The story below is a subterranean record of ideas and atmospheres absorbed and transformed in the imagination during four months of South American travel. It includes references to recent historical events and incorporates bits from my explorations. See my essay about wall art in Argentina: The Long Haul, The Writing on the Wall, and Sometimes a Bicycle is more than a Bicycle. Though this story is dark, my actual travels have primarily been full of light; beautiful, sometimes strange landscapes; eye-opening cities, towns, and pueblos; and kind people who have led me through the inevitable confusions that face a traveler./SJW

End of the Line (First Final Edit—26 April 2008)

Lines were long to begin with, and they just keep getting longer*. Though I see no signs of advancement, the lengthening line behind me makes me hopeful that when there is movement my position will be advantageous.

Unlike others, I have few bags—just one small leather suitcase and a canvas shoulder sack. A wide-brimmed Panama hat shades eyes from harsh midday sun. That is the worst thing about an otherwise enviable position in line: my hat is my only shelter from ruthless ultraviolet rays darting down through our hole in the ozone.

As we pass day number eighteen, many stories circulate that all cash machines are empty, but the newest story making the rounds states that even if we get to our line’s cash machine and can withdraw significant amounts of money, all currency is now entirely worthless. One man with a badly sunburned nose that makes him look like a clown said he was committed to reaching the machine and withdrawing thousands in hundred-dollar bills, even if it meant he would only wipe his ass with them.

Stories. You can’t believe everything people say. If you did, you’d be in one of the rag-tag groups hiking to Tigre to pray for alien intervention. Those folks, whipped up into a delusional state, report sightings of alien saviors, only to be devoured by the last of the tigers roaming woods by the rivers. Still others spread stories that the pope, acting as emissary for The Eternal Spirit of Jesus Christ, is drawing up lists of those who will be saved.

I admit that I haven’t actually seen our cash machine, but my cousin assures me one is next to the now-defunct panaderia, and I have a clear view of a large, golden medialuna-shaped sign extended out over a walkway 1½ blocks ahead. Why would he lie? Just the same, old man Javier from his place in a line two cues over said, “Bullshit! There’s no cash machine there. Never has been, never will be. You’re in the wrong line. You should get in the back of this one, the food line. Food has real value. You can eat food. Money is nothing; it is worthless in times like these.” Javier is fond of calling bullshit on anything someone says, though; it’s hard to take him seriously.

No matter what line someone stands in, for as far as the eye can see, lines have spread all over the city, and belief that there’s something at the end of any of them requires pure faith. Nobody can explain how they know what is supposed to exist at the end of their line—no one’s ever been there—but the lines continue to lengthen. In a strange way, I think you could say that faith is growing. No one moves forward, and not a single person has opened a door to the object of their desire. Yet the numbers of believers continue to grow.

Ronc, the waterman, says he hopes the lines don’t ever move. He’s never had it so good. Everyone needs water, so he can name his price. He sees a man with a casaba melon he wants, all he need do is charge a melon for a liter of clean water. Ronc’s not a bad sort, though. He’d never take someone’s last casaba melon, and I’ve seen him give water away for free to the many parentless children who aimlessly wander from line to line in search of a relative or friendly adult.

One day passes into another, arc of sun followed by arc of moon, and people etch diagrams and lists in the dirt to illustrate conversations about the past when they lived in houses, condominiums, or apartments in the days before doors closed, locking them out.

It’s common for someone to pine for a bedroom, kitchen, and bath—and, inevitably such people then whine that they’d been good to their living quarters, cleaning them regularly and treating them lovingly. They can’t understand why their doors locked them out, and they pathetically reach for reasons.

Those people are bound for insanity. All we know is that doors closed behind us, and then lines formed. There are no verifiable reasons, only speculation and stories born from the absence of causal links.

