Free Cracking the Sky by Brenda Cooper Page A

figure out how to get actual information from your host?
    Well, of course it was. My brain ran down that path while she meandered on, dragging me back with a vengeance when she stepped into the water and waded through sand. My legs felt wet like hers even though my feet were still and dry. She looked out, pointing at the sea. Resentment clogged her voice. “The reef has been bleached by excess, by pigs who burn too much gasoline and tourists with sunscreen. It is filled with dead coral that stinks when you pull it out of the water.”
    I wanted to tell her it wasn’t me, or even my parents. To say we were helping her now. But of course, I had no mouth in Mexico. She stood and looked out at the beautiful water with the sun splashing it, an offshore break the only sign of the dead things buried in the waves. I couldn’t hear her thoughts, but what I thought was how things often looked one way, like the calm, warm water looked inviting. But really, they hid something else.
    A soft buzz filled her ears. The timer on her watch. She turned it off. “Thank you for choosing me,” she said formally. “I’ll talk to you this evening.”
    I returned to the shuffle of metal chair feet on tile and the sounds of the same woman who’d retched yesterday retching again. Sweat ran down my forehead, as if my body really had been in a tropical ninety degrees instead of the cool northwest summer near an open window. In the corner, one of the men looked straight ahead, his eyes wide and damp and his tongue licking his lips frantically.
    Dr. Peters called on him. “Mathew?”
    “The . . . my hosts’s baby died. Now. I saw it.”
    Dr. Peters didn’t even soften his voice. His words were clipped. “The poor choose to let us host.”
    Sanctimonious bastard. Easy for us to assume the poor let us host. Even though Sensory Wireless Ride Chips weren’t supposed to be available to the public, rumor said they were big in the sex trade. I didn’t say that even though I wanted to. Mathew closed his eyes and put his long-fingered hands over his face.
    Dr. Peters continued. “Write. Now. Write down what happened without talking to each other and then we’ll discuss your next assignment.”
    So pens scratched paper and fingers tapped all-in-ones and the puking girl had the hiccups and one of the women in the front had an experimental table-topper that let her just write on her desk with her finger. Even though she made the least noise, most of us sent fascinated glances her way regularly. Kay, true to her nature, was completely absorbed in her bamboo-paper journal, crabbing out tiny lines.
    Me? I wrote the following:
    Why is she so pissed? How do I get to her? We know nothing of each other except this business transaction. We have each other’s pictures. That’s so . . . surface. I know what she feels but I don’t know why! I hate this. I was afraid, being in her. What is she afraid of? And then, as an afterthought, What am I afraid of?
    Then I figured I best have a whole page at least, just in case the Good Doctor came by and peered over our shoulders, and so I described the things I’d seen (crumbling bricks and sidewalks, dirt paths, children with patched clothes but clean faces, houses like mansions next to houses with leaning walls and tin roofs), the smells (the sea, the sea, and the sea, and the bitter coffee), and what I’d heard (tropical birds, with voices twice as pretty and ten times as loud as our little northwest finches).
    I felt like a tourist. I wanted . . . to learn about Mexico and Valeria. If I couldn’t have camels I could actually learn about the drug wars and the tourist tensions and how it felt not to be American. What did someone like Valeria think of people like me, richer by a factor of ten or twenty even if I was only upper middle-class?
    Dr. Peter’s voice startled me. “Turn your responses in.” I twitched and looked up. He was glaring at me, and probably repeating himself. So I sent my paper, kneejerk good