Remembering a Musical Place

The whole plaza seems to be made of marble. The ground is tiled with marble, the same marble that the building that surrounds two sides is made of. And the huge, quaint library seems to be made, at least in part, of the same thing. Its windows are supposedly made of mica so that enough light gets in but you can't see the interior from the outside. And the fourth side is just the road that passes by.

When I stand in the middle of the plaza I usually feel differently depending on where I am facing and when I am there. Usually there are lots of students streaming through. The building that takes up two sides has the dining hall for the first year students. If I am facing that building I can see the memorial to the fallen soldiers from this university who sacrificed their lives during the first World War. And a day like today, when it is very cold, a Sunday when most students are studying in the plethora of locales for the studious minds here, I find myself alone. Facing this building that also holds many concerts, I feel awed.

Or I should.

But I am distracted. In the center, where I am standing, is a semicircular bench, also made of marble, but the actual seat is made of a black marble, unlike the ivory type that engulfs you when you are here. It's winter so I imagine the bench is extremely cold, given, especially, that yesterday was the coldest day this year. But in my mind I remember a warmer day. It was a warmer evening, actually. It was summer, nearly two years ago. And there were people, and it wasn't quiet. There was music and these people, all of whom I knew, were dancing under the stars, in front of the huge stone tributes to the fallen whose names none of us would recognize, and that most of us didn't care. It was in this somber setting that lively music, music of love and disappointment, music of simplified courtship, was playing while the people, we, were dancing a dance of simplified courtship, pretend courtship. The dance of tango. The one where you improvise to the music and to your own brew of seduction, for a few minutes. And while couples were in their embraces, trying to figure out how to connect to the dance and to each other, and while some others were just sitting down, watching, two people were sitting somewhere else, not at the bench, but still facing the circle of people dancing. They were sitting on these steps that form small concentric circles in which the center was an obelisk, probably also a tribute to the fallen. The steps are of the same ivory marble, while the obelisk is of metal cast in the same traditional manner compatible with the rest of the surroundings, in stark contrast to the sculpture on the other side of the inner circle, behind the dancers, which was a huge, modernist jumble of iron painted in red. I was standing by that red jumble of modernism whose abstract meaning always eluded me, but I was standing by that that sculpture, observing the two sitting on the steps of conservative ideas directly across from me.

They weren't looking at each other; they were looking at the dancers, but surely, they were just blankly staring. They were having a conversation, but with them, I can never be sure what their real emotions were. He was always stoic when talking to her ever since their overdramatic breakup more than a year ago. He was still suffering, from what I have gathered over the times. But you couldn't see any sign of suffering on his face that night if you were seeking the familiar demeanor of a suffering man. He wasn't smiling, that was for sure. She wasn't smiling either, but she maintained her cool demeanor. She had an airiness not only in her facial expression but also in her gestures, in her posture, and, if she were walking, in her gait. She was very thin but not sickly so, and most men who pass by her turn to look at her once more, affected not so much by a raw beauty but rather more by this airiness, this dame-like confidence, in her movements, in the way she absorbed her surroundings. He, on the other hand, betrayed nothing, neither incompetence and ignorance nor mastery and understanding of his surroundings. And when I saw them sitting together, with a distance large enough to reflect a cooled relationship, I couldn't help noticing how different they were and wondered how they could have been together for more than a year. His lips moved to utter his words, but his facial muscles, like the muscles of his limbs and torso, didn't move at all. I wondered if he was even breathing. He never took his eyes off the dancers, didn't attempt to look at her, even to turn his body towards her. They have established an equilibrium where they didn't have to feel rude to each other but not any closer than whatever wall was standing between them.

She was much more gesticulating. Though her facial expression didn't tell me what they could have been talking about, it was animate. Her right hand was holding her keychain, and she was, from time to time, twirling it. The other arm she would from time to time move to a different position. And she would change the weight from one bent knee to another. At some point she rested her chin on her arms, which were crossed over her bent knees, as she listened to what he was saying. Or I assumed she was listening. But like him, she kept her eyes on the dancers. And like him, I would guess, she wasn't really paying attention to the dance.

The dance was what brought them together the first place. More than two years ago when she started it and he was happy to teach her, help her, and by doing so establishing a relationship with her that would raise edifices of hopes over that year. And now those edifices have crumbled on their own weights over the basis of the simplified, pretend love of tango, a music that professes its own cruelty just because that was how love was, especially when simplified, diluted, and abstracted from reality. And if I were them, either one of them, especially her, as I watched the dancers, I surely hope none of them would try to build similar edifices over such delusional feelings from a music that's as beautiful and cruel as any man would find the most elusive and beautiful woman. Every song that was being played that moment expressed this cruelty, as if responding to the words they probably weren't expressing to each other, for those words represented sentiments long lost, long buried, but, at least to him, unforgotten. It was the sentiment buried with those words that fixed his face, his body, like formaldehyde on a dead soul in a jar.

His eyes didn't see her, but he could smell her. It must have been painfully familiar even a year later. He could hear her voice, which also carried that airiness, the charm in her whole body, and that must have stung him ever more, brewing ever greater anger and frustration that was the formaldehyde.

I finally walked over, with a smile, pretending that I wasn't affected by the tension so obviously engulfing them as if they were sitting in molasses. I greeted her, although we were more than just friends. And I asked if she wanted to dance.

Yes, she and I also met in the music that had hurt him.

He didn't look at me. His pause in speaking was the only acknowledgment that I had presented myself, but his muscles, now including the lips, remained stiff. Until, of course, when I invited her to dance. He shook his head, slightly but noticeably, while she explained to me why she couldn't dance with those shoes she had on. I accepted her rejection gracefully, but my heart was pounding because of him. I was, in retrospect, afraid of him, afraid of the effect of my presence on him. I excused myself, but was so nervous that I don't think I remembered to excuse myself to him.

I'd later find out from her what they were talking about. She and I would talk more about him. But now, being in the same place, this same, haughty plaza of conservatism punctured only by this red jumble to my right, I recall that summer night. I recall the music, the lyrics, the couples dancing, and how all that seemed centered around these two estranged human beings sitting on the steps to commemorate the dead who have suffered infinitely greater anguish and whose loved ones suffered in equal measure.

The chilly wind picks up a bit, though here, protected in three sides by ominous structures, such wind is uncommon. I am going to leave this place, leave the memories, for now. Leave the couples dancing but would separate as soon as the music stopped. The dancers would regroup into different couples, just as I had regrouped with her at some point, after which I would suffer the same fate he did. Except that she and I would not have the same piece of memory as he did with her, sitting there, stoically, among the spirits that we refuse to forget, even when we want to.

You and Me, a Conversation

His smile was genuine. She could see that, finally.

"So what are you doing tomorrow night?" he asked.

"Actually, I am free then," she said, trailing off a little with the last word.

He hunches a little, obviously nervous. Why? She wondered. Probably because he wasn't expecting that she would say that, but rather some game about how busy she was, testing how earnest he was. Maybe. Maybe not. There could actually be some honest women in the world. People who didn't play games. He wasn't sure if he was one of them.

Was he?

The thought that she was eager somehow shook him a little. She actually would want, intended, to spend some time with him, if that was where he was getting at.

Was it?

He took a quick look at her. She was looking at him, but took her gaze off as soon as he looked at her. She looked into the distance a bit and then into her glass of martini.

"Can I take you to that little Spanish restaurant just two blocks down, you know which one, right?" he wanted to ask. It's been rehearsed in his mind many times for many different occasions and many different women. It had been used once, and only once, and it didn't work. So even though he would very much like to take a woman he liked to that Spanish restaurant down two blocks, he didn't dare to.

But instead, "They have decent drinks here. You wanna meet here again tomorrow?"

He felt ashamed, a coward who couldn't say what he really wanted to say, or at least had rehearsed to say what he had convinced himself, somehow, was the right thing to say.

She looked at him, thereby startling him and making him focus his attention at the glass of beer. She said, "Sure." Her eyes got noticeably larger, which encouraged him. He smiled. Then he remembered to breathe, finally. There shouldn't be any shame in breathing, he always thought, but somehow his body forgets very often to take in some good chunk of that free oxygen in the air.

"How about 9PM?"

A little late, no? Could that be interpreted as his wanting something.

His heart sank when he saw her smiles fade, confirming his fear that she was suspecting something. He wanted to say something, and she could see it, but she got before him, "I would love to hang out all night with you, but I have to be home by 10 at the latest."

She was a woman in her early 30s, can't be more than 35, he thought. His face had bewilderment written all over it. She could see it, obviously. And she became more embarrassed, even awkward. She couldn't look at him with a straight eye. He, feeling more confident seeing her in such sorry state, thought that he should be gentleman-like and loosen up the atmosphere of this strange interaction called courtship. "So do you turn into a pumpkin at 10?" he asked, smiling. She looked at him and, apparently affected by the quip, smiled a little. But that resurgent expression was short-lived. She frowned a little, moved closer to the man, her body contorted slightly, and said, "No. I have to be back for my son; his babysitter wouldn't stay beyond 10...."

Her face was almost apologetic. Her head lowered a little, as if awaiting for yet another verdict. He, on the other hand, was shocked. She suddenly looked different. Her blond hair suddenly seemed a little grayer, her rosy cheeks seemed a bit paler, and when she raised her head, as if in some defiance, and showed her eyes again, they looked, this time, to have born new wrinkles. Her beautiful dress now seemed to be wrapping around the trunk of a tree, having born so many years of hardship.

His heart was racing to the rhythm of his guilt and regrets. And the loudest voice in his head was calling for an escape route.

