Interfictions 2 (13 page)

And I really did, but I didn't mention that I sometimes imagined her flying away. One time I dreamed her wings were out and big and had all of these black and white feathers, she looked magnificent, and when she beat her wings, the wind blew my hair back like I'd stuck my head out the car window going 60 mph, but her feet were still attached to me, so when she finally lifted off, I came along, too, like a fish in the talons of an eagle.

When her wings finally did fully emerge, they were nothing like eagle wings. In fact, they were very ugly. They were the kind of ugly that people go all white in the face over. Oh, they're not so bad, I told her. I hate them! I want to tear them off my back! Wasn't it bad enough I had to be born attached to you! Wasn't it bad enough I had to have any wings at all! Why does God hate me? Who? Oh, never mind, I'm going to jump off a building! You'll just fly to the ground. You'll be all oh goodbye cruel world, and you'll jump, and then just like you can't kill yourself by holding your breath, your wings will start flapping, and you'll start flying, and that will be that. You'd pull me down, she said. You'd be heavy enough so we'd both go splatter on the sidewalk. Would you really take me with you, Renata?

No, not really.

By the time we graduated, and we did graduate, you wouldn't think we could, but we did, she was almost out, which made the logistics of getting around pretty difficult. Imagine walking around with a 105 lbs seventeen-year-old girl with stubby wings standing on your shoulder. Charlie rigged some scaffolding with wheels, squeaky hard-to-control shopping-cart wheels, and lots of aluminum bars. You might call us a two-story student—me plodding along on the ground level holding onto the bars with both hands and pushing the whole contraption down the high school hallways, and Renata up there like a queen of the parade shouting down greetings to her friends, making jokes, smiling smiling smiling, or pouting if someone had hurt her feelings, Bobby talking to Karen and not even seeing Renata as she rolled on by, slow down, Davy, slow down! Her biggest problem in those days, aside from having to crouch down whenever we went through doorways, was keeping those wings covered, not because she thought people didn't know about them, but because they were still so ugly.

Once she dragged (or more correctly directed) me around to thrift shops looking for feathers. Peacock feathers, feathers in your cap, old arrows, a couple of feather pillows, and when she had enough, she spread out her supplies on our bedroom floor, it looked like a bombing in a bird store, and took her glue, not superglue we should thank the heartless deity who had kicked this whole mess off in the first place, but white glue like kids use in kindergarten, and she glued the feathers to her wings. She really couldn't reach them right and was making a mess of it. I didn't say a word, but she could see the judgment in my eyes, so she got me to do it, so she would have someone to blame when it all turned out badly. And it did turn out badly. She looked awful—she had been bamboozling the town folks with some kind of dance hall and gambling scheme, and they had had it up to here. They'd gotten mad as hell and weren't going to take it anymore, so they tarred and feathered her and rode her out of town on a rail. What does it even mean to be ridden out of town on a rail? If she were to be ridden out of town, she would be riding me anyway. Charlie and Debbie gave us grief about the feathers, but the worst part was the way they looked at us like could there be anything more pathetic than you two?

I have to hand it to them, Debbie and Charlie, they did come to our graduation. They were out there with all the parents and siblings as Renata and I rolled together up the ramp and onto the stage. Renata had to be especially careful holding her arms out like a tightrope walker to keep our balance, and I had to push especially hard to get us up the ramp. It was touch and go there for a moment. It would have been just perfect if we had fallen over, people running around shouting and trying to get us up, looking at us like that, but we didn't fall. We made it to the podium, and Mr. Hodges reached up and gave Renata her diploma. Then he reached down and gave me mine. I pushed our scaffolding off the stage. Lots of people clapped for us. We're like dancing bears, Renata whispered, but she didn't sound bitter.

We came apart that summer before college. It happened just as I always imagined it would. Renata was sitting on the bed, and I was sitting on the floor. I had been able to see the tops of her feet for days, and now I could see most of the sides of her feet. And her toes. Just as soon as her toenails had dried and hardened up, she'd painted them bright red. The fumes from the polish made me dizzy. Oh, don't be such a big baby, Davy. Don't you just love this color?

I could take it or leave it.

