The World in Half Read online

  She sighs, then smiles. “Have fun.”

  “Your black beaded necklace is on your dresser,” I say.

  Two

  Orientation

  All the times I imagined it, I thought that what I would see from an airplane window would be this: rivers as thin as dried earthworms, treetops as lush as clumps of moss, patches of farmland laid out like pressed handkerchiefs, mountain valleys rounded like soft dimples, the earth in miniature. But the only thing outside the window is white air with, occasionally, bands of sunlight radiating through. It’s beautiful and breathtaking, being that close to the marbled sky, but it isn’t what I hoped to see.

  The man in the seat next to me smells of a garlicky sweat, a stench that lifts off him each time he stirs, and he often does, stretching his arms over his head and cracking his fingers. I try to ignore him and read the copy of Principles of Geology that I brought with me. I got it in high school as a graduation gift from my earth sciences teacher. The pages are worn and highlighted and notated and dog-eared from all the times I’ve read it. The man touches me once when I doze off, to announce excitedly, “Drink cart,” and point to a flight attendant standing in the aisle with a plastic cup raised in her hand like a trophy. I order water. He orders a tomato juice with lime and a tiny bottle of vodka.

  The two of us, along with at least a hundred others, are en route from Chicago to Houston. From there I’ll continue to Panama City, Panama. I have no idea what to expect. I know everything I’ve read about it in my guidebook—how much to pay for a taxi from the airport, what the temperature will be like, what areas of the city to avoid, what kinds of payments merchants will accept. But that’s all superficial. I don’t know what really to expect, underneath all of that.

  After he finishes his drink, the man next to me says, “So, do you speak English?”

  “Me?”

  “You know English?”

  “Yes.” I don’t feel like telling him that I know Spanish, too. Not absolutely, totally fluently, but well enough. When I was younger, my mother tried to teach me a little—the words for colors and numbers and animals and foods—anything she had learned when she lived in Panama. When we exhausted her vocabulary, she sent me every Wednesday night for a year to a Spanish class at the YMCA. She was always like that, pushing me to spend my time learning and studying and learning and studying because, she said, that was the way to become more than you knew you were. By the time I got to high school and started taking Spanish as an elective, I was the best student in my class. My teachers couldn’t believe how naturally it came to me. And they couldn’t believe, when they heard about it, that I hadn’t minded, all those years, taking Spanish classes outside of school. It wasn’t exactly that I hadn’t minded, though, as much as that I hadn’t known better. I didn’t know until I was older that not everyone my age was spending weeknights learning a second language. I didn’t consider the reason for it, either, but I think it boiled down to this: Spanish was just something my mother had fallen in love with, the way other parents are in love with music or baseball or books. She wanted to share it with me the way people want to share the things that mean something to them with those they care about. And she wanted to give me a connection to some part of my background. She wanted to hold open a doorway to myself.

  “Just checking,” he says. “I fly this route all the time, and a lot of times the people sitting next to me only know Spanish. Texas is full of Mexicans.”

  “Texas is a big state,” I say. “I think it’s probably full of a lot of people.”

  He shrugs. “So that’s where you’re going? Texas? You have family there?”

  “I’m just connecting there. I’m going to Panama City.”

  “In Florida?”

  “In Panama.”

  “Panama. Isn’t that a Van Halen song?”

  “I don’t know.” I do know. The first time I heard it on the radio, I almost couldn’t believe my ears. But I don’t feel like indulging him.

  “That’s where they have the canal, right? And the hats, too. Panama hats, Panama Jack.” He nods approvingly.

  “The hats are from Ecuador,” I say.

  “Come again?”

  “The hats are actually from Ecuador.”

  “Ecuador hats? No”—he frowns—“that doesn’t sound right. I’m pretty sure you’ve got that mixed up. They’re Panama hats.”

  “I know that’s what they’re called, but they’re made in Ecuador. They got popular when Theodore Roosevelt toured the canal, when it was being built, and he wore one. People started calling them Panama hats and the name stuck.” I don’t know why I’m telling him. As if he cares. I just want to prove that I know what I’m talking about. I always feel I have something to prove when it comes to the topic of Panama.

  “If you say so.” He raises his plastic cup and lets an ice cube slide into his mouth. “So why are you going? You visiting someone?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “What do you mean you’re not sure? Either you’re visiting someone or you’re not.”

  “I don’t exactly know my plans yet.”

  “How long are you staying?”

  “Three weeks.”

  “Have you ever been there before?”

  I shake my head. Maybe if I stop talking, he’ll return the favor. I peek around him, to a perfectly normal-looking passenger across the aisle, and wish I’d been assigned a different seat.

  “Three weeks without plans in a place you’ve never been before?” He widens his eyes. “Good luck.”

  Ordinarily, I am not a brave person. Not that I walk around all the time afraid of things, just that I almost never do anything that requires considerable courage or abandon. I do what’s asked and what’s expected and what I’m supposed to do.

  I don’t jaywalk. I wait in line at a register to ask questions that other people simply walk to the front with and shout at the cashier as she handles another transaction: Where’s the escalator? Can I make a return in this line? Which way to the shoe department? I pack up my things in the library and take them with me when I need to use the bathroom. I put money in the meter even if I’m running in for something I know will take only a minute. I sample lotions only from the labeled tester. I give back the extra change if someone gives me too much. I turn in my school assignments on time.

