The Transmigration of Bodies Read online

  So how come nobody ever comes to visit you? she asked.

  Everyone’s fine right where they are, he replied. And me and mezcal don’t talk shop.

  Lonely people lose their minds, she said.

  He always found it a miracle that anyone wanted his company. Women especially—men will cuddle a rock. When he first started getting laid he couldn’t quite believe that the women in his bed weren’t there by mistake. Sometimes he’d leave the room and then peer back in, and then peer in again, incredulous that a woman was actually lying there naked, waiting for him. As if. In time he found his thing: fly in like a fool to start, then turn on the silver tongue. Talk and cock, talk and cock, yessir. One time a girl confessed that Vicky, his friend the nurse, had given her a warning before she introduced them. Take one look and if you don’t like what you see don’t even say hi or you’ll end up wanting to fuck. Best thing anyone ever said about him. It didn’t matter that they never came back, or rarely. He didn’t mind being disposable.

  Three Times Blonde told him about her family. About a brother she never saw since he was a bad drunk and a hophead and when he was off his face he said awful things. About her mother, who introduced her to guys from work. Total scum. To illustrate what these people were like, honestly, she described their defining details: a lawyer from the office who would jam a napkin up his gums after eating and then put it back on the table, or this one guy who could never sit still and would readjust himself every other second saying, I swear, my balls are just too damn big.

  Can you imagine? she asked. I mean these people. Honestly.

  His type of people. Those were his kind, the kind he rubbed shoulders with, did deals with every day, the nous of his entre nous, his tribe.

  Which is why it’s so wondrous, he thought, why it’s so weird, to be this close to her when we’re from such different dirt. As Three Times Blonde spoke the whole house echoed in the absence of noise from outside, and for a minute he felt that now, really, all they had was time, and he got a good kind of creeps and was flooded with a patience he didn’t know he possessed. But then she started talking about her boyfriend, as if he was different from all the others, If only you knew him. And using a new sound as an excuse he said Be right back, and went out into the hall.

  He opened the door. There stood the anemic student, hunched, pale, dank hair dripping down his forehead like dirty bathwater. No doubt the guy hadn’t ventured out in days and the smell of quesadillas had gotten to him. For a second he considered saying Come on in, compadre, fix you something right up. If he’d been another class of man or arrived at another class of time he would have, but all he said was Go home, you’ll catch cold. He closed the door and went back to Three Times Blonde. Ha.

  Three Times Blonde had put out a couple scented candles and was kicking it in the purple den. He poured her a second mezcal and they toasted, did it right, eyes on the shot glass—none of this staring into one another’s eyes as if already wounded—and he downed it in one. Mezcal, so good so true. Distilled filth to filter his filth inside. He slammed the glass on the table and poured a third. Shots made him a better man: his teeth whitened, his wit quickened, his stiff hair stayed kempt and acted like it gave a shit. She didn’t need it, of course, she was rosy-cheeked and graceful sans hoodwinkery, but she too downed hers in one. I always assumed mezcal was slimy since they make it with dead worms, she said. And him: No, the worm is what gives it life.

  Like the nose on a u, she said.

  Mmm?

  You know how it has those two dots when it really sounds like u?

  Dieresis.

  The nose on a u. When it’s with a q the u doesn’t breathe, only when it’s far from q, and it doesn’t need a nose there. But I always put one on anyway.

  She traced the letter in the air with one finger and dotted it.

  Like that.

  He poured her one more and this time they did look into each other’s eyes before down-the-hatching. She glistened like a wet street. This might be the last woman I’m ever with in my life, he said to himself. He said that every time because, like all men, he couldn’t get enough, and because, like all men, he was convinced he deserved to get laid one more time before he died.

  A flat silence slipped in from outside, the hours on the street withering in abandonment, while those in the house were watered in mezcal. But the mezcal was running low.

