Lost Boys on the Train
Lost Boys on the Train Cruzer
Liam helps her find the boys.
What is this text coming up? She's reading her journal...when is she reading it and do I need to explain that...that night; ]
Beach writing at night
Don't know how but Machi charged my laptop. He took it this morning when he and David took off to do whatever it is they do. They go to work. Their work is amorphous and self-initiated, a kind of working that eludes me. Sometimes they're out with the thug boys and other times with the people who wear orange. What do these boys do? Whether or not it is called a job, humans work. When he came back the laptop was charged. He was about to tell me how he did this when David patted him on the shoulder and they were gone again.
Where did yesterday go? First right after we found David on the beach after their first embrace, Julia screamed and fell to her knees and kissed the ground and screamed some more. It took David and Machi together to lift her off her knees. She fell into David's arms and sobbed and sobbed. He held her. It was beautiful to watch him hold her, to see my friend at peace even if for one moment. She fed him. By then the beans that the Mujeres had soaked the night before were done. Everyone was euphoric after the Wade In to the Camp. I went along. David took all of us, even Taina. It was possible to reach the Camp by water. The guards waved. David told us there's a Wade in every month. The Senoras were ladling today's ration of beans and rice and bits of fish they sold for their livelihood. Taina clung to David's leg and he sat on the sand and played with her. It was beautiful to watch how he gave her his full attention. He listened to her with a look of utter delight and adoration on his face. She made up fables about iguanas as she built iguana houses in the sand. The iguanas in her tale had also lost their Papi. And when their Papi came home in Taina's fable both Taina and David were crying.
All that attention and then he and Machi were gone. Was that how it began, women's constant search for the man who would make up for that first absent one? Men couldn't help themselves, they were soldiers, always called off to some version of the constant war. After being tantalized with closeness and fullness Taina got listless and sunk and cranky. They have been gone all day, Machi and David, all night. And here I am writing by the fire Julia and I managed to build without Machi's help. I'm still in the notebook, feels like good things are happening in the notebook so I am afraid to use the laptop now I have the choice. He has been building our fires every night. I am frightened without him. My 17 year old protector. I am afraid to go to sleep in this shelter with no walls or doors or locks, surrounded by hundreds of people who have less than we have in our duffels, and in my secret money belt I keep strapped to my body all the time. I am surrounded by home invaders and how easy it would be to invade a home that has no walls.
02 28 11
Reading from the flashdrive
How odd is this, to be sitting by a dying fire, where my son just cooked some fish he bartered matches for, plugging my flashdrive into my tiny laptop... That dark skinned young woman with the long black braids just shoved a copy of LibERACION into my hands. I started out to tell her I used to write for the City Edition back in the day, but she was gone, moving fast among the tarp leantos. On the front cover is a photo of the Wade in, the large banner on the front Sueltenlos Ya! Held up by laughing children up to their waists in the surf of Playa Coral. Above the photo is a banner headline Calling for GRITO Day Camp Invasion. The photograph on page 3 made me close the paper and fold it up. Three emaciated men inside a metal pen like a dog kennel. The photo was blurry, taken by a cellphone. The headline seared into my mind's eye: Hunger strikers in the bowels of the camp. Was one of those men Ori? I wondered whether or not to show Machi when (if) he came home.
I found stored in the flashdrive an early draft of a story I started once about the lost boys on the train, one of the many stories I started in my early preworkday writing sessions at that odd desk with the fake marble top. Is an unfinished story I haven't looked at for years finished by default? As finished as it will ever be...[do I make this first person and as journal??? It's not really fictionalized and am I going to interject fiction pieces too??? aargh
16.READING ON CRUZER LOST BOYS ON THE TRAIN
Lost Boys on the Train
She doesn’t let herself remember it so now the dream is making her remember. Memory of last night's dream comes to her as she’s marble rolling her way to work, just as she passes the high wall of the police headquarters, one of the spots in the City she thinks looks ‘real’. The wall is red brick and across from it are cast iron buildings. Ori had brought her back from Ventura a book of photographs of Old Town in La Capital, and she'd seen photographs of cast iron buildings that looked a lot like these. This morning is a sunny one, already the clouds are burnt off and she looks up at the almost blue sky and the dream memory floods her, the narrative for this morning’s terror that had sent her retching to the bathroom as soon as she woke up.
