Floating Like the Dead

by Yasuko Thanh

  The shared expectation is that whoever speaks first will lose something.

  “I’m thinking of buying land here,” he says finally, but in German. “By the tortilleria, I teach in Puebla, but I love the ocean, the hummingbirds. It will be my small statement of patriotism to the coast.”

  That he spoke first does not diminish the braggadocio of his words. She’s familiar with this game some travellers like to play, of switching from one language to another like a merchant parading his wares. She responds in German, telling him she has also taught, some English, some French, relishing how his surprise makes his eyes twinkle. She likes who she is in German: analytical and specific.

  They speak about home, the complexity of the urban Seattle metropolis he has abandoned in favour of the simplicity of Mexican sand and sky.

  “Home for me isn’t a place,” she says. It’s something she’s building, she tells him, piecework, in her heart. A collection of all the things she’s seen and done and smelled and tasted. “And when I’ve travelled widely enough, wherever I end up, then I’ll have found my home.” She switches to English, details her travels over the years, describing her wanderlust.

  “Let’s walk,” he says, taking her by the hand and leading her out of the restaurant.

  They stroll under a canopy of white stars that look as though they are trapped in the black sky.

  “Maybe home is just a word for what you’re looking for,” he says. And she likes the feel of his fingers clamped around her wrist.

  His cabaña lies hidden deep in the palms. He bends over and opens the padlock on his door with a key he wears around his neck.

  He strokes her arms as if she is a doll while the palm fronds outside whisper against the tin roof.

  “Maybe we don’t know what we’re looking for,” she murmurs. “Or maybe some of us are never happy in one place for long. We discover that all the things we want don’t come together in one place, and so we decide it’s better to keep on searching.”

  “Maybe some of us want too much.”

  He lays her on the bed. From the drawer he pulls five long scarves and ties her up.

  She is not allowed to touch him.

  The woollen blanket scratches her writhing back. She screams, but nothing escapes the gag in her mouth. Sightlessly, she arches her body, suffocating.

  The man laughs and mumbles to himself in a language she doesn’t understand, its sibilance and harsh vowels catching in the back of his throat, like fish bones; she imagines him choking on them. She bites at the scarves, chafes her back raw.

  After he unties her, she flees like a rabid animal, stumbling into tree trunks, wiping excrement from her eyes first with her hands, then with her shirt. Eventually, she finds herself in front of the police station, unsure of how she got to this building by the naval base. Then she’s standing at the counter, with no recollection of having crossed the threshold. While she gives her statement, the station’s fluorescent lights shine down on her like a cold unwanted spotlight. The officers at the counter watch her skeptically, as if she is auditioning for a role for which she is as ill-suited as she is unprepared.

  A man with a chipped front tooth writes down her name. “You went with this man to his cabaña?”

  “Yes.”

  “You let him tie you to the bed?”

  “Yes.”

  He takes the form with him and walks across the room, stopping at a desk where his superior raises his eyebrows and then turns to stare at her.

  She must have been out of her mind to come here. She’s no longer the kind of person who can go to the police to report a crime, just as she’s no longer the kind of person who might one day work in an orphanage in Chiapas. Suddenly she cares only about the stench that clings to her clothing, the sidelong glances from the people crammed on the wooden bench, waiting.

  She takes a deep breath and walks out of the police station. She runs along the road to the beach, where she lets the hard waves pummel her, filling her with water as if she were a shell. She wants the ocean salt to sting her lips, her eyes to burn when she opens them. But the waves won’t wash her clean; she will continue hunting for men with sweeping arms, possessing laughs, losing herself in a desire that has nothing to do with any of them.

  She doesn’t know for how long she swims – a minute, an hour – before she pulls herself out of the ocean and goes to a nearby taco stand, because she can’t imagine going home to face Chinchu.

