Homecoming

What’s past is just that, thought Max. He was lying in a truck filled with cows, moving down the road beside the coast, contemplating the sky. What air! he thought. The smell of cow and of beach; this whipping and mixing around him, beach air – thick, mild, medicinal, odorous, always sweeter at the night.

Three hours before, he was sitting at a fish stand watching a small child play, as if it were his duty to watch quietly. He had the sense that he might go all week without speaking a word to anyone, and, what is more, that words could only confuse the purity of watching.

This was wrong, Max decided as he lay there on the netting affixed to the sides of the truck, above the cows. Beaches were not meant to be enjoyed alone; Max missed his companion already. Revile the past, and in that way, you worship it too. Sweet, encompassing memories, they leave an acid aftertaste.

Bands of dark chemical pinks and greens lined the upper sky. From where he was lying, the mountains of white sand and the stars were like spiritual bodies. Max shut his eyes, thinking about his trip and what to say about stars.

Chivay

He began to dream at once. The room was suffused with the golden light of a single electric bulb; through the windows truck headlamps occasionally shone. In this room, the candles looked like thin and anxious blinks, against the cement. Max was squinting to read the pages of his book, Herzog, while Conor danced with nobody in the far corner, occasionally grasping for the hands of a girl, who sat beneath rows of candy and bags of chewing cocoa. Truck drivers came to buy, and the girl shut the radio off. These were the saddest moments.

Later that night they managed to hitch a ride to Chivay, on a vegetable truck, pushing, pushing in the dark.

- - -

October 20, 2007. The conversation is light because there is nothing much to say. In fact, it’s all been said before, and in my mind I have this overwhelming feeling I have heard it all before. There is light and the colors of twilight shift on the planes outside. I see a fat bird sitting on the wing of the plane. Why? I wonder. He’s not crying out, not even looking at anything in particular. The bird just sits on the wing, doing nothing, expecting maybe, but not knowing anything – anything except that he’s not supposed to be there. I feel just like that bird. I am very far from home.

- - -

He stepped into the plane and walked down the aisle to his seat. He noted the faces. He assumed that he would never see faces like that again (which of course was wrong). He felt dizzy, and he dozed even as the plane had not taken off. Those hours on the plane were spent dreaming; the dreams were whirling, sweet, skittish; they smelled of dust and of brine and he heard the sound of taxis and saw mountains. He was tired, dead tired, and he suspected during the occasional moment of consciousness, that there was a certain nobility to this fatigue, and a sadness too, as if while he dreamed he were watching the very passage of time.

What of these dreams that he had on the plane to Newark Airport? You can understand what a boy like this randomly constructs with his sleeper's mind. At first everything became very, very large. And then everything became very small. Then things slowed down, real slow, and then they sped up fast, fast, like a cinematic effect. Then they became quiet, and then very loud.

Then Max woke and realized he was home.

Watching Iron Man in Bogota

He wasn't doing it right, this traveling. Too much aloneness; too much solitude. Despite his theories, whatever they were -- "that the better journey must be taken inward, to the self"; that "there is no endless solitude"; that it was "a culture of life and a culture of life cannot be enjoyed alone." He couldn't keep them straight. He made it all up anyways.

Aloneness becomes loneliness. It is that simple.

Max walked through the town with his bag on his shoulders. The sun was hot in the sky and mud was drying on his face. Max glanced at his fingers which were brown with mud. He look at the light which was glinting off the hard dust in the street.

Max had paid a boy on a motorbike to drive him through the valley. They had rode together over green fields that extended far, with god-like intensity. Then the motorbike slipped and they fell in a pool of mud and they laughed. Mud was on everything. The mud dried as they rode and then cracked on their skin so that it itched and they needed to stop to wash their hands in the stream beside the road.

"Anything extra?" the boy asked. "It was a real hard trip," he said. He did not look at Max's face as he spoke.

"How much will the Laundromat cost?" Max said, smiling.

Little bugs were hopping on the table as he sat. He leaned on the plastic. He looked at the town. It was a small town; a woman sat on her stoop in a rocking chair; the colonial houses stood in rows. The colors! he said out loud. Yes, it was always the colors that we wished he could keep. Max could only smile, though no body could see it. They would care, he knew. He knew they would care that he was smiling.

How would he change any of this? Well that at least he did not know.

Most of his days began with him lying awake in a hotel room. It was always dimly lit, real cheap. It was the worst place he knew: a hotel at midday. The walls glow blandly gray; people moving on the street. Then he would leave the room. The first light of the day is one of his greatest pleasures.

Really, Max thought to himself, sitting at the plastic table, looking at the town: things will work out. He hoped they would and he knew that they must. For if the world was not sorted for him ahead of time, the deck stacked in such a way that he might win, while barely trying, he felt that he could not do it for himself.

Thing will work out. He had great faith that they would. In fact he considered this a part of his personal faith in the power of an Almighty God. Yes, it was still vaguely considered, but he felt it deeply. Max believed that the universe was so delicately and precisely constituted that he needed only to throw himself within it for an experience to materialize. Things will work out. This was his Belief -- he believed that if he left his house, life would fall on him like raindrops. And he must only bring the buckets.

Max sat back in his chair. He was smiling dumbly at the town, sipping his grape soda. The question, of course, is that if the rain stops falling, where do you find the water? He hadn't figured that part out yet.

Would he need to? Alone, bored and lonely and covered in mud, Max felt that he was a creature of great luck. I walk through a forest and I stumble over something. When I look down, I find that it is exactly what I needed.

Yes, a creature of great luck, he said to himself. As if I made a deal with Fate to give me exactly what I need, and spare me the worst.

- -

A plump, dark-skinned girl sprawled herself on Max's mattress. She was smoking a joint. Her legs were spread out from her jean skirt, the dark skin of her legs shining with the lightbulb in the corner, like the wet scales of a fish. A topless boy sat in the frame of the door. He was saying, "New Yawk. New Yaawk." He looked at Max. "Tha Big App-lee. New Yaaawk, The Big App-lee."

"The Big Apple," Max corrected. "The Big Apple"

It was four a.m.. Outside the room, big men were yelling in a Caribbean slang. It was dark and the halls smelled like marijuana. Through the plywood walls of the room, Max could hear the Beatles. "Love, love me do," they sang. "You know I love you. You know I ll be true."

