Читать книгу The Descartes Highlands - Eric Gamalinda - Страница 9

We are held in place by gravitational forces

Humans are the only creatures who can tell a lie, to others and to themselves. Mother once told me that. Obviously she set herself as a perfect example.

A lie: Mother quickly forgets about Frank. Dubious proof: a rapid succession of unlikely lovers. But to be brutally honest, at her age, her only options are young Latino and African immigrants who take advantage of her, then move on. This is her latest relationship, and it’s going to be her last. Newly arrived from Brazil, probably twenty-five years old. A walking stereotype, a Carioca with six-pack abs and the insouciance of one who knows he is young and beautiful and desired.

I catch him sucking her nipple in the kitchen one afternoon. I watch them in silence, observing how his lips perfectly pucker over the rosy aureole, the expert way in which he flicks his tongue over the tip of the nipple and sends her swooning, giddy with pleasure.

They fuck boisterously, their moans so painful they seem in the throes of death. My room is just next to hers. I can hear everything, even the sullen, throaty endearments after sex, the obligatory shower, the furtive departure so as not to wake the kid.

Sometimes we go out to places that he likes. He doesn’t know much. He’s been in the country only a few months. Mother always tries to show how much she appreciates everything he suggests. We go to half-price movie matinees in rundown theaters uptown in the city, where cockroaches crawl over the stale popcorn people dropped on the greasy floor.

Sometimes we sit till sunset at the Cloisters. Whenever Mother goes to the bathroom, her boyfriend and I sit in silence, staring at the river. Once he tries to break the ice and says, “You hate me, don’t you?”

“I don’t feel anything for you,” I reply.

When Mother comes back she asks how we two are getting along. He says, “He’s a very precoscient kid.”

“Yes,” Mother agrees. “That’s what he is.”

They buy food and stuff and share it like conjugal property. He never stays too long, but his visits always transform her. She moves gracefully, as though she’s picking up the last gestures of a dance. She smells different, always a scent of almonds and musk.

I never find out what his name is, and never ask. (That’s not entirely true. She may have told me his name. I may have chosen to forget.) He is writing all over the blank slate that she used to be, recreating something foreign out of the emptiness that she has become. A creature whose voice has acquired an unfamiliar lilt, whose smile evokes joys so private they shut everything out. One of these days, he is going to stop creating her. That’s what I think. And when that happens, she might disappear without a trace.

Instead he’s the one who disappears. He finds someone with less age and more money. He stops coming over. There is no way for an affair like that to end except the way it does—hackneyed and predictable as a primetime telenovela on Univision.

Then she goes crashing back to earth and becomes the one I have known all along. And once again, somber with loneliness, sitting by my bed at night, she enchants me with her lies: the blood of Europe and Asia and Africa in you, and the ships swaying on the open sea.

* * *

Another lie: Mother loves her job.

She neither loves it nor hates it, and I feel the same way. It is simply the only kind of work she knows she’s good at, having had a lot of experience working with Frank.

When my mother comes back from Manila, she finds all of Frank’s personal belongings gone, his half of the closets empty. The only reminder of his presence is a series of phone messages, a bright red 8 blinking on the answering machine. She doesn’t want to play them back, thinking they’ll be that helpless woman’s voice again, or the usual anonymous nonmessages. But she takes a deep breath and presses the button, and listens to eight consecutive messages from the Life Crusaders who have finally decided to speak up, threatening to blow up the clinic. Poor Frank, she says to herself, run out of town by a bunch of crazies.

With Frank out of her life, she realizes this one thing about herself: she doesn’t know anything except what she’s learned from him. She is his shadow, and where does a shadow go when what casts it has gone?

But she picks up the work when she comes back. She can do it on autopilot. Years later I realize why. She was hoping that when he came back, everything would be as he had left it. The break in their narrative would be seamless.

* * *

I stand beside her, beaming a light into the cavern of a young woman’s uterus. Mother cuts up the fetus and with a forceps slowly plucks the pieces out. I hold up a tray for her to deposit the mangled bits.

It’s an emergency, Mother’s part-time assistant can’t come in, and I’m the only one around. I turn out to be an excellent nurse. I ask only the right questions. I know when to hand her the right instrument. I am fastidious and efficient, distant but not indifferent: the terrified young mother finds my presence surreal, but also somehow soothing, like a little angel.

When it’s over, I collect the pieces in a trash bag to throw in a furnace in the back of the clinic. I peer inside the bag before I do so. There are tiny, barely discernible parts that seem not quite human. The lacerated prototype of a hand, the impossibly minuscule fingers, still conjoined by a slimy web. And a small skull, squished like the head of a fish and marbled with blood and mucus.

I pick up the skull and examine it against the light of the fire. There are small veins showing through the translucent bone, like the beautiful imperfections one finds in certain stones.

* * *

Feast of the Assumption. In certain gnostic scriptures, God fucks Mary through one ear and her child is born out the other.

My mother always told me a virgin birth was possible, and she was living proof. I’m not stupid. Being Mother’s angelic assistant at the clinic has dispelled any romantic notions I might have had about fucking, or how babies are born. As I grow older I realize that statement was supposed to be a joke. Then I get it, and Mother and I have a good laugh.

I get it, and her lullaby of fictitious origins has become no more than that, a foolish childhood song. As I grow older the stories take a U-turn and Mother feels it is time to explain how someone like me really came into the world. Not in a test tube, which has some kind of futuristic glamour to it, but through a baby factory in some hardscrabble barrio halfway across the world. My birth helped pay off someone’s debts. On that account there weren’t going to be any secrets.

