The Lost

The Lost

Lisa smiled as she handed her credit card to the owner of a well-appointed hotel in Guatemala City. All I could think about was clean sheets, a heated pool, room service. After six months of rustic travel, Lisa and I wanted our last night to be a hedonistic free-for-all.

Oh, and another thing: we were flat broke. Hence the card. And as our flight back to Boston left the following morning, we reasoned that springing for a swanky room in Guatemala City for $45 was well worth the price when compared to the dubious quarters and hay beds we’d slept in up to that point; the way we figured, with sixty-five pound packs constantly strapped to our bodies, we’d bushwhacked through tangled mountains and cloud forests, rode precariously on the top of dilapidated school buses, and crisscrossed one byzantine street after another, all on a measly $6 a day. Not only that, but we’d recently become engaged.

Let’s go ahead and live a little.

“I’m sorry, but this card does not work,” the hotel owner said, trying to hand it back.

Lisa blinked, dumbfounded. “Ummm, can you run it again?” So the woman did. And then did again. She shrugged. A fourth time seemed pointless.

We reasoned with her, explained it was a mistake, that we had no more money, that the card had to be good. I emptied my rucksack atop the clean tile floor of the lobby looking for cash that maybe I’d lost or forgotten, and desperately pawed through a mound of books and clothes. Lisa performed the same upending with her pack, but arrived at the identical result: not a single coin.

“This is a mistake,” I said again, pitiful.

“Go to a bank,” the woman offered. “They’ll fix it.”

* * *

The day was oppressively hot, even as the sun collapsed behind the tallest buildings in the heart of Guatemala City. And one bank after another kept telling us the same thing: sorry, no good; no credit. We refused to believe it and figured it had to be some weird glitch. After all, we’d only used the card once before, and this was 1995; Guatemala wasn’t exactly a technological hotbed. In fact, if you wanted to do something as simple as call home, there were no satellite or cell phones, and you could forget about the internet. You had to use the national landline phone service provider: a row of phone kiosks offered in a specially marked building where you waited your turn, shuffled to phone booth #8 or whatever, and placed a collect call. The entire process might take 45 minutes. For a single call.

But as the streets grew darker and our frustration higher, I finally suggested to Lisa we give up and just stay at the city airport for the night. Again and again we’d been told by other travelers that you could sleep for free in the lobby of the Guatemala City airport and not be hassled. I reasoned that we could look for a quiet corner, or secluded bench, not make too much of a ruckus, and it’d be morning in no time. Sure, it’d probably be a bit uncomfortable, but so what? Our plane left early, and we’d be back in Boston by 2:00 P.M, our families waiting to greet us. Hell, if we could sleep on hay beds, an airport bench would be a snap.

Lisa stood thinking, leaned against a telephone pole crusted in flyers advertising the Peace Corps and cheap Chinese restaurants. She was then—and still is—thoughtful, gentle, and clear in her decision making process. A month prior, we’d taken a long, arduous hike from Livingston, Guatemala to the Seven Altars waterfalls high in the nearby hills. Each green-blue pool spilled luxuriously into another, and the entire jungle squawked and chattered around us as we stepped into the frigid streams, both of us naked and feeling incredibly alive. Later that night, flat on backs at the hotel, I started thinking about responsibilities, next steps. I knew I needed a plan for the future. I asked Lisa what she thought about “this whole marriage-thing”; she said what are you talking about, of course I’ll marry you.

“Okay,” she said this time. “It’s just for the night. Let’s do it.”

* * *

We walked for over an hour to get to the airport. A few wild dogs bounded about, skittish. Men and women curbside sold bananas, thick tortillas topped with beans and coleslaw, coffee served black and sweet from stockpots bubbling over fires. Busses, motorbikes, and cars filled the streets in metallic waves, then dispersed, one smoggy crush after another.

Getting inside the airport lobby required walking through a gate, around a couple of barriers, and then past a sandbag-fortified bunker, soldiers squinting out of their darkened fortresses with automatic rifles poking up in all directions.

