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/*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.*/
Forty years. Her niece had outlived her by forty years now. To Emily, she was still that girl who perished in the bitter wind among the birches. It felt strange, and Rose didn’t like her niece dragging her back to the forest, striking the match to end her life.
On the other hand, thinking of that girl she’d been made her remember Michael first, then Bencomo, the key man. Michael, with his plan for her, his organization projected all over the ground of that birch forest, had taken the pieces of her disordered brain and slotted them into the story he was constructing; Bencomo, on the contrary, with his happy-go-lucky disposition and easygoing manner, had just let her be, not required of her any action, even any intention. But this outward acceptance belied a highly structured interior. Was it the map of the island he held in his head that gave him the ability to be restful? Or rather, the three-dimensional model he had in his head, the topo of all the ways that water could move? His brain even encompassed the fourth dimension, time, as he could walk to any valve and know without thinking about it how long to leave it open, how and where and when the water would flow to its destination and where it would come to its rest and how long the residual would take to percolate through the basalt and back to the sea. Michael’s organization projected outward; Bencomo’s circulated inward.
Michael organizing the forgery of her German identity documents; Bencomo filling a clay jug and directing the stream of water into her mouth. Michael going to the office of the Civil Guard to register her as a domestic in his employ; Bencomo stretching next to her, not touching but barely, under the shade of a palm for a ten-minute nap. And she felt there, for just those ten minutes, that whatever would come would come, and let it. Like water moving downhill. Water had nothing to do with plans, with papers, with fake registrations or licenses…or autopsies. Well, that is what she thought back then.
Which man, she wondered now, was harder to know? If they’d both stayed, she might have found out.
Bencomo had been sitting in front of the computer as Rose transferred the sheets and towels from washer to dryer, ruminating. She walked back into the lounge and he turned in the chair to face her.
“I wrote to her,” he said. “She’s coming.”
“Iris? I know she’s coming, she sent me her itinerary last week.”
“No, Emily. And the little girl.”
Rose’s Journal
“Close your eyes,” Michael tells you, and you do what he says and hear the dark rocks shift under his feet as he takes your hand and seems to fall onto the sand-polished shingle. So you open them again. And there he is, holding up a ring with no box and looking up at you, his brow creased seriously. You take a step back and the unaccustomed weight at your belly makes you wobble a little on the rock. He tightens his grip on your hand. The volcanic rock under your feet should be rough, should grip your foot the way his hand grips yours, but it has been worn down for centuries. Millennia? Or perhaps some of it only for the past 65 years, since the last eruption? Although you doubt this rock came from that. More likely it has eroded out of the cliff since the time of Odysseus, and before.
Slow erosion, slow accumulation: a lifetime.
You couldn’t tell him yes, there on that shingle beach. The summer hadn’t brought the sand in yet, and you knew it hurt his knees to crouch there, in front of you; you could see him shifting a little, unsteady, as he held the ring he’d hurriedly bought in town up to you. Which, even this was formulaic, programmatic. Michael was following protocol. Amazing that someone who had put so much disruption in motion in your life could be so wedded to protocol. Ha! Wedded. Seeing him balancing on the rocks, you knew for the first time that that was one thing you would never be, wedded.
He would take the first plane out. You could have left him with some hope, an equivocal answer, but that just seemed cruel, to him and to you. So he would take the first plane out from the airport at Rodeo, that was his plan. He got on the bus to the airport and you thought about going to see Bencomo, having a glass of wine on the patio and watching the surf break, but that seemed unfair to Michael and also like a decision, or like part of the protocol, one man slinking away hunch-shouldered while another man raises a glass in triumph. That was not what you wanted. No milestones; no promises; no past and no future. No pivot points, no fulcrums. No before and no after. And certainly–no happily ever after. After having been a non-person for these five years, it was becoming easy for you to see how actual people messed things up.
Bencomo would be there tomorrow, a day much like today. And Michael, too, back on his base. Was that why you’d really said no? It wasn’t clear yet, but Michael had formed the beginnings of a plan to make you a person again. You were already apparently a German national living in Spain; the disorder after Franco’s death was the perfect stage set for a return, a redemption. A rebirth! You could see the wheels of his mind turning. You could see his desire, his perfect need to have you be his bride with lace curtains in a little pastel stucco house on the edge of the forest.
No, tomorrow you would share a bottle of wine with Bencomo and watch the tide begin to bring the sand in, as it did every year. That’s as far ahead as you were ever going to think.
That’s when the contractions started. And so that is why you were at the maternity hospital, with its pretty flowers flanking the front entry, when they started to bring the survivors in.
/*If you enjoy Nobody’s Property, please…
*One more chapter to go. What the hell is going to happen?
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Chapter Fourteen: Fire Weather