Ellipse, D.C.

Denis Tricoche

When me and Papi get home, Leo is half asleep waiting for us. He says, Veronica came by to give you something, but she told me I should only give it to you when you’re at your lowest. Not yet, I tell him. I ask him what happened to his hand because it’s covered in bloody gauze. I gave my teacher a rose I stole from the school’s greenhouse, he says. Go back to sleep. Mumbling, he shuffles back to his room. Veronica told me off night before last, when I’d signed my enlistment papers—I go straight to basic training after graduation. She’s pregnant, it’s mine. It’s reason number one and only I’m in the fight for Uncle Sam. I’ll marry her, I guess, when I graduate Basic, and tell everybody about the baby then.

At about three in the morning, sitting on the back porch, I light my twentieth cigarette to listen to Mami’s message for the thousandth time, You know, your father only went to the Army ‘cause he got me ¡preña! at sixteen with you! She left us years ago. This message is the first I’ve heard of her in six months. Funny how much like my father I’ve become. Papi comes out of his bedroom wearing only boxers and his insomnia. His eyes drowsily follow the answering machine cord from the kitchen bar through the sliding door to me drilling my cigarette into the concrete. He says nothing, just goes into the basement and comes back holding a small dusty blue box in the palm of his hand. Tomorrow, I’m taking you to D.C., to show you what you’ll be fighting for, he shows me his Army Commendation Medal inside the blue box, and this is for you, because your mother is wrong about you, because she’s never been right about a goddamn thing. I remember now how I was five when Papi came back from the Gulf War. Off the plane, he marched his squad toward our sea of waving flags and yellow ribbons. And I jumped out of my mother’s arms into his and he hugged me so tightly the bill of his hat lifted when he kissed my cheek.

I mistook the drops of rain on the windowsill for tears I’d cried in my dreams, for coffee percolating in the kitchen, for the soft sobs from Leo standing over me whispering, Miguel, Sarita told me I’d lose my innocence today. And I know there’s nothing I can do to save him—Innocence will pack up, rent out his heart to degenerate fuck-ups who’ll throw all his pictures and appliances overboard, and they’ll bust up the place until it sinks and all the debris washes up on some rocky North Korean shore. Everybody loses it sometime, I tell him, you’re lucky you had it at all.

Northward, to Washington D.C. The van still smells like dog shit and cigars. Hanging from the rearview mirror is a fading Puerto Rican flag—its proud white star slowly vanishing into its now mint-colored triangle. Leo whispers something about Sarita’s warning again. I think losing my innocence will be a good thing, he says. Afterward, he looks out the window at the fallow farm fields along the interstate and mumbles to himself until Papi tells him ¡Mira cállate ya!

The Lincoln Memorial’s Reflecting Pool looks like Lincoln pissed in it. The brown snow is piled on brown grass under bare trees. Low flying fighter jets, their secret weapon: goosebumps. I don’t want to be here.

At the Vietnam Wall, Papi shows me the name of his great-uncle who was killed in the Tet Offensive. He tells me, Listen, there are 58,234 lives on this wall who all died to protect this country. Then he enters a trance, hypnotized by his own reflection in the deep black marble, the color of rising plumes from oil rig fires along a desert floor, another war—I know this look, when his body and mind are taken over again by that mysterious disease no one admits exists. Leo’s face flickers with the answer to a calculation, Since the Vietnamese lost over two million soldiers, their Wall must be two miles long, ¿right Papi? Still mesmerized, They were the bad guys, Leo, and only Americans matter. My brother starts mumbling again, that’s how you know he’s talking to Sarita. Papi and my runaway mother have no idea Leo knows about his fraternal twin, the Still Birth, the Ghost from the Womb, the reason there aren’t any pictures from when Leo was a newborn. I don’t know how he found out, but one night, when he was four and Papi was stationed in Korea, I caught him muttering while staring out our bedroom’s open second-floor window, his tears glowing. I asked him who he was talking to. Our sister Sarita, he said. I tried to make sense of what was scaring the shit out of me. I told him we don’t have a sister. Yes we do and she died when I was born and now she talks to me.

Down in The Ellipse, it’s a giant whirlpool of people chanting and dancing. A party without balloons, a concert with no music, a pep rally with no game. Protesting against an invasion I’ll probably end up dying in, eventually. Code Pink, they call themselves. Papi snarls and orders us to march through the peace protest. I turn all the noise into silence because my Santera grandmother once taught me that in any ellipse sound collapses, nothing is heard, nothing that enters can ever escape from it in the same form. All I can hear are the flapping flags around the Washington Monument—they sound like my pregnant girlfriend chewing gum, Mami weeping in the closet after Leo was born, Papi slamming doors from bedroom to garage to car, and Leo sucking on a bottle of formula while I hold him.

