Broken Line.

The sign above the car doors says not to Apoye against La Puerta. It's a sunny Saturday afternoon, late September, and in fifteen minutes I'll be sitting across from my father at a damp greasy table in the Howard Johnson's across from Grand Central.

My father always told me, It never hurts to ask. What I never understood until much later, what he meant, was that it never hurt to ask others. Ask someone else why, or how, or who or when. But don't ask me. Don't ever ask me, because I'm never going to tell.

I haven't spoken to my father in six years. Not since he returned a letter I'd written him. Returned it, all eight pages plus the envelope I'd mailed it in, to my then-boyfriend in a 6 x 9 office stationery manila, a Post-It attached to the crumpled-up pages. On the yellow paper he'd Sharpied: You are no longer my daughter. I will make do. I suggest you do the same.

I have.

I carry a knife with me. Not in my purse but tight against my left hip inside my Wranglers. It's a switchblade, the kind that pops straight up with the slightest bit of pressure on its silver button. I confiscated it from Max, one of my students, and I never gave it back. On the side, crudely soldered onto the hilt, are the letters BBB. When I asked what they stood for, Max just shrugged. Depends on the context, like OPP, he said, his feet shuffling somewhere underneath his draggy hoopskirt pantlegs. Sometimes it's Bitches Be Beggin'. Sometimes it's Better Bein' Black. Right now I think it means, Blow Baby Blow. I took it from him the day my father left a message saying he'd be in town.

I'm in the Macy's car--nothing but Macy's ads posted on every ad panel inside the train. Ads that repeat and repeat and repeat. I'd never noticed the ads, their sameness, their redundancy, until the day I'd taken to carrying the switchblade with me. When I finally left school that day it was dark. I transferred to the N at 34th, not knowing the time. When I asked the woman nearest me, she and three other passengers held up their wrists. I looked around and everyone was wearing a watch but me; I had boarded the Swatch car. The day after that I hopped onto a Blimpie's car. Everyone had a sandwich in their lap--Whoppers, heroes, Egg McMuffins. A week later, I found myself shoulder to shoulder with a carload of hoop dreamers, boys and girls wearing nothing but Adidas--Adidas hi-tops, Adidas sweatsuits, Adidas caps. When I looked up all I saw was Stephon Marbury and Adidas, Adidas and Marbury. Since then, I've tried to avoid the subways and buses. But I was running late today, so here I sit, on the Macy's car, wh ere it's the same white Macy's faces every other five panels up one side of the car and down the other--and faces just as white and happy and bland sitting under each and every ad.

At 14th, I switch to the next car up--an MTA car. The woman sitting in the corner end has her creamy black legs craned over a yellow seat and an orange one. She has two gold earrings, rhomboid-shaped, huge, in each ear, and a folded-over copy of Word Search #37: Horror in one hand and a pencil in the other. She's crossed through words like Corpse and Exorcise but hasn't yet found Hex. I hold on to the metal strap above her and find Alien and Dread before she turns the page. She then cocks her head over to the woman across from her--who could be her twin, only not as dark-skinned, not as heavy, and she's doing Word Search #46: Terror. Being a woman fulltime, says the Horror woman below me, Girl, it's just too much work! The other woman nods, leans to say something back, but the storm door between them opens, and in from the Macy's car come two cops and a German shepherd. A K-9 unit.

The shepherd, a snuff dog, erupts into a fit of barking. Immediately, he spotted, or smelled, the doe-eyed, droopy-eared puppy at the other end of the car--a black lab, its soft head bobbing up and down from inside its owner's purse. The two cops, in shortsleeve shirts and shorts, stroll through, hefting their billy clubs like baseball bats, one making wide circular strokes in the air as if he's standing in the warm-up deck at Yankee Stadium. That little bitch must be in heat, says the white one, the slugger, looking directly at me as he says this. Why else would Rommel be yapping like that. Then he tips his square head in my direction, tapping the bridge of his nose with his club. Ma'am. The other cop, a woman, tugs at the shepherd's leash, gives the animal some slack. The dog, quiet now, moves its snout up my left foot, up my leg, into my crotch. Both cops turn, give the shepherd a grin. They plant their black thick-heeled cop shoes on the car floor not ten inches from my own, and teeter-totter back and fo rth in broken rhythm to the motion of the express. You wouldn't be carrying any illegal contraband in there now would you ma'am, says the woman cop, giving the dog more leash. The dog trying to jam its snout further into my crotch.

