by Daniel Mason
She surrendered to signs and suspicions.
In the city plazas, she watched the street pigeons and found significance in their flight, their numbers, how they watched her and when they took to the air. She noticed certain footprints shimmered on the wet streets; she took this to be a sign of Isaias’s passage. Hugo’s crying meant a path was mistaken, as did an ache in her shoulder. She rode a bus to its terminal because its numbers added to Isaias’s age. On a misty afternoon, when a golden dog turned to look at her, she followed it for an hour, losing its trail in a back-alley tangle of greased crates and wet cardboard.
She heard a rumor that a statue of the Our Lady of Good Birth was found wet with amniotic fluid and was answering prayers of unmarried girls. It was on the western edge of the Settlements, but the story frightened her and she didn’t go. The same woman told her of a magical baby who could find missing people. She imagined it on a wooden throne, attended by women in white gowns, a long line filing out through the door and down the hill. He was in Vila Marigold, said the woman, but when she asked, no one else had heard of a Vila Marigold.
A grasshopper appeared one morning in her room. Isabel knew this meant good luck, but the day unfolded like any other. She studied the swirls in the gravel outside the door for omens. She spent a day’s wage on a street-corner prophetess. The prophetess rubbed her hands over a crystal and forecasted a man in her future and a new job. As the women spoke, Isabel wondered how she would explain the missing wages to her cousin.
She spent another day’s salary on a magazine called Woman’s Life. On the cover, in purple letters, it said NEW HOME? GUIDE FOR STARTING OUT. Inside there was a long article about decorating a kitchen. She returned to the man who sold it. ‘There’s a mistake,’ she said, but he wouldn’t give her money back.
At times she was seized by sudden waves of fear. She began to feel a pain in her stomach. She paused outside the white-tiled pharmacies and thought of going inside, but she didn’t know how to explain what was wrong. In Cathedral Square, a man selling elixirs spoke through a megaphone about a new regimen for the liver. Perhaps it is my liver, she wondered.
She found a phone token. She clenched it in her fist until it grew wet and warm in her palm. Then she traded it for a coin, which she traded for a prayer card of Saint Anthony, saint of lost people and things. She tucked it into her dress, against her heart. At night, the print left ghostly images of the saint on her skin. She recited from the fading print until she had memorized the invocation.
Each day she wondered, When will I stop? The only answer seemed to be that she would stop when she was too tired to look more. She began to welcome the exhaustion that descended on her at night.
At the campaign office, Josiane asked, ‘Why are you so sad now?’ ‘I’m not sad.’ ‘Did you go to the police?’ ‘Yes,’ said Isabel sharply. ‘And?’ ‘And what? They told me that there were hundreds of Isaiases, thousands of Isaiases. That’s the only thing they said.’
Josiane tried to cheer her with a story about the street carnival. ‘The rides and machines are still there,’ she said, taking Isabel’s hand, ‘I think someone forgot them. Maybe they will be there forever.’ She said the couples went into a room filled with mirrors, so many mirrors that you didn’t know which person was real and which was only a reflection. ‘I went in there with a boy. I thought I would search forever and not be able to find him.’
Then she stopped, ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean … I’m sorry, Isa. I didn’t mean …’
On their way to the bus station, they passed a man with a sign that said NUMBER ONE SOLUTION TO POVERTY AND INJUSTICE 100% PROVEN FORMULA. WE MUST TAKE OUR FATE INTO OUR OWN HANDS 2 SAMUEL 6 (FATE OF UZZAH) PROVES IT IS THE WORKER THE OX-DRIVER WHO WILL ALWAYS BE PUNISHED GOD SAYS SAVE YOURSELF THE AGE OF JEREMIAH IS UPON US. Isabel heard him say, They are cruel and have no mercy, their sound is like the roaring sea, and she listened until Josiane pulled her away.
One night, at home, Manuela asked, ‘What’s wrong?’ and Isabel told her about the police. Her cousin erupted, ‘What are you trying to do to me, Isabel? What did I tell you about the police? You took my baby there? And now after what happened? What will people think if they know you went to the police days after a raid? They’ll finish with us. I’ve seen it happen, I’ve seen them send families into the street. They’ll do to us what they did to Junior.’
