Signal to Noise(58)

“Sebos?” she asked, her mouth dry.

She must be dreaming of him, like she did in Europe, during the long winter nights when he used to come into her room and sit quietly at the foot of her bed. The ghost of a boy who had not died.

“Nobody calls me Sebos anymore,” he said and when he stepped forward she saw it was not the young Sebastian who had haunted her. It was the older one. The real one.

“What are you doing here?”

“I went to your home for the novena and nobody knew where you were. I thought you might still be here. We had a movie to watch.”

“How did you get in?” she asked, wondering if he still had some magic tricks under his sleeve. Turning into mist and slipping under the door maybe.

“You left the door open.”

How prosaic. Meche shook her head, still groggy. She pulled out the earbuds, stuffing them in her pocket.

“Is the praying over?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

“What are you doing?”

“I was taking a nap until you interrupted me.”

“No, I mean what are you doing,” he asked, the inflexion falling on the last word.

He sat on the bed and she sat up so that she was level with him.

“Thinking,” she said.

“I had a hard time when my dad died.”

“When did he die?”

“A couple of years ago.”

“You hated him,” Meche said. “He used to beat you up.”

“He did. But he also did nice things. He made toys for me. Little things of wire and tin. I try to remember the good things.”

“Then you’re a better person than I,” she muttered, folding her legs into a lotus position.

“When did you get so sad?”

“Oh, please,” Meche said. “Am I crying?”

“No.Then?”

“When I was seven years old I fell down and I said, ‘I’m not going to cry about this.’ And I didn’t. I’ve stayed true to that. Waterworks don’t work for me, all that stupid melodrama...”

“You didn’t cry because you wanted to show your dad you were brave,” Sebastian said turning his head and looking at her. “You told me that story. I remember.”

“Great. So what? Should I start weeping all over your shirt and you can wipe my tears with that God-damn nasty tie you’re wearing?” she asked, jamming a finger against one of the buttons on his shirt. Poking his chest. “You get your kicks like that these days?”

“I can go if you want.”

“You do that,” she said and grabbed the notebook she had been reading before. She tossed it at him, hitting him on the face.

It made her incredibly happy. If only she could pelt him with about two dozen other notebooks. Seized by a desire for destruction, Meche grabbed a bunch of records and flipped them at him. Sebastian evaded them this time, ducking. She kept throwing them, like Frisbees.

“Look! Take On Me. Now that’s a classic. And here, La Puerta de Alcalá.’ ‘Look at her, look at her, seeing time pass. The door of Alcala.’ It was a big hit back in 1985. Oh, look at this one?” Meche showed him the sleeve. “Mi Unicornio Azul by Silvio Rodriguez. My dad liked that song a lot.”

Meche buried her face in the pillow.

She felt Sebastian’s fingers on her shoulder; tried to shove him away and failed, then lay still and blinked.

“I hate this city,” she told the pillow, because she wouldn’t tell him.

Sebastian’s hand just rested there as it had so many times before: comforting her after the news of a bad grade; the nasty words some classmate spoke at school; even the time when she got so many zits she promised she’d never leave the apartment again and Sebastian had arrived, luring her out with the promise of the arcade.

A phone rang. His cell. The hand left her.

“Yes. Mom? Yeah.”

He walked towards the doorway and Meche rolled over, grabbing the blanket and wrapping herself into it. She was not cold in Oslo but this apartment packed the cold of too many winters in its heart.

Sebastian returned and sat next to her.

“Jimena said your mom is sick.”

“Cancer. Romualdo and I take turns looking after her. That’s why I’m back in the city. The chemo has worked. I’m betting she lives to a hundred.”

She thought of her own father, shuffling alone through his apartment in his slippers with no one to watch over him. Nothing but the songs for company.

“You’re going to go visit her now?”

“No. I can stay.”

“I’m not asking you to stay,” Meche said looking over her shoulder.

“You think I’d leave just like that?”

Well, you did once before, she thought. Well, technically she’d left. But only after he completely abandoned her by the curbside.

“I don’t know you,” she muttered. To the pillow, again. “You’re a stranger.”

He turned her around and Meche frowned as she looked into eyes which were exactly the same as she remembered them. But the rest wasn’t. And this man... she had never ridden down the boulevard on this man’s motorcycle, never scrawled idly in his books, never listened to vinyl records in an old pantyhose factory with him.