The man who could move c.., p.22
The Man Who Could Move Clouds, page 22
Who denies themselves their own hunger? Mami asked.
* * *
—
Ghosts craved hunger because, no longer having bodies, they remembered with nostalgia what it felt like to be parched, to cave internally under the tick of an urge. They yearned for hunger as a land of exile.
I had always wanted to see a ghost.
Before our phone rang with threats to Ximena and me, before we turned to starvation for comfort, when I was twelve and we still lived in Colombia, I said to great-tía Carmen in Ocaña that I would give anything to see a ghost, I didn’t care if it meant I’d be haunted for the rest of my life.
We were sitting in a circle on great-tía Carmen’s back patio, which in Mami’s time had been great-grandmother Mamaria’s patio, where Nona had once stood telling Nono through the wall, I am still shaking from your kiss. Somewhere up the hill was the well down which Mami fell. We were surrounded by our family from Ocaña, cousins on the floor and elders in plastic chairs. The sky was glowing indigo. Great-tía Carmen clapped the air to shoo away my words. Be quiet, be careful! Here there are ghosts who can hear. Great-tía Carmen said she didn’t know how things worked in the city, but ghosts were nothing to wish on oneself. Then she told us a story.
Once, there was a girl orphaned by war. The girl couldn’t hear or speak; she was in shock. She showed up at great-tía Carmen’s doorstep, and Carmen took her in. One day, there was an earthquake. The girl remained rooted, frozen in the courtyard, as the family took refuge under a door frame and pleaded for her to find shelter. The courtyard wall fell. Great-tía Carmen feared the girl had been buried beneath the rubble. But when the dust settled, the girl was untouched. There had been a window, a carved-out space in the adobe. As the wall fell, the window opening slipped over the girl’s head like a dress. There was a tight square of grass around her feet; then, a few centimeters out, the ruins of the crumbled wall expanded into an imperfect rectangle.
When the wall fell, it revealed a second wall. A hiding wall, great-tía Carmen called it, an original wall, which someone had taken pains to wall in. Buried into a crack in the brick was a silver necklace. It was good silver. Great-tía Carmen knew it was meant for the girl, so she sold it and gave her the money. The next morning, the girl was gone, and great-tía Carmen was still not sure if she had been a girl or a ghost.
Ghost, voted the cousins.
Girl, voted Mami.
I did not know how to vote. I thought about what it would be like to spend a lifetime unsure of whether a person living in close proximity to you was living or dead.
As we sang together into the night, I thought of a worse thing. Maybe the girl herself was uncertain of what she was. I looked around, wondering, how many people, including ourselves, might actually be ghosts.
* * *
—
After surviving our years of terror, Ximena and I had a hard time making sense of who or what we were. Papi had professional connections, and he was able to find work that lasted a few months or a year in countries neighboring Colombia. We moved from place to place, grateful, physically unharmed. We promised to start anew, then drifted into ascetic tendencies.
I cut into my arm, and, like a magic trick, the lingering trauma of being followed and taken, and the guilt of surviving, dissipated, then was gone. A manic tranquility surfaced in its stead. At the time, I likened it to the exorcisms Mami facilitated for other people, an act through which I rid myself of poisons, but I can see now that I was only bonding with my ghosts.
Before moving to the United States, I had assumed that everyone had in their family a real or pretend curandero, that everyone pored over dreams, received prophecies—or, if not, that at least this kind of thing was not uncommon. In Chicago, where I went to college and lived alone, I discovered this was not the case. No one I met in that city had even seen a ghost, nor did they care about their dreams. Ghost stories were spoken of with derision, catalogued as legends and old wives’ tales, an idiom that told me everything I needed to know. The whole continent enfolded what it wanted to devalue with women.
White people in the United States held on to a hard line between fact and fiction, between what was possible and what was not. This made sense to me. U.S. Americans flew the Confederate flag, then insisted racism didn’t exist. They told me theirs was a country founded on ideals, then got upset when I brought up the genocide of Indigenous peoples or slavery, which were clear indications to me that the country was founded on something else.
To believe in ghosts was to know that remnants of a past violence return.
A country that doesn’t even believe in its own history cannot believe in ghosts.
This was why, in Colombia, we felt haunted by the ghost gold fever. We knew what had ravaged the country and feared it, watched for how it might possess us, work its way through us, make us ravage ourselves.
In my second year in Chicago, Mami telephoned to tell me that in Venezuela, where she and Papi then lived, a woman had called her house and told her that she had been given her telephone number in a dream, and that she had dialed because she was looking for someone to help her make a connection to the world of the dead. The next day, as I was unlocking my bike from in front of the journalism school where I was studying, a wiry man approached and told me he had access to dead bodies. I was told in a dream to look for you at this intersection at this time. I practice necromancy—do you know what that is?
