by Aura Xilonen
“Being nosy like everybody else.”
“Well, go be nosy somewhere else.”
Naomi spins on her axis in the wheelchair. It looks like fun behind my crusties. She’s wearing the same blouse she had on last night and the same ribbons. The sun is beating through the sheer curtains. In the daylight, Naomi looks more like a girl than she did at night, when she could have passed for a boy. Her hair is a web of black wool, blue-black at the temples.
I see several little heads peeking through the door. Then I see the kids’ eyes. I quickly grab my pillow and hurl it at them. The runts shriek again and dash off like a plague of leaping ants down the corridor.
“What’s with those little monsters?”
Naomi rolls over to the door, picks up the pillow, and places it on her knees.
“Don’t you know?”
“No. What?”
“You’re like a hero for them, a legend. They admire you. Unless, of course, that wasn’t you who was on TV . . .”
“Well, I don’t know if I was on TV. But I don’t think getting pounded into a pulp by a bunch of scruffs is any reason for a bunch of snot-nosed kids to think I’m special.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Well, what are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about the video that was on TV where you destroyed a boxer’s hand. They even showed it slow motion a bunch of times, like that, zoom, pow!”
* * *
[“Look, Jefe, I wrote a paragraph to win that fucking bet from last week. Here—now you can’t say I’m a fucking whiny-ass bitch and that I lose by default. I worked my ass off writing it, but go fuck yourself.”
“All right, let’s have a listen to your bullshit, you ridiculous clown.”
“‘I saw her there for the first time, or what the hell ever, spinning serendipital through the trees of a Pleistocene paradise. But she, with the fucking sweetness produced by blindness, didn’t see me till it was too late, mingled with a pagan night on a red bus, when we monsters sprout from the alveolar sewers of the city, under that hieroglyph that rains down ectoplasmic beatings on only a few, when amid the streets, amid the streetlights, amid the hanging gardens of the fucking stars, someone, in silence, falls in love.’”
“That’s not yours—you can’t have written that, you plagiaristic primate. Where did you copy that from? What book? Tell me, motherfucker!”
“It’s mine, boss.”
“It can’t be—you can’t write your own fucking name properly, and some of the words in there don’t even exist! Plus, you’re a fucking brainless reptile who couldn’t even produce his own goddamn saliva, much less use that fucking vocabulary. So you lost the bet, you leperous dog testicle.”
“It’s mine. I wrote it.”
“That’s not true, motherfucker, fucking asshole, and don’t you stubbornate with me. Since you’re a fucking liar, I’m not going to pay you a fucking cent this week and you’re going to work fucking double, you fucking mythomaniacal loser. Now get out of my sight—I don’t want to see you again, fucking devil spawn!”]
“Qué!” I exclaim in surprise. The fucking mollusk and his stateless thugs must have uploaded the video of me and the fucking Crazy Loco to YouTube.
Poor vato, stripped down like a plucked Quetzalcoatl.
Naomi spins again like a fucking pinwheel. She stops suddenly.
“Ms. Webber doesn’t like it when we mix languages. She says we should either speak English or speak Spanish. We take classes with her, and she says if we mix them up, after a while we won’t know what we’re saying and instead of enriching our languages we’re impoverishing them.”
“Qué!” I repeat.
“Didn’t you know that?”
“Do you always talk like that, dandelion?”
“I’m not a dandelion, Liborio; I’m a little girl and my name is Naomi.” She turns, her brow furrowed, and heads for the door. Some of the fucking dwarves move aside for her.
“Ooh, you’re mad now?” I yell, but she keeps going and I watch the huddle of manikins trail after her like the rats of Hamelin. “Give me back my pillow!”
I lie back again in this incredibly soft bed. I’ve never spent so much time lolling about before, keeping bird lice warm between the blankets, under my wings, amid the nits.
