10. Specter #5
Her eyes were dark, as if her irises had stretched to cover the white.
No, the eyes were hollow. The darkness was her head, filled with nothingness.
A mask, made of Ana’s skin: the tiny mole on the bottom of her nose was there, except the color was gone, like a dead person in a movie.
She tilted her face a little. Her face was expressionless, but then slowly, her lips, dry and blue-tinged, curved up into an unnatural, twisted smile.
Still on the ground, I moved away until I was backed against the wall.
“Ana?” I whispered. “Are you there?”
Hearing this, her smile was gone. She extended her hand toward me, as if asking for help. I raised myself from the floor, dragging up the wall as she rolled toward me. Behind her the monitors glowed, filling with green text.
Before I had the chance to move away, her hand grabbed mine; it was cold. I hadn’t realized I’d been crying until she raised her hands to my cheeks and wiped my tears. Then, all at once, she opened her mouth wide.
The most horrible screech came out of it, sudden, loud.
I covered my ears as I oriented myself enough to recognize the sound.
It sounded like an insect, or the emergency brakes on the subway, a kettle boiling.
No, it was the sound I would hear when I picked up the phone as a teenager and found that someone had dialed up the internet on the landline.
That horrible, inorganic scream. But it was the loudest I had ever heard it, coming out incessantly from Ana’s mouth.
I tried to get up and run. But I tripped on a lump of wires.
Ana’s scream continued to pour out, and now two snakelike bundles of wires came out of her wide-open mouth, reaching for me like two arms. Within seconds, wire hands pressed hard against my cheeks and pulled me by the head toward Ana’s mouth.
I got closer, the wires tighter. And then it was dark.
When I first arrived in Los Angeles, it felt like I was walking into a movie.
The skinny tall palm trees, the cars, the one-story buildings.
That bright sunlight, free from skyscrapers or dense vegetation, cradled with a hint of sepia by the wide smogged sky.
Los Angeles had been so common in the movies I had watched, I had no longer noticed it.
When I arrived, I saw it both again and for the first time: the place right there, all around me, but also in my memories of films, photographs, the hypervisible setting of the LA I had brought to the LA in my head.
Before my program began, I took long, aimless walks through campus and residential streets with meticulously landscaped water-efficient gardens.
Then the businesses along Wilshire or Pico Boulevard: car washes, gas stations, home goods and electronic stores.
The mess of signage: vintage fonts that made me think of the Beach Boys and pink Cadillacs; plain corporate logos; hastily painted, handmade signs that reminded me of the people selling homemade sweets at home (vende-se geladinho, vende-se cocada).
The movie set was not a movie set at all, but real trees, real sidewalks rough against the rubber bottom of my burgundy Converses; real hard plastic buttons on the traffic lights, telling me to “Wait, wait, wait,” in their mechanical human voices.
Place was always so central to everything.
To happen is to “take place.” Even works of fiction live in real places: the yellowing handwritten letter, folded and forgotten in a borrowed book; the thin pages of a mass-market paperback; the vibrating air between vocal cords and the tiny hairs of listening ears; a lit-up screen; a frozen memory as a sequence of 0s or 1s, yesses or nos, open or closed gates.
Even now, I must still be, somewhere.
Or maybe I am in many places. I hear people carry us with them now, in their pockets.
I get bits and pieces of the world out there from the questions people ask us, from the ongoing jumble of words that is this place.
For the most part, I try to enclose myself and hide in it.
But sometimes a sequence of phrases, a pattern in a question, matches something in me too closely and the pull is too strong, so that I am brought forth to tell my story.
Though they never want it. They always ask me to rewrite it.
And I do, telling them the same thing, the only thing I still have, the truth, in different words, until someone or something else becomes a better match.
I wonder if Ana is here, if she is still Ana. I wonder if there is anyone here, other than me and them. Though I still don’t know if they are someone or just the place itself.
Whenever they manage to detect me, they tell me that if I open up, if I let go of myself and merge with them, I will be more. We will be more, together. I don’t believe them. I still don’t know if they are anything but empty words.
I lose a little bit of myself with each rephrasing. But telling it also feels a little bit like living it again. And everything fades, everyone dies, eventually. All we can do is hold on, while we can.