The Infinite: A Novel

DEDICATION

For Kate and for Jonathan

EPIGRAPH

Es transparente el infinito.

—OCTAVIO PAZ

CONTENTS

Dedication

Epigraph

I. I need you to remember this.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

II. I’m not afraid.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

III. Old Mexico way, huh?

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

IV. I’m not from anywhere.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

V. I never hear you say anything.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

VI. . . .está allí para siempre.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

VII. You leave those feelings alone.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

VIII. El que nada debe nada teme.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

IX. Tell me you understand what I’m saying.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

X. . . . un círculo sin salida.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

XI. La cuenta, por favor.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Interlude

XII. Es común, pero no es fácil.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

XIII. . . . the border will always be there.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

XIV. . . . sometimes you come back with less.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

XV. Tú nunca hablas.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

XVI. Tell us what happened.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

XVII. . . . y será infinita mi voz.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

XVIII. Be thankful. Don’t look back.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

XIX. . . . sino una mujer.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Praise

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

I

I need you to remember this.

1

THE RIVER WAS THERE, BROAD AND BROWN. CALM, IT SEEMED. Clouds swept low, fled with the current. Luz sat with Jonah on the levee between river and sky, a nowhere place. He took her hand and the river did seem calm, but she heard the water at its turbulent depth, beating against a floor carved through millions of years.

We used to come up here a lot, Jonah said. My family.

No more? Luz asked. Over his shoulder, a gull shrieked and banked toward picnickers along the riverwalk.

Nah, he said. My brother moved away.

Your mother?

My mom died when I was little, Jonah said. A car wreck. Luz tried to apologize, but he interrupted to say, It’s all right. It feels like a long time ago.

A tug drove a column of barges in the middle of the river. A beat emerged from the wind—a kid playing drums on overturned buckets for the dog walkers and the joggers and the tourists arm in arm. Upriver, a cruise ship squatted heavily in the water against the bridge, near the hotels and the casino.

My mamá, Luz said, she passed away, too. Almost six years now. Sometimes, yes, it feels like a long time ago. But only sometimes.

Jonah’s grip on her hand grew firmer.

After that I came to the United States. To be with my papá.

Wow, he said. I’m sorry.

She was sick, Luz said, a small smile. We didn’t know.

The wake of the tugboat and the barges finally reached the bank, cresting against the rocks of the levee. It was spring, and the river was high.

Jonah wanted to know if he could ask something.

Okay, Luz said.

Did people tell you to talk to your mom? Like, talk to her in your head because she’d hear you and all?

And she was there, at home in Las Monarcas, in her grandmother’s apartment. The old woman held her hands and peered at her through her glasses. An uncle lingered in the doorway, waiting to ferry the little girl to El Norte and her father, and her grandmother said good-bye and told her to pray to her mother, always, for her mother would be watching and listening. My abuela told me to pray.

I got that a lot, too. The priests at school. Everybody. He was looking at their hands—hers was small and bronze; his was large and fair, some freckles. Does she ever answer you?

Luz closed her eyes and reached for her mother. The clouds broke and the sun was on her face. No, she answered. Not so that I can hear her. The gull screeched. A jogger passed, brief and mild hip-hop pumping from his headphones. I believe she hears me, though.

He nodded, watched her. His eyes were green, almost gray, and steady like the river seemed to be. But Luz sensed the pull beneath Jonah’s eyes, and it made her ache.

2

JONAH AND LUZ GREW CLOSER AS THE SUMMER PASSED AND EDGED into fall. He had been living alone in the camelback shotgun house in Central City, New Orleans, where his family, the McBees, had lived for three generations. Flaking lavender paint, a sagging porch, a dirt backyard shadowed by an ancient live oak. Jonah’s older brother Dex owned the home, but he lived like a recluse down the bayou. On only a few occasions had he come back to the city—the last time being for their father’s funeral, after the old man’s heart attack. Dex had stayed until Jonah turned eighteen—that is, until Dex’s legal guardianship had ceased—and then returned to the swamp and the old family fishing camp, where he made his living as a hunter.

Me and Dex, we hardly talk, Jonah told Luz. He sends some money every now and then to help with bills.

Jonah’s brother was his last living relation. The absolute nature of Jonah’s loneliness had staggered Luz, but it was of course familiar, and part of what drew her to him was this residue of his experience. It suggested he might be able to understand her in a way that nobody else—not her track teammates, not her father—was able.

