The start of a revolution

         When I was young, I didn’t realize that the world was crumbling to pieces.  I grew up away from corruption, on a small plantation near the edge of the last living tropical rainforest on the planet.  We didn’t have a television or a computer, and my parents kept track of the rest of the world, which seemed so far away, through newspapers and an old radio.  I spent most of my time outside.

         I still vividly remember my childhood home.  The natural hum of the rainforest was always audible above the sound of working people and the guttural growl of machinery.  The days were green and golden, and the nights were bright with the sheen of the moon.  Sometimes, my two older sisters and I would sit on the roof and stargaze while the sound of insects and nocturnal animals sang to us softly.  On other nights, when rain pattered against the walls, we sat inside and told stories around a small candle that cast flickering light on our faces.  Our lives were incredibly simple, and we had nothing to worry about but our chores and the various poisonous or dangerous animals that sometimes found their way inside.

         All that suddenly changed with the arrival of a tall, pale foreigner, who came to our door just before my tenth birthday.  He was wearing an olive suit that was far too thick for our humid climate and a pair of clean, white gloves, and he shimmered with golden pins and sweat.  He asked to talk with my father.  They stayed in my father’s study a long time, and when he left, we started packing.

         Two trucks with wide beds came to pick us up a week later.  They took us to a small airplane, and it took us across the broad ocean to a city sprawling for miles across dead ground.  As I stared out the window, I could only think of a parasitic fungus, stealing life as it spread.  It was a cold, dull scene, gray and black, incredibly different from the world I had known since I was born.  My heart sunk painfully.

         Our new house was four stories tall and two tiny rooms wide.  It was cold and empty, and the stairs were too steep for me to climb with my suitcase.  Exhausted, I sat on my new bed and looked out of the patio doors against which it was pushed.

         There was a small veranda outside, which stretched between my room and my sisters’ room.  Beyond its wall, I could see the hazy sky and the tops of hundreds of run-down apartment buildings, badly in need of repair.  I unlocked the glass door, slid it open, and slipped outside.  I shivered, unused to the chilly climate.  The air felt dirty in my lungs.

         I took a step towards the concrete barrier and leaned over, covering my mouth and nose with the thin sleeve of my shirt.  There was a brick wall on the other side of the road, topped with barbed wire, and directly across from me, a heavy metal door leaked rust onto the sidewalk.  Signs and posters written in a language I couldn’t understand were plastered up and down it.  I had never seen anything like it before, and a strange, uncomfortable feeling grew deep in my chest. 



         I don’t remember when I first began watching the slums across the street.  It was after I had read all of my books several times and before my father bought our first television.  Whenever my sisters were busy, I slipped out onto the veranda and sat on the concrete wall, looking across the road and beyond the barbed wire.  The people that lived there were strange and, to me, frightening, as if they weren’t human at all but some different kind of creature altogether.  They hunched low when they walked, gripping their ragged clothing close to their dirty bodies, and they moved quickly from place to place.  Sometimes, I could not tell old women from young men.  From my vantage point, safe on the other side of the brick wall, it felt like I was watching animals in a zoo.

         Late one night, after I had tried in vain to fall asleep, I opened the patio door and climbed onto the concrete wall.  The streetlights lit the slum.  Three people were huddled together near one of the shoddy apartment buildings, trying to hide in the shadows while they finalizing some strange transaction.  Perhaps they were bartering stolen food or jewelry, or maybe one of them had a new, comfortable pair of shoes and was trying to get something nice in exchange for them.  I saw many transactions like it before.

         Suddenly, a shout echoed down the street, and we all started.  Two men, an officer and a brightly-dressed man from outside the wall, were running towards the slum people, and all three dispersed gracefully like spirits in black clothing.  Two of them managed to slip into an apartment building, locking the door tight behind them.  The last one, without much choice, continued down the street, sprinting fast though he probably hadn’t eaten much in the past day.  His hood fell back, revealing long, bronze hair and a beautiful face.  He was incredibly young.

         The officer overtook him in seconds, grabbing his silky hair and throwing him to the ground.  I heard him grunt as he fell hard on his side.  He tried to roll away, but the other man stopped him with a hard kick in the face.  The boy curled up, holding his bleeding head.

         The man leaned down and wrenched his head up by his hair.  “What are you doing out here at this time of night, eh?  Who were those men?” he demanded.  The beautiful boy mumbled something that I could not hear.  They continued to talk in this way; the man spoke roughly, and I could hear nothing but the inflection of the boy’s voice, rising and falling in whimpers.  The officer watched stoically.

