CHAPTER ONE
His name is Gómez.
He carries a butcher knife in one hand, a chicken in the other. The chicken doesn’t flap, doesn’t tremble, just waits, watching everything. Back. Step back. The blade is sharp but the face is kind, hardened but kind, and the blood splattered on the apron is old.
Isabel sent me, says a little girl’s voice—my voice.
Gómez scrunches up his face, as if he’s a giant and I—she?—we are one of the little people they speak of that live in the forests outside of town. (Town? A town on the outskirts of a big city, a confluence of voices nearby. A market…)
Her sister, Gómez says. He nods. I see it now. Then he turns, holds the chicken down on the counter and thwunk beheads it, and the blood gushes then trickles onto the floor. Then he angles his body just so, after a conspiratorial wink down at us, and does something to the chicken.
It takes him a few minutes’ worth of sweating and mumbling carajo and adjusting his shoulders, and all the while the sound of a heart beats languidly around us: Ga-gung! It had somehow been there all along and now just gets louder and louder. It is gigantic, so big it must belong to the whole world.
Finally Gómez turns back around and hands us the paper bag, already wet from the newly dead bird and heavy—too heavy.
He doesn’t notice the heart that beats through the plaster walls of his shop, the tiny interruptions on the surfaces of puddles out in the street, the way the whole universe rattles with each ga-gung.
Careful out there, he says, watching us struggle with the weight of the bag. But of course we’ll be careful—the streets are full of soldiers and walking bad dreams.
When we look down, the thunder of that heart bursting through us, blood has already dripped onto our pretty … new … shoes.
* * *
“¡Ramón!”
A gruff and familiar voice, it yanks me forward along the pathway of that slow beating heart, away from those tiny bloodstained shoes, into a small ugly room with only a couch. On that couch, a gigantic man sits up, blinking awake.
“¡Ramón! ¡Te toca a ti!”
That is not my name.
I have no name. I have nothing, am nothing.
But I know that voice, and, distantly, I know the face of the man in front of me, who now rubs his eyes and glances around, bemused. Stubble from a few days without shaving crescents the bottom of his light brown face; his mouth hangs slightly open as he blinks away the fluorescent glare from above.
I know him, knew him once.
Once, when I was whole.
Shreds of it echo back to me: an old book, hurled across a cluttered office. A tower blocking out the sun. The smell of the ocean. A few indistinguishable splinters of voice, the creases of a face. Gunfire and the pound of wood against flesh.
That’s it. The fractured puzzle pieces. Useless really.
I have been here all along. Whatever happened to me, I lingered. I held on and remained, as my body turned to dust and my mind rejoined the swirl of whatever it is that minds swirl up into. At some point I must’ve become we and the little parts of me scattered into a great pulsing collective of minds. And we watched.
We watched.
We watched and we waited, processing, sometimes judging. Sometimes we dithered inwardly or sneered, that faraway crinkle in the fabric of the world you sense. We cringed when everything goes wrong, or exalted in some sweet conflagration.
But now I’ve been spat back out. Pulled, really. A second chance?
If I existed, if I’m more than just a nameless thread in some ghost tapestry, then I must know why I’ve been released, why I came back.
I must know everything.
Ramón puts both hands on his knees and grunts but doesn’t get up.
He is, let’s be honest, a lug.
Maybe it’s because he just woke up … but no, that’s a charitable lie. He shakes his head, looks around a second time, and I want to yell: Again, Ramón? Have you not already seen this pathetic little room enough times? But I can’t yell, I can’t wave, can’t sing—I am nothing.
He cracks his neck, sickeningly, then scratches his balls, yawns. The entirety of me, whatever that is, each simmering phantom speck, feels ready to blow. Maybe I should just let myself be enveloped back into the ether and be done with it, if this is what being back among the living consists of.
Finally, he rubs both hands up his face and into his wild black hair. “¡Ya voy!” he bellows. Then Ramón rises and suddenly the room seems smaller. He’s not fat so much as just large in every direction. He’s got some belly sag, sure, and arms like great napping iguanas, but it’s his height that seems to dwarf this tiny waiting area. He has to crane his neck to not crack the fluorescents.
He hunches his shoulders up and down a few times, then looks up, directly at me, and freezes.
A hundred seconds seem to fly past as Ramón slowly leans forward, squinting.
He sees me.
I am nothing, but he sees me.
And, taking his face in for the first time, I see him too. Recognition tugs at the edges of my memory, the first piece fits into place.
I know this. His beating heart beckoned me, his blood summoned mine, or whatever remnant of a lineage is left to me.
Ramón is family.
And he sees me. Face still squeezed into a fist, he cocks his head to the side, then reaches up and slicks back an unruly cowlick.
I whirl my attention to the part of the room behind me, and there is Ramón again, this version somewhat mustier and blocked by stickers.
Copyright © 2019 Daniel José Older