The Fortress From Up High

The wind has made an early autumn of the trees still holding on to summer. I let it push me up the road toward the fortress in this town I’ll call A.

I visit the town’s medieval fortress on Tuesdays because it’s convenient and it’s free for residents (I live just down the street). For the same reason, I visit to prevent this spectacle from becoming ordinary. At my kitchen window, I wash grease off dishes to the sight of great ramparts once dignified by the soldiers that patrolled them. I will live here for eight months on a work visa, which is enough time to grow accustomed to A. To think less and less of its wonders. I allot myself time every week to stay with my awe.

My coworkers told me that few people go. The 9th century Moorish fortress has lost its charm among the descendants of those it once protected. Disinterest is the first rule of being a local, after all. I had settled my unease around fitting in until A’s one taxi driver told me as he lugged all my possessions into town that (1) he loves America, and (2) I don’t have the local look. In the four minutes it took to cross town, I understood this to mean there’d be ways I couldn’t assimilate here. I didn’t come expecting that I could. The comment still struck something inside of me. Maybe I visit the fortress every Tuesday for the same reason as a child I played with bowls that were tucked away in the kitchen cupboards (the “lonely ones,” I’d cry). Everything needs company.

I ascend the fortress’ steep slope. The path of warm sandstone is bluing to the sudden overcast pulling over town. White homes and rows of olive trees become patches of color below. I weave through tall archways and switchbacks until they deliver me inside the fortress walls. The watchtower and the church, well-preserved, erupt from their bases. Both are tall enough to eclipse the sun at noon. Everything else is ruined stone, ruined houses. No one has lived here since the 15th century. It was then the valley became free of invaders and A’s medieval inhabitants could leave their protection behind. What’s left of it is beautiful to me—this evidence of a turn for the good. The bodyguard made obsolete.

The tower gates whine on their hinges as they resist the weather. No one else is here, so I thrust my nose up against the wind. The current rushes in. This trick I know cools my throat. It lets the wind breathe for me.

I find cover from spittling rain in a church corridor. A draft howls past me on its way in. I unload my book bag onto a bench, and I falter to read a single page. The whistling is rising. It rises until the chamber hits a pitch that brings to mind another odd habit of mine. A coping mechanism from childhood. I put the book down and think of all the glass juice bottles I drained as a child. I hear the same music I played with their emptiness.

*

A pair of photos have followed me to A. I have arranged the two pictures in the center of a collage, and I plan on hanging the colorful mass in my landlord-special white bedroom. The two photos are screenshots of a WeChat video call. In one, Yeye is peering down into the phone like I am tucked away in a box. His brows draw together as he seems to consider how to open it. The second screenshot is the moment Yeye realizes it is me. He finds inside his granddaughter who frequently misses him over long distances. My grandfather’s face is lifted. Yeye’s mouth is in the middle of opening wide, so joyful and agape with my name that, in my head, the picture produces a sound. I handle the photos like I open a singing Hallmark card. I pass over them again and again and again so I can hear him calling me.

*

A week before I departed for A, my grandmother and I nearly ran into each other as we rushed, for whatever reason, from opposite sides of the house.

Laolao and I still lived in my childhood home with my mother, the single generational thread between us. The two of us were supposed to be this house’s transient occupants: Me, having returned, a twenty-something with the privilege to stress about purpose, and her, never having returned to China after she and Yeye helped raise me and my older brothers.

We slowed in front of the dinner table, drawn into each other’s crosswinds.

Her smile failed at one edge. Laolao, I pled. I wrapped my arms around her. She wanted me to go to A, but this was our ritual. Every time I’d say goodbye, no matter how long I’d be away, she would find me in a final moment and let herself be held.

After Yeye died, the goodbyes began to linger. Laolao would wave from the lawn’s edge until my car was out of sight, rounding the bend of, what felt like, no return. She also began prefacing things with her age. I’m 87, do you know? She’d say. I’d deny the implication by staying silent. I’m one year older than Yeye now. She began to gift me random objects, too. At first I thought she wanted to de-clutter Yeye’s things. As Yeye’s hospice caretakers, we learned it was healthy to donate someone’s orphaned possessions. But I think in their discovery she was reviving them. Reliving memory. Laolao eventually found the photo albums this way, somewhere deep in the part of a closet that always remained cold.

