We Eat Our Own (4 page)

He stares at her through the net. He keeps hissing. He will keep doing it until she breaks down and moves beyond the curtain, until he can see every part of her up close. There is a part of Teo that hopes it will take hours to wear her down. There is a part of him that loves this part best, that wants for it to take all night.

• • •

Anahi stands as still as she can in the dark of the parking lot, looking at the actor, waiting for her behind the curtain. The humidity whirs against the nape of her neck. For a reason she
can't name, she thinks of her father. She thinks of the last time she saw a mata toro.

It was on the table in the middle of her father's kitchen, carved into hunks of wet, black steak. Her father and three of his friends were picking out the bones, drinking cachaça and laughing over a joke. Two were from the cartel: they'd brought back crates of liquor and clean shirts from the capital, cases of them layered over the kilos of coca paste in the speedboat. Half the liquor would be a gift to her father for putting them up on the trip north. The third man was an Indian named Unay who had been expelled from his village a year ago; her father was trying to teach him Spanish.

Unay dug his hands wrist-deep into the body of the snake and squealed at the sensation. He was laughing so hard he was weeping. The tears drew dark rivulets into the filth on his skin, and his mouth kept moving in an aimless way. She could tell he was already too drunk to talk.

Anahi stared into the pile of meat. It had so many parts inside: black tissues that came off in long strands, a yellow fluid that got under the men's fingernails. She saw a blue something that looked like lung fiber. She could not see anything like a heart.

How did you kill it? she asked her father.

One of the men from the cartel looked up. You're not afraid of the big snake, are you, girl?

She swallowed. No.

I think you are. You need us to protect you?

Anahi held her breath. The man walked closer. He was very fat and, she knew, more powerful than the other men. Maybe even the boss. She could tell by his watch, silver and leather flecked in snake blood, and by how close he got to her, and because when he did it, her father said nothing.

I used a great big gun, he said. It's out in the truck. Thing is this long, and the kickback is crazy.

When he laughed, she could see the grains of raw meat in his molars. She could smell the carcass steaming all over him.

Just say the word, baby. He licked one of his back teeth. I'll protect you.

Her father glanced up, but he kept slipping pieces of rib out of the meat like sewing pins, didn't tell the man to stop. The man was breathing into her face, her mouth. There was a wet, blue-black smear on the floor, some organ that had been dropped or thrown, and she focused as hard as she could on that.

Finally, her father put down the snake. It was already dead, he said. These assholes just found it out in the road.

Unay let out a sudden laugh. He shouted something in mixed Spanish and Ticuna that Anahi couldn't understand. She heard the Spanish words for
afraid
and
girl.
She heard her father tell him to shut up.

In the lot, Anahi looks through the mosquito netting at Teo. She wets her lips to make her mouth work.

You know, snakes aren't what you should be afraid of, she said.

She is thinking of the men in her father's house. She is thinking of the mosquitoes clinging to the mesh, working their way under the gaps at the doorframe. She is thinking of the larvae that clot in the mosquito's belly, the parasites that travel along the proboscis and into the blood. She is thinking of how they must look as they unspool in the glands, microscopic ribbons, pure white and silent. She is thinking of Unay's leg under the table, mottled with dark blood, swollen huge with elephantitis.

She can see Teo's shape edging closer to the net, closer to
her. He says, Why? Is there something bigger than an anaconda out there?

Anahi thinks of a tiny worm in the center of Teo's heart, working.

No, she says. There isn't. You're safe in there.

RICHARD

Bogotá

Y
ou fly to Bogotá, and as instructed, you wait.

The casting director told you the set was a charter flight away from the capital, but he didn't tell you how long it would take for someone to come put you on the next plane. To be fair, you didn't ask. You grinned and nodded when he pressed the envelope into your palm, leaned close to listen as he murmured, Hotel Ignacio. Here is money for the bill and for your meals, he said. Arrangements will be made to take you to the set.

The casting director smelled like Royal Copenhagen Ultra and match sulfur. A square gold pendant hung in the deep V of his neckline, nested in his pale brown chest hair, and you were embarrassed to notice it as you nodded yes, yes, you understood.

You had thought you'd have to wait two nights, tops. You thought they must be on
some
kind of a schedule. You knew, at least, that they'd need you soon, if the part was as big as they said. On the flight, you ordered a gin fizz and reread your copy of
Respect for Acting,
the corners of the pages shivering with the motion of the engine. You were too excited to sleep. As the sun set and the lights in the cabin went down, you eavesdropped on a conversation between a Scottish woman and her young
son: Look, love. Look. Can you tell where the sky ends? That's the water.

• • •

You had thought two nights, tops. Two nights and three days, and then they would come. But then the newspaper slides under the door, the date stamped in black ink above the masthead, unrefutable. Four days have passed.

