WARS. THREESOMES.

DRAFTS. & MOTHERS

WARS. THREESOMES.DRAFTS. & MOTHERS

Heriberto Yépez

Factory School2007

Wars. Threesomes. Drafts. & Mothers

by Heriberto Yépez

First Edition, Factory School 2007

Heretical Texts: Volume 3, Number 1

Series Editor: Bill Marsh

ISBN 1-60001-050-4

Cover art: Gidy LozaProduction Assistant: Octavia Davis

Reproduction and re-use of this work for non-commercial personal or collective purposes is permitted and encouraged. Reproduction for sale, rent or other use involving fi nancial transaction is prohibited except by permission of the author and publisher.

Factory School is a learning and production collective engaged in action research, multiple-media arts, publishing, and community service.

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. . .

7

EMILY CAME BACK on my birthday. My brother was waiting for her outside, just in case, she said, my reaction wasn’t cool. I heard the car. I was surprised to see her. We talked for a couple of minutes. I realized these few moments of talking were proof enough eleven months had passed. The skin of her face was really clean; it looked as if she had been completely relaxed without me. She didn’t resemble the image I’d had of her for the last few months. Seeing her now was like seeing two of her—the one standing close to me now and the one I had in my mind—and between these two—too disparate to consider one and the same—there was one missing—the one that connected the two of them. But if I could see that third one now, another two would be necessary to connect all three. Imagining her as a series didn’t help me listen to her. I became distracted and decided—to shield my absence—to be totally nice. We decided to spend the evening together. «To see what happens». And when one of us said that phrase—«To see what happens»—I thought seeing what happens was impossible. To see requires involvement. And once you get involved, you see nothing.

It was my birthday, after all, so my brother decided to offer us a ride to buy a cake. My brother was happy to see the two of us together again. I’ll never forget my brother’s face when he saw us standing together at the door, ready, the whole world around us. We felt powerful, alive. We had a second chance. And he was there to witness happiness return. I bet he felt fi ne, even though he seemed sick.

I could sense he was using different drugs now. His search continued. His search for the perfect orgasm.

Giving us a ride was quite a joy for him. He was a total fake. He didn’t even use drugs. His way of getting high was talking about drugs. He kept inventing new kinds. Or my way of destroying my brother was to turn him into a drug addict in a novel. Anyway, seeing his brother together with Emily again was his way to deny he was falling apart.

I certainly was happy that day. I was dead happy, as they say in Michoacán. It was a good sign to have her back exactly that day. She seemed very happy too. My brother decided we could even pass by our old house, the house we lived in when we

8

were children and mother was beautiful. Half the things we did that day were his ideas.

My brother and I have a lot of memories about that place. That was the fi rst time Emily had been there. She was in the back seat and at one moment I went from front seat to back seat. It feels ridiculous to remember that image now. That happy movement inside the car. Changing seats is childish. A cliché or a Chagall. I was totally happy. I asked her about her trip back to the border. She said, trying not to go into details, the trip was slow and fun. It was the trip back to you.

Her affair seemed over by then. Almost a year had passed. I guessed the great sex had become usual great sex. And that’s why she came back. Pity. Or she didn’t know what to do. Or my birthday simply changed things in her head. Aroused confusion. My brother stopped at a friend’s. Not even fi ve minutes and he was back with us. Emily asked if I thought he was doing drugs again; I said no way. He’s not going to be depressed ever again. My brother and I have a pact. When one of us is happy, the other lives from that happiness and submerges the fact that he has no life.

This isn’t about me. There’s no pain in writing this. I’m just a frigid phallus. Your plain old fellow. Cut the crap. I take Cut the Crap as an American saying. Pragmatism meets Whatevaism. I have no fi xed position on these subjects. This is not a bio. It’s just a process I’m following. I shouldn’t discover anything disturbing. I’m just storytelling. Continuing a spiral.

That night, what a night. I decided to ask her about the sex she had had with the other guy. It was fabulous and dirty, she said. Lot of orgasms? Lots of them. And I imagined her having the biggest orgasm of her life. An orgasm that would last for one minute, then two minutes, and then fi ve, and then ten, and then all the fun of the orgasm had ended, but the orgasm continued, it had become a torture, and she couldn’t stop it and the orgasm continued until four and a half hours pass and she dies of screaming, terrorized by pleasure.

I knew she was fucking with me thinking of him. I encouraged this to happen, so she would be happy.

All those months we were separated I couldn’t stop thinking of him. His name got obsessed with my mind and my

9

mind obsessed with him. I decided he and his name were two separate entities, and none of them had anything to do with Emily. Emily was some place else trying to fi nd her way back to me. I think she was in my brother’s car looking for my new address or something. I opened the door and they were there. I was lucky they didn’t have an affair while looking for me.

I crave writing in a non-mother tongue. It feels like language is disappearing. Trimmed, really trimmed. Writing’s anxious. I hook like a spider. Writing feels like an impossible implosion’s gonna happen. It feels like my mother’s going away. Like my mother’s dead.

The fi rst thought that crossed my mind when I saw the two of them was, Now what? Is my brother her new boyfriend, or what? She said Hi. I remembered today is your birthday. I called but you didn’t answer the phone. Then I called Antonio and decided to come. I hope you don’t mind. Antonio is in the car, he’s waiting to see what happens. What happens. He’s afraid you might use your fi sts on my face. I don’t know if that’s an image that can become reality. Several months have passed since the last time we saw each other and fucked and maybe your drug use has increased. Maybe you’re a more violent man now. No, I’m not violent. I’m just smoking a lot. That’s all. I feel dizzy all the time. So, don’t worry. How have you been? You look okay.

Alienated. I just recognized this is the word. An old word I might add. «Alienated». I guess this might be how somebody from outer space might feel if she or he were left on our planet. She or he might vomit at fi rst but slowly get comfy, in this cold comfort where we take a seat, eat a piece of cake, and decide this is simply the best day. We might even have a soul or at least a sofa; play cards or make love after so many months of being alone.

What have you been doing? Writing. What else?Emily, are you sure Norman’s okay? Yes, he’s okay. He

looks fi ne. I think he’s not doing hard drugs anymore, she said. So, you want to stay? I just spoke to Norman on Sunday,

and he said he was searching for you. I don’t think my brother is okay. Maybe you should get back in the car, say bye to him. On Sunday, Norman told me he had decided to kill both of you. He

10

was obsessed with the name of your Toluca boyfriend. He asked if he could use the car. I said no. This car wouldn’t make it to the South.

Emily’s using drugs too, you know. She met the guy she had an affair with in April, I think. And now Antonio and she are having a conversation outside. Emily just spoke for a couple of minutes with him. She says he seems calm. Emily feels sad. I guess her affair with the other guy didn’t turn out well. Or maybe she just wants to get some money before going back to him. After all, the money to buy the cake came from Antonio, but the story got all mixed up at some point—his identity became all blurred, as in a car accident.

Antonio gets confused very often. That’s why he doesn’t have a girl of his own. If he gets too close, he disappears real quickly into people, he fades into female bodies, like smoke coming off a match. He uses his car like a turtle uses its shell. He is not of the opinion he’s solid enough. Giving Emily a ride to his brother’s place was a good thing for him. Kinda like a test. He blurs as soon as he sees any woman, in this case, Emily, his brother’s ex.

He left the place. His brother’s place. On the way back to his apartment, he felt secure. His car was a good shell, the best. He imagined how the story of Emily and his brother could continue or end.

Some dreams are not desires. Some dreams are not fears. Some dreams are supposed to be completed. What happens is interrupted just before we wake up. And you’re supposed to fi nish the action with your mind awake. You follow the path the dream interrupted.

Antonio did that. He decided to imagine what could happen between Emily and his brother. He might hit her after a few minutes of conversation. He might throw the cake to the fl oor or throw it at Emily. Or he might even smear it on his face to let Emily know that when she fucked that other guy, he became a clown. He controls others, saying he’s not in control of his life.

Or they might get high together, and after that she might go away again. The other guy could fi nd them fucking. Fucking and speaking of him. Arriving at the scene to realize he does

11

not resemble what they are saying and thus he might not be the person they’re talking about.

But somehow those closures were not what this story needed. What just happened to Antonio—nothing out of the ordinary—needed a different conclusion, a different unchaining. This dream was not meant to close with Emily.

So, I parked the car and concentrated on the immediate image that came to mind. And it was the image of my mother as a child. The image of my mother and a male, maybe her father, maybe just another man Grandma was messing with. And I asked the little girl what connection she had with the story of my car as a perfect shell, with Emily and my brother, and she said, I don’t know. I’m just a kid. I’m just an image, and there’s a man at my side, and I’m afraid of how the story is gonna develop.

