Chapter Eleven: You Will Need an Interpreter

Nobody's Property Part Two: Madman Across the Water

Emily Cooke

Jun 17, 2022

`then read ↓`

/*Nobody’s Property, a speculative memoir, is the first offering on Stop Casting Porosity. It combines audio in the form of a legacy true-crime podcast with brief text and images responding to the podcast. The audio makes sense without the text and images but the text is not meant to stand on its own. Please listen if you have the time! Just hit ▷ above.*/

The door of the cottage stood open. Rose and Bencomo had walked up the hill in silence but he had held the gate, then the door, for her. Still he did not close the door behind them; he was not planning to stay. As she pulled the desk drawer open and rummaged through the detritus it held, he looked at all the familiar pictures on the wall above the little desk, the ones that Rose had taken but hardly thought to look at anymore: the artful shots of step pyramids and cactus and scrub, the candids of Iris, and years later of him. The one picture that remained of Michael, smiling standing on a beach of polished basalt. That one dated from before all the others.

She found what she wanted under some fragile scraps of airmail paper and handed him the crisp sheet, folded in quarters. He opened it.

“Michael brought it from Germany, that spring when he visited. It was a kind of justification, at least to him, for what they’d done. He thought—or he hoped—I would appreciate it.”

Bencomo stared down at the page. You didn’t have to read German to know what it was. It trembled a little in his brown hands. How was it still so crisp, so white, after all this time? How was there still a slight sheen of quality to the paper? It struck her suddenly: this paper, this evidence that she was missing, would outlive her after all. She had convinced herself it was an artifact of a forgotten time but now it was here, everpresent, outlasting all the people who’d searched for her, all the people who’d ended the search, and, soon, all the people who remembered.

Emily: she had a copy. And that copy, even though she was fifteen years younger, would outlast her too. Squirreled away in a trunk in her garage or attic or living room, for all Rose knew. She hoped it wasn’t the living room, but feared it might be. Emily had made this story central to her life and had no way of moving it to the periphery.

Bencomo spoke: “It’s too bad. It’s really too bad. I think, what if this was a picture of Iris? I would give my life to make it not true.”

“I am sorry I didn’t tell you, and I’m sorry I let you believe a lie.” She stared at the paper in his hands, hoping he would tear it up and throw it into the compost pile, willing him to take this story off her hands.

“Sorry is worthless,” he said instead, as he carefully folded the poster and handed it back to her.

Rose’s Journal

You felt you could live with this feeling for a long time—maybe forever. This feeling of not choosing. Of letting life choose for you.

Michael had promised to come back to you over the break at spring term, this time without his mother. This gave you a light feeling of conspiring with someone, although Michael’s mother must have endorsed the plan. He did nothing without his mother.

And Bencomo—you caught him staring not at you, but into you, with his wide amber eyes. Those eyes staring from under his strong brow and long lashes—those eyes made you feel owned. Still he was a perfect gentleman on the long walks you took with him, opening and closing the irrigation flumes with his trusty key. He had a flawless mental map of all the flumes and aqueducts on this side of the island and he pointed them all out to you as you walked. You wondered how long it would take him to reward you for these walks, this attentiveness.

Michael had never looked at you in the same way. His blue-green eyes always had a smile in them, and when he looked at you, you didn’t feel ownership but the sense of a shared secret, some adventure he’d thought up for just the two of you. Something he knew (and he was right) you’d have to say yes to. And so yes, you wanted him there, without his mother, and you wanted to say yes to whatever he proposed. And you wanted your walks with Bencomo, who’d never asked you for anything, but who you knew would get what you both wanted when the time was right.

Almost every day the two of you walked by his cottage, but he hadn’t yet invited you in. Maybe by the time the yucca bloomed….