The Sleeping World

by Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes

  “I don’t think she understands you,” La Canaria said. Berta had already turned back to the window.

  “Do you like living here?”

  Marie pulled at Grito’s ponytail and then rubbed her hand across his nose, leaving it speckled with ash from the hearth.

  “She doesn’t know how to talk,” La Canaria said.

  Grito stood up, holding Marie awkwardly, and she squirmed, too loose in his grasp to trust him. Berta turned toward them, and Grito placed Marie on the ground by her brothers. “I’ll show you something,” Grito said to the children.

  The boys bent their heads over the newspaper, bored of the game and drawing pictures of houses and animals that might have been sheep or dogs. But they were too bulky to be distinguishable and instead seemed threatening, their mouths big, and not easily named. Grito laid a new piece of newspaper over the old one. The boys both cried out. La Canaria stood over them and pointed down at Grito. Right then she was the magician’s assistant, wearing only feathers.

  Grito drew a new tic-tac-toe game but added extra lines and lines that intersected the new ones. The grid became more complicated, branching out at different angles. It took him several minutes, but then he gave the boys their pencils and stepped back. He nodded when the little one put down his x. He nodded when the older one drew more lines to intercept his brother’s x. “That’ll keep them quiet for a while.”

  “They were quiet,” Marco said. I didn’t know he’d even been paying attention.

  “They were until she pissed them off.”

  “I’m bored. And I’m hungry.” La Canaria said the last words louder, looking over at Berta, Berta at the window, Berta not turning. La Canaria brought her face a centimeter from Marie’s nose. “What have we got to eat, little girl?”

  Berta could probably understand La Canaria’s Castilian. She was speaking slowly, as if to an animal.

  “Find me something to eat,” La Canaria said. Marie giggled and stuck out her tongue. La Canaria bit at it. Suddenly, the little boy looked up, looked right at me. There was no way he could look the way he did, exactly like Alexis, almond eyes and curled lips almost too pretty for a boy, so much that I couldn’t look away this time.

  “Do you think Franz left before the storm started?” Marco said in English. His words brought the walls in closer. A bleeding in the air, layers of sense tearing. I listened to the one city still inside me, Paris, Paris, blocking out all other sound. The boy kept looking at me. Beneath his hand, the game Grito had made stretched the whole length of the newspaper and continued unabated onto the stone floor. The brothers were no longer playing with or against each other, just extending the game, placing their marks farther and farther away.

  * * *

  By afternoon the snow had stopped, but Franz hadn’t returned. Berta made us coffee, weak and mostly chicory. She handed us the cups. “You have to leave,” she said slowly in Castilian.

  None of us had spoken in several hours. The boys were upstairs sleeping and the girl sat silent where the lamb had been.

  La Canaria stood up quickly. “We’re not going anywhere.”

  Berta didn’t move and didn’t look at La Canaria. Berta was really small. Her body formed around tiny bones, not an extra ounce of fat except for her belly, a tumor jutting out of her. She bent down to pick up Marie and spoke to me in English. “I don’t like to do this, but I can’t keep feeding you. I’m sorry. You can make your way to a road that’s been cleared and get to town. I can’t go anywhere with the children.”

  “We’re not going out there,” La Canaria said, stepping closer to Berta.

  La Canaria probably wouldn’t hit a girl holding a baby, a pregnant girl, but we were all shaky with hunger and cold. La Canaria wouldn’t really have to do anything. Berta was alone and was acting strong, but there were four of us. “I’m not going out in that snow. You haven’t even paid us.”

  “I don’t have any money to pay you with. We obviously don’t have any money.”

  “You puta. The guy that brought us here said—”

  Marco stepped between them and turned to Berta. “We’ll leave. We’ll get to town and come back to help you.”

  This wasn’t what Berta had said, but it was a way that Marco could accept what we were being told to do. I didn’t think he was ready for the alternative. He didn’t look at Grito but kept talking. “This is a freak storm, right? The snow will melt soon and we’ll be able to get back here. We’ll find Franz and we’ll come back.”