‘I won’t go again,’ said Isabel. She didn’t say she was going each day to the Center. She knew she couldn’t tell Manuela about her dreams. They mean nothing, her cousin would say. They are just dreams, just the day passing through. Or she would mock her, Do they come with a map, these dreams? If he is eating an ice in a dream, do you follow the ice vendors? If he is swimming, would you look for him in the sea?
Isabel waited for her cousin to tell her not to worry about Isaias, but Manuela didn’t say this.
She stopped sitting with the washerwomen, and didn’t return to Junior’s store, which had been reopened by his cousin. Twice, she saw the portrait seller lugging his bag of frames up the hill, his hair neatly combed, laughing with the children. She closed the door and motioned for Hugo to be quiet. Twice, she heard him clap and call to her.
In her dreams, she looked desperately for street signs or names, but there was only Isaias Street or Saint Michael Street or Street Isabel. She rode buses with aisles that stretched the length of city blocks; there were no fountains or towers to guide her. She had a vision, one afternoon, of Isaias in a graveyard, sitting on the crushed edge of a marble slab, swinging his feet. Around him, angels alighted on the headstones, curling up beneath their wings. Their faces were streaked with soot-black tears, their cheeks hollowed by the city rain. Candles wilted at his feet, and the pathways ran with wax. She stared at the photos entombed in glass on the headstones. Each showed his face, the fiddle in his hands, the backdrop of his orchestra. Gray men walked through the cemetery in ill-fitting pants that frayed about their ankles. She recognized the cemetery from her walks, but she refused to go back.
She went and sat with Hugo on the steps outside the subway stations. He played at her feet, but she ignored him unless he began to cry. She watched the rising waves of faces that came up the stairs, searching the thousands of eyes and mouths and hair, thinking chance alone should bring him to me, it is impossible that there can be so many of them and still he doesn’t pass. Once, as she walked in a crowded street, she saw him staring out a window of a bank, until her eyes left his and saw the wild tangle of her own hair and the remainder of her reflection.
Sometimes when she walked she heard her name.
She learned after one or two times that there was no one there, but she always stopped. She did not understand why she took comfort in the crowds breaking and re-forming around her, the voices telling her to move, her importance.
One day, she passed a crowd outside a hospital. ‘Isaias isn’t sick,’ she told herself aloud, and walked on. But at the end of the block she stopped and went back. She waited outside in the mist, watching the crowd.
At last she went to the window. ‘I am here to look for someone,’ she said. ‘Then you are in the wrong place,’ said a woman. ‘These lines are for people who are sick, or who think they are sick. Visitors must go through the door.’
Inside, she found a desk with a sign that said INFORMATION. An old woman sat behind a thick black registry. She asked Isabel, ‘Is he a patient?’ ‘I don’t know. Maybe.’ ‘That isn’t helpful,’ said the woman. ‘This is a very large hospital.’ She ran a ruler down the pages of the register. ‘Here’s an Isaias with that name … Twenty-one years old. No hometown, no family listed, just the Settlements. Could that be him?’ Isabel stared at her. ‘Young lady?’ ‘Yes?’ ‘Could it be him?’ Isabel nodded slowly. ‘Ward 27, Inpatient Psychiatry.’ She wrote it down. ‘What does that mean, “Inpatient Psychiatry”?’ asked Isabel. ‘Crazy,’ said the woman. ‘It means locked away.’
She had to sit again. It can’t be, she thought. The inspector to
ld me: there must be thousands of Isaiases with our name, twenty-one years old, from the Settlements. Without a family. And if his family was recorded in the register? And if he was Isaias, brother of an Isabel? How many hundreds of Isaiases from the Settlements with a sister Isabel must there be?
I want to see this Isaias of another Isabel, she thought. Maybe he is identical in every way—maybe his Isabel is just like me.
She fed the baby from his bottle and pressed him to her shoulder. He yawned and closed his eyes. He is good, she thought, a backlands baby who learned long ago not to cry.
