I kept walking, trying to shake La Canaria, but she followed me without shame. I ducked into one of the Métro stairways leading underground though I didn’t have enough money to ride the subway. But there, on the wet stairs leading underground, circling just within reach, were the shadows I’d seen in the crowd. I stepped down, afraid to get too close. The air coming from the shadows was different from the air of the subway—dank and damp, yes, but the shadow air smelled like rust instead of urine, like salt and the sea. The shadows swirled over the steps, and I knew they were an entryway to a much deeper passage. I saw what I had seen before, hundreds, thousands, of filmy shapes, ghosts walking up and down the subway steps, pushing, slipping on broken stairs that had been mended decades ago, hurrying to homes long burned or bombed.
I opened my mouth and my lips moved as they never had, speaking to Marco or La Canaria or the name lost beneath the ice. A weight passed over them with each syllable, an ancient language I was only just learning, the words themselves painful to shape. The shadows were earth-black, deepest water–dark, cold and briny. I wanted to speak to them. I wanted them to listen. I had a message for them to carry.
* * *
Back in the room, I curled up on my corner of the mattress. La Canaria eased through the window I’d left open for her, but she didn’t speak to me. I closed my eyes. I didn’t sleep; instead I traced my steps that day. With my eyes closed, I saw it as a different city. Covered with a shadowy film, coated with layers of the shadows I’d seen. That city was still deep below me. I had a long way to descend, but the shadows showed me that I’d found the entryway. I was going down.
I opened my eyes to see La Canaria leaning out the window. She breathed in distance rather than air and pulled a small mirror from her pocket. I knew what she was doing—trying to re-create the language I had spoken in the subway stairwell. There was a length of syllables—a single word, though she didn’t know it yet—that I had repeated. The streetlight lit the mirror, giving a distorted glimpse of her mouth and tangled hair, nothing more. La Canaria tried to move her mouth as I had done. Again and again she twisted it toward the shape, hesitating at first, then adding sound, until slowly, slowly, Alexis’s name began to form on her tongue.
Grito had loosened something in me. It had taken time for this object, once affixed, now straying, to surface, but it had. And then it was all I could touch and see. It was movement, a drive that might break me. It didn’t care. When Grito fell beneath the ice, I’d seen the disappearance instead of just waiting on a void that didn’t fill. He opened up a crack into that world for me to pass through. I had slipped somewhere I had not been invited, and yet it was the place I was seeking. The shadows had woken me, but I was not in the same place anymore. And I felt not joy or gladness but a surety from it, a response so foreign that it took a while to notice the taste in my mouth.
Because Grito had been wrong. No one is a shard of sound bouncing off rocks. You can’t chop off limbs and expect to remain whole. Grito gone and we were only soft tissue tearing. It was Alexis I saw on the riverbank, if only just a part of him, an echo, a shadow or shade, and what I saw in the subway tunnels was the same. Hobo markings on friendly houses, they would lead me to him. I was more in my world than theirs, but I had crossed into a blurred perimeter. I knew Alexis wasn’t in Paris or Madrid or any of the cities I’d polished in my throat. He was somewhere else. And if finding him meant tracking the shadows into their depths, into the city I saw when I closed my eyes, let La Canaria follow me. I never knew anyone who wanted to stay alive more than she did. Let her be my tether back.
Alexis? I said to those shadows. Where is he?
How do I bring him back?
* * *
The streetlights were on and it had just rained—cold and pestering drops on my face and shoulders. The fire escape ladder was slick under my hands, almost too numb to grip the rungs. I still had only the work boots Berta had given us. They were sturdy, but the soles had thinned from my months of walking, and my feet slipped unpredictably inside them. I moved methodically up the ladder, slowly releasing one hand at a time and then closing it on the next rung, knowing no one would come looking if I fell and that an injury was not something my body could support.
I eased open the window, but the room was empty.
I’d never noticed how small it was. More of a closet than a room, and we had been living there for months. The room stank of rancid grease from fried potatoes and our sweat. It felt as small as it did because it was empty, as empty as it had been when we first climbed in through the window. Marco’s red backpack, La Canaria’s jean jacket, the sleeping bag from the farm, they were all gone. The dwindling stack of coins and bills was gone, too.
I could hardly register it. I’d been lopped off. True that we hadn’t interacted much in those months, but Marco and La Canaria were the only people I’d spoken to since Berta sent us into the snow. The only living people. I kicked the phone and watched the two pieces of the headset split apart. One skittered across the room to land in the opposite corner. The phone was made of hard old-fashioned plastic. It didn’t shatter when my foot hit it, just came apart. I picked up the errant piece and stuck it back on the headset. I held the dial tone up to my ear. It clicked on and off, like someone on the same line was trying to make a call. The plastic nestled comfortably back in its cradle. I did a quick sweep of the room, but there was no trace besides our smell that we had been there. I left the window open so that, too, would fade.
I climbed back down the ladder. The rain had started again, but it had a sweeter fall, more like mist rising off the pavement. I didn’t know where I was going next. There was nowhere else I could go, no one else I knew. I didn’t want to go back to the room. It wasn’t pride but a feeling that it was haunted by their leaving.
