Dreaming of Monsters and Friends

Part I

I think it’s been a long time since I had a dream. You work so long and you are so tired that nothing comes up when you finally fall asleep. It’s like a long stretch of void between the time you fall asleep and the time you wake up. And even when you are awake, you feel like you are an automaton. You work, you do the things that you are supposed to but you are still asleep with your eyes wide open.

 I remember that I used to dream a lot as a kid. It was as if all my brain did back then was dream. There was one that I remember well.  I was the Lone Ranger and I would catch the bad guys in the nick of time and then ride into the sunset like in the films. And there was always a beautiful brunette by my side. I wanted to marry someone like that back then. 

But then, I grew up. 

There is a little boy in the building where I live. He reminds me of myself as a kid. Scraggly hair, a ready grin almost as if he is trying too hard to please and that unmistakable look of loneliness. On most days, his parents work late and he stays alone in the apartment. I see him sometimes sitting on the staircase, close to the front door of the building. Waiting. And whenever he greets me I don’t seem to be able to respond. That simple attempt at a connection takes me by surprise each time. Tongue tied I wave at him and then feel guilty. I know he’s just a lonely kid trying to make a friend. 

I bet he dreams a lot. I bet he dreams every night. Nightmares that make your heart race uncontrollably. And the good dreams that makes your soul feel wightless like candy floss. 

I bet he dreams about brunettes with beautiful café-con-leche skin too. 

Maybe if I ask him what he dreams about, they will in turn become my own dreams like a secret being passed on from one to another. I can’t help but be greedy for dreams when all of mine have been extinguished so long ago.

I bet he dreams a lot. 

Lucky kid!

                                                                               ****                                                                                   

There’s one dream that always pops up in my head when I try go to bed. It goes something like this: I’m on the sidewalk outside my building, it’s almost dusk and the air around me feels cold. And then suddenly the ground beneath me starts to move. The concrete sidewalk turns into what feels like Jell-O and giant waves undulate making me lose my balance. And then, I start to shake in fear because my city is going to be destroyed. 

I haven’t told my mother about my dream. She would only become worried about me and say under her breath how much she hates her job. I know she feels guilty because she cannot take care of me after school. I sometimes listen to my parents talk in the night when they think I’m asleep. So, I know these things.

In the afternoons, when its only me in the apartment, I spend time staring at the snake-like crack that runs across the wall that is next to my bed. It grows each day like it has a life of its own. The zig-zag of the crack getting darker and wider each day. It’s so big now that my mother noticed it too. I could see concern in her face. 

We live in an old building. From the outside, it looks like it was built so long ago that it’s a miracle it has survived the constant rumblings that shake the city. The façade was painted a bright maroon two years ago but the battering during the rainy season and the grime off the streets has taken its toll. It looked just as sad as it used to before the coat of paint. And now the building stands next to a shiny new apartment building; its façade a sanitized steely grey, its windows cleaned each week, its balconies filled with outdoor chairs and neat potted plants. 

No, I don’t wish that I lived in an apartment like that.

I like my building. 

Sometimes I imagine it wants a friend too. And maybe I could be that friend. Someone consistent, who doesn’t let it down. My mother says that to my father sometimes. Those are the nights when she cries in the bathroom. You can hear everything in our little apartment. Everything is so close to each other: the living room to the kitchen, the kitchen to the tiny laundry room, the bedroom to the living room. We live in a small box that contains other small boxes within it. Like those Russian nesting dolls.  One within the other, constantly connected. Nesting. 

I walk home from school. It’s not that far. A few blocks to the south from where I live. When I walk home I like to think about these things. Of Matryoshka dolls. How we are just like that. Living so close to each other. And I think how come no one else seems to see it that way. 

Everyone is searching for space in this city. 

Somedays I wish I had my own space. Just mine.

