By Karlo Yeager Rodríguez
The first I heard of the abandoned neighborhood was from Arturo on one of those endless summer evenings between 6th and 7th grade when the streetlights are just ting-ting-tinging to life overhead. We were playing a loose game of cops and robbers cobbled together from other games we had almost outgrown. Arturo’s old Playskool blocks made up a crude city skyline; a handful of my scuffed and mismatched Hot Wheels were cop and getaway cars. For high-speed chases, we’d chase each other around our cul-de-sac in a game of tag. After a particularly frenetic chase, after we’d collapsed on the sidewalk sweaty and panting, Arturo blurted out, “You know about the old neighborhood they left to the jungle?”
He was always testing me, trying to get me to believe this or that and then laugh and laugh when he got me. I should have been skeptical but under the buzz of the streetlights, under that mother-of-pearl sky, with the faint sounds of telenovelas or the evening news drifting in the cool air, the bats fluttering from light to light, and me accepting that even though I had long ago read my Childcraft Encyclopedias from cover to cover there was a lot I didn’t know. The very idea of a modern neighborhood, overgrown and mysterious as ancient ruins, filled me with both unease and fascination. I pleaded with Arturo over and over again until he agreed to take me there.
We planned for Saturday. Initially, Arturo mentioned Sunday but I knew I couldn’t get out of going to Mass. My dad’s concern over how much Original Sin marred my soul was unwavering, after all.
“Just tell your mom you’re sleeping over this Friday,” Arturo said.
But after dinner, after the dishes had been cleared, after my dad lit coils of mosquito repellent and we retreated to our marquesina to watch TV, I had yet to gather my courage to mention the sleepover. We watched what our local station dubbed El hombre biónico (but the title card announced as The Six-Million Dollar Man) with the volume turned down. Tuned to a broadcast relay out of Charlotte Amelie, our boombox turned Steve Austin into a ventriloquist. His new bionic power enabled him to throw his voice from the screen to the speakers behind me. Always a little behind what was happening but at least I was practicing my English.
I was still agonizing over the perfect moment during a commercial break to ask when Arturo showed up at our gate. He asked to talk to my dad. When it became clear I hadn’t broached the subject, he flashed me an annoyed look, but a second later became the very image of a Respectful Young Man. He referred to my dad as “usted,” and “Don Garriga,” and only met his eyes when they agreed and shook hands.
Mom asked, “You’ll promise to be back by Saturday afternoon?”
Unsure who she was asking, Arturo and I both nodded.
The two days until Friday felt two weeks long–and that was nothing compared to the eternity of Friday night itself. After I accompanied my mom to Arturo’s house, she and his mom insisted on exchanging pleasantries. It lasted long enough that I shifted my pillow from one arm to the next and had to set my backpack at my feet.
Though I’d already had dinner, I was invited to join them for theirs. The way Arturo’s mom said it made it clear she wouldn’t take no for an answer. Dinner was followed by family time watching the local news, followed by El Chapulín Colorado–which I didn’t like as much as Chespirito’s other role in El Chavo del Ocho. No need for a relay station, or a radio, or practicing my English to laugh at the Chapulín’s antics. It felt like I was getting away with something. After that, we were allowed to go upstairs and get set up in Arturo’s room. Now, with the lights out and the house quiet, I lay on a spare cot, staring at the stucco ceiling. The night continued as interminable and torturous as Christmas Eve.
I sighed.
“You too?”
Startled, I bit back a giggle. “Yeah. I guess so.”
Something in the way I said that made Arturo laugh, which made me start laughing as well. From down the hall, Arturo’s mom asked, “Todo bien?” We shushed each other and Arturo took a moment before saying that yes, everything was okay and bendición, mami. I closed my eyes and covered my mouth to keep my laughter from bursting out. By the time the urge had passed, the house had gone quiet again.
I realized something. “Maybe we should plan for tomorrow,” I whispered.
“Arturo?”
A low snore was his response.
I shouldn’t have worried about the plan. Later, Arturo would reassure me that it wasn’t complicated–trek across four or five streets to where the jungle almost spilled out onto a dead-end street. I couldn’t help but feel like I was doing something wrong. Not about the lying, exactly, nor the sneaking around, either but I couldn’t understand why this felt different. I’d lied to my parents before, but those were for small things–staying up late, catching glimpses of nude scenes on HBO, taking precisely one puff off one of my mom’s cigarettes–this was something I wanted but couldn’t explain why. If you had asked me at the time if I was a liar, I would have hotly denied it but now I would have to admit that yes, I was and like most children, I could be pretty good at it.
