Jeff VanderMeer Read online

  Flight Is For Those Who Have Not Yet Crossed Over a short story by Jeff VanderMeer

  The only sounds inside the prison are the drip of water, the weeping of prisoners, and the chink-chink of keys on Gabriel de Anda's belt as he limps through his 2:00 a.m. rounds of the third floor. The prison walls glow with green phosphorescence and, from far below, Gabriel can hear the ocean crashing against the rocks. A storm builds out in the Gulf, where sargasso clings to drowned sailors and does not allow them to sink into the formless dark of deep waters. Gabriel feels the storm in the pressure of air pushing against his face and it makes him wary.

  He has been a guard at the prison for so long that he can see it in his mind like a slowly-turning, dark-glittering jewel. The Indians call the prison "Where Death Walks Blind of Justice." It is a block of badly-mortared concrete, surrounded by barbed wire, electric fences, and jungle. Resembling nothing less than the head of a tortured, anguished beast at sleep, a twenty-four hour lamp at the front entrance its solitary eye, it hunkers three stories tall, with tiny barred windows checkering a brackish, badly-lit interior where bare bulbs shine down on graffiti, guard, and prisoner alike. No one has ever escaped, for the prison, its foundations rotting, dominates the top of a cliff on the eastern coast of that country known more for its general, El Toreador, than for its given name, a name once Indian, then Spanish, but now forgotten.

  Gabriel's rumpled uniform scratches his back and fits poorly at the crotch. He shuffles over the filthy catwalk that leads from one side of the third floor to the other. Muttering to himself, he fights the urge to spit over the side, into the central courtyard, where the secret police hose down the violent prisoners. His gimp leg throbs.

  When only twenty-two, Gabriel was visiting Merida, Mexico, his brother Pedro driving and jabbering about some girl he knew in Mexico City "with thighs like heaven; no better than heaven." Enraptured, Pedro took a curve too quickly and careened into oncoming traffic. Gabriel remembers only a high-pitched scream and the pain that shattered his left leg, the bone breaking in two places.

  It gave him a limp. It gave him grist to chew as he navigates the catwalk. The janitors have not cleaned the catwalk from the last food riot. Dark, scattered lumps form an obstacle course, exude the stench of rotted fruit and flesh. What sweet relief it would be to press his face up to one of the outer windows; then he would see, framed by moonlight, the breakers far below tumbling against a black sand beach. The first refreshing hint of summer gales might touch his face in forgiveness, but afterwards, he would only have to return to the catwalk and the last prisoner, Roberto D'Souza.

  Roberto D'Souza has been held for five days and nights, charged with aiding the guerrillas who live in the northern mountains and call themselves Zapata. Gabriel has nothing but contempt for the rebels. If not for them, rationing would be less severe and goods would be more plentiful in the stores.

  Gabriel's pace quickens, for he can leave once he has checked on D'Souza. He can drive the twenty miles to his small house outside Carbajal, the capital, and his wife, Sessina. She has worked late hours setting up window displays and may still be awake, perhaps even have supper waiting for him: huevos rancheros with hot tamales. His stomach rumbles thinking about it.

  But first, D'Souza.

  D'Souza sits in the corner farthest from the bars and the only window, his knees drawn up tight against his chest. Gabriel sneezes from the stench of shit and piss, wonders yet again if it is necessary to deny political prisoners a chamberpot. Why haven't the janitors at least hosed down the cell?

  None of the cells have their own illumination and so Gabriel shines his flashlight on D'Souza. D'Souza's back is crisscrossed with red and black. Where whole, the skin appears yellow. The spine juts, each bone distinct, below a ragged mop of black hair.

  As the light hits him, D'Souza flinches, hides his head, and tries to disappear into a wall pitted from years of abuse. Gabriel flinches too, despite himself. He must remember that this man is an enemy of the state, a guerilla, a terrorist.

  "Number 255," Gabriel says, to confirm and then leave, limping, for home.

  No answer.

  "Your name, please," Gabriel says.

  D'Souza does not stir, but when his voice comes, it has a wiry strength, a determination ill-matched to the wasted body.

  "Roberto Almada D'Souza."

  "Good evening to you, Roberto."

  "Is it? A good evening?" Weariness in the voice.

  "The sky is clear outside, as you could see if you looked. The waves are still low. Tomorrow, though..."

  "I don't need to see. I can smell it. I can taste it. Rotted wood and salt and the last breaths of lost lovers. Can't you feel it? It will blow us all away."

  Unfolding his long arms and legs, D'Souza rises with gangly imprecision. He is shrouded in shadow shot through with flashes of skin as he turns toward Gabriel, who cannot see his eyes.

  D'Souza says, "I have children. A father who is blind. How can I feed them from in here?"

  "My father is dead."

  In the coffin, his father still wore the shabby black blazer and gray trousers from his days in prison, looking like an actor trapped in an old black-and-white silent movie.

  "Should I feel sorry for you?" D'Souza says after a swift scrutiny of Gabriel's face.

  "Tell them what they need to know and they will let you go."

