Hot Sur

8. From María Paz’s Manuscript

Here I am, Mr. Rose, out of Manninpox but still wandering through America, “saltando matones,” as they say. That was one of Bolivia’s many Colombian expressions, leaping over bramble patches. I have never talked like this, but as time passes, I am beginning to sound more and more like her. Saltando matones, indeed, because matones are exactly what I am trying to avoid, but not in the sense that it is used in the expression of brambles or thickets, but in the other sense of the word, which also means thugs and killers. In spite of it all, I still sit down to do my homework for you, as if to keep you updated, Mr. Rose. As if it is certain that I will no doubt see you again one day and turn all these pages in, so you can add them to the manuscript that I sent you from Manninpox. As you can see, I have not forgotten about you. It hasn’t been easy. To survive, I mean, since getting out of jail. I didn’t dare return to my apartment right away because of everything that had happened there. My whole being shrank at the mere thought of returning to that place, but I had to go look for Hero. I decided to make rounds in the neighborhood first, fearing what I would find there, or more to the point, who I would find there. I was not ready to come face-to-face with Sleepy Joe. I strolled by a few times first, getting closer and closer to our building, but not too close, to see if I could get news from someone. About Hero, you know. The first thing I had to do was figure out where my dog was. I sensed that people were pointing me out: There she goes, look, that’s the one they just let out of jail, the one who murdered her husband, who was fucking her brother-in-law, all that and who knows what other gossip. Fortunately, a neighbor did have news about Hero, good news. She told me that the cops had turned him over to an animal protection organization, so that perhaps I could get him back one day if I ever got out. Had they taken pity on Hero because he was lame? Maybe they had heard that he was a war hero, and this world is not so far gone that it’d let a decorated patriot starve to death.

My main problem was (and continues to be) the lack of money, so at night I stayed with my mother’s old friend, Socorro Arias de Salmon. I had given her my manuscript in Manninpox, and she assured me that it had been delivered, sent by mail to the proper address. That made me very happy, it has made me hopeful that you read all of it, which is why I continue to do my homework, writing whenever and wherever I can to finish my story for you. Like I told you once, I don’t like novels with wishy-washy endings, or worse, those kinds of endings that just tick off the reader. But staying with Socorro wasn’t easy, given her husband wanted to know nothing about me. This Mr. Salmon, also an immigrant, was an Olympic asshole, one of those who still believed that coming to America was the closest thing to going to heaven and spent his life making sure he wouldn’t get expelled from paradise. I’m talking about the on-their-knees, hypergrateful bootlickers who are more Catholic than the pope. I don’t know if you understand what I mean. So Socorro let me stay there, but hidden from her husband, and the neighbors as well, of course, and the whole world, because the woman had a serious case of heebie-jeebies and her skin broke out in hives because I was staying there. Hiccups, allergies — what didn’t she come down with? Shitass-scared, they call those kinds of people in Colombia, shitting on themselves about anything, that’s how they were, the Salmon couple, he with his adulteries and double standards, she with her breakouts and rashes, and me in a corner of the basement next to the washing machine as if I were a pile of dirty laundry. The poor woman twisting herself into shapes with all my used tampons, because I’m still bleeding, not as much as before but a little bit every day. Imagine poor Socorro, having to throw out all those tampons in the neighbor’s trash because of what her husband would say, how would she explain such a thing when years before she had already been the very figure of menopause on two feet, or rather menopause with her hair in a bun, skin breakouts, and nails painted a bright red, that was Señora Socorro. No sir, this was no life, some development, out of jail and into a hole. The worst of it was that I couldn’t have my dog with me. I could go claim him — but where would I take him? I had to work up the nerve to go back and live in my old apartment, me and my dog, and maybe someday my sister as well. There was an eviction notice plastered on the door of the place, and it had been sealed off with police tape, and it was still fire damaged — but so what? I would sneak in through a window and take it from there. I had learned that at least it was still empty. The owner had not rented it to anyone else. It’s not easy to find good tenants in those shitty neighborhoods today. “I would never put you out on the street,” old, sly Socorro said to me, though she was deep-down glad I was getting out. As a parting gift, she gave me this mink coat, pretty amazing, I have to say, a bit moth-eaten and such, way out of fashion and with the lining all torn, an old geezer of a coat that smelled disgustingly of mold, think Grace Kelly crossing the Atlantic to become the princess of Monaco. But hell, enough complaining; it was a mink, after all. Socorro probably gave it to me to soothe her guilty conscience, so that I wouldn’t leave empty-handed. She said it was for the cold or so that I could sell it and get some cash. For the cold? Yeah, sure thing, tightwad, I was going to go around looking like Cruella de Vil, so that the animal rights people would spray me with paint for skinning the good Lord’s little creatures. The only person who would have bought such a thing was Prince Rainier himself. Can you imagine the whole scenario? Coming back from prison without a penny to my name but wrapped in a fur? It was funny, given everything that had happened. Maktub, I know all fate is maktub — remember that? — written down somewhere, but whatever entity is in charge of destiny has a good sense of humor. Anyways, I got to my neighborhood with everything I owned on me, and my Hero, my little sweetheart of a dog, who had gone crazy mad when he saw me. I couldn’t tell who was squealing more when we first saw each other, Hero or me — enough to break someone’s heart.

It wasn’t easy to go back. I was panicking — the shitass-scared one was me now. I swear, Mr. Rose, I felt like Lazarus come back to life still stinking of the dead. Confinement in prison is hard, but it’s harder to poke your nose back out into the real world. I soon realized how maddeningly difficult it was going to be to return to real life, which was not the same one I had left and which wasn’t really mine anymore. What had been mine had come to an end. That day I returned will always remained burned in my memory, me hugging Hero tight, both of us trembling, as if he knew what I knew or feared finding Greg there, both of us in the same state, not being able to confirm the rumors about Greg’s death really until that day. Everything that led up to that day had been so unreal, beginning with his death, a bit of news that I wasn’t sure whether to believe. There I was, back home, slowly climbing the stairs of my old building and recognizing the old smells that were different on each floor. A scorched smell on the first floor from the time the owner tried to burn down the place to collect insurance, cat piss on the second floor, pine-scented disinfectant on the third floor, and cigarette butts on the fourth floor. I went late on purpose that night to avoid running into anyone. I had no wish to run into the other tenants and have to deal with their questioning and accusatory looks. There she goes, the woman from the fifth floor, the one from that huge controversy, with the murder and the bursting down of doors, who was sent to prison and now is back. I didn’t want them to look at me with suspicion or, worse, pity. I didn’t want to be that person, the one from the tragedy. Truth was, I didn’t want to be any other person either; I didn’t want to be anyone. Ideally, I would have liked to have been invisible and gone into the old apartment like a ghost. Fortunately, not a soul was around that night, not even the silent boy who always sat in the stairway between the second and third floors, perhaps asleep already, or his family had moved, leaving the building desolate. And I was a ghost as well, and Hero half a ghost, returning home. Except not returning, just getting there; we weren’t really returning, returning to what, to whom, because there was nothing left of what we had once had, ruins perhaps, embers, ashes, a profound hurt in the chest and stabs of disillusion. Although actually, everything was the same, difficult to believe things had changed so little. The same light-colored floor tiles, handrails with chipped gray paint, the meager light from the few lightbulbs that weren’t burned out. I paused at the last landing on the stairs before reaching the fifth floor to look for the keys in my bag. I’m going into my turf. And what is there to greet me?

A humid cold that encircles my legs and gusts of air that flow in through the broken windows, and that’s when I realized I didn’t need my keys — for what? — considering all the locks had been burst open, and the door knocked against the doorjamb, letting the wind pass like through the door of a saloon. That’s what it was like. And inside? A hole, a real shithole, like they say here. No water, no electricity, no telephone, because of course they had been cut off, the furniture all destroyed, grime and stink everywhere. Because the locks had all been broken and there was no way to shut the door from inside, I was at the mercy of anyone who wanted to come in. Unbelievable, I thought, all those bars and locks in Manninpox so that I wouldn’t open any door, and now not even a miserable little dead bolt to lock my house. I’m telling you, that maktub writer likes his laughs. A little bit of a downer, the whole scene. Downer and then some, but what was I to do? I wasn’t going to sit there and start crying. I had come from the depths of hell and this was supposedly a new chapter. “On the stairway to heaven blind with tears,” another of Bolivia’s sayings for you. Make the best of it, I told myself, and I got to it. I found an extension cord, plugged it to one of the public outlets outside, and ran it into the apartment. It was freezing cold, with no heater or anything, but I knew that in the basement there was always a collection of useless and not-so-useless things, piles of stuff — you know how the gringos are, even poor gringos, who use their things for a year and then just toss them. I went to down to dig around in the pile and found a small heater that didn’t look in such bad shape, and just as I thought, the thing worked. Nothing outstanding that put out suffocating heat, but enough to survive, though only at night. During the day, I had to unplug the extension cord so the neighbors wouldn’t notice and complain. And for water? Well, I did it by the bucketful, like we used to do whenever we visited our family in the country as children. Whoever used the outhouse went down to the river and hauled up a bucketful of water for the latrine. That’s what I had to do now, but of course not from a river, I had to haul water up from the faucet downstairs. Don’t think that’s such an unusual thing around here. How many people make do without any money to pay for public utilities? You can pass by and everything seems copacetic, but just take a peek behind the façade to see what real poverty is. Guess what I did for food. Depended on the charity of soup kitchens: good hot soup, some fruit, often a bit overripe, and little cartons of milk… not bad compared to Manninpox. To sleep? Well, to sleep, Hero and I used a thin foam mattress I had found in the basement. We had to improvise in that area because the FBI bastards had disemboweled all the mattresses and furniture. Then the smell. That was the worse. Rotted food in and out of the fridge. There was no way to get rid of the stink, although I spent a whole day of scrubbing away with those steel pads and a whole bottle of Ajax, which I had to buy, because they had emptied the old ones on the floor, looking for cocaine probably. You have to understand, Mr. Rose, I don’t want to bitch, it would be a serious lack of appreciation, but I swear sometimes I even missed Manninpox. There at least we had electricity, and running water, and three meals a day assured. And if I start complaining about these days, how do I tell you about the days that followed, all that stuff that happened afterward that was much worse? One night, I got home late and put Hero on the floor — I took him with me everywhere, night and day, in a tattered old bag — and I searched for the extension cord to turn on the light. There were only a few days left till the trial, and I was hoping that everything would go smoothly and I would be able to reestablish my identity as a free individual, so I could go back to work for the cleaning supplies company, make some money, reactivate my credit card, pay the old bills to get heat and water and light again, fix up some of the furniture, and rid the place of grime and memories. Clean out, as they say, and learn to forget. I had been unexpectedly released and life was giving me a second chance. It wasn’t something you waste. If fate had forgiven me, I was going to have to learn to forgive myself. Maybe I could even get a loan to buy the apartment. Who knows, there had to be some program for ex-prisoners in such a great democratic country that helped with things like that. Of course, nobody came by this house anymore, not even the cops. It’s as if the place had been erased from the map. Not even the owner came around to collect the rent. Maybe he was dead or had just given up on this place, left it like all the other godforsaken places in this neighborhood. After “white flight,” it was we persons of color who stayed behind, or I should say persons of many colors. As I figured, all I would have to do was take possession of my apartment and get everything in order again. How difficult could it be to set up a place to lead a decent, independent human life? I would get in touch with my old work buddies, throw a dinner party, and I would tell them such strange stories about what had happened to me since they had last seen me, almost like I was telling them about an old movie, one of those that they showed on TV recently, but no one could remember the plot. Then after that, I would go get my sister, of course. That would be the true beginning of a new life. I would take Violeta out of the special school, thinking of the face she would make when I showed her I had fixed up the room on the roof, the one she had always liked, her refuge upstairs, and I would lead her by the hand to the bathroom I had fixed up just for her, with a Jacuzzi and everything. You don’t have to bathe using the sink, I would tell her. I hoped Violeta would listen to me and not make a scene, Violeta who hated to shower and instead loved to clean herself in the sink on the roof, not caring about the cold or about parading around naked where everyone could see her, no matter that I got tired of telling her, you’re not a girl anymore, you’re a woman, a beautiful woman, and should act as such.

All that would be later, though, all that was the dream I was building up high as the moon while living down below in the rubble. For the moment I had to give time its due, without becoming desperate or depressed, keeping my priorities in order, surviving as best as I could in the ruins of that apartment, and focusing all my energies on the upcoming trial that was getting closer each day. That’s where my head was that night I returned home late, put the dog on the floor, and began looking for a candle, when I tripped on the mattress, the one I had brought up from the basement and that on top of everything smelled of urine. I tripped on it and asked myself what it was doing out there. I had left it in the bedroom and not where it was now, crossways at the entrance. Very strange, and my first instinct was to grab Hero and get the hell out of there. I should have done it, Mr. Rose, I should have. But I didn’t, just one of those times when I didn’t listen to my instincts. Analyzing it, I can’t quite figure out why I didn’t take off right away, when it was very obvious something was wrong. I guess in the end I didn’t do it because everything seemed so wrong during those days, one more thing seeming wrong just didn’t register; I was immune to things that seemed wrong. I must have thought that the stray cats had broken in looking for food and moved things around. But Hero was also startled and growled. It couldn’t be clearer if a hundred roosters were singing, or more to the point, one dog growling, but I refused to listen to the message. In the end, I think I didn’t run away because I didn’t have anywhere to run to. Better just to stay there and deal with whatever I had to deal with. I kicked the mattress aside, grabbed a candle, and went searching in the darkness for matches to light it, when someone grabbed my arm and pulled me back. Hard. Ugly. A big hand covered my mouth. Someone breathing on the back of my neck, and pressed against my butt, a… a man’s thing. Horrible? Disgusting? Terrifying? Of course, it was a horrifying experience, well, at first a very horrifying and then not so much, not so much and not at all, because soon I recognized that hand, that smell, that breath, that other thing.

