“Cordelia never wrote to us about her time in Boquerón. She didn’t put it into words for me until after she and my niece and nephews were back in California.” That was when Louise looked away from the flames briefly and straight at me. “But she didn’t have to. Those weeks she spent in Boquerón, I didn’t sleep well at all. Every night I was visited by demons. They pinned me down and ripped at my sweaty nightgown. Mother was shocked at the noises I made beside her in our twin beds, and at how much water I drank. I was insatiably thirsty.”
I noticed a cataract in Louise’s eye, like a passing altostratus cloud.
“I’ll never understand how José Félix could bring his young bride there, to that Green Hell... When Cordelia came back to us and described it, I already knew what it looked like. The thatched roof on the Boquerón outpost, the tall, tall pole with the Paraguayan flag, the only water source a well miles away at Isla Poí. With decomposing bodies floating in it.” Louise moved her gaze back onto the composite log. “We were the only women there... I’ve never killed anyone. But I know what it’s like. My sister did it for me.”
That night was the last time I ever went to the Essex Hot Tub. I tried a few times after that, but my code no longer worked. I remember the heady scent of blossoming trees as I walked down Stuart. It’s common knowledge what happened at the hot tub that night. And I told you already, I don’t want to talk about Bob. It’s like the punch line to that joke: What do you call a guy with no arms and no legs floating in a pool?
How could I have ever thought that I could get away from my ex-husband by fleeing to his hometown? It turned out Bob was within the radius of six degrees of separation from me all that time. And in the center, dead in the center, was the Essex Hot Tub. Did we have the same entrance code?
The Church of Núria, now located in Normandy Village, is just batshit. As wrongheaded as a cargo cult. Sure, there’ve been moments where I enjoyed the attention, especially from that sweet soul-integration teacher, Penny. I will say this, though: I’m done. You’re the last pilgrim I will entertain. I don’t know why babies shit so much. Or little dogs. Or men. I don’t know why women are expected to clean that shit up. I can’t explain these things for you. Please, stop asking for the answers to your questions. I don’t know why marriage is rape and why war is rape and why rape is rape and why tea is good and coffee is evil.
All I know is that Cordelia Zenarrutza took her three children to Pasadena, put the Green Hell and the Palacio de los López behind her, and didn’t remarry. Louise and I never finished that book on Miró, on the twentieth century, and on the difference between good and evil. And despite what you’ve read in the papers, and the attempts at extradition, for many years I wasn’t sure whether I’d actually killed Bob, or whether I’d just added him to the list of mistakes. And then thrown it away.
“Lucky Day”
by Thomas Burchfield
Berkeley Public Library
The rule was simple: no patrons were to be admitted to the library before it opened, no matter how hard they knocked on the big glass doors. The staff wouldn’t even bother with eye contact. Patrons could knock till their knuckles broke and complain till their voices cracked, but they weren’t getting in.
Mason, a cautious man who’d been working at the Berkeley Public Library as an aide for only three weeks (sneaking back into Berkeley after four years away, following his mother’s death and his family’s turbulent dissolution), understood this immediately.
He’d arrived at nine a.m. that morning with the manager of the day, Slim, an enormous languid fellow with spiky yellow hair and a wart on his nose that turned red during heavy rain, such as had been whipping the Bay Area the last three days with frenzied enthusiasm. BART service was sputtering even more than usual and ACT busses were detouring around flooded areas. Most everyone else would be late.
Except for Mason who, for his own reasons, left his closet-sized studio apartment near the Ashby Street BART extra early and took carefully planned detours.
Once Slim had punched the alarm codes to the Bancroft Street employee entrance and let Mason in, he apologized profusely. The new library director was arriving today, first day on the job, loose ends with the catering for the welcome reception. Slim would only be a few minutes. Would Mason mind being left alone, just for a while? Then he dashed back out into the rain.
Too new to object, Mason got right to work, opening the sorting room, checking the phone messages — sure enough, even Cleve, his manager, was mired in traffic. (Oh well. It was three hours until opening.) Mason next pinned the daily assignment sheet to the bulletin board. His first-hour duty: clean up and straighten the new bookshelves on the first floor, the first thing patrons saw as they entered from the sunken plaza.
The task was mundane to anyone but Mason, who sank into happy reverie: this was the best time to be in the library, alone, before anyone else arrived, among all the minds great and small, talented and not, that could fit on the shelves. As always, he found some of these minds had fallen or slumped over since yesterday; others had been picked up and abandoned far from home and now lay rejected, lost, and unloved. Mason took them all home. He’d edge the rows of books until the spines were perfectly snug (except for books by his favorite authors — those he brought forward out of line just a fraction). Then he’d run his fingertips over the rows of Mylar mirrors, each spine labeled NEW in red block letters, shining with promise.
Deep in his fun, he only heard the pounding on the glass door as a murmur from far above. When it finally penetrated, desperate and persistent, he swam awake like a drowsy fish. Then his irritated glance turned into a double take.
It was Sharpie banging at the door. He was a regular patron, one of the two kinds of characters who made the library a second home. The first were those who had someone to take care of them; the second, the majority, were those who had no one — the homeless.
Sharpie was among the latter. He was still very young, his fuzzy face not yet cured red by exposure; friendly, boyishly handsome, but clearly hapless. He wore the same tracksuit every day, black nylon with yellow stripes, and grimy black-and-yellow cross-trainers with loose heels that slapped against his bare feet as he walked. Extremely claustrophobic, his usual spot was the first-floor reading room, by the romance novels, an enormous greasy backpack, swollen with his material life, by his side. He’d spend most of his day reading the romance novels, or seeming to. It was strange, Mason’s fellow staffers remarked — a young man reading romance novels, a homeless young man.
It was Mason who said, “I bet that’s where he finds love.” Then, blushing, he added, “I mean, he’s not finding much of it anywhere else, is he?”
And now here he was, over two hours early, without his backpack, clutching his left side with one hand, thumping on the glass with the other, smearing it with reddish-brown paste, while outside the three-day storm was whipping into day four.
“Help me!” Sharpie cried, a sad voice under the hard rain. “Help me, man! I’m hurtin’!”
Rising to face a real emergency, Mason’s conscience brushed the rule off the table.
He let Sharpie in.
The plan, a quick gel in Mason’s mind, was to sit him down, then thumb 911. But as he took Sharpie by his cold, wet nylon arm, bony and trembling, and started to guide him between the new fiction shelves to a nearby bench, the door banged again, so violently it shook. This time, someone was calling — no, barking — Mason’s name, like the knuckles on glass. As Mason turned to look, Sharpie slipped out of his grasp.