Which feels swollen and itchy in his mouth, like it’s being dive-bombed by mosquitos.
“What’s up?” Nick says. “You’re looking a little Flowers for Algernon, man.”
Miguel startles, barks a laugh. He’s been chewing his tongue, trying to figure out what’s wrong with it, if anything’s wrong with it—trying to assess whether he’s having an attack. It’s not that cold outside today, above freezing. Still, it’s December and he’s not wearing a coat.
“Just chilly,” he says. “Better go inside.”
Chad and Emily are on the sofa looking at photographs—Miles must have fled for refuge in his room. Emily turns the pages of the album spread jointly across her own and Chad’s knees, and they look up at the sound of the door: four blue eyes in unison. Although Emily’s hair is bone straight, Chad’s in blond ringlets, they could be siblings, even twins. They have the same poreless skin and guileless innocence, an attractiveness Miguel hates himself a little for thinking of as bland. Which is crazy since, if Emily’s aesthetics diverge greatly from her former self, then Chad looks—with the exception of a few pounds—almost exactly the same as the day Miguel said “I do.”
“We have ice cream!” Emily bounds from the sofa. “It’s ginger-orange. Homemade.”
Nick made the dinner—couscous with some kind of caramelized onions and eggplant, with goat cheese; it was slightly ugly to look at but spectacular—and now homemade ice cream? Miguel and Chad have not used their kitchen to cook a meal since the new millennium. Clearly they should be the ones giving a baby to Emily and Nick, not the other way around.
They sit sipping French press coffee and eating ice cream out of faded, mildly chipped Moroccan bowls. All the poetry of this night seems in danger of killing him.
Miguel’s throat still itches; his tongue is still acting up. He chugs his scalding coffee and chases the burn with a big, unpoetic gulp of the heavenly ice cream for balance.
And that quickly, all air is gone.
He tries to breathe in but no: the passageway has closed. He hears his own wheezy gasp . . . some trickle of breath that must be escaping his lungs, and before he even knows what is happening his arms are flailing, knocking the precious little bowls off the table: he clutches the tablecloth (batik, something straight from Out of Africa) and runs, crazily, wildly, round the room.
Chad, Emily, Nick, making noises like, Ohmigod, are you okay? and Holy shit, what’s wrong? and Babe, what the fuck should we do?
“I’m calling 9-1-1,” Emily says, loud and clear, waving the cordless phone in Miguel’s face, which he sees only dimly, through stars popping in front of his eyes.
All at once, Nick is on him, and for a second Miguel has the consciousness to think the poor guy may be about to try to perform the Heimlich or mouth-to-mouth, unable to accept that their dinner guest, and the father of their collective child, is allergic to the fucking cold. Then it’s like Nick isn’t there anymore at all. The weight of him is off Miguel’s abdomen, where Nick had leaned an arm, and instead the world is gray and floaty, and he is gray and floaty in it—
Then: color, noise, flooding, wowowow—
He’s sitting upright, though he doesn’t remember how he got there. The world zooms at him loudly, colors vibrantly psychedelic. “What’s going on?” he shouts, his voice a volume he’s maybe never heard it. Under the raw bones of his chest, his heart races.
“Me, you, and syringes, my friend,” Nick says, holding up what looks like a long tube. “Meet Jay’s EpiPen.”
“EpiPen?” Miguel murmurs, voice breaking midway.
“Jay has asthma,” Emily says. “And all kinds of food allergies. They say it’s not part of his cerebral palsy—they say it’s a totally separate thing and really common now, with kids, but I don’t know . . .” She looks down. “We have to carry EpiPens everywhere.”
“Reason for my man purse,” Nick says, gesturing at his ratty messenger bag.
Staring at Miguel, all three manage grins to indicate gladness that Miguel has not ruined the night by being dead.
“Never a dull moment around you two,” Chad booms to their hosts.
“Us?” Nick says. “This guy’s the one who keeps getting, like, syphilis and falling on the ground choking. Jesus Christ. Can’t take you anywhere.”
Miguel feels himself laugh, although his head is still roaring.
