A Song in the Daylight. Paullina Simons

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СКАЧАТЬ for what?” the conductor muttered. “After they took your bike, what would they want with you?”

      “They’d have to kill me to separate me from the bike.”

      “Ah.” The conductor shrugged. “But I thought you was headed to Maplewood?”

      “I am. This isn’t it?”

      “No. It’s Summit. D’you hear me calling it out?”

      “Nah. I was sleeping. Damn.” He smiled unperturbed. “How far to Maplewood?”

      “Six miles. You wanna get back on?”

      The young man shook his head.

      “Or two minutes on that thing if you’re going fast.” The conductor enviously tipped his cap. “All aboard!” The train slowly pulled away.

      The biker was left standing on the platform, breathing in the freezing air, one hand steadying his bike, duffel between his legs. He was hungry. He was thirsty. He decided to drive around town for a few minutes, get a bite to eat, relax, and then head to Maplewood. It would’ve been better had he come in the spring, like he’d planned. Still. Fates, all kneel before ye.

      He got his bike up to the street on an elevator. After driving around the sleepy subdued Summit and not finding any place he wanted to stop, he looked instead for a street where he could ride the bike a bit. It was real cold, too cold for him in the long term, but he was so happy to be out and about. He wanted a sandwich. On Route 124, he raced up to seventy for a few brief seconds before the light turned red, already out of Summit and in another bare-treed town. “WELCOME TO MADISON.” He saw a large supermarket, an empty parking lot. “Grand Opening,” the sign read, “Drive-through Pharmacy, Starbucks, Fresh Sushi Daily.” That’s the ticket, the young man thought. A box of raw tuna won’t be as good as Maui tuna, but still, a box, maybe two, five minutes in the saddle under the sun in the empty lot. He’d been on the trains too long. He needed air.

2

       Che

      We are never alone for a moment. We are deceived into loneliness, into solitude, by our pride, by our pretensions. And yet all Che wanted was a child of her own. To never be alone again. She wanted to be renewed by child-birth, and yet it looked like that was never going to happen. Forget the clock. The boyfriend was the problem.

      On the outskirts of south Manila, through the wildly populated isthmus between two warm-water bays, on the edge of a rice field in Parañaque, near Moonwalk, in a thatched hut amid a thousand other thatched huts, at the end of a long afternoon when the palm trees were still dripping from the monsoon that had drenched the huts and the mud roads and made going out difficult, near a window and a mirror, a petite Filipino woman sat at a desk dressed in hiking boots, army fatigues, a pink scarf, red lips, tattoos, ebony hair spiked up and streaked white, cigarette dangling, ash falling, and scribbled a letter.

      Larissa,

       My one true friend, please come and visit your old best friend Che. I’ll teach you how to make rice pudding and patties. I’ll give you excellent cheap wine. I’ll introduce you to Father Emilio and to Lorenzo, if we’re still together, God help me. I can’t believe last time I saw you was before you were ever pregnant. I like the last picture you sent, though I don’t think you’re right, that your boy looks like an angel. His eyes are too mischievous. He looks like he rules your house. And angels don’t look like that, like kings. I should know. Lorenzo looks like that, and he’s definitely not an angel.

      What Che didn’t write to Larissa, but which was the impetus for the letter and the slight anxiety underneath the placid epistolary demeanor, was that the night before, Che thrashed herself awake from a terrible black vision in which she saw Larissa in a yellow dress, walking away, while Che was running, calling, Larissa, Larissa … Finally out of breath she caught up with her fair friend and grabbed her by the arm. Larissa spun around. Her face was pallid and wizened, more like the face of a flightless bird long dead. Che cried out, and then Larissa spoke, not in her voice, but a dead stranger’s voice. She said, “Che, what if everything in your life had turned to ashes?”

      Che could only shake her head.

      “Everything,” Larissa repeated. “Every good thing, every terrible thing, just burned to the ground?”

      No, Che mouthed.

      “What if there was nothing left?”

      That’s impossible, Che wanted to say. There is always something left. She reached out. Always.

      But Larissa, like fine wet sand, shivered and dissolved to the earth, in a small damp heap of blackened shavings.

      Che screamed—in the dream, in real life. For a long time she couldn’t get back to sleep and, because of that, today was exhausted. Nothing in Larissa’s previous letter gave Che any indication that everything was not, as always, joyous. The dream was incongruous. Che couldn’t put it out of her heart.

      The door swung open, and a young swarthy Filipino man stood at the jamb, his hand on his impatient hip. He was attired like her, freaky clothes and rips and rags. He had a look on him of a thing untamed. “What are you doing?” he said. “We’re going to be late. We’re starting in a half-hour.”

      “I’ll be right there,” said Che, turning her gaze away from his brooding face down to the white paper with roses on it. It was Epiphany today. So they were protesting. That’s what they were, Che and Lorenzo: professional protesters. For every major holiday and every major feast day, for every international visit and every small item of government policy, for every break in the political climate or even just the status quo, Che and Lorenzo protested. They worked for a company of subcontracted protesters. Whenever there was a demonstration that needed an increase in numbers, they were hired to paint the placards and then walk the streets and shout. “No More War! Separation of Church and State! No American bases! No Blood for Oil! Green Today and Every Day! Fur is Wrong! War is Wrong! Crossing Picket Lines is Wrong! No New Taxes!”

      For this Che was paid, poorly. But then she didn’t need much. When she needed extra money, she worked for Father Emilio. The nuns grew the fruit, and she sold it at a morning street market in Parañaque, shouting. “Peaches! Ripe, Excellent! Pears! Fresh, Succulent! Tomatoes, from the Vine! Mangoes, in Season!” Che was an excellent shouter, ripe and fresh from the vine and always in season.

      Amiga, thank you for the box of Nutella jars you sent me. It has nothing organic in it, right? So it’ll last me a good long time. Like Oreos. You and Nutella is what I miss the most. Can you send me a little of yourself too, in a box? Sorry this is so short. We have a “God is Dead!” demonstration in thirty minutes. Lorenzo is waiting.

      When she wrote his name, Lorenzo, something hot ran through her insides, from the center of her brain through her lungs and heart, through her abdomen, down to where children might come from, in other people, though clearly, not in her.

      “Che!”

      How endearing he was when he shouted for her. Not her Christian name, Claire, that would be too conventional, but Che, a non-conformist shortening of her last name, Cherengue.

      “I’m coming. Just …” СКАЧАТЬ