"Want some?" the plump girl asked, leaning her head on Max's leg. Max looked at her. He looked at the boy in the door frame. The boy's eyes were fierce, but his face looked sweet. On the door above him, tiny cockroaches climbed through the busted holes.

The Beatles sang: "So please, please, please...love me doooo"

"No, thanks." said Max. He looked back at his book in his lap, From Dawn to Decadence. He flipped through the pages, trying to focus his eyes. Somewhere, he knew, beyond this hall, beyond the beach, over the Atlantic, the sun was rising in the sky.

- -

Sometimes he found the differences charming. They were, he fancied, a part of his personal escape from the wholly parochial. Today was not one of those days. He looked at the street, hot with sweat, hot with stink. He spooned the soup broth. I never want to live like this, he said to himself.

- -

A thin lady wailing on the side of a main street.

The question of why some have more and why some have so very little is important.

But must the existence of such a question (of such a woman), prevent my enjoyment of a simple walk, on this busy street?

That was what he wrote in his journal. It was getting dark. The street was narrow and yellow; boys and girls were climbing the cobble stones; two were kissing in the shadows. Pastry shops lighted each corner. Beside them, policemen stood with machine-guns, chatting with the girls.

What was worse were the streets without the guns.

Men walk with black jackets and they pick through the trash. They look at me as I pass. I think they look like wolves. "Give me money. Any money," a man says and he touches me on the shoulder. I say nothing. I shake my head "no" and I walk. There is no light on the street. It is all blackness except for the occasional red of the florescent lights of a closed-down shop, small as a particle of dust, glowing red like a fat drop congealed in the distant upper sky. "You and me," the man says. His hair is long and his face is sooty. His eyes are wild. "In all of us there is only one spirit." "Yes," I say. I walk quickly. Streets like these are an image of Judgment Day. The weak face the strong and God says, "Well, boy, what have you done?"

What was worse were the streets without the guns. Beneath an order of guns is that more odious one: the order of human survival.

- -

Unless you are old or already in love, nights like these are spent feverishly. From the beginning they are unsettled, breathless, like running in a machine designed for the manufacture of illusions, like a whirling top. Nights like these are spent moving from place to place wondering whether around the very next corner is the Answer, the permanent fix to your endless hunger.

They were the same in Bogota as they were in Lewisboro, which is evidence that human anxiety is universal. For Max, who had no guts and anyways liked sleep too much, such nights still held their mysterious charm.

"How old are you?"

"Fifty-nine," said Max, making the numbers with his hands.

"No. Really, how old are you?"

"Age is illusion," he whispered in her ear.

"Is that so?

"Yes, illusion. And you? How old are you?"

"Thirty one."

"Thirty one? Really? Thirty-one? Don't worry, that is illusory."

She put his hand on her waist, and they both moved together. She was teaching him Salsa.

"Slowly, slowly," she said. Max smiled big and she smiled too. Wilfred, Max's friend, was dancing with a heavy woman in the back. His head rested on her shoulder; her eyes were closed. A man was kissing a girl in the corner, behind them and the girl was touching the back of his head. The whole room was moving. It was all real slow.

"Slowly," she whispered in Max's ear. She laughed and Max laughed too.

"White skin," he said, like a revelation. "Pizza, war -- that's all I've got. American."

"Now hold my hand," she said, taking his fingers, touching his ring. Max spun her. The lights hung from the wooden rafters on the ceiling, glowing soupy and big.

Max never caught her name. It was something long, and Latin-sounding. Wilfred and the heavy woman and Max and she sat down. They don't have girls like that back home, Max thought to himself. Nope, not in America. They all drank shots.

"In my opinion," Max said promptly, pointing at a man across the room. "In my opinion, that man, not really. Not really so impressive."

"Oh?" she smiled. "Is that your opinion?"

"Sure, sure," Max continued, not looking at anything now. "Sure he's more handsome that I am, and he can speak fluent Spanish, and he can dance better, but..."

He trailed off, unable to finish the comparison. In fact, it wasn't there for him to find. To put the question another way: what does it mean that he, this boy who hoped for pandemonium, with all these notions, far from innocent, is sitting here tonight? Perhaps (as he would later argue) he had been searching eight months for the answer. His mind now was eggy, reeling: all lightness.

The whole thing, he thought, was teetering on an invisible line drawn somewhere in the space between the musty shine of the wooden rafters and the infinite softness of this sly girl's breasts (and all the girls he's ever thought about) and to Max's own beating heart, thumping gaily to the rhythm that was filling this room. It was fast now, lots of trumpet. Perhaps everything rested on that line.

There's no time, Max thought, grinning, triumphant.

"Professor!" he shouted. The music in the room was loud. "Come heerree!"

"You." she said. "You come here."

She was moving her hips. Max got up slowly. It was dark and hot and it was hard not to realize at that moment, as he walked slovenly to the floor, that they were different -- she a Colombian woman and Max a Jewish boy from New York. There was no charm that he could summon, Max knew, to fill in that gap. That gap will persist; presumably it must.

They danced all night, whispering and smiling. Max, beside these beautiful women, looked as if he were only joking. In a lot of ways he was.

- -

Somewhere, he mused, drifting on the tops of the Andean mountains, is my style -- that slippery bitch. Is it buried in the snow? Maybe it's beneath a stone?

Max looked at the window, as the bus moved from the terminal. If only for the blows that I'm going to take, he smiled. I need a style, if only to survive. He looked back at his journal and then up at the mountains. I hope it's there, there for me to find.

Well, in any case, he thought, my stuff is getting better. That's all I want: to unite my thoughts with the realities of the world with the words I can write down in my journal. That is what he aimed for. He wished to express himself fully, and then die.

Crossing Borders

A girl stood beside the glass doors of a supermarket called La Vivanda. She held a cellphone to her ear, she seemed angry and moved her hands a lot, she seemed like she wanted the other person on the line to see what she was seeing, pointing down the street at the green park with the art exhibit which was hosted by theMiraflores municipality. The sun was high. When she moved her arms, the silver mesh on her belt glittered, like snowflakes.

