MORONA-SANTIAGO PROVINCE, ECUADOR, 1969
The stamps Randy bought a whole roll of, one hand holding Wright’s and one reaching into a tight front pocket and pulling out Fay’s money. The stationery he took from the inn, which Lucinda deducted from Fay’s paycheck.
“I don’t care,” Wright heard Lucinda say to a visiting friend, Belen, a woman with indigenous green eyes and an elegant way of interrupting, “what he does, so long as she’s happy with him. It is like the person who you visit who has a chair in a stupid fucking place—”
“You do not say how inconvenient. You just step around it.” It was off hours and they were drinking café con leche, petting a brindle stray cat when it came around. He was hiding in one of the empty rooms, listening under the window for the piece he needed.
“She has forgotten how to wash her asshole alone. About the boy, of course, I worry. He is becoming a person and she just stands there.”
They spoke about Randy’s hygiene, his volume in all things, but did not ask to whom he was writing so often, biting the ends of pens until the plastic splintered. The talk moved to Velasco, his fifth term, all of them laced with coups, and they joked cruelly about the holes in his power, how he retired military generals like a kid revising the fantasy. “I don’t like how that cat is staring,” Belen said, pushing invisible glasses up her nose as she sniffed. “That cat is now retired.”
Wright resolved to ask Fay about the letters, to get the answer using the voice he had cultivated to sound especially young, especially blithe. He had different ways of being with his mother now, exaggerating his sadness to incite her pity, mocking her spells of anger so she would thread him into the largeness of the feeling.
All afternoon the rain competed with the light. As it died he found her in the room, reading with a pen in her hand. It is foolish, she always told him, to imagine knowledge will be loyal to you. You must be loyal to it. He crawled into the bed next to her, his head at her feet, his legs over her torso, and pulled at each brown, callused toe, a sensation he knew she loved. He heard the book shut. They had always lived like this, each with total access to the other’s body, still showered together. He could remember breastfeeding, asking for it.
“God,” she said. “When you do that it feels like every part of my body is standing up to wave.”
“How does a kidney wave?”
“I guess it just leans in one direction. If that sounds sad, just imagine some of the other parts. The intestine, basically just one five-foot-long squiggle, can’t really do anything but sort of push and squash.”
“Sad.”
“Tragic. And yet: I know my intestine is waving at me right now. As you pull on that very toe, I know you have made it truly happy.”
The only light in the room came from a string of Christmas bulbs tangled in a mason jar, some nod to American kitsch that Wright did not understand. When he was very young he had called this hour the shadow shine and sometimes Fay still whispered that to him, The shadow shine, the shadow shine, pointing to a dark shape moving across a wall. It was a phrase that had become synonymous with anything tender or flighty, a thin red dog they met that would not quite come near, a look that came onto Wright’s face when a question thrilled him as much as it made him afraid. The meaning had mutated, become a nickname, referring sometimes to how he saw the world and sometimes to the world that was him.
“Mom?”
“Yes, my sweet.”
“Who is Randy writing to all the time?”
“Friends, family.”
“But before he said his friends all died. Before he said he didn’t have a family—”
Wright wouldn’t look at Fay but he could feel, beneath him on the mattress, that she was firming up her posture to deliver a statement. He had introduced the question too soon, knew the answer would be too short.
“He’s writing to some people in the States, a group of men and women with similar ideas about how our country treats other countries and how it treats its own citizens.”
“Has he met them?”
Slipped in the wooden seam of the mirror opposite them were photos he’d taken with the camera Randy was teaching him to use, and he stared at them now—Lucinda on a phone call with someone she believed to be an idiot, her eyes mostly their whites and her fingers spread taut on the counter before her. Fay’s soapy heel on the lip of the tub, a book splayed and puckered on the bath mat.
“No,” she said, “but he was connected to them through a friend who is also a veteran and who also opposes the war. There is a whole group of them, young men who were drafted to fight and are dealing with the consequences now. And there are others, people who didn’t go to war but want to end it, people who want to end the way America polices other countries just for having different ideas.”
She was speaking to him too slowly, as though describing a view that was blocked from his vantage, relating only vague impressions of shape and shade.
“But so they’re writing every day? They’re best, best friends? What are they talking about?”
“Mostly about change.”
