She says, “There are gods moving above us. I can hear them.”
I listen and I don’t hear any gods. It horrifies me that I can’t hear them. Makes me think I am terribly broken. There’s only the sound of my breathing, and it’s so loud and close, like I’m inside my own lungs.
She says, “They’re the old gods, and they’ve been forgotten. They’ve returned, but they’re suffering. And despite everything, they’ll be forgotten again.”
Maybe I’m not supposed to hear the old gods. Or maybe I do hear them and I’ve always heard them and their sound is nothingness, and that means we’re forgotten too.
I put my hand back on her ankle. Her skin is cool now. Maybe it’s my fault. My chest expands and gets tight, lungs too greedy. My head and back press against the weight around me. I’m taking up too much space. I let air and words out into the crowded void, trying to make myself small again. I say, “Did the old gods make the building? Did they tear it down? Did they do this to us? Are they angry? Why are they always so angry?”
She says, “I have a story. It’s only one sentence long. There’s a small child wandering a city and can’t find her mother. That’s it. It’s sentimental and melodramatic but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen every day.”
She is starting to break under the stress of our conditions. I admire that she has lasted this long, but we can’t stay in this no-room-womb-tomb forever. I should keep her talking so she doesn’t lose consciousness. I say, “Who are you? I’m sorry I don’t remember.”
She whispers. I don’t hear every word so I have to fill in the gaps. “Dad died when I was four years old. He was short, bent, had those glasses that darkened automatically, and he loved flannel. At least, that’s what he looked like in pictures. We had pictures all over the house, but not pictures of him, actually. My only real memory of Dad is him picking up dog shit in the backyard. It’s what he did every weekend. We lived on a hill and the yard had a noticeable slant, so he stood lopsided to keep from falling. He used a gardener’s trowel as a scoop and made the deposits into a plastic grocery bag. He let me hold the bag. His joke was that he was transporting not cleaning as he dumped the poop out in the woods across the street, same spot every time. It was the only time he spent out in the yard with me, cleaning our dog’s shit. I don’t remember our dog’s name. My father and the dog are just like the old gods.”
The old gods again. They make me nervous. Everything seems closer and tighter after she speaks. My eyes strain against their lids and pray for light. They want to jump out and roll away. I say, “What about the old gods?”
She says, “I still hear them. They have their own language.”
I wait for another story that doesn’t come. Her head is next to my feet but so far away. Her ankle feels different but that’s not enough to go on. Finally, I say, “Maybe I should go find the old gods and tell them you’re here, since you seem to know them. Maybe I’ll apologize for not hearing them.”
My elbows are pinned against my chest and I can’t extend my arms. I do what I can to feel around me and around her legs. I find some space behind her left hip. I shift my weight and focus on my limited movement. Minutes and hours pass. My body turns slowly, like the hands of a clock. If the old gods are watching, even they won’t be able to see the movement. Maybe that’s blasphemous. I’ll worry about it later. In order to turn my shoulders I have to push my chest into her legs and hips. I apologize but she doesn’t say anything. I make sure I don’t hit her head with my feet. I pull myself over her legs, scraping my back against the rubble above me, pressing harder against her, and I’m trying the best I can to make myself flat. It’s hard to breathe, and small white stars spot the blackness. I climb over her and reach into a tunnel where I’ll have to crawl like a worm or a snake, but I have arms and I wish I could leave them behind with her. I can’t turn around so I roll her back with my feet into the spot I occupied. Maybe it’ll be more comfortable, and after I’m through she can follow. I say, “Don’t worry, I’ll find your Dad,” but then I remember that she told me he died. What a horrible thing for me to say.
In the tunnel opening I find a flat, square object. It’s the size of my hand. The outer perimeter is metal with raised bumps that I try to read with my fingers, but they can’t read. It’s not their fault. I never trained them to do so. The center of the square is smooth and cool. Glass, I think. I know what it is. It’s a picture frame. Hers or mine. I don’t know. I slide it into my back pocket and I shimmy, still blind, always blind, into the tunnel. Everything gets tighter.
