PB Fic: The Most Beautiful Flower On Earth - Chapter Four
Title: The Most Beautiful Flower On Earth (4/8)
Author:
burntcircles
Characters/Pairing: Michael Scofield/Sara Tancredi, Jane Phillips, Original Characters
Genre/Rating: Gen (this chapter) / R (for language)
Spoilers: S1, S2, S3
Length: ~ 7,700 words
Disclaimer: Prison Break and its characters are a property of Fox Studios. The original characters and this AU storyline are mine.
Summary: Michael's journey, years after the escape from Sona, through the eyes of an original character.
Author's Note: First work of fan fiction. I don't share Ann's views on archeologists, so don't flay me alive *g*.
Previously: Chapters 1. Joe, 2. Us, 3. Confluence
“You have a Ph.D. in math or something?” Open Book #4 finally said one day, unable to contain herself anymore.
“Nothing that impressive, I’m afraid.” Joe laughed. It was a rare sound, which was a pity, since she thought it was one that suited him. “I don’t even understand half of what you tell me.” At first, she wanted to correct him, then I give you a book and in less than a day you’ve figured it out well enough to argue with me. “I have a masters degree in engineering.” A beat. “I was a structural engineer. In Chicago.”
“Was? You mean to say, you gave all that up to be a travel writer?”
Joe’s finger, which had been following a proof as he looked for errors, stilled for a moment before resuming its path down the page, Christ-in-a-rose peeking tantalizingly out of a sleeve before disappearing. “Not originally, but yeah, I guess you could say that.”
She began to feel the first twinges of recognition.
Then one night in November of that year, Joe cut his hair so short he looked almost bald, shaved, and turned up at Bigby’s.
When I first saw him—smiling with a mouth that seemed to me so perilously salacious it surely must have been kissed eagerly many a time—there was a moment of startling vividness, every detail in the room affixing itself in my mind’s eye like a snapshot. Then something—perhaps the warm elation that comes with being proven so right—clicked and I carried on as usual, filled with the placid assurance of one whose suspicions had been marvelously confirmed, though a trifle late.
Because I’d seen it coming—Joe, ever the gentleman, prodding me, most obligingly, along.
This was how the pieces came to fit.
Life on the island for ordinary locals offered no luxuries and even scrimped on a few essentials, including, but not limited to: fresh vegetables, spray-on laundry starch, and dead, properly disemboweled and de-feathered, neatly-packaged, well-chilled chicken. The starch bath turned out to be quite easy to make; I had a mental image of my grandmothers, aglow in soft, heavenly light, beaming approvingly down at me from a cloud when I succeeded on my first try. The chicken, I learned, though initially daunted, to slaughter myself (more on this later).
The vegetables I had arranged to be flown and shipped in every week from the mainland. I would wait merrily, all but tasting the tang of ripe tomatoes mixing with the snap of lettuce on my tongue, for the appointed person to arrive every Friday morning by plane and Monday afternoon by boat. The vegetables came with freebies: sometimes news of the nieces from my mother, often pretty pictures from a shutterbug sister, but mostly the tersely concerned letter from my father. Invariably, I would have a meal with the delivery man—Jerry if by sea, Lando if by air—at one of the small restaurants on Amoy Street, check him into the bright yellow pension house known for their good coffee, and bike off to Raul’s, large styrofoam box strapped securely to the rear luggage carrier, to deposit the precious merchandise in his big beautiful blessing of a refrigerator, dropping off some at Esther’s along the way. Then I would see Jerry or Lando off—a few hours later if by air, the next day if by sea—making sure to be the picture of fortitude and contentment as I waved goodbye.
One Friday afternoon Lando and I scuttled into the one-storey terminal through the cargo entrance—a privilege I’d earned with my weekly rations, and also we were running late—and spotted Joe in a dark corner of the pre-departure area, talking to a woman I’d never seen before.
With suitable haste I drew Lando to the check-in counter and once again took advantage of the larger dimensions of companion, nearby stack of cargo boxes, ground crew, and counter to furtively scrutinize her (more aptly, her back) as best as I could, given the distance, through the murky glass panel that delineated the area’s rows of seats from the rest of the building’s interior, Lando waiting for his boarding pass beside me.
She was tall, I supposed. The neat ponytail of her dark hair had been pulled through the gap above the adjuster of the baseball cap that framed her head. Now and again she would quickly glance between the terminal entrance and the plane, body tense as if bracing between someone’s arrival and her own welcome departure, her lips moving quickly. Joe would nod, looking directly at her as he did so, his hands in his pockets. Once he lifted a hand to press his fingers to the bridge of his nose, closing his eyes tightly, and the woman quickly placed a hand on his shoulder as if to console him.
At the contact, his hand fell away and, refusing to look at her, opened his eyes to focus instead on a point on the floor. The other passengers, lost in their own happier goodbyes, unwittingly missed the silent play unfolding a few feet away. Then Joe looked up, gave the woman a furious stare that swiftly softened, and suddenly he looked like he was about to cry.
Oh no, Joe, I thought, not again. I couldn’t stop the groan from rising in my throat.
“Is something wrong, Ann?” Fatherly concern etched itself on Lando’s face as he held his boarding pass in his hand. “You forgot to give me something?”
With herculean effort I tore my eyes away from Joe and his girl to stare at Lando blankly.
“Boarding,” the guy at the counter called out, with an impatience that clearly told me he’d said this before. He threw a pointed look in our direction.
“Jesus,” I muttered, “it’s not as if this is the freaking JFK International.”
“What was that again, hija? I’m afraid we don’t have time.”
To my relief, Joe had taken a couple of deep breaths and was now visibly calmer, though an acceptance of the way things were seemed to sit upon his shoulders, shrinking him. The girl reached for a slim laptop bag at her feet, and after a few words in parting, walked smartly across the tarmac to the C2786 waiting in the fading gray afternoon.
I decided to make a run for it before Joe could see me, still strongly convinced—despite his recent congeniality and my undiminished readiness to yield to the temptation to spy—that I did not, would never have, the right to know.
“Nothing’s wrong,” I told Lando, scuffling around an unforeseen potent nostalgia that lodged and sat, thickly, somewhere in my chest, suspiciously close to my heart. A thought came to me. “Would you—”
“Yes, hija?”
“Would you kindly tell my father to never stop writing to me?”
If Lando was surprised, he didn’t show it. “Of course,” he merely said, subdued delight in his eyes. For a moment I forgot the absurdity of my request, since I never wrote back. “He would be pleased.”
Later, as I sat at a table tucked well into one of the makeshift canteens at the periphery of the town plaza, sipping my fourth coffee of the day—it did little to assuage the heaviness that now seemed to settle everywhere, coursing through veins and limbs and a past that rose up like a ghost—I saw Joe, striding slowly but with firm intent to the cathedral. He would not leave until two hours later, rushing to get into a rusty old cab he had flagged in the hammering rain. I waited the rainstorm out, drinking one insipid cup of coffee after another, grateful that, for all the bad blood between us, at least Oliver and I never came to what Joe and his girl reached at their inescapable end: a long, drawn-out, agonizing goodbye.
That night, my fear of nightmares creeping into my sleep brought on by an eventful day went entirely to waste: I did not sleep a wink. As if in spite, the next day dawned bright and sunny, and Joe showed up at Raul’s doorstep at exactly half past nine, as scheduled, to look over my latest draft. Unbeknownst to me at that time, he had resolved to initiate a few changes in his life, and it was perhaps because of this that he looked, framed by the door with the aquamarine sea behind him, as fresh and crisp as the mountain air.
He began by upgrading his digs.
And not a moment too soon: the monsoon season, heralded by a torrential downpour that lasted for days, arrived a week later. I spent those days stranded in Joe’s second house near the cliffs: a white two-room indigenous limestone dwelling of a style long ago designed by the natives so as to withstand the harshest of typhoons, topped by a surprisingly sturdy roof of reeds and cogon. The efficiently equipped kitchen was a separate structure constructed similarly, painted in rich warm terracotta. In a row of similar houses painted a vivid, happy blue, you’d have to be blind to miss it.
Two houses away lived Jay, and it was he who told me that, unlike him, Joe was no mere tenant: after a negotiation so brief even the owner was surprised, he’d bought the house. In cash.
I wondered where he got the money. By that time I’d long since abandoned the idea that Joe was a travel writer. Yes, he would disappear, sometimes for days, on his falowa to some island even more remote that all the same attracted its own share of nature-loving tourists, but somehow Pico Iyer never came to mind whenever I looked at him. He looked more at home with the historians and preservationists from the national museum that kept track of the state of the heritage houses, a group he’d volunteered, much to our amazement, to help, accompanying them closely as they went up and down the hills, surveying his neighborhood.
When one Sunday, after the nine o’clock mass, he stayed to assist the local health clinic in the free immunization of babies and small children, the incredulity was more than my nervous system could bear. I stood beside him as he unwrapped one disposable syringe after another and lined up the vials of vaccine within the reach of the nurse on duty, my mouth opening and closing like a goldfish’s.
"Will you still have time to help me?” I whined.
“Of course.” He nudged me. “And don’t be selfish. Look at these children. Don’t they just break your heart?” At that instant a baby bawled in a manner indicating the possession of the most powerful set of lungs, setting off an intense pain in my eardrums.
“No.” I huffed and puffed. Joe grinned, unperturbed. “Do you know the average age at which Ph.D.s in my field get their degrees these days?” Joe set another vial on the table, queuing it up neatly along with the rest. “Twenty-seven,” I continued. “I’m pushing thirty, Joe. How can I ever compete with them? Have pity on me.”
“Hey, squirt, relax. I’m not going anywhere. You’ll get it done soon, believe me.”
(On the matter of my thesis I chose to believe him. And he turned out to be right, thank God; a year later I would successfully defend my dissertation. But that he was our own Pico Iyer, I definitely no longer chose to believe. And, in time, he would leave.)
As I pondered my future, Joe leaned over to tap the nurse’s shoulder. “Is there a feeding program around here?” he asked.
