Sea Monsters

by Chloe Aridjis

  The trip. My parents. The trip. My mind leapt between one and the other, and there was no way to reconcile them. I began to wonder whether I should call it off, explain to Tomás that I needed to remain in the city for college interviews; I was trying to think toward some near-distant future, in fact more near than distant, and was applying to universities abroad. Any day there might be a professor visiting from Europe or the United States who would be summoning me at short notice for an interview. Yes, that’s what I would tell him, that I couldn’t go to the beach but still wanted to see him as much as possible in the city. I had to remain there, on standby.

  The rain built in sound and volume, then turned into hail, and from one instant to the next every light was struck, every electrical current severed. I lit three candles, wicks twitching as the walls trembled with each peal of thunder. A giant hand of wind grabbed our house and rattled it. One of the candles went out. I heard sounds from other rooms, the opening and closing of boxes, objects in my father’s study starting to multiply. I didn’t want to be alone for a second longer. I threw on my coat and rushed out onto the street, into a punctuation mania of the elements, the angry question marks of car horns—traffic lights on the blink—and the exclamation marks of antisocial rain beating down on heads and shoulders, and ran from awning to awning till I reached the Covadonga, soaked by the time I arrived.

  I found a lighter in my bag and groped my way upstairs, glimpsing undefined figures on every floor and the firefly tips of people’s cigarettes. And, at the top, Julián, installed at a fold-out table accompanied by two candles. He stood when he saw me, as if expecting a visitor, footsteps always louder in the dark, and led me to where he sat. Our voices lowered and then rose as the rain lashed the metal door that gave onto the balcony. A drip announced a leak nearby. Julián repositioned the candles in such a way that new shadows were born on the wall behind us. Obeying a sudden command from within, I said to him, Show me some goblins. He held up a hand and tried unsuccessfully to cast a monster. No . . . He clasped his hands together again and this time produced a wolf, which of course was not a monster, I complained, so he had another go and finally created a pointy-eared being that was obligingly more goblinesque, and after that a snaggle-toothed creature, equally menacing, and then it was my turn, and I pressed my hands together and raised and lowered them in such a way as to create what looked like a fantasy composite swooping through the air or plowing through the waves in search of prey.

  After a few minutes of admiring the menagerie, though I wished we’d given each a slightly longer lifespan, Julián pushed the candle as its light chased the shadows chased the wolf, and we sat without speaking, listening to the rain. The first candle neared its end, soon to leave us with only one. As it sputtered out in a final smoky wisp, he drew my face to his and kissed me, a tender kiss, more fraternal than erotic, after all, he liked Carlota the trannie and I liked Tomás, and for several minutes we kissed, there in near darkness save for one timid candle, nothing touching but our mouths. Once the rain began to subside Julián walked me downstairs illuminating the way, and I stepped out into the wet murky streets. Most features around me, from the uninhabited sidewalk to the slumbering shops and streetlamps, felt like shadow play and illusion, and once again I felt lifted by new, wild thoughts. By the time I reached my house, my parents waiting with long faces—I hadn’t left a note—I was certain I would go to Oaxaca.

  A SUNDAY LIKE A CLOSED DOOR. MONDAY, A DOOR forced open.

  The morning of our trip arrived, the time to grant further dimension to the drawing. I was relieved the countdown had ended. It was still dark when I awoke to the sound of the newspaperman tossing the paper over the gate, the thud as it hit the damp ground and the fading zoom of his motorcycle. Once dressed I paused in the doorway of my room to cast a final glance around, but nothing held me back, no door, no object, no angle. I had packed my bag the night before—a sun hat; red lipstick; two T-shirts, a little dress, and a wraparound skirt; my black bikini; a pair of sandals; a miniature sample of Obsession; the Penguin paperback of Lautréamont’s Chants de Maldoror that Mr. Berg had lent me; my Walkman and, after great deliberation, a selection of tapes (Depeche Mode’s Speak and Spell, Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures, Siouxsie and the Banshees’ Tinderbox, the Jesus and Mary Chain’s Barbed Wire Kisses, the Cure’s Three Imaginary Boys, and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ Tender Prey); and a purse with money, 200 pesos in total, my escapade financed by a handful of friends who’d given donations ranging from ten to twenty. Satisfaction: my fugitive bag fit into my capacious obedient one, meaning I’d raise no suspicions when I left for school.

