22
If Maya hadn’t called, I don’t know when I’d have woken up – ten days later, probably.
‘You’re dead,’ she said, her voice low with fury.
‘Oh, hey, Maya.’ I slugged from my water flask and lay back on the pillows.
Motita coughed in the background.
‘Your reactionary, misogynist cat.’
The clunk on the line was Motita smacking herself against one of Maya’s cupboards.
‘You dumped her on me.’
‘Yeah, well, I also skipped the country, so there’s nothing you can do.’
‘What? Where are you?’
‘Uruguay.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘Yeah.’ I held up the phone. ‘Hear that? Uruguay.’
‘You have a lot of explaining to do. And even more apologising.’
‘I’m sorry, Maya. The Motita thing, it’s only for a few days, I swear.’
She didn’t say anything for a second. ‘You sound tired.’
Above the skylight the clouds had darkened, become a green ocean.
‘Dominic tell you?’
‘He just said you were OK. What happened?’
‘Remember your break-in?’
Maya didn’t say anything.
‘Something like that.’
A light patter started on the glass above my head. A voice rose in my head, a voice from eleven years ago, a voice that brought back a nape that had smelled of wealth, eyelids that had ticked under my lips like birds’ heartbeats.
‘Sucks, doesn’t it?’ said Maya. ‘I almost feel sorry for your cat now.’
‘Oh, don’t,’ I said. ‘That’s how she’ll get you.’
The white flakes stuck to the glass and didn’t melt. That numb, desert-trail emptiness I’d felt sitting at the wheel outside Abel Carranza’s house dropped over me again.
‘Do you want me to let you go?’ said Maya.
‘Yeah. I just have to take some photos.’
‘See you soon?’
‘Promise.’
You were right about the water-pressure. The blast lifted the blood and sweat and dirt from my skin, sent them swirling into nowhere, raising a steam thick as fog. In the mirror, my skin had colour in it again. Even the dark bags under my eyes had been scoured a fainter shade of purple.
You were sitting at the maple table when I came downstairs, stooped over the receipts, your hair shining dark blue in the light.
‘Well, hey, Lazarus,’ you said.
‘You didn’t want to go look at the snow?’
‘I’ll look in the morning,’ you said. ‘You going out in that?’
I still had Carlos’ jacket on. ‘Well, yeah. Warmest thing I have.’
You shook your head. ‘No, no.’ You got up from the table, walked behind the desk, and opened a closet. ‘Take this.’ You held out a long double-breasted wool trench coat. You pulled a mustard plaid scarf from the pocket. ‘We’re the same size.’ When you handed me the coat and scarf, you squeezed my shoulder. ‘Almost.’
‘Thanks.’ Your broad gold odour of gardenias washed around me when I buttoned on the coat. I headed for the door. ‘I’ll be back in a bit.’
‘Take your time. I’ll be here all night.’
What I wanted to say was, ‘I hope so’, but instead I just waved and went out into the shin-high fog and the snow’s oblique swirling punctuation.
The story was easy. Most people were kind of flattered, posing beside the names of their hotels or their restaurants or their casinos or whatever. None of the Porteños cared who knew about their dollar-runs.
By the time the orb-lamps on the main square glowed through the wet fog, and a red evening sun blotched the water, I had enough quotes to write up the snow story in a tiny café decked with nineteenth-century photos. Storm-noise and tide-hiss rinsed the windows, and, when my head nodded forward, I jerked from my doze to guttering candlelight, wishing the coffee was stronger, or spiked, or why not both.
‘Fuck this.’ I slid some money under the saucer and went out into the dark, down streets far from the tourist area, where dead ivy scrawled out the commemorative plaques, and the fanlights had been looted, and the balustrade pegs on the balconies lay keeled-over and poked through by cords of weed. Yellow plane-tree leaves drifted the curb, softening with the snowfall, and I slipped, and when I righted myself my foot caught a loose cobble and I went down hard on my shoulder. The strap of my satchel snapped and my laptop skidded out.
‘Fuck.’ The laptop was fine, but your coat was ruined, the sleeve all pulled and damp and muddy. ‘Just when I was all clean.’
