by Matt Burgess
Wow, this is heavier than it looks. I’d like to thank the Academy, my agent, my fellow nominees, my boyfriend Alfredo, my baby Christian Louis…
“Hey, Isabel,” Jose whispers. She can smell his aftershave. She can hear him chewing his nightly cherries, spitting the pits into a bowl. “Izzy?”
While he watches her, the room’s parrots watch him. They are Lizette’s bewitchment: wooden parrots, plush parrots, porcelain parrots, suspended from the ceiling by thin wires, perched menacingly on end tables. Alfredo’s mother gives them a weekly dusting; no strange thing, Isabel reasons, since everything around here is dusted weekly, or vacuumed weekly, or scrubbed or laundered or Windexed weekly. This is a fastidiously maintained apartment with as many rules as church—thou shalt not eat in the living room—and Jose bucks these rules as soon as his wife shuffles off to bed. Each cherry is a protest, each protest cataloged by the room’s ever-watchful birds.
“Can you hear me? You awake, girl?”
Of course she can hear him! Of course she is awake! To fall asleep tonight would be conceding defeat to tomorrow, and Isabel needs to delay Saturday’s arrival for as long as she can. The parrot with the clock in its belly argues that since it’s way past midnight, Saturday’s already here, but Isabel refuses to acknowledge such narrow-minded nitpickery. As far as she’s concerned, if she never goes to sleep, Saturday never dawns, and if Saturday never dawns, then Tariq never shows up, and if Tariq never shows up, then everything gets to stay the same. Simple as that. In the movie version of Isabel’s life, today is her Groundhog Day. With some obvious differences: the Hollywood version of Jose Sr. would’ve conked out by now, so that she could spend these precious hours in the kitchen, left alone, standing over the stove and preparing the Big Surprise for Alfredo.
“You fall asleep already?” Jose whispers. “You can’t hear me at all?”
When she doesn’t answer, he turns up the volume on his infomercial. Some extra decibels on the TV—that’s all he was after. He wasn’t looking to climb into bed with her, rub his feet against hers. How could he? His legs don’t work. For something like eight years now, he’s been paralyzed below the waist.
If Jose Sr. looked it up in the dictionary, he’d find the following bullshit:
ric•o•chet (rik′e-sha′,-shet′)—n. A method of firing by which the projectile is made to glance or skip along a surface with a rebound or series of rebounds.
A method of firing? You serious? A definition like that doesn’t acknowledge just how random, just how accidental firearm violence can be—it’s as if the OED were sponsored by the NRA. Because you can ask anyone in western Queens, or in Brownsville or Shaolin or even the Boogie Down Bronx, and they will tell you a ricochet is a mistake. Scan an article in your local newspaper and you’ll find “ricochet” coupled with “innocent bystander.” Whoops! Ricochets are why the NYPD is instructed to aim always for center mass, for the solar plexus, to shoot to kill. Because when you try to wing the bad guy and shoot him in the leg, you either miss or the bullet enters the thigh muscle and exits clean out the other side, and then—whiz, bang—you’ve got yourself a ricochet. The word in Spanish is rebote.
Jose Sr. had been working behind the counter. It was late at night. While his family slept in the apartment behind the store, Jose listened to sports talk radio at a very low volume. Bored, he grabbed a porno from the magazine rack (Club International) and took it out of its plastic wrapping. Who’s gonna tell? It was his store, his inventory. He spread the magazine open on the counter. Yawning into his fist, he flipped through the pages, stopping every now and again to bring his face close to the magazine and scrutinize a nipple.
A young kid walked into the store. The first customer in over an hour, he carried a brown paper bag, the crinkly kind one slips around a sweaty can of Modelo Especial. The boy—a Latino, maybe even a Puerto Rican, a boy who could’ve been Jose’s own son—stuck that crinkly bag in Jose’s face and told him, in a man’s voice, to hand over the fucking money.
You can hear this story from anybody. Lizette knows it. Alfredo and Tariq know it. Even Isabel knows it well enough to tell it. But nobody talks about it with as much eagerness, with as much hand-waving flair, as Jose himself.