         Finally losing his temper completely, the man stood up and forced the boy to his feet, and as he pulled him by his hair into a shady alleyway, I saw him reach for a thick club hanging loosely from his belt.  I slipped off the wall then, my mouth dry and my heart pounding painfully against my ribs.  I jumped slightly when I heard the sound of a blunt, heavy object making contact with flesh.  My hands trembled against the handle of the patio door.  A shriek followed me inside.

         I dreamt of that boy every night that week.



         Inevitably, I was forced to start school.  My father made my new school sound like a sanctuary; it was a private school, he explained, and only the best children went there.  I would have to wear a school uniform, a navy blue suit that my mother thought was incredibly handsome.

         I had thought that I would welcome the chance to get out of the cramped house, but as I walked into the school building, which jutted straight up into the sky and glared at the city with its barred windows, I felt a cold nausea settle uncomfortably in my stomach.  My mother was with me, but she was no consolation.  She seemed as afraid as I was.

         A balding man in a musty suit led us to my new classroom.  It was full of children who looked different than I did and spoke in a language I couldn’t understand.  I cowered as the teacher, a tall woman with bright lipstick, placed her hand gently on my shoulder and introduced me to the class.  She talked about me for an unbearably long time, and when I was finally allowed to sit, my face was burning and I knew that I was glowing red.

         The day passed slowly, and the other children only tried to talk to me once.  They left me as soon as they realized that I could not understand them.  I sat alone at lunch and again at my free period.  I wanted to go home and stay there.

         Still, I came back the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that.  My parents bought me a new bag and nice school supplies.  I began to look less and less like a wild boy from the jungle and more like an educated city kid.

         As I began to look more like my peers, however, I grew to despise them, and I made no effort to integrate myself into any of their social circles.  Everyday, as I sat in the back of the classroom and watched them interact with each other, I came closer to a conclusion that I would spend years trying to shake out of my mind: that people were jealous, that people were mean, that people were shallow and stupid and mindless things without imagination.  My classmates seemed to possess no good qualities.  They were the spoiled children of wealthy people, and they each seemed to think that they were amazingly privileged by their own efforts, as if they had earned their comfortable lifestyle through their own imagined intelligence or talent.  They didn’t know what real want or need felt like, and at the same time, they had no idea what real satisfaction was.  I spent my school days scoffing at them and their closed microcosm behind their backs.

         And as the year progressed, I spent more time sitting on my veranda, watching the slum people.  I stopped being afraid of them.  I felt sad for them, and then indignant, and then incredibly angry.  For the first time, I saw snow, and I was cold.



         That spring, my father bought our first television.  It wasn’t too big and it didn’t get more than a hundred channels, but it was enough to be the mortar in the wall that separated my family.

         Every night after classes got out, I would take a train from my school to a station three blocks from my house, and then I would walk the rest of the way home.  Before the day the television arrived, my mother would be sewing, knitting, reading, or maybe sketching when I walked through the door.  I would sit beside her and do my homework until my sisters came home, and then my mother would start making dinner and we would talk or play cards. 

Things changed after the television came.  It was audible when I walked through the door, and it stayed on all night, except for during dinner.  To my parents, especially my mother, it was a way to learn the local language.  We still talked to each other in our native tongue, but in the background, there was always the sound of the world that now surrounded us.  Even when we shut and locked the door, the city leaked in and broke into our conversations.

         Once, after dinner, a program came on.  It was some sort of documentary.  An overdressed white man was walking through the rainforest, following some of the last indigenous people as they searched for food.  The sweat shone on their foreheads and on the dark backs of the near-naked people.  Light filtered through layers of growth, and twigs snapped musically beneath their bare feet.  And in our house, in a dirty, soulless city, in a cold, foreign land, somewhere miles and miles away from that beautiful, heavenly place, my family stopped talking completely and watched the television.



         I got so used to the loneliness that sank deep into my body that I forgot about it until high school, when I finally made a friend.  He was tall and blonde, and he talked to me as if I weren’t a tumor in the student population.  When we first spoke, I thought he was making fun of me.

         “Hey,” he greeted, sitting at my empty lunch table.  I glowered at him.  Unfazed, he continued, “My name’s Ted.  You’re Jaime, right?”

         I hesitated before responding, “Yes.”

         “I’ve heard about you.”

         “You have?”

         “Yeah.  I like your accent a lot.”

         He grinned, and I felt the corner of my mouth twitch in annoyance.  “Thanks,” I growled, focusing again on my processed food.

         “Where did you come from?”

         I knew what he wanted me to say, and I almost didn’t answer at all.  I almost got up and walked away.  But I chose to humor him.  “The rainforest.”

         “That’s what I heard,” he breathed.  I glanced up at him and was surprised to see awe marking his face.  “What was it like there?”

         “Wet,” I said, shrugging.  “And hot.”

