The Mirage of Mario Sanchez

When he opened his eyes to the stagnant but tidy room -– its high wood walls and floors, the furniture that said, “I know you,” but not too much, and the faint light that outside was the hot sun -– it told him only that he was there. He had read “The Lost Decade” at the bidding of his wife, but he didn’t see the tragedy in it. His wife, Cella, made wood furniture, carving it out in symbiotic patterns that to her went on forever, past the back of the chair and the edge of the cabinet door. He thought her work was nice, and she like an orphan girl radiating through her rags while following the lathe like the back of a centipede, yet he chastised her passion for it and didn’t understand the spiritual and philosophical value she saw there. When she’d asked him to leave he'd thought of it simply as an incentive to get out of the house.
Each morning he puts his right forefinger in his mouth, takes it out for a moment, then tastes it. This isn’t to check the movement of the air. He feels he has become quite perceptive in his exile, and when he tastes the air he feels as though he’s able to taste the distillation of the entire day to come. Today it tastes a little off. Not tragically so, just a little odd -– like maybe a mighty, flabby woman will streak past him, or maybe he’ll see a toddler trotting along licking a huge pinwheel lollipop the size of its face and suddenly it will trip and fall face down upon it, like a sticky shield that will attract ants immediately. Or some tourist who’s had a good day fishing will decide to buy the entire crowd at the Turtle a couple of rounds, which had happened before. It changed the atmosphere of the bar to that of a carnival for an hour or so.
When he’d been with Cella he’d almost always drunk alone, but now every day he came effervescently to the Turtle, called there by what seemed like an obligation to his new identity. There were four bartenders at the Turtle, and he was friendly with them all, but of the four Bob on weekdays and Cat on weekends were his favorites. For the most part he also had more congenial memories of them. Bob let Stephen drink well past his obvious limit on many occasions, which Stephen appreciated. He wasn’t exactly a gentleman, but he was a soft drunk; he'd fall off his stool before he’d ever be lewd or obnoxiously belligerent.
It was Wednesday. He’d always hated Wednesdays because he felt that Wednesday was the least dramatic day of the week, save for Tuesday, but he was born on a Tuesday. Wednesdays made him lonely. On Wednesdays he sometimes thought of Cella’s flowery air and how she’d always have the windows open and never seemed to be cold. Sometimes on Wednesdays he thought of changing his routine, maybe just taking a walk, but he never had. And lately the Wednesday gloom had been worse; he was running out of money.
“Come on lad,” Bob the bartender said in a very fake Irish accent, “Tell me what’s got you saggin' or I’ll haveta heave-ho ya outa here.”
“Nothing.”
“But you’re sippin’ insteada sluggin’, lad …” he patted Stephen’s cheeks. “You look sick, sister. Come on, level with me …”
“Alright, fine.” Stephen leaned over the bar, “I’ll let you in on the secret, but when I stop comin’ in next week some time you gotta cover for me … say you heard I went snorkeling in the Bahamas.”
Bob had his ear cocked right over Stephen’s Seven-and-Seven with his eyebrows up.
“I’m broke.”
Bob jumped back and slapped the counter, “Get outa here!”
“Down to my last two thousand.”
“Now that ain’t exactly broke …”
“It’s broke to me,” he sipped his drink. “Especially here.”
“You got that part right anyway … mmm mmm mmm … Mmm! Whatchou gonna do?”
“Don't know ... I may have to call my wife.”
“I hear ya, I guess when you retire too early you ain’t got no feed when the cows come home,” he started wiping the counter and wiped over to another customer, shaking his head as he led himself across the boxing-ring bar. “Mmm mmm mmm.”
‘Why’d I tell him that?’ Stephen asked himself. He felt violated. He hadn’t analyzed too many things about himself consciously, but, faced with the potential of poverty, he realized that he felt as though an edge were dulling. He put a five on top of the twenty that already sat on the bar next to his drink and soaked napkin and stood up. It was early afternoon. Bob was resting on one hip talking to his customer with his back to Stephen and didn’t notice him walk out of the open-air bar.
