Part 2: Baja Leai & the Road to New York
Jesus has a fire/drowning nightmare; he and Andrea settle into a routine of garden work, classes, and evening smoking; a dance lesson with Layla becomes intimate; late-night banter with Andrea.
The next morning, Jesus woke up feeling awake and refreshed. He slipped off the bed and tip toed his way past the still sleeping figures of Justin and Alfred. They were dead asleep, resting peacefully. The curtains were drawn, and bright, powerful sunlight poured into the bedroom. The strong scent of smoke wafted through the room through the open door that led across the hallway, down the stairs, and into the kitchen.
Layla must be making breakfast.
It wasn’t until he made it into the bathroom to begin his morning routines that he realized something was off. For some reason, the bathroom reminded him of the one in the orphanage. The sink was the same, as was the mirror. Jesus was overcome with a strange, haunting familiarity.
It’s just my mind playing tricks on me. This isn’t Nueva Casa. This is Baja Leai. I’m just getting my imagination confused with reality again.
And indeed, he was. His perspective changed, and it wasn’t Sophia’s bathroom at all; it was Layla’s. Jesus dismissed it. For him, it was normal to have small lapses in perception. As he washed his face, however, he couldn’t shake the impending feeling of dread and unease. There was something rumbling, a faint white noise in the background, crackling in the recesses of his mind like a detuned radio.
No matter how much water he splashed on his face, he still felt hot and clammy. Jesus was burning up inside, and something else was burning. It wasn’t bacon. It was thick, grey smoke crawling through the cracks around the door. Jesus panicked and tried to open the door, but the knob wouldn’t budge. It was locked, or jammed. The white noise had steadily grew into the crackling roar that he had heard only days ago in the orphanage that had led to the destruction of everything he held dear. Had Rodrigo followed him here? Had he come to finally claim Andrea for himself?
Jesus continued to struggle more and more violently with the door knob. It was stuck. There was no way it could be locked. It locked from the inside. Jesus slammed his shoulder against the door in frustration. Now, the bathroom was filling with thick, choking smoke. Coughing, Jesus desperately threw his body against the door over and over again. On the third try, it finally gave way and Jesus burst stumbling into the hallway of the boarding house. He was met with a terrifying sight. Flames had engulfed the staircase and were quickly climbing the walls and ceiling towards him. The fire had blocked his only exit. For a moment, Jesus was in the boy’s dormitory in Nueva Casa, staring at the flames roaring outside the window. The window! That was it, his only hope for salvation. Jesus rushed out of the burning hallway, back into his room. The beds were all empty, and the window was open. He sprinted to the open window, and without thinking, dove through it and sailed through the air, right into the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
The waves were intensely strong, tugging him like a ragdoll in the turbulent currents and eddies.
A fierce undertow pulled him underwater. He was flung through the open depths before he oriented himself to the surface and swam upward. When he broke the surface, he could only gasp a fraction of a lungful of air before he accidentally inhaled a burst of seawater. He coughed and choked on the salty liquid, struggling to get a breath of fresh air, but the waves pulled him down again, as if the invisible force tugged his leg deep into the dark abyssal depths of the ocean. The filtering kaleidoscope light of the surface ran from him. Jesus desperately rowed his arms and kicked his feet, but it was no use. Further and further he sank. When his lungs burned, and his body couldn’t hold on anymore, Jesus screamed.
He shot up out of his bed, emitting a piercing, desperate scream. Jesus quickly realized that he wasn’t in the ocean, and the house wasn’t on fire. It had been a nightmare. Jesus looked around.
Somehow, he hadn’t woken up Justin, who was splayed out on his bed with his leg sticking off into the air.
After Jesus had washed off the sweat that soaked his shirt in his sleep, he made his bed, washed his clothes, and hung them out to dry in the back yard. At breakfast, Andrea slyly commented on his morning outburst.
“Did you fall off the bed this morning?” She asked.
“Almost. I dreamt about the fire at the orphanage. Except it wasn’t the orphanage. It was here.
It felt real.”
“If you wet the bed, I’ll be the one who has to clean it up. And if I have to do that, I’ll have to tell Mr. Lopez about you.”
“I doubt it. We’ll have to see how your boyfriend feels about that.”
When breakfast was over, both of them got to work, as would become customary on days they didn’t have school. Jesus began the lengthy process of extending the garden. First, he skimmed off all the grass and tossed it aside. Then, with a spade shovel, he churned and chopped the ground to till it.
