by Aura Xilonen
“Hey,” I say, my tongue like a necktie, “what time is it?”
At six in the evening I decide to go back to my provictional lair, my rooftop room. I haven’t managed to get any work or achieved anything else except roasting my sudoriparous glands a bit more. It’s true—just like the old man said, not even byzantine serpents would be coming by.
“If you want work, get here by six A.M. at the latest. And bring a couple of bucks to pay the fee.”
“What fee?”
“What do you mean, what fee? The fee to be able to do business around here, chico! Don’t you know anything?”
“And who do I pay it to?”
“Who do you think? The guy who charges it.”
“And who’s that?”
“Me, you botulistic buffoon.”
“And what if I don’t pay?”
“Then you don’t work, period.”
Aireen knocks on my door. I’ve been flipping through some of the old magazines in the room. I found a Life from 1964. It included a series of photos of Kennedy as he was being assassinated in Dallas. Yeah, that guy whose head they blew off. Unbelievable as it seems, without recognizing him by sight, I’d already heard of him in a fucking novel I’d read about his life and death, but it’s never the same to see mummified words as it is to see the photo where they blast the guy in the bean. The photos were blurry and out of focus, but you could see his brains flying through the air and splattered on the trunk of his car.
“Door’s open,” I shout, but Aireen knocks again and I leap toward the doorknob like a spring-loaded gonad.
* * *
[But most of the books I’d read in the bookstore had only sprayed muddy garbage in my eye, full of buzzing wordflies like dull needles.
“Listen, Jefe, a while ago that fucking nutjob writer guy came by, the one with the spaceship with no brakes. He asked if we had anything by Pi 3.1415 Téllez. Something about a novel about tablets and social networks called Feisbuk Connection. Wondered if we could order a copy.”
“So he isn’t into narcofiction anymore?”
“He didn’t ask for any Mexican authors this time.”
“That prick changes his tastes as often as he changes his underwear. Pretty soon he’ll even be a Coelho fan. Hoo-hoo-hoo.”
“And that’s bad, Jefe?”
“Goddamn right, you goddamn fuckwit! That’s why it wouldn’t surprise me if he liked that fucker, with all the crap he sucks in with those eyes of his.”
“But Coelho’s our number-one seller, Jefe.”
“So what? A fucking toilet is a necessity in life since we all take a shit once a day, but we don’t put it up on a pedestal in the middle of the room or give it prizes, do we?”
“I don’t know what you mean, Jefe. You shit more than once a day.”
“Jesus Christ, save me from this goddamn brain-dead chicken mite! Of course you don’t get it, you cretinaceous dumbfuck. I’m giving you a fucking metaphor for capitalism.”
“Asshole.”
“What did you say, you fucking pothead?”
“Capitalism’s a real bitch, huh, boss? Like you said the other day: fucking neoliberalism, right?”
“Don’t get smart on me, you faggoty-ass motherfucker.”
“Never, Jefe. Wouldn’t dream of it!”]
“You’ve totally transformed this room!” Aireen says as she walks in. She’s wearing a piece of fabric tied around her head and carrying a tray in her hands. The light from the bare bulb washes over her. I was going to wait for her at the bus stop when I got back from procuring no money at all and a light dose of heatstroke, but I decided not to, even though I’d been biting my nails this whole time. Instead I started reading those old magazines I found. By now it must be ten or eleven at night. Aireen sets down the tray with a glass of milk and a little casserole on one of the crates I set up as a coffee table. On it I placed the can with some plastic flowers I’d pulled from the planters outside. My hovel looks like a tidy little burrow. The bed’s covered with the newspapers and magazines, and there’s not a speck of dust anywhere. I’ve hidden the remaining crates out of sight under the bed.
“You like it?” I ask in reply, staring down at my druidic heartbeats.
