“It is. You know, the Atacama Desert is over six hundred miles long, but it’s only sixty miles wide. It’s the driest nonpolar place on earth. People here are lucky if they get an inch of rain in a lifetime. Scientists compare the dryness here with Mars.”

“Walking out here, that’s exactly what I thought,” Jack says. “It felt like being on Mars.”

“Do you have kids?” Matías asks.

“Two. A son, Duncan—he’s an electrician. My first daughter died during birth. Our second daughter, Megan, we adopted at age eight. But she killed herself when she was eighteen.”

“Oh, my friend, you have the string of bad luck. America. All chaos. No?”

It does indeed seem that chaos has always been just beneath the surface most of Jack’s life. But Jack wasn’t around much, and when he was, he wasn’t paying attention to the warning signs.

“Not everything in my life was chaos. I worked my way into a venture and built it into a Fortune Five Hundred company.”

“Fortune Five Hundred? What is this?”

“It’s a list of the biggest US companies based on revenue.”

“Revenue? You mean earnings?”

“Sort of. The five hundred largest money-making companies in the US.”

“Ah, you’re one of those soft-bodied suits? No, wait.” Matías chuckles. “The suit is your armor to keep you from getting crunched. That makes you more like a crustacean—hard on the outside, soft on the inside.”

Jack laughs. That’s certainly one way of perceiving it. He tells Matías, “Never heard it put that way, but I did wear my share of expensive suits.”

“So you sit in an office, behind a desk all day? You’re like a Donald Trump or Elon Musk—a zillionaire?”

“Most days, I did sit at my desk. I had meetings to attend, dinners with clients and potential clients and investors. And I traveled a lot, spoke to other companies and corporations. I’m no Elon Musk. I do have a substantial amount of money, but none of it means anything now. None of it can bring back the things that I’ve lost over time.”

“I couldn’t sit behind a desk all day,” Matías says. “I’d never make it. Here, behind this wheel, seeing the beauty that is Chile, it’s like freedom. A real breath of fresh air.”

“It wasn’t that bad, but I was never home. I missed my kids going to school, their games and concerts and their interests—never really watched them grow up.”

“You missed their influences.”

“I did, and I realized it way too late. Now my wife’s dead and my son is grown, and he wants nothing to do with me. I’m all alone. I have nothing and no one.”

“My son—he’s an outstanding soccer player. He will be the next Elías Figueroa.”