Another Day: People, Events

What happens to make her feel loved? X helps her to find Cheito in La Terraza?
THE BOYS: WHO ARE THEY: DAVID s, b,c,j,h LINKS TO EACH, OR DESCRIBE EACH?
Some of them are good. AND SOME OF THEM ARE GOOD. [SHE CAN’T TELL SHE’S THE ONE WHO STAYS AWAY FROM PEOPLE. ‘THE COMPANERA IS ALOOF…MEMORY? HOW CAN I KEEP THESE SCENES IN THE PRESENT?’

[Who should x be? Her old best friend from El Partido? What’s her name? Betzaida. Small framed, curls, strong. Persistent. Fierce. Determined.
Manuel:
She begins to remember who the other people are. ]

Silvia wakes up. She's afraid to open her eyes, look around, take in her bedstand with its teetering piles of books, her dream notebook, the black good pen Ernesto gave her for her 50th birthday. She's afraid to see Cheito's high school painting on the wall emerging from the darkness. In the smoky brown self portrait his face is unendurably vulnerable. What happened? She’s all alone; she feels alone even though she’s put up on the wall group shots of her many lives that include her: Silvia in third grade in the middle of the second row; then as a fifth grade teacher,standing in the back row, barely distinguishable from the girls; sitting on the side of the long table the Partido’s secretariat met around,furthest from First Secretary Manuel; dressed in white, front row, among her group of graduating yoga teachers; on the stoop, with Machi and the boys from the living room school, children swarming the sidewalk and the street during a summer block party.
"Pull your head out of your butt. You've got a meeting to run." Betzaida would say this when Silvia looked too sunk to lead the Propaganda Secretariat. She'd set up her life to run away from Betzaida so her head stayed in her butt. All those people in her life there to run away from so she attains isolation jaya. That moment of waking up terrified stays the same, feels the same; as she gets older, worse. Fear of the future sharpens as time foreshortens it; the future arrives; there is barely any future left; there is no more future. Capitalism careens the planet, the humans, toward extinction. Is the terror in the present more biting or does her mind drop into earlier and earlier moments of her own little life, where the terror was most raw?
She looks at the dog Thug curled up on the floor close to the radiator. He senses Silvia's awake and raises his head from where it's cradled on his front paws. He wants to know if it's his lucky day for getting an earlier, longer walk. He catches Silvia's eye. She's glad to have another set of eyes to gaze into, glad Cheito left the dog behind. Mornings like this one if not for the dog she might not get herself to rise. She sits up and lowers her feet into her worn out clogs. The things in her room look off, odd, the way they'll look after Ernesto's dead, after she's dead. She repeats the chant from yoga class, asato ma sat gamaye tamaso ma jyotir gamaye mrytior ma amritam gamaye lead us from unreal to real lead us from darkness to the light lead us from the fear of death to the knowledge of immortality.
One time after Cheito's home school class in the living room she sat on the edge of her bed looking at the curled up calico. The bed was a futon on the floor like when Silvia was a young adult, only because their house had burnt down and she, Ernesto and Cheito were for now in her mother's house down the block. The cat Lilac squeezed between the bed and the wall. Silvia had rescued Lilac from the backyards to keep her mother company during her final days in hospice care downstairs. Her mother had recently died in the room just below where Silvia sat.
The boys of the living room school, Franco ,Buda,Celso,Otis,Madrid. She couldn't save them. What made her believe she hadn't saved them?
She stared at the calico curled in the tight spot between the futon and the wall and for an instant stepped outside of her own mortality. A voice spoke in her head: this presence in you now has always been here, has never died. She had one moment of complete release from the constant gnawing of her death terror. That was bliss! What's becoming of those boys from the school in the living room? The school grew on its own as one of Cheito's friends after another asked to join his home schooling. The cat Lilac disappeared just a few days after Silvia for a minute had knowledge of immortality. She went off to die in the basement. While she was gone Silvia's Mother appeared to her in a dream, wearing a peach colored negligee, with a speechless beatific smile that somehow said, "I forgot to tell you how I showed my love. This smile is how I showed my love."Not having shown her love for Silvia, pinning lots of rage on her, had made Silvia's childhood torture. A few months before her death Silvia confronted her Mother with this truth. Her Mother promised to tell her daily and remembered to do so for two days. It was a good thing she got around to translating the meaning of her smile. Silvia got it. Come to think of it the dream message rang true. That very quiet way she show love had been covered up by the very loud ways she showed rage.In that same speechless way, mind to mind, her mother communicated exactly where the cat had holed up in the basement, behind a stack of Silvia's father's religious books. She knew this was a visitation and not a dream because her mother had accomplished what Houdini had not, devised a code to communicate after death. Silvia got the code at once. Years ago her Mother had sent her a telepathic dream in which she communicated that she'd put their old dog to sleep. The cat message referenced the dog message and verified the love message. Her Mother was a brilliant ghost.
While the bliss immortal moment lasted it seemed permanent. Silvia believed she was rid of the death terror for good, that the vise on her esophagus keeping her breath shallow, her psyche permanently on tiptoes, was gone. While she was immortal the moment was infinite.

This moment now is utterly trapped in time. When is it? Is it now, waking up with the realization that Ernesto might be dead. Her not thinking of him, her non-thoughts, always aim to erase the image of him in a prison. But this early morning terror has her mind aiming to erase an image of him dead.

