Free Perla by Carolina de Robertis Page A

just before the door slams: I’m not dead.
    I hid in my room. I thought the stranger might try to drag himself upstairs and knock on my bedroom door with his damp knuckles, but he didn’t come. I reached for a magazine and attempted to distractmyself with its pages, to care or at least pretend I cared about the fashion spreads and photos of celebrities with their ostentatious teeth, as if it were a normal night and the silence in the living room were normal also, why wouldn’t it be silent when my parents were gone and I was alone? Only I couldn’t fool myself, I was not alone, he was downstairs in the living room. I couldn’t stand the lack of sound. Silence prickling with the stings of incursion. I’m not crazy, I said to myself, and tried to believe it. Sometimes, when I was very small and cried too much, my father would say Don’t be crazy and I would quickly become quiet, brush away the tears and try to forget the lost doll or scraped knee or the punishment freshly meted out. There was always that fear of going mad, of falling off the edge of the family. Such a paralyzing fear. Girls who fall off the edge of their family have nothing left to stand on in this world. Or so it seemed, and not a fiber of my being dared test the theory. Not even now. That man, that thing , his presence downstairs threatened my sanity and my house and the very tenets I’d grown up on and now my thoughts were curling in on themselves, twisting into dangerous shapes; I had to get rid of them. I wished the man would vanish. If only I could make him leave: but how? Pack up your things was a futile thing to say, as there was nothing to pack. I could simply say Get out, and see whether he could devise a way to exit—I pictured him scanning the room, at a loss for where the doors were and how to use them; trying to heave his body forward and failing; dragging himself to the sidewalk with slouching steps, neighbors staring at him through their curtains. Maybe he wouldn’t go of his own volition. Maybe he would hover in the living room, refusing with one of those ghostly stares of his and then I’d have to grab him by the arm and drag him out, all the way out, more neighbors at more curtains that would blatantly pull open to watch me haul a soggy naked man to the curb. And then there he would be, out on the street, wet, abandoned, naked, trying to find his way through the suburbs, the train station, the cafés, the ruthless cars. I saw him razed by a fast taxi, or fallen in an elegant front yard (heseemed so weak, he could collapse, I’d never even seen him walk), or arrested for his inexplicable demeanor. Worst of all, I saw him staying at the front door of this house, ringing, knocking, ringing, waiting for me to open, filling the threshold and driveway and street with the smell of rotting fish, and me inside, trapped in my own home. Trapped, I thought, I’m trapped already. I wanted to scream.
    Perla, I thought, if you stay here like this much longer you’re going to come unglued, and in fact you’re already on your way.
    So I changed my clothes and came out of my bedroom, went down the stairs, and grabbed my purse without looking at the strange wet man who looked up as if snapping from a dream and said, “Where are you going?”
    I slammed the door behind me as an answer.
    I didn’t know where I was going. It didn’t matter, it couldn’t matter. I headed toward the city. I emerged from the train a little past midnight and the streets were swollen with people. I was out in the world again, out in Buenos Aires, where everyone lives above water and where restaurants are full of little candles and clinking knives, where people stroll or sit without ever leaning forward on damp haunches, where look look people were smiling as if the past were just a flattened thing beneath their feet, easily sidestepped, or at least possible to ignore long enough to go out for a drink. True, not everyone was smiling, but that’s the street, that’s