  A frustrated sigh. "I cannot tell them what I do not know."

  "Everyone is innocent here," Gabriel says.

  "Everyone except for you."

  "It's a living."

  "Is it?"

  "Good night," Gabriel says and turns to leave.

  "Would you take a message to my wife?" The faltering timbre of D'Souza's voice, the anticipation, the hope, sends a tremor down Gabriel's spine, even as he faces the prisoner.

  "What?"

  "My wife's name is Maria. Maria D'Souza. She lives in Carbajal, in the projects. Please. It is not very far. She is tall and thin and has hair as long and thick as the silk of angels. Please. Her name is Maria. Tell her where I am. Tell her I think of her. Tell her to visit my father and let him know where I am. Her name is Maria."

  Inside of Gabriel, something comes loose. A lurching nausea, a dislocation. It will pass, he tells himself. It has always passed before, no matter how they plead - which is not often because most times they just sit and stare at the walls.

  But he says only, "No. I cannot."

  "Please?"

  "No."

  D'Souza comes swiftly to the front of the cell, silent, his white, white skin stretched over his scarecrow frame, mottled by moonlight and shadow. His hands around the bars are gray and splashed with a violet color that would be red by any other light. D'Souza has burning pink flesh instead of fingernails. His face is a welter of dried blood and yellowing bruises. An apparition from the Night of All Saints, a carnival figure, but too grim for a clown. D'Souza stares at Gabriel and Gabriel, transfixed, stares back, wondering at the passing resemblance to his brother Pedro, the drawn cheekbones, the fiery black eyes, the anger that pins him, helpless: a priest hearing a confession, a vessel to be filled.

  "Do you know what they have done to me?"

  "I don't know what you mean."

  Gabriel is not a member of the secret police, but he has at times come to a cell at the wrong time and seen things that have made him retrace his steps while thinking desperately about the current football scores and his country's chances in the 1998 World Cup. A door left open. A shriek, abruptly cut off. Blood under the fingernails.

  D'Souza's hand snakes out from between the bars. He clutches Gabriel's wrist so hard it throbs. Gabriel smells the blood and filth on D'Souza, feels
the sticky cool softness of D'Souza's nail-less thumb against his palm. He struggles, wrenches away from that touch, backpedals out of reach, confronted with a rage accumulated not over years but days.

  "I must shit where I eat and I eat nothing because what they feed me is less than nothing. They come at all hours, without warning, with electric cattleprods. They beat me. They have torn my fingernails out. They have attached electric wires--"

  "Shut up!"

  "--to my scrotum and stuck needles up my penis. They have tried to make me confess to crimes I haven't committed, never committed....They are tireless and well-fed and confident, and I am none of these things. I was a painter before they took me. Now I am nothing."

  "I said to shut up!"

  But Gabriel does not pull out his nightstick or walk away from the cell. His lack of action mystifies him. He cannot understand why he finds it so difficult to breathe.

  D'Souza loses his balance, slides slowly down the bars, into the darkness of the floor.

  "Take a message to my wife or do not take a message to my wife..."

  And then, in a self-mocking tone: "It truly does not matter. I have dreamed of flying to her myself, you know. Flying over this country of El Toreador. My arms are like wings and I can feel the wind cool against my face. All the stars are out and there are no clouds. Such a clear, clean darkness. It seems almost a miracle, such clarity...Below me I can make out the shapes of banana plantations and textile factories. I can tell the green of the rainforest from that of the pampas. I see the ruins of the Maya and the shapes of mountains, distant...and yet when I wake I am still here, in my cell, and I know I am lost."

  D'Souza looks up at Gabriel, the whites of his eyes gleaming through the broken mask of his face and says, "My wife's name is Maria D'Souza. When I have died, you must tell her so she can come for my body."

  By the time Gabriel has stumbled back along the third floor catwalk, ducking the swinging light bulbs, and down to the second floor and finally the first; by the time he has passed through the endless security checkpoints in the first floor administrative offices where the secret police lounge, still wearing sunglasses; by the time he has lit a cigarette and limped through the rain-slicked parking lot to his beat-up VW, he has managed to distance himself from D'Souza and think of other things. The car, for instance, which is a present from Pedro, now a used car salesman in Mexico City, perhaps not where he wanted to be at fifty, but happy. It is like the shedding of some insidious skin, this thinking of other things.

  The car crankily shifts into gear and Gabriel turns on the headlights. He backs out under the glare of the moth-smothered lamp post and drives past the outer ring of guard stations, waving at his friend Alberto, who is good for a game of pool or poker on the weekends.

  The road is bumpy and ill-marked, but as Gabriel speeds down it he reaches an exhausted calm; his shoulders untense and he slides back in the seat, slouching but comfortable. Mottled shadows broken by glints of water reflect the stars. There is no traffic at this hour, the bright murals and billboards depicting El Toreador muted, rendered indistinct by a night littered with broken street lamps.

