The Sleeping World

by Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes

  But when the police came with his medallion, I knew. I knew he hadn’t been angry because he’d already known what would happen. He had slipped that night from their black leather gloves and cement interrogation rooms, he’d run home through the dark streets, but they would come, they would find him. He knew what he had chosen.

  * * *

  The problem with a body is that it’s entirely inescapable. It is entirely before you and you can’t cover it and it weighs so much.

  We never found Grito’s body. I lied about that, too.

  I later dreamed we did, dreamed there was even life left in it. I could see myself carrying him as we searched in the snow, but he slipped beneath the water and we stumbled after him, following the river as much as we could, not daring to get too close. He must have hit his head because we saw him go under and he didn’t come up again. Trees brought down by past floods or forgotten by loggers lay across our path. They reached back into the forest, their branches spiraling upward beyond our sight. For hours we screamed Grito’s name, until it was the only sound echoing back at us, arching across the mountains, and then we stopped speaking, still going forward. The road appeared silently beneath our feet and we almost crossed it without knowing. But La Canaria grabbed my arm and held it, waiting until I heard the sound, too. A small white van, narrow and high, drove slowly toward us, flashing its lights. My vision was only light and darkness, no stars, no sign of the river, on then off, on then off, for I didn’t know how long. Marco was about to disappear back into the gulch, to keep going after something we’d lost, we didn’t know where. I grabbed his wrist and his arm felt wobbly, unhinged.

  “Marco,” I said, feeling sound pass through my mouth after so much silence, noticing the shape of his name on my tongue for the first time. He turned around and looked down at his arm where I was holding him.

  I wanted to push him back into the gully, watch him skitter into darkness, fall into the water with Grito and everything else I’d lost. Marco who had stood by Alexis and yet couldn’t stop everything that happened next. Marco who knew I didn’t go and what I was. I thought I would crush his wrist. It takes as much pressure to bite through a human finger as it does a carrot.

  Marco pulled his hand away from me. He knew what I wanted. “I can’t feel it,” he said. “Where you were touching me.” In the headlights I could see his hand was white with splotches of yellow, blood retreating from the fingers and allowing the flesh to freeze. “You’re soaking wet, Mosca.”

  The van door opened and we got in.

  We drove, back and forth on the same roads or different ones, we didn’t know, jumping out of the car to stare and scream into the dark until the driver said no more, either we would go where he was going or we would be left in the snow. La Canaria shut the door tight against the cold. We couldn’t bar what else entered. We left nothing behind, and what followed us was all that remained of the thin and pitiful world I’d made.

  PART II

  THE BLOOD AND THE ALPHABET

  I thought they would come up from the cobblestones, the basements of high-rises, out of the sand at the edge of the city gates. But the dead come from the walls, warmed all day by the filtered light of this drowned city. If they were really dead, they’d rise from their graves, but they aren’t really dead. They never were. Delicate Phoenician wives and Moro children who look more like us than we’ll ever admit. They feed the dirty cats and kick pigeons. They bring coffee to your blind aunt and she thinks it’s you. They are unmistakable from everyone else.

  * * *

  Sometimes I see others like me. Walking through their private layers or stoking themselves up to head to a train station or plaza, any sort of crowd. I see them waiting in a group inside an empty hotel. Their faces are sky with clouds moving across. I ask them what they’re doing, but no one can tell me. I don’t know if they’re lost, too, or if it’s only me. It’s a different city for each of us. Some are in pain and some are frightened and some are followed.

  Not everything here is abandoned or broken, some places are so full of life it sucks you in. It takes a certain amount of holding on to not disappear into them—the crowds at the open-air market or circling a courthouse. It must be what it’s like to gnaw your leg out of a trap. The need to do it, knowing you don’t have the strength. Some stay all day in the crowded spaces, where life is too strong to keep to its own side. They walk around, trying to touch a living person’s hair, trying to get the guts.

