Blog 44-Unnameable

I followed the girls outside. My son walked toward me and a few steps behind him was the cad I'd had that affair with years ago, the man whose name I wouldn't think or say, who had been my only high school friend when I was a teen-aged exile, my political mentor when I was a young adult trying to save the world: the man who found the boys when Julia and I lost them on the train, then became the lover who exploded my marriage to Ori, who then dumped me summarily; the man who helped me find Ori and free him when he'd been picked up in the sweeps after the first Presidio; the man I'd just figured out was now Patria's special friend. Danny. His name was Danny. I made myself speak the name out loud.
I squinted against the sunlight. What was the unnameable man doing here? Was I always to rely on him to find and free Ori? I realized the sitio Machi went to last night was the office of the Justice Works Suelténlos Ya Campaign. Until now Machi insisted lawyers were never going to free his father. What made him decide it was worth it to find a lawyer? Did he want to get official confirmation Ori was in the Camp? And this was the lawyer he found. Danny. I made myself form the name again in my mind. I shuddered. I should have guessed he'd be involved in the Campaña. This was what he was good for, good at. It was the best possible use for his gift for predation. Maybe the only good use. I walked toward them and put out my hand for Danny to shake.
Machi said, “This is Daniel Macneil, a lawyer from Justice Works.” I looked down, barely able to hear my son say that man's name. "Otra vez," he said. "Gusto de verte," I said. I had forgotten how the man's owning class social skills had carried our many relationships over the years, overcompensated for my inability to be light; how I had mistaken his charm for love. What a mark I'd been; victim; prey. And how quickly it had bored him that I chameleoned, that my colonized mind tracked his dominant mind. Maybe for him, after a while, as soon I'd been digested and he was blood sated, I had felt to him like nobody was there.
What was I to do now? What would a human do? I hated the man. But I could ride his social skills to the next place. I had devoted months of my life to hating him, to plotting my revenges, and then to living as if he didn't. Truly, I had forgotten him, thought I had forgotten him. And yet he reappeared in my life, a bad dream. He turned up when I was with Jimmy, was there again and again. When Jimmy and his drinking let me down Danny and I had our first affair. And then for years I managed to never run into him, except once, he was revolving out a bank door as I was revolving in and there had been no chance nor need to acknowledge each other as we spun. Another time I almost collided with him on a subway platform. Months later he left me a drunken three AM voice mail on the phone. Just my name, said three times, but I knew his voice. I forgot him. Ori took me back when he decided to believe I had been out of body, in a fugue state, a multiple virtually, when I took up with the man; when he came to accept his own neglect and emotional absence contributed to the break-up. God help me if Machi ever knew this was the man I left the family for, the reason I was the woman who taught him to hate women, fear them, no matter that the man never truly mattered, that it had been to save myself I left (maybe that made my offense more terrible. The man over whom I'd caused so much pain, had been but a figment from a dream).
The man was speaking. I wasn't listening. I asked him to repeat what he just said. The Campaña was doing some kind of mass habeas corpus petition. Of course, the one Anacaona was covering for Verdad.
Legal papers were being filed in the City Court soon, to coincide with Grito Day. Anacaona influenced everything. She was why Machi was willing to consider legal tracking. She was why the others were chaining themselves to the Base fence even as we stood there chatting. Machi was asking if Ori could somehow be included even now, even this late. So now I was to rely on the man again for hope of getting Ori out.
Or this was another time, another need, and he was the person who could get me to Ori. Could I start over with this man, a new, different relationship? Compartmentalize the past? What was important was saving Ori. The man, Danny, took my hand, studied my face, looked into my eyes with his bright piercing little blue yellow eyes. What did he want? I pictured myself through his eyes: haggard, not a mystery. No. He did not want me in that old way and besides he had Patria. As we spoke the hating receded. It didn't matter now. Was I truly another person?
