by C M Muller
“Help me,” she said to whomever could hear. “Help me hold him.”
No one stepped forward to lend aid, as everyone’s interest was intractably drawn to the lonesome gloom that seemed to wend its way into our souls. I felt it dragging me back to the past, to the frozen storehouse of memory. It became difficult to differentiate my lifetime already lived from the immediacy of the now. The past was so cold, so cold. It crystallized every passing moment and caused some people, places, and events from yesteryear to shatter in my mind’s eye, to irrevocably fragment into a million tiny pieces that gently drifted over the surface of my thoughts like an early morning dusting of snow.
“Help me,” Charmaine called again as Vetterly twisted and turned and tried to throw elbow jabs to her stomach. But I couldn’t help. I was so lost in nostalgia that I was barely even in the room with her.
Charmaine and Vetterly struggled more, but Charmaine was clearly winning. She dragged Vetterly away from the door a few feet, then away a few more feet, and still a few more. As the two fought, the hummers returned to their original pitch and the murk again vanished. Vetterly toppled backward into Charmaine and both went sprawling, landing flat on their backs in the middle of the room with an unpleasant crunch and a curse from Charmaine.
With the murk gone, I regained my sense of time and place and rushed to the prone figures on the floor, where a circle was forming. Charmaine had broken out into a sweat. Her eyes were wide and her teeth clenched.
“Fool just fainted on me,” she breathed. “Felt him give out right on top of me. I think I broke my hip. Damned rickety body. Damn fool Vetterly.”
While a few people went off in search of a gurney for Charmaine, I bent down and put a hand on Vetterly’s chest. I felt neither rise nor fall. I took his pulse. Nothing beat inside him.
I straightened with a series of cracks and said, to no one in particular, “He’s not passed out. He’s dead.”
Everyone milling about the room shook their heads. A volley of questions and hasty conjectures bounced between us. “How?” “Just fell down dead.” “What happened to him?” “We didn’t let him go outside.” “What do we do with him?” “Nothing to be done.” Eventually, someone wheeled in a gurney and we managed to lift Charmaine onto it. Someone else dropped a blanket over Vetterly’s body.
The people by the window paid no attention to any of the proceedings. They seemed to not notice one of their number was gone, lying lifeless only a few feet away. They seemed not to care.
After I helped find some pain medication for Charmaine, I returned to my post in the cushy chair opposite the exit and checked the time. It was closing in on two o’clock. I sat and I waited and I stared through the glass doors to freedom. As I kept watch, I noticed that the trees and grass in the front lawn, the macadam parking lot where staff and visitors parked, and the parking lots to the businesses across the road had all disappeared. I feared what another round of vanishing meant. I feared that I would never hear the starlings sing again.
Two o’clock came and went. Three o’clock came and went. Four o’clock passed by, showing me its middle finger. Still no one showed. At least, not for me. The darkness, though, the darkness came to visit again and again and again, and every time was the same—the people by the window raised their pitch, a glow flashed from the gloom, and one of the call recipients fled from the home, into the engulfing darkness and its subzero concentrate of yesteryears. Considering what happened with Vetterly, we let them leave without issue.
As the murk ebbed and flowed, it eroded more and more of the world beyond our door. By the time only three people remained at the window, even the sky and the ground had disappeared, lost to the erasure of the darkness, forever washed out and faded to an undifferentiated grey plain that recognized no horizon.
At eight thirty in the evening, the last of the call recipients wandered from the home, alone and as joyful as all the others who’d stepped outside. I can’t lie. I wanted to venture outside, too. I wanted to go wherever the red light might take me. But I remained seated in my chair. I worried that I wasn’t wanted by the light or the darkness. I worried that something terrible might happen to me on the other side of the exit doors if I wasn’t wanted. I worried that, without Suzy, the only right and proper place for me was in this house of the dying.
I reached into my pocket and grabbed my children’s phone numbers. I traced the ones and the twos with my thumb. Surely they would’ve called if they had the time. Surely whatever had happened today must have forced them away from the phone.
