THE SIDEWALK'S CLENCHED JAW

            When El Esposo, the husband, opened the front door of his house with his right hand on the door knob, when his right foot hit the wooden floor of his porch while at the same time he put his left hand into his pocket to dig out his car keys—this was when he saw it, all over the pavement where pedestrians made their life’s way.

            El Esposo, the husband, out of habit, pressed the UNLOCK button on his key-apparatus. He heard a muffled BLARP BLARP, the car’s response. But he could not see the car.

            Which is to say, this is what El Esposo, the husband, saw when he opened the door and looked out to the world / the neighborhood / the street: first, the house cat, which had never liked the house, standing on the concrete walkway that ran from the porch to the sidewalk. The cat was standing on the walkway like it would have any day, except that it was unmoving, because the concrete had swallowed its paws, as if the pavement had become a liquid monster, crawling up the cat’s legs and then solidifying once its hold on the cat was secure. It left the cat paralyzed at the feet and agonizing everywhere else.

MEOW MEOW, went the cat, after the car’s BLARP BLARP.

The car, which had been standing on the driveway the whole night, was completely covered in cement: it looked now like a huge gray block, its identity consumed by the concrete. El Esposo, the husband, did not think of how he could still hear the muffled BLARP BLARP even though the car was trapped. This is because he then looked ahead at the mailbox of his neighbor, also fully enveloped by concrete—and then at his neighbor, who was standing beside the mailbox, or rather, hunched beside it, like he was picking something up.

His name was Tomás Thomas, and he was an arthritic fifty-five year-old. His condition notwithstanding, he stubbornly went to pick up the paper every morning, and when he bent down, El Esposo, the husband, thought, it must have felt like many rusty tubes inside him were creaking with pain. Tomás Thomas’s wife had always protested about it. “You’ll fall and die,” she used to say. But Tomás Thomas replied: “You would like that,” to which she wouldn’t respond. So the old man would pick up the paper without fail, every morning at 6 o’ clock. It was now 7 o’ clock, and he was still there, hunched down, picking up the paper, stuck in mid-motion.

The concrete covered about half of Tomás Thomas’s body. Only his torso, his left arm, and his face were spared by the pavement’s slow upward crawl. The pain of all those creaking bones was visible on his tattered face, and tears trickled down the tracks that his wrinkles had paved.

            “Oh no!” El Esposo, the husband, shouted.

            “God no!” Tomás Thomas yelped.

            “Oh My Tomás!” Tomás Thomas’s wife called out, and El Esposo, the husband, turned his head to Tomás’s house. Tomás Thomas’s wife was peeking her head out from the second-floor front window, her arms outstretched, her face wearing an expression similar to her husband’s. “Oh, Tomás! What’s wrong with you?!” she screamed.

Then she turned to El Esposo, the husband. “Esposo!” she cried. “We have to call the firemen!”

            El Esposo, the husband, turned away from the pleading face of the old lady. He opened the door to his home and went in.

            What it must have been like! he thought, standing with his back to the door, his hands pressed against it, trying to push away what was happening outside. To see the sidewalk open up like a wolf’s mouth and bite you, to become stuck in the sidewalk’s clenched jaw.

            He shirked the thought as he ran to the kitchen, only to gratefully see that his wife and son were sitting down at the wooden table, their feet on the wooden floor, their hands holding metal spoons. There was no concrete in the wooden house, the husband realized. But they would want to know why none of them would ever set foot outside the house.

AT NIGHT, THE CHILDREN

At night, the children wait for the firestars. They sit on their porches or on their porch steps, each with an aluminum bucket full of water by his or her side, spending hours looking up at the sky. Many come to memorize the names and shapes of all the constellations and can tell planets from stars. And of course, they have wished upon many a falling star, mostly for sleep. The firestars are falling stars, in their own way, of course. But they are different, primarily because they are orange. And it is the dim speckles of orange that the children look out for, their eyes open through 3am exhaustion.

The firestars appear first as small and flickering flakes, so high up and moving so slowly that they look like flaming 707 airplanes. As they come down—they do not drift down like leaves, they dart down, like bombs—and get closer, their shapes become more distinguishable: one can see what comprises the heart of the firestar, the black and burning star, surrounded by the fire it produces, the fire that surrounds the star and also gives the firestar its orange-red wake. And as it gets even closer to the ground—and this is a child’s main way of telling if the firestar is going to land anywhere near the child’s house—the crackling sound of fire, like that of wrinkling paper, accompanies the firestar, the firestar which is about the size of a human head.

And then, with a soft tap, a little paf, the comet lands on the ground, creating a ring of fire small enough for a bucket of water to soak out.

