Maya's Notebook: A Novel (30 page)

I put everything back in the lockers any which way and threw my dirty clothes in the garbage, along with the cell phone. Brandon Leeman had given it to me, and his murderers had the number. I took a shower and washed my hair quickly, thinking I could sell the other designer handbag, which I still had, and get enough to shoot up for several days. I put on the black dress and stuffed a change of clothes into a plastic bag, but made no attempt to put makeup on; I was trembling from head to toe, and my hands barely obeyed me.

The woman was still there, wrapped in a towel, with a hair dryer in her hand, although her hair was dry, spying on me, calculating whether she should alert the security guards. I tried out a smile and asked her if she’d like to buy my bag, told her it was an authentic Louis Vuitton and almost new, that my wallet had been stolen and I needed money to get back to California. A sneer of contempt marred her features, but she approached to examine the handbag, giving in to her greed, and offered me a hundred dollars. I gave her the finger and left.

I didn’t get far. The top of the stairs looked out over the whole reception area, and through the glass door I distinguished Joe Martin and Chino’s car. Possibly they’d been parking there every day, knowing that sooner or later I’d go to the club, or maybe some snitch had told them of my arri
val, in which case one of them must be looking for me inside the building right at that moment.

After a frozen instant, I managed to keep my panic in check, retreating toward the spa, which occupied one wing of the building, with its Buddha, offerings of petals, birdsong, the scent of vanilla, and jars of water with cucumber slices floating in them. The masseuses of both sexes were distinguished by their turquoise-colored smocks; the rest of the staff, almost identical girls, wore pink smocks. Since I knew how the spa worked—that was one of the luxuries Brandon Leeman had allowed me—I was able to slip down the corridor without being seen and enter one of the cubicles. I closed the door and turned on the light indicating that it was occupied. Nobody would be disturbed when the red light was on. On one table was a water heater with eucalyptus leaves, smooth massage stones, and several jars of beauty products. Ruling out the creams, I gulped down a bottle of lotion in three swallows, but if it did contain alcohol, it was a minuscule amount and no relief to me at all.

I was safe in the
cubicle, at least for an hour, the normal time for a treatment, but very soon I began to feel anxious in that enclosed space, with no window, just a single exit and that penetrating dentist’s-office smell that turned my stomach. I couldn’t stay there. Putting a robe that was on the massage table on over top of my clothes, I wrapped a towel into a turban on my head, smeared a thick layer of white cream on my face, and leaned out into the corridor.
My heart skipped a beat: Joe Martin was talking to one of the pink-smocked employees.

The urge to take off running was unbearable, but I forced myself to walk the other way down the corridor, as calmly as possible. Looking for the staff exit, which shouldn’t be far, I passed several closed cubicles until I came to a wider door, pushed it, and found a service stairway. The atmosphere there was very different from the friendly universe of the spa: tile floor, unpainted cement walls, harsh lighting, the unmistakable smell of cigarettes, and feminine voices on the landing of the floor below. I waited for an eternity flat up against the wall, unable to go forward or back into the spa, and finally the women finished smoking and left. I wiped off the cream, left the towel and robe in a corner, and descended into the bowels of the building, which we club members never saw. Opening a door at random, I found myself in a big room, crisscrossed by pipes for water and air, where washing machines and dryers thundered. The exit door didn’t open onto the street, as I’d hoped, but to the pool. I backed up and curled up in a corner, hidden by a heap of used towels, in the unbearable noise and heat of the laundry room; I couldn’t move until Joe Martin gave up and left.

Minutes went by in that deafening submarine, and the fear of falling into Joe Martin’s hands was replaced by an urgent need to get high. I hadn’t eaten for several days; I was dehydrated, with a whirlwind in my head and cramps in my stomach. My hands and feet went to sleep, I saw vertiginous spirals of colored dots, like a bad acid trip. I lost track of time—an hour might have gone by or several, I might have slept or passed out a couple of times. I imagine staff came in
and out to do loads of washing, but they didn’t find me. I finally crept out of my hiding place and with an enormous effort stood up and walked with leaden legs, leaning on the wall, feeling faint.

