Ramifications

by Daniel Saldaña París

  I remember that I liked that feminine warmth, that it seemed a new and desirable possibility: living with Teresa and Mariana, I’d never had occasion to experience it. Both Teresa and my sister expressed their affection obliquely, without falling into the trap of sentimentality or being overly demonstrative. Ximena and Citlali’s bubbly warmth was, by contrast, a window into a world of attentions I’d unconsciously longed for since I was small: I wanted to stay in their company, make other pronouncements that would bring fond smiles to their faces, listen to their reedy voices, treasure their gestures of approval. And what’s more, I wanted to rub myself up against them like a cat, brushing my shoulders against their knees, and I wanted that odd behavior to seem even more attractive, wanted them to be on the point of exploding with tenderness for me. But that would have been taking things too far: however ominously the threat of being found out might hang over her, when faced with such blatant upstaging, my sister would have pinched me, pulled my hair, locked me in the tiny first-floor bathroom.

  As I’d earned the right to join the party, I decided that it would be best not to attract too much attention—however much that idea appealed to me. I stubbornly stuck it out for quite a while, but the truth is that their conversation didn’t really interest me. No one mentioned origami, or the Bogeyman, or how to build a Zero Luminosity Capsule inside a closet. And neither did they talk about Choose Your Own Adventure books, even when I timidly attempted to raise the subject. Their only topics were boyfriends, girlfriends, bands, and what they could expect in senior high (which they would start in September). More teenagers arrived—by that time they numbered around twenty—and I thought that there had never before been so many people in the living room; maybe never so many in the whole house, not even when I turned seven and Teresa unexpectedly—it was a first—allowed me to invite all my classmates to break the piñata.

  As they entered the living room, the adolescent guests greeted one another with kisses, making me deeply jealous. I wanted Mariana’s female friends to treat me as an equal, wanted to feel them slobber on my cheek, wanted them to visit my bedroom to admire just what I could do with a simple square of colored paper: “This is the crane,” I’d say. “If you succeed in mastering this figure, you’ve taken the first steps along the road to mastering your own fears.” It was a phrase I’d thought up in case anyone ever asked me about my hobby, but sadly had never had the chance to use.

  They ordered pizzas and I ate a few slices, even though there were no Hawaiians: Citlali, whom I considered to be very good looking (her hair smelled of bubblegum), had ordered salami. Shortly afterward, as if attracted by the leftover food or the scent of boredom, Rat appeared. Mariana opened the door and he came in, followed by his band of emulators. One of them had a colorful paliacate tied around his head, like some kind of indigenous Mexican ninja. Another had an eyebrow stud, and that impressed me.

  I was surprised to see a local celebrity in our living room. That would never have happened if Teresa had been home, I thought. Mariana’s party was becoming increasingly large, serious, and unsafe. I was a little concerned that they might use drugs—temporary tattoos—or have sex: activities about which I knew very little but that were generally associated with teenagers (not adults: they drank tequila and made love, almost direct opposites to taking drugs and having sex, according to my worldview at that time). More beers materialized on the coffee table, and I decided it was time to “give them some space,” as my father had said I should. Moreover, my superhuman efforts to be accepted and pretend that I was interested in their criticisms of the ninth-grade physics teacher were becoming wearisome.

  I went upstairs to my room and closed the door. On the floor was the note I’d written about going to play with Rat. Suddenly it seemed dumb. I tore it into small pieces and hid them around the bedroom: I didn’t want anyone to reconstruct the note, as I’d learned was possible from my Choose Your Own Adventure books.

  I attempted to make an origami pagoda. The manual included a couple of explanatory sentences for each figure: “A pagoda is a Chinese house,” it said, but no one could have lived in the house I produced: it was a piece of crumpled paper with folds that refused to stay folded. If a family of origami Chinese people had lived in my pagoda, their lives would have been extremely tough. The origami mother would undoubtedly have run away to Chiapas.

  7

  THE PARTY DYNAMIC WAS REPEATED during the following days with a number of variations. The gatherings weren’t always so large, of course, and the pizzas and beer didn’t always appear. Sometimes it was just Citlali, Ximena, and my sister sitting on the floor for hours on end, grumbling about their parents’ general lack of understanding, making themed mixtapes, or comparing the size of their breasts. But in addition to Citlali and Ximena, Rat frequently turned up, not always accompanied by his henchmen.

  One morning, when I left my bedroom after a mammoth session of “blind origami”—a discipline that consisted of folding paper by touch inside my Zero Luminosity Capsule—I found Rat sitting alone on the couch in the living room. I asked very timidly where my sister was and he replied that she’d gone to the store. I returned to my room but was unable to concentrate on anything because I was worrying that Rat might steal the TV set or some other gadget.

