by Teresa Lamai
(5/23/07)
"Psychotic episodes like that can be acutely distressing," Dr. Crace murmurs, his eyes like a sad rabbit's.
I clutch the pill bottle. I knew I shouldn't have told him. I feel my eyes darting.
"Maria?"
He's a good doctor; he sets the chart down and lets his milk-white hands rest on the desk. He has all the time in the world. Snow drifts outside.
"In some cases, this medication is quite effective in preventing hallucinations," he urges. "It's worth a try."
"The hallucinations aren't all bad." I look down. A blush creeps up my neck.
"But the thing is, they're not real, are they? Maria. And you know that."
He smiles at me, his long pale cheeks warming. In our first sessions, he was stiff and desperately deferential, afraid to hold my gaze at all. He's since made real progress.
His smile fades as he watches me. He bites his lower lip.
I bury my face in my hands. My mind lurches like a tethered bird. But it is real, I think. It's the simplest thing in the world to say, but impossible.
The thump of Gabriel's feet as he lands on my carpet, that's real. The way he winces whenever his wings bump the ceiling. That's as real as both of us sitting here.
"Maria? Maria." Dr. Crace tries his best to roll the r . That always makes me want to giggle. I look up at him, forcing my breath to slow down.
Thinking of Gabriel even now makes my heart race. His eyes, hard and black as onyx, his short, curling lashes. The pure terror that shot through me when his shoulders first filled my window frame.
"Just try the meds, okay?" Dr. Crace raises his voice only a little, so that we can both pretend I haven't zoned out. He leans forward. "Humor an old man."
He has that nervous jerk in his shoulders whenever we joke like this, as if he hasn't actually laughed with someone else since he was twelve years old. He exhales, relieved, when I smile.
"Thank you, doctor."
"Till next week, Maria."
I'm alone at the pee-stained bus stop, peering down the street for the evergreen sparkle of the 635 Express. The pearl-grey daylight deepens to charcoal. When I'm still, I can almost feel the darkness pooling around me.
Downtown Detroit is like a bleak, defeated world, years after some holocaust. The air is sooty, low. Even the snow, that glimmers with a million unrealized shades, loses its color once it's fallen. The graffiti is like the hieroglyphics of some long dead language. It's hard to believe that Guatemala, with its white sun and enormous flowers, was on this same planet. Is, still, presumably.
But I loved this stillness when I first arrived. I felt like I was crawling into an icebox and closing the door behind me. I was astounded, back then, that my skin looked whole and normal, as I could feel my bones were rotten, fetid and hot, about to collapse. My thoughts were always moving too fast, flickering through my head like a broken film.
Even now, if I'm careless enough to close my eyes, the images blaze up again.
My memory-film always brings the happy scenes first, piercingly bright, cartoon-colored. There's me, the youngest professor in the San Carlos journalism faculty. I'd been more than a little vain of that. And I'd thought it meant I could finally speak my goddamn mind. Satire was already dead in Guatemala but I became famous for writing editorials "filled with blistering, rage-fueled humor and merciless insight," as one reviewer gushed.
Jose, my husband, came to every student rally I spoke at. He stood, sweating placidly, shading his eyes to watch me. We laughed at his parent's hushed warnings; I was tenured in the faculty -- I had articles published, friends all over the world.
And one day I came home to a stunned, silent house. Jose lay on his stomach over the poppy-colored carpet, his brown hands in half-closed fists, as if he slept deeply. His mouth was slack. His bare feet looked cold. The back of his shirt was soaked in cocoa-colored blood.
I was in Detroit a week later, in a beige, moldy room furnished by a group of nuns with brittle smiles. The nuns' lawyer and an immigration judge kept me quite busy for several months. Dr. Crace joined Project Save Maria as my psychiatrist. God, I'll never forget how nervous he was those first few sessions. I think he was disappointed that I spoke English so well -- he'd been hoping for the buffer of an interpreter. I wanted to pour him a drink.
