chapter 5
arribada
The day the refugees arrived, Burbank threw a street party. We shut down Magnolia, the way we always do for big celebrations, lining it with kiosks and food trucks from Buena Vista to North Hollywood Way, hanging banners from the light poles, every store window decorated with hand-lettered signs.
The local middle schools and elementary schools had devoted the month’s PE classes to long-distance walking and they’d arranged to meet the walkers on Glenoaks—middle schoolers picking them up from all the way in Pacoima, while the little kids walked in from the town line, past the airport. We got a steady stream of social updates from the kids all that morning, and once they turned onto North Hollywood Way a buzz spread up and down the street. A fleet of hobbyist blimps took off from the airport as they passed it, dangling long welcome banners with murals the high-school kids at Burroughs and Burbank High had painted onto massive sheets of perforated mylar that was weighted at the bottom.
When they turned onto Magnolia, the Burroughs band started playing, and fifty people opened their coolers and started handing out empanadas to the new arrivals, kids and refugees, and the misters overhead went into overdrive, bathing us in cool water. The band played “California, Here I Come” and “California Dreamin’” and the conductor timed it perfectly so that as they finished the second tune, they struck up “I Love L.A.,” in synchrony with the Burbank High band that swung around the corner from the parking lot behind Porto’s, brass bells glinting high in the air as they marched into the crowd, through it, dancing with the arrivals. It was as wonderful a celebration as you could have asked for and it got even better when some of the refus pulled out their own instruments—a couple of ukes, a no-fooling guitarrón the size of a cello, harmonicas and bongos—and started jamming.
I caught Ana Lucía’s eye. We hadn’t spoken when she got back from the Flotilla the night before, and we’d avoided each other all that day. But as she swung from one friend to the next, laughing and dancing and hugging, she and I made eye contact across the crowd and she shook her head at me, then laughed again, then beckoned me over, and before I knew it, I was in the dance too, being swung around by little kids and old ladies and teens and even some people my own age.
Once the party settled down, it spread out down Magnolia, so all the newcomers got a chance to check in with the People’s Airbnb, get a library card, sign their kids up for the schools, get in the Jobs Guarantee database, and have a chance to pose for a pic with one of Burbank’s many, many shiny red fire trucks, a remnant of the Lockheed Martin days, when the town was one giant fuel depot and it made sense to have a zillion fire stations.
Walking down the road, grinning like a fool, I got roped into doing a run as a guide, bringing kids and their parents who’d just picked up bathing suits for the short walk down California to the Verdugo Aquatic Facility, where they’d opened up the activity pool with its water slides and fountains. I led a column of five families and learned that Hector was a solar technician and that Laura was a medical administrator and that Hector Jr. really, really liked sharks, specifically lemon sharks, which turned out to be really cool.
I dropped them off at the pool entrance and collected some handshakes and admired Hector Jr.’s screen to watch a lemon shark live birth, which was, you know, wow.
When I got back up to the corner of Magnolia and California, I stopped dead. A bunch of the Maga Club guys had a table set up and were standing around, looking stiff and out of place, but as I got closer, I saw that they were handing out Burbank Chamber of Commerce paper fans and smiling at the newcomers who came up to get them. I guess they couldn’t just stay home when something like this was going on, and picketing it or burning a cross or whatever would just make them look like assholes. Instead, they could hand out fans covered in slogans written by aggrieved would-be plutes and temporarily embarrassed billionaires and seem like good guys doing good stuff. I wondered if Gramps would have joined them, and decided he’d have shown his face, then gone straight home and drunk beers and complained about the whole situation until bedtime.
I went the other way, giving them a wide berth, and someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned around and it was Ana Lucía, smiling, holding out a foil-wrapped empanada.
“It’s pumpkin,” she said. “They’re really good.”
I took it and bit in: “Oh my God, they’re really good.”
“Right?”
And just like that, all the weirdness from the day before was gone. We walked down Magnolia and turned off onto Avon and sat down on one of the benches that had been put in the curb lane, in the shade of a big, spreading camphor tree.
“So, yesterday,” I said.
“That was crazy,” she said. “I thought they were going to throw you overboard.”
“Me too!” We both laughed and I told her about the trip home, being locked in the closet and then getting a gift bag.
“Those people,” she said, and shook her head. “You should have heard that lady after you left. She was like, ‘An independent California wouldn’t be alone—it would be part of a community of sovereign nations devoted to personal liberty and personal responsibility’—and then she listed a bunch and they were all either underwater islands that only existed as flags these days, or poor-as-fuck tiny countries in Asia and Africa that they provide all the banking and governance for with their own private side-chains. It was gross.”