Dr. Ronaldo Lomo of the Centro de los Ojos has appointed himself official archivist and is trying to get to the bottom of the mystery. He, like so many in the Recoleta barrio, has moved into the cemetery for the feeling of security walls provide. Dr. Lomo says the dead provide clues to how we the living have arrived at this sorry state. “It is fitting that we live with the dead; the dead once lived, and the living will die,” the doctor says. Until he, or someone, cracks the secret code that will bring this lockout to an end, people in Recoleta Cemetery have a seemingly endless supply of stray cats to barbeque or fry in ingenious ways according to any number of cultural influences: Gato Milanese, Gato Portuguese, Gato Hamburguesa Americano, Etc.

Dr. Lomo, the surgeon who transplanted my eyes, inexplicably (perhaps carelessly, maybe lyrically, or more than likely out of necessity and usual shortages) gave me the green eyes that take in today’s harsh noon sun. Citizens who don’t know my name just call me Green Eyes. I don’t mind. I’m the go-to guy. I grew up here, have walked, bussed, biked, and driven most boulevards, avenues, streets, and alleyways. I am the human map, the human GPS system, though of course I have my shortcomings. “Ask Green Eyes,” people say when they need direction to where something is or used to be.

I’m glad to help, to be of use. It passes the time. When I get tired of explaining distances, right turns, left turns, shortcuts and landmarks, though, I wear sunglasses to cover my green eyes for a little peace from others’ confusion and desperation. Sooner or later everyone will be sorted into a line, for now I serve a purpose that keeps me employed.

6

The day the tumblers in the locks in all of the doors of Buenos Aires jammed felt like all prior days. No hints sparkled in the periphery of consciousness—no signs that privacy would come to an end, that inside would remain contained within walls without us. The most profound historical and personal transformations occur silently, seamlessly, recognizable only in retrospect.

Many evolutionary changes marked by explosions and huge events get all of the attention, but the deepest transformations are not marked by implosion, explosion, or grandness. The day the doors closed, locks jammed one at a time until every single porteno, every citizen of metropolitan Buenos Aires, clutched his or her keys, unable to fathom that no locksmith would or could come to their aid. Even locksmiths were barred entry from their shops, and none of their expertise with picks or drills could save them or anyone else.

6

Higo Blanco, everyone’s favorite albino little brother, was one of the first to provide Dr. Lomo with hints, clues concerning connections between eyes and locks. Blanco and I already had a personal connection—he with his pink rabbit eyes, I with my transplanted green ones—but little Blanco saw and dreamt and spoke the combinations of words and ideas that led the doctor to feel a conceptual key turn, opening a door to possibilities he’d never entertained in the light of day or in the shadows of dreams.

Ronaldo Lomo, Director and head surgeon of El Centro de los Ojos, heard in little Blanco’s mix of gibberish and poetry clues needed to begin composing a theory. If he could only see, reach into the albino’s wordbank and retrieve the eyes of Tiresias, the eyes of Oedipus, the once sighted eyes of Borges, and understand siftings and sortings from the light and darkness of hours and days strained through the albino’s pink rabbit eyes…

Dr. Lomo observed missing eyes in statues, monuments, and sacred paintings, and in those sockets, as directed by his blanched protégé, the doctor placed little keys carved from bone he and others excavated from narrow avenues of mausoleums in Recoleta Cemetery.

6

In the meantime, time passed, but lines did not move, and all anyone could dream of were enclosed rooms, real shelter, functional places with windows and doors that swung out into open spaces and the ability to freely move back and forth between that outside and an inside they could no longer reach.

Dr. Lomo placed bone keys in the missing eyes of The Virgin, and still doors remained glued to their jams.

Higo Blanco’s nearly transparent, pigmentless flesh was prone to burn, so he wore a hooded robe and hugged the shade of buildings and trees. The necessity of avoiding sunlight gave Moises (Higo’s birth name) an intimacy with shade, with darkness, with coolness and the people, animals, birds, insects, and thoughts that seek relief and retrospection. The most luminous little brother of them all—friend to stray children, heat-prostrated dogs, and shade-seeking cemetery cats— Moises would appear as from out of nowhere. Dr. Lomo sometimes called him “The Patron Saint of Dreams of Shadows Who Will Shield Us from the Sun and Unlock the Door to Our Inner Sanctum.”