In the dream she is on the subway platform, horror movie dark, and the train doors have closed, and the two boys are banging on the glass door. Machi and David. The inside of the train is lit bright. She looks at Machi’s face. His eyes are wide and his jaw is tight and he is shaking with terror. She screams at him to find and pull the emergency chord but of course he can’t hear her, over the train noise and through the glass, and even if he could he is too little to know what an emergency chord is, barely four years old. Dream problems are not for rational solution. Then the train is gone and the track is empty and her son is gone to where she can not follow him, and that’s when the terror makes the dream resorp or makes her wake up.
The dream is a mirror of the memory she will not go to. Even more, the dream is about her death. She will die and be left behind and the train of Machi’s life will go on to places where she can not know him, love him, help him. The first night Machi asked her about death, about her own possible death, she had invented the Machimbili stories. The little boy Machimbili traveled through space in a ship made out of his mother’s love. Her love would sheathe him, shield him, when she was gone. Did she believe this? To what war ravaged, impoverished, under water, denuded, sci fi world would that train take her son?
( She didn’t like to) The dream was a metaphor for the terrible memory she never wanted to let into her mind for the feelings it brought she couldn't bear to have. The boys could have ended up anyplace, fallen into somebody's hands who would have harmed them, sold, raped, killed them. There were lost boys who never turned up. She was a fluke away from never seeing her son again. And it would have been her fault. That was the first time she nearly killed her son. This terrible blunder she and Julia never spoke about had ended their friendship.
She and Julia had the boys by the hand the whole time, almost the whole time. Almost was not good enough. Marina had been euphoric that day. At last Julia had agreed to join the Partido Libre’s contingent at the Island Day Parade. Julia was her friend from the block. Julia had cared for Machi when she went back to work, became his wet nurse sometime during the second month, after he patted her breast and asked to be nursed. She’d seen her on the block since she moved in. They’d had their barrigas at the same time, Julia pregnant with Liani at the same time she was pregnant with Machi. She thought of Julia, before she knew her name, as the Other Mother, who surely knew what motherhood was all about. They waved and smiled and each kept to her side of the street. They got to talking in the park, both their three month olds in strollers. Julia’s eldest David, going on five, dangled from the jungle Jim. Marina mentioned she was looking for childcare for Maceo and Julia offered. “I’m home anyway.” David had run up to them just then, bumped into his sister’s stroller, knelt beside Machi’s. “A boy. We were supposed to get a baby boy.” Julia smiled and pulled him against her, onto her knees, where he let himself be held for a breath before he flailed his limbs and squirmed. Marina decided then. “You’re going to have a little boy. Maceo’s going to be spending his days with your Mother.” And so it had begun. Julia turned out to be an Islander who'd reclaimed her Taino heritage. On her living room table she had what looked like a vulva made of clay. She explained to Marina it was a reproduction of a cemi of Atabex, the Taino force of water and birth. David’s middle name was Guaibonex, after a cacique who fought the Spaniards. Liani’s name meant cacique’s wife. It had taken Marina five years of sustained effort to get Julia to see that the Taino’s fight was still going on, the fight against colonization, for independence for the Island, for socialism, was the same fight. To see that all of us Islanders and Venturans are indigenous, that Taino genes, chromosomes, and knowledge lives on in us all, even when we don't know this.