“Did someone want to get rid of me?”

“What do you mean, Jordan?”

“Did my mother want to abort me?”

“That wasn’t going to happen. Because you were meant to be mine.”

“But it could have happened, right?”

“No. Because you were special.”

“How?”

“I came to get you. I came at the right time. We were meant for each other. That’s why your birth was marked by man’s footprints on the moon. A million years from now—”

“There must have been a million babies born that year. Are we all special?”

“Yes.”

“Are we related?”

“No. But maybe in spirit.”

“Were some of them meant to be aborted?”

“Maybe.”

“So they weren’t so special after all.”

“But the important thing is you are. You are here. We are here together.”

“I wish you’d do something else.”

“What do you mean?”

“People hate what you do.”

“Some people don’t understand.”

“It could have been me.”

“But it wasn’t. And I wouldn’t do that to you.”

“But how would you have known it was me?”

“I would have known. We are connected.”

“Like an umbilical cord?”

“Like an umbilical cord. Yes.”

“I wish you’d do something else.”

“We are being helpful.”

“Nobody likes us.”

“I like you.”

“I have no friends.”

“I’m your best friend.”

Let me say this about my mother: we are very close, yet we are total strangers to one another. She had read all the how-to books on raising an adopted child, she knew all the rules. Don’t hide the truth, be straightforward, show them you love them, remind them they are not unwanted, they only had to be given away due to compelling, inescapable reasons. Let them grow up whole, and confident, and sane.

She knows the entire rigmarole, and she’s done her best. In truth, I have a niggling, maddening need to probe everything that remains unanswered—about myself, about Brezsky, about how I wound up not in that barrio but here, halfway across the world. Once you start thinking like that, every single thing in the world becomes obstinately imbued with mystery. And that’s a dangerous thing. I know that and Mother knows that. Even the books tell her so.

So, since the child psychiatry manuals have very little to offer (I have been reading them without her knowledge), I’m convinced that, in the grand scheme of things, something like my life—our lives—is largely karmic. Furtively, I even collect the pamphlets left by the Life Crusaders on our door—words literally scorched with fire and brimstone, pockmarked with copious passages from the Old Testament—wondering if maybe they have answers Mother and I should really know about, and guiltily hiding them under my bed the way other boys hide copies of Penthouse. And when Mother discovers them, she reacts like she’s just found her little boy whacking off to Miss July.

“Someday you’ll find the real thing, and all this will be trash.”

“Mother, why does God hate us so much?”

“A God that hates is not true.”

Which leads me to this. According to Tibetan Buddhism, God is all creatures, and all creatures were once our mothers. Presuming we have been reincarnated millions of times, it’s likely that someone out there, the cop at the corner, the Korean greengrocer, the coked-up homeless bag lady, could have given birth to us at some point in time. This idea is supposed to evoke in us compassion for all beings. And once in a while, if you try it, I suppose it does.

But that doesn’t explain much either. This is my idea of reincarnation: at death, our molecules, atoms, quarks, and gravitons disperse, spread into thin air, and realign and recompose somewhere else, mixing randomly with a million other particles to create entirely new organisms. At death, Jordan Yeats can become a fern, a groundhog, the next president of the United States, or all of the above. This, I’ve read, is my mind clinging to its materialist fixations. My mind refusing to let go. I am a Buddha’s nightmare.

Mother always tells me mine was a virgin birth, that I came into the world miraculously, and I am unique and special. That’s what I am, a fucking baby Jesus. Eventually I understand that this isn’t meant to be taken literally. Although I never met Frank, and only spoke to him briefly once or twice on the phone, she always talks to me about him as “your Dad.” But she also makes it clear, in no uncertain terms, that Dad fucked up and ran off with a cocksucking slut from the Dominican Republic.

The years drift by, and strangely I have no clear memory of them, except that everyone I meet in school drives me to bouts of torpor. Year after year my teachers write to my mother expressing their concern about my “reticence,” which in today’s world is a disorder as alarming as, say, bulimia. In my junior year in college, after a long and nerve-racking argument with my mother who refuses to give me her blessing, I undertake a bold experiment and live in a dorm off the Columbia campus. I’ve taken a long time to decide what I’m going to major in but this time I settle on film studies, a course easy enough to endure, in my estimation. It’s also becoming of interest to me, I mean the distance and immediacy of film, which happen simultaneously, its uncanny ability to immerse you in a world that it merely reflects. I decide that I have a lot to say about the subject. I might someday become a filmmaker myself. I will work alone, without a crew and without a studio; the thought of having to deal with so many people for a single work bothers me a little, but in time I will figure it out. In a few weeks, of course, the dilemma of wanting to create a film and not wanting to work with other people makes me doubt if this is the right course for me.

During my sixth week my roommate sets me up with an English major from Barnard who, no doubt offended when I pass on her offer to spend the night, spreads rumors that I am a “homo.” My roommate asks to be moved to another hall, but I do receive a warm invitation to join the LGBT soiree.

A week later I get mugged by two black teenagers on Amsterdam Avenue at four p.m., have to have four stitches to close the cut above my left eyebrow, and, still dazed with painkillers, I pack my bags and head back home. My mother says nothing when she sees me at the door. We are never going to part again.

And so I keep her company, and I grow older. We grow old together, as boring and complacent as a married couple, content in the safety of our lies. I read her some books at night, beside the fire. She makes me a cup of chamomile tea before bed. That’s what the world is like, and we live as best we can. The stories are there to make us feel better. A lie is an act of complicity between the one who tells it and the one who chooses to believe.