The Convulsion Factory (17 page)

Look into the rear view mirror and what does she see? The dark mascara runoff, so-blue eyes filled to overflowing with too many fears, too many questions, and a lower lip left ragged by nervous teeth. Hello young mother.

Hasn’t she known all along that something has been growing inside her? Something white and chalky and hard, this child of her own isolation, its skull a smooth dome of rock. She knows it never had a chance — it was never right and proper to begin with, and as such, what about its gestation period? How long will it take to come to term? And when its moment of delivery arrives, will it be like trying to squeeze a boulder from her body, and tear her in half with a rush of blood and chalky limewater flood?

There are no self-help books for this, are there?

Connie steps from the car with a deep breath, and at last prepares to live life according to her deepest instincts.

v. anastomosis

Standing in the doorway of Stefan’s room, she now sees him with new perception. Connie sags against the doorjamb, suddenly tired, exhaustion having found a home in her muscles, her bones, her soul. The climb up the stairs was an expedition.

She slips her suede jacket from her shoulders, lets it fall to the floor.

“I quit bleeding four months ago,” she tells him.

Stefan, of course, does not answer. Cannot even turn his head to acknowledge her in the doorway. Flatbacking, eyes toward the ceiling, without so much as the motion of perceptible breath.

“But that’s okay. I’ve bled enough.”

Silence. Closed up for late autumn, the house is as quiet as a mausoleum. An occasional creak, the settling of the house’s wood and iron bones. The occasional rattle of wind at windows. She has always felt safe here. There’s so much she makes sure remains outside.

Although, any more, she has to wonder if she belongs out there too. No longer to taint this house, its ageless serenity.

And, loudly, eternally, Connie screams.

At neither herself nor Stefan, yet at the same time both, at her home, at the world. She screams in potent raw distillation of feeling, without words. There are no words for this, the dawning revelation that betrayal has been in the works for a long, long time, and she has never chosen to believe it. Until now. “There’s someone for everyone,” her mother used to tell her, and she believed. And it’s true, but the truth is too spiteful to accept.

Someone for everyone — there he is. They deserve each other.

She blames Stefan for everything and nothing, knowing that half the fault falls squarely on her own head. Had she never let him get so close, he could never have infected her soul with whatever virulence had taken root in his own. Had she not continued to drape her own tender skin across his hard shell, he would never have violated the sanctity of her womb. It had never been made to grow anything like this.

Her scream is forever, it permeates walls and floor and ceiling, and after it drains her of breath, Connie steps into the room. With small, quavering grunts, she spins Stefan’s rigid form a quarter-turn on the bed, so that his legs hang over the floor. Then she maneuvers him up, onto his feet, and while his eyes are the only part of him that can move, can respond, she will pay them no heed. With her hands steadying his shoulders, he is balanced upright.

She moves him toward the door, into the hallway, rocking his weight to one foot, then the other, back and forth. Like walking a heavy piece of furniture into place.

Until she stands him before the flight of stairs.

Stefan is making a soft, high whine inside himself, and she can hear the crisp whistle of breath through brittle airways. Her hand firm on one shoulder as she bites her lip and moves around to gaze, at last, into his impassive face.

Only his eyes are vast and feverish, glazed with the terrible knowledge of expectation and damnation. Down his cheeks trickle white tears. Miracle of miracles, a statue that weeps.

“No,” she thinks she hears Stefan say, with ghastly effort.

“I can’t be afraid to be alone,” Connie says. “Be free.”

Then, lightly, she shoves him. His own weight and imbalance do the rest. He falls, striking down upon the staircase with a thunderous crash.

And Stefan shatters.

Connie stands with tears of her own, watching it happen, fragments large and small flying apart to rattle down the wooden stairs. They litter the staircase from middle to bottom, pieces of Stefan … bone china, and inner tissues like red sponge. Not nearly as much blood as she would have thought.

Call the king’s horses, call the king’s men. A fairy tale ending for her at last.

Too many dreams unfulfilled, too many expectations that were evidently too great, realized only too late. Love and family and security, so sorry, these belong to others, not for you, never for you. Maybe next life, ha ha. As she gazes down upon the fractured spill that was Stefan, she understands: This is the sum total of her life. Wouldn’t her mother be proud now, if she could see?

Footfalls soft upon the stairs, Connie makes her way down to sort among the debris. Stefan’s head is at the bottom, halfway across the dining room floor, and it is whole, but not much else is this recognizable. She finds what may be a piece of his arm, split lengthwise like a greenstick fracture, radius or ulna tipped by a point to reckon with. Long sharp shard.

Connie holds it in both hands, and it’s rough in some places, smooth in others. Moist. Moving to stand before a hallway mirror, she watches herself cradle it close. Mother … stone child …
 
shattered father? What poignant destiny that they should all end up in the same body.

She strips, tossing clothes to the floor, until she beholds herself naked in the mirror. Her bony frame, small ribs in bas-relief, can anorexia be far away? Her hair seems the biggest part of her.

Connie takes the stake of Stefan’s arm and, like a young Shakespearian lover wronged by family and fate, presses its point to the skin just beneath her breastbone. Angles it upward. Wraps both hands around the thicker base…

And shoves as hard as she can.

There is pain, the rending of skin, and she feels the last of Stefan slide in, an inch, no more, and then it stops. Feeling deep within a terrible scrape, the meeting of irresistible force with immovable object.

Hands falling in defeat to her side. Bone shard slipping free to fall and shatter on the hardwood floor. The spill of tears that descends to anoint her breasts, her new wound, bleeding both red and white.

Dear God, it’s worse than she thought.

But there is no piercing the calcified heart.

They kill children here. Let me make that clear from the beginning.

