It’s the color scheme of that first afternoon — that white panorama of full potential, that threshold white — that Marina understands as whomise. And that’s what she’s trying to recreate now, a year and a bit later, with a series of expensive light bulbs. ‘White Light’, the packaging promised. She fits them one by one throughout the house, and unbeknown to her, choreographs the slow dance of light-over-puddle in the passageway.
*
Marina did actually start college after she rented Bitter. She chose the degree herself, but not the timetable. Something about the word ‘design’ inspired a vague but firm hope in her — perhaps there she’d learn that most basic of things, the thing she saw in other people: an instinct for planning, for self-preservation. But the only thing she knows for certain up until now is that, as a direct result of attending morning classes, she’s never at home at the time of day when the sun paints the wall whomise. According to her theory, this is where it all went wrong, what set her off, what made her burn out again. A deficiency. Just as some people lack sunshine, she happened to lack this particular color. It got so bad that the usual serum shot wasn’t enough, and her mother had to be called for. Señora Mendoza came flying to the rescue, then disappeared again. You can still make out her fleeting presence in the spotlessness of the grout between the tiles, somewhere it had never occurred to Marina to scrub. There are new habits since the mother’s visit, too. Marina is medicated now. Marina is in therapy.
She left the standing lamp in the living room till last, and now it burns to the touch. She switches it off, slips her hand under her T-shirt and, using it like a glove, unscrews the bulb. So long, oppressive yellow light! (What’s that color called? Yellowoeful? Yelldown? Yepressing?) She screws in the new bulb and points the lamp at the wall. Instead of the desired whomise, a hard, futuristic light appears, as pristine as the pills she takes. This one, she decides, is called whozac. If whozac were a person it would have perfect teeth, wear a hospital gown, and roam the world preaching against hope: ‘There’s nowhere to run! There’s no way out! Filter your pain through our new Prozac-infused light!’
A design idea. The first she’s had in months: anxiolytics should be packaged like breakfast cereal, with Sudokus on the box to pass the time during that first month you wait for them to kick in, until at last you forget you’re waiting, and the only sign they’re working is the muffled hum of anxiety, as if someone were pressing their foot on the mute pedal. Even so, Marina takes her pills. Almost every day.
She unplugs the lamp and tests it on the other side of the room, but it doesn’t give the desired effect. Frustrated, she lashes out. Then, after a clunk and a flicker, the bulb casts a cone-shape of whozac over the rug. The light bulb just isn’t the sun. She might never recapture the whomise, and God, how frustrating the whole thing is. How ironic that every morning the very essence of wellbeing pours into her living room while she’s not at home; while she sits in a lecture hall doing her best not to think about anything at all.
‘What a waste,’ she says to herself, rolling the lamp across the rug with her foot. Marina despises waste. She sits upside down on the sofa and rests her feet against the wall where there’s no sunlight because it’s nearly ten.
‘I haven’t even eaten,’ she thinks.
Her trousers slip down and she looks at her legs: much wider than her arms. Damn asymmetry. Why can’t everything be the same size? She lies there for a while. She’s so tired it’s almost like being calm. She wonders if she should just quit school, and she thinks about Chihuahua, too, the man she sleeps with from time to time, but who she hasn’t heard a peep from in weeks. The last time she saw him, he’d been getting dressed after sex while she lay stock-still staring at the ceiling, and just before walking out he said, ‘This is too much for me.’ As if their relationship were a carrier bag he was holding, with Marina inside it. As if the weight of that tiny waif were cutting into the poor guy’s fingers.
*
Marina is never home for the hours of whomise on the weekend either because she works looking after Linda Walker’s kids. They live on the other side of the passageway, which means the sun doesn’t hit their house in the same way. They don’t get any sun at all, in fact, except in their backyard. Their yard is three times the size of hers, and doesn’t have a giant water tank in the middle, but it’s so crammed full of stuff it puts you off going out there. And yet, go out Marina does, to smoke in the rare moments when the three siblings settle down together in front of the TV. She has to hide because the eldest — a chubby little twelve-year-old who talks as if she’s swallowed a dictionary — is on a permanent anti-smoking campaign.
‘When I was your age I was already out paying my way,’ Marina wants to say when she sees her poring over some 600-page tome.
There used to be four siblings in the Pérez-Walker clan, but the youngest died a couple of years ago. Despite having never met her, Marina suspects that once upon a time the house did get some sunlight, but that the little girl took it with her to the other side, or to the grave, or to the bottom of that gringo lake where they say she drowned. They found her little body floating, caught up in the weeds. Olmo, now the youngest, told Marina all about it while he was busy with his crayons, drawing something else; a cow, or maybe a plane.
Marina charges for her babysitting in English lessons. She studies with cool but genuine interest.
‘It’s a healthy drive,’ she told her therapist when he suggested that Marina was taking on too many activities. ‘They’re just English lessons,’ she reasoned, ‘so I can understand the lyrics of the songs I sing along to.’
‘And the work itself?’
‘I like the work,’ she’d told him. ‘The kids are fun.’
But really it’s the kids’ mother Marina likes. Every Tuesday and Thursday, Linda comes to her house and they do two hours of English. Teaching materials exist in the form of CDs that Marina has in a standing bookcase. It’s a small but lovingly amassed collection, which began on a cobbled street in Xalapa, in Tavo’s Rock Shop (the sole line of communication with their era for many Xalapans in the nineties). Marina used the modest wage her father began to pay her at thirteen (after she plucked up the courage to suggest that her brother and she were poster children for child exploitation) to buy one CD, then another, and another. She liked the little shop because nobody she knew ever went there. They sold T-shirts with blood on them. American blood, silk-screen printed. Fake, of course, but sufficiently convincing to foster myths about the place: ‘Tavo’s Rock? They practice satanic rituals in there. They’re child abusers. Everything they sell’s come off the back of a truck.’
Blood which, now that Chihuahua tells her so many things about the north, and now that she’s stopped thinking of her country as a simple yin and yang of Xalapa and Mexico City, doesn’t seem right to Marina. These days, if she sees someone on the street wearing an offensive shirt it gets her back up. Marina knows violence begets violence, and she opposes it in principle, but the problem is that, beyond taking offense, it doesn’t occur to her what to do about it. In spite of herself, she has always been more impressed by the military than militants. Marina sees a lot of het-up people at college, lots of banner waving, and she doesn’t know what’s more shamefuclass="underline" her absolute ignorance of the situation, or her absolute indifference. So she picks up her chin, pulls a face that says that she too suffers, makes as if she’s in a hurry and walks on by. She has coined the color redsentful.