Machi led me to the picnic table. Guada had given in and taken Yuissa and Taina to the beach. Patria and Julia were dressed in their orange jumpsuits and waited under a sea pine for the meeting with the lawyer to be done. There were always people outside the casitas and today there were many more, dressed in fake orange jumpsuits. No radios were playing for just this moment. A breeze flowed from the sea. I sat facing Beachside. The man sat across from me. Machi stood over us. "What is to be done?" Machi leaned over the man's folder which he set on the picnic table and unbound and watched the man take out papers and spread them out. One more thing to think about, to figure out. Machi grabbed the papers before I could reach them. I let him and just watched. "These are their names?" Machi scanned the pages. The man nodded. "These are the names that we have. There are many more renditioned detainees in the Camp than we've been able to track down."
"He's here." Machi pointed to the bottom of the third sheet. I felt nothing. Was it that I needed to be alone to feel? That I was past hoping? I looked at Machi and Danny. Their heads were close together. What did it mean that Ori's name was on the list? I had the thought and heard my voice ask. Danny looked up. "He's listed among those who have been assigned legal counsel. That means I should be able to track him down."He rose. "See you at the action?" I stared at his back as he walked away toward the beach where Patria and Julia had already joined Guada and the girls.

Anacaona, dressed in an orange mameluco, ran up to Machi and me as we passed the dunes and first caught sight of the women and the girls splashing in the shallows. She handed us their orange jumpsuits. "I wanted to give you time with Daniel. We all did. But I came back for you. Get ready. We're late. We've got to go." Just then Patria, Julia, Guada, Taina and Yuissa joined us. The girls, drenched, walked past and barely noticed us, searched in Julia's cooler, and pulled out cartons of fruit punch. Guada wrapped them both in one big beach towel and rubbed them dry. "We're going to find agua dulce." Guada pointed to the public beach. "We'll use the showers in Playa Caracol, the few that still work." She and the little girls set off toward the Playa but Anacaona called them back, “Forget the showers, put on their orange mamelucos and get to the Camp now.” As Guada dressed the girls Machi and I scrambled our limbs into our orange jumpsuits and marched toward the base as fast as we could, barely keeping up with Anacaona.
I saw Anacaona look at Machi. Their gazes held for a second. I hadn't noticed them becoming friends, maybe more than friends. Of course it must have been Anacaona who told Machi about the unnameable man, who encouraged him to try all means of tracking his father, even official means. Anacaona jogged ahead of him on the sand. When he caught up to her they both took off at a full run. The rest of us followed as fast as we could.
There was a swarm of people dressed in orange jumpsuits close to the main gate to the Base. Guards stood at three feet intervals along the inside of the fence, staring past the demonstrators. I worked myself through the crowd, got close to the metal grid, tried to see past the uniformed soldiers, who looked as young as my son. Was I hoping to catch sight of Ori? I felt a surge of rage and with the others I screamed as loud as I could, “Suéltenlos.” Screaming across the fence made me feel my power. Free them now...I screamed until I was hoarse.
Machi left right from the demonstration, never came home. I didn't know if he was with Anacaona, Lagarto, Franz, or with Daniel. Had he found himself some other targeted for destruction young men to get killed with? Or had he gone to the Territorio Libre with David? I lay on my narrow bed in my sleeping bag on the thin horsehair mattress that smelled faintly of mildew and ancient urine, looking through the open shutters of the tiny window, through a clearing in the branches of the sea pines, at the stars. I was alone. Julia was sleeping in the lean-to with Taina.
Just as I had as a child I took comfort in the stars. They confirmed the universe was benign. So many stars. As many as I remembered from my childhood Venturan skies. A depth of stars, layers of them, seas of them, swirls of them. I understood why the ancestors found patterns in the stars and named them. I wondered what my Tainos had named the stories they divined in their stars. My eyes found stars to form a noose, to form a woman hanging from it. I saw a woman curled to shield herself from blows, a woman bent over the baby she was drowning in the river. But there, in that other cluster, I saw a woman standing up, arms raised, fighting back. I laughed out loud. Was my mind ready to give up its familiar beaten woman pose, battered woman pose? Was I ready to give up waiting for a man? All my life I'd been waiting for a man...father, then lovers, then husband, now son. Nothing was as hard as waiting for a son. I made myself look at the fighter, that star image of a warrior Taina cacica.
