20

It was Courtney who first gave me the news about Alex. She somehow found the number for La Posada.

That was about eight months ago. My aqueduct was in full swing, and I was enjoying a slow weekend at La Lib. Ben and I had made love in the afternoon and he’d fallen asleep. I’d tried to nap as well, but a dream kept waking me: A giant snake, big as a freight train, slithered up beside my sleeping body. I’d lie still and play dead; then the snake would move on. But each time it started on its way, I’d shudder from fear and wake up.

“Chinita.” A hesitant knock came at the door. Kristy rarely bothered us in our rooms. I’d heard the telephone ring a few seconds before. It must be important, I thought.

“Momentito.” I wrapped a sarong around my torso and tied it behind my back. Ben didn’t stir. Outside the room, my eyes constricted against the sun.

Kristy crossed the courtyard. I followed several paces behind.

The phone cord stretched from the office out to the patio in front of Kristy’s room. I took the call there.

“Sí,” I said, still groggy.

“Malia? Is that you? Are you sitting down?”

“Courtney? What’s up?”

“Sit down, Malia.”

The only way to get a chair was to put the phone down and fetch one from the dining room—too much trouble. I waited a second, then lied and said I was sitting.

“It’s about Alex,” she said.

“What about him?”

Outside the gate, Peseta walked by, scanning the street for some sort of action to get into—travelers in search of accommodation, surfers in search of drugs, any brand of honest-enough hustle that might result in a few coins.

“Alex hurt himself,” Courtney said.

“Is he all right?” Finally, I woke up; the tragedy reel played through my mind. This was long before the earthquake, so it was informed mainly by images from television and film: hospital rooms with their beeping machines, bent-up car bumpers, swirling red and blue lights.

“They say he’ll be okay.” She exhaled hard, so that it came through the phone as static. “He lost a lot of blood.”

I grew more confused. What exactly had happened to him? Kristy’s broom scraped across the floor behind me.

“It’s weird, because nobody knows what they can or cannot tell us. But the rumor is that he’s got some bad scars.”

Peseta passed again, looking impatient.

“Courtney.” My heart thumped inside my chest. “I don’t understand. What happened?”

“It was some kind of razor knife, apparently.”

“Alex got stabbed?” As I pronounced the a in stabbed, my bedroom door opened across the courtyard. I saw Ben stretch his arms above his head and yawn.

“His wrists, Malia.” Courtney spoke as if this should all have been obvious to me by now. “Alex tried to kill himself.”

My vision went grainy and out of focus. I put my hand on the wall to keep my balance. “Where?” I asked.

“It happened in his site, but somebody found him.”

Ben crossed the courtyard toward me. Our eyes met and his expression turned somber.

“Like I said,” Courtney went on, “it’s all rumors and speculation right now. But they say a woman there put tourniquets on his arms and called for help.”

Doña Carmen. I knew her. In a sense, she was to Alex what Niña Tere was to me. During the war, I’m sure she’d stopped the bleeding of hundreds of hurt guerillas, but this sort of wound was almost certainly new to her.

“Holy fuck,” I said.

Ben stood beside me now. He put a hand on my back.

“They’re sending him to D.C. tonight. It’s a medical evacuation.”

“I see.” I wanted to get off the phone. “I guess I’ll send an e-mail. That’s probably the best way to get in touch with him.”

“Probably. Like I said, a lot of what I told you is rumors, so don’t quote me, okay?”

“Right. Thanks for calling.” My legs wobbled as I reached inside the office and hung up the phone.

“What the hell happened?” Ben held his arms out at his sides, as if ready to catch me.

“Alex tried to kill himself.”

“Jesus.” Ben winced. “He all right?”

I shrugged. “They’re sending him to D.C., to see the shrinks and all.”

“Chuck Norris!” an obnoxious teenage crackhead known as Marlboro hollered as he walked past. He used two hands to make that in-and-out gesture symbolizing sex—for no discernible reason.

