Events

I step out of an airplane in Caracas in 1971. The breeze plucks and grasps like an elephant's trunk; a hot humid breath huffing into my ears and into my hair. I clunk down the metal stairs and onto the tarmac. There is no one here to greet me, so I start to walk over to the terminal building with the other passengers. They are mostly businessmen, their necks beginning to sweat under tight collars, their foreheads shiny beneath glistening coiffures that jump around in the wind. One man with no sunglasses holds his newspaper up against the sun, and glances at me, his mouth open to gasp, walking quickly, his other hand clutching a leather briefcase. A small boy hangs off of the arm of a rumpled woman who drags the child like another piece of baggage. A man with a blue suit is obviously an American G-man. We all walk over to the building, crossing the shimmering black lake of heat without wasting breath to speak. Men with large ear protectors drive carts or trudge towards the airplane on foot, disregarding us, their faces dark and unreadable behind silver sunglasses, their mouths all open in the hot sun, intent as lions.

The glass doors creak open and lukewarm air sloshes out. The air conditioning is flaky, and as we walk it gets hotter and hotter until it is hotter than it was on the tarmac outside. We wade through dense, unbreathable air; faded dusty chairs and the smells of other people's sweat and exhaled cigarettes. A man hits me in the face with a handful of cigars and runs by and I stumble over rows and rows of legs, children and mothers and dead bodies (?). (They are bags.) When I get back to my feet finally I walk quickly to catch up to the group; I have no idea where to go, and I don't want to lose sight of the others. A bird flutters near the high sky light and escapes through a hole, drifts upward until it is invisible.

I go to Kansas in 1983. It is another hot day, muggy. The blue sky stuggles to hold back a high dark cloud, so high and dense it is like a new continent disgorged from space. But eventually the cloud looms overhead, and the scent of rain drifts in with a cool wash of air, and then the hand of the cloud reaches down with a tickle and tiny drops fall so cool that they feel like cigarette burns.

I am giggling as I enter a diner. I sit near the window so I can watch the rain. I order soymilk and a donut. Lemon meringue pie remains are splattered on the counter top, in yellow and brown dollops, as if a child had eviscerated one with a series of wallops. The lady behind the counter grins at me and wipes it up, her big bosoms stiff as tree stumps. I am alone here except for a man behind a raised newspaper, one disfigured hand clutching at the newsprint. I lean over slowly until I can see his face behind the paper, and he grins back at me with a child-like pucker of mirth. No soymilk, only cow milk, which I slurp as I eat.

"Olive trees don't grow very well here," the diner lady says to me, pointing with her nose out the window towards a clump of dead trees. The air conditioner fills the background with a vibrato hum, and a woman bustles in through the door, and behind her comes the noise and smell of the downpour. She is wet as a doused cat, and shakes her head and and her hair and wipes her shirt down. Then looks at me. I am effervescent and dissipate.

I am in Tenochtitlan as the drum of night thunders from a lightning strike, exhilarating the air with brash delight. Water is death, and life is a cup. Hold them up. Praise them, not the ululations of the morning prayer. A mace hits me in the face. Flashes of light; on hands and knees; dirt and grit in my palms, stone tiles, bird feathers washing away in a torrent of water. Red drops that don't stop. A neverending flood. A man stabs me in the leg with a spear, wrenches it out and stabs me again. Accrual, light heart. In the end, there is a sum or something. He stabs me again in the gut, and only blood comes out when I scream.

In the flashes of light I glimpse the knotted ropes that tie my wrists. In the flashes of lightning the entire night is shaved of its darkness to the bare white clarity of blades and bones. The rain drops are picked out like pin pricks. There is a spearhead in the gutter that points at my bonds, and I start to crawl to it, and I am grateful, so eternally grateful, when everything washes away.

In the last part I don't know where I am, and I shuffle along a dismal alleyway towards a wide market square, full of noise and color, people and animals and cloth and beads and spices and food. I slouch in the alley mouth and watch it all, my body and heart sore and wicked. My feet are angry buzzards of pain. If anyone looks at me I stare at them, and they all cringe when they smell me, and hurry away. A mother and her child: If that beggar approaches you, kick him.

And that is all. Words, words, words, and words. All that happens is the words stop.

technorati tags:rain, heat, caracas, kansas, tenochtitlan