Show Me a Picture

Mell shares photographs of her Yucatán trip on her website. Images of Uxmal arranged to the left and the city of Mérida on the right. When Lang asks why, she replies that she doesn’t know. Something about imposing order on chaos; something about the doubling of opposites; something about time travel. She has more ideas. She can’t find room for them.

Even now, hundreds of years after the Mayan collapse, Uxmal is a code of colors: luminous yellows come from bright earth for the making of bricks, pale greys swath the squat boulders where iguanas lie in the sun, black belongs to the jaguar and the underworld. The modern world is elsewhere, an hour away by car. The city streets mix and match: wide avenues carry traffic up and down; narrow cobbled streets hide behind corners. People move in slow motion. Palms are the high rises of trees. They compete with buildings for humid air space. Mell stands next to one of these giants while Lang clicks the picture. She wears dark sunglasses and a large, floppy hat to keep from being boiled alive. A taxi idles while waiting for the light to change. The cathedral radiates with spiritual importance.

Mell uploads another picture. Dawn in the Yucatán. A cock crows with bullhorn intensity. Wake up the dead! Wake up the dead! Mell stumbles out of bed, into the bathroom and into her clothes. She takes a moment in the mirror to inspect her soul. Lang joins her. This is their first time in the hotel, in the Yucatán—and the mirror hides every flaw. A magic mirror. Mell grins. Her teeth are young again. She could be young again.

“It’s why we are here.”

“What’s that?” Lang jiggles his soft belly.

“To pretend we haven’t changed a bit since our twenties.”

“Only one of us has to pretend.”

Outside the hotel, a man wipes down a white SUV. Mell sees him through the giant glass doors. It’s cool inside the hotel; outside, it is raging hot. His name is Hernán. He is a local. He speaks fluent English. He knows the highways. He knows the best restaurants. The heat doesn’t appear to affect him.

He smiles at Mell and holds the car door for her. His smile is charmingly self-possessed. They make it to Uxmal in excellent time. Hernán walks them through the gates and into a different time and space. A different cosmology. Secrets are revealed that are only secrets because Mell and Lang have so little understanding of their surroundings. Mell finds Hernán impressive. Lang does too. Throughout their day, he becomes more special to them–more than a hired guide. He is their Virgil. Without him, they would go to pieces in the heat. There is no guarantee they won’t.

On their way to lunch, Mell asks Hernán what he thinks of their president.

“I don’t let external politics run my life. My ex-wife maybe, but she is a lawyer. I focus on my customers and business.”

“We can relate,” Lang says, though he is also a lawyer and politics do run his life.

Mell stares at a photo, then another. None of them are great. One or two are good, but the rest are forgettable. There are no pictures of the trip to the cenote. Mell considers the cenote the highlight of the trip. Quiet. Mysterious. Mercifully cool. She uploads a picture of Lang holding a tamarind. Exotic fruit.

At the college reunion where everyone is young again, Mell drinks too much. The ex-pat hosts of the party own a house in a fashionable district in Mérida. Once, they made movies, now they write. “Time to get real,” the ex-pats reply with impatience when Mell asks if they intend to remain in the Yucatán. Who is this person? Lang’s wife. What’s her name again? The evening grows impossibly warmer, the terrace more crowded.

“Do you know my husband?” she asks a woman in cat glasses.

“Who’s that?”

“The guy over there with the Friends t-shirt.”

“Never saw him before.” The woman turns her back. Mell smiles at the bartender and shrugs.

The party goes well into the humid night. Someone calls out, “Dinner downstairs in the restaurant.” Mell sees a familiar face. “Viv!”

Viv halts. A pale man halts alongside her.

Head cocked like a pigeon, she studies Mell. “Have we ever met? I don’t think we have.” She looks to her companion, as if he can settle the matter. He seems amused—and somehow paler. Evening snaps into night. Bistro lights twinkle. Merry, merry.

“Of course we’ve met. You were the bridesmaid at my wedding.”