[Time line: how much older than Machi does David have to be to be the father of Taina when they all go off to the encampment, and still be young enough that it was dangerous for them to be lost on the subway…He could have had Taina when he was 16, and be 21 when M was 17 and they go to the encampment…Taina could be 5 and David could be 4 years older than Machi…that would make him 9 or 10 when lost on the train, unless Machi was 4, David 8…youngest Machi could be to be lost on the train would be 3…He’d have been in a stroller why wouldn’t he have been in a stroller at 3…makes more sense if they’re closer to the same age…but then Taina…what do I do with her? I could get rid of the Taina character.I like her, though. It’s good for Olga to always be taking care of a child…] machi 4 david 8 has taina w older woman when he's 16
Julia decided to go back to work when Liani and Machi turned three. They'd put their children in Pinocho, the family day care their neighbor Elena started on the ground floor of her house down the street. Was that when the pulling apart began, or had it always been there unacknowledged? Two very different Mothers began to be pulled apart by a forcefield of reciprocal assumptions. Julia was real, a real Islander, a real Taina Latina who knew how to raise a child, how to be a woman, how to navigate the real world and still this must mean she was a bit stupid, assimilated, conciliatory, compliant, colluding. Marina was an artist, a poet, a hippie, a rebel, a cadre, too chaotic, confused and unformed to be a good mother. A puppy dropping bitch. Their boys loved each other and so Julia and Marina continued to be forced together. The mothers were called at work the day of the invasion at Elena’s when the wilding gang of teens erupted into the front door, ran through the hallway terrifying the children, through the maze of climbing toys and sand box and swing in the backyard, over the back fence, and disappeared down the narrow passage between two multiple dwellings on the next block, only to be followed by the gang of cops chasing them. Julia and Marina ran into each other on the train. Marina was reading Liberacion and there was a cover story on the Desfile. Julia bristled. “You’re in the Partido? Why do they want to mess with our Parade? It’s our one day to be proud and you want to take the pride away?” Marina was too afraid to argue. She ventured softly, “The Partido is proud too, of nuestra herencia de lucha.” Julia didn't hear her. After that one try Marina just listened . Julia let it rip and after awhile she slowed down, softened her tone and said, “My Papi was an Independentista and he and my mother had big fights at home. One time he almost hit her when she said the City was the best thing that had happened to la Isla, we were weak and couldn’t survive on our own.” He raised his arm and then he dropped it. He looked at his hand and started to cry and ran out of the house. But tell you the truth, I was secretly proud my father was an Independentista. At night he’d tell me stories about Tomasa Monte (Flor Beltran?) Heroina de la Patria”, Tomasa was a Taina, Tomasa fought for independence”….Should it be Tomasa Monte
Marina had broken in again to say softly, “We always dedicate our contingent to Tomasa…” Should she tell her Tomasa was a socialist and fought not only for independence but for workers' rights, for ending capitalism?..She opened the paper to the centerfold where the column to the right, Pie de Lucha, had Marina’s photo at the top and was dedicated to Tomasa.”
“You write for them?”
“I work there. That’s my job.”
Julia grabbed the paper and read the first sentences out loud.
“If you are an Island woman living in the City these days, you can do worse than model yourself after Tomasa Monte. Few people know she spent many months at a time during the Primera Insurreccion, rallying support in the City at meetings and street marches, raising funds. Or that she believed the fights for independence and socialism were inseparable. Capitalism required colonies. Only socialism could provide the economic independence to make political independence real, not just a slogan….
“You’re a comunista but you don’t have horns…” Julia was smiling. She read the article all the way to the end.
That had been a running joke for a year, each time Marina invited Julia to join the Tomasa contingent. A long sustained effort Ori questioned. “Don’t mix up recruiting with making friends.” But Marina thought maybe they could be, should be, one and the same. She liked Julia. The way she kept David to a schedule, gave him a bath at the same time, fed him store bought baby food from jars, made Marina feel safe. Because Julia worked as a receptionist at a doctor’s office, kept an immaculate house, and was a strict--almost harsh-- single Mother to David, Marina had been shocked the afternoon a dark brown, tall, built up man, head shaved and with the Santos’ halo tattoo on his left forearm showing under the lose sleeve of his t, came to pick up David instead of Julia. David brought him over to Marina. “Mi Papi.” He introduced himself as Arturo and offered Marina his hand. After David and his aparecido Papi left Elena told Marina about Julia's marriage. Julia was a dealer widow and Arturo spent more time inside than he did out. Arturo was back inside the day they lost the boys on the train..
