by Ron Arias
“I said come back tomorrow.”
“Then could you tell me if there’s a bus that comes through here?”
“Maybe.”
“How’s that?”
“It depends. Maybe a flat tire, maybe an accident, maybe it rains . . . maybe the driver doesn’t feel like working.”
Gabriela watched the shiny metal file scratch back and forth. On the counter, a thick roll of tickets propped up an open comic book filled with colorful illustrations depicting what looked like romance stories.
“Do you know where the buses leave from . . . that is, when they are no accidents and the drivers want to drive?”
“You think I’m stupid.”
“What?”
“That I don’t know things.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Well, you’re right. I got an empty head.”
Gabriela’s eyes opened wide.
“I do. It’s because of this place. People come here for one reason and then they leave. No one wants to stay. They go look at the ruins and the famous cave and then they leave as fast as they can. Like there’s a disease and they don’t want to breathe the air.”
Gabriela listened politely, nodding as the woman made a stinky-smell face.
“Why don’t you stay a few days? Don’t be like everyone else.”
“Really, I’ve got to leave.”
“Tell me what’s happening outside. I mean outside this place.”
Gabriela stepped back. “What about the bus?”
The woman stabbed the nail file into the counter top. “Tomorrow morning about ten. It leaves from here.”
“Thanks.”
Gabriela had already visited the ruins, had walked the mile along the creek bank to see the fallen stones, bought a cold soda from a grizzled vendor who stood by the “sacred” spring and listened to the sales pitch of a local shirtless boy who promised to lead her beyond the burial caves. It was there, he said, that the first human inhabitants of the New World discovered the miraculous tunnel to “the other side.”
Gabriela finished swallowing the overly sweetened soda. “What’s on the other side?”
“A paradise,” the boy said.
“No.”
“Yes!”
“How come there’s nothing in the guide book about a tunnel?”
“It’s a secret.”
“Just show me the caves.”
“You’ll be sorry.”
“The caves, let’s go.”
Gabriela followed the boy along the bottom of a chalky granite cliff. There were no other visitors; she had seen no other tourist in town. “How far to the caves?”
“Pretty soon,” the boy said and skipped ahead on the dirt path.
That’s when Gabriela, suddenly feeling an odd hyperawareness, stopped and said she was going back to the ruins. She spun around and hurried along, sensing the boy and who-knows-who-else trailing her. She heard him calling for her to stop and wait for him. But now she was running. By the time she reached the spring where the water bubbled out from among the blocks of stone, she realized she was alone—the old man selling sodas was gone. She heard footsteps behind, whirled around and faced her young guide.
“I have to go,” he said, his eyes darting beyond her and to the sides. “You’ll give me something?” he said, extending an open hand.
“For what?”
“I brought you here. You almost saw paradise.”
“Fine,” Gabriela said, smiling as she pinched up paper currency from the pocket of her jeans, gave it to him then watched the slender figure disappear into the brush.
Later, when Gabriela was about to leave the train station counter, she was warned about the bus drivers. “They all drink a lot,” the big, congested clerk said. “Stick with trains. They stay on the tracks.”
“Right.”
“You want to stay on the tracks. On the tracks, sweetie, on the tracks I always say.”
Gabriela left the repetitive, phlegmy ticket seller without a glance back. Even in the street under the heavy gray sky, she felt a tightness in the air, a narrowing of spaces, the certainty of tropical plants growing too fast. How could she escape the suffocation of all the incessant greenness, of vines and leaves and weeds, of cobblestone and dry, crusted streets, of thick white walls, of the curious, blank stares of strangers under the shade of wrinkled hands?
“Postcards!” a short man in a patchy shirt and trousers shouted. “Buy some postcards—or just one!”
He approached the sweaty stranger and with one hand, in a lazy flourish, he made a rainbow fan of the postcards, all of the same scene: the ancient structure of stones with the spring of water pooling in the center toward the bottom.
“Pick a postcard, young lady.”
