Migration

Out of the Mind and Into the City 

She stands in the kitchen, one hand rests over the work of seven months in her, the other holds a glass of purple wine. She leans in to kiss her lover, says she has to leave. The father of her child is home, where he should be. The other father, of the other child, has gone where all the fathers go. He lives in a one bedroom apartment, in a city that sends a letter on his behalf once a month. I am coming, I am coming, and the woman, heavy with the error of one evening, tears it open by the window she’s meant to clean for weeks, and reads instead, will you come to me? 

Will you forgive me for not wanting to return? 

I have fallen in love with someone else. 

No. I am still in love with you, but you with child, and another, what is left for me if I come? 

When I come...

Her face is bare, clean. She is two months away. Two months away in an island with no hospital. I am afraid, for her, for the tired thing in her who is drunk and high and telling her what she thinks of it all with her busy foot. 

She says she has to leave. She returns an hour later. Her girlfriend’s daughter sits beside me. Hours pass. The daughter does not ask for the mother. The mother does not ask for her daughter. Maybe it is the way things go on this island, to love, to remain separate, untouching. A daughter walks over to a man’s lap, nestles her head in his shoulder. A lover drives away from the one she loves, crosses the island, returns when she wants to. Only when she wants to. The one she loves lies on the couch beside her brother, calls the father of her daughter. Maybe she wants him tonight. Never mind that the sea by his window is not the same sea before her. 

One loose end of the hour touches the other slightly, before parting. The new one enters, observes the mess we’ve made, the commitment we’ve upheld to forget, for one evening, for once. No pain, no solitude, only laughter and loose talk masking our little tragedies. Touching. Not touching. 

To be loved, separate. To hand your child to the evening and say, here, care for her. I’ll come back when it’s time for her to sleep, which is never, which is when the body gives in on its own and a pair of hands, sometimes hers, sometimes a stranger’s, carries her to bed, not that it makes any difference, where its done once it’s begun. 

The one she loves, who stays with us, for one hour, alone, her eyes, her brother’s eyes — the slit, the tapered edge, like a tender hand with all the time in the world said here, sit on your knees and let me carve you an eye. Say you catch a pair of eyes like hers over the rim of a cup, or through a smogged window on a parting train. Like a verse in a poem your hand loses its mind over for hours, waiting, waiting. Then the line, so savagely fought for, delivers itself and its the only part of the poem worth reading. Like that. God with his pencil was sketching when he arrived at the top of her and nearly tore the page erasing over and over. It’s frightening, when you’ve got a part of you that looks like more work than the rest. Makes you wonder what was left neglected when God sat down in a terminal somewhere and lost himself in that part of you. Say he forgets to finish the mind, or leaves the pages of her life empty, incomplete. Say he forgets to insert a line of pleasure into her story, say this story goes on and on because he never did decide when it was meant to end. It’s the kind of eyes makes it easy to imagine losing yourself in making, and losing yourself in fighting. 

The rest of her face is thin, incomplete. It doesn’t move much, not to receive a kiss, not to be spoken to, or to speak. The rest gives little, as if to say, the eyes take enough. 

I leave her now, I leave her daughter, her lover, her brother, the evening's thrifted dress with a torn hem. I give you the malecon, where three men sit. In no particular order, I give you the first, a rambling man with a cowboy hat that looks just as old and tested as him. The hat’s as much a part of him as his crazy is. I’ll tell you this, one day I saw a man with a shaved head facing the ocean early in the morning. He turned to me. I didn’t know it was him until he spoke, and even then, I could not believe it was the same him who sat beneath the hat. I said, where is it. He said, I don’t know, I woke up and it wasn’t there — his english, a heavy bucket pulled from a deep well. The water low. Right then, I wanted to abandon whatever it is I had in my head and go searching for it, to find it, and in finding it, return the him that was lost with it. 

Then, the thought of him sleeping never occurred to me. That he was just as much human as me never crossed my mind. And when it did, I was desperate to know where exactly he slept, what he ate, if he ate. You know how every place has that one thing that a tour guide in white polo and a measured that tells you he’s done this more times than is good for his mind, will point to and declare, “native.” That is Manny, our first man, and one, like all the others, I meet in the evening, when the island relents, says fine, you can go and gives its children a few hours to leave. 

