Non-fiction
Fragments
Of Bus Rides and Visas
Despite only being the fourth most dangerous car ride I had taken in that 10-day trip, I was still not quite accustomed to such a shanty minibus speeding this fast on the pot-holed Grand Trunk Road at dusk. I had already survived an "ambulance" ride in a carry diba which ran over a cat and a dog on the way— so-called only because of a few parchment bandages stuffed in the trunk — a long bus ride through Diameer Bhasha— where a landslide blocked our road and we got rear-ended by a truck—, the jeep ride to Fairy Meadows— where if I stuck my head out I might as well have upset the center of gravity of the entire machine and sent it falling down into a crevice—, not to mention the other minibus in which we ended up getting into a road rage situation and our driver had to threaten the driver of the soapbox-sized car with a wrench—though I suppose that would be the fifth.
The minibus seemed to hover above the tarmac, and whenever the driver pressed the horn, which he did whenever a vehicle was seen in a 200-meter radius, it let out the entire hour-long rendition of a symphony from Bach. It managed to cover the 3-hour distance between Pir Wadhai station in Rawalpindi and Mirpur in a speedy 3 hours - an impressive feat for a Hiace with 20 people sitting in it. Much like the minibus, I hovered too, half of me in the air right next to the sole exit/entry door, as my neighbor had elected to put all his mortal belongings, and maybe even some of the gifts promised to him in heaven, on a part of my seat.
"Are you from Mirpur?" he asked me. It was a silly question. I would have tried to explain to him how no one emigrates to smaller cities, the poor quality of educational and professional opportunities in Mirpur, and how it was downright mathematically certain that, of course, I was from Mirpur - for why else would someone in their right mind go to the city? However, I had asked him earlier, "How much is the ticket for?" which arguably is a stupider thing to ask someone who - it turns out - is not the conductor of the bus, and so I instead replied with a simple "Yes." I mentioned that I was returning home from the US as I had studied abroad. Given that I was in a Hiace with a small luggage bag only, there was a fat chance this was true, and the guy probably knew it too. It was a lie; I had returned home 10 days ago, but as soon as I came I had left again, venturing north with my friends, so in a spiritual sense, it felt right to say and much more terse than whatever my mind could capture of the events from the last 10 days.
"Are you from Mirpur?" I asked.
"No," he said, explaining how he was actually from Faisalabad, applying for a UK visa. I hadn't known this, but there were only three British consulates in Pakistan: Islamabad, Karachi, and Mirpur - due to the heavy immigration to the UK from my city. He was surprised that I had no one in my immediate family who lived in the UK, but then again, I was studying in the US, and the stereotype fit just the same.
"But why are you coming from Islamabad then?" I was perplexed; he probably would've been better off just going to the consulate in Rawalpindi, but he explained how the appointments there had been booked all the way through to some unknowable future date. Mirpur had free slots earlier, and he was in a hurry to go to the UK and make a quick buck, so he stopped in Islamabad for one night before heading back south to Mirpur.
We talked about where he was staying (I knew the spot) and what or where Sector F1 was (I explained to him), and I told him to reach out if he needed any help (he did not in the two days he was in the city). I was struck by how much this man was traveling just for a UK visa, to a random town like Mirpur, which he would have no interest in or reason to visit otherwise. I thought about how convenient my life had been - born into the privilege of studying abroad, having better pipelines to success, and a visa office I hadn't even known about until minutes ago, sitting just a 15-minute drive from home. Outside, the last of the dusk sun reddened a rotating pattern of unkempt fields and dust-colored hills.
The red glare cast shadows onto the interior of the Greyhound bus that hovered through the freeways between SF and LA: far from home and from anywhere near my list of most dangerous bus rides. I was on my way to answer the call of the Argentine consulate, who had been so kind as to offer me a visit to their office 1000 kilometers away for my Argentine visa application. To not inconvenience them as hosts or waste ink writing my name in some register of theirs or occupy some bits in their computer counter system, I had tried to excuse myself. Despite my insistence that I had work, that it was a Wednesday, and why I was needed there in the first place when none of my classmates were (because of my Pakistani passport), I had failed. 2 months after meeting the unnamed traveler, I was reminded of him on my way to LA, as I stared into a deep purple sky.
—-----------------
Notes from Buenos Aires
Just like a person unable to sleep tosses and turns, I too hop from the room's table to the common floors of the building to cafes, mostly to no avail. Enough time spent ricocheting between different Café Martinezes, and having seen the ones on my side of the Avenida de Julio, I began to exile myself to Palermo and other more distant parts of town. That day’s search had launched me across the avenue, into the streets behind Congreso, following Google Maps' promise of power outlets and wifi.