“Your wedding!” Viv recoils, her disgust operatic. “I was never at your wedding.”

“You were the bridesmaid.”

“Then show me a picture,” Viv demands.

Later at the hotel, Mell screams at Lang for leaving her alone with that “group of vipers.”

“I love you but you’re drunk. I can’t talk to you when you’re drunk.”

“Don’t change the subject.”

“Once more, I love you but you’re drunk.”

“I want you to kill them.”

“That is never going to happen.”

“It would if you loved me.”

“That’s not fair, Mel.” Lang’s back is turned. He fusses with covers and pillows. When the fussing ends, he lies down. “Come to bed.”

“Only if you promise to kill them.”

“I wouldn’t kill them even if you weren’t…”

“Stop it!” Mel bursts into tears. Drunk tears. Drunk sobs. Lang is there, holding her to his chest, stroking her hair, saying, “Tomorrow we go to the beach and see the flamingos, and we go swimming…and no one’s going to kill anyone.” 

Mell sorts through more photos. She sees herself at a dozen angles, but apparently never the way others see her. Lest it escape her attention, they show up at various points in time to remind her. Regrettable reunions. Awful encounters.

“Why do you care?” It’s the mirror talking again.

“Doesn’t everyone want to be loved?”

“You’re alive, aren’t you?”

Mell’s website receives modest traffic. The hotel swimming pool gets the most views. A few people click on the tamarind. Mell remembers Hernán cutting a pitaya over lunch while talking about the Mayan highway to the underworld. She lazily remarks that every culture has a version of hell.

Hernan continues cutting. “The underworld is not hell.” The pitaya opens like a flower. “You will see when we go to the cenote.”

Mell searches Google for the cenote. Nothing turns up. She isn’t ready to accept defeat despite the tab explosion in front of her. All cenotes are sinkholes, but all sinkholes are not cenotes. The cenotes were sacred to the Maya. Cenotes date back sixty-six million years and were formed during the Chixulub Crater Impactor. Woman’s ancient skull shows evidence of a hard life.

Around two or three in the morning she accepts defeat while sleep, that anti-gravity potion begins to take her away into the dark. She pushes back. She and sleep dance in slow circles. The circles grow smaller, catch her around the waist. “Ask for a blessing.” Mell knows that voice, its glassy persuasiveness. “Ask!” Darkness closes over her; it feels like soft water, a second skin.

Mell wakes late in the day. She turns on the computer. Clicking through Drive, she pulls up pictures of her wedding. There is Viv in strappy heels and a floor to thigh slit up her skirt. Her smile is relaxed—not frozen like the night of the party. It should have ended there, not like it did in the impossible heat with Viv editing Mell out of her life, leaving her in shreds on the cutting room floor of her curated existence. What other memories has she disowned? Mell remembers long afternoons eating bread and olive oil in an apartment thick with cigarette smoke. She and Viv talk for hours about art, life—and all the beautiful people who stopped calling Viv that summer. Viv pretends she is hiding. She is overwhelmed. While chain smoking, Viv tells Mell about her best friend, who overdosed in college. The most popular girls always seem to die alone. Viv’s voice is heavy with grief. She is certain her friend’s death is an accident. Mell listens and, in her listening, she feels an arousal of empathy. An infatuation of empathy. A love affair of empathy. Only with the passing of time, motherhood, her frayed marriage, the vanishing of friends does Mell realize this love rarely lasts. She won’t look at Viv’s picture again. Why return to all that darkness?

Mell uploads a photograph of a cenote from a travel website with thousands of hits. The image is otherworldly: cavern walls in hummingbird colors, stalactites dangling in a shaft of sunlight, the smooth, clear water. A beautiful photo. Mell could never take a photo like that. These are some of the world’s most beautiful graveyards, she types under the picture and links it to the travel website. As she hits publish, she can’t help but wish for a photo of her in the cenote—a selfie—to share.  If anyone asks, she wants proof that she too has been to the underworld and back again.