an empty space left behind
When Michio left, he took the living with him.
The store was old, with a brownstone facade partially hidden by English Ivy. It sold mostly used books - on shelves, on podiums, arranged in fanning stacks, tucked into snuggeries, with lacquered leather covers and handwritten epitaphs (Beatrice, forever. Paul, I'm sorry. Remember Firenze.). Because of this, the living were greatly unnumbered by the dead, and so the loss was hardly noticeable. Michio had not owned much else - a pair of brown canvass shoes and a suit that had been tailored for him, one decade and two sizes ago. These things had also disappeared. He'd forgotten his green cardigan, but that had been folded for so long beneath Augusto's socks, that it smelled only of detergent and of shrimp, curling in the sun.
Because he was a scholar and could read Latin and Greek, Augusto knew those truths of love and loss, older than the Christ. Older than the monsters slumbering off the coasts of Greece.
Still, he kept the sweater.
Before the bookstore, Augusto had come from Andalucía. He wore a religious medallion of St. James on horseback, and remembered the scent of bitter orange, and the blue of Moorish mosaics, but he no longer considered himself to be Spanish. His thoughts came naturally in English; he preferred its clean shaped consonants, its variability, but he did not think of himself as an American, either. If he belonged to anywhere, he belonged to the store.
Perhaps, the only exception was in certain dreams, where he walked through the Alhambra, running his fingers across the looped bands and curves of Arabic calligraphy in marble. In these dreams, he muttered: Vámonos de aquí, vámonos.
Vámonos, Michio had repeated. The words were too sharp, an Asiatic strike on the vowels. Dreams, he had said, don't mean anything.
Augusto closes the store at six in the afternoon. He draws the curtain down and sits in the dark. He is unable to read the type, but the rhythm of turning pages in therapeutic. He feels ashamed of himself for being glad that the living are gone. He doesn't miss the easy course of their blood, the drawl of their breath. Life trails the living, and it is loud and clumsy, knocking some things over, breaking others. The dead are silent and elegant. The dead are an empty space left open, just in case they return to fill it. This is how it is, he thinks.
On the fourth day, a customer enters. He has wiry black hair and dry teeth. His irises are skewed in different directions. Augusto can see the outline of his collarbones through his shirt.
It is obvious he does not belong to this world.
I would like to see your drownings, he says.
Augusto is embarrassed when he has to tell him: I don't have too many of those. But I do have a decent selection of political executions. And suicides, of course, are always in abundance.
The man clicks his teeth impatiently. I was really hoping for a drowning.
Come this way, then.
The man leaves with a copy of Prometheus Unbound beneath his arm, protected from the rain by a plastic bag.
Late in the night, he wears Michio's cardigan and paints.
He begins with portraits. Realistic. Lifelike wetness to the eyes. He begins with Cervantes, moves eastwards to Tolstoy, ends with Mishima. Then, the style changes. The portraits fracture, move towards expressionism, then abstraction. Eyes become great fissures, caves. Mouths are open and empty and lost in the process of decay.
He puts the paintings up for sale in the store, but no one buys them. They look wrong. They look like unfinished business.
Any rare toxic blood disorders? Any car accidents?
The man has been here three times this week. He cannot get enough.
What about Lorca? He was murdered.
No, no. I'm really in the mood for something unexpected. Unplanned.
He is wearing a black suit and his hair has been combed, but his voices carries the ambient hum of static. When he looks at Augusto, he only does so indirectly. Through a reflection in the window. Through the moist ring Augusto's coffee mug has left on the counter.
I have an interesting one in my private collection. Madness and starvation.
Ah. The man considers this. I would like to see it.
It's upstairs.
Upstairs?
Michio would have never allowed a customer into their private apartment above the store. The man follows him so closely that his knees knock into the back of Augusto's calves.
It is the 1842 edition of Gogol's Dead Souls. The man's face changes; for a moment, his eyes are barbaric. His jaw slackens. Mouth purses. Dust drifts away from the book's cover. Gogol left us, he says, but the wound is still fresh, hot pink, infected.
Augusto looks at the man's nails. They are long and yellow. There is dirt beneath them, and his hands are embroidered with flat brown veins. He asks: What are you?
The man reaches out and touches his cheek. Lets his hand trail down the jawline, and settle on Augusto's throat as if checking for a pulse, but he does not answer.
They go to watch a movie at the Imperial Theater. The actors on the screen have pollen-pink cheeks. The girls wear linen shorts and stand in a hyperblue celluloid ocean, waves lapping at their thighs. A lighthouse is beamed down from some hidden place at the back of the room. The two of them leave early, dissatisfied.
They buy Italian food and carry it back to the bookstore in soggy paper bags. They're just not the same, the man explains. He is stabbing penne with his fork, making a great show of movement that only accentuates the fact that he is not eating. Eventually, he passes the aluminum box to Augusto. A drop of orange sauce lands on his trousers. The director makes the movie and the movie is finished. The novel is never finished. Writers are fanatical, obsessive. They live their entire lives as plots. All plots have only one ending.
Augusto looks down at his pasta. The sauce is congealing. Time, maybe, is congealing. He puts the food aside.
The insides of the man's thighs are cold, like packaged meat from the freezer in a grocery store, bound in plastic, slippery and synthetic. They are clumsy. Teeth knock together painfully. The man has his fists clenched against Augusto's scalp. Augusto imagines he must be very careful every time he lifts his hands from the man's skin. Its adhesion to flesh seems inadequate, he is afraid it will peel back. All things about the man appear frail, except for his hands and his erection - nestled inside of him.
Augusto makes a garbled noise that does not move past his larynx.
The man's semen, like everything else, is freezing when it spills across Augusto's stomach. Fuck, he hisses, feeling his abdominal muscles tighten involuntarily. None of it has been how it should be - warm and moist, the sound of creaking human tendons, bubbles popping in the stomach, an orgasm with such gravity that all the blood in the body rushes towards the loins. It has been nothing.
It has been nothing but still, Augusto can hear a voice in the room, and it is either God or ghosts. For a moment, he accepts his destiny. By morning, he has forgotten it.
When the man leaves, he takes the dead with him. They were who he had been coming for, this whole time.
Empty easels.
Empty shelves.
The dead, after all, can only exist alongside the dead.
Augusto moves from room to room. The closest. The bathroom with olive-green mold spreading in the corners of the tub. He notices details he never has before. A spotted towel on the floor. The brand name on a pack of cigarettes. In the kitchen, the plates with rorschach patterns of marinara sauce.
He doesn't bother to unlock the front door. He has nothing left to sell.
He squats, tipping forward, supporting his body weight on the backs of his calves. Only his own heartbeat, in the empty house. Turbulent, mechanical. Moving forward with steady direction.