1. Akimbo

Like a student in a limbo,

Like the devil in a trance,

I see you standing there Akimbo,

Almost like waiting for a chance.

Hold your fire a little longer,

First we should complicate the pose,

Then continue with a whisper,

For how much longer? No one knows.

Akimbo by The/Das

Akimbo was born standing in a brook. She appeared one night, quiet and up right, water to her belly button. Was she propped there by prophetic forest spirits, the prodigy of nature or a despairing mother? This story doesn’t say. It does say though that standing in a brook, isn’t easy.

Akimbo was born standing in a brook, but if she had known the word for river, that’s what she would have called it. The fishes that swam between her legs were friends often as big as she was, and the rocks on each side of the streams were mountains she couldn’t climb. Beyond the mountains, she saw standing things, very straight and mostly serious: the skinny trunks of birch trees separating  into thinner and thinner lace until they disappeared into a mostly blue sky, and the pointiest parts of pines, prickling the clouds. She couldn’t see where they met the ground, and she wasn’t curious about it. She never could have imagined anything other than running water on slippery rocks, nothing dry and powdery, nothing green or yellow and softly spiky, nothing like the ground. From the tadpoles that grew legs, though, she got a sense that one day she too would grow and discover where they hoped off to. 

Akimbo was born standing in a brook, but if it wasn’t for the alliteration, I might have called it a creek. On each side of the rocks she stood on, the water was deep enough for her to drown, and she couldn’t touch both banks, even lying across the stream. She didn’t know that soon she would be big enough to step through the river and over the mountains and onto the ground. Rather, she night dreamt of arduous yet successful climbing across the  peaks and crevasses to where crickets cry out to cruel crows. These dreams fed her patience.

Back then, Akimbo’s feet were strong. They could hold her small body stably in and above the water, and they most often did, legs apart and hands on her hips, although that was not her favorite position. While she was waiting to be grown, Akimbo learned that if she laid her body flat, it floated, and she learned that if she laid it stomach down, she could move around with her hands, when the current allowed it, and go against the stream pushing her away. That is the direction she went in, upstream, not only because she was getting into that rebellious stage and there was nothing else to rebel against, but because she was still in that scared-to-leave-home phase, and she wasn’t sure she’d be able to get back from the other side. So as she went further up - until the only way up was climbing wet walls which she left for her future, bigger self to do - and turned around and let the water take her home, the ground started to appear. Up on her feet she could see it now, not right after the rocks but further away, she saw that there was something not like water.

She could have crawled out. She could have climbed over rocks and gone to the other side, touched the dryness and experienced the ground. She could have circled trees and rolled in grass. But she didn’t. So now, when she got up, there was more dry than wet on her body, and that was scary. Plus, she didn’t like being on her feet, which had grown weak from lack of usage and it didn’t look like she would be able to slither around where there was no water. So she stayed put, in her brook, and who can blame her, really? What sort of self hating creature would choose the heaviness of being dry over the light softness of a brook?

I wish I could tell you Akimbo had never seen anything human, no discolored cans or plastic wrappers, but I know you know that’s not plausible. Did she sense that these things were intrinsically different from everything else around? Did they stick out like sore feet? No. To Akimbo they were just dead things, like the dead leaves that coated the rocks, and they certainly weren’t the worst dead things in the brook… But we’ll get to that. Akimbo had seen human things, but she’d never seen anything like herself. She was the only standing thing in the forest. Except for trees. But trees are trees, and she is Akimbo. She had seen plenty of other non-dead things though: She had seen ants build fortresses, raccoons fight and lose eyes, foxes tear into the juicy flesh of unexpecting rabbits… Rabbits she knew. Rabbits she had seen born. Rabbits not yet grown.

Akimbo didn’t always know words. She caught them like butterflies, with the big net inside her head. She never pinned them to anything, she read their wings and then released them. The butterfly called ‘sky’ flew upwards and disappeared. The ‘brown’ butterfly went from tree bark to wet dirt to Akimbo’s hair, and again, and back, a few times, to these different textures in different shades, until they became sort of one thing, somehow, and Akimbo pointed to the silt on her skin and said “brown” and the Tawny Emperor flew away. Some butterflies, like ‘babbling’ went into her ear. Two butterflies named ‘eye’ poked her there repeatedly, and when single letter butterflies like ‘I’ and ‘a’ came along, they danced in a row with the others. It was hard for Akimbo not to get distracted by the choreography, and read them out loud. The most annoying butterfly was one that started with a capital letter. ‘Akimbo’. It stuck to her like a regular fly, and no matter how many times she shooed it, it always came back. “Akimbo,” she thought, “does that mean pain in the ass?” 

When Akimbo closed her eyes, she saw neon butterflies named ‘bored’, ‘beautiful’, and ‘bad’, and they flew to places she almost knew existed. The thoughts in her head that had looked like clouds became shapes, and shapes became sentences, and sentences became stories, and stories became that annoying thing named ‘Akimbo’.

There is only one butterfly more exasperating than the ‘Akimbo’. It’s called ‘brook’. At first it was invisible, or so visible she never noticed it. It was always there, always the same. But with the seasons, it grew more noticeable. First it slimmed down, and almost dried up. Then, as everything turned red, including her from the leaves that stuck to her skin, the water got cold. Later, freezing, when white flakes that only seemed to get her wet and shivering ate up the world around. 

Akimbo eats earthworms, or on good days she does. She finds them in the wet dirt between the rocks on the sides of the brook. Back in the Winter, when the stream was weak, the spenganophiles were scarce, so Akimbo ate ants, beetles, or whatever was available, really. You would think that Spring, with its abundance of insects, leaves and berries, would have been good to Akimbo, but you would have been wrong. In the Spring, when everything is green and about to burst, the water is strongest. The brook flings down to Akimbo whatever lies in its way. All the dead things. Cans and wrapper. Pieces of wood. Dead  branches appear upstream like skinny black lines. They seem unthreatening in the distance, but she’s not fooled. Not anymore. The branches will pass, whether Akimbo is standing or lying there. They will hit her hard, in the knees or the neck, and hurt her like no water can. 

Maybe it was Akimbo's curiosity for things and places that are dry growing stronger that turned her home into a waterboarding nightmare, or maybe it was just Spring, but by the time this story starts, in this very paragraph, the brook is torrential, Akimbo is grown, and she carries two heavy loads on her chest. So much water has run between her toes that if she leans over and touches them, she feels only a paper thin layer of wrinkled softness over the bone. “My skin is like the stream,” she thinks, “and maybe what’s inside the skin as well.” Sometimes, she dips her hands in the water and looks for two rocks stable enough to support her. She gets in a headstand and gives her legs a rest. She likes watching the water be her sky and her toes fly free over the newly open ground. She can imagine she’s not standing in a brook anymore.

She is looking at two rabbits poke their noses out of the ground. They open their nostrils and see the morning. Their furs change colors with the breeze. She will never get to touch it, because rabbits can’t swim. Something cracks loudly and the rabbits look up. Akimbo looks up too and sees a line, a dot still. She forgets to breathe. She watches the dead line speed up and thicken as it gets closer. Already her throat is dry and tight. The memories of all logs past that left her fighting against the current -her eyes pink and puffy, rubbing the palm of her hand on her bruised and bloody skin- well up and fill her mouth. She swallows them back as far down as she can without choking. She can’t look. She’d rather pretend it’s not about to happen.  She turns downstream, she softens her gazes on the water tirelessly disappearing in the distance. She focuses her mind on the stillness of the bank. She hasn’t slept in a few nights now, because the brook hasn’t let her. She is tired from fighting it. She listened to the frogs bowl their deep sounds. She heard the birds tweet and shake off the morning dew. She watched her blood from the last blow flow away to explore where she hasn’t wanted to go, leaving her behind. She has been thinking about lines. She wishes the water would stop, just for a moment, just to let her rest, and maybe, step out. But even if it did, she knows her eroded feet couldn’t support her without the help of water. She doesn’t know how she knows this, but she does. Water falls from her eyes to the brook. More water, like that’s what she needs. “This bruise will kill me,” she thinks “And would that be so bad? Do I want to watch the brook slim down again, to the point where I can barely move around, and then get so strong it’s impossible to stay still?” She looks back at the coming branch and she gets an idea. She dips her hands in the water and pulls her feet to the sky.  It will knock her down. It will break her skull on the rocks. It will drag her along on it’s way to who knows where, and she is ready to go. She looks at death come, defiantly, at the dot becoming a line becoming wood. She is ready to unhear the steady hum of water, she is ready to unfeel stray drops jumping at her always, she is ready for where the brook disappears.  

Something shimmers at the corner of Akimbo’s eye. The rabbits have gotten closer, they look at her, they say “goodbye?” There are no feelings in their eyes, except maybe for a quiet curiosity.

