The Sleeping World (20 page)

I knelt beside him and stared at the article. I read aloud: “‘The performance art group that was arrested in Madrid for weapons possession, arson, and conspiracy has been sentenced to a military tribunal. Citizens hopeful for a democratic resolution to the case—'”

“See?” Marco said.

“We don't know it's them,” I said.

“Arrested in Madrid—right after we were there,” Marco said. “We have to get out of here. It's not safe for us in the city—too many people can see us.”

“No one knows we're here,” La Canaria said.

“They will soon. Those punks—they could tell them about us. Borgi knew where we were going,” Marco said. He smoothed down the paper. The tips of his fingers were black with ink.

“Even if that's true, what's it to you?” she said. “You're not going to get in trouble over anything.”

“They might be looking for you and Mosca,” he said.

“And I'm still wondering why you care so much.” Her voice was harsh. “Don't let your guilt make you paranoid.” La Canaria closed the window and bolted it shut. She ran her fingers around the wooden frame, weak in some spots from mold, and then pressed her face against the dirty glass. I didn't know if she meant guilt over his family or Grito or something else. Marco stood staring at La Canaria, his mouth open and his breath like sharp bird heartbeats. I wanted to touch Marco, to calm him, but I couldn't. It was better to stay as far as possible from each other.

“No one can find us here,” I said.

Marco folded the newspaper and then fiddled with the rotary phone he'd dragged into a corner.

Alone, we had believed we were safe. All summer and fall we thought it was only together, speaking to one another, that we created a door that allowed entry to all we couldn't name. If we stayed apart, the opening would dissipate. Instead it had stretched, forcing us against the damp walls, threatening to fill our lungs with ice water. I recognized that space. The same contours as the widening in the crowd, but this space didn't want to listen, it wanted something from us. We couldn't travel far enough away.

La Canaria opened the window, gasping for air. Exhaust and the scent of fried potatoes entered. It wasn't like she needed something clean. She wanted only to slow what would happen. We both knew the opening would expand to every corner of everywhere we went, until finally, our backs against the last wall, it would go down our throats.

I couldn't sleep. Marco and La Canaria buzzed with life
they'd lacked for months. I needed silence. I needed to understand what I had seen in the opening in the crowd.

I climbed out the window and down the fire escape. Turning the corner out of the alley, I could hear La Canaria landing on the damp pavement behind me.

It was late, but the bars were still open and bodies pressed against each other in the shadows and in doorways, extending goodbyes. I found my way back to the spot on rue Marguerite where the crowd had parted and I'd seen those almost solid shadows. No one was on the street. The streetlight reflections felt encased in pearl, contained in the puddles on the sidewalks, the brass doorknobs and plated windowpanes. Always a drop of water for light to bounce off, or a gilded corner, a white-domed roof. But all the light made the street feel colder and less alive, like shopwindow mannequins illuminated past closing.

I stood right where I had stood and waited, opened my mouth and tried to speak. But nothing came out. Damp air swirled in my mouth, but there were no special words; there was no torque in my tongue that would hinge the opening I sought. The street held shadows but not with the ones I'd seen when the crowd parted.

I kept walking, trying to shake La Canaria, but she followed me without shame. I ducked into one of the Métro stairways leading underground though I didn't have enough money to ride the subway. But there, on the wet stairs leading underground, circling just within reach, were the shadows I'd seen in the crowd. I stepped down, afraid to get too close. The air coming from the shadows was different from the air of the subway—dank and damp, yes, but the shadow air smelled like rust instead of urine, like salt and the sea. The shadows swirled over the steps, and I knew they were an entryway to a much deeper
passage. I saw what I had seen before, hundreds, thousands, of filmy shapes, ghosts walking up and down the subway steps, pushing, slipping on broken stairs that had been mended dec­ades ago, hurrying to homes long burned or bombed.

