The Barbarian Nurseries

by Héctor Tobar

  When Maureen awoke the morning after her first assault with the mop, it was with the anticipation of ant-free surfaces. Instead she found a new trail entering the kitchen through one of the light fixtures and splitting into two branches, one crossing the room to the pantry, where the ants were devouring a loaf of stale French bread. Yet another trail entered from the backyard underneath one of the sliding glass doors, across the former path of one of Araceli’s chalk lines, and Maureen followed it to the remains of a dead grasshopper that had somehow been trapped behind one of the bookcases. This is more than I can take. She could not look at the sickening nodes of their dirt-colored bodies a moment longer. Several times a day, she felt one or two crawling on her legs and arms, racing for her neck and breasts, and she fantasized about finding their colony’s nest, and bringing some cataclysmic destruction upon it that would end ant culture and ant history on this hillside. Finally, that afternoon, she stood in a supermarket aisle she always tried to avoid, and purchased two different cans of poison. When she got home she was so desperate to see the chemicals work that she didn’t bother to get the children out of the house before she began spraying.

  In the evening Maureen had rearmed herself with the spray can, determined to find any ant scouts or trails that had escaped her initial offensive, and was wandering the various rooms of the house when the phone rang.

  Scott answered in the kitchen. “Hello, Mr. Goller,” he said, and Maureen listened, watching as he spoke in profile, either unaware or unconcerned that she was eavesdropping.

  “No. We’re not going to do that … We really don’t want to be there. No. We’ve made our statements … You go ahead and do that, and we’ll be there if you force us to. And you know what: we’re pretty clear on exactly what happened … Meaning that we left separately and didn’t … If you’d just let me finish … Well, I guess you could say that, but I’m past being embarrassed now … No, neither will my wife … Right … Child Protective Services was already here … It was a very nice visit … Well, I got the distinct impression we don’t have anything to worry about … I’m sorry, Mr. Goller … I think that would be an injustice, Mr. Goller. Supremely unfair, for reasons that should be clear without me having to say why … I understand what the laws are, yes … I have to go, Mr. Goller … Kids, you know, and dinner … Goodbye, Mr. Goller … Goodbye.”

  For the first time since that night he’d pushed her, Maureen allowed her eyes to settle and linger upon her husband. He was as exhausted as she was, but also completely in the present, his eyes pale brown embers giving off the same serene and low-burning glow of a woman in the days after childbirth. Men don’t often look like that. Scott had somehow understood, from one moment to the next, that they were no longer at the mercy of the melodramatic machinery of the media and the criminal justice system. It had hit him, Maureen sensed, with a eureka suddenness and intensity, like the solution to a programming conundrum. These prosecutors and bureaucrats have no power over us. None. Because we haven’t done anything wrong. We’re just as innocent as Araceli. Aren’t we? Every so often her husband did something brilliant like this, shifting his thinking as easily as he might shift his posture or his feet, finding a solution suddenly falling into his arms, simply because he’d stepped out of the box of a problem and examined it in an entirely different light. That’s something he can do that I cannot.

  Looking at him, she began to see the possibility that the original, simple, and indefinable feelings that drew her to him might return.

  “Is it over now?” she asked.

  “I think it is.”

  “Really?”

  “I don’t think he’ll be calling us again.”

  “Thank God.”

  She was still holding the yellow can whose steel skin was emblazoned with drawings of bugs and a thousand words of warning in minuscule fonts.

