Jeffrey Sarmiento - Catalog
Encyclopædia
Jeffrey R. Sarmiento
The Invasion
by Emily Benz
The invasion was minor at first, but it was there, something new for the other to behold.
The man noticed that a family had moved into the yellow house at the end of the cul-de-sac. He drank hot chocolate and watched from his bay window as the family of four drove up in a wood paneled station wagon one evening and began pulling cardboard boxes from its back. They looked like they came from a faraway place that saw sun, perhaps even local fruit. “They aren’t from around here,” the man noted, though the man’s wife pointed out that being from around here wasn’t necessarily something to brag about.
“What are you trying to say?” the man asked his wife.
“Never mind,” she said. She said it caustically, like a snake lived inside her. She looked hard at the man, and then went back to cross-stitching an optimistic pattern into a bib. A gift for someone else’s pink baby.
The man knew what she was thinking. She was dark and dramatic. She was thinking about how babies are nice things, nice things that haven’t been crushed by the world’s cruel heel yet. “Maybe I’ll go over and say hello,” suggested the man, in an attempt to lighten the mood.
“Maybe you should just go,” said his wife.
He gulped his hot chocolate, let it scald his throat. He coughed, almost choking on a marshmallow.
The man went into the garage and turned on the radio. It was his favorite, a call in show about space aliens. He pulled on his jacket and gloves and wrapped his throat carefully with a scarf. He pulled his ski mask over his head. The weather buzzed mildly on the radio, it happened every hour, a break from the aliens. Twenty below with wind chill. A cold night to have to move, the man reasoned. He would offer a neighborly hand.
He walked across the street. The night was silent. The stars were out and all around, the only sound was the gust of the wind blowing and feet hitting the pavement, his feet, and the feet of the family moving from the back of the car to their new, suburban home.
“Hello,” the man called, raising his thickly gloved hand.
The family looked up from their station wagon and shrank back. The mother wore a silk scarf, which she clutched, and the father stepped forward, as though protecting her. The older sister stood near the house, and she turned and ran in, the storm door smacking with finality. The man noticed the little boy most of all, who stood nearest to him and seemed to be suspended, his glasses fogging in fear. The man could see that the boy was afraid. He closed his eyes for a moment, and tried to see what the boy saw. There was a large man there, waving at him through a cloud. If the man had been on television, he would be robbing a bank right now. He wore a ski mask, with holes only for seeing and breathing. It was a black mask, with red outlines around the eyes and mouth holes.
The man understood then that he looked like a professional wrestler, or maybe a murderer. The man tried to apologize, tried to say he was sorry, but it was too late. The little boy had already started to scream.
The boy wasn’t sure about his new neighborhood. Sometimes it seemed like a cold and barren dream. He wasn’t sure how to play here. He wasn’t sure who to play with. He wasn’t sure what he should do if something happened. How would he defend himself? The boy wasn’t sure.
The boy made things and made things up. Years later, the boy would still be making things and making things up, commended for one and reviled for the other. At six, no one commented on either behavior, and so he lost himself in both activities without concern.
The boy thought about his new, cold home. He thought about the wind, which blew across the little road like it was a barren desert. The boy thought about the man who had tried to get him the night before and the mask the man had worn, crude with red lines around the eyes and the lips. The mask hadn’t even had a place for the man’s nose. What kind of mask was that?
The boy wasn’t sure, and so he talked to his imaginary friend as he crafted a weapon out of cardboard and tin foil and magic marker. His imaginary friend was new; he was from this cold and strange place. He was strong and if provoked, behaved like a pirate. Fearless and brash. The boy was watching his friend, trying to learn a lesson.
“What are you making?” asked his friend.
The boy wouldn’t tell until it was ready. When it was done, he swung it in the air, right past his friend’s nose. “A machete,” he said.
“What for?” asked his friend, a sly smile on his face.
The boy thought of its clear swing, its clean message, Stay away, or else.
“So we can go outside,” said the boy.
The man worried about the misunderstanding from the night before. He mulled it over as he pushed his snow blower out of the garage. It had snowed overnight and it was still snowing, the first real snow of the season. When the man pushed his blower to the edge of the driveway, he saw the boy across the street, and thought he might have a way to rectify the situation.
The boy was so bundled with coats and layers that he appeared obese, though the man knew he wasn’t. He watched as the overly layered boy stood still in the bleach white snow and let it fall on his face like it was something different, something spectacular.
The man looked at his snow blower. He hadn’t turned it on yet. He was anticipating turning it on, pulling the cord, and feeling the motor explode into action. He was imagining blowing snow into a neat, long pile alongside his immaculate sidewalk, thinking about the way he’d smell when he was done, like gasoline and sweat, and he imagined falling into his wife’s neck to kiss her.
He knew this wouldn’t happen. His wife had asked him not to blow the snow. She didn’t like him to blow snow until it had stopped snowing. “Well then I’d never blow any snow, as it never truly stops snowing.”
“You know what I mean,” she said.
