In my dream,
he brings me a onion plant.
He says I have nothing,
he says how can I live like this?
I buy him a carton of Winston’s for Christmas.
I keep them in the bottom drawer of the bathroom.
In my dream
I am practicing
how to tell him this dream.
Bells, vibration, and melody wake us up.
I was in a cabin, I say, I had nothing.
You invited people over. You gave me an onion plant.
Cool, he says. The bulk of him warm
and he’s as foreign as a new animal.
Clipping the old man’s nails, it seems inhuman to grow anything so strong, the ridges mirror the whorls in his fingers he kisses my arm and I ignore this, follow the curve of nail over finger. This part is like a moon, too. He forgets what I’m doing and moves too much. I snap at him. Feel like a mother, since his family has left for California. This is where I come to save you. Already the night has threatened while I pretended to dream. The fire would be beautiful and violet-edged. The fall would be exactly like the earth opening. The heat would drop you to sticky slumber, reminding you of the womb. The gas would touch you like a memory, then drop your eyelids, heavy. I am here to save you. Stumbling in with love wounds and shaky hands. Here to chop wash cook mop sift empty and close. Put back what you thought should be out. Take the dolls from the walls and the flags from your collars. (But I leave the rubber bands in the fridge, ‘cause I, too, think they are happy there, cold and nestled into themselves…we both put our fingers into the bowl, satisfied.) He has hidden the fan again. I have to take the bananas from the microwave. Put the ice cream back in the freezer. Sift through what seems like years of junk mail—red inked pleas, Native American girls with matted hair, the horse murders, the NRA… Nancy Pelosi has written him a personal letter. These are my moons. These are my ridges. This one, this purple one, is from a bruised heart door slam in the heat of a southern summer. These are the scars from Iraq when fixing planes. Red planes. Small wings. The way they lifted like grasshoppers up into the sky. I hold his hand and clip his nails. Everyone knows the only way to cut someone else’s nails is to pretend they are your own.
The same magpie has visited me for three days now. It is the prettiest thing in this whole valley. Prettier than the waterfalls on one can ever find. Prettier than the willows out in the middle of dead crops; homes barricaded with sharp garbage.
This is the valley she grew up in. She spends all day looking at the mint with a magnifying glass, looking for mites. The mint oil stains her fingers. In a painting she is ivory, violet and verdant. When she pulls her eyes from the leaves she sees cloud upon cloud like they just can’t wait. Somewhere there are different colors. Real colors. Deep purples and blood-reds. When she kills the mites, they make no mark at all.
I don’t think we’ve been to this cemetery. It was a different one, but still with a view of the mountain. I know how to identify one kind of bird, and it’s a magpie. The names of the dead come at us rubbed out, mostly, and with adjacent twin plots of young grass. German settlers and old Swiss from Michigan, Mormons, and Catholics and new believers of some new God. These have self-watering baskets of large-blossomed flowers, and it’s almost like they’ve figured something out. The Protestants have mounted a giant jug to the surrounding chain-link fence marked “WATER,” and this is transported cup by cup to the correct graves.
The magpie. I have to tell her the name of the bird, because if I don’t, she’ll feel like she’s losing something again. She always thinks it was all hers to begin with, and that a steady deficit is working against her. There were no golden plates. There were only girls who walked in circles. There was only the club with a stereo for a DJ. And always, always the winter. When the horses climbed on roofs, we would pray. There was a legitimate sense of death. There was the scent of snow. She wished to get stuck.
We go to an NA meeting. Can’t we all just descend into the meat of loneliness together?
The woman at the front desk of the Antiques store is talking about tomatoes. Antiques make me queasy, like a carsickness. It feels like old people are around the corner, waiting to jump out. It’s maybe a trick, all the soft fabrics of their odd-shaped hats, the heavy coats and gaudy gold-plated jewels. These are just things, the dead whisper.
But I’m from here, I want to tell her. I grew up among these things. I have bound my arms with bangles and squeezed my earlobes into clip-ons. I’ve wanted. Her butterfly hands touch me but she’s talking to the tourist,”My tomatoes..”
Photos in a plastic bag. The street humming in shades of gray. She points. A magpie. The mint small as something new, horses strangely muscled. Ropes and ropes of electric fences and no one around to feel it.
The job itself wasn’t that bad. It was a bunch of little tasks that had to be done in a certain order. The mailboxes stared at her in a cluster against the wall. They reminded her of human cells, in a staggering organic shape, but each individual box the same size as the next.
The place was stuck in the ’60′s, so she started dressing that way, wearing pearls and bright lipstick and dresses that were a little snug in the rear. She got hit on all day, but with weird archaic phrases that struck her as cute.
