Unpredictable

We are walking on the shore of a beach, a windblown and deserted place, where the Atlantic Ocean's foaming tongue licks the stones and pebbles, polishing and punishing them, slowly wearing them down to sand. Without taking her eyes off the gulls wheeling overhead she bends slightly and picks up a medium sized, perfectly rounded stone, black and dense, just like any one of the dozens lying at our feet. See, she says, look how they're all the same, juggling it between her hands, you take one stone, you look at its shape, feel its weight in the palm of your hand...you can feel its cold hardness with your fingertips. Is there anything else to know? No... now you know everything about this stone, and everything about every other stone on the beach, how they tumbled and stumbled over each other and were carried in by the tides, worn down and shaped by the waves. Life's like that, she said, you don't have to guess what's going to happen, just look at the cycles... nothing ever changes? It's all lies...you experience something once and it's the same every time afterwards... It's so predictable,
She lazily drops the stone, which immediately becomes indistinguishable from its equals carpeting the sand.
I found a curved, flat stone amongst a small column of rocks that a previous walker must have constructed, and crouching down level to the sea I let the stone fly from my hand as low and fast as I could. It skimmed out over the water, bouncing and skipping several times before disappearing into the sea. That's what life's like, I said, you can't be sure how far you'll fly or where you'll fall...You can throw the same stone a hundred times and it will always have a different destination... It's unpredictable...

Chapter One: When we were kids

When we were kids we used to do all the stuff kids used to do, climb trees, swing on a rope over the river... fall in the river...play James Bond and spies and cops and robbers in the building site of the new houses next to ours, sneak into the half-made houses and get chased away by the watchman, steal apples from the trees, throw rocks into the pools left behind by the disused mines, everything and anything was good for having fun.
I grew up next to a graveyard, it sounds creepy but it wasn't, it was actually a lot of fun, a fantastic place. Nobody ever went there anymore, the graves were too old to have visitors, and we had the place to ourselves, which sounds odd I know, the place being full of dead people, but it never bothered us, we never got spooked or scared. You could hide behind the gravestones, leap-frog the fallen urns, and find rusted lengths of metal railings in the tall grass to use as spears or javelins. There was a crumbling disused internment chapel that had been last used 20 years before, it was great for playing in, especially as night was falling. Sometimes we would light a fire in the middle of the stone floor with wood from the old pews, and we'd talk about everything or tell ghost stories. It was a good place to grow up, Durham City, green countryside all around, the winding river and the fields and woods, bucolic and beatific at 7 years old, and hell at 16.
It snowed like crazy every year, it would drift down from the sky steadily from December to February, you could go sledging and skating every day until you collapsed exhausted from the sheer joy of being alive. We spent all of our time outdoors and our parents never worried, we made friends, we fought with each other, we took sides against our enemies, and stood up for each other against the unfairness of adults.
We played all year round, whatever the season whatever the weather, rain, hail, snow, the baking summer heat, nothing stopped us, when we were tired we'd just collapse in the grass to catch our breath...and we'd talk....
"It's a rabbit"
"No, more like a cat"
"No...look see the ears...aw, now its gone"
"A dragon, see there's the tail"
"Wow, thats exactly like a dragon!"
"See that octopus coming over the trees, that big clouds the head, and that little one's a leg"
"Not leg...tentacle"
"Leg...tentacle...whatever, Mr.Smart Bottom!"
"So...where do the shapes come from, I mean who makes the clouds look like animals and stuff?"
"I don't know, God I guess...."
"Or the cloud fairies!"
"Yeah, the cloud fairies... you nitwit....I think its the wind...or our imagination...whatever, it don't really matter, I like looking at them".
"Why don't they ever have words up there, or messages?"
"I guess its hard for your cloud fairies to make words!"
"Ha ha ha, clever clogs....I mean it would be really cool to see a message up there one day, eh? Like a secret message...."
"Hey, maybe you could see you fortune up there, maybe what you see is what you're going to be one day..."
"Well you're going to be an stinky slimy octopus I guess!"
We rolled around play fighting and tickling each other till one of us gave up and surrendered, we'd look each other in the eye and swear to be best friends for ever. We'd lie back again with our cheeks touching, funny how we always found ways to hug and be near each other. Everything meant something and we knew it somehow, every little gesture, every little touch.

