Out There: a novel (19 page)

I am alive.

The rounded twin was cooking what seemed to be a mole stew—lamb and chocolate and potatoes and cinnamon and chile. She paused to serve him a cool mint drink that began, almost immediately, to free him of his worries. Her loose cotton pants brushed his toes as she moved from the low fire to her bag of supplies, and a few times she paused in her work, knelt, and touched the top of his head.

He was alive
.

Jefferson became caught up in the whirlpool of miracles once again as he took swig after swig of his cool mint drink. He had survived near-death at the hands of the bergamot woman and her boys less than four hours previously. Before that, he had survived Iraq. (Though he had in truth survived many near-death experiences while in Iraq, Jefferson thought of it at this moment as one big near-death experience.) Before that, he’d survived childhood in Santa Fe, with his loving grandmother doing the best she could. By definition this meant he had survived, first of all, abandonment by his mother as a baby. He had known no father—that went without saying.

He was alive! Jefferson closed his eyes and marveled at the miracle of miracles and smiled at the beauty of the mingling scents of cinnamon and chile and chocolate.

Jefferson didn’t know when the pile of quilts had materialized below him, or how his shoes had been removed, but he was lying shoeless on a pile of lilac and coral-colored quilts, the sunlight filtered through the gauze dissolving any sense of time in its hazy radiance. The wild-blue-egg twin had taken a bottle of oil and, kneeling by his feet, begun to rub it into his parched ankles and cracked heels and tired toes.

Jefferson had not realized his skin’s thirst until the oil touched his feet. He was aware of his muscles turning soft. His memory of the scene amongst the gigantic boulders, his face down and his knees in the hard-packed earth, floated before him, now miraculously tucked into a soft cloth basket of past-tense near-misses. He was in the process of living to tell that story.

There was little talking between the twins, just a flow of singsong and humming and nostalgic clicking of tongues and soft laughter. Jefferson was not afraid. Jefferson was alive.

He began to be aware of a loosening in his chest as his breath flowed into cavities within his chest that had been long closed. His breathing eased. In . . . and out. In . . . and out. There was nothing else he needed to do. The sky pulsed blue—an exceedingly blue blue—and nothing about any of this was frightening. He was fully awake. He was near to life. In fact, he was so near to life that he was, in fact, alive.

The wild-blue-egg twin, after finishing with Jefferson’s feet, had moved up to his ankles and calves, and now she was working on his left knee. There was no doubt that she believed in the criticality of kneecaps. She kneaded in and out of the grooves for fifteen minutes before moving on to the right side, as if releasing toxin. Her sister refilled Jefferson’s cup, gave the pot a stir, and sat down next to him, motioning for him to lift his head and place it in her lap. She glared maternally when he hesitated, and so he obeyed. Faceup, his head resting in the junction of her two crossed legs, Jefferson caught speckled sunlight as it found its way through the oak’s leaves and branches, through the cotton of her camisole and the wisps of her hair.

“Relax, my friend,” she said in near-perfect English, and began moving her fingertips in circular patterns in his scalp, along his hairline at first and then fully into the depth and breadth of his tired head, whispering as she rubbed, cooing like an evening bobwhite, reminding Jefferson of the way Esco had helped him overcome his fear of night as a child—tickling his shoulders and arms and back with her stubby-nailed fingertips, singing old lullabies.

The fire smoldered.

Jefferson’s mind wanted both to race and to rest.

“Rest,” said the woman holding his head. And though it seemed a miracle that Jefferson could understand them, that somehow their words sounded like English to him, he relaxed his mind and thought of the story in the Bible in which this had happened. He did not need to understand everything.

They wrapped him in heavy cotton blankets and left him hanging in the hammock, surrounded in gauze. A stone soup bowl steamed next to him on a stump.

“Eat,” said the rounded one. She sat nearby on the ground, eating, feeding Remedios out of her hand. Jefferson had many questions, but he was overtaken by a sudden appetite, and so he propped himself up and he ate.

He had lost his appetite for entire days since he’d returned, finding the sound of Esco’s earnest knife against cucumbers to be nauseating. He imagined that it was the sound of her trying to compensate for every deficiency, for all of him now missing, left behind across the ocean somewhere.