  The first geologic exploration of the South Pole was in 1911, in the midst of the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration. Roald Amundsen, the man who completed it, was an adventurer to the marrow of his bones. As a young boy, he used to sleep with his bedroom windows open in the winter to get his body accustomed to the cold he would one day endure as the explorer he knew he wanted to be. The second person to reach the South Pole was Robert Falcon Scott. He died trying to get back to his base, and I have often imagined that he did not particularly want to go on the trip in the first place. All he had to look forward to, after all, was ice and bitter cold and the great occupying space of the unknown. He may have acted with bravado and been brimming with confidence, but what if he was simply a man caught up in a race, a man leaving his family behind, a man who felt he had something he needed to prove?

  Some people are true adventurers. But many more are adventurers by circumstance, adventurous only because their goal requires them to be. They pull on the mask of daring because doing so is the only way to get where they’re going. And sometimes the mask becomes them, and by the end of their journey, the true adventurer who has lain dormant in their soul ignites and takes hold. And sometimes the mask is still just that, an outer shell, and the inner person remains unchanged. It’s hard to know all the time which is which and who you are. It’s hard to know until the end.

  I don’t know what will happen to me by the time this trip is over, but right now, at the start of it, I am Robert Falcon Scott, and Panama as well as everything that might happen there is my fantastic unknown.

  I lied to my mother about this trip. More than two weeks ago, I booked the ticket online and then walked int
o her room to tell her I’d been invited on a Geophysical Sciences Department trip to the Cascades Volcano Observatory in Vancouver, Washington. There was no way she could have known that I was really going to Panama.

  “I’ll be gone for three weeks,” I said. “The trip is for the first three weeks of the quarter.”

  She said, “There was a human head on the kitchen counter this morning.”

  I was sitting on her bed while she stood in front of her dresser and applied makeup. I was watching her face in the mirror. In the lower corner of it, I could see my own—my wide, dark brown eyes; my long, straight nose; my pale lips, shiny with ChapStick; my black hair pulled into a low, haphazard ponytail loop; my bangs cut in a blunt line, dusting the tips of my thick eyelashes.

  “A human head?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  When I walked into the kitchen, there was a cantaloupe on the counter.

  Back in her room, I said, “I think it’s gone now.”

  “What is?”

  “Mom, did you hear me before?” I didn’t know why I was pressing it. She had already taken the news better than I thought she would.

  “You mean about the trip?”

  “Yes.”

  “I heard.”

  I wasn’t going to tell her the rest: that I had arranged to take the entire next quarter off. Later, I would. But not yet. I wanted to avoid the inevitable fight the news would trigger. My mother would argue that taking a quarter off was the first step down a slippery slope that ended with me, in a heap at the bottom, quitting school altogether. There was no way to explain to her that taking a quarter off was no big deal, that people did it all the time. Even when I talked to the dean about it, he’d said I was the third person that day to come to him with the same request. He’d told me that my scholarship would remain intact as long as I took off for no longer than one year. Everything would be fine. But none of that would matter to my mother. To her, it would signify the beginning of the end. She had always made it clear that there was no messing around when it came to school. She wanted more for me than she had for herself. That sort of thing. By the time my mother was my age, she had been herded to a small, local Catholic college along the banks of the Hudson River at the insistence of her parents, who wanted to keep her close by. The point of going to college, as my mother tells it, was not so much to gain an education as it was to find a husband—a singular obsession with her parents, who believed, even in the late seventies, that the best any woman could do was to find a good man. In the shadowed wings of my mother’s life, her parents were conspiring to help her winnow her marriage prospects until they finally settled on one man, a U.S. Marine named Brant Strickland, whom she wedded before transferring with him to his station in the Panama Canal Zone. He and my mother were divorced less than a year later. “It wasn’t right from the start,” she told me once when I asked her about it. “It wasn’t right from the start or from the middle or from the end. It was never right.” And why hadn’t she gone to college after that? “Because, Mira, after that you were making your grand entrance.”

  She held out a tube of lipstick the shade of apricot and said, “What do you think of this color?”

  “I promise I’ll be back soon,” I said, unwilling to let it go. “And someone will be around, you know, to help you.”

  “All fine,” she said, and gazed again at the mirror. She pressed her lips together and released them with a faint popping sound.

  As soon as I step off the plane and into the airport, I get swept up in the masses of people hurrying all together in the same direction, like a school of fish darting through the terminal. I walk with them, gripping the strap of my orange bag, half reading the backlit advertisements for hotels and travel excursions and banks that hang on the walls. It looks like any airport. Not that I’ve been to one before today. But it’s not so different from O’Hare or Hobby. Maybe the lighting is dimmer. The furniture is older.