"Baggage, lots of baggage, not just the kid, but her, like the bags that have just appeared under her eyes," the chorus was singing.

But he was a good actor, or so he thought, and he said, while fingering up and down the cold glass of beer, "That's cute! A babysitter!" He didn't want to say too much. He learned that saying too much reveals the insincerity of a person's true thoughts. He waited for her to smile too, to allow her some room of possible relief. He then asked, "How about 7?"

Her eyes, to his surprise, didn't get bigger, there wasn't a renaissance of delight in her. He knew now why she was happy to be with him, to oblige his wishes that didn't interfere with her plans with that other man in her life. Suddenly she seemed desperate. His heart sank further.

She said, smiling, but not so obviously sincere, "That sounds good. Here, right?"

"Yes,here."

Waiting another five seconds to allow for collecting thoughts and rein in emotions, but not too long lest awkwardness could quickly envelop them, he got up, gave her a kiss goodbye on the cheeks, and left with a smile. He was careful not to leave with any gait of hurry, but the loudest voice in his heart wanted him to be out of that woman's claws as soon as possible. Guilt would soon take over as the loudest voice, but, he knew, that would not last for too long.

Coldest Night

He stopped and the sound of the footsteps stopped too. Obviously, it was his own. Besides the bicycle that quietly zoomed past him with its blinking rear red light, there wasn't anyone else on the street so far. He noticed, again, that when he breathed in, slowly, the insides of his nostrils contracted to the inflow of the frigid air and his nostril hair huddle up like penguins in that movie he had seen.

That was a while ago. Well, a few years ago. He watched it alone, in his room, which was all quiet like this street except during the time he was watching the documentary. He inspected his surroundings. It was downtown on a Saturday night. The cold was very distracting, yanking his exposed ears, his toes despite the thick boots, his nose, and even his eyes. All held prisoner in the attention of the coldest night of the year, yet. He didn't wear a hat. He was vain, too vain to wear a silly hat over his well-styled hair.

He remembered being called vain, and admitting being vain. There was a woman involved. Suddenly, for a moment, the cold air wasn't that cold in comparison.

Feeling every little muscle in his feet moving, as if watching the little gears of an intricate machine turning and affecting one another, he resumed his walking. And no sooner did his second foot started pushing his bundled up body forward did the air respond with a howling wind that brought the temperature down instantly even more. He stopped and wondered if he should take a different route, away from the wind tunnel in the middle of downtown. Perhaps he should just go back.

But back where? To the familiar? To that same place where he watched the penguins on a 2-D screen trying to survive Antarctica? Where no one was waiting for him. Where he was supposed to feel good about being alone, about being independent, unhindered, unchained. He would pay for his vanity and go on walking.

He had walked this route many times. But tonight was different. He had just had a very short haircut and it was the coldest night of the year, so far. The wind was picking up. But he wouldn't die. He wasn't a penguin in the Antarctic. So he kept on going. Moving into the painful but still less painful than the familiar. Away from down the street whence he came. Even though he had walked this route so many times, tonight it felt very long. He felt almost as if he wouldn't make it. The big toes were the first of their little platoons to feel the fiery fury of the frigid wind. He had to tuck in his already gloved hands in his pocket. His eyes started tearing as the winds irritated it with unfamiliar dryness. And his legs felt bare in icy water despite the thick pants. And by the time he had crossed through the wind tunnel, his torso, so well bundled, had started tasting the sinister smiles of the sobering wind.

At the corner a woman turns and walked his way. She seemed absorbed in her thoughts. She was beautiful, he noted. Then, having passed her, he realized he was obsessed with observing and judging the physical features of women. And guilt distracted him momentarily from the merciless cold. The street was lit but most buildings, being classroom buildings, were dark. Once again, he was alone with his thoughts, interrupted sporadically by the night squalls. He thought a bit more about the woman who had passed him just now. He didn't really get a good look at her face. She simply left him with the impression that she was beautiful. But in his mind, he had pasted a face on her. The face of some woman. The one whose little hair clip he had by accident found in the backseat of his car.

What was it doing there?

He had to climb many mountains of memories in vain to recall how it could have landed there. But there was no mistake about it; it was hers. It was tiny, of dark brown color, not uniform. One of the teeth was missing. She had a lot of them like that, with at least one missing tooth. In passing through all those mountains of memories he remembered her, how she put them on, even where she had kept a whole box of them in which drawer in which room of her apartment. The pang of this remembrance, the pang of the ending, the pang of longing, all came in harsh, frequent assaults as he lumbered through those mountains only seeking the moment when she could have left that little clip behind, there, in that crack on the right passenger seat in the back. He found it when he was retrieving the groceries he had placed in the back after today's shopping trip.

That woman who had just passed him probably didn't have any of those clips. But as he crossed the street he recalled all these moments surrounding the different clips she had. In the darkness, consumed by his own deepening thoughts, he found everything to look the same, the buildings, the trees, the vehicles parked on the curb, even though he had seen every building and tree and knew how different they were from one another. But tonight, distracted by his thoughts, his emotions, and by the nearly unbearable cold, he felt he was walking in a dream where nothing was familiar but neither was it important. His nostrils continued to contract, with its hairs huddling at each inhale. His ears felt the sting at the sound of every howl. He squeezes his shoulders together a little more, to warm himself up in his already thick bundle.

And he stopped, for a moment. He was almost there, at the library. Farthest point he could get away without freezing his toes off. And as he looked around his surroundings and savoring his desolation, he took off his right glove, and put his cold fingers on his even colder right cheek. And his right cheek noticed his fingers too. It was as if two people suddenly realized each other's existence even though they had been walking their whole lives together. And as his freezing fingers glide with utter anguish along an imaginary path on his right cheek, he found himself suddenly as a human being in this coldest night on a deserted street frequented, tonight, only by the winds.

Rumble in the Kitchen

I have never seen him comb or brush his hair, all my life. I don't remember the time when he had a full set of hair. Now, in the kitchen, he had enough to show what little pride he carried in life. Most of it was gray and white. Almost like a tumbleweed, through which you could see the color of his scalp. He has accumulated vast amount of wrinkles recently, but I suppose by "recently" I meant the little I've seen him. And after each time I saw him there seemed more.

Food was ready. He cooked most of it. But he wasn't with us. He was in the kitchen, busy washing utensils used for the cooking. He had a rag, not a sponge, and I am not sure where he got that rag from, but I suppose it was clean. He squeezed a bead of dish washing liquid in it and started foaming the spatula he used for stir frying the bok choy. He rinsed off the foam and proceeded to the next item, two bowls where he put the raw meat and some scallions earlier. He never washed with gloves; to suggest it would have caused some confusion on his face. He, in fact, never wore gloves, not for cleaning, and not against the harsh wintry winds. If you haven't worn gloves most of your life, it would feel strange to start now. His fingers, however, were all cracked; no amount of any type and of any cost of cream could heal them. They were the constant victims of the winter, not only its harsh winds but also the cruel dry air. I have never opened his palm and looked at it, but I imagine they are full of cracks and lines that told the stories of his life. I have asked him about his hands, and he responded in an as-matter-of-fact manner that they were what they were. And in a way, they've always gotten the job done, whatever the toil was.

Now it was an easy job. Just the routine washing of the dishes before eating dinner, my parents' only daily meal together. They wouldn't sit at the dinner table, normally, but rather eat in front of the TV, watching satellite broadcast Chinese shows. They would dump all their food into a big bowl of rice and eat from there. Very practical. The formalities of eating had eroded and eventually disappeared with their simple and lonesome lives. When there were no guests, no relatives, and, of course, no children to be around on a regular basis, there was no need for tradition, and the value of food had shed off its complicated rituals and boiled down, to to speak, to a process of obtaining it, cooking it, and ingesting it, each in its own place, if that's a ritual. It is a ritual, it seemed, however, to wash whatever dirty dishes and utensils lying around. To forgo this and do it afterwards was to break a habit, not so much a tradition, that was just as strong as any ritual. So when I asked him to come and join us, since their son was here, at the dining table, he had refused many times. He couldn't just stop. He had to now attend to the big wok where most of the food was made. He grabbed each side with a hand and lifted the wok, which already had water in it, soaking up all the residue for easier cleaning, and turning to the right where the sink was, he poured the water out gently, careful not to let it spill out onto the little counter space there was between the sink and the stove top. And using a harsh scrub without any soap or detergents he scrubbed off all the pieces of food and films of oil off, and then, having put the scrub back in its proper place next to the faucet, he grabbed that rag and rinsed off the soap before superficially washing off any remaining item on the wok. It was important, he had told me when I was a kid, to not wash the wok with soap, as it was of steel and so could rust.

Shaking off the last beads of water from the wok, he wiped it with a dry rag hanging just behind the faucet, and placed the wok back where it was sitting on the stove top. I am sure he heard me beseeching him to join us, but his tired eyes under those thick, unkempt, gray eyebrows saw the wok lid. He grabbed it with those same strong but wrinkly and overused hands, and just with the wok, he washed it without soap but with a scrub followed by a rag.

Perhaps at that point I walked in the kitchen and invited him out in person. He was short, lately seemed shorter than I could remember. He, as always, didn't look at me, his head bowed, even though he was smiling, with a tinge of embarrassment that I had to come get him in person. He shook the water off his sixty-something year old hands, then dried them with a rag, not sure which one. He asked, without looking at me, if I needed anything. And when I said that just that he joined us, he said all right, and he grabbed his bowl, not just any bowl, but his bowl, even though for me they all looked the same, and he filled it up with rice. With his own stuff he was fast; there was not much attention paid to the things he did for himself. Perhaps it was because he was just usually dedicated to others, or perhaps he knew himself so well that everything he did could be done in the dark. I bet he had opened that rice cooker, or any that had sat in that same position for decades, scooped up the same amount of rice out of it, dumped into the bowl, repeated the same rice action the same number of times everytime, closed the lid, turned to open the draw to get a pair of chopsticks, and walked out of that tiny kitchen, all this done thousands of times.