Holding onto the strap with one hand, I reach into my switchblade pocket and rest my fingers halfway in. I haven't been this close to a cop since the night three Tucson police arrested my dad for threatening a Domino's delivery kid who'd been speeding down the alley behind our house. The dog, smelling blood, digs further into my zipper. I stare at the cops' badges: Molinari, 43621. Gibbons, 40499. Rubbing the three Bs on the side of the knife, wondering, what's the context now? Broad bloodies bulls? Barbie bores beast? The two Word Search women curl up their legs from the seats and ease their feet flat to the floor, distracting the shepherd and diverting the cops' attention away from me.

That's when the train engine shuts down. The lights inside flicker off, flicker on, flicker off again. No one says a word. Not even the shepherd. Slowly we drift past the tiled pillars of 23rd Street. Wisp. Shuh-shookh. Wisp. Shuh-shookh.

No humming. No roaring. No knocking or clanging.

It's as though someone has pursed their lips together and is blowing us gently, gently through the tunnel. The air releasing from their gigantic mouth in one continuous Hatha yoga breath. No wind. No pushing or pulling. The entire train gliding along on a pillow of air. The wheels turning and floating, floating and turning. Effortlessly. Like drifting downhill on a bicycle without holding on.

I try to picture my father at the restaurant, waiting for me. Always late, he'll say. Just like your mother. You two are going to be late for your own funeral. Sitting there tone and tan as the All-SEC split-end he once starred as at LSU, decked out in his Jimmy Buffett muftis: a loud Hawaiian shirt, Teva sandals, and paint-spattered khaki shorts. Nothing more than an order of dry toast and a tea with honey and lemon--a real lemon, not the processed juice in a plastic squeeze packet. Eight or nine percent body fat. The long stringy sun-choked hair, the beard my mom later referred to as the Charles Manson special. And a drooping shoulder. His first-ever injury: a broken collarbone.

A second cousin had passed through Tucson and had seen him right after his accident. He wouldn't tell her, but one of the kids said it was rollerblade related. It had sent him into a severe depression, an intense mental pulldown that hit every six or seven years. This collapse, unlike the three or four others I'd grown up with--bouts that hit when Dad turned 30, then 40, or when the strain of his and Mom's semi-open marriage finally took its toll on him, too, when he couldn't deal with Mom having decided to match his adultery with an affair of her own, bouts that lasted from several weeks to over a year, bouts apparent only to me and Mom and my brother, never to outsiders, Dad always functional, always working, always there for others--this breakdown was first brought on, it seemed, by Cindy, his second wife and mother to his next five children, having left him. Exacerbated, the cousin had assumed, by the shattered clavicle. But the injury, knowing Dad, probably shook him harder than the disintegration of hi s marriage. After all, his body is his temple. His body had never before wilted, never folded, on him.

For my twenty-first birthday, he'd sent me a check for $50, a framed picture of him crossing the finish line at the Ironman in Hawaii, and the new Celeste Sportsmedicine T-shirt. Celeste after himself, T.J. Celeste. Silkscreened on the front of the black shirt, a Gray's Anatomy-detailed drawing, in yellow, of a torn-up knee; on the back, Dad's favorite refrain. Find the subluxation. Correct it. And leave it alone. He'd first heard it during his residency at Tulane, from his advisor, the chief of orthopedics. Dad embraced it instantly and has stuck by it ever since as a work and a life philosophy. Repeating it over and over to my mom, at work, and to me and my little brother.