He didn’t beg for his life. He’d had a gun shoved in his face before, and while that’s not something one could ever get used to, he was at least able to maintain some composure. No tears. No quivering lips. With his words jamming together, he talked about his family, his wife and their two sons. He didn’t tell the boy that they were all asleep behind an employees-only door. Of course not. Instead he talked about random things, silly things, hoping to appear calm so that the boy might be calm. My youngest son is right around your age, he said, even though it wasn’t true. Hey, maybe you two even go to school together. For reasons he doesn’t understand, he told the boy about how Alfredo can multiply giant numbers in his head, how he can memorize all sorts of license plates. He didn’t know what else to say.
The bag caught fire. People have told him that’s impossible. A bullet punches right through a paper bag, no problemo. But Jose swears he saw a little curl of flame, there and then not there. The light on the ceiling above his head flickered, and he remembers thinking, That’s something I need to do. Change that bulb.
Later, in the hospital, Lizette told Jose it was a miracle. Shot point-blank in the face and the bullet misses him? Doesn’t happen. He should be dead. According to the cops, the bullet ricocheted off the wall behind him. According to the doctors, it entered the T12 region of his spinal cord. It’s a miracle you’re not dead, she told Jose. She talked about a higher power. Higher power? Jose asked. He wanted to know who caused the ricochet. Who put the bullet in his back? God do that, too? That’s right, Lizette said, and blew cool air into her coffee cup.
Jose smelled the firecrackers smell, but he never heard the pistol’s report. Not when it happened, not afterward. He saw a tongue of flame lick away the edges of the paper bag (maybe), and then he was on his back behind the counter, and then he was in a hospital room with a ponytailed nurse squeezing his shoulder, and then they were moving into this new apartment, Jose no help at all, unable to lift even a box.
He wonders why the boy pulled the trigger. Because Jose didn’t move fast enough, or because he moved too fast, or because it was simply too hot in the store, or because the wrong commercial came on over the radio? Or maybe there isn’t always a causal relationship with these kinds of things. Jose doesn’t know. He thinks he never heard the gunshot because his eardrums ruptured. To this day he has trouble hearing, although Lizette thinks it’s a ruse, her husband faking deafness so he doesn’t have to wheel himself toward her when she calls for him.
But Isabel believes him. She figures he’s gotta be deaf. Why else would he be turning up the volume on his infomercial? He doesn’t know she’s secretly awake. He thinks he’s got no audience in this room, and without an audience there’s no reason to fake it. Where’s the angle? If Jose weren’t sitting in that chair, she certainly wouldn’t be pretending to sleep. She’d be up, boiling water for the Big Surprise. But as it is—with Isabel under observation—there’s nothing she can do but wait. She hopes Christian Louis will float by on the inside of her eyelids. She hopes he’ll be riding a series of numbered, hurdle-jumping sheep. Maybe he’ll be bent forward at the waist like a jockey, making yip yip noises, with his fierce infant fists buried knuckle-deep in wool. She tries to will the image onto the back of her eyelids, but all she sees is darkness. She’s faking sleep, and Christian Louis doesn’t stop by when Mama’s being duplicitous. Fair enough, Isabel thinks. She waits. She schemes.
Alfredo turns over each deadbolt with a whisper. He cracks open the front door a couple of inches—push it any farther, it starts creaking—and he tiptoes into the living room. These late-night stratagems aren’t for the benefit of his mother, who passes out shortly after sundown like a hummingbird, exhausted from the all-day effort of flapping her wings. Impossible to wake up, she sleeps
at the back of the apartment with the extraneous aid of a slumber mask, a box fan, earplugs, and two Tylenol PMs. Forget about her. Forget about Papi too, who is snoring loudly only a few feet away, a lumber mill crammed into a wheelchair. Jose’s a lighter sleeper than his wife, but Alfredo’s gonna have to wake him up soon anyway. No, all these stealth moves—Alfredo feels like he’s been walking on his toes ever since he slipped into the apartment—are for Isabel’s benefit alone.