They had screamed at the helpless useless train station police, run outside, pushed their way against the crowd, Julia saying nothing, Marina asking in people's faces, “Have you seen our boys...Two boys by themselves?” They shouldered and elbowed their way through the growing mass of people filling the streets and sidewalks to the rally point of the Contingente Tomasa Monte.
The boys were there. They clung to the legs of a young City man, light skinned, with a long narrow face and a thin moustache. woman who stood close to a banner that was just then being unfurled. Island Solidarity. Julia fell to her knees and grasped David. Machi let go the man's leg and Marina bent down to lift her boy into her arms.
Relief, joy, tears filled her. She had Machi. She didn't have to die just yet.
Later on, after the crying and the shaking the man introduced himself as Liam, from Justice Works.
some transition between this chunk and the one that follows...
Insert segment: finding boys at rally point
I searched in the flashdrive for what comes next in the story...David walks through the glass. Some of my attention on the cruzer, most of it on the where are the boys, men, right now? I'd just found the file when I heard a roar of voices coming from the path.
I found Machi and David.
Taina ran off toward the voices, toward the path, the old path, still paved with stones, from when this was an ecopreserve, and when she ran off in the direction of the noise Julia and I took off after her. A short white man in a uniform of leaf patterned cloth was walking the path as fast as he could, surrounded by three men, taller, younger, leaning into him with arms spread to block the crowd pressing into him, calling out, “Vende Patria, Vende Patria, Traidor.” I spotted my boys. For one moment Machi and David were right on the man, their faces in his face, until one of the guards pushed into David and he fell into the crowd and Machi fell with him. Taina saw this and screamed and somehow David heard his daughter's voice in all that roaring and screaming and pulled himself and Machi away from the crowd still haunting and taunting the man.
I asked them who he was. “The Camp liaison with the Encampment. He likes to drop in on us, do little talking tours.” David's voice dripped with contempt. Machi cur in. “He likes to think he's one of us, like us. He grew up in Coral. We've been hounding him to tell us if Pa's in there. He's fucking got to know.” Machi threw himself by the fire and stretched his legs. “I'm wiped out. We didn't sleep last night.”
I wanted to ask what they were doing but didn't dare and David took the conversation someplace else.
“I'd like to figure out a way to make our little Captain Ojeda....”
“Capitan Jodido,” Machi broke in. David laughed and went on. “I'd like to make our Capitan Jodido or Jodon get what exactly is it he's doing...Make him know who's side he needs to be on.”
They crawled into their leanto. Taina went with them so maybe they wouldn't smoke, maybe they'd fall asleep the way nature intended. (What way to sleep might that be?)
09 17 10 10 27 10
when did the breakup happen? Liam needs to be involved in the rescue of the boys?
01 25 11
17. CRUZER: DAVID WALKS THRU GLASS
03 01/2 11
Marina stood by the kitchen window, looking down on David and Machi running in a circle in the yard. She'd just dropped off Machi at Ori's for the weekend and David was already there in the yard, playing alone on the wooden jungle gym. “Julia doesn't know David is here.” Ori looked up from the stove he'd just lit. Marina shrugged. “She should let those boys play together. It's making a rule that's sure to be broken. I'm not going to enable her fear.” Marina turned to face him. “She won't talk about what happened to the boys on that train. She doesn't care that we found them, that the other marchers on their way to the Desfile took care of the boys. She remembers our terror, running to the cops, pushing our way against the press of the people to the rally point. She doesn't remember getting there and finding them absolutely safe, each one hanging from one of Liam's legs. She blames me as if I put David in greater danger than his own father does. She crosses the street if she sees me coming.”
“Why don't you confront her?”
Marina shrugged. “You know I pick my battles.”
Ori joined her by the window. “I know you avoid your battles.”
She felt him about to put his arm around her, and then hold back. “So David learns to defy her. He climbs over the back fence. God help us if he impales himself on a picket back there. I saw how he does it today. I saw him running out of the trash can alley by that big apartment building on the next street. And next thing, his hands appeared pulling him over the fence.”
Marina looked up at Ori. “Should I let them play together'? Should I abide by a parent's irrational rules? They look so happy. They love each other. Do you remember when you were that way?”