  At the passport vestibules, everyone sorts instinctively into two lines: one for Panamanian citizens and one for everyone else. I get in the line with everyone else. I know it’s where I’m supposed to be. Of course it is. But I can’t help looking at the Panamanians who snake their way through the stanchions—women carrying woven-plastic bags, women wearing gold jewelry, men with leather shoes and mustaches, men in linen shirts, everyone’s skin darker than mine—and feeling a twinge of displacement, as if almost, maybe, I could be in that line with them. I’m not sure why, but I want them to know that. I want them to know that I’m not just any tourist visiting their country, that I have a claim to this place and a reason for being here, that I belong to them, at least a little bit. I wonder whether, or how, they would treat me differently if they knew.

  When I get to the scratched Plexiglas window, the man on the other side peers at me under heavy eyelids. He opens my passport and stamps—thud, thud, flips a page, thud, the rhythm of my pounding heart—then slides the passport and my tourist card back under the window.

  In a way it’s amazing that I even have a passport. Until now I’ve never once had the fortune to use it. The year I turned sixteen, I begged my mother for a passport as a birthday present. She drove me to Circus Joe’s Burger Palace and sat me in the old-fashioned photo booth they had by the register and told me to smile. The bulb flashed four times. “This was cheaper than going to Walgreens,” she said, when I came out.

  “What do you mean?” I asked. Somehow, I didn’t realize that she had brought me there to get my official passport photo. I had been pestering her for a passport, sure, but she hadn’t given any indication that she was actually going to get me one. I thought that we were merely going to Circus Joe’s for a birthday lunch, and that when she sent me into the photo booth it was for a commemorative birthday snapshot.

  “The post office is even worse. They should be ashamed of what they charge for a passport photo.”

  “This can’t be my photo,” I said.

  “We haven’t seen them yet. I’m sure they’re fine.”

  “No, I mean it has to be official. Circus Joe’s isn’t official.”

  My mother stared at me. A giant plastic elephant, lion, and bear stood frozen in parade through the middle of the restaurant. Then, a strip of photographs came sliding forth, as if the booth was sticking its tongue out at us. My mother bent down slowly and plucked the strip out of the tray. “I know that,” she said evenly. “I just thought you might need a warm-up.” Without another word, she stuffed the narrow band of black-and-white photos into her purse, and strode out to the car. She drove us straight to Walgreens.

  Several weeks later, after we also went to the post office to fill out the required papers, I received in the mail a beautiful gold-stamped navy booklet. By then, my mother was long past the embarrassment of her mistake, and she came into my room smiling, holding the passport aloft, and told me, “Happy Birthday, Mira.” I spent that entire afternoon cutting out silhouettes of the countries I longed to visit—Iceland, Mongolia, France, Egypt—and sticking the pieces, like paper fish, between the pages of the booklet. The first one I cut out, of course, was Panama. I’ve been holding on to my passport, waiting for the day I would use it, ever since.

  Hotel Centro is the cheapest lodging listed in the guidebook that also advertises air-conditioning. I’m paying for this trip with money I’ve saved from my scholarship stipends and from the little bit that I have in the bank from odd jobs I had throughout high school, so there isn’t a lot of wiggle room as far as my budget is concerned.

  I made a reservation before I left home. Over the phone, the man I spoke to told me at first that the hotel was booked. We were speaking to one another in Spanish so I wasn’t sure whether I misunderstood. Then he said, “I’m joking, of course! We have plenty of rooms. You want to go to Costa Rica? No rooms. But in Panamá we have plenty of rooms. How many nights?” I started with one. I had given myself three weeks for this trip, but who knew what would happen? I didn’t want to commit to anything for too long. Besides,
he assured me, extending my reservation, even by increments of one night at a time, would be easy.

  It’s almost ten o’clock by the time the taxi pulls up in front of the building. A doorman with a gold name-badge that says “Hernán” opens the car door and, through the night air, carries my suitcase up the stairs from the street.

  The lobby is small and sparsely decorated with two club chairs and a potted palm tree. A room off to the side houses a small bar, the bottles lined up against a mirrored wall like at an apothecary. Hernán places my suitcase on the floor by the front desk before stepping back a polite distance. I check in with the attendant on duty, who hands me a key for room 308. “It is the top floor,” he says. “I hope you will enjoy it.”

  Hernán follows me up the flights of stairs, thumping my suitcase behind him. I could have managed it on my own, but I don’t want to offend him by saying so. At the door, I tell him thank you and try, as gracefully as possible, to hand him a folded dollar bill for his trouble. Hernán takes it, then starts back toward the stairs.

  The room is plain but clean. It smells faintly of disinfectant. There’s a twin bed with a beige bedspread hanging low enough that it brushes the tile floor, a small television set on top of a white wicker dresser, a private bathroom with a standing shower, an air-conditioning unit perched in the window. The few times my mother and I have traveled, we’ve gone by car, and we’ve stayed in motels, and we’ve done that only if there was no way we could have pushed through the dark and our exhaustion to our destination. My mother never wants to stop and pay money to sleep. My room now isn’t much different from those—if anything it’s nicer—except for the fact that I’m in it by myself.

  I lay my suitcase flat on the floor and turn on the air-conditioning, waiting as it gurgles to life. On the ground below, there’s a lighted alley lined with a row of trash cans, and across from it, apartment buildings with ironwork balconies, almost all of which are strung with laundry.