Last Night I Sang to the Monster

by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

  “Yeah, sure,” I said.

  Adam shot me a snarky smile. I knew about those smiles of his. “You said you wanted to remember.”

  “I do.”

  “I’m going to ask you a question, Zach.”

  “Sure.”

  “Why haven’t you ever asked about how you came here? How long has it been—sixty days?”

  “Fifty-three days.”

  “Fifty-three days and you still haven’t talked about what got you here.”

  I looked at him blankly.

  “Your first day here you told me you didn’t know how you got here. And since then you’ve never asked. You’ve never asked who’s paying for your stay here. You’ve never asked why you have money in your account, the money you buy cigarettes with and buy your soap and shampoo and shaving cream and all those things.” He stopped, almost as if he wasn’t sure, but then he got this determined look on his face. “And you’ve never asked about your family.”

  All of a sudden I felt numb and frozen. You know, I felt like one of those windshields I used to take a bat to. I couldn’t speak. I didn’t know what to say.

  “Zach?”

  Adam was looking at me, studying me. I looked back at him. I know I was holding a question in my eyes. He was holding a question too.

  “Adam, I don’t want to know.”

  “You don’t want to know or you’re afraid to know?”

  “I told you I wasn’t brave.”

  “You are brave, Zach. Didn’t I tell you once that you’ve already survived the worst? You’re here. You’re alive. You’ve survived all the bad things already.”

  “I’m not alive,” I said.

  “Yes, you are.”

  “I don’t feel anything. I hate feeling. I’ve told you that.”

  “But you do feel, Zach. When I didn’t go after Sharkey, you were furious with me. I’m making up that the reason you were so angry with me was because you love Sharkey. And you love Rafael. I saw the look on your face this morning when Rafael was talking about his son. You looked at me and I thought I saw this look. I’m making up that you wanted me to stop his pain. You wanted Rafael to be free of pain and you wanted me to do something. Am I right?”

  “Yeah, something like that.”

  “I can’t stop his pain, Zach. But you love him. You love Rafael. I can see that. That’s a beautiful thing. That’s feeling, Zach.”

  “It hurts like hell, Adam.”

  “Yes, it does, buddy.”

  “I hate that.”

  “But love doesn’t always have to hurt, Zach. Didn’t anybody ever tell you that love could feel good?”

  Nobody had ever said anything about love to me. Not anything. Not one word.

  -6-

  Amit, our new roommate, had chocolate skin and black eyes. He was sort of a big guy and he was a lot like Sharkey in some ways. He liked stuff. He had lots of sunglasses and watches and stuff. And lots of different kinds of expensive tennis shoes and lots of clothes. He was around thirty and just like Sharkey, he took up a lot of space. Rafael kept smiling and I knew what he was smiling about. He was thinking the same thing I was thinking: already this guy was taking over Cabin 9. Not that either of us cared.

  Amit wasn’t very talkative. He seemed a little far away. I was reading a book and Rafael was working on another painting and as soon as Amit finished putting away all his stuff, he put a pack of cigarettes in his pocket and was out the door.

  “I guess people just come and go here,” I said.

  “No one comes to stay, Zach.”

  “I guess not.” The thought entered my head that maybe Rafael wouldn’t be staying for very much longer. I had this feeling. You know, it was like he said, he felt like a desert after a storm. And then I sort of got this thing inside me. You know, when he left, what was I going to do? And me, how long was I going to stay? That anxiety thing was going at me again. Shit.

  I got up from my bed, put my book down and walked over to see what Rafael was painting. It was a moon right in the center of the night sky. And he was drawing a figure to the left of the moon. “What’s that going to be?”

  “A coyote.”

  “Why a coyote?”

  “A coyote howls. It’s his way of singing.”

  But the coyote didn’t look like he was howling. I looked closer. Rafael wasn’t finished with the coyote, but it looked like he was going to be leaping through the air. You know, like he was happy.