12

«I do not know English.

«I do not know English, and therefore I can have nothing tosay about this latest war, fl owering through a night-scope in the evening sky.

«I do not know English and therefore, when hungry, can do nomore than point repeatedly to my mouth.

[…]

«Because I do not know English I have been variously calledMr. Twisted, The One Undone, The Nonrespondent, TheTruly Lost Boy, and Laughed-At-By-The-Horses.

«The war is declared ended, almost before it has begun.

«They have named it The Ultimate Combat between Nearness andDistance.

«I do not know English.

Michael Palmer, The Promises of Glass

13

English brings me to my mother. English brings me to poverty and beginnings. When my mother came to the North some people laughed

at the way she talked. People from rural areas in the South talk like birds, she says. So, people laughed when she talked. The guy at the store where she bought bread and milk to eat before going to work simply laughed at that bird-girl from the South. People from the North, you know, are very ironic. They don’t believe in identity.

I hear my mom all the time in my head. Finding a voice somewhere in the woods, a voice saying names. The voice of a bird-woman. And the voice wasn’t calling her son or lovers, she was just saying names, and the names didn’t belong to anybody. They were only sounds coming out of a mouth, eating bread, drinking milk. No sons or lovers yet. Only a young woman saying names—most of them male names. And the air in the room got fi lled with empty names before she left for work.

Dancing for them.The fi rst place she lived in when she came to the city was

a motel downtown. I’ve been in that motel two or three times. The motel has long stairs, really long ones. When you go up, the place even feels bigger than it really is, so you go to the AM-PM on the corner and you return to the motel, stop at the façade, you look at it and the place is just not that big. You go inside anyway, and while you’re using the stairs there’s no way you are not going to decide this is a very freaky place. The kind of place where you belong.

And you start to wonder if this is the motel where your mother lived thirty years ago or your mother’s womb and you’re still in it.

And the supervisor working there is probably the same guy that knew my mom. He simply had to notice her when she lived here. She was so beautiful. She was the most beautiful bird in the city. Her eyes and wings were so beautiful, no human could see her. All of them saw her in the form of a woman.

That year somebody took a picture of her, a picture all about her legs.

He is probably the same guy, I bet he has no idea I’m the

14

son of that woman. I’m sure if I mentioned something about this, the same joke would appear in the mind of both of us, a poor joke about his being my dad. But maybe he’s not the same man.

But I’m sure if I asked that fat old guy how many years he’s been working here and I explained to him why I’m asking that kind of question, even if he weren’t that guy looking at my mother on her way to the stairs, the joke would still appear in his mind and mine, because you have to build a relationship with unreality, and the best way is through jokes like that. Jokes that both create a distance and fi ll a space. Jokes made in order for us not to notice how empty the whole situation really is.

My father and I used jokes. She used names.

15

What follows from the denial of life is control. Control of one’s own feelings, thoughts and actions. What follows is control of others. What follows from the denial of life is countries like Mexico or the United States.

Sometimes while constructing a character life is denied. You become a storyteller because you want to control others. You call this control «characters». I want to control my mother. I want to control myself. I want to control my father. I want to control my brother. I think that’s why Emily returned to the car so soon.

She saw my brother was relatively calm and knew they were not going to get into a fi ght, at least not in the next few minutes, and then she remembered how I was trying to control her behavior, feelings, and future actions while I was driving her to my brother’s. Driving her and trying to control my car.

Are you sure he’s well? You know that’s not what I heard. I heard he has problems, you know, dealing with the whole situation. I think it’s a good idea for me to go with you, stay close to both of you. Maybe even be in the middle.

And she realized I was not going to give up my control of her, and she said, in order to control me, «yes, maybe that’s a good idea, a good thing».

Plots, endings, those are also resources for controlling others. And I said, I think the two of you need some time alone, but why don’t the three of us go to buy a cake fi rst? Let’s celebrate.

16

I have a question for you.How much time are Emily and my brother going to spend

together this second time? I wrote that they separated soon after Norman’s birthday,

but I think I was wrong. I lied. Stories, as I understand them, involve a lot of lying and too much truth.

I had a nightmare that day. And what I told you about their separation was just part of that nightmare. Not reality. In reality Emily and my brother stayed together. But for how long? That’s something I want you to decide. I’m being democratic here, experimental or something. How much time before they separated again? Two hours? Two days? Two weeks? Nine years? Two deaths?

Taking control of a story causes anxiety. Telling what happens, describing it, making it up requires becoming responsible, and I want to take some of that anxiety from you. I won’t leave all the deciding in your hands, I will describe a big part of the story, I will let you sort out mainly the non-anxious parts of storytelling.

Imagine their separation. Imagine this man, my brother, whose name is Norman. Nor

man nor woman. Imagine Norman. And imagine this girl named Emily, sometimes known as

Emily / I’m a lie.Imagine the two of them, the story they share. The story

of a birthday. A story in which I drive Emily, and on the way down to my brother’s place I try to control my feelings for her, feelings I’ve been having since the fi rst day I knew her.

What went wrong? She liked me. I liked her. We became something similar to friends. I even told Monica I was feeling something really strong for her friend and Monica told me she could help to bring Emily close to me. She could infl uence her movements. But then Emily met Norman. The story changed.

17

«Plots carry their own logic. There is a tendency of plots to move toward death. He believed that the idea of death is woven into the nature of every plot. A narrative plot no less than a conspiracy of armed men. The tighter the plot of a story, the more likely it will come to death. A plot in fi ction, he believed, is the way we localize the force of the death outside the book, play it off, contain it».

Libra, Don Delillo

18

And there’s no defi nitive juncture. Voice does not remain single. And the stories are insuffi cient, and they proliferate, and have no one ending.

Rewriting means risking the characters, who keep changing in rewriting. I’m trying to unearth the story of my family. And I fi nd gaps. In those gaps mutations arise. Photographs I have of my mother do not imply a puzzle.

I remember the next time I saw Emily she was no longer the same woman. Between the day she left town and the day she returned, there was a change. And in her clothes or even in her hair I couldn’t fi nd clues of the events or people she met. I tried to recognize changes in the way she talked, but no big changes had happened there. No new words. There was a slight change in her eyes, but I can’t read eyes.

In one of his prose pieces, Borges describes a character from a novel he’s reviewing. This character dedicated his life as a student to search for a man called Almotásim. The student discovered a glimpse of him living with criminals, looking at them.

At certain moments, those vile men, Borges explains, showed decorum, a clarity and tenderness whose origin surely wasn’t in them. Those traits and features had to be refl ections. They had to belong to a man those vile men knew. A man they were mirroring through a friend mirroring him, a man known by a friend of a friend, a man collected in them. Looking upon one of those men the student decides to look for Almotásim. The moment he fi nds him, the novel ends. Or at least that’s what Borges says the novel does.

This piece by Borges—«El acercamiento a Almotásim»—sometimes appears as a short-story and sometimes—for example, in the 1974 edition of his Obras Completas—as a book review. I’m sure it is neither. And when we call something «hybrid» it means we aren’t capable of bearing its complete otherness. Calling it «hybrid» brings it closer to us, half of us is put into what really is complete otherness. Hybrid is one of our best lies. Borges was of the opinion it would be a great aesthetic mistake to turn the search for Almotásim into the search for God.

19

Yes, Emily had a slight difference in her eyes, but I couldn’t take the risk of following those kinds of leads toward the gap. Her eyes could lead me anywhere and I wasn’t about to take such a trip. Eyes are voyages I can’t deal with.

Except for that, there was no visible change in her—what about her skin?—so I knew the change had happened deeply inside. I had a gap in her story. I know she left for Toluca and in Toluca she met somebody or met quite a few, or met none at all, and it was all about her being alone. And the gap was real, and the gap was all I thought about.

I had to give names to that gap. She gave me two. Teresa and Rafael. And both of them appear to have been her lovers, but I decided to concentrate on Rafael, because I have a greater experience imagining men, since I never knew who my father was.

When I asked Monica about Teresa, she became very quiet and that was hmmm.

Emily wrote some emails to Monica. But Monica says news from Toluca was scarce. I bet at least one of those emails mentioned Teresa, and Monica’s silence over my question about Teresa meant Monica had a story she wasn’t ready or didn’t want to share, or simply Monica had no story because Emily didn’t share any story with her.

I began to think Teresa was a character I was overlooking. I had put too much emphasis on Rafael.

Or maybe Teresa and Rafael became that couple Emily always fantasized about having sex with. Threesomes don’t work, but neither do couples. So I can see why Emily got involved in something like that, and if that was the case, that would explain perfectly why Emily returned to Tijuana after eleven months in Toluca.