"Rich bitches" thought Max, entering the market. You can do better than that, Max. You know her only too well. Educated, but too stupid for it. Fatuous. He walked through the isles lined with expensive food that he had never seen in Peru. He looked at the girl through the glass door, talking on her cellphone like that, moving her arms, the sun spotting the silver on her waist. He wasn't sure what to make of a girl like that, here in Peru. He knew her only too well. He wondered why he felt this way. She wasn't so bad. Was it that he didn't like girls like that, or that they generally did not like him? He contemplated this point, sifting through cheeses. A man across the counter looked weary. After all, he was of her class, he knew: these girls and him -- man, they were just the same.

Spoiled bitches? Yes, he thought, spoiled bitches. Things need proper names.

At the checkout counter the woman in front of Max placed on the conveyor belt a jar of olives and a couple of peppered sausages and a loaf of French bread. She was a quiet-looking girl, and you knew that she didn't belong here. She checked the list as the food rolled by. One imagines this kind of woman setting tables and taking out the garbage from a big manner home somewhere. Maybe she sends money to her mother. Five hundred years of blood and fire held in those brown hands.

The woman paid for the groceries and walked out of the store. The girl was still beside the door, apparently waiting. She did not speak anymore. As the maid passed, she did not even look.

"Spoiled rich bitches" thought Max, putting his brie on the conveyor.

- - -

The rain stopped as Max turned from the main road towards the beach. The sun was setting over the Pacific Ocean and the fishing boats were returning to the shore. The wind was blowing while the shadows darkened on the sand. Beaches are perfect in the dusk, after rain. Better than in the sun. Yes, much better.

Max bought a beer and sat on the beach, against a stone wall which bordered a raised platform with benches made of cement and cement tables painted in bright colors. Sand blew against the wall and stuck to the wet bottom of the beer bottle. Beaches are perfect in the dusk.

Above, on the stone wall, sat a man. He knew he was there, when Max sat, though he couldn't see his face. When he heard him shift, Max knew that he was going to say something.

"Where do you come from young friend?" said the man.

"The United States. New York." said Max. "And you, sir?"

"I am from here, Mancora"

"What do you think (how is it)?"

"Oh, Mancora is very beautiful" said the man. "Are you traveling alone?"

"Yes. Alone"

"How long are you staying here?"

"I lived in Huancayo for five months. Working with artisans. I am going to stay in Mancora for two more days."

"Oh Huancayo. The south."

"I am going to Colombia next."

"Oh Colombia is very beautiful" said the man. Max looked up at him. He was big and his face was sweaty, though the night was cool.

"You know (about) Colombia?"

"I lived in Cartajena. Beautiful, like Mancora."

Max poured his glass full of beer and handed it to the man. He didn't say anything when he did this.

"Where are you staying (in a hotel)?"

"La posada."

"Over there" the man said, pointing.

"Yes"

"How much does it cost?"

"15 soles a night"

"Do you know Miami?" he asked.

"No. I do not know Miami."

"How much is it to stay in a hotel in the United States?"

"Forty dollars a night. I don't know. But the economy is different. You make more money, too."

"Are there jobs in the United States?"

"Yes" said Max.

He considered saying that there are poor people in the United States, too. He considered saying that life in Mancora is calm and beautiful, and that though he was young and didn't know a lot, he knew that beautiful things are worth too much to run from. But he did not say these things. He was watching the boats get larger as they returned to the coast. When he thought about all the things he wanted to say his heart tightened. These past months he had changed, he knew that. He first to ditched ideas about futility. People can change the world, he really believed that now. Then he began to talk about duty. The poor girl on the street, crying like that. I could be her, he knew. I've got to use what I have. But this wasn't enough, he began to understand, recently. He saw that he was sad, sadder than ever before. This wasn't enough, to think about helping. He had replaced one sadness, the personal sadness of futility, with another one, more universal: the sadness of the human condition. He felt things were very serious. Max knew he was hardening.

One must be very serious, he thought to himself looking at the ocean, to ride a fishing boat like that, moving goods through the dark water, all alone. One has got to be serious to steer a boat like that. The sky was pink now and the clouds were moving quickly. Max was not sure whether he wanted company or to be alone.

- - -

Funny thing happened at the Ecuadorian border. Just really funny.

Max had overstayed his three-month Visa in Peru, once again, and he noticed this two days before he was to cross into Ecuador. He wanted to travel to Colombia, because the woman are beautiful there, he was told, and it is a warm, wonderful place. They told him that. It was his second Visa which he had overstayed, which he purchased at the Bolivian border, when he traveled there with Conor. He did not want more problems. Crossing borders is almost always difficult, at least for Max. He hated borders.

He decided to altered the visa with a black pen that he had in his bag, as he sat on the bed. He did not want to pay that shitty tax and deal with all those shitty problems, he decided to himself. Gringos were tanning by the pool, and Max sat in the dark room of his dorm. He meticulously wrote a 1 before the 90 on his passport. But it didn't look right. He went over the 190 with his pen. He did this a number of times, until all the numbers looked the same. But that did not look right, not at all. He wrote "6 Meses" beneath the 190. One hundred and ninety days is, after all, about seis meses. The American passport is a fine, stately thing. But this looked all wrong. Jarring and messy and large. He couldn't think of anything else to do.

Max rode on the bus the next morning and began to worry about the preposterous mess on his passport. It was the size of a playing card. He was traveling with two other people (a boy from New Zealand and a girl from Israel). He was sure this was going to be a problem.

The border official brought the foolish American to his office. "You wrote that" he said.

"No, sir," Max said, "I paid for 190 days. Perhaps the policeman at the border lied to me. Perhaps I was tricked."

"You wrote that 190. No immigration official would write 190 like that. You can only receive 30 or 60 or 90 days"

"I paid him, sir. Perhaps he fool me. I am just a student, sir."

"This is a crime. You know that? This is a crime. You're going to stay in Peru for a while."

"Well, sir, for me, Peru is a very beautiful country."

"Ever slept in jail before?"

"No."

"You like Jail?"

"No."

"You want to be deported?"

"No."

The man left the room. He said he was checking a system. He came back and asked Max to stand up and he took out handcuffs and put them on Max's wrists. Max could hear the others walking though the station, looking for him. When he left the room, the two travelers were standing, crazy-looking. Max winked at the Israeli girl. He was led him to another room by his elbow, because his hands were cuffed in front. It was an empty room with a chair and a desk and the walls were cracked with white concrete, like walls of poor buildings at beach towns. This joker is going to bluff all night, thought Max.