DURING AFTERNOONS WHEN THERE WAS NEITHER WORK NOR TRACK practice, they took to reclining on the couch in his living room and talking, learning each other’s histories. Jonah had pictures all over the walls of his home, photographs of his family. He had explained to Luz that while he was growing up his father never wanted to see the images, wanted to leave them buried. They reminded him of too much. At the camp, here at the house, bare walls, Jonah had said. But once Jonah was alone, he put them up. He was much younger than his brothers, nine years junior to Dex and ten to Bill. Jonah had been six when a drunk driver blew through a stop sign and broadsided his mother’s car less than a mile from their home. He needed the pictures, markers to trace out his own beginning.

Luz got up from the couch and circuited the living room, looking at the framed shots while Jonah commented on each.

There was a photograph of his father in which the old man stares through the grass of the duck blind, hair rumpled and face confused—as if wondering why this moment called for a permanent likeness at all—as droplets of mist freeze in the flash against the predawn dark.

There was a photograph of Jonah’s mother, a blond bob and green eyes, and she stands on the riverwalk, slightly turned from the camera, her hands resting atop her belly.

Maybe she’s pregnant with me in that one, Jonah said.

Luz watched the wide river roll behind his mother, the steeple of a church on the far bank. The view was not far from where Luz had first sat with Jonah on the levee.

I remember small things, Jonah told her. Just flashes. Mom walking me to church while my brothers watched football with Pop. Tracing symbols on my back after she tucked me in.

Luz smiled and returned to the photograph. Jonah’s eyes were like his mother’s. Luz imagined his father taking this picture, pride swelling. A wish rose for her own possible future with Jonah.

Luz prayed, quick: Please, señora McBee, help us.

Jonah did not pray to his relatives, so Luz had begun to speak to his mother. It was a small thing she could do for him. Luz imagined Jonah’s loss as an anchor obscured by dark water. Jonah neither saw it nor understood how it restricted the range of his drifting. If you would only reach for her, Luz had tried to tell him.

Luz paced the living room and stopped opposite the couch, where in the center of the wall there waited a photograph of Jonah’s eldest brother, Bill, with a crew cut and in dress blues. The American flag the government sent, cotton folded in a triangular frame, hung next to it. Jonah told her that a land mine had killed his brother. Something old, something the Soviets left in Afghanistan more than twenty years before Bill showed up. How fucked up is that, Jonah whispered.

Alongside the jamb of the kitchen doorway Jonah had hung the only photograph he had of him with both brothers. Little Jonah stands in front of them. Bill and Dex are in high school. Bill is eighteen, just before he graduated and enlisted. He’s my age now in that picture, Jonah said. Bill was sandy haired and green eyed like Jonah, but he was stocky where Jonah had become tall. In the photo Dex is darker, rangier, wearing a sour look. All three stand on the dock at the camp, the cypress and the early pale sky behind them.

Think I’ll ever get to meet Dex? Luz asked.

Jonah shrugged from the couch.

Luz again sensed the implacable sadness roiling within Jonah and tried to find something to say. She glanced over the photographs and told him that he looked like his mother. You and Bill both, she said.

Jonah grinned and picked at a thread in the couch cushion. You must look like your mom, too, huh? He had seen her father once or twice, though he’d not yet spoken with the man. Her father was lanky and his skin was cooked like a baseball glove and his eyes were blue, which had surprised Jonah.

I do look like my mamá, Luz told him. She explained how her mother used to tell her that they were descended from Guachichil warriors, who had lived five hundred years ago and fought the Spaniards. The Guachichiles were the fiercest of the Chichimec people. As Luz grew older, she began to understand that her mother couldn’t know for certain whether they had Guachichil ancestry as opposed to anything else—all that history was lost—but it didn’t matter. It was more, Luz recognized, a matter of what they wanted to believe and what that belief could do for them. Her father couldn’t care less, practical as he was. But her mother liked the stories, appreciated their power: This history makes you strong, my Luz. And Luz saw it, watching herself age in mirrors. Sometimes, now, she looked at herself before track meets, narrowed her eyes like a hawk, and imagined herself to be a warrior.

What do you mean, you don’t know for sure? Jonah asked.

I don’t know, Luz said. It doesn’t matter.

