Nico Alvarado
L’Étranger
I don’t want to write this. It’s Thursday, it’s pretty out, the girls are playing with their cousins, the wind in the trees sounds like the sea, the morning light so violently clear it cuts the air like glass. Why not. I don’t know, I’m afraid, I’m heartsick, I’ve got this great big dumpster where my heart should be. My dad broke down on the phone when he called, I can’t take it when he does that. Those memories, this crying. Melissa says essays are for explaining, poems are for what you don’t want to have to explain. Want to, have to. But what if you don’t want either one. Memories, crying. An endless series of this that these those. What if what you want is for someone else to explain. It’s so pretty out even the birds sound bored. Everything is big and shiny and empty. Everything is wind, trees, sun, glass, grief.
Sheriff’s deputies found her sitting up in a chair, surrounded by library books. The clerks in these fleabags are pros, they know the signs. Nice old lady in 41 doesn’t come out for a cigarette three days straight, call it in, have them open up the room. It’s terrifying, it’s a David Lynch movie, she’s all alone in this seedy place. Piles and piles of library books. “It’s how she would have wanted to go.” We’re all choking on platitudes. Or maybe it isn’t the platitudes, maybe the conditional is the problem. Maybe it’s exactly how she wanted to go. It’s a question of autonomy, self-government, the right to choose. Does anyone really believe that other people’s choices are really their own to make. It’s terrifying. Maybe she just went.
Say it.
OK my Aunt Nancy died alone in a cheap motel three blocks from her childhood home. OK she walked away from her entire life to live and die alone. OK to live and die alone in cheap motels. OK no money, how did she live, she hardly ever worked, was Social Security enough, what did she eat, how did she cook, did she have a microwave a hot plate, did she go grocery shopping go to McDonalds go hungry. OK eating alone on the edge of the bed for fifteen years. OK why, how, was it suicide, no one knows. OK I loved her, she was kind to me, she looked out for me all my halfway broken childhood. OK we’re waiting on the toxicology report. OK it’s either broken or it isn’t, pick one. OK was it pills or illness, did her heart just stop, was she in any pain. OK there’s a courtyard where my father, sobbing on the phone, reports she would have sat and smoked and passed the time with other residents. OK it’s comforting, it means not every day was passed alone. OK you have to move every 28 days then you can come back, the clerks let her leave the little rusted-out Corolla in the lot. OK to live and die alone in cheap motels. OK what did she want, she wanted to read library books undisturbed, that’s insane, none of it makes any sense. OK I can’t take my dad crying anymore, my dad can’t take any more dying. OK OK OK OK OK. Explain that.
Rise at two a.m., cup of coffee, consider a shower, think better of it, there’s no time, the car not so cold at first, growing colder nearing Denver, the shimmy at first distressing, the steering column shaking hard every thirty seconds, violent shudder, it’s like it’s on a timer, a violent shudder tearing through your life on schedule, it’s almost like you get used to it, you get over it, you just deal, it’s like, it’s growing colder as I get closer, park in the long-term lot, generic Xanax, wash it down with cold coffee, it’s dark out, still no dawn, I just wrote “I wish it down,” it’s so close, it’s like, it’s almost, it’s almost like—
She wasn’t cuddly or warm exactly, but she was interested in us, she cared, she was present and available. She liked Scotch, crosswords, the funny pages. Mostly books. All she wanted to do was read. Me too. She took me to the library, let me get whatever I wanted, let me read all kinds of horrifying trash. I loved it, loved her. My dad’s older sister. Sardonic air, messed-up teeth, faint smell of cigarettes long after she supposedly quit. We visited on holidays, she took me to the library. Deputies found her sitting up in a chair, surrounded by books. She preferred mysteries, also the kind of thrillers in which people are tortured to death, their bodies disposed of in really pretty ingenious ways. Man, whole armies of people who sit around all day coming up with new ways to dismember people and hide the pieces, it’s entertainment, we take it in for pleasure, we seek it out. Say this of us: we were a people who gobbled up endless violent fantasies of our fellow humans dying. Entertain: “to keep up, maintain, to keep (someone) in a certain frame of mind,” from the Old French entretenir, “hold together, stick together, support.” I want to hold her, I want to hold her together. Who was I that I loved to read those books. I don’t know him. I can’t read them anymore.
Why don’t I know the names of things? When I go back I’m always struck by the lushness of California. It’s crazy, it’s paradisal, I mean is there anything else to be struck by? Coming out of the airport the air surprisingly fresh and cool. Oh yeah, money. Coming up 19th on the bus, the world is charged with the grandeur of money, the landscape overlaid by money. Ficus cypress eucalyptus magnolia. I had to google “SF trees” to get those words, I don’t know the name of anything. Homecoming a sharp nostalgia also foreignness and something spiteful, a little dread. Now crossing the Golden Gate Bridge, the largeness and wonder of it, a strange old pirate ship on the water, sails and two masts, the wake of a motorboat, people stopping and looking out, the sun cutting through the minimal haze, then houseboats and marinas, the bus driver cutting too close to the guardrail it feels like, it’s scary, then it all kind of opens out. Tamalpais. Crazy eucalyptus, the green furring the earth, clotting it, reshaping it. The names of things. I never really do go back though. Nothing is not anything. I’m a stranger here now. Not anything at all.
