Girl with all the Pain

by Michael Herman

  “How tall you think he is?” Pablo says.

  “Tall, real tall. Twice the size of my dad. He’s gotta bump his head just going through doorways.”

  “You ever hear him talk?”

  Carlos shakes his head. “Just grunts and coughing and stuff. He don’t say much and I don’t get too near him.”

  “No one does. He’s got the stench of a sewer hole.”

  “Garbage stink.”

  “Skunk bad, like burning tires.”

  Skunk Mountain is like a pile of moving trash with legs; dirty baggy long pants, shoes with holes that reveal colored socks, unkempt long droopy hair, eyes that rarely leave the ground, hands that usually disappear inside the pockets of his coat that hangs mid-thigh, and a grey untucked loose shirt that appears to have been something approaching white in the distant past. He is the type of figure people cross the street to avoid; slow-moving, dark, brooding and mysterious. He reeks of homelessness and mental illness. When he arrives at the doorway Isabel went through, he ducks his head and shuffles through.

  “Whoa! You think maybe he’s her dad?” Carlos asks as he stops recording.

  “My sister says she’s got no parents, that she’s an orphan or something.”

  “You think they live together in there?”

  After a few minutes, they see Skunk Mountain duck back out of the building and amble slowly away.

  “I don’t see him carrying that doll anymore. Maybe he brought it to her as a present.”

  Pablo goes syrupy and says mockingly, “Awww, isn’t that sooo sweet. He gives her a present.” Carlos laughs and makes mock cooing sounds.

  Ten minutes later, they see Roberto’s brother coming down the street looking from side to side.

  “What’s that on his hands? What’s he wearing?” Pablo asks.

  Roberto’s brother is dressed in long baggy yellow rubber pants with suspenders, sandals, an oversize sports jersey and wearing large yellow gloves.

  “He just come from washing a car or something?” Carlos asks. He steps out of the shadows of the building where he and Pablo have been waiting and waves to Roberto’s brother, who waves back.

  When it dawns on Pablo, he slaps Carlos on the back and says, “Rubber gloves! Rubber pants. He’s going to grab the Eel. He don’t wanna get bit.”

  Carlos smiles. “Smart.”

  Roberto’s brother is not smiling when he joins the two in the shadows. After demanding a retelling of what went down at the initiation, he listens attentively and curses when they finish.

  “That little Mapuche traitor bitch is going to tell me where Roberto is, even if I have to strangle her,” he says.

  He lets them know he is convinced that she tricked the gang into the hands of waiting police, who used a concussion grenade.

  “I seen it on TV,” he says. “They throw them into a building and BAM! Everyone in the building is stunned. The police rush in and grab everybody, rush them out in handcuffs and throw them in waiting police cars.”

  “We didn’t see no police cars,” Pablo says.

  Roberto’s brother sneers, “Probably ‘cause you weren’t looking. You two were probably around the corner making out with each other.”

  Pablo and Carlos vehemently deny such a thing until Roberto’s brother quiets them and says, “So she’s in there. You see anyone else go in there?”

  “Just Skunk Mountain. He dropped off a doll, but he’s gone.” Carlos pulls out his phone, shows Roberto’s brother the display and replays the man walking down the sidewalk.

  “Skunk Mountain lives there?” Roberto’s brother asks.

  “He just came and went. He’s gone now.”

  “No police anywhere?”

  They both shake their heads.

  “Okay, follow me. Don’t talk unless I talk. Don’t do anything unless I tell you. Got it?” He glares at them for a moment then starts across the street. Carlos puts his cell phone on record and follows behind Pablo.

  When Roberto’s brother gets to the doorway, he stops to peer in. Inside is a narrow trash-strewn hallway, empty of people in both directions. To his left, down the hall, is a doorway with a damaged door leaning half off its hinges. To his right are two closed doors. Trash patterns on the floor indicate the direction to the right is the less traveled avenue. Trash to his left betrays a small path between mounds of debris.

