El Medio

Hotter than a dog’s tits, sweat poured down every surface of my body. My hair matted to my head. My quick dry shirt felt like a bathing suit and my feet swoll in their sandals. Every window open, the breeze gushing upon us all, and it didn’t matter one bit. It just let in more bugs.

The man who at first had been hilarious now annoying and slightly threatened and loomed. His smile began to show too many teeth. His arm swoops, expressive and engaging at first, now came too close to riders’ faces. The driver ignored him – we, collectively, were on our own. I started to imagine what would happen if he suddenly snapped and broke into a different type of frenetic action: no longer clownish, but aggressive. I pictured the dark, grizzled man with the huge paunch strong arming him in the face and knocking him down while my lean, blonde fiancé jumped on him. I imagined us joining together to throw him off the bus, suddenly united despite our disparate disconnections.

My fiancé’s calm voice continued to translate the street clown’s jokes for my foreign ears, “…your mother’s dog,” he said to a pale and drawn young man, “or is your mother the dog?” Some people laughed and egged him on, even now. Most had begun to ignore him. The young man stared through him like he wasn’t there.

I saw the sign, “El Media del Mundo” and my instant pride fell into just as instant chagrin as I then noticed the Disney-World-esque monstrosity rise in the distance, casting the sign into the realm of non-necessity. Before I could indicate for a stop, someone else had pulled the chord anyway.

“Fucking finally.” I said as my fiancé gathered our bags and said some things to nearby people.

“Gracias. Pardon. Gracias…”

Regarding the monstrosity, we both sneered, but granted it the acknowledgment that it stood as our best bet for a free bathroom. We wandered in past the gate where once, perhaps, people were made to pay to enter. Gigantic structures pointlessly marked the equator and looked gaudy. Technicolor and shiny, they provided space for birds to sit and shit. So yes, I technically went to El Medio del Mundo.

The thousandth stray cat approached us and stood at a distance, begging in the most aloof of manners as only a cat can, dusty and war torn, as we settled our bags on our backs and consulted our maps for directions. This false equator failed to distract us: we held out for the real deal.

The natives of the pre-Columbian invasion had a sacred site near here. As conquerors tended to do, they straight up ignored the sacred knowledge was, of course. Hundreds of years later or more, Europeans “discovered” the equator. Marked, with the aforementioned monstrosities heaped upon it, it took until the 20th century for people to notice they had calculated it wrong. With our more precise abilities to measure these things, we realized something you’ve probably already guessed: the natives had it right.

If you get down to the scientific minutiae, they were dead on.

Funny, that.

I committed myself to visiting the real equator. It was the highlight of an already epic trip through Ecuador, all regions of the country.  I even had a sacred ceremony of my own to perform there. Nothing could stop me, as usual. And now, we were nearly there. A hot, hours long bus ride filled with annoyances later, we approached the grail.

One of the many cabs clunked and screeched to a stop before us as my fiancé did his best to explain where we wanted to go to the impatient cabbie. Dirt and urine drifted about us on the hot air as the driver seemed to finally understand the phrase “muy viejo”. Emphatically gestured into the cab, all of us smiled on our way.

Now it was getting real: it was just around the corner! This was it! I squeezed my fiancé’s hand, so grateful to have a translator to get us to the best places, the least-often-accessed-by-foreigners places, the sacred places.

Driving miles outside of town and in the general direction described by the few English translations we could find of how to get there, I imagined what it would be like. I thought of the ceremony: equal parts earth, air, water and fire placed equally on each hemisphere – fire for the east, air for the north, water for the west, and earth for the south. The prayer played out in my mind.

The driver stopped at another gate that may have once required payment to pass, but now simply offered shade to a woman, breasts exposed, nursing a listless child on her lap. Instantly, she held out her hands to us as we exited and paid, thanking the driver. Placing some coin into her hand, I looked up: there were stone structures, old and broken, above us on a hill.

I didn’t remember that description amongst those I had read, but none of them quite clearly elucidated what to expect. The ten billionth stray dog approached us, cute and tiny as any pupper. I named him Medio, fitting as per our locale and his half tame, half wild antics. Medio gave us a tour, ran with us through the ancient hallways no longer taller than our hips, jumped up on raised, flat stones to get pet.

But, the further in we walked, the less sure I felt: where were the people? The displays or signs? It’s early, I had told myself, no one else has come today…yet. The sun burned mid-way through the sky, though. So many medios surrounded us, none of them what we sought.

