My name is Hector Luis Ramón. I am visible. I exist. I repeat these truths to myself, over and over, every day. Because to some, this is not true.
Today I go to the Neptune Hotel, where my cousin Marco works, to wait for his shift to end. That’s how it is: he has a job at the Hotel and I do not—he works and I wait. I wait at the far edge of the stretch of beach which the Hotel owns, just inside the line so the Security from the Hotel on the other side doesn’t bother me. The Neptune has Security too of course, but they know my cousin, so they leave me alone as long as I don’t bother the tourists. I sit in the sand and I wait for my cousin and I don’t bother anybody. A tourist comes towards me. Right at me. This white guy. He is huge. He has a huge white belly and huge white arms, and he is holding a great big margarita in a giant plastic glass which is spilling over it is so full. He’s wearing sandals and swimming trunks. His knees are so fat, they are double. The swimming trunks are orange and have pictures of a type of fish I have never seen before, wearing sombreros. On his head, he has one of those headsets with the very wide, very dark shades, attached to thin silver frames which wrap around his skull and tuck behind and just inside his ears. He’s shouting. He’s coming right at me and he is shouting in English and there is no one else even close to us. “Walt!” he shouts—a name I think; my English is good, but there is much I don’t understand—“Goddamit, Walt, just listen. If you trade off all the (blank), before you have (blank), and that asshole in (blank) isn’t willing to go the two million in (blank), you’re gonna be left with (blank) and (blank) (blank) and shit-all else!” He’s so close, he’s almost on top of me, blocking the sun—but he walks right past, his sandals kicking up sand under his weight. My name is not Walt. It is Hector Luis Ramón. He walks past me to the beach and puts his feet in the edge of the ocean. It laps at his sandals. His back to me, he holds his margarita up to the ocean. “Christ, Walt,” he says, in a happier voice, lifting the margarita to his mouth, “you are one beautiful son of a bitch.”
It is the headset of course. My cousin, who works at the Hotel, explained it to me. It lets them see and hear things that are not here. And it works the other way too. What is here, they don’t have to see.
There are other tourists on the beach. They lie on towels in the sun, or sit on deck chairs underneath huge umbrellas which have the name of the Hotel, Neptune, printed on the sides. Some of them walk down to the beach, then back, dripping. Wet, they look like seals, slick, contented, their bellies full of fish. The tourists always have something in their hands—drinks, extra towels, souvenirs. They talk into their headsets, into thin air, and sometimes to each other. A young woman, very pretty, removes her headset and blinks in the bright sunlight, then looks at her parents and frowns. She is my age, a teenager, and very beautiful. She sees me and gets up. She walks down the beach toward where I am sitting. She’s looking right at me! I tilt my chin down, out of reflex, as if that will make the scar above my lip appear smaller. Farther away from her, at least.
“Hello,” she says to me in Spanish. But why bother? Everything else she says is in English. My cousin told me the headsets can translate as well, but she has left hers next to her parents. It makes my fingers twitch, to see it lying on the deck chair by itself. Now she is very close. She smells like coconuts, and pineapple, and other kinds of sweets I cannot name. Her hair has been done up in tight braids and beaded by someone hired by the Hotel. She is white, but very tan, almost as dark as I am. Her eyes are silver. “I’m Austin,” she says, sitting next to me, in the sand. She stretches out a long tan leg, burying her toes. She doesn’t ask me my name. It is Hector Luis Ramón. “Do you live here?” she asks me. I am confused. I say the name of the town where I live and gesture toward it, tilting my chin further down. “No, stupid,” she says, smiling, “I mean here,”—she thumps her hand into the sand—“Mexico.” Of course I live in Mexico; what can she be thinking? But she is still talking. “I love Mexico,” she says, leaning forward. “I want to learn all about it. I want culture.” She looks back with a sneer at her parents on the deck chairs. In this position, her breasts are very close, round and full. They are barely covered by the smallest pieces of bright fabric, which makes my fingers twitch. I do nothing. Out of the corner of my eye, I see the Hotel Security who knows my cousin, watching us closely. I do nothing. “Tell me something,” Austin says, facing me again. “Tell me about yourself. What do you like?” “Please,” I say in very practiced English, “can you spare some change?” She pulls back abruptly, wrinkling her nose in disgust, and I think at first it’s the scar. “Oh,” she says, angrily, “you are so materialistic. Just like my parents.” She spits this last word out. “All they want to do is buy stupid things all the time!” Now she is standing, slapping the sand off her legs. “I am so sick of it,” she says, “I want culture!” She stomps her foot once, then turns and walks quickly up the beach, away from me, her perfect tan legs taking her back to the Hotel.