If the firestar lands on the front yard or on the backyard or on the roof, it is the child’s job to assure that the fire be put out before it spreads out and consumes the house. So the child picks up the bucket and pours the water over the burning fire, thus putting out last breaths of the firestar, drowning its last few flames, leaving behind what was once the head of the blistering comet: a wrinkled-up, ashen, and paper-textured star, its five triangular legs curled up, like the head and arms and legs of a baby in the fetal position.

The child then puts the bucket on its side on the ground and, using a broom, sweeps the star into the bucket. He walks back to the house and then puts the star in the porch floorboards. The more firestars fall, the more they get heaped up on the porch, the child piling them up as the night goes on and eventually makes way for morning.

When the first rays of sunshine appear and the dark blue begins to brighten—that is when the weary child can go back to sleep and not see the bucket or the night until the next night.

And this is how nights are for the children of Firestar Bay.

For the parents, the day begins when the sun has come up. They wake up with wide smiles and slip on their morning sandals. If their room is in the second story of the house, then they rush down the stairs, almost stumbling over each other—such is their ecstasy as they slam the porch door open and see—oh yes! The heap of firestars! Look how beautiful they look when they are dead, they say to each other, there, dried-up and piled on the porch.

Then, beaming with pride, they wake up their children, who had gone to sleep a few hours before.

“You are so good at star-gazing!” they say.

“I wish I could still be a child, putting out the fires! I miss the smell of the night, the smell of the smoke, the contemplation that the solitude allowed!” a dad says.

“If I could only stay up late without worry of performing badly in my job the next day, I would surely stay up with you and gaze at the sky!” a mother says.

“Oh, isn’t it wonderful to watch a rain of firestars?” they both ask.

“Isn’t it wonderful to watch them when they are alive? It is so sad for us, to only see them when they are dead. But it is what we can have! And we sure are proud of it, and proud of you, dear child, for keeping us safe!”

The child, if the child awakens, mumbles along, a yes or a no or something indecipherable under a sleepy, croaking voice. The parents just nod and nod and nod and go back outside to look at the heap of dried-up firestars on their front porch with doting eyes, holding each other’s hands and remembering their beautiful childhood and their shared past before quickly blowing at the dried-up stars with their mouths and seeing them disintegrate into the white morning air, becoming ashes so disperse that they are nothing, nothing at all, the porch now looking as clean as it ever did.

And then they go to work in their cars, which vroom away trailing smoke.

Two hours later, the child wakes up with eyes surrounded by black rings, to go to school.

Firestar season lasts August to May. During the summer vacation, no firestars fall, and the children are free to play at night and to run around with their friends. But what most children do, at least for the first few weeks of summer, is sleep, because summer is the only time that they can dream.

THE MOST DIFFICULT QUESTION

The husband scrambles into his house and slams the door behind him, pressing his back up against the wooden door, pressing his fingers up against that hardwood, pressing. He grunts.

            And then he exhales. Sweat drips down his face and shirt. His tie is askew and his heart beats with the pace of a fever nightmare. He puts his hand over his chest and closes his eyes. It is morning, and no morning has ever begun like this. Not for him and, he guesses, not for anybody. He lets himself breathe again, a chilly heat simmering his body. He turns his head, puts his ear to the door. He could peek through the window beside the door, but that would entail looking outside.

            He hears no sound, and still nothing pushes against the door. He exhales again, and this time he lets himself feel some relief.

            His fingers let go of the hardwood. His back, too.

His mind turns to his wife and son. And faintly, he hears the sound of their simple breakfast chatter from the kitchen. He pictures them in the kitchen, now surely aglow with white sunlight, and the fear slithers away like a snake that vows to return.

            He paces. He tries to walk, of course. He tries to be as composed as he can be as he approaches the kitchen, but he only achieves this awkward, shaky pace. He cannot stop his fingers from trembling. And when he appears at the kitchen doorway, his skin looks yellow with fear.

His wife and son are sitting down at the white table. They have red bowls of cereal. A flake hangs off his son’s lower lip. The son’s tongue slides out of his mouth and disappears the flake from view.

When they look up and look at the man of the family—the husband knows that they will read it in his face—everything will change.    

His wife asks him with a look, a questioning frown in her eyes. He answers with desperate exhalations and a brief shaking of the head, all that he can muster at the moment. That should be enough for her, for now.

But the boy asks with words.

And the question of his son, that is, the question of a child who wants to know what is going on outside, the husband realized then, is the most difficult to answer.

THE DYING GAME

The little bowl fell and broke into three thousand pebbles of glass, clear pebbles so small you could call them sand, and the water that the former bowl used to contain now spread all over the floor like the eight tentacles of an octopus.