  He slowly enters the hallway and heads left following the narrow path between the debris mounds. When he hears movement ahead, he stops, turns to his companions and puts his finger to his lips for silence. Both boys nod acknowledgment. His eyes narrow as he strains to hear. When the sounds cease, he continues on to the broken door, where he stops again and cautiously peers inside.

  On a grey and cracked concrete floor, worn metal drums are everywhere, randomly stacked three or four drums high. Dusty rectangular rooftop skylights illuminate the two-story storage area, giving it an airy feeling. A small female voice is humming in the distance.

  He takes a few steps into the room and stops, listening and looking around. Besides the female humming, the drums appear to be the sole inhabitants of the warehouse. There is no movement among the rows of drums.

  He turns to his compadres and signals where the humming is coming from, then slowly heads in that direction, treading lightly on the concrete floor, keeping his footfalls soft and light. Stopping every now and again to determine the direction of the humming, he takes a zigzag course through the labyrinth of drums until, judging by the nearness of the sound, it’s apparent that they are almost to their quarry. Rounding a final set of drums, he sees an open door that leads to a small room. Gingerly he steps to the doorway and peeks inside.

  The room is a small office with no exit and no windows to the exterior. Light from the skylights leaks in through an interior window next to the door. Blankets are mounded in one corner, where he sees Isabel with her back to him. Another pile of blankets is mounded in another corner. An overturned chair rests on top of the second pile. When he breathes in, his nose wrinkles. The odor left behind by Skunk Mountain’s recent visit is still strong.

  Isabel, humming to a doll she is dressing, picks up another doll and starts a low conversation with the two of them. Between her and him, a large stuffed panda bear nestled into the blankets stares back at him. Satisfied that his quarry is found, he grins and takes a silent few steps into the room. Following behind him, Pablo steps on a piece of glass, sending a sharp crunch into the air. Startled, Isabel snaps her head around towards the door and lets out a small sound of surprise.

  Roberto’s brother straightens his back, frowns and launches an agitated inquisition. “You and Skunk Mountain live here together? It sure smells that way.” His eyes go to the doll in her hands. “He bring you presents? Keep you here for himself?”

  She is mute, still, and wary.

  Behind him, Carlos is recording with his cellphone.

  Losing patience with her, he yells, “Where is my brother, you bitch?” Without waiting for an answer, he advances with hands held wide to block any attempt to run.

  “Where is he? You lead him to the police, huh? You trick him into their hands, yes? You watch as they drag him away in cuffs? Is that what happened you little traitor?” His face is red with anger.

  Isabel crab crawls away from him, back to the wall, clutching her dolls tightly. She shakes her head and whispers that she doesn’t know anything.

  “My brother, Roberto. He did the initiation. He holds you until they count 30. You lead him to the police? They take him away?” He points to Pablo and Carlos, a few feet behind him, and says, “They see you. They see you go to the roof and then they see you come away, but they never see my brother. What happened to my brother, you little shit?” He lunges, grabs her by the arm and pulls her up to her feet.

  “Where are they?” he yells.

  Isabel whimpers that she doesn’t know. She didn’t do anything.

  With his free hand, he grabs her neck and starts to squeeze.

  Pan
icked, she drops her dolls and claws at his yellow-gloved hand, trying to pull it from her throat. She kicks out with her foot and hits his leg.

  He slams her to the ground, straddles and kneels on top of her. Using both hands on her throat, he squeezes harder. “Where is he? You know. Tell us!”

  Pablo, alarmed by the escalation, intercedes, “She can’t talk if you choke her. Let her go. You’ll kill her. Let her talk.” He grabs Roberto’s brother by the shoulder and pulls. Roberto’s brother shoves Pablo away. Carlos, equally alarmed, stops recording, sends the video to his sister, grabs Roberto’s brother’s shoulder and pulls, yelling that he’s going to kill her if he keeps choking her. Stymied, Roberto’s brother finally releases Isabel, who lies choking and coughing.

  “Where is my brother?” he says and slaps her across the face so hard that his hand stings.

  Trapped and pinned under his unmovable weight, vainly trying to defend herself, frustrated and terrified, crying in pain, she responds with the only thing she has left.

