by Paul Pen
“There’s nothing on the other side of the windows. Just more concrete.”
“There is for a bird,” she said. “The chick was very small, it could fit through any crack. I bet you it managed to get out somehow.”
I considered it.
“Is the chick OK?” I asked. I imagined it alone in that world made of blisters.
“Oh, yes.” She rested a hand on my face, warming my cheek. “I’m sure it’s fine. It’ll be better off out there than in your—” She didn’t finish the sentence.
“If I wanted to, could I go look for it?” I asked. I thought about the door in the kitchen. About the useless movement of my hand, unable to turn the knob. If I’d tried to open a wall with a knob drawn on paper nothing different would’ve happened.
“But then you wouldn’t see me anymore,” she responded. “Or your mother. Or Dad. Or the baby. Is that what you want?”
I shook my head.
“Well? Is that what you want?” she asked. She couldn’t see me.
“No.”
“No, of course it’s not.” She put her hand around my neck to pull me closer to her. Then pushed my face into some warm place between her chest and shoulder. I kissed the air. “Now get back to your room,” she whispered.
“I’ve kept a piece of shell in case the chick comes back. So it knows where its house is.”
My grandmother’s chest rose. “You’re such a nice boy,” she said. I nodded in the warm place where my face was, smelling the talcum powder. “Now go to bed,” she added. “Get some more sleep.”
It was an incredible power that my grandmother gave me that night.
On the way back to my bedroom, in the hall, a gentle draft came in through the window. I put my face between the bars, closed my eyes, and breathed in, letting that different smell that came from outside envelop me. It was different from anything there was in the basement. But a bitter note ruined the moment, because the outside had just become somewhere I couldn’t go even if I wanted to. The door in the kitchen was locked.
I felt another waft of air on my face.
And it brought with it the first firefly.
It flew in front of my eyes.
Then it settled on the surface that stretched from the window to the other wall, at the height of my neck. When it landed, it hid the wings that it’d used to slow its descent under its shell. Really, coleopterans’ shells are just another pair of wings, hardened to protect the ones they use to fly. The insect walked toward the bars over the gravel that had built up in the space. Toward me.
And that was when it lit up.
For a second, the body of the dark bug was illuminated with a magical green light that glowed from the end of its abdomen. Just like in my insect book, the one I kept at the foot of my bed. The first time I turned the pages of the book I was fascinated by the long legs of the mantises, the perfect camouflage of the stick insects, the colors of the butterflies. But it was the firefly’s glow that totally captivated me. An insect that makes light. Like the bulbs that hung bare from the ceiling in the basement. But living.
There was another flash, identical to the one in the photograph in my book, which showed a firefly perching on a blade of grass. Now I held out a finger in front of it, on the gravel, blocking its path. The firefly climbed onto it, keeping its balance by fluttering its wings.
I kept my eyes open so I wouldn’t miss the next flash. When it lit up again, I had to blink a few times to moisten them.
I returned to my bedroom with my forefinger held out in front of my face, the firefly on the tip. My brother was snoring. I opened my drawer. First I put the piece of shell that I’d rescued from Grandma’s bed in the T-shirt nest.
“In case you come back,” I said to the chick that wasn’t there.
Then I found the big jar where I kept my colored pencils. I tipped them out into the drawer, then put the firefly inside the empty container. It tried to find something to grip on to in its new world of transparent boundaries, but it slid down the glass. I put a pencil in the jar so the insect had somewhere to perch. It thanked me with a cold green flicker. There’s no creature more amazing than one that can make its own light.
6
Naked, wearing only a towel around my waist, I went into the bathroom. It was a big room with tiles on the floor. They were on the walls, too, but just halfway up. Above that, it was just concrete.
I found my sister sitting on the edge of the bath in her underwear, her legs inside. The water bubbled as it filled the tub. In the basement it didn’t get hot enough to make steam.
My sister undid her bra. She let it fall onto the pile of clothes on the floor. She stood up, pulled down her underpants, and took them off one foot at a time. She got them wet with the water that slid off her toes. I discovered yellow areas on her skin, bruises about to disappear, the ones she got hitting the table the day the baby was born.
From my position at the door, I could see the water level rising. It almost reached my sister’s knees. The smell of soap filled the room.
She turned the water off.
Her hand spread over the mask. With the other she stretched the black rubber strap that ran across the back of her head. “I’m here,” I said.
She lifted her shoulders. “Have you finished on the bike?”
“Yeah.”
We all had to go on the bike three times a week. Dad had positioned it in a corner of the living room, near the calendar. It was blue and white. It never moved, no matter how much you pedaled. When it was my turn to go on it, I’d ask Mom to put a movie on the TV so I could imagine that I was cycling through the landscapes on the screen.
My sister tilted her head without letting go of the mask. The tip of an ear emerged from her black hair. “How long have you been standing there?” she asked.
“I just arrived,” I lied. “It’s Mom’s turn now.”
“Are you going to take a bath?”
“Do you mind?”