That’s it. I’d had enough. I turned on my heel and made haste for the cathedral, fearful of the revenge of the Partly-Subjugated Thesis now that my strongest ally had acquired other priorities.
“Where are you going?” he called after me.
“The chapel, to light a candle. For your enlightenment.”
Outside, Ed delivered the final blow: “Told you he has a thing for nurses.”
And the mothers, Esthers all, came from all corners of the island like ants lured by the sweetest candy, smiling toothily at the nurse’s assistant with the beautiful hands, soothing voice and ever-changing eyes. In the end, Joe and his orbs of wonder would single-handedly ensure the success of the government’s inoculation program in the island’s four towns for nearly two years. The people would tell you, but you’d never read that anywhere.
To be marooned in Joe’s house while the monsoon’s fury raged outside had not been on the agenda. A few minutes before the sky broke, I'd been good and ready to go, new proofs packed safely in my backpack, alerted by the thunder rumbling overhead. Then an impenetrable wall of water fell, gushing over the eaves of roofs and hills, negating my exit. I stood at the door, as forlorn as the hibiscus in the garden that sagged under the weight of so much rain.
“We can have tea while you wait,” Joe yelled from the kitchen, already putting the kettle on the stove.
I would have tea with Joe for four days.
First I was gratefully relieved; if I’d been caught in a downpour this heavy on the way home, the rain would have soaked through my bag and destroyed an afternoon’s worth of work. As the hours progressed and a pitch-black night fell, relief gave way to an uneasiness to be tinged, as the minutes crept towards midnight, by fear, its tendrils evoking a memory of candles and Misery disguised by Stillness and Grace. At the stroke of ten, I got up, rolled my jacket to form a pillow, put on Joe’s vakul, and was halfway out the door when Joe caught me as he emerged from his room.
“Where are you going?”
“To the kitchen.”
“You told me you weren’t hungry.”
“No, I’m going there to sleep.”
Joe regarded me keenly, noting the averted gaze, the tension in the air.
“Look, Ann,” he said finally, “it’s perfectly safe. I promise you. I will not let anyone hurt you.”
Oh, if only I had known then how hard that was for him to say. All I knew at that moment was that it was the nicest thing any man had ever told me.
You’re such a girl, Villanueva, I admonished myself minutes later as I lay in bed. Still, I couldn’t help the smile that came to my lips as I drifted off to sleep.
As the sky heaved and the ground turned to mud, cutting all mobility even at times when the rain lightened to a drizzle, the tea loosened my tongue in a way beer never could.
“I used to think that your hut was haunted,” I revealed as I prepared lunch.
“Is that so?”
“Uh-huh.” The smell of steaming rice filled my nose, warming me straight to my feet. “I was even convinced that you were a serial killer, and that your—” I almost mentioned his girl, but caught myself just in time. Joe didn’t seem to notice. “I mean, that one of your victims was buried in your backyard.”
Joe gave a smile that did not quite reach his eyes. “That’s been known to happen, yes.”
“But you’re such a wuss, I don’t think you can even harm a fly.”
Joe continued to smile indulgently. I decided to push it.
“Joe,” I began, “are you rich?”
The question hung in the air, taking on all the distasteful inflections of gold-diggers and social-climbers.
“Oh, fuck it, I didn’t mean to sound so...so...”
“Cheap?”
“Yes. Gee, thanks.” I busied myself with stirring the soup to hide my embarrassment. “Well?”
Joe moved to my side and started slicing the lemons. “I robbed a bank once,” he said solemnly.
Just then Jay burst through the door. “Feed me, guys,” he implored. “I’ve run out of supplies. Blast this rain.”
A warning pealed in my head like the carillon in St. Dominic’s at Easter Sunday dawn, unrelenting.
Two weeks later, I was at Raul’s making starch for the sheets, waiting for the mix of cornstarch dissolved in scalding water to turn into sticky mush, when I stumbled across a loophole in Joe’s suggested proof as I went through it in my head. Confirming it minutes later with pen and paper, I rushed to soak the sheets in the starch and hang them out to dry, cursing colorfully at the uncooperative uneven clothesline, and just about ran to Joe’s house by way of the shore, my feet kicking up the sand.
My excitement was understandable. This was the first time that Joe had ever been wrong.
(And the last. So forgive me for the dreary technicalities that follow—a once-in-a-lifetime event that paints me in such a good light must be, short of embellished, related in all its glory.)
Joe was approaching the beach in his falowa as I ran—if I’d given in to my impatience and gone earlier I would have missed him and consequently, that last piece of the puzzle—looking at me quizzically as I waited, virtually bouncing from agitation, for him to come within hearing distance. He stepped out of the boat and dropped his Crocs on the sand, only to pick them up after what seemed to me a moment of deliberation and keep them in his hand as he slowly walked up to me, barefoot.
When he’d come near enough, I launched eagerly into my argument, the anticipation of triumph fizzling behind my ears. “We cannot use the theorem,” I proclaimed, “because the function is not integrable.”
“And good morning to you too, Ann,” he responded breezily, sighing in jest. His dark hair, which had grown even longer in recent months, was drying out, the curls gradually springing back to life, and his clothes were drenched. He’d been swimming—fully clothed, again. “Sorry, but you have to jog my memory a bit. This is regarding...?”
I thrust the paper I held in my hand to his chest. “It’s quite simple, really,” I blurted out before I realized how ridiculously gung ho I sounded, poking the paper as if to prove my point. “I mean, clearly, one cannot find a partition such that the integrability condition is satisfied—it’s all there, I’ve written it down.” Another poke. “But if I do it the long way, which is what I showed you last night, I run into the contradiction we are looking for, without making such a heroic assumption.”
Joe took the paper from me and gave it a quick scan, brow furrowed in concentration. Fizz, cackle, pop, went my ears. “I see,” he drawled. “And you assume nothing other than boundedness?”
I looked down, my mind racing through the theorem I’d used to start off my proof. Mentally I ticked off in rapid succession all the possible necessary conditions for a theorem of this kind to work, only for my progress to be cut short by a startling vision in the sand. My ears iced over.
I blinked once, and then some more. It didn’t matter. It was clearly not an apparition.
I sharply sucked my breath in, looking up at Joe as I did so, as if willing him to tell me I was wrong, that I was imagining things. I was sure that I was the picture of absolute shock, but he merely examined my upturned face silently, holding my gaze as he waited for me to answer. “Ann?”
My pulse pounded, a hundred times it seemed for every time the surf slapped the shore. “Uh...yes?”
His eyes warmed into a sympathetic gray, as though he’d sensed and understood my distress. “Is boundedness,” he repeated gently, “all that you require?”
I nodded slowly, my brain gradually returning to life as I took deep, measured breaths. “Yes, it is.”
“Okay then.” He handed the sheet of paper back to me. I took it gingerly but, thankfully, with steady fingers. “I’ll be waiting for you here later at four with—”
“No,” I said softly. I took a step back, the desire to flee and the urgent need for calm flooding me in equal measure. “I need to type last week’s notes while they’re still fresh in my mind.”
“Tomorrow, then?” he asked placidly—helping me along, it seemed.
I nodded again, not trusting myself to speak anymore, then turned to make my way back, feeling the hair at the back of my neck bristle. I resisted the urge to look over my shoulder and check if Joe was watching me, somehow so certain that he was.
Two toes are missing, two toes are missing, I kept thinking as I walked. Eight toes. Just as I’d read. Figurative kick to the forehead. How could I have missed it?
(In my defense, I couldn’t access the internet from the island, and I couldn’t very well ask someone else to do it for me now, could I? All I had, after all, was my goddamn memory.)
Finally, everything fell into place.
The bar at Bigby’s is a nondescript affair, a row of plain unpainted wooden high tables with unpolished surfaces, manned that night by a local named Ben. I’d already had the first part of my birthday drink—two shots in quick succession of a mysterious concoction Ben wouldn’t name—and had just come back, unsuccessful, from convincing Mario, who I’d spotted walking by, to join me.
“Esther would kill me, Ann,” he apologized. “I promised to lay off the bottle for a month. Where are the others?”
“Raul and Jay are back home. Ed’s still at the site.”
“I would love to invite you home, hija, so we can finish off that gallon of tuba, it’s just that I promised Esther—”
“—to stop drinking for a month. Yeah, yeah, I understand.” I gave him a mock-salute, smiling to show that I didn’t mind. “Off you go, then. Tell Esther I said hi.”
“You sure you don’t just want to go home? It’s not good for a girl to be out at night by herself.”
“Oh, Mario, don’t worry, it’s cool.” I reassured him that I would be sleeping at Ed’s place, which was just a street away before quickly walking back inside, determined to finish my birthday drink, because it was my goddamn birthday and I could get wasted if that was what I goddamn wanted, goddamn it.
I’d just announced my return to Ben (“Birthday girl’s ready for her part two, Ben my man!”) and was struggling to get on one of the bar stools, which had always been too high for my liking, when I felt myself being lifted by the waist, my feet fully clearing the floor. In no time at all my tush was neatly parked on the stool, the whole of me squarely facing the counter.
“What the—” I began, twisting in the seat, elbow cocked against the table, knee raised, ready to kick the offender to kingdom come.
It took me a mere split-second—but the longest split-second in the history of the universe, it seemed—for me to realize it was Joe, grinning with a mouth that was...Well, I’ve already told you what I thought of that mouth. It was nearly criminal. “Happy birthday, squirt.”
For the tiniest moment my jaw went slack. I summoned to my defense all the times I’d imagined a clean-shaven Joe as I strove to remember the name to go with the facts: impressive tattoo, engineer from Chicago, escaped felon. It was futile; nothing could have prepared me for the real thing. A J.D. Salinger story sprang to mind—Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes—as I blinked, amazed at the perfect congruity of reality and fiction at that instant.
