It was just past noon when Joseph Szabó crossed the bridge from El Paso and entered the city of Juarez carrying in his briefcase a stack of glossy brochures and a pair of $75 etched, black porcelain doorknobs. Featuring solid brass and steel inner works with machined spindles and brass rosettes, they were the latest in push/pull privacy locks—the Rolls Royce of doorknobs. That’s what his brother Reuben said anyway. He’d just come back from a trade show in Vegas where he had obtained exclusive rights to distribution in the southwest, and he was giving Joseph the job of getting the whole thing off the ground.
“I think,” he smiled, “these may open a few doors for you.”
Few indeed. Through Reuben’s contacts, Joseph had landed some moderate sales with regional developers building luxury town homes outside of Houston. But the trips to Phoenix and Albuquerque were a bust, and so now Reuben had sent him across the border.
New job, new territory, new product. Whoopdy do.
He winced. He hadn’t used that phrase since he was eleven. For a year around that time that’s what he’d say whenever any adult spoke to him about anything that didn’t involve the Texas Longhorns or the Dallas Cowboys. He wanted so much to be a real American, despite having been born in an Austrian refugee camp. So when his father told stories about the old Hungarian Jews who drifted like ghosts into the jewelry shop or his mother announced they had found in New York another relative who survived the war, he’d circle his index finger in the air, “Whoopdy do.” His parents called it a phase, prompting Joseph silently to vow never to stop doing it, but at some point—he couldn’t remember when—he dropped the routine. Why then, after so many years, did he feel an overwhelming urge to act out the old gesture?
It was hard to get excited about selling doorknobs in Mexico after spending eight years working for Preminger. The venerable old marketing firm had gone to Budapest in the early nineties bringing good old Texas know-how, and they brought Joseph along because he spoke the language and had blood ties to the country—even though he had never been there, his parents having escaped after the revolution in ’56, two years before he was born. But in the new millennium, the Hungarians didn’t need American know-how anymore. Now they knew how and could go with cheaper local firms who understood the culture better. So they sent him back to the Lone Star State, and eventually he was laid off and when he had nowhere else to turn, he went to work for his younger brother. Well, it was okay. Joseph would become the best doorknob salesman south of the Rio Grande. If only it wasn’t so hot. The sun was like a great blazing brass fixture in the sky.
As he entered the downtown proper, he reached for the top of his head, thinking he should have worn a hat or at least slathered on a thick layer of sun block. By the end of the day, his crown would be charred. But instead of finding a warm patch of skin, his hands discovered a thick pelt of hair. Then he remembered.
Not hair-plugs, not a hairpiece, the infomercial he had seen late one night described it as “a system.” Someone must have spent a lot of money researching that term. So much better than “toupee” or “weave.” The former inspired images of dusty, black rugs that sat on the head like dead animals until the wind, a toddler, or an angry girlfriend ripped them off and exposed the pale fleshy dome beneath. “Weave,” on the other hand, brought to mind Rastafarians and black women with hair extensions. Yes, “system,” was much better.
When the installation was complete and the technician finally let Joseph look in the mirror, it took him a moment to recognize himself. Even when he had had a full head of hair it never looked like that. It had been wiry and unruly, a perpetual mess, not this coiffed, manicured guy-from-Baywatch look. The styling, of course, was ten years out of date, but otherwise looked convincing. While he was still in the chair he raked his fingers through his new tresses, imagining they were the digits of the bikini-clad blonde in the infomercial who ran her hands through the luxurious mane of an International Hair System member who moments earlier had been slaloming behind a speedboat. They said the system was undetectable, but he could detect it, the lines and knots that held it in place. Still, he was looking for them, and besides, outside of promotional videos, when did anyone ever touch your hair, much less run their fingers through it?
“Hey big brother,” Reuben had said as Joseph entered his office that day, “looks good. For a moment I thought you were David Hasselhoff. Close the door.”
Reuben asked a few polite questions about the system. How did it feel? Was it what Joseph had hoped for? Did he plan to take it out for a test drive tonight at Mad Dogs? “Fine,” “yes,” “maybe,” were Joseph’s respective responses. Then Reuben got down to business. Clearly the new line was not taking off, but he had a plan. They would expand their territory, stay in the Southwest, but go a little more south. He was sending Joseph to Juarez.
