“Jesus H! Why does it smell so bad in here?” she cried.
Sergio rolled back, falling to the floor laughing. “See, Vada, see! I said you smelled funny, too!”
“Is that him?” she asked.
“Yeah, like farts,” Sergio snickered.
“Oooh,” Margot moaned, “that’s totally bad.” She stuck her tongue out and clicked it against her palate.
“Can’t you do something about that?” she winced, peering towards Rovada.
“Sorry, Margot,” Rovada explained, “it’s from our diet, high in sulfur. I apologize if you find it offensive.”
“You’ll get used to it, Margot, don’t worry, just don’t get right next to him, it’ll knock you out. I’m not kidding.”
“God, a cockroach that smells bad, too,” Margot said. She noticed Rovada moving back slowly towards the Wall. “How come I didn’t notice this horrible stench before?”
“Your senses will gradually come back. The fact that you can smell is a good thing. It shows that your olfactory nerves were not damaged by the accident.”
“The fact that I can smell is a bad thing,” Margot interrupted, “if I have to smell you all of the time.”
“Margot,” Sergio said as he bent down and touched her leg with his small hand, “believe me, you’ll not even notice it after a while.”
Margot looked down at his hand on her leg.
My God, human warmth, human hand, the life in it, the pulse of blood in his hand, the softness. Geoff would rub my calves after a long climb.
She closed her eyes and took a slow, deep breath.
“Geoff?” Rovada said.
Margot was startled at his remark and pushed her torso up from the ground. “Where are you bug?” she yelled, squinting at the dark, trying to find his outline in the shadows. “I told you. Don’t read my mind, you horrific scum!”
“Margot!” Sergio yelled, slapping her leg gently, “that’s not nice! Vada is my friend.”
She looked back at Sergio’s hand, still on her calf, and very slowly spelled out, “Look, beast, I don’t want you to mention that name again. I won’t think about him. I will force myself not to. But I don’t want you to speak his name! Got it?”
“Sorry, Margot,” Rovada replied. “I understand your sensitivity.”
“Bullshit! You couldn’t know of things that I’ve been through. Don’t mention it, got it?”
“Got it, yes, I understand.” Rovada hoped that he would remember this, concerned that the Das were cursed with nominal long-term memory. Blessed and cursed.
“Sergio,” she ordered, still angry, “help me up!”
Surprised at her outburst, the boy stood up and held his hands in front of him, unsure how to help her get up on her feet.
His closeness resurrected her thoughts from many times passed. Margot stared deeply into his eyes.
I see you, child. I see the outline of your sad, drooping eyes and yet I see such life and color in your irises. Your pupils are large and black, and I can peer into you, your entire being, through those dark holes protected by strong, green gates. I see in you the horrible and desolate place that I relegated you to, the place that felt so out of place when I’d see your brothers and cousins in the convenience store and wonder what they might do. Shoplift? Pull a gun? Gang members? What will they do to a white girl? My morality was certainly above yours because mine was right and proven over time and possession, my country based on Puritan ethic and thought and strong virtue and an emphasis on education and self-reliance. And I knew that I lived in a land that was once yours and was peopled by your forefathers. But I am here now, in this desert, and English is my language and Spanish is foreign and my skin color is not nearly as dark as yours. Look at you, with your pigmentation. You were made to work outside, it is this thought that stays with me, as abhorrent and bigoted as that sounds. Then why did I so despise my white skin that wouldn’t tan? I wanted so much to have your coloring. And every time I saw your brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers they were working outside doing the landscaping everywhere in town, every neighbor’s lawn. Or maybe they were inside at manual tasks that I would never do as my own profession. Did you like that? Did you want that? Did they not have the will like I did to better myself, to rise above the menial? Oh, there were the few that broke the chain, but they were generally lighter skinned with your last name and I felt more comfortable with them, and they seemed almost white, or it was something about their accent, or lack of accent maybe, that made me feel like they were one of me; and I shook my head in pain as some of you received scholarships through college while I worked my butt off as a waitress and suffered from those horrible shoes they made me wear. Better I should waitress in hiking boots. Four long, tedious years, little time for anything else but working and studying. No time for Geoff or fun or even friends. Maybe why Geoff did what he did and wandered away, I don’t know. But I suppose that’s just life and perhaps it was okay that some of you got through easier than me. I suppose you lacked the upper middle-class upbringing that I had, and that some of you actually even suffered because you were poor.
