The Absent 1 The door to his apartment shut like a long echo. Navy-blue coat, the one worn this morning, white t-shirt and blue jeans that were glazed with scratchy hues: he sat down in the hallway outside his door. Coal-black hair, the little that was left, drizzled upwards. Thin, circular black lenses made his eyes look smaller than they actually were. With his right palm he thumped his knees softly. Light-orange walls behind him like a billboard. Waiting, Gustavo sat with thin hands now in his coat pockets. Across the hall, he realized that no one had lived in that apartment since they moved in, a little over two months ago. Two doors down from him, grimy sounds seeped through the building: noises with blank faces. The television hadn�t stopped after he walked out of the apartment, so he now thought of how she was on their bed: involuntarily moving her knees, something she even did in her sleep. Yellowish light fell across Gustavo from the bulbs above. He held on to a cigarette, the same kind he hadn�t touched in three years, and pretended to breathe, his lips making a popping sound. You don�t even sleep, Mari. The last time you did, I was teaching freshmen and that was� �Years, Professor�� Eyes opened. �It�s been years since I�ve seen you� Spidery hair disheveled, wide nose and eyes that were too close together. Like he was from here: �Remember me? From Hartford Prep? I was in your Discrete Math class four years ago� �Right (the middle of the word stretched out). How are you�what was your name again?� �Agustin, but you always called me Guillermo� He didn�t hear him walk up or the thump of his cherry-red Japanese sneakers, because he was listening for Mariana. Though he had small ears, he still listened for crinkles in the bed, heavy breaths or even her getting some more milk from the refrigerator. Something that told him he couldn�t go back inside. �Oh, right. That�s, um, that�s my brother�s name, I think�� �You don�t know your own brother�s name?� (he chuckled, confused) �Yeah. I don�t know, guess you just look (a pause�) how are you?� �Good, I guess. Doing things to keep me occupied.� (Looked white. But I still remember after class once, he told me he had never met anyone really from Uruguay, except his mother. Grew up in a real rich neighborhood in Montevideo. Talked too much, either way. Another kid sent to the States to study, who was raised to think he was brilliant. Private schools are like sex shops: full of pricks.) �But things are alright, you know. Probably going to CalTech next year� He used to always cheat off the kid next to him. �I�m happy for�� ��I�m so glad I ran into you, actually, because today, at my place�not in this building, I�m just here to see a girl, you know, but at my apartment on 7th, I thought of this, this device�it has to do with pianos� People, Gustavo thought, never consider those around them�you see this in cafes, libraries, universities, the grocery store�those kids on cell phones talking about their most intimate moments, having heavy conversations with their mothers, girlfriends, lovers as if the people around them, in real spaces, were abstract. Gustavo caught him mid-sentence: ��It turns the page for you, while you�re playing� He breathed lightly through his nose. �What�d you think?� Breaths became thicker. Two Puerto Rican women, from next door, yelled like a TV turned up too loud. All fast words and static. Gustavo, limp unlit cigarette between his fingers, watched his former student quietly, amplifying the silence between them. �Are your parents still together, Agustin?� �Um, no, no they�re not. Why?� �Uruguay, right? That�s where they live� �Yeah� �They live in big houses, huh?� �What?� �Probably lot of rooms in those houses.� �I don�t understand� Lips bent into a smile across Gustavo�s stubble-filled face. And the student continued: �Are you okay?� Answering him after a few moments, �Can you leave me alone, please?� �Sure, I didn�t mean to interrupt, just leaving, you know�� He saw him about to think it again. Gustavo cut him off: �Yes� Two seconds later, cherry-red sneakers thudded off on the toffee-wooden floor. Chewed up filter of the cigarette was wet and getting dingy from his lips. Tiny ghosts of gray air were everywhere: he wished he could cover the hallway with smoke. Looked at his right wrist and his watch that was two minutes too slow. And the penciled shadow of blurred memories behind his eyelids. 