Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club Read Online Free PDF Page B

each syllable on my tongue, I wondered what their names meant and wondered if they had scars too, scars that they were hiding from me and hiding from my mom and dad and from the world. And wasn’t that the way it should be? Shouldn’t everyone’s scars be silent and hidden? Shouldn’t we all pretend perfection and beauty and the optimism of a perfect day in spring? Why not? This was America, the country of happiness, and we had come from Mexico, the most tragic country in the world. And the only thing me—and those like me—were allowed to feel was gratitude. The boys who had hurt me, they spoke a different language and it was not a language I understood and maybe never would understand.
    My brothers and sisters came in the evenings, all of them, as I lay in the hospital room. And I was trying, really trying, and I spoke to them softly but I wasn’t really aware of the words I was speaking and what did it matter if what I was saying didn’t mean anything at all? I felt as if it was someone else who was uttering words in an unknown language. And they were kind, my brothers and sisters, so kind, and they said I was looking better and I was surprised that I understood what they were saying. I smiled and squeezed their hands when they squeezed mine and I wondered what they felt because all I felt was that I was left for dead on the outskirts of Albuquerque on awarm night when I had stepped out to mail a letter. That was all I was doing, mailing a letter at the post office and then I heard someone yelling names at me and then I was being dragged away and kicked and everything changed. And here I was in a hospital room, not dead, not dead . But I knew that something in me had died. I did not know the name for that something.
    I felt like an impersonator. I found it disconcerting that everyone still remembered who I was. But I knew that whoever it was they remembered was gone and I did not believe that the boy they had loved would ever come back.
    I looked at my father and touched his face as if I were a boy who was staring at a man for the first time in his life. There was something sad about my father’s face, and yet there was something hard and angry about it too. It seemed to me that the hospital room was suffering from a chronic silence. It was as though all sound had been banished from the world and the words and the laughter had been sent back to Mexico and I had been forced to stay in this foreign land that hated me. That’s what they had said when I’d felt the knife slicing into my back Why don’t you go back to where you came from? Motherfucker, motherfucker, go back, go back. But not knowing my way back, I was forced to stay.
    The doctor asked me if I knew my name.
    I looked back at the doctor. I was trying to decide if he was real or if he was just a dream I was having.
    The doctor looked back at me, stubbornly waiting for an answer.
    I didn’t want to talk to him. But I decided he wasn’t a dream and that he wasn’t going to go away. “Yes,” I said, “I know my name.”
    “You want to tell me what it is?”
    “Don’t you know?”
    “Can you just tell me?”
    “My name is Nick.”
    “What’s your last name?”
    “Guerra.”
    “What year is it?”
    I decided the doctor wasn’t a bad man. He wasn’t like the boys. He wasn’t going to hurt me. I think I might have smiled at him.
    “What year is it, Nick?”
    “1985.”
    The doctor nodded and smiled and I wondered if he had a son.
    “Who’s the president?”
    I closed my eyes. “Ronald Reagan.”
    “Who’s the vice president?”
    “Bush? Is it Bush? Does it matter?”
    The doctor smiled. “You’ve suffered quite a shock, Nick.”
    “Is that what it was?”
    The doctor touched my shoulder and I flinched, a reflex. “Steady,” the doctor whispered. “No one’s going to hurt you here.” His smile was kind and it almost made me want to cry. “You’re going to be just fine, Nick.”
    I wanted to believe him. I shut my eyes. I