Some of my class mates refuse to speak to me or play with me during recess. They called me “weirdo” one day. Maybe it’s because I like to think a lot. Maybe it’s because I don’t talk to them about the new toy that my parents bought for me or the cartoon that I watched on TV. Then I remember what my mother says to me. She says: Don’t you mind the silly talk of children. They don’t know anything about life. You are perfectly fine as you are.And then she’d kiss me on the crown of my head tenderly. 

                                                                             ****                    

Raul, the man I work with most of the time thinks I’m too old for the job and likes to call me grandpa.“ Abuelo…. que onda?”  He would holler at me from the other end of the parking lot as he walked to the cramped security post at the exit. I always worked from the post at the entrance. A crude square box with Plexiglas windows that makes me think of a coffin.  At first Raul used to get under my skin and irritate me. His lack of respect. But then I realized it was nothing personal. And now I don’t mind that he calls me grandpa. 

Lately, I’ve been seeing ghosts in the mirror. I wonder if my time is up. Usually, the afternoon sun manages to creep through the narrow slit of window in the bathroom and cast shadows where none should be, playing tricks on me. They make me think that I too belong among the ghosts of my past. Somewhere in the twilight of the bathroom, the shadows metamorphose into faces of those long gone. 

On most days when I walk out of the building there’s a feeling of being disconnected from the natural flow of life. By late afternoon, for most people the day has already begun to wind down. The small children’s park, sandwiched between two forks of the street that leads to the street where I catch the metro-bus is always full of children and young mothers. Watching them I wonder if my mother ever played with me in that attentive, caring manner. She was a woman of little words and little affection. Growing up I thought that was how things were supposed to be. That chilly feeling between her and I every time we were alone. Maybe that’s why I couldn’t bare the loss of my father when he finally passed away. He always had a tune on his lips and a joke for me. Despite his efforts, I ended up resembling my mother. Juana with her sharp features and pursed lips, dressed in her clean modest clothes looked unhappy next to her effervescent husband in faded family photos. What she was unhappy about I never knew. When she died, I felt guilty for the relief I felt at finally being alone.

Sometimes, I miss my father. It feels strange to miss him when I think that I could easily be mistaken for someone’s grandfather. There’s more grey hair than black in my head now, my skin hangs a little slack around my jaws and neck and my gait is starting to get that slow shuffle of the elderly. He died a year shy of turning forty, not a single grey hair visible on his head. Aging baffles me. This slow decay of my body and my senses.

I finally find some space in the crowded metro-bus; stuck between two women talking enthusiastically about their grandchildren. Their talk is cheerful. One of them is dressed fashionably, her face caked with make-up and the other is dressed in a pair of jeans and a sweater that suit her well. They could be my age. Looking out the window at the passing buildings and traffic I suddenly feel weary. 

There would be no one to bury me when I die.

                                                                                ****

Don Rodrigo waved at me today as he walked out the building to go to work. He’s an odd sort, I’ve heard my parents say. But I think there’s a chance that he might be someone just like me. 

Last night I had a nightmare again. It’s the same dream. The undulating waves of the asphalt, and me falling on the ground. But this time there was a sound. A rumbling so loud and clear emanating from deep below the earth. I woke up in the morning feeling exhausted. When I dressed standing in front of the mirror, I wondered if there was a way to escape from a dream. The light outside the tiny window of the bathroom looked grey and foggy. And on my walk to the school, the wind blew chilly and sharp at my sides, my lungs feeling heavy as I took each breath. The air smelled acrid and stung my nostrils. 

But it ended up being a good day at school. During recess, I sat down and drew the skyline of the city, making sure to include all the tall buildings that I knew.  No one bothered me in my little corner of the playground. They were completely oblivious to my presence. I looked up and watched the kids running, pushing and jumping around me. It looked like a battle of sorts; each trying to carve out a space for themselves in a place where there was so little of it.

Back home in the afternoon I ate the food my mother had made for me that morning. Chicken and rice to be eaten with tortillas that she had bought from the shop around the corner. There was always a line for tortillas there. On the weekends, it was my chore to be in the line. The smell of the fresh corn dough and the noise of the machine that made the tortillas never failed to fascinate me. Somedays the line would stretch to the end of the block. 