I spoke my fear aloud and realized that my fiance had felt the same, niggling worry. “Muy viejo” it definitely was, just not our “muy viejo”. We came to the end of the ruin and looked out over a vast valley below. It stretched out beautifully, gorgeously. One might have come all the way here, hours outside of Quito by sticky bus, just to come here, to see this. But not me; my destination, I now knew through some intuition, was exactly across the the valley, on the ridge opposite us, miles away. It may as well have sat hundreds of miles away, on the other side of the globe.

It was too late in the day. In order to get back by bus we would need to catch one within the next hour or so. There existed no way we could find another taxi, explain across another language barrier once again, hope to be understood, get to the Real Equator, get back to the bus hub of a town, and still make it home to our hostel. No way.

It sat just there, I could point at it, and I couldn’t get there.

I sat, then. I sat and I cried. Medio helped. He howled at the midday sun, curled up against my leg, threatened to cutely stare down anyone who might harm me, and licked my hand from time to time.

*

The day before, we had planned it all out. We found the bus routes and names of towns, the directions from the Fake Equator to the Real Equator, the markets where we would buy our food and drink provisions, the times we would travel: all of it, planned.

After planning, we had plenty of time to explore the city, so we went on a walking tour with a dude we met at the hostel. He hailed from Ireland. Peter, the fantastically assimilated expat, gladly took our money and walked us around, telling us facts and stories, making us laugh. I loved him. What I loved most was that he accidentally introduced us to a taita, a father, a shaman. This taita instantly leapt at my heart and I knew I wanted to know more of him. The taita invited us back after our tour. I took him up on it.

Peter left us and we wandered back to the old, Victorian style mansion that was haunted by the ghost of the first female, foreign landowner in Quito, whose home it had once been. Now, it was dotted with various tenants and shops in each of the many, antiquated rooms. Wide leaved palms in pots hung about central plazas and stairways went hither and thither in the tiled spaces.

The taita found us on his veranda like he expected us. He welcomed us into his room.

We had come to talk. He eyed us with the eyes that see conquistoadores wherever they look and greeted us with the hands of those who worked every day of their lives for what they have. Through my translator fiancé, we talked of the conquered, of the languages that separated us, of the languages that brought us together, and how both are languages of the killers and oppressors. We talked of the languages of the soul, which transcends time and space. He saw a need and a darkness in me and invited me to ceremony. My mind held fear but something greater in me knew better. This was after all, I knew on some level, what I had come for.

So I came to stand in a corner of a room littered with skulls, skins, posters, trinkets, stones, feathers, magazines, beaded necklaces, and regalia, naked and shivering, as the taita spit cleansing waters at me. He became alarmed at one point when my candle nearly went out. He became more fervent in his work, circling and circling me, speaking and sometimes  hollering at what I couldn’t see. I didn’t shake from the cold fluid chilling my skin in the shadowy room, I shivered from what I felt being rent from my subtle body. Time doesn’t exist in these spaces. Eventually, the ceremony ended.

After, when we talked of what my follow up care would be, as he apologized that he could not follow me back to our white world, as he explained the darkness he tried to wrest from me proved stronger than he had imagined, he asked me what brought me.

Funny thing, to ask afterward what brought me.

Misunderstanding completely because of that strange timing, I smiled and told him of my plans to visit the Real Equator. I thought with pride of how he would love that we knew about the Real Equator and the native intelligence that predated the “civilized” science. My instant pride was just as instantly chagrined as he laughed derisively and heartily. He laughed and laughed. I smiled at first, not understanding why we were laughing, until the smile faded from my face as I realized that only he was laughing.

“Mi hija,” he said, “no entiendes este mundo!”

I looked to my fiancé and he looked sheepish as he translated, telling me that I did not understand the world.

I looked back to the taita and he clarified, “No puedes hacer planes. El universo hace planes para ti.”

Those words echo in my head forever, never losing that grave tone and always with the serious, dark eyes leveled at me: “You cannot make plans. The universe makes plans for you.”

*

My sense of direction is nearly omnipotent. I won’t even have paid attention to how we got to a place and I can still get us back out of it. There’s no accounting for that skill, I just have it. I’m never worried about getting lost. But the further we went into Quito the more I realized: I had no idea where we were. I kept expecting some part of the city to look familiar or some section of the route we had taken to the Double Fake Equator to reappear. It didn’t happen. I became so lost in trying to find some aspect of familiarity that I just stared intently out the window to the point where my partner had literally no idea that I was building up to a meltdown.

The bus was crowding with afternoon commuters and the smells were crowding with afternoon bodies. The sun was baking the bus like an oven and my worries were raking my mind like hot coals. Nothing. Nothing looked familiar. We just kept going, mile after mile, and nothing looked any more familiar. For days prior we had roamed the city by bus and now nothing looked familiar.

