How to Escape From a Leper Colony Read Free Page A

want to be heard.”
    “A tree fall in the forest?”
    “All the time.”
    I could not help myself. Suddenly my body felt heavy. Suddenly I felt alone. I walked over to him and bent into his small chest. I cried loudly. I cried for my mother. “I’m here,” Lazaro said. And he said it over and over again.
    The doctor dressed in white. He covered his hair and face. Only his eyes showed and I couldn’t tell if he was French and tanned, or African but light, or Indian even. I imagined he was my father, whom I couldn’t really remember. I imagined this as he leaned into my face and his face turned hazy and then disappeared. I slept as he carved out the muscle around my elbow, which wasn’t much muscle to begin with as I was still only fourteen and quite skinny. “They didn’t cut your arm off,” a nun said to me and smiled when I awoke. And I knew that was something to be thankful for.
    I was allowed to watch a movie two nights later at the small cinema that had been built for the volunteers and the nuns. Once a month was leper night—for those of us who had gone to Mass every Sunday and for those of us who had been to hospital. I invited Lazaro and they allowed him to come even though neither the Protestant nor the Catholic church could claim him in their congregation. And he was not ill. He was never ill.
    The lepers sat in the front rows. The nuns sat in the very back, like chaperones. The movies that were brought were old movies. Movies that were already old in Trinidad, where my mother was. They weren’t even talkies, most of them. Silent things with caresses so passionate they made even the nuns giggle loudly.
    Movies are like so much art. They can start a revolution. This was not a movie about war. Or about race and oppression; no one talked about those things in 1939. A man loved a woman. A woman loved a man. They were willing to do bad things for that love.
3rd Kill a nun
    I was not yet sixteen when we made the biggest decision of our lives. Lazaro was almost eighteen. Appropriate ages for independence. We went into the jungle of the island to build it. We stole wood meant to steady the leper houses. This was more important. Tantie B did not know what we were doing. I was still alive. She was still alive. Babalao Chuck was dead. I did not go to see him cremated. I believed his stories. I believed he had flown away. He said his Orisha had taught him. I told Tantie B that Lazaro and I were going to build us a house, separate and away from the other houses. And because all every leper wanted was a world that was the same as Trinidad, just with limbs that were fragments of the big island’s, a vacation home in leper town didn’t seem unbelievable. “Every young couple need some privacy for when they wed,” Tantie B mused. And I imagine she thought that Lazaro and I were in love. I cannot blame her. I thought the same.
    But we were not building honeymoon quarters. We were going to build an altar to the goddess Kali. Kali who dances and spins this Kaliyuga world. Bringing the destruction we asked for when we didn’t know what we were asking. “Dear lordess,” I said as I nailed and Lazaro carved. “We is your servants. I drag this wood on my back to show you that we ain no better than dust.” For by then I was resigned to the fact that when I died I would not be buried.
    It felt as though we were playing a game. But I knew it was not a game. We would be punished, though we would not be lashed or starved. Hurting our flesh was not something our nuns would ever do. They were of a peaceful order that believed in punishing the mind. We would be forced to do penance. Perhaps we would be separated. Perhaps we would have to spend days in church, he in the Protestant, me in the Catholic, where we prayed and prayed all the prayers we could remember and then were forced to learn others. This was not a small crime. This was blasphemy. They would tell us we were building false gods; though I knew Hindu gods could not