The avenue is the bounding punctuation of the walkable world: to the north of our neighborhood lies Retiro station, and I am chained in by train tracks and then the port beyond it. To the east is the canal of the citadel of Puerto Madero, where yachts stand with their white sails upheld like lanced cavalry, and to the south - if you manage to walk enough through cobblestone to the San Telmo market - the wall of the highways bound me back. The avenue is the softest barrier, walkably far from where I live, yet once escaping it, I could be walking endlessly down roads, neighborhood to neighborhood, until they turn to streets that turn to paths that turn to dirt somewhere along the infinite length of Argentina.
Crossing the grand avenue, I was off by one street - misled by Google maximizing some ununderstandable efficiency metric. Streets slipped into streets as I made my way parallel to the avenue that threads between Congress and the presidential palace. There are a few things to do in Congreso besides protesting or seeing the world's only libertarian government swear in (political leanings notwithstanding). However, this was before either of those events, so I simply walked the road to Plaza Congreso, past Palacio Barolo and other postcard buildings. Instead, I found myself enveloped by arrays of old overhanging balconies, beautifully carved, that I knew dripped rain on rainy days and stole the sun away on others. The ground level was all parking garages and shutters tattooed with bright paints, the upper floors punctured by windows, interrupting chamfered corners rising to be capped by still-preserved domes.
In these early morning hours, a man high up on one of the balconies played some Andean type of pan flute which I hadn't learned to describe yet because this was before my trip to Jujuy. He played to somehow no one and everyone in particular, but especially not to himself. A person shouted something to him, and a conversation passed me by, then the flute continued carving sound out of thin air, setting up into a tune for a moment and a half until it dissolved into blunt whistles and raspy notes, catching and releasing melodies again and again.
The streets otherwise were empty; on such a wintery morning, the city had decided to leave the roads be, except for the hapless public buses en route. People stood mostly in the same confusion as me, looking around in surprise that anyone had been out at all. Intersection built on intersection to envelop the park in front of the Congress building. I just walked on, saving everything for later, everything for the walk back, marching on the sidelines, having just exited the lattice of streets.
I remembered reading about Palacio Barolo's fourteen staircases - seven for heaven and seven for hell, all inspired by Dante. But for better or worse, I exist only on the level ground, and there was work to be done and coffee to be had. I connected to the wifi and hooked in the plug.
All that sifted through was the morning light on the blue-green dome of the congress, the blind glare of the northern sun through southern apartment windows, a Palacio Barolo not ever seen on one end, a Café Martinez on the other - had brought me there…
And now I realize I can't think what that task was.
—--------------
The Garden of Entropy
The leg of the chair poked into the seam between two small grey ceramic tiles. It rocked back and forth as I failed to find a firm footing from which to approach my work. In synchrony, the grey clouds parted, revealing a serpentine cleft of bright white sunshine pouring through onto me. The light trickled down as drops of pearls withdrew to the floor, neatly ordering themselves in queues as they marched between the blocks of tiles in neat canals, avoiding the shadows, pouring themselves out into the central boulevard of white stones, like a dry stream bed. The pearls slipped into the seams between them and into the great underground, under the stones, to water the garden of Entropy.
Others scattered on the miniature palms that lay in the hillpots toward the upper edge of the land, dammed by the all-encompassing grey concrete which seemed to stare back at the glaring sun. A pearl of light dripped down from the tip of a discolored leaf, catching my eye as it flew toward a glimmering blue ceramic cup on the other end of the room.
"Cafe Latte!" announced the barista, and I leaped toward the counter through the puddles of light, scattering and splashing, piercing and breaking the light. The heavens, disturbed by this pause in worship, moved yet again, and the great tear in the sky stitched up, leaving me in the dark, gloomy netherworld with my morning coffee.
—--------------------
Conversations
When all else goes dark, the lights of the ice cream store at Plaza San Martin hold up against the night, and being done with business, we moth our way to it. Shadows layer over shadows as we step out of the dark and into the storefront, discussing how awful the political situation has become back home. I don't really remember when any of this was; it's generally true most of the time in the century.
Jumping out from behind his ice cream cone, a large man ambushed our conversation asking where we were from and posing questions about our country's situation in global politics, the big war in some part of the world, another conflict in another, the pandemic, and all other topics known to any keen reader of various political 4chan boards. After being affirmed that he was right, that taxation was indeed theft and that I had always thought the ice cream server had a reptile-like quality to his skin, he felt confident in confiding with us that he believed his homeland was falling apart too: law and order on the streets had broken down, the leadership was corrupt, the economy based on lies, and he was compelled to leave it for the city of Buenos Aires. His new home, to which he had managed to escape, was so much superior and safer in every way, he said as I stared through the window at the empty streets, thinking about the 5-minute sprint I'd have to make to our residence at this time of night.
I was curious about what such a horrid, run-down place on the brink of collapse could be.
"I moved here 2 years ago from San Francisco."
San Francisco. Of course, San Francisco, I should’ve guessed: the city that dropped acid once in the year 1969 and never looked back. I shed a tear, took a deep sigh, and embraced him (fortunately, figuratively): here was someone who kept the uniquely San Francisco brand of weird alive, our ambassador in such a distant foreign place.