Was there ever a message in the clouds?
Yes, actually one day there was, and we never expected to see it...
We were older then, I guess 16 or 17, we were lying under a tree, smoking, holding hands, I was looking at her from the corner of my eye, she was looking at the sky..."Look," she said, suddenly jumping up, "up there, see?,"....there were two short sentences, one for her and one for me, written by the same hand, interlocking and inseparable...pointing to the same future. ..

So, you ask, what did you see there, in the clouds...
I can't tell you, she earnestly swore me to silence then, and I still bear the silence.
Now, a whole ocean away from the grassy fields, a whole life away from her, I can look out of my office window and sometimes I see my half of the message, and I wonder if she can see hers? If she can remember the whole message as we saw it that day, I see and I remember, and I remember my promise and I remember her.

Chapter Four - Lower East Side

I have drawn my hands away
Like ships for guidance in the lift and spray
Of stars that urge them towards an unknown goal
Drift, O wakeful one, O restless soul
"Meditation" Hart Crane


I couldn't fall asleep and I couldn't wake up all the way.
I was skating on the thin ice between waking and sleeping, numb and paralyzed in my sleeplessness, mutely staring at the ceiling and silently fuming inside. I really hated when that happened, because I would always be totally wrecked by the time I had to get up and go to work. I looked at the bedside clock, 3.30a.m....well that's me fucked then. I heard her moving in her sleep, breathing like the sound of deep waves in the distance, the call of the sirens.
Fifth floor walk-up, run-down railroad apartment, corner of 3rd and Avenue B. Freezing in winter, a humid oven in Summer.
The building is as quiet as the grave...well...quiet except for the crack head paranoid downstairs who always chooses this time of night to run up and down the hallway banging on the walls and screaming over and over, "White devils! White devils!" The never-seen woman who lives upstairs rearranging the furniture, dragging the sofa from one side of the apartment to the other, lift...drag...thump...lift...drag...thump, I wish the next thump would be her dropping stone dead on the floor. All I need now would be for Giorgio, the middle aged Ukrainian alcoholic who lives next door, to realize that he's out on the street in zero degree weather freezing to death, with his keys lost somewhere in the snow, to start buzzing my door so he can crash on the sofa...Giorgio doesn't trust me with the keys when he's sober, he doesn't trust us at all.

And, now what the hell is she doing?

Why can't she stay in bed, jumping up all the time to do God knows what in the kitchen, every time she gets up she lets a draft of cold air in the bed, I mumble...honey?....don't put the light on...the light switch clicks, the fluorescent in the kitchen sputters to life, throwing it's harsh light into the corner of the bedroom where we sometimes sleep together, when it's not so cold and icy in our hearts. Why can't she go to bed at a reasonable hour? Sleep all night long once in a while, take a pill or something? It's bad enough that she has to work at the bar until after midnight, but why doesn't she ever get home until after 2am, I don't get it. I sometimes wonder what goes on there after they've cleaned up and locked the doors, but, I guess I don't really care anymore, as long as she comes home at all these days it's a good sign. I just want some peace, and between the getting up and coming back, and turning the light on and off, and the bloody mobile bleeping away all night I'll be lucky to get an hour's peace tonight.
The front door bangs open, freezing cold air rushes in from the hall way, the windows rattle and my spine ices over, I hear her making a run for the stairs, footsteps skittering and ricocheting off the tile floor...what drama is unfolding in her now? Could have at least closed the door on her way out!

I'd seen her around the neighborhood for the last few months, since the end of summer I guess, walking alone most of the time, walking a dog once which seemed so incongruous.
When December came it started to get really cold, and the wind chill would blow unhindered up the Avenue from Houston Street.  Most early evenings I sat in the cafe on the corner for warmth, every so often I'd see her hurry past, wool hat pulled tight down over her ears, the collar of her pea-coat turned up, an outline of black in movement, a brief sense of heat on my cheek. Or I'd pass some place, a diner, cafe, laundromat, whatever, and out of the corner of my eye, I'd make out her shape, have the feeling of her sitting at a table by the fogged-over window, some hot drink steaming between her hands. I think she was a waitress in a restaurant, I'd dropped into a neighborhood Italian place one night with friends, I think it was her, coming from the kitchen with plates and cutlery, it was a dimly-lit dining room and I couldn't really make her out clearly, I was distracted by my friends and couldn't pointedly turn around and stare...but I saw her appear and disappear in the mirrors around the room, it was her, I felt the heat on my cheek again.
 I'd never actually seen her with anyone, no boyfriend, maybe there was one at home, in the background, wherever home was. She was an abstract person in my peripheral vision, there and not there at the same time, registered...then gone. You'd never have the chance to meet square on, because there is no direct connection from you to them, nobody you know knows them. Even if you knew where they should be at a particular time, they wouldn't be there...they'd be there...then gone, the wrong place at the wrong time. This might sound crazy but I was always aware of her when she was close, even if I couldn't see her directly, I began to worry that I was hallucinating.
     
