10. Specter #3
I breathed in, closed my eyes, and talked about my first days in the US, about how I loved LA.
The freeways, the cars, the golden sunsets over the frigid waters of the Pacific, the dry landscapes, the hikes, cracking steps on sandy dirt and pebble paths, the long stretches without coming across any other pedestrians, the street closures for filming, the hip-hop, rancheras and Pink Martini blasting out of convertibles, the terra-cotta roof tiles like those at home, the burger place “animal style,” the never-ending traffic jams like organisms with oblivious cells, A Video Store Named Desire, the midnight Rocky Horror Picture Show, potlucks in rental apartments, with gray wall-to-wall carpets and too many roommates and views of the freeway, but homey and ours.
My voice broke. I paused from speaking and opened my eyes, thinking that I had to go home, get away from all of this.
I couldn’t keep going anymore. I cried softly. I felt so tired.
The creature punched the side table, causing the lamp to fall on its side and the alarm clock to drop to the ground.
I started talking again. I talked about lying on the embroidered white hammock on my parents’ porch, smelling the rain and the red earth.
I told it about the brown mineral waters of Abaeté.
About how capybaras were related to nutrias and chinchillas and how they were everywhere on the outskirts of my hometown.
How they snuck out under the fence and came in and out of their zoo enclosures as if they were guests at a hotel.
About how the zookeepers didn’t mind. I told it about the beauty of language in general and my language specifically, the way it turned stops into fricatives, the way it implied the object with blank space, the breath and music of it.
The creature got angry again. I had said some of those things before. It didn’t like repetition. So I talked about Ana.
Her father, some asshole who Ana was sure only asked for weekends and holidays to bother her mother.
I talked about what I remembered from her linguistics papers, what she was working on for her thesis, about how we had laughed at Ana’s early crush on Zach, something that seemed ridiculous now.
I read our emails to each other to the creature, the few short text messages.
Until, exhausted, I reached for my pocket, where I had kept the note she had written in the corner of my notebook that morning: I just want you to be okay.
I extended my arm limply and let it go. Down went Ana’s note, into its alligator mouth. That finally satisfied it.
I lay down and pulled the blankets over me again, then looked at it once more, before it turned around and left. As I drifted back to sleep, I wondered if I had seen something on the other side of its hollow eyes this time: in the darkness inside its head, a tiny flicker of a greenish light.
I woke up midmorning with the sun shining bright through the window, right on my face.
I was startled for a minute, thinking I had missed class, but realized it was Friday.
We only had the colloquium in the afternoon.
On the leather chair, there was a pile of papers lined up neatly and stapled.
I picked it up. It was an assignment with an analysis of the dataset from the day before, my name on top.
I skimmed it, and though I didn’t know for sure, the analysis sounded reasonably good.
As soon as I got to campus, I went to the office of the professor from the day before and knocked on his door. I told him I hadn’t been feeling well and asked if I might be able to have an extension for the paper.
“There have been just too many times.” He looked down at his desk with a pained expression. “I can’t keep doing this.”
I swallowed. I didn’t know how I was going to make it through the semester. “I understand,” I said softly and began to turn around.
“Wait,” he said, stroking his gray mustache. “Listen, I was about to enter the grades. If I can enter yours today, if you have anything done, I can look at it. If I do it now, it won’t look bad on my end.”
I looked down at my shoes.
“Look, I am trying to help you. I think you can do great work. You have done so well in the past.” He sounded genuinely concerned. “But I have been hearing that you haven’t been keeping up lately.”
A place has a strange way of taking hold of you, a way of rooting in you as you start to make a life there.
It is difficult to rip it out, both the life you built and the dream you brought with you from long before.
That makes it harder to admit that the alarm saying “Leave! Now!” reflects something real.
You think you want to try just a little longer.
The same hope that helps you keep going makes it harder to see clearly.
You think you can find a way for things to be okay, for you to stay.
Hands shaking, I pulled out of my tote bag the paper I had found on the leather chair. I looked at my hands gripping each side. “Thank you,” I said so softly, I am not sure he heard me. Then I gave it to him and left, unable to say another word.
Sometimes I still wonder if I never came to Los Angeles, if I had turned around and gone back to where I came from, as people say, maybe it would all have turned out differently.
Would my alternative self naively regret my return?
Or maybe a version of this life would have followed me anywhere.
I try not to think about it anymore, but sometimes I can’t help it.
It’s hard enough to keep things together.
It continued visiting me, sporting its coconut head or classic alligator, but occasionally also a turtle; a gourd; the volleyball head from the movie Castaway; a reptilian but lion-like creature; an iron pan with eye and mouth holes; a footballer’s helmet to match its now-massive body.
It had spells when it came frequently, then it would disappear for several nights, when I mostly slept.
I worked hard not to make it angry again.
Twice more it brought me written papers to submit.
Other times, I cobbled things together superficially, without a full understanding behind my words.
Something felt vaporous in my mind. But I was able to scrape by and recover enough to avoid getting myself on academic probation for the semester.
Between the schoolwork, finding content for my late nights, and trying to get some sleep, I couldn’t spend much time hanging out in the graduate lounge anymore.
I said no to many invitations from Ana and Zach.
I became a sort of recluse, a feral creature.
It was difficult for me to talk to people.
I had no energy and they couldn’t understand.
I missed last Thursday’s toast again. Ana was mad, but she didn’t want to show it.
Eventually she stopped asking. And I let her.
Then, one day, I came into the graduate lounge to get a linguistics journal in case I had a visit that night.
I overheard Ana on the other side of the metal bookshelf stacks.
She was talking about capybaras, about how they snuck out from their jail cells and the zookeepers just laughed.
I was disoriented. I didn’t think I had told her that.
She was talking about someone, some guy she had met, who had told her about this.
I wanted to hear more, but they seemed to be moving toward the couch.
I turned around and left before they saw me.
Later that week, I stood by the door as Ana talked to Zach.
They were discussing an idea she had been working on for a paper.
Something about the position of agreement particles in Roman versus Slavic languages.
The discussion sounded somewhat familiar.
I was trying to remember where I had heard or read those points before, when I heard footsteps behind me.
Someone was coming to the graduate lounge.
I pretended to be looking for something in my bag and left.
When I got home that evening, I picked up the paper that had been left on the chair for me the night before again.
I sat on my bed and went through each line.
Short sentences that went straight to the point—borderline curt, bland but clear—the arguments made in an intelligent, transparent way.
Confident. No flourishes, no unnecessary words. It was Ana.
It had somehow stolen her work. I felt sick. Had it been seeing Ana? It had not come for me as much in the past month. Maybe it had attached itself to her, too. Maybe she was in danger.
I hurriedly put on my shoes and grabbed my key from the bedside table. But when I lifted my gaze, there it was again, sitting in its corner. Tonight, it was a dragon’s head.
I was so angry. I ripped one of the pages from the paper it had given me and approached it.
When I slid the page down its mouth, there was something inside the head.
I couldn’t see everything, but roughly aligned with the empty eyeholes, only deeper inside the head, were two small lights, like the kind one could find around a Christmas tree, both green…
and something else. I could barely see it in the faint green light, but it looked like a jumble of wires, like a small nest. Before I could see more, it tilted its snout up and roared.
Its body was so enormous now, it barely fit the chair.
It stood up, towering over me, then reached into its mouth with the nails and extracted the page I had fed it before balling it up and throwing it at me.
The teeth on the mask were made of something hard and sharp this time, like real teeth.
It swatted at me with its giant arms. I jumped back in time for it not to hurl my head off my neck, but the nails still scratched my left cheek.
I brought my hand to my face. It was wet with blood.