  Grito nodded and La Canaria stepped away from Marco. Berta gave us extra sweaters and plastic bags for our boots.

  “Follow the river,” Berta said. “It will lead you to the highway.”

  Eleven

  The snow kept betraying us. In some spots it held, supporting our weight, and we were able to take several steps on top of it. Then it would collapse. The sound of our boots on the ice grated against our teeth and clung to the insides of our ears. We’d never been in deep snow, never been this cold or wet for this long. We kept walking, trying to follow the river but not get too close. It had frozen in some spots, a thin skin over shaded eddies, and black water rushed underneath.

  “We have to keep this mountain on our left,” Marco said, pointing at a peak I guessed was to the west of us. We nodded, but we’d lose sight of the peak when we climbed down into gullies, and its position would shift by the time we got back out. There were dips and tiny streams. It was hard to know if we were following the right river anymore. The snow swallowed. Even my breath entering the air became white and indistinguishable from the ground around us. If I closed my eyes, all I knew was the sound of my heartbeat, fast but buried deep. I wondered if it was really my own or the sound of the snow expanding and bringing everything it touched inside. Or if it was someone behind us. I thought this and not that it was the sound of Marco’s or Grito’s heavy, wet breaths. At first I felt the sound inside me. But we kept walking, and more and more I felt the sound around me. It was larger than I was, and following.

  The edges of the forest disappeared into darkness. I could see only in black and white. Snow clung to our clothes, seeping through the wool and layers of thin cotton. My legs were thin sticks, toys a child would hit together to make noise and see which would break first. We shouldn’t be out in this weather and we knew it. La Canaria and Marco slowed down, leaning into each other and stumbling.

  Grito was farther ahead, moving toward a deep dip in the snow. It was getting dark. Grito fell through the ice and into the river.

  * * *

  You say what you don’t want to only when there is nothing left to say. When that thing is all you are, all you’ve become. No words, breath disappearing, legs brittle movement, collecting patches of wet lichen that fall off too quickly. When Grito fell into the ice, I saw Alexis at the edge of the frozen river. Not someone who looked like him or a memory of him. Him actually there. He was standing in the deep snow, wearing his long dirty raincoat. He looked at Grito, Grito falling, Grito taking in huge gulps of watery air. He looked at me. La Canaria screamed in my ear and Alexis was gone. There was only Grito in the water, trying to dig his nails into crumbling ice.

  In Berta’s son’s face I had seen Alexis, in Marco sometimes before dark, in the pigeons that came fast around stone corners in Casasrojas, chased by something they certainly could not name. In what chased them, I saw my brother. I saw him at the riverside when we were kids, turning, that man’s hand on his shoulder, smiling, then his smile changing, thinking it was me, turning and knowing it wasn’t. But I saw that, saw that smile turning, so I didn’t have to see other things. Picked at a scab to ignore the termites making a home in my spine, crawling into my organs, forming lace of my bones, dyed red and dripping.

  The night after I was supposed to help Alexis, I came home late from the library. My abuela had left me a plate of ham and chorizo and the last of that day’s bread. I’d been t
rying to avoid Alexis and expected the house to be quiet, dark, Abuela sleeping and Alexis out for the night. But the kitchen lights were on.

  Alexis and Marco were sitting at the table. They had been talking, I could tell from the suspended flecks of unclosed verbs in the air. They were silent when I walked in. Not silent because I was there but because of the burnt words passing between them. Marco got up to leave without looking at me, and Alexis held his pocketknife in his hand. I sat down at the counter and stared at the drops of blood where Marco’s hand had been.

  I don’t know why I sat down. I needed to explain why I hadn’t met Alexis like I’d said I would. To tell him that it wasn’t just cowardice, that in my own way, I’d been trying to protect him. But I couldn’t speak with our abuela in the other room. Alexis was churning within himself, like he was too big for his skin. It made him still as he was never still. Completely silent, the knife stuck in the table, stuck there at some point between Marco leaving and me staring at the drops of blood.

