Chapter 6 Luis
LUIS
HE SEES HER IN THE morning, during his shift.
She’s at the desk with the other girl, and her face is a face he knows, but he can’t say why.
It’s the feeling of seeing someone in a photograph and then again, in another, wearing different clothes, their body in a new position, but still that thing that lights up about them, that says SAME SAME SAME.
He watches her as he cleans the glass, when he walks past her on his way to lunch, when he comes back.
He’s studied so many women’s faces, hands, teeth, hair, elbows, eyelashes.
The shape of their jaws and the curves of their ears and the swish of their ponytails and the dots of freckles on their noses and cheeks and arms. He stores her away in his brain, her dark brown hair and her brown eyes the color of chocolate.
Her pale skin and the arches of her eyebrows.
After he clocks out, he waits around for a chance to look at her up close, but she doesn’t come into the back hall, where all of the other women keep their things.
He knows this will continue to bother him until he sorts it out, the itch of an understanding that’s being withheld. His fingers curl into a fist.
HE’S ON his way home, to the boardinghouse, when he sees the men walking in his direction, on the opposite side of the street.
The sight of their silhouettes gives him a squirming feeling in his guts, like he’s eaten something bad.
He stops and wonders whether he should turn around and circle the block or try to slip into a store until they pass, but before he can decide, the man with the shaved head cuts his eyes right to where Luis stands.
He taps the dark-haired one on the arm, and smiles, his teeth so big and white and square they shine at him with mean delight—save for one of the teeth, which glints coppery-gold.
They cross toward him, their chains thumping against their chests, and Luis braces for what’s next.
He could try to run, but last time they caught him, and it only made things worse.
There’s a cop car parked in front of a bodega, windows down, but the cops just watch and never help.
Gold Tooth runs into him hard, in the chest, so hard that his teeth crash against one another.
The dark-haired one grabs his arm tight, the way you might do to a friend, then closes his grip until it shoots a pain into his shoulder.
He jerks his arm away, shakes his head, no.
It’s been like this for months now, ever since one of them caught Luis staring at a woman in a tight pink dress.
She had reminded him of someone he knew once, a daughter of his grandmother’s friend, but there was no way to tell them that.
The next thing he knew, the men were shoving him to the ground, kicking him in the ribs.
That’s how it’s become around here—there are certain women who belong to men, women who are owned.
The cops come out of the bodega with paper cups of coffee, see the scuffle, smile, and shake their heads.
One of the officers calls out to them, which makes the other one throw his head back and laugh.
He tries again to pass, but Gold Tooth hooks a foot behind Luis’s knees, sends him crashing to the ground.
Luis looks over at the cops, who stare at him, smiling.
More rage surges through his limbs, and he extends a leg and kicks the bald man in the ankle.
He knows to brace for it—bam—another slap upside the head.
His jaw slides sideways. His temple throbs, and his whole spine feels bruised.
The men leave him on the sidewalk and one of the cops spits a chewed piece of gum out the window. Even with their eyes masked behind mirrored glasses, Luis can tell that they’re laughing at him, the corners of their mouths curling up. His heart flutters like a bird trapped in his chest.
He brushes the gravel out of his palms. Out of the corner of his eye he sees a needle in the gutter, a busted plastic lighter, a shimmering film of cellophane.
He shudders, stands, brushes more gravel from the knees of his pants.
He’s been thinking of ways to avoid the men and the cops who do nothing.
But what he wants most is violence, to take a swing at those big, stupid grins, grind their faces into the ground, a swift kick to each of their guts.
But he knows what would happen then: his hands twisted behind his back, the silver cuffs biting into his wrists.
The rules are different for him. And it wouldn’t be his first arrest—in the spring he was caught in the parking garage of the old Taj Mahal.
They must have thought he was up to something bad, but he was only curious.
What it looked like empty of all those cars.
It makes him feel better to think it, that they don’t know the half of it—if only they knew how often he is somewhere he isn’t supposed to go.
If only they knew how frequently he made himself invisible, how closely he could watch.
As he limps home, he thinks about the way the whole city is dying around anyone who is left; slowly, though, like a large animal falling to its knees.
All he can see are the ghosts of the places they used to go when he was a boy.
The shop where his grandmother bought meat for the week, the one where his grandfather bought him his first bike.
He can still remember when the boardwalk was lined with old hotels, beautiful redbrick and decorations that reminded him of frosting on a cake.
His grandfather had brought him to the beach to watch as one of the bigger ones was destroyed.
He and his grandfather pressed up against the plastic fence and watched the old hotel slide out from under itself, bloom into a cloud of rubble and dust. Other people around him covered their ears.
He felt the crash of brick and walls and roof move up from the ground, through his bones, into his jaw.
Five years after that he watched another one get smashed by a giant metal ball, but by then neither of his grandparents were alive to watch with him.
Then, the casinos rose up with their horrible red lights that blare through the night sky, their dark insides, their huge, gray slabs of concrete.
They teemed with people for a time, but now the people haven’t come, not like before.
Now the movie theater has closed, the letters dropped from its marquee.
Forgotten playgrounds with rusted merry-go-rounds, swings that hang from one chain.
There are fewer visitors, and more litter in the streets.
He feels inside of him what it means to have grown up here.
Another thing that has seeped into him and made him all wrong on the inside.
It’s in his hands, his blood, in his bones.
The next morning he senses the soreness before he opens his eyes.
He’s older now and feels things in ways he didn’t use to.
The injuries linger, stay in his skin. There have always been the men and the cops like this in his life, people who will use the way his voice is trapped in him against him.
People who think it means he’s stupid, that he moves through the world not just deaf and mute, but blind and numb.
He goes into work feeling tired, battered, and bruised, his anger glowing in him like a hot coal.
Once again he tries to puzzle out where he’s seen the girl before.
It chafes at him, but he knows that doesn’t matter. He’ll get it right eventually.
For now he’ll only watch and wait.