Sal and Gabi Fix the Universe

by Carlos Hernandez

  Plus, I still had all the tricks I kept in my backpack.

  And anyway, if I do say so myself, I look good in kung fu pj’s. “Hey”—I shrugged—“if Aru Shah can have adventures in her pajamas, why can’t I?”

  Gabi, who reads even more than I do, snorted so hard that she filled her lungs with Miami traffic fumes and had a mini coughing fit. “Don’t flatter yourself, bubba. You’re no demigod.”

  “Oh, and I suppose you are?”

  “I am the demigod of Shut Your Tacohole So I Can Think. Let me figure this out for a minute. You don’t want to feel like an empty grave the rest of your life, do you?”

  I didn’t, of course. But what I said was “I’m the demigod of Putting My Foot So Far Up Your Butt You’re Gonna Lick My Toes.”

  Oh, she heard me. She let me know by raising her nose that she was ignoring me. “The remembranation machine, Sal. What does it do?”

  Dad: The Final Frontier was a calamity physicist just like Papi, so Gabi knew as much about the machine as I did. Which, I admit, was basically nothing. “It…remembranates?”

  Gabi could’ve killed a bunny with the look she gave me. “We are thinking things through carefully and logically, you jar of farts. Now, tell me out loud, nice and slow, exactly what the remembranation machine is supposed to do.”

  Omegalol. “Jar of farts.” It was hard to be careful and logical when I was laughing at Gabi’s insult. But I tried. “The remembranation machine [snort] is supposed to fix the membrane that separates one universe from another [ha-ha]. When the membrane gets a hole in it [titter], pieces of the membrane go flying off. Also,” I repeated, “jar of farts [giggle].”

  Gabi, all business, tried to get me back on track. “Those pieces that break off from the membrane are called calamitrons.”

  “Right. Calamitrons have to be stitched back into the hole in the membrane they came out of. That’s called remembranation, and that’s what the machine does: It puts calamitrons back where they belong. It fixes the rips in our universe’s membrane.”

  Gabi nodded. Maybe the sun was playing tricks on me, but I swear, one of the joker barrettes in her hair winked at me. “When your papi turned on the remembranator, Sal, that’s when you felt like a soulless grave?”

  Hearing her quote me made me wonder if she was making fun again. But she didn’t look like she was playing. She looked like a lot was riding on my answer. So I answered straight. “Yeah. I think that’s why I’m feeling so much better now. The farther I get from the machine, the better my mood gets.”

  “And the remembranator was still running when your papi tried to go into your house with Iggy?”

  Why was I thinking slowly today? It was so obvious! But since we were being careful and logical, I said it out loud: “No wonder Iggy screamed. The remembranation machine hurt him, because his existence is tied to an Iggy from another universe.”

  Gabi tapped her temple. “The remembranator is fixing holes in the universe. But my brother is a hole in the universe!”

  “And being a hole is probably the only thing that’s keeping him alive.”

  Man, oh man. What would’ve happened if Papi had insisted on bringing Iggy inside the Coral Castle? Iggy would’ve been cut off from the only thing keeping him alive—his connection to the other Iggy. He might have been killed!

  “We have got,” I said, “to keep Iggy away from the remembranation machine.”

  Gabi and I walked a grim half block imagining the consequences if we didn’t.

  “The problem is,” Gabi said finally, “we can’t keep Iggy away from it. Not forever. Our dads want to use it to fix the whole universe. Soon there won’t be anywhere left for Iggy to hide.”

  Uh-oh. When your mami dies when you’re just a little kid, you learn quick what despair sounds like. Gabi was starting to lose hope.

  And losing hope is the one-way bus to Failuretown. Hope is the thing you lose right before you lose everything else.

  “Hey, Gabi,” I said to her. “It won’t come to that.”

  Her eyes started loading tears into her tear ducts like a submarine loads torpedoes into its tubes. “How do you know, Sal? How can you be sure?”

  She wasn’t being rhetorical. She wanted answers.

  So I gave her one. And I wasn’t just saying it because it was the answer she needed to hear. It was the bone-marrow truth. “Because, Gabi, I will relax that remembranation machine into the sandwich-eating sun before I let it hurt Iggy.”

