Perla (17 page)

He cocks his head.

Now you may talk.

No.

I can go to class? When I get back you’ll be here?

I will.

How can you be sure?

I can’t be.

Then how can I trust you?

No one is ever sure of anything.

Some people say they are.

They’re liars.

She smiles wryly. Maybe so.

She leans back in her chair, into a ray of sun, and glitter briefly fills the chaos of her hair.

8
Nectar and Venom

I
meant to go to class. I really did. But in the end I couldn’t bring myself to leave the house. I couldn’t even bring myself to shower. I cooked Lolo’s squash and returned to the living room. Cigarettes for breakfast. I was low on smokes again. How had that happened?

The living room rug was ruined. It had soaked through with the strange waters of my guest, and smelled like a decomposing orchard. I saw myself attempting to explain this to my parents on their return: I’m sorry, your fine Persian is gone, it’s just that I had a phantom over, or rather, one of the disappeared who reappeared. Yes, I know, who could have imagined it—but then again, isn’t there some logic to the reappearance of what disappears? Isn’t that what keys and socks do? If you can’t explain how something went away, then why should its return obey the laws of reason? And what is reason anyway, hasn’t it been used to exploit the—yes, yes, I’m sorry, let’s not fight, we were talking about the rug. Your rug. I’m afraid it’s gone. You might say it’s disappeared.

That would be the easy version, the one that might conceivably occur if the guest were gone when, four days from now, my parents came home. But what if he was still here? He showed no signs of leaving. I had no idea how to explain his presence, or, more important, how to keep my father from trying to slaughter the ghost. I could see him now, the look on his face, the kitchen knife or what he could do with his bare, well-trained hands—though surely he would not succeed since ghosts cannot be slaughtered. Who knew what would come
of such an attempt? It was a mystery. The whole future was a mystery. I had no plan for what to do on my parents’ return. I tried to picture the moment but I could not bring it into focus. Two blurred figures would hover at the edge of the living room, their faces inscrutable. Then a sharp cry from one of them, followed by a garbled stream of words in which I could make out only
Perla
and
our house
and the high rise of a question mark at the end. Then it would be my turn to speak, to answer the question I had not understood, but I could not imagine forming any coherent words, I saw myself opening my mouth to speak and spilling out water the way the ghost had when he first arrived.

These were, of course, ridiculous imaginings. They did nothing to move me closer to a real plan, which I needed, of course, but which I could not bring myself to make. The pragmatic part of my mind had come undone, its order dismantled by droves of thoughts that clamored to be noticed, to be touched, to be seen. I could not touch them all at once. I could not address the future when I had barely begun to address the crowded past. The mind is elastic but not infinite, it can only pull so far at once before it starts to break apart, and Time, it turned out, was not a river at all but an ocean, spreading in all directions, disorderly and vast, swirling with spiraled currents. You never knew where you might drift, or what would become of you along the way.

Such thoughts rushing through my mind. More than enough to drown in.

The rug. I stared at the rug. There was nothing left but to get rid of it, stow it somewhere out of sight. Gently and with great effort, I pulled him over. He didn’t resist, but it was still difficult, as he barely had the strength to stand up on his own. The feel of him startled me, it was so ordinary, like any human being just risen from water, from cold water, perhaps on a dark winter’s night. I rolled up the rug and stowed its damp remains in the basement, then returned to him.

“There. You’re dry now.”

“Am I?”

I looked at him. He was dripping. “You’re drier. You have a dry place.”

I moved him back to the center of the room and arranged towels around his body, to catch the moisture as it emerged from him. He was curled up on his side, so I gently lined his back with towels, and draped others along his legs and hips, white towels against pale skin. I covered his groin with another towel, a kind of loincloth, even though I was accustomed to his nakedness, and no longer had to consciously avoid his genitals with my eyes. I’m not sure why I covered him. Perhaps I was thinking of the lepers in the Bible, their supplication, the acts of charity and grace. I wanted to minister to him that way, not out of selflessness, but for more complicated reasons. There was something for me in it, a kind of expiation, or perhaps a restoration, but of what exactly, I could not say.

