My brothers and sisters came in the evenings, all of them, as I lay in the hospital room. And I was trying, really trying, and I spoke to them softly but I wasn’t really aware of the words I was speaking and what did it matter if what I was saying didn’t mean anything at all? I felt as if it was someone else who was uttering words in an unknown language. And they were kind, my brothers and sisters, so kind, and they said I was looking better and I was surprised that I understood what they were saying. I smiled and squeezed their hands when they squeezed mine and I wondered what they felt because all I felt was that I was left for dead on the outskirts of Albuquerque on a warm night when I had stepped out to mail a letter. That was all I was doing, mailing a letter at the post office and then I heard someone yelling names at me and then I was being dragged away and kicked and everything changed. And here I was in a hospital room, not dead, not dead. But I knew that something in me had died. I did not know the name for that something.
I felt like an impersonator. I found it disconcerting that everyone still remembered who I was. But I knew that whoever it was they remembered was gone and I did not believe that the boy they had loved would ever come back.
I looked at my father and touched his face as if I were a boy who was staring at a man for the first time in his life. There was something sad about my father’s face, and yet there was something hard and angry about it too. It seemed to me that the hospital room was suffering from a chronic silence. It was as though all sound had been banished from the world and the words and the laughter had been sent back to Mexico and I had been forced to stay in this foreign land that hated me. That’s what they had said when I’d felt the knife slicing into my back Why don’t you go back to where you came from? Motherfucker, motherfucker, go back, go back. But not knowing my way back, I was forced to stay.
The doctor asked me if I knew my name.
I looked back at the doctor. I was trying to decide if he was real or if he was just a dream I was having.
The doctor looked back at me, stubbornly waiting for an answer.
I didn’t want to talk to him. But I decided he wasn’t a dream and that he wasn’t going to go away. “Yes,” I said, “I know my name.”
“You want to tell me what it is?”
“Don’t you know?”
“Can you just tell me?”
“My name is Nick.”
“What’s your last name?”
“Guerra.”
“What year is it?”
I decided the doctor wasn’t a bad man. He wasn’t like the boys. He wasn’t going to hurt me. I think I might have smiled at him.
“What year is it, Nick?”
“1985.”
The doctor nodded and smiled and I wondered if he had a son.
“Who’s the president?”
I closed my eyes. “Ronald Reagan.”
“Who’s the vice president?”
“Bush? Is it Bush? Does it matter?”
The doctor smiled. “You’ve suffered quite a shock, Nick.”
“Is that what it was?”
The doctor touched my shoulder and I flinched, a reflex. “Steady,” the doctor whispered. “No one’s going to hurt you here.” His smile was kind and it almost made me want to cry. “You’re going to be just fine, Nick.”
I wanted to believe him. I shut my eyes. I wanted to sleep.
When I woke in the darkness of the hospital room, I thought I heard the sound of my own voice. A nurse rushed into the room. I looked at her with a question on my face. “You were screaming,” she said.
“Oh,” I said. “I’m thirsty.”
She gave me a glass of water.
“I’m sorry they did this to you,” she said.
“You’re sure I was screaming?”
“Yes.”
“I was dreaming,” I said. “It rhymes with screaming.”
“What do you remember, Nick?” It was the doctor again. It wasn’t night anymore and I was glad.
“Do you remember being transferred here from the hospital in Albuquerque?”
“Albuquerque?” I whispered. “Is that an English word?”
The doctor had a puzzled look on his face. “No, I don’t think it is.”
“What does it mean?”
“I don’t know, Nick.”
He was quiet for a moment. His eyes were green and silent and I didn’t know what his silence meant.
“Nick, do you remember arriving here?”
“No.”
“What do you remember?”
“Why does it matter?”
“Do you know what city you’re in?”
“Home.”
“Home?”
“El Paso.”
“Is that a guess?”
I shook my head. “When will you let me out of here?”
“I’m worried about you, Nick.”
“I thought you said I was going to be fine.”
When the doctor left, I wondered what the word for worry was in Spanish. I couldn’t think of the word. It was gone. In order to translate words from one language to another, you had to know both languages. The languages I knew were disappearing. I wondered if I would have to find a way to live without words.
When my mother told me I was being released, I smiled at her.
“We’re taking you home,” she said.
I nodded.
“Why won’t you talk, Nick?”
“I talk,” I said.
“You don’t.”
I remember the trip back to my old neighborhood, the familiar houses. It was as if I was watching myself get down from the car, watching myself as I stared at my father’s neat and perfect lawn. My mother’s roses were in bloom and I thought they were very beautiful and I spelled out the word beautiful to myself and I wondered about the origins of that word and what kind of dreamer had dragged it into the world.
I wandered the rooms of the house. Nothing seemed foreign. But nothing seemed familiar. I stared at the pictures on the wall. There was a picture of me as a boy and I held an Easter basket and my sister Angela was kissing me.
I wanted to sleep. I was tired.