I could not look at Yeye’s photos for months after he passed. They were mostly from the first years he immigrated to the US. He did not come to America on account of a Dream. He came to resolve our family’s separation, and it was the most photographed time of my early life. In one, I am sheltered in his lap, diaper-bottomed, sticky (probably), and all milky smile. He sat proud and tall, the life-sized rendering of Pinocchio he’d painted for me just behind him. The pictures were so good, so sweet they gave me a kind of stomach ache. No—a motion sickness. These photos could clip time, render the subjects inside them eternal yet static. The moment I put them down, I accelerated into their future, into a present in which Yeye was gone. Yes—it was the whiplash that kept me away.

Laolao and I swayed on our heels, tempting to spin with the centripetal weight of our knowing. In one week, I would be gone. I led her away from the jutting edges of the dinner table. Her head rested underneath mine. Her perm had the effect of making her short, white hair into clouds. I buried my face in them.

I’ll be back soon, Laolao, I told her in Chinese, in the one language we share. She nodded against my chest. We held each other, turning in place. I let her pull away first.

*

I search for high places when I visit the fortress. On this visit, I follow directional arrows to the watchtower’s roof. Its empty, weathered deck was once equipped for battle. Its perimeter is a rhythmic pattern of merlon and crenel—a heartbeat of sturdy blocks rising in defense, then falling away to reveal the valley below.

Two butterflies appear in yellow. They revolve around each other as they thread in and out of the tower’s teeth. It will be too cold soon, and I wonder of their instinct to migrate. They disappear and return, vulnerable to wind gusts and the fact of their lightness. I want to mimic them, their play—and, I remember, instantly, how I’ve been told I am too sincere for this world. Laughter ruptures from me, anyways, crackling louder like applause. My bag sinks at my feet. Stepping away, I begin to spin.

I spin so fast that the tower’s teeth blur into wisps, and it’s as if I am at the Way-Way-Up Park again. Yeye has placed me in the bucket swing, and I pull my feet through its holes. He is twisting the chain-link and telling me to hold on because when he lets go, he, too, will become wisps. My squeals encircle me as I fly. He tugs me out of the swing and takes a risk placing my dizzy tummy on his shoulders. I am up high now, and I can see everything below me. The tops of bushes, the hoods of cars. I can see everything that I couldn’t without him.

*

Laolao asked how to pronounce A and leaned in. She was nursing a bowl of sunflower seeds at the dinner table and told me to sit. Splinters leapt from her lips. A name fell from mine, its syllables multiplying at my attempt to roll its R’s. She threw up her hands.

English is hard enough, she lamented. Let alone Spanish.

She sat up straight as she told me how to survive away from home. She doubted how I’d make friends, and questioned where I’d buy food. She somehow found another concern that I wouldn’t have a stovetop.

The worrying frustrated me. Half of these problems were not likely, and the ones that were I couldn’t solve now. But I also knew what she was doing. It was what Laolao and Yeye had always done. In naming a problem before it materialized, my grandparents acted like they could tame it. It was almost superstitious, this ritual of shielding me.

Laolao slid a pod between her front teeth before pulling it away. She paused, staring through me.

So why? she resumed, twisting the seed.

Why are you going so far?

I explained in my best Chinese that I’d get to have my own classroom and teach English overseas like I’d wanted to, that it was important for my future to get this kind of training. My list continued.

I wanted to say this path was meant for me, too. I wanted to remind her how it’d been evidenced from a young age, from when I was seven or eight and I’d beckon from my bedroom that “class is in session!” Laolao and Yeye would file in and sit on the floor, eye level with me. I dictated nonsense to them with a ruler, rapping it against a white board where I had scrawled trailing numbers to decipher something about moon phases or the extent of Godzilla’s atomic powers. Yeye would sidebar Laolao about dinnertime, and I’d chirp at them to “focus!” But I had their attention. Their attention held me so fully that I could not see, just beyond a sticker-studded bedroom door, how my parents were falling away from each other. The more my grandparents giggled at my severity, the longer I kept them in class.

It was true I hoped to teach English. I had not lied to her. I loved the written word. But I had no language to tell her the truth, of my grief about Yeye. No language but breath that wails as the speech of loss. I had lost the walls that harbored me, and she did, too. But unlike her, I had to flee. I wanted to go as far away from memory as I could.

Laolao’s lips drew into a line. She nodded at my cast of reasons before moving on to another story. The bowl eventually filled to its edge with seed casings. Laolao walked it to the kitchen and grabbed the bin. The patter of shells striking bottom sounded like rain.

