Masks in the room. I'm masked too.
"Stay down," I repeat, to Moritz.
The lady with my name does not seem so surprised and falls to the ground until boots walk in.
Luviel falls to my eye-level, she is gripping her side.
My grandmother runs to Luviel's side and covers her.
Then my grandmother lashes back as if being hit by something on her center back.
Pounding is heard behind me, and the luchadores fall like they would on TV, except they did soâthenâon mattresses', wrestling mattresses', whereas here they fall on the floor, with nothing to protect them or cushion their fall.
I take myself off of Moritz and crawlâor attempt to crawlâtowards my grandmother.
My grandmother is still next to Luviel.
Luviel's hand falls. Her grip is no longer over any hole or wound.
In a snake-ish position, in a snake-ish slither, I make my way to my grandmother. Or am I dead? Have I been dead?
"Ludy," my grandmother lets out in a warning tone.
"Ludy," she repeats, grabbing my hand.
Then I feel Luviel grab my hair and pull it back. "You fucking bitch!" she says.
The ceilingâthe ceiling of this place is nice. I had not noticed it before. Blue like the skyâthat's what the paint is like. I look at it when my eyes are pulled upwards, towards it. My eyes are stretched out from the pull my hair gets from the hand, the fingers.
It's usually the ones we can't escape at youth that entrap us for all our later days to come.
****************
"You fucking bitch!" I hear Luviel repeat.
My eyes are dragged back even more. The ceiling is beautiful. Or maybe it is that I don't give a shit about anything at a time like thisâwhen I can possibly be snapped to blackâthat I believe everything really is beautiful: if you can see it...
...it is beautiful.
During the dragging and my admiring, Luviel moves her hands down and up, dragging my vision with herâin this drag, my vision saw the lady with my name getting ever so closer to me. She was also dragging herself.
But where is Zero?
The whistling around us stops. When it did, so did the bodies on the groundâthe whistling made the bodies stop slamming and "knocking".
"Get off of me," I hear Luviel scream, and at that time too, my eyes went loose, no longer attached to the ceiling, or forced to look up at it. The straining on my hair was also released. I could once again control my own hair line, along with my scalp, as it was no longer being pulled back.
The release on my face allows me to look around at all that was happening around me and not just at the target I was intending to reach: my grandmother.
What my vision did see was more soldiers. They were all huddling and scattering around the lady with my name as if to protect her. I saw this same move once when the president almost got shot and the secret service forcers had to build a human-wall around himâpossibly a better-serving wall too than the one he built, than the one he sacrificed so many lives to build.
The soldiersâdifferent colors they were too, unlike the red and blue I was used toâhad bigger vests than the Catz, and they had hats, and thicker boots, and the straps and badges on their shoulders and arms weren't that of the Catzâthe Catz didn't really have anyâbut these soldiers did.
"Mamâhow are you?" one of them asks.
Big men and women, about as big as Zeroâthat is the size of most of these soldiers, the ones helping the lady with my nameâtalk to the lady with my name as if they know her.
"How many of ours are down?" another soldier asks the lady with my name.
She finishes helping them untie her bands before replying:
"All of them," she regretfully releases.
The big men and women drop their eyes. Their heads fall for a second and then they're back in action.
Luviel is being held down, and now, what she did to us, is being done to her: her hands are being tied in plastic.
"Fuck you!" she screams, repeatedly.
**************
"Mam! Your mother?" one soldier lets out, helping my grandmother to her feet, handing her a big grey towel to place over her like a turtle placing its homey shell over its back to return to the place it belongs, the place of comfortâto return to its place of living.
The lady with my name looks at me.
"Yes," she says.
Then, the lady with my name walks to me.
She looks at the closest soldier to me and she head-bobs towards me as if to tell him to help me, as if to give him the sign he needed to offer me his service.
The soldier gets to work on my feet first.
Once I hear the band snap, a wave of life flushes over me. A sense of freedom I have never felt before hits me straight at the core.
Then I see Moritz.
Moritz!
Then the bands on my hands snap.
"You're good to go," the soldier says to a distracted, mind-robbed me.
Moritz.
Then the lady with my name grabs my newly-released hands and encloses them with hers. She lifts themâsort ofâat breast level and she gives me her full attention.
"It's me," the lady with my name says.
"Is he okay?" I ask without wanting to askâmainly asking because my vision is at Moritz.
