“Yes, I am here with you.”
“Sometimes you’ll find multiple copies of the same document. We only need to save one. The other copies you can put in this box marked ‘Trash.’ Okay? If there are various documents under the same category, you’ll need to put them in some kind of order, you know, chronological or by author or by recipient. Take item number twenty-five here on the list.” Wendell lifts a sheaf of papers and reads from it. “‘All offers made by Sandoval & Holmes to settle the litigation related to windshields.’ In the boxes, you will see a small number twenty-five written in pencil on all documents that fall under this category. You need to take all those documents and organize them. You’re good at that, aren’t you Marcelo?”
“Yes. I like to organize things.”
“That’s why I asked your dad if you could help me. You should have seen him. He was bursting with joy. Vidromek is your father’s biggest and oldest client, so it’s only right that you have a hand in this. You’re the man. This is a little more important and requires more brainpower than what you’re used to doing with Jasmine.
You have to make sure you look carefully at every single document in these two boxes. If we tell them that we don’t have something when we do, it’ll be…”
“Kaput.”
I make the same sword-motion with my hand.
“That’s exactly correct. Up shit creek without a paddle.”
“Okay,” I say. I wonder if Wendell’s efforts to have me work with him are his way of letting me know that he wants to be friends again.
“Just leave the boxes here when you finish. Juliet will make a copy of all that we send them tomorrow morning.” Wendell stops talking but he doesn’t leave. Is he waiting for me to say something?
“Okay,” I say again. “I understand.”
He steps closer to the edge of the desk. “So, we are on our way to getting you what you want.”
“Yes.” But I don’t really know what he is talking about.
“The bond that you and I talked about. I am fulfilling my part. I got you to work with me on an easy assignment. And there will be others like this the rest of the summer. Then we tell your father of your success. Right? That was our agreement.”
“Yes.” I am confused. What is it that we agreed? Wendell is going too fast for me.
“Yes? Yes as in yes, you are going to do your part. You are going to ask Jasmine to go on the boat ride. That was the agreement, right? Have you asked her yet?”
I’m trying to remember exactly what was said at our lunch. What did I agree to? I am certain I did not agree to ask Jasmine. Did I agree to consider it? Is there any way that I could have even considered it?
Wendell looks at his watch. “I gotta go. I will take that as a yes. We’ll work out the details later.”
I stand there looking at the boxes. What happened? Why did I hesitate in telling Wendell I will not help do anything that may harm Jasmine? How could it be that even as I understand Wendell’s views on sex, I am still pulled toward success in my father’s eyes?
I start to work on the assignment. I want to get it done so that I can return to the mailroom. Aurora told me that when I was little, I would take the daily mail and sort it into different piles. The order of the piles, she said, was hard to figure out. Sometimes it was by the size of envelope, sometimes by the color of the stamp. But there were times when no matter how hard she tried she could not discern my logic. I don’t remember doing that, but I imagine that it must have been hard to find the one unifying element amongst many possible ones. My CDs come to mind. Sometimes I sort them by composer, sometimes by instrument, sometimes by the length of time I’ve owned them. Right now they are sorted in a way that no one in a million years could ever figure out. For the past year I have been sorting them by the music’s predominant emotion: joy, sorrow, longing, loneliness, serenity, anger. The reason no one could ever figure out the categories is that I myself am often at a loss at how a particular CD ended up in the happy category, for example, when it is clear as I listen to it again that the music is anything but happy.
This is what I’m thinking about as I go about the task of organizing the documents in the list. First I find on the list all the documents that fall under the same category. Then I look for the documents in the boxes and begin to separate them into piles. I do the obvious ones first. All letters written
by
Mr. Reynaldo
Acevedo, President of Vidromek, go in one pile. The documents in that list I arrange in chronological order. All letters written
to
Mr. Acevedo in another pile. Then there are memos from staff of Vidromek to Mr. Acevedo and memos
from
Mr. Acevedo to staff. I make another pile of what looks like reports that contain different types of data and then another pile composed of various letters and envelopes addressed to the law firm. Altogether I come up with nine categories of piles.
