And so it remains a secret reverie. It is a little jackal that sits crouched in the back of her skull, hungry and ridden with fleas, stalking the gray wet bloom of her brain and saying feedmefeedmefeedme. She coddles it, it’s true. She likes to tend to that little beast, the ridiculous festering vision that sinks its teeth into the tissue of her daydreams and refuses to let go until she believes again in its possibility—A Vargas girl! Helen! Her portrait scotch-taped to the underside of bunk beds and tucked inside miniature bibles—studied and pored over and illuminated by the light of countless matchbooks: a vision for the GI boys; a false idol here on earth. It is the end of August. It is 1943.

So when he pulled me down into the cane fields, I sunk my teeth into his neck and tasted the salt of his sweat under the high noon, in the dirt, among the wiregrass that scratched at my bare skin, and I thought, Okay, here I am. Okay, here we are. Okay, here comes the thing my mother said I must be watchful for. Here was the dark creature, coming out, breath by long breath, pushing itself out through our wet mouths and my hands that grabbed at his hair and we rolled between the rows of sugarcane that stretched high above our heads. I was sure. I was determined. I was the girl who felt the water drip down from my chin to my neck and pool in the bowls of my collarbone, the wells of lust, the thirst of fifteen and fucking, for the first time, outside in the windless heat. He moaned and whimpered like a puppy, just a kid, trying to contain the thing but not able to keep it still. I touched his earlobe, soft and still covered in fuzz, as a trio of vultures circled over the field, marking the stink of a rotten body, a cage of ribs, a feast for the taking. He came and fell on me, in a heavy fall, until my whole self was covered with the weight of his self, and the only thing uncovered was my face still staring up above me towards the spot where the cane parted and the sky loomed in a white hot burn. He sighed, because it was over, and so it was over, and it didn’t seem so hurtful or so wrong, and as I lay there thinking of the way my mother might be wrong, to listen was good, to follow the pull of the heat could be saving, a pair of faces came and crowded my view. Two men looked over us then, spit tobacco juice from the corners of their mouths. They winked and smiled their smiles of crooked teeth and long pink gums. They loosened their belts. They said, Well, well, well.

Remember the day. Your mother bent-necked over the kitchen counter, two letters side by side, one to you, one to her. A telegram, the black star, smell of collard greens and your little brothers playing in the backyard (walled). Laundry blowing on the line. Your mother’s tears dimpling the paper, making it age already, just born, just opened. The letter to you was postmarked weeks before, before he died, yet here it was, alongside the telegram with the black star saying he was dead and you were the man now and nothing would be the same.

Remember the night, early morning, that strange twinge of daylight just coming up. The fight in the sidestreet, by the cigar shop, who knows how it starts. We never know how it begins or ends or what the reasons are. Just a lot of anger you don’t know what to do with; you were avenging your father, maybe, and I wanted to help and fight for my own, because it’s crazy, but I felt like if I put up a good fight he might come home safe—and fuck the bastard, I hated him, but I wanted him to come home safe, to my mother, so I didn’t have to see her leaning over the kitchen table, so I didn’t have to look around and see my brother opening up his arms to me. We fought and glass flew and names called and we thought it was over, when a kid came flying at you, with a piece of bottle glass—shaped like an arrowhead, his own teeth gleaming with pink thin blood, running at you like a mad animal, a starved thing, and I saw you looking past me, at someone else, not seeing him, not, and I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t shout, and I jumped in front of you and felt that cool blade sink into my thigh. Then everyone seemed to disappear. I don’t remember how it ended, it just seemed like everyone fluttered away like ghosts, except for me and you, leaning against the wall, holding our wounds, blood running hotly into my hands. Strange because it didn’t hurt, and we looked at each other and laughed nervously, our first real cuts—wounds that would scar. And the sun was starting to rise, and we just leaned up against the wall. Trenches, cold eyes in the trenches, mud splattered on boots, your fathers dead eyes closed somewhere in a black bag at the bottom of a ship, and we were just two dumb kids in Philadelphia.

In the afternoon when Anse was asleep and with the last one still walking home from school, instead of going to gut and clean the fish I would walk down the road to the arboretum where I could sit quiet and hate them. It would be still at the pond, with the glass water and rabbit bones and everything slow and dead, smelling of mud and sap and the the black wet earth.

And so I took Whitfield. I was unvirgin before and unvirgin after he came down through the high brush and the cattails and said words that were nothing, empty air, loose as the water that has no shape, but he was not-Anse and so I took him. He said Love at the start and Adultery at the end, but they both meant the same thing or nothing, I did not know. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what they call it.

I would take him in the mud next to the water that lapped at our toes and find that I had forgotten my own name. And so the blood curdled and clotted, contained itself within myself and refused to flood again. I would think: I am full and empty, motionless, still as the rabbit lying there soft and quiet and beginning to liquefy underneath its fur. I was a cold jar, a hallowed tree, a body up-and-down and then flying flat sideways. I would think: I am already dead.

