The wrongness of the idea that beauty is extra is what I’ve been talking about in this whole paragraph you skipped. Carolina is looking at me. What? Don’t complain that I don’t get any character development. This is my fucking “character!”
I have to get Carolina to the Uhuyjhn city. According to her, there’s one up there somewhere. The Uhuyjhn are setting up their own cities on earth alongside ours, she says. But I can’t remember where I parked shitty hatchback. Etsimen is such a small town, just three lights, but I can’t find it. Every block is lined with parked cars. People are sleeping in them, and the windshields all have fog inside. Even when the windows are cracked, the fog stays inside, like a cloud of smoke in the mouth. They look like people sleeping, all splayed out. Carolina wants to interview an Uhuyjhn, or at least a human representative. I don’t really know what she’s talking about, and I think she may be trying to locate content from hallucinations in real life, if I can speak that way without invalidating my whole long diatribe on the topic you may remember. It just happened. Carolina takes off all her clothes in the car and lets the wind blast her whole body, she likes that. I like it too, but it does conjure alarming scenarios. She’s walking ahead of me, naked still. Am I going to do anything? I’d just piss her off. She goes into a bar I can’t see, just a streak of faint light reflecting off an invisible door. I follow her in. The lights are all orange and by them I note everyone is naked but me. As usual, Carolina knew.
A skinny man waves at her from a booth, and she slides into the empty seat. I sit beside her not sure whether I am really part of this, but neither of them seem to care one way or another. My clothes may not make me invisible.
The pair shake hands briefly and Carolina says something I can’t make out because I’m still sitting down and pointed the wrong way. She may have introduced me. The thin man has thin hair and a big nose. He sits with his big hands folded on the table in front of him.
“It’s all arranged,” he says. He’s speaking Spantuguese with a weird accent. “We go from here to a farm about six kilometers outside of town.”
He hands her a little pad of paper and a pen. She draws three characters on it and hands it back to him. He folds the paper into the palm of his left hand and, when we get up to go out, it’s gone. So’s the pad and pen. We go out together and he leads us to one of the parked cars with fogged windows. We get in, the air inside close and stale, and Carolina indicating that I should drive. The thin man gets in the back seat, where a chubby little boy is sleeping, wrapped in a white lace blanket and holding a long piece of striped, hard candy.
Following skinny’s directions, I drive us out of town into the utter blackness of the desert. The dirt road is level and free of rocks, a pale fleshy brown in the headlights. The lights catch on the crumbly borders of the road, which flashes up brightly against the inky black. Now I catch sight of a low ranch building tucked in some landscape folds, with a few big trees and a wooden fence. The house is a slightly paler blue in this darkness, and there are no lights inside. Skinny has been watching behind us, sitting sideways on the back seat and dividing his attention between our rear and the way forward, giving his directions impersonally.
“Turn off the headlights and stop a moment,” he says.
He gets out and, after looking around for a few minutes, he walks, with a kind of strutting, flamingo-like stride, over to the wooden fence, which is parallel to the road here. He squats and lifts the wooden bars, holding them to his chest. With them out of the way, he waves us to come on, through the fence. I nose the car through, stop again, he puts the bars back and comes up to the car without getting in, points up toward the house a few dozen yards away.
“Pull the car around behind the house, out of sight of the road,” he says. “I will let them know we’re here.”
He heads for the house. I get the car around the corner, swerving a little to avoid running over a shovel and then pivoting to avoid the wheelbarrow that pops up in front of me. My eyes are getting used to this blue, arid darkness with its deep indigo shadows. The stars, motionless for a while, suddenly veer to new positions in the sky as we get out of the car. The skinny man is sticking out of a window like a house-centaur monster. He waves to us.
“Don’t go in the front,” he says. “Come through here.”
I offer to help Carolina up, but she kisses my cheek and then climbs nimbly inside. I follow and we’re in a dark, shuttered room, lit only by this one window, with a doorway facing it. There’s a clean linen smell here. Like grandma’s house. Tidy country farmhouse. Cornmeal smell. Skinny shuts the sash and pulls the interior shutters closed, deepening the darkness. The air is fresh, not close, as if we were still outdoors.
“OK, come on,” Skinny says. I can dimly make out his form going through the door, and then Carolina. Skinny shuts the door and then an orange light swings up into view as someone lifts a hidden lamp up from under a counter.
But it’s actually much later, at least, later that week, that I am walking with Carolina at night down another unlit street in dark Etsimen, where all the people are silhouettes and all the lights are weak, and you only get flashes of faces in the occasional streak of light, someone comes out a front door, already backlit but you can see the person behind them, that face in the shrinking gap before the door blends back into the black prop housefront row and the slender figure who emerged is slipping away in flip flops or bare feet, carrying a bucket or a drooping chicken or a bundle of wood. The streets here have no smell at all, it doesn’t make scents get it? We’re out walking, Carolina is high and quiet as usual and she keeps swaying accidentally up against me like she’s ready to drop. The nice thing about a dark city like this is you can see the stars overhead. The sky is so full of stars it’s frightening. In a completely unlit street, you can actually see by starlight alone, just a little. I turn a corner and there’s nothing at the end of the street, it just stops down there, and some contrivance of landscape has levelled us with the horizon so the stars are shining not above but directly ahead of me, as though I were sticking out among them, and if it weren’t for the close embrace of the dark, seamlessly attached fronts lining the street my old boyhood terror of being sucked out into space would have paralyzed me.