About one hour has gone by and I think that in another hour I will have completed Wendell’s assignment. What if Arturo asked me to work full-time with Wendell? On the one hand this sorting is more fun than the mindless copying and binding that occupy most of my time in the mailroom. On the other hand I would not like working with Wendell. I like working with Jasmine. I like the way it feels when we work in silence together or when she wordlessly drops a new jazz CD on my desk. It reminds me of the times when Joseph and I would work side by side on paint-by-number pictures.
In another hour I am done with the assignment. I decide to check the documents I have placed in the “Trash” box to make sure that I have not placed a document there by mistake. Wendell did not ask me to do this, but it only makes sense to do so. We should have one copy of every document that is in there. At the very bottom of the box I find a single brown envelope. I open it. Inside the envelope there is a picture.
I look at it for only a fraction of a second and immediately put the picture facedown on the desk. I close my eyes but the image of what I saw remains. It is possible to simply put the picture back in the envelope and walk away. I know that if I look at the picture
again, the image will affect me like a burn. Yet I have to look. I am drawn to it. It is like the force of the IM when it is most powerful.
I turn the picture over slowly. I focus on the eyes of the girl. She is my age, maybe a year younger, but it is hard to tell. Her eyes remind me of someone. Eyes that I have seen before. Half of her face is intact but the other side is missing. The skin on the deformed side is withered and scarred, as if the cheek and jaw had been carved away with a dull knife. There is a mouth with lips that end halfway, an ear that seems about to fall off. I take the envelope and place it over the picture so that it covers the bottom part of her face. Those eyes. Her eyes are unaware of what is happening with the rest of her face. It is as if she had yet to look in a mirror. And there is something else in her eyes: a question directed at me.
“Marcelo, how’s it going?”
Arturo is behind me. I put the picture back in the envelope as fast as I can. There is not enough air for my lungs in the whole law firm, it seems.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
I turn around and hide the envelope with my body. Arturo is standing in the doorway. How long has he been standing there, and did he see me put the picture away? I am overwhelmed by the sense that I need to hide the picture from him. It is as if I don’t want him to take away from me what the girl made me feel.
“Well, did you get everything done that Wendell wanted you to do?”
“Yes.”
“Wendell asked me if you could work full-time with him for the remainder of the summer. I think it would be great if you did. It will give you a chance to do something more challenging. And—”
“Jasmine needs me,” I say. I can feel anger rising.
“And, as I was saying, I think you need to be around a young man like Wendell. You need to have the experience of working with men. You will learn more from him than from Jasmine.”
“It is not fair.” Even to me this sounds like what a child would say.
“What is not fair? What is it about working in the mailroom that is so important to you?”
I realize that there is no reason why it is not fair for me to be moved out of the mailroom. It simply feels unfair all of a sudden. I try to explain as best I can. “It is not fair to take away Jasmine’s help. And it took Marcelo a long time to learn the mailroom work. I work well there. Jasmine and Marcelo work well together. We help each other.”
“You are raising your voice. I haven’t seen you do that in a very long time. That’s interesting. Anyway, I will get Jasmine the help she wanted to begin with. She’ll be all right.” He comes closer to where I am. I step back, hiding the envelope from his view. “Wendell asked for you. He obviously thinks that you can help him. The work with him will involve more reading, more analysis. It is more intellectual work. You will learn more working with him. That’s what this summer is all about, isn’t it?”
I want to tell him that the only reason Wendell asked for me is that he wants to use me to get at Jasmine, but I cannot say this. I feel too spent to say anything. All the energy of anger has rushed
through me and carried with it all the words. Besides, I know that on my own, without Aurora’s help, there is no changing Arturo’s mind once he determines what is best for me.
I grip the envelope as hard as I can, and then nod in acceptance of his new command.
