“Auntie, I brought you something.” She is not his auntie, not in the slightest. But she pronounces his name in the Spanish way, and she is the only person he speaks that language with, the only person who reminds him of home. What he thinks of as home.
He gives her the paper-wrapped parcel from his pocket—a pound of pork sausage, a half pound of brisket. Nothing that Gennaro’s will miss. He already has more steak in his fridge upstairs than he needs.
“Ah, good boy,” Sofia Rosa says. “You will have coffee, yes?”
He makes the correct amount of mild protest at the offer. She gives him a little cup of Mexican coffee; he drinks it in the doorway, burning his tongue, before thanking her and returning the cup, heading upstairs.
The building narrows as it ascends. Irregular street patterns in the Meatpacking District are the result of the clash between the Greenwich Village system, the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811, and the demands of heavy industrialization after the Civil War—Simon has looked it up—which is why all the apartment blocks are oddly shaped. This one is like a wedge of cake. There are six small apartments at ground level, four midsize ones on the second floor, three larger ones at the top.
The ground-floor tenants are all elderly. On the second floor, residents include a gruff woman in her mid-twenties who dresses in all black, a bicycle courier who is probably a drug dealer, and two more meatpacking workers. Simon shares the third floor with a middle-aged nurse and her disabled adult son. The last third-floor apartment is locked and infrequently occupied; Sofia Rosa keeps it for people sent her way by Felipe Brava, people just off the boat. Simon stayed there briefly six weeks ago, when he first arrived in Manhattan—whenhewas just off the boat—before he found the meatpacking job and decided to stay.
Inside his own room, he dumps his keys and groceries, strips out of his boots and clothes. He takes a hot shower, standing in the old claw-foot tub under the spray, scrubbing particularly at his nails. Then he gets back into bed, sets the alarm for two hours, and does a breathing exercise to force himself back to sleep.
At one thirty in the afternoon, Simon jerks up, enveloped in blankets, and slaps the alarm off. He’s sweating.
He scrubs his face with his hands. He doesn’t always dream when he sleeps, but it’s almost always the same dream. And that was a bad one.
Untangling himself awkwardly from the blankets and pulling on a pair of jeans, he assembles a fresh pot of espresso, takes another Vicodin as the coffee brews. Then he sits on a chair by one of the long windows, bare feet up on the sill, sipping coffee and smoking until his sweat dries. The apartment is warm; golden afternoon light spills through the parted curtains. Outside, a radiant slice of street. Downstairs, one of the other meat workers is playing rock music at low volume. After a while, Simon feels better.
He rubs the muscles behind his neck with his free hand, working out the stiffness there. The dreams always throw him off balance. He doesn’t know what they mean, doesn’t know how to make them stop ... He only knows they’re exhausting.
The dreams are merely one symptom of his condition, though. It’s been five years since Simon was found washed up on the riverbank in Guatemala, five years since he was hauled onto the back of a pineapple truck and taken to Richard Flores’s village clinic in Piedras Negras to have his skull pieced back together. No name, no home, no identity—no memories except the ones he’s made since he regained consciousness. He’s lived with memory loss for half a decade, and it’s never gotten easier, with the dreams and the headaches and the snippets of hazy recall.
He’s a ghost of a person, spat out by the river, his only North Star a handful of clues pointing him toward a possible point of origin in America.
Still, he wonders if this quest was a mistake. Coming here to track himself down has introduced more complications—he’s had to find work, avoid immigration, manage a new style of life. But while there are many things he’s figuring out about living in the United States, none of those mysteries have so far held a candle to the mystery inside his own head.
This is why Dr. Flores pushed him, encouraged him to go.
“So many years of your life in a country not your own ... It’s not right.” Flores stood in the kitchen of the clinic house, near the concrete counter with the kerosene stove. Out the window, in the gathering afternoon dark, a woman in a long skirt with a bundle of palm leaf kindling walked along the red-dirt lane. Inside, a gecko clung to the wall, watching the doctor pour measures of cusha corn spirit into two small glasses. “You should go to America—find out who you are.”
“I don’t know that country.” Simon was wary. He had a routine in Piedras Negras; he had a life. He’d spent the day labeling equipment in the clinic room next door and studying medical textbooks. His knowledge of human anatomy had come very easily and was by then almost equal to the doctor’s. Whether Flores’s suspicions—that Simon had some medical training in his background—were correct or not, it had certainly made him a better assistant at the clinic.
“Going to America is worth a try,” Flores had insisted. “Maybe you will see familiar things. Maybe your memory will come back. Maybe your soul will remember.”
“I don’t have money. I would need papers, passage—”
“I have money. Forget the money.” The doctor clunked the glasses onto the table. “If you find out you are a rich man, return to Piedras Negras and pay me back.”
“But—”
“No, listen.” Flores sat down with a sigh. The gecko eyed the mosquitoes zooming around the light bulb under the tin roof. “I understand it will be difficult. America is not what you’re used to.But there is a deep part of you, something inside, that you do not yet understand. You know it is there, yes?”
Simon was forced to glance away. Yes, he knew.
“You must continue to interrogate it. To resolve it.” Flores passed him a glass. “Anyway, I didn’t put you back together after that trip down the river so you could sit around here at the clinic, or in the village.”
WhydidFlores put him back together? Simon still isn’t sure.
He stubs out his cigarette in the glass ashtray on the sill. It’s time to scrape off the residue of the dream and get to work—his other work. Uncovering the clues to his missing identity is slow going and involves a bit of effort, but he keeps digging.
One day, he will get some relief. One day, he willremember.
From the top of his dresser, Simon collects a phone book, the top hardcover notebook from a stack, and an old orange cigar box. He transfers everything to the little breakfast table near the window by the kitchen. The notebook contains page after page of jottings in his own spiky handwriting. He has a full collection of notebooks: They contain timelines of dates, accounts of his existing memories and his experience in the river, accounts of his dreams, notes from Dr. Flores, details about his migraines, and the steps he’s already taken to explore his lost past.
This latest notebook has journaled info that starts from when Simon arrived in America, with a list of investigative options. His most recent dead end involved a trip to the Municipal Archives on Chambers Street. He wanted to look up American death notices from 1982 to see if any US citizens had been reported deceased in Guatemala during his time frame, but the population of the United States is too enormous. He’ll have to narrow things down; he’s been trying to figure out how to do that. By accent? America is vast, and there are many types of English spoken here. Perhaps he could scour a detailed map for recognizable place-names? Or test himself with regional foods—some of the junk food in the USA is very location specific. What he really needs to do is check the newspapers from five years ago for missing person reports. But again, this is a massive job, a task that must be broken down intoparts. He can start with the southern states, the ones nearest Mexico, and even that will take weeks.
Today he has only three hours before offices close. What can he do in the immediate term? Consulting the phone book, Simon creates a list of places to make inquiries. He’ll have to go down to the grocery to use the pay phone.
