Americans rented there because the bungalows were cheap and neat and had grassy lawns and no deposits were taken. But he didn’t know the American girls next door, and now that Rae was coming with the money, and the hard part was done and Sonny was coming out, he wouldn’t have the chance. He had begun, in a month of waiting and passing through offices and anterooms, and seven months living alone, to feel like he was losing a freedom of some kind, getting cautious without any gain back in precision. Bernhardt said it was the American experience abroad, the long decline in expectation until you could see the immediate world like a native, but without the native’s freedom. It should be a great unburdening, Bernhardt said, but to Americans it was always a hardship. Bernhardt thought Americans thrived on protecting privileges nobody else would ever want. Bernhardt liked explanations. It was a lawyer’s vice.

Oaxaca sparkled like a matrix of platinum sequins laid over velvet. The dark played out into the valley south toward Chiapas, so that where the land stopped and the sky began was a boundary lost to sight. He counted landmarks every night. The pink rotator on the airport tower, the blue Corona Cerveza on Bustamante, the hollow lights that shone all night on the cathedral opposite the zócalo, and the red Pepsi script shimmering far out in the Mixtec barrios beyond the river. There was never a sense of intimacy. The town seemed to function practically in the visible distance, though the empty air in between became enticing and silent and still. The American Highway curled down the mountains, split, circled the city two ways, then reunited, and the only detectable movement there was the lights of an overland truck gearing down before flatting out into the valley. Americans were off the road hours ago. The trucks and the Dinas would blink their lights, then run you off the cliffsides.

Quinn thought when you hung out in the present, which he did, you slipped free of the past, though not the future, and all the anxieties came in at higher calibers. It was why he liked fucking phony Italian girls from the Portal, and why he’d let Rae leave when she got ready. Too much future, too much anxiousness. In the present, he knew precisely how it would all feel every time: the contact, then the being alone, then somebody else coming in to fill up the space. That was manageable, and you felt lucky and not anxious, and when it wasn’t done right, like this time, it didn’t matter. Except for Rae. Rae had left a space he couldn’t quite manage anymore. And he’d come down for Sonny just to get Rae, since Rae seemed essential to the present, and since he was tired of being alone with himself. Efficiency only took you so far.

Her letter had said, “Dear Harry, No phone? Are you still up there protecting the animals in silence? If so, could you bear to protect one more? (That was my joke, though jokes aren’t your long suit.) I apologize for saying Sonny’s in trouble in Mexico. Needs money. Needs help. It’s me who needs protecting. Could you do this one? Could you, would you? I think there’s still a chance. Call me on Long Island. Love Rae.