Wari didn’t arrive at the airline office that day; he didn’t smile at any nameless woman across the counter, or reluctantly pay the $100 fine to have his ticket changed. Instead he wandered, passed the time in intense meditation upon the exotic, upon the city, its odors and gleaming surfaces, and found himself in front of a group of workers digging a hole in the sidewalk at the base of a skyscraper. He sat down to have lunch and watch them. With metal-clawed machines they bored expertly though concrete. Wari had made a sandwich uptown that morning, and he ate distractedly now. The people passed in steady streams, bunching at corners and swarming across intersections the instant a light changed. From a truck, the men brought a thin sapling and lowered it into their newly dug hole. They filled it with dirt. Trees to fill holes, Wari thought, amused, but they weren’t done. The workers smoked cigarettes and talked loudly among themselves and then one of them brought a wheelbarrow piled high with verdant grass cut into small squares. Sod. They laid the patches of leafy carpet out around the tree. Just like that. In the time it took Wari to eat, a hole was emptied and filled, a tree planted and adorned with fresh green grass. A wound created in the earth; a wound covered, healed, beautified. It was nothing. The city moved along, unimpressed, beneath a bright, late-summer sky.
He walked a little more and stopped in front of a group of Japanese artists drawing portraits for tourists. They advertised their skill with careful renderings of famous people, but Wari could only recognize a few. There was Bill Clinton and Woody Allen, and the rest were generically handsome in a way that reminded Wari of a hundred actors and actresses. It was the kind of work he could do easily. The artists’ hands moved deftly across the parchment, shading here and there in swift strokes. Crowds slowed to watch, and the portraitists seemed genuinely oblivious, glancing up at their clients every now and then to make certain they weren’t making any mistakes. When the work was done, the customer always smiled and seemed surprised at finding his own likeness on the page. Wari smiled too, found it folkloric, like everything he had seen so far in the city, worth remembering, somehow special in a way he couldn’t yet name.
Wari had been invited to New York for an exhibit; serendipity, an entire chain of events born of a single conversation in a bar with an American tourist named Eric, a red-haired Ph.D. student in anthropology and committed do-gooder. He had acceptable Spanish and was a friend of a friend of Wari’s who was still at the university. Eric and Wari had talked about Guayasamín and indigenous iconography, about cubism and the Paracas textile tradition of the Peruvian coast. They’d shared liter bottles of beer and laughed as their communication improved with each drink, ad-hoc Spanglish and pencil drawings on napkins. Eventually Eric made an appointment to see Wari’s studio. He’d taken two paintings back to New York and set up an exhibit through his department. Everything culminated in an enthusiastic e-mail and an invitation on cream-colored bond paper. Wari had mulled it over for a few weeks, then spent most of his savings on a round-trip ticket. It was the only kind they sold. Once in New York and settled in, Wari buried the return ticket in the bottom of his bag, as if it were something radioactive. He didn’t know what else to do with it. That first night, when the apartment had stilled, Wari dug into the suitcase and examined it. It had an unnatural density for a simple piece of paper. He dreamed that it glowed.
Wari found Leah, his host’s girlfriend, making pasta. It was still light out, and Eric wasn’t home yet. Wari wanted to explain exactly what he had seen and why it had impressed him, but he didn’t have the words. She didn’t speak Spanish but made up for it by smiling a lot and bringing him things. A cup of tea, a slice of toast. He accepted everything because he wasn’t sure how to refuse. His English embarrassed him. While the water boiled, Leah stood at the edge of the living room. “Good day?” she said. “Did you have a good day?”
Wari nodded.
“Good,” she said. She brought him the remote to the television, then turned into the small kitchen. Wari sat on the sofa and flipped through the channels, not wanting to be rude. He could hear Leah humming a song to herself. Her jeans were slung low on her hips. Wari made himself watch the television. Game shows, news programs, talk shows; trying to understand gave him a headache, and so he settled on a baseball game, which he watched with the volume down. The game was languid and hard to follow and, before long, Wari was asleep.
When he awoke, there was a plate of food in front of him. Leah was at the sink, washing her dish. Eric was home. “Buenas noches!” he called out grandly. “Good game?” He pointed at the television. Two players chatted on the mound, their faces cupped in their gloves.
“Yes,” said Wari. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes.
Eric laughed. “The Yanks gonna get it back this year,” he said. “They’re the white team.”
“I’m sorry,” was all Wari could offer.
They spoke for a while in Spanish about the details of the exhibit, which was opening in two days. Wari’s canvases stood against the wall, still wrapped in brown paper and marked FRAGILE. They would hang them tomorrow. “Did you want to work while you were here?” Eric asked. “I mean, paint? At my department, they said they could offer you a studio for a few weeks.”
That had everything to do with the radioactive ticket interred at the bottom of his suitcase. Wari felt a tingling in his hands. He’d brought no brushes or paints or pencils or anything. He had no money for art supplies. He guessed it would be years before he would again. What would it be like not to paint?
“No, thank you,” Wari said in English. He curled his fingers into a fist.
“Taking a vacation, huh? That’s good. Good for you, man. Enjoy the city.”
Wari asked about phone cards, and Eric said you could get them anywhere and cheap. Any bodega, corner store, pharmacy, newsstand. “We’re connected,” he said, and laughed. “Sell them right next to the Lotto tickets. You haven’t called home?”
Wari shook his head. Did they miss him yet?
“You should.” Eric settled into the couch. Leah had disappeared into the bedroom.
His host spoke to the flickering television while Wari ate.
The American embassy sits hunched against a barren mountain in a well-to-do suburb of Lima. It is an immense bunker with the tiled exterior of a fancy bathroom, its perimeter gate so far from the actual building that it would take a serious throw to hit even its lowest floor with a rock. A line gathers out front each morning before dawn, looping around the block, a hopeful procession of Peruvians with their sights on Miami or Los Angeles or New Jersey or anywhere. Since the previous September, after the attacks, the embassy had forced the line even farther out, beyond blue barricades, to the very edge of the wide sidewalk. Then there’d been a car bomb in March to welcome the visiting American president. Ten Peruvians had died, including a thirteen-year-old boy unlucky enough to be skateboarding near the embassy at exactly the wrong moment. His skull had been pierced by shrapnel. Now the avenue was closed to all but official traffic. The line was still there, every morning except Sundays, in the middle of the empty street.