Hypothermia

to work in the Treasury. On the way to the official appointment ceremony he stopped by my office and told me: I’ll see you at the party, bring your wife along. Is yours coming? I asked him. He raised his hands as though praying to heaven and answered me: She’s been driving me crazy for weeks, telling me how nice it was to see you, and how she’s dying to meet your wife. By now Malik had finished his kebab, and said: So you hooked up with her right in front of everybody. No, it wasn’t me: it just happened. We ended up chatting, and before I knew it we were sharing the same glass. Then she told me that she had a message she’d been keeping for me. What? I asked her. It’s a message that can only be passed through the saliva, she answered. And she pushed you down on your knees, finished Malik, standing up from the table, and she opened your mouth, and she let fall a drop of her holy water on your tongue. That’s a little much, but I guess you might put it that way. The Sri Lankan glanced at his watch and said: I don’t have to leave yet, but the truth is, I don’t want to hear any more.

THERAPY: GRINGOS

    Australians were the dregs of British society; their country was a penal colony that became a nation. Besides there being something heroic in that assertion, there’s also a real identification between the land and its occupiers: Australians are from Australia . We gringos can’t even boast that much: we’re the scum of the earth, the leftovers from all the other countries that came looking for a second chance.
    It’s nothing to laugh about. You were born here and they convinced you in school that it’s the best country in the world, but sure enough, your father or your grandfather didn’t think that way, did they, because they came from somewhere else.
    Isn’t that right?
    This country is nameless, and we as its inhabitants have chosen, consciously and consistently, to have no patronymic: Salvadorans are Salvadoran, Chinese are Chinese, and the French are French. Gringos? We’re African Americans, Mexican Americans, Native Americans, German Americans, Irish Americans. A woman at the Bank defines herself as a Bohemian American, and nobody remembers anymore, not even in the Czech Republic, that Bohemia was once a nation under Austro-Hungarian protection. We’re neither an empire, nor a republic, nor a monarchy. We’re nothing: it’s every man for himself because no one wants to belong to the world of second chances. We’re whatever slipped through the cracks of history: pure ambition without any ulterior commitments—a ragtag band of pirates. We’re gringos and we urgently need some national therapy.
    Don’t laugh. Think of it as a business opportunity and you’ll see that I’m right.

SAINT BARTHOLOMEW

    Sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory.
    I C ORINTHIANS 15:43
    He told her that he’d gone to church one day and that the Polish baritone had just disappeared, his wife and all their children too: now they hadn’t been to Mass in three weeks.
    He said it apropos of nothing, simply to fill up a moment of silence, perfectly aware of the fact that this was the first she was hearing about the singer. It was an incidental sort of anecdote, and he probably thought to bring it up just for a laugh, but it pulsed with something sadder and less explicable: talking on cell phones made him tense because—he thought—it conjures up a frustrating and illusory sense of nearness; information is accelerated but nothing is communicated, at least not in the strict sense of the word. No matter how much you want it to, an empty, disembodied voice does not represent an act of communion. He felt that their calls were like some exam that he had to pass, or simply survive.
    Sometimes they talked for a specific reason—to agree on a cover story, to avoid some careless slip—but most of the time they called each other just to call. It was a ritual, an act of acquired, gratuitous risk, something that had begun one day and quickly acquired a life of its own: at one time it would simply have felt right now and then to call, but now it was a ritual, something they’d come to expect. Sometimes it was a good call, sometimes not, but it formed a strand in a vast web of expectations and anxieties to which they were now well accustomed. Perhaps those ten minutes plundered from the wasteland of the day helped them—like going to church—to show each other that they weren’t gringos, not yet, not