My sister sighed, letting her shoulders drop. She let go of the strap on the mask so that it tightened against her head. Then she pushed off, her hands to the side of each hip, to submerge herself in the water. She hiccupped when her chest went under. Once in, she tipped her head back to wet her hair. She ended up sitting at one end of the bathtub, her head resting against the wall.
“Come on,” she said. “You can get in.”
I closed the bathroom door, left my towel on the sink, and got in the water at the opposite end from my sister. I sat with my legs slotted between hers, which were open and bent. I bent mine, too, so I wouldn’t touch anything with my feet.
“Smart-ass, you’ve left me the end with the plug,” I said.
My sister laughed behind her mask. It was strange to hear her laugh. She passed me the shampoo so I could wash my hair. After using it, I gave it back.
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
“The same as you. Wash my hair,” she answered. “And my face.”
“OK,” I said. I closed my eyes tight and added, “Ready.”
My sister clicked her tongue. I heard her stretch the strap as she took off the mask, and the bottle spitting soap out onto her hands, then the sound of her rubbing the shampoo into her hair, and the water splashing her face.
“Done?” I asked after a while. She didn’t answer. “Done?” I said again.
After a few seconds’ silence, she answered, “Do you really not dare look?”
I covered my eyes with both hands. The bubbles in the bath crackled, floating on the water or sticking to my body. I shook my head.
“Come on,” she said. “Think how Mom and Dad’s faces are. Mine can’t be much worse.”
“You don’t have a nose,” I replied. “I don’t want to see your hole.”
She grabbed one of my wrists.
“Look at me,” she said. “I know you want to.” She took my other wrist as well. A tide was set off in the bathwater with our movement. The plug scraped my backside. And one of my big toes brushed
against the hair between her legs.
She pulled my wrists in opposite directions. “Look at me,” she said again.
When she managed to part my hands from my face, I clamped my eyelids together. So tightly that I saw colored dots floating around me. I moaned. I tried to get out of the water, but my sister grabbed hold of my knees and pushed me back down. The plug stuck into one of my cheeks again.
My sister tried to part my eyelids. I managed to resist by squeezing them shut with all my might. They hurt. Then she used both hands to try to wrench open one eye. She used her ten adult fingers to separate a boy’s eyelids.
“Look at me, look at me, look at me . . .” Her voice grated in her throat.
A slit of light began to seep in through that eye. Then I could make out some colors and also started to distinguish shapes.
That was when the bathroom door opened.
“What—What are you—?” It was my mother shouting.
My sister’s fingers vanished. The bathroom door slammed closed. Mom approached the bathtub and put her hand over my eyes. I instinctively blinked to relax my eyelids.
“You’re lucky it wasn’t your father who came into the bathroom,” Mom said, spitting the words through clenched teeth. “Out of the tub. Come on, go.”
My sister’s legs separated from mine. The water level fell. I felt it go down on my chest. I heard the water dripping from her body as she stood.
Something touched my chest, at the same height as the water level. When I held out my hand to feel it, a shock of terror sparked at the base of my back. It was my sister’s nose. A floating plastic nose pointing up to the ceiling.
“And take this with you,” Mom said. There was a dripping noise in the place where the mask was floating. “None of us want to see your face.”
I heard the strap tighten against my sister’s head. It sounded different on wet hair.
“Suit yourselves,” she replied before leaving the bathroom.
Mom stayed with me until I got out of the water. Kneeling on the floor, she wrapped me in the towel. She hugged me with the material, kissing my neck. It tickled.
“What’s her face like?”
She dried my eyes with the corners of the towel. They still throbbed from the effort I’d made to keep them shut.
“Why do you want to know?” she asked.
I remained silent.
“You don’t,” my mother said. “You don’t need to know. Your sister has always worn that mask in this house. It’s your father’s decision.”
“Did she wear it when you lived outside?” I asked.
“You know she didn’t,” answered Mom. “She wears it because of what happened. The fire.” When she said that, my mother’s ragged gaze clouded over. Her nose whistled. Then she blinked, one eye closing just before the other one did, and returned from wherever it was she’d gone.
“The fire didn’t affect me,” I said.
“Of course it didn’t,” she replied while stroking my hair. “Because you were in my tummy. You were a surprise.”
“What was it like, living outside?” I asked.
“Why so many questions all of a sudden?” she asked back. “You have everything anyone else has. A home to live in. And a family. The people who live outside don’t have much more than that, you know.”
I thought about the smell of the breeze that sometimes came in through the window in the hall.
“Why did Dad lie to me about the door in the kitchen?”
Mom let go of the towel. She looked at me for a few seconds with her arms crossed.
“Little boys are always told stories. You don’t think the Cricket Man really exists, do you?”
“Shh,” I whispered. “He can hear you. I don’t want him to find me.”
Mom dried my ears.
“And how is it you remember that night so well? You were no bigger than this,” she said as she drew a small space in the air with two fingers. “That’s how little you were.”
I shrugged, pushing out my bottom lip. It made her smile.
