Sea Monsters

by Chloe Aridjis

  As for Tomás, yes, he had been a snag in the composition, somehow inserting himself in the picture in a way the others had not.

  ON DAYS OF LESS POLLUTION ONE COULD SEE THE volcanoes there on the edges of our city, taunting and majestic, their contours carved by light, their slopes scaled by countless imaginations, even mine, especially at moments when I felt hemmed in. Needless to say, there were still plenty of scenes and vistas of which Tomás did not form part. Not even as an idea. It was important to have those too, and the most successful of these intermissions was an evening spent at the home of my friend Diego Deán, punk rock singer, draftsman, and occasional shaman.

  A small gathering, he’d called it, which it was in size but not tenor, our festivities conducted under the gaze of his three iguanas, who blinked warily each time a new guest arrived. Diego had produced hundreds of sketches, from all angles and perspectives, of his companions: frontal, profile, rear. He drew their prehistoric eyes, their lazy lids, their heavy blinks. These sketches hung on the walls between the bookshelves, and it was hard to tell where his pride lay most, with the drawings or the pets.

  That night the creatures had watched us from their enclosures, tall glass tanks that loomed over the furniture in the living room. Someone put on a Klaus Nomi record while a large spiral of white powder was prepared on the coffee table, cards angled left and right creating whorls so thick it looked like the ghost of an ammonite, a logarithmic spiral like the ones from last year’s geometry class. Once the spiral was completed Diego rolled a fifty-peso note into a cylinder and helped himself to approximately two centimeters of powder. After inhaling he passed the note to the guy next to him, who repeated the action before passing it on. Eventually the rolled-up banknote reached me, its paper warm from so many fingers, and what could I do but join in the ritual.

  The bold hum of voices, mostly male, rose and fell around me, everyone talking and thought-walking like Cantinflas, their voices expansive, compulsive, filling every inch of air. And soon I too felt charged, charged and restive and impervious to everything, and after two lines I rose from the sofa and marched over to one of the iguana tanks and stuck in my arm. But scarcely had my fingers touched the top of the scaly head than Diego rushed over and yanked my sleeve, saying I’d clearly never experienced the dinosaur teeth or dinosaur scratch or dorsal thwack of their tails, not to mention one should never approach an iguana from above, only from the side, otherwise they think they are under attack, and furthermore, it takes years to gain an iguana’s trust, he said with pride as the creature looked up at us with an indifferent eye.

  Diego returned to the table, circling the spiral like a sinister jester. Someone turned up Klaus Nomi and for a moment the living room was transformed into an opera set and in my mind Diego Deán and Klaus Nomi became one. Diego could be Nomi without the makeup, it occurred to me, they had the same arched eyebrows and beaky nose and rosebud mouth. Then again, Nomi had recently died of AIDS in solitary conditions in New York, I remembered reading, people too scared of the new disease to even visit. Dark thoughts began to wash over me, the shadow side of drugs, which was why I didn’t venture there often, and I tried to sink into the sofa despite being too wired to properly sink, observing the dwindling spiral as every few minutes another whorl vanished, every guest part of the anti-helical operation that slowed down as we neared the center.

  I’d been thinking of getting up and checking on the iguanas when the doorbell rang, announcing the Afterhours gang. They were like astronomers: night was never long or black enough. First there was Cera, who with his 1940s suit and ruddy cheeks and greased-back hair reminded me of a wind-up doll, and his sidekick El Chino, who lived with his pet canary, Juan El Ciego, blind since birth, for whom he fashioned nests out of discarded shoulder pads. And El Chino’s older girlfriend, Lorita, a tense woman in a purple jacket who had a habit of finishing other people’s sentences. And last, El Pitufo, a coke dealer who wrote poetry; people listened to him recite his latest poems in exchange for free samples, and the more they consumed, the better his poetry sounded to their ears. He longed to be taken seriously, but when people saw him all they could think of was fine white lines.