*

The classrooms at school echo, like the locker-lined corridors that funnel into them. The walls are bare, but the students are lively. I lecture four days a week about English or American culture with topics set by the program. I go off-script when I explain how US-Americans descend from many cultures, that I cannot teach them a single story of who we are. I can never tell what the teens are thinking, but I experience notes of elation, pride, and that I’ve done my job when they use their best-effort English to ask why.

A student decorated by zits and braces began sitting across from my desk recently. I tell myself he has landed here at the front of the classroom because he likes the topics I teach and not simply the functioning radiator at this edge of the classroom. Before class one day, he shoots me a thumbs up.

“Profe?” His voice lowers, approaching a whisper. “Are you okay?” His balled hand in the air waits for my dismissal.

In the jolt of his noticing, this sudden reversal of care, I cannot tell whether I am surprised or touched. It is not a student’s job to worry about their teacher, I think. I feel dated reciprocating his gesture, but I mean it. I double-down—two thumbs up, a full-teethed grin.

He re-collects in the corner of his friends, and I want to rip open the window behind me. I need a cooling draft. But I imagine disgruntled students, grumbling about the cold. They would not understand. How could they when I learned about this from other Chinese in America? The lungs carry grief, we say. So my trick to devastation is to let the wind breathe for me, wail for me.

*

It is winter in A, and I need better shoes. I took a bus to a neighboring city today—the only one with department stores. I had invited a few acquaintances, couched it as a “fun trip out of town,” but maybe the prospect of cold was uninviting. I’ve returned after sundown chilled and empty-handed.

I am not in a rush on my walk home. I head away from the bus station at the outskirts of town toward the historic center. The center’s unlit Christmas lights crisscross between ornate edifices that are too old to support them. Up the hill, a shooting star is strung between the fortress’ watchtower and church spire. They will all be lit in a week.

The town’s usual quiet makes it easy to slow down, look up. I spot a local clothing store on a side street I hadn’t noticed before. “Fei-Xiang,” it’s called. I recognize the romanization. Could there really be other Chinese immigrants here? I cross the street toward familiarity.

“¡Buenas!”

“Hola buenas.”

I sift through a maze of boots. I try a pair in a size that’s too large and in a size too small. The shop attendant is behind the counter, mulling over something in front of him.

“Ey, 请问,” I switch. “这双鞋有 37 号的吗?”

He lifts his head. He doesn’t respond. I’ve seen this expression before. When I first arrived in A and couldn’t convey what I meant in Spanish, locals were patient enough to gather what I meant and point me in a better direction.

The shop attendant leads me back to the shoe rack. His sandals yelp as he crouches, swiveling between the rows of boxes. He runs a finger along a vertical stack of them. I explain, still in Chinese, that I didn’t see the size I was searching for. Maybe there are some in the back?

His eyes widen.

I must have made a mistake. He was probably born here and only speaks Spanish. The look on his face must be some kind of diasporic dysphoria, just as I felt last week in the nearby city. On my initial search for winter boots, three shopkeepers with indecipherable half-smiles rouletted all the East Asian greetings they knew— “Konichiwaaa” “Ni haaao!” I assumed they wanted my business. Or the one woman who waved for my attention, eyeing me from behind a café’s floor-to-ceiling window pane. I waved back, surprised by my impulse but not yet embarrassed by my sincerity. Then she bowed to me. Over and over. Her friends beside her joined in, grinning, only inches of glass between us.

“好像没有 37 号的了。。。,” the man responds. We hold each other’s gaze. His thick-rimmed glasses frame eyes like mine. His black hair and soft nose differ from my own.

Where are you from? He starts again.

The United States. But my mom is from China.

I do not explain that my father is white. Here, to this shopkeeper alone, I want to be Asian enough. Enough to be claimed, so that we might together share a solitude.

Ahh, that’s why.

He is talking with his hands now.

You know, when you started speaking to me in Chinese, I thought maybe I didn’t hear you
correctly.

Is that right? I say.

Yea. I looked at you and…

I brace for what I think he will say. How he, too, sees me.
…and it was like a dream.

*

The dream keeps me from sleep. It repeats itself when I get too hot in the nighttime. There is frost around my bedroom window in A these days, but it is not cold enough to cool me down. I wake up, night after night, to the sight of my bed having disrobed itself of its blankets. The dream is more like a nocturnal memory. Yeye is being put into a body bag. And as they cover him with it, I recall the things my father used to tell us as kids: “Don’t put plastic bags over your head!” I amassed his one-line cautionary tales and fashioned from them a moral compass, and I became so good at staying alive that my father never really worried about me, even now that I am Depressed. Yeye is still visible by a stroke of cheek, and the coroner, or whoever this man is in a special-occasion button down, pulls the zipper shut. The zipper reeks of sound. It reeks like these lessons I thought people needed in order to live.