  I saw my mother only briefly, our paths crossing in the kitchen. Flustered by an unpaid bill she’d found lying on the counter, her only preoccupation apart from numbers—she didn’t notice I was hardly eating—was whether to have tea or coffee. It was a similar crisis each morning, the mouse of indecision running between the two, but after a few seconds she would always choose coffee. That morning, however, she seemed truly unable to decide, and put on the kettle before also switching on the coffee machine. Indecision accompanied her in most tasks, a habit, if it could be regarded as that, she’d acquired while translating; she would sit for hours at her desk or the piano top caught between words, succumbing to the force field of one and then another, and when I saw her so immobilized I couldn’t help thinking she should’ve been a tightrope walker instead, that was the ideal profession for the indecisive, with only one path to take, forward, the distance determined before you even set out; you cannot take a left or right or a sudden diagonal, your journey is simply from A to B or from B to A, and all you control is the speed. That morning I had no room for indecision, there’s always a danger it’s contagious, and was relieved when she switched off the kettle and turned her full attention to the coffee machine. Yawning as she tightened the belt on her robe, still in a fog she asked what I wanted for lunch later that day. I looked away guiltily and mumbled the name of a favorite soup.

  The machines of the construction site lay asleep but in the plaza the old organ grinder sat by the fountain polishing his instrument. The sun painted the tops of trees and the uppermost corners of windows. The wind flipped through the pages of an abandoned magazine. I hurried past a cluster of shops selling hearing aids, imagining the gadgets inside amplifying my steps, and once on the bus chose a seat by the window and laid my bag beside me so no one would join. That morning the Swedes played Yazoo. I tried to concentrate on the singer’s hefty voice, in dialogue with the keyboard whose tunes alternated between happy and forlorn, and allowed my nerves to be buffeted between the two. But just as the bus was crossing Chapultepec Park’s tercera sección, the music stopped. Someone cursed, first in Swedish and then in English. Their batteries had run out.

  The only other time the stereo had gone quiet was on the morning of the earthquake. As we’d crossed the city in apocalyptic collapse, the driver braking every now and then as he tried to decide whether to complete the journey or bring us home, the Swedes, once they realized the scale of the horror, had switched off their music. When we reached the school gates a policeman told us to turn around, classes would be suspended until further notice, and the driver returned us to our homes one by one. This was the last time, as far as I knew, we’d had total silence on the bus, a requiem without notes or music or ascension.

  That Thursday at the end of classes instead of the school bus I boarded a Ruta 100 and went to meet Tomás at TAPO, one of the city’s four bus terminals, each corresponding to a cardinal point, in this case Oriente. To some the terminal may have seemed like a kaleidoscope of shifting landscapes, beams of light that changed color and pattern with every rotation, but to less foreign eyes like ours it was a cauldron of bad moods and coyotes on the prowl, its noisy hall full of bewildered tourists, pirate taxi drivers, and street vendors all jostling for space. From every corner, bus companies—Estrella Blanca, Cristóbal Colón, and Oaxaca Pacífico—competed for passengers. By the time we re
turned from the taquería across the street it was nearing five, at least according to the large clock that watched over the terminal with a skeptical eye, but the afternoon heat, trapped in the limbo of imminent departures, told a different hour, and we sat on our bags, restless and cranky, as more and more vendors arrived balancing racks of food on their shoulders or dragging sackfuls of trinkets they would decant onto a polyester blanket.

  Finally Tomás, who held our tickets, signaled it was time to board. In the terminal’s hinterland our Oaxaca Pacífico bus was waiting, shuddering as it warmed its joints for the long journey ahead. Dozens of eyes tracked our movements as we shuffled down the aisle, our fellow passengers mostly men from the countryside, some with their wives, the overhead racks sagging and bulging with parcels. Our assigned seats were in the middle, across from two elderly men who studied Tomás as he lifted our bags onto the rack. It was an old bus, probably from the seventies, with faded pink-and-blue-checked seats and entire maps scratched into the windowpanes. I asked to sit by the window; Tomás was familiar with the route but I’d traveled to Oaxaca only by plane, with my parents. Once seated I leaned back and grabbed his cool hand as the driver tore through the city, tore through its outskirts, and tore down the first stretch of highway before relaxing into a more leisurely speed.