Aireen’s gaze flits around the room and stops on the flowers. She looks at them. For a moment I think she might say something like what I once read in a short story by some rusty old lech of a writer: “The advantage of plastic flowers,” Popeye told his Popeyetta as he held her smitten hand, “is that they never die, just as what I feel for you today, oh, by-me-loved, will never die siempre.” But Aireen doesn’t say that. She just looks at the plastic flowers and smiles. She moves to the right around the crates and sits down on the planks of the bed. I don’t know where to move to, so I don’t; I just clasp my hands so they’ll stop shaking.
“It’s very peaceful here,” Aireen says suddenly. She places her hands on the bed and arches her neck backward while closing her eyes. Neither of us speaks. There’s not a sound—the silence has turned into foam that flows through the air.
Only sometimes, a very occasional sometimes, like an emetic rarity, does the noise of a passing car manage to scale the walls to reach us. Aireen starts turning her head like her neck hurts, like she’s dancing to the beat of an invisible music. Just then Aireen opens her eyes and I am brought suddenly back from her lips, her exogenous smile, her perfect and neatly shaped eyebrows. She stops smiling, and I jostle the air around me with an estranged tremble, a shiver that runs up my spine from my tailbone to my noggin. I shrug and stiffen, a flush staining my face as if her eyes were piercing my cheeks.
“How old are you, dude?”
I’m still struck dumb, like a voyeur who’s been caught peeping through a hole in a wall. I shrug my shoulders like a stabbed starling, a worm that’s been dipped in salt.
“I don’t know.”
Aireen plunges into my eyes and starts swimming all through my innards.
“Qué! What do you mean you don’t know, dude? Think back!”
I think back, trying to bring the remote past into the present. Aireen leans forward, still looking at me.
She’s waiting for me to answer. My hands are now sweating so much, you could wring out my fingers one by one.
“I don’t know . . . According to my aunt who wasn’t my aunt but was actually my godmother, I must be about sixteen or seventeen, but I don’t know. I think I’m seventeen, but I don’t know. Maybe I’m actually older than that, or maybe younger.”
Aireen half closes her eyes the way people do when they’re thinking about deep things, when pondering penetrates deep into the gray matter, that territory where an idea can stretch into infinity and, with its serendipity, put asunder all the substance in the universe.
“So when’s your birthday?” she says, her eyes still scuba diving, like spiral-bound saucers.
Immediately I look away, embarrassed. I feel uneasy. I don’t know how to meet someone’s eyes, how to endure having the things that hurt me be linked through our retinas the way a bridge connects two far-off lands. Slowly, as if pleading for forgiveness, scarlet with shame, I answer, my voice distorted, staring at her beautiful feet:
“I’ve never had a birthday before.”
* * *
[“Auntie . . .”
“Goddammit, I told you not to call me auntie—I’m just your godmother, and I already regret being that. I curse the day I hired your mother as a housemaid. All it’s brought me is pure misfortune and tragedy.”
“Godmother, do you know what day I was born?”
“What difference does it make? You’re never going to amount to anything anyway.”
“Godmother . . . what was my mother like?”
“Your mother didn’t have a mother herself. That’s why she paid so dearly for all that sleeping around, to be frank.”
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“And did she see me when I was born? Did she hold me? Did she see what I looked like?”
“No, demon spawn. She was already dead and they had to cut her open to remove you from her belly, like at the fish market when they cut open the fish to remove the eggs. And if it hadn’t been for me, you’d have ended up in a garbage can or an orphanage or something.”
“Godmother . . .”
“What?”
“What was your fucking mother like?”]
Aireen reappears with a slice of bread spread with condensed milk, and her cell phone so she can take a photo of us, she says. She jumped up from the bed a little while ago and rushed off to her grandfather’s apartment while I was polishing off the casserole and milk so my guts would stop growling.