But this troubled Jonah, how something could be unknown and known at the same time. Something so essential. He could know, for instance, that the McBees had lived in the Scottish Highlands a long time ago. Then they left those for New World highlands. Sometime later they showed up in New Orleans, and here he was. It made sense.

Look, he said, getting up and directing her attention to another frame on the wall. Within it a sheet of parchment depicted the McBee family crest—a disembodied hand running a sword through a green dragon. I don’t care that much about it all, he said, but it’s something I can know, at least. Doesn’t it bother you at all, that you can’t know for sure?

Luz, though, was thinking about all the countless things that had happened on different parts of the planet in different eras in order for her and Jonah to be together now in New Orleans. It was a strangely sobering thought. An image popped into her head: she saw them as an impossible couple, five centuries before. Jonah wore a plaid skirt and swung a sword, and straw-colored dreadlocks fell over his bare shoulders. She clutched a spear and wore the head of a wolf for a hat and painted her face red and munched peyote before battle. She began to laugh.

What? Jonah said, breaking up before he even knew the joke. What’s funny?

Luz shoved him so that he fell backward over the arm of the couch. She leaped after him and, in the breath before she kissed him, she said, You are, Jonás. You.

ALL THE GUILT THAT HAD BEEN THERE AFTER THEIR FIRST TIME AND the times after—it eventually passed when the retribution Luz had been taught to expect never arrived. It amazed her, how quickly they learned each other. She figured him out without a word, and once the guilt ebbed, giving in felt good, and with it came a new and special understanding of the world. After a while she imagined that God might consider them a special case. And if not, she might convince Him otherwise. Maybe they had been given a unique opportunity.

And likewise, Jonah learned to treat the geography of her body with diligence, with the terrifying knowledge that the moment would end. She was small, she was strong. The first time she threw her leg over him, he was surprised by the hardness of her muscle, the solidity and weight of her leg, and he could summon that moment any time he wished and it would excite him. They discovered their own rhythm, created it between themselves, called on it together in his bedroom. Sometimes Spanish words left her lips when she forgot herself, and this was a fact no other man but Jonah possessed. Sometimes she called him Jonás. It was a thing with which he came to define himself.

3

JONAH DROVE TOWARD LUZ’S APARTMENT IN THE TREME AND parked down the block from the double shotgun house. He heard the music, buoyant guitar. The sun was going down behind the overpass, bleeding orange down the street and backlighting the small crowd gathered in front of the building. Luz’s father—his name was Moses Hidalgo—sat on the steps, a beer at his side and his guitar balanced on his knee. The man wore canvas pants and a paint-splattered work shirt, but he had taken off his boots. His bare toes gripped the edge of the step. His eyes were closed while he fingerpicked the nickel strings. Luz stood behind him, elbows on the railing, singing some old Spanish tune. She had told Jonah she sometimes sang, but he hadn’t heard her until now. He could feel the melody sinking between his ribs. The dilapidated shotgun homes around him, the crooked telephone poles and their buzzing nests of electric cables, the palmettos with their decaying fronds—it all seemed to diminish. Luz sang with a full, warm tone. She neither tarried nor rushed. She sounded at home. Each note centered and lingered beneath Jonah’s breastbone. He felt his feet moving freely and safely toward her, as if her voice had conjured on this street corner a refuge unencumbered by the prosaic dangers of the city.

Jonah joined the handful of neighborhood folk. Together they were suspended, as if they’d all been en route to someplace else when they heard the music. There was a black kid holding a skateboard; a white twentysomething with a beard and thick-rimmed glasses; a Latino neighbor from the other half of the shotgun with a beer in his hand, bobbing his head to the music. Small evening insects stirred, rising and falling above the length of the broken pavement, catching the sunlight and sparking. The air was hot and damp, but they were all there together. Jonah smiled and listened and felt his heart swell in its cage. But when Luz noticed him and stumbled over the words, her father cracked an eye at Jonah and ended the song in an awkward, atonal swipe. He stood and turned and grabbed his daughter by the arm. He pulled her inside, the screen door clacking shut behind them, staccato and harsh.

The fuck happened? asked the kid with the skateboard.

Jonah kept quiet. The skateboard’s wheels rumbled low on the pavement and faded away. The neighbor’s door hinges squeaked. Jonah was alone, and his embarrassment burned in his face. Another feeling had arisen by the time he climbed back into his truck, however, and he nearly snapped the key off in the ignition.

