Papi pulled the shirt away from his face. He looked disappointed. He smelled it twice more, I think hoping for a better result. I didn’t know what answer he was looking for; all I knew was that he didn’t get it. Dejectedly, he balled up his guayabera and turned to throw it in the laundry hamper, which was just outside the bathroom.
Just before he three-pointed it into the hamper, he remembered something and fumbled to catch the shirt while still in the process of throwing it. It was a pretty funny take—I’d have to remember to use that move in Mrs. Waked’s Intermediate Theater Workshop the next time we did a comedy sketch. Anyway, Papi unballed his shirt, reached into one of the pockets, and pulled something out of it.
Hard to make out what it was in the darkness. It was a tube of some kind, as long as my two middle fingers when I made a bridge out of them. There, in the murk of the bedroom, Papi contemplated the tube the way a war doctor who’s had to do surgery on themselves studies the bullet they’ve just pulled out of their own calf muscle.
And then I smelled it. I would have preferred sniffing the rank stank of Papi’s body odor a million times more than the acrid, earthy, noxious odor I caught wind of just then. It brought back so many memories. All of them bad.
“Hey, Papi,” I said, stepping into the bedroom, “whatcha got there?”
Papi screamed like a bag of cats.
TEN MINUTES LATER, PAPI and I were sitting on the back porch together on two dirty, crusty patio chairs that had come with the Coral Castle when we bought it. You never quite knew if the weave of the seats was going to hold. The chairs popped and groaned every time you shifted your weight. Your butt could fall through at any time.
A round patio table with a frosted-glass top stood between us. Every house in Miami is required to have one of these. An umbrella stuck out from the center, and it was more mold than canvas at this point. We were afraid that if we opened it, it would start singing, “Feed me, Seymour!”
Papi and I were both facing forward as we licked diabetic-friendly chocolate yogurt bars. They were about 45 percent good. They were melting because Miami specializes in melting frozen treats.
Neither Papi nor I spoke. We sat looking at our backyard. In response, our backyard did absolutely nothing.
I did like the Coral Castle’s backyard, though. Like so much of Florida, it was full of plants and trees that stegosauruses used to munch on, back when there were stegosauruses. Lots of sharp, spiny succulents with serrated edges and pointy tips spread out all over the yard. We had fronds ferdays. Wait, did I say days? Fronds for eons.
You’d think that, with all this prehistoric plant life growing in our backyard, I’d only be smelling the wet, loamy, oxygen-rich scents you’d expect from a jungle. And yeah, I got plenty of that. But sitting out there then, my tropical olfactory symphony was interrupted by a sour, burnt stink. It came from the ashtray on the table, in which two recently smoked cigar butts huddled like cut-off thumbs.
It’s funny. Back when I was little, I used to like the smell of Papi’s cigars while he was smoking them. But an ashtray of used cigars had always been on my list of top-five worst stinks, right above cheese that smells like acne, and right below Papi’s grajo.
And, chacho, I’d made Papi sweat like an ice sculpture when I’d caught him with his cigar! He’d taken a little time afterward to wash up and put on a clean cloud of a guayabera before we went to sit outside. The yogurt pops were meant to help keep us cool while we talked things through. But when the wind changed direction, I knew sin duda that dude had started sweating again.
Why didn’t we just stay inside, you ask, where the air-conditioning was plentiful? He didn’t explain, but I was pretty sure I knew the reason: because he wanted to show me the scene of his crime. He wanted me to see the ashtray with the two cigar-thumbs in it, and the box of wooden matches he’d used to light them. He wanted me to know how he’d done it so it would be easier to catch him the next time. Because then he’d think twice before he tried again.
Once I’d seen the ashtray, he’d offered to clean it out so I wouldn’t have to see or smell it.
“Leave it,” I said. I wanted to sniff up all the terribleness that ashtray had to offer. My disgust gave me the strength, finally, to pose the question I’d been wanting to ask for ten minutes.
“So. When did you start smoking again?”