And then it was like she was only resting her feet on my shoulder, me on the floor, her sitting on the bed, the late afternoon summer sunlight making the room too hot, but not so hot it was worth it to get back into the scaffolding and go outside.

And then I could feel her moving her feet back and forth on my shoulder, a little to the left, a little to the right, and I knew she was loose, but I didn't want to admit it just yet. I could tell she knew, too. This was our big moment. There should be a band. The sky should open up and a Big Face should scowl down at us and say, okay, that should teach you two a lesson! A parade, noisemakers, corks popping. Davy and Renata, two people, separate at long last.

She lifted her left foot off my right shoulder and put it back down on my other shoulder. I leaned back against the bed. Then I leaned over and pressed my face against her right leg, the one that might still be attached. No, I knew it wasn't. I rested my cheek against the warm skin of her leg. She put both hands on my head and moved them around gently like my head was a hairy crystal ball and she was reading our future.

Would she fly away now like some kind of angel? Well, maybe if all the world's a barnyard, and plucked chickens have angels. She'll be running around flapping those awful wings and going nowhere fast. Then she'll put on a big coat and take a cab, or she'll get on a horse and ride away, wings scooping at the air but not even lifting her butt up out of the saddle, or maybe she'll buy a motorcycle.

And I'll go around town pushing my squeaky scaffolding, and people will all the time be saying, hey, Davy! Where's that beautiful sister of yours? And I won't know what to say. What in the world will I say?

"The Two of Me” comes from a challenge to write a story based on a drawing by Rhiannon Rose, a young writer/artist in my workshop. Isn't that a cool name? Wouldn't we have to make her up if she didn't already exist? Isn't it strange the way you never know where a story will pop up next? I like to look at things and write stories about what they bring to mind. In the case of looking at someone else's artwork, it is a kind of collaboration in that the object is talking back with its own point of view and agenda even if what you are hearing isn't what it is saying. The result is something between where you start and what the object wants. I am a chicken or an egg or maybe both at the same time. This is the way I've been writing for years. I'm not sure I could do it any other way, but it's nice to finally have a theory! I'm almost always after a story that is simply itself. Yes, stories talk to stories, and I always listen, but I doubt if I'm qualified to file a report on their conversations. Sometimes a voice in my head scolds, “You can't do that!” And the rest of us smile. Those are some of the best times. If a story really is just itself, it will probably be hard to categorize and might fall through the cracks. That's not always a pretty sight.

Ray Vukcevich

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to Quantum Santeria

Carlos Hernandez

I was heading toward Parking Lot Four on the east side of campus, mentally reviewing the interview I'd just had with NPR's
All Things Considered
about my new book, when I almost kicked a pigeon. I'm a physics professor at CalTech specializing in quantum entanglement and unspeakable information, and my new book is called
The
X
Axis of Time
. The idea is this: what if time, a dimension we normally think of as a one-way line, has
width
as well as length? What if it is traversable in two dimensions? Well, my book contends, it would explain a lot about our universe: like, for instance, entanglement. Uncertainty. How the universe can be expanding faster than the speed of light. It is, you know. Nothing can exceed the speed of light—except the whole damn universe. A 2-D model of time offers at least one explanation as to how.

The book is the kind of speculative, sweeping thought experiment that all the cool physicists are writing these days. I am probably wrong about almost everything. But I hope I'm wrong in the ways that will someday lead us to science. That's exactly what I said to my kid-gloves NPR interviewer, and she seemed, in her throaty, liberal-media way, duly impressed.

And then I almost kicked a pigeon. Though I was too distracted to see it at the time, in hindsight I can describe exactly what happened: the pigeon stood in place as I approached, as inert as an abandoned football, watching me approach with one curious eye. Only at the last moment did its little birdbrain realize that I was about to kick it, and, once kicked, there would be no turning back on this
XY
point on time's Cartesian grid, and the pain and consequences of the kick would forever be a part of its history. It therefore decided to get out of the way, with a commotion of wings that startled me back to our shared dream of the world.

There on the sidewalk, surrounded by the cool of an autumn night in Pasadena, I got down on one knee and said to the pigeon, who was now eyeing me gravely, “Sorry, little fella. Didn't see you there."

