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Kevin introduced her as Bermuda Triangle. She corrected him, saying it was just Bermuda. Andy called her Tri out of a worn out joke. Jeanette called her Berm with the Perm, despite she never having had one. Jean-François rolled the r excessively in a French way when he talked about her, and his girlfriend avoided using her name at all because she thought Jean-François might secretly be in love with her. I met her on one of Kevin’s Sunday picnics at the park, but it turned out the reason she looked so familiar to me then was because she had been my neighbor in the apartment for the past six months. We had never seen more than each other’s profiles as we disappeared into our apartments.

There were things about Bermuda that were noticeable, but the first, besides her name, was the fact that she had a really severe limp in her left leg. I learned she wore a metal brace that strapped onto the top of her thigh and ran down to the sole of her shoes, with a rusted pivot joint at the ankle. She wore it under her pants, usually, but the metal brace clamped around her left shoe was always visible, like the stirrup of a worn horse saddle. Another thing that was noticeable about Bermuda was her accent—that, for Montréal, it was neither French nor English.

She said she was from Guadalajara originally. She had moved to Montréal and was taking English and French classes for free at Tongues, the dilapidated language school where Jeanette worked on the fourth floor of a place up Sainte-Catherine. Bermuda started there since she stopped being possible to afford Concordia. She ran out of money by the second semester, and, actually, her student visa had expired. She laughed when she showed us all the worn out date on the card as she explained a bit about herself at Kevin’s picnic. She said she wasn’t even supposed to be here anymore. She said it was like she wasn’t even real. But she was going to stay as long as she could ride it out, and that it was okay like that.

When Kevin introduced Bermuda to me, I remember thinking myself clever, saying oh, so you’re the one who’s been hiding all those airplanes and cruise ships, but before anyone could laugh she asked, sort of somberly, don’t you live in apartment 303?

I said yeah and paused. In an apartment way down in Point-Sainte-Charles, though. Wait, have I seen you before?

Yes, she said. I am living next to you. Our balcony is connected, I think.

Oh wow, yeah, I said, but don’t go out there. I think it’s only propped up by the two rusted nails left in the wood. That’s crazy, though, that you live there.

In those days, Kevin came around a lot. Usually with Andy, Jeanette, Jean-François, and Jean-François’s girlfriend in-tow. The apartment was only a bachelor suite with a kitchenette by the entrance, and a tiny bathroom where you could wash your hands in the sink while sitting on the bowl. It was far for most of them to travel besides maybe Jean-François who lived in Saint-Henri, but everyone seemed to find themselves so well at home that they made the trip down without ever thinking twice.

When they were over they’d take turns disheveling the blankets on the bed, spreading out on the sofa, and fighting over the computer chair in an effort to bring up something relevant on Wikipedia. When we realized that Bermuda lived right next to me, we extended the invitation to her to come waste her weekends with us. We developed a secret knock to use on the paper-thin walls between her place and mine to let her know she could come over—the movie was starting or a bottle of wine had just been opened. Without ever hesitating, she’d come over in her socks, leaving the brace back in her place. She would move carefully over to the bed, holding her leg a bit, turn around, and let herself fall onto the bed, sighing in relief at the same time.

The seven of us squeezed into that tiny space every weekend. By the end of most nights we’d have broken off: Kevin and I would be at the table playing a drunken game of Chess with the few remaining pieces, which were whittled away or defaced by kitchen knives and cigarette burns. Jean-François and his girlfriend would have their legs twisted up on the bed, whispering in French to each other as Jean-François ran his hands through her hair. Andy and Jeanette would often be in the kitchen, reviving parts of the dinner we had all cooked earlier in the evening, and Bermuda would float among us.

She’d lay flat on the bed next to JF and his girlfriend for a while, catching only parts of their conversation in French. She’d interject softly sometimes, asking grammar questions to discern between the French she was learning at Tongues and the French they were using to love on each other. She’d then stand up suddenly and show curiosity about what Andy and Jeanette were picking at in the leftovers. She’d explain to them that her mom taught her to make the best Mexican mole and that she’d have to make it for all of us to try some time if she could find all the ingredients in Montréal. She would take over for me at the Chess game sometimes, too. I’d sit back and watch her play against Kevin. Her face would become deeply serious, and she’d concentrate without ever saying a word until the game was over and she had won. She’d then say sorry to Kevin and explain that it was about time for her to shuffle back to her place.

One day, she and I hung out on our own without the other guys since we lived next door to one another. It started when I faintly knocked the secret knock on her wall when I was home alone just to see what would happen. I think she knew I was alone because her door creaked open slowly, and it took her almost a full five minutes to make it over to my apartment and tap at the door, like there was something she was unsure of.