But was that my fault? I mean, look at your history, brown boy, and look at mine. I can trace my family back to Illinois and South Dakota and strong English roots to the 16th century, to Jamestown, or so my dad said, and the Dutch on my mother’s side, and these people worked hard and settled America. You were chased out, or maybe bought out, or cheated out, or warred out, but then look at your people, look at their lack of emphasis on education, look at the church and wanting to have so many of you procreate and guarantee your relegation to poverty, look at the too many mouths to feed to focus on college. Look at the enslavement of the natives, and your eventual mixing with them. Oh, I know the history. I knew the history. I aced it, aced it so well. The teacher loved me. “Discovery of the Americas”, and I thought it would cover the Northern parts, so little did I know about the South. But instead I got to see the Spanish, what little remains that belies you in those green eyes, the son of the son of the son and on to some string of purposeful conquistadores centuries ago who brought to the new world a wrath of plagues and burdens to your mothers. Who impoverished the people who you became? They, you, did this with your own hands. Yet you remained enslaved through the centuries in your needless, senseless governments of graft, your military bombast and your fear of all that made sense in the world. Your greed and poverty brought you all down, your lack of focus on bettering and improving all of yourselves, and I see you young Sergio, simply the son of a man who thought it would be better here, in my Puritan America, my United States, and I saw what was coming from the border, I saw what Los Angeles had become, and I feared for the rest of my country because ignorance and poverty spreads like an amoebic disease, and your people’s growth exceeded mine and one day the U.S. would be yours again, and this wrath of poor, ignorant peoples who stepped across the many borders would one day become the norm in what was once this society whose focus was upon individual improvement and peace for mankind and all that was possible for humans.
Nogales? I have seen Nogales. I have seen the burrows and holes of Mexico City and I watched the small brown people moving like chocolate snails through the dirt streets, from tin shack to straw walls and cardboard, anything that could be pulled from the rubbish of others more fortunate, I saw you all there in the squalor and filth of what was left of once great empires. I saw you from my air-conditioned bus and hoped the bus would not break down for fear that you would accost us all and we would disappear forever in the tormented world you live in, to be a white slave to a dope dealer or die a miserably sick death in hole you dug in the nearby desert. I just wanted to get back to my Phoenix where I at least knew the law would be on my side if anything happened, that it was not all graft and payoff there, that if drugs were planted in my suitcase I could find an attorney and prove my innocence without my parents being forced to commit their life savings to getting me out of some rotting prison and rape from the guards, and I
saw these children when the bus stopped, with swollen lips and red eyes, the smell of poverty reeking from their shoddy clothes, I saw them in a system of government that cared so little for its people that it failed to give them a proper education or chance at meaningful employment. I saw a people without a purpose, and I saw a place reeling out of control with readily available pharmaceuticals allowing people to live longer and breed longer in their wallowing ignorance, wallowing because of their lack of caring, their lack of ethics, their lack of concern for each other.