2 Eyes open. Dark brown faces, like burnt glass, dulled the reflections. The flat screen, wide enough to cover half of their bedroom wall, was looping. Sitting in her white underwear, a pink polo shirt with the collar popped up and short, jagged brown hair clipped to the side, she was smoking on their plaid blue sheets, waiting. With the sun crinkling through the bedroom blinds, the coffee she had poured herself fifteen minutes ago was nearly frozen. Wondering out loud through her caramel skin, emerald irises and shapeless lips at the muted television. Sitting cross-legged, she watched the screen. The buildings she filmed while in Monterrey last month with the digital video camera she bought on credit. Gustavo was lecturing at the Technological Institute there and she decided to take a cab to the Macro Plaza. She brought the camera, feeling possibilities multiply. And took the camera out of its black duffel bag (those who walked by eyed her suspiciously, as if to think she�s from a television show, we�re going to be on television�it seems the only realness young Mexicans want is that which televisions give or perhaps they were just thinking of stealing it). Warm hands gripped the camera like a gun: Blank narrow streets, made of stone, like the ones she saw pictures of in that magazine about Madrid. Students, silver headphones attached to their ears, walked around staring into the lens. Coal-black German cars across splintered pavement. Again, more dark brown faces, those of mothers and their daughters in yellow dresses walking across busy intersections, selling gum to businessmen. After three hours of videotaping, Mariana took a lime-green cab (she then realized that was mostly what was on the road, taxicabs and police officers along with European cars��only the rich move in this city�) back to the Technological Institute. Buildings blurred through the filthy cab windows. Without moving her mouth too much, she mumbled four words no one heard. The cab driver whose large black bifocals were sliding off of his nose, looked at Mariana strangely through his rear-view mirror. Bending her lips, she smiled at him. Black screen. Mariana, out of smokes, jumped off the bed and walked into the bathroom. Twisting the faucet, water spilled onto the sink as she wetted her face. Too tired to remain awake, but too wide-eyed to fall asleep, she wondered where Gustavo was. He had stopped teaching ever since his brother died four months ago, so now he had more time to forget. Waking at eight in the morning ever since, he usually walked to the Moroccan market at the corner for some coffee. She glanced over at her alarm clock. 9:35 AM. Feet against cold wooden floors, she walked to the kitchen and took out the quart of vanilla soymilk. Filling an olive-colored mug with more coffee (drops spilling onto the floor) and enough soymilk to match the dark honey color of her hands, she walked back into the bedroom, smelling her own armpits seeing that she didn�t shower last night. Around the edges of her eyes, white crusts, from sleeping ten hours, made them itch. Blinking, while rubbing them with her palm�the same one holding the coffee�the olive mug slipped softly from her fingers. �Shit.� And the crashing mug cracked on the floor as coffee spilled under the bed in thick, rippled pools. Mariana sighed splinters. Beneath the bed, covering months of papers, notes and written lectures, thick clouds of coffee were continuing to slide across the floor. Seconds later, again: �Shit.� Fingers, thin like pencils, covered her mouth. Quickly, she jumped on the bed and grabbed both her pillow and Gustavo�s and threw it over the scattered pools. Kneeling down, still in her white underwear, smoothing her hands across the pillow as it soaked, she reached for handfuls of papers and notes under the bed. Four notebooks, dripping. Without looking at them, she threw them to the side and threw her arm under the bed again. Loose leaves of paper, two pens, a dingy white t-shirt and some old copies of the LA Weekly that she had colored on with red marker�she crumpled them, as beads of caramel-colored liquid fell to the floor. Wrapped in sheets and sheets of notebook paper, with her wet hand again under the bed, stony and cold, moving more papers out of the way, a mashed up paper shaped like a gun. Looked fake, but she grabbed it. Eyebrows wrinkled. �What the fuck.� With her index finger and thumb, she held the gun-shaped assemblage. Not realizing that what she was holding was real, she dropped it. Thud. Then, her heart, as if sewn by stones, fell slowly. 3 I think she knows it�s before eight. Either way, today, like most mornings I woke up at 7:50 and, in the dark, put on clothes to leave the apartment. Spiced coffee at Marrakesh and a walk down the street, which always takes me about ten minutes. Used to count the steps, but I would always get headaches. Saw those three Arabic kids again and looked away. They were my students at Hartford, like Agustin, but I failed all three of them, like I should have done him. When I was done, stood in the middle of Fairfax and saw how long I could stay there without opening my eyes. Seconds passed and I just remember some black lady yelling that I was about to get hit. Then, after walking to the gas station to buy some smokes�I don�t actually smoke them, haven�t in years---I walked around my building for twenty minutes and came back here to find people, neighbors, making noise. They�re never quiet. But apartment hallways are meant to make you hear. They leave you listening, always, with open ears like polaroids�couples making love, loud Mexican television shows, children running around yelling, plates clinking against kitchen tables�everything is always noise. Despite all that, it�s still too fucking hot in this coat, but I�ve worn it every morning for a week and I don�t plan on stopping now. Mariana bought it for me in Monterrey last month at a small boutique in the Barrio Antiguo. That�s where a fellow lecturer�Oscar�told me that repeating things is the only true mathematics. Ever since I stopped teaching, that�s all that�s made sense. You can only think about the same thing so many times. Like last week, after I came home one night, Mari asked me �Do you remember my name, anymore?