So much so that in the gray light of morning I lurched awake. Elsewhere in the house, quiet sounds–Arturo’s parents making morning coffee. Their low murmurs sounded like a conversation that had been going on for years, something Arturo didn’t know about. Listening to them soothed me. I must have drifted off at some point because suddenly Arturo was nudging me awake.
“Come on,” he said and prodded me again.
“Okay, okay I’m up,” I said, obviously not.
Arturo was fully dressed. I tugged my sneaks on,. pulling the loops tight–childhood warnings about tripping ever-present in my mind–I asked Arturo what the plan was.
He shrugged. “You take my bike and I keep up on my skateboard.”
I wanted to point out that wasn’t a plan, but he said it with such confidence that I figured he knew something I didn’t. He was right, too. For the most part. We breezed out of the house, pausing long enough for Arturo to tell his mom we were going to the park down the street. At the time, it was so strange to me that she wasn’t suspicious. My mom would’ve had so many more questions.
But all Arturo’s mom said was, “Just be careful. Okay?”
I nodded along with Arturo.
None of this is to say Arturo or his parents did anything wrong. It showed me that because they loved their son, they trusted him. No interrogations, no trying to catch him in a lie. Not quite the same environment I was used to, but after everything maybe I lucked out where he didn’t.
The faintest of gravel roads led into the jungle. Its straight lines had been broken up by secondary growth over the years, as if the greenery had gnawed away the layers of bitumen and asphalt until it exposed bone. Standing under its green shadows with the drone of insects and birds calling all around us it felt like the jungle had merely paused to digest before continuing its slow meal.
We followed what must have been an old access road, pausing often to make sure we hadn’t wandered off it. By then, we were old enough to have heard the stories in the newspaper about people vanishing into the jungle. Not just tourists, but UPR professors and field researchers. Experts.
But with a confidence borne of our many years, we shrugged off those disappearances because they happened far away, and it was El Yunque, after all. Everyone knew that was an eerie place, maybe even a haunted place since Taíno times. Maybe before.
It wasn’t arrogance, exactly, that kept us pushing into the jungle, convinced nothing bad could happen. Instead, it was an adolescent’s rubber-boned assumption that while we didn’t think we were immortal, death, injury, infirmity were far away, that they could only happen when you’re old.
I rolled the bike along, half-carrying it through denser patches of underbrush. Mosquitoes whined in my ear. Arturo switched his skateboard from one hand to the other to swat at his neck. We exchanged glances, ready to take a breather but the crunch of gravel gave way to a paved road. Cracked and slippery with moss, it was however smooth enough to swing up into the seat, Arturo kicking easily to keep pace on his board.
After a while, the road gained an incline and Arturo was forced to call for the break we’d put off. I caught my breath while Arturo unlooped a length of bungee cord from under the bike seat. He knotted it into a makeshift tether so I could tow him up the hill.
At first, the added weight wasn’t an issue, but the longer I pedaled the more I realized I’d overestimated my strength. Breath sawing out of me, I quietly celebrated every straightaway. Every dip in the road, a brief respite from the slow burn in my legs. Working to gain momentum on a downslope, I was brought short on the next rise. Legs straining against the pedals to no avail. Frozen in place, trembling with effort, my sweat pattered across the handlebars and onto the seamed blacktop.
I tottered, then fell sideways.
I sat up, wincing at the pain in my knee. It was a deep scrape, with bits of gravel and dirt stuck in the wound I wanted to pick out before it got infected. I was steeling myself when Arturo interrupted me.
“Why’d you do that?” He trudged towards me, skateboard in hand. An irreparable scratch marred the looping dragon on its underside. “You stupid?”
“No,” I said, gesturing at my leg. A trickle of blood had stained the cuff of my sock. He glanced at my knee and without a word helped me up. As close to an apology as I’d get from him. I righted the bike and after we’d twisted the handlebars back into place limped along on foot.
“How much farther?”
Arturo shrugged. “Pretty close, I think.”
“You think?”
He shrugged again. “How’s the knee?”
He was ignoring the question and I knew it. Rather than press the issue, I made a show of putting weight on my injured leg to test it. I responded with a shrug of my own. “Hurts. Not bad, though.”
We plodded along in silence.
