Recently I started writing this long story, something a bit more personal than the goofy Apocalipsis. It is shaping up like a longer narrative (dare I call it novel?) and started out as two parallel stories about characters with a few traits in common, alternating between both stories one chapter at a time. The idea was that as it progressed the reader realizes that they're actually the same person, one of the stories being the character's past and the other one his future.
I began writing it to exorcise some recent issues, as a way to crawl back up from the creative wasteland said issues had moved me into, using it as a tool to force myself to create something more intimate, in the manner of my earlier photos, instead of hiding myself behind the patina of sense of humor and sarcasm of my other stories.
At first the story progressed quickly - words came easily, phrases started building up, paragraphs just appeared out of thin air. Every so often I'd hit a bump, but with the help of stubbornness and a few screwdrivers I managed to just ride over them, finishing a section and moving on to the next one.
Then something happened and I stopped writing. The flow of words had become a trickle and I just couldn't seem to get over the current section. Last Sunday, after trying to force myself to put down 1000 words and not managing to get more than 400 out, I just collapsed on my couch to wonder what the hell was going on.
I went over what I had written, reviewing which chapters managed to hold my interest and which ones I just fast-forwarded through to get to the next one. A pattern slowly emerged. Just as it had happened when I was writing, I realized that the bumps in the story were the even-numbered sections, those set in the character's past. Those were there only because I had sold myself on a gimmick for the story and wanted to carry it through because I liked the idea. Pulitzer delusions, maybe.
The obvious solution was to cut them out, prune them, leave them in the floor of the editing room. Something stopped me, however. Those chapters were the ones that were more self-indulgent, the ones I had been writing as a way to spite a person, or just to fictionalize some recent events. Bendrix, from The End of the Affair, came to mind immediately: a book takes me a year to write - it's too hard work for revenge.
I had run out of anger.
Off those chapters went. Put together they constituted less than 25% of what I had written, and the result is something much cleaner, something I want to continue building on top of.
It also gives me the feeling that my subconscious was telling me that the future is much more interesting than the past.
If you're curious, the removed sections follow this note. The rest will stay locked up in my machine until (if ever) the story if finished. I may continue this storyline later, when I've put more time and distance from the events.
"We could arrange something," his wife says. "I don't know, agree to see other people."
She pauses, waiting to see his reaction.
"Are you trying to insult me?" he replies, "I have no interest in seeing other people. I'm married to you."
And so it had begun.
For some reason he had missed the obvious signs. When she had made that comment during dinner, red flags should have appeared all around her, sirens screaming, alarms going off in his head. For some reason it didn't happen. In retrospective, with that clarity that being outside the situation gives people, he thinks he can come up with an explanation: he had been so used to his wife's jealous fits, to her insecurities, to having her always think the worst possible thing about him when he hadn't ever even lied to her, that another comment along those lines didn't seem out of place. He just thought she was baiting him, goading him into accepting all those thing she suspected about him.
He wasn't surprised either a few weeks later when, while he fast-forwarded through the ads in some show they had taped, she threw her hard back and with practiced spontaneity, said "You know what we could do?"
"About what?"
"You know, the house." She pauses for a moment so that he can accomplish the context switch. "We could be roommates. We would live together, but we each do our own thing. We both share the rent, and then arrange something for when you want to bring a chick to the house - I don't know, tie a handkerchief to the door or something." And she laughs, with that hideous it's-a-joke-I'm-not-serious tone she uses for when she doesn't have the guts to just come out and say something.
It isn't until almost two weeks had passed that it finally hits him, a bucketfull of cold water thrown straight at his brain as he is trying to finish a particularly nasty section of the program he had been working on. He starts to slowly put scattered events together, at first nudging them close to each other to see if they fit, then throwing more and more things on the table until in the end he starts just dragging tiny, heretofore irrelevant tidbits from the dark recesses of his memory, and piling everything in an unstable stack of recollections.
All the times she had to stay working late at the office, even after the company had reorganized the financial department years ago so that they didn't have to pull all-nighters anymore.
Those strange occasions where she had to go to work on, for instance, December 22nd, and had returned home well after 3am.
The I'm-tireds, it's-too-lates, it's-too-earlies, ate-too-muchs, it's-8-already-when-it-was-really-7s, and other greatest all-time hits she used to pull on him to escape any hint of sex. Oh, let's not forget the I've-got-to-leave-now-maybe-when-I-return, and then she comes back home and crashes on the couch to randomly flip between channels.