The inside of the terminal was surprisingly small; really just a circular two-floored room that resembled a low-rent food court. We spied some benches and my heart sank: the seats were of the hard, scooped variety lined brightly in rows. Trying to sleep across them would be impossible, like trying to sleep across a giant, plastic egg carton.

But we were happy. We finished our trip relatively unscathed. Sure, we’d had our close calls: the half-sticks of dynamite thrown at us by laughing 12-year-olds on the Caribbean island of Utila; my stupidity of buying drugs on more than a few occasions; the scary ex-military dude who threatened to disappear me in El Salvador because I was asking around about the “body dumps” made famous during that country’s civil war.

I didn’t care. I fashioned myself some kind of brazen adventure-journalist a’ la Oliver Stone’s movie Salvador, and courted danger incessantly, romantically. As one of our last detours on this trip, Lisa and I traveled to the colonial city of San Cristobal de Las Casas in Chiapas, Mexico on the one year anniversary of the Zapatista uprising. The city was empty of tourists and little girls on the streets tried to sell us hand woven dolls of the rebel leader Marcos. One night, we heard the extended report of automatic gunfire reverberate from the hills and jungle as we sat writing postcards on our terrace. Things got real when I finally had an M-16 put in my face at a military checkpoint and almost pissed my pants. I understood then I was not an adventure-journalist.

And now, exhausted, we dropped our bags near a cluster of airport pay phones, (something we’d not seen in Guatemala before). I told Lisa I was going to call home and she said she needed to find the bathroom to wash up. She smiled at me and went wandering around a corner.

My older brother Brian answered the call, accepted the charges. Not having spoken to anyone in my family for so long had me prattling nonstop—I couldn’t help myself. Brian kept trying to interrupt me. He kept saying it was important. I was telling him about Tikal, the largest Mayan ruins yet discovered, and how Lisa and I saw the sunrise from the top of Temple #4, both of us standing above the jungle canopy, and about how it was one of the most transcendent moments of my life as I watched a flock of toucans fly by as the howler monkeys unleashed their resonating yawps and the sun burned away the pre-dawn mist.

“Chris, I need to tell you something,” Brian said again, his voice serious.

“Wait, wait,” I pleaded.

“Chris, are you listening? I need to tell you something.”

“What? Okay, fine. What is it?”

“Are you listening to me right now?”

That’s when I first felt panic, like the onset of a powerful fever, crawl my skin, the back of my neck, my arms. My throat constricted.

“Brian…what…”

“Chris, Lisa’s brother…”

Lisa had two brothers, but I immediately knew what he was going to say. And I knew which brother he was going to say it about.

“Please don’t…”

“Chris…”

“Brian, please don’t tell me…” I started crying. Right there at the cluster of phones in the Guatemala City airport.

“Lisa’s brother Paul is dead.”

“Stop telling me this.”

Across the way, Lisa came out of the bathroom and saw my face. She immediately came over, stood in front of me. She was angry. “Who is that? Is that Brian? What is he telling you?” Lisa knew Brian and I had had an up and down relationship over the years.

I looked away, waved my hand at Lisa to turn away too.

Brian explained to me that there was a car accident a few weeks ago, that no one back home knew how to reach us; that the funeral had already taken place. He said Lisa’s family would be waiting for us in Boston tomorrow.

I finally, somehow, said okay and hung up.

Lisa was looking right at me. “What? What did he say?”

I was thunderstruck, unable to process what just happened.

“Lisa, you need to call home.”

“Why? Why do I need to call home?” Her eyes softened a bit.

“I can’t…” I was terrified, overcome. I couldn’t believe I had to say this to her. Here, like this. It was an impossible proposition.

“Lisa, just call home.”

“Did something happen?” Lisa’s face went slack and her eyes welled. She knew. In fact, a few weeks before, she woke up in the middle of the night, screaming, a nightmare about her father dying. As we would discover later, that was the exact same night her brother Paul died.

“Is it Paul?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. And then, helpless, I watched the love of my life bury her face in her hands and begin to cry.

* * *

Lisa called home and spoke to her mother, broke again as she had the terrible news confirmed. We held each other for 30 minutes on the floor near the phones. Then we got up and dragged ourselves over to the benches and cried some more. Not a thing to be done. No one to save us.

