The Lands Behind Their Eyes

On the night they met, as he told her stories of his home, she felt as though his face opened up and pulled her into a world more richly colored and intricately drawn than anything she had experienced.

She had found this cafe a couple weeks prior, after looking for a quiet place to study and, honestly, to just be alone with herself. Something past the city traffic and away from her classmates’ effortless focus but not all the way to the rocky hills and unspoken worries that surrounded the farmhouse she lived with her parents.

For him, the cafe was the living room of a home he had built out of the disconnected spaces of his life since moving here. The bedroom at his host family’s house, the office he shared with three other bedraggled T.A.s, and this dark neighborhood coffee shop. He had come to cherish the couple friends he had here, and hoped everyone else would regard him as unremarkable as the bistro tables they perched around.

She had seen him before — almost always with back to the door, sheafs of paper and a few books fanned out in front of him, taking up one end of a communal table that usually sat empty — but for some reason, tonight she really noticed him.

She walked up and asked if she could share the table and he looked up and replied, “Yes. Please.” Out of courtesy, she sat at the far end, but as she pulled her books out of her bag, she felt his eyes on her.

“Thanks for letting me share the table,” She said, looking up. “You’ve got your work cut out for you.”

“Research paper,” he replied, sticking his tongue out. “I think it’s killing me.”

She apologized for interrupting him and he closed his laptop, “I’m happy for the break if I’m not keeping you.”

Her mind went not to the exam she was preparing for but the dinner she was avoiding. “not at all.”

He asked if she was in school and she replied yes, a sophomore. He looked at her book and asked if she was majoring in Economics. Surprised, she looked at the book herself, “Oh, no ... I have no idea what I’m doing.”

She had always felt uncomfortable talking about herself. This type of conversation, specifically. She had been raised in a family that communicated mostly with actions, and so she had found this time in her life difficult. Exactly where she had planned to be, but somewhat rudderless,  searching for direction. The weight of her parents’ hopes for her had been getting heavier, as had their unspoken questions. She was an only child and the first to go to school. They had wanted this for her, and worked desperately to make it happen. Still, she could feel them wondering, in their quiet, concerned way, what would come of it. Honestly, she had begun coming to this coffee shop so that she didn’t have to spend as much time at home.

And so, as she had gotten used to doing, she turned the conversation to him. He looked like he was using primary sources, well-worn books and even just loose pieces of paper. She wondered if he was in grad school.  “What are you studying? Those don’t look like text books.”

He laughed and said he wondered the same thing sometimes. He said he was getting a masters in Public History and that all this was just for a tiny thing he was trying to piece together. “It’s really interesting, but holy shit. A lot of work, you know?”

She told him, honestly, that she’d never even heard of that discipline, and asked how he’d gotten interested in it. He laughed and said, “We would be here all night.” She thought about the drive home and said, “I’ve got time.”

He looked at her and exhaled a smile. “Okay, well I warned you.”

He began by talking about his earliest memories, running up and down the hills around the houses of his grandmothers, aunts and uncles with the other kids of the neighborhood. Built on the sides of incredibly steep hills, often with salvaged materials. The houses shared walls with their neighbors. The roof of one person’s home would form part of another’s floor. Many of his playmates were his cousins, but many weren’t. They played as though none of that mattered, an entire neighborhood of children running frantically through homes like Bolivar charging up the Magdalena. And on these conquests, the way his tias disciplined everyone who ran through their kitchens as though they were their own children — and the way he, in turn, was disciplined by women he’d never met — had taught him a broad definition of family.

His parents were academics, and lived in a neat apartment sequestered from its neighbors in the city, but they had both come from this neighborhood, and had wanted him to grow up the way they had, too, even if they no longer lived that way. When he was with his abuelas, he felt as though he was raised by no one person, but by a whole community. And it hadn’t really mattered to him whether the kids he ran with were his actual relatives. He called them all primos. He would spend days on end there, especially in July, after the end of the school year. And then, when he would return to the more austere environs of the apartment, his parents helped him understand that this was a unique and beautiful part of their collective culture.

Most of his classmates at the British School were city kids, who came from generational wealth and didn’t know this world, and so he had always felt his grandmothers’ neighborhood was a place of magic that only he knew about. The neighborhood was constantly multiplying. Sometimes he’d come back to find a new doorway opening into a space he had never known before. Other times he’d come back to find a whole new house perching atop an old. Everytime a new room or house sprouted, the owner would run a line to siphon electricity from the poles that stood at irregular intervals. He would lay on the roofs at night and imagine the lines forming a latticework that protected the whole neighborhood. He imagined them carrying him from place to place the way they carried electricity.