“Yesterday,” he answered, muted, embarrassed, noticing my revulsion. But he was in full confessional mode now. “After everybody left. I smoked one cigar yesterday and one today.”
“Why?”
He cow-tongued his yogurt bar. “Deciphering the first page of that scientific paper was maybe the single greatest moment of my career. I mean, advancement in science just doesn’t work like that. Eureka moments are extremely rare. But when I figured out the first page, Sal, the future of our universe changed forever. I’m not bragging, I promise. My team and I might very well be nominated for a Nobel Prize before I die, because of yesterday. So,” he finished, rotating the frozen treat in his hand in contemplation, “I guess I wanted to celebrate a little.”
I nodded. “By smoking a cigar.”
“Yes.”
“Even though you swore to Mami when she was dying in the hospital that you’d never smoke a cigar again.”
“Yes.”
We licked our yogurt bars in perfect unison as we listened to the birds gossip.
“How was it?” I asked next.
Papi shook his head. “Terrible. I’d had those cigars for years. I had found them over the summer, when we moved, in some forgotten box. Remembered them and dug them out. I hadn’t taken care of them. You’re supposed to keep cigars at a certain temperature and a certain moisture level. I used to have a humidor for that, before I told your mami I’d quit. But even in a humidor, these ones are so old, they probably would’ve been stale anyway. It was like smoking a roll of notebook paper that had been dipped in tar. Bitter and too hot and basically terrible, start to finish.”
With a chunk of frozen yogurt on my tongue, it was hard to sound as angry as I felt. “And yet, after that terrible first smoking experience, you smoked a second one. What were you celebrating today?”
He had the face of a man with no good answer. “Nothing. Nothing at all. Oh, I thought I was going to have something to celebrate. Bonita had the brilliant idea of uploading the paper into the remembranation machine to see if it could figure it out ‘from the inside.’”
I became suddenly uncomfortable in my chair. It crackled and complained as I squirmed. “Did it work?” I asked innocently.
You win some, you lose some, said Papi’s shrug. “As soon as Bonita had suggested it, I was a hundred percent sure it would work. So I got the second old cigar ready while she uploaded the paper. Only it didn’t work. In fact, the remembranation machine started to malfunction. A definite step backward. So Bonita went to get some equipment from the lab so we could find out what had happened.”
“And you decided to celebrate anyway.”
Papi sucked the rest of the yogurt off the stick and winced when he got an instant ice cream headache. “It didn’t matter that it tasted terrible. It didn’t matter that I had nothing to celebrate. I am addicted to smoking. I’m an addict, always will be. All it took was one bad cigar, and the door was open again. It’s bonkers how hard it is to close that door once it’s been opened.”
My own yogurt bar looked a lot like a cigar at that point. “So, what should we do?”
“I’m going to tell your mom when she gets home tonight. I’m hoping both of you will help me get this under control again.”
My chair complained like an old man when I leaned toward him and smiled. “Por supuesto, Papi.”
I liked the way my Spanish made him smile. “Gracias, mijo. I feel very lucky and very grateful to know my family will get me through this.” He had to gather strength to add, “It’s hard for me to ask for help.”
I fell back hard into my chair, remembering all the mistakes I’d made over the
past two days. “I know. Me too. What a pair we make, huh?”
“The Vidón boys: wrecking their lives one bad decision at a time.”
“One?” I asked, scraping the last of the crappy chocolate off the stick with my teeth. “Why, sometimes, I can make six impossibly bad decisions before breakfast.”
“Speaking of bad decisions, your principal called.”
I started chewing on the stick. “I know.”
“Congratulations on becoming the codirector of Rompenoche.”
“Thank you.”
“You love the Alice books so much. I can’t wait to see what you come up with.”
“Neither can I.” Crunch crunch crunch went the Popsicle stick.
“She also tells me you are not allowed to bring magic tricks to school anymore.”
“Yeah.”