No matter what the situation--trying to write the personal essay for my college applications, what to do about my breakup with my first boyfriend, how to deal with my parents' separation--I'd always found a huge amount of wisdom in it. Identify the problem, the area of disjuncture--the subluxation. Fix it, and move on. It was so simple, so clean, so cut and dry. But then I got older. I didn't get into the college of my choice, I never got over my first boyfriend, and I still have problems with my parents' divorce.

I wore the T-shirt only once before storing it away in the back of my closet. But my father's aphorisms and some of his other Iron John values still creep into my mind when I least expect them to. It's partly why I laminated the Post-It he attached to my letter. I laminated it--and copied it too--because my father tends to rewrite history--his own and anyone else's he becomes involved with. He amends events, changes opinions from what they used to be into something he's always said or believed, and waits until others have left the room, gone home, walked away from him before he mocks them, derides them. He never liked Scott, my first boyfriend, because Scott didn't have a job, couldn't read a map. Then, after we split up and I'd left home, Dad would talk about what a hard worker that Scott was, how he could've dropped him in the middle of the Table Lands at midnight with no compass and a concussion and Scott surely would have been able to blaze a trail back to our doorstep by the next morning. Or it wasn't D ad driving the night the neighbor's dog got run over, it was Mom. And Mom not there to defend herself then but back in Pennsylvania, alone, trying to sober up, about to meet her next future husband.

A while back I took seven of my kids over to the U.N. for a field trip. We tried to film the international session--that day they were to vote on whether or not Milosevic and Karadzic should be extradited and tried outside the former Yugoslavia as war criminals--but the guards wouldn't let us inside with our camcorders. So I attached the pinhole cam to Jamal's Bulls cap and we got some hidden footage anyway. Afterwards, in Dag Hammarskj[ddot{o}]ld Plaza, the kids ate their Subways while I rolled myself a cigarette. Halfway through my second one, five young white men in blue suits and yellow and red ties sat down at a table next to ours. I looked at the kids with me-Jamal, a quasi-Muslim kid who could barely read; the three girls, Keisha, Toni, and Sondara, Toni already pregnant and the other two girls saying they were going to be corporate lawyers on Wall Street; Max, the kid whose switchblade I took and who wears his yarmulke only at home; and Rich, with his fake Tourette's and his sights already set on NYU Film School. And me. With my estranged father, my Mom also on her way to a second divorce.

See those men over there? I said to the kids, almost catching myself too late--that of putting on my teacher-tone as best I could without sounding too much like I expected a real answer. The kind of tone my father would use. What do those five guys have that we don't have? I said. The tone really there this time. It worked too. The kids just gave me that, Is this a test? look. Bad ties? said Jamal. And they all laughed. All except Max, who then took out a cigarette of his own. I'd given him my Dad's subluxation T-shirt, the one my Dad gave me, in exchange for having taken his knife. He had the shirt on backwards underneath an unbuttoned Mao jacket and he'd scratched out the Correct it part. Then I heard my father's voice. If you just think the right way, he intones, jutting his finger at the men in suits, the world is very accessible.

The shepherd pivots, looks again at my crotch. The lights still out, the train still floating uptown, now past 28th. The cops absentmindedly banging out crude gamelan sounds with their clubs on the triangular metal straps. The scent of coagulation and flow worrying its way to the inside of my jeans. The hairs on the dog's nose twitching, aroused.

The day after my father phoned, I found myself in a fifth-floor walkup in SoHo, among a roomful of strangers. Nine of us in a half-circle, two balanced on the edges of the cold fold-out metal chairs from Ikea, the rest of us on the floor, our feet splayed in a wide V, inserting and reinserting a tonguelike clear-plastic device into our vaginas. Giggling, squirting, the firm cervical caps popping out across the hardwood floor every now and then. More giggling. These caps are so thick, is he going to be able to feel me through all this plastic? You'd rather go back to copper wiring? The doctor herself, across from us, patient, guiding, naked too except for her Manolo Blahniks, her lavender blouse, her white overcoat. Her first name, Celeste, stitched across the top left pocket of her coat. The name my own, my father's. The image of my father, ever confident, ever youthful, breaking the tape of the Hawaii Ironman, my father, tone and tan and pure of clavicle and everything that every boyfriend never could measu re up to. The ill-fitted cap clear and hard and curved and deep deep inside me. My father even further, always there in my mind, forever inside my emotions. Saying, Everyone disappoints eventually, Maya. Everyone.