I kept seeing Paul’s sweet face, and just couldn’t believe it. He was barely 19. The day we headed out for this trip six months ago, I hugged Paul a long time, as did Lisa. His hair was a bit crazy because he’s just woken up. He smelled good—like fresh sheets. He was living with his parents again at that point. Knowing how long we were going to be gone, Lisa and I cancelled our car insurance and left the car with her parents, but we’d learn that Paul would sneak it out one evening to attend an all-night rave. By morning, not having slept, he’d fall asleep at the wheel, cross the highway, and hit head-on a van filled with girls going to soccer practice.

As we said goodbye to him that last day, he reminded us to “be good” and write. We said of course.

Lisa now sat in my lap and shook. People walked around us this way and that like this was perfectly normal. I finally stood up and approached our airline provider, pleaded for an earlier flight, but they had nothing. No one did. My eyes burned as I described our plight to every airline agent in the building, hoping someone could do something, and began crying anew as I stood explaining myself at the last counter available.

The well-dressed man listened to me and made a sound with his mouth, like an apology, saying there was nothing, so sorry. At that point I realized with sickening clarity we were stranded until the morning: no money, no food, the only option to slowly dissolve into any sleep we might find.

It was impossible for things to get worse.

Then, after about two hours of sitting and staring at the floor, the lights started shutting off, one after the other. We looked around, confused. Metal grates were being pulled down in front of the counters, employees were exiting in their coats and jackets. The place was going into complete lockdown.

Finally, after a long silence and the place mostly deserted, a security guard approached us apprehensively, his tan uniform a bit too big on him. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But you need to leave. We are now closed.”

* * *

Paul was 18 when he came live with me and Lisa the year before. Lisa’s parents threw him out of the house. He was partying too much, not living by their rules and expectations; you know the drill. He liked nothing more than to listen to the Beastie Boys, smoke a ton of pot, and then go skateboard around town with his other slacker friends.

I could totally relate.

Lisa and I weren’t much older than Paul, (We were both 25), but I too left home at 18 while skateboarding around town and listening to Beastie Boys and smoking a ton of pot. Plus I did a lot of worse stuff. A lot worse. Yet when Paul moved in I knew I had to do something more than the “cool older brother” shtick; I had to be responsible…somehow. And that was a major pain in the ass.

* * *

Paul liked to sew. He even began making his own clothes. He talked pretty regularly about what he wanted for his future, all of his big plans, but one thing for sure was that kid was a natural designer. He played with all types of fabrics and patterns, experimented with texture and color. He made a pair of wide corduroy pants, but instead of the patterned lines going vertical like on any old pair of traditional corduroys, his went horizontal.

He did most of his sewing in private, in the spare room we provided. However, most of his stuff was left at his parents’ house, balled up and stuffed in the closet; teenage boys who sew don’t get a lot of respect from teenage boys who don’t.

“I want to make my own line of skate clothes,” he told us one night while the three of us sat around a table of spaghetti and garlic bread.

“Oh yeah?” Lisa asked.

“Yeah,” Paul said. And then he smiled. Paul was incredibly handsome, having one of those classic black and white photo handsome qualities, like he stepped fresh out of the 1940’s. He was a dead ringer for Red Sox legend Ted Williams, a man known both as one of the greatest baseball players to ever live and a merciless heartthrob.

“Do you have a name picked out for your brand?” I probed.

Paul was near bursting, hoping someone would ask.

“Yep. I’m gonna call them ‘Church Clothes’, because remember how on Sundays your mom would say, ‘Don’t go out and play until you change out of your church clothes’? Well, with my line, now you can.” He smiled again, stuffed a forkful of pasta in his mouth.

Paul, however, didn’t stay with us for long. We weren’t that much fun; I wouldn’t buy him beer and he knew he couldn’t smoke around us. But it was more than that—I understood we were a stop-gap until something better came along. In less than a month he said he was moving in with some friends over in Manchester, New Hampshire, and that we shouldn’t worry—he was going to figure stuff out.