The only variation might be that most of the time he would have a soup first. But I think this time he forgot, or that his habit was a little shaken up, by my intrusion into the kitchen. He managed to remind me to have soup first, but this time he forgot it himself. He had a smile on, still a bit embarrassed, but he had a smile on. With people he usually had a smile on, and with me, since I didn't come to visit them that often, the smile was even grander. And when he smiled, his age lines, scarred permanently on his face for eternity, became even more pronounced. His eyes become even smaller as the lines at their corners and on their eyelids, became deeper and more concentrated. And when he came out and entered the dining room, where there was a warmer light, as opposed to the fluorescent blue light of the kitchen, he was talkative and his age lines were all sentences of joy. A huge contrast to his pensiveness in that little room where food was made and the utensils used for this process were rigorously and meticulously cleaned.

We finally sat down and started eating. He paused for a moment and murmured, before continuing dipping his chopsticks in the shared food, that he forgot to have soup first.

Snow behind the Green

The unexpected snowfall has become heavier, despite the relatively warm weather outside. Though not yet a blizzard, the flakes visibly huge and the quantity enough to turn the view through the windows one of a translucent white curtain. From the safety and warmth here, the green plants watch the white drama unfolding. They have been observing since day light has broken and the snow had already been falling. The verdant mini-forest in the living room sits quietly. There is no wind here, no disturbance, and there are different plants coexisting in their own little pots whose sizes accord to the owner's. Outside there are no plants, save the city trees that stand naked without a hint of leaves as they stand sleeping through this winter that doesn't seem it will last very long. But for now they sleep in the safety of their unconsciousness while their cousins in this living room watch on with patience and silence.

The African violet has been producing flowers all year round. Little flowers that start out as little violent balls size of a corn seed and soon blossom into happy faces with golden centers. The leaves would eventually turn towards the outside if someone would reposition the pot. Other plants behave the same way, and now it's as if they all want to quietly enjoy this white spectacle that is playing itself out in the danger outside. There are a few cars moving about, making slushy sounds as their tires roll over the bed of snow melting in the warm road and under the constant pressure of the vehicles. But there was plenty of the beautiful but cold stuff from the heavens. The sky, which the plants always yearn to see, doesn't appear for very long in the winter, though now that we've passed the solstice, the bright sky bestows the plants with its grace a little bit longer each day.

It is at night that the plants hang their heads a bit more. At night it's difficult to see what is happening outside. The mercury light that turns the darkness into sallow depression is never of much interest to the solar power starved green forest here. The tall avocado plants have reached their maximum height given the little pots they live in and the little sunlight that they receive from inside here. They each try to twist and turn in the smallest possible steps in order to reach a place with unchallenged sunlight. It's as if they were children among tall adults on the streets where they all want to see a busker does his amazing tricks, and the children try to sneak through or climb up or squeeze between any thing to get a better view.

The sun is indeed their god. The plants are of types from different parts of the world even if they were born here in the cool Northeast. They carry in their souls in part the heritage encoded in their genes. They are not standing in the soil of their preference and they aren't among neighbors that compete and commiserate with them as their kins are doing in their native land. But here in this melting pot of a forest of different ethnic trees, they get by. The rose bush, among the smaller plants, stand tall with its thorny, thin branches, as it displays its red trophies, even though they are all dried now in the winter when water is artificially given at reduced quantities. The Christmas cactus has long blossomed but still holding its green with little water asked. It looks forward to next Christmas when it can explode into a violent drama with huge flowers that stick out golden tongues in the shapes of fire works. And the mysterious plant from Central America is slowly letting some of its leaves yellow and die to hibernate. It knows, it doesn't kid itself, that it's winter, that there is little sunlight and in its country there would be little rainfall. And it will conserve its food and energy in its roots until spring comes, at which time it will blossom not with flowers but with an ebullience of green stalks.

The oldest member of the forest, the original colonist, stands on a pedestal. It's a palm plant that grew up in some greenhouse at some multi-national company's warehouse far away until it was adopted long ago. It has experienced many winters and has seen many snowfalls like today's. It is still happy to see the drama outside but it doesn't share the same enthusiasm. Its leaves show yellowing on the tips to show its sadness and longing for the sun. It's not a big plant, but it has captured a lot of drama in its leaves, in its bulb that used to be the seed from which it grew up, and in its heart it is content to live another year in this region of extreme seasons.

Below it, as if worshiping it, are the two newest comers. They are hardy plants that aren't as sentimental about the sun as others. A grapefruit tree and a kumquat tree, both small but full of dark green leaves that can capture the slightest bit of sunlight. They are used to this type of temperate zone, and they are grateful to be inside here in the warmth despite the lack of sunlight. They will continue growing in all seasons, and perhaps will surpass even the avocados if they gods allow them a bigger pot. They are enthusiastic about becoming members of this small multi-ethnic ecosystem, and they look forward to their first spring here when the extra sunlight will give them an even greater boost.

Goldfish

"Are your goldfish doing anything for the people, Comrade Jiu?" asked the committee chairman.

He understood the question, and quivering, he acknowledged their zero utilitarian contribution, "No, Comrade Zhang. They are just for my selfish pleasures."

His head bowed low, his eyes moist but his heart has so far been able to hold back the more tears.

"You understand that only the bourgeoisie would keep pets for their own pleasure while the proletariat starved and strove for such pleasures," said the woman next to the committee chairman. Like him, she also strove to sound sympathetic, rather than arrogant. They all knew him. They were his neighbors, no less. They knew he had cherished those goldfish for the past five years. His father had died a little before this decadent pleasure of his started to foster.

"Are you taking care of your Mother, at least?" asked the young man to the far right of the table, looking rather stern.

"Yes," said Comrade Jiu, his head dipping further.

"And the people?" demanded the same young man, who frowned.

Pausing, Jiu answered, "Not enough, Comrade Cao." His shakes and near tearfulness could be interpreted as remorse. They had been rather lenient with him, under the circumstances and with such accusation as harboring bourgeois desires. All he had to do was confess his sins and undo his wrongs.

"I have not done nearly enough. I owe the people a great apology I cannot mend. I will make it up to the people, through hard work and rigorous study of Chairman Mao's poetry and quotes and his ways."

They nodded, and even the stern young man softened the expression on his face. Jiu's words sounded sincere, more sincere than perhaps necessary. Everyone else just confessed using the same rote of words, same monotone of defeatism. But Jiu spoke with some emotion, some conviction.

Still, it was not enough. The young woman at the other end of the table suddenly stood up and screamed, "How do we know you are not just a two-face bourgeois who says one thing and still bears the evil heart of the oppressor?"

There were some cheers and more nods from the crowd behind Jiu, who was flanked by two Red Guards. The meeting was hastily put together. It would have been less rowdy but trouble has been brewing lately, with factions of Mao's followers bickering, sometimes even fighting against one another, with reports of gun violence. Therefore all the public hearings, which were really humiliation sessions, had to be done more haphazardly lest factions bump into each other.

The young woman, wearing her red scarf of the communist flag, with an equally red set of cheeks, looked with piercing eyes at the middle-age man with a lowered head standing a few feet from her. It was her moment to glow, to show everyone that she meant business, that her path with the Sun, with Mao, was the righteous one in case any bourgeois vermin should try to sneak in and steal from the people. She was expecting something.

Then he, with greatest effort in his life, held back his growing pressure of tears, raised his head to look at her, and said, "Comrade Liu, I will bury those bourgeois pleasures as soon as the people let me, to correct my ways."

The young woman, without smiling but obviously feeling triumphant, looked around her and said, "Let the bourgeoisie die now!" The whole room broke into an uproar, causing the older committee members to look a little intimidated. But they all stood up and shepherd the goldfish lover out of the school where this was taking place. They walked through the streets they had all spent their lives walking and sharing until they reached his place. They tried going inside, but the committee chairman stopped them and said, "Let the little bourgeois go in and fetch his fish. We need not have our spirit tempered by his evil atmosphere." His concern for the man's emotions was discerned only by the young woman, who eyed him with enough venom that he knew he could very well be the next to stand before the committee.

Jiu went inside with the uproar behind him. He went to his fish tank and started catching the fish one by one into a bowl of water. Was it water or his tears. He finally could cry all he wanted and had his sniffles and bitter cries drown. It was a pathetic scene, his tears mixing with his nose snots and his saliva, but it was the saddest moment in his life. When his father died, they didn't let him cry too much, saying that such tears should be saved for the glory of the revolution. But now he was alone, burying again all his sorrow, but in his own free privacy. The fish were startled, and almost as if they were looking at him for some answers to questions they could not transmit to him. But his answer was an infinity of apologies. He didn't know what had gone wrong, but it was all wrong. And in a few moments, in his own backyard, he would dig a hole with is bare hands as an ultimate act of sacrifice, to the people, as it seemed, but he knew in his heart that it would be for his own cowardice, his own safety. And into that hole he would throw in his precious loved ones who would be flapping and yelping for air in the dirt before he would cover them with dirt. He would see the dirt hopping a little before he fully covered them. And he would never go to his backyard, ever again.

Two Boys and a Cart

The humming of the AC stopped again, and suddenly the silence of the room became the loudest sound in my head. The electricity had been cut off again. It's common here, in this underdeveloped part of the developing India. This time I didn't feel like being stuck in the room that is now dark until someone opened the door to let some sunlight in.

