The Memory of Light

by Francisco X. Stork

  Mona says that talking heals, but at times like this, I think that just being next to someone who likes you is all anybody ever needs. Still, the peace radiating from Dr. Desai is not enough to calm my mind. My father is coming to pick me up in four days, and my head is churning with thoughts and questions about what will happen then. After a while I say, “I don’t understand how this is supposed to work. How’s it going to be different when I go back home? What am I supposed to be getting out of these talks with you or with the group?”

  Dr. Desai stops for a moment as if to consider what I have just said and then continues walking. When I see that she isn’t going to respond, at least not immediately, I say: “And there are things that don’t make any sense to me. Like what you said about pretending, that we all need to pretend to survive. But that’s all I’ve been doing, and it’s what I will have to do when I go back home. Pretend to be nice when I feel mean, pretend I like school when I hate it, answer politely when I feel like telling people to go to hell. ‘Hi, how’s it going? I’m fine, thank you,’ when what I want to say is ‘I feel like crap.’” I breathe deeply. Why am I so agitated? This is crazy. Now I’m angry at Dr. Desai.

  “Go on,” Dr. Desai says. We move to the side to let an old man in a wheelchair go past us.

  I hesitate and then I let it all out. “If all I’m supposed to learn here is that pretending is okay in some cases, then this is not going to work. Sooner or later I’ll … I’ll be sick of myself.” I let Dr. Desai guide me by the arm to a concrete bench on the side of the track. From somewhere in her sari, she takes out a white hanky, and I press it against one eye and then the other. “Sorry. I don’t know where all this is coming from,” I say, sniffling.

  “Is there more you want to tell me?” Dr. Desai asks.

  I shrug and shake my head. It feels like my chest is full of feelings that want to latch on to words, but the words aren’t coming.

  Dr. Desai sighs. “My goodness, Vicky, I don’t know if I have the answer to all your questions. There is so much there. Let me see. How does this work? How will it be different when you get back home? What are you supposed to be getting out of the private sessions and the group talks? And pretending. When is it okay and when not? Ooof. You want to make me earn my paycheck today, I see.” She is smiling now, her hands folded on her lap. I catch myself twisting her hanky and begin to fold it neatly. What does a person do with a used and borrowed hanky?

  “Just now when you were asking me all those questions, you reminded me of when I was a child growing up in a small village in India. There was an old man who lived outside our village. We children called him Mr. Karamachi, although I doubt that was his real name. Mr. Karamachi owned an equally old elephant named Lady Chatterley — don’t ask me how she got that name. Mr. Karamachi made his living by renting out Lady Chatterley for wedding processions or to pull a big fallen tree from the forest or to give rides to tourists. I think you reminded me of him just now because I used to pepper Mr. Karamachi with all kinds of questions, and he would grab his head with both hands and say, ‘Such big questions, such little brain.’”

  Dr. Desai grabs her head and makes a funny face. I laugh first and then she does as well. I feel a raindrop land on my arm. We both look up at the gray clouds. Dr. Desai and I stand and begin to walk toward the entrance of the hospital. After a few steps, she speaks again, so softly I have to lean closer to hear.

  “Besides renting out Lady Chatterley, Mr. Karamachi would also go into the jungle and catch small monkeys, which he would then take to Bombay and sell to a man who would send the monkeys to different zoos around the world. We children were fascinated by how he would catch these monkeys. He took a small cage made out of bamboo and put a peeled mango inside it. The bars of the cage were far enough apart to let the monkey stick his hand in sideways, but close enough together to prevent the monkey from removing his hand once he grabbed on to the peeled mango. This cage with the mango, Mr. Karamachi would tie to a tree, and sure enough, now and then, he would come home with a captured monkey.

  “I could not believe the monkey could be so stupid. ‘But why doesn’t the monkey just drop the mango and run when he sees you coming?’ I would ask Mr. Karamachi. He would grab his head and say ‘Such big questions, such little brain.’”

  We are at the entrance to the hospital, where a group of noisy would-be walkers is trying to decide whether it will rain on them. Dr. Desai turns one of her palms up to feel for raindrops. I do the same. “Do you think we can make it around the track one more time before it pours?” she asks.

