Sunspot Jungle: Volume Two, page 24
By Monday you’re able to drag yourself back to work. There’s a note taped to your locker to go see Boss. You find him in his office, looking through the reports that he sends to Management every week.
“I hired a new guy.”
You swallow the excuses you’ve prepared to explain how sick you were, your promises to get your numbers up. They become a hard ball in your throat.
“Sorry, Jesse.” Boss actually does look a little sorry. “This guy is good, a real rez guy. Last name’s ‘Wolf.’ I mean, shit, you can’t get more Indian than that. The Tourists are going to eat it up.”
“The Tourists love me, too.” You sound whiny, but you can’t help it. There’s a sinking feeling in your gut that tells you this is bad, bad, bad.
“You’re good, Jesse. But nobody knows anything about Pueblo Indians, so all you’ve got is that TV shit. This guy, he’s …” Boss snaps his fingers, trying to conjure the word.
“Authentic?” A whisper.
Boss points his finger like a gun. “Bingo. Look, if another pod opens up, I’ll call you.”
“You gave him my pod?”
Boss’s head snaps up, wary. You must have yelled that. He reaches over to tap a button on his phone and call security.
“Wait!” you protest.
But the men in uniforms are already there to escort you out.
You can’t go home to Teresa. You just can’t. So you head to the Hey U.S.A. It’s a different crowd than you’re used to. An afternoon crowd. Heavy boozers and people without jobs. You laugh because you fit right in.
The guys next to you are doing shots. Tiny glasses of rheumy dark liquor lined up in a row. You haven’t done shots since college, but when one of the men offers you one, you take it. Choke on the cheap whiskey that burns down your throat. Two more and the edges of your panic start to blur soft and tolerable. You can’t remember what time it is when you get up to leave, but the Big Chief is bright in the night sky.
You stumble through the door and run smack into DarAnne. She growls at you, and you try to stutter out an apology; but a heavy hand comes down on your shoulder before you get the words out.
“This asshole bothering you?”
You recognize that voice. “White Wolf?” It’s him. But he looks different to you. Something you can’t quite place. Maybe it’s the ribbon shirt he’s wearing or the bone choker around his neck. Is his skin a little tanner than it was last week?
“Do you know this guy?” DarAnne asks, and you think she’s talking to you, but her head is turned towards White Wolf.
“Never seen him,” White Wolf says as he stares you down, and under that confident glare you almost believe him. Almost forget that you’ve told this man things about you even Theresa doesn’t know.
“It’s me,” you protest, but your voice comes out in a whiskey-slurred squeak that doesn’t even sound like you.
“Fucking glonnies,” DarAnne mutters as she pushes past you. “Always making a scene.”
“I think you better go, buddy,” White Wolf says. Not unkindly, if you were in fact strangers, if you weren’t actually buddies. But you are, and you clutch at his shirtsleeve, shouting something about friendship and Theresa and then the world melts into a blur until you feel the hard slap of concrete against your shoulder and the taste of blood on your lip where you bit it and a solid kick to your gut until the whiskey comes up the way it went down and then the Big Chief is blinking at you, How, How, How, until the darkness comes to claim you and the lights all flicker out.
You wake up in the gutter. The fucking gutter. With your head aching and your mouth as dry and rotted as month-old roadkill. The sun is up, Arizona fire beating across your skin. Your clothes are filthy and your shoes are missing and there’s a smear of blood down your chin and drying flakes in the creases of your neck. Your hands are chapped raw. And you can’t remember why.
But then you do.
And the humiliation sits heavy on your bruised-up shoulder, a dark shame that defies the desert sun. Your job. DarAnne ignoring you like that. White Wolf kicking your ass. And you out all night, drunk in a downtown gutter. It all feels like a terrible dream, like the worst kind. The ones you can’t wake up from because it’s real life.
Your car isn’t where you left it, likely towed with the street sweepers, so you trudge your way home on sock feet. Three miles on asphalt streets until you see your highly-mortgaged three-bedroom ranch. And for once the place looks beautiful, like the day you bought it. Tears gather in your eyes as you push open the door.
“Theresa,” you call. She’s going to be pissed, and you’re going to have to talk fast, explain the whole drinking thing (it was one time!) and getting fired (I’ll find a new job, I promise), but right now all you want is to wrap her in your arms and let her rose scent fill your nose like good medicine.
“Theresa,” you call again, as you limp through the living room. Veer off to look in the bedroom, check behind the closed bathroom door. But what you see in the bathroom makes you pause. Things are missing. Her toothbrush, the pack of birth control, contact lens solution.
“Theresa?!” and this time you are close to panic as you hobble down the hall to the kitchen.
The smell hits you first. The scent of fresh coffee, bright and familiar.
When you see the person sitting calmly at the kitchen table, their back to you, you relax. But that’s not Theresa.
He turns slightly, enough so you can catch his profile, and says, “Come on in, Jesse.”
“What the fuck are you doing here?”
White Wolf winces as if your words hurt him. “You better have a seat.”
“What did you do to my wife?!”