Teresa and Rafael decided not to split over Emily, and Emily decided a threesome wasn’t quite real enough for her or anybody. As I said, that would explain why she came back but not why she left again the next day.

By the way, I always told Emily the fantasies she had about fucking with a couple had to do with the image of her mother and her father never, never making out in front of her. No love between them, so Emily wanted to fulfi ll that desire by having

20

a threesome. She said I was dead wrong. «Dead wrong» would be impossible in Spanish. Cultures that use Spanish think being dead could never be wrong. And I was dead wrong if I thought her threesome project had to do with her parents.

If there was any crap like that in the situation, she said, it had to do with a desire to win the attention of a woman right in front of her husband, that is Emily and her mother intensively loving each other while her stepfather couldn’t do a thing but just watch and maybe place a hand.

Wanting to see your mother and daddy fuck is yourmotivation, not mine, she said to me. She wasn’t that far off, because my interest in threesomes involved seeing Emily having sex with another man. I never saw my mother with a man. Her men were just ghosts to me. My brother Antonio was the closest thing to knowing something about my mom’s men.

So I guess I threw Emily ‘into the arms’ of other men. I was writing all day, drinking very heavily. And I couldn’t handle doing both things at the same time, so I felt like I was two different men, and I started to call that situation «My brother and I».

One day Emily said the relationship wasn’t working. I wasn’t the same guy she had fallen in love with. She was offered a job in Toluca. She was going to take it. Meanwhile she was going to think a lot about the two of us. I remember exactly what I said.

—Do as you please. I’m sure you’re going to fi nd somebody there. Border girls are very popular down there, you know, so some guy’s gonna get lucky real soon. And when you say you’re going to think a lot about «the two of us» I know what you’re referring to. You’re referring to you and to a part of you, which you call «you», that is «me», which you want to deny, and so you have ended up falling in love.

21

I used to write her story in my mind every day, almost hour to hour. Writing is controlling, an extension of the usual politics, and I did the writing in order to fi nd out who she was, who I was, and then why she left me for another man. I think it was because of my writing, always deviant.

She came from work, then saw a movie, we slept together or went for a drink; maybe she was totally unhappy living like that. I was certainly happy writing all day. Or maybe I was completely unhappy too. Don’t know anymore; it’s about the past, so it’s all rewriting.

Did I write too much? Did I lose interest in life because I basically lived inside texts? And did I fabricate stories about alcoholism, drugs, sex, threesomes, to have something else in life? Something other than texts? Was it the money I stopped earning once I decided to become a full-time writer? Was it something else? But I don’t see anything else, except matters in writing. You do the deciding. Decide what kind of character this guy is. You decide.

You decide the story of my life.

22

I always get to discover my mothers in bad trips.I’m a prostitute. And my fi rst mother was a prostitute too.Her name is Verónica.She was raped when she was young She was used all the

time She was raped like every woman in my family for as long as we can remember.

(Still, my family, an unforgettable valley.)Her name is Raped Again and Again.Her name is Tonight.I’m a man and that’s the only reason I wasn’t raped. I was

supposed to be the rapist, like my older brother and every man in my family for as long as we can remember.

Becoming a rapist is called, at least in my family, loyalty.Our memory doesn’t want to remember we are the ones

that forget.I didn’t become a rapist because I decided I would become a

prostitute. I was Weak. I became a Man.This is the book on how a character cannot be one. This is a

book, a little book, on how a man is nothing. Never a character, a single person, an identifi able being. He

cannot be He.He always needs to divide. He doesn’t accept giving himself

to a woman or to a book.My mother became a whore at sixteen.One night my grandmother notifi ed her—and notifi ed is

the word my mother uses to tell this story—a man notifi ed her (my grandma) that she needed to give her daughter to him, so he could fuck her, because she was nothing. It was one of those places, one of those places where a woman is worthless. It was no place in particular, no place at all.

Mexico, like the United States, is full of these places. Places like this. And the man told my grandmother either she gave up Nothing to Him, or He was going to fuck Nothing anyway.

So my grandmother told Nothing she either was going to get fucked or she was going to get fucked.

So Fucked-Up left Colima and went to work as a waitress (a whore! a whore!) in Guadalajara. From Guadalajara she went to Nuevo León, Tamaulipas, Sonora, and ended up, of course, in Tijuana. She was a whore all over the Country of Maize. Mexico is great.

23

Then she crossed to the States. A Whore there too. There she met my father, a Mexican man working in the fi elds. He was an alcoholic and out of loyalty I became an alcoholic too, even though I never got to know him. He just fucked my mother for a few months and suddenly left for Mexico again.

(Meanwhile he raped my older sisters.)She was a waitress again.She became her own fortress again.She met a man again.The Man raped her, only this time the rape was Mind-Rape.He never believed my mother had stopped being a whore.Twenty years passed and he was convinced my mother was

going to be a whore all her life. That’s why he never left his wife. We were, as they say in Mexico, su casa chica.

My mother was an alcoholic. My mother had no true house. She lived in the mind of my

stepfather.I never knew my mother. I only knew his mind. His words.

Every time I think of my mom I hear the voice of my stepfather defi ning her as either a whore or a Nothing.

«Encueratriz» he said. That’s why I’m obsessed with the mind of men.

24

No sex in your life, there?Who cares! Get high.Go to Tijuana

Lie

Buy

Die.

25

If I feel life I feel ill.

26

Norman has no idea what really happened. I guess we are very different types of writers and, most of all, very different human beings.

He’s full of himself. He has no clue about the real motives of people. He had this insane idea about my leaving him to search for his father. He said I was going to end up fi nding his old man. I took the plane. Good bye, you asshole. I hope your book on us goes well, at least better than our life together.

My plan was to stay a few days in Mexico City. The place is awful. Mexico City men are even worse than men from the Border

or the States. I was supposed to stay with Lourdes, but as soon as I

arrived, the situation quite frankly became very weird. She was married to this guy who thought I had no money, so as soon as the three of us started talking, he carried on about his business going so well and so on and so forth.

Somehow this pathetic guy imagined if he talked about his success, by the end of the night I was going to crawl up to his bed. Mexican men can be like this because their women are all fucking each other. Machos are in a fi ve centuries’ denial about that. So they pretend they are real men, even though the last men they knew died seven or eight centuries ago. And Spaniards were laughing at them.

But gossip survives in Mexico City, and the remnants of dead manhood are still recycled among its inheritors. And they sometimes work, so when I got inside Lourdes’ home, his husband started to talk about money, his position in el sindicato, and maybe oil, pyramids, his accounts in a Swiss bank or in Sudan or something like that. After fi fteen minutes of his garbage I simply closed my ears and started planning my escape.

Schopenhauer wrote that humans were not created to think. According to him, our ears are proof that we’re sloppy animals who need to live in total vigilance. I closed my ears, then, and I started to think about how to run away from this couple.

At one point I realized Lourdes also had a plan to get me into bed.

27

Lourdes insisted on drinking wine. She knows I hate wine because wine gets me horny. And so we drank. And the guy, Felipe I think his name was, kept talking about his grandfather being a caudillo in the Revolution and how some of the words printed in the Mexican Constitution came directly from his mouth, and he also said «men like that deserved to have two women», and the talk concentrated on sex and more sex until I realized all of this was Lourdes’ idea. She’d somehow brainwashed the guy to talk about something he knew nothing about: sex. And the guy gave so many details that it was clear to me and to anyone that he had no idea about sex; he even related the topic to love, family, movies.

Mexican men haven’t had sex in centuries. No sex has taken place here ever. I mean I have no explanation for why babies keep appearing and for why as they grow older they keep moving North, until someday they sneak into the U.S. and then send money to make the men left behind in the South feel even worse. Feel like they are not really men at all.

And so this Felipe character continued his speech on sex, and he used every joke in the book, every albur, and Felipe at moments became credible, his ideas on how bodies correlate during what he called sex became somewhat plausible and even desirable, but then he offered to prove that sex could produce love, and I said no more wine, Lourdes, c’mon, your man is pure chilango sci-fi .

I don’t blame Lourdes. There are no men in Mexico. Getting this guy to talk while serving me more and more wine was a great way out of her marriage. What Lourdes wanted was to get the three of us into bed and then write a story about repentance, sex, and abandonment. She wanted me to take her place in that house, so she could escape. She had fi gured it all out.

I excused myself and went to the bathroom. I called Monica’s friend.

—Teresa, I’m Monica’s friend. I’m in Mexico City right now. Monica told me you’re cool and I could spend the night with you before leaving for Toluca… Okay, thanks, I really appreciate that. Give me your address. I’ll be there in an hour or so, see you and thanks again.

