Sal and Gabi Fix the Universe

by Carlos Hernandez

  Mr. Milagros crossed himself.

  Gabi cleared her throat. “I have summoned you here, specter, to tell me the location of Sal Vidón.”

  Wait, what? “You summoned me?”

  She made big Play along or else eyes at me. “Yes, specter, for, I, am, a, bruja, and, I, summoned, you, to, do, my, bidding. Now, do, my, bidding.”

  Oh. OH! That’s what Gabi must have been telling Mr. Milagros: that she was a bruja, and she was going to cast a spell to help them find me. The best part was, she hadn’t even lied. She’d been calling herself a bruja ever since I’d gotten all sensitive about kids thinking I was a brujo. And she literally had summoned me here!

  “Okay, sure,” I said. “What’s yer bidding, m’bruja?”

  Gabi closed her eyes, did some weird dance with her fingers, and swayed her whole body like a snake getting charmed. “Sal Vidón has disappeared. Where will he reappear?”

  She opened one eye, watching for my response.

  I needed a second to think this through. If she was asking where I would reappear, that meant she did not think it would be a good idea for me to just launch myself through the portal and pop back into the bathroom. I agreed. I was already blowing Mr. Milagros’s mind as it was; seeing me materialize out of nowhere might have been the straw that broke the custodian’s brain—not to mention Vorágine’s.

  But the only other option would be to make a hole of my own and use it to arrive at some other location in my universe. And, as stated earlier, I’d never done that before. I was afraid to try that by myself.

  Oh, wait. With Gabi here, I wouldn’t have to do it by myself. When we had collaborated before, we’d manage to save Iggy. I wouldn’t be scared to make a hole of my own with her helping me.

  “M’bruja,” I said to her, “if we both concentrate on that problem, I think we can come up with the best answer.”

  She thought, and blinked, and ticced her head…and then she got it. “I understand. We must ride the taco together, as we have in days of yore.”

  “What in the world are you talking about?” asked Vorágine.

  “Oh,” said Gabi, turning to the toilet, “just some bruja-talk. The spirit knows what I mean. Don’t you, Mr. Poltergeist?”

  “Yes,” I said. “We need to figure out where Sal will reappear. I am ready. On three?”

  Gabi firmed up her resolve. “On three. Let’s count together.”

  We did. “One. Two. Three.”

  * * *

  This isn’t bragging. This is just real talk when I say Gabi and I were getting better at this.

  We hadn’t known what we were doing when we saved Iggy. We’d gotten lucky back then. But now, we had a clear sense of what we needed. We focused both our minds on listening to the universe. Hearing its desires. Waiting for it to tell us where it wanted me to reenter.

  I know, I know: It sounds like I’m pretending the universe has a big fat mind of its own. Like, the universe cares where I reappear? It’s not a living thing. It isn’t capable of having preferences, right?

  To which I say: Fine, yes, you’re right, suck my nose. It’s still easier when I think of the universe that way. And if I’ve learned nothing else in my thirteen years of being alive, I’ve learned this: When you’re trying to do the most good for the most people, for as long as you have the spoons, it’s okay to stick with what works.

  It was working now. As I visualized a top-down, bird’s-eye view of Culeco, a great, glowing spot appeared on the third floor, against the wall of hallway 3E, burning brighter than a video game NPC with a quest.

  “Gabi,” my ghost projection said to her, “are you seeing what I’m seeing?”

  She nodded. “I mean, we should have guessed, right? There’s a lot of…history there. It makes sense that that would be the easiest place for Sal to reappear.”

  “But can I”—I quickly corrected myself—“can Sal fit in there?”

  “Oh,” she said with a laugh, “don’t worry. Sal can fit. There are no books in the way. I made Yasmany take them out on Friday so he would do his homework.”

  “Okay. Well, that’s that, then. We have our answer. I guess I’ll just be going, then.”

  “Yes, you should be going now. I release you from my bruja magic. Thank you, specter.”

  “Wait!”

  That last, desperate call was from Mr. Milagros. He said it so loudly, so passionately, that it scared me. I involuntarily reared back, my projection retreating so far into the wall that only my face was still visible.

