Salsa Nocturna: A Bone Street Rumba Collection

by Daniel José Older

  "So why don't you..." Carlos starts to say to Janey.

  "No." She cuts him off. "I'm coming in with you." It's obviously not up for debate.

  Carlos sees it as clearly as I do, so he just sighs and gets out of the cab. "Keep it running," he says with a certain gruff resignation in his voice.

  The three of them head up the front steps and into my apartment building and I just sit there staring at the door, feeling oddly giddy and terrified for a few minutes. Then the giddiness goes away and I admit it: I get caught up with all kinds of phantom imaginings. I'm actually pretty well put together, physically. Buff, I'd even say. Much more so since things started getting rocky with Vanessa, because when shit's not right in life, I work out. When I'm confused, I work out. If I can't make heads or tails of a situation, if the words I need to express myself aren't there, if my thoughts are one big tangle of shit? Find me at the gym. There, at least I can make sense of something, feel my body grow, struggle and triumph. Something.

  It was a pretty bad breakup, to be honest with you, so I'm huge.

  But huge doesn't count much when you're fighting off "entities" like the one Carlos described. I don't know much about it, but I know things like that don't give two fucks how much you can bench-press. And you know, spiritually, I keep my dashboard saints and talk to them when I need parking or the strength not to call Vanessa, but otherwise? Church, only very occasionally.

  So when the door of my building swings suddenly open it scares the ever-loving shit out of me. There's a figure standing there, all shadowy and backlit by the rude fluorescents in the lobby. And here I am feeling about as unprepared for this as anything I've ever faced in my life, and Vanessa's angry mug is still dancing around in my mind, telling me I ain't shit. And right about now, she's right: I really ain't shit at all. I'm just some overlarge asshole in a Crown Vic. The figure in the doorway stands there for a few minutes and the whole world around us goes perfectly still, like even the trees don't want to move for fear it'll notice them and hurl some infernal wrath their way. So nothing moves, and then it takes a step forward and everything's swishing and swaying and alive in the night. Trash clutters down the street and leaves are whipping around. Am I making this up? The mind can play some foul and fucked-up tricks on a person, yes, but I swear by the lives of my five that the wind picked up strong right as it started moving, whereas just seconds before the world was cloaked in stillness. The thing, shadow, creature, form – whatever it is – it steps very slowly down each stair. And each movement is jerky, like it's some tin windup toy gone rusty over the years. It's tall and skinny and lurches towards me in uneven spurts, like it might collapse at any given moment into a sorry pile of skin and bones. And I pray it will, but I know it won't. It's got the fury of intention behind each clunky move; it's not going anywhere.

  I wonder, just before it steps into the pool of streetlight beside my cab, where Janey, Carlos, and Gordo are and why they let this entity get away so it could come kill me. I hope Janey's alright. Then I think how amazing it is that I just used what might be one of my last thoughts to worry about a woman I haven't spoken more than five words to, and not the woman I spent the last three years of my life loving. I'm thinking how odd that is when the thing creaks forward into the light and I see its face and I almost scream because it is Juan-José, the old guy from the eighteenth floor who lost his mind. But it's also not.

  First of all, Juanjo is always hunched over and he holds his arms and fingers all shriveled up into his body like dead branches. This thing, this entity, it stands perfectly erect and its arms dangle at its sides. And then there's the eyes. Juan-José's were pretty dull, like he couldn't be bothered to focus on anything. Nothing dramatic, just your average old guy blurriness. But the eyes that look back at me from the passenger window – because now the thing has creased itself at the waist the better to glare in at me – those eyes are sharp, and they seem to even vibrate slightly and the pupils are teeny tiny like a methadonians' – tiny and sharp and fixed right on my face. And when it smiles, everything inside me says to peel off as fast as I can, and be gone.

  Well, not everything apparently, because that's not what I do. I think about Janey again, and what it'd be like if she came out and found me gone, and this thing here instead, and what she – any of them – would do. They asked me to stay, to leave it running even, and so that's what I do. And then the entity opens the damn passenger door, which I could've sworn I'd locked and sits down and says in a voice crawling with worms, "Drive," and so that's what I do.

