Kafka loves sitting on the balcony. He’ll stand at the door and stare at us, until one of us lets him out. We have a wrap-around balcony right above the intersection of El Paso and Nevada streets. We rented out our house in the swanky Kern Place to live here in this apartment in Sunset Heights, walking distance from the university, because we wanted to feel like we lived in a city. We love the view of the mountains, the downtown skyline, rooftops on the sloping hills of the Heights. At night, on one side of the balcony we see Ciudad Juárez as a sea of lights. On the other end, around the corner, we see the El Paso Texas Star shining on the side of the Franklin Mountain, the city’s postcard identity.
Kafka can sit for hours on the corner of the balcony, the elbow, looking down on the busy intersection. On one corner, across from us is the Escher House, a three-story mansion now converted into cheap rooms. Kafka stares as people walk by, from homeless guys looking for spare change to college students parking in front of our building and running late to class. El Paso Community College’s downtown campus is a block away, and students park in front of our building, often making it hard for us to find a spot.
Kafka just watches, and sometimes when he sees something interesting, his ears will rise up and he’ll burp out an involuntary bark, as if it came from his throat. The only one he always barks at is an old woman from the Escher House. She causes him to tense up, and he’ll bark as if she were evil itself.
We don’t know his criteria for barking, but he must have his reasons. A man in a dark trench coat could walk by and he might look a little shady to us, or at the least somewhat bark-worthy, or maybe a cholo walks by with his bulldog –a spike collar on a leash – or a homeless man might follow students asking for money, and Kafka may not bark. But when that old lady comes out of the Escher House, bent over, wearing a house dress and holding a broom and she starts sweeping the steps, he barks like crazy. Maybe it has to do with the sound of straw scrapping the cement, sweep, sweep.
I call it the Escher House because it’s an optical illusion, a strange loop, an impossible figure like an Escher drawing. The house has been cut up into so many different parts –so many doors and walkways and staircases leading this way and that, going up and down and sideways– that it seems impossible. Through windows I get glimpses of old ladies walking up and down stairs like on a Möbius strip. They can walk up and end up coming down and out the front door, or at least it seems that way. If I stare too long at the Escher House, my peripheral vision of the intersection transforms into an impossible city grid, like in a Piranesi sketch, or one of Calvino’s invisible cities; a tangle of staircases, windows, doors, cars, light poles, stray cats, sidewalks up to the sky, shadowy figures lurching in dark corners. A red car could go up the street and disappear at the top of the hill and without a pause end up coming from another street, passing below our balcony, as if it had gone through a wormhole.
The impossible stairs are not the only strange thing about the Escher House. There are multiple people living there, and during the day you see them go in and out, up and down the stairs, but at night, all the lights in the Escher House are out. It stands pitch black on the hill on the corner as if no one lived there.
In the morning a man comes out of the house and puts two kitchen chairs under the shade of some Mexican alders. He sits there, sometimes with the old lady who sweeps, sometimes alone. This man is huge, like Frankenstein’s monster, and he’s bald and wears denim overalls like a Steinbeck character. He sits out there all day, watching the neighborhood. Sometimes Jehovah’s Witnesses will walk up the wide cement stairs to the Escher House, and they go in. I assume they come back out again.
The Escher House is made of brick. It has three stories and an attic. I can imagine when it was a mansion, it must have been beautiful. A rich family must have lived there. Maybe when you walked into the foyer, there used to be a chandelier hanging, but now, at night, there’s no light. Someone from inside the house comes out and sits on the steps and smokes a cigarette. I can never make out who it is, just a shadowy figure that seems thin, androgenous, and young. Kafka just stares at the glow of the cigarette, but he doesn’t bark.
