A MEMORY. I’m fast asleep in the first room I’ve rented in Mexico City. I’m 23. I’ve been gathering my mettle after my first cataclysmic break-up, newly wading into the tide pools of hedonism and the shells that can slice your feet there. I’ve been comforted by the presence, secured by chance on the internet, of a gentle roommate and his great galumphing pewter-colored dog, Pechuga (“chicken breast,” if you must know). I’m jolted awake before dawn by a thunderous noise, the floorboards shuddering. Mexico City is a seismic zone and I’ll soon make the acquaintance of several earthquakes, but this is something else, I discover when I stumble out of bed and over to the window: it’s a brick wall, shoddily affixed to the facade of the building next door as an ornamental layer, that has collapsed in a single precipitous rush of matter, filling the passageway between the two buildings with debris.
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