The second man is a symbol — a testament to how this island is a colony of accidents. A gringo, or ginga, says to himself, I need to be alone, buys a one ticket, boards a ferry, comes here. A few days, he says. Until I clear my head. Problem is, the head never clears. It stays murky, busy with mud and candy wrappers and everything else that hasn’t settled to the bottom. He waits for it, and in waiting, forgets the verb, forgets all his plan...what plan? I can’t tell, yet, if its the gringos giving themselves to the island, or the island taking and they forgetting they’d ever intended it to be temporary. I can’t tell which of the two is more dangerous, a conscious, ceremonial surrender, the I do, or the accident that was no accident at all when the island eyed him from the deck, swaying with his trouble and the story he means to set right here beside this wilting coconut tree with the snapped branch and return all tidy and fine, and said, this man, I take, for me. 

He leans over the railing. The ferry draws near, remains near forever. It never arrives, or it does. He imagines himself, the return, his skin touched kindly by the sun, not burnt, his mind, a clear blue, no waves, no debris. He sets his bag by the door, is greeted by someone. In his mind, there has to be someone. And this someone and this someplace makes him wonder why he ever left. He gives his weight to the couch, turns the tv on. All is well. He’ll never leave again. Look at all he has here, the house, the ac, a working door, no roosters in the kitchen, no chicken pecking your leg. He is normal again. 

Except he never returns. The fixing’s never done. He means to get around to it. But hell, for what? For whom? 

He traces his eyebrows with black marker. There’s a hole beneath his knee. I will notice it later, weeks later. I thought Manny and him were friends. It made sense, then. But they are not friends. You must remember that. 

I leave common sense where it came from, someplace far from this island. I leave my company,  which has never been kind to me anyways, and I give myself to the empty space beside them.

Tell me there’s something attractive about madness and I’ll agree. There’s a carelessness your tongue takes on in the crowd of mad men (mad women are another thing altogether, but that’s a conversation for another time). 

In the company of mad men, there’s no need to stutter through every thought, hustle every sentence through a checkpoint, pat down every word front and back before it's uttered. The mind, in the presence of the others more wild and free than she, takes off her heels, sets her earings in the ashtray, rubs her lipstick off, undoes her zipper, and gives herself to the evening the way a woman does when she’s done enough acting for one day and she can now draw the curtains and sit like that, eyes closed, husband sleeping, or no husband at all. Tell me there’s something necessary about mad men, and I’ll agree. 

And with my coming, a foreign-scented silence nudges through and they turn to me, take me in, study the shape of me. Not a gringa, no, not one of ours either. They take parts of me in, reassemble what’s relevant, discard what’s not, and each returns to me with a gaze in their eyes that tells me they have settled the slightly significant question of who I am. One of them, the one that meant to make it back, announces, you are a mermaid. From nowhere, he brings forward a white board, takes the black marker he used to trace his eyebrow and begins to draw me — me without legs, me in the new assembly of his mind who has seen me and seen the other that I do not know. 

It is not the mermaid that tells me he knows, but the permanent migration that she carries, like he took one look at me and saw the miles inside, the roads, the people, the man. He saw me through his madness or he saw me through the coke. It matters little, what instruments we use to see. And if it was the coke, well, in that case, his vision appears all the more trustworthy to me. 

Manny, the rambling one, cocks his head, points to me with the blunt held precariously between two answering fingers and settles his vision easily with, I love you. I say, well let me tell you my name first, then we can talk about loving. He said, I don’t need it.

The third who has not spoken yet draws near, hesitant, careful, pauses a yard back and asks what Manny had no use for. He says, el nombre not as a question but more like a sentence he waits for me to complete. I answer. Later, on the last evening before the island is once again sent into lockdown, he will lose himself talking about his music, and how he left the massive crowds for the streets, where a man with a song on his tongue can stop when he feels like it, flip an empty box over, stand on a white malecon bench and let it out, someplace a singing man can lean so close to his listener he can almost hear the body giving its reply. And now, what to do with another song in his body and another on the way and there’s nobody but us on the malecon to listen. He takes me aside, tries a song on me. He sings it too fast, and he ends up having to say the whole thing over, real slow, like he were reading it off the sea where it came from and where he sets back when it’s all done. He has to leave suddenly. Later, it won’t strike me anymore, his sudden appearance, his just as sudden departure. 

