The Sleeping World (19 page)

PARIS

January 1978

Months dropped out from under us, the rest of summer and fall. I opened my eyes and it was winter and nothing had changed except we were skinnier and the room was cold. We didn't talk about what we feared or what we would do next. Instead we tried to anticipate the need for speech, rotating who went out to get food, who rolled the cigarettes that made us need less of it. We did nothing except keep off the steepest edge of hunger, the kind that would let us stall completely, let us slip into stillness. We were parts on a body, moving without speech but unconnected, too, loosed from any sense of common organ. That common organ was known, though we didn't name it. It had curdled, preformed, in our throats. We didn't think about Grito. We were gray with not thinking about him. Lonely anemone all attached to the same rock, tendrils shooting off in different directions, colorless beneath water beneath clouds.

After a few months, La Canaria found a job that paid nothing and lost it, found another job that paid nothing and lost it. Her last job, she complained to the boss that one of the stockers kept grabbing her in the back room and the boss asked to see her papers. She didn't want to work after that. Her ankles were swollen, and what food we had she could barely keep down.

Marco and La Canaria seemed foggy to me. Sometimes
there'd be a carton of cold fries or half a grilled ham sandwich sitting on the mattress for me when I got back inside, but sometimes there wouldn't be anything and I wouldn't eat all day.

Marco's money was running out. La Canaria said he should ask for more, but she also told me she couldn't imagine anything really being his, certainly not anything as powerful and as real as the money a family like his must have. I felt the same. Nothing seemed to belong to Marco. His grip was tentative, easily unmoored. He couldn't even kill himself right. He couldn't even own that. Except for the night when he was on his horse—but the horse wasn't something that could really be his.

The city was empty of Alexis. No tags, no one knew him. I could feel that emptiness clinging to my insides more than I could feel my hunger or the cold. I spoke his name again and again—to the too-clean punks, to the vacant-eyed men who slept on the streets. Who would trust me? I followed half-formed thoughts and hunches, but I said his name too many times. It became a lie, hollowed out and rattling inside me.

We had moved so quickly. Marco, La Canaria, Grito, and I. Through cities and over borders. A blur impossible to slow in present tense and clarify. We had moved without reason and we had left behind no memories. No one could say we had been there because we had not been. We were not anywhere. No one could know who first edged our books to the fire. We had smudged even that. But Grito's death had stopped us. A wall stretching up to the sky.

We were lodged where he was, wherever it was we'd left him, under a black log, cold water rushing over our heads.

Grito drifted down to join Alexis. There were two names, two different rivers merging, but we hadn't seen either body.
We didn't speak either name. We were frozen in fear, in loss, in longing. How unformed it felt. An impermanent mark, but we could not shake it. Time slipped by like sleep. We dreamed of never waking.

Then something grabbed me by the throat and shook.

* * *

January, the streets empty, the tourists returned home, the old people inside away from the cold and the young people left on the first train for their jobs in the city center. The parks had been green when we arrived in the summer, stretching wider and longer than the streets, leading to the palaces turned government buildings, palaces turned museums, palaces that were war relics and allowed to remain palaces. The plane trees had been cut, their summer growth carted away, only stubby knuckles left. A sky heavy enough to collapse.

I thought I'd walked every street, but in the early evening I turned down a street I'd never been on. The sidewalks were empty and it was beginning to get dark. The advertisements coating the brick walls were faded. Children holding up bread with Nutella, their faces turned gray and smiles streaked with green dye from the detergent ad above. At the end of the street I could see railway wires and tracks, but the nearest stop a long way in either direction. A dark matted thing batted up against a corner of the chain-link fence—whether trash or an animal, I couldn't tell.

Maybe it was the walking and hunger and wearing down, a chafing away of the grit and sand of myself until I was a smooth stone as thin and light as a sheath of skin, that made me able to see what I saw. I couldn't really see the streets around me. I couldn't find what I was looking for, I'd never find that, so I saw nothing at all. But being so next to nothing for so long, walking
without thoughts or the strength to keep walking, maybe that was how I was able to slip, without noticing it, into somewhere else entirely.