“Juarez?” Joseph asked. “What, are they renovating the brothels down there?”
Joseph had not been to Juarez since he was a teenager and he and his friends had come seeking cervezas, mujeres, and the infamous donkey show. Half a dozen of them had driven nine hours from San Antonio but had spent less than six in the city. That’s how long it took them to drink enough beer and eat enough tamales for one to get sick in the street and two others to race back to the border clutching their stomachs, trying not to shit their pants. Joseph and the others who stayed behind didn’t meet any girls, though a couple of streetwalkers approached them. When one of Joseph’s friends asked a hooker about the donkey show, she started cursing so fast and loud in Spanish they thought they would be arrested or attacked, and they all fled the place.
Juarez had come up a bit since then. It felt less like a spaghetti Western, more like a modern city. He didn’t see any streetwalkers, and the place wasn’t as dusty or chaotic as he remembered. There were still children peddling Chiclets on the sidewalks, vendors trying to wrangle you into their stores, and all manner of street hustlers wanting to sell you everything from pirated CDs to drink specials. But the sidewalks were clean and the roads well-paved. The stores and markets on Avenida 16 de Septiembre all looked newly painted. Many of the older buildings had been restored.
“The Mexicans are moving forward into a middle-class, first-world nation, just like the Hungarians,” Reuben had said. “And there are new developments all over that region crying out for a little luxury. You’ve got experience in international trade. You’ll do fine. Just don’t marry any of the women down there.”
Joseph’s meeting was not until the evening; he had come down early to get acclimated, to get a feel for the people and the territory. But now that he was here, he didn’t know what to do with himself, so he entered the city market. Maybe he should bring something back for his mother. Since his father died last year, she’d been spending too much time alone. Joseph would bring her back some Alebrijes, the colorful, twisty little animals made in Oaxaca. She liked the lizards especially, hanging them on nails in the bathrooms, “to keep the real ones company.”
Inside the market, he found a stall piled with the carvings—coyotes, dragons, an owl with its arms outstretched that you could hang from the ceiling. They were painted in electric blues, greens, reds, and yellows, speckled all over with dots and geometric patterns. He picked up a large scarlet cat with black spots, a long tail, and thin, black wooden whiskers protruding from its jaws.
“Is very beautiful, no?” said an old white-haired vendor as he came out from behind his table to join Joseph. “Hand-carved from copal wood. Each is unique. The shape of the wood determines the animal. Thirty dollars for this one.”
Once the family had come to Juarez, and he and Reuben both purchased sandstone chess sets for next to nothing. They were elaborate creations composed of dark wood and green and white tiles with drawers full of pieces carved in the shapes of Inca gods. “Very beautiful,” said one merchant to him as they headed out of town, “but they will fall apart,” and, of course, they did.
“Beautiful, but fragile,” said Joseph to the seller. “These whiskers will be broken to pieces by the time I get back to the bridge.”
“No,” the old man said. “The whiskers and the tail, they come off.” He took the wooden cat from Joseph and one-by-one removed the tiny rods protruding from its face, then pulled off its tail. “You see. I pack it for you. No problem. Twenty-five dollars.”
“I don’t know. How about ten?”
“Señor,” the vendor protested, “this is a work of art. The very spirit of El Gato. Twenty dollars.”
“Fifteen.”
“No, señor, twenty.”
He put the cat down and started to walk away. He knew a little about haggling.
“Fifteen, fifteen, señor.”
“Deal.” Joseph turned around, took out his wallet, and gave the man a twenty. He got forty pesos in return, which he knew was not a good exchange rate, but he let it go.
You can’t get something for nothing. The system, for example, cost him nearly $2,000 and would cost him another seventy-five every six weeks for adjustments. Then another $1,500 for a full replacement in a couple of years. He put the whole thing on a low-interest Visa card.
You get what you pay for. He knew all this, and yet he had married Angelina anyway.
While he waited for the vendor to wrap El Gato, Joseph looked over the other items in the stall—black lace pottery, musical instruments made of clay and animal skin, a forest of tiny ceramic statues. He picked one up, thinking it might be good for Reuben’s kids, and saw it was the figure of a kneeling man offering an enormous erection to a bare-breasted paramour. The woman was holding the tremendous phallus in both hands and smiling, but she was not looking at it but rather into the eyes of her lover.