         “I mean, what sort of plants and animals were there?”

         “There were a lot of them.”

         “What did the sky look like?”

         “It was blue, and black at night.  There were a lot of stars.”

         He stared at me, enrapt, and I thought he had finished asking questions and again began to eat.  “You speak really well,” he finally said, interrupting me once more.

         I grimaced.  “I’ve lived here a long time.”

         “Everyone told me that you couldn’t speak well.”

         “Would they know?  They don’t talk to me.”

         “That’s true,” he chuckled half-heartedly, and I knew that I had finally managed to make him feel guilty on behalf of the entire school.

         “I try to read a lot of your language,” I explained, softening my tone just slightly.  “And I study with the teacher.”

         He relaxed a little and smiled.  “Why don’t you try to talk to more people, then?”

         I grimaced.

         He paused before venturing, “You like to be alone, don’t you?”

         “No.”

         “You don’t?” he asked, surprised.  “Then why don’t you hang out with anyone?”

         “I don’t like the people here.”

         “Oh… why?”

         I sighed, and the bell rang.  I immediately got up and left him sitting at the table alone.

         I didn’t dislike him, and I didn’t know why.



         After several week’s worth of lunch periods, he claimed to be my best friend, and I let him.  He introduced me to the people he knew.  Surprisingly, he was rather popular.  I didn’t benefit much socially from his attention, but I did feel a pressure inside me lighten noticeably.

         Since we seemed to have almost nothing in common, he passed the time we spent together asking me questions.  Mostly, they were simple and basic, like “What’s your favorite color?” and “How big’s your family?”  But the questions he really liked asking were about my past life.  At first, I was hesitant to talk about it, and I couldn’t understand the reason.  The words seemed to stick to the inside of my throat, dry and thick.  I could do nothing but describe it vaguely in short, clipped sentences that did no justice to my memories.  I knew that it disappointed him.

         Finally, near the end of spring, I found my voice again.  We were sitting in the library, near the windows that overlooked the small, uninhabited courtyard.  It was as green as anything in the city ever got; there were one or two trees that, though scrawny, had managed to grow surprisingly tall, and the branches were blooming with leaves and pinkish flowers.

         “Were there trees like that in the rainforest?” Ted asked me, watching me watch them.

         “No,” I said.  “Our trees were bigger.”

         “Bigger?”

         “Yeah.  One hundred times as big.  If you climbed one of our trees, you could touch the sky and bring a piece home to your family.  It would feed them for weeks.”

         “Yeah, right!” he laughed.  “You can’t eat the sky.”

         “Not this one,” I murmured.  We both glanced up at the haze that made the sky look like mucus.

         “Would you move back if you could?” he asked.

         “Yes,” I said, sighing.  “Yes.”

         “Please tell me more about it.  I really wanna know.”

         When I looked at him, I saw something in his expression that I immediately knew I wanted.  It was a searching, grasping thing, deliberate and not quite desperate.

         Suddenly anxious, I opened my mouth to speak, and I remembered everything about my old, old life that visited my dreams in the dead of night, just close enough to dawn that I could recall them fuzzily in the morning.  Like always, the words caught.  I licked my lips and looked at my hands, which had grown pale.

         My skin never used to be so pale.  Physically, I was a city boy.  A pale city boy that sat inside and only dreamt at night.  I knew that there had to be someone else inside of me.

         “Do you have paper?” I asked Ted.  He reached into his bag and pulled out a notebook.  “How about crayons or markers?”  He had those, too.

         I opened the notebook and pulled out several colors.  Green, blue, yellow, red.  Anything but gray and black.  For the next few minutes, wordlessly, I bent over Ted’s notebook and colored the picture that refused to leave my mouth.  When I had finished, I showed it to him.

         “This was my home.”

         My picture, which was everything I had been trying to say, lubricated the words that were waiting in the back of my throat, and as I pointed to things and identified them, I found myself talking quickly, rapidly, forgetting to pause and breathe.  My accent grew thicker.  I stumbled on vocabulary I had spent years learning.  I grew so excited that my checks flushed pink.

         We skipped our next class, hiding between shelves in the library and looking for pictures in books and on the Internet.  I told him more than he had ever asked for, and he listened to every word.

         Since I had become a city boy, no one had ever paused to listen to me.  It was good to talk.



         “Can I come to your house?” Ted asked one day during our junior year of high school.

         “Why?”

         “I dunno.  I wanna meet your family.”

         I hesitated.  I knew that Ted was a rich kid; everyone in my school was a rich kid.  My father spent a lot of money on my education, but we weren’t rich.  We lived next to the slums.

         “I live far from here,” I said.

