Empire

1973

13 1973 A buzzing swells, breaks, returns in the form of mechanical moans before becoming a young man’s shredded voice reciting word problems, his beard barely able to disguise his boyish cheeks. If they take the city if they storm the palace how will we explain it? Tapping the side of the loudspeaker to introduce time and the girl to his left, who looks down at her coffee-stained notebook as if to spell us there. X-o-c-h-i-q-u-e-t-z-a-l. I was given an Aztec goddess– flower-bird name as the last planes released their official Agent Orange on leaves leading out of the Mekong, my father sticking my feet in his mouth to warm them. Light feeding across the sky as if caught by an arrow of geese . . . T At seven, I’m called the Bird Lady. 14 Hostages are returning, my uncle still alive in the New Mexican desert. I hear two volumes: loud and louder. My mother’s newspaper clippings curling in the deep drawer of the living room end table. My father lifting his wrist to read the Golden Nugget digital watch for the 40th time. He discovered it in the gutter near our front porch. My sister and I, fighting our laughter, fail to understand lost things. The beginning of the end must have its own exit, own rhythm. M-i-s-s/i-s-s/i-p-p-i, I repeat, while practicing to dance the Four Corners, the Smurf, while looking up at Tiny Baby Tender Love, 15 her underpants gone, revealing the little hole she peed from. Seven sounds like a boy’s age, so I call myself Frankie, call myself on the rotary phone by dialing our number to announce the good news. It’s a new decade; I’ve shed the last cell of the beginning of the coup d’état. I’m a year closer to the presidency, I think in the hot-lunch line of San Juan Bautista Elementary the year my aunt returns (from Paris? Madrid? where she danced as a skeleton) to live in our back room; the day I vote for Jimmy Carter in Ms. Moreno’s class, letting Javier look up my skirt because he doesn’t speak English. Vanishing! a word I’ll repeat all afternoon to mimic Spanish, infinity, and my mother wearing only water, a wetness that signals 16 I’m not alive to write this. At the end of the Second World War, her limbs shiver, bob all afternoon in a water-filled wine barrel, rescuing her tiny brown body from the San Joaquín sun. A lucky one, or maybe it was another whose name escapes me now, lost in a blizzard, the one I tried to stare through, wondering if I could write something I believed in. ...