Today is the day she said she would go back to the Special Office set up to track down the disappeared. Silvia didn't know if they only tracked those who had been detained without trial or even a record of arrest, or those who got themselves swallowed into the mushroom towns growing in parks, by highways, on the edges of every city, this city, where D had told her Cheito had gone. (D another of the living room school boys going to hell.)Is reluctance to stand on line at the SO, sit and wait, talk or not talk to the other waiting women, what woke her up this terrified, a hair away from running to the toilet bowl to vomit, the way she used to do when she was first an exile in the City, or every single morning for the first days of school?
A kind of emotional astigmatism, a reversal of life imagery, happened when she was a child. Truly terrifying stuff was happening at home but to survive it she made the badness good, erased it, and home became a force field of false safety. For a whole summer she balanced the effects of the nighttime incursions into her bed by P and the daytime beatings by M by mastering the art and practice of reversal. Now exiting to the outside world made her dizzy. She had no footing in the real. Her reversing had left her internally empty, a non-being. And it made the external world unreal. She often had dreams of herself at the edge of the top of a steep spiral staircase like a well. In the better versions of the dream she would discover when she at last dared lower one foot onto the top rung, that each rung was actually enormous with plenty of room for her to plant both feet and get steady before plunging further in. (Of course, she was still plunging into a well, but she had the choice to do so slowly at her own pace,proceeding slowly toward death, not head first to instant death).
As she approached adolescence and more often got her hands on the copies of Sucesos magazine her father left lying around, she found out there were worse tortures going on in Ventura than those she reversed at home. She couldn't get herself to stop looking at the photograph of some sort of empty water cistern full of half naked bodies missing bits, or to stop reading what was done to the women: breasts cut off, vaginas douched with acid.
Was that what happened to Ernesto? Was that happening to him this very moment? Were there rooms in the City right now in which this was going on? Somewhere on earth this very moment someone, many someones, were being tortured for their politics; or tortured in that odd way that these systemic tortures were recorded onto the minds of citizens who replayed them: a Mother or a Father on the far frontier of discipline, or a serial killer who had attached an erotic charge to the hurting. Or some teenager might be holding a whole school hostage or just finished shooting it up with the gun he found he too could acquire and shoot, doing onto his own real or imagined tormentors what he saw his government got away with doing.
Someplace right this minute humans were answering her question, are we good or are we bad, is it fairy tale or horror story. They were screaming out yes it is the horror story, we are bad.
She slides further into the down quilt so her head is engulfed, curls up, cocoons herself. She makes herself breathe deeply but is still unable to interrupt the surges of adrenalin, full fight or flight. She tries the fantasy of the woman on a galloping white horse, then the woman running footsure through dense woods, then the woman deep under the ground denning with wolves spooning and spooned by them. When she was a girl she'd be getting up to vomit at this point so now it's better, she's not about to throw up.
When she wakes up with a start it's always this way: Her mind knows absolutely that people are bad. All the reversing she managed in the daytime is undone and P and M are purely bad, and with them the whole species. Are they good or are they bad is answered definitively: they are bad. Anything good they have done is canceled by their evil. She pictures the instant when the woman knows she is about to be murdered, she will be murdered, when she undergoes the tortures in the certainty that she will die. The instant when the political prisoner knows that after the fingernails are ripped off and the eyeballs are gouged out he will be killed. She never pictures herself in the other role, as torturer, but she realizes now that she'd been awakened by one of those dreams in which she has killed, somehow done the one thing that cannot be undone, a dream where she is the perpetrator. In the dreams she's always done the killing unawarely, by mistake. In her dream this morning she fed the man his own eyes, meaning to nourish him, and caused his death. Who was the man?
Last night she shouldn't have stayed up late watching the film in which the social climber murdered his impoverished sensual alcoholic lost mistress to save his perfect marriage to the clever pretty rich one. She couldn't make herself stop watching and she didn't feel the story seeping in, stirring up that dark old child's question, are we good or are we bad? Is it the fairy tale or the horror story? Is our badness in the service of our goodness, some temporary turbulence, and the good weather more real? Or is the goodness a disguise to sweeten the badness or to worsen it by tantalizing, by offering what might be true, should be true, but is actually too good to be true; what looks like goodness is just part of the grift, the scam?
But in the middle of the night she woke up having dreamt that she had killed, knowing any one of us could. And knowing at the same time that Ernesto is dead. (Was it that by reversing the truth about him being dead into some made up prison tale she was somehow killing him again, killing him more?)And what if he were dead? Could she be any more alone than she is with him gone, dead or alive? But believing he is somewhere on planet earth and might resurface must have been a lot less terrifying and lonely than knowing he is dead and completely gone. (Or is declaring him dead when he isn't because she can not tolerate ambiguity, the final abandonment Cheito accused her of when he left? You've given up on finding Pa. Had Cheito gone to challenge her to find him?)

She knew all this was just the prelude to the unthinkable thoughts about Cheito. How is he living? How do you find someone in a mushroom city without actual streets let alone named streets? How does he live? How will he live? Will he survive? What will become of him? Will he ever stop drinking and drugging? Will he end up in the gutter like the homeless sleeping man on the subway platform yesterday morning, with the book Current Trends in Marxism by his side?
And here they are,on schedule,the next horror thoughts trampling into her frontal lobe: How did she ruin Cheito's life? Why can't she do his childhood over? She remembers him when he was eight, taking her hand while they walked on the avenue, closing his eyes, walking blind, her job to make sure he bumped into nobody. He loved this game. He laughed and laughed. She sobs, pierced by a grief her body can barely hold. What happened to her little boy? What did she do wrong? She can never forgive herself for whatever it was. Why can't she do his childhood over? When did she feed him his own eyes thinking she was nourishing him? His struggles are the proof that she is bad. It's all she can do not to beat her fists into her head, not to ram her head hard into the wall.
Next. Here they are: the unbearable thoughts about her own old age. Herself blind, incontinent, unaware, homeless, stinking, demented, one of the many street dwellers in the mushroom cities, the favelas, swept by the tidal waves. All along have her tidal wave nightmares been prophetic?) She must push away images of the underwater planet, of favelas, of the billions drowning, among them Machi and herself. Maybe Ernesto is the lucky one, dead for his cause, dead while he still believed that by dying he was ensuring the revolution; dead before he knew we are all already dead. Capitalism has already killed us all.
We are bad and it is too late and we have destroyed the planet, destroyed each other in small ways in our little lives as separate creatures and destroyed everything altogether in huge ways as the one huge organism that we are. An organism split against itself, its thinking confused by greed, its might out of control. We are the genocidal beast.
Cheito may survive in his little life only to be drowned by the big death.
History, has it been a series of catastrophes or is there indeed an upward trend?
Silvia has believed all along that we have already won but when she wakes up in the middle of the night in terror she knows we are already dead.

Is this only the memory of waking up in the middle of the night after a beating, wondering did her Mother truly want to kill her? Waking up after the things that went on in her bed in the dark when Papi was home? What seems like truth, a hard won knowing, might it merely be her mind still trying to cry that little girl's tears?

She is afraid to face the day. To face the others who must be classified as good or bad, from whom she must protect herself. Another day when nothing will happen. Another day of waiting for her number to be called at the Special Office only to be told they have no record of any Ernesto Valdez or any Maceo Valzez Roman.
She doesn't know where any of them are. Ernesto is in prison or dead. Cheito is god knows where. He never replied to the email she sent when D finally gave her an address. She's in her own kind of prison and her own kind of death.

