tres leches

Overnights, 2001. He sits cross legged at the entryway to his riverside home. The portico protects him from the rain though he’s splashed by drops exploding onto the pavement. No one ever asked him about rain. No one asked if he liked it. He prefers not to say. Inside his home he makes food and eats it while watching the evening news. What he’s most afraid of is someone finding him out. Maybe afraid is too strong a term, it’s more like vague worry. After eating he washes his dishes and changes into uniform and leaves for the bank. The afternoon guard nods on his way out. An orange sunset like sorbet through the bank’s entrance windows. Shameful, he thinks, how easy it is. The focus remains. He moves through the bank lobby with 12 cameras following him to the meager room of security boxes and inserts the two different keys, rotates them, opens the door. A vault of 32 anonymous steel boxes. There is poetry in security. He pulls the blade from his pocket and slices the outside of each forearm, finger-painting blood onto the facades of the boxes and then, in a final act of protest, opens up each forearm artery, feeling no pain, grinning at the deep dark liquid draining away from him.

Black milk, 2016. Someone else, some other time woke alone and hungry, the cold wind sabotaging the walls, the floorboards. He thought he might be dead. He slept again and dreamed of fire, fire covering everything. He saw a bear on fire, running. He woke sweating and seriously ill to a knock at the door. It took two minutes in his weakened state to crawl and greet his friend checking on him in the blizzard. They arrived at a hospital within the hour, two nurses leaning over the patient. Bring that larger hose back around here, he heard a female nurse say, and then he was sedated to nothingness, not even blackness. Not even a place. He woke three days later. His friend said: …medically-induced coma to drain fluid from your head. They drained fluid from your heart. Viral infection. How did I get infected? the patient asked. They’re trying to figure that out, said his friend. It could be some bacteria or parasite inside you caused the infection. Or the parasite caused your immune system to backfire, to turn on itself. They’re ruling out probabilities. Who? asked the patient. The doctors, man, said the friend, looking around. Who else? Wait, are you all right? Hold on. You don’t look good. Hold on. Nurse! Nurse! Doctor!

Mayonnaise sky, 1979: The Cherokee stood watch at the front glass door. Two men in suits sat in the front seats of a parked black Lincoln at the far end of the block. The morning fog had lifted and milky sunlight coated the city. The Cherokee watched the men in the car and scanned the street. Paulie nearly soundless behind him counting and sorting bills at his desk. The Cherokee knew never to interrupt Paulie when he counted money. Twice this morning the Cherokee vomited uncharacteristically into the bathroom sink. His woman told him he was getting older and to see a doctor while he was in the city. She knew he carried a gun for a living but she didn’t know he’d used it to kill people. The black Lincoln crept away with the two suits inside. What do you see out there? Paulie asked, scooping banded stacks of worn bills into a backpack. Nothing, said the Cherokee, still, his eyes on the sidewalks, the cars, the road, the building windows, the rooftops. He reached for the shotgun out of habit and pinkied the barrel. A motorcycle growled up the street, howled past.

Last one, Paulie said. He hefted the backpack full of money off the desk and dropped it onto the floor next to three others. A fluorescent light blinked. Paulie began to fill another backpack with the last of the counted and banded cash. The Cherokee knew never to ask Paulie which drop would be first. Let’s go, Paulie said, scooting his chair back and lifting two backpacks of cash onto his shoulders. He motioned for the Cherokee to pick up the others. The Cherokee grabbed his shotgun and the bags of cash by Paulie’s desk and walked toward the back of the store to the other guard at the alley exit.

The Consumption of Zagreus

Zeus secretly begot his son Zagreus with Persephone before she was taken to the Underworld by her uncle Hades. One midnight, The Titans, Zeus’ enemies, lured young Zagreus away with toys. Zagreus showed courage when they murderously set upon him, and he undertook several transformations in attempts to delude them. He became Zeus in a goat-skin coat, Cronus making rain, a lion, a horse, a horned serpent, a tiger, and a bull. At that point the Titans seized him firmly by the horns and feet, tore him apart with their teeth, and devoured his flesh raw.

Athene interrupted this grisly banquet shortly before its end and, rescuing Zagreus’ heart, enclosed it in a gypsum figure, into which she breathed life; so that Zagreus became immortal. His bones were collected and buried at Delphi, and Zeus struck the Titans dead with thunderbolts.