We often hear people comment on how much dogs look like their owners. I remember having lunch with friends at The World Café on Venice Beach. We were sitting a few tables away from the famous baseball player/heartthrob José Conseco. He wore a white, silky sweat suit and gold jewelry, and like us he was sitting at the rail, at the edge of the café and the sidewalk, right next to the foot and bike traffic of the tourist boardwalk. You might even see Harry Perry slide by on skates, the man with a turban strumming an electric guitar.
Conseco had his dog on a leash, on the other side of the rail, like I had Felix on his leash.
Felix was my first dog, before Kafka, so this was years before I lived on the Writers’ Block. He was a black-lab German Shepherd mix that looked mostly black lab. The waiters at that café were nice to dogs, bringing them bowls of water and treats, but today they gushed over Conseco’s dog like a theriomorphic god. Felix was loyal and smart, but not flashy. He looked like a million other ordinary dogs. Conseco’s dog was an exotic breed I had never seen in real life, with silky fur like it had come from the vaults of Saks Fifth Avenue. He had tall legs and a torso so fit he looked like a show dog. Passersby stopped at his dog and asked if they could pet him, and Conseco nodded yes. He was having lunch with his kids. After having doted so long on Conseco’s dog, a few people walked by Felix and said something like, He’s cute too, but no one stopped to pet him or take his picture.
After lunch Conseco stood up like a movie god, tall, built, gleaming with silk and gold. He and his dog and his children walked down the boardwalk, a sea of people moving out of his way.
Dogs look like their owners for obvious reasons. Owners choose dogs in their own image. When they choose a dog, they choose what they see or want to see about themselves, even when they’re not conscious of it. I remember when I first saw Felix. I had responded to an ad about German Shepherd pups for $150, and the owner assured me that the two that looked like black labs would turn out to look like German Shepherds, just like the mother. To show me how strong these puppies were, he got a bag of hard dog food and poured some into a metal bowl. Those puppies fought their way to the front and chewed on hard chunks like wild animals. I didn’t know much about dogs, but later I would find out that the way to pick the best of the litter (at least this is what the experts say) is to choose the most aggressive one, the leader; but I picked Felix, because he was the only one who wasn’t fighting to eat all the chunks of food. He sat in the corner, head down, shy, afraid. He’s like me, I might have thought to myself, unconsciously.
I knew he was the dog for me.
I want that one, I said to the man.
I’ll take fifty bucks, the man said.
Some experts say that what determines a dog’s personality is species and then breed, in that order. They have complex evolutionary codes that guide their development and allow us to predict their behavior, so if you want a dog that acts in a certain way, look at the breed. But I also think a dog’s personality comes from the owner. If the owner is always nervous, afraid of everything, the dog will hide behind furniture when he hears lighting. If the owner is mean, hates people, hates his neighbors, the dog will bark meanly when anyone approaches. If the owner is always depressed, the dog will be morose.
In the morning, I write my fiction in my home office. During this silent time, Kafka has no one to play with. Sometimes he comes into my office holding a rubber lobster in his mouth, ready to play, the lobster squealing. He’s a small dog with big, floppy ears, probably part terrier. When he sees me writing he knows. He’ll sit there on the carpet, but he gets bored pretty quickly, and he lets out long sigh. He stands at the door to the balcony until I let him out, and he’ll go out there alone and stare at the intersection. He barks at the old woman sweeping in front the Escher house, he watches the beeping garbage trucks lift dumpsters with their massive metal claws.
Like me, my partner is a professor in the Creative Writing department, me fiction, her poetry, and we make sure that we teach on opposite days so we can have our writing time and so someone is at home with Kafka. Sometimes my partner[*] will come home from teaching a class and ask, Where’s Kafka?
