Carry Me Like Water

by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

  “Shhhhh—don’t talk. Just don’t talk. I’ve got to take you to a hospital.”

  “The river was so clear and blue—bluer than your eyes, Jacob, I could even see the fish and they were gold. And I was thirsty and the desert was on fire. And you were calling me but I couldn’t go back so I just jumped.”

  “It was just a dream.”

  “I wish you believed in dreams.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Do you remember the time you left me?”

  “Shhh—we don’t have to talk about that anymore.”

  “I waited and waited, and then I thought you’d never come back. I thought I’d never see you again. I wanted to die, did I tell you?”

  “But I came back.”

  “Are you glad?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m tired, Jacob.”

  “Don’t talk. You don’t have to talk.”

  “I’m tried.” Joaquin looked up at his lover. “You seem so far, Jake. Are you going away?”

  “I have to get you to a doctor.”

  “Can’t I just sleep here?”

  Jacob kept rocking him in his arms. “Shhhh. Shhhh. I’ll carry you.”

  “Like water?”

  “What?”

  “Like a river carries water.”

  “Yes—just like that.”

  “How serious is it, Tom?” He had long ceased calling his and Joaquin’s doctor by his title. Tom seemed too young to be a doctor though he’d been one for twenty years, and Jake wondered how it was that a man who worked so many hours managed to look so rested and relaxed. He wanted to like him as he stood in the hallway of the hospital, not that he hated him anymore, just couldn’t like him. “It was only a kiss, Jake—a very smalt one.” “Did you—” “Look, we’re friends, and have never been more than that, and will never be more.” “I don’t believe you.” “That’s because you don’t know how to have friends.” “What the fuck does that mean, J?” “Look, we’re just friends.” “He had his arm around you.” “I’m only going to say this one more time, gringo, Tom and I are friends. You don’t get to pick my friends and I don’t get to pick yours.” He looked at the way Tom was processing his simple question—he hated that about him sometimes—the way he was too careful, the way his sincerity took up all the space in the room. “How serious, Tom?”

  “Well, it’s serious.”

  “A vague answer to a vague question. Doctor.” He combed his hair with his fingers, then pulled at the ends of his hair.

  “Pulling your hair out, huh, Jake?”

  “Why’d I have to pick a gay doctor with a sense of humor?”

  “Good taste.”

  The doctor nodded. “You want to have a cup of coffee instead of standing here in a hospital hallway in the middle of the night?”

  “Nothing’s open.”

  “We can get some in the lounge. It’s a friendly place—always open, always coffee. They’re nice to visitors on this ward—didn’t you know?”

  “Yeah, I remember. The last time Joaquin got sick, they were redoing it—making it more user-friendly.”

  “It isn’t an instrument.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “It’s just a room with a few couches. Let’s have some coffee.”

  “I don’t want to leave him.”

  “He’ll be OK.”

  “What if he dies?”

  “Not tonight.”

  “How the hell do you know?”

  “I know.” Tom walked toward the lounge. Jacob followed him down the hall toward the lounge near the nurses station, Jake noticed his walk—tight, I wonder what Joaquin ever saw in him? Too asexual. The hallway was quiet, and it seemed the whole world had gone away and left him with this man, this doctor. The lounge was dim. The carpet was soft and thick and Jake felt his feet sink into the fabric as if he was walking on mud. He read the plaque on the wall that read: IN MEMORIAM: NORMAN CAMPBELL ROBERTSON. There were magazines neatly arranged on a glass table and a bookshelf full of books. There was a refrigerator and a drip coffeemaker on a shelf next to a small sink. He stared at the plaque and sat down on a beige-and-turquoise couch that was comfortable enough to be in somebody’s living room. “Very Santa Fe,” he mumbled, then shook his head.

  “Huh? Did you say something?”

  “No, I was just making remarks about the decor.”

  Tom handed him a mug of coffee and sat on an overstuffed chair opposite the couch. “Where were we?”

  “I asked if it was serious and you gave me the kind of answer they teach you in medical school.”