Big penises, Joseph thought, that’s what women want. Angelina had never said anything, but he had his suspicions. Well, there was nothing he could do about his mediocre member. A hundred and forty-two dollars worth of enlargement cream and six months of Kegel pelvic exercises hadn’t earned him a centimeter more of manhood.
“That is a fertility statue, in the pre-Columbian style.”
Joseph turned to find a young Mexican man addressing him. “Yes, I see.”
“They believed these would bring rain and good crops.”
The young man had long black hair tied in a ponytail and wore brown beads, blue jeans, and a loose-fitting white shirt. He looked like one of those Peruvian musicians you would see sometimes playing on the street corners in Austin. If he tries to sell me a pan flute, Joseph thought, I’ll brain him with a doorknob.
The vendor presented Joseph with a sky blue cardboard box tied with a thin red ribbon and nodded to the young man, who returned the greeting. “I give you that for another twenty dollars,” the vendor said, indicating the statue still in Joseph’s hand.
“No, thank you,” he said, putting it down
“Fifteen.”
“No, really. I don’t want it.” He walked away.
“Ten,” the merchant cried out, but Joseph didn’t turn around.
Joseph figured on the attractiveness scale, Angelina was pretty damn close to a ten. Standing 5’8,” she was barely an inch shorter than him, and she was neither gaudy like the older generation of Hungarian women, nor cheap like the Budapest girls who strode down the avenues in shorts cut high enough to display the lower half moon of their butt cheeks.
Hennaed hair the color of an eggplant, locks curved like a scimitar just above her shoulders, she wore dark lipstick and lots of black. Sometimes she appeared in a motorcycle jacket—the European, not the American, kind, sleek, no buckles, with thin red stripes running down the arms. Her skin was pale and her fingers long. She had a body curved like the Danube, breasts like a pair of Vizsla puppies, and dark, dark eyes like deep wells of foamy espresso. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever met.
In Texas, he knew himself for not much better than a six, a six point five at best—if he wore the right suit. But in Hungary, his status as an American corporate consultant had elevated him to at least an eight, and, given the limited number of single American men and the abundance of gorgeous Hungarian women, an eight could take one pretty far in Budapest.
These numbers, he knew, were not just the product of his imagination, but were real, measurable standards, as objective as a Standards and Pours rating. They were routine tools at Preminger; he had used them over and again to select spokesmodels for clients. If you were selling a car or tampons, you wanted a nine or a ten, but if you were selling a detergent or hemorrhoid cream, you could never go above a seven. Five to six were okay for toilet paper, fast food, and vocational schools. You never, ever went below a five.
Levels, however, were not static. Having to retreat to Texas when his company withdrew from Hungary dropped Joseph down a notch, and losing his job once he got back probably knocked him to a five or less in Angelina’s eyes. And being married to a five, well, that averaged her out to maybe a seven, and that was simply intolerable for a woman who, prior to marriage, was so near the top of the scale. After she left, he thought he had better do something to raise his rating, and that’s when he invested in the hair system.
As he exited the market, Joseph raised his hand to his head again to remind himself of his coverage and to feel for knots and lines. The gesture was becoming habitual.
“It is very warm today, no?”
It was the young man again.
“Yes. But I don’t want to buy anything.”
“I am not wanting to sell you anything, sir. You are here on business, yes?”
“Yes.” Joseph looked at him with suspicion. “How did you know?”
“You do not look like a tourist. You are a businessman. My name is Miguel.” He held out his hand.
Joseph hesitated, but the young man had a pleasant smile, despite his pock-marked face. He shook his hand and gave the young man his name. “Are you from Juarez?” Joseph asked.
“Yes, but I am hoping to get a green card to work in America.”
“Doing what?”
“I want to go into business.”
“What sort of business?”
“Any kind. There are no good opportunities here, and I want to get to the U.S., but I don’t want to sneak across and go to work in someone’s garden or restaurant.”
With his dark hair and dark eyes, Miguel reminded Joseph a little of his nephews, which made him sad because he had hoped to have children with Angelina. But he knew that in places like Juarez people traded on innocent looks to prey on gringos. He couldn’t blame them, given the state of their economy, but that didn’t mean he had to fall victim to them, either.