“I remember running up and down Moon (Union) Park. Sometimes I ran all the way down to the river.” Ori grinned with joy for an instant and just as quickly his face reset into the sad mask. “I’d been running with Victor, back from the park, straight up to the roof of his building the day he fucking jumped off.” Ori let out one abrupt sob and just as quickly he laughed. He shook his head. “What was that?”
“Maybe you're way behind on your tears...”
He smiled. “I never knew why Victor did that. He wasn’t around anymore to ask.”
“He’d hit a few too many walls.”
“Oppression sucks.”
It was so easy to fall back into the rhythm of their conversations, to forget they were not a couple and she didn't live in the house anymore.
She took the cup of cafe con leche he'd made her. “My students gave that poverty pimp Amanuel Cole a hard time about the budget when he showed up at Centro Libre, but of course he snakily slithered out of answering their questions. It’s hard to sit with them, knowing what I know about the budget and not be able to tell them a thing. Truth is we may have no program, and I may have no job. There’ll be more layoffs at Centro Libre.”
Do I insert Amanuel episodes here? Does she already work at Centro Libre? Guess so since she and Ori left party when Machi was born?.. But when the lost on the train she works at Liberacion and she and Ori are together...aaargh ..Here they are not living together...She's visiting Machi...or coming to get him?*
“Jimmy?”
“I hadn’t thought of Jimmy but probably yes. He’s one of the last hired. He can't catch a break. This is probably the first job he ever had with health insurance.”
“This is what belonging to a group targeted for destruction looks like.”
Marina turned away from the window and watched Ori stir a sofrito at the stove. How easily they could slip into their old routine, their endless conversation. She could invite herself to dinner, invite herself to sleep, invite herself to stay and never leave.
“Will you come with me to Paco’s memorial?” Ori couldn’t face going alone. She could hear it in his voice. Anything to do with the Partido was still painful to him.“What if nobody was the bad guy when the Partido fell apart? Do you ever consider it was the coyuntura?”
“Paco was left on his own after he was arrested. That was being the bad guy. The Partido didn't do shit. It took months to organize the Free Paco committee. I came to politics doing prison work. I know the Partido failed him. And now they're using the memorial for their own agenda, making him a martyr they can use when they did nothing to get him out.” He looked at her so hard she turned away. The boys were running around the glass framed summer house the previous owners left behind. He stepped in closer, pressed against her as they both stared out onto the yard. He almost whispered, “Remember when we were in the car last month, and I asked you why you left me, and you said you were dissociated at the time, somebody else…like a multiple…what did you mean?”
“I don’t remember saying that. Maybe I was somebody else.” She stepped away, leaned forward so her forehead touched the window glass and Ori was behind her.
“I’m not joking.” He stepped close again.
“It’s humiliating to talk about how I don’t remember so many things you tell me I’ve done or said. To say I was somebody else…that’s humiliating too. It sounds too much like I’m trying to avoid responsibility
“Me not taking you back”
“Is the right punishment.”
“What was so hard about being with me?” He was afraid to ask. She could always hear fear in Ori’s voice and that made her frightened. She counted on him to be the brave one, the man. Where did men go to show their fear? Was that why they drank? They came together to drink and hide their fear together.
##
“I counted on you to be the brave one and you’d come back shaking from an action. That made me feel scared. But what was worse was not being able to know where you’d been and what you’d done. You’d be gone, and that was too much like my childhood with my Father always gone. The man always having something more important to do than be with you. And then you’d be back and you’d be gone in a different way, licking your wounds, silent and withdrawn playing your flute or listening to your records, Machi and I walking on tiptoes to protect you.”
“I didn’t help. I didn’t make up for your lonely childhood, instead I made you relive it. Put you back in the place where god was your imaginary friend.”
“I was lonely with you, Ori, and you and the Partido even took god away.”\
“I was a fool. I left all that room for loneliness and that predatory prick Liam walked into all that loneliness with his ruling class charm…
“See…It’s too painful to talk about this..It’s too raw.”