“We should probably go to the ER,” Emily says. “You should be checked out.”
This gets Miguel to his feet. “Oh, no, that’s not necessary,” he says. “I’ll make an appointment with my doctor tomorrow. I should probably . . . I guess request one of those Epi things for myself.”
“Honey,” Chad says, “maybe you should see some kind of specialist.”
“I don’t think they have specialists for people who are allergic to the cold, Chad.”
“Don’t kid yourself,” Chad says. “If you can charge money for it, there’s a specialist for everything.”
Suddenly they are at the door. Everyone is hugging. Everyone is filled with miraculous relief and affection, like prisoners who have just orchestrated an elaborate breakout and now find themselves bidding adieu on the other side of a river, safe from the law. Things, lately, are absurd. For the past decade, Miguel has done nothing much more complex than go to work every day, come home, order dinner, watch TV, or attend some party or fundraiser or theater performance that Chad insisted on dragging him to, then falling into his increasingly platonic bed. The days have blurred together in a not-unpleasant fugue of sameness. If all the world’s a stage, Miguel was one of those serving as the requisite audience. No drama for him. He’d had enough in his first thirty years to last him, thank you very much. Now, lately, he suddenly feels the stage under his feet again. It may be a comedy of errors, but he is the star of his own life again.
“Next time we’ll pad the walls,” Nick calls after them, holding up a bowl fragment.
“And put away the breakables,” follows Emily.
It may be all the adrenaline from the EpiPen, but Miguel would have to label the warm rush he’s feeling as happiness.
One morning, the smell of Mami’s overly strong coffee still hanging in the air, Miguel found himself alone in the kitchen with Isabel—unusual in their house populated by five people. Miguel was obsessing about the night before, about having his cock sucked for the first time, by another lifeguard at a beach party, their intertwined bodies pressed flat as possible against the pier in the dark so no one would see them in the distance, images and sensations playing in a loop in his mind, when abruptly Isabel said, “Do you know if somebody has a criminal record in another country, do they still have one in the United States, or is it gone?”
Miguel sat up straighter, and just like that it was all back: Caracas, Papi, the constant air of a danger that had nothing to do with pleasure, with parties, with clandestine desire.
“You mean you?” he stammered. “Have? A criminal record?”
“I don’t know,” Isabel said. “I’m not sure.”
“Uh. How can a person not be sure if they have a criminal record, exactly?”
“You know.” She shrugged, and her shoulders beneath her sleeveless nightgown looked as though she had applied some kind of shimmery body lotion to them, but that was just the way she looked; while other people were matte, Isabel was glossy. “From when they finally found me and picked me up off the street to tell me Papi had died—when they made me go back to Mami.”
Miguel had no idea what this meant. In his family, though, he had learned to approach truth sideways and with eyes averted, like one might a dangerous animal accidentally set loose. What was his sister doing being “picked up off the street”? He never permitted himself to think of it consciously . . . but of course it made sense: if she wasn’t with them after Papi’s death, she must have been . . . alone. He took slow, invisible inhales as though if his older sister noticed him breathing it might be incriminating. But wait . . . Caracas cops were not such a considerate breed
as to go hunting for a thirteen-year-old girl for who knows how long, to personally tell her about her father’s fatal accident. They had come to the door for Mami. How would they know which of the children had been sleeping in a bedroom that night? Why would they have targeted Isabel in particular and gone looking to retrieve her?
He said, circuitously, to keep her talking, “I don’t think being on the street is, on its own, cause for a permanent record. You were underage, for starters. It would have been expunged when you turned eighteen, even if it were a crime . . . which I don’t think it is.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” she said, voice slow and cautious, and he got the feeling that she was playing the same game he was.
“What I don’t understand,” he continued, “is why you didn’t just come to Tía’s. From the beginning—were you afraid our father would come there to find you and, like, kill us all? I mean, he must have known Mami was there and he never showed up.” But he felt the blood rushing to his face and his casual tone faltering, even as it happened. “I’ve never understood exactly how it became your job to keep Papi from the rest of us. It was like you and Mami had some unspoken conspiracy but . . . I mean, you were thirteen.”
