From the archives: This story was posted at the Virtual Occoquan a year or so ago. I thought it would be fun to post it here. Miguel called me last night, and is planning on visiting me next month. I can't wait!
Don Juan Miguel
Every couple of weeks or so I buy two chocolate croissants and two Mexican mochas with extra whipped cream at the French bakery and carry them across the parking lot to the 76 gas station garage. I give a pastry and coffee to the mechanic, Miguel, and we sit on oil-stained metal folding chairs and talk. He always eats too quickly and jumps up to finish rotating tires or replacing timing belts or changing oil. I take longer to eat, and sip my mocha and watch him work while he tells me his theories of the universe.
Miguel emigrated from Mexico City twelve years ago. He snuck over the border by way of the Imperial sand dunes, and three members of his alien group died of heat and dehydration. The Border Patrol found the rest, gave them water and food and sunscreen, and trucked them back to Tijuana in a green van with tinted windows like they always do, but not Miguel. He rested under the sands with the sidewinder rattlesnakes, knowing his destiny was United States or death. It didn't matter which one.
I'm not sure how he ended up a mechanic. Maybe he learned his trade in Mexico. I asked him one day and he told me again of his night in the sands when an angel appeared and told him to burrow and hide and keep his ears covered with sand, pressed into the dunes, so that he could hear when it was safe to leave.
"Wow. No way! What kind of an angel," I asked him, "Can you describe her?"
Miguel laughed and told me I didn't understand. "Birdie, not one of your Catholic angels. A desert angel. They don't have wings."
He shrugged his shoulders and the buttons down his shirt pulled uncomfortably apart.
"And man, you gotta stop bringing me this stuff. I gotta go on a diet."
He picked up a wrench and bent into the hood of a silver Thunderbird, and I heard the echo of metal against metal against his smooth low voice.
"I'm too fat to hide in those dunes now. For the young, that is. For the young."
He laughed again.
Miguel isn't an ordinary mechanic. At least I don't think other mechanics drive to the desolate areas in the spring and take time-lapse photographs of ocotillo and sage flowers and write longhand letters to physicist Stephen Hawking and speak to angels and demons on days when the garage sits empty and the marine fog rolls in and around the piles of broken greasy parts.
I met him when I brought my minivan to his shop for an oil change. I watched him feel the hood with lovers' hands, saw his eyes roll white under his wild Latino afro as he listened, heard him match the engine drums with a human hum. I must have stared too hard because he raised one side of his mouth and gestured toward the ceiling. He spoke like a priest, slow and clear with soft rounded vowels, almost a sign song tone.
"The spirits tell me what to do. Your car is alright but you drive too fast and she doesn't like it."
The other day we sat and talked about time. Miguel told me that I felt the hands of the clock because culture and church and convention played tricks on my mind. The universe is one point, he said, one point of existence where time and space collide.
"It's like this. Time is space, and there is no time. It's like it all already happened one moment and now we just live bites of that moment. Get it? Just a bite at a time but it's one big donut. You gotta small mouth. You can only eat one bit at a time."
Miguel wiped a fly off his forehead, leaving a timeless splotch of black oil in a line above his eyebrows.
Time is space, and there is no time. I started repeating this to myself, hoping the mantra would chip tiny cracks in my rigid thought, leaving a crevice into which enlightenment can seep. The message is clear: everything happens at once, not only in the garage, but also in my heart, in my mind, in the whole, huge, entire expanding universe.
I just didn't get it. I'm in my late thirties. But this moment today is the same moment I lost my first tooth, it's the same moment I began menstruating, it's the moment I lost my virginity, and the moment I married for the first time. It's the moment I married for the second time, and the moment I became a mother. It's the same moment I met Miguel, and the moment I eventually die. It all happened at once, in the same first breath as the universe was spun and the same last breath as it decays. Time is as simple and profound and as enigmatic as birth.
I closed my eyes and listened to Miguel grab a rusty nut with pliers, heard him grunt and pull, the sound of oil splattering into a plastic tub underneath the car.
"So Miguel. Is this what you wrote to Stephen Hawking? All this stuff about time?" Maybe new theories about the nature of reality would arise from my mechanic's interaction with one of the greatest scientific minds in all history, I wondered.
"Nah. I told him he was wrong about black holes. You can see what's happening with those black holes if you just look at the pictures. Doesn't he look at the pictures? Who's an expert anyway?"
He tapped a new filter into place, and for a second, as Miguel squeezed hard to tighten the seal, out of the corner of my eye, I felt him breathe, felt Steven Hawking breathe, as if our mouths were connected to one starburst lung spilling mocha oil into the center of the galaxy.
7:40:25 AM 
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