He told her how his tios told stories that grew with every telling until the lives of men who had never left the hills began to take on the epic character of the globe-trotting Francisco de Miranda. And they would talk about a hot-headed scuffle after a couple beers as though it were a clash of civilizations. Their uncles would tell the children they were descended from los llaneros and he and his cousins would run off, herding the neighborhood dogs as though they were feral cattle of the plains.

He told her how his aunties would yell after them, saying their uncles wouldn’t know a horse from a hole in the head and how they had their own, very old, form of magic. They and all of their neighbors would gather to make hallacas, a traditional food handed down from enslaved ancestors who had mixed masa with scraps from their masters’ plates into the cuisine that had sustained them in the indigo fields. There was wonder in his voice as he described entire neighborhoods of mothers coming together to create seemingly endless feasts that would spill out of their doorways until entire hillsides sprouted like cornucopias around Caracas.

Though his school took pains to teach him about his country, he had realized that the lives of people like his family were as rich as that of any liberator, but had no home in any history he had ever read. It was kinetic, and ephemeral. It lived in those rooms but wasn’t contained by it. It rushed in and out of the doorways of all those houses, that carried in the air itself, along the tangled electrical lines.

Even as a young child, he told her, he had wanted to catch those stories.

“Those neighborhoods,” She asked, “Are those favelas?”

“We call them barrios, but it’s the same thing,” he replied. “Slums.”

“I hate that word,” she said.

He smiled and looked at her. “There have always been barrios. The people are poor, but they have their own power.”

She felt like she was going to cry, listening to him. “That’s why you’re sitting here with those papers,” She said.

“There are so many histories of Bolivar in my country,” he said, “I want to write a history of the barrios.”

She told him her family didn’t have any stories like that and he said that  no one does until you make them. She said she wouldn’t even know where to start and he said, quietly, that where to start a story is wherever you feel comfortable, and a good place to go next is a place you think the person you’re telling the story to might understand.

This gave her a kind of confidence, and so she just began. “Well when you mentioned the power lines in those neighborhoods, all I could think of was the pole at the end of our driveway,” she said. “There’s one big, twisted line that runs from the transformer off the highway to the pole, and these littler wires running from there to the house and to the garage and to the barn. Then a line my dad buried running from the barn to the chicken coop.”

She talked about how quiet and wild her childhood had been, and how with all that land and so few people, her imagination had grown to fill the whole space. She told of the friends and kingdoms she would invent running between the pine woods and the pasture, then out among the cattle, all the way to the strange little aspen grove in the middle. The grove wasn’t good for grazing but her father never considered cutting it down. On one particular day she remembered hiding in the grove when her dad came looking for a young calf who had gotten separated from the herd. He trudged around for a moment, then sat on one of the big rocks that sprouted out of the ground alongside the trees and just looked up at the sky. For the rest of her childhood, whenever she passed by that rock, she sat and said little prayers for the peace of her parents.

The words came haltingly, at first, but eased as she spoke them  until they were flowing so freely she could hardly believe the simple truth of what was coming out of her mouth.

She remembered, now that she mentioned it, that the solitude of her childhood was frequently punctuated by her own family. Though it was just her and her parents on her dad’s family homestead, with her grandparents retired in a double-wide on the other end of the property, the farmhouse had raised 7 siblings and they all returned frequently with their kids and, increasingly, grandkids so that, pretty regularly, the quiet old house made its own electricity.

Her father had been the only sibling to continue the family work and most days, the stress and uncertainty of this cut deep lines into her parents’ foreheads and at the corners of their eyes and cheeks. But when the family gathered, those lines also accentuated the joy that flickered to life on their faces. She remembered, too, that when her city cousins wanted to run out into the vast wild of their family property, they all begged her to play tour guide. Through the years, the cousins would continue going out into the property, but their adventures became less wild, gradually taking on worries of their own.

She realized, as she told him these things, that the self-consciousness she felt had fallen away, as though her own face had opened up and beckoned him inside. It was as though she hadn’t been telling him a story, but walking with him through the memory itself. Realizing this broke the spell and suddenly they were back in the cafe.

She also realized, as she felt a tear building in the corner of her eye, how much she missed her kingdom. “I don’t know why talking about this makes me sad,” she said. “I think my parents want me to have an easier life than they’ve had. And maybe what I want is to find that magic again and live in it.”

She couldn’t think of anything else to say and so she stopped. He didn’t seem to be in any hurry to fill the gap and, somehow, she found herself comforted by the silence. “It’s beautiful,” he said, finally. “Thank you for sharing that with me.”

All at once she became aware of herself again and, reflexively, said, “I bet my parents are wondering where I am.”

He smiled, “Yeah, my host family is making dinner.”

///

They packed in silence, but as they walked she felt herself wanting more of him. He opened the door for her and she took the opportunity to linger there, asking “So you’re not going home for break?”

“Thanksgiving isn’t really a thing in Venezuela,” he said, with that calm smile.

