1 - Caroline
Caroline dragged her dog from her ghetto fourplex apartment on the southeast side of Albuquerque, New Mexico, to Burton Park a few blocks away. Her parents named her after the Neil Diamond song, but she preferred a much darker tune of her namesake by a band called Espers. The temperature was already pushing the boundary from warm to hot because the winter finally decided to abate. Albuquerque had only two seasons, summer and winter. Fall and spring went by so quickly that Caroline didn’t notice her first year. The sky was overcast one moment then clear the next. The air was freezing then blazing hot. Since Caroline pushed her third year in Albuquerque, she knew she needed to take advantage of mild temperatures while they lasted. The summer would crush her before she could shove her winter clothes into bins and hang her summer wear in her tiny closet.
Caroline didn’t like extremes. She hated the weather when it was too cold and when it was too hot. However, as a girl of mixed European descent who grew up as the daughter of hippies from San Francisco, she wanted every city to have the same ocean weather patterns of the Bay Area. So that’s why when the temperatures reached triple digits, she would sequester herself in a swamp-cooled house. When they dropped below freezing, the blankets came out, and the heat came on. In Albuquerque, she had a very narrow window of outdoor weather to her liking, so she went outside as much as possible during what she liked to call “spring week.”
As a California native, she never really dealt with extremes, so she spent most of her graduate school planning her move from the Southwest. However, Albuquerque possessed the ability to swallow people and keep them. A friend of hers said that Albuquerque was “a rest area where you decided to live.” She didn’t understand why anyone would want to stay in a rest area until she found a boyfriend named Cody who persuaded her to stay awhile in the land of entrapment. He didn’t want to leave New Mexico. She wanted to experience new locations. Eventually, he won the argument. She decided to stay and explore the possibilities of their relationship and accepted a post-graduate job to support herself. The worst part was that the job loved her, and Cody only loved Cody. Now she was stuck in Albuquerque, her plans for the world on hold.
Caroline picked Albuquerque because she decided the University of New Mexico was a great place to get a Master’s in Spanish. She could immerse herself in the Spanish language. The newscasters used the formal pronunciation of Spanish, most people she met were bilingual, and there were no shortages of restaurants that could provide a Spanish menu upon request. It was such a good place for practice that she had to “un-whiten” the Spanish she learned from California. Her aunt lived in a seaside Greater Los Angeles sprawl called San Pedro, with an “e” sound like the synonym of urinate. Caroline had confused an Albuquerque native when she asked directions to a street called San Pedro. The resident replied with a, “You mean San Pedro,” stressing an “a” sound, like the candy bar some employers would hand out every other Friday, much to the dismay of a person with a peanut allergy.
She cursed her high school Spanish teacher for teaching her the “white woman” Spanish as she struggled to correct herself in her Master’s level classes. She earned herself a bit of a reputation at school for being the quiet one when her silence was more of an embarrassment avoidance mechanism than shyness. The other component in her lack of Spanish pronunciations skills was that she had an English undergraduate degree with a focus on Latino literature. Caroline read and wrote in Spanish and never got to practice much until she immersed herself in a community where Spanish was more prevalent.
Her post-graduate job was with a non-profit organization that helped build up poor communities by providing entrepreneurship training. Her ability to read and write in Spanish put her on the preferred qualification list for some part-time work as a Master’s student. When a soft-spoken man named Cesar, with the help of her organization, created a very successful taco truck with his family’s secret recipe, the funding of the non-profit almost tripled the next year. Caroline was asked to go full-time as soon as she graduated. Her work was rewarding but didn’t fuel her urge to travel.
The most traveling she did was walking her dog around Burton Park, because even though her dog hated the park, it transported her out of the ghetto and into the exotic million dollar home neighborhood. Her side of the park had small but middle-class houses right on the edge of the park and with each street further south, the income dropped dramatically until she was in the ghetto four streets away. When she originally moved to Albuquerque, she learned of an area called the “war zone” and thought she was living there. Since moving into the fourplex, she had experienced a neighbor passed out with legs inside and torso outside the front door, another neighbor with foot traffic only a drug dealer could have, and a prostitute who propositioned people on the sidewalk in front of her house. Her Albuquerque friends informed her that the “war zone” was officially a little east of her location, which made her wonder if the “war zone” was an actual war zone with R.P.G.’s and machine gun fire.
She dubbed her apartment location the “near war zone” and never thought about moving. The people in her fourplex may have had problems, but they were people. In her opinion, the only difference between a crime-infested part of the city and a middle-class one was the opportunity to develop the inhabitants in legal businesses and give them choices besides crime. What started as a naïve choice made by an out-of-town girl while looking for a cheap apartment within biking distance of the University of New Mexico became a deliberate attempt to help the community improve their living situation. Cesar parked his taco truck only a block from her fourplex, so she got to see the good she was doing. She felt that if she left for safer living, she would be abandoning the people her non-profit work was trying to help.
