Cars on Fire

by Mónica Ramón Ríos

  I consider leaving. Then Lish mentions DeLillo, one name in a long list of authors, and I’m intrigued by the coincidence. All are friends of his, he explains. He prattles on about his power over dead writers. I finally decide to take a photo of the object. But he’s offended by the black square I hold in front of my face and he curses me. The members of the audience are uncomfortable, but he won’t cede the floor, and he eventually suggests that they ask him questions. No one dares to speak. One woman looks down at the glass of wine she’s been holding for the past thirty or forty minutes. She doesn’t know if she should or can raise the glass to her lips, her body frozen in an endless yes. The object has taken over the audience. Suddenly, we all shift into impatience, we all want the launch to be over. We all feel a little bit of contempt, a little bit of pity for the object.

  He never leaves his house, he says then. He’s walked the two blocks here as an exception. He usually just looks out his window uncomprehendingly as the world changes down below. All that motion, all those people, all those colors, he rasps. Coughing a time or two, he decides to stop talking. No one buys his book.

  All of us are outside the bookstore. Inside is a city that no longer exists. Outside, we can breathe. Inside is anxiety, the fear of a tyrannical white man who watches with horror and rage as the world transforms around him, as if it were the code to some indecipherable science. Outside, space has twisted into folds, a spiral where our very breathing grants it those multiple universes. The city fades away with every block: the city of shortage, poverty, excess, the centripetal force of fantasy, the void where bombs and fish rain down.

  I take the bus home instead of the subway so I can feel the air and the light. Two hours to my apartment in Crown Heights. I hold a rare English-language translation of The Night of Tlatelolco, photocopied and unbound. As the bus moves east and down below the island of Manhattan, leaving it behind, the city shows its tips, reveals its edges, the colors change, it teems with objects that puncture cameras. The movie theaters fill with local audiences speaking languages that smudge and mix together, identities grow liquid and numerous. The streets throng and people follow other logics to understand that the New York we’re all leaving behind is not the object anymore.

  Invocation

  For J and C

  The walls in the first-floor room, where I’ve been led by the woman down a long hallway, are soundproofed with egg cartons, and the single double-paned window looks out onto a large garden with a little table in the sun. Before the writer stands and holds out her cold, gnarled hand—her right is stained with dark greenish ink—I hear how silently she writes. The only noise is a faint, mantric sound emerging from a cheap little speaker on a corner of the desk. The first thing she does, the woman who’s led me there, is to open the window, letting the wind and the rustle of new leaves seep in. The two women who live in the house exchange mistrustful glances. The writer addresses me in a heavy accent, inviting me to sit in a small armchair beside the window, facing a table set with two cups of tea. She rejects the other woman’s every offer of a drink, although, once we’re alone, she pours herself a cup of what I myself have been served. I have to give her a couple pats on the back after her first sip. She gestures almost violently for me to stop.

  I turn on the voice recorder and repeat my endlessly rehearsed introduction about why I’m conducting this interview, careful never to mention our past association. She asks me to remind her where it’s going to be published and she raises an eyebrow at my answer. I carry on for a bit, trying to decipher whether she’s understood or simply stopped listening altogether. And so I interrupt myself to ask her why she’s soundproofed the walls. I let her speak, shifting my pencil from one hand to the other. This way I can look at her calmly and for a long time. I’m struck by her masculine hands, their short nails, dry skin, no rings. She hasn’t aged much. It’s so strange that she doesn’t remember me. I’ve heard her vision has started to fail. She couldn’t take her eyes off me when we met. The tremors that crept through our bones and lower bellies whenever we ran into each other—it was a joy, and a kind of curse, this constant feeling-outside-of-ourselves in the other’s presence. We’d avoid each other, but everyone else could tell what was going on.

  Her nearness was like an illness in me.

  I remember reading The Sorrows of Young Werther as a teenager, my face tight with derision. As if killing yourself over a heartbreak were something alien, a thing of the past. More than a decade after shedding my immaturity, my body unexpectedly experienced childish feelings—and for someone I never would have admired beyond a stirring of murderous resentment.