Isabel wrapped her arms around herself and rubbed up and down the sides of her arms with her hands. She made a noise in the back of her throat that sounded like a laugh, if a grim one.
“I knew I wasn’t welcome at Tía’s, Miguel, let’s just put it that way.”
“What, because you were pregnant? Mami knew about that already?”
“Something like that,” Isabel said. He could hear the warning in her voice, not to cross the next line. He remembered a time when there hadn’t been lines between Isabel and himself, when lines were between Them and the rest of the world. Who was he kidding, though? He’d sold those days down the river long ago. That scared boy cozying up to Isabel’s prematurely maternal body in their piece-of-shit house—it wasn’t even a house; it was a freaking shanty!—that kid was dead.
“I’m sure you don’t have a criminal record,” he said, using a tone as though she were still thirteen, and he the older brother suddenly. “You’re probably just lucky the cops picked you up when they did. I’m sure they were only trying to help. I hardly think you won’t be able to get a job in Chicago because of the Caracas police. Getting your GED is probably . . . um . . . a bigger concern, if I had to put my money on it.”
She watched him for a long time, not moving the cup from her lips but not drinking. He watched her head bob in a slow nod. Her eyes looked moist, and he felt vaguely guilty as he got up and went to the shower, though from then on, if anything, Isabel was warmer toward him, more like a real sister again, some ice broken. But she never mentioned the police, living on the streets, or any of the things that had lingered unsaid between them, again.
And this is of course how it happens. This is the lesson Miguel should have learned at ten years old—the lesson he failed to learn when marrying Chad, in some blind belief that Chad’s relentless optimism could remake him. But he is a Guerra: a fool who never learns from his mistakes. Because although Miguel does not believe in any god, or bullshit like karma or fate, one thing he does know beyond a doubt: if you dare to open yourself to that trickster, Happiness, it is an open dare for misfortune to find you.
Maybe he and Chad see the voicemail light blinking when they get home from Nick and Emily’s. Maybe they do, but Miguel has just almost died, and they have earned The Daily Show on TiVo; they don’t check it. Miguel is not a brain surgeon on call—his cell phone is . . . somewhere. He is asleep before Jon Stewart’s “Moment of Zen,” waking some nebulous hours later to a first frost on the windows and a relentlessly ringing phone. Beneath his cottony haze lurks a memory of the phone ringing, too, in some diffuse “before” time, while he was in the land of sleep—he can’t be sure. It’s barely 8:00 a.m., and Chad hasn’t even stirred. The machine picks up, so Miguel rolls groggily over onto his stomach again.
“Miguel.” It’s Lina’s voice. “What the fuck, where are you? I’ve been trying your cell all night, too. Listen.” But what follows is silence; what follows silence is a jagged breath clogged with sobs. “I didn’t want to say this on your machine before, but . . . shit. Isabel has cancer. Ovarian. I don’t know much more, we found out last night—Eddie called Mami, but Isabel won’t take our calls so we can’t talk to her. I’m on my way to pick Mami up now to drive to Charlevoix. It’s not good, Miguel. Eddie says it’s already spread.”
Chad, now, is sitting up, too, his hands over his mouth, saying, “Oh my god, aren’t you going to pick up?” but Lina’s voice is gone, it’s too late. Miguel and Chad sit together in the bed, staring at the phone as though perhaps, if Miguel never stands up, never crosses the room to call Lina back, this may not be happening; this may not be real. Let me be dreaming, Miguel thinks nonsensically, but that has never done him any good: in none of his worst nightmares has he ever been dreaming. No lightning bolt came hurling from the sky for him—his husband is huddled next to him; his baby has a heartbeat; he survived the attack of the killer ice cream—but meanwhile Isabel, who saved them all, may be dying.
ACT II
COMMUNISTS IN THE FUNHOUSE
THERE ARE ALWAYS TWO DEATHS, THE REAL ONE AND THE ONE PEOPLE KNOW ABOUT.
