The Sleeping World

by Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes

  I walked up the stairs behind La Canaria and Jean-Paul.

  * * *

  Marco was gone in the morning. I figured he’d headed back home to beg, and that wasn’t where I wanted to be. I had to keep searching for the shadows. For a way to get to Alexis. Marco would probably have a better chance with his parents without me, anyway.

  I looped slowly around the mill, then headed outside of town, keeping to empty streets, catching the worst of the wind. Sleet started to fall. I’d been waking up with headaches that got worse each day. I couldn’t see clearly; my skin had this strange tinge. Patches of time were dropping out from under me, like when I couldn’t remember that we’d decided to move to the mill. But there was less to mark these disappearances. More and more, the life I walked through felt like that little room when I’d climbed into it from the rain to find it empty. Emptier and smaller for all it once contained.

  Edging around an abandoned schoolhouse, the last building before the brambles and oak saplings took over the sidewalk, I felt something following me. I knew not to turn but kept walking, more slowly, hoping to catch the shadows once they stilled. Usually then I could see them, but I had to be patient and wait for them to stop moving. I smelled rot and I saw a different shape, clearly a man’s figure, neatly dressed and ducking behind an abandoned woodpile, just inside my peripheral vision. It was the ducking that frightened me. The figure was comfortable in his skin, rigid and regimental in bearing yet agile in movements, but ducked slowly enough that I could see. It wanted to be seen.

  I changed directions and crossed into the street with the bakery. My feet skidded slightly on the forming ice.

  The rotting smell stayed with me—the scent of something wrapped in salt and left out too long. The figure had disappeared into shadow when I turned to it, like smoke among the rotting wood, and when I tried to name the shape, I saw only a cloud moving over a black ocean, shades of a different dark. If I saw a hand or a face in the cloud, there wasn’t any I recognized, or it was a hand that couldn’t be there, layered memories—the man’s hand on Alexis’s shoulder by the bridge, the policeman handing my abuela his medallion. I didn’t know if this figure was different from the shadowy openings I’d been looking for. Now both frightened me.

  La Canaria and Jean-Paul were fighting. I could hear La Canaria shouting through the thick stone and plaster. It comforted me because at least it was La Canaria and not this creature she’d slipped into when Jean-Paul walked in the door. I heard glass shattering and a heavy scrape across the floor. I didn’t know if I should go up there. La Canaria was strong, stronger than I was, but probably not stronger than Jean-Paul.

  A door slammed and I could hear her walking down the steps. She held an open bottle of white wine to her cheek. The chilled glass sweated from the heat of her hand. Through the glass I could see a bruise blooming.

  “Qué idiota,” she said, knowing I’d heard it all. She took a slug of the wine and walked out of the mill. It was raining slightly, the air cold. I could see her walking to the dam and leaning over the rail. The water must have been below freezing, but it was moving too fast to solidify into ice.

  Jean-Paul walked down the stairs, and I moved toward the door. He sat down at the farm table and started speaking as if I would care what he had to say. He looked split in half, so I stayed to watch.

  “She told me on the islands that she was a virgin,” he said.

  I almost burst out laughing. If I’d had something in my mouth, it would have unleashed in a spray across his face like a scene from a telenovela. Instead I bit my lip.

  “I really believed her,” he said. “She said she’d been waiting for me.” The lavender scarf he wore hung limp and tangled at his neck. He had two deep gashes on his cheek. It was a testament to La Canaria that even a lie she didn’t want anyone to believe would bloom into something far larger than she’d imagined when she tossed it into the air.

  I shrugged and struggled not to laugh.

  “You can’t stay here,” he said, and walked out the door. He met La Canaria at the bridge and moved close to her. I couldn’t hear what they said. After a few moments he turned and walked back to his car, reversed quickly down the gravel, tires shooting up small stones. La Canaria stayed where she was, staring out over the bridge.

