Chloë Joan López
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Dream of the Latent Prompt

"Barbie," she said, "it's such a help that you can fold it out flat and still keep all the colors. I just need you to make the telephone call." So it continues. I'm continuing to wait, to wait for the prompt to come back.

I hung the robe on the antique-styled hanging pegs. The bath recalled a bath in a post-war Japanese middle school: gratefully sparse. I started the water. They had put the child on an aircraft carrier and sent him back to Venezuela. Now I knew, long before the prompt ever came back, that the ship had been torn up into foil and scrap.

They interviewed the expert, the young oceanographer, even before deciding to grill him on air. His background made castings of his inquisitors' warpedness, their brittleness, their haggard sensibility. They tried every trick in the awkward style-book to make him, make life, make his life make no sense. But he sat still all through the segment, eyes a narrow, distant blue, occasionally thin and grey. His skin patient and pinked, slightly chapped on his delicate cheekbone framework. His walnutwood hair closecropped.

Somehow I remember his apprehension by the MP's without benefit ofTV dramatization. Confused patrolwomen had staked out the houseboat quarters ofhis beloved and dignified mothers, then lumbered in, clumsily hefting magnums.Was the family expecting them? It had been the dead of night, but they hadcalmlyfiled out of the bedrooms, fully dressed, each with a small bag packed. Theofficers had lined them up on the living room couch and had begun to try todo for themselves what network TV newsmagazines would soon try to do formillions of morbidly fascinated viewers: to make sense of this family."Are you lesbians?" the officers had asked them. In turn, each ofthe young oceanographer's mothers answered, "Yes.""No," he said softly, not realizing that they weren't asking him.

The ship then lurched into foil and scrap, pitching the refugee childinto the waters. Pitching everyone overboard. Only the young oceanographerwould later be able to explain exactly why it went down.

"Delete everything," my supervisor advised me. It helps thatthe laptop folds out in triptych panels and highlights what's important. Iclosed the door but I knew that soon I would have to venture outside. Evenif just to the bath. Of my many emails, a leviathan message took forever todelete, and I contemplated my future while I waited, waited for the promptto come back.