  “I’m sorry about Joaquin,” I said. I sat down on the chair next to his desk like I always did when I wanted to talk to him.

  “I think that’s one of the reasons I came here. To let him go. His memory, that’s one of my monsters. Beautiful Joaquin. I can’t carry all that stuff around inside me anymore, Zach.” I think I knew what he was trying to say.

  “Last night I couldn’t sleep. You were having a bad dream. You were talking to Santiago. You kept saying, don’t don’t don’t. I went and sat on your bed. And you know what I did, Zach? I sang.”

  “You sang?”

  “I sang, Zach.”

  “But you said you’d stopped singing after Joaquin died.”

  “Until last night.”

  “What did you sing?”

  “A song. I used to sing it to Joaquin.”

  “You sang it to me?”

  “Yeah. And you got quiet and calm. And I guess I thought you were safe again. And then I got up and got dressed and walked to the tree named Zach. And I stood there and I sang. I sang that song and I swear it felt like that song was coming from my heart like a fire.”

  I looked into Rafael’s eyes and whispered, “Sing it.”

  It was like Rafael saw something in my eyes. Or maybe heard something in my voice. So he did, he sang it…

  One of these mornings

  You’re going to rise up singing

  Then you’ll spread your wings

  And you’ll take to the sky.

  But till that morning

  There’s a’nothing can harm you

  With daddy and mamma standing by.

  I swear Rafael looked like an angel. I remembered the day Mr. Garcia had played the trumpet for me. The song he played had been the most beautiful thing I’d ever heard. Until now. And I knew that Rafael had found a way to tame his monster.

  I knew right then that Rafael would be leaving.

  I wanted to keep him.

  I wanted him to stay forever.

  I wanted him to teach me to sing that song.

  How can you live when you don’t know how to sing?

  REMEMBERING

  I can’t sleep.

  Rafael just finished leading Amit back to bed. He sleepwalks just like Sharkey. Rafael, he really is like a watchdog. He’s the sentry of Cabin 9.

  I’m running through a list in my head of all the things I’m worried about. I’m worried about Sharkey. I’m worried that he’s not going to make it. I’m worried about me, about what I’m going to do when Rafael leaves. I heard him talking on the phone after dinner. I don’t know who he was talking to, but I heard him say that he would be back home in a week or so. Home. That was a strange word. I hadn’t thought about that word in a long time.

  This is the thought that’s entering my head right now: Adam knows what happened to me. He knows how I got here. So why doesn’t he just tell me?

  I already know the answer to that question.

  I’m fighting myself. I know I am. One minute I want to remember. The next minute I want to live in the land of forgetting. One minute I want to feel. The next minute I never want to feel anything ever again. One minute I want to learn how to sing. The next minute I want to hate Rafael for reminding me that there are songs in the world.

  I’m beating the crap out of myself.

  I’m living in a space between day and night.

  I want to move. I want to stay still.

  I want to sleep. And I want to be awake.

  I want to be loved. And I want to be left alone.

  I k
now that I’m better because I can name things now. I can place myself on the map of the world. I can. I can talk about myself to myself. I can be honest about a lot of things. But I don’t want to think about my mom or my dad or my brother.

  I know that something bad happened.

  I’m thinking that a memory can kill a guy.

  I wake up. I look at the clock. It’s four in the morning. I get up and turn on my desk lamp. I get my sketch pad out. I haven’t sketched anything since I’ve been here. I don’t know why, but I have to sketch. I just have to sketch because if I don’t, I know I’ll die. I just know I’ll die. Anxiety is back. I can hardly breathe. If I just sketch, I’ll be able to breathe again.

  I’m sketching. The pencil is moving on the white pad. I can see what I’m drawing.

  I feel like I’m standing outside my body. Watching. My hand is moving across the paper.

  I’m sketching. I’m remembering.

  THE WAKING

  -1-

  This morning, I felt a hand on my shoulder shaking me awake. Then I heard Rafael’s voice. “Okay, Zachariah, it’s time.”

