Today is a Saturday, the last of August. This train rocks, sliding north. It’s four in the afternoon and the sun is bright on the left side of the train, beaded like a salt crust on the dirty windows, so that much is sure: the train is headed north. The last ten days are like shreds in a bag of scraps. Nothing in memory makes sense. Everything is gone, pockets full of ashes.

Lev was right to the end. The story of Jacson Mornard is so vile, the newspapers have been bound to tell it. President Cárdenas has condemned Russia and the United States as well, a league of foreign powers that dishonored our country with the attack. Three hundred thousand Mexicans walked down Paseo de la Reforma in the funeral procession, after walking here from mines and oil fields, from Michoacán and Puebla. Half made the journey without shoes. A quarter of them might not be able to say the name of Lev Davidovich Trotsky. Only that he was one of the generals in their Century of Revolution, as the president says. A man cut down by outsiders who refuse to believe the people can succeed.

On which day was the funeral? The attack was on a Tuesday, his death on Wednesday, and everything else is gone. Papers, books, clothes, and every memory ever recorded in a notebook. The police took everything from the guard house rooms, confiscated as evidence. The only hope of sorting out anything now is to put it in this little book. Starting with today, working backward: Day Last in Mexico, the train slides north; the train begins to move; the train is boarded at the Colonia Buenavista station; a packet of sandwiches and a small notebook bound with a wire coil are purchased at the new Sanborn’s in the downtown station, using pesos out of the little purse from Frida.

Already the rest is a jumble. On which day was that, when Frida handed over the purse with the money and the documents for getting her crates through customs?

It was after the murder, but before the funeral. After the interrogation at the police station. They even questioned Natalya, for two hours. Everyone else they held for two days at least. Frida was ready to bite those men for making her sleep on a cot in that cold, stinking room. She was nowhere near, on the day of the murder. Joe gave the best statement, he remembers the most, even though he was on the roof when Jacson arrived, so didn’t see him come into the courtyard.

No one else saw that: his nervous smile when asking the favor, one more critique of this paper he’d written. The raincoat over his arm: the weapon must have been underneath his coat. No one else saw Lev’s silent glance back over his shoulder: I would rather face the gulag! His plea. A secretary’s only work is to protect his commissar—Van would have done it. Any small discouragement could have sent Jacson Mornard away: Sorry, but as you know, Lev is awfully busy. He has to finish his article on the American mobilization. Maybe if you could just leave your paper, he’ll have a look at it when he gets the chance. That could have happened. Lev could have been saved.

Now Miss Reed sits on the side of the bed holding Natalya’s hand, whether it is Tuesday or Sunday, morning or midnight. Joe and Reba are in Lev’s study packing up the papers and files. In that room only, the police left everything in place. They didn’t take much from the house, either. But from the guard house: everything. It was astonishing. To be driven home from a blank brick cell at the police station, walk through the gate, and see Lev’s cactuses still standing in place as if nothing had happened, the hens waiting to be fed. And then the guard house: the doors to every room standing open and nothing at all inside, only blank brick cells. The metal cots, the mattresses. The floors swept as clean as the day of moving in. The little table loaned from Lev was still there, but nothing on it, not even the typewriter. The books, gone. The trunk and boxes under the bed, gone. Clothes, tooth powders, the few photographs of Mother. And every one of the notebooks from the very beginning, from Isla Pixol. Also the box of typed pages that had grown to weigh as much as a dog, and had been that kind of faithful friend at the close of each day. The stack of pages growing fatter and more certain all the time. It doesn’t matter. None of that matters.

Frida says the police are stupid cockroaches, they confiscated anything written in English because they couldn’t tell what it was, the idiots couldn’t see it’s only diaries and stories. The Scandals of the Ancients, evidence of no crime except Mistaken Identity: a young man possessed of the belief he was a writer. So distracted by his dreams, he was a careless secretary, the type to leave letters lying around. Or leave his boss at the mercy of a tedious visitor, one more deadly supplicant with a badly written article.

