by Aura Xilonen
So I reach her door, a yellowish wooden door, the bottom half ragged. There’s a faded bienvenido—welcome mat in front of it. I stop to gulp air and wipe the sweat from my forehead. I jump up and down a few times until my breathing starts to slow. I knock hard, my knuckles now like powerful harpoons.
“It’s open.” I hear the voice of an antediluvian man on the other side of the door. I push on it and step inside. The first thing I see is a vase with no flowers but full of peacock feathers perched on a chair. The room is illuminated with the sunlight streaming in through a large, half-open window with plain curtains tied back at the sides. There are two lusterless armchairs and a coffee table made of reddish, cholerical wood topped with a piece of smoky glass; on it is a runner made of hemp and decorated with sequins. To the left is a little table with a computer and a rolly chair. On the wall beside it hangs a large painting with lots of lines and splatters like colorful loogies, as if a consumptive had inhaled a few quarts of paint and blown out all his snot across the canvas. The floor is wooden, like the floors in all old buildings. The apartment has high ceilings and isn’t very elegant, though it feels palatial. I move farther inside, and all the ribs of its floorboards creak.
“So your rooster came through for you today, huh?” the same voice suddenly says, sitting near the window in a high-back chair.
“What rooster?” I ask.
“Pardon?” the man answers from his chair.
“I don’t have a rooster!” I say.
“Who are you?” he asks.
I take another two steps toward the window. From there I can see a bit of the bus stop.
“I’m looking for . . .”—and in that moment I realize I don’t know the chickadee’s name. I’ve never known it. I’d never even given her one. Never. In the street, everything’s so generic, multiplied, added, subtracted, and divided because everything is equal, like a fucking globalization of names: addos, yups, scruffs, dudebros, chickadees, papasitos, raggies, and even the mortifying jackasses of the city’s east side. Fat Spañoleros with cigars and berets, hairy all over like apes.
“Are you looking for my granddaughter?” he asks, turning slowly, very slowly, in his armchair.
“I don’t know,” I say, all in a muddle, uncertain whether she’s his granddaughter, his daughter, his assistant, a young woman, an angel, my peace, my war, the housekeeper, the surgeon who cut out my heart just by looking at me, or maybe I’ve got the wrong door and it was actually the other one, the one across the hall. Now all bashed in, I ask him, “And who are you?”
“Ha!” He emits a three-tiered cackle that bounces all around the room and sails out the window. When it dies down, he muses to himself, “Oh, what a world, ha-ha-ha, and in my own home too, ha-ha-ha, have you ever seen anything like it.” He finishes turning the chair toward me, and I see a grandfather with blue, glaucomated eyes, like jelly garnished with raisins in the middle. He’s holding a cane with a silver-plated knob in both hands. His hair is long and his broad forehead shot through with lots of wrinkles. He has a long white beard. He’s wearing pewtazure checked pajamas and brown slippers. “If I were your age,” he tells me, still laughing, “I’d be beating you with my cane for barging in here and bothering an old man like this. Ha-ha! But getting old means you start letting a lot of things go that you didn’t used to. You’d better help me up so I can really go after you with my cane.”
“Shit,” I say, “are you serious?”
“No, of course not. I have to go to the bathroom, and my granddaughter already left for work. I was waiting for the young man from Social Services, but since you’re already here, you get to help me instead. Let’s go, my bladder can’t hold out much longer!”
I approach the old man warily, concerned he might thump me on the headpiece with his cane.
“What do you need me to do?”
“Just help me stand up, and if you see me tipping to one side, push me the other direction. A man’s got to preserve his dignity—his vertical—as long as he’s still alive.” He holds out his hands, covered with age spots and angular veins. I haul him upright. “My, my, the world sure looks different from up here, doesn’t it? Have you ever heard of the tall-men theory? They say that tall men get better jobs because their egos puff them up like popcorn so they look down at us mere mortals from on high. Pure natural selection.”
I shrug, aspartamized. Yeah, the world is a crazy shitstorm or whatever.
“Now what?” I ask the scrawny reed, holding my hands out so I can try to catch him in case he falls over so he won’t bang his head on the floor so hard that he busts through right down to the ground floor.
“Nothing. I’m going to walk straight ahead here and you’re going to follow after me in case I tumble over.”
He starts walking like an infirm, ambivaleyed tortoise, as if he were carrying the weight of a hundred elephants tied up in a bundle on his back. Slowly, as if he had all the time in the world. Un pasito para adelante, otro pasito para atrás, one step forward, one step back, one step . . .
“Hey,” I say, “do you want me to carry you?”
“Over my dead body! Dignity before all else, featherbrain.”
Three centuries later, we finally reach the bathroom. He opens the door and says to me, “I’ll take it from here. But if I’m not out in a couple of hours, call the plumber.”
“What!”
“All right, then, the funeral home.”
“What!”
“Come on, kid, laugh.”
“Why?”
“Because when somebody says something funny, people generally laugh.”
“But I don’t feel like laughing right now.”
“Well, all right, don’t laugh, then; you’re within your rights. I won’t be long.”
