by Sara Faring
I’ll be real: He’s what my brain-dead half sister, Liese, would call a phenomenal catch, like, Bachelor-worthy, before even speaking two words to him. But his angular face scares me. It’s cruel in its symmetry, if that makes any sense at all—like the God that made him perfected his glossy exterior as if to make up for skimping on a bargain-basement interior. I knew one too many people like that.
“Oh God, I’m so sorry,” I say, flustered by our closeness. Force of habit. Despite all my colossal screwups, despite being here, I’m unfailingly polite in person, always blushing at strangers, no matter the savage thoughts in my head. And it infuriates me now more than ever. The dude stops, as if he’s heard a whisper, but after a second—after a haughty grimace, the kind of expression you see on people who demand managers when coffee isn’t scalding hot—he stoops to pick up a sheet of paper on the carpet that I hadn’t seen. It reads: Yesi’s Lesson Plan, followed by carefully printed notes in a beautiful cursive hand.
“Peasants,” he says to himself, crumpling the sheet into a ball. Bitterness pinches his face, and boredom deadens it immediately. He keeps moving, walking with the sort of swagger you have if you’ve known only great comfort in your life. One comfort being the absolute and total certainty that you’re important. If they made hazard signs for assholes, this guy would be the poster child, and I would be the hoodlum scratching x’s into his eyes.
I could do almost anything next. And yet, I follow him. A part of me wants to scare the shit out of him if only I could figure out how. We go down the steps at the end of the corridor, through a stone hallway, up a carpeted stairway, and into a royal-blue bedroom with a jaw-dropping vista.
And I recognize it.
It’s the Patagonia of my dreams, ripped straight from one of those bizarro Nat Geo specials they used to screen in middle school—fields of windblown wildflowers unfurling before silvery peaks, their blooms like stars studding the night sky. A shock of blue-white glacier rising from the depths, the kind intrepid explorers probably crunch across with snowshoes or crampons or whatever it is they wear (the closest I got to that kind of equipment was passing a ripped guy in a Patagonia vest on the Third Street Promenade once). It’s a thousand times more vivid than anything I could have ever imagined—my dreams remade in Technicolor. I stumble a little on nothing but air, feeling an invisible knot in my invisible throat as my breath is taken. Argentina. As a kid, I watched Mama wordlessly paint this view dozens of times, dabbing in each layer with deference, a respect I now understand. Leo DiCaprio would lose his mind, seeing these glaciers before global warming melted them. Ice—great sheets of pale blue, jagged and milky against an indigo sky. Snowy mountains in the distance, peaks puncturing the haze, and enormous hunchbacked cumulonimbus clouds billowing in to meet them. Impossibly majestic—it brings the Zapuche stories I heard as a kid to life, each and every one of them set here.
So I’m here, I think, for the umpteenth time.
The whitewalker cracks a window and lights a hand-rolled cigarette, coolly observing the expanse. He leans forward, angling for a view of the steps, and I follow.
There’s a girl down below.
She’s a little bit older than me, I think. Nineteen, twenty. She has softly curled brown hair that falls to her waist in a curtain, framing a nut-brown face. She climbs up the hill of stones below us, wiping sweat from her brow, with a look of total determination on her face, like she’s that fierce Patagonian explorer I imagined. But when she glimpses the house, she breaks into a goofy grin, ditches her bag, and punches her fists into the air, like she couldn’t care less if anyone’s watching. It disarms me, makes me smile for the first time in a while, at no one at all. Hmm.
The whitewalker watches her like he’s a cat and she’s the mouse he plans on batting around until she’s good and bloodied. Peasants, I hear echoed in my head.
“Stop it,” I say, snapping at him. He doesn’t hear me.
As she approaches the door, she evens out her shirt and hair, composing herself again—the picture of decorum. I know immediately that she’s a teacher, but I wonder what she teaches since she’s so young. She knocks politely once. She waits a beat, folding and refolding her hands, and knocks again.
