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I’d been. Sometimes I smelled of liquor and cigarettes; other times of sex. On the bed lingered the scent of strangers. I found piles of unopened bills on the table by the door and food spoiling in the refrigerator. My clothes were scattered on the floor and the bed was a jumble of sheets and pillows. Beyond myself with fear at what I’d done in my amnesia, I called my former lover, the Cuban teacher with the blind son, who gave me the name of a psychiatrist and hung up.
    The suggestion that I needed a psychiatrist struck me as absurd. It was God who needed one, not I. God, the miserly master with the wide buttocks and the huge testicles, sat on his sofa and fanned himself as the world burned. All this time I’d expected him to come down in his mercy machine and make my life tolerable. Life is neither tolerable nor intolerable. It just is; otherwise, I wouldn’t have come to be in that room at that time in this city. I opened the blinds and let the morning light flood in. I surveyed my apartment and thought of fleeing as I’d fled other disasters, but I didn’t. I showered and put on the last clean dress I owned. Then I cleaned as I’d never cleaned before, even when I was with Vicente and it was my happiness to do so. That simple act did more to bring me back to my senses than all the roaming I’d done and all the lovers I’d had over the years.
    All the money I had was in my purse, enough for breakfast and a newspaper. As I ate, I leafed through the classified ads and found my current job, which I’ve had for fifteen years arranging tours for people who like to visit the world I left behind. They find it quaint, restored to a postcard version of what it once was. They don’t know about the ruins on which that world is built. They don’t know about the hunger or the splinters of souls that litter the ground on which they walk, or about the walking dead, like me, for whom Cubop City is a last resort. We are born again here. We take our first steps. We learn the new language, the rhythms of the days and nights, the hymns of false virtue that keep us in our place, moving nowhere but deeper into ourselves, where a minotaur waits.

A WHITE BIRD
CROSSING THE SKY
    A ngel didn’t die. Eventually a Good Samaritan passed by, saw his bloody shirt, his bloody belly, his body splayed on the sidewalk against the newspaper box, and called the police. The pedestrian crouched over him, his hand resting softly on Angel’s shoulder until the officers came. Angel didn’t learn the name of the man who saved his life. Now that Angel is healthy, the pedestrian comes to him in dreams; he is sometimes long and lanky, sometimes short and round, holding a cell phone to his ear. Behind him a crowd is pointing and gesticulating in Angel’s direction. The crowd has no faces, only hands and fingers. They don’t bother lowering their voices, and they all speak together, making it impossible for him to make out individual words or the sense of what they’re saying. Rutabaga, watermelon. Even if he could, it wouldn’t much matter. Soon the emergency medical technicians gather around him to work on his wound and the crowd disperses into the night.
    At this point the dream takes one of three routes: the route of the desert, the route of water, or the route of dissipation. The first is self-evident. He is in the Atacama, the Sahara, the Mojave. The heat sears his skin and his thirst makes his tongue swell with pustules. Off in the distance there are blue mountains he never reaches no matter how much he walks. Shadows don’t exist there, not even his own, and when he turns to look back from where he’s come, he realizes he hasn’t moved an inch since yesterday. He tells himself that he must complain to the proper authorities, but they will not pay attention to him, limited as they are by the rules of their office. Forms in triplicate. Sleepy clerks. Appeals to the assistant