It is then that he realized that the sooner she left, the better. Her attitude, her behavior, her whole manner of being, were slowly turning him into something he despised. He was being transformed into the stereotypical spouse that hears insinuations in everything the mate says, that wonders if the other person is really where they said they were going to be, that worries if they're doing what they said they were going to be doing.
She was turning him into her.
And whatever else happened, he couldn't allow that.
Oh shit.
Oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit.
Oh shit oh shit oh shit.
What the fuck did you do, man? What the fuck did you do?
He looked at his hands, holding them under the sink as he rubbed them vigorously, seemingly making no dent on the filth covering them. His mind swam with vague recollections of what had happened, his right hand reached for the loofa and started trying to take the skin off his left hand, and then
he was on the toilet, doubled over, execrable, wet noises coming out of somewhere in his upper body, and acrid stench filling his nose and causing more of the painful splattering gurgles to emerge, his hand hanging limply over the toilet bowl and into the sludge-filled water, his stomach trying to rebel again and choke him to death and
he kept telling himself to just walk towards the shower, forget the sink, just stumble towards the shower and open the cold water, just don't slip on the stupid rug that was there precisely so that you didn't slip on the stupid floor, please don't step on that rail that hurts, and just get in there and who gives a fuck if you have a shoe on, or pants, and screw the wallet and your ID's, just open the water and let it
hit him like a pillow case full of bricks, cold and hard against the back of his head, and the sensation was so agonizing that he would have screamed had not some part of his consciousness-in-exile told him that may attract the neighbors and then he would have too much to explain, and so he bit down, hard, on the back of his hand, and held his teeth there even when he tasted something sweet in the water, something warm and sweet that relaxed him, just as the water stopped ramming into him and turned into a blanket that enveloped his body, returning feeling to the skin he would have swore was dead and about to fall of his still moving carcass.
He opened the hot water as well and slowly, gently, he slid down to the tiled floor and curled up, a child in amniotic fluid, the sins of the night gradually washing away from him, oblivion coming and taking from him the worries of the inevitable clean up, and he slept.
Mauricio threw his head back slowly, closing his eyes to get the glare of the computer monitors out of them for just a moment. He brought his hands up to his face and slowly rubbed his eyes, giving up after a few seconds on any hope of stimulating the lachrymals into refreshing his dried-up eyeballs, and with only a minimum of groping he got his eye drops from the desk and used them.
He held the pose for a while, mildly entertained by the fact that with his face to the sky (or the ceiling, for that matter), neck stretched, hands behind his head and fake tears running down his face, he must look like a parody of a supplicant to a higher power.
"Mauricio," Roldofo's gruff voice jerked his mind back to reality. "There's a phone call for you."
He opened his eyes back into the office reality. Rows after row of desks stretched around the space he lorded over, like pods on the human fields of the Matrix, betting clerks of the horse department taking a strangely uniform break after because the Kentucky Derby, the Superbowl of horse races, had just started and no more bets could come for at least two hours. The fifteen clerks of the department, his small, irrelevant fiefdom, were all relaxed after long hours of dealing with stupid, thick gamblers, their only redeeming feature being that they had money to spare and wanted to throw some (or most) of it at the book.
"I don't care if it's a VIP," he replied to Rodolfo, regretting at once the grumbling tone he was using with a the big guy who was, deep inside, as tender a Sweetums the Muppet. "Tell them we're not taking any more bets."
"It's not a client, it's a personal call. Some guy named Arturo Rodríguez. He said he's a friend, mumbled something about loyalty."
"Hmmm, OK. Please tell Laura to pass it through."
Mauricio felt like he hadn't achieved much in his life. Considering he was an Anthropology major (solely because there wasn't actually an Archaeology career) the fact that the was leading the horse betting department of an online sportsbook and not discovering a lost civilization somewhere, clearing the dust off some bones fresh off a dig site, or at the very least classifying pottery to see if said dig site was Pre-Columbian or Post-, felt like a futile accomplishment at best. Still, it reflected his loyalty to the company, his regimentation for achieving his ends (however irrelevant in the grand scheme of things they may be), and the fact that he stoically believed in the pure, internal beauty of discipline, like a member of an symphonic orchestra that no matter how senior or how experienced he may be, how many concertos he may have lead the other cellos on, he still must fall in line with the guidelines set by his conductor or risk spoiling people's edification through music.