  “No, wait!” he said, and jogged over to my spectral self. “Espere, por favor. Le ruego que me conteste una pregunta. Pago cualquier precio que me cobre.”

  “What are you saying, Mr. Milagros?” asked Gabi.

  “He’s asking me,” I interpreted, “to answer a question for him. He says he’ll pay any price for the answer.”

  Something told me that sticking around would be a bad idea. I’d never seen Mr. Milagros act like this before. He looked as though one touch would cause him to shatter like a dropped Christmas ornament. I knew I had already crossed like six lines, acting like a ghost.

  But when you’ve crossed six lines, why not seven? “What is your question, señor?” I asked.

  “Lourdes,” said Mr. Milagros. “Can I talk to Lourdes? Is she…Is she okay? Is she happy? Ay, mi pobre querida. Mi amor eterno. Please, if it’s at all within your power, let me talk to my wife.”

  Oh. Oh no. No, no, no, no, no. This is why you don’t cross the seventh line. Poor Mr. Milagros must have lost his wife, Lourdes. And, since he thought I was a spirit, he wanted me to bring her over to talk to him.

  He was such a good man, and this was the second unintentional trick I’d played on him. Both had backfired. The first one got Culeco this swanky new bathroom. But this second one—this one was much, much worse.

  Gabi’s eyes welled up as quickly as mine. She touched Mr. Milagros’s arm. “Oh, Mr. Milagros. I’m so sorry. But he can’t—” She had no idea how to finish that sentence. She turned to me then, pleading, confused. How can we fix this, Sal?

  Heck if I knew. All I knew was that I hadn’t been so mad at myself in a long, long time. So I just started talking. But not in the way a river flows. More like the way a dam breaks. “Look, Mr. Milagros, I have no idea who Lourdes is. Never seen her before. And you know why? Because she must have been a good person. Una santa. She must have been, to have been loved so deeply. But me? I’m a trash fire. I’m a heap of bad ideas and poor impulse control held together by my undying belief that I know better than everyone else, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Oh, and there is so much evidence to the contrary. I get slapped in the face by my own idiocy seventeen times a day. I’ve known steamed yucca that’s smarter than I am. You think anyone as wonderful as Lourdes would want anything to do with someone like me?”

  “Oh,” said Mr. Milagros. He didn’t seem as brittle anymore as he took in my words. He became increasingly pensive, and more at peace. “Oh. Oh, I see. You’re right, she was a saint. And you…you’re a demonio.”

  Both Gabi and I drew our heads back as we slowly cottoned on to where he was going with that line of thinking. “Yes,” I agreed. “Yes. I am most definitely a little devil. People are always calling me that.”

  It’s true. People like Papi and American Stepmom.

  “Y si usted no la conoce,” Mr. Milagros logicked, “es porque ella no está donde usted está. Ella está en…en otro lado. Un lugar distinto. Uno donde los diablos no la puedan molestar.”

  “What are you saying, Mr. Milagros?” asked Gabi, buoyed by his increasingly un-sad body language.

  I translated. “He’s saying that if I, a diablo, don’t know who she is, it’s because she isn’t with me. She must be somewhere where devils like me don’t get to have any contact with her.”

  Mr. Milagros knelt so that he was eye level with Gabi. “She’s not with the devils, Gabi. She’s with the angels. Lourdes is in heaven.”

  And in that mom
ent, all the hope in the world gathered in Mr. Milagros’s face. His expression was beyond joy or sadness, beyond laughter or tears. Inside that shaky, swimming smile of his, he was experiencing total union. Total oneness. The 100 percent opposite of loneliness.

  “I don’t even believe in heaven,” said Gabi, bawling like a squall, “but I’m sure Lourdes is there! May I hug you, Mr. Milagros?”

  He opened his arms, Gabi jumped into them, and rapture enough to start another universe beamed out of their embrace.

  That was my cue to exit. So what I thought was going to be this massive confession and admission of guilt on my part turned into something completely different. I hadn’t tried to feed Mr. Milagros a load of cacaseca. I didn’t even start out trying to misdirect him. But as a magician, it is against my very nature to correct people’s mistaken ideas. If I did, I’d be out of a job.