_{Graves, Robert, The Greek Myths. Folio Society, London, 1960, re-published 1996: 118.}

Paraquat

The detective walks from the bar out to the heat and darkness. Sudden silence. Jasmine in the air, the fecund scent of a nearby creek. The scent of herbicide, the scent of engine exhaust. Birches scatter the wide field toward faraway hills—the trees appear as individual clusters but are one organism. Gravel and century-old pavement beneath his boots. Endless landscape awash in moonlight. Headlights approach from the distance, then the cataclysm of a tanker rig blasting through midnight. Silence returns gradually and the detective walks to the Jeep, driving south from marsh country with the wind whipping through the open vehicle.

Fifteen miles later he glides into an office park with few cars in the lot. Building C, Unit six. He parks at the entrance curb and kills the engine, then walks to the door and presses the button. The door buzzes open and he approaches the darkened front desk. A man appears in the shadows to his left and greets him apologetically.

Sorry to startle you, he says. The lights have been out all day. Follow me.

The detective follows the man down a hall into an office lit by a floor lamp connected to a portable electric generator.

Have a seat, says the man.

No, thank you, says the detective. This shouldn’t take long.

After a pause the man nods and leans over to pull open a desk drawer. The detective hates moments like this. Anything could be in that drawer. He holds his breath. The man lifts a folder from the drawer and reaches it across the desk for the detective to take.

It’s all there, says the man. Military record, current registered address. Names and addresses of family and friends, names of closest colleagues in the police force. A dozen or so photographs.

Thank you.

Destroy everything when you’re finished. I don’t want any more part of this.

The detective reaches into his rear pant pocket and tosses the small roll of rubber-banded cash at the man, who drops it, picks it up, drops it again.

The detective returns down the dark hall and outside to his Jeep. He wraps the folder in a towel from the back and secures it underneath the seat. He drives south and east with the moon’s guidance toward a most elusive goal: the confrontation of an injustice and the finality of its resolution.

The Night Gardener, Pt. II, by Benjamín Labatut

I met him in the mountains, in a small town where few people live save during the summer months. I was walking at night and I saw him, in his garden, digging. My dog crawled under the bushes, ran towards him in the dark, a short white flash in the moonlight. The man bent over, rubbed my dog’s head, went down on one knee as she offered her belly. I apologized, he said it was okay, that he loved dogs. I asked him if he was gardening at night. “Yes,” he said, “it’s the best time for it. The plants are asleep and they don’t feel as much, they suffer less when moved around, like a patient etherized. We should be wary of plants.” When he was a boy, there was a giant oak of which he had always been afraid. His grandmother hanged herself from one of its branches. Back then, he told me, it had been a healthy tree, strong and vigorous, while now, some sixty years later, its huge bulk was was ridden with parasites and rotting from the inside, so much so that he knew it would soon have to be removed, as it towered above his house and threatened to crush it if it came down. And yet he could not bring himself to fell the gargantuan thing, for it was one of the few remaining specimens of what used to be an old-growth forest that covered the land where his house and the whole town now stood, dark, foreboding and beautiful. He pointed at the tree, but in the dark I could see nothing save its massive shadow.

It was half dead, he said, rotten, yet still alive and growing. Bats nested inside its trunk and hummingbirds fed on the ruby red flowers of the parasitic plant that crowned its highest branches, the hermaphrodite Tristerix corymbosus, known locally as quintral, cutre or ñipe, which his grandmother used to cut back every year, only to see it regrow with stronger, denser blooms. “Why she killed herself I still don’t know. They never told me she had committed suicide, it was a family secret, I was young, no more than five or six at the time, but later, decades later, when my daughter was born, my nana, my nanny, the woman who raised me while my own mother went to work, told me, ‘Your grandmother,’ she said, ‘she hanged herself from that branch at night. It was awful, terrible, we could not cut her down until the police arrived, at least that is what they told us—“Don’t cut her down, leave her there”—but your father could not leave her hanging like that, he climbed the tree, higher and higher—no one understood how she had climbed so high—and removed the noose from her neck. She fell through the branches, landed with a thud. Your father started hacking away at the trunk with his axe, but his father, your granddaddy, would not let him. He said that she had loved that tree, she always had. She had seen it grow, tended and nurtured it, pruned and watered it, and fussed over every tiny detail. So it stayed there and it’s still here, though it’s going to have to come down, sooner rather than later.”

_{Labatut, Benjamín, from The Night Gardener, Part II, in When we Cease to Understand the World, trans. by Adrian Nathan West. The New York Review of Books, New York, 2020: 176.}

Aztec 52, by Eliot Weinberger

In the Aztec empire, every fifty-two years, once in an average lifetime, the world was on the verge of coming to an end. The sun would no longer move, night would be eternal, and man-eating demons would descend to rule the earth.