  “Where the fuck were you?” he said.

  I knew I should get up. I knew I shouldn’t stay in this room, where my breath itself was a challenge. But I had to try to speak. Instead, Alexis stood up and left the knife in the table.

  Later that night he came to my door, like he did when he was a kid.

  I was in bed listening to the dump trucks, the clang of metal echoing down long channels of stone. I kept my room bare, almost empty, except for a plywood desk covered in books and my narrow bed. Years before, Abuela had tried to throw away everything that had belonged to our parents. I saved what I could. My mother’s old journals and christening gown, my father’s university papers, notes and torn kerchiefs, I placed in cardboard boxes and wrapped them tightly with twine. I shoved the boxes under my bed, against the far wall and beyond my reach. I never looked there again, but I knew what was there, sleeping over a whole ocean I didn’t want to touch but couldn’t let go of. At night our street was an underwater cave: me floating above what was left of our parents, the lamplights bouncing off formations made of exhaust and burnt coal, a drunk calling down the alley just to see how far the sound would carry.

  “Coño, Mosca,” Alexis hissed. “Where were you?”

  He stood just inside the door, and the sound of his voice skimmed over the cracked linoleum floor. Alexis never knocked when he came into my room and would swear and slam the door if he found me undressing, like I should have warned him. I knew he couldn’t see my face that night in the dark. The lamplights lit a yellow stripe that hit the wall above my head, punctured by red stars from the dump truck. To me, he was just an outline, a figure I knew should be there, and I filled in the rest.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “You said you’d help. We were going to get the info on those pendejos.”

  “Look, I said I’m sorry. But I didn’t want you to go. It’s too dangerous. Marco said he would tell you, and you wouldn’t go without me—”

  “Joder, Marco—”

  “I know it’s what you wanted, but it won’t bring them back. Finding who did it. The whole thing will only get you into more trouble.”

  I could hear him ease the door shut behind him. He stopped before the latch clicked. The cheap metal rested on the frame with an almost silent intake of sound. The black space that I had filled in to make him moved over to my desk.

  “Something bad happened, Mosca.”

  Alexis was crouched over, leaning against the desk, cupping in his hand a cigarette he’d just put out or hadn’t yet lit. I didn’t move, didn’t even sit up, as if staying still would stop what I feared would come next.

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “Everything was fine, we met my contacts, exchanged info, but then the police showed up. They knew we’d be there. They spotted me and I ran.”

  “You—you still went?”

  “I need you to do something for me.”

  “What do you mean? What do you mean they saw you?”

  He moved, and the streetlamp lit up half his face. Except for the cigarette, he looked the way he had when he was a kid and was scared and wanted to climb in bed next to me. And it would be fine if he did, if I just said he could.

  “I have something important. All the information I’ve been collecting—a lot of work went into it. The fachas don’t know I have it. But if they find me with it—”

  “Well, get rid of it!”

  “I can’t. It’s too important. Please take it, just for a few days. They don’t know about it, and they don’t know anything about you.”

  “Get rid of it—get rid of it right now,” I said.

  “Look, Mosquita, I’m leaving soon, and I’m taking it with me. But I need you to hide it first.”

  He’d set a box on the desk. Just bigger than a small bag of flour, one dented cardboard corner catching the light. I didn’t want to see it. He was desperate or he wouldn’t have asked.

  I sat up, though I didn’t get out of bed, wanting to keep as much distance between me and this thing as possible. “What about Marco? Can’t you ask him? Did they see him, too?”

  “No, they didn’t see him!” His voice suddenly cracked in anger. “Look—just fuck Marco. You stay away from him.”

  “La Canaria?” I said. Her name made him flinch, I could see that even in the dark. “She’d do it for you—and even if you’re split now, you’ll get together next week.”