When he came home Machi was drunk. Drunk again. It had been so long since I had seen him drunk I had come to believe he was done with it. I heard him stumbling outside. He banged into the table where the pots and pans and utensils for cooking in the fire pit were kept. The crash as they fell over woke me. I stood at the kitchen door and watched him. I wanted to have drowned him at birth so that oppression didn't have a chance to kill him. I wanted to die. I couldn't live knowing my son was a drunk. He passed out in his sleeping bag in the lean-to. How had it come to pass that the little boy who sat on my lap, clung to my neck, took long walks with me, closed his eyes and gave me his hand and made me guide him unseeing along the avenue, charged me with keeping him safe...had become someone who got drunk every day..every day of his life, sometimes a little bit drunk, other times very drunk. Here I thought he was done with it. I thought revolution had cured him. And here he was, drunk again. I couldn't live. I couldn't bear to live. I went back to my cot, curled up into myself and sobbed. I made my hands into fists. I writhed. I could not bear this pain. I had not kept him safe and oppression had taken him. Oppression had taken my son and I couldn't get him back. I couldn't save him. I might not be able to save my baby. I could never cry for Ori like this. All my losses converged here. My little boy, sitting on my lap, clinging to my neck...Running and playing and climbing me to nurse whenever he felt the need, clinging to me in his sleep. That little boy lay here on his belly dead to the world from drink. Was this the way he lived when he wasn't with me, night after night after night? And now he was showing me, doing it when he was with me as well. I could not live for having seen this again with my own eyes. How could I help him? Surely there was some way I could get Machi back from hell. But what was the way? Everything I tried made things worse.
I wanted to die because my son was a drunk. I understood exactly how Irma(Patria, now) had felt about her drinking, drugging son Tomas. I remembered my boy on my lap, hanging from my neck. The memory was tactile. I could feel his small, bony body, the strength in his arms. I sobbed, writhed. How had this come to pass? Why couldn't I go back in time and undo the harm I'd caused him that made him come to this? My little boy. I remembered when he almost drowned, not yet six years old, pulled by the undertow in this very island, on this very beach. Three beach boys had come in, skipping into the surf, to pull him out. Where were the people now to help me save my drowning son? I spoke in the empty room. “Somebody help me. Somebody help me. Everyone drop everything and come help save my drowning son.”
Did I sleep? I felt the sunlight through my eyelids and awoke nauseated from terror, my mind scanning for what the bad thing was. Machi. Drunk again. I sat up in my cot. I couldn't bear it. All my life marked by drunken men: Jimmy who drank because he couldn't get a job and couldn't hold a job because he drank; Ori who white knuckled himself to sobriety but drank around Machi for most of the time I was gone. Even Mirta, my Mother, turned out to be a secret drinker and died of cirrhosis of the liver. None of them prepared me for the helplessness of watching Machi be a drunk.
I stood in the sun by the picnic table staring at him passed out on the ground. He'd rolled off the sleeping bag and lay outside his lean to almost on the path. He sat up as if my thoughts had wakened him and stared straight at me with the surly morning after look I dreaded, a look I now saw he'd had many mornings since he'd been back. Had he been drinking and I'd chosen to not know it?
"What are you looking at?" I turned away, fixed my gaze on my bare feet. The toenails needed polish. My little toes were curved and calloused. My toes were too long, like fingers.
"I get drunk every day of my life. You should know that. It's tribal. I do it because my tribe does it, because all tribes do it." He lost steam. We both knew this was no longer true. He no longer got drunk every day. When I said nothing he stood, towered over me. When had he gotten so big? "That mother fucker I got drunk with last night after the action, that mother fucker I beat up last night, is the man you left my Father for? You left me for?"