“Speaking of food,” Joseph said, “I’m going to grab some lunch.” He headed toward the courtyard of a restaurant just outside the market, figuring to divest himself of the young man that way.
“No, sir, this is not a good place. Just for tourists. Come with me. I know a much better one. You like molé?”
He did, but he did not want to be led astray. “Is it far?”
“Just across the street.”
He had come early to get the lay of the land, he thought, and to do so, it wouldn’t hurt to have a guide, and he was a businessman—not a tourist—with experience in international trade, so he went.
It was a second-floor restaurant, much busier than the one outside the market, and Joseph ordered chicken molé and a cerveza. Miguel just got some agua de orchata. The waitress was a little chunky but had the sort of breasts that could sell a Suzuki. She seemed to know Miguel. Everyone did. Several men had nodded to him as they entered.
He was originally from Chiapas, he told Joseph. His family left the region years ago when all the fighting had broken out. They had come north to Juarez to get as close as possible to the States. His parents and sisters all worked across the border, but he stayed in the city, making himself useful to local business in whatever way he could, running errands, sometimes helping the vendors set up. He had learned English watching television and movies. During the busy season, he led tours through the city. One day, he would start a tourism business of his own in the States or maybe become an exporter of Mexican handicrafts.
Joseph didn’t want to disillusion him by telling him the U.S. was already flooded with cheap Mexican products, and the Internet was swallowing up all the travel agencies. Look at me, he wanted to say. We’re trying to sell you goods. He showed Miguel the doorknobs.
“They are very beautiful,” Miguel said. “You are going to sell them in the market?”
Joseph shook his head and explained he was meeting a developer tonight, a man who built hotels and resorts, and he would try to get a contract with him supplying door hardware. He showed Miguel the brochures, practicing his sales pitch. “They’re the Rolls Royce of doorknobs.”
“Buena, buena. Very good,” said Miguel. “Perhaps someday you will need a partner?”
“Perhaps.”
The molé was excellent, the best Joseph ever tasted. He got the check and paid for his meal and Miguel’s drink, and Miguel thanked him, and Joseph said, “no, thank you.”
He was starting to relax. “It takes a while for the new system to become integrated,” the hair technician told him the day of the installation. Joseph said he was sure that was true.
As they left the restaurant and returned to the street, Miguel continued talking and asking questions. Joseph knew enough to remain on his guard. He was sure at some point Miguel would ask him to buy something, but he never did. He just wanted to know about America and corporate life. Joseph told him he didn’t work in a big corporation any more. “You’ll have to cut your hair, if you ever go to work for one of the big companies,” he told Miguel, though he wasn’t really sure if that was true any more.
Miguel asked him if he had ever been to Juarez, and Joseph said, twice, once as a boy with his family and once as a teenager. He told him how he and his friends had come in search of booze, girls, and donkey shows.
“There are no donkey shows,” Miguel said. “It is a myth. But there are a lot of prostitutes in Juarez. You have heard, I suppose of the ‘women of Juarez?’”
Joseph had. For years now, the police had been finding the bodies of young women in the desert outside the city. There had been more than three hundred, and the police were, apparently, no closer to solving the case today than when it began. There were allegations of police corruption, incompetence, and cover-ups at the highest levels.
“We are not proud of this story,” Miguel said. “But there are many beautiful things in Juarez. Have you seen the caves?”
“Caves? In Juarez?”
“Oh, yes, very lovely. They are famous. You must see them. When is your appointment? Do you have time? If you want, I will show them to you.”
“Well,” Joseph said, “the meeting isn’t until five. Does it take long?”
“No, no, not long.”
Joseph knew there were caves in Mexico, but in Juarez? In the middle of the city? It didn’t seem likely. But he liked caves. They were cool and dark and reminded him of his childhood, crawling around with his brother under the sheets in their bedroom, exploring with flashlights. So he followed Miguel, and left behind the crowded markets, the vendors, and the restaurants, and entered a part of the city he had never seen before where the streets were less congested, with only a few shops scattered amidst warehouses. The beggars and the street hustlers vanished. So did the white people.
“How far is it?” Joseph asked.
“Not far,” Miguel said.