I stood up, grabbed my camera and left. The men inside, along with two women, just continued lounging in their extremely uncomfortable chairs. They were used to this, used to the constant interruptions. They couldn't even while their time away on the Internet now that the Internet is dead, temporarily.

Although the room remained cool, I didn't want to just sit there and watch the humans lose their energy while the little mice scurry around the corners, looking for dropped scraps of food. That was the most interesting to see when you had no Internet to do your work. The outside air felt like the oven when you open it to check on your cake. It was the height of the heat. But no matter, I preferred to be outside. I closed the door behind me gently, as a matter of courtesy as there was no one who would have been bothered by a slamming door. I took one more look at the enervated creatures lying or lounging almost lifelessly at the cheap desks.

There was a gate I had to open before releasing my body into the outside oven. Upon touching the cool metal of the gate I could feel the warm air penetrating through the crack between the two doors. It is not often in the developed world that you would walk into such incredible heat.

And there it was, the outside. I wrapped my head with my extra T-shirt and stepped outside. There was a divide in the middle of the road the separate the traffic of opposite directions, but often people here ignored the rules. The divide is more useful for the shades its trees provided. And in front of me was a cow sitting lazily under one of such trees and gnawing whatever regurgitated food she had ingested earlier today, which is probably nothing healthy considering that nearly all strayed cows and bulls just eat garbage found on the extremely dirty roads. Not far from her was the same man, probably homeless, that I had seen earlier this morning when I arrived. He was sitting against a tree this morning, but now he was lying there, motionless, and I wondered, for a moment, if he was dead. If he was, it wouldn't really make a lot of difference.

I walked slowly along the road, trying to be in the shades whenever possible, but it wasn't always possible. The sun was merciless, and the clouds you wonder where they had taken their long vacation. The rumors of an early monsoon still haven't materialized, and only in hindsight did we realize that actually the monsoon would come very late. I continued walking, slowly, to save my energy, and to drink as often as I could. I saw a few people walking by, and even a rickshaw with a man who were too tired from the heat to notice me. Normally he would approach me to try for some business.

Even under the T-shirt on my head I started feeling the heat. My normally non-sweaty face started to collect little beads, first on the nose, then everywhere else. The brain started to feel the heat too, as if my skull were some slow-cooking oven. I, too, stopped noticing my environment. The rays of the sun was so strong that everything seemed like a big white blur, like a photograph that was overexposed. Few details and colors remained to my eyes that felt like sweating too.

I finally came to a shady place under the awning of an old house. I doubt anyone was coming out or going in at this hour. Shops were either closed or the people inside enjoying a siesta. Most people here didn't have air conditioning. In fact, the only reason the office I was in had it on was to please the foreigner. They wouldn't turn it on if I wasn't there.

I sat down on the cool slab of stone in front of the door, and finally could inspect my surroundings. In front of me was a T-intersection. The road that intersects the one I'd been walking on and deadends with the house I am sitting in front of was not really a road. I had to look more carefully to realize that it was just a wide alley between the walls of the two surrounding buildings. But there was a lot happening there. Much of the entrance to this alley had a barricade of garbage, not intentionally to barricade the interior, but just that garbage was left there by everyone. On the barricade, which extended quite far into the interior, were someone's goats. A lot of villagers come to the city, forming the majority of the poor people here, and for those who couldn't establish somewhere more stable, they just lived in a place like this alley. And with them they brought along their livestock as well as their families. I could see that behind the barricade of garbage was a long row of tent-houses. They weren't houses, that's for sure, and they weren't really even tents if you think of tents as fun things to set up during a camping trip. They were, as I had seen often in this country, just sticks propping up whatever they could find to fend off the elements: tarp, plastic bags, slabs of cardboard, whatever you can find that was light but water proof. And they were held together by bricks they had found or stolen from the myriads of construction sites that formed part of this developing country.

I didn't see the shepherd.

I did, however, see two little boys. They, like many children here, were wearing tattered clothes. Actually, they were wearing tattered shorts. There was no money for a shirt. They were surrounding a rusty cart that was probably in such bad shape that not even the normally crafty and creative Indian person could make use of. But the children were having a blast. They were giggling and jumping up and down in excitement in this tormenting and potentially lethal heat. Their pathetically gaunt bodies were like the sticks that propped up their houses, and yet these sticks were having a blast around this cart. The slightly older one, judging from his bigger size, held up the little one and put him on the rusty cart, and after that the little one got even more excited and jumped up and down in the blazing sun. The older one then, with all his might, started pushing the cart. It resisted a little then started moving, at which point the little one started screaming in excitement. Their joy was the only sound at that moment when there even the wind was taking a siesta.

Surrounded by mountains of garbage and sorrow, these slum boys were having a blast. They would later devise other ways to have fun in this treacherous alley where water was surely, like all slums of any size, stolen from some unreliable source. I thought about that as I had my last sip of the bottled water and decided that, treating this road like a desert in some wild section of the US, I should turn around and head back where there might be electricity and the comfort of the AC again.

Face of Mysterious Air

She has short hair. Cute. She has a small nose. Cute. Everything else adds to the delicate nature of who she is.

Her head is turned away when she speaks to you. She knows you're there. She's not trying to be rude. That's just how she is. She would nod, without looking at you. But then, for a split second, as if she doesn't want to seem rude, she turns her head and before continuing turning to look away from you in the other direction, her eyes acknowledges you, even nods a little.

Maybe she can't keep a gaze. Maybe that's just something one culture does and another doesn't.

Her eyes are dark, not eerily dark, but dark enough to hide whatever it is you might be looking for, and you're looking for something.

The answer to who she is, perhaps.

She smiles, very genuinely, like everything else she does. But still, you want to know more. It doesn't help if you try to fix your gaze at her. She simply won't hold it. She will continue talking to you without really looking at you. So you don't see all her eyes. You can't attempt to pierce it and find the treasure of answers you're looking for. The dark, think eyebrows above each eye are like sentinels, drawing your attention along with some awe and respect for them.

Yet, you don't want to look too long. You know it's rude to stare.

But where are the answers? If not in the eyes. Her cheeks are pink and have a soft glow. Her lips are thin but they weave a mesmerizing note each time she speaks.

How is it that someone with such frank and sincere demeanor could have answers you don't know? How does one hide something that should not be of interest to anyone who can't see it?

For a split second, she looks at you, intently, while you're talking, and you feel shy. And you are the one looking away. You are the one being vulnerable now, talking and talking. She doesn't keep her gaze long, looking away again while you're talking. The mysterious light that has brought you to this land and continues to do so is always a few steps away from reach.

With no luck at the gates of her eyes, you inspect your surroundings. She stands in front of you. You can feel her presence, her warmth, you can even sense her scent, natural, but forbidden as well. You can see the olive color tone of her skin that shows itself from her neck to her shoulders. But it's like gazing at a majestic mountain; you can write all the poetry you wish, paint with all the skills of a master, but you still can't enter into the secrets of the mountain. Especially if you can't scale it.

But even if you can. Suppose you can, in your wildest fantasies. Her eyes won't necessarily open up for you. Her dark, think eyebrows won't step aside to give you your grand entrance into her realm of the poetry that defines her, the poetry that is constantly changing.

So from this side of the valley, you can gaze at the beauty that is she, contemplate the mystery that is her, make guesses about what she's thinking, how she's feeling, her desires, her wishes. But in the end, you're an outsider, no matter how much she smiles at you with the deepest sincerity, how much confides in you about everything she feels safe to share, how ready she is to listen to you. None would open the gates. And while the mountain will loom constantly with you as long as you wish, you would continue on to a different path, explore other peaks. But every now and then you turn around, you see her beauty that embodies the answers you can't have, and you can't help but smile too, feeling safe that you're being watched with a pure heart, even if you can't always see her eyes looking at you.

Glass at the Hour

It was empty until now, when she finally poured it quarter way up with the red wine that's been left open since she had sat down, probably an hour ago. She watches as the dark, red liquid falls into the bottom of the glass, rises in circular waves but soon levels off. She pretended, for a split second, that this was a commercial for some cheap wine during prime time. She rotated the bottle a little as she stopped pouring, catching a final drip from the mouth of the glass neck. And when she set the bottle back down, carefully, almost at the same exact spot where she had lifted it a moment ago, she heard the soft sound of the bottom of the glass bottle meeting the marble surface of her dining table. Then with left arm resting on the cool surface, she lifted the glass with her other arm, faintly made a toast as she tried to smile a little, eyes becoming more moist, and sipped down the nectar. She savored every bit of the decadent liquid in her mouth, on her tongue, her palates, gums, and let its powerful aroma irrigate through her nose, maybe even the wetting eyes. Her blue eyes twinkled a little when she heard a sound. Her senses all shut down as she tried to pay attention.

It was just her cat in the kitchen munching on the remaining bits of the food from this afternoon.

She took another sip and then rested the glass next to her empty, beautiful, porcelain plate. She didn't notice the faint reflection on this beautiful piece of ceramic reserved, along with its brother across the table, for special occasions such as that which might have been tonight. She was, instead, looking at the cork, the inscription on it. It was the name of the wine he had mentioned so many times, said so often that he wish he could have a taste of what many said was the best bottle of the decade.

But now the decade had ended. It ended probably half an hour ago. She has ignored the clock in the kitchen all this time. She knew that it had passed because she had been startled earlier, by the revelers outside and the fireworks. Every now and then an explosion could still be heard outside. But by now she was no longer noticing anything except possible footsteps, doorbells (in case he had lost his keys), or at least, a phone call.

