# The Hares and the Ice

After I threw the first shovelful of dirt on my dad's coffin, I knew I had nothing left in Hipólito. Crossing on the cheapest bus line I could find; showing the Border Patrol my Visa; watching the desert pass by the window; all while crumpling a piece of manila envelope in my hand. On it, with his last strength, my dad wrote a name: Concha —my mom's sister— and a phone number in San Esteban. Three weeks before, it was my birthday. I turned twenty.

***

At the corner of 22nd and 14th, I called my aunt from a payphone. With the most neutral tone I could manage, I told her about my dad, that he had died, and that I needed a job and somewhere to live. I heard her sigh. She gave me her address and told me she'd pick me up wherever I was, with a tone like she knew that the destiny of the women in our family was to abandon Hipólito. I said no, thanks; I had the money my dad left me in my bag. Besides, I wanted to clear my head walking a bit and buy some cigarettes. I'd never smoked and this seemed like a good time to start.

When Concha opened the door, I recognized the same cleft lip my mom had and I remembered the only photo we took as a family: my dad carries me while my mom looks at the camera. Her upper lip lets a bit of incisor show; her mouth always reminded me of a hare's snout. And that's what leporino means, "rabbit." I have a similar scar, only smaller and on the left side. I thought of myself, my aunt and my mom as if we were a bunch of white hares.

***

Concha lived in a one-bedroom apartment with a living room that was also dining room, kitchen and service patio. Above the television were plates; next to the stove, an iron; some benches were the clothesline. Her bathroom smelled of Roma soap and Pinol. That made me feel at home.

While we ate spaghetti with sausages, she told me she hadn't heard from my mom in years. Like me, she arrived at her house, they worked together at a kebab restaurant and then she left in the early morning without even saying goodbye. I told her how my dad died and that the landlord wouldn't keep renting to me; that even if I found work, I wasn't trustworthy.

"Because of how you look," I said, while touching the piercings on my black-painted lips. She looked me up and down a bit. I was going to get mad, but I had everything to lose. "Can I?" I asked while taking out a cigarette. Concha made a gesture I didn't quite understand, like anger, but also resignation.

"But smoke it by the window, so my clothes don't stink," she answered. "Stay as long as you need. Monday we'll look for chamba."

She made me a bed on the sofa. I gave her all the money I still had. That night I felt strange: the only thing that was mine at that moment was the clothes I was wearing.

***

Concha worked at a cleaning company. I met her boss two days after arriving. As soon as I entered, he knew I had no papers; the knockoff Dr. Martens and green hair didn't please him either. As a favor to Concha, he hired me, but if immigration pressured him, he wouldn't stick his neck out for me. The salary was almost double what they paid my dad after thirty years at a law office.

***

They put us to clean a place about twenty blocks from the apartment. It was a warehouse full of freezers on the walls; they went up to the ceiling and each had a number. In another section of the warehouse, there was a huge mechanical arm and an industrial oven, with a window to look inside; next to it, a metal plate. Behind a drywall, there was a workshop and an office. The warehouse only opened from ten at night to five in the morning. We worked there a supervisor, blond as hell and always in a brown tailored suit that was too big for him; a Turk who maintained the machine; Concha and me.

We didn't talk much. After I told her about my dad's cancer and that I failed the university entrance exam twice; after she told me about the months she lived with my mom and about her youth, silence seemed more comfortable. Sometimes we went home together, though I preferred walking alone. I'd make up anything to stay longer at work. Concha understood. Or didn't care.

Concha lived in an industrial zone, full of wide streets and no people since six in the afternoon. I liked walking there and listening to the echo my belt chain made. The sound felt like a drum rhythm to me; it let me think: was I going to look for my mom or keep working until immigration caught me? Both were a waste of time.

***

I don't know much about my mom. I remember a vacation at the beach. Surely it was in Acapulco. The photo I have is from that trip. My mom said seawater could infect her lip scar. My dad answered that it would be easier for a shark to tear off a chunk of leg. She didn't move and stayed on the sand, watching us get rolled by the waves. We found a transparent crab; it was the size of my thumb. It moved sideways while we chased it and we laughed that it raised its pincers and popped out its eyes. Like it wanted to pretend it was bigger than us. In some way, my mom did the same: she challenged us just by staying on the beach, without wetting her feet.

***

Concha and I arrived before the Turk and the supervisor. First we cleaned the offices: water the plants, dust the shelves and scrub the bathrooms; then, the machine room: there, sweep and mop. The supervisor forbade us from even passing a cloth over the controls. The only thing we could do was flip a fuse and open the gas valve to the oven. That way, when the supervisor and the Turk arrived, everything was ready to work. The machine room smelled of oil and metal.

The Turk was twenty-five and had studied engineering. I don't know if he was Turkish anymore, because his grandparents had been born in San Esteban. His name was Sila and he told me that in Turkey that was a woman's name, but that he didn't mind. According to him, it sounded like something like an ancient city, one of those that were already ruins when they discovered them a thousand years ago.

