The Iliac Crest

by Sarah Booker

  “Don’t forget that she is still recovering, Amparo,” I said upon realizing the authenticity of the woman’s pain. Her bloodshot eyes, her dry hands, the position of her body on my body, indifferent and broken at the same time, told me. But when she stretched her lips into something like a smile that only amounted to a grimace, I realized the stupidity of what I had just said.

  “You shouldn’t mock me,” the False One said.

  “These things happen,” I replied after fruitlessly wracking my brain for something comforting or at least hopeful to say. For once I wanted to sound like someone wise, functional. I assumed the Betrayed must have been at the Seducer’s office, savoring the whiskey that should have been in my mouth, listening to the music that should have been passing through my ears. Turning back requires so much, sometimes. I tightened the arm that held the False One close to me.

  “Why don’t you talk to Amparo Dávila?” I suggested casually, in that half-worried, half-benevolent way a father sometimes speaks to his favorite daughter. Ultimately, I said it because it seemed the most appropriate thing to do.

  “Amparo Dávila?” my guest asked, alarmed. “But I am Amparo Dávila!”

  “I’m talking about the other one, the old woman,” I stuttered, quickly distancing myself from her angry slaps, from her eyes widened with horror. I watched how she stood up from the chair, the tenacious and crazed way in which she began to walk from one end of the room to the other, covering her mouth with her hand as if to stifle the scream surely caught in her throat.

  “It isn’t possible,” she said, finally freezing. “She’s doing it again, that fucking bitch.” She looked at me as if I were a ghost or a mirror, not realizing I was listening. “She doesn’t care that nothing in our lives, nothing in our bodies, will make sense without her words. Touching, you know what that is? Truly touching. Being that close.” She placed both her hands together, as in prayer.

  “The fun she must be having at our expense. That wicked bitch,” she insisted, speaking at greater speed as her desperation increased. “How could you explain this otherwise?” she said, pointing at her body, more specifically at some inexhaustible point between her breast and her abdomen. “How could you touch this? She has given up, and turned us in. That’s what happened. She has given us away.”

  Defeat lurked in her hands and transpired in her skin. Here she was, the smallest of creatures, finally crushed, or shackled. Time withdrew. I became painfully aware of my breathing patterns, fearing for a moment I would forget how to breathe entirely.

  “Have you already met her?” she asked, her face suddenly reconfiguring. “Did she speak to you?”

  “You know full well you are not Amparo Dávila,” I said in lieu of answering her questions. Her mental state had begun to seriously trouble me.

  “But she isn’t, either,” she murmured, turning her head from left to right as if afraid someone might be spying on her. “She’s an Imposter. The only thing that interests her is destroying us,” she concluded, her gaze boring into my eyes.

  I decided, contrary to my certainty that morning, that I would go visit Amparo Dávila, the True One. I had to put an end to all of this. I had to find a way to silence the both of them.

  With the decision made, I convinced the False One to sleep for a while.

  “Sleep will be good for you,” I promised.

  “But what if I have nightmares?” she asked me, childlike.

  “Even that won’t be as terrible as this,” I murmured, absolutely convinced. With a flash of linguistic clarity, I realized that, in spite of myself, I was beginning to understand—even if just barely—what “this” was. Disconcerted by my discovery, I accompanied her to her room and pulled the blankets up to her chin. I closed the curtains and turned off the light, and as I pulled the door shut I realized she was praying.

  The road to South City had never felt so long. I drove at the same speed, paying attention to the same things, but I had the sensation that the closer I got to the urban center the farther away it really was. Perhaps because of this strange sensation, like I was on the brink of losing everything, I acted quickly and without adequate precaution. When I got to the city checkpoint, I pulled my documents out of the glovebox and shoved them toward the official without even trying to pretend to be one of those normal and productive individuals they so easily let into their world. I glanced over the officer’s shoulder and saw a group of men held in cuffs, upright, absolutely naked. They could have been migrants on their way to a detention center or a new shipment for our hospital. I revved my jeep, making a truly spectacular noise, and headed for the Blue-Blue zone to find the apartment of the woman who, at this point, I no longer knew whether I could continue calling the True One.

  This time I didn’t hesitate upon my arrival. I avoided directing my gaze toward the people on the plastic lounge chairs around the pool for fear of seeing the eyeless woman again, but even so I could sense the apartment complex was darker than I had remembered. Between the plants and the sky, there was a kind of fictitious matrimony that in many ways suggested the fixed quality of a poorly taken photograph. Everything had the unreal patina of shiny celluloid, of a forced smile. Luckily or not, my urgent need to face the old woman and my fear of repeating what had happened before made me walk quickly.

  “Who is it?” the woman asked through the door as soon as I knocked.

  “Maybe you are the one who should answer that question,” I replied impulsively. Exasperated. Disgusted with myself. I thought about her name, about how inadequate a name like that was on the shoulders of all the women who dared carry it. Amparo. Protection. As if they were it, as if they could give it.

  “You never understand anything, do you?” my host seethed when she finally opened the door to her apartment.

  Amparo. A name. Like all of them, the more it was said, the less meaning it had.