The inscriptions on the bottle cork became her fixation. She stared at it for some time before she tried to pick up the glass again by the stem only to suddenly let it back down as she let her head fall slowly on her resting arm. Her sobs did not go unnoticed. Her cat had long stopped eating and had been watching her, and watching even more intently now as she was making little sounds, shaking, but remained still at her beautifully carved oak dining chair. The candle had been blown out shortly after the sounds of the fireworks had commenced, but there was still a wisp of smoke streaming from it, still so resilient, in reminding the observer that the ending was not to be reversed, the disappointment not to be undone, and she would be in this state long before the wick of the slender candle becomes cold and dark again.

Sanitized Hands

Pulling the little lever under the soap dispenser and the pink liquid oozes down onto his left palm. It's like a pearl, moving, dynamic. Then it spreads its wonder under the warm, flowing water of the sink as I lather the soapy foam on both hands. The slippery feeling, the warm bath, the wet exhilaration. Everything. Including the sound of the water running and the hands rubbing together. All this with the goal of cleaning, sanitizing. The feeling that after this simple process my hands would be clean makes me happy. I can enjoy it without fail. I can just feel good about it.

And then I shut off the water once all the bubbly pearly foams have disappeared, and with my hands still dripping with water, I reach for the dry towel and a new and final feeling of cleanliness soars in my soul. Now my hands are damp, so they feel cool in the air. But before that finality, being embraced by the dry towel is like being wrapped in a towel that had just come out of the dryer.

Now my hands are clean and a short episode of life is complete.

Fishmonger

"What would you like?"

"A pound of the cod you have there for sale."

He didn't have a hat on. His near baldness was irrelevant as he cut the remnants of his gray hair down to stubbles, just like his facial hair. He's in his mid fifties, his eyes of a lackadaisical expression, his rather fat lips matched the lump of fat also hanging under his chin. There's nothing menacing about him, but neither adorable. It was late evening in the supermarket and soon the seafood section would close. He was catering to one of his last customers. His dirty apron hung on him as if it, too, was tired from the day's work. When the previous customer, a black woman standing in front of her impatient boyfriend, was being indecisive about what to order, inspecting carefully all the items on display, the fishmonger all that while did not change his lackadaisical expression. He was daydreaming about the end of his shift. He got up early this morning for his other job, also as a fishmonger, but for a much smaller shop specializing in fresh seafood, and he did a lot more heavy duty work there. After his brief lunch break that was the drive from that first job to this supermarket, he had a lobster roll his daughter had made for him.

He grabbed the white piece of flesh, paused for a split second to eye the previously frozen piece of a very big fish, and then slabbed it on the electronic scale on which a piece of wax paper had previously been placed and tared. Both him and the customer looked at the digital monitor of the scale at the same time, though from opposite sides. It was just shy of a pound, and the customer nodded. While the customer looked at other items in the display, he carefully wrapped the flesh with the wax paper. He turned to reach for the sticky tape, pulled about five inches out, ripped it off the dispenser, and then sealed the corners of the wax paper that have congregated in one place after the paper had wrapped the precious cargo. He then turned to his right and pulled out a plastic bag somehow was made specifically for seafood. He tore that out too and carefully put the wrapped fish inside. He looked up at the scale and found the button he was looking for. For a second he couldn't find it with his fingers, and his eyes struggled to focus on the button he was looking for. It's been a long day.

So he pressed the button and the sticky tag with the price came out. He taped that on the doubly wrapped cod fillet and asked:

"There you go. Would you like anything else?"

He usually, when not so tired, would be smiling and making conversations like "How are you making that?" He would even share a recipe off the top of his head that he had seen his daughter do it. But now he's just waiting for the moment to come and he could put away this stinky, fishy smell. Despite his daily showers, he couldn't get rid of his fish smell, which accompanies him straight home, where his daughter is the only person in the world who never complained about the smell, not even when she was younger when kids of that age felt free to complain about everything.

"No, that's all, thanks!"

"Have a good evening!"

"You too."

And another customer disappeared from his sight. There was no stool or anything to sit on, and he could just go in the backroom and sit there for the remainder of the sevent een minutes. But for a moment he took a deep breath, ignoring the dead sea smell pervading into his nostrils. He looked around him, the store, the vegetable isle, the pasta isle, and he wondered if he wasn't sick of this same view for over a decade now, well over.

Self Portrait

Red brick and mortar form the background. There is a crack slightly right of center that runs from slightly above the middle to the end of the frame. The wall was, deliberately or haphazardly put together in such a way that seems old and yet attractive in a modernist way. Adding to the overall roughness is the texture of the mortar, much of which exudes out without having been trimmed off to align with the the surface of the brick. The bricks are each unique, different chips, different holes of different sizes and shapes and depth, and each brick has a slightly different tone of crimson. This is a brick wall of red rectangles and gray lines, upon whose closer inspection complements the finer and simpler foreground, the main character of a photograph who stands just a few inches in front of it. He is, like the crack on the wall behind him, standing slightly off center, though still revealing the crack behind him that runs down his left shoulder. His expression hints at some disapproval, or perhaps just thoughtfulness about some distant object he is focusing on. Perhaps he is scheming. He is not entirely in profile. You can see a little bit of his right cheek as his head is slightly turned to his right. The left corner of his lips is slightly pinched, pinched perhaps by the impression he has about what he is seeing or thinking. his lips have one of the few colors on him: dark red, almost like some of the bricks behind him. The lips are sealed, no sign of teeth that would suggest a more relaxed attitude.

While his head is turned slightly to the right, his eyes are turned even further to the right, revealing much of their white from their left sides. It is as if he doesn't want to turn too far towards whatever his eyes are focusing on. His shoulders are relaxed, no sign of hunching up, so whatever he is thinking or looking at can't be that stressful. Added to this theory is that he isn't frowning. He has thick, relatively dark eye brows, between which is skin that is as smooth as the rest of his face.

Where is he standing besides in front of a brick wall? There is ample light cast on him and on the wall, and more interestingly, light from above. His forehead and his nose, the only two protrusions on his body in this picture, show reflection from some bright source of natural light from above. But the shadows cast from his collars onto his chest suggest that equally bright light is coming from the direction of the target of his contemplation. But no direction has a strong enough light to cast a strong shadow from him. He is somewhere, watching one of the sources of light in some distance.

While his facial skin is a little dark, the skin on the little of his chest revealed to us is distinctly paler. But that could be because he is wearing a shirt that's completely black, except for the two buttons that reflect some of the light from where that same target of his contemplation. The buttons are not used, which help to reveal that paler part of his body that we can see. It is meant to add a slight tinge of sexiness to him. His chest has no texture, just a very, very pale coffee color that is in harmony with the red and gray background. And like the black shirt, there is no texture of any kind. The only other thing black is his hair. Cut a little short, styled with gel, in a haphazard way not unlike the way the brick and mortar were put together to make the wall behind him. The hair color here looks exactly like that of the shirt, completely dark, and separated from the shirt only by his head, the focus of this image. Between these two pieces of black fragments stands his yellowish brown face whose color and texture are interrupted only by the aforementioned lips, the nose, and the most important feature, the eyes. They are brown. But even more importantly, because they are looking at the source of light beaming from the side, they are twinkling, almost. That source of light is reflected on surface of both his eyes, straddling between the brown iris and the white, and giving his over expression a sense of optimism, not just pensiveness.

He is waiting for something, not a person or anything to arrive from outside. He is waiting for a thought. The brick wall betrays nothing about his location, not even whether he is indoors or outdoors, though the multi-directional lighting suggests indoors. To the left, balancing the crack on the right, is where the wall bends perpendicular towards us then bends again in the same manner. It's protrusion of some sort. But that only adds intrigue on where he might be and what thought he might be waiting for.

As soon as the thought comes to him, he will probably turn his head back in light with his chest and go and move on somewhere. And what will be left is this highly textured brick wall of many shades of the two colors, perhaps waiting for something else to come and stand in front, taking the current place of this man.

The First Ascent

Learning anything often involves an initial ascent that likens to the start of an arduous hike. It just feels so hard after just the first ten minutes, and many of us, especially not experienced in the general area of what we are learning, can hear loud and clear that defeatist voice inside our heads. Fortunately, most of us would still move on, for there will be many other kinds of obstacles, more fearsome, awaiting us later.

But that initial hopelessness was what I saw in the eye of the husband sitting there next to his wife, trying to learn English. I tried to remind him that in many ways, English was easier than Spanish, his native language. I tried to tell him that in the beginning it was the hardest.

But his sighs, his frowns, and just the look of being lost, all made me feel very sorry for him. This man, big, tall, well-built man, sitting like a child in his own home, at his own kitchen table, next to a wife who knew a little better English. His goatee, his stature when greeting me, his smoothness in speaking his native tongue, all suggest a very confident man if he were a character on some Hollywood movie. I don't know him well at all, just through our weekly tutoring session. He is warm, like his wife, and funny, when speaking Spanish. But that's all I know.

I pointed the words, basic words, on the sheet of paper I scribbled the words on, and he had the hardest time remembering their meaning. He held his pen with frustration, as if he were writing out in the air all the frustrations with his slowness in learning the language. I sympathize with him; I know how hard it is to learn a new language, or more precisely, to learn one in order to survive in the country of that language. It's not like learning some foreign language in school to get through some language requirement. As long as their English stay the way it is now, they can't get far in life.

Three fingers. That's what he showed me when I asked how long they had lived here; he showed me the number of years. They reminded me of my parents, whose English, though better than theirs by a little, have lived here for over twenty years. How can I not sympathize with them? They are refugees. They came to this country on a little raft, escaping Cuba to join one of the twenty thousand and change people to be granted asylum by this country, the country whose language they still have yet to master.