  “She doesn’t know anything about this,” he said.

  “She doesn’t have to. Just give it to her—don’t tell her what it is.”

  “She doesn’t know anything about this, and it stays that way.”

  He wanted to protect her. Maybe it was his desire to protect her over me that made me refuse.

  “No,” I said. “Just throw it in the river. And get out of here. You need to leave. You’ll be safe if you leave.”

  “It’s small, just keep it for a few days. You have to.”

  “No,” I said again. “I won’t. Leave me alone.”

  “Please, Carla.”

  He said my name, my real name, which no one had called me for years. But I thought of our abuela praying for our parents. I didn’t want to be another laminated card on her shrine.

  “You said you would help,” he said.

  I turned my face to the wall. I heard him pick up the package. There was a long pause and the sound of him moving across the room. The door opened and closed.

  * * *

  Grito was in the water, and I must have run to him, reached for him, and fallen in myself, though I don’t remember. All I remember is seeing Alexis, clearly, deep in the snow. Then La Canaria screaming and the water, the water like nothing water could be. Change could come without warning, a storm arrive to kill us, and tomorrow it wouldn’t even be there. The snow must have been melting, making the water stronger, making it more, it must have been more, to be so much. Warmth on my arm and ice scraping across my face. Marco grabbing my arm and whispering, “I’ve got you, I’ve got you, just you.” He’d been saying this for so long, that there were two of us to save and he got only one.

  Grito wasn’t where he’d been in the water—there was only water and ice breaking around us. We ran down the bank of the river. If Grito was in the water, we couldn’t see him, we kept running, the branches and the snow stopping us, feet sinking, the shoes that had never fit getting caught, dropping off. We were mimes, so hilarious, the snow muffling us, too scared to speak, trying to move fast and falling. Grito moving beneath the water or caught somewhere, stuck when we rushed on. Perfect globes of air floating through the black water, going up and no way to push them back in, they would not go back in though his mouth was open, though he was trying to bring them back. Dark, darker than any night under his sheets because there were always streetlights, under the ice the snow covering the ice only water and not clear, filled with everything the
water wanted to be filled with except light.

  When we found him, his body curled around a branch brought there in the same way, his thin arm bobbing in a break in the ice, we didn’t know how long he’d been there. How long we’d been pantomiming through the snow. How close or far we’d been from saving him.

  Marco grabbed his arm, and with La Canaria’s help, we dragged him out of the water. Grito lay there in the snow, his face swollen and his sweater torn and clinging to his skin, leaving parts exposed and purpling. Sheep bleated above us; we wondered how far we were from the farm, from anyone. The sheep could be lost, too, they could be stuck, faced with their own inescapable mass of weakness, blood that can spill and soft marrow. Grito’s skin shifted at our touch, a mood ring’s waves of pigment responding to heat. There was perhaps a pulse inside him, breath that knew we were there. If we can get him warm, if we can get him dry. Marco grabbed his wrists, and me his feet, but we couldn’t move forward that way, the snow was too deep. We took turns dragging him. We didn’t know where we were going, and he was too heavy. Getting darker, the trees rushing up to meet us, appearing silent and solid against the anti-night of snow.

  * * *

  Two weeks after I refused to help Alexis, the police brought his medallion to our door.

  I wish I could say that was the last time I saw him: when I stared at the blank void of his body and refused. But Abuela made us lunch the next day and he laughed, placing his hands too hard on her shoulders without knowing it. Only I noticed her quick wince and knew that even if she were someone who complained about physical pain, she would never do anything that would stop him from laughing. He even joked with me, imitating the ridiculous way I walked when carrying my heavy backpack, doing a perfect impression of my English accent. When he didn’t leave town, I lied to myself that he’d figured a way out of what he was in. I thought he’d destroyed the box and that was enough. That it hadn’t been that important. He’d blown it up because of the dark, because of whatever he was on, because his mind had turned toward that thought and refused to turn away.