Then it was over. I said I won’t ever tell it. And he said I had every right to tell it, but I knew to him they were just words in the air that turned to nothing. They were wooden sounds. They were pale wisps of a thing already gone.

He comes from the city of orphans and smog, built overnight and abandoned again, its empty factories standing now like the ransacked mausoleums of ancestral giants. There are no stars. There are no freight trains for a hundred miles and so he walks along the railroad tracks just before dawn, drunk and dreaming of the desperate laughter of whores; they smell of rosewater and burnt almonds and whisper things to him he cannot understand, but the sounds themselves go on reverberating in his skull for the rest of the night: sibilant, carnal, buoyed by the inherited sorcery of women—of sirens who wrecked ships and ruined heroes and made fools of men for thousands of years—

But the sun breaks over the tops of the trees and everything resumes its ordinary color. He stops and takes a leak at the edge of the woods, thinking of Marguerite with her black hair and bitten thumbs, and how the world has lost some elemental danger. There are no goddesses to take him captive. There are only girls and women.

I dream of the swamp and its lonely ghosts. They have moonblown faces and paraffin eyes, melting and hardening and melting again, like the candles that gutter inside the heads of rotting pumpkins. Have you see them? They are thirsty. They do not levitate the way I thought they would, but drag their feet across the mud and muck and rotten leaves. There are rumors of who they were and how they died: confederate soldiers who camped out here, in their pup-tents and mildewed clothes, nursing rotten limbs and eternal erections, dying from the heat, from boredom, from the absence of all tender life—but it doesn’t really matter. Understand that they’re dead. Understand that this place is haunted.

December ??, 1937
Oaxaca

———Day: and once again, the cruel splendor of a glowering star: hot and molten, blazing across the road and through the dusty curtain into the cloistered shadows of a room where, commingled with its plangent rays, sound all of the voices of the world: boys eating chocolate skulls, the horses in the road, the carts and marketplace and, maybe, possibly, somewhere across the stony paths, the sound of ¡Feliz Navidad! and your voice, if it’s your voice, carried on the back of a mother who walks with her wares, a glass bottle, a hollow chorus. And as if this were not enough, in the afternoon, in the bleeding golden light, the sounds of slaughtering in the kitchen reverberate like so many sharpened knives through the floorboards of my room. I should wait and let them splinter the wood, drive their serrated tips, like the silver narrowed teeth of feeding sharks, through my feet and fingers and throat. I should let them sever the nerves or cut out my liver; I am already a dead Prometheus, flayed and withered on the rocks. …The gods roar in the running water of the faucets, in the liquid that drowns my fever, all sounding like thunder when I submerge my head in the porcelain bath, wrathful, grieving and echoing: you stole the fire; we want it back. The green vulture comes daily through the open window to feast on my organs. He sits perched on the washbasin. He flies at me with his claws poised to tear open my flesh and then, quietly, terribly, his cold beak buries itself inside the putrid cavity of my soul.

Do you wonder how I am? This was our room, once, if you remember, in Oaxaca, with the slaughtering sounds then muted by the grace of your body and your eyes and Oh, Yvonne. I am utterly alone. I try to write, telegrams and letters, on sheets of paper that lay like crumpled ghosts in the wastebasket, under the bedsheets, on the stained floors of the cantinas that creak and rattle under the weight of the patrons who stumble across its length. I know this is hell. I know this is hell to see your figure in the glass and to realize it is only an illusion: my hand touches nothing but the cool air and the lacquer of this bar that stretches like a thirsty unspooled tongue from one end of the room to the other. In the shadows and noise, there is a woman that weeps. Have you wept for us? Have you wept for your fool of a husband who cannot find his way without you? Come back to me, Yvonne. Y. The first letter of your name and and and, repeating in my skull, the necessary fulcrum, the only conjunction: how can we live apart?

—The woman beside me weeps for her lost son, Cristobal, shot, one year ago, in this same cantina. Is Mexico dead? Is the world asleep? I stumble out into the darkness, the somber night, a somnambulator lost in a field of shuttered stars. How much time has passed? Has it been days or weeks? Not months, I know, it is still December. The roads here are steep and crowded with houses, perpetually leaning towards each other, dreaming of touching their leaky roofs and swollen gutters, if only for a moment…

And then today the beggars touched my coatsleeve on the road. I brushed them away and wandered into a garden that wasn’t mine and fell asleep among the weeds. Something had eaten the flower-heads. I dreamed that I was already dead: my face pressed against the soil: a swarm of insects suddenly teeming over my body and feasting upon my face. The locusts took my eyes—the fine pupil and crescent of lid and quivering optic nerve. And this is how I sometimes think of myself: a corpse in a stranger’s garden, faceless, a brood of insects fastidiously consuming the carcass, piece by piece, hair by hair, while scorpions dance in a venomous parade along my torso and a river of cockroaches descend, one by one, their antennae waving, into the spirals of my ear: a stranger, an exiled corpse, dissolving into the dirt. ——I cannot sleep without seeing the volcanoes. They are opened veins spewing forth the lava of their blown cores: invisibly, furtively, for anyone who gazes at their flat black crowns imagines they are dormant. It is not so. I am aware of some imminent explosion. I am roiling glowing mass, set ablaze and burning, for you…your face. If you ever loved me, come back. I am lying in a valley, under the volcano, about to be buried and waiting to be found.