Yeye is wheeled out of our house, and I wake up gasping.

*

My hands are full of soap, and I tell myself that I am so lucky.

I promise I won’t complain about washing dishes because I have a view of a fortress from my kitchen window. This isn’t normal. I am so lucky. I repeat this to myself knowing that I have not visited the fortress in some time. Whenever Tuesday comes I have a real excuse for why I can’t go like I used to, even though when I make it I feel something flicker in my gut.

It is past New Years, and the shooting star strung between the watchtower and church remains lit. I keep the kitchen lights off to see it instead. I’ve also broken several dishes this way. I yelled into the sink last week when I once again shattered a glass doing dishes near midnight. I still didn’t stop. I risked more dishes because I did not want to go to bed and risk dreaming. I could not avoid it—the same dream-memory that nights are forcing me to re-live. I squinted from the fluorescents as I diligently placed shards in the trash to compensate for my lapse into fury.

The ropes that tether the shooting star to the sky fade from sight after sun down. I swear the star is suspended on its own, posed forever mid-flight in the exact moment it theoretically enters the atmosphere. It glows white and blue like it is actually burning hot against A’s rural, obsidian night. Awe feels so big inside of me that, most of the time, I barely stomach it. I know I can never fully take in its subject. That the longer I try, the no greater the guarantee it will stay, that I can preserve its imprint forever. I know the time will come when the shooting star will be turned off. And the light will be taken down.

I am so lucky, I whisper so I can hear the soap froth crackle, disappear. I am so lucky I get to see this, even though it is almost gone.

*

The adult school in A has a lot of class offerings. I’m taking their conversational Spanish course because I still want to connect with locals.

I arrive to class tardy today because the start times here are suggestive. Other students have taken their seats. We wait for Paola, our teacher with red hair, a strong jaw, and a minimal grasp of English. She arrives on time fifteen minutes late.

Paola takes a marker to the board and begins her usual line of questioning. What’s the date? Yes, it is March now. And in what year? No no—not TWENTY, two THOUSAND and— The marker squelches. Anyway, we are moving onto unit seven today, which is about dreams and how to describe them.

Can anyone tell me what kind of dreams they have? I am the only one in the front row. She asks me first.

I look away probably because I am lying. I have to lie. I like to go flying? I decide. I fly in my dreams. Paola’s pen squeals as she writes this down.

“This is ‘lucid dreaming,’ no?” she says in trilling English.

Several people stop by the classroom’s open door over the next half hour. They inquire about a key to a locked utility closet or a missing form for a field trip. Paola halts mid-sentence, beckons them in, and leads them out with an enthusiastic but noncommittal bar invitation. I pick off my hangnails as I wait for her to continue the lesson.

Another passerby interrupts. I consider leaving with my weathered patience.

Everyone, this is Mamen, Paola switches to Spanish. She is a very special friend of our school.

Mamen has deep lines set across her cheeks, maybe from a pairing of time and sun. I can’t tell if she is excited or speaking quickly because her words are clipping themselves in half. Paola has her arm around Mamen’s shoulders before the two break away into laughter. Mamen has made a joke that, it seems, only she can get away with, at least telling by the way Paola is shaking out her hand like she has touched something hot.

Paola takes her underarm again. She asks Mamen, each word articulated for us students: Tell us about your dream, like she is referring to the one.

Mamen clears her throat and, with it, stray classroom chatter.

OK. OK. OK, she begins.

I grew up here with my mother and my grandmother. But when I was still young I moved to Germany. There wasn’t enough jobs here that could ______. So I went to go live with my father. But in those days, we didn’t have cellphones, we couldn’t ______, OK? So maybe I was there for a year before I had this dream that I explain to you.

In the dream, I went into my mother’s home. I looked up and down—it’s the same. But my mother? No. I saw she was different. She was wearing a ______, do you understand me?

She glances at Paola. “V-veil, no?” Paola suggests. The other students nod, so I do, too.

Mamen leans on my desk, balancing herself against a breeze-like sway. She scans the room and stops over me before letting go.

My mother was standing next to a—well—a big box in the living room. It is called a ______.

