Stumbling novice, tapping her walking stick in haphazard sweeping gestures and clutching my left arm with her free hand, Nathalie took forever to traverse the handful of blocks to our destination. The entire way I was terrified we might cross paths with an actual blind person. Obviously, they wouldn’t be able to see us if we did, but man, talk about rude. It would have been a seriously shameful moment. As it was, I was embarrassed enough by the way people were staring at us, trying to figure out if Nathalie was really blind or if maybe we were doing some sort of lame performance piece. Let me tell you, I’d never been happier to arrive at the Village East Cinemas than I was that night. I paid our dues, guided Nathalie through the foyer, and led us up two flights of sticky handrail-lined stairs to the third balcony.
Movie theater third balconies were some of my favorite places in the world. True nosebleed seating, they’d originally been designated for colored folk and the poor. As far as I was concerned, there was absolutely no better place to watch the speckled black-and-white films of yesteryear. And from the third balcony of this Yiddish vaudeville theater turned revival movie palace, one could also mourn bygone eras’ neo-rococo gilded ornamentation as it stumbled up the walls and onto the ceiling. Having existed for over three-quarters of a century just north of St. Mark’s Church—but jammed between a storefront car service office and a unisex hair salon that no historic society or tourist association would ever recommend visiting—the theater was permanently streaked and stained by particles of soot. The third balcony was an antiquated and empty place, and, as usual, so was the rest of the damp, ammonia-soaked theater. My blind mouse Nathalie and I were entirely alone.
“Frank, I can’t see anything in here,” Nathalie whispered once I’d helped her to the seat beside me. She adjusted the oversized dark glasses, which kept sliding down her nose.
“Maybe you should take off the glasses,” I said.
I really wished she would. Trust me, I know, taking her to a movie theater was more than a little passive-aggressive. But, whatever, I wanted her to put the glasses away. I wanted them back in my dad’s briefcase. And I most certainly didn’t want her wearing them. Seeing her with the glasses creeped me out. So why’d I give her the walking stick then? Fuck, do I have to be able to explain every little thing I did? Does it all have to make sense? Sorry, but all I knew was: 1) Seeing my father’s glasses really upset me, and 2) I wasn’t sure how to tell Nathalie that I didn’t like her playing blind without it seeming like I was making a big deal out of nothing.
Glasses still on, Nathalie pushed herself up out of her rusted-springs sunken chair. Closed walking stick tucked under her left arm, she groped the backs of chairs with her clumsy blind hands and jammed her knee against the railing at the row’s end. Cane snapped open and pointed into the aisle, she tapped the theater’s matted carpet and walked in a slow straight line until she found solid resistance. The right side of her body flush against the wall, she slowly descended one stair at a time out of my sight and into the lobby.
When Nathalie returned, several long deafeningly quiet minutes later, the tart stench of melted artificial butter preceded her. She sat down, and I closed my eyes and listened to the muffled and wet sound of paper tearing between her teeth. I heard her spit out the paper and I strained my ears to catch soft sandy rainfall as she poured small packets of salt onto her popcorn. I opened my eyes when she pressed a few kernels to my lips. Being with Nathalie made my mouth dry, and like so much of the time when I was with her, concerns of unfulfilled thirst plagued me.
I leaned forward and reached into the soft and wrinkled bag I’d packed for us. Cool and dense comfort, I took out the orange. I balanced the fruit on my lap, peeled it, sectioned it, and cleansed each sticky wedge of its foamy white veins. Not hungry, I only sucked one wedge for its juice and then chewed particles of bumpy thick peel until a bitter chalkiness coated my tongue.
“Frank?”
“Yeah?”
“Can I have some orange?” she asked.
“Of course.”
Nathalie reached a searching hand to my lap, took the fruit one section at a time, and ate.
“Nat, I think we should talk,” I said. “I mean, do you really you want a baby?”
