Monstress

by Lysley Tenorio

  Vicente stared at them, one fist closed and ready. “I don’t like police,” he whispered.

  “They’re here to help us,” he said.

  “We did nothing wrong.”

  “I know.” Fortunado helped Vicente to his feet, then picked up the suitcase and led him to the door. As they passed the dresser, he reached for the envelope marked with their names, and tucked it into Vicente’s coat pocket.

  They stepped into the hallway. Protest signs and posters were litter now, and chains dangled from the banister and exposed pipes. An officer stood by Fortunado’s door, knocked twice, then opened it. “No one here,” he said. “That’s everyone.”

  They descended the stairs, moved carefully past small desks and mattresses in their path. They reached the lobby, stepped over wood planks and broken glass, and as they crossed the fallen door of the front entrance, Fortunado took Vicente’s hand. “Don’t let go,” he said, then led the way out of the I-Hotel.

  After the fight in the elevator, Vicente spent more nights with Althea in the Berlin Deluxe, returning to the I-Hotel only for a change of clothes. At the Parkdale, Fortunado worked the front entrance as often as he could, and whenever Vicente approached he would steer his luggage cart in another direction; after work, Fortunado would rush out to catch the next cable car back home. One night, waiting at his stop, he saw Vicente and Althea leave the Parkdale together, arms around one another as they walked down Powell Street. A light rain fell, and Vicente took off his jacket, draped it over her shoulders and held her close. They kissed.

  “Disgraceful,” a man with a bushy, white mustache said. He looked over at Fortunado. “You’re not foolish enough to try something like that, are you, boy?”

  Fortunado turned away, toward lit windows high above, and said, “No.”

  Hours later, alone on the third-floor fire escape of the I-Hotel, Fortunado drank through a bottle of Du Kang, remembering the kiss he shared with Vicente, how it happened in darkness, in silence. And he thought of Vicente and Althea’s kiss on the sidewalk, so reckless and unhidden, which perhaps was the point: Fortunado understood how difficult love could be, how its possibility hinged on a delicate balance between complete anonymity and the undeniable need to be known.

  He let the empty bottle of Du Kang roll off the fire escape, listened for the crash of glass. The night was freezing now, and he imagined Vicente and Althea in the window of the Berlin Deluxe, looking down upon the city, warm in each other’s arms.

  Vicente had no right to be there; the I-Hotel was where he belonged. There were rules in this world; why should Fortunado be the only one to suffer them?

  He got to his feet, steadied himself. Then he climbed inside and went downstairs, walked out of the I-Hotel to a telephone booth on the corner. He stepped in, shivering as he dialed.

  The Parkdale’s night operator answered.

  Strangers where they didn’t belong, he finally said. A couple—Filipino man, white woman—hiding in the Berlin Deluxe. Hotel security could catch them. Hurry.

  He hung up the receiver, stepped out of the booth. He headed toward Market, turned east toward the water, then walked along the Embarcadero, the Bay Bridge coming into view. It was finally finished, ready for use in a matter of weeks, and all year long advertisements had announced its opening. Joining two cities! one poster read. Bringing the world together! But tonight the bridge was dark and still untraveled, and the world felt more like the place it was, an endless earth in which Fortunado stood alone.

  A man in a dark suit and hat approached. He stood beside Fortunado, put his hands on the rail. “Quite a bridge,” he said.

  Fortunado nodded.

  “Nice night, too.”

  Fortunado looked at the fading moon. “It’s almost morning.”

  “There’s still time,” the man said. Then, without asking, he took Fortunado’s hand and whispered, “It’s okay. I know a place.”

  Fortunado looked around, checking for nearby police or anyone within earshot. When he knew it was safe, they moved away from the water to a darker, unnamed place that in daylight would be impossible to find again.

  The warmth he felt inside this stranger was unquestionable and necessary, and each time it happened was meant to be the last. Now, Fortunado feared a lifetime of this and little more, and he wondered how long such a life could be.

