Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club (5 page)

For a week, all I did was search. I spoke to Javier’s neighbors. No one said anything. Everyone was afraid. Some of them had lost their own men in that raid. Their sons. Their fathers. One woman told me to go back to El Paso.
Y no vuelvas. Nadie sabe nada. Y si saben no te van a decir.
She was right. No one was going to tell me anything.

I went to the police.

The police told me that they’d received a phone call from the consulate and that they were looking for Javier. “He’s probably just running away from his wife and his responsibilities.” That’s what I was told. I didn’t bother to tell him that I was as close to a wife as Javier would ever have.

I went to the newspapers.

I talked to lawyers.

I talked to human rights activists.

I talked to my congressman.

No one really wanted to talk to me. I began to understand what it feels like to be invisible.

I thought of looking in the desert, but where in the desert would I look?

He was gone. Javier. And I knew I would never see him again. I was angry at my own heart that refused to give up hope despite the fact that I begged it to give up. I began spending weekends in Javier’s small apartment. Magda and
Sofia told me that I was putting myself in danger. “I don’t care,” I said. “They can take me too.”

I would call the consulate three or four times a week.

I would visit the police station and ask questions.

I kept talking to reporters.

I would sleep in Javier’s bed and dream him back to life. The dreams were all the same. He was happy and reading a book. He was touching me. He was making love to me. We were walking down Avenida Juárez holding hands. I would wake to his books and to his plants. I always called his name and waited for him to answer.

I never cried. There was nothing but the numbness of my angry heart.

I stopped calling the consulate.

I stopped calling the police.

Months passed. I stopped writing.

And then I stopped going to Javier’s apartment. I just stopped. It had been months. Winter had returned.

One evening in December I got a phone call from Magda. “Come,” she said.

I felt something in my heart. “Have they found him?”

“No,” she said. “You have to stop hoping.”

I nodded into the receiver.

“Sofia and I have something for you.”

I walked from my apartment to the bridge. I took a cab to Sofia and Magda’s house. Sofia offered me a glass of wine.

I took the glass. Magda offered me a cigarette. “No,” I said. “It doesn’t help.”

“I’m happy you loved him so much.”

“I’m not,” I said. “What does love do except make you sad?”

“Without it, we would be even sadder.”

Sofia took something out from her purse. I could see what it was. Javier’s watch. The watch his father had given him. He never took it off.

“Where did you find it?”

“Some people talked to us.”

“Who? Who talked to you? Who?”

“It doesn’t matter who, Carlos.”

“It does matter.”

“You have to leave this alone, Carlos.”

“Why?”

“You know why.”

I nodded.

“They led us to where he was.”

“You should have taken me.”

“We went at night. It wasn’t safe.”

“So he’s—”

“He has gone to be with the women. With all the nameless women who have been buried in the desert.”

I nodded and thought,
He has gone to be with his mother.

She handed me the watch.

I found that I was kissing it. How banal. To sit and kiss a lover’s watch.

16.

I don’t remember leaving Magda and Sofia’s house.

I vaguely remember walking down some half-familiar streets.

I walked for a long time.

I found myself sitting at the bar in the Kentucky Club.

I had a drink and then another—and then another.

I stared at Javier’s watch.

I don’t know how long I sat there at the bar, drinking, trying not to think. Trying not to hate. Trying not to feel anything.

And then I just wanted to go home. But where was home?

There were moments when I sensed my mother and father at my side, staring at me as if they were trying to sift through the wreckage of a storm, trying to find my remains. My mother would touch me, hold my hand, whisper words to me, words I couldn’t understand. I felt as if I was no longer in control of my own voice, my own body. When my mother looked into my eyes and kissed my forehead, I stared back into her almost familiar face. I could see the hurt in her eyes as she whispered my name and I felt as if I had become a wound, the source of all her hurt.

My brothers and sisters came to visit. I looked at all of them as though they were perfect strangers. I stared into their eyes, listened to their voices. I felt as if they must have all been hiding somewhere in my memory. I would look at my fingers and whisper their names and count them when I was lying in bed in the dark:
Cecilia, Angela, Monica, Alfredo, Ricardo. One, two, three, four, five.
And then I would repeat the names again and again and again. And count
one, two, three, four, five
. I must have loved them once, and I tried to remember that love but there was nothing there. Only their names remained and their expectant faces. Angela kept repeating
, How could they have done this? How could they do this to you
? But
didn’t she know? She was eight years older. How could she not know how cruel the world was? No, not the world, the world was neither cruel nor kind. But the boys in the world—it was the boys that were cruel—that’s how they translated the world, with fists, with rage, with violence. And what good did it do to think about all these things, to ask why when there was no answer?

And wasn’t their last name Guerra? And didn’t that name mean war? And didn’t that mean that they were born to fight? But being born to fight did not mean that they were born to win the battles they fought. As I repeated the names of my brothers and sisters and felt each syllable on my tongue, I wondered what their names meant and wondered if they had scars too, scars that they were hiding from me and hiding from my mom and dad and from the world. And wasn’t that the way it should be? Shouldn’t everyone’s scars be silent and hidden? Shouldn’t we all pretend perfection and beauty and the optimism of a perfect day in spring? Why not? This was America, the country of happiness, and we had come from Mexico, the most tragic country in the world. And the only thing me—and those like me—were allowed to feel was gratitude. The boys who had hurt me, they spoke a different language and it was not a language I understood and maybe never would understand.