Still, it was Joe—and it was not.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Ben approaching with my shot glass, jigger ready in one hand. “’Evening,” Joe greeted him, sliding smoothly onto the stool next to mine. (Oh, the sheer arrogance of tall people.) He rested his elbows on the counter, and my eyes fell on the pushed-up sleeves of his black sweater, at long last baring his forearms to the world. Then he turned to look at me quite deliberately, as if waiting for a reaction.
By that time I’d learned that nothing Joe ever did or said was by accident. I’d been aware, the secret knowledge purring beneath my skin, of what he’d been up to: this piecemeal revelation that was so subtle yet so clear that the conclusion was unmistakable. And I suspected the boys had been as well. But the four of us skirted around it, a blaze we were afraid would engulf us, and we shot glances at one another, the flicker of truth dancing on our faces, but never once meeting the others’ eyes.
Like the night the discussion drifted precariously to the subject of our names.
Ed is not particularly ticklish, but there is one spot on his nape—a little bit off-center and to the left—that would incite a most riotous, uncontrollable reaction from him. One night, overcome by audacity, I used this information to torment him. Flailing wildly, he toppled over bottles which then rolled noisily down the table; beer shot out of his nose. “Anecita!” he bellowed. “Stop it!”
Joe’s eyes lit up. “Anecita? Your real name’s Anecita?”
“Yes.” Jay laughed. “Her full name is Consuelo Anecita Villanueva. She’s ancient.”
I was named after both grandmothers, I explained.
“Consuelo’s a nice name,” Joe said. “It fits you.”
I felt my face grow warm. Joe always said the nicest things.
But not the boys. “You gotta be kidding,” Ed roared at me. “You’re blushing.”
“Shut the fuck up,” I shot back, “Edmundo.”
The three of us broke out into shrieking laughter, as Ed braced himself.
“Edmundo?” Joe asked, trying to keep up. “Like, Edmond Dantes? The Count of Monte Cristo?”
“Exactly!” Happy tears were streaming down my cheeks. “His full name is Edmundo Dantes Ruiz.”
“My mother just had to,” Ed said, shaking his head in mock sadness as our laughter reached fever pitch.
Between labored breaths I revealed that Jay was Jacinto Emilio Fernandez III—we have a hero named Emilio Jacinto, said to be the brains behind the revolutionary movement against Spain—and Raul was Raul Vincent Garcia.
“I don’t understand,” Joe said as we continued to laugh. “Raul Vincent sounds safe.”
“Oh, no,” Jay countered, red in the face, “on the contrary, Raul is a pretty tricky name. See, if I want to say ‘Raul is happy’ in our language, it would be—“
“Si Raul ay masaya,” Ed interjected. “Get it?”
“Si Raul sounds like Sira ulo. That means 'crazy', man.”
Sira ulo, Sira ulo, Si Raul ay sira ulo (Crazy, crazy, Raul is crazy), we sang.
Joe waited for our laughter to subside before taking an ominous pause. As he opened his mouth to speak, a sickening sensation of foreboding landed in the pit of my stomach.
Of course, I remember thinking. It’s his turn.
My spine tingled. “My real name is—” Joe began.
“I know!” I exclaimed. “Is it Jormungandr?” His eyes snapped to me. I looked up at the sky, hand cradling my chin, pretending to be lost in the thrill of the challenge. “Finnish, right? After your grandfather?”
“Gaga, it’s Joseph, what else?” Raul said, a bit tremulously, but he pulled it off.
“Remember that Joseph guy I went to college with?” Jay veered more confidently. “He now answers to Josa. You know, as in Diyosa. Goddess.”
“No way,” said Ed. “Captain-of-the-volleyball-team Joseph?”
“One and the same.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah.”
“Wow,” Ed repeated, standing up this time. He clapped Joe on the shoulder. “What do you know. Goodness. Gotta take a leak.”
Round and round the fire we went, the flicker of truth dancing on our faces, but never once meeting the others’ eyes.
And now, there we were, two-fifths of a gang of gladiators in a sport of throw-and-dodge, sitting next to each other at a bar, the ex-con coming to the spy.
Two can play this game.
I scanned his exposed skin. “Pretty clean fineline,” I said, casually. “Custom?”
An eyebrow rose, but his gaze remained steady. “Yes.”
“Full set of sleeves?” A completely useless question, as I knew exactly how large the tattoo was from memory.
“Bigger.” He didn’t elaborate, but his silence was eloquent.
I ignored the bait.
No way are you making me, Scofield, the name that had escaped me for weeks popping effortlessly out of the blue, catching me by surprise.
Scofield! That’s it!
I grabbed the shot glass and quickly threw back the drink to hide my smile of victory, which would be quickly soured by the apprehension that I might not be the only one blessed with recognition that night. It was as if Joe had pushed all concern for self-preservation aside, in sharp contrast to all he’d previously believed and wanted, and threw himself into a pit of vipers.
In 2005, according to the tattoo enthusiasts’ magazine Skin Art, a structural engineer from Loyola—this fact I remember because I was schooled by the Jesuits myself—frees his wrongfully convicted, sentenced-to-die-by-electric-chair-for-m
If you looked at the tattoo chances are you wouldn’t see anything of the sort; staring at the reconstruction on the magazine centerfold, I know I didn’t. But then again, the engineer is said to be a genius with an affliction that allows him to view the world differently.
It was a plan a year in the making.
According to the files the FBI retrieved from the engineer’s computer hard disk—dredged up from the bottom of a river his apartment overlooked—the tattoos cover his entire torso and both arms, the interlocking parts, the FBI confirms, ordered in Greek letters according to the sequence dictated by the escape plan.
He escapes with his brother and several other prisoners. The police call them by a catchy name, which is probably not catchy enough for long-term memory as I could not remember it.
Anyway, somewhere in the story a large sum of money becomes important. The brothers successfully escape to Mexico, never to be heard from again.
An advisory directs people to be on the look-out for two blue-eyed men about six feet tall with closely cropped hair, the engineer allegedly missing two of the smallest toes of his left foot. Judging from the photos the police released to the press, which appeared on one corner of the centerfold, the brothers are fairly good-looking.
Of all of his tattoos, in my predominantly Catholic country the Christ-in-a-Rose would prove to be the most popular, the numbers on the flower’s stem changed accordingly to represent a birthday, a wedding date, or a code for a lover’s name.
In this side of the world, the remarkable story of a brother’s sacrifice to free another—and they go by different surnames to boot, adding to the allure—got no more than the sixty-second report on the evening world news for a few consecutive days before it was replaced by accounts of a failed coup d’etat, oil leaks off the coast of a famous beach, and pregnancies of unwed celebrities. They got more coverage on the internet, where a viral video of them speaking of government cover-ups and conspiracies and a shady FBI agent streaked like wildfire, earning 25 million hits in a day before being mysteriously deleted from every file-sharing site known to man.
Today, the brothers’ story would be best remembered overseas by the most avid tattooists. The next best bet would be someone who merely dabbled in the art but had somehow come across the magazine article and had a serviceable enough memory.
Meaning, me.
I have two tattoos.
The newer one is graphic illustrator Kajo Baldisimo’s first sketch of Alexandra Trese, a sword-carrying local comic book detective that investigates supernatural occurrences in big cities. (I have the complete set of books, including a copy of Trese 2: The Rules of the Race with creator Budjette Tan’s much-treasured autograph). One sweltering summer I read Our Secret Constellation, the third installment in the Trese series—twenty pages, took no more than five minutes—wiped away the tears that came with the ending, got out of the house in a daze still wearing my pajamas, and cried some more—but softly! and bravely!—in the tattoo parlor where I sat for three hours as Trese’s thin face, all angry eyes and disheveled hair, was inked onto my lower back with excruciating slowness.
The older, smaller one—almost five years old now—is an ouroboros circling my left thigh, three inches above the knee. When I get fat with age and my thigh enlarges along with the rest of the body, the thin red serpent eating its own tail will inevitably morph into a bilious pink anaconda. But it’s the location I strongly regret, never the tattoo. In the midst of the Hindu symbols and zodiac signs and Celtic codes and the cohabiting fish and dragons and butterflies bedecking the wall of the parlor, I did not so much choose the ouroboros as it chose me, doom and hope fused in the idea of infinity latching on to my fascination and never letting go.
But the story of a tattoo neither begins at the second the eyes close in anticipation and the needle first meets blank skin, nor at the instant that the choice of design is made. It starts at the moment a rebellious flash streaks from the eye to travel underneath the skin and the brain’s neurons fire off and insist upon one another, Hey, that tat looks nice, I bet it would look good on me. And the rest—the trip to the artist, the hours in the chair—is a logical conclusion.
That moment for my ouroboros came after I admired Oliver’s tribal armband on his right bicep, fully on display as he stretched out beside me in post-coital bliss. I’d been telling him about the centerfold spread of the latest issue of Skin Art I’d come across in the dermatologist’s office by accident: an escaped convict’s astonishing gothic long-sleeved shirt of a tattoo dissected in interviews by FBI agents and various news reports into prison blueprints, escape plans, chemical formulas, reminders and clues. I then paused to drag one fingertip lazily along the dark blue ink round his arm, murmuring my appreciation. “You’ll never get one,” he declared, and promptly nodded off. I lay there for a while, frowning, post-coital bliss rapidly turning into annoyance, gave the matter my most solicitous consideration, got dressed—properly this time—and, rousing at 2 a.m. from sleep a reputable artist with the promise to pay thrice his usual fee, proceeded to prove Oliver wrong.
And so it is that of the two tattoos, with much apologies to Tan and Baldisimo who would forever be my heroes, it is the ouroboros—Jormungandr, the Midgard Serpent—that reigns supreme in my heart. For its story—from its beginning to its logical conclusion—are inextricably tied to a secret I will carry with me to the grave, imparted by its own unexpected hero who, much like the ouroboros, picked me out to be the keeper, supplanting my consent.
For now, however, said hero was sitting at a bar, busily basking in the attention of two extremely solicitous women.
They came in with Ed, all tanned skin and perky breasts, looking forward to winding down after a whole day at the archeological dig. Joe had gone up to ask Ben for a glass of bright blue coconut vodka, and the two rapidly swooped down on him, pinioning him to the bar. He had not returned to our table since.
