OFTEN, DIEGO WONDERED what it would be like to be dead. Probably, he thought, it couldn’t be very much different from Vicky’s kitchen. He had decided a long time ago that he didn’t like the idea of being alive. When he was twenty, he had begun a suicide note. He was serious about it, and he meant to kill himself as soon as he finished the letter. He worked on his letter almost every day. He told himself he’d end his life when the letter was perfect.
During the week he woke up at three-thirty. He shook—he always shook. It was as if his blood was too heavy for his veins to carry, tco heavy because it had picked up the litany of loneliness that made up the hours of his life. So he shook. And after the shaking stopped, he made coffee. Waking up in his room was like waking up in Vicky’s kitchen. He sat at the window looking at the outlines of the downtown buildings and the soundless freeway that was almost empty of traffic. The cars moved so quickly when he saw them pass and he wondered about the sound of moving tires on the pavement.
He had constructed a desk out of a few wooden boards and some bricks he’d stolen from a torn-down building. That was all downtown seemed to be: torn-down buildings replaced by new buildings that would also be torn down. He drank coffee and read the newspapeper from the day before, the newspaper his boss gave him as he went home every day. He enjoyed reading the news a day late.
He put down the newspaper and took out his suicide note, which he kept displayed on the corner of the desk next to a stack of books he’d checked out from the public library. He looked it over carefully, trying to think of changes he might make. It went that way every morning. He added, changed sentences around, scratched out entire paragraphs, and sometimes reinserted them in different places. He scratched his head and drank his coffee, lost in his thoughts. Somehow, he felt there had to be a way of saying everything he had ever wanted to say—everything he had ever thought. He had read a book on how to write, but it did not seem to have helped him very much. He read the letter slowly to himself:
“To whom it may concern …” That part bothered him, but he couldn’t think of what else to say. If it was addressed to someone other than the person who found his body, then there was the real chance they would not even bother reading it. He hoped the landlord wouldn’t be the person to find his body. He hated the thought of Mr. Arteago standing over his dead body like an unholy angel sneering down at him—and worse—he hated to think that he would read his letter. He wanted to write “To whom it may concern (except Mr. Arteago)” but he knew his landlord was just the kind of man to read it anyway, so it was a useless addition. He shook his head knowing there was no way out of his dilemma and continued reading:
“Death is easy. It was life that was so damn hard …” He wasn’t sure about that part either, not because it wasn’t true but because it was so true that everybody already knew it. Why was it necessary to state the obvious? People might not like it and never read the rest of the letter. He scratched it out with pencil. Maybe he could find a better way of saying the same thing. He made a note to himself to go to the library and check out a book of quotes or something like that. Maybe he could find an appropriate quote as a kind of epigraph to his letter. It would be a nice touch. He continued reading: “I always hated that I was born deaf. I think my mother always hated it, too. She never learned sign language. I don’t think she wanted to learn, or she didn’t have time—I don’t know. I think sometimes that she never wanted to hear what I had to say. She knew when I was hungry or thirsty or tired; she knew when I was happy or upset; she knew the easy things, but that’s all she knew. Maybe she didn’t think I had real thoughts. Maybe she thought things were different for the deaf. I don’t know. Maybe she figured because I talked with my hands she could guess everything about me from the outside. She was like everyone else I ever met: always smiling at me and hoping I would somehow go away. Where the hell was I supposed to go?
“I guess it doesn’t matter much. I know she loved me as much as she could. And she loved me better than anyone who has ever known me …” Maybe I should add something here, he thought. He took a drink from his cup of coffee, shook his head, and took down a few notes on the margins of the paper. “… Now, I just go to work in a place where there will never be any signs of the sun and I come back home. I watch people talk; I read their lips and they say things like, ‘I need to get out of his hellhole of a town, I hate this city—it’s fucking dead.’ I saw this lady once, dressed real nice with lots of jewelry, like the Empress Carlota’s, and she was telling her friend that life was a piece of shit; ‘My husband, he buys me rings and necklaces and clothes, and he takes me out once a year like a moveable, decorated Christmas tree.’ I think she wanted to cry—but she didn’t. The look on her face wasn’t angry. She was mostly sad, I think. Sad. And the people I see at work, they look like they’re in a war or something. They don’t even have enough energy to raise the flag of surrender. They all took tired. Maybe it’s me who’s tired—that’s what my friend Luz says. She says everyone looks tired to me because I’m tired. I wrote out on my pad: “Your eyes would be tired too, Luz, if you always had to stare at people’s lips to see what they were saying.” She told me to stop being angry. “You’re not the only one who has to look at those faces,” she said. Maybe she’s right, but goddamnit, I can’t help being angry. I can’t stop myself. Besides, Luz is as angry as I am.
“Most people don’t know I can read lips. It’s a secret I like to keep. Why should I tell them? I just pretend I don’t understand, so they write things down for me. When we have to write things down, we’re all equal. The people who come into the restaurant always tell me I have real nice handwriting—but I read their lips and they say things. And I don’t care for what they have to say. Well, it’s their world—but they don’t have hearts. Luz says I’m too nice to people on the outside and too hard on them on the inside. But one thing I do know: The only way to find out if some people have hearts is to cut them open and take a look because I sure as hell can’t tell by the way they act …” Right here Diego stopped and shook his head. Luz is right, he thought, I am too angry. It wasn’t fair to be so hard on people. And what if someone found this letter when he was dead? Wouldn’t they hate him for it? He laughed. But he’d be dead—he wouldn’t feel a thing. He made a mental note and continued reading:
“The owner of the place where I work, a place called Vicky’s Bar, he beats his wife. I’ve seen her bruises. She left him. She walked in one day and started throwing glasses and dishes and turning over tables all over the place. She had the strength of an earthquake. Talk about angry. ‘You’re lucky I don’t cut your balls off and feed them to the pigeons at the park!’ That’s what she yelled. She yelled alt kinds of other things. He laughed at her and told her all kinds of things. I couldn’t read his lips very well, but I do remember he kept telling her she was crazy. But she wasn’t crazy, not crazy at all. Anyone could see that. He called her a puta. Puta, puta, nothing but a whore. ‘Not yours!’ she said, ‘not yours anymore,’ And afterwards I had to clean up the mess.
The boss told his friends that if he ever saw her again he’d beat the shit out of her. He almost changed the name of the bar after that since he’d named it after her, but he figured he might lose some business, so he kept the name. The boss doesn’t like his sons much, either. He says they’re like their mother. He hired me instead of one of his sons because he said they would rob him blind. He called his sons a bunch of cabrones, and everything else he could think of—lazy, castrated thieves on top of everything else, ‘And besides, the deaf guy’s cheaper.’ I saw him say that to his friend. Everybody’s a target to hit with fists or words; everybody’s toilet paper; everybody uses everybody. Everybody’s mad at everybody—me included. Who wants to live in a world like this? I don’t. Not me. What for?”
He finished reading the letter, and looked it over. He hadn’t signed it yet. Today, it struck him he liked the ending very much, but he didn’t much like the part about his mother. Why drag her back into the world by mentioning her in his letter? She had died her own death already. Why drag her through another funeral?