by Aura Xilonen
Nah, sí, fucking misery abides everywhere or what the fuck ever—from the mad-dash yuppies down to the threadbare impoverished, it’s a fucking waterfall of shit. Just then I see a grungehead carrying a bag of glue, which he’s inhuffing and exhuffing above his slack jaws.
If I fall asleep, I’m fucked, I think, because it’s like sliding right down into hell. I nestle into myself. I hug my legs with my hairless arms; all I need is a fucking cowboy hat and a poncho to turn into a raggedy statue.
I only half close my eyes since they’re already nearly swollen shut from the brawl and the lack of sleep. Here you have to sleep with your eyes open so nothing happens—but I can’t think, don’t need to think anymore. And the more I close my eyes, the more I see the chickadee.
Is love always a goddamn cascade of mirrors showing us the reflection of our own emptiness?
I want to become invisible so the chickadee will get out of my head, to dissolve so I can dissolve her. I can’t bear the weight of her in my thoughts any longer. I see her smiling, penetrating every fiber of my brain and flaying me from within. Oh, and what I’m feeling soaks through me. I breathe deeply and gradually relax. The night grows more and more tyrannical, its fog overpowering me; I fall slowly, tangled, circumflex into its outstretched arms. I’ll go. I’m going. I’m gone.
I feel a rap on my shoulder. It’s still dark and the night is rolling on. Now I’m definitely shattered. I feel another jab, harder this time. The swelling in my headlights has given way to fucking crusties of steel. My lashes are stuck together with gobs of glue. I can’t open my eyes. A third blow runs down from my shoulder to my wrist and splatters my clavicle.
“Hey, hey, tú, no esleep in el parque.”
I hear it in the distance between dreams. It’s like I’m blind, like I’m a dim-witted marionette that’s missing its strings.
“Hey, hey, hey.” They bash me in the shoulder for the fourth or fifth time.
“He death?” I hear a Latinoid accent.
“Yeah, mira, seems like he’s not breathing,” someone else answers.
“He got dinero?”
“I don’t know. Hang on, yo chequeo.”
Feeling his paws running over my bones, I writhe like an earthworm in a shower of salt.
“Fuck off, motherfuckers, let me sleep!” But my ocular chains are broken and my eyes flop open like quesadillas. They stop patting me down.
“Oh, shit!” yells the handsy Latinoid one. “He’s alive.”
“Hey, hey, hey, boy, boy, boy. You can’t sleep in the park.”
I blearily open my eyes a bit more and see two security guards or police officers, I can’t really tell. “Chingada madre, just what I needed,” I think. Before the goon hits me, I decide to stand up to them—in any event, things can’t get any worse.
“You’ve got to be shitting me. What about all those fucking gueys passed out down there?” I say, ignoring the sharp nightsticks they’ve been prodding me with. They take a step back, hesitant, security guys feeling insecuritous. They’re wearing their uniforms and their fucking helmets. They’ve got radios on their belts and shiny boots. They look like Martians.
“You have dinero?”
“What?”
“You’ve got to pay to sleep here, vato de mierda.”
“What?”
“Dinero”—and he rubs his thumb with his index finger.
“Look, assholes, I’ve had a rough day. Fuck off. I’m not going anywhere,” I tell them. I see them take another step back all skittery, like they’re scared. “That’s right, motherfuckers, fuck right off, I’m fucking exhausted.”
They take another step back and look into each other’s eyes like a pair of fucking lovebirds.
“Fuck,” says one.
“Fuck,” says the other.
“Fuck, fuck”—and then, a cantabrian glint in their eyes, they raise their spears, their banderillas, as if I were a fucking bull in a bullfight. They raise their crushing clubs and give me a few tastes, one after another, on my back, shoulders, and braincase. One precise blow on the back of the skullery knocks me out. They clobber me artistically, lovingly to sleep like a fucking baby at the foot of the tree in the melancholy night.
Fuuuuuuck!
Yes, you don’t realize it, you never realize it, but you can always go lower; there’s always farther to fall. There’s a low that’s deeper, cavernous, like a grave full of worms.
