The Sick Horror at The Lost and Found (15 page)

“
I will drink from the cup,
and find salvation in the resurrection,” she said. Her eyes widened
as if she was watching a train speeding toward her.

Usnavy was sitting in front of the
rock, humming like child and playing with something that looked
like a wooden idol with wings. She was flying it back and forth
like a toy plane, seemingly unaware of anything else around her.
Dr. Mike sat down beside her.

“
Usnavy?” he asked. “Who is
the shaman of you island?”

“
Meeee!” she giggled
gleefully.

The wind seemed to pick up and blow
through Maria’s hair. She slowly lowered herself to her knees. Her
eyes rolled to the back of her head and I saw the whites of her
eyes like she was a feeding shark. I was paralyzed. María slowly
eased back and laid flat along the curve of the Elephant Stone’s
spine, with her limbs dangling on either side of the
stone.

I felt a sudden shock. I can’t explain
it. A sudden shock and then I felt week in the knees. As I fell to
ground, the last thing I heard before I blacked out was María,
repeating listlessly, “I’m flying, I’m flying on the blue rock, I’m
flying.”

The Child, Cup and
Resurrection

By María
Concepción

I wake up in the TV room because Rocky
is batting around his metal water dish.

The TV hisses static. I feel the night
breeze from an open window.

A great bird, some kind of massive
eagle, swoops in and perches on the window sill. I recognize it. It
is Dr. Mike’s power animal, the Harpy Eagle.

I look down at my hand and see the
crescent moon I drew there. I realize that, although I remain in
the TV Room, I am still asleep. I am lucid dreaming. I am in
control. I command the walls to disappear and they do.

I turn for the moon and, like the
great goddess I lift up my arms to command it to rise. It
does.

The bird glares at me… something
sinister. I clap my hands and he flies away.

The full moon is rising, growing
larger. I am excited.

But then in the corner… it’s Shekinah
standing there in silence. I feel it is her even though there are
no dirty streaks of tears, no blue dress.

Something is wrong… she is standing
apart from the moon. She is older now. She is a woman. Then I look
again. It is all wrong. It can’t be her. She must be in the moon.
She is the moon. Then I see. Her eyes are vacant… white. Something
is controlling her.

The imposter turns her back on me. I
see the ankh of Isis on her back, and a mask around the back of her
head. It is Harpy Eagle back again. Something is going wrong. I
can’t move. Something terrible is happening.

She holds the moon in her hands and
begins to turn it. Darkness descends across it, from a full moon to
half-moon, to crescent, to a sliver. She shakes the giant orb… it
is a globe… the earth. The oceans spill out onto the floor and
stretch across the TV room. The static from the TV hisses loudly. I
am too paralyzed to even cover my ear. She reaches into the sphere,
now become a giant eye, and pulls it out… a screaming, half grown,
bloodied fetus. I collapse onto the floor. The bird stares with an
evil smile.

She kicks the fetus across the wet
floor. It whimpers before me but I am too paralyzed to do anything.
“I have to go,” it whispers.

I try to reach down and hold her. My
arms slip through the water and ripples carry her away.

I look up and see him. His toothy
yellow grin. He is shirtless, but he still wears his gray fedora. I
hate that word. He never calls it a hat. “Why don’t you come here,”
he says, his disgusting mustache rising with his grin exposing his
cracked teeth even more. “You’re all wet.”

He comes to me, stroking his
cock.

I want to curl up into a ball and
shrivel up. Fly away to the wasteland. I see an elevator. I pull
myself through the water. Suddenly I am near the dorms. I see the
pyramid I put there – I know it is for escaping. I crawl into an
elevator and reach up to press the buttons before he can follow me.
I see the choices: the road, La Mina and then a third button. It
must go deeper, go farther. I press it. The ground falls away from
beneath me. I am falling. I want to go the depths, where there is
no light, no sound… but not this way. I am falling fast. I stretch
out my hands to fly. I am lucid dreaming and I want to fucking fly.
I fall and fall into darkness.