6

When Moises was born in the pueblo of Humahauca, his father crossed himself and moved to the hills. His mother went to church with silver and tin eyes to offer up to Jesus, Mary, The Holy Ghost, and a misery that bleached her future of all color. The church held no hope for her, but her sister told her Buenos Aires might bestow a scientist, a doctor, a magician, or the good air of hope. Father Simon said to trust in Our Lord’s gift of a special child, a pure little fish who might one day swim upstream to the source of The Mystery. If she were to move to the city, though, Father Simon promised to pray for her and Moises.

Moises’ mother felt no consolation in Father Simon’s words. What could he know? He’d never given birth to a child. He’d never felt a woman’s warmth. The man was sincerely dedicated to his calling, but he lacked imagination or originality. Before her husband retreated to the hills, he used to say, “Simon is a parrot for The Lord. You’d be better off talking with a real bird.”

One thing Buenos Aires has is tall buildings, many of them, and even the ugliest structure creates shade according to its size, its shape, and its position in relation to the sun. Though Moises’ mother had lost faith in The Son, she diligently learned about the sun, shade, and her bright, intuitive little rabbit. From the time he was a boy, she trained him to hug the walls, to blanket himself in shade, shadows within which he felt his mother protectively wrapped around him. And one day as her bunny rounded a corner, who should come rounding the corner from the opposite direction but Dr. Lomo, taken aback by the little albino’s strict and humorless gaze.

Dr. Lomo handed Moises’ mother a card and told her to bring the boy by for an examination the following Tuesday. There were “promising new experimental treatments” with pigmentation and eye transplantation, and he would consider Moises’ case seriously and at no cost.

That is how Dr. Lomo learned of Moises’ special talents. And long before “promising experimental treatments” fell from favor at the hospital, the good doctor became surrogate father, and outside the office became Uncle Ronaldo to Moises.

What warren of fated events form a life and introduce student to teacher, making teacher a student to that most unusual being who arrives for lessons and becomes the event that supplies a reason beyond all daily schedules and chores?

Eventually Dr. Lomo reserved a regular place in his schedule each afternoon at 3:30 for Moises.

6

Moises: Uncle Ronaldo, do you believe the armadillo has a hard shell because its feet are small and its legs are short?

Dr. Lomo: Why do you raise this point, son?

Moises: Because I was wondering what makes people feel they need armor like the armadillo’s.

Dr. Lomo: Who, what people are you thinking about?

Moises: Everyone who has eyes, that’s who. You, mother, the people in the park, most everyone—all of the people with eyes who walk in the sunlight wear armor. I just don’t know why, and so I thought if I could understand the armadillo I might know why these people feel they need protection.

Dr. Lomo: Do you need armor? In my line of work I find it’s helpful to ask myself why I feel something when I want to know, or at least want to get closer to why someone else feels something. Ask yourself why you need armor.

Moises: But I don’t walk in the sunlight, so I already have my armor. Mother has given me the shade. And my rabbit eyes are not the eyes of those who walk in sunlight. My skin is like glass, uncle, and my eyes are precious pink marbles. I must be alert or the light will ignite my heart, and the sun will cook my brain. The shade and the night are my armor.

What is your armor, uncle? And why do you need it?

Dr. Lomo: These are all worthy questions, son. But my years exceed yours, and it isn’t possible for me to explain to you the experiences that have created my armor. When you are older and have lived the inevitable loves and losses of life we can have this discussion. For now, I will divulge that answers such as the one I just enunciated are my armor.

Moises: Yes, you do have eyes, Uncle, and your words are those of a man of sunlight.