I felt my body go cold. I shuddered. He told Machi? What had Danny told Machi? It never once crossed my mind that he might. I thought of my story with Danny as mine. Danny was barely in it.
"You want to know why I drink? You want to know why I rage? I do it because you went away. I do it because you left us."
I couldn't think of what to say. I felt tears run down my face. Even if I knew that he was trying to push my buttons, manipulate me, hurt me, wasn't there a kernel of truth in what he said? I stood and faced him. "O my God Machi, if I'd known then what I know now it wouldn't have happened. I regret it. I apologize. It wasn't about that man anyway. He was an accident, a catalyst. It was...” Machi looked away. How did I tell my son I'd had no self with which to be a mother? It wasn't that I'd gone away from him but toward some bedrock in myself that was absent and kept me absent even when I was physically there. How did I explain that my bedrock was taken by internalized colonization and genocide transmitted through my mother's blows and my father's absences and his excessive love, that it was further smashed and eroded by exile, by the pain and shattering loss of being an emigrant; and that the detritus, the sand of the bedrock was further washed away by all the compromising, colluding, submitting to dominant minds I'd had to do to survive being an immigrant...that there had been nobody there to be his mother, or that the longing to embody myself in order to be a good enough mother for him had been pinned onto that man, because the longing had been for my Papi, for the mother I never had. How did I tell my son something that probably sounded like this...You were so not enough to keep me home... that the man I left you for was nothing to me, wasn't even real, was a waking dream. How to tell him I had never grieved enough and raged enough for all the submission I had to do to survive, the submission I had to see on my parents and grandparents, all the way back to the Tainos who chose to swing from trees...How much rage did it take to become one of the other Tainos who drowned the colonizers to see if they were indeed gods?"
We stood inside a pool of light, the shadows of the flat sea grape leaves moved softly in the sea breeze. "What did that man say?" Machi turned his back, made fists, growled and brought his right fist to his mouth, he bit. "What do you care what he said? He said enough and I filled in the blanks. First he told me he was the one who found me and David when you lost us on the train. Then he told me about you and him." Machi writhed, punched the picnic table. "He thought I already knew. An ego like his couldn't imagine you had never told me about him at all. That in our family he was a blip, that his name went unmentioned. So he told me man to man and I punched him in the face."
I said nothing. Half the time with Machi I didn't know what to say. Then some words surfaced. I remembered that it mattered if I said something. "I'm sorry. It doesn't make it not have happened, but I'm sorry."
"I've heard it. If you knew then what you know now..." His hatred, the face he made when he was hating me, reminded me of my own raging face. Was this what he had seen on me? What I had seen on my mother? What I had seen on the faces of the Guardias at the camp? What Ori must be seeing every day in the faces of his captors?
"Can't we decide to make this stop?" Maybe his face had softened, but maybe it hadn't. How many times after one of these fights with Machi had I thought things had changed? But here he was again, drinking, fighting, blaming me. Try as I might to change my own face, I couldn't change the raging face of oppression that gazed constantly upon my son. He got up and walked toward the beach. I considered going after him but didn't. For men there was always the public sphere to go to, even for men as targeted for destruction as my son, as marginal to the wheels of empire, there was the corner. Here he had already found his corner men. In the encampment we were all corner people. Before he made the turn around the dune I saw Anacaona catch up to him, put her hand on his shoulder and then they both disappeared. Maybe Anacaona could save him.

You've Seen Todos
Days went by and nothing, no word from the unnameable. Maybe, after the fight, he'd do nothing. Machi was gone every night, came by in the afternoons for Taina and Yuissa. I didn't think he was drinking. At least I didn't think so. I sat on the picnic bench with Guada, Patria, Julia and Anacaona, watching the stars, listening for the surf under the blasting music, so many different kinds. I tried to listen to the sounds as one. Guada said, "Todos attacked again last night. Set fire to an army van parked in the plaza." Anacaona nodded. "Todos cut a new hole into the side of the Camp. How do unelectrify the wire?" Julia looked from one woman to another. "David came to see me last night. A stealth 2 AM visit like always. I saw the palm of his hand, the T tattooed into his lifeline, almost invisible."