He’s with Ben, I say. They’re hanging out. Our neighbor, Ben, is a famous writer. He’s a novelist and a poet, one of the most well-known writers in the country and with international acclaim as well. Years into the future, I will see him in Colombia at a book fair, FILBO, and we’ll plan to have dinner after his event. The book festival in Bogotá is like a world’s fair with hundreds of thousands of people visiting every day. I will wait two hours for him to sign books, a line of Colombian teenagers waiting to get their few seconds with him. Ben will win so many awards it will be hard to keep track: the American Book Award, Lannan Foundation, American Library Association, The PEN/Faulkner, the Guggenheim. He publishes on an average two books a year. When I was a young Chicano writer starting out in the MFA program at The University of Oregon, I read his work and admired it. He was one of the reasons I thought El Paso might be a good place for me, because of the way he wrote about it.
The Writers’ Block is a renovated two-story building, which must have been something when it was new, but it became a crack house and the city closed it down, declared it a fire hazard, boarded the windows and posted “keep out” signs, until our landlord, a friend of Ben, bought the building and spent over a year getting it into great shape. Now it’s beautiful again. Hardwood floors, large windows, and we share the top floor with Ben. People sometimes ask what it’s like living next to a famous writer, and I tell them, I don’t know. Ask Ben.
Really, it’s like our own private sitcom called The Writers’ Block.
Ben is the absent-minded and brilliant neighbor. We could be standing before the stove making dinner and Ben comes out his back door and appears on the shared fire escape, and he’ll be framed in our window, a big smile on his face, waving at us, like a moving portrait in a Harry Potter movie. What’s going on, Ben? we’d ask.
I locked myself out! he would exclaim, and we would roll our eyes and the laugh track would kick on.
He goes to that window often, sometimes to ask if we have milk or if we want to come over for soup or if we want to have some wine on the balcony. One time he asked us for pot, not because he smoked it (he didn’t like it), but because a famous poet was spending the night with him, whom I will not name, and he wanted some for a trip he was taking to Marfa.
We even have a secret code with Ben, so if we tap on the wall in the kitchen and he taps back, we’ll can yell through the wall, Do you have any balsamic vinegar? Do you have coffee? Printer ink? We often have dinner together. We often sit on the balcony and drink wine together as we watch the Escher House or the building directly across the street from us. Ben calls it the Nunnery.
It used to be a nunnery, he tells us.
It’s shaped like a rectangle, and it has two floors and multiple rooms along linear hallways, most of the windows facing us. We love our big windows, and when we moved into the place, the former nunnery was still being renovated, so we had no blinds on the windows that faced it. We liked walking around our house whatever way we liked, but now the Nunnery is made up of rooms they rent to young men, and only men. When the men have their lights on at night, we see into their lives. We see them in front of the TV or staring out their windows. We see them in silhouette pacing. We see them turning out the lights to go to bed. We see one of them writing his novel.
He’s one of our graduate students, a man in his early thirties. He is a successful journalist in Venezuela, but now he wants to work on his novel so he’s getting his MFA in our bilingual Creative Writing department. He is not only my tocayo, named Daniel, too, but he’s also my graduate student assistant at UTEP, my TA, which is how we support writers from Latin America. He has no internet in his room, so every morning when we walk out in our pajamas and robes to let Kafka potty, he’s sitting on our front stoop with his laptop. He has Ben’s wireless password.
Hola, boss, he’ll say. Es mi oficina.
His room in the Nunnery faces our bedroom, so the day he moved in we went to a home store and bought blinds and put them up, not because of him – he was a great guy and we liked him – but because we wanted to walk around freely.
In our dining room, my partner, who I’ll call Sara, has a desk where she writes poetry. It faces another window of the Nunnery, where another young man just moved in. This 20-year old kid used to live right underneath us, with his older sister who was a college graduate with a job, but when she lost her job they couldn’t pay the rent. The apartments we live in are expensive by El Paso standards, so all this young man could afford on his own was a room in the Nunnery. His name is also Daniel. He lives right on top of the other Daniel. He is an undergraduate at UTEP. He sits at his window at his desk and studies into the night.
