It was like hearing a thin pane of glass suddenly crack from extreme cold.
“I guess,” Julia finally said, “we were supposed to toast to our future as born again singles over wine and pasta.”
Gordian heard the creak of his office chair as he changed position. He, common noun, had once been referred to by name: Craig. Her husband of seven years. It was still unclear what had pulled them apart. The divorce petition Craig had filed cited irreconcilable differences, no elaboration. Over the months she’d been staying with her parents, Julia had occasionally talked about their long separations because of his career, about her loneliness when he was away on the job. He was a structural engineer, freelance, though most of his recent assignments had been for the big oil companies. His specialized niche was the design of fixed offshore drilling platforms, and he’d often spent many weeks on-site, overseeing construction. One month it was Alaska, the next Belize. His absences surely contributed to their problems, but Gordian suspected there had to be more. If Julia was the one feeling neglected, why was it Craig who’d wanted out? Gordian hadn’t pushed for answers, however, and Julia had offered very few on her own to either him or Ashley. She had claimed there was no infidelity, and they were trying to take her at her word. But why had she been so guarded with them? Were the reasons too painful to share? Or might Julia herself still be in the dark?
Gordian shifted in the chair again. “What did you tell him?”
“Nothing. I was too incredulous,” she said. “But wait, it gets better. While I was staring at him, really dumb- struck, he leaned over and tried to kiss me. On the lips. I turned my head soon as I realized what he was doing, or
“And then?”
“And then he backed off, wished me luck, and we went our separate ways. God, it was just so awkward and squirmy.”
Gordian shook his head.
“An overture toward putting the bad feelings to rest,” he said. “Ill-advised, inappropriate, and without any grasp of how you’d be affected. But I suppose that was his intent.”
“He wanted the greyhounds as part of the settlement, Dad. If I hadn’t been the one to sign that contract at the adoption center instead of him, giving me ownership in black and white, he’d have taken Jack and Jill away from me. There’s an overture I won’t forget.”
Gordian strove to come up with a response. In the end he could only echo his own previous comments.
“It’s behind you now, Julia. You can move on. Let’s be glad for that.”
Another significant pause. Gordian heard car horns squalling at the other end of the line. He wished she hadn’t insisted on going to court alone, wished she weren’t driving unaccompanied — not being as distressed as she sounded.
“Better go, traffic’s a mess,” she said. “I’ll be home in time for dinner.”
But it was barely nine o’clock in the morning, Gordian thought.
“There are quite a few hours between now and then,” he said. “How are you planning to fill them?”
There was no answer.
He waited, wondering whether she’d heard him.
Then, her tone suddenly brittle: “Did you want a complete schedule?”
Gordian raised his eyebrows, puzzled. His fingers tightened around the receiver.
“I only meant—”
“Because I can pull over at the nearest
Gordian made a gesture of frustration into the empty room. His stomach went from bad to worse.
“Julia—”
“I’m a grown woman,” she interrupted. “I don’t think you need a full rundown of my comings and goings in advance.”
“Julia, hang on—”
“See you later,” she said.
The connection broke.
Blew it, Gordian scolded himself. Somehow, you blew it again.
And try as he did to see where he had gone wrong, he could not.
He simply could not.
Many stories below on Rosita Avenue, a street sweeper shot past the building as Gordian’s employees began to arrive for the commencing workday, but the clamor of its equipment would not have impinged upon his thoughts even had it reached the heavy floor-to-ceiling windows of his office. From where he was sitting, alone at his desk, the dead, silent telephone still clenched in his hand…
From where he was sitting right now, the rest of the world seemed immeasurably far away.
TWO
In the center of La Paz, on the main thoroughfare that descended from the heights to the modern business district, one could look up beyond the rows of exhausted little shacks on the canyon wall to where three of Illimani’s five snow-capped peaks took a great bite out of the Andean sky. It was a sight that none who visited the city could forget, and that even indigenous Aymara Indians, with their blood memories of the Incas as encroaching newcomers, viewed with awe and respect.
The National Police Corps vehicle and its motorcycle escort headed southeast on Avenida Villazon to its wide fork less than a mile past the Universidad Mayor San Andres, then bore left onto Avenida Anicento Arce toward the Zona Sur. Nuzzled deep within the canyon in Calocoto and other suburban neighborhoods, sheltered from the cold sting of high-altitude winds, the city’s affluent lived behind high gates in exaggerated chalets and sprawling, tile- roofed adobe mansions constructed in deliberate imitation of Hollywood cinematic style.
In the police car’s backseat, the lean, ascetic man in first officer’s dress had ridden most of the way with his eyes downturned, a bony hand on the satchel beside him, his lips moving in a nearly constant whisper. He had looked out the window only twice — the first time, by simple chance, when they had passed Calle Sagarnaga, crammed as always with customers of the Witches’ Market. There at the outdoor vendors’ stalls were charms, potions, powders, and fetuses carved from the wombs of llamas for their alleged luck-bringing properties, their dessicated skin pulled tight over unformed bones, forcing them into contortions that resembled, or perhaps preserved, a state of final agony. There, indigent chola mothers, wearing traditional bowler hats and shawls, walked beside women of means in Parisian and Milanese vogue, a rare mixing of classes in this city, fear or reverence for pre-Christian deities being perhaps all they had in common. There,
The car’s single passenger had frowned disapprovingly. He spent much of his time among the poorest of society and knew they reached out to the ancient superstitions in ignorance and desperation. But the moneyed, well-educated elite, what was their reason? Did they think to apportion their faith like cash in separate bank accounts, placing small deposits in each, giving their full trust to no god while hoping to prejudice the will of all?
As his escort had left Calle Sagarnaga behind, remaining on the boulevard that traced the subterranean flow of the Choqueyapu River to the city’s outskirts, he’d briefly looked out his window again, his eyes going to the slum housing on the face of the mountain. At first glance it seemed an insult to the divine scheme, heaven and hell inverted, those in the bowl of the earth living without need, those on the heights needing for everything. But that was to ignore the more sublime visual message of Illimani in the background: its sharp white peaks at once reminders of God’s soaring majesty and a warning that He had teeth.
Bowing his head again, the passenger addressed his inner preparations for the next thirty minutes, fingers spread atop the satchel, quietly reciting the prescribed lines of verse from memory.
