Esteban and Martin
Esteban is not a big man, neither tall nor stout. His three-piece suit is pinch-tailored. You might call him dapper, except his suit is red, as is his shirt, as is his tie, as is his hat. Bright red. Neon red. Eyes follow him as he enters Café Delfini.
At a table at the edge of the room, Esteban pulls up a wire-back ice-cream chair from the mismatched seating. He removes his red hat and places his briefcase on the ground as a wave of silence moves out from table to table. When Esteban feels confident that his tomato-splash display has succeeded, that he has the room’s complete attention, he sweeps his arm like a ballerina, bows to pick up his oversized briefcase, and presents it on the table for all to see. His hand lingers on the handle and then disappears. On the side of the briefcase facing the room is a whiteboard, framed in gold. In fat black letters, it reads:
DEADBEAT
<———————
OWES $152,000
The restaurant patrons’ faces with dropped jaws turn from the red suited Esteban to the arrow directing them to the table next to him. Their, sitting alone, casual as a lifeguard, is the banker, Martin Osorio. Esteban has angled the briefcase so Osorio cannot read it. The air fills with choppy little chuckles and snorts that build and then subside. Osorio, also transfixed by Esteban’s crimson display, turns to face and join the derisive giggles, shrugs a laugh, and is shocked to find everyone staring, not at Esteban, but at him.
This is what Osorio’s father would call a moment with meaning, a moment that changes the moments to follow. The banker’s gaze returns to the spectacle of Esteban. Confused, Osorio’s hand, as if on its own volition, flicks a wave to the red-suited man. A murmur begins in the room. Esteban stands and with a slight bow to the banker slowly turns the briefcase to reveal its accusation. On impulse, Osorio looks behind for the deadbeat, then, recognizing the amount, his body jerks as if the arrow has released and pierced his chest.
Laughter echoes through the room like ripples in a pond. Patrons, waiters, even the kitchen staff poke out the swing doors to join the comedy. Osorio rises, fumbles with his napkin, takes a misstep from the table twice, returning for his phone and then his glasses, and stomps toward the exit. Esteban follows and passing the maître’d he hands him an inch-thick batch of red business cards for ‘Red Alert Collections’ along with a twenty euro note and suggests, confident of their request, “For your patrons.”
Leaving the Café Delfini, Esteban walks on Avenida Venezuela a few meters behind Osorio who is aware of his scarlet shadow. The banker envisions the catastrophe awaiting his entrance at Banco Santander with Esteban dogging him. “No, that won’t do” he thinks, “a plan is needed.” His immediate escape is simple as he hails a taxi.
Considering where Osorio might be headed, Esteban has a choice to make. He doubts he will go to the Bank, but might either head home or to his health club. Both would provide an immediate hiding place. The same thoughts echo for Osorio and he directs the taxi south, to the Loro Club.
Arequipe Peru is becoming a modern city and its new Google offices near the port are filled with techies that brought a trail of service providers to accommodate their health and happiness. Chic restaurants, boutiques, flower stores, hair and nail salons, spas, even gourmet food trucks, have popped up. The Loro Club became a desired ‘old school’ perk, its membership including the company’s management, bankers, business leaders, important bureaucrats of the city and the mayor.
During the taxi ride Martin resolves to plan for the red-man while he relaxes in the steam room. He marches through the club’s ornate doors, a taste of desperation burning his lips. Nodding as he passes the reception desk, he arrives at number 129 in the teak-paneled locker room and he strips. Heading toward the steam room, he returns and reopens his locker twice, to leave his glasses and to get his shampoo. Finally, sitting in a haze of 45-degree steam, his balls resting on the crested cockatoo logo of the Loro Club towel, Martin Osorio takes stock of his situation.
The debt, $152,000, the result of Martin’s affinity for danger, was only one of many. He had an idea, and not a man to wait for something that will never happen, he believed there was no time to delay. Still, the memory is hazy, like a dream.
It was three years ago, a wish that he had continuously put off, an exclamation point to his hang-glide hobby. He had promised his bride, Miranda, to end jumping off cliffs supported by a flimsy aluminum frame and small Dacron sail. “Just one more time”, he pleaded. What he had in mind was the ‘cherry jump’, the drop off Mervinup, known as The Smile, in the Sierras near the southwest coast of Peru. There, the cross winds, down drafts, and thermals are known to be treacherous. Miranda acquiesced, and Martin seized the chance to do something he never before dared, something incredibly difficult and dangerous that he knew could only be accomplished with complete confidence in a smooth effortless manner.
Martin remembered the day, March 25, his birthday, a back throat taste of bad memories. Before dawn, he and Miranda exited Hotel Altamira heading for Mount Mervinup.
Jorge Mohr from the Federation Aeronautique Internationale drove the Mercedes van that carried them and Lorenzo Marchado, who would also fly. Jorge focused on driving the twisted route up, Martin clenched Miranda’s hand, and Lorenzo, who on occasion experienced vertigo, meditated. The night before, the weather had been considered and accepted as reasonably safe. In the buttery golden glow of first light, the mountain loomed ahead like an explosion, its summit piercing through thick, puffy clouds and highlighting the severe drop on the western slope.
Martin chuckled to himself thinking how ironic to recall that freezing day three years ago while baking in the steam room of the Loro Club. Then he trembled and wheezed hot steam, remembering that his skin tight body sock, matching helmet, and soft leather boots were all bright red.