There’s always a line for anything in this city. 

But my mother likes those tortillas and so I wait patiently. Sometimes I see Don Rodrigo in the line too. That makes me happy since I like to imagine that he is my friend.

Part II

I don’t believe in monsters but then I also believe in them especially just before I fall asleep. I imagine the crack in the wall next to my bed widening into a chasm that swallows me whole like the maw of some giant monster. My mother calls these things my silly notions. She blames the TV for my nightmares.  She thinks I watch TV in the afternoons when I’m alone at home. I don’t tell her about the books I read instead. The books about gods and the people who lived long before this city existed and long before us. 

“Why don’t you find some normal books to read? Comics- Superman, Spiderman…….” She sighs as she rummages through my collection of books. Most of them are mine, bought from the second-hand store next to my school. The rest are from the school library.

She then caresses my forehead tenderly, her gaze intently focused on my face as if she is trying to read something on it. Her hands feel soft on my skin and I smell the last traces of her perfume. I feel that familiar heaviness in my heart. It’s love and concern for her. There’s tears in her eyes. She feels the same heaviness too. 

“Mi amor….” She says and takes a deep breath. I see her controlling her tears. 

“I’m okay, Mami.” 

She nods her head and attempts a smile.  Right then I hug her, feeling my arms wrap around her neck and feel the warmth of her cheek.

“I want the best for you my kiddo……but then sometimes I can’t help but worry. You are so grown up I can barely recognize you sometimes.”

“Soon, you won’t have to worry about me at all.” I say calmly. She then kisses me on the cheek and places her nose on my skin and inhales deeply. 

                                                                           ****

Today, I finally said hello to Don Rodrigo. He looked at me as if he had been hit in the face by someone. He missed a step as he walked down the rest of the staircase. And then he stopped and said hello to me. 

“What kind of job do you do?” I asked him before he stepped outside.

“Oh……. I’m a security guard.”

I nodded my head slowly the way I’ve seen my father do sometimes. I wanted Don Roderigo to know that I was giving that information careful consideration. 

“That’s good.” I said finally as he opened the lock of the small door to the street. And with the door ajar he turned towards me and spoke again.

“Are you alone in the afternoons?” 

“I’m nine and I can take care of myself.” 

“Of course.” He said and closed the door behind him carefully. 

That was the most I’ve heard him speak. Just then, I was sure that I liked him.

Maybe, I could tell him about my dream.

                                                                           ****

I listened to Raul talk about a young woman he had met a few days ago. He described her appearance in detail taking time to tell me that he had wanted to sleep with her right away. 

“But she’s the type you got to woo into bed with a nice meal, a movie, a walk in the park……maybe some ice cream, which ever she pleases.”  There had been a glint in Raul’s eyes when he talked about the woman. An energy that made me feel old the way young people inevitably make the elderly feel.

“So will you date her, then? Woo her?” 

“I think she’s worth it…… just that body is worth the effort.” Raul said earnestly. It seemed that he had given his plan some thought. 

“And then what would you do?”

“Well……” Raul shrugged to say that he had no plans.

“Marriage?”

Raul looked at me with a look of pity. An expression that seemed to say; the old man’s one of those poor romantics. Maybe that’s why he never married. 

“What marriage? She’s not the type I’d take home. My mother will clobber me over the head.”

I nodded my head in agreement. My mother had never approved any of the girls that I had eyed as a teenager. Even when I was an adult each time she had caught me looking at a young woman with interest, she would glare at me with such force that I would immediately look away from the woman. You see, my father had left my mother for another woman just after my tenth birthday and I think since then she had wanted nothing to do with men. Sometimes I wondered if the irony of having to raise a man had made her bitter towards me despite her maternal feelings. 

