The Compass of His Bones and Other Stories

by Vandermeer, Jeff

  Gabriel’s leg begins to throb and he remembers D’Souza saying, “When I have died . . . ”

  He stops thinking and stares ahead at the road. Soon he pulls into the gravel driveway of his four-room house. It forms part of a state-sponsored housing project, not much different from the relocation sites made available to Indian tribes uprooted from the mountains. His house is constructed of unpainted concrete, single-story, with the gracelessness of a building block. As the VW comes to a stop, Gabriel blinks his headlights three times before turning them off, so that if Sessina is awake she will not mistake him for the police.

  Gabriel knocks on the front door and then unlocks it, certain she is in the kitchen preparing his meal. Inside, Gabriel can smell rice, beans, and eggs. Sessina has turned off the lights to conserve electricity and he has to orient himself by the glow of the kitchen and the television in the living room. The bedroom is off to the left. They share an outdoor bathroom with the couple in the house next door. The living room wall is half wallpapered, half rude concrete.

  “Sessina?” he says. “Are you in the kitchen?”

  “Yes,” comes the muffled reply. “You are late.”

  Gabriel unbuttons his shirt, places his guard’s cap on the baroque iron hat rack. Another present from Pedro.

  “A little trouble with a prisoner,” Gabriel says. “Nothing to worry about.”

  “What?” she says as he walks into the living room. A replay of the football game is still on and the national team is up three to two, with thirty minutes to play. The green sofa calls to him, but he disciplines himself and walks into the kitchen, shielding his eyes from the angry white light of the naked bulb that hangs there.

  “I said I had a little trouble with a prisoner.”

  Sessina stands before the stove, spatula in hand. The light illuminates her face in such a way that her beauty is almost painful to him. Her hair is black and shines a faint metallic blue, her eyes large, her nose small and slightly upturned. She still wears the dress she wore to Garcia’s Department Store in downtown Carbajal, but she has taken off her black pumps. The grace of her small feet, their contours clearly visible through her pantyhose, makes him smile. He comes close to her and touches her lightly on the shoulder.

  She smiles a tired smile and says, “It was a long day at the store, too. I had three window displays to set up. We finished very late; I got home after eleven. Sit down and watch the game. I’ll bring you your dinner.”

  A peck on the cheek and back to her skillet.

  Although Gabriel wants to linger, wants to say how good she looks to him, he walks into the living room. The sofa springs are old and he sinks into the cushions with a grateful sigh. His back muscles untense and only now does he really feel sleepy, lazy, relaxed. He lets the low hum of the announcer’s voice, broken by moments of excitement, lead him into a half-doze.

  After eighteen years, Gabriel is still bewildered that Sessina agreed to marry him, although at the time he must have appeared to be a man who would make something of his life. But then had come the leg injury, Pedro having whisked him away for a “little bachelor fun” a month before the marriage. While Gabriel was still in Mexico, El Toreador staged his successful coup and Gabriel’s grandfather was stripped of his rank, forced to retire because he had refused to join El Toreador.

  “Stay in Mexico,” Pedro pleaded. “Don’t go back. I’m not going back. No one can make me go back. It will be Guatemala all over again. Don’t go back.”

  But he had gone back. He remembered getting off the plane and walking onto the escalators at the airport and, seeing the black-red banners of El Toreador, realizing it was not his country anymore. Until he saw Sessina waiting for him. And then it didn’t matter.

  “Here you are,” Sessina says, and hands Gabriel a steaming plate of rice, beans, and eggs. From beside him, Sessina kneads his back in just the right spot while the game drones on.

  “Thank you,” he says, and begins to eat.

  “What was the trouble with the prisoner?”

  “He wanted me to get a message to his wife,” he says between bites of food.

  “And what did you say?”

  “No, of course.”

  “Did you have to say no?”

  “He’s a prisoner, Sessina.”

  “What did he do to get put into prison?”

  “Traitorous things. A traitor to the country. An enemy of the state.”