The refugee network, I found, was a well-oiled machine, a bit unnerving in its efficiency. There was apparently an entire industry thriving around misery and displacement. And its key objective was that I keep living. I didn't have the heart to tell them how impossible it all was.
I tried to act as though I could somehow go on.
But my blood ran too hot, scalding, filling my mind with nightmarish non-memories. I started seeing Jose's body, his rotting body, lying on our bright orange carpet still, covered in shimmering gold pollen. Turquoise butterflies quivered around him, eating his flesh where it was exposed.
One night, I had that same dream over and over and over until I jumped out of bed, whimpering, nauseous. I stumbled. I could feel my mind swelling until it stung the inside of my skull.
I saw a knife in my kitchen, glinting in the moonlight. My palm ached for it. I knew where I could punch it, just under my ribs.
My room filled with pure blackness. I looked to the window. I was not alone. I shrieked in Spanish, first, hardly aware of what I said.
Wings. He was wearing outlandish wings. Freak. They seemed to weigh on his slim back. He stood on the fire escape, hunched slightly, a long shadow backlit by the lemon-yellow streetlamp and the ivory moonlight. How had he climbed up five stories without my hearing a thing?
He crawled through the window. I tried English, my best American accent. "I'll get my gun, asshole."
He limped towards me and started to speak. His language was breathy and sibilant, with a slow lilt that gave it a sense of ceremony. His skin gleamed. My knees shook. This was not a person. His wings were real, gorgeous, fluttering slightly, giving off the clean scent of snow.
I let his voice soothe me. I put up my hands only for form's sake as he came near. He lifted my nightgown. His fingers were rough.
He held me for a long time that first night. His lambswool hair smelled of cloves and moss. My skin clung to his; his wings closed around me, their feathers caressing my twitching back. I was trying to make sense of it all but when I pulled away, he reached between my legs. My terror and outrage were what made me come so quickly, like the sparkling flare of a chemical fire. I beat the wide muscles of his chest, cursing, choking. He kissed my forehead when the orgasm finally released me.
I woke late the next morning, small grungy feathers stuck to my breasts.
I was relieved, in a way. I'd been wondering for months whether I'd gone mad, and now here was positive proof. At least it was decided.
The next night I lit candles. He approached cautiously. His skin was dark, but glinted here and there as if dusted with mica. Scars covered his naked body, badly healed gashes that made me wince. My breath stopped when I saw his face. His round, dimpled cheeks were furrowed with scars, his mouth was sweet and full, his eyes were black and guileless as a gazelle's. His ears were nicked and split, half-covered by his wild hair. He was missing two fingers on his left hand. His right foot was misshapen.
"Are you Gabriel?" I whispered.
He knelt at my feet.
"I can't stop remembering," I told him.
But he parted the hair over my mound and watched my labia swell. My blood filled with sugar. I was drunk on the scent of his hair. He teased out my clitoris with his tongue. His fingernails, bright as opals, scratched over my belly.
When I woke the next morning, the room seemed to hum with emptiness.
The silence distracted me; I stumbled to the window and looked over the grey, grey city. The air was heavy, thick and damp as cotton wadding. The sidewalks were deserted. Not one car moved, not one airplane cut the colorless sky. I couldn't breathe.
I wondered what it would be like to jump from my window and splinter the silence with my cracking bones.
It was very early, but Dr. Crace was in his office. He was slurping black coffee, staring listlessly out the window. A plaintive Bach melody crackled from his radio. I said his name, softly, several times as I crept in. I still startled him. His laugh was loud and genuine.
Now I sit naked on the bed as night falls, rattling the prescription bottle. The pills look so benign, Barbie-pink. I set them by the bed and start lighting the tapers I bought. The room smells of beeswax. There are so many candles that they give off a low warmth, making my brown body glow like burnished gold.
He appears as soon as the sky turns black. The fire escape rings with his landing and he twists through the window, grunting resolutely with the effort. I run to him and he lifts me in his arms, his eyes wide. He strokes my hair as he lays me on the bed.
