The Barbarian Nurseries

by Héctor Tobar

  Araceli tugged at her uniform, wishing she’d had a chance to change. She had been plucked by Maureen from the laundry room as she folded a stack of el señor Scott’s boxer shorts and in the chaotic evacuation of the boys from the home she had carried that underwear into the dining room and left it on the table, and it annoyed her to think it would still be there when she got back.

  When the car turned a corner and disappeared, the boys and Araceli shared a few moments of contemplative silence. She’s really gone, Brandon thought, our mother left us here on the sidewalk. Even though it had been announced with that angry speech, his mother’s absence felt stark and sudden, and for a moment he imagined that he had been dumped into the plot of a melodramatic novel, like the parentless hero of a multivolume series of books he recently finished reading, the adventures of an adolescent boy unwittingly thrust into an adult world of crime and magic. He was alone out here in public, without even Guadalupe to take care of him. Araceli did not yet register in Brandon’s mind as a protective force, and he quickly scanned the park like a young warrior about to enter a dark and threatening forest. He imagined a “strike force” suddenly descending on the park, a hooded army of armed underworld types, the machine-gun-toting villains in one of the books he was reading.

  “Do you think the Russian mafia would ever come to Orange County?” he asked his brother.

  “What?”

  Keenan believed that his big brother read entirely too much and knew him to be an incessant confabulator, prone to confusing and scaring his younger brother with fantastic thoughts. At their very expensive private school, Brandon’s big imagination caused him to run afoul of the otherwise laid-back teachers there, primarily because he had freaked out many of the girls with new and ever more elaborate versions of the Bloody Mary myth, causing them to avoid the girls’ bathroom, with a handful of peeing-in-the-hallway incidents the result.

  “You know,” Brandon insisted. “Like in Artemis Fowl.”

  “Nah,” Keenan said. “It’s too sunny here for the Russian mafia.”

  Brandon was still only eleven years old, and the morbid and fantastic imagery from his middle-reader novels did not linger in his mind’s eye for long; in less than a minute he was running down the grass with his brother chasing after him, the reasons for their living room fight forgotten. Araceli followed them down the slope of the park toward the rubber play mat and swings and took a seat on a bench facing the ocean. Brandon watched her as she looked off in the distance at a lone surfer tossing himself into the waves, the charcoal skin of his wet suit swallowed up by water the color of the backwash in her mop bucket. Araceli was a major planet in Brandon’s universe, and he studied her often as she shuffled around the Paseo Linda Bonita house. Sometimes he wondered if she was angry at him, if he had done something to upset her, because why else would someone be so quiet in his presence for so long? But after careful consideration of his actions—he was, in his own estimation, despite a few flaws, a “good boy”—Brandon arrived at the conclusion that Araceli was just lonely. And when he thought about her loneliness, he concluded that she should read more, because anyone who read was never alone. In books there were limitless worlds, there was truth, sometimes brutal and ugly, and sometimes happy and soothing.

  Brandon considered giving her the book he had managed to bring with him, but then he thought better of this, and instead left it on a bench and joined his little brother on the plastic body of the play structure and its short hanging bridge, and began to playact with battle sounds formed by trilling tongues and popping cheeks. Araceli listened to them and slunk down on the bench, looking up at the gray sky and wondering why it was that here along the beach the sun seemed to come out less during the summer than it did during any other season. The blankness of the sky reminded her, for some reason, of Scott’s underwear left on the table, and of other things left undone at the house up on the hill, where Maureen was probably just now arriving to the quiet of a house without boys. Araceli would give anything to be back in Mexico City on one of those summer days when balls of white drift across the blue canvas of the sky and you can follow them on their march across the valley of the city, and know that they will soon drop a cooling rain shower on your face. She wanted to feel something cold or warm, because in this uniform, in the amphitheater of this park, she felt like a stiff pink box and not like a human being. Looking down at the beach, she saw the surfer climbing out of the water, a brown-haired teenager in a black wet suit, and in an instant she imagined he was Pepe the gardener, dripping water from his bare chest. She imagined herself sitting on the beach on a towel, Pepe walking toward her with beads of water clinging erotically to his pecs, climbing up the sand to reach her, leaning over her, dripping salt water over her dry and lonely skin.

  Ten miles away from the Laguna Rancho Estates, on the third floor of an office building in a business park on a wide and sparsely traveled boulevard, in a corner of the city of Irvine, itself sparsely populated by various medium-sized corporations with generic and quickly forgettable names, Scott Torres toiled at work, sitting before a flat-panel computer screen displaying five different images of the perimeter fence at the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky National Airport. He waited with a dulled sense of anticipation for the knee-high grass at the base of the fence to be whipped back and forth by a gust of wind or the back-draft of a passing airplane, a confirmation that the image was, in fact, “live.” Over the course of the morning, Scott had opened windows on his screen that revealed various locales in the United States, noting that it was raining at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota, and watching the long, Arctic-summer shadows stretch underneath the Alaska Pipeline. The pipeline to the Bering Sea was a favorite summer place to spend time at the Elysian Systems office because there was a chance you might see an elk or deer scurrying across the tundra. All day long the computers on the third floor of the Elysian corporate headquarters were open to windows showing lonely stretches of fencing that seemed static and frozen in time, like the peopleless backdrops to a deep and disturbing dream, with only the effects of the weather and the moving of the shadows to prove they were objects in a real, living world.