  * * *

  Something smells and obviously, it's not me. I'm damn near metrosexual about my personal hygiene, especially on the fragrancy tip. That is to say, I generally smell impeccable; swoonworthy even. Not to brag. But the harshness invading my nostrils right now is another thing altogether. An evil thing. It reminds me of the time Cespedes killed a mouse and hid it under the fridge and I had to track the stench to the little crimpled corpse. It's a wretchedness that enters me like a poisonous gas and I can almost feel it clouding up my airway, corroding the tiny vesicles in my lungs. Or whatever it is that's in my lungs. If I breathe too deeply, I'll probably die, so I just take shallow gasps of air.

  "Take a right," it says and I do. It directs me north, north and further north until all the quiet little midnight blocks have turned into factories and then it tells me to pull over in a gravelly area surrounded by rusted out industrial skeletons. I'm sweating. Maybe because I know I'm about to die a gruesome, supernatural death at the hands of my geriatric neighbor. My mind races through possibilities: Beg, make a break for it, fake a seizure. But all the mini-movies that play out afterwards are stupid and end with me dying anyway.

  There's an awkward pause. Absurdly, my mind still fills with thoughts of this strange and amazing new woman, Janey. What does she do in her spare time? Who are these comrades of hers? Is she possibly wondering about me, right at this very moment? Then the thing breaks into my reverie by croaking, "Vanessa." I damn near fall out of the car in surprise. I turn and face it full on for the first time and I see the old man and something else very hideous lurking in the air all around him, something writhing and dying and salivating all over his empty form. For a second my thoughts are all confusion and then it clicks into place. Nothing that happened tonight was an accident at all.

  "Devin," I whisper.

  It looks up, heaving rattly, mucous-filled breaths, and nods.

  "It's not like that anymore," I say. "We ain't a thing anymore." I'm kinda improvising, but it also happens to be true and I pray that Devin's dead ass can see that through my fear. I've been in this situation before. Okay, no, I’ve never been in this situation before, but I’ve talked down more than a few angry exes actually, but usually I'm the one with the upper hand. "She left me. She..." as I'm speaking I realize I really don't care. In some perverse way, I'm happy. She left me. And she took all her crap baggage with her.

  Well, almost all of it.

  "Out," the thing belches. When I don't move, the air gets heavy around me and I have to yawn to unpop my ears. I just look straight ahead because if I look it in that decrepit face again I'll probably turn to dust. A cold, cold hand reaches slowly out, grazes my cheek and then slithers down to my neck. First I'm breathing way too fast and then not at all. I pull and pull for oxygen but it's like there's nowhere for it to go; my lungs have closed up shop and shut down. I feel my eyes get wide, all the vessels in my face seem like they're about to explode and I imagine blood streaming from my ears, my nose, my fucking soul.

  And then it's gone, whatever it was and I'm sucking in desperate mountains of air, wrapping my whole mouth around that sweet empty savior and coughing and blubbering and carrying on. When I recover myself some, Devin-entity says, "Now, out!" and I stumble out of the cab.

  We pass through a hole in a fence, walk along beneath giant shadows of cranes and scaffoldings, breach another fence and come out on a rocky embankment by the water. Trucks thunder along the expressway a little fu
rther down the creek. Queens is sparkling back at us from the far shore, a world away from this horror show that is my life. I wonder briefly if I could make it across but then I remember all the filth and pollution that they've dumped in these blue-green waters and I think about all the mutant diseases I'd probably get and I opt to try my chances with the demon-Devin-thing. And then the demon-Devin-thing shoves me hard and I trip forward and land face first in the shallow rocky river edge, scratching my arm and bruising my face.

  I roll over just as it lurches on top of me. It's doing something down around my abdomen, but I can't tell what, just see its arms reach down there and feel a sharp cut and then pressure. For a few seconds the sheer terror renders me useless. I just thrash and flail. Water gushes into my open mouth and I vomit it back up and gasp for air. Then I realize I can breathe. I don't know why – maybe it's growing weaker somehow, but whatever it was doing to me in the car isn't happening right now. Once I clear all the mutant river water out of my airway I take a deep breath and come back to myself.