Too much introspection. Rodolfo was gone and the small orange light on his desk phone had been blinking for a while, indicating an incoming call. He hadn't heard from Arturo for several months now. He was a loyal friend but Mauricio had the distinct idea that Marianella, Arturo's wife, didn't like him one bit, so Arturo took pains to see Mauricio outside any circle where he may run a chance of running into his wife. Mauricio considered it a mostly sensible compromise: it allowed Arturo to avoid friction with his old lady, while at the same time keeping him in touch with old friends.
He dreaded pressing the blinking orange button. It had nothing to do with Arturo - he just hated phones. His people at the office teased him saying that he must be the last single person in Costa Rica without a cell phone, and that he should get one if only to support the nationalized phone service. Mauricio, however, couldn't get over the fact that having a cell phone would make him reachable everywhere, something that while for most people it was precisely the reason to get one, for him it was nothing but yet another roadblock in the way to finally disappearing, leaving behind any possibility of somebody tracking him down.
He hadn't done anything wrong. It was not like he was planning to bomb a building or attempt to assassinate the president or print counterfeit money or something. He just treasured his privacy more than anything else in the world.
Hell. Arturo. Right.
He picked up the handset and pressed the insistent little bugger that kept nagging at him for his attention. "Mauricio, horses."
"Hey, Mauricio, how are you?", Arturo's voice came from the handset, just a bit more sirupy than usual.
"Hey 'Turo, how are you buddy?" he replied, the gusto in his voice genuine. Arturo was a close friend, and close friends you not only respected; you loved them like they were your family. More than that, because your family at least had the blood bond - friends were strangers who had earned it. "I haven't heard from you for a couple of months."
"Good man, good." Came the automatic response, no spirit whatsoever behind it. "Listen man, when can we meet?"
Mauricio glanced at the weekly schedule, which was pasted regularly on the wall for anybody on the team to see. Today was Friday... so considering bet influx and factoring the possibility of any of his clerks getting sick...
"How about Sunday?", he replied, looking aimlessly around the hall.
"Can't wait, man. Seriously." There was strain in Arturo's voice, an almost imperceptible wavering as he beseeched, "Can you show up tonight? I need to talk to somebody I trust."
"OK, sure. Tonight, then. Where?"
"How about Big Dog's?"
"Pavas?"
"Right."
"I'll be there. Hey 'Turo," he paused momentarily before hanging up, the certainty that in the more than a decade he had known Arturo, his friend had never requested any favors, holding himself back from requesting help even when he was going through what was obvious to all his friends were bad times. While Arturo probably made more money overall working as a software development consultant that Mauricio could hope to make as a betting clerk or, needless to say, as an archaeologist, he knew that the software market had gone in a steady decline for almost the last two years. Arturo just sucked it in, tightened his belt, stuck his chin out and weathered the bad seasons; but while the lean months must have taken its toll on Arturo's reserves, he was never depressed - gruff, maybe, but he always managed to find the spirit to joke about things or some spare cash to buy his friends a round of drinks. If Arturo was pleading for somebody to talk to, which was precisely what it sounded like, things must be bad. "Is everything OK?" he prodded, without kicking himself for not finding a way to ask that wasn't so cliched.
"Yeah, don't worry. Well, they're not. But it's no use worrying about them. It's just..." He stopped, holding himself on the threshold of some confession. "Not over the phone, OK?"
"No problem. Is eight-ish OK?"
"Eight it is. See you. Thanks man."
Big Dog's Sports Café was a small bar at that strip of San José where Sabana is still morphing into Pavas, and it's feeling more than a bit unsure of its identity. There was a mix of small office buildings, the largest one a whopping four stories high, and which belonged more to the Sabana side of things; and the furniture stores, appliance stores and bars that covered most of Pavas' main street. The schizophrenic end result couldn't possibly be good for business: people who wanted a bar kept going further into Pavas or Escazú, while the area wasn't highly valued for business real state which caused most buildings to end up only half-occupied, looking like they couldn't make up their mind if they were derelict or engaged. As Mauricio walked there he couldn't help but wonder why most of those business didn't just pack up and leave for greener pastures. Probably, he thought, the area was just enough: just cheap enough for moving not to be cost effective, just respectable enough so that a new address wasn't necessary for making business, just reachable enough that employees didn't have too much of a hassle getting there. The zone walked the very fine line of pure, unapologetic mediocrity, and (completely in line with its other behavior) managed to barely survive while doing it.
