Colored engraving of a large scorpion, Buthus granulatus. Courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London, and Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC0 4.0.
1.
In the weeks before I left for Mexico, the flies showed up. My apartment became overrun with them, the size of small red grapes, five to ten ripe orbs at a time buzzing around in any given room. A fly or two had never bothered me, so I was able to balance my pacifist instincts with a more rigorous approach to housekeeping; I took the trash out every other day, and if I saw an errant roach in the bathroom I would kill it, the way you wash a glass in the sink without thinking twice. The flies radicalized me. They wheeled through the apartment, attacking every cubic foot of open space, refusing to be ignored. It sent me into a fugue state of bloodlust. I wondered if there was a corpse they were drawn to that I couldn’t see. Maybe I was the corpse.
I became obsessed with stalking and killing every last one of them, fantasizing that if I could annihilate them all before the sun went down, the problem would be solved. But it never worked. I slaughtered twenty-five at a time—my windows, ceiling, and rolled-up copies of The New Yorker splattered with gore. I’d wipe down nearly every wall and window in my apartment to keep other flies from coming back for the blood and guts. But they always returned.
But I never killed the spiders in the apartment, as a rule. I reasoned that they would help keep the place clean by catching flies. They didn’t. I resented them for not pulling their weight. “Do better,” I whispered, gently but not kindly, crouched over one little
translucent creature
coterminous with the dust
behind my bookcase.
2.
I took the trash out again before I flew to Mexico City to meet Andrés, bringing along a copy of my book for his family in Chiapas.
On the far side of the Plaza de las Tres Culturas—Andrés insisted we go straight from the airport—pyramids decked out with little spirals carved into the stones, like the phonemes of fingerprints. At the top of the square there was a massive Spanish colonial cathedral built with those same stones, stolen from the pyramids, punched through with blue windows glowing in the rain like the frozen blood of blacklight. Finally, across from the pyramids, a towering block of public housing—on its roof, in 1968, President Ordaz had sent snipers to shoot the students gathered there to protest his government in what became known as the Tlatelolco Student Massacre. This place is a microcosm of what goes on here, Andrés told me: Teotihuacan, the Aztecs, the Spanish, the communists, something keeps getting violently overthrown.
In the morning we headed to Coyoacán for breakfast. It was September 19, the date of not one but two devastating earthquakes, in 1985 and 2017. To commemorate this uncanny twin anniversary, and in honor of the thousands killed by a combination of terrible luck and criminally shitty infrastructure, the city now runs an annual earthquake drill. Sirens went off as Andrés and I were having coffee. We walked outside into a small plaza, led by smiling volunteers in orange vests, and stood patiently, waiting for nothing to happen.
From under our feet, a silent chord rippled through us. We looked at one another. “Do you feel that?” I said. Slowly at first, gathering force, a hanging lamp swung
like a pendulum,
the planet twisted inside
its elastic shell
and then the ground went still. Purple jacaranda blossoms fluttered from the trees. Several people in the plaza crossed themselves. Later, a researcher calculated that the odds of a third earthquake happening in Mexico City on September 19 had been somewhere between 0.000751% and 0.00000024%. As we finished breakfast, Andrés looked at his phone and shook his head. His father had texted: “The dead are kicking.” We hit the road.
3.
Andrés and I met in a freshman English class, gleefully arguing about the Iliad. It was a deep and occasionally caustic bond. After we graduated, he and his brother Juan and I shared an apartment in Brooklyn. Juan and I never quite took to one another. He was a painter—brooding, strange, and quietly volcanic. When we first met, he asked if I would make art as the world were ending—that’s the kind of question he asked people when he first met them. It was a test. My answer—probably not—was a drop of poison in our relationship. I had little patience for this brand of purity and found his pious death drive clownish and immature. We lived together for a miserable year in the depth of the 2008 recession and then parted ways—Andrés and I to grad school in different cities in the Midwest, Juan back to Mexico to paint.