  I nod and we start to walk in the direction we had come. It strikes me that everyone always walks or wheels around the track in the same direction.

  “So,” Dr. Desai says, once we are away from the noise, “how does this work, you ask?” We are moving slowly, but she slows down even more so that we are barely walking. I see her face flush with concentration, making sure she finds the right words for what she wants to say. “In some form or another, all mental illness consists of our inability or unwillingness to let go of a mental mango that is hurting us. The mango can be an idea, such as the paranoid’s belief that people are following him, or it could be an image we have of ourselves, such as ‘I’m a bad person for pretending to like school when I really don’t.’ The mango is a view of reality that is not true, a story about ourselves or about our world that causes us pain and keeps us from being open to life as it is.” She pauses. “I suppose what we are trying to do here, in our talks alone and with the group, is to create a safe space where we can reflect on the stories we hold on to in pain … so we can let go of them. And of course some people are holding on to more than one mango.”

  I say, “My mango is thinking that I’m a big, bad phony because I don’t like hardly anything or anybody in my life and I have to pretend that I do.”

  Dr. Desai smiles. “Maybe pretending is not the right word. When you are kind to someone, even though you don’t feel like being kind, you are choosing what kind of person you want to be in that particular circumstance. Your kind side and your yucky side are both parts of you. Are you being a phony when you choose to override the part of you that wants to be mean and you decide to be kind? It’s a sort of pretending, I suppose, but it’s a good kind. I think the efforts you made to carry on with your life despite the depression that was bogging you down were good, brave efforts. You were choosing life when everything inside of you wanted you to choose death.”

  “Until one day I grabbed the mango of death and didn’t let go.” I laugh a nervous kind of laugh.

  Dr. Desai grabs me gently by the shoulders and peers intently into my very soul, it seems. She looks at the darkening sky and then speaks with a quiet urgency I’ve never heard her use before. “Thoughts are clouds, Vicky. They are not you. The cloud of wanting to die appears, and if you don’t grab it, it will eventually float away. The cloud that says ‘I’m lazy and a coward and a phony to boot’ floats before you, and you can calmly watch it come and go. You are not the clouds or even the blue sky where clouds live. You are the sun behind them, giving light to all, and the sun is made up of goodness and kindness and life.”

  Then she lets go of me. A drop of rain lands on my head, and when I look up, another falls on my lips. Then all the water in the heavens seems to fall on us all at once.

  But that’s all right. The sun is still there.

  The next day, even E.M. seems excited by the prospect of dinner at Gabriel’s. Hospital food is therapeutic that way. The more you eat it, the more you want to get well and find someplace else to eat.

  Mona fretted all morning about what to wear. Finally, she went to the lost-and-found room and picked out a pair of lime-green pants and a bright-yellow T-shirt. “How do I look?” she asked me.

  “You glow,” I told her.

  “That’s the idea,” she said.

  Gabriel’s grandfather is waiting for us in the familiar parking lot below my window. He’s a tall, strong-looking man with eyes that crink
le at the edges, as if he were always smiling. He takes off his straw hat and hugs Gabriel for the longest time. Then he shakes each of our hands, bowing slightly as he does so, and tells us to call him Antonio. He’s driving a blue truck that has clearly worked hard for many, many years. Mona climbs into the front seat and scoots to the middle so I can sit by the window, but I tell her I will ride in the back with Gabriel and E.M. It’s hot, but it feels good to be outside.

  The three of us sit with our backs against the cabin, me in the middle. I am tired from a night with little sleep and my mind is … tender. I guess that’s the best word for it. Still, I decide to make an effort to be social. “How does it feel to be seventeen?” I ask Gabriel at a stoplight.

  “So far about the same,” he responds.

  “Birthdays suck,” E.M. says. He has his eyes closed and his face tilted up like a sunbather.

  Gabriel and I look at each other and smile. What else would E.M. say?

  “When is your birthday?” Gabriel asks me. The truck jerks forward and our heads bump against the back of the cabin.

  “Is Mona driving?” E.M. says.