–JEAN RHYS
EMILY
Emily’s car is in the shop so she has to take the CTA back from work, just pregnant enough to feel bloated and nauseous, not pregnant enough to be given a seat, the whole ride home on her tired feet, the sticky stench of children on her skin. This is the irony of her life, a not-funny irony that has started to feel like a sick joke: Emily has realized that she hates most children, and she can’t get away from children, and she can’t get away from the self she is who hates children, which is a self she didn’t know she was, back when she decided to become a teacher, back when she decided not to abort Miles at twenty-five when she found herself knocked up and thought it would be a grand adventure. She grew up listening to her bitter mother talk about how she wished abortion had been legal when she got pregnant with Emily, because she would have had one, and back then Emily imagined herself the complete antithesis of her mother: while her mother was selfish and had no filter, was constantly spewing bile into the world and spreading her legs for strangers, Emily would be loving, giving, altruistic, perfect. She would marry at a respectably young age and be a good mother and not fuck around. She would work in a selfless profession “doing good.” She would finish college and make money and not subject her children to a roach-infested apartment or sit around in a half-open robe on weekend mornings diatribing about the fantasy of legal abortions—a necessity in her mother’s mind because she had been stupid enough to marry a car-thief junkie who liked to smack her around. Emily married a man from Ireland, which connoted class and culture and the opposite of everything her mother was. Nick was from a theater family and had lived all over the world. They would have a baby and she would be a teacher and everything would be as far from that stench of bottom-rung-blue-collar bitterness as Emily could get without leaving Chicago, where her upwardly mobile career was already underway. She was convinced of her every oncoming happiness.
Now here she is on a fucking CTA bus, in the snow, with the smell of wet leave-in conditioner clinging to the hair of various passengers, turning her pregnant stomach, hating where she’s come from, hating where she’s standing, dreading her arrival home. All day long, children want a piece of her, with their infinite neediness, their black holes of selfishness that make Emily’s mother look like a giver. Children are the most narcissistic creatures in the entire universe and nobody forewarns you about that. Now Emily pities her mother, who is of course dead, who died youngish hauling around an oxygen tank because she wouldn’t give up smoking despite her CPD—now Emily thinks about her mother having to live with her, Young Emily, an Emily who must have been as self-absorbed as these legions of children at her job, as her own sons are at home, and she f
eels surprised her mother didn’t give her over to foster care and go on with her life, since nobody was really . . . looking.
If nobody was looking at Emily, what might she do?
But everyone is always looking at Emily. No, not here on this bus—but that’s only because Jay isn’t here with her. When he is, they are the object of constant scrutiny, judgment, pity: everyone writes their own story onto Emily, the long-suffering saintly mother of the palely luminous Disabled Boy who says sweet, precocious things to strangers that set Emily’s teeth on edge. Jay, like his father, never knows when to shut up. He invites people into their periphery with his big mouth, as though his gait and leg braces and arm crutches don’t do enough to assure Emily’s privacy is constantly being invaded. At work, since she finally, after years of night classes, got out of the classroom and became an administrator and got a vice principal gig that allows her family to have purchased a pitifully mediocre westside house and stop having to rent, people are watching her more than ever. Leader of a brave new charter school! But all children despise a vice principal. The vice principal is like the bad cop of childhood, and gets all the dirty work and none of the rewards. She spends her day “punishing” revolting children, and no longer has any real access to the few exceptionally delightful ones that made being a classroom teacher—at times—bearable. Her day revolves around the little vipers of the school, and then she goes home and has to put on her saintly disabled-child’s-mother hat, and put up with Miles and Jay both also treating her like a bad cop of sorts, taking her for granted, wanting her to serve their every need until Nick comes home and they can ignore her. The money is never enough (the car in the shop again! This fucking CTA bus! Who rides the CTA at forty? She is a vice principal, for God’s sake!), and now here she is, trying to scrounge a little more since Nick can’t be counted on to do it—here she is in the ultimate irony in her perpetual clawing desire to flee from the Velcro needs of unappealing children: pregnant again.
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