� and I just looked at those green eyes, questioning. I could never remember names, I told her. She shook her head and then mumbled something before I kept on talking. Names are just spaces I never understood. Gustavo�it�s hideous, I know. My parents must have thought I was going to grow up to be Russian. But more than not remembering, I never remember things for the first time. We can�t, it�s impossible. The beginning of the word warns us that remembering means returning. And you meet people once and they expect you not to forget them for years. Then you�re thirty-one and sitting in a brand new apartment hallway, waiting for your wife to not get up. We think of our lives like television shows, Mari told me that night�the sweeping orchestral music behind us as we think how our pasts could be different, better. (I hadn�t watched television for four years until she brought one home when after she came back from Spain eight months ago. Plastic, gray, small: you never see the same image twice.) Like my brother: short hair, with a long scraggly beard, he used to walk to Westheimer with me, in Houston. Older than me by eight years, I was seventeen but he knew all the people down that street in the late 80�s. Homeless men with walking sticks, carrying around bags of clothes, cans and trash in shopping carts, these two white prostitutes named Star and Olivia�both in their twenties, young kids my age all addicts of something, Meme Las Manchas who they called that cause he always had stains on his shirts, employees of Greek cafes getting out late at night and all the Mexican kitchen workers that left for home when we would walk around, talking. Without our parents ever knowing�my father fast asleep, readying for work at the construction plants the next morning and my mother with him, always�the two of us would sneak out of the house. Living in Houston you drive everywhere, even inside your own house it seems. Guillermo used to have an �82 Cadillac�rusted baby blue�and we would take it into the city past looming churches, billboards with smiling white women, oil refineries that looked like small cities with tiny lights in the night sky and flat fields of houses. �Hold your breath, Gustavon� he would yell, as I was pretty chubby at the time, when we smelled that shit��pig�s dreams��Guillermo called it, with all those small cities blurring. We would park the car on the street in front of a nice house and walk. The heat kept me in a yellow t-shirt and old jeans, but Guillermo always wore a sweater no matter the temperature, saying that it was always cold for him. For someone that dropped out of high school, he read too much. And he talked like he had dictionaries in his mouth. Like the night he spoke to me in Spanish (mine was terrible, I sounded like what I was, a kid from Houston�a �coconut� they used to call me, brown on the outside, white on the inside) about there not being a word for the Spanish, �rostro�. Face, which is the closest translation, is something you say to everyday people. Rostro, he told me, are the memories on the wrinkles above your lips. Years of words, silences, eyes meeting, lipstick traces and loud breaths. By then we had walked to Montrose where all the black transvestites were nagging at us. Invisible wrinkles, like the ones penciled across my face now, showed up when he smiled. Through cigarette packs (the almost milky smoke always trickled through his wiry beard) he told me about when he was moving to Los Angeles. About how he wanted to move to Echo Park and sell drawings�he�d sit in cafe�s, streets, malls or record stores and draw whoever walked by. Oily scribbles with cheap ink on receipts or the back of magazines, anything that was white, he drew portraits. He used to mail them to me, when he moved. I kept most of them under my bed with my spiral notebooks of lecture notes. I would look at them, right now, if she weren�t inside the apartment, sleeping. 