  * * *

  I walk into a room or down an alley and see all the things I’ve done. The city’s walls are so thin. You can slip right into a new room without even noticing. Eating with Mosca in our abuela’s apartment. Drinking with Marco outside the cathedral. Dancing under the streetlights with La Canaria. Many layers, many times it’s happened. The room has this ability to hold all you’re capable of—your whole life—between those thin walls. I open the door to Mosca’s room. I tell some assholes I’ll do a job for them. Even things that happened only once have layers. I can see everything I’ve ever done reflected in those few words. Boiled down into a thirty-second paste. I can taste it. I spit it out, and it floats in a white cloud through the water around me. Some days I just want to stay still, to keep that taste off my tongue. It slips in anyway. I open a door. I’m carrying something I don’t want to. I’m bringing it to Mosca.

  * * *

  Mosca is looking for me. It’s not me she sees. Don’t you know that? I try writing, hoping my words will get through. I search for phones with her on the other end. I try to get the phone just before the first ring. It happened once in Casas­rojas, when I was trying to call Abuela to say I’d be out late, and Mosca picked up the phone before it rang. I could hear her pausing, looking up a number in her notebook and biting on her lip, which she did when she was deciding something. She didn’t know I was on the other end of the line. It was nice to listen to her that way, when there was nothing we had to be saying to each other. I hung up so she could make her call. I try to catch that moment now. I walk through the city picking up phones, searching for an opening to where Mosca is. I need to reach her soon.

  The city is a sunken harbor. One lifetime built on top of another. Built on unburied bones. Layers of white stone, femurs as mortar. The city is an extension not strong enough for its own weight. The final crust on the edge of a peninsula, stuck out at the edge of the ocean like a dare—the kind that you know you won’t live through but that you go for anyway because you’re young and you don’t give a shit and there’s no backing down. But the city is old. It keeps daring itself not to bury its dead. It grows on them. And it keeps growing, stretching into the water. It exists in every city. It’s almost the same city but with the thinnest film layered over, just enough to gray all surfaces, just enough to allow me to speak.

  PARIS

  June 1977

  When we finally got to Paris—after weeks of slow thawing that never really completed, days when we turned around to bum a ride in the opposite direction and tried to find our way back up that mountain and to the river where we’d lost him, days when we didn’t eat and our clothes were soaked from walking in melting snow and sleeping on wet ground, waking and walking again because we were shaking too hard to sleep, days I can barely remember because I was not completely alive during them—La Canaria opened her brass cricket box that I’d plucked from the coals in the mountains outside Casasrojas. It was empty of money, but folded at the bottom was a piece of paper with an address carefully written on it. The address of the apartment we were going to squat in and the meager culmination of our plans. Paris, Paris, the word had bullied me even through the freeze. La Canaria held the scrap in front of my face. The crowds of tourists jostled around us. The paper was creased and the ink blurred. I read it again and again, as if I could find something more in the few words but also because they took so long to harden into legible shapes. Finally she let the paper drop. It fell on my boots and we stared at i
t. Marco slowly bent to pick it up. At one time he would have caught it before it fell.

  It wasn’t hard to find the apartment. A huge gray stone building just off one of the wide boulevards. A wealthy ­neighborhood, close to all the museums and in the very center of the city. The front had a marble staircase and a doorman and balconies with bright red geraniums. We sneaked around to a side alley with small windows and narrow doors used only to carry out dirty laundry. We climbed a back fire escape to the top floor. Through the window we could see a large bathroom and hall, but we kept climbing to the very top, a garret right beneath the roof. The window there was smaller, and the casings hadn’t been replaced in decades. It was too dirty to see through and held shut by a rusty latch. I used a knife La Canaria had taken from a roadside café to force it open. Inside was only a bare room, a water closet—the door didn’t quite close—and a cracked enamel basin that cold cloudy water spurted into. On the floor was a mattress and an old phone, its dial tone intermittent. It must have been a servants’ quarters once. A low door in a corner opened to steep stairs going down. Marco tried the door at the bottom of the stairs, but it was barred from the other side and wouldn’t budge.

