Pause for Effect

Luz is a pocket-sized Peruvian creature with bobbing, pin tight black curls and buttery Incan features. She's been treating Teresa more and more lately and on this Saturday afternoon, the city is eerily motionless. Traffic is sparse, the horns distant: today marks the Day of the Dead. Any shopping, as we had thought, will have to wait for another day. The streets are empty and the cabs hard to come by.

There's a distinct vacation-like feel to the clinic today too, like the friday afternoon before a three day weekend. You can tell, even english speaking ears, that not much is getting done. Luz is kind, but her bedside manner needs some work.

I'm already far too annoyed that both she and Nathan halt treatment to answer their cell phones, which are always in their front scrub pockets, hands still covered in the green iguana ointment (yes, iguana...and no, i'm not asking any more questions about it).

I'll assume for now that this too is a cultural adjustment to make, just like the constant staring. Its still hard to get over feeling the person on the other end of Nathan's phone, with whom he is having a very personal conversation, is more important than the patient who he is scheduled to treat. Most of me still thinks its downright rude.

My irritations are truncated quickly when the clinic floor begins to roil and rumble under our feet. Luz's head snaps up from the massage table: she holds up a slender hand as though we are not already silent and stiff. The hand shakes back and forth, the walls shivering as pottery plates glide over the sheetrock. Nathan appears around the curtain. "Terremoto," he says looking around. Of course today i've forgotten the dictionary, but thanks to Coach Bob, the concern in Nathan's voice, and remembering we're positioned over a subduction zone, i'm pretty confidant terremoto must mean earthquake.

Its our first Lima shakedown, and it probably won't be the last. The 4.5 hiccup along the Peru-Chile trench registers on Reuters that night. You don't get mountains like the Andes without having to pay a little geologic price tag now and again I guess. The fluid tremors settle out and when its clear its over, Nathan erupts in high pitched laugh, hitting several octaves my ears are not prepared for, even from school girls.

On the way home, cemetaries brim with flowers, and the only thing that crowds the streets is a still, haunted emptiness.