They continued, Max explaining calmly that he hadn't written anything on his passport, that he was only a student, that he was helping artisans in Peru, duped at the Bolivian border, and wasn't there something he could do. Isn't there sir anything I can do? The midday sun by now was tawny and gold, through the window. He offered him the 90 soles he had in his pocket. He didn't have any more money. That was all he had. The man took the bills and consulted a few more officers that had entered the room. It was all very impressive: they were not going to let him commit a federal crime. Their sense of justice was very great.

Another hour passed and Max just sat there grinning widely. The sun was glinting off his handcuffs.

"Do you have kids, sir?" asked Max. He was boring rappidly with the spectacle. A man like this, a mountain of man, I am sure he has kids. He did not answer. "Your kids, are they studying English?" He did not answer this either. "Well, look sir, I have a present for your kids. Here's an English book. Do you want a book in English for you kids? It is by Ernest Hemingway. He is very famous. Yes, he is very good."

He put his feet around his bag, so that he might open it with his hand cuffed together as they were. He showed him the book. On its cover was a picture of a boy on a train. It was a very American book. The man looked at Max and then he looked at the book. He looked at the bills sitting on the desk and then at the passport and then at the book again. He went out of the room. He came back with the passport stamped and he removed Max's handcuffs.

Neither of them said anything else. Max left the room, and walked quickly to the door. He did not want to look back to see, but he imagined the officer was smiling. It was a good time they had. And now the policeman had an English book.

Outside the two travelers were sitting in the street waiting. The girl was drawing pictures with her finger in the dust. On the bus Max watched the Peruvian streets recede into the distance. There are always problems crossing borders, he said quietly to himself. He look out the window, the dusty town of one country being replaced by the dusty town of another. It looked the same. He wondered whether any of it would be different after all. At least for me, he thought, there are always problems crossing borders.

He watched through the window for a long time, as he did not have his book to read anymore. He thought that Hemingway would not have liked it any other way.

- - -

Holding the map, she showed me where she lived. Max was lying on her hotel bed, looking at the map, trying to imagine a country. What are these mountains? And this city, what does it sound like? She was an artist, she had told him. She lived in Medellin and was 29 years old and her camera was in the corner on the green desk. He was thinking all sorts of things. They were saying almost everything. They talked about New York, she wanted to go to the Guggenheim, she said. And about the bible and art and vegetarianism, as she was a vegetarian, and love and about Simón Bolívar. You know, said Max, he was a brutal, brutal man. He shot all the Europeos, all of them, even the innocent. The secret, Max said, was not be a Europeo. Then you wouldn't get shot. Yes, she said nodding, the secret was not to be the one they wanted to shoot. That's still the secret, she said smiling. Claudia loved to smile, she smiled while she talked. It was all very jolly, lying on the bed that night.

Eventually they just looked at each other. She asked him what he was thinking. He said he was thinking about flowers and clouds and then he leaned in towards her lips. She turned her head. She looked at the wall for a moment. Max tried again, leaning against her body. He tried again to kiss her lips, and then she turned once more, this time, moving close to his ear. She was all seriousness now. She said, too loudly for a whisper: Not all Colombian girls are what you think.

He smiled and kissed her on the cheek and got up from the bed. It was late. Yes, he said, and not all American boys are what you think.

At the door he turned and she was smiling, leaning on her arms on that hotel bed, her black hair falling on her shoulders, blacker than the night through the window. Tomorrow we hike the volcano, Max said. Yes, tomorrow we hike the volcano, she agreed. She thought about blowing him a kiss, but Max wouldn't have seen it. He was already out the door. He was happy. Tomorrow they were going to climb the volcano. He loved Colombia already.

Watching Ayacucho

I feel I should preface this short story by saying that the more I travel, the more I am skeptical of its charms - its voyeurism. I tried to write about that tendency of the traveler to watch rather than to feel. People tell me these are the most fulfilling experiences in life. In many ways, I think they are the most empty.

What is this feeling? He shuddered. A mix, a mix of grief and joy and loneliness – and the realization that he could do anything he wanted.

Max walked down a small street in Ayacucho, watching the yellow in the streetlamps shine against the sky. It had rained during the night and the day; and though the sky was clear now, thin drops of water still fell from the gutters of the buildings above; the cobblestone, smooth and wet, reflected the yellow beams of the streetlamps, in a glowing yellow.

His scarf was wrapped around his neck, French-style and in his hand he held a book by Jack Kerouac. As if, thought Max, I have pretensions to be free and without fear. Though he knew at times that he did.

Yes, yes, he thought, who am I kidding? I am free. He smiled. I, a poor man's Kerouac. Nobody knows me here and nobody knows where I am. Free to glow on the margins and make love to that nothingness and do nothing. I can do everything. Freedom as weakness. Freedom as invisibility. Free because I am small. That's Kerouac's freedom. Max saw himself beneath the yellow streetlights. He felt vicious and even trembled. How simple it is to be a mouse.

The Plaza de Armas was filled with people. A crowd of fifty-thousand or more, Max guessed, circling the street. He had come to Ayacucho to see the final days of Holy Week. Ayacucho was famous for Holy Week. Tonight was Good Friday and late tomorrow night was Easter Mass. It wasn't as a pilgrimage or anything, that Max came. He traveled simply because he could, and because he wanted to. Sometimes things where he lived were sad; the girls felt trapped and alone and the whole hotel that they lived in was like net for hatching butterflies, and then lettering them go. Max could leave too, and he had. That was part of his feeling. He hoped that by leaving, just leaving he would find something real and big. For that is what his heart persistently sought.

In the Plaza, people moved about. Max, having nothing to do, sat on a bench. He listened to the clacking of shoes. He watched couples dance in the street. A drunk man danced alone, looking sad. A little girl jumped in a shallow puddle. Above these things – the hundreds of families and vendors and murals that lined the ground – sitting at the center of the square was a large bronze horseman statute. Max admired its noctilucent beauty. Beneath it a tiny old woman sat selling candy applies. She was murmuring something soft. Surely, thought Max, Christ would bless that woman and those apples. He had no doubt about that.

Continue here.

Obama's Dilemma

It should not be surprising that we are seeing aggression from the Hillary campaign. Now, her winning by reasonable democratic measures is besides the point: she cannot overcome a lead in pledged delegates or a lead in states won or by popular votes. Instead, she has two options: drop out and rally behind Obama; or stay in the race and hope that she can deligitimize him to the point that he is so unfit, weak and damaged, that superdelegates vote in her favor because she is simply the last person standing.