“Let’s get some privacy,” Ben said. “How about the roof?”

Ben rolled a joint while we sat and watched the sea. The wind had died down and the point looked fun, but I couldn’t bring myself even to talk about surfing.

I got much more stoned than was my custom, and tried to figure out what my emotions were, exactly. I’d not looked back since Alex and I broke up. He was a great confidant in training—able to be sarcastic and brutally honest about the Peace Corps. Along with Courtney, the three of us gave one another a break from the relentless optimism and political correctness. I’d always found Alex smart and interesting. He’d been a classics major in college, and was well read—full of references to Shakespeare, mythology, and the Bible.

But as a boyfriend, he’d been a heavy burden. It was hard to read his sentiments and navigate his moods. His awkward good-byes often left me feeling guilty and confused until the next time we saw each other. Socially, he was two-faced. The life of the party one moment—cracking jokes and telling stories. But if he felt the least bit intimidated, he’d retreat into a shy and judgmental shell—not speaking for hours on end. And then there was the fact that he’d cheated on me with that girl who was only here for a heartbeat—something I never forgave him for. We hadn’t spoken since.

“Can I ask you something?” Ben studied the nearly spent joint in his hand.

“What?”

“Do you think he’ll come back down here?”

I shrugged. “He’s got his family right there in D.C. It wouldn’t be hard to stay.”

“What might be better for him, do you think?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Guess it depends on how the therapy goes.”

Ben pinched the last of the joint, gave it one more pull, then set it down and left it to burn itself out.

“This would all be easier to handle if we were in the States,” I said. “I tried to talk about suicide with Niña Tere after the news about that Estonian chess master who jumped out a window. It was like we couldn’t understand each other. She kept thinking he’d fallen or gone crazy. All these Salvadorans who’ve been through hell—the war, refugee camps, trips through the desert on the way north—it’s like killing yourself doesn’t even exist in this culture.”

“Funny,” Ben said. “I feel like this country has made me understand suicide for the first time.”

“How’s that?” I asked him.

“It helps to compare us to plants.”

“Plants?”

“Yeah. Plants have this thing called the root-shoot ratio, which keeps them balanced. If they can’t get enough sun or air, they grow more shoots. If they need more soil nutrients, they grow more roots. If there’s not enough nutrients to be had, they let part of the roots die, and sort of cauterize them.”

“What does this have to do with suicide?”

“You’ve said yourself that overpopulation is the source of all this country’s problems—all humanity’s, in a sense. We don’t have enough resources, too little light and air. Try to think of people not so much as individuals but as one big organism—a field of grass or something. Then it makes more sense. Killing off some of the new growth gives room to the rest.”

In spite of all my mixed emotions, I didn’t like to hear Alex spoken of this way. “Human beings aren’t fucking grass.”

Ben shrugged. “It’s not how we prefer to think, that’s for sure. We like to see ourselves as wolves out on the frontier or something, not connected to any other species, free to go wherever. Eat what we kill.”

The conversation’s new direction looked like it might lead us into an argument. I said nothing more.

*   *   *

Months later, a rumor floated around among the Peace Corps volunteers that on the morning of his incident, Alex had spotted a man from his village having sex with a neighbor’s goat. The story went that Alex thought of the goat as sort of a favorite animal—one he fed scraps to and watched children play with from his backyard. The man was apparently some cruel drunk coming down from a bender—a man Alex loathed.

It was a story that traveled fast and grew well known. Darkly funny, memorable, and with something of a causal relationship to the suicide, it was perfect. As far as I knew, Alex neither confirmed nor denied it. I was certain it was complete bullshit.

Most likely, he invented the bestiality anecdote while in D.C. He probably didn’t lie to the therapists, but the story must have been useful for fending off the curious volunteers from other countries who wanted to know why he was there—and could see the scars along his forearms.

At any rate, he came back to El Salvador six weeks later, joking about the fact that he’d been declared “not a threat to himself or others” by the psychiatrist, as if that was funny.