Outside it was still daytime. It must have been about six or seven in the evening, and the pool was full of people. It was the club’s busiest time, when office workers arrived en masse. It was also the time when Joe Martin and Chino should be getting ready for their nocturnal activities, so they had most likely left. I fell into one of the reclining chairs, taking a deep breath of the chlorine-scented air. I didn’t dare dive in; I needed to be ready to run. I ordered a fruit smoothie from a waiter, cursing under my breath because they only served healthy drinks, no alcohol, and charged it to my account. I took two sips of that thick liquid, but it tasted disgusting, and I had to leave it. It was futile to delay; I decided to take a risk and walk out past reception, hoping that the rat who’d alerted those villains had finished his or her shift.

To reach the street I had to cross the parking lot, which at that hour was full of cars. I saw a member of the club from a ways off, a fit guy in his forties, putting his gym bag in the trunk, and I walked over, blushing with humiliation, to ask him if he had time to buy me a drink. I don’t know where I got the courage. Surprised at this frontal attack, the man took a moment or two to classify me; if he’d seen me before he didn’t recognize me, and I didn’t fit his idea of a whore. He looked me up and down, shrugged, got into his car, and drove away.

I had done many imprudent things in my short existence, but up to that moment I had never degraded myself this
way. What happened with Fedgewick was a kidnapping and rape, and it happened because I was reckless, not shameless. This was different, and it had a name, which I refused to pronounce. Soon I noticed another man, fifty or sixty years old, big paunch, wearing shorts showing his white legs with blue veins, walking toward his car, and I followed him. This time I had more luck— or less luck, I don’t know. If that guy had turned me down too, maybe my life wouldn’t have gone so far off the rails.

Thinking of Las Vegas makes
me feel nauseous. Manuel reminds me that all this happened to me just a few months ago and is still fresh in my memory, assures me that time will cure, and one day I’ll talk about that episode in my life with irony. That’s what he says, but it doesn’t apply in his case—he himself never talks about his past. I thought I’d come to terms with my errors, that I was even a little proud of them, because they’d made me stronger, but now that I’ve met Daniel, I wish I had a less interesting past so I could offer myself to him with dignity. That girl who intercepted an overweight man with varicose veins in the club parking lot was me; that girl ready to hand herself over for a shot of booze was me too; but now I’m someone else. Here in Chiloé I have a second opportunity, I have a thousand more opportunities, but sometimes I can’t get the accusatory voice of my conscience to shut up.

That old man in shorts was the first of several men who kept me afloat for a couple of weeks, until I couldn’t do it anymore. Selling myself like that was worse than going hungry and worse than the torture of abstinence. Never, not drunk or drugged, could I avoid a profound feeling of degradation. I always felt my grandfather watching me, suffering for me. Men took advantage of my shyness and my lack of experience. Compared to other women who were doing the same thing, I was young and good-looking; I could have arranged things better, but I gave myself in exchange for a few drinks, a pinch of white powder, a handful of yellow rocks. The more decent ones let me have a quick drink in a bar, or offered me cocaine before taking me to a hotel room; others just bought a cheap bottle and did it in the car. Some gave me ten or twenty dollars, others kicked me back out onto the street with nothing. I didn’t know you should always charge first, and by the time I learned, I was no longer prepared to carry on down that road.

I finally tried heroin with a client, directly into the vein, and I swore at Brandon Leeman for having kept me from sharing his paradise. It’s impossible to describe that instant when the divine liquid enters the blood. I tried to sell what little I had, but no one was interested; I only got seventy dollars for the designer bag, after pleading with a Vietnamese woman at the door of a beauty parlor. It was worth twenty times that, but I would have given it away for half as much, my need was so urgent.

I hadn’t forgotten Adam Leeman’s telephone number, or the promise I’d made to Brandon to call him if anything happened, but I didn’t do it, because I was thinking of going to Beatty and appropriating the fortune in those bags.
But that plan required a strategy and lucidity I completely lacked.