She rattled a paper cup filled with just a splash of soda and mostly ice cubes. I knew her ice routine from glasses of water in bed, at restaurants, in the park, wherever we went. The girl didn’t sip daintily. Nathalie avoided the liquid soda in her cup, seeking out solids, stopping only once her Kali tongue found and retrieved the perfect ice cube to warm in her mouth. She’d told me once that she loved the feel of an already slightly melted-down cold square diminishing under the roof of her mouth, the crackling of its surface an audible popping sound. She was such a delicate girl in some ways, such a brute in others.
“Nat?”
She crunched on her ice, reveling in its decimation.
Torn and stained once-crimson curtains abruptly parted in front of the screen below. The movie began. There was no orchestra.
“Nat, come on …”
“I don’t want to talk during the movie, Frank.”
She rattled another piece of ice into her mouth.
For the next one hundred forty-nine minutes, we sat in silence.
Trying to read between the lines without enough background information is fool’s business. I would be a rich man if that business paid well. All through the movie I’d attempted to decipher what the hell was really going on with Nathalie. It wasn’t until we got home that she finally gave me a decoder ring to begin unscrambling the mess. She explained:
That morning, after I’d left for work, she’d woken—totally groggy from cough medicine, too little sleep, and a raging temperature— to screams. From across the street. In the park.
Nathalie heard the noise, and she pushed her dizzy sick self out of bed and onto unsteady feet to investigate, to call the police if necessary. She stumbled over to the window, and what did she see but just a bunch of day care kids entering the park in tidy lines all chain-gang roped together. Eardrum-shattering communal screams, the kids were set free in the playground just three floors down and slightly east of our window. They swung from monkey bars, spun in circles, kicked each other, threw dirt at the bright yellow plastic slide. Their sugary morning-snack-fueled choruses were pure unconsidered truths: there-is-no-future, there-is-little-past, this-is-now and now is what I feel and it is a blue sky day and the air is shivering cold and I’ve been fed and I don’t have to piss or shit and this kid is chasing me and the swings are calling my name. Their noise was absolutely pure primal joy and excitement, but the screeching chilled Nathalie.
She heard the kids and she remembered the screams of people jumping from fireball crumbling tall buildings. Screams on the television. Screams from flyers taped on lampposts and bus stops on every downtown street. The guttural screams that had escaped from her own mouth during so many lucid early-morning nightmares. Screams. She had run away for weeks to try to escape memories of screams. And now that she was settled at home again, children had woken her with their screams.
So why didn’t she just close the windows and block out the racket, right? If only. It was too hot in the apartment with the building’s heat blasting. The windows had to stay open. And hence the screams continued to filter in. Couldn’t she have turned on the television or radio to cover the noise? Well, she did. But the first thing she heard as she listened to NPR was yet another announcement and reminder about the protest. It was far from the white noise she craved.
Restless and eager for distraction, but too tired and sick to go anywhere, Nathalie dragged out an old storage box of her things from the back of the closet. She pulled yarn and bamboo knitting needles from the box. And when she sat back in bed with her supplies, she noticed my wallet on the nightstand. In my cloudy-headed morning rush after a sleepless night spent taking care of her, I’d forgotten it.
Nathalie reached for the wallet—to pick it up and call me and tell me I’d left it
behind, to put it on the kitchen table where it could wait for me until I got home. But Nathalie’s inner-ear must have been swollen or whatever it is that happens to one’s equilibrium when a person has the flu, because as she reached for the wallet, she lurched too far forward and accidentally pushed it off the nightstand. It fell on the floor, open. Nathalie honestly hadn’t intended to snoop, but as the wallet lay there, she saw the estate-sale photo of the flapper. I’d all but forgotten the photo was there, but for Nathalie it was a brand-new discovery. She couldn’t help but pick up the wallet and stare. Eyes fever blurred, Nathalie swore she saw the flapper hitch her dress a little higher and purse her lips in an extra slutty smile.
Forget rules clustered in twelve—those written in stone and otherwise—jealousy is the most honest of human states. Add to jealousy a touch of the emotional regression that typically accompanies being sick, and you’ve got the most uncensored and bluntly honest of truth serums.
“How about a photo of me, asshole?” Nathalie had asked aloud. If she could have slapped the flapper girl, she would have. Instead, she closed my wallet and slammed it back down on the nightstand.