On Leaving and Loving 

One can’t take place without the other. To leave is to have built something worth turning to from the deck, and it turning to you and the two of you trying to make sense of this leaving that has to happen. To love is build a little harbor from which to launch our leaving, a mind willing enough to carry our departure. To love is to build an altar precisely where it doesn’t stand a chance against the sea. To love is to make damn sure you’ve got someone showing up at the harbor, one hand gathering the urge to kill you, the other caging the urge to make you say. To love is to rest easy that there’ll be a bare foot back in the yard you left kicking the dirt over your leaving. To love is to make sure there is an absence that stays behind and finishes the work you began on a stranger’s heart. Then, to leave is to announce that love in a way your staying could not. 

To love is to have made our leaving impossible. The object of love follows with a sort of mocking fidelity. The memory, if not the love itself, grows stronger in the distance, and when the last of the love dims and flickers desperately over the last of the wick before it bends its heavy black edge and fades, the memory remains true, faithful. If love is a mound of clay we’ve played with, memory makes a mound of clay out of us and plays with it just the same. 

The last nights here bring us together, by chance, and each alone, separate. I meet the musician by the corner shop. He stands closer this time. He is easy with me, almost. He’s got the song in him. I can tell by the way he’s swaying when he speaks, like speaking’s just a cover up, something civil and right and appropriate. The thing is I didn’t know this then, but if I can walk back to that little moment outside the corner shop with the old men sitting, smoking, watching us, I’d lead him by the hand, find ourselves an empty place somewhere — and with the way things are now there’d be plenty, and I’d let him sing and then when he’s done I’d reach into my pockets (I imagine I can bare my poetry long enough to keep it in my pocket for a night, though I’d make it seem like I’d just kept them there by chance, like carrying my poetry around was the most natural thing in the world) and I’d ask him to read. And he would, and I’d know he wouldn’t think of it as a favor either He’s the kind of man wants to know his audience, what kind of mind receives his music, is it the right kind? He would read once, then again. He’d withhold his opinion so I can’t tell by the shape of his eyes or the tilt of his lips what he was thinking. Then he’d look up, let his thoughts settle somewhere in the air so he can see them the way he sees a song, and then he’d turn to me, give face to what he’s read, put the two together, and I imagine he’d say, almost. And I would understand. That would be all he needs to say. And heres the thing, I’m just waiting around, kicking the sand up a bit when I get bored, waiting to hear it. 

Almost. 

It’s the same evening, or another. It doesn’t matter, not here. In one night, you feel the presence of a thousand others, the ones that have passed, the ones to come. A thousand nights disguise themselves as one as they walk down the street, which happens to be the one you are passing through now, and it just so happens they’ve settled by the foot of a man holding a bottle of whiskey by his knee. The hat tilts back, takes me in, says, You know I love you. That’s all he ever says, the word love mindlessly placed within a slightly different assembly each time. Someone calls him over, begins to sing for him and he brings his bag down against the malecon bench and walks halfway through the street to answer. He lets the song run through him, lets it decide which direction it wants to take his hands, and in which direction the legs. It’s something to see, when the song guides the hands one way and the legs the other, and he just lets it. 

How many of us can hand our body over, for just a minute damn it, one minute and let something do with it whatever it pleases. I’d die for a minute like that.

Our third man passes to remind me again, that I am a mermaid, that he means to finish that drawing he began the night I arrived. He carries a guitar on his shoulder, tells me he can chop my head off but he won’t. He hands me taffy, says if I don’t want it I can leave it on the bench right there and he can take it back, which is what I do. Not because I don’t trust his taffy, it’s just something mindless you do when you get a feeling someone hands you something from his pockets he wants more than you do. 

