I. will you stay in our lover's story
I woke up with heavy rain falling on the roof of the car, darkness all around us except when lightning struck. Kooks was on the backseat shivering; I didn’t know where Mabel was. I opened the door to find that water was already a foot up; I closed the door again. I still had some of my meds with me. I could administer some to Kooks and to Mabel - if I could find her - and take the rest myself, the car would maybe be taken with the flood, we would drown. If this was two months ago, I’d do it. In the flash of a lightning, a shadow crossed my line of vision and I reached for the shotgun in the passenger’s seat. I still wanted to live. Lightning struck again and the shadow was gone - a good thing as I had no idea how to shoot. I took Kooks to the front seat with me, inside my coat, and cuddled with her. I called softly for Mabel and I heard her meow from under the seats. I fell asleep again.
---
This time it was the humid heat that woke me. The sun was dawning, and the rain had stopped. Mabel had come to the front seat and was sharing my lap with Kooks. We were hungry. I searched the car for the rest of the cat food sachet and split it evenly between the two. The car wouldn’t start, and I felt lost, but restless. With a vast field of mud and grass and no danger in sight, I let Kooks out of the car so she could run a little.
I myself needed a stretch so I got out of my coat and stepped out, raising my arms and looking around. A beaten path stretched out to the horizon. There was no point in waiting for anything. I went back in the car and started to figure out what amongst all the junk I had to take with me. I got out Mabel’s backpack, designed specifically for carrying cats, with nets on both sides for breathing. Ideally, I would take my own backpack, with a lot more room, but I needed something with which to carry Mabel and I couldn’t take both. So, I had to be economical. Everything had to fit into the two side pockets. I reached for their food sachets, my ID, my dead phone and its charger. On the other pocket I squeezed in a clean shirt, my glasses and the rest of my meds. A small notebook and 92 dollars. In Mabel’s compartment I put in her small blanket and a copy of Thoreau’s “Walden”. And Mabel herself. On myself I hung the shotgun with its mere two bullets, a canteen for when we were to find clean water - I realized now I should have saved some from the rain - and my trumpet. On my coat, Kooks’s whistle and a pocketknife. I changed into my combat boots, called Kooks with the whistle and stood on the edge of the path. Kooks went straight to the right, so I followed.
---
We had walked for about an hour when I heard a motor sound coming in our direction. I looked back and saw a monster truck slowing down towards me. I held tight to the shotgun. A woman put her head outside the truck window.
“What’s a guy like you doing in a place like this?”
I was used to being misgendered since I had shaved my head. As she approached a bit more, she seemed to realize her error.
“Where are you off to, darling?”
“Don’t know. Somewhere. A city”.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you”
“Do you have any water?”
The truck stopped and she jumped out. She had seen Mabel and was scratching the net, trying to get her attention.
“You’re a rebel huh” she said sarcastically, “you know you’re not supposed to keep animals anymore, right”.
“It’s not a law”
“Is that yours too?”
Kooks was coming in our direction. I was getting nervous about this woman maybe being in a government militia. She turned around and boarded the truck again, and I could hear her arguing with whoever was probably driving, although I couldn’t make out what they were saying. She jumped out again, with a bottle. And an iguana. I gave some water to Kooks, took off the backpack and gave some to Mabel. Then I drank the rest of it.
“We’re going to a place up the mountains. It’s open to anyone who is willing to maintain it - I mean keep the place clean but also defend it if necessary” I stood silently as I don’t like to invite myself to things. She looked at me inquisitively.
“So+”
“Who’s there? Who’s we?”
“Look, it’s hard to explain. But do you really have another option?”
Without saying anything, I put on my backpack again, took Kooks in my arms and boarded the backseat of the truck. Besides iguana-woman, two other women were in the truck.
“Hi, I’m Lilith”, the driver looked back at me.
“Artemisia” the woman who was sitting by my side said.
’That’s Kartini”, Lilith pointed to iguana-woman, who had just gotten back in. “And you are...
“Well, they call me Índigo”
I was expecting follow-up questions, but they never came.
We introduced the animals to one another (Fiona was the iguana) and Kartini asked me to empty the backpack’s pockets. She grabbed my phone from my hands and threw it out the window. Lilith sped up.
---
It’s not like I immediately trusted those women, it’s just that I had missed the comfort of a backseat, dozing off while others decided where we were going. Artemisia, beside me, seemed to enjoy the same feeling, barely keeping herself awake. Lilith and Kartini were non-stop talking back and forth, in an intimate manner, playfully, bantering. In between naps I tried to list all the things I could guess by looking at them. Lilith was the oldest, in her forties, late forties, probably. Kartini seemed to be my age, but more my age than me, you know. Not that she looked older, she just looked more together.