Anacaona rose."Let's go walking." Only I followed. The younger woman walked fast, along a path she knew I couldn't see among the lean-tos, tents, shacks, the gathered crowds. "I knew only you would come walking. You're the one I want." We reached a hill. I did what Anacaona did, lay flat on my belly with my head at the edge of the cliff. We overlooked a deep, wide bowl carved into the mountain by torrents, wind, and time. Far below us young men in a circle moved toward the center and away. Two men in the center sang and talked. I saw two others bent over a boombox calibrating beats. We watched in silence as the group, at least 50 of them, circled and moved in and out. I couldn't understand the pattern for when the men at the center changed. Then it was Machi and David. "Beautiful, isn't it?" Anacaona took my hand. "There's no denying that." There was something benign here. This was what Machi meant by his tribe. Anacaona beamed with pride. "They somehow used the alcohol and weed to release this beauty." She pointed to the foothills of El Pico, what we in Palenque called Hillside. “When they're done they go into the shelters they've dug up, our storm shelters. They live there because their whole lives are storms.” Anacaona was rising now and pulled me up by the hand. "They release beauty,” I said, “But at what price?" We walked back a different way, made our way to the water, and stood on the beach watching the tide come back. "You know you've just seen Todos." I said nothing. My mind couldn't hold one more thought.
As we reached the casitas I saw the unnameable man walking toward us. Anacaona went into the house and I sat down on the bench of her rescued picnic table where the man motioned me to sit. His name was Danny, I had to bring myself to say it. He had his folder and he opened it on the rough wood surface. I'd never noticed the splinters just waiting for my hand. He barely said hello. I remembered that when Danny was working he didn't waste time on small talk. Or this was his way to avoid talking about his fight with Machi. "The Camp authorities asked me to approach you about talking to Ori." I didn't understand. After two years of denying he'd been disappeared they were now acknowledging he was in the Camp. The man, Danny, put his hand over mine. Was he having sex with me? I didn't think so. I didn't move my hand. "You would get to see him. They would expect you to persuade him to want to talk. Or even if you don't say anything to him about naming names they would expect that simply to see you, to remember life outside, would make him see reason. Reason from their perspective."
I pulled my hand away and rose and walked as fast as I could around the dune, to the water. I could feel him walking behind me. What was I to do? What would Ori do in my place? Already I could feel my mind moving toward the decision that I would see him. At whatever price. I would do anything to see him. They knew that. Was this one more submission, one more chunk of my bedrock, my integrity, gone?
After the unmentionable man left I crashed, went numb, into the fishbowl. I sat at my dune, facing the sea, listening to the surf, trying not to seem to watch Machi talking intensely with Anacaona by a sea pine close to the path. She was pulling her body away from his. He was leaning his body toward hers. Anacaona knew things Machi didn’t know. I feared for him, for how Anacaona would hurt him, hurt him without meaning to, simply by being better than he was, having found herself to a better lock of the canal, a better pen, a better pack. As a Karayan young woman she'd been less targeted for destruction by the City than he'd been as a Karayan young man. Then I felt fierce hope. Could Anacaona turn out to be the strong woman my son needed, that Ori got to have in me, that men of Ori's generation managed to hold onto? What had happened to mating between humans? I felt bewildered, desperately let down, completely alone, lost. Was this what waiting for Papi to come home had been like? I was flooded by the memory of sitting alone inside the house in Ventura after my father had decided we must go into exile, while all my friends were off in the mountains in the literacy campaign. I'd been under parental house arrest from January when the campaign began until September when my family left. Vibrant history flowed around me, exploded around me, everywhere people were engaged, part of things, while I was alone, lost, waiting, making all of reality out of my own thoughts…
I rose and headed for the beach. As I passed Machi and Anacaona I heard her throaty laugh. I imagined I could smell the pheromones. “I’m not ready. We’re not ready…” Anacaona had moved closer to him so that their shoulders were touching, but she looked away from him. Neither of them noticed me walk by them.
