Latin@ Rising

by Matthew Goodwin

  Giannina:

  How did you become a mummy? Weren’t you supposed to be a good wind that makes everything feel good? Your torch — wow — it’s the spotlight over my head.

  Statue:

  Let me tell you a story. I was once told that my genie would be liberated when the three come together. That moment has arrived. You are the three together — you, Zarathustra, Giannina and Hamlet. Let me tell you my secrets. Oh, my prophetic soul! I am the spirit of Joan of Arc. I liberated France from Anglo-Saxon freedom in the Middle Ages — and was burned at the stake. I came back to lead the French Revolution — and was sent to the guillotine. I reincarnated into the spirit of Napoleon. The French sent me to America as their horse of Troy. Under American surveillance, I’ve been the unhappiest woman on the planet. They turned me into the mausoleum of liberty. They say: Freedom! Freedom! But freedom means Anglo-Saxon Protestant rule oppressing the Latin, African, Asian, Arab, and Jew. When immigrants come looking for freedom, I suck their juice — under the surveillance of dread of labor without labor — of jobs without lightness of feet and creativity. I kill music. I kill love. Banks are banking my juice into credits and debts. But something is changing. I was Sleeping Beauty for too long. But life is not a dream. I have been waiting for a Prince of the Gutters to rise and seal my lips with a kiss that will awaken the winds of Joan of Arc, the French Revolution, and the spirit of Napoleon Bonaparte. With one kiss on the lips — I will come alive again. The moment has arrived. I am already feeling the signs. My cheeks are blushing. My knees are shaking. I feel vulnerable again. This Prince of the Gutters will make love to me. I will make love to him. We will become one and bring an era of peace and prosperity. Throughout the Americas, from the tippy top of the Yukon to the tippy toes of la Tierra del Fuego. Let me tell you another secret. Anglo-Saxon dominance is doomed. It wants to be the head of the elephant, but it’s the tail of a mouse. The worst is ruling our shores.

  Zarathustra:

  Pity the country that is ruled by the worst. And I don’t pity anyone — not even the country ruled by the worst.

  Statue:

  You don’t know, Zarathustra, how many repressed emotions I’ve had to bury in my chest. I was almost diagnosed with breast cancer a few years ago. But I did something illegal — and if the authorities knew about it — they would have hammered me down to pennies — searching for the terrorist who sucked the milk from my tits. Since then I have not been the same — I cry, I weep. I am not supposed to feel — I am a mummy. My job is to gag and bind the prisoners of war — and the illegal aliens — and whip them into submission. But I feel for Segismundo. I nursed him. He might steal my crown one day. Unless, unless I realize I am not a dominatrix but a genie with human feelings that can love and be loved — even by one called terrorist. Segismundo is not a terrorist, I assure you. He is a liberator.

  Zarathustra:

  He is the overman.

  Giannina:

  He is a poet.

  Hamlet:

  He is a conqueror. I see him rising up from the dungeon. He will make Puerto Rico a state. Then he will become the president of the U.S. and in the spirit of Napoleon go south and conquer all Latin America.

  Giannina:

  Again! The same mentality of domination! Can’t we come up with a better system where the ones on top aren’t whipping the ones on the bottom into hard labor, bankrupting creativity. Give me your social security number.

  Statue:

  My social security number is 009-11-2001 — the day the towers fell, I began to shrink.

  Giannina:

  Is that your expiration date? I still see you standing there.

  Statue:

  The day Segismundo takes the crown.

  Giannina:

  As a product you have an expiration date. But you’re not a bottle of champagne or perfume — you have the stench of sweat — you have blood on your hands — you are a revolutionary — you are change — you mean business. You weren’t meant to be a product — to be sold on free markets. You don’t believe in free markets or free trade agreements or freedom fighters. Marketers have misrepresented you. You’ve become a symbol of the establishment but you were meant to abolish slavery — overthrow the status quo — blow winds — inspire change. Instead they bottled your essence so they could sell you. That’s why you have an expiration date. Products are meant to expire. But once your genie is out of the bottle — you will become a creative process again. Your genie wants to be liberated. Who among us doesn’t want liberation? We are on a quest for something higher than material dispossession.