I thought about Cammy’s present, up in my room, unopened forever, and a tear rolled down my cheek.
The starlings didn’t sing today, that much is true, but, really, I suppose today’s been like every other day after all.
Aycayia
Rowley Amato
Once, a young man named Hector Fuentes crouched on a jetty, taking water samples from the Gowanus Canal, when he looked down and saw a woman’s face glaring up at him.
For a moment, he was too surprised to react. The face swished away like a pale ghost. A shock of adrenaline coursed through his body and the flask that he was preparing to dip into the canal dropped from his hands. It splashed into water stained the color of strong, black tea.
He glanced around the canal: a pigeon cooed on a patch of barbed wire. Insects droned and buzzed. Trucks and cars rumbled down the bridges that crisscrossed the water like stitches in an open wound.
Hector shook his head and breathed deep. The face he saw was just a trick of the sunlight, a rainbow in a slick of gasoline. A striper wandered in from the harbor, maybe.
He lay on his belly and peered into the toxic water, thinking of a story his abuelo once told him. Below him, dark eddies rose and churned.
Hector had spent most of his summer trudging along the Gowanus Canal in a kind of sun-sick fugue. He worked as an intern for a small nonprofit called the Friends of the Canal, collecting and cataloguing daily water samples at different points along the banks in preparation for the Superfund cleanup. The work was, he thought, rather excessive; the grant would end in September and the cleanup was coming soon after, so his time spent logging samples felt perfunctory, like homework in the last week of school before break.
Every morning, he drifted in and out of consciousness on the long train rides from his mother’s apartment in Alphabet City, all the way out to Union Street. At the office, he checked in with his supervisor, a glum older man with a ruddy nose and wet eyes named Kowalski, who plugged numbers into spreadsheets in a cubicle at the farthest end of the office, dutifully filling out Hector’s academic credit forms with little comment beyond the occasional, “Thanks for all your hard work.” From the office, he would walk a few short blocks to the water.
The canal was just a New York oddity for many, but over the course of the summer, Hector came to appreciate its mysteries. It seemed to live a secret life of its own, in its little corner of Brooklyn.
He was mesmerized by its unnatural changes in color: one day it was a dark gray that swallowed up the sunlight. The next it was a bright, St. Patty’s green, the result of whirling galaxies of algae that bloomed in the stagnant heat. After heavy rain, the storm drains vomited raw sewage into the canal and turned the water brown and fecal, the bulkheads threatening to breach and flood the streets.
He sometimes awoke, choking, in the middle of the night, the smells pervading his dreams. A noxious blend of sea and city: a base of sweet brackishness—the salt of the harbor—mingled with centuries of industrial and human waste, the sour, metallic overtones of VOCs, PCBs, PAHs, and other arcane acronyms. The stench grew stronger as he approached the water, and on hot days the air itself seemed to thrum with poison.
There was a malicious quality to the canal that disturbed Hector. His hands jittered as he walked its banks, waiting for a seagull’s caw to break the fetid silence. He jumped when shadows passed over him, when splintery boards sagged under his footsteps. It had a stra
nge effect on sound, and noises were sometimes audible from blocks away as they echoed and ricocheted down the twisting bends and tributaries. He often heard loud clicks, like the gnashing mandibles of an enormous insect.
In the late afternoon, whenever he was finished hopping from jetty to jetty, he would rush back to the office and drop off the day’s samples in a basement with a bored assistant, relieved to be free from the canal’s lurking predation. His coworkers invited him out for drinks at some Third Avenue dive every now and then, but they too stank of the canal, in their way.
Hector imagined the face again and again as summer dragged on, and soon it became a constant, niggling source of worry in his life.
Every now and then, he would catch a glimpse of something from the corner of his eye—a flash of white streaking through the water; a hand slicing the surface. But whenever he took a second look, he only saw trails of muck or shadows flitting under the surface. He would stare at lights dancing on the water for what felt like hours at a time, as if hypnotized.