The vendor’s hair sprouted at the top of his head in dirt-colored tufts. One eye peered off to the side and his blotchy, wet forehead came close, almost touching her arm. He grinned and displayed a grotesque line of stained teeth. Gabriela remained still. The man gave out a sudden, hollow laugh, then walked away counting each postcard as if counting his fingers.
Gabriela stopped under a dying oak tree that tilted over one corner of the plaza. Above the huge, scarred trunk a few patches of leaves drooped motionless from the only live branches. Leaning against the tree, she scanned the plaza, waiting for movement on the streets or in the shadows. Occasionally figures moved across the plaza or along the fronts of the low buildings. A noisy, dusty car bounced by, followed a while later by an even noisier, dustier pickup truck.
“Why go?” Roberto had asked her at home. “Why go there?”
“I don’t know, why stay here?” she had answered, then added, “I have to get away. I can’t take it anymore.”
Her boyfriend had placed a hand on her forearm. “Move out, get an apartment somewhere.” “No, I’ve got to go away.”
“Stay with me. I’ll make room.”
“What for? So I can call her every day, listen to the same thing? She doesn’t talk to anybody else—not him, not my brothers, nobody but me. How sick is that?”
Gabriela had walked to the window where she could see the patio. She hated to explain, especially to Roberto, whose patient, probing eyes were like pig snouts burrowing in the garbage. Eventually he would discover something and she didn’t want to explain, didn’t want to say she was tired of watching her mother plunge a knife into the silence of a man she had loved until he changed into a stranger.
“No, no questions now, Roberto. I don’t want your hands and your patience or your bed . . . maybe later but not now. I don’t know what it is but not now.”
“Why?” he had asked again.
Gabriela had wiped her moist hands on her hips, pressing hard on the cotton dress as if she were squeezing blood into her loins. “Not now!” she had told him. “I can’t tell you but I have to leave.”
“What about your job?”
“They’ll get a substitute teacher.”
Gabriela had expected a smile. “Say something easy, Roberto. Make it seem perfectly normal for a young woman to escape into nowhere. Explain it to me, since maybe you think you know. Tell me about this silly, freed bird that refuses to rest even when she sleeps.”
Roberto had been silent; he did smile but only for an instant, perhaps a hurt smile. Gabriela couldn’t tell because at that moment she saw her father’s car swing into the driveway. On cue Roberto had given her a quick kiss on the cheek, waved goodbye and left by the back door.
The rabid dog spun into the plaza, followed by a group of screaming, raggedy kids. With sticks and rocks they chased him toward the big tree in the plaza. The closer the dog came, the harder Gabriela pressed her back against the rough surface of the tree trunk. When it seemed the dog would not turn and would either smash into her legs or leap onto her chest, it swerved and the boys careened around the tree and continued the chase.
The rest of the afternoon, Gabriela sat on her bed in the hotel, sipping from a bottle of cheap rum she had pur
chased on her way back from the ruins. With her notebook on her knees she was trying to state her impressions of the trip so far. She had purposely omitted bringing books to read. “I want to turn myself inside-out,” she had told her mother. “Where I’m going I don’t want to think because there’s too much to see, to do.”
Gabriela struggled with the simplest words, afraid to describe what she had found. The place of the ruins was all she could manage, but there were no people. And the path to paradise had to have been something else in a boy’s scheme or dream.
At night the rain began, softly at first, then with the weight of a cloudburst. In the morning—although the daylight barely cast a shadow in the room—the rain continued. For three days the water came down.
Gabriela ate her meals in silence with the other guests. A light bulb dangled from a taped cord above the long, food-stained table. At dinner during the first night of the rain, the hotel owner, in his typically crude manner, announced that the four guests should eat very slowly and make the meal last as long as possible, “. . . since there’s nothing else to do.”
