Swear to God, I spend half my life waiting for people who never show up. The church bells chime once, I crane my neck. The Cathedral clock reads 4:45. Where's Javier?
       I'm sitting on the scrubbed-clean steps of the gigantic Cathedral Central in downtown Guadalajara. Just a few feet in front of me is a corner newsstand, with rows and rows of magazines and newspapers hanging from tight stretches of twine by clothespins. The type of kiosk ubiquitous in urban Mexico.
       "Where the hell is he?" I ask out loud to the white sky and the Volkswagen taxis and the ladies with marbled black and silver hair coming down the steps, finished with their prayer vigils.
      "Should've known better. Shit." We're supposed to be going to dinner tonight; I'm hungry as hell.
      Along the sidewalk, Mexican women sell powders, crucifixes, and soaps that rid you of evil. A Virgen de Guadelupe swap meet. What if Javier's waiting for me at some other Cathedral? Maybe he's found some other guy. Or maybe I'm just obsessive, another uptight American. It's tooth and nail, shouting down this fear.
      He has a thick rope of a neck, a smooth curve up from his throat to his chin, very handsome. Some days we meet at my hotel room, some nights we go walking through the plazas or parks, even the shopping centers of Guadalajara. At first it was a new sensation to me, having somebody there; I didn't know how to react. But this waiting on and on, more doubts invading my brain every minute, I know that all too well. Back in Oakland, it seemed more the rule than the exception.
      Inside the newsstand, a no-nonsense lady with her hair pulled back counts out change to a teenage boy with two cowboy comic books in his hand. Behind her, tabloids full of celebrity crises and drug murders; full color close ups of charred corpses. Scandalized politicians under black banner headlines. Fan magazines plastered with faces of teen heartthrobs, all of whom have light skin and green or hazel eyes. Displayed very orderly, yet their images are rioting; fighting each other for visibility.
      Buses without mufflers blast past, Armageddon convoys. A bouncy pop song comes out of a boutique across the street; cloying and loud and distorted. I'm the only thing sitting still in the whole city. I look around the corner, but no Javier. Only a line of students and housewives leaning against the wall of the church, waiting for buses. As hot as it is, most of the woman have their sweaters buttoned all the way up; some still wearing housefrau smocks on the outside.
      Javier, where in Christ's name are you? Pages of soccer news flapping in the hot breeze. Naked women with bloodstain lipstick doing something with their tongues. They're all demanding my attention. Glossy fantasies, grainy hyper-reality.
      "Fuck this!" I want to scream, but I say it under my breath, standing up, indignant. I march down the last couple of steps, vowing never to wait this long again. Marching in anger, loving it down here, hating it too, hating these re-occurring straights I find myself in. Waiting and waiting and still ending up alone. Storm-trooping, in and out of love. Just another place to feel out of place, I guess.
      I find an open-air place selling pollo al carbon, half a chicken grilled over fire, with fat, grilled green onions. I wolf it down in minutes. Afterwards, I sit watching toddlers with huge, beautiful smiles running between the restaurant's tables, only returning to their families when older sisters chase them down.
      I walk, I walk and I sweat from the outside in. Absorbing the sensual, the utterly senseless and the streaking, desperate sunlight. A flock of pigeons in a plaza explodes in gray around me. Rising en masse, they swoop and circle over the buildings countless times. They are of one mind.
      Eventually I turn around, legs tired, and end up back at the Cathedral. But this time I enter, into the cool and dark and quiet. It's like being underwater. I can picture garibaldi and globefish, bright shining orange, swimming through the shadow-air of the sanctuary, fins and tails swaying slowly back and forth. The street noises far away now, buses and police whistles and sirens. I'm not Catholic in any way, shape or form, I just need a break from the swelter outside. All around me, candles and alcoves, San Cristobal and San Jacinto, crowns of gold on little babies, Catholic dust.
      Few people in here right now, no one seems to mind or even notice me sitting here in this pew, staring at the silence, soaking up the statues. Salvation crawls out of my skin in drops.
      An old ranchero, holding his cowboy hat in one hand, lights a stubby red candle with the flame of another. He makes the sign of the cross and mouths the words to a prayer. A prayer for who? A sick granddaughter, deceased wife, son in the army?
      This thin, white-haired man reminds me of my own grandfather, who I last laid eyes on in 1968, in an Iowa convalescent home. He, too, had been a farmer. By that point, however, he could only lay prostrate in his hospital bed while Dad and us small kids watched; all shriveled skin, not recognizing his own grown son. I looked down at the sagging pouch of skin over the spot where his right eye should have been.
      "What happened to his glass eye?" I wanted to know. "Who took it out?" But I didn't say it out loud. Did an evil nurse take it home? One day, after decades of farming, he stood in back of one aging horse, and the beast, ornery or spooked, struck out with a sharp kick backwards. It's hoof caught Fred in the face.
      Even now I remember the smell of that nursing home, the antiseptic stink of senility and hallways. The look in Grandpa Fred's one good eye.
      I follow in the old man's steps. I light a candle for my own Dad with my non-Catholic fingers. Then a second one for Javier, hoping he's alright. I put thick 10-peso coins in the box, hoping for him to prove me wrong. Every burning candle for someone who couldn't be here today; they throw off light like hovering fireflies on a humid night. Strength is measured inside your skin where no one can see it. In muscle tissue and bone marrow. But right now I need to see it for myself, I need to feel it.
      This is underwater; this is cool and dark and calm, where people whisper to statues, where the statues talk to themselves, crumbling inside 'cause it's lonely being a martyr. Where Christ himself hangs down as if he's no longer in agony, just wishes he had someone to talk to. Each drop of blood for someone who wasn't convinced.
      I can hear the summer rain start coming down outside. The deep, silent ocean fills the empty space, pouring in through the stained glass. Salvation drips in from the outside, slow. The old man is still kneeling. He is in no hurry.