The bandages on my back were gone. I wondered if the words they wrote on my skin had disappeared—but I knew they were still there. They would always be there. And then I laughed to myself. What if they had misspelled the words?
The newspapers started calling almost immediately after I was released from the hospital. How did they know I was home? I watched my parents as they struggled to answer everyone’s hungry questions. No, they couldn’t speak to me, yes, it was outrageous, no, the family had no comment, please, please, no, no, describe how you feel. Describe how you feel?
I didn’t like that my mother and father hovered over me as if I was a bird born with a broken wing.
I noticed how my mother would flinch every time the phone rang. A reporter from one of the TV stations showed up at our front door, cameraman in tow, and smiled sympathetically at my mother as she stood at the door. “We’d like to feature you,” she said. “Would you mind saying something, just a short interview? Actually, would the boy like to say something?”
“His name is Nick,” my mother said stiffly. “And he’s a man, not a boy.” She shut the door. I studied the look on her face. I thought she was going to cry—but she didn’t and I was glad she didn’t because I didn’t know how to calm her. I could see her lips trembling and I knew it was because of me. When the reporter began taping her segment using our house as a background, I stood in quiet awe of my sister Angela who stormed out into the yard, grabbed the reporter’s microphone, looked into the camera and yelled: “Someone used my brother’s back like a goddamned chalkboard. You want to know what they wrote on his back? Is that what you want? You want to know how we feel? We fucking feel like dancing.” She tossed the microphone into the neighbor’s yard and stared at them until they drove away.
I watched her from the doorway. I wondered how it was that she came to be the owner of that rage.
I wanted it for myself but there was nothing in me. I was a tree who had lost its leaves in the middle of spring. When Angela came back into the house, she was shaking. I put my hand on her back and felt the sobs washing through her body. I wanted to beg her to give me her tears.
A magazine from Chicago called. Would it be possible to interview me over the phone. “No,” my mother said. The reporter pushed, wanting to know how I was doing. Would I be permanently scarred? Was I returning to college in the fall? Did I hate the boys who’d done this? What did I think about the Hispanic community’s reaction? Did I support the student demonstrators? My mother listened patiently to all her questions—then hung up the phone.
The phone calls became routine—calls from friends, from acquaintances, from people we didn’t know, most of them offering sympathy. I asked myself if sympathy was a good word or a bad word. But there were other phone calls too, calls that were not related to the word sympathy. Wasn’t it true that the boy had done something to those other boys? He must have provoked them, goaded them into attacking him. Surely the boys must have had a reason. Couldn’t it be true that the boy wanted to start some kind of race war? Did the boy have papers? What was an illegal doing at a public university?
I looked up the word illegal.
An anonymous caller said that I was lucky. “They didn’t exactly lynch him, did they?”
My father had our phone number changed.
But even after that, when the phone rang, my parents gave each other tentative glances before they answered it.
Everything felt like it was happening to someone else. The newspaper people and the journalists, they didn’t want to speak to me. They wanted to speak to a Nick who no longer existed. The dead couldn’t speak. Didn’t they know that? The thought occurred to me that the living were exhausted from the weight of the words they were forced to carry with them everywhere they went.
I at least felt free of the weight of words. Why don’t you talk, Nick?
If I lay still in my bed, maybe I would dissolve like dry ice in a glass of water. To melt, to turn into a gas, to float away. To disappear.
But my mother’s food—and the smell of it—reminded me that having a body wasn’t always a bad thing. The odor of her sopas and caldillos and guisados. The garlic, the onion, the cumin, the cilantro, the roasted chiles. Sometimes, the odors that came out of my mother’s kitchen made me want to live.
Taste lies on the tongue but it is beyond the reach of language. That’s what I wrote down on a piece of paper. I stared at what I had written. I ripped up the piece of paper until all the words were indecipherable.
My mother came into my room one night. She sat on my bed. “I thought you’d be reading,” she said.
“I don’t want to read anymore.”
“You told me you couldn’t live without books. You said you wanted to learn all the meanings of every word that existed in the world.”
“I don’t remember saying that. It must have been a long time ago.”
“No, Nick, it wasn’t long ago at all.”
“I don’t feel that way anymore.”
“What were you thinking about?”
“What?”
She kissed my forehead. “When I walked in the room, Nick, you were thinking about something.”
“My scars.” I didn’t know why I said that.
“They’re not just places of hurt, Nick. They’re places of healing.” My mother and I disagreed about how to translate the words on my back.
I felt the soundless tears running down my face.
I let her rock me to sleep.
I woke to the sound of thunder. I’d been having the same dream, the white sun beating down on me, the blood on my back as purple as Lenten vestments. But the morning storm was stronger than the dream. I opened my eyes, heard the drops pounding the house, smelled the pungent odor of the thirsty creosote.
I ran my hands under my T-shirt, feeling my own smooth chest. I caught myself reaching for the scars on my back, the tough, raised skin. I rose from my bed and stared out the window. I watched as my father’s peach trees swayed to the rhythm of the wind and the water.