The jungle pressed in, looming over us. A curve in the road revealed the remains of a cyclone fence, crushed under the weight of an enormous monstera plant. Sheltered by its glossy leaves, a rust-pocked sign was caught in its coils: WARNING–AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.
Arturo helped me lift the bike over before following.
“What was that?” I asked.
“My grandma told me this used to be an Army base or something, but who knows? Dad says her memory’s bad.”
It’s comforting to think we can know our own minds when we recall our memory of an event, but looking back at that moment is like staring at the landscape of an unknown country. I no longer know why Arturo’s story resonated with me, or if I ever did. I can only conjecture. I’d like to say it was because I knew about how Agent Orange was tested in El Yunque. Everyone knew that–it was an open secret–but I didn’t. Not then. I only learned about those experiments as an adult, when people near the research station made the news. Cancer clusters, rare diseases. Very sad, but it was happening to people over there. Perhaps it had to do with how my dad had changed since taking a job at Fort Buchanan. Not long afterwards, he started comparing me to his colleagues’ kids. Where he had been gentle with me before he was now impatient. Demanding. He didn’t hit me but often looked like he wanted to. All because I was behind, I needed to catch up, I wasn’t good enough–not yet. Yet, a land whose shores were cursed to always be out of reach, as unattainable as my eternal salvation. A story about how there was something in the water on base was easier to accept than the humiliation of being something to show off to his friends at work.
Then again, maybe the Army base was another Arturo Special I’d gobbled up and was hungry for seconds. It made the jungle feel more mysterious, and when the undergrowth thinned and fell away, the clearing we entered felt alien. Sacred. And silent. No trill of birdsong in the canopy, nor the thrum of insects below. The air itself was close, thick with pollen. The quiet bred a quiet I dared not disturb.
Gradually, I recognized the remnants of boxy mid-century housing emerging out of the vegetation. Here, a window pried open by thick vines, its louvers rusting on a pile on the ground; there, a young flamboyán had knocked over a wall as it grew, its roots cracking the rest. A whole street where families had once had dinner, where their kids once played in yards taken over by sawgrass, and they got together to watch TV in rooms now open to the elements. Where had they gone?
A loud whoop interrupted my thoughts.
Arturo had found a huge pile of louvers, and after clambering up onto it had proceeded to fling them as hard as he could. He watched them tumble through the air, waiting for each to land before throwing the next one. With each clatter, the silence seemed to sharpen around us. I watched him for a bit, uninterested in joining him, before setting the bike on its side and moving on. Near what I imagined had been the end of the street, one of the houses stood almost intact.
Arturo called after me, “Brian!”
Clatter.
“You’re missing out on this!”
Clang-ang-ang.
That’s when I saw them.
Through what remained of the sliding doors leading to the back porch, a handful of pallid, fleshy growths rose over a small forest of secondary growth. Almost as tall as I was, rounded buds drooped on each stalk, their petals closed tight. They reminded me of something bloodless and predatory I’d once surprised under a rock. I’d let it get away, too repulsed by its undulating pallor to try and figure out what it was. Any more pale and he’d glow in the dark, like my abuela used to tease my cousin, and call him blanquito. Of course, for all her teasing she envisioned a shining future for him. College, travel, prestige–all things she never associated with me. Sure, how my abuela carried on wasn’t my cousin’s fault; and sure, when we were alone, my cousin would admit that he hated when she did that, but he never did anything to stop it, either.
My arms crawling with gooseflesh, I took one stuttering step towards them. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to get closer. My stomach gave a queasy flop but the next step, the next step was easier, easier than not taking it so I did and a low wind must have whispered through and set everything rustling because out of the corner of my eye the smaller stalks seemed to bend towards me, not moving with the wind at all and the big one was turning, turning, turning and maybe they were the true owners of this neighborhood and always had been; where had they gone was a silly question because they had never left and I wanted to scream no because that couldn’t be and I didn’t want it to be, and I didn’t want to take another step–
“Think fast!” Arturo punched me in the arm. Not hard, but not exactly soft, either.
“Hey!” was all I could manage as I came back to myself. I rubbed my arm. “Why’d. . .” I meant to finish with do that for? but Arturo was already walking towards the blanquitos in a daze. I wish I had done something. Warned him. But watching that dumb look spread across his face made me laugh. God, had I looked like that?
My laughter trailed off as I realized it was getting dark. How much time had we been here? It was dim enough that the hoary webwork on the tree trunks around had begun to flicker with a sickly light. Somehow, I knew that if we stayed longer in that poisonous glow we would be lost.