28

And the moment I saw Emily I knew she was trouble. She came to the house, said Hi to Rafael and both of us noticed right then she was totally drunk. She was trying to convince us of two things. One: she was running away from another couple in Mexico City who wanted to use her to ruin their relationship.

And Two: she said sex didn’t exist. Incredibly, s(h)e was buying the story. S(h)e looked worried.

At one moment, Emily said she was too tired and maybe could use a sofa or bed or even the fl oor, and the conversation almost stopped.

And I called Monica in Tijuana, and I said, Monica, your friend Emily is here with us, either she’s high or drunk, or maybe just out of control and so she behaves like bubble gum. I don’t think I can control her as you suggested. Can you send money so she’ll leave real soon? I don’t want Rafael to fall in love with her, and I also think Rafael wouldn’t be any good to her. Monica, can you help?

—Teresa, I think your view on Emily is absolutely cartoonish. She’s just telling jokes. Don’t you get it? There’s no way sex is a hoax. No way. Sex has destroyed us all. No way, okay? The monster must be real. And don’t worry, Emily’s leaving tomorrow. She needs to be in Toluca before Monday. Just try not to control her and she’ll seem normal, don’t freak out. Don’t get involved. Try to see reality for what it is. I know you’re not freaking out, Teresa, I’m sorry, yes, I understand what you’re saying. Sex is a big part of your life and you’re not about to stop believing in it, I know, but please hang up, leave me alone.

29

This story I’m reading now was written for a reading. This reading.And the author wants to leave in it the mark of its genesis,

purpose and performance.To achieve this goal the author will include in this page a

sort of game.

Instructions on how to conduct an exercise in democracy between his authority and the audience.

He needs to conduct this exercise in democracy with the live audience listening to this piece.

Here it is.

I need the audience, this very real audience, to vote on which chapter the author should read next.

(Please listen very carefully to your options, and then exercise your right to choose.)

The author should read…

1. A chapter narrated by the voice of the mother.2. A chapter narrated by the voice of the father.3. A chapter narrated by the voice of the main male

character.

[The author-reader now gives instructions on how to vote.]

— I should clarify that not all of the audience needs to vote. I know some of you may feel dizzy right now, or have better things to do, such as trying to sleep or absorbing radiation from your cell phone, but please some of you must vote —

«Those who vote for the voice of the mother, please raise your hand.

[He counts very carefully and writes the results here: ____ ]

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«Those who vote for the voice of the father, please raise your hand.

[He counts very carefully and writes the results here: ____ ]

«Those who vote for the voice of the main male character, please raise your hand.

[He counts very carefully and writes the results here: ____ ]

31

Offi cial Results

After subtracting the invalid votes from the Florida black voters who didn’t raise their hands in the proper manner, and after invalidating the votes from the undecided Democrats in the upper rows, we have determined that the main male character voice won. Again.

32

I feel anger toward my second mother. She had too much happiness in her childhood. She was

so happy, she even remembers the years and their meanings. She means. She can have meaning in her life, she can fi nd it. I resent that. She can recreate the events, imagine them. She was comfortable with the light. She can make sounds.

From book to book. A secret spider. On my 2 mothers. I went to another language in search of a new mother. I did

it to have two bodies and a new identity, an American one, a new self to live in after the death of the Mexican, because that’s who I am, the self-knowledge of a culture which is dying.

«This poem was written by my mother. But I have had two mothers—the second one was a stepmother—and although I am inclined to think my real mother wrote it, I cannot be sure» (The Bridge of Dreams, Junichiro Tanizaki).

The fi rst name of my (second) mother was Jill, the obvious choice and the fi rst genealogical confusion. Then April came. At that time, by the way, I was in love with a girl named April, so I never knew who was who. I was confused.

The third name of my second mother was Megan or Cynthia. I didn’t care what she decided to call herself as long as it was an American name, a writing which helped me know who I was becoming. Which parts of me were dying. I like American names. They make it hard for me to recognize myself.

Those four names are basically the same character, a book, which I call the Female Page or UnLove-for-Her.

This imaginary mother-character helps me deal with American cops and with Homeland. Makes me feel I can have pleasure together with otherness, and know that I don’t have to think about killing them all the time. An image I try to keep away (shun) every time I cross to Calexico.

—To check my P. O. Box —I explain to the INS agent every time.

This imaginary mother-character takes care of me. She does not search my body for drugs or false IDs. This female being

33

makes my daily border comedy easier. The comedy stops itself, writes Lacan, but who can put an

end to laughter? he adds not in search of an answer.I met the character (her fourth name) on an airplane from

NYC to LA, and on that trip all I thought was:“Your childhood was too beautiful. My fi rst mother’s life

was nothing like that. She was a prostitute and the man who fell in love with her never believed she could be more than a whore, even twenty years after she changed jobs thanks to his money. So I am now holding the book of another person’s life, my second mother’s paragraphs. Reading them feels like falling in love. You have too many ideas, and I don’t know if this hurts because it is not my memory or because it is not my mother’s.

“I feel betrayed by your lyric return. I feel anger. (Yes, only fragments are angry).

“You’re seducing me, mom. I know you. First you start with the milk thing, then with the word play. Facts about lips.

“You know very well how I always fall for older women, for women from the upper class, for second mothers with an intellectual background.

“Ya sabes, ya lo sabes bien. Siempre caigo enamorado de esta calma tuya, de este devenir y llegar allende. Este no parecerte al lugar donde provengo, esta idea de que es posible llegar más allá. Ando en busca de otra familia y esta búsqueda comienza, forzosamente, con otra madre nueva. Te estoy probando a ti, estoy esperando que me atraigas. Lo único que me molesta hasta ahora es tu infancia. Tu niñez no se parece a la suya y eso es lo único que quisiera que fuese semejante, un semejante inicio. I feel annoyed by Megan’s childhood. I feel I wouldn’t play with her. I feel my fi rst mother would be made fun of by her.

In the second fl ight I read Hassan’s House by a character called Mike. I wrote on the last page of Intuition. Yours a thought that corresponded to that second book:

“I wasn’t supposed to write. What writing means. Zoocially. I don’t need to write in English anyway. But why is this happening? Why is my mother appearing all over my life? Why is English taking her place? Because my culture is falling, and this is part of the collapse.

34

“I’m not a construction worker.“I don’t need to identify with these American books. I am

not them.Our bodies are changing, our childhood is under erasure. I want to choose my American mother before my Mexican

mother dies of drinking too much Coca Cola and coffee. Sus huesos disueltos por las aguas negras del ‘imperialismo yanqui’ (como los llamaba la maestra vieja del bachillerato, esa marxista ridícula.)

I don’t think mothers are sacred. They are discontinuous.

In the periods during which I want to kill American males, I translate in order to take those thoughts away. But as soon as I start to do that, another thought comes into in my head, a thought, again, about killing, the thought of erasing English altogether, using the excuse of translating it into Spanish, and so I hurry my translations all I can, all I can, because the mere thought of erasing the language I hate so much, the language I feel so passionate about, excites me to the point of not knowing anymore who am I translating, why am I doing it even in my sleep. What is reality and what is a dream.

And then the third feeling arises: “translate, translate,” and I become a slave.

«Your two mothers will become one, with no distinction between them»

In the months during the second war on Iraq (the mother has to be killed twice), I was taking too many drugs. That made me understand the violence that was really happening; a violence we weren’t watching in TV.

—TV is one of the main causes of my multiple personali-ties. All those changing channels. All those different stories happening at the same time. Switching from one self to another in just a second. Losing who I was just a channel ago.

35

I was trying to develop my writing in English. Thinking a lot about it. Using my American voice too much. Having a girlfriend who liked to use English too, who used it especially when making love, “Fuck” “Fuck” “Fuck” she said, something which I disliked because it seemed contradictory: she was part Mexican, part French. Her name is now Freedom Frida.

Then the war happened, and it was all over. It was portrayed as our war. I started to hate Americans again, something which I had to deal with years earlier, but which started to happen again after 9-11. All these things got worse when my brother published his novel and I appeared there as a cynical and very secondary character. I hate Norman.

On the morning of 9-11, I found myself getting up and going to the fridge for a beer. I drank it. And then the second plane crashed. The whole neighborhood in Mexicali was cheering aloud. I was doing it too, and I was hearing the guys next door do the same. Then I called my fi rst mother on the phone and I said to her «Are you watching TV? Are you seeing what’s happening?» She said she was. «Malditos gringos, malditos gringos» (I said to her). «They are Americans, mom, they deserved it», and I was thinking of the American pig whom my grandmother had married and who raped my sister the day he discovered her kissing that boy, and I was thinking of the missing half of our body, and about NAFTA, and about Gatekeeper, I was thinking of all those pigs, and I heard all of them, I heard them burning in the two towers. Then I saw the towers collapse. I heard the big oink oink oink oink.

