Make money doing the work you believe in
Villahermosa
Naida, where time stopped counting. Between the Rocket Prologue and Chapter 1.
I can't tell you how long I was in Villahermosa. That's not a hole in the memory. The memory's fine. It's that time stopped being a thing that passed and turned into a thing that just was, like weather, and you don't count the weather.
This is the part where the routine takes over, and the routine is the real damage, way more than any one bad hour. A single bad hour your head can wall off, can file, can route around. But sameness? The same room, the same tin roof, the same rain on it, the same scrape of the same door at the same hours? Sameness gets in under the walls. It doesn't file. It teaches. And what it taught me, in that town whose name literally means beautiful village, was how to not be there.
I got good at it. I want to lay it out plain, because nobody ever laid it out for me, and if you're somebody this happened to, I want you to know it has a shape and a name and you didn't make it up out of being weak. When the door scraped, I left. Not my body, my body couldn't go anywhere, my body stayed and did what a body does when it can't run, went still and watchful and kept its small mean records. But the me of me went cool and far back behind my own eyes, to a Managua afternoon, to a hand laid flat on the top of my head, and I let the girl at the door be some other girl. That happened to some other girl. I built that sentence like a wall and I lived behind it. For years after, I still said it. It took dying to learn the other girl was me, and that I owed her the welcome I'd spent so long slamming the door on.
The useful face stopped being something I put on. Somewhere in all that rain it just became the face I had. Carlos had been building it onto me and the routine finished the job. I'd come up out of the cool far place and find the front of me had already smiled, already gone soft, already said the agreeable thing, while I was gone, without me, the way your hand yanks back off a hot stove before you decide to move it. He'd turned my own face into something that answered to him instead of to me. I'd surface and catch it mid-performance and feel a horror I had no words for then. The horror of being a passenger in your own mouth.
That's the thing I need you to carry out of this one, because it comes due later, in a desert, in a grave. He wasn't only doing things to me. He was installing things in me. Building responses into my flesh on his own triggers, his voice, a phrase, some little ritual, so the body would run them on cue whether the girl agreed or not. And I could feel it taking, the way you feel a splinter work in deeper. My body was being taught to obey a hand that wasn't mine, and I was losing the argument with it, and there was nothing on the page of me that could outvote what he was writing into the muscle.
I still flushed. Still got hungry. The rain still raised the hair on my arms when it came in cold off the tin. The loud living machinery kept on, faithful, stupid, keeping its books. But I'd stopped feeling like its owner. It was turning into something I shared with him, occupied territory, and I was the smaller force in it, losing ground every single day, in that beautiful village where time didn't pass and the calendar on the wall had no marks on it, because nobody in that room was counting toward anything at all.
