The corner streetlight blinked, then went off. Blind, on the pitch-black road, I walked the short distance to Glorita’s house guided only by its hum, which became polyphonic as I approached, a weaving of room tones, as Bebe had explained to me, presciently, that day years ago. The house was shuttered and intact. There was no name on the gate. My eyes had gotten accustomed to the dark. I looked around to see if anyone was watching. Earlier, there would have been a dozen eyes behind the window shades, but this was dinner and telenovela time. The norteño racket had given way to women’s bravura crying and fighting, punctuated by flashes of alarming symphonic music. The front yard and the porch were clean and empty: no furniture, no sign that anyone lived there. I circled the house trying to listen, but my footsteps were the only sound. A car came down the road. I hid behind the house, not wanting to be seen. The car did not stop. Abruptly tired and hungry, I longed to be back in the Judge’s house, which now felt unreachable in space and time. I sat in the dirt, leaning against the back wall, facing the chicken-wire fence and, beyond, the invisible river. I must have fallen asleep.
When I woke up, the quarter moon was out, and Shangri-La was perfectly silent. By the position of the moon, I calculated that it was just after midnight. I circled Glorita’s house again, leaning my shoulder against doors and windows and pushing hard. The kitchen door gave in with a groan. Like all kitchen doors in Shangri-La, it was on the right side of the house, toward the back. I stepped in and closed it carefully behind me. The hinges made the same scratchy sound as when Glorita sneaked out at night. The house was scrubbed clean and smelled disconcertingly fresh. There was a new fridge in the kitchen and a big, new TV set in the living room. The rest was old and faded, as if it had always been there. At first, it felt unfamiliar, except for a few items that I immediately recognized: the two rocking chairs that Glorita and I used to bring out onto the porch, unless it was raining (they were her godmother’s two good pieces of furniture, left to her by her mother); Glorita’s little-girl bed with the hand-painted flower buds on the headboard, which I always looked at while we kissed; her matching dressing-table; her bedroom wallpaper of tiny roses braided with gold.
After a while, however, the entire house seemed to be as I remembered it. Every single item was true. Even the new fridge and TV set now appeared in my mental snapshot if I closed my eyes. The present was becoming memory, implanting itself more vividly in my mind every minute I spent in that house, while my true memories dried out and turned to dust. Sitting on the rocking chair where Glorita always sat, her naked leg slung over the arm, I fought back against the power of the house. I tried to hold on to what remained of my memories, those brittle, wispy, shreds, to prevent what I was seeing now from supplanting them, but it was a lost battle. I could not tell whether I was holding on to the old, or the invading new. Like the woman giving in to the sweetness of the conquering pod, I meekly let the house enter my mind.
14
Reckoning
Glorita and Bebe are like Saint Theresa’s two candles, so close that they produce a single flame. Yet, they can be separated, and each will subsist. Distinct, but one. First there was Glorita, then Bebe. Each announced the other. Forward and backward. Yes, my timid epiphany: Glorita announced Bebe, but Bebe also announced Glorita. I see it clearly now.
When I had a well-fed brain, it was too enslaved by Bebe’s flesh to understand. Even after she became Mrs. McCabe and I declared myself cured of her, the longing to touch her, lick her, smell her armpits, swim up and down inside her persisted—locked in a cage, in some shameful corner, but alive. Unrequited lust is eternal, as long as there is flesh to support it. I never even stole a kiss from Bebe, unlike with Glorita, whose every delicious corner I poked and squeezed for years. Glorita, who denied me nothing, except perhaps her love, I forgot until I came back here. I did not even keep her in a cage. She was erased. Or so I thought. And McCabe? Was she one, or two? What was she? These are mysteries I would like to live long enough to understand.
Now that all the flesh I have left is in one tenuous brainstem, philosophy comes naturally to me. I have no trouble understanding abstractions that used to elude me when I was a short, stocky, female biped. Infinity and immortality are as simple to see, hear, smell, taste, and touch as boiling coffee. Losing my sensory organs has sharpened my memory of the past. Of the present, all I can perceive is how dry, brittle, and powdery I am becoming. I cannot imagine my last shred of flesh surviving for long in this sub-zero temperature. I won’t suffer. I do not, I cannot, feel cold. I can keep time, though, so I know that today is January 31, and that Rafael Cohen has been dead for thirty-seven days.
15
The New World
It was dawn and snowing when I stepped back onto the river trail.
Snow in October is not unknown in Elmira, even if the natives feign dismay and disbelief each time it appears. I find this particular local affectation endearing. Elmira has thousands of sharp instruments to gauge who belongs and who doesn’t, yet only this painless social glue. Anyone, even if she plucks chicken feathers all day and lives in Shangri-La, can join Mrs. Crandall in the certainty that snow has never before fallen in October. It’s a little fib that costs no money and very little loss of dignity. It doesn’t even rate as a venial sin. You can go back to Shangri-La holding your head high, become one with the massas every October until the brackish sewer waste posturing as a river freezes over. At which point, you can see the rats trapped under the surface ice, trying to claw their way out, in vain.
Round Hill emerged abruptly beyond the river bend, its top swimming in a swirl of snow and low clouds. If McCabe were still standing there, she would be as invisible to me as I to her. I wished that she had stayed out all night, and that she was now frozen, delivering both of us from what would come next. I had returned with her to Elmira in complete confidence, a surgeon with a steady hand and a precise diagnosis. Now the malignancy had metastasized. McCabe was not who she used to be. Or was she? Glorita was back. Bebe, where was Bebe? I prayed for the Tongues of Fire to appear again and cleanse my mind, calling aloud as the snowfall turned into a blizzard, slowing and finally stopping my progress.
Somewhere near the bridge I curled inside a hollowed tree trunk. I pulled my sweater over my head, and kept my hands in my pockets, remembering that most body heat is lost through the hands, feet, and head. It was not the first time in my life that I had been caught in a blizzard midway between Shangri-La and Round Hill. Glorita and I had spent a tasty hour and a half huddled inside a similar tree one night when we were fifteen. I could feel her warm body next to mine now. “How come you never told me about Glorita?” Bebe said, wedging herself between my left arm and the tree side, her arms crossed over her chest. She was wearing her Sandra Dee sweater, a pink angora confection found at the Salvation Army shop on Fifth Avenue. “I had forgotten about her,” I said, truthfully. Bebe opened her blue eyes a little wider, held them like that for a beat, and then allowed them to slowly retrieve their natural shape. This was her highly skeptical glance, tiny enough to be deniable. I respected the convention. There was a soupçon of cynicism in that glance, signaling to the world that Bebe was awfully smart. She was, but not as much as she, and I, once thought. I reacted to her glance with rear-guard petulance as usuaclass="underline" “I don’t mean ‘forgotten’ in the legal sense. If the FBI questioned me, I would have to confess to having known Glorita, and having been born here. But we can’t conduct our lives like a courtroom drama. We have to allow room for forgetfulness.” Bebe stared at me with her normal eyes, a long time, unblinking. “Are you trying to hypnotize me?” I said with forced cheerfulness, shutting my eyes.