HERE IS A SAMPLE OF
UNSPEAKABLE
– A NOVELLA SET IN THE CALIFORNIAN DESERT.
It’s an abandoned cabin, surrounded by debris:
an easy chair spilling polyester, a coffee table with splintered legs, broken
patio stones in a heap, a rusting barbecue, shards of glass under a hollow-eyed
window.
I walk to the front door, push it open and
stand aside to let out the monsters -- spiders, scorpions, coyotes, whatever –
I don’t know what to expect. I’ve never been in the desert before. But nothing
creeps or flutters or dashes out as the door swings back creaking on its
hinges. Instead a man’s voice says:
“Don’t shoot. I’m unarmed.”
It’s a voice with a hint of Latino
accent. The possibilities flash in my
brain: a felon on the run. An illegal border crosser. A madman. And the
impossibilities: I can’t run away. I’m too tired, and he knows I’m here. I
swallow hard, move my mouth, breathe in and out. I can’t talk. My voice has
been trapped too long in my throat. I work my lips to push out an intelligible
sound.
“I’m not armed either,” I say, taking one
step over, risking it, showing the left half of myself to the invisible man. Now he knows that I’m no danger to him. I’m
slight, five foot two, a teenage girl.
“I’m
lost,” I say. My mouth feels woolly.
He keeps a watchful silence. I stare into the dark space beyond the open
door. I can see him now. He’s eighteen maybe, or twenty, short and stocky, with
a blanket draped around his shoulders like a serape. He has a round face,
half-moon eyebrows, a fleshy nose. The lower half of his face is shadowed by an
incipient beard. He is unsmiling, unmoving, like someone carved in stone. Then
his hands begin to stir, open and close, as if to limber up for a fight. They
are large hands, capable of strangling me. Fear is swarming my brain.
“How’d you get here?” he asks.
I’ve caught him by surprise. He expected a car engine to announce my arrival.
“Walking,” I say. My voice sounds metallic,
thinned by the fear in my throat.
He looks at me uncomprehending. No one walks
in the desert.
“Are
you hiding from someone?” I ask. I am trying to keep up the conversation. We
have skipped the introductions. I guess that’s because we are beyond the reach
of civilization. We are in the wilderness, and neither of us is keen to let on
who we are.
He looks down on the dirt floor and answers
my question with a nod: yes, hiding.
We haven’t moved. We are still looking at
each other from across the room. He has his back against the wall, and I am
standing rooted in the doorway. Can he see that I’m afraid of him? No, my face
is in the shadows. All he can see is my body silhouetted against the sunlight.
He knows I’m no match for him, but he knits his brow and doesn’t relax his
stance. He’s afraid, too.
“Who’re you hiding from?” I say.
“The Migra.”
He’s afraid of being deported. He’s an
illegal. A criminal. Or maybe not. I don’t know. I haven’t given it much
thought. It’s not a crime like rape or
murder at any rate. It’s just being in a place where you are not supposed to
be. A type of misdemeanour. Or is it theft -- stealing someone else’s job?
“So what d’you want?” he says.
I’m
trying to answer, to come up with words, but I’m not used to talking.
“I’m hungry,” I say. “Do you have any food?”
He drops his eyes. A ghost of a
smile appears in the corners of his mouth, a smile of embarrassment, because
I’ve asked for something he doesn’t have or doesn’t want to share with me?
“How old are you?” he says.
“Fifteen,” I say.
“You talk like a child,” he says. “I’ll get
you something to eat, but then you have to go.”
He shrugs off his blanket and opens a closet
door in the back wall. The door is crooked, hanging awry and scraping against
the floor. I can see a few cans piled in there. He bends down and picks one and
takes a can opener to it. It’s a can of baked beans. He sticks in a plastic
spoon and hands it to me.
“You can have half of it,” he says. The muscles
on his arm are corded. He has a worker’s rough hands.
There are bottles of water in the closet as
well, and he gives me one that’s already been opened. “You can drink the rest,”
he says. “That’s all I can spare.”
His voice has no ups or downs. He doesn’t
want to sound inviting. Better not talk
to her, his face says.
I step into the room and accept his gift of
food and drink…
I am ashamed of my manners, scraping the
spoon against the sides of the can, gulping the food like a dog. It takes me
only a minute to suck the water bottle dry, to eat my portion, and hand back
the can reluctantly. I would have loved to eat the rest.