4 Soft brown dots littered the bottom of her pink polo shirt as she looked down to see what the spilled coffee had done. The thud made a thin sound like when you close a door. On the wall, the flat screen was now quiet. Standing in the middle of the room, she rubbed her hands, specks of coffee on her palms, against her white underwear. Threads of morning light slid across skinny blinds next to the bed and draped her in muted hues of pillow orange. Green eyes grew large. This wasn�t hers, never knew it was beneath their bed. For two months, as Gustavo was out of the apartment most of the day, she was at home, on the bed sleeping, watching the videos she made, putting out cigarettes, all while this was under her bed. Her breaths became thick. Sheets of paper soaked as the gun, wrapped in notebook paper, still sat near her feet. Fuck where did he get this? I don�t remember him ever buying one of these why would he? Ever since his brother died He�s never been the seen me in the same way ever since his brother died he won�t tell me how he never did tell he how he died but he walks in here every nights usually drunk or his eyes red from not enough sleep into the bedroom in the bathroom closes the door and then there�s no sound no noise and I wait for a sound something to tell me he�s awake walking around the room waiting for me to come to bed nothing ever comes out he just sits there on the bed or watches TV or maybe he talks on the phone to someone calls a lover someone he doesn�t want me to know about someone he thinks I don�t know and quietly laughs thinks I�m not listening but all I do is listen all I can do is hear for when there will be something that tells me he wants me again he wants to fucking feel from me from the outside what I want and what we were before his brother before leaving Echo Park to move here to Silverlake I can�t take this much longer not sleeping and waking up and he�s not here never around never at dinner or with me for coffee and I don�t know where he is what is this gun where did he get it why does he have it why does he Blinked and looked up because her silver cellphone, by the television, rang loudly and made light leak into her eyes as they slid open. Walking over, she picked it up and saw the name on the screen: Violetta 818-351-2679 Pressed the off button on the top of the phone and put it back down (her thin fingers were almost shaking). Violetta was a friend who grew up with Mari in Los Angeles who always called when she didn�t have a boyfriend or someone to sleep with. Bare feet slowly walked back towards the soaked object on the ground. That shape, the curves etched with ink, reminded her of history. Looked down again. Two years ago before we were married he told me he was from Mexico but he wasn�t that his family was born there and his brother was the last one that he felt he was never as real we left for London after that to take trains across England and be in Spain with my grandparents for two months and I learned that he studied math in Austin because his dad wanted him to and his brother did heroin or something and he never knew his sister really cause she left home and went back to Mexico like he always wanted to but he used to say I live in LA now he used to watch my videos before I finished them and tell me you shouldn�t show this or forget everything just look up and he would stand behind me when I used to show my films on building walls around the city with crowds standing around at nights he would stand there And she blinked. Slashing the black thoughts in her head, she walked back into the kitchen, past the minimalist burgundy leather furniture spread across the living room, looking for a knife. Loudly thinking about Gustavo, where he was roaming right now being that the car keys were still in their room. Often, Mari opened the door to the apartment and left it open, letting whatever sounds the hallway made leak into the place. Missing him was something she never let him see. It was always quiet in the apartment. Driving through the city or out with her video camera, she rarely thought of him. Like the ghostly smoke around her, she would let him dissolve. For the past year, and only in her head, she thought about their marriage. Never content with his silence, Mari would stare at him, always wondering. With this gun, her wondering faded into doubt. Picking it up again, with thumb and index finger, she tore through the flimsy sheets of paper. Pieces fell to the floor. Breathing heavy, her dark eyebrows crunched up. She noticed there was a letter written with blue ink on the other side of the sheets of paper. Watery words slipped through Mari�s hands as she picked it up and set it on the plaid blue bed sheets. Eyes scanned the phrases while not wanting to read the entire letter�there was a freezing fear between her fingers. Pink collared polo, hugged to her body tightly, warmed her. She didn�t understand why he would have this under the bed. Never, in two years, did Gustavo ever talk about guns or wanting one. Breaths became whispers when they left her lungs. Looked at the letter once again, now angry, and threw it on the bed. The gun she grabbed. Mari looked for a new pack of smokes. And walked to the kitchen, gun in hand. 5 No one knew why he did it. The asshole never told me. Moved out of Houston in the