I wrote an elegy called “The Art Buyer,” not long after receiving word that he had slipped on a rock and fallen into a waterfall he’d been painting in Las Nubes, a remote part of the Chiapas rainforest by the Santo Domingo River, where Andrés and I were now driving. Or was it an elegy? I loved Juan, but the love felt strangely vacant, like a doorway you keep expecting someone to darken. It was that kind of poem. One problem with elegy is that it tends to valorize its subjects, erasing ugliness in all directions, including in the poet—I tried to foreground my strain with Juan in my own poem, which Andrés liked. He likes conflict and disagreement. I like to remind him of it.
At some point many years ago, I bought Andrés a copy of The Mooring of Starting Out, a collection of John Ashbery’s first five books, which he never read. I found it on his shelf as we were packing and threw it in the car. We argued about it.
“The problem with Ashbery is he’s too American,” Andrés said, driving us through the weaponized vegetation on the road between Puebla and Oaxaca, having never so much as read a whole poem, trying to bait me. In college, at the height of the Bush administration’s war in Iraq, I’d once tried to disavow my status as an American. The country was nothing but a bunch of jingoistic pigs, I claimed, and I wanted nothing to do with it. He was livid. “Of course you’re American,” he replied, shaking his head. “You’ve benefited from this country your entire life. Claiming you haven’t only proves it.” He wasn’t always right, but he was that time. And that’s how it is with us. He playfully asked me to fight him once, then punched me in the head so hard he fractured his hand.
He wasn’t wrong about Ashbery either. Particularly in the early books, Ashbery is the consummate expat—imbued with a folksiness artfully deranged by tangled, sublimated desire and grief, perhaps even violence. Some attribute this to Ashbery’s sexuality, others to the death of his own younger brother in childhood. Andrés had sniffed out the microtonal dissonance of a sublimely gifted, uneasy agent of American empire. It is difficult not to sense the covert action and longing that charge from the poems’ margins. Even when he is faithfully describing a painting, his presence changes it.
Humoring me, Andrés listened intently as I read aloud from the book. I reached “These Lacustrine Cities,” the opening poem of Rivers and Mountains, and came to its final lines: “You have built a mountain of something, / Thoughtfully pouring all your energy into this single monument, / Whose wind is desire starching a petal, / Whose disappointment broke into a rainbow of tears.”
He was silent for a moment behind the wheel. “Whoa,” he said.
As we made our way into the mountains of northern Oaxaca, a cop pulled us over. Andrés rolled down the window. He stared at her blankly—she didn’t frighten him enough, or she frightened him too much. There was a thin burst vessel in the white of her eye. She searched our car on the side of the road. As she flipped through Andrés’s passport, her face was stony. But when she saw mine, she looked up at me and smiled. Then she sent us on our way.
We drove for three days, wending deeper into the forest, sometimes going hours out of our way to avoid roadblocks and checkpoints.
On the third day we entered Chiapas. Around a bend in the road, a group of masked men flagged us down. I shot Andrés a look.
“They’re Zapatistas, not Narcos,” he said, rolling his eyes, telling me to chill. He said hello and handed the men a few pesos. One gave us a pamphlet. They let us go with a friendly wave.
Hours later, we were driving along a lush ravine. Below, the Santo Domingo plunged between mountains.
“I want to show you something funny,” he said.
He drove into a parking lot near a series of lakes. Deep mineral deposits had colored them a shade of otherworldly blue, like the stained glass windows on the cathedral at the Plaza de las Tres Culturas. A slimy length of black rope hung awkwardly over the water.
I asked what the rope was for.
“You’ll see,” he told me.
We entered a small gazebo with a sign bearing a faded painting of a toucan and the words bienvenidos a guatemala, directly aligned with the rope over the lake.
What is a line? It’s not that borders aren’t real—they’re just imaginary. Here in the rainforest, standing before an unmanned gazebo, they seemed almost childish. If they didn’t result in mass death and dispossession it would be funny, the imposed psychosis of the whole operation coming into slapstick relief, a monstrous clarity—
enter here, not
here or here. This side is space
but this is domain.