The fish lay alone on the floor, its waterless gills gasping for their watery oxygen. I could hear it. And I knew then that the sound of a fish gasping for breath is very similar to the sound of a helpless man gasping for breath. Like a creaking door, that inward scream of the man trying to swallow oxygen from nothing. And every time the fish opened up its gills, finding no water, I heard it: those creaks of desperation. Its glassy eyes stared at nothing, but I could feel them pleading to me. That is, it could form no facial expression to tell me it was dying, but it was telling me anyway.

I scrambled to the floor and tried to reassamble the pieces of glass-sand. I formed a perfect mound of glass pebbles that looked like a translucent Everest. The water was flat on the floor and I could not tell it to stand up and go to the nearest bowl. My hands scrambled. I went for the fish and cupped it in my hands. I will save you, because while you drown I now feel myself drowning.

I ran to the kitchen sink and then I flipped the fish over to my left hand, wrapped that hand’s fingers around it (you will not fall from my hand, fish), and then used my right hand to turn the C handle on the kitchen sink: WHEEAK WHEEAK, it creaked, the sound of metal turning on metal. No water tunneled through the tube’s hollow brass-blackness. So I turned the H handle (it’s better to be hot than to be dead, fish, don’t worry, you won’t die), to no results.

My right hand went back to my left hand and I went back to cupping the fish and I ran or scrambled or rather my legs were like the awkward legs of a scissor jumping across the house; this is what saving a life does to me. I ran with my scissor-legs (thank god I don’t have scissor hands, fish, haha) to the bathroom and tried the H and C handles on the shaving-hair-ridded sink, the H and C handles on the shower, and then I, yes, I opened the toilet and it was as dry as my throat and the fish’s throat.

So of course I ran back to the kitchen and took my right hand out of my left hand to get a cup from the counter and put the cup’s lip under my eye and started to squint and to wince and to think of dead babies or dead fish in order to get the tears out, but my tear ducts inside my eyes were as hollow as the brass tubes of all the sinks in my house.

Two doors swing open and a splash of sunlight: I am outside, running, and where is the damn river? All cities have rivers but I only see houses, and all these houses are empty, and the only blue thing around here is the sky and there aren't even any white clouds, so I run, and then the sound of a blocked lung, an inwards burp, the open mouth of the fish being the open arms of a mother, the lack of water being the lack of a son, the lack of a daughter, the lack of a father, all at the same time, because H2O is like that: it is everything you need to be alive, fish.

I run to many houses, knock on many doors, but either they don’t answer or they don’t care about the fish. Everything is dry of water. 

Now the night is about to fall, and the fish is still dying in my hands. I sit down on the curb and look down at it, see its body bobbing up and down, still half-breathing. This is no way to live, fish, I say. 

*

“So I cupped it in my hands, this little fish that, trying to find water in the wind, and in a state of permanent asphyxiation, would not die,” he said. “And I ran. I could never find the water, nor did the fish ever die. I wondered then: if the fish is to live in this semi-death outside the water, will water only kill the fish? If so, should I throw it in the water? Can you see my position? I couldn’t just let go of the fish and throw it on the floor, because then the fish would never die. But I couldn’t take it to the water either, because then it would certainly die.”

And then I said, “Wouldn’t it be worse to be not the one holding the fish but the fish itself, the fish helpless and at the mercy of a giant being who runs, even though running doesn’t help?”

LAUGHTER AT NOON

When he arrives and our bi-weekly ritual begins once again, the waitress writes down two orders of coffee and fried eggs. She doesn’t need to ask.

Today’s topic: shopping.

I’m a wanderer, he says. Ashley always has to fetch me from the technology section. It’s the movies. I always look for discounts on classics. Habit I started in college that I never knocked.

I think: My Jake likes to lose himself too, in the books. For him there’s nothing like a beautiful book cover with a discount. Those percentage signs reach out for him like tendrils. $15 for the latest Stephen King hardcover, X % off.

% % % %.

I tell him about the % thing, and we chuckle. He says, exactly, that is exactly the thing! Ashley gets annoyed with me, too; she, like, hates it, poor thing, she’s got to stand that kinda thing from me!

We laugh and clink, and if it were later in the p.m. the sun would be setting on us and the night would envelop and swallow the oak tree’s silhouette. What I mean is, laughter is different at noon.

He goes on: there’s one thing Ashley and I can’t not shop for together: ice cream flavors. Do you and Jake have something like this?

Oh yes of course. Chips, I say: We obligate ourselves to pick only one bag, out of the zillions.