  Scott and his programmers at Elysian Systems were drawn to the images for their clandestine, remote allure and for the rare pleasure of officially sanctioned voyeurism. They had been given access to this government system to develop software, a contract that happened to be the only source of positive cash flow in the Elysian Systems corporate spreadsheet. When Scott thought about his responsibility to enforce this contract by telling his seven programmers never to discuss their project “with any individual outside our direct work group,” or when he was forced to ask them to sign numerous promises of confidentiality and loyalty to the United States of America, he could not help but feel silly, because such admonitions ran counter to the iconoclastic programming ethic of his youth, and even the essential élan of his initial foray into entrepreneurship. This was the central contradiction of Scott’s professional life, to be the enforcer and organizer of a project that did not fire his imagination, and to be the oddball in a moneymaking culture that as of yet generated little money. He was a relic, an aging survivor from that clan of “robust” programmers who came of age in the interregnum between the slide-rule epoch and the Ethernet era. There were moments during the workday when he felt this characterization growing among his underlings and Elysian’s executives; it was a fleeting sensation, a truth just beyond his grasp, like knowing the meaning of a word but not remembering the word itself, the syllables that described the idea unwilling to gather on your tongue. No one here admires me, no one looks up to me, Scott thought, except maybe Charlotte Harris-Hayasaki, a young and as yet unsuccessful game designer who was as misplaced at Elysian Systems as Scott was, and who often stole glances at him through the glass of his office.

  The executives running Elysian Systems were serious, middle-aged, and worked on a separate floor, the fourth, as if to immunize themselves from the eccentricities of the pro
grammers: the executives wore suits and ties, and decorated their walls with plaques earned during their days as mid-grade managers at detergent and soft-drink companies. They had charged this government contract to Scott, the “vice president of programming,” even though any first-year graduate student in computer science could have managed to write the essential code. The contract was for the “accountability software” of the “Citizen Anti-Terrorist Sentry System,” CATSS, by which the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, and other agencies farmed out guard duty at airports, nuclear power plants, and military bases to thousands of Americans sitting at home staring at their computer screens.

  Scott’s programming mission was to find ways to make sure the “citizen sentries” were actually monitoring the 12,538 cameras in the system, instead of using their computers to play solitaire or shop for shoes. His programs gave these people, like rats in a laboratory experiment, meaningless tasks to do while watching the camera images on their computers, then rated them on those tasks and produced a waterfall of statistics that was especially pleasing to Washington. Scott clicked through fence images from a half dozen more places, including a perimeter fence in a piñon forest in Los Alamos, New Mexico, then went back to the work he was supposed to be doing: analyzing his programmers’ progress on a project to design animated fake “intruders” who would “walk” and “dig” and perform other suspicious acts alongside the fences and gates, frightening the citizen sentries into pushing the alert! button on their computer screens and causing an Elysian Systems server to register another entry in the vigilant column. He tried out “turban man,” an image of a swarthy fellow with a towel wrapped around his head running and ducking: the actor was his lead programmer, Jeremy Zaragoza, and the clip had been filmed at a rented studio along with others of “binocular lady” and “shovel man,” all played by various programmers in this office. Scott made turban man run along various fences: the challenge was to create animations in correct proportions to the various barriers on the screen as they ran and shoveled alongside them, which was proving to be trickier than anyone had anticipated. After watching turban man pass improbably back and forth through the steel mesh fence at the San Onofre power plant, like some superhero possessed of special powers, Scott absentmindedly clicked open the latest numbers from NASDAQ, which had been especially bad all morning.

  No one in Elysian Systems bothered to hide the fact that they were using their computers throughout the workday to watch their stocks and mutual funds and 401(k) accounts, not even the executives up on the fourth floor. Before, we played Nerf football in the hallways, and practiced tango dancing in the cafeteria. Now we watch our retirement shrink in multicolored graphs. Football and tango were better for the soul. This morning, as on most mornings in recent months, Scott squinted at his screen in frustration at the dynamic displays, updated at five-minute intervals, that confirmed his poor financial judgment, his bad bets. For several years the market had risen dependably, and people started to think of it as a machine that made money, but that wasn’t its true nature. The market did not behave according to any pattern Scott had been able to discern. Turning the market into the graphs and charts of the type filling Scott’s flat-panel display created the illusion that it was a mathematical equation, that it obeyed rules like those hidden inside the core of computer games, where players spent hours exploring and prodding to uncover the underlying logic, the key that opened the jewelry box. The equations that ran the market were, in fact, too vast for any computer to decipher: they were the sum of the desires and fears of millions of people, divided and multiplied by the ostensibly rational but really quite subjective calculations of “analysts.” The math was twisted further by the fiscal legerdemain of accountants who could be as creatively fuzzy as impressionist painters. The numbers their spreadsheets spit out, Scott now knew, were inflated by narrative inventions like those Sasha “the Big Man” Avakian used to confabulate at meetings with venture capitalists. Scott had learned these lessons while watching the Big Man run their company, but unfortunately he had no way to apply them to his own investment decisions, and he had spent several frustrating years moving the “go-away” money from MindWare around the market and into various “instruments.” Five years ago the charts and graphs pointed, unmistakably, toward exotic new fields being tested in Research Triangle laboratories, and if they had continued to follow that logic Scott would not be working at Elysian Systems today, he would not have a mortgage to worry about, and Pepe the gardener would still be cutting the lawn and tending to the backyard garden and Scott would be liberated of his wife’s complaining to him about it.

