Spring 2020 Issue - The Harvard Advocate

The mirror’s clubfooted,
not me. Afro’s gone Medusa again.

Every coil’s its own Hydra.
I’m adventuring with a comb.

The sink’s full of myths...
The myths are growing...

Everyday I find myself
smaller with effort,

my life’s light
with every person who

spoke of me. Last night,
Achebe tried again

and I nearly heard him.
Ngũgĩ refuses these tones, says,

this music has the worst sort
of oceans beneath it.

Besides, his ears
are busy with real myths…

Being alive must be nice,
says the sink-basin, filling

further with myths…
I say, abandon narrative,

latch on to landlocked
home— forget ships,

take planes! land with
passport on to place

with shore— forget ships,
take planes! land with

passport back to place
without shore— forget ships

for a day sometime on
winter break, during summer—

our only seasons here.
My body’s a clubfooted boat,

not me. One time I went
blonde, that’s a different

prow. One time I went
with suit-jacket, that’s a different

sail. One time I go
and touch the exact difference,

pretty, sailing, she says, I love you.
I say, whose boat.

This time, I want it to be simple: say you are
a fresh, cool lemon. Your rind is dotted with wet.

Say I have a tongue and lick away the wetness,
have hands and excavate the seeds.

I pull you out of yourself. I raise newness.
Everything tastes yellow and the sea-line is a line

down my throat. The lemon is a line across
the sky and that too is what you are: everything

mistaken for something else, the citrus getting larger, blooming.
Are you blooming? Are you in bloom? Tell me how you feel.

You don’t have to be a lemon if you don’t want to.
The rind could slip from my hand, if you asked for it.

I only want to speak to you. I’ve known lemons before:
tendrils of fruit clutching to the white, hand unhooked,

every cold, flowered thing giving way to water. Things change
when I speak and fruits flower, open slowly, without knowing it.

Try this: the dig of your finger under stem, stopping
crooked between flesh and peel. So what if when I dream

I dream citrus? I can taste even the farthest slick of air,
unlace semblance from skin. I can feed in pieces.

When I call out your name, it is your name
before it is anything else.

Later, I can ask you about the rest.



Title is taken from Archibald MacLeish’s “Ars Poetica."

in the kingdom of purity i obeyed my husband
i walked behind him my breasts covered

by a camera                 in his arms was a mirror held aloft
i faced myself & myself blurred in slightest motion

light fleeing the shutter                 & in the castle of purity
i closed the lights & faced my husband & my husband

called me by my glottal name                 my mouth
a depression in clay                 my mouth a mirror in the arms

of my husband                 my minaret a nipple in the direction
of my husband & five times a day i hesitate                 & five

times a day i chip a tooth & study sepia photographs
to learn names for my mothers                 to learn arrangements

for my photographed parts                 my captured parts
i tighten the frame                 i close my legs

when i say girlhood i say prison
i clean myself up & repent

Whatever it was that was supposed to
hold on my face,
steady the astrolabe,
reserve the seats and tether the baboon,
whatever those pills are supposed to do,
those hooks, rings, documents,
whatever I meant by delphiniums,
what she wore by the lake and said,
they say every other Rembrandt
although, as will blood, the fake
is often the most convincing.
Some contaminants make liquids clearer
but put enough black paint on anything
it becomes a door.
It’s dark out.
The most elegant woman in the world
watches me throw up in a trash can.
When you hold something on fire,
shouldn’t it weigh less and less?
Does everything have to become ash
to ascend? It’s not that there aren’t comforts.
An inmate in Iowa sends chocolates.
My mother comes back from the dead.
A call from a friend stuck in an elevator.
A postcard of a child riding a pig.
I went where we used to live
to dump the last teaspoons of dog ash
into the culvert. Someone was signaling.
Someone was being carried out.
5 trips. In pieces. Like a harp.

In all likelihood, they were the ugliest pants I had
ever seen. Something with the soft brush of velvet
but none of the right lay, huge hem with full break.

Repeating from somewhere once, I said “corduroy”
comes from cord du roi, cloth of kings. Obviously, B.S.—
I mean, who the hell ever saw Louis XVI in wools?
I picture him now in the pillory, in Levi’s, with his head
all spent, tumbled pale in the basket like an unripe berry.

I get pale-dry like that when I sleep funny. Those days
always seem so muffled, like a watch wrapped in cotton,
and viscous time contracts like a vein. Just like that, a day
can fold itself into three hours, skim milk in coffee.
The way it falls in on itself, then disperses. Now look,

I’ll be the first to admit: it’s been years since
I truly wanted something. A pair of fuzzy socks
with individual toes, the texture and color of moldy grapes.
So it’s not that I want you, this oil-slicked time, these pants.

More so, I want the feel of it, tight bands of corduroy,
packed like bamboo, Styrofoam-peanut seconds
pressed just-so to the minute, the easy sweep of skin

on skin. The feeling of everything suspended
at once, like how the light seems to honey
in Nan Goldin’s pictures, a looming sense
of awareness coming into a frail body,

like the husband walking in on his wife with the plumber
while John Lennon intones the “Day Tripper” chorus.
It’s such a steamy coincidence that I whip pan to the husband
as the words come down like hail: It took me so long to find out,
and I found out.

In the end, I don’t buy the pants, and nobody bothers
to fix the sink, which is a flood hazard. Which is to say,
nothing happened, and no one cared about it one bit.

After Magritte (1935) and Leone (1966)

Doctors promise it is not so, but I swear I am
going deaf in my left ear. Unequivocally, this is
more humiliating for them than it is for me.

After all, I have done the tests, snapped my fingers
on left and right, heard the difference in pitch
like the small slaps of waves under the hull.

Once, in a floating hotel, I was given no pillow,
told the sound of the river would be my cushion.

Still, I couldn’t fall out of time there, couldn’t still
the thrum of my pulse: something about sweeping
and ticking, the dull shush of the sand.

It’s like that sometimes on dim afternoons,
a slow wade into late lunch and oyster crackers,
when the real sense of small apocalypse creeps in.

It rolls by, the tumbleweed a minute before high noon,
the shrill, smoking, wild-west beat like boiling water.

The Good, The Bad, The Ugly, each passing like a hiccup
because the throat makes no such distinctions when parched.
It simply cries out, then sleeps.

In the Western, the cowboy hero. Drygulched
when he least expects it. Bandits rustle his steer. Revolvers pop
like whips. Again and again, owl eyes stare with apathy.

There is much in this world that is unspeakable,
and so much silence worlded by its thingness.

Like the leeward side of a mountain, which is deserted
by the rain, lying in its shadow. The silent rock as it stands.
There is only one thing in the universe that is like an ocean.

Somehow, it all spins like a quarter on the sticky bar counter,
the illusion of fullness, a silver berry, for a second. Then the drop.
Something about sweeping and ticking.

I’m watching a cat drink out of a bowl of blood.



Apparently, cats love the taste of blood. Maybe this should be obvious. Cats are predators; they’re technically not even domesticated. A cat digs into a freshly killed rodent because it likes it, not just because it has to.



Still, as I see the fur around the cat’s mouth stain red, I realize I haven’t thought about this before. *Why didn’t I know that?*



I’m learning a lot of things today.



A few minutes ago, I was taught how to slaughter a lamb, which is the source of the blood. The lamb’s carcass, still fresh on the table, is leaking bodily fluids out of both ends onto the concrete floor. Blood is still dripping out of its neck into a bowl, where the cat waits to lap it up. It’s red, poppy-red, so bright it seems fake.



I’m starting to feel like I’m hallucinating.



I’m playing at butcher as a sort of cultural experience. This is not without some irony. By the time my grandfather was my age, he had killed countless chickens; when you grow up as a sharecropper, it’s an essential skill. He showed me how to do it once, miming instead of using a live bird. You grab the chicken by the neck and twist sharply, until you snap the vertebrae. Today, he goes to Walmart to buy Vienna sausages, and his granddaughter has to travel over five thousand miles to see something he would’ve considered standard. Progress, I guess.



I’m doing a backpacking expedition in Chilean Patagonia with an outdoor education program. My group mostly consists of the kind of American and European teens who are disaffected enough to disappear into the woods for over a month, but wealthy enough to do it on another continent. For the majority of us, this is part of a gap year or semester off. The exception is the lone Chilean student, who needs to take this trip to qualify as a tour guide in Torres del Paine.



Patagonia has a special appeal for the outdoor-minded. The climate has always been too harsh for large-scale agriculture or development — it’s mountainous, infertile, and as cold as Alaska. Ongoing assaults of earthquakes, wind, and ice have carved out an army of looming, jagged peaks. Many of the ranchers who lived here are gone, lured away by jobs in tourism and homes in larger cities. Pumas have eaten the horses and cows they left behind. In their stead, the Chilean government created a system of national parks covering nearly ten million acres of land.



Currently, I’m not in school because my body has decided that I need a break. By senior year, the pressure cooker of my high school had shredded my nerves along with any desire to do academic work. The thought of enduring college had become almost unbearable. Upon graduation, sensing that I might be fragile enough to crack like an egg, my parents let me take some time off.



I’m similar to many in this group in that I might be a failure. Most of us are the children of middle and upper-class professionals whose trajectories we have deferred from, sometimes to their sharp disappointment. We each internalize this differently. Only I and a quiet Canadian girl, whose rugby career was abruptly cut short by an injury, seem to have the acute sense that our lives have fallen out of alignment. The rest, to varying degrees, have co-opted this and transformed it into a point of pride. The absence of education, of jobs, of plans, is a sign of moral fortitude. They can turn their lives into a series of adventures instead — of which this is one.



