Daniel Alarcón - At Night We Walk in Circles

“Don’t touch it,” Noelia said again and again. “Leave it alone. You’re going to be fine.”

I wasn’t so sure.

My mother rushed over, and Noelia’s expression was of relief. I watched my mother in action. She asked Mrs. Anabel to explain what had happened. Then to follow her finger with her eyes. “Can you get up?” my mother asked. “Can you move your toes?”

Mrs. Anabel never answered any of the questions directly. She followed my mother’s finger as it drifted left, and then she stayed there, holding her gaze on the empty space in front of her.

I heard my mother sigh.

Together, my mother and Noelia helped the fragile old woman to her feet. I offered to help, but my mother waved me away. They held her steady. They brushed her off. Mrs. Anabel had a cut on her elbow too, and she held it up for inspection. I watched my mother brush the dirt from the wound, and pick out a few tiny pebbles that had stuck to the broken skin.

Then they all but carried her to her bedroom.

Mrs. Anabel wasn’t dying, or at least it didn’t seem that way to me — but she was on the border of something. That sounds inexact, I know, and perhaps it does lack a certain medical precision, but what I mean is that even then, in the first moments after her fall, Mrs. Anabel appeared to be drifting between two states of consciousness. Her voice would accelerate and then fall off, then pick up again; and neither my mother nor Noelia, and least of all Mrs. Anabel herself, could control it. I watched her move across the courtyard, held up by Noelia and my mother, and it seemed almost as if she were floating, her feet barely touching the ground. She kept up a steady stream of words, calling for friends and relatives, calling for Rogelio, for Jaime, for her husband, quite clearly beginning to panic.

We made eye contact as she passed me. “Where is everyone?” she asked, but I didn’t respond.

Noelia and my mother took the old woman inside, and Nelson and I pressed in too. After a few moments, my mother announced that she was afraid Mrs. Anabel might have suffered a concussion. We’d have to observe her carefully over the next few hours. The danger was swelling, and since no one had seen her fall, we had no way of knowing how bad it really was.

I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t want to hear any of this. Watching her loosed something within me; like I was a young boy, suddenly aware of nakedness, unprepared for it, and ashamed. I shouldn’t be here, I thought, and somehow this emotion felt selfless at the time, though I see now that it was just the opposite. I wasn’t respecting Mrs. Anabel’s privacy; I was protecting myself from something I feared instinctively. This too was clear: the young man standing beside me felt much the same way. Outside, the earth glowed beneath a miraculous Andean sky, but from the corner of her room, the shrinking Mrs. Anabel exuded only darkness. It was like standing at the mouth of a deep cave and being chilled by its cool breath.

My mother and Mrs. Anabel whispered together for a moment, the old woman shaking her head again and again. Then, in a surprisingly loud voice, she asked for Rogelio. I turned to Nelson (though that was not yet his name to me), who stood with downcast eyes, his fidgeting hands momentarily still, jammed in the pockets of his jeans. He rocked back and forth on his feet, very slowly, and then, without a word, turned and left the room. Even now, this gesture seems very cruel, and I looked to Mrs. Anabel, then to my mother, then to Noelia, who shrugged. There was nothing for me to do there, so I followed him.

I found Nelson pacing the yard, looking alternately at his feet and then up at the sky. I sat by the wall, relieved to be out of doors, and watched this fitful stranger, whose theatrical display of anxiety relieved me of the necessity of displaying my own. There was something very genuine to it, and at the same time, exaggerated. I asked him what had happened, and Nelson frowned.

“My name isn’t Rogelio,” he said.

“So what is it?”

“Nelson,” he answered, then apologized for having misled me.

I told him it didn’t matter.

“You live here?” he asked. “I haven’t seen you.”

“I’m visiting. My mom lives across the street. But you knew that.”

“That’s my room,” he said, gesturing with a half-raised arm toward the bedroom where he slept. “I’ve been here three weeks. Almost.” He shook his head then, as if the very thought of these past three weeks made him tense.

“You’re from the city?” I asked, though I could tell the answer just by looking at him.

“Yeah.”

And then, for some reason, I asked him how he liked our town.

He smiled wanly, then shrugged. “It’s very pretty,” he said, which I would’ve expected him to say. Then he went on: “What I can’t figure out is what people do for fun here.”

It was an odd remark. As odd and misplaced as my question, perhaps. The wounded Mrs. Anabel was raving just a few steps from us, and suddenly Nelson wore an amused look, as if the idea of fun had only just now occurred to him, as if that were his complaint — the lack of fun — and not the terrible scene unfolding in the other room.

“That’s what you can’t figure out?”

He laughed nervously. For this, I liked him. “Among other things.”

“What are you doing here?”

Nelson shrugged. “You know what? I can’t remember.”

“She’s your grandmother?” I asked.

I honestly had no idea what their connection might have been.

He shook his head, but didn’t explain.

My sense of him, in those first moments we spent together, was of someone who’d lost his way. He was tentative, unsure of himself. He showed not the slightest interest in my presence. I could’ve been anyone. The sun was in my eyes, and when I looked at Nelson now, it was almost as if he were being swallowed by the light.

“Do your people know you’re here?” I asked.

“Ixta does,” he said.

“Who?”

“My girl.”

The name stood out. I’d never met anyone by that name. Never even heard that name before, in fact.

It was then that Noelia ducked her head out of the room where Mrs. Anabel was languishing. She wore a look of worry. “Go to the store,” she said. “Ask Segura for hydrogen peroxide and aspirin and bandages.”

Nelson nodded, but made no move toward the door.

“And try Jaime. Segura has the number.” Noelia frowned at me, at my unnecessary presence. We hadn’t even exchanged a greeting. “You go with him.” We were two young men being shooed away from a crisis. Sent on an errand, like children. I was happy to be dismissed.

Except for the walk to my parents’ house that morning, this outing with Nelson was my first in many years through the streets of T—. I was always misremembering the place. The stunted tree in the courtyard was just one symptom of a broader condition. In my mind, the shuttered church had always been open; the dusty, neglected plaza had always been neat and tidy. It was a town where people did not die so much as disappear very slowly, like a photograph fading over time. And here I was again.

The bus I’d come in on that morning was still parked in the plaza, preparing to make its return trip to San Jacinto. A few locals hovered around its open door. They loaded the bags, rearranged them, made space, and jammed in some more. Buses like this one were never full. They left half-empty, and picked up passengers along the way, as many as could fit. Nelson glanced in the direction of the bus. I must have said something about T— not being as I remembered it. I’d been having versions of this very ordinary realization all morning.

“What was it like?” Nelson asked, with something like genuine curiosity.