“You are right to be careful,” the one with the shawl whispered. “But you should be much more careful. Looking is very dangerous. You have to leave everything behind when you enter the city. And you need someone very strong to bring you back.”
Marco’s head emerged from the doorway. “Mosca, I was worried about you.” He was only wearing his undershorts, no shirt or shoes.
The women clucked at the impropriety of it all, shifting into the light and off the step. I turned away from them and followed Marco up the stairs, wondering how two old women, a grocery cart, and I could have fit in that tiny doorway. As if they were no larger than birds.
* * *
That night, the final night of Carnival, I asked Marco again. I woke to the shadows at the window, and I knew if I didn’t speak, they would break through, they would crawl across the room and paw into my throat. I spoke because I had to.
“Why did you come here?” I said. “To this city, why now?”
He got out of bed and picked through the sandwich wrappers on the bureau, folding them with tight creases like my abuela always did. Marco could have been anywhere then, in any cheap room with torn wallpaper. He could have been a continent away, not speaking to me, not known to me at all.
“I thought I’d find him here,” he said.
From the particular way he didn’t look at me, I knew he was talking about Alexis. “I mean, I knew I wouldn’t find him. But ever since Grito—I had this feeling.” He turned back to the wrappers. He stacked them in a neat pile, lining their edges up with his index finger. “I thought there’d be some part of him here that I could bring back to you.”
“Pendejo,” I said quietly. “You left me alone and with no money.”
“And you fucked that asshole.”
“Paco?” I said, almost laughing. “What do you care?”
“You know just how much I care.” He paused, waiting, but I didn’t say anything. “Whatever—this isn’t about that, it’s about them. Grito and Alexis. I couldn’t have them on my back. Not both of them.”
“What happened that night?” I said.
“What night?” Marco turned away again.
“When we were supposed to meet the militants. What happened?”
“Same as I told Jean-Paul—the police showed up. We ran, but they had seen us.”
“But why did you come here?” I asked. I wanted him to look at me, though I knew he wouldn’t until I stopped speaking and let him find the words. I held my breath until he spoke.
“Alexis said he’d come here. Some contact—I don’t know who. When you said no.”
“Said no to what?” I got up off the bed. Marco was still facing away from me. The air was suddenly thicker, catching in my throat, becoming visible and coated.
“You know—to keep the package for him.” He looked at me then, his hand on the sandwich wrappers.
“He told you that? He told you I said no?” I couldn’t keep the knowledge in my head, that Marco had known my worst secret. What I thought I’d kept hidden from everyone, he’d known all along.
“I thought at first he was lying that you didn’t have it. That he just said that to protect you—from me.”
“How could he tell you? You’ve known all along it was my fault?”
“Listen to me, Mosca,” he whispered. “You have to just listen to me.”
Shadows were filling the room all around us, bringing with them the chemical water that transforms light. All the names that had been spoken catching on fire.
“He said they didn’t see you. Did he ask you to keep it? Did you?”
“Mosca, please, please. He didn’t ask me. He couldn’t.” Marco stepped toward me, and later I saw what that meant. “Mosca, just listen, I need to. It wouldn’t have mattered if you were the lookout, whatever you did. The police—they knew what was happening.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s my fault. They were following me. Keeping tabs on me for my father. I didn’t know, I swear. I led them right to him.”
I punched Marco in the mouth. My knuckles split across his teeth. But the pain was like Marco’s words, distant and unconnected to me. I’d already known the truth of what he’d just said, the part he’d played; in some way it didn’t surprise me. Perhaps I’d known since his parents’ villa, perhaps I’d known for years.
Marco pushed me down onto the bed and held me there; the blood from his split lip dropped onto my cheek. I tried to get my hands out from under his body, but he wouldn’t let me move. “Let me just talk to you, Mosca. Let me just say what I have to.”
“I don’t want to hear it,” I said.
“He made me promise to take care of you, Mosca. Promise to never touch you and to take care of you.”
