Flores, Guatemala, March 14th, 2006

 

That night after exploring the ruins of Tikal I sat in a chair up on top of the Hotel Mirador Del Lago, its roof served as a balcony with a beautiful view.  I was in the town of Flores, which covers an entire island in a large lake, Petén Itzá.  The town was one of the last holdouts of the Maya, and wasn’t conquered by the Spanish until 1697. It is easy to see how they held out on such a small easily defensible island.  Aside from an amphibious assault the Spanish would have no way to get there.  Unfortunately, when it finally fell the Spanish followed their normal procedure of destruction and none of the Mayan structures remain, a church sits where the temple used to be.  However, the town retains the characteristic of maximizing space, and is almost in its entirety dotted with houses.  From the top of the hotel a good portion of the cramped buildings are visible, as is the bridge onto the island.  When I was up there it was becoming dusk, streetlights came on slowly.  Oddly weak at first, they appeared to brighten as the world around them darkened.  Big puffy clouds billowed skyward, and the sunset was orange and brown, beautiful and dirty.  Magnified to an impressive size, the moon rose on the opposite horizon, capturing some of that same color.

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“Do you see the man in the moon?” Steffi asked me. 

 

She said that once you see the face you can’t help but to see it every time.

 

“There are the eyes,” she said, “tilted a little bit to the left.”

 

I didn’t see it. 

 

Steffi is a medical student from Germany.  I traveled for several days with her and her friends Rebecca and Ursula.  They would all soon be doctors.  Two other women from Germany, sisters Silke and Anja, traveled with us as well for a while.  I had been alone for most of that trip, so it was nice to have fun people to travel with, but somehow the female companionship made me miss my girlfriend even more.  They spoke German to each other now and then, and the conversation would be unintelligible to me, like static on a radio, a background noise.  I would get a word here, or the gist of it there, but mostly it was an unfocused photograph.  Occasionally for a joke I would say a nonsensical sentence in the few German words I knew: “Hamburg, schnitzel schnauzer. Wie Geits Berlin Auf Wiedersehen Ja.”  I would say it as if in the middle of an animated conversation while we walked past other tourists so I would appear German to them.  The girls thought it was funny, especially Steffi.  Laughing comes easy when you’re on vacation.

 

I strained my eyes and tried to see the face, but just couldn’t.  It looked like the moon and nothing else.  I expected it to come into focus, like one of those pictures that is a vase when you look at it one way and two faces when you look at it another, or maybe like a map when you first think one part is the ocean and then realize that the ocean and land are reversed.  Instead, I saw just the same moon disappearing into one of the few clouds in the sky.

 

An international group of backpackers sat across from my little circle of Germans.  There are things I love and hate about running into a group of backpackers. These guys were part of the latter. They had some sort of a pissing contest going on as to who was the most extreme traveler. It was unfortunate to listen to, and about as much fun as hearing someone gripe about work. One guy claimed to have nearly lost a thumb to frostbite on a Mexican mountain, another bluffed bandits by hiding his money. All agreed they were extremely bold for even visiting Guatemala.  It was dangerous, I gave them that, but their boasting was ugly.  They affirmed each other’s bravery over and over again.  Thankfully, talking with the Germans rode over top of the other conversation, pushing it into the back, turning it into dull, meaningless noise.

 

*  

 

At dinner an Englishman invited himself to our table.  He said he’d been to Happy Hour and was obviously trying to get with one of the girls.  Like a self-appointed master of ceremonies he steered the conversation, completely dominating it, which was odd since he crashed our dinner.  He talked for a while about his parents and how daring they were for their age, and what interesting things they did like sky dive and do adventure tours.  He asked several times, would our parents do anything like that?

 

“I mean, really,” he said, “Imagine old folks doing those things.  Would any of your parents do that?”

 

He was, in his own way, behaving like those backpackers on the rooftop.  Humility was at a scarcity in Flores tonight.

 

Rebecca indulged him and said, “No, my parents are quiet and like to be at home.”

 

I was next in the circle, and I didn’t much want to play the game.