Stephen had had four drinks but was still very sober. The sidewalks of the small island were half taken over by elephant-ear sized leaves and as he attempted to stroll he felt self-conscious veering around them, as though people might think he were stumbling. The sidewalk seemed unpaved, uprooted as it had been by Banyan tree roots, uneven, rural-seeming and coarse. What was he going to do without money? He couldn’t imagine having to do the jobs that people had -- every day! The rent for the small furnished apartment with the polished wood floors was a thousand a month. It was the 27th. He didn’t know how long he could last on a thousand dollars -– he’d never added up his expenses. Regardless, he’d soon be out of a place to live. He was sweating through his white ramie shirt and envisioned himself suddenly eclipsed by the sun, going mad in a dark alley like Jack the Ripper. ‘I was almost a lawyer ...’ he thought. But the thought of working felt like the word entrapment. Entrapment. ‘Not only trapped, but framed, like a defenseless moron. Framed.’ He stumbled through the streets, though to passersby he was only walking; a well-dressed man on his way to meet someone or out on an errand. An ordinarily brilliant soul rotting in the embalmed body of a rich man, flawless.
He had walked about three blocks when he turned down an alley-street which had music diffusing into the humid air from someone’s back yard. Stephen realized he had a cigarette in his mouth, though he didn’t know how long it had been there. He had felt hurried, but deliberately slowed to look through the gaping red hibiscus that seemed to grow wild there to a little white house that was as bright as a bleached white sheet; his wife always used white sheets and shook them out in the breeze of her open windows. There was a clearness around the little house. It had a little wooden blue jay next to the house number. As he passed it he noticed an old gentleman at the side of the house, partially on the lawn, partially on the unpaved drive, which was bordered by an old wooden fence, standing in front of a wooden table. “Lo there,” he waved to Stephen. Stephen stopped and took the cigarette out of his mouth. “You lost?” he smiled and looked up from what he was doing.
“No, no,” Stephen cleared his throat and lit the cigarette. “Just out for a stroll.” He felt his face –- he shaved every morning and it was smooth.
“You live aroun’ here?” the man had an accent Stephen didn’t know. He was pointing bits of color and white onto a board with a small brush.
“Yes, sir.”
“You an’ your wife?”
“Yes.”
“Where’s your wife on theese fine day?”
“She’s at home –- doesn’t like the heat.”
“Wrong place for her then,” he laughed.
“That’s what I tell her.” He looked past the old man to where things began to get blurry.
“You wan’ to come an’ see?” he pointed to the piece of wood on the table.
Stephen walked among the rough white rocks until he was a few feet from the old man. Their chalk stuck to his black dress shoes. He peered over the space as though the old man were behind a partition, roped off.
“Come closer.”
Stephen could see what the old man was painting with his fingers and a brush whose bristles were splayed out like an old toothbrush, like the one he’d had as a kid.
“Ice cream,” said the old man. “Not like to-day –- real ice cream … glace.” There was a man with a cart vending ice cream by white and red bathing cabins on the beach. All the colors were bright and proud, natives. “That man was an entrepreneur,” the old man said, “He know where to sell hees ice cream.”
“It’s wonderful,” said Stephen.
“I give eet to you when I finish – tomorrow.”
“Oh no …”
“Don’ worry, I give to you. I no charge a poor man.”
Stephen looked at him. He held his dying cigarette at his side. He looked down at the table and saw everything on it like a pinwheel spinning; brushes, bright circles of paint, tubes, a cloth, the wood with dried and drying paint all over it. “I’ll come back tomorrow,” he said.
“Good,” said the old man. Stephen nodded once. “See you tomorrow,” the old man said as Stephen turned and walked as lightly as he could down the rough drive to the sidewalk.