[Don’t get me wrong. Our spouses are not our only topic. But it’s quite the fixture. For example, these are the some of the things that I have gotten to know over many plates of fried eggs: Ashley likes the Bond movies (he thinks that they’re ultra-chauvinist, and they argue about this but he always relents when she reminds him that he reminds her of Bond, in a physical way, and that this played no small role in their relationship); Ashley sleeps with socks on and always wears socks, even when they make love, the latter which he admits turns him on—he thinks maybe she doesn’t use socks in the shower, but that is just a theory; Ashley’s right-hand pinky finger wiggles when she gets angry; on the car radio, Ashley can only listen to classic rock in the morning, R&B during the day, and Jazz Fusion at night (he has no say in the radio choices, and she let him know this the day they met); Ashley’s hair is black like that of a Native American (he did not tell me this—this I know from knowing her—but I say it because he talks about it in different contexts, like: I brush it when we’re watching movies together; I have the ability to distinguish it in a large crowd, and I don’t know if this is some special power I have or if her hair is simply that out-standish; I have never threatened to snip it, and I don’t know who would, I’m not the kind of person who humorously threatens to cut off a part of one’s most sacred body part for the curiosity of watching that person’s reaction; she’s protective of her hair and she told me one night two years into our relationship that I should consider myself lucky to touch it, etc.—the thing is that I am left with the impression these moments give of that blackness, the way it works on him like some Native American charm); Ashley snores the way he imagines an overweight Italian man would snore if frogs lived in said man’s throat; Ashley doesn’t like it when he talks about me; Ashley has never woken up after eight-thirty in the morning, even after wild nights of sex (she’s a screamer, like I am. I don’t know this because he told me, but because one time he forgot to hang up the phone, and it just lay there, un-hung up, on the nightstand. He must have noticed the next morning that he had a 55-minute conversation with me. He’s never mentioned it.)

That’s very Native American of her, I remember saying, re: the jealousy and the eight-thirty thing, and we laughed because that’s Jake’s humor shining through me: Jake would say that, he said, and I said, I know.]

When we’re done with the eggs and with our shopping talk, we talk about football (I could mention how Jake wields a stress ball whenever he sees F. S. U. games, but I’ve sang that ditty before). Then we leave and I go pick up Jr. at school. Jake has bought some David Foster Wallace rare edition. I jot it down.

That is, we know all the important things about our and each other’s others. We observe our spouses like they are specimens, little animals whose quirks we record in journals; we make sure to remember a gesture, a phrase, a fight, a particular twitch of their lips, all for the biweekly ritual. But sometimes it is so urgent that we turn to texting. Tonight is one such occasion.

Him, 12:30pm: There go the socks.

On my nightstand, the cell phone goes VRRRM VRRRM. My little Pavlov’s bell. Jake is a deep sleeper.

Me, 12:31: Where?

H, :31: She came in/out of shower w/them, don’t know if she EVER took them off.

M, :31: Maybe she has magic sockS.

H, :32: MAGIC

M, :33: Nobody knows the secret

In all probability: she asks him who he’s texting, with those slit eyes and that wiggly finger of hers. He’ll say: I’m checking the latest stats on X quarterback, while he changes the screen, erasing the text message history. That’s why he never answers my message.

Tomorrow he’ll call me and tell me how he almost got into trouble for getting a text message while the cell phone was on the nightstand, because then Ashley said one of her your other girlfriend comments and he might have resented that and then resentment resentment resentment. But I always keep my cell phone on the nighstand. He keeps it there, too; and Jake’s a deep sleeper.

ROMEO MOTHERFUCKER

“Oh,” she says. 

Her eyes are glazed, like those of a bored house cat. He had a cat once. Fucking hated it. But it’s not hate he feels now. It’s more like his body is buried under snow in the north pole, his head sticking out, like a mole, being torn to pieces by a polar bear. With penguins watching.

Cold, that’s how he feels.

“Eh, uh, oh,” she says, her head shaking like a dog drying off. “No, I mean—” she clears her throat, and her eyes look at him with a steely certainty, composure regained: "No."


She walks away. He can’t hear the click-clack of her heels on the floor. Maybe it’s because he’s thinking about the fact that she should’ve been wearing the ring by now. Or maybe it’s because there are 23,500 people in the basketball arena who have just released a collective gasp, followed by a worried murmur. In the overhead monitor, a pink heart frames the solitary man with the ring in his hand. The caption under the heart: "CONGRATULATIONS!" The woman walks away from the frame, her hand over her eyes and her eyes cast down, her feet awkward on their heels.

He finds it in him to pursue her, walking behind her with the clumsy strides of a duck. “Jen,” he whimpers, over the burgeoning, bleating crowd-noise.


