“Well,” I say, “assuming proper maintenance, Václav will still be around to hear that. So that’s something.”
“Yes, but what? What does it mean if Václav is still here 300 years from now?”
Consuela’s urgent, eager. I’m getting increasingly leery of her. “I don’t know,” I say noncommittally.
She peers at me, smiles a little. Her face decides something. She gets up and leaves the room. When she returns a half-minute later, she has a chrome disc the size of a frisbee in her hand.
“Do you know what this is?” she asks, and when I shake my head: “This is a neodymium rare-earth magnet. Super-strong. I had to get special permission to buy one this big.”
I don’t say anything. I watch.
“Will you sit on the sofa for a moment?” she says sweetly. I move from the piano bench to the sofa. She puts the magnet on the floor and moves the piano bench out of the way. Then she slips out of her chancletas and gets on her knees and takes the magnet in both hands, like a steering wheel. She knee-walks over to the piano. I can see the magnet is already pulling itself toward the piano; she has to fight it. She hugs the magnet to her chest, lies on her back, and scoots herself under the Bösendorfer.
“What are you doing?” I ask vaguely, wine in hand.
She looks at me. I’d been so busy watching her antics with the magnet that I had neglected her face. Tears stream out of her eyes. “This is why I brought you here,” she says. Then she lifts the magnet upwards, and the magnet launches itself into the piano.
The jacket squeezes me so forcefully I gasp. I can’t inhale. This is what a python attack must feel like.
I am about to panic when the jacket slowly slackens its grip. Its strength fades, fades. Then it’s completely powerless.
Consuela, still on her back under the piano, sobs into her hands. My addled brain slowly assembles a kind of sense of what has just happened. My mouth understands before any other part of me, because before realization has fully dawned in my mind I can hear myself saying, “No. Oh God. No no no no no. Oh God, please no.”
Almost a month after my interview with Consuela, Leniquia Yancey, my editor at the Squint, comes up to my desk with a manila envelope. “Mail call!” she cheerily chimes.
If you’re thinking it’s weird for an editor to bring a reporter her mail, you’re right. Leniquia’s been checking in with me several times a day since that interview, because frankly, I’ve been a wreck: useless at work and experiencing random panic attacks a few times a week. Every night I dream of being crushed to death.
I smile at Leniquia. “You’re a good friend. You don’t have to bring my mail every day.”
Leniquia’s constitutionally incapable of pessimism, so whenever her face grows solemn the way it has now, it’s cause for worry. “This time I really had to,” she says. “It’s from Consuela Balusek.”
The Squint’s mostly a wall-less workspace where snoopy reporter types spend all day overhearing each other’s shit. I look around and, yes, everyone’s pretending not to look. “Can we do this in your office?” I ask Leniquia.
A minute later, we’re in her office. “You open it,” I say to her.
She grabs a letter opener and starts slicing open the envelope. “It’s clean, by the way,” she says. “I had our guys check it.”
I make a wtf face. “Consuela wouldn’t try to kill us.”
She stops opening the letter to look at me incredulously. “After what that crazy bitch did? Erasing her husband right in front of you?”
“She thought she was freeing his soul.”
Her affect flattens. “That is pure bullshit. She didn’t think his soul was really in there. She just wanted the publicity. Think about how famous she is now. This was all part of her big plan.”
This is an old fight between Leniquia and me. I take my traditional tack: mocking her. “You’ve been in San Francisco too long amongst the godless liberals. You’ve forgotten that there are radically different worldviews out there. Consuela’s actions are totally consistent.”
They are. My therapist and I have been over it several times. If you believe in a human soul, and in a Catholic heaven, and that your husband’s soul resides in an eneural, then, QED, you have prevented your husband from entering into an afterlife of bliss, for your own mortal, selfish reasons. After much soul-searching, she decided she had to erase Balusek publicly—in front of a reporter—to show the world the pitfalls of that thinking: immortals never get to go to heaven. They’re destined to an eternal Hell on Earth.
“There is no way a woman of her intelligence and education could possibly believe that,” Leniquia insists, arms crossed.