My cousin, who is handsome, has had girls like this. He works at the Hotel, and resembles a Mexican-American pop singer the girls all like. I’ve had a scar above my lip since birth and don’t work at the Hotel. When he tells me about the girls, about their bodies, it makes my fingers twitch. He enjoys telling me about these things, things I can never have. He is my cousin, but he can be cruel. Once he told me about the time he was with a very beautiful, very drunken girl who let him try her headset. He tried to explain to me the technical parts, the filters, the “pattern recognition software,” but the way he described it, I became confused, and I secretly think he was confused too, not understanding all of it, just repeating parts of things he’d heard the tourists say—so instead he described how things looked:
“The beach, the sky—background, these things looked normal, Al,” he told me. He calls me Al, sometimes, after Al Pacino, an actor from the United States who was in an old movie called Scarface. He is my cousin, but he can be cruel. “The background looked mostly normal, but darker, like through regular sunglasses. But other things—smaller, closer things, like a pile of garbage, or a starving dog, the unemployed—these things you can hardly see at all. They appear dimmer, out of focus, not really there. You couldn’t see your own face, Al!” He was being cruel when he told me this, but I was so interested by the headsets that I didn’t care. “Now each other, they can see. They can see each other perfectly well. Even if they’re far away, back in the United States. This is because of the chips in their headsets.” He used this English word “chip” a lot, proudly, and also the word “transmitter.” Sometimes he’d say “translator” as well; often he’d confuse the two: “transmitter chip” and “translator chip.”
“The Neptune Hotel, you could see. It’s very bright. There are chips all over the Hotel—in the walls, on the deck chairs, everywhere. And they give you information too. Like if you looked at a certain door of a room in the Hotel, you could see how much that room cost, and how many appliances are in that room, and like that.” He was smiling, getting to what he considered the best part: “You can see me. You can definitely see me. I have a translator chip in my uniform. When I looked down at myself, there I was, very bright. And you know what else? I saw my name. Floating in the air around me. It said Marco, and how to pronounce it. And my position, Waitstaff/Busser. And then a suggested tip amount: Four dollars, American.” He laughed proudly, “Man, I wish I could make that number higher!”
I tried to picture it all in my mind. How the tourists saw my cousin: Marco. Waitstaff/Busser. Four dollars, American. And how they saw me: Dim. Out of focus. Not really there. No name. Nothing.
I have a name. It is Hector Luis Ramón. I am visible. I exist.
* * *
After his shift, Marco and I walk home together. He gives me a bag of leftover donuts from the Neptune’s brunch. They are stale and they are delicious. I eat two, greedily; the rest are for my family. Marco gives us money sometimes too, when he can. Not always. He is saving for a motorcycle. I don’t ask Marco for the batteries even though I know he is waiting for me to ask. The batteries are for the holo game a tourist left on a step in our neighborhood, years ago, before I knew how to stop my fingers when they twitched. My grandmother was angry and made me take it back to the Hotel, but by then the tourists had gone, and it was mine. Grandmother was angry because of what Security can do to you if they catch you stealing and she knew about my fingers’ twitching. Marco keeps looking at me, expecting me to ask, but I know he doesn’t have batteries for me today, so I stay silent. Finally, at his door, he says, kind of disappointed: “Well, see you, Al.” My name is Hector, not Al. But he knows that too.
