The Sky Below

by Stacey D'Erasmo

  Jabalí’s short, wrinkled forehead shortened further as he frowned. “I got rid of the things that could hurt her. It’s what she has left of Marie. She’s been going up there all her life, and I’m not going to take it away from her.”

  I pressed on. “What, you get rid of a few rusty nails and you’re a hero? That broken ladder is there, everything is burnt to shit, it’s creepy as hell. The fucking skeleton is lying there, for fuck’s sake. She’s a little girl. It’s not right.”

  Jabalí cleaned his plate with a bit of bread. “I meant,” he said, “the syringe. I meant the burnt spoon. Marie was trying. She loved Julia.” He picked up his plate and walked out of the dining room. He left so abruptly that I didn’t have time to ask him how it was that he had used her name. And which name was it, her northern name or her southern one?

  I pushed my rice and beans around the plate, worn out by the day and by what I had learned. The ground was always shifting in the ex-convento; the people were masked, but the masks were always slipping, and they weren’t that great in the first place. This meant that you were often given a choice about which face to believe: the genius or the convict, the revolutionary or the lost professor, the beautiful one or the junkie, the living or the dying. It wasn’t always clear—left eye, right eye—which one was real. Since I had left New York, for instance, my lion had been sleeping soundly. Nothing in my body hurt, not my eyes or my skin or my joints; if I had fevers, they weren’t high enough to stand out amid the general sweat and heat of every day; the nodule had grown and hardened, but it never hurt. Malcolm X had taken the pain out of it with her cunt. I was still weaker than I had once been, but not so weak that I couldn’t cover it up with a little effort. Now I could heave around big bags of cement. They were real enough. It was as if, with no one here to tell me what my numbers were, those numbers didn’t exist. Or did they? I had no way of knowing. Which one was real, the ex-convento or La Hacienda? Did anybody care? Did nothing hurt on me because I was cured, or because I was already dead?

  I put my fork down and shoved my plate away, sick of this strange zone of illusions, shades that didn’t know they were shades, crackpot cosmologies. A place governed by the dreams of a little girl with no education and an overactive imagination. Why was I here? I was kidding myself. My father was no hippie. He wouldn’t have liked it at the ex-convento, and he wouldn’t have stayed. He probably went back to Massachusetts, as Julia had hinted before I pushed her so hard; he grew a potbelly and found someone easier to live with than my mother. He had a weak chin. He drank beer in our small living room. He was left-handed. He had been popular in high school. His knees ached when it rained. He probably never went to Mexico at all. Tijuana, maybe. For the day.

  The next morning, I packed. It didn’t take very long. I carefully counted the money in the knapsack, and it was all there. I folded my few shirts, my pants, my underwear. I latched the suitcase with a solid click. I put my watch on. Leaving my room, I found Malcolm X, Jabalí, and the one who had been in the frog head—the tall, skinny, freckled kid—standing in the courtyard. “I’m leaving,” I said. “When are you going to town?”

  They regarded me. “Leaving?” asked Malcolm X, giving me her sharp look. “Really leaving? When did you decide this?”

  “I’ve got to go home,” I said. “I dreamed it.”

  Jabalí shrugged. “We’re going to town right now. Come on.”

  Because I was the one who was leaving, I guess, I had to ride in the bed of the truck while the other three rode in the cab. I held tight to the handle of my suitcase and the knapsack strap with one arm, clasped the rusty bed’s side with the other arm. The landscape unfurled backward as we jounced down the mountain.

  When we got to Ixtlan, I hopped off the truck and gave them all fervent, teary hugs. “I just need to go. You’ve been great. I’ll write.”

  Malcolm X, her breasts pressing against my chest, stood on her tiptoes to kiss me on the side of the face, like an aunt. Jabalí clasped both my hands in his. “Be well,” he said. I watched them climb the steps of the municipal building together, then I crossed the basketball court and headed for the Internet place, to check my e-mail and see if I could book a flight out of Oaxaca. I wanted to walk through the door of my cruddy apartment as soon as possible, experience the miracle of a real shower, sleep in my own lovely, sagging double bed. I would face the music. I would see my numbers. I would come in, if that’s what it took, all the way to the hospital, all the way through chemo. I would give up my hair. I had been as foolish as the skinny kid with the frog head, who said his name was Xolotl. I would explain everything to everyone.