Mami and I made jokes at the time about dream-world Do Not Call lists and how to get on them. I didn’t tell anybody except Mami about the necromancer, because who else would understand? I carried unlike worlds inside me, one excommunicated from the other. It was easier than having to educate people. Where could I even begin? When you see a lot of death, you begin to live inside the unexplained, you conjure a porous communication with the past. But I had no language for this kind of thing, didn’t even know the term “code switch.” I walked around distending, an impassable hair’s breadth between the woman I was and the one I had to become.
* * *
—
I started denying myself my own hunger when I first arrived in the United States. I grew acquainted with the hard curves of my skeleton, probed the dips between my bones, established that they led to a terrifying nothingness. I sucked on ice cubes and filled pages with words. If I went out with friends, I drank absurd amounts, woke up bruised on couches or in beds I did not remember falling into.
But something stopped me from spiraling further. That summer, I went to Virginia with two friends, and we went to swim in a lake. The sky was clear and bright. We had calculated it would be an easy ten-minute swim to the small island in the middle of the dark water. My muscles braced against the cool lake as I dove. I was surprised to find myself fatigued a few minutes in, then remembered I was weak from not eating. I was used to having my mind subdue the pains and needs of my body, so I continued, expecting it would be like enduring hunger, that at some point there would be a daybreak of good feeling. I flutter-kicked my legs, spiked each arm into the water, propelled myself under the surface. A tingling spread over my limbs. Halfway to the island, I tried to raise my arm and could not. The muscle spasmed, hamstrung into stillness, and my legs too. There was no fat on my body, nothing left to turn into fuel. I was shocked at my body’s betrayal, then understood my own part: I had starved it. The surface of the water, the glittering play of light dappling the top, receded, and I dropped into the green murk.
I would have died, except that one of the girls I was with worked summers as a lifeguard. She dove me up, embraced me in the hold in which the drowning are held. Her forearm clutched around my chest, her legs scissored beneath me, and stroke by stroke, we neared the island. I stared back at the shore, watched my two feet drag a wake in the water behind us. At the island, I said I was a worse swimmer than I knew, and we pretended nothing had happened; she swam me back to the shore.
On the sand, I was dizzy and outside of my body. The girls sucked on a shared joint, making its tip flare, and I stared at the sky, and we talked about abortions. I shared that my childhood best friend got pregnant from a rape. She couldn’t tell her parents, so, to hide the cause of her growing stomach, we ate chocolate together. We gained weight quickly and as a unit, until she was able to get an abortion. While I spoke of wandering with my body into the pain of another’s, I showed off the white stripes on my thighs that were a mark of the love and care I was capable of.
I wondered then how many women, beset by burdens, had drowned in lagoons, and if there were many, and if this was why in Colombia we spoke of hungry lagoon spirits.
Maybe all water is haunted. Maybe all water carries the incantatory chorus of the dead, has a woman standing at the middle of it, a hungry mouth calling for a drowning.
I knew that by denying my own hunger, I had wanted to drain myself of vulnerability, as if there were a prize at the center of myself I could extract. I shuddered, remembering the feeling of sinking of a few moments ago, and finally, I bent toward surrender.
* * *
—
The image of a woman standing at the middle of a lagoon is all over these stories, I realize as I am writing this. I don’t mean to write her in. She just emerges—in the middle of a forest, at the center of a skirt of black silk, surrounded by crude oil, lying at the bottom of a well, standing amid the ruins of a wall—bidding me to look.
I suppose a woman entering into water is always half vanishing. To vanish into water is to become half nothing—the you that is there, and the you that is gone. The ghost must be in the reflection, the upper half rippling on the water.
To starve oneself is to will oneself to vanish too.
From the oldest memories surviving in our land till now, the stories the men told made us believe our hunger was wrong. Their stories are plagued by women with ravaging appetites, ambitions, and desires, who, because of their hunger, suffer terrible and ignoble fates.
As ever, those men were wrong.
There is nothing wrong with hunger.
Hunger shapes us into a wisdom we cannot yet know.
* * *
—
I never got as far into an eating disorder as my sister did. My near drowning had forced a recognition: the power offered me through denying my hunger was an illusion.
As I began to eat again, my anxiety and panic attacks, embodiments of memories that I wanted to repress, returned. I let the un-dealt-with fears of the past pass through me in a flash and a ravage. Many things we are come wrapped in barbed wire. Now I know to reach for the sting, so I can get to the good.
But you’re okay now, Mami will say to me, exasperated, when I tell her about the visitations of fear I experience. You have housing, income, food. You survived. Why be fearful in the face of plenty?
How do you convince the body, which has decided to be afraid? Fear once taught the body survival. Teachings leave their echoes.
It’s a ghost, Mami, I say to her when I want her to understand.
You just don’t get it, I say when I don’t want her to get it.
There’s surviving, and then there’s surviving the surviving, I never say but always think.
Mami says she can’t take my panic attacks away. Some ghosts need to be faced, and I must face them. Over the phone, she prays over water for me so I may learn what the ghost wants. Mami says ghosts have their own language, articulation. It is up to me to listen.