She laughed at herself, “Oh right. Obviously. Christmas then?”

His smile broadened. “They’re coming up here, actually. For like a month.”

“Oh that’s great.” She said, and then without really thinking, added, “I’d love to meet them.”

A cold wind hit the doorway at a moment that and her feelings of self-conscious returned, as if carried in on it. She moved through the doorway and fought the urge to break into a run.

When his words came — “Maybe we could show them your family’s farm” — they felt as though they weren’t coming from behind her, but from inside her own head.

“I’d like that” she replied, or maybe just thought. Either way, she was sure he had heard.

The Gospel of Thomas

As the child drew near, his muscles tightened and his breath became shallow.

His hands and neck began to sweat, so he took off his gloves and hat and pushed them into the pocket of his mother’s hunting jacket.

At first the child had tracked the animal by something like feeling, or premonition. He had followed his father as his father followed the game trail eastward, but the child had felt something at the back of his neck that told him his father would not find what he was looking for.

The child slowed his pace to gain distance from the man, and when he had, the child turned north and mounted the ridge and then walked along its spine until he began to see sparse droplets of blood. He walked until he heard wet, panicked breathing and until, at the edge of a dense bramble, the crisp, bright air of late autumn became leaden, and carried a ferrous reek.

The trail up the ridge turned hard right at the blackberry thicket and disappeared around a large cedar tree, but the animal itself — either by guile or terror — had crashed straight through.

The child rolled up his mother’s coat and held it closely to his chest. He thought for a moment to ask God to deliver him from the thorns but he stopped short. He had been asking God for many things lately, and didn’t know when God’s good will would give out.

The child entered the bramble and emerged out the other side and saw the Elk, a nice-sized bull, on its side, head rolling, antlers dug into the ground in panic and protest. The child gagged from the smell and from the fear he felt.  He had never seen this much blood, not even during gutting, and had never seen such an expression on anything’s face as on the face of the elk.

The child walked around behind the creature, away from its hooves and away from the blood and set the coat down. He found where the blood was pumping out of the animal’s side and knelt over it. The elk craned its neck to watch the child come, but his antlers hung up and so it just lay, snorting and staring out of one eye.

The child was too scared to speak anything soothing so he just placed his hands over the wound and felt the heat of the blood mix with his own heat until the heat of the blood stopped. The child took his hands away and ran behind a tree while the animal gained its legs again and walked off.

When the elk was gone, the boy slid his gloves back on to hide the drying blood and sat down on the trail, waiting for his father to call out. He could feel the man coming.

“Thomas?” Came a hushed whisper.

Thomas, the child, called as loud as he could.

“I’m here dad. I found where it fell, but it’s not here.”

The father came and searched the ground, and lo, the trail was cold.

///

On the third day, little Tommy Bahanan told the dead to rise, and walk.

It was a Wednesday and, after kindergarten, he had come home to find a snack of apple slices and string cheese waiting for him at the kitchen table. Halfway through the cheese his mind turned to his chosen people — the Bahananites. He remembered that on Sunday, after the elk, he had left them languishing in a quaggy limbo, and his heart raced.

He put the cheese in his pocket, so his mother wouldn’t worry, and ran to the back yard and into his sandbox, which was mostly just dirt now. His parents didn't have the money for another load of sand, but it was better this way. Thomas' father had told him how the soil around their house was full of clay, which made it good for building structures and fortifications but bad for growing things.

"You just add some water, son ..." he'd say, and then his voice would trail off, working water through the soil with his knotty fingers until it the mixture became suitable for forming. Tommy had built fortifications and staged a large swampland battle in which his army had emerged victorious, leaving them encamped that night when called to supper.

Thomas returned now to his little brown world expecting to find a swamp of emulsified muck but found instead a dry flood plain, the surface flat and cracked from evaporation. It was a killing field. The bodies of his people entombed, bent knees and crooked arms poking out of the hard dirt. He clawed at them but recoiled at the feeling of clay it under his fingernails, so Thomas grabbed the hose from the house and turned on the water and flooded the land again until the clay had softened enough for his fingers to penetrate.

He searched by touch and found the GI Joe called Snake Eyes on his back with one leg buried up to the knee and his body bent around it in an excruciating way. He plucked Snake Eyes from the ground and laid hands on him the way he'd laid hands on Sally Martin when he made her knee better, and then set the figure upright.

Thomas tended to each of his flock in turn — Gung Ho, Wild Bill, Ripcord — removing them from the soil and laying them in repose while he tended to their wounds. Cover Girl and Snow Job proved difficult.  Snow Job was completely buried, and Thomas only found him by the invisible hand of God, which guided Thomas the way God had guided him to Jami Reynolds, unconscious in a drainage culvert in the the woods past the hole in the playground fence. Cover Girl was bent backward in half and Thomas healed her the way he had helped Andy Cummins feel his hands and feet again after diving head first through the hole at the top of the jungle gym.