He rested his temples on the hands of those fingers as he tried very hard to remember the four different interrogative pronouns I had written out (the only one missing is "when" and "which", as four was already too many). I had randomly picked one for him to translate into Spanish. He stumbles. First on the meaning, then, after being told the meaning, he stumbles on the pronunciation. All these words seemed the same, sounded the same, yet to everyone who spoke English they were all different. He couldn't understand why they were spelled in such a way that didn't make sense.

"Makes sense?" I asked.

And the next minute or two I tried and failed to explain what that question means, and so in the end I had to reveal the Spanish equivalent. That's when I saw a smile on his face.

His wife was patient with him. She knew a little more English, but had to struggle too. Yet, she wasn't as frustrated as he was. Why? Maybe he's the man? Maybe he doesn't believe he has the so-called talent for languages? Doesn't matter. She was there for him. I realized to help them both I had to recruit her. They had to learn this together when I wasn't there. And perhaps in my absence he would be more relaxed.

And the lesson continued, and his frustration didn't subside. Nearly every task was like stepping on yet incline. When your legs feel like a bag of lactic acid, you just want to see an descent, just a little. But you don't stop because you're too proud. You have turned your head to see that you haven't accomplished much yet, that the trail head is clearly within sight, that the watch tells you to draw the same conclusion that you haven't walked that much yet, and so you can't just rest yet. And the most you can do is curse yourself for being a weakling, and perhaps smooth the edges of self-demeaning by saying that you haven't been to the gym lately, or that you should have warmed up, so it's really not something innately weak on your part. Not really.

His eyes looked at these simple words, then looked at the group of conjugations of "to be", then the group of pronouns. All he had to do was linked members of these three groups together to make a coherent question. His tongue slurs as he tried to string up three beads in a grammatical way. His eyes haven't blinked.

I wonder, as I patiently waited for him, how this was harder than being on a raft with no certainty awaiting you in US waters. Courage comes in different forms and is fulminated from your heart in different ways. Here he is swinging between the need to learn the damned language and the frustration with his slow accomplishments. But courage? There's no room for that here. There are no storms, no sharks, no Cuban naval patrol boats, just words he had to string up in a sensible way. He gently dropped the pen that had anchored his emotions, sat back against his chair, and sighed in frustration, murmuring in Spanish how he wouldn't get this right. In the background he heard his wife explain to him things he probably understood. But to have his mouth say the words, to have his ears understand their sounds, that, he knew, with augmented frustration, required practice. That was the only way up.

You just keep walking. You just have to swallow the frustration, ignore the muscle pain, the dripping sweat, and go on. You don't even notice the scenery around you. You're just walking up the mountain for the sake of walking.

He leaned back towards the pieces of paper, picked up his pen that he hardly used for writing, and tried again.

Smiles in the Rubble

Beads of sweat streaming down her face, but the smile is unmistakable. She finally elbowed her way through the huge crowd of equally desperate people. Like them, she had to push through aggressive sweaty arms and over rubble of houses and shops she had until two days ago visited or at least passed by like so many other days in her life. The earthquake had leveled her neighborhood, which is an hour's walk from here, where one of the food distribution centers was. She was lucky that there was one this close. True, in the past she would just take the bus and it would take her ten minutes to come here, where her youngest daughter went to school. She was now dead, but that's not the point here. The point is that she was happy to finally get a package. She could have saved herself half an hour, but that's nothing to save in a world where life had stopped, almost. She didn't want to pay the looters for something she could get from the Red Cross, just an extra half an hour of walking through air still thick with stink of death and now often there's violence over the little food and resources trickled in from the outside. Yes, she is truly lucky to have to walk only an hour when many didn't have anywhere to go to, and many still are trapped and dying under heaps of their own broken homes and businesses.

Her eyes are large, the white of which against her dark brown skin of the face exuded so much hope that you would not think about all the tragedies around her and in her life. She was clutching tightly on her brown box. She knew that there were people who would kill her for it, despite the increasing presence of the police that finally came to bring some order to this chaos. Her big, dark red lips were quivering with joy. Inside the box was not only dry food but also a basic first aid kit for her two remaining children whose injuries weren't serious enough to be treated by the few doctors here that had to attend to life-threatening cases that often ended in death. Her husband was out fetching water and fixing up the makeshift tent he had erected for them in the backyard of what used to be their house. It was a miracle that the entire family didn't meet the same fate as her daughter.

But she wasn't thinking about her daughter then. It was another hour of walk through another throng of desperate, hungry, angry, people still wearing the smell of death. Outside a lot of buildings there were still some corpses left in the open, waiting for the limited number of police officers to get them. Now that the Americans have come to help bring order, the bodies have been disappearing, scraped up in bulldozers and dumped into dump truck before being hauled to the incendiary. The stink still gets to her, but her eyes were still sparkly holding that box, that precious box. That box didn't have the future. She had no idea what they would do the next day. She came from a middle-class family. Her husband was a merchant with ties to Florida, and she was a professor at the university in this impoverish city. They had a very nice house, envy of her relatives who were still living either outside in the villages or in little apartments in a different part of the city. But now their lives have been leveled to the same playing field, with some lives lost and many others injured and all very desperate and afraid. She and her husband had grown up having to struggle for survival in a country that seems always to be in a perpetual state of violence and uncertainty. Nevertheless, this current state of collective shock had unnerved her in ways she had never experienced, and clutching this brown box she felt for the first time joy that could only be born from misery. Her legs were tired. Before trekking to the aid center, she had walked the entire day since dawn looking for basic food, careful not to get dragged into armed conflicts among looters and between them and the police, careful to avoid the hospitals and medical centers where the stink of death is strongest and its intensity was matched only by the raw emotion from the living. She, furthermore, did not want to have to deal with her own emotion still bubbling from that moment when they told her her daughter could not be saved from the mortal wound on her little skull.

The wind from the sea was blowing strong now, and with it the briny smell of the calm waters soothes her a little, and its soft caresses on her skin stopped further condensing of the sweaty beads on her face. She was almost home, but she had to sit a little. She was very tired from this morning's foraging. But she clutched on her box ever so tightly. She rested her head on it, but was very alert to the people around her, some of whom she was aware were eyeing her box. But they also saw the machete on her side, and they wouldn't want their blood on its rusty surface. She used it to chop sugarcane she would buy from the local market, which was also completely flattened, with two of her friends perished under its roof. Now the instrument that helped give her family so much sweetness was her protection from now on. This morning, before it became her hunting companion, she was stopped by two men. She couldn't forget their eyes. They reminded her of the eyes of strayed dogs you find all of the city, and at dawn their eyes seemed almost glow with the desperation and violence of the hunger in their bosom. She had managed to steal a small bag of rice and a box of salt from a shop whose owner had left a long trail of blood before his corpse was taken away by the Red Cross under a huge slab of concrete. By the time she had gotten there most of the store's supplies had been looted, and it was only careful inspection and desperate search under every corner that she found the precious bag and box. She was ecstatic, more than today, but that ecstasy was short-lived because when she turned the corner those two pairs of eyes met her, one holding a steel pipe and the other a meat-cutter. Her motherly instinct told her to fight, but she managed to calm herself enough to think clearly. It was better to go try harder finding something somewhere else than meeting near certain death, which would turn things many folds harder for her family still grieving for the loss of her daughter. She pleaded, but the eyes didn't respond, didn't even scream out violence, they simply moved closer and became more menacing. She dropped the rice and salt and turned around, her eyes flooded with tears. She knew those two young men, whose faces were covered still with dust, whose arms were shaking, but whose eyes were filled with determination towards her meager food supply. Those eyes were once determined to change the world, or at least their world. They were her students, first year, full of joy, hope, and if she remembered correctly, love as they were handsome young men very popular with girls and yet very serious about their studies. But now they were hungry beyond description, and maybe they had lost family members too. She was very hurt to see this, more for the reason of this tragic consequence than for the lost of the food.

But soon she snapped herself out of the sentimentality of the stories of this earthquake, of which there are as many as the city's population. She was determined not to allow herself to become a victim again, to let her family be a victim again. And that's how she turned her cane snapping machete into a weapon. She had killed animals before, for food, and so killing a man for defense could not be much harder. And now she had rested enough, she stood up and with her brown box she trudged through the avenue she had known so well most of her adult life back home.

Laguardia Return

She looked like a doll. Her face had a creamy complexion with a rosy glow, and I don't know enough about cosmetology to know if that can be done by make up, but her facial skin was simply perfect. Her nose was a small, like on a doll. Her lips too, though perhaps that's the result of some lipsticks art. Her face is round, and perfectly symmetrical. What she was wearing was equally doll-like, or mannequin-like. She was wearing a cap of probably some French style, with black and white patterns too abstract to be described. Her scarf, partly hidden under her collar, is of the same exact material and design. And her coat looked something out of a Fifth Avenue boutique shop. Her demeanor made her look like some elegant character from a movie about society people in New York. Her eyes betrayed neither any obvious emotion nor lack of emotion. She was like a model for something I just didn't understand. She wouldn't be a model for clothing, for her face suggested that she wasn't one on the border of anorexia, or crossed over it. She was simply a doll, like the dolls for young girls. She obviously know exactly how she wanted to look and could perfectly execute the means to achieve that goal, every morning.