There is a universe where I probably *would* view it that way, assuming a few of my essential characteristics were changed. I immediately notice that I’m the only black person in this group. I’m also one of only a few girls. On our first night, we sleep in tents segregated by gender: one for the girls, three for the boys. Perhaps if I were different, I would have the freedom some of these boys seem to possess; they walk like where they step doesn’t matter. I, meanwhile, have been raised to ward against the danger of mistakes.



In my head, I call them American Boys, though they’re not all American. Still, they embody something particular about our national character. It’s not just their whiteness, their maleness, or their physical strength, though those certainly are factors. It might be how unburdened they are.

I sense that these are people who, unlike me, are not persistently aware of their vulnerabilities. I’m unsure if this feeling of mortality is more attributable to my background or my anxiety. They’re probably related.



Our trip is thirty days long, starting and ending at the program’s base, which is also a fully-functioning farm. In the intervening period, we live out of our packs, bushwhacking and kayaking around the Pacific coast. Upon our return, the farm’s butcher, Sebastian, asks us to help kill the lamb. It’s for a traditional Patagonian-style barbecue, meant to celebrate the completion of our trip. Like most of the kids in this group, I’ve eaten plenty of meat, but I’ve never really seen anything die before. Truthfully, the anticipation of what I’m about to see makes me a little nervous.



“Don’t worry,” one of our instructors, Carolina, a slight Chilean woman, says. “It’ll be quick. It won’t even feel it.”



I believe her. I agree to help.



<p align="center"> *** </p>



When you’re an American, you can make the inconvenient invisible.



It’s almost implied by what we call ourselves: “Americans”, as if there aren’t 34 other countries in the Americas. Our dominance takes the form of ignoring other people’s existence. Felipe and Carolina, our Chilean instructors, take great pains to point this out. They call us “U.S.A.-ans”. This moniker never really catches on in our group.



The American food system benefits greatly from our ignorance. We don’t know the basic facts of where our food comes from, probably because a separation between us and the things we eat is important for maintaining our sense of ourselves as moral people. Contained animal feeding operations and fields tended by migrant workers are not pleasant to envision. Fortunately, we aren’t reminded of these things at the grocery store.



Our power shields us from the truth. It starts at the beginning — in America, farming means ownership. From our nation’s inception, a number of those who we’ve labeled “farmers” have rarely done much planting or harvesting; that’s left to the people whose labor they’ve bought. Thomas Jefferson, foundational in our country’s mythmaking, called himself a farmer. He also had over 600 slaves.



My family used to be the kind of people who were owned by other people. Until very recently, we were not Americans, even though we were brought here almost four hundred years ago. To this day, “American” is probably the last identifier my granddad would use to describe himself. He’s a Christian, a black man, even a veteran. He is not, in his mind, an American.



Granddad was born a sharecropper, which is to say, a slave. Sharecropping was an arrangement in which wealthy white landowners “rented” plots of land to poor, often black, families. They paid back their debt by cultivating the land, giving almost everything they produced to their landlords. Often, when their output was tallied, families would mysteriously wind up with more debt than they’d had the previous year. If sharecroppers tried to complain, or worst of all, unionize, they would be hung from trees. In this way, an ostensibly temporary arrangement could last for generations.



While the rest of the country started to eat pre-butchered meat from industrial slaughterhouses, Granddad’s family got what their landlord, Mr. Beasly, didn’t steal. Sometimes, this was one chicken for over a dozen mouths. To this day, whenever my grandfather eats meat, he gives thanks for what he calls “the blessing of the flesh”. He thanks the animal for giving up its life force because he understands its value. Even as he lives through an era of artificial abundance, he still believes meat is a luxury.



The ceremony of eating meat, as in a celebratory Patagonian barbecue, is rooted in scarcity. I suspect that the significance of such an event is lost on people who have always lived like they’d never be hungry.



<p align="center"> *** </p>



I realize quickly that lambs know when they’re going to die.



We stand in front of their pen and pick one out, and then two boys from the group go retrieve the animal. They are the only ones strong enough to carry it, since lambs, as it turns out, are *not* small. When they enter, the lambs panic, backing away until they’ve coalesced into a formless blob of wool and jittery knees in a corner. They bleat in terror as the boys approach, each one fighting to recede into the mass. Eventually, the boys get too close and the bubble bursts like a spider’s egg sack, lambs scattering across the pen.



I watch from outside the pen and I think about dodo birds. When they lived on Earth, they didn’t fear us. They had no predators, so when approached by humans, they didn’t flee, and that was the beginning of their end. If the lambs are afraid, I reason, they know what’s coming.



The selected lamb fights back, bucking when the boys try to lay hands on it. It isn’t enough. Eventually, the boys catch it, grabbing its legs so that it can’t run. It writhes for a few moments, trying to break free, and then abruptly goes still.



They carry it into a shed near the pen — a mini-slaughterhouse. The smell is suffering: sweat and urine and the metallic tang of blood. In the center of the shed, there is a table on which the lamb is tied down. It quivers, but otherwise does not move. Sebastian places a bowl on the ground, just beneath its head.



Sebastian draws the knife — a surprisingly short, blunt blade — and the lamb flails wildly, or as much as it can while tied down. It knows, just as well as I know, what the knife means. It manages one bleat before Sebastian’s hands clamps its mouth shut. Its eyes are wide, rolling around in terror. He cradles the lamb’s head and quickly slices its neck open. Blood pours out into the waiting bowl.



The cat arrives. It has been lingering in the corner, flicking its tail in anticipation.



At this point, two of the girls in the group, who were previously watching, leave the room. One of them looks like she’s going to be sick; the other’s lips are pressed so tightly together that they’re colorless. The first one, I recall, has recently been complaining about how much she missed Chick-fil-A.



I don’t want to be in the shed. The stench of the lamb, I am convinced, will linger on me forever. I want to take a shower so that it won’t stain my skin. I briefly contemplate leaving, but then I glance up at the American Boys. Two of them are smirking. I stay, but it’s getting harder to breathe.



<p align="center"> *** </p>



Here is the great irony of Patagonian tourism: the same forces that preserve this place will eventually destroy it.



Patagonia is extremely popular among the world’s wealthy, a fact that is immediately obvious.

In thirty days in the backcountry, we encounter one human settlement: a half-finished geodesic dome on the far side of a fjord. It’s likely owned by the richest man in Chile, Julio Ponce Lerou, a former son-in-law of Pinochet, who has bought large swaths of land in the area.



Maybe he’s building the house to escape people who hate him. His wealth comes from a mining industry that is infamous for destroying ecosystems and poisoning water, causing some public ire. The only way to reach the house is by a two-hour long boat ride, combined with a six-hour long hike — or a helicopter.



Interestingly, you can’t find the location of the house on a map, at least not a physical one. It sits in a fjord formed by a branch of the Southern Ice Field, which is rapidly receding. The last time it was surveyed, around World War II, it was still covered by a glacier.



Patagonia’s crowning asset — its ice — is disappearing. Its glaciers are melting remarkably fast, partially because there’s a hole in the ozone right above it. Its visitors, who come here to admire it, are often the kind of people whose carbon-emitting trips and over-consumptive lifestyles kill a planet. But maybe this doesn’t mean much to them.



One of the particularly cruel aspects of climate change is its fundamental inequity. The parts of the world that are warming the fastest, or are most vulnerable to natural disasters or droughts, are disproportionately in the Global South. These regions also produce vastly fewer emissions than the Global North. So, the drivers of climate change will never experience the worst of its effects.



We have come to Patagonia to see its beauty before it's all gone. Our presence is also part of the reason why that beauty is vanishing. We’re like thieves, stealing pieces of this place until there’s nothing left.



Our instructors, Felipe and Carolina, seem painfully aware of this. Their salaries require them to spend most of the year in the field. So, unlike us, they are not voyeurs in this place — it’s their home. Probably as a result, they seem to have internalized the cost of their lifestyle. If climate change is the result of our collective consumption, then each of us is responsible. In light of this, Felipe and Carolina don’t buy new things, don’t eat meat, and rarely travel. They want to live without impact.



I think they might be on a mission to change us, too. While we’re here, they announce on the first day, we will Leave No Trace. We will act like we want to erase our existence. Unfortunately, we are never very good at this; throughout the trip, we trample endangered plant species, accidentally spill soap into sensitive freshwater environments, and secretly dump our food waste onto the forest floor.



Maybe Leave No Trace requires more significant unlearning than Felipe and Carolina imagined. American thought isn’t predicated on such ideas of limitation and restraint. As a culture, we rarely challenge the notion that Americans should take what they want.



In the mid-20th century, amidst genuine environmentalism, corporations that produced disposable packaging began to fund anti-littering campaigns. Instead of questioning the underlying logic of making things you can only use once, they encourage us to “properly” dispose of our waste so that it doesn’t dirty our community parks. In many places, Earth Day is now synonymous with cleanups — as if the carbon emissions of a plastic bottle are offset when you put it in a trashcan. In reality, our waste is just put somewhere else, usually shipped to developing countries or piled together in undesirable neighborhoods.



In America, conservation is when you make a mess and then force someone else to clean it up.



<p align="center"> *** </p>



I’m wondering why the lamb isn’t dead yet.