  “It’s the transmission,” Gabriel explains. “It’s not long for this world.”

  “Like you,” E.M. says, elbowing me. I turn to see if he’s smiling, but he isn’t.

  “Don’t listen to him,” Gabriel says. “They just let him out of a psychiatric ward. So you were saying, about your birthday.”

  “January fifteenth.”

  “That’s a good day to be born. Did you do anything?”

  “Cecy, my best friend — well, she used to be my best friend. She came over and had dinner with me. Juanita made me enchiladas. She baked a cake.”

  “Just you and Cecy and Juanita? And your parents?”

  “My father and Barbara were on a business trip.” It occurs to me for the first time that it was kind of crummy of them to not be there for my birthday. Yes, Mona, my father and Barbara can be jerks sometimes.

  “You got sad all of a sudden,” he says. “Why?”

  “Sorry. I was just thinking about my family…. I’ll try to be happy. It’s your birthday.”

  “Forget about trying to be happy,” E.M. says. “You can’t control being happy. Try to be brave. You can control that.”

  “Out of the mouth of babes and psychopaths,” Gabriel says, laughing.

  “I heard that,” E.M. says.

  “What do you know about happiness?” Gabriel teases him.

  “All I know, I learned from Huitzilopochtli.” E.M.’s eyes are still closed.

  “Wee-chee … what?” I ask.

  “Oh, oh,” Gabriel moans, “now you’ve done it. You’ll never get him to stop talking about Huichi.”

  “Huitzilopochtli,” E. M. says. He pronounces it wee-chee-lo-posh-tlee. “Alls I’ve been telling you about being strong, about not feeling sorry for yourself — all that comes from Huichi. Huitzilopochtli was the Aztec god of war. He protected warriors in battle and gave them strength and courage. He fights the night each day so it doesn’t stay dark forever.”

  That sounds familiar, I think. Except that Huichi appears to have more success than I did. “So what do you have to do to get strength and courage?” I ask.

  Gabriel is about to say something, but E.M. says, “Shh. No more talking. Just act brave even if you’re scared. Pretend you’re courageous even if you’re a coward. That’s all you need to know about Huitzilopochtli right now.” Then he shuts his eyes and crosses his arms.

  “It works for me,” Gabriel says, smiling.

  The truck goes up a ramp to a highway. Clouds of white exhaust spew out of the tailpipe, and I can see people shake their heads as they pass us. I imagine Barbara driving by in her baby-blue Mercedes and seeing me in the back of the ailing truck between E.M. and Gabriel. The thought makes me smile.

  We get off the highway in an area of Austin that I never knew existed. There are restaurants called Tito’s and MexDonald’s, and a store advertises BUENA ROPA USADA. A gas station’s roof blinks with red, white, and blue Christmas lights. We turn off the main avenue into a street with small wooden houses. Most of the houses have a front yard and a porch and look like they could use a paint job.

  Gabriel’s house is a small one-story white cottage with dark-blue trim. It’s one of a dozen similar houses on the street, but it is by far the best maintained and the most colorful. White and purple flowers line the brick path from the street to the front porch, and a tall, bushy tree occupies one side of the yard. The grass is dark green and lush and neatly trimmed. We jump out of the back of the truck and wait for Mona and Gabriel’s grandfather.

  “Dude, this looks like a fairy tale,” Mona says to Gabriel as we walk up to the front door.

  “Grandpa here works hard to keep it looking good.” Gabriel touches his grandfather’s back.

  Antonio opens the screen door and we enter. Maybe it’s the smell of mole, or maybe it’s the light that fills the room, or maybe it’s the old but comfortable-looking sofa, but as soon as I step in, I feel as if I have entered a space that is very safe and welcoming. Mona sighs, and E.M. takes a deep breath. I wish I lived in a place like this and I can tell that Mona and E.M. do as well. Then I remember that in two days I will be going home to a place nothing like this, and the air and light leak right out of me.

  “I’ll get Grandma,” Gabriel says, disappearing down a hallway.

  “I’ll get the lemonade,” Antonio says.

  “You got anything stronger?” Mona asks.

