Stuart Dybek - I Sailed with Magellan

Their eyes follow his, looking into the gangway. Perhaps something back there has meaning for them, too. Surely one of them must have descended the back stairs some winter night, maybe lugging a sack of garbage out to the alley, and stopped to stand looking up into the random patterns of snow, letting the flakes melt against his face. Están cayendo hojas blancas … white leaves are falling … Perhaps he imagined them as cold flecks of soot that had floated through infinite space from burned-out stars, or imagined how, above the cloudy snow, the gorgeous, terrifying blizzard of the cosmos wheeled over the back yard. Mick remembers such nights, when he gazed up aware that he was just another speck adrift in stardust on the absolute zero breath of God, and yet that lonely awareness made him feel more intensely alive and, in a strange way, free — a freedom by which he’s determined to live his life. But when he looks from the gangway to the gang staring at him, Mick loses any desire to step off the street into its shadow.

“ Qué quieres? ” the Disciple demands.

“ Qué trais, pendejo? ” a heavyset guy, the oldest-looking of the group, with a rat-tail braid of the kind favored by featherweight boxers, adds in an exaggerated drawl of Mexican Spanish: What do you bring, asshole?

“A dildo para te metas, pinche puto,” a kid with a scholarly, Indian face mutters. He’s the only one besides my brother wearing glasses. His comment draws snickers.

Mick catches that they’re joking about how he might abuse himself with the kielbasa and tries joking back. “ Es mi amigo,” he tells them, brandishing the kielbasa. He’s begun slowly backing away, talking as he does: “ Mi amigo and I go everywhere together and now it’s time for us to catch a bus to Memphis, Tennessee. Hasta la vista .”

“ Está hablando español boricua chingau. Aqui es un barrio Mexicano ,” the heavyset guy says: You talk like a fucking PR. He stands and flicks the lit butt of his cigarette at Mick, and the other guys on the stairs spark theirs at him, too.

And only now does my brother realize what he should have picked up on immediately — his accent is Puerto Rican, not the best impression to make on Mexican guys wary of rival Puerto Rican gangs. He can’t explain his theory that the way to learn a language is to fall in love with a woman who speaks it. He can’t tell them how the language becomes indistinguishable from her, internalized, permanent as any gang tattoo, that even when she’s gone for good she’s there in the feel of the words in his mouth. He knows what they’d say to that or anything else he might tell them.

“ Qué quieres? ” the Disciple asks, and takes a step toward Mick.

They’re all standing now, representing as if practicing some spastic tai chi, throwing gang hand signs as if hexing Mick or warding off evil, speaking as if one in a mute language whose lexicon, if their facial expressions are any indication, consists entirely of obscenities.

“You know what I conveniently forgot?” my brother asks in English, moving off faster, still walking backward so as not to turn his back, “I forgot how sometimes I fucking hated it here.”

“ Qué quieres ?” the kid barks, following after Mick, with his homies behind him.

“ Nada, ” my brother answers.

As soon as he rounds the corner, he begins to run down Twenty-fifth Street, through a boozy blast of conjuntos nortentos from an open bar that used to be Metric’s — in memory everything seems to happen to music — past JJ’s and the driveway where, in summer, Señor Hot Tamale, the name painted in flames on his little white cart, sold incendiary tamales. He kept an iguana on a leash, and his beautiful wild daughter, known on the street as Tamalita, could be momentarily glimpsed clinging to the backs of motorcycles that Mick, eight years old and madly in love with her, would chase for blocks.

Qué quieres?

I want to be wringing the throttle, winding through gears, saddled to the chromed sky-rocket of a Triumph 650.

He turns down Rockwell, past the defunct 3 V’s Birdseed Factory, whose windows once broadcast the cries of caged exotic birds. Its walls are spray-painted in the style of Siqueiros. The peeling murals make the factory appear to be disintegrating along with its superimposed bandoliered angels and peons who ride rearing Quetzalcoatls auraed in fire, its mariachi whose guitars gush at their center holes into rivers of blood and orchids, and its olive-skinned Virgin of Guadalupe. Mick’s reflection flees across her enormous, mournful eyes.

Qué quieres?

I want to hide among the martyrs and heroes; I wish this factory, bankrupt of birds, was a cathedral that offered sanctuary.

Down the flooded side street where Johnny Sovereign had his balls blown off, a street that might have issued from the mural, Mick splashes upstream through the current of an open fire hydrant, scattering gulls lured from garbage dumps by the water. The street is deserted but for a young girl in a wet dress who utters aloud the name of God as a loco blond man races past with a drooping, wind-resisting Polish sausage.

Run, Jimmy Delacroix, breath ragged, a stitch in your side. Don’t look back to see what’s gaining. Run until the city beneath your feet becomes a blur, run propelled by fear, familiar fear — the fear by which you know you’re home. Don’t stop for traffic, stop signs, red lights, don’t stop for shrines or to kneel beside the pauper’s gravestone where your name’s inscribed in the Seaside Cemetery, a graveyard where the sprinklers throw salt spray and the markers are seabirds that fly away at night.

Qué quieres?

I want winged shoes, my old PF Flyers, I want to be wearing the invisible clothes of wind, to be trailing a comet tail of songs: “ A love supreme, a love supreme … Those redskin boys couldn’t get my blood cause I was a-ridin’ on a Tennessee Stud …”

Qué quieres?

I want to change smoke into a perfume of gardenias.

The concertina sleeping beside Lefty has started to wheeze. It’s the middle of the night, even the streetlights have their misty blinders on, and the concertina can’t seem to catch her breath. In the dark Lefty listens to her ragged sighs. He can’t sleep to the concertina’s labored breathing. He’s worried. He can’t help thinking about what happened with the glockenspiel, how he would wake to find her place beside him on the bed empty, and then, from the other side of the locked bathroom door, he’d hear her heart hammering arrhythmically and flat, a dissonant rise and fall of scales. Once it began, it went on like that night after night. The neighbors complained; finally, he lost his lease. And one day at dusk, he found himself standing on a street of pawnshops and tattoo parlors, with nowhere to go and only a pawn ticket to show for what had been his life. He’d wandered out with a tattoo — not a rose or an anchor or a snake or a heart, but a single note of indelible blue, a nameless note without a staff, only an eighth note, really — stung onto his shoulder.

Afterward, he spent a long and, in retrospect, mournful time alone before becoming entangled with the tuba. He met her at a tuba fest, and for a while it seemed as if they were destined for each other, until the dreams started. Disturbing dreams in which he ran lost and breathless through twisting corridors, dreams he’d wake from in the dark to a borborygmus of gurgled moans, blats, grunts, drones, which seemed drawn out longer each night, like the vowels of whales — melancholy whales. At first, he tried to tell himself that it was only gas. But the signs and symptoms were undeniably clear, and this time he didn’t wait for landlords or court orders to tell him it was over. He’d already been evicted from sleep. One afternoon, while the tuba was away for a valve job, Lefty, groggy with insomnia, packed what he could fit into a suitcase that once cushioned a saxophone and left the rest behind.