Big Dog's itself was a similar mix. It had the air of a bar born in a good family but that has come down in the world, and instead of the lofty goals its progenitors originally had for it, dreams of being filled with attorneys and doctors and general managers and politicians, stuffed with money and eager to spend it on Lynchburg Lemonades, Chocolate Martinis, Singapore Slings, Knockouts, it had to settle for secretaries and bank clerks and - at best - a financial advisor or two, people that went there and drank beer out of the bottle, putting the glass aside like they had been given a fork to eat peanuts, guys and girls who when bored gawked at the large screen where random games of multifarious sports were sometimes projected in order to allow the place to maintain the pretense that it had something to do with sports, and who sometimes drank too much and became despondent of their lifestyle and ended up clutching the somewhat filthy toilet, loudly invoking Great Cthulhu.
Arturo was sitting at a table near the glass-less window, as Mauricio had expected, given 'Turo's hate for smoke. His back was to the door and he was trying to push a lime wedge into a Corona bottle with that singlemindedness that alcohol can give you, the husks of two other beers that had gone through the lime-rape and subsequent drinking standing in line on the table. A cheap short-sleeved burgundy shirt draped over his slightly overweight form, jeans that he had worn a couple of days too long and dusty hiking boots, Arturo looked just picture perfect for the bar - the only thing missing was a gold-digging secretary looking to get knocked-up by the boss and thus getting on the alimony gravy train sitting beside him.
Giving the lime a slight twist as he pushed down, he finally managed to get the damned thing into the bottle, sprinkling himself with lime juice in the process. He brought his fingers to his lips and licked each one with an abandon that Mauricio had never seen him do anything, turning his head and scanning the bar as he did it and finding Mauricio as he walked towards the table. Arturo stood up and, as Mauricio extended his hand in greeting, Arturo unexpectedly hugged him. He certainly looked better than Mauricio had expected, given the tone of voice he had when they had spoken.
"How are you, man? Great to see you. Thanks for coming. Grab a seat. Corona? No, you're a Pilsen man, right? Hey, bar-girl! A Pilsen for my friend, please. Sit down, sit down. Say... what's up? How's work? Always at the same horse betting thing? Of course you are, that's where I called you today. Sorry, you know I'm not a big drinker, two of these and I'm ready to climb on the table and yell Rancheras at the top of my lungs, and this is my third. Good of you to come, man, good of you to come. Seeing anyone lately? No? Well, you know, it happens when you're picky. So anyway... yeah..."
He finally inhaled, held his breath in for two seconds, and exhaled. Mauricio had managed to squeeze in a grand total of three words, two grunts and maybe a nod during the whole tirade, so he just observed his friend as 'Turo jabbered and gesticulated as in a frenzy, making greeting gestures towards Mauricio and almost knocking over his Corona, which Mauricio managed to straighten up just in time, and then flailing bombastically to clear his arms off the table and missing the Pilsen bottle the pale-faced baggy-eyed waitress was bringing by mere inches; and when he finally stopped to breathe, Mauricio took a long swig from his bottle, thinking that in doing so he was setting himself smack down in the average clientele of the bar, and decided that unless Arturo had been surviving solely on chocolate-covered coffee beans for the past three weeks, something was seriously wrong with his friend.
"Yeah... " Arturo continued, "So what have you been doing? Mostly the betting gig?"
"Mostly, yes," Mauricio shrugged.
"What about your Archaeology classes? Still in college?"
"Anthropology."
"Right, they don't actually give Archaeology here, was that it?"
"Yes. There's this dig site that I may go to, but you know how those things are. They don't pay as well, and they take forever."
And damn it, that was true. They didn't pay well at all, barely above minimum wage, mostly because him and the others were supposed to be only students who not only didn't have any use for the money but used the excavation work for extra college credits - which may have been true for most of his classmates, but after dropping out of a Law career that he had joined only to please a former girlfriend and spending the following years on personal pursuits, Mauricio was already pushing 32 and had the bad habit of supporting himself - so they were used by the University expeditions as a trained substitute for the cheap, generic labor they would otherwise need to get on site. And the expeditions did take a long time, but what really screwed up your planning is that it was a random amount of time: you could start with a nice plan of how you were going to clear and bag everything, which would be followed to the dot for three out of the four weeks that had been allotted for on-site work, and the somebody got lucky, stumbled onto a secondary site, and next thing you know it's your third month removing dirt with a toothbrush and some dentist tools - leaving aside how long you were going to spend numbering, tagging, weighing, dating and classifying all the little bits of pottery, bone, jade or stone that the team found.