“You don’t know what curiosity is,” Akimbo tells the rabbits. “You can’t even imagine it.” 

The rabbits stare. The black line is round and brown.

“I’ll never know anything but this running water.”

She can see the patterns of tight lines on the branches.

“And it’s my own fault.”

She can see the sun shining in specks though the rabbits’ pale air. She can see the wetness on the rabbits’ eyeballs. She can see it all so closely she can almost… Her hand moves for her. It reaches for a rock closer to the rabbit and settles there while the other hand is already on its way to another, half dry rock. Did you know she could do this? Before Akimbo realizes, both her hands are on the wet ground and she watches the log pass by. Akimbo screams. The thing her hands rest on is not slippery. It’s stable, a little itchy. Grass is brushing her wrists. As she looks at the green spades in fascination, she feels her eyeballs rolling up towards the ground, and she falls, heavy, next to the stream.

Akimbo slips from unconscious into subconscious, and stays there for a long time. She dreams of a night sky because even her dreams are sick of water, but they don’t know enough about dryness to make up stories of what’s to come. She sleeps the sleep of the very tired. Heavy. Pitch dark. No stars. And wakes up still tired. The rabbits are gone. The ground and the grass have become hotter than she has ever known the water to be. Sweat tickles as it slides down her sides. The sun is shining into her eyes right above her head. The ground supports her firmly. She lays her hand between green tufts on the moist dirt below. 

The ground thumps.

Immediately, Akimbo takes back her hand. 

The ground thumps again. She lifts her head. 

A third thump runs down her vertebras. She cannot hear it with her ears, only feel it at regular intervals like 1-2, 1-2, 1-2. She lays her head back down. Why shouldn’t the ground have a rhythm? The brook certainly did, though not as structured as this one. More of a high pitch mess. It’s still there actually, only a little less loud than before. It sounds different from the side. A little deeper. 

Akimbo stays on her back for a while. The ground is comfortable. It firmly supports her newly acquired weight. Its evenness hugs her from behind. The thumps massage her back. The leaves shift in the wind. Akimbo closes her eyes to try and make out their whisper. That makes the silent thumping a little louder. She does notice an eerie silence around the brook and the thump -no birds chirping, no frogs burping -just the thumps giving the messy babble a new found purpose.  Akimbo’s hands start moving again. Her fingers discover positions they haven’t been in before. Following the rotation of her wrists, they fold and unfold as her hands cross each other over her closed eyelids. Her feet join in. Her lips stretch into the biggest smile the forest has ever seen. Is it the fact that she’s out of the brook or music deciding for her body for the first time that’s making her happy? Another sound of cracking and swishing is approaching and Akimbo swings her head to it.

In the darkness full of light behind Akimbo’s eyelids, a black oval appears. She opens her eyes and sees a mass between her and the sun. The mass is a head, attached to a body that sits down next to her. It’s not a fox or a rabbit or a tree. It’s a thing like her, sitting and showing friendly teeth. There are other things like her in the forest. Standing things. Akimbo is stumped. She has stopped dancing. She waits for it to do something, but it doesn’t. It just smiles the second biggest smile the forest’s ever seen. She wants to ask so many questions that might have an answer for the first time ever, but she’s most curious to see if it has a voice like her. And because it’s the sound and not the information she’s after, she asks the wrong question: “How did you find me?”

Lou wasn’t looking for her, yet he can see in her eyes how much she needed to be found. How did he find a small and dirty naked white girl lying on the side of a brook? He looks for inspiration in the yellow shapes of the canopy. They are looking geometrical right now, a kaleidoscope of light and dark green shadows. His answer makes him giggle.

“I followed a rabbit.”

Of course he did. 

“It wasn’t white though. But close enough. I thought maybe he’d lead me to a whole to fall down. Everybody back there is chasing their own rabbit anyway, if you know what I mean.”

Akimbo doesn't know what he means, but his voice is soft like the moss at the bottom of the brook. She wants more, so he goes on.

“It was more grey with a little brown in it. The rabbit. Dirty snow. There was light in his fur, like fireflies in the day. You know how it is when your pupils are thirsty for light. They just drink it up...”

Akimbo doesn’t know, but she smiles so wide, Lou decides to continue.

“You’ll never see any fireflies at a festival. No animals. They hear the bass and they go hide. So that rabbit must have been the only animal for miles around. Apart from us, of course.” Akimbo chuckles. “Us” she knows the butterfly, but she’s never felt it before. 

Lou points to the pointiest parts of pines and says “Look at that! They’ve got frosted tips! Wow, you’d think nature was timeless but that is very early 2000s…” and he laughs, and it’s messy like the brooks’ music, and before she knows it, a messy sound is coming out of her too. And when it quiets down, it picks up again, until all four of their eyes are wet. 

Akimbo asks:

“Do you have a name too?”

“Yeah! It’s Luis. People call me Lou. You?”

“I’m Akimbo.” 

“Pleasure to meet you. How did you end up all the way out here?” He asks.

“I’ve been here. In the brook. I’ve been stuck.”

“Oh wow, well, good thing I found you. We forgot how to be in the wild. But then we come back out here where it’s nice and quiet and we’re like, let’s see how loud we can make it. Isn’t that weird? Zorra says it’s a white people idea. No offense. She says that when DuBois* went to Scotland, to a lake, he was listening to its beauty, and then a group of white Americans came along, talking loud and they rowed to the center of the lake. She says if there’d been an island in the lake, they’d’ve planted a flag in it. She says that’s how white people took the music out of the House and back into the field, like it’d never been there before. But I’m here, and this is techno. Anyway, I disagree, I think when we rave, we listen.” 

And they listen for a while, to the silent bass giving rhythm to the forest's music. A familiar heat rises at the bottom of Lou’s stomach, and he tries to exhale it out. He gets on his feet.

“We should go back, I want to dance,” he says. Akimbo stays on the ground. Lou dusts himself off and looks back at Akimbo, who is not getting up. She blushes. He looks at her long hair thick with dirt, her face grey with mudd, and her big yellow eyes that greedily eat up the world. Her naked body is bony except for two full breasts. Akimbo’s legs are bone, and on her ankles and feet, the skin is paper white and wavy, showing off its layers. 

“What’s up with your feet?”

A damn gives out in Akimbo’s eyes, and her face becomes broken and wet. What is up with her feet? 

Lou immediately says, “Oh no! I’m so sorry. Don’t worry, I can carry you, don’t worry.” 

He unwraps the cotton neckerchief from around his neck and dips it in the water. He hands it to Akimbo to wipe off the dirt on her cheeks and arms and stomach. Lou looks into the stream, and the warmth in his stomach comes up to his lips. He plunges his hands in the water and drinks. He throws water on his face and stands still, attentive to the long drops slipping on his chest and back. Akimbo is looking at him. 

“You gotta stay hydrated,” he tells her, and brings some water up to her lips. Then, he unties the purple sweater from around his waist and passes it over Akimbo’s head. He takes off his white and green sneakers and his white sport socks. He hands the socks to Akimbo and says “Sorry if they smell.” Akimbo puts the socks on and it’s painful, but they are very big and once they are on, they barely touch her skin. Her feet are warming up. She’s never had warm feet before. 

“Alright, we’re ready. Say goodbye Aki. Can I call you Aki?”

“Yes!” she says, “and I don’t need to say goodbye.”

Aki wraps her legs around Lou’s skinny waist and her arms around his strong shoulders. She makes a crunchy shell on Lou’s back. The two headed creature follows a thumping sound through the forest. 

2. Where Worms

“Suonavamo perché l’oceano è grande, e fa paura,

suanavamo perché la gente non si sentisse passare il tempo,

e si dimenticasse d’overa, e chi era.

Suonavamo perché se bali, non puoi morire,

e ti senti Dio.”

Novecento,

Alessandro Baricco

In an industrial part of Brooklyn, between a warehouse and abandoned rail tracks, there is a short building. The truckers driving by pay it no mind, but when you come walking, on a bright morning, you will notice the rhythmic rattling of wire netting on the black windows. So you will stop. But see nothing. You will listen again. And hear it still. But you will not see it. And so, you will be on your way. That following night, when you go to bed, in your house, blocks away, the rattling will keep you up, it will keep you wondering. So you'll go digging for information, but you'll find nothing online, only yourself, at four in the morning, burrowing your way back to the rattling netting. I hope you come on a week-end, and knock at the front door. I will take you by the hand and say “Let us go.”*

A big guy will open the metal frame door. He will let us into a small chamber, darkened by the fleece blanket tapped to the window. At a gray plastic table, two proud gatekeepers wait. They will demand that we pay, and in their open mouths, we will place ten dollar bills, and be on our way. The smell will hit us, then, through the second door. Sweat, cigarettes, liquor and more sweat that will stick to our clothes long after we’ve gone home. But we’ll step into the funky heat anyway.