  In the air-conditioned, businesslike environs of the Internet place, I discovered that I finally had an e-mail from Janos. His tone was distant, firm, but not unkind. With the help of a good therapist, he said, he had come to some decisions. He and Caroline had been talking a great deal during these long weeks (weeks? could it have been weeks?); he had the highest admiration for her as a woman and an artist. He enumerated the decisions he had made, with tremendous regret, but what choice did he have? I was an adult, after all. I, wherever I was, was clearly making choices. He was done with me, as I so clearly seemed to be done with him. He was exhausted. He had to take care of himself. He was responsible, ultimately, for his own happiness. Also, Caroline had given up the lease on the East Seventh Street apartment, and whatever had seemed salvageable from it was now in storage. Janos would be happy to provide me with the key to the storage unit, should I ever come back to New York. If he was out of town, as I knew he often was, his office had been instructed to give me the key. So. He requested that I reply only to indicate that I had received, and understood, his message.

  I closed his e-mail and opened the next one, which was from Sarah.

  Gabe—Hey. Look, I know it’s been a while, and I totally understand if you don’t want to talk to me again, but I’ve been thinking of you. Peter and I have to bring some of the puppets down to the city in two months for a show, and I would love to see you. If you want to. I’m sorry. Sometimes things happen and it’s hard to explain, even to people you really love. I didn’t mean to hurt you and, honestly, I’m just the same dumbbell I always was, except now I’m fatter. (too much good cheese!) I found some great people up here, I play the accordion in their band. It feels like Arizona days. Peter and I are renovating a barn. If I don’t hear from you, I’ll call. I still totally adore you. xoxoxxxx, sarah

  I closed her e-mail without sending one back. I replied to Janos: “Yes. I got your e-mail. Thank you.” I Googled my father’s name, but my father’s name was Jeff Collins. There were millions of them, Jeff Collinses everywhere, running companies, playing on ball teams, acting, teaching classes, leading physics seminars in San Luis Obispo, graduating from high school in 1946, 1953, 1988, 2001.

  The world abounded in Jeff Collinses. My father could be hiding anywhere. He could be in prison, like Julia’s father had been. I tried the first five listings in Massachusetts: three were disconnected, one who wasn’t him told me loudly that he was on the Do Not Call list, and the last was a fifteen-year-old with a private land line for his small business in collectible vinyl records. “Thanks,” I said.

  I couldn’t find any of the people I wanted to find, and the people who wanted to find me had no idea where I was, nor could I explain it to them. Where I was. And where was I, really? No address, no boyfriend, no name, no father. Just a bag full of money and nothing to spend it on, and a borrowed set of flea-ridden wings. I was a bird now, or the shadow of a bird on the ground—a shade, a dark ripple, a random collection of gestures and half-understood inclinations. Gabriel, in the wind in Mexico, sometime in early spring.

  I walked outside the Internet place. Michael Jordan still gazed soberly over the concrete basketball court. The wind roared across the zócalo, shimmying the leaves. The church lorded it over the valley. I bought a grapefruit soda from the soda machine near the court and drank it. When I was done, I saw Jabalí, Malcolm X, and
Xolotl walking down the steps of the municipal building, deep in conversation. I crossed the zócalo, met them at the foot of the steps, and rode back up the mountain in the truck bed, my suitcase banging back and forth against the rusty truck walls.

  I remember my nightmares. Every night, I was locked naked in a cage, and lowered into a pit where creatures pecked and bit me. I was shot, or everyone I loved was shot, or I was handed the gun to shoot them with or ordered to shoot myself. My limbs fell off, my face disappeared, I tried to scream and couldn’t scream, dark figures mumbled as they plotted my demise, I ran over landscapes that cracked open under my feet, I was caught up in tidal waves, I was trapped in a speeding car with no steering wheel and locked windows. Every night, I woke up in my single nun’s bed in a panic. I put my hand on the old, uneven stone floor, listened to the roar of the wind, and gradually quieted down. But the second I fell asleep it started all over again, and by the time I woke up in the morning, I felt as if I had done a week’s labors in a night.