Images of finding a piece of your home in a country far away appeared - the sound of being spoken to in your dialect, the taste of the roasted sesame treats you used to have as a kid, the memory of the smell of grass that only your city has … except in this case, the memories involved having unprompted conversations about aliens with some Market Street mystics on a chilly San Francisco midnight.
He explained that he had escaped San Francisco during the pandemic - that never was, of course - as the leaders took off their masks and the people put theirs on. To him, Buenos Aires was just a short walk to catch some fresh air.
We prodded each other for a few more thoughts, but my ice cream had dripped away like candle wax, and I excused myself before the conspiracies would start burning my fingers. Surveying the plaza with its fenced-off statue of de San Martin trying its best to glimmer in the moonless night, I prepared for my 5-minute sprint and other journeys.
—------------------------
A Basin of Salt and Memory
I once had a dream of an apocalypse. Not surprising - I think this was at some point after 2019 - the year in which I had seen military jets fly above my city and India and Pakistan come close to a nuclear war, and months later, an earthquake that shattered many dreams and vases forever in the city I had called home. I had the vision of a ruined, desolate, and yellowed Mirpur, some grey concrete mansions hardly standing, with the earth stripped barren of all its greenery. I saw an endless yellow waste from a hill, the same one from which I used to look down on my own home in D4.
I saw it again when our car turned at the oxygen-starved heights of some hill of the Andes. From the port of the car, I saw a never-ending valley covered in nothing but yellowish gravel, with not a sight of a breathing creature for the entirety of the basin that lay before me. And in the distance, hills crowned by the glimmering plain of salt - the Salinas Grandes. It was awe-striking how empty the world could be.
There isn't enough space for me to explain what emptiness is. Sitting in your room in Nob Hill if I were to strip away all furniture leaving behind nothing but yellow walls, then strip away the yellow walls, then strip away the building, then the street, the city, the ground, the Bay, the feeling of time and wind, then whatever yellowish ether remains suspended around would be: empty.
The altitude sickness made me delirious, and I became assured that if a nuclear war were to happen and if Mangla Dam ever became dry, the world would look no different.
The territory was claimed by neither man nor animal nor plant. Few are frontiers where humans haven't been and fewer where we won't find a distant mammalian kinsman burrowing, none where some toad or insect couldn't be found, and yet here was a place that life had dared not touch, where not even the hardiest of animal or plant could have the luxury of being at its mercy.
I was sure that this was what hell would look like: not only the pain and anguish that attack us after death: a ghostscape of an endless hot valley, with no water to drink and no creature to celebrate the existence of life with, a Martian barren wasteland rising as a canvas of yellow, surrounding you on all sides, but also the physical hell that will take our landscapes after they die: a bowl of dust in the high Andes mountains that perhaps was never meant to be found, that no man was meant to travel, the inverse of Eden, where nothing has grown in the past 1000 years and nothing shall bloom for a 1000 more.
—---------------------------------
Penguins at World's End
Punta Tombo felt more like the end of the world than Ushuaia did. We went there towards the very last days of our semester. It has nondescript land covered with nondescript grasses that merge seamlessly into a nondescript sea that seems to begin but never end. It lacks human or natural features, like a work in progress, a space not fully rendered, a part of the world still in development where God has yet to determine where to place the rocks, the trees, and the wood cabins. There, you will find estancias without any sheep, streams without any water, and roads without any tarmac. And at the end of the world, you will find neatly uniformed penguins patrolling their nests, entirely indifferent to the trivialities of tourists who, to them, are as nondescript as the rest of their world.
—---------------------------------
Election Day at Fitzroy
When you told me that up there was Fitz Roy, I had to take your word for it. It was a cloudy day, and neither of us could see. Half an hour ago, before we had made that turn to El Chaltén, I would have done anything to see it. Hell, I would have even made someone drive - six hours total, here and back - across these grey-green tundra fields with icy glacial veins flowing through them, on such a cloudy day as this.
I saw Fitz Roy clearly then: I was sure that slightly grey patch was where the peak was, that other weird curved edge of the cloud was where the second highest point was, and somewhere along the rest of the blank grey sky the rest of the mountain hid. Well, that was that. We only paid to roll the dice. Now the dice were rolled, and all the pieces had to move back before it got too dark.
And so the six of us headed back to an SUV where an impatient driver awaited both us and the election results.
"Told you guys it's too cloudy and too late in the day," he said. "There was no point coming here in the first place, but you know."
I appreciated the sentiment, but the sky was cast. It was no use arguing over a decision made many hours ago; despite the protests from our driver, Javier, we could only do nothing.
I opened my phone - still no signal. The higher arcs of my wifi sign had disappeared as much as the peaks of Fitz Roy had.
"Any news of the election, Javier?" I asked before we began our three-hour drive back to Calafate.