He closes the door and I hear his slippers polishing the wooden floor. A couple minutes later I hear the flush and shortly after that the faucet.
An overflowing moment later, he opens the door.
“You still there? I thought I might have hallucinated you. As you get older, you find new travel companions just by staring at blank walls. Can you see all my friends?” He heads toward his armchair.
“Are you doolally?” I ask, crumple-browed.
“Ha!” he exclaims, “it’s been ages since I’ve heard that word! But oh, no, I wish! The world’s an unbearable place when you’re in your right mind. Lunatics can handle the mayhem a lot better; the only good sanity’ll do you is that you can hang yourself without any help.”
An evermore later, moving at the speed of serenity, we reach the chair. He turns around and prepares to touch down on his buttocks.
“Give me your hands. The hard part is sitting down and standing up. If I sit wrong, I’ll throw out my hip again.”
I lace my hands in his like a crane. I act as a lever, gradually lowering him till he’s anchored in his personal ocean.
“So,” he says, adjusting his pajamas, picking up his cane again, and resting on it with both hands, “you came looking for my granddaughter Aireen?”
“Aireen?” I repeat her name and it reverberates with loneliless, eternitude, between my skull and my heart; her name thunders like an air cannon, water cannon, earth-and-fire cannon inside my chest. “I thought you were crazy and forgetting things,” I tell the old dodderer, like an instantaneous reflection, like a glowering grumpus, frittered between my desire to see the girl and her parsimony, to breathe her in as a singular, life-giving aroma, to experience those amorous urgencies of the exterior world and the sluggishness of the interior world.
“Ah, no, plover-head, I still remember lots of things. Old age isn’t synonymous with imbecility.”
“Are you mocking me again, sir?”
“Not at all, young man. Plovers are a kind of bird that’s chicken-brained and pigheaded.”
“Oh, all right then.”
�
��And check out that photo,” the grandfather tells me. “That’s Aireen on her third birthday. And the woman behind her is her mother, my daughter. My only daughter.”
“But they don’t look like you at all,” I say, trying to make sense of things.
“Oh, that’s because she’s only her mother’s daughter.”
“What?”
“Oh, kid,” he says. “Everybody’s got a history, some longer than others. A gazillion years ago I met a gorgeous woman . . .” He falls silent; an enormous pause arises between us, as if he were searching the blank walls for his memories, his eyes blue, elderly, scarred by his slow eyelids. He stills his cane. Swallows. He is absorbed, amber, his wrinkles perpetuating his face. Just then someone knocks on the fucking door. “It’s open,” calls the grandfather, corking his thoughts. Then he speaks to me. “I’ll just say that a father is not the man who spawns a child but the man who raises her. Do you understand?”
A white Latinoid warrior opens the door and walks toward us.
“Good morning,” he says, sweeping me up and down with his glance as he heads for the old man’s armchair.
“All right, son, it’s time for my physical therapy.”
I place the photos on the coffee table next to the sequined runner.
“How’s my favorite patient doing this morning?” the warrior, dressed in a blue shirt, Nike running shoes, and a walkie-talkie on his belt, breaks in, invisibilizing me. I head for the door.
“Not great, Zubirat; I woke up starving and disheveled, my belly button sticking out.”
The warrior Zubirat laughs loudly at the grandfather’s wisecrack.
“You’re a real wit, aren’t you? And what about Aireen, sir, how’s she doing?”
I step through the doorway, still listening.
“Well, you know, always running all over the place. She’s working a lot. She wants to stay in college, but these days everyone has to work like a peasant to try to live like a king.”
“Well, tell her to say yes to me and it’s all set, we’ll figure out her money problems,” I hear the petulant, doggedly creaky voice of the Latinoid warrior say.
“If it were that easy, Zubirat,” the grandfather replies, “she’d go looking for someone with more money than the king of Persia”—and he laughs uproariously as I close the door.
In the hallway the lamps flicker absently. I think about the chickadee and the photos of her, especially the one with the cake, where she’s blowing out the three little candles, her cheeks round and chubby but already destined for the great beauty she’d become years later.
I descend the stone-and-wood spiral staircase to the ground floor. The light clobbers me when I open the door to the street. Time is different inside the old red building; it seems like the time that marks melancholy, the taciturnity that sickens sighs once happiness has taken a powder.
“Happiness, man—what the fuck is that anyway?”
I look over at the bookstore as I start down the stone steps. It’s closed and garlanded with yellow ribbons like a bow on a fucking gift. I can see inside. The bookcases are still upended. The broken windows have been boarded up. I sit down on the steps of the chickadee’s building. My clothing is almost dry now; only my underwear is still damp. The sun is beating down on the sidewalk, and I feel its heat in my rump. The bus stop is the only place that has any shade. Cars are milling about unrepentantly. Three or four vehicles are parked on the other side of the street, practically right in front of the bookstore, and there are two gorillas in tight black shirts perched on the hood of one of the boats. A chickadee goes by dragging a baby carriage with a newborn in it.