“I didn’t do anything to your wife.” He picks up a small, folded piece of paper, holds it out. You snatch it from his fingers and move, so you can see his face. The note in your hand feels like wildfire, something with the potential to sear you to the bone. You want to rip it wide open, you want to flee before its revelations scar you. You ache to read it now, now, but you won’t give him the satisfaction of your desperation.
“So now you remember me,” you huff.
“I apologize for that. But you were making a scene, and I couldn’t have you upsetting DarAnne.”
You want to ask how he knows DarAnne, how he was there with her in the first place. But you already know. Boss said the new guy’s name was Wolf.
“You’re a real son of a bitch, you know that?”
White Wolf looks away from you, that same pained look on his face. Like you’re embarrassing yourself again. “Why don’t you help yourself to some coffee,” he says, gesturing to the coffee pot. Your coffee pot.
“I don’t need your permission to get coffee in my own house,” you shout.
“Okay,” he says, leaning back. You can’t help but notice how handsome he looks, his dark hair a little longer, the choker on his neck setting off the arch of his high cheekbones.
You take your time getting coffee—sugar, creamer, which you would never usually take—before you drop into the seat across from him. Only then do you open the note, hands trembling, dread twisting hard in your gut.
“She’s gone to her mother’s,” White Wolf explains as you read the same words on the page. “For her own safety. She wants you out by the time she gets back.”
“What did you tell her?”
“Only the truth. That you got yourself fired, that you were on a bender, drunk in some alleyway downtown like a bad stereotype.” He leans in. “You’ve been gone for two days.”
You blink. It’s true, but it’s not true, too.
“Theresa wouldn’t …” But she would, wouldn’t she? She’d said it a million times, given you a million chances.
“She needs a real man, Jesse. Someone who can take care of her.”
“And that’s you?” You muster all the scorn you can when you say that, but it comes out more a question than a judgment. You remember how you gave him the benefit of the doubt on that whole Cherokee thing, how you thought “pretendian” was cruel.
He clears his throat. Stands.
“It’s time for you to go,” he says. “I promised Theresa you’d be gone, and I’ve got to get to work soon.” Something about him seems to expand, to take up the space you once occupied. Until you feel small, superfluous.
“Did you ever think,” he says, his voice thoughtful, his head tilted to study you like a strange foreign body, “that maybe this is my experience, and you’re the tourist here?”
“This is my house,” you protest, but you’re not sure you believe it now. Your head hurts. The coffee in your hand is already cold. How long have you been sitting here? Your thoughts blur to histories, your words become nothing more than forgotten facts and half-truths. Your heart, a dusty repository for lost loves and desires, never realized.
“Not anymore,” he says.
Nausea rolls over you. That same stretching sensation you get when you Relocate out of an Experience.
Whiplash, and then …
You let go.
Which Treats of Lázaro’s Account of the Friendship He Shared with a Blind Traff icker in Stories and the Misfortunes That Befell Them
Carlos Yushimito
translated by Elizabeth Bryer
“Have you ever seen out in the country at midday an electric bulb aglow? I have seen one. It is one of life’s bad memories.”
—Juan Emar, Miltín 1934
There was a time when I often gazed at the factory chimneys. Each morning they were the same height and their colour resembled zinzolin, a kind of purple that, lacklustre as it is, blended with the red of daybreak. Those details were important to me: they let me know that between night and day nothing had changed. The rain, for example, had not made one chimney grow taller than the other or effaced or discoloured the enamel. It soothed me to note that the black clouds that rose from the chimneys, though unrelenting, would never darken the rest of the sky; the smoke billowed, and it seemed to me that I was watching a giant’s fingers as he twirled his hair.
On those occasions I spent hours waiting for the blind man to wake. Between the white eyes of sleep and the white eyes of waking, I learned to distinguish a rift: the sun hastened the contours of the chimneys, and shortly after his hands began to shake as if they were drowning in the light; after this, now with his whole body shaking and his eyes rolled back, he groped his way towards where I was watching him, and with a couple of blows to my head, cried:
“Open your eyes, Lázaro! With no energy there’s no voice, and with no voice there’s no appetite …”
And when that happened, the streets were already teeming with the same diligence. The blind man gave the order to go outside and not long after he was crying out, “Have a story told, any story!” He left out nothing that the other traffickers in stories thought to say. People passed by, avoiding his voice; the women, especially, sidestepped him and wrinkled their noses as if they were afraid of getting them wet. But there was always someone who, lured by the words cast by that hoarse and almost violent voice, dropped a coin into our little tin and inclined his or her head to listen more closely. Perhaps owing to his blindness, if the blind man said he remembered, the people believed; and if officials overlooked the fact that he dared spout the lies that came out his mouth, it was because in those times, when stories were forbidden, his were ensconced in the impunity of his useless eyes, which were never taken for anything but harmless and devoid of all authority.
This was how we lived: a little here and a little there. When we amassed enough water, we moved south, never north. There, the factories sprouted; the dogs snarled, and problems piled up. In the south, by contrast, there was still space enough for solitude. But because the blind man migrated often and we had to return regularly, we secured a basement where we could shelter while we took turns to stock up on more ampoules. All I had to do was shake the tin whenever I noted interest on the face of someone who had heard “Forty-millilitre coins; forty-millilitre coins …” And as I said earlier, if, with a little good fortune, someone dropped us a coin, the blind man rolled his eyes back and remembered the years when there was plenty of water and mankind reproduced; when factories had not been invented and all the things that people say used to happen did indeed come to pass as naturally as nowadays they do not.
