Seventeen Beats, the Chirping Stopped

The cicadas chirp blood. He said that in a dream. He said it with his voice falling apart, the shadows in the room like trees growing on the walls. We hadn’t had sex. It was the two of us in bed; we were friends, just boys. It made me feel better having him there. He asked about Venezuela, whether I missed the sun or the wind. I’d been five when I’d left, there was nothing to miss. Yet he always looked sad, like he knew I was lying, even though, now standing here, waiting for him, I know the truth.

He was a smiling man. Cheery, handsome, he had blond hair that curled when it grew out. He had white skin that became red when he drank. He was an inch taller than me. He was callous, a rock, a tiny splinter and the blood, it came cascading in-between the floors. He was dead, dreaming somewhere. He died in a hospital miles away from me. I was sleeping when they called. I’m not sure who it was, whether it was a dream or if he was there, holding me down. I’d been in love with him but not then. When I cried, I swore I heard them, chirping, lonely, summer-fed. His heart gave out. Only 30 and his heart gave out. 

He’d asked me if he could come with me. I hadn’t known what he meant. To Venezuela, to Cúa, my hometown. You still have a house there, don’t you? Yes, my family did. Of course, I couldn’t go. I liked it here. The snow made my hands red. The sky never broke open with pregnant clouds. I was afraid. Somehow he knew this.

I didn’t go to the funeral. I despaired for what they would say. When I imagined him, I saw mounds of dirt. I didn’t know what I wanted. I heard the chirping. He had said it half-asleep. We’d been naked in bed. We always slept naked. Sometimes, I’d hold him and pretend. I loved him like I loved the mountains. My mother had a painting she’d brought from Venezuela. It was a road, a house at the foot of a forested mountain range. It was warm, sticky, it was something inside my heart. 

I’d never gone back. The country was growing putrid with communism, that’s what the west said. I was the west, I was hearing the news about Chavez, about an opposition made of straw. I was here now and I was cold. He’d been to Colombia. I scoffed when he asked me about arepas, and yet, I had a smile on my face. What did he see when he was falling from me? In my mind, the walls of his apartment were blood-encrusted. It wasn’t his, wasn’t human, it was seventeen long years in waiting. There was oil in his bed.

I knew I had to go. 

I hadn’t left Ontario. The terror grew between my teeth. I would wake up in the middle of the night with the feeling of a hand on my shoulder. I’d look into the darkness and see a body made up of cavernous shapes. The lack of light was an overflow of viscera. I could close my eyes and see him, naked, his chest cut open. His heart wasn’t there, replaced by the husk of a cicada. Hundreds of them crawled over his body. They didn’t chirp. An eyeball turned and I knew he could feel everything. I screamed and woke up. 

My mother wasn’t happy about me going. It was too dangerous, they would know, they would know. I laughed, told her she was being ridiculous. She kept shaking her head. Her long black hair reminded me of the dead. I was an adult, an almost-man. I had to get away. I didn’t tell her about the pills nor the chair. I didn’t tell her that sometimes I’d wake up at 3 in the morning with my nails floating an inch from my fingers. I was her only son. She repeated they would know under her breath. They know here too, I wanted to say back.

There wasn’t much to plan. I kept seeing him around the corners of my apartment. He was always shirtless. The chirping continued. He loved how dark I got during the summer. I liked it too.

A friend drove me to the airport. My mother texted me. It was a sound note. Look, listen here, mijo. It was chirping, the scraping of bark, the crunching of leaves. I was trembling. My friend asked me if I was alright. I looked out to see the CN tower. My phone ran out of battery. I was here, standing on free, white-liberated land. I was a child on a plane. A week after we left Venezuela, a plane crashed into the North Tower. I sat in the living room watching the TV. A second one then total collapse. I said my favourite part was watching the dust cloud swallow up the street. I didn’t understand. Or I knew, understood I’d be on a plane again, alone this time, and as we flew over America, I’d wonder what was left to hit. 

He said we were America. I said it didn’t matter what we were, we all let it happen. I loved being vindictive. I knew Venezuela was already lost. The hands, my hands, grabbed the blue, the yellow, the red, wrenched it open until petroleum fell out. Chavez was dead and we cheered. No, I cheered and I was ashamed. Canada was growing around me like an icy chrysalid. I bit my tongue. It’s the muscles that make the noise, the clicking of chambers in the cicada’s body, the tymbal, what I pictured as the abdomen. He now had wings over his eyes.