All I would need is a week with Leniquia in Miami to prove to her how wrong she was. But for now we’ve reached our traditional impasse. “Are you going to open the letter?” I ask her.
She smiles and shakes her head clear. “Almost forgot!”
She finishes cutting through the top and blows open the envelope. From it she extracts a picture and a note.
We look at the picture together. It’s a photograph of Consuela and Guy Sauveterre, Chair of the Board of Regents for the Smithsonian Institution. They’re wearing expensive suits and are sitting on a piano bench, hands on knees. Behind them is a 97-key Bösendorfer Imperial Concert Grand.
I grab the note. “Dear Gabby,” I read aloud, “I’ve had Vaclavito’s backup eneural installed in the Bösendorfer and donated it to the Smithsonian. You’ll be receiving an invitation for its debut. I hope by then you will have forgiven me. Please come. Que Dios te bendiga y proteja. Consuela.”
Leniquia’s mouth hangs open for a good five seconds. Finally all she can manage is, “Bitch had a backup?!”
But I understand completely. I can’t get over the validity of her logic: so perfectly consistent! A soul can’t be mechanically reproduced, goes Consuela’s thinking. By definition, a soul is singular. So when they made the backup copy of the eneural, they didn’t copy Václav’s soul: just his mind. In her eyes, she sent her husband to heaven by destroying his original eneural. In the meantime, she’s donated the soulless backup to the Smithsonian, thus preserving his art on Earth forever.
“Eneural ex machina,” I say to the piece of paper in my hands. And breathe.
The Assimilated Cuban’s Guide to Quantum Santeria
I was heading toward Parking Lot Four on the east side of campus, mentally reviewing the interview I’d just had with NPR’s All Things Considered about my new book, when I almost kicked a pigeon.
I’m a physics professor at CalTech specializing in unspeakable information, and my new book is called The Grid of Time. The idea is this: what if time, instead of being a single dimension, itself contains multiple dimensions? Well, my book contends, it would unify a lot of disparate theories: if only it were true. The book is the kind of speculative, sweeping thought-experiment that all the cool physicists are writing these days. I am probably wrong about almost everything. But I hope I’m wrong in the ways that will someday lead us to science. That’s exactly what I said to my kid-gloves NPR interviewer, and she seemed, in her throaty, sleepy, liberal-media way, duly impressed.
And then I almost kicked a pigeon. Though I was too distracted to see it at the time, in hindsight I can describe exactly what happened: the pigeon stood in place as I approached, as inert as an abandoned football, watching me approach with one curious eye. Only at the last moment did its little birdbrain realize that I was about to kick it, and, once kicked, there would be no turning back on this XY point on time’s Cartesian grid, and the pain and consequences of the kick would forever be a part of its history. It therefore decided to get out of the way, with a commotion of wings that startled me back to our shared dream of the world.
There on the sidewalk, surrounded by the cool of an autumn night in Pasadena, I got down on one knee and said to the pigeon, who was now eyeing me gravely, “Sorry little fella. Didn’t see you there.”
All was forgiven. It immediately came amblin
g up to me, eager for a handout. I laughed. And when I find something funny, I often switch to Spanish. “¡Ay, pero niño!” I chastised. “¡No debas ser tan confiado! ¿No sabes que cuando yo era un niño, maté a puñaladas una paloma ….”
I fell quiet. To the pigeon, who stared at me with one curious eye, it must have looked as if I had suddenly shut down, like an unplugged robot. And in body I had. But my mind, like a ghostly projector that had started itself, began playing the reel of the time I killed a pigeon in the kitchen sink of my boyhood home.
I had to. The heart of a pigeon was the last ingredient I needed for the Santeria ritual I was performing so that Pápi could find love again.
Mámi died the summer before third grade. Doctors were removing a benign tumor from her uterus when … well, we weren’t allowed to know exactly what had happened. One of the conditions of the settlement was that all documents relating to the case remain sealed. The official cause of death on her death certificate is “cardiac arrest,” but her heart was doing just fine prior to surgery. They must’ve done something to her.