In spite of that, I have for two years found this city an agreeable place to live. Still not a lot of friends, but those I have are genuine, and diverse. Their company cheers me on those days when I still miss my family so much the pain claws at me like a wounded jaguar.

It was Pedro Javier that I met first, or that’s the way I remember it, a little man with silvery hair above a brown old face wrinkled in the kindliest of ways. His shoulders are rounded with a perpetual stoop from all the years he’s spent hunkering down behind a camera so antiquated that no one’s interested in stealing it. Every day, for more than forty years, he’s come down to set up his camera in the Plaza del Oro, and take pictures of tourists and students, lovers and anybody else who’ll spare him a few minutes, against a backdrop of a fountain cascading with water that looks purer than it really is. Pedro hasn’t missed a day in four decades … except for some week many years ago, a week I’ve never been able to get him to talk about. I suspect it happened when the army was in charge, when the
generales
often rounded up anyone they thought might not fit their agenda. I suspect this. But I never press him on it. He’s a happy man, and God knows I realize how easily bad memories can tear your day to tatters.

“Roberto,” he greeted me one afternoon, same as he always did. I think he believed that adding the
o
might make me feel more like a native down here. It didn’t, but I never told him. I handed him a coffee I’d bought from a vendor across the Plaza. He always appreciates that. “Thank you, thank you.”

“What says the sun today?” I asked. As a photographer, he is deeply into the philosophy of light and shadow and the shadings between the two, their subtle nuances and how they speak of the world.

“
El sol
, today he is saddened by the change of seasons, and how he gets not so much time in the sky. He is weary, but he still fights. See the golden glow of the shadows today? Beautiful, isn’t it?”

Pedro was right, but this was something I’d not have noticed until someone with his eye pointed it out to me. The Plaza, full of those strolling along, taking time out to enjoy the day, seemed suffused with a warmly glowing luster, and whatever teardrops the day called its own pooled only in the thickest shadows.

I wasn’t the only
norteamericano
in the Plaza, but few would mistake me for a tourist. I’d long ago lost that scrubbed, pressed sheen, had effortlessly cultivated the rumpled, lived-in look of one who has forsaken a prior lifetime, to live the rest of it in a land that made the smallest daily acts seem new again.

We talked for a while, then when he’d finished his coffee, Pedro flicked a spindly finger at me. “Okay, over by the fountain with you. Today we will make a new picture. That time has come again.”

“Already?” But I was walking to where he wanted me.

“One each month, you know my plans for you, hee hee.” Pedro sank into his stance behind the camera, making adjustments on the boxy contraption, compensating for changes in the light that only he could see. “Someday you will thank me, you will be able to look at them in sequence and see how well you have aged. Or … how much you have healed. Now smile, lazy
gringo
.”

I pushed my graying ponytail off my shoulder and smiled for him. The camera resonated with a far more substantial clunk than did the Nikons and Canons I was familiar with. Pedro straightened — a little — and grinned broadly, a dotty old wizard whom I feared might be the last of his kind.

When I stood at his side again, he patted my mottled arm just below the rolled shirtsleeve, the skin of his hand like a smooth leather glove, dry and comforting. I felt that effortless acceptance that seems to emanate only from the very old, who never feel the need to say anything simply because there is silence. Back in the States we’ve forgotten how to appreciate that.

Pedro and I took seats on a stone bench where already we had passed so many hours, the impressions of our rumps might have been worn into it.

“I saw something strange last night, Pedro,” I said at last. “Down in the alley outside my bedroom window.”

“Ah,” he said, nodding steadily. Waiting.

“Do animals from the jungle ever come this far into the city? I think it was a big cat. Or something like that.”

“Why should it not happen, from time to time? Cunning beasts, they can survive easier in our world than most of us can survive in theirs. They are like the children who roam the streets and have no homes. They reduce life to its simplest term: survival.”

“I just saw it for a few seconds. It looked up at me in my window there. Then it ran.” I didn’t tell him it had been a bad night, that I’d spent two hours or more crying over a bottle of dark rum. “I swear it was holding a hand in its mouth. Severed right above the wrist.” I traced a line across my own to show him.

Pedro frowned. “Well, what can I say? Night can be a fearful time, still, even in the heart of the city. All the gold is gone from the sky, and the shadows have their way with all else. It is the way of night.”

“That wasn’t all. You know the way cat eyes glow green in a flash of light? These didn’t. These glowed red. Like…”

“Like a man’s? Ah, well.” Pedro shrugged, with the well-aged wisdom of those who have discovered that the longer they live, the less they’ve really seen. “For every law, something that breaks it. This is the way of the world.”

*

I came here an expatriate from the States. Never say never, they tell you. But I’m never going back.

You’d hardly recognize me these days from the tiny picture that used to accompany my column in the
Chicago Tribune
, which was syndicated to nearly 100 dailies. I’ve done a lot of living since that bland little picture was shot, much of it hard, and I see the world through eyes that aren’t necessarily different, just … wearier. I used to strike a comfortable balance between cynicism and idealism. But the balance has tilted out of whack since I wrote my last column three years ago.

Still, for nearly every day I do make an attempt to find something good in it. My wife would expect it of me.

Around the time of that last column, I had been enmeshed in an ongoing debate over sex and violence on TV. As one who earned his living from words, I was made nervous by the groups of self-appointed guardians of the public trust who were making noisy demands that they knew best for us all, and should be granted an advisory capacity to restrict what went out over the airwaves. They were armed with lots of zeal, and stats selectively compiled from cause-and-effect studies whose validity wasn’t even agreed upon. I spent a lot of ink trying to puncture holes in their self-righteousness and pseudo-science. Today an image, tomorrow a thought, that was my fear. It’s not without precedent.