"No."
As we shut the car door, the sky and earth collapsed, the world shrinking between door to door and bonnet to bumper. Most of the group soon fell asleep, exhausted from travel, and those who remained awake simply watched the same film in reverse that we had seen on their way here, left to silly procrastinations of looking at the mountains around us and making absurd guesses of how long it would take to climb them.
A traveler appeared in the distance: the river itself, milky-blue and chalked with glacial sediment, grinding stone to dust as it snaked down the hills. We leaped over it across a bridge and turned into the parking lot of a log cabin souvenir store, the only excuse for a stop on the journey. A single dish crowned one of the corners of the building from which a twig-like antenna poked out. Javier disappeared into the cabin. Unlike last time, we didn't get off, or rather, we didn't have time to. He was back soon.
"They don't have signals either. Their stuff is broken."
The film rewound, and our car set off again.
Javier had said we were surrounded by sheep ranches, but we never saw any. Instead, there were only two parallel fences guarding these empty farms on either side, threaded by guanaco corpses in different states of rot, stuck between the road and the ranch, their heads pointing towards the distant hills. But the mountains were left far behind and, merging with a larger road, we watched the river blossom into the bright blue pan of Lake Argentino, the edge of Calafate visible along its shore.
A single pop emerged from my pocket, and soon, my phone leaped into my hands. The lock screen made funny faces about undelivered WhatsApp messages, of downloads stuck at 1%, and other mild impossibilities.
Then the wifi bars reached higher and higher, and my phone was flooded by meaningless notifications, a million messages, and PedidosYa marketing. The wifi bars grew, enveloped the car, and reached out to some distant cell tower, catapulted to space forever, and then quickly struck down by satellites down to the city of Buenos Aires. They heard everything they could.
Javier's ears shot up upon hearing the notifications. He passed a look into the rearview mirror.
Expecting.
I shuffled to switch tabs.
"Milei won".
He just sighed and drove on.
—--------
Cordoba Dream
It starts.
We spin spin spin spin, endlessly, ages pass, just people staring at each other, hardly hanging on to the metal. If I let it go now, I will go flying.
We make it over to the great black tarmac highway, some sort of Styx that divides civilization, the village on one end with the endless farmland and pampas on the other side. The elevated highway blocks us from seeing what is there on the other end. A few trucks pass down its infinite length - the hardly worn surface is majestic and formidable on foot, but having seen the end of the world, now we must turn back.
The mint is an entire rainforest on my tongue; I can hear the animals; it feels like I just licked every single leaf in that forest, but my tongue goes silent soon, fully numb, lost somewhere in that jungle.
Mary of Lujan stands there indifferent. The image with its multitude of banners stretching out ever radiant strikes fear in me. But what is she doing here on the outskirts of the town? Is she warding off some evil, but from whom or what? She doesn’t seem too keen on me.
Was that a fox in the dark? I’m pretty sure it was a fox. In the singular light of the stars, there is a single constellation of a face grimacing down at me, and all I can see in that light is imagined foxes.
The stream dances on the rocks to the sound of chimes, sweet orchestral notes bouncing off. The rocks must be very round and smooth, like the sounds and the jets of water are.
Smoke cannot be seen in the dark, and I cannot smell it either now. I inhale the dust as moonlight pours through into the chamber. We stand in a circle, not sure what any of this means.
It ends.
—--------------
Velocity:Design:Comfort
I found it somewhere in my Spotify Discover while in Buenos Aires, tucked between the clamshells of my laptop keyboard and display. Finals week spiraled - one song latching onto another: Dsco, Pro:Lov:Ad, Velocity, then Design: 1, playing endlessly back to back, never letting the white line cross the grey.
Why do I like VDC so much? I'm not sure.
Is it the cover art of the never-ending grey-blue panels spanning to infinity, the pastel rainbow that zaps towards you, outrunning you at lightspeeds to some future? The great concrete building wrapped around itself, and the blue sky that someone has picked right from my balcony? The same deep, deep blue merging somewhere out of frame with space itself and puffs of dreamt white clouds hanging perfectly spaced out?
Or is it that in some outer edge of Buenos Aires, dreaming vividly with eyes wide open I had opened my phone to a full screen of that image as Design: 1 played, and it felt like I was moving along all those parallel and intersecting lines towards the future too and that life was good? That the soft piano bounced around, formless against all the discord of the world, like a heart beating arrhythmically, trying to jump out of the drowning, glitching sounds, order out of disorder, but never fully emerging?
Or was it that, as I worked on my final assignment - something about Prolog, Peano's axioms, and a calculator - shirtless and delirious, I looked out of the 16th-floor window to see and hear the same clouds, the same grey glassy panels, the same sharp-angled corners as our building? Thinking: it's all ending?
I'm not sure, but Velocity:Design:Comfort is something that I play a lot now. It sounds like life on the upper stories.