The Hotel Ignacio is seven blocks from the statehouse, four from an open-air market that sells headless calves strung up by their anklebones. The city is surrounded by black mountains to the east and north and south. On the first day, you walk as far as you can, through the crowded streets and south to what you think must be the city center, but in no less than twenty minutes you see jungle. Even the foothills are covered in it. Forty-foot trees lean over a highway overpass and cast blue shadows across the road. Leaves push at the diamonds of space in a wire fence, branches hacked off at a disturbingly neat perpendicular a foot above the rail. The whole city has that sense of something barely contained, an epidemic or a state secret. When you swipe at the sweat along the side of your neck, you find an insect sitting on your collar like a tracking device, its domed eyes steady as little cameras.

You turn back. You wander to a movie theater, but everything they're showing you've already seen.
Jaws
;
Sal
ò
;
Picnic at Hanging Rock
. Their titles are handwritten in Spanish on a piece of paper and taped to the window, and the marquee is blank. A blind man with a missionary pamphlet stands outside the empty box office and tries to stuff his leaflet into your shirt pocket, weeping and gasping, tears darkening the fabric above his name tag.

Some violence is happening in the capital, that's clear to
you. Every morning, a police jeep with a roof-mounted machine gun trawls the dusty thoroughfare, five stories down, matte army gray. Heat pushes at the hotel window and makes it steam. You can't believe how many people are still in the streets, walking two feet behind the slow wheels of the jeep like it's simply not there, bear-hugging briefcases as they jog toward a departing bus. The machine gun roves, side to side, then up toward the water stain of daytime moon. Why isn't anyone on the street afraid? How do they live this way?

Or do they? Maybe the jeep is your own personal and daily hallucination. Maybe the newspapers that you find slipped under your door are a joke someone is playing on you; you never see the person who puts them there, never even hear their footsteps coming or going down the hall. You almost don't believe the articles are real: these photographs of men kneeling, hands knotted behind backs with twine, flour sacks pulled over their heads so they can't see what's coming. These headlines: Administración Turbay Ha Capturado Enclave Guerrillero. Under the fold, a 3 x 5 of the president, unsmiling in a striped bow tie.

You don't speak Spanish. The flour sacks are stamped with red stars and arching wheat and the word
H
arina,
creased deeply at the vowels. You study the word like a cipher.

Why don't you call Kay, like you told yourself you would?

You should have done it the first day you got there. Why didn't you? You couldn't have known how long it would take for someone to come for you, that past the third day, the telephone would clang you awake every morning and a man on the other end would scream at you in Spanish, probably for payment on the room. But that is what has happened. The money in the envelope that the casting director gave you won't come close to covering it all. Almost all of your own cash that you managed to bring is gone, spent on the room, soggy takeout meals, the
dozen toiletries you forgot to pack, and one souvenir: a figurine of a flamingo in a yellow, blue and red bikini. It is a present for your mother. You leave it on the nightstand. You stare at it as the phone clangs again, anxiety streaking through your limbs, the flamingo grinning openmouthed at her tiny maracas.

The Hotel Ignacio has brass mail slots on every hallway, pale green baseboards, thin walls. On the fifth day, you drop a peso down the mail slot and listen to it clang against sixty feet of sheet metal, waiting for the sound of it landing against the floor of the basement. It doesn't come. You put your ear to the slot and think you hear someone murmur something—Qué coño?—but you can't be sure. You remember the word
coño
from your days in
LA
, hurled between car windows across lanes of traffic. You never asked anyone what it meant. You don't know how to respond.

• • •

After six days of waiting, you decide you can't stay in another night.

The phone book in the nightstand looks like it's been spun in an industrial dryer, but you manage to find the name of a club in its pages, an address that you circle in pencil on a map. A speck of a place, two kilometers away. The fourth entry under the heading labeled
BAR.

If you were a woman, you'd squeeze the hotel key between your second and third knuckles as you walk, try to remember the spot beneath a person's eye that will dislodge his cornea if you gouge at the right angle. But you are a man, so you keep the key in your pocket, fingering the little red ribbon it's tied to, trying to keep your gaze forward. The back of your throat tastes briny and dry. The streets are empty at this hour and loud with voices from inside buildings, televisions, music, women screaming at children.

When you get to where you're going, you don't realize, at first, that you've arrived. The nightclub is in a former storefront with black house paint rollered over the windows. Uncertain, you hand a man three pesos at the door, and he hands you a stout green bottle without a label, full of carbonated liquid that smells vaguely industrial, like some sort of solvent.

You drink. They're playing a song in English that you don't recognize, projecting a black-and-white porno from the 1930s onto each of the three walls. The stereo sings:
Watch new blood on the eighteen-inch screen; the corpse is a new personality.
The guitars pluck, the rhythm too slow for dancing. Teenage girls dance anyway, in clusters, in front of men slouching in red chairs. The light
from the projector turns their bodies white, then black, then marbled. You realize you've been wearing the same dirty shirt for three days.

If Kay were here, she could understand what the girls are saying. And here is something you do not even consider: that if Kay were here, she would tell you that you need to leave, right now. That this place is for guerilla sympathizers plotting a socialist revolution to take down the administration of President Turbay. That she overhead a conversation. That you wrote the address in the phone book down wrong, and you're not safe here. She would whisper it quick into your ear, Let's go, but she wouldn't drop her smile until you were out on the street, three blocks away. Only then would she exhale, all the tension leaving her body in one awful rush.