The sea was calm, or looked calm. I stepped out of my yoga shorts and top (in Karaya most of the time I wore a bathing suit underneath). I waded into the surf, unexpectedly cold. I faced the horizon. There was so much I wanted: Ori’s freedom, world revolution, a good world for Machi, for Machi to stop drinking. I swam toward the horizon wanting so many things I could not make come to pass. When I turned back to face the shore I saw that it was far away and when I swam toward shore I could not. I thought of Machi pulled to sea by the undertow so many years ago. Didn't I know better? I tried to push into the force of the water. How was it I hadn’t felt the current at all until now that I tried to move against it? Time to drown.
I wished beach gigolos were bounding in to get me the way they’d come for Machi when he almost drowned on this very beach when he was barely six years old. I was always longing to be saved. But this was the time to save myself. I threw my body into the current. The water pressed into me, my muscles burned and gave way. Was there no way? I felt Atabex was gripping me with her hands, pulling me back into the water that birthed me. Then a thought formed, came to me like a voice, a woman's voice. Was it the voice of my longing for a mother who loved me? Later Julia would insist Atabex spoke and saved me. "Swim parallel to the shore. Swim parallel to the shore until you’ve swum away from the fingers of the rip tide." I turned my body and swam away from the Base, followed the yellow shoreline until I no longer felt the current. I swam and stopped, and swam and stopped, pushing until my body gave up, then starting again. I didn’t know how long I swam, far longer than I thought I could sustain, far less than my fear expected.
I reached the shore, stood, and stepped onto the packed wet sand. My knees were liquid, gave way. I climbed up the steep beach to where the sand was dry and sat down on a dune. The sky was a flat soft blue, almost bare of clouds. I felt a breeze and in the distance to my right saw a rain of leaves or a swarm of butterflies (was there such a thing?) catching the light. Did Tainos believe gold rained? I saw Machi and Anacaona approaching me hand in hand. I didn't think they had seen or they would have come in for me into the sea. They sat beside me. His body was warm as I leaned into it. He put his arm around me. When he touched me I trembled. I leaned my head into the hollow of his shoulder and sobbed. I wondered if he'd forgiven me...or if his rage was simply banked, waiting to flame?
"Daniel has a message from the Camp about Pa. He wants to encourage you to go see him even if the price is you have to tell Pa, or pretend to tell Pa, to talk to them." I sobbed. Anacaona knelt before me, cupped my face with her hands and raised my chin so that she could look into my eyes. "They are letting you see him. Make it a victory."

The Base
We left the encampment before sunrise in the rented jeep of the man whose name I couldn't say. Danny. I made myself say it aloud when I greeted him. He negotiated with the guards at the main entrance to the Base and drove a zigzag of straight roads to the Camp, as if all of this had been easy, as if this moment that seemed to never arrive, barely exist even as possibility, was just one more moment, the next moment. I sat in the passenger seat looking out the window at the squat wooden buildings. The access road was almost deserted except for two young men in caqui uniforms sitting outside one of the huts. Machi sat in the back seat tapping his foot. How to get Machi in to see Ori was a question the man, Danny, had not yet answered.
I sat on a plastic chair in a small waiting room with other silent people, mostly women. Machi sat next to me, and the man next to him. I didn't want to count the women. There were more of us than I could see when I looked straight ahead. I sat in the middle of the middle row, the only empty chairs we'd found when we arrived, too early for our supposed appointment, but later than hundreds of others. I was afraid to speak, and the others were also afraid. Was the window to our right as we faced a long brown formica table, one way glass? Were we being watched for some sign? Every now and then, at unpredictable intervals, a deep male voice through a speaker on the wall called out a series of numbers. I wondered if my own number had been called and I had not heard it.