I watched in muted horror as one of them—Erika? Nicole?—leaned in ever so closer to get a clearer look at Joe’s arm. “What’s this?” I could make the playful lilt the question took at the end. “English, Fitz, and...?”
“Percy,” Joe said, moving his arm to give a better view. Both girls moved in, effectively blocking off all other potential competitors. “English, Fitz, and Percy.”
The plump-lipped one with red lipstick—Nicole? Erika?—ran a delicate pinky along the letters, her mouth—intentionally, I would stake an eye on it—forming a highly suggestive ‘O’ as she went. “Amazing,” she gushed.
At our table, I hissed at Ed. “Tell Cherry to keep her hands off.”
Ed studied the trio at the bar. He’d been more surprised than I'd had been when he'd seen Joe, but had been as quick, if not quicker, to recover. Now, I caught the concern that briefly pulled at his brow before he turned back to me with a reassuring half-smile. “He’s fine. Let the boy have some fun.”
“How far up do these go?” the long-haired one asked. Ben had turned down the music, and their conversation easily carried. I had to give it to them: having cornered their prey, each patiently waited for her turn to ask, mutually understanding that a question for each of the other’s guaranteed peace.
They knew how to share, the bitches.
Joe’s adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed a mouthful of vodka; both girls stared at it, transfixed. He watched them with half-lidded eyes over the rim of his glass as he drank, deceptively blasé.
Setting the glass down, he told them, finger showing the way, how the tattoo covered his arms from the wrist to the shoulder, curved along the collarbone, and washed down his whole upper body to stop at his hip, long finger marking the spot. It seemed to me that the girls were giving the spot—and its immediate environs—more attention than was necessary. It was not lost on Joe; he laughed. In the dusky air the low chuckle cut through time sensuously, smoky and quietly dangerous.
Red-lipstick girl told Joe how artistic his tattoos were, so unlike the ones the ex-cons sported upon release, marked forever by the gang they pledged allegiance to while inside. “So Joe, tell me,” she continued impishly, “did you get yours when you were in prison?”
“Before,” Joe deadpanned.
“Oh, Joe,” Rapunzel burbled, “you’re so funny.”
And on it went, Joe affixing each girl with his eyes, limpid when they looked back, lit by a cold, calculating glow when they did not. I drank and drank, the burning liquid unable to slake my anxiety, until I felt Ed’s hand on my wrist. “Ann,” he ordered, “you’ll pass out at the rate you’re going.”
“I’m not even tipsy.”
And it was the truth; I could still count. I knew that Joe was on his second vodka; two more, and I would get him, bodily if I had to, the hell out of here. As long as I’d known him, Joe had always been a careful drinker, but that night, with his smooth face and scheming eyes, he had ceased to be the Joe I knew. And God only knew how many more of his rules he would break.
Ed kept his hand on mine, smiling slightly. “Are you jealous?”
Round and round the fire we went...
Suddenly I was very, very tired of playing the game.
I looked Ed in the eye; first his smile faded, followed by the playful arc of his eyebrow, until his whole face settled into a clean plane of seriousness. I pulled my hand from under his, and with my other hand pushed my glass away. Without breaking his stare I leaned back and shook my head. It didn’t even make me dizzy. I’d had the three-part birthday drink by Ben (five shot glasses) and two Wife Beaters, but my mind was as clear as a summer’s day. “Why is he doing this to himself?”
Ed regarded me so thoughtfully that for a moment I thought I was guilty of making a Heroic Assumption. As I grappled in my mind for an excuse, he grabbed a paper napkin, wrote quickly on it and pushed it across the table to me.
Keep your voice down, it said.
I exhaled. “Yes, sir,” I whispered.
Another napkin: Still on the run—yes?
I nodded. “I think.”
Fake passport?
“Most likely,” I answered. At the bar Rapunzel laughed gaily as she dabbed at the beer that missed her mouth and trickled down her neck into the valley beyond. Joe, bless him, kept his eyes on her face.
Ben turned the music up. “They’ll catch him,” I murmured, the words rushing out of my mouth. “It’s only a matter of time.” Ed shifted to the seat next to me and laid his hand on my arm in a calming gesture. “Why would he want that, Ed?” I continued. “And if that’s what he wants, why doesn’t he just tell the whole town he’s Sc...his real name? That should do the trick. Better yet, why doesn’t he just freaking turn himself in?”
Ed had no answers. Neither did I.
“There was this video,” Ed remembered.
A frightening thought flared across my brain. Cherry and Rapunzel didn’t look like they were hardened killers, but still... “You think those two—”
Ed was right there with me. “They’re graduate students. They’re interested in pre-historic beads, ceramic, and…and men. Preferably live. I’ve known them for years.”
“Oh, Ed, I don’t know.” I snorted. “I don’t know why I believe he’s done nothing wrong, but I do.”
“So do I.”
I finished my third Wife Beater and decided to go home, instructing Ed to stay put. “You watch him,” I said before quietly slipping out. “You archeologists are the most promiscuous people I know.”
After walking up and down Amoy Street so many times the balut vendor asked me if I was all right, I checked myself into the yellow pension house—I was in the mood for good coffee—and was about to get into the shower when I realized that Ed hadn't even made a half-hearted effort to walk me home. My heart stilled.
Raul I’d known for ten years, Jay practically my whole life, but Ed...
I’d only met Ed when I got on the island.
The bathroom mirror returned a face that was being drained of all color as I thought frantically, Could Ed...? Could he possibly? And the two flirts...
My God, they’ve sent a team!
I ran down Amoy Street, breezed past the bewildered balut vendor, turned into the main road, and saw that Bigby's had closed—an hour ago, I confirmed with a quick look at my watch, my breath hitching in my throat. Heart pounding, I sprinted to Ed’s place, noting the soft light escaping under the closed door, muttering a prayer under my breath as I all but swept the door away.
A team, all right, I thought a beat later. Make that a ménage à trios.
Later I would seriously contemplate washing my eyeballs with acid, so traumatized was I by what I saw. But at that moment, relief—from the solid confirmation that Ed was still good ol’ Ed, and that Joe was still good ol’ Joe—so overcame me that I leapt up on the bed, fairly dislodging Cherry and Rapunzel by a few feet, and planted a huge, wet smack on Ed’s lips. “You son of a bitch!” I exclaimed happily. “Thank you!”
The next morning Jay and Raul arrived. Over lunch—the first few minutes of which the two of them spent commenting nonchalantly about Joe’s new look and doing the dance of obliviousness around the fire—Raul issued an orchid-hunting invitation, this time with the forests of one of the lesser-inhabited islands in mind. Still wary of the falowa, I declined; I was the only one who did. The afternoon of the very same day, the four of them set off in Joe’s light blue boat, talking excitedly.
“Bye, Consuelo,” was all Joe said to me. He did, however, give me a broad boyish grin, as well as a spare copy of his house keys, like the rest of the boys.
“In case we don’t get back,” Raul said.
They would return four days later, famished, spotted all over from mosquito bites. The large dinner I prepared disappeared in less than ten minutes. Joe sported a slight tan and four days’ worth of stubble. He would let his hair grow long again, and in a few months, he looked exactly as he did the first time I met him.
Time passed. Mothers continued to stream steadily into the clinic with their babies every first Sunday of the month; the group from the national museum, like the storms, came and went. Frustrated with the high prices of construction materials on the island, Joe conceived a way of building cheaper classrooms using adobe and soil technology and pitched the idea to Jay, who then sold the idea to the local school board. Jay would later claim credit for these ‘earthbag schools’, but the four of us knew that it had only been upon Joe’s insistence. My thesis flourished. Rapunzel and Cherry, data in hand, went back to the mainland, and Ed once again hid as Tina sought. I started writing back to my father. The only crisis that we had at that time was when Raul received the news that Andy had gotten married, after which he disappeared for a week, going off to hunt for orchids without telling us. He came back, noticeably thinner, and after one long cry on my shoulder, moved on and never looked back. All seemed right with the world.
So perhaps I’d grown complacent. Perhaps I thought, since Joe went his unruffled way through the days although we never saw his girl again, that Happiness finally walked with Stillness and Grace. So pardon me if, looking out from Raul’s balcony as a fierce storm raged to see Joe standing on the shore in silent contemplation, the wind whipping at him, before wading out as if he was offering himself to the churning sea, I totally went blank, so numb was my mind from shock.
Pardon me if I never expected, struck blind by a contentment I thought he shared, that Joe would try to end his life.
End Notes:
Nader Khalili, an architect said to be of Iranian-American descent, is the real-life developer of the Earthbag Construction System.
Skin Art is a real magazine. You can check out their website at www.skinart.com.
Alexandra Trese, published by Alamat (Legend) Comics (www.alamatcomics.com), is a real comic book series written by Budjette Tan and drawn by Kajo Baldisimo. Rules of the Race and Our Secret Constellation are Books 2 and 3. Alexandra Trese is, literally, Alexandra Thirteen—because thirteen is a considered a mystical number, and not because the series stops at Book 13, I hope. The tattoo should look like this: http://www.flickr.com/photos/92701996@N00/310212818/.
The ouroboros is my tribute to the character Special Agent Dana Scully of The X-Files. I hear there’s a second movie in the works. *is giddy* For examples of ouroboros tattoos, see http://www.vanishingtattoo.com/tattoos_designs_symbols_ouroboros.htm.
For those unfamiliar with Crocs, check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crocs. As you can see, they cover the toes quite well. Joe would pick the black and brown ones, I would imagine. *g*
In dare-you-to-do-this shows like Fear Factor, eating the balut and keeping it down proves you can stomach a very nasty dish. It is a local delicacy, much loved by beer drinkers.
Finally, a Wife Beater is a beer cocktail. It is one-part beer, one-part vodka drink (like Smirnoff Ice) paired with a shot of, yes, more vodka. Not for minors. Seriously.