After only a couple hours of work, his shoulders and forearms were sore. They would harden over the coming weeks. Soon, he would be able to work the entire day, only stopping for lunch, but that first day, the labor had broken him. He returned inside to rest and regain his strength a full two hours before lunch, utterly exhausted by the seemingly endless toil. Layla had checked on him periodically, giving him direction and pointers. It was clear that he had his work cut out for him. It would take weeks of constant labor to cover only a portion of her property in a proper garden. Still, he was glad to be afforded the chance to work, and looked forward to when he only needed to maintain the plants, and could reap the fruits of his labor.
Looking out over the plants, he observed a fat rabbit hop up to his garden and begin chewing on one of the bell pepper plants. When he returned outside, he chased the pest off, but the animal remained in the peripherals of his vision, waiting for Jesus to leave so he could continue snacking. This was the rhythm that was established: The rabbit would remain far enough out of the way that Jesus would have no chance to catch him, but whenever he left the garden unattended, the uninvited visitor would return to eat his fill. Eventually, full and satisfied, the rabbit would leave and make off to his nest or do whatever it is that adequately fed rabbits do. Two days later, Jesus asked Layla if she owned a gun. Layla simply laughed and dismissed the question.
That same day, Jesus and Andrea went back to Baja Leai University to register for classes. A patient and genial advisor suggested Jesus pursue a major in communications, and he selected the requisite classes for the major. As an elective, he enrolled in an English course for intermediate students and a creative writing class, mostly under the impression that it would be a throwaway class, an easy A.
It was not, and the teacher, an enigmatic white-haired Senor Miguel whose voracious energy and passion for literature didn’t match his advanced age, proved to be one of his most difficult and work-intensive courses. The first week, three students dropped out, and the class size was reduced from fifteen to twelve.
Senor Miguel was twice as critical as Sophia had ever been. He believed that a good writer should only use as many words as absolutely necessary, and that any excess verbiage should be cut off like a butcher trims the fat on a prime cut of meat. He didn’t believe in long, drawn out expressions of colorful speech when a utilitarian, minimalistic approach would suffice. On several occasions, Jesus grew exasperated with Miguel after he returned a paper that Jesus had slaved over to perfection filled with red marks, crossing out entire sections and critically tearing apart his work. Once, he even considered joining the three others in dropping out of the class, but stopped himself before he did.
Andrea and he fell into a familiar rhythm of work and school. If they didn’t have morning classes, they would care for their duties in the AM and attend class in the afternoon. On days with morning classes, they would reverse the schedule. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, they would walk together to the university. At nights, they would sometimes act out their ritual of heading down to the shoreline and smoking while overlooking the ocean. Jesus savored these opportunities, and also wondered how Andrea seemed to somehow hold an inexhaustible supply of the drug. Like Osito said, some questions are better left unasked.
As days turned into weeks, the steady passage of time turned Jesus’ neck dark with sun and his hands coarse and calloused by merit of labor. Layla’s property slowly transformed from a grass-covered yard to a rich, ever-expanding garden. There was still one problem Jesus couldn’t solve, the family of rabbits that had laid prey to his hard-won assets. He tried traditional remedies, cayenne pepper and human hair, but neither seemed to dissuade the uninvited lunch guests.
In the evenings, Layla played salsa music while he worked on his homework. It was more than he was accustomed to receiving from Senora, but nothing so difficult that it was insurmountable. Andrea and Jesus were both competent and diligent students and excelled in their studies.
On a Friday evening, some seven weeks after the orphans’ fateful arrival in Baja Leai, Jesus was working studiously on another assignment for his creative writing course—which increasingly gave him the notion that it would limit his creativity, not expound upon it—a short two-page exposition of an event from the student’s childhood, recounting the day, at nine or ten years old, that Christian who would become his closest friend, first arrived at the orphanage, when a thirst drove him downstairs to find a drink of water.
He found Layla dancing in the foyer to a salsa record that he didn’t recognize. At first, she didn’t notice his presence, but when she did, she made no indication that she cared. If anything, she danced better. It was apparent from her quick, fluid movements that she was a trained and practiced dancer. It was natural, the way her body moved in time with her steps, a loose rhythm that not so much as locked in with the music, but laid on top of it, maintaining an independent pulse that had its own flow and cadence, separate from the spicy Latin rhythms, but never at odds with them.
“Come here, Jesus,” She beckoned, motioning him to join her in the foyer. Jesus approached.
“You’re really good. Where did you learn?” He asked.
“When I was your age and younger, I went to a school. We used to compete professionally. It’s another one of the things I haven’t been afforded the time to pursue since I took on this responsibility,”
She indicated the house they were standing in with a sweeping gesture. “Now that you and Andrea have taken up many of my daily responsibilities, I have time for this again.”