I opened the door and quickly retreated to a seat at the kitchen table so that she would let herself in.

Hey, I said from within the apartment, sorry. I was just bored.

It’s okay, she said. I was bored, too. She closed the door behind her.

She sat down opposite me at the kitchen table. For some reason, it was one of those Sundays where I had made it to the late hours of the afternoon without ever turning a light on in the apartment, so, as we spoke, the room was a dull gray, growing into darkness. Something like Brian Eno was playing from my computer.

I offered to take out the Chessboard so we’d have something to do across the table. As we were lazily setting up the pieces, I worked up the courage to ask Bermuda if she ever told anyone about what happened to her leg. She said it was a really long story, and one she might have trouble telling or that I might have trouble listening to. I told her if she was comfortable, I was willing to listen. I asked her if this was a story I should turn the lights on for, but she said no. It’s the kind of story you tell in the dark.

When she was sixteen in Guadalajara she wanted to die. Even now she couldn’t really explain why, but she said from the day she turned sixteen on, the first feeling she had each day was that she should be dead. Her mother and father started looking tired of each other. They would sit at the dinner table with dark rings around their eyes. Her brother, after discovering his homosexuality, looked tired, too. He locked himself in his room and tried to wake up by pumping loud music into his ears. She went to school, and the faces of her friends all looked tired to her. The faces of her teachers looked exhausted. The cars moved like slugs around her on the streets. It was like even the Sun was holding back from an outburst about how tired it was of having to wake up and be present all the time. And she, herself, she was the most tired.

On her walk from school she would cross an overpass that went over a highway, and she’d think about jumping each day. It seemed like something that would put flavor into her mouth. Thinking about the fall and the wind hitting her face on the way down electrified her in a scary way.

She said, then, one morning, I couldn’t feel anymore. I can’t remember that day well at all. I only tell this story from the way I think it happened. I went to school and came home. I changed into my favorite clothes from my school uniform and went back to the overpass. I walked past three girls from my class, smiled at them, then jumped off without thinking.

She fell into the back of an oncoming pick-up truck and broke her hip, her femur, and most of the bones down the left leg and in her foot. When she woke up in the hospital, she said, suddenly, I wasn’t tired anymore.

I didn’t say much after her story. We sat in the dark of the apartment in silence, I think looking at each other across the table, taking our turns at the Chess game with disinterest. I thought a lot about the truck going by in her story. I imagined the driver standing on the brakes as the body fell from above. I pictured him calling 911 in a panic, hoping whoever it was wasn’t dead, wondering why she was dressed so well.

That was a long time ago, she said. I’m okay now. I mean, I’m not so tired anymore.

I thought for a moment, then asked, Does it still hurt?

If I don’t wear my brace for a few days, it hurts me a bit.

It must, I said, uncertain.

The apartment had completely sunk into darkness, but turning the lights on felt like it would ruin the privacy she had had while telling the story, so we just went on sitting with our eyes searching for each other across the table. The vague shapes of the black and white Chess pieces were the only things discernable.

For two weeks then, Bermuda stopped showing up when we knocked on her wall. I thought something had gone wrong, or that I had made her uncomfortable or vulnerable when I asked her what had happened. The guys assumed she was out or that she’d made friends with other people, like it wasn’t anything big. Andy said it wouldn’t be hard for her to find an alternative better than hanging out with us. Jeanette tried to convince him that we weren’t that boring. Jean-François’ girlfriend had a look of contentment in her face, while Jean-François kept singing Bermuda’s name aloud to call her forth from the other side of the wall. Kevin swore she’d be back. I never mentioned to anyone the story that Bermuda had told me, even though I knew that they must have been curious about her leg, too. Or, I thought, perhaps they already knew—they had each had their own private moment with Bermuda like I had. I thought about her often, though, and I wondered what kept her away from home for so long.

In the middle of the following week, on Thursday night, I had a dream where Bermuda was falling. Her voice said her leg was better, but she was falling, as if from the sky, onto truck beds heaped with metal leg braces. It just kept happening over and over. In a few instances, I was the driver of the truck, and I saw her for a split second falling with a smile on her face while I tried as hard as I could to stop the truck. But she’d fall every time into the truck bed, wearing a dress with defaced Chess pieces printed all over, or the leftovers she picked at with Jeanette and Andy, or patterned like my bed sheets. She didn’t make any kind of sound, except when she hit the braces it made a sound like our secret knock as she bounced around. After the fifth iteration of the fall and the knock in the dream, my eyes shot open in the apartment.