My arms are pinned to my side. My untrained hands under my pelvis. My legs and feet do the all the work. Those silly hands and useless digits fret and worry. The tunnel thins. I push with my feet and roll my stomach muscles.
The tunnel thins more. My shoulders are stuck. I can’t move. Should I wait for her? She could push me through. Do I yell? Would the old gods help me then? But I’m afraid. If I yell I might start an avalanche and close the tunnel. I’m afraid they won’t help me. My heart pumps and swells. There isn’t any room in here for it. The white stars return. Everything is tight and hard in my chest. I feel a breeze on my face. There must be more open space ahead. One more push.
My feet are loud behind me. They’re frantic rescue workers. I hope they don’t panic. I need them to get through this. My shoulders ache and throb. Under the pressure. Legs muscles on fire. But I squeeze. Through. And into a chamber big enough to crawl in.
I feel around looking for openings, looking for up. I still can’t see. I’ll use sinus pressure and spit to determine up and down. My legs shake and I need to rest. I take out the picture frame. My hands dance all over it. Maybe it’s a picture of her father in the yard. He’s wearing the flannel even in summer. I remember how determined he was to keep the yard clean. He didn’t care if the grass grew or if my dog dug holes, he just wanted all the shit gone.
I need to keep moving. I pocket the picture frame and listen again for the old gods. I still don’t hear them. There’s a wider path in the rubble, it expands and it goes up and I follow it. Dad had all kinds of picture frames that held black-and-white photos of obscure relatives or relatives who became obscure on the windowsills and hutches and almost anything with a flat, stable surface. He told me all their stories once, and I tried to listen and remember, but they’re gone. After Dad died, Mom didn’t take down or hide any of the pictures. She took to adding to the collection with random black-and-white photos she’d find at yard sales and antique shops. She filled the walls with them. Every couple of months, she moved and switched all the pictures around too, so we didn’t know who our obscure relatives were and who were strangers. Nothing was labelled. Everyone had similar moustaches or wore the same hats and jackets and dresses and everyone was forgotten even though they were all still there. I can’t help but think hidden in the stash of pictures were the old gods, and they’ve always been watching me.
The path in the rubble continues to expand. My crawl has become a walking crouch. There are hard lefts and rights, and I can’t go too fast as I almost fall into a deep drop. Maybe it’s the drop I shouldn’t be concerned about. What if I should be going down instead of up? The piled rubble implies a bottom. There’s no guarantee there’s a top. What if she did hear the old gods but her sense of direction was all messed up? What if they’re below us? Maybe that’s fine too.
I continue to climb and I try to concentrate. Thinking of the picture frame helps. In our house there was a picture of a young man in an army uniform standing by himself on a beach, shirt sleeves rolled over his biceps. Probably circa-WWII but we didn’t know for sure. He had an odd smirk, and like the Mona Lisa’s it always followed me. I also thought his face looked painted on, and at the same time not all there, like it would float away if you stopped looking, so I stared at it, a lot. If I had to guess, I’d say that’s the picture in my back pocket.
My crouch isn’t neces
sary anymore and now I’m standing and level and the darkness isn’t so dark. There are outlines and shapes, and weak light. My feet shuffle on a thin carpet. I avoid the teeth of a ruined escalator. I’m dizzy and my mouth tastes like tinfoil. There’s a distant rumble and the bones of everything rattle and shake loose dust. She was right. The old gods are here. I imagine they are beautiful and horrible, and immense, and alien because they are all eyes or mouths or arms and they move the planets and stars around. I take the picture frame out of my pocket and clutch it to my chest. It’s a shield. It’s a teddy bear. I found it between floors. There’s a jagged opening in the ruined building around me and I walk through it.