  I kept my eyes closed. “I’m too tired.”

  “Time to get up.”

  “Screw it. I’m staying in bed.”

  “No can do, dude. Up. C’mon. Hit the shower.”

  The guy wasn’t gonna let up. “Okay,” I said. “And fuck you.”

  “Nice mouth. Very nice mouth.”

  “I mean it, Rafael. Fuck you. And why didn’t you tell me you were leaving?” I sat up on the bed. Rafael just looked at me.

  “Guess you’re awake now, huh?”

  “I thought we were friends.”

  “We are friends, Zach.” He popped his knuckles. Sometimes he did that. “My days are up, Zach. I thought you knew that. Fifty-eight days I’ve been here.” He shot me one of those Rafael smiles, the kind that made you unsure of what the smile meant. “Fifty-eight fucking days.”

  “Nice mouth,” I said.

  “Yeah, nice mouth. Look, Zach, it’s time.”

  “You should’ve have told me you were leaving.”

  “It wasn’t a secret, Zach.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Hit the shower, kid.”

  “Don’t call me a kid. Fuck you.”

  Rafael didn’t say anything. He just sort of smiled and looked at me. I’m not sure what the look meant. I watched him as he left the cabin.

  I sat there in bed staring down at the floor. What was that about—staring at the floor? Why did I always do that? I really hated myself sometimes. I got up and looked at the sketch. It was a scene from my life, the part of my life I had wanted to forget. But now I was remembering. Not that it made me feel any better. All it did was make me feel bad. I held the sketch in my hand, then put it down. I had the urge to tear it up. Tear it up to pieces.

  I wondered what it was like to feel whole, to not feel torn up or stunned out or wigged out or any of those things. I wondered what it was like to walk around the world looking up at the sky instead of searching the ground, eye to eye with things that crawled.

  I walked toward the shower, but as I walked past Rafael’s desk, I saw his journal sitting on his desk. It was open. I walked up to the journal and picked it up. I held it and told myself to just put it back down and walk away. But that’s not what I did—I stared at the words and began reading:

  I feel like I’ve been driving down a road for a long time—and I’m the only traveler. I don’t really know where I’m going—and the problem isn’t that I’m alone. Alone is good. I’ve never really minded being alone. But sometimes I just want to stop traveling down wherever the hell the road is leading to. I just want to stop the car and remember where this trip began and why I’m taking it.

  I want to talk to someone and I want to ask them to point to the place of the pain. I want to say: “Show me where it hurts.” And then I want to touch them there. And then I want to show them where my hurt is and I want them to touch me there. Letting someone touch you in the place where it hurts the most, if I could do that, if I could just do that, well, that would mean I was alive.

  I’m thinking that if I can touch other people’s hurt and they can touch mine, then something might happen. Something really beautiful. I don’t mean that the hurt would disappear. I just mean that it might be possible to continue on the road toward a place called home.

  Home. There was that word again.

  I stared at all of Rafael’s words. God, there was all this chaos inside me. It was like all these memories were having a riot inside my heart and my brain and maybe that was why I was all torn up. Was there a word that could save me?

  I kept thinking about my sketch as I took a shower. The thought entered my head that it had all been a dream and that what I’d sketched wasn’t a scene from my past at all. It was just a dream. It was just another dream.

  Nothing was real—except for the words in Rafael’s journal. I felt the hot water hitting my body. Hitting wasn’t the right word. Hitting was what my brother had done to me. Hitting was what I had done to windshields and parked cars. The water was soft and my brother, there was nothing soft about him. His fists were hard, his eyes were hard, his voice was hard, his heart was hard. He was the hardest thing in the known universe. In my known universe.

