31

I think I’m dreaming. Short, soft breaths puff along my face. A child with small lungs moves over me. Something shuffles beside my head. The breath smells bad, like rotten fruit but also chemicals. This is not a dream. Somebody is in my tent with me, and it’s not Ben. He goes for my Che wallet.

Without thinking, I push him hard with both hands and curse in English. “Fucking sneak thief motherfucker!”

The tent cloth whooshes with motion. He tries to scurry his way outside the door on knees and elbows, but I grab him by his wrists. The two of us wrestle our way through the still-open flap.

Out in the courtyard, I scream, “Ben! He was in the tent!”

Ben snaps upright in his hammock. He sees the two of us struggling in the dark. I hold tight to each wrist. The thief thrashes and convulses like a snake in my hands, tries to kick me in the knees. To Ben, it must look like some bizarre dance of violence.

“Weefer!” Ben screams. It’s the guy who briefly helped us. “¡Mañoso culero!” Unlike me, Ben remembers how to speak Spanish. He runs over and puts Weefer into the same kind of headlock he used on my first night here. Also like that night, I notice how comically small the crackhead in Ben’s arms actually is. I wonder if it could be the same person.

“Let me go!” Weefer screams.

From her own room near the kitchen, Kristy emerges, shouting. She screams for the police, which is almost laughable, under the circumstances.

While Weefer thrashes around in Ben’s arms, I go for one of his pockets—dodging his flying knees and elbows, airborne spittle everywhere. I manage to pull out my Che wallet. In the process, a small pink piece of glass falls to the dry earth of the courtyard. I pick it up. One end is charred and black. The other end is broken off.

“Fucking crackheads.”

To help me access the other pocket, Ben switches his grip, pulling upward. Somehow, Weefer gets one of his arms free. It swings toward me in a windmill motion. I take a step back.

In a blur of spinning limbs, Weefer reaches up and then appears to pat Ben on the back. The two of them freeze, their arms around each other: Weefer on his tiptoes and extending his head up at Ben’s, Ben leaning forward, toward the smaller man. It’s like Weefer wants to whisper something into Ben’s ear, or kiss him on the cheek.

Then Weefer is gone. The speed with which he climbs up the stairs to the roof and then scurries down the tree is almost comical—like the old sped-up footage from silent movies. Ben goes to his hands and knees, wheezing as though he’s just surfaced from a two-wave hold-down. Blood pours from his back. I look. A little metal stalk blossoms to one side of his spine.

“Take it out!” He coughs the words.

I’m frozen: waiting for the punch line, not getting the joke.

“Take it out,” Ben pleads this time.

I nod, then wrap my fingers around the silver stick and pull straight up. It’s that butter knife sharpened on both edges—the same one Peseta used to save me, or one that’s identical. Ben turns over on his back, arms out at his sides. This isn’t right, I want to say. Ben told me himself that they never carry weapons when they come in to steal. No, I shake my head, incredulous. Go back! It’s an illegal move. Over the line! From underneath Ben’s back, puffs of dust blow out with each of his belabored breaths.

“Kristy!” I shout. “¡Llame a un médico!” I finally remember how to speak Spanish.

“You’ll be okay,” I say to Ben. At that point, I still believe it.

“I can’t breathe.”

“Kristy’s calling a doctor.”

He smiles at this, as if trying to laugh, seeing the absurdity that I’ve missed in the very notion of calling anyone, let alone a doctor.

“We should’ve left here,” he says with great difficulty. “We should have left here a while ago, sweetheart.”

“No!” I say it out loud now. “No. We survived!” The equation simply doesn’t add up: Ben’s will to live was greater than two major earthquakes, but less than a fucking butter knife? It can’t be so. I put my hand on each of Ben’s round shoulders. “Listen to me: We’re the survivors!” I shake him as I shout, but he doesn’t stir. “We’re the survivors!” I say it again and again.

Sweetheart is the last word Ben says. I turn him onto his front, thinking I can plug the hole in his back somehow, with my fingers or with the same towels we used to hold together Pelochucho’s face. But by the time I have my hand over the wound, it is too late. That manta ray of muscle across his back now feels as limp and lifeless as a supermarket steak. No air comes in or out, only blood. Ben has drowned to death on dry land.

Beside him, on the dirt of the courtyard, I curl myself into a fetal position, spooning his body one final time, blood soaking into my shirt. I cry until my face hurts, muttering words like fuck, goddamn, and love every so often.

An hour passes before Kristy finally comes and pulls me off the ground. She helps me over to the hammock where Ben had slept before I woke him. She covers me up with a sheet, then covers Ben’s corpse with a thick wool blanket. I can smell him still in the thin nylon strings of the hammock. Drained of tears, I tremble and hyperventilate away the rest of the night.

A random bit of wind blows in with an odd, metallic smell to it. A few drops of rain fall—raising small puffs of dust about the courtyard—and then grow into a heavy downpour. I wonder, if this rain had started an hour earlier, would it have kept Weefer at home?

For the first and perhaps the only time, I feel a suicidal urge. The unknown suddenly looks more appealing than this world. I think of what Alex had told me about pretending and not pretending. For me to go on living, another year or another seventy years, I’ll have to pretend every second not to be haunted by this night.