Then it’s all for nothing, because she ain’t even here. The sofa bed’s thin mattress bears only the imprint of her body. He assumes she’s either stuck on the bowl, battling pregnancy-related constipation, or she’s in the kitchen, asleep on her feet and snacking on cookies. Lately, in the middle of the night, she’s been staggering into the kitchen to pour herself a glass of milk and twist off some Oreos. The next day she claims no recollection. With chocolate mashed in her teeth, she denies all accusations. Sometimes Alfredo will open the freezer and find a pint of ice cream with the lid off and a spoon sticking straight out of the top. Isabel will say, Nah, wasn’t me, I don’t even like pistachio. Alfredo will say, Okay. He thinks those Kansas farmers who wake up with crop circles in their backyard should stop squinting up past the sky and look instead across the breakfast table, check the wife’s housecoat for tractor keys.
Of course it’s always possible Isabel’s being framed. Stranger things have happened around here. But Alfredo knows he isn’t doing the framing, and his father couldn’t plant a spoon in a freezer he isn’t able to reach, and Alfredo’s mother—admittedly the most likely suspect—would never sully her own kitchen. One morning he caught her dragging a finger over the countertop, scooping up Oreo crumbs. Her lips were drawn back in panic, as if the chocolate were anthrax.
“Parrot droppings?” Alfredo had said.
“Your girlfriend, she’s going to give us mice.”
“Actually it was me. I had the midnight munchies.” Not that she believed him. Lizette had been lied to so often in her life that she’d built up an immunity. Bullshit clanged off her. She wiped down the countertop and stuck the milk-coated glass into the dishwasher.
“We’ll be infested,” she said. “More so than we already are.”
“I won’t do it again.” Lying to his mother, Alfredo felt like a boy playing chopsticks for a woman used to the symphony, and yet it pleased him to have covered for Isabel, even ineffectively. He felt taller somehow, taking responsibility for a thing he did not do.
Meanwhile, outside this apartment, Curtis Hughes is dead. Alfredo double-checks the deadbolts, makes sure to fasten all the door chains. He imagines Curtis lying in the back of an ambulance with the lights flashing and the sirens turned off. Something cold and dark like sea-water takes hold of Alfredo’s throat. It drops whispers into his ear. If Curtis’s beating is linked to this Vladimir/infinity-logo disaster, then “C. Hughes” is merely one name at the top of a list that includes “A. Batista,” and “Winston,” too.
Winston. After the police left Alfredo, he called Winston six times, and six times the phone went straight to voice mail. Hey, uh, leave a message? Alfredo pictured Winston holding the phone to his ear as an aluminum bat caught him from behind, smashing the bones in his hand, breaking the phone into bits. Alfredo searched the streets for the Spider-Man hat, looking near gutters and under parked cars, before he spooked himself and ran all the way home.
For the seventh time in the last twenty minutes, he dials Winston’s number. He knocks his knuckles against the beak of a wooden parrot, hoping—praying really—that this time the call will be answered. Just give me a ring. Tell me the phone is on, at least.
Hey, uh, leave a message?
The TV flickers light onto Papi’s sleeping face. Jose watches, or rather he was watching, at an unreasonable volume, the Home Shopping Network. He doesn’t buy anything, not anymore at least, not since Lizette canceled his credit card. About a year after the accident, an HSN package arrived every other day: candleholders, digital cameras, vacuum cleaners, cologne, a sauna belt, dual drills, lint rollers, magic blenders, suction cup hooks, Space Bags, a knife sharpener called the Samurai Shark, Dr. Ho’s neck massager, the Lauren Hutton Face Disc. These brown-boxed parcels became for Jose one of the few ways he communicated with a world outside this two-bedroom apartment. The collapsible ladders and magical mops were his street gossip, his walk to the mall.
Alfredo turns off the television. In the sudden silence Jose’s head tilts back and he snores more deeply than before. His face shines with sweat. It’s hot in this room—hotter even than it is outside—and every degree seems to glaze Jose’s cheeks and neck. Even his glasses look damp. Alfredo knows that tomorrow morning Tariq will come home from prison and he will see this face—the liver spots, the mustache dappled gray—and he will think their father has aged decades. But that’s all wrong, Alfredo thinks. Couldn’t be wronger! Look at the button-down shirt Jose wears. Look at his hair slicked back with gel. These aren’t the signs of a shriveled enfeeblement, but rather the bulwarks erected against it. Granted, one sideburn extends lower than the other, but you try shaving in a wheelchair, your eye line below the mirror. Isn’t it enough, big brother, that Papi shaves at all? How could a man be old if his cheeks still smell of Aqua Velva? If his lips are stained with cherry juice?