  She screams.

  Rooted deep in her frightened chest, driven by every rigid muscle in her small body, she shrieks out a shrill and knifelike lament, ear piercing and blanketing. Its mad emotion wraps around her attackers, squeezing and then completely engulfing them in its agony like an electric current from an open socket. And then the world stops; no sounds, no movement, no air, no passing of time.

  Nothing.

  It just stops and a light mist of white light particles starts falling from the ceiling, like salt from a salt shaker; falling and falling, filling the room with its whiteness, burying everything and everyone in white light particles until they are visible no more, like snow in a Christmas glass globe settling after you shake it. The room quickly becomes a sculpture in white that, when it reaches a saturation point, begins to pulse in brightness.

  Blue fingers of electricity emanate from Isabel and shoot around the room, dancing over the mounds of light, wiggling and scratching everything. The air crackles and pops as the blue fingers touch and probe. The odor of burning ozone permeates the room.

  Buried under the whiteness, Isabel becomes enveloped by a bubble of serenity once more; safe and removed from all danger. As if in a motherly womb, she nestles in and feeds on it as growing calm fills her until–with eyes closed–she feels completely released from the danger of her intruders.

  Instantly, the white explodes away from her; clearing and cleansing all threat from the room. When she opens her eyes, she finds she is alone in a scorched and smoking space. The wall and window and doorway separating her room from the storage area are gone. The drums in the storage area are cleared and piled in disarray at the far end of the warehouse. Grey and black streaks on the floor emanate from where she lay. The roof of the warehouse at the far end is creaking, drooping down, trembling, and sputtering; bent and broken.

  Slowly she rises to her feet and surveys the damage that is now becoming familiar with this second occurrence of her explosive scream.

  She has been protected once again by her guardian angel.

  Moving into the warehouse area and looking up at the roof, she wonders about her protector, “Where are you? Why can I not see you? You see me and protect me, but I don’t see you. Why?” Her eyes drop to the marks on the concrete floor and she thinks, “Or is it me? Do I make this?”

  She continues past the mounds of drums, piled and thrown about to walk into the hallway beyond, then out the door and into the street. Turning, she advances up the street to the car that she had admired earlier, and is stopped midstride by what she sees.

  There, implanted in the hood of the car at an odd angle, is the boy who had been strangling her. The upper half of his body sprouts from the hood of the car like an odd flower in a strange garden. She knows it’s him by the yellow glove he still wears and the yellow sliver of his rubber pants exposed above the car hood. His head is down and his body is slowly drooping. A low moan emanates from his direction. She cautiously walks to the side of the car to face him. His confused and troubled eyes look past her, off into the distance. He trembles slightly, slides his yellow-gloved hand along the hood for a moment, then he goes still and his eyes glaze over.

  Dropping to the ground and peering under the car, she sees his feet and yellow pants protruding from the underside of the engine. When she stands, his lifeless eyes stare down at the ground. She moves to the driver side window and, looking in, finds one of the other boys inside, stretched from front to back; piercing the seatback and dashboard. Looking beyond him, she sees part of the third boy angled and protruding from the trunk. His face is buried partly in the metal. His legs and feet protrude from the back seat of the car.

  There is a stillness about the scene, like a sculpture in a museum; avant-garde and surreal. She reverentially slides her fingers along the shiny red paint of the car, as if it were precious and sacred. She is tempted to touch the part of the sculpture that is the boys, but cannot bring herself to go that far, its awful reality being too much to bear.

  It occurs to her that this car was what she had been thinking about just before the boys arrived. She had visualized her and her dolls in the front seat of this nice shiny bright red car, driving away from the city to go to the mountains. When the boy with the yellow gloves startled her, she was pretending that she and her dolls were being chauffeured out on the road by her big friend, out for a leisurely drive past all the buildings and into the countryside. Was her guardian angel eavesdropping? Does her guardian angel watch all the time?