She went to a sign with arrows and ward numbers, and followed a large hallway to a bank of elevators. In an open lift, a nurse stood behind a wheelchair-bound woman with a thin tube in her nose. The woman sat crookedly against her chair. Her hands trembled slightly in her lap, her fingers reminded Isabel of bent fork prongs. The elevator groaned upward. The old woman looked at Isabel. ‘It’s you, Lourdes!’ She smiled beatifically. ‘Don’t listen to her,’ said the nurse. ‘She’s so demented. She thinks she’s still in the north.’ ‘Her family’s in the north?’ asked Isabel. ‘Who knows? They found her alone in the Central Station, wandering by the track.’
The lift grated against the shaft. When it stopped, the light from the elevator illuminated a sign that said VISITORS MUST ANNOUNCE THEMSELVES. Isabel stepped tentatively out, and then the door closed, shuttering the wall in darkness.
She followed the hallway to a rectangle of light cast on the floor by an intersecting corridor. She turned into it, not knowing where she was going. There were no signs; the rooms seemed empty. It smelled of bleach and urine, and something else—birth, maybe, she thought. In places, the paint was swollen in bubbles. She passed a discarded metal tray, and later, a stirrup and an archipelago of scattered pills. She could hear the echo of her own breathing. At the end of the corridor was a door with a glass window. It was a children’s ward, and the floors were littered with discarded toys, but there were no children anywhere. She turned into another hallway, but it was also empty. As she went back, a child stepped in front of her. Its head was big and round, like the photo of the child in the magazine, and its arms were as thin as sticks. It looked like a little skeleton. It hobbled toward her, and she lifted Hugo away.
A nurse came from an open door and picked the child up. ‘Come, now,’ she scolded, softly. To Isabel, she said, ‘This is Serafina. She’s from New Grace, in the Settlements. Her mother left her and two brothers in a shack. She is named after the great actress Serafina, you know.’ Isabel didn’t know if the nurse was accusing the mother or the actress Serafina. She thought it was an odd thing to tell a stranger anyway, and so she didn’t answer.
She showed the nurse the slip of paper. ‘One flight down,’ said the nurse.
She descended an empty stairwell and found herself in an identical hallway. At the end of it was a door with a small window, and the number 27. The handle was locked. She knocked. An old man passed, shuffling his feet.
A nurse appeared in the window, a fat woman with a white paper cylinder for a cap. The nurse bent to speak through small holes in the glass. ‘Yes?’
Isabel spoke loudly: ‘I am here to see my brother Isaias.’
‘This isn’t visiting time,’ said the nurse.
‘Please, I’ve come a long way. I haven’t seen him for months.’
‘Not visiting time,’ said the nurse, and went away.
Isabel watched the patients through the glass. They don’t know how to take care of him here, she thought. If he were home, there would be a prayer or a candle to burn. He shouldn’t be locked up like this, caged up with old men.
The nurse walked by again and stared. Isabel stared back. I am not going to move, she thought. If I go away, I am not going to have the courage to return. She saw the nurse talking to a second, wiry nurse. She returned to the window. ‘Who do you think you are? We have two nurses for the entire ward. We can’t let visitors in all day.’
‘I will go when I see him.’
The nurse walked off. In the sling, the baby stirred. ‘Don’t cry,’ she whispered, lifting him to her shoulder and stroking his head. ‘Please, be good like you were good before.’ He reached for her ear, and she tilted her head toward him and let her hair pass back and forth over his face. He laughed, and then clung to her again and soon went back to sleep.
She slouched against the wall. She waited an hour, and then the nurse returned to the door. ‘Visiting hours are over for the day. You are making the patients upset. You have to go home.’
‘I don’t have a home,’ she said. ‘I don’t have a place to go to. If you won’t let me in, I’ll stay here until visiting hours come.’
The woman looked behind her. ‘It’s not that I am against you. But there are policies.’
‘He has been missing for over four months,’ said Isabel. ‘I’m not against you, either.’
After another hour, the second nurse appeared with a key. ‘You can come quickly,’ she said, ‘but then you will leave.’