  In the first months I knew you, I felt something like the pain Werther felt for Charlotte: it made me scorn and desire you at the same time. My vulnerability intensified because I was broke, really trapped in a state of total precariousness despite the books I’d published and the occasional award I’d won for my political writing. I thought that you, an immigrant like myself, would understand what it meant to take on that kind of job, so far removed from my area of expertise. But you harbored unresolved oe-dipal feelings that eventually surfaced between us. They appeared like an egg between my thighs, blossomed forth from my navel, sprouted like the head of a ram on the other’s neck. Your childlike sadism, your utter need to see your desires fulfilled, materialized with me, an insect on my tail, an ache in my back. There were things I was unwilling to do, particularly after I’d finished the philosophy book that would bring me such good fortune a few years later. But you needed something else—entertainment, perhaps. What else could you want in that idyllic, painless present you bore like a burden? You saw me as a lost mother of sorts, someone you could use to enact all your sadistic impulses. The feeling—hidden deep inside you, though it asserted itself intensely—that women, and the woman who inhabited you, were contemptible. In me, you could embody all your hatred of yourself.

  Once, I remember, when I’d come to the theater, you asked me to watch the rehearsal of a scene I wasn’t in. The actors were personifying a drama of submission you’d decided to light obliquely with a bluish glow that granted the scene a kind of crushing coldness. It ended in total silence, and when the actors were done, you gave me a tender smile, handing me your jacket with a series of incoherent instructions, as if you were rehearsing a scene with me, too. I remember that I walked out of the rehearsal room, and before I shut the door behind me, I tossed the jacket into a box that was designated for discarded wardrobe items. A little later, sitting in front of the mirror to review my lines, I saw you reappear with the jacket hung over your shoulders, not saying a word.

  Looking at the stage from up above, I see the ground shift like water, see characters whose fluidity addresses the two of us, reflects us. The lights go out, and as the actors recover their breath, I see your face, transforming into a body that doesn’t seem like mine. Liquid trickles out from between those legs.

  Over the next few days, during rehearsal, you reappear wherever you aren’t, impeding my diction. Sometimes you look me in the eye. Sometimes your stark profile tilts toward me. Other days, when we run into each other in the halls, I see a light emanating from your chest, my vision blurs, and I experience your footsteps as a blow to my stomach that forces me onto my knees before you. Feeling the tips of my breasts go firm, my voice falters.

  In rehearsals, I no longer understand what the actors are saying or where the banal storyline is headed: a plot you’ve put together by dint of massive budgets and luxurious wardrobes brimming with costumes that must cost as much as the foreign actress’s salary. Images pass before my eyes as on a screen, or like the act of hypnosis. Any nearby body could feel the force of it.

  The first dream came to me in the form of a vampire, reading at a table in a library. My hands held some loose papers and I was annotating them. In the dream, I couldn’t manage to stay awake. Unfolded in this way, I could see, from the other end of the room, my lashes fluttering shut with fatigue, my head dropping backward toward the back of
the chair, a set of teeth piercing my neck. When I woke up, two old men with books in their hands were staring at me, each in his respective corridor.

  The second dream occurred at the very midpoint between wake-fulness and sleep. With my eyes closed, I’d see your profile appear against a dark, wild landscape, your red locks tumbling down your slender neck and the stiff cloth of your white shirt that marked the contours of your body. Your face would suddenly turn to meet mine, staring deep into me. The background would disappear, and with the light that shone forth from your chest, you caught my gaze like a rabbit in the woods at night. Your expression, a perverse fawn, was the light bulb. The sets were varied: a hotel room, a location inspired by countless films. An elevator, like the one you described in your novel. Your house, which I recognized from descriptions alone. The street or any other space with lighting that resembled the kind you’d sketched out in the stairway scene we were rehearsing at the time. You’d approach me open-palmed and I’d clasp your neck before our bodies touched. You wouldn’t stop and my hands would grip harder and harder. With your veins about to rupture, you’d softly place a hand on my cheek, forcing yourself to look at me with those dead-animal eyes. Your lips would draw closer, slowly, and you’d back me up against the wall, and you’d slip anything into me, your fingers, your tongue, a genital prosthesis, as my legs rose up and my hands scraped at the wall behind me. There would be no conversation afterward, and I’d exit stage left.