I’m about to close my eyes again when Naomi comes back with a gaggle of children and plants herself directly in front of me. “I’m not mad at you—I’m upset, which is a big difference, and take your stupid pillow.” She hits me on the head hard with the pillow and leaves again, herding the kids between her wheels.
* * *
[Jefe was pissed off at me for almost four weeks. He spoke to me only to curse at me, a fucking vicious circle.
“Clean, sweep, organize, put, take out, shake, wash, rinse, mop, bring, carry, scrub, carve, haul, fuck yourself, clean, sweep, organize, put, take out, shake, wash, rinse, mop, bring, carry, scrub, carve, haul, fuck yourself . . .”]
I leap lightly out of bed and spruce myself up like a fucking astronaut: my shirt, the sweatpants from Double-U, and the sneakers that Aireen gave me. I fold the nightshirt and leave it in the wardrobe. The doors in the hallway are open, and I can see that most of them are rooms with bunks. The beds are already made with gray-checked blankets. I move on toward the exit on the opposite side of the gym. I want to get out of there as soon as possible, like fleeing from wild beasts.
I get to the metal door and open it.
The street twists under the armor of the cars. The area seems run-down with age but not dirty. There isn’t as much graffiti as in other parts of the city I’ve seen. There are even some little planters filled with green plants watered by the people from the shelter. I stop in the doorway and, to my surprise, smell food. Always with the fucking food, goddamn food harassing me day and night. The aroma is coming from the dining room to the left of the main entrance. I turn on my heel and plunge back into the jaws of the shelter, obeying the fucking hunger that always cuts trenches in my soul.
* * *
[“You were right, Jefe, I copied that thing I wrote from a magazine.”
Jefe removed his glasses and, smiling from ear to ear like a diabolical alebrije, pounded his fist on the counter. The sound echoed through the bookstore.
“Bingo! I knew it, you piratic plunderer! How were you going to write something like that? Maybe the fucking curse words were yours, but the rest of it, ha!”
“Well, I wanted to win the bet, whatever it took, boss.”
“And you lost it anyway, you twittering pterodactyl.”
“Yes, Jefe.”
“Now bring me the magazine you pinched it from.”]
“You must be the new boy,” a stout woman says to me when I enter the dining room.
“And you must be the old lady, right?”
“Ha ha ha,” she laughs. “I like your sense of humor, kid. Most people here are really serious. But what else can we expect? Life’s not a bed of roses.”
“My bed’s really soft.”
“Ha-ha-ha,” she laughs again. “You can’t have had it so bad in life, since you’re still able to make jokes. Are you going to have breakfast now?”
“Yes, but I don’t have any money.”
“Don’t worry about that. We’ve got plenty of dirty dishes to wash.” She laughs, disappears into the kitchen, and returns with a tray with a roll on it. “This is all we’ve got left; breakfast starts at eight on the dot.”
“But it smells like stew.”
“Yes, that’s right, but that’s for lunch. If you want to get in on that, you need to be sitting down with your hands washed at two P.M. sharp.”
I take the roll off the tray and start gnawing at it.
“It’s really hard.”
“Well, yeah, it’s the bread we use to feed the animals.”
“The animals?”
“Yes, the roosters and hens in the chicken coop we’ve got up on the roof.”
I stop making faces and keep nibbling.
“And where is everybody?”
“Waiting in the gym for it to be lunchtime.” And she heads back to the kitchen to keep banging the pots and pans around.
I finish jawing the roll. It’s almost two, and the bit of bread has awakened my sense of time.
My timing.
I enter the gym, and suddenly everyone’s staring at me. It falls quiet. I’m not used to making heads turn wherever I go. I feel self-conscious. I walk toward one of the bleachers and lie down, curling up in an effort to turn myself into a clockwise zero. When I disappear, people go back to their conversations and the racket starts up again.
The bleachers in the shelter’s gym are full of all kinds of kids. Only three people seem to be older: a beefy coach with a whistle, a lady sitting at one of the desks, and Mr. Abacuc, who’s coming toward me. The rest all seem to be between the ages of four and twenty.
