Utza'm Si'

I have to tell you about a man now, and I am going to tell you about him the way I tell everything about that room, which is from the doorway. I will take you to the threshold and no further. What happened past it is not a thing I keep where words can reach it, and I am not going to go and get it for you. Understand that this is not me sparing you. It is me keeping the last of what is mine. The marigold girl taught me how to be kind in a hard place. This is the kindness I learned to do for myself.

Until him the machine had no face. It was trucks and lists and men who counted, none of them quite a person, all of them a process. Then they brought a person. He had a soft voice and clean hands and he looked at me the way no one on the road had bothered to, which is to say he looked at me as though I were someone, and I was so starved for that by then that the looking itself did something to me before he had done anything at all. That was the method. I did not understand it that night. I understood it later, all the way down. He had found the one door the others left shut, and he had come to open it.

He called me florecita. Little flower. He said it soft, like an endearment, like a man who loved me, and that was the worst of it, that he made the tenderness into a tool and used it like a tool, with care, with aim. I would not give him my name and he did not want it. He wanted to give me his, florecita, a name for a thing you keep in a pot on a sill and water when you remember. I refused his name in return. In my head, where he could not reach, I would not call him by the name his mother gave him either, because my grandmother had taught me that to name a thing is to feed it. So I called him what you call the coyote when you do not dare say coyote. Utza’m si’. The old word, the safe word, the one that does not summon the thing it means. I never once said it where he could hear. Naming him in secret and refusing his name out loud was the whole of the war I had left, and I fought it, every day, to the end.

I am not going to take you past the door. On the other side of it is the void, and the void is where I have put what he did, and I am going to leave it there. Here is the only thing I will carry back out, because it is the thing this part of the story is really about. I screamed. After. I screamed the way I had screamed in the truck, with the whole of a voice I still had, because some part of me, even then, even there, still believed a sound that loud and that true had to reach something, had to bring someone up the road at last. I screamed myself hoarse. No one came. No one was ever going to come, and that was the night my body began to learn it even while my soul refused to. I can barely talk, I remember thinking, as if it were a small thing, the way a girl notes she has lost her voice from singing. I had lost it calling for a help that was not coming. It did not come all the way back for a long time.

My faith did not break that night. I want that said plainly, because it would be a cleaner story if it had, and this is not a clean story. What happened is that it went down under the surface, the way I had been driving it down for weeks, except now it had a reason, now it had a shape it was hiding from. The enemy had a face and a soft voice and a name I would not say. I closed my fist around what I had left and I braced. I had been a girl who prayed so the whole table could hear. I became, after that night, a girl who prayed with her teeth shut, in the dark, in a voice already half gone, to a God I had decided, with no evidence and against all of it, was still there. That decision is the whole of who I became. It started in that room, on the far side of a door I am not going to open for you.