Could I show one face to the Camp authorities and keep my own face, my own mind? Was this yet one more acid bath to corrode me? Had I kept my face while putting on the mask of burocrat in my last job? Most of the time I thought not. But Soli, my colleague, then friend, and finally boss, said I had. "You keep us honest." What did she mean? It was a job I didn't want, to be the conscience of the literacy group. I laughed. I was a beta human. I survived by submission, not by dominance. Or I was not alpha enough to survive, to hold on to my mind. I felt the rabia sorda of the subjected...of the submitted..of the beta.. So in my life, nothing happened.
We didn't sit long in the windowless waiting room stinking of cigarette smoke but empty of ashtrays. Had they only recently they'd forbidden smoking? The smiling officer entered from the far door and approached me with his hand held out. I gripped his hand hard and watched him give Machi a rigid charming smile. They wanted something from me, from us. I was not the only supplicant here.
I had no idea what it must have been like for Ori to have been in the Camp for two years. I was embarrassed that my images came from movies and childhood magazine photographs of tortured men and women. "Por dos años a Ori solo lo vi en sueños." I had said those words to Anacaona last night. We''d sat together until almost three in the morning at the table by our shelters,both of us unable to sleep, both waiting for Machi, both at once hopeful and afraid of finding Ori.
The smiling man brought somebody in. From Machi's sharp intake of breath I understood that this was Ori. For two years I had only seen him in my nightmares. I was never more glad that my son was with me, that the man Danny convinced the camp authorities it would go better if both of us saw Ori. I was almost certain this thin man with cheeks sunken around missing teeth, was the man I'd seen on the surveillance screen, curled up on a cot somewhere in the bowels of the Camp. He stood perfectly motionless by the door for just a moment before he stepped into the room and walked toward me. I saw he had no idea he was unrecognizable and that was good. To himself he was still Ori.
The three of us were alone in the small room although the smiling man and others must be watching through the square window that must surely be one way glass. Machi stepped between us and pulled his father into his arms. Now Ori was the smaller one, frail inside his burly son's embrace. Machi's arms were crossed behind Ori's back and his hands were spread, enormous on both sides of the curved spine. Ori melded into Machi, gave way, collapsed into him and made a sound I couldn't name, between a cry and a growl. He sobbed. I moved toward them and put my arms around both of them. Ori was still Ori if he could cry. I remembered before the separation, how Machi choreographed family kiss ins, getting us all to hug and kiss at once.
On the other side of the glass the watchers must be waiting for me to deliver the message. Another thing I must do I didn't want to do. Had I ever done anything other than comply? Were all humans bound together by terrible twining coils of compliance? Surely the smiling man didn't want to be smiling. What was there to smile about when you worked in a torture camp? Complying. Following the order to use a prisoner's wife's need to see her husband as pressure so that she complied with your request to get her husband to comply, to collaborate with what? They called their tortures interrogations.
"Como estas?" Ori raised his head from Machi's chest and offered me his gaze. His eyes were huge now in the shrunken face, liquid, showing terror and confusion and still the fierceness I recognized as Ori's essence. For a long time I simply looked into his eyes. I felt his mind. They hadn't killed him. They had hurt him but they hadn't killed him. He remembered me and I remembered him. He held my gaze. "They expect me to inform." His voice was unlike his voice coming from that reduced chest. His voice was softer, hoarser but still his voice, the words connected to the thought, the words uttered just a heartbeat more slowly than most people.
Then the moment was over and we were outside in the bright sun standing with Danny. His name was no longer impossible to think or say. I doubled over about to vomit, my body trembling, my face hot with tears. I pushed my face into Machi's chest and screamed, the wrenched sounds muffled against him. I clung to Machi and he held me hard. Danny stood by, looking down at us from his great height, his long arms hung limp from his oddly square shoulders and then he raised them and put one arm around Machi and one around me. I raised my head and looked up at him. "Is there any fucking way on earth to get him out of here?"