Have you guessed? If you bet on Sleepy Joe, then ding-ding, you win. Apparently, he had been there, waiting for me in the dark, crouching quietly in a corner. I don’t know how long he had been there. It’s possible that he came often, and stayed the night once in a while. So I arrived that night, and he jumped me. I almost had a heart attack at first. You have to understand, Mr. Rose, my thing with Sleepy Joe had been a torrid love, and you can’t simply delete those things. You can shove them completely out of sight or bury them under a mountain of forgetfulness, but when you least expect it, they come back full force. That’s just how it happened here, my old flame jumps me from behind, and before I knew it, we were back to the same old thing, embarrassing as it is to admit it. I’m not saying I still loved him or anything like that, the opposite, in fact. I knew better than anybody what an absolute bastard he could be. A do-nothing, an asshole of the worst kind, but he hadn’t done anything to his brother. Sleepy Joe adored his brother, Mr. Rose, and I was sure he hadn’t lifted a finger against Greg. Sleepy Joe was not the murderer. And he was still a hot little papacito, no use denying that, so with all those repressed desires built up from Manninpox, that long dry spell, that abstinence that made me want to explode, starving and with my man right there, like a pie cooling on a windowsill. But not as you may imagine it, because there was a lot to talk about first. It was obvious he only wanted one thing, a little toss in the sheets to get things going, but I needed to talk. I needed to know what had really happened to Greg, what Sleepy Joe knew about the murder and this mess I was in up to my chin. What role had Sleepy Joe played? How deeply was he implicated? Did he know about the arms trafficking? Who had killed his brother? Why the fuck did he not come to visit me in prison? How is it possible that he abandoned me at the lowest point of my existence? What was that whole muddled history of the knife, the one I had wrapped as a present like an idiot? A whole rush of questions brimming with rancor, mistrust, and suspicion… and hatred. Because deep down, I felt a physical hatred for him, a primal hatred thickened with regrets. You would think that even the most feverish lust would cool under these circumstances. You would think. But Sleepy Joe wasn’t your run-of-the-mill character. He wanted me on the bed, or on that filthy mattress, and that’s it. But that’s not what I wanted. Well, maybe a little bit, because Sleepy Joe was no good to the core, but damn, he was fine. “Come here, my little hot ass, don’t waste this present I’ve unwrapped for you,” that’s what he said, the damn flirt, and I could easily confirm that he wasn’t kidding. He goes at me with kisses all over my neck, and I slowly get lost in his smells, a little bit saying no and a little bit saying yes. And right in the middle of all that he blurts out a very strange question, well, strange for someone in the throes of this kind of passion.

“You have that hundred and fifty thousand, right? Tell me you do, my love, tell me you have it.”

“What hundred and fifty thousand?” I said, pushing him away. “Don’t fuck with me, Joe. They almost fucking killed me for that, some hundred and fifty thousand I didn’t know shit about. So you tell me. What hundred and fifty thousand?”

“Whatever you want, my little hot ass.” He backpedaled, trying to calm me down to get back to business, “Take it easy, my love, don’t get all flustered, let’s just stay with this and we’ll talk later.”

I needed to think. Hit pause to take in everything that was happening, bring down the temperature to avoid making a huge mistake. We were still inside in the dark and it was cold, so I was able to convince him to go out in the hallway for a moment to plug in the extension cord. But he kept on coming at me when he came back, determined not to let me interrupt things, so the fever had risen instead of dropping. Although maybe not, maybe that’s not how it happened. I think I’m lying, Mr. Rose. Maybe writing is not a good medium to tell about these intimate things, or maybe I just shouldn’t be telling you in such detail. In any case, I think I’m not being clear. The confusing thing about the feelings we carry inside is that they never are what they seem, always something different. Here I am confessing to you that what I felt for Joe was physical desire, and yes, that’s partly true, but it’s also not true, because in those days what I really wanted was something or someone to return to after a long voyage, and the familiar and once-loved body of Sleepy Joe could very well have been felt as a home, a place where you are received with a hug. I don’t want to get entangled in my psychological ramblings, Mr. Rose. So be that as it may, the scene was sexual. Now another confession, this one a bit stupider. It has to do with female insecurity. The truth was that I was self-conscious about being so thin. The last time we had made love I had been some forty-four pounds heavier, and Sleepy Joe wasn’t at all attracted to the sylph type, and had always said he liked my body because it gave him something to hang on to. Now I’d come back looking like a scarecrow, all bones, and I didn’t want him to see it, to realize that the thing he liked about me was no longer there. I had an idea. I’m not sure if right at that moment or a bit later, but I had an idea. Maybe not such a great idea. “Wait here,” I said to him in a very seductive voice, “I’ll be right back.” Sleepy Joe stayed in the living room while I went into the bedroom and took off my clothes, all my clothes. The mirror in my vanity was broken. They had destroyed it with everything else when they had burst in, but for one jagged piece that still hung there. I caught a glimpse of myself there. Where before there had been a full and delightful body, as someone had once described it, now it was just a skinny thing, too skinny. And that wasn’t the worst of it. When I looked closely, I realized how evident the suffering was on me. Maybe that’s what I should keep Sleepy Joe from seeing, I thought. What I need to hide from him is not so much this thinness, but the pain and weariness I’m carrying inside. That person in the mirror looked like a piece of cow cud or something that had been put through a grinder. Everything that had happened to me had turned my soul into jelly. Something told me that I needed to keep that from Sleepy Joe. I’m not sure why. It just seemed like an anti-aphrodisiac. Who’d want to hook up with someone so beaten down? I didn’t feel very seductive, let’s just say, but at least with my clothes on it wasn’t so noticeable.

Now that I’m recounting all this, Mr. Rose, I realize there may have been different reasons. I didn’t want Sleepy Joe to guess the true state of my ruins, because it would prove costly, I was sure. He would be merciless, taking advantage of it to hurt me further. Getting naked in front of him would be like taking off my armor and exposing myself. But that’s what I think now, like I’m telling you, that night my head was somewhere else, so the next step was to let my hair loose and lower my head to brush it all forward, all of it, and then in one gesture, throw it all back so it fell down my back thick and frizzy. Do you see where I was going? Then I put on the mink that Socorro had given me, finally finding some use for that coat, throwing it over my skin and bones, bare naked under it. An old female trick, à la Marilyn Monroe, fill a man with wonder by appearing naked under a fur, also very useful to hide physical defects, in this case, my hyper thinness, so Sleepy Joe wouldn’t realize I was bony as a stray cat. Not to mention the hemorrhaging, so that he wouldn’t notice that especially. God forbid he thought I had my period, because then the whole seduction ruse would be fucked. There was nothing that terrified him more than menstrual blood. Like I’ve said, no one could outdo this man when it came to weird ticks and prejudices. I stripped down, threw on the fur, and went out to try my luck. My Greg, with his obsession with Christmas carols, had a video in which Eartha Kitt sang “Santa Baby.” Kitt is naked under her white mink in the video, or so it seems, and my poor Greg used to imitate her using a towel, clowning around, showing his bare shoulders as he sang along karaoke-like about seducing St. Nick to get a blue convertible for Christmas: “I’ll wait up for you, dear Santa baby, so hurry down the chimney tonight.” You can imagine. But first, let’s shoo Greg from my memory, Mr. Rose, so I can go on with my story. It’s hard to explain how much Greg’s memory weighs on me, all that time I had cheated on him. That was not right, my poor old man. Poor me too, left without love or company. But let’s move on. I went back to Sleepy Joe in my tattered mink, all seductive and stuff, cue the sexy music, a sexy little kitten moving in stealthily step-by-step through the hallway, humming “Santa Baby” and letting the fur slide ever so slowly down my shoulder. And the Neanderthal of Sleepy Joe, instead of focusing me, all of a sudden could see nothing else but the fact that I had a mink coat. Think about it, Mr. Rose, he realized I had a mink coat. He went nuts.

“You liar,” he screamed. “You do have the money! You took the hundred and fifty thousand. How else would you have such a coat? You bought it with that money, you fucking liar, admit it.”

Unbelievably, for Sleepy Joe that coat was proof that I had the money and was spending it on luxuries. That made him start to get violent. He grabbed me hard and demanded I tell him where the money was, with his big open mouth close to my face. “Where’s the money, you bitch? Did you spend it all already? You didn’t save even a little bit for me?” And liar and bitch, and liar and bitch. “Not even a little bit for your papacito? Huh, you bitch? Not even a little bit?” He had me by the hair and was tugging it so hard it hurt. This can’t be, I thought to myself, is life just a repeating reel? Before this it had been Birdie, now Sleepy Joe, both assaulting me for the same reason — the only difference that Sleepy Joe wasn’t smacking my face. He shoved me around but did not strike me. I just want to be clear on that detail, Mr. Rose: Sleepy Joe, the thug, the scrounger, did not smack me, while the FBI, who supposedly stood for law and order, had beaten me senseless. But the two scenes also had their similarities, and to think that so much fuss was about some money that I had never seen in my life, one hundred and fifty thousand blessed dollars. Son of a bitch, if I would have had that kind of money, none of these losers would have seen me or my shadow again. I would have taken off for Seville, Seville in the spring with the flowers blooming, that city I had never visited but dreamed about, fled to Seville where these animals couldn’t put a hand on me. I tried to think about that and only that, Seville and its blooming gardens, while Joe manhandled me and screamed, sticking his chest out and getting all machito on me, till I was in tears because of that deep and violent voice. All that show of manhood so I would throw myself at his feet and shrink like a worm. What did this asshole want? For me to apologize. Fine, I’d apologize, I’d suck him off if that’s what it took for him not to smash my face in, and was just about to beg forgiveness on my knees. But for what? I hadn’t even seen that money, much less had my hands on it. So beg for forgiveness out of sheer exhaustion, to save my neck, so this animal would think he had won, that the battle was his, that I was not even worth hitting anymore. Beg for forgiveness so Mr. Macho Man would stop his assault. But something in me didn’t want to go there, bend over, humiliate myself. I just didn’t feel like it. Hadn’t I just survived hell itself, where I had to learn to defend myself against real monsters? I wasn’t going to let this shitty little asshole bring me down now. I could give him a Swiss kiss that would rip the lips off his face. See if he stopped screaming then? I had never actually done the Swiss kiss to anyone while in Manninpox but I knew about it through the grapevine. Better to try a more proven method. So I head-butted him smack in the middle of the nose with such a brutal force that I heard something crack, like a branch breaking off, and when I saw the concern with which the moron took his hands to his blood-soaked face, I said to myself, now, María Paz, now or never! And I was off, without a hitch, as they say. Bone thin and naked as I was, I untangled myself from him, slipping out of the coat like a serpent from its old skin. He held on to the moth-eaten mink with one hand, more surprised than anything, his face covered in blood. He tossed the coat aside and tried to chase after me, but his feet got caught up in the extension cord and he came crashing down with a loud thud, like an armoire tumbling over, leaving the apartment in darkness again. I wish you could have seen that idiot, Mr. Rose. The way he came down as if struck again, in the end — it was comical. Too bad I didn’t have a video camera. The howling when for the second time that night that nose got smashed in was unforgettable. That gave me time to run into the bedroom and hide behind the stinky mattress leaning up against the wall, leaving a little space where I was just able to fit. There I waited, protected by the darkness, like I hoped brave Hero was, somewhere else, and listening to Sleepy Joe grope around in the darkness and bellow, looking for me. The night could not last forever, and soon light began to seep in through the window. A pale mist began to fill the room, and since it was so thin at first it didn’t quite reach my hiding place, but soon enough it spread and brightened the whole room, leaving me exposed. All Sleepy Joe had to do was stick his head in the room and he’d see me hiding there behind the mattress like a terrified, sorry-ass little mouse. That’s not how it was going to be, I decided. Instead of panicking, I grew very peaceful. If there was nothing to do, there was nothing to lose, I said to myself. If Joe was going to find me, he might as well find me ready to defend myself. So I came out from the hiding place, went to the closet, and grabbed a baseball bat that had been Greg’s since he was a kid, gripped it tight with both hands, and waited strategically behind the door, taking a good stance to be able to unleash the bat across Sleepy Joe’s head as soon as he crossed the threshold. Then I heard the tap of his yellow boots. Heard him coming. If he was out to hurt me, he had best be ready to be hurt twice as bad. Greg had made me watch his favorite video a thousand times: “The Twenty Greatest Home Runs,” which among others included highlights of Kirk Gibson’s glorious high fly-ball doozie in Dodger Stadium, Bill Mazeroski’s World Series slam, and the best one of all, the one that I had seen so often that I had memorized it, October 3, 1951, Bobby Thomson of the New York Giants battling the Brooklyn Dodgers for the National League pennant takes a pitch from Ralph Branca, and with all the soul and cojones he had in him line-drived the fuck out of that ball for the most memorable home run of all times. And that’s the exact position I was in behind that door, with a strong grip on the bat and ready to send this retard Sleepy Joe flying out the window so his head plunged into the asphalt and he became what he truly was, a little splatter of shit, a piece of garbage that everyone would simply step over like all the other garbage in this neighborhood.

