Читать книгу The Descartes Highlands - Eric Gamalinda - Страница 12

We are held in place by gravitational forces

Then the Life Crusaders blow our place up.

It begins that afternoon, when Mother and I come back from the supermarket. As we unload the bags from the trunk, a car speeds by, and somebody hurls a couple of beer bottles straight at us. One grazes my shoulder, and smashes against the hood of the trunk. The other hits Mother on the forehead. She reels, puts one foot back to steady herself. The car has already sped away, someone poking a dirty finger at us.

I help Mother in and as soon as I sit her down I notice the blood dripping down the gash on her forehead.

“Fuck, Mother, I’m calling the cops.”

“Don’t.” She walks into the clinic and comes out minutes later with her wound sealed with a thick wad of gauze, a small bright spot of red the only sign of her ordeal.

“I’ll take you to hospital.”

“No need.”

“What did you do?”

“I’m not letting them hurt me.”

I lift the gauze a little. The stitches she’s done are fine and tight. “You could have asked me to help you.”

“No need.” She unloads the bags and starts putting the groceries in the fridge. Then she falters, stands dazed for a few seconds. I rush to her and catch her just before she hits the ground.

* * *

“How long was I out?”

“Two hours.” The steaming bowl of soup by her bed is starting to form an ugly crust of grease. “Bad soup. We should have gotten the other brand.”

She gets up. “I feel fine.” She walks out of the room.

“What are you doing?”

“Tea. Want some?”

I follow her to the kitchen. She’s scrounging around for the pot. I pull it out from under the sink. “Mother, we have to do something.”

“You show them you’re scared, that only makes them stronger.”

“I am scared. And they are strong. People who think they have the full support of God, any god, think they’ve invincible. They will do anything and not even think twice about it.”

“They should read Freud.”

I keep staring at her.

“You know, Civilization and Its Discontents. Religion is an infantile neurosis—”

“I know, Mother.”

“I feel sorry for them. Stupid people are helpless creatures. They live all their lives stupid, and they die stupid. What a waste. Of life. Of all the possibilities of life. I feel very, very sorry for them.”

“Well, they don’t feel sorry for you.”

“That’s Christian love for you.”

“I wish it would stop.”

“What?”

“This. Everything they’re doing.”

“Try telling them that. Try telling that to their stupid god, or their stupid church.”

“I don’t see why we have to keep doing what we’re doing.”

“Don’t give me that again, Jordan. You know why we’re doing what we’re doing.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Because those girls need us.”

“Because you don’t want to stop.”

“Why don’t I want to stop?”

“Frank.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake.”

“You have enough to retire on.”

“No.”

“I hate living like this.”

The kettle is whistling. Neither of us pays attention. She is holding the tea bags in her hand. She has crushed them in her fist.

“I hate living like this,” I say again.

“You want me to surrender.”

“I wish something would happen that would make you want to stop.”

“Be careful what you wish for.”

“I want you to realize that you can stop. No more of this. No more of Frank. Time to move on, Mother. It’s time.”

“You don’t tell me what to do.” Her hands are shaking. “You don’t know what I want.”

* * *

I’m wide awake, unable to sleep from the heat of the humid summer night. Mother comes in my room.

“There’s a noise downstairs.” She hasn’t spoken anything else to me all night.

“I’ll go down and look.” I put a shirt on.

“Don’t bother. I think I left the exhaust fans on.” She walks out.

“Mother, I’m sorry.”

“About what?”

“What I said earlier.”

“I don’t remember what you said.”

“Okay. You sure you don’t want me to go check?”

She is heading down when a flash of light bursts from the stairs. It seems to last for a long time, although it takes no more than a few seconds. It blazes up toward her from below, so that all I see, for what seems like a motionless eternity, is the skeletal silhouette of her body against her nightdress, an X-ray of her in the reddish glow. Then there’s a quick pop, like a bottle uncorked. A thunderous explosion shakes the apartment and jolts me out of bed. A searing heat rips through my room. I shout to her, but all I hear is the clangor of the fire alarm as the sprinklers turn on. The water hisses as it hits the crackling flames.

I find her sprawled on the stairs. She’s cut up and bleeding in many places. I carry her out a fire exit in the back. She’s staring at me, her mouth moving without words, her eyes wide with shock and gratefulness and relief.

* * *

How to build a pipe bomb. Take a steel pipe, stuff it with gunpowder, and bore it with a fuse hole on one side. Insert a cherry bomb inside the pipe as a five-to-ten-minute detonator. Add a few slivers of steel for greater impact, and like the bomb dropped at our clinic, throw it inside the ventilation shaft for maximum effect: an enclosed area like that converts a crude, homemade device into a bigger, more lethal explosive.