She comes home late, sometimes she's drunk, sometimes she seems high, but I know she doesn't do drugs, it's the chemical cocktail in her brain she says, the dry martinis and tequila sunrises of the ups and downs, the slow-motion icing down of her neurons, the doses of poison she has to take and the antidotes she swallows...and honestly I try but I don't understand what she's talking about, I just know the times I have held her close to me for hours as she sobs and howls, laments and mourns, for something she says she has to do, or had to do, or did. Until, in spite of the nervous energy still coursing through her, she collapses depleted of sense, she becomes heavy as a river stone and I carefully carry her to bed.  Sometimes I lay her fully clothed on the duvet to sleep, sometimes I feel braver and calmly undress her, taken aback once again by the smoothness of her skin, like marble, each curve and fold an index of the bones below...and I wonder what demons could inhabit such an angel...we make love to draw out the animal that sleeps inside her...trying to reconnect to it...hoping touch will reawaken it, later we lie in the omnipresent darkness, in silence and she tells me things...about herself, about her past, and I listen for the clues that will explain her reckless and ecstatic life.

Now she's gone again, and I have no idea when she'll be back.
So, I'll try to sleep a little, try to ignore this.
Explain her fleeing headlong as insomnia, nervous energy.
Maybe she went down to the corner for cigarettes, maybe she'll be back soon.
She's gone to meet someone I just know it.
Gone to get something she's always needed more than me.
She never tells me where she goes, she skates around the facts, I don't have the faintest idea where she came from or where she's going. To be honest I never did.
I've never seen her passport, any I.D., any proof of anything she's said or who she is.
I know nothing for real, and I didn't give a damn then or now.
In her address book I was number 37, I'd looked. 

You know, I found her again eventually, one day, or she found me, standing in the doorway of the Ukrainian Social Center waiting for a friend, sheltered against the cold...or was it that she stepped out of a taxi right in front of me and we smiled in mutual recognition...or was she waiting for the bus, her head stuck in a book, and I went to stand next to her...does it really matter how it happened? No, if I tell the truth it was much more straightforward, she just walked up to my table in the cafe, and without any apology, sat down opposite me, took off her winter coat and laid it across the chair next to her, pulled the wool hat off her head and shook her hair out, it was shorter than before. She looked me right in the eye, those brown eyes, those large dilated pupils...I started drowning in them, the sound of the deepness of the ocean and far-off tolling bells...she cocked her head to one side, put two fingers on her chin and said to me, "OK...so...tell me a story."

So I did, and I kept talking to make her stay there with me, and I've been talking ever since because this story can never end, it has changed from being all about me, to being all about me and her, to just being all about her, and now the story is only about being silent, I've run out of words for once, and I'm ready to sleep at last.

The Trees.

Yesterday I went to the woods to talk to the trees, that's usually what I do when I need answers, I find their patience and stoicism easier to take than the uncertainty of my friends advice. They've never failed me yet: their message?...patience...take it easy...one day at a time. I appreciate everything they've shown me, the tenacity of the roots in the shallow earth, the constant search for nutrition, how they stretch out their verdant limbs to shade their children, the saplings, below.
But today?
"You wanna know something? We're tired..." they groaned in unison as a gust of wind stirred their branches, "...we get asked too many questions, it's not only you that walks through here you know, everyone wants answers to the big questions...but we don't know anything either, that's why we just stand here, we really don't have anything to share..."
Yes, but...why do I always feel better when I come here? Why does contemplating you make me feel more at one with my own nature?
"It's the placebo effect...it's all in your mind...we're trees, not prophets, sorry if you got the wrong idea."
"Meanwhile, stop by sometime, enjoy the foliage and the fall colors..." one particularly gnarled old tree replied, it's limbs crossed in a gesture of finality, "...but right now...we have nothing for you."
It's true, you know, they looked so unsure, unconcealed, stripped bare of their leaves, naked branches sticking out awkwardly from the trunks, stark treetops against the darkening sky. One fellow lay, uprooted by lightning or toppled by the wind, in the outspread arms of another. Prostrate on the forest floor, my fallen soldiers, once towering and vigilant, now laid out on the pine needles covered with blankets of dry leaves.
No, there would be nothing answered today, so I just watched the setting sun lighten their upturned hands, the fingers closed in silent prayer; no birds to sing to them.
I took a photograph...
...the lengthening shadows and the starkness.
I turned my back on it all, left the woods by the path to the main road, went back to light, to noise, to humanity.