But you don't know anything, and now the music is getting louder, and Kay is in New York, sitting alone on a roof with no view.

A sweet sort of guilt sits in you as you think about her. Her Spanish, quiet but steady, accented perfectly. The straight lines of her body, the pale wall of her hair. After your career bot
tomed out in
LA
a year after college, you'd pronounced to Kay that the theater scene in California wasn't the right fit for you, that you needed to be in New York, and she'd surprised you by asking, simply, when the two of you would leave. She had contacts from architecture school in Manhattan who could get her a job. You were her boyfriend; what was the question? You didn't know how to say no, and so she took the long drive with you through Arizona and New Mexico and Texas, ordering at all the restaurants and asking for all the directions.

That's the thing about Kay: she is so weirdly sure about you, a cool shadow that follows you patiently, even when you sprint. From the moment you met her she's been that way, sitting alone in a turtleneck at a pool party in central
LA
that a friend had dragged her to and then abandoned her to smoke peyote. Within five minutes of offering her a drink, it was over; it was like she'd decided you were the one person at that party who was meant to be her friend. She told you that night how she grew up an only child outside of Sonora, and how her best friend as a kid was a Peruvian acupuncturist named Elka who worked at her parents' ashram and spoke about five words of English. You didn't know what an ashram was, and it all sounded a little ridiculous. But there was something vivid and weird about Kay that you liked, even if it was the exact thing, later, that would make it so hard to break it off: the way she held her margarita glass with both hands around the stem like she was reading tea leaves in a chalice, how out of place she looked on that pool deck at that party with all those tanned, laughing girls. It took an hour of conversation for you to get her to smile, though she never stopped looking you straight in the eyes. When she did, it was like a white bird had finally opened and showed you itself, the trailing edge of its wing yellow as a sunburst.

In the club, the girls are whispering. They have skinny
chains looped around their abdomens, little shiny scars on their bellies, tiny girlish teeth. The dark crowds over them like a thunderhead and flees as they nudge each other into the beam of the projector. One of them points to you and yells, Venga, and another lunges at this girl, still grinning, and covers her friend's mouth with both her hands.

Cállate, zorra!

They giggle and screech. A girl with black hair is shoved out into the light.

Él te puede oir! Vaya!

The girl is so small and dark. She makes herself exhale, relaxes her shoulders down her back, minces forward across the dance floor. Her friends titter. She is coming straight for you.

On the road trip from California to New York, passing through the western states, you had to goad Kay into the gas stations. Your Spanish is amazing, you said, and she swatted you, shrieked, That's not the point! You watched her from the car, across the parking lot and through the spattered glass of the gas station window. She was awkward in jeans and a white button-down that were both too thick for the weather. She looked rigid and formal and bizarre next to the display of Technicolor Jaritos and plantain chip bags, but the man behind the counter grinned at her with his whole face.

You think: Is this when it started? The jealousy, rising just an inch in you, like floodwater.

The girl in the club says something in Spanish—Quieres bailar?—and you say yes.

When Kay came back to the car, her whole body had relaxed. The Juárez wind hauled over the border and mussed up her hair, made her skin pinken and go bright. He was really nice, she said. He gave me a pack of cigarettes for free.

What did he say about the hotel?

It's six miles north. She chewed her lower lip. But there's someplace he said we should go first.

When you hold the girl in the club, you can feel her lower ribs move under your hands. It feels less like breathing than like a boat tilting in a wave, and when you glance at her face, you see this, too: something queasy and weightless about her expression, the music moving her to an imperfect rhythm, like water. The piercings in her ears look new, a little fringe of blood around the stud. What's your name? you say, in English, but she just leans into you, puts her chin against your shoulder, and mouths something to her friends across the room, thinking you can't see, that you can't feel her jaw moving on your shoulder.

The place the gas station attendant directed you to, the Lightning Field, didn't look like much when you pulled up: a low sweep of land, dusk. Rain shimmered over the windshield. Kay leaned back on the headrest and closed her eyes, murmured, The air here tastes—
different,
somehow. Then, after a thoughtful squint, she said: Pale green.

It
tastes
pale green?

What? It does.

You smiled, loved her again. You're so fucking pretentious.

No, Kay said. I'm a synesthete. I'm exact.

Beyond the windshield, the sun dodged a fistful of clouds, and you finally saw what was in front of you: an outdoor art installation of lightning rods, a square mile of them glinting in the new light.

Her voice was full of thrill and wonder. Do you think it will storm?

It didn't.

The men in the club watch the girls drink. When you look them directly in the face, a sudden loneliness strikes at you, bruising a tender place deep in your chest that you didn't know
was there. Their hands look too big for their beer bottles. Their coats are all shiny fake leather, all look like they've just been bought new for tonight. The music is too slow, and they are not like you: none of them are dancing.