  As the days went by, I began to understand that Rat’s fame was, to say the very least, exaggerated: he was just as bland and apathetic as any other of my sister’s teenage friends (with the exception of Citlali, whose scent of bubblegum held me spellbound, returning to my memory in waves even hours after I’d smelled it). At least when he was in our living room, Rat had no temporary tattoos and didn’t seem particularly threatening. He did smoke, in an unbroken chain I’d only ever seen equaled by the assistant head of Paideia, an obese woman whose sweaters always reeked of cat piss and full ashtrays. For any kid with a minimum of brains, Rat’s ever more frequent appearances in the living room, in my father’s absence, would have had an obvious explanation: he was dating my sister. The erotic subtext of the situation was, however, lost on me, caught up as I was in a symbolic reading of the events and, naturally, concerned by Teresa’s sudden disappearance, the effects of which seemed to be multiplying by the day.

  According to my theory, Rat was there, smoking in the living room, because I’d somehow conjured him up when I wrote that note to my father explaining that I’d gone out to play with him. After I’d invited him into my life from the realm of fiction, Rat had answered my call in real life. The fact that he’d become Mariana’s friend was merely a consequence of that invocation.

  Entranced by this new variant on my megalomania, I started to spend my time writing false notes on a wide range of topics with the hope that they would have similar consequences in reality. In order to heighten the magical or parapsychological effects of my invocations, I used to pen those notes—expressions of my most secret desires—on pieces of colored origami paper and then fold them into imperfect cranes and abstract pagodas, convinced that this would cause my fantasies to be realized more quickly.

  I wrote an alternate ending for the soccer World Cup, wrote about time travel from the comfort of my closet, and, finally, about Teresa’s unexpected, joyful return one morning carrying a Hawaiian pizza. But Brazil continued to be the world champions, my Zero Luminosity Capsule was still just an ordinary closet with the addition of pillows, and Teresa didn’t return to our lives, with or without pizza, on any morning of that summer. Teresa didn’t in fact return on any morning of any season of any year.

  8

  ONE DAY MY FATHER ANNOUNCED that he’d be later than usual getting back from work. He went into unnecessary detail about the reason for this, speaking of the many implications of the signing of NAFTA. I had no idea then what NAFTA was, but I did know that anything that needed signing was never going to be either fun or interesting. Life had already taught me that lesson. One of the most feared moments of the whole of any year was when Teresa had to sign off on my report card. After her sixteenth birthday
, Mariana had spent two weeks practicing what would be her new and definitive signature: her name written in a hand that seemed illegible to me. One day she even practiced that signature on some important document that Teresa had left by the telephone and received a severe reprimand. The previous year, at a school bazaar, I’d had to sign my marriage certificate: my wife—a girl in my class whose name, Karime, seemed mysterious and seductive—teased me about my signature and decided that our marriage was over, only seconds after it had begun. Signatures, in short, belonged to the murkiest areas of the adult world, so I assumed that my father’s late return from work that August evening was attributable to some evil force, and I was a little worried.

  Mariana, on the other hand, seemed to cheer up when she heard that my father would be delayed; that gave her more leeway in terms of smoking cigarettes with Rat, drinking beer with Citlali, or breaking the unspoken rules of our home in some other way. For my part, I found that need to transgress incomprehensible; not because I had any particular liking for established authority or the rules Teresa imposed on us, but because I loved repetition, patterns, the way the days always divided along the same axis, like a square piece of paper retaining the memory of its previous folds. Transgression, my sister’s ultimate aim in life and almost obsessive desire, was for me like folding a piece of paper in the opposite direction to the crease, like ignoring all the clues that seemed to be shouting out for you to choose a given adventure. Since then I’ve learned that a piece of paper can be folded down the middle only so many times, and that the adventures that lead you to the most satisfactory ending of a story aren’t the ones you choose by rationally weighing the significance of the clues, but those undertaken in the heat of the moment—that sheet of paper without folds, that eternal square with no memory.

  That day, Rat turned up, as was usual, at about three in the afternoon, accompanied by one of his bodyguards and carrying a paper bag containing cans of beer. He looked cleaner than usual, as if he’d showered before leaving home. I wondered if his escort had waited in the street until he’d completed his ablutions. That’s the way it would work. With his friends, Rat behaved like a hardened criminal, although his actual record included, at very most, petty theft from local grocery stores and perhaps the occasional use of soft drugs. His freshly showered appearance humanized him even further in my eyes, as if he’d finally fallen from the Olympian heights of neighborhood legend on which I had set him one day when I saw him from afar in the Rec. If Rat took showers, he probably also had a mom who made him take them. For the moment, I had no mom, so the bottom line was that I could do whatever I wanted, at least until the end of the vacation. That realization suddenly made me feel a little more grown-up—more grown-up than Rat, which was saying something.

  Mariana shouted at me to go to my bedroom and close the door. She’d gradually become more confident in her “responsible adult” role and by that time could no longer be intimidated by the threat of snitching: she ordered me around with self-assurance.

  Rat ruffled my hair as I passed him on my way to the stairs. “What a crackbrain,” he said, and his bodyguard—the boy with the eyebrow stud—responded with an idiotic laugh that didn’t sound natural to me. The hair ruffling didn’t bother me; there was something companionable in the way Rat treated me, as if he’d been converted into a medium and was channeling the fraternal feelings my sister—a much colder individual—never dared express.