No one answers her—I would, if my crystal hands could get purchase on the doorknob. She flits about the steps, craning her neck to see into windows. She hasn’t seen the whitewalker yet, for whatever reason. He takes long drags from his cigarette and sneers at her, and I want to smack him across the head. I jab him on the shoulder instead—my finger darts into the squeegee-flesh of his muscle with practically zero resistance—and all he does is shiver. But that minuscule movement of his sends a jolt through me. So you can feel me. But can he hear me?
“Answer the door, fool,” I hiss.
He doesn’t. He licks his lip, pulls out a book titled Tropic of Cancer, and languorously turns the pages, without a single look at the words. He tears out a sheet of the book to roll a cigarette. I punch at him repeatedly, but the magic that had him noticing my touch before has worn off. Minutes pass as I creatively try to shock him and scare him to no avail, but my fingers do dive deeper into his flesh, and I wonder if I could wedge myself into his overtoned body. Call out to her through him. As I’m hovering around his shoulders to try, he opens the window, and leans over the edge.
Outside, the girl’s slumped on the steps, eyes closed, chin in hands. She must be so exhausted from the trek up, and now she’s been abandoned on the steps as the darkening clouds encroach upon the house. About to get soaked.
Somewhere inside the house, a bell rings—a pleasurable rolling tickle. Whitewalker registers the noise before looking down at the girl again. He’s smoking a new cigarette; he leans forward and ashes its flaming butt on the girl. He grins so maliciously at her that I expect horns to sprout from his head, and then he pitches the entire damn cigarette at her.
It lands near her back, ash end scorching the stone. Inches from the ends of her hair, which blow closer with the breeze. What a game—singe the new girl. Not even I would try this kind of crap on my worst days. Seething, I launch myself out the window, like a knight in crystalline armor, intent upon helping her, God knows why. Her fist-pumping, maybe.
I land gracefully beside her, Olympic gymnast–status. I swear she smells like sweet bakery bread—the first scent I can kind of pick up on. I stop myself from savoring it (creepy) and tap her on the shoulder.
“Wake up,” I whisper. Again, God knows why.
She shakes me off, as if roused by a fly.
“Oh, come on. Wake up.”
I hover a hand over her cheek to slap her awake. But that’s when I pause.
When she’s still, her eyes shut, the hard edge melts from her features. She’s gentle-looking and delicate, like a fawn, with eyelashes to match and a dusting of freckles. As my hand meets her flushed skin, she slaps a hand over mine, through mine, and I feel her clasping the area between palm and wrist, that delicate spot that sends a tremor through me when touched.
She opens her eyes, catching mine for a moment. My invisible pair. It’s as if, in that gummy layer between sleep and full consciousness, she can see me, the pained and desperate and lonely and lost me. And if the harshness of the whitewalker’s expression scared me, the tenderness of hers is … soothing.
Shit.
I know that she can’t see me. But I still fall back, self-conscious. And she cranes her neck up, up toward the window I jumped from a moment ago.
“I know you’re there!” she shouts at the window, coming to her feet, all that intensity rushing back.
Whitewalker pokes his head out. “Forgot the password?” he asks.
“Oh, seriously, shut up,” I say to no one. And I thought I couldn’t hate him more. He watches her with a churlish grin, the kind that the dangerous Casanova would flash the ingenue in Mama’s telenovelas before claiming he loved her. Do you hear this asshole? Mama would say, grabbing my hand and cackling. Don’t fall for his BS, Maria Eugenia. Don’t do
it. He’s hollow. Let him become a bad memory, girl.
“Did you spit on me?” she asks. Spit? Did she think my touch was him spitting on her? I cross my crystal arms.
The pink in her cheeks ripens to red. At first, I think she finds the dickhead attractive, because she looks at him the way my sister, Liese, looked at her meathead husband (He-who-must-not-be-named) before he impregnated her with his demon seed. But her jaw sets.
“How’s this for a password, you bastard?” she says, flipping him off. I laugh out loud. If only I’d done the same to every idiot I’d met, instead of cursing them in my head and babbling Oh, wow, sorry for existing aloud. It’s less than ideal timing for her gesture, though, because the door before us opens, and I swear those black clouds scoot in and settle overhead as a scowling specter of a woman appears in the frame.