The two Spaniards, older men with grim expressions, ignored the comment. But Gabriela and the nervous shoe salesman turned to watch the thick-bodied man swagger into the soot-blackened kitchen, “to encourage the cook in her labors.” When it rained this hard, he had warned, the train never came and the buses and trucks almost never passed the first mudslide. The Spaniards grumbled and went off to play checkers over drinks, and the shoe salesman politely excused himself, saying he wanted to read his Bible.
On the second day of the rain, Gabriela wrote five pages of scenery descriptions in a jerky scrawl. The words seemed cramped with odors and sounds, the taste of fruit and the movement of flesh. Toward the end of this entry, the hotel owner crept onto the fifth page, and though she tried to keep him from her thoughts, slowly she filled the last paragraph with his sweat and dirt and rough, ugly pleas for a few minutes to lie beside her. Beer-bloated and with clumsy fingers, he chipped away at her shell like an amateur who knows the pearl is inside but chooses to bash away until it’s there, in the palm of his hand.
By the afternoon of the third day, Gabriela stopped writing. She ripped the notebook and dropped the pages into the metal washbasin, followed by a lit match. Now there was only fire, the sound of rain on the metal roof, as well as the image of the mad dog, twitching, finally silent.
Gabriela snapped the bed sheets free of the bedbugs, beat the mattress surface, and then neatly tucked in the two sheets. After removing her clothes, she stretched herself out on the bed—legs together, hands by her thighs—and waited.
For a long while she waited. Then they came. One by one, two or three at a time, she didn’t know. But they came. She could feel them. And still she waited, letting them bite, waiting, watching the room turn dark with the coming of night.
Awakening
Despite three cups of strong coffee, Martin Medina began to nod off. When his chin thumped down on his chest, he jerked back and blinked himself awake. The speaker had just finished, so Medina joined the clapping. Soon he began to drift again. A Los Angeles book dealer, he was in London at a conference of antiquarians, feeling powerless against the effects of jet lag and the comfort of a cushioned seat in the middle of the sixth row.
As soon as the next speaker was introduced, he began to squirm, tightening and relaxing his buttocks, a sleep-fighting trick he’d learned in grammar school. But all his pinching and squeezing did not work. The voice droned on about damage to paper and parchment and how to combat acid damage, which Medina heard as sasid samidge. And the word map sounded seductively like nap.
“Excuse me,” his neighbor to the right whispered.
Medina turned to face the pointy pink nose of a white-haired woman. Thinking he might have snorted or snored, he apologized.
“Nonsense,” the woman said, handing him the folded newspaper that had slipped from his knees. “Wish I could escape as easily. The chap’s a bit of a bore.”
Medina smiled and glanced down at the Telegraph classifieds on his lap. His wife Sandra had gone off to tour museums, and he was supposed to meet her for dinner at the hotel by seven. So it was a matter of staying awake until then.
Near-sighted, he removed his wire-rimmed glasses and began skimming the notices. He was hoping for anything interesting—a funny word, an odd typeface, anything to kill the speaker’s monotone delivery. Toward the bottom of the page he spotted a three-line announcement of a 10 a.m. estate sale in Greenwich. Squinting, he reread the tiny print, dwelling on the words collection of old and rare books. Suddenly alert, he leaned toward the pointy nose and announced, “Gotta go!”
The woman nodded sharply and whispered, “Yes-yes, by all means.”
Clutching the newspaper in one hand, Medina stood.
“Sorry.”
“No need to explain,” the woman said. “Nature calls.”
Medina thought of explaining but stepped in front of her and moved on, careful not to step on toes or bump knees. When he reached the aisle, he pivoted and bolted for the exit.
A while later, he emerged from the North Greenwich tube station into the warm air of late spring and waved down an empty taxi. After getting in, he offered up a scrap of the newspaper page with the estate-sale circled.
The driver, a young woman with wild red hair, took the notice and read it. “Right,” she said and gave it back.
“How long will it take to get there?”
“Depends.”
“Excuse me?”
“On if you let me read your ’aid.”
“What?”