Alas, I was no Bobby Thomson. What a loser of a ballplayer I turned out to be. Sleepy Joe came in and in a matter of seconds he wrestled the bat from me.

“Time to pray, my little hot ass,” he said, his face all drool and blood, and because his voice was all nasal with the broken nose, he sounded more dejected than enraged.

“Go ahead,” I said. “Go up to the roof and pray; I’ll wait for you right here.”

As if he was going to do as I said. He grabbed my arm and bent it behind my back in some jujitsu hold and led me up the stairs to the roof. It was dawn, the time the little Slovak boys performed their prayers. Once up on the roof, Sleepy Joe took off his belt and bound me to the railing with my hands behind my back and naked as I was.

“Let’s see if you can let me pray in peace, you two-timing whore,” he said.

“I’m cold, Joe,” I responded.

“Shut up, bitch, or I’ll warm you up with a beating.”

“But why are you tying me up?”

“So you don’t escape.”

“I’m not going to leave.”

“Bullshit, you bitch.”

I had never actually known what the brothers did on the roof during their prayers because they never let me up there, assuring me it was not for women. But this time I saw how Joe lit some candles, spread out some blankets, messed around with a bell, took out a Bible, incense, and I couldn’t tell what other knickknacks and placed them all very meticulously on a red cloth spread out on the floor as if for a picnic. What a dirty Mass, I thought.

“Stop playing around, Joe,” I called. “Come here, hon, untie me. Or at least cover me with something; don’t let me freeze to death here. And don’t get so close to the edge, baby, careful or you’ll fall off.” I said all this in a very sweet tone to see if I could win him over, but he was so focused on the whole ceremony that it was as if I wasn’t even there.

“Get over here, Joe, give me a little kiss.” I didn’t know what else to try. “Come on, let me go, don’t be such a bad boy to me. Let me clean up that nose, my poor little baby. Does it hurt a lot? Why don’t we just go back down, things were so good there—”

“Shut your mouth, you whore, I’m doing this,” he said without even turning to look at me.

Sure enough, he was doing that, on some cosmic voyage or some shit, as if he were in another world, tooth and nail with his god so nothing else mattered. Meanwhile, the city slept below, and I trembled naked in the cold. What could I do? Scream? Wake up the whole neighborhood, yelling for help by causing a scene? Not a bad plan. But Joe must have thought about such a possibility at the same time, because he interrupted his little Mass and came over and gagged me with a handkerchief. So much for my plan. After he was done muffling me, the nutcase moved away and knelt on the very edge of the roof — and because there were no parapets on the cement roofs of the buildings in this neighborhood, the edge was like the edge of a cliff. A wind swept across the roof, blew out the candles, and tousled my hair. The city was waking up little by little below, and I was a little stunned by the change in my brother-in-law. Just a little while ago, he had been a raging macho hyped on testosterone, and now he seemed to be some type of angel glowing in the divine light of morning. He was moving in slow motion, half monk and half yogi, and he began to chant, at first in a low voice with his head lowered and his whole body folded in on itself, like some giant fetus floating in the amniotic fluid of the first light of day. Then slowly his voice grew louder. He straightened up and let his head fall back theatrically, and his body went into convulsions or something, as if electrical shocks were coursing through his body. His body shook epileptically, but somewhat controlled, the petit mal, let’s say — I know too well about these things with all the psych wards I’ve had to visit for Violeta.

A song in two different tones now broke out from Sleepy Joe, first one tone then the other. For the first tone, a grand and serious voice emerged from his throat, a voice like Greg’s, I remember thinking, if I closed my eyes I could imagine it was Greg who was there, it was his Gregorian chant. Motherfucker, I thought then, I was hallucinating because of the incense that, not for nothing, smells like weed. What purpose did all this serve for him? What was the point of this ridiculous theater? Did he miss his brother? Was he summoning the spirit? I began to shiver. And then it was no longer Greg’s voice that was coming out of that throat, now it was a little thin voice, almost a child’s, that responded to the other one. Sleepy Joe’s voice as a child? The two brothers together and praying? Oh, God, so horrific I was getting goose bumps. They must have been very ancient chants from Slovakia, but so incomprehensible, son of a bitch, lightning over Tatras. In spite of it all, there was something very impressive about it, I had to admit. Sleepy Joe’s silhouette over the city was a potent sight. My loser brother-in-law had become a dark, half-naked priest, with the bloody face and the rivulets of blood dripping on the crucifix tattooed on his chest. He spread out his arms as if he wanted to hold the universe and let his head fall back. No laughing matter here — this was scaring the shit out of me. His back was tense, so arched that his ribs stood out like a vault. I was beginning to lose it, I don’t know, so much so that Sleepy Joe seemed to be emitting heat and brightness, perhaps burning, it seemed as if the air around him had caught fire. The veins in his neck popped out and his fists were so clenched that I could imagine his nails cutting into his palms. Could it be that he had some kind of supernatural powers? Greg used to say that his little brother was imbued with the Spirit, but I never believed that crap, because I knew that if his little brother had any powers they were located elsewhere. But now, watching this mystical display, I wasn’t so sure. Stop with this idiocy, María Paz, I told myself — what powers? what possession? — it’s just your asshole brother-in-law monkeying around with rusty buckets and pots and tin sheets. But the reality was that the man covered in blood celebrating this ancient ritual at times did seem more than just a man. Of course, I knew that wasn’t the case. He was just some maniac. Not a devil, just a man. It was a line from some movie that came into my head then. And it helped calmed me down, not the devil, just a fucking man. I repeated it to myself. This Sleepy Joe was like a coyote, mysterious and cowardly. A loser, all fucked up and defeated by life. But in that state he was in during the ritual, shaken by some sort of celestial orgasm, with his eyes gone white and fully raised to the heavens, Jesus, you had to respect it. I swear, Mr. Rose, more than a man. As if some high-voltage electrical shocks had transformed him, that’s what it seemed for a moment, and I began to understand some things then. I felt as if Corina were beside me and suddenly I got it. My Corina, I’m sorry for my stupidity. This is what you saw, Cori? This is why you fled, to save yourself. This is what frightened the shit out of you. This fear I feel now was your fear. These muffled screams were your screams. Oh, Bolivia, my beautiful mamacita in heaven, Corina in Chalatenango, have mercy on me and save me from this lunatic. Something has happened, now I can see that this uncouth man who had been my lover has been endowed with some horrendous power. He was a terrifying being, inside and out; he instilled fear in others and at the same time was devoured by it. His faith was nothing more than panic raised to a maddening power. But this was the first time I witnessed the full metamorphosis. I had known the signs. They were obvious every time we made love.

Sleepy Joe made his way through life half-asleep, lacking in initiative, no plans, indifferent and drowsy, a pack of muscles that went underused. In bed, however, he was able to let loose that impressive voltage that dwelled inside him.

“If you were to put such energy into work,” I always told him, “you’d be a millionaire.”

When it came to sex, everything about him was much too grand and lasted forever. There was in him a kind of excess that made me think of a goat, an animal in heat, a satyr, something not quite human, like those hyperactive and hypersexual monkeys Violeta and I saw once in the zoo, jerking off and fucking like crazy in the cage. Violeta was speechless. “Let’s go,” I told her, grabbing her arm, “come on, Violeta, there are other cute animals.” But Violeta did not move from there. “You go,” she responded, “I want to see this.” I had also glimpsed the other Sleepy Joe, in those fits of rage that made him want to kill everyone and everything. This monk-like creature on the roof was not my brother-in-law, not my boyfriend or my lover, not his brother Greg, not the poor, good-for-nothing Joe, the sleepy, lonely, fake trucker. He was something else now, a feverish possessed lunatic, a sinister priest, a murderer clown. This son of a bitch would no doubt kill me, I thought. Suddenly that became very clear to me. Or at the least impale me with a broom, as he had done to Corina.

There were some nails lying around and I started to try to reach them with my foot, little by little, so he wouldn’t notice. Until finally I was able to get a hand on one and with it I started to loosen the knot on the belt, doing it in little steps, patiently, slowly. It was time to gamble all or nothing: Sleepy Joe was flying, stoned with the divine presence, and as the knot started to come loose, I gave a good pull on the belt, managed to free myself, and flew down the stairs as fast as I could. I wasn’t going to make the same mistake as before, no more of this hiding in the rat hole. This time, I grabbed my mink and shoes, and Joe’s wallet, which in a stroke of brilliance I snagged out of his jacket, and ran out the door. I flew down the stairs and out into the street! I buttoned the mink all the way up so that it wasn’t obvious I was butt naked underneath, and soon I was down in the labyrinths of the subway.

Hero! Shit, I had left Hero behind again. I hadn’t even seen him when I rushed out, and to look for him at that moment would have been suicide. But whatever was to happen, this time I was committing to rescuing him once and for all. At the next station, I got out of the subway and hailed a cab. You must be wondering, Mr. Rose, why I just didn’t call the cops to have Sleepy Joe arrested. The answer is simply that the cops are the enemy, that’s the main difference between your people and my people. You have authority on your side, and we always have it against us. If I would have gone to the cops in the state I was in, an ex-con in their eyes, a mess, ass naked under the mink, do you get how fucked I would have been, Mr. Rose?

“Just go,” I told the cabdriver.

“Where?”

“Just away from here.”

After a few minutes of riding around, I gave the driver my address. When we got there, I instructed him to park nearby, behind some garbage Dumpster halfway down the block. I scrutinized the driver while we waited. He was an ogre from the very heart of Africa, a man of few words who took shit from no one. This was my man, I told myself. Nothing was going to faze this guy. And money was not a problem because there was three hundred dollars in my brother-in-law’s wallet.

“If you don’t mind, I’m going to hide here,” I told the driver, crouching on the floor of the backseat and greasing his hand with a hundred-dollar bill. “Go up to the fifth floor of that building and let me know if there is anyone there. Go in the apartment, check everywhere, the bathroom, the kitchen, everywhere. If there’s no one there, check the roof, just a look, and come down and let me know. There’s no lock on the door. I just don’t want to run into my drunk of a husband, you know. He hits me when he drinks. No big thing, you have nothing to worry—”

“I’m not worried,” he cut me off. It seemed he’d done this kind of thing before.

“If you run into him, just say you must have the wrong floor.”

“I can take care of myself, miss.”

“Good, I’ll wait for you here.”

Ten minutes later, the driver returned. Good as new.

“He’s in there alright,” he told me. “On the roof. Some tall blond dude?”

“Then let’s wait till he comes out. I’ll stay down here and you keep a lookout. I have another fifty. Easy money. Just tell me when he leaves.”

“There goes the son of a bitch,” the driver announced forty-five minutes later. “That’s the dude on the roof.”

And sure enough, it was him — hands in pockets, head buried under the upturned collar of his jacket. Sleepy Joe walked down the street and out of sight.

“Wait for me here,” I said to the driver. The plan was to go quickly into the apartment, get Hero, some clothes, especially the stuff Pro Bono bought me for the trial, which I had left sitting out, and leave there forever.

