Sitting. In a car. Like a stone. Everything about his body heavy. He could sink into the earth. As he stared into his hands, he understood that they were throbbing as if they had become his heart. He rubbed them as if to rub out the tightness, but the rubbing made the hurt even worse, and so he stopped. Ice. That was what he needed, to soak his fists in ice and freeze the pain. That was the answer to this simple problem. But how did you freeze a heart, the days and weeks and months that made a life? How the hell did you freeze that?
He looked around, confused, trying to remember how he came to be in that car. He looked at the driver. Al, yes, he had been with Al in a bar, and there had been a man, yes, the man. And he’d remembered him, remembered how that man had lied to him years ago, and how the smell of him just came up through his nostrils and settled in his throat and how he’d wanted to take a bath because just smelling him made him feel dirty and—for the longest second—how he’d wanted to jump in an ocean, scrub himself raw until all of his skin was gone so he could grow a new outer shell, a shell that man hadn’t touched, and he hated how everything came back to him in an instant almost as if it wasn’t a memory at all but a moment in time he was condemned to live and relive, a scene in his life he’d have to step into over and over again until he got his lines right, but he would always get it wrong—and just then he was in the scene again, a boy again, young and inexperienced and stupid and inarticulate and how the man was making him do things he didn’t even have a name for because he was twelve, twelve, and what did twelve-year-old boys know, and then he stepped out of the scene and looked at the man and he felt nothing but the purest kind of rage, an anger so distilled that it was as clear and sparkling as champagne and he knew that what the man had done to him, that man, that man who was sitting there, there, right there—what he’d done to him had started something inside him because something started to break then—and there he was—sitting right in front of him—and it wasn’t fucking fair that he was sitting there all nice and neat and put together like some gentleman out of a magazine, like some reproduction of a suave movie star, wasn’t fucking fair when he, he, Andrés Segovia, was all broken into pieces and he knew that he had this one chance to do something, to say something, to try, to try, to act, to not be passive because he wasn’t twelve anymore and for the longest time he hadn’t had a say in how he got to live his life, and it wasn’t even a conscious decision, no, it wasn’t like that, it wasn’t as if he had decided I will hurt this man, I will hurt him but God, it had felt good to say I hate your fucking guts for what you did to me, I hate, I hate, God, it was good to say that even if he was saying it with his fists, but even then, he knew that it was his fists that were in control and not him, not his mind, not his heart, and maybe it wasn’t possible for a guy like him to be led by his heart because something was broken, so goddamned broken that nothing could fix it, not all the saints in all the churches in Mexico, not the Virgin herself, not his mother if she came back to life, nothing, nothing in the large, ugly, violent, fucking world, nothing in its past or in its future could fix what was broken.
He looked at his fists and opened his hands and he felt his hands so tight that he couldn’t really open them, not really.
“You could’ve killed him.”
He looked in Al’s direction.
“Yeah,” he whispered.
“Why did—” Al didn’t finish his question, already knowing that Andrés didn’t have an answer, and knowing, too, that his disapproval did not matter in the least. “You’re lucky he didn’t call the cops.”
“Yeah. Lucky.”
“He could’ve called them, you know?”
“Yeah.”
“Except he knew something, didn’t he?”
Andrés shrugged. He didn’t want to talk about this, not with Al, not with anybody. “Look, doesn’t matter.”
“Maybe not. But you could’ve killed that guy.”
“Maybe I should’ve.”
“Yeah, well. What did he do to you?”
“It’s a long story.”
“Yeah, well, it must’ve been something really bad. No cops, that’s what he kept saying. No cops. There he was, all beat up to hell, and all he kept saying was don’t call the cops. So you must have something on him that’s really bad.”
Al nodded and kept nodding, and then they were both quiet for a long time. Al seemed to be just driving, not really going anywhere. Andrés didn’t care. He just sat. He wanted to sleep. That’s what he wanted to do.
Finally Al whispered something, and Andrés looked over at him.
“Where do you live?”
“Sunset Heights. On Prospect.”
Al nodded, then drove. It wasn’t far.
Andrés nodded off. Couldn’t have been long, though he felt he had been sleeping for hours. He opened his eyes and found they were on his street. He pointed. “Over there.” Al slowed down, then stopped in front of the run-down apartments. “Nice place,” he said, then laughed. Not a convincing laugh.
“Yeah,” Andrés whispered. “I’m tired.” He reached for the door, but found he couldn’t turn the handle. He winced.
“Here. Wait.” Al got out of the car and opened the door for him.
Andrés got out, and for an instant he felt like an old man. “You treat your dates really good,” he said, then laughed. He didn’t notice if Al laughed or not. And then he couldn’t stop laughing, but he knew, really, that he was crying. And then he didn’t want to stop, so he just let himself cry, and he didn’t give a damn about anything. Not anything.
“Can you get in all right?” He heard Al’s voice, but he couldn’t speak, he just couldn’t. He didn’t remember if Al had helped him into his apartment. He didn’t remember if it was Al who’d placed his fists in a bowl of ice. He had a fragment of Al inside him, of Al whispering something to him. Maybe it didn’t happen. Did it matter how he got there? The pain in his fists, maybe that was the only thing that was real. Him, sitting there in his chair in his small apartment, his fists stuck in the ice. He looked around the room, then pushed himself onto the bed, and he was so tired, but he couldn’t sleep, so he forced himself to get up and he forced himself to find the bottle of bourbon that he almost dropped because he couldn’t really hold it very well because his hands were so numb, but he managed to swallow some of that liquor that soothed him like a lullaby, and he liked how it burned, and he drank some more, and then he felt better, sure, better, so he stumbled to his bed and fell on it.
Before he went out, he swore he smelled his brother, Mando. And maybe he heard him, too. He wasn’t calling for him, not for him. He was calling his sister, searching for her, but it was useless because she was lost forever. And then, all of a sudden, his father was saying something to him, and his mother, too, and he could feel and smell his father’s hot tobacco breath on his neck as he rode a bicycle through a lost city. He was dreaming them—all of them—but even in his dreams he was pushing them all away, pushing them toward a place so dark that not even the angel of God would bother to search the face of it to find them.