It occurs to her to make herself remember a happy time, a moment when she loved.
There was one Thanksgiving when she and Cheito and Ernesto stayed home. Why they didn't go to either set of parents' she doesn't remember. Ernesto cooked pernil and arroz con gandules. They sat at the table with the tv turned off and they talked. Cheito asked questions about the revolution and Ernesto explained his vision of how life could be, will be, when humans figure out how to share the wealth and allow each other good work. They talked about life's work, about having a life's work, and how fortunate they were because they did; they knew the score, they understood what went on, and they had a way to change it. They knew what is to be done and had only to do it. There were only a few small details to take care of, distribution of the wealth, getting rid of the guns. In the excitement of the conversation Silvia's chair tipped back and Cheito stopped her fall and they laughed and laughed and laughed.
The memory doesn't soothe the terror. It sharpens it. Where did those moments go? Later that same night Cheito heard one of his missing friends had been found, the body of his friend was found, by the river in a duffel bag dead by strangling stabbing sodomized. Another boy from their living room school gone.
Would the revolution be made in time for Cheito? Was it already too late?
When she managed to get herself out of bed she moved slowly not to disturb the field. This is how she moved as a child after one of her family's rent veil events, hoping to not enter her mother's sphere, her father's sphere, as if by disappearing herself she could avoid the rules of annihilation. She dressed blindly in the dark all in black as usual, bundled herself into her down coat, wrapped her head and face into her scarf, and leashed Thug. It was probably a good thing Cheito left his dog behind,to make her get up and get outside.

Taped onto the tree in front of the house was a wanted poster, the words REWARD were in big red letters. The photograph was of D who'd come by the house drunk out of his mind at three am just last month, just back from the Island War, looking for Cheito. The cops must think someone will see D coming to her house.
He'd stood by this same tree telling her as he sobbed how in the Island War he'd had to shoot at other Islanders, ones who believed in what they were fighting for. He'd come back maybe a week later after he found Cheito, the only one of the living room boys willing to tell her where he was. He gave her Cheito's email and told her which mushroom town he was living in. She ripped the poster off and read it as she walked the dog toward the avenue. It said D had crashed a stolen car and inflicted life threatening injuries on someone else in the car. She folded the poster and rammed it into her coat pocket. D's face stared at her from every street light on the avenue. No surprise if D had gone back to stealing cars. It was the only place he got to use his brilliance, push his mind to the limit, work hard. She pushed away the thought that this might not have happened if she hadn't been afraid to let him come inside that night, if she had listened longer, if she had helped him.
D was another mother's son. Her own son could one day be on such a poster. She couldn't even help her own son let alone another Mother's.

As fate would have it, here was D's mother approaching her on the avenue, taking D's daughter to school. Silvia caught her eye wanting to say many things with her smile. There's nothing to be ashamed of (Julia's instantly averted eyes screamed unendurable shame); Your son is good; You and I have our own relationship. Julia kept going and Silvia called after her, stopped her. She spoke the words out loud. "Your son is good. He's a good boy." Julia nods. "Las malas companias." Silvia shook her head. She didn't want the conversation to go that way. Her own son was part of the bad company. But whose son was bad company for the other? "There's no room for our sons." Silvia looked hard into Julia's eyes, ringed with shadows. "We've made a society that makes no room for them. They're under too much oppression, targeted for destruction." Julia raised her hand to silence her. "You and your son are part of David's problem. Thinking he's a victim of society doesn't lead him to better choices. It just justifies the crazy shit he does. Look at Juan or Carlitos. They have jobs, they're in night school." In the face of Julia's rage Silvia couldn't think. Those were two of the living room school boys who were maybe doing well. She stammered. She came back with,"They're working as prison guards! The system has a few available slots for assimilation, for middle men of oppression, managers of the poor. In a few years all our sons will either be prisoners or prison guards."
Taina broke away from her grandmother's hand, ran to the closest poster, yanked it off, ran ahead to the next one, yanked it off. Julia ran after her. Silvia watched Julia slap the little girl's hand. She followed after Julia. "Call me or come by if there's anything I can do. If you need help finding a lawyer. If you need to borrow money." Julia yanked Taina's hand and walked away. "Fuck you. You and your son are half David's problem." Silvia watched Julia walk away. Then she caught up to her. She didn't want to open her mouth but she couldnt make, herself stop. She watched herself say "Io fuckedmother I've been trying to be your friend since I moved into this neighborhood when our kids were a year and a half. Just because you choose not to know who your real enemy is doesn't mean I have to put up with you thinking I'm your problem, or my son is your problem."
Julia kept walking. Silvia let her walk away and let Thug pull her as far as her own door and into the house. It seemed being outraged trumped being terrified. She was no longer scared. She was mobilized. She spun her rolodex for the names of lawyers. Nothing good had come of Ernesto's legal problems except she was well connected to a network of left wing lawyers. If Julia thought that Silvia was going to do nothing for D just because she was full of io, she was wrong. All those memories of her mistakes with Julia, all the years of going after Julia and having things go wrong over and over begin to exhaust her, but she has the poster of D to stare at, that photo of him wanting to look like a thug unable to keep his eyes from showing he's scared, to keep her going. She's just going to have to go after Julia one more time. (do link here: section of D and C playing, J pissed off because when he comes to S' D gets spoiled. class and adultism: the climbing toy, D breaks glass in the yard, D running like a loosed wild horse when they go on an outing)

On the train to the Special Office Silvia makes her phone list. While she waits she'll call around, call in some old favors to a couple of the lawyers she's interpreted for in court. It's too late for the work rush. She has a window seat. She called in sick and hopes she doesn't run into anybody from her job. The train is going over the bridge and today the river is steel gray, the sky and the buildings are gray, gray is beautiful,rich.
When did things go bad with Julia? The day she came to pick up David and he didn't want to leave, perched himself on top of the wood climbing toy in the middle room between her bedroom and Machi's? The day David put his fist through the glass door of the summer house in the yard (not long after that Ernesto tore it down so the boys had more room to play.) It wasn't until after the subway disaster that she stopped letting David sleep over, although it never stopped him. He just lied. Silvia had finally convinced Julia to go to a demonstration against the Island War and she talked her into bringing David, it would be so great for them to see there's something we can do about oppression, there's something besides the adults\' world and the street, a third choice out there.
They were in a thick crowd of people. The trains got more and more crowded as they neared the midtown rally point. They reached the stop where the Partido de La Felicidad's contingent would gather and the group pressed out of the train , a thick mass of people barely able to get through the door. Silvia and Julia were pulled apart and the boys were pulled apart from each of them and from one second to another the two women were on the platform and the boys were left behind in the train. Silvia could see Machi through the glass, his terrified face is unforgetteable. She mouthed to him to get out at the next stop and wait for her. David she didn't see. Julia was screaming. They got themselves outside where of course there was no way to get a taxi. The streets were filled with people, the sidewalks were jammed. Silvia explained to Julia that the boys should be waiting at the next stop. They pushed their way the ten blocks, pushed their way down into the hole in the ground against the tide of demonstrators climbing up. There were no boys waiting. The train had long come and gone.
Julia was speechless, following Silvia. Silvia told the token seller, told the transit cop. He told them to go back to their contingent. Someone from their group might have gotten left behind as well, and taken the boys to the rally point. Silvia didn't know how she was moving, stepping one foot in front of the other, how she was breathing, her heart was racing and her lungs were stopped. How did she make it back? What if the group had already begun marching?
The boys were there. Each boy clung to one hand of a Partido militant Silvia barely knew. Each mother flung herself onto her knees and clutched her boy and sobbed. Silvia and Machi stayed with the demonstration. Julia yanked David's hand, yanked him away, plunged into the train without saying a word.