  “Coffee!” Antonio shouts from the kitchen.

  E.M. plops himself down on the sofa. Mona picks up a picture from an end table and smiles. “Look,” she says. It’s a picture of Gabriel, six or seven years old, holding the hand of a young woman. “Must be where Gabriel gets his looks.”

  I walk over and take the picture from Mona. There is no doubt that the woman holding Gabriel’s hand is his mother. She’s beautiful, and Mona is right, there is a strong resemblance to Gabriel. I study Gabriel’s picture for a few moments. His ample forehead and deep-set eyes, his thin nose, the curve of his lips, they all fit together. Gabriel hasn’t changed all that much. His eyes are somehow deeper and sadder, but the beauty of the little boy’s face in the picture is still there. I place the picture gently on the table.

  Mona looks around the room. “I haven’t seen one of those in ages.” She walks to the record player and begins to sift through the albums neatly ordered on a shelf above it.

  “Why don’t you put something on?” Antonio is carrying a tray with a pitcher of lemonade and glasses.

  “You sure you can work that?” E.M. says to Mona, who is fiddling with the record player. Mona shoots him one of her killer looks.

  “He meant that because you’re so young, you may not be acquainted with old-fashioned phonographs.” Antonio places the tray on the coffee table in front of the sofa. He fills a glass and offers it to me.

  Mona flashes an album at Antonio and Antonio gives her a thumbs-up. After a few minutes of Mona fumbling with knobs, the sound of a mariachi band fills the room.

  Gabriel enters, pushing his grandmother in a wheelchair. She is wearing a black dress with white polka dots, her frail, wrinkled arms resting in her lap, a rosary wrapped around her hands. I think of Juanita and the times we said the rosary together.

  “This is Chona, everyone,” Gabriel announces.

  Chona grins a sweet, toothless grin at everyone as we take turns shaking her hand. “Who are these angels?” she asks Antonio.

  “They are friends of Gabriel. They came to celebrate his birthday!”

  “Birthday? Who has a birthday?”

  “Gabriel. Your grandson.”

  “Ahh, Gabriel.” She stretches out a hand toward E.M.

  “That’s Gabriel’s friend,” Antonio corrects her. “Gabriel’s over here.”

  Chona grabs E.M.’s hand and places it against her cheek. “Gabriel,” she whispers, “have you been a good boy?”

  Hi
s face freezes, his dark skin turning darker.

  “Well, answer her,” Mona says. “Have you been a good boy?”

  E.M. declares, “No, I’ve been a bad boy.”

  “Let’s eat!” Antonio claps his hands. “Margarita has prepared a feast.”

  As we walk into the dining room, I ask Gabriel, “Who’s Margarita?”

  Gabriel laughs. “She’s the daughter of Chabela, the lady who takes care of Grandma during the day when Grandpa and I work. Margarita is an even better cook than her mother, so we’re in luck.”

  “Your grandfather took a day off to celebrate your birthday?”

  “Yeah,” Gabriel says. “I wish I had known. I would have tried to talk him out of it, not that I would have succeeded. He can’t afford to take days off.”

  “He loves you.” The words are out before I know it, and for a moment I hope Gabriel doesn’t hear them. In my world, that kind of demonstration of love is unusual. But Gabriel does hear my words, and when he touches my arm softly, I know he also hears the sadness behind them.

  “Wait until you taste Margarita’s mole,” he says.

  There is mole, thick and reddish brown, and fluffy yellow rice and beans and empanadas and tamales. Mona has to tell E.M. not to drool on the mole and also not to drool on Margarita, who turns out to be yet another beauty. Then when no one can possibly eat anything else for at least a month, Margarita brings out a chocolate cake, the seventeen candles already lit. We sing “Happy Birthday” first in English and then in Spanish, and Gabriel blows the candles out after making a silent wish.

  “What did you wish for?” Mona asks.

  He doesn’t say anything, but the way he gently touches his temple makes me think his wish has something to do with what is going on in there.

  After dinner, E.M. insists on helping Margarita with the dishes. “What?” he says in response to the cynical look on Mona’s face. “I like to work. My brain thinks better when I work.”