* * *
In our town there is one paved road. It leads to the Neptune Hotel and from there to the highway and the private airport. The tourists ride on this road in a bus from the Hotel, then get out and walk for one more block. They are accompanied by the Hotel representative, and one to three Security, depending on the size of the group. The bus driver stays with the bus. At the end of the road are stores, which is where the tourists are now. They walk in and out of the stores happily, dressed in casual new clothing, their hands and mouths always full. The stores are huge inviting buildings designed to look like Spanish villas. They are much nicer than any other buildings in town. From what my cousin told me, I know these buildings must have chips in them, so the tourists can see them fine. They can’t really see the other buildings, the dirty shacks and lean-tos where the rest of us live. They can’t see my home, not because of headsets, but because it’s too far away. But it’s just as bad as the others.
Inside the stores, the headsets let the tourists see the things they can buy and how much they cost and little guarantees that everything was “Made in Mexico.” At the edge of town, far from here, are the factories where they make the jewelry and the clothing and the blankets and all the other things the tourists buy. The factories pay seventeen cents an hour—I have applied for a job, but there is a waiting list. Neptune, the company which owns the Hotel, owns the factories and the stores too. Mr. Saenz runs one of the stores for Neptune, and I see him now, standing in front of his store, waving and talking and smiling to customers. His English is very good, polished. The tourists leave his store happy, bags full. His whole family works in the store, except for his youngest two daughters who are in the United States going to Universities.
Eventually the tourists become tired, slower, and are escorted back to the bus where they leave for the Hotel, holding their new belongings and staring silently through the darkened glasses of their headsets. This time of the evening, as the sun is going down and the tourists leave, is when I feel most relaxed. I walk to the stores as they are being closed down for the night, the doors locked, entryways swept, and all I hear are soft Spanish voices.
Tonight, it doesn’t last.
“Excuse me,” says a loud voice, in English. Heads turn and there is a woman walking forward, a big woman in an Aztec print dress, a tourist. The Security from the Hotel walks behind her, looking at us, bored and apologetic. “Excuse me,” says the woman again. Her face is broad, flushed, and she seems out of breath from walking. Her hair, I notice, is braided, a style not fitted for someone her age. “Excuse me, but I’ve lost my earring. Has anyone seen it?” She looks around, her eyes hidden behind an elaborately designed headset.
“What?” says Mr. Saenz, surprised, an awkward smile stuck below his mustache.
“My earring,” the woman says again, tugging on her left earlobe for emphasis, “I got it in India. It was a gift to myself…a little elephant. I’m very sentimental about it.” She keeps sweeping the shopping area with her headset, her gaze stopping nowhere.
“Oh,” says Mr. Saenz, recovering, “I could certainly check the store for you Ma’am.” He backs away, pulling a key from his pocket. The woman keeps searching—the ground, the walls, everywhere. “It’s a little elephant,” she says.
She turns away from Mr. Saenz’s and starts walking toward a different store, her head moving back and forth constantly. She has just reached the other storefront when I stand in front of her. She stops, like a dog who is confronted with an unfamiliar scent, then steps around me, head moving. What could I have looked like to her? Some dim shape? Out of focus? Not really there? I stand in front of her again. She pauses, then moves on. I do it again. Behind her, the shopkeepers and Security are looking at me strangely. The woman is turned nearly around now, so she heads off in a new direction. Moving quickly, I pass her and stand directly in her way. This time she stops flat. She opens her mouth as if to say something, but doesn’t, lifting a hand toward her face instead to adjust her headset.
My fingers twitch.
The headset comes off in my hand in one smooth motion, revealing shocked blue eyes. Her mouth is opened wide; her face, like the number zero, is a perfect white oval. “My name is Hector Luis Ramón!” I scream into that void. “I am visible! I exist!”
The Security knows my cousin so at first he doesn’t handle me too roughly, but when I keep shouting the same thing over and over, he has no choice. He covers my mouth with his thick leather glove and twists my arm behind my back until I drop the headset which clatters against the paved road. More Security arrive, and soon they will pull me away from the stores, dragging me back down familiar unpaved streets, around corners, out of sight. The woman is waving her arms, screaming, furious. But her eyes are wide open. She sees me. My name is Hector Luis Ramón. I am visible. I exist.
"What is Here" originally appeared in Rosebud magazine.