I. Anticipatoria

Imagine an island made of ash—cooled lava that yawns like a black sea before you, cracked and crevassed, hardened now but not forever. You might walk a good distance, a mile or so, looking for some sign of life, and sometimes you will find it. I saw an ancient woman with her dog once—a hideous hairless dog with yellow teeth and bugged-out eyes nervously shaking in the woman’s hands—and I asked her something (I don’t remember what), and she turned her head to face me, so slowly, quietly, that I thought whole universes might have collapsed and been born again in the time it took for her to make that subtle gesture, but of course on other planets it might have only been a single second. That is the first thing you learn about this place—time is an untamed creature. There is no formal curvature of space, no patterned fabric or universal law, and so you forget how to tell a story. Time itself is flattened, bloated, twisted, bent, stretched and swallowed, doubling and redoubling back upon itself, until the beginning seems like a dream you imagined once and the end is an invisible ghost. But the woman—the one with the dog—she said, “I can’t believe it. I forgot to bring toothpaste. I forgot those little bottles of travel shampoo.”

“But you remembered your dog,” I said.

“Yes,” she said and gripped him even tighter to his chest. The thing shivered. “But he’s leaving soon.”

In the distance you could see the blown top of the volcano, with its jagged edges like a broken tooth, beginning to belch fat clouds of steam that signaled its coming eruption. But how long did we have? I had not found my father yet. I had been told (in another life, in another galaxy it seemed to me then) he would be taken away by the molten river, dissolved, returned to the dust and the ash—and this was the waiting, the waiting, the waiting. The sickening knowing dread.

They told their wives, It’s probably nothing, as they sat at the edge of their beds just before dawn and pulled on their boots. All over town, the wives rolled over and touched the empty spaces where their husbands had lain—the sheets still warm, the pillows still dented from the backs of their oily heads. Lawrence, the wives said. Jackson, Philip, Earl. This was their calling song—the husband’s name, spoken dreamily and half-whispered, as the men went to the closets and pulled their shirts down from wire hangers. Where are you going?

The men looked back at their women—in their nightgowns and robes, nipples peeking tenderly through the fabric, eyes crusted with sleep—and they wondered what the Wheeler girl saw, if it really was a body, and if so, if it was the body of a man or a woman. It made a difference somehow. Somehow one was worse than the other. They cleared their throats. They felt protective. They turned off the lamps on their nightstands, leaned over, and kissed their wives goodbye.

She was an aerial blazing comet—hurtling with a determined velocity through the vast coldness of space, around the astral bodies and spiraling diamond galaxies, their arms outstretched, reaching, curving toward her as if to grasp her body, as if to draw her towards their centrifugal suckling mouths: the stellar nursery, the infant nebulae, the birthplace of planets and moons and other earths, less beautiful, less lonely, blooming now with the verdurous ecstasy of a newly minted soul.

She flew past the clusters of constellations, the lines between their points suddenly drawn clear in the darkness, vivid and bright and knowing—each shape becoming clearer, their flat edges suddenly bearing dimension and weight, the volume of a being. She watched the bears and centaurs and southern cross come unhinged from their fixed points and she gathered her favorite stars and stuffed them in the pocket of her dress. …Her fingers were made of a million burning suns, effervescent, tingling and pulsating, and she reached out her hand to touch the cold mud of a gray planet. She felt a shiver in her gaseous spine, sparkling, glittering, and broke apart the terrestrial plates to form separate continents of her own. Pangaea dead, her first murder, and she scraped at the raw dirt until her nails bled and the edges were formed: new shores, new oceans. A continent has no countries, she thought, peripherally, before there are people’it is all a single rolling place.

She strode easily, gracefully, down the side of her creation, feeling her feet haphazardly creating the valleys and the mountains and the soft swamps of lower ground. She cleaved handfuls of rock with her teeth and touched her finger to the shavings, alighting them and making them spin in the air, metamorphic beads: turning bright: to wood, to grass, to blood and human bone. She felt herself grow smaller. She looked over her bare shoulder, across the valley, beyond the mountain, under the twisting breaking clouds, but she was alone. She felt the earth stretch higher and higher above her, wild and unkempt, and before she lost the beautiful blazing thrust of a comet’s arm, she flung the stars in her pocket back up into the theater of space.

She felt, then, the notches of her spine click into place: hardened and connected, no longer the buoyant tissue of an astral body: she was mortal; she was a woman in a nightgown, sweating and turning in her sleep, reaching her arms out in the darkness of an unknown room, clutching the air, touching without feeling the fine gradients of moonlight.