  During the day, however, I felt necessary, and strong, and sometimes rather happy. I often felt remarkably well. I would forget for hours at a time that I supposedly had cancer, and when the knowledge returned to me, it was like a familiar, bad taste and I would quickly cast around for something to wash it away. Work helped, usually. There was plenty of that. My muscles ached, grew stronger, ached again. My hands and feet grew rough; the skin there thickened. At the end of a good working day at the ex-convento, I couldn’t wait to tumble into sleep, nightmares or no. Maybe my lazy lion had somehow changed from a solid to a liquid to a gas, and now it was exiting through the top of my head at night. Or maybe the deal was that I could have my days, but the lion, nocturnal, got to prowl at will through my nights. It seemed like a fair trade.

  Malcolm X’s room was the same size as mine, but in hers the plaster walls were in far worse shape. The wall across from her bed was pale pink in some spots, gray in others, pitted everywhere, with a major crack that ran diagonally from ceiling to floor and smaller cracks scattered throughout. The wall beside her bed, against which she was reclining, naked, bowed near the top. I had almost gotten used to her body; it looked like a sea creature, made buoyant by her breasts. I was naked as well, stretched across the foot of the bed.

  She touched my left calf with her toe. “We call it crossing the third river. It’s the dream river. That’s where you meet your shadow side.”

  “Then what?” I closed my eyes, unsure whether I wanted to fall asleep there or not. I opened them. Malcolm X’s charcoal drawings of local flowers, a pear, Javier’s dark-eyed face, fluttered on the opposite wall. She had hung a simple, raw cotton curtain along a length of twine across her window. Her colored pencils, her earplugs, her drawing pad, and her reading glasses rested on the nightstand she had made out of wine crates. Her face in the dim light was round and sober; her straight brown hair shone. She had, I thought, nicely shaped ears. I turned on my side, facing her, head propped on my hand.

  “Then for about a week you won’t dream at all, and you’ll feel very light and spacy. Then you’ll dream your name.”

  “Is that what happened to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And do you never think about going back up top?”

  “Less and less. It used to be so painful, but now a lot of that is what seems like the dream. It gets far away. There’s so much to do here.”

  I ran my hand up her short calf, down again. “How long does it take?”

  “Less time than you’d think. More time than you might like. Don’t move.” She reached across me and grabbed a piece of charcoal, her glasses, her drawing pad, and began to draw me.

  I remember the library. It felt like my first one, which it was, in a way. It was a wreck, a nightmare. It had roughly half its roof, but even that half was dipping, frayed, its insides perpetually spilling out. The floor had long since returned to dirt. Books were sprawled and stacked and tumbling everywhere, many of them inflated to twice their size from water damage, soaked in mud, splattered with chicken shit, or sloppily mortared together with some sort of groutish stuff to prop up the disastrous cracked and crumbling remains of the adobe walls. Tiered plywood planks toward the back of the structure served as support for nests, and the nests, to the chickens’ credit, were generally full of eggs in various colors: blue, green, a rich yellow, speckled brown and white. The chickens were fat, aggressive, and happy. They clucked and flapped and engaged in complex machinations with great energy all day long. The kids loved to feed them, and did so at any opportunity. Chicken feed was an inch thick in places on the ground, which was also sprinkled with old beans, pork rinds, cupcake wrappers, and smears of guava paste. The kids liked to see what the chickens would eat; the results were more unpredictable than you might think.

  It had a splendor to it, the ruined library. The broken shelves were mahogany, elaborately scrolled, and ominously empty, split, and unevenly sheared away. Semiroofless, the library was at the mercy of the sky. The books had absorbed decades of sun, sleet, wind, and rain. In addition to the black marks on white paper that composed them, they bore the marks of the weather, the animals, and the people. Teenage couples from the one-road town nearby sneaked off to the library at night to fuck; the younger kids had their fights there after school. The chickens had fattened on their power over this domain of Eros and Thanatos. They were smug, roosting everywhere on half-decomposed volumes, regarding visitors patronizingly.