* * *
—
Two thousand eleven was the year when my sister’s symptoms peaked, and the year when my panic attacks and middle-of-the-night episodes became more frequent.
In the daytime, I did my best to keep my panic attacks under control, but twice a week, at night, I went from ghost to revivified body. I did my best to be a good audience. I never knew when, exactly, the nighttime amnesia would occur. I tensed in anticipation of the horror I would feel when I sat up in bed without recognizing my surroundings. I knew I would scan the room and feel an abundant emptying, isolation, translucence. I was a ghost. But once I observed I had a body, I would, as always, remember wrong—arrive at the conclusion that I had slept with my brother, or that my body was a prison. Then I’d experience a despair so large it seemed to crater the spot in the mattress on which I sat.
Mami knew a lot about ghosts. The ones who don’t have self-knowledge are the worst, she shared. They’re stranded in one moment in the past, which they relive for eternity.
How do you get rid of that type of ghost? I asked, thinking about my nightly episodes with amnesia.
You know, Mami said, then was quiet. I always passed up those jobs.
How come?
Ghosts hunger for hunger. The kind of ghost that is stuck reliving a moment has the worst unmet hunger. They walk an addictive circle, always after something they can never entirely get. You’d have to break their reality in order to free them of what’s keeping them enacting the same scene. It can take so much time. Hardly worth the money.
I considered what Mami had once said about me, that I’d rather die than ask for help. It was true that it would be much simpler to just ask for her medicine. Instead, I posed inscrutable questions and searched her words for how I might help myself.
Maybe I was addicted to the memory of being a blank slate, but as I came around to discovering that I was only a human forgetful of her burdens, inevitably, the experience blighted into a nightmare. If I wanted to break the cycle of recurring amnesia, I’d have to excise the idea that being a blank slate was better than being an accumulation. I’d have to practice surrender.
* * *
—
There were many things the accident in Chicago changed in me, though a lot of it went unnoticed as I focused on outliving the fear that memory incited in me. I didn’t notice at first that when I entered stores that had a single exit, after going down an aisle, I could no longer find my way out. It took a while for it to dawn on me that I was encountering difficulties remembering where the grocery store was, even though I went there consistently and it was only a block away. Then, one day when I was driving a friend’s car and he asked me to go around the block, I turned once but could not work out which way to turn next. Walking from place to place, if I gazed at maps, I had to sit down, sweating, no longer able to translate the information they held.
By 2011, I knew that the neurological condition was a consequence of brain damage, and it had a name, topographical disorientation. This meant that my brain could no longer make maps. It’s different from what we colloquially refer to as having a good or a bad sense of direction, a concept that alludes to a spectrum of how easy it is for the brain to make a cognitive map. Most people can form a mental map once they’ve traveled a space once, twice, or twenty times, but in topographical disorientation the map is not created at all. To have this condition is to be permanently lost. Even when I am reading at home and stationary, if I am introspective, if I am looking down at my hands, into the ice cubes in my drink, I am lost. I look through a window to a sight I’ve seen a thousand times, expecting a different street to be there.
Before, I invested a lot of time trying to rebuild what was gone. I walked away from home, then gave myself the task of navigating back. For hours, I’d stare at the map on my phone and the circle that represented my body. I’d be only six blocks south and two east from my apartment in San Francisco. I could intellectually understand the layout of space on the surface of my screen, could count how many blocks there were, could grasp the route I’d need to follow. But the moment I looked up, I couldn’t work out which way to go. I watched the dot move toward the left of my screen as I moved forward. Okay, so…
The little dot advanced some more. Okay, so…
Trying to carry the spatial information from my phone to my brain so that I could apply it to the landscape around me felt like having sand sift through my hands. I got vertigo, doubled over, feared I would puke. I turned on my phone’s voice directions and, following the simple instructions given to me at the appropriate times, I made it back.
By 2011, I had embraced space as an ever-changing sea, in which streets were subsumed and reappeared with no rhyme or reason, and I reconsidered what navigation might mean to me.
Navigation is simply the ability to pinpoint the self to a meaningful crosshair. Therefore, anything can be a meaningful crosshair. I learned to plot my regular routes through language.
When it is the library I am going to, I step out the door of my building and search the awnings and marquees visible from my doorstep up and down the street until I see the word “Odd,” and I walk toward it. Along the way, I’ve chosen other words at crucial junctures, which act as breadcrumbs guiding me to turn left or right or go straight. The phrase that forms a map that leads me to the library is Odd temple American warfield. To go to the grocery store, it is Except longitude no warning. To me, the world remains insurgent, undiscovered, untamed. There is a small wildness in it. I live beyond the politics of the map, through which much of the world has been seized.
But what space could I open in the face of panic and midnight episodes of amnesia? I had to make a home with distress. Surrender means to answer to what shapes us, the layers that we are. Many things don’t have to be overcome, only outlived, and then lived with.
To get rid of a circle, you externalize it, Mami says. You tell a story. I needed a new story too.