They say that after a few months of living on the street, a person is definitively marginalized; you look destitute, you lose your identity and social network. In my case it was faster; it took just three weeks for me to reach bottom. I sank with terrifying speed into that miserable, violent, sordid dimension, which exists parallel to the normal life of a city, a world of delinquents and their victims, of crazies and addicts, a world without solidarity or compassion, where people survive by stepping on everybody else. I was always high or trying to get high. I was dirty, smelly, and disheveled, increasingly crazed and sick. I could barely keep a couple of mouthfuls of food in my stomach. I coughed constantly, and my nose was always runny. It was an effort to open my eyelids, glued together with pus. Sometimes I fainted. Several of my jabs got infected. I had ulcers and bruises on my arms. I spent the nights walking from one place to another—safer than sleeping—and in the daytime I looked for hovels in which to hide and rest.

I learned that the safest
places were the most visible ones. I would beg with a paper cup in the street at the entrance to a mall or a church, which can trigger feelings of guilt in passers-by. Some would drop a few coins, but nobody ever spoke to me. Today’s poverty is like leprosy used to be: people find it repugnant and frightening.

I avoided the places I used to go to regularly, like the
Boulevard, because that was Joe Martin and Chino’s patch too. Beggars and addicts mark their territory, like animals, and keep within a radius of a few blocks, but desperation made me explore different neighborhoods, without respecting the racial barriers of blacks with blacks, Latinos with Latinos, Asians with Asians, whites with whites. I never stayed in the same place for more than a few hours. I was incapable of carrying out the most basic tasks, like feeding or washing myself, but I managed to get alcohol and drugs. I was always alert, like a hunted fox, moving quickly, not talking to anybody. There were enemies on every street corner.

I started to hear voices and sometimes found myself answering them, although I knew they weren’t real, because I’d seen the symptoms in several residents of Brandon Leeman’s building. Freddy called them “the invisible beings” and made fun of them, but when he got bad, those beings came to life, like the insects, also invisible, that used to torment him. If I caught a glimpse of a black car like that of my pursuers, or anyone who looked familiar, I’d slip away in the opposite direction, but I didn’t give up the hope of seeing Freddy again. I thought of him with a mixture of gratitude and resentment, not understanding why he’d disappeared, why he couldn’t find me when he knew every nook and cranny of the city.

Drugs kept hunger at bay as well as the many bodily aches and pains, but they didn’t calm the cramps. My bones felt heavy, my skin itched from being so dirty, and I got a strange rash on my legs and back that bled because I scratched so much. I’d suddenly remember I hadn’t eaten for two or three days, and then drag myself to a women’s
shelter or the Saint Vincent de Paul soup kitchen, where I could always get a plate of hot food. It was a lot harder to find somewhere to sleep. At night the temperature stayed in the high sixties, but since I was so weak, I felt cold all the time, until someone at the Salvation Army gave me a jacket. That generous organization turned out to be a valuable resource; I didn’t have to wander around with bags in a stolen supermarket shopping cart, like other strays, because when my clothes stank too much or started to get too big for me, I exchanged them at the Salvation Army. I got several sizes skinnier. My collarbones and ribs were sticking out, and my legs, which used to be so strong, looked pathetic. I didn’t have a chance to weigh myself until December, when I discovered that I’d lost close to thirty pounds in two months.

Public washrooms were dens of delinquents and perverts, but there was no choice but to hold my nose and use them, since the ones in stores or hotels were now out of bounds. They would have kicked me out before I could get in. I didn’t even have access to gas station washrooms; employees refused to lend me the key. And so down I went, almost sliding down the banister of the staircase to hell, like so many other abject beings who survived in the street, begging and stealing for a handful of crack, a bit of meth or acid, a swig of something strong, rough, and brutal. The cheaper the alcohol, the more effective—just what I needed. I spent October and November in the same state; I can’t remember with any clarity how I survived, but I do remember the brief moments of euphoria and then the degrading hunt for another hit.

I never sat down at a table. If I had money I might buy tacos, burritos, or hamburgers that I’d throw straight back
up with interminable heaves on my knees in the street, my stomach in flames, my mouth split open, sores on my lips and nose, nothing clean or kind, broken glass, cockroaches, garbage cans, not a single face in the crowd that might smile at me, no hand to help me. The whole world was populated by dealers, junkies, pimps, thieves, criminals, hookers, and lunatics. My whole body hurt. I hated that fucking body, hated that fucking life, hated lacking the fucking will to save myself, hated my fucking soul, my fucking fate.