Swaddled

I woke up.

Take a moment with that. I have had years and I am still not finished with it.

I was under a bush. There was sky through the branches and it was black and the stars in it were the hard bright kind you get out there, nothing like the ones at home, and I lay looking at them and waited to understand where I was.

I was wrapped.

That is the word. Wrapped, in one of those foil sheets they put round people, the crackling silver kind, folded round me properly and tucked. Not thrown over. Tucked.

Somebody had put me somewhere sheltered, out of the road, under cover, and arranged the covering, and gone.

I got out of it and sat up and nothing about my body was right.

No list. Nothing hurt. That was the first thing, and it was an alarm, because I had not woken up without pain in about eleven months and the absence of it was the loudest thing in the desert.

My back was smooth. I found that out with my hand before I found out anything else. Smooth, all of it, the whole map gone, and I sat in the dirt in the dark running my hand over a back that had no history on it at all.

There was one mark left on me. You know which one.

Then everything arrived at once.

Every person I had ever felt. All of them, together, the whole of it, nine girls on a concrete floor and eleven and fourteen and a man with a case and a room full of men playing cards, and the truck, and the truck, and the truck. I went over sideways into the brush and it kept coming.

Then it narrowed.

In that hour the gift changed. It was a sponge and then it was a knife. Before, everything came in and soaked and I could not find the edges of any of it. After, it arrives thin and exact and it goes precisely where it is aimed, and I can put it on a single person across a room and know things about them that they have not told themselves.

It is better. That is true and it is disgusting.

It is a better instrument and I paid for it with the only thing I had left and I was not asked.

Somewhere in that I reached for my Abuela.

It was reflex, a thing your hand does. I went for the smell of copal, the way I had every time anything in my life had gone wrong since I was six years old, and I was on the ground in the dirt in a country I had never seen and I was dead and I reached for the smoke.

And it was there.

I cannot tell you how. I will not try. It was there and it was hers, resin and church and forty years of it in her skin, and it held for about as long as it takes to breathe twice.

It is the last kind thing that has happened to me that I didn’t have to pay for.

I sat up again.

I understood by then, roughly, what I was. I didn’t have the word for months, but I had the shape of it. The cold. The stillness in the chest where a thing should have been moving. The stars being too sharp, the brush being too loud, the whole desert coming through at a volume no living person gets.

I thought: what hell is this.

It was not philosophy and it was not fear.

I was raised by a woman who lit candles for the dead and by a village that crossed itself when I went past. I had been told my whole life what happens after. I had just died in a truck with my brother’s head in my lap and I had wanted it, and I had taken it, and I had been glad.

Then I was somewhere, awake, in a body that did not work, with no one coming.

So I did the arithmetic I had been doing for a year, because it is all I know how to do.

He had gone. Chepe had gone, out, finished, through, and whatever is there or is not there he had got to it.

I had not.

I had asked for an ending and been given something else, and my brother was the one who got what I wanted.

Nobody has ever been able to tell me why. I stopped asking a long time ago.

He is better off. I have said that about him for years.

There was no name left for what I was. The girl who was in that truck was finished and the thing sitting in the dirt was not her, and I would not use her name for it.

So I took one.

Copal. For the smoke. Because it is what is left when something that was alive and warm gets caught and hardens, and because it is what you burn when you want to send something up to the dead, and because it was the last thing that had been kind to me and I was not going to let go of it.

Nobody gave me that. It was not a gift, there was no ceremony, there was nobody there.

I took it, out of the dirt, on my own, before anybody came.