“Hero?” I started calling him. “Hero? Hero! Come here, my little doggy, where are you, my precious? Where you hiding? Come to Mommy. Don’t be afraid; Joe’s gone; the monster’s not here.” But nothing. I looked for him under the sofa, behind the refrigerator, in the bathtub, the closets, nothing. He had to be somewhere. He always used to hide really well when Sleepy Joe was around, but I couldn’t find him anywhere and it was not that big of an apartment. I climbed up to the roof, already very freaked out, I knew he couldn’t even climb up there in his state, but I went to check. The sun was already hitting the tar full force, and the remains of Joe’s ceremony were scattered all about. Candle stubs, little wax puddles, a few rags blown by the breeze, and a thread of smoke from incense still burning. That’s it. Now that I’m telling you this, Mr. Rose, I recall this amazing nightclub I once went to with Sleepy Joe because Greg was out of town tending to some problem in his other house. Sleepy Joe and I went dancing, my idea — I paid for it and chose the place, a nightclub named Le Palace that was one of the most astonishing places I had seen in my life, with music blasting so loud that I felt it vibrating inside of me, and that extravagant mob flying on Ecstasy and drinking tons of water, women showing off their tits, the trannies wrapped in sequins and feathers, the couples amid the incredible high-tech laser light show. Four floors of live music, and I floated amid the lights and careless laughter as if I were inside a fish tank, not knowing for sure if all that was real or if I was just dreaming. Needless to say, I had an amazing time, even if Sleepy Joe was in a shitty mood and had to be dragged to the dance floor. But in the middle of it all, I lost an earring. It was a little gold stud that I really liked but I hadn’t even noticed I had lost it till I got home. So the following morning, I had to go back to the nightclub and see if I could find the earring. The place was closed but the workers let me in while they looked, and I was shocked. In the light of day, the spell from the night before was shattered. Imagine Cinderella’s world after the clock strikes twelve. The so-called Le Palace was just an empty soulless warehouse area, a really gloomy place, deathly silent and with battered furniture covered with dust, badly painted black walls, torn curtains, a suffocating smell of cigarettes, and garbage in every corner. In the light of the day, the nocturnal paradise was reduced to ashes. Now, on the roof of my building, I looked with the same unease at what remained of the great ceremony my brother-in-law had conducted. It was so desolate, such an inconsequential place, littered with broken toys. That was the feeling I had, as if I were seeing the remnants of a children’s game. The whole scene was nothing more than a poor imitation, an absurdity instead of a real ritual. And that had been the horrible scene, the dark nightmare? I swear I felt ridiculous about the ghosts I had invented in my head. Where had that unwarranted fear that had left me paralyzed just a couple of hours before come from? But then I found something that congealed the blood in my veins. It was something so frightening that my legs weakened and I fell to the ground. I had to cover my mouth to stifle the scream that escaped from me, in pieces, almost comical, like one of those doomed girls in a horror film. What followed was something visceral, absolute terror. I saw Hero. Sleepy Joe had nailed him to the wall. My doggy. Sleepy Joe had nailed my dog to a wall up there on the roof. There was Hero crucified, bleeding, and already dead. I bent over at the waist clutching my stomach as if someone had kicked me there. I was paralyzed by the pain, the horror, the anguish, the trembling, shaking like a leaf, Mr. Rose. When I was finally able to react, I pulled the nails off, washed the wounds, kissed Hero’s snout, and stroked his body a long time, crying over him, and then I placed the remains in a pillowcase.

From Cleve’s Notebook

I hadn’t known anything else about María Paz since the workshop at Manninpox had ended. But I thought a lot about her, all the time, I should say. I was hooked to her pain, tangled to her hair, dreaming of her eyes, maddeningly wanting to touch her legs. Who knew if I would see her again, and the uncertainty was killing me. When I tried to visit her in prison, they told me she wasn’t there anymore. Her old friends couldn’t tell me anything about her because they had not heard from her. And then one morning, I’m on Facebook and I get a friend request. I always deny them, hating these intrusions from strangers. But this one said, “Juanita wants to be your friend.” I had no idea who this Juanita was, but it was a Latina name and I immediately thought that perhaps it might help if I became friends with her in relation to María Paz. Instinct? Premonition? Neither, really, more like desperate love. How many times had I answered the phone convinced it would be her, and nothing? How many times had I followed some woman down the street thinking it could be her, and nothing? And now another time, this friend request on Facebook, which I immediately thought could be connected to her. And it was. This time it was.

María Paz had been looking for me through her friend, this Juanita getting in touch. So we arranged to meet that afternoon in Central Park, and because I was coming from the Catskills, full of hope and very jittery, I almost killed myself on the way down trying to get there on time. The meet-up was somewhere she had proposed, near the statue of Alice in Wonderland, right in the heart of the park.

I can’t say that there was anything exciting about that first moment, anything romantic. Something wasn’t right, something had broken, and things were different than they had been in Manninpox. I had spent weeks going over in my mind each of those moments of shared complicity, those sudden bursts of excitement, those shocks of illicit attraction between us. But at the park, all that was gone. In the plain light of day, in an area reserved mostly for children, with her as free as I was, no guards watching us, no rules and regulations to follow, the magic had gone. We were a couple of strangers, she without a uniform, all made-up, her hair longer, a flashy pair of earrings. Perhaps prettier than before, I’m not sure, but definitely a lot thinner. And something strange about her, as if the fire of that raw beauty that made me so insanely attracted to her had suddenly gone out. Something missing, that’s how I would put it. She looked dazed, half-asleep. I felt as if I were looking at some creature that had just risen from the dead, some being from some other reality that hadn’t fully made it into ours. I tried to convince myself that the girl of my dreams and this stranger were the same person, but something faltered in me. I went to give her a hug, see if the physical contact would thaw things a bit, but she brusquely cut me off, and I felt horrible, mistaken, ridiculous, out of my element. Later, she told me of the sudden and miraculous turn of events that had led to her freedom, which I supposed had a lot to do with this new mood between us. This woman has just come back from the underworld, I told myself, so it was natural that our world would still be a little strange to her. And what had been her first impression of me? Couldn’t have been much better. I must have seemed just like any other guy, no longer donning the writing teacher mantle, instead wearing a threadbare leather vest and boots, which were white because I had bought them in a thrift store and that was the only color available, but which aside from being white were also bulky, as if they were made for an astronaut to walk on the moon, not to mention the ugly red mark on my forehead because my helmet was one size too small. Some motorcyclists take off their helmets, tidy up their hair, and look great in a matter of minutes. I am not one of them. When I take off my helmet, I look sopped and disoriented, like a plucked chicken. The first thing María Paz asked me was if I had received her manuscript. And I said I had no idea what she was talking about. What manuscript? A very long one, she told me, and it had taken her days and days to write it while she was still in Manninpox. She was horribly disappointed when she realized I didn’t even know about it. It was clear she had put everything she had into writing her story, and that the manuscript had been lost was like a blow to the gut, one more loss among so many others. I felt like an idiot consoling her, assuring her we could find it, could find out what that woman from Staten Island who was supposed to have sent it to me did with it.

“Why did you try to send it through that woman and not your lawyer?” I asked her, and she said that there had been rumors going around that everything was going to be confiscated and she had no choice but to hand it off to the first person who showed up to visit.

Be that as it may, things were tense there in the park. Maybe we had both been expecting too much, and when it came to it, things were just different. Maybe my expectations were just different from hers, but, whatever the cause, it was an anticlimactic scene. It seemed in fact as if the old connection was missing. The conversation was going in reverse, each exchange of words like giving birth, the kind of birth where you have to use forceps, and that was just on my part; I was doing all the heavy breathing and pushing and all the while she remained undaunted: silent and absent. There I was, putting on a show, playing ping-pong against myself. What a difference from those moments after class in the prison, the way we contained ourselves in front of the other inmates, the distress in front of the guards, the indirect communications between her and me, the little word games, disguised seduction, all that spilled energy, the sexual drive under extreme circumstances. All that illicit flirtation, that pseudo fucking right there in that jail, or at least that’s what it seemed to me, but now everything was flat, sadly antiorgasmic. We finally had a chance to tell each other everything we had kept suppressed before, but it was as if there wasn’t anything to say. María Paz was definitely acting strange. She seemed so dejected, so sad. I tried to change the mood with a rigorous interrogation: “When did you leave Manninpox? Have you been found innocent? Are you on some sort of parole? How have you been since then? Have you been able to get in touch with your sister?” Such basic questions seemed to puzzle her, or bore her, or something; in any case, she let them pass without even trying to respond. When I asked about her time in jail after the class was canceled, she responded with a gesture of indifference and said, “I told you about all that already in the manuscript that was lost. Everything was in there.

“Tomorrow is my trial,” she told me suddenly, and then a bulb came on inside my head: the eve of the trial, of course, that is the root of the problem, worst time possible for any kind of romantic connection. I told her that it was no wonder she seemed concerned.

“No, it has nothing to do with the trial,” she retorted.

“So, what is it then?”

“My writing, does that not matter to you? Do you know how many days I spent writing that? How many hours, with shitty pencils the size of a cigarette butt? Even in the dark, I wrote. Come on, Mr. Rose. I dreamed you were going to read all of it one day, kissing ass with the guards, to see if they could slip me any piece of paper, and now that all the shit is lost, all that work for nothing, and you’re telling me I shouldn’t be upset.”

“María Paz, I’m really sorry, me more than anyone, but don’t be like that with me, it’s not my fault.”

“It is your fault, who else’s? You were the one who put all these delusions into my head,” she responded, turning her back to me and pulling some papers out of her bag, which she tore into pieces and threw in a trash can.

“What are you doing?” I shouted to her. “What are you tearing?”

“New chapters that I brought you. So what? Everything is fucked anyway.”

Quite the little scene she was putting on, right in the middle of the park, an unexpected tantrum by a spoiled brat and with the destruction of the manuscript in theatrical gestures à la Moses breaking the Tablets of the Law. If I had not been a writer or aspiring to be, I would have never understood the frustration of someone who had spilled her guts on these pages, and when I say on every page, I mean every paragraph, every line… and more so under such harsh conditions as she’d done because of what I had made her believe. So it felt like a violation when she was tearing up the pages, as if she were violating some part of her, and both of us remained still, shivering, and mourning.

It took a couple of minutes to react, but eventually I did. I moved to the garbage, and, like a Red Cross volunteer, I set off to rescue any of the surviving torn pieces of manuscript. Some had been smeared with organic yogurt, others with the remains of Turkish wraps, and the luckiest ones Van Leeuwen ice cream.

“Leave it alone, Mr. Rose,” she told me, “don’t.”

But that wasn’t going to stop me. I continued sifting through the garbage, which I was not disgusted with at all, until I had recovered most of the manuscript, and although all wrinkled and sticky, my girl’s chapters made it out of the sinking boat alive and ready for a little reconstructive surgery. I put the pieces in a plastic bag that I also found in the garbage and tucked the bag safely in a jacket pocket. I had hoped that after my heroic feat there would be some appreciation, or admiration, the kind of moment when Lois Lane finds out the geek Clark Kent is Superman. But that wasn’t the case. María Paz hardly reacted.

“Why would you bother?” was all she said to me, but I suspect that deep down the gesture had moved her.

After a while I asked, “Do you want me to go?” And she asked, “Where?”

“To your trial, María Paz. I want to go with you.” And she accepted, but accepted without much excitement, and so we remained there, acting like strangers. Me from a simple and calm world, she from one shaken by drama; me with a secure future, she with her fate hanging by a hair; me looking at her from between the ears of the White Rabbit, she sitting on the bronze mushroom beside the Mad Hatter; the two of us finding no way to break our deafness, or our muteness, because we had failed to articulate what we had wanted to say from the moment we met. In any case, I felt exhausted, defeated, convinced by that point that I had invented everything, that all that give-and-take at Manninpox had been unilateral, that any give had a corresponding take that was just a figment of my imagination. Standing there, it occurred to me to ask, “Why is a raven like a writing desk?” The riddle posed by the Mad Hatter in Carroll’s book. I guess I asked it because what else was there to say with us just standing there. María Paz knew how to respond: “I give it up. What is the answer?” she said. Exactly what Alice says. She must have read the book at least twice, because she knew exactly what I was talking about and kept to the script perfectly. “I haven’t the slightest idea,” I replied, just as the Mad Hatter did. Bingo! There was the magic, the connection, the key to the door that was closed until that moment.

Then finally we laughed, as if we had suddenly recognized each other. We hugged. Holy shit, what a hug, the great, long hug of two people who become one, using four arms to press in, to amass, until they find that they no longer want to let go. Her face buried in my chest, my face buried in her hair, a long-expected, long-awaited hug from eternity to forever. I mean, it was the hug of a lifetime. Things between us began to proceed as before, or much better than before; arguably, we moved the second stage of a narrative, which graphic novelists call “things go right” and that comes after “conflict begins” and before “things go wrong.” By now, we were starting to float in the bliss of “things go right,” and she told me she wanted to know something about my world because I had shared hers during my days at Manninpox, but she did not know anything about mine except what she had imagined from the few facts that I let seep in.

“We can do that later,” I said. “For now it is important you rest and get ready…”

“Perhaps there is no later,” she said. “I want to do it now.”

I asked her if she wanted to visit Dorita, and it upset her because she thought I meant my girlfriend. I explained that Dorita was not my girlfriend but the girlfriend of the suicide poet, and that she and the poet were the protagonists in my series of graphic novels. I suggested we visit the Forbidden Planet on Broadway, which sold manga and anime, retro and modern comics, pop-culture items, Japanese figures, and T-shirts and hoodies, and where both vendors and patrons were fans of my novels. I explained that Forbidden Planet was a heaven for nerds, a nostalgic corner that smelled of lost childhood, where children who were no longer children went to look for toys. It had been one of my places of worship and a great showcase for my Suicide Poet and His Girlfriend Dorita. She agreed to go but said she wanted to eat something first.

We went into the first diner on Madison Avenue that we passed and ordered spinach omelets and salad, and she began to recount, from beginning to end, the implausible events that led to her release from Manninpox and the multitude of things that had happened since. All of it was very emotional, and I thought she was going to break down and start weeping, but she didn’t: my girl was beyond tears. Though the trial was to take place the next day, we did not say anything, not a word, not mentioning it as if to not tempt fate. But, finally, the topic had to be addressed; it was unwise to continue avoiding it.