The bruises on my ribs and my back rang with pain, and the cuts on my knees leaked blood into the one clean pair of jeans I had. Slowly I got to my feet and kept walking, the wind making swallowtails of your coat’s hem.
White-knuckling, they call it, when you’re sober but you don’t do meetings, and that’s because however hard you grip, your grip’s got to slip sometime, and down you’ll fall, all the way back down to the places you swore you’d never go again.
The snow was coming down hard now, and in that whipping cold every bar, every restaurant, every beer-ad glowed like the lights of a rescue boat.
Any one of them would have done, every one of them.
And I would have cracked, I know I would have, but those lights, they were too harsh, too yellow, when what I really wanted was to get lost in the mellow forty-watt glow of your hotel.
Meaning you saved me, kind of.
‘Fuck you, Carlos,’ I said, and chucked the flask of LSD away, then I ran through the snow – ribs burning, knees screaming – all the way back to you.
You’d moved to the couch by the time I got back, staring at the fire and pouring hot water from a Thermos into your maté cup.
‘I’m so sorry.’ I raised one arm. ‘Sleeve’s out of shape.’
You crossed the room and took the cuff between your fingers. ‘It’s just wet.’
‘But the mud.’
‘Andrew, I run a hotel – I know one or two dry-cleaners. It’s fine.’
‘I’m so embarrassed. I never do this.’
Taking your coat back from me, you saw my jeans and you made an ‘O’ of your mouth. ‘Ouch. That was a bad fall.’
‘Different fall.’
You looked at me and frowned. ‘What happened to you?’
Through the window the snowfall had become a storm. When a draught rocked the door it could have been Carlos’ ghost roaring to be let in.
You draped the coat on the armchair nearest to the fire. ‘Want to sit down for a bit?’ Then you sat back on the couch. ‘It’s miserable out there. Come dry off.’ For a second I wasn’t sure if I should join you on the couch, but then you held up the maté cup. ‘Thermos is still warm,’ you said, pouring out another cupful of hot water from your flask and holding the maté out to me.
‘Is it always so quiet?’ I sat down beside you and sucked a tart mouthful through the metal straw.
You laughed. ‘I wish.’
‘Keep it this way. Tell guests it’s cursed.’
‘I have heard of better business models than this. Oh, and before I forget.’ You collected an ashtray from the table and handed it to me.
‘Technically you’re not supposed to let me.’
‘Technically, I don’t really care.’ You took back the maté. ‘You’re all right, you know. Most of the people who come here, they’re real demanding.’
Dark chunked logs burned in the hearth.
‘Strange question,’ I said. ‘I knew this guy. Came here when he was a kid. Said he stayed at El Sur. You remember him?’
You frowned, sucking on the straw. ‘When?’
‘Oh, shit, like, seventeen years ago.’
You laughed. ‘See, that’s a problem. I was fourteen. And I’m from Rocha.’
‘Oh. Well. Worth a shot, I guess.’
‘What happened to your friend?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Not quite.’ I took the worn copy of Proceso from my satchel.
You took the magazine from my hand and looked at the date, then back up at me. ‘This isn’t so long ago.’ You flicked through the pages. ‘Jesus. What a sad time for Mexico. Seems like everyone has a tragedy in their lives.’
‘Yeah, well.’ I was slumped halfway down the couch now. ‘Call him mine.’
Another page turned. ‘That’s really hard,’ you said. ‘What was he like?’
My eyes crept towards the window. ‘A good guy, mostly. Troubled. But OK.’
‘You’re shaking.’
A sheet of ash slid from the log.
‘Yeah,’ I said, and swallowed, shutting my eyes. ‘I still … I see him.’
The magazine rustled shut. ‘When?’
‘Sometimes. Often. He’s –’ I huffed out a sigh, and when I blinked I saw Carlos’ poppy collar of bruises, the hole in his forehead, the bullet stigmata that marred his hands ‘– he’s very much like a ghost.’
‘You miss him,’ you said. ‘My grandmother saw my grandfather after he died. A lot at first. Then less, and less. And then once more, when she was dying, she said he’d come to say goodnight. Went the next day.’
