Читать книгу Panopticon - David Bajo - Страница 16

What does it mean to call someone salamandro?” he asked Oscar as they watched the fifteen remaining screens, one at a time, go into squiggles and patterns of saver mode.

“I hear it sometimes around the campuses. State, UC. It’s new. A salamandro’s a mozo spending too much time in their cave, under rocks, watching their screen. Turning white from it. Even if you’re like me.” Oscar rubbed his jaw, pushed his dark skin. “Why? Someone call you salamandro? One of the Luchadors last night?”

“No.” Klinsman nodded to desk 11. “Rita used it. I think that’s the word she used. Her Spanish is too fast. She was scolding a kid on the trolley. A guy watching her too much. Dressed strange. Like a waiter from the ’50s. When I picture him, I see him in black and white.”

“Rita used it?” Oscar lifted his chin, scowled a little. “How was she with the Luchadors?”

“Okay. Her usual good. Having people pose, then taking shots in between. The real ones. Mixing. You forget what she is, even with all that equipment hanging from her.”

“Yeah,” said Oscar. “But I mean was she different with any of the Luchadors? Was she keen on any of them?”

“Maybe,” replied Klinsman. “One of them. I’m pretty sure it was Del Zamora.”

“Zamora’s not helping Culture Clash anymore.”

“He was last night. I’m sure it was him, behind the mask.”

“You’re seeing things,” said Oscar.

“I am seeing things. All the Luchadors seemed different.” “Different how?”

“Even more mixed into the crowd. More than usual.” Klinsman pictured Santo thickly dancing with the club women. Remembered X-25 in her orange pantsuit, barely shaking her hips, scanning the room. “More in,” he explained to Oscar. “Blurred in. Like they were sucking you into the screen with them. Almost.”

Oscar looked intently at Klinsman, tasted something.

“Why?” asked Klinsman.

“Nothing.”

Klinsman tilted, watched his image fragment across the screens. Then he looked back to Oscar.

“Your three. What are your three tags?”

“The clothes mountain out near Tecate. An old story like yours. Then the Juárez benefit up in La Brea. Again. But I did ask Gina for that one.”

“And the third?”

“Gina didn’t give me one. I’m waiting for the third shoe to drop. It’s put me on edge a little. About everything. Rita. You even. And with Gina being gone like this. Staying gone. What’s she up to, you know? What’s she up to?”

The desk screens began blinking into sleep mode, going blank in perfect order like dominoes.

They went outside to climb the landing, one floor above the late-morning traffic of El Cajon Boulevard. The T-shaped North Park sign spread its arms, looking quaint and somehow stunned by what had grown around it over the decades. Klinsman loved all such signs along the Boulevard, their grand arching, their neon script, the crumbling stucco of their bases, like fragments of aqueduct in ancient cities.

Oscar squinted at the sun over the eastern hills. An ocean breeze this far inland made the sky feel even more blue.

“It’ll be even nicer in the borderland,” he said.

“The strawberries are out.” Klinsman visored his hand above his eyes, mildly watching the Boulevard, counting good car, bad car.

“But forget about the strawberries,” said Oscar. “For once, Aaron. Forget about the strawberries and all the things you used to see and taste and smell down there. Go down there and try some things. One thing that always works for me. Get things wrong. When you talk to the clerk, get things wrong. People love to be right, love to correct.”

“Any clerk at the Motel San Ysidro would be all over that, Oscar.”

Oscar shook his head, bit his lower lip. “Even if that happens, keep going. If he’s on to you, watched too many cop shows, then he’ll slip into his role. Really. It’s even better when you get them to slip into their role. Direct them. Milk them.”

“Want to come along?” Klinsman asked.

“No. I got my old piece. That mountain of brand-new clothes, last year’s lines, piled into an old airplane hangar. You buy Chanel and Prada and Gap and Kmart, all mixed together, by the pound. You go in like a miner.” He exaggerated his accent on the brand names, making the last one seem the best prize.

Klinsman looked down at his own clothes, fingered a fauxpearl button on his Western shirt, thumbed the silhouette of a cowboy galloping past cactus across a sunset.

“Maybe I’ll find something there for you,” said Oscar. He put his hand on Klinsman’s shoulder. “You do fine.”

