The (Imagined) Lover

The (Imagined) Lover

Fictive dreaming: 

Gabriel, mi amante imaginado, was shot in the head on 12^th Street. He was thinking about mangos and murcielagos, and then he was thinking about nothing at all. That’s how death is. I didn’t see the bullet. It was closed casket. I imagine victims are the morticians’ nightmare. A bit of blush doesn’t do much when half of your head is caved in and your mouth isn’t the biggest hole in your face anymore. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the young man behind the desk at Rogenheim’s was born with just the kind of hands for building back bodies. Something in the shape of his fingers reworks skin like masons’ mortar and he spends nights waiting for gunshot wounds. But I doubt it. He has a weak look to him, not much good for pinching and molding.

I met Gabriel when he was twenty and I was twelve. He seduced me with language, got me off on his words. Perhaps I should not say “seduced.” That lends the wrong impression to my meaning. And what I mean is that he took off my clothes, peeled away my skin like a sunburn to my bones, stripped me bare of systems of veins and organs. Gabriel built me backwards. Gabriel unearthed me out of my body. Gabriel, my beautiful Colombian writer, knew me.

I stand at the back during the funeral. I carry one of his books, wear Lula’s lattice-worked earrings. I see many of his lovers, see the things they leave for him. I do not cry, not with the perfume and the air-conditioning, not in this place created for a corpse.

Is Gabriel here? A closed coffin has no one to tell.

Unreliable narrator:

I should tell you. What I said about Gabriel wasn’t true. Or it wasn’t right. The facts, anyway, were unclear. He taught me that.

After the funeral, I eat my aunt’s cake with a plastic fork and hide in Frida’s room with my books. Her duvet muffles the downstairs sounds. In a family like mine, someone is always coming or going, getting baptized or getting pregnant. Birthdays bully me around and Aunt Dorotea’s small hands are perpetually tipped with frosting. Today she has shaped the sugary paste into pink rosettes and hippos. At the party, no one will notice.

I wrap the duvet around my head and neck. The sky pleads but the rain waits. I wait too. Wait for these feelings to lessen, wait for Gabriel to return to me.

I’m half asleep when I feel Eveline lifting up the corner of the comforter. She moves around, ties my hair into tight braids, says nothing. I don’t look at her, don’t need to. She lost her Maman when she was my age. She knows grief and how it builds inside. She once told me that some of grief’s structures are beautiful if you figure out the right way to go about looking at them. Grief in small spaces, she has said, grief in small spaces is my specialty.

I believe her. I saw a pin-up of Rita Hayworth at the diner where Eveline works, and she looked so perfect and so sad. If you imagine Eveline, think of her like that: perfect and sad. Eveline cut her hair off when we were in middle school because she is too beautiful most of the time. The thing is though, whenever I look at Eveline, her beauty is always the last of what I see. I look at her and I think that she is curious and complicated and more herself than anyone I have ever known.

Eveline settles beside me in her old jeans and t-shirt. Her arm around my waist smells like diner grease and ketchup. She whispers to me in French, things her Maman used to say to her. When I fall asleep, it is with the warm impression of Eveline smoothed flat against my back.

I wake up and Eveline has slipped back into the pages of the worn book beside me. Hardly anyone has read it, and sometimes I feel as if I’m the only one who knows her.

Frida is here now. She purses her lipsticked mouth, and I feel bad for her. She has tried to like me for so long, but even though we’re cousins, she can’t stand my books or how it is I never brush my hair. Right now she’s looking at the gooiness of her mother’s cake still stuck to my chin.

I don’t try to tell her about Gabriel. She wouldn’t understand.

Allusion: 

An Argentine writer and I play Scrabble, or as Borges says, “escrabble.” We sit around a card table in the attic on rusty folding chairs I carried up from the garage. Occasionally he complains about the dust going up his nose. Borges is old and blind but with a tongue that makes his own gums bleed. That’s what you get when you spit too many barbs, I like to tell him. He just tilts his head and tsks at me, the tiles inches from his peering eyes. We spell words like capricho, quixotic, parataxis. I never win, and it’s because he is an incorrigible cheat. Borges likes to think he’s Dr. Seuss, Shakespeare and Cervantes, which is why he creates new words with such authority and riddles the board with his imaginings.

The Friday after the funeral, Borges asks me about Gabriel without pretext. He wants to know about the bullet that killed him. I tell him I didn’t see it. A shame, he sighs, a shame. Borges believes there was a story in that bullet. He wants to know what kind of mangos exactly, and were the bats—murcielagos—brown or black? Gabriel didn’t have to die, he says with a shake of his head, he didn’t have to die.

I tell him everything as he edges words onto the board. When I am done, Borges looks at me with his milk-and-coffee eyes and nods at the table covered in our letters.

You know, he says, Gabriel is here. Gabriel is here and always will be.

Synecdoche:

There’s a blue-eyed boy. It’s his wrists actually, his wrists and his hands. They’re beautifully bone bound, the most exquisite shapes I’ve ever seen. The curls, the rise of veins, and how his hands fall outwards, fingers cut to grasp long.

