“So who is this guy your mother’s seeing?”
“Come on,” Emma said, tossing her taco on her plate. “Fiesta Night, Dad.”
As a rule, while eating during Fiesta Night, they could only speak Spanish. Emma instituted this rule when he and Rachel started breaking their agreement not to argue in front of their daughter. “I hereby declare we shall only speak Spanish while eating tacos,” Emma had said. They knew little Spanish, just the pleasantries and basic commands, and the dinners on Fiesta Night, at least, were all politeness and awkward phrasings.
“I don’t care about Fiesta Night,” he said. “I want to know what’s happening in your lives. It’s like covert ops between you two.”
“I don’t want to be your informant, Detective.”
He exhaled a long line of air. “Muy bien,” he said now, bobbing his head from side to side in mock silliness. “Salsa es muy caliente!”
“Sí,” she said. “El carne asada es muy bien!”
“Feliz Navidad,” he said.
THE GARGANTUAN SELF
He’d watched her for two days while he and a couple of Hondurans laid PVC for a sprinkler system next door, his shovel digging deep into the clay soil. He’d gotten strong doing this kind of work, his shoulders rippled with muscle, his biceps and forearms wiry sinews. The old woman clipped dead heads from thornbushes, watered flower baskets that were like purple constellations.
She reminded him of someone, someone from a long time ago, but for the first day he couldn’t say who. He kept watching her until he remembered the woman, the one who had lived next door to the house where he was kept in the basement. He saw her the day his father brought him home from the doctor. The woman had been in the side yard, near the painted-over window to his basement, watering flowers that were like pink explosions. His dad made them sit in the car and wait, the sunlight so bright that he had to squint to keep it from stabbing inside his head; they waited until she rolled up the hose and went inside her house. Down in the basement, there had always been a shadow cast across the painted-over window, something like smoke that rippled into arms and legs, a shadow he sometimes spoke to when he was in the darkness. It hadn’t been smoke or a black angel, it had been this woman, just outside the painted-over window, watering flowers in the sun.
He cut the shovel into the dirt now and watched this new woman; she clipped wilted flowers from the bushes, her shoulders slumped as though Death were teasing her bones toward the peat earth at her feet.
Soon after he was released from the state hospital with the doctors who tried to fix what was wrong in him, he tried to go back to that house, the one with the basement and the mattress and the lock on the door. He took a bus to the town and walked to the edge of the street, his eleven-year-old self thrashing around inside his adult body, but he couldn’t make himself go, and he sat alone in a motel that night, cursing names at his face in the bathroom mirror.
When this new woman was finished with the flowers, she drank tea on her porch and stared at the grass. Later in the afternoon, she sat in a recliner and watched people kiss on television—he could see her, her back to the windows. She was alone. A widow maybe, an old maid.
He had learned to avoid men. He’d had to shatter the skull of one with a statue, the brain like melon seed spilling out. It was brutal, beneath him. He wanted it to be calm, quiet, like an act of love. He didn’t hate them; he simply needed what they gave him.
Tonight he sat in the car and listened to the song—the cutting guitar, the bludgeoning bass, the singer’s voice devouring the eleven-year-old self—then listened to it again, his muscles electrified, his hands becoming clamps. Music had waves, and they pulsed in his body. When he slipped through the sliding glass door, she was asleep, breathing quietly on the couch—her nightgown loosely tied around her waist, her gray head lolled against the headrest. He had learned how to move quietly, like a cat, soft on the balls of his feet, his weight hovering in the air, wraithlike.
His thumbs pressed into the notch at the base of her neck even before she opened her eyes, her fish mouth gasping. Her irises were gray, with yellow starbursts exploding from the pupils. The dark holes dilated with shock. Is this really happening, her eyes seemed to ask, is this a nightmare? Yes, he said. It’s really happening. Tonight I’m taking you with me. She kicked the footrest, scratched at his forearms, but soon her muscles slackened and her eyes gazed at him, milky and floating, her lids finally closing.
He let go of her then and watched her, her neck ringed red, her lips contorted but softening, her chest rising and dropping. Asleep. They were beautiful when they were sleeping. This is what his eleven-year-old self must have looked like to the man, his father, the man who locked him in the basement. He understood this about that man: They looked so innocent that you needed to own them, wanted them for yourself. He leaned over her, admiring the placid look on her face, watching the pulsing vein in her neck. Her face made him think of milk, for some reason. White and clean. He could do anything to her while she was asleep, anything at all. But he didn’t want those things. He didn’t want what that man, his father, had wanted from his eleven-year-old self. They were dirty things, animal things. He had been so small then. A bird with a hood over his eyes.
She started to move, her mouth gasping air as though she’d been held underwater. He sat on her lap and clasped his fingers over her throat again. He heard the singer’s voice in his head, the urgent pummel of the music, and he felt his body grow, his gargantuan self filling the room. He could feel her pulse on the edge of his thumb—arrhythmic, out of time with the song, a thrumming persistence against his skin. Find a little strip, find a little stranger. He had been so small, but he was gargantuan now, and she lay there between his legs, asleep, a false mirror of her coming death, and he loved her. Loved what she would give him, loved that he could take it. It was like food, sustenance. That man had made him do things for food, disgusting things, and he was no longer hungry. Had to force himself to eat, the smell of each bite conjuring his father’s body, billowing that man with ugly life.
Nothing in my dreams, just some ugly memories. Still her pulse, beating against his palm, her eyes erratic beneath the lids. The song looped in his head, the guitars, the bass, the singer’s growl filling his body. Swear you’re gonna feel my hand. The wind shuddered the windowpanes, a gust blowing papers from the kitchen table. A siren wailed in the distance, carried aloft on the wind and growing faint. The soul of the body was electricity. There was no heaven or hell. The soul became clouds, joined the thrum of power lines, dissipated in the desert air if you didn’t catch it.
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