  I don’t see anything I want to here. There are people I should see. When we were kids, our fights meant so much, stupid kids tormenting each other, always over nothing, but Mosca knew how to end them. You wouldn’t know our parents if they walked right up to you, she’d say. You’d run away from Mamá and Papá like they were strangers. I’d deny it and cry until Abuela came and comforted me. Really, I always won, because Mosca knew what she said wasn’t allowed, wasn’t something Abuela could hear. But Mosca was right. I might pass them every day. The photo doesn’t do much. It’s blurred here. I can’t just hold it up to everyone I pass. I tried that and it didn’t work. They might be the only people here, and I still don’t know them. But I don’t think so. I can’t see them, it’s true. But I don’t think they’re here. I can’t ask them to help me. And I’m not the one who needs protecting.

  La Canaria woke me in the dark. We’d spent all day waiting for Jean-Paul to return and kick us out. Finally I’d curled up by the fire to try to sleep.

  “Mosca,” she whispered, her hair lit by the moon through the lead-glass windows. Her skin was pale.

  “Stop it,” I said. “I’m sleeping.”

  “Mosca, wake up.” She pushed me off the pile of blankets and found my hands between my knees, where I kept them warm.

  “Canaria, leave me alone—”

  “Please, mija. Come with me.”

  Her back was stooped; holding my dry palm, calling me her child. The only person I could remember calling me that was my abuela. I rolled onto the wood floor and let her pull me up. Let her lead me, almost weightless, up the stairs, through halls I still couldn’t recognize, shafts of moon mimicking our white breath in the dark. She opened a door with keys I didn’t know she had, pulling them out from under her sweaters, hiding them underneath again. She stood in front of a door and said, “Close your eyes,” but she didn’t need to. The door opened to darkness. My eyes couldn’t adjust. She brought my hand up to graze something. A cloth hung behind the door, enclosing a room within the room, made of scraps and cardboard. I lifted the fabric opening and stepped inside. A sort of glow in there from light I couldn’t trace—perhaps a window covered by blankets, the moonlight turned yellow through wool. Shades of brown and cardboard as padding, with polished stones from the banks of the dam in the corners. The room outside it—the shell room—wasn’t large, a maid’s quarters or a place for brooms. The space she’d made inside it was even smaller. Neither of us could stand up, and we couldn’t go far from each other. Our heat mixed involuntarily. I was still almost asleep. I dropped down and found the floor as soft as the walls. So soft, the room felt like it was floating, a hanging chrysalis inside an endless house. La Canaria knelt and placed a blanket over me. Climbed underneath and pulled off her layers of sweaters.

  “We can stay here,” she whispered into my ear. “You don’t get hungry.”

  I nodded, and with my eyes still shut, my hand found the way to her stomach. I tried to cup what was growing there, but it was too big for my hand to hold. It had been for a long time.

  I could almost sleep in the cocoon La Canaria had built, heated by her body and what it was growing. Grito and Marco lopped off from me. Even lying beside her, the sinews that connected La Canaria to my tissue were shredding. I had only what had happened, my refusal, my betrayal, what had brought me there. I watched the memory fill the cocoon and wondered if La Canaria could see it. If she could dream my thoughts, and would she hate me for them more than she already did.

  * * *

  Jean-Paul’s headlights hit the gravel drive and curved around the mill. I crossed the bridge before he could speak to me,
and I watched from a distance. He didn’t look angry. He slunk back into the mill, tail tucked, waiting to be told what to do. He had brought another roast chicken and the evening paper. The sounds that came from their room were soft and muffled. But he left before dawn, and I found La Canaria sleeping again in her cocoon. I crawled in beside her.

  She was getting bigger. I noticed the change as if I’d been away for months instead of a few hours.

  “How can you sleep in here?” I asked. It was suddenly too hot in the cocoon. Her own heat, because that night had brought an even more insistent frost than the last. I stretched as far from her as the cocoon would let us. She was barely awake.

  “It keeps me warm,” she said.

  “Did you see the paper Jean-Paul brought?”

  “I can’t read French,” she mumbled.

