(novella project excerpt)
Prior to my permanent arrival, we spoke in our respective tongues. Filled with youthful malleability and the corresponding inability to say anything truly worth saying, he would speak in the learned manner of this country and I replied in our mother's speech. Dancing across the water. Balanced. I have no siblings and neither does he, and so we connected and separated instinctively. Once I came to visit while it was snowing. I was unused to the dry, frigid air, burning my lungs and expelled as smoke. It was my first time seeing the sky turn white. I watched him make angels in the ground and gleefully copied him.
"Here, try this."
He gestured at the lid of some plastic tub he had stolen from my aunt's closet, and we laughed and screamed all the way down, and then trudged back up and did it all over again. And then it was over. His sister, in the aggregate, for but a few months. The last time he came to see me I had not yet learned all the particulars of English and still found it comfortable to engage in our arrangement, but now we stood on the same ground. Used the same idioms. Spoke our minds improvisationally, fluidly, not in some constructed childish pantomime. We observed the disparate reality of our thoughts for the very first time.
His stature, too, had changed. He stood unusually upright, scapula retracted, some pinned butterfly or disciplined ballerina. A body no longer in some androgynous state, but imbued with first wisps of virility. The round of the shoulder separated from the arm. The triangle of his back extended up into his neck. I watched his eyes flick up and down women on the beach, impulsively, and I felt a mother's disappointment. For in seeing him age so rapidly I understood how young he was, how young we were. This ageless entity, with whom I had entertained an abstract correspondence for so long, now revealed to be nothing but a boy.
The tide peeled back as our shadows lengthened. The tip of his nose and feet started to burn a mild pink, my darker complexion still unscathed. He gestured towards the surf and started to run. I followed. The sand near the waterline was firm and cold and ridged in patterns like the roof of a mouth. We ran without speaking and for moments it felt right. I tried to trip him and he kicked sand back at me. Then the water came up over my ankles and I felt nothing like a child. I understood that he felt it too because he slowed to a walk and then stopped and stood there with his hands on his hips breathing hard, looking out at the horizon with an expression I will call, for lack of a better word, embarrassed. We walked back without discussing it. The sun was a wound on the water and then it wasn't, and the beach repopulated with the long blue shadows of things.
***
We drove in the morning, as the fog covered the estuary. Blasting music loudly in the battered minivan that had been to hell and back and back again, odd stains and an odder smell evidence of a vehicle for maturation. The bass shook something in the dashboard loose, some plastic panel rattling at just the wrong frequency. Emile's mother sang along with mine, and I watched the smiles on their faces from the backseat through the rearview mirror. Neither could sing, but still, a kind of harmony. My aunt in isolation always seemed so severe, but here the severity had nowhere to sit. Her face rearranged itself around the singing, creased and contorted as they volleyed the music of their youth. She was always the firebrand to my mother's apathy. Older and angrier perhaps? Or younger and resentful? Unsure who was born first. But watching them now you could see it, some old current that ran between them, volatile and familiar.
Once, in Caracas, they were stuck in traffic. Traffic was a dull constancy in the city, perhaps not now, but then, when people had things to do and the city was alive with expectation. Old roads constricting, a plastic band cutting into the green flesh of a growing sapling. They wound through the valley like stacked ribbons, motorcycles needling through the threadwork, vendors walking the median with cases of Polar, ten different radios bleeding into each other through open windows, diesel and heat rising off the asphalt. My father's face was flush with indignation. He held his mother's countenance—round, almost gentle—and had never forgiven it, the softness betraying him now, twisting into something that recalled nothing so much as a whining baby.
"What the fuck are you doing...? Get the fuck over towards the exit! You're going to miss the exit... I can't possibly be late because of some insolent bitch that doesn't know how to drive."
My mother placed a hand on his knee and said his name once, quietly, the way you speak to something that might bite. He kept going. His voice had that recursion to it, looping back over the same grievance, tightening. A slap connected. My aunt merged over to the side of the overpass. Four lanes. Semi trucks blaring, commuters honking. Left him there, briefcase and all.