 

“And you Franklin,” he was good at getting everyone’s names right, a skill I haven’t yet mastered, so of course I hated him, “Would your parents go skydiving?”

 

“My parents died a long time ago, when I was a kid,” I told him.

 

There was silence.  I was cramping his pick-up attempt.  There’s nothing swinging and sexy about dead parents.

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“My goodness, at the same time?” he said. 

 

Tiny beads of water dripped off his beer bottle as he held it motionless at shoulder height.

 

“At different times,” I said.

 

“Who raised you after that,” he asked.

 

“My brother,” I replied.

 

“Would he sky dive?”

 

“He’s dead too,” I said.

 

This produced another spell of awkward silence, broken only by the clank of cutlery on plates.

 

“A lot of people have had it a lot worse than me,” I said.

 

​

“Maybe during genocide,” he said, swigging from his beer, and I felt weird.

​

When he found out Ursula had a fiancé he started talking to Rebecca and rudely ignored Ursula from then on.  We found out later that Ursula had pulled out a picture of her boyfriend on purpose, and dropped it into the conversation like a bomb.  The rest of the dinner was strange.  Whenever somebody wasn’t talking to me I felt an island to myself, easily tuning out the sea of words around me into nothing, like static on a TV or the rush of traffic on a distant highway.

 

*

 

Back at the hotel, the fan was as loud as a jungle monster.  Over its roar I talked with Rebecca about what she was doing for her thesis in Medical School.  She said that she was dealing with how people react to trauma.  I told her how I had come upon a murder-suicide eleven years before. 

 

“When I was living in Indiana,” I said, “a woman had thrown her two little boys off of an eight-story parking garage, and then jumped herself.”

 

“I was on lunch break from painting houses,” I said, “I was drinking an orange Gatorade. I used to love that flavor but I haven’t bought one since. It sounded like two shots, two loud noises, followed by a scream.”

 

The two guys I worked with and I ran toward the corner of the garage, where the noises had come from, and there were three people lying on the ground. I thought to myself, if someone shot them, how did they shoot three people with two shots? Then I realized they’d fallen off the garage.

 

As I told Rebecca the story, her expression was one of sincere compassion. In that moment I went from thinking she was pretty cool to knowing she was a good person.

 

“I was among the first on the scene,” I said, “When I got there the woman was dead. The kids were still alive, but they were smashed to pieces. I leaned over one of the boys and put a hand on his shoulder. I tried to tell him that he was going to be OK, but my voice cracked a little.  I hated myself for not being strong for the kid as he lay there broken.”

 

A woman showed up and tried to put a sheet on them, but we wouldn’t let her, the boys weren’t dead. Another woman and her friend smoked cigarettes and nodded while saying, “Oh, they’re dead. They’re not going to make it,” and it was all I could do not to shout Shut the fuck up, they can hear you!

 

“The boys died later in the hospital,” I said, “I found out the next morning and lost it in the storage area at work, threw brushes and rollers and empty buckets across the room.”

 

“But while I was there at the scene, as the cops and paramedics arrived,” I told Rebecca, “I stood back and watched. My mind went blank, and the weirdest thing happened.  I was struck by the action and the movement of everything, the art of it, of the ambulance workers and the firefighters working.  It was all so vivid and perfect that I remember wishing I had a camera to take a picture of it.  I felt horribly guilty to see such beauty in the horror. But at the time it felt like one of the most cinematic things I had ever seen.” 

 

Rebecca said, “This is normal.  It is a form of detachment. You saw it as something to capture in a photo and that put it outside of yourself and made it separate.  It was a coping mechanism.”

           

When it came time to sleep again, I needed earplugs to deal with the fan.  It sounded like the whole room was taking off and I slept as I did the night before, with the feeling that I was on an airport runway, taxiing before takeoff.  I could almost hear the air traffic controllers in my head.  I thought about monkeys in the jungle, the moon, German words, trauma, and then a dream sound started in the distance and grew louder and stronger until it was in the forefront.  It seemed like music, like waterfalls and breaking glass mixed with tinkling bells, and as it overtook the airplane roar, I was sleeping.