Summary

Back at the hotel, Frank is restless. He thinks about his long struggle with defining his identity, half Jewish, half Catholic, half Guatemalan, half Russian, half immigrant, half American, how when he was a kid he just wanted to be “one thing, like a normal person” (269). He was tormented by the longing to belong and the “loneliness of not fitting anywhere” (271). He recalls the public library in Guatemala City where the books were carefully, tidily shelved by the author’s nationality. He found appealing the librarian’s “mania for disaggregating and classification” (270). Could he not be, he asks, “fully one and fully the other, at the same time” (275).

He calls his sister Lexi to see whether he could visit to return the arrowhead. Lexi, however, expresses her concern that their mother is slipping into a misty world where fantasy and...