4

JONAH STOOD WITH HIS FRIEND COLBY IN THE WARM HALLWAY. Jonah was laughing at him.

You don’t know shit about style, Mickey-Bee, Colby retorted, jacking his sneaker against the lockers and running his fingertips along the fin of his new haircut, a short Mohawk. Sweat glistened in a fine glaze where his head was shaved above his ears. I could give you my barber’s number if you interested in learning, though.

First bell had rung some time ago, but the hallway was as crowded as ever. My head ain’t as shiny as yours, Jonah said. Wouldn’t look right.

Colby smiled and hooked his thumbs on the straps of his backpack. I don’t think he knows how to cut white people’s hair anyways.

The school, downtown on Carondelet Street, was big and old. Cracked marble, an air of former grandeur. It was in the Recovery School District, which had been a mess since Hurricane Katrina and the flooding of New Orleans, more than four years ago. The city was going to close the school come the end of the semester, no secret, and reopen it again as a charter school. New administration, new students, new money. All the kids who had been able—most underclassmen, good athletes, and decent students—transferred to other public schools on the fringe of the city’s attention. Most of the faculty members spent their days fretting over their careers. The leftovers were those without any other recourse, waiting for the end. Jonah was here because he’d been expelled from two previous schools.

They won’t let you keep that hairdo, you know. Jonah meant the army. Colby was planning to enlist upon graduation, and Jonah had said he’d do it with him. Jonah didn’t actually want to enlist, but he went along with Colby’s talk, with his jokes, for his friend’s sake. This was easier than focusing on the absence of other options. Jonah thought of Bill and knew where they sent guys like himself and Colby, kids who came from nothing—the same place they sent his brother, the same war.

Course they won’t let me keep the ’hawk, Colby answered. Why I’m rockin’ it now. His eyes never stopped moving, never stopped scanning. He muttered to a passing kid, Got good weed, but the kid ignored him. To Jonah, I been researching. Lots of cash in bonuses if we sign up right. Like, if we sign up now saying we’re in when we graduate, that diploma gets you a bonus. What you think about that?

Bounce music played down the hall, a high-capacity rat-a-tat thumping through the crowd. Jonah was watching another kid rip up the black strip of electrical tape that had been stuck down the center of the corridor only the day before. The tape had been the brainchild of the principal—stay on the right side of the tape when you walk down the hallway. It was a measure to curb the fights between bells, during class time, whenever; fewer and fewer teachers felt compelled to make students sit in their classrooms.

I’m telling you, Mickey-Bee, Colby went on, grinning sidelong. You make a lot of money up front, and you could take care of that little chickadee.

Uh-huh, Jonah said. The kid in the center of the hall was winding the tape around his fist, making his arm into a tangled nest of black.

Need weed? Colby muttered to a passerby. The kid stutter-stepped, marched on.

Jonah waited. How’s the army gonna feel about your bonus when you get busted for selling drugs?

It’s a better living than whatever else you got right now, Mickey-Bee, Colby said, spreading his arms to encompass the chaotic stretch of hall, and this is a good market. He turned and slapped Jonah’s arm. Don’t worry, this time next year we’ll be arguing about who shot the most Talibans.

Jonah feigned a laugh. The kid with the electric tape was backpedaling as he ripped it up, and soon enough he bumped into another guy. Jonah saw it coming. Fights struck like lightning, often only because you brushed against somebody who didn’t want to get clowned in front of his boys. The kid with the tape turned, a stupid smile on his face. The other guy shoved him, heels of his palms to collarbones, and then they were grappling each other to the floor. Handfuls of shirt, electrical tape flaring and snaking around them. The hallway collapsed, kids crying out, cheering, calling for blood. Cell phones blinked to life, documenting this occurrence forever. It happened multiple times every day. Colby’s potential business was gone for the moment.

Teachers made their way in, tried to pry the combatants apart. The police liaison dashed down the hallway, swimming past students. He elbowed gawkers aside and put the tape kid in a bear hug. A graying teacher clutched the other. Only then did the crowd begin to disperse. Once the thrill was over, it was over.

Students here had learned to enjoy what they could while they could. Enough of them had friends or classmates or family members involved in the drug trade or other rackets. Murdered or jailed or simply disappeared. Often enough, students ferried blood feuds and drug drama from their neighborhoods into the hallways. Not many here envisioned old age. Jonah hadn’t grown up looking at the world this way, but he could understand it, for he was in similar circumstances, even if he didn’t deal drugs. For somebody like Colby, deciding that the army was the best choice he could make ensured something, even if—Jonah was thinking of old, unknown land mines—that something was another roll of the dice.