  Statue:

  Can I sing again as the fat lady you’ve all been waiting for?

  Zarathustra:

  Why do you think I became a hermit? I entered the stage of the world — and my exit was fast. I gave my speeches. I said what I had to say. I gave what I had to give and when I had no more to say — silence sealed my lips.

  Hamlet:

  The rest is silence.

  Giannina:

  I used to hear the voice of the people in taxi drivers — but now their voices are hooked up to cell phones, iPods, or BlackBerries. If you talk to them — they disconnect only for a second — and return to their gadgets. Human beings can’t bear very much reality. They need a prop in their hands. It used to be the cigarette. Everybody was smoking in the streets. And now they use electronics to formalize the fact that they’re busy with the dread of daily living that produces nothing creative but the monotony that they call pragmatism. They’re busy producing dust, frenemies, intrigue. They’re fire-breathing dragons foaming at the office of their mouths. What would happen if we snipped the wires of their busyness. Progress would happen — as it did to us on September 11. Inspiration made an installation that day.

  Zarathustra:

  That whirling of the Muslim world — that earthquake. We were walking with our dead bodies on our backs.

  Giannina:

  I thought — more delays — I’ll never get to the statue. But the delay turned out to be progress. I had to move from Ground Zero back to midtown again. I lost track of the Statue of Liberty and of Segismundo. Even they lost touch with themselves. Segismundo, who was milking the breast of Lady Liberty, retreated into the dungeon — receding into seclusion and silence. I said: Enough! Let’s start our voyage again. We were set to take a ferry to Liberty Island when the Twin Towers melted down. I thought: Am I melting? Where is my creative energy? Where is my progress? Where is Zarathustra? In what part of the city is Hamlet? If like a crab I could walk backwards. Backwards I walked — and like a crab I found Hamlet crawling into a manhole where he thought he would find Ophelia’s funeral procession — instead he found the bones of the businessman.

  Hamlet:

  Alexander died, Alexander was buried.

  Giannina:

  It’s not over until it’s over. Do you think I came to this country to shrug and say: Well, every empire has to expire.

  Hamlet:

  Our empire is over.

  Giannina:

  It might be over for you. But for me it has not even started. I’m starving. You ate all the food. And left me leftovers. I’m hungry. I’m an illegal alien. My strength is not satiated like yours. You might be disintegrating into body parts. But not me, honey. I am not over. It’s over for you, but for me it’s only just beginning.

  ENTANGLEMENTS

  Carlos Hernandez

  Born in Aurora, Illinois, Carlos Hernandez has a Ph.D. in English from Binghamton University and now serves as Associate Professor of English at the City University of New York. He is a game designer currently working as the lead writer on the Lewis and Clark CRPG Meriwether, now in beta. In his story “Entanglements,” Jesús, who had not known that Karen was married when they had an affair, finds out in just about the hardest way imaginable: when her husband, Chase, returns from his deployment in Iraq after having lost his legs to an IED. In a fit of guilt and unresolved emotion, Jesús vows to help Chase using the experimental
technology at his Basic Energy Sciences (BES) lab.

  I didn’t know Karen was married until her husband Chase was wounded in action and was coming home. An IED took both his legs at the knee. She couldn’t leave him, not now. She had to break it off with me.

  I should have been angry, but all I felt was a vacuous shock. I had no idea how I should react. So I tried to imagine what a decent person would say in this situation and parroted that. “What do you need?”

  She didn’t answer for a while. Her kitchen smelled like a Pennsylvania July. The mason jars lining the high shelf broke the morning sunlight into rainbows. Through the window I watched the corn swaying like the crowd at a revival. I leaned against her counter sipping orange juice; she sat at the table double-clutching her mug and letting her tears fall where they may.

  “Chase can’t have children anymore,” she finally told her coffee. “I will never be a mother.”