Even after getting off a flight. We were in a bus, a public bus, from La Guardia to uptown Manhattan. She wasn't a model, let alone a super model. She was probably some student or recent graduate who was enjoying some independence in the big city. She could have taken a taxi. But I have known wealthy New Yorkers who prefer public transportation because the way they got wealthy was to be frugal. My guesses with her can't go confidently beyond simply her looking like a doll. Everything perfect, every detail of her face, including the eyebrows, the eyelashes, the ears, or what I could see from under the cap, and everything covering her. So this doll was in a New York public bus, going with me to Harlem. She didn't get off in Harlem, though. I don't know where she went.

Coming to New York there's always something worth noticing. And coming back from even a brief, weekend trip, there's always a bit more to notice. As the plane descended over Brooklyn and Queens, the part of New York sitting at the eastern tip of Long Island, I saw the island illuminated in ways incomparable to any city in the world. Only a few minutes before I looked down and I saw the suburbs of Northern New Jersey in the purple hues of dusk. I closed my eyes for a few minutes during this descent to the airport, and when I opened it again, I saw all these yellow lights and the spaghetti of yellow streets they illuminate. It was as if the sky had taken on a dust of gold and inverted itself on earth. And as the plane got closer to land I could see the thousands of yellow and red lights on those strands of spaghetti. I didn't know exactly over what neighborhood we were passing by. I recognized the thin peninsular, more like a colonized sandbar, that is the Rockaway. So my parents' house was nearby. But then, where was JFK Airport? I didn't see any runways far away. The sea was just a fused part of the darkening, blue sky, and the effect of this fusion was enhanced by the haze that apparently had formed over the sea. And as the details over the little houses of Queens became more clear, I could see first the Whitestone Bridge, and then the Throgs Neck. They were bridges I'd crossed many times, and with each crossing some memory of my life.

That's what New York does to me more than anything else. Memories. My life has always been inextricably linked to this city since arriving in it during my childhood. Even when I no longer lived there, a lot of deep memories were associated with a return to or a departure from the city. And so the twinkling lights of the Whitestone Bridge glittered equally in the boxes of my memories. And suddenly, strangely suddenly, the things on the ground, the houses, the cars, parked or speeding, the stores of different neon signs of different colors of different sizes, they all started speeding in front of me very fast as the plane was about to touch down. And among all these lights and the human stories nurtured and rotting among them, the sea showed its face briefly again in the form of the Long Island Sound, the last remnant of it before joining the Hudson River. And this nudge of the Sound almost looked like a dark island in a sea of civilization. It was as if the city had to take break somewhere, had to have a solace somewhere.

And the plane touches down, roaring as its wing flaps open up and the reverse engine throttled to make the plane decelerate quickly. Whenever I landed at night in La Guardia I saw the body of water that's the dark island among the twinkling lights, and I would always think about the accident I saw on TV when I was a child, an accident involving a plane overshooting the runway and ended up in that body of water. It was a winter day. I wonder what I was thinking as a child then. I wonder what I was doing before and after. My childhood in New York, or rather, the path towards resolving the many issues of that childhood, has been another bond between me and the city.

The city has changed a lot over the years, and I have seen the recent changes while missing the ones before when I wasn't around very much. But there have always been the public bus, no matter how much more civilized it has become and still could become, and there have always been the mannequin-like women who walk with confidence and understood at least a superficial sense of their own beauty, and there have always been people like me, who have left the city but deepdown always felt a connection that sometimes get confused, perhaps, with a yearning.

Goal Oriented Dancing

Her nose is small, a little pointy, and if it were just for her nose she would already look like a model. It's the envy of many women who seek out or wish they had the funds to seek out plastic surgery. But it's also her subtle cheek bones, her lips, and the piercing eyes that are parsimonious in sparing a moments gaze at you. Her complexion is mysterious. Not very white, though she is undoubtedly a white woman. It's olive color, almost. Is she Middle-eastern? Is she Spanish?

She's tall, but not a giant. She is, of course, very slim without looking anorexic. If she were in any other setting, she would be turning all heads. But the only heads that are turning towards her as she stands there nearly motionless belong to men who haven't seen her dance yet. Purely her physical beauty gives her enough points to elicit an invitation from a man she hasn't danced with yet, an invitation that by now she would probably reject. She stands there with her black, thick shawl wrapped around her as the the grand ballroom is a little chilly and unless you're dancing you become part of that temperature. She doesn't respond to any gaze, but she is aware of all of them, and if she feels any too predatory that's one of the reasons for her to move to a different location.

She, too, is stalking. She is watching the dance floor, watching the people on the dance floor. She knows who she would want to invite her. She is too much of a neophyte to be part of a community in which she would ask or entice a man of her choice to dance with her. She is, for now, and perhaps to adhere to tradition, forever, be waiting for men of her choice to ask her. But for now she is not on the top of the list of desired dancers for those men. And so while she plows through, struggling at times, the road of ameliorating her dances, she has little more to offer than patience. And it's not always with difficulty. Her hopes are reinforced quite often with the reality that she is asked to dance by many of those men. And by dancing with them, she gets better much faster than many much less beautiful and so less lucky women in her community, here or at her home base.

But tonight, at least during these hours, she has to compete with women with far greater experience, which outweighs a lot more her beauty, which never directly translates into a good dance.

She is a decent dancer. She tries to look better than she knows she is. She is trying. But she isn't here, in this social dance night, to have fun only. Or rather, her idea of a fun night is not dancing with just anyone. She has high targets to shoot for. She is watching the dancers. She is evaluating new faces and sees if she should add them to her mental list of people to accept. By now there is no hope of adding faces to the list of people she is dying to dance with, for there aren't many and so she has captured all their faces. While she gingerly passes judgments on the face of this or that man, she is hoping to get a dance with someone amazing.

She doesn't sit down; she doesn't want to be seen and therefore categorized with the other women who are sitting, and these women are often hopelessly sitting for a long time. Standing means you are eager, even if too eager, for a dance, and you can smooth out that rough edge of desperation by rejecting advances from people not on her special guest lists, preferably by preemptively moving away from the suitor before the awkward moment of direct rejection.

It's getting chillier. They have opened the back doors to the frosty outside of this Texas city in the winter. All the women who are helplessly sitting down are wrapped in something warm, also looking at the dancers though sleeping in their own thoughts. She isn't distracted. She is looking at the dancers for the dancers' sake. She feels the chill, but she won't risk sending out any signal that she is not available. She is a stranger, still, in this town where many don't know her, and in tonight's dance, most people aren't even from the Lone Star Republic. And the best dancers are indeed from out of town. So it would be a huge shame if she gets past for a dance because she sits down or does anything that may suggest she's taking a break.

It's hard work on the road of being the best dancer, even if that's not your profession. It's important if you need to feel wanted by those most sought after and whose attention is gold, and that their dances feel more precious than any metal and gem. Standing on high heels is not at all comfortable, and only more bearable than dancing. But she stands there on her beautiful shoes, in a dress slightly sexy so as not to flaunt desperation, but enough to remind people that she is a beautiful woman to be with in a dance.

But her gaze, or the absence thereof, or the mere shortness thereof, makes her look unreachable. She walks up and down the isle flanked by sitting forlorn-looking women and predatory men. She can feel the gazes falling on her from both genders, but she doesn't care. She is trying to make herself visible. She is tired of standing there and have to be showered by the attention of men she isn't sure would be good, and she is afraid that she would sooner or later break and allow herself, once again, to be in the arms of someone who wouldn't give her that sweet dance to remember by. Unlike other women, she doesn't make a lot friends here, not any chitchat. She didn't come here for making friends. She wants to be the best dancer she can. However, if she had connected a little with the women here, she would have been told that not even the best dancers could give her the best dances. It doesn't only depend on how good the man is. And besides, and they would find a more diplomatic way of telling her this, she isn't the best dancers here and to expect these men to be thinking about her, and even to expect her dances with them to be amazing, is a bit of a stretch.

Still, she stands there, feeling some growing frustration but still patiently waiting, watching the crowd, ignoring the gazes from around her, and as the last song of the set comes to an end to signal to the dancers to disperse from the floor, her hopes once again rise.

Infinite Smiles

She arrived a few days before the festival had started because that's when the ticket is cheapest. Still, it was very expensive, especially for someone who's self-employed and had just started her business a few months ago, and she can tell you that starting a business is very taxing on the savings account and even more on the mind and emotions. But still, she decided to burn herself out with a lot of dancing.

Why not? Dancing takes energy from the physical body, the shell, and replenishes the soul protected by the shell that is, in the end, driven by that soul.

That was over New Year's Eve, two weeks ago. But now she's back on the dance floor, crossing the country to be with those she had danced many times with and new faces she would love to make acquaintances with. She stayed with one of her dance friends, as part of her effort to minimize the cost of this dance experience. She told me that as sort of a compensation she had been executing her culinary skills in his kitchen and dishing out yummy treats for him. She spoke this, as always, with a genuine smile. In fact, even when she's not speaking, she has a smile, latent in her face, ready to be dispensed to anyone who wants to enjoy it. Some people are always pensive, their faces laden with some other thought even when talking to someone else, and if you have some sort of psychic hand you can feel the craggy, rocky surfaces of their souls through their cheeks. But not her. She seems present whenever I see her; perhaps that's one benefit of dancing so much, of opening your heart, or maybe the other way around.