That’s all it takes, a device so simple and low-tech any amateur terrorist can assemble it. A thoroughly persuasive weapon nonetheless: the bomb wrecks the clinic entirely. There is not much for the fire department to save. The job, I must say, has been well done. Of course I still wish some bungling rookie apostle had fucked up and lit the fuse at the wrong moment, blowing up himself and his fellow terrorists for Jesus. Blowing them to kingdom come. That didn’t happen, obviously. And somewhere out there the same zealots are still looking to assassinate people like us in the name of love.

* * *

Several pieces of shrapnel pierced Mother’s arms, back, and lungs. Doctors are able to pluck out most of them, except for a small triangular piece, the size of a guitar pick, that landed so close to her heart it’s risky to even touch it.

With the insurance money, I have the clinic rebuilt and furnish it with new equipment. Mother comes home from the hospital to a place that’s barely changed, except for the fresh-out-the-box smell of new machines.

Her recovery is quick and easy. Or so it seems, at first. Then late one morning I find her still in bed, her eyes wide open, staring blankly at the ceiling.

“You all right?”

“I can’t move.”

I open her canister of painkillers. “You’ll have to eat something first,” I remind her.

“It’s in there.”

“What?”

“The thing that wants to kill me.”

“Don’t worry, Mother. It won’t do that. The doctors gave their word.”

“It’s going to rain soon.”

I look out. The sky is overcast, a big gray blur is inching its way toward us.

“I feel cold.”

I pull her blanket up and feel her forehead. “You’re okay. You want me to call the doctor just in case?”

“I don’t like the cold.”

“Me neither.”

“It’s going to make me burst.”

“Just rest awhile. You’re just having a bad day. We knew you would get bad days now and then. It’s all right.”

“I smell something.”

“What?”

“Sulfur. Nitrate. There’s a bomb inside me. It’s inside my soul.”

* * *

It’s weeks later, and I find her on her knees, rag in hand, scrubbing the kitchen floor.

“Mother, you don’t have to do that. Let me do it.”

“It’s not going away,” she says, standing up. She lifts her arms. “It’s coming out of my skin.”

“What is?”

“That rotting smell. That old-people smell. That stench of formaldehyde that makes them smell as though they’re dying from within.”

I take her hand and raise it close to my nose.

“Don’t patronize me.”

“I don’t smell anything, Mother. Just soap. I always liked the smell of your soap.”

Late that night I find her still awake in bed. All the lights are on. She has the radio humming softly, an old Frank Sinatra favorite.

“You’ll be all right?”

“I don’t want to sleep.”

“Don’t force yourself. Read, do something. Let your body tell you when it’s ready to sleep.”

“I don’t want to sleep.”

“Okay.”

“Because if I do, I’ll never wake again. And you know what that means?”

I pull a chair over and sit next to her bed.

“It means I never survived the bomb. It means, at last, that I’m dead.”

“Oh, Mother. Please don’t say that. Please.”

“Am I dead?”

“No. Not at all. Don’t let them do this to you.”

“I can’t feel anything.”

I poke her arm lightly with my finger. She twitches, pulls away. “You’re okay,” I tell her.

“I didn’t feel a thing.”

* * *

Days later the caravans come. They must be people from the next county, driving by several times a day and shouting, BABY KILLERS GO TO HELL! When it becomes obvious that, under my supervision, it’s going to be business as usual at the clinic, they use more covert, and more annoying, tactics. I find our door locks stuck with glue, the car tires punctured, the phone wires cut. Fake clients keep calling to set appointments and book us for weeks, and we have to turn away patients who really need our services. Someone spray paints, MOMMY DON’T KILL ME, on our front door.

Right before Thanksgiving, Mother’s name appears on the Life Crusaders’ online hit list, just below Frank’s; the list is alphabetical.

I decide to move Mother out of the place. It isn’t a hard decision to make. Her delusions soon overwhelm all sense of reality. In time I have to admit that she is never going to work again.

I pack our things in a U-Haul. As I heave the last of our stuff in the back of the truck, the neighbors stare at us, peering from behind curtains or through slightly open doors.

Just before we move, the Life Crusaders have one last thing to say. They send Mother a letter with a line from the Book of Hebrews. This is what it says:

For our God is a consuming fire.

* * *

We move down to the city, where I can have her close to specialists who can keep her under observation. She is diagnosed with a rare disorder called Cotard’s syndrome. In Cotard’s syndrome, all senses become disconnected from emotions. Everything in the world ceases to have any emotional significance. The only way a patient explains this is that she’s dead. Anything that contradicts that conviction is distorted to fit the delusion.

I have never heard of anything like it before. Despite the specialists’ careful though arcane explanation, it sounds too weird, too sci-fi, and I argue that all Mother needs is a little rest and a little time. I find a two-bedroom apartment on West --, five flights in a walk-up above a truck garage. Every night when the trucks come in, the building shudders like an island sitting on a tectonic plate. We hardly see anyone else, except for a young Korean couple on the first floor who walk a yapping terrier late at night and don’t like to chat much.