Now in total focus, he remembered the plan. The uniqueness of Mount Mervinup’s standing waves provide both ridge-lift and its alternating areas of sink. There would be no problem to find winds rising faster than the glider’s sink rate. Still, it was crucial for Martin to time his flight to accommodate the well-known pattern of three-four. He must avoid the three downdraft winds, screeching 100 kph along the cliff, and embrace a series of four ridge-lifts. The surety of the wind’s rhythm along the cliff-face was crucial for a safe entry to the ten-meter lift band that extended off the mountain.
Sitting in the steam Martin questions his original decision to make that flight. Once again, he asks himself, ‘Why did I?’ Martin would always avoid that question, for it brought guilt and anxiety. So instead he recalls the flight protocols and it calms him to remember:
There was the protocol of assembling the bird – control bar, kingpost, triangle, harness belt.
There was the equipment protocol, and Martin lip-speaks as if to Jorge, ‘the carabinder tight, batons in parallel, turnbuckles secured at 89 torque.’
There was the weather protocol, and though they frequently lied about many things, they never lied about the weather.
There was the good luck protocol where Miranda held him tightly and looked at him with wide eyes, trusting, and hopeful.
There was the execution protocol to do all things necessary like the centipede’s skill in using a hundred legs at once.
Martin almost always hit a speed-bump when thinking back to that moment when he held Miranda in that squealing wind. The slightest distraction would interrupt his reverie, taking Miranda out of his arms. It happened more often than not, but if not, then remembrances of the flight itself would start.
Sitting on the white-tiled bench in the stinging steam heat, Martin allows the memory of the flight to materialize. His eyes close and the image of Miranda fades. He sees a sky that looks like a burnt photograph, singed with curled edges.The freezing air blows in a dry, wheezy rhythm, whipping a Peruvian flag that marks a boundary. Jorge kneels twenty-meters ahead at the cliff’s edge. It is so cold. Martin stands twenty meters back from the jump spot. Tight in his harness, one with the bird, a sick flop in his stomach, he begins to run, his eyes fixed on Jorge who is monitoring the three-four wind pattern. With perfect timing, Jorge drops his arm on the second ridge-lift and Martin leaps off the mountain’s rim into the empty sky. He shoots straight up as if yanked by a wire. Miranda watches as he flies into the void, shrinking into the sky like a rock down a well, a red blur. Wooosh.
It did not go well. Within a few seconds Martin’s glider jerks this way and that, flip-flops in a corkscrew wind, and smashes against the mountain. Yet, without any particular skill, Martin was saved, dumped like a sack of onions on a small mountain outcrop three-hundred meters below the jump-base and a two-thousand meters above the valley. The bird was not particularly damaged but he immediately knew it would be suicidal to attempt a leap off the tiny foothold. His first reaction saved his life as he pulled the emergency release cord just as a ridge-lift wind snatched the glider into the abyss. The excruciating pains in his leg, back, and shoulder told him any movement was going to be a tortuous challenge. He was helpless.
The steam machine kicked in, fogging the room. Martin whimpered and asked himself, ‘Who likes to feel helpless?’ A slave to logic, he particularly remembered the thought of rescue, that it had been illusory and that Jorge and Miranda, even if they witnessed the destruction of the glider, would not know that he had survived. The astonishing clarity of his catastrophe had stunned him. He kept adding thought to thought in the dark and then went to sleep, or perhaps feinted.
The night passed in pain. He thought about his childhood, how he had been a rough kid, loud, happy, and excited. He realized that the plot of his life made no sense anymore, that there was no life waiting for him because he had never bothered to build one. Why the compulsion for thrills, the inevitable march toward disaster, a life based on substance abuse? Under an eyelash of moon and the wild, wicked squealing wind, he resolved to change if he survived.
Around mid-day a Peruvian Coast Guard helicopter hovered above the adventurer. A crewman and gurney basket descended via pneumatic hoist, found Martin with several broken parts and hypothermia, and was able to extricate him from the ledge. Tied in the basket, Martin was reeled up to the helicopter spinning like a top. The $152,000 was the demand by the Peruvian Coast Guard for the rescue.
In the Loro Club, the roaring hiss of steam ended and Martin sat in silence. Sweat poured off his face. He both felt and heard his heart beat, thudding, just as he had that night on the mountain. He became conscious of his consciousness and it made him feel alive. It was liberating then and more so now, bringing a smile of validation. “Yes,” he thought, “Once something bad happens, it can’t be undone. You hold it somewhere in the back of your mind. Rescue doesn’t stop it from being with you every second of every day.”
Freshly showered, Martin stands at locker 129 with his Loro Club towel wrapped tight. He breaths deeply, his chest swelling, his stomach loosening the towel. He notices a mustached man standing not far away, also wrapped with a bird-towel. There was a familiar quick look that happens in a locker room, a glance of recognition. Martin watches the man turn to his locker and, again, a nod perhaps as the man belts his red pants. It is only a moment, struggling with one pant-leg in, Martin sees Esteban grin and slip into his red shirt. Martin, hopping like a drunken frog, finally sleeving his other leg, he pulls his pants up, admits the comedy and surprises himself by beginning to laugh - a jerky laugh. Then he surrenders to the farce, a suck of air and an explosive laugh; and then a roar and bounce to locker 134 for support, laugh. What follows are uncontrolled deep, throaty howls and hoots - as if it was the best thing that happened to him in years.