“Am I dead?” I ask groggily, lying belly up, when I see the chickadee’s face leaning over me. My neck hurts, my arms hurt, my feet and ass hurt. It’s day now, no idea what time, and the world is alight.
“Look, it’s Ass-Face,” says the black woman. “Yo’ head must be made of concrete.”
Just then I feel a massive tongue slobber across my forehead, as if a fucking angel were licking my wounds. I look up and see a large German shepherd sniffing at me.
“Candy, no,” the chickadee tells it, standing up and yanking on the dog’s leash.
“Am I dead?” I ask again.
“Ha!” the black woman says. “You’s hardheaded, boy. Wasps stingin’ yo’ ass and you still alive.” She grimaces with the three or four teeth she’s got left, grabs her shopping cart full of junk, and starts dragging it toward the path the cyclists take. Chuckling to herself, she mumbles, “Ha! You’s like a weed—cain’t get rid o’ you. Ha!”
I half close my eyes. Maybe it’s all a dream, a psychedelic dream, or maybe yes, I’m actually dead and at any moment I’ll be dissolved like a pyrrhic spoonful of salt into the vast pond of the universe.
“I was going to call 911, but that woman told me not to. She said it would be worse for you,” I hear the girl’s voice say. I open my eyes and see her again—she’s looking at me. She looks at me. Yes, I’m dead. I must be dead; there’s no other possibility. “It doesn’t seem like you’ve got any broken bones.”
“Huh?” I say with difficulty, as if I were quivering inside, I don’t know why, but I say it at ground level. I can’t find any other words in my vocabulary—they’ve all scrammed, and there’s not even a stray letter wandering around my tongue.
“I shouldn’t . . . Well, ya sabes. I was really rude to you the other day. Disculpa. I’m so sorry.”
I’m out of focus. Not understanding anything. I look at her, beautiful, bending the space around her; if this is what death’s like, I want all angels to be like her.
“I have to go,” she says after a moment of silence in which I hear only the noise of her wings in the park, the chirping of her feathers rustling in the treetops, mingled with the noises of passersby, like the rumble of the shopping cart the black woman is pulling, which gradually disappears down the stone walkway, and the distant clamor of the cars whirling past.
“What day is today?” I ask her, my voice embarritiously breaking. She’s wearing tight-fitting athletic clothing, her hair’s pulled back, she’s got gleaming little earrings, and for the first time I spot a tiny tattoo beneath her ear when she turns to look at the German shepherd. It’s a feather.
“Jueves.”
“Mmmm . . . what?”
“Today’s Thursday, dude,” she says.
I swallow with difficulty. I feel the grass tangling between my fingers. My reading tree is swaying above us. The sky is blue and cloudless.
“I saw you once. It was Sunday, a beautiful Sunday, the most beautiful Sunday,” I babble at her, my mouth bruised.
She clearly has no idea what I’m talking about, because she answers:
“I’ve got to go. I’m going to be late.” She tugs the dog’s leash. “Ven, Candy, come on.”
Before she walks off, she turns back to me:
“Hey, man, you got money for some food?” I nod. “O.K. Bueno, bye.”
She heads back to the path and quickly moves away, the German shepherd dragging her to the edge of
the park. Every fucking bone in my body hurts, but even so I sit up and watch her cross the street next to the park and keep going until she disappears from view. My body hurts, yeah, it hurts a lot, but something inside me starts to do I don’t know what. I don’t know. I lie down again, my face to the sky. I don’t know what to think about, so I don’t think about anything. I just let the roots of the grass settle all my bones in their place.
Moments later I turn onto my left side before the sun becomes a ball of ruthless splendor.
I gingerly prod myself to make sure I’m all there. Yep, nothing missing. Three beatdowns in a row and I’ve made it out unharmed. Just a few aching lumps, but not too bad: with familiarity, carajo, pain’s gotten pretty cheap.