Life on steel, glass, and sky.
Despite only being the fourth most dangerous car ride I had taken in that 10-day trip, I was still not quite accustomed to such a shanty minibus speeding this fast on the pot-holed Grand Trunk Road at dusk. I had already survived an "ambulance" ride in a carry diba which ran over a cat and a dog on the way— so-called only because of a few parchment bandages stuffed in the trunk — a long bus ride through Diameer Bhasha— where a landslide blocked our road and we got rear-ended by a truck—, the jeep ride to Fairy Meadows— where if I stuck my head out I might as well have upset the center of gravity of the entire machine and sent it falling down into a crevice—, not to mention the other minibus in which we ended up getting into a road rage situation and our driver had to threaten the driver of the soapbox-sized car with a wrench—though I suppose that would be the fifth.
The minibus seemed to hover above the tarmac, and whenever the driver pressed the horn, which he did whenever a vehicle was seen in a 200-meter radius, it let out the entire hour-long rendition of a symphony from Bach. It managed to cover the 3-hour distance between Pir Wadhai station in Rawalpindi and Mirpur in a speedy 3 hours - an impressive feat for a Hiace with 20 people sitting in it. Much like the minibus, I hovered too, half of me in the air right next to the sole exit/entry door, as my neighbor had elected to put all his mortal belongings, and maybe even some of the gifts promised to him in heaven, on a part of my seat.
"Are you from Mirpur?" he asked me. It was a silly question. I would have tried to explain to him how no one emigrates to smaller cities, the poor quality of educational and professional opportunities in Mirpur, and how it was downright mathematically certain that, of course, I was from Mirpur - for why else would someone in their right mind go to the city? However, I had asked him earlier, "How much is the ticket for?" which arguably is a stupider thing to ask someone who - it turns out - is not the conductor of the bus, and so I instead replied with a simple "Yes." I mentioned that I was returning home from the US as I had studied abroad. Given that I was in a Hiace with a small luggage bag only, there was a fat chance this was true, and the guy probably knew it too. It was a lie; I had returned home 10 days ago, but as soon as I came I had left again, venturing north with my friends, so in a spiritual sense, it felt right to say and much more terse than whatever my mind could capture of the events from the last 10 days.
"Are you from Mirpur?" I asked.
"No," he said, explaining how he was actually from Faisalabad, applying for a UK visa. I hadn't known this, but there were only three British consulates in Pakistan: Islamabad, Karachi, and Mirpur - due to the heavy immigration to the UK from my city. He was surprised that I had no one in my immediate family who lived in the UK, but then again, I was studying in the US, and the stereotype fit just the same.
"But why are you coming from Islamabad then?" I was perplexed; he probably would've been better off just going to the consulate in Rawalpindi, but he explained how the appointments there had been booked all the way through to some unknowable future date. Mirpur had free slots earlier, and he was in a hurry to go to the UK and make a quick buck, so he stopped in Islamabad for one night before heading back south to Mirpur.
We talked about where he was staying (I knew the spot) and what or where Sector F1 was (I explained to him), and I told him to reach out if he needed any help (he did not in the two days he was in the city). I was struck by how much this man was traveling just for a UK visa, to a random town like Mirpur, which he would have no interest in or reason to visit otherwise. I thought about how convenient my life had been - born into the privilege of studying abroad, having better pipelines to success, and a visa office I hadn't even known about until minutes ago, sitting just a 15-minute drive from home. Outside, the last of the dusk sun reddened a rotating pattern of unkempt fields and dust-colored hills.
The red glare cast shadows onto the interior of the Greyhound bus that hovered through the freeways between SF and LA: far from home and from anywhere near my list of most dangerous bus rides. I was on my way to answer the call of the Argentine consulate, who had been so kind as to offer me a visit to their office 1000 kilometers away for my Argentine visa application. To not inconvenience them as hosts or waste ink writing my name in some register of theirs or occupy some bits in their computer counter system, I had tried to excuse myself. Despite my insistence that I had work, that it was a Wednesday, and why I was needed there in the first place when none of my classmates were (because of my Pakistani passport), I had failed. 2 months after meeting the unnamed traveler, I was reminded of him on my way to LA, as I stared into a deep purple sky.
—-----------------
Notes from Buenos Aires
Just like a person unable to sleep tosses and turns, I too hop from the room's table to the common floors of the building to cafes, mostly to no avail. Enough time spent ricocheting between different Café Martinezes, and having seen the ones on my side of the Avenida de Julio, I began to exile myself to Palermo and other more distant parts of town. That day’s search had launched me across the avenue, into the streets behind Congreso, following Google Maps' promise of power outlets and wifi.