“Because you’re a very clever boy,” she said, answering her own question. She stroked my whole face with the palm of a wrinkly hand. “And that’s why you know you wouldn’t go anywhere even if that door was open. Where would you go?” Mom hugged me again through the soft fabric of the towel. “Where do you want to go?” she persisted. She looked at me with her droopy eye and uneven smile.
“Nowhere,” I answered.
Dressed only in my underpants, I went to the kitchen. I could hear the carrot soup bubbling on the stove. I also heard my family talking before I arrived.
“We’re running out of everything,” Mom said.
A utensil clinked against something metal.
“He was supposed to have come yesterday,” Grandma replied.
When I walked in, I saw my mother standing on tiptoes to reach the top of one of the kitchen cupboards. In addition to the two hot plates, the kitchen had a sink, an oven, a fridge, and lots of cupboards and drawers. They were all open.
“There’s nothing here,” Mom said, her arm inside the upper cupboard, as if she hoped to find something that was out of sight at the back. “All we have is what’s on the table.”
She lowered her heels and turned around, then she saw me.
“Dinnertime. We’re all here now,” she said.
She approached the table, touched my grandmother’s shoulder, and gestured with her mouth to Dad. They were all sitting there, under the cone of light that the bulb projected onto the table. I saw the strap on my sister’s mask tight against her hair, which was still wet. Grandma and Mom tidied away some packets of rice stacked on the table. As well as cans of tuna, and eggs and potatoes. They put them in the cupboards where they were kept, which were emptier than they usually were.
“About time you showed up,” my father said. “Why do you spend so long at that window? Do you want to leave or something?”
“I wasn’t at the window,” I answered.
“And he doesn’t want to leave, either,” added Mom.
“He hides things in his drawer,” my brother blurted out.
“Really? What is it you hide there?” Dad asked.
My brother wanted to say something else. Before he could, the hot pan of carrot soup appeared on the table.
“Let’s eat,” Mom said.
She served our dinner with a ladle, filling the bowls that my grandmother had arranged on the table. She also served a seventh bowl. The one nobody would touch. And which, as ever, would end up in the trash or down the plughole.
7
The second firefly arrived that night.
Lying in bed awake, I listened to the lines in the movie my family was watching in the living room. Dad’s favorite. He’d put it on so many times that I knew every word by heart, every pause, every gunshot.
I whispered the words into the darkness.
In the basement we had a television, but no antenna and no signal. There were lots of tapes on the big bookshelf in the living room, which we watched on a video recorder that had the word Betamax printed on one side. Dad liked cowboy movies.
Just like the cowboy would be doing on the screen, I pulled a hand out from underneath the covers, imitated a pistol with my fingers, and fired some imaginary bullets into the darkness. Just then, the baby began crying.
As if the bullets had reached his crib.
I heard my mother’s footsteps in the hall. Behind her, my grandmother’s. Since the night he almost suffocated, every time the boy cried they ran to his crib, scared they’d find him turned blue.
I opened my bedroom door to see what was happening. The TV screen flickered light into the hall. I pictured Dad in his striped armchair. My brother sitting on the brown sofa, laughing when he wasn’t supposed to at a violent scene, or frowning, not fully understanding what was happening behind that window of images. My sister sat on the floor, using the sofa as a backrest, her legs crossed and her interlinked hands resting on her stomach, wat
ching the TV like someone staring at an aquarium.
“Shut that baby up!” Dad shouted from the living room. He made himself heard over the noise of the gunfire and my nephew’s inconsolable crying.
I crossed the hall in the direction of his room. Something hurt my foot. It was a little screw from Dad’s toolbox. I thought it’d stuck into me, but it fell away by itself, rolling along the hall floor.
As soon as I walked into the room I smelled Grandma’s talcum powder. By the crib, my mother was rocking the little boy in her arms. Seeing me, she held a finger to her mouth so that I wouldn’t make any noise. When there was more light from the screen because an especially bright image in the film had come on, a pan shot of a sunny day in the mountains, for instance, I could make out her features. But when the screen went dark with a close-up of a cowboy’s dirty face, she wasn’t more than a black shape in front of me.
I felt my way up my mother’s body, over her stretched T-shirt, to the baby.
“Easy now,” I whispered.
Mom sighed. My grandmother put her arms around me, resting her hands on my bare chest.
That was when I saw it.
A spot of green light floating in the hall. A few flashes left a trail from the ceiling to the floor. I pushed Grandma’s hands away so I could go find it.
“Hang on,” my mother said. I thought she was talking to me, that she’d seen the firefly, too, but then she switched on the bedroom light and the insect’s green flicker disappeared.
Dazzled, my eyes stung.
The baby stopped crying.
Mom hit the switch once more.
In the dark, the baby started crying again.
When my mother turned the light on for a second time, it was as I guessed.
“Same as him,” Mom said, pointing at me with her chin. “It’s the dark that makes him cry.”
“Same as me?” I asked.
My mother passed the baby to Grandma. Then she sat me on the bed.
“When you were little you were frightened of the dark,” she explained. “The first few nights, you wouldn’t stop crying until someone turned on a light.”