It’s been minutes and it’s still staring at me, or at least it feels that way. I’m so unnerved that I involuntarily step back out of its sight. Its stomach is still rising and falling, ever so slightly. The blood fills the bowl and then overflows, spilling out and into a drain in the floor.



I can’t move. In my mind, I chant, *this is natural this is natural this is natural*, and hope that the repetition makes it true. *This is how my ancestors lived.*



That fact seems to be mocking me at this moment. My mother always wanted to send me back to Arkansas. She thinks I’m too sheltered. “You don’t know how lucky you are,” she sometimes mutters. “When your *grandparents* were your age...”



There’s a part of me that understands that this needs to be done, that this has always been done. In many ways, this is probably the most ethical way to eat meat. But another part wants to leave. Something about this feels out of context, its meaning distorted. We aren’t slaughtering this animal because we need to; we’re doing it because we want to see what it looks like. Still, my feet remain planted.



I notice that even without thinking, I have been holding myself extremely still. My spine is so straight that it has begun to hurt. It reminds me of a bear encounter I once had, when I was alone in the woods and my screams would have been swallowed by vegetation. I remember thinking that the bear was so large that my head could fit comfortably in its mouth. I was still then too, trying desperately to make myself invisible, convinced that if I moved the bear would realize that I was something it could devour. We stared at each other for what was probably a second, but felt like hours. Then it lumbered back into the forest, and I ran as fast as I could to the nearest road.



So, perhaps I remain out of fear. The departure of the other girls meant that the group is now overwhelmingly male. Looking at the expressions of the American Boys around me, which range between impassive and smirking, I have the sudden conviction that to register any discomfort would be dangerous. If the word “empathy” literally means to be “in feeling” with another, then expressing what I feel would be an admission of identification with the lamb, a marker of myself as potential prey. I don’t want to be eaten. I stay where I am.



All of this, I think, is meant to be a lesson on the cost of things. But I am unsure of what this means for us, who will never really have to pay for anything. It strikes me that there aren’t very many consequences for someone like me. I look again at the American Boys, who only seem to register this as a performance. There are even fewer consequences for people like them.



A milky film forms over the lamb’s eyes, and I know that it is finally dead. I exhale slowly, releasing the air in my throat. I’m glad it's not looking at me anymore. Its gaze seemed like an accusation.



<p align="center"> *** </p>



In September 1973, the United States government, under the front of the Chilean military, overthrew the country’s democratically-elected president, Salvador Allende. They replaced him with Augusto Pinochet, a right-wing dictator who killed thousands and tortured ten times more, but fortunately was not a socialist. Most Americans are unaware of this, probably because the U.S. government covered it up for over twenty years.



A decade earlier, Granddad was entangled in another of America’s interventions to liberate people of color from self-governance, this time in Vietnam. It was the military or sharecropping, and he picked the former. Death in a jungle, or death in a cotton field. He calls this a choice.



Currently, Granddad’s body is slowly decaying. He uses a walker and his hands tremble involuntarily every time he raises them, the result of rheumatoid arthritis. He has a number of health problems tied to Agent Orange exposure in Vietnam that the V.A. will not recognize, because when the majority of the sufferers are old, poor or foreign, it’s not a priority.



Granddad was one of the oldest of 18 children, and so his absence didn’t mean much for the family’s harvest. But when his younger brother, Lionel, tried to leave for high school, he was met by Mr. Beasly, their landlord. Mr. Beasly pointed a gun in Lionel’s face and told him that it was the fields or a bullet. He chose the fields.



Lionel is one among a faction of my relatives who are highly invested in my academic success, and who I probably disappointed by taking a gap year. Truth be told, we don’t know each other very well. I suspect that I am more of a symbol than a person to him. A few months ago, on a trip back to Arkansas, he ran into Mr. Beasly’s daughter. Apparently, she and her husband are now unemployed and on the verge of bankruptcy. They might lose their house — her father’s house. He recounts this with something like glee. “I wanted to tell her,” he says, grinning, “You’re broke, and I got a niece going to *Harvard*!”



My other grandfather, the son of industrious Scots, also went to Harvard. He is an excellent American Boy. One of his professors there was Louis Fieser, the inventor of Vietnam’s other predominant chemical: Napalm. Napalm was developed in Harvard labs specifically for killing. It was originally intended to set Japan on fire, though it’s most famous for burning whole swathes of jungle in Southeast Asia, including the people inside it. Fieser later remarked, “I have no right to judge the morality of Napalm just because I created it.”



“You know, he was the nicest guy,” my American grandfather says, contemplative. “You’d never know he’d made a thing like that.”



One grandfather had to drop Napalm out of planes, the other got to chat with its creator. Some kinds of people are always at the mercy of the decisions of others. When Lionel looks at me, he sees someone with the power to make those choices. He sees an American.



<p align="center"> *** </p>



Sebastian cuts along the skin of the lamb’s underbelly, just deep enough to puncture the layer of wool, and forces his fist in between its pelt and its stomach, separating the two. This, he explains, is how the animal is skinned. He looks at me, smiles, and steps back, inviting me to continue his work.



The eyes of the others are on me. I step forward and hesitate for a moment, but then I remember my audience. I shove my hands inside the gap Sebastian has already made, slowly pulling the two layers apart. It is unsettlingly warm. One of the American Boys hoots. The message is clear: *you’ve passed a test*. When I pull my hands out, they are sticky.



Eventually, when the lamb is sufficiently skinned, Sebastian cuts it open and pulls its organs out, discarding them on the floor. “We don’t waste here,” he says. As if cued, the cat abandons the blood to nibble on the gallbladder.



Sebastian strings up the carcass so that the fluids can drain and we leave the shed. The fresh air is startling. “I’m glad that he was so respectful with the animal,” one of the boys says to me as we walk up the grassy hill towards the farmhouse. I pretend I haven’t heard. I don’t say what I’m thinking: *the lamb didn’t give a shit if we respected it when we killed it*.



Later, the lamb is served for dinner. It is a great success. Everyone eats it, including the girls who left the shed. Including me. The only exceptions are Felipe and Carolina, who are both vegans. As I chew on the meat, I contemplate my weakness. *Fucking conformist*, I hiss. *You’d do anything to blend in*.



*But I was just trying to survive*, I whimper.



Maybe that’s not quite true, though. Survival is different from the path of least resistance. I make a mental tally of the major actions of my life; did I do them because I had to, or because I wanted to? *I wanted to*, I realize. The thought is unpleasant. I’m in Patagonia because I want to be. I’m going to Harvard because I want to. I have been *taking and taking and taking* my whole life, mostly just because I can.



I wipe my greasy fingers on a paper napkin and stare out the window of the dining room to the glaciers in the distance. The sun has just begun to dip behind the horizon, turning the sky a pale pink. I’m trying to memorize this view, because I know I probably won’t see it again. In a few days, I will fly two hours to Santiago, and then eleven hours back home to New York. These flights will help kill this place. I wonder, if I do return, whether the ice will still be here. It seems unlikely.



Over our meal, we talk about a lot of things that don’t matter. One girl misses the fried chicken place in the Denver airport. Another of the boys discusses his next adventure: scuba-diving and spearfishing in the Seychelles. I wonder if they know how they sound.



<p align="center"> *** </p>



A few months later, I’m on a train from New York to New Orleans to visit part of my family. The train ride is 36 hours, criss-crossing sections of the country that I have no real relationship with but, I suppose, could be considered an ancestral homeland. In spring, the Southeast becomes dense and green with vegetation. After Virginia, the landscape is almost indistinguishable, creating the odd sensation of a divorce between time and motion; the hours pass, and we don’t seem to be going anywhere.



I could’ve taken a plane with my parents, but instead I’m in the coach class of an Amtrak. This, I told them, is part of an effort to live more sustainably. In reality, it’s less altruistic than that. I’m attempting to cure myself of the feeling that I might be a bad person. I now walk most places, and if I can’t then I take the train. I’ve been much more careful with the things I buy. Soon, I’ll stop eating meat.



I still remember the lamb. It mostly appears in my dreams, which have become increasingly vivid. Often, they’re about the various ways I might die; drowned in a flood, eaten by a puma, cut open by a butcher. Guilt, I’ve found, pairs poorly with anxiety.

“Hello,” he hoped, and I saw immediately that he was a Jewish boy, just like my brother, and I became upset that the only ones who ever hope hello at me are Jewish boys.

“If you insist,” I said.

Don’t get me wrong, I think Jewish boys in this day and age have much to recommend them. I know plenty of girls who were raised to be stoic—that means not complain, maybe not even want to complain—who sigh their tasteful chests up and down in want of a Jewish boy.

“I’m sorry,” I told him, “it’s Saturday. You’ll have to go home to your mother, who will be happy to have you I’m sure.”

“You keep the Sabbath?” he said.

See? I didn’t tell you earlier, but he doesn’t even look Jewish. I can simply spot them from the masses. One tribesman’s heart cries chosenly to another’s.

I didn’t tell you earlier because I know you’re liable to call stereotype. It’s the 21st century! you’ll be thinking. You are a highly educated young Jewess! But please go ahead and describe the picture you conjured when I said “I saw immediately he was a Jewish boy.” Yes, I know all about it. So I am now absolved from blame for as long as I have you, dear or accidental listeners to this weekly midnight radio program.

The whole truth is he was very tall and childishly hairless, with a bit of blond fuzz coating his head and an apparent inability to grow a beard.

“No, I don’t keep the Sabbath,” I said, suppressing my sudden desire to shout Shabbat Shalom! right there on the sidewalk of Hoboken, New Jersey, beside an Irish pub.