Sometimes, however, someone would arrive wanting to buy another kind of story.
Thereupon, the blind man would lower his voice and squeeze my arm.
The man seemed nervous and bit his lip. A longing to be injected with one of our story-filled ampoules had brought him here. I was used to recognising such customers because, since I had been living with the blind man, I had seen that they came in several shapes and sizes. Some, such as this one, peered at us from behind a pair of glasses with transparent frames; these were almost always shy and had sallow skin. Others wore blue tracksuits and dyed their hair white. Their preferences may have often coincided, but they were usually strict in terms of the stories they wanted to experience and the time they had to spare. This was why we went down to the basement. There, next to a small makeshift pallet, the blind man opened the case and exhibited the titles of the ampoules, which were often numerous and came in many sizes. Along the length of the ampoule plastic, you could read the name of the story, and if it was selected, I moistened a little cotton ball with disinfectant and rubbed the nape of the person’s neck before guiding the blind man’s hand; and he sunk the needle into the flesh and injected the colours.
When we reached the basement alongside the shy young man with the glasses, the blind man said what he always did:
“A one-hour ampoule of story costs half a litre; a two-hour ampoule costs one.”
You could see the man had been through this before because his mouth tightened and he replied:
“I’ll give you a litre and a half if you get me what I want.”
Once more I felt the blind man grab my arm, and the scraping of his shoes on the steps turned protracted and rough.
“Indeed, indeed,” the blind man chewed the offer over. “A litre and a half is a fair amount. Tell me what story.”
“What I’m after isn’t exactly a story,” the shy young man lowered his voice so much that for a moment I thought he had begun to swallow his words, “but a name: Felisberto Hernández.”
“Felisberto,” murmured the blind man while picking at his mole-specked head; “a strange harvest, no doubt about it, but the distiller will know how to get hold of it if we give him some time.”
“But it’s vital that I experience it today!”
“That makes it tricky.” The blind man hastened to feel out the space before him with his crutch until the edge of the wood caught me in the ribs. “You heard, nephew,” he let three coins drop into my hand, “be precise with what you stipulate and make sure it’s top notch.”
He made me repeat the name three times, and then I ran to the distillery. I often went in there with the blind man; beforehand, we had to cross a little room with walls covered in labelled vials that were full of cloudy water; inside them floated objects that I could not always identify. All of it was under the care of a fat woman who picked at her fingernails and had a decisive character. Yet she would get nervous whenever anyone asked after the distiller even though such a thing was not out of the ordinary; she would shake her head and make strange faces as if she were putting up a struggle against words that refused to come out her mouth. If this kept up a long time, she would press a blue button; if a short time, a red one. At that moment the distiller would appear. He was a man with a beautiful moustache who often made apologies, which you could see was because he held the blind man in high esteem. He would take us to a small room where there were two couches, and the pair would sit down to drink a bottle full of the liquid on the walls while they waited for the operator to arrive with a selection of ampoules. The blind man would take a whiff and rejoice; later, sniffing the sample of ampoules, he would say yes to one story, no to another, and one by one the distiller would fill our case, which we would then hide in the basement.
Now I was knocking at the distillery door with both hands; I banged at it until one of the operators stuck his face out the window.
“What do you want?” He was a wide man pitted with smallpox scars and visibly in a hurry.
“The blind man sent me,” I replied, “with an emergency.”
Clearly, the blind man was important to them because they let me in right away. The fat woman looked me head to toe and, after listening patiently, pressed the red button. I stood there, unsure of what to say. Her jaw wiggled a good while, but finally, words managed to escape her:
“Wait for him in the other room.”
I ducked under a curtain; it was the first time I had been in there. Behind the curtain there were several alembics dripping stories, and almost at once it occurred to me that it was like watching a group of obese people sweating in a gymnasium. Every now and then an operator with rubber gloves inspected the alembics; he sniffed the filter and later went out of the room carrying a little tray of vials filled with different colours. I heard his heels pecking at the roof. Several iron pipes descended from the ceiling, and the noise that travelled down them went around in a spiral that was like a sluggish digestion tract.
Soon I sensed that someone brushed against the curtain. The folds of the red fabric softened. I saw the bristles of a moustache.
“This will take some time,” said the distiller. “In the first place, it is a tricky item of fermentation. Add to that the whole matter of the tank. We have to search the storehouse, process the dyes, et cetera.”
I suspected the fat woman had munched on my thoughts while I was in that room; if not, I was at a loss as to explain how the distiller knew I had come for such a rare ampoule. I lamented thinking unkind things about her and being found out, but above all I was distressed to think our sale would not proceed, and the distiller was saying rushed things as if he wanted me gone. The coins were bulky in my hand and damp; I clenched them, and as if in affinity, my eyes caught their dampness. It was two days since I had eaten, and I had got my hopes up.
