Signal to Noise Read online

  He was a harmless, dull fellow of few ideas and few complaints, who liked nothing more than to drink a few beers, eat large portions of spicy birria and coddle his daughters. None of the three was more coddled than Daniela, the youngest daughter and also the one with lupus—twin conditions which ensured she was guarded as carefully as a princess in a fairy tale.

  Daniela was picked up and dropped off at school even though she was located closer to the Queen Victoria than her two friends. She was not to play sports of any kind for if she suffered the most minor bruise, her skin would turn an ugly shade of purple and there was always the danger of a scrape turning into a mountain of turmoil. She was not permitted any boyfriends, though this was not an issue because in addition to her childish ways—no doubt rooted in the babying imposed on her by her parents—Daniela was a moon-faced, limpid girl. Her greatest assets were her breasts which had started swelling at the tender age of eleven, turning into two rather large embarrassments, causing Daniela to walk everywhere looking a little hunched.

  In fact, Daniela and Meche made quite a pair when they were side by side. Meche, thin and flat as a board, pimpled, dark of complexion and intentions, standing always very straight. Daniela, dwarfing Meche with her greater height, chubby and pale, shy and slumped, with short frizzy hair of a vaguely reddish hue which she had inherited from a Scottish ancestor who had stumbled into Mexico some eighty years before.

  Daniela liked watching soap operas and reading romance novels. She painted her room pink and kept all her Barbies on shelves. She was, in short, the polar opposite of Meche and loved her friend precisely because of this.

  Sometimes, though, Daniela had to admit Meche scared her. Early on in their friendship she had been warned by some of the other girls at school that Meche was odd, different, perhaps slightly crazy. However, beggars can’t be choosers and Daniela did not have many friends. Plus, Meche’s energy attracted Daniela, even if this same intensity made her step quietly back at times.

  Meche had a way of roping you in with her words, of convincing you to do the unthinkable. One minute you were firmly telling yourself that you would never play with a Ouija board, the next you were gathered in the bathroom, the board sitting on top of the toilet lid, while Meche urged you on before the principal came and busted you all.

  Daniela, never one to put up much resistance, constantly fell under the sway of Meche’s stronger personality, always the handmaiden to the queen.

  Like that day.

  She had told Meche there would be no spell casting in her home, but Meche informed Daniela that they couldn’t do it in her apartment because her mother was around and they couldn’t do it in Sebastian’s apartment because he shared a room with his brother, and Daniela was the one who had an empty house on Thursdays because her mother and her sisters went grocery shopping that day during the afternoon. It all made perfect sense, see? Before Daniela knew it she had said “yes.”

  Meche arrived with Sebastian, placed the portable record player on the floor, flipped the case open, and was riffling through the records she had brought inside a tattered, nylon market bag.

  Daniela wrung her hands, hoping her mother and siblings would not burst in any time soon and that this whole witchcraft thing did not involve anything gross. Once, when she was little, Daniela’s mother had taken her to an old healer for a limpia. The woman had rubbed an egg and a lemon all over her body, then made her drink this bitter brew, telling her it would heal her. It hadn’t. Daniela still had lupus and her mother still would not let her play sports for fear of lacerations.

  “What are you doing?” Daniela asked eventually, because standing there and staring at her two friends was starting to bore her.

  “We are picking spell music,” Meche said.

  “What spell are we doing?”

  “Something about success.”

  “Okay, why don’t we use the Iggy Pop song?” Sebastian asked, holding up a record.

  “Too obvious,” Meche said.

  “What? We get points for being cryptic?” Sebastian said.

  “You don’t just go out there and blurt it out,” Meche replied.

  “Why not?”

  “Because it would be too easy.”

  “Easy is good.”

  “My mother will be back soon,” Daniela muttered.

  Sebastian and Meche turned towards her, eyebrows arched, with that look that meant, Daniela, you don’t get it. It was a very common look.

  “Fine,” Sebastian said. “David Bowie. We play Fame and call it even.”

  “That’s about two degrees less lame,” Meche said.

  “David Bowie is lame?”

  “No, using that song is lame. There’s like zero effort.”

  “Oh, okay. So let’s go with this guy we’ve never heard of,” Sebastian said, holding up another record, “because that’s not lame.”

  “Without Robert Johnson you wouldn’t have Elvis, no Beatles, no...”

  “The lyrics you showed me don’t say a single thing about success.”

  “They don’t have to. He’s standing at the crossroads because he’s about to sell his soul to the devil.”

  “I don’t want to do any devil songs,” Daniela said. “I don’t want to give birth to a baby with hooves who throws his mom down a staircase.”

  “That’s like a fucked up version of Rosemary’s Baby crossed with The Omen,” Meche said.

  “No devil songs.”

  “Daniela, wouldn’t you prefer to play a David Bowie song?” Sebastian asked.

  Meche’s eyes said ‘absolutely not,’ but Daniela could not side with her this time. She bobbed her head timidly.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “That is not fair,” Meche said.

  “There’s three of us and we just out-voted you,” Sebastian said, smugly sliding the record from its sleeve.