“Thanks,” I say.
“Now go,” he says, jerking his head in the
direction of the door.
“I’m
too tired. I’ve been walking for hours. I need a rest.”
He looks away, avoiding my eyes. He doesn’t
want to see my need. I know what he’s thinking. I’m lost. What if they come
searching for me and find him instead?
“You can’t stay here,” he says.
“Please,” I say. “Half an hour?” My shoulders
droop, and he relents…
There is no furniture in the place except a
wreck of a sofa. I take off my runners and lie down on the sofa. I close my
eyes, but before I can go to sleep I have to say my prayer. I call it a prayer
because I use the same words every night when I go to bed and I’m afraid if I
skip it even once, I’ll forget. It’s a formula I’ve worked out, an invocation
of memory, a chronicle. I can’t afford to lose any part of my prayer. If I drop
one syllable, it will drag down the rest, and everything will collapse and
vanish, like all my other memories of the beyond. I have to hold on to this last bit of my
prenatal life. The history of life after birth doesn’t matter. That’s shared
property, family history, repackaged in anecdotes and brought out every
Thanksgiving and Christmas. I don’t care about that part of my story. It has
been handled so much, the fabric is soiled and frayed. It has everyone’s paw
prints on it. It has been dragged through the mud of their memories and chewed
to pieces. Only my prayer is left intact, and I mouth it quietly, barely moving
my lips, guarding it against the stranger whose hideout I am sharing:
I was
scheduled to be born in 1962, in a city 50 miles north of Saigon, but I
preferred staying in limbo, and who wouldn’t, considering what was going on in
Phuoc Vinh at the time. I fought hard against the call, and my would-be mother
was glad of what passed for a miscarriage, a bit of clotted blood in a rag. She
was on the move with all her possessions bundled on her back and a five-year
old trudging beside her, silenced by exhaustion. She was glad it had turned out
that way and vowed to celebrate Buddha’s 2527th birthday with
special devotion, and she did, but government troops fired on the celebrants,
and she was killed.
I had
another call in 1974, this time from New York. The situation was more
promising. My would-be mother was set up nicely in a brownstone in Manhattan.
Her family was wealthy, but she was a drug-addled teenager. I didn’t think I
could handle crack, and I’m sure she, too, was glad when the pregnancy test
turned out to be negative.
In 1995
the powers that be finally had enough of my recalcitrance and kicked me out. I
ended up in a petri dish in California and was implanted into a thirty-eight
year old housewife who decided to have one last shot at motherhood. And that’s
when I was born.”
I put together my prayer a long time ago, in
words I brought along from the beyond. But do they even have words there? I’m
no longer sure. I can’t remember. That’s why it’s important to keep reciting my
story, to engrave it on my brain, so it will always be there for me, to carry
me back to my pre-birth world.
I paid for fighting destiny. Fate doesn’t
alter its timetable for a stubborn embryo. The growth and development of my
brain was arranged eons ago, when atoms bonded into molecules and the planets
started orbiting. There is no way to stop the motion and reset my brain to
zero. That’s why I was born lopsided, with a ’95 body and a ‘62 brain. Later,
there was some give and take between my infant body and my thirty-something
brain, an exchange of essence and energy, with my brain trying to lift off and
my infant body hanging on like deadweight, dragging it down, but never all the
way down to its own innocent condition. My brain is still ahead of my
fifteen-year old body, by ten years or so. I am a fairytale creature, half
teen, half adult, fantastic, monstrous, unbelievable like a mermaid.
My mother is tracking my life in a
scrapbook. She likes cutting up time into regular squares and taking the
coordinates, putting coloured dots on graphs. Everything about me that can be
weighed and measured is noted down in her scrapbook. My name is on the first
page, MELANIE in felt-tipped pink, wreathed with a daisy garland. After that, no more flowery nonsense, just
the facts, pounds and inches traced on a chart, a perfect time line of sitting,
crawling, and first steps, but on the page marked FIRST WORD: nothing. A blank page. I couldn’t get myself to speak.
I didn’t want to shock people with the contents of my ‘62 brain spilling hot
salsa, when they expected the milk of innocence. I decided to delay the
business of speaking until I could reasonably be expected to talk in full
sentences and say clever things.
Wonderful novella! Funny, touching and beautifully written. I loved it!
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