I stumble to my feet. I put one hand on the tree and try to regain control of my vertical. I think I must not be hungry because my stomach’s crammed with fucking killer butterflies. That’s what I read somewhere—those love bugs rub our entrails with their wings and stab hunger to death. I stick my hand in the pocket of my jeans, which are smeared with blood and dirt. Rotten fucking polypathetic crooks, carajo, fuck me: those asshole policemen nicked my fucking money. I check the secret spot in my belt, where I was also carrying Mr. Abacuc’s two ten-dollar bills, but it’s all gone. They really screwed me; the only thing they left behind was the damn note he wrote me. I search a little more thoroughly and my mother’s little locket appears; I put it back, fold Mr. Abacuc’s slip of paper as a memento of the lost bills. “Oh wells,” I tell myself as usual to keep from feeling like I’m always losing out.
I hobble to the sailboat fountain. Nobody’s there; today’s not Sunday, it’s Thursday, and I’ve never been to the park on a Thursday before. It’s not Sunday, and there are only a few faded amblers, ramaged, inscrutable, amid the lawn and the swollen trees. Two or three cyclists cruise along the dog-walking path. A few benches are occupied by couples who are oblivious to me. I cup water in my hand and splash it on my face. A little decoagulated blood drips into the fountain, and the drops just dissolve, the way the entire fucking universe can dissolve like a grain of salt. I watch the water stillen and see my reflection.
“Puta madre. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”
My mind a blank, I plunge into the water, into the fountain, to end this once and for all, to let go of the only thing that belongs to me. The water covers me and I sink; I want to drown, merge with the fucking fishes.
“The world’s a goddamn pile of shit. Vermin should be exterminated in a public fountain so people can see it’s possible to go out as clean as you arrived.”
The water in the fountain starts to get murky, filthy—the dirt from my clothing and the blood turn into gray atoms. When I run out of air, I poke my head out. I float splayed, flayed. I close my eyes and let myself jell. I’m sluicing away all my perspirations; I feel buoyant, transaquatic.
The water is freezing.
Inexplicably, I start to feel better. I don’t know in the morning, I don’t know anything. The cold water purges my skin. I hang on to the edge and, scraps of water streaming off me, clamber up and out of the fountain. The lovers on the benches glance at me when I go by, dripping on the grass, and stop sucking each other’s tonsils. I walk back to my tree and, as the sun macerates the granite with its fire, spread myself out to dry like a fucking dirty rag. My eyes don’t hurt so much anymore; seems like nothing hurts forever. I sit down under the tree, my back pressed against its trunk. I look around. Cars over there, couples over here, two more cyclists come up and lock up their bikes. I feel fricasseed, letting my agitation flow down into the tree’s roots; I’m weightless, miles away, dazed by the water and the fire.
“What happened to you this time, dude? You’re soaked!”
A shudder suddenly runs through me, polyhedral, hematomous; it climbs from my ears down into my heart and back again. I turn my head to the left and see the chivata once more, this time holding a cup of instant soup behind me.
“Where’s your dog?” is the only thing I can think to answer in my tremblishness.
“Candy? Oh, ya sabes, I went to take her back to her owner.” She pauses between the tree, us, and the sky. Her curved lips envelop my pupils. “I think you don’t actually have any dinero, dude, so I brought you soup; it’s not much, just chicken soup.”
She holds out the boiling styrofoam cup.
“Weren’t you going to be late?” I ask bluntly as I take the soup, almost brushing against her beautiful fingers.
“I just barely made it. My boss leaves at ten and I can’t bring Candy after that because I’d have to keep her till nighttime. I had to run to get there in time, sabes.”
I blow on the soup a little and then take a sip, trying to keep my hands busy so she won’t see how they’re shaking. The soup’s still hot and burns my tongue. I haven’t eaten since the day before yesterday, and my belly’s bluffing. The butterflies slowly come alive again, hot, and flutter around my intestinal labyrinth, which has now been asperged with instant soup.
“What happened to you, man, and what happened to the Spanish Bookstore?” She bends down and watches me suck down the bits of rehydrated chicken, peas, corn, and carrot. “The bookstore was all shut up this morning,” she continues, “with that yellow tape, sabes, like when something awful happens.”
I finish the soup with a slurp, scalding my small intestine, which I’m breathing from in order to heat every millimeter of the rest of my body. I’d actually been dying of hunger and I hadn’t even realized it.