He felt like having a soda, a pop, like when he was a kid. It seemed he hadn’t had plain soda since then. There was a store on the corner across the street from his apartment. As he turned onto the sidewalk he glanced back toward the old man who was not there any longer. He looked around and down the alley-street. There were some old men three houses down playing cards at a square table at the edge of a flat driveway. There was an old woman two houses down from them and across rocking on her front porch. There were two chickens criss-crossing each other in a hurry, and the sounds of them and children from a block over. There was the music coming into and out of the air like breath. He looked back up the old man’s drive –- no old man, no table, no glace. Stephen turned around and went back the way he had come.
Once he was back at the apartment he sat on the bed.
‘Man,’ he looked around at the contrived living space. ‘I’m going to turn into a freakin' nutball.’ He lay back and watched the ceiling fan until he fell asleep.
He was hot and crumpled and uncomfortable, wanting incredibly much to let go of his mother’s hand, though he knew he couldn’t. His mother was beautiful, as all mothers are to their sons.
“Mama, can I please have some glace?”
She looked down at him and out at the sea. He was aware of strings from his brown cut-off trousers tickling his knees. He was barefoot.
“Do you have a nickel, son?”
“No.”
As they passed the ice cream cart Stephen noticed it was the old man vending -– he being himself as a boy and also outside himself, watching. He looked longingly at the white-handled wooden cart, knowing the sweet smoothness of the mango glace that was inside. The old man took out a shallow paper cone and filled it half with mango and half with mammie ice cream, and handed it to Stephen.
“I’m sorry, sir, not to-day,” said Stephen’s mother, her red-brown hair blowing almost away from her in the sea breeze.
“Don’ worry, ma’am,” the old man said, “You get me back an-o-ther day.” He bent down to Stephen and whispered as he handed him the glace, “I no charge a poor man.”
Stephen sat up straight in bed with his slicked black hair stuck to his forehead and face. The room was so quiet; he had never known it to be so. The noise of cars, mopeds and people talking, even yelling, seemed to be in a bottle tossed away from the captive and self-contained silence of his room. He sat up in bed, the lining of his light blue pants making a slick sound against his bare legs. His childhood room had been light blue, “sky blue,” and his mother had painted white clouds across it. Cirrus and cumulus, he remembered. He put his hands over his face and brought them down slowly, sliding with the thick sweat. He couldn’t even feel the ceiling fan it was moving so slowly.
‘I know I have a pencil,’ he thought, ‘If I could only draw something …’ He went over to the table by the window, but there was just a pocketknife on the dark varnished wood. In the kitchen, set off barely from the livingroom at a depth of four lonely feet, he found a golf pencil in the silverware drawer. It was from Oregon. He smelled it. He sat on the bed with the yellow and white striped sheet that had been furnished him, with his stubby golf pencil and an American Express bill envelope and commenced to draw a portrait of Cella. ‘Just a line,’ he thought as he tried to define the details of her face in his mind, the real shape of it. ‘Just a line to begin –- a line is all you need.’ He placed the pencil to the envelope and his hand drew a quick, curvaceous line for him; he hadn’t realized he was shaking. He quickly retracted his hand from the paper and closed his eyes. ‘I’m a bastard … a real bastard.’ He looked around the room; wood table, chairs and nightstand, wood doors, wood-framed clock, driftwood hanging on the audacious stucco wall, wood everything, it seemed; the windows even had wooden shutters. ‘It’s all drawn,’ his thoughts stuttered as he imagined someone, people, making all that his room alone contained. ‘Everything.’
He sat still until the dark came and the now strangling complexities of his little room softened; he was a stranger to his room at that hour, yet he felt welcome, as though it had been waiting for him. Soon he would start the throwing up, the convulsive terror of withdrawal, but as the liquid sense of a warm night settled over him he wanted only to sit in peace; a few moments more as captain at the end of his pirated plank.

Cristen Hemingway Jaynes
Seattle 2001