Roast chicken, salad, pastries.
No one says her name.
She hangs over the house like a cloud of ash.
I miss Lollipop. First thing I always said to my Aunt Nancy when we got out of the car: Can I take Lolly for a walk? Little black dog, getting grayer and grayer. Long dead now. There’s no story here, I don’t even have the facts. What was the cat’s name for example? Ginseng. Even as I wrote the question I remembered Ginseng. Aunt Nancy loved animals, they were her friends, I see now. At the cemetery we scatter some of her ashes on her parents’ graves, what parent would have imagined this fate for their child, it’s good they’re long dead, is that perverse? No funeral, she didn’t want to be remembered, didn’t want us. My cousin’s kids stand back, they feel betrayed, they don’t want to mourn her, she walked out on them, they were just babies when she left. Allison filed the report with the baby in her arms. At the police station for hours, crying, falling apart. Missing persons. Participle modifying persons or gerund phrase, the state of. Claire’s in high school now. All her life her grandmother has been only a wound. It’s almost a palindrome. Missing the missing the missing. Aunt Nancy never abandoned her animals, only her people.
It doesn’t make any sense. Fifteen years ago she was living with her only child and taking care of her gorgeous grandbabies. Then gone. Allison got a call: Don’t come looking for me, It’s not you, It’s something I need to do, I just want to be left alone, Please just leave me alone. We all got used to it I guess, she just went. And we let her, how could we do that. We scatter her ashes all over town. No use for a funeral, she wouldn’t have wanted all the pomp and faking. A deep distrust of ceremony. Big and shiny and empty. Of everything really, I mean you don’t walk out on your only child and your gorgeous grandbabies to live and die alone in a goddamn motel if you have an ounce of trust in you. My dad breaks down on the sidewalk by their childhood home. I hold him, he sobs. It’s his childhood, his blood, a lost world, a big sister, it’s all going away. Then the library. It’s weird, it’s a fitting place to scatter her ashes. It used to be a park when they were all growing up. There was a bandstand. Huge old trees. We scatter ashes around the biggest. Uncle Joe, my uncle, her brother-in-law, even more distant than I remember him, he doesn’t want to spend time with a nephew he hasn’t seen in twenty years. We cross the lawn beside each other, he’s looking around, impassive, mute, suddenly he says, “We used to come here looking for people to rob.” He was a gangster in the fifties. From Sal Si Puedes. The barrio called Get out if you can.
Everyone likes the mental-illness argument. It’s comforting. It’s not a choice, it’s a directive, a sick brain, a victim, a patient. Did she abandon everyone else or did she estrange herself? Choices hurt, imperatives do too, but less. I don’t believe it, I don’t know why. Is it the pure abdication of ties, of duties, of love, of having to be for other people? Or is the real secret that this was just about pitifully small and selfish pleasures? Mysteries, whiskey, cigarettes, doing nothing all day? Is the secret that living solely for herself is all she wanted, and that some part of me, of all of us, wants that too, no matter the cost? Are we, in other words, fundamentally estranged from one another? Mia says it’s impossible, a mother can’t walk away from her child like that without something having broken inside her. OK but doesn’t it happen all the time? I don’t know, does it? I don’t know but I can go there, I can see it. Late sun fading at the window, turning on a light, pouring cheap Scotch over ice from the machine in the hall. Turning a page. Turning another. In the story, another body has been found. The pages turn themselves. Total absorption in the narrative. Outside, cars pass. Abandoned, estranged. Loneliness so pure it stops the heart like a shard of glass. Extranjero, te extraño. The truth of this, of cognates. Stranger, I miss you.
Freshwater stunned the beaches. I could sleep.
—Monica Youn
That’s the whole poem, it’s seven words, it’s called “Ending,” I think about it a lot. It’s a love affair, I think, it’s the compound word, the subject-verb-object, the someone or something did something, it’s the heart of the language, then the swerve to the self. There’s been a long madness, heat aridity brightness of day glinting on cars on salt on sweat, every sound so sharp it cuts the air like glass, tortured sleepless nights and then it’s over, it’s over, the heart goes quiet, the heart a big old lake so big it goes on forever, and we’re far away from the tumult the heat the brightness, the heart goes quiet, the speaker stunned by white noise, the clear white darkness filling her eye and ear and heart. Nowhere to go, that’s a good thing. All those sleepless nights a long sickness. Slaking a mad thirst on freshwater drowsiness rest and quiet. I don’t know what this poem has to do with my Aunt Nancy but it does, I think about it all the time. She found her ending, the one she wanted. Quotes or italics or nothing, I’ll go with nothing, I’ll go with freshwater, with nothing at all, I’ll say it. She can sleep.