The Angels

 

Thomas Jeffrey Vasseur

 

 

 

"Voices, voices--even the girl herself--now."

 

     --Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

 

 

Sometimes, I think of the face Frank wore that day and imagine him jumping from the airplane. How difficult it must have been--how sad--that he couldn't indulge in the thrill of the fall. I think of what he was thinking and the degree to which his thoughts were different from those of previous jumps, different from any I'll ever know. I suppose that falling out of the sky must be an overcharged version of that tender tug you feel whenever the car you're in goes over a hill too quickly, or when your body is caught by a wave. The most vulnerable part of you is lifted up and then there's a slow, sexy sinking.

I wonder, what is the scenery like from five thousand feet with the wind in your face while you're falling? What color are Panamanian hills? Or the water in the middle of the canal, miles from either ocean? Turquoise or muddy? Brown or blue? Where do all of those barges come from, and why in the world did they leave?

Whenever my mother writes me from Mexico City, my father always scribbles a few lines at the bottom of her letter. He calls me gringa and says how much he would like me to visit them as soon as I find the time and money. It's not cold-hearted, not really, and he means to be funny. But you have to know his code. This is my father's way of reminding me how far away from home I am and letting me know that he misses me too. I know this, for my memories are solid. There were good times too with my father.

Right now it is winter in Los Angeles and the man I loved has been killed. Frank is dead. So I try to remember my childhood, my parents, all the things that I thought about when I was a little girl and the innocent games we played growing up in the outskirts. I would skip rope on Calle Duraznos or kick a ball with my brothers and sisters, the standard games kids play, or we would invent something else to do: fasten bedsheets or towels around our necks, then jump off stairwells and pretend we could fly.

I remember becoming very ambitious, quite logical, about the sensation this flying produced. I wondered if with a bigger cape, or perhaps some more practice, I would be able to stay afloat for a few seconds longer. Then one day my brother Ernesto snatched my grandmother's umbrella, jumped off the roof, and broke his arm. Afterwards I forgot about the idea of rigging up something that would let me glide around the neighborhood and smile at all the others. It was a blissful state to be in though--believing. Believing that for a short space of time it might work, that the privileges and invulnerability of youth, that these good times would last forever. It is something that I'll always remember about my childhood and that I used to tell Frank about sometimes. We didn't have television, we didn't have cartoons, but on Saturday mornings my mother's mother would bake thin sheets of pie crust with honey. We would fight over who got the biggest pieces--we were kids--then race around the neighborhood, our faces smeared with cinnamon, wearing our sheets and soaring off stairs.

We used to play so hard and get filthy from head to toe. The dust from our calle would get caked on our fingers and we would chase one another around, trying to wipe our messy hands on each other, my grandmother's pastry inside us and on us, giggling and falling, the wind in our hair.

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