We can’t go straight. The streets here keep forking. And they are getting deeper and darker, like deep railway cuts, tighter and tighter and then a white plaza sprawls out all around us, all strung with weak but numerous electric bulbs powered by a few gas generators and market full of webbed bag shoppers. There are fish from somewhere lying splayed out whole on heaps of ice, no crustaceans or shellfish owing to a popular superstition that maintains it’s bad luck to eat them, tubs of pipe tobacco with or without weed with or without tobacco, plastic coolers filled with weird local sorghum beer that everyone seems to drink and nobody seems to like least of all me, manioc, sweet potatoes, plantains, and beans. Beans plus starch, eighty different ways, washed down with weird sorghum lager. Then, man or woman, you smoke a pipe. Everyone here has one. You have to be careful when you light up, too, because everything comes sprayed with discount rum and I don’t know if it’s booze or the kerosene they pep it up with but the fire coming off the initial light will blaze up into your face if you hang over it.
We’re over toward one corner of the market. The buildings all have lights shining up from their bases like flashlight faces, and I’m taking in the people passing by along the fringes of the market. It seems the more ostentatious citizens of Etsimen, rather than going somewhere else, probably because there isn’t anywhere else, stake out the periphery of the market for a ritual promenade in the evenings. These aren’t necessarily the richest citizens, it’s the ones who are the biggest-show offs over on the far side of the square, while here it’s the more down-dressed or somber ones. On the far side, a naked man is singing a patriotic song on top of a simple stage to very loud distortion with some music somewhere mixed in with it. Glistening with oil and perspiration, a group of Vehueqnim women trots into the squ
are not far from us, hooting in unison and waving wands. They will make a circuit of every square tonight, I don’t know why. The people passing us turn to look and I happen to glance their way, mainly because we’re going largely against the flow of foot traffic and local color, and then a few dozen paces later I stop and look back. There’s nothing back there—yes, there, just disappearing around a corner. The same woman—middle aged, small, tweedy, talking animatedly, escorted by two extremely large men who are not friends or colleagues of hers I’m sure. In my mind’s eye I’m seeing what I saw a moment ago when they passed us—that woman’s face.
“I just saw Tripi.”
Carolina stares at me, instantly alert. She doesn’t have to say anything.
We take off after them but they are already well along the street and a crowd is boiling up down there, spilling out of a place with a bonfire out in front to the sound of accordion music and some brass—I think I see a shortcut and take off running down an alley that branches and I keep following the turns angling over to keep to the right, there’s the bonfire ahead of me, good, turn again, to my left is loud rock and roll guitar, I can run here, the alleys are full of junk but they aren’t blocked with people and turn into an alley and they are there, right in front of me, a few dozen yards away. The woman is still talking, gesturing, persuading, cajoling, and one of the men grabs her by the chin and shakes her head to shut him up. I take a step and Carolina’s hand is flat on my chest, holding me back.
“I don’t like that.”
“Don’t do it.”
“That makes me mad.”
“Don’t do it.”
A moment later they turn back out into the street and in the time it takes us to get to there ourselves they are gone.
“Was that her?”
“Yes.”
“You’re sure.”
“Of course.”
“What now?”
“Keep looking.”
Back at the farm, through the window, go into that darkened room with a fresh laundry smell, cornmeal, the lantern swings up like an orange ghost from behind a counter, illuminating a big man in a t-shirt. He has orange skin and dense black eyebrows over small, far-away eyes. His eyes are like craters in the underlight. He steps out from behind the counter with a heavy tread of bare feet, and drags up a wooden chair, putting the lantern down on a piece of furniture, white and gold and full of rounded carvings, like Louis quatorze. Skinny meanwhile is doing something in the next room. I see him with a big enamel kettle and there’s a little whoosh and glow of flame, slosh and gurgle of water in there.
The big man shakes left hands introducing himself.
“Kerman,” he says. He doesn’t meet our eyes even as he gives first Carolina and then my hand a single firm squeeze, sitting heavily down, hands falling into his lap. He seems tired, nodding, breathing deeply through his nose.
“This your farm?” I ask.
Kerman makes a swinging gesture with his hand I don’t know how to interpret. I think he’s under hypnosis, or high.
He rubs his palms on his thighs, and keeps doing it. I’m getting the idea he’s crazy. Every now and then he takes a faster breath in among the even ones.