In the Motel San Ysidro parking lot workers were stacking mattresses from the rooms, tilting them together on end like giant books. They had taken nightstands and bureaus from most of the rooms and arranged them in stacks for hauling, fitting the cheap matching units together, snug as Lincoln Logs. It unnerved Klinsman to see the mattresses and furniture laid out that way in the morning sun, years of intimacy and secrecy, night stuff, whispers, mechanically exposed to the day. A man from a city truck was spray painting green and orange marks on the asphalt.

“What’s going on?” Klinsman asked him.

The guy wore his yellow helmet at an absurd slant, embarrassed maybe. He kept looking down at his work, at the measure of his strokes. The paint hissed, then flicked, hissed, then flicked.

“Getting set for a teardown.” He glanced at Klinsman—blue eyes under hard black brows, deep laugh lines that only made it seem he was done laughing forever—then he back-stepped to his next target on the asphalt.

Klinsman stepped with him. “Think I could check one of the rooms? I think I left something last night.”

The guy shrugged and sprayed two lines, one green, one orange, deftly working the toggle switch on his paint torch. “Most of the doors are open. But if it was worth anything, you won’t find it now.”

Klinsman found the door to room 9 wide open, a yellow bar of sunlight across the colorless carpet. One of the movers resting on some stacked furniture briefly eyed Klinsman. Still wearing his clothes from the night before, his TJ Western shirt untucked and wrinkled, his hair dirty and mussed, Klinsman must have looked the part, a drifter wishing to retrieve his wallet, hoping desperately that woman hadn’t stolen it, hadn’t wanted him for that. Not just for that.

Inside, the room was gutted except for the bed frame and mattress. He could imagine the yank of the sheets from the skewed position of the mattress. The black tape piece from the fan’s pullchain lay on the carpet. Some of the other tape pieces, from doorknobs and curtain pulls, had fallen also. The bag of lightbulbs was gone, and so was the toothbrush.

I was alone. He crouched near the foot of the bed, looked carefully around the room. We were alone. Something was missing from the wall, near the light switch. On closer look he figured it was the thermostat, one of those old round dial types with the glass center. Its two thin sensors dangled from torn plaster, wires skinned and curled at the end. He checked the two rooms on either side of number 9 and found the thermostats still there. Three of the movers were now watching him.

Klinsman pretended to leave, went instead to the back, used a rain gutter and honeysuckle trellis to climb onto the roof of the motel. He was careful not to walk above the lobby, where the clerk might hear him as he made his way up the pitch to the top. He sat on the ridge beam, where he could think and breathe a little.

Who would take an old thermostat? He couldn’t recall if it had been there last night but was pretty sure he’d have noticed if it wasn’t, his eyes keened by the odd tape pieces and covered mirrors. Rita could have doubled back on her own to take it. Oscar could have hurried down in his truck this morning, ahead of Klinsman’s trolley ride. Or the woman on the bed. She could have returned for it. Maybe nobody in particular had taken it. Maybe it had just been erased, vanishing as so much of this landscape had vanished, sometimes in sweeps, sometimes in bits.

He imagined himself a gargoyle on the ridge beam, crouching, familiar, knowing. The ocean breeze was stronger down here in the South Bay. A pond smell was heavy in the salt air, which meant the tide was in full ebb, sucking the Tijuana sloughs with it, walling the waves up high. Glimpses of the breakers’ white blown-out tops feathered between the far beach houses and dunes. The bullring, marking where the Mexican beach began, looked like a flying saucer landed at the sea edge. Everyone described it this way.

The lowlands between him and the sea, where Aaron had once ridden his Stingray bicycle and played among the little ranches, farms, dairies, ponds, swamps, and graveyards, were now covered with dun-roofed houses and condos and licorice-colored streets and cul-de-sacs. The long slab of the Tijuana mesa rose sharply from the ocean, then ran east seemingly forever, split once by Smuggler’s Gulch, immediately south of him. No one called it that anymore. They called it Goat Canyon. But no goats or smugglers ever passed through that split in the mesa these days. Only rancid black and chemical-yellow trickles from the colonias and maquiladores came through, finding their way to the riverbed.

