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metal stairs made tinny noises beneath my feet. I could feel the heat rising from the asphalt as I walked to the terminal.
    I stepped into the shade of the terminal, my head up, my smile in place. I waited for my suitcase to roll by on the belt, letting the crowd surge around me. I tried to catch familiar words in the babble of Spanish, but had no success. I grabbed my suitcase when it rolled past and stepped outside the terminal.
    "Taxi?" asked an old man standing beside a dirty dark blue Chevrolet. I nodded and told him in my best high school Spanish that I wanted to go to the ruins, but he refused to understand. "Sí," he said. "To Mérida." He wore a straw hat pushed back on his head, and when he smiled he showed broken teeth stained with nicotine. "Downtown," he said.
    "No," I said. "To Dzibilchaltún." I stumbled over the name and the cabby frowned.
    The young man from the plane appeared beside me and put a hand very lightly on my shoulder. "You want to go to Dzibilchaltún?" he asked, then spoke to the cabby in rapid Spanish. The two of them argued for a moment, then the man from the plane said to me, "He'll take you there for seven hundred pesos. OK?
    And if you are in town, you must promise to look me up. My name is Marcos Ortega. You can usually find me in Parque Hidalgo. Look for a hammock vendor named Emilio. He's my friend. He'll know if I'm around." His hand was still on my shoulder. "Promise?"
    I nodded and gave him a smile that was almost real. As I drove off in the cab, I looked back to see him standing at the curb, staring after me with a curious expression.
    The streets of the city of Mérida are narrow and winding, little better than alleys. The houses and shops crowd tightly together, forming an unbroken wall of peeling facades painted in colors that might have been brilliant once: turquoise, orange, yellow, red. The sun fades the paints to muted shades, gentle pastels.

    I saw the city in glimpses from the backseat of the cab: a row of shopfronts, each painted a different shade of blue, all peeling. A dim interior seen through an open doorway and a hammock swaying within. A group of men lounging on a street corner, smoking. A small park with a statue in the center. A fat woman leading a small boy down the narrow sidewalk. A row of stone buildings with carved stone facades bordering on the edge of a park. Trees crowned with red-orange blossoms. My cab narrowly missed a motorbike carrying a man, a woman, a baby, and a little girl, then swerved around a buggy drawn by a weary-looking horse. Finally, we headed out of town along a wider road.
    The highway ran straight through a landscape of yellowing trees and scrub, broken now and then by a cluster of small huts. We passed a crew of men who were repairing the road; the cabby tooted his horn and passed them without slowing.
    I thought about telling the driver that I had changed my mind: he should turn around and go back to Mérida. But I could not explain that in Spanish and he was already turning off the highway onto a side road.
    My hands were in fists and I forced them to relax. I tried to take deep breaths, tried to calm down.
    I had screwed up royally this time, and I knew it. I was arriving with no warning in a place where I was not wanted. I had been stupid to think that I could do this. I felt sick.
    On one side of the road, spiky plants grew in unbroken rows. On the other side, the trees and scrub towered over the cab. The cabby did not slow for potholes; the cab jolted and bumped over rocks and raised a cloud of dust. We passed a cluster of battered stucco houses. The driver slowed to let chickens scatter before us, then drove through an archway and down a dirt road to a cluster of palm-thatched huts that looked even more dilapidated than the stucco houses.
    The dust settled slowly. The place seemed deserted. Washing—three T-shirts and a pair of jeans—hung on a line by one hut. The tarp that shaded a group of folding tables flapped lazily in a