I was still telling myself that any moment I’d leave for school, but as I draped the last towel around his knees I realized that I would not. I could not leave. I’d always been the girl who felt the sky collapse if she arrived in class a few minutes late, but now I thought, To hell with it, the heavens can buckle and fall if they must, the grades can plummet if they must, I don’t care, I can’t care, I can’t leave. Everything that matters is here, in this room, in this strange unfolding story—once upon a time there was a turtle and a woman and a man or not-man and they spent many hours together as if their lives somehow depended on the spending, or on
together
, or on how the hours slowly sank into their skins.

We were quiet together. He stared at the ceiling. I was free to examine his nose, ears, eyes, the way his jawbone jutted an angle at the edge of his face. He’d be handsome if he weren’t so blue and soggy. I wished I could see the way he looked before he died. He would have been a young man then, just venturing into adulthood. I imagined that, back then, he had a fresh clean face and a lithe body and that love came to him like an act of grace. The world rolled out
before him in all its shine and possibility, entreating him to come and rove and touch it, and he surely would have if he hadn’t disappeared.

I couldn’t stop looking at him, couldn’t stop straining to imagine his features on a living man.

By evening he had soaked through the towels. I replaced them with dry ones, knowing they wouldn’t last long.

“Do you want to move to the bathtub?”

He shook his head. This had become his room.

Later, as I brushed my teeth, I thought of the pool. I found it after a long rummage in the basement. It was packed neatly in a cardboard box, labeled with my mother’s handwriting. Mamá was the most organized person I’d ever known. She thrived on the maintenance of order, as if assembling boxes and arranging shelves pushed back the dim unpalatable chaos of the world. How did I marry a man who can’t even find his keys? she would say, smiling at her husband. Didn’t they teach you anything in the Navy? Her husband would smile back, genially: Who needs the Navy when I have you? Those were their good days, the days I would call up in my mind during less hospitable times.

I opened the box and pulled out the deflated red plastic. Holding it, I could smell the fulsome warmth of summer grass, see the red tint of water captured in red walls, and hear light splashes around my body, which was lithe and small and supple once again, the shape-shifting body of a child; now I was a princess, now a dolphin, now a fusion of them both, a royal animal with gemstones draped along my fins. The sun leaped and shimmered in the water. I flapped my feet and the crowds—fish and seahorses and octopuses—shivered in delight. They bowed to me, to Princess Perla, and the salty currents sang my name, Perla, Perlita, swim for us, stir the waters. I laughed. I swam around my tiny sea, utterly alone, pretending I was not alone, never thinking about the breath from my father’s lungs that had created the pool and
that held its walls in place. Sometimes my father came to squat nearby and watch me play, with a look of baffled tenderness, as if he could still scarcely believe this good fortune, a princess in his midst, or so I imagined his thoughts from the perspective of my subsuming game. And I would think, I will tell the seahorses to carry him a gift (a rock, a whisper, a rare bone), the poor man, so tied to the land, incapable of experiencing our sea. In the context of my game, he was of a different species, a lesser one, unequipped to learn the ways of water. He was foreign to me, and though he didn’t know it, the imaginary animals around me did. The seahorses would not want to carry gifts to him; the octopuses shuddered with mistrust; the fish swarmed around me in defense. I had to placate them, sshhhh, don’t worry, be kind to him. He’s not a bad creature. He just doesn’t understand our world.

I returned to the living room and inflated the pool. He lay on his side, limbs limp as always, watching me do it with those eyes that seemed to look right into me, wide, clear, indecipherable. A man with limp arms and weak legs and the most vigorous eyes. I put the pool down in the middle of the floor and helped him into it, propping up his body as he swung one leg in, then the other. We’re getting better at this, I thought.

He looked like a child in a plastic crib, limbs curled into its confines. I didn’t know what to say to him, but then, he didn’t seem to be waiting for me to speak. He seemed immersed in staring at the porcelain swan on the bookshelf. I read on the sofa, a Saramago novel I’d left unfinished months ago, about a city thrown into chaos because everyone sees white, nothing but white. I read until the words began to blend and lose their meaning. I fell asleep with the book open on my chest.

In the morning, the water level had risen; the pool was a third full.

“Good morning. You dripped a lot.”

“I remembered a lot.”

“You drip when you remember?”

He shrugged.

