The Gone Games

When I think of that place, I think of diesel fumes, pinkeye, and bodies. A cinderblock building, a bleached pile of bones, served as the school. A chain link fence curled around it, festooned with a single strand of perfunctory barbed wire. The bathroom was a ditch entombed within more cinder block. Countless tiny pools bedazzled its floor, germinating unseen invaders who dreamed of sinking hooks into your pink intestinal lining. I and the Europeans simply held it.

Each morning, when we arrived by taxi, packed like the proverbial can of sardines, I would break into a smile and disbelieve the tremors of happiness which would spark through my body. The children should be morose, I thought, but they were usually a constellation of crooked smiles (although sometimes the ones who hadn’t eaten would wear glazed expressions, like wax figures). We forked over a fistful of sols to the curly haired driver, who never spoke.

the goal was to cultivate a fantasy: that this was a real school, indistinguishable from the others. In reality, it was a fleeting way station on the road to a terrible place: this place. It wasn’t denial - more like erecting a lean-to in the dark angry woods. Shelter isn’t permanent. Most of us volunteers had a couple months in the tank before we would crumble and blow away and another denizen of the first world would arrive to take our place. No one remarked one way or the other on this cycle. I didn’t like to think about it.

Lars towered over the ocean of children. Standing by his side, I got to know his shoulders well. A blonde Dane with an easy smile, he walked with a bounce and frequently indulged the children’s’ requests to throw them in the air; they would giggle madly as they brushed the sky and returned. Lars told me he’d been traveling for over a year. His were true adventures: at his last stop, in Guatemala, an enraged husband had chased after his (allegedly unfaithful) wife with a rusty machete and attempted the coup de grace right outside Lars’ window (the blade sank into the windowsill and Lars whipped the poor woman inside as her assailant struggled to yank it free). Together, Lars and I taught an English class. I would play guitar and sing American Top 40 songs once the children got bored. They often requested “It’s My Life” by Bon Jovi.

The kids numbered about fifty, and there were, at most, four or five lugubrious soccer balls, deflated to the point of resembling shrunken heads. The fastest kids would sock the blobs back and forth, stirring up miniature dust devils in their wake. The rest of the gang wandered around the yard in the strange green glow from the sun shade overhead. The French girls would braid a few lucky heads of hair.

“These kids need some toys,” said Lars one afternoon. “I can’t stand watching them wander. It bums me out.”

I nodded in agreement. I noted that, around here, toys cost next to nothing. Lars proposed that we take the bus to the market after school and pick up a few things. I said yes, let’s do it.

At the end of the day, we waved goodbye to the smudged faces and walked to the bus stop, garnering plenty of stares from passersby who gawked at the skyscraping Norseman in their midst. The bus was a van which, no matter how many bodies wedged inside, was never considered full. We wove our limbs between sweaty workmen and grandmothers with jammed shopping bags and stoic expressions. “Beats a day at work!” said Lars from somewhere to my left. I grunted in assent.

The market could have been a dream. Not an ideal in the mind’s eye, but a Bermuda Triangle of subconscious fragments. Homeless images. As soon as we entered, we were lost. There were mangoes for sale alongside Spongebob boxer shorts. An arsenal of colognes and perfumes dappled with pink price tags sat beside racks of used CDs. I spotted Backstreet Boys’ Millennium and recalled a time when they couldn’t keep that on the shelf. Massive tower speakers clobbered the aisles with “Despacito” and “Criminal”; our heads bobbed of their own accord.

“Here we are,” I said, noting the pastel tones of kid world. We fingered the cheap plastic designs - detritus washed over from China that felt brittle and barely fought gravity. I was no iron man, but I felt I could crush anything on offer with a bare fist. I wondered if Lars felt that way when he looked at me.

The sight of a Norseman twirling six hula hoops around his ungainly hips was enough to bring the proprietors (a portly mustachioed father, a mama in a blouse dotted with pink roses, and two teenage daughters) to side splitting laughter. I took a few swings with a wiffle ball bat and hit a moonshot into the rafters above. The dad thrust forward his elder daughter, who blushed ferociously, and Lars bowed and kissed her hand, eliciting squeals from the females.

I’d never been able to distinguish foreign currency from monopoly money, and that’s how it felt as we forked over a few wads of the stuff in exchange for armloads of hula hoops, badminton rackets, ball-in-a-cups, rainbow-colored kites, wiffle bats, whistles, Groucho glasses, frisbees and kickballs. The legion of plastic edges clicked together as we strolled to the bus stop, the strange bazaar fading as dreams will do. It was four o’clock, but it could have been anytime, anywhere.