  He had an emergency bottle at home. But what if the anemic student was there, curled up by the door waiting for them to toss him a tortilla. He was determined to hold out until the bastard had slunk back to his doghouse.

  Sometimes I go outside in the middle of the night, said Three Times Blonde. If there’s not much light you can see the stars. No way we can do that now.

  He looked up a lot too, nights when he was still on the grind at dawn and the streets were deserted. But he kept that quiet, she’d never buy it.

  So you were telling me about Prince Charming, he said; and she said Foo don’t be mean.

  He’s very refined, she said. This is my first boyfriend, my first really real one.

  Then she started saying she’d met him at a party, fighting to defend the honor of a girl being bothered by two drunks and she fell head over heels just like that; okay, she admitted, he’s a bit cocky, and yeah he sometimes raises his voice, and sure he’s insanely jealous and sometimes drinks a lot and fusses too much over Bronco—

  Who’s Bronco?

  His car, silly.

  He named his car?

  Yeah, see he takes such good care of it. But when it’s just the two of us alone together he is so sweet, if you could only see him.

  Good grief. Little slickster, alias Angelface.

  Something in the air swished a candle, flicking light onto Three Times Blonde’s shoulder and suddenly he envisioned her unwrapped. Without thinking his hand reached out and very gently squeezed.

  We went to the beach last week, she said, looking at him like he wasn’t touching her.

  With the other hand he turned her slightly and began, ever so softly, to squeeze more as her skin surrendered.

  Mmm, that feels nice, she said. Keep doing that.

  He kept doing it, inwardly faster and outwardly keener, with a tremble he fought by staring only at his next little crest of flesh. And then he began with his mouth. Just peeling off the wrapper and popping each little crest into his mouth. She cocked her head slightly to glance from the corner of her eye and said You are insane, you know that? He said Nnnf and kept at it.

  When he got to her shoulder blade he came upon a scar like a line upturned at the ends, deep. He traced it with one finger.

  How’d you get that?

  My fucking deranged brother. When we were kids one day he lost his shit and tried to knife me with a spoon.

  A spoon?

  I’m telling you he’s deranged.

  He stopped touching the scar carefully, as tho afraid it might come off, and kissed it. She arched her back. He pulled down one spaghetti strap but before peeling off the rest traced his fingertips along the sierra of her spine. No longer leaning over to squeeze small folds of her, he slid across as if his arms were too short and he had to scoot right up to reach. As he kneaded another knot, almost to the edge of her back, he lowered the other hand to her hip and pulled her to him gently. For the first time she tensed.

  You and me don’t even know each other.

  He stopped moving his hands but didn’t take them off or release the pressure on her hip.

  That’s the best part, he said.

  And even before he said what he said next, he could tell the bastard was back. Bastard alias the Romantic.

  It’s the best part, because affection is exactly what we need. Can you imagine what it would be like if instead of killing we cuddled? You seen how many people are out there hurting each other without even knowing who they’re shooting at?

  He believed that, he really did, and yet he was still a bastard because he’d said it like a man paying off the
popo to disappear a ticket. Obviously he couldn’t let this chance slip by. But still: bastard.

  Three Times Blonde turned to look at him like he’d said something unforgivable. She stared tremulously a couple of seconds, then pulled him in by the neck and kissed him, sweeping her tongue across his as if surveying a new possession, marking more than kissing him, and he, already overexcited, had no idea what to do, but his left hand, which had twisted with her waist, and his right hand, which had landed on her belly, lent him the will that had wavered. He slipped his hands beneath her top and uncovered her breasts. They weren’t like he’d imagined them, with his hands and his head, so many times: they’re never the way you imagine them, they were smaller and pointier and one was slightly inverted as tho ordering him to suck it out, and as he obeyed he was shocked that Three Times Blonde started taking off his shirt, that she wanted it too.