The avenue is the bounding punctuation of the walkable world: to the north of our neighborhood lies Retiro station, and I am chained in by train tracks and then the port beyond it. To the east is the canal of the citadel of Puerto Madero, where yachts stand with their white sails upheld like lanced cavalry, and to the south - if you manage to walk enough through cobblestone to the San Telmo market - the wall of the highways bound me back. The avenue is the softest barrier, walkably far from where I live, yet once escaping it, I could be walking endlessly down roads, neighborhood to neighborhood, until they turn to streets that turn to paths that turn to dirt somewhere along the infinite length of Argentina.
Crossing the grand avenue, I was off by one street - misled by Google maximizing some ununderstandable efficiency metric. Streets slipped into streets as I made my way parallel to the avenue that threads between Congress and the presidential palace. There are a few things to do in Congreso besides protesting or seeing the world's only libertarian government swear in (political leanings notwithstanding). However, this was before either of those events, so I simply walked the road to Plaza Congreso, past Palacio Barolo and other postcard buildings. Instead, I found myself enveloped by arrays of old overhanging balconies, beautifully carved, that I knew dripped rain on rainy days and stole the sun away on others. The ground level was all parking garages and shutters tattooed with bright paints, the upper floors punctured by windows, interrupting chamfered corners rising to be capped by still-preserved domes.
In these early morning hours, a man high up on one of the balconies played some Andean type of pan flute which I hadn't learned to describe yet because this was before my trip to Jujuy. He played to somehow no one and everyone in particular, but especially not to himself. A person shouted something to him, and a conversation passed me by, then the flute continued carving sound out of thin air, setting up into a tune for a moment and a half until it dissolved into blunt whistles and raspy notes, catching and releasing melodies again and again.
The streets otherwise were empty; on such a wintery morning, the city had decided to leave the roads be, except for the hapless public buses en route. People stood mostly in the same confusion as me, looking around in surprise that anyone had been out at all. Intersection built on intersection to envelop the park in front of the Congress building. I just walked on, saving everything for later, everything for the walk back, marching on the sidelines, having just exited the lattice of streets.
I remembered reading about Palacio Barolo's fourteen staircases - seven for heaven and seven for hell, all inspired by Dante. But for better or worse, I exist only on the level ground, and there was work to be done and coffee to be had. I connected to the wifi and hooked in the plug.
All that sifted through was the morning light on the blue-green dome of the congress, the blind glare of the northern sun through southern apartment windows, a Palacio Barolo not ever seen on one end, a Café Martinez on the other - had brought me there…
And now I realize I can't think what that task was.
—--------------
The Garden of Entropy
The leg of the chair poked into the seam between two small grey ceramic tiles. It rocked back and forth as I failed to find a firm footing from which to approach my work. In synchrony, the grey clouds parted, revealing a serpentine cleft of bright white sunshine pouring through onto me. The light trickled down as drops of pearls withdrew to the floor, neatly ordering themselves in queues as they marched between the blocks of tiles in neat canals, avoiding the shadows, pouring themselves out into the central boulevard of white stones, like a dry stream bed. The pearls slipped into the seams between them and into the great underground, under the stones, to water the garden of Entropy.
Others scattered on the miniature palms that lay in the hillpots toward the upper edge of the land, dammed by the all-encompassing grey concrete which seemed to stare back at the glaring sun. A pearl of light dripped down from the tip of a discolored leaf, catching my eye as it flew toward a glimmering blue ceramic cup on the other end of the room.
"Cafe Latte!" announced the barista, and I leaped toward the counter through the puddles of light, scattering and splashing, piercing and breaking the light. The heavens, disturbed by this pause in worship, moved yet again, and the great tear in the sky stitched up, leaving me in the dark, gloomy netherworld with my morning coffee.
—--------------------
Conversations
When all else goes dark, the lights of the ice cream store at Plaza San Martin hold up against the night, and being done with business, we moth our way to it. Shadows layer over shadows as we step out of the dark and into the storefront, discussing how awful the political situation has become back home. I don't really remember when any of this was; it's generally true most of the time in the century.
Jumping out from behind his ice cream cone, a large man ambushed our conversation asking where we were from and posing questions about our country's situation in global politics, the big war in some part of the world, another conflict in another, the pandemic, and all other topics known to any keen reader of various political 4chan boards. After being affirmed that he was right, that taxation was indeed theft and that I had always thought the ice cream server had a reptile-like quality to his skin, he felt confident in confiding with us that he believed his homeland was falling apart too: law and order on the streets had broken down, the leadership was corrupt, the economy based on lies, and he was compelled to leave it for the city of Buenos Aires. His new home, to which he had managed to escape, was so much superior and safer in every way, he said as I stared through the window at the empty streets, thinking about the 5-minute sprint I'd have to make to our residence at this time of night.
I was curious about what such a horrid, run-down place on the brink of collapse could be.
"I moved here 2 years ago from San Francisco."
San Francisco. Of course, San Francisco, I should’ve guessed: the city that dropped acid once in the year 1969 and never looked back. I shed a tear, took a deep sigh, and embraced him (fortunately, figuratively): here was someone who kept the uniquely San Francisco brand of weird alive, our ambassador in such a distant foreign place.