Of course, unlike Tariq, Alfredo never went away for two and a half years. He knows what it’s like to see his father transformed—from walker to sitter, from upright to broken—but he doesn’t know, and he can’t appreciate, what it’s like to see the man suddenly grow old. Their only significant separation dates back to when Alfredo was in the third grade and Jose lived with a white woman for four days in Rego Park. Four days—that’s it, the longest amount of time father and son have spent away from each other. Alfredo never enrolled in college or joined the merchant marines. He never even went to summer camp. In the living room, in the dark, Alfredo approaches his father’s wheelchair, stepping around the empty sofa bed, head brushing against a low-hanging parrot, and he wonders if now is not the time to get the hell out. Leave this room, this apartment, this neighborhood, this borough, this city of New York. His brother comes home in a few hours. A guy is out on the street murdering drug dealers, avenging Vladimir. Maybe. So maybe what Alfredo needs to do is pack a bag, buy a bus ticket for him and his pregnant girlfriend, and head … like west or something. Alfredo catches his lips moving. It’s a stupid idea. What would you tell Isabel? We need to get out of Jackson Heights for a little while. Nothing to worry about. Plenty of women go into labor at the back of a Greyhound. Moving through the dark, he accidentally kicks over a bowl. Cherry pits and cherry stems skip across the floor. The bowl goes clatter clatter.
“Nice going,” Jose says. Behind the lens of his glasses, his eyes stare down at the ground. Bright red cherry flesh clings to some of the pits; the juice bleeds onto Lizette’s carpet.
“You’re not supposed to eat in here,” Alfredo says.
“You’re not supposed to kick my bowl.”
Too tired to argue, Alfredo moves behind the wheelchair. His feet hurt. Since Thursday morning he’s gotten four hours of sleep. Alfredo hopes that this—getting wheels to roll forward in a room with wall-to-wall carpeting—will be the last difficult job in a day full of difficult jobs. He lifts the handlebars, digs in, and pushes hard. The wheels tangle with the carpet, but after a little time and with a little effort, the Batista boys get rolling. They cruise toward the bedrooms at the back of the apartment.
“You pick up our investment?” Jose asks. By which he means, Did you get me my Lotto tickets? He’s an every-day player, a purist who never lets the machine Quick Pick his numbers, but instead chooses himself, playing his sons’ birthdays or his Social Security number or particular license plates or—if a bad streak gets bad enough—the date he got shot, Jose hoping the Lotto gods appreciate irony. The morning after a drawing, he spreads his pink tickets across the table and opens up his Newsday and checks his numbers against the winning numbers,
Jose circling matches, crossing out misses. Lotto, Take 5, Mega, Win 4, the Numbers—he’ll play them all. But he won’t do scratch-offs. They’re low class, he explains. A sucker’s game. But the real reason, Alfredo knows, is that the scratch-offs provide too instant a gratification, too immediate a disappointment. Where’s the suspense? After closing his Newsday and after finishing his buttered bialy and café con leche, Jose methodically balls up the loser Lotto tickets and tosses them in the trash. Then he re-ups. He’ll give Alfredo five or ten or fifteen dollars and tell him to go buy more—and make sure you play these exact numbers. He sends Alfredo out into the world on his behalf so that the father can be, once again, for the next twenty-four hours, a possible millionaire. Their agreement is Jose keeps 90 percent of all winnings and Alfredo pockets the rest. A little scratch for doing the legwork, so to speak. For picking up the tickets. Except tonight—understandably—Alfredo forgot. “I saw this set of knives on HSN I’d like to buy with our earnings,” Jose says. “These knives, I swear to God, they’d cut off a finger.”
“Well,” Alfredo says. He speaks into the heartbreakingly boyish swirl of hair at the back of his father’s head. “The thing is …”
Jose’s hands flare out as if he’s going to clutch the wheels and arrest their progress. These hands hover in the air for a moment before drifting back into his lap. He crosses one muscular arm over the other. “That’s not like you,” he says. “To forget like that. What if those numbers hit, Dito?”
“Then I owe you a million dollars.”
“Am I gonna have to partner up with your brother when he comes home? Hire him to pick up my tickets?”