This is a remarkable and insidious hope. She is banking her success against her own party; it is the hope that Barack will lose to McCain in the general election. This explains Clinton's ad campaigns, her remarks about whether Obama is a Muslim (he's not, “as far as I know”), and – most incredibly – her repeated suggestions that McCain is a more worthy commander-in-chief than Obama.

Will she be successful? Probably not. However, the negative attacks reveal an interesting point: that Obama, the idea of Obama, is uniquely vulnerable to this type of aggression, not because he is weak or inexperience, but, importantly, because aggression is diametrically at odds with the narrative structure on which has has based his entire campaign. That is to say, he is muzzled by his own conceptions of a new politics.

We all know this conception. This election – so his narrative goes, one that I have been known to prop up – is not about two people or two plans but about two divergent sets of values. It is choice about the aesthetics of political power: the new versus the old, the united versus the divided, and finally, the beautiful and eloquent versus the tough. Obama based his campaign on this idea, that people were hungry for a different type of politics, and with great success.

The question is, however, Can a person who has decided to play by different rules, win the game? Does agreeing to abide by a future, more perfect politics, pose limitation on one's success within the confounds of old politics, where we currently reside, where people make accusations and throw mud.

What makes Clinton's attacks important is not just that they hit Obama on a tactical level (that is the theory of negative-sum campaigning, that everyone gets hurt, but the attacker falls less than the attack). What is important is that the negativityhits Obama on a structural level. Clinton's story becomes "Hillary the fighter" and Obama's, inverted, becomes "weakness." His new politics, one is meant to see, is not equipped for the world of old politics, he is too weak to survive, effete and thin.

This contrast will be difficult to escape, because it is built within the narrative of his campaign. If he fights like Clinton, he undercuts his message of transcendence; if he doesn't fight, then he is weak, and one wonders, can any presidential candidate survive perceived as weak? At best, his assertiveness is defensive, and at worst, it is whole-sale hypocrisy.

The point may be this: if Obama or anyone wishes to change things, he's first got to get into power. For even very good people must first succeed within the limitations of very bad systems.

This is Machiavelli's paradox. Good, he said, must necessarily be founded on the evil – who, after all, would Lincoln be without slavery or Churchill without Hitler. What Machiavelli gave us was the Prince, who knew that if he wanted utopia, he had fight for it within a reality-based world. The future, in other words, can be only be achieved from within the constraints of the present; and perhaps so too must Obama's new politics be achieved with the tactics of old politics, with strong people, armed prophets, a willingness to first get your hands dirty first, before anything can be clean.

Natural Dyes

Just a preview.

Their own version of existence under the crushing weight of mass.

I have been working on this essay, for a while. It´s about the novel Herzog, by Saul Bellow.

Many have been lifted from the idiocy of village life, that is true; and we thank our forces of accumulation. But many, like this Herzog, are lost. Suffocated. Frightened and confused. Even Newsweek tells us that there is too many, too much and nothing new can come about. How might I keep up the burden of self-hood despite the excess of everything. Who I am among this mass? Where does a feeble voices fit, among this group, these thinkers, possessors of every wisdom, alive and dead, among this great authority, indiscriminate, teeming, swollen, vast. I am completely lost.

Click on, to read more.

Barack Obama and the Importance of Change

A year after his high moment in 2004, Karl Rove, “Boy Genius,” fell into utter disgrace. His privatization scheme fell flat; the Iraq war proved to be unwinnable; Hurricane Katrina; Harriet Miers; and Bush´s poll numbers dropped lower than any president in history.

It turned out, Rove was appallingly inept at turning his visions into reality. And this illustrates a simple piece of political wisdom: getting into office and governing once you're there, are two different skills indeed. Dividing the country proved effective campaign strategy, but terrible governance principle. Karl Rove´s fall reminds us that a great politician is not always – and not often – a great leader.

- -

Hillary Clinton, by all consensus, is a great politician. She and her husband control the machinery of the Democratic party, and insiders from the outset believed her nomination to be inevitable. If the measure of a president were, as Clinton wishes us to believe, a matter of experience as a politician, then she deserves to win. And Barack Obama, by that standard, could have waited to run for presidency.

However, the case for Obama rests on the assumption that he could not wait to run. That his skills are not as a politician but as a leader and that this specific moment in American history, when the world and our role within it is shifting – “the urgency of now” as he likes to say – uniquely calls for a world leader, rather than world politician.

- -

For fifty years, the politics of the Baby Boom generation has defined our political discourse. From the creation of a capitalist, democratic world-order after World War II, to the advances of Civil liberties and the triumph of West in the Cold War, the post-WWII generation´s particular brand of optimism – that the evil can be and must be combated – has wielded force with great success...... continue reading here

The Elusive Search for Papá Noel

Merry Christmas, Happy New Years and stop necessarily fooling. This set of sketches is very long, but that doesn´t mean it´s very good.

· · · · ·

It was a Wednesday more difficult than most. Rain was falling, and drops dripped from the sides of the concrete walls onto everything, onto Max too, as he walked down the sidewalk towards the doors of the restaurant. It was a difficult, sad Wednesday. It is true that there was sickness (Max had been throwing up for days) and then there was the letter. Yet, he felt that tonight there was something more – more subtle, more deep; that tonight his melancholy was not general, but precise – truth, like.

But Max knew enough about life to distrust these feelings. Big emotions in the young come without reason and recede as quickly, like erections at random.

Max had an occasional, cranky intensity and he wore this tonight. And when a boy walks like this, as if he is caught by some imperial weariness, he has an advantage: no one suspects much, especially that he might be alone. He of course had another advantage: he was gringo, and therefore impossible to understand.

He was walking towards a pizza place. He had never been, but the the memory of what it might be mingled with the sweet nostalgia of Christmas. There were other places – better places – but Max, after all, was an American far from America: pizza is his home, and that's where you go when you are sad.