  After several visits to courtrooms, police stations, and jail-houses, Araceli now understood that Americans associated justice with two dominant architectural styles: the austere cement cubes where walls, floors, ceilings, and passageways blended into a single smooth surface; or the woody hominess of dark paneling that suggested shadowy forests of mystery. This new Laguna Niguel satellite courthouse had a bit of both, and the mood was as somber as those other places, despite the presence of large Latino families with children sitting on some of the benches in the hallways and playing with toy cars and dolls. The look on the faces of the mothers and wives said, This is where I come to say goodbye to my viejo. Adiós, pendejo, and yeah, I’ll look after the kids, because what the fuck else can I do? This was a place, Araceli understood, where the damned were released temporarily from their dungeons to intermingle with the undamned. The presence of the inmate fathers and brothers in their shackles and jumpsuits sent everyone around them into a funk. The gloom was there to see in the faces of the mothers and the daughters, the judges and the lawyers, including Deputy District Attorney Arnold Chang and Ruthy Bacalan, who had lost the sheen of pregnancy on her cheeks and looked older somehow as she took a seat with Araceli at a table before the judge. There was sadness too in the look of pained exertion on the face of the first witness of Araceli’s preliminary hearing, a police officer she had never met before.

  Deputy Ernie Suarez was not dressed in police clothing as he sat in the witness box, but rather in jeans and a collared short-sleeve cotton shirt that revealed his rather excessive musculature. He wore a small loop earring that was meant to convey masculinity, but whose effect, Araceli decided, was completely the opposite. Only the badge on his belt identified him as a member of the tribe of law enforcement.

  “You are, at the moment, working?” the prosecutor asked by way of explanation.

  “Yes.”

  “Are you working as what they call an ‘undercover’ officer at the moment?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What is this, ‘undercover’?” Araceli whispered to Ruthy. It didn’t sound good.

  “I’ll tell you later.”

  “At the time of the incident involving the Torres-Thompson children, you were a patrol officer assigned to the Laguna Rancho area, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  Guided by the prosecutor’s questions, Deputy Suarez proceeded to tell the story of his arrival at Paseo Linda Bonita, of the “distraught” state in which he found Maureen and Scott, and his search of their home for clues of the boys’ whereabouts, and how Maureen paced and held the baby.

  “Had the defendant left any communication of any kind with the parents?”

  “We didn’t find any note or message of any kind, sir, no.”

  “So the parents had no idea where their children were?”

  “That’s correct, sir. And they were pretty shaken up about it.”

  Listening to the deputy, Araceli saw the events inside the home on Paseo Linda Bonita that day through the eyes of Maureen and Scott for the first time. Her employers were adrift and afraid in that orderly house Araceli had left behind for them. I cleaned the sinks before I left, but I didn’t think of the most obvious thing: to leave behind a note. I made a mess of things as much as they did.

  As the court session moved on, Araceli could see the prosecutor was building a tale of foreboding around her acts of naïveté and stupidity. The deputy district attorney was a short man in boxy, scuffed black shoes, and a tie that was knotted too loosely. Now he began to fiddle with a computer and a projector, and raised a screen inside the empty jury box. An image appeared on the screen, a video from a Union Station surveillance camera that showed Araceli, Brandon, and Keenan, seen from an eye high above the waiting area, the shiny floors reflecting the atrium daylight into an odd glare, so that Araceli and the boys stood in a menacing glow. The prosecutor had a sheriff’s detective state the video’s provenance and act as narrator. “The defendant enters the frame at one forty-five p.m…. You can see the victims walked in after her …”

  “Were you able to determine if the two boys have any relatives in the vicinity of that st
ation?”

  “To the best of our knowledge, they have no relative within thirty miles of the station.”

  The video representation of Araceli turned her head in several directions, mulling which direction to take as the boys studied the high ceilings above them. Video Araceli walked away and out of the range of the camera without saying anything to them and they followed after her. Araceli looked at that footage and saw what everyone else did: an impatient woman who never wanted to take care of children, who rushed out of the home without leaving a note because she was too anxious to be rid of them. The video doomed her. Am I really that selfish and mean? But how had she allowed herself to be placed in such a predicament in the first place? You are going the wrong way, woman! Go back to the house and wait! Why was she always at the mercy of other people? Seeing this stupid woman projected on the screen, Araceli felt an impotent rage that made her want to stand up and shout in Spanglish, I am a pendeja! Looking for the grandfather? ¡Pendeja! But she said nothing, and slumped back in her chair suddenly and folded her arms, and shook her head with silent violence. “What’s wrong?” Ruthy Bacalan asked. They are going to put that woman in the video back in jail and then send her home with plastic ties around her wrists because she is a callous simpleton. Araceli fought to hold back the water welling behind her eyes; she couldn’t let these people see her cry. Now I understand why there are all these boxes of tissues in the courtroom. There was one box on the table before her, another perched on the railing where the witnesses stood, two more in the empty seats of the jury box. People come to cry here. To see their follies projected on a screen, and then to weep.