  It’s almost dawn. She sits, dripping wet, eating pozole while a drunken chilango leans unsteadily against his sweating beer, leering at her soaking wet sarong. His eyes are cold, and vacant, and sad, like the teacher’s. She eats her bowl of corn soup and ignores his eyes, remembering what Juana had told her when she was last in the mountains, as they walked past the river where Juana took the goats to drink.

  “You have to be careful. Just last week they found a man’s body, floating here.”

  She asked whose body, why he was killed.

  “He was from the next village. He wanted to marry a girl, but her brothers wouldn’t let him, they didn’t like his name.”

  Juana was pretending at toughness, trying to impress her with this talk.

  “The world can make you strong, Juana. But be careful,” she warned. “Because sometimes the world only lets you think you are tougher than you really are. Don’t let the world tell you what you can do.”

  She tries to imagine what Chinchu will say if she tells him: Did he hurt you? Are you sure you’re okay? Then, You could have been killed, and the words she least wants to hear, Who do you think you are? She imagines herself poised with Dashon’s rifle, her finger curled around the cold trigger with the deer in her sights, and laughs. Who did she think she was? Chinchu would whip the man with his bicycle chain if he found out he hurt her, and, in the end, she would become nothing more than the object of his compassion and pity. Unbearable because even Juana probably knew better. Unbearable because he would be right.

  She checks her body for bruises then turns to the man, still drunk, still leering. “Look at my face,” she says. “Tell me honestly, what do you see?”

  “I see bruises, cabrona. Bruises. But, in the right light – who knows?”

  This morning, like most mornings, she holds her hands out to Chinchu. His tongue flicking across the opium stains on her fingers is like a switch. The taste of salt burns on her tongue when she in turn licks his fingers.

  She feels half-empty when she looks into his dark eyes, because the addicts are still moving into their compound, moving forward across the sand, toward the cabaña, and she knows they’ll never stop. They’ll always come back to this place, just as she and Chinchu will never leave.

  Sun pierces through the bamboo slats and illuminates curls of dust spiralling from the dirt floor. They are swinging in the hammock, the rays warming their legs, twined over the criss-crossed threads like tendrils of seaweed looped together. But even as they embrace, she knows that he, too, is thinking about other bodies, the landscape of foreign places. Chinchu kisses her, his hand solid behind her neck, his mouth crushing hers, oblivious to her secret about the man with the scarves. He believed her when she told him she had a body-surfing accident. From now on, she tells him, she will always check the shoreline for hidden rocks.

  Later, she counts her pesos and stacks the pawned and useless items in a corner by the bed while Chinchu restrings his guitar. Before she goes to wash her hands, she turns at the door. “I’m going to start arranging tours into the mountains, for tourists.”

  Chinchu stares at her for a long minute, as if trying to decide whether she is being serious or not. And then he laughs. “More deer hunters? Híjole.”

  Once outside she stumbles toward the sickle-shaped shard of mirror nailed over the cistern, which frames her face in a canvas of bougainvillea against an amethyst sky, though it is so scratched she must squint to make out her reflection. The taste of excrement is still in her mouth though she has brushed her teeth a thousand times. She
stands there and looks at her reflection as the bougainvillea petals muddy around her and people come and go. Intent as a scalpel, she watches her face take shape in the mirror, piece by piece.

  She washes her hands in the water and listens to Chinchu singing. She could make it to the bus station in Pochutla before he even notices she is gone.

  Last night she was at the police station.

  Now she is washing almost in a trance, her mind blank except for the conviction that before moving on, one’s hands should be clean.

  HELEN AND FRANK

  Helen and Frank lived on the corner of Birch and Elm in the house with the half-moon windows. They went to church every Sunday, gave to charity, and donated blood simply because they felt it was their civic duty. Whenever the children were fighting over candy, or who got to sit shotgun in their dad’s brand-new ’53 Bel Air, or whose turn it was with the pedal car or the spud gun, Helen would tell them the story of how Alan had been raised from the dead.

  Alan had been born just a few minutes before his twin sister, Barbara, the two of them thirteen weeks early. He had stopped breathing and turned blue in the doctor’s arms. Dr. Payne (the family physician who had also delivered Alan’s older sister, Eulalie, four years earlier) rolled Alan into a blanket and held the baby out to her. He asked Helen if she had picked out a name.