Joe and Reba will pack up what’s left of Lev, his thoughts crammed on paper, so it all can be sent to a library somewhere, sold for enough money to help Natalya get away. Van might arrange the sale, if he can be found. His last letter came from Baltimore; he was teaching French. He may not even know about Lev’s death. Unthinkable. All of this is unthinkable, however much Lev and Natalya did think of it, anticipating death with each day’s dawn. To think is not always to see.

Natalya will finish out the bottle of Phanodorm day by day, holding tight to Miss Reed’s hand until she can open her eyes and walk on a ship and sail away. The United States won’t let her come back with Joe and Reba. So Paris, then, to live with the Rosmers. She has to go. Lorenzo believes she’s now a target, a highly watched symbol of her husband. She can’t sleep for fear of the GPU, the wolves of her dreams.

Frida is going to San Francisco, where Diego is already. As usual she has a plan: her friend Dr. Eloesser will cure all her illnesses, and Diego will want her back. Melquiades plans to go south where he has relatives, Alejandro may go that way too. San Francisco, Paris, Oaxaca, the four winds—everyone scatters. Lev’s writings will be kept together somewhere, but what of the secretaries who recorded them, their small contributions to his logic? Or even the contribution of a good breakfast, the satisfied stomach on which the greatest plans were launched, who will remember that? The New York boys versus the Mexicans in courtyard football, Casa Trotsky is gone, as if it never existed. The house will be swept and sold to new owners who will tear down the guard towers, puzzle over Lev’s cactus gardens, and give away his chickens, or eat them.

This household is like a pocketful of coins that jingled together for a time, but now have been slapped on a counter to pay a price. The pocket empties out, the coins venture back into the infinite circulations of currency, separate, invisible, and untraceable. That particular handful of coins had no special meaning together, it seems, except to pay a particular price. It might remain real, if someone had written everything in a notebook. No such record now exists.

Frida says everybody had better knock the Trotsky dust off their shoes and get out of here. “Sóli, I have a plan for you,” she said, seated at the little wooden desk in her studio. She’d sent Perpetua running down the street with an urgent summons—Frida wants to see you right away. “We have to get you away from here, you’re not safe. The police took everything from your room, even your socks. It’s because of all those things you wrote. I’m sure they’re watching you.” The police took many things from many people, but she believes words are the most dangerous. She says maybe Diego was right about “your damn diaries,” the confiscated notebooks might put their author in jeopardy.

But she has a plan. She needs to send eight paintings to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, for a show: Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art. And after that another show is planned, Twentieth-Century Portraits. Frida has become a fixture of her century. The Levy Gallery may be interested as well. She needs a consignment marshal. “Or whatever the hell you call it in English,” she said; she’ll look it up for the documents. Pastor de consignación is what she called it, a “shipping shepherd,” a legally authorized agent to accompany the paintings on the train all the way to New York. “Your passport is already fixed up. You were ready to go with Lev last fall, for that hearing.”

“Frida, the police won’t allow an emigration. Not with a murder investigation still open.”

“Who says you’re emigrating? I already talked with them about this. Leaving the country for a short time is okay, as long as you’re not a suspect. I told them you’re my consignment marshal.”

“You already talked with the police?”

“Sure. I told them you have to oversee this delivery because I can’t trust anybody else to do it,” she said, tapping her pencil against the wooden desk. This plan had no complications at all, in her mind, beyond selecting which portraits to send for the show.

“And then?”

“No and then. You’ll have to carry all these customs forms, one for each painting. You show them at the border, and get each one stamped. Declarations of value and all that. You have to be really careful to hold on to all the receipts from the lockup.”

“The lockup?”