  The next morning Fortunado waited by his window for Vicente’s return. The Parkdale would have fired Vicente, that was certain, and their security might have dragged him out of the room, down the back stairs, and thrown him into the street. When night came and he still had not returned, Fortunado picked the lock of Vicente’s door, went inside, and lay on his bed. It was morning when he woke; another night without Vicente. He got up, smoothed the sheets over the mattress, and left the room as though he was never there.

  At the Parkdale, none of the bellhops mentioned an incident in the Berlin Deluxe, and when Fortunado asked his boss if he had heard from Vicente, his boss said, “Maybe he had a toothache,” then closed his office door. Once, he stopped in front of the Berlin Deluxe, rattled the doorknob, and whispered Vicente’s name. He listened for movement, for breath, but heard nothing. After work, he checked every store, restaurant, and bar in Manilatown, even searched the crowd at the Dreamland Saloon, but the one person he recognized was the ticket man with the cane. “I know you,” the old man said, and Fortunado left as quickly as he could.

  Hours later, Fortunado made his way back home. When he reached the end of Kearny Street, he saw a light in Vicente’s window.

  He ran into the I-Hotel, up to the third floor. Without knocking he opened Vicente’s door and found him sitting on the edge of his bed, elbows on his knees, hands clasped together. He was still in his uniform. “They found us,” he said.

  Fortunado stepped in, shut the door behind him. “When?”

  “Two nights ago.” He lowered his head and told Fortunado the rest, like a confession. He and Althea were sleeping when hotel security and two police officers forced the door open. They brought him to his feet, pushed him against the wall, shouted questions they wouldn’t let him answer—You think you belong here? Who do you think you are? Althea stood in the corner, and Vicente told her not to be afraid, that nothing they did was wrong. “Then one of them, the bigger one, started shouting at her. The things he called her …” He shook his head. “So I hit him. As hard as I could.” He remembered Althea crying, then something smash against the back of his head, three times, maybe more. He remembered falling.

  For a day and a half he sat in a cell with other men who looked the way he imagined criminals did, threatening and silent, always watching. “I didn’t move. I didn’t want to close my eyes. I was scared.” Before they finally let him go, an officer asked if he had learned his lesson. He promised them he had.

  Fortunado crossed over to the window, closed the blinds. “Althea?”

  “Gone, maybe. I don’t know.” From the jail he rushed to Althea’s boardinghouse, and the housemother told him she took the first bus back to Wisconsin, where she couldn’t mix with men like him.

  “You’ll find her,” Fortunado said.

  Vicente said nothing.

  Fortunado saw what looked like rings around Vicente’s wrists, red as a burn. “Handcuffs,” Vicente said. “They kept them on the whole time. It feels like they’re still on.” He put his hands, palms up, on his lap, unable to make a fist.

  “You were brave, Vicente.”

  “I was stupid.” He turned and lay on his bed, and told Fortunado to turn off the light on his way out.

  Fortunado returned to his room. He sat on his bed with his back against the wall, remembering what he saw: Vicente’s eye bruised purple and blue, the gash in his lower lip. And now he could hear Vicente on the other side, turning and breathing as he tried to sleep. Once, those sounds had comforted Fortunado, made him dream of them together, holding and loving each other. But now, all he heard was loneliness, Vicente’s and his own. For this, Fortunado s
tayed awake through the night, and wept for them both.

  Thousands filled the street but the human barricade was gone, replaced by squads of police who fended off protesters with batons and shields, and arrested dozens more. Fortunado squeezed Vicente’s hand as they moved farther out onto Kearny Street, moving in whatever direction the crowds would allow. “Almost there,” Fortunado shouted, as though a true destination was finally in sight. He tightened his grip, tried to move faster, but from the side a protester rushed by, slamming into them. Fortunado fell.

  The asphalt was cold against his palms, and gravel jabbed the back of his neck. Above, the sky was black and starless.

  Two girls in Berkeley sweatshirts helped Fortunado to his feet. “You okay?” one asked. “Do you have someone with you?” Fortunado steadied himself, and just as he told her yes, he realized that Vicente was gone.