  Helen’s husband, Frank, slumped at her bedside, his head on her arm.

  She took the baby from the doctor and rubbed his back. She removed his blanket and placed him on her breast, over her heart, flesh on flesh. And as she rubbed his tiny arms and legs, she told him how much she loved him. How much she wanted him. After an hour, during which no one wanted to take him away from her – she had the kind of eyes that only a mother can get, lawless, savage, spilling over with love – his limbs jerked. His eyes suddenly opened.

  “Just a reaction,” said the nurse flatly.

  Helen, her heart flickering with hope, continued rubbing her hand back and forth across the baby’s back.

  Alan’s eyes fluttered open again.

  “Look, we get to see the colour of them before he dies,” Frank said, still convinced the nurse was right.

  But Alan did not die. And his eyes stayed open. Wide open. So the nurse called for the doctor. An exam was performed. Alan was sent to the prenatal ward and the whole event was pronounced a miracle.

  Helen told her children this story because she hated it when they fought. “Never forget to treat each other nice,” she said. “That’s the meaning of the story.” Because life, as she often reminded herself, especially as she was drifting off to sleep, is a fleeting miracle.

  At night, Helen and Frank would lie in bed together, their feet touching under the blanket.

  “I love you because you taught me to make spaghetti sauce from scratch,” she would say.

  “I love you because you still laugh at my jokes.”

  Even after they had been married sixty years, they still got dressed up and went to dances at the Legion. They danced the foxtrot. Frank could do a mean Charleston. Helen had always loved that about him. That and the way he held her hand while they danced.

  At Helen’s eighty-third birthday party, Alan got drunk on the wine he’d brought back from Spain the year before.

  “My periodontist wants to pull them all out,” Alan told his mother, talking about his teeth. “I don’t know if I’m ready for dentures.” Her little boy.

  Eulalie had cake on her lip, where lipstick feathered into her laugh lines.

  How life had flown by.

  When Alan and Barbara were six, and Eulalie ten or eleven, the three children, who often played together despite their age differences, cut a sign out of cardboard. They’d used the box the clothes dryer had been delivered in to complete their project. On the homemade sign they had written in big bold black letters: “Honk! If you’re happy.” They took the sign to the corner of Birch and Elm, where they jumped up and down, waving the sign around.

  “The new paint looks great, Dad,” Alan said, pointing to the seafoam green of the living room walls.

  “Thanks,” said Frank, who’d done the work himself. Frank loved his home. He loved scooping maple leaves from the gutters, digging weeds out of the garden; he even enjoyed pulling hanks of hair from the bathtub drain with a clothes hanger. “A man’s home is his castle” was something he often said with pride, as though more than just a common adage it was a hard-earned truth.

  Just then Helen came out of the kitchen with her delicate, long-boned fingers wrapped around the stem of a crystal cake stand. She set the cake she had baked herself onto a lace doily in the centre of the dining room table.

  “Ooooh,” said Barbara.

  “You shouldn’t have gone to so much trouble, Ma,” Alan said.

  “Sit down, Mother,” Eulalie said in tender admonishment. “You work too hard. You need to relax. I’ll serve.”

  They ate cake and drank coffee, and the children asked Helen and Frank about the cruise their parents were taking that November.

  “A European cruise, right?”

  “Yes, that’s right,” Helen said, shooting a glance at Frank, as if confirming his approval. “With a view of the Adriatic, grey inns, window boxes full of kale, flourishing purple in the cold.” Helen continued talking about the Eastern European ports of call that most excited her. Before she died, Helen wanted to see the “Pearl of the Adriatic,” the twelfth-century city of Dubrovnik and its outdoor cafes. And she wanted to see Split, and the islands of Hvar, Brac, and Korcula.