late 80�s and never had a phone, never had an e-mail. Not one that I knew. You forget what people look like sometimes. Videos, photographs�these exist only to keep us from not forgetting ourselves. I never liked math that much. Dad made me study it after high school in hopes that I could go into accounting or law or some shit that would make him money. That�s why he hated Guillermo. His long beard and short hair�like some kind of Mexican rock star or something, reminded my dad of him and nothing hurts more than not needing a photograph�to have your son always there, not letting you forget. I always sit here, every morning, but Mari never knows. She sleeps or sits around, not doing much of anything. When I taught at Hartford, she would maybe go out and film some stuff for little videos, the same she used to show around the city with other people. They would wait until late at night, after passing out flyers at music shows or theaters and bring a projector that Mari bought with the money her grandparents send from Spain. It�s been months since she�s gone, ever since Guillermo. And it�s the time after that hurts. Having to rationalize, to think and think about small moments. Television has made me think of things in events, like large moments where I can trace back happenings. But, what resonates more are the quieter ones, the ones without light, the ones where there�s just two people and some beer (he used to buy it for me when I was 16) or when he used to draw me when I was younger. Mari doesn�t seem to care anymore. I just walk in whenever I want and go to my room and sleep. That is where things make sense to me. Asleep. Like she is, in there right now. It�s already 10:15 and she�s probably still sleeping, in that pink polo shirt she was in last night (�people should dress up to go to sleep� she always says, �why do we dress up only when we go out?�). But I don�t. I don�t have love for her anymore. Endings have always made me think that living was understandable. That things end�breathing, family, love, television shows, teaching, songs�is the closest thing to beauty I can understand. That�s why I held on to Guillermo�s gun, the one that he did it with. Because it is a photograph that reminds me of what he looks like and that things end. The rumble of his deep voice, the small scar on his left hand from fighting once in Mexico and his yellowing teeth. Last time I sit in this hallway, this new building and these neighbors who won�t stop making noise. I booked my ticket to Houston before I threw away my cellphone while having coffee at Marrakesh. She probably still thinks I�m out, driving around LA, trying to find work as a math teacher or walking around aimlessly. Doesn�t realize that I�m right outside the door. Sitting here, burning up in the same navy-blue coat she bought for me. Puta madre. 6 Hands shaking, as if in a car accident, nervous and real. Found a pack of smokes in her brown purse, the one with plastic studs sewn around it. Wondering, how she would talk to him about it if he came home before ten at night, she walked back into their bedroom. Gun in left hand, she holds it with quietness. Watching her alarm clock, the neon red numbers turn. 10:18 AM. Mouth moves with softness: �Fuck him.� Sitting on her bed, the plaid blue sheets crumpled beneath her white underwear and coffee-stained shirt. Two Puerto Rican women yelled at each other next door. Ceiling fan air smothered her honey face from above. She looked at a blank screen. With loudness, she started shaking her head from side to side like she was a little girl again, saying no to her grandparents in Madrid. Again and again, furiously shaking her head mumbling the same four words she told the cab driver in Monterrey, I have to leave. Her left hand swayed mechanically with her head, the silver gun blurring. Noises muted her mind as again and again like electronic beats her brain slammed against the air. Then, the gun flew against the bedroom wall, crashing. And she stopped. Breaths heavy. Throwing all the papers on the bed around the room, a letter she will never read, math notebooks, drawings she had never seen, she still wondered where he was. Grabbing a pair of scratchy blue jeans, she frantically put them on. Wondering if he would be back any minute, perhaps he would decide to come back for some coffee or to sleep or watch some films. Wanting to let the hazy drops her heart wanted her eyes to make, she put on a pair of checkered skating shoes and walked out of the apartment, her pink collar still popped up. Maybe Gustavo was walking around the city, looking for teaching jobs. Her heart was blank. Tiny echoes filled the long space as her shoes tapped the toffee-wooden floors, stepping out into the hallway. She locked the apartment door behind her. The light-orange walls made her think of billboards. With green eyes glazed by morning light, she looked up at the empty hallway, hearing only her own shadowy heartbeats.
Copyright © 2005 Martin De Leon |