The kids in the park screamed.
Fuming, Nathalie picked up her knitting needles and cast on the yarn. One tightly pulled knot after another, a scarf took shape and gained length in her shaking hands. Eventually she relaxed, the rows of knitting became looser, and she tried to laugh off caring so much about the photograph in my wallet.
Having depleted her limited reserve of energy, Nathalie stopped knitting mid-row, stared at her hands, and noticed the shallow wrinkles and sprinkling of pinprick age spots that grazed her skin. Green veins pushed up far more than she’d remembered ever seeing before. Accustomed to considering herself as barely not a teenager anymore, it was in that exact moment that Nathalie realized, equal parts thrill and disbelief: These are hands of a full-fledged adult. Then, radio news detailing the war our government was about to send troops to, and kids screaming happily in the playground outside in loud happy bursts—nihilism and idealism juxtaposed so vividly—something deep in Nathalie begged for recognition. Immaculate or however it had to be, she wanted a baby kicking her from the inside. My baby. Our baby. The thought persisted. Demanded to be acted upon. And now that it had found her, it would remain.
Though it made little sense on a purely logical level, Nathalie suddenly craved the tiredness that would accompany waking throughout the night to tend to a creature half her and half me. She wanted to suckle a little monster until her nipples ached. Vivid daydreams filled her thoughts, and she watched as she grew a big round belly and heavy breasts and, fire searing pain, she heard our baby’s first cry. She saw herself wrap our son in warm blankets, highchair feed him, teach him to speak, she saw herself by his side when he lost his first tooth … and in that particular future conditional moment, she watched herself run out to the corner bodega to buy a wind-up blink-eye robot to put under our little boy’s pillow as he slept, so he would find it in the morning when he woke, so he would believe that the tooth fairy really did exist—so that when he was full-grown and looking back on his childhood, he would know his mother had always loved him dearly.
As much as Nathalie would have preferred to stay in this happy dream, memories of a lurid event she’d read about years before in the library-loaned biography of Nahui interrupted her bliss. The story, the only one she’d learned about Nahui that she hadn’t yet shared with me, was of Nahui’s baby—a baby I never even knew Nahui had.
The children in the playground screamed again. Ecstatic joy and destruction—who could tell them apart by sound alone? All those pleased children’s screams probably weren’t so unlike the scream of my father’s sister as she fell under the train’s weight. Likewise, my father’s sister’s scream probably wasn’t entirely unlike Nahui’s baby’s final plea.
1915. Nahui’s little Ángel Rodríguez Mondragón was born. He was a striking baby with electric wild green eyes like his mother’s. Nahui loved Ángel—a creature crafted of her own flesh and blood—in the way it is said Narcissus admired himself. Fully. Obsessively. Without apology or hesitation. But, same as with any new mother, taking care of Ángel made Nahui more tired than she’d ever imagined. Every night she woke in the predawn dark to her son’s cries. She took him from his bassinet and returned to bed with him beside her. His mouth at her breast, the warmth of his body soothing her, she fell asleep. This was their routine.
Then one morning Nahui woke to find baby Ángel lying at her side peacefully, but far too still and cold. He was not breathing. He was stiff to his mother’s touch. Nahui screamed. Loudly. For the entire city to hear. She screamed to the heavens. To the earth. The oceans. Fire and air. She had never wished to harm her Ángel. But she had hurt him. Irreversibly. Nahui had smothered him in her sleep.
Before you judge her, consider this:
When Ángel was pronounced dead, Nahui’s heart shattered. She threw herself onto his infant coffin at the grave. People snickered and called her a scandalous whore. They whispered loudly that God had never wanted her to be blessed with a child. There was talk that her baby had been bastard devil spawn. And when her husband left her, neighbors said it was because of the baby’s death.
If they’d only known that Nahui agreed with much of what they said. Because, yes, their Catholic God, she was sure, wouldn’t have wanted more of her kind. And, yes, it was true, the wicked love only their devil approved of was exactly the sort she enjoyed most. As for her husband—still but a young man torn by his desire for adventure and lovers as handsome as he—Manuel’s deep sadness for his son’s death was only part of the reason he left Nahui. That aside, to all the other mean-spirited accusations, Nahui would have confessed. Readily. It made no difference to her if she was guilty of such things. But really, the pain she felt, her baby dead, it was cruel of people to torment her further.