Papi got up, reached across the table, gently took the stick out of my mouth, and threw it in the ashtray. “She thinks you stole a piece of equipment from me that allowed you to break some fundamental laws of physics. She wants to make sure you aren’t trying to pass off scientific apparatuses as magic tricks. Because she really does not want you to break the laws of physics anymore while you’re at school.”
“She told me all this, yes.”
“Also,” he said, easing himself back into his failing, suffering chair, “I would greatly prefer that you didn’t break the laws of physics, in school, out of school—really, anytime.”
I thought about this. I could have gone the clever route and tried to find some wording to wiggle my way out of promising anything. But instead, I went down a more traditional path for my age: I gave him some good old-fashioned teenage sass-back. “Tell you what, Papi: I will if you will.”
Confused, bemused, and thoroughly unamused, he said, “Explain.”
“You’re breaking the laws of physics at least as much as I am. You’re trying to seal up holes in the membrane of the universe.”
“Which you made.”
“Not all of them. Some of them got there who-knows-how. Isn’t that true?”
“That’s true,” he conceded.
“But you want to close those, too.”
Papi straightened up in his chair, the way he does when he’s starting to enjoy a debate. “When you have holes in a bucket, Sal, you plug all the holes. Not having any holes is what being a bucket is all about.”
“That’s a metaphor. But what if it’s the wrong metaphor? What if ‘bucket’ doesn’t correctly describe the way the multiverse works?”
“Then I’ll find a better one.”
“I’ve got one.”
He smiled and shut his eyelids halfway, like a dubious iguana. “Let’s hear it.”
I stood up and paced the patio as I spoke. “The universe is like a cell. A cell without a wall would die. But a cell without a permeable wall would also die. To live, a cell must both keep things out and let things in.”
Papi gave me his official Nod of Approval. “Permeable,” said Papi. “Your vocabulary has really grown in the last few years.”
“Don’t butter me up. What’d you think of my metaphor?”
He scratched his nose for too long. “I think a metaphor without proof to support it is just poetry.”
I was expecting something like that. “What if I could give you irrefutable proof right now that I’m right? Would you change your mind? Just like that, this very second?”
“Yes,” said Papi, looking surprised that I would even have to ask. “I’m a scientist. When better proof comes along, I change my beliefs to fit the best evidence. Anything less would be illogical and unethical.”
I walked around the table to stand right in front of him. “Brana isn’t broken. Bonita was right. It read the paper and understood everything.”
My words impacted his face, like his nose was a black hole. “Who’s Brana?”
“The remembranation machine. I named it.”
Papi rested a bare foot on the other knee and held his ankle. “So, you’re on a first-name basis with my remembranation machine?” Guilt had kept his anger in check until now, but I could see his ire catching fire when he added, “So, you learned nothing from being grounded? You need to be grounded for longer?”
“Ground me all you want. It won’t change the fact that you’re dead wrong.”
He raised his chin and scrutinized me. “Wrong about what?”
This was it. This would prove who was right about Papi: FixGabi or me. “Sealing up every hole in the universe will make it explode.”
“Says who?”
“Says Brana. Who knows a lot more than it was letting on to you. But it told me the truth about the multiverse.”
Papi stood up. “Sal. Sal. Please think hard about your next answer. My life’s work depends on it. Are you certain you understood the remembranation machine correctly?”
“You don’t have to take my word for it. Go talk to it yourself.”
“I will. I am, right now. But will you help me?”
I took a step back. “You don’t need me. You’re the physicist.”
“But you’re the AI whisperer. I mean, the entropy sweeper thinks you’re its best friend. And now Brana has a name I didn’t even know about, but you do. Why do all the AIs I program love you so much?”
I shrugged. “Maybe because you programmed them, you big sap.” A thought occurred to me. “If I help you, what will you give me?”
“Give you?” Papi looked deeply offended. “Free room and board? A loving home to grow up in?”
“Come on, viejo. You can do better than that.”
“You don’t want to be grounded anymore, do you?”