  I'm a fighter. My whole body is a well-tuned machine that is capable of total destruction. Of course, I've never employed it that way before, but I know my way around the boxing ring. And maybe this is some horrific demon of my ex's ex working me over right now, but it's inside a mortal shell – an old frail-ass one at that – and I certainly don't plan to go out without doing some damage. I swing my brollic arm, catching the thing across the face. It's not the strongest hit in the world; I'm still getting my bearings and I only clip it its cheek and brush along the nose. But the follow-up hit finds its mark and the old man's body goes slack. I heave him off me and pin him down in the shallow water, landing a few more cracks across his face to give me some time to get my bearings.

  It's amazing, not to care. I wish I knew how it happened so I could reproduce that thing again and again. It's not even in a cruel way, simply that the horror of this poor fool being haunted all the way into the afterlife by that ridiculous woman... They made each other miserable in life and now he's come back to make me miserable too? Absurd. I'm almost smiling at it all when Devin drives an old, frigid hand into my neck and closes off my airway again. I look down, shocked back into the moment, and see only rage in those eyes glaring back at me. Watch my hands snake around the old man's neck, all folds of skin and goiter collapsing beneath my fingers. Watch my muscles strain to close off the airway even as my own vision blurs.

  Janey. The river is rushing around us: Me, this empty old body and Devin's hideous ghost. Janey. Her face glistening out of the night, reflected in my backseat window. She's no one to me really, a ghost. It hasn't been Janey trying to reach me telepathically all this time, it's been me; my own heart. I swipe those old arms away from my neck. My heart is still alive. Those flashes of Janey are like tiny distress signals. That flush of freedom; letting go of Vanessa. I'm still alive. I'm free.

  The airway is collapsing in my grasp. The old man's dead eyes grow even deader as he gasps and sputters beneath me. My stomach is still burning from whatever fuckery Devin's ghost did down there. It's getting worse actually, but I can't worry with that right now: I have to survive. Because even after that world-shaking shattered feeling, and even after that grave silence that's been haunting the inside of my chest since shit with Vanessa went sour – I still have a heart. It's got nothing to do with Vanessa or Janey. I'm alive and capable of love, and love is a fucking river. It's never ending and it flows through us, all around us, keeps us alive and decadent, fierce from struggle and genuine in our vulnerability.

  I look down, see this poor old man dying beneath me. I throw myself off him. What have I become? My arms cradle his frail body and I heave him onto the rocky shore. I'm trying to think what the fuck to do next when I remember there's something terribly wrong with my stomach. Before I can figure out what, I'm sitting down hard and trying to keep the world from carouseling so fast. When I put my fingers there they don't touch skin but instead something wet and gooey like pasta. Guts. I'm wide open.

  Then I see Janey, only this time it's really the flesh and blood beautiful Night Queen of Brooklyn, fitzing along the shore like some motherfucking pixie to the rescue. At least, I think she's real this time. My body wants me to collapse. I feel the weight of unconsciousness tugging at me like the edge of a sleepless night, but more than anything I want to see what Janey will do next, so I blink away the drowsiness and wave at her. Carlos comes next and I can hear Gordo struggling with the fence not far away.

  Janey stops in her tracks, taking in the carnage. The old man is bleeding too. I hadn't noticed it, but he has an identical slice to mine, right along his gut. Nothing dangling out though. I wonder if I'm going to die, if I look stupid or heroic, why there's no pain, just an odd throbbing that takes over my whole being. My pulse. The river flowing from my heart. I hope it doesn't stop.

  Carlos seems to know exactly what's going on. "It's still in the old guy," he says to Janey. "See if he has a pulse." Janey reaches down to the old guy's neck while Carlos crouches beside me.

  "How you feel?" Carlos says in a surprisingly gentle voice.

  "Not too good," I admit. "A little nauseous. No pain though!" I manage a smile.

  "What happened?" Pleasantries over. Business.

  "He...It brought me here and tried to drown me in the river. I got the upper hand, though."

  Carlos frowns. "Did it fight back, once you got the upper hand?"

  "Yes." But then I think about it. How easily I had swiped its grasp from my neck, how its whole being seemed to collapse after I pinned it. "Not really, actually. Kinda deflated in fact."

