.”
“They booted Melecio too. Turns out the gringa was an underwear model and a professional con artist. She’d charged more than a hundred thousand dollars in jewelry and clothes to her hotel account. When everything went down, the hotel didn’t realize. The trick is that they don’t realize what’s happened until she’s already on the plane heading home. She did the same thing at the Conquistador, the Marriott, and the Intercontinental too. I thought you guys knew about her. Fuck! I didn’t know the bellboy was you. Damn, everything’s so fucked up.”
“You’re not messing with me, right?”
“No, I swear. Last week I ran into Inés, one of the girls from the lobby at the Cactus, at four in the morning and she told me everything. I can’t believe it, man... Ah, that’s my number. See you. Good luck, man. Take care.”
And so I stayed in that chair, watching as my buddy from Santurce Plaza went in to talk to his case officer, wondering what other hotel Carlos Melecio had hidden in.
I went outside to smoke a cigarette. I came back quickly because it was hotter than hell. When I got the paperwork from a little old lady, I wondered what story I could invent to convince the officer to accept my case, when I couldn’t put down the only legal employment I’d had in more than fifteen years as a reference.
Things Told While Falling
by Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro
So many things begin and perhaps end as a game.
San José
1.
You play at identifying buildings to avoid the anxiety that landing always causes. There you are, right in the middle of the airplane’s gut, aisle seat. From there you watch, turning your neck from side to side, and spread yourself into that metal bird’s extremities. Left wing and right wing; engines to the right and left; identification lights off — it’s daytime — to the left and the right.
A therapeutic late-afternoon sun threatens to leave you blind, keeping you from enjoying the descent. You curse the blind man to the left, in the window seat, who cares little about looking out of it. If only they’d given you that seat. You also curse the abundantly white Afro of the old lady sitting in the seat next to the right window. The mass of her messy hair blocks all visibility. You move restlessly about in your seat, sometimes stretching your neck, bobbing up and down, rolling your shoulders, trying to play the game. The game that calms you, keeps you from falling into mania.
You spot the first identifiable place: Palo Seco, an energy plant that supplies electricity to various towns, which exploded once when you were little. The fire could be seen all the way from Las Vegas, Bay View, even from Amelia, the neighborhood where you grew up. No one was implicated in that “accidental” incident, blessed ode to the impunity of creole terrorism. Fuentes Fluviales, as they were previously called; now the AEE in concert with the AAA, investigated by the FBI. You spell them out to see if you remember what each letter stands for — it’s part of the game. Not getting nervous is always the primary objective. Fucking landing.
You keep playing at identifying structures. The second one: Los Molinos, some concrete plants where they manufacture purine, grain, and other contaminants. You also identify the barges at the dock, the cranes, the containers. Some of them say Sealand, others Navieras de Puerto Rico. Your uncle worked all his life for an abusive business just like that one, until he ended up with Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and a pension that barely provided enough to buy the essentials: eggs, milk, bread. Never meat. Never some good chops or steaks. Los Molinos, even today, continues to erode the health of many people, without the affected or the witnesses ever saying or doing anything. Without anybody protesting.
Plaza Las Américas, the center of everything. From Santa Cruz, Saint Thomas, and Monserrat — where a volcano spouts ash on its leeward side every ninety-some days — people come from all over the Antilles to buy things and lose themselves in the largest commercial center in the Hispanic, Anglo-Saxon, and Francophone Caribbean. “The people from the little islands” is what they call those individuals with ordinary features. You remember well that during your childhood, your grandma called them madamos. Actually, that’s what she called the really dark blacks, the purple blacks; the ones who did or didn’t wear turbans. Blacks blacker than you, with gigantic noses and protruding lower lips.
Teodoro Moscoso Bridge. You promise yourself you’ll look up who the hell that guy was on Wikipedia, because the truth is, neither you nor anybody you’ve asked knows. You’ve always imagined that it has something to do with Moscoso Pharmacy, the one you frequented as a kid on the way to the Cantaño boat launch, where one time they found a half-dozen dogs with their throats slit, and no one immediately responsible despite the fact that the suspects walked around at school quietly singing: Under my house, there’s a dead dog. The one who says eight, will eat it off their plate, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven...
Approaching the bridge you get unnerved, because you’ve reached that point of arrival. You stretch your neck even farther, and the old lady with the white Afro notices. She gestures to you with her hand, asking if you want her seat. You say yes. So she stands and you stand too, and from a distance, the flight attendant scolds you because you’re supposed to remain seated, the plane is about to land. When the warning ends, you’re already clutching the window.
You fasten your seat belt. You pull out your digital camera because you like to take photos of the landing. You count in silence and breath rhythmically. You’re about to pass over the booth of the excessively expensive toll that opens onto Avenida Central, and everything ceases to be Lilliputian. First photograph. You inhale and exhale. Now you count the flags of the damned United States and the blessed Island of Enchantment fixed to the bridge as they grow larger. Photograph. You inhale and exhale. You count the little houses on the water in San José, all of them half-fallen into the lagoon that’s deminiturizing in front of your eyes. You inhale. A boat and you replicate Gulliver’s gaze. You exhale. Flash. A San Juan police boat and you are Micromegas. You breathe in. Two kayaks. One bright blue and the other apple green. You breathe out. A jet ski. Another photo. You inhale. Another boat, the coast guard this time. A sequence of flashes. A police helicopter hovers far away, and you imagine it’ll wait until the air traffic clears to approach. You hold your breath. The mangrove. You turn off the camera’s flash and hold down the shutter to lengthen the sequence. The mangrove increasing in size and the bushes with splayed roots drinking from the pestilent lagoon. A body. A floating body. Your finger pressing the button gets nervous, but keeps shakily shooting the target. A woman floating in the water with breasts and downy pubis exposed. Her face so far away from you, from your plane, and lifeless. Zoom in on every detail, zoom in on every new horror. Arms extended, like the wings of the aircraft, but she doesn’t fly. A woman who doesn’t fly. Increase zoom to 60X Optical by 2000X Digital. Hands removed from those arms at the wrist; surgically severed without pain or glory. They’re gone. A woman, dead and incomplete. A corpse that screams of violence and welcomes you back to your homeland, after ten years of absence.