  Plus, after the grief I’d nearly caused that dear man to suffer, there was no raunching way I was going to take from him the tiny momentary rest from grieving his wife that I’d accidentally given him. From one mourner to another, let me tell you, moments of reprieve are priceless.

  And anyway, there wasn’t time. I needed to go stuff myself in Yasmany’s locker, stat, or I’d be late for homeroom.

  REMEMBER WHEN I WAS being all smug about spending so much time on the climbing wall in Health and Wellness? Yeah, now that I found myself folded up tighter than a Navy SEAL’s parachute in Yasmany’s claustrophobic locker, I wasn’t feeling nearly as smart. See, I could have been taking yoga for weeks now. Weeks! There was a pace group in Health and Wellness that had been sun-salutationing and downward-dogging since day one of school. By now, I could’ve been contorting my body like Dhalsim.

  But oh, no, I had to spend every free period trying to get to the top of the red zone on the wall. Fat lot of good all that climbing was doing me now. If anything, it had worsened things, because I now had these beefy, bulging calf muscles that made fitting into Yasmany’s locker even harder. This must be what it feels like to be buried alive, I thought. I even had my arms crossed in front of me like Tutan-freaking-khamun. Except, unlike King Tut, I couldn’t stretch my legs luxuriously inside my huge sarcophagus. My knees were touching my chin. I was a Sal ball.

  The lapse in judgment that had led to this current predicament had taken place back on the space station. I thought I’d make the split in the fabric of the cosmos, the one that would lead me back to Yasmany’s locker, right beneath me and come in through the top. That way our new tear in the universe wouldn’t touch the one already in the back of the locker: the original hole that led to the universe from which I had purloined a little poultry. (Had no idea what flavor of catastrophe would occur if two different holes to two different universes touched and was not interested in finding out just now; thanks anyway.)

  I pictured myself drifting down gently into the locker, getting all nice and snug in there at my own pace, and even standing up and sticking my head through the gap between worlds to enjoy one last look at the space station. I would’ve liked to have seen the Earth of that universe one more time, tell it I was sorry for what the Gustavo Vidón of that world had done to it.

  But nope. As soon as I’d stuck my feet through the portal, I’d been pulled back into my universe faster than you could say Gravity: It’s not just a good idea; it’s the law. Yep. I’d been in zero g for like fifteen minutes and already forgotten that, in my universe, gravity exists.

  And I paid for it. I rag-dolled into the locker, hard, and did my best imitation of a fetus.

  “Ow.”

  The only thing that had saved me from being completely crushed to death was the hole in the back of the locker. My head, shoulders, front, and upper back pressed mercilessly against the unrelenting metal of the locker. But my posterior slid past the point where the metal locker and concrete wall should have blocked me. And I felt on it the invigorating chill of the powerful air-conditioning that a poultry-processing plant uses to keep its product fresh.

  Yep. I was sticking my butt into the chicken universe.

  Which, as far as I was concerned, was fan-pantsing-tastic! Thank the Great Sandwich that Gabi and I hadn’t finished sealing up the hole yet! We’d been working on it for weeks, after all, snorting up a few calamitrons every day. When we’d started, the hole was big enough to let a full-grown poultry-plant employee come through. Now, you’d have to really shove to force a pair of thin chinchillas through at the same time.

  Luckily, my buttocks are much daintier than a pair of chinchillas. Plenty of room to rear my rear into the delicious, open-air freedom of an alternate universe. Ah.

  “¿Que’eso?” I heard.

  It sounded like the voice was coming from everywhere at once, but that was just because I was trapped in a locker, and the echo made it hard to place sounds. But since I didn’t say it, and I was the only person in the locker, then the voice had to be coming from outside the locker. Furthermore, it wasn’t coming from the hallway, because someone talking outside of the locker would have sounded muted, not echoey. Someone talking through a rip in the universe would have sounded loud enough, but the voice couldn’t have been coming from the space station, because it was abandoned now. That left only one place.

  The poultry-verse. The chicken workers must have noticed my can.

  If I remembered correctly, the other side of the wormhole in Yasmany’s locker led to a wall in the poultry-verse that was, like, two stories up from the factory floor. A conveyor belt that carried poultry carcasses, hanging by their drumsticks, was within easy reach.