  The prosecutor turned off the video, the deputy left the courtroom, and the next witness entered the courtroom.

  Detective Blake marched down the gallery aisle like a middle-aged man in a hurry, rose to the stand, said “Yeah, I do” in response to the oath, and plopped down into the witness chair. He was soon asked to relate Brandon’s tale of his journey with Araceli.

  “The neighborhood this boy described to you,” the prosecutor began. “Would you say it bore a general resemblance to the neighborhood near the intersection of Thirty-ninth and South Broadway?”

  “Very general. Yes.”

  “What did Brandon tell you about that place?”

  “That it was dirty and grimy. That a lot of people came and went there. That he heard a man screaming. That he slept on the floor, next to a child who was a slave, or an orphan, or something like that.”

  “On the floor, next to an orphan?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did he say anything about seeing people with scars on their faces?”

  “Yes.”

  When the prosecutor had finished, Ruthy Bacalan rose to begin her cross-examination. She was dressed in her own idiosyncratic version of summer courtroom dress: a white jacket with gold-braided epaulets on the shoulders, and wide white pants and white sandals, an outfit that suggested she had come to represent a defendant being brought on trial before the captain of a luxury cruise liner.

  “Generally speaking, during the hour or so you spent with Brandon, did he seem frightened to you?” she asked the detective.

  “No.”

  “Did he appear intimidated by his experience with the defendant?”

  “No. Probably the opposite.”

  “The opposite?”

  “Yeah, he seemed like he was having fun telling his story. It was all sort of, uh, fantastical to him. ‘Magical’ is the word, I guess.”

  “And how much of that story were you able to verify?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Did you make any effort to find out how much of Brandon’s story was true? For example, did you find anyone who looked like they had been through a war, like the, quote, ‘refugees’ Brandon mentioned?”

  “You mean, did we find the war refugees Brandon told us about?”

  “Yes.”

  “No.” For the first time, the detective dropped his guard and grinned. “Didn’t know where to start looking for them.”

  “Brandon also mentioned something about time travel. In a train.”

  “Yes.”

  “Able to verify that?”

  “We punted on the time travel, ma’am.”

  From her chair, Araceli felt the mood in the courtroom turning light, inconsequential. The judge rolled his eyes—twice! My Ruthy is winning! The prosecutor was starting to look ill, he was grabbing the table before him with two hands, as if the building were shifting, very slowly, and the floor of the courtroom were suddenly afloat and tossed about by rough seas. “Brandon said his brother had been, quote, ‘holding fire,’ unquote. Did you find any burns on Keenan Torres-Thompson’s hands?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Did you find any fires burning underneath the surface of the earth?”

  “Excuse me.”

  “It’s in the statement. Brandon says he saw a fire burning in the ground.”

  “There was a pig cooked, apparently. At the home in Huntington Park.”

  “And what about the, quote, superhero? Mr. Ray Forma?”

  “We were able to ascertain, to a high degree of certainty, that there have been no sightings of any such man.”

  On the bench, the judge gave a bemused smirk that matched the one on the face of the detective.

  “No further questions, Your Honor.”

  Ray Forma sounded like a stage name to Araceli. There was a student she knew in art school who worked as a clown for children’s parties and called himself Re-Gacho. “Really Uncool” was a typical Mexico City clown who amused and annoyed in equal measures, harassing the moms with double entendres that their kids didn’t understand. Yes, Re-Gacho would fit perfectly in this courtroom, where even the bailiff looked grateful for the brief levity of superheroes and time machines at the end of a day of slogging through the calendar. Cover the oak with red and yellow streamers, bring out the balloons, and put a big top hat on the judge. Qué divertido.