But he didn’t know what she meant. He hadn’t understood what his wife meant for a long time, and each and every time he didn’t understand something she said, he moved a little farther away from her. This cold distance growing inside his home was one of the reasons he liked to go outside where it was warmer and blow snow. He liked the methodical back and forth, liked the ferocious noise the blower made and the smell of a large, angry machine on his skin. He liked to hook his walkman to his belt and listen to the tapes his daughter recorded from the radio, though it was difficult not to feel disturbed when he heard what she listened to. Theirs was a sexual culture, growing more charged everyday. “Where’d you get that tape you left in my walkman?” he once asked his daughter as they ate spaghetti, the sauce from a jar, the meatballs hand rolled and fried with care and concern for taste alone.
“The radio, daddy,” she’d said, staring into her steaming dinner, her arms crossed over her stomach.
The man pulled the cord.
He blew snow for a half an hour, until every flake was piled up alongside the sidewalk in a jagged, skinny mountain. He knew tonight or tomorrow, the snowplow would come down the street and make his mountain even higher. He paused to admire his work, and saw that the boy hadn’t moved. A ballad played on his walkman. The song was about a failing marriage. Images from a movie played in his head. Cancun, Mayan ruins, drunken sex he would never have. But the failing part, he knew about that. He turned off the blower, shut off the music. His gloves were so thick he had to stop the tape by pushing all the buttons on the walkman at once.
Across the street, the boy was talking to someone that wasn’t there. He had removed his mittens and was reaching out his hand to let the flakes fall on his fingers.
“You’re welcome to climb this mountain, if you like,” the man shouted.
The boy said nothing, and instead, raised something silver to the sky, and then thrust it with intent in the direction of the man.
The man pushed the button on his garage door opener.
Maybe it was warmer inside.
The boy slept that night and dreamt about animals. The boy dreamt about birds. His favorite dream involved a rooster. The rooster in his dream was a fighting cock, a champion, worth more money than the man across the street would ever make in his life. The rooster in his dream was gold and red and strutted around with a walk that made other roosters cower in fear. In his dreams, the boy trained the rooster, and tied him up at night to his bedpost to make him angry, to make him lust for fights. In his dreams, the rooster tore away and ran the streets, the cord frayed around his skinny leg, looking for trouble and finding it.
In his dream, the boy and the rooster were famous together.
He told his imaginary friend about the rooster, and the imaginary friend was not impressed. “Nobody wants to hear about your dreams,” explained his friend. “Hearing about dreams is boring. Especially dreams about birds. Birds aren’t fierce, like pirates.”
The boy went outside with his imaginary friend, bundled to the nines. The weather hadn’t warmed, and so the snow sat outside in slowly dirtying piles. The exception was the man’s pile across the street. His pile was high, and away from the road, and looked as white and pristine as new sneakers.
The boy and the imaginary friend climbed the small mountain. It was the middle of the day, and the boy’s father was at work. The boy assumed all fathers were at work during the middle of the day, and after he climbed to the top of the mountain he thought of his father sitting at a desk, and of his grandfather sitting at a desk, both hunched over some batch of papers, their eyes tired behind their glasses, and of all fathers everywhere, at once, sitting at desks, their images blurring into one another until they all looked the same, fuzzy and hopeful, holding their salaries out to their children like diminishing offerings.
“My father doesn’t sit at a desk,” bragged his imaginary friend, waving the machete.
“What does your father do?” the boy asked politely, walking across the jagged top of the mountain like he was balancing on a tight rope.
“My father is a butcher,” the friend bragged, “so cock a doodle do.”
The boy was beginning to dislike his imaginary friend. “Your father could never kill the rooster,” he said, expertly snatching the machete out of his friend’s hand.
His imaginary friend said something, but the boy didn’t listen. He thought of the man across the street, he didn’t go away during the day. What did the man do? The boy wondered as he stood on the man’s small mountain. The man was tall and tired, with lines running down his long face, three inches deep. The man probably didn’t sit at a desk. The man probably worked with his hands. Maybe the man was a butcher. This idea upset the little boy considerably. He saw the man seizing the rooster by its tail, his eyes shining behind his winter mask, whispering, “Cock a doodle do.”
The boy shook his head. No one could kill the rooster. He hummed a sad song he had heard on the radio and focused on the memories that had sustained him here in this cold, hard place. He thought of the rooster. It had been real, once, and bright and angry, tied to a post in his neighbor’s yard, thrusting its beak at anyone, bird or man, that stepped too close. Once the neighbor had invited him over, and he had tried to get close to let the rooster, and the rooster had let him. The boy had crouched in the cool dirt, touched the rooster’s head, gently, and the rooster had trilled for him, soft, sliding like the keys of a piano.
“You’re the only one,” the neighbor had said.
The boy remembered swimming in a pool, which he hadn’t done since he moved. He had liked to close his eyes and float facedown in the pool, and to pretend that he was drowning, and imagine that soon, someone would save him. He looked around at the cold landscape. There wasn’t a pool that he could see. The closest thing to a pool was this mountain. The boy imagined lying face down in the snow, playing dead until someone ran out on the street in terror. His mother. The man. The rooster.