The big room is on the left. We take five steps sideways, chest against stranger’s chest, butts and feet in our way, and we find ourselves in darkness, in pumping, repetitive bass, and in a mass of steaming bodies wasting there Sunday away. I introduce you to friends standing in the back, talking and shifting their weight from one foot to the other, switching, sometimes in rhythm, sometimes not. They hug us. They ask how we’ve been, and when we answer, they don’t listen. Then, we go to the end of the room and face the DJ. We are now with those who tap their feet passionately,  who look at you with glossy eyes and stay in one spot forever. We move with them, sync our bodies, let our eyes gloss up and our lips smile. We  wave shyly to the cool worms doing drugs behind the DJ - always the same many worms- and we write private jokes with chalk on the black walls and we check on the sleepy worms napping on the wooden pallets. They’re okay, so we want a drink.

We make our way back through the corridor, past the entrance, to the bar. There is sunlight here, pouring from the horizontal windows high on the walls. There are the mixed and mixing musics of the big room’s techno and the small room’s house, which sounds quite cacophonic to the sober ear, but marvellously melodic to the inebriated one. There is a fridge and a table next to it. I sit there and stare at Sofia’s big blue eyes and goofy smile, her long blonde hair and necklaces swinging around her chest as she fills plastic cups with flat beer from the small tap in the plywood bar. When the police come, you will know, for we will get very quiet. We will roll the bar with the cash box inside. We will pretend we are house partying. We will hope they don’t arrest Sofia and wait for them to go.

When enough beer has filled your gut, and you need to relieve yourself, you will get in the sinuous line. That’s where you’ll meet them, future friends and lovers, all the weirdoes.

In the small room, the ceiling is high, and the windows on the upper part of the walls have been painted black. With our nails, in the paint, we carve the shape of a heart and the words ‘where worms’. In the mornings, the carvings make slim lines of lights for our pupils to dance with. On the left side, there is a wooden stage that comes up to our chests. When my feet get tired, I sit on it, move my hands and watch other worms spin and smile. Sometimes, I get up on the stage and imagine myself the conductor of the wiggling crowd. In the middle of the stage, there are steps where tired worms rest, and behind them, on the beige wall, there is the poster that gave the place its name. On a pale blue sky, red bold letters ask “WHERE DO WORMS GO IN THE WINTER?” The question is tickled by the ribbed leaves of tall oaks and tuliptrees. Down their bark and on the cool forest floor, above a vertical cut of burrows where worms in different shades of pink and brown crawl, read three expository paragraphs about earthworms, some of which you’re familiar with already. The first sentence answers the ticklish question, it says: “They go deep.” Lou and I like to repeat these words to the music. We sing: “Where do worms go in the winter? They go deep.- They go deep.- They go deep.” 

To the left of the poster, sticking out of the wall, there are five wooden steps, an escape to the surface. If someone props the trap door open to let in some air, Mauro closes it, because the sun has risen. Mauro can’t deal with sunlight. He always waits for the night to come back down before making his way home.

Everyone knows Mauro. His teeth shine in the dark like the Cheshire cat’s and if you’re not careful, he’ll make you fall down his gaping pupils. He walks around the party with his hips forward, like he is being dragged by his pelvis. His fingers play a game with the layers of music. Together we like to guess where they are going next. We look into the black of each other’s eyes and try to catch new sounds before the other does. I think he is winning, but he is sure I beat him every time. It makes him a little bit mad and a little bit sad when I can do things better than he can.

We had met on a mad morning, his hands had passed drugs to hands, to other hands, to Lexie’s hands, to mine. Now he isn’t shy about shoving bitter crystals between my lips, or passing them to me with the tippity tip of his tongue. Then he turns back to the DJ with a hand above his head which he shakes to the rhythm. Others copy him. We all shake our hand, and so does the DJ. They like dancing like him because things in his eyes vibrate. He makes women twirl like he understands their bodies. He makes moments twirl and leaves them dizzy. His sweaty hand spin mirrored dreidels but never breaks them. That is very precious to us earthworms who like for the moment to last too long, until it’s exhausted, and whose worst fear is that the moment will pick up again after we’ve gone. After a long day of dancing, when most have left and I am sitting, contemplating in a loop the eighteen minute walk in the real world to get to my bed, Mauro whines in my ear, “Aki, play with me.” So I get back on my aching feet and let him twirl me. 

When I finally  convince him to go home, it’s late winter afternoon. Outside, he starts kissing me immediately. They are wet, sloppy kisses. He leaves long pink fingerprints on the skin of my neck. I think he’s trying not to see white sky. We kiss and walk and kiss and walk all the way to my house. I’m not sure where he lives. 

Dizzy and tired from the drugs wearing off, when we get home, he leaves his clothes a mess on the floor. He wears superhero underwear. I’ve seen them before. Last time, that’s when I started worrying, when I saw the muscly print. I knew what was going to happen next, sex, but I didn’t know how humans did it. Staying very still, abdomen to abdomen, like butterflies? Becoming a vibrating ball like rabbits? Or like worms? I had asked Lou about it but he had said he wasn’t a specialist when it came boy/girl sex. He’d told me to watch porn, but Zorra had said “Absolutely not!” and Lexie had said “Watch Erika Lust,” but I trusted Zorra more. So there I was, with no idea.

All the worrying, it turned out, was for nothing. As soon as my skin touched his, I knew what to do. It was easy. It was like dancing. I just had to let myself be led by the music left over in our ears. Until… just like last time, nothing is working, especially not Mauro’s penis. He isn’t apologetic. He is frustrated and moans that the universe is being unfair to him. I, on the other hand, am quiet. I know he doesn’t have this problem with Sofia, who he fucks, loudly, in her bedroom, while we pass around lines in the living room. I am chasing familiar explanations down sineous paths that spell out “It’s your fault.” Though, the others don’t agree. Lou: “It’s probably just the coke.” Zorra: “He cares too much about you.” Lexie: “Fucking loser. Don’t waste your time.”

He met Daphne one mad morning. We had been running around Where Worms, he lifted his arms up and asked me to smell him. Because I stank too, we went into the bathroom and found a manly stick of deodorant behind the mirror. He pulled up his T-shirt and had me apply it on his armpits. He did the same to me, and because everyone stank we went up to other worms and asked “Would you like to be deodored?” Some did. Many did not. 

As Where Worms emptied, Mauro disappeared. I noticed it in my high’s lulls. I looked around the small room and asked Lou if he’d seen him, but Lou didn’t care. He was busy chasing his own rabbit. Was Mauro spinning Sofia behind the bar? Or matching salsa steps with a grey haired cuban women, like last time? He was on the couch that happens to be in the big room that day. There was no music playing there, and some morning light fell on the tired hardwood floor and the couch’s fake leather. He was speaking to some people I didn’t know and he didn’t introduce me, so I knew he’d found someone, and I walked away, politely.

Until the following Thursday, I didn’t know how precious his find. I found out in a gas station parking lot, behind a small door leading to a large room where parties sometimes go to die. It’s usually white and smelly, but that evening, there was an armchair in a corner, rugs on the floor, and a warm orange light like that of a fireplace. The room wasn’t very full yet, and I spotted Mauro right away, swaying in an unreachable cloud. Behind him, looking at the floor, Daphne was dancing in her own cloud. Her cloud was silver lined with golden hair falling around her plump face. A flame fluttered in her eyes, and when her lips met as she inhaled to say hi, they formed the trembling shape of a rippling wave. Then, she smiled, and it was warm. The flame grew into a fire. It heated up the cloud and shattered it, like glass, into sun shards floating on a quiet sea. She, like Mauro, is from the Mediterranean. Daphne’s light sticks in my eye long after I’ve closed them. I stop wanting Mauro. I have found something far more interesting, and I can’t stop looking. 