  He lifted the needle. There was the faint scratch against the vinyl and then the song began to play.

  “Okay, now we hold hands and dance around it,” Meche said.

  “Really,” Sebastian replied dryly.

  “Yes. That’s what witches do. They dance around the fire. Only we don’t have a fire, so we’ll dance around the record player.”

  Sebastian rolled his eyes. Meche pinched his arm. They joined hands, clumsily turning around, like children playing Doña Blanca, only they weren’t little kids and this was not a game at recess.

  “Ugh, your palms are sweaty,” Sebastian said, drawing away from Daniela.

  “Don’t break the circle,” Meche told him.

  “How about I spin in my place?” he asked, wiping his hands against his trousers.

  “Seriously,” Meche muttered, but she didn’t ask them to hold hands again.

  They did spin. They whirled. At first, it seemed silly and Daniela thought she was going to get dizzy and throw up. But the more they did it, the longer the seconds stretched, the more it seemed to make sense. Daniela felt very warm, like there was fire blooming from the pit of her stomach, stretching up her chest and stinging her mouth. Their fingers brushed as they turned.

  She watched as Meche spun. Her friend’s gaze was fixed on a distant point, her body turning but her eyes always returning to that distant something. Sebastian, similarly, seemed to have locked his eyes on something. Daniela closed her eyes and licked her lips; her cheeks burned.

  She didn’t feel dizzy from the movement. Not really. But there was something dizzying, hypnotic about the music, and she was reminded of a documentary they’d shown at school in which some monks were dancing, their skirts flaring around them.

  Fame, fame, fame.

  Daniela’s head lolled to the side and she snapped her eyes open. Something seemed to lift from them, quickly leaving the room, cooling her skin. She blinked. She shivered, suddenly afraid because she had almost touched something that didn’t seem like another of Meche’s games.

  Meche lifted the needle and they stood around the player in silence, nobody daring to be the fi
rst one to speak.

  Finally, Sebastian found his voice.

  “Did it work?” he asked. “Do you feel different?”

  Daniela flexed her hands. Meche moved towards the white, wooden vanity with the pink necklaces strewn around its surface. She leaned forward, a hand against the mirror.

  “Not really,” she said.

  “Me neither,” Daniela added.

  “But something happened,” Meche said.

  Neither Sebastian nor Daniela answered her. Daniela stared at her hands, at the ugly, bitten nails. She could not stop chewing them. Sometimes she even hurt herself and this alarmed her mother greatly because every little scrape could become a life or death matter.

  Daniela heard the front door opening, her mother and her sisters’ voices heralding their arrival. Whatever uncertain power still remained in the room now definitely dissipated with the intrusion of the women.

  Meche began gathering her records, putting them back in her bag.

  “A SIX PAGE essay on Cervantes and his connection with modern realist literature,” she told him as they walked home.

  She was wearing a heavy, green jacket which made her look like a bag lady. He’d told her that one time and Meche had punched him, but it was true. It was a formless sack. Meche resembled a very large, very green jellyfish from behind. She drowned in that jacket, but then again she seemed to drown in all her clothes. Only the fingertips peeking out from the sleeves, the neck erased by folds of clothing. Beneath the jacket she tended to wear oversized t-shirts with names like Iron Maiden, Queen and The Who emblazoned on them.

  “He must be very mad at you.”

  “It’s a scam. He wanted me to take this tutoring session with him. All he wants is to make extra money.”

  “You could use some tutoring.”

  “Not with Rodriguez. He is such a dick.”

  Sebastian was carrying the portable record player, Meche had the bag. They walked down the narrow streets, side by side. It seemed to Sebastian they were always walking, going from or to school, going to the market together, stopping at the store to buy a soft drink. Except, that was, when he took the motorcycle out for a spin.

  The motorcycle had belonged to his older brother, but his brother had given up on it. He’d called it a piece of crap and left it to rot. Sebastian tried to get it going again, and it sputtered to life now and then, though it was an unreliable creature. He liked riding it, when he could, because he thought the leather jacket he had found at the tianguis—used, Sebastian could never buy new stuff—coupled with the sunglasses made him look more masculine.

  The boys called him Sebastian Soto el Joto and Sebastian Puto, and sometimes, to be creative and not rhyme, Sebastian Pansy. No matter what the nickname was, the crude conclusion was always the same: he was gay. Sebastian was straight, but accuracy did not have much say when it came to these things. Marking him as effeminate was just a way to toss him into the pile of the undesirables, to mock his everything, to serve as an excuse for their rudeness.

  He remembered one time when Constantino caught him looking at Isadora and snapped, “What are you looking at, faggot?” Sebastian had wanted to beat the crap out of him, to paint the pavement red with the guy’s blood.

  Sebastian wondered if the magic would fix this. If he might grow more muscled, leaving his scrawniness behind. Maybe Isadora would look at him if he looked tougher, if he had nicer clothes, new sneakers. Sneakers that weren’t painted with a black marker.