“Well, you didn’t listen, did you?” I spit, trying to move beneath him.
“I promised him,” Marco said.
“When?”
“What?” he said, his breath clouding my ear.
“When did you promise?”
“After. Later.”
“Later, when?” I knew Alexis was nearby, if only I could reach him. “Is he here?” I said. “Marco, do you know where Alexis is?”
Marco looked at me, and he was so sad. Because I said what we both hoped, and he was the one who had to answer.
He let go of me and I sat up straight and fast, expecting resistance and receiving only air, like trying to force open a door you think is locked but isn’t even there.
“The package,” Marco said. “It wasn’t just information about your parents. There was a lot more. He’d put it all together—gotten it from other people, all those different trips he went on. Names and dates that linked a lot of important people back to what they did. That’s what he was protecting—that he couldn’t let them get.”
I could feel Alexis by us. I couldn’t see him, but I could feel him. It wasn’t Marco that was the door—I could feel a door inside me open wide and close. Alexis walking away and shutting the door. I leaned into it, but it wouldn’t open. The cities had been a lie. There were no steps to trace that the two of us hadn’t already planted. Everything that had happened that night was a trap Marco and I had laid for him. We had set it and we had turned away so we wouldn’t have to watch him fall in.
“But you said you thought you’d find him here.” I was grasping for anything that might be left.
“We all tell ourselves lies,” Marco said. “But he didn’t. He knew.”
“What? What did he know?”
Marco pressed a dirty sock to his lip. The red caked to brown on the gray cotton. “I’d betrayed him. But he knew I wouldn’t betray you, too.”
I covered my face. My hand ached. “Even if it didn’t matter about being the lookout, I still wouldn’t hide the box. That’s why he died.”
“I don’t know—”
I dropped my hands from my face. Marco’s expression was the same as when he was on his horse in the olive grove. But it wasn’t a smile. It was something else. He was terrified, he was so sorry, but just for one second he wasn’t either. He didn’t give a shit about either. He had said everything he could say. He had laid his burdens at my feet and he was weightless, blank. Marco was waiting, his face the stillness before action, but an action based not in fear or in the past, in only what he saw before him at that moment. His face open, looking only at me.
I kissed him gently, on the side of his mouth I hadn’t hit.
“I have to bring him back.”
If I could touch Mosca, I would do it now. Touch her softly on the top of her head. I’d say she’s come far enough, she knows enough secrets now. I would touch Marco, too, on the shoulder. To tell him the same. The other shadows are gone. The room is empty except for me, and it’s all right. I want to be a priest and touch them and lift a weight off of them. But it’s me I want to lift. My own body
ground into fine silt and spread over the length of their skin. It catches light like mica. I have settled, grown into their bodies, shaped them. A tree letting barbed wire curl into its heart. It would take years, a fine chisel, patience I do not have, to unwind it. It is me that I need to lift. But that is not a job I can do.
I reach out to them anyway, step toward them, my arms open wide. I know it won’t be enough.
I left Marco standing with his bloody sock in his hands and ran down the boardinghouse stairs. At the entryway, I passed the old woman who had told me about the city under the harbor. She nodded as if she knew where I was going and why. I nodded, too, certain. I pushed through the crowds. Carnival was at its peak, but I shoved anyone who got too close, dead or alive, no matter how big. I caught sight of my reflection in a store window—a sight I hadn’t seen in months. I was thin, my flesh a screen my bones were trying to push through. My skin cast off a light like the moon but more taut. A light ready to snap and launch. I got to the water quicker than I thought I could.