“Wow,” I said. “So, uh, I’m sorry but I kinda thought you were into it? Now it sounds like you’re not?”
“I’m not into those guys. Just because I want money and governance out of the hands of people who suck up to rich people, it doesn’t mean that I just want them in the hands of rich people! I want something that works for people like me, not people like them.”
I grinned. “And you think they don’t want something that works for people like you?”
She blew a raspberry. “Think it? I know it. Shit you shoulda heard that crazy white lady after you got eighty-sixed. She was like, ‘Let’s talk about the Green New Deal’ and all the old guys in there started booing, but she held her hands up and made them go silent and said, ‘No, no, no, you’ve got it wrong. Giving people a job, that’s good sense, especially if it’s work that bootstraps new ventures, clickwork and gigwork, solves all the union problems and all, just underwrite them as a labor commons for all the brilliant ideas you can come up with.’”
“Jesus! Defi for chain gangs!”
“Oh, they ate that up. And it got worse.”
“I refuse to believe it,” I said. It was nice to be on the same side as her again.
“Believe brother. ‘We love the Green New Deal,’ she said, ‘but you have to apply common sense. Like the San Joaquin Valley? Its aquifers have been pumped so dry that it’s thirty feet lower than it was a century ago! The San Joaquin Valley’s not coming back. We can use it for stuff, sure, like maybe automated manufacturing facilities of the kind you wouldn’t want within four hundred miles of a populated area. But subsidizing people to live there? Sending them water from the Colorado River? That’s just nuts. It’s like McMurdo Station without the science!’”
“McMurdo?”
“Antarctica,” she said. “I had to look it up.”
“Wow. Just … wow.”
“Yeah. That’s her vision of a utopia: people like me in indentured servitude, my home turned into a sacrifice zone that’s made permanently uninhabitable by any living thing for a thousand years. So fuck her sideways with a brick.”
“Hall-ay-loo,” I said. “You’re good people, Ana Lucía.”
She tore open a pouch of beer and passed it to me, then took it back and swigged. “You too, Brooks.” She drank and belched. “Hey, uh, look. I’m sorry I didn’t stand up for you yesterday. When they dragged you out. That was weak. I just froze up.”
“Aw, it’s okay. Freezing up is natural, something like that happens. It was not exactly business as usual.”
“No, it’s not okay. I’m supposed to be a community organizer. I’m supposed to run toward danger. The way you did, the other night. Freezing up is a luxury for civilians.”
“Don’t beat yourself up. I accept your apology, if that’s what it takes. What I did the other night, it wasn’t because I was brave, it was because I was furious, and to be honest, it was mostly on my own behalf. Those asshole pals of my grandfather’s, acting like I owe them something, like they’re the guardians of Gramps’s memory, like they’re the guardians of fucking Burbank and they have the right to decide its future. I’m done with it. So done.”
“Well, that was also a good reason to run towards the danger, Brooks. Thank you.”
“Thank you, too. It’s been good to get to know you. I’m really glad you and your friends are gonna be my neighbors.”
“Me too. You’re a great host, but I’m sure you’re gonna be glad when we split tomorrow. It’s gotta be great to be getting your house back.”
“You guys were great houseguests,” I said, but even as I said it, my brain was going yippee! at the thought of the miniature refugee camp in my backyard being dismantled. Some part of me was a selfish dick. Fine, I was Richard Palazzo’s grandson, after all. I couldn’t escape that feeling, but I didn’t have to act on it.
* * *
The Burbank Housing Expansion Project kickoff meeting was held in the big function room at the Buena Vista library. I sat through a presentation from a nice old guy from the city manager’s office, explaining that the council had green-lighted three new high-rise buildings on the Burbank Boulevard corridor, right near where the light-rail was going in, and that anyone who sold their land to the project for additional high-density housing would get preference for it, and preferential rates. The way he explained it, it was a pretty sweet deal: I could sell ’em Gramps’s house, get market rates for it, then get a cool, well-built co-op unit in a high-rise with all kinds of cool amenities supercheap. I’d be making way for three or four refugee families to live in a low-rise on my lot, I’d get a place to live, and I’d have tons of cash left over.
Oh, Burbank. Always finding a way to do well by doing good.
And then came the Q&A. After a couple of dudes asked rambling questions, a woman stood up. She was Asian, tanned, with broad, strong shoulders, wearing a sort of cut-down, semi-military jacket and wide Thai fisherman’s trousers. Her hair was glossy and anime short and prickly, sticking up and out in crazy, cute spikes.
