At Night We Walk in Circles (18 page)

Henry walked back toward the bus. Accidents like this happen all the time, but somehow in all his travels he'd been spared seeing one up close. He felt sore all over, in his jaw, in his back, in his hips. It wasn't overwhelming pain, just enough to make him feel old.

A few moments later, Patalarga returned. “Three hours, at least,” he said. “Get comfortable.” They stood by the roadside, looking out over the valley. “Are you all right?”

Henry answered with a nod.

“Our friendship began to unravel then,” Patalarga told me later, “just when it should have been strengthened. I tried to talk to him, but he was hard to reach. I thanked him for last night, for telling us everything. I got no response. I told him not to worry about Nelson, that he'd be fine, and he just shrugged.”

Henry doesn't exactly dispute this. “The wreck put me in a mood. The wreck and everything else. I couldn't help it, but I felt like he was judging me.”

“But Patalarga was your best friend,” I said.

“That's true,” Henry told me, “and it also isn't true. You get to an age when that phrase isn't quite what it used to be. There is no best friend role waiting to be filled. You're alone. You have a life behind you, a series of disappointments, and perhaps a few things scattered ahead that might give you pleasure. I wasn't happy. What else can I tell you? I felt like a failure. I lost everything in Collectors. And in T——, I'd felt for a moment like I might be able to get it back. I wasn't worried for Nelson, but there was no escaping the reality of it: we were going home without him.”

This was our third interview. He was thin and unshaven, with a grayish pallor, and had deteriorated even in these few short weeks since we'd first spoken. He'd just told me a version of what he told Nelson and Patalarga the night before their departure—the story of Rogelio. It was summer on the coast, and the windows of his half-furnished apartment had been thrown open, the curtains pulled. The room was filled with light, but Henry slumped in his chair as if he'd just woken from a nervous sleep. A fan whirred in the corner. I had the sense we were acting out the very scene he was describing: metaphorically, there we were, he and I, standing by the side of the road high in the mountains, observing the wreckage. Only in this case the wreckage was him.

It was almost dusk when the traffic on the road to San Jacinto finally began to move again. All the cars and trucks and buses and vans followed in a long, slow procession, rolling along as a block, never more than a few car lengths between them, as if by riding together, they could steel themselves against the impact of the accident they'd just seen. They arrived in San Jacinto that evening, in time to catch a night bus to the coast. Everyone was tired; nerves were raw. Henry and Patalarga bought their tickets, and waited.

Even at that late hour, the station was manic. There were children everywhere, Patalarga remembers, not children who were traveling, but children working the station: selling cigarettes or shoe shines or simply begging. Below the constant noise, if you concentrated, you could hear the dull buzz of the fluorescent lights. Everyone looked like wax dummies. I can't wait to leave this place, Henry thought. We can't possibly leave soon enough.

At nearly one in the morning, the bus was ready to board. Before it pulled out, the passengers were videotaped, this time by a girl of fifteen wearing a tank top and a pair of unnaturally tight jeans. She had black hair, a moon face, and was shy. Perhaps half the people on board had heard the news of the deadly crash at the bridge, and as a result the taping was more somber than usual. No one waved, no one smiled; they peered into the camera's glass eye without blinking, as if searching for a loved one on the other side.

Henry didn't even face the girl, but turned instead toward the window.

“Hey,” she said, “over here,” but the playwright didn't respond.

Patalarga shrugged an apology on behalf of his friend. “I'd never seen Henry like that,” he told me later.

After a few seconds the girl moved on, muttering complaints under her breath.

They hadn't been on the road long before Henry turned to Patalarga. He wore an expression of worry, or even heartbreak.

“I guess that's it,” Henry said to his friend, his voice low.

Patalarga had been on the verge of sleep. “Yeah?”

“The tour's over.”

The two friends didn't speak again until morning.