  In my bedroom, I tried to read my Choose Your Own Adventure novel but couldn’t concentrate and soon set it aside. I discovered that I had a loose tooth. My upper and lower central milk teeth had all already fallen out, but one upper canine and three molars were refusing to go, despite my habit of constantly poking them with my tongue. That loose tooth heralded good things to come: not that I believed in the tooth fairy (my mother had decided to bring us up in a strict form of atheism that excluded Santa Claus and other such chimeras), but whenever one of my teeth fell out, I was taken to a bookstore in Coyoacán to choose something from the stock. Thanks to that ritual, my bedroom shelf had been gradually populated by vampire stories, books with three-dimensional optical illusions or pictures of dinosaurs, and children’s novels of every variety. I liked Coyoacán: it seemed a much more cheerful neighborhood than Educación, had books and pigeons and carts selling chicharrones.

  Given the imminent loss of a tooth, my dilemma was now whether to ask for a new title in the Choose Your Own Adventure series or the book about samurais I’d seen on my last visit to the store. I thought that the samurai book, being about Japan, might help me develop my skills as an origamist. But I also needed to hone my detective skills if I wanted to work out exactly where in Chiapas Teresa had gone camping and how long she was going to spend there before coming home. Her prolonged absence was beginning to cause me a certain amount of distress, and the image of the Bogeyman dropping me into his bottomless sack, which haunted my dreams each night, with more or less sinister variants, was obviously the result of that distress.

  I heard the metal gate to the street closing and deduced that the boy with the eyebrow stud had left. It wasn’t unusual for Rat to turn up with someone else, pretending they had planned the visit together, and for that person to then mysteriously disappear, leaving him and Mariana alone. As I’ve said, all that subterfuge went over my head, although in hindsight it seems perfectly clear proof of Rat’s intentions.

  As usual, horrible music was issuing from my sister’s bedroom, occasionally punctuated by Rat’s booming, almost aggressive laughter.

  I entered my Zero Luminosity Capsule. The noise was slightly muffled in there, as if coming from a far-off galaxy. It occurred to me that if he was in the mood, the Bogeyman might also steal teenagers; that one of these days he’d come to the house and put Rat and Mariana into his bottomless sack, and they would laugh and pretend to be having a good time (I couldn’t believe they were ever actually having a good time). But he’d never find me: I was beyond all that, in an empty, unreachable—really comfortable and radically dark—space where the only things to be seen were the explosions of colors that occur when you shut your eyes tight. I concentrated on those shapes for some time. If I rubbed my eyes with my knuckles, the shapes danced in interesting ways, like the New Year’s fireworks display Teresa had made us watch from the roof on a couple occasions.

  The minutes, perhaps hours, passed. The explosions of colors on my closed eyelids started to organize themselves into perfect origami pagodas, cranes, frogs, and balloons. Then, little by little, the shapes and characters began to weave themselves into stories. The transition to sleep was smooth, painless. I dreamed of fractal structures: origami figures with midribs folded over like a boy doubled up in the Bogeyman’s sack. I dreamed I was doing origami with newspapers from the previous eight months: newspapers with photos of balaclavas and political killings, and Brazilian goals in the soccer World Cup.

  Toward the end of my REM sleep, when my body was beginning to feel the effects of being doubled up on the floor of my Zero Luminosity Capsule, I dreamed that I stole the letter Teresa had written telling my father she was in Chiapas, and made it into an incredibly complex origami figure that included various species of animals, multitudes of people crowded together in the middle of the jungle, and a castle with over forty bedrooms, behind whose doors mysterious, narrow, inescapable labyrinths awaited me.

  When I woke, sweaty and aching, the house was silent. Mariana’s music seemed to have stopped, as had Rat’s booming laughter. I remained in the capsule for a few minutes, incapable of moving my legs. I’d spent too long in the same position. I wondered if it was dark or still light outside; if my father had come back from work; if there were any leftovers in the kitchen to alleviate the pangs of hunger I was suddenly conscious of.

  I slowly opened the closet door. Once outside, I did the pre-competition warm-up exercises the PE teacher had taught us. I sat on the floor with my legs straight and tried to touch my forehead to my right and then left knee. When I did this wi
th my eyes closed I experienced a fresh outburst of the colored shapes I’d seen just before falling asleep, but this time they were less intense, as if the Zero Luminosity Capsule had amplified their effect, clarity, and complexity.

  A languid early evening light was filtering through the curtains of my bedroom window. At that age, I used to find the speed of the evening dizzying. It disturbed me to watch the advance of the shadows, the way they became elongated and crept across the tiled floor of my bedroom like hungry reptiles and then disappeared into the unbounded darkness of night. But that evening was different: it was an evening on pause, as if the enormous floodlights of a sports stadium or spots of a film set were illuminating the street, generating an unreal atmosphere, an exaggeratedly dramatic light, a manufactured dusk. I wondered how long I’d spent in the closet, thought that maybe it wasn’t dusk but dawn the next day. That would explain the prevailing calm, the sense of newness that seemed to cloak the world.