“So, thanks for that, but I’ve only got one question. Why are we giving preference to Burbankers who own homes, when we’re trying to house refugees who don’t?”
Well, when you put it that way.
The guy from the city looked at her. Then everyone else did. I felt bad for her. She was supremely cool.
“Well, uh, we’re trying to balance out the incentives here. We need infill, and the easiest way to get it is for people to sell us their plots for redevelopment. Deals like this—”
“Deals like this just make lucky people luckier and rich people richer. You don’t need incentives. We’ve got a refugee crisis. Under federal law, you can just use eminent domain, scrape the houses to the foundation slab and get building.”
“Well, that doesn’t seem very fair—”
“No, that’s totally fair. What’s unfair is losing your whole town in the climate emergency. Being paid a fair price for your house that you only own because your great-grandfather paid a nickel for it in 1939 isn’t fair? Come on.”
“Well, that’s an interesting perspective. You should come to a council meeting and raise it. I just work for the city manager, and we do what the council tells us to do.”
That settled it. She stayed standing for just a few seconds longer than was comfortable for anyone (except, judging from her bearing, her) and then settled herself into her seat, shaking out a screen and tapping away at it. She typed fast and got an awesomely fierce look on her face while she did it—not rage-typing, but so focused. She also looked familiar, I realized, though, of course, most people in Burbank looked a little familiar. Maybe I went to school with her younger sibling or …
The meeting broke up and she gave the most desultory of applause. On the way out, I found myself next to her. She smiled at me.
Wow. That smile!
“Hi, uh.” Smooth, Brooks. Very smooth.
“Hey there.”
“So, I liked what you said in there. I mean, I hadn’t even thought about it that way, but when you said it, I was like, oh yeah, of course. I mean on the one hand, it’s nice to reward people who are being altruistic and making a sacrifice, but on the other hand, isn’t it more altruistic to do it without a reward?”
“Yup, exactly. I mean, there are so many other ways to do this: needs-based placement, lottos, whatever. We’re going to have to do something like that eventually—it’s not like this’ll be the last caravan of refus that head to Burbank. The way things are going, we could end up housing all of Santa Monica in a decade. These guys are still thinking about this as a problem to solve—not a new normal we have to adapt to.”
“Holy shit. I never thought of that. Wow.” I scraped up my courage. “I’m Brooks, by the way,” and held out my hand.
“Phuong,” she said.
Holy shit. “Petrakis?” I said.
“Uh, yeah.” She looked surprised and not entirely pleasantly so.
“You were a senior at Burroughs my freshman year. I just graduated. Holy shit, you look totally different.” She did—so much wiser and stronger, and sophisticated.
“Oh! Hey, that’s funny. I guess I sorta remember you? I’ve been in London for the past two years. Blue Helmets. Working on the Thames Estuary Barrier as part of my engineering practicum. I haven’t thought about Burroughs in so long. Is Hartounian still there?”
“Yeah! She’s still totally badass. I just ran into her at a council meeting on Jobs Guarantee allocations, when we faced down the Maga Clubs.”
“Wow. Good old Ms. H. Badass is right.”
We’d reached the corner by now. I wished desperately for the courage to ask her to dinner, but I couldn’t find it. Then she said, “Hey, have you eaten? I was gonna go to that new Ethiopian on Victory.”
“There’s an Ethiopian place on Victory?”
“Just opened.”
“I love Ethiopian food.” My heart was pounding and my mouth was watering. Then I thought about getting food all down my shirt while trying to impress this amazing, gorgeous, older woman, and then I remembered again how much I liked Ethiopian food. “Let’s find bikes!”
* * *
We got a veggie platter and a fake-meat vegan platter and an extra basket of injera. The restaurant was almost empty, which made me sad, so I set a reminder to social it later and took pictures of the food when it arrived, and then set to work demolishing the platters. As always, there was more food than I could eat, and as always, I ate it all anyway. It’s the injera, pancakes made from a grain called teff—so spongy and tangy, and the stuff that sits under the curries and absorbs all the sauce is just the best, and scooping it up with fresh injera and making an injera-stuffed injera roll is recursively delicious.
Phuong ate just as much as I did, making groaning, delicious-food noises and licking her fingers between tearing off more injera and going back in for more stew.