“My Jefe disappeared yesterday,” I tell the chickadee, holding the empty cup in my hands after gulping down the last bit of soup and rubbing my rattletrap with my forearm to wipe away the pearls of broth.
“Oh . . .” She’s pensive a moment and then, as if she were coming back to earth, exclaims, “Now I really do have to go, sabes. Seriously, thanks for defending me. I don’t know, man, I’m not used to that sort of thing. The world is full of I don’t know what—it’s impossible to know what to think. Gracias. Adiós.”
She straightens up and walks past me and heads toward the gravel path to the park fountains. I leap to my feet in an instant. My legs have become bouncy springs, cocked slingshots.
“Hey,” I call wildly, pilgrimated with the airs of a stoic, a silent lover. I shout after her, endemically content, juxtaposed with whatever is afire in my chest. “It was no big deal,” I say.
The chickadee stops, turns to look at me, and smiles.
“Take care, dude. Hope your clothes dry soon.” Then she quickly turns back to the gravel path and heads down the little slope of the bike parking. I watch until she disappears from view among the trees, but even then I can still see her—I picture her as a flower, a beautiful flower clinging to the tendrils of the air, planted in the center of the universe. She reaches the edge of the park, crosses the street; I hear the horns in the distance honking at her; I hear the engines revving, the sloshing of the scruffs and addos unfurling their slobbery tongues and whistling at her in an effort to suffocate her circumferences, to scour every cranny of her lovely lattice. Then the light says go and the cars dart about again, euphoric, like dogs in heat.
I realize then how strong she is, how powerful with all that fucking world around her, and pipsqueak me defending her. All covered in patches.
“Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”
So, with my boots bepooled, my jean jacket steaming, and my bookstore shirt all wet, I plunge into the void among the trees in the park. I have no idea what I’m going to do, but I’ve got to do something. “Something. Something. Something, goddammit.” I crush the styrofoam cup in my hand. My brain aches like it did when I first started reading those fucking cheesy, fake, vomitous novels in the bookstore. All of them with their alphabeticated song and dance, all hat and no catacombs. Almost all of them were out of this world, out of this life.
Their clutches blown out from all those hollow words.
My bra
in makes me lose all my senses. I have to do something; I feel caged like a fucking swine with panic attacks. I pace in circles on the grass, around the trees; I kick the ground, kick the air; I have to move because if I don’t the fucking worms will eat me; I feel them moving through my flesh and swallowing each of my cells, my retrammeled vital follicles, with their soupy jaws. “What do I do? What do I do?” I don’t know, but suddenly, without thinking, I start running like a lunatic, coco loco.
I race to the edge of the park. I don’t have time to wait for the light to change; my heart is noisily escaping out from under my fingernails. I start dashing through the stream of cars speeding by. The cars whistle at me too; they yell at me. They honk at me. They rev their engines as I cross the crowded street. They curse me, insult me:
“Fuuuuck yooou!”
Two cars squeal their tires and skid to keep from pancaking me on the asphalt. I don’t have time to look back, time is short; time is killing me with every second they’ve excised my heart.
On the corner I barrel into a careless yup in a suit who’s talking on his cell phone and carrying a black briefcase; I blow him down and keep running.
There are more people up ahead. I try to plow into them as little as possible, zigzagging between them; I can feel their expressions, first surprised and then irritatedly pissed off, fuming, as if running for your life were inappropriate in the civilized world.
A little kid with a lollipop in his mouth wanders out in front of me; he’s blond with long curls. I leap over him and leave him behind. His mother yells after me, “Fuuuuuck you, asshole.”
I don’t have time; life’s getting away from me.
I whistle like a short fuse.
I turn the corner where the bookstore is and head toward the chickadee’s redbrick building. I don’t have any idea what I’m going to do or what to say, but I figure something’ll come out. I climb the stone steps in a single bound and open the door. I’m panting, the water from the fountain now mingling with my sweat. The corridor leads to a winding staircase. It’s dimly lit. I take the stairs two and three at a time and arrive at the chickadee’s door, where I’ve wanted to knock so many times and where I’ve always chickened out and retreated, my knuckles burning with viral cowardice.