"I got pop-corn, I got beer, I got everything, hear hear!"

Within the crowd, someone is laughing. The man with the ring in his hand hears it over the cacophony and the stereo and the pop-corn and the boom box. It’s not cold he feels now. Now it’s like his dick is falling off of him.

He can see the headline. Pre-game show highlights: man’s penis falls off before stunned crowd. Referees pick up scrotum shreds.

He stops, looks at the stadium crowd around him, and feeling the urge of politeness or a surge of weight, holds out his hand to them, the one that doesn’t hold the ring, with the index finger up, as if saying, shush, shush, mommy and daddy are talking.

“I’LL BE RIGHT BACK,” he shouts. “OKAY JUST A MINUTE.”

Then he walks off the court, leaving it empty and lit.

On the sidelines, the man wearing the jersey (home team, yellow, number 45) wipes his face. “Romeo motherfucker got the raw deal,” he says. Coach, standing up, arms crossed, shakes his head and bites his tongue. Number 45 shakes his head too: “Juliet be trippin, man.”

In the crowd, a man continues laughing. He is still laughing when home team loses later that night; and it’s maybe his laughter that bounces off the alley walls when in the black hours of morning a beggar finds a 14 karat ring in the dumpster behind Cheng's, the Chinese joint.

Atrevete-te

Calle 13 released “Calle 13,” their first album, when I was wearing a white uniform to high school, which means that it must have been somewhere between freshman and junior year. Seventh to eighth grade boys (affectionately called "mojones" or "little turds" by the older guys) wore blue uniforms, the ninth to eleventh grade boys wore white, and the seniors had their own thing going on, varying each year—one time it was turqouise, another red, etc.

            The staple song that got everybody shaking their asses was “Atrevete-te” which won awards and used the Cumbia rhythm, a classic Colombian rhythm, an evokation of Latin American history. And that was so strange for a reggaetón album (reggaetón has nothing to do with reggae—it’s Puerto Rican hip hop). And “Atrevete-te” means “Dare-are” in Spanish. And there’s a line about Coldplay and Green Day, bands also popular in the time among the English-speaking students who always hung out by the stairs beside the library. 

             On the other side of the social spectrum, language-wise (and hang-out-wise), were the scholarship kids, who knew how to speak English, yes, but were proud of how broken they spoke it, and in turn knew all the corners of slang Spanish and most importantly Puerto Rican slang, who flaunted their rolled R's and their mastery of the slang to their English-speaking fellow students who slurred through their R's, both in English and in Spanish:

Mera mamau

(Look, you sucked cock)--Mamau comes from mamabicho, which means "cocksucker." Mama means "to suck," and it has a maternal, breast-association (mammogram, etc); bicho means "bug" in all the Spanish-speaking countries in the world, but in Puerto Rico it means "dick" or "wang" or "cock" or "penis" (think of "fag" in England vs. America). To say you are a "mamau" is to say that you are a "sucked one," or a dick after it has been sucked. And what is a dick after it has been sucked? It's a flaccid little thing, and to these guys, it was a Puerto Rican who spoke English better than they spoke Spanish.

And there was nothing like getting told that by a scholarship kid who had been raised in the hood and who wielded biceps that could break bones as well as hearts. It was the way they threw Puerto Rican at the English-speaking students. 

The scholarship kids. The ones from the projects, the ones completely different from everybody, the ones who played basketball or baseball or were Protestants—hung out on the other side of the school and looked down on the English speaking kids who liked to talk about Green Day and Coldplay and Rihanna and South Park and Bush, even though they couldn't vote for Bush or Gore or Kerry, because, you know, Puerto Ricans don't vote for the president. That's why they say we're a colony.

Anyway, here's the Atrevete-te refrain:

atrevete-te

salte

del closet

destapate

quitate

el esmalte

 deja de tapalte

que nadie va a retratalte

levantate

ponte hyper

...
Qué importa si te gusta Green-Day?
Qué importa si te gusta Col-play?

And so in English it would say something more like this:

Dare dare

Get out of the closet

Take the cap out of the bottle

Take off the lipstick

Stop covering yourself

Nobody’s going to take a picture

Stand up, get hyper.

…
Who cares if you like Green Day?
Who cares if you like Coldplay?

(Looks like a hooligan, right? Well, guess what, he got a degree from SCAD.)


The point is, it wasn't just women jiggling their stuff. It was men and all kinds of men, too. The scholarship kids, the rich kids--even though with them (the white ones, the rich ones) there had to be an "irony phase," where one liked Calle 13 with irony, as a joke, before one could say that, hey, this stuff is actually enjoyable.