Before we finally pull into Grand Central, still in darkness, still silent, an elderly black woman limps through the storm door, also from the Macy's car. Huffing her big car wreck of a body past the two Word Search women, then past the dog and the two cops as if they were aluminum poles, she plants herself in the center of the car and booms out to no one in particular, When Jesus comes knocking on your door are you gonna open it up and let him in or are you gonna tiptoe up to the peephole and hope he goes away? The white cop turns to his partner, twirls his club in the air with the leather strap. I guess that would depend on what he's selling, he says. But the old woman just ignores him and bellows her sermon again. And again. And again.

No one else seems to notice the door she came in through--that it's still open. Or the skein of swallows and pigeons now fluttering into the car, noiselessly, like silent-movie props. Even the shepherd seems oblivious, no longer interested in my pelvis either. The blood drying up now, caking. Hardening. The tunnel-gray wings of the birds drifting through the car: Wisp. Shuh-shookh. Wisp. Shuh-shookh.

You don't remember this, my father once told me, not long before I left Tucson, but when you were a little girl, just three months old, your mother and I took you down to Nogales for a weekend. To get away. Away from both our parents and out of that shitty little house your grandparents bought us. We were sitting in his office. Miniature plastic-model medical-company give-aways of broken hips, shredded ACLs, curved spines and torn rotator cuffs crowding his desk, obstructing my view of his face as he talked. The glare from the three-panel x-ray machine directly behind his head making me squint, making it even more difficult to see him. Your mom had just knitted you a sweater with that Navajo design on it, like the rug I gave you after graduation. And she'd put it on you and left you in your bassinet on the balcony of the hotel we were at. She'd gone inside to get a Coke or something and when she came back out there was this beautiful brown hummingbird sitting on your chest. Dad pausing now and then to sign of f on someone's chart, run his fingers over vertebrae 4 and 5 of a hard-plastic scoliotic back--the Scylla and Charybdis, he liked to say, of any major spinal operation. There was a patch of red in the Navajo pattern she'd knitted, on your sweater, and the bird had been trying to feed from it with its beak. And you lay there calm as ever. As if that bird stopped by every afternoon to sit on your tiny chest.

Then he told me what he'd really wanted to say, only he couldn't say that either. He said when I was born, he and Mom buried my umbilical cord under the doorstep of that first house. It was a Navajo tradition Mom believed in, he said, his beeper going off. A way for the parents to insure that their kids would always return home. To their family, their community. Funny thing was, Dad couldn't remember which house it was we lived in back then, and neither could Mom. Then he finally said it: Cindy was pregnant--the phone ringing, the phone ringing again. He was going to finalize his divorce from Mom and remarry--the nurse peeking her head into the half-open door to say Mr. Evers had been prepped and was ready when Dad was--and he wanted to name this new daughter Maya, too-- the intercom now--and bury her umbilical cord--the curved vertebrae wobbling in his grip--under the doorstep of his and Cindy's new house, so both of us would always know where home was.

Inside one end of Grand Central's giant terminal room, the cover story of the newest issue of Vogue is inescapable: The Housewife Who Became A Scholar, blares the headline, without a trace of irony. The glossy fashion magazine encased in plastic and repeated thirty times up and across the Eastern Newsstand kiosk. The words Housewife and Scholar leading me first to my mother, who gave up her Ph.D and her dissertation on Wittgenstein to raise me and my brother, then to what my brother told me after I told him about Dad calling to meet.

Mom's been on Klonopin for the past two months, he said. It's an anti-anxiety drug. She says how before, it was like she was living her life on a zipper. Now it's smooth as a line drawn in ink. Maybe you should call her up and ask for a bottle, he laughed. But serious too. Give it a try. I wanted to say, I lived with Dad, it doesn't mean I was married to him. And who do you think the zipper was anyway? But Tim himself had just switched from Lithium to Zoloft. He'd lived with Mom from sixth grade on, seeing Dad and me only on holidays, or for half a summer.

