Cingo, Cingere, Cinxi, Cinctum continued...
"Hola manchada!" she shouted. She braked hard on the big wheel, stirring up dust that made MJ cough. She knew Ana Claudia's great-grandmother would know who she was, just by the sound of her cough. She'd probably already known who'd been sitting there on the stoop.
"Maria José," the old woman said.
Hola Señora, MJ replied. She lifted herself up from the stoop and went to stand at the open window. Her chin came right up to the windowsill. Estoy enferma. I think my head is trying to say something.
When the old woman's hand reached for her face, she thought it was going to hurt, but it didn't, not as she pressed her palm alongside her temple, not when her thumb moved in an oscillating arc over her forehead, her eyebrow, across her eyelid. She ran her fingertips through MJ's hair.
"What you mujeres up to?" Ana Luisa came up the path, sending messages with her phone, bending to pick Ana Claudia up and then continuing to type with her arms around her daughter. She never seemed to have any books with her, just a pocketbook and that phone. MJ had barely glanced at her; the woman's hands were again on her eyes, and she closed them, seeing the lines that had begun to break now, trailing off in places, pulsating in others.
I think your grandma is reading my face, MJ said. I wish she could run her fingers along what I see inside my eyes.
"Que pasa, Abuelita?" Ana Luisa sounded serious. The old woman's hands moved again to MJ's scalp. She spoke, but in that way she always did, in an accent and arrangement of words her granddaughter understood, though MJ never could. She opened her eyes so she could look to Ana Luisa.
"She says there's something there - algo más, something else, I don't know what she means," Ana Luisa said. She talked rapidly to her grandmother. MJ couldn't follow. Ana Claudia's eyes moved back and forth between the two women, her big wheel forgotten, one of her braids halfway undone, the hair-band meant to be fastening it long lost.
"Hey, what's your grandma doing?" MJ hadn't heard Todd follow Ana Luisa up the path. Todd was Ana Luisa's new boyfriend. "Is she using healing powers or something?"
"No, dumbshit," Ana Luisa said. "She's translating." To MJ she said, "Here," and handed Ana Claudia over. Ana Claudia put her arms around MJ's neck and brought her face close to MJ's, staring at her dots.
"She wants me to write stuff down, like I've got a pen or paper or whatever." Ana Luisa fished through her pocketbook and pulled out an eye pencil. "Wait - I'll just put it in my phone. What's your number MJ? You get texts, right?"
MJ gave Ana Luisa her number - her phone was inside - and then she held Ana Claudia while the old woman's fingers probed her face, walked through her hair. She said things - sounds, letters, fragments MJ couldn't understand - and Ana Luisa typed, hitting Send every so often, the phone making triumphant little musical flourishes when she did. Todd was sprawled out on the stoop, spinning the big wheel's pedals with the tips of his sneakers. Ana Luisa's abuela pressed harder against MJ's face. She asked Ana Luisa a question.
"She wants to know what you did to erase the dots," Ana Luisa said. "She says they're disappearing."
Todd whistled. "If they're disappearing now, I'd hate to see them before," he said. "Those are some whacked-out freckles. Is that shit contagious?"
"Don't ask me, I'm just the, whatyoucallit, the scribe," Ana Luisa said. Her grandmother kept rubbing and talking, and she kept at the phone, making skeptical motions with her eyebrows, which were plucked around the edges but still supple and thick. "My grandma says she can only make out some patchy stuff. First she said it's like something she forgot. Then she said it's like something she can't remember, or maybe better than what she can remember, so maybe it's something she never knew." She said all of this while she typed letters into her phone. "I'll let you decide what that means."
"Seriously," Todd said. He got up and brushed the dust from his pants. His t-shirt was huge and white, an empty screen on which MJ could make out the little fireworks sputtering from her peripheral vision.
Gracias, she said when Ana Luisa's abuela rested her hands on the windowsill. The woman's eyes were milky, unfocused, and MJ never knew where to aim her respects. Ana Luisa let Todd pass Ana Claudia over the windowsill into her great-grandmother's arms, something she did only on special occasions. "Good thing I got unlimited texting," she said. She picked up the big wheel and Todd followed her inside. MJ stayed and sat on the stoop a little longer, looking for dots in the darkening neighborhood, but she couldn't find any; her eyes seemed to have lost track of them, or maybe they just weren't there any longer.
She found her phone where she'd left it, at the bottom of the plastic bag from the pharmacy, and saw the long string of text messages from Ana Luisa, each one marked with a pictogram she knew was an envelope unopened, though to her eyes it only looked like a white hole punched into the black screen, its edges undefined. She could not quite see the buttons on her phone, either, but she knew which would access the messages, and she opened the first one. She had expected sentences - or words, at least - but here there were only characters, letters and symbols strung one beside the other that added up, she felt, to nothing. No less silent than the gaps between them. She thought of calling Ana Luisa to ask if something had gone wrong, but she'd heard what the girl had said: she was only the scribe. She opened all the messages, and they were all the same, an endless lexis of which she could make no sense at all. The notion dawned on MJ that the dots at the backs of her eyes were meant to fill the spaces in between the characters, to link them together in meaning; this made no sense, either, but it struck her with a sort of desperate conviction, desperate because those dots that had nearly overwhelmed her sight were barely there now, glimmering somewhere in remote places in the cavities of her head. She felt a dizziness then, a kind of nausea that swept over her in a sob, and then she felt another wave, this time of absurdity, since what was she doing squinting at a cell phone in the dark, panicking over the loss of something she'd never had to begin with? A virus was a funny thing, she thought. Especially one that sat dormant on one's own spine and then crawled out whenever it felt like it. Why this virus had come out to surround her when it did, she did not know, nor did she know if it had done so to attack or protect her, or what in the world (the world she felt she was now returning to, little by little, at long last) had provoked this bizarre girding.
A new text came through, interrupting the others. It was from the dermatologist's lab. She found herself alarmed by its syntax, which clamped down on her with the force of certainty, though she wasn't at all certain she understood what it meant. It said the skin culture was inconclusive. It said to continue the course of antivirals as directed. Her eyes were tired, then, from staring at the tiny screen, she gathered, and so she was glad for the reminder to take her pills before she climbed back into bed. When she woke up she no longer felt the pain in her head, and when she looked in the mirror, her eyes clear of anything but the image it presented her, her skin was smooth, free of bumps and scabs and dots, the blankness alarming her even as she recognized her old self from before this had all begun. When she'd called into the place where she worked to say she'd come in today, and showered and dressed and combed out her hair and walked the dusty front path to the sidewalk and the bus stop, she felt a twinge at her temple, but it was only momentary, and then it was gone. It happened again, at work, when she'd laughed at a joke her co-worker made, and then later, when Ana Claudia stirred up the dust with her big wheel and she coughed. Every once in a while, she'd feel another pang, sometimes when she thought she caught something out of the corner of her eye, something she'd not forgotten but rather failed to remember, something she needed to do, urgently, even, but could not quite comprehend. She told her doctor about the pain, and the doctor said, post-herpetic neuralgia, if you want I can refill the antidepressant to see if that will help. But she couldn't help but wonder if it was something else, a language she'd almost known, words that she was meant to recognize but instead had lost. That was what the pain was now, when it came in tiny, strangled waves: grief for the thing she'd almost discovered, but had not quite dared to understand.
END