Costa, Sierra y Selva

Wanting to get to the bottom of all this, I asked myself to have a cup of coffee with me. We chose a corner booth so that we could keep all exits in clear view (a tactic a friend had taught me years ago).  I had prepared a list of questions to ask myself, scribbled in red ink on a yellow legal pad. But the blank stare across the table made them all seem somehow irrelevant.

Sorry?

I didn’t say anything.

Oh, I thought you said something.

No.

I Wonder as I Wander floated eerily through the still air. Aside from our waitress and a very large man who seemed intent on devouring the entire counter, we were alone. The weather channel played on the single television, and the woman on the screen moved and shifted from side to side before a computer-generated United States of America. She waved her arms maniacally across the regions. So this was it, I thought to myself. A cold front descending upon the southeast.

So, how are you adjusting? It’s been a nearly two months now.

Oh, there are little things that take a while getting used to. I keep wanting to show up late for things, I find lines inconvenient, and is it just me, or is it really quiet around here?

Yes, but I mean how are you really adjusting?

I’d like another cup of coffee, please.

Just then a bird flew into the diner. He took one look at us, shook his head, and flew back out. The waitress mumbled something about varmin and took windex over to the window and I noticed for the first time a gentleman in a fedora. He was eating pie and reading Le Monde Diplomatique with a sneer. What he found in that publication to sneer about I guess I’ll never know. But I did believe for a moment that he had appeared out of nowhere and then realized that that was something we had in common. I asked for the check and tidied my legal pad. The interview was officially over and I had places to go and people to see. The fedora looked up at me inquisitively as I passed by but I paid him no mind.

***

The grand house rose from the Georgia clay as if it had grown up side by side with the magnolia tree that shaded its porch. Perhaps it had, and they had played together as children, a clapboard cabin and sapling romping between the cotton fields long into the summer nights. The distant singing had kissed the shifting bolls and sent the hardwoods shivering. Now, the house’s boards creaked with arthritis, and the old magnolia was gnarled and weary.

We walked from room to room playing ghostly tricks on each other, sending laughter ringing through the halls. The sense of guilt I ought to have had at so shamelessly tramping through the old rooms and listening to my raucous voice echoing off the old walls was exchanged for a feeling of entitlement, as if I, too, belonged there.

There was a large gilded mirror on the landing and it watched our every movement like a shimmering eye. I stopped before it for a moment and stared into its depths, wondering what scenes had unfolded before this glass, and when we would see clearly, face to face. But the mirror surrendered none of its secrets aside from a memory so covered in dust and mildew that I could barely make it out. A woman, it seemed, had stood on that very landing and looked down into the darkness of the midnight house below, so still she seemed to be made of porcelain. The beating of her heart echoed that of the clock. And then her head tilted downward and she sighed milkily into the shadows and retraced her steps bedward. The vision faded, and the mirror motioned me to silence.