  I mean, that’s not exactly how it works. I can’t relax anything into this universe’s sun, no matter how many sandwiches it eats. But if I sent the remembranator into a different universe, it could potentially fall into a white dwarf, or maybe a red giant, or perhaps a nice, fat neutron star. That would still count, right?

  Either way, the statement cheered up Gabi. I could hear the uncried tears mixed in with her laugher, but the tears never came out. “I believe you, Sal. I mean, you already saved Iggy once.”

  Not quite true. “We saved him, Gabi—you and me together. Well, and with a lot of help, too.” I opened my arms televangelically wide. “That, my friend, is the power of positive relaxation!”

  She went inward before she spoke out loud again. “Relaxing. It’s…it’s not easy for me.”

  “‘No es fácil,’” I said, quoting every Cuban ever. “Nobody who loves Iggy would find any of this easy. But you know what, Gabi? You can relax so well, you can see into the multiverse. You’re the only other person I’ve ever met who can do what I do. That’s got to count for something, right?”

  She uncrumpled a smile. “It counts, Sal. It counts a lot.” She stopped walking and stuck out her hand. It was the sincerest handshake anyone had ever offered me: like a Girl Scout trying really, really hard to earn her Handshaking merit badge. “Thank you, Salvador Alberto Dorado Vidón, for caring about my baby brother so much. And also for teaching me to do…what you can do.”

  I studied her hand. She was holding it out so hard, it was quivering. “Wait, are we thank-you friends?” I asked.

  Her eyebrows seismographed. “Is it bad for friends to say thank you?”

  “It’s not bad. But it’s like level-one friendship. I thought we had reached at least level four by now.”

  Gabi smiled, but warily. She didn’t drop her hand, but she sensed trouble. “What’s level-four friendship?”

  “That’s where, instead of saying thank you, we call each other a jar of farts.”

  Gabi covered her mouth and danced that dance you dance when you’re dying of laughter but you’re trying to talk at the same time. “It would be really hard, trying to catch a fart in a jar.”

  “Gotta be fast!”

  “No one’s that fast!”

  “Get up, turn around, slam on the lid, sniff the air, and: aw, too slow. Ain’t no fart in that jar—it’s all up your nose.”

  Gabi gave in to her giggling entirely. I’d been kind of snickering, but now I started cracking up, too.

  And, oh, big mistake. Maybe the biggest mistake I’d made all day.

  Because, see, laughing reminded me that I’d forgotten to pee. I’d neglected to all morning. I kept meaning to. But what with Papi fixing the universe and Iggy going to the hospital and all, I just never went.

  But now. Now, chacho. If I didn’t find a bathroom very, very soon, I was going to go to the bathroom while not in a bathroom. Like, right now.

  THE NEED TO PEE, and the fear of wetting yourself in public: I was experiencing two of life’s great motivators at the same time. Was really regretting drinking a water tower’s worth of agua that morning. But what could I do? I was thirsty.

  Welp. I didn’t have many options. It was too early in the morning for the stores on the way to school to be open, so I couldn’t beg bathroom privileges from a friendly business owner. I guess I could have tried to find a bush or a quiet corner somewhere, but Gabi’s presence made that option less than ideal. The last thing I wanted was to commit a potty-related misdemeanor in front of the
editor of our school newspaper. I could see the headline on next week’s issue of the Rotten Egg already:

  MAGICIAN’S POOR DECISION LEADS TO UNWANTED EMISSION

  No, the best option was to knock my knees, grit my teeth, and force-march my way to school, ASAP.

  To be fair to Gabi, she didn’t threaten to write a scandalous article about my misfortune. She didn’t make fun of me or, like a lot of middle school kids I know, make waterfall, raging-river, or bubbling-brook sounds as we walked. Instead, she found a way to genuinely distract me from the fact that I was one untied shoelace away from becoming a human water balloon. If I tripped, I’d pop.

  She let me play with her flying drone.

  “It’s called a Fey Spy,” she explained. “It’s actually two drones: the big one that looks like a bird, and a tiny one that looks like a housefly’s eyeball.”

  “I was wondering why your bird had a hole in its forehead,” I croaked. Wasn’t easy, forming sentences with a bladder the size of a whale’s brain.