  Later, Eulalie took Helen into the kitchen. Frank was snoring in the corduroy easy chair, and Alan and Barbara were cheering the world heavyweight title match on TV. Eulalie wouldn’t stop touching her hair with her jittery hands. Even as a baby, Eulalie had been fussy, spitting out her soothers. And when her daughter was in high school, Helen would gaze at Eulalie’s greasy hair, high cheekbones, and the pimples spotting her chin aglow in the light of the open fridge, and see in her face a sadness too old for someone so young.

  “What are you looking for in there, anyway?” Helen once asked, somewhat impatiently.

  Eulalie turned, slowly closed the fridge door, and lifted her eyes. “Inspiration?”

  Eulalie lived in a draughty house with three dogs. Her grown son, Peter, lived off his girlfriend, who was a cashier at a discount clothing store. Eulalie often subsidised the couple’s rent, just because “it was the right thing to do.”

  “Mom, I’ve got something to tell you,” Eulalie said, now leaning against the stove. “I think Beth might be pregnant. The thing is, Peter hasn’t come out and told me, not in so many words. But they’re coming over on Sunday night.”

  Helen thought for a long time. On the wall above the stove hung a sampler in a frame that Helen had embroidered in high school: “A real woman brings out the best in a man.” Those words had always made her shiver with pride. She was a real woman and Frank was her air and water and light. She didn’t know what Eulalie wanted from her. “I was a grandma by the time I was your age.”

  “They don’t know the first thing about being parents. I don’t feel old.”

  “What is old supposed to feel like?” Helen asked. “I don’t feel old either. Inside, I still feel like a sixteen-year-old girl.”

  The next day, after Helen and Frank’s daughter Barbara had taken her golden retriever for a walk, she returned home and took a shower, letting the water tickle her tongue as she lifted her face to the stream. She put on her bathrobe when she was done and perched on a kitchen chair, a fresh cup of coffee in her hand, waiting for the phone to ring. Her mother had phoned her every Saturday for the past twenty years.

  When the phone did not ring, Barbara put on a pair of canvas sneakers and drove to her parents’ house. In the combination box by the front door, painted the same colour as the frame, was a spare key.

  The half-eaten birthday cake was still sitting in the middle of the dining room table, the pile of dirty plates stacked beside it. Her mother’s s
lippers, as if waiting for her, were still by the front door.

  “There must have been something.”

  “Some emergency.”

  “Some kind of accident.”

  “Her slippers.”

  “By the front door.”

  “She always washes the dishes.”

  “The cake was still on the table.”

  “Not even covered.”

  “Not like her.”

  “Not at all.”

  Sometimes, when the children were still young, Helen and Frank would meet in the middle of the afternoon at a motel room. The place was halfway out of town, on a hill with a view of the city. The rooms had hard mattresses and carpets that smelled of cheese, and sometimes they filled the narrow pink bathtub with bubble bath. Then Helen would lead Frank, still wet from the bath, to bed.

  She would unzip her duffle bag and take out a strand of pearls that dangled. With his wet body dripping, Frank would sigh as she crawled into bed, wearing just her jewellery. She grazed the nape of his neck with her chandelier earrings, skimmed her strand of pearls up and down his legs.

  She loved his soft stomach, how he smelled like pine-scented candles. She loved kissing the blue veins on his feet, the crooked toe on the right foot that he’d broken in a football accident. She marvelled at its delicacy.

  His hands were as big as sunfish. His hair so thick she could grab it by the fistful. And his back, with her legs twined around him, reminded her of a horse, his muscles rippling.

  Afterward, lying in bed, staring at the patterns of light on the ceiling from the sun through the curtains, they’d talk.

  “Barbara said she liked a virgin of that song ‘Flip, Flop, and Fly.’ Isn’t that a hoot?”

  “Alan fed the dog olives.”

  “Eulalie left late for school – again – wearing two different socks.”

  They’d laugh. They loved this part the best.

  “Well, she wouldn’t have left in her slippers.”

  “Yes, but –”

  “But the cake.”

  “Yes, the cake.”