Jefferson spooned more stew into his mouth, identifying the distinct flavors on his tongue. Beyond goodness and warmth, it embodied a creamy dark trustworthiness mixed with the pep of tomatoes and the anonymity of a woman who knew nothing about him. Not his name or that he was a soldier or that his mother had been sixteen when she left.

After the first bowl he asked for more, and only into his second bowl did Jefferson’s stomach proclaim just how empty it had been all those months, its solitary yearnings all those neglected years. That much was now clear as Jefferson ate almost three full bowls before pausing. And then, as if he had removed the tiniest of pins in a very large dam, the words began to trickle out. The twins sat on either side of him on the ground next to the fire. They huddled under the blankets as the high desert chill fell upon the night.

He was alive. He was warm. His pup was content.

“I was almost executed this morning,” he told them, hoping the Pentecostal effect of the afternoon had lingered.

The women looked at him with wide eyes. “Tell us the story,” said the rounded one.

“Bandits of some sort,” Jefferson said. “They came out of the hills. They surrounded me.” His voice began to shake, but he continued.

“You were scared, but you survived!” said the angular one.

“You were brave,” said her twin.

“I was lucky,” Jefferson said.

He felt the need to go on. It seemed they were willing, and his gut told him this was what he needed, to tell his story. It was of course a miracle that they understood each other. Thinking back on it, Jefferson could not say whether he was speaking their Spanish or they, his English, or whether instead all three of them were speaking some third and unknown hybrid.

“Why did the woman—that bergamot woman—why did she spare your life?” the one on his left asked finally, locking his eyes into the grip of hers as if she had reached the end of her expansiveness and now wanted to know, simply and truthfully, the answer.

Jefferson shook his head. He closed his eyes and shook his head. His index finger and thumb pinched the bridge of his nose, a ragged breath escaped his mouth, and suddenly he was crying, his upper lip bloated, his shoulders quaking, his chest heaving.

He could not explain what had happened.

He knew what he thought the answer was, but it made no sense.

The twins beheld his tearful silence. They did not touch him or invade the space around him. They began a soft cooing, a wordless chant of nostalgia.

“The woman didn’t kill me because I am meant to go on living. My life is not over because there are things I still need to do.” These last words settled around him, as close to the truth as Jefferson could imagine.

Excluding the several times his young mother had tried to breast-feed him, the once or twice his grandmother had held back his longish hair when he’d been sick in the toilet, and the time in sixth grade when Josephina had grabbed his hand on the walk home from school, Jefferson’s physical experience of the opposite sex was confined to a handful of events inside a storage container with a woman he hardly knew and would never see again. Esco had told him many times, always, it seemed, as a sort of apology, that his mom had attempted to feed him with her tiny breasts. He remembered his grandmother holding him while he vomited. He remembered the thrill of Josephina’s warm hand in his, even all those years later. He remembered those hurried encounters between stacks of canned tomatoes and processed cheeses. These formed his small collection. Memories of female touch.

Jefferson had not realized it at the time, but when he began reading
One Hundred Years
he’d been hungry for the aura of sex. What was it to be with a woman? He’d never realized the degree to which a classic piece of literature—a book not even available at the grocery store—could be doused in sex. In
One Hundred Years,
sex was everywhere, slathered across the pages like so many adjectives describing the weather. It was straightforward, it was unapologetic, and though none of it was pretty, all of it was inspirational. A prostitute teaching her own son the secrets of the flesh. A wrinkled auntie who caressed her virgin nephew in the bath. Men and women making love in cisterns and hammocks and sheds. It did not match any of Jefferson’s preconceived notions of love, and yet he found it all strangely comforting; when he read these scenes he felt less like a lonely soldier lost in the Middle Eastern landscape, and more like a man journeying to find his real home.

Naturally, the novel became his sexual primer. He liked the idea of having gotten his ideas from literature rather than from anything he’d seen on TV or the Internet, but more importantly he thought the famous writer’s ideas made sense. Nothing about sex had ever seemed sweet or sentimental to Jefferson; rather, it seemed like an animalistic urge to drive away loneliness. This honesty, Jefferson could live with.

