Blog 45-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."