Romulus 2018

“LIKE THE HUMAN HEART”
Álex Sartoris
There’s something to be said about the sounds of trains in the distance: they soothe the soul. Or so I
like to think, sometimes. Some other times I don’t even think I have a soul. Still, this is not my story
but rather someone else’s.
It was on one of the first days of fall that I walked to the place I go when I feel sad and want to
be alone. It happens to be an old McDonald’s overlooking the edge of town, as the Springsteen song
goes, and from its terrace you can watch trains departing an even older railway station, far enough so
that they look like a line between the meadows and the sky, and yet so close you can still hear them as
they speed away into the sunset at dusk.
There’s something to be said about McDonald’s, too: no matter where you are in the world or if you
ever get lost, be it a highway in the desert or one of those concrete jungles we call cities, you can always
find solace in between their facsimile walls. God bless globalisation for these small miracles. Perhaps
it is this abatement, to instantly believe I’m somewhere I know and will always know wherever I am,
that draws me to this place again and again. However, as it happens, I find myself ever more oblivious
to my surroundings than to my thoughts. That may be why at first I didn’t see her sitting by a table on
a corner, her face towards the same sunset I had been watching until then.
It took me a while to recognize her because of the years, her sunglasses and her hair – once blond,
it now glowed pink as gum. Nevertheless, there was still an aura of improbable beauty around her, like
snow on a summer day. I stood up and neared her.
‘Claire, is that you?’
She looked at me then, but said nothing.
‘It’s me, Álex. You know, I was friends with your brother at school. May I sit down?’
She shrugged and I took a place, unaware of the fact that I obstructed her view of the sun.
‘It must have been, what? Ten years?’
I really couldn’t tell how fast time had flown since I had last seen her. Before I knew, I was talking
again.
‘You know, I often think of him. Max, I mean. It’s been ages since I last spoke to him. And you. I
sometimes think of you, too.’
Her brother and I had one of those friendships that were everlasting as long as school years lasted,
right until college started and we all drifted apart like castaways after a shipwreck. On summer days
I’d ride my bike to their house. I couldn’t be more than twelve, and mum was always somewhere else,
working. Where my dad was, that’s something she wonders still. When I think of that summer, I
remember the lawn behind their house, the pool we’d jump into, the room where Max and I would
play videogames or jerk off for the first times to Madonna clips on an old computer.
When I think of Claire, I remember long afternoons by the pool, water dripping from her hair, the
blue of her eyes. I also remember we played hide and seek with her brother, careful not to disturb their
father, whom I remember always sitting in front of a TV, beer in hand. Claire and I always hid inside
a closet in her bedroom which proved a perfect cocoon from the outside world. We could see the bed
through the keyhole in the wooden door and hear Max’s footsteps in the corridor before he gave up
on us and went somewhere else to play. We stayed a little longer, and she would hold my hand then
and tell me how she often hid in there.
She produced a smoke from her purse. The moment she lit it made me feel like something precious
had been lost that would never be found again. She took a drag and let the smoke out through her
nose, her eyes still hidden behind the shades. The sky was now the same colour as her hair, which gave
her the somewhat hieratical looks of a sculpture or a ghost.
When I asked Claire why she hid in there, she replied: ‘It’s because of monsters’. I thought she was
old enough not to believe in monsters anymore. Now I wonder if she had ever been young at all. Back
then, I still didn’t know monsters had a human face, a human smile, a human heart. Nightmares made
of flesh and bone lurking in broad daylight.
Her phone chirped and she held it with both hands. I could see the screen reflected on her sunglasses
as she started texting.
‘If you’ll excuse me, I need to go to the toilet’, she said and then she disappeared into the building.
I stood there, still thinking of the last summer I spent at their house. I had biked all the way there
to find that only their father was at home. His breath reeked of beer when he told me Max and Claire
had gone shopping with their mother. He said they’d be coming any time soon, though, and that I
could stay until then if I wanted to. He sat in front of the TV and fell asleep as if I had never shown
up, so I went to Claire’s room and waited there.
She used to draw a lot, I recall now. She was too shy to lend any of her pictures, and so I thought
this could be my chance to take a better look at them. I was scanning through some sketches when
I heard a door shut and a sense of guilt grew inside me. Afraid that she would get mad at me for
being in her room without her knowing, I did the only thing that seemed reasonable at the moment:
I opened the closet door, slipped inside and closed it behind me. Not a minute later, Claire walked in
the room. I should have opened the door right then and explained why I was there, but I didn’t. Things
might have followed a different path then. Instead I remained silent, careful not to give myself away.
I wanted to see; what, I did not know then, nor could I have imagined.
She pulled over her t-shirt and threw it to the floor. An ethereal steam of sweat rose from her skin,
and I could see the ever more protruding shape of her breasts beneath a white bra. She unbuttoned her
trousers and let them fall to the floor. From where I was, I could see the first signs of pubic hair were
starting to sprout here and there on the leg openings and band of her panties. And then it struck me
that she was going to open the closet looking for something to put on. Still, I could not take my eye
off the keyhole. Then she turned around, and even though I could not see past her, I somehow knew
her father was there, too. It smelled of beer.
I never told anyone what I had seen there. For years it haunted me like a bad dream. As I grew up
I sometimes found it exciting, only to feel empty afterwards and hate myself for it. In time, it became
less a memory than a nightmare, or at least I wanted to think it had been nothing more than that. And
though it still lingered somewhere in my mind, I came to doubt its veracity. I had to.
When it happened, I was too scared or confused or simply too astonished to do anything. All the
while, Claire looked toward the closet and her eyes were an infinite blue that could almost pierce
through the door. Bent as she was on the bed, one of her hands was gripping the bed sheets while the
other was reaching out towards me for something that wasn’t there, and then I, too, held my hand
towards the door, as if trying to hold hers.
Like that day, I then stretched an arm towards the emptiness she had left before me. I wanted to
hold her hand and tell her how sorry I was, but there are invisible walls we cannot cross, and I could
never reach out for her any more than I can reach out for you. Besides, I was and would always be late,
ten years too late.
By then the sky had bruised to night already and the last train had long departed the station. When
it was clear she wasn’t coming back, I stood up and walked away.
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