about the author

Jerome Edwards lives in Downtown Los Angeles.


Bookmark and Share
 

 


font size

What, So? You Are Lost, Are You? So What?

Jerome Edwards



‘Sun at noon, tan us.’

I’m given to this kind of talk after too long in the sun.

‘You can cage a swallow, can’t you, but you can’t swallow a cage, can you?’

Dom’s used to it.

We’re back where we started, a part of town where the locals say—in a brand of Spanish I still can’t manage—that the devil never even lived. Hot stench wafts from a stretch of railroad where a dead bird splays awkwardly along the tracks, a wing turning up like the last page of a book.

I’m aloof, a fool am I—which is to say that Dom is the leader of this duo by default. I drag the toe of my boot across a worn railroad tie, let my foot carry through a patch of brown grass, wait for the next route to be decided. Color has been burned from the sky leaving only a stifling blanket of brightness and I’m nostalgic about sunglasses. I drain what’s left in my boto—pain rolls from one side of my head to the other.

Dom tries the map again, gives up on it soon enough.

‘It’s too hot to hoot,’ I say.

‘We just need to find the station.’

‘We could follow the tracks.’

Dom’s nodding, but not because we’re any closer.

We double back, pass through a blanched scrap of town where the air holds distinct odors you can measure by—some kind of food, some kind of smoke, some kind of decay. A sun-bleached piece of wood with MUSEO carved into it hangs from a shanty that looks like it’s been built from the remains of a bonfire.

‘Se orar—raro es,’ I say—a phrase I picked up somewhere, meaning something like, ‘I can pray—it’s strange.’ I try it again, the ‘r’s rolling away from me.

We turn a corner and pass through a shadow. Buildings like cardboard boxes along a hard road of dirt; a tire-less rusted hatchback cocked at an angle. We’ve seen all this before—it’s familiar and foreign and the heat is everything. The heat is heartbreaking. A fly spreads itself on my tongue.

Later, in a market with a makeshift roof, we buy two bottles of Regal Lager and refill our botos with wine. Dom buys plantains from a boy pushing a cart. A small girl wearing shorts held up by a shoelace pulls at the cheap camera around my neck—I’m trying not to look directly at her undeveloped chest and asking, ‘Borrow or rob? Borrow or rob?’ I secure the camera with my hand and she poses as I take her photo. ‘Oh, cameras are macho!’ she says, then pushes up on her toes, kisses my cheek....

The sun is still high when we approach mildewed old furniture piled around a dark round man who we’ve passed twice today already—‘Tut-tut,’ he says when I finally ask if he speaks English, and Dom asks him loudly, slowly, ‘Where. Is. Train. Station?’ ‘La ruta nos aportó otro paso natural,’ is the man’s calm reply.

I’m laughing and laughing because it’s all so goddamn funny to me.

‘Circles,’ Dom says, maybe to himself.

‘Somos o no somos,’ I say—I roll the oblong syllables out of my mouth until I think I have them down. Heat ghosts hang over the only section of paved road in front of us. I step into my own footprints and feel like I could belong. How clear it is to me that we are all lost, always.

Up ahead, the alula of a dead bird’s wing lifts, showing a spot of rot underneath. Dry wind pulls the foul scent to us. The same stretch of tracks.

Dom spits into the dust.

‘Do geese see God?’ I ask.

I wring a stream of red wine into my mouth and search my pockets for something, for anything. We’re at the beginning. We’re at the end. We’re somewhere in between. We are where everybody is. We’re somewhere in between. We’re at the end. We’re at the beginning. I wring a stream of red wine into my mouth and search my pockets for something, for anything.

‘Do geese see God?’ I ask.

Dom spits into the dust.

The same stretch of tracks. Dry wind pulls the foul scent to us. Up ahead, the alula of a dead bird’s wing lifts, showing a spot of rot underneath.





HTML Comment Box is loading comments...