Once the settlement came through, Pápi didn’t work full-time anymore. He had been teaching senior math at Samuel Adams High School in Handcock, Connecticut, since before I was born, and substitute teaches there to this day. At Samuel Adams they call him “The Professor,” partly because he has a Ph.D., but mostly because he is a Professor, capital P.
You know the type: the kind of man who has to bite down on a pipe (or in his case, a puro) to remind himself that he has a body as well as a mind, whose eyes are always looking past you and into a reality that is somehow less substantial and more consequential than the one you exist in. It’s one thing when these professor-types are tall, bearded, tie-choked, corduroy-jacket-wearing sages who are as white as the faces on Mount Rushmore. Then they’re easy to spot. But on the outside, Pápi is as Cuban as they come: 5’5”, fat as a top and just as agile, with a nose like a head of cauliflower and Wolfman hair growing off his ears—and always, always wearing a pastel guayabera, even in the ice-age middle of a Connecticut winter. He looks like a guajiro who just needs to pick up his machete to be ready for a full day of cutting cane. But then, just as people start feeling superior to him, he starts talking mathematics—in virtuoso English that will send responsible listeners scrabbling for their dictionaries. It just takes one meeting. After that they call him “Professor.”
We were the only Cubans in town. Therefore, the Connecticut Yankees of Handcock thought all Cubans were like Pápi. So did I. Using a kind of commutative-property logic, I reasoned that, since Pápi was Cuban, all Cubans were Pápi: intellectual, distracted, blunt, cheerful, apolitical, and immune to neurosis of any kind. Kind of like Mr. Spock, but with a better sense of humor. And a lot more body hair.
I got to hear from other kids how much better Cubans were than other Latinos, who sent their kids to American schools even though they were illegal. They were poor because they were lazy, and the only reason they couldn’t speak English was because they didn’t try hard enough. You speak English, Salvador, why can’t they? Stick those stupid spics in Special Ed with the other retards.
I agreed with them completely. You see, while they were insulting those other Latinos, they were complimenting me.
I forgot at those moments that, as hard as she tried, even after years of study at the Vo Tech, Mámi still struggled with English, that whenever we went shopping without Pápi she always sent me to talk to Customer Service. But at night I would remember. When I spoke to Mámi then—surrounded by a darkness so complete I wasn’t sure I still had a body—and asked her why she left Pápi and me alone, and when she was coming back, I spoke to her in halting, failing Spanish.
When I was eight, it was dinosaurs. When I was nine, it was magic. And when I was ten, I got into Santeria.
Not even a month after starting third grade, I got in a fight with a kid at school because he said Mámi didn’t die, she’d been deported, because eventually that’s what happens to all spics. I was Latino small, so the kid, Timmy Andersen, thought I was an easy mark. Big mistake. I rushed him, but instead of taking a swing, I yanked down his pants. And his underwear, perhaps understanding the justness of my cause, slid down like they’d been buttered. I will never forget the sight of his tiny white penis: it looked like one of those miniature rosettes adorning the edge of a wedding cake. Little Timmy screamed and tried to pull his pants up, while I, almost leisurely, pushed him to the ground, grabbed his hair in two fists, and bashed his head into the playground loam. It’s the third happiest moment of my childhood.
Because little Timmy was more embarrassed than hurt—his forehead was red and plenty dirty, but no lump emerged—the principal took it easy on me. He just sent me home for the day with a note for Pápi to sign. Because it was too early to take the bus, Mrs. Dravlin, one of the assistant principals, drove me home. She and I were buds; I had known her since I was in Kindergarten and had always been one of her favorites. She wasn’t as pretty as Mámi or as chubby as Mámi or as vivacious as Mámi, and she didn’t know any more Spanish than you need to get licensed as a teacher in Connecticut. But she smiled as big as Mámi, a huge, scary, dental-exam smile, as if she wanted you to be able to count her teeth.
I loved her teeth.
She wasn’t smiling then, though; she had to watch traffic as she drove, but she kept sneaking fretful, motherly looks at me and saying things like, “Salvador, you’re too smart to get in fights,” and “I want you to apologize to Tim tomorrow,” and “Maybe you should have your dad call me.”