He said nothing. I watched him think. I wanted him to fix this the way I'd wanted Papi to fix things. Papi couldn't. I was still waiting. On the way back to Palenque I sat in the back seat and neither Machi nor Danny said anything. I imagined I looked too sunk, unreachable. We drove away in silence past little wooden houses with little front lawns shrunk and transplanted from a City suburb. Outside one of the houses a thin blonde City Navy wife stood over a pigtailed pale toddler on a tricycle. I wanted to grab the woman and shake her and ask her, "Do you know what your husband is doing? Do you know where his hands have been just before he puts them on you at night? Make him stop." But I said nothing. I wondered if I would ever manage to say anything again.
Machi's voice reached me from the surface. It was Danny he was speaking to. "You know my Mother is Venturan. Is there something you can do with that?"
“It's possible. Every so often El Mandatario wins a mass canje. This is how I see it. We try every legal angle, City law, international law, pardons. Just last year Padre Ezequiel brokered a one for one exchange. One hundred City force prisoners captured in Ventura during incursions exchanged for one hundred renditioned rebels in the Camp. You try every tracker angle, vigils, breaches, rescates, extraofficial canjes. We throw them all. Sooner or later one will stick.”
"Marina. Despierta."
Danny stuck his head in the flap of the lean-to. I bolted awake and stood. In Palenque I wore 24-7 clothes, yoga pants and T-shirts I could live and sleep in.
"Gotta go. Right now." I made a stop at the bank of toilets and we were in his ancient four-wheel drive within minutes. On the way to the Base he explained that after our last visit Ori had resumed his hunger strike, vomiting whatever he was forcefed, tearing out the iv. They want you to try again. There's something they think he knows.
I clenched my fists, brought them to my face and screamed in silence. "Something they want him to know." I watched the lavender sunrise through the of the windshield, grayed by seasalt. We got to the Base before I was ready. I paused at the steps to the shack, noticed the peeling beige paint. A small iguana caught my gaze for a second before it scurried under the small porch. This is where Danny squeezed my arm, sat on the porch railing, and waved me in the direction of a young smooth skinned guardia who had clearly been expecting me. We left Danny on his perch.
I followed the young guardia beyond the compound of small shacks, on a path of packed sand until we reached what looked like oversized dog crates. I proceeded behind him along a passageway between rows of crates, not looking, not wanting to look, but seeing nevertheless from the corners of my eyes the wire mesh pens, and the men inside them who were turned away from me. They wanted to not see me, not be seen by me? Were they too humiliated, broken, and shamed to be seen? I couldn't let myself feel anything, least of all knee buckling horror, in this moment. This was how they were kept! The cells were cages, mesh on all sides and overhead. In some of them three or four men sat on narrow cots or stood, their heads almost touching the overhead grid, or they bent forward. Or they squatted. It was better not to see much. I followed the guard who led me down a maze of passageways, an unending series of pens surrounded by the blue sky and yellow sands of paradise.
Now the young man leading me approached a wooden structure, a house. He climbed up the steps leading to the narrow porch, like the one at my abuela's house in the Venturan campo. I followed him up and through a narrow door. There was a front desk but nobody guarded it. We made our way along a hallway with doors close together on both sides. He pointed to the last door on the right and stepped aside and waited. I understood and pushed the door in and walked inside.
Ori stood with his back to me, facing a window. His shoulders were rounded and his spine was stooped. He turned toward me and I approached him and stood inches away from him. He smelled of laundry soap, the castilla soap from my childhood. His hair was wet. I looked into his eyes and drew him to me. This stranger was my husband and the father of my child. We were face to face. I remembered having to look up at him, before. I took his hand and drew him toward the bed. My knees were giving way. I needed to sit down. I sat and he stood beside me. I drew him toward me and he surrendered onto my lap. I held him like Mary holding Christ, this person, once my husband, was skin and bones and shaking in my arms. I whispered into his ear. "They want me to make you want to do whatever it is they want from you." I felt him sigh. His shoulders rose and fell and I understood that he was crying. He said nothing. I don't know how long I held him before the guardia took me back.