NELSON WAS GIVEN
what was simultaneously the largest and smallest room in Rogelio's family home: the largest in terms of sheer physical space; the smallest because it had become, in recent years, a de facto storage locker. The rusty bunk bed where Jaime and Rogelio once slept now served as the essential infrastructure holding, but not containing, the family's history in objects: bundled, precariously balanced, stacked from floor to ceiling, the remains of twenty-five years, thirty years, five decades of life in T——. In this house. Nelson spotted an old sewing machine, a teetering heap of newspapers from the seventies, a dead man's mothballed clothes. There was an overstuffed cardboard box sitting on the lower bunk, with a dented teakettle and a few cracked wooden kitchen spoons peering out from the top. There were mismatched shoes beneath the bed; a couple of soccer balls, deflated and ripped open; bent wire hangers linked together like a makeshift cage; a box of marbles; and a child's tricycle that appeared to have been taken apart violently. Nelson even saw a few of the old sculptures Rogelio had made out of wood.

Together, it was something to behold. Had it stood in a museum or an art gallery, the critics would have been unanimous in their praise.

Noelia must have noticed Nelson's expression, or the sharp breath he drew at the sight of it all.

“We don't throw anything away,” she said. “We just don't. I'm not saying this is a good or a bad thing.”

Nor could Nelson decide.

Rather than attempt to make space on the lower bunk, Noelia had Jaime and Nelson bring in a cot, along with three heavy blankets that smelled powerfully, but not unpleasantly, of woodsmoke. She was eager to get her guest settled in. “Go ahead, give it a try,” she said, standing in the doorway, and watched as Nelson lowered himself carefully onto the cot. The fabric sank beneath his weight, like a hammock, but it held.

“Not bad,” he said.

“Lie down.”

Nelson flipped his legs onto the cot. His toes hung just off the edge. “It's fine,” he said.

“I'm sorry, but it's the best we can do for now.”

“It's fine,” Nelson repeated. “Really.”

It was early evening, and Mrs. Anabel was resting. It had been a big day for her. The temperature was dropping, so Jaime, Noelia, and Nelson moved to the main visiting room, that dark and dusty place where Henry had first been received. The family photos were right where he'd said they'd be. Nelson glanced back at his hosts, as if for permission.

“Go ahead,” Jaime said.

Nelson nodded, and searched the menagerie of black-and-white images, the faces blurred, but recognizable. Young Jaime, young Noelia, and the youngest, Rogelio, he assumed. He examined that face most carefully of all, looking for some resemblance that might explain his own presence in this strange home, in this strange town. They looked nothing alike, which was both a relief and a disappointment. It felt unsettling to be suddenly so connected to a dead man. There were a few scenes from the plaza, from the days when T—— had been alive. There was one photo of the family stepping out of the cathedral, dressed in their finest, Mrs. Anabel's stern late husband with an arm around his wife, and a date scrawled in the corner of the image: May 1970. Nelson studied the old man's face, an opaque, unreadable mask; it was the face of a man accustomed to suffering. Husband and wife both wore this expression, in fact; but the children clustered about them—two smiling, irrepressible boys, plus one prim and beautiful little girl—did not.

“What a lovely family,” Nelson said.

Noelia smiled. “Yes, we were. My mother thinks we still are.”

“We made a good team,” Noelia told me later. In spite of how it ended, she had fond memories of Nelson's time in T——. “I told him everything I knew. Not just that night, but every day I added something, every day I remembered. He helped me, just by being there.”

Noelia began that evening by explaining Mrs. Anabel's peculiar sense of time, the seven or eight key events which her mind played in a continuous and maddening loop, and the connective tissue between them. For example, it might be necessary to understand how the death of Rogelio's father related to the 1968 earthquake. Noelia explained to Nelson (and later to me) that something in the chemistry of the soil changed after the quake, and the small plot he'd saved up years to purchase became suddenly infertile. The old man all but gave up hope after that. Though he didn't die until a few years later, as far as Rogelio's mother was concerned, he'd
started
to die at the moment of the earthquake.

“You would've been five in 1968,” Noelia told Nelson, like a schoolgirl slipping answers to her favorite classmate. “And almost eight when my father finally passed.”