  “Oh. That explains why your back is so tight. Was it difficult to say no?”

  Gabriel shrugs, then shouts, “Yes!” when the national team scores again. The television blips to a news brief: more bad news about the economy, three murders in the southern city of Baijala were still unsolved, and a boy had poured a pot of boiling water over a puppy and felt no guilt. The last item makes Gabriel feel sick inside.

  “How terrible.”

  “People are terrible,” murmurs his wife. “You could find another job.”

  They have discussed this before, it is old news, and Gabriel does not answer.

  Sessina’s hands draw larger and slower circles across his back. Soon the hands stop moving altogether.

  “Sessina?”

  Gabriel finishes his meal and puts his plate next to him on the sofa. He carefully lifts Sessina’s arms away from him and sets them down in her lap. He turns off the television and walks into the kitchen holding the dishes, puts them in the sink.

  A rosary hangs on the wall over the faucet, on a nail, and next to that, a photograph of his grandfather beside his MiG, smiling with his wide mouth so that his tan, leathery forehead crinkles up even further. Sunglasses hide his eyes.

  Gabriel turns away and comes back to the couch. Sessina still lies there, her mouth half-open, her breaths shallow, the top two buttons of her wrinkled white blouse unbuttoned.

  When they married, Sessina had aspirations of a modeling career. Now she dresses up the mannequins that decorate the window displays of Garcia’s Department Store. In the bustle and fatigue of day-to-day living, the dream had slipped away from her, fragment by fragment, until she must have forgotten, or believed she had never dreamt of such a thing.

  And does she, Gabriel asks himself, stare into my eyes and think the same thoughts, and there we both are, caught in moments that trickle away endlessly, lost in the repetition of doing the same things over and over?

  Looking down at Sessina, her beauty remote from him, a movie image, not flesh and blood, Gabriel knows he still loves her — a sudden intake of breath when he sees her at night, a palpitation of his heart, the sense that even caught in the morass of daily life she makes it worthwhile. Yet there is such distance, as if, were he to reach out and touch her, he would find that she is really miles away.

  D’Souza, pressed up against the bars of his prison cell. Might Sessina have met his wife in Garcia’s shopping for clothes or perfume? How difficult would it be to simply whisper, “Your husband is in prison.”

  Gabriel gathers Sessina up, a feather weight in his arms, and she locks her arms around his neck and, half-asleep, nuzzles up against him. Not bothering to turn on the light, Gabriel takes her into their bedroom, past the chest of drawers with the photographs of her mother and father, Pedro, and Gabriel’s mother; another of his grandfather, months before his death. He lays Sessina on the bed and undresses her. Instead of turning the covers down, he slips out of his shoes, sheds his trousers and unbuttons three buttons on his shirt. He pulls it over his head and drops it onto the floor to join the pants.

  Sessina has curled up on her side and so he slowly gets into bed opposite her, slowly makes his body fit the contours of her body. He puts a hand on her breasts and kisses her freckled back. Her skin feels warm to his touch. She makes a purring sound and reaches out with one hand to stroke his hair. He runs a hand along the side of her hips and she arches her back until his thighs come to rest against her buttocks. She is very hot; he wonders if she is a fallen angel, come streaking down from the sky, to be so hot. Such a beautiful strang
er in his bed.

  As he is about to fall asleep, Gabriel hears the sudden whisper of rain, and then an echo, and then a thousand voices, a speechless, rumbling patter. The storm will come in the morning, he knows, and he cocks his head to one side, as if listening beyond the sound of falling water for some other sound entirely.

  Waking to the patter of rain against the roof, Gabriel looks groggily at the clock, which blinks “1:04 P.M.” Sessina left for her job at the department store hours ago. The bedroom window has fogged over and he smells the rising sweetness of orchids laden with moisture, bromeliads nearly choked with it. Drains gurgle with water.