Chapter Five (Part One)
Author:
burntcirclesCharacters/Pairing: Michael Scofield/Sara Tancredi, Jane Phillips, Original Characters
Genre/Rating: Gen (this chapter) / R (for language)
Spoilers: S1, S2, S3
Length: ~ 7,700 words
Disclaimer: Prison Break and its characters are a property of Fox Studios. The original characters and this AU storyline are mine.
Summary: Michael's journey, years after the escape from Sona, through the eyes of an original character.
Author's Note: First work of fan fiction. I don't share Ann's views on archeologists, so don't flay me alive *g*.
Previously: Chapters 1. Joe, 2. Us, 3. Confluence
“You have a Ph.D. in math or something?” Open Book #4 finally said one day, unable to contain herself anymore.
“Nothing that impressive, I’m afraid.” Joe laughed. It was a rare sound, which was a pity, since she thought it was one that suited him. “I don’t even understand half of what you tell me.” At first, she wanted to correct him, then I give you a book and in less than a day you’ve figured it out well enough to argue with me. “I have a masters degree in engineering.” A beat. “I was a structural engineer. In Chicago.”
“Was? You mean to say, you gave all that up to be a travel writer?”
Joe’s finger, which had been following a proof as he looked for errors, stilled for a moment before resuming its path down the page, Christ-in-a-rose peeking tantalizingly out of a sleeve before disappearing. “Not originally, but yeah, I guess you could say that.”
She began to feel the first twinges of recognition.
Then one night in November of that year, Joe cut his hair so short he looked almost bald, shaved, and turned up at Bigby’s.
When I first saw him—smiling with a mouth that seemed to me so perilously salacious it surely must have been kissed eagerly many a time—there was a moment of startling vividness, every detail in the room affixing itself in my mind’s eye like a snapshot. Then something—perhaps the warm elation that comes with being proven so right—clicked and I carried on as usual, filled with the placid assurance of one whose suspicions had been marvelously confirmed, though a trifle late.
Because I’d seen it coming—Joe, ever the gentleman, prodding me, most obligingly, along.
This was how the pieces came to fit.
oOo
4. Remembrance
4. Remembrance
Life on the island for ordinary locals offered no luxuries and even scrimped on a few essentials, including, but not limited to: fresh vegetables, spray-on laundry starch, and dead, properly disemboweled and de-feathered, neatly-packaged, well-chilled chicken. The starch bath turned out to be quite easy to make; I had a mental image of my grandmothers, aglow in soft, heavenly light, beaming approvingly down at me from a cloud when I succeeded on my first try. The chicken, I learned, though initially daunted, to slaughter myself (more on this later).
The vegetables I had arranged to be flown and shipped in every week from the mainland. I would wait merrily, all but tasting the tang of ripe tomatoes mixing with the snap of lettuce on my tongue, for the appointed person to arrive every Friday morning by plane and Monday afternoon by boat. The vegetables came with freebies: sometimes news of the nieces from my mother, often pretty pictures from a shutterbug sister, but mostly the tersely concerned letter from my father. Invariably, I would have a meal with the delivery man—Jerry if by sea, Lando if by air—at one of the small restaurants on Amoy Street, check him into the bright yellow pension house known for their good coffee, and bike off to Raul’s, large styrofoam box strapped securely to the rear luggage carrier, to deposit the precious merchandise in his big beautiful blessing of a refrigerator, dropping off some at Esther’s along the way. Then I would see Jerry or Lando off—a few hours later if by air, the next day if by sea—making sure to be the picture of fortitude and contentment as I waved goodbye.
One Friday afternoon Lando and I scuttled into the one-storey terminal through the cargo entrance—a privilege I’d earned with my weekly rations, and also we were running late—and spotted Joe in a dark corner of the pre-departure area, talking to a woman I’d never seen before.
With suitable haste I drew Lando to the check-in counter and once again took advantage of the larger dimensions of companion, nearby stack of cargo boxes, ground crew, and counter to furtively scrutinize her (more aptly, her back) as best as I could, given the distance, through the murky glass panel that delineated the area’s rows of seats from the rest of the building’s interior, Lando waiting for his boarding pass beside me.
She was tall, I supposed. The neat ponytail of her dark hair had been pulled through the gap above the adjuster of the baseball cap that framed her head. Now and again she would quickly glance between the terminal entrance and the plane, body tense as if bracing between someone’s arrival and her own welcome departure, her lips moving quickly. Joe would nod, looking directly at her as he did so, his hands in his pockets. Once he lifted a hand to press his fingers to the bridge of his nose, closing his eyes tightly, and the woman quickly placed a hand on his shoulder as if to console him.
At the contact, his hand fell away and, refusing to look at her, opened his eyes to focus instead on a point on the floor. The other passengers, lost in their own happier goodbyes, unwittingly missed the silent play unfolding a few feet away. Then Joe looked up, gave the woman a furious stare that swiftly softened, and suddenly he looked like he was about to cry.
Oh no, Joe, I thought, not again. I couldn’t stop the groan from rising in my throat.
“Is something wrong, Ann?” Fatherly concern etched itself on Lando’s face as he held his boarding pass in his hand. “You forgot to give me something?”
With herculean effort I tore my eyes away from Joe and his girl to stare at Lando blankly.
“Boarding,” the guy at the counter called out, with an impatience that clearly told me he’d said this before. He threw a pointed look in our direction.
“Jesus,” I muttered, “it’s not as if this is the freaking JFK International.”
“What was that again, hija? I’m afraid we don’t have time.”
To my relief, Joe had taken a couple of deep breaths and was now visibly calmer, though an acceptance of the way things were seemed to sit upon his shoulders, shrinking him. The girl reached for a slim laptop bag at her feet, and after a few words in parting, walked smartly across the tarmac to the C2786 waiting in the fading gray afternoon.
I decided to make a run for it before Joe could see me, still strongly convinced—despite his recent congeniality and my undiminished readiness to yield to the temptation to spy—that I did not, would never have, the right to know.
“Nothing’s wrong,” I told Lando, scuffling around an unforeseen potent nostalgia that lodged and sat, thickly, somewhere in my chest, suspiciously close to my heart. A thought came to me. “Would you—”
“Yes, hija?”
“Would you kindly tell my father to never stop writing to me?”
If Lando was surprised, he didn’t show it. “Of course,” he merely said, subdued delight in his eyes. For a moment I forgot the absurdity of my request, since I never wrote back. “He would be pleased.”
Later, as I sat at a table tucked well into one of the makeshift canteens at the periphery of the town plaza, sipping my fourth coffee of the day—it did little to assuage the heaviness that now seemed to settle everywhere, coursing through veins and limbs and a past that rose up like a ghost—I saw Joe, striding slowly but with firm intent to the cathedral. He would not leave until two hours later, rushing to get into a rusty old cab he had flagged in the hammering rain. I waited the rainstorm out, drinking one insipid cup of coffee after another, grateful that, for all the bad blood between us, at least Oliver and I never came to what Joe and his girl reached at their inescapable end: a long, drawn-out, agonizing goodbye.
That night, my fear of nightmares creeping into my sleep brought on by an eventful day went entirely to waste: I did not sleep a wink. As if in spite, the next day dawned bright and sunny, and Joe showed up at Raul’s doorstep at exactly half past nine, as scheduled, to look over my latest draft. Unbeknownst to me at that time, he had resolved to initiate a few changes in his life, and it was perhaps because of this that he looked, framed by the door with the aquamarine sea behind him, as fresh and crisp as the mountain air.
oOo
He began by upgrading his digs.
And not a moment too soon: the monsoon season, heralded by a torrential downpour that lasted for days, arrived a week later. I spent those days stranded in Joe’s second house near the cliffs: a white two-room indigenous limestone dwelling of a style long ago designed by the natives so as to withstand the harshest of typhoons, topped by a surprisingly sturdy roof of reeds and cogon. The efficiently equipped kitchen was a separate structure constructed similarly, painted in rich warm terracotta. In a row of similar houses painted a vivid, happy blue, you’d have to be blind to miss it.
Two houses away lived Jay, and it was he who told me that, unlike him, Joe was no mere tenant: after a negotiation so brief even the owner was surprised, he’d bought the house. In cash.
I wondered where he got the money. By that time I’d long since abandoned the idea that Joe was a travel writer. Yes, he would disappear, sometimes for days, on his falowa to some island even more remote that all the same attracted its own share of nature-loving tourists, but somehow Pico Iyer never came to mind whenever I looked at him. He looked more at home with the historians and preservationists from the national museum that kept track of the state of the heritage houses, a group he’d volunteered, much to our amazement, to help, accompanying them closely as they went up and down the hills, surveying his neighborhood.
When one Sunday, after the nine o’clock mass, he stayed to assist the local health clinic in the free immunization of babies and small children, the incredulity was more than my nervous system could bear. I stood beside him as he unwrapped one disposable syringe after another and lined up the vials of vaccine within the reach of the nurse on duty, my mouth opening and closing like a goldfish’s.
"Will you still have time to help me?” I whined.
“Of course.” He nudged me. “And don’t be selfish. Look at these children. Don’t they just break your heart?” At that instant a baby bawled in a manner indicating the possession of the most powerful set of lungs, setting off an intense pain in my eardrums.
“No.” I huffed and puffed. Joe grinned, unperturbed. “Do you know the average age at which Ph.D.s in my field get their degrees these days?” Joe set another vial on the table, queuing it up neatly along with the rest. “Twenty-seven,” I continued. “I’m pushing thirty, Joe. How can I ever compete with them? Have pity on me.”
“Hey, squirt, relax. I’m not going anywhere. You’ll get it done soon, believe me.”
(On the matter of my thesis I chose to believe him. And he turned out to be right, thank God; a year later I would successfully defend my dissertation. But that he was our own Pico Iyer, I definitely no longer chose to believe. And, in time, he would leave.)
As I pondered my future, Joe leaned over to tap the nurse’s shoulder. “Is there a feeding program around here?” he asked.