Chapter Five - Somewhere in America

"And I see losing love is like a window in your heart,
Everybody sees you’re blown apart, everybody sees the wind blow"

"Graceland" Paul Simon

He was busy working, in the afternoon on a day like any other, when the office phone rang, He had his feet up on the windowsill and was looking out over Broadway. He had a call on line one the receptionist said, it was his Father, he never called him at work. His blood went cold, He knew it was bad. Son, he said, your Mother died last night, you have to come home. That was it? He couldn't catch it, he asked him to repeat it, then he heard the shaking in his usually stern Father's voice and he knew it was true, he was in New York, and she was in England....but at the same time not in England. He hadn't had the chance to say goodbye.

It was a couple of days after I'd come back to Madrid from visiting him for Christmas, I talked to him the night before, he wasn't feeling good and I told him to go to the doctor's the next day, I will, he said, goodnight son, talk to you tomorrow. The next morning I got a phone call from my brother. Doug, he said, I heard the discomfort in his usually placid voice, Dad's dead, he had a heart attack this morning, around 6, he was going to the kitchen to make tea....he just....collapsed. It was too late to stop it, it was now in the past, I turned around repacked my suitcase and went back to England, it was too late to tell him that I loved him, even after all the years of mutual suffering, I would have to bury that part of myself along with him.

I was at college in Orlando, she came down to visit me, my wife, I was still so much in love with her after 12 years of marriage. We went for a drive, then we went for a walk in a park, we were walking through the rose garden, let's sit down she said, we need to talk. It's...well...it's like, when you come back to New York I don't want us to live together anymore, I want to move on. All I remember now was the park bench, and the heat, and her perfume, I couldn't weigh her words, they weighed more than gravity. Later that year I went back to New York to live alone, and in a way I still do.

It was a Sunday afternoon, and it was raining. He was driving to the market when she messaged him on his BlackBerry, he tried to read but was about to lose control of the car so he pulled off the road into the market's parking lot and without turning off the motor sat motionless there in hell in the rain reading the flow of the severing words, desperately thumbing the keys of the phone in reply, trying to stem the flow, to cauterize the wound, to stop her leaving him for ever. She was walking away from something dangerous, something she didn't even know about, because it was his dream not hers, she was only afraid of causing damage. The messages stopped, he sent her a final "?", there was no reply...there was a vacuum. He threw the phone on the floor, violently as almost to separate his head from his body he wrenched himself forwards in the seat clutching at the steering wheel and felt such a strong desire to drive blindly into the Main Street traffic, to collide with something real and substantial and true, to do something to take away the pain. Rocking backwards and forwards like a child he couldn't stop crying, weeping for himself and his life, and for what he'd done, and feeling so sorry for himself, so sorry for misunderstanding her intentions. After a while he calmed down enough to walk quietly through the parking lot through the pouring rain into the market, carefully comatose, reddened tear stained eyes blind, trying not to look his fellow shoppers in the eyes, because they would be able to sense his extreme vulnerability, feel his guilt. He bought what he needed, milk, cereal, a box of rat poison powder and a gallon of Clorox, and by old habit smiled at the cashier. He walked out into the rain and got back into the car...OK, he thought...time to go home and act like nothing's happened.

