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Marco dreams of something greater.
America wraps its giant arms around him in a warm embrace and whispers promises of a better life. And he believes it every time.
Putting his belief into a promise was worth more than throwing his belief into the fountain to sink with an empty ‘I wish,’ and reaching into the water for a handful of strangers’ wishes just so he could buy himself a meal.
He sleeps well, most nights, when the sweltering heat doesn’t get to him before the morning. The voices of his roommates fade into the background if they’re not being written into his journal. Some evenings they would sing, some they fought, and cried. And each time, he listens to it all.
Farouk keeps him up on occasion, tossing and turning in the bunk bed beneath him, praying to God, begging for his mother until he doesn’t know what to say. Marco listens and his heart breaks for his cousin, and swells in relief that he is the one who squeezes his hopes and dreams in his fist instead of letting them fall through the cracks of his fingers.
It had to be one of them.
He decided when they came to America that he will take the blows. He promised. But he feels a stab of pain each night, a dread and fear that Farouk will break it.
Farouk’s eyes are valleys and Marco stares into them all the same, aching to pry out the nasty festering poison of nostalgia from his cousin’s lungs before it does him in like a canary in the mine.
Marco feels that ache often. Each night. Even when he manages to go to sleep. And he sleeps well, he insists. He does. But that ache creeps into his fresh scrapes and into his bloodstream and he aches. He aches to give back however many hours he had slept so that his cousin could get at least one. He aches.
To scream. To shake him, to hug him, to see him smile. It hurts and it sears and severs Marco’s soul in two and still he would give more than half of it to Farouk if it meant repairing his broken heart. He would give the whole of it to see him clean, fed, content. To make him listen, and to yell and cry:
Am I not home enough for you?
But he knows he will never fill the shoes of a mother’s love. One of their roommates tried, bless her soul, and she had even managed to convince Farouk to perform. (He hardly agreed.)
Marco was more than happy to tag along. He was no actor, but it was another way to make an extra buck, maybe.
Maybe it was all for nothing.
Marco knew all too well that the ‘better life’ would not come to him overnight. But night was the time for dreaming, and what better promise to believe in than the American dream?
So he worked. And worked, and worked, and worked. Blinded by the lights of the stage, obscured by the darkness of the mine, sprawled out bloody on the boxing ring. Drinking and drinking and drinking until he can clearly see that dream again and it’s not completely soiled by bruises and shaky hands covered in soot. Or the mocking laughter of Mr. Lyons, (if he had it his way, he’d punch his lights out.) the despondent frown of his dear cousin, the emaciated figures of his roommates.
All he can do is his best. Farouk will want to take care of him, he’ll want to do the same, they may fight. It wasn’t often, but it happened. He wishes he could bear the weight on his cousin’s shoulders before it crushes him, but they’ve both come to resent wishes.
He doesn’t know who to trust, here. Not yet. Certainly not Mr. Lyons.
But he has Farouk. That’s all he has. Farouk would never leave him, he knows that. He hopes.
Hope hurts him as much as fear. He’d seen the despair of even the happiest couple, his roommates, when their hope begins to crack. (They can deal with cracks. They won’t let it shatter.) He’s seen the boxer, swallowed whole by the ugly opposite of hope that he does not know the word for, let himself be dragged deeper and deeper into that anguish until he begins to drown. He is still drowning. Marco can tell he is beyond saving.
It will all be worth it, he says. The hoping, wishing, dreaming, praying. Crying, yelling, working, hitting and kicking. It will be worth it all.
Until then, he dreams.