  Dusk blurred the features of the landscape, the outlines of billboards and the spectral needles of telephone poles growing scanter the farther we got from the city. Tomás and I plugged into our Walkmans, the Specials for him and Nick Cave for me, while the engine purred beneath my seat, and for a few blissful hours I felt we were moving through a universe in which space and matter were organized in just the right way. After Nick Cave I put on Joy Division. As much as I loved Unknown Pleasures, I began to wish I’d brought their other album, Closer. Unknown Pleasures had “New Dawn Fades” and “She’s Lost Control,” but Closer had “Decades,” “Isolation,” “Passover,” and “A Means to an End.” In other words, it had more songs that meant something to me. A hopelessly tiny predicament, I tried telling myself, I wasn’t going to be away forever and once at the beach I’d probably have no need for music. But I kept thinking of the songs I didn’t have rather than the ones I’d brought along.

  We had just turned a dangerous curve when my Walkman batteries ran out. By then I’d moved on to Depeche Mode. With little warning, the voice and the synths began to slur as if mired in reams of magnetic tape. I shook my miniature stereo, removed the batteries, reinserted them in an alternative order. To no avail. I glanced at Tomás. As far as I could tell, he hadn’t run into a similar problem. I made a sign for him to remove his headphones. No more battery, I said, no more music. How many hours left? Quite a few, he replied, but don’t worry, and extracted a white pill from his pocket, some kind of -zepam he’d purchased at the pharmacy, diazepam or lorazepam or clonazepam, as easy to buy as aspirin, he said, and suggested I start with half. I washed it down with some warm Sidral and waited for it to dissolve in my system.

  Gradually the armrest, the window, the figures around me lost their focus, and I recalled a book someone once brought to school containing photographs of spiderwebs woven after the spiders had been given different drugs (peak activity of web construction being around four in the morning). The scientists had delicately removed the spiders and sprayed their webs white, then photographed these against a black background, the resulting images like negatives that revealed the darkroom, the industry, of night. I tried to recall some of the patterns. Caffeine was the greatest disrupter, producing highly irregular spacing and very big gaps between the radii. LSD inspired webs whose threads spread widely outward like the rays of the sun. As for diazepam or whatever sedative they administered in drops of sugary water, at that moment I couldn’t remember what patterns had emerged, only that the spider’s activity levels had been greatly reduced. But how convenient to go through life with silk as your currency, and all movement from the periphery inward.

  With this in mind I sank farther into my seat as the bus penetrated the landscape, a landscape that held what felt like equal amounts of promise and danger, the thought stirring enough to keep me wakeful despite my wonderfully drowsy state, and in this state I observed from the window the ragged cacti and hilltops, assertive verticals on an inert plane, and every now and then the sad sight of a run-over dog, its carcass spotlit for a few seconds by the headlights.

  Tomás was fast asleep by the time our bus began to skim the fragile rims of ravines, past the tops of tall, ancient trees, a heart-bursting drop just feet away from where we sat. I grabbed his hand but it was limp so I borrowed his Walkman instead. It still had some battery, and I listened to the Specials until there, too, the voices slowed down and then ceased completely. And once that was gone I reached into his pocket—he didn’t react—and found the second half of the pill. We still had hours to go and I didn’t want to be the only person awake, everyone around me now asleep apart from the driver. I could see the back of his head and if I strained my eyes the top half of his face in the rearview mirror, though before long he switched off the light, plunging us into a kind of oblivion, the only sounds of life the engine’s steady pulse and a cumbia playing softly on the radio.

