Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club Read Free

too? I knew the answer to that question even before I asked it. He wasn’t the leaving kind. He loved his Juárez. I could see that in his eyes, in his unshaven face, in the way he moved and talked. I could almost taste his love for that poor and wretched city in his kisses. It enraged me that Juárez had become so chaotic and violent and capricious, a city hungry for the blood of its own people. How had this happened? I was sick to death of it, sick to death of the body count, sick to death that every killing went unprosecuted and unpunished. You could kill anybody. And what would happen? Nothing. The fucking city no longer cared who was killed. Soon, they would just be stepping over the bodies. Stay safe. Stay safe. Stay safe.
    7.
    The next Sunday, he appeared at my door. It was early. “They admitted my uncle into the hospital last night.”
    “You look tired,” I said. And he did look tired. Tired and sad, his white shirt wrinkled.
    “I slept in a chair in his room.”
    We walked up the stairs into my apartment.
    “I like your world,” he said as he stared at the new painting I was working on. He stared at the words on my computer. “Were you writing?”
    “Yes.”
    “You write on Sundays?”
    “It’s like going to Mass.”
    He smiled. “So this is communion.”
    “Something like that.”
    “What are you writing?”
    “A poem.”
    “About what?”
    “About what’s going on in Juárez.”
    “Why would you want to write about that?”
    “Juárez is an obsession.”
    “Why?”
    “Because it’s a part of me.”
    “You don’t live there.”
    “We’re all one city, Javier.”
    “That’s shit, Carlos.” I liked the anger in his voice. “You think the fucking border doesn’t matter?”
    There are a lot of things I could have said, wanted to say, but the border was there and we lived on different sides of it. What good were utopian ideologies about borderless worlds from a writer of political poems? What good was an argument with a beautiful man?
    He smiled. “It’s not you I’m mad at.”
    “I know.”
    “Don’t write about Juárez. Write about something beautiful.”
    “That’s not what I do, Javier.”
    “I know. Your books are getting sadder.”
    “There’s a lot to be sad about.”
    “That’s strange. Because you’re not a sad man.”
    “No, I don’t think I am.”
    “Why aren’t you sad?”
    “I used to be. I’m better now.”
    “And so you’re happy?”
    “Right now I’m happy.”
    “You’re complicated.”
    “I’ve gone from being interesting to being complicated?”
    He laughed. He put his head on my shoulder. He started to cry.
    “He’s going to die,” he whispered. “I don’t have anyone.” His tears were soaking my shirt. I wanted to taste them, bathe in them, drown in them. “He’s going to die.” He kept repeating it over and over.
    I never knew what to say when people cried. Especially men. Before my father died, I used to sit and listen to him weep. Sometimes I’d hold his hand. I was in love with that picture in my head: me holding my father’s hand. So that’s what I did. I took Javier’s hand and held it. I led him to my bedroom. “You should sleep,” I said. “You’re tired.”
    He lay down on the bed. I took off his shoes.
    He stared at the small mural I’d started on one of the walls. “I like it.”
    “I just started it.”
    “Leave it like that.”
    “It’s only a sky.”
    “It’s beautiful. Just a sky. Leave it like that.” He was tired and he was whispering.
    “Sleep,” I said.
    It was cold outside. The wind was picking up and the clouds were gathering like a flock of unwelcome crows. I hated crows. They were mean and selfish and liked to dance around and gloat when they caught a lizard. I stepped out into the balcony and took a breath. I thought of smoking a cigarette—but I didn’t want to go back to that time. I wasn’t so young anymore. I’d made so many mistakes. Smoking was the least of it. I wouldn’t go