Subtraction. Mary Robison

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      The year before I had spent summer break in Cameroon. My dad, Mario, took me. He was a sculptor and he wanted to see Bamileke and Zambeze art and what architecture remained. Cameroon was hotter than Houston, and wetter, but I came to regard it as just a place. Houston was just a place.

      Raymond pulled up now in his convertible, a broad old top down, the clear-green color of a frog pond. All over the sides were furry spray-painted scribbles and scrawls: “JURA!” and “LOS NINOS,” and twice in script, “LUISA.”

      “It’s a beaner-mobile,” Raymond said. “I use it to drive to work. Nobody’s gonna steal it. I work construction. Doors are broke so when I say ‘Hop in . . .’ ”

      Riding along, head lolling back, my eyes caught the rim of the sun there, visibly beaming red hydrogen light.

      We drove up Bienvenida Boulevard. There were pudgy short palm trees with fronds bowing from their tops.

      We passed a baked-clay building marked EL ESTUDIO ESCUELOS CANTOS; next a fence of three hundred hubcaps; now Southwest Texas College’s Beam Particles Laboratory, all buff and square.

      Ahead, huge cloud forms were piled up and the sky shone the same bluejay blue as the Houston squad car riding with us, driver’s side.

      “I really appreciate this!” I shouted at Raymond.

      He glanced at me, jimmied the gear stick to neutral. We idled at a railroad crossing while a Union Pacific switcher shunted some fifty tanker cars past.

      “It’s fun, riding in a convertible,” I said.

      “This day should be over, though,” Raymond said.

      My head bobbed yes, but I was a little hurt he thought that.

      Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us?

      That was Nietzsche, quoted in a kind of goodbye note that Raf left.

      “I thought of a place,” Raymond said. “We’ll be lucky or we won’t.”

      We jounced over the train tracks after the guard gate’s arm lifted. We passed a Fiesta, a food market with brass noise coming from loudspeakers over its entry doors. We went by scrap-metal yards, and a building titled O.K. CREDIT USED CARS AND TRUCKS.

      Raymond’s engine was missing bad. He fought the stick for each gear shift. His suspension was blown.

      We banged along beside a broad cement ditch—Buffalo Bayou.

      “All right, darlin’,” he said. “This is gonna be rancid.”

      “I’m ready.”

      He looked over. “Maybe,” he said.

      There was a marquee with pink and emerald bulbs and tall letters that read: THE NEW TEXAS MOTEL—WE HAVE HOURLY RATES—XXX-PLUS MOVIES!

      Raymond whipped on a pair of dictator-style dark glasses.

      He wheeled into the central court for the motel, where parking slots surrounded a circle of chicken-wire fencing. Inside the fence, a couple lean boys reclined, sunbathing on lounge chairs.

      Attached to the motel was a shack called The Anzac Club. In a box of shadows from the overhang of its tin roof three Mexican women swayed. They were all three stout women, all rocking to the cowboy music issuing from the club. A newborn baby gestured in the arms of the stoutest.

      Raymond got out and went over to her.

      I stayed in the green car.

      He ambled back to me eventually, swinging a room key. “You wanna come with?” he asked.

      “I guess I do,” I said.

      “Be sure now. You’re not counting on anything.”

      I boosted off the mushy seat and stepped out of the convertible.

      We entered the motel room through a rusted pummeled door that looked as though it’d been wrenched from its hinges and smashed in before.

      Inside, a pinging air-conditioning unit kept the temperature icy and mixed up smells of people and disinfectant and a fruity incense.

      The walls had new wood-tone paneling.

      Mostly there was a bed—a swollen featherbed under a black velvet throw.

      “Well, no husband,” Raymond said. He turned to me. “Maybe you’re glad.”

      “But he was here? Here here?”

      “Afraid so. My Spanish is leaky but I believe she said last night, and they didn’t none of them see him leave. But he’s left,” Raymond said.

      He dropped onto the carpeting and got cross-legged. He popped on the TV.

      The screen showed nude men with a slender woman, very busy.

      “Good, the BBC,” I said.

      “Sorry. I just thought you oughta get the whole landscape.”

      “Oh,” I said, “I know the landscape.”

      The show wasn’t a movie, it was a video, and the moans and gasps that went with it sounded contained and local, as if coming from the next room.

      “Well, look at that,” I said.

      “I don’t wanna,” said Raymond.

      “She’s made different from me.”

      “You better hope she is,” he said. He put out the picture and his shoulders sagged.

      I didn’t move. My knees were crooked over the high edge of the bed and my bottom seemed to be sinking through the mattress, but I didn’t get up, didn’t let my gaze wander from the gray iridescence of the blank TV screen.

      “Well,” Raymond said. “We need us a telephone before we can go any fuh-thuh.”

      Back in the green convertible we drove an access road that paralleled the Gulf Freeway. We passed a furniture warehouse, industrial plants, a Flintkote factory that was sided with glazed tiles.

      My motel room was at the Park Inn, a pricey building built during the boom.

      The room had a low ceiling, and off the front balcony was a great palm that sent barbed shadows through the picture window and made pointy areas of darkness and chill.

      Raymond docked his car next to my rental, the red Firecat.

      “Don’t think we’re quitting yet,” he said, as he stopped his engine from screaming.

      Now instead we had the happy ratcheting of a zillion cicadas.

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