Llaves

By Regina WB

In the last ten years, I have moved with the frequency of an Army brat, however, without the Army. My internal clock hits the six month mark, and I start putting my belongings into boxes and searching drawers for packing tape. With a fat-tipped marker I write, FRAGILE. Usually I am happy to go, the familiar element of change now soothing.

This is my third move in fifteen months. I sit on the battered sofa, turning my silver keys in my palms, sliding them along my fingertips. I survey my belongings, which are now stuffed into five absurd bundles and resemble tight sausages, shoes and bits of pillow protruding from their slick skins. I await the tardy landlord. The apartment is empty save the lingering cigarette smoke and my unattractive luggage.

Forcing a sigh, I turn my gaze to the small balcony, which through peach colored curtains are fading yet admitting the only natural light in the room. Like all of the layered apartment buildings in this neighborhood, mine was designed as a buzzing hive by careless architects with little regard for UV-ray hungry houseplants and light sleepers. After six months living in this bee’s nest, where people eat, sleep and fuck in perpetual darkness, I had still not met the Queen Bee officially.

I figured her to be the loopy Señora living on the ground floor, whose sad afternoons are spent corralling laundry that has escaped from the inner courtyard lines. She collects the fallen garments, and then displays them in the building’s foyer at around seven o’clock, just as everyone begins to return from work. On the stairwell handrail residents are forced to examine giant undies, once white pit-stained undershirts and smiley-face-print thongs. I have always been disgusted by this parade of underclothes and have avoided the handrail at risk of falling so not to touch it. I realize it matters very little whose knickers will be on display in the vestibule today, as within the hour I’ll be gone.

Generally absentminded, I’ve lost my fair share of wallets and sets of keys. Over time, I’ve accepted my goldfish’s memory and taken steps to guard against further loss and embarrassment. It’s simple: keys in bag always (never the shelf, never the pocket, never the top of the refrigerator…never); before leaving check for keys in the bag; at the door before closing it, pat bag and listen for jingle of keys; mistake jingle for lose change and dig through bag hurriedly, eventually finding keys and then enjoying general feeling of relief.

My constant care for the keys’ whereabouts binds us and makes my giving them up when moving a weird and nervous transaction. For months the chunks of metal and their shiny ring were my only real objects of importance, then one day they cease to be useful as I toss them on the table with a note, or pass them to the hand of a greedy, meddling slumlord. Almost instantly, I forget our co-dependent relationship, quickly moving on to another set of jinglers and a new door with different old locks that will sometimes stick.

The grease splattered clock in the kitchen indicates that I’ve been here over a half hour. As the boredom of waiting begins to grip my soul, I fall back into the sofa and submit to the rambling meditation that forced silent patience always induces within me. I follow a faltering train of thought, tracing steps back to previous homes and the sensations their memories evoke, until finally arriving at our front door, now long gone.

Peering in, I allow my eyes to adjust from the bright, equatorial sun to the dimness of a brick-clad salon. The living room was decorated in red and blue with dabs of white, it always seemed so subtly patriotic for me as an American, but he never made that connection.

He sits on the couch facing me. ‘You should give me the keys.’ he says.

I try not to hear him, and look out the window at the overgrown bougainvillea bush, its mass nearly covers the window completely. The afternoon sun collides with the flowers, magnifying the slender intricacy of their leafy petals, forcing their magenta hue to envelope the living room in rosy dust.

Their pinks shadow across his perfect features. He glows there, and I study the scar above his right eyebrow. I know the scar, its width, depth, length and origin. At some point, when we were thick, hot and intertwined, he had explained everything. The men had placed large stones on the dirt road, forcing him to bring the car to a stop. Instead of allowing themselves to be robbed, he and his three friends had taken on the group with unbridled testosterone and the indisputable invincibility of being twenty-one. It was a rock to the temple that nearly removed his eye from its socket, but instead sliced his eyebrow in half, the skin flap hanging in front of his line of vision, and the blood making everything blurry.

‘I don’t have them with me.’ I lie.

He is regarding me with disappointment, daring himself to call my bluff.

‘Fuck.’ I think, as we stare at each other, reading each other’s minds. Before, we would lie on the blue bed and close our eyes. ‘Tell me what I’m thinking…,’ I would laugh, and concentrate to picture in my mind’s eye Playa Esimiero, or a plate of fried plantains. It never mattered how obscure my mental imagery was, he would guess it without error. ‘The swimming pool by the rock quarry, that’s too easy.’ he would report, and I would howl in amazement of his ability to decipher my brain waves.

Looking at me now, and reading me from his position on the chequered couch, he should read my thoughts one more time and understand that these stupid keys are everything for me. They are the way the rust squeals and cracks when I unlock the decrepit gate and the means to open the heavy wooden door, allowing it to swing aside with dangerous speed. They are soft grass and puffing smoke and palm fronds. They are too, the way he waits for me, and all the illusions we have created for one another. Maybe he knows, or maybe by now our telepathic connection has been obliterated, but either way he seems not to care. I excuse myself.

When I return from the bathroom, his eyebrows are raised in question and pity and his fists are clenched, holding tight around my set of keys. ‘Jesus Christ, this is crazy,’ he whispers, shaking his head at me.

****

Thousands of miles, hours and thoughts have come and gone since the rosy living room and the blue bed. I re-live it all, shifting old keys and new life back and forth between my hands methodically, in systematic recollection. The landlord arrives.

All surrendered, I exit through the lobby for the last time, where I see the supposed Queen Bee as she hums to herself and tidies things up. She is dusting some plastic plants which she has forced into the hard soil of the ceramic pots near the door. The fake fern and daisy flowers are cheap replicas and their falsehood is painfully obvious. I cringe, but relax when I notice how happy she seems to be as she tends their rootless stems.

‘Goodbye,’ I tell her, interrupting her from her gardening. The Queen regards me with grey eyes from behind mammoth glasses that cover half her lined face. Her hair is an electrocuted maroon, in need of a dye-job, and I feel that she is one good example of people who look like their dogs, or whose dogs look like them. Ugly, Pepé is short and could also use a trip to the hairdresser. He is a terrier with bladder control issues, but a lively personality. I smile at her and head for the door.

‘One minute,’ she holds up a dishwater-dry hand, asking me to wait. She returns from her dark doorway and asks, ‘Is this yours?’

She is holding up a black pair of panties that say ‘Sweet Thing’ in gold letters, which she apparently had collected earlier that day after their silent escape from the clothesline. I shake my head feeling awkward, and she seems disappointed. She stuffs Sweet Thing into her apron and continues her chores while I proceed to get the hell out of there. I hear the door as it thunders and shuts for the last time, locking me out of the hive forever more. Flagging a cab, I search myself for fear or regret, but come up void, encountering instead something that closely resembles happiness.