We need someone whose expertise is varied, she said, but nice to meet you, and we’ll be in touch. It was over in an instant. I shook her hand and left to wait for the elevator in an empty hall paved with the kind of composite stone that looks like black vomit with white chips. If the city, just before it collides with the sun, becomes someone else’s Suolucidir, then these crappy office towers are the nymphaneums, arsenals, temples, and coliseums of the future. Good luck, dude, trying to figure out what went on in these cubicles.
I decided to walk east to grab the F train. The fruit man, a big, bearded Dominican with a square face, long hair in a ponytail, stood on the corner of Houston and Broadway stacking bags of plantains and avocadoes. Paintings of pineapples and bananas still floated on the side of his stall, but there were far more people walking through this intersection than there had been before I’d left the city. A bank had replaced an old man who repaired sewing machines. A hardware store had become what looked like a showroom for shoes that resembled small sculptures you could hold in your hand. I still wasn’t acclimated to large crowds. Then I saw her: Ruth, across the street, laughing, arm and arm with someone, another ponytailed man, though his was short and looked like a shaving brush. I took him to be Saltzman, but it could have been anyone. I didn’t know Ruth was back in the city, but why would I? I started to cross the street to talk to her, then stopped, because I didn’t know what I would say. Ruth, I found the lost city, I was left for dead in a pit, Ruth, call your grandmother? I turned on my heel and ducked into a bar that catered to tourists. It was dark and loud, but the swinging double doors were right there, so I stood at the zinc or zincish counter and ordered a beer. A man in a sweatshirt that read, If there’s no gambling in heaven, I’m not going, pored over a guidebook, and I was about to ask him if he needed directions when I heard a voice calling my name. My first impulse was to be happy to hear the cheery Ash-shor, but this reaction was quickly followed by a different instinct: oh fuck. It was Ruth, smiling as if glad to see me. She had cut off her hair and was wearing big silver Frida Kahlo–like jewelry. Her voice had a new slightly Mexican accent when she said words with r in them. If only I’d chosen another bar, or gone deeper into this one. Larry hung back a few feet away, holding a rolled-up newspaper in one hand while he put change in a telephone near the entrance, and looked up briefly to give me a smile that would only tax his face for a second until he got back to more pressing matters. Phone wedged between ear and shoulder, he had a concerned expression on his face, so I hoped the call would last a good half hour at least.
“I saw you from across the street. Didn’t you hear me? How have you been?”
I ping-ponged the question back to her, though I didn’t really want a response, and knew I’d get one whether I wanted one or not. She and Larry were only in the city for a week, then they would return to Mexico where they were now working, making a film about Augustus Le Plongeon and his photographs of Chichén Itzá. There was no monkey with a monogrammed case, but she was interested in the story about the platform of the Eagles and Jaguars high on the calendar pyramids, the spot Le Plongeon said was the burial place of Chacmool, prince consort to a dethroned Maya queen who had escaped to Egypt. From the Chiapas to Ghiza, they planned to follow a footpath of memes. They had gotten enormous amounts of grant money from Kodak. When she asked me what I was doing I told her I had a job producing films for NASA on interplanetary travel. I was so preoccupied figuring out how to illustrate jumping from Jupiter to Mars, in other words, that I hadn’t heard her call my name.
“I saw you last week on the Q train platform at Union Square, and yelled your name, but you didn’t turn around then either. Your train came, and you disappeared.” While pronouncing this sentence she became annoyed, accusing me of avoiding her, of making our split more of a cataclysm than it needed to be. Insisting that the unpaid delinquent taxes and late fees that still dogged her, all of it was my fault, I’d disappeared into what was it called? Soul Disappear? Sole Sidur? No, Suolucidir. Okay, yeah, where should she send all the letters from the IRS? The gust that began sort of friendly turned into a tornado: your enthusiasm is like a firehose, you don’t take anyone else into account, she shouted over the man in the gambling sweatshirt who was asking the barmaid how to get to Grand Central. He wanted to take a train, not a shuttle, and didn’t seem to understand that the shuttle was a train. Why are you telling me all this now? I shouted. Ruth kept raising her voice. She remembered when she wanted our apartment to be a meat-free zone, and I brought home smoked shoulder of something, some animal, just to spite her, and the apartment was filled with the smell of meat, spicy and salty, the air made you hungry every time you inhaled. The time I left her waiting at the airstrip because in my experience, arriving flights to central Chichén Itzá were always late, and I assumed her plane would be, too. I’d landed a few weeks earlier in order to set up camp, so I knew the odds of an on-time arrival were small. How was I to know that one time the plane would be on time? Ruth was alone, pacing the airstrip in front of a small one-room structure that served as a station, you couldn’t really call it an airport. Even the woman who sometimes sold polenta and chilies wrapped in banana leaves to passengers, even she was gone. Ruth had steam coming out of her ears. It was not an image I wanted to remember. I began to wish Larry would get off the phone already and tell her they needed to leave immediately in order to make a bus to Susquehanna to see a man about a hat company.
“I didn’t take a Q train last week. I never take the Q and less than never from Union Square. It must have been someone who looks like me.”
“No one looks like you.”
“Thanks.”
“Don’t thank me, I didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“I figured.” It was familiar joking banter, and though she smiled almost sweetly, full typhoon averted, when she spoke, I glanced casually at my watch, calculated that if I didn’t leave soon the conversation would spiral and include the new boyfriend, so I left Ruth with my half-finished beer, tipped my hat at Larry, still on the pay phone as I passed him on my way out.
When I got to my building the astrologer was leaving her apartment, taking out a stack of old newspapers, archival evidence of her columns giving love and money advice for a future that will never happen.
“Are you having work done in your apartment?’
I shook my head.
“Someone was making a racket up there.”
“When?” I shouted at her as I leaped up the stairs two at a time, looking down at her hair dyed in olive and grape-colored feathers. She shrugged.
The door was ajar. I only had to look in at the stuff thrown all over the place in my apartment to know the refrigerator door would also be open, swinging in the breeze, orange juice concentrate melting and pooling into a small lake. The scroll and the simurgh were gone, as was Sidonie Nieumacher’s notebook, and Rostami had left no forwarding address.
“Ariel? Thank God it’s you. I’m still looking for Ruthie, and now I’m getting very worried. Did you see the paper this morning?”
“No, Ada, no, I haven’t read anything yet.”
“There’s an obituary for Ariel Bokser, a thirty-six-year-old man who lives in Brooklyn, left an ex-wife and a stepmother behind, but no other relatives. “
“It must be someone else because you’re talking to me.”
“Well, I don’t think so. It sounds just like you. How’s your stepmother?”
“I don’t know I haven’t talked to her in a while.”
“A strange woman. She argues with everyone, and she can’t stop talking. It’s like there’s a button on her butt, and when she sits down you can’t shut her up. I don’t know what your father saw in her. You can’t trust Tchoimans.”
Ada, who often appeared to be easily steamrollered, but in fact was no pushover, said this about a lot of people. The truth