—These are people you are talking about, Antonio, don’t you have any feelings? Are you drunk again? —She asked. I put the phone down. I didn’t want to hear her oink oink.

I saw my fi rst mother become an American too, she had become someone else, I thought, someone who needed to die in New York.

And so I used my two hands like two planes, and the two hands crashed her photo up on the wall.

Seeing the pieces on the fl oor I preferred my relationship with my second mother, even though that relationship was a purely imaginary one. A female fantasy I had.

I haven’t even lived in the States. I know my second mom

36

mostly by TV, listening to her music, reading her books. They are mostly good, they give me pleasure, but I don’t want to hear about my American dad, because at the moment of his appearance my second mother would also become male. Masks would be used for a long time.

So after 9-11 I started again, I again hated myself because of my involvement with American writing. My cross-dressing into another language, even worse than my writing in my mother tongue, which is in itself an incestuous praxis. Writing splits me.

My drinking got heavier, and it hit a high point around March.

At that moment I started to hate my American mothers. I started to change my recollections of them. All the cocaine I was using was directed against them. In my mind I was the United States.

So I went to look for my grandmother, old Jill living in an apartment in National City. Once I found her—she always changes apartments since she is not happy in any of them—I told her: “I am not your fucking little Chihuahua. Erase me from that really odd book. Please divorce that pig you call your husband. Take his hands off Claudia.”

Then I went looking for April. And I said to her: «Your name is not April». April is now gone. She’s in my head. She’s dead there.

Then I looked up Cynthia and explained to her—I was afraid she was going to hit me—I was even going to translate her, to make her part of my fl esh, I was going to become her slave. Punk, punk, you’re nothing but a punk, I said.

As I write this chapter my body hurts and is constantly interrupted by a cell phone. The same phone I always carry around to interrupt my life, interrupt what I am doing, to make me enter another domain. A third breast.

My brother doesn’t know I am a writer too. I like to pretend I’m one of his characters.

Two identical rooms. Having to choose only one of them, and then let the other one be closed or have an imaginary life identical to the one we have in the Chosen One. Having to imagine it while we exist in the other, the domain of the real. Rooms do that.

37

This is what death is. Several mothers becoming one, with no distinction between them. I’m afraid I will forget my fi rst mother, I am afraid she is never going to recuperate from the planes or my hands. I am afraid she is going to become male.

So I have to rewrite my second mother’s relationship with me. Here it is:

«I never read Intuition. Yours. I didn’t affect me a bit.«That’s why I went to look for her in San Diego.«What I am going to transcribe here is the letter I wrote to her:

«Dear Mom,

«You were not pregnant with me. I’m not this kind of son. My mother tongue was not given to me by you. But for a period of my life, some weeks or months, I took you as my mother because I am afraid of American men, afraid of turning into one of them. I think I am bisexual. I think I am going to kill my recent identities. I think self is nothing but a series of deaths.

«I will look you up in San Diego. Friends tell me you’re going to be there next week.

«See you then.

And so I got to the event. Megan was there. It was the fi rst time I saw her. I didn’t recognize her but I sat down in one of the last rows. Hearing the panel I realized my mother didn’t look like her, nor did I look like Megan. That was the moment I decided I would have no memory of her.

38

«‘¡Animal!’, me dice mi padre, y me tira una piedra en la cabeza, ‘¡Deja a las pobres lagartijas que vivan en paz!’ Mi cabeza se ha abierto en dos mitades, y una ha salido corriendo. La otra se queda frente a mi madre. Bailando. Bailando. Bailando».

«‘You, animal!’, my mother says to me, throwing a rock at my head. ‘Leave those little lizards alone!’ My head has been torn in two. One half is running. The other half remains in front of my mother. Dancing. Dancing. Dancing».

Reinaldo Arenas, Celestino antes del alba

39

How rewriting is rewritten. In the middle. Periodical.

A technique I sometimes use. Not every text can be manipulated with this technique. Some texts are easier to use than others. Which doesn’t mean diffi cult texts shouldn’t be employed. Lezama Lima believed only what’s diffi cult is stimulating.

The technique is very simple. You fi nd a text, let’s say a chapter, a short-story, or even a poem. Just try to fi nd texts which use a lot of periods. Some writers use a lot of commas. I try not to use commas. Stein believed commas bring bad luck. Asthma. She was right. They stop you from breathing. And when you stop breathing you don’t experience feelings.

Other writers like to use lots of periods. They write something. Period. Something else. Period. And the story advances. This. Period. That. Period.

The text ends up being something that can be broken into parts thanks to its periods.

And the periods of course bring up questions about blood. And about months. And about fertility. And about opening up. And about middles. And about vaginas. Periods.

Instructions: Find a text by somebody else. A piece of writing with lots of periods. Transcribe that using your computer. And then write a third sentence between every two sentences separated by a period.

Make some comment on the original sentence. Change the subject. In other words interpolate. Insert new

sentences. After every period.And then erase the original text. Try to leave no trace of it.

Make it disappear as the body of your mother disappears and you become derived from her, as you become a comment on her life, something that happened after one of her periods.

40

Try not to leave anything from the original mother-text. It will remain by itself. As the languages from the past remain in us.

And the body of the mother. And the body of the daughter. Not interwoven anymore.

And I write the daughter and not the daughter and not the daughter son. Periods make writing mostly female.

And the two bodies divide. And the remains stay.And the «Mother» is gone. The mother is the name I give to

the original text. And the writing you insert has a name too and her name is «Daughter».

I don’t want to explain the experience of looking for mothers, or having daughters.

Experiences are different from their explanations.It’s not exactly rewriting. I prefer to call it Inter-writing.Writing between somebody else’s period and the fi rst word

of the next sentence. Interrupting. As we know God was invented in this way. The Bible was

interrupted many times, interpolated. I guess the structure of the Hebrew language—which is written without vowels—invited this to happen.

Letters, daughters. A good bye and a dialogue.

What to inter-write? Anything you want. Repeat the meaning in another way. Change it completely. Disagree. Rearrange. Do your own business. In Spanish I call it «interescritura» and what happens . ________ «sangrado».

You bleed it.

41

PHASE 1. YOU HAVE THE MOTHER

«You animal!, my mother tells me, throwing a rock at my head. Leave those little lizards alone! My head has been torn in two. One half is running. The other half remains in front of my mother. Dancing. Dancing. Dancing».

PHASE 2. MOTHER AND DAUGHTER (TOGETHER)

You animal!, my mother tells me, throwing a rock at my head. If the rock the mother threw is real, the head of her son is now bleeding, but if the rock is just a word the head of the son is becoming several phrases or two opposite characters. Leave those little lizards alone! What kind of little lizards was she yelling at him about? (The word in Spanish was lagartijas.) My head has been torn in two. When the head of the son is torn in two one fragment of Sappho appears in my head, a fragment which says: «I can’t decide: I have two souls.» One half is running. I’ll bet the half which is running is her daughter, running to the South, running away from her mother and running away from the half that stayed. The other half remains in front of his mother. And the mother is supposed to see the remaining half in dread. Dancing. Or she’s mad seeing its silly dance. Dancing. Or going insane. Dancing. The dance of this half wants to bring delight to his mom, dancing, dancing, dancing, he wants to become his own mom, who used to be a stripper, and this half also wants to become the sister who’s gone.

PHASE 3. EITHER MOTHER OR DAUGHTER DISAPPEAR. OR REMAIN.

If the rock the mother threw is real, the head of her son is now bleeding, but if the rock is just a word the head of the son is becoming several phrases or two opposite characters. What kind of little lizards was she yelling at him about? (The word in Spanish was lagartijas.) When the head of the son is torn in two one fragment of Sappho appears in my head, a fragment which

42

says: «I can’t decide: I have two souls». I’ll bet the half which is running is her daughter, running to the South, running away from her mother and running away from the half that stayed. And the mother is supposed to see the remaining half in dread. Or she’s mad seeing its silly dance. Or going insane. The dance of this half wants to bring delight to his mom, dancing, dancing, dancing, he wants to become his own mom, who used to be a stripper, and this half also wants to become the sister who’s gone.

43

*

I love Lezama Lima. Lima sounds like a sound/word somehow derived from Lezama. Lezama Lima. A metamorphosis. Lezama, the mother. Lima, my daughter.