The last shop before the train tracks was set away from the rest. Inside, the store was dark, the merchandise generic, past its expiration date, and cheap.

I grabbed a loaf of stale bread wrapped in paper. Alexis's medallion and La Canaria's bullet were cold when I pulled them out from under my sweater, even though they'd been right by my skin for months.

“Is that how you're going to pay for this?” Alexis said, leaning up against the filmy counter. His hair was short and he was too skinny, but he was smiling. That smile I rarely got to see, that made my abuela walk soft to make it last.

“This is real gold,
macho,
” I said. “And this bullet's a war relic. Republican memorabilia.” I was trying not to laugh. When he teased me, I could never keep from laughing, even if he was making fun of me.

“Listen, Mosquita, you know I don't care about that Republican memorabilia shit.” His smile changed. “Isn't that my medallion?”

“No, it's mine now.” I stopped laughing.

“Where are you?” I said. “Tell me where you are.”

* * *

The store was empty. I'd crawled in through the broken boards on the windows. A car's passing lights lit up the dusty air. No one had been in there for months. I found a dented sardine tin under one of the empty shelves and crawled out the way I had come.

I didn't know what I had just seen; Alexis, yes, as solid as I'd seen him on the river when Grito fell in, as alive as in my dreams. But I didn't know what it meant. I'd seen him
once and thought it proof he was beyond finding. Seeing him again, a different space opened, a different possibility. I couldn't name it, but I lurked around the space, waiting for an opening.

* * *

I climbed the fire escape, shaking and scared that what I'd seen was smeared all over me. More, I felt that I had been skinned, and when I climbed through the window Marco and La Canaria would see not a skinny girl in dirty clothes but a flayed thing, rotted and not worth picking at. But Marco barely looked up at me, and La Canaria was asleep on the mattress.

Marco crouched on the floor, counting his money to come up with the amount we had to live on the next day. The number kept getting smaller. I sat down next to La Canaria on the mattress. Heat uncoiled slowly off her body and I wanted to relax into it. We slept next to each other, but we slept as if separated by mile-high bundling boards, tense and not touching. Moving close to her might help me warm up, but if I did, I'd only get cold again, and that return wasn't worth it. Better to stay numb than to know the details of your frostbite.

Marco stared at the money. His fingers were dirty. Washing meant splashing cold water from the sink onto body parts already recoiling from exposure. He seemed to be diminishing as the money did, whittling down to not much at all.

But I could see him clearly for the first time in months. Sweat-stained clothes, rings of grime around his neck. He spread his coins out on the wood floor like a magician setting up a trick with cards. I wanted to reach out and touch him—and the feeling was so strong and surprising I winced.

“Mosca?” he said, as if he could hear that want, something
he'd been tense listening for. It had been so long since someone had said my name out loud. It was just one word, but he was looking at me, when he said it, hoping for a response.

I turned away as if I hadn't heard him. If there were a bridge between us, neither of us was in shape to cross.

La Canaria pushed herself up on the mattress. She seemed different, too. Maybe after what I had seen, maybe something else had changed.

“Why don't you just get more?” she said.

“What?” Marco said.

“Get more. Money.”

“I can't,” he said.

“Why not?”

He stacked the coins into a pile and pushed them over to the phone. “Because there isn't any more. My parents have been broke for years. What I took from the house—what he—in Madrid—that was all that was left.”

* * *

I got up early the next morning and said I would try to find us something to eat. I always said that, and no one believed me. Out on the streets my eyes strayed toward graffiti-­coated walls or the faces of homeless kids clumped at the edge of markets, looking for familiar slouching shoulders. If I'd seen him the night before, perhaps I could see him again. La Canaria followed me all day. I didn't pay much attention to her. She was good at finding spare change, knowing who to ask for a light and get a whole pack. She had changed, thickening in some spots, thinning in others, silent and flashing her teeth when least expected. Out walking, she could become almost transparent, blending with cement and prismed pigeons.