Always, he sensed that he was being watched, and he would find himself spinning around when he heard those awful clicks, or when that dreamlike feeling of paranoia became too much to bear. He once caught a bedraggled cat eying him in the shade of an ailanthus tree, but never the invisible thing that stalked him. He regarded this presence as he did the gang of rats that always rummaged through the trash-cans outside his window late at night, or the patch of evil black mold that crept steadily across the bathroom ceiling.
He thought of his abuelo, and he wondered if he was losing his mind. If the Aycayia was real.
When he was young, Hector spent a summer playing dominos with his abuelo, Rafi. He was a slight child, preferring the company of books and videos and D&D monster manuals to that of his peers, who tossed baseballs in the park and threw slapdash fishing lines into the East River. The summer after sixth grade, several weeks into vacation, his mother (who worked long shifts in the Montefiore emergency room and returned home broken and exhausted) issued an ultimatum.
“Mira,” she said. “You can either go play with your friends or with abuelito. You’re not staying cooped up in the apartment all day.”
Hector chose his grandfather.
At first, their time together was awkward and fumbling. Hector was quiet and nervous, the kind of boy who felt a flush of self-conscious embarrassment when he heard groups of people laughing on the street. Rafael Fuentes was loud and boisterous, a real old-fashioned Boricua who had a bushy gray mustache and wore a rumpled linen suit year round. He drew the attention of the entire neighborhood when he walked down Avenue C, and everyone seemed to know his name: the old Jewish and Italian holdouts, the twitching junkies, the defiant warrior poets, even the NYU kids, who treated the neighborhood like some rugged frontier outpost.
Rafi conducted himself in public and private with a certain grand showmanship, an ostentation that made Hector uncomfortable. He reminded Hector of a character in an old spy movie—the jovial, dark-skinned sidekick, armed with a pair of sweat stains and a toothy grin.
Every morning, Rafi would pound on Hector’s bedroom door and the two would walk downstairs, carrying a white plastic table and some folding chairs that Rafi found squirreled away in the basement. They would meet the other men on 10th Street and play all day.
At around lunchtime, Rafi would slip Hector a few bucks to buy a pepperoni slice and a mango icee, plus (and here, he would always lower his voice to a whisper) a forty of Budweiser from the bodega down the block. Rafi always let him keep the change, winking as he cracked open the heavy bottle.
“Es nuestro secreto, hijo.”
Hector became a strong dominos player in the summer between sixth and seventh grade. He quickly learned to slam the tiles down on the table and talk shit in the Nuyorican machine gun patter as well as any of the old-timers in the neighborhood. Many dropped by to chat, but the core group was always Rafi, Willy Vázquez, and José Silva. They seemed to live in a perpetual cloud of smoke, and Hector would return home reeking of cigarillos, with a headful of tall tales embellished with each telling.
These stories were relayed with a sort of repressed misery that Hector was too young to understand. Only later did he realize that they were mourning for their youths, for their island.
The men would often map out faded scars that traversed their bodies. A pink worm wriggling down Willy’s ribcage was the result of a street fight in the Ponce slums (or was it from the knife of a crazed ex-lover?). An accident with a pedal-powered thresher (or, sometimes, a shark off the coast of Vieques) had left José with a dappled, deformed knee-cap. A reddish half-moon on Rafi’s neck was, he claimed, a parting gift from the Aycayia.
The story went like this: when Rafi was a young man, he left home and found work on a small coffee plantation up in the mountains. By day, he walked between the rows of shrubs, shaking the red berries free from their branches. Little green snakes and lizards fell with them, and he would nudge them away as he stooped to pick up the valuable fruit. The work was hard and grueling, and he would return to the huts late at night soaked with sweat, his arms covered in blisters, his back aching.
It was like this for months, every day in the hot sun and every night in the buzzing, mosquito-infested shacks. He kept most of his wages hidden in a tobacco tin buried in the loamy earth beneath his cot, sending a dollar or two home to his mother in the city at the end of every month.