I heard something moving on the balcony outside the window near my bed, then I noticed a shadow with long arms hunched over the low clearing of the balcony’s roof. I recoiled for a second and thought about what I could grab to defend myself with without moving too much. A second later, Bermuda’s secret knock came from the balcony door, which I had bolted shut, never expecting to use it.

Hey, you, she whispered from the other side of the door, open up.

I got up quickly and unbolted it. She looked unsure of herself when I finally got the door open. She apologized for waking me up, but she wanted to say something to me.

Sorry, she said, for disappearing. She looked exhausted. Her long dark hair was more tangled up than usual.

It’s alright, I said. I think I can understand.

My heart was still racing from the adrenaline of being wakened, so I didn’t move from the doorway right away.

She carried herself carefully over to my bed wearing her socks, turned around, and let herself fall. I asked if she was okay, and she said yes. She had just felt weird about something since the day she told me her story. She had wanted to spend some time not around other people.

That’s understandable, I said. I’m sorry to have asked you to share something so—

But there is something more, she said, that I wanted to say—on that day that I told you the story.

Okay, I said.

But it is a secret, she said, and it is strange.

I told her, again, that I’d be willing to listen if she wanted to share. I sat down on the opposite end of the bed to hers, where she was now half-lying and half-sitting. I could just barely make out her eyes were closed with the orange glow of the streetlight coming in between the shades.

It’s like, I mean, she stumbled, for me, in my life, it always appears like I’m losing someone. Or that people are disappearing. Without reason even. When they leave, it feels like my other leg is bad, too. It feels like I don’t have arms, sometimes, and all I can do is stay in bed, feeling the last parts of my body that are left. They are the last things I hope won’t leave me. It started after my accident, she said.

Bermuda explained that after she woke up in the hospital, her parents actually never came to see her. Her brother didn’t either. Even up until now, she has never been able to find them. When she was released and went home, she found semblances of her parents and brother living in the house, but their names felt strange to pronounce, and they didn’t recognize her at all. They invited her in when they found her knocking at the door, but they explained that they were sorry, they had never had a daughter before, and, no, they didn’t know where her family had moved to.

She looked for her one grandmother in Guadalajara, too, but there was no evidence of her house between the two houses Bermuda remembered as belonging to her grandmother’s neighbors. She searched for her friends, but the parents of Lupe said she had gone on a study abroad program to Spain, and that she had never mentioned having a friend named Bermuda. María’s parents answered the door, but they were a lesbian couple instead, and when they called María down from her room to meet her friend at the door, María took one look at Bermuda and ran back to lock herself in her room. When her parents unlocked the door with Bermuda at their side, María was nowhere to be found in the room. Her face went up on milk cartons around the city later, and no one ever saw her again.

When Bermuda somehow came to terms with her world missing, she moved into a rescue home for at-risk teenage girls and went back to school to finish the only thing left that she could think of. Even there, the teachers were all different. There was no one she recognized in all of Guadalajara.

I interrupted Bermuda’s story a few times, and I told her I thought she had had a bad dream. I wondered if she wasn’t still asleep, somehow sleepwalking and talking there on my bed. She said no, that this had definitely happened, and that’s why it was so hard to explain. She was massaging her leg, and she had moved to lie flat out on the bed.

When I was older, she said, after I finished school, I met Angel. He was a car mechanic, living just outside of Guadalajara. He fixed the beaten up car I had a few times. We were in the same class when I graduated high school, but we didn’t talk much then. His parents had a small farm with a few chickens, two motorbikes, and some land that stretched into the mountains, where he sometimes rode with his younger brother, Raúl.

They were really happy all the time. I mostly just remember his family smiling. They smiled at the bread guy who dropped off the bread and milk to them each week. They laughed when the neighbor up the dirt road stopped by to talk about the weather. They smiled while telling stories to each other in their living room. Raúl smiled while he mimicked the motorbikes. They smiled while they put down the feed for the chickens around the yard. They smiled a lot at me, and, one day, after spending a whole week on his farm, Angel said he loved me while he was smiling. I told him I loved him, too, and I went back to my place in the city to pick up my things before moving in with him and his family on the farm.

When I got back, she said, there was no more road to their farm, like it had been erased. I felt crazy for this to be happening again. I drove around for two days, up and down the crossroad, looking for the road between the trees on the mountain. I got out a few times, and I hiked up to see if I could find Angel’s farm somewhere down below. I never found it.

I went back with my things to my apartment in Guadalajara. I slept sometimes only feeling like I had one good eye left, and that everything else of mine had disappeared.