Alone in the apartment, sitting by the window, she was fixedly staring at the computer screen and she couldn't believe what she was reading, the force of the blow had knocked the breath from her lungs, she gulped and gasped for air and kept reading, she couldn't pull her eyes away...transfixed,nailed to the chair by the betrayal in the words scrolling before her eyes. The pages went on and on, some so old they were mildewed and yellowed by time. Every hurt she'd ever endured from every man was there, brazen and unapologetic, stacked up like the dirty dishes, ugly and twisted. Here she was in the realness of the comfort of her own home, by her window, looking at her trees, and yet this was also really happening. She pulled her knees up to her chest to protect her heart from the arrows, yet also left herself wide open, so open and vulnerable like Saint Sebastian pierced through and through by the awful knowledge that this was probably going to kill her, and if not the whole of her, then it would raze that private garden that she had loved and watered with her resilience and tears. Then mercifully she slowly ceased shaking and groaning and a cold fear entered her veins, what does this mean?, she asked, what's the point if this is what you always get in the end, I shall be strong enough to get over this, I've done it before, and I'll do it again. She unfolded herself, and stood up, looked out of the window at the fall leaves on the covered pool, yes, she thought, everything has it's season.

The Dispensary

I've been thinking that there should be a special place where you go to receive bad news, like a special Department or Office, or even Clinic or Dispensary. There should be an official looking summoning, exquisitely printed, embossed even, or perhaps a personalized phone call from a calm, softly spoken representative, requesting  that at such and such an hour at such and such a place you should present yourself, with a form of picture ID, because unfortunately the universe has gone a bit crazy, some stuff's happened, and well, sorry to say but we have some bad news for you. So you go, feeling nervous and anxious, because, although this might have happened before it's still not a very pleasant experience, rather like going to the dentist's. Even people who have received bad news in the past, and have learned to accept it, still feel a shiver of apprehension down the spine when they grip the envelope or pick up the phone and here the soothing muzak and the calm voice asking you to please hold for a moment. Once you arrive you check in, they're very busy and there are always people waiting, but the staff are courteous and professional in a doctor's waiting room way. They sit you down and tell you the bad news, they give it to you straight, no messing around. Then it's up to you, cry, scream, pass-out, go into denial, throw things (they have a wide selection of things to throw), curse God...whatever you want, go ahead, nobody will judge you based on your reactions, you don't have to worry that someone might misunderstand, the attendants are highly trained and have seen it all before, they are unshakable. After a short while you will be offered tissues to dry the tears and shoulders to cry on, genuine understanding and empathy is available 24/7. Surrogate mothers, fathers, husbands and wives are at you disposal, as are many variations of pharmaceutical palliatives, your choice, it's on the house. But, no sharp objects, razor blades or knives, no means of permanently ending the pain are available, you're just going to have to go home and figure that problem out for yourself.

Bridge building by night

"—As if too brittle or too clear to touch! The cables of our sleep so swiftly filed, Already hang, shred ends from remembered stars." "Voyages" by Hart Crane

Every night, as they slept miles apart in their separate worlds, he in his bed, and she in hers, they unknowingly shared the Bridge Building Dream. In it they dream that they are building a bridge towards each other, they are not acting together, hand in hand, in concert, but they are building to the same plan, following the same inordinately complex design that is required for the dream to function, and using the same ethereal materials that could dematerialize at any moment should their attention wander. They were building two spans of the bridge, that would meet at a predetermined spot in space and time, to unite themselves into one gigantic structure that would close forever the gap between them.
Night after night the pavement was slowly raised foot by foot, and the curvatures grew broader and stronger, the cables intertwining to create the cat's cradle wherein the builders sleep when they dream about sleep. Far below the raw masonry edges the oceans churned, occasionally a tongue of wave would leap up hungrily and carry away a loose chunk of material, that would later have to be replaced.
Why they or anyone else has this dream is unknown, each builder raises their edifice to join with another, sometimes the joining and completion is in alignment, sometimes it misses by a fraction, the fusing impossible.
She had in her mind the idea of a bridge arcing away to a metropolis, whose lights glimmered on the calmer water off in the distance. His bridge arches off way into the sky to touch the moon that shines on the snow of the Himalayas. One with her feet on the land and one with his feet in the skies, looking Brahma-like, towards and away from each other at the same time, face to face, spine to spine, spinning their impossible structures in mid-air.
Purposefully the sun begins to flood the room where he is sleeping and touches his eyelids, as he wakes the dream begins to fade and all his night's work sinks back down into the waters from where it was constructed, he must dredge up the materials from the depths every night to continue again. Still deeply asleep on the other side of the ocean she is distracted for a moment from her work by the slow, deep rumbling coming to her from miles away. A distant storm? She thinks. The sound of steel and concrete collapsing into the waves, coming from somewhere indistinct. Way over the dream's horizon a light that had brightly pierced the sky shudders for a second then winks out, darkness rises for a second then falls back, leaving silence.
She shudders fitfully in her sleep, her eyes blink open in the pitch darkness of her room, confused about where she is, she stretches momentarily, then without a second's thought turns back to continue with her work, there's always so much that needs to be done before waking.