  The third dream was made of images that would overtake me while, sitting at your desk, I reviewed rehearsal schedules and budgets that blistered my fingers with resentment. I’d dream you were ill, on the verge of death, or dead by my own hand, at the same time as I remained your only salvation, both emotional and physical. I’d dream of you with sores on your arms, indifferent to heat and cold, requiring my every attention. And I’d respond by spitting in your face. Sometimes you’d make requests of me and I’d threaten to hit you until you bled. I’d urinate onto that radiant chest with which you’d introduced yourself to me, and if you were lucky, I’d insert a prosthesis into your anus like a punishment.

  You decided to leave for a while to visit your family—and, I suspected, to visit one of your lovers in Paris. My feet didn’t know where to rest during your absence. When I’d try to focus on them, the ground would go transparent and I could see the five floors below me, could imagine plummeting down into the abyss, the flocks of mourning doves rising up without me. I’d barely manage to make out those hands I’d never touched from among their wings, hands that now looked entirely ordinary. When I became myself again, I found messages unanswered. The coldness of your replies pierced me like a knife, my hands bound to your blade. My chest broke out in rashes that resembled the outline of your fingers pressed into me. My texts grew lax, my thinking vague. My notebooks filled with errors: they were incoherent sketches if I didn’t add any of your name’s secret letters and the rhythms I used to interpret the days when we recognized each other.

  During the month you were gone, I put away my pencil for good. I couldn’t sleep at night and food felt like an excess unless I forced it down with a glass of wine or hard liquor. All the cigarettes made me cough. The gauntness of my cheekbones, legs, and hips became a source of concern to some. But to others, my livid lips, the dark, low circles ringing my weepy eyes, my stammering throat, the cowed hunch of my back, my hips warped as if by a sprain—they were a magnet now.

  I didn’t go home for a month. I’d leave the bedrooms of my occasional lovers in their husbands’ pants, socks, and boxers. I’d forget my bras under their pillows. In the evenings, I’d touch young women’s faces with the same gestures I wanted you to use in touching mine. I’d undress them as I wanted you to undress me. I rehearsed without my prior passion, whiling away the hours in books, rediscovering the mark my pencil could make. I’d go to opening nights with colleagues to whom I’d profess and be professed undying love. I found solace in one. His straight hair, his dark, deep eyes called out for my care. His drastic thinness, his flat chest, his voice like a purring in my ears. I kissed a man for the first time while dressed as a man. That night, we called each other by all sorts of names as our lips met softly and our clothes jumbled together in embraces that dropped to the ground. We closed our eyes. I was met with the sight of your face in profile, stark like his face, your long, slightly clumsy fingers in his fingers. The desire that manifested in him was your desire. After that night when I spoke your name for the first time, I went home and took off the clothes that didn’t belong to me. I pulled on my skirt and my slender, feminine shoes, the bras that exaggerated my cleavage.

  You turned around and the first thing you noticed was the fullness of my breasts, my semi-sheer stockings, the shoes that made me stumble down the halls. You’d close your legs. When I’d approach you, you’d hide behind the walls. You’d avoid speaking to me altogether so that I wouldn’t notice your discomfort. The day I returned from my travels, I told you I’d missed you. I couldn’t see your backlit face. You came closer and I could see that your chest was now flat and you had a package of meat between your legs. Your unshaven face, the masculine dryness of your skin. I felt a bit repulsed when you looked me up and down from that body of yours. I repeated the sentence, addressing you with the male pronoun. I was suddenly shot through with a sense of tenderness toward you, like what one might feel for a child.