“The only thing that’s important now is the trial,” I said, very aware that it was not the best way to approach the issue. She remained firm and did not answer. Instead, she talked a lot about Sleepy Joe, her brother-in-law, and confessed that she had also been his lover. She harped so much on this guy, it made me feel lousy, because at the time, she seemed interested only in him. And what a story she told, a folksy and spooky version of the drama of Paolo and Francesca, the two kin who become lovers and dwell in Dante’s hell. The difference was those two had been killed by the husband, while in this story the husband was dead. According to the description María Paz offered of her brother-in-law, I saw him as a sexist, an abuser of women, an ultra-Catholic, an uneducated and violent man… an ordinary person. And then, I saw him for real. Speaking of the devil or its semblance. At first, I saw it in the eyes of María Paz, the flash of panic. She was facing the entrance to the diner, and I was on the other side of the table, facing the back of the room.

Suddenly she saw something, or someone, who appeared behind me, and the color drained from her face. I turned to look toward the door and saw this somewhat handsome thug with a hostile, sullen, pissed-off look on his face. He was white, muscular, and supple, but show-offy, cocky, wearing very tight jeans, the kind you have to put on using plastic bags, topped off with an ostentatious belt buckle that signaled he was ready to whip anyone. He avoided looking our way, though it was clear he saw us. He passed right by and sat at a table a few feet away with his back to us.

“That’s him,” María told me, grabbing her bag and getting ready to run out of there.

“Him?” I asked, although I had guessed already. “Who?”

“Him, Sleepy Joe,” she murmured his name as if it were an evil spell, and I, very nervous, was only able to respond that she should calm down. I suggested she should not let her fear show.

“What did he do to you that you get like this?” I asked several times, but she didn’t respond. She pretended to continue to eat but couldn’t even swallow one bite; it was obvious that she was not all there. I only had a view of the man’s back, and I noticed how he passed his hand through his ashy, dirty hair every once in a while; but then he turned as if wanting to catch my eyes. And I couldn’t avoid them, those eyes, inexpressive, fucking cold eyes devoid of feeling. At that moment, I realized that he was your typical neighborhood hoodlum, a good-for-nothing, but I sensed something very dark dwelled inside him. This poor devil could become the devil himself, I thought.

“What’s up with this horrible guy?” I began to ask María Paz, but she got up and dashed out of the diner before I could finish speaking.

She hurried up Madison Avenue with me trailing her, and pushed through the heavy glass door of an upscale boutique, running all the way to the back of the store like a soul possessed. In the shoe section, I finally caught up and grabbed her by the arm.

“Why is he following you?” I asked.

“Because he wants some money he thinks I have, but I don’t have it. Partly because of that, and partly because he loves me.”

We ran back to my bike and got on to try and lose this loser: a blurry sequence of turns and skids, me and María Paz going around in circles in the city, feeling this animal on our heels, disappearing into alleys and passageways to shake him off. Meanwhile, I was trying to get María Paz to explain things to me, to get me up to speed about this threat, this mystery. The realization hit me like a bucket of cold water, that unlike when we were behind walls of Manninpox, where I didn’t have to deal with the crimes she may have committed, here, in the real world, in the streets of New York, I was getting the whole package, the girl and the consequences, the girl and her past, the girl and her true story, the one that she had not wanted to tell me in the writing exercises I assigned for class — me insisting we should call the cops on Sleepy Joe, she insisting we could not.

“That son of a bitch is harassing you,” I said almost furious. “Why don’t you just fucking turn him in?”

She refused without offering any explanations, so I just tried to convince her to spend the night in my studio, where I knew I could take care of her. I told her I would sleep on the floor and she could have the bed so she could rest, that the following day I would make her breakfast. Then a nice hot shower that would leave her feeling like new, and I would take her on my bike to Bronx Criminal Division, escorting her safe and sound right up to the door of the courtroom. For some reason she refused. Unbelievable, just like a woman. According to what she told me, the only reason why she couldn’t stay with me that night was that she had clothes for the trial stashed away in some other place, and she wanted to look good. “We’ll get the clothes and then I’ll take you home with me.” I begged her, but she made the whole thing difficult, too much of a big deal, and there was no way to convince her.

“If everything goes well tomorrow, we’ll take off wherever we want to go,” she promised me, “but if things go the other way, well then, they go the other way.”

I knew that phrase was going to play in my head all night; I wasn’t going to be able to shut my eyes for fear of dreaming of the places I would take her if everything went well, the secret beaches, the cabins in the woods, Prague, Istanbul, Santorini, or Buenos Aires. But all those dreams would be overshadowed by the threat of this fucking shit Sleepy Joe. I would have to ask her for a few more details, tell her to paint me a more complete picture, so I wouldn’t have spent that most important morning in her life wandering around. Because she assured me she had a place to stay, I let her go against my wishes. The best I could do was to promise her that the following day I would be there in the first row, keeping her spirits up. I could not stop her from getting off my bike and running down the subway steps into the bowels of the city. She hadn’t given me a phone number or an address where I could reach her in case of an emergency. “What for?” she said. “We are going to see each other in a couple of hours at the trial.”

The following day, I arrived before there was anyone in the courtroom, all dressed up in suit and tie, and I sat in the first row like I had promised her. A pair of attendants came in to install microphones, move some chairs around, and do whatever else, their steps echoing in the empty chamber as they left.

María Paz was still not there. A little while later, other people started coming in, guards, a lawyer, a very peculiar old man who I imagined was her lawyer, everyone, except her. The minutes passed and she did not arrive, my nerves were a mess, everyone else was just looking at their watches. There was no sign of her. I chewed my nails to the nubs and no sign of her. It sounds unbelievable, but María Paz never came. For some reason she never showed up. Never showed up to her own trial, forcing the judge to declare her in contempt and issue an arrest warrant, setting the powers of the law after her. What the fuck had happened?

It was the strangest thing and I racked my brain trying to come up with reasons for such a disaster: 1) Sleepy Joe had found María Paz and killed her. 2) Sleepy Joe had found María Paz and kidnapped her. 3) María Paz was running from me and she went looking for Sleepy Joe because deep down she was still in love with him, and they decided to flee the country together. 4) Somebody else did not want María Paz to testify and offed her. 5) María Paz hit her head and came down with amnesia like in the movies. From the moment I left the courtroom, all those reasons kept turning in my head, driving me crazy.

I remembered the manuscript from the day before and I returned quickly to St. Mark’s, dashed into the studio, took out the pieces from the pocket of my leather jacket, cleaned them up as best as I could, spread them out on my desk and began to tape the pieces together like a jigsaw puzzle. A puzzle that was about life and death, and I almost couldn’t shuffle because my hands were trembling so hard. It was dark by the time I had something that I could halfway read. The story in that manuscript was alarming, like everything about that woman, but in the end, it shed no light on what would have led her to miss her trial.

There was nothing to do. I had run out of hope. María Paz had lost herself again in the world, and I had no other option but to wait, night and day, until I heard from Juanita on Facebook again or some other sign reached me. If that happened, then María Paz was still alive. In more optimistic moments, I imagined her as a fugitive, hidden in some hole looking for a way to contact me. Although it could be that by that point she could be in a bikini wandering the beaches of Puerto Vallarta, in the arms of the criminal Sleepy Joe. I was desperate, checking my e-mail and Facebook all the time, reading the papers to see if there was any news of her arrest or even her death. Anything was possible, and I was in a bad state, completely disconcerted, with absolutely no appetite, and consumed by anxiety.

I’m writing this in a hurry from the Catskills. This afternoon I have to leave for Chicago, and I want to write down the recent events, now that I have finally been able to reconstruct everything. I don’t want to let another day pass, so I don’t forget any of the details. What else can I do? It’s the dark part of this job. María Paz was going to be the heroine of my next series of graphic novels; the poetry before all, as Hölderlin said. In the end, the hand follows the heart. After our meeting in the park and running from Sleepy Joe, María Paz went to some place in Queens, to the home of her friend Juanita, an ex-coworker, who had the clothes that María needed to wear for the trial. Juanita caught her up on all the hot gossip from work, made sure she had a good night’s sleep and a full breakfast, helped her dress, and said good-bye to her at the door with a big hug. “Good luck, my dear,” she said. She didn’t go to the trial because she couldn’t miss work, but that night she waited for her at the Estrella Latina, the best place in town, where they were going to celebrate by partying all night long.

“Can I bring a friend?” María Paz had asked her.

“A friend? There is a friend? Great. What’s his name?”

“Rose.”

“Ha. A lot of rug munchers in these women’s jails. So then your friend is a woman?”

“He’s a man, silly. A gringo. Rose is his last name.”

“Is he cute?”

“You’ll see for yourself. If they don’t throw me up in jail again.”

María Paz got to East 161st Street with plenty of time to spare. When she got out of the cab, the tight skirt ran up her legs, and she noticed the driver sneak a peek. Outside the courthouse, she tidied up her outfit, wet the ends of her fingers with her tongue, and pushed back a lock of hair that kept falling obnoxiously over her forehead. Following Pro Bono’s instructions to the letter, she had tied her hair up in a tight bun. She looked very distinguished, Juanita had told her, she seemed Andalusian. “A big-eared Andalusian,” María Paz had responded, pointing to her ears that jutted out of her head, according to her like the fins of a shark. It was a beautiful day, chilly sunlight and a blue sky, but she felt as if she had a dark cloud hanging over her. The feeling didn’t bode well, but nevertheless she made her way resolutely across the plaza toward the central building of Bronx Criminal Division. She strode toward the place courageously, although she thought it was an absurd courage, because it was leading her straight to her doom. Yet, she kept moving. Whatever would be would be; she was ready for it. In the end, it was all the same. Today was her day. If there were any justice in this world, things would turn out okay. But whoever said there was any justice in this world? She had given this a lot of thought and concluded that justice was just a sham, a shadow-puppet show put on by society to avoid dealing with the issues, a kind of theater that had nothing to do with ascertaining the truth. She would have liked to have felt strong, optimistic, confident, beautiful. Her lawyer was the best in town, and she was wearing a dark suit that looked amazing on her, surprising even her when she caught the reflection of her svelte figure in the glass windows. Crazy, she thought, finally I look a little bit like Holly; I had to go through all that hell just to look just a little bit like her. She clung to the two-thousand-dollar Gucci purse as if it were a shield, and she thought that wearing the pink scarf was a herald of her imminent victory. On her neck was the broken coin necklace given to her by her mother, Bolivia, when she had left for America, on her finger the wedding ring given to her by her deceased husband. Both pieces of jewelry been returned to her when she left prison, but today she felt as if the amulets were not working. Rub them all she wanted, but they were powerless. “Wish me luck, Gregory,” she told Greg. “Don’t go abandoning me now because I cheated on you, you know how much I have already paid for that.” “Help me, my beautiful mommy,” she told Bolivia as she crossed the esplanade, “if you are with me at all, you have to help me.” María Paz had gussied herself up the same way her mother had many years before when she went to meet the official from the immigration office to get her green card, and María wanted to believe that this time things would come out just as well. It would be just if they came out just as well, so much effort couldn’t have been in vain, so much struggle to conquer America could not end in tragedy. “Come on, Bolivia, lend me your strength, help me, Mommy, this is your mission, don’t forsake me now, don’t let your dream end in a nightmare.”

“Mommy? Greg?”

Nothing.

“Mommy? Greg?”

No one responded.

Today, my dead are dead, María Paz thought.

For days she had been meticulously studying the dossier Pro Bono had given her, all the instructions of what to say and what to keep quiet. Everything she had to say was memorized, but the words weren’t hers, nothing of what she was going to say in that courtroom room was what she really thought. Pro Bono had warned her that the outcome of that day would depend in large part on her, by her ability to radiate a bright light, her ability to seem transparent and reliable. That will be hard, she thought, very hard to radiate a bright light in this fucking bleak mood. Because deep down she knew they were going to break her. What kind of verdict can you expect from people who don’t know her, who don’t like her, who don’t care about her? And why would someone like her expect justice? She, who had experienced firsthand the arbitrariness of it all? She had to be optimistic, as Pro Bono had advised and I had insisted. Me, Cleve Rose, known to her as Mr. Rose. But all she felt was fatigue, a tremendous fatigue that had no cure.

“It has been so long since I make any decisions for myself,” she had complained to her friend Juanita. “Everyone making decisions for me. Life has pushed me where it wants without consulting me, giving me little choice.”

Today, her fate would be decided by a flip of the coin, she knew that whether it’d be head or tails, the world would go on as it always did. In the end, what did this trial have to do with her, when she knew she would be nothing more than a spectator there? It would be others who decided, and she would have to attack. For the moment, she continued crossing the plaza toward the main entrance. Once inside, she would have to pass through the metal detector, submit to a pat down, show her appointment citation, and cross the huge lobby to find her courtroom. But before she got there, she had the impression that she was being watched from above. It was nothing but a slight disturbance, a vague intuition, someone’s eyes fixed on her, something like a silent scream from above that made her look up.

