Perla (15 page)

“You’re never to speak to reporters. They’re like vermin, they get in where they shouldn’t and they’re never any good. And in general, be careful of the company you keep.”

“Whom I speak to is my concern.”

“Perla. Everything you do is my concern.”

“It’s not. I have my own life.”

“Because I gave it to you.”

I stared at him; he seemed startled at his own words. “Fuck you,” I said, fully expecting him to shout or slap me for it. I’d never dreamed of saying such a thing to him before.

But he did not shout or slap. Instead, he said, “Perla, listen. You have to listen. There are things you don’t understand.”

He stared at me with an intensity that reached beyond his words, and in his gaze I read a plea that he would not articulate and that I should not accept, a plea that reached back to our conversation from the night before and asked for absolution or amnesia or, at the very least, for continued love. He wanted me to stomach his confessions and stand by him, his faithful daughter, an essential part of a united family that knew how to keep secrets from reporters, from the world, from their own selves. I should not accept the plea, I thought. I should spit in his face on behalf of a nebulous thirty thousand, or at least denounce him with brutal measured words, disentangling my own conscience from his deeds—but I could not. I would pay a price for this. It seemed a terrible crime to allow the threads of our connection to go uncut. I wanted to be a different kind of person, free to
condemn the flights and other horrors with pure contempt. What a luxury, pure contempt. How very civil, how very smooth. Like Amelia’s mother, and like so many members of my own generation, with whom I felt out of step, unable to join the full-throated recriminations without tearing myself in two. My father needed me. Only I had seen his tender places, heard his tears; if I abandoned him, in any sense of the word, he would surely wander lost and fragile and alone, without anchor, without salvation.

I wanted to run from him, from the crowded patio, from his gaze on me, from my own freighted love. But I did not run. I stood, paralyzed, while my father walked away with the last word.

6
The Word
Where

T
his is how it ended: they came in with syringes and he thought it would be lethal but it was just some kind of drug, to keep you calm, they said, while we transport you to a special station in the south. Bliss, relief, to enter the haze drugs gave him, like white gas piped into his mind. Then he was in a truck, an Army truck, the kind with a green canopy over the top, he couldn’t see it through his blindfold but he could tell by the fabric he leaned against, the leak of air from outside. He was crushed against the other bodies, also drugged, all of them nameless with nothing but a number to identify them. He tried to recall where they were going: to the south, yes, that was it, they were going to a special station in the south. He tried to hold on to this with his sedated mind, grasping at the word
south
like an anchor, but it kept slipping away into white fog.

When the truck stopped, they were taken to an airplane, dazed cargo that they were, with legs that could not walk or run. They were half-carried, half-dragged, a guard holding his arm, holding him up, guiding his steps. The guard’s body was young and lean, muscular, most likely he grew up on the edge of town, so many of the military boys of low rank grew up on the edge of town, meals without meat, not enough bread, not enough school, hard knocks, perhaps he’d been a good boy, was still a good boy now, the arm was strong and could be leaned on, faster, said the guard, come on, let’s go.

At the door of the airplane two guards fought over their bodies. There isn’t room said the guard right beside him.

Then make room, the other guard said. Pack them in.

What if they don’t fit?

Idiot, then come back for the second load.

Strange, he thought, that they would argue in front of prisoners. Perhaps they were confused by their instructions. Perhaps they thought their charges were too drugged to understand. He was dragged into a hold and pushed against other bodies, stacked like odd-shaped boxes.

They flew.

They rose into the air, stuffed into their dark hold. He felt a woman’s body crushed beneath him, a man’s legs on his chest, felt the lurch and rattle of the machine. The air was scarce and fetid. He wondered where they were really going. The plane rumbled and groaned. It took a long time but there was no time, not anymore, it had stretched and warped so it didn’t matter. He felt another needle in his arm, another prick, more drugs. From the flinches of bodies next to him he knew they were injected, too. More time passed. The fog inside him deepened. The hands returned and stripped their clothes off. He thought, The south, I’ll never see it, not that I’d have seen anything anyway, but the south is not where we are going. The stripping seemed to take a lot of time. His sores opened as pants legs were removed, he oozed onto their hands. They wiped their palms off on his thighs, brusquely, still so much to do. Eventually his body pressed against other naked bodies, his thigh was in an ass, a hand pushed against his rib cage, no, it was a foot, twisting the skin, as though trying to get some kind of foothold, they were so close, the gas so thick inside his mind, skin is pliable, it melts, skin is made to melt right into skin, you can’t escape it, their bodies seemed to blend into one writhing, liquid body. It was hot and hard to breathe. Suddenly the slide of metal, roar of air, and the hatch stood open to the sky. The bodies drew back from the open door as if they were one body. He felt the scuffling of many limbs, some of them his own, a slow and pointless stupor of a scuffle. A body was pulled on, pulled away, and he felt the ripple of its loss through the mass of them, the swirling human cumulus.

A guard-voice: Come on, push.

Another guard-voice made a sound, a sob, the kind of sob that cuts the throat.

You faggot. Fuck.

Another voice, deep with age: Take him to the cockpit.

There was confusion among the naked ones, they were too dazed to scream, some of them were pinned against unconscious bodies, the hatch was open, there were a few groans that rose and disappeared. He heard the guard who’d sobbed move through the groaning mass, away from the opening, away from the bare sky. From the hatch he heard a whimper, a whimper falling away, so far already, lost in the air. More groans now, grunts, whispers, quiet sounds of terror. Slowly there began to be more room. There were less of them and he was not so crushed, they were pulling apart into discrete bodies. Naked bodies were falling from the hatch. He swung an arm and it was caught by a firm hand that pulled him to the edge of whipping air; he didn’t resist; he was so flimsy: he was on his knees at the lip of the hold and the push was almost gentle like a blind man being guided through the night and then he tumbled forward into sky.