I got a tall cup and a bucket and began to empty his pool, slowly, cupful by cupful. I watched the water pour from cup to bucket, catching the early morning light. It looked silty, slightly opaque, like river water, but otherwise quite normal. “So are the memories in the water?”

He didn’t answer.

“I’d like to know what you remembered.”

He looked doubtful.

“You don’t believe me?”

He shrugged again.

He remembers that when he was in the water, the water ate him, ate his body, and as his body decomposed his consciousness was freed into the sea. Consciousness—death showed him this—is a supple wide translucent thing that can gather and disperse, stretch and shrink, be thin or viscous, roil or remain still. Let loose from the body it becomes a free amorphous haze of presence. He was untied, loose, he had no static bulk or density, he simply interpenetrated water. Objects with life or bulk could move through him with ease: currents, silt, the deep-down cold, the dance of starfish, coral fingers, tentacles, fins slicing their world as they passed by, the shake of sun, gentle knives of moonlight, bones down in the sand, things he could not name, and there were no names left, only the plumb and swirl and hover glide pour open close of being.

The sea, the endless breadth of it, long push of unhemmed waves, the sea, the sea, dark and wet and dirty, he was not alone there, the sea was full of presence, including presences like his because his living body did not fall alone, other bodies came undone inside the water, other clouds of consciousness glided too, and it is an illusion to be one and only one, especially once the body breaks apart: then communal truths reveal themselves; he blended with the others and what a searing joy to mix with them, complete the merging their skin had
begun during the flight. Now without skin it was so easy, there were memories in the water, the water was marvelously cold, the memories were points of light that shot through them, shot through the schools of fish that pierced them, shot through their water, iridescent flashes of their collective past: someone ran through wheat stalks on naked feet, someone opened naked legs on the kitchen table, someone’s wrist blistered under shackles, someone watched sausages blister on a grill, someone writhed tied to a grill, someone lay between two men who writhed in sleep, someone woke up to the wail of a tango from the piano, someone danced on a crowded balcony, someone hid in a bare basement, someone smelled shit, someone smelled fear, someone smelled night-blooming jasmine, someone kissed a woman beside night-blooming jasmine, someone kissed the toes of a child, someone was a child, someone was afraid of the dark, someone prayed in a clean cotton nightgown, someone heard a bedtime story, someone heard a gun, someone wept, someone sang, someone opened empty palms, and there were no more someones, all the memories were shared, everyone remembered or not so much remembered as shared a single consciousness infused with memories; the memories shimmered in the mesh of them; the mesh of them expanded and contracted, together, a heaving underwater lung.

Others came at first. They fell into the water just the same way, in clusters, thrashing against the sea. The vast collective lung inhaled them and helped them decompose, sshhhh, sssshhh, here you go, take off your flesh, take off the pain, open to the water, let your body fall apart, let us absorb the rest of you like oxygen. Water rocks and breathes and in the water there are things that awaken. In the wetness there are things that sink away. And then there is this, the merging of things, the sloshing permeability of consciousness, shot through with bright darts of memory that belong to the currents, the breathing, the seaweed and the silt and the sharks—and so inside this liquid haze all things belong to each other, the seaweed belongs to the light that illuminates its fronds, the breaths belong to the silt itself, the
memories belong to sharks that belong inside the drenched collective lung.

And the sun, the sun pulsed through all of it, slow and golden, pouring its heat into the water. Unmeasured years of underwater sun. The mesh of them drifted out to the vast ocean, kissed the roots of hot islands and cold icebergs, but they returned. They reached the shore of their own land again, hovered at the wide river’s mouth. The river yawned to welcome them. It unfurled fluid claws. It pulled them in and they rode its rich waters, riding against the currents, into the bay between two countries that burst with human life. The claws of the river drew them, hooked into them, seemed to know them and want them close. And they, for their part, permeated the river with ease and gladness. It was home. They were close enough to the lands of their beloved living ones to almost taste them—their morning musk and piquant sweat and bitter sadness—in the particles of soil that browned the water. The almost-taste of their beloved living ones kept them in the brackish bay. Meanwhile, the two cities on either shore hummed on, unaware of the third city, the liquid city, that hung underwater close by, mocking their solidity, challenging the arrogance of steel and stone,
psshhh we are also here and also real
, breathing in the great wet space between two nations, between saltwater and fresh, sea and river, true life and true death.