  Tom smiled, then sipped from his coffee.

  “Nice set of teeth, Doc. I bet your parents paid a bundle for those.”

  “As a matter of fact I was born with this set of choppers. Are you flirting with me?”

  “No. I’m not interested in white boys.”

  Tom laughed and shook his head.

  They sat in the quiet for a long time, the sound of footsteps moving in the background like calm waves in an ocean. Jake stared at Tom for a while as if he were about to ask him something, but said nothing. Tom remembered the first time Jake had walked into his office. “Just good old-fashioned gonorrhea. Are you allergic to penicillin?” “Nope.” “Talkative, are you?” “Didn’t come here to talk.” “I suppose you didn’t come here to talk about your sexual practices either?” “What’s that mean?” “It means you should be careful.” “I know about sexually transmitted diseases.” “Firsthand, I’d say.” Tom had hated him then, hated him for his don’t-give-a-shit demeanor, his superior sense of masculinity, the complete look of disdain he wore on his face as if it were a medal won in a war. He’d been this man’s doctor for seventeen years, and he felt no nearer to knowing him as he sat there than he had the first time he’d walked into his office. He remembered the first time he’d met Joaquin, how they had connected instantly, how Jake had resented their friendship from the moment it began. “I want your paws off my boyfriend, Tom.” Some people were not meant to be friends, he thought, and yet he had never stopped trying. He wanted to break the silence, but it was as hard as the ice of his Minnesota childhood. “How’s the coffee?”

  “It sucks.”

  The silence returned like the San Francisco fog. “It’s OK to be afraid,” he said finally.

  “Thanks for your permission.”

  “It’s OK to be afraid,” he repeated, “but it’s not OK to be an asshole.”

  Jake smiled. “I deserved that one.”

  Again, they sat in the quiet. A patient down the hall was moaning, Jake shivered. “Why are we sitting here?”

  “We’re sitting here because your lover has Pneumocystis carinii, and I happen to be your doctor and your friend.”

  “Joaquin’s friend,” Jake corrected.

  Tom nodded. “Sorry. You know, it’s a good thing I like you, Jake. Otherwise, I’d kick your ass from here to L.A.”

  Jacob laughed. “That’ll be the day.” He shook his head as if his hair was wet and he was attempting to dry it. He leaned back and looked up at the ceiling. “I don’t think you do like me, Tom.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.” Jake sipped on his coffee. “This is really bad stuff.” He looked at Tom. “How can you do this for a living?”

  “I was bom to it, I guess.”

  “I’d hate it.”

  “That’s because you’d have to be nice to people. You’d have to touch them.”

  “You know what your problem is, Tom? You think life is a good thing.”

  “It is a good thing.”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s not as disgusting as all that, Jake.”

  “Well, you and Rick are a pair, aren’t you?”

  “Don’t start in on Rick, Jake. He’s a decent man.”

  “Meaning he’s a politically correct faggot.”

  Tom kept himself from wincing. He kept his voice steady without hiding his disgust at Jake’s remark. “You have an interesting way
of thinking about things, you know that, Jake? You’re so fucking insulting sometimes.”

  “Are we taking off the gloves now that Joaquin’s not here to play referee for us?”

  “How come life’s a boxing match for you?”

  “I had a psychology class in college, too, Tom.”

  “Did you pass?”

  Jacob stood up from the couch and glared at the doctor. “That’s it—I’m outta here.”

  “Finish your coffee.” Tom said calmly. “I don’t want to fight. I’ll change the subject. It’s too late to be arguing with you, Jake. And it’s useless.”

  “For both of us.” Jake sat back down.

  “Yeah, for both of us. Look, go home and get some rest. You look like hell.”

  “To you too, Doc.”

  Tom got up and put his mug in the sink. “I’ll come by sometime before noon and check in on Joaquin. I need to check his vision. You’ll be around?”

  Jake nodded.

  “Get some sleep, Jacob.”

  “Tom?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Am I gonna lose him this time?”

  Tom took his time with Jake’s question “I don’t know. Maybe we should …” He paused. “We should be ready for anything.”