“I’m convinced this stuff is hydrophilic,” she said, “like you eat it and it fits in your stomach, but then it absorbs all your stomach juices and swells up to ten times its size. Every time I go for Ethiopian, I swear I’m going to stop before I get full, and then—” She licked her fingers, gestured at the empty plate.
I looked around and took in the decor. There’d been a period in junior year when I’d been going down to Little Ethiopia three or four times a month, eating my way up and down Fairfax with a group of school friends that I’d cycle there with, taking the LA River Trail along I-5.
“This place is a little different from the other Ethiopian restaurants I’ve been to, but I can’t figure out exactly what it is. It’s been bugging me since we got here.”
Phuong looked around. “You’re right. I used to go to all these Ethiopian places in Kentish Town and Camden and there’s something missing…” She stared around intently. “Now that you mention it, it’s driving me crazy. What is it?”
I grabbed my screen and started tapping through pics of the restaurants on Fairfax. What was it? Then I snapped my fingers. “The pictures! There’re no pictures of that guy, Haile Selassie.”
“That’s it!”
The server came by to take away our clean platter and we told her how much we liked the food and unwisely ordered pistachio baklava sweets and coffee that we would have to find room for.
Phuong asked, “How come there are no pictures of Haile Selassie? I think this is the first Ethiopian restaurant I’ve ever eaten in that doesn’t have them.”
The waitress—whom I thought was probably the owner, too—a woman in her forties in a bright cotton print dress and a matching headscarf, got a complicated look on her face. When she spoke, I could tell she was choosing her words carefully, and that we’d said something that she wasn’t very happy about.
“Oh, we are not Ethiopian, we’re Eritrean. Haile Selassie is not … He wasn’t kind to Eritrea.”
“Oh!” Phuong covered her mouth with her hand. “I’m so sorry, I just assumed—”
“No, no, it’s okay. Everyone makes that mistake. Ethiopia is much better known than Eritrea. They have many more people—thirty or forty times. And the food is just the same, really. But we don’t have such a good relationship with the country.”
“I’m really sorry,” Phuong said again, and the woman assured her it was fine and brought out a frankincense brazier and roasted our coffee for us at the table, then went back into the kitchen to brew it.
“I love that smell,” I said. “I mean, normally I am completely uninterested in coffee before bed, but Ethiopian coffee, fresh roasted at your table—”
“Eritrean,” she corrected me.
“Ugh,” I said. “Yeah, sorry.”
Over coffee, she told me more about her life in London, the time she helped evacuate the Houses of Parliament when the Thames burst its banks, the work on emergency cooling during the big heat wave the previous summer, the time she’d been pressed into service, carrying pensioners’ bodies out of overheated blocks of flats where the heat had peaked at 56°C.
“What’s that in stupid American?”
“Over a hundred and thirty-five,” she said.
“We get days like that most summers,” I said.
“But everyone’s got air-con here. Lots of that old housing stock, it’s just not equipped. They were relying on swamp coolers and fans.”
“Damn,” I said. “Damn.”
We found room for more baklava. The coffee was gritty and strong and so good. She asked me about what I’d done since school, and I told her, a little: Gramps, Ana Lucía, the ship. Then I had to backtrack and tell her about the roof and Mike Kennedy, and for the first time since that happened I loved having the story to tell, loved having a story where I came off as a hero.
“That is fucking crazy,” she said. “I mean, seriously. Who knew boring old Burbank had all this drama?” I must have had a weird facial expression. “Did I say something?”
“Sorry,” I said. “Look, I just really like it here. Burbank. It’s my hometown—my adopted hometown, anyway. It’s my home.”
She smiled a little, and I felt patronized. Trapped. What was I doing here with this near stranger who thought I was some kind of rube? “Sorry, dude. But you gotta admit, that’s a lot of drama!”
And then I understood and suddenly felt better, even though my heart was still thudding. “Oh, shit. No, that’s not the part I was upset about. Burbank’s got all kinds of fucked-up old white nationalists. It’s the boring part I was upset about. I love this place. I love Food Truck Fridays. Movie screenings with live orchestras at the amphitheater. Griffith Park. The horses. The Halloween stores. The vintage stores. The schools and the people. My affinity group. All those people who came out for the caravan. Shit, the studios! All those editors and carpenters and scene-painters. The crazy Christmas lawns.”
Now she was laughing, but I could tell it was laughing-with, not laughing-at. “You’re a one-man tourist brochure.” She picked up the last flake of pastry from the baklava plate and licked her finger and I had a little sexy shiver as her fingertip went in and out over her mouth. “You know, all that stuff is true, and it’s all great, but I gotta confess, the whole time I was in London, all I could think about was how I wanted to tear this place up.”