In the apartment below, someone plays a cello every morning. For several weeks after we move in, the same Brahms andante floats up to our apartment as I make coffee. I am desperate for signs that I have done the right thing. This seems as good as any. It gives me, at least, some reassurance that Mother and I can now safely disappear.

The apartment has enough room for some of the stuff I saved from the bombing, useless junk that she and Frank once shared, some CDs and books. Not one photograph of our life in Dobbs Ferry has survived the fire.

“Who are you?”

The first time she asks that question, I realize no proof of our existence remains. I don’t know how to respond.

* * *

There is no better place to move her to than New York City. It is the only place where we can avoid caravans of indignant Christians and be safe from their threats and pranks. It isn’t going to get her name off their hit list, but at least no one is going to lob another pipe bomb at us around here.

In my need for providential signs, our move seems significant at that time. The city is the opposite of what she is. It is her image in reverse, magnified and multiplied. She is alive and believes she is dead. The city is by all appearances alive, and only when you look closely, not up at the lights and towering high-rises but down in the gutters and tunnels, do you realize it’s in an advanced state of decomposition. It’s propped up by a life-support system of billboards, shops, train tracks, tourists, money, noise, and seemingly purposeful mayhem. But it’s a lost cause. It’s rotting in its bones, its innards infested with cockroaches, mosquitoes, and rats, its services inept, its dissonant ghettoes teeming with the refuse of the human race, the homeless, the crazy, and the poor. It’s a city sewn together from many cities, people from all over the world bring their shit here and call it a life: a Frankenstein’s monster of a city, born without a soul and doomed to die, if not already dead. No wonder Lorca’s impression of it was morbid:

Por los barrios hay gentes que vacilan insomnes

como recién salidas de un naufragio de sangre.

In the neighborhoods sleepless people stagger

like survivors of a shipwreck of blood.

I am happy to stay home with her all day. The city discombobulates me. Its farrago of everything causes my head to spin. Just the idea of having to go out already makes me feel nauseous. The shortest trip to a Rite Aid three blocks away, where I have to get her medication, feels like I’m walking through a gauntlet, past the rebellious gun-toting teenagers streaming out of Martin Luther King High School, the hawkers of fake Gucci bags, the Chinese takeout cyclists who will run you down for no reason. Anything within three feet of the building’s front door only makes me want to slink back home.

Wild animals seek some place of solitude when they’re injured. They wait out patiently for nature to take its course, for the body to heal itself. I am certain Mother’s body will do the same thing.

Either that, or she and I will have to blend into the shipwreck. She and I will have to disappear.

* * *

In 1889, Jules Cotard, a neurologist and former military surgeon, finds out that his daughter has contracted diphtheria. He has been living in Vanves for fifteen years and is already famous for having first described what will be known as the Cotard delusion, the belief that you are dead, don’t exist, or don’t have bodily organs. Cotard refuses to believe that his daughter is dying, and doesn’t leave her bedside for fifteen days. Eventually she does recover, an event that, though no records show it, I imagine Cotard may have interpreted as proof that disease is at bottom a manifestation of the mind. Ironically, he contracts the illness himself and dies a few days later.

I take copious notes about the disease, but to what end I can’t imagine. I come up with a story. Cotard, through some demonic, Faustian transaction, saves his daughter by exchanging his life for hers. It appears to me that, in the small universe in which we operate not through will but ultimately through patterns, I will eventually have to do the same thing for my mother. The idea of such a sacrifice fills me with a sense of purpose, a destiny, but also with dread and a simmering resentment toward her stubborn refusal to heal. In short, my mind is getting really fucked.

It takes me days to unpack. Boxes choke the apartment, and I eat my dinner on them, write my journal on them, masturbate on them. When I finally find the energy to open them, I discover a bunch of folders from mother’s files, records of patients, deeds of sale, tax returns—and a browned and crisped document that will, if this didn’t sound too dramatic, change the course of my life.

It is a typewritten bequest prepared by a notary public whose scrawl I can barely read. It is tucked among the documents she drew up before the Life Crusaders destroyed the clinic. It specifies the money that Andrew Breszky wired back to Mother, a few months after I was born: fifteen thousand and five hundred dollars, half the amount Mother told me she paid to adopt me. By today’s standards I reckon that has appreciated and must be worth twice as much, maybe even more. So I guess Mother did get a full refund.

Then it occurs to me that this is evidence that Mr. Breszky did in fact exist, and maybe still does. That he is indeed my father, and that all her incredible stories about Manila, the storm, the dead air on the day I was delivered, aren’t just embellishments to an otherwise incredible history. But I really don’t care whether it is fact or fiction; history, as far as I’m concerned, is dead matter. What I never knew, and discover only when I read the document, is that Andrew Brezsky also bequeathed the exact same amount to another son, who, it seems, was born on the same day that I was.

His name is Mathieu Aubert. Grew up in Paris, or the south of France, or the Philippines, or all of the above.

He is, it seems, the only family I have left.