The student stops bugging me after I say that. My words have created a temporary truce.
When I think about it now, I think I really meant it. Only Eddie, who doesn’t give a damn, remains unimpressed.
* * *
I’m standing naked in the middle of the room. The lieutenant’s sitting at a table, sucking on a cigar. He’s had this one cigar for weeks, but he doesn’t ever light it. He just sucks on it. He has this beady stare, a junkyard dog stare.
The guy with the Uzi’s inspecting my jeans, T-shirt, sneakers. There’s a long, uneasy quiet as he scrutinizes every inch of my clothing.
The lieutenant puts his booted feet up on the table. Finally, he lights the cigar. He blows the smoke out in one steady stream, his lips puckered, his eyes shut to savor the sensation. He’s got a large dark face & his skin is tough & greasy, like the skin of roast pork. He looks at me in a way that seems both bored & snide. I’m one more in a list of endless chores.
You, Yankee boy, touch your cock.
I don’t understand what he says. So he says it again. Show us how big it can get. Americans have big dicks, right? You proud of that, right? Go on, touch it, masturbate.
You a homo? I ask him.
The lieutenant’s face turns red. His eyes bulge. He looks like he’s going to explode. He glances at the guy with the Uzi, who looks away. But he tries to help the lieutenant save face. He says, There’s plenty of time to deal with that, he’s not going anywhere.
The lieutenant isn’t letting it go. He’s decided they’re keeping my clothes. Then some kind of argument begins. They fight over who keeps the jeans, who takes the T-shirt, who gets the sneakers.
The lieutenant takes his feet off the table, unlaces his boots, & yanks them off. Then he stands up & takes his T-shirt off. There’s a tattoo of a crown of thorns on his chest, right over his heart. He pulls his fatigue pants down. He throws the T-shirt & pants at me. They stink like shit.
We like Americans, he says. You & us, we’re friends for life. No matter how much you fuck us, we still like you.
I put his T-shirt & fatigues on & the guy with the Uzi leads me out of the room.
As I leave, the lieutenant says, In this country, revolution is a bad word. You say it again & you’re going to get really fucked.
We are held in place by gravitational forces
Humans are the only creatures who can tell a lie, to others and to themselves. Mother once told me that. Obviously she set herself as a perfect example.
A lie: Mother quickly forgets about Frank. Dubious proof: a rapid succession of unlikely lovers. But to be brutally honest, at her age, her only options are young Latino and African immigrants who take advantage of her, then move on. This is her latest relationship, and it’s going to be her last. Newly arrived from Brazil, probably twenty-five years old. A walking stereotype, a Carioca with six-pack abs and the insouciance of one who knows he is young and beautiful and desired.
I catch him sucking her nipple in the kitchen one afternoon. I watch them in silence, observing how his lips perfectly pucker over the rosy aureole, the expert way in which he flicks his tongue over the tip of the nipple and sends her swooning, giddy with pleasure.
They fuck boisterously, their moans so painful they seem in the throes of death. My room is just next to hers. I can hear everything, even the sullen, throaty endearments after sex, the obligatory shower, the furtive departure so as not to wake the kid.
Sometimes we go out to places that he likes. He doesn’t know much. He’s been in the country only a few months. Mother always tries to show how much she appreciates everything he suggests. We go to half-price movie matinees in rundown theaters uptown in the city, where cockroaches crawl over the stale popcorn people dropped on the greasy floor.
Sometimes we sit till sunset at the Cloisters. Whenever Mother goes to the bathroom, her boyfriend and I sit in silence, staring at the river. Once he tries to break the ice and says, “You hate me, don’t you?”
“I don’t feel anything for you,” I reply.
When Mother comes back she asks how we two are getting along. He says, “He’s a very precoscient kid.”
“Yes,” Mother agrees. “That’s what he is.”
They buy food and stuff and share it like conjugal property. He never stays too long, but his visits always transform her. She moves gracefully, as though she’s picking up the last gestures of a dance. She smells different, always a scent of almonds and musk.
I never find out what his name is, and never ask. (That’s not entirely true. She may have told me his name. I may have chosen to forget.) He is writing all over the blank slate that she used to be, recreating something foreign out of the emptiness that she has become. A creature whose voice has acquired an unfamiliar lilt, whose smile evokes joys so private they shut everything out. One of these days, he is going to stop creating her. That’s what I think. And when that happens, she might disappear without a trace.
Instead he’s the one who disappears. He finds someone with less age and more money. He stops coming over. There is no way for an affair like that to end except the way it does—hackneyed and predictable as a primetime telenovela on Univision.
Then she goes crashing back to earth and becomes the one I have known all along. And once again, somber with loneliness, sitting by my bed at night, she enchants me with her lies: the blood of Europe and Asia and Africa in you, and the ships swaying on the open sea.
* * *
Another lie: Mother loves her job.
She neither loves it nor hates it, and I feel the same way. It is simply the only kind of work she knows she’s good at, having had a lot of experience working with Frank.
When my mother comes back from Manila, she finds all of Frank’s personal belongings gone, his half of the closets empty. The only reminder of his presence is a series of phone messages, a bright red 8 blinking on the answering machine. She doesn’t want to play them back, thinking they’ll be that helpless woman’s voice again, or the usual anonymous nonmessages. But she takes a deep breath and presses the button, and listens to eight consecutive messages from the Life Crusaders who have finally decided to speak up, threatening to blow up the clinic. Poor Frank, she says to herself, run out of town by a bunch of crazies.
With Frank out of her life, she realizes this one thing about herself: she doesn’t know anything except what she’s learned from him. She is his shadow, and where does a shadow go when what casts it has gone?
But she picks up the work when she comes back. She can do it on autopilot. Years later I realize why. She was hoping that when he came back, everything would be as he had left it. The break in their narrative would be seamless.
* * *
I stand beside her, beaming a light into the cavern of a young woman’s uterus. Mother cuts up the fetus and with a forceps slowly plucks the pieces out. I hold up a tray for her to deposit the mangled bits.
It’s an emergency, Mother’s part-time assistant can’t come in, and I’m the only one around. I turn out to be an excellent nurse. I ask only the right questions. I know when to hand her the right instrument. I am fastidious and efficient, distant but not indifferent: the terrified young mother finds my presence surreal, but also somehow soothing, like a little angel.
When it’s over, I collect the pieces in a trash bag to throw in a furnace in the back of the clinic. I peer inside the bag before I do so. There are tiny, barely discernible parts that seem not quite human. The lacerated prototype of a hand, the impossibly minuscule fingers, still conjoined by a slimy web. And a small skull, squished like the head of a fish and marbled with blood and mucus.
I pick up the skull and examine it