“Don’t worry, you’re not going to jail.” Her hair has grown back, just barely long enough to coronate herself again, with the help of plenty of ribbons. When did she cut it off? The conversation of that morning is gone, that notebook is gone. Every time it hits like a rock. In Frida’s studio, in front of the window, exactly where Van used to sit for dictation, she now had a half-finished portrait on her easel: Frida in a man’s suit, cutting off her hair. Keeping your damn diaries, but these paintings are her own version of it.

Today she rattled like a gourd full of seeds, talking and fidgeting with the things on her desk. “Okay, the porter captain on the train will make the guys bring the crates to a special part of the baggage car, where they have a cage. You follow him in there to see him do it. He’ll lock the crates inside and give you a receipt for getting them back. So you don’t want to lose that.”

“A cage?”

“Not the kind of cage for lions. Well, maybe they would put lions in there if they were expensive ones.” She seemed desperate to be cheerful. She picked up tubes of paint, like big silver cigars with brown paper labels around their middles, then fingered the brushes standing together in a cup. She was afraid. It took a while to understand that this was the problem: fear. Not for herself but for her friend, whom she had thrown to the lions many times before. This time she wants him saved.

“Oh. So the paintings won’t just be in a big suitcase or something?”

“Oh my God, wait till you see. They build a traveling crate for each one. Diego has a man who does this, he’s very expert. He wraps them in layers and layers of kraft paper like a mummy and then fits each painting in two wooden crates, one inside the other. There’s a space in between that’s stuffed with straw, to prevent damage during shipping. The crates are huge. You could get inside one yourself.”

That was on a Friday, because Perpetua was cooking fish. The day before the funeral? How long did it take to build those crates?

The police returned a few things the following week, but not much, not even clothing. Knowing those pigs, she said, they stole anything useful and burned the rest. Reba had to ask Natalya to open the wardrobe and pass around Lev’s shirts, so the possessionless guards could have something to wear. His shirts were so familiar. It was startling to see them from the back, walking through the garden. Of all of us, they fit Alejandro best: small devout Alejandro, no one would guess they were the same size. Lev was so much larger than his body.

One day (which?), Frida said she went to the police station and screamed until they returned a few more items. Probably the officers locked the doors in terror, and threw things out the windows. So she had a small suitcase of items to hand over, along with the documents, for the trip to New York. That was yesterday. In the dining room of the Blue House, after one last look round the place, those mad blue walls and yellow wicker chairs. That glorious kitchen. Embraces from Belén and Perpetua.

“The police already had destroyed a lot of your things,” Frida said flatly when she produced the suitcase. “This is what you’ll need for the trip, and the rest you wouldn’t want. There were some really old clothes and things, but you won’t need that junk right away. I had it packed up and stored in a trunk at Cristina’s.”

“Anything else? Papers?”

“Only some books I think you borrowed from Lev, so I gave them to Natalya. Your room was all in a big metal box marked ‘C,’ maybe the third one they tore apart. I could tell because it was your clothes. There was hardly anything else, just some old magazines. We can send you the trunk after you get an address in Gringolandia. Sóli, jump! You’re going to be a gringo!”

“This is all?”

She had packed the suitcase herself. It was hard to look inside: the unbearable persistence of hope. Of course there were no notebooks, no manuscript. Only shirts and trousers. A lot of woolen sweaters; Frida believes the sky of New York flings down snow at all times, even August. Also milk of magnesia, aspro gargle, and Horlick’s powder for nerves, furthering Frida’s vision of Gringolandia. Toothbrush, razor. She says it’s not a good idea to bring more than this. A large trunk would draw suspicion.

“Remember, this is not an emigration.”

But her embrace was like a child’s farewell, dramatic and desperate. She didn’t want to let go. “Look, okay. I brought you two presents. One is from Diego. He doesn’t know yet. But I’m sure he would want you to have this. For Sóli, the drifter between two houses, to commemorate your journey. Look, it’s the codex!”