Her second day, Mike had her try to sleuth out a mailbox (PMB) for a customer who kept retrieving mail that the PO sent back to them. She checked the card file, a few notebooks, then physically went through each row of boxes until she found his name: “Michael MERTZ/ Aquatic Supply.” The box was grotesquely stuffed, with rolls of magazine sagging into a coronet’s bell. How she did not notice it, she didn’t know, unless maybe because the digits were completely covered up. “Found it,”she said, “and it’s super-full.”
Mike squinted and sighed,”Oh, God. Bless him.”
She later learned it was very common to have customers pass on…that maybe there would be five a year. The misfits of society preferred them over the regular post: the musicians, artists, drug dealers, homeless, vets, fourth-generation port folks, the ones who operated industry on the river. Mike said he stopped coming to work for awhile.
On her last day she wore a t-shirt and jeans that were maybe too tight. The regulars who stopped in seemed to have pinched faces, large thighs and limbs. They barely spoke to her, stood in front of the copier catching the strange green glow.
She put up the final poster behind the front door- a gorgeous thing a color between marigold and butter, with artwork like ink cobwebs that swirled you down and off the page.
“Why is the door half closed?” A regular complained.
“Oh,” Mike said, “the girl’s trying to do the fliers, on a day so hot we can hardly breathe.”
In Mexico my brother and I are friends. We see the same things. We see the beaches with dead things on them—a pufferfish all ribs with a surprised eye. We see the bottom of the ocean and it isn’t pretty.
In Mexico we follow the men in open-back trucks, guns up, siderails like fences. Green splinters in the sky.
We go to the store to try on shiny things. My brother walks up to me grinning, holding a giant liquor bottle by the neck. “Five dollars,” he says. The sunglasses in my hand have already broken. I buy them anyway.
My brother begins to look at me in Mexico. I wear his contacts. In Mexico we eat octopus and eyeballs and it is sort of the same thing.
I use his wife’s shampoo then put it back exactly, making it exhale before closing the cap, the way she always does.
When a day is finally warm enough, we all go to the beach, lie in black swimsuits among the bird shit.
We see the fish roll the sea-sponge slowly along the ocean floor. It is quiet and I am still afraid of dying.
There are so many ways—you could swallow it up and not make it to the surface, pinwheeling your way into a blackness that catches you. You could get eaten by a hammerhead. So many that there are tours.
The fish, my brother pointing. The fish wearing a cowboy hat, galloping beside a tumbleweed. The whole thing makes me laugh, and so I begin to die.
It seemed so stupid, to die in a reef that wasn’t particularly beautiful; that didn’t have the colorful tropical fish or the ones that looked like monsters, but only the kind the color of mud like in the pits back in Kansas. There were also a few small electric blues, but these were the size of your pinky, so nothing to get excited about.
I was disappointed in my death but I was also offended, because nobody watched it. My brother’s pale body hung like an apparition, like a fresh white thing in the night sky, his dumb finger following the cowboy-fish.
I saw my mother as if I were a bird above, knew her to be draped in black gauze, her skin pock-marked next to the pebbles of the beach and her face in a scowl at whatever my father was saying. Of course my brother’s wife was inspecting that one-eyed fish on the wet sand, her little toes brown and straight across the toes of her sandals.
So I would be alone, even in this. When the cartwheel came, I relaxed into it. There were explosions behind my eyes, until there was whiteness, then blueness, then the sun too hot/thrown.
Skinny brother. White fishy flesh. Laughing. Now Tuesday would still happen. And the days would pile themselves like that always did, one on top of another and too fast.
I had to walk away and head for the crowds. I liked to look at the teenage clothing and imagine myself with narrow shoulders again, with a neat collarbone and young beginnings. I wanted the sort of fabric that is cobwebs and mesh, a few thin straps and glittery fabric—the kind that will fall apart on your skin.
We shall live in a magazine. We will touch the ones we know. We will have a pool boy, and the coconuts will be the pretty round kinds with lots of milk.
I will find perfume in your bathroom and try it on. It will smell like a girl who climbed out of the sea and put baby powder between her thighs.
None of us will be able to pronounce the furniture. The vate and the skala and the numerar. Always when you leave the apartment, you will turn on the washer; leave me alone with the sound of a torrential flood.
When the money comes we will take a trip in a rented car to all the parking lots in the city, to the perimeter of the big box stores where we will stop for lunch and eat shrimp, letting the tails dangle from our lips, getting dizzy from the boats below us. After the meal we will vote our waiter as the best employee this place has ever known, and the space between us will be almost nothing. Nothing you would notice.