“Change how?” It was completely dark now and when she bucked her hips he would not let her rise toward the lamp. He thought of all the ways he could recognize his mother, by scent, by the shape of her ankle, gemlike, sharper than any other part of her. He believed this would be important someday, that there would be an occasion on which his understanding of her would be tested, and he was going to be ready, to prove that before anything else she belonged to him.
“Okay, okay. Change on the most fundamental level, how Americans think about other Americans, how they think about the rest of the world, whether they think about the rest of the world. How to get people to see past their front lawns. How to get people to think about how their lives unfold on the backs of others.”
“How does Randy think he can change that?”
“Well, there are a number of ways, all of which involve getting people to think. There’s education, there’s demonstration, there’s symbolic action.”
“What’s a symbolic action?”
“It’s an act that summarizes something much bigger or longer, in a very public way, so that people who might not otherwise think of that something will begin to.”
“An example being . . .”
He had learned the shortcuts through the airy way she had begun to speak, and he deployed them like the politician all his mother’s secrets had made him. Certain turns were required in a conversation with her, from ignorant to mindful, from son to something else.
“Do you know you are the only nine-year-old who says ‘an example being’?”
“An example being—”
“Okay, an example being—I’ve told you about teach-ins, where a group of people set up in a public space and lecture and distribute information through pamphlets and what have you.”
“And that’s a demonstration.”
“Right. A symbolic action, an example of one, is called a die-in, which is when a lot of us get together and we wear costumes and makeup that bring to mind the Vietnamese people who have been killed in the war.”
“Why do you say ‘us,’ Mom? We’ve never done that. You and me have never pretended to be dead.” As he spoke he tried to cover fear with emphasis, but the boil of his body stepped in front of his speech, making his talk quicken.
“Us and we are pronouns that help to emphasize the global nature of all these problems. Saying ‘they’ is the same as saying ‘not me, not my problem.’”
“I understand,” he said, the phrase he had learned to use when he could not.
“We can talk about this as much as you want.”
“How about as little,” he said, a minor fury coming to his mouth now, remembering things he’d heard Lucinda say. “It’s weird how your voice sounds like his voice. It’s weird how you forgot to wash your own ass without him around.”
She was silent, then conciliatory, treating him like a boy much younger. Her bribes he declined, a story, a bath floated with flowers. She could run to the kitchen and caramelize some chocolate. He wouldn’t answer, only set up on his own bed with a basket of scrap paper and began practicing a new design of a plane, the Dragon, thirty steps he’d memorized. He could feel that his mother was watching him, her arms crossed, her tangled hair pushed all to one side, brown and red and blond, could hear how her breathing had quickened. She swung her feet over the side of her bed and strode to the bureau, the wide sleeves and skirt of her kimono creating a slight wind that moved his papers around.
“Goddamn, woman,” Wright said, echoing a refrain of Randy’s. “On your way to the hospital? I’m doing stuff here.” She was placing a hunk of pot in a grinder, the snap of her wrists gone sharp with anger. He knew what was coming, the voice she would use.
“I feel sad and unloved when I’m spoken to with sarcasm. I would appreciate, in the future, if you expressed any frustration with sincerity.”
It was called an I-message, a device for the discussion of feelings that she had decreed as rule in the room the three of them shared. Okay, babe, Randy had said, 4–0 on the cry message. Wright had laughed until he saw his mother’s face. It seemed that she had slipped into Randy’s politics totally, his way of thinking, but with hers he could pick and choose. In the adult world where they argued, the male mind was a cathedral, cool and stony, and the female a colorful junk sale, surprising but inconsistent.
She leaned darkening on the dresser, her hair tied up in an ugly knot, the smoke filling between them until she began to cough and displaced it. He hated the smell of it, hated the way she looked as she inhaled, her eyes shut to everything, hated how after nothing could interest or upset her. He began to throw the planes at her, first in gentle arcs, then angry lines. It didn’t take long for her to go, less than a minute, and she left the joint smoking in the ashtray. He brought it into the bathroom and pissed on it.
IN BETWEEN DREAMS THAT NIGHT were the sound of their voices, the flint of the lighter catching again, a Stones record she asked he turn off. “—action met by action. No more protests, no more slogans on paper. If our government continues to destroy, then we must destroy the government.” Wright woke to the sun rising and his mother on the floor, her hand moving fast across a page, the inn’s stationery spread around her like a corona, the thin papers catching all the light.