  Magnified by the hush of surrounding trees, the silence is unbroken, except for the chugging huff of Gabriel's VW, the even sound of which reminds him of an old Mickey Mouse alarm clock; the ticking had more than once lulled him to sleep, wedged between three brothers on a small bed. His father had been alive then, and they had been poor, although well-off compared to some families, until he'd been caught selling drugs to supplement their income. A thin, short man in a shabby black blazer and gray trousers too baggy for his legs; eyes that had once reflected laughter become as flat and gray as slate; shoeless feet a flurry of scars from working hard labor in the quarries. Mother had had to find work in a clothes factory, making bright cotton designer shirts that would be shipped off to the United States, to be sold in shopping malls with names like "Oaks" and "Shady Brook."

  The silence, then, and the space, which allows Gabriel to pretend that nothing surrounds him, that the road passes through an infinite bubble encompassing the sky, and within that bubble he is the only person alive; that once he passes through the silence and space, washed clean by it, when he is home, he enters his second life.

  Glancing at the stars, Gabriel gets a crumpled feeling in his chest. Once, he had dreamed of flying as a career: a commercial pilot or a member of the airforce, like his grandfather. His grandfather - Ricardo Jesus de Anda - whose hands were so soft and supple it was difficult to remember that he was a hard man who had spent many nights in his MiG defending the country's borders from attack. Before the coup, his grandfather shot down three F-15s in four hours over Honduras and they gave him a medal. The next day, he was at Gabriel's house, laughing, holding a beer, and looking at the ground in embarrassment while Gabriel's mother detailed his exploits. And Gabriel had thought, What could it possibly be like to fly at such a speed, no longer bound by the earth, curving the air with the violence of your passage?

  Gabriel's leg begins to throb and he remembers D'Souza saying, "When I am dead..."

  He stops thinking and stares ahead, at the road. Soon he pulls into the gravel driveway of his four room house. It forms part of a state-sponsored housing project, not much different from the relocation sites made available to Indian tribes uprooted from the mountains. His house is constructed of unpainted concrete, single-story, with the gracelessness of a building block. As the VW comes to a stop, Gabriel blinks his headlights three times before turning them off, so that if Sessina is awake she will not mistake him for the police.

  Gabriel knocks on the front door and then unlocks it himself, certain she is in the kitchen, preparing his meal. Inside, Gabriel can smell rice, beans, and eggs. Sessina has turned off the lights to conserve electricity and he has to orient himself by the glow of the kitchen and the television in the living room. The bedroom is off to the left. They share an outdoor bathroom with the couple in the house next door. The living room wall is half-wallpapered, half rude concrete.

  "Sessina?" he says. "Are you in the kitchen?"

  "Yes," comes the muffled reply. "You are late."

  Gabriel unbuttons his shirt, places his guard's cap on the baroque iron hat rack. Another present from Pedro.

  "A little trouble with a prisoner," Gabriel says. "Nothing to worry about."

  "What?" she says as he walks into the living room. A replay of the football game is still on and the national team is up three to two, with thirty minutes to play. The green sofa calls to him, but he disciplines himself and walks into the kitchen, shielding his eyes from the angry white light of the naked bulb that hangs there.

  "I said I had a little trouble with a prisoner."

  Sessina stands before the stove, spatula in hand. The light illuminates her face in such a way that her beauty is almost painful to him. Her hair is black and shines a faint metallic blue, her eyes large and evenly-spaced, her nose small and slightly upturned, her lips full and liberally painted with red lipstick. She still wears the dress she wore to Garcia's Department Store in downtown Carbajal, but she has taken off her black pumps. The grace of her small feet, their contours clearly visible through her pantyhose, makes him smile. He comes close to her and touches her lightly on the shoulder.

  She smiles a tired smile and says, "It was a long day at the store, too. I had three window displays to set up. We finished very late; I got home after eleven. Sit down and watch the game. I'll bring you your dinner."

  A peck on the cheek and back to her skillet.

  Although Gabriel wants to linger, wants to say how good she looks to him, he walks into the living room. The sofa springs are old and he sinks into the cushions with a grateful sigh. His back muscles untense and only now does he really feel sleepy, lazy, relaxed. He lets the low hum of the announcer's voice, broken by moments of excitement, lead him into a half doze.

  After eighteen years, Gabriel is still bewildered that Sessina agreed to marry him, although at the time he must have
appeared to be a man who would make something of his life. But then had come the leg injury, Pedro having whisked him away for a "little bachelor fun" a month before the marriage. While Gabriel was still in Mexico, El Toreador staged his successful coup and his grandfather was stripped of his rank, forced to retire because he had refused to join El Toreador.

  "Stay in Mexico," Pedro pleaded. "Don't go back. I'm not going back. No one can make me go back. It will be Guatemala all over again. Don't go back."

  But he had gone back. He remembered getting off the plane and walking onto the escalators at the airport and, seeing the black-red banners of El Toreador, realizing it was not his country anymore. Until he saw Sessina waiting for him. And then it didn't matter.

  "Here you are," Sessina says, and hands Gabriel a steaming plate of rice, beans, and huevos rancheros. From beside him, Sessina kneads his back in just the right spot while the game drones on.

  "Thank you," he says, and begins to eat.