These conversations had a way of living beneath the doctor’s skin, distracting him from listening carefully to his patients when Moises’ questions worked upon the good doctor’s sense of certainty, breaking it down, and sometimes making work feel trivial.

6

There is a look, a facial expression that occurs when trusted behaviors or reliable chains of events unexpectedly defy expectations.

One by one, or five by five, or hundreds by hundreds, this expression formed on each face as the key that fit the lock would not turn tumblers.

It was as if a shadow of an upright key that would not turn unlocked this expression from face muscles, releasing Buenos Aires from any assurances about its place, its standing in Argentina and among the great cities.

If a key would no longer open a door, what next?

A new facial expression took its place in the lexicon of gestures. Everywhere faces said, What next?

6

Naturally, at first there were those who looked to windows for entry into their homes, but we cautious ones—we many timid ones—saw that brave ones who jimmied, pried, or broke windows and regained entry to their shelters never emerged again. Yes, they re-entered their homes, but darkness and silence swallowed them.

Then we formed our lines, and at the head of each line a monitor related rules. I’ve never been to the head of the line—no one I know has—but word travels from the head back to us, or so each of us has been told by the person in front of us, and when word gets to me I accurately pass it on to a Brazilian woman who occupies the space behind me.

We know, for example, that our bank machines only accept certain cards—Link and Banco—and that the machine only functions at particular hours, completely shutting down on Sundays, turning off early on Saturdays, and when temperatures rise suddenly or heavy rainstorms blow in, we expect machines will function erratically. The word from the front of the line informs us of these facts so we will be fully prepared for the day when doors open.

We are told that the door to the bank machine will be among the first to open when doors in Buenos Aires are released from whatever spell or peculiar magnetism holds them in its grip. We need to have patience we’re told. We’re instructed that we must have faith in the economy if we want the door to our cash machine to open. We’re assured that our line is one of hundreds of such lines in all of the barrios of Buenos Aires—lines that lead to their respective cash machines, and that bolster our collective strength.

Our job is to maintain faith in the economy and to keep our watches wound and set to the correct time. We’ve adjusted the hands of our watches and clocks to add two more hours of daylight each day. The old fellow in the food line gets his water from Ronc, same as the rest of us, and gets his food from the gardeners. Gardeners don’t stand in lines, but they do honor the importance of maintaining those who manage straight, civil lines directed ahead with purpose and faith.

6

Moises looks on from the shadows and meets with his Uncle Ronaldo. They understand the importance of these lines, too. They know that chaos, rioting and looting, could easily explode onto the streets if faith in lines should break down, but they also know that no number of lines will open the doors.

6

Moises related the following stream of perceptions: 

Uncle, the doors and windows are only a small portion of our circumstance. Moles in a garden burrow up from beneath roots, and we flood their tunnels with a simple garden hose, taking these clueless creatures by surprise, drown and suffocate them in their muddy channels. How are we like the mole, uncle?

In my dreams, we are moles. A mole’s eyes are sensitive to light, like mine, so I understand why I am a mole crawling through a black tube of earth in this dream, but why are you, mother, Green Eyes, Ronc, and all the others moles? Why do we all burrow in the dark?

I am no spelunker, uncle, but I know the dark and can crawl through it on my belly when necessary, and I feed on roots, filigree of rootlets, lights spindling down from stars, and I know a flood is on the way if we don’t unlock the doors. I taste the starlight’s roots, uncle, and its finely spun sugar tells me these days of the living are numbered if we cannot open our doors by Day of the Dead. So, clean your gravestones in Recoleta, excavate bones, diligently fill all vacant eye sockets with carved bone keys, and, most importantly, do not drown in channels of misguided theories. Keep your eyes open in the darkness.

6

Dr. Lomo wanted to pluck his eyes from his head. He wanted to burrow into the earth. Instead, he maintained his professional face and then his fatherly face.

“Moises, thank you for locating the deadline. We must keep the people in their lines and alive. Don’t let your line to the stars go dead, and call me if you taste anything new.”