Two men sat on a battered couch, chewing their lips. Another lay on the floor. Isabel’s stomach knotted. She feared she would pass out. She thought she should hand the baby to the nurse, but when she tried to lift him off her shoulder, she was shaking.
At the end of the hallway, the nurse said, ‘He doesn’t like being called Isaias, he wants to be called Arthur.’
In the room was an unfamiliar man. His head was shaved, and his arms were tied to the bed. ‘Arthur,’ said the nurse. ‘See, your sister did come.’ ‘Yes,’ said the man. ‘He’s heavily medicated,’ said the nurse. ‘If not, he screams. He thinks he is the Boy-King himself, that he has come to liberate the world.
‘Is something wrong?’ asked the nurse, but Isabel was crying. ‘I need to go,’ she said through the tears. The man watched her impassively. ‘Goodbye, Arthur,’ she said.
‘I know it’s hard,’ said the nurse, outside. ‘But at least you came. Maybe he is a special person, like he says. In another time, they would have called him a prophet. Back home in the north, where I’m from, we have many men who claim they are prophets or kings, who wander the backlands in great beards, preaching the end of days.’
‘He’s not my brother,’ said Isabel.
‘He has been speaking of his sister. Her name is Mary. That isn’t you?’
‘No,’ said Isabel again, very slowly. ‘Maybe he’s also a brother, but he isn’t mine. Maybe he means that Mary. It’s a mistake, I’m sorry. I am Isabel.’ ‘I see,’ said the nurse. She paused. ‘You must be relieved, then. He’s a very sick person.’
‘Yes,’ said Isabel, and walked out of the room, down the hallway and into an elevator, which carried her to the place where she began. She stood before the old lady at the register. ‘It isn’t my brother,’ she said, and returned to the street, where the mist had given way to rain.
August became September. Hugo began to try pulling himself to standing at the side of the bed. Isabel fashioned him a rattle with stones and a plastic can, and he shook it by swinging his whole body. She found herself singing to him for hours. He was so transfixed by the songs that she wondered if he already knew them. But Manuela rarely sings, she thought. Can you be born remembering a song that your parents heard? She sang about a thrush whose call foresaw rain, and the laughing falcons that brought drought. She sang about traveling south on the parrot perches and about a blackbird whose eyes were gouged to make him sing more beautifully.
With the rain came flying ants, fragile creatures that were easily broken. They flew inside in lace-like clouds, pattering against the walls. They tangled themselves in the curtains and the sheets, shedding legs and wings in gossamer piles. They buzzed over the floor with the trajectories of skipped stones. Isabel spent hours watching them, holding them by their arcing brown abdomens. She found great solace in them, these delicate, carelessly made creatures that let themselves be captured and didn’t resist.
When they died, she swept them into little mound
s, set them on the windowsill and watched the wind caress them into the air.
She didn’t descend again to the city. Her world contracted to the hill.
When the loneliness of the room became too much, she went to Junior’s store. His cousin let her sit and watch the afternoon soaps. Sometimes there was a program where a man granted wishes to poor people who wrote in asking for help. They came on the show, tears streaming down their cheeks as he gave them money for new houses, for private schools, for plane tickets to the north. He spoke to them like they were little children, and she despised him.
She didn’t tell Josiane about the hospital, and when she waved her flag she lowered her cap over her eyes. Josiane didn’t seem to notice any change. One Saturday, as they walked to the bus, she rested her pink fingernails on Isabel’s arm and said, ‘I never told you, but most Saturday nights I go dancing. I’m going tonight. Come. My friends will like you. They call you my backlander.’ She laughed and then stopped. ‘They don’t mean it in a bad way—not that you are ignorant, just that you still have country ways. You should come.’ Isabel shook her head. ‘Just offering,’ said her friend. ‘Sometimes I don’t understand you. Do you even think about what other girls think about? Sometimes I think you will always be so young.’
She returned to washing in the river.
With the rains, the water was high. She found comfort in the rocking, and in the river’s new smell of roots and soil. She asked to help with the other women’s clothes. She watched her hands disappear and twisted the shirts until her forearms ached.
