jo reyes-boitel

This hospital room is larger than I would have expected, given my medical insurance. There’s another bed here but it’s empty and I got the bed nearest the window. The nurses may pity me. Here alone, sick and with no visitors. That’s why I am getting preferential treatment. If they hadn’t already asked for my emergency contacts, I could blame the incoming bad weather on my being here alone. The clouds are darker than I expected. I’ve been here a day now and the sky is overcast, and evening is dark, with blues blending into the sunset.

My partner would have sat beside me, but Martín died a year ago. I can’t believe it’s been a year now. My neighbors are kind, they ask how I am. They used to ask how he was too. They were concerned for me the last time I saw them though they don’t approach me like they used to. Or I don’t let them approach me. It’s easier that way – to distance myself. I have been having trouble walking and the man who delivers meals on wheels brought me a cane he said his father used when he was still with them. A simple wood cane with a curve at the top. Maybe, for some, I look too sick to be approached. Like a sick, weak kitten left by their mother.

I should have stayed home. I’ve been sick before. For a while now actually. I don’t remember why I needed to come in. My head is foggy now. My doctor says one of the medicines I’m taking affects recent memory. Or maybe it’s my condition that is loosening my memory. At this point does it matter? My body spends most of its time falling apart. Martín used to say our bodies followed the seasons. If that’s the case, this may be my Winter.

The night nurse, Betty, has come in to tell me they may fill the second bed. They are moving non-emergency people into vacant areas because the hurricane has turned and is expected to make landfall near us. It will be good to have some company. I don’t care for tv but I turn it on to watch the news. This hurricane is big. ¿Como se llama? Andrew. I had heard hurricanes named after men weren’t as powerful. This one is testing that idea. I wonder how my house is. There’s no one there to board the windows. It’s a duplex and Herlinda and José are good neighbors. Maybe they covered the windows for me. We already have the wood. Living in Southern Florida means you have the wood planks ready as soon as summer arrives. If you wait until a hurricane makes landfall you end up paying double or more for wood if you can even find it. I hadn’t told them I was coming here. I never told them I was sick, even when it must have been obvious to them. To be gay the assumption is I will get sick eventually, I suppose. It’s as inevitable as a hurricane landing in south Florida. I have had too many friends die. there are medicines for AIDS, but they only delay this inevitability. Herlinda was always kind enough to at least not ask me, even when my skin yellowed or when I got the lesions on my face. I could hide the ones on my body, wearing long sleeves and khaki pants despite the humidity. Some days you could cut me out of those clothes, the temperature and the air’s wetness unrelenting.

I’ve been here for a week. The doctors have given me a cocktail of antibiotics and other drugs. I want to say I feel better, but I don’t know any more if I am trying to convince myself or if there’s actual improvement. The rain started coming in today. That helps. It’s a reminder that I’m not the only thing in this world feeling all its emotions. They sky was working on its own sadness. The people preparing their homes also emotional, unsure. I always liked the rain on the outskirts of a hurricane. It circles, like birds in their murmuration. Bands of terrible rain twisting around the eye, interjected with quiet sunlight or the clear night sky like a pinwheel. It’s hypnotizing.

My mother always said I found hurricane season exhilarating. Me and the other neighborhood boys would run into the street with the wind at our backs. We were like Superman. Nothing could stop us as we steamed forward, the wind pushing us. Or we would test how strong we were by walking against the winds and rain, our shoulders cutting into the atmosphere. We would stay outside until the last possible moment, or when one boy’s mother, fearful of the weather, would call for him. The rest of us would head home too, knowing that it wouldn’t be long before all the mothers were calling out for us.

They’ve moved an elderly man into the room now. He’s asleep, it seems. I don’t know if I want to talk really but the option would be nice. I kept the television on but it’s low, so it doesn’t bother him. The nurse’s station is quiet, considering what’s coming. But I’m on the 6th floor. I’m sure the emergency room and lower floors are busier. And the weather reports are saying this thing is coming just to the south of us. I never understood why the focus is on the eye, how we use it to show where a hurricane will land. As though none of what’s whirling outside of the eye wall was important. Or if we can only be sure of something if we are in the middle of it. Maybe because we can stare into an eye while pretending the surrounding chaos doesn’t exist since it’s out of our peripheral view. It looks like we aren’t even allowed the grace of having the center of the eye pass us. This means the rain will not stop. The destruction it brings will not allow us a breath to collect our thoughts. Martín would say this is life. If you have caught your breath, you have stopped, and this life is too short to stop.