The marsh returned in pieces through the window. Emile had his head against the glass, I could see the side of his face in the reflection, transparent, superimposed over the passing green, a boy made briefly of swamp and tempered soda-lime. His mother was driving now. Mine had her feet on the dashboard, sandals off, toes curling and uncurling absently, thinking without speech. Then Orlando assembled itself. Not suddenly, but in accumulation. The way a headache builds. Billboards, then strips of strip malls: Wendy's. Walgreens. Wawa. Everything the same flat height, as if the land itself refused it.
The apartment complex had a name that contained the word "gardens." A wide black pond lay opposite the H blocks. The parking lot was full of vehicles in various states of negotiation with functionality. My uncle's truck sat in the same spot it had occupied for months now, pooling dark fluid onto the asphalt. Inside, the nightly compression. Six people in two bedrooms and a living room that was also a bedroom, the couch a site of territorial dispute between my uncle and whatever guest had arrived most recently. For now it was Emile and his mother on the pull-out, toe to head in an approximation of privacy. For the moment he had won, his wiry frame leaning forward as he twirled the TV remote. Tomás's eyes were glassy. Betrayed nothing. He had a way of lingering in spaces before he entered them, testing the waters, under the security of doorways. The raised furrow of tissue on his palm, pink against brown. My grandmother was in the kitchen. She was always in the kitchen. Not cooking always but stationed there, presiding over the room the way a body presides over its own breathing, and she spoke to Emile now rapidly in a Spanish that belonged to a different era and he responded in attempts, circling around words, his accent perfect but the vocabulary mapped like complexities onto a child's pictures, and the bathroom was occupied, it was always occupied, and I waited in the hallway that was not a hallway but a passage between the kitchen and the bedrooms narrow enough that two people could not pass without one turning sideways without one body acknowledging the other's right to space, walls thin enough to hear everything and thick enough to pretend you couldn't, the crowd noise swelling, my uncle's single exhalation, a goal or a near miss both producing the same response the same slow release of air, and I waited, the air conditioner shuddering, cooling the apartment the way aspirin addresses a fever not by solving anything but by creating a local exception a temporary and unconvincing argument against the heat, and somewhere a faucet running, and the smell of something reheated, and Emile laughing at something on the screen, and my grandmother saying something I half-heard, and the pull-out mattress springs when someone shifted, and outside Orlando continuing.
***
Yaneth was my mother's cousin or my aunt's friend or both or neither. She worked at Universal five days a week and had for nine years, Yaneth, whose hands were extraordinary, raw and cracked and enormous on a woman her size, hands that had scrubbed the artifice clean so that children could believe in dinosaurs. She's the reason we could go.
The parking structure swallowed the van in dull white fluorescence. Negative brightness. Transition. We ascended the helix, passing cartoon index. Section Astrid. Section Bumblebee, in pale yellow. Finally we reached the top—it must've been busy—and the fluorescence gave way to the heat of the day and a shine that implied humidity even with the windows shut and at once I felt a kind of dread. I swallowed it. We walked across the hot concrete toward the gates. Emile beside me. Our mothers behind us. We descended and skated across those mechanical walkways, turning and moonwalking as we shuffled within the crowd. Showman. My aunt smiled, slightly.
Brief intermission through security theatre, and then the interior city folded out in front of us. It was enormous. Blue sky cut into shapes by rooflines and facades, and the mist nozzles caught the light so that for a moment everything in front of us appeared to be gently dissolving. Emile said something I didn't hear. The colours were impossible, the reds and yellows of things that want to be seen, aposematic, and the music came from no identifiable source, not a direction but a weather, a wash. I hated how beautiful it was. How well constructed it felt. The crowd dissipated into packs, circular cells splitting into arterial paths, into shops, restaurants.
A boy, about four, in a Real Madrid jersey ran the wrong way through the crowd, shin guards on for no reason, and his father trailed behind with a metal water bottle and no apparent intention of catching him. The boy stopped at some threshold only he could see and turned and waited, bouncing on his toes, and when his father caught up the boy grabbed the water and drank with his whole face, water running down his chin and darkening his collar. He wiped his mouth with the back of his arm and said something and his father bent down and the boy said it again, closer, into his ear, like a secret or a threat, and his father straightened and shook his head and the boy pulled at the hem of his shirt once and then gave up with a completeness that seemed practiced. They stood there for a moment in that strange ceasefire. The boy's hair was a glittering, healthy brown with red in places and his face was round, inflated, he was beautiful and reminded me of Emile. I told him as much. He glared at me.