“Your ’aid,” she said and handed him a wrinkled business card.
Medina took the card, pushed his bifocals snugly onto the bridge of his nose and read the words in the center: Mary Clear, Phrenologist. A Dagenham address and telephone number rippled across the bottom.
He stared at the name and title. He’d never met a phrenologist.
“I read ’aids,” the woman explained. “’Finology?”
“Yes, I know,” Medina answered, returning the card.
“Well?”
Medina glanced at his watch, which showed twelve minutes to noon. “I just want to go to this address.”
“Suit yourself.”
“How long will it take to get there?”
“Not long.”
He slid back on the seat and closed his eyes as the cab accelerated, braked, turned, accelerated, slowed, bumping along. He and Mary Clear were both quiet, the street noise of engines and tires on the pavement coming strongest from her open window. He sat up and looked at the billow of Orphan Annie curls now partially blocking his view of the road ahead. He was about to ask how much longer it would take to reach the address he’d shown her when the cab swerved to the left, slowed and stopped at the curb.
“Well?” she said.
“Well what?”
“Your ’aid?”
“We there?”
“Almost but I ’afta read it first.”
“I don’t think . . . ”
“Please.”
“No.”
“Only take a minute.”
Mary Clear shifted her body around and looked at Medina. “Sir! A few minutes—for practice.”
“Practice?”
“I’m in training.”
Medina removed his glasses and bent forward to retrieve the piece of newspaper that had fallen by his feet. He intended to read the address for her but then he felt her fingers on the crown of his head. Instantly, a pleasurable wave descended through his body; thoughts faded to sensations.
“All right,” she said with a perky, Cockney lilt, “so whot we ’av ’ere?”
Medina listened to her describe his traits. As her fingertips moved over his nearly naked dome, he wondered “what harm could she do? All hokum anyway, a kind of cranial palm reading. She’s a student in training. Let the girl train, practice all she wants.”
Her hands moved off the top of his h
ead and onto the furrows above his eyebrows, then around to the thinning, gray sides of his temples. He heard in her cheerful voice the words “spontaneous . . . curious . . . vigorous.” The pleasing patter continued as her fingers inch-wormed their way over his head, pausing now and then before moving on.
Head tilted forward, eyes closed, Medina dreamily wondered how he must look to anyone walking by. He pictured the frizzy-haired figure kneeling on the front seat, her rump facing the dashboard, arms extended, hands busy.
Her voice now turned soothing. The last word he heard before dozing off was, “lucky.”
Medina’s motionless forehead was resting on the top of the seat when he heard an insistent, “Wake up, sir! Wake up!”
Mary Clear tugged at one ear. Medina raised his head. His eyes began to adjust to the sudden light, and then the young face, all freckles and concern, came into focus.
“Your features are balanced, even keeled,” she announced.
Medina smiled, thinking Sandra should hear this. After almost half a lifetime with her, he knew his wife would never say his ship was steady, especially since his business had started to list badly—actually, to fail and head to the bottom.
In the past several years his bookstore had barely turned a profit, losing out first to the chain stores, then to online sales and beyond that, to the entire onslaught of the electronic world. His response was paralysis and emotional benders in which he would read trancelike for days on end. He was no longer interested in selling books or talking the trade with his two employees. In dealing with customers, some of them longtime regulars, he could no longer muster enthusiasm for bookish chitchat.
Medina moped, ignoring his usual morning jog in Griffith Park. His son, a lawyer in the district attorney’s office, tried and failed to argue him out of his funk. Movies, dinners out, visits with the grandkids, an overnighter to Catalina Island—whatever he and Sandra did, Medina’s mood remained gloomy. His son urged him to write fiction again, making it sound as simple as opening a door, which in a way had been bolted and nailed shut for years. As a young man he had published three short stories and wrote two unpublished novels of adventures he never had. Medina scoffed at his son’s suggestion, saying his imagination had wandered off a long time ago. Now, he preferred to sit and read.