I meet up with Daphne in her yard, a few blocks from Where Worms, one afternoon that Spring. I bring a liter of cheap white wine, and we curl up on a swing sofa, the cushions of which have turned gray and itchy in the rain. We start talking. She tells me about Adrien, the boy she loved that died. They walked around Manhattan during hurricane Sandy, after the electricity went out. They went all the way to the waterfront and looked at the waves break into drops of white that glowed in the night. She tells me she got the phone call from Mexico just a few days later, about the car crash. I tell her I’ve never been in love. I spent my hurricane Sandy eating strawberries and fluff with Lou and Lexie, on our couch. She tells me she went to Berlin, after Adrien died, and lost track of life in the labyrinths of bass. I tell her I watched the sun rise on the East River once and got hypnotized by the honey splinters in a German boy’s eyes. She tells me to listen to Kid’s Play by Ian Pooley and I tell her to listen to the remix by Stimming, and we dance to both infinitely. She asks about Mauro, and who I think he is.  So I tell her about the dreidels of his presence, and I don’t tell her about the sharpness of his absence, because people in love don’t listen. We talk and talk and the afternoon turns into evening and the evening into night and the next day into a week, and another week into a month. She drops out of school. I quit my job. We get more wine. We look at the leaves and the sun and call our talks the drawer conversations. We burrow through a never ending dresser, opening drawers, and drawers in drawers, inspecting each one meticulously, and forgetting what larger drawer we had opened in the first place. The words spill out of her like water, jetting out at times in her charming short attention span way, and I soak them up. 

Meanwhile, Mauro moves into her home. At Where Worms, he makes Sofia twirl and Daphne asks me to go dance between them. He calls Daphne and I lesbians for spending too much time in the bathroom together, even though it was only because Daphne couldn’t pee, and I was begging her to hurry, because the ketamine made it look like the checker pattern on the floor was being inhaled by one corner of the room. 

Daphne loves ketamine. Mauro and I don't really get it at first. We snort the stuff and look at each other with a shrug. And then, we take more. Ketamine is like walking in a park, on a dirt ground after it has rained. There are big puddles all around, the kind you would carefully avoid to keep your white and green sneakers clean. But not on ketamine. On ketamine, you jump right in, white and green sneakers first, and discover they are deep, deep pools, and sink all the way to the bottom. Looking up, you can see light coming through the spots where the puddles were on the ground. Down there, the world is mute. The pressure makes it hard to move, like wigging a pinky is a life well-lived. It’s fun. It’s walking on Daphne’s kitchen counters and rediscovering the apartment from above. It’s running around the party with a disposable camera and yelling at people “Follow the flash! Follow the flash!” when we take misframed selfies with them because we truly believe that focusing on the square of light it leaves behind will lead us somewhere. But it’s also paranoia. It’s the Where Worm crew turning on each other. It’s them arguing about money and titles. It’s friendships turning ugly and never going back. It’s waking up after a few months feeling a lot dumber than when you started.

I take the few steps up to the Where Worms rooftop where the sky is drying up and turning pale, looking for Daphne. She is alone, sitting on a rotting rolled up rug. She has been crying. The flame has gone out. 

I ask “What happened?” as I lay her head against my chest, but she doesn’t want to say. She wants to protect him from what I already know. Finally, she interrupts her rhythmic gasps to take a deep, painful breath, and says “He is angry. He gets in these moods where I can’t do anything right. He yells until he is exhausted. Nothing will make him stop. I don’t think he wants to stop. He says that it’s just who he is, and I should love all of him unconditionally, even the anger.” Then, there is silence like after a difficult question. But I don’t have any answer other than “Leave him.” All I have is anger. Not an anger like his, not like the white of waves. My anger is cold and runs deep down my spine and breaks something at the bottom of me into cutting disappointment. I thought that if Mauro looked into the pile of ashes I am looking at now, he would know to leave her alone. 

Daphne and I walk back down stairs through the trap door into the small room. I see Mauro, sitting, surrounded by five men dressed in long black T-shirts, cutting generous lines of coke on his leather wallet, and I feel no tenderness. 

It’s hard with Daphne now. The little things are heavy. Our conversations are interrupted mid-sentence because she is fighting by text with Mauro. We can’t go out because she can’t party without Mauro. We sit at home and wait for Mauro. He’s never charming around me anymore. I don’t let him. I hold on to my disappointment like a weapon. I hold on to it because someone has to. I hold on to it because Daphne keeps forgetting. But the more they fight, the more committed they seem to staying together. And the more useless I feel, standing in their living room, cutting my hands on my own disappointment, acting as a buffer until I go home and finally let them fight.

At home I realize, there isn’t much left. I’m out of money and out of dopamine. I don’t know what to do with myself.  

The Where Worm crew is fighting as well, so much so that before we know it, we’ve spent our last week-end at Where Worms. It’s a good one. The DJ in the small room has long hair that goes back and forward on his Iron Maiden t-shirt as he rocks over the controller. He plays Kerri Chandler's Brooklyn (where I live) and everybody sings. My feet are killing me, but I want to dance forever. I take off my sneakers and get on the couch at the back of the room. There is no bounce to it at all. My feet sink in and I try to pick them up to the bass. I know I look ridiculous, digging myself out of a beige marshmallow, but I don’t care. I want to dance forever.

And then it’s over. Other mornings are spent at other parties, but they’re not Where Worms. Nothing will ever be Where Worms ever again. On one of those mornings, Daphne calls me. She tells me Lexie was found hanging from an electrical cord, her eye dangling from its socket. My heart stops. 

We take drugs because the world is painful to look at. Because we want to escape the ugliness. Then we take more drugs to not think about the ugliness it took for the drugs to get to us in the first place. But in the end, only a deadly amount of drugs can make us blind. 

I run to the restaurant where Mauro works. We hug for a long time. Daphne is there, and the three of us ride the train back to Brooklyn in silence. She is holding him and she is holding me. Lexie’s voice rings messily in my ear. She introduced us all, Mauro, me, the Where Worms crew. It’s what she did, dug tunnels between the friends that will rely on each other to grieve her. She spun a web at the bottom of the wormhole to catch us in our fall. 

We take the Metro North to her funeral. Lou holds my hand, and we joke around so we don’t cry. It’s a suburban house we walk up to in the dark with others we wouldn’t usually see on a Tuesday. Inside, grown ups talk softly, while we sit in the back and brace ourselves. She is lying in the front, in beige ruffles. We have to walk up, one by one, and say goodbye to a wax statue of her. And she isn’t the only statue. Those sitting in the front row look and feel like marble. 

I can only look a moment. I close my eyes and bring her back in her underwear, picking a white knit top with a tight skirt and a bold gold necklace from a rack of carefully curated clothes, and laying them on her bed, in the bedroom next to mine. She makes astutes remarks about my own outfit options while applying her make-up, and then we head out. I get annoyed at the tinny step her short legs make in that tight skirt while I stride ahead, impatient to get to the party. I wish I’d slowed down. Together we’ve been to clubs, warehouses, boats, basements and backyard. I’ve danced while she laughed and talked and flirted, picked out the best people to bring home and continue the party with. So why do I get to stay? I think many of us ask ourselves this question. The boy she loved who sits so stiffly by her casket, the friend who found her, whose skin looks grey, the people who only knew her happy, who only knew her on the week-ends. 

We decide to organize our own memorial, in Brooklyn, with candle light and baby’s breath. We get a good price on the top floor of a newly renovated building. Daphne is working behind the bar. Her hair flies around as she pours drinks. I look at it shine. Mauro sits down next to me and we talk. We haven’t talked in a long time. We don’t talk about Lexie. We don’t talk about the mushroom trip we had all together on another rooftop, not long after we met, when we all hid under a blanket. We laughed a lot that day but it’s not what we talk about. We talk about the new designer drug that’s all the rage. Mauro says it’s soft and dreamy and happy and you shouldn’t take more than half a pill because it’s strong. I say I’d like to try it.

The light outside is turning blue and the room inside is lit with gold. Mauro is dancing next to me, right in front of the DJ. I see him like he used to be, wet lips and loving eyes. He turns to me and tells me to open my mouth. I do. He places half a pill of 2CP on my tongue.

3. Rivers

I pull my sleepy tongue away from my palate. Damn. It’s sour in there. Real sour. I didn’t brush my teeth. I should have. Maybe that would've helped me sleep. 

My ears aren’t buzzing so much anymore. I can hear the silence of the apartment and the ambulances outside. Why do they have to be so loud? Why do they have to yell like that?

Alright. Brushing my teeth. Toothbrush. Bathroom. Walking. Feet. Let’s go. Feet. Feet. Feet? Hello?! Are they sleeping? When did that happen? Why do they get to go to sleep? 

I guess my mouth is staying sour then. I’ll just look at these yellow twinkles on the wall, the ones not staying still. Kind of looks like… kind of looks like me… Why is my face twinkling on the wall? I better close my eyes. My eyelids are tired anyways, they’re tingling like crazy… Oh! No, bad idea. It’s even more twinkly in here, and spinny too. Very spinny. Let me keep these eyes open. Maybe… I wonder what’s going on on the ceiling. What are they showing up there? Seems like my hands are cooperating. Okay, here we go. Hands by my shoulders… let me push… now for the flip. I am a pancake, just a big fat pancake. Uuh… It’s nice up here. My face feels cool… Uh… Nice. Let's see what they're showing up on the ceiling. It’s… Oh, wow… I know what this is. This is last night. This is Sofia’s hair. 