* * *

The young guard proved nice enough, and after hearing our predicament, decided not to throw us out of the airport. We were relieved, and figured that was that for the night.

Then, about every two hours, a new batch of security guards came in, looked around, found us two zombie-like on the benches in the dark, their flashlights scarifying our faces, and proceeded to tell us the same thing: Leave or else. I even remember one guard in particular after we said we had nowhere else to go; he resembled a Warner Brothers cartoon wolf, laughing and rubbing his hands together while saying in English: “Then gimme a dollar.”

But Lisa and I were patient, explained we had no money, that we were misled to believe we could spend the night in the airport, and, please, in the name of God, (what the hell—they were Catholic), have mercy on us. We had got into a pretty good routine by the third or fourth time we were confronted. And the guards, all of them, would eventually relent and put their flashlights away, and move on.

Between the visits, Lisa and I would take sleep shifts: one of us would sit up in the hard plastic seat, awake and waiting for the next guard, while the other curled down and slept across that person’s lap. We’d switch after the guards left.

Then, around three a.m., we met Marco.

I was sleeping on Lisa’s lap when this new guard showed up. When he asked what we thought we were doing in there after hours, Lisa, calmly and slowly, explained that we didn’t have any money, had nowhere to go, and that we were literally getting on a plane in three hours.

“I don’t know,” the guard said. “It’s against the law.”

“I understand,” Lisa countered. ‘But we have no money, and…”

“I have money,” the guard said.

What I didn’t see, but Lisa told me later, is that the guard proceeded to take a large wad of bills from his pocket and showed it to Lisa. With his other hand, he put his finger to his lips, looked down at me.

Lisa was confused. I had woken up at this point, but played possum and continued to lie there motionless, not sure why it was suddenly so quiet.

“My name is Marco,” he said. “And if you need to make a little money, maybe we can strike a deal,”

“I don’t understand,” Lisa said.

“Well, I’m going to go over to that men’s bathroom. Why don’t you get up in five minutes, leave your boyfriend sleeping there, and come into the bathroom to meet me. You’ll earn your money. And you’ll like it. That’s our deal.”

“What?”

“You heard me. Respect my authority.” Marco became stern. “There is no one else in this building right now. Do you understand? We’re all alone. Go. To. The. Bathroom. Like I said… you’re going to love it anyway.” He smiled, Lisa said, and it was the kindest, most terrifying smile she’d ever seen.

“Wait, I can’t…we need your help, we have nowhere…” Lisa’s voice was shaking.

Her legs stiffened beneath my head and I understood things were about to spiral somewhere really bad. And I believed, no, I knew—call it gut, call it too many close calls in six months—if I didn’t do something, right then, the two of us might actually die in the that airport.

I sat up. “Hey, what’s going on? Oh, good evening, sir, how are you,” I asked in my best sleepy Spanish. Marco was standing there, legs spread, staring down at Lisa. He was only about three feet away and his right hand rested so casually atop his 9 mm that I expected him to look down at it and say: “Oh, this old thing?”

Marco introduced himself, said he was 23. He’d been a real cop before he got shot. Excitedly, I asked if I could see the scar. He was more than happy to oblige, unbuckling his pants a bit to show us the scar on his thigh. Lisa and I acted dually impressed. Okay, I thought. Now pull them up…pull them up. He eventually did, but slowly, deliberately.

I knew I had to just keep him talking, talking, talking. At one point, he asked if I wanted to see his gun, laughed, and said he was joking. Then he quickly asked me again. We laughed in unison this time and I thought I was going to throw up. But I didn’t care; I was determined to keep me and my fiancée safe until there were others, until there were witnesses.

Finally, around 5:30, a man in a suit and tie and long, flapping scarf, unlocked the front door, walked in, and flipped a light switch. He then unlocked and rolled up the grate to his American Airlines counter.

“Oh, looks like the workers are back,” I said, my voice rasped and shaky.

Marco wrote his phone number on a piece of paper, handed it to Lisa. He said to call him the next time we came to Guatemala, that he’d show us a good time. His eyes stayed locked on Lisa’s as he said this.