One night when we are sitting on the balcony drinking wine, Ben tells us that one of the men who lives in the Nunnery gives gay happy ending massages. We see a man pull up in shiny a truck. He parks on the street and walks up to the building and rings the bell, and the man lets him in. Watch, Ben said. In an hour the guy will come out again.
And he does. He walks to his truck.
In the future Ben will be known as a gay writer and activist, but at this time he had only recently come out, having been married for years to a straight woman who was a prominent member of the El Paso community. They were a high-profile couple, well known among the political leadership, hanging out with judges, city officials, state senators and other Latinx and democratic leaders. He was openly gay now, and happy to be so. He was also in love with a young man who would visit him often. It was good to see him so happy.
Most of the writers on the block are home a lot. I remember a scene from Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy. When the landlord of an apartment building finds out his prospective tenant is a writer, he doesn’t want to rent to him. He says something like, You guys stay home all the time, using electricity and gas and the plumbing. It’s true. On the Writers’ Block all of us are home most of the time. Living in the unit below us is another one of our MFA graduate students, an Arab woman named Sahalie who is working on a novel. We sometimes see her at her window, at her desk, writing as if no other world exists. There is also Diego who lives on the block, another writer from our MFA, a journalist from Juárez.
Sometimes we write at the same time, all of us within our own walls, writing alone, in separate places, Ben at his desk, me at mine, Sara at hers, Daniel across the street writing his novel, Sahalie downstairs writing hers, Diego writing stories, all the writers on the block hunched over keyboards or note pads, writing at the same time. I like to imagine that when this happens, when we’re all working at the same time, our collective language breathes life into a creative entity so powerful it rises like a lightning cloud over Nevada Street. It hovers between El Paso and Oregon, and then it floats up higher and higher, over Sunset Heights and higher, over the grey city that curls reptile arms and legs around the silver mountains. From way up there, the Writers’ Block beats like a heart in the body of a snake.
Ben is the grounding spirit on the Writers’ Block. He not only writes book after book, poem after poem, but he paints and he makes his own furniture, and he cooks soups and makes seven kinds of salsa. At six a.m. he turns on NPR full blast and listens to the news and talk shows as he drinks his coffee. Sometimes he’ll have coffee on the balcony, and sometimes when I’m on the balcony drinking coffee Ben will come out and we’ll have a bit of morning chat or we’ll play with Kafka. This is where I tell him about my idea for a radio show, a show about books. Writers (us) talking to writers, which we will end up calling “Words on a Wire” and it will not only air on KTEP, Public Radio for the Southwest, but it will become one of the most important literary podcasts of its time.
I’ll throw Kafka’s lobster to Ben’s side of the balcony, and Kafka will leap over to get it, and Ben will throw it back to me. Our balconies are next to each other, separated by a small rail that is more symbolic of personal space than a real border. You can step right over it. When Ben comes out, Kafka gets excited to see him, and he’ll run over to Ben, and the both of them will make a big deal out of each other. Ben will exclaim, I love you! I love you!
Sometimes Ben will take him into his apartment and they’ll hang out for a few hours. Sometimes Ben will watch him when we are away. When Sara comes home from teaching, she wants a drink and a puppy, and she’ll look around and say, Where’s Kafka?
Hanging out with Ben, I’ll say.
That’s weird, she’ll say. Our dog has his own social life.
Sometimes Ben takes Kafka for walks.
We’re not worried that Ben will want to take Kafka for good or that Kafka would rather live with Ben, because after a few hours, they both seem ready to go back to normal. Kafka will stand at Ben’s door ready to go home, and when we open our door he’ll get all excited, tail wagging, wanting to jump all over us and lick us in a million places. Or Ben will bring him back and say, sounding very tired, I got to do some errands, and he goes right back to his place and we know that he just wants to be alone.