His hands flew to his face and pushed his blindfold off his eyes. Below him was a sea of clouds, torn, white, criminally beautiful, blinding in their radiance, the moonlit water far below. They fell down, naked humans, puncturing the clouds. He is one of them, a drop of rain, it’s raining humans, naked humans, naked drops, below him white, around him wind, the whir and whip of air, his mouth hangs open and he opens his arms too, as if to fly, as if to brace, he thinks he may be pissing on himself, he falls into the spray of his own piss, white, he falls through white, it doesn’t break his fall and for an instant he is cloud and there were times when as a boy he’d lean back and stare at clouds and on his wedding day she came to him right down the aisle in her white bridal gown all puffs and lace and how he longed to touch her, he falls now through her skirt, her billowed bridal skirt, vast and white and torn by bodies falling and so soft so very soft it cannot hold him, cannot keep him, he grasps the
air for threads but still keeps plunging, hold me, wrap me, where are you
mi amor
, I think I smell you, the musk under your skirts, strong, savory, opulent, your deep scent; I want to stay inside the skirts but I am falling, down, away, he fell through all his memories of white, the clouds in boyhood, altars at church, paper silent underneath his hand, all those words he’d written, the words he’d never write, none of his words had white to land on anymore and he had nothing to land on also, he was below the clouds now in the black crystal air, his arms still out as if to embrace the sea, wind rushed against him, the water stretched below him long and calm, a thick dark mass now broken by a falling body, then another, naked bodies break the surface and the water twists and spikes and takes them in, ripples circle out around their landing, subtle wrinkles glistening beneath the moon, water slightly wrinkled by human bodies and the wind, he would not wrinkle, would not age, now it was decided, instead he would be swallowed by the sea as he was, young, smooth-skinned, rainbow-skinned, with red and blue and white and green and purple marks across his skin, it would take him and he prayed it wouldn’t sting, he could face death if it only wouldn’t sting no more stinging, water was close, an instant left and he said, God, where the fuck are you? where’s my wife? our baby? though all that left his mouth was the word
where
before the water broke and swallowed him and cracked his bones and filled his mouth and didn’t sting at all.

Memories exhaust him. They have wrung him like a rag. He would rather shut them out, at least for a time. He is alone; the girl has not returned; even the turtle has slunk off to the kitchen. The room is dark, lit only by dull blades of light from streetlamps through the window.

There is only one thing he wishes to remember, and that is Gloria’s face. It hurts him, the empty oval in his mind, surrounded by dark hair. Other parts of her are vivid and exquisitely illumined—her
shoulder blades, the way they jutted that last night in sleep; her ankles, thick and solid, surprisingly so for her slight frame; her shoulders tense and compact that last time he saw her, tied to a chair; her long fingers on his knee in the evening; her fingers the first time she touched him, the night they met, at 2 a.m. in the bookstore when, like an idiot, he asked her for the time, because she was beautiful, to start a conversation, and she said, I don’t know, I’m not wearing a watch. She looked amused and glowed as her friends laughed at him, but she also brushed his wrist with her fingers, saying, You’re the one with a watch, why don’t you tell me? She looked up at him undaunted, waiting, as she would do so many times from that night on, and he longs to see but cannot see her face. It tilts blankly in his memory, a blur of erased flesh. She was small without being fragile, this he knows. She was bony and the bones of her cut into his mind, he wants their cutting, wants to be scarred by her protrusions, to carry their marks on this new skin. Most of all, he wants her face back, wants to recall her nose and eyes and jaw-slope in the fog behind his eyelids. If he can just see her face, he thinks, then perhaps he’ll have her back, at least a scrap of her, no matter what’s been done to her or what she has become, and then he won’t be alone in this dark house.

He gathers all his strength and stares at the wall. He will conjure her face along its surface. The task is slow and arduous, but he is determined. It is coming. He will have this part of her back.

He works for a long time, in absolute silence.

Finally he has done it. Gloria’s face is there. The forehead is hazy and there is fog where ears should be but the rest of it has been composed against the bare wall. Gloria’s face, ceiling to floor. He could soar up into it, fly right up to the face, and lose himself there, open his head and press his naked mind against her lips, that’s what he longs to do but he stays still because he doesn’t want to lose the image. And so he concentrates. He stares unmoving at the wall, keeping his mind still, his mind a jar of splinters that must not shake, must not be jostled, every fractured shard of memory in its place. The face glows.
The eyes are perfect. He holds the image of her eyes and they are wide and alert, his masterpiece of recall.

Key in the door. He hears it turning. The girl is home.

She enters and shuts the door behind her. She stands there for a moment, looking at him without turning on the light. He feels her gaze on him as he stares, intently, at the wall. He feels his body again, under her gaze—hands damp on the rug, the drip from his chin, bent knees. The light from the streetlamps mixes with the glow from Gloria’s face. He stays still, he has to, the life of Gloria’s face depends on him. The woman in the doorway walks toward the wall. She’s in his peripheral vision now, and Gloria’s mouth is large and voluptuous and opens slightly. He lets his gaze dart at the woman who has come.

You’re still here, she says, with no trace of surprise.

He looks at her and her mouth is also open, slightly, in a manner that makes his head roar because it is so much like Gloria’s—so very much like Gloria’s—and then the face on the wall is gone, leaving sudden clarity in its place. The room becomes a vortex of stars that shoot fast circles around him, closer, closer, threatening to cut into his heart. He wants to make a sound that is unbridled, a sonic flood that rises but stays trapped inside his throat.

All he can say is, You.

He stands up for the first time, knees shaking, and reaches out to her.

The woman looks into his eyes and then she runs to the stairs and is gone.

TWO