Jakarta

by Rodrigo Márquez Tizano

  48.

  Here in the room, the stone made the dogs disappear a long time ago. But they’re still around in the streets. You can hear them and they are powerful. Their barking is a way of keeping themselves company, I think, because over the course of time, with all our domesticatory efforts, flea shampoo and flea collar and flea bait, plus just how shiny-white their canine teeth are nowadays, we’ve stripped man’s best friend of its original resource: no longer do they howl. Simply no need. These dogs don’t have a clue about running in packs, about the moon, so all you get from them is an interminable, low-level yap yap. They’ve learned to drink tea, can speak several languages, keep weekly appointments with the psychoanalyst. Then again, our onomatopoeic woof, though we know it isn’t always just a simple complaint, makes no distinction between the noise of small dogs and large. Here’s a suggestion: wouldn’t it be great to come up with some new terms to distinguish the alarmed bark, the don’t-come-a-step-nearer bark, and the much quieter, sad, or hungry kind of bark, which is sharper, has a different tonal quality altogether, and can be like a lament and laughter at the same time? And such nomenclature would in turn require subdividing according to largeness or smallness of dog. But if you’re in the vicinity of the stone, or of Clara and the stone, the fact is they can’t be heard anyway.

  49.

  From Morgan’s notebook:

  “Notes on Wellington: on occasion the copy and the original are indistinguishable. And not only that: the great copy, the perfect copy, seeks to be indistinguishable from nature, from reality, from the world.”

  A story: the king asks the artist to paint him a labyrinth.

  50.

  Sometimes, though not what you could call often, we got together at Birdface Helguera’s place. His stepfather wasn’t around much, and we never asked about his mother. She didn’t exist. And if a thing doesn’t make itself apparent, don’t go digging. When Birdface wasn’t around, Morgan talked about her having lain down on the train tracks when her son was very small. Morgan seemed to have this on good authority. It had fallen to Birdface’s stepdad (he always referred to him as Stepdad, though not without affection), to, well, step up. He was the Mirasol man. That summer, our ninth-grade summer, they had only recently arrived—two years before, at most. Around the time the first Mirasol store opened. The factory wasn’t built until a long while later, in an empty lot not far from Birdface’s house. His stepdad would sometimes be gone for several days at a time, visiting the farthest corners of the state on behalf of the thriving company. Birdface told us the sales were better in those places, where his stepfather worked door to door, like in the precorporate days, all bootleggers and shoeshine guys. And so we spent quarantine-free summers—there were five decades, in all, between the Ý and the Ź. Grandma never tired of telling us how lucky we were, how blessed. But progress, hope, all of that: I never bought any of it. The only thing I felt was boredom. I sometimes wished Fish Hook’s stories would come true. I wanted to know what the Bug was really like; I wanted a taste. Anything but the searing doldrums of our days, the inexorable, relentless, utterly boring passage of them. To top it off, summer was Vakapý off-season. We tattooed skulls on one another’s body using compasses and Biro ink; we stole cigarettes from the grocery store and took them down to the docks to smoke. We smoked so many in such quick succession it gave us head pangs. We played tic-tac-toe with the fishermen. We went up to the freeway, Arroyo Muerto way, looking for roadkill.

  51.