“Oh,” he said, “me neither”—a bit proudly, which meant he was still deeply smushed beneath his mother’s thumb and rebelled by poking at it gently with his little finger; or a bit guiltily, even worse, because what is more typical than Jewish guilt? My poor big brother Jakey has it in spades about a whole cabinetful of faults, mostly never playing baseball with our old-now dad who can’t play baseball anymore.

“Just don’t tell my dad about the shabbos thing,” the Jewish boy said, and grinned. “He’s a rabbi, after all.”

A rabbi’s son! And to think—I don’t have to tell my few but steadfast listeners—I’ve been seeking a nice Christian boy for some time, with no luck. It’s about time for children, I say, and I want mine to have insurance. Coverage against man, the universe, and acts of God. I’m no ignoramus; I listened when my Nana spoke. I don’t want blood that’s also liability.

“Hey,” I said, “what happens when a minister’s son, a rabbi’s son, and a Jewess walk into a bar?” I laughed alone, because the joke was its own punchline; I was on my way into the pub to meet my Catholic man. I told him so.

“You have a Catholic man?” he said. His smile vanished.

“No,” I repeated. “I’m going to meet one.”

“Can I come too?” He looked at me, which was a very unfortunate event, because Jewish boys can read me like the alphabet. “I’ll come too,” he corrected himself. I walked in the door without checking whether he was following me. Assuming he was.

Translated from the Spanish by Javier Arango.