  There was quiet again between them, but the sadness over Joaquin was shared, and so, for a moment, they did not feet so far away from each other.

  Pneumocystis carinii, Pneumocystis carinii. Jacob kept repeating the Latin words like a prayer at matins. He spelled it out in ink over the headlines of the morning newspapers. He thought of the conversation he’d had the night before with Tom. He was a good doctor—the best—and he trusted him completely. Mister Clean, Mister Responsible, Mr. Spokesman for Safe Sex, good diets, and holistic health. If he had been bom straight, he would have been unbearable—too many virtues for Jake’s taste, too much of a social conscience in that morally superior Protestant way he had. “If I hear Dr. Gay Community Awareness say ‘the common good’ one more time tonight, I’m going to stuff my fist down his throat.” He remembered saying that to Joaquin at a party one night. “How come you think life is a boxing match?” He looked out the window—the sky seemed as dark to him as Joaquin’s black hair. He sipped on his morning coffee. He picked up the phone and called his office. He recognized Alice’s raspy voice. “I won’t be in till this afternoon.”

  “Are you OK?”

  “Yeah. It’s J. He’s in the hospital again.”

  “Take the whole day—we can handle it. You got some time coming—take as much as you need. The ads keep coming in by themselves. The Chronicle will survive—just make sure you do the same.”

  “Thanks, Alice.”

  “Give J my love.”

  “Sure thing.”

  “And eat well, Jacob.”

  “Don’t you have enough sons?”

  She laughed as she hung up the phone. At least she has a heart. he thought. Thirty years of selling ads for the Chronicle and she still had a heart. Amazing. “I’d have killed somebody by now.”

  He got up from the kitchen table, pulled on his bathrobe, and stared at a blue patch of sky that was somehow visible through the fog. He watched as it disappeared. For some reason the sky reminded him of the summer he’d spent in Seattle. He didn’t even remember how’d he’d gotten there—he’d just found himself in that strange and lonely land of rain, nineteen years old with no money and no place to go and no plan and no one to belong to—with no future and a past that only made him want to throw himself or somebody—anybody against a wall until all the bones that held the body together broke and cracked. Didn’t somebody have to pay for what had happened to him? “I should have killed them.” Even now, more than twenty years after he’d left his parents’ house, he felt intimate and comfortable with that hate. “I should have killed them.”

  He remembered himself in Seattle that summer. As he had walked along the shore of Lake Washington, he remembered seeing a heron gliding over the water, its wings flapping, then spreading, the labor of its slow-moving wings dwarfing the sky. He remembered how it had flown up, up almost as if the white and lonely bird knew he was there and needed reminding that flight and movement and grace were possible in the physical world despite the limiting pull of gravity. For a reason he did not understand at the time, he felt the heron was freeing him, and that flight, common occurrence that it was, was anything but common. That flight was everything there was in the world, and everything seemed to depend upon the grace of that flight. He urged it to fly on, to fly as if the beating of its wings would save the world, would save him from all the cruelties that had been and were yet to be. He remembered the clarity of his voice as he shouted at the great white heron: “Fly, fly!” He had yelled and yelled until he had almost gone hoarse. He was so mesmerized by the flight that he had lost control of his voice, of his mind, of his body. It occurred to him that he had never bothered to watch birds in flight; he had been oblivious to them because nothing else had existed except his pain. He had not felt himself to be a part of the world, of the earth. He was a permanent and unnatural foreigner, and there could be no possible home for him. But he knew he would keep what he had just seen, he would put the scene in his brain as if it were a pocket where he could store a lucky penny.