A Day At The Beach.

A day at the beach,
a cold wind whipping the sand,
and a light rain falling.
We were sitting
watching the sky close its eyes,
the horizon rearing up,
a sheer wall of water ,
watched them melding into one
arching canopy of grey steel.
I said... Sometimes I feel like
returning to bone, to sand,
seaweed, and sea–salt... devolving...
She said... Sometimes I feel
like I need to leave you behind
and evolve some more.
She ran to the water's edge,
dived in, swam away,
churning the breaking surf...never looking back.

Chapter Seven - Isla Fernando Rivera

I never thought I'd grow up so fast, so far, To know yourself is to let yourself be loved. And I want to be addicted, I want to be secure, I want to wake up after the night before, but do you get me? Do you ever get me?"
Words: Ben Watt, Everything But The Girl


......and so inevitably we come to the last chapter, the last story in more ways than one, but I'll tell you now that I think it's going to have a happy ending.
We went to ground in 2015 from the USA just before the dollar crashed, and just after Tatiana was born, it wasn't easy, we had no money and my wife was working crazy hours at the Ministry to keep us fed. I did what I could, but most of the time I looked after Tatiana and wrote. When my first book eventually came out things started to get better, there was money coming in from the digital rights and the film adaptation. The future was looking a lot brighter than it had done for the last few years, we were more relaxed and we were extatic when Carlos was born in January of 2018. Then we had an unexpected stroke of luck, I found a "posada", a small, not so rundown hotel, on the island of Fernando Rivera that was for sale really cheaply,
It needed a little loving care but not too much, I thought that with the money that was going to come in from the advance on my second book we could buy it and fix it up for her to have her office on the Island, instead of in Puerta de La Cruz.
That was 10 years ago now, time flies, this place is so beautiful, you have to see it to believe it, we wake up to the sound of the surf pounding the rocks below, the calling of the gulls, and the endless wind rustling the palm trees, does time fly slower in paradise?, Yes, it comes slowly arcing into the mind in an intravenous drip kind of way.
I could get up now and walk to the balcony if I wanted to, look over the edge into the blue pools below between the rocks, the small sandy cove at the foot of the hills where Miranda is probably looking for shells, something we always used to do in Mallorca and Maine when she was a child. I could get out of this chair right now and go and watch Carlos, 12 years old and already a lanky adolescent, toasted brown by the sun, wirey and strong, wrestling with getting his surfboard into the Jeep. I bet he's swearing under his breath so she can't hear, she hates it when he swears. I could pull this recalcitrant shell of a body upright, and with a little effort, look into the living room where Tatiana is sipping an illicit early morning espresso. My God but when she turns her head that way she's the image of her mother, even down to the furrowed brow and the gentle scowl as she tries to finish the crossword that's already been worked on for a week. She is so like her, she carries herself the same way, erect and proud, black hair flowing behind her, but with that same sweet shuffle in the hips that caught me years before.
How did I meet Mami?, the perennially favorite bedtime story told the same way a thousand times, Carlos scrunching up his nose in fake disgust when I tell him about kissing her for the first time, but still very happy to get a bedtime kiss from her later, the little faker. Tatiana's eyes still becoming as big as plates with the wonder of how we survived the transition from the US, and how love can rescue you and help you do the impossible, there are no Princesses and Princes in this story, the hero's are Mami and Papi, alone against the world trying to slay the dragon everyday and maybe succeeding, Tatiana will stop asking for the story soon, she's begun to notice the boys that fish in the pools below, soon they'll come looking for her, what are we going to do with her? We'll keep her as long as we can, teach her about the world, and then set her free.