I fell asleep during the flight and dreamt of cutting off my right hand. Inside was a tiny city. He was in there, replicated as a colony. He waved at me and I asked where my blood had gone. He mimed taking a drink. They were carving my bone into a bridge. My severed hand squirmed then dug into the dirt. Yes, it was dirt, my mother’s childhood home. I could hear the chickens. My hand buried itself. Seventeen again. I had touched a boy for the first time. I was queer, I was free, I was finally west.

I woke up to his voice. We were disembarking. I was nervous about finding my suitcase. No, it was about walking, not knowing who I was, where I’d go. When I left the airport, the wall of heat slapped the whole of my body. A honk and there was my uncle, with his beat-up van, the paint peeling. Hernando! It was my name that forced me to come back. I was home. The noise of Caracas was the noise of Toronto—I was synthesizing the air, the earth, the snow I had left behind. In the plane bathroom, I’d seen a cicada dig itself out of the floor. I could see him. He was making coffee, humming a song. His ex had called the night before. He was shirtless. His back muscles had insectile wings. And a drum, the start of a hymn with the sharp pain in his chest. He must’ve been scared. The floor hadn’t been soft. I was there but the hallway was too long; it was a worm, I had to dig, hide him, we would wait, I kissed him and he shuddered. 

The road to Cúa was alien to me. To my left, I could see the barrios crowding the face of the mountain. The valley came into view as the darkness of the night swarmed over the ocean. I kept looking down at my hands, embarrassed I was going to start crying. My uncle asked about the family, about Canada and the winter. I tried to keep my voice as soothing as possible. The fascination with snow irked me, but I’d been the same, enamored by the freezing of things. He asked about a girlfriend and I laughed. You’re thirty now! No luck, I told him. He said maybe she’s waiting here. His laugh swallowed the van. 

When we reached Cúa, I was thinking of him and his reaction. I wanted to be five again. I wanted everything to be real. I could hear him in the back seat. I was scared to turn around. If the hole was still there, I’d know I was on the right path. I felt nauseous. Something buzzed in my throat. My uncle asked if I was okay, I told him I was just tired.

Here we were. My childhood neighbourhood, the family house, the north field no longer a field but a mess of houses. All the homes were gated. I was in a T-shirt and jeans. The house sat at the very end of the street. Everything looked smaller than in my memory. 

I saw my aunt come out, her floral dress a lily in the heat. Her hair had gone gray, her skin was wrinkled. She had grown old. Her eyes were bright, filled with tears as she hugged me and kissed me on the cheek. The warmth of her embrace repulsed me. She couldn’t believe how big I’d gotten. Her hands were so soft, they were his, and I was in love, and I was there waiting for the breakup—I was sleeping with men much older than myself, calling them daddy, making a totem of their flesh to bury underground. 

I was suddenly surrounded by people. Cousins, aunts, and uncles, I was reminded of my part in all of this. The chirping came from inside the house. A beer was opened. Musica ranchera played, with its mournful passion, with a country slowly atrophying. I looked for him. In the corner of the patio, there was an anthill. I knew no one else could see it. Everyone asked about my mother, about Canada, my job, about a girl. I wanted to tell them my best friend had just died. I had quit my job working at an ice cream store. I had a degree and never did I think about Chavez in a jail cell, his friend, our friend, his brain turning inside out to explain how petroleum became a golden serpent. Up north they called it the feathered one.

The beer was water. I wanted to yell. I was happy and I had tears in my eyes. We were all laughing because I was home. His body was being incinerated. His cousin had messaged me. She said she could come pick me up for the funeral. I hadn’t ever learned to drive. I told her I wasn’t in the country anymore. Yes, anymore, a finality, a conclusion of what my mother had already known. 

One of my cousins asked about a girl. I laughed again. This time it was real. There was corn on the cob, there were arepas and cheese and meat. No, the meat had disappeared. It was hidden in the long lines, in the tickets from the government, in the chirping, the goddamn chirping. 

There was a beautiful boy there, with broad shoulders, with the smile I used to imagine. The jock, always the jock, who moved next door, who threw a ball and hit me in the head. The friend, the chirping again, and that summer they’d appear and I’d take a man in for the first time. The beautiful boy was a cousin’s new fling. He would’ve loved him. Who hadn’t he charmed? His last boyfriend had been Bolivian. He was following the footsteps of old Simón. My first boyfriend, he’d been German. 

I kept stealing glances at the boy. I imagined his naked body. I imagined his sweat. His breath. His heart. My hand went up to my chest. I was drunk. We danced merengue. The lazy beat was changing me. A flag hung over the wall. Yellow, blue, and red. It had eight stars. I remembered seven. The eighth appeared liked a phantom. I wanted to scrape it off, wanted to scream that it was stolen, we had stolen the land, we had to give it back, we, we were stolen people. My grandfather had been black. I used to joke I was bronze. The heat welcomed me back. The party continued all night and in the early morning hours, I found myself in bed. It was my old childhood room. 