“Arturo?” The big one arched over Arturo, as if it was preparing to strike. He had raised a hand towards it, palm almost touching the bud. “We’ve got to go. Arturo!”
He turned towards me, dazed.
“Let’s go. Now!“
That snapped him out of it. Once he stumbled away from them and out of the house, he came out of his stupor. I checked my Casio. It was almost 6 o’clock, much to our dismay. The streetlights would be buzzing awake by the time we got back.
“I’m gonna get in trouble,” I said. “First from your mom, and then from mine, when they talk.”
Arturo reassured me that wouldn’t happen, but his heart really wasn’t in the lie.
We headed back. Our parents were livid. My parents were sitting with a police officer when I got home. I took my lumps (as I’m sure Arturo took his), but something had changed. My parents thought Arturo’s family was negligent and Arturo a bad influence. Arturo’s parents thought mine were comemierdas. We tried to stay friends, but we went to different schools the following year and drifted apart.
Thinking back on it, I almost wish something more dramatic had happened on the way back. Something that might explain how the story’s survived in my memory for so long. Not always–not even sporadically–uppermost in my mind, but emerging in strange ways over the years. Like it sent out runners. Slowly, blindly inching its way underground only to sprout when conditions are right. Sometimes it’s for no reason I can discern, but other times . . Well, other times it’s because after nearly 30 years Arturo sent me a friend request on Facebook.
Over months, we caught up with each other. He’d never left Puerto Rico but had lived in Mayagüez for a long time. Taught some classes, lived as well as he could with a professor’s salary until budget cuts and his parents’ failing health made him move back in with them. His father passed away first, followed not long after by his mom. That was 8 years ago.
I told him how I’d moved to Orlando, then bounced from odd job to odd job along the east coast–though oddly never New York City–and had sort of settled down as an instructor at a New Mexico ski town. Can you imagine–a Puerto Rican ski instructor?
About as likely as a hockey league champion, Arturo messaged me back.
After a few months of this, Arturo wanted me to come and visit. He hadn’t mentioned it before, and the longer our messaging continued the more awkward it became but might as well now. He was sick. The doctors weren’t entirely sure what it was, but they’ve already had talks about what his end-of-life plans are.
It wasn’t going to happen tomorrow, but by now it had diminished from years to months.
Of course, I went to visit. His remaining family was very gracious and helped me find somewhere to stay. When I arrived Arturo himself greeted me at the airport with a hearty embrace. He took me directly from the airport to some shack for mofongo. On the way, just beyond the tourist areas, a parade of empty storefronts, abandoned houses. Some, the result of Hurricane María’s destruction, but not all. After a couple of beers, Arturo and I compared notes on what happened that day. Oddly, our memories were pretty similar. Except for one thing–what Arturo saw when he approached the pale growths. He insisted they had eyes.
“Eyes?” I asked, unsure where this was going, but expecting one of his old tricks.
“Aw, man.” he said. “I was sure you’d–you sure you didn’t see it? It looked like it had eyes, but they were closed.”
“Eyes.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Crazy, right? But I remember not getting over how the eyelids looked fake. Like maybe someone had used a magic marker to draw them on. For real,” he insisted when I interrupted him by bursting into laughter.
“Oh man,” I said. “I’d almost forgotten how good you were at this sort of thing.”
He gave me a rueful smile. “You’re right. I’ve lost my touch.”
I had completely forgotten about what he’d said until my last visit with him. This time, he was in the hospital. Skeletal. Hollow cheeks. Seeing him try to smile hurt me. He didn’t have a lot of strength left for words. I slipped my hand over his, careful of the IV stent, and sat beside him. We watched TV.
Right before visitation hours came to close, he told me what I haven’t been able to find rest from since. Afterwards, I wondered why he waited that long. Had he been working himself up, saving his energy to tell me, or. . . ? I only had theories, now.
The following morning, one of Arturo’s cousins–her name was Maite–intercepted me on my way to see him. She thanked me for coming to visit but he had passed late last night and it was only family. I managed to thank her and somehow made it back to my rental car.
After the shock wore off, I started the car and drove all the way back to the old neighborhood. Even here, houses left empty, FOR SALE signs faded from the sun, the jungle creeping up out of the cracks, sending out runners. If I peered through their windows, how many of them would I find in those hollowed out rooms? I parked right at the end of that dead end street, peering into the shadows for the ghost of a gravel road. I came here because Arturo’s last words were they’re opening their eyes and so help me God, I have to find out.