Miranda, almost 5 feet 10 inches tall, cornfield yellow hair and eyes like azure stones, a Valkyrie, a reaper of souls, including mine. She was my first child, and the first unconditionally great love of my life, a love that transcends all love, a love that's genetically programmed to last for as long as we do, which might be a short time, who knows?. She skips up the white steps from the beach, the red pail full of shells, water slopping over her green painted toenails. She always was an artist, even as a child she could see things other kids couldn't, how shapes fit together, the flow of colors in the sky, the flux of emotions on faces, she's always been gentle on the outside but hard as nails inside, she's seen things a child shouldn't have too, the end of dreams and illusion, and beginning of my problems...silly old Daddy. Right now she wants me to help her sort out the shells into piles, first by size, then by color, then by type, and finally, into some order only known to her that will become the geometric basis for her next painting. She has a special eye for reality that girl, and people are going to realize it soon. She looks like me, she always did, except for her eyes, the shape of which she got from her mother, their color blue from me. My voice, my sense of humor, my walk, she's me as a girl, it's weird sometimes to see yourself as the other. She grins, she's so happy to be here, she loves the ocean and the sand, says she wants to move here after her first exhibition closes in New York, she better hurry if she wants to find me here.
Well, it was inevitable, the doctor said there would be days like this when the pain would be so much that even the morphine wouldn't cut it, when the hallucinations start it's never sudden, it's always like drawing back a curtain onto a stage set, but I never know where I'm going to be, or which part in the play I'll get this time. I can never tell what's fake because it's all so real, the images must be coming from my memory, but I just can't remember from when, is she real or did I end up alone in the dingy studio apartment in Boston, broke after the crash, is Miranda really laughing with me, or is she laughing at me, like when she and her mother walked out for the last time. Carlos and Tatiana, are they my kids or are they my sister-in laws kids?, what the fuck's going on? Was there ever the island, were there ever tears on the pillows after the fights, the masses of gardenias growing in pots on the terrace, were there ever the ghostly, silent patients walking in the garden in the sunset, slowly being released from their own worlds into our world by my words, the magical incantations, the id, the ego, and the superego ad infinitum? Was she ever really there holding my hand, did she ever really say "Yes" when I asked her to marry me, I'm sure I did that?
"Where are you God?, I don't see you, where are you!" I'm shouting again at the top of my voice, "It's real, I wanna go, it's real, I wanna go baaaaack!!" I'm screaming now, delirious....the nurse will come now...No....it can't all be made up can it?...there's only the white metal end of the hospital bed and the colorless IV tubes reaching out for me like branches, and the dull green walls for inspiration, nothing of color to act as a catalyst, it must be the infection and the fever again...but...ah good here ...here comes the nurse at last, the Brazilian one with the long black hair flowing behind her who always grins at me, I like her, she's just like..(blur of static)...no, I don't want to see...just like someone I know, she touches my hand, she hugged me once when I was crying to go back, she said "Não se preocupe, sua família vai esperar por você para voltar", Don't worry, your family will wait for you to get back. She always gives me a few extra cc's to put me to sleep faster, and then I really can get away from this damn pain, and back to my real life on the island of Fernando Rivera.....(you know you can pick up your flight in Valencia or in Puerto de La Cruz and go directly to Fernando Rivera in approximately 1 hour......you know from August to January there are no rains, and from February to July there is more chance to have heavy rains rains rains rains that never ssssstop...). I'm rambling again, it's because the five flavors drug cocktail is starting to kick in....La Vila de Las Flores on Fernando Rivera, where there are things that need doing, I have to get out of this chair and call to Miranda, I have to pick up the breakfast things, I have to give the doors a fresh coat of white paint, I have to call the office and tell her I missed her, I have to finish this story now...I have to stay forever this time.