  Many years later, he had dreamed the flight of the heron and it had been so real that he expected to find himself at that same lake when he woke. Joaquin had asked him about his dream. “You were yelling, ‘Fly, fly!’” “I don’t remember,” he’d said. He’d lied and had not felt bad about the lie. There were certain things that were only his and not even Joaquin could have them. He looked out the window at the slowly moving fog and thought of that nineteen-year-old boy wandering, lost. He was moved by the image of that wounded boy, and wondered how that boy had managed to survive the cities he had lived in, had managed to survive his own rages, his own flirtations with destruction. He loved that boy, now, loved him for what he had survived. On the way to the hospital, Jake wondered if it wasn’t time to start thinking about letting go of Joaquin. “But how will I live without his eyes, his hands, his voice?” He saw a convenience store, found a parking spot, then ran in and bought a pack of cigarettes. He sat on the hood of his car surrounded by the gray morning, and smoked a cigarette. He held the smoke in his lungs as if it were Joaquin.

  6

  ALL MUNDO REMEMBERED of his stabbing was the face of the sonofabitch who stuck a knife in him. He remembered thinking “I’ll find you, I’ll find you.” He couldn’t recall how the fight started, why it started, who had started it. He remembered the stench of rotting tomatoes as he fell into another world. He remembered thinking that Rosie would come and save him. He smelled her sweat as he fell into a deep sleep, her smell overpowering the smell of rot around him. When he woke, he half-expected her to be at his side—there, beside him again. She was not there—she had not come. As he slept in Diego’s apartment, a part of him reached for the world of the dead. No longer having a sense of direction, he was lost, unaware of where he was. He stretched out on Diego’s bed, shaking and mumbling to himself. He felt tired. He wanted to let go. He wanted to sleep forever, go to a place where there was no more fighting, no more pain. Maybe Rosie would be waiting for him in that place. He would make love to her there and she would hold him until there was nothing but peace.

  Diego watched the young man lying on his bed but couldn’t make out anything he was mumbling. He saw his lips move occasionally and his attempts at kicking off the blankets. Maybe he wasn’t saying anything, Diego thought, maybe he was just moaning from the pain. He had stitches over his left eye and a bruise on his cheekbone. He had bandages on his side where they’d stuck him with a knife. The nurse had promised to come by if they needed her, “He was lucky,” she said, “the knife missed his vital organs. He’ll live long enough to gel himself into another fight.”

  Saturday night Diego slept on some blankets on the floor. Sunday, Mundo slept all day. Sunday night, his new roommate seemed on
the verge of waking up. He kept opening and closing his eyes, Diego sat at his desk wondering whether or not he was going to be all right. He should have woken up by now, he thought. Maybe he should get Mr, Arteago to call the nurse for him.

  Diego looked up and noticed Mundo staring at him.

  Mundo did not recognize the man in the room with him. The thought occurred to him that maybe he had died and the man standing in front of him was God. He shook his head, his vision returning clearly. He laughed to himself. How could that man be God? In the first place, Mundo was certain he would never make it to heaven. In the second place, the man standing before him looked like a Chicano. God, a Chicano? He wanted to laugh at his own thoughts. His mother had given him too much religion as a little boy—it had made his head soft. He stared at the man who was looking at him curiously. “Where the fuck am I?” he asked.

  Diego stared at him and started to write an answer on his pad.

  “How come you don’t answer—answer me, godamnit!”

  Diego put down his pad and took out a large sheet of paper.

  “Calm down, you’re all right. I’m deaf so try not to speak so fast so I can read your lips. And save your voice—it won’t help if you yell.”

  “Oh shit!” Mundo said. “I died and got stuck with a goddamned deaf man as my roommate.” He lifted himself from where he was lying and sat up on the bed. He winced. He placed his feet on the floor and made circles with them.

  Diego looked at him blankly. “If you don’t look at me, then I won’t be able to answer you.” He lifted up the paper and showed it to him.

  Mundo tried to laugh. “I’ll be goddamned.” He began laughing. trying to hold back. “I hate to fuckin’ read, man. I don’t even fuckin’ read the National Enquirer.”

  Diego nodded. “If you don’t read it, how do you know it exists?”

  “My old lady reads it—it’s the only thing she likes to read. You ever read it?”

  “No,” Diego wrote. “I like real newspapers.”

  Mundo saw a copy of the El Paso Times sitting on the floor. “You call that real?”

  Diego shrugged his shoulders. “It’s the best we got in this city.”