At dusk, I looked through the windows into a café, full of mirrored light and students in fitted dark clothes, the women
with fine leather handbags at their heels. They bent over marbled tables, heads close together. Cigarette smoke, mimicking their words, circled tight and then dissipated. The students listened to the same music we used to, but they had more of it. Record shops advertised all the new albums with uncensored covers. Even the punks seemed cleaner, outfitted in brand-new black jeans and crisp Ramones T-shirts. The girls dressed like Jane Birkin, miniskirts and gauzy see-through tops even in winter. Their hair fell long and shining, not from grease but health, over their faces. They smiled coyly down into their steaming mugs of Moroccan mint tea, flashing turquoise rings from Tibet and Arizona.

La Canaria held out the few coins she'd collected, but the café was too nice and our clothes too dirty. I turned back to the crowd skittering from work to home, each person grabbing a baguette or chocolate or a bunch of radishes. I walked toward the street, trying to shake La Canaria, and for a moment the crowd opened.

The people walking didn't notice the opening, but they moved around it just the same. The space was hardly big enough to detect, but I saw it and stopped. In the space were shadows with a heft unlike any shadows I'd seen before. I recognized the smell—rust from the bridge in Casasrojas, aerosol paint, mud at the bottom of a river, and an added scent I couldn't quite place. The shadows got thicker until I stepped inside them.

I looked back at the crowd, and it was gorged with people. Not just the ones I'd seen from the sidewalk. Scrawny children in homespun rags, hobbling men in old-fashioned suits. They were faded slightly, these new figures, and they walked around and into buildings that no longer existed. There were layers of them, growing on top of one another, squished together and weightless. More, the more I looked, centuries of life moving
over the stones. I opened my mouth to speak, hoping that one, just one of them, would turn to me and hear, but no sounds came out.

* * *

La Canaria grabbed my arm and pulled me back against the café window. “What are you doing?” she said.

“What?” I felt dazed, like I'd been pulled from a deep sleep.

“You were talking to yourself.”

I was still stunned, but I didn't bother trying to fight her. “What did I say?”

“Nothing I could hear.” She looked back at the spot where I'd been, but the opening was gone. An old couple walked through where the shadows had swirled, their scarves tucked neatly into fur coats and shoulders bent against the wind.

“Come on, you fucking
loca,
” she said. “Let's get back. I'm cold.”

* * *

We climbed the fire escape, familiar with its creaking rungs, which ones were slippery, which rusted weak. The room smelled like an unwashed mouth, and the air was emptied of anything but hunger. But Marco didn't ask us for food. He barely saw us enter. He was pacing the room, banging his head against the wall and then spinning around like a doll. On the walls, at the level of his head, were small ovals of grease where his forehead had landed on the grimy plaster. He slapped a rolled-up newspaper against his thigh.

I helped La Canaria through the window. Her sweater caught in a piece of broken wood on the pane. I tugged at it and it ripped. We both lost our balance for a second, and when I turned around, Marco was centimeters from my face, holding
up the newspaper and grinning anxiously. “You must have seen this?” he said.

La Canaria jumped down from the window and focused on her sweater, but she backed up almost imperceptibly from him.

“You did, didn't you?” he said, moving closer to us.

“See what, Marco?” I said. I couldn't decide whether to stick by La Canaria or try to get out the window.

“The news, the news—”

“Marco!” La Canaria snapped her head up. “Just shut up and sit the fuck down.”

It was the old La Canaria speaking for a moment, fully in her body and voice, commanding, not questioning. Marco crumpled onto the floor. He opened the newspaper on the floor and folded it so that only one article was visible. He pressed and pressed the paper with his palms, smoothing the pages and blurring the ink. I turned to La Canaria, but she was her faded half-self again, looking out the window, no trace of the voice that had calmed Marco.