  The front-page article said two students were found dead outside their apartment in Madrid, in the same style as the attorney months before. The article even mentioned the attorney by name, not afraid in this country to make the obvious associations.

  “It said the students were part of an anti-fascist group,” I said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And it said someone’s targeting people who have information about the old guard, who can prove the crimes they committed, just like Marco said—”

  “So what?” she snapped, fully awake. “What’s it got to do with you?”

  I didn’t speak.

  Soon I could hear her breathing heavily, sleeping or faking well enough.

  In that floating world the objects she’d collected buried light within them, creating a live and pulsing cadence. I thought I could hear notes, though they never linked to a melody. The city I walked through with my eyes closed was dimmer there, and I was happy for it because the city had become full of shadows like the one I’d seen by the woodpile, figures I didn’t want to see.

  I write all over the thin floors and walls of this city, hoping it will seep into wherever you are. This is a scroll inscrutable. This is ink that can be read only as it washes away. These aren’t my words. That’s not how I speak. I trace the words in the dirt anyway. I lick them again and again with my dry tongue, a sad dog licking the broken paws she thinks are her pups. When I can find a way to write, the words are as dry as my tongue and deader, but I write them anyway. I write on a white floor with charcoal from something’s fire. The words go up the walls, but when I look at them, I wonder if they’re like the notes the others write. Do they look like that because I killed them with my tongue, or is that how my words have always looked? All my words turn into one word, my name, but you know that one already, what will it do to you? Mosca, I am no good with them.

  I must have fallen asleep, because she woke me. The layers of cardboard and cloth filtered the streetlight like a candle through a cat’s ear, warm and full of blood. She moved my hand slowly to her stomach.

  “It’s Alexis’s,” she said.

  “What?”

  “The baby, it’s Alexis’s baby.”

  “That’s not possible,” I said, still groggy.

  Her lips tightened into a cruel filigree smile. “You’ve been looking for him, right? Maybe I found him first.”

  Fully awake, I pushed away from her. My hands landed hard on her chest, and her breath caught there. I shoved my way out of the cocoon, tearing the fabric and cardboard, my arms flailing.

  Outside on the bridge, I stumbled over the moss-slick stones. On my fingers, I counted the months since Alexis had disappeared. I kept losing track. But he’d been gone two years when we burned our clothes in the mountains outside Casasrojas.

  The first time I saw Alexis and La Canaria together at El Chico, I’d thought they were the same. Not just the way they linked into each other, driving out all other sound; it was more than that. A quality of visibly false bravado, like a kid boxing with his shadow. There was an uncrouched attitude about La Canaria that Alexis had, too. It drew us all to her. She might break, but it would be something to see.

  The months bled when I tried to count them, but it had been too long, too long to be possible. All I could remember was that La Canaria wasn’t around those days we were waiting for Alexis to not be dead, to come up the stairs, and she wasn’t around the days after the police brought his medallion, the days after the Mass. When I resurfaced from my abuela’s weeping, she and Grito were sitting together at El Chico, his hand on her thigh, and I couldn’t say a word. She didn’t speak about Alexis then and hadn’t since.

  It was cold outside the mill, and I didn’t have a coat. I just had on old sweaters, picking up dust and the thin sweat of a bad sleep.

  La Canaria was cruel. She’d take what she wanted, but usually her actions were like the wavering air before a gas stove lights. I could understand them, see right through them. Throw a match and it was gone. This I couldn’t see through.

  Maybe I’d misheard her. She’d said Marco or Jean-Paul or Grito. Maybe Alexis’s and Grito’s bodies were blending in her mind, both unfound, both forming anew. Maybe she’d said Alexis because it was the closest she could get to saying Grito. Or the other way around. But I replayed her words in my mind, and I could see her shaping the long A, her tongue hissing through the complicated x and s.

  By the dam was a pile of hand-rolled cigarettes, one of them still burning. I picked it up and held the ember cupped against my palm to protect it from the splashing water. La Canaria slid up to me slowly, becoming visible piece by murky piece.