  We didn’t care what led beyond that door. We’d spent all we had left getting there. Climbing the metal fire escape, I felt like the bottom of a ceramic bowl—Paris, Paris, the voice scraped inside me. No other cities mattered. And yes, we were finally in Paris, but I was hollowed out, and any effort racked me with a grating peal. No one would see us come in and out through the fire escape. The room was all we needed.

  Once inside, La Canaria wiped the grime off the window with a scrap of newspaper crumpled up in the corner. Over the buildings you could see the Tuileries garden: rectangles of blurred green sectioned off neatly by gray pathways and speckled with dots of people. It was the height of the summer tourist season and hot in the room. She laughed a cold bark. The only sound I’d heard out of her all day. It was early evening, but we fell asleep as soon as she closed the window. We all slept on the mattress, as far away from one another as we could.

  * * *

  In the morning I walked north, to Montmartre. It was where Alexis had said he would go that afternoon in Casasrojas when he held an empty handgun to his temple. Paris the target and the Sacré-Coeur Basilica the bull’s-eye, where he said he’d be waiting for me so long ago. I’d retraced that memory so often that it had worn out completely. It was more a gap than anything else. But Alexis speaking, his voice, remained, and I could feel the letters in my blood. I slipped out of the room while La Canaria and Marco were sleeping. We still hadn’t spoken a word.

  I went slowly, taking side streets and stopping in alleys. It was midday by the time I met the steep hills and the dark-even-in-daylight cafés packed with students. I’d told myself when I was leaving the room that morning that if Marco or La Canaria woke up, I’d say to them I was going to get food. But I couldn’t eat. I’d walked and walked, curving slowly around narrow corners and into dank alleys. We had hardly eaten while we hitchhiked to Paris. Every time I opened my mouth, I saw Grito’s mouth opening and river water rushing in. Food made me worse than nauseated and played a trick on my throat more horrible than a gag.

  Down a narrow street I saw a patch of color—red poppies and yellow mullein—and followed the color to a section of train tracks lined on either side with makeshift gardens. Behind the flowers and drying vegetable growth, the cement walls were covered in graffiti. Mostly murals, a fake Aztec sun and women planting sunflowers that bloomed in the shape of hearts, cheesy hippie stuff they probably took for granted here but which still felt slightly dangerous to me.

  I walked the narrow series of tunnels and passageways that lined that section of the tracks, picking my way through overgrown melons, broken glass, and the sodden pads of cardboard someone had been sleeping on, my fingers trailing the cement walls. No voice seeped through, nothing but echoes I knew were my own straining. You can make sounds in your head if you want to and know only after they’ve passed that you’ve turned a truck backing up into an old lullaby, a feral cat yowling into a voice calling your name. The one word I was looking for was nowhere among the graffiti and murals. My fingers collected only soot.

  I walked back into the streets in the condensed light of late afternoon and, on the buildings and outside of museums, read the history of the arrondissement: It had declared itself its own country a century ago, a barricaded, bloody little island of attempted democracy. I touched a brass plaque on the corner of a stone building that detailed how thirty laundresses had held the army back.

  It took me all day to get the guts to walk up the basilica steps. It was such a white, unblemished building, rising like a blister over the steep hills. When Alexis had mentioned it in Casasrojas, I hadn’t understood why he would go there, but thinking of those laundresses, I figured he must have wanted something like that. A battle in the streets that was remembered, mythologized, set to music. Not that he cared much about whether he himself was remembered, but I think he wanted his fight to be something you could talk about, not just a hollow, grown in on itself and silent.

  The steps leading to the domed cathedral were covered with painters and tourists and couples making out and little kids in matching summer shorts racing one another up and down, but the stones were scrubbed clean of every mark and every face unrecognizable. Everywhere I looked was so empty of what I was searching for that the basilica steps might have been vacant, rid of all people and pigeons, rid even of the cathedral. The entire city was like a smooth blank page too heavy to turn.