“What!” she echoed, leaping gymnastically, and ran downstairs. I was left adrift, hollowed out when she moved past me. I never believed birthdays were important to other people, or that anyone would care about the years passing, celebrate them, affix them in memory, take a photo of them, and then let them go. “You can’t have a birthday without candles,” Aireen says cheerily as she tries to light one and stick it in the center of the slice of bread. Her fingers are slender, the nails painted with an iridescent bronze polish. “Now turn off the light, ahorita—you have to blow out the candle before midnight so you can have two birthdays: today and tomorrow.”
I stretch toward the wall and flip the light switch. Night bursts into the room through all its open wounds while the lit candle, there, exposed, inflames me all over. Its tenuous, trembling light, as it burns down above the slice of bread, gives Aireen’s eyes an endearing glow—her beautiful eyes like cheerful tacks, her chickadee eyes like an alabaster quarry. The chiaroscuro becomes real; our dark profiles, I imagine, are rembrandtified like works of art—at least Aireen’s is, standing out from everything else on this night I wish would last forever, her staying awake for the rest of time, where any sleeplessness can be filled with fragments of eternal instants.
“Now blow!” she cries as she takes a photo with her cell phone. The flash blinks and goes out, bouncing around inside our peepers.
I blow so hard that the candle bends and the smoke spills across the bread and condensed milk and then we are left in darkness like an obsidian blaze.
“Blow again now—it’s midnight.”
I blow on another candle she’s just lit while she takes a second photo. The flash of her cell phone rekindles and blinks out along with the candle’s flame.
The pale smoke from the candles curls into our nostrils.
“Good,” Aireen says there in the dark, “now you’re nineteen and we’re the same age,” and she lets out a naughty giggle that I hear vibrating back and forth like a rubber band.
“Nineteen?” I immediately ask, like a georgic revelation, to make sure I’ve heard her age correctly, her beautiful age in which she is queen and princess of her empire.
“Yes,” she responds, “but if you want to be older, no problem, we can light another candle and make you turn twenty just like that.”
Without knowing how, without understanding its origin, I am overcome by a dactylic gale of laughter that runs from my stomach up to my face, and unexpectedly I hear myself for the first time, as if I were somebody else, maybe a hog, unfurled, laughing uproariously as if the mechanism of laughter were autonomous and I its unbrakeable conduit.
“Urrrr gra-ha-ha”—I sound like a grunting swine—“urrrha-ha-ha”—it’s an attack of quarrelsome ants teeming in my throat—“urrrr gra-ha-ha-ha-ha-hai”—I can’t stop; I’m a tangle of nerves that I’m expelling in the form of a grunty laugh. I try to explain it to the girl, stammering: “I-I-I ask ha-ha-ha-h-h-how old you aaaa-a-a-are ha-har-gur-gurg.”
Aireen, hearing my stuttering pig squeals, I guess, starts laughing along with me, epidemic but clean, limpidous, sounding like a bewitched hummingbird, and within seconds both of us are a heap of helpless, dissonant laughter, our cacophony replicated by the walls of the little room where we’ve become infected.
And we laugh.
We laugh hard, loud, like a flawless burglary—punching holes in the walls to steal unimaginable treasures.
Consuming raucous oxygen, the kind that can gush only from a delirating throat.
“Shall I turn on the light?” I ask as we pause to catch our breath. My stomach is starting to hurt, and I’m weeping crackling tears.
“N-n-not yet, c-c-cousin.”
And in an instant, when I hear her stammer the way I imagine sheep stammer when they give birth, I pick up my laughter again, uproarious, splattering it everywhere. My belly aches, but I can’t stop the fit of laughter; I’m incontinent, and I laugh and moan, moan and laugh at the same time like Calchas.
* * *
[“Go on and laugh, you anxiolytic asshole. Whenever I say something funny, you just stand there like an idiot, moronicated, looking like a sad pig.”
“Why should I laugh, Jefe? You don’t pay me enough.”
