The Forgotten

 

I woke up sweating in a hotel room that smelt like gas and wet cement, with the ceiling fan making more noise than wind. My friend was snoring softly in the other bed, bare-chested, a machete tucked under his pillow like a joke nobody would laugh at twice. We were in El Salvador, again. Or still. You never really leave, especially when you’re trying to forget something.

--

She was a freelance reporter. Sarah or something like that. Gringa. Young, blonde, and probably used to lattes and Netflix recommendations. She had come down with a padded notebook and a press pass printed at home. “Investigative,” she’d said. “Immersive.”

We were drinking cheap local whisky out of water bottles and eating potato chips from a plastic bag. The conversation had turned into a slow spiral of abstractions—poverty, memory, global conscience. She said, with this blank conviction that only people who had never been afraid for their lives can manage:

“There are no forgotten people anymore. Not in the modern world. Everything’s documented now.”

I laughed once, loudly, and then stood up. My laugh startled my friend, who had been half asleep in his chair, like an old jaguar that never stops listening.

“You stupid bitch,” I said, “Of course there are forgotten people. Most of the world is made up of them. You don’t see them because people like you are the ones who did the forgetting.”

I was shaking now, and she blinked. My friend was on me before I got any louder, pulling me out of the room with a force that felt like compassion, or at least strategy. As the door closed, I saw her shaking her head, like she was disappointed but determined. She was going to prove her thesis. That was the story. That we were all accounted for.

--

We were dropped off somewhere east of Cojutepeque, or maybe it was further. No signs. No signal. No clear instructions. We were supposed to find a woman—his aunt, allegedly—who might help us with something undefined. Food. Shelter. The story.

The sun was vertical and overwhelming, and the road was all dust and dog piss. Within five minutes, we saw them—three young men standing beneath a tangle of barbed wires and dying yellow flowers. Tattoos up to their throats. One of them had a glass eye that didn’t track with the rest of his face.

 “Buenas,” I said, with the forced casualness of someone pretending not to smell death in the air. “We’re looking for my friend’s aunt. Maybe you’ve seen her?”

My friend tensed like a wire pulled too tight. He said:

“Tía? I don’t have a tía here, vos. You must be confused.”

 

They left us alone. But as they walked away, my friend leaned in, whispering to me:

“You don’t ask people things like that around here. If they think you’re looking for someone, they’ll want to know who, and why. Then they’ll go find her before you do. Not to help her. To find out what she knows. You get me?”

I got him. We were walking blind, in a game rigged by ghosts. Every question was a clue in a crime we hadn’t committed yet.

--

Later, I started thinking about her again—Sarah, or whoever. I imagined her stumbling across the cracked tile of some comedor, asking old women with cataracts where the child soldiers had gone. I imagined her recording quotes that sounded profound in English but were just tired fragments of survival. She’d be somewhere not far, I thought, lost too, only in a prettier way.

She would write about hope and resilience. She’d quote a man who used to be in a gang but now makes jewelry out of shell casings. She’d miss the man sleeping on cardboard behind the cantina who used to be the mayor’s brother.

Eventually, I thought, we’d run into her again. Maybe in the town square. Maybe on the edge of a dry riverbed where bones are buried. And I’d ask her if she still thought everyone was remembered. And I’d point.

To the old woman with no teeth who once taught algebra and now sells candy from a tray. To the child drawing cartoons in the dust with a nail, whose mother was disappeared, whose father was dismembered, whose name no one says. To the man with the glass eye who used to be called Alejandro but now answers to no name.

I’d tell her:

“This is where the census ends. This is where maps curl at the edges. This is where God forgets to answer the radio.”

And maybe then she’d understand. Or maybe she’d write a grant proposal. Or maybe she’d shake her head again, because some truths can’t be carried back on an airplane.

--

That night, my friend and I slept in an abandoned house. Rats scratched under the broken sink. The roof leaked even though there was no rain. I had a dream I was a boy again, looking through a keyhole into a room full of people who had forgotten my name.

When I woke up, I wasn’t sure where we were anymore. I looked at my friend, who was staring at nothing, his face lit by the slow, blue dawn.

“Do you think she’ll make it out?” I asked.

“Probably,” he said. “They like her type.”

Then we got up. We kept walking. Looking for a woman who may or may not exist, in a village with no name, to prove to someone who didn’t believe in the forgotten that they were still here.

Still waiting. Still hiding. Still real.