Finally, she said, I decided to disappear from Guadalajara. Now you see me here on your bed.

I moved from the edge of the bed and lied down next to her, leaving some distance between us. My head was resonating with the story she had told. Obviously, I couldn’t believe any of it. There is no way, I told her, with my eyes fixed on the ceiling. Why would that happen?

She said that now she was sometimes able to see it as just a way the world changed after she jumped from the overpass. Sometimes it felt just like little changes and not like she had lost her family, Lupe and María, or Angel. She could lay in bed and feel all of her limbs except the one bad leg. Other times, like after she had told me the story of her accident, the disappearances dug deeper at her. She felt urges to go rampaging around her apartment, looking for all of them under her blankets, in her sofa, or hidden down in the depths of her shoes or in the few journals she brought with her from home.

After that she paused. She said she was sorry for telling me all of that. It wasn’t a secret she wanted to make me responsible for. She asked me where I was from and, maybe sarcastically, if my world ever felt like hers, like if my limbs ever felt like they disappeared when people left me.

I swallowed and thought about it.

I grew up maybe thirty minutes from here. You know, it’s kind of different from your story, but when I was young, my mom and dad attempted suicide pretty often. It was like a competition between the two of them to see who could get closer to doing it. I remember things like my mom taking all the Tylenol in the house; my dad stepping in front of a train and telling my brother and sisters about it. It really changed how we were able to look at them, you know? In a way, each time they tried was like they had actually died. We didn’t know how to talk to the ghosts of them when they came back from the hospital. There came a point where they couldn’t tell us anymore that it was going to be alright. We just ate the McDonald’s our aunt brought over as she escorted them back home. Then, we went back to watching TV. Now, I think we understand it was something they did out of depression, you know? Their need to get away from each other was violent. I guess they’re just lucky to have made it out of that.

Can you still see them? she asked, I think meaning do I still see them.

Yeah. I do. Sometimes. Less the older I get and the more I want to. It’s never easy to talk about what happened.

She was looking up at the ceiling next to me, with one arm massaging her left leg and the other she put up in the air to watch the outline of her hand in the dark above her.

We should be careful, she said.

We fell asleep later, not much closer, but I remember being conscious or nervous in my sleep of my arms reaching over to the foreign body in my bed.

For the next three days, Bermuda and I hardly left the apartment. We got up from the bed and looked out of the window at the last August rainstorms pummeling the street below. We didn’t say a whole lot to each other either. Bermuda stepped out once to grab ingredients from her apartment to make mole. She told me if I liked it well enough, she might make it again for all the guys next weekend. We searched for all the Pedro Almadovar movies because she was in the mood for listening to people speak Spanish, and I told her I really liked Volver. We danced a bit around the apartment to an old Cindy Lauper tape she said someone left in her apartment until Bermuda said she was tired. She showed me the scars on her leg, which won’t disappear. She said it was okay, though.

This is a moment when I feel like the only thing wrong is my leg, she said. I have the rest of me. She smiled.

The Monday after that, when my eyes peeled open, the apartment was gone from Bermuda. Everything was lifted and transplanted in a place where she couldn’t be found, where she didn’t ever again answer the secret knock on her wall. Everything outside the apartment was gone, too. The balcony finally unhinged completely, and the hallway outside the door to 302 was no longer like it used to be. I’m still around with Kevin, Jeanette, Andy, Jean-François, and his girlfriend, and we don’t talk about anything much really. I am somewhere dark like the unlit apartment. Somewhere where I watch Volver on repeat, but the words mean nothing. I can think about the accident, a girl hitting a truck bed, my mom emptying the pill bottles, my dad walking in front of a train, the taste of my aunt’s McDonald’s. I can also think about Bermuda falling back on my bed with a sigh of relief, throwing her hands up in the dark to look at their outlines above her head, how the outlines sometimes look like her hand, then my mother’s, then my father’s. But I can’t get any better than that. The mole I keep trying to make has no taste. The Chess games are all vague and incomplete. When someone laughs, it sounds as though it came from the other side of the wall. No matter what I do to flip the lights on, it’s dark, and it’s like everything in the apartment is tired. Especially me. I’m so tired.

Stephan Antoine Viau holds an MFA in poetry from Louisiana State University, where he served as assistant fiction editor and poetry editor for New Delta Review. He was the director of the 2020 Delta Mouth Literary Festival, put on in conjunction with New Delta Review and The Southern Review. He is the recipient of the 2018 William Jay Smith Award for Poetry, judged by Douglas Kearney. He lives in Baton Rouge with his family.