Artemisia was in her mid-twenties, at the most. Kooks had now made herself comfortable on Artemisia’s lap, who had woken up completely and held the dog tenderly. I didn’t trust them, but I loved them already because I needed to.
---
I ran out of meds after two days. On day five, Mabel still hadn’t shown up from wherever she went when we arrived. I felt sluggish and useless. I couldn’t eat or shower. So far, it was just the four of us in the house, but they were always talking about the others. Lilith dragged me out of the room, a small cot outside the main house, and told me to get dressed and eat something because I would be on the lookout that night.
“I will be there with you”, she said, soothingly, “I will show you everything”
“Can you shave my head?”
She changed her posture and looked at me like that was the weirdest request she had ever gotten.
“We do have a shaver”, she decided.
I sat on a wooden stool in the middle of the giant bathroom, the brightest room in the house, in my boxers and no shirt on. Something happened in there that there were no shadows, everything just glowed. I was to remember Lilith’s first touch, right before she put the shaver against my head. It was on the back of my neck, and suddenly I missed everyone. Lack is a presence, I could feel it everywhere, overwhelming me. It was this wanting lodged in my lungs. I tried not to breathe too hard so as not to flood the whole bathroom with it.
Once she finished, I wanted to tell her to stay in that bathroom forever with me, at that precise moment of the day, morning, silence, past and future contained in the here and now. But she left me to clean the mess up and shower, because she was going to teach me how to shoot. I got rid of all the hair on the floor and got in the shower, but before I could wash myself, I saw a dark spot on the bathtub, so I took a sponge and scrubbed it clean. But then there was another dark spot, and another, and another. When Kartini finally got in to see what was taking me so long, I stood naked, knees red, the whole bathroom so clean it was out of focus. She left without saying a word. I finally showered.
---
I had had precisely one bullet to practice, because we couldn’t waste ammunition. Lilith smoked a cigarette and held a revolver. I had my shotgun. It became boring. And out of boredom, I wanted to kiss Lilith, or maybe it was because of how she lowered my head while she was shaving it. I was looking at her when we heard something.
"Where did that come from?”
Lilith tilted her head in the direction of the banana trees. She motioned for me not to move and pointed her revolver in that direction. I don’t know what came first, the screaming, the shot, the name-calling.
“Mabel!”
“You fucking shot me, Lilith!”
“Luz! I’m so sorry! You didn’t say anything about coming back tonight!”
It was only when Luz had come a lot closer to us that I realized what it was that she was carrying.
“Mabel!!” I said again, this time like crying out a miracle. I threw the shotgun down and took the cat from her, holding her against my chest.
“Second time. This is the second time one of you shoots me”
Luz brought her ankle up and examined the wound. Luckily, the bullet had just scratched by. Then, she and Lilith embraced firmly and tenderly all at once. I stood with Mabel in my arms, ready to be introduced to Luz and to thank her for finding my cat, and for holding onto her even after being shot. Already I would do anything for this woman.
In a day, I knew this: that Luz and Lilith shared a bed. That that first shot had been entangled in complex circumstances and had been a lot more serious.
---
Luz was everywhere in history. Born in Nicaragua from Jamaican descent, which is to say from the Gold Coast, present Ghana, Akan. Matrilineality. She had participated in the Sandinista revolution, fighting along a group of women against the Somoza dictatorship. It was there, still as a teenager, that she learned how to organize. After the revolution, she was supposed to spend a stint in the US on a fellowship for research in African diaspora, but during the brief period enjoying a somewhat prestigious career as a poet and academic, she got involved with activism. Already at that point, political groups and organizations were being criminalized, at least as far as minorities went. She was arrested and deported for protesting a black leader’s unfair detention, and her next stop was Cuba. She taught at the university, and eventually her partner met her there with their US-born son. Nothing was official, but she was now a widow, nearing sixty, and she came here. Artemisia told me all of that during our breaks from the boxing lessons she was giving me.
“She is the smartest person I know. She will talk about anything, except personal things, she doesn’t do that. She talks about space a lot. Not outer space but as a concept. People study her, her poems”
And here I was, hearing about her for the first time.
---
In five days, what I knew was: that Luz was the smartest person I had known. That she had been depressed as well. That Mabel took to sleeping with her and Lilith, because that’s what she had gotten used to, two people. That Kooks insisted on being a dog, loving everyone who loved her, and Luz had instantly loved her. That, like her name, Luz brought light, as well as purpose, to the house.
That I wanted Lilith.