The boy had a feeling his imaginary friend would not show much concern.
The boy slid down the little mountain and into the man’s yard. The snow was hard and icy, and hurt him a little. When he stood to dust himself off, he looked in the man’s big picture window and saw him standing there, drinking something from a mug. He wasn’t wearing his mask. He was old and pale and he looked very tired, like he’d been trying very hard at something, and not succeeding.
Something about the way the man watched made the boy know. The man would not kill the rooster. The boy raised his machete towards the man, both a threat and an invitation.
“Cock a doodle do,” taunted the imaginary friend from atop the mountain. But it was too late. The boy had already left him.
The man had seen the boy in his yard. He had seen the boy climb his mountain. The boy had waved a toy knife at the man. Had he waved it aggressively? Invitingly? The man wasn’t sure.
He watched the boy from his picture window, not hiding. He watched the boy’s face twist in annoyance as he spoke to something. He had yelled at it, driven it away. The boy was like a philosopher in his innocence, the man thought. That thing, whatever it was, hadn’t made the boy happy, and so he had made it leave. Now the boy had climbed up to the top again, and was digging holes. He appeared to be preparing burial sites, but the man couldn’t be sure. He was too far away. What he could be sure of was that the boy seemed happy. Very happy on the mountain, very happy digging.
The man thought about the things in his life that made him unhappy. The job he didn’t have, the money that was sifting through his savings account. His angry wife and blonde and soft daughter, who seemed unmoved by him and unmoored from him, too. What made the man happy? Snow. This was the man’s one truth. He wished he lived somewhere in the far north. Somewhere men drove snowmobiles to desolate jobs, and drank to dull their desire for happiness.
Somewhere like that might make more sense than this organized, inhabited place.
Still, his little mountain sat in front of his house, clean and wild. And now here was this child, alone at the top, digging in it and burying things, too. It might have made him unhappy, someone else, digging into his mountain. It might have made him nearly insane if it were the next-door neighbor’s boy, a fat petulant child who cried when he played with others. But this little boy, his being at the top of the mountain seemed right.
The man wanted to join him there.
The man finished his hot chocolate and found his snow pants and his waterproof jacket.
“What are you doing?” asked his wife.
“I’m just going,” the man said, pulling on his snow boots.
The boy had a box of things he had brought with him. It was small and light and filled with things from the old house, the life he knew. He had filled the box believing these things were important. Now the boy could see that things were not important. It was the memory of these things, the fact that they were inside him, not outside. Outside of him, they didn’t matter.
He sat on top of the mountain and dug holes with his cardboard machete. The snow was hard on top, but below it gave easily. He took the things out, little histories, and one by one, dropped them into icy graves. They were not important on their own. A photo of a friend, a short haired girl who hated posing for pictures and refused to sit still, her portrait a lovely blur in his hands. A drawing of the rooster. A note from his cousin in a language he was beginning to no longer understand. Plastic army men, frozen in fierce battle. A jar of chlorinated water from the pool where he used to swim. They were not important on their own. What was important was that they were his. They were all that mattered, and yet, they did not matter. One by one, he removed the things from the box, and dropped them down the cold holes he had dug for them.
One by one, he said goodbye.
He covered them in snow, made them invisible. He imagined the mountain freezing over, keeping them there for a long time, maybe even all winter. He imagined spring coming, a great thaw, and his things frozen each into their own layer, a long block of ice on the ground containing his history, each layer revealing a truth impossible to see, but all together adding up into an equation that made sense. His life, there, frozen in time.
The boy heard a noise as he smoothed the snow over each item. He looked up, and the man was there, next to him at the top of the mountain, dressed in snow clothes, without his mask. The man carried a shovel, his face soft and solemn. The boy said nothing to the man, and the man said nothing back. The boy imagined saying hello, but it seemed impossible. His tongue felt cold, he was unsure whether he could move it. And so instead he worked carefully on his small graves, and hoped the man wouldn’t ask questions.
The man selected a spot on the mountain a few feet away and began to dig. He dug hard and very deep, and hummed a song the boy recognized from the radio. It was a sad song, a song about falling out of love in a hot, foreign country. The boy had seen the video, and he conjured its tropical contrast as his hands grew numb. The boy hummed with the man as he dug. The boy smoothed his little graves as the man dug deeper and deeper, until the man had dug a long and wide hole that he himself could fit in. The boy stopped humming then, stopped smoothing snow. The man handed him his shovel and lay down in his hole.
The boy nodded. The boy understood. The man wanted to be buried, like memories. The man wanted to wake up in the spring, frozen in ice, a mystery for the world to decipher. The boy took the man’s shovel and laid his damp machete across the man’s chest. The man hummed loudly. The boy dutifully covered the man with small clumps of snow as the man continued his radio ballad. Piece by piece, he covered the tired man until he became a part of the landscape, gone but for his sad song.
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