I loved my little girl with the bursting heart and worried mind of an untested father—even if love wasn’t nearly a strong enough word to describe the feeling that filled my entire body every time I saw her innocent face. Love may have adequately defined the feelings I had for Eden, but with Annalise, it was something entirely different. It was something new; something that she brought with her from the mysterious land of the unborn, a feeling that was reserved only for a speechless new father when his only true treasure opened her bright eyes for the very first time. Saying that it was just love, would have been like comparing a dying tide pool to the great Pacific Ocean and all its incredible natural treasures and ancient secrets. What I felt for my precious girl was 100 percent universe shattering and something that made all my other emotions squirm and weep in frantic jealousy. They cried and cried in their madness and tried to desperately get my attention, but it was all in vain because nothing could have ever competed with my love for Annalise—nothing. There was only one star in the endless darkness of the mysterious cosmos, and it was powerful and strong, and it consumed everything around it, even if it was kind, unselfish, honest, and filled with love and innocence. She was a miracle star that made everything else look insignificant and almost indifferent. My only mission in life was to love that star and keep it happy and shining bright, keep it growing, and keep it safe. I was the loyal guardian of that rare gem, and I was ready to sacrifice everything and anything for it. I was ready to kill, and I was ready to die.
When she smiled, it was 100 percent genuine. When she cried, it was 100 percent true. She never lied, she never faked, and she never pretended. She never concealed her happiness or held back her tears. She never abused an emotion or twisted its original, true purpose. She was untainted.
The purity of a child exposed that remarkable perfection that was so often short-lived in the world of people, the world of grown-ups, the world of the mad and the sad. Oh, how she would have kept that perfection forever if I had just raised her under the starry skies of the magic forest where purity, truth, and kindness reigned over filth and lunacy, where exposure to any evil or jealousy didn’t exist, where the competitive nature of people couldn’t ruin that unspoiled canvas of a child that was so generously, so recklessly, given to us corrupted.
I watched that purity in total awe and fascination, and its fragility and lack of protection concerned me greatly. I became terrifyingly worried, and I cried when I held my daughter in my inexperienced arms. Her skin was so soft, so exposed, and I missed her even when she was right there with me. I missed her when she was asleep in her pink room, and I missed her when she was eating her morning cereal. I looked at her innocent face, and I was terrified to the core because I could feel that little cut in my heart and smell the dark blood that was slowly dripping from the wound. I was inadequate, and I didn’t understand why I had been given something so precious and so incredibly beautiful even if I was not perfect. A treasure of that magnitude belonged somewhere else, away from the wickedness of man, away from all of us, away from me.
2
Inferno
I saw that Ford Bronco approaching fast—tinted windows, a shadow inside. It was the devil himself who drove that car, and I hunted him for four years with murder and torture burning in my bleeding eyes. I roamed the black freeways like in a cruel dream and searched every bar and every liquor store, but the devil was gone forever. The coward had slipped back to hell and closed the smoldering gates behind him.
I carried the tiny casket from the church in my trembling arms, and I cried, and I died, and I crawled, and I goddamn screamed in my madness like a poisoned spring lamb. My tears joined the black October rain as I watched my only true love disappear into the abyss of her eternal grave. I tried to reach for her when they put her in that lightless world where no child belongs, where the innocent should never be welcome, but she was already too deep, too far away.