Moises paused, looked skyward, and as he scuttled off, hugging the walls, said, “Scooby Doo, uncle.”

6

What happened next?

As if floating outside my body, my life reported itself to me from a distance:

The cell-phone lines went dead. The last bit of juice from batteries drained into final severed conversations.

While Green Eyes spoke with Moises’ mother, his phone beeped three times before dead space filled his ears. She went on polishing the wings of bodiless angels—cherub heads with wings—over heavy mausoleum doors. She neither needed to pray now nor listen to talk talk talk.

Green Eyes snapped closed his phone, tucked it in his pocket, and looked ahead, eyes forward. The line was a little quieter, angels’ wings in the cemetery shone a little brighter in the sun, and somewhere beneath lawns and gardens, nearly blind creatures intuitively scratched out tunnels toward tender young shoots, snouting forward to roots in earthly tunnels, empty black pupils reflecting no real notion of what next.

And I snapped back to my place among the others.

6

Doing nothing but waiting, going nowhere, standing in lines exhausts a human body and drains the human spirit. Exhaustion leads to flat emotions and a feeling of weight, time’s weight and the weight of uselessness and hopelessness. Most walls are covered with stencil graffiti depicting naked bodies swinging from trees, faces with hollow black sockets and toothless black mouths. Some of the corpses are recognizable figures like the mayor, who left his office for his family’s country residence the day before The Great Exclusion. The timing of his departure has some of the wonks speculating that the whole situation is a government plot.  Secret artists at the end of their own ropes come out at night to paint these suicidal images on walls, buildings, houses, the sides of abandoned city busses whose doors also remain jammed closed. Heavy exhaustion will do this. To look into anyone’s face is a painful mirror of how we all feel every day. Exhausted. There are moments, though, when the exhaustion can become intoxicating, a kind of languorous, opiated feeling. The weight bears down and muscles and bones feel the pull of gravity so extremely that one can hardly stand, can hardly stand it, can hardly stand for it, and even the weight of eyelids becomes too much. Then, and only then, when the weight of the world transcends all emotional barometers, can a release, a pure but nearly orgasmic letting-go take over, followed by a drugged sensation. It doesn’t last long, but it allows us to keep on waiting. We are temporarily renewed. Those who cannot or won’t experience the release, they are the ones we eventually find in a puddle of their own blood or swinging from a rope above a puddle of piss.

When we say we have a case of gallows humor, we couldn’t be more literal. We joke, but the jokes are very dark indeed. Have you heard the one about the teacher who slit his wrists instead of reading his students’ essays? It’s the oldest joke in the book. I won’t bore you. We got a million of’m, but the punchline is always the same. I don’t know why it cracks us up every time, but it does, and the laughter, even though at odds with the laugher’s eyes, helps. Most of us go on, taking what solace we can from our respective lines and what we believe awaits us at the front of those lines.

Some gallows graffiti is a cry for help. Mostly this happens with the children, but adults have been known to do it as well. A person will paste a personal photo on the head of one of the graffiti corpses, and if anyone notices in time, that person has a chance that someone will care enough to save them. There are many among us, though, who cannot commit suicide ourselves but believe those who can are lucky they’ve reached a stage of hopelessness profound enough to do the deed. So cries for help, even when they are received in time, often go unheeded.

It’s enough to put you off your breakfast when you discover a child swinging from a tree, but then you consider that at least they won’t have to endure the seemingly endless waiting.

6

Moises: Uncle, money isn’t filthy.

Dr. Lomo: I might agree with you if I am hearing what you mean. What do you mean, son?

Moises: Money is not filthy. People say it is filthy, and it isn’t. It is nothing. Things that are something remain, no matter what. They are clean or filthy. Money…money is nothing.

Dr. Lomo: I am inclined to agree with you, Moises, but our agreement that it can purchase things that are essential, that are something, give it extraordinary power to make people behave in the oddest ways. Not only in odd ways, son, but in ways that twist human behavior all out of shape. That is what people mean, I think, when they say money is dirty. Do you understand?