Everything was different and yet I was still small. The house had one level, no basement. The earth wasn’t friendly anymore. There was a separate apartment above the house. When we lived here, it was still under construction. You could get to the roof from up there. The kitchen was a corridor, connecting the living room to the tv room. Another small hall in the living room led to the bedrooms. My aunt slept in my mother’s old room. My uncle slept in the guest room.

The darkness was the same here. The funeral had passed. My friends asked me if I was okay. I had nothing to say. He wasn’t coming back. I’d heard his ex had had a breakdown. I wanted to tell him to grow up, that he was a rung, a silly little thing that would quickly turn to meat. I wanted to be cruel, angry, I wanted the power of death. I researched brujería and was immediately embarrassed. I had an idea of chicken bones, of bloodletting, of a circle made of fire, earth, water, and wind. I was ready to mix worlds together, to cut myself into pieces if it meant a little part of him would return. I needed to tell him I didn’t love him anymore, I wasn’t waiting. I needed him to believe me. 

The humidity had fingers. It crept around me, urged me to remove my clothes. I lay naked above the sheets. My eye hurt. I could feel something crawling in my throat. If I closed my eyes, I would hear them. When I was a child, I would stand on the roof and watch the summer thunderstorms come across the valley. I believed there was magic in those clouds. Old, ancestral magic, something that craved to destroy wooden ships and inundate entire prisons. 

It was an election year. I couldn’t vote. The opposition leader was a pale, weathered man with a handsome face. He had charisma, with a sabre for los venezolanos. He was a man made of maize. There was nothing he could do. The country needed a bomb, it needed the destruction of America, of the west. They held the embargos, they cried communism, they cried terror. Chirping, chirping, chirping, all seventeen years. Communism was something red, eerie, it was a feast; no one was there. It wasn’t real. The petroleum was the blood of my country. Mine, gathered in my chest. He was naked and I touched him. He was crying. I held him and told him a boy will have a hundred broken hearts. He asked me to sing to him in Spanish.

I woke up drenched in sweat. I lurched forward as I heard a pop. My left eye dangled from its socket. The ocular nerve was long and fleshy. My eye rolled on to the mattress and towards the foot of the bed. I felt something crawl out of the socket. It vibrated. I grabbed the nerve and pulled. There was a crunch as it ripped. A cicada fell onto the bed. I trembled. There was another pop as a new eye took the place of the old. I tried to throw up but nothing came up. I knew that if I opened the bedroom door, I would see an ancient stone corridor. A labyrinth of choices, a tomb—there was enough hatred in the country to know I didn’t belong. 

I tried to look for my eye but it had disappeared. The cicada was gone too, but its shell, its body, it stared at me from a fold in the bed. I held it in my hand. There was a crinkling sound. The ceiling fan started to shake a little. I looked at my phone. I had a text from my mother. And—it was his name. His number, all 10 digits, sequenced out in a lovely strand. I opened it.

A man lay on a bed. He was naked, hard, he was stretching as to show off. Someone else had taken the picture. The man’s face was dissected by the photo so only his lips and chin were shown. It was him. I knew it was him and a thousand other men. His hand wrapped around his cock. I could hear myself breathing. 

Something moved in the picture. In my head I screamed. I was still, I was waiting. Little feet crawled behind my eye. A moan. The man was changing, no longer white, more open, he had brown skin, everything was intact. It was my cousin’s boyfriend. I could see his whole face. He was looking away, embarrassed, cheeks red, lips pursed. He was afraid. 

I let the phone fall to the floor. I looked down at my naked body. I waited for my skin to pull apart. Nothing happened. There I sat, waiting for morning.

My aunt made arepas for breakfast. The cheese was thick, made my stomach churn. I wasn’t used to the food anymore. I had never been used to it. My body was fascinated by the oils, the fats, by the heat of the food and the air. The harina pan’s yellow packaging kept catching my eye. It had the head of a lady on it, with beautiful eyes, red lipstick, with a headwrap and large red hoop earrings. She was our mother.  

I would never go back. I’d seen god. I’d seen an open door and he was shaking, he was trying to reach the counter, for the phone. He was the man who came to the shores of my country, who saw a western city, who made us tiny, gave us anger. Chavez had turned it into wrath. He died with rot in his body. The yellow was the gold in his veins. The blue was the sea that separated him from our mother. The red was the blood of his people, of our children, of me trying to return. Seven was a lucky number.