She was sitting there in her dark, silver dress, her face lit with a certain liveliness that escaped words. With anyone else I would have thought something special had happened, but with her I knew that it was simply because she was there, being there was special enough. I made myself known, me, one of her tango friends, and she gave me a strong embrace straight from her heart. I was a little nervous, as always in a tango setting, in a milonga. I was going to ask her to dance, and although she had always been generous with her acceptances, I was never without some noticeable degree of anxiety. Her smile was unmistakably sincere. There is something to be said about being with someone who offers sincere smiles; it puts your unnecessary guards down, it inspires you to be sincere, to be true to yourself as well as to others. Her eyes aren't terribly large, but when she smiles, even though they get a little smaller, they sparkle with an exuberance your fears can't help but succumb to. And she spoke, with her Montreal accent, with a frank and caring attitude. She isn't repeating some lines that you do when you meet someone or bump into someone to make conversation, to break ice. She doesn't seem to need that. And she didn't at that moment after she rose up to give me that disarming embrace.

I, on the other hand, didn't know what to do. There's always a part of me that wants to get to know her more, but when I am at a milonga, I have only one goal, which is dancing. I allow myself to believe that it's a legitimate goal. Nevertheless, this goal always makes me nervous; perhaps because tango makes me nervous, reminds me constantly that I am being tested, evaluated, and to some extent it's a performance for the woman rather than a partnership. It's complete folly, of course, especially with someone who appears far from being judgmental, and whose goal there was simply to have a good time.

Which is how she danced with me. It was second nature to her to show me how much she was enjoying herself, how attentive she was with the music and with me. And my armor quickly unbuckled and left me, and with that I felt my heart opening up. I felt I wanted to have her with me for each heartbeat of the time that we would be dancing. Her face, her Aguilar nose, her thin lips, her prominent cheeks, her smiling eyes, all touching the right side of my face. My face could feel her smile, the aura around my thoughtful head fused with her aura around her carefree presence. And her torso around which I wrap my right arm felt at times fused with mine, that in those moments we were just one and one moving along the music. I could feel the strands of her hair tickling, almost, my right ear, my right temple. And when we pause between songs and chitchat, she never seemed tired, or absent-minded.

Where did she get all this energy, not only to dance but to be present? Is it really the dance? I couldn't figure out. But for sure after we were finally done and I thanked her profusely, I was left feeling happy, optimistic, as if I were infected.

Airport Bus

Two men walking up and down the sidewalk, passing each other occasionally, screaming out the great deal their employer is offering from their pawn shop. It is a rather warm day in the middle of winter, and most people on this busy street are just milling around. A woman is a among the half dozen people waiting for one of the three buses at the bus stop in front of the pawn shop, which is squeezed between "Harlem Foods" that doesn't actually sell any food and a deli that purports to be open 24/7. While the men walk with their big and colorful placards on their chests, boasting "big dollers [sic]", the woman looks into the distance, checking for any sign of the airport bus. She has just one piece of luggage, a big black suitcase, and nothing else, no hand bags, no duffle bag, not even a purse. She is not mindful or is completely oblivious of the business that is happening around her. A man comes out of a crack in the fence behind which no building seems to be functioning. Another man talks in a nearly incomprehensible slang and accent to another one, both very animated but not angry. Across the street a mother in some African-like dress and head wrap is pushing a baby carriage with a screaming baby, passing in front of a bakery that doubles as an eatery.

A bus comes, but not the airport bus. The woman continues to stand there, stretching her neck a little to see if there's any other bus coming. She knows that the bus comes quite often, but the disappointment with this arriving bus increased her anxiety a little. A young man with a baseball cap worn reversed is leaning on one of the walls of the bus stop, and eyes her from behind from head to toe, and back up. He's wearing a Chicago Bulls jacket and a big golden chain around his neck over a black shirt underneath. But after a few more rounds of inspection, he loses interest and takes out his cell phone to compose a text message. The old lady in front of him just now, very short, with gray hair like a nest sitting on her wrinkly head, slowly ascends the bus that had just arrived. Two women, young like the one with the suitcase, run up to the bus, with big smiles of relief. While waiting for the old lady to slow climb up the bus and slowly pay for her fare with a bag full of coins, the two women stub out their cigarettes and giggle. At this point the young man with the Bulls jacket looks at the two women, and keeps his stalking eyes on them until they disappear behind the closing doors of the bus.

Finally, the airport-bound city bus arrives. The woman reaches into her right pocket of the jacket and takes out her metrocard. Two teenage boys walk past behind her, talking Spanish while munching the fried chicken from the fast food restaurant across the street. They crossed over to this side to go to the very dingy and suspiciously looking hotel at the corner. And they didn't notice the woman with the single piece of luggage going in with a very glum face. She would keep that emotionless face through out her trip, in the bus, at checkin, through security, at the gate waiting, on the plane, during the flight, and at the baggage claim, where she will reclaim that one piece of luggage of hers before being greeted by another public bus that she would have to wait, that would take her back home where other people with even sadder faces await her.

Final Beats in Haiti

The smell takes a while to get used to, but then, it doesn't constantly bother you because there's so much screaming, everywhere. Dr. Pérousse is a brave man, in the sense that he hasn't collapsed under the weight of his own fatigue and of the trauma around him. He is the only surgeon now in the only room where there aren't corpses strewn all over the place. But the operating room is has been in for over twenty hours now has been shipping out new supplies of cadavers that inevitably produce long and painful screaming in the hallway. Joseph is a friend of Dr. Pérousse, and they have known each other for a while now. They have seen a lot in this island country, all the political upheaval, all the criminal violence, and the bone chilling poverty of the poorest nation of the Caribbean. Joseph, unlike Dr. Pérousse, is neither black nor Haitian; he comes from the island of Manhattan where he has a nice little, very little, studio paid for by his job as a freelance reporter and photographer.

Today in this capital of this impoverished island where a merciless earthquake had flattened buildings and lives, Joseph sits motionless. He is tired and he is lucky. Has a broken arm, but he escaped the collapsing building and cheated fate's cage of rubble that is still trapping many others, dead or dying.

There, another scream, another wailing.

His broken arm is not important now. There are people far more wounded than he is and many of these people will not leave this tiny clinic again as they would bleed to death or succumb to vile infections. Joseph is here to help, actually, in whatever capacity his brain and body, minus that non-functional hand. But now he is exhausted. He is sitting on the dirty floor, a small patch not stained with blood. On his left is a corpse covered with a dirty white piece of canvas. The blood from its head has seeped through. In front of him sits a man who is staring into some distance; his occasional blinking is the only sign that he's alive. Joseph saw him earlier when he was writing people's names down and the names of the people they were waiting for in the hospital. The hospital itself is half destroyed; many nurses and doctors perished in the process. But this wing remained functional.

Where are the looters? He wondered at that point, writing people's names down with, luckily, his writing arm. Like the police, the looters were probably stuck somewhere. There he saw this man now sitting motionlessly in front of him. Then he was crying, holding a girl whose face was all bloody. A volunteer from Médicin sans frontier asked if the girl was all right.

"Ça va?"

"Oui"

She could barely squeeze out that one syllable word. The father went on to explain that his oldest daughter was dead, and this one was dying, and begged the volunteer to help.

Joseph didn't hear the rest; he had to work. As he couldn't help with any heavy lifting, his task was to bring some order in this emotionally trying time in the hospital where people couldn't help blaming the doctors and others in charge for the death of their last hope for their loved ones. Now this man sits motionless without his daughter with him.

There's another little girl, much tinier. She lies motionless, too, on a cold, metallic table on Joseph's right. He turns his head to check on her. She is covered with a soft piece of cloth; her abdomen still heaving, slowly, subtly, up and down. Her eyes closed, one of which is covered with the blood still shiny from the huge gash on her right temple. He reaches out to her little right hand; it is soft and still warm. But the little girl is alone, no parents. No one has come to ask for a little girl like her. Joseph didn't even know her name. She was left there by someone, someone who found her somewhere, probably. Her face still has the gray dust from wherever she was dug out from.

Then there was a huge uproar from the east wing. Joseph props himself up, and before he runs to see what's happening, he notices that the man is not at all perturbed by the commotion. His eyes blink once, still staring into the darkness through the iron rails of the window in this section of the hospital.

Joseph reaches the center of the commotion, after nearly tripping on one of the growing number of corpses left lying on the floor. The people who had been sleeping with them are all now standing, tired but alert. A few men were making a lot of noise, but Joseph, the only white man there now, got himself into the center of the crowd. He finally learned that someone has said a tsunami is coming. Many people already have gathered their things and are starting to leave. Joseph manages to outshout the fear-mongering phantom that stalks the living and he explains to them that no tsunami was coming, that he was a scientist and understands that tsunamis only can come if the earthquake happened in the sea. The second part is true, but he was never fond of science. After a lot of desperate looks, finally, the people calmed down and returned to their mattes among the dead. Many are so tired that they immediately fall asleep. Joseph isn't always sure if a given body on the floor is cold or still has a heart beat.

When he returns, he hears a voice, the voice of the man who remains motionless, emotionless, still staring into the distance.

"Elle est morte."

Joseph has no emotion left to spare either. Before he can move, the operating room's door is thrown open and another corpse is rolled out. He catches a glimpse of Dr. Pérousse's face, very serious, even a little sad after having released another soulless shell of a body covered with bloody blanket. He sees Joseph and smiles a little. Unlike most people in the city now, at least they had each other, friends, a familiar face that isn't lying dying on the floor. Then the door closes.

Joseph goes over to the little girl. Yes, the man is right, she is dead. Completely frozen. He touches her little hand again, the one that was warm. It is slightly warm, or maybe that's because of his mind playing tricks on him. He gently tucks the little hand underneath the little blanket but he doesn't sit back down. He has work to do. But whatever it is, he needs one moment. And for that moment, he props himself against the wall of this already underfunded hospital, and he rests his forehead on his right arm. Then he starts to cry as if no one can hear him; but really, no one can hear him on this island; everyone wants to be heard.