  I thought terrible things. Among the least savage was, We were planning a family together. You and me. Remember? But out loud I said, “Right now you need to focus on Chase.”

  She looked at me, her smile full of self-loathing. “Do you hate me, Jesús?”

  “No,” I said automatically. “You’re human. You made a mistake.”

  She laughed through her nose; no sound, just bitter air. “I don’t get you. I don’t get you one bit.”

  I swirled my juice. “You want me to yell and scream?”

  “I want you to feel something! Jesus Jesús. Do you know what Chase would do to me if he found out I’d been cheating on him all this time?” She was about to sip more coffee, but she stopped suddenly and yelled, “Aren’t Spanish guys supposed to be passionate?”

  I stopped leaning, stood straight. I dumped out the rest of my juice in the sink, washed the glass, dried it with the rag, set it oh so carefully in the rack.

  “What are you doing?” Karen asked.

  I stepped away to admire my work, made a box of my fingers like a cinematographer framing a shot. That glass was perfectly clean. Still looking at it, I said, “Spanish guys come from Spain. I’m Puerto Rican.” And without another word I left.

  As I drove to the lab where I work — I’m a physicist with the BES—my thoughts turned to Chase. I felt for him the kind of barrenness only fields of burgeoning corn can inspire.

  His service to his country had left him mutilated. He’d suffer for the rest of his life, physically. But worse, there was the secret pain of his wife’s betrayal waiting to reveal itself to him. Maybe someday when he was feeling stronger, maybe when he was starting to feel like he’d gotten a bit of his life back, Karen would unburden herself and tell him about us. Or maybe one day when she just felt like hurting him.

  I had to pull over for a minute to collect myself.

  Like everywhere in Pennsylvania this time of year, a cornfield abutted the road. I got out of the car and walked up to the six-foot-high wall of stalks. Took deep breaths.

  These fields always remind me of my research. If there are Many Worlds, that means that there are many versions of me out there: an infinite number, maybe. Uniqueness is our most pervasive illusion. I’m just one of many cornstalks in the field.

  I pushed a stalk gently, set it swaying. Flexible, but solid. Vibrantly alive. Indistinguishable, yes, from the thousands of others in this field: until you get up close. Then it becomes uniquely itself. For now. A farmer would soon mow it down, it and all its buddies. This whole field of slightly different stalks would be razed to the dirt. Where was the lesson in that?

  There was none; it was just a field of corn. But even if the universe has no use for right and wrong, humans do. My affair with Karen had left me feeling very, very wrong. I needed to make amends.

  So, with the stalks of corn as witnesses, I said aloud, “I’m going to help you, Chase.”

  I met Chase in person for the first time three months after he’d come home. I invited him and Karen—she pushed his wheelchair—to the BES superportation lab late on a Tuesday afternoon, when I was sure I could be alone with them. After I met them at the door and we introduced ourselves, they followed me to our experiment chamber. Karen rolled Chase carefully behind me; she was terrified of crashing into some multi-million dollar piece of government equipment.

  The first time I heard Chase speak, he said to Karen, “Why the fuck are you going so slow?”

  “There’s no rush,” she replied.

  “Fuck you there’s no rush. The game starts at 7:30.”

  Karen stopped moving; though I was studiously pretending not to hear any of this, I paused too. “You said you’d hear him out.”

  Chase craned to glare at her.

  When he turned back to me, he was smiling: but like a hyena sizing me up. I sized him up right back. His hair was bristly and straw-colored, like he’d picked up a handful of hay and stuck it on his head. Harley Davidson muscle shirt, cargo shorts, nothing to cover the puckered, scarred ends of his legs. The tan he must’ve developed overseas had largely faded and his skin was returning to its default papiermâché color, though freckle-specked. His solid build was starting to slacken and fatten; he was starting to melt into his wheelchair.

  And he had good hyena-teeth. He was smiling when he said, “Before we go any farther, Doc, why don’t you explain to me what I’m doing here? See, that way, once Karen hears how full of shit you are, we can go home and I don’t have to miss the opening pitch.”