Below me, there was the sound of sneakers on the pavement. A cat or a rat moved out from under a cardboard box that had blown into the alley after the last storm. I stayed where I was on the ladder, a few rungs from the bottom. The figure moved closer to me, but I didn’t go up or down. It was too dark to see the ladder or anyone on it until you were right next to it. That had made the alley a perfect entryway. With the rain, it was too dark to see anything. The footsteps got closer. I closed my eyes. I should have moved up the ladder, jumped down, done something. A hand closed around my ankle like it was reaching for the first rung. I kicked it off and screamed.
“Mosca?” Marco called into the dark.
I jumped off the ladder and landed on the wet pavement, slipping a little. “You comemierda,” I said.
“What are you doing here?” he said.
I walked out of the alley and onto the sidewalk. I wanted to see his face to make sure he was real. His voice was raspy from a cough he’d had for a few weeks. The streetlight lit his face, so much skinnier than before. Rain had soaked his hair as if he’d been out walking for a long time.
“I didn’t get the memo,” I said. “You know, the one that said you were gonna ditch me?”
“Ditch you—what are you talking about?”
“Did you forget your hair comb, maybe some cologne?” I wanted to be sarcastic, but it took too much energy. I turned and started to walk away.
“Mosca, wait, what are you talking about?”
“You left me—” I said.
“We talked about this today.” He grabbed my arm and spun me around. “La Canaria heard one of the maids say that the owner is coming back. We had to get out of the room before he got there. We decided this morning where to go—”
I turned away from him, hoping my confusion and the blush that came with it were masked by the darkness. His words pulled something up, but it was unclear whether that was an actual memory or what the words themselves had shaped.
“We decided—Mosca, you don’t remember?”
“Of course I remember.”
I did once he said it. La Canaria had shov
ed herself through the window, talking excitedly before she was fully in the room. She’d heard a maid on the balcony below us complain that her boss liked his house just so and she would have to clean every room.
“She’ll be coming up here,” La Canaria had said. “She hasn’t seen us yet, but she will.”
“Joder.” Marco had started pacing again. “What are we gonna do?”
“We’ll just go to that country home he’s got—he’s not going there in the winter.”
“Won’t it be freezing?” Marco said.
La Canaria shrugged.
I had been there, I had heard them, but it took Marco’s words under the streetlight for me to remember it had happened.
“It’s just—”
“I know,” he said. “It’s hard—to keep things straight. It—all of it—wears on you.”
He put his arm around me and we were standing close together in the dark, in the warm bowl of the streetlight, the rain coming down or misting up.
“When you were gone in the morning, I looked for you and then went with La Canaria to the mill. I thought maybe you’d gone ahead. Then I came back—I couldn’t find you.”
He was dripping with rain and his clothes smelled musty, but when I leaned into him, it was as if he had a familiar place buried inside, somewhere healthy and clean, a patch of grass or dry pine needles. He raised his hand to brush my hair from my face—it had hardly grown since summer, just gotten more tangled and split at the ends. So gently, tentative as a fawn, he moved my hair and set his hand, wet but warm, on my cheek. His thumb grazed my frozen earlobe, coaxing it back to life.
I leaned my forehead against Marco’s and breathed in his exhales, sour as my own but familiar. My arm circled beneath his jacket without my asking it to.
“Why even bother coming back?” I said.
“I told him I’d protect you,” he said.
The streetlight blackened everything out of its reach. Yet right at the edge of the orange light, I saw a swift-moving shadow. Instead of holding still and beckoning, it hurtled toward me, taking form. I turned away from Marco, his arm falling from my shoulders like I’d shrugged it off, turned to face the approaching shadow, but it disappeared the second I stared at it full-on.
“I don’t need your protection,” I said, and moved away from him, searching for the shadow. “Why are you still chasing someone who doesn’t care about you? What do you owe him?”
“Just let me take care of you, stop walking, let me—”
“Next time you want to leave,” I said, “have the guts to actually do it.”
Marco was offering me his hand, off the rope and onto solid ground, or onto something, at least, large enough for us both to stand on. But I wasn’t going to take it.
***
The mill was on the outskirts of Paris, an hour on the local train, in a small, fading village. It was freezing when we got inside, the building not meant to be occupied in winter. Marco fiddled with some switches on the wall, but instead of lights turning on, there was a low groan and the creak of iron on wood from behind a stone wall.
“That must be the old waterworks,” Marco said. “I don’t think it’s connected to anything now.”
“Leave it on,” La Canaria said. She stood in front of an ancient fireplace, thin smoke moving around her. The fireplace was big enough to step into, with thick iron bars across it for hanging pots. The whole building hummed from the grinding turbine.
Marco handed me an old blanket. The dampness hung tightly to us. Above us, a staircase climbed toward the vaulted ceiling and led to hallways and rooms. It probably would have made more sense to stay in one of those rooms, but most of the doors were locked and I couldn’t stand the idea of being in an enclosed space after those months in Paris.