  HAD I NOT ENTERED HER APARTMENT, HAD I NOT CROSSED THE threshold, I’m sure I would have been able to process this story as I had so many others in the past. After all, it is a fact of life that we let almost everything pass by with little awareness or appreciation. Even with all the strangeness, all the inconveniences created by my peculiar guests, their hermetic and private language, in that moment—I am totally convinced of this—I could have let it all go without a second thought. If I had decided to do this, if I’d had the necessary clarity or cowardice, I would have returned, without any major changes, to my dying men and women, to my routine of hatred and death, to that sincere erasure of myself. Without a doubt, I would have withdrawn to my own ocean. My instincts advised me to do so without any hesitation, but in those days I acted fundamentally against myself. Contradiction drove me. Paradox gave me courage. I suppose I took those steps that carried me through her doorway because of this. And I went directly toward her. Into the True One’s gaze.

  “Did you know that apples are a paradox?” she asked, pointing me toward a bright-red upholstered armchair—surely Damascus brocade—that I hadn’t noticed during my previous visit.

  “Of course,” I answered confidently, but then I bit my lip and tried to backpedal. You grow accustomed to this: laughing in the face of the languages you don’t understand. Sometimes it’s the only option, the last resort. She was silent, imprisoned by one of those characteristically feminine trances. Immobile. Watching drops of water slide down the window. Like my first visit, scenes from antiquated movies came to mind. Images in black and white.

  “Have you noticed how this winter never ends?” She didn’t expect an answer, and as such, I didn’t waste my energy by replying that yes, I had indeed noticed—with a bit of desperation to tell the truth—that this winter seemed to have decided to stay on the coast and its two cities for good. It was raining now, as had become an everyday occurrence. It rained with that tiring and frightening noise of regular things. It was raining outside and I felt miserable, curled into a fetal position inside myself.

  “And what brings you here, miss?” she asked with a lightne
ss I hadn’t expected after her period of intense observation came to an end.

  “But Ms. Dávila,” I said, feeling a sudden sense of sympathy toward her, “you are the one who called me yesterday, don’t you remember?”

  The old woman tossed her hand in the air, pretending that she remembered, but, by the hurried way that she went to the kitchen, under the pretext of fetching lemonade, it was clear she had forgotten. At that moment I was sure she didn’t even know I had visited her before, not even that long ago. I decided that it must be a case of Alzheimer’s, perhaps in its early stages. And I was disconcerted upon realizing that no one was taking care of the old woman. Surely she didn’t have children or grandchildren. Surely she wouldn’t have received news from her family for some time. Her end would be difficult, sad—I was sure she would die alone. All of this weakened the defenses I had built up against her, my suspicions, my distrust. I had arrived with the goal of unmasking her, and after only a few minutes in her apartment I was already on her side. This old, forgetful, and, as everything suggested, insignificant woman couldn’t possibly pose a threat. A woman of this age in these conditions could not be the voracious and Machiavellian enemy described to me. Did she want to end her life, her legacy, so that the Emissaries couldn’t take her writing into the future? Was this her way of destroying such a future? The True One could be nothing more than the True One, not the Imposter who so terrorized my guest. Anyway, the desire to protect the old woman came to me as quickly then as my suspicions had before.

  “The Little One sent you, isn’t that so, miss?” That was enough for my initial skepticism to return in full force, and I was immediately on guard again.

  “The Little One isn’t so little, you know.” I couldn’t ignore the irony. There are only so many things you can ignore, after all.

  “But what do you know, dear, if you never understand anything. The Little One is tiny, haven’t you noticed?” She challenged me with her glassy gaze, her lips poised on the rim of her bitter lemonade. “Have you hugged her?”

  “Yes, this morning.”

  “Then you should have noticed.” Her sentence seemed to be definitive, almost as much as her sudden foul mood. I suspected the old woman was jealous, but, because of its absurdity, I dismissed the thought as soon as I could.

  “She says you are not Amparo Dávila,” I said, the tips of my fingers brushing the Damascus brocade. I had the sense I was doing something shameful. The old woman’s cackle broke my trance immediately, and I refocused my attention. “Well?”

  “Why does it matter?” Her question was explicit, and fair. Why was it important to me whether or not she was Amparo Dávila? What the hell was I doing in this barely furnished apartment chatting with this old woman suffering from mental illness? Was I truly that afraid? Was I that interested in my strange guest? Did I have that much time to waste?

  “No one really knows for sure why they do something, right?” She enunciated her words as if she had been practicing them for years. “You never really know why you begin, one day, indeed any day, this search for meaning, or why you cease doing it, do you?”

  I nodded in silence.

  “I say the same thing to you: I don’t know if I am or am not Amparo Dávila,” she continued. “But her name reminds me of something from beyond memory.”

  I closed my eyes to better listen to her.

  “It comes from before. A mineral world, without a doubt. A vegetal world. It comes from the ocean, don’t you see? From a day filled with sun. From a phrase.” She lowered the volume of her voice. “He’s going to kill himself,” she whispered.

  I saw the twilight from the other end of my retinas, in some hidden chamber within my brain. I heard the phrase, and its echo. He’s going to kill himself. A strange sweetness pervaded my body.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked her.

