According to my mom, I was born in Bogotá and moved with her to the US when I was six. Although Bogotá is the city listed on my birth certificate, I have seen no photos of my life, or hers, in Colombia. I have never been back to visit, or even talked to relatives there. I’ve never heard my mom speak Spanish, and if I ever knew the language, I have long forgotten it. In fact, all my memories from before are in English, albeit a strange, antiquated dialect.
Most strikingly, the city from my earliest memories does not look like the sprawling metropolis nestled in the Andes, or, for that matter, any other city on earth.
It was a gray city surrounded by a vast desert of white sand that stretched to the horizon. The buildings there, constructed of gray stone, reached up to the heavens, so tall that even on the rare occasion when the sun shined, the city would be covered in shadows. Grotesque carvings of gargoyles adorned the buildings, watching over the alleyways, which were so narrow that two men would have trouble walking shoulder to shoulder through them.
There was no order to the city, no grid. The alleyways, always packed with urchins and beggars, seemed to zig and zag for no apparent reason. It was not a large city, probably not even a square mile, but it seemed to take hours to get from one place to the next on the labyrinthine streets. Never remember seeing any cars, only an occasional donkey or mule, always overburdened with sacks of goods, always so skinny that when one fell over and died the enormous vultures, which perched on the tops of the buildings, would devour its carcass in a matter of minutes.
My mom and I lived alone in an apartment in the center of the city. It was just us in there. Never remember my dad, if he was ever in my life. Never remember any other relatives stopping over. No friends either, just the two of us.
I think we lived on the tenth story. No elevator, I remember dragging parcels we bought at the market up the circular stone staircase. Don’t remember much detail about the the apartment’s interior, just that I had my own room, where over my bed a wooden crucifix hung. On the opposite wall was a small painting of a beach, the ocean calm, the sun bright, the sky cloudless. I stared at that painting for hours.
In the penthouse of the building lived a man whose name I never learned. He was tall and pale and gaunt, always dressed like an undertaker in a three-piece black suit and a matching top hat. Every night, from the peephole of our apartment door, I watched him descend the stairs, carrying a large cage in which were dozens of small songbirds, their feathers blue and pink and orange and green, the only colors in an otherwise gray city.
My mom forbid me to leave the apartment after dusk, and warned me multiple times to avoid the man in black, who seemed to come out only at night. I followed her instructions, but some nights, around midnight, I would sneak to the peephole and watch the man, the bird cage in his left hand, a street urchin dressed in rags in his right, ascend the stairs. .
One night, my curiosity got the best of me. A few hours after midnight, I snuck out of the apartment and climbed the stairs to the penthouse. The city was absolutely quiet, no sound other than that of my shoes on the stone. It seemed to take hours, but eventually I reached the top. Through the door, I could hear the songs of hundreds of birds.
The wooden door, with a brass knocker in the shape of a lion’s head, was much taller than my own. I had to stand on my tiptoes to reach the knob. I expected it to be locked, but it opened.
The apartment was far larger than mine, somehow far larger than the building’s exterior dimensions. In it was an indoor forest with hundreds of white trees, their branches stretching up to the ceiling, which looked to be over 50-feet high. In the trees, thousands of colorful songbirds roosted. I had never seen so much color in my life.
As I took in the scene, I caught a glimpse of the man in black, about thirty feet away. He was sitting under one of the white trees, gnawing on what looked like an enormous drumstick. Then, horrified, I realized the truth. The trees were of bone and the man was eating a human leg, a child’s leg. He looked up at me, blood dripping from his mouth, and smiled, revealing a pair of sharp fangs.
“Come,” he said, “let us play.”
I turned and ran, out of the apartment and back to the stairwell. I slid down the banister. I heard footsteps behind me, but I dared not turn around. Finally, I reached the landing of my apartment. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the man in black, about twenty feet above me. In his hand was a knife. As I turned the knob, he threw it at me. I tried to jerk out of the way, but the blade pierced my shoulder. I screamed, let go of the doorknob, and collapsed to the ground. The man slowly descended the stairs, blood dripping from his fangs.
When he was about ten feet away, the door flung open and my mom dragged me back into the apartment. Tears were in her eyes.
A few seconds later, I heard a knock on the door.
“May I come in madame?” asked the man. “I have fallen going up my apartment, and I fear I have broken my ankle.”
“Don’t,” I screamed. “He’s a monster.”
“I know who you are, what you are.” my mom replied. “You may not enter!”
“Do not listen to your son,” said the man. “He had an accident, and is confused. I am just a poor old man.”
My mom did not reply. I was scared that the man would break down the door, but he didn’t.
“His kind cannot enter unless invited,” my mom said, seeming to read my mind. “We are safe in here.”
She washed and bandaged my shoulder, before carrying me to my room. We did not leave the apartment for several days, not until high noon on a day where the sun peaked through the clouds. We didn’t carry much, just what little food we have, several canteens of water, and the crucifix that previously hung above my bed.
We made for the desert.
I don’t remember how long we were among the sands. We walked during the day and spent nights, cold, cold nights huddling together behind a sand dune. The wind was relentless, the landscape featureless. For days we didn’t see another living creature, neither man nor beast.
Finally, close to death, we came to a small oasis. Our water having run out days earlier, we drank till we could drink no more. We waited there, praying for rescue.
A few days later, a small camel caravan stopped at the oasis. We traveled with them across the desert. For how long I do not know, for my next memories are of New York. I have told my mom of what I remember, and she tells me that I must have been dreaming. But from the expression on her face, I can tell that she knows my words are true. I still have the scar on my shoulder, which my mom claims I got from falling off a bike back in Colombia. But I know that it came from the knife of a monster.
I will probably never learn the truth, never know where I came from. I just hope that someone reading this can shed some light on what happened in my early childhood.