Moises: If I stand under that, and uphold it, Uncle, I would have to uphold other unrealities, and before you know it I would understand too many absurdities. Look at the lines to the cash machines. The door is locked, and we don’t even know if there’s money in the machines. If there is money in the machines, what could it possibly be worth beyond the value of the material it is made from? Not much. And look how people suffer for not having it and think that it will bring back what they have lost. Yet we have to let them go on standing there.

Dr. Lomo: Let me ask you this. If the door opens and the cash machine issues notes, what do you think people will do with those bills? Do you think people will spend them and others will exchange goods and services for them? Or do you think that they will light cigars with those bills, paste them to lampshades, fold them into origami cranes, make them into wallpaper? What do you think?

Moises: What they will do is of little concern to me. It is what they do that concerns me. They stand in the sunlight, in moonlight, in darkness, in rain, or in hail, and for what? Their money is not filthy, but it is nothing but a pipedream.

Dr. Lomo: Some pipedreams contain more influence and power than others, son. Consider the nature of words. Are they real? Are they substantial? What is left when we stop using them. Your chair remains for you to sit down whether you call it a chair or not. Would you agree that words are not nothing? 

Moises: Words do not need my agreement. The bird’s song doesn’t need the bird to agree or disagree with the song. The bird sings. The song sounds.

Dr. Lomo: Yes, Moises. We are singing now, singing about money. We are singing the song that asks if the money is real, and that is the song that asks if reality is real. We sing because we are creatures who sing. Sometimes that song helps us to know what remains and what lacks substance.

6

The doctor and Moises had these conversations, and the doctor picked over the substance of their exchanges for clues, but he couldn’t make connections. He, like the multitudes in their lines, only maintained an irrational faith that he might, through his relationship with Moises, discover the key.

Not everyone could bear the lines, though. Not everyone could bear the weight (the wait), and some of those people experienced a peculiar transformation into holy, dangerous clowns who smeared ash on their faces and dog feces in their hair. Clearly they had gone over the edge. Many of them would dance, walk, or ride bicycles backwards and invert and alter their words when they spoke: wordsback for backwards, for example. The clowns would say things in their twisted language that Moises understood, and at night he could be seen eating raw rat with them around a fire no one else dared to approach.

The holy clowns were regarded as having been touched by God, and they often performed outrageously comical mime shows that reflected the daily trials of the masses, but in a split second such shows could turn to bloody mayhem and screamed obscenities. A clown might grab a woman or man from the audience and rape that person before the crowd or begin pissing on a person or throw dirt into the eyes of small children. And a clown might as likely slash him or herself across a bare stomach with a large knife. Comedy could turn to violence without a trace of transition. Laughter could turn to tears, trauma, and blood in an instant.

Moises could pass between the clowns’ world and ours, and the doctor had faith that Higo Blanco would provide an answer in time. What disturbed the good doctor and struck fear into the rest of us was the escalation: even as the number of suicides decreased, the number of dangerous holy clowns began to increase.

6

On the night of the bonfires, the clowns were out in full force, apparently in a comic mood (a cosmic mood), and the gardeners’ harvest had been bountiful, brightening our optimism. Moises looked on from a distance, and the doctor, from his office window at the Centro de los Ojos, looked down to see Moises crying relentlessly, the bonfires’ flames illuminating tears streaming down the albino seer’s white cheeks. We didn’t know whether he was crying for a vision or crying because all was hopeless.

6

My line has received word from the front that the cash machine is emitting a deep humming sound, a message that has apparently come from the front many times, but in the past I never heard the humming.

The desire for the bank machines to work often resulted in one or another of us believing that it was booting up for action. I, however, had never succumbed to auditory hallucinations until now, and when I realized that I could no longer always tell the difference between real sounds and false ones, my heart sank deep into desperation.