She kept on, and Nelson took notes. Jaime was mostly quiet, nodding now and again, or correcting Noelia's dates. Together, brother and sister conjured this memory: they'd last been together, all three of them, at a party in San Jacinto in the early 1980s. Neither could remember what they were celebrating, or why Noelia had been visiting the provincial capital. They remembered this: the sun setting, the three of them and perhaps a half dozen friends in a circle of plastic chairs on the unpaved street in front of Jaime's house. It had rained the night before, and the chairs sunk and waddled in the soft earth. Music played from a handheld radio, they swapped stories, pulled bottles of beer from a bucket full of ice. Friends came by all through the night, and Rogelio was quiet—“He was always quiet,” Noelia said—until a certain song came on the radio, something bouncy and pop. Then, to everyone's surprise, he stood up and started dancing.

“Everyone stopped to watch,” Noelia said, shaking her head at the image. “He was so shy back then.”

“It was a real sight,” Jaime said, and laughed to himself. It was the first time Nelson had seen him laugh.

They're not talking to me now, Nelson thought. It's like I'm not even here. He kept his eyes wide open, his ears perked, and did what he could to inhale this memory, to make it his, as if the truth of this emotional detail could make any difference at all to Mrs. Anabel.

“I was watching you today,” said Jaime finally.

“You were very nice,” added Noelia.

“That's true. You did fine.”

“But?” Nelson said.

Jaime pressed his hands together, and held them against his chest. “But Rogelio had no schooling. He didn't read plays or write books. He couldn't read at all.”

“He was in Henry's play, wasn't he? In Collectors?”

“Just something to keep in mind.” He pointed at Nelson's notebook. “Don't let my mother see you writing, that's all.”

“You have to remember who our brother was,” Noelia added.

Jaime frowned, and ran a hand through his hair. “And who my mother thinks he was.”

“Okay,” Nelson said. “I'll try.”

When they'd finished for the night, Nelson went back to his room and sat on the cot with his back to the window. He'd heard many stories, some true, some invented; his journal was filled with notes, and his head was spinning. He stared at the clutter on the bunk bed, as if examining the gears of an inscrutable machine. It was impossible not to appreciate its size, the stunning illogic of its composition, and the history embedded within. He felt duty-bound to understand it, or attempt to. All this junk was something more: it was a family's history, and wasn't he, at least temporarily, part of this family?

If Nelson had known more about T——, known more about the region and the relentless out-migration that had changed it, he'd have known that all the houses in town had rooms like this. That some houses, in fact, were nothing but large, sprawling versions of this room, no living space left, no people, only assorted objects gathering dust behind padlocked doors. He might have appreciated that Mrs. Anabel and Noelia had managed to contain the past, more or less; that by holding it within the four walls of the boys' old room, they were living, to a greater degree than many of their neighbors, in the present. It would have impressed him, certainly, but for an entirely different set of reasons. For now, he couldn't escape the sense that this lawless room was simply the physical representation of Mrs. Anabel's mind, that if only he could place these many items in some kind of order, he might discover the secrets of her dementia. He might resolve it. And find a place for Rogelio within it.

•   •   •

NELSON WOKE THE NEXT MORNING
to find the family in the kitchen, chatting over a simple breakfast. He crossed the courtyard, wearing his best smile, and joined them. There was no mistaking Mrs. Anabel's happiness; it was evident in the way she greeted him—brightly—and in every gesture thereafter. He drank tea, ate a hard-boiled egg and not-quite-fresh bread with cheese, and sat by the window, letting the sun hit his face. Mrs. Anabel kept her eyes on him, which might have been unnerving in another context, but which here seemed exactly right, and even expected. He performed for her.

“How did you sleep?” the old woman asked, and though his back hurt and his neck was sore, he didn't hesitate: “The best I've slept in years, Mama. It's so nice to be home.”