Wait! Oh, God. How this well of guilt boils up in me and burns a caustic orb in the pit of my stomach. White hot. For I know the truth, too. I found it there, in the history. God, forbid, my fathers were not innocents. They did not sit idly by. I knew the number, the native peoples, in this land of the North, before the English, Dutch, French, Irish, before we were all here. And I knew what was left. Afterwards. The few. And I knew, too, what havoc these invaders had wrought and I cowered and hunched over in guilt at imagining the many untold versions of Wounded Knee and sick and dying of measles in the middle of winter. I know of the atrocities they all so neatly participated in and the complicity of doing their evil because they felt they could do it, that they could justify it in their religion and greed, the two twins, that they thought they were superior because of their skin color or language or education or morality or presidential doctrine. I look at you, boy, the innocence and smile, I know that you are not unlike my Joey except in darker skin, and I have to say I am sorry, horribly sorry, for all the terror and sickness that my fathers and mothers had burdened upon that native that is within you. Upon that Latino in you whose land and riches we wrestled away under war or coercion or eminent domain. It sickens me what we do, we humans. I am overwhelmed with the putrid stench of guilt when I look at you knowing it is my fault, or that I am part of the blood that caused the fault, as the Europeans, all Europeans, came to this land and pursued a course of savagery with the ignorant claim that all of you were the savages. And I share in their shame. God, I am not too dumb to know that the genetics that created us are all the same. Yes, I aced biology and genetics, too. I had a science minor, as if that would help me now. Brown boy, I will try to get along with you, but you are the first one I have known this dark, for I have hardly touched another, you see, where I lived and I saw your kind, and I even knew a few in high school. Yes, I was nice to them, but I hardly remember talking to them. I did have a friend, though, who was half Italian and half Mexican, but her dad had died in the war and she didn’t seem Mexican to me, so I’m part of the way there with you, or at least that helps get me there. I’ll do my best to get along, to understand you. Yes, yes, it’s okay if you touch my hand. I’m not scared. God, how could you scare me anymore? There are none of you. Hell, there are none of me. It was so much easier when I could lay blame on others. They are all to blame, I think, for what happened. But now, none are left to blame. Blame is irrelevant. My biases, and I’m not so stupid to not know that’s what they are, what I abhorred about me, are irrelevant. As I am irrelevant.
“Grab my hand, Joey, I’m going to stand up.”
Sergio grasped Margot’s hands and stood solidly back on his heels as he pulled her up to her knees. Margot sat up, torso erect, the hard floor pressing against her kneecaps.
“Sergio,” he whispered.
“Sorry,” Margot replied, her eyes falling to the ground. “Sergio, Sergio, Serge. You don’t look like a Serge.” Margot felt the burning in her buttocks from muscles too long unused. Lactic acid was building up.
“Serge, look, this may seem funny to you, but I need to crawl,” she said as she dropped to her hands and slowly began to crawl forward. “Bug!” she yelled. “You may want to be prepared. I’ll be walking soon,” she laughed wryly. “I’ll want to see you face-to-face, in all your ugly glory, cockroach!”
“Cucaracha!” Sergio laughed, then his smile turned to a frown. “But Margot,” he said as he followed her step by step across the dark floor, “you shouldn’t tease Vada. He helped me, and he picked me up!”
Margot lifted her head up and turned it around to her right to see Sergio quietly stepping behind her.
“Don’t worry, Serge, I won’t do anything to hurt him. You see,” she said, “I’m just a little mad at him for staring at me naked.” She paused. “Wait, have you been in in here before?”
Sergio began to step backwards, his eyes growing larger. “Well,” he began, “Vada wouldn’t let me in. Not all the way. Only a couple of times – and from a distance.”
Margot stared straight into the darkness where she located Rovada’s outline. “Thanks, bug. You’re a big, big help,” she said sarcastically. “Leave me a little dignity.”
“It was nothing,” Rovada replied softly. “We all must maintain some pride of self.”
Margot stopped crawling and sat back on her legs, her hands resting on her thighs.
“Bug,” she said, droning on almost hypnotically, “I want to touch you. Help me to know this is real.”
“You are still doubting.”
“Yes. How long have I been awake?”
“In your terms?” Rovada stopped for a second to check his monitor. “A little over seventy hours.”
“I’ve been awake that long?”
“No, no, just in and out. Remember, you fell, but you have maintained a conscious state with normal sleeping patterns. You have drifted some.”