My brothers and sisters came in the evenings, all of them, as I lay in the hospital room. And I was trying, really trying, and I spoke to them softly but I wasn’t really aware of the words I was speaking and what did it matter if what I was saying didn’t mean anything at all? I felt as if it was someone else who was uttering words in an unknown language. And they were kind, my brothers and sisters, so kind, and they said I was looking better and I was surprised that I understood what they were saying. I smiled and squeezed their hands when they squeezed mine and I wondered what they felt because all I felt was that I was left for dead on the outskirts of Albuquerque on a
warm night when I had stepped out to mail a letter. That was all I was doing, mailing a letter at the post office and then I heard someone yelling names at me and then I was being dragged away and kicked and everything changed. And here I was in a hospital room, not dead,
not dead
. But I knew that something in me had died. I did not know the name for that something.

I felt like an impersonator. I found it disconcerting that everyone still remembered who I was. But I knew that whoever it was they remembered was gone and I did not believe that the boy they had loved would ever come back.

I looked at my father and touched his face as if I were a boy who was staring at a man for the first time in his life. There was something sad about my father’s face, and yet there was something hard and angry about it too. It seemed to me that the hospital room was suffering from a chronic silence. It was as though all sound had been banished from the world and the words and the laughter had been sent back to Mexico and I had been forced to stay in this foreign land that hated me. That’s what they had said when I’d felt the knife slicing into my back
Why don’t you go back to where you came from? Motherfucker, motherfucker, go back, go back.
But not knowing my way back, I was forced to stay.

The doctor asked me if I knew my name.

I looked back at the doctor. I was trying to decide if he was real or if he was just a dream I was having.

The doctor looked back at me, stubbornly waiting for an answer.

I didn’t want to talk to him. But I decided he wasn’t a dream and that he wasn’t going to go away. “Yes,” I said, “I know my name.”

“You want to tell me what it is?”

“Don’t you know?”

“Can you just tell me?”

“My name is Nick.”

“What’s your last name?”

“Guerra.”

“What year is it?”

I decided the doctor wasn’t a bad man. He wasn’t like the boys. He wasn’t going to hurt me. I think I might have smiled at him.

“What year is it, Nick?”

“1985.”

The doctor nodded and smiled and I wondered if he had a son.

“Who’s the president?”

I closed my eyes. “Ronald Reagan.”

“Who’s the vice president?”

“Bush? Is it Bush? Does it matter?”

The doctor smiled. “You’ve suffered quite a shock, Nick.”

“Is that what it was?”

The doctor touched my shoulder and I flinched, a reflex. “Steady,” the doctor whispered. “No one’s going to hurt you here.” His smile was kind and it almost made me want to cry. “You’re going to be just fine, Nick.”

I wanted to believe him. I shut my eyes. I wanted to sleep.

When I woke in the darkness of the hospital room, I thought I heard the sound of my own voice. A nurse rushed into the room. I looked at her with a question on my face. “You were screaming,” she said.

“Oh,” I said. “I’m thirsty.”

She gave me a glass of water.

“I’m sorry they did this to you,” she said.

“You’re sure I was screaming?”

“Yes.”

“I was dreaming,” I said. “It rhymes with screaming.”

“What do you remember, Nick?” It was the doctor again. It wasn’t night anymore and I was glad.

“Do you remember being transferred here from the hospital in Albuquerque?”

“Albuquerque?” I whispered. “Is that an English word?”

The doctor had a puzzled look on his face. “No, I don’t think it is.”

“What does it mean?”

“I don’t know, Nick.”

He was quiet for a moment. His eyes were green and silent and I didn’t know what his silence meant.

“Nick, do you remember arriving here?”

“No.”

“What do you remember?”

“Why does it matter?”

“Do you know what city you’re in?”

“Home.”

“Home?”

“El Paso.”

“Is that a guess?”

I shook my head. “When will you let me out of here?”

“I’m worried about you, Nick.”

“I thought you said I was going to be fine.”

When the doctor left, I wondered what the word for worry was in Spanish. I couldn’t think of the word. It was gone. In order to translate
words from one language to another, you had to know both languages. The languages I knew were disappearing. I wondered if I would have to find a way to live without words.

When my mother told me I was being released, I smiled at her.

“We’re taking you home,” she said.

I nodded.

“Why won’t you talk, Nick?”

“I talk,” I said.

“You don’t.”

I remember the trip back to my old neighborhood, the familiar houses. It was as if I was watching myself get down from the car, watching myself as I stared at my father’s neat and perfect lawn. My mother’s roses were in bloom and I thought they were very beautiful and I spelled out the word
beautiful
to myself and I wondered about the origins of that word and what kind of dreamer had dragged it into the world.

I wandered the rooms of the house. Nothing seemed foreign. But nothing seemed familiar. I stared at the pictures on the wall. There was a picture of me as a boy and I held an Easter basket and my sister Angela was kissing me.

I wanted to sleep. I was tired.

The bandages on my back were gone. I wondered if the words they wrote on my skin had disappeared—but I knew they were still there. They would always be there. And then I laughed to myself. What if they had misspelled the words?