In the motel parking lot below, the movers were hauling bed frames, snagging them together, metal clanging. The man from the city truck was still spraying his green and orange marks on the asphalt, occasionally eyeing the Mexicans.

From his satchel Klinsman withdrew his spiral notebook and jotted down his thoughts about the thermostat, put in a reminder to scan for it in the captures he and Rita had taken. Then he sketched a pull-chain and a doorknob, one pair with tape squares on their ends, one pair without. He darkened the tiny circles at the centers of the last two sketches, the pencil lead forming a reflective slick.

He fought against reverie, against indulging more in the views, sounds, smells, tastes of the past, against the strawberries for which Oscar had chided him. He noted the factory outlets built along the riverbed to the east, where some of the strawberry fields had been, asparagus fields, too, where on hot days he could lie within the green ferns, look at the blue sky, the black turkey buzzards circling, and listen to the stalks growing. So fast, yes, he could hear them sprout and stretch.

I could hear them, he wrote in pencil.

Klinsman climbed down from the roof, smoothed himself, and entered the small lobby, surprised to find the clerk manning the counter as though nothing were happening. He was a bony guy with dentures that were too big for his mouth and horn-rimmed glasses that seemed to crash down on his face, making him grimace and wince around his shiny incisors. He wore a polyester guayabera the color of soap. You could get the shirts for three bucks along the walk to Revolución, amid stands hawking tire-tread sandals and paintings of Elvis on velvet. It looked good on him, right and safe.

Klinsman told the man who he was, that he was doing a story. “On your motel. We think it’s a landmark.”

The clerk wrinkled his nose. Klinsman feared the heavy glasses would tumble from the old guy’s face.

“You mean before the teardown?”

Klinsman rubbed the back of his neck as though he were tired, chewed imaginary gum.

“Yeah. Before that. When is that again? Exactly?”

“Three days. They’re not supposed to be gutting the place yet. I’m supposed to be here running the place as usual. Right up to the end. But they asked if they could sneak in early, and I said to hell with it.”

“No one’s been checking in, huh?”

“Oh, yeah. Some yesterday even. But to hell with it.”

“Room 8?”

“Three, 5, and 9. I like to space them out in case they want to make noise.”

“Lonely men down from LA.”

The clerk weighed and bounced his dentures with his lower jaw. His pale arms hung like sticks from the stiff sleeves of his guayabera. “No,” he said, getting his teeth right. “And a woman.”

“Yeah,” said Klinsman. “Marta Ruiz in room 9.”

The clerk leaned his head way back, trying to get Klinsman within range of his bifocals. He sneered his upper lip above his dentures, where it stuck.

“An old colonial like you, up from Guadalajara,” guessed Klinsman. “Come to stay here one more time.”

“Nah,” he replied, his throat rattling, then clearing with the long sound. “A pretty Mex. Your age. Standing like you. Just like you.”

Klinsman looked down at himself. “How am I standing?”

“Like someone who owns the place.”

“A pretty Mexican? How pretty?”

“Very pretty. Like cactus pear. With dew on the needles.”

Klinsman had to brace his boots apart. “But not named Marta Ruiz.”

“Nahhh.” He pushed his big glasses into place, where they balanced fleetingly before sliding down one notch. “Something else, I’m sure.”

“Something prettier,” said Klinsman. “Like cactus pear?”

“Yeahhh.” He rattled it out long. “With red in it.”

Klinsman rubbed the back of his neck again, bowed away from the old guy.

“Where’d you get that shirt?” the clerk asked as Klinsman turned to leave.

“Next to the place you got yours.”

Klinsman started to push open the glass door, step into the sunny parking lot, where one of the workers was singing a Oaxacan lullaby, about a coatl who loved a mountain cat.

“You still have the scar?” the clerk asked from behind.

Klinsman turned, keeping the door ajar, letting in the lullaby, the part where the coatl gets rejected and vows to travel the world. He looked at the clerk, who was tilting his head way back again, getting Klinsman into focus.

“The snakebite,” said the clerk, drawing out the last syllable in a kind of reenactment.

Klinsman pulled up his pant leg, hitching it above his boot edge so the clerk could maybe see the two red puncture scars along his shin, innocent as desert flowers.