Above she saw Pro Bono leaning over a railing in the gallery. She was about to wave to him, but something held her back. She had never seen such an expression on the lawyer’s face, a stony and urgent look, as if he had been trying to get her attention forever. Why hadn’t he just called her name? All it would have taken was one little shout. But Pro Bono could only stare, Jesus Christ how he stared, a frightening gaze. When he finally got her attention, he made a tiny gesture that took but a second, and her veins grew cold. A secret gesture meant only for her among the crowd of people in the main lobby: he slid the tip of his index finger across his throat, as if he were slitting it. The message was loud and clear to María Paz: you’re fucked, he was saying, and there was nothing he could do. Pro Bono then shook his head, almost imperceptibly, but clearly signaling for her not to come any closer, now with a small shooing gesture, telling her to get out, to leave before it was too late. And then he repeated the first sign, as if to leave no room for misinterpretation, the index finger slicing across his throat. Everything was clear. Pro Bono was telling her, go, flee before it’s too late. While up in the gallery, Pro Bono adjusted the knot on his tie as if that was what he had meant to do when he brought his hand to his throat, down in the great lobby María Paz felt like she was going to barf, as if all the breakfast that Juanita had made for her was coming back up, the Rice Krispies, orange juice, and toast with a poached egg. Her head began to get hot, her heart thumped in her throat, her pupils dilated, and her legs grew wobbly. She was going to have to turn around and head out the way she had come, and do so unnoticed in that place watched over by a hive of undercover cops, secret agents, whistleblowers, security guards, and cops. She slowed down but avoided stopping altogether, which would have given her away, so she got hold of herself, straightened her posture, took a deep breath, put on a blank expression, and forced herself to take a few more steps forward. She got into the act that had been scripted on the spot: she was late, and with a dramatic gesture of a smack on her forehead with the palm of her hand, she realized that she had forgotten something. She pretended to look frantically for that something inside her bag and then murmured a reprimand to herself for being such an idiot. How could I have left that in the car? Now she had to dash back to get it, she simply had to. Her confidence grew and she even managed an embarrassed smile—I know, I know. I’m such a nincompoop; I didn’t bring the most important thing. She realized that her nostrils were flaring, a sign that she was beginning to hyperventilate, something that had first happened to her in Manninpox, and that now occurred every time she became too anxious. She made a concerted effort to breathe evenly, turned 180 degrees to head back, and exited the building, remaining very cognizant as she moved away that one false move meant her doom. Above all, she must not look back. She commanded herself: Do not turn around or your fate is ten times worse than a pillar of salt. To her surprise, she was suddenly very enlivened by an odd current of new energy rushing through her insides. No, she murmured, now everything is entirely up to me. She would no longer have to play as the visiting team, she could finally rely on her own strengths, and those at least she could trust. She sensed that a door had opened to a new world, and she was suddenly thirsty for life and desperate for the freedom she had not experienced in so long. Let’s see, you bastards, she challenged the world. Let’s see who comes up on top this time. Stand back, motherfuckers. You’re not going to snatch me this time. Serenity and control, those were the crucial twin elements in the moments that she left the plaza behind and headed toward the parking lot. She lengthened her stride a bit but did not shift into a run, emulating the brisk pace of top models on the runway instead. She was just someone who had forgotten an important document in her car and was in a hurry to get it. She made it to the parking lot, meaning she had gotten through the worst of it, had left the minefields behind her. And at that moment, she was overcome with a weird urge to return home. She missed the Nava sisters and yearned for Bolivia. She needed Mandra X and wanted to hug Violeta, pet Hero, find a coin to call Corina. Or to be holding the large, safe hand of her husband, Greg. Or her father’s hand, whomever it was that hand may have belonged to; even that bastard Peruvian seaman who was probably her father came out well in this hypnotizing script she was writing on the spot. If she could only close her eyes and return home. She was inundated with a sudden wave of nostalgia, an unforgiving depletion of adrenaline that left her exhausted. Where a few minutes before there was determination, there now followed a schmaltzy indifference that was no help at all. But the worst of it only lasted a few minutes because the revelation suddenly struck like lightning. Home? What home? What goddamned home have you ever had? How can you return to something that never existed? This lightning strike did not bring her down. On the contrary, it burned away the gauzy, drooly nostalgia that was hypnotizing her and debilitating her. She remembered a Juanes music video that had been playing a lot recently, Juanes in an orange jumpsuit whispering in a gringo prisoner’s ear, “No one left to account to, no one left to judge me.” And damn it, he was right. That’s how I feel, baby, with nothing to explain and no one to explain it to. I’m coming after you, Juanes, and God save those who try to judge me. I feel sorry for them waiting for me with the verdict that they can stick where the sun don’t shine, because it’s me, and I account to no one. There’s no love that will stop me or hate that will hinder me; even if I waltz straight to hell, I still win. Heads or tails, I win. She had all her powers under her control and was finally going to get ahead, two steps forward and one step forward, like her mother used to say, the Colombian Wonder Woman, fucking them all and blasting them into little pieces. She took out the useless keys to her apartment and made them obviously visible and jingled them, the keys of the car door she was about to open. The rows of cars before her became obstacles that she needed to overcome, that she was already overcoming. She walked past the first row, the second, the third. Someone approached her from behind, a man apparently from the heavy steps. He was getting closer and closer, almost directly behind her. María Paz chose a cherry-red car, a color that inspired confidence, and pretended it was hers. She placed her bag on the roof, pulled out her sunglasses and put them on, and turned to face the intruder.

“Do you have a cigarette by any chance?” she asked him.

The man pulled out a box of Marlboros, gave her a cigarette, and lit it with a Zippo before he moved along. Then and only then, while she pretended to smoke and tried not to cough, did she dare look at her watch for the first time. It was still ten minutes before the scheduled opening of the trial, 11:30 a.m. The alarm bells had not gone off yet; the hounds had not been let loose. She still had at least twenty minutes before they began to suspect she might not show and started looking for her. She stayed in place till her pulse recovered to normal. It didn’t matter if fires raged inside, as long as outside the air seemed calm. Purposefully, she kept the air of a well-dressed, handsome woman in her sunglasses on a cigarette break by her car — nothing so strange about that: Why would she smoke inside the car and stink it all up? Anyone who saw her would think nothing of it, just a woman who now casually crushed the butt of the cigarette on the pavement, a regular person, maybe a secretary or a lawyer, or someone who worked in the administrative offices of the court, certainly not a former inmate at Manninpox; those folks did not look so decent, they did not own two-thousand-dollar Gucci bags.

From some nook in her mind, the elusive image of a dream from the previous night alighted: a huge vagina made of cloth, just the thing itself, unattached, the edges sewn together and round as a ball. Furry, rabbit-like creatures poke out of gashes in the vagina, but they are indeed not rabbits. Someone tells her that one of the creatures is ill, and she picks it out right away, because it is the one throbbing. She cuddles it in her hands and calms it down because she knows that this little beast, or whatever it is, will be safe with her. She gives it a three-letter name that she has never heard before: AIX. The little creature immediately responds to the name. And that’s it, that’s all she remembers, because the dream bursts and vanishes like a soap bubble.

But María Paz remembered the name, and before leaving the parking lot, she wrote it with her finger in the coat of dirt on the cherry-red car. At the last moment, she noticed that Pro Bono’s Lamborghini was parked nearby. It had to be his, there was no mistaking it, and it would have been too much of a coincidence that there were two of them there. Her first thought was to hide underneath it until the lawyer came back, ask him what happened, why he had made her flee, figure out what happened, count on him to escape, rely on him, take shelter under his wing. But she immediately thought otherwise. She didn’t have to ask Pro Bono anything. She had to believe him and go. He must have had his reasons and that was enough for her. Also, she couldn’t put him in a compromising position; the old man had risked all he could, and she couldn’t ask him for more. No, from that point on, she was her own boss; she was alone. From now on, I will depend on me. All she had to do, her main task, was to get the hell out of New York, the city that opened up before her like a sea. She left the parking lot, mixed in with the passersby on Melrose Avenue, and took the first bus that came along. She got off after a few stops, not really knowing where, and walked as fast as the tight skirt and high heels allowed her. Above all else she needed to be quick on her feet, so when she walked by the first cheap Chinese street vendor, she bought a pair of cloth slippers that she immediately put on, tucking the high heels in her bag in case she needed them later. It was like in those movies where the good guy changes clothes so the bad guys following him won’t recognize him. María Paz took off her coat with the same purpose in mind, pulled out the hairpins holding up her bun, and let her hair fall down her back, her exquisitely black long hair like that of Our Lady of Mount Carmel.

María Paz knew New Yorkers well: she was aware that a select few of them walked down the street in a hurry to get somewhere, well dressed, thin, attired in black and charcoal gray, while the great lot of the rest of them went around dressed as if for a carnival, a grandiloquent parade of ridiculous and absurd Third Worlders. And if only a few moments before she needed to look as if she were one of the snooty ones, now she needed to blend into the anonymous crowd. So at another vendor, she tried on an ensemble of green, red, and yellow scarves, hat, and gloves, an unsightly combination only worn by certain Caribbeans, curiously only where it was hot. She looked at herself in the mirror the salesman had handed her and laughed at the thought of what Bolivia would have said if she had seen her like this — Bolivia, who had always been so well kept, with her light, inoffensive colors — not to mention what Socorro Arias de Salmon, who was so afraid to seem different, would have said. And there was how she, María Paz herself, would have looked upon all this just a few years ago, when she was so terrified of being perceived as having bad taste that she couldn’t breathe, and her main goal was not to seem like Latina trash, so she dissimulated her accent, avoided mentions of her nationality, and made sure to stress time and again that Latinos were not all drug traffickers, not all terrorists or members of the Mara Salvatrucha or the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. Off she went, with the multicolored knit cap pressed down to her eyebrows, the accompanying wool scarf instead of the silk one around her neck, those ridiculous gloves on her hands, the cloth slippers on her feet, and, hanging above her head, the bench warrant and bad name and criminal history. Fuck, wearing all this, who was she going to impress or convince of her innocence? But she was no longer obliged to convince or obey anyone, or be anywhere on time, or look good for anyone, or buy anything, or cancel subscriptions, or pay bills on time, or be or not even be a good lover, or get good grades, or be prettier or skinnier, or show up for an arraignment, or pass any test. None of that, zilch, zero. Jesus Fucking Christ, she thought, putting on this goofy cap has been the most liberating action of my life. Of course, she still had the Gucci bag, which clashed badly with her new look. She thought she should just toss it somewhere, casually throw it out somewhere, or give it to a passerby. But then all eyes would be on her. It would be a major scene, even in a city that has seen everything; people don’t just give Gucci bags to strangers. And shit, why would she give away such a marvelous gift from her lawyer? No sir, she would never again own such a precious thing, that Italian aroma, the thick buckles and perfect size that molded to her hip in such loving fashion.

In one of the subways she took that day, someone next to her was reading the Daily News, and she had been able to get a peek at the pictures and headlines. What an exposé, right in the middle of the paper. On the right page, a picture of a very young and handsome Greg in his police uniform, and on the left page, Greg’s crumpled body in a pool of blood. An emotionally moving picture of Greg with Hero. And one last picture, darker and much smaller, of María Paz herself. The mug shot from Manninpox, her hair a mess, looking like a lioness in heat, the placard with the serial number hanging on her chest. The visual was very obvious: the demented Colombian versus the good American cop. Pro Bono had always told her that juries were very susceptible to the whims of public opinion, and this kind of publicity must have exacerbated their patriotic spirit. It would not have been difficult for Pro Bono to put the pieces together, and she guessed that Pro Bono had grown certain about which way the verdict would go. He must have been very concerned about what he saw in the paper, enough so to give her the signal to go. At least that was her theory. After spending some time making herself scarce among the shelves of bargains in a secondhand store, she took another bus, and when she got off, she slipped into a movie theater. Near dusk, she was attracted by Andean music that was coming from a schoolyard. There was a cookout where traditional dishes were being served, and María Paz bought a ticket. She mingled among the lute and charango musicians, kabobs, ceviches, pisco sours, and Inca dancers late into the night. Right there, among the members of the Peruvian community, she met a family that believed she had recently arrived in New York and offered her a place for the night. As the band grew weary, the guests danced a few more short waltzes and drank a few more pisco sours, because the organizers were about to make last call. The musicians put away their instruments and left, and María Paz looked at her watch. It was 11:20 p.m. In ten minutes, she would have been a fugitive of justice for twelve hours.