That’s it. I’d had enough. I turned on my heel and made haste for the cathedral, fearful of the revenge of the Partly-Subjugated Thesis now that my strongest ally had acquired other priorities.
“Where are you going?” he called after me.
“The chapel, to light a candle. For your enlightenment.”
Outside, Ed delivered the final blow: “Told you he has a thing for nurses.”
And the mothers, Esthers all, came from all corners of the island like ants lured by the sweetest candy, smiling toothily at the nurse’s assistant with the beautiful hands, soothing voice and ever-changing eyes. In the end, Joe and his orbs of wonder would single-handedly ensure the success of the government’s inoculation program in the island’s four towns for nearly two years. The people would tell you, but you’d never read that anywhere.
oOo
To be marooned in Joe’s house while the monsoon’s fury raged outside had not been on the agenda. A few minutes before the sky broke, I'd been good and ready to go, new proofs packed safely in my backpack, alerted by the thunder rumbling overhead. Then an impenetrable wall of water fell, gushing over the eaves of roofs and hills, negating my exit. I stood at the door, as forlorn as the hibiscus in the garden that sagged under the weight of so much rain.
“We can have tea while you wait,” Joe yelled from the kitchen, already putting the kettle on the stove.
I would have tea with Joe for four days.
First I was gratefully relieved; if I’d been caught in a downpour this heavy on the way home, the rain would have soaked through my bag and destroyed an afternoon’s worth of work. As the hours progressed and a pitch-black night fell, relief gave way to an uneasiness to be tinged, as the minutes crept towards midnight, by fear, its tendrils evoking a memory of candles and Misery disguised by Stillness and Grace. At the stroke of ten, I got up, rolled my jacket to form a pillow, put on Joe’s vakul, and was halfway out the door when Joe caught me as he emerged from his room.
“Where are you going?”
“To the kitchen.”
“You told me you weren’t hungry.”
“No, I’m going there to sleep.”
Joe regarded me keenly, noting the averted gaze, the tension in the air.
“Look, Ann,” he said finally, “it’s perfectly safe. I promise you. I will not let anyone hurt you.”
Oh, if only I had known then how hard that was for him to say. All I knew at that moment was that it was the nicest thing any man had ever told me.
You’re such a girl, Villanueva, I admonished myself minutes later as I lay in bed. Still, I couldn’t help the smile that came to my lips as I drifted off to sleep.
As the sky heaved and the ground turned to mud, cutting all mobility even at times when the rain lightened to a drizzle, the tea loosened my tongue in a way beer never could.
“I used to think that your hut was haunted,” I revealed as I prepared lunch.
“Is that so?”
“Uh-huh.” The smell of steaming rice filled my nose, warming me straight to my feet. “I was even convinced that you were a serial killer, and that your—” I almost mentioned his girl, but caught myself just in time. Joe didn’t seem to notice. “I mean, that one of your victims was buried in your backyard.”
Joe gave a smile that did not quite reach his eyes. “That’s been known to happen, yes.”
“But you’re such a wuss, I don’t think you can even harm a fly.”
Joe continued to smile indulgently. I decided to push it.
“Joe,” I began, “are you rich?”
The question hung in the air, taking on all the distasteful inflections of gold-diggers and social-climbers.
“Oh, fuck it, I didn’t mean to sound so...so...”
“Cheap?”
“Yes. Gee, thanks.” I busied myself with stirring the soup to hide my embarrassment. “Well?”
Joe moved to my side and started slicing the lemons. “I robbed a bank once,” he said solemnly.
Just then Jay burst through the door. “Feed me, guys,” he implored. “I’ve run out of supplies. Blast this rain.”
A warning pealed in my head like the carillon in St. Dominic’s at Easter Sunday dawn, unrelenting.
oOo
Two weeks later, I was at Raul’s making starch for the sheets, waiting for the mix of cornstarch dissolved in scalding water to turn into sticky mush, when I stumbled across a loophole in Joe’s suggested proof as I went through it in my head. Confirming it minutes later with pen and paper, I rushed to soak the sheets in the starch and hang them out to dry, cursing colorfully at the uncooperative uneven clothesline, and just about ran to Joe’s house by way of the shore, my feet kicking up the sand.
My excitement was understandable. This was the first time that Joe had ever been wrong.
(And the last. So forgive me for the dreary technicalities that follow—a once-in-a-lifetime event that paints me in such a good light must be, short of embellished, related in all its glory.)
Joe was approaching the beach in his falowa as I ran—if I’d given in to my impatience and gone earlier I would have missed him and consequently, that last piece of the puzzle—looking at me quizzically as I waited, virtually bouncing from agitation, for him to come within hearing distance. He stepped out of the boat and dropped his Crocs on the sand, only to pick them up after what seemed to me a moment of deliberation and keep them in his hand as he slowly walked up to me, barefoot.
When he’d come near enough, I launched eagerly into my argument, the anticipation of triumph fizzling behind my ears. “We cannot use the theorem,” I proclaimed, “because the function is not integrable.”
“And good morning to you too, Ann,” he responded breezily, sighing in jest. His dark hair, which had grown even longer in recent months, was drying out, the curls gradually springing back to life, and his clothes were drenched. He’d been swimming—fully clothed, again. “Sorry, but you have to jog my memory a bit. This is regarding...?”
I thrust the paper I held in my hand to his chest. “It’s quite simple, really,” I blurted out before I realized how ridiculously gung ho I sounded, poking the paper as if to prove my point. “I mean, clearly, one cannot find a partition such that the integrability condition is satisfied—it’s all there, I’ve written it down.” Another poke. “But if I do it the long way, which is what I showed you last night, I run into the contradiction we are looking for, without making such a heroic assumption.”
Joe took the paper from me and gave it a quick scan, brow furrowed in concentration. Fizz, cackle, pop, went my ears. “I see,” he drawled. “And you assume nothing other than boundedness?”
I looked down, my mind racing through the theorem I’d used to start off my proof. Mentally I ticked off in rapid succession all the possible necessary conditions for a theorem of this kind to work, only for my progress to be cut short by a startling vision in the sand. My ears iced over.
I blinked once, and then some more. It didn’t matter. It was clearly not an apparition.
I sharply sucked my breath in, looking up at Joe as I did so, as if willing him to tell me I was wrong, that I was imagining things. I was sure that I was the picture of absolute shock, but he merely examined my upturned face silently, holding my gaze as he waited for me to answer. “Ann?”
My pulse pounded, a hundred times it seemed for every time the surf slapped the shore. “Uh...yes?”
His eyes warmed into a sympathetic gray, as though he’d sensed and understood my distress. “Is boundedness,” he repeated gently, “all that you require?”
I nodded slowly, my brain gradually returning to life as I took deep, measured breaths. “Yes, it is.”
“Okay then.” He handed the sheet of paper back to me. I took it gingerly but, thankfully, with steady fingers. “I’ll be waiting for you here later at four with—”
“No,” I said softly. I took a step back, the desire to flee and the urgent need for calm flooding me in equal measure. “I need to type last week’s notes while they’re still fresh in my mind.”
“Tomorrow, then?” he asked placidly—helping me along, it seemed.
I nodded again, not trusting myself to speak anymore, then turned to make my way back, feeling the hair at the back of my neck bristle. I resisted the urge to look over my shoulder and check if Joe was watching me, somehow so certain that he was.
Two toes are missing, two toes are missing, I kept thinking as I walked. Eight toes. Just as I’d read. Figurative kick to the forehead. How could I have missed it?
(In my defense, I couldn’t access the internet from the island, and I couldn’t very well ask someone else to do it for me now, could I? All I had, after all, was my goddamn memory.)
Finally, everything fell into place.
oOo
The bar at Bigby’s is a nondescript affair, a row of plain unpainted wooden high tables with unpolished surfaces, manned that night by a local named Ben. I’d already had the first part of my birthday drink—two shots in quick succession of a mysterious concoction Ben wouldn’t name—and had just come back, unsuccessful, from convincing Mario, who I’d spotted walking by, to join me.
“Esther would kill me, Ann,” he apologized. “I promised to lay off the bottle for a month. Where are the others?”
“Raul and Jay are back home. Ed’s still at the site.”
“I would love to invite you home, hija, so we can finish off that gallon of tuba, it’s just that I promised Esther—”
“—to stop drinking for a month. Yeah, yeah, I understand.” I gave him a mock-salute, smiling to show that I didn’t mind. “Off you go, then. Tell Esther I said hi.”
“You sure you don’t just want to go home? It’s not good for a girl to be out at night by herself.”
“Oh, Mario, don’t worry, it’s cool.” I reassured him that I would be sleeping at Ed’s place, which was just a street away before quickly walking back inside, determined to finish my birthday drink, because it was my goddamn birthday and I could get wasted if that was what I goddamn wanted, goddamn it.
I’d just announced my return to Ben (“Birthday girl’s ready for her part two, Ben my man!”) and was struggling to get on one of the bar stools, which had always been too high for my liking, when I felt myself being lifted by the waist, my feet fully clearing the floor. In no time at all my tush was neatly parked on the stool, the whole of me squarely facing the counter.
“What the—” I began, twisting in the seat, elbow cocked against the table, knee raised, ready to kick the offender to kingdom come.
It took me a mere split-second—but the longest split-second in the history of the universe, it seemed—for me to realize it was Joe, grinning with a mouth that was...Well, I’ve already told you what I thought of that mouth. It was nearly criminal. “Happy birthday, squirt.”
For the tiniest moment my jaw went slack. I summoned to my defense all the times I’d imagined a clean-shaven Joe as I strove to remember the name to go with the facts: impressive tattoo, engineer from Chicago, escaped felon. It was futile; nothing could have prepared me for the real thing. A J.D. Salinger story sprang to mind—Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes—as I blinked, amazed at the perfect congruity of reality and fiction at that instant.
Still, it was Joe—and it was not.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Ben approaching with my shot glass, jigger ready in one hand. “’Evening,” Joe greeted him, sliding smoothly onto the stool next to mine. (Oh, the sheer arrogance of tall people.) He rested his elbows on the counter, and my eyes fell on the pushed-up sleeves of his black sweater, at long last baring his forearms to the world. Then he turned to look at me quite deliberately, as if waiting for a reaction.