He’s one of those men with no story and a thousand stories, each equally true and untrue. He’s got countless guesses tried with his name, which may or may not really be his. Some say he was tossed into the sea with a load of bricks. Some say his kayak drifted into the middle of the sea. In both stories, he comes back, or was this the closest island to where his story was meant to end? Try as much as you want to, you can’t figure it out, the mystery of him. 

There’s something attractive about that no? Being someplace and no one figuring you out, where the hell you came from, how you feed yourself, how you bare all that lonesome time. And there’s the question of children, a wife, the war, how many wars? 

Try asking for the hell of it and walk away thinking yourself so clever that you bothered to ask when no one else did. Right, then go back the next day and ask him the same question and listen to him telling you something completely different. I suppose you understand now, why no one bothers. 

Ah … here she is. She walks into the bar, searches for me. I’ve told her, where I was, but I never expected her ... and so quickly. Her eyes are bare tonight. It is harder to stand them, all naked and no black to lull them into something familiar. I watch her walk across the bar and come to me. She tells me to come. Her girlfriend enters behind her, seven months heavy. She orders a beer. Then, the father of the baby comes too, and he greets me casually. Something has shifted in the air with their coming. Nothing is as it was. The bar is no longer a bar, the sea behind us no longer sea, I am not I. She tells me to come. It is too much for me. I tell her I can’t, not now. She says, then later. 

I am on the other end of the island. They come to me. They wait outside in a white truck. She sits in the back. Her girlfriend, in pain, lies on her lap. The pregnant one says, I’m thirsty and the father hands her whatever’s in his plastic cup to drink. She shakes her head. She means water this time. They have none. I am sitting in the front seat. I am not entirely sure why they’ve come to get me, but I am here, with them, and it’s too late to change my mind now. We pick up a friend, then we drive to her home, which is not really her home but his, the bottom floor of an unfinished building. He says to me, I own it, and we enter, and that whole place is no bigger than a tiny room with a kitchen in the corner, a tiny couch. The bed takes up the rest of the space, and he tells he’s had to give it to the girls. The girl with the eyes takes my friend out and leaves me aone with him. I don’t like it at all so I walk towards the door and open it. They come back in. A few hours pass. The girl with eyes comes back with her daughter, lays her on a futon. She falls asleep instantly, the room heavy with the smell of two lit joints. My friend says she’s ready to leave. I say I am too. He says something in spanish to the girl with eyes and motions with his own eyes towards me. I understand now. 

On the way to return her home, he speeds past my place. I say, I can get out here. He says no, he wants to drop her off first. After we’ve taken her home, he circles back to where I live. As we draw near, he asks me to dinner. I tell him, because here you have to remind them, You have a girl. He says he doesn’t, and I’m thinking the hell he doesn’t, and I happen to know she’s crazy too. And because I’ve never learned to say no, just plain and simple no, I play with a list of reasons. None of them work on him and finally I step out of the car and to his departing question I answer, “I’ll think about it,” because what are you going to say to someone who tells you they’ll think about it. Nothing. 

But there I am, the next day, falling in love left and right like it’s nothing at all. If love’s a train you miss by a minute, I’ve missed more than I can count. And there I go, falling in love though there’s nothing left of me to offer, even if the odds settled in my favor. My mind returns to one face, to the same lips, the same lashes, the same hands, the same eyes. Behind the face of every man I love for one evening is the face of the man I am trying to run from. The tender shape of his head visits me in the middle of the night, moves under my shirt, emerges with an apology I’ve never heard, and I am awakened. I know it is not the him I lost, not the him that confesses, that begs despite the odds, but the him I left. The monster I left. 

Still when the loneliness gets so bad, I imagine him as he was when abandon made all the sense and there was nothing else in my life worth the madness, the sleepless nights. For him, I killed a writer. For him, I killed a girl. For him, I killed an artist. For him, I killed a poet. For him, I split the roads in two and made a knife of one half and an easy neck of the other.

And here, beneath the tender shape of his head, is all who I’ve killed, one foot in the sea, one foot on land. They are here, to kill the false one who has killed them and who has come here to bring them back before her end.