In that lonely autumn darkness, a part of me went into the grave with Annalise, the good part, I suppose. I cursed the skies, and I hated everyone at the funeral—the minister and my wife included. “Say something, a word of consolation to the congregation,” someone requested, but I said nothing because I knew that they would never understand. I just stood there, staring at the little grave under a crying sycamore tree, water dripping from my graying hair, millions of little knives stabbing my organs, billions of dark thoughts eating my sanity alive. I closed my eyes and whispered to myself like in an endless dream, “When the bell tolls, my love is buried, and my dreams die. All the colors fade, and the beauty of a sunrise goes away. When the bell tolls, I have my sight, but I don’t see. I have my hearing, but I don’t hear. When the bell tolls, I touch, but I don’t feel. When the bell tolls, I apologize to you, summer sky and the misty forest and the wildest of spring rivers, because I no longer notice you, I no longer want you, and I no longer need you. I apologize to you, waterfalls and lonely glaciers, because I don’t like you anymore. I apologize to you, the moon, and the stars and the galaxies and the eternity, because you mean nothing to me now. I apologize to you, hope, forgiveness, ambition, happiness and purpose, because I have no use for you. I apologize to you, death, because I no longer fear you, and I apologize to you, life, because you don’t excite me anymore. When the bell tolls, a man is lost, and only darkness reigns in the emptiness of his moribund soul. When the bell tolls, it is the end, and the lonely man starts waiting, waiting for departure—his only chance to see his precious love again. When the bell tolls, you can tell me that I am wrong, but you can never be me.”
The police told me that the case had gone cold, and I was soon alone in my quiet house with Eden, a pile of unpaid bills and a grotesque, all-pervading pain that whispered to me every night that it wasn’t going away. I could still hear Annalise’s little footsteps on the hardwood floor, approaching fast. I could see her running to me with a book in her tiny hand—a book about forest animals. But then she disappeared again, and I opened my teary eyes and fell to the dusty floor. I wanted to go back in time and read that book to her again and again and again. I would have read it as many times as she would have wanted to and kicked that goddamn TV out of the window. I swear to God, I would have kicked it all the way to the dark side of the moon.
I tried so hard, but I still lost everything. I was kissed by the devil, murdered by the evil, raped by the world—slaughtered like a confused calf and left to rot in a world where compassion lasted as long as the next news story. Everywhere I went, I could feel the hounds of hell walking next to me, whispering to me, laughing at me, saying that even in heaven, my daughter wasn’t safe. I was already dead inside, but the demons wanted to kill me more, put me in a cheap birch box, and dance on my grave with their grimy hoofs. They wanted to see more tears and more sorrow, and they mocked my pain, and they ridiculed me even if I was already lying on the ground bleeding. They were addicted to madness and pain, and they wanted me to join them, multiply with them. That is why they took my precious treasure, that’s why they tormented me so.
Life after Annalise was a struggle of immense proportions, and the demons never left me alone. I wanted to die and save my baby from the cruel bastards, but the promises I had made to Eden and the hope of revenge kept me alive. Yet, when the night was at its darkest, and the dawn seemed so far away, I often thought about breaking all my promises and leaving the unfair world behind. I got so close, so very close, but the survival instincts built in me always talked me out of it. Goddamn romantics and eternal optimists. I could have easily subdued them with alcohol and drugs, but I felt that it would have been an unnatural, cowardly thing to do. If I wanted to kill myself, I was going to do it sober and without hiding behind some filthy man-made cocktail of cheap whiskey and disgusting pills. I wasn’t afraid of dying. Not one bit. I just wasn’t ready yet.
The battle between all those different forces inside me was something that confused me greatly. It was just very strange to watch them fight in my body and to learn that I had so many conf
licting thoughts in my own head. I had always believed that I was in total control of my emotions, feelings and decisions, but I wasn’t so sure anymore who made the final call. Was it my body or my mind? Which one would have won if I had decided to pull the trigger?
Eden was dead inside, too, and she was crying, or on the verge of crying, most of the time she was awake. The thick dark veil of pain and hopelessness never dispersed, and its constant presence in our sad home was starting to strangle us so hard that it was almost impossible to remain sane. We could hardly breathe anymore, and we rarely exchanged full sentences with each other. Eden didn’t want to wake up in the morning, and she said that her eyelids couldn’t stay open because they had turned into lead. I was staring at the white clouds through the living room window for hours at a time, waiting for the winter rains to arrive and wash all the pain and sorrow away. Sometimes I intentionally forgot that Annalise was gone, and I walked into her room, only to break down violently like a fragile mud tower in a Valdivia earthquake. I could see my heart beating in my chest, and my whole body was shaking, hurting, dying, and rotting. I collapsed into a fetal position like a stabbed mental patient, and I screamed, and I fucking bawled. Eden was standing there in a white nightgown at the door, looking at me, witnessing a monster being born. Oh, my precious Annalise, what do I do now that I have no more tears left? What do I do now that my heart has died, and only a shell of a man is standing alone in the quiet cemetery with his fading bluebonnets? What do I do now that my desperate fists have destroyed all the walls and doors? What do I do now that I am no longer a father? What do I do? Do I die, or do I keep living here with my pain? Oh, what do I do, Annalise?