“You OK?” he asks after being quiet for a long time.
“Yeah,” I say. Carolina is looking at her fingers.
“You going to say anything?” I ask her.
She just glances up at me, then back at her hands.
“You waiting for me to leave?” I ask.
Oscar comes in with a TV tray and sets it down, pulls up a seat, and makes the mate on it. Then he passes it to Carolina, she to me, I gesture at Oscar but he indicates Kerman so I give it to him, Kerman takes some, then Oscar. A few rounds go by in silence. Then Oscar sets the mate down and Kerman draws a long inhale.
He explains that his cousin has a farm way up in the mountains. Last week, this cousin was out checking a stand of cacao trees at the far edges of his property when he noticed some signs of activity near the ruins of another, even more remote farmhouse. He sneaked up and got a better look; watched for a bit and eventually saw two armed men hustling Tripi out of the house and into a van that drove off. He waited there for hours, came back other times, but there was nothing. He even approached the house, but it was deserted. So, he’d probably seen them leaving for good.
Kerman lunges forward as though he were going to headbutt me, but he’s only straightening out to reach into his pocket. He opens his fist and shows us a handful of brown things: cigarillo ends, with tar-stained filters. Carolina takes Kerman’s hand and pulls it toward her, flicks the ends this way and that with her finger.
Kerman puts the ends in a heap by the lamp and straightens again, this time swatting the other pocket. He produces a clear plastic pinch-strip bag with a few strands of grey and dark hair, all the same length, inside.
“May I keep this?” Carolina asks.
Kerman shakes his head and puts his hand back out. She returns it to him.
Back at the farm, we’re brought into a low room, or rather a room made low with many low hanging hangings, and there’s Kerman in a cloud of incense smoke and a homemade shrine built around a bed with someone lying in it, a woman with a bandaged face.
Kerman gestures at her with the lit stick of incense in his hand.
“Tripi.”
So what did happen to her?
*
She went off for a smoke, saw a small child, naked, watching her from the scrub, and went to investigate. She followed the child through the bushes, walking down the slope, carefully placing her feet from stone to stone for a sure purchase, and therefore leaving no recognizeable footprints. Then she fell, straight down, having missed a sheer drop screened by branches. She fell twelve feet, upright, landing square on her feet with a shock, her right ankle buckled and she collapsed. Eventually she found she could stand, her ankle hurt but unbroken; but there was no way back up the slope. Either the face was too sheer, or the shrubbery too dense to climb through. She called out—no reply. Then she began searching along the base of the slope for a way up, heading in the direction of the gas station. But she was turned around. The gas station was actually receding behind her. There was no sign of the child, no path, no building, no place that child could have come from. She remembered the face, the huge eyes, the uncertain mouth, the streak of dirt across the lips and chin, the short, silky hair falling slantwise across the little forehead, the fleshy little hands. She had not imagined the child.
Tripi wandered for three days. When she realized she had set out in the wrong direction, she reversed her tracks, only to realize many hours later that she had not quite reversed them enough. She must have gone off on a tangent somehow, which hours of walking widened into a serious deviation. The area is folded in shallow canyons, trackless and uniformly covered in dense, monotonous brush. Knowing which way was east didn’t do her much good; she couldn’t manage to get up the slopes to a ridge line, being rebuffed at each attempt until her clothes were quilled with thorns and the broken ends of sharp twigs. She couldn’t make much headway along the valley bottoms either, where the foliage was thickest. Her best way was slightly above the bottom, just a bit up the slope, walking sideways along those places where the topsoil falls away from exposed puzzle rock that has looks solid but will often tumble apart in geometric sections when seized with the hand. She kept going for over eighteen hours before finally allowing herself to drop on her calves, exhausted, covered in dust, sore, thirsty. She toppled over without clearly realizing it and slept, woke up sweating in the full light of the sun, cramped, parched, hungry.
The path gave her a new rush of energy. She found it only about twenty minutes after she’d managed to throw off her torpor—an ash-white scar slicing through sullen desert scrub. She followed until it died two hours later in the middle of a broad, flat, empty expanse of brush. The path sieved apart into dozens of dwindling pathlets and was gone. No buildings, no remnants, just the flat land around her, the mountains in the
middle distance and the hills on this side. There was nothing else to do. Numbly, Tripi turned to retrace her steps along the path. All the way back she kept her eyes riveted on the path, as if it might jump out from under her if she took her eyes from it, absently counting the dim impressions of her footprints, reclaiming them like so many rejected offerings, one by one. When it began to rain, she counted it the one barb of bad luck she’d managed to miss, because she’d made it back to the place where she’d first encountered the trail before the rain could efface her tracks. The rain was not heavy, but it persisted. It soaked into her very gradually, but she welcomed its coolness at first. It didn’t really slake her thirst, it wasn’t heavy enough for that, but drawing the air through her open mouth helped a little. The dust was rinsing away, and in time she was able to wring some water out of her blouse to drink.
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