153
I WALKED INTO TOWN with the rest of the tourists and took a room at the hotel on the main street. The Chinese woman who ran the hotel sat in a back room; when she failed to acknowledge me, I slowly went up the stairs and found the first door that opened for me. The room was like many rooms I’ve lived in. I lay down on the bed and waited for someone to discover I was here. A bowl of rice and pork was sitting on the table by the window when I woke. Since then, every twilight when I’ve awakened, rice and pork wait for me on the table.
She and her son live several doors down the hall from mine. After I’d been in my hotel room for a month, during which time no one spoke to me or asked who I was or what I was doing, I got up one night and walked up the hallway and stood before their door. This was the place and moment to which I’d been compelled by his defiant birth. Now, years later, I’m still compelled there because I haven’t yet found the courage to do what I came to do. Now, years later, I still stand before their door having come to the door that first night and then the next, and then the next, and every night after that for a week and then a month and then a year, and then two years, then five, then ten. Always I believe the courage will come to me at her door. I will not die as he did, never begging someone’s forgiveness. That she would not or could not give forgiveness isn’t what matters; what matters is the act of my begging. Every night I raise my fist to the door, about to knock; sometimes I hear her or the boy turn in their sleep on the other side. Many times I stand there the whole night for hours on feet that are racked with pain. When the dawn light drifts up from downstairs, when I see the top of the stairs fade to a softer blue, when I hear someone stir on the other side of their door, my nerve collapses altogether; I return to my little room and close the door and wait for the next night, when I try again.
154
IT’S NOW BEEN SEVENTEEN years since I came to this hotel. Seventeen years of nights I’ve stood at her door with my hand raised. I see her sometimes from my window, when I have the courage to look out. Occasionally I believe she looks just as she did when she watched me from her own window that day in 1937, ’38, I don’t remember anymore. She spends much time in her own room caring for the boy; sometimes, when the boy’s out playing somewhere, I smell the liquor in the hallway. I would have a drink with her, if it was possible; fortified by it, I would say all the things. All the things to say. We would, after all of it, become drinking pals in our old times. From my window I watch the boy too, whitehaired embodiment of the willful love of hers that defied all our terrible power. When the rains come one autumn she runs from the hotel looking for him as the island floods; the waters rush down the mainstreet with a terrible power of their own. After neither of them has come back, I pull on my coat and climb with difficulty down the stairs and out the hotel’s backway. In the rain and wind I slowly trudge up toward the northern end of the island where the cemetery lies; there, huddled beneath a wooden shack, I can see the boy trapped by the storm as the graves bubble up around him. I wade out to him. By the time I reach him the downpour is such that almost nothing’s visible but rain; I spot him by his hair. He’s nearly unconscious. I pull him up from the water and for a moment, as he’s caught in my hands, I have that old urge to avenge my wife and child who I can barely remember anymore; all I remember is vengeance. I have that old urge. But I pick him up out of the water and hold him to my chest and wade back to town. I come back to the hotel and up the stairs. I’m wondering what I’ll say to her when I carry the boy through the door. But she hasn’t returned yet and so I lay the boy on his bed and pull the blanket up around him when I hear the door downstairs, and I’ve only returned and closed the door of my own room when I hear her footsteps in the hall. She’s lived a whole lifetime not to hear my footsteps behind her anymore. I hear her call his name at the sight of him, the noise of love’s weapon fired years ago from the moment she bore him.
155
SEVENTEEN YEARS I SLIP in and out of the hotel back door in the dead of night and storm. Except for the unknown stranger who brings me my food, I am unknown and strange to the rest of the town. I’ve fallen out of time, it searches for me and I hide like a rebel in the ruins of Mexico. If it’s found me out, it’s left me to my delusions. From the window I watch the tavern, the woman who runs it, the Chinese carrying their dead north; I hear ice and its machine, crackling in the distance. Sometimes I like to pretend she’s the one who brings the rice and pork. Sometimes I believe I wake to the smell of liquor in my room; I leave such a conviction to my delusions as well. I don’t have much time.
156
I DON’T HAVE MUCH TIME. Dania. Forgive me.
157
A MOMENT AGO MY heart woke me. I look around and it’s dark but still early, I hear the tourists in the tavern across the street, which means the last boat hasn’t yet left for the mainland. I can barely move from the way I’m stricken, from beneath the weight. I’m angry with myself for having gone seventeen years without ever finding the courage. I don’t have any time now. Time knew I was here all along. Now I have only moments. I have only one last burst of havoc in me. I stagger from my bed and lurch across my room to the door. In the hall it seems to take forever to get to her door. Maybe it is forever. Maybe it’s the moment into which one’s whole life falls. At her door my hand slides across the surface when I try to manage a knock, I cannot manage it. I can barely manage the knob. When the door opens, she’s standing there in the middle of the room; no son or lover waits with her. She turns to look at me. Her face when she sees me is inscrutable. I look for a signal but she gives none.
Forgive me?
Lying there on the floor at her feet, I’m aware of the boy coming into the doorway. He stares at me in shock. Is it simply the sight of a dead man, or is it any man at all in his mother’s company? Does the part of my soul attached to his give it a small tug? Does he feel the times I nearly killed him? Does he feel the times I finally saved him? Does he recognize in me the darkness from which I tried to create him? He looks at me, at his mother, and bolts. And somewhere, even in the silence of a forgiveness that never was given, the two parallel rivers of the Twentieth Century, which forked the only other time she ever saw me, flow back into one.
158
FOR AN HOUR OR so there’s some confusion as the room fills with townspeople and tourists from the tavern across the street. A doctor confirms the news they’re all waiting for, which is that I am indeed dead. But who is he? everyone’s asking; no one remembers me from the tavern or coming over on the boat earlier that day. “How could anyone not notice him,” the doctor says, “the man’s a giant.” I’ve never seen him before in my life, she tells them, still inscrutable. You remember me, I’m thinking, looking up at her: Vienna. In the window. The townspeople accept my anonymity with solemn resolve; it takes twelve of them to drag me out, after the tourists have gone their way. They’re none too delicate about it either. My head bounces down the stairs like a bowling ball. For a moment I thought she was going to stop them, but she didn’t; for a moment I think the woman who runs the tavern is going to stop them as well, but she doesn’t either. They drag me down the street and through the thicket outside the cemetery marsh until my backside’s raw; if I were alive I’d crack the little fuckers’ skulls together like eggs. In the cemetery at the edge of the island, before the wild night, they must bend the tree all the way over to the ground in order to fasten me to it, since they can’t lift me; when they release the tree I think I’m going to be catapulted into space. But the tree only groans back to something midway its original height, the last thing on earth that will ever succumb to the size of me.