  Now that I was a woman and you were a man, we could comfortably inhabit the stereotype. I could say, then, that our relationship unfolded amid the conventions of a melodrama. It was, as they say, love at first sight, but complications quickly ensued: I was an avowed feminist and you were a happily married member of the bourgeoisie who was embarking on the necessary paperwork to adopt a child with your fourth wife, a well-regarded doctor I met in the emergency room when I fell down the stairs at the theater. As I’d maintained lesbian proclivities in spite of my femme presentation and she was festering with desire for the baby that would come from the same third-world country as I, we forged a bond triangulated by the man you now were. Over subsequent visits to her office, that maternal affection evolved into a confusing love. With you, by contrast, I became a submissive woman, the transformation exacerbated by the cast on my leg, my improbably high heels, the dark wooden cane the doctor had lent me, and the glasses, my body brimming with sharp prostheses. The tension intensified between us. While you desired to destroy me by consummating the act of love, I kissed your wife in the remedy-room, reaching out my hand for syringes pumped with opiates that would eventually fill my dreams with sexualized depictions of your fourth wife’s toned legs. I opened her white smock, lifted her skirt, and slipped my tongue between her shaven luxuriances of flesh. I breathed in the scent you breathed. I tasted the same tastes you’d grown accustomed to tasting for the past four years. I’d move her hips with my hands, I’d touch her navel, I’d feel her hard nipples. I seized the golden curls that tumbled over her shoulders and left her neck exposed, biting it violently, feeling her as you’d felt her before.

  Later, I came to you with the taste of her still on my lips, on my hands, between my legs. Maybe you recognized it. Open with incredulity, your mouth revealed to me that I took pleasure in causing you pain and in never allowing your hands to touch my knees, lower my stockings, gently undo the side clasp on my skirt, insert first your fingers into me and then your brand-new penis, penetrating my unshaven flesh. Never letting you pull up my red skirt with your hands or mouth, never letting you undo my leather bra and suck at my breasts until you’d almost swallowed them, never letting you move your body until my legs were completely open as you seized my tongue with your mouth, never letting your saliva invade my mouth or your teeth bite my neck. Never permitting my legs to brush against your newly stitched balls or my liquids to drip onto your chino pants. I found more pleasure in denying you such things, particularly the one physical act you most wanted to perform, conscious as you were of your new body. I wouldn’t admit, then, that you denied my body’s effect
on your pen and your intellect, over your spirit and how it shaped materiality. I let you breathe, on me, the scent you found in your bed every night, bored by then of such doctoral discipline. Withholding something from you when you wanted it was equivalent to cutting off your penis, murdering you, and thus transforming you back into a woman and into the object of my affection.

  In the dressing room, I was struck by the force gathering in the melodrama, the very same power that, on that opening night, made you approach me with the intent to snatch my fragility away. I walked out onto the stage, barely remembering the words I’d so exhaustively rehearsed that they’d become a part of me, the letters imprinted onto the folds of my body. I left the stage, feeling as if I were about to burst, containing the intensity of my emotion through deep breaths that quickly proved useless as the marks emerged, evidence of the blows that my fellow actors had dealt me onstage, hurling me to the ground. Facing the mirror, I saw my face altered by tears and the blood pooling in my cheek. One of the actors apologized, holding out an ice pack to me. I let him place it gently against my cheek and we looked into each other’s eyes, though whether we did so as actors or characters, we no longer knew. He stroked my legs, which were dappled with wounds from my fall onto the glass, my ankle re-swelling without its cast. Applause sounded in the background. My scene partner, professional, cooled of onstage emotion, eager for recognition, reached out his hand to me and we walked back out to face the audience. Just before we reemerged onstage, I saw the trails of blood I’d left on the floor, the stains you’d tread across in black overshoes like a European hiker. Amid the applause, my feelings dispersed and I inhabited that other place, receiving in my hands your hands and those of my colleague stretching in his dancer’s body.