The place was small, nothing more than two tables and an oven. A man stood in the open kitchen (only ten feet from the door) peeling processed meat. A woman with tight blue jeans – the man´s wife, probably – leaned against the counter. They did not speak. They both just knew too much, and the great weight of the unspoken left only silence. Being old is no better than being young, he thought. He sat quietly, pensively at a table against the wall, conscious not to disturb anything. Everything was silence. It was one of those place that smelled like cooked food and where it´s possible to see everything. The woman leaned over and the crease of her jeans pressed against the soft skin on her belly. The man seemed to know without looking. His face was steady and his eyes were deep-set, as if they knew and knew and knew.

Max looked through the window, dreamily. The haste and heat of the city outside shouted: move! – the city lights; dirty roads; hurried people slipped past slow-walkers down the sidewalk; small motorcycles pushed the street; young girls leaned beneath thresholds dripping rain. Move! But here he sat in silence, watching like a clinician or a voyeur. An old woman kneeled on a dry stoop roasting meat and shewing alley dogs. The dogs would shiver tonight in the rain, no doubt. But she did not seem to care. Max knew that it was wrong to withdraw from the pulse life – he knew it was wrong just to watch, if only because it was too easy. Lucho said that you shouldn´t use bridges; you´ve got to jump into the river. Max smiled at this. Leave those judgments for easier days, he thought. The heart is ruthless in its manufacture of illusion, and so it must be, sometimes.

I was my idea – to start the co-op. Lucho was Max's business partner -- but the word partner was wrong. Lucho is a big man; his face is angled, as if instead of bones in his face he had twisted rocks that pushed beneath his skin. Lucho´s eyes are puffy. Every moment it looks as if he is at the point just before tears (rage or glee, Max could never tell). He didn't belong to the city: he was an animal. But he lived in the city, alone, like a wolf, howling at the moon. We are all howling at the moon.

One of Lucho's workers had stolen Max´s email password and sent him some of Max's mail. Lucho yelled, “I do not need an educated American to tell me what to do.”

He continued to stare outside. Exhaust blew bits of skittering litter around the old woman's ankles. Sometimes on these street corners one can smell nothing but machinery. Thousands of people poured through the street. It was there, Max recalled, in this great crowd, possessor of every genius and every secret, that he first felt disfigured -- that everyone was moving together, like a larger body. At that moment he felt within it, the great mass of the current, the past, he was a part of the impulse everything and he could think to say within the throbing heat was, “my brothers, my brothers.”

But now in the pizza shop, he didn't much feel much like a brother to anyone. And if there were a larger body of Collective Man – well tonight, he felt all alone within it. No, if there were something larger, he felt like he was struggle against the extinction of himself, to that dear, dirty mass.

What am I doing? he thought. How can I work for a man who does not trust me. I trust him. Well, I have to trust him, because there´s money. What am I doing? The question – the question of whether you are squandering yourself – is remarkable because there is no answer, only perpetually prolonged guesses, secondguesses and guilts. Guilt! guilty about being guilty, guilty about not feeling guilty. Above all we want to confess.

The nausea returned. He put his head on the table. No one came to give him a menu; no one disturbed him. Silence and the scents of cooked food lingered like soporific lullabies. In time, he fell asleep. He dreamed. He was at a phonebooth. I am sick, yes, but I am surrounded by sadness, he said somewhere to someone. I live with a woman, he continued. She is beautiful, but she is all alone in the hotel. Shouts from around him began. It was a great mass of people, like the one he saw on the street. Tell me that I am decent for doing this – for trying to help somebody, for trying to disturb what is, he said loudly into the phone. The shouting around him was great, and he could barely hear his own voice. He said: I just need to know that I am not all alone.

He repeated, “I just need to feel like I am not all alone” a number of times, at first softly, then with greater force. “All I need is to know that I am not alone” he said, almost shouting. He felt in this dream that it was quite true.

His shoulder was pushed, pushed, a dream, he was awake, it was the woman. He looked up and she did not even smile and no one seemed to care that he was mumbling as he slept.

When the pizza arrived he was happy, because it was better than he had remembered.

· · · · ·

Max is now awake, vividly, fumbling with his shoes, his flashlight, the steps; every step is one more closer to the hole – his stomach, a cannonball, spiteful. Everything is lucid, the night – perfect photographs. He sees a bird on a branch. It looks like it is floating with the clouds in the sky. Fuck that bird.

He is there – the hole – release: for twenty minutes his colon purges into the ground. Then he tips over and throws up. It is treacherous.

Silence. At this hour, between the final rustle of men and the first call of the rooster, all is silent, except for the occasional movement of dogs and birds. Max is spread Christ-like, half-naked from the bottom down, on the shitting hole, in this personal mix of disgust, vomit and chemicals. The wounds from earlier in the day (he had slipped down the hill and to stop himself grabbed onto a thick, thorn-covered bamboo); these wounds are his stigmata. But for what sin? He could only think the words "No me importa ser una piedra mas." The silence, as he lay awake in the dark, unable to move, was only broken by the ticking of Max´s wristwatch; frantically ticking, harder, harder; and all the while, this young boy wondering why he is here, why it hurts so much, why consciousness, which was spinning like a top, is born.

· · · · ·

Papa Noel lives in the Andes mountain Huayatapallano, Max had been told. And that was where he happened to be this Christmas, in the mountains, with a family of gourd carvers visiting their uncle, searching for Santa Claus.

- -

A beautiful girl entered the open courtyard of the house. She was wearing a colored skirt and holding a dead calf. Its face was defined, like hers, and its eyes were open, like all of theirs, but they were alive and the calf was dead. Dead as stones. She placed him down besides a tin bucket of fresh cheese. The man whose hut this is was in the yard, digging a hole and heating stones with an open fire. As he worked, gravel leapt into the air, leaped up and then landed lightly, rolling back down the mound beside the hole. I thought, Who is this girl? She picked up an axe from against the wall and raised it above her body. She swung down and cut the head from the calf. Tiny blood drops flicked into the air, onto her skirt, onto her cheek. Decapitated, only one swing, only one clean stroke. Her brother ground corn as she worked the skin with a knife. The blood specks stayed like a badge on her. And the head of the calf, lay alone, eyes open.

That first afternoon they all ate well. Together they were warm, though the thatched roof leaked water. And as they ate, Max was quite sure that killing an animal was not like killing a man.

- -

They set out early next morning to find Santa Claus. Surely he lives in the peaks. So they climbed high, where ice covers the ground and there is a lake filled with trout. The girl took long strides, and her skirt and apron brushed against the stones. “Tired?” she asked, whenever Max fell behind. "You okay?" she´d ask, and each time, he hated it more. He did not want to be a child, especially today, this important day, as he searched for Santa Claus.