  “That’s where the eyeball drone stores itself when it’s inactive. When I say, ‘Fey Spy: Mobilize!’”—instantly, the glittery robot hummingbird shot out of her hair and hovered a few feet above us—“both drones activate. The eyeball drone—you see it here, Sal?”

  She was pointing to a speck floating maybe eighteen inches away from her face. “Yeah.” I grimaced.

  “The eyeball drone is the eyes and ears of the Fey Spy. It watches for my hand gestures and/or listens for my verbal commands. Then it transmits those to the hummingbird drone, which then carries out my orders. This way, I can control the big drone from far away, with either hand gestures or my voice.”

  “That”—I winced—“is kinda amazing.”

  She took her tablet out of her backpack. “It gets better. All I have to do is fill out this online form for you”—she talked a little slower while she chicken-pecked at her virtual keyboard—“and take a couple of pictures.” She paparazzi-ed all around me, using her tablet to take up-close candids of my teeth-gritting mug. “Now, repeat after me, Sal.” I saw her press a red record button on her tablet. “That quick beige fox jumped in the air over each thin dog. ‘Look out!’ I shout. ‘For he’s foiled you again, creating chaos at the zoo!’”

  I was not in the mood for games. “That quick beige fox jumped in the air and did a bunch of cacaseca and bit Gabi Reál on her left wenis.”

  Gabi, unamused, made a swooping gesture with her hand, and the Fey Spy, following orders, smacked me upside the head. It didn’t hurt—I’ve been hit with wads of paper that stung more. But it’s the principle of the matter, right? I tried to Godzilla-swipe the hummingbird out of the air.

  But Gabi flew it out of my range while she asked, “Do you want to fly my drone or not?”

  I mean, I did before, but now even more. I owed her one (1) drone whacking upside her hairball. “I would like to, yes, please, thank you,” I replied.

  “Then you have to say the sentence right. It contains all forty-four of the phonemes in the English language. That’s how the Fey Spy will learn to recognize your voice and obey your commands.”

  Oh. “Why didn’t you say so? Show me the sentence,” I said, while imagining deserts, empty pools, and the planet Mercury, the driest hunk of rock in the solar system.

  She showed it to me, and I read it aloud: “That quick beige fox jumped in the air over each thin dog. ‘Look out!’ I shout. ‘For he’s foiled you again, creating chaos at the zoo!’”

  She pressed a few buttons on her tablet. “Good. Now this one.” She flipped the tablet around so I could read it.

  “The hungry purple dinosaur pleasurably ate the kind, zingy fox, the jabbering crab, and the mad whale, and started vending and quacking.”

  She did more stuff on her tablet. “Good. Just one more. Read this.”

  I tried to hurry through it. “Sal Vidón is a nose picker whose hobbies include making Civil War dioramas using his largest dried boogers—Wait a second! I don’t think that sentence has all forty-four phonemes in it!”

  Gabi, chuckling, pressed the stop button. “It doesn’t. That one was for my new podcast, Something’s Rotten, where I reveal all the deep, dark secrets of the Culeco student body.”

  “I swear on the president’s butt, Gabi, if you—”

  “Gotcha!” she said, as smug as a V for Vendetta mask. “As if I’d tell you if that’s what I was doing. Now, stop being such an easy mark, and look at this.” She put her tablet in front of me again.

  On it, I saw a live bird’s-eye view of Gabi and me walking to school. She was walking backward, while holding up the tablet to me. I was walking like a penguin who’d just taken a line drive to his black-and-white crotch.

  I tried to walk a little less like a penguin and more like a human, and said, “Are we done setting up? Will it obey my orders now?”

  Gabi nodded. “Tell it to do something.”

  I wasn’t sure what to say. “Is there a list of commands?”

  “You have to memorize all the different hand gestures, but it’s pretty smart when it comes to voice input. It will probably figure out what you mean. Just try it.”

  Because I’m the bigger person, I did not say, Fey Spy, slap Gabi like her mama don’t love her. Instead, I stared at the tiny fly’s-eyeball drone, which was staring back at me creepily, and said, “Fey Spy, fly to Culeco Academy of the Arts.”