I lay in bed that night imagining the morning’s scene. This was a place where surprises were uniformly awful. Would it be like accepting candy from strangers? I guessed I was now the stranger.

They beamed but didn’t touch. The candy-colored pile sat on the ground, like poison coral. Lars strode to center stage and wrapped himself in every hula hoop in the stash. He whipped his mountainous figure in every direction, sending up a clatter of rings and the hiss of interior beads. I pressed my lips around a bright blue whistle and began to bleat madly and dance in circles around Lars. Two clowns showing kids how to play. This felt like a day’s work.

Finally, the bedlam we craved. Their shrieks incised the air like bottle rockets tied together in bunches. Plastic bats swung willy nilly and a few found bare skin; some tears of pain joined our odd symphony. A little boy with one arm beat on a toy drum and I admired him for setting a pulse. I kept dancing and twisting my body, flinging my inner fragments to the outskirts of the universe, borne by centrifugal force (the finest of the forces). An old man pushing a fruit cart stopped and stared through the black bars of the fence. It felt like he - the world even - was incarcerated. Us: the lifer’s mad fantasy of freedom.

Afterward, Lars and I gathered the dusty playthings and piled them behind the building (a box was out of the question). Lars clapped a palm branch hand on my shoulders and grinned. I showed my teeth in return, but a vacancy flitted past, a feeling like an elevator beginning its descent.

That night I lay naked on my granite slab of a mattress, sweating. The pulse of 808 ricocheted through the street outside undergirded by shrieking laughter which suggested tropical birds. When dreams came, it was akin to riding a carousel which you have only previously watched from the sidelines.

I’d never thought about what it might feel like to be a mummy, but I think I understood the next morning. The already baking light of dawn played across my face and movement felt perilous. Every crevice of my interior plumbing, from intestines to capillaries, felt cracked and barren, the walls sucking in on themselves, abhorring the vacuum. A maelstrom of nausea seethed in my stomach, and I leapt from bed. My bare feet slapped the floor as I jogged to the bathroom. It came out in chunks, fighting all the way. Panicked inner voices wondered if these were shards of my insides peeled from their bony scaffolding.

For the next five days, I was either curled around the filthy toilet or twisting in my bed. Hallucinations paid me a visit. In them, the children begged for more toys, and I produced all manner of strange mechanisms whose use I could not explain. They wept and said these were not what they wanted, and I promised I would try again.

On the first cool morning in weeks, the fever broke and moved on, a ghost searching for another house to haunt. I quivered at the breeze’s tender caresses. It was a mother: a rarity as precious as speech or sight.

“El salio,” the volunteer coordinator informed me. Lars was gone. She said he didn’t say why. It took a moment to digest this news, like it would for my body to digest anything for a while. Had he come to say goodbye and I had forgotten in my delirium?

I piled into the taxi with the others. There were several new faces looking limpid and ready for wounds, much like fresh bandages. The compression of flesh into scarce space was something I’d missed. I imagined a fish might feel this way after rejoining its school, attaining safety in numbers.

I mostly watched the morning’s lesson, allowing the French girls to bear the burden of explaining, in Spanish, the concept of division. I stared out the window at the tin rooftops. I thought of a lizard’s scales. I awaited a reunion with the madcap carousel at recess.

Things did a lot of vanishing around here. Parents, limbs, promises - all of it prone to sudden dissolution, leaving only a brief corona flickering in memory. You know that, in your own cells, that same frightened deer trembles, waiting for a reason to bolt into the safe and inscrutable shade.

It was the same listless scene: soggy soccer balls, hair braiding, a makeshift game of hopscotch. Startled, I searched for the toys. I found a blue whistle half buried and the splintered remnants of a stepped-on tennis racket. Nothing else. I interrupted the children and other volunteers at their games, inquiring after the lost playthings. Lots of head shaking and shoulder raising. The children wanted to know, with those deep black pools set in their foreheads, what kind of question this was? To expect to find what you’d left still clinging to existence.

I gave up and joined the soccer game. I scored two goals! I beamed and pumped my fists. Where was Lars now, I wondered? Swimming in the vast expanse of shadow beneath memory, no doubt.

We are accustomed to vigorous duration, bewitched by a supposed permanence. But the best memories are like insects frozen in amber which you may wear around your throat: an amulet to ward off Beelzebub.

Lunging to intercept a pass, I tangled feet with a little boy of about nine. He cackled with joy. His name was Pepe, I think. He jumped to his feet and swept away the lumpy black and white sphere. “Yo la tengo!” he cried, sparkly little pools trained on me, craving a reaction. Before I could speak, another boy slid between us and knocked the ball loose. He ran after it, Pepe ran after him, and I ran after the pair of them. We ran ourselves into the gone.