Andy Cummins, who had betrayed Thomas afterward, calling him a devil for healing him and a fag for touching him at all.

But unlike the schoolyard, with its hovering aides and treacherous fifth graders, no one would question Thomas’ motives here, in his kingdom. When they were healed, Thomas set his people up in defensive positions around the kingdom. Snake Eyes took point, his light machine gun aimed toward the patio and the house, vigilant against marauding Hittites, the agents of COBRA, and assholes like Andy Cummins.

By the time the last of Thomas’ small band was made whole, the child had lost the light behind the white picket cliffs that stood vertical and fence-like at the edge of his lands to the east.

The security lights came on and the door opened. A human form — backlit and angelic, — beckoned him inside.

///

The meal was sparse, a bunless patty of beef with ketchup and a three bean salad whose dressing was so vinegary that it made Thomas’ eyes water. He had devoured the patty, but took his time on the salad, hoping that, if he took long enough, the rapture would come.

His father had returned from work and walked directly to the table and begun eating without saying a word.

Thomas’ mother regarded her son. “Don’t you like the salad?” She asked.

He looked at her and smiled, “The salad’s good, mom.”

“Too much vinegar, though? I think I put too much vinegar.”

“No mom, I like it. It’s good.”

“We didn’t have any Apple Cider Vinegar and I thought it’d be alright with just regular vinegar if I used less but you don’t like it. I can tell. I don’t really like it either.”

“Mom,” Thomas said, “I like it.”

His father finally looked up from the plate: “Eat the beans, Tommy.”

Thomas looked at his father and saw in the man’s face the blankness he saw before the man screamed and when the man cried. He didn’t want to see either, so he put a forkful in his mouth and tried to keep his tongue away from it. His mother gave a smile of pride and kissed his temple as she got up to put her dish in the sink.

She returned to the table with a second beef patty for his father, who forked a piece and put it in his mouth.

“Where’d you get the meat?” The man asked. Thomas could feel the heat rise in the room.

His mother met his father’s eyes and smiled her disarming smile. “Found it in that freezer they have for the meat that’s going bad. Got a good deal.”

Thomas looked back to his father in time to see the man’s face sag at the corners of his eyes. He grabbed Thomas’ hand and reached long across the table for his wife’s as well. He looked at one and then the other and said, finally. “I’m sorry. I thought I’d gotten the thing clean. There was so much blood. I don’t know how it got away.”

Thomas’ mother smiled again and squeezed her husband’s hand, “S’alright sweety. Gives you another weekend to hunt.”

Thomas’ father smiled back at her and ran his fingers through his son’s hair. “That’s right, huh?” He said. “What do you think, Rambo? You got another early Saturday morning in ya?”

Tommy saw the joy and expectation on his father’s face and looked down at his plate. He took another forkful of three-bean salad and nodded his head, yes.

///

Thomas and his father got two more weekends to hunt. They’d gotten skunked under shifting winds that blew the scent of their humanity every which way, scaring off even the dullest game. Thomas’ father kept a spray bottle of urine from the previous season’s kill to mask their scent, but it had turned somehow, and was unusable.

The second weekend the air was calm and a light dusting of snow aided tracking. Thomas’ father found a small herd at the fringe of a clearing and took a good shot at a big old cow but the herd scattered, rather than all taking the same direction.

“You see which way she went?” Thomas’ father asked.

“I didn't know which one you were shooting at.”

The man took Thomas’ hand and trudged to where the herd had been. There wasn’t any blood at the site and the tracks shot off in all directions.

“Shoot.” The man said, and stood silent for a minute. Finally, he touched the top of Tommy’s head. “You found the thing last time. Think we oughta split up?”

“Sure,” Thomas said.

“Alright, but keep your coat on this time, so I can keep an eye on you.”

They stood looking at a chaos of tracks on the ground for a moment and then Thomas felt his father nudge him. He looked at the man and found him smiling his half-smile. “You wanna give your old man a hint?”

Thomas smiled and felt warmed by his father’s words, and then pointed in the wrong direction.

///

Thomas picked up the trail as he moved diagonally away from his father. At first he saw small dots of blood and then the dots became drizzles and eventually the flow of blood was constant.

As he moved through the brush, Thomas prayed to find the animal dead, but it wasn’t. It sat on its side in clearing of ferns and a pulse of blood ran from it’s side. Low and behind the heart, probably nicking a lung. The cow heard him coming and turned her head to look at him out of both eyes. She spooked and the blood pulsed harder, but when she tried to get up she fell and her head came to rest on the undergrowth and her hind legs kicked out.

Thomas stayed put, and as he watched the last breaths rattle from the cow, he held his hands to keep them from doing what they were meant to do.