And here was the best part. In García Márquez’s novel, no man or woman was excluded. GGM didn’t mention anything about good looks or money as prerequisites to sex. In fact, it seemed the only ones who didn’t get love quite right in the novel were the truly beautiful women. Men who had left their families for world adventure, fat men covered in tattoos, men who fixed pianos, who could be mislead by gypsy tricks, who were chained to trees, who worked all day in their laboratories, who murdered other men for no good reason—even the least of these found sexual comfort in GGM’s story. Even the lowest of the low found a lover to hold him. For Jefferson this was a secret message of good tidings: Jefferson Long Soldier, despite being left by his mother, despite never having known his father or either of his grandfathers, despite being poor, despite having seen what he had seen out there, would one day feel the comfort of a real woman’s embrace.

And this good news made it impossible for him not to love Gabriel García Márquez. Though Jefferson had nothing more than phantom memories of having lain in the arms of a woman, he believed his day would come. And what was more, Jefferson believed that if asked, GGM would say Jefferson’s day would come as well.

He fell asleep that night with this hope, and dreamed of the rounded reds-and-orange twin climbing into the hammock with him, a feat he’d have guessed would be awkward and uncomfortable but which was in reality full of pleasure. He smelled almond cookies and smoke and the oil of unnamed fruits from unknown kingdoms long ago. She was near him and with him and above him and below him and behind him and before him all at once and at the same time.

“Mmmm
 . . . ,” she whispered in his ear. “Gzhoooozzz . . . hauuuum . . .” Her hands rubbed his ears and his shoulders, his satisfied stomach and throbbing thighs. And then, as if she’d become leechlike, the dense sediment of grief within Jefferson began to soften and break apart and leave him. Specific days and times, specific losses.

Galen from Albuquerque.

Tristan’s hand.

The old man with his goats.

Adams from Hollidaysburg.

Jeff Kleiner.

The father and the three young girls in the Toyota.

Ramon from Las Cruces.

Sergeant Schoener.

Hume, twenty-one, of Appleton, Maine.

That sweet hound.

The seventeen-year-old.

Dudzinski from Guam.

Hazelton from Edinburgh, Indiana.

Ray Soto.

The next morning Jefferson awoke on that roadside in Mexico, curled up in a soft place among the roots of the grandmother oak, not another soul in sight and no hammocks or blankets or pots or pans. He was not sure what had happened or why. Had they simply left without saying good-bye? He stood up and surveyed the branches, looking for something the women might have left behind. A rope that had secured the hammock? A cotton head wrapping? A necklace? But there was no trace of them. His belly was full and his body warm, but even the rocks of the campfire sat cold and silent.

As he dusted off and prepared to get back on the motorbike, the lingering apparitions of the twins taunted him. Shy and inexperienced as he was, Jefferson had dreamed that this might have been his day. He had imagined that the time had come for his first salutary lovemaking, and that it would be exactly what he needed. He believed the fortuitous arrival of the twins had been part of a divine plan to heal his wounds. He imagined that the heavenly sisters would reciprocate his quiet eagerness, and that this episode would become a story of mythic proportions, a story he would remember for the rest of his days. But the morning was upon him, and he was no longer certain that the twins had been real.

Gabriel would understand. As much as he seemed to believe in a woman’s ability to comfort, the writer seemed equally aware of a woman’s power to drive a man to insanity. The great writer loved and believed in and was driven insane by women. It was one of the things Jefferson hoped to talk about face-to-face with the old man in Mexico City. He was hoping the great writer would share some of his real-life experiences. Was it his experience, for example, that a woman could be truly uninhibited sexually and that, absent familial boundaries, she would share herself with any man to whom she felt connected? Did he, like Jefferson, prefer round women to skinny ones? And what about the old grandmothers and aunties? Did the famous writer believe in a world in which wrinkled old women pleasured themselves with the young and old alike? And how much of this had GGM experienced firsthand? Had he fathered seventeen sons with seventeen different women, like Colonel Aureliano Buendía? Jefferson knew it was not any of his business, but he hoped Gabriel García Márquez would be willing to share the details.