As they continued away from the central district, Miguel questioned Joseph about his business and his family. He wanted to know about his brother and his parents. When he learned they were immigrants—all but Reuben who was born in the states—he wanted to know why they had they left Hungary. So Joseph told him about the communists and before them the Nazis, and then Miguel wanted to know why his parents hadn’t left earlier, and Joseph said he wasn’t sure. His folks didn’t like to talk about the war, he said, and Miguel said he was sorry when he learned Joseph’s father had died the year before. Joseph did not tell him about Angelina.
And as they drifted further and further Joseph wondered if he were being sized and set up for a kidnapping. He had heard of such things happening in Mexico. “I think I’d better be getting back.”
“But we are very close.”
“Maybe, but I don’t want to get too far from the city center. I don’t want to be late for my appointment.”
“You will not be late. I promise you.”
He knew it was foolish to trust the young man. He was in foreign country. He was alone. Even in Budapest, this would not be wise. Every block he told himself, just one more, and I’ll turn around. But he was starting to wonder if he would even be able to find his way back.
He doubted he would be worth much to Reuben if there were a demand for ransom. His mother had very little, just some old stock from the jewelry shop, gold chains and Swiss watches his father hadn’t been able to sell. As for Angelina, well, she wouldn’t part with a forint on his part. She hadn’t even spent money on an international envelope, just a postcard from Pécs, where she was supposed to be visiting her sick father. The message was like a telegram. “Cannot return. Am sorry.”
She wasn’t much more communicative on the phone. She cried a lot, said she missed her parents, her country. “I don’t like Texas. I don’t like America.”
“Then we’ll move. We’ll go somewhere there are more Hungarians. We’ll go to New York. You love New York. I’ve got cousins there.”
“We can’t afford New York. I don’t want to be poor and live in America. And it is too dangerous.”
“Then I’ll come back over there.”
“I’m sorry, Jószi. It was a mistake. I don’t belong in America. You don’t belong in Hungary.”
He didn’t know what to make of it, and so he came up with whatever reasons he could understand, job loss, baldness, penis size. He only wished there were a workable system for the latter.
He swore to himself he would not go one more block when Miguel finally stopped and pointed at a small building across the street. It looked like a large adobe or a house out of The Flintstones. Above its arched door were the words Las Cuevas.
“There,” he said. “There are the caves.”
“It’s a bar?”
“No. It is Las Cuevas. The caves.”
This was not right. It called to mind the donkey shows and the women of Juarez. He turned around toward the city center. “I’m sorry, I’ve got to go.”
He expected the young man to protest, to persuade, like the vendors with their trinkets. But Miguel just said, “Okay. It was nice meeting you.”
Joseph ran his hand over the top of his head, feeling once more for the tight netting. He was sweating under the new hair system. He wanted to peel it back and dip his head in a bucket of water.
No, she hadn’t left him because he was bald. When he met her, he had the same horseshoe haircut he had sported since college, and she said she was surprised his family was originally from Budapest. “You don’t look like a Hungarian,” she had told him.
“Why not?” he asked.
“You’re not ugly.”
He had never heard Hungarian men described that way before. He had been raised to think of them as handsome, if dangerous, men—dark, mustachioed figures, always ready to pick up a sword or a whip or dance the Csárdás. But she said no. They were short and poorly dressed and lazy. “They expect the woman to do everything.”
But wasn’t that what he had expected? He had thought that marrying the most beautiful woman he had ever met would change his life, would change everything, so that he would never again feel like the pathetic, displaced boy. He thought that when he shattered the glass under the chuppah, he had broken the spell of unhappiness that had haunted him. But it was their union, not his ill luck, which proved fragile. And now all he really wanted was to crawl into a hole somewhere and rest.
A cave, he thought, was a kind of a hole.
They entered through broad wooden doors into a cool dark chamber, and it took Joseph a moment to adjust to the light. Then, to his surprise, he saw he was in a grotto. Above his head and all around him were jagged rock formations lit by battery-run electric lamps like the kinds you would use on an underground expedition. He could smell earth and water and stone. A few feet in front of him was a large Mexican in overalls and a miner’s hat, complete with headlight. Next to him was a velvet rope hanging between two golden rods, and behind that was a curtain from which a cool breeze escaped. The man asked Joseph for one hundred pesos admission. Joseph paid and entered. Miguel followed without paying. “The tour is not guided,” he said. “But I will show you around if you like.”