  I put my hands in my pockets and paced toward him. “You’re not talking about the All-Star Game, are you? You actually watch that?”

  He said nothing. He was shocked that a scientist could know anything about baseball.

  “Look, Chase,” I said, “I get it. You think this is just a waste of time. You think I’m some clueless egghead, or worse, some fraud who’s out to rip you off. You’re only here because of Karen. She’s the only person in the world right now who could’ve gotten you here on a Sunday.”

  He folded his arms. “So?”

  I closed the distance between us and took a knee in front of him. “You’re here because you love her. Because you want to make her happy, even when you know she’s wrong. Because now she makes your life possible. What would you do without her, Chase? If she got sick of your foul mouth and your bad attitude and the burden of caring for you, and left you?”

  I glanced up at Karen. She was stone-faced. It had taken me this many months to convince her I wasn’t plotting some kind of secret revenge on her, like some morning talk-show revelation/confrontation/conflagration. She kept telling me she still loved me, that she only wanted the best for me, and why would I ruin the wonderful memories we had shared together by destroying her life, or Chase’s, who, I should remember, was a war-hero and deserved better?

  Only after weeks of repeating that I only wanted to help Chase did she finally halfway believe me. Now, though, her strained face told me she thought I was indeed about to betray her. She was stoically preparing herself for the ugliest moment of her life.

  Chase, meanwhile, reacted just like I thought he would. A guy like him is a tea-kettle; his shame at being disabled always boiled just under his skin, looking for any weak point through which it could escape, whistling. He bowed his head and, with a voice thick with self-pity, said, “Karen is the one good thing I have left in my life. I would do anything for her.”

  I smiled and nodded. Karen tilted her head. Then she squeezed Chase’s shoulders and, looking at me with a face somewhere between relief and wariness, said, “I’d do anything for you too, baby.”

  I stood up. “What you’re feeling right now, Chase—that’s what I need you to hold onto. And Karen, you too: hold onto every bit of love and loyalty you feel for Chase. Love is entangled across universes. We’re going to use the love you feel to find good matches for you.”

  “The fuck you talking about?” said Chase, staring at me, hard. I’d exposed his vulnerability, and now he needed to assert himself. He was used to making people look away whenever he wanted these days
. A legless man glares at you, you avert your eyes; that’s the rule.

  I didn’t look away. I even smiled a little. One hyena to another.

  “I’m part of a team that’s researching a process called superportation. That over there,” I said, pointing to the 320 sq. ft. gray-concrete cube in the center of the room, “is the heart of what we call our Classical Information Aggregator. ClassAgg for short. It’s where we conduct our experiments.”

  Chase, like any good Pennsylvania farmer, scowled at all that mumbo-jumbo. But to my face he said, “Well, don’t stop now, Egghead. Tell me how it works.”

  “I’d have to lecture you for a year on current entanglement theory to even scratch the surface,” I said. I opened the door to the ClassAgg and flourished like a New York City doorman. “Why don’t I show you instead?”

  I love watching the faces of people when they first get a look inside the ClassAgg. It looked like a homey efficiency apartment, featuring a 12-point stag-head presiding over the faux fireplace and framed, embroidered psalms hanging on the walls. The quilt on the full-sized bed was a gorgeous example of the local art. On the gingham futon sat an oversized Raggedy Ann. Coffee and whoopie pies—Karen loved whoopie pies—waited for us on the Amish kitchen table.

  “This room is so darling!” said Karen. I’d showed it to her several times back when we were lovers, but she had to sound surprised for Chase. “I want to move in!” she flourished.

  Chase didn’t seem able to see through her lies. Glad I wasn’t the only one. “This is science?” he asked, not without humor. “How is this science?”

  “Let’s eat and talk,” I said.

  So we dipped our fingers in cream filling and spooned sugar in our coffee while I did my best to explain uncertainty and entanglement in layman’s terms.