We strolled through the gazebo into Guatemala. A dog emerged from the woods and followed us as we passed small houses and shacks, chickens running between the yards. Then it got bored with us and loped back into the forest.
4.
We continued until we pulled into the village of Las Nubes, paid for our cabin, and drove down a steep hill to the river. Summer was over, and there was no one else there. Hibiscus and bird-of-paradise flowers hung everywhere, and the spiked sunset skins of lychee covered the ground. A line of ants carrying hacked up bits of leaf five times the size of their bodies stretched into the forest. Toucan chatter fizzed from the trees. Beyond the cabins was the Santo Domingo, a faint roar. We dropped off our things in the cabin. Andrés warned me to zip my bag. “I accidentally brought a tarantula home once.”
We reached the path to the falls at dusk. We would perform our ritual in the morning—this was just to get a feel for the place. The river had overflowed, and we had to remove our shoes and lift them above our heads. The water rose to our waists. “I’ve never seen it so high,” Andrés said. The path sloped up and we stepped onto a stone platform fortified with rough mortar. There was a railing.
What can I say about what was beyond it? The water gave the most ferocious display of physical force I’ve ever witnessed firsthand. Mist gripped my throat from the inside; it sensed us, and we were of no particular interest. Above us, a cave pinched the river’s flow into a space the size of my bedroom, shooting through in a bone-crushing current that bloomed and tumbled down below us, widening hundreds of yards. This bottleneck accounted for the river’s relentless power. The entire landscape looked ready to crumble. From this close up, the roar of the water erased almost every other sound. In the small space above the cave, a hole punched clean through a mountain, a doorway waiting for someone to darken it, swallows flickering back and forth, whitewater leaping behind their hollow silhouettes. Spray dripped down our faces. On the cliff overlooking the whole scene the rock’s discoloration formed the unmistakable shape of a massive skull.
Andrés pointed to the railing. In this spot, for two years, some drips of acrylic paint from Juan’s last painting had endured the elements. But the river’s atmospheric cataract had by now stripped them away, save for one tiny speck of sky blue.
The clouds turned gunmetal as the sun went down. It was time to get back to the cabin. We waded through the water, a brown spider the size of my hand gripping a nearby tree trunk. We ran up to the cabin and the sky cracked open. There was no electricity, and it was dark. We lit cigarettes under the awning as rain bombarded the roof. When he took a drag, I saw tears in Andrés’s eyes, but they didn’t fall. “This place is so him,” he said. Frogs called out a rough symphonic drone. The hands in his wristwatch
phosphoresced, small v
rhyming with the glowworm
crawling at his feet.
We entered the cabin by the light from our phones. I opened the bathroom door to take a leak. On the floor, in the weak magnesium glare, I saw a large black scorpion.
5.
Andrés let out a low sigh, and I choked back a scream. I had never seen one in the flesh. Usually when we confront something we fear, reality turns out to be softer than the monstrosity our psyches have concocted for us. But the scorpion was precisely as horrifying as I’d imagined, a creature plucked directly from childhood nightmares. “It must have come in through the shower drain,” Andrés whispered, though there was no one around for miles. “They travel in pairs.” We didn’t see its mate.
We quickly hatched a plan: We would place a cup over the scorpion, and in the morning we would slip a piece of paper underneath and transfer it outside. But when we dug through our bags, we found we didn’t have a cup or any other tools to deal with the situation at hand.
“If Johnny were here he would just let it be,” Andrés said. “He let them crawl all over him. Never even killed a roach.” I recalled Juan staring at a silverfish in our shared bathroom with a dark beam of murder emanating from his face, but I held my tongue.
We turned our flashlights back to the floor. The scorpion was gone.
We looked everywhere—behind the toilet, in the corners, and, shielding our faces, on the ceiling. Then I turned my flashlight to the corner by the door. At eye level, between the second and third hinges, spiked black feet rippled slowly up the jamb.