By that time I’d learned that nothing Joe ever did or said was by accident. I’d been aware, the secret knowledge purring beneath my skin, of what he’d been up to: this piecemeal revelation that was so subtle yet so clear that the conclusion was unmistakable. And I suspected the boys had been as well. But the four of us skirted around it, a blaze we were afraid would engulf us, and we shot glances at one another, the flicker of truth dancing on our faces, but never once meeting the others’ eyes.
Like the night the discussion drifted precariously to the subject of our names.
Ed is not particularly ticklish, but there is one spot on his nape—a little bit off-center and to the left—that would incite a most riotous, uncontrollable reaction from him. One night, overcome by audacity, I used this information to torment him. Flailing wildly, he toppled over bottles which then rolled noisily down the table; beer shot out of his nose. “Anecita!” he bellowed. “Stop it!”
Joe’s eyes lit up. “Anecita? Your real name’s Anecita?”
“Yes.” Jay laughed. “Her full name is Consuelo Anecita Villanueva. She’s ancient.”
I was named after both grandmothers, I explained.
“Consuelo’s a nice name,” Joe said. “It fits you.”
I felt my face grow warm. Joe always said the nicest things.
But not the boys. “You gotta be kidding,” Ed roared at me. “You’re blushing.”
“Shut the fuck up,” I shot back, “Edmundo.”
The three of us broke out into shrieking laughter, as Ed braced himself.
“Edmundo?” Joe asked, trying to keep up. “Like, Edmond Dantes? The Count of Monte Cristo?”
“Exactly!” Happy tears were streaming down my cheeks. “His full name is Edmundo Dantes Ruiz.”
“My mother just had to,” Ed said, shaking his head in mock sadness as our laughter reached fever pitch.
Between labored breaths I revealed that Jay was Jacinto Emilio Fernandez III—we have a hero named Emilio Jacinto, said to be the brains behind the revolutionary movement against Spain—and Raul was Raul Vincent Garcia.
“I don’t understand,” Joe said as we continued to laugh. “Raul Vincent sounds safe.”
“Oh, no,” Jay countered, red in the face, “on the contrary, Raul is a pretty tricky name. See, if I want to say ‘Raul is happy’ in our language, it would be—“
“Si Raul ay masaya,” Ed interjected. “Get it?”
“Si Raul sounds like Sira ulo. That means 'crazy', man.”
Sira ulo, Sira ulo, Si Raul ay sira ulo (Crazy, crazy, Raul is crazy), we sang.
Joe waited for our laughter to subside before taking an ominous pause. As he opened his mouth to speak, a sickening sensation of foreboding landed in the pit of my stomach.
Of course, I remember thinking. It’s his turn.
My spine tingled. “My real name is—” Joe began.
“I know!” I exclaimed. “Is it Jormungandr?” His eyes snapped to me. I looked up at the sky, hand cradling my chin, pretending to be lost in the thrill of the challenge. “Finnish, right? After your grandfather?”
“Gaga, it’s Joseph, what else?” Raul said, a bit tremulously, but he pulled it off.
“Remember that Joseph guy I went to college with?” Jay veered more confidently. “He now answers to Josa. You know, as in Diyosa. Goddess.”
“No way,” said Ed. “Captain-of-the-volleyball-team Joseph?”
“One and the same.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah.”
“Wow,” Ed repeated, standing up this time. He clapped Joe on the shoulder. “What do you know. Goodness. Gotta take a leak.”
Round and round the fire we went, the flicker of truth dancing on our faces, but never once meeting the others’ eyes.
And now, there we were, two-fifths of a gang of gladiators in a sport of throw-and-dodge, sitting next to each other at a bar, the ex-con coming to the spy.
Two can play this game.
I scanned his exposed skin. “Pretty clean fineline,” I said, casually. “Custom?”
An eyebrow rose, but his gaze remained steady. “Yes.”
“Full set of sleeves?” A completely useless question, as I knew exactly how large the tattoo was from memory.
“Bigger.” He didn’t elaborate, but his silence was eloquent.
I ignored the bait.
No way are you making me, Scofield, the name that had escaped me for weeks popping effortlessly out of the blue, catching me by surprise.
Scofield! That’s it!
I grabbed the shot glass and quickly threw back the drink to hide my smile of victory, which would be quickly soured by the apprehension that I might not be the only one blessed with recognition that night. It was as if Joe had pushed all concern for self-preservation aside, in sharp contrast to all he’d previously believed and wanted, and threw himself into a pit of vipers.
oOo
In 2005, according to the tattoo enthusiasts’ magazine Skin Art, a structural engineer from Loyola—this fact I remember because I was schooled by the Jesuits myself—frees his wrongfully convicted, sentenced-to-die-by-electric-chair-for-m
If you looked at the tattoo chances are you wouldn’t see anything of the sort; staring at the reconstruction on the magazine centerfold, I know I didn’t. But then again, the engineer is said to be a genius with an affliction that allows him to view the world differently.
It was a plan a year in the making.
According to the files the FBI retrieved from the engineer’s computer hard disk—dredged up from the bottom of a river his apartment overlooked—the tattoos cover his entire torso and both arms, the interlocking parts, the FBI confirms, ordered in Greek letters according to the sequence dictated by the escape plan.
He escapes with his brother and several other prisoners. The police call them by a catchy name, which is probably not catchy enough for long-term memory as I could not remember it.
Anyway, somewhere in the story a large sum of money becomes important. The brothers successfully escape to Mexico, never to be heard from again.
An advisory directs people to be on the look-out for two blue-eyed men about six feet tall with closely cropped hair, the engineer allegedly missing two of the smallest toes of his left foot. Judging from the photos the police released to the press, which appeared on one corner of the centerfold, the brothers are fairly good-looking.
Of all of his tattoos, in my predominantly Catholic country the Christ-in-a-Rose would prove to be the most popular, the numbers on the flower’s stem changed accordingly to represent a birthday, a wedding date, or a code for a lover’s name.
In this side of the world, the remarkable story of a brother’s sacrifice to free another—and they go by different surnames to boot, adding to the allure—got no more than the sixty-second report on the evening world news for a few consecutive days before it was replaced by accounts of a failed coup d’etat, oil leaks off the coast of a famous beach, and pregnancies of unwed celebrities. They got more coverage on the internet, where a viral video of them speaking of government cover-ups and conspiracies and a shady FBI agent streaked like wildfire, earning 25 million hits in a day before being mysteriously deleted from every file-sharing site known to man.
Today, the brothers’ story would be best remembered overseas by the most avid tattooists. The next best bet would be someone who merely dabbled in the art but had somehow come across the magazine article and had a serviceable enough memory.
Meaning, me.
oOo
I have two tattoos.
The newer one is graphic illustrator Kajo Baldisimo’s first sketch of Alexandra Trese, a sword-carrying local comic book detective that investigates supernatural occurrences in big cities. (I have the complete set of books, including a copy of Trese 2: The Rules of the Race with creator Budjette Tan’s much-treasured autograph). One sweltering summer I read Our Secret Constellation, the third installment in the Trese series—twenty pages, took no more than five minutes—wiped away the tears that came with the ending, got out of the house in a daze still wearing my pajamas, and cried some more—but softly! and bravely!—in the tattoo parlor where I sat for three hours as Trese’s thin face, all angry eyes and disheveled hair, was inked onto my lower back with excruciating slowness.
The older, smaller one—almost five years old now—is an ouroboros circling my left thigh, three inches above the knee. When I get fat with age and my thigh enlarges along with the rest of the body, the thin red serpent eating its own tail will inevitably morph into a bilious pink anaconda. But it’s the location I strongly regret, never the tattoo. In the midst of the Hindu symbols and zodiac signs and Celtic codes and the cohabiting fish and dragons and butterflies bedecking the wall of the parlor, I did not so much choose the ouroboros as it chose me, doom and hope fused in the idea of infinity latching on to my fascination and never letting go.
But the story of a tattoo neither begins at the second the eyes close in anticipation and the needle first meets blank skin, nor at the instant that the choice of design is made. It starts at the moment a rebellious flash streaks from the eye to travel underneath the skin and the brain’s neurons fire off and insist upon one another, Hey, that tat looks nice, I bet it would look good on me. And the rest—the trip to the artist, the hours in the chair—is a logical conclusion.
That moment for my ouroboros came after I admired Oliver’s tribal armband on his right bicep, fully on display as he stretched out beside me in post-coital bliss. I’d been telling him about the centerfold spread of the latest issue of Skin Art I’d come across in the dermatologist’s office by accident: an escaped convict’s astonishing gothic long-sleeved shirt of a tattoo dissected in interviews by FBI agents and various news reports into prison blueprints, escape plans, chemical formulas, reminders and clues. I then paused to drag one fingertip lazily along the dark blue ink round his arm, murmuring my appreciation. “You’ll never get one,” he declared, and promptly nodded off. I lay there for a while, frowning, post-coital bliss rapidly turning into annoyance, gave the matter my most solicitous consideration, got dressed—properly this time—and, rousing at 2 a.m. from sleep a reputable artist with the promise to pay thrice his usual fee, proceeded to prove Oliver wrong.
And so it is that of the two tattoos, with much apologies to Tan and Baldisimo who would forever be my heroes, it is the ouroboros—Jormungandr, the Midgard Serpent—that reigns supreme in my heart. For its story—from its beginning to its logical conclusion—are inextricably tied to a secret I will carry with me to the grave, imparted by its own unexpected hero who, much like the ouroboros, picked me out to be the keeper, supplanting my consent.
oOo
For now, however, said hero was sitting at a bar, busily basking in the attention of two extremely solicitous women.
They came in with Ed, all tanned skin and perky breasts, looking forward to winding down after a whole day at the archeological dig. Joe had gone up to ask Ben for a glass of bright blue coconut vodka, and the two rapidly swooped down on him, pinioning him to the bar. He had not returned to our table since.
