The Traveling Death and Resurrection Show - Ariel Gore [61]
“Go where?” Throat parched, whole body heavy, head pulsing, chest raw. “Did I get shot in the head?”
“No,” Barbaro assures me. “You have been shot in the foot. You hit your head on a stage platform.” His face blurs and he’s standing in a courtyard in the snow, white flakes in his dark hair, blowing a grand plume of fire. My strange prehistoric bird of an angel.
I close my eyes and I’m climbing a ladder. I’m looking for my haloed man, but when I reach the final rung, there’s only the bright Easter image from my grandmother’s living room. White cloaked and well fed, Our Savior stands perfectly still, arms outstretched, glowing like the sun behind him, palms still bleeding from his Good Friday ordeal. I say, “I want the real you, not my personal mythology.”
But he doesn’t answer. It’s Barbaro’s voice I hear. “I have for you a wheelchair.”
I fall backward from my ladder, fall for a long time. Wispy clouds, sky the color of bubblegum ice cream. I don’t need a wheelchair. Heavy limbed, foot smoldering like a black-orange coal, but crutches would certainly do. “No,” I say out loud, but even as I say it, I let Barbaro help me into the chair. “Where are we?”
I am wheeled under fluorescent lights, brought to a pause in a windowless purgatory of empty chairs and humming coffee machines. A muted television mounted near the ceiling.
“Are you ready to be awake?” Barbaro asks.
“Ready?”
He lifts the morning paper from a low table, points to a twisted face that looks like it’s made of clay: an unfinished bust in some sculptor’s studio. A body dragged by rough hands, a bold headline:
GOD TOLD ME TO KILL HER
“There are many pigs in this hospital,” Barbaro says. “You will have to speak.”
Oh, make them blind to me.
I take the newspaper from Barbaro, try to read the tangled mess of words that confirm the dense-world obvious: Frances Catherine, the stigmatic performance artist… That clean bullet was meant for my heart.
Barbaro holds a Styrofoam cup of milky coffee in front of me. “Drink this,” he says.
Will it make me bigger or smaller? Will it seal my scars?
“Do not be terrified,” Barbaro says.
Down seven long white hallways, I sip the coffee, careful not to spill it as Barbaro pushes me around corners, faster and faster.
Slow down is what I’m thinking, but a new panic rises in my gut as we approach our fellow travelers. They stand like spectators, looking through a sea of glass mingled with fire and into a white room.
On the other side, Manny lies silent, only his sweet bronze face visible from under white sheets. The shock of black hair. He could be sleeping, dreaming in some nameless motel room at the edge of some nameless highway, but wires and tubes connect his small body to an IV drip and computerized monitors: Beep, beep, beep. That mechanical bird, communicating without words. Beep, beep, beep.
Lupe kneels at her son’s bedside.
A uniformed cop stands sturdy at the door.
We are to keep our distance.
“He has survived the surgery,” Barbaro explains. “However, his condition remains critical. He is so small. He has entered a coma.”
The bullet meant for my heart. My guilt tastes like tar.
My fellow travelers stand, gargling their own thick self-hatred. Tony lured mother and child from the safe womb of their adobe in the desert, did he not? Promised to keep them safe on the road. Barbaro opened his big trusting mouth to high-heeled Judy when she pretended to be friend and confidant. Paula failed to build the LEGO castle Manny wanted. “Let’s go see the show,” she pleaded with him. “It might be the last time. I’ll let you sit front and center.” Pia heard the first shot, but she didn’t register it, so focused was she on her mystical levitation. Magdelena tackled me to safety. Surely if I’d caught the first bullet, the shooter would have relented, satisfied.
And Lupe, crouched next to her baby now, head bent and shaking. Lupe, who had the audacity to bring a bright and defenseless new soul into this mean and knotted world. All the sins of humanity pile on her trembling shoulders.
“Frances Catherine?”
I turn,