A pincer reached around the wood, and a long, segmented, prehensile tail dragged a venomous little knife behind it, curling.
“Cute of Juan to let this crawl on him,” I said. “But what about you? Do you want to wake up with this in your bed?”
He considered it for a moment. “I don’t.”
There was only one option.
“I’m sorry,” Andrés whispered. I pulled the door hard, slammed it shut, my knuckles white on the knob. When I opened it again, the scorpion’s dead weight fell from the jamb to the floor with a sickening click. Our light fell on the little creature, intact but slightly flattened, motionless on the ground. Andrés sighed. Johnny would have let it live.
“Are you sure it’s dead?” I said.
“I don’t know man, it looks pretty fucking dead,” he said.
“It does look dead. It’s dead.”
He ripped out a page from his journal to scoop up the body.
The tail curled. A pair of pincers reached up through the damp air.
In a single motion, Andrés pulled off his boot and slammed it on the ground five times until the scorpion was a black smear on the tile.
“Now I’m pretty sure it’s dead,” I said. I was uncomfortably aware of my pulse. Andrés brushed black exoskeleton and guts onto a ripped notebook page. When you neutralize
the the you fear most
back to its indefinite
article, there is
nothing you can do but confront it in your dreams. He checked his sheets, crawled into bed, and immediately fell asleep, breathing heavily. I lit a candle, sat down at a desk, cracked a lychee open, and listened for what was talking in the rain’s static on the roof. I wrote this down. A green and black spider crawled across my notebook. I picked it up, cracked the cabin door, and sent it out to make a home between raindrops. I returned to the desk. Wind blew hot wax across the words. A second spider appeared on the page.
6.
The water had risen overnight from the rain, and by dawn, when we were back at the river, it reached up to our chests at the lowest point of the trail. We approached the platform and lit three votive candles. “These will go out in two minutes with all the mist,” Andrés said, “but whatever.” We stepped to the edge of the platform, and he nodded at me to start.
I read the “The Art Buyer” slowly, almost shouting each word so Andrés could hear, though he was right next to me. “Poetry has done its work on you,” I read, though I did not remember writing that. As soon as my voice hit the air it sounded like a whisper. The pages of the book turned pulpy as I read, the text blurring in the moisture. When I ripped them out they tore smoothly, without a sound, like flesh from a steamed fish. One by one I threw them in long, slow arcs into the Santo Domingo, which instantly whipped them away; they seemed to dissolve just before hitting the water.
When I finished, we grinned. We were drenched. The cliffside skull above us stared into the clouds. The candles had melted into a pool of wax. We left them burning.
All this actually happened, but none of it is real, except as poetry. I render this border almost automatically, without trying, starting with the word “I”: Here I am, in this line of text, where I am not. But this line is porous—it has holes that no one can account for where poetry, reality, the living and the dead, slip back and forth undetected.
“Reading you reading me,” Andrés texted me the other day, after looking at an early draft of this account, “I feel perhaps distant, oracular. Priestly maybe. Which is fine, it’s a role I can certainly play. But we have all kinds of disagreements that your more mythological retelling of the trip occludes.”
“You love disagreement as an aesthetic ideal,” I texted back.
“I don’t agree!” he replied. I laughed.
The day after we left Las Nubes, as we were driving through Chiapas, a tiny chapel on a steep hill appeared up ahead of us. Apparently San Andrés walked there, Andrés told me, and sometimes people burned offerings by the chapel.
I asked him to pull over.
At the top of the hill I took the remainder of the book from my backpack—“The Art Buyer” now torn out—spreading it over the ash as Andrés watched, lighting the damp pages that somehow still burned, the flame turning blue and green as it crept up the spine and touched the cover, and when the poems crossed from one state of matter to the next the distance was next to nothing
through the air’s net, gray letters
legible for one
or two seconds in the breeze.
A light rain began to fall.
Daniel Poppick is the author of The Police and of the National Poetry Series winner Fear of Description.