It was the codex. The ancient book of the Azteca, a long tableau in pictures on accordion-folded paper, describing their journey from the land of the ancients, wandering until they found home. It was a copy, of course, not the original. But probably worth some money. Diego might not be pleased about this. It can always be returned.

Her face brightened. “The other one is from me. I made a painting for you!”

Frida only gives paintings to people she has loved. It was unexpectedly hard to keep from crying as she fetched the crate from the other room and lugged it in. It must be a small portrait; the outer crate is only the size of a suitcase, easily managed with regular baggage. But heavy as lead, for its size. She must have put a lot of paint on that canvas.

“Unfortunately you can’t see it, I’ve already packed it up to go. I hope you’ll like it. Write and tell me what you think. But you have to wait until you arrive in your new life. This is very important, okay? You mustn’t peek. This is my gift, so don’t defy me. Don’t open this damn thing until you get to your father’s house, or wherever you end up. Okay, promise?”

“Of course. Who would defy you, Frida?”

“And don’t get it mixed up with the others. Look, I had the man print your name on the outside of the crate to be sure. You have papers in the folder to get it through customs, the same as the others. But don’t give it to the museum by accident.”

“Are you crazy? I won’t forget.”

“Yes, I am crazy, I thought you knew.” She stared at the crate. “Look at that, it’s an omen. You and I came into life through the same doorway, and now you are supposed to go through this one for me. It’s your destiny.”

“What makes you think so?”

“Your name. For me you’re just Sóli, I forgot you’re Shepherd. You were meant to be the pastor de consignación.” The shepherd of the shipment.

Eight paintings, a suitcase of Viyella socks and milk of magnesia. And two gifts, from people whose faces already slide backward from memory as the train climbs north.

Oh, the little stolen man. Forgotten until just now. Even he is left behind, the police must have taken him in the sweep, with everything. It’s a pity. This train might be just the thing he was looking for, those thousands of years. A long, narrow channel through darkness, a tunnel through the earth and time. Take me away to another world.

More memories bubble up every day. The sea cave in Isla Pixol, cold water on prickly boy-skin. Images, conversations, warnings. The first time seeing Frida in the market with Candelaria: What was she wearing? Mother in the little apartment on the alley off of Insurgentes. Billy Boorzai. The first days in Mexico City. Isla Pixol, the names of villages and of trees. Recipes and rules for life from Leandro: What were they? Whom did Mother love, and what made her so happy that day in the rainstorm? The reef full of fishes, what were their colors? What lay at the bottom of the cave? How long did it take, exactly, to swim through it without drowning?

The notebooks are gone. It must have been like this for Lev at the end, with his past entirely stolen. A lifetime of people, unconfirmed by their living presences, or photographs or descriptions in a notebook, can only skulk in the corners like ghosts. They shift like chimeras. Careful words of warning reverse themselves like truth and newspaper stories, becoming their own opposites. An imperfectly remembered life is a useless treachery. Every day, more fragments of the past roll around heavily in the chambers of an empty brain, shedding bits of color, a sentence or a fragrance, something that changes and then disappears. It drops like a stone to the bottom of the cave.

There will not be another notebook after this one. No need. No more pages piling up. Oh, the childish hope of that. As if a stack of pages could someday grow high enough that a boy could stand on top of it and be as tall as Jack London or Dos Passos. That is the sorest embarrassment: those hopeful hours of typing through the night shift while Lorenzo’s boots tapped overhead on the roof, all of our hearts bursting with the certainty of our own purposes. No more of that, never another typewriter. Accumulating words is a charlatan’s career. How important is anything that could burn to ash in a few minutes? Stuffed into an incineration barrel at the police station, set on fire on a chilly August evening—maybe an officer warmed his hands, and that is the use of that. Better to roam free like a chicken with no future and no past. Searching only to satisfy the hunger of the present: a beetle or lizard snapped up, or perhaps one day, a snake.

Harrison W. Shepherd leaves Mexico with his pockets full of ash. An emancipated traveler.