He wanted to explain to her that sometimes an intensity finds him – of mind, of senses – when everything in the world becomes just one place. He wants to dig that place. He got that feeling sometimes lying with a girl or sitting outside. Small boys kicked a soccer ball through the stones; an eagle dipped into the blue. And now he had it, that feeling of great intensity, as he hiked in the cold air through these mountains. He hated the question because if he answered it – if he talked at all, then the wings are plucked from the butterfly, the moment is lost.

And, in any case, if he couldn´t focus, how could he ever find Santa Claus? (After all, what is Christmas, but an intensity of feelings?)

He reached the summit and could see the lake with the birds skipping on the water. Everyone had already arrived. He fell to the ground, breathing fast and heavy. “Tired” the girl asked, with no hesitation. She didn´t even smile. If her cheekbones weren´t so high and her face so nice, one might say that she stood like a man. She held her shoulders high and watched as her brothers shot stones at the birds. He wanted to punch her. Max got up from the ground and walked up to her. She didn´t even notice him. From behind, he touched her cheek, and then held her face firm as he bent forward and gave her big kiss on the chin. A big, facetious kiss.

She did not move or do anything at all. She stood in surrender.

“Thats a warning,” he said, smiling. “If you ask me again whether I´m tired, it will be on the lips.”

She looked at him with an open face and blinked. Never before – and not once for him again – would she look like such like a woman to Max.

- -

The next morning was the type when everything is still and you think – Yes, this is what a mountain feels like.

The air was cold and the great white clouds that would later blind the whole valley were now only whispers. Thatching from the roof drifted in the dirt of the courtyard. Max sat on the ground eating panetone and sipping a slippery drink that was white and tasted of oatmeal. He tried not to watch as the girls took off their clothes to bath in the river. Instead, he stared at the soup bowl in front of him: cold water, corn kernels and chopped bull testicle.

So this is Christmas, he thought. The mountain range was big and gentle as if it were its own reflection in a still body of water.

- -

Later, they -- all twelve -- piled into a taxi to leave these mountains. The white clouds of the evening began to float through the valleys, and at everything was thin and white and you see nothing. That was how it was as they drove through the mountains Christmas day. The sun was setting and everyone was going home.

But as happens in moments when you lose the present and have instead that heavy, fierce anticipation of what is next – their taxi lost a tire. They had no spare and the closest town was four hours away on foot and it was now dark and the the girls had nothing but skirts and mantas for the cold. They set a bonfire and the youngest girl said "I´m tired" Beside the road, together on in the middle of the Andes mountains, they came to solemn and unspoke understanding.

But this is the season of miracles. It was nine o´clock at night when the truck came. It was filled with watermellons. At least that moment, this big, dirty fruit truck suggested to Max the divinity of Jesus Christ. I don´t know much about these things, Max thought as all twelve of them were freezing together, laughing too, as they sat on the back of a truck filled with watermelons, diving them home. I don´t know much about these tings, but this must have something to do with the spirit of Chirstmas...

The truck moved forward and family said goodbye to their uncle. (I still do not know where he slept that night.) Max turned back and saw that the uncle, the man who dug the hole, now hundred of yards away, was still watching the truck roll beyond his sight. One understood solitude in that second; but he is not alone. One is never alone if one looks at these mountains. Especially, Max thought knowingly -- especially with Santa Claus roaming and receding in their peaks.

Mirrors

The following are short sketches of three images. They are from separate instances, and the narrative is weak.

· · · · · ·

The bus makes its final roll forward after seven hours ascending the Andean mountains, and as it does, a wild dog barks at the yellow beams cast by the headlights. The passengers pass single file through the bus door, and the dog continues to bark. Though no one seems to notice the dog; somehow his noises only contribute to the quiet and dusty darkness of the night. The bright nearly-full moon makes clear, even in the darkness, the impossible magnitude of the mountains – their dark shadows go on forever – and also in a way the impossible smallness of us.

Max descends from the bus and the dog´s bark is like the crack of a felled tree; everyone now notices the dog. He crouches then he jumps forward and for a moment there is a fight between Max and the dog. For a moment there is a fight, and everyone sees the beast´s wild red pupils. A man beside Max kicks the dog hard in the chest and picks up a stone from the dirt road. He holds it over his head. The dog, pushed back, hesitates.

He looks over the mountains beneath him and then back at the shadowy path towards the man with the stone. Then he puts his tail down and his legs begin to weaken.

· · · · ·

At some point between Chosica and San Pedro, Max noticed the mirror on the dashboard. It was held by the hands of a Jesus figurine and trembled over each pebble on the unpaved road. Off the surface of this small, minutely cracked mirror was another mirror, that of the driver´s face, whose Aviator glasses were shinny and curved. In this remarkable and cruel double reflection the world in front of the bus was revealed and distorted: the cacti were metallic spider webs and the yellow road was indefinite. Max discovered then (with the inevitability of discoveries made in the heat of the sun) that there is something grotesque about mirrors.

· · · · · ·

“¿Qué quieres Joven?” asked a woman, who was quite young, probably the café owner´s daughter. Rather than walk, she seemed to glide to the table. This is because the concrete in the plaza is smooth, as if it were cut from ice, and covered with dust. Max did not notice this until later, however, because he was thinking deeply. Though the night was alive and sexual, it was also dark, and in the dark alone it is easy to sit and sip coca-cola and think deeply, or to watch pretty girls walk about the plaza and think about nothing at all. Perhaps now he was doing both, as he reflected on the wrinkled woman he saw, with an indigenous colored skirt and dark braids, who sat on the corner of the street huaking nock-off deodorant to a hurried public. That is the solitude of this land, he thought, to be at once very old and very young…

“Joven, vas a pedir?” the woman asked, this time more loudly. When he looked up, she smiled a great facetious smile. Everything in her face pulled smooth but the rims of her eyes, as if they were dual keepers of some great wisdom. Her smile was so nice that he thought, if only I knew her language…

Around the plaza, faded pinks and green covered the low walls and smoky reflections drifted in the light of the lamps, like gray clouds gently dripping dust.