I emerge into an alien world. I’m not where I used to be. This is the top of the ruined building, or its other bottom. The air here is thick and not well. Behind me there is a section of the building’s second or other foundation that is still intact. My eyes sting and my vision is blurry, but the sky is red and there are mountains of glass and mountains of brick and mountains of metal and I stand in the valley. Nothing grows here. There are eternal fires burning without smoke. Everything is so large and I am so small. There are pools of fire and a layer of grey ash on the ground and mountains. I’m alone and there’s just so much space and it’s beautiful, but horrible too because I can’t make any sense of it and there’s too much space, too much room for possibility, anything can happen here. I shouldn’t be here. She was right not to follow me because I climbed through the rubble in the wrong direction and I think about going back, but then I see the old gods.
I don’t know how she heard them. They’re as alien or other as I imagined but not grand or powerful. They’re small and fragile, like me. There is one old god between the mountains and it walks slowly toward me. The old god is naked and sloughs its dead skin, strips hanging off its fingers and elbows. Its head is all red holes and scaly, patchy skin. The old god must be at the end, or maybe the beginning, of a metamorphosis. There is another kneeling at the base of the mountain of glass. The old god’s back is all oozing boils and blisters. Its hands leave skin and bloody prints on the mountain. It speaks in a language of gurgles and hard consonants that I do not understand. The old god is blessing or damning everything it touches. I don’t know if there is a difference. I find more old gods lying about, some are covered in ash, and they look like the others but they are asleep and dreaming their terrible dreams. And she was right again; they are all suffering. I didn’t think they were supposed to suffer like this.
I walk and it’s so hard to breathe but I shouldn’t be surprised given where I am. There’s too much space, everything is stretched out, and I’m afraid of the red sky. Then I hear her voice. Her falling dust in my ears. She’s behind me somewhere, maybe standing at the edge of our felled building and this other world. She asks me to tell the old gods that I’m sorry I forgot them. My voice isn’t very loud and my throat hurts, but I tell them I am sorry. I ask her if I’m the small child in the city looking for my mother in her one-line story. She tells me the old gods have names: Dresden and Hiroshima and Nagasaki. She knows the language of the old gods and I know the words mean something but it’s beyond my grasp, like the seconds previously passed, and they all will be forgotten like those pictures, and their stories, in my mother’s house.
I’m still clutching the found picture frame to my chest. There’s a ringing in my ears and my stomach burns. The old god walking toward me spews a gout of blood, then tremors wrack its body. Flaps of skin peel off and fall like autumn leaves. Change is always painful. I take the frame off my chest and look at it. Focusing is difficult. There’s no picture. It’s empty. There’s only a white sticker on the glass that reads $9.99. I feel dizzy and I can’t stay out here much longer. It’s too much and minutes and hours pass with me staring at the empty picture frame, and how wrong I was, how wrong I am.
There’s a great, all-encompassing, white light that momentarily bleaches the red sky and I shield my eyes with the empty frame. Then there’s a rumble that shakes the planet, and well beyond the mountains that surround me a great grey building reaches into the red sky. They’re building it so fast, too fast, and that’s why it’ll eventually fall down because they aren’t taking their time, they’re not showing care. It’s still an awesome sight despite what I know will happen to it. The top of the building billows out, like the cap of a mushroom, and I try to yell, “Stop!” because they are constructing the building’s second foundation in the sky. The building won’t be anchored to anything; the sky certainly won’t hold it. It’ll fall. I don’t want to watch it fall. I can’t. So I turn away.
She speaks to me again. She tells me to leave this place and come back. I do and I walk, trying to avoid the gaze of the old gods. They make me feel guilty. But they aren’t looking at me. They cover their faces. They’re afraid of the great light. Or maybe they’re just tired because they’ve seen it all before. I walk back to our ruined building, but she’s not at the opening. She’s already climbing back down. I’ll follow. I’ll climb back down to our space between floors and bring her the picture frame. I’ll tell her it’s a picture of my Dad in the yard with flannel and his poop-scoop.