Needless to say, we both lost our jobs after our baby was taken from us. Eden didn’t even try to go back to work after the funeral, and I left voluntarily after a series of nasty fights with the principal—consequently saving the school board from the hellishness of firing a unionized teacher who had just lost his only child.
I hated my job so much after my eyes were forced open by the trauma I had never invited into my life, and I didn’t give a rat’s ass about the education of the new generation anymore. The school didn’t mean anything to me, and I no longer wanted to replace the horny cow and become the principal. I just despised her and her lustful eyes, and they burned my skin like a torturer’s blowtorch every time they focused on my wretched body and started feasting on me. The fire was scorching my drained intestines so hard that I started to see her as the incarnation of the Angel of Darkness herself, the wicked one. I walked the halls in my tight pants that exposed the shape of my testicles and tried my best to hide the hate and beast’s fury raging inside me. My quietness concealed a horrible, satanic danger that lived inside my tortured body, and the fuse in the invisible bomb of dark thoughts and uncontrollable rage was burning fast. The deadly solar tornado was expanding like a gasoline-fed bonfire, and I knew that it would soon consume everything, everyone. I got so scared of myself that I e-mailed the principal and said that I was not coming back. She said that it would be OK.
It seemed like Eden and I had truly been cursed and sent to the vestibule of hell. We had lost everything, and even the day care business, Rent a Sister, we had started in our hopelessness and delusion when Eden had stopped going to the library went under after a rowdy kid pushed another kid against a sharp corner. The boy got out of the hospital with a couple of stitches and a blue gorilla sticker, but his parents sued us for hundreds of thousands of dollars, and that marked the end of our well-intentioned business venture. We were officially broke.
Soon after, we couldn’t pay our mortgage, and the bank threatened to take our house. Eden couldn’t bear the thought that someone else would be living in Annalise’s room, and her health started deteriorating fast. Her will to live was gone, and it provided a fertile ground for all kinds of cowardly diseases to thrive inside her. They took full advantage of the huge chink in her armor, and the bastards seemed to follow some wicked orders to finish her off as fast as possible—get rid of the one who no longer contributed, the one who was lost forever. Eden died on December 24, when the first snow started falling on the mossy roof of our dream home.
After that, I was alone, staring at the table that Eden had set for Christmas with the trembling hands of a dying mother. I had been emotionally alone from the day Annalise had died, but now I was also physically alone. It was an utterly terrifying feeling for a man who had always had someone beside him, someone to share his thoughts with, and someone to rely on when the world kicked him in the ribs with a steel-toe boot. I simply didn’t know how to live my life without Eden, and I was scared of my solitude and how it would affect me. The demons weren’t the companionship I was looking for, and they only strengthened the grip of loneliness. They told me to drink all the beer I wanted to, now that the puritanical eyes were closed forever, but the thought of having a beer in that house made me want to rip my spleen out.
I soon realized that I had arrived at a place where pain and misery were so excessive, so overflowing and exaggerated, that a strange vacuum had formed and altered the whole fabric of emotions inside me. In that vacuum, a perverse, unnatural calmness reigned, and all emotions died a slow death. It was a place where pain and his sordid minions had gotten so greedy and gluttonous that—to their great surprise—they self-destructed and disappeared. The bastards had simply overplayed their hand, and the result was that the man they had tortured for so long didn’t even cry anymore. He didn’t feel anything, and he didn’t care. He just existed and exhaled ash like a forgotten deer in a burned-down forest, and that must have really pissed them off. They simply couldn’t believe that the fun was over. Goddammit, the whole thing was hysterical, if you ask me.