The obsession with maintaining a constant contact between skin and various liquids. Water, petroleum, mud, bodily fluids: blood, oils, acids, tears, sperm. Brilliant flesh, scrubbed again and again, clean, eaten away, naked, buried, immaculate, tarnished, dead. The fervor is so great that skins end up simply dissolving. From a face, usually only the raw flesh appears. It is confirmed that the skin was torn off before death. On the underground transport, every day one can see millions of travelers freshly bathed, with damp hair, usually worn in strict styles. It’s not in vain that thousands of liters of gel are sold each year. At parties, ladies and gentleman present themselves all tidied up before the celebrations. On birthdays, both the celebrant and the guests try to dress to kill. The children painstakingly wash the iguanas, the rats, the skunks that they own, to sit before a photographer with the animal on their lap. They try to the best of their abilities to keep their suits clean. They always appear immaculate before the abductions, the abuse, the ritual killings to which they are subjected. There are also collective baths. It’s an official profession: the washers of bodies, both living and dead, skinned or intact, who use harsh sponges and coarse scrubbers to eliminate any bodily impurity. The hot water, the steam, the vapor expands profusely. For each death, it is important that there be a great amount of liquid. The perfect crime seems not to be one that is never uncovered, but one that leaves the greatest amount of aqueous substances spreading over the scene of the crime. Whether it occurs on the streets or in privacy. In a crime of passion or hatred, there must be many stab wounds, tens, sometimes hundreds, so that the emerging liquid can be used to write on the walls the motives, the circumstances, and the consequences of those actions. Written with blood. Bodies washed, brushed, trained. Docile and elegant, often sitting before a photographer’s lens, forming part of an image that itself is only possible by way of another liquid, a chemical, that will fix it onto a rigid surface. Naked bodies, cleaned of all shame, a peasant dancing with no clothes on, with enormous ears and taking little hops. Or the images of Pedagogue Boris or Teacher Virginia that are kept in some of the poorer homes. Bodies that present themselves directly to those who need them, conscious of their transience, of their furtive passage through the world. Moist surfaces, wet bedsheets over wrinkled skins. Morgues, amphitheaters packed with neat cadavers. Stinking trucks, overflowing with the dead that nobody claims. Travel agents who scam the visitors, mostly already dead, who wish to get to know the region. It’s common to see how, after a day’s work in streets or markets, the hygiene of the place becomes essential. Enormous amounts of running water are thrown on the surfaces. All to erase any trace of blame. The same thing happens after the various religious rites that take place throughout the city. After people gather around the learnings of the Sacred Quran or after Evangelical or Catholic rites, the water seems to emerge from nothingness. The liquid in the synagogue is no different from the others. The presence of water is fundamental. It seems even more important than the oxygen needed to breathe. Pedagogue Boris remembers the time when a philosopher, whom he met as a young follower of the Blind Poet, told him about when he fell asleep in the rural baths. He had taken a long nap because the place was empty, silent, free of danger. He frequented the baths; they were cheap. He never had enough money to properly care for the pains resulting from the genetic abnormalities he suffered. He found relief in the steam rooms, in the showers of those public baths. Steam, humidity, running water. The philosopher was officially certified as a mutant. Lulled by the calm induced by the constant flowing of liquids, he fell asleep, hopeful that soon he would have a sacred dog. A dog that had been offered as a gift in a dream experienced after leaving his place of prayer. When he woke up he found himself in the midst, not of dogs, of sacred ghosts, but of dozens of naked men. He became alarmed. The bodies were of different ages, of different complexions. Before putting his clothes on and leaving the place, he took a digital image with the camera on his phone. He wished to take with him the instant he was experiencing. He captured an image of a man’s skin overcome by soap. When he was leaving the baths, he noticed that suddenly the horde of naked figures started calling out for him to return. They demanded reasons for what he had just done. Taking a humid image, the bare skin of men bathing together, was a grave offense for which he should pay. The philosopher was already out of the steam baths. In the area where people get ready to leave. The men could not reach him: they had no clothes, and many were mid-bath. That moment he learned, as told by one of the receptionists, that the angry men were peasants who were washing themselves after a day of hard work. They were bathing in order to return home spotless. They were performing the ritual of exposing skin to liquid. And precisely because they were carrying out an ancient rite, they would not allow someone to take an image of the scene. Their anger toward the young philosopher was a result of the obsession with exposing skin to the constant flow of water. A near madness that had to be carried out without the presence of witnesses. Finally, the young philosopher managed to escape, taking with him the secret, the microsecond in which he had captured the practice, skin, water, shine, excoriation, disappearance. A population immaculate by nature, clean, a victim of itself, beheaded with a clean cut. Naturally, the heads tend to roll in a large puddle of liquid creating a curious outline on the surfaces. Nobody is guilty of anything. Maybe only aqueous matter is scrubbed again and again. It all seems to show that hygiene is a gift from heaven. The appearance of skinned bodies is too. A miracle that a man had dissolved hundreds, maybe thousands, of cadavers in acid, which were handed to him systematically to be cooked in corrosive liquid. In large scalding pots. A radical task of cleaning. Now, that man walks the streets freely. It is not written in any code that making bodies disappear is a crime. On the contrary, he was following the necessary laws of purification. Clean are the subjects whose bodies are wrapped in burial sheets. The ones who wash themselves until they are skinned alive. Clean, the cancer operations, the routine amputations, surgical interventions, mutilations, almost always carried out ritually. Clean, the heads apart from their bodies. The ones who await their sexual clients are in conditions of extreme tidiness. The famous Pamelitas, bound by the orders of obese old men. The migrants who go hand over their clean lives to an unknown nothingness. The transvestites. The muxes, figures who are recognized by at least two different gazes. The clowns who try to surprise motorists on the busiest street-corners. Exquisite, the nakedness of the one enveloped by a snake. The territory of impeccable deaths. The ones who pose with a wild animal on their laps. The neatness is so polished that many times the living don’t know that they are already dead; some cadavers are present, alive, in anguish of the ones looking for them. The traveling mages. The indigenous. The ones who frequent the public baths surreptitiously. Who immerse themselves in temples of prayer. In porno theaters. None of that exists, except in what is liquid. In its aqueous state across centuries, times overlaid on one another to form a body, unique, compact, broken, diluted. Matter held together only by the fervor with which millions try to keep their purity intact. Skin and aqueous substances. I offer liquid and I demand liquid. Nothing bad can happen inside this gel reality, protected, armored, solid, in a reality so grotesque due to the constant fluidity to which bodies are subjected. An unparalleled protection is offered by the aqueous quality of souls looking for a moist skin to embody, to disappear into and then reemerge in another body just as liquid and fleeting. The young philosopher’s desire before falling asleep in the public baths, apart from keeping his body absolutely clean, was to have a sacred dog. The dog that is not a dog, but a Gift from God. Is the Quran perchance unfamiliar to these people? Surely it is. Also the theology of pre-Colombian gods, who manifest themselves in ordinary ways, especially around the primary-school- turned-hospice that Pedagogue Boris had set up before the arrival of the horde of bathing peasants. Neither what is Muslim nor what is pre-Colombian belongs to us, he seemed to want to scream when he was beside the dying people in the school he ran. The Torah, the Cabbala. Despite currently living in a planet inhabited by the dead, there is no Sacred Word to follow. We live in a space with no defined destiny, framed only by the constant need for water, needed both to live and to be dead. In a place for cadavers where Pedagogue Boris ended up not only settling in for good, but also founding a modest school that people attended with the hope of being taught brilliantly. A classroom, a primary school that eventually flooded. First with vapor, then with water, with blood, with liquids emerging from bodies on the way to decomposition. It seems that nobody believes in anything, not has faith in anything that does not come from the virgins, the ones who are depicted in these lands as women dressed for a wedding whose heads are really the skulls of Santa Muerte. So we must be humble, bow our heads and accept that we live on a planet where there is no longer any Word, no Tutelary Books, no Codices, none of the intricate and impenetrable atavistic writings of the civilizations of the South. Nor any new interpretations from the countless evangelists who knock again and again on the doors of the little school-turned-hospice that Pedagogue Boris so kindly founded. Nothing to give sense to the infinite number of deaths that surround us: the moist living, residing above the dead, the dead drinking the water of the living, the dead burying their own dead, the dead digging up their dead. Mud. Watery lands. Hopefully, I wish with all my heart, the young philosopher will be able to have his sacred dog. He is just as worried about finding a way to get it, as he is about knowing whether he is even in the right conditions to raise it. These dogs are delicate: they need open space to run and develop properly. He doesn’t think that this place for the dead where he lives, where nobody believes in any Scripture anymore, is the right place to see it grow up. Will it be appropriate to tell this sacred dog, in the right moment, that he is not just the author of a series of books, but of the bearer of New Scriptures? A dog who does not dig up the dead with his nails. When the other dogs tried to desecrate the tomb of the Prophet, Mohammed’s followers eradicated all the dogs, hundreds, thousands, with the blade of their swords. All of the dogs in the area were left lifeless and bleeding. They formed astonishing mountains from the bodies, which they had to decompose with acids, with liquid chemicals, to later incinerate them and throw the ashes into the waters of a nearby river. The flesh of dogs taken to the cremation ovens used in military barracks. Dogs killed like dogs. Guided by a higher order, not written in any Sacred Book. The Present Scriptures no longer exist. The dead form a single mass. Today, sacred dogs are almost impossible to come by. The bones of the clandestine dead are still present around the young philosopher, Pedagogue Boris, or Teacher Virginia. Clean, brushed, impeccable. They go past any Scripture. To get a sacred dog, one must undertake long journeys. But the true miracle would not be the arrival of the dog that is not a dog, but the emergence of a proper form of writing. With a gift seemingly enjoyed by the nomads of the desert when they hear their dogs chasing a hare. More than once, the Prophet himself, a Blind Poet in this case, has declared that a Bedouin without a good sacred dog by his side, a form of writing, can be considered a dead man. Pedagogue Boris and the young philosopher must forget their frequent worries. Not worry too much about the guests, the sick on the verge of dying whom they keep in the little, primitive school. Nor notice the hundreds of impeccable dead that surround them, not only the bodies on the way to extinction, those of the guests at the school for whom they are responsible, but also those who reside in the grave pits that never stop appearing, or the ones who travel the underground transport, hair styled with gel. These times seem to necessitate the emergence of a new series of letters, forming new phrases. No language is capable of expressing the misfortunes of which Pedagogue Boris and the young philosopher are victims. Among other things, of liberating them from the side-effects of the medications they must take to stay alive. Where are the Dead that we know? Where the unknown? Can it be that Pedagogue Boris and the young philosopher are actually a single being? I think so. Pedagogue Boris and the young philosopher are the same person. Letters appearing from nothingness led him to write his first book. A philosopher who does not write treatises or create systems of thought. The young philosopher’s work of creation was perhaps one of the ways he found to escape the guilt arising both from writing and from not writing. To think, how not to do it. To bathe whenever possible. To visit the public baths at every opportunity. Maybe he only feels fulfilled in places that are flooded with all kinds of substances, which is just how the area where he lives has been inundated. It can’t be possible for someone like the philosopher, who did not study at any university or institution, who barely knows how to read and write, to feel a guilt like that. Nor can it be that in his capacity as Pedagogue Boris, he created a primary school where children go to die. In reality, the philosopher has never had any kind of education. In fact, he is infected, a pariah. Another Pamelita who prostitutes himself, pleasure included. Someone condemned to the most terrible death. He was taught no more than the basic letters and a few passages from the Bible. While he read, lying on the rug where he often slept, the young poet remembered that at certain moments, he had felt the deceptive feeling of protection, both from himself, and from the constant images of systematic slaughters, especially of dogs, that would appear before him; of the shapes of mosques, both in the East and the West, of children drowning other children in mountain villages, in lagoons, in rivers, on endless plateaus, on the black coasts of the Pacific. He saw himself, brutally murdered in the heavy snow. He felt in his body the scenes of Gods devouring other Gods. I imagine nobody would believe that this very young man represents the New Scriptures. Only Pedagogue Boris, who does not remember clearly when he met the young philosopher, affirms this. The fish know it too, those fish in the tanks that the young philosopher kept at the school for classes on the Natural Sciences, as does the sacred dog that he wished for. Letters that are able to define him both as a young philosopher and as someone immersed in tragedy. And also as the figure of a Pedagogue interested in opening a school. Although many people know that the philosopher’s words, his thoughts, his dreams, are all lies. The liquid boiling in his brain. Nobody believes in the Sacred Books, neither the Western ones nor the ones from the region where he lives. It is widely known, I repeat, that the young philosopher has never had any education. According to Pedagogue Boris, he only writes to forget that he will die soon, the victim of an incurable disease. It is the destiny marked out on those lands. Although he lives with the hope that the New Scripture will appear by spontaneous generation. Perhaps it will be like a dog that is larger than a horse. Almost like a camel in the desert. Or maybe it