She was dancing all the way in the front, and her hair was up in a complicated do. She’s blonde, like thoses twinkles, and she had clipped little birds on her head. They were perched between braids and tufts. They moved around with her. She has an elegant head. Or maybe it’s her neck, the way it curves into a straight line. Something about it is sophisticated. She was swaying, and even from the back of her head you could tell her eyes were closed because of the way her hands moved outside the rhythm. And also because she kind of jumped when someone came up to talk about the birds in her hair. She smiled at them or put her palms together in thank you, and went right back to the music. She didn’t want to miss a note. She’s young. She’s only been dancing for a few years. She can give her body to the music, and turn off her mind, no words, not one. Just music. 

She came to hug me goodbye and one of the birds looked at me right in the eye, it’s plastic beak against my  nose -real feathers though. So I said “bye” to the little guy and she said “bye” back. Then I watched it fly away, stopping every few steps to say goodbye. She said goodbye like an apology.  

My phone just buzzed. Let’s see, who is it? 

Aki.

“We still meeting at Rabbithole?”

Good question. Are we? Can I? Can I get out of this bed? Get my feet to work? Brush my teeth? Walk the couple of blocks over? Can I?

“You want me to pick you up?”

She knows me.

“Yes!”

“K. Be there soon.”

Alright. She can carry me, we can be a two headed insect again. Save me, Aki, smelling good from a full night's sleep.  

After Sofia left, I stayed. The sun was rising but I stayed. My people had gone home but I stayed. The music had gotten monotonous but I stayed. I was looking at a tall guy with curly hair. He danced stiffly, his knees jerking up and down and his hands in two loose fists, stayed low by his thighs. He had a long skinny nose and bony cheeks, but his lips were plump and curvy. And when I caught his eyes, I discovered an unusually soft gaze for a blue one. We looked at each other furtively  for a while, as the room emptied. Every time the emptiness jumped at me, I went to the bathroom to do a bump. On one such excursion, I found myself in line behind him. Max. 

When I came out of the bathroom, he was waiting for me leaning against a black wall. We walked to the smokey area outside, and sat in a ray of sunshine. We let it warm our faces and shared a cigarette.

Max is a nostalgic. He prides himself on knowing how it used to be. 

“I wish I had experienced it, he said, with his words and with his hands, when it was all sweaty gay men in a warehouse, one DJ for 10 hours. Black gay men. When it was only house music. Now there’s so much choice. Do you want old school deep house or the new slow stuff? Techno or minimal? Trance or EDM? Do you want to party inside or outside, in a club, a warehouse, on a boat? In the afternoon, the night or the morning? Do you want to party with straight people? Gay people? Young people? Old people? Rich people? Less rich people? So many decisions to make before even hitting the dancefloor.”

“You’re not really presented with all the choices at once, though. You find one thing which leads you to another, then another… At least if we started with all the options, we’d try all the things, and maybe switch it up. But what we really want is to get caught up in one thing, follow a tribe.”

“And then sometimes, we party in unexpected places with unexpected people, and those are the parties we remember the most.”

“My parents met at the Paradise Garage, actually,” I tell him, knowing he’ll be impressed. 

“That’s very cool. So they must have been okay with you being gay.”

“Yeah, she was cool with it. She did give me a life supply of condoms. The whole AIDS thing really put a damper on the whole sweaty gay men thing back then.”

Max doesn’t answer, and in his silence, the echo of what I just said sounds cold. I think that’s it. I think he is going to walk away from the awkwardness. But he doesn’t. He points to a couple engaged in a strange something, between a dance and a seizure. 

“What do you think’s going on there?” He asks.

“I don’t know.” I feel my lips smiling.

We talked a while more, exchanged numbers, kissed before getting up and walking our separate ways into the light. I smile. I turn on my side and the blanket becomes his arms. I think I pass out. 

The doorbell rings. Elie can get it. I hear him say “Is it bad?” and Akimbo answers “Yeah, it’s pouring.” She knocks on my door before opening it. She’s drenched. She’s holding a wet to go coffee cup in her hand and gives it to me. 

“Wow! For me? A single use cup with a plastic lid?” 

Akimbo doesn’t kid with single use plastic.

“Yeah well you better recycle it because if that lid ends up in the sea, I will find you and throw you to the fishies,”she threatens in all seriousness. 

“I mean… they need it, they haven’t had a plastic free meal since 1993.”

“You think you’re plastic free?” She pretends to laugh and it makes me smile. “How was last night?”

“It was good.”

Narrating a party always felt weird to me.

“Shall we?” and the impatience in her voice wakes up my legs. I nod yes.

“Let’s go,” she says. Back in the day, she would have been in this bed with me, lighting joint after joint and smoking the hangover away, until there were no more sparkles on the wall, but not anymore. Akimbo doesn’t smoke, and if she goes out, she leaves before most. I don’t think she judges herself for her years of indulgence, but she definitely judges me for still indulging. I put on my yellow and red rain boots, grab my green umbrella, and we leave my house. Outside, it smells like water. The sidewalk is so wet there are no puddles to jump in. It's more like walking in the shower, the shower I didn't take because I was too exhausted. 

We wait to be seated by the hostess’ stand. There’s a woman we know at a table by the window. She is looking intently at nothing. She has grey messy hair past her skinny shoulders, ripped jeans, a 50s black leather jacket on a grey basic tee, and a heavy silver necklace with three triangular lapis lazuli gemstones. Her red mudd skin is thick and her pores reach deep into it. I point her out to Akimbo with my chin. With her eyes she tells me she’s recognized her. Her arms usually swing to the beat like two dislocated wings as her knees wiggle to and away from each other. In the summer, the lathery skin on her stomach moves to the rhythm, and she looks straight into the sky. But now she’s just sitting. We get seated at the table next to hers. We nod and smile in acknowledgment but she doesn’t see us. Even though her lips don’t move, I can hear Akimbo say “It’s awkward sometimes, seeing worms in the daylight.” Akimbo and her worms. We both always thought she would be a zoologist, specializing in invertebrates. She would have a giant lab with no floor so she could study the soil. But now she works on a linoleum floor as an unpaid intern in an environmental NGO. Which is very impressive for a girl with no degrees.

“So tell me about this guy,” Akimbo says right away. She made me tell her about Max on the walk over.

“Curly. I think he doesn't pick up on awkwardness.”

“Sometimes I think it’s us who are over sensitive to it.”

“Maybe.”

We talk about our food options, rabbit stew for me, carrot salad for Akimbo, and order. Then, we turn back to the rain. In yellow patterns, the canopy above the brook dances on the window. 

The day after I found Akimbo, we went back to the buildings, the rush, to the pollution, to thinking of having to work the next day, of paying rent at the end of the month and of doing laundry, and Akimbo became heavy. I started to feel the weight of her on my back. I realized I had brought back a small, but full person from the woods, so I didn't take her to my apartment. We went to the only person I knew who could help me carry this load. We headed to Loisaida.

I put Akimbo down on my childhood  doormat, the  one with a faded red apple on it, and started looking for my keys in the pack on Akimbo’s back. Through the door, my mom’s tunes were pumping faintly. The keys were at the bottom of the bag. Why do they always dig their way down there? I took out my towel and handed it to Akimbo, but she didn’t take it. She was staring at the door.  

“Hey!” I said, annoyed. Akimbo looked at me. There was shock in her eyes. She looked back at the door, and stepped closer to it. She stood on two toothpick legs with a bag bigger than herself on her back, forgetting she didn’t know how to stand, wild eyed, her ear against the beating metal door, and she asked “What’s that?”

I had to laugh. “That’s disco,” I said, and right then, Zorra opened the door. She looked at the small white girl wearing my clothes, and then at me. She shook her head no, but after a few seconds, she let us in. 

Zorra was a teacher, and she taught Akimbo. She more than taught her, she raised her, like she had raised me. She took this twig of a girl and grew her into a woman. No one asked her to, except me maybe, but she did it anyway. I wonder if she wanted to, sometimes, but I think wanting meant something different to my mother. 