Chapter Six - New York

It was 8.05 when we left the office, it was getting dark and it was raining a little, I wanted to be a gentleman so I got out the umbrella, "No" she said "I don't need that, I love the rain". "Even the dirty city rain?" I asked, "Any rain is good!" she said, throwing a brief smile over her shoulder at me as I raced to keep up. "Oh fuck, there's the bus" she yelled, and took off running across the busy intersection, oblivious to the cars turning in from Lexington Avenue, God just reached down and paused reality for a moment to let us cross without getting creamed by a Yellow Cab. "Are you going to get on?" she asked "Yeah sure" I said, thinking of course I'm getting on I have nowhere to go right now but with you. The future I don't know, but this moment right here and now has always been inevitable.
"Let's sit here" she said, pointing to a seat facing backwards, "Better here" I answered, gesturing towards a forward facing seat "I hate to travel in reverse on busses it makes me feel like I'm regressing, to much going backwards. I need to start going forwards again." She smiled a little and we sat down. There was silence for a moment, "Let me see the tea kettle again", I said, she's just bought one as a wedding present for a friend, "It's great, they're going to love it, brushed silver and red's chic" I say. "Well they better, they told me exactly where to go to get it, Macy's", "Cool, so they made a list, very practical, you don't want two tea kettles when you get married, it's a bad omen unless you're English, you need to make concessions." There was another silence as she started to methodically scrape off the price sticker with a fingernail, apparently deep in concentration.
Ok, I thought to myself, this is where I have to say something or I'm going to go off the boil, "So...can I tell you something?", I offer, touching her arm lightly with the very tips of my fingers, "Yes", she says looking me directly in the eyes, no holds barred....ok...I'll admit I was expecting a helping "Sure", but she hasn't adopted that accommodating affectation of American speech yet, she goes straight to the nub, no messing around, I see she's going to make me work. "So, the last time?" I look into her eyes, please don't look straight at me, look away, please, "Yeah, that last time I saw you, that was horrible", I almost stutter, trying to backpedal a little " I mean really e-e-embarrassing", she arches one taut eyebrow, she's sensed where this is going, "Ok, I mean it was one of the worst fucking moments in my life, I shouldn't have said what I said I was a total idiot and I felt so lousy for weeks and months and I was worried you didn't want to see me or talk to me again!", this comes out in a machine-gun-like staccato, unrehearsed and un-punctuated and so unlike me. My heart is pounding and I think she's going to hammer me to the floor, "It's ok", she says...What!? I think, what just happened?, there's been a shift in reality that's what... "Wait wait, how could it be ok?, you said you hated me". "No" she says, a slow pan to a three quarter view, she's not looking at me now, she's facing forward and my eyes are boring holes in the side of her head, I want so desperately to read her mind. "No" she says again and it's a jump cut that yanks me back into reality, "I said I was hating you at the moment, you understand the difference right? Not hate, hating", Now she turns so quickly, and her eyes meet my eyes that are still pinned like lasers where her temple was a split second ago, "I mean you speak English don't you, the progressive tense, no?, I was hating you and now I'm not, ok, but you have to respect me...and yourself". "I do respect you, but there's things going on that you don't know about and I don't even know about yet. I mean, I've spent years not feeling like myself, and now I come back here to New York and I feel at home, I feel like I met myself again, there's things going on that make me feel good to be me for a change". I hadn't planned to say that, but I'm feeling relieved about the way it came out, she inspires me to honesty. "And it's not just the language?" she asks, a little more serious now, "It's more than just that right? You came back for more than that right?". "Yes, it's all that and more, I've had the time to think about things, not just acting out all the time, reacting to outside events, Jesus...you know, some days it actually feels good to be me, like the old me...but better". "That's good" she says, "you must be happy? Yes?". She has a way of asking things so simply, yet with such conviction that you just want to tell her everything. "But you have to have respect for me, you know, for what I've been through, I mean I'm here...", she waves her hand in the air encompassing the whole city outside the bus, "...and you're here", she pats the seat between us. There's several heartbeats, then she asks, "Are we going to talk about the other things?" . All this time her eyes have not strayed a millimeter from mine, I swear she hasn't blinked, and if she did the Earth could breathe a sigh of relief. But me?, I feel calm, I've just said everything I wanted to say and I feel cleansed, blessed.
My stop gets called, "Can I do something", I ask her, "What?" she says a little warily, what does she think I want from her now?, "I want to hold you, I want to hold you close for a moment; ok?", and to be honest that's all I really want to do right now, I want to feel her warmth and weight, her corporeality and reality in my arms. "Ok" she says and leans into me, her arms going around me, strong arms holding me tightly, I push my face into her hair and breathe in the totality of her, and she smells divine, I kiss her left cheek and her temple, I can't stop, I'm so relieved, so happy to be here with her, so desperate to keep hold of her for another second, I feel her hair caressing my arm and I'm stroking the nape of her neck. "God, that was so nice" I say "I really wanted to do that", "Yes it was nice, I wanted to too" she says, and she's really smiling at me this time. "Will you still be here tomorrow?...", I wave my hand at New York exactly like she did, "...or do you I have to leave the country and come back again, again?" I ask as we disentangle arms. I get up to get off the bus, I have to lightly brush my fingertips on her arm again once more, just to check she's real, "Yes I'll be here" she says with that air of finality that she has at times, and she doesn't turn around to smile or wave as I walk past the bus window on the sidewalk, but that's ok, she's just given me a good look at my redemption, one more glance doesn't matter.