  I wondered how they’d spotted me so quickly. I mean, those workers had to be hard at work doing stuff to chickens, and from their angle, there’s a conveyor belt at least partially blocking the view of the hole. They would have had to have been on the lookout for weird stuff coming out of this spot, like, all the time.

  “Yo sé exactamente lo que eso es,” said a grim woman’s voice. She sounded a lot like Principal Torres when Principal Torres was just about to lay down the smack. “Eso es el fundido de un diablo.”

  Oh. Well, okay. If the workers thought the hole was really a shortcut to the Bad Place and devils would occasionally pop out of it, then that would explain why they were watching it so carefully. I recognized the voice of the woman who had spoken, the one who thought my backside was a demon’s backside. She had very briefly visited my universe, when Gabi and I had stolen a second chicken from her universe. She came through the locker and demanded we hand it over. We did, because we didn’t really want to steal a chicken, and because she was pretty scary.

  She thought we were devils the whole time. We’d promised to be good devils from then on.

  But I guess shoving my butt into their universe didn’t constitute good-devil behavior in her book.

  “¿Qué hacemos ahora?” said another chicken worker’s voice, one I didn’t recognize. “¿Llamamos a un sacerdote?”

  Ha! They wanted to call in a priest to perform an exorcism on my floating keister. That would make me Insta famous for sure. So I gave them an extra-demonic wiggle to encourage them.

  “No necesitamos un sacerdote,” said the Principal Torres sound-alike. “Todo lo que necesito es una escalera. ¡Prepárate, diablo!”

  Yeah, I really shouldn’t have trolled them with the extra wiggle. That woman was getting a ladder so she could climb up here and literally kick my butt back into my universe.

  Time to get out of here.

  “Gabi,” I said into my smartwatch, “I’m in the locker. And I need to get out ASAP. Where are you?”

  I was desperate for an answer, but even I couldn’t have hoped that Gabi would have responded as quickly as she did. She really was number one at replying to texts. Hang tight, Sal. Yasmany’s almost got his part down pat. He’ll be ready to perform the trick in just a minute.

  Imagine me, in almost total darkness, trussed up in the locker like a Cuban American turducken, desperate to get out of there before I got my rump busted by a very a
ngry chicken worker, reading Gabi’s reply on my smartwatch. I didn’t even know where to begin.

  Oh, wait, yes, I did: by screaming at Gabi. “Gabi! I am trapped in the locker! I need to get out right now! Why are you involving Yasmany, anyway?”

  Gabi’s reply, appearing almost instantly, was descriptive to the point of bewildering. How the heck had she had the time to text so many words in so few seconds? I’ve been busy writing the act that we have to perform. You can’t expect me to be the writer and the lead actor with so little notice, can you? Since it’s Yasmany’s locker, it only made sense to ask him to do it. But don’t worry. He’ll be great. We’re just about ready to go! We’re taking our places. Just follow Yasmany’s lead; you’ll know what to do when the time comes.

  Qué en el nombre de la alfombra was Gabi planning? I had so many questions. But before I could ask any of them, I heard the unmistakable sound of a two-story metal ladder being leaned up against the wall of a poultry-processing plant.

  “¡Hoy voy a almorzar diablo asado!” said the chicken worker as her first step onto the ladder made it rattle. For you non–Spanish speakers, she said that she was going to eat roasted devil for lunch. Also, I was the devil she was talking about. This woman was legit terrifying. I mean, how many people, when they believe they are being been visited by a heckin’ devil, instead of running or pleading for their lives or even trying to strike a bargain, decide they’re gonna eat the thing?

  I tried to retreat my fanny back into the locker like a turtle hiding its head, but I couldn’t get it all the way inside.

  “Gather around, everybody!” said Yasmany in a booming carnival barker’s voice. “The show’s about to start. You don’t want to miss this! I’m about to blow this school’s mind!”

  Okay. Okay. The “show,” whatever it was supposed to be, was starting. I just needed to buy a little time and then, somehow, Gabi was going to get me out.

  The problem was, I didn’t have time to wait. The chicken worker was stomping her way up the ladder step by heavy step. I could hear her desire to rip me a new one with every clomp. I needed a solution this very second. But what?