We separated from our mothers by the unspoken agreement of teenagers, the mutual understanding that the alternative was a specific kind of death. We had decided on Islands of Adventure earlier, something about the promise of water, of being soaked and cooled and temporarily absolved of the heat. We beelined to the disability office. I delivered my prepared speech. Urinary In-Con-tin-ence. The woman behind the counter looked at me the way a teacher looks at a student who has just asked to go to the bathroom for the third time in an hour. She didn't believe me. I could feel Emile behind me, his silence loud with the effort of suppression. She asked me what exactly the condition prevented me from doing and I said it, plainly, looking at a spot just left of her face, that I could not stand in line for long periods of time without the possibility of an accident, and the word accident hung there between us, absurd and clinical, and she stamped something and handed me an orange card and neither of us looked at the other.
The card entitled us to a time, not a line. We blitzed the park with ruthless efficiency. Mathematically traversing from node to node in an attempt to maximize all that Emile's mother had given us. Granola sequestered in our pockets, our pemmican and hardtack, we bounced between all the shorter rides as we waited.
"I want to leave."
The line wound through a constructed environment, some interior meant to resemble a laboratory or a government facility, the walls dressed with props and screens that displayed information about the fictional crisis we were about to participate in with cheerful imperative. Around us families stood in the patient daze of people who had agreed to wait as a form of leisure, and they stared at us as we sauntered through the roped sections.
"Leaving what?" with concern. "The park?"
"No. All of it."
He looked at me with a kind of bemused tolerance. I hadn't seen his father in a while, but it seemed like the genesis of such an expression. European patronization.
"Where would you go?"
"I dunno. Somewhere with hills."
He laughed. He didn't understand it but he laughed, which was generous, which was Emile, always generous. I watched him look around the fake laboratory with genuine curiosity and I understood that our positions could not be reconciled.
Finally, Hulk. We had heard it all throughout the park, the carts launched with a synthetic roar followed by the very real screams of bodies twisted and twirled through space. We arrived at the maw of the beast and the older lady looked at my card and smiled us through, and for a moment I felt a pang at my deception. The walk up was endless, even the accelerated line was filled with enough people that had my condition been legitimate there would have been strain, my guilt acquitted. We got closer to the track where packs of bodies were herded into the slaughterhouse, and I felt legitimately excited and I felt Emile's excitement around me but also a touch of unease, and then finally we got to the line and they shipped off a pack right before us which put us in the very front of the first cart and I felt lucky but also mortified, for I had never been first. Emile took it in stride. They locked us down. Green bars ratcheting onto my lap, and it felt so very claustrophobic and I almost wished it wasn't there, to trust in the momentum to keep me in my seat like a children's science experiment. We shifted back for a barely perceptible moment as the brake disengaged and then HULK SMASH and I was accelerated into nothingness like a particle in an adult's science experiment and I thought of the first house I had lived in with my uncle and his ex-wife and how they were fused back together despite, and now because of, a previous fission and the predictable explosion and the texture of screams all around me, Emile had attempted a stoic brace beforehand but he folded so quickly it was its own kind of whiplash, and I heard his voice break a little and it made me laugh but of course he didnt have the energy for a glare in the face of this blinding light, my uncle's son never had energy for glares he was all pout and who could blame him, my uncles other son beyond pout as he had dared to love, but my fathers face was all pout and I missed and longed for him and click click click and we ratcheted upwards briefly in some false suspense but it was relentless and we plummeted back down again and I wanted to feel his embrace again to feel the compression of his arms against my skin and to turn off my brain and feel safe and secure and bank right and emile screamed, a legitimate scream of joy, the kind that empties you and I was envious, jealous beyond belief, and we corkscrewed and I felt my spine compress and I felt nothing like a child and I felt nothing like his child and the track straightened and the brakes came on in a long mechanical exhale and it was over and it was not enough and emile was laughing and shaking and alive and I was too but differently
entirety of part1 can be read at
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WPuOIqHt-xF4zB1WCNb6RDvDssTgywWou8Xkij6LwYk/edit?usp=sharing