  She moved forward a step or didn’t, but I felt she had directed herself toward me, her hands lifting the gauze that covered her.

  “I am dead,” she said. “Have you not realized that I am dead, that I have been dead for a long time?”

  I listened to the conversation as if from behind a half-opened door. The voice had a certain aromatic delicacy, like an apple slowly shriveling up inside the drawer of an abandoned desk. It was a woman’s, of that I didn’t have the slightest doubt. It was the smooth voice of a middle-aged woman ready to accept the unacceptable. The voice shattered everything at once. I had the feeling I shouldn’t have heard it, that the words were meant for someone else. In some way, upon hearing it, and later upon holding it within each organ of my body, the voice turned me into a thief, an obstacle.

  “Ma’am, are you saying that you are dead?” I asked her with the utmost innocence. Her lips formed a half-smile.

  “Me? No, dear. She is. I am the only one left.”

  I realized then that I was before the Disappearance Itself. The vertigo that overcame me was real, just like my fears, my yearning to return to the forest where we were all nothing more than immaculate trees. I wanted to have roots. I wanted to turn back.

  The True One or, better said, the Only One Left, looked at me with infinite patience. Even like this, in such a state, she was still a beautiful woman. She sensed all my transformations with the calm of someone accustomed to resigning herself to everything in the world. I couldn’t help but feel like she looked through me, at another person, at a loved one.

  “Do you know about the great wings of love?” I asked her, my eyes still closed.

  Amparo Dávila was silent again. She sighed a couple of times. She seemed to be restraining herself from answering.

  At first there was immense pain. A splitting out in silence. Dislocating itself in the dark wind. To suddenly pull up the roots and remain without support, dully falling. Tumbling from a lofty peak. A memory, a vision, a face, the face of silence and of water . . .

  “Have you touched the words?” she asked me. Outside, the storm enveloped reality. Glu. Glu. Glu. Drops of water on water. Glu.

  “No,” I said, with complete sincerity.

  Words finally like something touched and felt, words like inevitable material.

  “That must be why,” she said, enigmatically.

  I remember the rest like a bad dream: first there was the sharp memory, like guilt, of her manuscript. I had taken it with me on my last visit, and I hadn’t shown it to the False One. I kept it—hid it, I mean to say—in the door of my vehicle. It’s true that I remembered having read it, but I had no memory of its content. It was that, the absence of traces, of signs, that made me think about the pages almost obsessively. What exactly had I missed?

  I took advantage of the old woman’s weariness, her forgetfulness, to furtively leave the apartment. I ran to where I was sure I had left my car and, just as I had feared, just as I had expected, the jeep had disappeared. I first thought of the obvious: South City’s crime rate was shocking and so I deduced that I had become yet another victim. But then I considered the possibility that I had unknowingly fallen into a trap, which is usually how you find yourself in such situations. I considered all sorts of possibilities and, the less likely they were, the more practical they seemed. For example, I thought the False One had led me to this place with the sole intention of recovering that which, from her perspective, belonged to her. I also considered the possibility that the General Director, trying to ingratiate himself to the woman with the protruding hip bone, had followed me to South City and had, with the help of some hired thugs, stolen my car and everything inside. It was still raining. I was thinking and the sky was pouring rain. It seemed like my thoughts and the humidity were competing with equal passion and mistrust. I walked up and down the street, from one end of the neighborhood to the other, trying to locate my jeep, but nothing came of it. Finally, with my clothing soaked through, I decided to walk back to the coast. Clearly this was my most ridiculous idea yet. But as Amparo Dávila had said to me, we so rarely know why we do the things we do.

  I walked for
hours, maybe even entire days. I have no idea. Images from that walk blur together in my mind. Did I really see body parts washed up on the shore? The screams I heard, did they come from the lungs of those chased by armed guards or from those desperately fleeing the malignant fog—or was it just the wind? Did I see those spectral groups of migrants chained by their ankles on the road to nowhere? Did I see the red, flagrant lights of ambulances and police cars? When I finally made out the imposing fortification of the hospital in the distance, I breathed a sigh of relief. A pod of pelicans flew over my head, toward a place in the sky I sensed could only be of another world. There was my salvation. That was my place of rest. I lost consciousness, or to put it another way, I lost what I had thought to be my own consciousness. I don’t know if I dreamed. I don’t know if I found pleasure within my nightmares. When I awoke, I saw the mercurial light coming through the rectangular window of the elite ward and felt protected. I was thirsty. I asked for water.

  “Na pa glu?” said the voice of the Betrayed coming from close by. I turned to look at her with curiosity, but the glass of water distracted me. It was perfect, clear, circular. I couldn’t remember having seen anything as strange in my entire life: a woman with a glass of water in her hand. I hurriedly drank its contents, out of fear of wanting more.

  “Glu hisertu frametu jutyilo, glu-glu,” I said, and closed my eyes, readying myself to keep drinking.

  THERE AREN’T MANY THINGS THAT CAN BE DONE FROM A HOSPITAL bed, but it is possible:

  1.To meticulously examine the ceiling’s every detail.