It was confusing to be loved that way. There was always a hint of anger in her gestures of love. As I grew up that love turned into possessiveness as she realized that she was utterly alone. She wanted me to herself and I was too naïve to realize what she was doing to me. 

By the time she died it was too late for me.Iwas the one who was now utterly alone.

“You have no one?” Raul asked egged on by his curiosity about me. Lately, he had taken to asking personal questions that left me feeling exhausted. 

“It’s just me.”

“You know it’s never too late to find someone.” Raul patted me on the shoulder condescendingly. I’ve learned to ignore his youthful arrogance. 

The long daylight hours of summer had begun to dissipate and it looked dark and gloomy already. 

I looked at my watch. It was time for me to start work. I waved a quick goodbye to Raul and started walking to my post.

Part III

I barely heard the siren go off the first time that day. It sounded foggy in my sleep addled brain.  I knew it was for the drill to mark the anniversary of the earthquake of 1985. I barely remembered things from back then. What I knew were the stories that my mother had retold over the years of the destruction and the loss.

And then I had a dream. It had been so long since I had a dream. 

I think I had become greedy for one.

It was me but younger. I was standing on the sidewalk outside the building where I lived. Then out of the blue a rumbling sound like a train coming towards me rose from the ground. Something powerful and primal was awake. And the Jacaranda tree across the street; its branches full of green leaves started to shake making a noise like falling rain. As I stood transfixed, the ground beneath me gave way and I fell into a dark chasm. 

I woke up terrified in my bed. My forehead covered in sweat. As I stood up, I felt the urge to piss. I shuffled to the bathroom, my heart still pounding in my chest. The light inside was too bright for it to be time for me to prepare for work. I glanced quickly at the watch. 

It was twelve thirty in the afternoon.

My stomach felt empty. I opened the fridge to find a tortasitting in a plastic bag from this morning. I had bought it from the seller close to work. There had been the usual line of customers waiting patiently for their breakfast sandwich. Some of the faces were familiar. Regulars like me. A few of them nodded a greeting as I joined the line. 

I pulled the tortaout from the plastic bag and began to eat it. It was cold but still tasted good. I couldn’t bother to heat it up. 

The dream had started to fade away from my mind by then. Only the image of the jacaranda tree and the rumbling noise was left as I sat down in front of the TV. 

                                                                             ****

My mother said it was okay to stay home today. My stomach had ached all night and then in the morning I had thrown up the slice of bread that my mother had served me.

She was worried that I would be alone at home all day. 

“It’s okay, Mami.” I said.

“It’s just that I can’t take a day off kiddo. There’s so much work piled up.” She stroked my hair tenderly. “I will try to come home early, okay? If something happens knock on Tia Lucia’s door and she will take you to the doctor if need be.” 

I nodded my head even though I didn’t like Tia Lucia and the smell of her apartment. It was a heavy mix of condiments and the wet-dog smell of her poodle whose matted brown fur seemed never to have been groomed.  She lived in the same floor as Don Rodrigo and would sometimes check on me in the afternoons. A short stout woman, she always asked too many questions and demanded answers even thought I didn’t want to share my thoughts with her. I felt she wanted a friend too but I wasn’t sure that I liked her that much. 

And when the siren went off I looked out the living room window calmly. Most people were still walking on the street. A block from where I lived, there was a group of office workers standing on the street outside the new building that had been completed only a few months ago. They looked relaxed; chatting, taking photos or staring at their cell phones. I walked back to the couch and continued to watch the TV show about African dung beetles. While I sat there my stomach rumbled faintly and I wondered if the worst of it was over.

Part IV

When I woke up, I remembered falling asleep on my bed and then the loud rumbling of some terrible monster waking from its slumber. And then a feeling of weightlessness followed by oblivion. There was a faint memory of a siren; the blare urgent and stabbing at my ear drums. 

I woke up sandwiched between a slab of concrete and my bed. The crack on the wall had finally consumed me as I had imagined. But I was miraculously still alive. 