“Why, because he dumped you the minute you were free? He just wanted a no strings married woman…”
“Not a falling apart just broke up…”
“Psycho bitch…”
“And he probably never saw you go into a crazy cleaning frenzy, staying up all night tossing out stuff and moving furniture and mopping…”
Marina doubled over laughing. “It’s not funny. When you start one of those big cleans there’s no natural stopping point…
“Yeah. Especially if you only clean up once a year…”
He stepped alongside her and like her leaned his forehead on the window glass. They were both looking down when David ran full speed through one of the glass windows of the summer house.
They ran downstairs and walked into the yard just as David stepped out of the glass house covered with shards, bleeding from his face, and neck and wrists and hands, anyplace skin was exposed. He was grinning, looked almost euphoric.
“We’ve got to get you to the emergency room.” Ori bent down and reached for his hand. “We’ve got to call your Mother.”
His eyes widened and he shook his head. “She doesn’t know I’m here. For real then she’d never let me come back here again.” Before Ori could catch him he ran to the back of the yard and climbed over the fence. “Where did he go?” Machi stood, hands clenched, holding back tears. “He's gone into the tiny yard of the apartment building behind us on the next street, and along the narrow trash can space between the buildings, to the next street, the way he comes.” Ori leaned beside Machi and reached out his arms to him. Machi threw himself into his arms and let himself sob.
Only then did Marina notice Machi was shaking. She knelt beside him and enfolded both of them in her arms. “He was bleeding all over. Is he going to die?” Machi sobbed. Even through Ori's embrace she could feel his small body racked from the belly. She could barely hear him say, “I’m scared.”
What had she been thinking leaving this family, this boy? Every minute life here needed her. How was it that some people managed to break away, divorce, start new families? She could barely manage to meet a few of the needs of the family she had.
Ori's voice was tender. “David’s going to be alright. He’s a fighter, a survivor.”
“Like you Papi, like you after they tried to dunk your head in the toilet in the foster home?”
“Like you Machi, after Rusty the cat got run over on the avenue.”
Marina looked at Ori. She could read what he was thinking in his face. 'Like you after your Mother ran away from home.'
Shattered Glass David
Ori carried Machi up the stairs, all the way to the top floor. Marina trailed them. He set Ori down on his futon in the eaves, along the window. Machi rummaged among the books and action figures and cars wedged between the futon and the window frame and pulled out his blanket, once yellow now gray, which could not be washed and he hadn’t been needing lately to go to sleep. “Maybe he should eat?” Marina didn’t want to leave him for one minute even to get him food. Machi shook his head then nodded. “Macaroni and cheese.” She rose to fix the food and stood for a moment at the door watching Ori curl up beside his son.
Ori still kept the block of cheddar in the same drawer of the fridge, the pasta shells on the same shelf. Marina put on the water to boil and sat herself at the table to grate cheese into a bowl. The tree branches were barely visible. Night had come fast. The supplicant still partly bare branches moved in the soft breeze.
She thought of bleeding David and terrified Machi and moaned. “What was I thinking? Was anything worth causing her son pain?”
She put the shells into the water and walked out of the kitchen along the hallway, through the living room to the front windows, just underneath Machi’s room. She remembered that if she put her face on the glass and craned her neck far to the right she could catch a glimpse of the river. This was one thing she loved about living in Moon Park, it was perched on a hill, and from all the street corners, and even from her own window, she could see a shred of river. She grew up on a Caribbean island and couldn’t bear to feel landlocked. Below her awareness there was a way she was always missing the Island and it helped to remember that the City was also an island. She walked back to the kitchen, mixed the shells with the butter and cheese and served Machi a bowlful.
Machi was asleep against Ori’s chest and Ori was also sleeping. Marina spooned against Ori with her head propped on a pillow, staring out at the street. This was what Machi saw every night. The street lights came on, the people ambled up the block, home from work. She saw Julia across the street making her way up the hill in her high heels and little red suit. She saw her turn into her stoop partly blocked from view by a tree. She heard her scream, the same horror film scream she’d given the day they lost the boys on the train. She screamed until the neighbors on both sides of her house came out and joined her. “Dios mio, que te paso?” One of them must have called the cops and within minutes there were two patrol cars spinning their lights, their noses parked on the sidewalk.