Silvia walked outside. It was a garish sunny day. What did the sun have to be shining about? And what is she to do now? She can barely stand her own thoughts. She was done at the Special Office much earlier than she expected. The man had no information on Ernesto. She had finally decided to take her turn and ask about him because of Cheito there was even less likelihood they would know anything at all. And of course he knew nothing. They took him. They put him wherever they put people they didn’t want found. Cheito believed they’d taken him to the Camp, on the Island’s offshore prison island. There was no way short of seizing the state to find anybody there until they were good and ready to release them. With the Moat act there were no so called civil liberties left.

She kept walking trying to not think, wishing there was a way to switch off her mind. She remembered her long ago yoga teacher who called meditation, parking the mind. She willed it away, from that ancient time, that life before the Party, Ernest or Cheito, her mantra floated into her head and she repeated the syllables, matching them at times to her breath at times to her gait. She had some idea where she was heading but she didn’t want to actually decide. Until she got to the corner the south east corner of the park, or what used to be the park and was now a mushroom town. Cheito called them that, mushroom towns, in one of his songs, his spoken songs.
If he was in there, and D said he was, she would find Cheito.
The place had a fascination. She stood a few yards into the path wondering which way to walk. She counted on the simmering rage inside her to keep her safe. Nobody would dare mess with her. She decided to walk uphill and bear left because long ago she and Cheito had walked the dog Thug to the meadow that used to be that way. Now it was full with a maze of structures built out of cardboard boxes and pieces of billboard. She saw a room made from the middle of a car. From looking a while she made out paths among the clustered structured. Nobody was about. Maybe they went out of the park to work, or maybe they slept in the day. She walked to what was once the high spot on the meadow. With the houses there the view of the City on the other side of the river was not visible. She braced herself and knocked on a door. The woman who came to the door was older than Silvia, dressed like Silvia, for an office, and she didn’t look annoyed. “Who are you looking for? Your son?” Was the park full of desperate mothers? Silvia burst into tears. The woman did know Cheito but she didn’t tell Silvia where he was. She said she’d tell him she’d come looking for him. “I can’t afford to break their trust,” the woman said. “He’s fine. He’s doing well. He’s got friends who have his back.”
Silvia watched the woman walk down hill to her job as a visiting nurse. She stayed. She found a place where a park bench wasn’t inside anybody’s house and she sat there. Between two mushroom houses through a space left as a passage she could see a bit of river, a bit of skyline. She sat and waited for her son. She thought she might just sit there for ever until he manifested on his own, or someone told her she was there, willing to make him come see her. She would not more. She would go on a hunger strike. She would dare challenge society or god. So much injustice couldn’t just go on with impunity and she go on dragging herself to work, sitting at her desk, looking out the window at the mirror building across the way. Why didn’t everyone simply stop where they are, refuse to make another move or take another step until there was justice? She would sit there until god responded and made something happen.

She sat and parked her mind and let some voice in her head repeat the mantram. She felt hugely relieved. She would never move again until either Ernesto himself came and got her or Cheito turned up.

Just about nightfall Cheito came and sat beside her. He took her hand. She put her head on his shoulder. She tried to keep her tears silent. She was afraid to open her mouth, say anything that might make him go away. He made the first move, pulled on her arm and walked out with her, walked with her all the way to the house. Thug knocked him down with his euphoria. He went with him into the shower and they showered together, master and dog. She cooked Cheito’s favorite macaroni and cheese. They sat together to eat. Was she dreaming?
“I got word about Pa. He’s in the Camp.”
“How?”
“Everybody sooner or later turns up in Mushroom Town.”
Silvia was afraid to breathe for fear she’d conjure him away just as she’d somehow conjured him to her.
“D’s there.”
She nodded. It was obvious that was where D would have gone. Where else was there to go completely off the grid?
“He’s not hanging around for this one.”
She understood. The rest of the guys had turned their back on him. Blamed him for the Sapo’s being as good as dead, if not dead already. But Cheito had a different sense of loyalty. If only it included her? Or was his presence here now a sign that maybe now it did include her? Had she been good enough for him? Had her seres de luz prayers healed them both? Healed her enough?
He said he’d stay the night but would go away next morning.
Before he went to bed he enlisted Silvia in his plan for them to go to the Island, then the prison island and demand to see Ernesto.

She called in sick a second day. She'd end up on the list of people with time and leave problems. She woke up, jumped out of bed and ran to Cheito's room. Had she dreamt everything? He was in his bed with his down blanket wound around his head, under his neck, between his legs. Her knees gave way from tenderness. Love for her son made her liquid inside. She couldn't bear his going again. She watched him sleep,looking like her little boy.

She couldn’t stop him from leaving. Always in her life there had been a man who was leaving. First her Father, then her lovers, now her son. It couldn’t help her son for her to be feeling about him the way she felt about Ernesto being gone. But she didn’t, actually. Her son being gone nothing had prepared her for. Unendurably bereft. She watched him from the window, heading uphill. Now she knew where he was and she could find him again. But why did becoming a man mean he had to leave her? And how had it come to be she had almost no life beyond him?
He said he’d be back after he took care of getting D out of town. He didn’t want to tell her where he was sending him or taking him. “If you don’t know you can’t answer when they ask you.” Already her son knew more about the world than she did. Or more about the world that men had set up. The world she knew about was a different one.
She had no idea what to do next. What to do now. She noticed that she was sobbing. Racking, loud sobs. She shouldn’t be crying alone. She put the leash on Thug and went outside and let the dog drag her wherever he wanted. She imagined the dog would track Cheito, lead her to him without her having to decide to chase her son. But Thug walked the opposite way, down the hill, toward the river.
She walked to the Partido's storefront. A crowd was gathered by the coffee machine. She knew at once from his absence it was Manuel she'd come to see. There was a bang on the front window and there he was. She opened the door to let him in. He scowled. "The door was locked." She'd somehow locked it when she walked in. He walked through her, past her and hugged each of the coffee drinkers. She stood to the side assuming he'd get around to her but he didn't. Invisible. She followed him into the back room. He leaned over the desk into his hands, his face close to the front page of Redencion. "Manuel." He turned to face her. Now he smiled. She couldn't count on holding his attention so went to the point: "Ernesto's in the Camp. You have to tell me how I find him."
It had been a long time. She had no favors to call in with Manuel. He resented her disappearing from the Party after Ernesto was expelled although they'd never bothered with expelling her. They'd simply let her disappear into motherhood. But she could see Manuel was listening. She could offer him Ernesto as a cause, a front page story, a documentable disappeared who had been traced to the Camp. First she'd have to prove to him that he was there. And how could she be certain. She was going on what Cheito said he'd found out she didn't know how. She believed it. She'd always known it.