  The landscape began to feel compressed, features that usually lived far apart now uneasily close, cloudsroadsmountaintops, and I had eased into almost total tranquillity when all of a sudden the bus came to a halt. Lights on. Driver’s voice down the aisle. A drug search: all women off. Along with eight others I stepped out into the shivering night, exposed to the spirits and highway bandits known to populate the caves by the roadside, but the pill kept me calm as I stood looking up into the windows of the bus. Four policemen were shining their torches into each man’s face, including the pale moon of Tomás’s, and patting their pockets, an operation that fortunately did not last long since they found nothing but a few pills and cigarettes, and after ten minutes they disembarked and sped off on their sputtering motorcycles, allowing our bus to recommence its journey to the coast.

  It was deep night when we arrived in Zipolite. One by one we stepped off and dispersed. I held on to Tomás’s arm as the sand gave way beneath our feet, the warm salty air exuding its welcome as the ocean roared territorially nearby, and we walked in a direction that could have been left or right or straight ahead. The dim form of a woman appeared and from this form emerged a voice that offered an open-air palapa for ten pesos a night or a bungalow with walls for twenty. She switched on her flashlight to illustrate the first option: a thatched structure held aloft by four poles, containing two hammocks side by side. We’ll take it, we said in unison. Exhausted from our travels despite having slept on the bus, we remained in our clothes and deposited our shoes on the sand below. By the time the overhead lamp reached the end of its wick Tomás had drifted off and soon I too was able to hand myself over to sleep, despite a loud whirring of wings followed by an abrupt silence, as if a large insect had come to land on the cords of my hammock.

  FOR AS LONG AS I COULD REMEMBER—SOME POINT IN early childhood when I began to distinguish one landscape from another—beaches had had an unsettling effect on me. I did not love the water particularly, nor the heat, nor was I given to long spells of repose. Other shorelines didn’t trouble me. Only the beach. And yet here I was. I had no desire to speak as we tipped out of our hammocks and onto the hot sand that first morning, clusters of palm trees waving like hunched trolls in the wind. Behind us lay hills and fields of corn and before us the waves of the Pacific, rolling and peaking and breaking. Resisting the urge to explore, we decided first on breakfast—we hadn’t eaten since leaving the city—and after putting on my hat and sunglasses I followed Tomás along the shore to his favorite fonda, El Cósmico, the name, hand painted in pink letters on a splintering board, at odds with its humble dimensions: three sloping tables, their legs half sunken in the sand, and six subservient chairs.

  A young girl in a red strapless dress recited the dishes of the day—fish in mango sauce, fish in mole pob
lano, breaded fish with something or other. I asked whether there was any dish without fish. The girl looked at me curiously and fetched her mother, a more weathered version of herself, in a matching red dress. The woman offered to make me tacos de calabacita for five pesos more. Yes, please, I said quickly. We need to keep an eye on the money, Tomás muttered once the woman had walked off. I reminded him that I was a vegetarian, a fact he knew, but still he rolled his eyes in the irksome way that carnivores often had. I didn’t think fish counted, he added, which made me further recoil, yet I mumbled a reply, Nothing that lives, which was indeed a pact I’d made with the animal kingdom on the day I turned fourteen. You’ll stop growing, my parents had protested, but once I’d listened to “Meat Is Murder” and the decision had been made I knew I would never go back. How to justify a life extinguished for the fleeting pleasure of a meal, a meal forgotten as soon as the next one came along? There were few matters about which I felt as strongly, yet most of the time I kept my thoughts to myself, and on that first morning, across from Tomás at the blue table with its legs half sunken in the sand and the ocean beckoning meters away, I reined in my irritation.

  There I was, sitting with Tomás Román, beneath an insistent sun that didn’t let us forget its presence. He had traded his fitted black garments for linen, white and baggy, and there was something cloudlike about his appearance, vague and undefined, that didn’t suit him. But this was TR, I told myself, TR. The same person from the luchas, the cinema, the abandoned house, the person whose name adorned my notebooks. But even his expression had changed, it wasn’t as playful or maverick as it had seemed at first. Perhaps all would become clearer at sea level, free from the giddiness created by the city’s high altitude. Yes, now that I considered it, most actions in the city were probably carried out in a state of semi-giddiness, surely living at 2,250 meters above sea level impaired one’s judgment, and we all suffered from a strain of mountain sickness without being in the mountains.