I don’t know why, but I accepted that I shouldn’t feel guilty about the absence of my emotions, and I slowly drifted into a peculiar wasteland, a howling wilderness where I started to transform into something dangerous. I hibernated there in my solitude for eight strange weeks and watched demons partying under my wet, briny pillow and hurling insults at me from the cold darkness, still trying to drive me mad. It was the birthplace of my becoming, and there, in the land of total isolation and emptiness, I slowly started to listen to the whispers of the demons and gradually gave the devil what he wanted. I sucked all forgiveness and understanding from my body with a dirty addict’s needle and flushed them all down the toilet together with my humanity. All love and kindness left my body, and hate, revenge, fury, and bitterness filled their empty seats. The beast that I am today started to take its final form.
3
House Party
During the painful years that followed my family’s death, I slowly learned to embrace solitude and appreciate the absence of forced socializing. I liked being alone, and I was no longer scared of my inner voice. The man I saw in the mirror every morning had become my friend, and I had accepted that I could have conversations with him and protect myself from demons with his help. My mind had learned to survive alone, and seclusion had transformed from a scary and hopeless sinkhole into a source of strength and balance.
I rarely encountered any living souls, but I occasionally talked to my neighbor, Sandy, and the unlucky debt collectors who made the grave mistake of dialing my number. I had lost respect for most human beings, and I just wanted to be left alone in my private world. I had no desire to share my pain with those selfish creatures who sat on a shuttle bus from Disneyland and refused to offer their seats to a pregnant mother carrying her sleeping toddler in her tired arms. I was sick of people who were nice and polite only when things went their way, when things were perfect.
The debt collectors called me because it was their job, but Sandy started coming to my door voluntarily after Lucy had thrown her rooster handbag on the passenger seat of her Cavalier and told him that their marriage was over. His loneliness had forced him out of the house and encouraged the desperate man to go and talk to people he previously didn’t see as being worthy of his time—people he didn’t
need when he had Lucy keeping him company and listening to his stupid stories while massaging his hairy back with her tanned hands.
Sandy didn’t seem to notice that his misfortunes revealed the selfish prick who lived inside his beautiful body, and his behavior reminded me that even a beggar with a hot dog becomes a man’s best friend when he is left starving on a dirty street corner. He loves the beggar’s cracked lips and the greasy food he carries in his stained bag, but only until the tide turns. Then he despises him again and forgets his help and his repulsive hot dog, even if he had promised to remember him forever, to pay back every favor he ever did for him. He wants to erase the unfortunate memory from his brain because it wasn’t the real him there on the streets, after all.
I was that beggar with a greasy pork hotdog, and Sandy came knocking—hungry for companionship, hungry for humanity, hungry for an escape from the prison of his solitary thoughts that no one wanted to hear anymore.
However, his hunger didn’t flatter me much because I knew that I was one of the last souls on the list of people he thought would offer a firm shoulder to cry on. It was clear that all the others had told him to go back home, and that was the only reason he was at my door. I wasn’t his friend. I was just a stupid neighbor.
When he knocked for the first time, he was sad and dirty. The superwinner was standing there like a frightened puppy, and he looked like a man who had aged a year in one single, hellish night. It was evident that the wretched soul had been crying and squirming a little too long in that rusty fishing hook that Lucy had so effortlessly slipped through his spineless worm’s body. He seemed ready for the lidless perch to emerge from its reed home now and gobble him and take all his happy memories with it to the depths. He was no longer the Sandy I had once so admired. He was an old, bitter man who had let his dreams die simply by becoming complacent and unloving. He had created a suffocating world that every woman hated—a world where sharp cold words, dull breadwinner’s routines, and clumsily hidden denigration had replaced romance, exciting laughter, gratitude, and surprise.
The Sapphire Express Page 3