“Do you work here?”
“No, but I am friends with the owner, and I bring him business.”
“I see.” Though he no longer thought he was going to be murdered, Joseph felt robbed by the price of admission.
“Come, let me show you.”
Before them lay a series of damp stone steps heading downward, but there was no guardrail, so Joseph put his hand on the wall for support. It was made of some kind of limestone. Cold and hard, he could feel the seams between the rocks as he descended. There was not much light to see by, and he had to feel his way slowly down the uneven stairway.
“Do you know the analogy of the cave?” Miguel asked.
“You mean Plato?”
“Si.”
Sure, of course he did. His first marketing professor had often spoken of it. “Your job,” he told the students, “is to keep people in the cave, not with iron chains but with silken ropes of desire.”
“Las Cuevas are a little like that,” Miguel said. “You will not want to leave.”
Not want to or not be able to? Joseph thought of a line from “Hotel California.”
The air was getting colder, and he could make out a faint glow at the bottom of the steps, something bluish and white, but he was not prepared for what he saw when he arrived there. Brilliant gleams of aqua illuminated a wide chamber of ice that opened around him and Miguel. Flows of frozen water covered the ground like layers of blue tongues; the ceiling was white and ribbed with frost.
“Behold,” Miguel said, a slight mist escaping his mouth, “The glacier cave.”
There was music playing, the sounds of water dripping, an electric harp. Of course, Andreas Vollenwieder, Caverna Magica. He dated a woman in business school who listened to that all the time. She also believed in angels.
Then Joseph saw there were marine-colored light bulbs hanging bare from the corners of the ceilings, and he touched the side of the cave. It was cool, but not cold, and what had looked like ice was really something more like papier-mâché. He thought he better not press to hard or his hand might go right through.
“What is this stuff made of?” Joseph said.
Miguel did not acknowledge the question. “Look, there, a woman frozen in time.”
Joseph followed the trajectory of the young man’s finger to a shadowy shape in the wall and was shocked to discover what looked like the freshly preserved corpse of a young woman. All but naked—she was wearing some sort of fur around her waist—she had been encased in a sheet of blue polyurethane and inserted into cave’s wall. Perfectly preserved, dark-haired, dark-skinned, she reminded him with horror of a display he had once seen at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, a woman whose body had been donated for study and was displayed in cross sections between planes of Plexiglas. He stepped forward on a damp wooden plank that formed a pathway between the faux ice flows on the floor and then put a hand to his heart in relief. She was a mannequin.
“They say she was a virgin of the temple who wandered too far and got lost,” said Miguel. “Lovely, is she not?”
She was, for an oversized doll, and now that he saw she was not the body of some young kidnapped Juarez prostitute, Joseph allowed himself to feel a slight stir of sexual hunger, something he had not felt in a long while.
“Come, let us enter the next chamber,” Miguel said.
This one was smaller and darker, and they had to stoop as they went in. Then Miguel passed his hand over the wall, and Joseph heard a click, and a soft yellow light illuminated a crawl space above them, a rock ledge where there appeared primitive drawings—like the ones found in caves in France, long maned horses and great horned bison, sketched in broad, chalky outlines. But as his eyes grew used to the light he saw these drawings weren’t quite like those in Lascaux. One of the bisons was mounting the figure of a woman, her breasts hanging low and pendulous like udders. Next to that, a woman crouched beneath the haunches of a horse accepting its long equine member into her mouth. They were the sort of drawings, Joseph thought, that a Neanderthal teenager would scrape with a rock onto the sides of a primeval bathroom stall.
“The chamber of the sacred rites,” said Miguel, “where men sought to capture in images the life-giving powers of beasts. Some say these were mere fantasies, pictures meant to convey power onto the priests; others say these are actual representations of the dark acts committed here in ancient times.”
“The donkey show,” Joseph said.
“Yes,” Miguel said.
The third chamber was the largest and was populated above and below by stalactites and stalagmites. The former, on closer examination, proved to be long, knobby phalluses of varying girths and curves constructed of the same delicate material as the ice cave but striped and speckled, painted in gorgeous neon hues like the Alebrijes in the market place. On the floor, pairs of multi-colored legs rose spreading from the ground, some straightened with feet arched ecstatically in the air, toes pointing toward the ceiling, others bent at the knees, soles hovering just above the ground as if held by obstetrical stirrups. “The vault impregnates the floor; the floor grows with the moisture of the vault,” Miguel said.
