Abby Maldonado did not feel well that day.
It was early morning and already the room was hot. Today was going to be scorcher. She did not want to rise from bed and open the window. She enjoyed the quiet, and the open window would bring the noise city to her ears. She wanted to forget the city. She wanted to forget it all.
From her bed, she saw the rooftops of Tampico, and even those rooftops, with all their festive colors, could not lift her heart.
She lay in bed smoking, her eyes moving between the window, the brown ceiling, and the wallpaper. Carnations and rosebuds decorated the walls, but even in this so-called garden, cockroaches and the occasional spider moved along the flowered walls.
One of her patrons, a short bald man named Rock, had bought the wallpaper. He bought it on Valentine’s Day as a “symbol of his love for her.” The wall before its papering with flowers had been mustard yellow. Now she was surrounded with symbols of love, of carnation and rosebuds, as long as she did not look skyward towards the brown ceiling with the broken ceiling fan.
Not since her father Angelo had she ever loved a man. When Angelo left for good, Abby was fourteen years old. For the first time in her life, she found herself without a father. His absence proved to be an aching, painful thing. She searched the faces of wild men seeking the approval that Angelo had once given her, back in the days when she was happy. A lot of good her search had done for her.
Like her mother, Abby sought the pleasure of men, but never for money. While money did come with her new life, she sought the approval in the eyes of men, for that approval made her remember, for a moment, what it was like when her father favored her. Whenever he fought with Carla, Angelo always turned to his little girl and offered her reassurance, telling her not to worry, explaining that arguments came with the territory of marriage.
“Passion’s a good thing,” he often said. “It means we care for one another.”
“But the raised voices scare me.”
“Don’t worry. You worry too much. Like your grandmother. Passion just means that we’re alive.”
That’s what Angelo always said – to be passionate was to be alive. So, when the arguments stopped, Abby was too caught up in the peace blooming in her heart to see the iceberg that had grown between her parents.
Separate rooms, separate lives, and then, one morning, Angelo was gone.
“He was good for nothing,” her mother had told her. “We’re better off without him. He was a crazy man who sold his life for a junkyard.”
“He made me feel good,” Abby said in defense of the only man she would ever love. “You can’t say he was good for nothing.”
“You have a good deal to learn.”
While Carmen was right about the girl having a good deal to learn, she was wrong about Angelo meaning nothing. That could not be true, for why had she spent a decade of her life sleeping with strange men in strange rooms, trying to recreate an emotion she knew she would never experience again?
She had, after all, chased love across desert waste lands to end up in a stuffy room with a broken ceiling fan where she waited patiently to die.
As she lay on the green comforter smoking, her mind ran back to an art history lecture on Simeon Stylites. In those school days, with her pleated skirt and saddle shoes, she strove to escape the poverty of the world around her through her imagination. Art History offered her an escape into images and relics from distant civilizations. All the pleasures of the flesh had left her hungry, and she because could not imagine how to satisfy the materials longings of her diseased heart, she turned towards the spiritual side of things. In her own life, living in a brothel of a desert town, she wanted nothing more than to mount her own pillar to escape the world.
Dropping her second cigarette butt into a brown bottle where it hissed, she rose from bed, smoke curling from the neck of the bottle. She swirled the butt in the bottle and walked towards the mirror.
She was naked, her brown skin drawn tight over her frame.
She bathed, dressed, and walked west into the desert.
The sun shone without compassion, but she did not care. She was ready to face death, out among the hot sand and red rock. Out on the hot asphalt, not a car passed. She was alone in the world – physically alone for what seemed the first time in her life.
The only sound she could hear was the pumping of her heart. Her heart sounded loud in her ears. She was thirsty, she was hungry, and she never felt more alive, more pure. Her mind was clear for death.
She woke to discover that she had been sleeping for a while. The right side of her face felt hot, scorched. She looked into the clear sky to see black objects circling. The long screech of vultures brought her into sharp consciousness. She did not want her bones picked while she was living; with death making its steady progress, she became a hypocrite. For all her thinking about and longing for death, she discovered that she wanted to live after all.
She began to move eastward along the sun-baked highway, back towards the hell she’d left behind, the torment of Tampico with its narrow rooms and narrow minds.
-- Dr. Delano Greenidge-Copprue