  Another spiral quickly formed on the coffee table, cast forth from a folded white envelope rather than any mystery of torsion. El Chino replaced Nomi with Bauhaus, then Japan. The spiral changed shape, everyone spoke at once, and whenever someone approached the table the others followed their movements with dilated pupils, rarely a pause between beers, words, or cigarettes, and that night I felt deliriously detached from it all. Detached, that is, until I began to worry about the iguanas. We were keeping them up; they looked increasingly vexed. I suggested we dim the lights and turn down the music but no one, including myself, could be bothered to tend to either, and only when an iguana nodded off, its dropping lid shutting out our species for the night, did it occur to me to check my watch, which read ten to three, information that jolted me back to my senses, and I said goodbye to the sleeping creatures and left the others to their fine white lines while El Pitufo recited his. But once home, it was impossible to drift off. A white electricity ran through me, as if my system had been rewired by an evil technician. Only then, as I tossed and turned under my wool blanket, did I think of Tomás, amazed that I’d completely forgotten about his existence for nearly five hours, but now the technician had returned those thoughts, and others, to their casing.

  THE VELOCITY OF PARTICLES TRAVELING ALONG A given axis; the indispensability of horses and railways during the Mexican Revolution; a map of chromosomal deviations; character development in Macbeth. Evenings, once I had completed my other homework, I would return to the Baudelaire poem, trying to approach it from different angles to see whether a little more light might enter the landscape. And during the ten days that I worked on it, jotting down whatever occurred to me at whatever moment, I had a series of further encounters with Tomás that at times seemed to echo the poem’s ambiguous message.

  The Kythera from the poem was remote from the Kythera of my father’s stories, yet in my mind the images began to merge—as did the two islands, Kythera and Antikythera. Yet each really did have its own wreck: the Kythira Strait was one of the greatest navigational hazards of the Mediterranean, an infamous graveyard for shipping, a place of sandbars, shoals, and sudden currents, my father would quote. Kythera’s shipwreck wasn’t as famous or as ancient as Antikythera’s, though its cargo was. On board the ship were some of the Elgin marbles, the ones Lord Elgin had taken from the Parthenon. He was bringing them to England in 1802 when his ship the Mentor crashed into some rocks and went down off the coast of Kythera. The salvage operation began immediately and all the goods were recovered with the help of the locals, who were never told what was inside the seventeen cases they brought to shore, Lord Elgin insisting they contained nothing but rocks of no value.

  That was Kythera. But the Antikythera shipwreck belonged to the great canon of shipwrecks, my father insisted, and his enthusiasm was easily transmitted. The vessel had been heading from Rhodes to Rome, it was believed, when it went down off the coast of Antikythera sometime around 70 or 60 BC, and lay on the seabed until 1900, when it was discovered by sponge divers from Symi who were taking shelter in the bay from a storm. The diver who first came upon the wreck thought he was seeing a row of drowned men and horses lined up on the sea shelf, and returned, terrified, to the water’s surface. But when the captain dived down to have a look he saw they weren’t men of flesh but of bronze and marble, in total thirty-six sculptures, men and horses, like the scattered pieces of a chess set. Along with these sculptures and a collection of jewelry and amphorae was a bronze mechanism, an astronomical instrument with more than thirty gears that could measure the movement of the cosmos, its fragments kept pressed together by the tremendous pressure of the water. Ancient clock, calculator, calendar, computer: archaeologists were still trying to figure out what it was, and decipher the inscriptions that covered its surface.