Images of finding a piece of your home in a country far away appeared - the sound of being spoken to in your dialect, the taste of the roasted sesame treats you used to have as a kid, the memory of the smell of grass that only your city has … except in this case, the memories involved having unprompted conversations about aliens with some Market Street mystics on a chilly San Francisco midnight.
He explained that he had escaped San Francisco during the pandemic - that never was, of course - as the leaders took off their masks and the people put theirs on. To him, Buenos Aires was just a short walk to catch some fresh air.
We prodded each other for a few more thoughts, but my ice cream had dripped away like candle wax, and I excused myself before the conspiracies would start burning my fingers. Surveying the plaza with its fenced-off statue of de San Martin trying its best to glimmer in the moonless night, I prepared for my 5-minute sprint and other journeys.
—------------------------
A Basin of Salt and Memory
I once had a dream of an apocalypse. Not surprising - I think this was at some point after 2019 - the year in which I had seen military jets fly above my city and India and Pakistan come close to a nuclear war, and months later, an earthquake that shattered many dreams and vases forever in the city I had called home. I had the vision of a ruined, desolate, and yellowed Mirpur, some grey concrete mansions hardly standing, with the earth stripped barren of all its greenery. I saw an endless yellow waste from a hill, the same one from which I used to look down on my own home in D4.
I saw it again when our car turned at the oxygen-starved heights of some hill of the Andes. From the port of the car, I saw a never-ending valley covered in nothing but yellowish gravel, with not a sight of a breathing creature for the entirety of the basin that lay before me. And in the distance, hills crowned by the glimmering plain of salt - the Salinas Grandes. It was awe-striking how empty the world could be.
There isn't enough space for me to explain what emptiness is. Sitting in your room in Nob Hill if I were to strip away all furniture leaving behind nothing but yellow walls, then strip away the yellow walls, then strip away the building, then the street, the city, the ground, the Bay, the feeling of time and wind, then whatever yellowish ether remains suspended around would be: empty.
The altitude sickness made me delirious, and I became assured that if a nuclear war were to happen and if Mangla Dam ever became dry, the world would look no different.
The territory was claimed by neither man nor animal nor plant. Few are frontiers where humans haven't been and fewer where we won't find a distant mammalian kinsman burrowing, none where some toad or insect couldn't be found, and yet here was a place that life had dared not touch, where not even the hardiest of animal or plant could have the luxury of being at its mercy.
I was sure that this was what hell would look like: not only the pain and anguish that attack us after death: a ghostscape of an endless hot valley, with no water to drink and no creature to celebrate the existence of life with, a Martian barren wasteland rising as a canvas of yellow, surrounding you on all sides, but also the physical hell that will take our landscapes after they die: a bowl of dust in the high Andes mountains that perhaps was never meant to be found, that no man was meant to travel, the inverse of Eden, where nothing has grown in the past 1000 years and nothing shall bloom for a 1000 more.
—---------------------------------
Penguins at World's End
Punta Tombo felt more like the end of the world than Ushuaia did. We went there towards the very last days of our semester. It has nondescript land covered with nondescript grasses that merge seamlessly into a nondescript sea that seems to begin but never end. It lacks human or natural features, like a work in progress, a space not fully rendered, a part of the world still in development where God has yet to determine where to place the rocks, the trees, and the wood cabins. There, you will find estancias without any sheep, streams without any water, and roads without any tarmac. And at the end of the world, you will find neatly uniformed penguins patrolling their nests, entirely indifferent to the trivialities of tourists who, to them, are as nondescript as the rest of their world.
—---------------------------------
Election Day at Fitzroy
When you told me that up there was Fitz Roy, I had to take your word for it. It was a cloudy day, and neither of us could see. Half an hour ago, before we had made that turn to El Chaltén, I would have done anything to see it. Hell, I would have even made someone drive - six hours total, here and back - across these grey-green tundra fields with icy glacial veins flowing through them, on such a cloudy day as this.
I saw Fitz Roy clearly then: I was sure that slightly grey patch was where the peak was, that other weird curved edge of the cloud was where the second highest point was, and somewhere along the rest of the blank grey sky the rest of the mountain hid. Well, that was that. We only paid to roll the dice. Now the dice were rolled, and all the pieces had to move back before it got too dark.
And so the six of us headed back to an SUV where an impatient driver awaited both us and the election results.
"Told you guys it's too cloudy and too late in the day," he said. "There was no point coming here in the first place, but you know."
I appreciated the sentiment, but the sky was cast. It was no use arguing over a decision made many hours ago; despite the protests from our driver, Javier, we could only do nothing.
I opened my phone - still no signal. The higher arcs of my wifi sign had disappeared as much as the peaks of Fitz Roy had.
"Any news of the election, Javier?" I asked before we began our three-hour drive back to Calafate.