At that same time, in another corner of the city, I was freaking out knowing nothing about what had happened to her. And it would be another seven weeks before my uncertainty was eased when I received a Facebook message from Juanita one Saturday morning. The message said, “Two little ducks in front of Dorita.” Shit, it was not an easy message to decode. Two little ducks in front of Dorita. That’s it. Could it be referring to the duck pond in Central Park? The offices of the Ugly Duckling Presse on 3rd Street in Brooklyn, because I had once told the class at Manninpox that I did some work for them? Or maybe the Peking Duck in Chinatown? Nothing made much sense until a bell went off. The “two ducks” could very well be Colombian slang for the number 22, the shape of which resembles two ducks waddling to the left. So maybe it was not code for a place but for the time, twenty-two hundred hours, or 10 p.m. “At Dorita’s” was much easier to figure out. There was only one Dorita who was known to us. María seemed to want to meet at 10 p.m. at Forbidden Planet, where I was going to take her the night of our reunion to show her the series of my graphic novels, The Suicide Poet and His Girlfriend Dorita, before Sleepy Joe changed things. If it wasn’t that, then I had no clue what it could be. A date maybe? I started thinking maybe it made more sense that it was a date. The 22nd of this month? No, it had to be the time. Forbidden Planet at 10 p.m.? But then on what day? The next day, a Saturday, I waited for her there from 9:30 p.m. to midnight. She didn’t show up then, or on Sunday, or Monday. On Tuesday, I was running late, and when I arrived there at 10:20 p.m., I thought I saw her at the front door. But the woman was wearing a strange cap pulled down to her eyes and the rest of her face was under a scarf, so it was only when I was very close to her that I knew it was indeed her. I had already decided that I would hide her in the house in the mountains; it was, for the time being, the best option. I had to get her out of the city, because they would be looking for her with a magnifying glass in places where you needed your identification documents and were reported for the slightest suspicions. God forbid she had tried in desperation to check into a hotel. I didn’t even ask her. There was no time for debates. I simply signaled that she climb behind me on my bike and took off. I only revealed our destination when we were already on the way. Her response was to ask where it was, and didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when I told her it was just down the road from Manninpox.

I’m not quite sure how to explain what’s happened since that night. Let’s just say we’re living as if in a dream, the two of us hidden in the attic, making do with things as if we are two kids in a tree house because we couldn’t care less about what is happening in the world below that is bristling with dangers. We shit on those dangers for now. And the dangers shit on us, stuck in that attic of the house like ants after a fumigation.

All the powers of the state are set against María Paz, and I’m still a little puzzled how this charming girl has become the bull’s-eye of so many pissed-off macho men — agents of the CIA and the DEA, migrant and bounty hunters, and a posse led by the vermin Sleepy Joe, who must have been howling in his cave because so many others were trying to snatch his prey. But María Paz has not wanted to talk about any of that. She does not bring up her past, much less her future. I think it is comforting to her to feel as if she is in a boat in the middle of a timeless sea. Once again, she and I are floating in the bliss of a period of “things go right.” Seven months ago we went through a similar ephemeral period that lasted only a couple of hours; then we passed through a very long and anguishing “things go wrong,” and now we have returned to the bliss of the good days.

Like any good graphic novel heroine, María Paz is complex; there are no predictable plots in her story. Everything is extraordinary, very intense, and at the same time so otherworldly and unreal, such as letting the days pass ignoring what has happened, purposely ignoring all the possible consequences, letting the world fall to pieces all around us. And that’s just a figure of speech. Symptoms are beginning to appear, a new phase of “things go wrong” has reared its ugly fucking head. Four days ago, a horrendous crime took place on this mountain. The victim was the man who brings us the bags of food for the dogs; it is something utterly indescribable, they didn’t only murder him, but they ripped off his face. The authorities are still searching for the suspects and have the area under twenty-four-hour patrol: a good thing on the one hand, because it reestablishes the sense of safety, and a bad thing on the other hand, because for us up here it make us recluses with much more claustrophobic force than before. Now it is clearer than ever that María Paz cannot as much as peek outside or the entire security operation would descend on the house. But I’ve decided not to tell her. What good would it do? For the moment, I see no reason to worry her. Up here, she is secure, free from any danger, ignorant of the mayhem outside that has everybody on edge. María Paz needs her rest. The important thing is that she recovers from the damage of what she has gone through, enjoys herself however she can, is pampered, eats a lot, sleeps as much as she needs to, and is left alone. So I keep the fears and conjectures to myself.

For now, I have no intention of letting this bubble of blind, deaf, exclusive, and self-sufficient happiness in which we both float burst. Because I’m on vacation, I don’t have to go anywhere. No one bothers us up in the attic and we are together twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, with the exception of a couple of nights a week when I go down to have dinner with my father so as not to arouse suspicion. I return to the attic with a healthy portion of the meal. María Paz is effusive and generous when we make love, but I have not been able to get her to sleep in my arms. After we make love she turns the other way and curls in upon herself like a seashell, and I have to make do with the unconditional affection of Skunko, who has begun to sleep draped across both of us, and I resign myself to simply watch her for hours. I am astonished by her tendrils of black hair invading the pillows, and her long eyelashes silky as spider legs. I linger my gaze on the curve of her shoulder, on the protruding ears that she hates so much, on the soft splendor of her skin, the light hairs on her nape, the lapping waves of her breath, the white cotton panties that she wears, bigger than any other girl I have known — prison maxi panties, to be truthful, or more like orphanage maxi panties, that are far from sexy but still manage to turn me on, like everything about her. Now, I understand more profoundly what Boris Becker meant when he said that he only fully realized how dark-skinned his wife was when he saw her naked body on white sheets for the first time.

We never dare ask what is going to happen when we are brought down by force to face reality. When I asked her how she survived after fleeing from Bronx Criminal Division, she said that it was thanks to kind folks. She told me about the Peruvians she met at the cookout and a rich bachelor from Park Slope who allowed her to use his penthouse. She also recounted times when she panicked, lonely nights, times when she escaped just by a hair, about dangerous corners in some neighborhoods, and about a friend’s betrayal. There were also the two sisters who sold tamales from home and hired her to knead corn flour.

“I had never eaten so many tamales,” she said.

“Why didn’t you leave the country?” I asked the obvious question.

“Because of Violeta, my sister, Violeta, I can’t abandon her. I will not leave until I can take her with me.”

I found all this out during our first few nights together in the attic, when she spoke nonstop until the early hours of the morning, weaving together the disconnected episodes of her epic. On a particularly chilly night, she recounted to me the events around her husband Greg’s death. She spoke at length and candidly, and somehow we got into the Gothic scene about her friend Corina and the broomstick. She mentioned that event, but as with others was somewhat oblique around the topic of Sleepy Joe’s participation in it, as if she wanted to lessen his guilt, so I had to remain alert and insist that she make certain things clearer, that she couldn’t invent things because I knew more about all of this than she thought. I told her that I had taped together the manuscript she had ripped to pieces in Central Park, and so that I knew well the horrific actions that Sleepy Joe was capable of, like the abusive interrogation he had submitted her to and the death of her dog. María Paz’s response was to stop the story cold, and since then she has not told me about anything else in her past, as if the instinct had dried up, or she preferred to forget the content of those sections. We talk to each other a lot, but always sidestepping certain issues and keeping the conversation at surface level. She is allowed to ask me about heaven and earth, but I can’t ask her anything.

I see her floating in a state of grace and innocence, a nymph in the woods, or maybe more like a lily, a fawn, an odalisque. Too many things have happened to her, very serious things in a short span of time, so it’s understandable that she doesn’t want to torment herself by unraveling the treacherous twists of fate. It is almost as if she has gone into hibernation to regain her strengths and get ready for what is to come. Truth is I don’t know, don’t want to know, don’t want to think about it either. But at the same time, I am terrified of what she still may be keeping from me.

While she sleeps beside me, I remain awake thinking about it all, as fucking insomniac as they come. I sense her sweet breath and soft snoring, and I ask myself who this woman is who is so full of darkness and secrets. One night recently, I tapped her on the shoulder because I needed to know the answer to one question right then.

“Have you been lying to me?” I said.

“You have to believe me, Mr. Rose,” she said half-asleep.

“Why? Tell me why I have to…”

“Because when people tell you things, you should believe them,” she said, and curled herself up tighter than before and fell back asleep. I couldn’t help but think about her twisted relationship with her brother-in-law/lover. I have compiled a list of character traits and habits for him, such as sleeping during the day, visiting brothels, his obsession with María Paz, his taste for spicy candy, the useless purchases from infomercials, and, above all, the performance of bloody rituals. I have read that while bloodless rituals are at core symbolic or figurative, the bloody ones necessitate the spilling of blood of a sacrificial victim. With the exception of bullfights in Hispanic cultures, or of such things as fight clubs and ultimate fighting tournaments, this kind of bloodletting as spectacle is rare in the West, because people are horrified and disgusted by blood and can only deal with it on the screen, where it doesn’t hurt, stain, or infect. The peculiar thing about Sleepy Joe is the leap backward, the primitive, brutal ritual. And so, little by little I have begun to understand a few things. The problem is that my investigation is typically amateurish, and in reality it just follows a method I found in a blog that I came upon by chance in serial form called Killing Me Softly. That’s why I thought it would be better to get a more qualified opinion, so one day I left María Paz alone in the attic to head to New York, supposedly to hand in a manuscript to Ming, my editor, but in truth to ask him about Sleepy Joe, whom he didn’t know and hadn’t even heard of. But he asked how he could possibly help in gathering the information I required.

The fact is Ming collects everything and is an expert in a thousand things, the more bizarre the better. He’s an expert, for example, on the many varieties of caviar, ancient African bridal gear, and a sumptuous and fierce species of warriors called betta fish. But of all his obsessions, the one that he devotes the most time to is noir comics. Along with being an editor of one of them, Ming owns an astonishing collection of volumes on the occult that he has found all over the world. And folks who are expert on this subject are expert on the subject of murderers.

Neo-noir comics, originally inspired by Frank Miller’s Sin City, and frequently printed in black and white, is a bristling and electrifying genre, as if on amphetamines, generally misogynous and eschatological and centered on sadistic, disgusting, maniacal crimes, with decadent and vicious detectives.

It’s not my genre, of course: my suicide poet and his girl are little sisters of the blind compared with the freaks that appear in noir. I told Ming more or less what I already knew of Sleepy Joe, his habits of burning and destroying on a massive scale, the dice on the eyes of a dead ex, the ritual with a broomstick involving Corina, the ritual with a knife involving his dead brother, the bone-chilling event with the dog.

“He doesn’t sound like a big-time murderer,” Ming told me, “more or less a small-time killer, timid, unsure. At least for now, although maybe he may yet do more terrible things.

“His ceremonial executions are crude, but whatever they lack in finesse, they make up for in conviction,” Ming continued. “For now, he threatens and assaults but does not kill, or he kills animals but not humans. Although things may escalate depending on what is propelling him. There must be a touch of necrophilia. It’s possible that he nailed the corpse of the dog to the wall after it was dead.”

“Which means he tortures cadavers?” I asked.

“I don’t think he sees it as torture, more like purification or glorification. Perhaps he makes his peace with the dead through the ritual. It could be how he asks forgiveness, as in how he sliced the corpse of his brother with a knife, a brother with whom he identified. Greg, the older brother, his idol, possibly the only person who cared for him and worried about him. Sleepy Joe must have adored him.”

“Yeah, he adored him, but snatched his wife. Some love.”

“There you go. He adored him up to a point. Look closely at the details: it was a pure instance of substitution; when he took the wife, he put himself in the shoes of his brother, he became the brother, and made María Paz the ardent object of his desires. When María Paz didn’t want anything else to do with him, she stripped him of very fundamental things, castrated him when she rejected him sexually, negated the identification with the brother, and to top it off he believed she took his money. He must have felt as if he had been skinned alive, anyone would have felt as such. He beat her but did not kill her because that would be the end of his desideratum, and he’s no idiot. But he beat her almost to death, and began to destroy the beings she loves. She is left with nothing and no one. You understand. That’s the message he is sending her: ‘The only person you have in this world is me.’ You have not told me that she is with you now, but I imagine she might be. If so, be very careful. You are getting directly in the path of Sleepy Joe, a complicated individual.”

“Can you sketch me an outline of his modus operandi?” I asked.

“Fuck, Jack the Ripper had a modus operandi; this bastard barely knows where he is heading,” Ming said.

At that point, I told him about the Eagles case and that I thought Sleepy Joe was the culprit.

“It has his trademark, a ritual over a cadaver,” Ming responded as he fed mosquito larvae to the iridescent and bluish Wan-Sow, the best of his bettas. Ming meant that unexpected forces were pushing Sleepy Joe to more dangerous levels. “If Sleepy Joe is Eagles’s murderer, it would mean that the guy is getting close, Cleve.”

If he is the murderer, he is among us. Although it is highly unlikely that he’ll remain wandering around there, given that since the night of the murder the area is crawling with patrol cars. The cops come by our house at least twice a week, calling out at every door to make sure everything is okay. This has become for us a protective barrier against Sleepy Joe, and at the same time the greatest threat, because if they discover María Paz, she is history. That is, those who can do us in are also our protectors; damned spot we’re in, so dual and complex. As the Coen brothers scripted for George Clooney in O Brother, Where Art Thou? “Damn! We’re in a tight spot.”