Sportsbooks were a steadier, better source of income, but he had to be careful that the siren song of easy money didn't distract him from what he really wanted to do. He had had enough of that already.
"And how's the sportsbook treating you?"
"Well. I'm doing fine. Storing some money away, you know, in case I want to move out or something. Or just spend some time on a site." He drank from the bottle, studying his friend. Arturo leaned over the table, supporting himself on his elbows, holding the Corona with both hands, arms close to the body, looking at him intensely but with eyes that felt vacant, his mind either having vacated the premises to make room for more alcohol or just occupied someplace else. Mauricio though that his posture seemed coiled, like the inner springs of a cobra baton ready to be unfurled by a security guard to bash a dangerous bar patron over the head. "How about you? Job OK?"
"It is! This has actually been my best year, in the past five that I've been a consultant. Remember that project I told you about six months ago?"
"The ones that wanted you to come on board full time?"
"I did. It's a cool project, they pay on time, and I still get to fix my own schedule. It works really well."
"I'm glad for you!" So it wasn't money. "How's Nella? Always in love with me?"
Unfortunately he had picked a bad time to drop the question, because Arturo was drinking his beer and, since they were sitting across from each other, the bottle blocked his face and Mauricio couldn't see if there was any reaction. He did seem to soak up for longer than usual, but when the bottle came back down on the table, already half-empty, Arturo's face was blank.
"You know how it is..." Mauricio could almost see the footnote, a disclaimer saying that whatever he though of his wife, his duty as a husband was to complain and joke. "Nella's insane."
"We know that, she married you."
This was the standard exchange, which took place almost every time Marianella came into the conversation, but Arturo's spirit wasn't into it today. He leaned back on the chair, his shoulders collapsing, the looped energy going out of him. He raised his beer and started to say something, holding his mouth open and his bottle on the air as if time had stopped, then sighed as if the little energy he hadn't spent on his initial rant had been drained out of him with the effort of just starting to talk again, and his body crumpled back into the chair again. Mauricio stared at his friend, who avoided his gaze and finished his bottle with one gulp.
Both sat quietly in their own chairs, the static of a hundred happily drunken people enveloping them, Arturo looking at Mauricio like a local TV channel had gone off the air and white noise had filled the screen, but he was too worn out and weary to walk up to the TV and turn it off; Mauricio's mind wandering, mistrustful, wondering what had dragged Arturo so far down.
Some minutes later - none of them had been keeping track - Arturo stirred back to life.
"God I'm tired." He rubbed his eyes with both hands, and then pointed a thumb over his shoulder to the door. "Let's get a cup of coffee somewhere."
"Sure."
"Where to?"
"Dunno. Wherever."
"Let's go to my place. It's close enough, and I make one killer cup of coffee."
With that he slunk out of the chair and, without any further words, he started for the door. After calling for the waitress and taking care of the bill, Mauricio followed.
Mauricio sat still on one of the couches at Arturo's apartment, holding his beer, uncertain at how to react to what his friend had just told him. Arturo was obviously plastered - hell, had actually been drunk already when Mauricio got to the bar - and the first hour after they arriveed he had just kept guzzling can after can of Guiness until, his eyes glassy and his movements jerky, he had stumbled onto the sofa and collapsed, passed out but still holding onto a mercifully empty black Guiness can.
Fortunately for Arturo, Marianella hadn't come back to the house early. It was actually fortunate for Mauricio as well, since he wasn't exactly in the mood to stand there and while she perorated about him leading her poor, innocent husband astray and making him drink obviously more than he could take. "It's only when he goes out with you guys that he does these things," she would say. He'd get extra shit brownie points if Arturo happened to barf all over the sofa, burping in technicolor over the already picturesque furniture that only Nela could have chosen.
His first thought was to call a cab and leave, but even after having had a few beers he wouldn't bring himself to just dump his friend there like a half-dead junkie in the door of the emergency room. Who knows how much he had actually drunk, it might take him a while to wake up and then...
Oh fuck. What if he actually had alcohol poisoning?
Honestly, he had no idea how much Arturo had drunk during the day. Maybe the four coronas and six or seven Guiness were enough to you ripped but not to actually poison you, but what if he had started earlier?
[...]
Posted by Ricardo at March 31, 2004 12:08 PM