One day, I had just left the warehouse and Sila caught up to me. I was smoking. He asked for a lighter and saw my boots, already worn and unpolished. He made fun of them, asked me if I was goth. I gave him a really nasty look in silence. We finished the cigarette without talking. We started walking together. A few blocks ahead, he said goodbye without turning and went around a corner. The next day, he gave me a walkman and three cassettes. He gave them to me, he said, to apologize for yesterday and so I wouldn't get bored at work.

***

My dad loved to dance. At my house, the same one where he died and that he rented his whole life, there was always background music. One day, my dad and I were practicing some steps in the living room; he told me it was so I wouldn't spend parties sitting down. He put my feet on his loafers and lifted his legs; I felt like at a carnival game. Between spins and turns, I saw my mom in the kitchen, with a lost gaze and a half-finished cigarette in the ashtray. So still and with her lip scar, it seemed like she was just waiting for some misfortune.

***

I started smoking inside the apartment. Once, Concha asked me for a cigarette and told me that my mom aborted twice before I was born. The first was natural; the second left her bedridden with a uterus infection. She was saved by a miracle and thought she'd become sterile. When she found out she was pregnant with me, my dad saw it as a gift from heaven. Concha told me that my mom never stopped religiously smoking her half-pack daily.

***

Sila brought me a new cassette every week. They were almost always industrial: rhythms that sounded like they were made by pistons and bricks falling from a flatbed truck. They made me feel in tune with the mechanical arm and the oven.

Once, Sila lent me a black cassette with gold details.

"This is the soundtrack of a Japanese movie," he told me, "Tetsuo, the Iron Man. It's about a bum who likes to stick tubes in his thigh. Halfway through the movie, a truck runs him over and metal completely contaminates him, turns him into a machine. Capisci?" I wanted to tell him that a Turk with Italian phrases was the most ridiculous thing I'd heard; though also the most tender. "I saw it like ten years ago. Honestly I didn't get it, but the music is great."

Of the few things I enjoyed about my shift was entering the arm room and playing the first song from that Chu Ishikawa cassette. I liked matching the music's accents with the oven's sounds. It was like the machines were talking to each other while I swept, like there existed between us a secret language of squeaks and sparks.

***

Concha liked Sila. She said he was a good guy, but that I shouldn't get attached: that any day now they were going to change our location. For her, industrial was nothing but noise and what she needed in this life, ours, the one we shared in that one-sofa apartment and in that two-space warehouse, was silence.

***

My mom was a machine and my dad, her operator. She performed and, after work, smoked and squeaked, complaining about another day. My dad oiled her, spoke to her with affection and maintained her so her parts were always well conserved, but she didn't respond, she couldn't: she simply functioned and turned off at the kitchen table, with her half-finished cigarette.

***

I remember one of her birthdays: sitting as always in the kitchen, lights off and my dad and me singing "Las Mañanitas" to her. When she blew out the candle, we applauded. Not once did she smile and she only caressed my head. She went to sleep, and my dad and I finished the cake. I got diarrhea; I missed school and my dad, work; I vomited all day. My mom went to work and at night only stopped by my room to ask how I felt, though she didn't wait for me to answer and went to sleep.

***

Sila took me to the machine room.

"You know what the oven is for, capo?"

I shrugged.

"Guess."

I looked at him with hatred. Like that I wasn't going to finish cleaning on time.

"Sorry," he answered while laughing. Then, he got serious. "There are like two thousand unclaimed morto per year. People who who knows who they are. The government conserves them for eighteen months. Somewhere they have to store them. Those freezers have corpses in ice. Each of those blocks has a date; that's when the government no longer has legal obligation to keep it. We check this notebook daily"—he raised a green folder notebook, the kind accountants use—"When a number reaches its, how to say, 'expiration date,' we activate the machine; we look for the block. The arm grabs it, puts it in the oven and incinerates it. Want to see one?"

Sila pressed some buttons on a keyboard and the arm put a block on the plate. We approached and he removed the frost with a rag. Inside was an old man, black, with a beard full of white hairs. He had his eyes closed and his mouth half-open, almost like he was smiling. I could even see the warts on his skin.

"Why is the ice so clear?"

"Ah, they freeze them with distilled water. That way they get it transparent, without minerals or anything, without trapped gases. Imagine: someone wants to look for their relative here and, to see if it is them, they'd have to unfreeze corpses all the time. It's the same if the police comes to check the bodies. The most practical is to freeze them like this; you just wipe the condensation with a cloth and you have the cadavere in front of you like it was fresh. Well, they look a little weird from the refraction, not because they're dead."

Sila laughed. I just thought he was half an idiot and looked at the body. It seemed like the old man floated a few centimeters above the plate, like he was trapped in polished glass. Sila coughed a bit.

"You shouldn't look at their faces too much," he said. "Well, for me it works to pretend they're all the same. It's easier to think there's only one morto and you put it in the oven a bunch of times."

Sila turned the machine on again and put the Chu Ishikawa cassette on his portable radio. We watched the arm work all day: it took out a redheaded teenager; an obese man, also black; a bald old woman; and a hunchbacked boy with one shorter leg. When the blocks touched the oven, they sounded like water drops falling on a hot pan.