The dog followed for several blocks, past the beating black hearts of Mexican dance clubs and between flagstones on the sidewalks. The sea was to the left but would soon be straight behind her, and at the top of the hill she would look down to see the white sails of boats, like broken shells. Once she found a shell like an ear (they called it a conch), and another time a spotted one like a leopard. This one was handed to her by a little girl dressed in what appeared to be a snowsuit. She spoke only one language, and it was not English. But these sails were ordinary. Just bleached white shells; the kind you would find behind a bar on the malecon, crunched up under your feet, and picked out like shards of glass in the morning.
Now she wants a beer. An old Mexican man with a nose like a fist sits alone at the bar. The dog follows her inside, lies under the bar with his patch side up, panting. The bar is a “fuck you” bar- doesn’t want you to come inside, and tricks you from leaving.
The girl takes in his veins like tributaries under his eyes and across the bridge of his nose. It is hot now, and the whole town has turned on its side to sleep.
“Guera?”
“Pacifico,” she says. The beer goes down quickly, so she orders another one. The man with the fist for the nose gets drunker, and shares photos of his grandkids. Cheek after chubby cheek, wrapped presents, a mom, a palapa, an oak.
As soon as she finishes the beer, she leaves the bar and turns up the hill towards the Museo de Serpientes. The dog trots ahead of her, stopping often to mark the garbage cans and plants.
Max was an electrician in the States, a carpenter by heart. She remembers the day she met him, outside the bar with the good Southern food. He told tales of excavations, the old money he found in between the walls, and another house where he found a safe and sent the boys home so he could swing at the lock with an axe. They had sat at the bar with lemons and salt and tequila. The night had grown brighter. She knew she would go home with him and she would love him and the next day she would be scared. That’s how it was with Max. The next day was Wednesday. The day she walked to the food bank and filled her bag with cans of fruit, white rolls and spaghetti sauce. It would be alright.
The day he flew to Mexico, he checked a garbage bag of clothes and took another, smaller plastic bag on the plane. He liked to fly. Liked the ritual of drinks, peanuts, then pick-up. He liked to stare at the wing and the metal gills that flew up and down at take-off. This was a long flight- there would be several rounds. Flying made him homesick, but this was a brief worry. He handled it with the free beer and a few tiny blue pills in his wallet. Homesickness, he once read, was love. Or no, it was that being in love was the same as being homesick. Made sense to him. But it was a physical loss, too. The way the mountains disappeared and were replaced with the flat blue of ocean. The way the city in its grid kaleidascoped away, and hours later became a European-plotted town, with streets clocking out from the center like rays of a sun. It was not in his plans to ever stay where he went. But this time might be different.
He did not know she was here. She pictures him among the snakes, knows he would enjoy the bravado, the machismo of it. The snake was just a muscle. The thought disgusts her. Cages and cages of muscles.
A few blocks now. Past the Mini-Super Mart and all the carts that sell plastic dolls with their arms straight out, as if to catch someone. Hot dogs, elotes, a hill of shelled nuts. A smell of old clothes, humans sweating, of cheap perfume trailing two girls with hair extensions. She feels the lightness of the beers, senses that without the drinks there would be a weight in her stomach, a resistance against each step up and towards.
Yesterday she bartered with an old man at the beach. She wanted a shell on a leather necklace. Every time she tried to buy it, he gave her the wrong change. Finally, she took the man’s hands and pulled out 60 pesos. “Todos,” she said, pointing at her chest. She felt a strong anger flash into in her cheeks, though he was only shorting her the equivalent of 50 cents. “Cinquenta!” He said, ignoring her, and showing she could buy five for that much. In the end, she pulled out a pack of cigarettes and gave it to him, herself leaving empty-handed. She didn’t know why. Today, when she woke, she replayed the scene in her head, and was again confused by her own actions.
The dolphin and the mermaid statue. Turn left here. Should be one more half mile. The girl felt happy for the dog, felt like he was guiding her. But as she got nearer to the Museo, he skipped down an alley and was gone. Now a church with its doors wide open. A few boys selling shoe-shines. A woman with a broom outside the Hotel Lucinda.
“Serpientes” was written on a concrete wall. There was a smell of dead animal. Turn around, turn around, turn around. She enters. The casual language of young men. Girls on the wall. A dark-skinned man with green eyes is peeling a mango.
“Max?” She says, feeling the dry cave of his name. “Max,” she says again, like a statement. She looks around. There are no snakes here, just parts of cars and grease and barrels.
“Buenes tardes, guera. You need car fixed?”
The girl shakes her head and turns to enter the sun. The sea is straight ahead now. The water is a new color. When she gets to the beach, she will turn right. She has not yet seen that part of town.