  I closed my eyes and let the water rush over me and I wondered what it would be like to be as soft as water, to make people clean, to quench people’s thirst. That would be a beautiful thing, to be like water. And then all these photographs started entering my head, my brother hitting me, my father’s head on the kitchen table, the empty look in my mother’s eyes, me roaming the streets like a wounded dog, me lying down in Susan’s office, breathing, crying, Rafael sitting on my bed singing, Adam’s voice, “When was the last time someone told you they loved you?” Then there was a gunshot. I kept hearing a voice, “No no no please God no.” The voice was mine.

  I don’t know how long I stood there in front of the mirror, hugging myself. My eyes were dark today. I stared at them. Adam had told me my eyes were hazel. Sometimes they looked green. Green, as if there flecks of leaves in them. Like summer.

  Today my eyes were dark as winter.

  I looked at my calendar.

  This was my fifty-fourth day—in this place.

  Fifty-four days.

  I was thinking that I had been here all my life.

  “What’s that?”

  I turned and saw Rafael looking at my sketch. He was studying it.

  “Did you say something, Zach?”

  “I was just talking to myself.”

  “A habit you share with most of the denizens of this place.” He seemed only halfway in the conversation. “This is wonderful, Zach. I didn’t know you were an artist.”

  “It was one of two classes I loved.”

  “What was the other one?”

  “English.”

  “Ah,” he said, “Mr. Garcia.”

  I looked at him. I wondered how he knew about Mr. Garcia. I’d never told him about Mr. Garcia.

  “You talk to him in your sleep.”

  “You shouldn’t listen in on other people’s dreams.”

  “I’ll try not to. Just keep it down. People are trying to sleep.” He kept staring at my sketch. “Are you bringing this into group?”

  “I wasn’t planning on it.”

  “Bring it in.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Storytime,” he said.

  “I don’t—.”

  Rafael stopped me dead. “People tell their stories on their second week.”

  “I know that.”

  “It’s time, Zach.”

  “Adam will tell me when it’s time.”

  “Adam’s not going to tell you shit, Zach. Adam’s not here to tell you what to do. He’s not a cop. The work we do is not for Adam, Zach, it’s for us.”

  “I thought you liked Adam.”

  “I love Adam. He’s a beautiful and gifted man. But what does l
iking or not liking Adam have to do with you telling your story? This is up to you, dude. You.”

  Rafael didn’t say dude. It wasn’t a Rafael word. When he said dude, it meant he was starting to get mad.

  “You’re no expert on what I should do.”

  “So what? You think anybody’s an expert? No one’s an expert on human behavior, Zach. Especially fucked-up human behavior.”

  “Are you saying I’m fucked up?”

  He grabbed me by the shoulders and looked right into me. “I’m saying it’s time, Zach.” He was wearing this very serious look in his eyes. “You can’t just hang out, Zach. You can’t just loiter. There’s a reason you’re here.” He took his hands off my shoulders.

  “I can’t.”

  “You can, Zach.” He smiled. “You want me to try guilt?”

  “Guilt?”

  “You want me to leave this place without hearing your story?”

  “Fuck you, Rafael.”

  “Nice mouth.”

  “Yeah, nice mouth.” I gave him a snarky smile.

  He looked at his watch. “We got twenty minutes.”

  “To do what?”

  “Let’s you and I walk the labyrinth.”

  -2-

  I don’t know what made me follow Rafael to the mouth of the labyrinth.

  We stood there for a moment. There was something still and quiet about the labyrinth. It always made me want to whisper. “Close your eyes,” he said. “Take a breath—then open your eyes and walk.” I heard Adam’s voice inside me: Walk the labyrinth with intent.

  Remember remember remember. That was the word that came into my head. It was almost as if remember was a wind blowing through all the sad and dark corners of my body. That wind blew and blew and blew until I reached the center of the labyrinth.

  Rafael was there.

  Don’t be afraid. It felt as though his voice was coming from my heart.

  -3-

  After Check-in, Adam asked if anyone had something to work on during group. I found myself raising my hand. Not that the hand-raising thing was something we did in group. It wasn’t like school. Well, I think it was a school. The subject here was our pain.