***

I remember my dad when he got home from work, with his briefcase, his short-sleeve shirts and his law office badge. I'd run to greet him, but he'd caress my hair and go straight to the kitchen, where my mom was with a lost gaze and her half-finished cigarette. Only after kissing her on the cheek, asking if she was hungry and her answering no —or sometimes nothing— would he come back to me and pick me up. My mom stayed static until late at night. The only movement was the smoke escaping through her upper lip scar.

***

Concha got transferred to some offices downtown. The warehouse didn't need so much maintenance staff. Concha preferred that I stay because the walk to the apartment could be done in half an hour at a quick pace; besides, Sila was there. That season, the supervisor stopped going: it was also decided he was a useless expense. Sila took advantage to connect his portable stereo to the speaker system and we listened all night to Ministry albums, Throbbing Gristle and, whenever he activated the arm, we'd put on Chu Ishikawa and watch the frozen faces pass. With some Hispanics, many blacks, too many children, junkies with destroyed arms, Sila and I formed a small orchestra. The director was the arm. Always at the same speed, always with the exact agility of an obese robotic cat, but a cat nonetheless.

***

Concha told me she didn't really know my mom, or well, that she never really got to know her. She had been the same in Hipólito as in San Esteban, quiet, in eternal stand by. Concha said she'd been like that since she was little; that she spent her time looking at her scar in the mirror. They thought she was crazy or something. When she hit adolescence she started smoking and, since grandpa had forbidden smoking in the house, she started doing it in the living room. Concha also remembered her half-finished cigarette, frozen in the ashtray. She remembered the brand: Delicados, unfiltered.

***

Sila went on vacation; he was only going to be gone four days and didn't want to ask for permission so they wouldn't dock his pay. He taught me to operate the arm and interpret the data from the "expiration dates" notebook.

"It's very easy, ragazza. You just enter the code from here, press this button and, if needed, you calibrate with this lever so the machine doesn't crash into the freezers. I just did maintenance. If the arm squeaks, fill this jug with oil. If it jams, reset the console like this."

"Doesn't it feel weird moving corpses all day?"

"You get used to it. Besides, they pay better than McDonald's"—he smiled and nudged me with his hip. I smiled back—"Presto?"

I answered yes and he let me put three bodies in the oven by myself. He took out some Budweisers and we toasted to my "graduation."

***

On the way back to the apartment, I leaned against a railing next to the drainage canals. I didn't feel like getting home to Concha yet. It had been a long time since I'd seen the sun come up. I put a cigarette in my mouth and, when I took out my lighter, my wallet fell into the drain; luckily I had no money. I lit the cigarette and watched it sink under a pile of lilies. Dawn was just breaking. I put on my headphones and, while Chu Ishikawa played, I noticed something floating toward the concrete wall. It crashed with a splash of water below me. For a moment, I thought it was a fetus, between purple and gray; but no, it was a doll. I looked at it a while and remembered the only gift my mom gave me. It was when I turned four or five. As always, my dad and I were singing "Las Mañanitas" while she smoked in silence with smoke escaping through her lip. She got up, went to the living room and gave me a box wrapped in blue cellophane. I opened it more surprised than happy: it was one of those Nenucos that have a hole between their legs and another in the mouth; it came with a baby bottle and some cloth diapers. The point was to give it water so it would pee and change it like it was a real baby. I told my mom thank you and kissed her on the cheek, which of course she didn't respond to, and I went to play in the living room. The doll came defective: its hole was blocked; if I gave it the bottle, liquid came out its mouth, dislocated in an eternal "o."

***

Without Sila, the days at the warehouse were really slow and boring. Though I also liked being alone. I could look at the corpses calmly, think about their children, their friends or their spouses; think about whether they knew they were already dead or if the ice fooled them, like they were waiting for the alarm to ring.

The arm hummed without moving. I pressed the button and let the oven swallow the corpse of a teenager, with lots of pubic hair, who looked Chinese. I marked the next number on the console. The machine squeaked, the freezer door opened with a sound of pressurized air. The arm took the block; it looked smaller. When the ice approached the plate, the Chu Ishikawa disc was about to end. I removed the frost and saw a woman of, I think, fifty years. With thin hair and several bald patches on her head; she had dirt under her nails. Her right forearm was purple, almost black; you could see some gangrenous holes; she also had them on the other arm, between her toes and on her neck. Though her face was full of scratches, I could see the scar. Like hers, this woman's wound lifted her lip and you could see a piece of yellow tooth. The cassette finished and I heard how it automatically rewound. There was no point looking for information in the notebook; there were only numbers and dates. I was never going to be able to know what this person was called or where she lived; not even where they found her or what she died from.

I calculated the time so that, when the music started again, the arm would activate with the cushioned sound of pistons. The machine put the block in the oven. I thought if the right thing was to cry or pray, but supposed that activating the arm and lighting a cigarette was ceremony enough.

Normally, bodies took about two hours to cremate. Through the oven window, I could see the blue flames.

The woman was consumed in half an hour, along with the Chu Ishikawa cassette.