“You like fistfighting, right?” he asks, sitting down beside me. I’ve still got a bit of bread caught in my teeth.
I shrug. I don’t know if the old man’s looking for a fight, but I’m not interested. I could cram the few teeth he’s got left right up into his skull.
A few kids are playing with a ball, trying to get it into a dwarf basket. They fumble it, and the ball gets away from all of them and rolls slowly off the court. The paunchy coach blows the whistle. He scoops the ball up and hands it to one of the kids, and the game resumes.
“Did you know sports are the best way to work through anger?” he remarks as one of the kids finally makes a basket and rolls around on the floor, ecstatic, in celebration of his miracle.
Naomi is on the other side of the gym, in front of the bleachers. She’s holding some faded pennants and yelling at the kids. She cheers. She spins in her chair and yells again.
“What happened to her?” I ask, pointing to Naomi with my eyes. Mr. Abacuc looks at the girl.
“A tragedy,” he replies tersely.
The giant coach blows loudly on his whistle, ending the game, and yells to the next team to take the court. He’s sweating buckets trying to line some little kids up by height, but they’re more interested in picking their noses than in following the big lug’s instructions.
Mr. Abacuc strokes his gray beard. He’s thinking. It looks painful. One of the blue veins in his forehead gets even bluer as he idly fiddles with a piece of paper. He looks at Naomi.
“One day her father lost control. They’d fired him from his job at the factory. He went home. He picked up a .22 and shot his wife, his daughter, and finally himself. Naomi didn’t die, but the bullet broke her spine in two. This was years ago now.”
I swallow hard. I look at Naomi’s face. Can a person forget the past like that, quickly, as if certain things had never happened? Naomi keeps waving the little flags, two or three tots hanging onto her legs as if they were paper vines.
“Is she bitter about it?”
“I don’t know, son. She’s a smart girl, but I don’t know. I don’t know if she’s holding on to something deep inside. I imagine she is, even if she doesn’t want to be. Look at her—she’s glowing, isn’t she?”
“Why do you do all this?” I ask, looking around at the kids playing, the squirts cheering in the bleachers. They run, leap, crash into one another, laugh.
“What?”
“Go around giving charity to people.”
“I often ask myself that very question. Especially when it’s not enough. But look at them, the world isn’t as bad as it seems and there’s still hope—don’t you think that’s a good reason?”
“But if you don’t believe in God, why? Why do all this?”
Mr. Abacuc smiles. He slowly closes his eyes and opens them again.
“It’s true, son, I don’t believe in God, but that doesn’t mean I don’t try to be a good person.”
He puts a hand on my knee and gets up with some difficulty. He limps down the bleachers as if one of his legs were shorter than the other. He stops and turns around.
“Oh, I almost forgot . . . Somebody left a note for you—that’s what I came over to tell you.” He holds out the piece of folded paper he’d been twiddling between his fingers.
“Why didn’t you give it to me earlier?” I cry amid the din of whistles, dribbling, the shouts of children and circling flies.
“Because I’m old and I forget this sort of thing.”
He descends another step and turns to look at me with compassionate eyes.
“It’s very easy to lose control, son—what’s hard is the opposite.”
He continues down the bleachers and goes over to the lady at the desk. She’s got a little boy next to her who’s shrieking for some reason.
I hastily unfold the paper and start reading, my pulse spilling from my hands. Suddenly my blood freezes in my eyes, in my cheeks, and I feel a pang in my gut that pushes all the air out of my body. “I don’t want to see you again. Aireen.”
* * *
[“We don’t have that magazine anymore, Jefe. You sold it to that fucking fancy lady who wanted to know what a demiurge was.”
“The one in the rat-fur coat?”
“That’s the one.”
“But that magazine was about Mexican cooking.”