---
The thing about the Apocalypse was that no-one really knew when it had begun. For some, it was all they knew - not me, I was privileged. I could dream about my mother and wake up and be able to smell her for a second, and then I was happy because everything was beautiful. Another thing was its narrative, which was very divisive, if not clearly defined: it was us versus them. I could’ve been them, but I somehow ended up us. The third thing was that sometimes, nothing happened.
Luz left again, to see her son in the city, and we all missed her as soon as she walked out the door, Mabel especially.
---
I was still feeling bad, waking up in pain and taking all morning to come to my senses.
Lilith, who was an experienced experimental dancer, offered to help me stretch every morning, so she went into the cot at 5 pm every day to grab my fists and push me side to side, front and back. She said dancing was a lot like fighting. I hadn’t been touched in such a long time, besides that time in the bathroom. One day we danced to “Oh! You pretty things”, her telling me I was a body, that I was a story told by it.
Lilith was now behind me, and ran her hands up my back, bending me forward. She held me only by my arms, at their limit. It hurt but I could not take her letting go. We had stopped laughing and we didn’t know what to do instead. She gently let me down on the ground, surprising me with her strength. I was face down, and she had one foot on each side of me. I could feel her kneeling down, and she sat on my back. I turned around and she was now sitting on my stomach, but not for long: soon she brought her face near me, adjusting her body to match mine. We kissed, and after careful, slow movements up until this point, we took our clothes off and laid on the mattress. Back to slow, we remained kissing and running the tips of our fingers on each other’s bodies.
She straddled my thigh and I could feel she was wet. She moaned; I didn’t because I was too scared. Then we heard a shot.
---
There were screaming, and more shots. I ran outside, naked, and found Kartini kneeling and massaging Kooks’s chest, who laid on the ground. I threw myself beside them and took Kooks into my arms, holding her head next to my face and rocking back and forth Kartini kept saying she was sorry until she finally said that she couldn’t do anything else. I cried and told Kooks she could go. I told her that we’d be alright, that we’d think of her every day day, miss her, honor her. I told her she changed my life, that she was pure life. I told her I never less than loved her all the time. I had her blood all over me. We dug a hole the garden, threw flowers on her body, and planted a lychee tree on top of her grave. Artemisia played the guitar. I couldn’t cry because I was angry, but that night we got drunk and I told Kooks’s story. Kartini finished the chronology by telling us she heard a shot and ran outside; she saw only a sort of movement and shot in that direction.
Artemisia was crying because she was playing with Kooks and just had gone inside for a second. Then she started soothing herself by singing.
“Will you stay in our lover’s story...”
---
A week later, Luz got back, but wouldn’t tell us about her son. With her, she brought Maria and Maria’s three-year-old son, Juan. Luz spent the morning cooking, mostly refusing help from anyone but Lilith and Maria, although we all helped the way we could. Early afternoon, she called on everyone to follow her to the river, a three-hour trek from the house. There, she washed Guillermo’s clothing while we all ate and drank rum. As the night fell, she burned the clothes and started chanting - after a couple of times we had memorized the lyrics in Rama Cay. We all sang until we were laughing and laughed until we fell asleep. Back at the house, the next day, Luz built a wooden platform in the yard and spent the next three days burning herbs. We each took turns to keep a vigil beside her. Artemisia prayed, Lilith embraced tightly all the time she was with her, Kartini and I cooked and gathered the herbs and stood silently beside her.
Maria cried with her. Once the fire was out, she spent the rest of the day in the dark, with only Mabel beside her.
I was reading her book of poems when Luz rose up from her bedroom.
---
Guillermo, or Will, had been born in the US. It was Luz’s partner, Serena, who had given birth to him. Guillermo was ready to go back to the US with his wife and son, back to Serena’s, who now lived in the northwestern area forests, what was left of it from the floods and fires. Maria wasn’t going to stay there; she had joined a group called Revolución Diâspora which operated mostly in what used to be Texas. She was still going now, but without Juan.
---
Sometimes we played cards. Sometimes Artemisia played the guitar and I played the trumpet. Sometimes Lilith made us all dance, or Kartini made us do yoga. Sometimes we asked one another questions. Sometimes I would talk about animals because that was all I knew. Dolphins could sense sound. Possums have been the same for nearly 60 million years. Kooks loved watermelon. None of them existed anymore. Sometimes we admitted that we still longed for fulfillment. Lilith now shared a bed with a child, a cat and a grieving mother. I watered the lychee tree every day. Sometimes we reminisced as if our individual stories could be a clue to the collective chaos we were now living.
Sometimes Lilith and I took baths but didn’t kiss, or even talk.