“Can you teach me?” He asked.
She walked over and stopped the music, “The first thing you need to do is learn to count. Do it like this: One and two, three and four,” Jesus followed her lead and began counting in time with her.
“Now add in these steps,” She showed him the movements a short half-step forward and half-step back. He tried clumsily to mimic her, stopping himself quickly out of embarrassment.
“Try it again,” She encouraged, stepping with him. He watched her feet and fell in step with her, this time more confident of his movements. They continued on like that for a few more minutes, Layla demonstrating the basic step while Jesus tried to familiarize his senses to it. Eventually he got it, and the two were moving in unison.
“Very good. Now move your hips with it,” She said, demonstrating. Jesus tried to mimic her, but it felt awkward and uncomfortable, and he quickly lost the rhythm and fell out of step. He stopped, embarrassed and overwhelmed, and started again. After a few times, he eventually got it. She danced next to him until that pattern of movement became more natural and engrained.
Layla stepped in front of him, “Hold your hands out like this,” She showed him how to hold his arms, palms towards the ceiling, and put her hands in his. “Now, when you step, move with me. Ready?
One two three, four five six,” She counted as Jesus and her danced together. He could feel her energy and movement through their mutual connection in their hands. Jesus tried to move in synchronicity with her, relying on his sense of feeling to predict her movements. “Don’t follow, lead,” She said, “The man always leads.”
Jesus began dictating the pace with his movements, and she fell in rhythm with him. “Now turn me, like this,” She showed him how to lead her with his hand into a turn. “Do it on the one, like this … ”
She demonstrated, and he followed. Then, she showed him how to turn himself.
“You’re learning fast. That’s great. Now, let’s put it all together,” She put on the music. It was fast, and he had trouble keeping up with the quick tempo. He danced by himself, trying to find a natural rhythm and flow to his movements. When he found it, he held out his hands to Layla, who placed hers in his and let him lead. They fell out of time with the music, but she stayed with him. He tried a turn, and she followed his cue. At first their dance was awkward and rigid, but after he found the beat, he began to have fun, moving around the room, dancing with Layla. She pulled him close to her, putting her hands over his shoulders. He placed his hands on her hips. They moved together in a sensual, intimate display of rhythm. Jesus thought of the party at Oscar’s and how he had danced with Miriam. Layla was a strong and capable dance partner, and gently guided him into twists and turns. They stepped around each other, sometimes disconnected, and sometimes together, until the song ended. Jesus found he had worked up a sweat.
“Wow Jesus, you’re the real renaissance man. Now you can sing and dance,” Andrea joked dryly. Jesus spun around, not expecting to hear her. She stood by the door with a cat-like grin on her face. Jesus figured she had just come in.
“Andrea, why don’t you join us? I was just showing Jesus how to dance. It would be good to have a partner at his same level,” Said Layla.
“Maybe some other time. I have a ton of homework to catch up on.”
“It’s the weekend,” Said Jesus, not expecting to convince her. He just wanted to give her a hard time.
“Yeah, and I’d rather spend it furthering my educational pursuits,” Layla didn’t notice the subtle note of sarcasm in Andrea’s voice.
“Well, I think that’s great. I love having you two here. I think you were brought into my life for a reason,” Layla replied.
Jesus and Andrea exchanged a knowing glance. “I need to get started on this assignment, too. I came down here for a glass of water and ended up with a dance lesson,” He said, “Not that I’m complaining.”
“You’re hot for Layla; I can tell,” Said Andrea, staring out over the ocean. The waves crashed hypnotically onto the rocks on shore. It occurred to Jesus that they had crashed there long before man had even been in that part of the world, and would likely continue long after they had abandoned it, or it had abandoned them. Nature doesn’t care for the simple trials and tribulations of man. It dances its own eternal dance. All the empires and kingdoms of man could not equal one step in the great dance of time.
Fuck I’m high.
Rufus looked up at him. “You’re high, man. You’re really, really fuckin’ high. You’re so high that you think a dog is talking to you.”
“Did you say something?” Asked Jesus.
“Would you bang her?” Andrea responded.
“Bang who?”
“Layla. Who else?”
Jesus paused. “Really?”
“Really.”
“I’d rather bang her than Sophia.”
“Good answer.”
“Speaking of banging, did you see our friend at Americana’s?”
“Yeah, but we didn’t talk much,” She said, “I was there with friends.”
“You have friends?”
“You should try it some time.”
“Maybe some other time. I have a ton of homework to catch up on,” This earned Jesus a laugh.
“Come on, let’s go inside. This joint’s out, and I’m cold.”