That moment of waking up terrified is always the same, outside time, although as she gets older it gets worse. Is it that the terror in the present is more biting as capitalism careens the planet, the humans, toward extinction, or that her mind drops into earlier and earlier moments of her own little life, where the terror was most raw? The wake-up terror gets worse instead of better. She looks at the dog Thug curled up on the floor close to the radiator. He senses Silvia's awake and raises his head from where it's cradled on his front paws. He wants to know if it's his lucky day for getting an earlier, longer walk. He catches Silvia's eye. She's glad to have another set of eyes to gaze into, glad Cheito left the dog behind. Mornings like this one if not for the dog she might not get herself to rise.
She's afraid to open her eyes, look around, take in her bedstand with its teetering piles of books, her dream notebook, the black good pen Ernesto gave her for her 50th birthday. She's afraid to see Cheito's high school paintings on the wall emerging from the darkness. In the smoky brown self portrait his face is unendurably vulnerable. What happened? The things in her room look off, odd, the way they'll look after Ernesto's dead, after she's dead. She repeats the chant from yoga class, asato ma sat gamaye tamaso ma jyotir gamaye mrytior ma amritam gamaye lead us from unreal to real lead us from darkness to the light lead us from the fear of death to the knowledge of immortality.
One time after Cheito's home school class she sat on the edge of her bed looking at the curled up calico. The bed was a futon on the floor like when Silvia was a young adult, only because their house had burnt down and she, Ernesto and Cheito were for now in her mother's old house down the block. Lilac squeezed between the bed and the wall. Silvia had rescued Lilac from the backyards to keep her mother company during the hospice days. Her mother had recently died in the room just below where Silvia sat.

She stared at the calico curled in the tight spot between the futon and the wall and for an instant stepped outside of her own mortality. A voice spoke in her head: this presence in you now has always been here, has never died. She had one moment of complete release from the constant gnawing of her death terror. That was bliss! What's becoming of those boys from the school in the living room? The school grew on its own as one of Cheito's friends after another asked to join his home schooling. The cat Lilac disappeared just a few days after Silvia for a minute had knowledge of immortality. She went off to die in the basement. While she was gone Silvia's Mother appeared to her in a dream, wearing a peach colored negligee, with a speechless beatific smile that somehow said, "I forgot to tell you how I showed my love. This smile is how I showed my love."Not having shown her love for Silvia, pinning lots of rage on her, had made Silvia's childhood torture. A few months before her death Silvia confronted her Mother with this truth. Her Mother promised to tell her daily and remembered to do so for two days. It was a good thing she got around to translating the meaning of her smile. Silvia got it. Come to think of it the dream message rang true. That very quiet way she show love had been covered up by the very loud ways she showed rage.In that same speechless way, mind to mind, her mother communicated exactly where the cat had holed up in the basement, behind a stack of Silvia's father's religious books. She knew this was a visitation and not a dream because her mother had accomplished what Houdini had not, devised a code to communicate after death. Silvia got the code at once. Years ago her Mother had sent her a telepathic dream in which she communicated that she'd put their old dog to sleep. The cat message referenced the dog message and verified the love message. Her Mother was a brilliant ghost.
While the bliss immortal moment lasted it seemed permanent. Silvia believed she was rid of the death terror for good, that the vise on her esophagus keeping her breath shallow, her psyche permanently on tiptoes, was gone. While she was immortal the moment was infinite.

This moment now is utterly trapped in time. When is it? Is it now, waking up with the realization that Ernesto might be dead. Her not thinking of him, her non-thoughts, always aim to erase the image of him in a prison. But this early morning terror has her mind aiming to erase an image of him dead.