  Immediately, the hummingbird drone rocketed ahead of us. On the tablet, I got to see a fast-forward preview of the journey Gabi and I were making to school, except from forty feet up. From this bird’s-eye view, Miami looked like different epochs of human history mashed into one city. You had Jurassic tropical trees mixed in with architecture from a hundred years ago, and fifty years ago, and twenty years ago, and twenty minutes ago. They spilled all over each other like a bucket of Legos dumped on the floor, colorful and angular and a golly-dolly mess. Lots of buildings had murals on their sides, in every style: Some looked like they should be hanging in a museum, and some looked like they were made by kids high on Red Bull and spray-paint fumes. Lots of large chicken statues, painted by artists in all the crazy ways artists can paint chickens, stood on the sidewalks as proud, weird symbols of the city. The cars grumbled and rumbled on the streets, like they were getting mad but hadn’t completely lost their tempers yet. They would, though. Rush hour would be starting any second now.

  The drone, high in the air, bypassed all the traffic. It didn’t need to follow roads and sidewalks; it flew on a diagonal path straight toward the middle school, fast and sure. Before long, I saw Culeco’s roof: specifically, the huge American flag being held up by a human-size egg with arms and legs and a superhero cape.

  The hummingbird zoomed over the school and brought its careening flight to a stop when it hovered above our rotten-egg school mascot. It had turned itself so that its camera eyes pointed toward the courtyard at the front of the school, where students, teachers, and staff all gathered every morning, way before it was time for school to start, just to hang out and have fun together. It was one of the reasons I loved my new school: Everyone seemed to want to be there.

  “The Fey Spy is so cool, Gabi,” I said. It’s amazing how being so engrossed in watching it go had made me want to go so much less. “Where did you get it? Is it another of Dad: The Final Frontier’s inventions?”

  Gabi, still walking backward, still holding up the tablet for me, peeked around it. “Nooo,” she said slowly. “It was a present from a friend.”

  A friend. Not her mom or one of her dads. That was weird. “Must be a pretty good friend, to give you a bleeding-edge flying drone. Do I know them?”

  “Not yet. I’ll have to introduce you sometime.” She pointed to the tablet screen. “Notice anything odd, Sal?”

  I got the sense she was trying to change the topic. But I mean, if she didn’t want to tell me who gave her a super-expensive techno gadget, that was her choice. I played along; I squinted and leaned closer to the screen.


  Now, Culeco students (and a lot of the faculty) love to dress in costume to go to school. We have more than our fair share of students who want to work in costuming and makeup for their careers, and pretty much everybody at Culeco is at least partially an actor. So every school day is like Halloween, except the disguises and masks aren’t cheap, off-the-rack, flavor-of-the-week getups. They’re custom-made, over-the-top, brimming with lights and sounds and special effects, and making obscure pop-culture references taken from every nation that has a significant cartoon and/or comics and/or movie industry.

  So at first, no, I didn’t notice anything odd. People were wearing all sorts of costumes, just like any other day. Except—wait a second. There were fewer colors than normal. The courtyard looked black and white and red all over, since those were, by far, the predominant colors on the outfits. Also, there seemed to be an unusually high number of living chess pieces walking around. And human-size playing cards with arms and legs. And royalty with oversize heads and itty-bitty crowns. And Cheshire Cats.

  Well, there was only one Cheshire Cat, with a smile as big as an ivory boomerang, but it was one more than I usually saw at school. That was the last hint I needed. I couldn’t help but smile, because Lewis Carroll is one of my favorite authors, and his books were the theme for this parent-teacher conference.

  “It’s Wonderland,” I answered Gabi. “Culeco’s turned itself into Wonderland.”

  A WEEK AGO, PRINCIPAL Torres had sent an email to the padres and me about the first parent-teacher conference of the year. I’m sure you’ve noticed that we do things a little differently at Culeco Academy, read her note. At our school, parent-teacher conference night isn’t just an opportunity to make sure Sal is getting the best education possible. We’re all performers here, and any chance we get, we like to put on a show. That’s why we call this event “Rompenoche.” We are going to give you a theater experience so great that you’ll swear we “broke the night”!

  That’s what “Rompenoche” means: “Break the night.” And let me tell you, I liked the sound of that! I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it before, but I am a showman.