All was forgiven. It immediately came ambling up to me, eager for a handout. I laughed. And when I find something funny, I often switch to Spanish. “
?Ay, pero nino!
” I chastised. “
?No debas ser tan confiado! ?No sabes que cuando yo era un niño, mate a puñaladas una paloma
...."

I fell quiet. To the pigeon, who stared at me with one curious eye, it must have looked as if I had suddenly shut down, like an unplugged robot. And in body I had. But my mind, like a ghostly projector that had started itself, began playing the reel of the time I killed a pigeon in the kitchen sink of my boyhood home.

I had to. The heart of a pigeon was the last ingredient I needed for the Santeria ritual I was performing so that Papi could find love again.

Mami died the summer before third grade. Doctors were removing a benign tumor from her uterus when ... well, we weren't allowed to know exactly what had happened. One of the conditions of the settlement was that all documents relating to the case remain sealed. The official cause of death on her death certificate is “cardiac arrest,” but her heart was doing just fine prior to surgery. They must've done something to her.

Once the settlement came through, Papi didn't work full-time anymore. He had been teaching senior math at Samuel Adams High School in Handcock, Connecticut, since before I was born, and substitute teaches there to this day. At Samuel Adams they call him “The Professor,” partly because he has a PhD, but mostly because he
is
a Professor, capital P. You know the type: the kind of man who has to bite down on a pipe (or, in his case, a puro) to remind himself that he has a body as well as a mind, whose eyes are always looking past you and into a reality that is somehow less substantial and more consequential than the one you exist in. It's one thing when these professor types are tall, bearded, tie-choked, corduroy-jacket-wearing sages who are as white as the faces on Mount Rushmore. Then they're easy to spot. But on the outside, Papi is as Cuban as they come: five-foot-five, fat as a top and just as agile, with a nose like a head of cauliflower and Wolfman hair growing off his ears—and always, always wearing a pastel guayabera, even in the ice-age middle of a Connecticut winter. He looks like a guajiro who just needs to pick up his machete to be ready for a full day of cutting cane. But then, just as people start feeling superior to him, he starts talking mathematics—in virtuoso English that will send responsible listeners scrabbling for their dictionaries. It takes just one meeting. After that they call him “Professor."

We were the only Cubans in town. Therefore, the Connecticut Yankees of Handcock thought all Cubans were like Papi. So did I. Using a kind of commutative-property logic, I reasoned that, since Papi was Cuban, all Cubans were Papi: intellectual, distracted, blunt, cheerful, apolitical, and immune to neurosis of any kind. Kind of like Mr. Spock, but with a better sense of humor. And a
lot
more body hair.

I got to hear from other kids how much better Cubans were than other Latinos, who sent their kids to American schools even though they were illegal. They were poor because they were lazy, and the only reason they couldn't speak English was because they didn't try hard enough. You speak English, Salvador, why can't they? Stick those stupid spics in Special Ed with the other retards.

I agreed with them completely. You see, while they were insulting those other Latinos, they were complimenting me.

I forgot at those moments that, as hard as she tried, even after years of study at the Vo Tech, Mami still struggled with English, and that whenever we went shopping without Papi she always sent me to talk to Customer Service. But at night I would remember. When I spoke to Mami then—surrounded by a darkness so complete I wasn't sure I still had a body—and asked her why she left Papi and me alone, and when she was coming back, I spoke to her in halting, failing Spanish.

When I was eight, it was dinosaurs. When I was nine, it was magic. And when I was ten, I got into Santeria.

Not even a month after starting third grade, I got in a fight with a kid at school because he said Mami didn't die, she'd been deported, because eventually that's what happens to all spics. I was Latino small, so the kid, Timmy Andersen, thought I was an easy mark. Big mistake. I rushed him, but instead of taking a swing, I yanked down his pants. And his underwear, perhaps understanding the justness of my cause, slid down like they'd been buttered. I will never forget the sight of his tiny white penis: it looked like one of those miniature rosettes adorning the edge of a wedding cake. Little Timmy screamed and tried to pull his pants up, while I, almost leisurely, pushed him to the ground, grabbed his hair in two fists, and bashed his head into the playground loam. It's the third happiest moment of my childhood.