Who or what could I trust if I could no longer rely upon my perceptions, my most basic sensory intake? Was I only seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting what I wanted from the world? Would I one day see the doors open even when they remained closed? Were the doors really closed? What were these green eyes telling me? Were the holy clowns, the touched clowns, the only ones among us who understood where the lines between reality and imagination appear and disappear? The only ones who could highlight how dangerous cracking up could be, yet approached such lines with a ruthless sword and wild, brilliant, destructive/creative laughter?

How might I answer these disturbing questions from my place in line? In the end, where do we draw the line? Where would I draw the line? Where is the end of the line? Where do lines begin and end, and how many points make up a line? How much is it a choice as to whether I cross the lines that define who I am, who we are, and the place at which inside meets outside? Individual meets collective? Survival meets demise of a species or of an individual? Is asking the questions the very sign that the questions are already superfluous? As I asked these questions I knew that we were all, always and forever, at the end of the line, at the end of our tether to a consensus constructed from certainties no more substantial than cotton candy or the lullabies a grandmother sings to a small child with influenza and hot earache. And as I thought these questions, or these questions thought me, the central star in the belt of Orion called my name, and one-hundred-and-eighty degrees away the tail of the scorpion constellation stung me in the back of my neck. Starstruck and starsick I stepped out of line: I walked to the circle of clowns who threw me down and kicked me until I understood why the doors had closed and why I could no longer wait for Moises to lead me to the keys that might never exist, might never have existed except in a void from which Manjusri or another many-limbed god has always danced creation and destruction.

I pulled my knife from its leather scabbard and slashed at my forearms, much to the delight of my fellow clowns and the wild older women among us who hiked up their long skirts to stimulate their vulva, releasing an orgasmic ululation inspiring night owls to hoot the answer. An answer clear enough to night birds.

But Moises would not lead his people to civilization, and the good doctor would never see dancing skeletons play their guitars on Day of the Dead.

I had stepped out of line, yet remained at the end of my line, all alone among others as a cloud of black smoke** blew in over the horizon, making it difficult to breath or to see more than a few feet ahead, eyes burning and tearing, even as a searing, overwhelming taste in the back of my throat revealed the black spit of our reality.

6

*Lines: One of the outstanding conditions of life in Argentina concerns waiting in lines for nearly everything, including cash machines, sometimes several lines for a single transaction to come to completion.

**Since the fifteenth of April 2008, the city of Buenos Aires has been in and under a black cloud of smoke caused by post-harvest brush fires set by farmers in the pampas outside the city. The government advises people to stay in homes with windows closed, but portenos report burning eyes, and large numbers of people have reported to hospitals to complain of labored breathing. Highways are temporarily  closed, no busses are allowed in or out of the city, and only international flights enter or leave Buenos Aires. I have delayed travel plans, staying in Sucre, Bolivia, an extra day, and intend to monitor the situation from Salta, Argentina, when I get there on the 24th.

NOTE: The central character Moises earned that name because one day as I sat at a table during my first visit to Salta, Argentina, a beggar-boy named Moises (Moses) approached me, and his intelligence and good humor impressed me./The Centro de los Ojos actually exists in Buenos Aires in the Recoleta bario. My daughter Ari and I walked by it frequently as we strolled to or from the neighborhood that surrounds Recoleta Cemetery. I recall seeing a young man standing outside the doorway, beneath the clinic’s sign, his eye covered in white gauze bandages./ In December 2007, Ari and I saw a fantastically talented clown/mime outside of Recoleta Cemetery who played the line between comedy and violence. He would fold a pink balloon into a sword, lure a small child forward, and then symbolically cut the child’s throat before giving up the balloon. The act’s pure symbolic violence never failed to elicit laughter. Clowns: The holy clowns at the end of the story are modeled on Native North American clowns who are Contraries, though I don’t intend an accurate representation of them.

 Steven Jay Weinberg

Salta, Argentina/December 2007 to April 26, 2008