I opened my mouth and my lips moved as they never had, speaking to Marco or La Canaria or the name lost beneath the ice. A weight passed over them with each syllable, an ancient language I was only just learning, the words themselves painful to shape. The shadows were earth-black, deepest water–dark, cold and briny. I wanted to speak to them. I wanted them to listen. I had a message for them to carry.

* * *

Back in the room, I curled up on my corner of the mattress. La Canaria eased through the window I'd left open for her, but she didn't speak to me. I closed my eyes. I didn't sleep; instead I traced my steps that day. With my eyes closed, I saw it as a different city. Covered with a shadowy film, coated with layers of the shadows I'd seen. That city was still deep below me. I had a long way to descend, but the shadows showed me that I'd found the entryway. I was going down.

I opened my eyes to see La Canaria leaning out the window. She breathed in distance rather than air and pulled a small mirror from her pocket. I knew what she was doing—trying to re-­create the language I had spoken in the subway stairwell. There was a length of syllables—a single word, though she didn't know it yet—that I had repeated. The streetlight lit the mirror, giving a distorted glimpse of her mouth and tangled hair, nothing more. La Canaria tried to move her mouth as I had done. Again and again she twisted it toward the shape, hesitating at first, then adding sound, until slowly, slowly, Alexis's name began to form on her tongue.

Grito had loosened something in me. It had taken time for this object, once affixed, now straying, to surface, but it had. And then it was all I could touch and see. It was movement, a drive that might break me. It didn't care. When Grito fell beneath the ice, I'd seen the disappearance instead of just waiting on a void that didn't fill. He opened up a crack into that world for me to pass through. I had slipped somewhere I had not been invited, and yet it was the place I was seeking. The shadows had woken me, but I was not in the same place anymore. And I felt not joy or gladness but a surety from it, a response so foreign that it took a while to notice the taste in my mouth.

Because Grito had been wrong. No one is a shard of sound bouncing off rocks. You can't chop off limbs and expect to remain whole. Grito gone and we were only soft tissue tearing. It was Alexis I saw on the riverbank, if only just a part of him, an echo, a shadow or shade, and what I saw in the subway tunnels was the same. Hobo markings on friendly houses, they would lead me to him. I was more in my world than theirs, but I had crossed into a blurred perimeter. I knew Alexis wasn't in Paris or Madrid or any of the cities I'd polished in my throat. He was somewhere else. And if finding him meant tracking the shadows into their depths, into the city I saw when I closed my eyes, let La Canaria follow me. I never knew anyone who wanted to stay alive more than she did. Let her be my tether back.

Alexis? I said to those shadows. Where is he?

How do I bring him back?

* * *

The streetlights were on and it had just rained—cold and pestering drops on my face and shoulders. The fire escape ladder was slick under my hands, almost too numb to grip the rungs. I still had only the work boots Berta had given us. They were
sturdy, but the soles had thinned from my months of walking, and my feet slipped unpredictably inside them. I moved methodically up the ladder, slowly releasing one hand at a time and then closing it on the next rung, knowing no one would come looking if I fell and that an injury was not something my body could support.

I eased open the window, but the room was empty.

I'd never noticed how small it was. More of a closet than a room, and we had been living there for months. The room stank of rancid grease from fried potatoes and our sweat. It felt as small as it did because it was empty, as empty as it had been when we first climbed in through the window. Marco's red backpack, La Canaria's jean jacket, the sleeping bag from the farm, they were all gone. The dwindling stack of coins and bills was gone, too.

I could hardly register it. I'd been lopped off. True that we hadn't interacted much in those months, but Marco and La Canaria were the only people I'd spoken to since Berta sent us into the snow. The only living people. I kicked the phone and watched the two pieces of the headset split apart. One skittered across the room to land in the opposite corner. The phone was made of hard old-fashioned plastic. It didn't shatter when my foot hit it, just came apart. I picked up the errant piece and stuck it back on the headset. I held the dial tone up to my ear. It clicked on and off, like someone on the same line was trying to make a call. The plastic nestled comfortably back in its cradle. I did a quick sweep of the room, but there was no trace besides our smell that we had been there. I left the window open so that, too, would fade.

