They had known each other, worked together, grown to like each other over the course of seven years. So this would be easy for them, waking together, finishing off these seven days together. Seven days is right for us. They would have nothing to decide, could ride feelings like bubbles rising to the surface, heading breath-held toward open sky.
Del Zamora appeared in the last version of the dream, only his voice, really. But Klinsman could sense in the dream that Zamora had removed his mask, freed his lips. Remember when you could get it in Baja for fifty cents? It looked green in the sunlight. You know this woman beneath you.
This version startled Klinsman into permanent wakefulness, the heart-deep kind of quickening that fires all nerve endings. He slid up against the headboard as though pulling himself from a cold ocean dive. He heard the lonely clacks of the day’s first trolley.
He wakened Rita, warmed his hand with his breath before gently tugging her shoulder, smoothing her hair from her face. Her body set itself beneath the sheets. She made a small questioning sound. Her hand moved downward over his stomach, found him.
“Good,” she said.
They made love sleepily beneath the sheets, reaching to feel what they might find, cupping and grasping to tell what part of them it might be. He lay fully on her, she whispering an order for him to do that, to not brace his arms, to relax onto her. Her muscles, all along her, carried him. He barely came, a tug of a drawstring, the last of him. But she cried out, threw him upward with her body.
They dressed in the darkness of the room. They heard the shudders and blats of the first trucks on 1-5, heading north, the only direction here at the very bottom of this longest of freeways. Klinsman and Rita gathered their stuff, their captures of room 9, and walked into the dawn light of the parking lot. She swung her camera and bag over her shoulder, gathered her hair with both hands, the clasp held in her lips, ready. She took furtive strides next to Klinsman, some a little sideways, keeping him alert.
They found their bearings in the middle of the empty lot, a photographer and her journalist striding toward the day. They didn’t look back toward room 9, never thought to wait for the figure of Marta Ruiz to appear.
9.
Klinsman started some copy on the Luchadors story that morning at the Review, just feeling around for ideas on the keyboard. No one else was in the newsroom, though someone had arrived before him to turn on power, make coffee, put out baguettes and strawberries. He wandered from his copy, sat on the edge of the couch, fingered the coffee table as he looked over the sixteen empty desks, their flat screens like dark mirrors aimed together in a solar field. Only his at desk 7 was aglow and askew, foolish looking. Without Gina around, people weren’t coming in. They were staying home, working or not working on their laptops.
The scent of the strawberries reminded him of the border, though the last of the riverbed farms had scooted north to the Otay years ago to avoid the polluted Tijuana. Strawberries, their scent in the ocean air, signaled the end of the rainy season. The grass along the freeways and on the hills behind the city would begin to yellow soon. Maybe one more rain would delay that turn.
The taper of the rainy season had always felt the most eventful time of year for Klinsman, a desperation lifted in him. It had to do with school’s end, summer’s approach. The days could still be different—cool and misty, rainy, hot and staticky with the Santa Anas, or infinitely blue, the Pacific horizon like a razor. Any chance he would have with a girl at school would be coming to an end, pushing him to be courageous, foolish, impossibly clever even, when he was lucky. This remained true from grade school through college. He was still programmed that way by this end of the season.
It no doubt had played a part in his reaching for Rita, his decisive and clear grasp of her hip. And it had him thinking perhaps too much about the motel. He was thinking beyond the thrill of it, the exciting notion that he and Rita were the ones who had committed the room’s crime, invented the room’s crime, finished things. He hurried back to his desk to tap some more lines of the Luchador piece, thoughts of room 9 alight in his fingers. The call had been for him. The door had been left open for him. This had to be the case.
Some of the copy was about Del Zamora, and he knew Gina would edit it even if it somehow passed fact check. So he typed one more line to be cut: You know this woman beneath you.
When he came to the press floor first and early like this, he fell easily into believing he was in the true heart of this city, removed from the tourist spectacle of the Gaslamp and Old Town. It was part of Gina’s design for the Review, for all of them. Outside, the Boulevard ran due east from the edges of downtown to the foothills of the Cuyamaca Range, straight through endless miles of work and dreams, cultural blends and barriers. When alone like this, Klinsman could feel the Boulevard’s waking buzz, a wire always seeking full connection, popping here and there, up the way or back against the sudden rise of downtown. The temperature rose ten degrees if you moved from the sea air of the west end to the smoggy push against the desert hills of the east. In that rise of heat you could get a loan, your car fixed, a good or bad haircut, a hooker, a book, a drink, coffee, or drugs; you could quit a day job, play a gig, or speak Spanish, English, Vietnamese, Tagalog, and then a different-sounding English and Spanish.
At desk 7, Klinsman always felt off-kilter, as anyone would at the four middle desks: 6, 7, 10, 11. No one could be at the precise center. Gina was at 10, an over-the-shoulder glance at Klinsman’s 7.
The overhead lights were still off, the only other glow coming from the rest-area lamp in the back. He returned to the couch for the fourth or fifth time this new morning. In the coffee-table spread someone had left a hard end from yesterday’s baguettes just for him. His favorite breakfast was black coffee and a hard roll. He felt sorry for, the only one of the sixteen desks to have no job prospects after next week’s final issue, the only one who was still coming to work on time. The perfume of the strawberries made him want to go outside, ride down to the border, see the bullring at the sea’s edge.
Klinsman sensed movement, a gray blur at the upper edge of his vision, and looked to the monitor above the back door, which scanned the entryway outside. In the monitor stood Oscar Medem, encased in the webby light of the cheap security. The grainy capture, the camera’s struggle to make sense of the contrast between Oscar’s dark skin and light shirt, reminded Klinsman of the stock footage so often seen in Santo movies. Oscar might have been thinking something similar as he eyed the little outside screen that showed what awaited inside. Gina’s sense of balance again, her tilt on the collective.
Oscar entered and moved along the edge of the desks, arms folded, that marching stride he had, watching Klinsman smell a strawberry. The act of keeping a secret hung on Klinsman’s shoulders, kneaded along the muscles of his back. He must have shifted his posture. Oscar, he could see, had been about to say something, something maybe about the strawberries, but then he closed his mouth, reasserted his honest gaze, and tightened his arms about his chest. He tilted his head as though Klinsman were something new, something exotic and behind bars. Klinsman would have to tell him about Rita, but now felt too blunt, too soon. It would have to be sometime before Rita divulged anything. If Rita told first, Oscar would be hurt, betrayed even. Such was the timbre among the desks, especially those at the floor’s heart—Oscar, Gina, Klinsman, Rita, 6, 10, 7, 11.
Oscar proceeded into his routine, walking the row to his desk, checking any open pages or notes or photos on other desks along the way, picking up fallen pens. He looked back at Klinsman in quick glances, selectively, as though Klinsman were one in a crowd.
He punched in his jump drive, bringing his screen to light, then slung his messenger bag over the back of his chair. He set his notepad to the right side of the keyboard and his green metal water bottle to the left. Without sitting down, one arm braced on the desk edge, he visited his home page—the site of a journalist in El Paso, the woman who’d written the first book on the Juárez femicides and who was still keeping tabs on those kills. The one journalist trying hard to keep it real, the one who was not going to let it all disappear into wrong metaphor and the wash of drug violence from here to there. She was Oscar’s hero, Klinsman’s