‘You saying it’s normal?’
‘I’m saying it happens.’
‘I don’t want to be mad.’
‘You’re not. You’re just someone who’s lost somebody. And you’ve probably seen some things. And you like strong water pressure.’ You swatted my shoulder. ‘And you’re really bad at taking care of coats.’
‘Do you think the coat’s OK?’
Your hand didn’t move. That warmth, that soft weight took the cold from me.
‘I think the coat’s probably fine, Andrew.’
When I opened my eyes you were looking at the fire, but your hand was still warm on my shoulder.
‘You’re still shaking.’
‘Lean there long enough, there’s a rhythm.’
You gave it a couple of seconds. ‘Incorrect.’
A snow-edged gust wind chased a ‘V’ of crows past the window, and your throat was a ‘V’, too, as you leaned in honey-slow to pull us both down.
Afterwards, in my room, we sat half-wrapped in the bedclothes.
‘Had it been a while?’ you said, and bit my shoulder.
‘What?’
You looked at me sidelong.
‘Oh. Yeah. Kind of. Why?’
‘You seemed very … euphoric.’
‘Jesus. That’s embarrassing.’
After a while we sifted through my old notebooks. You ran your thumb over the words like each letter was a tiny blue scar. With you beside me, walking your fingers from my throat to my navel and back, the room’s warm blue dark on our skin, it was easy to tell you all of it.
‘Where were you for this one?’ you said, opening the one with all my notes from Poza Rica inside.
‘Worst place of them all,’ I said, and lit a cigarette.
‘Oh, you’ll eventually feel nostalgic about it,’ you said. ‘Trust me.’
‘Yeah?’ I said, tapping ash. ‘When?’
You lay there, looking light and untrammelled, with your tanned and bird-alert face and your hair spread all around you black and wild as a cloud of starlings, smiling at the ceiling.
‘One year,’ you said, ‘I didn’t go back to university. Went on a boat instead.’
‘What? How?’
‘It’s easy,’ you said. ‘You go search for boat crew on the Internet. And you fill in a form. And then you’re on a crew. Easy – except for storms.’ You laughed. ‘And now I even miss them.’
In my head, Mangueras’ car pulled up outside Armando’s house. My hand found the small of your back and the picture vanished.
‘I mean, the storms are bad,’ you said. ‘You’ve got these waves like towers above you – they’ve even got shadows. Drops rain down from them. Wet your face. And then they hit –’ you clapped your hands ‘– and you think you’re going to flip. All you’ve got is your black box, and your GPS, and your six crew members, and that’s it, that’s all you are. And when you don’t flip, you feel so light. So unbreakable.’
My eyes moved over the three bags that were my life now.
‘The calm, afterwards – that’s delicious,’ you told me. ‘You lie on the deck. All you have are the stars, the boat rocking, the feeling of your own body pulsing under nothing. The sea, afterwards, it’s like a mother carrying you on her hip. Gets me so nostalgic that I even miss the storms.’
‘Huh.’ I lit another cigarette. ‘And what’d you do all day? When you weren’t playing Captain Ahab.’
You rolled over and put your head on my chest. ‘Read Proust. Perfect time to. As long as there’s no storm, you can just watch the water. Read. Maybe that’s what you should do, after you’re done.’
‘What, go on a boat?’
You propped yourself up. ‘No – go somewhere quiet. Stare at nothing.’
What I wanted to say was, ‘I’d rather stare at you’, but I just kissed you instead.
After you fell asleep I slid into my pants and sweater, borrowed an umbrella, and crept from the hotel, the snow creaking underfoot all the way to the park. Bergs of dead plane-tree leaves flowed down the curb, carried by the currents of meltwater, and I reached in my bag for the El Paso tape, slotted it into the recorder, skipping four hours in, to when me and Carlos were making roaches from his old business cards and he was doing a frame-by-frame commentary on Elvis’ 1968 Comeback Special.