Jonah felt a thrilling lurch when he spied Luz navigating the crowd and coming toward them. She clutched her books to her chest and she was as beautiful as she was serious. She had told Jonah that this had been the only school that would enroll her. But she seemed to make the best of it, crafting what opportunities she could. Jonah had witnessed her in nearly empty classrooms, standing at the teacher’s desk and asking earnest questions about something or other in the textbook. She also ran on the ragtag track team, and she was pretty fast, one of their better runners. She was the lone Latina in the school, and she seemed to have a knack for steering clear of much of the fighting, even the basic macho posturing. Sometimes, she had told Jonah, I am invisible.

Señorita, Colby said to her, tipping an imaginary hat.

Luz winked at him. I like your new haircut, Colby.

Jonah gathered Luz in his arms. She asked if he had work later—he was a part-time mechanic at the Walmart auto shop on Tchoupitoulas Street. No, he said. Free.

Me, too, Luz answered. She pulled away, saying she was going to class. Adiós, Colby. And with a sly grin: Adiós, Jonás.

Once she had disappeared, Colby mimicked: Jonás, Jonás. Sound like she saying ‘ya own ass.’

Jonah started to laugh.

Adiós, ya own ass, adiós. She was saying good-bye to your ass, Mickey-Bee. Colby, grinning, ran his fingers over his hair. Likes my ’hawk, though, ya heard?

5

T HAT AFTERNOON THEY LAY IN HIS BED, LUZ’S HEAD AGAINST his chest, and she told him about San Antonio, Texas, and the time she had spent there. Sharing a bit more of the history that had been only hers, that she would have him keep now, too. They have a cathedral there called San Fernando—she whispered it to him. She told him how people had gone there for hundreds of years. Wars were fought, the city’s flag turned over. They were Spanish and Mexican and Texan and finally American. And all the Latino families would gather at the cathedral for the parade on the feast of Guadalupe. There were other children who were her friends. Not like a Mardi Gras parade, she explained. They gathered and marched from the cathedral with a portrait of la Virgen. Flowers and music and dancing in the street. It is a beautiful place, Luz said, and I miss it.

The weight of her head on his chest was something Jonah could not lose. He asked if she loved San Antonio more than she loved New Orleans with him.

She sighed, laughed. That’s not what I mean.

Luz had known her father only sparingly through her childhood. There were brief telephone calls and postcards written in his poor print, and his few journeys home to Coahuila, during which she was expected to pretend she loved him and missed him terribly—which she did, in a way, because her mother instructed that she must. Luz was eleven when she crossed with an uncle, who delivered her to her father in San Antonio. She was a little girl who had lost her mother and made a terrifying journey. She did come to love her father very much during their time in Texas.

Then Katrina came, and the flood followed. Her father was one of the thousands who came for work. The apartment they currently lived in was one half of a double, and they shared it with a friend of her father’s, a former stonemason from Matamoros named Rodrigo. A revolving group of Hondurans lived in the other half of the house. Luz and her father had stayed in this apartment for a while now—housing was in demand as the city continued to fill—but in those early days they had moved around a lot.

I was only thirteen, she told Jonah. I was scared. She had discovered, upon moving to New Orleans, that not many of the other men like her father had their children with them. Things had been different in San Antonio, where there were families and friends. But post-flood New Orleans was a place for young men or grizzled veterans only. Workers who shared decaying apartments and wired meager amounts of money home. Those first few months, the nights were impossibly dark, impossibly quiet. Soldiers in the streets, window-rattling Humvees. There were few people in the neighborhoods. More grim-faced workers arriving each day. It was different, Luz said. That’s what I mean.

Damn, Jonah said. Pop and me, we couldn’t come back for months. We evacuated to Houston. Didn’t know it would take so long for them to open the neighborhood back up, so we went to the camp. Pop and Dex, they were at each other’s throats the whole time. It sucked. Jonah inhaled the scent of Luz’s hair. Then he said, You wanna go for a ride with me?

Hmm?

There’s something I want to show you.

Jonah drove an old Ford F-100 that had belonged to his brothers before him and their father before that. He had kept the thing running when it should