  He could hear his name—Nado, Nado—but everywhere Fortunado looked he saw only strangers, hundreds of them, shouting and waving their signs. He forced his way through the crush of bodies, searching for Vicente’s voice and face, until he finally reached the other side of the street. He staggered up the front stairs of an apartment building, hoping the higher ground would help him find Vicente, and from the top step he caught the flashing headlights of a white van at the end of Kearny Street. It was the shuttle for the West Oakland Senior Center, and one by one, a line of I-Hotel tenants climbed inside. As the last man boarded, Vicente approached, his feet dragging. From inside the van, tenants beckoned to him, but then Vicente stopped, let the suitcase fall from his hand. He was standing in the same spot where Fortunado had found him weeks before, asking strangers where he was, if they knew the right way home, and Fortunado remembered seeing him from afar, pacing the sidewalk corner, a man stranded on the smallest piece of land.

  There was no pacing or panic now, just the stillness of a person taking in the view before him. Vicente looked at Kearny Street, watched police beat down and drag away protestors through the aimless mass, their signs fading and torn, gone. Then, as if he had finally seen enough, Vicente turned away, picked up his suitcase, and stepped into the van. Fortunado imagined him crossing the eight miles of the Bay Bridge, speeding over water as though moving from one country into the next.

  The van pulled away slowly, and then it was gone.

  Fortunado would make his way to the West Oakland Senior Center later; another shuttle would come. If not, then he would seek temporary shelter somewhere in the city, and find Vicente tomorrow. For now, Fortunado rested on the top step, and across the street, the I-Hotel looked like a silhouette of itself, a darkness against the city. But higher up was a last square of light, and Fortunado remembered leaving his bedside lamp on from the evening before. His was the only window lit, and in a matter of hours, daylight would make it dim and empty as all the others. But night would fall and the room would glow again, until the lamp itself finally died, or until someone turned it off.

  L’amour, CA

  My sister, Isa, speaks English and Tagalog. But one word she could say in many languages: koigokoro, beminnen, mahal, amor. “It’s the most important thing,” she used to say, “the only thing. L-O-V-E. Love.” So when we learned that we would be moving to California, to a city called L’amour, she called it home, the place where we were always meant to be. I believed her.

  This was January of 1974, our final days in the Philippines. Isa was sixteen, I was eight, and we were from San Quinez, a small southern village surrounded by sugarcane fields and cassava groves, with a single paved road winding through. Every house was like ours, made of bamboo and nipa and built on stilts, and every neighbor was somehow family. No one was a stranger where we lived.

  Like many Filipino men at the time, my father joined the U.S. Navy, and after he had served in Korea and Vietnam, his request for a transfer to America was finally granted. “Our plan from the very beginning,” my father said. My mother stayed silent, rubbing the leaf of a houseplant between her fingers until it ripped. My brother, Darwin, who was twelve, said he didn’t care one way or another. But Isa started packing that same day. “L’amour, L’amour,” she went on, like it was the name of a special friend she had that others never would. Friends and neighbors called her haughty and boastful; our oldest cousin called her an immigrant bitch. “American bitch,” Isa corrected her, and called our cousin a village peasant who would never know a bigger world. “You’re stuck here forever.” As though no place was worse than the one you were from.

  This is us on the plane, the day we leave: across the aisle my mother stares ahead, barely blinking, never speaking, and my father rifles through papers, rereading each document as though he can’t figure out its meaning. Darwin sleeps next to me, so deeply that I double-check the rise and fall of his chest to make sure he isn’t dead. On the other side of me is Isa, and only when she looks at me do I realize I’m crying. She unbuckles my seat belt and lets me sit on her lap, promises me that I’ll be fine in L’amour.

  We land in San Francisco but we keep moving: as soon as we claim our boxes and bags, we board a shuttle van and head south on the freeway, turn east hours later. I’m lying down for most of the ride, my head on Isa’s lap, feeling our speed. We never traveled so quickly or smoothly on the dirt roads back home; I could almost sleep. But suddenly we’re slowing, and the driver yawns, “Almost there.” Isa looks confused, then panicked, and when I sit up all I see are endless fields of gray stalks, the miles of freeway we leave behind, and, up ahead, we seem to be driving into a cloud. “Fog again,” the driver says, and down the road, a sign becomes clearer. WELCOME TO LEMOORE, CA, it says, ENJOY YOUR STAY!

