Pages of Mourning by Diego Gerard Morrison

Author:Diego Gerard Morrison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Two Dollar Radio
Published: 2024-05-24T00:00:00+00:00

BOOK III

Schrödinger’s Cat

2017

The red-eye ado coach to Comala is cozier than it first seemed. As it glides through the night, humming along the federal road, I seem to myself suspended, partially nonexistent—life’s impostor. If only I could stay on this bus forever, have it drive down an endless road, leaving me simply and idly here, with nowhere to land, in the illusory, circular despair of a hangover, awaiting resolution and the better feelings that may come with it—then I’d never have to confront the loss of my mother, let alone finish my novel.

After a final rise and fall of the road, though, the bus slows with the rumble of low gears, pulling into the station with an abrupt turn. It comes to a full stop before the illuminated terminal, where the brakes exhale and the vibrating engine dies.

The blue clock by the driver’s seat beams 6:00 AM right in my eyes, and then the lights inside the cabin erupt, a bright white, prompting passengers to shuffle down the aisle through air thick with morning breath, grabbing for handbags and boxes, as a curtain of body-heat breaks over me. I’ve arrived to the town of the dead, where a few feeble lights glitter across the mountainous terrain—the place I’ve never yearned for, the place my mother fled from, but also the hotbed of my repression, as I imagine it, not a little self-consciously.

At the coffee stand in the station everything reeks of the past, of stale bread and honey, while the already abandoned tabloids spread open over the tables remind me I’m still in the midst of this country’s contemporary wave of violence: vivos se los llevaron, vivos los queremos: parents of the 43 students meet with the president at los pinos.

Flipping through the tabloid, it seems as though the ad on the back not only refers to my own situation, but rather full-on mocks me: busca a tus desaparecidos—if your loved one has gone missing in comala, dial 111-alerta amber.

Up a few blocks there’s more of the tug of war between past and present—oxxo, Miscelánea, Pizza Hut, Estética Alicia, Fedex, Registro Cívil, Convento San Miguel de la Mora—as early light peeks behind the hills as I arrive at the town’s all-white plaza, its ancient church so white it looks like a cake overwhelmed by icing. In front of the church, I hop into a taxi, and, after a minor jam around the plaza, traffic eases through the bends and ravines on the outskirts of town. Observing the hills as the day brightens further, an overwhelming conflation of distance, rolling and unraveling, sweeps through me, and I find myself testing the sight against my memory.

The taxi turns onto a dirt road, where a woman pushing a wheelbarrow full of animal bones crosses in front of the car without looking, as if it wasn’t there. Right behind her, under the early morning sunlight, lies a cemetery of brass and wooden crosses.

In the final stretch towards Los Confines, my mind flashes back to

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