The dancing crowds were thick right up to the shore, then stopped just short of the sand. The scent was strongest on the sand, the ocean blending to black at the edge of the horizon. I thought of ancient artifacts, women who never bathed and instead coated themselves in scented oils. Women with coins slipped over their closed eyes who could read messages written in the fumes coming from the water. The Carnival lights flamed over the harbor. There were no birds, few in the whole city, and the only sound was the water inviting me in. The scent from the water was pleasant, like an opiate bath, or I was used to it and no longer noticed the other note, of uncovering, of thawing. I knew what I would see if I looked behind me. The breaker wall, crumbling from the force of decades of waves, lifetimes of tides. Scrawled over the length of it, in loping serifs and proud curves, was Alexis’s signature, the trailing x visible for miles.
On the edge of the crowds I saw the man who had been following me. But he was many men, the police who brought the medallion, the old guards on street corners, the man who put his arm on Alexis’s shoulder, the body that stalked me through the shadow city. He was wearing a Carnival death mask, grinning white bones over a black background, pulled halfway over his face. The other half was shadow, hollow and blank. He broke away from the crowds and edged toward the sand. I couldn’t let him see me, I had to get to the water first. Marco had made me certain that Alexis wasn’t in any living city. If I wanted to find him, I would have to go where he was. I waded into the ocean until I was knee-deep in kelp, took off my boots and sweater, and dove in.
PART III
THE CITY OF THE DEAD
Beneath the water, at first all I felt was tightness, my chest unable to expand. The water dark and freezing. I could see nothing and my limbs were numb. But then I saw another city stretching out low and long, larger than the white one with the Carnival parades and crowds in costumes drinking all night. My limbs glowed and my air bubbles turned to gold medallions—one for each of the saints, all protectors of hopeless prayers in their way. I swam through branches and the water turned into snow and sound ringing as light, over and over. I swam into the city beneath the water, but it was not just a city or a fixed place. Each death made it grow, added buildings and terrains, split rooms, each room already containing a whole world. The city above the water lit the water on fire. There was no way I could go back up.
Beneath the water, I swam into a hunting shack surrounded by mountains. A tree was breaking through the wooden shutters. The limb sneaked through the window, splintering the wood fiber by fiber. The sun through the broken shutters glinted on spilled bullets and pheasant feathers ground into the floorboards. I could smell the scent of a boy who would not hunt with his abuelo, who cooed like a fox beneath the kitchen table. His hand stretched out to me like the tree limb. But something else coalesced in the opening in the shutters, forming from a branch into an arm, not a child’s but a man’s, capable of dragging me down.
Beneath the water, I swam into a countryside of mountains, following a stream of snowmelt that cut through fern-covered hills. A shadow drifted over the hills, moving closer to me. I circled a pool where spring water tore out of the rock like a tongue. The rocks in the pool were green and slick with all that lived on them. But there was something white circling in the water. It was the color of life drained, a child sucking red from strawberry ice and dropping it in the sand. The white thing swayed and I moved closer. A scrap of cotton. An arm, thin as a branch, emerged from it. Grito’s black hair circled beneath his arm, moved gently by the water. I reached out my hand to touch him and was pulled deeper.
Beneath the water, I saw all the ways I could have accepted the box from Alexis, all the frames that had repeated endlessly in my mind since I refused. I crossed the ocean with it. I threw it into the river and left Casasrojas. I carried the package with me to every exam and every class. I still carried it, and every day Alexis asked if it was safe and I said yes, because he could still ask. But these were fabrications no different from what kept me up at night—all the ways I could have and did not.
I kept swimming. The fire the Carnival lights made on the water was no longer visible. I doubted that this was really a city and not just water taking away all my air and leaving me unable to break through ice. I knew I was being followed. The man was getting closer. He didn’t need a mask. There were others with him, circling me. The scents I’d caught while looking for Alexis, the shadows behind me and exiting his mouth when he spoke. They were getting closer and I was running out of air.