I think there had been two kinds of wanting in her life. She had wanted my father after seeing his hips move on Larry Levant’s dancefloor, and she had danced her way over. She had wanted many silk head scarves, handkerchiefs and neckerchiefs, colorful, bright or pastel, floral, animal design or print, patterned, colorblocked, African inspired, Orientalist or European, Halston, Gucci, Fiarucci. She saw them in thrift stores or on 5th avenue. She wrapped them around her 4a hair, her neck or her waist. They hung delicately inside her closet door, in a contraption made of toilet paper rolls she and I built when I was a boy. We stapled the rolls together, one for each scarf, and added to it with each new purchase. The other kind of things Zorra had wanted were abstract. First, she had wanted to have fun. She had wanted it without detail. She had let life give it shape, the shape of her older brother taking her from Harlem to music filled nights in Soho, the only place where her soul went quiet, where she could truly focus,  get to know each of the music’s repetitive lines, discover her wordless self, listen more and hear the changes, anticipated, but still, suprinsing, get to know them too and adapt, until each part of the music claimed a part of her body, until her feet were the bass and her arms were the snare, her fingers were the violins and her head was the voices, until her hips were the saxophone. Then, she had wanted to support herself. Because dancing on the week-ends wasn’t enough dancing for Zorra, a friend she’d met at the Garage took her to her Bomba class on the East Side. Although Zora wasn’t Puerto Rican, she knew the language of African drums and improvisation. Zorra danced downtown several times a week, after long days of bagging groceries, East side Monday to Thursday, West Side Friday Saturday. Rest on Sunday. She took the train from Harlem, danced, and sometimes had dinner at her dance teachers house -Susana, when it was too late and too dangerous to take the subway back. She helped in the kitchen and putting the children to sleep. Then they stayed up drinking beer and looking at pictures of Susana in Puerto Rico, when she didn’t know snow. Then Zorra slept on the couch, under a crochet blanket. Soon, Zorra became Susana’s assistant, before teaching her own classes on 9th and C. She had wanted her own place to live, close to her new job, and her new friends. One of the units in Susana’s building soon became available. Finally, she had wanted to fight for the people who were becoming her people. She had fought for her neighborhood, dancing in the parade, signing petitions, helping to maintain her building after the landlord abandoned it and putting up posters that let people know they lived in Loisaida, not in the East Village. She hadn’t won all the fights. A few years back, when the after school dance program she had worked hard to build was defunded because the young Whites moving into the neighborhood didn’t have children, there was nothing she’d been able to do, other than retire. And her children were now the childless invaders of another neighborhood, on the other side of the bridge. 

What she hadn’t done was obsessively imagine herself on top, picturing every detail of success, and believe the inspirational memes that told her not to compromise, never to settle. She had never had the luxury to be tempted to do so. She had let the things she had gotten for herself become the things she wanted: the one bedroom she raised me in, which had been too small for a while, but then just the right size again; the wooden spice rack in the kitchen, which grew with the arrival of new immigrants; her record collection, and the state of the art DYI sound system my father had built for her, almost every part of which she had replaced over the years, most recently with the help of my tech wizz of a cousin. 

That’s how Zorra’s life had happened, and to me, telling it now, it seems like it couldn’t have happened any other way. 

But it could have. I could have never brought Akimbo back from the forest. She could’ve enjoyed her own space, in her newly perfectly sized apartment. The moment she saw Akimbo though, she had wanted for her to be okay, and the only way for it to be so was for Zorra to roll up her sleeves, and help. She taught Akimbo how to dance, how to walk, how to cook, she asked around and took Akimbo to Queens, to the street where fake social security cards are made, and together they stood nervously while waiting for the guy to come back, hoping he hadn’t just ran off with the 80$. She let Akimbo listen to her record collection, alphabetically, from Afrika Baambata to Womack & Womack, one by one, making three piles, love dance, love chill, not for me. She took Akimbo to get a library card and got her the books she had loved, in  no particular order, Langston Hughes poems and others by Audre Lorde. Akimbo’s thirst for knowledge could be clenched by no amount of water. She drank it all up. She knew she was lucky. Like me, she did not want to disappoint Zorra. But then, she did.

I can feel Akimbo shiver with embarrassment. “Go ahead, tell it,” she says. 

Akimbo took one of the few jobs you can take with a fake social security number. She was a waitress. She didn’t have a talent for it. She was clumsy and forgot things. Being on her feet for hours was less than ideal. Once she ordered filet mignon instead of skirt steak four times in one shift. The shame of it kept her up at night. And that was what saved her. That’s why she didn't lose her job. She cared. The worse she did, the more she cared.

She also took pride in the fact that she got better. After a year, she was more efficient and rarely made mistakes. She even got involved, tried to make the workplace better, went to staff meetings, and listened through the complaints, and brainstormed for solutions - but restaurants are dictatorships. The responsibilities piled higher and higher, the struggles for self-importance raged on, the animosity between the servers, who got all the money, and the busboys - sorry bussers - sorry server assistant - who changed names but not pay, and the kitchen staff who continued to be paid even less, crystallized, while the yelp reviews got reviewed, and the managers called the shots. So, as the job got easier, Akimbo started to care less. As restaurant owners revealed themselves to be egomaniacs and/or drunks, she cared less. As customers turned out to be whiny brats, she cared less. It became apparent neither cared about her, so she cared less. The money was good, however, and that was her only option, really, so she continued. 

Even though she cared less, the dreams never stopped. She dreamt up restaurants: a marble and gold room with a bar in the middle on the ground floor of a lighthouse surrounded by tall yellow grass swept in the wind; a giant fish shack with christmas lights on a string lolling on the white walls, feet in the sand of a beach with no sea; dining rooms next to each other but on slightly different levels, like on the Meditterrean mountain side, one is yellow, one is red, one is blue but all with vines as a ceilings; tables around fake roman columns lite in blue and purple from the base, and faceless customers holding hands over glasses of wine. They only had one thing in common. Too many tables and only one waitress -her- roaming the room, looking for orders to be taken during a shift that never ended.  

Sometimes, I picked her up after her shift and walked her the five blocks to Zorra’s. One night, I couldn’t really see in the dark, but I could hear her silence, the specific silence that doesn’t want to reveal a voice breaking. I let her be silent. There’s nothing worse than not having the privacy to cry. I should know. Behind the two cotton sheets I tie-dyed in purple and burgundy to match the carpet and hung in a corner of the living room to make a third wall to my room, I’d mastered the art of the silent cry, less Zorra hear a whimper and tear the fabric away, pierce me with her unblinking eyes that say “You better tell me everything right now.” The same stare she’d given Akimbo when the corner lamp with the fringes dancing from the shade revealed her raw face. Zorra didn’t see anyone’s privacy but her own. She made Akimbo tell.

“I got fired.”

Zorra didn’t blink.

“Why?”

“A comment on yelp said I was racist.”

Zorra blinked. She asked, louder:

“Were you?”

Neither Zorra or Akimbo had anticipated that after a while, Akimbo’s consumption of black culture would look like gluttony, slurping on a supersized coke while swinging her hips, gobbling up burgers and dropping ketchup between pages. I could have, though. She’d twirled out of that brook and into life with an ease that made me uneasy, and I’m left doing the heavy lifting in this story, dealing with the realities. To my mother, the brook thing had always been more a metaphor for whatever crummy corner I’d found Akimbo in, and her getting fired for racism was proof that she hadn’t come out of nowhere. 

“Mom, I found her there. I saw it with my own eyes. She’s been in the world, privilege and all, for a couple of years now. What this is proof of is that that’s all it takes.”

“People only come out of rivers in books, the fully grown ghosts if babies*, and I don’t believe in ghosts.”

“What about Moses?”

She turned to Akimbo. “How do you think you’d do in the desert?” 

Akimbo smiled. 

“I think it’s time you learned about your own people,” said Zorra.

So Akimbo did. And the more she learned about them, the less she could accept that white people were her people. Which baffled Zorra, who had never been given a choice in the matter. Even in Loisaida, they called her la negra.

But still, Zorra adopted Akimbo so she wouldn’t have to work as a waitress anymore. 

My mom’s favorite song was My House by Diana Ross. She blasted it on Sunday mornings, and on Sunday mornings only. “If you really care about a song, only listen to it one day a week. You can listen to it 100 times on that day if you want, but only one day a week. Preserve it. Don’t use it up, otherwise it’ll be no good to you,” she said. So on Sunday mornings, while making pancakes and bacon for brunch, Diana sang and Zorra mouthed the words with delight. I was in charge of air trumpeting the brass section that came in after the first chorus. Akimbo did the flutes in the last part of the song. “There’s my chair, I put it there...” and we circled the seaweed green leather armchair she had positioned by the window to sit in and catch the sunshine on her face while listening to her less dancy records. “On the table, there sits a rose…” and we pointed to the single flower she bought at the bodega in preparation of her Sunday performance, and placed it in a blue glass vase with a little water -a sunflower though because that was more her style. “There’s a candle, to light the stairs…” and we turned to the wall by the entrance door, to an imaginary staircase, up to a second floor she could never afford. “There’s my name on the ceiling above, ‘cause it was built for looooooooo-ooo-ooove, it was built for loooooo-o-o-o-ooove” and we spun looking at the yellow ceiling with our arms in the air.