Gabriel's strangely light on top of me, but his skin is so smooth, so delicious. I run my tongue over him, giggling like a little girl; his neck tastes of coconuts. I squirm into his embrace, trying to warm him. His wings knock the pill bottle to the floor. The candles gutter.
He lets me scramble under him for a time, then raises himself up on his forearms. He rests his mouth on my forehead and lowers his hips to mine. I stroke his waist, the downy, sleek muscles of his hips. I gasp when I feel his cock press against my belly -- as if all the heat in his body's moved there; it's hard and searing as a fire poker. I wonder if it will scorch me.
When it slides through my hair and nuzzles between my aching labia, I feel its heat all along my spine. My flesh draws him in. My hips buck. He closes his hands round my pelvis and fucks me in slow, measured strokes. I clutch the headboard to keep from sinking my nails into him. His warmth spreads to my solar plexus, my throat.
I watch his face, his glittering eyes, as his thrusts become faster. Icy tingling starts at the crown of my head and I go motionless, lifting my chin to the ceiling, my spine coiling and then stretching taut as the come races through me, unbearably hot, almost suffocating me with panic. Colored lights fill my eyes -- violet, crimson. I stop breathing.
Suddenly everything is still.
I feel sunlight deep in my bones. There's a distant rush of water, orioles overhead. I'm standing, it seems; my bare feet are sunk in tangled, mid-summer grass. I hug myself. I suspect this is another, more involved hallucination, one that's taken over all my senses. Either that or I've died.
I try to open my eyes but the sunlight makes me cringe. Guatemala sunlight.
"Don't," a voice says, as a thick hand slides into mine. "Don't open your eyes."
It's my husband's voice and my arms fly out, fumbling blindly for him.
His familiar body is sturdy, round, full of life. I grip the back of his shirt. The musky scent of his skin, the feel of his stubbly cheek on mine. I'm never going to let him go.
"Jose."
"Don't open your eyes, Maria, it's not time yet."
My naked breasts press into him. His pulse thuds in my belly. It takes a great deal of effort to speak but I don't know how much time I have. "Jose, forgive me, forgive me."
"Shh, Maria." Jose's kiss is loud and bracing. "Oh, Maria, you know how proud I've always been of you. I always felt like a king beside you."
He hugs me so tight I lose my breath. My shoulders hitch. He lifts me off the ground, kissing my cheeks, my eyelids.
"Jose," I start to gasp. "Jose, damn it, you really are going to crack my ribs one of these days."
Jose smacks my ass. His laugh is a bear's roar as hefts me. I bounce. I laugh so hard I start to cry.
When I wake in my bed, tears are still streaming along my temples, wetting the pillow. The room is filled with light. The sky is soft pastel blue. My skin smells like Jose.
Gabriel is sitting on the windowsill, watching the pigeons. Kids are rapping, freestyle, in the parking lot below. His wings twitch as he listens, making a warm, mango-scented breeze in the room.
I approach and look over his shoulder. The snow is melting, azure and rosy in the gentle sunlight. Water cascades from the eaves.
Gabriel is holding Dr. Crace's prescription bottle. He turns it over in his fingers, absently, as his inhuman eyes flit over the scene below. His scars are silvery in the daylight, like streaks of mercury burned into his flesh.
Without looking at me, he takes off the cap and shakes the pills into his mouth. He swallows, grimacing, jerking his head to the side and squeezing his eyes shut.
I nestle my head under his chin as he embraces me. He has no pulse. He kisses my temple.
Then I'm alone in my room, watching the parking lot swarm with life. More rapping, dancing, now a proud brace of little kids on bikes and tricycles, their parents strolling behind. Some trailers pull up on the sidewalk, setting out grills. I'm suddenly ravenous. I get dressed, slowly.
When I walk outside, the air is so fresh and sweet it stings me a little.