On that day all fires were extinguished and floors were swept clean. Old clothes, the images of gods kept in the house, the hearthstones on which cooking pots were kept, mats, pestles, and grindstones were all cast into lakes and rivers. Pregnant women were given maguey masks and locked in granaries; if the world ended, they would turn into monsters.

That night, everyone dressed in new clothes, climbed onto terraces and rooftops; no one touched the ground. Children were poked and threatened to keep them awake; those who slept would wake up as mice. In Tenochtitlan, the capital, eyes were fixed on the temple atop the Hill of the Star. There, at midnight, the priests were watching the stars called Tianquitzli, the Marketplace, our Pleiades, to see if they would cross the meridian and ensure another fifty-two years of life.

In the temple, a prisoner without physical blemishes, with a name meaning turquoise, year, fire, grass, or comet—words that denote precious time—was stretched across a flat stone with a piece of wood on his chest. As the Tianquitzli constellation crossed the line, a priest began furiously spinning his fire drill into the wood. A little smoke, a few sparks, and then, as the wood took flame, the prisoner’s chest was slit open with an obsidian knife, his heart pulled out and set in the fire. Four bundles of tied wood, each with thirteen logs, were piled around him so that his whole body was consumed by flames.

As the bonfire became visible, the people slashed their ears and the ears of their children, scattering blood toward the flames. Messengers carried torches from the Hill of the Star to the principal temples, and from there to the palaces, and from the palaces, street by street, house by house, until the whole city was lit again. All night, relay runners carried the new fire throughout the empire. People threw themselves at the fire to be blessed with blisters.

Children born in the night were given the name New Time. In the morning new mats were spread out, new hearthstones placed, incense lit, and honey-dipped amaranth seed cakes eaten by all. Quails were decapitated.

_{Weinberger, Eliot. An Elemental Thing, New Directions, New York, 2007: ix.}

down rodeo

I wrapped the shotgun in a blanket and put it in the trunk before driving through West Hollywood into Beverly Hills with the spring sun blazing. I had to see some guys but instead maneuvered through gridlock traffic to a coffee shop off Santa Monica Boulevard where hipsters brunched and rich folk avoided the homeless. She sat at a table near the front window. I kissed her on the cheek and sat, regretting I didn’t have time for coffee.

I just came to say hi, I said.

She smiled and time stopped for a few minutes. I forgot about everything else, only absorbing half of what she said, spellbound, entranced.

I have to go, I said.

She stood to hug me and I kissed her neck, inhaling her.

Back in the devastating noontime light I steered the rented sedan toward West LA and contemplated how the room full of thieves would react when out come that shotgun.

Transfiguration

He wrote himself into the story as a marginal character, someone who watches and listens intensely, someone who, beneath his ordinary appearance, conceals a deadly weapon. Knowing he possesses the weapon provides him with a sense of power and he scans the room of people dressed formally beneath twinkling chandeliers. None of them share his clandestine power. He is handed a bubbly drink in a flute glass and sips it, then drains it whole. Who are these people made of gold? It isn’t enough to own the world; one also has to celebrate their ownership. He pats the weapon in his pocket, feeling its cylindrical body, the antenna-like electric coils. Soon this will all be over, he thinks. I’ll be on my way home to the blue bungalow on 23rd with the giant rhododendron in front that nearly conceals the building. In an hour the bleached teeth, overpriced garments, and ornamental minerals will drop suddenly from these people to the ballroom floor, the flesh and bone of their previous owners evaporated, transfigured, only to return in part to a different place, as a different being.

Cărtărescu’s anti-literature

After you’ve read tens of thousands of books, you can’t help but ask yourself: while I was doing that, where did my life go? You’ve gulped down the lives of others, which always lack a dimension in comparison to the world in which you exist, however amazing their tours of artistic force may be. You have seen colors of others and felt the bitterness and sweetness and potential and exasperation of other consciousnesses, to the point that they have eclipsed your own sensations and pushed them into the shadows. If only you could pass into the tactile space of beings other than you—but again and again you were only rolled between the fingertips of literature. Unceasingly, in a thousand voices, it promised you escape, while it robbed you of even the frozen crust of reality that you once had.

_{Cărtărescu, Mircea. SOLENOID, trans. by Seán Cotter, Deep Vellum Publishing, Dallas, 2022: 42.}