“A what?” I lean back, whisper-yelling at Elena in the row behind me. “What did she say?” Elena is tunneling, her eyes growing and chin lurching forward as she gazes past me at Mamen. I shift in my seat, swiveling back. Its joints whine. I am unsure I want to know anymore, but I can’t look away from Mamen for too long. Without the shape of each word forming on her lips, without body language, I cannot confirm what I think I hear. I lose a truer meaning.

I had two mothers in this life, Mamen continues, like she has leapt too far forward in the story. She takes a hand over her mouth, the movement so swift and honest that in it I glimpse a child.

She uncups her mouth like her hand is hinged at the wrist. And like this, her voice rises, crackling, they carried my grandmother’s body out of the house.

My breath catches.

Mamen is describing the scene, and it must be awe that I feel because my stomach is curling. I am in awe that we share a dream like this. In fact, it takes my breath away. In fact, I have stopped breathing altogether.

This is the scene I refuse to remember:

Two mortuary men arrived at our door dressed in a stiff black with punctuating-red neckties. I stood opposite them in the yellowing clothes I’d hardly changed since I became one of Yeye’s caretakers. It was obvious to me that none of us knew the right way to dress for this lurid occasion. They asked why we didn’t call it in earlier. His body is still warm, I failed to say. Then, they swept through in silence.

After the men carried Yeye out of the house in a body bag, they loaded him into their van, and when they put him away I began to sense the bowls from the back of that kitchen cupboard, all those melamine bowls so often found in Chinese households with red swirls and yellow geometries that have fed every mouth, touched every lip of those who spoke my mother tongue, and in my young mind this intimacy meant the bowls weren’t simply objects of use, they were my subjects of care, but before I could get to them, to be with them (the “lonely ones”, I ferociously cried), the men shut the trunk with a bodied thud, they climbed into the two remaining seats of their van, and they drove away.

For the first time, Yeye was alone in America. And the clinical fact of his body somehow meant it did not matter whether or not I went with him.

Paola watches me with burrowing concern. I do not mean to distract anyone, but the welling in my throat is giving way. It staggers out of me, onto its knees. Mamen is speaking faster. I have lost what she is saying. Maybe Elena knows where she is in the story—whether Mamen has been back in A all this time or if she has spent every year since affected by this dream, which she seems to say was true to life, a harbinger. I lose the thread almost completely that I don’t know why she herself begins to cry until she takes a labored gasp and tells us, in one of three possible tenses:

[I should be dead]

[I was dead]

[I would be dead]

…but, no, no. Mamen shakes her head. She bares her palms, up and open, toward the classroom, the whiteboard. Paola. Us. Like we weren’t in a classroom at all but among church pews and the frescoed saints that delivered her from the edge of her life. Indeed, Mamen is a special friend of this school.

Paola coos. She reaches for Mamen and takes her arm in arm.

And that’s it, she concludes. Mamen’s hand slaps her side, and she splits into a bright laugh. She has moved with ease from one emotion to the other like she knows how to emerge. I hardly know what has just transpired, but I am in the open now. She has not wiped her tears and neither do I.

Class ends on time. The room fills with our shuffling. Paola and Mamen are speaking at tempo. Mamen, Paola calls, pointing to me. She told me that she flies in her dreams, too.

I only nod, but I am flickering with relief. I want to tell Mamen everything. In my mind, she would understand. We are the same. Same enough. My mouth surges with language.

Oh, you do? Mamen straightens. Well, when I fly I go into the olive groves and around the fortress.

Mamen pulls away from my desk and spreads out her arms. I would fly when I was Depressed. She stands with her eyes closed, and I am ready to slip away with her. She teeters on each foot like she is already weaving through trees.

*

My neighbor tells me before shutting her door that the dust blowing into A this week is coming from the Sahara desert. It will get harder to breathe, so I’ll need a mask when I leave home. The storm will last for seven days. Wherever its origins, it muffles the sun and makes pale and slick every handrail, every uncovered stair. It confines me to my apartment. I spend an entire weekend in this arid murk before I hear my own voice from a distance, like a search party closing in. Start small. Do first what is manageable. I begin here: the dust will eventually settle, and I will sweep it from my front steps. I may even manage to descend them, go into town. I will buy dishes (unbreakable ones) even though I won’t live here for much longer. Then when I am ready, I will practice a new trick. The one that lets Mamen fly. What a wonder it would be to see the fortress this way—from up high.

The current will move through by Sunday, which happens to be Easter. The forecast says the haze will go with an unseasonably good rain. The days will pass into spring.