“Don’t be an idiot, you little shit, I’m not paying you to laugh. I’m paying you to wipe that trash-picking look off your snout and stop scaring the fucking customers.”
“All right, Jefe, I’ll laugh at your stupid jokes.”]
We’re reduced to hiccups. Worn out. The room is dark. I hear her breathing slowly grow quiet, unblooming, torpid, like chillic drops that nod off when they touch the planks of venetian oak.
Her body is no longer chipping laughter.
“Come on, let’s go outside.”
She gets up from the bed and goes out onto the rooftop.
The city’s mercurial light bounces back at us.
Aireen props one foot up on one of the wooden shutters that must be from the Quaternary Period and clambers up to the highest part of the roof, above the washing machines. I follow her on all fours, clinging to a railing. I don’t say anything. It’s as if we left all words behind in the room alongside our gales of laughter.
Up above, the wind blows gently in our faces from between the tall buildings with lit-up offices in the distance. There are hardly any cars out at this time of night. The traffic lights are all yellow. Aireen heads toward one corner of the building and sits on the edge of the roof. I follow her and sit next to her. Our feet dangle into the void. Below us, far below us, you can see the trees that line the streets. You can see the planters. The parked cars. A few yups coming or going. Neon signs blinking on or off. You can see the top of a garbage truck that’s got its yellow light turned on. From this side of the building, I can see Wells Park better. It looks dark in some areas, but I can make out the main fountain, looking tiny. Beyond it is the baseball stadium, which is only dimly lit. And closer in, I see Aireen’s eyes, which open and close rhythmically as she looks out at the city.
“Why did you defend me like a warrior that day?” she asks after a few minutes of incorruptible silence.
At her question, I turn to look at her. She’s still staring at a point off in the distance, on that Yankee horizon. I shrug my shoulders and then turn back to watch a scruff who’s riding a kick scooter along the bench down there.
“Anybody would,” I say without giving it much thought.
We fall silent again. I look a little higher up and see a few clouds starched by some sort of white light from the city. The wind has become static, perhaps run aground on our invisibility.
“Not anybody. You did.”
I don’t say anything. What can I say? Aireen starts gently moving her legs back and forth, as if she were on a swing.
“I’m really sorry about your bookstore,” she says after a bit.
“What?”
“You losing your job like that.”
I try to turn my head to look at the bookstore, but it’s on the other side of the building. That thought hadn’t occurred to me. The missus, Jefe, the little misters. The bastar
d publishers. The fucking distributors. The customers—regular, irregular, occasional, unwitting. The books. The books of all sorts. The fucking poetry that was like a tongue-twister, like riddles I could hardly ever solve, even if I read every dictionary in the world.
* * *
[“‘Does cold, too, succumb / to the heat of death?’ What the hell’s that supposed to mean, Jefe?”
“It means, you evanescent elf, that you’re a garden-variety moron, you frigid freak.”]
Or the plays, too, and the doormat novels, the ones you can deflower in a quick lay. Or the photographs of ships in large, thick tomes. Or the book of American cities at night, illuminated by a shit-ton of royal-blue lights: Manhattan and Brooklyn, Dallas, Houston, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, all looking like cities on Mars and not like my hometown, which is illuminated only by perpetually lit candles.
I also think about all the illustrated children’s books I leafed through up in the loft.
* * *
[“Why do you think so little of children’s books, when that’s what sells the most, Jefe?”
After all, Jefe himself used to buy them just to quench the wild beasts’ thirst and, of course, earn a little money through the slaughter of the victims themselves, he’d always say.
“You bastardite dope, those adverbious idiots can diddle around with doodles all they want—what the hell do I care? Anyway, losers like you are perfectly happy with ignorance, right, you stratospheric little shit?”]
“I’ll find another job,” I tell Aireen.
Aireen closes her eyes and exhales noisily, her chest rising toward the firmament. She puts her hands by her sides and lies back on the edge of the roof, gazing up at the night sky.