The Zigzag Way Read Online Free Page A

colleagues, two terribly sober and certain men who talked between themselves constantly, using a language Eric could not follow, it was so specialized and technical. He had followed them in, dressed for a holiday in a warm climate, and found himself with nothing to say. He had convinced himself that scientists were fascinating people: they knew the human being and the phenomenon of life as no one else did, after all. He had imagined he would put intelligent questions to them, and listen to their stories of medical emergencies, crises and curiosities. But they had no stories, they were not doctors: They did research. If they saw patients, they saw only those parts necessary to their research and were not in the least interested in anything beyond these bounds. Of course what Em shared with them was precisely that focus, that intense and exclusive focus, and it was what Eric had hoped to escape on concluding his thesis in order to let a wider, more expansive view take over and transform his world. Realizing he would have to embark on that journey alone, he thought it best to leave them to themselves and fell back. They glanced at his initially hopeful, ingratiating smile, ignored it, and went ahead.
    He insisted they take the three seats in front together, sat behind them, and read all the airline magazines, drank all the drinks offered him, and listened to the animated conversation in Spanish between members of a family scattered through several rows of seats while they passed the smaller ones from lap to lap along with bottles of milk and pacifiers and diaper bags, toys and snack packs. He began to get a headache from the chatter and the glare that came in through the window as the plane droned its way over endless, colorless plains and the pleats and convolutions of mountains that were like prints left by giant knuckles in a pan of putty-colored dough.
    The headache was blown out of his head when the top of Popocatepetl suddenly floated into sight, disembodied in the haze over Mexico City, catching him utterly by surprise. No one had told him he would see Popocatepetl but he knew it could be nothing else, nothing less. “Em,” he shouted, rising in his seat to tap her head in front of him, “Em, look!” as if he were a boy, her boy.
    But Em and her colleagues had visited Mexico many times before; they glanced out of the window, took note of the familiar landmark, and what they saw had the effect only of making them gather up their files and briefcases and begin to prepare for the descent. Eric was left with his face flattened against the oval aperture to catch what he could of the magic of a cone of ice floating in a blur of clouds and dust over a dun cityscape.
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    T HE DISJOINTEDNESS OF their joint experience of Mexico was repeated at every step. While Em and her colleagues passed casually through the immigration barriers and collected their baggage with the harassed air of professional business travelers, Eric found himself distracted by everything in the airport—the booths displaying textiles bright with rainbow stripes and rainbow flowers, tequila bottles shaped like cacti, sweets made out of cacti and fruit—and the arrival hall, which was swamped by more people with black hair and brown skin than he had ever encountered before, families embracing and weeping and laughing as if they lived their lives on the level of grand opera. Outside, he was faced with light that struck more whitely, electrically than he had ever seen onto a spectrum of color unknown in Boston, Massachusetts—flat-roofed houses with pink and orange and violet walls, pea-green taxis and leaf-green buses. When they reached the hotel, where the tranquilizing effect of plashing water in marble fountains was canceled by the shrieking of birds of bright plumage in tall cages, he had to lie down, he felt the blood racing in his veins too fast.
    Em did not appear concerned; she went about unpacking, hanging clothes in a