On Christmas Eve, the overseer—a blanquito who strutted around camp with a rifle slung over his shoulders like John Wayne—surprised the hands with a few bottles of rum and a fat, squealing pig. That night, the workers celebrated with booze and mounds of spicy meat roasted in leaves hacked from the forest with dull machetes. Someone produced a battered, out-of-tune guitar, and during the celebration, Rafi danced and drank strong coquito for the first time, spinning and whirling around the bonfire.
When most of the other hands had gone to bed, long after the electric lights in the big house had darkened, Rafi staggered into the forest to relieve himself. A million pairs of eyes watched him as he trudged deeper and deeper into the woods, but he felt no fear. Owls hooted and the eerie, playful calls of coquís rang out all around him. Bats flapped overhead and other unseen things rustled in the undergrowth.
He walked for a while, content to just follow the moonlight that spilled through the rustling canopy. Soon, he came to a break in the trees and the rocky banks of a small brook that twisted down through the hills.
He dipped his hands into the water and sipped deep from his concave palms. The cool water dribbled down his chin. The moon hung high over the stream, its light casting everything in silvery blue. The forest was deafening, but he could hear a small, distant spluttering, a little plane flying low over the mountains in the west.
In the stream, a hand emerged from a shimmering moonbeam, pulling itself up. The hand grew into an arm, into a woman’s torso and a bare breast. The woman had skin the color of dark rum and long hair that hung down her back in little black curls. Her body glistened with droplets of water, and her eyes were bright headlights shining out, illuminating troops of frogs and lizards and turtles lined up along the shore. She rose until her waist floated just below the surface. Rafi could see little silver scales running up and down her thighs.
As he told the story, Hector furrowed his brow. The other men listened in hushed reverence.
“She was the Aycayia,” Rafi told him, sensing his confusion. “La diosa.”
“Oh. A naiad,” Hector offered, recalling his monster manuals.
“Hmm?”
“A water nymph…an aquatic fairy, I guess.”
Rafi shrugged.
The woman beckoned to him.
Ven aquí, she murmured.
She spread her arms wide and Rafi moved towards her, splashing into the stream. The water rose up to his chest and he felt his feet slipping on the smooth rocks on the bottom.
Ven.
He scrambled
deeper and soon he was right beside her. He reached out and touched her dusky skin, and she wrapped her slender fingers around his hands.
¿Por qué robas mi agua? she whispered in his ear.
Rafi nodded. “Lo siento, doña.”
She smiled, pointing a long figure at his chest.
“I don’t know why I did it,” he shrugged, taking a drag from his cigarillo. “She was very beautiful. Quizás era una obligación. No sé.”
Rafi bared his throat to the woman in the stream and she ran a finger along his arm. He could not pull himself away from her eyes, the brilliance of which blinded him, and left him seeing a crimson afterimage silhouetted against the stars.
He touched his neck and felt warm blood seeping over his fingers. The woman began to lick and suck at his neck. The experience was discomfiting, but, Rafi found, not all that unpleasant. He grabbed at her body, kissing at her and finding her smooth, amphibian lips. His blood dripped down into the cool, clear water.
She moved back to his throat. As she performed her work, he looked up at the night sky scattered with an impossible chaos of stars, and listened to the forest shriek.
Soon after Hector’s summer with his grandfather, the neighborhood seemed to reach a breaking point. The trailblazing NYU kids were soon joined by yuppies in suits and shining black shoes. The Irish dive became a Duane Reade. The pizza place became an affected coffee shop. The plastic furniture on 10th Street was replaced with stained wood tables, where the new residents ate sixteen-dollar burgers and drank eight-dollar craft beers with silly, ironic names.
People moved away. Many of the junkies migrated, but some stayed behind, hidden in doorways and cellars, squatting in the few abandoned tenements left in the neighborhood. More police cruisers skulked up and down Avenue C. The older folks—Hector’s mother, Rafi—watched these changes with a sense of unease, a weird mix of relief and wariness of things to come.