"No."
As we shut the car door, the sky and earth collapsed, the world shrinking between door to door and bonnet to bumper. Most of the group soon fell asleep, exhausted from travel, and those who remained awake simply watched the same film in reverse that we had seen on their way here, left to silly procrastinations of looking at the mountains around us and making absurd guesses of how long it would take to climb them.
A traveler appeared in the distance: the river itself, milky-blue and chalked with glacial sediment, grinding stone to dust as it snaked down the hills. We leaped over it across a bridge and turned into the parking lot of a log cabin souvenir store, the only excuse for a stop on the journey. A single dish crowned one of the corners of the building from which a twig-like antenna poked out. Javier disappeared into the cabin. Unlike last time, we didn't get off, or rather, we didn't have time to. He was back soon.
"They don't have signals either. Their stuff is broken."
The film rewound, and our car set off again.
Javier had said we were surrounded by sheep ranches, but we never saw any. Instead, there were only two parallel fences guarding these empty farms on either side, threaded by guanaco corpses in different states of rot, stuck between the road and the ranch, their heads pointing towards the distant hills. But the mountains were left far behind and, merging with a larger road, we watched the river blossom into the bright blue pan of Lake Argentino, the edge of Calafate visible along its shore.
A single pop emerged from my pocket, and soon, my phone leaped into my hands. The lock screen made funny faces about undelivered WhatsApp messages, of downloads stuck at 1%, and other mild impossibilities.
Then the wifi bars reached higher and higher, and my phone was flooded by meaningless notifications, a million messages, and PedidosYa marketing. The wifi bars grew, enveloped the car, and reached out to some distant cell tower, catapulted to space forever, and then quickly struck down by satellites down to the city of Buenos Aires. They heard everything they could.
Javier's ears shot up upon hearing the notifications. He passed a look into the rearview mirror.
Expecting.
I shuffled to switch tabs.
"Milei won".
He just sighed and drove on.
—--------
Cordoba Dream
It starts.
We spin spin spin spin, endlessly, ages pass, just people staring at each other, hardly hanging on to the metal. If I let it go now, I will go flying.
We make it over to the great black tarmac highway, some sort of Styx that divides civilization, the village on one end with the endless farmland and pampas on the other side. The elevated highway blocks us from seeing what is there on the other end. A few trucks pass down its infinite length - the hardly worn surface is majestic and formidable on foot, but having seen the end of the world, now we must turn back.
The mint is an entire rainforest on my tongue; I can hear the animals; it feels like I just licked every single leaf in that forest, but my tongue goes silent soon, fully numb, lost somewhere in that jungle.
Mary of Lujan stands there indifferent. The image with its multitude of banners stretching out ever radiant strikes fear in me. But what is she doing here on the outskirts of the town? Is she warding off some evil, but from whom or what? She doesn’t seem too keen on me.
Was that a fox in the dark? I’m pretty sure it was a fox. In the singular light of the stars, there is a single constellation of a face grimacing down at me, and all I can see in that light is imagined foxes.
The stream dances on the rocks to the sound of chimes, sweet orchestral notes bouncing off. The rocks must be very round and smooth, like the sounds and the jets of water are.
Smoke cannot be seen in the dark, and I cannot smell it either now. I inhale the dust as moonlight pours through into the chamber. We stand in a circle, not sure what any of this means.
It ends.
—--------------
Velocity:Design:Comfort
I found it somewhere in my Spotify Discover while in Buenos Aires, tucked between the clamshells of my laptop keyboard and display. Finals week spiraled - one song latching onto another: Dsco, Pro:Lov:Ad, Velocity, then Design: 1, playing endlessly back to back, never letting the white line cross the grey.
Why do I like VDC so much? I'm not sure.
Is it the cover art of the never-ending grey-blue panels spanning to infinity, the pastel rainbow that zaps towards you, outrunning you at lightspeeds to some future? The great concrete building wrapped around itself, and the blue sky that someone has picked right from my balcony? The same deep, deep blue merging somewhere out of frame with space itself and puffs of dreamt white clouds hanging perfectly spaced out?
Or is it that in some outer edge of Buenos Aires, dreaming vividly with eyes wide open I had opened my phone to a full screen of that image as Design: 1 played, and it felt like I was moving along all those parallel and intersecting lines towards the future too and that life was good? That the soft piano bounced around, formless against all the discord of the world, like a heart beating arrhythmically, trying to jump out of the drowning, glitching sounds, order out of disorder, but never fully emerging?
Or was it that, as I worked on my final assignment - something about Prolog, Peano's axioms, and a calculator - shirtless and delirious, I looked out of the 16th-floor window to see and hear the same clouds, the same grey glassy panels, the same sharp-angled corners as our building? Thinking: it's all ending?
I'm not sure, but Velocity:Design:Comfort is something that I play a lot now. It sounds like life on the upper stories.
Life on steel, glass, and sky.