‘Man, look at the arm-waving,’ Carlos said over the orchestral billows at the end of ‘If I Can Dream’. ‘So gospel. This note is rad. Wait, no. Next note, next note.’ He blew out a sigh. ‘After that thing with the cops, man,’ he said, ‘I just looped this song for hours. In my room. I don’t think I was me any more, you know? Took loads of my mother’s pills. Zolpidem. Temazepam. Names like Aztec gods, man.’ His dark cackle jagged up out of the speakers. ‘The fucken sun-god, man, to go by the sweating. And then one day, I drove out into the desert in my mother’s car. Way, way out, down into the canyons, boiling up dust behind me, until I came to a rise of boulders. Neon cactuses towering around me. Lay there in the smoothed-out rocks.’
His voice was deep and slow and rhythmic, like he was chanting. ‘The carves of some old gone river had left shapes in them like emptied veins. And I just lay there, and smoked a bowl, and the pink-lit clouds in the sky were the dying thoughts of God, seemed like, and the rocks I lay in were the lap of some beautiful corpse.’
He sucked on the joint and his voice came out croaky and strained. ‘The clouds were history, and history was God’s dreams as he died high and paranoid in the sand. After that I dreamed I was dead.’ More smoke puffed against the mic. ‘And I didn’t mind at all.’
Carlos cleared his throat. ‘And that didn’t scare me. Just made me feel a bit ill, a bit embarrassed for the person who had to come clean me up. I looked down on myself, laid down on the rocks, split from hip to rib, laid in hay, my heart glistening apple-red like a prize for the ants. A wind scattered my bones’ white nubs like dice.’
Then you could hear the rustle of his bedclothes as he sat up. ‘Ah! Here it is. Way Elvis hits this note. This one right here.’ His tenor grew reedy with passion. The orchestra boomed behind him and he pumped up the volume. The tape buzzed.
Somewhere, out in the cold distance, a car raked past.
‘Troubled,’ I said. ‘And probably not OK at all.’ I stopped the tape.
You half-woke when I came back into the room, rolling over, your eyes shut.
‘Out with your ghost?’ you said, in a voice thick with sleep.
The boot stopped halfway off my foot. ‘You heard?’
‘Mmhmm.’ You stretched. ‘Saw it, too. Was asleep. Was nice.’
‘You mean you were dreaming?’
‘Close the door, won’t you?’
The beach wa
s white when we headed out the next morning.
‘You don’t seem impressed,’ I said. ‘This blizzard is, like, historic.’
‘I work ski-seasons in Bariloche. You get all the snow you could ever want up there.’ You kicked a drift. ‘More, even.’
On the sand stood a chunk of whitewashed wall reading PARALLEL UNIVERSE ENTER HERE with a squiggled line pointing at a door.
‘Bit trite, that.’
‘One of the better ones around here, unfortunately. Let’s go to a bar. A warming whiskey, I think.’
‘Ah. I don’t do that any more. Quit.’
You laughed. ‘A journalist who doesn’t drink?’ You slid your arm through mine. ‘Well, then. Glass of … milk?’
I kicked a heap of snow. ‘Ah, God. At least offer a coffee, like. So I don’t feel like an absolute child.’
On the far shore cranes swung in the dusk. Brine stung my nose. A large black dog trotted across the sand, his moustache a sandy droop, blood thick as ketchup dotting his flank. He threw himself down in the snow-covered sand, panting like he’d never stop. When he saw me he flinched upright, growling. You leaned towards him, arms out, murmuring under your breath.
‘Careful. That dog has no chill.’
‘Oh, he’s all right. Just don’t give him that look. Watch.’ You knelt beside the dog with your hand out. His tail slapped the snow, throwing up white dust. Then he whimpered and rolled over on his back with his tongue out.
‘You ever pass a dog you didn’t greet?’
You rubbed his dreadlocked belly. ‘God, I hope not. You got pets?’
‘Kind of.’
‘What do you mean, kind of?’
‘Just moved house. Gave my cat away. I mean, she was kind of a wanker sometimes, so it’s probably all right, really.’
When you’d had enough, you wiped your hands on your jeans and kept walking beside me. The dog sprinted off in the other direction. ‘Will you get another?’
Call Him Mine Page 15