The girl stumbles to her feet, blood draining from her face. But she composes herself quickly, looking unruffled as can be, if a little paler. I feel an alien swell of pride and admiration. I follow her into the house and help her with her bag as best as I can because I can tell she’s beat, and the scary woman deposits her by a door marked with the numeral 7. The same door I came through upon my arrival. Fate. She takes a deep breath, a hopeful smile wavering on her face.
“Let’s do this,” she whispers to herself as she opens the door and flips a switch, flooding the room with light. Another whiff of bakery bread—it’s the smell of the crispy-flaky facturas Mama would sometimes bake at home for breakfast, plus a hint of caramel flan. You better inhale these before I do, she would say. They give me life.
I stop.
Not because I’m worried the girl will see me in the light (ha), nor because I’m super concerned about her privacy. (I grew up with a Latin mom and siblings who wouldn’t leave me alone, and I have far too few boundaries, okay?)
I stop because a vibrant flicker of excitement—of joy I thought lost to me forever—interrupts my thoughts. So sharp and bright and sweet I could cry.
It whispers that there could be a story waiting for me here in Patagonia.
It whispers that this girl could be in it.
Let’s do this.
Snap out of it, Angel. To have thoughts like this now is traitorous, cruel, wrong.
But I can’t help that I have a sick history of tending to my weird fantasies like rose beds, fantasies that feel too rooted in something real. Sometimes, in the glow I felt after Mama told me bedtime stories, I imagined my Argentine relatives—the ones I never met, the ones I couldn’t be sure existed, the ones Mama must have left behind—chattering around me like protective fairies, gently teasing me, asking me to get off my ass and help with the cooking, laughing together. I could feel our bond, our closeness, a loyalty that would never wither and die, even though none of it was real. These stories I told myself kept me going through the dark spots. At least for a while.
I shudder, waiting for the feeling to pass. She shuts the door behind her, and I don’t follow her inside.
Angel. Get Charon’s warning through your thick-ass skull.
Charon explicitly told me not to become attached to anyone here. Because I’m not like them, no matter what I believe. They can’t see me; they can’t know me. Our kinship is all in my head—it’s even more intangible than I am.
* * *
Charon is my unwilling asshole of a spirit-mentor, the Snape to my Harry, if I was a loser who thought that way (I am—don’t tell Charon). I met him in the cloud house, a halfway house for spirits built by a cheeky Zapuche god with too much time on his hands and tucked in the sky above the ice.
The first time I saw Charon, I was a little put off, to be honest, because he looked like the worst kind of crackhead bum—the sort of guy Liese wrinkles her nose at on street corners—slumped on his cloud chair inside the cloud house, his lumpy potbelly draped with a stained tank top (it looks like a soiled bandage, but he treats it like a Christmas tree decoration), a scraggly, pube-like beard, and two rodenty-gray eyes that either scrunch up to judge or widen with mania. He caught me staring at him even though I was a crystal blur, and he set down his runny cheesesteak. He stood, ranting in a booming voice as his “unique” form of introduction, spittle and juices running down his chin:
There Charon stands, who rules the dreary coast,
A sordid god: Down from his hairy chin
A length of beard descends, uncombed, unclean;
His eyes, like hollow furnaces on fire;
A girdle, foul with grease, binds his obscene attire.
I know now that he meant to freak me out, but I couldn’t stop staring at the legitimate clown-car crash of his performance.
“I can tell you’re watching me, scumdog millionaire,” he said, in more of a bark than anything else. “You’re not invisible to me.” He ripped into his cheesesteak with gray teeth. I didn’t ask him where he got it, nor if I could taste it, even though I wanted to (I know, gross).
“Uh, who are you?” I asked aloud, before wondering if he could hear me. “And why can I see you?”
“I’m fucking Charon. For fuck’s sake.” He’s got a mouth on him. “I’m your spirit guide. Like the boatman across the river Styx.” He sighed. “Little turd hasn’t read the classics.”
“I played a Greek mythology RPG once,” I said.
“Let me guess. You played as…” He trailed off, squinting at me, and I felt self-conscious, wondering how much of me he could see.