“How long do you think we can stay here?” I asked Marco.
“I guess until that guy shows up. Which could be anytime.”
* * *
I slept all night and most of the next day curled by the fire on a pile of blankets and sofa cushions. It was already dark by the time I woke, evening come early so deep in winter.
Marco handed me a cigarette he’d rolled, and I lit it on the low coals.
“What are you going to do?” I asked him. He stared at my cigarette, which was canoeing toward my lips. He licked his finger and killed the ember.
I both wished and dreaded someone would ask me what I wanted. Would ask me anything, because then the air bubbles might escape from my throat and into the water, my words unable to be shoved back down.
“I don’t want to stay here,” Marco said, looking up at the ceiling of dark interlaced wood. La Canaria had crossed to the kitchen and stood staring at the black window.
“And then what?” I asked.
He opened his mouth, and I thought I’d done to him what I feared would be done to me. That words and air would come out of his mouth and water would rush in to fill the vacuum and there would be no way for me to reverse the process, to exchange air for water. I thought that he was finally going to speak.
“There’s someone at the door,” La Canaria said.
“Just ignore them,” I said. I was trying to act the way I thought she would. To slink on that bravado and act like anyone who was watching was too mesmerized to move. But she was tamped down and had been for months, giving me no mirror. She went to the door and opened it. Marco took my arm and pulled me into the shadows, where the light from the fire didn’t touch us. I wanted to stand up to hear what La Canaria was saying and who she was speaking to, but I was so worn that even the slightest resistance was more than I could fight against. A breath could have blown me down.
“Who is she talking to?” I whispered.
“I don’t know—a neighbor? The police?”
“Shut up,” I said. “It was stupid to listen to her.”
“I didn’t hear you say that when we decided to stay at his apartment.”
“Then why don’t you go back?” I said.
“How can I?” he said. He moved his hand to mine and opened my clenched fist. Traced his fingers across my palm and then between my knuckles. “Return with your shield or on it,” he said.
It should have been easy to say something back to Marco, to react to his fingers hovering over mine as if my skin were too hot to touch. We hadn’t lost a shield, we’d abandoned a limb, a self, a friend—that’s what Grito was—we couldn’t name, to water too cold to speak of, instead we waded through it all night long. I couldn’t move my tongue and I couldn’t move my arm. I doubted Marco’s hand, I doubted any words I might shape, I doubted everything but the slow beat of my pulse and the shadows I saw when I closed my eyes. My words to them, my chase. I saw the room as an undeveloped film of itself—different versions of different shots. Exposed paper about to disappear into a tub of chemicals. Only the red light of the darkroom visible until the images took shape from blankness. Then there were so many choices, a crop here, a different exposure, all a matter of light and perspective, of aperture. These choices in that red room changed who entered the door. First it was whoever owned the mill. He slipped his arm around La Canaria. It took him a moment to notice us, but when he did, he changed and it wasn’t he who walked through the door but Marco’s mother, holding folders full of papers and screaming. Then Grito came in. Each of these entrances etched on top of the other. They weren’t even different shots to choose from but the same strip of film, exposed again and again. Grito’s old white shirt was wet. He came in dragging the branches and weeds of the river behind him like those old-fashioned ghosts who carry their sins in labeled chains around their necks. And then it was Alexis rolling a cigarette, lifting his face to the rafters.
La Canaria stepped back inside and closed the door behind her.
“Who was that?” Marco said.
“Just a neighbor,” La Canaria said.
“Are
they suspicious?” Marco said.
“Yeah, I think so.”
“I don’t know how much longer we can stay here,” Marco said.
La Canaria laughed, a sharp, broken sound. Her skin hung off the bones in her face. She was yellowed as old ivory worn down by someone’s hands.
Marco went outside to see who she’d been talking to. I rubbed my hand and wrist. There was a cold feeling in my palm where his hand had kept me warm. Return with what you came for or why return at all.
* * *
I woke again to an early twilight. No one was in the big room at the mill, but I heard something above me. The sound clear but the location uncertain. I climbed the stairs and walked to the end of the narrow hallway at the top of the stairs. The mill was hundreds of years old. The wood stained in a way no varnish could replicate. La Canaria materialized from around a corner, carrying an armful of flattened cardboard and plastic bags of rags and wire. Since we’d gotten to the mill, she hadn’t stayed put. She’d wandered around the mill or outside of it, come back with cardboard, cloth, bits of wire, and plastic crates. The geography of the place revealed itself to her. Its halls mirrored the twists of her veins, and she didn’t get lost or spooked like Marco and I did.
“What are you doing with all that trash?” I asked.
“Marco coughs too much at night. I’m looking for a place where I don’t have to listen to him.” She looked flushed and tired.
“But what is all that stuff?”
She moved past me without answering. Perhaps I could not be heard. I no longer knew when I was speaking. If the words actually came out, in what language. She had been close enough to touch me, but instead of warmth, I got only a fetid scent coming off the layers of sweaters she wore. The same scent that lurked behind me when I walked.
“I said, what are you doing with that mierda?”
The Sleeping World Page 19