will manifest itself as its opposite, miniscule like one of the colored fish from the Natural Sciences course. Pedagogue Boris knows that there is no conventional way to express that which appears like a monster, like a shadow: the writing that is carried out throughout the course of existence. He does not know the exact moment in which the urge to write, blind, dumb, with no definite sense, went on to form an archive of reality. Perhaps forgetting was its reason to exist. To put into practice something like The Scriptural Seal of Non- Memory. In that exercise in forgetting, the philosopher places some sacred dogs that he wishes to have before his death. He remembers nothing. Has he mentioned this before in some space? He doesn’t know whether he is a philosopher, a writer, or a pedagogue. It only occurs to him, while he travels in an underground coach surrounded by clean bodies with their heads polished, humid, covered in gel, that a Muslim boy is recounting his dream. He is going to receive a sacred dog from the Superior of his Order. The transparent fish-tank from the classroom also appears. The steam baths full of naked men willing to beat him to death for having taken an image of their skins being rubbed by liquid again and again. The book of the dead. Secret tributes. A monster that can only be endured if one does not remember it intensely or if one lets it remain in its kind of aqueous existence, clean, carried in the hairstyles worn by the city’s underground transport passengers. The philosopher has the duty to write. Repudiation, ignorance, and necessity are all that is left to him after rejecting the Sacred Books, the Aztec Codices. Perennial cultures, extreme, unstable, bloodthirsty, just, unjust, whose opposites now tend to present themselves simultaneously. That’s why he knows that it is difficult for him to be understood when he explains that his way of working is not like that of others. His study, the one in which he invented the existence of a classroom decorated with pedagogical fish, every now and then becomes a sort of nothing. He places, on a white surface, one word after another. He notices that we rarely talk about non-writings, neither new nor classic. That it is easy to omit referring to silences. The important silencing, the definitive one, appears to be the one that is kept, hidden, in these regions. He never trusts words. Nor reviews, honors, awards, distinctions, doctorates. Nor the existence of mystical dogs that can reach the size of a camel. Nor does he trust the words of his brothers in the Order when they say that they live in heaven on earth. Where the limits between the living and the dead seem to have been erased. Like words and writing. We are all Muslim, some around there say. The mystical is present in the ordinary. Pedagogue Boris, in his effort to run a primary school, has already forgotten the hieroglyphics buried in the eternal snowy steppes of the North. Something similar, necessary forgetting, is what should take place with the writings of all times. Scriptural Seals of Non- Memory. Inscribed in clay tablets, in the dark surfaces of caves or on modern keyboards. Maybe also on those decomposing bodies, hanging from bridges, skinned alive. Washed and washed again. Dying in a classroom in a primitive school, where the pupils have been condemned to death for reasons unknown to us. The worst enemies of writing are exactly those who practice writing, affirms Pedagogue Boris. The saint Mansur Al-Hallaj was tortured to death for claiming “I Am the Truth, I Am God”. The same way that a philosopher would be executed in our time if he dared to say something similar: that he is the Word. And the young philosopher allows himself to say, surrounded here by dozens of cadavers, that there is no objective. Apart from writing a book, everything is imposture. The descriptions of the dogs, of the fish. The stories, the characters, the repetitions. All a falsehood, a pretext. It’s possible that each golden fish, swimming majestically, being described by condemned children, by Pedagogue Boris, may be the representation of the proper word. A word that can never be complete while the marked dogs still exist, those wandering the world in search of burial. An unnamable writing, indefinite, fleeting, transparent, as the passage of time appears to a dervish in its spinning trance. “I Am The True Scripture”, anyone can say, who simply takes a pencil to paper with the intention of making a stroke, a letter, a flourish. Something that, with a single movement, etches on a surface its passage through the world. Or rather the footprint of its being scorched into the ovens of some military barracks. Constant water. Bodies cleaned of their corporeality. Scorched bones, transparent bones, bones of an extreme whiteness that shine under the sun. On certain autumn nights, especially on those when the philosopher’s epilepsy medication leaves him in a state that can neither be called sleep nor wakefulness, scenes and thoughts pass through his head, most of which are difficult to describe. Events that take place as if behind a transparent curtain, a shadowy sheen. Similar states must be experienced by some animals in the solitude of their coops, stables, or barns. Pedagogue Boris is sure that this happens to the dogs that sleep in his room. Sometimes he surprises them, in the middle of the night, gazing, engrossed and focused on an indeterminate point. He usually notices how they’ll suddenly move a muscle compulsively or let out a moan they seem unable to control. He is sure that in those moments they are living scenes from some other reality. One time, the young philosopher felt something similar while he was wrapped in the blanket where he spends his nights. He noticed a figure very much like him, it was himself, sitting on one of the edges. From the first moment, he noticed that the shadow was talking incessantly. It was as though he had found it in the middle of an eternal monologue begun at an indefinite time. Upon hearing it, he realized that the shadow was talking about Our Lady, about a kleptomaniac, about a tour guide who lived exiled in a part of the country where the corrosion from sea salt was very pronounced. The results of oxidation could be seen in electrical devices, in the ancient and broken summer chairs out on balconies, and in the general structure of the building. The fire escape had turned into a heap of twisted iron, which the neighbors had decided to place facing the ocean like a great sculpture. Our Lady had been, in her time, an effective tour guide, especially when nobody knew that she would steal things while she was doing her job. She would usually steal unimportant objects, things of little value, from her clients. It all ended when she was caught taking the earrings from a jewelry box that the wife of a foreign king had left on a table in the suite where she was staying. She was never told anything about her crime. Rather she was forced to remain locked away in her house indefinitely. She did not receive a formal penalty, except the order not to leave her apartment for any reason. She was forced to stay there as long as was necessary. Our Lady (a tour guide?) is a character that the young philosopher came up with a few years ago, when he was using the study that a photographer had lent him to edit a book. He wrote it on a typewriter, producing a sound that bothered the photographer’s children, who lived on the floor below. They were also bothered by the sound of the dog’s footsteps above them. It was called Sueño del Pongo. The dog that shouldered the burden of millennia of injustice: that of the abusive owner, himself abused in the dream of someone oppressed. In that study, sometimes a memory would arise, in the way that memories do, of the vague presence of his mother. Not the one that everyone knew, but the one who had actually raised him. The faded one. The dead mother. The one who would never move away from watery surfaces, with her shining skin, luscious, who would give herself to the street vendors. The mother who, since the philosopher was little, took advantage of the disproportionate size of his penis. The one who would demand various objects from the other women in the region in exchange for letting them look at her son’s member as long as they wished. Our Lady, a kleptomaniac tour guide, is based on the story of a government worker who was the philosopher’s neighbor during the years he lived in other parts. In a society governed by a totalitarian system. The image of the philosopher’s mother, the faded one, who was attentive to the women looking at his naked body, may appear as a consequence of the mutual rejection they always felt for each other. From the moment of his birth. The mother facing the son and the son facing the mother. Maybe the root of this discord has to do with the circumstances of his birth. The philosopher is missing some body parts. He was born that way. That is why he carries a document that identifies him as a mutant. The condition of his body sometimes causes unbearable physical pain, which has led him to imagine an institution specializing in patients with strange maladies. He imagines that he attends a clinic that focuses on people who have never had, who have lost, or who are about to lose an appendage. Including the penis that his mother methodically showed in public. The institution has a floor exclusively for that type of patient. It offers a pool with underwater jets that give firm massages. Steam, fog, vapor, incessant water on the surface of bodies. It also has clinical equipment. It is common to see people entering or leaving the building, sometimes with help, a series of individuals who search the waters, the machines, the institution in general for the peace they need to go on with their lives. His visits to that clinic remind him that when he was a boy, he frequently attended an institution for deformed people, where he spent a good part of his childhood living with people trying to adapt to normal life, many desperately, others with resignation. What they sought in his case was to make him hear through his missing ear, and for him to accept wearing a glass eye so as not to show the hole, the scar, the scratch, the dead eyelid on his face. In another corner of this floor of the clinic were the rooms dedicated to individual therapy. They were small spaces with beds for massages, physical therapy, osteopathic treatments, separated from one another by thin curtains. In that section, they could tend to up to six patients at a time. In fact, a single therapist was able to offer his services to all of them, going from one bed to another every few minutes. The most well-known massage therapist was a body- builder who more than once told Pedagogue Boris about the strange situation that was taking place at his home at that time: the transformation of his mother into a parrot. The mother had died months ago, murdered, disappeared, skinned, inert on the side of the road, and the parrot that she had had for several years would repeat her usual words. Also, he told him in confidence, the parrot would not miss an episode of the television series that his mother had not been able to finish watching. With regards to the presence of the philosopher’s mother in the baths, we must clarify that in reality, such places never existed. Just like there never existed, except in his fictions, a man who lived close to the central airport. An invalid, like the ones who used to go to the clinic that he created in his mind while laying down, wrapped in a blanket, on the ground, or in the rehabilitation area of the hospital in whose basements he had spent a good part of his childhood. He mentions the basements because that is where the prostheses are usually built: arms, legs, ears, eyes. Eyes. Dozens, hundreds of eyes kept in large jars of liquid. Floating eyes. Wet. Clean. Aseptic. He remembers that, despite his forced visits, on one occasion he was not able to get a new eye because his father refused to accept the cost based on his socioeconomic evaluation. A new eye? The young philosopher is missing an eye? The father indicated that despite the place where he worked, a mid-level job, he did not have enough money for this expense. Pedagogue Boris remembers that this led to a nasty argument between the father and the social worker, who was trying to show him that his fees were adjusted to his economic status. Nevertheless, his rejection was decisive. The father calmed him down as they were leaving when he said that he knew a place where they made perfect marbles. So perfect that nobody would notice that he was missing an eye. He never took him to such a factory. His mother preferred for him to spend his days lying down. Just like that character who lived near the airport, who lay eternally in bed screaming orders to the guard dogs that he owned. Despite being immobile, that man was considered one of the best trainers of the region. He shared his house with his mother, a sister, his nurse, and nearly a dozen dogs trained to kill at the sound of an order. It is unknown why, upon entering his room, some visitors felt the presence of an atmosphere that had to do with what could be called the future of America. Maybe the Inuits’ drawings, the Lakotas’ way of organizing themselves. Some interpretations of the Codices, usually flawed readings. There seemed to be in that room some word, some Sacred Book that would once and for all define that part of the world. If anyone asked about his situation, the immobile man would respond, in his nearly incomprehensible way of speaking, that it was one thing to be immobile and another to be mentally retarded. It was a shame that a trainer like that, effective, about to reveal the mysteries of this area, the reasons for which a girl would take a seat with an iguana on her lap, died on an ordinary night when one of the animals escaped its crate and devoured him while he slept next to his nurse. The room filled with liquid. It may have been a sacred dog and not a guard dog. The size of a camel in the desert. The blood of the paralytic man spread through the room. With fecal matter. With his brains, which soon emerged. Once again, liquids flooding the scene of a crime. Honoring the aqueous nature of this part of the world. But it’s true, the young philosopher’s mother took advantage of his embarrassment. She showed off her son clean, his breast, his arms, his legs, his genitals, the way that skins are often presented in the region. There was the disproportionately large penis. Some men, the bathers, gave him a particular shine. They seemed to want to prepare him for his next disappearance. That way his body would look very tidy, naked, next to the other bodies washed in the same desperate way. As if in all that scrubbing they were trying to hang onto this world. To be allowed to continue attending the primary school that Pedagogue Boris had created with such care. To keep studying the water in the fish-tanks to get good grades on the exams. To continue on with their exfoliated suits, so clean, whose cleanliness they would protect with care in case they were eventually forced to sit before a photographer’s camera with an iguana on their lap. Peasants with huge ears dancing naked. Hair styled carefully with differently textured gels. Immaculate bodies, clean, unpolluted. In this way they would be handed over to that nothingness: immaculate. Surrounded by holy ghosts, the dogs. By cancer operations, by routine amputations, by surgical interventions, by mutilations. Exquisite, the nakedness of the one enveloped by a snake. In porno theaters. Hopefully the young philosopher will be able to obtain his sacred dog. The saintly dog. The side-effects of a medication that lets him stay alive. The need to write to create an Archive of Reality. The Scriptural Seal of Non-Memory. Repudiation, ignorance, and necessity. The book of the dead. Secret tributes. The epilepsy that the philosopher suffers. The solitude of the stables, coops, and barns. The dogs that sleep in the poet’s bedroom. Next to the blanket he wraps himself in, inside the primitive school run by the poet himself– Pedagogue Boris and Professor Virginia– in the hope that the students may have a proper place to die.