Sundays like these were few and far apart. Akimbo and I spent our Sundays dancing in sweaty crowds, and Akimbo felt guilty about that. She’d ask “What do you think Zorra doing right now?” and annoyed the life out of me. 

“I don’t know. She’s fine.” 

And she was. She spent her Sundays running errands and talking at old deli counters that gentrification hadn’t yet closed down, about what had changed and what had remained the same. She grabbed tacos at the mexican deli on A between 13th and 14th and talked about what had changed and what had remained the same. She went to the japanese hair salon facing the park, not to get her hair done, they didn’t know how to do her hair, but to talk about what had changed and what had remained the same. She went home and cooked dinner for herself and a friend or a family member, and talked about what had changed and what had remained the same. Then, after closing the door behind her guest, she put away the dishes she had cleaned while the conversation was still going, she turned off the lights in the kitchen and in the living room, and stopped the turntable last. She went into the bathroom, wiped the lipstick and mascara off her face, wrapped her hair in a red silk scarf. In the bedroom, she took off her clothes and draped them over the back of the wooden chair by her dresser and slipped into her white cotton nightgown. She took off the small and thick hoops from her ears, the two golden rings on her left hand, the pink flowered one I got her for her 35th birthday on her right ring finger, and put them in the small porcelain plate on top of the dresser. She pulled back the heavy blanket and the light purple top sheet, and got into bed. She turned off the light on her night stand and closed her eyes. She did not dream.

“What? How do you know she didn’t dream?” Akimbo violently turns her head to face me, the red bow from my mother’s red scarf bounces on her forehead. 

“I can’t picture my mother dreaming. She was too old to dream. What would she dream about?”

“How would I know? But she definitely dreamt. I wish we’d asked her. I’m sure she had some crazy 1970s dreams.”

“What are 1970s dreams?”

“I don’t know, hippy trippy dreams.”

“My mom didn’t have trippy hippy dreams!” I say, offended. “If anything, she was a disco queen all the way.” 

“Okay, then maybe she had disco trippy dreams.”

“No she didn’t.” I’m shaking my head.

“You don’t know!”

I know what she didn’t dream about: pulling her teeth out. They grow back and I pull them right back out again, over and over, even though I shouldn’t, even though being teethless scares me, I can’t stop because of the satisfying succion when the teeth tears away from the gum. I wake up and sigh with relief to the feel of smooth hardness against my tongue. My mother was too old for teeth pulling dreams. Those dreams live in the head of people who can’t stop choosing today over tomorrow. My mother’s dilemma was with yesterday. Her life was set. Her cards had been dealt. What do you dream about once that happens? 

“A person’s life is never set. If you think for one moment you’re set, that’s when it’ll come tumbling down on you,” Akimbo says, expertly.

“So what’s going to happen to you?”

“I could never be promoted and have to quit and work as a full time bartender. I could get cancer. Or, you know, tornadoes, rising sea levels, food shortages… Pick your poison."

At least Zorra won’t have to pick.

“She did pick. She chose to live, everytime. I don’t like how you tell the story. Like she had no choice in taking me in. She did have a choice. She missed you. She told me so. She said you brought me to her like you threw a life line. She hoped your raising me would bring you two together again.”

Ouch.

After the sun fell again on Sunday nights, or rose again, on Monday mornings, Akimbo and I sat on the subway. We wore a trusty pair of sunglasses from our respective collections, our skins looked dry and thin and our lips, puffy, shook sometimes but a feeling of superiority held our chin at a right angle to our necks. We giggled at the people going to work, at my mother making breakfast, because we were embalmed in a secret. We smelled. We stunk the stench of the underground. We were part of the army that crawls out of dark rooms after sunrise. You see us stumble, chapped lipped and empty eyed, and you think “Somebody had fun last night... “ and you know what? We did.

Aki deserted the army a few weeks after Lexie’s funeral. She retreated. She shielded herself behind her comforter. She stopped leaving her cotton castle, unless it was to make a few dollars guarding a fortress of coats. It was the only job she could do since she had lost control of her lacrimal glands. We looked that up. “I just start crying. Nothing happens. I don’t feel sad. They just fall out of my eyes. I never really had control of my lacrimal glands but this is just lacrimal incontinence at this point. I cry paying for groceries. I cry walking down the street. I’m crying right now.” And she was. So she hid under the covers for a few months, watched every nature documentary she could get her eyes on, to give her tears a meaning, until one Tuesday evening. 

 Zorra brought me to Aki’s tiny room at the very top of a four story skinny house that leaned to the right. I followed her up the wobbly staircase and looked at my feet as to not fall down the small steps and because I thought this was a bad idea. I thought only Aki could save Aki. I thought about how I would feel if Zorra and Akimbo showed up at my door and coaxed me out of my cocoon before I was ready. While she knocked on the door, I looked at the roommates doors and prayed they wouldn’t open. Before Akimbo answered, Zorra walked in and peeled the fluffy shell off of Akimbo, who was in a small ball in the blue light of her computer. Zora said: “Put your shoes on, we’re going.” Immediately, brooks formed on Akimbo’s cheeks, but she didn’t argue. She never had and she didn’t have the strength to start then. She slid her feet into her sneakers and took the hand Zorra was giving her. Mom took my hand at the end of her other arm and we started down the narrow stairs, sideways, like a family of crabs. We rode the M train in silence, looking at the patchwork of brick, steel, concrete and shine on both sides of the orange river, the view that always made New York worth it. 

Zorra and I sat in uncomfortable plastic chairs. She had kept her black parka on even though the dry heat in the waiting room made my chapped lips chapper. She held her red fake leather purse tight against her stomach. She looked at the door in front of her, the one Akimbo had walked through with a small woman who wore magnifying glasses on her nose and spoke in a whisper with a strong Argentinian accent. I looked anywhere else, following the drama at the nurses’ station, arguments about schedules, the same arguments that were happening in small and large businesses all over the city. Just as one of the nurses swore she was going to have a word with the head nurse about her night shifts and the other one doubted it, Zorra turned to me and asked, a few decibels louder than necessary: “My son, how are you doing?” like it had just occurred to her that if one of her children was in trouble, she should also probably check on the other one, just to make sure. I had never heard my mom ask a question like that before. Zorra prided herself on being all knowing. In her mind, she could hear people’s heart rates in the beat of their voice. She came away from a conversation about the weather with her upstairs neighbor convinced that he felt guilty about a budding relationship only two years after his wife’s passing, and making guesses as to who the new woman could be. But right then, in her words and in her eyes, I could see the auburn rug from her living room had been pulled from under her. I took her hand.

“I’m good, mom. And so is Akimbo. I know you think she needs help but she survived a year in a forest by herself. She can get through this. She just needs to be alone for a while, figure stuff out. She’s just hibernating.”

“She’s not hibernating Luis, humans don’t hibernate. She needs help, or a kick in the butt, or something.”

Under any other circumstances, I would have laid the case for human hibernation, but this wasn’t the time. Aki came out with a puffy face and Zorra hugged her. 

Aki never went back to the small Argentinian lady, and never took the drugs she was prescribed. Drugs were what had gotten her there in the first place. Not the same drugs, but close enough to scare Akimbo out of bed. She moved back in with Zorra, and on Sundays, we danced to Diana Ross again. Zorra and I watched Aki pick the next record from behind the kitchen counter and mom said: “See, I told you she needed help.” I laughed.

“It was never that bad mom, all it took was one shrink appointment.” 

Zorra frowns. Silently, we agree to disagree.

That last look on my mom’s face, the frowning one, it sticks, and I exhale a little too loud. Aki notices. She puts her hand on my knee, and to make matters worse, she asks: “Lou, what are you gonna do?”

Oh my god. The drama. Can’t I just breathe painfully for a second? I feel a powerful current running and I want it to take her. But I know it’s my fault she’s asking, really. I know I messed up. It’s because I told her about Edward Enninful. 

It started with Zorra’s scarfs. I wrapped myself in them and hung them on my arms and neck, a white and gold cheetah one on my hair, a blue one with yellow poppies around my waist and a purple chiffon one to cover my nipples. I walked down the small hallway and out into the living room for Zorra to see, but she didn’t find it as cool as I did, she just said: “Be careful with those!”. Later, when my bed was in a corner of the living room, behind my curtains, I rolled small pieces of scotch tape into tubes to make it double sided and taped i-D magazine covers on the walls. When I took the subway, I wore my favorite wool sweater, a black one that made my shoulders look broader than they were, and I crossed my legs and held my head graceful and grave, waiting to be discovered. It had happened for Edward, why shouldn’t it happen for me? When it didn’t happen, I walked up the steps out into the city that didn’t care about me, feeling chipped, like the porcelain cups in Zorra’s kitchen cabinet. The ones I’ve kept and never use. By the time I realized it was never going to happen, there wasn’t much left of me. I was all chipped off. 