Not too far into the future, my partner will no longer be my partner, and a few years later Kafka will no longer be my dog, but tonight we are sitting on the balcony, and it’s a beautiful night. Kafka keeps bringing his lobster and we pull it away from him like tug-of-war, and when we get it, we throw it and he runs for it and brings it back for another round. The night somehow feels special. The wine is going to my head and I feel relaxed and at peace, and so does my partner, I think. One of us might even say, as we look at the El Paso star glowing on the side of the mountain, This is nice.
The lights in the Escher House are out and the lights in the Nunnery are on. There are a group of homeless people hanging out in the parking lot across from Jimmy’s Market, sitting in a circle. They often hang out drinking and smoking late into the night.
Ben comes out of his place and stands on the balcony.
Kafka gets so excited he jumps over to the rail.
We say, in sit-com style unison, Hi, Ben!
Ben looks sad.
Can I take Kafka for a walk? he asks.
Of course, we say. I go and get the leash and a plastic bag, in case Kafka poops. Ben takes him inside his place, and a few minutes later, we hear their feet going down the wooden stairs to the street.
When they get to the foot of the building, Ben looks up at us and waves. He looks sad, not like his usual, cheerful self. Later we will find out he was thinking of his own dog. In the painful divorce he had gone through, his ex got the dog, the one he loved and used to take on walks every morning when they lived in Kern Place. I lived there too, and I used to walk Felix in the arroyo, a sandy rocky field of mesquite bushes and ocotillo plants and several types of cactus. Sometimes I would see Ben on the other side walking his dog Sofie, and we would wave to each other. He misses Sofie.
That night he got an email from his ex. Sofie was dead.
Now, Kafka looks excited about the walk, pulling on the leash, his little legs moving so fast like a puppy in a cartoon. It’s his second walk of the day, but he’s as excited as if it were his first.
Kafka and Ben walk down El Paso Street, past the figure smoking on the steps of the Escher House. They walk toward El Paso Community College. It feels like we’ll never see them again, and we won’t, at least not exactly the way they appear now. Time is imaginary, Like Feynman’s sum-over-paths, all possible paths exist simultaneously side-by-side with the others. They curl up and cross over each other like the stairs of the Escher House. Douglas Hofstadter describes a Bach canon as a strange loop, where multiple musical themes might be chasing after the leader, but they run in so many different loops that time makes no sense, and the pursuer bounces around in time and becomes the pursued. This is the world wherein writers live. We write about worlds while the world within which we write twists and turns in ways we cannot imagine, and sometimes, we can remember the future. We write from this world. Over the years I will watch the words move around these pages, deleted and added and moved, letters arranging and rearranging themselves like tiles on a European train schedule.
We are time travelers. We are two nations, one that lives in what we think is the real world, the structured world, the world we are taught to believe is real, one as old as time; and we are the eternally new nation that reigns in the imaginary world, the creative world, where time is impossible.
Now, as I write this, Ben and Kafka are walking down El Paso Street, toward Ciudad Juárez. Now, as I revise this ten years later, they are still walking. Now, from our balcony on the Writers’ Block, it looks as if their dark figures, man and puppy, are sinking into the city of lights.
This relationship will end, and by the time this gets published I will have been in another one for almost ten years. I am and married and have a daughter now.
But I wrote this in present tense, as if I still lived on the Writers’ Block, which I did when I started writing this essay.
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Daniel Chacón is the author of six books of fiction, including Kafka in a Skirt, Hotel Juárez: Stories, Rooms and Loops and the forthcoming The Last Philosopher in Texas: Fictions and Superstitions He has won the Southwest Book Award, the American Book Award, the Pen-Oakland Prize for Fiction, and the Hudson Prize. He is host of Words on a Wire, a radio show and podcast about books and ideas.
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Tim Fitts is a short story writer and photographer. His work has been published in the New England Review, Granta, Shenandoah, Boulevard, fugue, and the Baltimore Review, among others. His photographs have been shown in South Korea and the United States, most notably the Thomas Deans Gallery in Atlanta. His photographic works often combine color transparencies, as well as transparencies with black and white film.
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