I let Mrs. Crandall get dressed, pretending not to notice when she hid the double plug strap at the bottom of her bag. I followed her up the stairs until she reached the main door of the library. When she turned around to say goodbye, I shoved her on the ground and mounted her. She was bigger and heavier than I was, but I caught her off-balance. Weeks on the wheelchair had built up my upper body. She giggled first, then struggled, not daring to make a noise so close to the street. She put up a fight, twisting, kicking, biting, spitting, punching. She broke my lip, which bled all over her face. I strangled her with my left hand. When she was about to pass out, I released my grip so she could breathe, and shoved my right fist into her cunt. I slapped her until her lips and her nose bled. She tried to slide away but ended half-sitting against the door, which allowed me to push her legs wide open over my shoulders and push my fist into her ass. She screamed, but no sound came out of her mouth. When I shoved my fist back into her cunt, she came in a flood of cum, piss, and blood, over and over and over. Exhaustion stopped us a long time later. We lay side by side, listening to the sound of snow falling outside. She was the first one to move. When she returned from the bathroom, she was wearing her blue knitted ensemble. Her face was almost normal, except for a slight swelling on the upper lip. It would look much worse tomorrow. She shoved her soiled, torn dress into her bag. I did not know what to say or do. I was ashamed of myself. I still am. This is the most shameful thing I have ever done in my life. I have confessed it to you in vivid detail at the risk of appealing to your basest instincts, as a way to mortify myself and perhaps, in time, gain absolution, not from you or some improbable god, but from my best self, which watched me in horror and repulsion. I did not know what to say to Mrs. Crandall that night. I stood before her majestic blue-clad figure silhouetted against the library’s storm door, a ragged, stinky pygmy before a towering Athena. “Make sure you lock up behind me,” she said, not unkindly. Then she was gone.
23
Ashes to Ashes
The next morning, there was a small brown parcel in my breakfast basket addressed to “Miss Mirtila” and bearing no stamps or sender. Inside was Mrs. Crandall’s Shangri-La logbook, wrapped in a silk scarf so old that its crisscrossing threads hung in the air like a cobweb. The scarf smelled like overripe blackberries and wet soil, Mrs. Crandall’s smell at the beginning of our daily sessions, before the more potent animal odors set in. Was I forgiven, or was this a set up? Had she lied to me some, a lot, or not at all? I sniffed her scent on the scarf with the indecent voracity of a dog. Then I folded it carefully and put it inside a vacuum-sealed plastic bag, the kind used for frozen leftovers and forensic exhibits. Mrs. Crandall’s scent would be preserved for future use. I was her dog. She was my mistress. Mrs. Crandall whistles; I stand on my hind legs and shove my hairy dog dick up her ass. The Archangel Raphael sweeps down from above, burning sword in hand, and slashes the whore and her dog down the middle. I took a freezing shower, grinding my teeth, until my gnarled toes began to turn blue. I had to flush Mrs. Crandall away, purge her from my body in order to regain my human form. I could not allow her back until I had found and killed McCabe. For that I needed to be human. McCabe was my true quest, my only enigma. Everything else, even Mrs. Crandall’s cunt, would have to wait.
Hardened by the icy shower, I examined Mrs. Crandall’s logbook with the necessary sang-froid. It was, like her, an imbrication of order and debauchery. The entries were surgically precise and systematic. The handwriting was in black ink, with an architect’s small, perfectly even capitals. The map was impressively accurate and detailed. Mrs. Crandall had been modest when she had called it a sketchy line drawing. The book itself told a different, more hedonistic story. It was made of heavy Canson paper with a Belgian watermark, hand-stitched and bound in luxurious black leather. A red silk string page marker was attached to it. An entry on the final Sunday showed that Mrs. Crandall knocked on the third house on the south side of my old street, but that no one answered. Did Mrs. Crandall know that the National Security Advisor, Rafael Cohen, had been born in that cinderblock shack? If so, had she told McCabe? Had McCabe asked?
Rafael’s official bio listed Elmira as his birthplace, and then jumped to Harvard, Oxford, and Rhodes Scholarship glory, with only a discreet wink to the spic vote (“the son of hard-working Hispanic immigrants”). Not a word about Shangri-La. Rafael despised that name, but was infatuated with his own, believing himself named after the archangel—a felicitous name, he once remarked, embraced by all three great monotheistic religions. “I can pass as anything anywhere,” he boasted to Glorita, who promptly informed me with tomboyish glee. I knew better, but did not want to torment him. Didn’t I cling to my own conceits to survive in the belly of the beast Glorita had named Aracnida, the Beautiful? Rafael Cohen had not been baptized after the Prince of Light, but after El Chino Rafael, the fat, ageless Chinese who for half a century pushed his bountiful fruit and vegetable cart through La Esperanza’s pig-stained streets, my grandmother confided, after swearing me to silence. El Chino doted on little girls, particularly Rafael’s mother, who was pretty as a picture and adored him, my grandmother added, willfully blind to the unsavory implications, as the custom had been in La Esperanza. There, Chinese men were highly prized and thought to come in only two flavors: the industrious eunuchs, like the ostensibly celibate El Chino Rafael, and the good fathers and providers, those openly shacked up with the black or mulatto women who always swarmed around them in the hope of catching themselves a Chinaman.
One place they hadn’t looked was Shangri-La’s cemetery, not to be found on Mrs. Crandall’s map. It was hard to find. An impassable field of hawthorns and thistles hid it from the barrio. The only access was through a narrow, muddy path that began near the river. The sun was high and bright, melting the snow on the Judge’s rosebushes. I decided to go visit the dead.
The cab left me at the end of the paved street. I went up the slippery path on foot, keeping my balance with the Judge’s walking sticks. I found my grandmother’s grave first, overrun by thorny weeds. I’d paid seventy-five dollars to lease the plot in perpetuity, and three times that for a fancy pink granite marker with her name and vital dates. My father went in next, then my mother. There was space for one more. “I want my ashes to live with a woman who loves me.” The phrase popped into my mind accompanied by the humiliating blare of mariachi horns. If only I could express with dignity and simplicity the horror of being abandoned underground, or encased in a marble wall, or describe the longing to be remembered, loved, and kept forever at home. Turgenev would have pulled it off even if he had been born a spic. Torn between ridicule and fear of death, I stood before my grandmother’s tomb and did all my limited talent afforded me: I sang for her the maudlin, pitiful phrase in my uncertain Spanish, so she could understand. “Yo quiero que mis cenizas vivan con la mujer que me quiera.” I cut my right index finger trying to remove a big weed. A drop of blood fell on the snow, perfectly round for a few seconds. This was my red flower for my mulish grandmother, my belligerent mother, and my puzzled father. “Talk to me,” I asked my grandmother. “What should I do now?” She tickled the soles of my feet but did not say a word. The sun began dropping behind the cemetery hill.