  It’s hot, and I start seeing the things I don’t very often see: there, Birdface Helguera holding out a box of matches. See? In all his Birdface glory: jumpy as hell, underfed, permanent look of fright on his face. He doesn’t know his time among us is short: in a few months his stepfather is going to send him to military school, and after that none of us will ever see or hear of him again. It’s hot; surfaces bend and ripple in the scorching air, and there are other things the boy I then was has no way of knowing, like that Birdface and his sister take a beating just about every other day when they get home from school, and that there can be all kinds of reasons for it: because it’s foggy, because their stepdad is hungry, because he’s bored, and sometimes just because. There, I see it now, the mark from a belt on Birdface’s forearm. A gash. A scar on his forehead. A burn on the back of his left hand. Over the years their features—eyes, mouths, noses—will warp inside my memory, change from their original composition. I now see Birdface clearly, such great clarity in the undulating particles of hot air: his body permanently trembling, his hands always ever so slightly in motion. A split-screen vision: in one of the shots, one that I can’t control, can’t reach in any way, he’s lord and master, he rules everything there is; in the other, which shows some outside location, and the frame of which keeps pulling back, widening, I have control of the lens, and I get a view of a vacant, weed-choked lot, an uncultivated parcel of land that in later years will be the site of a mill, and after that a factory for making bracelets, home to a sect, site of a mound of dismembered pinkie fingers. The lens stops zooming out. And the land, which like us seems to cower and flinch a little, becomes a panorama comprised of objects associated with things we did when we were together: four bicycles in a pile beside the railing at the edge of the lot; a flat inner tube hanging from the branch of a tree; and nearby, a tumbledown sheet-metal hut, overrun with weeds. That was where we stored the tools, hidden under dried-out branches, and beyond it lay the area earmarked for the burn. Seen from this angle—the one arbitrarily designated to replace my real memory of the place, and one that includes features that weren’t part of the original footage at all—there’s an ashy cross marked in the middle of the lot. Like x marks the spot. Between us and the x stands the tongue-lolling dog we came across a few streets after setting out from the dockside market. It’s having difficulty breathing, and around its neck is a leash I improvised: a twice-looped piece of rope, one end tied to a stake a little way in the distance. Usually we bring dead animals back from the freeway at Arroyo Muerto. Today Morgan decided we’d bring a live one. He’s been standing there for a while, dandling a cigarette between his lips but not going so far as to light it, and not giving any of us the signal to strike a match for him either. He hasn’t yet decided how to proceed. Nearby, sitting on a crate, Zermeño hurries the minutes along in the tapping of his orthopedic sandals on the ground, letting out little vexed grunts all the while: he wants recognition for having spent a large part of the morning syphoning gas from his mother’s car by the old suck-on-a-hose technique. He wants Morgan to slap him on the back, wants to be appointed deputy leader. Some people are like that. Birdface, though, all he wants is to set fire to something. I see them, I see them, safety in numbers, comfort in being part of something. I see them standing beside the blurry shadows that were once my friends and that I can no longer properly make out. Morgan says something: It’s the last day of summer, he says. Special occasion, special operation. To which we all nod, not expecting any response, and indeed Morgan says no more. And making no clear sign that he’s noticed any of our responses in particular, he picks up his bicycle, mounts it, and cycles away. He enters a row of palm trees. One minute we can see him, the next we can’t.

  52.

  Sometimes, when I go to the stationery shop, I try to work out which of all of those animals it was that used to wake us up at night, in the period following the Ź-Bug but before the stone’s appearance in our lives. In the time before. Because it’s now as though my past, the calendar in my mind, has been slashed and hacked at by some enormous blade, halved or quartered or shredded completely, and I struggle to believe in the existence of a time that fits such a description. Clara doesn’t even understand the word when I say it to her. I say it over and over: before, before, before. She gives me the blankest look: I may as well be speaking a foreign language. Even distinguishing the two syllables, be-fore, comes to feel somehow pointless, though that in itself doesn’t invalidate said temporal space, because for all of that, this before may no
w have become a vacant, uninhabited beginning, it did ultimately, at one point, accommodate me, and—how could it be otherwise, even me wishing it so doesn’t change the fact—I do retain memories of that anterior zone: clear, fine-grained memories, close to soothing in their malleability to my mood, to the current climate. Therefore, rather than consider myself a survivor from that period of time—a period at once inexact and photographically precise—I’m better off when I go there conducting myself in the attitude of an old friend, a neighbor I once knew, say, because to go there is a comfort, and though you can make it through all kinds of horrific experiences (the tunnels, the epidemics, the rats), mangled memories are sure to be the death of anyone. Either you find a way to float above them, or, like in a sweet dream, sink down into them, but that isn’t what’s happening here, we aren’t talking about the vacant lot itself but a vision of the vacant lot, and it’s every inch as real as it seems: you can more or less do as you like there, you control the lens, swing the shot around like some prying neighbor, some lesser version of a busybody apartmentbuilding dweller, the kind who loves organizing meetings for the general good of the building, opens up a bank account so everyone can pitch in for the installation of a new motor for the cistern, makes sure there’s a birthday present for the porter this year. A good neighbor, the best kind: the kind who disappears without making a noise. In the lot, in the silent, weed-crazed lot, I was the best neighbor, the one who looks the other way, the one who doesn’t spy, the one who makes absolutely no noise in the night. The one who suggested we start from the uninhabited beginning.

  53.