  The Antikythera
Mechanism. When I heard those nine syllables, I couldn’t help thinking of the Baudelaire poem, envisioning a mysterious force that worked against the romantic, some sort of in-built mechanism that sprang into action whenever someone began heading toward Kythera, although the Kythera in the poem was far from idyllic. Without mentioning my theory, I described it to Tomás, this enigmatic feat of engineering that had survived against all odds, a bronze instrument found among the sunken treasures, if he liked abandoned houses why not vessels on the seabed, but he simply propped his feet on a chair and said, Well, I once found a five-hundred-peso coin at the bottom of a swimming pool, and pulled a face as if to say this wasn’t the moment for scholarly matters. And perhaps he was right, for as we sat there in my local ice cream parlor La Bella Italia, right by the Wurlitzer jukebox with its glowing eyes and silver-grille mouth, I was struck by how quickly the thoughts that occupied my mind at home became irrelevant once I stepped outside, especially when face to face with someone physically alluring, there was no denying the fact, and as I looked out onto the street, hectic and sooty compared to the parlor’s smooth, tidy interior, Tomás began telling me about how, after dropping out of school, he’d gone to live with an uncle. He spoke of his uncle’s house with its peculiar insects and haunted furniture. I then told him about my father’s pathologically shy cousin Gamaliel, who would come over to play chess. He seldom ventured out and had the awkwardness of someone who spent a lot of time on his own, but was assertive on the chessboard and nearly always beat my father. Tomás then told me about an aunt of his, an obsessive gardener of cacti, although as far as he knew cacti didn’t require much gardening. This aunt lived in Satélite with her husband and cat, a fluffy animal whose fur absorbed the cooking smells of the house. And as we spoke about our relatives rather than ourselves I’d lower my eyes and watch the ice cream in my dish losing its shape, what’s more part of the universe seemed less spherical than it had only moments earlier, and then I’d glance up at the gap between his teeth, speculating whether it was the sort of detail one grew used to, eventually, and at moments our questions and answers felt as random as the songs playing on the jukebox. In what way is your uncle’s furniture haunted? Oh, you know, it tries to hold on to me when I stand up, it doesn’t release its grip. I must’ve looked confused since he quickly added, Speaking of which, why don’t you come with me to the wrestling, I’m going next Thursday and have two tickets.

  In order to go to the luchas I told my parents three lies. First, I told them I was going to see a play. Then, that I’d be with Julián and his (imaginary) cousin Miguelito. Last, that the theater was in Colonia Cuauhtémoc. The truth was, I was going to watch the lucha libre with Tomás at the Arena México in Colonia Doctores, a neighborhood known for car theft and delinquency, where grocers had installed gates in front of their shops and conducted business through the bars. As far as I knew, no one from school had ever been to the district or the wrestling.

  A red sun sinking into a bronze sunset, colors as saturated as those of artificial flowers, ushered us into the evening. Tomás grabbed my hand just as we were engulfed in the stream of people pouring into the arena, a thick lava flow driven by scorching anticipation. Inside, the atmosphere was as raucous as my father’s descriptions of the Roman coliseum—men, women, children, grandparents filled the benches that surrounded the ring, a large quadrilateral rising from the center of the hall. We took our seats in row 23 while the snack seller hurriedly made the rounds with bags of chips and beer in plastic cups. And then a torrent of raunchy music followed by the MC, a mustached man in a black suit, who wailed out the names Blue Demon and Cachorro Méndez. Upon hearing them, the wrestlers stomped out from behind the curtains. Two fleshy statues of testosterone, bulging out of their sparkly shorts and shiny tights, they thundered down the ramp, manes of hair spilling out from under their masks, and toward the ring, where they hoisted themselves in with one diagonal leap.

  Once inside, the men lost no time in assaulting each other in whatever way they could. They grabbed each other’s faces, yanked each other’s hair, and tried to trip each other up in their gladiator boots, the taut cords of the ring constantly stretched and deformed as the quadrilateral changed shape each time a wrestler leaned into one side and catapulted himself back into the center. Tomás seemed completely gripped by the spectacle, in fact he was hardly aware of my presence, so I ignored him too, and we sat side by side watching two huge masses interlock as they came together and then shoved each other away, a constant attraction and repulsion, at moments reminding me of a bizarre hybrid that after merging its elements splits back into two, like bull and man melded into the formidable minotaur, who then, when separated again, find themselves in direct confrontation inside the ring.

  I couldn’t even tell for whom Tomás was rooting, for the rudo or the técnico, that is, for the man who played dirty or the man who played clean, but when Blue Demon was knocked down and unable to stand up despite the wave of hysteria and the dictionary of curses flung at him by the audience, Tomás stuck his fingers in his mouth and made a catcall that ricocheted off the roof and back into my ears. Blue Demon was hardly moving. A hush fell over the hall. The referee approached the collapsed pile of a man and with one theatrical tug he removed the blue-and-silver mask. And with that tug a baby face was revealed, and all strength and mystery extinguished.