The summer my sister went to war I started digging a hole in our backyard.

Before she left, Annie hugged me real hard and said in her quiet way, Jenna, if you ever need me I’ll be right here. She stomped on the ground with her new brown boots. Okay?

In the ground? I asked her.

No, she said, on the other side.

I stood watching her on the porch, gnats spazzing around my hair, as the car grumbled off into the distance. As soon as the curve of the cornfield swallowed her up, I took off and ran to the shed, taking the biggest, shiniest, sharpest shovel we had and hauling it over to one of Daddy’s off-rotation fields. It took me a while to pick a spot because what if I went to far left and ended up in China or too right and ended up in Paris or even worse I dug right under her and she fell through the big, dark, long tunnel into the nowhere beyond? I decided to dig in smack-dab middle. I was two feet deep by the time Daddy came back with the empty car.

I always remind people of other people. I’m used to it by now, having somebody else borrow my face for a little while. Cause I’m that hard thing people throw their memories against. I’m what they bounce off of right before they cut through the air and get back to who they really belong to. Before they section that sheet of atoms draped between us, rip apart that fabric wall till the strips are laying down at our feet like leaves. Till we’re just staring at each other across that gaping throat the tear makes.

It happens after five but before seven. You know, when the sun’s dripping down the sky, brazed orange up against a growing darkness. The fading sunlight slinks through the space around it until both things find themselves inside of each other, figure out they can make the softest purple so they do. It’s not dark yet and I’m two blocks away from home. Maybe it’s three.

I usually cut through the empty lot right behind the beauty supply store on sixth. The chain-link fence runs parallel to the lot.

There’s a hole in the fence that leads up pretty beautifully right up to my street. All I have to do is walk across the concrete partition that leads across the canal and I’m golden. I almost drowned in that canal once. And I know that every time I cross it, it feels like my lungs are full of water again, like my own panic’s got its arms wrapped around my chest again.

Nico pulled me out, dragged me onto the barren narrow bank. And when I opened my eyes, coughing, all I could think about was how his head cut against the glass blue sky like a fucking sun. And if I thought that I kind of liked the way his eyes got all big and scared for me, kind of liked how their pretty green made me think about saturday mornings in the grass behind my grandma’s backyard, well… nobody needed to know that.

I’d seen him sometimes in the cafeteria, with the other Colombian kids, but having somebody drag you out of a canal? It changes things, makes you close. So when I started going everywhere with Nico, walking to school with him, going home with him, playing with him on the weekends… people didn’t think I was gay, they thought I was grateful. Shit, I ran with it.

I think he knew. Before I even told him, I think he—

I’m crossing the street in front of the post office and a royal blue Chevy Tahoe misses me by like half a foot. My heart falls through my ribcage, into my stomach. Stays there long after the truck’s gone. I’d always thought that there had to be an easier way to let everybody know how far along you were in your midlife crisis, but trucks seem to be the way to go down here. Cars have already started to swerve around me by the time I start to get out of the street.

I’m almost there. I can see the Family Dollar up ahead, so I’m less than a block away from the beauty supply shop.

I always love visiting my grandma (not the Cuban one that hates me; the black one that hates my mom) in Wynwood. She’s just a city over, not that far, so I walk. I go for her, stay for the art, the streets of murals, that kind of shit that would make white classicists pass the fuck out.

With her there’s this love inside a four bedroom ranch-style that wraps around me, leaves me warm for days on end. Then I get the walls of screaming colors, stark blues and greens and yellows and pinks and oranges and reds yelling just to yell just to yell. Screaming and screaming and screaming at me until something inside me picks up the key and starts giving as good as it gets.

Liberty City’s where my heart got built, where it learned to pump blood through me, where it’s probably gonna stay. But Wynwood? Wynwood makes my soul shake something fucking awful inside me, so hard my teeth rattle. Makes my soul want to take over, turn my body into an afterthought, into postscript.

I think my mom can see it sometimes when I come home, maybe. My soul leaving and my heart staying and me, caught up in the middle not choosing. Less because I can’t and more because I don’t want to have to.

My mom hates her mom just as much as my grandma hates her. Think maybe it has something to do with when she got pregnant with me. My mom sees my grandma in me, Wynwood in me, and I think she loves me harder because she’s trying to get rid of both. Trying to Clorox that shit right out of me with her sacrifice, her twelve-hour nursing shifts at Jackson Memorial, the bikes, the phones, the skateboards, the clothes the clothes the clothes, the jackets, the jeans, the shirts, the bags. Tommy Hilfiger would want to marry her on the spot if he could see my fucking closet.

I think that’s when it started, this vicious thing between them—when I was inside my mom, asleep, unborn. When I was inside her and my grandma found out that my dad was white (no, not just white. Cuban. worse). When my grandma saw her past, laid out in front of her. Years and years and years of hearing nigger negro sucio mono, of being spit on, of avoiding Little Havana like the plague came back and picked up a mortgage there.

So growing up I always felt it. But here’s the thing—my mom and grandma hated each other but my mom would never keep me from her. That’s the thing with my family—we’re loyal to each other, even when we don’t like each other. Loyalty drinks up the hate, grows strong on all that bad blood.

My grandma was the first person to let me know I remind people of other people. I was six. I was at my grandma’s house and she called me into the kitchen. But she said Jasmine, my mom’s name. I stood there, kitchen island barely coming up to my chin. I stared up at her. She stared down at me. It took her so long to realize what she’d said. And that wasn’t the last time it happened, either. Still happens. On this visit I was sketching at the dining room table and she walked up behind me, wrapped an arm around my shoulders and said whatcha workin on, Jazz?

I’m pretty sure my grandma loves me. But I also think that some of that love she’s holding for me, wherever she’s keeping it, is meant for my mom. She can’t give it to her, won’t let herself. So she gives it to me. I hold it in my pockets, my bookbag, between the sheets in my sketchbook, in my socks, my shoes. But I take it all out on my mom’s front porch. Think it would hurt her too much if I came into the house with it.

My mom was the second. And she gave me a two for two, bless her heart.

I was nine. I was just playing in the backyard. Hadn’t met Nico yet. Kwame and Tyler were both visiting family out of state. I didn’t really like any of the other kids in the neighborhood enough to invite them over (sue me). I don’t know what the fuck I was doing. You know how boredom brews up inside a nine year old, makes them do the most mundane, ridiculous shit to tamp it down. I was running back and forth across our tiny backyard, trying to figure out how fast I could really go. Back. Forth. Back. Forth. Big palm tree. Propane tank. Big palm tree. Propane tank.

I tripped, and my knee fell hard against a sharp ass rock. I was mostly in shock then, but now that I think about it, I was bleeding pretty bad. Red blood ran under the grit and gravel on brown skin. Thought I looked a little like a National Geographic volcano, hot lava dribbling out of me, eating up all the trees on my expanse.

I didn’t cry and I didn’t yell or anything. I don’t think my mom would’ve found me outside if she hadn’t been walking past the patio door just as I fell. She ran out and fell to her knees, looked at my cut. She hugged me. When she pulled back to ask me how I felt, if I had any pain, her eyes were wet. I told her I was fine.

“Juanlu don’t lie to me.”

We stared at each other, hot lava between us. She bit her lip when she realized what she’d said, but she didn’t correct herself. Wonder what she thought would happen, if she went back and fixed it. So that’s how I figured out my dad’s name. Juanlu. Juan Luis.

When she came back outside with the hydrogen peroxide she gave me a look too big for me and her tears came harder. I think she was seeing my grandma, what they used to be. Maybe those times when my mom fell and busted her ass playing, and grandma came out with that brown bottle. When grandma used to run out and check up on her. I wonder if grandma was serious with it, face folded up with worry. I wonder if she tried to make my mom laugh.

I think when she looked at me that day on the ground in our backyard, the past cut her up. Carved her into pieces it took for itself. Left her raw and open, blood splattered all over the present. The life that came first, with my grandma. The one that came after, with my dad. But God I think too much. Nico’s right.

“You gotta stop that shit babe,” he’s always telling me. “Your face screams ‘come fuck with me.’”

I love my mom and I love my grandma, but they take pieces of me for themselves, reach through me and around me and across me towards each other.

Nico doesn’t divide me like that. He keeps me whole when he looks at me, talks to me. I can only ever remind him of me, I think. I mean, how many people has he pulled out of a polluted Florida waterway?

And like a goddamn prophet, that shit Nico’s always telling me about how I look way too off my guard when I’m walking through the street? Comes to pass. His warnings find footing.

I’m passing by the bus stop. Street’s empty. The cars running past on the street make the only noise for miles. Makes sense. Sundays are always quiet like this, slow. We have way too many churches down here for us not to respect god at least a little. And in a place where nobody can ever keep still for too long, silence is the highest praise.

Out of the corner of my eye I see some kid in a blue plaid sweatshirt texting on his phone, standing under the bus stop lamps, that white light caked in blue. Another kid’s sitting on the hard plastic bench, headphones in, head down.

The thing about reminding people of other people is that it’s a complete shot in the dark. I’ve gotten quick smiles at the Publix, right before the lady with the sew-in wig realizes I’m not her son. Soft casual where were you?s at the Steak-n-Shake from pretty girls who register I’m not their boyfriend only after a few blinks. But I’ve also gotten tight lips and raised brows from cashiers at the Wingstop (I like their ranch better than Wing on Fire’s) who realize I’m not their ex or the guy that cut them off while they were getting off the I or that dude who walked into class without holding the door for them only after they really look at my face.

I’m almost past the bus stop when the kid in the plaid walks up to me, ditches my periphery for my direct field of vision. I’m just starting to think you want the shoes, right? when he punches me in the face.

I’m gonna spare you the poetry. Getting punched in the face isn’t like anything else in this entire fucking world. Newton’s bitch ass says that for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction. Every hit gets a hit back. But damn if it isn’t the shittiest thing in the world when that’s the only thing I can hope for, that my face fractures Blue Plaid’s knuckles a little bit.

I’m laying down on my back on the sidewalk now, staring up at the world’s ceiling getting dark. I move to get up. Somebody kicks me in the ribs, evicts the breath from my chest. Try to curl up on my side and what’s that shit Nico’s always telling me about getting jumped? Protect the head. I move to cover my head with my arms but somebody jerks me to my feet. Somebody pulled back and kicked the world as hard as they could—that’s why it’s spinning like this. Someone’s holding my arms pinned behind my back. Must be Blue Plaid, because Headphones is standing in front of me now, looking at me with an anger that sears my throat raw. He hits me in the stomach and I wanna double over, fold in half, but I can’t.

“You hard now, motherfucker?! Huh?!” Headphones is asking me, voice all warbly like it’s coming through water.