It hit me then: we must have overshot and now we weren’t even in Quito — or we were way past the section of Quito we knew and would just have a harder and harder time getting back to our hostel if we didn’t just get out now.

My hand shot up and pulled the stop indicator before I could explain to my fiancé and I was gathering our things and losing my shit.

Off the bus, the evening market and foot traffic combined with the instantaneous barkers in my face to clusterfuck my thoughts even more. I genuinely thought I would cry for the second time that day and the only thing that stopped me was the keen awareness that predators looked for weakness – and we were likely surrounded by predators. I kept my face straight, but inside I was howling with Medio at a sun that was too hot, in a market that was too crowded, in an area of a city in which I was too lost.

And we hadn’t even gone to the equator. Not even the Fake Equator. Only a stupid fucking Fake Fake Equator. And we would get lost and killed and die for nothing.  And that stupid man wouldn’t stop calling people’s mothers dogs on that stupid, reeking, sticky bus and that stupid sun wouldn’t stop baking us all and I just hated this entire stupid country.

And then I saw a steeple.

It was a steeple I knew because Peter had shown us, the day before, on our walking tour.

And I walked toward it because I knew that, if I got there, I could get us back to our hostel.

The steeple saved us.

And we walked toward it and the sun started to descend and it wasn’t so hot.

And the market traffic thinned out and it was just a street.

And a cat wandered up and followed along a raised wall beside us for a block.

And the smell of palo santo drifted on the light breeze from somewhere nearby.

And we came around a corner, eventually, onto the main street that led to our hostel.

The steeple saved us.

But the universe wasn’t done fucking with me just yet.

Because, just then, something deep settled over my soul in that way that tells you that things are not quite right. Maybe we weren’t saved, after all. I heard a commotion coming down the city street. Things dropped down into a sub-category of reality running in slow motion. Every glint and tick stood out to my senses. Suddenly, there were no cars honking and zooming past us on the once busy road. The sound of a deep beating steadily grew louder – whump whump whump whump – my bones began to vibrate and suddenly the whumps became a helicopter and then another right there, in the sky above us. That feeling of unreality kept me from running: this must be a dream — the cleansing water spit upon me, the candle that almost went out, the laughter at my mortal attempts to plan my life, the Fake Fake journey, and now this?

Just a dream. No wonder it had all been so off.

I watched as massive crowds of people carrying rainbow flags with snakes and other symbols on them poured over the hill of the road and with their roiling current of human bodies in protest they brought to me this truth: this moment was not the dream, but I had in fact dreamed this before.

It all came back. I had dreamed of a chaotic journey by bus, of frustration, of begging to get off the bus, of being lost, of being in the middle of a rainbow crowd of people.

It had all happened just like that.

There was just one thing missing: at the end of that dream, there had been a church I had gone to just off the main street with the throng of humanity.

I started running. I knew right where to go. I passed people who felt my current fully charged such that they turned even from the massive demonstration that thronged before them to see me go. My fiance was used to the ride, but even he thought me dangerously crazed at this point and screamed after me, “Quorri, stop!”

His screams faded behind me, under the whump whump and into the throngs of drumming and chanting as my feet slapped the concrete and stones. My fervor drove me. I had to know, to prove to myself that this was my dream. I hung suspended in between some universe like the taita described, where I did not choose and plans were useless, and my own free will. En el media del mundo. Maybe it was the Realest Equator.

It drove me crazy.

My feet ran to get me out of this middle I could not remain in. I saw it, the corner approaching, just turn left there and it will either be there or not. I propeled myself and each foot hitting the ground held equal chances: left foot slaps said it was not a dream from months ago playing out before me and right foot said it was surely that and that no plans of mine could ever matter. And both feet took me around the corner where I nearly fought to keep my eyes open, somewhere in me wanting them to remain closed.

I turned the corner and there it was, exactly like my dream: white church, small, short steeple, small fountain in the tiny courtyard surrounded by plants, stone everywhere.

Like a dream. Actually a dream. And not a dream at all. It had all happened, just like that.

I sat on the fountain and listened to the crowd still chanting and roaring by under the thundering helicopters above, but it was all far away. What was present, what was right in the forefront of it all, and what I can still hear today is the taita clarifying, “No puedes hacer planes. El universo hace planes para ti.”

In the water I saw my own reflection and my eyes were like his — serious, dark eyes leveled at me: “You cannot make plans. The universe makes plans for you.”

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