I climbed back down the ladder. The rain had started again, but it had a sweeter fall, more like mist rising off the pavement. I didn't know where I was going next. There was nowhere
else I could go, no one else I knew. I didn't want to go back to the room. It wasn't pride but a feeling that it was haunted by their leaving.

Below me, there was the sound of sneakers on the pavement. A cat or a rat moved out from under a cardboard box that had blown into the alley after the last storm. I stayed where I was on the ladder, a few rungs from the bottom. The figure moved closer to me, but I didn't go up or down. It was too dark to see the ladder or anyone on it until you were right next to it. That had made the alley a perfect entryway. With the rain, it was too dark to see anything. The footsteps got closer. I closed my eyes. I should have moved up the ladder, jumped down, done something. A hand closed around my ankle like it was reaching for the first rung. I kicked it off and screamed.

“Mosca?” Marco called into the dark.

I jumped off the ladder and landed on the wet pavement, slipping a little. “You
comemierda,
” I said.

“What are you doing here?” he said.

I walked out of the alley and onto the sidewalk. I wanted to see his face to make sure he was real. His voice was raspy from a cough he'd had for a few weeks. The streetlight lit his face, so much skinnier than before. Rain had soaked his hair as if he'd been out walking for a long time.

“I didn't get the memo,” I said. “You know, the one that said you were gonna ditch me?”

“Ditch you—what are you talking about?”

“Did you forget your hair comb, maybe some cologne?” I wanted to be sarcastic, but it took too much energy. I turned and started to walk away.

“Mosca, wait, what are you talking about?”

“You left me—” I said.

“We talked about this today.” He grabbed my arm and spun me around. “La Canaria heard one of the maids say that the owner is coming back. We had to get out of the room before he got there. We decided this morning where to go—”

I turned away from him, hoping my confusion and the blush that came with it were masked by the darkness. His words pulled something up, but it was unclear whether that was an actual memory or what the words themselves had shaped.

“We decided—Mosca, you don't remember?”

“Of course I remember.”

I did once he said it. La Canaria had shoved herself through the window, talking excitedly before she was fully in the room. She'd heard a maid on the balcony below us complain that her boss liked his house just so and she would have to clean every room.

“She'll be coming up here,” La Canaria had said. “She hasn't seen us yet, but she will.”

“
Joder.
” Marco had started pacing again. “What are we gonna do?”

“We'll just go to that country home he's got—he's not going there in the winter.”

“Won't it be freezing?” Marco said.

La Canaria shrugged.

I had been there, I had heard them, but it took Marco's words under the streetlight for me to remember it had happened.

“It's just—”

“I know,” he said. “It's hard—to keep things straight. It—all of it—wears on you.”

He put his arm around me and we were standing close together in the dark, in the warm bowl of the streetlight, the rain coming down or misting up.

“When you were gone in the morning, I looked for you and then went with La Canaria to the mill. I thought maybe you'd gone ahead. Then I came back—I couldn't find you.”

He was dripping with rain and his clothes smelled musty, but when I leaned into him, it was as if he had a familiar place buried inside, somewhere healthy and clean, a patch of grass or dry pine needles. He raised his hand to brush my hair from my face—it had hardly grown since summer, just gotten more tangled and split at the ends. So gently, tentative as a fawn, he moved my hair and set his hand, wet but warm, on my cheek. His thumb grazed my frozen earlobe, coaxing it back to life.

I leaned my forehead against Marco's and breathed in his exhales, sour as my own but familiar. My arm circled beneath his jacket without my asking it to.

“Why even bother coming back?” I said.

“I told him I'd protect you,” he said.

The streetlight blackened everything out of its reach. Yet right at the edge of the orange light, I saw a swift-moving shadow. Instead of holding still and beckoning, it hurtled toward me, taking form. I turned away from Marco, his arm falling from my shoulders like I'd shrugged it off, turned to face the approaching shadow, but it disappeared the second I stared at it full-on.