For now, I have María Paz by my side in this attic refuge, and she is my only reality. She peruses my books while eating cheese, leaving them all greasy. For long periods, she does nothing, she wastes all the hot water while showering, she brushes Skunko and paints her toenails. Afterward, she lies on my bed and watches some reality shows that I think are horrible but that she won’t miss and then recounts them to me episode by episode in complete detail. First thing in the morning, she does aerobics following the instructions of a woman called Vera in a program called In Shape with Vera. She has a double portion of ice cream for breakfast, later she puts on my clothes, that is if she doesn’t remain in her pajamas all day, and entertains herself rummaging through my drawers and disorganizing my things. She sits by the side of the window hidden behind the curtain to spy on the deer that ravage our garden and the moose that turn over our garbage cans looking for food. She appears serene, light — I would say radiant, in any case — very beautiful. I am madly in love with her.

But I live in a state of alertness with my hairs standing on end. I spend many hours psychoanalyzing the brother-in-law, dissecting his personality. For obvious reasons, I have been interested more in his story than the story of the murdered brother. Arms trafficking seems like a very ordinary subject matter, one more chapter in the kind of corruption that is eternal. And besides, I hate cops, and any atrocities that they are accused of committing are possible and likely probable. In contrast, I have reached some interesting conclusions about Sleepy Joe. As a child, he must have always been scared to death. In general, those types of bullies have been bullied themselves, they become abusers because they have been abused, anybody who reads comic books knows that. I imagine that in his case, old childhood fears must have reemerged in adulthood, creating a sick and distorted ritualization. María Paz recounted that when Sleepy Joe was a boy, the mother forced him to recite a prayer called “A Thousand Jesuses” that was a repetition of the name a thousand times. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. Of course, maybe this wasn’t the best tactic, a thousand Jesuses is an exaggerated number of Jesuses; you can go a little nuts during the few hours on your knees repeating Jesus in Slovak.

She has also told me that in the bedroom of Greg, Sleepy Joe, and the rest of the siblings, there hung a large portrait of the baby Jesus nailed to a white cross. Not the adult Jesus but the baby Jesus. Crucified. Such a thing, a child as a crucificado.

I would not have been able to open my eyes with that portrait in the room, that would have been the least of it, but I would not have become a master criminal because of it. Who knows what else could have happened to him, from what root the tendency toward evil had sprouted.

There must have been other things, because in the end being the son of a mother who says the rosary every day does not automatically lead you to nail a dog to a wall. It was too obvious to look automatically for Christian roots to any perversions, but perhaps the drama has less to do with Christianity than with the Carpathians, their region of origin, mountain ranges that I imagine gloomy and menacing, boulders cut by picks and vertigo-inducing cliffs, with frozen landscapes and a national history crisscrossed with everyday butcheries and cruelties. The whole Slovakia thing may be nothing, I couldn’t even pick out its exact location on a map, but that’s how I imagine it during my nights of insomnia. Then I remembered about the lands of Vlad Tepes, Dracula, the insatiable impaler who liked to eat his dinner among the dozens of Turks whom he had ordered to be strung from behind. And don’t some of Sleepy Joe’s actions seem Dracula-like: Corina and the broomstick?

Isn’t it easy to make connections?

But those are just the speculations of the sleepless, too many horror movies. The only thing that’s clear is that the more I know, the more I am disgusted with Sleepy Joe.

I am the type of person who cannot stand the suffering of animals. I must admit that sometimes I feel like Brigitte Bardot with her maniacal and exclusive obsession with the well-being of seals. I do not compromise with anyone who engages in the abuse of animals in any form, and that’s why I’m a vegetarian. But to nail a dog to a wall, you have to be a sadistic motherfucker to do something like that. And that would be enough to earn my hate, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. If there’s something I can’t stand in this world it’s a man who mistreats a woman. Zero tolerance, much less if it’s the woman I love. Yet there is another side of him that caught my attention, a corner of his character, one only, that inspires a degree of envy, his knack for the ritualistic, which seems authentic. He is a nobody, illiterate and vicious, but he retains the sense of the sacred. Or least he is one inspired son of a bitch. A taut string of conviction vibrates in that bastard, and I dashed to write that phrase down before I forgot it. Writing graphic novels for so long, I have developed the habit of thinking in vignettes, which I translate into catchy expressions that fit in dialogue balloons.

Some force is pushing Sleepy Joe beyond himself. Something lifts him from his current surroundings. At nights, in the safety of my bed, I intuit what an angry María Paz had to experience on her own on the roof, tied up and terrified, naked and trembling from the cold as she watched her brother-in-law officiate that ceremony. She knows exactly what all this is about, and after so many days of silence on the matter, early this morning she uttered a phrase whose meaning I haven’t quite fully deciphered. I don’t know if it was said in defense of her brother-in-law or against me: she warned me not to underestimate Sleepy Joe.

“You may hate him, yes, despise him even, whatever you want, but never underestimate him.”

“Alright,” I said, somewhat annoyed, “I’ll be careful; I don’t like the idea of being nailed to a wall.” Not to mention a broomstick up my ass.

Two days ago I told María Paz that today we would have to separate for a few days, just a few, because my mom and Ned’s anniversary was coming up, and I had promised both of them that I would go to the celebration in Chicago. I hate the idea of leaving María Paz alone here, knowing that Sleepy Joe is near, but it is much more risky to try and take her out given the police presence. I can’t miss this fucking anniversary, my mother would kill me, she’s already very touchy since I decided to live with my father, and missing her party would be the last straw. Besides, María Paz is fine on her own. She is in a house owned by white people who are more or less rich, or at least upper middle-class, and, as such, free from suspicion. The state troopers are well aware that they are here to protect us and not make things harder, and they will not have any awareness of her presence unless she makes it known by peeking her nose out of the hiding place. I have warned her a thousand times that she cannot do it, not under any circumstances. She cannot be tempted to look out the window at the garden, as she does when I am there, or go down the stairs, or go to the front door, under mortal risk.

“Look me in the eyes, María Paz, promise me you are not going to do anything crazy while I’m gone,” I said, and tried to soothe her anxiety. “It will only be forty-eight hours, forty-eight hours of common sense on your part, that’s all I’m asking. Before you know it, I’ll ride back up to the house on my bike. Think of it like this: I will only be gone this afternoon, tomorrow, and the following morning, just the ride there, the party, and the ride back. Don’t pull any stunts during that time or engage in risky action, just do that for me. Do you understand?”

“What if something happens to you?” she asked, widening her big black eyes so that I wanted to jump into her, plunge into the deep dark water of those eyes, forget about Edith and Ned, to hell with their anniversary, there will be others, but I can’t, just can’t.

Edith would kill me, and if you ask me whom I fear more, Edith or Sleepy Joe, I’d have to say Edith by a few heads.

“Nothing’s going to happen to me.”

“Motorcycles are very dangerous…”

“Now you sound like my father.”

I’m going to leave her plenty of food and a ream of paper, in case she is inspired to write something new. As a temporary farewell, yesterday we made love and took a shower together, me struggling to hold her under the warm stream as she slid down my arms, wet and slippery as an otter, and I brought up her dream again, although she didn’t seem to want to talk about it this time.

“So AIX?” I asked her.

“What?”

“AIX. That’s what you said the creature in your dreams was named, the one that comes out of the cloth vagina. That was it, right, AIX?” And I wrote the letters in the foggy glass of the shower door.

“And what if your father comes up, Mr. Rose?” In spite of all the intimate acts we had shared, to her I continued to be Mr. Rose, her creative-writing teacher; she never called me Cleve.

“My father is going to be in the city. Besides, you know he never comes up here. Why? Will you get bored?”

“How can I get bored, when I am in heaven?”

Her response could not have been more lovely or full of joy. But it concerned me somewhat.

Even though María Paz may not think of it in these terms, she is as locked up and deprived of liberty here as she was in Manninpox.

“Why don’t you start writing your memories over again,” I suggested. “I’ll leave you my laptop, you know how to use it now, or there is paper if you prefer longhand.”

“Ugh, no, Mr. Rose, write everything down from the beginning again, way too long. That’s lost, and it should stay lost. Oh, one little thing before you go,” she said, handing me a small wooden box that she took out of her bag. The box contained Hero’s ashes and the medal of valor given to him in Alaska.

María Paz wanted me to bury the box and keep the medal, but the medal was attached to a blue ribbon that was all stuck to the ashes, so I suggested that we just bury the box with everything inside.

She agreed, and asked that it be buried in a clearing in the woods that was visible from the window. Today, before I leave for Chicago, I will do it in a big way. I am going to give Hero the funeral rites of a hero, a war hero, with Wagner and everything. I’ll burn his name into a small wooden placard and mark the spot of the burial with a makeshift wooden cross. Although on second thought, no name. It would be stupid to do that and then already be well on the road when the police make their daily rounds and investigate. Or what about if my father saw it and was curious about this Hero. What hero? He’d wonder. I will just bury the box, make a quick cross with two pieces of wood, and that’s it — no Wagner or any such other stuff. I’m doing terrible on time. I promised my mother I would not ride the bike at night, and I’m already cutting it close.

A few hours later, I say good-bye to María Paz, my father, and the three dogs. I go to the garage to get a shovel, but I pass by the kitchen for a second to grab a Gatorade and I notice Empera putting out the food for the dogs. She has her iPod headphones on with the music so loud she doesn’t even realize I am standing there, so I pause for a second just to watch her. I have always suspected that she is not much of a dog person. She does not have much interaction with them or much less pet them. On the other hand, she prepares their food bowls with care, adding the appropriate vitamins and supplements to each plate. She doesn’t feel any affection toward the animals, but she also doesn’t mistreat them or neglect them, that’s what I was curious about, and I am pleased with what I see.

“Hi, Empera,” I say to her back, and she almost has a heart attack she is so startled. “It’s a good thing to see you don’t nail dogs to the wall.”

“God Almighty, child, the things you say. Why would I do such an awful thing? Dogs stink to heaven, but they are God’s creatures also.”

“Okay, so tell me what you think about this, Empera, you who know so much about life… What’s going on inside the head of a man who nails a dog to the wall?”

“Nails a dog to the wall?”

“Yes.”

“Well, it’s an atrocity. The only thing a person like that has in his head is madness, and the best thing is to lock him up in an insane asylum. Nail a dog to the wall like they nailed Christ to the cross, that’s heresy. How can you nail such a dirty beast as if it were Lord Jesus? To die nailed is a privilege of the Almighty. That’s heresy, no doubt. As far as I see it, such a person does not believe in God.”

“Thank you, Empera! That’s exactly the kind of thing I was talking about,” I say, and I go back upstairs. “I need to see one thing.”

Suddenly, I have the urge to check this one book, and it has to be now, not when I get back, it has to be right now, even if my mother kills me for being late.

“So,” María Paz asks — she’s by the window, waiting for Hero’s funeral to begin—“not yet?”

“That’s next,” I say kissing her. “I have to jot down something first.”

I know exactly the location of all the books on my shelves, I could pick one out with my eyes closed, and especially if it is Borges, who I am always reading and rereading. But shit, it’s not where it is supposed to be, and immediately one party becomes suspect. I ask María Paz, and she pulls out the book from under the bed. It’s the second volume of the complete works of Borges, and it’s not difficult to find the passage I am looking for, all underlined as it is with my notes on the margin. Page 265. It’s Borges’s commentary on John Donne’s Biathanatos. I read the note I scribbled on the margin a few years ago: “Biathanatos, one of those improbable and cursed books that every so often cast its shadow over humanity, like the Apocalypse of the false John the Evangelist, or the Necronomicon that Lovecraft conceived but never wrote.”

According to Borges, the purpose of Biathanatos is to expose that the death of Christ was in fact a suicide. Therefore, the entire history of humanity, from Christ and to Christ, is nothing else but the staging of a spectacular and self-induced deicide, accepted by the Son and promoted by the Father, who created the earth and the seas as a setting for the torment of the cross on a stunning cosmic gallows. And if it’s true that Christ died a voluntary death, according to what Borges claims Donne says, and here is Borges’s quote: “This means that the elements and the worlds and the generations of men, and Egypt and Rome and Babylon and Judah were formed from the void to be destroyed. Maybe the iron was specifically created for the nails, the thorns for the crown, and the blood and water for the wound.” There it is; Old Man Borges gets it just right, as always, and before Borges, Donne. And this leads to the corollary, the cherry pie.

After this passage, all I have to do is turn the corner to get to Sleepy Joe. The result is surprising. More than surprising, dazzling. If Borges is right, and if John Donne was right before him, each one of those ritual crimes or imitations of crimes must mean a step toward the greater ritual for Sleepy Joe, the definitive one, the one that expresses the culmination of all his anxiety, the apotheosis liturgy he has been so insistently pursuing, his own immolation. His own homicide — that must be what he is ultimately searching for. “How nicely you throw people off, you bastard,” I would tell him, “how expertly you disguise yourself, a small barrio thug, aficionado of indoor tanning who goes around showing off your six-pack, but who is shaken by sublime tempests inside, you fuck. I’ve figured you out, you damned punk, now I know that your minicrimes are reaching for perfection. What you did with the broomstick to Corina, the postmortem cuts on your brother’s body, the martyrdom of little Hero, and who knows what other perversions I don’t know about… Go ahead, you asshole, keep on climbing that ladder, giddyap, many steps to go, move ahead, man, go for your highest level yet, put your soul into it, no stopping until you have made it, put more heart into it, almost there. Your last victim will be you.”