I shut my eyes tight… and then I can
hear her. She is like an angel… Tuna… “Drink from the cup, find
salvation in the resurrection, save the child. “

I can still hear her voice as I awake.
I check my dream symbol to be sure. It is there, a normal crescent
moon.

I plant my heel on the floor to stand
up, and my bare foot slips on something wet. I fall, face first,
back onto the tiled floor of the TV room. My foot is wet and
sticky. I put my hand on the floor. I look at it. It is all
brownish red. I look between my legs. Blood soaks through my
underwear and runs down my leg. I drag myself to the corner of the
room. Blood streaks across the floor. I pull off my panties and
throw them at the opposite wall. I crawl in the darkness, up the
steps to the shower. I can’t walk. To stand, I have to lift myself
up by the concrete around the sink. I see myself in the
mirror.

I take a deep breath and look at
myself. The moon is the mirror… it holds the sun. The order
changed. Tuna changed the order. I don’t need to save the child
first. . I want to crawl through… through the looking glass, and
drink from the cup… I write the words -- with her blood on the
mirror… The Holy Grail.

I stumble into the shower and hold
onto my knees as I wash what was left of her down the
drain.

Oscillate Wildly

By Mathew Hope

Travel, whether a year trek or a day
trip, cannot be enjoyed if you think you can control all the
variables. Women are like travel – variables. Put them together and
you have constant variables.

Maria and I decided to take a bit of
time for ourselves and play tourists in Boquete on our way up to
visit Dr. Mike. He finally had invited Steve, Estrella, Maria and I
to visit him and Usnavy. We dumped the car in the town center and
walked the winding road up to his “castle,” stopping first at the
garden known as “El Explorador.”

Imagine what Walt Disney would do if
he were a gardener on acid. An antique telephone sits in a little
hut in the garden. Pick it up and it’s Bach. What was junk has been
collected and turned into art with little philosophical
inspirations written on the side. The plants were sculpted like
Edward Scissor Hands went to town. It was Maria who insisted we
come here. She walked around like she was looking for something in
particular. The first variable we hit was rain. We found shelter
under a covered swing and Maria dug out the wine and cheese for our
picnic. She kept digging around in her bag and after concluding
that the object of her search was not to be found, she glared at
me. The second variable was enough to spoil the mood. When I packed
the wine and cheese, the only other thing I saw in the bag was
dirty laundry. Like really dirty -- they were panties that met the
arrival of the Red Sox five day home stay.

That was enough to cancel
our picnic, and we headed to Dr. Mike’s house in silence. I, at
least, tried to enjoy the beauty of walking among the coffee
plantations and savoring the smell of burning pine coming from the
fires in the small shacks of the Indian coffee pickers. The rain
never really materialized. A fine mist they call
bajareque
drifted past
Volcán Barú, leaving a dizzying double rainbow. This was
appropriate for our walk – the winding road we were on was
called
Arco Iris
,
which is Spanish for ‘rainbow.’

Dr. Mike’s rented house really looked
like a castle, complete with natural rock and turrets. Only when
you get closer do you realize that the turrets were not nearly as
large as a real castle, and the ‘rock’ was merely stylized cement.
Dr. Mike, Usnavy, Steve and Estrella greeted us with hugs and
handshakes.

I am sometimes reminded how little I
know of Maria. I was told Colombians have a hierarchy or strata in
their society that is not subjective. They actually have six
levels, based on their incomes and tax bracket. Because Maria
speaks impeccable English, sometimes with only a subtle accent, I
always thought she was from money. Maybe a strata five at least.
But her awe of this upper middle class faux house only contributed
to the mystery that she was. I can recognize the self-creation of
the enigmatic persona to hide a lack of depth. Anyone who has ever
said ‘there’s so much you don’t know about me,’ is guilty of this.
This is not Maria.

The girls eagerly jumped into the hot
tub overlooking the valley of coffee farms. Dr. Mike took advantage
of the moment to take Steve and I into his study. Inside, it was
obvious that he had filled the book cases with books he had
authored himself. The kinds of books I had only pretended to read
in college.