It's now been more than an hour. The menu still on the table in front of me. My bladder full, pressing on my ischial bone. The last time I went back to Tucson I tried to talk to my father at home, not at his office, not at the restaurant near his office, but the day he said Come on over, he'd decided the kids should take the day off from school and hang out with Aunt Maya. He was standing in the kitchen, his hand braced on the open refrigerator, and the kids, all with their separate demands, were screaming and pulling at him. Never have this many kids in a row, he said, stretching his arm into the cold for a pack of hot dogs. Then he turned toward my five new half-siblings and began counting them off with his pinkie. One, two, three [ldots] As if his children were so many cartons rolling off an assembly line. The look in his eyes not just weary, but dismissive, disappointed.

I order another bottle of Beck's, my fourth, and as the waiter waits for me to finish my third one, he catches me staring at the writing on the T-shirt he has on underneath his faded-red Howard Johnson's polo. Oh, this, he says, picking at the neckline of the T-shirt. My boyfriend has a rather sick sense of humor. In huge black letters, his shirt proclaims: Thank God for AIDS.

As he walks away, I say, Doesn't everybody? and he gives me a look that's not sure if I mean Thank God for AIDS or Everybody has a sick sense of humor. So I yell out, a little too loudly, A sick sense of humor! Isn't everybody sick?!

The tourists and the loners, they startle, shudder, heads skittering, desperate for a confrontation, a New York City scene to take home. But the two men at the table directly across from me, two men my age, in navy blue sweatshirts and black jeans, scruffy, bohemian, carry on as if I'd never said a word. That's because they're deaf, Dad, I say, whispering the word deaf and dipping my head to our table in case the men read lips. If you ever bothered to look, if you were here to ignore them, you'd know that. Or if you'd ever paid attention to Cindy's deaf sister, you might've learned how to sign, too.

If my father were here he'd be sitting here ramrod straight, his spongy vertebrae locked up tight, and he'd be answering every question of mine with, Those are the choices I made, That's the way I am, You'll just have to accept that. Did you even read my letter? I ask him. That's the way I am. How can you expect to just waltz back into my life after six years, after all you've done, and tell me you won't change? You'll just have to accept that. Did you ever love me? Those are the choices I made. That disappointment in his eyes no longer looking outward, looking down on me, but boring inward. The red veins coursing across the whites of his tired eyes now like so many hairline fractures, so many subluxations. If he weren't my father, I'd pity him. If he weren't my father, I'd forgive him. But you'll never even forgive yourself, will you? You'll never be able to live with yourself. Or Mom. Or me or Cindy. That's the way, he tries to say. Those are the, the choices, his mouth cracking now, the sound of bone snapp ing inside him, echoing throughout the restaurant. You'll just have to, to love me, he wants to say. But he can't. He can't say it. He's my father and he can't even tell me.

The two men haven't signaled each other since the waiter came back with my fifth Beck's. They've been holding each other's hands across the table, smiling and staring into one another's Kahlua-white eyes. Suddenly, the one facing me raises his eyebrows and throws up his hands, as if to say, Oh, yes, I just remembered the funniest joke.

Do you know what mung is? he gesticulates. Mung, he says again, now spelling the word a letter at a time--M-U-N-G--for his friend. And me. No, goes his friend's head. It's what comes out of a pregnant woman's pussy when you hit her in the stomach with a baseball bat. And the two of them laugh--that mimey hollow laugh all deaf people have. Then they turn their deaf faces in my direction, as if they aren't quite sure I know what it is they've just said, as if it were their joke and nobody else's.