Fuck, Martín. I miss you. I miss your youth, dancing in our kitchen on Sunday afternoons after being up all night talking about nothing, laughing at everything, and happy for the life we created for a bit. How many threats of a hurricane did we survive? How many tornadoes did we see attempting to touch ground in the distance? And those small whirls of wind that would move down the street, what were they called? Not dust devils. Maybe pseudo-dust devils. They wanted to be bigger than they were but could only carry a few leaves before their weight would disassemble them. You would chase behind them and run through. Just in case, you would say. We don’t want any tornadoes near our house! As though that tiny thing could grow to swallow all of us, our house, the potted plants – even suck out the mailbox from its cement base. Sometimes Herlinda would sit with us as we saw the darkness moving across the sky. Excited, she would run back to her house, and return with her grandfather’s machete, her arm wielding it into the air as she swung it up and down then left to right in a cross across the face of the faraway clouds, yelling Ay‘tas! Vete! We aren’t scared of you!

I miss those slow mornings after so much rain. Martín would make café con leche and toast while I dragged all the potted plants back outside by their lips. Most days, whenever a hurricane or some other large natural event hit land we could count on the morning to be quiet, revealing new clarity. Trees might lay across the streets. Overhead powerlines too. There was an RV park a block down. They were guaranteed to have damage. No joke that those homes weren’t built for heavy wind. Neighbors would check in on each other. Herlinda would have made a pot of arroz con pollo and left it warming in the oven overnight in case someone didn’t have food or a way to heat food, or if they were busy cleaning and exhausted by circumstance. I’d let the dog and her puppies out to run around. They were desperate to be outside. And the cockatoo needed sleep after screaming out from her cage all night.

I never was afraid of hurricanes. My mother says that’s because I was born during the Great Hurricane of 1935, which made landfall on September 2, at the same time I did. The way she told the story I kind of felt responsible for the whole show. 480 dead. Homes and buildings razed. Land leveled in minutes. Or, maybe it was responsible for me. And my mother always reminded me I held those winds within myself too. Wind can be pleasant and beneficial: removing pollen, helping us breathe, pushing in cooler temperatures. Or destructive and scary: feeding ocean waves, starting fires, or destroying crops. She never said which kind I was. I always felt like I was a little of both.

I was surprised to bump into my half-sister in a Miami grocery store ten or more years ago. We were both ice storms, circling but oppositional, like a magnet repelling the other’s pole. After that, I chose to see people for who they were in that moment. Martín was all cold front when I met him at a drag brunch, but he admitted ot me later that I was a warm Spring breeze and Spring always gives way to warmth. A fresh perspective saves me. Martín was younger than me. We didn’t have any friends in common and so we met as the two we were in that moment.

My sister and I didn’t really know each other either. We certainly didn’t have any friends in common. But we had stories laid before us that defined the other more than we ourselves were allowed. It’s like a hurricane, I suppose. We can hear all the news about its wind speed, the size of its eye, or the reach of its feeder bands, but we don’t quite know its potential until we hear what it did to the last land it hit. Most stories about my sister do not include her. The one I know best: when our father disowned me because he told my mother I was a maricón. I was three or four, but I remember him looking at me as he said that word. At the time I didn’t know what it meant but for a moment it sounded tender in the way he whispered it. Tender but giving way to the last hard syllable.

My sister was only a few years younger than me. Then he had another daughter sometime after that. Eventually we moved to the States when my mother’s aunt could petition for us. My younger sister would come to the states three years later with our father and his wife. Then my older sister some years after with her husband and two children. I was all alone. My mother never had another child. Somehow, she kept up with where they were and, while they didn’t communicate, they shared a common friend or two who would update the other. I’m not sure it was much more than a “yes, you each still exist” acknowledgement. I got to see him once more through friends of our families. He was shorter, thinner than I remember. His eyes pale blue like vacation-worthy ocean water against super fine sand. I saw tenderness, I thought. He looked at me, unblinking, but refused to speak. I guess I could have tapped down my gayness but I came out of a hurricane like this, had my own trajectory, and couldn’t change for anyone.