The siren woke Machi and Ori. They watched in silence as the ambulance pulled into the hydrant space in front of Julia’s. David still sat on the stoop. His younger sister Liani, Machi's milk sister, sat stiff beside him, afraid to touch him. Julia paced. Marina could feel Machi’s body trembling as David was put into the back of the ambulance. Julia shooed Liani toward the stoop next door where Elena scooped her into her arms. Marina looked at Ori. “Were we stupid for not getting David to the emergency room right away? Should we have guessed where he would have gone? Should we have called Julia? Was it respect for David or fear of Julia that kept us from acting like grownups? We let a 9 year old tell us what to do.” Ori was smiling. “David takes care of himself.” For a few minutes after the ambulance was gone they watched the neighbors clustered around Julia’s stoop, lit by the streetlight, talking. What story did David make up? What door did he say he had walked through?
Marina watched Ori pick up Machi from the bed by the front windows, gather his blanket and skinny feather pillow, and walk him through the toy room back into his bedroom, Marina and Ori's old shared bedroom. “Do I get to sleep with you tonight?” Ori kissed the top of Machi's head. “Tonight you get to sleep here.” He tucked Machi into the bed. Marina handed him the bowl and sat next to him with a stack of picture books under her arm.
“I don’t want a book. I want Machimbili.”
He ate one mouthful of macaroni, and then another. But he pushed the bowl away.
“Machimbili was traveling through space in a spaceship made out of his Mother’s love.”
Machi looked at Ori. “Can it be made out of his Father’s love too?”
Marina nodded. “In a spaceship made out of his Mother’s and his Father’s love.”
“They didn’t know where in space they were. This was a part of the Universe they hadn’t seen before.”
Machi gripped her ear with his fist. He spoke softly. “He couldn’t see the planets. Because they were made of glass. He didn’t know there were any planets around or if the invisible people in the glass planets were good or bad.”
He sat up. He’d gotten himself excited instead of sleepy. “His spaceship crashed right into one of the glass planets and next thing he knew he was covered with little tiny sharp pieces of glass and his red blood was getting all over everything. He really wanted his Mother and his Father to come help him but he didn’t know how to reach them…”
01 26 11
Ori crawled in behind Machi and as he leaned into the backboard of the bed he pulled him onto his lap. He spoke with a tenderness Marina rarely heard, the tone of his private discourse with Machi. “He remembered his powers just then, the magic panel on the dashboard. It was only to be used in big emergencies. Machimbili decided this was a big emergency. He pushed the button..”
Marina nestled against them. She brought her face close to Machi's. “When he pushed the buttons Mami and Papi materialized beside him, they beamed there.”
Machi took her hand. “O yes. That’s right. He can beam them whenever he wants them, they’re always there, they’re the spaceship.”
She stroked the hair pasted with sweat onto his forehead. “And now that they were there, so real that he could touch them, what were they going to do to help him?”
Machi thought, scrunched up his face, opened his eyes wide. “They brought the glass magnet and pulled off all the glass, and the healing potion and closed off all the holes, but best of all, they brought the book with the space maps. The book with all the secret paths between the planets that no one can see.”
Ori laughed. “And what about the special magic glasses that let you know at a glance if somebody is good or bad.”
“And there he found his friend Davimbili who’d flown into the glass before him and he pulled off the glass and wiped him with the potion and through the magic glasses he knew, that no matter what Davimbili’s mother said, or what the teachers in school said, David was good.”
After Machi was asleep, Marina and Ori drank tilo tea in the living room.
“You know you can stay the night, right, this is your house. Will always be your house.”
He brought her a pillow and a quilt and she stretched out on the couch with her head on the pillow on his latp and let herself drift to a half sleep as he turned on the tv. Just before she lost herself to sleep she opened her eyes and caught him watching her. “Of course I'll go with you to Paco's memorial. You have to be there and I wouldn't dream of letting you go alone.”
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