  He frenzied from breast to breast, undone by the inability to tongue them both at the same time. He licked his way down the almost-invisible trail of three-times-blonde peach fuzz that crept into her pants, which he unbuttoned, but before pulling them off he slipped a hand through her thong to finger her curls. He stood, fearful in that half-second she’d be overcome with ambivalence as he took off his own pants, but she was already stroking his stomach with the tip of one toe. He dropped everything but his unsexy underwear, knelt, and as he started to tug her panties aside heard Three Times Blonde ask What’s my name?

  He raised his head, racing breakneck through half-a-dozen idiotic replies.

  Like you know mine.

  That’s not the same, you swine.

  He’d had the good sense not to stop moving his fingers for the duration of that exchange and by the end Three Times Blonde had stopped worrying about names and he let his tongue revel the way a tongue can only revel when nobody’s asking it for words. As soon as he sensed he didn’t need further permission he pulled off her panties and got naked and pulled her to him by the hips but then she said Where’s the condom?

  Motherfuck the condom. He’d asked himself the same thing and had answered himself Don’t fuckin worry about it right now.

  He put his pants back on, said Don’t move.

  He stepped into the hall barefoot. The anemic student was nowhere to be seen.

  He ran into his apartment reciting the prayer of the overheated horndog:

  Oh please, oh please, oh please

  May he, the drunken me

  May he, the dumbfuck me

  May he, the me who never ever ever knows where shit is

  May he have saved one

  Just one

  Lubricated or corrugated

  Colored or flavored

  Magnum or tight-fit

  Oh please

  Holy Saint of horndogs

  Grant me just one condom

  But he knew there were none. He’d used that prayer the last time, months ago, and managed to unearth one under the bed, gleaming and glorious as a national hero. The very last one. This was not a time for heroes or miracles. Fear was what had granted him these hours of intimacy but now it was showing its virulent side. Go on, off to the shop, ladykiller.

  Across the street was an old-school pharmacy run by little old men who still wrapped condoms and sanitary napkins in brown paper so the customer need not feel self-conscious on the way out, but in the mental photo he’d taken that morning the metal awning was down. He triangulated the hood in his head, locating shops and less-far pharmacies and said to himself, Be right back, no big deal. He walked out of his place and before walking back into Three Times Blonde’s saw the anemic student at the end of the hall, staring at him, fiery-eyed, glassy, on his way out the door.

  Three Times Blonde was still splayed across the love seat, transfixed by the shadows cast by the candle. He told her what he’d told himself:

  Be right back, there’s a pharmacy close by.

  She sat straight up on the couch.

  No no no, how could you leave with that thing out there, it’s not like we’re that desperate.

  Evidently she knew nothing about him. In other circumstances he wouldn’t have listened, but the current circumstance, the one that concerned him, wasn’t the epidemic so much as Three Times Blonde herself, naked before him, adamant, insisting Come. That was all. No pharmacies and no condoms. Locked up with a woman who was calling him.

  Like a wrestler, he said to himself, I surrender. He approached and attacked her tongue as he once more undressed and then she said We can’t get comfy out here and led him into the bedroom where at first she just let him adore her unwrapped three-times-very-taut skin and run his lips across it and his fingers inside it, but then she put her mouth to his cock, no talk; they rolled around clutching bony and fleshy backs, round and skinny buttocks, until there in the center of it all he felt her so wet and so ready and so present that he just slid inside. It was worth it, no matter the price, just to feel her drawing his cock in from the deepest part of her body, even if only for an instant. He did it fast but in that time a million epidemics came and went, through a million deserted cities in which the only sounds were deep sighs, and then she, once more, looked at him like he’d done something unforgiveable, a thing that for one very long minute he did not want to end: she trapped him with the lips of her sex, with her legs, with her fingernails, and then said, in a steady but almost inaudible voice, Off.

  He pulled out and slumped beside her. He thought she’d kick him out and told himself the same thing he’d told himself so many times in so many situations: All good things are but a part of something terrible. But instead of shouting at him she reached out a hand and took hold of his cock, squeezing and stroking steadily until he came, tho he begged Wait wait wait, stop, because he had his hopes set on who knows what.