I weighed good and evil in my two hands. “I’m gonna need to put a lot of work in to save Rompenoche over the next few days. I’m really asking for the sake of my education.”
“I’ll need to clear it with your mother.”
“She’ll agree if you do. She loves all my extracurricular activities.”
Papi laughed, then extended his hand. We shook on it.
Then I patted his back, guiding him back toward the glass door. “C’mon. Let’s get inside. It’s time to school you on some calamity physics.”
AT THE END OF the school day, after detention, I stood at Culeco’s student pickup area with Gabi, Aventura, and Yasmany, waiting for our ride to arrive. Gabi wasn’t dressed as Alice anymore. She had on a red T-shirt that said: “YOU CAN’T USE UP CREATIVITY. THE MORE YOU USE, THE MORE YOU HAVE.”—MAYA ANGELOU, and barrettes: Some were full moons, and some were werewolves howling at those moons. (I was never so happy to see so many barrettes in one person’s hairball. Way, way, way, way better than a single chip clip.)
Aventura still had on her rabbit suit, but she’d fixed the makeup on her face. No sign that she’d ever cried today. She looked like one happy bunny now.
Yasmany had on his sweats and was running through some ballet moves. He was skipping his after-school dance practice today so he could help us out. I didn’t want to stare, but it surprised me every time when I saw how casually great he was at dancing. Chacho could spin like a drill bit.
While he practiced, Gabi, Aventura, and I texted. Aventura was texting the million kids who were asking her about the changes to Rompenoche.
Gabi and I were texting each other.
We’d been doing that pretty much nonstop since Papi had dropped me off at school again. We had a lot to catch up on.
But you already know everything I needed to tell her. So I’ll just give you some highlights from her responses:
Yasmany and I both got two weeks’ detention for aiding and abetting you in your “magic trick” wink-wink.
BTW, does Principal Torres know about our special “gift”? She was acting all sly and knowing. Left me paranoid.
It’s okay about the Fey Spy. I have my ways. I’ll find it.
You call her FixGabi? Seems to me girlfriend needs to fix her hair. Did you see that CHIP CLIP instead of barrettes? Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!
&
nbsp; Wait. She wants to do WHAT to the multiverse?!?!
No, don’t feel bad. She probably would’ve fooled me, too. But she must be stopped. We will stop her. This I vow.
Good job, Brana, throwing that other Gabi out of our universe! “It was a ti-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-e!” Ha! What a BLT.
Oh, you mean this symbol --> <-- ? That’s an interrobang. It’s a question mark and exclamation point all in one. I love that Brana is using them! I think they should make a comeback.
Wait. Hold on, Bubba. I want to be sure your autocorrect isn’t getting frisky. Did you really just text me that FixGabi was right That closing up all the holes in the universe will actually break the universe
Well, yeah, I guess Brana would know. But still. Holy Taco Tuesday.
Oh, I wish I could have seen that! You and Dr. Vidón and Brana and Sweeps all talking together like a little human-robot family! Working out your differences, figuring out how to communicate better—it’s just so cute!
Yeah, definitely. FixGabi will be back. And she’s a dangerous foe. Luckily, you’ve got me. I am literally just as dangerous as she is. I just wish you had told me about her sooner. Which reminds me: Remind me to tell you something. I don’t want to text it.
Oh, Ave’s fine. Terrified about changing Rompenoche this late in the game, but in a good way. She thinks you’re somehow going to wave a magic wand and fix everything.
Oh. Right. Your mom DID figure out how to make the Death costume work, didn’t she I remember you called her your “secret weapon” when it came to school projects. Is that why you’re having her pick us up from school?
And right on cue, American Stepmom came cruising into the pickup lot in her noiseless electric car.
She pulled up and let the car idle as she rolled down the shotgun-seat window. She was wearing big circular movie-star sunglasses, and she lowered them as she leaned toward us and said, “Get in, nerds. We’re going to fix Rompenoche.”
Sal and Gabi Fix the Universe Page 23