Days, weeks, months of nothing but sun.
The learning to live without water.
The parched land.
The waiting.
And then the rain.
When I was a child, the whole world stopped at the sound of the thunder. I had a memory of people stepping out of their houses. The people would watch and listen closely as if each drop that fell to the ground was a whisper of a loved one come back from the dead.
I tried to picture my brothers and sisters playing outside, their laughter distant and lost amid the thunder, their bodies glowing in the bolts of lightning. I saw myself running toward them. Together, me, my brothers and sisters, all of us laughing, happy, together.
The storm stopped as suddenly as it began. The image of my brothers and sisters disappeared. I looked up at the immaculate, clearing sky.
I moved away from the window, then sat on my bed. I decided to go for a run. I was sick of feeling the presence of three white boys that had occupied my body. Their hate sat inside me like a bird who was nesting—waiting for her eggs to hatch. I decided I could get used to hating, could even learn to love it in the same way that I’d learned to love the desert.
You could learn to love anything.
I yawned, stretched my arms upwards and left them reaching towards the sky until they hurt. I looked in the closet for my running shoes and found that all of my shoes were neatly arranged. My mother must have unpacked and organized everything. She was good at turning chaos into order.
I grabbed my running shoes, opened a drawer and found a pair of socks. I changed into my running clothes, then walked into the kitchen. My mother and father were drinking coffee and reading the newspaper. They looked up at me carefully—as if they were afraid I might break if they said the wrong thing. A part of me wanted to laugh, but the other part had forgotten how to laugh.
“Hi,” I said.
I thought I saw something in my mother’s eyes. She was either happy or sad—I couldn’t decide.
“I’m going running,” I said.
“Be careful,” my mother said. “You’re still a little weak.”
“Just a short run, Mom.”
“You want breakfast when you come back?”
“Sounds nice.” I looked at my father. “You were right, Dad.”
“About what?”
“You said I should have stayed home and gone to college here. You were right.”
He didn’t say anything. He ran his fingers through his thick, graying hair. “It doesn’t matter. You’re going to be okay. You’re home now.”
I nodded and kissed my father on the top of his head as I walked out the door. I wondered why I had done that but it seemed like the right thing to do. The old Nick would have done that. You’re home now. Home. I thought that word was just a dream.
I half expected the ground to give, open up and swallow me whole. But every time I took a step, nothing happened. I found myself heading toward the desert, but as I reached it, I stopped as if I had reached a line I was not allowed to cross. I looked toward the houses behind me, all in neat rows, all with numbers and mailboxes and sidewalks. I wondered why people had such a need to make the desert into something tame. Green lawns and flowers. It was all so futile—and such a waste of water. I sat down and looked at the well-trimmed hedges, the flowers struggling to survive.
I walked past all the homes and stood at the edge of the desert. I looked out at the mesquites and chamizos and the cacti. They always caught me there in the dream, caught me in the desert. They lived there, those boys, the three of them, the white boys who had hurt me. They lived in all the deserts of the earth. Death. That was the new word for desert. So that’s where they lived now, in every desert, in every dream I would ever have. I knew they would find me someday, catch me, cut me up again. I turned my back on the desert I once loved and r
an home.
Breakfast was waiting for me when I walked into the house. “I’m out of shape.” I smiled at my mother. “Smells good.”
“Huevos con chorizo.”
I washed my hands at the sink.
My mother pushed the plate in front of me. “You’re too thin.”
I nodded, began eating, then looked around the room. “When did you paint the kitchen?”
“Two weeks ago.”
“Guess I haven’t been much help around here.”
“You’re looking better, mi’jo. Y no se te quita lo bonito.”
“Mom, I’m plain as a row of cotton.”
“A row of cotton is anything but plain.”
“You want me to argue with you, Mom?”
“It would make me feel better if you did.”
I shrugged, took a tortilla and scooped my eggs up into my mouth. “Good,” I said. “This is really good.”
My mom looked almost happy. “What are you going to do now, Nick?”
I forced a smile as I looked into my father’s dark eyes. I thought they looked like a winter night. “Now? Today?”
“Yes. Now.”
“Now?”
“Now that you’re alive again.”
“Oh,” I said. “So that’s it. I’m alive?” I rolled my eyes.
“See, you always did that before—” She took a drink from her cup of coffee. “You always used to do that. You’re home now, Nick. You’re home.”
I looked up the old words in the dictionary, words I’d once known the meanings of: home, desert, death, knife, skin, blood, knife, hate.
Waiting tables is not what I had dreamed of doing. Not that I minded the job. Café Central. My oldest brother knew the owner. It was the nicest restaurant in the city. The food was as good as it was expensive. And the money was even better than the food. Not that I gave a damn. What was I going to do with the money?
I liked my new routine. Running in the morning, going to work in the evening. It almost didn’t matter that nothing happened in between.