“I could try to get into the fucking bookstore and grab some stuff, even if it’s just my blankets, since those belong to me,” I think. “How would I get in, though? Oh, I can hang from the telephone pole over on that side and get my foot up on the cornice and lever myself up onto the roof above the loft, where there’s that boarded-up window. I could kick it open and sneak inside. Nobody would know I’m in there. I could even sleep there and nobody would realize. I could use the storeroom door to go in and out. The one that leads out to the back alley. Jefe never uses it for anything, the one behind that bookcase full of cheesy, dreary, syrupy poetry, the kind that only brainless guts read. Behind that is the service door.”
* * *
[“See, before this it was a fucking restaurante mexicano, and that door was what they used to take out all the fucking basura; that’s why there’s grime cobwebbing the roof back here, you pornographic prick. Clean it good up there, where that black splotch is.”
“What if I fall, Jefe?”
“You’re not going to fall. The ladder’s not going to break, and if you do fall, you won’t go through the floor.”
“And don’t you think selling tacos would be a better business than selling books, boss?”
“Shut up, you meddling little queer, and make sure all the stains are gone or I’ll smack you upside the head with a book.”]
“Or I could go into the building next door and jump from the roof. Eyeballing it, though, it looks like it’s got to be twenty feet—I’d crash into the wall. Or I could scrabble up the drainpipe and drop onto the railing of the fire escape, though from there I’d have to jump like six feet in midair; if I don’t make it, that’s like a fuckety-foot fall down to the street, and I’d be bread-puddinged by the impact. It would have to be a little later too, when there are fewer people out and the streetlight’s the only thing around to see me.”
A bus goes by, stops, lets off passengers, and picks up the chickadee with the baby carriage. She climbs aboard with difficulty, carrying the kid in one arm and the contraption in the other. The bus pulls away and turns down a side street. The black-clad gorillas start across the street as the bus moves off. I eye the bookstore. Maybe I could remove the board that seems to be propped up by one of the tables of new releases.
* * *
[That table of books where the gaggles from the fucking limp-dick transatlantic publishing houses ended up because of all their intransitable verbs—would have been, would have seen, would have fit—and their agamanthine baby-babble idiocies; their words neutral and empty, like pneumatic tires rather than solid rubber, utterly limp-dick, formal, flat, wlobalicidal word world anxiously sought by some fine-feathered filly.
I also remember the Latinoid loco with a pimply face, rectangular glasses, and minnowy muscles who came in every couple of weeks to ask about some literary prizewinner that had just been published. I once heard him tell Jefe that he wanted to be a famous writer and make it big.
“Chingonametrically speaking, as big as the world.” He had an amazing story about spaceships, he said, and he planned to sell it to Hollywood to have them turn it into a movie. “Because spaceships sell, man, just like special effects do. Just imagine, a huge spaceship comes down to Earth but it doesn’t have any brakes. What would happen? The Apocalypse!”
“No, well, sure. That’s a pretty good story,” Jefe rejoindered as he counted the money the Latinoid scribbler had just given him for the latest Pulitzer-winning novel.
I stood there watching them, a dopey look on my face, and tried to imagine what a damn spaceship looked like. I figured they must run on coal in little braziers, and you’d blow like the dickens to make them take off to anywhere in the universe.
“Hey, Jefe, what’s outside of our universe?”
“You nosy little squirt, stop eavesdropping on my conversations with customers and stick to picking your ass instead.”
Once Jefe complained that they wanted to sell the bookstore out from under him and turn it into a posh café.
“Sell it, then, what do I care? You’ll make some money off it, and then you won’t be able to go around complaining you don’t have enough money anymore.”
“Stop bugging me, you fumigational louse! I’m selling! And if I ever give you
any coffee, it’ll be up your ass.”]
In any event, I think now, if I were the owner, the bookstore’s megamaster, I would put in a fucking café there across the street so I could spend the rest of my life looking at the chickadee. Maybe I could even win her heart: I’d have scratch to go with my sniff, greenbacks so I could wrap her in my arms and kiss her, kiss her like I’ve never kissed anybody before. Yeah, some tables on that side, and over here, if I wanted something like Jefe has, a bookshelf for the few books that make it through unscathed because they’re actually alive; all the rest I’d shred into a million pieces. And I even know what I’d call my popsicle stand: “Aireen.” “Aireen’s Love.” Yeah, that’s it. Where’s Jefe now so he can see I can do something with his fucking bookstore?
And suddenly the little hairs on the back of my neck stand on end; they warn me, stiffening like cats’ whiskers. I sense the two gorillas in black bearing down on me. I leap down the three or four steps to the sidewalk and take off running, but one of them, the tattooed bald guy with an earring, snags me by the arm and I stumble into the chest of the other guy, who’s a little slimmer but solid, his pecs like two marble carapaces. “No way, not another beatdown.” They’re much taller and heavier than I am, but one thing I learned in my street fights back home is that I’m going to be scrapping with them, not picking them up, and the more massabolic they are, the more painful their rotten fall to earth will be.
In street fighting, it’s not about martial arts or Confucian technicism; it’s a cross-country brawl, a pitched battle, and anything goes.
I don’t even have time to think before I knee the marble-chested guy with all my might and he doubles over; he can lift all the fucking weights in the world and steel up every muscle in his body, but even Superman’s balls are still fragile.