  He dreamed. Among the succession of images in his dream, a replay of his half-assed hungover day, was one of a black dog who turned up often; this time the black dog, shaggy and wet, was shaking himself energetically, whipping out shards of water like little sliced-up lakes, and with each sliver that flew off he felt himself—since the dog was also him—grow lighter, lighter, lighter, lighter, until he awoke so light he could touch the ceiling.

  She was still there beside him. Not once in the night had he lost awareness that she was there. Not when he was an animal shooting out shards of water, not in the flickering light at the end of the hallway, not in the face of the anemic student staring at him one last time before he left, had he ever stopped knowing she was there, spooning him. Yet he told himself anyway: there they were, the two of them, at the same lock-in under the same roof.

  He started stroking her from curve to curve. He heard the fridge start up behind the door and panicked. The power had come back on and he feared she might flip the lights and see him, squalid, ruining her mattress the way he ruined suits, so when he felt her start to stir he said Shh shh shh and slipped a gentle hand between her thighs to rouse her sex softly, awaken it gently. He moved his hand ever so lightly and as he did she moaned, and he moved a little more and felt his sorrow start to slip away and himself finally defeat what his roughneck cousins used to say to one another if they saw a drop-dead gorgeous girl: Ain’t nothin the likes of you could do with the likes of that.

  He felt her body contract and release and then languish again, but awake now.

  Bet you can’t do that, she said after a minute.

  What?

  See colors like I do. When I was a girl it was just bright lights but now I see colored lights.

  What colors did you see just now?

  I don’t know. They were pastel. When they go out I forget.

  This was exactly the way he wanted everything to stay. Let them bury me, he said to himself, let them scatter dirt on me, mouth wide open, snuggled up just like this. Let them bury me. Let them burn me and turn me, mark me and merk me. They can deep-six me if they want, but let everything stay like this.

  Suddenly, like an involuntary twitch: guilt.

  I meant what
I said yesterday, he declared. I said it to sway you but I meant what I said.

  She said nothing.

  You mad?

  That stuff about how great it’d be if the world was all loved up?

  Yes.

  Pfft, I knew that. What, you think I’m stupid? That’s just a way to flirt, right? Why bring it up now? Silly.

  Why indeed. She was right.

  It’s just habit, tricks of the trade, but I didn’t want it to be like that with you. You know what I do?

  Yes.

  He sat up, and it was he who turned on the little bedside lamp to look at her.

  You do? For real?

  Of course. You’re a fixer. Take care of stuff under the table at the courts.

  He froze. For her to call him that, after all those kisses.

  One time I heard la Ñora say The landlord told me not to bother the guy in 3 if he’s late with the rent—that man knows a lot of people and he doesn’t want any trouble.

  He said nothing, but the silence was interrupted by his phone. He decided to answer. Like a man who goes to the john to sidestep the bill.

  He picked up and said Yeah. No one spoke but he knew the half-lung wheezy sonofabitch on the other end of the line, and knew if he was calling now, with the city shut down the way it was, that he was needed and couldn’t say no.

  Who’s this? the man asked, like he didn’t know what number he’d just dialed.

  Who do you think, replied the Redeemer. It’s me.

  ‌2

  Animals. They behave like animals, the Redeemer thought, watching a line of cats prowl the ledges along the block, and a small happy dogpack trot down the center of the street; they wagged their tails and cocked their ears, sneezed loudly, and when a car came along they parted with careful coordination before chasing it a few feet, barking at the tires. They’re more clever when there’s nothing in the way, he thought. The air seemed almost insubordinate with odors: because there was no smoke, the scent of jacaranda could be clearly discerned among the miasmas that had been blown uphill like never before, in the tropical storm that had skewiffed the wind like never before—and so the smells, rather than fading, fermented.