Bad Influence.

PART ONE: ATMOSPHERIC DISTURBANCE

1.     Copán

She says, “Marco, one of us is the bad influence, but we’ve been friends so long I don’t remember which.”

I keep cranking the lever on the winch. I hate it when she talks like this. Among other things, “friends” just isn’t the word.

“I mean, how did we even get into this—again?” She has that tone in her voice—sex, thinly veiled—that happens when she’s doing something whose illegality is offset by its pointlessness. Her cheeks are pink in the floodlight and the words catch in her throat in the way they do when a woman tries to conceal her arousal.

The winch winds all the way up and a box emerges from the dry well. It’s rectangular, about a foot by two feet, slick at the bottom but dry at the top. Both Mariah and I reach for it, lifting it out together. It’s too heavy for its size. A very dark hardwood, with metal strips sealing the edges. Its top is inlaid with rose quartz, gold, cinnabar, and pale jade in a Mesoamerican serpent design. The lock is gold and decorative. I fight the temptation to see if I can break the box with my hands.

Because this job is not pointless for a man like me. I have Patrick to consider. The thought of Patrick sends a spasm of pride and anxiety down my spine. He’s whip-smart, my son, and they let him into the school for gifted students, admission to which is predicated on IQ scores. His IQ shocked even the admissions committee, who made him take the test a second time. Even with his scholarship the tuition is killing me. I ran a construction crew, while married, until my rotator cuff injury. I was already fifty-two when my wife got pregnant. Then she died and Patrick became what I lived for. Workers comp ran out, but I still had some underworld contacts, from an older life. I did a job here, a job there to keep us afloat, mostly small, uncomplicated robberies, feeling shitty after each one. Frank (not his real name) introduced me to Mariah when we needed a honeypot to access a tech billionaire’s Los Altos home. I’m not sure why but she requested to work with me again after that. Each job I do with Mariah is another “last job,” and then she finds us another. She’s always there when I’m starting to get desperate for money.

I realize I’m angling my hands to see if the box will break under the pressure, but it remains intact.

Mariah Laghmani does not need the money. Her parents wed in an oil alliance: Jakartan mother whose company manufactured mining equipment, Qatari oil magnate father who used her equipment. Mariah lived an heiress’ life in New York, Dubai, Milan, and Doha, but she’s just as comfortable in seedier milieus. She has the kind of angular, high-drama looks that, while not beautiful, are effective on fashion runways and can tidily silence a room. She studied modern dance and linguistic anthropology at Columbia, and her intelligence fairly crackles from her body like static electricity, though, knowing its value, she deploys it only when the occasion requires. Mariah’s fingers are always in motion—her long, finger-like toes each have a ring on them and curl over the top step of the stairs—and her restlessness reads like addiction. I see her as addiction itself. Risk is her poison. I know better than to pair up with such a one, but I give in each time she calls and I’m drowning in bills. Despite all, watching her fingers shake as she takes the slick box in her arms, my mind reels ahead a few hours to what will happen in the hotel once we get there, and lust kicks up indolently inside me, thumps its tail once before settling into a familiar stupor. I see her wanting to open the box. I see her see, like I did, if the lock would give, accidentally. The wanting flashes across her skin like the flash of a fish’s body in murky water. Our pay depends on our returning the box intact, but we could recoup some, maybe, if its opening was accidental. Frank didn’t tell us what was inside.

I pack up the winch, hoisting it into the back of the pickup truck. I wipe my brow. The night air is unusually hot and dense. Global warming, they say—strange weather phenomena across the globe, with a yearly increase in weather-related fatalities.

We bump down the dirt road away from the well where the box was left for us by some other party, known to Frank but unknown to us. We are only one part of an elaborate chain of custody, charged with retrieving and transporting the item across the Guatemalan border into Honduras. The well looks serene and untouched in the moonlight. The moon above softens the whole scene like a haiku, a seasonal nugget of wistful beauty, a little mono no aware, which is how my best friend, Kaito, described the cherry blossoms in Kyoto, when we were there on that job, stripping the TaiyoWorld server farm of its usernames and credit card data.

“‘The sadness of the temporary,’” he’d said in his precise English, hand raised to include the whole scene. “Mono no aware. Try to feel it, Marco.”