“Hercules or Athena, depending on my mood.” Obvious hero choices, maybe, but I was scrawny and vulnerable once upon a time, so it was a pleasure to play someone strong, someone fierce.
“Ya don’t say.” He narrowed his eyes further and sucked his teeth with disdain—yet we’ve been semifriends ever since. He’s sort of a godlike presence, I would say. I mean, he’s definitively not God. He’s just uninterested and blasé and weird, and above it all, he carefully tends to his perverted sense of humor. And that’s how Catholic God acted toward me a lot of the time. Charon doesn’t leave the cloud house, but he is a treasure trove of information (practical and metaphysical) as juicy as his cheesesteaks. Even if he’s not the most eloquent.
“It’s going to be sick in the house,” he told me that day.
“Um, yeah,” I said, being meek and bland as always, with a decent lacquering of sarcasm that a stranger wouldn’t notice. “Sounds sick.”
“Show some respect,” Charon said, seeing right through me. “You being here and not in your own personal hell is all thanks to the Zapuche tribe. One of their goddamn shamans, to be specific.” He fought a lecherous grin, as if the shaman was an ex-lover whose warm skin he could still feel. “Now listen to me, kid. And listen good. Time is circular to the Zapuche—like a stream their spirits can dip into anywhere. It’s a gorgeous concept, isn’t it? Anyway, stop me if you know all of this”—but really don’t stop me, his eyes were telling me—“but this shaman, she cursed this pocket of land seized from the tribe by European colonizers during her lifetime, turning this spot into a frothy rapid, churning together the Other Place and their ruined world over and over and over again. So besides the average Zapuche spirits roaming around this place, there are Others from all ages, too—drawn here like bees to honey, like moths to a flame, like cockroaches to sweet, steaming piles of garbage. Dip in, dip out, dip in, dip out, but only as an Other, and only in this one stretch of metaphysically spumy stream—the only stretch left to Others. That is sick.”
“I think you’re mixing metaphors,” I said, even though I was devouring his every word. I knew I was lucky to be here—that it was an alternative to my personal hell.
He looked down his nose at me. “Did you even listen to a single word I said, you cockroach?”
Later I would know that calling me an insect was his way of expressing paternal affection. I am the pretty little cockroach Charon never had.
* * *
After I leave the nut-brown girl in her room, I shimmy through doors and walls to find more activity and end up in
a room with a thirty-foot table, covered in outrageous, steaming platters of food and intricately etched crystal pitchers of drink. A feast unlike any I’ve seen outside of illustrations of grandiose royal gatherings in history books. At least twenty sit at their places:
A tall, icy-blond woman at the head, rearranging her silverware with a precision belying her distress, which is tangible in the air around her. The specter who answered the door to her right, sucking in all air and heat and light. Whitewalker, frowning with boredom and guzzling great quantities of a beverage as deep and rich as wine. Beside him, a series of young girls, chattering among themselves, glistening and gleaming with too-perfect youth, like life-size Bratz dolls. One twirls her braids, staring into space. Another secretly carves an initial into the wood of the table by her leg. A couple press gloss to their lips and pout for invisible boys. There are ten little girls, if you include a tiny girl with pale ringlets, seated away from them, who seems to wither before them, not quite here, not quite there. She looks no different from the little girls farther down the table, except for this studied unease of hers.
A man with short, curly white hair and a faraway smile scribbles into a pad. A woman with cat-eye glasses twitches her nose, pupils darting from face to face. A second, wrinklier woman squirrels food into her napkin, then cracks her knuckles on the table to draw attention away from her lap. As if anyone would care if a fist’s worth of food disappeared from the overwhelming spread. Last, a flat-faced man with a neck the width of a fire hose snorts to himself. And there, an empty space. The new girl’s space.
They’re finishing their meal. They shovel food into their faces, as if they’re learning how to consume the slabs of meat. Even though their chewing is nasty, watching them makes me miss eating. I used to cook a lot with Mama, making a mess as we whipped up the sweet corn empanadas and gnocchi and milanesas she ate in her youth in Argentina. That food fed some part of her soul that I never came to know, hide it as she did.