After he walked away, I asked Lisa for the scrap of paper. I looked down at Marco’s handwriting, coughed up a large loogie, and spit into the center. I then dropped the paper on the bench and said, “Let’s grab our bags and get the fuck out of here.”

* * *

Before boarding our plane, Lisa and I drank endlessly from the water fountain. I went to the bathroom, washed up, looked at myself in the mirror. I’d lost over 25 pounds in six months, grown a little goatee. Yet my face was ashen under its suntan; I looked like a ghost.

On one of the last nights that Paul was living with us in our apartment, I told Lisa I’d take him out for a bit, maybe get a bite at Taco Bell. I figured it a ruse in order to have the “So-What-Do-You-Want-From-Life” talk.

Sitting in the car in the restaurant parking lot, Paul spoke about how he knew things were a little screwed up for him at the moment, but that they were going to work out, that they had to work out, because he had a plan. I reassured him, kept saying things like “Of course,” and “Sure, sure.”

“Hey, is that that big water park across the street,” he suddenly asked.

I turned my head and looked. “Yeah, that’s Water Country. Friggin’ huge. Got, like, a wave pool and shit. Tons of slides.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, but they’re closed now. It’s almost nine.” I took a big chomp out of my chicken burrito.

“I’ve never been there,’ he said.

I looked up at Paul, and, before I could even stop myself, said: “Wanna see if we can break in?”

* * *

After we ran across the street, we walked back and forth in front of the big, wooden gates, staring up, looking side to side. I shook the gates a few times. A giant spotlight illuminated the sign next to the road, but not us.

“Locked up tighter than a drum,” I said.

“Maybe we can climb the walls,” Paul offered.

I noticed all the barbed wire running the perimeter and frowned. “Nah, we’ll get snagged and be hanging upside down like a couple of douchebags by the time the cops arrive.”

This made Paul laugh. I knew his laugh meant that we were off the hook. I sighed into the darkness, relieved.

As we ran back across the street, a cop car cruised by us, braked, swung around, and swiftly turned into the parking lot and up to my car as we were reaching for the door handles. I looked at Paul, and he was staring at the ground guiltily. I suddenly knew I had let him down, doing what I promised myself I wouldn’t, and now look what I’d done.

“What you boys doing,” the cop asked out his window, spotlight in our faces.

“Sorry sir, we left our hats at the water park today, and came back to get them, but didn’t know they were closed,” I lied, pointing at the water park for added effect.

“Really? Your hats?”

“Yes sir. Just didn’t know the place was closed. They’re special. Our hats. You know, Church Clothes brand? They’re really expensive and…”

“Okay, okay.” The cop was now bored, looked away. “Next time, call alright? It’ll save you a wasted trip.”

On the ride home, Paul and I couldn’t stop laughing. We went back and forth retelling what happened, and then laughed again. We decided not to tell Lisa, because she’d totally freak out. This was followed by a fresh burst of laughter.

“You see,” I said, merging onto the highway and back toward the safety of my apartment. “Church Clothes. You’re already famous.” I felt both hero and savior.

Paul’s smile filled the car, and I knew I loved him at that point, that he was my brother. “I know,” he said. “Didn’t I tell you I had a plan?”

* * *

Waiting to board our plane was excruciating. When they finally called our row, I was holding the back of Lisa’s head as she sobbed into my shoulder.

Our connecting flight took us to Houston. I ended up by the window and Lisa the middle seat. A large, boisterous, and friendly Texan sat in the aisle seat next to her. He engaged Lisa and me a bit, asked where we’d been, where we were going. He actually wore a white cowboy hat. Finally, he asked the question I was dreading:

“So, you two got any family? Brother and sisters?”

I said yes.

“What about you young lady, got any brothers or sisters?”

“Um, I have an older sister,” she said.

“Any brothers?”

Lisa’s voice was soft, like water: “Yes,” she said. “I have one brother.”

It was the bravest thing I’ve ever heard anyone say, and also the most unbearable. So I squeezed Lisa’s hand and looked out the window at the clouds, the great streaks of beautiful blue sky, and then closed my eyes.

END