  “The People rest, Your Honor,” the prosecutor said, causing the judge’s face to come alive again with a sparkle of astonishment. The judge was a balding man with a sallow complexion and a fringe of white hair: up until that moment, he had maintained a temperament of studied evenness and congeniality. The judge considered the seated prosecutor for an instant, and then his face collapsed into a mask of disapproval, as if the exit doors had been thrown open inside a darkened theater, interrupting a bad movie and revealing the sticky, trash-strewn aisles.

  “That’s it?”

  “Yes, Your Honor.”

  “Ms. Bacalan. I see you have one witness,” the judge said after a pause. “Is he here, by any chance?”

  “No, Your Honor. I didn’t anticipate the prosecutor cutting short his witness list.”

  “Right. So, tomorrow at nine a.m.?”

  “Yes, Your Honor,” Ruthy and the prosecutor said in unison.

  Sitting in the last row of the gallery with his legs crossed, Assistant District Attorney Ian Goller fixed a dagger stare at Madame Weirdness, the Mexican woman who could make his life easier by making the rational choice and taking the plea bargain. In his desire to avoid defeat he had assembled a squad of attorneys and investigators dedicated to keeping alive the machinery of case AB5387516, in the hope that he would eventually pressure this stubborn woman to accept the inevitable. But as he watched the defendant leaving the courtroom behind her attorney, Ian Goller realized she would not give up. Araceli Ramirez was a Mexican national with nothing going for her but a strong work ethic, apparently, and lived unaware of her powerlessness relative to your average American-born resident of Orange County. She owned no property and had no social security number or credit rating, but walked past him like an exiled empress in denim and sneakers because she inhabited another, Spanish-speaking reality where those things didn’t matter, a world of people happy with the plebeian pleasures of hurdy-gurdy music and pickup trucks. The assistant district attorney knew, in fact, that there was a pickup w
ith a driver waiting for the defendant in the parking lot. Goller had that information thanks to the investigator he’d assigned to track her movements—an egregious misuse of scarce resources—but the assistant district attorney only now realized how unhealthy his obsession with this case had become. Could it ever be a bad thing to want to win, Goller wondered, when the side you were on was called the People? He wanted this woman to make the rational calculation of a defeated American criminal, but of course she would not. His experience with the Mexicans that crossed his path was that they expected the worst and were immovable once they latched on to the idea that the DA’s plea offers were the ploy of English-speaking grifters. Thinking of all of this, Ian Goller slipped into a depression, because Araceli’s surrender was the only path to victory in the case.

  Maybe he should just go hit the waves and cuddle with the moving water and its shifting shapes, with its power to lift a man and make him fly.

  Assistant District Attorney Goller was in the parking lot, opening the trunk of his car and confirming the presence of his wet suit and mini board in the back when his phone beeped with another text message: his investigator was following the defendant from the parking lot and was wondering whether to continue surveillance.

  No, the assistant district attorney wrote back.

  He saw The People v. Araceli N. Ramirez more clearly now. It was unusual to be burdened at this relatively late stage with so many bad facts: the parents caught in contradictions, the paper trail of their lies, and the older boy and his elaborate fantasies. In the name of efficiency they usually tossed unwinnables like this one out the door. And yet there was still the march of institutional logic, the overwhelming likelihood the judge would order the defendant to stand trial, adding the passage of time to the equation. It would be four months, at least, until the trial: that kind of time often worked wonders, since it brought into play the predilection of defendants to muck up their lives. The defendant might run afoul of the law while free on bail, allowing her to be arrested on another, unrelated charge. Or they might get their deal. If none of those things happened, there would always be another illegal immigrant to arrest and try in another high-profile case, eventually, inevitably. The math suggested it would happen again soon, though it was hard to imagine a case as perfect and full of possibility as two handsome boys spirited away by their humorless Mexican nanny.