Rafaela opened her eyes. “What time is it?” she whispered.
“What does it matter, my child?” Doña Maria rose from her seat of vigilance.
“The match. It will be starting soon.” Rafaela grabbed the swaddled pocketknife from under her pillow, pushed aside the sheets, and slipped from the bed.
“You aren’t well enough. You’ve been sleeping so fitfully. Where are you going?”
Rafaela stepped across the room, grabbed a small hand mirror from atop a chest of drawers, and stared at herself in horror, but the old woman snatched the thing away with a sudden fierceness. “Whatever are you doing?”
Rafaela bit her lip, adjusted the white lace straps of her cotton shift over her bruised shoulders and limped barefoot into the garden toward the orange tree. Doña Maria had applied a slather of poultices over her wounds; now dried, her skin had a chalky appearance. New red blood and old black blood spotted the white trim of her sheer gown. “You’re still bleeding, my dear,” Doña Maria called after.
Indeed it was a long walk, the well-worn path the same path but a path disappearing forever northward through a thicket of sunflowers and cactus, and the orange tree a small green speck in the distance. Doña Maria’s protesting voice was soon swallowed by folding space as was a blinking X on a map on a television screen. Rafaela kept sight of the tree and stepped lightly through the sand and dust. She only stopped momentarily to fold the pocket-knife into the skirts of her gown, tying it in a secure knot in the bloodied trim. After several hours, she strained through the good vision in one eye to see the thin figure of a man leaning against the tree. “Bobby?” She hurried forward, pressing her hand to her side, cracked ribs shifting under her skin.
Bobby seemed to have seen her and was now walking toward her. They both walked and ran forever. The purple places on her face and limbs throbbed with every step. She stretched her arms across an infinite and yet invisible chasm.
But then she saw it: the fine silken thread she knew so well, the one that would lead to the orange and hopefully to Sol. It lay in the dust, occasionally whipping about like a delicate piece of tinsel. One more step and she could grab it. Take it in her hands and twist it about her body, pull herself toward Bobby. She held herself against it and, like a sweeping wave, rode forward.
Bobby held her bruised face in his hands and wept like a child. He stroked her dark hair and tenderly felt the crusting patches in her scalp where the hair had been ripped away. He lifted her lace shift away and kissed the welts on her bare shoulders and the scars along her back. He cradled her in his arms, heaving and groaning. He wrapped himself about her wanting to protect all the parts of her yet untouched, wanting to heal all the parts of her so tortured.
Rafaela pulled the silken thread around them until they were both covered in a soft blanket of space and midnight, their proximity to everything both immediate and infinitely distant. She kissed his palms and pulled his clothing and possessions and his work away. She tugged at everything and cast them all aside, folding and warming herself in his naked frame. They came together in a fleshy ball, wrapped and clinging one to the other, genitals pressed in a lingering fire, heart to heart, mind to mind.
But imperceptibly the silken thread unfolded and tugged itself away, caught finally between their ephemeral embrace. They straddled the line—a slender endless serpent of a line—one peering into a private world of dreams and metaphysics, the other into a public place of politics and power. One peering into a magical world, the other peering into a virtual one. “Will you wait for me on the other side?” she whispered as the line in the dust became again as wide as an entire culture and as deep as the social and economic construct that nobody knew how to change.