Especially considering the truth she never admitted aloud:
She couldn’t remember anything of the night Ángel died, not a single damned moment or detail. But she did remember the day her son was born, she remembered that with crystal clarity—terror had gripped her chest and made her hands tremble when she saw him for the first time. From that moment forward, she’d secretly feared she wasn’t capable of being the mother such perfection deserved. But she tried. She tried desperately. Then when Ángel died, nightmare that the possibility was, Nahui feared she’d been awake when he died, she feared she’d known she was smothering Ángel, that she’d been aware of his fading life, that she’d needed him gone. Nahui’s uncertainty haunted her to her final day.
Biting her nails, gold flecks of polish on her teeth, Nathalie tried to push away thoughts of Nahui’s baby. She tried to think instead of my promises to plant endless evergreens for her, leafy pothole love letters unfurled for the world to crash into. “Each tree, my heart on my sleeve,” I’d post-fuck whispered to her as I promised to tear down the universe one city block at a time and build it back up in her honor.
Nathalie wiped tears away with the sleeve of her bed dress. Damnit, she thought, like hell if she was going to sit and stew enviously over a stupid old photograph in my wallet when there was a simple solution at hand. She went to the closet to find a picture of us to replace the one of the flapper. She sorted through old envelopes stuffed full of photos and negatives, and soon she was going through everything in that closet. Her things. My things. All our skeletons combined. And that was when she found the blind man glasses in my father’s briefcase. They were enticing and hot to the touch and she couldn’t help but put them on. Instantly, Nathalie fell in love with the way they blocked out the world around her, the way they made things so dark that even sound was somehow muffled.
For a while she returned to her knitting and completed the scarf. But by the time I got home, she was futzing with the boxes of our personal history again. And she wanted a baby.
Nathalie waited until late that night after we returned home from the movie theater to tell me abo
ut Nahui’s baby. Unfamiliar images of Nahui as a mother skipped in and out of my mind, and I found myself thinking about my own mother. Like Nahui, my mother had also somehow managed to sleep through the death of her only child. (Forgive my emotional heavy-handedness here; I was extremely tired when Nathalie told me the story, and exhaustion tends to cause hyperbolic sentiment in me.) Yes, of course I hadn’t actually died like little baby Ángel, but an innocent and peaceful kid had been stamped out of existence just the same during certain miserable nights of my own childhood. To say I was deeply unsettled by the fact that Nahui and my mother had something so regrettable in common would be an understatement of vast proportions. I was horrified.
Trying to keep a logical cap on the situation, I calmly forced myself to ask Nathalie why she hadn’t told me about Nahui’s baby before. Forget just sooner that night; why hadn’t she mentioned it on the Ash Wednesday years earlier when she’d told me everything else she’d learned about Nahui, when she’d taken on the role of Nahui and brought her to life?
She replied: “I didn’t want to ruin Nahui for you.”
I suspected Nathalie actually meant, I didn’t want to ruin us.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
14 February 2003. Valentine’s Day.
A ll morning at the shop, thoughts of Nahui’s dead baby refused to leave me be. Little Ángel—inexplicably dressed by my imagination in a Victorian-era funeral gown, stiff lace ruffle collar pushing up against his pallid full-moon cheeks, lips and eyelids waxed closed for his wake viewing—accompanied me as I stumbled around, sold an antique celery vase to a boho-professorial dude, dusted knickknacks, and tried to convince myself I didn’t really keep getting whiffs of lilies and smoky funereal candles.
By early afternoon, somewhat queasy from my morbid preoccupations, but aware I would soon get a headache if I didn’t eat, I forced myself to open my bagged lunch. I wondered if it would be proper to give half my sandwich to Ángel. If it were appropriately reverent, I could make an altar for him in the store and leave offerings. But would he like grilled tofu on wheat with red leaf lettuce? Maybe he’d prefer a glass of soy milk instead?
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