“Tear it up?”
“You know, infill it. I mean really infill it. Not little two-story eightplexes. High-rises. Tokyo-style, earthquake-ready skyscrapers, forty stories tall. Pack in everyone west of Culver City, relocate ’em here, make it as dense as Manhattan, as dense as Kowloon used to be, all pedestrianized, and then extend the Angeles National Forest right to the edge of it, so you go from the middle of this superdense, urban, walkable city into this wild, massive forest that just goes on and on and on.”
“Holy shit,” I said. The way she moved her hands while she described it, the way her eyes shone, I felt like I could see it too. “Wait, what about fires?”
She shrugged. “There’re gonna be fires,” she said, “but there’s so much rain these days, I’d be more worried about floods. Of course, everything’s so fucked that we might get both at once. During another pandemic, why not? But come on, think about it. The best way to prevent fires is to decarbonize and the best way to decarbonize is to put everything close together, maximize how much space we give over to habitat and vegetation and carbon sinks. And it would be amazing: with all that weird, gnarly Burbank stuff you love as a seed, we could build the most incredible place here, a city like no other, like Hollywood movies, but real.”
“Shit,” I said again. “Holy shit.”
Let me say right here that Phuong was beautiful. I mean, she’d been beautiful and impossibly glamorous when I was a freshman pip-squeak and she was this tall, smart senior. Four years under a blue helmet had left her roped with muscle and with this amazing world-smarts that was a million times more glamorous. I could have had a crush on her even if we’d never had that dinner.
But when she talked about how she wanted to live, her version of the city, it was like she was this incredibly sexy Joan of Arc, a visionary who made me want to fall in and march. There was a “leader” thing that some people just had. She had it.
“That is just incredible.”
She smiled and shrugged and my heart went thud-thud-thud. Did she know she was doing it? How the hell had I ended up across the table from her? I was easily the luckiest guy in Burbank.
“Don’t get me started on the airport. After we put in high-speed rail, I want to turn it into a museum of bad habits from a fallen civilization.”
“You should run for mayor. I’d vote for you.”
“I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t thought of it. Because I do agree with you, Brooks. Burbank is special. It’s beautiful, it’s full of smart, creative people who do and make stuff, and it’s got political independence. It’s not LA, but it’s next to LA. They can do what they want, but we don’t have to go along with it. We’re our own city. Governments are cool toys: they have a lot of power.”
I seriously wanted to hug her just then. “Uh, can I tell you something personal?”
She suddenly looked nervous. “I guess?”
“Sorry, that came out weird. It wasn’t a swipe-right thing. Though—” I swallowed. “I’d be lying if I said that hadn’t crossed my mind. Just putting that out there.”
I couldn’t bear to look at her face and see what she made of that. I couldn’t believe I’d said it! I rushed on. “But that’s not what I wanted to tell you. But it is personal. Is that okay?”
“I guess?”
She looked like she wanted to leave. I felt like an idiot.
“Sorry, it’s okay, forget I mentioned it.”
“Actually,” she said, and she smiled and I got so many feels. “Actually, yes, I think I would. Please, go ahead.” Another smile. More feels.
“Well, there’s a good part, then there’s a sad part, and then there’s another good part. Just warning you.”
“I’m warned.” The whole vibe had shifted. Were we bantering? Did she want to swipe right?
“Right. The first good part. My dad grew up here, in Burbank. So did my mom. But they both got Canadamania, you know, the Canadian Miracle. They weren’t much older than me and they left for Alberta, to work on the Calgary project—wildfires, floods, moving a whole city.”
“No way,” she said. “That’s cool. Romantic, even.”
“I think it was! I was born there—”
“You’re Canadian?”
“Dual,” I said. “But yeah.”
“Lucky,” she said. “You got an escape hatch.”
“Not really,” I said. “There’s only one planet and—” I realized she’d been teasing. Of course she knew that. “Sorry. Back to my parents. I was born there and it was all totally normal to me, of course, Mom or Dad having to rush out in the middle of the night to help with an evacuation or sandbagging or whatever.
“Now, this is the sad part. They died. I was eight. It was one of the fevers. I was orphaned and then I moved here—” Her face was doing this thing now, and I could tell I was bumming her out. “It’s okay, really. I mean, it’s not okay. It’s fucked. I’m all kinds of fucked up about it, to tell you the truth. But that’s not what I want to tell you.”