  However, titans though they were, they were no match for the stray dogs, and casualties were high. Across the front of the library was a bent and rusted length of inadequate wire fence, badly anchored by a few moldy two-by-fours. We needed to rebuild the library walls, because we needed the eggs, to eat and to sell, but there was the unstated sense that we also needed the good will of the chickens.

  Sweet, the adobe man, tootled up to the church’s iron gate one morning in his adobemobile, a truck full of adobe forms, scrapers, and huge buckets of dry clay, and with a globe—made out of adobe?—affixed to the roof. He hopped out of the adobemobile in red-and-white-striped knee-length cargo shorts that exposed the machinery and beige plastic parts of his prosthetic leg. He was a short, lithe man with a clever face, big blue eyes, and a singsongy way of speaking.

  “Hola!” he called out, opening the back of his truck. “Estoy aquí! All right, children, let’s go.” As I stepped forward from the courtyard with the others to unload the supplies, I noticed that Sweet’s hands were scarred as if he’d been in a fire; his hands looked boiled. But he was quite efficient and commanding, and in short order, out by the ruined library/chicken coop, we had become a team: Xolotl trundled a wheelbarrow full of clay and sand to a clear area in the dirt; Helena, who came from the town to do laundry and help us out with various tasks, trundled another, filled with buckets of water; Malcolm X scattered straw on the ground; and I trundled a wheelbarrow filled with trowels, a shovel, adobe forms, scrapers, and hammers. Sweet surveyed the ruined library, squinting. The chickens squawked and clucked inside.

  “Holy shit,” said Sweet. “You didn’t tell me about the roof.”

  “For the books?” I asked, setting down my heavy wheelbarrow. “For the chickens?”

  “You’re cute,” said Sweet. “Where did they get you? No, mi amor, for the adobe. The walls won’t last six months without a roof. They’ll crack.”

  “That’s how it got like this in the first place,” said Malcolm X.

  “Where are we going to get a roof ?” I asked, thinking: Home Depot.

  “We’re going to make one,” said Sweet. “God help us.”

  Malcolm X sketched an area about two by two feet in the dirt. She handed me the shovel. “Dig there,” she said, and winked. “You know how to dig.”

  I gave her a swat on the butt, began to dig away, and before long there was a nice square hole about three feet deep. Xolotl, looking dreamy, brought over a large piece of plastic and we arranged it as a liner in the pit, holding it down with books at the c
orners on the ground above. Sweet, leaning back on his prosthetic leg, tipped in about half a wheelbarrow of clay and sand. Helena waded in, waved her hand. Sweet emptied one of the buckets of water into the pit, and Helena sloshed around, plunging her hands in, rolling up her pant legs, up to her knees in muck the consistency of bread dough. “Más. Más. Good, good. Bastante.”

  Sweet handed Helena an adobe form, and Helena quickly, gracefully filled it with the clay-and-sand mixture, troweled off the excess, and turned the adobe brick onto the straw-covered ground next to the pit. “See?” she said to me. Sweet handed her a double adobe form. Like a magician, with a whirl of her long arms she filled the double form, struck off the excess, and turned two bricks out on the straw. Now there were three newborn bricks drying in the sun, oblong and thick and dull red.

  “Like that,” said Sweet to me. “Do you get it?”

  What was there to get? It was a hunk of clay in a box. “Sure. Okay.”

  Malcolm X began applying sunscreen to her arms and face. Xolotl sat down cross-legged at one corner of the adobe pit. I sat down at another. Sweet took off his prosthetic leg, leaned it against a wheelbarrow, and sat down at a third corner. He whacked a form and turned a brick onto the straw. The corners of his brick weren’t quite as crisp as Helena’s. “Here we go, children,” he said merrily. “Get comfortable.”

  “Sweet, how many, do you think?” asked Malcolm X, taking a seat. Helena climbed out of the pit and occupied the fourth corner, shaking adobe off her legs.

  He crinkled up his clever face. “I’m thinking, you know, two thousand.”

  “Two thousand?” I looked at the adobe pit. “You can’t make two thousand bricks out of that.”

  “Magic is another word for repetition,” opined Xolotl, slowly trailing the side of his hand along his brick and making swirls in the adobe. Since his sojourn in the sacred tree, his fair skin had deepened to a burnished rose color.