Lima. That’s what my mother called Emily, whose name in Spanish is Emilia. She called her Lima because when Emilia was a young girl she pronounced her own name that way. Lima. Calling her Lima is a way to preserve her as a baby. Little Lima playing while mother Les ama.

In Spanish, Lezama sounds like «Les Ama». Meaning in English [She] «Loves You». Mother Les Ama. Mother Loves You. Daughter Emily. Emilia. Lima.

*

Stein believed commas bring bad luck. Asthma. She was right. They stop you from breathing. And when you stop breathing you don’t experience feelings. Fritz Perls said Stein was more important than Freud. Freud is all about family. Stein is all about breathing. Freud and Stein have one thing in common, producing new feelings. All of those feelings, of course, are useless. This is the tragedy and the comedy inside: you can produce as many feelings as you want, and all of them are a useless plus.

Fourier believed the corporeal man was made up of two men. The spiritual man of 810.

810 passions exist. 810 characters. And Pessoa wrote that the task of writing is to be open. Not to be determined. I guess Derrida would agree with this. Pessoa named his own movement Sensacionismo. A writing movement about sensations. Sensacionismo suggests «that each idea, each sensation must be expressed in a different way from every other». Pessoa wrote his work using several «heteronyms». He wrote works through a characters—Ricardo Reis, Bernardo Soares, Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos—and each character had his own literary style. Pessoa had dozens of heteronyms. Pessoa wanted to discover the 810 passions.

Fourier was wrong. We now know emotions number almost one thousand.

44

MOTHER

[Erased].

DAUGHTER

Why not let it be morning. In the morning the lamps appear useless, and if the light is turned on, that light and the light of the sun make an interesting point about juxtaposition, artifi ciality, cycles, and time. Her mother seems never to be in any middle, she too may have two souls—almost everybody in this story has at least two souls. But if Emily thinks the ups and downs of her mother made her impossible to deal with, that means Emily took the position her mother presumably never took, the middle—who knew Emily could be an Aristotelian daughter?

45

Eyes mean cliffs. Precipices I imagine. Nothing really real. Just a way to think I can escape time or, at least, a bit of space. Is vertigo a form of politeness? You’re invited in. Anyway. If it’s calling you, must mean you belong there or, at least, you’re desired. You don’t seem to see what’s real and what is just not-enough-sky. Antonio is that kind of man. She fi nds a woman and in an instant he decides to jump right into her eyes because, he says, the abyss calls. I’m somewhat ironic about my brother’s position. I think eyes look like cliffs to him because he simply likes to jump into big black holes. He knows there’s one point in every black hole, an event horizon, in which, from that point on, there is no possibility of return. No event can come back. That’s a fi nal border, the only true border that exists. He is looking for it. He fi nds the event horizon in girls’ eyes. I think he’s a romantic. I think he’s wrong. He thinks reality cannot return once it enters into fi ction. But it does. And this is the real tragedy: reality comes back from black holes. No getting rid of life. Information gathers. Oblivion’s a dream. He thinks he jumps into something different than him. As Emily thought she did with the other guy. And Antonio found himself in the form of a rock wall. And Emily found her father. Or found me again, her own rock wall. Antonio thinks he jumps into the abyss opened by the female eye. And when he jumps his head breaks against the petrifi ed mirror.

46

South has All Secrets. Secrets don’t mean Truth. Or truths. Secrets means

somebody knows more about you than you. Secrets mean even others know what I doesn’t have an eye for. Secrets are more I doesn’t have an eye for. Secrets are more Iimportant than truths. Secrets are eyes that don’t belong to you. Eyes that see more. Eyes that laugh. If the animal mouth were to open to its complete circumference it would turn into a third eye. Tongue would transform into a new sight.

South has All Eyes. I I I I I I I I I I were going to the South. North is just one.In Mexico, we all know South is wiser. North is pragmatic.

North pays. South is dying. You look into the South to understand. You look into the North to see where we are headed. Straight into a wall. And behind it, a petrifi ed nuclear mushroom. A monument to the Marines—those living inside mom-water—those trying to get out of the uterus using daddy-technology.

Mexico is the United States hermeneutical past. Canada its lame future.

I was going to the South to see. But I didn’t want to see what I was pre-seeing. I was pre-seeing Emily with another man. So I was going to the South to hide from that scene. Every time I was a second away from seeing the two of them, I disappeared.

There were moments I didn’t exist. I stopped living in linear time. I did it through confusion and pain.

I didn’t see anything. And that’s the fi nal function of South.While disappearing—exactly when you are ready to see—

North reappears.

47

I am all alone. No one with me. And then, I walk from one corner of my room to the other. And there’s no real room there. I’m all inside of me. And then I return to my fi rst idea today: I am all alone. No one with me. I need to have others. I need to reach somebody. I need to believe we are not otherless.

How can I have that if there’s nothing except me-me-me inside here? Haven’t been outside. Nobody really exists, we just insist. There’s no way out. I tried looking for doors, holes, looking for tunnels. But no door. No hole. No tunnel. No nothing to escape.

I am the emptiness created between walls. Walls. Walls.Except stories. Stories help us to relate the one and the

other. Stories create fi ctional relationships. And there are only fi ctional relationships. I never loved Emily. I never loved Antonio. And nothing can happen between us. Not even hate, which is a strong bond, can happen. But the desire to cling persists. The desire to get to the other side. I wanted to hate my brother so bad. I wanted him to surrender to me. To recognize I was superior. He was nothing but a junkie and I was being successful. I had decided to make him angry. He had no attention for me; he didn’t even bother to notice I existed. Antonio did never never did look at my eyes. No word I said to him ever reached him. There was no way, I know.

So I create stories, I build them around those I cannot relate to. And putting them in stories, replay is assured. I envy people in jail. At least their situation is made evident. Freedom? You must mean Free Domination. That’s what all of us want to achieve over others. Free Domination over them.

Some do it through wars. I do it through stories.

48

I realized war was not taking place. War meant images taking War meant images taking Warplace in my head. War was the way I was destroying her. And I was projecting all those images on a place called the Middle East. The Middle East is a symbol of the memory. Of the memory we need to attack brutally. A mysterious place where women don’t show their eyes so you don’t jump into them. I was destroying her vagina. I was destroying her tits. I was a cancer. And the cancer spread.

Other people had similar images to replace their life with spectacular happenings. Everybody seemed to have an idea about this plot to replace their lives with supposed images of a supposed war in the Middle East. No war was really happening. Hegel says space is the negative possibility of There. The point, he says, is the negation of space taking place in space itself. A point fi lls space, suppressing it. Leaving less and less space with the appearance of more and more points. (Points which become lines.) Space is being eaten away through points. (Like an intellectual novel killing characters’ lives through frequent remarks.) And like Hegel’s point—suppressing space—every image of the supposed war in the Middle East was covering up our real life, piece by piece. And where the image of her real face was now was Saddam’s. President Bush was part of the puzzle too. Another provisional puzzle we were obsessed with in order to cover up what’s below the puzzle. And with every piece of the puzzle falling into place, less and less.

There was an underground war taking place. It is the war to destroy both.

You call that language? I call it hate-cum. In every couple there’s a United States and there’s an Iraq. “United States” is the so-called-victimizer. The master that ejects violence. The psy-ops, the war-words, the troops he sends (The Kids!). And then—on the other side—the so-called-victim. The so called poor-little-you. The one that doesn’t deserve the treatment you’re getting, your bad-bad luck, the you-know-who. “Iraq.” One and the same. The whole circle of dual lies. The He-She doesn’t get it. The United States invades, wants to dominate. While Iraq plays dead. The United States goes blind. Iraq plays innocent victim. United States uses images. Iraq plays silently. Iraq sabotages the master’s plan. Iraq denies any involvement.

49

The United States’ game is Justice. Couple is Combat. I was the United States, that’s why I have been obsessed with it—because the United States is our allegory, as are Iraq, Mexico, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, Panama or Vietnam. (And the Jews going from extermination camps to becoming the Nazis of the Middle East, from victims to victimizers, thanks to a Holocaust.) You see those missiles hitting their targets? That’s the way you launch. The way you behave, so called brother, that’s the way you exist, so called sister. Those explosions? The effects your words have, your actions on others. See those tanks? The artillery? The planes? That’s the way your career advances. Uh huh! ♪♫ Yeah, that’s the way your career advances, uh huh! ♪♫ That’s the way your day-to-day works. You see those Marines? That’s your scared genitals. You see those victims? That’s the way you play with the Media. Bush was Iraq. Iraq will be Bush. But don’t worry. Not in your lifetime. You’re gonna be happy someday, not in your lifetime, but happy someday, when you’re part of his, her memory info. Your life will be replayed infi nite times in the form of a Micro Hollywood Movie. Then you will be happy, don’t worry.

