I don’t go to the police. I think about it of course, but I don’t go. Mr. Lynch back at the hotel don’t ask questions and I have no idea why. I look like hell. He just gets a maid to come up and help me wash and bandage and ask if there is anything more I need and when I say ‘no’, she doesn’t come back. But there is something I need, so I go out again to a 24-hour store.

In the morning then I haven’t slept at all and I’m all drugged up on caffeine and cheap booze. It’s a wonder I can still walk down the stairs to the ancient computer that Mr. Lynch has lovingly installed on a small table across the minuscule reception desk.

‘Free for use for guests’ – whenever it works that is…

There’s a single e-mail. Nobody’s written to me in ages… Who –
__________

<Carrie,
My uncle finally went to Villa Tunari, so I could get a lift. You had not answered my last mail so I try again. Where are you? Your mother has left a message, too, at ENTEL. I picked it up. She is very worried. But you have not given her your e-mail address, she said. I am praying for you – wherever you are. Please answer this mail and tell me you are all right.
Julia>
________

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I should’ve quit at the first danger sign – that is when he insisted on us driving in his own car and not taking a taxi. I should have just gone away then. But after all that struggling with myself to prove that I was not afraid and didn’t care if … well, I didn’t.

The real shit started, though, when he suddenly turned off the expressway, down a minor road without lighting that ended in a container lot of some sort. We had been talking fairly normally, albeit awkwardly, up till then – actually, we had been talking quite well from the moment we left hostal Peron:

Miguel had first asked if I wanted to come with him to someplace called “Tigre” where his brother owned an “acclaimed” restaurant. I had said yes, because what else should I say? I had gone this far with him. Why question the fact that a guy like Miguel really might have a brother with a restaurant that got stars in the local newspapers.

I mean, didn’t everyone have a life before a war? Why not him? Why was I so focused on seeing only stereotypes – like the young offenders from Boyle Heights or Mid-West small towns who so often sign up for the army because they got nowhere else to go.

Then we had reached his car, an old Sedan that looked like it was only running on good will. I hesitated. I discovered that I was still in the process of making my real decision. The problem was that I didn’t even know for sure why I had done this. I only knew I didn’t want to date him for real – you know go home with him and all that – or anything. Of course not! But this was kind of like a date, wasn’t it? The problem is always like that: If you have never made up your mind entirely, if you don’t know your own reasons, someone else will tell you what they are.

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Night envelops Buenos Aires again. And with it I am enveloped in more strange dreams about ice cold seawater pushing into my mouth. It’s like Miguel’s bag is still in my room. I know what is in it, and yet I did not look in it. Or … have I not been sleeping at all, since I came home, just imagining?

Outside my hostal a hooker howls in frustration over a customer that apparently drove away without paying for a job in the car just below the dead lamppost at the corner; there is the even more distant howling of horns from taxi cabs squeezing each other to get the last customers in front of the Estación Buenos Aires Línea Belgrano Sur; transistor radios blast through wide open windows in the apartments opposite our building and in our building – bad pop music from the more seedy discos in the barrio of Barracas where I’m staying.

Funny, because in the day, Buenos Aires seems relatively mild, despite its subdued Latin American passion and the occasional soccer brawl; it’s mild in attitude, even welcoming in places – unlike, for example, L.A., which I’ve been to a few times. Sucked big time. Didn’t like it. Maybe if you lived in Beverly Hills, but then you’d just be a bird in gilded cage, wouldn’t you?

Maybe Ohio wasn’t so bad. Or even Skye …

Careful, Carrie – don’t get over-sentimental. Just find that single clean black blouse you have, and the least-worn looking pair of jeans and that comb you use too seldom. And then Mr. Miguel Sanchez Palomino won’t get any ideas of the sort men who are 20 years older than you might easily get. I’m not gonna look the part.

It could still go horribly wrong, though … What was I thinking?

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The cold South Atlantic waters can no longer be stopped from pressing through your nose, mouth, into your lungs; – the inevitability of the breathing reflex is remarkable, even when there’s nothing to breathe but heavy sub-Arctic seawater..  

*

I get torn out of sleep, almost instantly, when I can’t breathe.

Wait … I … can breathe. I’m … alive. Here. In the hostal. In Buenos Aires. Near the railway …

It’s deep night. The city is not asleep. I don’t think I’ll be again.

I’ll be thinking about why I am going back to look for Miguel tomorrow, and why it is so important that I have not  looked in the bag.

His bag. It’s there. On the floor, beside my too-short bed with the cement-mattress.

What do I want to prove?

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Dear Julia,

It was not easy coming to Buenos Aires, finally. It was not easy saying goodbye. But I had to go and you know why … There’s a war in me. But maybe here, at the edge of another ocean, I will be able to make an armistice?

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