  As was their custom, the regulars at Laguna Municipal Park South began arriving around noon. They brought packed lunches, strollers stuffed with extra diapers and moist towelets, and carried pay-as-you-go cell phones to talk to the barrio relatives who were watching over their own children as they earned dollars caring for their patrones’ boys and girls. The weekday routine of the park was broken this morning by the appearance of a new woman, a fellow latinoamericana who occupied the bench by the play structure, and who instantly reminded the regulars of locales deep to the south, and not because of her broad face and caramel skin, or the way she slumped on the bench and sneered at the play structures. No, it was the uniform that reminded them of their home countries, the excessive professional formality of matching pink pants and the wide, pocketed blouse that was known back home as a filipina. It was the uniform of the high-society domestic back home, though hardly anyone wore one in California, where most employers preferred their domestics in the sporty and practical attire of jeans and tennis shoes, complemented with the odd gift garment from the boss: a quality hoodie from Old Navy, or a sturdy cotton blouse from Target. The new woman in the park was sitting with her arms folded defiantly across her chest, as if she were a prisoner taking some fresh air in the recreation yard, watching over two boys who themselves were very familiar because they used to come here with Guadalupe, a favorite of the group.

  “¡Buenas tardes!” announced a perky older woman in sweatpants and a loose-fitting blouse as she took a seat next to Araceli. “Those are Guadalupe’s kids.”

  “Así es,” Araceli said.

  The woman introduced herself as María Isabel and pointed out that she had brought a girl to the park who was about Keenan’s age. Araceli watched as the girl and Keenan stood on opposite sides of the elaborate play structure, as if contemplating the gender divide and the walkways of plastic and compressed rubber that stood between them, until Keenan made another mouth explosion and returned to the game with his older brother.

  “I heard that Guadalupe might quit,” María Isabel announced. “So, you took her place?”

  Before Araceli could answer, María Isabel rose to her feet to push the girl, who had run over to the swing, and then turned toward Araceli in anticipation of an answer.

  “No, we used to work together.”

  “That Guadalupe was a funny girl. Always telling jokes. Did she ever tell you the story about the little boy getting lost in the women’s section in the mall?”

  “Yes.”

  María Isabel gave the girl another push, the wide fan of her charge’s blond hair catching the air and billowing in the moist morning air, her pendulum movement and the creaking of the apparatus keeping a kind of harried time. “Push me higher, María,” the girl yelled, and María Isabel obeyed and gave another heave. María Isabel was a woman of oak-bark hue with freshly dyed and aerosol-sprayed short hair, and she was wearing smart matching accessories of gold earrings and a thin gold chain on her wrist that were mismatched with the bleach-burned T-shirt draped over her short frame. This woman arrives at work dressed as if she were a secretary, and then strips down into janitor clothes. “You tell a few good stories and the time just flashes by,” María Isabel continued. “A lot of us come here every day. Later on we’ll probably see Juana. And Modesta and Carmelita. Carmelita is from Peru and the nices
t woman you’ll ever meet. Maybe we’ll see Fanny, though I hope not. Fanny is a mess.”

  Araceli said nothing and for a moment they watched Brandon chase Keenan over a bridge of plastic slats, until Brandon lost his footing and fell over the edge, headfirst onto the black mat below. Keenan laughed as his brother climbed up and rubbed his head, unhurt.

  “Niños traviesos,” María Isabel said with a tone of mild exasperation that she intended as a gesture of sympathy with Araceli. “But I’d rather take care of children. If you’ve got a girl, it isn’t any work at all. A boy is a little more work, but I’ll take even three boys over an old lady. That was my last job, taking care of a viejita on her deathbed.”

  “Really?” Araceli said, unable to mask her complete lack of interest.

  María Isabel lauched into a story about la señora Bloom “wrestling with death” and “trying to keep him from taking my old lady away.” Araceli was going to speak up and say, I really don’t want to hear this story, but at that instant María Isabel shifted her gaze to an object or person behind Araceli and began to wave.

  “Juana! ¡Aquí estoy! Over here.”

  Within a few minutes Araceli was sitting in a circle of Spanish chatter, with three more women greeting Araceli with smiles and holas and polite kisses on the cheek.