Why am I telling you the truth? Because you don’t deserve anything at all. You’re trash. You’re only what I desire and nothing more. You belong to me. You keep listening to me. You keep wandering. Thanks to me you feel powerless. Thanks to me you don’t reveal you’re destroying yourself and me (too). You are here, on Earth, only to pay tribute to my images, my words and my ideas. The United States never prevails. In every case, the United States fails. Iraq’s sole mission in life is not to win. But Iraq will always defeat you. He, she, has his, her own tactics. The United States in every couple ends up going mad. All our roads head to Insanity. All our roads lead to “Love.” And “Love” is what you now call WAR.

50

I always wanted to turn into my father. But every time I tried I became a woman.

Father was a distance. A fl at horizon. He didn’t reject me. He didn’t even know me. When I was a child I was tired. I remained sleep most of the time. I wanted to see my father. I lost him at three. From then on, my relationships always last three years. And then, I’m gone. I need to split, like he did. This is not about psychology. This is about time. And how fl esh remembers. Patterns which compose our silence.

Emotions are demons. The region of the demotional is me.Emotions gather. Emotions gather in it, a story. Emotions are how stories

move from one point to the next, emotions are motors and waves. Every point of the body has a trapped story. If you touch the point, the story explodes.

Emotions fold stories. The demotional is how an emotion is charged in the form of

a story. Emotions are not concepts, but abstracted stories. If you touch emotions you touch dead stories. Demotions.

When I was a kid I touched my body looking for the story of my father.

Somehow I knew the story was stored some place near my hands. So, I touched every centimeter of my hands to release the story, to see him again. I released thousands of them. One of my books was born this way, listening to the stories looking for the story of my father someplace along the surface of my body.

But I could never fi nd it. I guess I lost the cells that stored my father.

Where are you, father?I have constructed songs for you, father, songs of denial of

bodies.I am someplace near you, I think. I can listen to you from

here. Where are you?I don’t see you.I don’t see you either.But we are close, real close. I can hear your words.And I can hear yours.So, where are you?I’m in San Diego.

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What are you doing there?I’m working.Doing what?I don’t want to tell you. I work for Americans. I feel

humiliated by that.Don’t exaggerate, father. Let’s not discuss Americans now.And where are you, son?I’m walking to take a bus.Where are you going?Don’t know exactly where I’m heading. I guess I’m heading

South. But I can hear you from here. Don’t know how. But I’m happy. I looked years for you. I fi nally found you, you where immediate to me, you were my skin.

I have always been here, in the States. I couldn’t return to Mexico. It was not my home anymore. It didn’t feel right. I had demons inside. I returned to this place. I think it was about money. Or about memories. I had no memories of the States. All my memories were memories of South. North is about forgetting, eventually going blank. But where did you look for me, son?

I looked for you in my hands.Wrong place to seek out your father. Did you look on your

sole?On my what?Your sole. I understand now. We are now talking because I’m walking.

The ground is pressing a certain point on my sole, where you are located. Father, are you dead or alive?

Don’t know, son. I know I’m working and that’s that.So, all these years you been hiding in my sole.Yes, and my head is crushed every time you step on me.

You don’t want to know what you’ve been doing with me, son, I know. You don’t want to realize every step you take is taken on my face. I kinda like it. I too destroyed my dad. Tell me more about you, what are you doing now? What kind of job do you have?

I don’t have a job now. I’m taking a break from life in general. I think I’m going to snap any moment now.

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We used to be stronger. Now we are weak. Men like us never snapped. But now we are fragile. Some woman, right?

Yes, what else, dad? I learned that from you, I guess. Using stories about women to snap really quick, get away from life.

What’s her name, boy?Her name is Emily or Emilia. Neither of them is profound.American? Mexican? Mexican, kinda.Kinda? Whoa! Does your mother know?Don’t want to talk about mother, dad.Is she still a whore or what?Dad, I don’t want to talk about mom. If you keep asking,

I’m leaving.Ok. But tell me more about your girlfriend, your ex.I don’t want to talk about her either. I think she and my

mother are basically the same person.That’s crap, son. Women are not even themselves. There’s

no way one woman can be the same as another. Women kill each other.

I now see where I got my ideas on women. I got them from you. Let’s skip the subject, dad.

Tell me about your brother. Haven’t heard from him.Father. I think we better end this conversation. I just want

to consult you on something. I never got to learn anything meaningful from you. So this is your opportunity to teach me, to help with your best advice. Lately I’ve being circling a single event. My life has become a series of loops around a single event. Is there a way, dad, is there a way to end a life that has become nothing more than loops?

Son, I will respond to you simply by saying this: I didn’t even know life wasn’t supposed to loop.

Bye, dad.Bye, son.One last thing, dad.What?Every time I want to turn into you, I walk a straight line.

I think it has to do with my complex issues, like linear time,

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but to say it bluntly, when I try to become you, I end up taking a step back. I think I’m going back to the hole, back to mom. Dad, I think this time the United States might win.

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There’s no question I was becoming my mother. Emily was lucky. Now I’m happy for her. It was no coincidence I saw her again on my birthday, as if.

As if we can’t stop being somebody else’s mother. And the love we suffer is all about our being daughters. And a father farther and farther away. Emily went to Toluca because she was escaping Tijuana. Emily could be my sister—though I’m not exactly sure which of them. She was escaping me. I was becoming my mother. And I thought she traveled to Toluca in order to fi nd my father. She was going to bring him to me, and my mother and I would be happy with him.

And in the happiness of the three of us we would discover the music coming out of the wood.

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«Deiner Mutter Seele schwebt voraus.«Deiner Mutter Seele hilft die Nacht umschiffen, Riff um Riff.«Deiner Mutter Seele peitscht die Haie vor dir her.

Paul Celan, «Der Reisekamerad»

«El alma de tu madre va fl otando delante.«El alma de tu madre ayuda a sortear la noche, escollo a escollo.«El alma de tu madre fustiga a los tiburones delante de ti.

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Traditional notions of the body suggest that a body is an entity that occupies a place in space. No other body can occupy that same unique place. But that notion simply does not apply to mothers. It ends when you become pregnant and two bodies start to occupy one space.

There’s a guy from Harvard who studies creative processes. He studies artists and writers and does research on the patterns behind their praxis and their poetics. According to him, one of the principles that helps generate ideas is what he calls the «homospatial process».

He explains it this way:

«The homospatial process consists of conceiving two or more discrete entities occupying the same space, a conception leading to the articulation of new entities. In this process, concrete entities such as rivers, houses, human faces, as well as sound patterns and written words are superimposed, fused, or otherwise brought together in the mind and totally fi ll its perceptual space—the subjective or imaginary space experienced in consciousness. We generally describe this space as that in the mind’s eye, but to describe the process accurately, we should include unusual terms such as the mind’s ear, mind’s touch because entities perceived in any of the sensory spheres may be involved: visual, auditory, tactile, kinesthetic, olfactory, and gustatory. The homospatial conception of discrete entities occupying the same space is always a rapid, fl eeting one». (Albert Rothenberg, Creativity and Madness)

In his book, the researcher doesn’t seem to realize that the two processes he describes, the Janusian Process and the Homospatial Process, correspond to copulation and motherhood. What he calls the Janusian Process—that is, opposites or antitheses being conceived simultaneously, in defi ance of logic—is sex, copulation, the two opposite lovers, two magnets at the same time attracting and resisting each other.

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And what he calls homospatiality is nothing but pregnancy. More than one body occupying the same space. And that’s why, I think, I was becoming my mother. Why Emily continued her life in Toluca and then came back and continued her life in Tijuana. I was becoming my mother. I was returning to what Alejo Carpentier calls the «semilla». And the trip back included lies, religion, drugs, traveling, alcohol, dreams, and becoming a prostitute in more than one way—I was going back.

My life became unbearable. And I noticed my brother was in that same trip too. Our mother was about to die. And we wanted to return inside of her before she collapsed. So when she collapsed she would collapse with the two of us inside, just like we lived before we were born, the two of us fl oating in her uterus, understanding the black mystery of the red moon.

Emily and I had sex all night. We had all the sex we didn’t have for all the time we were separated. We even had sex talking about Teresa and Rafael. All the hot sex she had with them.

The phone woke me up. I immediately noticed Emily wasn’t there. In the two seconds separating that perception and the act of picking up the phone I constructed all kinds of stories.

