Free Still the Same Man by Jon Bilbao

information. He had brought them this far, at least. And arranged them a place to stay for the night. That was all he could do for the time being.
    He defended his decision by telling himself that he truly
needed
the phone.
    He tried to imagine what his wife and daughter would think if they were there. His wife would question his decision at first, but her practical side would take over and in the end she’d side with Joanes. His daughter would say that he was despicable, making her feelings absolutely clear to him. And yet, for better or for worse, neither of them was there.
    He was snapped out of his thoughts by a sudden gust of wind, so strong it nearly knocked him to the ground. The trees rustled. and even the metal rods sticking out of the roof of the English Residence made a gentle clinking sound. The gust barely lasted a few seconds and was followed by a cool, blustery breeze that also disappeared a moment later. Joanes and the few Mexican guests that remained outside looked up to the clouds, clearly anxious; that had been no more than a taste of what was to come. Calm was restored to the yard, but this did little to reassure the people still out there, who began edging towards the hotel.
    On the east coast of Yucatán, the wind had already begun to blow with some force. A salty rain would follow it—ocean water, picked up and dragged along by the hurricane, accompanied by gulfweed and corral and fish, some of which would still be alive, flapping around on roads and backyard patios, on the roofs of houses and in the jungle, among the dark roots of trees many miles inland.

Three months after his visit to the professor’s house, Joanes started working in a modestly sized company that made telephone cables. A year later, he and his girlfriend got married, and almost immediately after that, she became pregnant.
    Joanes tried to do his best at work, but things didn’t go as well as he or his superiors hoped they would. He felt out of place there, and pined for the post that never was at Robot Systems. He realized that he’d wanted it much more than he’d previously realized. He ended up convincing himself he’d been destined for that job and that now that it was out of his grasp, no other job would ever be right for him. Time and again, his initiatives at the company came to nothing.
    After a couple of years, he was transferred to a secondary department whose main role was replacing the polyethylene covers on cables. His performance there also stood out for all the wrong reasons.
    One evening, on his way home, he heard someone calling his name as he sat in a line of cars all waiting to reach the tollbooth. In the adjacent line, a driver was waving his arm, trying to catch Joanes’s attention, half his body hanging out of the car window. It turned out to be an old friend from the School of Engineering. They hadn’t seen each other since graduation. Yelling from car to car, they agreed to meet up in town for a few beers.
    Things weren’t going so bad for his friend. He headed up a small air conditioning firm, where he acted as an intermediary between manufacturers and clients, and at the moment he found himself with more work than he could manage alone. He dropped into the conversation that it wouldn’t be a bad idea for him to have a partner with some technical know-how. Joanes didn’t take the hint, but that night he told his wife about it. It was true that he’d never seen himself at the helm of an air conditioning company, but the opportunity had come up at just the right moment, and it was pretty tempting—just two partners, no one above him, the chance to make decisions . . .
    As part of joining the company, he was required to invest some capital, capital he didn’t have. He spoke to his father, who gave him the money he’d been saving for his yacht. Joanes promised to repay him the moment he could.
    For a while things went swimmingly, exactly as Joanes had hoped, and better. The business grew. He repaid