Joseph smiled. This was undoubtedly the strangest place he had ever been. But he was relieved to find he had merely landed in some sort of Mexican pornographic theme park rather than a lair of murderers and kidnappers. He spent a few minutes wandering among the sculptures hanging from the ceiling and raised from the floor, admiring the handcrafted workmanship. No two penises or pairs of legs were alike. Someone had spent a lot of time down here.
“Shall we go on?” Miguel asked.
“Sure.”
They crawled through a low passage, and when they emerged they found themselves standing before an underwater pool that went so far back into the darkness, Joseph could not see to the other side.
“This place is incredible,” Joseph said. “It must have taken years to excavate.”
“There was no need to excavate. This was once the town cistern.”
As he said this, he opened a door behind him, and after passing through a short hallway, ushered Joseph into one last room where they were greeted by a lovely young woman with pale skin and the kind of steel-straight platinum blonde hair that would make a Panteen model envious. She wore a short black dress with a black lace choker and smiled as they entered. “Hola Miguel.”
Joseph looked past the hostess to the room behind her where half a dozen men in suits sat scattered on couches and at tables consorting with lovely young women in various states of undress. The place was carpeted in red, the walls paneled in dark brown wood. All references to underground chambers were gone except for a neon green sign above the stage that read “Las Cuevas.”
It was familiar territory after all. Joseph had spent many nights at just such a club only a few blocks away from Preminger’s office in downtown Budapest. Sometimes he sat by the stage and watched the show. Other times, he sat in a booth and bought tiny bottles of champagne for the beautiful young women who wandered the floor. Some were from Hungary; most were from other places— Spain, Slovakia, Italy. They would stroke his arm and ask him about life in America. Occasionally, he would splurge and spend an hour with one of them in the VIP room. But mostly, he would sit at the bar and order martinis and leave inordinately large tips for the gorgeous server with the hennaed hair, the most beautiful woman he had ever met.
Miguel took Joseph’s hand. “Good luck with your business this evening,” he said. “Enjoy the rest of your stay in Juarez.”
“You’re going?”
“Yes, I must return to the market.”
“But how am I going to find my way back?”
“It is not difficult,” he said. “Just return the way we came.”
The hostess sat him in a corner, a discrete distance from the other men and Joseph ordered a coke and ran his hands through his newly acquired hair system and stared emptily at the women swaying slowly on the stage. One by one, he politely declined the proffered company of the strippers who wandered the floor when they weren’t dancing, but somehow he couldn’t get himself to leave. He didn’t want to stay in Las Cuevas. He knew he should get going. He knew if he remained much longer, he would spend money and time he didn’t have. He knew he would be late for his appointment if he lingered. But what he didn’t know was how to unknot the silken chords of desire.
He sat there for a while, nursing his soda, wondering what to do, and then finally, he asked the waitress if she could bring him a pair of scissors or a sharp knife.
“We do not allow knives in here,” she said.
“Just something small,” he said. “Nail clippers would do.”
She left and came back with a tiny pair of scissors, the kind used to remove cuticles, and he thanked her and asked her to point out the men’s room. He was in there for a long time, so long, in fact, they sent someone to call him out. He was startled by the thumping of a fist on the door and a man’s voice demanding, “¡Por favor, señor, por favor. Abra la puerta!”
“Un momento,” he said, then added in Hungarian, “kérem szépen.”
When he finally emerged, he was bald again, and the hair system was lying in a bucket by the toilet next to the briefcase containing the porcelain doorknobs. He apologized to the bouncer standing outside the bathroom, returned the scissors to the startled waitress, paid his bill, and found his way back home.
Thomas P. Balázs teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga. His fiction has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. He was awarded the Theodore Christian Hoepfner Award for best short fiction, 2010. A recipient of a Tennessee Williams Scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and a Vermont Studio Center fellowship, his stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best New American Voices, and the AWP Intro Journals Project Award. His short story collection Omicron Ceti III, to be published by Aqueous Books, is scheduled for release in January 2012.