Above the water, La Canaria turned on the turbine to make the mill shake. She thought of those pictures of fish getting chased by bigger fish. Something was inside her and she was inside something big and loud. She went outside and stood at the bridge overlooking the dam. The water was green. It was the only real green thing. It foamed and caught glass bottles that once held hard cider and silver tins of pickled fish. The containers swirled in the water. They were like her, except what they carried had already been eaten. She leaned against the bridge. The baby was eating her up. She didn’t have enough to give. The mill was cold. The cocoon she built was colder than the rest of the house because of the hole Mosca had punched in it. She thought she should have gone somewhere where everyone would hate her so much they couldn’t touch her, not so much they wanted to touch her all the time. The baby made her tired. It made her remember everything she’d lost. Alexis and then Grito, she was all alone but for the wreck inside her. The baby was eating her right up and she was going to get skinny, skinny, and the baby was going to be huge. She wanted to disappear like everyone else. She wanted to leave, but she didn’t know where to go. She didn’t want any of them, not Mosca, or Marco, or Grito, not even Alexis. But they were growing inside her. They wouldn’t leave her alone.
Beneath the water, the man who had been following, the shadow in death’s mask, found me.
He closed his hand around my arm, tugging me into a cement room with only a bare bulb and the scent of sweat tortured out. I turned in the water, nothing to propel off but a fading catalyst within, nothing to kick against but the air exiting me. I bit his fingers and my mouth exploded with salt. He was nothing. Nothing other than the one room I wouldn’t go into. The one room that held the one way I could have saved Alexis. The light swung from a bare bulb into the yellow streetlamps of my abuela’s apartment on Calle Grillo, and the silence into the sound of the garbage truck backing up the night Alexis asked me for help and I wouldn’t. I closed my eyes because I knew who I would see next if I didn’t. I heard the door open and Alexis walk in. I didn’t want to see him beneath the water. If I looked at him, then he couldn’t come back with me. I knew that much.
Like he had above the water, Alexis asked me to keep the package, and again I refused and fell asleep. All this was the same. All this was the reel in my head I could not stop, that, since he disappeared, would spin me into and out of an endless half-sleep.
I pulled myself up, ou
t of the memory, and into the water. I kept my eyes closed, but I yelled after him. “I’ll take it,” I said. “Please, I will keep you safe.”
But beneath the water, Alexis hadn’t left my room.
My eyes shut, I could hear him walk slowly up to my bed, quietly, as if I were still sleeping. He slipped the package beneath my bed, behind books and old clothes, beside the boxes of my parents’ belongings, left it there, to gather dust.
This wasn’t a dream. This wasn’t part of the reel. This was the sight the water gave me. Alexis stood by my bed, and this time, beneath the water, he woke me. My eyes opened when he put his hand on my arm, and I couldn’t stop them from seeing him. He wanted me to see him there, beneath the water, where only the dead live.
“You have it,” he said, almost laughing. “Under your bed with all that other fucking junk.”
He held on to my arm, gripping it tightly. His hand was a carbon wire used to cut through metal. It was cutting through my skin, but I didn’t want him to let go. Even if his hand were a wire, it was still his hand. It was still him. I looked at him and looked at him and looked at him and I didn’t look away. My looking meant he had to stay there. It meant I could go back.
He knelt down, reached under the bed, and pushed aside the old boxes knotted in twine. He pulled out a small cardboard box, about the size of a bag of flour. “It wasn’t me you saw,” he said. “I didn’t lead you here.”
He set the box, battered and covered in shredded packing tape, on my lap. I opened it. He grabbed hold of my arm again. The box was full of papers and photos like the one Alexis had shown me of our parents; there were notes of recorded conversations, there were memos that ordered death as casually as an afternoon espresso, there were names. In the photos, the mouths were open, calling me.
Each photo I pulled from the box floated out of my hand and up through the water. I plucked them one by one until there was only one left—completely black and undeveloped. Yet when I touched it, a face slowly surfaced: Alexis. Blackness behind him, his face the only object the flash could catch clearly in the dark. The shadow of the river just a smudge on the film. The sand a cushion beneath his knees. I stared at the photo until I knew his features were layered on mine, an endless series of exposures, until I saw out of his eyes.
The Sleeping World Page 23