Despite her high-minded reasoning for staying in the ghetto, she still took walks around Burton Park because the park was a transition from the plight of the poor into the luxury of the rich. Albuquerque was not only a city of extremes with the weather, but her neighborhood was also a place of the extreme class divide. The park had some sort of city power station in the center that divided the rich and poor. After about forty feet of grass was a fence overgrown with vines and plastered with HIGH VOLTAGE KEEP OUT signs. A drab windowless brick building interrupted the fence on the eastern side of the inner complex. Her dog detested the perimeter of the government facility in the middle of the park, which surprised her because she figured he would love sniffing all the vines. She liked walking the perimeter because there was soft grass instead of the hard sidewalk. When she got to the section of fence that gave way to the brick building with a single access door, her dog would become especially nervous. Caroline chalked his behavior up to some piece of machinery inside the building that she couldn’t hear. Caroline read somewhere that dogs could hear way more than humans. She even heard they knew the sound of their owner’s car from far away. Or maybe that was cats? Her dog’s need for escape from the park was fine by her because she was almost to the million dollar neighborhood. There was a home with an estate-sized property with a giant house hidden in the center. Another house looked like a Grecian temple more than a home. She pictured Greek gods in togas and wreaths lounging away in their Albuquerque summer home. It was different than her side of the park.
The transition from wealthy to poor was abrupt and strange. She could not understand how some humans could live on piles of money when a few blocks away people struggled to find a meal. The power plant in the center of the park seemed more like a barrier to keep the two elements of society divided rather than serve any utilitarian purpose. She figured some rich person didn’t want to see the poor side of town across the park, so they used their financial sway in local politics to create the power station. A few vines turned the razor wire, chain link fence into a forest. It was a perfect way to ignore the ghetto in sight of their homes. Maybe her dog didn’t like it because it was an easy way to ignore the social problems facing the city. Also, she sometimes made her dog sound a lot smarter than he was, as social problems for a dog revolved around a little dish of food emptying and filling.
Caroline’s dog bounded through the grass to the street, happy to be away from that awful area. The Grecian mansion came into view, and Caroline saw her ex-boyfriend, Cody, walking down the street with an arm full of flyers. He wore black skinny jeans, a black shirt, and had thick, black plastic glasses. She didn’t even know what she thought when she first dated him. They met at a coffee house too hip for its own good. At first, his militant veganism was adorable, but then it got irritating as he peppered people’s houses with flyers about their animal killing ways. Not wanting to waste any more of her life with false-courteous conversation, Caroline turned back toward the vine-entangled fence before they made eye contact. Though she was pretty sure, he saw her, because he yelled, “Hey.”
She pretended not to hear anything and yanked her dog along. The dog was a little irritated about having to go back to that dreadful place. She shuffled the dog around the corner to the brick building side of the power station compound. Another, “Hey, Caroline!” could be heard a little closer than before. The side of the brick building didn’t offer much in the way of a place to hide, so she ignored the employee’s only warning sign on the single doorway. It was unlocked.
She opened the door and stepped inside into a hallway. It was so long that it seemed to stretch forever and disappeared into the dark. There were pipes and wiring on the ceiling. It reminded her of the steam tunnels below UNM. A friend of hers who worked at the Student Union got her inside. They had crawled through these tunnels full of the guts of a building too ugly to show to the world. All the sewage and wiring snaked through the ceiling. An ugly tunnel was better than a long-winded speech about how she was killing the environment with her lunchmeat. Besides, Caroline bought cage-free and organic! He had nothing on her. Her dog sat outside of the door. He whined and refused to go in.
“Come on! There will be a biscuit for you when this is all over,” she attempted to persuade him, and eventually yanked him inside. She tried to shut the door, but a sandaled foot prevented it from closing all the way.
“Ow!” She heard a yelp from outside. Her dog shook in her arms and whined. The door swung limply ajar, and she could see Cody on the other side rubbing his foot and hopping up and down on the other. Caroline was already irritated and let loose on him, “Why did you stop a door with your foot if you were wearing sandals?”
“Because I thought it would lock when you closed it.”
“I opened it just fine!”
“But it may lock from the inside. You know, like the doors that lock from the outside.”
“Have you ever heard of a door locking from the inside but not the outside?”
“I got stuck in a building at UNM once.”
“Those doors lock from both sides with a key.”
“Why were you in there in the first place?”
“I was trying to avoid you,” Caroline said as she stepped out of the building and instantly regretted it when Cody’s eyes teared up. He was always too much of a pansy – not that she wanted him to be so macho that any emotion was a sign of weakness. It was more that he let his emotions get the best of him. Being the daughter of hippies, she understood that men didn’t always have to fit the stereotypical mold of manly men. But there was a certain level of pitiful Cody exuded, and Caroline found out she did need some degree of masculinity in her men, even if the real macho types disgusted her.
“I thought we were still going to be friends?” Cody said, fighting back tears.
“No, Cody,” she explained. “It’s not that we aren’t going to be friends. It’s that I didn’t want to see any friends right now.”
“Oh. So we’re cool?” Cody seemed to straighten up fairly quickly. He was such a mood-swingy guy. Caroline didn’t know what she ever saw in him. Despite her lack of love for extremes, extremes seemed to seek her out.
“We are cool,” she lied. So much for her conversation free of false courteousness.
“Oh great,” Cody said, back on track. “So, what are you doing?”
“I was going home,” Caroline lied again, losing a bit of her soul.
“Could you pass out some flyers along the way? The meat packing industry ruins the life of illegal immigrants…”
Caroline tuned out the rest of the diatribe as she took some flyers she intended to deposit in the nearest trashcan. Her dog wagged its tail and jumped on Cody’s leg. At least Cody had distracted her dog from whatever he hated about the building. Caroline thought of ways to extricate herself from the conversation. She turned back and shut the door to the government building, and as it closed, she caught something out of the corner of her eye. It looked as if there was something in the hallway. She swore there was a pair of eyes watching her from the dark. She attempted to open the door again, but it was locked. She dismissed it as a figment of her imagination. Cody didn’t notice. He was too busy changing the world.
