Clearly Now, the Rain Read Online Free PDF

and tear down Route 66 with guitar banging on the radio and we smile because we find that fleeting intermission of freedom again before the reality of Sage Hill swallows us. As we round the last turn she fiddles with the radio. I feel like the idea got into my head a fraction of a second before the tune did: “I Can See Clearly Now,” just starting up. We look at each other and smile and don’t need to say a thing.
    Those last soggy weeks of 1997 felt more cramped, mainly because we were bound for Study Abroad programs in the spring. I hugged Serala goodbye on the bleached concrete outside Messert Hall and we agreed to come together through words. We were to meet for lunch dates where we would both write letters at mid-afternoon—once she settled into her Parisian sidewalk cafés and once I settled into my Venezuelan watering holes.
    (Here is my parenthetical nod to chronology because I learned it right here in time; here’s what she told me on a tiny postcard that read
Christmas Love
; here’s the bad stuff; here’s the savagery of my duty; here’s the consequence of her moments of peace in that drug; here is when I began to guess at the horror she’d endured. What I mean is, here’s the shape and shadow of it, which is all that I have to offer, because it’s all she’s offered me: in Riverside, at the end of the term, there is a man and his hypodermic blessing, there is her frail form rendered helpless by it, there is the advantage he takes with his lust and his fists, the two confused and conflated; but there is the oblivion of her sharp mind, the detachment of her old soul and on that postcard, which I read in front of the mailbox with adrenaline swirling through me, she shrugs it off—
not so bad,
she claims. And more: in Connecticut, just before she flies away, slides a black ocean between herself and home, there is another man, one she used to know who tries to but cannot hurt her, because despite warm flesh, a distant pulse, a sip of air, despite his knife gleefully lacerating her in private places, it seems that her grace remains untroubled, because, again she claims,
she is not really there.
)

Four
    Before I knew it, I was shopping Seattle’s awful February streets for bug spray, sunscreen, and an inauspicious backpack. I was saying goodbye to Samar over long, dramatic telephone hours.
    The closest I came to capturing Venezuela was in those imaginary café lunches that Serala and I convened for: her scribbling with frozen fingers in a French street, me sweating in a humid Venezuelan noon, the pages that then drifted slowly, back and forth over the Atlantic.
    Mérida was high in the Andes in a valley formed by craggy peaks. If you dared the suicide switchbacks to reach such altitudes, they would take all the warmth from your bones, render your alpaca hat and sweater silly with one driven gust. When we first arrived, all my wrong expectations went the way of spindrifts I would see smoking off blades of mountains. Venezuelans were supposed to be hospitable and open. What the “preparatory reading packet” didn’t mention was that Mérida was an anomaly; it bore more resemblance both in climate and character to cold European places. Packed buses were often silent and upon greeting a stranger you were as likely to get an indifferent stare as a nod.
    I walked down those streets and pedestrians avoided my eyes. I moved into a Catholic house and three generations of women who lived there treated me with kind formality. I went to sleep at night (by plowing through fat cans of Polar, the national beer) after failing to get a familiar voice on the sketchy phone lines.
    One afternoon, after lunch, I push through the wrought iron front gate to return to the city center. I catch sight of the bus at the stoplight, affectionately dubbed the “Gray Buffalo” by its driver. The cylinders of two-dozen dirty vehicles growl and huff. I pull myself aboard