Today is the day she said she would go back to the Special Office set up to track down the disappeared. Silvia didn't know if they only tracked those who had been detained without trial or even a record of arrest, or those who got themselves swallowed into the mushroom towns growing in parks, by highways, on the edges of every city, this city, where D had told her Cheito had gone. (D another of the living room school boys going to hell.)Is reluctance to stand on line at the SO, sit and wait, talk or not talk to the other waiting women, what woke her up this terrified, a hair away from running to the toilet bowl to vomit, the way she used to do when she was first an exile in the City, or every single morning for the first days of school?
A kind of emotional astigmatism, a reversal of life imagery, happened when she was a child. Truly terrifying stuff was happening at home but to survive it she made the badness good, erased it, and home became a force field of false safety. For a whole summer she balanced the effects of the nighttime incursions into her bed by P and the daytime beatings by M by mastering the art and practice of reversal. Now exiting to the outside world made her dizzy. She had no footing in the real. Her reversing had left her internally empty, a non-being. And it made the external world unreal. She often had dreams of herself at the edge of the top of a steep spiral staircase like a well. In the better versions of the dream she would discover when she at last dared lower one foot onto the top rung, that each rung was actually enormous with plenty of room for her to plant both feet and get steady before plunging further in. (Of course, she was still plunging into a well, but she had the choice to do so slowly at her own pace,proceeding slowly toward death, not head first to instant death).
As she approached adolescence and more often got her hands on the copies of Sucesos magazine her father left lying around, she found out there were worse tortures going on in Ventura than those she reversed at home. She couldn't get herself to stop looking at the photograph of some sort of empty water cistern full of half naked bodies missing bits, or to stop reading what was done to the women: breasts cut off, vaginas douched with acid.
Was that what happened to Ernesto? Was that happening to him this very moment? Were there rooms in the City right now in which this was going on? Somewhere on earth this very moment someone, many someones, were being tortured for their politics; or tortured in that odd way that these systemic tortures were recorded onto the minds of citizens who replayed them: a Mother or a Father on the far frontier of discipline, or a serial killer who had attached an erotic charge to the hurting. Or some teenager might be holding a whole school hostage or just finished shooting it up with the gun he found he too could acquire and shoot, doing onto his own real or imagined tormentors what he saw his government got away with doing.
Someplace right this minute humans were answering her question, are we good or are we bad, is it fairy tale or horror story. They were screaming out yes it is the horror story, we are bad.
She slides further into the down quilt so her head is engulfed, curls up, cocoons herself. She makes herself breathe deeply but is still unable to interrupt the surges of adrenalin, full fight or flight. She tries the fantasy of the woman on a galloping white horse, then the woman running footsure through dense woods, then the woman deep under the ground denning with wolves spooning and spooned by them. When she was a girl she'd be getting up to vomit at this point so now it's better, she's not about to throw up.
When she wakes up with a start it's always this way: Her mind knows absolutely that people are bad. All the reversing she managed in the daytime is undone and P and M are purely bad, and with them the whole species. Are they good or are they bad is answered definitively: they are bad. Anything good they have done is canceled by their evil. She pictures the instant when the woman knows she is about to be murdered, she will be murdered, when she undergoes the tortures in the certainty that she will die. The instant when the political prisoner knows that after the fingernails are ripped off and the eyeballs are gouged out he will be killed. She never pictures herself in the other role, as torturer, but she realizes now that she'd been awakened by one of those dreams in which she has killed, somehow done the one thing that cannot be undone, a dream where she is the perpetrator. In the dreams she's always done the killing unawarely, by mistake. In her dream this morning she fed the man his own eyes, meaning to nourish him, and caused his death. Who was the man?
Last night she shouldn't have stayed up late watching the film in which the social climber murdered his impoverished sensual alcoholic lost mistress to save his perfect marriage to the clever pretty rich one. She couldn't make herself stop watching and she didn't feel the story seeping in, stirring up that dark old child's question, are we good or are we bad? Is it the fairy tale or the horror story? Is our badness in the service of our goodness, some temporary turbulence, and the good weather more real? Or is the goodness a disguise to sweeten the badness or to worsen it by tantalizing, by offering what might be true, should be true, but is actually too good to be true; what looks like goodness is just part of the grift, the scam?
But in the middle of the night she woke up having dreamt that she had killed, knowing any one of us could. And knowing at the same time that Ernesto is dead. (Was it that by reversing the truth about him being dead into some made up prison tale she was somehow killing him again, killing him more?)And what if he were dead? Could she be any more alone than she is with him gone, dead or alive? But believing he is somewhere on planet earth and might resurface must have been a lot less terrifying and lonely than knowing he is dead and completely gone. (Or is declaring him dead when he isn't because she can not tolerate ambiguity, the final abandonment Cheito accused her of when he left? You've given up on finding Pa. Had Cheito gone to challenge her to find him?)

She knew all this was just the prelude to the unthinkable thoughts about Cheito. How is he living? How do you find someone in a mushroom city without actual streets let alone named streets? How does he live? How will he live? Will he survive? What will become of him? Will he ever stop drinking and drugging? Will he end up in the gutter like the homeless sleeping man on the subway platform yesterday morning, with the book Current Trends in Marxism by his side?
And here they are,on schedule,the next horror thoughts trampling into her frontal lobe: How did she ruin Cheito's life? Why can't she do his childhood over? She remembers him when he was eight, taking her hand while they walked on the avenue, closing his eyes, walking blind, her job to make sure he bumped into nobody. He loved this game. He laughed and laughed. She sobs, pierced by a grief her body can barely hold. What happened to her little boy? What did she do wrong? She can never forgive herself for whatever it was. Why can't she do his childhood over? When did she feed him his own eyes thinking she was nourishing him? His struggles are the proof that she is bad. It's all she can do not to beat her fists into her head, not to ram her head hard into the wall.
Next. Here they are: the unbearable thoughts about her own old age. Herself blind, incontinent, unaware, homeless, stinking, demented, one of the many street dwellers in the mushroom cities, the favelas, swept by the tidal waves. All along have her tidal wave nightmares been prophetic?) She must push away images of the underwater planet, of favelas, of the billions drowning, among them Machi and herself. Maybe Ernesto is the lucky one, dead for his cause, dead while he still believed that by dying he was ensuring the revolution; dead before he knew we are all already dead. Capitalism has already killed us all.
We are bad and it is too late and we have destroyed the planet, destroyed each other in small ways in our little lives as separate creatures and destroyed everything altogether in huge ways as the one huge organism that we are. An organism split against itself, its thinking confused by greed, its might out of control. We are the genocidal beast.
Cheito may survive in his little life only to be drowned by the big death.
History, has it been a series of catastrophes or is there indeed an upward trend?
Silvia has believed all along that we have already won but when she wakes up in the middle of the night in terror she knows we are already dead.

Is this only the memory of waking up in the middle of the night after a beating, wondering did her Mother truly want to kill her? Waking up after the things that went on in her bed in the dark when Papi was home? What seems like truth, a hard won knowing, might it merely be her mind still trying to cry that little girl's tears?

She is afraid to face the day. To face the others who must be classified as good or bad, from whom she must protect herself. Another day when nothing will happen. Another day of waiting for her number to be called at the Special Office only to be told they have no record of any Ernesto Valdez or any Maceo Valzez Roman.
She doesn't know where any of them are. Ernesto is in prison or dead. Cheito is god knows where. He never replied to the email she sent when D finally gave her an address. She's in her own kind of prison and her own kind of death.

It occurs to her to make herself remember a happy time, a moment when she loved.
There was one Thanksgiving when she and Cheito and Ernesto stayed home. Why they didn't go to either set of parents' she doesn't remember. Ernesto cooked pernil and arroz con gandules. They sat at the table with the tv turned off and they talked. Cheito asked questions about the revolution and Ernesto explained his vision of how life could be, will be, when humans figure out how to share the wealth and allow each other good work. They talked about life's work, about having a life's work, and how fortunate they were because they did; they knew the score, they understood what went on, and they had a way to change it. They knew what is to be done and had only to do it. There were only a few small details to take care of, distribution of the wealth, getting rid of the guns. In the excitement of the conversation Silvia's chair tipped back and Cheito stopped her fall and they laughed and laughed and laughed.
The memory doesn't soothe the terror. It sharpens it. Where did those moments go? Later that same night Cheito heard one of his missing friends had been found, the body of his friend was found, by the river in a duffel bag dead by strangling stabbing sodomized. Another boy from their living room school gone.
Would the revolution be made in time for Cheito? Was it already too late?
When she managed to get herself out of bed she moved slowly not to disturb the field. This is how she moved as a child after one of her family's rent veil events, hoping to not enter her mother's sphere, her father's sphere, as if by disappearing herself she could avoid the rules of annihilation. She dressed blindly in the dark all in black as usual, bundled herself into her down coat, wrapped her head and face into her scarf, and leashed Thug. It was probably a good thing Cheito left his dog behind,to make her get up and get outside.