I
f the object is to make it through the summer, to simply complete the assignments given to me, why does the picture of the girl unsettle me so much? I did precisely what I was told. Had I not looked in the trash box on my own initiative, I would not have seen the picture and I would not have her eyes burning within me. Why can’t I forget about what I found and move on, count the days left in this job?
Here, in the dark of my tree house, I try as best I can to understand what happened, what is happening. I saw a picture of a girl who must have been disfigured by the manufacturer of the windshields that Arturo represents. The picture was in the trash box and this could not have been a mistake. There was something about the girl that did not matter, that was not significant to the law firm, to…Arturo? I am reminded of the way Arturo spoke to the man at the gym—like he had secrets he could not speak openly about. What does my father do?
I have seen autistic kids at Paterson affected by things that do not affect a normal person. Like the time Alexandra refused to
speak for weeks after a teacher’s aide accidentally threw away the postcard that fell from Alexandra’s desk. No one could understand Alexandra’s sadness over the postcard except a few other autistic kids. Is that what is happening to me? An overreaction caused by my condition, whatever that is? This that I now feel for the first time—is it simply a symptom, something a normal person would not feel?
I have been around kids that suffer at Paterson, at St. Elizabeth’s. It’s like I have walked among them without noticing the pain that must exist beneath their skin. Now I notice the girl in the picture and feel as if I were responsible for her pain.
I close my eyes and in my mind there appears the portrait of Jesus that Abba kept when she lived with us. In the middle of Jesus’s chest there is a red heart and around the heart there is a crown of thorns. A flame of fire shoots up from the top of the heart. One day Abba saw me looking at the portrait and she said, “That’s Jesus’s heart. It shows how He feels for us.” Then she took the picture down and sat beside me on her bed. “The thorns are His sorrow for all that we suffer, and the flame is His love.”
Now, here in the dark, the envelope with the picture of the girl on my desk, I understand what it was about that portrait of Jesus that so captivated my attention that all I could do when I entered Abba’s room was stare at it. There was something about the image that was not right, something out of place. The eyes of Jesus were soft with what I took to be the look of love, but the flame in His heart burned with a fire that would scorch you if you touched it. I replace Jesus’s gaze with the eyes of the girl in the picture, and the portrait of Jesus finally makes sense, the eyes at last reflecting the intensity burning in His heart.
I hear Namu below me whimpering. He knows that I’ve been awake all night, even though I have not moved in my sleeping bag but have stayed still, staring at the stars that pass across the skylight of my tree house. Namu can hear the turmoil in my mind and is offering comfort.
I search for the IM but can’t find it. Then I try to block out the rushing thoughts by remembering a favorite piece of Scripture, but the remembering is not focused. It has a life of its own and what it presents are lines from different parts of Scriptures, senseless and disconnected, like an inner Tower of Babel.
Now dawn is breaking. I see the blackness of the night fade slowly. I put on a T-shirt, a pair of shorts, and sneakers. I climb down and touch Namu’s head. “You want to go for a walk?” I ask him.
He turns and picks up the leash that is dangling from the roof of his doghouse.
I let him lead me. He decides to take the steeper path.
I
am gathering my things from my desk, getting ready to move. The only good thing about getting reassigned to Wendell is that it will be easier for me to go through the Vidromek boxes and gather more information about the girl. I don’t know what I will find out. I am afraid of what I may discover. But last night, or rather early this morning, I decided that I had to follow this uncomfortable need to know more about the girl regardless of where it takes me.
“Hey.” I hear Jasmine’s voice in the distance. Then she sees me putting my things in a box. “What’s going on?” She sounds worried.
“I have been assigned to work with Wendell full-time,” I say. I am afraid to look at her.
“What the…When? How?”
“Yesterday. After I finished helping Wendell. Arturo decided. He was going to make sure you had help. Maybe Jasmine can still get Belinda.” Then I see amongst my things the list that
Jasmine made for me that very first morning, and my eyes well up again.