  The list of motivations and tools for domesticating any creature is long and varied, but at the very top is fear. Fear is a weapon that will not fail. Not pain, but rather denying any certainty about when the pain is going to end, or supplying a subtle presentiment that it may in fact never end. That it’s always going to be like this. Plus the fear that you’ll just get used to it, Birdface, that you’ll end up needing it. A fear of the dishonesty and obscenity that follows the realization that there isn’t any way to be free of the past, the realization that the pain it causes me is simply of a greater magnitude than the pain it causes you. See these marks on my skin? See what the belt has done? Well, the pain it causes me to do this to you, for all that it’s invisible, is greater, is infinite, is anterior to everything. And before everything, what? More suffering. Pain begets pain; it is its own mother. But we aren’t going to find this out until much later, by which time it won’t matter anymore, by which time we’ll have decided it’s ceased to matter, or at least we’ll believe it’s we who’ve decided, as though this or any alternative were a question of deciding, purely because it won’t be so distressing if we think we had a part in the decision and it won’t be so distressing if nothing matters, or if it does, but only a little bit.

  54.

  There were mornings—I remember now—when we woke in Jakarta.

  55.

  It’s dark by the time Morgan comes back to the lot. He has a rucksack over one shoulder and his breathing is ragged, like he’s been in a chase. He doesn’t apologize for having taken so long, and he doesn’t need to. For Morgan, we would have waited until the end of time, or longer even: in the lot. In the lot, joined in emptiness, silent but in unison—because the stone, inscrutable as ever, stalled at that part, and because, at least in the memory, this other memory that is the stone and its visions or rather the physical sensations that the stone and its visions bring about, it may seem that in his absence there was nothing but a long silence interspersed with the first cold winds of the year, the ones that sweep down from the Sierra at nightfall to announce summer’s end, unhitched convoys gusting down the slopes to crash headlong into the city, welcome, really, after the months of constant oppressive heat. That was followed by further silences, profound, harsher, or more belligerent, presaging his return. Such an interval that the dog forgot us, curled up on the ground, and slept awhile. But now Morgan’s back, and the dog jumps up, as though it smells the mortal end of day, the death of day. Morgan’s come a long way. He is like a heavenly body moments before it hits the earth, a comet that, after the eons of its formation, of condensing among interstellar gasses, shooting stars, water vapor, and tumultuous oxides of all kinds, is ready to take its place in the great procession—part of the code whose origin we will ultimately be forced to acknowledge as indecipherable and, what’s worse, indescribable, because though the numerous obstacles that Morgan had to negotiate to arrive here do comprise an account, and though that account could well be paraphrased and examined for certain general inconsistencies, it is absurd to look for the first cause or to try to establish a schema in which earlier causes may correspond, and what’s more, it is not ours to know whether what we are now seeing is but a variation: Morgan, panting, pedals into view after a period of around two hours, seeming to speed up when he senses we’ve seen him in the darkness, picked him out against the yellow crest-like fronds of the coastal palms (in which the rushing wind is amplified), although that shroud-like darkness, according to Clara, may be nothing more than artifice, a sham version of what was really there in the first place, so Clara says (still cońńected, still projecting): it’s just place, an image that occupies no plane other than the general quality of place-ness, it makes very little difference who’s there or what moment in time it seems to occupy, or if it happens to be another one of us, Birdface Helguera, say, emerging from the distant dark of the palm trees on a bicycle, rucksack on, for the who and the how in the rest of this story isn’t the point, just as it isn’t in the other stories it gives way to, that it seeds, that are its fruit, which will be nothing more than variations on older refrains, ballad-like repetitions forged out of the tiniest errors, a concatenation of smallest departures from the truth: these will have been altered in advance and spring from another beginning that, unimaginable though it is to us, we posit as a given: each version, notwithstanding the apparent likenesses, is independent of all the others and would appear different, there would be differences between the notional plants in those backgrounds and the ones in front of which Morgan now stops, laying the bicycle down and coming toward us: we ourselves are crisscrossed by so many forks in the path: there are vacant weedy lots that are people’s lives: there are lives that are the evergreens, because none of the flora here in Atlantika grows upward via rigid stems, because they are all pretense, are all perfectly flexible, all composed of filaments, strands, fibers, all subsumed within a mysterious system through which the vital sap courses, flooding and eventually breaking each and every one of them down. In the end it doesn’t matter who is Morgan: we are all bound by so, so many commissures, all driven on by the grinding of teeth. The big thick thing that is a tongue. I smile at them. I remember who I am. The rest of the boys glance nervously at one another and then I, with a slight wave of my hand, announce that it’s time.

  56.

