14.
Even after she befriended Aaron in seventh grade, Aracely Montiel never confirmed or denied the bedside visit. When he first reminded her of it, asked her about it in the school lunch yard, she said nothing. The next day she said she didn’t know, maybe she had just dreamed it the night before, a dream induced by Aaron’s question. Subsequent dreams on following nights, of her own snakebite and Aaron’s, only served to bury her true memories. But Aaron knew it.
He lay in his sickbed, unable to sleep, the insomnia that would plague him for the rest of his life already set in at the age of nine. The final late showings of the South Bay and Big Sky drive-ins had flickered off, quiet flames blown out by ocean wind. The flat sweep of borderland lights seemed to shimmer beneath the air, like pebbles on the bottom of a clear stream.
Aracely rose step by step through the floor entrance to the loft. It pained Aaron to crane his neck to see who was coming. He was still hoping to receive a first visit from Az, to hold his hand. Aracely’s skinny little frame lifted quietly into the attic, almost too light to creak the sensitive floorboards. She wore her Mt. Carmel uniform, white blouse, green plaid skirt, and green knee socks. Her black hair was pixie-cut, bangs even as a comb over her brown forehead. Her dark eyes seemed amused. They always seemed amused, he would learn in their later friendship. At nine she had just gotten her real smile, a smart white challenge to everything she said, you said.
Her voice had an intermittent crease in it, an extra curl to the r-sound, sharpening all the words around it. Her English had no accent.
She stood at his bedside, looked him over, lifted her brow at the view he was afforded.
“I know you can’t talk,” she said. “I couldn’t speak for a whole week.”
Aaron moved his eyes, a kind of nod.
“And it hurts for you to move anything.”
He felt tears welling, prayed against them, against the horror of letting a girl—a girl in his class—see him cry.
“Here,” she said, “I’ll show you something.” She pressed her thumb gently into the soft crook of his elbow. Her touch felt cool and deep against his fever.
“It doesn’t hurt here,” she said. “Feels kind of good even. And it doesn’t hurt here.”
She moved her thumb to the hollow of his collarbone. From there the coolness of her touch seeped downward through him, a momentary current against the venom. She raised her foot to the edge of his bed, pushing her knee toward him. She carefully rolled her knee sock down her skinny brown shin and showed him the fang marks. They had become flowerlike scars, tiny rose tattoos.
“They’ll itch for a month,” she told him. “Go ahead and scratch, no matter what they tell you.”
She tilted her head, kept her knee toward him. “Did they tell you?” She challenged her words with a smile, the first time for him. “Did that Mexican guy out there try to tell you? Tell you it won’t kill you? But it will ruin your life?”
Aaron shifted his gaze slightly, a shimmering.
“That’s what they say where I’m from,” she said. “Where the snake’s from. But you have to know Spanish to get it. You speak Spanish?”
Aaron looked down at her scars, then back to her eyes. She recited the saying in Spanish, the quirk in her voice gone without the English r-sound.
“See?” she asked. “They use the word arrasar. Which doesn’t have to mean ruin. Like in English. My nurse told me. After she found me crying through my swollen throat. Arrasara. Almost my name. Arrasara. It will raze your life. You know what that means? You know what raze means?”
She pressed one cool thumb to the crook of his elbow and the other to the hollow of his collarbone. She smiled some more, her new teeth, her woman’s teeth.
The last time Klinsman ran an image search for Aracely Montiel, a year ago, he found only one. It was a photograph of her with two other women at what looked like a fund-raiser. The women were dressed formally, with thin silver necklaces, looking like supportive wives. Ara’s hair was cut short again, the way he had first seen it but with the bangs swept back, matronly. Her smile was the same, too, unmistakable. The caption was brief, locating the event in Jalisco and not naming any of the women.
Except for Connie, Klinsman’s sisters continue to argue that Ara’s bedside visit had to have been a dream. That it occurred so late—after the drive-ins had finished!—served as one obvious clue. How would a nine-year-old girl from a family like that be allowed to do such a thing at such a late hour? And the uniform? This was Liz and Jo’s favorite challenge to the reality of the visit. Even if she had somehow managed to be out after midnight, the idea that Aracely was still wearing her school uniform, the only way Aaron had ever seen her to that point, clearly indicated dream and fantasy. He had probably seen the fang marks on her shin in the schoolyard. Aracely was a fever dream, they told him.
She was your body healing itself.
15.
From Motel San Ysidro he traveled one trolley stop north. Pressed amid Mexican passengers heading toward noon jobs, Klinsman called up the billet on his notebook. The next assignment left for him by Gina, listed after the Luchadors and room 9, was for him to do that story on park surveillance. This puzzled him, even after speaking with Oscar. The story was old. The Review had run a number of pieces on the various impacts of public security cameras, one story by him, others by better street reporters. London had its Ring of Steel, and New York was unveiling its own version. Several movies and novels had already saturated media with the subject, had shown how frightening it was that the average American was recorded two hundred times per day. No one seemed frightened.
Heading into the morning in Amsterdam, you could stroll past a sidewalk projection and wave to pedestrians in Tokyo, heading into the night, waving back just the same. You could get to know someone that way, someone on the other side of the world, passing by her life-sized image every day, maybe develop a crush, exchange a look, tip hats.
Maybe he was supposed to put some cultural spin on the subject, to make it into something that might be viewed as art. To consider the possibility that the city was inadvertently composing a true portrait of itself with its myriad devices for self-surveillance, with its cameras above freeways and traffic lights to catch speeders and red-light runners, with its sonar and visual sensors gridded about the borderlands to monitor illegal immigrants and smugglers, with virtually every public space and every place of economic exchange under a collection of online eyes.
But even that angle felt tried. Perhaps for his finale Gina wanted him to give what she called “that special Klinsman twist” to the entire landscape of his work for the Review. This was to be his summation, his farewell to covering the eccentricities of his homeland. There was no way to confirm this. Gina was gone, not there for anyone, it seemed.
He looked over the passengers, tried to see between those who had to stand in the overstuffed car. His shoulders were pressed by commuters on the seats next to him. His wrists were forced into angles above the keyboard, his fingers brushing the keys. He spotted the security eye atop the front bulkhead of the car, the lens as nonchalant as an eight ball. Someone had drawn a bit of graffiti beneath it, a black-marker rendition of a blunt-tailed reptile nosing the dark glass.
He looked for one of Rita’s salamandros, some paling Latino youth oddly dressed, someone briefly out of his cave. But everyone he could see was dressed for work, their eyes glazed