  Gabriel rises with a half-groan, half-yawn, his neck muscles aching. His mouth is dry; he feels parched, weak. Eyes blurry with sleep, he trudges out to the communal bathroom to take a shower, then dresses and eats a quick lunch. At three o’clock he leaves the house, hurrying to the car under the shelter of a tattered gray umbrella. His shoes are soaked by the time he closes the VW’s door. The engine starts reluctantly when he turns the key, then growls, as if the rain has done it good.

  The drive to the prison takes no time at all under the gray-black sky, blurred further by his faulty wipers, so that the concrete blocks of houses, the shiny metal of cars, and the sharp straightness of trees become patternless streaks of green and brown.

  As Gabriel passes through the prison gates, he begins to discard thoughts of Sessina, Pedro, the news on the television. He begins to think of his rounds, the fifteen-minute breaks he will have as the night progresses, how he will have to speak with the janitors about cleaning the third-floor catwalk. He knows that the ceiling leaks and that moisture will bleed through the walls, bringing with it lizards and cockroaches.

  In the administrative offices, Gabriel passes the secret policemen. They are frozen in the same positions as the night before, only now three of them smoke and one man gazes out a window at the cliff face and the downpour falling onto the black sand beach below. The sea bellows and shrieks against the rock.

  These men always look the same — outwardly relaxed, but posed so exactly that Gabriel believes them guilty of a hidden tension, as if, full to bursting with secrets and mystery, they must sit just so, their clothes pressed perfectly so they resemble figures in a wax museum.

  What new secrets do they possess that they did not know yesterday? Gabriel thinks as he checks in at the front desk.

  Administrative work awaits Gabriel and he spends six hours sorting and filing various forms in a ten-by-ten room with flickering fluorescent lights. He can feel the pressure of the sea colliding against the impervious rock: the crunch of waves, maddened beyond reason, so compressed and thick that something, somewhere, must give way, the entire world unmoored.

  His friend Alberto — short and swarthy and enjoyably foul-mouthed — enters three or four times to share a joke and a cigarette, but for the most part Gabriel is alone with his aching leg and the red tape of El Toreador’s bureaucracy. As Gabriel places one file atop the next, one piece of paper atop another, he thinks of D’Souza’s face pressed up against the bars, and then of his father’s face.

  Gabriel cannot remember many times that his father was not in prison, pressed up against those bars. The wane smile. The sad eyes. Gabriel can remember the feel of his mother’s hand in his during those visits, the hand progressively thinner and more bony, until it seemed she was only made of bone, and then even less substantial: a gossamer strand, a dress blowing, empty, in the wind. She had survived her husband by less than three months and Gabriel knew that his father’s incarceration, his death in jail, had diminished her, so that she had died not so much from a broken heart as from a sense of shame that burrowed beneath the skin and poisoned her every action.

  The sheets of paper he collates seem as thin as his family history, the only depth provided by Pedro, who once caroused with him around a Merida traffic circle and crashed joyously into oncoming cars. Lucky Pedro, well fed in Mexico.

  At last, Gabriel has filed the last file and he begins his rounds with the common prisoners on the first and second floors: the murderers and rapists and bank robbers.

  The wind buffets the prison walls; Gabriel thinks he can almost feel the floor shift beneath his feet as if moved by that wind. Or perhaps he is just tired and afraid. Afraid of what?

  Lightning strikes nearby, followed by thunder, and the lights flutter violently. The beach will be drowning in water soon and only the cliff will stop the water from rising farther and flooding the interior. The rush of water is almost a second pulse.

  When Gabriel reaches the third floor, he is out of breath, in darkness lit by the bare bulbs. They swing like low-strung stars, blinding him with their glare. The janitors have yet to clean the mess and he moves through it cautiously.

  The guard at the entrance to the political prisoners’ section is not on his stool.

  The hairs on Gabriel’s arms rise in apprehension. Has the man abandoned his duties or gone to the bathroom? Gabriel hesitates. Perhaps he should return to the first floor?

  Instead, ignoring his fear, he moves to the first cell. He shines his flashlight on the bed. He shines his flashlight in the corners and under the bed. The prisoner is gone.