The luchadores are down and Moritz is down, and if the people helping a down man are now down, who is going to help the man down not be so down?
"Who is going to help him?" I let out once more.
There are tiny beats over his chestâover Moritz' chestâI can see that from here; there is a beat of hop...as my uncle would have hoped back in his store.
*************
If we were slaves then, could we not still be slaves now?
We are to this living room. And we were to the bandages barely taken off my wrists and ankles. And the ones that blinded me before getting here; or the ones that muted me and censored my cries and screams and yells before being dragged out and released into more death.
**************
"Ludyâlook at me..." the lady with my name demands, turning and forcing my face to face her face.
The tears were no longer controlled by me.
"We need to help him," I reiterate, over and over and over again, the tears flowing over my lipsâand some into my mouthâthen onto my shirt; they were non-stop now, a real water-flow.
"Ludy," the lady with my name beganâor continued...
But she couldn't finish:
"We need to get out of here before they send more. It's still on," said one of the soldiers, grabbing the lady with my name and looking back to show her the blinking light over the camera that covered the dead young youth behind the crane holding it in place, on the floor.
The camera makes me think a thought I never thought I'd think: maybe it's good that the other people, on the other side, saw all this killing and crime; maybe it'll all help them; maybe it'll all help us cope with insanity, because as they will see, it is already here.
"We must hurry," the soldier said, placing another hand on me. Or was it a different soldier?
On the other side of the Wall, we never had to worry. We never had to worry about what would happen if we didn't hurry to protect each other. On the other side of the Wall, we did as we like. We did as we wanted. We did as we were told to by our bodies. But here, on this side of the Wall, I've only had to do what I've been told to do, I've never been able to hurry on my own time, or to truly live on my time. It's always do this, or do that, or go here, go there, run there, run there, kill them, kill her, kill himâhurry, hurry, hurry to do everything but live.
****************
At the dashing prance we are being dragged by, I still manage to slip another "we must take him to the hospital."
"We are," a luchador let's out.
They will! They will?
"The University of East Wall medical Centre is the closest," one of the women lifting Moritz says.
The University of East Wall Medical Center, like their badges?
"They're from there," I said.
Did I say it? Does it matter if nobody heard me?
Yell it! I hear myself, tell myself:
"They're from there! The men! The medics, or whoever was helping him," I say.
Moritz coughs again.
"If he makes it, we need to go now."
"But they came from that hospital," I say.
"Who?" the lady with my name replies, fully free, now taking command of the situation.
But when my brain thinks back, I remember that I never let the lady with my name tell me what she wanted to tell me.
"One of them has a tag," I say, dragging my eyes to the lower bottom where I had seen it. But where is it now?
"Who," asks the lady with my name.
All the luchadores are checked, but the tag I say I saw is nowhere to be found, or, seen.
"We have no time, Ludy," says the Lady with my name. "Take him out, hurry!" she then says to the soldiers carrying Moritz.
"But what if they're waiting for him?" I say.
"Ludyâhe does not have long. And the next hospital is another thirty miles away. Thirty miles!" The lady with my name lets out.
"Yeahâwell this isn't the other side of The Wall," I hear one of the woman's soldiers say. "Meds aren't cheap here."
*****************
ThenâI hear an alarm!
It's like screams.
It's not coming from inside the building, or the house. It's an alarm that's more like scrams. They're these shoutsâor as my grandmother would like to say: they're like the cries of la Llorona, which in English translates to "the crybaby...the weeper."
"Come one!" screams the lady with my name, while grabbing my grandmother who was spooked half-to-death in the arms of a different soldier.
I believe this kind of "spooked" has a name: traumatized.
My grandmother is in shock.
And the cries continueâthey continue in forms of screams. And loud ones too, mimicking the beat and rhythm of an alarm you'd hear from an ambulanceâthen again, all alarms have the same rhythm.
And when you think about it, it's the rhythm of the heart that the rhythm of an alarm matches; and to me, that can't be a coincidence; I, perhaps, think that whoever made the alarm sounds, whoever made that beat, whoever matched it up for all the types of alarms that exist in this world, did it on purpose so that we are reminded what it is that we are being alarmed ofâwe are being alarmed of our life, of what we have that is in danger; it's the bump bump, the ring ring that takes us back to our monitor, beating deep inside our chest.
*******************