  The upper part of the plain that we had crossed the day before was now red with snow, and it was evident that there was a storm raging behind us and that we had only just crossed the Burji La in time to escape it. We camped in a slight hollow at Sekbachan, eighteen miles from Malik Mar, the night as still as the previous one and the temperature the same; it seemed as if the Deosai Plains were not going to be so formidable as they had been described; but the third day a storm of hail, sleet, and snow alternately came at noon when we began to ascend the Sari Sangar Pass, 14,200 feet, and continued with only a few minutes’ intermission till four o’clock. The top of the pass is a fairly level valley containing two lakes, their shores formed of boulders that seemed impossible to ride over. The men slid and stumbled so much that I would not let anyone lead my pony for fear of pulling him over; he was old and slow but perfectly splendid here, picking his way among the rocks without a falter. At the summit there is a cairn on which each man threw a stone, and here it is customary to give payment to the coolies. I paid each man his agreed-upon wage, and, alone, began the descent. Ahead was Ja
karta.

  57.

  We gather newspaper and twigs from the hut and make a bundle. I carry the demijohn over to the ashy mound, though it’s Zermeño who takes the cap off and pours out a little of the gasoline. Birdface has lit a match. He holds it between forefinger and thumb. The flame seems not to move down the match but to remain burning just at the tip. The dog, terrified by the blaze, backs away as far as the rope will allow. The fire gives off a dirty, foul-smelling smoke. Beyond the smoke and the heat I can see Birdface: he’s smiling, or trying to smile, his stubby canines flat as molars. We turn and see Morgan bending slowly down, moving in skidding slow-motion. Then, arching his back, he comes to crouching and reaches into his rucksack, reaches deep inside: in this movement, I now see, lies the trick, the assiduously careless gesture of the magician: his hand moves, and, just as it falls on the thing it’s looking for, it stops, renouncing the quest: his forefinger and thumb are no longer apparent as they yank open the zipper, nor as the triumphant pincer brings forth the gun. Only his hands, in motion. It’s my pop’s, says Morgan, he keeps it in case of burglaries. There is a kind of aural residue to his voice, a second voice carried on the wind, nearly evaporating before it reaches us though, in fact, it will never evaporate. A voice I remember. In the firelight, shadows dance across our faces, and we look younger than we are. I can see it: we look almost like children. Morgan says otherwise: we’re grown-ups now, according to him. The voice bleeds into everything, like a thick ubiquitous film that spreads and dries in an instant, possibly on account of the wind or possibly on account of its own chemical makeup: dry and static, forming a kind of exoskeleton for the railing, the dog, the flames, the rucksack: only the hands move, and that faster and faster, because everything else seems to have acquired a thick, glaze-like coating under the second voice, us included, frowning adults, adults-in-waiting, undefined, perching on the very cusp of past and present. Right here, says Morgan, right now. We each nod. He raises the gun and, one by one, points it at each of us. When it comes to me, when I’m looking down the barrel—and see beyond it Morgan’s eye—my legs go numb. Morgan laughs; Zermeño laughs too, but nervously. Zermeño, those deep-set, bloodshot eyes of his. He’s going to be a barber like his father, and like his father’s father before, like his sons, grandchildren, all Zermeño progeny. He ought to know, and we do at that point all know it, but Zermeño himself, there in the interzone of adolescence, his face awash with zits, still labors under the illusion that one day he’ll be somebody. Like a politician. Not that cutting people’s hair isn’t an estimable thing to do. Or doing the shampoo, or the part when they get rid of the hair around your collar with one of those brushes dipped in talcum powder. The problem is Zermeño, his infinite sense of shame, his desire to be something. Look at him now. That laugh: pure fear. The laughter of pure cowardice, like glass shattering. The safety’s on, you fag, says Morgan, teeth ever so slightly angled back in his mouth on account of his constantly pulling them back in with the tip of his tongue, that pleased, pleasurable look that comes over his face when the rest of us show any sign of fear. He spins the chamber and points the gun straight up at the sky. He holds the gun like Flash Gordon. Flipping open the chamber, he shows us the three bullets. The kickback is a bitch, I hear him say. Where’d you learn to shoot? says Zermeño. My pop. It’s easy, just like in the movies. Just gotta be ready for the recoil, you can lose a tooth. Gotta grip the hilt good. What’s the hilt? someone asks, maybe me. This bit here, fag. Then the gun is in my hands. My finger cradled snugly by the trigger. My knees hip-width apart. Braced. Good. It’s heavy in my hand, and cold. Black. A very sort of black. The blackest black I’ve ever seen. We’re grown-ups now, Morgan says again, winking at me.