I’m fairly sure he has a name. I call him Wrists.

He sits beside me in the city library with its claw-footed tables, uses his hands to cover pages in pencil sketches. Some days they are better than others. I write down the titles of the books he reads: Johnny Got His Gun, Heart of Darkness, A Separate Peace. After he returns them to the shelves, I collect them to write notes in the margins. Little things like Who are you? Why are you here? Do you like horchata?

Two Sundays after Gabriel’s funeral, I find a lead lined page in the back of my book. The eyes are too wide-set, the nose more manageable, but it is my face, or rather, a perception of my face. I have never seen myself like this before: the downward scrape of pencil twining into hair, an ashy smudge marking the hollows of a throat, the fleeting little lines insinuating the rise of bone beneath cheeks. Each bit is integral to the next, his pencil point building from the hazy base, filtering in and fluttering around, illuminating a face from whiteness—my face. I am swallowed by the feeling of doubleness, of magnification and duplication, of existing beyond and outside myself.

I do not take the drawing with me when I leave that afternoon. My fascination with it is met only by my fear of it. It implies that I am not the only one capable of watching. It implies that Wrists is, after all, quite real.

And yet for days I am plagued by the thought of his wrists and the designs they made while he beckoned over empty paper, teasing out my likeness with soft pencil lines.

Death of the author: 

The man in the box. That wasn’t Gabriel. To be honest, I don’t even remember his name. He may have died from a gunshot wound. Some people do. The casket was certainly closed and the door to the funeral parlor was certainly open. He didn’t have to be Gabriel. Mi amante imaginado. It could’ve been anyone, really.

I didn’t have to walk into that funeral and make the dead man Gabriel, I think as Lula curls my hair, But then, why did I?

                      

Lula arranges me before the large vanity mirror, clucking to herself as she rubs kohl around my eyes and turns my lashes into a strip of grasping spider legs. She is merciless in this, and when she is done coating my face in makeups and my body in fabrics, Lula will declare me beautiful.

I do not feel beautiful, but I do not mind what Lula, my kind, sweet cousin, has done. Somehow this hour with her makes it easier to swim in my sea of relatives, to let uncles and aunts and nieces wash over me.

Frida says that Lula is stupid: sweet, but stupid. I think that Lula is kind and if she knows me as little as everyone else, at least she plays her fingers through my hair, brushes kisses over my split ends, and tells me I am beautiful. I may not believe it, but she does, and looking back at myself in the mirror, I am Lula-rendered, all glossed lips and satin hair.

Downstairs in the kitchen, it is the face Lula made that will give and receive the learned double-tap of cheek kisses. Outside in the yard, the legs Lula covered in buttery chiffon will relent to a dance. I will eat my aunt’s cake with Lula’s polished nails and the flush on the bones of my face will really be Lula’s powder.

At home afterwards, I will wash Lula and the party into the old bathroom sink. My own eyes will again appear in the small mirror, and on my birthday, I am the only one who will see them.

I will be seventeen, and Gabriel will still be fourteen days dead.

Narrative: 

Gabriel called me Meme, which is my name shortened. Meme: an abbreviation of me. He called me Meme and sat on my bed smoothing the patterned duvet, laughing when I called him Gabo. He liked to come at night and tell me stories. We’d lie under the blankets and block out the house, this ugly room. His face was vibrant against the clean backdrop of sheets. Years passed like this. He and I like kids under the duvet, hiding from I don’t know what. Then one day I didn’t feel like a kid anymore.

I loved Gabriel. And how could I not? We talked for hours about alchemy and whether it was technically a lie when Frida said I love you. I spoke of Boston and he brought us to Buenos Aires. Gabriel built towns for me, conjured lives from little more than muffled air. Most nights, I wanted nothing more than to exist in his head space, but as that was unreasonable to ask, I settled for his forehead on my shoulder, my lips against his hair. I loved him. I had loved him.

I think maybe one day I’ll try to tell someone about Gabriel. I don’t know who. Maybe Lula. Maybe Wrists. The way Wrists looks at me sometimes, it’s like he thinks he knows me. Actually knows me. He’s wrong. Of course he’s wrong. It’s just, the way he looks at me. Sometimes I forget that Gabriel didn’t have blue eyes.

Subtext:

I have meant to stop coming to the library. I decided it wasn’t good for me. Of course, it is not so simple. Three weeks after my birthday, I find myself at a table admiring dust suspended in the thick sunlight. Borges once told me that snot came from just this phenomenon: that passing through such a space, the particles fled up your nostrils and caught themselves in those tiny hairs. Then he would blow his nose.

Wrists slides out one of the heavy chairs and sits down across from me. He does not have paper or pencil or any other reason to be here. I look at him through the block of light. Wrists pulls at the books I’ve piled up like walls around myself and turns them over in his hands. He traces the faded lettering on the many times broken spine of Gabriel’s book.

Wrists looks at me as if he’s actually seeing Meme, and a slow smile begins to pull at his mouth. Leaning forward into the sun he asks, “Did you like García Márquez?”

My laugh is unoiled, more of a bark than a bell.

“I loved him.”