Outside, measuring my steps uptown, the opposite direction of my apartment, I stumble into Max on 66th and Columbus. He's with his parents and his two cardiganed little sisters. He has on a yarmulke and a dark suit and tie. His feet for once visible, I see a fresh pair of heavy brogues at the end of his wool trousers. I say hello to his family, ask Max if he wants back his Sharpie. Abruptly but smoothly, he pulls up, moves Out of earshot, tells his folks to go on ahead. Yo, damn, he whispers, his hands now moving like a Doggy Dogg version of Benjamin Netanyahu. Why you gotta be griefing on me like that?

Blasphemers be blasphemin', believers be believin', I say. But he doesn't get it, he doesn't understand the context. How could he? How can any of us?

You got my knife, keep it, he says, waving me off. You drunk. You gonna need it.

You're right, I say, patting Max on the padded shoulder of his suit jacket -- touching for the first time his soft narrow shoulders, almost joyful almost sorrowful at how rubbery and lubricated must be the rotator cuffs deep inside his unblemished teenage scapulae. You must be right, I say. Boys like you are always right.

Damn straight, Teach, he says, bouncing on his heels. You need to find that subluxation shit and leave it the fuck alone.

By the time I make it back to Grand Central it's nearly midnight. Inside the vast indoor room are five or six homeless slumped against the marble walls and a pair of women statued behind a small booth near the antique clock in the center. When I passed through earlier I must have missed them--a dwarfish black woman and her white counterpart, both about 50, both wearing gray orthopedic nursing shoes, dark-brown corduroy jackets, thick-lensed glasses and light-blue hospital-thin hair caps. Their sign says:

World Monetary Crash

Great Depression Near

For more info

Watch Bayside Cable or call

1-800-345-MARY

They smile at me painfully as I shift ahead to the downtown Lexington line. Leave it alone, I almost shout at them. Let it crash, let it sink. Just leave it the fuck alone. But I stay silent, muted.

The Six train pulls in an hour later, rousing me. I step inside but do not sit down, instead resting my shoulder blades against the express-side exit doors. The only other person onboard is a white man in a wheelchair. He's wearing a Hard Rock Cafe Salt Lake City letter jacket and a Just-got-laid-look on his Robert Lowell face. The car we're in is a Bronx Zoo car. Elephant, snake, panda, ostrich, tiger. Elephant, snake, panda, ostrich.[ldots]

By the time we pull out of 23rd Street, the Hard Rock guy has wheeled himself up against my knees, the homeless have laid themselves out on every flat surface, and half the metal strap-bars have people hanging onto them. It's when the lights begin to flicker and the engine goes silent that I realize I'm on the same train I took uptown in the afternoon. Through the storm-door window at the rear I see the same Macy's ads over and over, the same Basquiatish graffiti smeared across one of the Macy's model's faces.

The train jerks forward and a man at the other end of the car starts shouting, Fermez las fenetres! Fermez las fenetres! He looks Asian, maybe Vietnamese. He's dragging a square car-sized basket behind him, the top of it flopping up and down, everyone staring at him, trying to ignore him. Close your fuckeeng windows! he screams, his mouth wet, his shirt collar torn. Then we all see why: a phalanx of cockatiels, parakeets, macaws and parrots is pouring forth in front of the screaming man in a sharp V, streaming through the car sideways, back and forth, into people's hair, into people's necks and faces, slamming into their own reflections in the shiny aluminum siding. Screeching, shrieking, squealing. A mass of jungly red and tropical green and rainforest yellow, beaks and claws, blue and gold, maroon and fuchsia, feathers and birdshit, silver and pink.

The basket man scrambling up and down the car, trying to shut the open windows, trying to snare a macaw in one hand, a cockatiel in the other. The basket overturned on its open end. The birds all battling the passengers, the lights continuing to flutter on and off, the train slowly pulling into Union Square. The Hard Rock guy rolling backward and forward, forward and backward, the handle of his chair knocking against my pubis, pushing into me, into my bladder. Then I see a small algae-green parakeet land sideways on one of the vertical slat windows across from me. The bird pauses, stares into the blackness of the tunnel, looks back at the plume of warm-blooded disorder, pauses again, and then disappears.