They named this one Andrew. It’s a good enough name. I doubt anyone has a negative connection with it. It sounds like a professor or a waiter at a small new American bistro. Hurricanes that are too destructive have their name retired. To carry the old name carries too much history. And any hurricane that makes it through the islands gives this country an idea of its potential for destruction. This Hurricane Andrew is coming to us directly. So who knows what it has planned for us. Even storms with 175 mile per hour winds can touch land and fall apart. Others with the same speed can wreak havoc for days, jump onto land, return to the ocean once more to power up, then hit the land once again.

I didn’t sleep very well. The tv stayed on until the blueish light matched the early morning clouds I see rolling past the windows. For hours I watched the clouds thicken into navy and cobalt blue as they traveled across the sky. I can hear more noise in the hallway. There’s more activity. I guess because there are now more people situated up here now. The old man in the bed next to me is awake though he’s just as silent as when he was asleep. They’ve brought us breakfast. I know he is eating but can hardly hear even how he lifts the paper cover over the orange juice glass. I cannot hear the glass as he lifts it to his lips then sets it down again, but this room is abnormally quiet, and small movements change the air. This is what happens when no one visits. Atmospheric pressure builds. I don’t quite know how it all connects but I’m left with more body pain and now I have a headache. It’s like wearing those headphones that swallow your entire ear but without music playing and that pressure of no sound makes a kind of push and pull inside and outside my whole body.

Technically, my mother didn’t give birth to me in the middle of the Great Hurricane of 1935. But she did bear down on the morning of September 2, 1935, as the winds started whipping through Isabela de Sagua. And it was a hard and steady rain as her contractions increased. The rain was heavy, turning the dirt road in front of her parents’ home into a full mudslide by the time her contractions were two to three minutes apart. And that evening, while the eye passed about 30 miles north, I came into the world, my grandmother and the neighbor and my father all there helping to greet me. It’s no wonder my mother created this story of my birth. She needed it for herself – a story that told the world she was capable of anything. And she needed it for me, because she told me from when I was young that I was who I was and should never feel diminished because of others’ limiting view.

Of course I’m here now, with Andrew on his way. No one has come by in a while. It’s okay. The old man and I are well. I can hear his breathing in time to his machine’s beeps. I’ve turned off the sound from the television. The same image is shown again and again on a loop. It makes it look like the storm has slowed, though I know that’s not the case. Two steps forward, one step back. Like a mambo, ¿no? Martín would laugh if I said that to him. Not because it was funny but because I would dare try for humor in a time like this. This hurricane is tremendous. The lights flickered for a bit earlier, but I assume generators are supporting the hospital. It’s late morning and I haven’t slept so I should try. I am tired but I feel like I’m here to welcome Andrew. It works as a distraction too. Every day this week the administrator comes in to ask if I have any family I want to contact. Even if I knew how to reach my half-sisters or my father I would not. They never had use for me. I am the memory of something my father did not want and so neither did they.

The news says the eye is seven miles wide. My house is probably that far away from here. It sounds like a large eye but it’s smaller than most. Small, tight hurricane eyes mean the storm will be stronger. Like a spinning top, it holds itself together better. I used to think the eye was a kind of blessing if it went over me. I realize now it means we still have another half of this storm ahead. And really, because of its churning, it is the same storm, doubled over. I inherited my father’s eyes. I think it made him more upset, to know that I ended up his only son and the only one who had his features – even his personality – but, because I was born this way, he could not accept me. His daughters’ eyes are brown like warm, dark rum. I always thought blue eyes were cold, distant. It wasn’t until Martín reminded me it isn’t the eyes that hold a temperature, it’s the spirit behind that warms with its unique fire. Between the unforgiving darkness of these clouds and all this rain I can see the hint of sunshine trying to break through. I close my eyes. Ah, Martín, how do you still hold me? Even here?

Josue? Betty calls to me. Her hand is warm against my shoulder as she lightly jostles me. I don’t answer. I don’t open my eyes. The old man is breathing, quiet and regular, with the occasional soft snore. The shuffle of shoes and the murmurs of small groups in the lit hallway falls away. Josue? How are you, dear? Her voice disappears in the soft trill of wind against the windows. The warmth of her hand falls away. The unceasing rain becomes a chorus. The thunder rumbling through the building, through my body. The whole room set alight by lightning. The person I was, in part, created by that great hurricane. Only fitting that this storm would come now. It’s like a rueda of dancers. We spin and spin, trading dance partners in this life until now, matching steps with Andrew. He’s stunning, really, the way he opens his arms sweetly and holds me close. Closer. Until my body is lifted from this bed and I’m outside of this building, once and for all, claimed.