  * * *

  “Well, we’re here,” La Canaria said when I climbed back into the room. It was late, maybe midnight. Even with the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling turned on, a foggy dark ring hung around my vision. “Now what?”

  “Excuse me?” Marco said. He was lying on the mattress looking up at the ceiling, moving his hand in and out of the light. It was a position similar to one he’d struck those days in Madrid—like he was waiting to move on but didn’t care either way. The act felt different in that room.

  “Now what?” La Canaria repeated, not bothering to look at Marco. “We’re in Paris, which was the big plan, so now what?”

  Marco started laughing. I flinched at the sound and so did La Canaria. It echoed off the tight walls of the room, no hallways or furniture to soak it up. He rolled over, the sound ricocheting out of him and onto the floor. When he was out of breath, he still rocked back and forth silently, an awful smile plastered on his face. Finally he wiped tears from his eyes—his nose had started running—and looked up at me. “Yeah, Mosca. Now what?”

  I knew he regretted his words immediately, but he had started speaking and simply couldn’t be stopped.

  “Are you going to call her?” Marco whispered.

  “What are you talking about?” I said, not looking at him. “Who?”

  “Who?” he suddenly shouted. “Who? Grito’s fucking abuela, that’s who! Who is going to tell her we let him die in a fucking river?”

  “Shut up, you pendejo, I’m not calling her.”

  “This was your plan, Mosca! You got us here!”

  “It wasn’t my plan!” I backed away from him until I was pressed against the wall, the window shooting hot night air against my neck.

  “Then whose was it?” La Canaria sneered.

  “You want to go back to Casasrojas, La Canaria?” I said. ­Marco’s words had loosed the words within me. I, too, couldn’t stop them. “The police are looking for you. You don’t know anyone. Your little deal—whatever it was—has dried up. You really want to go back?”

  La Canaria flicked me off. “You have no fucking idea.”

  “Marco, you should go home. Slither home to your facha father and slip right back in. You probably have a good job waiting for you if you grovel enough—”

  “Shut up,” Marco said.

  “It wasn’t m
y plan and it’s not my fucking fault! It’s your fault, you facha!”

  “Don’t call me that!”

  “That’s what you are! You’re the reason the police knew who we were! You’re the snitch!”

  “Don’t call me that! I didn’t tell anyone anything!”

  “You didn’t need to,” La Canaria said slowly and quietly. “Just being what you are is enough.”

  Marco turned away from us, crouched against the wall and waiting for another blow, but I was silent.

  I drew in air like I’d been held underwater, and the air hurt, too. I’d said what Grito had said, his exact words, and though I couldn’t speak his name, it was like I’d heaved his body, waterlogged and decayed, between us.

  La Canaria relaxed her clenched fists and held her hands up and out, empty palms tilted toward the ceiling.

  I climbed back out the window and down the fire escape. We didn’t have anything else to say.

  On the final rung, I froze, one foot stretched out into empty air. La Canaria was right. Paris was where any semblance of a plan ended. Since the bonfire, we’d been aimless, but it had been possible to pretend we were having fun, that messing up was an end in itself and even if it wasn’t, who cares, we wanted it. But that particular masquerade ended when Grito fell through the ice.

  The cities were just a lie I’d told myself—that I could find Alexis, that I could undo what I’d done. But when I saw him on the edge of the river, I knew I couldn’t. It didn’t matter what memories I swirled up from the mud. Skipping my final exams couldn’t erase the exam I’d taken when I should have been helping him. The space I’d created on the mountain after the bonfire had no power. It was just a wasted brown field. It could undo nothing. I thought I’d seen him in Madrid, thought that with Borgi’s words perhaps I could find him in Paris, but when he stood on the snowy riverbank, I knew he was gone.