Walter’s friends were the only people who ever came by.
After five months of work, my brother bought himself a PlayStation and every weekend was a carnival: friends, PlayStation, pizza. We had a TV, but our cable had been cut and we never hooked it up again, so it was only good for gaming.
The boys were interested in one thing: soccer. When there was a game on, they went to Hernán’s and I was left on my own. Hernán was the only friend of my brother’s who paid any attention to me. He started bringing me music, knockoff CDs that we played on the console. I said “hey” and “thank you” and not much else, and he, a couple of times, came out with: “you’re never alone when you’ve got music.”
I had trouble sleeping. I nodded off a bunch of times a day and then, at night, it was all: eyes wide open, twisting, turning, pondering.
I started taking beers from the fridge, cracking them open and drinking them. I had kept my old man’s bottle opener—the only thing of his I had left—and was always carrying it around in some pocket. Beer was like a blanket hug that covered me from top to bottom, my head most of all.
I only ever saw my old man in dreams. After waking up and not getting back to sleep, I’d play the music Hernán had left me until the very end. I had a stack of twelve CDs. Half of them read “compilation” and had a picture on the cover of some chick in a thong. Those ones, I stared at. The others, I popped into the PlayStation. I liked them better. When the beer ran out, the music kept on playing, and I drifted off.
Walter didn’t notice ’cause I never drank with him and his friends. But one day he found me asleep with two empty bottles lying on their sides at the foot of the sofa. He wasn’t mad.
“I’ve been leaving you on your own,” he said, sitting down next to me.
My head hurt like next-level hell.
When he woke me up, I still felt queasy and weighed each step between me and the bathroom against the need to puke, which throttled my stomach.
We sat there, chatting a while. He told me what he’d been up to that night and I felt like I had nothing to share. But I liked that Walter was there with me.
I didn’t have family, I had Walter.
We sat like that on the sofa for a couple of hours, till we heard clapping. Somebody was calling us from behind the property gate. We couldn’t see much, so we both went out. It’d been a long time since I’d walked outside with no shoes on. I felt the dew and the chilly earth on my feet, and it did me more good than splashing my face with water a thousand times.
When we got near her, the woman who’d clapped her hands spoke:
“I’ve come to ask a favor.”
My brother and I made eye contact and my head split again, as though her voice were another swig of booze. Neither of us moved and the woman didn’t look like she wanted to leave. She was dressed in elegant clothes.
“Open up,” I told Walter, and my brother undid the lock.
“What sort of favor?” I asked the woman when she came through.
“Help. I need your help.”
We went inside. The house was a dump, dingy like an animal’s lair. But the woman seemed to have eyes only for me. She sat down without a word. She waited, as though being there, beside us, were an important part of what she had come to do.
When my brother went to the kitchen to put the kettle on for mate, she asked:
“Do you have vision?”
She said it quietly, like a secret.
“No.”
“Don’t lie to me. Do you have vision?!”
Thick bitch, I thought. Though I didn’t like it, her question forced me to take a hard look at myself. I’d never thought of what I did as vision. Vision was a strange thing, like believing I could guess the winning bet. Which had nothing to do with closing your eyes and being faced with a naked body on the earth.
“No. I used to, but not anymore.”
“Did you try just now?”
Walter had come back, so I didn’t answer. How did she know about us? The woman wouldn’t shut up, though. She said she needed our help, that she’d heard there was someone here, in this house, who could see, that she had money and was willing to shell out a tidy sum.
“We don’t need your money,” I said.
“But I need you.”
Hernán walked in, shoving the door open. We hadn’t put the lock back on the gate and he’d let himself through. He’d brought a new CD. I was scared he might hear the woman say the thing about sight.
I was frozen in place. Walter sent her packing, as though he felt the same way.
Before she left, the woman knelt down, righted the two bottles by the sofa, and said:
“You drink this junk for kicks. Won’t you eat earth ’cause somebody needs it?”
I felt like beating the shit out of her but stayed right where I was. I couldn’t even look at Hernán. As I watched the woman walk across the yard, I took a deep breath and slowly let it all out, till I was empty. Only when Walter locked the gate did I breathe.
Hernán had put a CD in the PlayStation. The music was getting started.
I bet she waited for Walter to leave. Alone, lips sealed. Not moving the slightest. A woman looking for her son can turn invisible, like a cat stalking a pigeon.
I got it, she was looking for somebody.
I’d started noticing a special trait in people who were looking for someone, a mark near the eyes, the mouth, a mixture of pain, anger, strength, and expectation made flesh. A thing broken, possessed by the person who wasn’t coming back.
I opened the door and let the woman in. She sat opposite me. She set a can down on the table and stared. Didn’t even blink. What was it? Money? Chocolate? Fancy folk can do that, I thought, stuff a bunch of chocolate and cash in a can and set it right in front of you. So you’ll say yes, even if you don’t want to.
I didn’t like her.
She started talking. For her husband, she said, it was always nothing: sometimes kids fall behind, sometimes kids disappear. It had been like that in the past, when Ian was two years old and still couldn’t walk, and it was like that now, when he was sixteen and hadn’t come home.
I didn’t want to listen, not for all the chocolate in the world. But she went on: that his absence was killing her, that her body hurt more now than when she’d given birth to him.
“Ian,” she said. “My son. He never hurt a soul, you know. He couldn’t.”
Scared she’d never shut up, I cut in.
“What’s in the can?”
“Earth.”
I didn’t want to, but the woman opened the can and left it there, and the memory of earth turned to water in my mouth. Dark earth shone inside and some part of me responded without words.
I didn’t want to, but my body did. I touched the dirt like it meant everything. I pulled it toward me without lifting it from the table.
“Turn around,” I said. “You can’t watch.”
She didn’t much like that. She took her time, mulled it over, then got up and turned her chair to face the other way. She didn’t try to steal a look.
I grabbed some earth from the can and bit by bit stuffed it in my mouth.
The house grew dark, like it’d been covered in a black sheet. I had the urge to switch on the light. To keep the night, which the earth had unfurled around us, from swallowing us up. Everything was so dark, so like a deep well untouched by the sun, no good could come of it. When I was about to stop, to quit out of fear and open my eyes, the darkness retreated, as if somebody had lit some candles, one by one. My eyes got used to seeing again.