  They stopped by the bakery and stared at the confectionery for the Day of the Dead: the little candy skulls glittering in the twilight, the sugar looking like tiny diamonds. He liked this time of year. The end of October, the appearance of the orange and yellow flowers, the papel picado and the colourful skeletons which heralded the arrival of the festival, and with it, the end of the rainy season and the beginning of the cold months of the year.

  “Is your grandma going to bake bread for the Day of the Dead?” he asked.

  “Yeah. Next week.”

  “Can I come and eat some?”

  “Sure.”

  Meche entered the shop and bought two pieces of sweet bread. Sebastian didn’t have any money. One more reason why he walked everywhere. She gave him one of the breads and they sat on the steps of a nearby building, eating and watching the few people go by as it got dark and the street lights bloomed into life.

  “Do you think it’ll all be different in the morning?” he asked.

  “You still do not believe me?” she asked.

  He licked some cream which was spilling from the bread onto his hand and shrugged, not wanting to look too excited by the whole idea. Not wanting this too badly, although he did.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Fine.”

  “Hey, don’t get mad.”

  “I’m not mad.”

  He sat back, his head against the door of the building. Meche, in turn, rested her head against his shoulder. For others, it might have been an intimate gesture. Maybe it was, but not in the way most people might think. Meche and Sebastian were used to each other, comfortable in their proximity. They folded and kept their dreams in the same drawer, spun fantasies side by side, lived in the easy harmony of youth which did not know the need for tall walls and sturdy defenses.

  Sebastian popped the last bit of bread into his mouth and chewed it slowly. The sweet potato seller pushed his cart in front of them, the hiss of steam announcing his arrival, his voice slicing the night.

  “Camotes! I sell camotes!”

  The man paused and glanced in their direction, but his small, black eyes did not seem to see them. They skipped over Sebastian and Meche as he moved away, the wheels of the cart turning, the steam rising towards the night sky.

  Though he was not particularly musical, Sebastian thought of a song. Duncan Dhu, singing En Algún Lugar, and for a reason he did not understand he had this image of Meche stepping onto a plane. He put an arm around Meche’s shoulders, holding her tight.

  MECHE WOKE UP the next morning with the giddy excitement of a child heading to open her Christmas presents. She brushed her teeth, combed her hair, rolled up the sleeves of her sweater and put on her shoes. Then she bounced towards school, eager to meet up with Sebastian.

  He was waiting for her at the street corner and they walked together, as they usually did, quiet and filled with hope.

  Hope began to disintegrate around noon when it became obvious that nothing had changed for them. They were still the same losers as the day before, still sitting in the same corner of the schoolyard, still looking forlorn at the more popular, more beautiful, more-everything kids. When the bell signalling the end of the day rang, Meche could barely contain herself. Jaw locked tightly, she hurried back home.

  “Hey,” she heard Sebastian say, but didn’t slow down to let him catch up with her and she dashed home, hands tight around the straps of her backpack.

  They had failed.

  She stomped up the steps towards her apartment, rushing into her bedroom and tossing the backpack on the floor. Meche put on a record and listened to Frank Sinatra promising to fly her to the moon. Tears threatened to leak from her eyes so she rubbed them. She hated crying. Hated feeling weak.

  Meche sniffled and cleaned her nose with the back of her hand.

  She had seriously thought it would work. She had pinned her heart on a stupid record, like a modern-day Jack showing off his beans.

  Of course it would never work.

  They would always be the same.

  Life would always be this dull shade.

  Meche turned her head and looked out the window, at the fragment of mocking grey sky. Birds sometimes dropped dead in Mexico City. That’s how polluted the city was. Because of the overwhelming smog, you couldn’t even hope for a glimpse of its snow-capped volcanoes.

  Meche draped a blanket around her shoulders and went to sleep. She did not bother changing out of her uniform and into her regular clothes.

  When she woke up it was
dark and there was the smell of food wafting into her room. Meche walked towards the kitchen and found her grandmother busy, humming over a pot. She smiled at Meche.

  “I’m making chicken soup today,” she said. “It has the potatoes and carrots all nicely chopped, the way you like them.”

  “Thank you,” she muttered.

  Meche’s grandmother filled a chipped bowl with soup and Meche began to eat. The warm food soothed her belly and she slowly started feeling better. Her grandmother poured her a glass of lemonade. Meche sipped it, holding the glass with both hands.

  “Are you getting sick, Meche?”

  She shook her head.

  “Okay.”

  Grandmother was quiet. She didn’t push or ask questions. But her silences pulled the truth out of you anyway, made you speak despite the desire to remain silent. So Meche spoke, her hands sliding against the cool glass.

  “Mama Dolores, what did you mean when you said magic will break your heart?”

  “You’re still going on about that?” she asked, placing a bunch of tortillas wrapped in a warm cloth by Meche’s plate.

  Meche peeled open the wrapping and pulled out a tortilla, dipping it in the broth.

  “Maybe.”

  “Magic gets you what you want, but it doesn’t solve your problems.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “It does,” Mama Dolores pulled out a chair, sitting next to Meche. “There was a man in my town who wanted to get married but he could not find himself a bride. He went to a witch and asked her for a charm. Something that would get him a wife.”