I have to push the wheelchair handles away from the sides of my hips before I can step over to the doors, to where the parakeet had fled. The other birds still flapping about the car. Quivering, cawing. Beating their papery wings furiously, frantically. I press against each door panel as hard as I can, prying at the rubber edges where the two doors meet. I try to pull them apart. Not waiting for the train to stop, the doors to open. A sunburst-yellow parakeet then bumps into my hair, alights on the open slat next to me, the same slat the parakeet had landed on, pauses, looks at me, looks at the other birds, looks at the Bronx Zoo poster of the panda next to her, and disappears. Then another--a macaw--spots the opening, lands, pauses, and leaves. Then another--another parakeet. And another bird. And another. One by one go the birds, like so many Catholic emissaries, hurling themselves from Prague's seventeenth-century embrasures. The Vietnamese man screaming in horror each time, the Hard Rock guy laughing, sh oving his wheelchair into peoples' knees, over their feet, the homeless half-awake, half-heartedly grabbing at the birds.

I want out. I want free. I want away. I want to follow the birds to wherever it is they've gone to. I want to know how they do it. I want answers. I want to know where that house is, where Mom and Dad buried my umbilical cord. I want a father. I want my father. I want out.

Taking the final step to my sixth-floor walkup, I look up and see my neighbor, Luisa, standing, hobbled over, her left hand on the doorknob to her apartment to keep herself balanced. She simply stands there, a five-foot-five-inch 82-year-old model of degenerative osteoporosis and curvature of the spine, and it seems from her expression that she's been that way, in this position, all night, maybe most of the day too. Has she been expecting someone? Waiting for someone? Rose, her best friend from downstairs? Perhaps she heard a knock on the door and thought an angel had come to take her away but when she opened her door, no angel. No faceless figure of death. No one to guide her back into her apartment.

Hello, I say, a slurry cheer in my greeting even though it's nearly two A.M. Luisa feebly draws up her right hand, the wrist falling backward as she raises her palm, her smooth flesh clinging to the loose muscle underneath. Only then do her lips line up in the manner of a smile, only then do her eyes ring out in recognition of my voice. And as she mouths the word, Hi, such a simple opening word, so pure and forthright and monosyllabically beauteous, like Yes and No and Me and Love, as she tries to utter this word to me, a thick thread of saliva trickles out the corner of her mouth. It dangles for a second in front of her, like a diaphanous spider poised on its web, then snaps in two and lands, a small wet pool, on her doorknob hand, the one she's been using to balance herself. The upper half of her spittle then recoils and gathers on her chin. She does not notice, nor do I flinch. I'm used to her spit, her urine, her gas. A weak groan comes out of her then and her smile broadens. I smile back and reach for m y key.

By mistake, I pull out the switchblade. I hear the phone ring inside my apartment. I turn toward Luisa and bounce the knife in my palm. A woman can't be too careful nowadays, I say. Right? Luisa just smiles again and places her chalky palm flat against my left breast, her other hand still holding Onto her doorknob. Can't be careful, she mouths, her big bony man's hand shaking my breast, her hand shaking so lightly it's as if she's rubbing me there. Feeling at me. Listening for something. Her movement so like Dad's playful auscultations when I was little. Her hand searching, healing. Her long hummingbird fingernail moving across my collarbone, tracing a broken line down to my sternum. Max's words coming back to me. Leave it alone, he's saying, his voice suddenly rabbinical and full of gospel. Find it and leave it alone. The chirp of my answering machine ringing Out. A long hollow beep. My key turning in the lock, the door sticking like it always does--Apoye, chica, I hear someone saying. Apoye contra la puert a--and my father's voice speaking to me from behind the door.

Devon Jackson received his MFA in fiction from the New School. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His first published short story appeared as a runner-up in the Mississippi Review's 1998 fiction contest, and his first nonfiction book, Conspiranoia! was recently published by Plume.

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Author:	JACKSON, DEVON
Publication:	Chicago Review
Article Type:	Short story
Date:	Dec 22, 2000
Words:	5825
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Topics:	Short stories