In fact, Max was so diligently engaged in the activity of watching the girls in the plaza and thinking grand thoughts, that he hardly noticed – as if in a daze – when a crooked man (Max would later remember seeing him picking through the dump) walked to his table, lips shining, and grabbed at Max´s Coke bottle. His hands were shaking, like the of humming vocal chords passing through his body.

“Hey, don´t, sir” Max said, but he was passive. The crooked man took the Coke bottle and held it with two hands. He went to the center of the plaza and with two hands, he drank the Coca-Cola. He placed the bottle on the ground with tenderness, and then, hurried, went towards the dump, around the corner, out of sight.

The waitress had her hands on her hips.

“Más Coca-Cola Joven?"

“Sí por favor” he said. She walked away, and as she did, Max watched her slightly revealed waist, the smooth, brown skin above her jeans, gently wrinkle and tighten with the movement of her hips.

Immediately, of the crooked, old man, he wondered: How different is this country, engaged in dizzying modernization, from a crazy man with a coke bottle, picking through the remains of others refuge?

As the woman reached for a second coke bottle, she absently shook her head and smiled, “los gringos.”

It was only later that Max wondered: How different am I?

Chupaca Livestock Market

It is still early, so the sun is hot and the road is still dusty and dry. A dog is barking from the roof of a faded, concrete house, and as the group of travelers walks to the market, the bark of the dog and the sound of the sun burning white, gringo skin is all that can be heard.

Beyond the town, the Andes Mountains are crisp and plump against the sky, as if a sleeper built them in his dreams.

They enter the livestock market, a hundred yards of tarp-covered shops and tied pigs, donkeys, sheep and cow. Max tries to commit to memory the sense of its machine-like bustle and its mixture of yellows and reds. I want to write about this, he says to himself. Nothing in the world is easier than not to write; and that is what he has done. Max has written nothing since he arrived in this dusty, yellow, sexual place. So he has to say “I will write about this,” because otherwise he won´t, too afraid that he will fail the richness of his experiences. How can I write, he reasons, about the small brown girl with dirty hands and a dirty pink shirt that holds a piglet like it is a pile of clothes, who has tears running down her cheeks? I cannot.

But I can try – I will – because whoever cares to read the stuff will be able to correct the twists and distortions in the imperfect lens, because he will know the imperfect lens grinder. He will know that the failed sketch is made by a young boy whose image of the world is formed during the terrible lucidity of insomnia or the terrible lucidity of loneliness or those moments when he is so happy that it is as if the world has stopped turning and everything is that single moment.

A pig is dragged squealing by a rope twisted on its back legs; a drum somewhere is beating. The odor of feces and fried meat mixes with the heat, the heat! which rises in waves off the yellow dirt and also the smell of humanity. Everything is dust, dry and yellow. The pig is thrown into a bag, jerking and alive, by a woman with a multi-colored skirt. She has two braids darker than the darkest black in the pupils of a bird´s eye. The drum continues to beat, a little quicker than the beating of the human heart.

A man leaning against a painted wall holds a rope tied to a lamb. Blood is caked in small spots on the top of the lamb´s head; flies dance in the flakes of dirt and blood in its fleece.

"What happened to the lamb?" Max asks to the man.

"A wolf" he says.

"Que lástima."

The man has sad, liquid-blues eyes. Deep marks are in his cheeks beneath his eyes. He holds a beautiful child in his left arm; her skin is the color of the mountains.

"How much to buy the lamb?"

"45 Soles"

"Cute and delicious, right?"

After the market, the group of travelers hikes to a top of a mountain and watches the blue and brown mountain range while sucking on orange slices.

For lunch, they eat on tables under straw huts. The sun glints off the skin of the chicken. “Tranquilo” says one of the travelers. Max hopes that one day it is he who can explain that in English no word is quite like “tranquilo” to communicate total, quiet contentness. While they eat, stray dogs circle the chairs for food and children throw rocks into baskets and laugh.

On the way back to town, Max sees the man with liquid-blue eyes. He is walking down the hill with his child and his lamb. He is moving so slowly that a butterfly flutters past him and loses itself in the sky.

Marcahuasi

For now, this very short video of my trip down from the site of Marcahausi, a stone forest high in the Andes Mountains, must do.

A Very Short Love Letter to America

This small collection of pictures spans a time period from the beginning of the summer -- to me known as the Summer of Love -- to the end of my travels in the West. Though this period is rather short, I will remember it as endlessly long. How long is the moment that a ball tossed in the air stops and sits before it travels down again? There is a moment that the ball does not move. This is the moment of transition, of reflection; the ball is at once traveling up and traveling down; this is the moment that glances at infinity, that is outside of time, has no beginning, no end and is infinitely short. Therefore the moment is forever. For me, that is the feeling of this period in my life.

This was not a specific feeling, but a general one. It gripped all those closest to me. On the hottest days of the heart, it was always three o’clock in the morning, and we are waiting awake for the first light of dawn. This was a period of restlessness.

Perhaps, one might say that America herself is caught on a brink of anticipation, running without moving towards something we do not know. America (to borrow Mailer's phrase) is pregnant and whether she gives birth to a greater republic or the worst tyranny the world has ever known only time will reveal. So let us wait, you, America, and me. We will we wait for the garden.

I am leaving for Latin America on Sunday, and once I leave, I doubt that I will ever be able to sufficiently restore these feelings of infinite anticipation. After I leave I doubt I will ever be able to wholly return, and perhaps I will not want to. Therefore, these photographs and memories are a last glance at my home. These are my images of America: if they die away, then a part of America for me dies too. But they are alive, and indeed it is tough to hate America looking at the Rocky Mountains. My country has certainly committed barbarities – yes, they are outrageous. But can America be truly obscene if she has produced for me these people and spaces?

Treehouse

The dirt is soft against the feet. That is how you know the trail, even in the dark – like tonight, with a full moon. The woods are wild: a cracked tree, long javelins protrude in the moonlight, fallen stones from the old wall, logs decaying to sawdust, wiry branches kiss your face like sad, chapped lips, spider webs wrap on your skin and taste like long hair in your mouth. About two-hundred yards into the trail, the cars and road are no longer visible. If you stare into the glow of the trees against the black sky it makes you think for a second that you’ll die in the woods, somewhere next to the stone wall, but that it wouldn’t be the worst end, to leave your bones among the leaves. After all, the black sky is august.