Chapter 7-Mission to Wondra

Black and white photo of Marina sitting by a plump, dark skinned young man in a wheelchair, holding a 357 Magnum in its rectangular box.
Marina looked out the bus window enjoying the hypnosis of the moving ribbon of green, the trance from hours and hours of sitting. Her legs were on the hump of the bus tire. The vibrations aroused her and it was Jimmy her mind went to for a few seconds before it scanned its way to Danny and Ori and at last to the imaginary protagonist of her bad woman fantasies, Diana, voluptuous and blonde and completely unlike her. She ran through Diana's repertoire of sexual badness, a child's idea of badness. Diana had been born by Marina's mind when she was 12 so that somebody else could do the sexual sinning. In his sermons her father bellowed “el sexo”, the reverberating words were the climax of his litany of sins and seared in her mind sex with terror. But at the same time, she had almost no information of exactly what activities were “el sexo”. She thought of “el sexo” as the wet, chloacal feelings waist down, down there between her legs that she could make herself feel when Diana drank and smoked and wore dresses that hugged her hips and showed her breasts, or went alone to the dark corner bar Marina passed on her way to school, and danced there. It didn't take long before the orgasm shuddered through her.
After that she slept and woke up at the Wondra bus station. It was smaller and dirtier than she remembered. She hadn't been back here since she took the bus after her last semester. She had already decided to transfer out, to a bigger university in the City. She'd said to her close friend Craig, “If I'm going to work this hard I'm going to a school somebody's heard of.” She walked between the rows of bolted down steel frame chairs, avoiding the extended legs of the sleepers. She saw many of Wondra's homeless still spent the night at the station.
It was almost daylight. She walked to Craig's apartment near the bus station in the bad part of town. He hadn't moved in five years. She corrected her own thought. Of course he hadn't moved, he was quadriplegic, in a wheel chair. He hadn't changed apartments. He'd be awake. He barely slept.
It was Ray who came to the door. He was thinner and his grin showed one less tooth, maybe, but he looked pretty much the same, dark skinned, big grinned, able to show he was delighted to see her even though she didn't bother to call in advance. He stepped back to let Marina into the small, dark room, almost the same, but also smaller. How did Craig survive in here? She noticed him now, in the glow from the television screen, pale, plump, smiling. How had he found peace? She had written a poem about him calling him the unwilling buddah. He was sunk into his wheelchair against the back wall. She walked over and kissed his cheek, she remembered his damp, cool skin.
Craig and Ray were as good as ever at getting her talking. She described meeting Jimmy at Chef Manuel, how he'd stayed the night the first time he came over and never really gone back home. She described their wedding, Kwasi's officiating, and the vows she and Jimmy wrote themselves, all about making room for each other's lives and looking outward and forward together. She didn't mention coming to at the wedding with Danny's tongue inside her mouth, or that there'd been no wedding night to speak of because Jimmy had passed out at the Waterhole.
“You're a homewrecker.” Ray laughed but Marina felt like she'd been slapped.
“Ouch,” Craig said. “But do you love him?”
She didn't answer right away. “I thought I did.”
Craig looked at her with no reassurance on his face. “That thing we think is love, that merging feeling, I think it's just the longing for the mother we never had.”
“Or the Daddy,” Ray laughed again.
Marina got up, walked to Craig's hospital bed and threw herself on it. She played with the controls until she'd got her back resting at a perfect angle. “There's something I need to ask you.” She had an enormous urge to get her errand over with. Neither Danny nor Jimmy ever again mentioned their action plan (something to do with finding a public official to kidnap and hold for ransom; fear made her unable to hold the details in her mind). Even so, she'd taken on a task and she was going to carry through. Craig, who was quadriplegic from sliding down a wet slope while hunting, into a stream that was shallower than it had been the previous year, was the only hunter and gun owner she knew. She'd come to get him to sell her one of his guns or tell her where she could buy the 357 magnum she'd been assigned to find. She had no idea, and didn't want to know, how he did it, but when she woke up from her nap, the deed was done. The gun in its cardboard box was right next to her on the bedside table. She buried it in her backpack and after they'd eaten a pizza she walked back to the bustop and headed home. There was nobody else she wanted to see and nothing else she wanted to do in Wondra.
She curled up on her bus seat with her backpack for a pillow. She kept her head on her treasure all the way back to the City. Craig's question wouldn't leave her. Did she love Jimmy? She wanted to. She missed their endless conversations, their walks along the abandoned docks. But he already had a love he cherished far more than he cherished her and it hadn't been Marlen. Whenever she saw her now, Marlen looked like she was doing great. She'd gotten a job in one of her jazz club hangouts, doing promotion and some of everything, she'd cut her hair, she looked younger. Marina had taken Jimmy off her hands and after the initial outrage over his betrayal, Marlen had seized the opportunity. Jimmy was someone you wanted to love but then he pissed you off so much your love might as well be hate.
She was due at Verdad and went there directly. She shoved her backpack under her desk and dove into the translations. Going from Spanish to English and English to Spanish filled her mind. Most of the time as a writer she felt she had no language at all, no language of her own. English wasn't hers, didn't sit right on her tongue or sing in her mind and she felt stiff and stuck writing in it; Spanish she'd long ago stopped living in. It lived on elsewhere, in Ventura, where everything that truly lived still went on, and she was here in the City with no living words of her own. But this, going from one to the other, filled her.
She remembered last night's perfect words dream. Since she'd begun translating she'd begun to have these dreams in which she found the perfect words, the words that fully held the thoughts and fully made them intelligible. She felt the pleasure of finding the perfect words with every nerve and synapse because the words were complete. But then she could never remember them. They shattered like glass as she woke up and the loss of the words was a physical pain. Now with the recollection her eyes filled with tears.

Ori came to get her copy to edit and noticed her backpack. “Coming or going?” She kept her eyes on the keyboard and pretended she didn't hear. He cleared his throat. “Wanna go grab some lunch?” She did want to but she didn't dare leave her backpack. This time she turned and faced him. “I'm way backed up. I got in late.” She pointed to the metal bin with the copy she still had to translate. The issue of Verdad from the Island with paper clips marking the articles Ori had chosen for translation, which she hadn't even gotten started on, was folded, untouched.
She worked straight through, and barely touched the sandwich isleno Ori brought for her. She was done with the translations and dropped them on Ori's desk. “You're in a rush?” He looked puzzled. She hoped he wasn't hurt or getting a crush on her. She pointed to her wedding ring and blushed. When she got home Jimmy was out. He'd been cleaning up and she saw that her white wool rug from the Island was gone. It needed a wash, that was true, but it was real Cayo Karaya wool. She sat waiting by the kitchen table and the minute he walked in she pounced.
“What in the fuck did you do with my rug?”
He shrugged. “I would have thought you'd be glad I cleaned the place.”
“And so what if the rug was dirty. It was my fucking rug. I bought it myself in the mountains close to the Cima of El Pico at a native market.”
He turned on his heel and made for the door.
“That's right. Go to your girlfriend, the nice cool tall bottle.”
But he was already out the door and didn't hear her.