This was over twenty years ago, long before I was married, when the world was full of endless, unfurling future. Kaito and I each held a Kirin among the blossoms. They swirled down around us. We sat on a bench. Two girls in school uniforms, most likely sisters, giggled in front of us, whispering to each other behind cupped hands. They walked the meandering paths through Maruyama Park. They spoke with such excruciating intimacy that my eyes welled up. There was no loneliness like watching the two of them. The blossoms spiraled everywhere and I felt it flash through me, the mono no aware, the sense that this perfect moment was slipping away as it began.

“See gaijin?” Kaito was watching my face. “Even you feel it.”

Yes. Its flash was like a vein of ore in ordinary rock. The smell of spring was a sad song not quite recognized, that makes the ear strain and yearn toward it. Then it was gone.

Kaito, too, is gone. Graci, his Spanish wife, invited me to the scattering of his ashes over Lake Biwa. The sun set slowly behind the torii of the Shirahige Shrine. The water below reflected the setting sun. Half of his ashes hung in the windless air—his concession to Graci’s Western roots. The other half were to be interred in his family plot. I was not invited to that ceremony.

The only time I felt that vein of feeling, exquisite and unbearable, run through me, since it did with Kaito in the park, was when Patrick was born: Wonder and anguish and a kind of tragic luckiness that this thing had happened to me, so late in life, even though I ill-deserved it.

I shake the memory off. I’m too easily distracted by the past. I need to get my head in the game.

We find the unpaved service road separating the two countries, empty as promised, and cross the border. In the truck beside me, Mariah stretches and I look at the long lines of her body, each rib standing out beneath her blue cotton top. Were I younger, the stretch would illicit an unexamined surge of desire. But from my vantage I see it for what it is. Some girls have personality. Some have seduction. Nor can you blame them; it works with greater efficiency. I’d use it, too, if it were my superpower. Personality is an admittedly slow burn.

I’ve watched Mariah idly seduce men half my age. That stretch, on display in a roomful of men, making sure her chosen sees she was a dancer with a dancer’s grace and dexterity. The room takes notice. She makes the stretch seem unscripted, a private moment of enjoyment: a girl and her body. Then she sweeps her eyes like she doesn’t know everyone’s watching. Around the room they beacon until they are caught by the sight of the prey. Her eyes say they have been snagged in his net; shipwrecked on his rocks. But it’s he who’s caught. The man and Mariah share an animal look until she forces her eyes away. And then she stands as though confused, waiting for his approach.

He approaches four times out of five. He thinks: We can’t help ourselves.

But in truth the trick is easy, cheap, and repeatable, and she does it when she needs something and even sometimes when she’s bored.

Mariah needs something from me now. She uses sexuality to get it not because she thinks I’m fooled but because she thinks I like the dance. We’re both in the mood after a job, flesh still ticking with adrenalin but hours of waiting ahead; wondering, together, what that box might contain, trying to keep our minds off it. Whatever she wants from me, I wish she would just ask. These days I find dances exhausting.

The mattresses in this Honduran hotel are very thin, topped with colorful blankets. A painted Virgin Mary spreads her arms above the beds. We don’t have separate rooms because then only one of us would have the box and we do not trust each other. We wait for our contact, who is scheduled to arrive at 11 am. It’s only 5:43 am now. I lie with my hands behind my head. I’m thinking about Patrick. He’s with my mother-in-law, who is only about ten years older than I am. I’m sick with the slurry of love, pride, and regret that sloshes in my chest as I imagine him riding his bike along her sleepy street. This is no kind of life for an older father. A lament I make too often.

Mariah is itsy-bitsy-spidering on her bed, walking her long fingers up each alternating thumb. Her foot, atop her knee, jiggers up and down. The box in its felt bag isn’t visible given the way my head is angled, but it seems to exude heat from the nightstand between us, and a kind of ambient vibration. I feel its low, steady hum in my groin. I feel it invoke in both of us a sense of greedy branching possibility, and the room is electric with it.

Mariah gets up all at once. Something is on her mind. I hope she will tell me what it is, but instead she kneels on the bed and begins to itsy-bitsy-spider her fingers up my leg. OK, this is what we’re doing. I let her crawl up my body. I watch, arms behind my head, before languorously reaching out for her. I let her softness wipe my mind clean.