At the rim of the whirlpool, we’re caught in a clash between opposing protesters. Our path to the White House is obstructed by brawling bodies. ¡God hates you! We are surrounded by a thousand hands and fingers darkening the sky. ¡Our bodies, our choice! We’ve been swallowed. We’re being digested by a monster whose guts are lined with arms and legs and torsos. ¡Baby Killers! My brother holds my jacket, mumbling. Papi pushes against the monster and the monster pushes back. ¡Go Fuck Yourselves! Through a hole, I make out the White House fence. ¡Hellfire awaits you Sodomites! We’d stopped. I hold Leo close to me. Finally, the raging creature vomits us onto the sidewalk, where we watch it devour itself. Leo says, I don’t understand what they are fighting about. He’s trying to hide his tears and trembling body from Papi. The White House Rose Garden, the police in leather, guarding. Papi is about to make a declaration, something important, so he stutters, These people are fucked up, but you’ll be fighting for their right to be fucked up. I’m just holding Leo’s hand, the one that’s not wrapped in bandages, trying to be his father again, thinking about how stupid it is for some Holy Rollers to show up at an anti-invasion protest. I’m not fighting for them, I scream at Papi, I enlisted ‘cause I got Veronica pregnant. I imagine the screaming protesters, the fighter planes circling overhead, the engines of government, the tourists photographing, the flow of the Potomac, all halting to look at Papi and me, at his disappointment, the muddy thoughts bubbling up from his clogged pores. His lips quiver when he tells me, I’d fought so hard, so you wouldn’t be like me. And look at you. All that swimming only to die at the shore. The elliptical silence. Leo’s calling for Papi, Where are you going? He’d turned and marched back into the monster on the Ellipse. I look instead at the voice of an angry man controlling the monster with his bullhorn, and his hand is missing two fingers.

Leo and me are refugees at the world’s loneliest McDonald’s, a block from the White House. Papi’s gone, we don’t know where. I imagine us trapped here for years, eating only burgers and apple pies, and eventually donning uniforms of blue and brown, swearing oaths to the Golden Arches, Thy Coke and Freedom Fries shall comfort me … I reach into my pocket, hoping enough change is there for Leo and me to share a drink. It begins to rain outside. Leo, I say, this is my lowest. Whatever it was Veronica told you to give me, I want it. Leo hands me a note with a smiley face drawn on the front:

Querido Miguel,

I loved you. But all you really wanted was to take care of your family without actually being around to do it. The Army was the easiest way to abandon me and the baby and still feel like you were being responsible. Since I wasn’t about to be that cliché Puerto Rican single mother, I’ve freed you. I gave our kid back to God.

P.S. Have a great spring break! XOXO

Don’t cry Miguel, you’re lucky you had her at all, Leo pats my shoulder. An old man and his wife sit against the wall close to us—they’re laughing, sitting side by side. The woman’s cheeks are sinking and bluish and she wears a new red bandana to cover her bald head. The old man’s right hand, holding the Big Mac, is missing two fingers, thumb and index. I stare until I realize he was the preacher at the Ellipse with the bullhorn. Leo follows my eyes and tells me he recognizes the man, he was screaming about dead babies. But I’m lost to the world. I’ve fucked up and I can’t snap out of it even as Leo walks over to the old man, rolling up the sleeves on his windbreaker. Sir, there’s no difference between a dead soldier and an aborted baby because they both died for someone else’s freedom. The old preacher finishes his last bite, wipes his mouth with a napkin, Leo still casting a shadow over him. He wriggles his mangled hand at Leo, I lost these fingers when I was ‘bout your brother’s age, he starts, I’d run away from home in Tennessee with my best friend and got down to Florida where we started robbin’ ‘ol Indian graves and huntin’ Spanish treasure. One night, me and him been diggin’ for hours in the dark and the rain, and we’d hit a mausoleum full of ol’ gold and silver coins. We pull it all out the ground and load it on my Chevy. We’re both smilin’. And my buddy takes his shovel and whacks me across my face. See here? He points with his stump to a long shiny scar from his temple down to his jaw. And while I’m on the mud bleedin’, he takes his chain cutter and cuts off my finger and thumb, and pockets ‘em. He tol’ me ne’er to follow him. So I follow Jesus instead because he saved me that night—through his blood, I am saved. You and your brother oughta think about doin’ the same. Then Leo begins unwrapping the bandages from his rose-stuck hand, he stuffs the gauze into the old man’s ice water, the ice chiming against the glass. The bloody wrap steeped in the water turns it amber with wisps of bright red, like a Rooibos tea. If you drink my blood, will it taste like Jesus’s? The man stands up, takes his wife by the waist and opens the door out into the rain. His wife opens a large pink umbrella that says Make Peace Not War, and I overhear her saying, Children lose their innocence so young these days. The wet shine from street lamps and car lights shimmering like constellations as Leo tells me, I can’t hear Sarita anymore.