“Help me.” My voice sounded disconnected as I uttered those words repeatedly. I felt light headed and somewhere below my waist I could feel a slow draining. I moved my left leg but my right was stuck. I felt a wooly void where my right leg should have been. That’s when I screamed. An incoherent wordless scream. 

                                                                               ****

I heard the boy. I knew it was him. He was scared and probably injured. 

“I’m here.” I shouted and instinctively tried to raise my hand to wave. Immediately, the pain that shot through it made me feel light-headed. 

“Fuuuck!” I screamed too. Then, I think I lost consciousness for a few minutes only to wake, this time to the sound of my name.

“Don Rodrigo!” It was the boy again. I wanted to respond by saying his name but realized that I didn’t even know that.

“Hijo! Kid!”

“I’m hurt” He was scared, I could tell.

“Don’t worry. Someone will come to help us.”

There was silence from the kid. I started to panic again. 

“Let’s keep talking until help arrives.”  I said running out of ideas.

“Okay.” He said faintly.

Looking around I could see that I was still in my living room but the space between the floor and the ceiling had been reduced to only a couple of feet. The floor beneath my body was dangerously slanted. I understood what had happened. The force of the quake had made the floors of the building collapse on each other like neat crumpled layers of a cake. The boy and I were stuck between these layers like the icing. In the silence between the questions and responses, there was nothing except for the sounds of sirens and the buzzing of helicopters overhead. 

When the earthquake siren sounded the second time, I knew there was not enough time for me to climb down the stairs so I crawled underneath the dining table in the living room and decided to wait out the shaking. The rumbling sound had been the worst just before I felt my body being thrown into the air. And then I blacked out. 

“Where are your parents kid?”

“Work.”

“How come you are not at school?”

“Don Rodrigo…….” The boy sounded like he was about to cry. “I had a dream of a monster swallowing me up.”

“I had my first dream in years this morning.” I said trying to change the subject. “It was a good dream.” I lied deliberately.

“What was it about?” The kid responded after a few minutes of silence.

“A carnival. I was on a carousel…… on a pony going up and down.” 

“I like carousels……. I wish my parents could take me to places like that more often.” 

“I’m sure they want to.”  

“Don Rodrigo………Do you think people can be in the same dream?” I’m lost for words.

                                                                                 ****

I’m glad that I’m not alone. I could never tell my parents but I hate being alone so much. And now as I look up at the patch of sky above me I wonder if this is what it always looks like. White clouds that seem like they’ve been shredded by hand, floating in a grey-blue sky. The color makes me feel sad. 

I haven’t heard from Don Rodrigo for a while now. There’s people talking in the street and the steady pulse of a police siren. And then the voice of a man calling out. 

“I’m here.” I yell, my throat hurting from the effort. I feel parched and my tongue is coated in dust.

 There’s footsteps approaching now. I feel hopeful and shout for help again.

“Don’t worry…. you are going to be fine.” A man says touching my forehead gently.

“There’s another person…. Don Roderigo………. He lives alone.” 

“Huh?” The man looks puzzled.

“Don Rodrigo! Find him!” I yell feeling desperate, on the verge of tears.

                                                                            ****

I think for a few minutes before I answer the boy’s question. And run my tongue over my parched lips.

“Hey kid,……. don’t you stop dreaming.” I say instead of agreeing with him. 

I feel a sharp pain in my chest. A calculated stab at my heart. 

I want to tell him that no one cares about the dreams of the poor and insignificant. That our dreams are not worth much to anyone else but us. 

“Kid……. are you there?” I yell again. 

“Here!” I hear him say. “I think this is a dream and we are somehow dreaming it together.” 

“Yes, ……we are.” I managed to say as the pain in my chest begins to dull my senses.

“Don Rodrigo, would you be my friend?” I hear the boy say as if he is talking to me through a veil over his mouth. I no longer have strength to move my mouth so, I nod my head to say yes. 

Yes, I could be your friend.