“I want to touch you.” Margot reached out with her hand towards the dark shape.
Rovada moved slowly forward. He knew that this job was risky for this very reason. He knew that his credits were accumulating and that they would allow him to travel to other places vastly different from the last planet, earth.
Not that earth was so dreary. He liked making observations of the life forms on earth. In his few years there, he had made it his personal challenge to see every form of bird but had only partially succeeded before the disaster. He loved the birds. Such grace when they flew on light wisps of air, an atmosphere he could never hope to fly in, save for gravitational modifiers. Not so real as flying without them. He loved the planets whose atmospheres could carry his body through the air, but they were so few. The winds would carry him, high into the sky. Then there were the adjustments he’d have to make to the slightest changes in air pressure, pockets, down drafts, clouds and currents. He just hated the stagnancy of the artificially-created air of the caves, the Wall, with none of the fun or excitement or chance of real planetary conditions.
Beyond the fear associated with possibly being attacked by Margot, Rovada hardly knew other fears since they were trained out of him so long ago. Despite his poor memory, he could still recall the intense training when he was very young. Training to recognize, manage, overcome, push down, deviate, suspend. It was so many things he was taught, drilled into him so long ago, and now an inherent part of his makeup.
Yet the fear of getting killed remained and was closer to him than it was to most Das. Everything in his world was engineered by the Wall, created so many eons ago. The Das objective was to prevent catastrophe, to prolong and extend life so that true immortality was not only possible, but it had occurred for eons on a wide scale among the Das and the three other surviving sentient societies like the Das who traveled the galaxies.
He remembered the histories of those Das who died by accepting very risky positions, but the zookeeper job posed only modest risk. After all, he could readily protect himself with lightning-fast moves of his body. He could sheer his wing through her torso with a quick movement. He could rely on the speed and timing of the Wall to ensure him no harm. But she could damage him. That possibility always existed. Nothing was ever certain. There were just odds and management of those odds, which were amplified immeasurably by their longevity. But that is what the Das did so well. It must be those brittle bones, he thought, that started us down this path. So very light, but brittle, and subject to breaking at even the slightest damage. Those same bones, however, did al
low them to escape their natural enemies, many years ago, long before they traveled in space.
Rovada looked at her thoughts. She didn’t know any of this. She didn’t know how easily she could damage him, up this close, but her thoughts divulged no ill intent. He moved slowly forward using his rear tail appendage as the back leg, using the wings as crutches to propel himself forward. All the Das moved this way. Margot’s jaw dropped as she glared at Rovada, now fully immersed in the light and within inches of her. From where she was sitting on the floor, he seemed towering.
She first noticed the dark black of what she thought were elbows touching the ground. The tail came to a point that was covered with a small, spongey pad, like the pads of a baboon’s butt. Elbows were connected by two pole-like brown bones, with dark brown flaps and folds of an opaque, skin-like substance between them. “God,” she said, “you are a freakin’ bat!”
“Thank you!” Rovada exclaimed, taking pride in being compared to the flying mammals he studied while on earth.
“Not meant as a compliment. Bats are terminally ugly.”
“Margot!” Sergio urged. “Shhhh!”
“Oh, Sergio, I think he can handle it.” Her eyes crept up his torso. It was clean and glistening brown, looking like the underside of a hard-shelled beetle. She shook her head, having caught full sight of the dark brown, triangular-shaped head.
“Yichhh! Uuuungh. God, why can’t you look more human?” She thought if she was forced to look at this creature for the rest of her life, she’d rather be blind.
“Bag it!” she exclaimed.
“Put a bag over my head? Why?” Rovada replied.
“Margot!” Sergio screamed, his eyes filling with tears.
“It’s okay, little guy,” she replied and grabbed at the boy’s arm, pulling him to the ground. She wrapped her arm around him. “Rovada,” she called out. “Let me touch you, too.”
The Space Between Her Thoughts (The Space in Time Book 1) Page 8