“Well, I don’t know, but you told her it had a recipe for demiurges in garlic sauce.”
“Are you shitting me, you insolent ingrate?”]
I read Aireen’s message three billion times in a matter of seconds, and her handwriting seems to get blurrier and blurrier. Those letters written in blue ink that proceed nervously, hastily, breathlessly down the page, as if they were fleeing toward the ice at top speed. Another improvised drop falls onto the paper and puddles it, like an ocean, like a river of scrambled words. Aireen, vestal of the sacred flame where a man will pay for any attempt at seduction with his own loutish life on a bonfire? With his heart ablaze? Fuck, fuck, fuck. And nothing grows in the darkness of despair, only those blooms of water, maybe, that make a person’s peepers gleam with the ocean. Chingafuck.
“Why are you crying?” I look down and discover Naomi intersectioned below the bleachers. “Is it because our team’s losing?”
“I’m not crying, you stupid kid. It’s sweat.”
“Sweat makes your eyes all red?”
“And black and blue if you don’t shut up.”
Naomi holds out a rumpled little pennant made of red paper.
“Stop sweating so much and start cheering for our team instead so we can win the world basketball championship.”
I lift my head. Down on the floor is a cluster of the youngest kids. They can barely stand, and the ball is so large for them that it looks like a beach ball next to scrawny, potbellied ants.
“Cheer for those little twerps?”
“Yes, they’re going to be our champions someday.”
“And why should I cheer them on?”
“Well, we’re all on the same team, aren’t we?”
“But look at them—they can’t even stand up on their own.”
“That doesn’t matter. They’ll grow up one day.”
I take the pennant from her and start waving it slowly, waterily, cancerously, until my epithelials are suddenly gripped by a fit of rage and I rise from my seat and start yelling like a madman, filled with fury, with bitterness, with the pain caused by Aireen’s fucking note and her invisible presence rubbing against my waterlogged eyelashes.
“Fucking snot-nosed little brats, get the fucking ball in the goddamn fucking basket if you want to be fucking champions one day!”
The whole gym goes quiet, absolutely silent. The little kids stare at me, the devil in their faces. The enor
mous bewhistled coach lets his tweeter drop to his chest. The lady at the desk and Mr. Abacuc are aghast.
Without warning, just like that, like worn-out bells hurled by frenzied monkeys, the little kids all start wailing at once, in unison, like a fucking orchestra playing forte, fortissimo, howling like angels and devils.
“Now you made them cry,” says Naomi at my feet beneath the bleachers.
I’m still shaking. However tough I seem, I feel smaller than the tiniest, shriekiest little child down there. Overpowered by powerlessness, I jump down to the floor and make for the exit. Just then, Mr. Abacuc grabs hold of me with a strength that’s surprising in an old man.
“If you leave, you might never come back. But if you stay, you can do more good things than bad.”
I push his arm away. I feel like taking off; my legs are cramping up with the urge to get out of there. To free myself of the whole goddamn world and smash it into fucking pieces. I start walking toward the double doors; I want to kick them down, but something stops me.
Something I can’t really explain.
My own triumvirate conscience tells me don’t and I don’t know why.
Naomi wheels herself over to where I’m standing in front of the doors, panting so hard I can hear the horses in my veins galloping through my head like a spiderweb of clots.
Naomi takes my trembling hand.
“Stay!” That’s all she says.
Nothing more.
Her hand is an ember that I can’t distinguish in all that conflagration.
I know everyone’s looking at me because I feel them hovering at my back like sharp knives. I can also see the shrieking children reflected in the round windows of the Eliason doors.
“Coach Truddy, please bring the therapy dummy,” says Mr. Abacuc.
The massive whistler goes over to the box of balls and rings. He rummages around in the bottom and pulls out a cushion covered with tattered red and black vinyl.
“Get in position.”
“Let’s go!” says the giant, sweating like a pig as he secures the dummy to his chest with one foot in front of him and the other behind.