I wasn’t at all sorry about pounding stupid Timmy’s head into the ground, but Pápi had taught me to respect teachers, even when they’re wrong. So I agreed with everything she said, and, once she had parked in my driveway, I said to her, “I’m sorry I was bad, Mrs. Dravlin.”
Something in the way I said it? She cried exactly three tears. The first two tumbled out of her eyes like the boulders of a surprise avalanche. I was a little scared; I’d never seen an assistant principal cry before. As she erased the tears from her cheeks with the back of her hand, a third skittered down her face without her knowing and hung pendulously from her chin. It refused to let go of her face as she spoke. “Listen to me, Salvador. You are not bad. You’re a very, very, very good boy.” Then she leaned over to the passenger side and hugged me. The tear on her chin sank through my t-shirt. Long after it must have evaporated, I felt its warmth and wetness on my shoulder.
I waved goodbye to Mrs. Dravlin, who was waiting to make sure I could get in the house, and “snuck” past Pápi. After the settlement came, he was always home. He sat in the living room with his chin in his hand, studying a Rithomachy board on the coffee table; I could’ve brought a dead cat into the house and he wouldn’t have noticed me. To prove it, when I was nine I actually did bring a dead cat into the house, but I’ll tell you about that later. For now, I went to my room.
On the bed lay an illustrated encyclopedia of dinosaurs. It was the biggest book I’d ever seen, even bigger than Mámi’s Bible. The inscription inside read, in Pápi’s plain and serious script, “The best way to honor Mámi is to better ourselves.”
At the end of that school year I became the youngest winner ever of the school’s Science Fair for my project “How the Dinosaurs Really Died,” where I explained, based on the exciting new research of this wicked-smart Latino named Walter Alvarez, that the dinosaurs had actually been killed by a huge chondritic asteroid with the cool name of Chicxulub that had blasted the Yucatan Peninsula about 65 million years ago. The judges must’ve known Pápi wrote it, gathered the research, made the graphs—this was stuff even the science teachers hadn’t heard about yet. But, in my defense, I memorized every last bit of it. I won because it’s cute to hear an eight-year-old say phrases like “unusually high concentrations of iridium” and “nemesis parabolic impactors.”
To celebrate, Dad bought us tickets to go see locally famous prestidigitator Gary Starr make a giraffe disappear. But Pápi wa
s unimpressed by Gary Starr; he told me after the show, “That guy couldn’t even fool his own giraffe.” But after seeing with my own eyes a full-grown camelopard disappear off the stage and reappear in the theater’s parking lot, where it was waiting for us, next to a Gary Starr flunky selling Gary Starr t-shirts and Gary Starr prepackaged magic tricks, I was hooked. Pápi wouldn’t buy me any Gary Starr tschochkes, of course, but he would gladly take me to the library. I checked out the fattest magic books they had.
By the time I was nine, I had become a not-too-shabby magician and could even fool adults right in front of their faces. You know the trick where you cut the rope into pieces, only to pull on both ends and—tada!—it’s back together again? I did that one for show-and-tell and pissed off my fourth grade teacher, Mr. Liss, when he couldn’t figure out how I did it. And of course I wouldn’t tell him. Magician’s code.
But my best trick of all was a bit I did with the help of Roadkill the Magic Dead Cat. Roadkill wasn’t a stuffed animal. Roadkill was a dead black cat, stuffed and mounted and made—why?—into a piggybank. The taxidermist had done a good, if clichéd, job with her: she had a permanent arch in her back, an eternal horripilation of the hair along her spine, and a look in her glass eyes that said “I am three-quarters demon.” I got her for ten bucks from Mr. Strauss at the magic shop I frequented after school because he was getting remarried and his wife hated it, had threatened to call off the wedding if he didn’t get rid of it. I think he made up that story just to get a sale, but who cares. A dead-cat bank for ten bucks?
Here’s how the trick went down, as per the performance I gave to Mr. Liss’s class. I went to the front of the room and put Roadkill on Mr. Liss’s desk. Everyone said “Ooh!” One girl, Jenny Chalder, said, “That’s gross.”
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