Taped onto the tree in front of the house was a wanted poster, the words REWARD were in big red letters. The photograph was of D who'd come by the house drunk out of his mind at three am just last month, just back from the Island War, looking for Cheito. The cops must think someone will see D coming to her house.
He'd stood by this same tree telling her as he sobbed how in the Island War he'd had to shoot at other Islanders, ones who believed in what they were fighting for. He'd come back maybe a week later after he found Cheito, the only one of the living room boys willing to tell her where he was. He gave her Cheito's email and told her which mushroom town he was living in. She ripped the poster off and read it as she walked the dog toward the avenue. It said D had crashed a stolen car and inflicted life threatening injuries on someone else in the car. She folded the poster and rammed it into her coat pocket. D's face stared at her from every street light on the avenue. No surprise if D had gone back to stealing cars. It was the only place he got to use his brilliance, push his mind to the limit, work hard. She pushed away the thought that this might not have happened if she hadn't been afraid to let him come inside that night, if she had listened longer, if she had helped him.
D was another mother's son. Her own son could one day be on such a poster. She couldn't even help her own son let alone another Mother's.

As fate would have it, here was D's mother approaching her on the avenue, taking D's daughter to school. Silvia caught her eye wanting to say many things with her smile. There's nothing to be ashamed of (Julia's instantly averted eyes screamed unendurable shame); Your son is good; You and I have our own relationship. Julia kept going and Silvia called after her, stopped her. She spoke the words out loud. "Your son is good. He's a good boy." Julia nods. "Las malas companias." Silvia shook her head. She didn't want the conversation to go that way. Her own son was part of the bad company. But whose son was bad company for the other? "There's no room for our sons." Silvia looked hard into Julia's eyes, ringed with shadows. "We've made a society that makes no room for them. They're under too much oppression, targeted for destruction." Julia raised her hand to silence her. "You and your son are part of David's problem. Thinking he's a victim of society doesn't lead him to better choices. It just justifies the crazy shit he does. Look at Juan or Carlitos. They have jobs, they're in night school." In the face of Julia's rage Silvia couldn't think. Those were two of the living room school boys who were maybe doing well. She stammered. She came back with,"They're working as prison guards! The system has a few available slots for assimilation, for middle men of oppression, managers of the poor. In a few years all our sons will either be prisoners or prison guards."
Taina broke away from her grandmother's hand, ran to the closest poster, yanked it off, ran ahead to the next one, yanked it off. Julia ran after her. Silvia watched Julia slap the little girl's hand. She followed after Julia. "Call me or come by if there's anything I can do. If you need help finding a lawyer. If you need to borrow money." Julia yanked Taina's hand and walked away. "Fuck you. You and your son are half David's problem." Silvia watched Julia walk away. Then she caught up to her. She didn't want to open her mouth but she couldnt make, herself stop. She watched herself say "Io fuckedmother I've been trying to be your friend since I moved into this neighborhood when our kids were a year and a half. Just because you choose not to know who your real enemy is doesn't mean I have to put up with you thinking I'm your problem, or my son is your problem."
Julia kept walking. Silvia let her walk away and let Thug pull her as far as her own door and into the house. It seemed being outraged trumped being terrified. She was no longer scared. She was mobilized. She spun her rolodex for the names of lawyers. Nothing good had come of Ernesto's legal problems except she was well connected to a network of left wing lawyers. If Julia thought that Silvia was going to do nothing for D just because she was full of io, she was wrong. All those memories of her mistakes with Julia, all the years of going after Julia and having things go wrong over and over begin to exhaust her, but she has the poster of D to stare at, that photo of him wanting to look like a thug unable to keep his eyes from showing he's scared, to keep her going. She's just going to have to go after Julia one more time. (do link here: section of D and C playing, J pissed off because when he comes to S' D gets spoiled. class and adultism: the climbing toy, D breaks glass in the yard, D running like a loosed wild horse when they go on an outing)

On the train to the Special Office Silvia makes her phone list. While she waits she'll call around, call in some old favors to a couple of the lawyers she's interpreted for in court. It's too late for the work rush. She has a window seat. She called in sick and hopes she doesn't run into anybody from her job. The train is going over the bridge and today the river is steel gray, the sky and the buildings are gray, gray is beautiful,rich.
When did things go bad with Julia? The day she came to pick up David and he didn't want to leave, perched himself on top of the wood climbing toy in the middle room between her bedroom and Machi's? The day David put his fist through the glass door of the summer house in the yard (not long after that Ernesto tore it down so the boys had more room to play.) It wasn't until after the subway disaster that she stopped letting David sleep over, although it never stopped him. He just lied. Silvia had finally convinced Julia to go to a demonstration against the Island War and she talked her into bringing David, it would be so great for them to see there's something we can do about oppression, there's something besides the adults\' world and the street, a third choice out there.
They were in a thick crowd of people. The trains got more and more crowded as they neared the midtown rally point. They reached the stop where the Partido de La Felicidad's contingent would gather and the group pressed out of the train , a thick mass of people barely able to get through the door. Silvia and Julia were pulled apart and the boys were pulled apart from each of them and from one second to another the two women were on the platform and the boys were left behind in the train. Silvia could see Machi through the glass, his terrified face is unforgetteable. She mouthed to him to get out at the next stop and wait for her. David she didn't see. Julia was screaming. They got themselves outside where of course there was no way to get a taxi. The streets were filled with people, the sidewalks were jammed. Silvia explained to Julia that the boys should be waiting at the next stop. They pushed their way the ten blocks, pushed their way down into the hole in the ground against the tide of demonstrators climbing up. There were no boys waiting. The train had long come and gone.
Julia was speechless, following Silvia. Silvia told the token seller, told the transit cop. He told them to go back to their contingent. Someone from their group might have gotten left behind as well, and taken the boys to the rally point. Silvia didn't know how she was moving, stepping one foot in front of the other, how she was breathing, her heart was racing and her lungs were stopped. How did she make it back? What if the group had already begun marching?
The boys were there. Each boy clung to one hand of a Partido militant Silvia barely knew. Each mother flung herself onto her knees and clutched her boy and sobbed. Silvia and Machi stayed with the demonstration. Julia yanked David's hand, yanked him away, plunged into the train without saying a word.