  Confused, she turns away from the odd mixed media car-and-body sculpture and heads out into the street that now has people running in her direction towards the location of the explosion. She traverses quietly past them, hugging the edge of the buildings, keeping to the shadows, staying low and small, leaving no trail and making no impression on them. She is inconsequential, outside of their interest and essentially invisible.

  Ignoring the people, she suddenly is struck by inspiration. She knows just the person who can answer her questions about the guardian angel.

  Chapter 8

  Day 1

  Santiago, Chile

  Twizzle and Forbes stand facing Zed and Rafa on the busy street in front of the Centre for Reproductive Medicine and Infertility. The sounds of street traffic play in the background for them. Pop music from an open doorway of a nearby clothing shop chimes in with the street side ambiance.

  “We leave at 6:00 AM sharp for the Laser Array test,” Twizzle says without looking up from her cellphone.

  “Sonnet and the twin going to be there?” Zed wants to know.

  “Valdivia is their hunting grounds right now. The twin is obsessed with that area, wants to scour every inch between Valdivia and Puyehue-Cordón Caulle with her avatars.”

  “Puyehue-Cordón Caulle?”

  “Two coalesced volcanic edifices that form a major mountain massif in Puyehue National Park.” Twizzle taps away at her cell phone and then turns the display to Zed. It shows the view from the top of the volcano. Three young hikers are off to one side with their hiking gear. White snow covers much of the high mountainside in the distance.

  “Breathtaking. I should be one of those hikers,” Zed says.

  “You’ll get your chance. One thing at a time.”

  “So what’s next on today’s agenda? I get a tour of El’s village of new and improved humans?”

  “Habladas Silencias is how they refer to them,” Twizzle says. “Means ‘silent spoken’. It’s a reference to the psychic connection they all have with each other. And no, no tour today. El’s schedule is too busy for that right now, maybe later. After the Laser Array test, we join Sonnet and the twin, which should make you happy. Mountains, volcanos, open countryside and all that.”

  “Aces, aunty,” Zed says and gives her a thumbs up.

  “Zed, this isn’t the thirties. And, don’t ever call me aunty again. Makes me sound like some old maid.”

  Zed laughs and corrects himself, “Sorry, Mrs. Mundoz,�
� then mimicking El, he adds, “or is it Ms. Brown?”

  “What is with you today? You trying to see how far you can push me? Is this because you don’t have Sonnet around to bug, so you pick on me?”

  Zed holds both hands up in the air and backs away grinning. “Sorry, sorry.”

  Forbes, watching Zed play with Twizzle, wonders what it would have been like if she, rather than he, had been the one to raise Zed and Sonnet in Kinshasa. She rarely has patience with Zed’s jokes and needling while he just takes it in stride, chalking it up to Zed being much like his deceased father, Messenger, who was always a pain-in-the-butt jokester, mercilessly kidding Forbes when he was younger. While Twizzle stayed in the states handling family business, Forbes was the one who lived with Zed and Sonnet in Kinshasa, watching over them, directing their development from childhood to young adulthood. Maybe she would have had more patience with him if she had spent more time with them in their later years of development.

  “Let’s get rolling, shall we? I’ll go with Zed in his truck,” he says.

  Twizzle gives Zed a wry look. “I’ll stick with Rafa for the return to the hotel, assuming there’s a helmet for me.”

  “Wouldn’t have it any other way,” Rafa coos. “It’s locked to the bike with mine.”

  Five minutes later, approaching the parking lot, they see a crowd gathered around Rafa’s bike. Rafa stops Twizzle, Zed, and Forbes and then pulls out his bike key fob. He says, “Watch this.” He presses one of the buttons. Suddenly, screams come from the center of the crowd. People stumble away from the bike, falling back into the gathered people.

  “What did you do?” Twizzle asks.

  “Bike theft device. Sends a chill into whoever is touching it at the moment.”

  “Chill?”

  “Well, you know. A tasteful jolt, a reminder to keep hands off; nothing they won’t get over. Watch.”

  Rafa waits for thirty seconds and then hits the button again. Once more, yells emanate from the crowd.

  “Just couldn’t resist a second try, could they,” Rafa observes. “You’d think once would be enough.”