Make money doing the work you believe in
Carlos
Naida, in the corridor. Between the Rocket Prologue and Chapter 1.
Okay. I have to give you a man now, and I've been putting it off the whole way here, because the second I say his name he's real again, and for a long time the only good thing I had was that my head had filed him somewhere I couldn't reach. Then it gave him back. All of him. So now I've got him, and I'm only handing you the part you can live through, which is the part outside the door. I don't go past the door. Not then, not now, not with everything back. That's where I stop. And I need you to trust me that the stopping isn't me skipping something. The stopping is the story. It's the most honest thing I've got.
His name was Carlos. Carlos Mendoza. He wasn't big, wasn't loud. The loud ones are almost easy, ¿verdad? They want you scared, and scared I could hand them, no problem, scared I could keep in a pocket. Carlos didn't want me scared. Carlos wanted me in love. That's the thing it took me two lifetimes to be able to say out loud, the thing that's so much worse than a fist, because scared comes free, but in love you have to pay for out of the middle of you, the smile, the soft voice, the leaning-in, the whole live center of you handed over on purpose. He didn't play the jailer. He played the boyfriend.
He called me noviecita. Little girlfriend. Almost never Naida, in the end, almost only ever noviecita, like we were sweethearts, like this was a romance he was being patient and decent about, and the name did its work the way a name does, scooping out the girl I was and dropping his thing in where she used to be. He had a thermos, this pinche dented metal thermos I swear I remember better than his face some days, and he'd set it down with a little click and pour his coffee and talk to me like we were getting to know each other, two people, a courtship. He taught me to call him Papi. He taught me to say gracias, Papi, after, every time, until it came out of me on its own. And when I was good, when I did it right, he gave me a chili-mango lollipop, like I was a little kid who'd behaved, and called me good girl, that's my girl, my best student, told me I was special, told me I understood exactly what I was for.
And here's the cruelest gear in the whole machine of him, the one I only got from the far side of dying. He made me feel loved and he never once said it. Never said the words. Not in any form, not ever. Because a real loverboy says I love you, he needs you to believe it. Carlos was colder than that and got the same thing for free. He built the feeling and withheld the word, kept it just out of reach, so I was always leaning toward a thing he was never going to hand me, working for it, earning toward it, and it never came, and the never-coming was the leash. It's the saddest, most evil little trick I know, and it worked on a seventeen-year-old with both parents three months dead, because of course it did, because I was starving for exactly that and he could smell it.
And the thing I couldn't have told you at seventeen but can now: he believed it. That's the horror at the bottom of Carlos. He didn't know he was a monster and do it anyway. He thought he was a teacher. Patient. He thought he had a hard job somebody had to do and he did it gentler than the animals would, and that made him, in whatever little ledger he kept on himself, basically a good man stuck in a hard line of work. He went home to somebody every single night, and he was probably good to his mamá, and he probably never once in his whole life caught himself being the villain of anybody's story, least of all mine, which is the exact reason that when I try to picture him now, all these years and one death later, I don't get to picture a beast. I have to picture a man pouring coffee, calling a kid noviecita, telling himself a sweet story about how gentle he is, while he did to her what he did. That's worse than a beast. A beast doesn't choose. Carlos chose, every day, with a thermos in his hand, and called it love and called it school and called it kindness, the cabrón.
What he was teaching me, in all those patient little talks, was how to disappear into being whatever he wanted. And he was good at his job, I'll give him that, I hate that I'll give him that. He had a method. He built the smile onto me until I stopped having to send it. Built the gracias, Papi onto me until it came up out of my throat on its own, like a reflex, like he'd unscrewed my real voice and dropped his in. I didn't feel it as stealing, not at first. It felt like being chosen. It felt like a boyfriend who saw something in me. Took me way too long to get it: the romance was the cage, the lessons were the harm, the lollipop was a leash with sugar on it. He wasn't teaching me to survive the machine. He was the machine, dressed up as a man who loved me, filing me down to fit, and the sweet girl who came when he called noviecita wasn't a mask I was choosing anymore. She was turning load-bearing. She was turning into me.
I managed him like I'd managed boys my whole life. Read what he wanted, gave him the front of it, kept the back for myself, felt proud of how slick I was, same dumb pride I'd felt at Mateo's door. And it took me forever to clock that this time the trade was different. Boys at home wanted homework and a kiss on the cheek and I paid in nothing real. Carlos wanted the middle of me, the live in-love part, the part that leans toward the withheld word, and every time I spent it to keep him sweet there was a little less of it left for next time. Was I being smart, working him like that? Or was I just helping him hollow me out? I still don't have a clean answer. He wasn't only taking my body, that's the void, that's the part you don't get. He was taking the part that loves, the part that says gracias and means it, keeping it for himself so that years later it'd still answer his voice instead of mine.
And I didn't even hate him yet. I need that on the record, because it's true and it's the worst part. In that corridor he was just another set of hands, smoother than the rest, dressed up as the only person being kind to me, and I was so deep in the numb and so busy reading him and feeding him the sweet front of me and keeping the cold back of me hidden where he couldn't get at it that I didn't have one thing left over for hate, not a scrap, not a coal of it. The hate came later. The hate is the whole rest of this road, and a desert, and a fire I couldn't hold. But it started right here, as a face that called me noviecita. You can't hate a relay. You can hate a man with a thermos and a lollipop who taught you to call him Papi and made you fall for a word he'd already decided never to say. He handed me, without ever meaning to, the one gift that'd eventually let me turn into something nobody could file down or sweet-talk again.
He gave me somebody to burn.