I ease back into the rubble, dowsing paths and gaps, climbing down, knowing eventually down will become up again. Or maybe I’ll tell her it’s a picture of that army guy I didn’t know, him and his inscrutable Mona Lisa smirk. Did he have the confidence and bravado of immortality or was he afraid of everything? She won’t be able to see the picture so I won’t really be lying to her. The picture will be whatever I tell her it’ll be. I won’t tell her about the new giant building, the one that was grey and has a foundation in the sky.
The gaps in the rubble narrow quickly and everything is dark again. I once asked Mom why we kept all those old, black-and-white pictures and why she still bought more, and why all the walls and shelves of our house were covered with old photos and old faces, everyone anonymous, everyone dead, and she told me that they were keepsakes, little bits of history, she liked having history around, then she changed her mind and said, no, they were simply reminders. And I asked reminders of what? And she didn’t say anything but gave me that same Mona Lisa smile from the photograph, but I know hers was afraid of everything.
The picture is in my back pocket again. I am going to tell her that everyone who was ever forgotten is in the picture. We’ll be in the picture too, so we won’t forget again.
I’m crawling and the tunnel ahead will narrow. I can feel the difference in the air. There is another rumble above me and the bones of everything shake again, but I won’t see that horrible light down here. I’ll be safe. I wonder if I should’ve tried to help them. But what could I have done? I suppose, at the very least, I could’ve told the old gods that there is no light between floors.
Headstones in Your Pocket
The sun is high but it feels low, its heat close and heavy enough to push heads down and slump shoulders. Border Patrol Agent Joe Marquez runs his hand along the tractor-trailer and chips of white paint break off and crumble to dust under his fingertips like dried leaves from a dead houseplant. There are rustling noises inside the truck, trapped spirits, humanity in a tin can. He wonders if they’ll emerge in any better shape than the trailer’s paint job.
Two agents pin the driver against the truck’s chrome grille. He yells, claiming the hot chrome burns his skin. The agents don’t care, don’t say anything while they handcuff him. The smuggler is priority one. The cargo can wait.
Joe jogs the length of the trailer and yells ahead, “Let’s go, get those doors open, now!”
Local commuters and smugglers and immigrants know the Tubac checkpoint’s schedule. The checkpoint is thirty miles south of Tucson and thirty miles north of Nogales and the Mexico-US border. It was supposed to be closed at this mid-afternoon hour, but the Border Patrol office in Tucson, which prominently features a photo of John Wayne (circa The Alamo) on its wall, received an anonymous tip, a ti
p that turned out to be true.
One agent turns the rusted handle and throws open the trailer’s doors while another agent aims his automatic rifle. Heat, sweat, and a low, desperate collected conversation rush out of the trailer and into the surrounding desert. There is no air conditioning and the temperature inside is more than 110 degrees. Flashlights penetrate the darkness and reveal a mass of bodies, scores of men picking up their heads but closing and hiding their eyes, holding out empty hands.
They’ll be unarmed, they will not hurt anyone, and they’ll have nothing on them. All will be processed for deportation. Joe has been a Border Patrol Agent for two years and has witnessed the same sorry scene at least twice a month.
The Tubac checkpoint is a temporary one, with its portable lights and generators resting on the shoulder of I-19, alongside its incendiary local politics. The suburbanites don’t want a fixed checkpoint because checkpoint towns become a de-facto second border. The fear is that smugglers and immigrants and other dangerous (non-white) criminals would use their sleepy little towns as waystations, drug factories, and shoot ’em ups. The Border Patrol’s Tucson sector comprises almost the entire Arizona-Mexico border and is the only sector without at least one fixed checkpoint.
Agents separate the fifty men into groups of ten. The men have been reduced to a task to be divvied up. They are sweaty, exhausted, and frightened, but everyone makes it out of the trailer alive and conscious. Joe’s group of ten stands in a line and with their hands held out and open although he did not tell them to do so.
Joe pats down his men. The third man in line has something in the front left pocket of his jeans. Joe says, “¿Cuál es su nombre?” being rigidly formal in the request, Joe’s intent is to give a measure of respect and dignity, but he knows it could very well be interpreted as one of la migra flaunting his position.
In the Mean Time Page 15