I watched in muted horror as one of them—Erika? Nicole?—leaned in ever so closer to get a clearer look at Joe’s arm. “What’s this?” I could make the playful lilt the question took at the end. “English, Fitz, and...?”
“Percy,” Joe said, moving his arm to give a better view. Both girls moved in, effectively blocking off all other potential competitors. “English, Fitz, and Percy.”
The plump-lipped one with red lipstick—Nicole? Erika?—ran a delicate pinky along the letters, her mouth—intentionally, I would stake an eye on it—forming a highly suggestive ‘O’ as she went. “Amazing,” she gushed.
At our table, I hissed at Ed. “Tell Cherry to keep her hands off.”
Ed studied the trio at the bar. He’d been more surprised than I'd had been when he'd seen Joe, but had been as quick, if not quicker, to recover. Now, I caught the concern that briefly pulled at his brow before he turned back to me with a reassuring half-smile. “He’s fine. Let the boy have some fun.”
“How far up do these go?” the long-haired one asked. Ben had turned down the music, and their conversation easily carried. I had to give it to them: having cornered their prey, each patiently waited for her turn to ask, mutually understanding that a question for each of the other’s guaranteed peace.
They knew how to share, the bitches.
Joe’s adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed a mouthful of vodka; both girls stared at it, transfixed. He watched them with half-lidded eyes over the rim of his glass as he drank, deceptively blasé.
Setting the glass down, he told them, finger showing the way, how the tattoo covered his arms from the wrist to the shoulder, curved along the collarbone, and washed down his whole upper body to stop at his hip, long finger marking the spot. It seemed to me that the girls were giving the spot—and its immediate environs—more attention than was necessary. It was not lost on Joe; he laughed. In the dusky air the low chuckle cut through time sensuously, smoky and quietly dangerous.
Red-lipstick girl told Joe how artistic his tattoos were, so unlike the ones the ex-cons sported upon release, marked forever by the gang they pledged allegiance to while inside. “So Joe, tell me,” she continued impishly, “did you get yours when you were in prison?”
“Before,” Joe deadpanned.
“Oh, Joe,” Rapunzel burbled, “you’re so funny.”
And on it went, Joe affixing each girl with his eyes, limpid when they looked back, lit by a cold, calculating glow when they did not. I drank and drank, the burning liquid unable to slake my anxiety, until I felt Ed’s hand on my wrist. “Ann,” he ordered, “you’ll pass out at the rate you’re going.”
“I’m not even tipsy.”
And it was the truth; I could still count. I knew that Joe was on his second vodka; two more, and I would get him, bodily if I had to, the hell out of here. As long as I’d known him, Joe had always been a careful drinker, but that night, with his smooth face and scheming eyes, he had ceased to be the Joe I knew. And God only knew how many more of his rules he would break.
Ed kept his hand on mine, smiling slightly. “Are you jealous?”
Round and round the fire we went...
Suddenly I was very, very tired of playing the game.
I looked Ed in the eye; first his smile faded, followed by the playful arc of his eyebrow, until his whole face settled into a clean plane of seriousness. I pulled my hand from under his, and with my other hand pushed my glass away. Without breaking his stare I leaned back and shook my head. It didn’t even make me dizzy. I’d had the three-part birthday drink by Ben (five shot glasses) and two Wife Beaters, but my mind was as clear as a summer’s day. “Why is he doing this to himself?”
Ed regarded me so thoughtfully that for a moment I thought I was guilty of making a Heroic Assumption. As I grappled in my mind for an excuse, he grabbed a paper napkin, wrote quickly on it and pushed it across the table to me.
Keep your voice down, it said.
I exhaled. “Yes, sir,” I whispered.
Another napkin: Still on the run—yes?
I nodded. “I think.”
Fake passport?
“Most likely,” I answered. At the bar Rapunzel laughed gaily as she dabbed at the beer that missed her mouth and trickled down her neck into the valley beyond. Joe, bless him, kept his eyes on her face.
Ben turned the music up. “They’ll catch him,” I murmured, the words rushing out of my mouth. “It’s only a matter of time.” Ed shifted to the seat next to me and laid his hand on my arm in a calming gesture. “Why would he want that, Ed?” I continued. “And if that’s what he wants, why doesn’t he just tell the whole town he’s Sc...his real name? That should do the trick. Better yet, why doesn’t he just freaking turn himself in?”
Ed had no answers. Neither did I.
“There was this video,” Ed remembered.
A frightening thought flared across my brain. Cherry and Rapunzel didn’t look like they were hardened killers, but still... “You think those two—”
Ed was right there with me. “They’re graduate students. They’re interested in pre-historic beads, ceramic, and…and men. Preferably live. I’ve known them for years.”
“Oh, Ed, I don’t know.” I snorted. “I don’t know why I believe he’s done nothing wrong, but I do.”
“So do I.”
I finished my third Wife Beater and decided to go home, instructing Ed to stay put. “You watch him,” I said before quietly slipping out. “You archeologists are the most promiscuous people I know.”
After walking up and down Amoy Street so many times the balut vendor asked me if I was all right, I checked myself into the yellow pension house—I was in the mood for good coffee—and was about to get into the shower when I realized that Ed hadn't even made a half-hearted effort to walk me home. My heart stilled.
Raul I’d known for ten years, Jay practically my whole life, but Ed...
I’d only met Ed when I got on the island.
The bathroom mirror returned a face that was being drained of all color as I thought frantically, Could Ed...? Could he possibly? And the two flirts...
My God, they’ve sent a team!
I ran down Amoy Street, breezed past the bewildered balut vendor, turned into the main road, and saw that Bigby's had closed—an hour ago, I confirmed with a quick look at my watch, my breath hitching in my throat. Heart pounding, I sprinted to Ed’s place, noting the soft light escaping under the closed door, muttering a prayer under my breath as I all but swept the door away.
A team, all right, I thought a beat later. Make that a ménage à trios.
Later I would seriously contemplate washing my eyeballs with acid, so traumatized was I by what I saw. But at that moment, relief—from the solid confirmation that Ed was still good ol’ Ed, and that Joe was still good ol’ Joe—so overcame me that I leapt up on the bed, fairly dislodging Cherry and Rapunzel by a few feet, and planted a huge, wet smack on Ed’s lips. “You son of a bitch!” I exclaimed happily. “Thank you!”
The next morning Jay and Raul arrived. Over lunch—the first few minutes of which the two of them spent commenting nonchalantly about Joe’s new look and doing the dance of obliviousness around the fire—Raul issued an orchid-hunting invitation, this time with the forests of one of the lesser-inhabited islands in mind. Still wary of the falowa, I declined; I was the only one who did. The afternoon of the very same day, the four of them set off in Joe’s light blue boat, talking excitedly.
“Bye, Consuelo,” was all Joe said to me. He did, however, give me a broad boyish grin, as well as a spare copy of his house keys, like the rest of the boys.
“In case we don’t get back,” Raul said.
oOo
They would return four days later, famished, spotted all over from mosquito bites. The large dinner I prepared disappeared in less than ten minutes. Joe sported a slight tan and four days’ worth of stubble. He would let his hair grow long again, and in a few months, he looked exactly as he did the first time I met him.
Time passed. Mothers continued to stream steadily into the clinic with their babies every first Sunday of the month; the group from the national museum, like the storms, came and went. Frustrated with the high prices of construction materials on the island, Joe conceived a way of building cheaper classrooms using adobe and soil technology and pitched the idea to Jay, who then sold the idea to the local school board. Jay would later claim credit for these ‘earthbag schools’, but the four of us knew that it had only been upon Joe’s insistence. My thesis flourished. Rapunzel and Cherry, data in hand, went back to the mainland, and Ed once again hid as Tina sought. I started writing back to my father. The only crisis that we had at that time was when Raul received the news that Andy had gotten married, after which he disappeared for a week, going off to hunt for orchids without telling us. He came back, noticeably thinner, and after one long cry on my shoulder, moved on and never looked back. All seemed right with the world.
So perhaps I’d grown complacent. Perhaps I thought, since Joe went his unruffled way through the days although we never saw his girl again, that Happiness finally walked with Stillness and Grace. So pardon me if, looking out from Raul’s balcony as a fierce storm raged to see Joe standing on the shore in silent contemplation, the wind whipping at him, before wading out as if he was offering himself to the churning sea, I totally went blank, so numb was my mind from shock.
Pardon me if I never expected, struck blind by a contentment I thought he shared, that Joe would try to end his life.
End Notes:
Nader Khalili, an architect said to be of Iranian-American descent, is the real-life developer of the Earthbag Construction System.
Skin Art is a real magazine. You can check out their website at www.skinart.com.
Alexandra Trese, published by Alamat (Legend) Comics (www.alamatcomics.com), is a real comic book series written by Budjette Tan and drawn by Kajo Baldisimo. Rules of the Race and Our Secret Constellation are Books 2 and 3. Alexandra Trese is, literally, Alexandra Thirteen—because thirteen is a considered a mystical number, and not because the series stops at Book 13, I hope. The tattoo should look like this: http://www.flickr.com/photos/92701996@N00/310212818/.
The ouroboros is my tribute to the character Special Agent Dana Scully of The X-Files. I hear there’s a second movie in the works. *is giddy* For examples of ouroboros tattoos, see http://www.vanishingtattoo.com/tattoos_designs_symbols_ouroboros.htm.
For those unfamiliar with Crocs, check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crocs. As you can see, they cover the toes quite well. Joe would pick the black and brown ones, I would imagine. *g*
In dare-you-to-do-this shows like Fear Factor, eating the balut and keeping it down proves you can stomach a very nasty dish. It is a local delicacy, much loved by beer drinkers.
Finally, a Wife Beater is a beer cocktail. It is one-part beer, one-part vodka drink (like Smirnoff Ice) paired with a shot of, yes, more vodka. Not for minors. Seriously.
Chapter Five (Part One)