I got a job in a thrift store, where I could run my hands on fabrics all day. The owner let me take pictures of Akimbo in the spiral staircase at the back of the store, the one that led down to the room where the smell of mold was almost impossible to get used to. The staircase was metal and painted in thick layers that peeled in  places, revealing past colors, surrounded by mirrors that made it look like there were five staircases. I dressed Akimbo in a blush tube dress, a blush swim cap and gave her blush eyelids. She wiggles around, looking like five worms trying to get up five staircases. I liked how it looked, then. The pictures got tapped on the thrift store walls, right above the staircase, and I felt really proud.

The pictures get dusty, the blush turns grey. I look at them one morning, feeling like why did I stop then? and remembering why. No one noticed them. Then my phone rings. It’s the hospital and they tell me that Zorra's died. My lungs fall out of my chest. They bounce down each step of the staircase, dotting the mirrors with red, and ending in the basement with a muffled splotch. I fall to the floor. They call Akimbo to come pick me up and clean up the mess. She does, and then she takes me home. She gets the flowers. She gets the candles. She calls the people. She tells them to meet in the community garden on 9th and C. They walk through the flowers, sit on the benches gathered here and there, and feed the turtles while remembering Zorra. They remember the dance moves, the scarves, the confidence. An old friend with a guitar sings salsa covers of Diana Ross. They reminisce about the Garage and I can’t be amazed or envious. I sit and watch bees and butterflies and feel about as much as the insects do. 

I feel like an insect for a week, until Akimbo brings me back to Zorra’s to decide what to sell, what to keep, and what to just hold to our chests, bowling, and unable to decide. That’s when, in the kitchen, behind plates and glasses, we found Zorra’s chipped porcelain cups. I held them, touched the grainy part of the rim, where it had been smooth, and when Akimbo asked, I told her about Edward Enningful. The look of sadness on her face told me I’d fucked up. It told me that’s who I was now, the guy who had wanted to be Edward Enningful, but had never become him. That’s who I will always be, until maybe one day I become something else. But there’s no end to this me in sight. 

It’s how she’s looking at me now when she asks “Why don’t you start taking pictures again? You could submit them to magazines… Doesn’t Sofia work at one?” 

The current inside me grows stronger. I want it to roll her up in  a big wave. 

“That’s not how it works. First I would need to buy a really good camera. I don’t have the money for a really good camera.”
“You could have the money, Lou. You could if you just stayed home a few week-ends.”

I want another wave to pile up right on the first one, and another one on top of the second, I want them to just keep coming, so she can never ever breath. But she ignores the thundering sound of the waves and goes on.

“Or you could send your pictures to Edward Enningful! Write him, tell him how much he means to you. He might write back, you never know.”
I want the wave to spit her out on a beach of pointy pebbles and sharp seashells shards that cut and bruise every inch of her skin. Why on Earth would she ever think it could be that easy?

“That’s not how it works, Akimbo. He probably gets thousands of these. Why would he ever write back?”

“If you’re talented he might.”

The anger rolls back with the waves and I realize it’s me that’s washed out on a beach. That’s the question, isn’t it, am I talented?

A surprisingly high voice for such a rough body, with a strong latin accent, comes out of the woman still sitting at the table next to us and says: “Talent is an opinion.”
The woman is smiling, indulgently. 

“I’m sorry to interrupt, but trust me, talent is an opinion. Some people will think you are talented, some people won’t. Including yourself depending on the day.” She pauses, but we don’t know what to say. “What matters is what you want to do with your time,” she continues. “If you have something to say, you’ll end up saying it.” She pauses again to let us speak, but we don’t, so she gets up and leaves. Through the window, she waves and mouths something that I think I recognize as “Suerte!” 

The waitress brings us our food. 

“See. Easy,” jokes Akimbo. We start eating. After a few bites I don’t feel myself tasting, Akimbo changes the subject.

“You know, this girl at work told me “zorra” means fox in Spanish. Why did Zorra have a Spanish name?” I begrudgingly take her cue. 

“She didn’t. My father gave her that name. And it doesn’t mean fox, it means slut. Or rather, it means both.” 

She never told him my name, but she did tell me his, like a DMV clerk categorizes the color of your eyes. Name: Eduardo, Nationality: Chile. He’d left during the junta, not really out of fear, more so out of craving for adventure, newness, movement. Or that’s what he’d told Zorra. Zorra thought maybe he’d been scared out of being scared. He had told her about his best friend disappearing, walking up to his apartment and finding it empty, and yet so full of his stuff on the floor everywhere. He looked and waited, but his friend never came back. So Eduardo left his town and his country and his continent and decided never to be afraid again. It’s that fearlessness, she said, that drew her to him, like something fundamental in both of them, at that moment, that made them recognize each other. It was the nature of that sameness that had failed to moor them together. It wasn’t a surefooted fearlessness, claiming its place, standing its ground, it was a daring one, eager to prove itself, and so, it made it hard to stay in one place. Zorra found it easy to let him go, eager to find out what was next. Each of them were in his&hers small boats, nodding at each other in acknowledgement of their shared interest in fishing, catching something and unhooking it with care, letting it play with their hand in the bucket and softening their gaze on the shiny scales before freeing it back into the water, admiring it’s souple movements over the boat’s edge while letting the current take them in the opposite directions. 

Zorra only told me the story once, because I never wanted to ask again. It left in me a shape like a whole. Something I fail to be. The edges of it make themselves known when something hurts me and I fail to admire it’s souple movement as I back away, everytime something resembles a fear I can’t keep at bay. 

As for Zorra’s name, it was the only thing Eduardo left behind. Well, that and me. She loved the nickname. She’d always fancied herself a bit of a Janie.*  But Susana told her -she had to- the meaning of zorra. And two tears fell out of my mother’s eyes. She said they fell out of her because of the shock. She would never admit it was from the pain. Susana had tried to soften the blow. She had told Zorra that a woman that couldn’t be kept did not represent the same thing in South America. She wasn’t to be burned at the stake -femicides were not counted as such until 2010 in Chile and 2014 in Puerto Rico. Rather, a woman like that was to be written and sung boleros and tangoes about. But that did not make Zorra feel better about the situation. She didn’t want to have to see Eduardo as a coward, who had left because he could not love someone who’d love him back. She had liked the idea that they had both loved, but not more than they had loved their freedom. She’d liked thinking that they’d drifted apart. He had made himself the victim of her imaginary sly ways, and she’d never gotten the chance to call him out on it.  Zorra told me that part later. It made the edges of the hole sharper. Like I’m failing my mother twice, once by not being like her, and once more by being like Eduardo. Zorra never was like Eduardo. Not one bit. She never lingered in her pain, wrote any song or ran away. By the time she got home from Susana’s, she knew she’d keep the name. Change its meaning. Make it hers. She made people call her Zorra until Zorra meant her. She made the insult disappear, and if anyone snickered, she snickered back: “So you know the word, don’t you? Let’s see you use it against me. Just try. See who comes out of it the slyest.” 

When we’re done eating, and pay the bill, and step outside, the rain has stopped. Puddles have formed in the cracks and crannies of the city floor. I am tired, finally. I want to go home. I want to sleep. I have to work tomorrow. I have to do laundry and pay rent at the end of the month. I tell Akimbo. 

“No, no, we have to go see the river before you go. It’s on your way anyways.” It’s not, but I don’t have the energy to fight her excitement. We walk, and she talks and I yawn. So she lets go of my arm and picks up the pace. Walks ahead a few steps of me. Turns around and stops. Looks at me defiantly. She’s next to a puddle.

“The floor is lava,” she says, and jumps in, sneakers first, splashing water on her jeans, and the unexpecting tourists who look at her, annoyed. I yawn again. “Come on! The floor is lava! You’re gonna die. You can’t die. I wouldn’t be able to live without you. You can’t abandon me. I need you!” ect. I know she won’t stop until I jump. But I don’t want to. I could just walk away, leave her in her puddle. I would. But I look down at my feet, happily dry in my yellow and red boots. They ask me “What do you want to do with your time?” Ughh.

So I hop. And we hop from puddle to puddle all the way to the East River.

We get there, laughy and breathy. We sit on two rocks and look at the patchwork of rust and silver buildings between the white sky and the white river. The view that makes New York worth it. There is a boat with a party on it. We can’t hear the music, but we can see the bodies moving together. They sway in a common motion, but each in their unique way. One is led by the sunglasses on her face, and another by the bangles on his wrists. Some are talking and just let the boat do the swaying. Many look out to us and feel every bit of air swipe over their faces. They are smiling. They are high. Will they remember this tomorrow? I want to take a picture.