         “You can’t live that far.  I mean, you come to school every morning.”

         “Yeah, but… I have to take the train, and—”

         “I’ve never been on a train before!” he exclaimed, and he glowed with enthusiasm.

         I sighed.  “You shouldn’t want to.”

         “Why not?”

         I paused, and he took my silence as a rejection.

         “C’mon, Jaime, please?” he pleaded.  “I just wanna go just once.  If it’s that far, can’t I stay overnight or something?”

          “…I’ll ask my parents.”

         I thought I would come back the next day without asking and tell him that they said no.  But that night, during dinner, I really did ask.

         “May I bring a friend over?”

         My whole family looked at me, astounded.  “From school?” Eva asked, trying not to sound too incredulous.

         “Yeah.”

         “Do you think that’s a good idea?” my father asked.

         “He’s nice,” I replied simply.

         My parents exchanged looks.

         “He’d have to stay the night, though.  He lives a long way away.”

         “Well,” my father said, still eyeing my mother, “if you want to bring a friend over, Jaime, we won’t stop you.  But be careful.”

         “I will.”

         And so, that Friday, Ted walked with me to the station after school and we rode the train together.  It was a dirty, unpleasant way to travel, but he seemed to enjoy it nonetheless, if only for the sake of the experience.  We got off at my station and began the walk to my house.

         “What’s that wall?” he asked, pointing to the brick wall on the other side of the road.  I pretended like I didn’t hear him.

         For once, the television was off.  My mother was making something special, something she used to make for us all the time when we were children, and even though it tasted different when she used the ingredients from the grocery, the thought was touching.  She smiled at Ted as he entered the kitchen.

         “Nice to meet you,” she said, straining through her heavy accent.  My mother didn’t get out as much as the rest of us.

         “Nice to meet you, too,” Ted replied, grinning broadly.

         We stood in the kitchen for a few minutes, trying to act comfortable.  Ted did his best to look at everything without actually moving.  I had never been to anyone else’s house, so I didn’t know how my house differed from his, but I could tell that he was impressed with my mother’s little decorations and trinkets.

         “You like?” she asked him, pointing at an old mask on the wall.

         “Yeah.”

         She smiled.  “Jaime,” she said to me, switching to our native language, “why don’t you show him the rest of the house?  I think he would like to see it.”

         I nodded.  “Come with me,” I told him, and I took him up the stairs to my room.

         We were chatting mindlessly as I prepared a place for him to sleep that night.  He sat on the edge of my bed and looked out of the patio doors.

         “What is that?” he murmured, staring at the expanse of broken apartment buildings.  I acted like I didn’t hear him.  “Hey, Jaime?”

         “Hmm?”

         “Across the street there.  Is that like a prison or something?”

         “What sort of prison would look like that?”

         “I dunno.”  He paused and then got up and slid the door open.

         “Uh, Ted!” I said, getting up as he walked outside.  “Don’t stand outside, or you’ll get sick.”

         “Why would I get sick?” he laughed.  When he didn’t come back in, I sighed and followed.

         “Are you sure that’s not a prison?  Look, there’s barbed wire and everything!”

         “No, it’s not a prison.  It’s the slums.”

         “The slums?”

         “Yeah.  Haven’t you heard about them?”

         “Well, yeah…” he said, frowning.  “But I didn’t know that they looked like this.”

         “You didn’t?”

         “No.  They're really big.”

         “Yeah.”

         “Can we go in?” he asked.

         “What?  No!”

         “Why not?”

         “It’s really dangerous in there!  Look, read the signs!”

         He fell silent and studied the land behind the brick wall.  “Those people don’t look that dangerous,” he said after a few seconds, pointing at two slum people huddling on some steps.

         “I wasn’t talking about them.”

         He glanced at me, confused.

         “Things go on in there,” I explained quietly.  “People go in and do weird things.”

         “Like what?” he whispered.  Suddenly, we were telling horror stories.

         I shook my head.  “I dunno.  But the police help them.”

         “And what about those people?” he asked, pointing again at the two slum people.

         “They don't have anything.  Sometimes they starve and die on the streets.”

         “You’ve seen that happen?”

         I nodded.

         “That’s not right,” he whispered.  “How can that happen?”

         “That’s what the slums are.”

         “It’s not right, though!  I didn’t even know that there were people that lived like this!” he exclaimed.  I didn’t know what to say.  We were quiet for a few minutes.

         “Hey, Jaime?” he finally said.

         “Hmm?”

         “Something’s gotta be done about this.”

         I looked at him, and he had that something in his expression again, that something that I wanted.

         “Let’s help.”

         Slowly, I nodded, and a little spark of that something found its way into my soul.  With its fire, we would one day start a revolution.