Nico Survived the Island Wars

Week83

Sitting in my office. Lucha isn’t in yet. My time. Zombied. Blurry eyed. Who woke me last night was Nico who pounded on the door at 3 AM. I thought it would be Machi coming home. But it was his old friend Nico, drunk out of his mind, looking for Machi to tell him he’d survived the Island Wars. Just back from the Island Wars. I’d forgotten Nico. I don’t remember to include him when I count targeted boys to chase away my sleep, when I account for my brood.
But will it matter?
The Greenland icecap is melting. It’s reached the tipping point. It’s melting into the sea and melting upon itself, springing interior rivers and lakes, disintegrating, dissolving. Raising the level of the sea. Changing the weather.
Last week there were 29 inches of snow and three days later it was 60 degrees and the snow had melted but in the center of the country there were icestorms and the lights went out and on another continent rains slid the ground and drowned people in mud.
And the winds.
What will happen to the children? What will happen to Machi’s world?
So then, what difference does it make if I am or am not bankrupt from the mushrooming of the debt from Ori’s defense and all the time I wasn’t working to deal with Ori’s legal woes? Do I or don’t I have money? I can’t tell. I don’t pay this bill to pay that one. Two weeks ago my lights were turned off. I managed to pay the bill by being late on my mortgage. Every month I pay the minimum on my credit cards bloated and uselessly permanently maxed. I buy all my clothes second hand.
So am I the working bankrupt? They will say, o but you have a house. You have assets. Milk those assets. And then you’ll have nothing left when you’re old. And there will be nothing to leave to Machi. (But will it matter? I don’t think I will have sprouted gills in any case nor that my offspring and their offspring will have evolved them).
If only I could think. If only there was somebody who knew more than I know.
Poor Nico. I didn’t want to let him in. What if he never left? Having at last gotten rid of Adolfo I am afraid of being invaded by any others of Machi’s friends, brothers, peers, crew, posse, hangers on. Maybe it’s them Machi’s running away from.
So I stood in my robe by the sidewalk tree. “You won’t believe what I saw there. People willing to die for what they believe.”
Then I walked back inside.
Leaned against the shut front door and sobbed. For Nico. And for Ori who had been willing to die for what he believed and drag his family into his own dying.
Angry on Nico’s behalf, for the waste of his young life…I remembered the time he’d sat as a young boy of maybe 12 on the stoop with a pit bull newborn puppy bundled in his jacket on his lap. The look of joy and love on his round face. And two days later I saw him again and asked after the puppy and Nico told me the dog died of distemper. Nico did’t know not to wean the pup too soon. He didn’t know not to let the young pup walk on city sidewalks. Nico didn’t know not to enlist. Nico didn’t know he hadn’t exactly enlisted but simply had no choice, poverty drafted him.
Just as maybe I don’t know I am one of the working bankrupt.
Rage on Nico’s behalf made room for my rage at Ori to rear from wherever it’s kept contained. For just a moment leaning against the shut front door I hated Ori for making my life be strange. “Where’s the revolution, I don’t see it?” Machi yelled at me more than once and he’s right. The only movement he’s been left with is the movement of crack on city streets.
What have I done? What have I done to my son?
So do I go awol from the rule of fico? Stop paying my cards. Wait until they settle for a portion of what I owe? Or do I steal from my old age and my son’s underwater future, and pay them off with money bled from the house?
I can’t think. I have nobody to think with.
I’m more people poor than I am money poor.
Lucha walked in.

Now it’s lunchtime. I’m sitting by the fountain where x dropped dead.
I told Lucha. I was sobbing unbeknownst to me when she walked into the office and I told her. Told her the whole thing. About Ori and how and why he’s in prison. About Machi she already knows. But I’d never told her about the debt.
It was a huge relief to tell her.
Turns out she was in the Urban Communists the same years I was in the Island Liberation Party, she was part of that cresting wave of movement that stopped the First Island Wars. She doesn’t think it would be necessarily insane to go awol from fico’s tyranny. She thought it could be creative. But not necessarily creative either. She was for thinking and inquiring. Lucha believes in thinking.