In one of them she had left me forever. In another she was still close by, and in my mind her body appeared at every possible point in each room. Washing her hands in the bathroom. Opening the fridge in the kitchen. Sleeping on the couch. Out getting some fresh air. Opening the door to come back inside. Under the bed playing a joke on me. Or she was calling me to say she was sorry but things last night were just not the same, and that’s why we had to have sex while talking about her two recent lovers. I picked up the phone and the stories continued. And I said hello. And my brother said «Hi. I know you’re alone».

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I was born September 8. The last time I saw Emily was September 9.

It was about 4 a.m. I came for the last time. She was on top. I fell asleep. I don’t know what happened after that. Maybe she slept too for a couple of hours, and then fl ed. Or she immediately left my place. I don’t know. That part of the story I leave for you to decide. But please remember Emily’s life continues today. And at this moment she’s doing something someplace in the world. Try to imagine what she is doing right now. And then imagine how that relates to your own patterns of storytelling and other patterns beyond that.

I know my brother Antonio saw her again. But we decided not to talk at all about her. Antonio only wanted to talk about drugs. And I was too angry to admit all I did was think about her. And also talk about the good memories I had of her. The kind of absurd stories she comes up with—the nonexistence of sex, the hidden truth about dinosaurs, why Mexico was robbed of half its territory. I said nothing of that sort. My brother and I just don’t talk about feelings between us.

Anyway, my brother invited me to stay with him for a couple of days. He said it would be good to talk about some «things». Mainly «things» related with Mom. I knew something was wrong, but quick questions or quick responses are events that don’t happen in the relationship between my brother and me. With him a period means that’s it. Period.

I know how to conceive ideas between mothers and daughters—I mean I’ve even promoted this method of writing by inserting sentences between other’s people periods, which I guess is a male-female method, because you have something you insert but you also have a period going on. So conceiving between mothers and daughters is not a problem for me, but once I have to come up with something happening between two brothers I become completely blocked. The only thing that occurs to me is to put some beer between the two of us. Instead of admitting that between the two of us there’s blood.

So we needed to talk about our mother’s health. We knew she was dying. And we knew we had no money to help with the health costs. And she had no Mexican social security. And even if she had it, Mexican social security stinks. And my brother

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wanted to talk about drugs. And I wanted to remain silent about every issue, except about Mother, and I started to tell Antonio we needed to do something to help her in some way. And he said how and I said how and I said how I don’t know. I just write. I don’t know a word about healing. I even think my sickness helps me to write. Or my writings help my sickness to survive.

And the beers started to help our communication, and we laughed, and I told him some jokes, and he said, Norman, I think this is the fi rst time I have appreciated your literary talent. You really can tell a joke! I thought you could only write those lame poems I read in one of your magazines. No wonder every girl leaves you so soon. And that comment brought up the issue of Emily, but both of us suppressed it right away, and Antonio felt guilty for having touched on that so he allowed me to ramble on. I needed to talk to somebody about what I was doing in writing and here was my brother.

I was writing novels. It was the fi rst time the idea of writing novels had occurred to me. I had written and published poems. God, I even talked a lot about never doing prose. Not even an article. I hated prose in every way possible. But some time in the beginning of that year —it was 2001— I was unemployed, I had decided to write full time, and I started to come up with a story, in fact, two different stories, and so I began to write two simultaneous novels. One about January, one about a gay man in Mexicali. And I think, Antonio, it has to do with you and me being twins. That’s why I’m writing two simultaneous novels. My fi rst two novels. And my brother almost started to cry. This was the fi rst time we talked about us. And the drinks helped us let some trapped feelings come to the surface. And I started to moan too. And I felt as if I were going to be born any minute now. I wanted to cry. This was the fi rst time in our lives we had talked about our common origin, how we were created at the same time, and how we were our fi rst couple, our fi rst love. And I said I think the novel about the gay man in Mexicali is about the love I have for you, the love I haven’t been able to talk about.

And we gave each other a kiss.

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«We need to fi nd a way to think about things, which is not only a way to come up with alternatives to them. We need to fi nd the perfect couple».

Adam Phillips, Monogamy [translated from the Spanish version].Monogamy [translated from the Spanish version].Monogamy

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We had been drinking now for twelve or fourteen hours. Some time early Monday we fell asleep, totally drunk. I woke up. My brother was still there.

No question about it. He was my perfect couple. We could spend months in bed together, just as we had

spent nine months inside of her. We helped each other survive that period. I haven’t told my brother this yet. But I knew Mother was fucking men during her pregnancy. She continued doing business. After all, she was a prostitute. And fucking is what prostitutes do. No big deal. No resentment.

Who our father was, no big deal too. Our father was a condom that broke. Or that one percent in the Pill industry. Or my father was a migrant worker in the U.S. Or my mother was never a prostitute. Or my father is that old man who keeps asking me why I make up so many stories about him.

All that sex my mother had during pregnancy got both of us horny for other men. Maybe my brother remembers that too. I’m not sure. Time and reality are different inside there and you just never quite understand what’s your body and what’s not. You grow so fast you don’t even know how many characters you have become.

But I do. I do remember. In the uterus my brother and I had a lot of sex. We were alone. Just like in a motel. And we only had each other. And we were afraid, and the only thing we could do to have some warmth was to have fetal sex.

So we had it.Today is September 11, 2001.Brother, there’s something very strange on TV, please wake

up.And the second tower collapsed. And all morning we

watched again and again the same image. We couldn’t believe what was happening. We became involved in the image of the towers. We couldn’t understand the meaning of «happening». Kaprow invented happenings because this American artist wanted to invent an event that could only happen one time and never again. Kaprow, of course, wanted to dispel America’s nightmare about having to use the nuclear bomb again. Two times was more than enough. He wanted to create one happening at a time, something happening just once. My brother and I saw

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the video of the towers collapsing too many times. And every time it happened twice. The United States is always bipartisan in its deepest structure. We are close to the point where there are going to be two United States. And my brother and I watched and watched the crisis of the fi rst one.

We had to repeat the crashes. One tower wasn’t enough. We needed video proof of the day we were living. For the fi rst time in our lives we couldn’t believe TV. And we started crying. Not because we were sad but because we were trying to fi nd out what we were feeling, as babies cry to fi nd out who they are, what they are feeling here, outside.

That image had a powerful emotional effect on all of us. This was a new emotion. An emotion which consisted of the fall of America, a cold September, a closed border, a black remote control, fear of Islam, hangover, the fear of becoming any moment a weapon of hatred, and collapse, a collapse that happens two times.

That Tuesday we had witnessed the planetary inauguration of a new dark passion. Emotion number 911. An emotion as traumatic as fi ghting for the light between the two legs of your mother. Having to compete with your nine months’ lover, being capable of kicking him right in his face in order for you to get to the light, to get there fi rst or be the only one to survive.

The two planes not only announced the end of an era, but they also showed what was happening inside our lives. I read 9-11 as the crumbling of two people together, as the failure to stay next to each other, standing.

And one tower was Emily, and I was the other tower, the fi rst to fall. And then one tower was my brother and the other tower was me, and we both were destroyed by the world. And one tower was my father, and he became dust, and the other tower, my mother, and she became a scream.

And the two towers were love.What if, he said to me, what if you write a story about two

brothers who divide life between them. And one brother lives only the darkness of life, and that’s you, and the other one experiences only happiness, and that’s me. And we laughed and we said yes. Why not? Let it be so. And let’s throw a coin to fi nd out which twin tower will survive.

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And my brother put his shirt on. And he said he had «things» to do. And I asked if he had some more beer. And he said no. And I left.

We see each other all the time. We always get drunk. Sometimes we still have sex. (Being inside the same mother is just not the best situation to prevent incest.) Every time I go to his place, I bring a video of 9-11, to try to understand what happened then in our lives. And fi nally we have managed to talk about mom.

And he tells me he feels he’s dying from drugs. And he feels like that fi rst tower every time he uses the needle. And I try to ask him what Mom would think if she saw us right now. And we agree she would think we were just two more of her clients.

And I tell him I’m still writing novels. A series of novels called «La desintegración», because I think writers like me write in series. Other kinds of writers write great books, maybe masterpieces, but I’m not a great writer, I’m a minor writer. I never succeed in telling the whole story, I always fail to close it and the story continues. I don’t have great ideas, ideas which are complete from the beginning. I write in spirals, I write in series, I write the same thing over and over. And right now, brother, I’m writing another pair of novels. Always two novels at the same time. And one novel is about you, still this other novel is about you, Antonio, and the other novel is about writing as discovery, light anew, a new yes to life, yes again and again, yes anew, yes of me and you.

Two novels all about them. Novels of bodies departing. Novels of bodies coming.