I told my aunt I was going for a walk. I was wearing acid-washed jeans and a threadbare red flannel. I was no longer hot. I closed the gate behind me. There used to be a bodega down the street. I walked past it but it was gone. The chirping came every five steps. I was nostalgic of a boy I’d only met three times. He hated clothes. He was scared of the sun. He had a wooden box and I—blood flowed in straight edges. 

I kept walking, recognizing swatches of the town, misremembering giant voids that became black spots in my vision. I remembered my best friends, how we threw water balloons during carnaval, made kites out of plastic bags and twigs. How we played futbolito and I was horrible, had zero coordination. How I hadn’t been five; I’d been seven, eight, twelve, I was about to enter high school. 

My new eye kept itching. He’d wanted to backpack through South America, one of his exes’ ideas. I’d told him the jungle was a sea that kept us apart. He’d asked about El Salto del Angel. He never called it by its English name. The west couldn’t capture the brightness of our nature, the water which blended with the sky. He’d told me he kept seeing a man on the ceiling. A man? Yes, like a spider, attached, climbing, four-legged, like a man-thing. He’d wanted to know if I believed in ghosts. I’d told him I didn’t know. Something had been in the apartment. He'd kept talking about his cottage and the summer; he was trapped in a sort of nostalgia. Yes, trapped, that was it. He’d wanted to go to Venezuela and meet my family. I’d wanted to ask when he first saw him.

I was in a plaza. There was a statue of a man. The plaque said Ezequiel Zamora. I had never known his name. There’d been no name before, everything had been a simple noun, a space, tiny husks separated by road. It read brave citizen. Where had he come from? I knew that if I kept staring at the statue, I would see a cicada scurrying over its surface. I had already seen three holes in the ground. Their sleep was coming to an end. 

I sat on a bench and watched people walk by. The day was bright and sunny. Every night I looked up at the ceiling and waited. He had tried to call me. The voicemail was still on my phone. It was a silence so deep, I had halfway fallen in. And then three chirps. I’d heard him moan. I had asked him what was going on. Don’t come home. Nothing else. It had been a dream. I’d woken up to a call. Heart attack. Died alone. Visceral crying. Above me something had moved.

I took a picture and sent it to my mom. On my street there used to be a mango tree. Iguanas would sometimes jump from tree to roof. You wanted the mango green, to pour salt on it, feel it drenching your mouth. I wanted to look at my phone and find more men. What had crawled on the ceiling, behind my eye, wasn’t a man nor an insect. I’d brought the memory of summer with me. 

I returned to the house. No one was in. I locked the gate. I stared through the metal bars, tried to remember how everything looked when I was a child. I could see shapes, hear the sound of a boy crying. My body would pass through the bar, it could crush itself, become a goopy paste, a sludge falling between the cracked cement. I knew my insides were already changing. I went to the back of the house, up a set of cement stairs to the roof. The upstairs apartment was locked, the door covered by newspaper. There were words written across it. A word, letters, all jumbled up. 

He’d wanted me to come and get him. He’d woken me up one early morning sobbing into the phone. His boyfriend had left. His boyfriend had stepped onto the railroad. His boyfriend who was Bolivian, landlocked, something so little, my thumb would have crushed him. He’d told me his boyfriend left something in the house. Dark, he’d said. So unbelievable dark. 

The chirping was louder. I stood at the edge of the roof, feeling the wind over my skin. The humidity no longer bothered me. I had wanted him gone, back south, back home, back to old Simón. I could see across the valley. All our towns were born between mountains. In the horizon, I saw dark hungry clouds. The wind was picking up. The chirping came in an aberrant beat. I didn’t go to the funeral because I knew what the body would look like. The seventeen years were over. It no longer mattered who found what. It was in the ground, but not this ground, a place in between, a sliver that cut purgatory in half. 

My eye throbbed. There was a buzz. I looked down, saw that my left hand was gone. From the open wound, blood fell in a spiral. My aunt was in a locked room. My uncle had overslept. The thunderstorm was gathering—it was summer, I could dream it, wait as the rest of the voicemail unravelled itself. 

The clouds weren’t clouds. The thunder was chirping. Something hid in the storm, a million somethings. Husks, no life, no temerity. My right hand was severed. You asked if this was a dream. I know nothing of the darkness in your sleep. I know he was dead but not really. I know that it was me, I had left something behind. 

I had more to say. 

Cicadas rained from above.

Over the new subdivision I saw a plastic kite. It moved side to side. I knew not to follow its string. How would I change, knowing there was nothing holding it there?

I wouldn’t find out. 

With a calmness, I heard thunder. 

A pitter-patter as the chirping continued.