Silvia walked outside. It was a garish sunny day. What did the sun have to be shining about? And what is she to do now? She can barely stand her own thoughts. She was done at the Special Office much earlier than she expected. The man had no information on Ernesto. She had finally decided to take her turn and ask about him because of Cheito there was even less likelihood they would know anything at all. And of course he knew nothing. They took him. They put him wherever they put people they didn’t want found. Cheito believed they’d taken him to the Camp, on the Island’s offshore prison island. There was no way short of seizing the state to find anybody there until they were good and ready to release them. With the Moat act there were no so called civil liberties left.

She kept walking trying to not think, wishing there was a way to switch off her mind. She remembered her long ago yoga teacher who called meditation, parking the mind. She willed it away, from that ancient time, that life before the Party, Ernest or Cheito, her mantra floated into her head and she repeated the syllables, matching them at times to her breath at times to her gait. She had some idea where she was heading but she didn’t want to actually decide. Until she got to the corner the south east corner of the park, or what used to be the park and was now a mushroom town. Cheito called them that, mushroom towns, in one of his songs, his spoken songs.
If he was in there, and D said he was, she would find Cheito.
The place had a fascination. She stood a few yards into the path wondering which way to walk. She counted on the simmering rage inside her to keep her safe. Nobody would dare mess with her. She decided to walk uphill and bear left because long ago she and Cheito had walked the dog Thug to the meadow that used to be that way. Now it was full with a maze of structures built out of cardboard boxes and pieces of billboard. She saw a room made from the middle of a car. From looking a while she made out paths among the clustered structured. Nobody was about. Maybe they went out of the park to work, or maybe they slept in the day. She walked to what was once the high spot on the meadow. With the houses there the view of the City on the other side of the river was not visible. She braced herself and knocked on a door. The woman who came to the door was older than Silvia, dressed like Silvia, for an office, and she didn’t look annoyed. “Who are you looking for? Your son?” Was the park full of desperate mothers? Silvia burst into tears. The woman did know Cheito but she didn’t tell Silvia where he was. She said she’d tell him she’d come looking for him. “I can’t afford to break their trust,” the woman said. “He’s fine. He’s doing well. He’s got friends who have his back.”
Silvia watched the woman walk down hill to her job as a visiting nurse. She stayed. She found a place where a park bench wasn’t inside anybody’s house and she sat there. Between two mushroom houses through a space left as a passage she could see a bit of river, a bit of skyline. She sat and waited for her son. She thought she might just sit there for ever until he manifested on his own, or someone told her she was there, willing to make him come see her. She would not more. She would go on a hunger strike. She would dare challenge society or god. So much injustice couldn’t just go on with impunity and she go on dragging herself to work, sitting at her desk, looking out the window at the mirror building across the way. Why didn’t everyone simply stop where they are, refuse to make another move or take another step until there was justice? She would sit there until god responded and made something happen.

She sat and parked her mind and let some voice in her head repeat the mantram. She felt hugely relieved. She would never move again until either Ernesto himself came and got her or Cheito turned up.

Just about nightfall Cheito came and sat beside her. He took her hand. She put her head on his shoulder. She tried to keep her tears silent. She was afraid to open her mouth, say anything that might make him go away. He made the first move, pulled on her arm and walked out with her, walked with her all the way to the house. Thug knocked him down with his euphoria. He went with him into the shower and they showered together, master and dog. She cooked Cheito’s favorite macaroni and cheese. They sat together to eat. Was she dreaming?
“I got word about Pa. He’s in the Camp.”
“How?”
“Everybody sooner or later turns up in Mushroom Town.”
Silvia was afraid to breathe for fear she’d conjure him away just as she’d somehow conjured him to her.
“D’s there.”
She nodded. It was obvious that was where D would have gone. Where else was there to go completely off the grid?
“He’s not hanging around for this one.”
She understood. The rest of the guys had turned their back on him. Blamed him for the Sapo’s being as good as dead, if not dead already. But Cheito had a different sense of loyalty. If only it included her? Or was his presence here now a sign that maybe now it did include her? Had she been good enough for him? Had her seres de luz prayers healed them both? Healed her enough?
He said he’d stay the night but would go away next morning.
Before he went to bed he enlisted Silvia in his plan for them to go to the Island, then the prison island and demand to see Ernesto.

She called in sick a second day. She'd end up on the list of people with time and leave problems. She woke up, jumped out of bed and ran to Cheito's room. Had she dreamt everything? He was in his bed with his down blanket wound around his head, under his neck, between his legs. Her knees gave way from tenderness. Love for her son made her liquid inside. She couldn't bear his going again. She watched him sleep,looking like her little boy.

She couldn’t stop him from leaving. Always in her life there had been a man who was leaving. First her Father, then her lovers, now her son. It couldn’t help her son for her to be feeling about him the way she felt about Ernesto being gone. But she didn’t, actually. Her son being gone nothing had prepared her for. Unendurably bereft. She watched him from the window, heading uphill. Now she knew where he was and she could find him again. But why did becoming a man mean he had to leave her? And how had it come to be she had almost no life beyond him?
He said he’d be back after he took care of getting D out of town. He didn’t want to tell her where he was sending him or taking him. “If you don’t know you can’t answer when they ask you.” Already her son knew more about the world than she did. Or more about the world that men had set up. The world she knew about was a different one.
She had no idea what to do next. What to do now. She noticed that she was sobbing. Racking, loud sobs. She shouldn’t be crying alone. She put the leash on Thug and went outside and let the dog drag her wherever he wanted. She imagined the dog would track Cheito, lead her to him without her having to decide to chase her son. But Thug walked the opposite way, down the hill, toward the river.
She walked to the Partido's storefront. A crowd was gathered by the coffee machine. She knew at once from his absence it was Manuel she'd come to see. There was a bang on the front window and there he was. She opened the door to let him in. He scowled. "The door was locked." She'd somehow locked it when she walked in. He walked through her, past her and hugged each of the coffee drinkers. She stood to the side assuming he'd get around to her but he didn't. Invisible. She followed him into the back room. He leaned over the desk into his hands, his face close to the front page of Redencion. "Manuel." He turned to face her. Now he smiled. She couldn't count on holding his attention so went to the point: "Ernesto's in the Camp. You have to tell me how I find him."
It had been a long time. She had no favors to call in with Manuel. He resented her disappearing from the Party after Ernesto was expelled although they'd never bothered with expelling her. They'd simply let her disappear into motherhood. But she could see Manuel was listening. She could offer him Ernesto as a cause, a front page story, a documentable disappeared who had been traced to the Camp. First she'd have to prove to him that he was there. And how could she be certain. She was going on what Cheito said he'd found out she didn't know how. She believed it. She'd always known it.