  During the next match, between El Espectro and Huracán Salgado, Tomás continued spellbound and in another orbit, especially when El Espectro carried out a suicide dive, hurling himself headfirst out of the ring like a tormented rag doll (in a surprising act of generosity, his opponent caught the fall just in time). And I knew I stood no chance once the female wrestlers came on, La Reina Sombra and Felina Gutiérrez, pure muscle and curve in their leopard-print tights, tension coiled in their thighs as they trod down the ramp and swung themselves into the ring. From the front row three middle-aged women cried out for blood like those knitters at the guillotine, their faces contorted into storms as they bayed obscenities and punched the air.

  On the way home Tomás, his battered station wagon ignoring every red light, mentioned that the luchas were choreographed, the moves mostly planned out in advance. I said I was glad I hadn’t known at the time, since it would’ve probably interfered with my enjoyment. But I wondered to myself about his display of suspense, why he had appeared so rapt when he’d known all along that the struggle wasn’t real.

  Despite the romantically arid night I felt drenched in testosterone, and once back in my room I couldn’t shake off the sticky clammy atmosphere of the ring. The only antidote, I decided, drawing on available resources, that is, was to put on the Smiths; if anything were capable of neutralizing the virile concoction of Arena México, it would be them. I laid out the albums and dropped the needle onto “What She Said” and from there onto nine or ten other favorite songs. But I couldn’t get the wrestlers out of my head, the wrestlers or Tomás, one seemed to highlight the other, the wrestlers so ardent, and Tomás so unlit; what would it take, I asked myself, to make this person come just a bit more alive. Sooner or later when listening to the Smiths I would have to think of my friend Patricio, who had Morrissey’s autograph hanging on his wall, framed and behind glass. He’d been visiting London with his parents when he spotted Morrissey on the escalator of a famous department store, and quickly turned around and caught up with him. The singer was friendly, he said, in his blue jeans and striped polyester shirt, and signed the paper Patricio held out. We’d all pilgrimaged over to his house to study said autograph, it was far too valuable to leave the premises or even to be taken out of the frame, and both times I had gone I’d stared and stared at the childlike scrawl, in capitals, the tall R’s tilting forward as if going for a walk, and the curves of the S’s unfinished, like two upright parallel waves. But the curtain fell one drunken night when Patricio confessed he’d made up the story and forged the signature, though it was true he’d gone to London with his parents and this had been the outcome he’d been hop
ing for, and furthermore he’d practiced the signature so many times it really had begun to feel real. The main effect of listening to the Smiths was, obviously, a spike in longing, a longing for whatever one didn’t have in life and perhaps never would, and as the needle danced over my loyal records I realized that more had to happen with Tomás, something had to be sealed, there had to be a sense of complicity; this was something I’d learned at the Burroughs apartment, complicity was what made two people a couple, regardless of how it all panned out.

  I SOUGHT CALM WHILE THE OCEAN WAS RESTLESS, the only hint of serenity the bluish gray of an indefinite landscape in the distance, yet this ended up being nothing but more sea. At night its thunder was hard to bear, and I’d have to remind myself how in the city silence was also an impossibility, and that even on days when I didn’t leave home the city would force its way through the windowpanes. Our street wasn’t busy but even so, the clamor never ceased: car horns, the cries of ambulatory vendors, deliverymen on motorcycles, radios playing on nearby rooftops and patios.

  From my hammock I tried to conjure up my favorite city sound, that of the tamalero who’d announce dusk with his disembodied cry. The cry grew louder as he drew nearer to our home. He’d cycle past each evening, calling out Ricos tamales oaxaqueños, compra tus tamales calientitos, alerting everyone to the hot tamales in his cart. Sometimes when on the phone with a friend I would hear the same cry in the background and for a long while I thought the tamalero had the gift of ubiquity, until someone pointed out it was a recording activated by the turning of the bicycle pedals. The man’s voice had apparently been recorded at his uncle’s house when he was a teenager and had, like most city features, proliferated over time, eventually spreading to every corner, becoming the soundtrack to many people’s evenings, not only mine. Tamales oaxaqueños belonged to no one, a mantra released at dusk like an orphaned balloon.