Her contentment was palpable, and it meant something to Nelson.
When she took my hand, it made sense somehow,
he wrote later.
At least as much sense as the tour did.

That morning, his first full day alone in T——, would be the template for each of the mornings to come. The work of impersonating Rogelio, of convincing an elderly and senile woman of this identity—it was a task to be accomplished at the local rhythm, that is, slowly, carefully, making no hasty or unnecessary gestures. The breakfast table was cleared, and he helped Mrs. Anabel to her spot in the courtyard, where she sat with her back against one of the adobe walls. She asked him—Rogelio, that is—to sit with her, and he did, very close, in fact, side by side on the sunken top of an old leather chest, the outsides of their thighs touching. Their conversation could barely be called that: they enjoyed long silent spells, interrupted by Mrs. Anabel's occasional questions, queries which did not require specific answers. Here and there, she made the odd statement about which there could be little or no disagreement: “The sky is good” or “The wind is nice.” She'd smile afterward, nodding at her own insight with an air of satisfaction. Nelson smiled back, and gently squeezed her hand to show her he was listening.

She asked Nelson about his life, and he improvised based on the general script he'd heard the night before: his Rogelio was a version of the lie Jaime had invented. He lived on the outskirts of Los Angeles, in a working-class neighborhood of small, tidy houses. There was an industrial area nearby, where giant factories ran all day and all night, frantic and bustling, belching thick smoke into otherwise blue California skies. In his description, the factory was good work, and everyone was happy to be there. Satisfied to be
making something
. It was the sort of cliché of which Henry might have disapproved, but still, Nelson owned it, holding his hands out, palms flat, when he said this.

“But your hands are so soft,” Mrs. Anabel said, not skeptical so much as delighted by her son's lovely hands.

“I wear gloves. We're required to wear gloves.”

Nelson had never been inside a factory. Still, Mrs. Anabel accepted his answer with a contented smile.

“What do you make?”

“Movie sets,” he said, because it was the first thing that popped into his mind.

She seemed to take this answer in stride.

Nelson's Rogelio, like his brother Jaime, was a mechanic; unlike Jaime, he'd never married. He lived a quiet life, though he spoke with great conviction about his desire for a family. Soon, he told Mrs. Anabel, but insisted it would all come in due time. “I'm still too young for that,” he said that morning, a statement which worked on a variety of levels. At the sound of those words, time collapsed for Mrs. Anabel. If Rogelio was still young, then she must still be young too!

“Oh yes, you're very young,” she said, and her eyes glistened with a pleasing confusion.

Then it was time for her nap, and Nelson was left alone with Jaime in the courtyard. A cat meowed from somewhere inside the weeds. Nelson had done good work that morning; he was sure of it, but his employer (for that is what Jaime was) kept his distance, observing him from the kitchen doorway.

Finally, Nelson said, “Were you watching? How did I do?”

“Not bad.”

“Did I get anything wrong?”

Jaime shook his head. “Not really.” He stepped out of the doorway, and into the courtyard. “A matter of degree, I guess. I see you and I don't see Rogelio. But that's not your fault. You're not doing anything wrong, it isn't that. My mother sees what she wants to see. And she likes you. I don't know how you people do it.”

Nelson shrugged.

“How it is you pretend, I mean. Come with me. Let's take a walk.”

It would become habit to break up the tedium of the morning with a stroll just before lunch. This was the dry season in the mountains, when every day is a replica of the day before. Above, a smattering of white, cottony clouds. They walked the few blocks to the plaza in silence, passing only a few people along the way: a girl skipping in the direction of the school, and an elderly gentleman with his hat pulled low against the sun. The narrow side streets of T—— were shadowy and cool, but the plaza was blanketed in boiling sun. And it was empty, but for a few people milling around the bus that would leave in a few hours. The owner of the bodega sat on the steps outside his store, reading a newspaper. He waved to Jaime, and they walked over to greet him.

“Mr. Segura,” Jaime said, “you remember my brother, Rogelio, don't you?”

Nelson narrowed his eyes. He was being tested.