Glenfiddich, Glenamarenge, Glenlivit,
other Glens. They were all offered, and we tasted them all. When we
loosened up a little, Dr. Mike asked me about Maria. I realized we
had all come a long ways together. Steve, Dr. Mike and I had all
begun our implausible relationships around the same time. We had
that in common.

I confessed to them my frustration
with Maria’s sudden mood swing over what appeared to be a bag of
dirty laundry. I thought Dr. Mike would have insight.

“
I have no idea. As men we
can’t begin to guess the minds of women,” he said. A defeating
thing for a former therapist to say. But he did offer advice in the
form of a personal story.

Dr. Mike had married young, had one
daughter, and then divorced. I never knew this about him. Back in
the days when Dr. Mike was happily married, his wife would make
brown bag lunches. Often his daughter helped her by dropping in
little notes that always ended with, “I love you.”

One day Dr. Mike’s daughter gave him a
brown bag with some of her most precious possessions: a dinosaur
eraser, a couple of pennies, and a stick of gum. She asked him to
hold onto these things “for a while.” The bag sat on the counter
and one day, instead of grabbing his brown bag lunch, Dr. Mike took
the bag his daughter had left for him.

When he went to open his lunch that
day, he saw the junk, carelessly tossed it, and went to a
restaurant with the other professors. But that night, when he saw
his daughter’s eyes, when she asked for her things back, he knew
her things were not garbage but gold. They were treasure. And she
had entrusted her treasure to the one she trusted the
most.

He went back to the university and
ended up digging through the big dumpster at the back of the
psychology building with the janitor (who understood Dr. Mike’s
plight since he had two children of his own). Dr. Mike returned the
treasure to his daughter and a few days later he was entrusted with
them again. This went on for weeks. Each time he held onto her
knickknacks, she asked for them back, until the day came when she
did not ask.

Dr. Mike said he hid them away on the
top shelf of his home office, and they were the only things he
would risk his life to save in the event of a fire. After his
divorce, he put them in a safety deposit box, and when his
daughter, now 20, gets married, it will be part of his wedding gift
to her.

We don’t know what can be important to
people or why. As men we just need to be the best listeners we
can.

Dr. Mike continued the tour of his
home and lit candles in iron-wrought candle holders -- candle
holders like I had seen once at an art show, that I had imagined
buying for my imaginary loft in Brooklyn.

The girls joined us, steam drifting
off their bodies from the hot tub. More scotch. The candles burned
brightly and melted down quickly. The soft yellow light played on
Maria’s face. Her red streaks flitted, intertwined and disappeared
among her dark black tresses.

Miles Davis but then Tom Waits. Then
the Gorrilaz. Tom Waits sort of fit. The Gorrilaz blew my mind,
then cozied right in. Here we played billiards, not pool, with both
kinds of balls in a separate room with the red felt, not the
green.

I sensed the drifting smells of rooms
in the distance, rooms that were never even hinted at except by my
curiosity. Some of the distant rooms echoing at me from lonely dark
corridors smelled like Christmas candles, and others had the faint
tint of the chlorine from a pool. Hardwood floors. Knotted oak. The
draft from a cellar – a wine cellar. Vaulted ceilings. Humidors.
Fuck, like I even smoke cigars. Glowing lights under an outdoor
pool. Leaves floating on the surface. Ornate Turkish tapestries.
Cedar in the library. You can’t even find these hardcover books in
Panama. Leather. A fireplace with ages of soot.

Maria danced, first with Estrella, who
bounced and gyrated, and then disappeared with Steve. And then
Maria danced for herself, with her skirt floating back and forth in
the wind like Stevie Nicks in a Fleetwood Mac song. Then she danced
for everyone, and finally she danced for my ego-centric
intuitiveness. She looked at me. And danced for me. The way she
tugged at her bottom lip. The way food fell from her mouth when she
laughed. I loved her. I had loved her for a while but this night I
was proud that she loved me.