  "That's because it was trying to transfer into you. That slit." Carlos nods down at my hands, which are still holding my guts in. "It's an entrance point. The ghost wanted you to kill its horse so it could enter into you."

  "You mean if I'da killed the old guy..."

  "You'd be a walking nightmare. And a much bigger problem for us to deal with than Juan-José."

  "Pulse," Janey reports. "But only barely. It's thready."

  "Step away, Janey," Carlos says. "It was lurking in that old man for a while, gathering strength and waiting for the right moment. I'm sure we rustled it up ahead of whatever demonic schedule it was keeping when we came hunting. And now it's looking for a body."

  "It's looking..." I manage to whisper. "...for my ex."

  Carlos stands and unsheathes what looks like a samurai sword from his cane. "Well," he says like this shit happens all the time. "She's not here."

  That's when things start getting hazy. Carlos makes some vague explanation-slash-apology about what's about to go down, but I can't make out all the words. Then Carlos does something with his sword to the old man. Janey stands there watching; doesn't even flinch. The air gets nasty thick again and I think my head might explode. A few more sword swipes happen, the thickness gets worse until every cell inside me is screaming for it to stop and then it does stop and the sense of imminent universe collapse dissipates. The world is very peaceful again. The breeze is gentle.

  We're stumbling back through the dark lot. Carlos and Janey are on either side of me, helping me along. I'm still holding my guts in but I'm pretty sure I'm going to make it. Carlos says he's going back for the body and Gordo mentions something about an ambulance coming, and yes, I'm quite sure I will make it through this alive. And when I wake, I will remember the river, the one that's always been there, flowing out of my heart and through my veins, keeping me alive; keeping us all alive.

  Forgive Me My Tangents

  I love the night.

  Feels like it was built for me: A canopy of stars stretched over my head, and they're vibrating so hard I can feel 'em even through all these layers of concrete. There's three floors above mine. Maritza lives one level up with the memories of her bobofied father who used to always declare his love to me. There's a young couple of indeterminate race above her, not even sure if they know, and then an empty apartment. Then comes the rooftop and then the sky, the sky, the s
ky and then stars. Hundreds of thousands of them, all bouncing light back and forth and spinning in their crazy long-dead so alive cycles, just like us.

  My thoughts loosen like they can't in the daytime and I just sit in the middle of my living room and let them go. They bounce easily through general topics, memories, occasional hopes, fears and fantasies. Sometimes I wonder, sometimes longingly, what it must be like for those folks that lay down every night beside the same person – those who have a vessel in the form of a partner into whom they can unload all those reams and reams of raw mind material. Quickly though, my thoughts keep moving, an unceasing caravan through the night.

  My computer is on. I have one of those screensavers that's all the blinking lights of the city. It sits beside the window and outside the lights of Manhattan sparkle with all their splendor, so the silly screensaver is like a joke beside it. A chiste.

  Joke is okay as far as words go. It's curt and to the point, but chiste is something else altogether. It brings the bestial ferocity of the che followed by the childlike ee and closes out with a resounding eh, which doesn't carry an accent but might as well – it's a power sound. So chiste is playful and ferocious power. Which is about right, I'd say. The adjective form, chistoso, takes it one step further, adding the Spanish word for bear at the end. Surely the Wise Masters of Language weren't intentional about such a homonym, but still, there it is.

  Forgive me my tangents. It's been suggested by more than one of my astrologically-inclined lovers that I'm a Gemini and since I don't remember my birthday I usually just pick a day in the May-June transition and take myself out to dinner at the spot around the corner.

  Anyway, they're probably right. I'm more than a century old but in my heart of hearts, I'm still that little girl skipping back and forth through the trees behind our little house on the edge of the cloud forest. Every tiny thing held its own sense of wonder, deserved a good solid stare from my wide eyes and I thought I could spend hours looking at each leaf of each tangled vine until a bird would fly by and I'd have to go chase it to see where it went. I thought at the time the world was putting on a show for me, displaying its finest shapes and colors like a proud lover showing off, but I later realized we were looking at each other. The Living Earth wanted to watch me, bask in my wide-open amazement. She put her finest on display so she could see me gasp with delight. A child's excitement is its own force of nature.