“Okay, but Brooks, that’s really—”
“I know. It is. More than I can say. But.
“Okay. Then I came here and I was raised by my grandfather and of course I could tell that things were really different here and there weren’t many people like my parents, no one who lived the way they had.”
“No shit.”
“I mean, back then. None of the adults in my grandfather’s circle, they’re all Magas. These days, sure, yes, I’m surrounded by people who remind me of my folks, but back then, I wasn’t just dealing with being orphaned—I was also trying to deal with this kind of lifestyle whiplash, not just being in a different place, but being with people who weren’t living for this big vision of what things could be. I mean, my grandfather, all he cared about was how things had been, and if he thought about where they were going, it was only to be angry about it.
“I fell in love with Burbank obviously, but I never saw myself staying here. I always felt like if I was going to find the kind of cause that made my parents who they were, I’d have to go somewhere else—go help relocate San Juan Capistrano or do what you did, go somewhere drowning like London or Lagos and pitch in.
“But Phuong, the way you talked about Burbank just now—seriously, it gave me goose bumps. What a vision! The idea that we could take all that land all around us and give it back to nature, and then give that nature to ourselves, put all the displaced people here, give them somewhere decent to live, give them to ourselves too!” She laughed. I was shouting. The waitress was staring, but smiling. “I mean, don’t take this the wrong way, but you don’t just have amazing ideas, you have an amazing way of talking about them, a way that makes me want to stand up and salute.”
She took my hand across the table and I thrilled from my scalp to my toes.
“Thank you, Brooks. Seriously, thank you.”
We were so having a moment. She got all dreamy. “And if we did it,” she said, “if we did it, we’d have our own Blue Helmets, people who’d lived through the Burbank Miracle, people who could go across California and teach them how to do it. Make every community that has a future into a haven for the places that don’t have one.”
Another shiver chased the first one. She had these little flecks in her irises, and a dot of scar on her nostril where she’d had a nose ring. There were a few dark hairs mixed in with the blond ones on her upper lip. Her lips were thick and pouted, like a Greek statue, and her nose had a little hook in it, giving her face so much character. When she was lost in thought, her facial muscles all relaxed, giving her a statue’s smoothness, and then when she came back from thought, she animated all at once and a thousand tiny lines and muscles leapt into definition and she was as full of character as a line drawing, crosshatched and shaded.
She squeezed my hand and let go. We split the bill and stepped out into the night. It was cool and there were these giant green fig beetles buzzing us as we mapped our way to more bikes. We hardly said a word as we walked down Victory to the bikes, then we turned to face each other. My hands got sweaty.
“That was a pretty fantastic night, Brooks.”
“It was an extremely fantastic night, Phuong.”
“I wish I’d known you at Burroughs.”
“I’m glad I know you now.” God, I was so in the zone. She laughed.
“I’ll call you,” she said.
“That makes me happy.”
We went in for the hug, and it was a long one and a good one, longer and better than a friendly California hug. A hug with meaning and promise. Then she pecked me on the neck and pulled her face back and gave me a slower one on the lips. Her breath tasted like coffee and spice. My head and hands and feet went numb.
“Wow.”
She laughed again. “You’re funny.”
“Wow.”
She rode off, and I just stared after her, hand on my bike’s saddle, as her legs flashed through the vents in her trousers and her hair spikes blowing crazy in the wind, the kiss lingering on my lips.
I swung my leg over my bike and cycled home, parked the bike at the curb for the next rider, and stepped into the house. It was empty: Wilmar and Milena were out with friends, and when I got to the back door, I found a gift basket packed with Mexican sweets and a jar of homemade orange marmalade and a huge card signed by everyone from Ana Lucía’s advance party of refus, all gone to their People’s Airbnbs. They’d completely packed up the backyard, tearing down their tents and infrastructure and installing a pretty little flower bed around the perimeter.
I sat there, reading my card and dipping my finger in the marmalade, which was delicious, spiced with ginger and cardamom, and let the mosquitoes sip at my ankles and calves, watching the stars whirl in their heavens and feeling that kiss again.
People were great. That was something easy to lose sight of because when they were dicks, the experience was so out of the ordinary that you lost sight of just how great they were the rest of the time.
I climbed into bed, thinking of Phuong. Just as I dropped off, I thought about the waitress and my stupid Ethiopia/Eritrea slipup, and just how many of these old grievances there were. Would Eritreans ever stop caring about being mistaken for Ethiopians? Would Gramps’s Maga buddies and the seafaring plutes of the Flotilla ever stop nursing their grudges?