  The flashlight shakes in Gabriel’s hand. He feels nauseous. Perhaps the secret police have taken the prisoner for questioning and not bothered to inform the guards. Perhaps the third-floor guard accompanied the secret policemen.

  But when he comes to the next cell, it too is empty. The next cell is also empty, and the next, and as each new cell is revealed to be empty, Gabriel walks faster and faster, until he jogs and then runs, sweeping the flashlight over each bunk as he passes it. No one. No one at all. They are all gone.

  Panting, sweating, Gabriel comes to the last cell: Roberto D’Souza’s cell. The cell is lit by the moon shining into the window: a huge burning white globe shrouded by the torn ends of purpling storm clouds. Gabriel drops his flashlight to the floor. His mouth opens and closes. He does not even know what he is trying to say.

  D’Souza floats next to the window that faces the sea, his eyes tightly shut and his arms outstretched like wings.

  There is a raw churning in Gabriel’s stomach. He wonders if, perhaps, he is still lying next to Sessina in their bed.

  He pulls out his nightstick. He takes the cell key from his belt ring and unlocks the door.

  D’Souza continues to float next to the window. The wind sends his long hair streaming out behind him.

  “Come down!” Gabriel shouts. And, in a lower voice, “Come down.”

  D’Souza does not open his eyes. His body is still scarred and pitted with the excesses of his torturers, but the wounds are clean and unmarked by red or black. D’Souza floats toward the window until his head is pressed up against it.

  D’Souza melts or wriggles through the window. It happens so slowly that Gabriel should be able to tell what has occurred, but he can’t; it is as if he blinked and missed it. Gabriel runs to the window.

  In the light of the moon, he sees D’Souza and dozens of other prisoners, washed clean by the bracing wind, the stinging rain. As they dip, gyrate, and glide through the sky, Gabriel can hear distant laughter, faint and fading. As they fly farther away, they appear as swathes and strips and rags of darkness swimming against the silvery white of the moon. He stares until he cannot see D’Souza, just the shapes of bodies moving like dolphins through water.

  Watching their flight, Gabriel feels a weight in his heart, an emptiness, a loss, and a yearning. He shuts his eyes so tightly they hurt and wills that his spirit too should fly up into the moonlight, into the clouds, the torrential rain, and the wind. But as he wills this, as his body starts to become lighter than air, than life, he sees the images he has sought to block out: the scalpels edged with blood, the secret police gathered around their victims, the rubber gloves and the wires.

  When Gabriel opens his eyes, he is still on the ground, in the empty cell, with the door open.

  Gabriel stands the
re for a long time before he takes off his guard’s cap and lets it fall from his hands to the floor. He walks downstairs to the first floor, where the secret police no longer lounge, but instead run back and forth, scream, shout, and gesticulate wildly. This secret is too big for their minds to hold. Boots clatter against cement runways. Automatic rifles are loaded with a desperate chut-chut.

  Gabriel walks past them and out into the rain. The rain feels good against his face. It dribbles into the corners of his mouth and he tastes its sweetness. Above, the prisoners, and ahead, from the parking lot, guards and secret police, soaking wet and strangely silent, shoot at the prisoners as if their sanity depends on it.

  Ignoring them, Gabriel gets into his car and drives off, past the empty observation posts, past the twenty-four-hour light, past the useless barbed wire, past the ludicrous outer fences, and onto the twenty-mile stretch of road that leads home. He shivers as his shirt sticks to his skin, but he feels the cold only as a numbness that has no temperature. The night along the roadside no longer feels like an infinite bubble; it is static, dead.

  Finally, he drives past his neighbors’ ugly concrete houses and into the driveway of his own home. He gets out of the car and stands in the rain, but it no longer invigorates him. It makes him tired and old. He walks to the door, opens it, and shuts it behind him almost as an afterthought.

  “Sessina?” he says, expecting no reply and hearing none.

  He walks into the kitchen. Beside the stove he finds a message: “Dinner is in the refrigerator.” He does not look in the refrigerator.