  “It’s funny, isn’t it, what Marco said?” she said. She looked over me to the green water, mostly covered by shadow. Her eyes rested on a pocket of froth where the current stilled and trash and leaves collected. The cigarette kept burning in my hand. Tobacco ash dropped onto the wrought-iron railing. I could feel the ember on the tip of my forefinger.

  “What’s funny?”

  “That story Marco told Jean-Paul about you and him being big revolutionaries.”

  “He was making something up to cover your ass.”

  “But it’s true, isn’t it?”

  “No,” I said, and started walking away. One more word and I couldn’t control what I would do next.

  “It is true,” she said, moving closer to me, smiling, making me turn involuntarily. “You were gonna be big revolutionaries, but you backed out. You had to save your own ass. You and Marco left him to die.”

  She stood close to me. Even though we were outside the cocoon and in the wet night air, she felt closer to me than anyone had ever been.

  “You have no idea,” I whispered.

  “Don’t I?” She brought her lips to my ear. “Alexis told me everything.” Her stomach pressed into mine, harder than I’d imagine it would be. She leaned back a few centimeters. “Actually, he didn’t tell me anything. He thought I was too stupid to figure it out—how he was trying to play resistance fighter but was having trouble finding the supporting roles.”

  “It can’t be his,” I said.

  “Of course it can’t! Alexis is dead in a ditch or a river. Long dead. Even if someone did find the body, there’d be no way to even tell it was his.” She wrapped her arm around my neck and grabbed my ear like she had at the bar in Casasrojas. “So why do you keep looking for him?”

  “Shut up, you puta.” I pushed her back and punched her in the stomach where she was largest, right below her navel. She doubled over but then grabbed my hair and twisted it around her hand until I was pinned to her cheek. I elbowed her in one of her massive tits, and she fell back on the cold stones. The turbine was on and its roar echoed over the stones. For a second I saw Alexis standing by the red door, head thrown back in laughter.

  I had to get away from the mill. I didn’t even recognize Alexis. He was an impostor, the seams showing, a creature poorly wrought.

  It was raining slightly, a fine mist. I left La Canaria staring up at me and crossed the bridge, running
away from the mill. I ran over to the fields that had been full of birds when we came, dipping toward the ground like fighter pilots, skimming over our heads and calling out. The brown grass wet and matted, caught in mangy clumps on the barbed-wire fence. I could see a figure walking into the fields. I ran and tore my jacket crossing the fence.

  “Alexis! Stay there!” I shouted. “Just stay there!”

  I ran but could barely see him against the trees on the far side of the field. I moved through the air, becoming water, swimming farther away from the lights of the town. He was a bird or a crucifix, shadow against darker dark. He didn’t turn around.

  “Where are you going? Tell me!”

  He stopped then and turned around. “You want to know? Ask your good friend Marco, you chicken,” he said.

  Another figure, taller than he was, came out from the trees. I yelled at Alexis, though I knew it was too late. They were gone, and I couldn’t be sure where that man came from or if he was really there, but I saw him and I had to get to Alexis before he did.

  Mosca, you brought something with you. Because you can see the shadows, I can see something else, too. Someone is following me. I know him, and his face doesn’t change how everyone else’s does. I can’t see his face, but I know it doesn’t change. I’m bleeding, a sepia tone, that’s not my word. I’ve been collecting them. Dead tongues are hard to shape, but they bounce back with new words splattered on them. I wonder if he made me bleed, why would he? The time blurs, but all the moments are open-eyed and watchful. I don’t know how he could’ve slipped in. Maybe I’m trailing something else. Not blood but a scent, lit on the striking surface of this city. I try to wash the trail. Nothing can be cleaned.

  He is getting closer and Mosca is, too. He knows I see him and he knows I know he follows me, but we haven’t acknowledged each other. We’re playing, flirting, pretending we’re really into the beer and the loud music, but instead of a bar and music, it’s gray concrete and wax paper and receipts in the wind. I told you not to come, Mosca. He is following me, but he is following you, too. He can do far more damage to you.