  They sound the same—L’amour, Lemoore—but I know they’re not. “Lemoore.” I tug at Isa’s sleeve. “What’s that mean?” She doesn’t answer.

  We exit the freeway, turn into the Lemoore Naval Air Station. We drive through foggy streets to a section of military housing, passing rows of gray and concrete rectangular houses with low, flat roofs, then down a block that ends in a cul-de-sac. “That’s ours,” my father says, and we pull up to a house with a faintly lit doorway, newspaper-covered windows, a grassless yard. We step out, unload our cargo, drag boxes up the driveway to the front door. Most things are too heavy for me to lift, so I stand by the van to guard our belongings. Across the street, a balding blond man mows his dry, yellow lawn. Two houses over, a lady with a shirt that says RENO! soaps her car, sprays it down, soaps it again. Then I see a family sitting in folding lawn chairs in a line along the sidewalk, their faces toward the sky. I have never had to meet a person before—back home, everyone knew everyone—and now is the time for someone to say Welcome or How are you? But by the end of the day no one says hello, not even us.

  I hate my house. Too many walls make too many rooms, the hallway is long and dark as a tunnel. Nothing scared me back home, and I always knew where we were: you could hear a person breathe in the next room, and the floor shook when someone ascended the bamboo stairs. Now, brownish-orange carpet mutes our footsteps; I never know when a person is coming or going, who’s here and who’s gone.

  And even our bedroom doors have locks, which we never had before. But my mother fears someone could enter the house through our bedroom windows while she’s alone and cooking in the kitchen, so she makes my father reverse the bedroom doorknobs; that way, she can prevent anyone who tries to break in through our rooms from entering the rest of the house. “But I want my lock inside my room,” Isa says, and when my father asks why, she says, “Privacy.”

  “And what would you be doing in there,” my father says, “that you need to lock us out?” Before Isa can answer, he is kneeling on the floor, unscrewing the knob.

  Strangers come each day with heavy cardboard boxes on dollies—a refrigerator one morning, a kitchen table the next. When my father breaks down the box for our new oven, I drag it to the garage and build it again, turn it on its side, and wedge it between the washing machine and the wall. I crawl in, close the flaps. I fit perfectly. Minutes p
ass and I decide that I’m hiding, so I wait to be found, for someone to call out, Where are you? Where did he go? But no one searches, even as the afternoon fades and the garage darkens.

  Then someone comes. It’s Isa. She has a suitcase in each hand, like she’s running away. But they’re empty, and she drops them to the ground like trash, pushes them against the wall with her foot. Then she paces from one end of the garage to the other, never seeing me, and stops at the driver’s side window of our new, blue Impala. She stares at her reflection and sighs, then rests her forehead against the glass, clasps her hands together below her chin.

  When I pray, I pray for us: my parents, Isa, Darwin, and me. Who knows what my sister prays for? When she’s finished, she writes something on the window with her finger, looks it over, and hurries back inside. I wait two seconds so I won’t be seen, crawl out of the box, and run to the car window, expecting a message from Isa. But all I see is her name, in fancy cursive letters, underlined twice.

  I write my name over hers. I do it again and again, until all the dust is gone. Then I crawl back into my box, thinking how funny that Isa never knew I was here, that I still am.

  Finally, we start school. The morning of our first day, Darwin and I are sitting at the kitchen table, eating instant champorado from a packet, a thing I’ve always hated: rice boiled in chocolate has never made sense to me, and when I say, “We should have left this back there,” Darwin socks me in the arm, tells me to not say things like that in front of our mother. I’m about to jab him in the head with my spoon when suddenly Isa appears in the kitchen, and the sight of her dazzles me: her eyelids are as blue as our toothpaste, her cheeks so pink I think rose petals have melted into her skin. I want to tell her, You are beautiful! and I’m about to, but Darwin says, “You look like a hooker,” and when my mother turns from the sink and looks at Isa, I know that trouble is ahead.