And all I can think right now is who do you see who do you see who the fuck do you see. I try to say something but Headphones hits me again and I don’t get the chance. I try harder.

“Mother… fucker, I’m not… I’m not…” I push my words through the empty space that cuts through the forest of pain growing inside me. Between the branches behind my face. Between the leaves in my chest.

And I see it, clear as anything. When Headphones realizes I’m not whoever the fuck he wanted. He looks at me, eyes wide, anger gone. And he says,

“Oh shit. Ooooh shit. P, it’s not him!”

Blue Plaid drops me. I land on my front, break my fall with my arm. When I look up they’re running into the sun. Good. I hope it eats them the fuck up.

I don’t know how long I’m laying there. Street’s still empty and I’m thinking of course this shit had to happen on the quietest Sunday in Miami history. I’m trying to take inventory. Face? Right cheek hurts like hell, pain in the dairy section, right next to the yogurt. Ribs? Hurt less, ache with the produce, between the tomatoes. Think Blue Plaid’s shoe had a soft toe. Think they were Champions or something. Stomach? Hurts less than the cheek but more than the ribs, pang with the cereal but not the good shit. No Cinnamon Toast Crunch or Cocoa Puffs or Cookie Crisps. It’s with the muesli, the plain oats, the unsweetened Cheerios.

I roll over to my side, the one with the uninjured ribs, and I cough. When I look down at the concrete I’m relieved to find that there’s no blood. A good sign. My arms feel a little strained from Blue Plaid holding them so tight behind my back, but they’re okay I think. I use them to brace myself, and I get up.

I limp over to the bus stop bench, sit down heavier than I intended to and pay for it with my ribs telling me to fuck off. I wince as I pull out my phone, go to call my mom. I pause over her name, her contact picture where she’s smiling big in front of the Dolphin Mall, browner with the summer. I’m in it too. Her arms are tight around me. I’m smiling softer but fuck, I look so fucking happy. I think about limping home, coming into the house with a huge bruise on my face while she’s getting ready to go to work. I know what she would see. Her baby got jumped her mom got jumped the love of her damn life got jumped on the street while he she he was walking home. I breathe deep, and the breath sidles up to my bruised ribs, swats at them on its way out my chest.

I lock my phone and slip it into my pocket. I get up. The neon lights of the beauty supply store are shining back at me. I can see the start of the chain-link fence right behind the building, even from the bus stop. I put up the hood of my jacket and walk the other way.

Nico lives right next to the Dollar General on 65th, in the neighborhood with the water tower. It sounds stupid but when I was little I thought that was the coolest shit ever. Growing up down here, one of the first things you learn is that the tap water’s probably gonna give you nerve damage (not saying that it will , just saying that it might ). Thought it was the coolest thing ever that Nico lived right under something we needed so bad.

It scared me shitless when I figured out I looked like myself to him. It made me want to run into a Publix and dance down the aisles but it also scared me shitless. I was ten and I felt naked, like he could see everything. God.

We were sitting on the floor in his room, playing GTA San Andreas. He looked over at me, head tilted to the side a little, and said,

“You have a bunch of dots on your face. So does my mami, but she calls them beauty marks. But we’re boys, so what do we call them?”

I didn’t want to look him in the eye then. I wanted to look at the TV screen, where CJ was paused in the middle of throwing somebody out of an El Dorado. But it felt like Nico’s eyes would be wherever I looked, so I shrugged and joked,

“Do they make me ugly?”

Nico shook his head, all serious, and the air around me got so tight that I had to unpause GTA with my controller, to turn it back into something I could breathe.

When I get to his house the driveway’s empty. His parents must be at work. Luz is probably at her boyfriend’s. Abril might be at a sleepover.

I climb the steps of his porch with some difficulty, ignore the doorbell, knock hard right on the door. His front door’s got that frosted glass that looks good but doesn’t actually let you see shit. Wonder what I’d look like to him right now, hazy body mixed up with the indistinct light of the streetlamps. He takes too long to answer. I knock again. I hear footsteps now, and the door opens so fast it makes me dizzy.

“Dude why the fuck are you knocking on my door like you pay this damn mortgage—”

I look up and he stops talking.

“Holy shit.” He steps aside. “What the fuck are you doing out here? Come inside.”

I move to come inside, but my foot catches on the threshold and I trip. Nico catches me, wraps my arm around his neck and helps me to the living room.

I stare at the dark screen of the turned off TV. The house is quiet. Nico’s moving around the kitchen. I hear the freezer door slam, and a few moments later he’s back, handing an ice pack to me before he sits down in the armchair to my right. I hold the pack to my cheek and feel instant relief run through me.

“What the fuck happened?” he asked, the calmest I’ve ever heard him.

I look up. His voice worries me. That calm’s hard and hot, like iron left to smolder. That harshness like searing burning broken glass, that ferocity that tells me someone’s gonna get fucked up no matter what I say. And in moments like these the truth and the lie have the same damn face so why bother.

"Got jumped. They thought I was somebody else.”

I see his fists clench in the light coming in from the kitchen. “Hijo de puta.”

I hold the ice pack tighter against my face.

“Where?”

“The bus stop in front of the Family Dollar.”

“Who?”

“Probably some South Beach kids. I’ve never seen them around here before.”

“And you won’t see them around here again.”

“Nico…”

“Fucking comemierdas think they can just run around here and fuck up whoever or whatever the fuck they—”

“Nico…”

“—I mean are they fucking kidding? You see somebody on the street and you just—”

“Nico…”

“But it’s not gonna be no two-bit mistaken identity Face-Off Nicholas Cage bullshit when we—”

“Nico, can I stay here tonight?”

He calms down when he looks up at me, for real this time. I wrap his anger up in a gentleness I thought somebody kicked out of me at a bus stop in front of a Family Dollar. I give that anger nowhere to go. And he says,

“Yes.”

My mom should just be clocking in right now. I text her from Nico’s bathroom, tell her where I am. I look at myself in the mirror. I want to see just how bad shit is.

And it’s… pretty bad, but I’d say that for getting hit super hard in the face with a closed fist… maybe not as bad as it could be.

A bruise grows from the corner of my left eye to the brown shore a few miles right below my left cheekbone, its own little continent. It’s a pretty deep purple and it’s gonna get worse before it gets better but I think I might be able to work something out with Luz, get her to let me borrow some of her concealer. I can Youtube it before I get home if her generosity ends with just lending me the concealer, figure out how the fuck to use it.

Nico’s standing in the hallway when I get out of the bathroom, waiting for me.

“If you want, you can sleep in Abril’s room, in a bed. She’s at Sloan’s.”

I want to sleep in Nico’s room, in his bed, but it happened again. Somebody turned me into someone else, and I got my ass beat for it. I feel loose, unmoored, like I got sent back to that blank space we’re in before God calls us in. Before we’re anything.

“Abril’s room sounds good. I’m starting to like pastels.”

The smile that Nico tries to give me loses its way to his eyes. He runs a hand through his hair, like he was gonna try to touch me but I burn too hot. He never knows what to do when I get like this. He described it to me once. Said it’s like taking a tire iron to plexiglass.

I try to fall asleep, I really do. Roll around in Abril’s princess twin as much as my ribs and my stomach will let me. But trying to sleep with fresh injuries has to be the ninth circle of hell. That’s what Satan decides you have to do for the rest of forever, when you get down there.

Whenever I get close to something like sleep the ache in my stomach or my chest or my face yanks me back, slaps me awake to the dark that’s sitting like a slab of concrete on my chest right now and fuck maybe I was wrong maybe my ribs are broken and the shards caught a lung and that’s why I can’t breathe right now I can’t breathe I can’t breathe I can’t breathe—

I sit up. A tabby kitten on the giant poster opposite the bed stares back at me with huge marble eyes. I leave the room.

My ribs still hurt like hell, face still sore as shit. But I came here cause I breathe the best with him, right? Damn if it doesn’t sit on my chest, knowing that neither my mom nor my grandma really knows how to give me a life that’s just my own. One that I don’t have to share with all the people waiting out inside their pasts. I don’t want to have to carry breaths that aren’t my own.

Through the windows in the hallway I can see the driveway. I don’t know what time it is but it must still be pretty early. No one’s home yet.

I push open the door to Nico’s room, and I can hear him snoring quietly. He’s facing the door, mouth wide open, curls wrapping around his face like dark vines. I walk over and nudge his shoulder. Nico’s always been a light sleeper and he wakes up immediately, eyes misty with sleep.

“Asaad?” he croaks, “you good?”

He always says something like this before we start, no matter how many times we do it. No matter where it happens.

I don’t say anything. I nod but I don’t think he sees it. I don’t know, maybe he does. Either way, I answer: I pull back his sheets and climb on top of him, my knees up against his waist, the length of my calves up against his hips.

He’s shirtless. I put my hands on his chest, palms prickling with the feeling of his heart beating steady inside him. He’s fully awake now but his face still has that muted sleepy calm that only ever comes out at night. He’s holding my hips now. The moon swings through the window to interrupt the dark around us and for a second it looks like my hands and his chest are a single thing. Like I dipped my hands into a pool the same color as me, like my fingers grew a chest, like they painted us conjoined, a Wynwood vista. And it’s here, on top of him, that I start having a really shitty thought. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe I don’t actually have my own face for him. Anyone, Nico would’ve pulled anyone from that canal—

But I don’t know how to ask him about something like that so I don’t. I take off my hoodie and we make the softest purple.