Sal and Gabi Break the Universe (A Sal and Gabi Novel)

by Carlos Hernandez

  “No one can see this but us?” asked Gabi, pointing to the people outside this little room.

  I shook my head.

  She walked around, putting her hands through ghosts. “All these things we’re seeing,” asked Gabi. “They’re real?”

  “Not in our universe. But somewhere, yeah.”

  “Okay. So, how do these other universes help us?”

  I didn’t say anything. Because that was exactly my point, Gabi, remember I have no idea what I am doing, thanks for listening.

  “Oh,” she said, looking at me across the roomful of possibility between us. “That was what you were saying before, wasn’t it?”

  I gave her double thumbs up.

  She walked over to me, passing right through a Gabi from somewhere else, who was screaming and crying at the unfairness of life. “Well, let’s start with what we know. When Yasmany was being a jerk to you, how’d you find the chicken universe?”

  “By relaxing.”

  “Okay,” she said. If she was hoping saying “Okay” would help her understand, it didn’t work. “But what does that mean, ‘relax’?”

  “We’ve been through this. Remember?”

  “The screened-in porch. Yeah, I remember. But tell me again.”

  “Okay. It’s the opposite of what you’re doing now.”

  “Ugh!” She took a deep breath. “Okay. Okay. You’re the kung fu master, Sal, and I’m the white belt. Please explain to me, Master, how to relax.”

  I could get used to being called Master. “Well, white belt, you can use meditation techniques, like I do. I learned a bunch from my psychologists back in the day.”

  “Fine. So teach me. How do I meditate?”

  I moved so that we were standing side by side, looking out at the room. “Okay. Don’t close your eyes. You have to use all your senses. Ready?”

  “Ready.”

  “Okay, raise your hands in the air. It will help us concentrate.”

  “Um, Ignacio?”

  I looked around. “Put him in the incubator.”

  She did, came back, and, copying me, raised her arms as high as they could go.

  “Good. Okay. Now picture this. You are sleeping on the belly of a giant. He’s a friendly giant. He—”

  “Does it have to be a he?”

  “Um, I guess not. I’ve always pictured a man giant.”

  “Typical boy. I’m picturing a fifty-foot woman.”

  “Picture a fifty-foot taco for all I care. But don’t interrupt. You can’t interrupt and meditate at the same time.”

  “Maybe you can’t. I’m gifted.”

  I ignored that. “Breathe in, white belt, then breathe out. Listen to your master. Breathe in. Breathe out. Picture yourself sleeping, snug and safe inside your giant taco.”

  “Don’t make me laugh!” she said with a laugh.

  “Breathe in. Breathe out. Eyes open. Breathe out. You hear the giant taco’s heartbeat.”

  “Tacos don’t have hearts!”

  “Silliness can save you, white belt. Breathe in. You feel warm and secure. Breathe out. The giant taco will protect you. The giant taco is your friend. Breathe in. The giant taco will help us choose. The giant taco is flying. It’s like your own personal dragon mount, except it’s a taco. Breathe out. Soar the skies on your giant taco, Gabi!”

  The ghosts became smudges of color. Between blinks, furniture moved, monitors dissolved, equipment disappeared and reappeared in other parts of the room. The room lurched like a roller coaster, twisting and dipping. “I think it’s working,” I told her. “Keep breathing. Don’t close your eyes.”

  “It’s like watching my dreams and nightmares dance together,” she said, openmouthed.

  And then the room shook into focus, as if we’d slammed on the brakes. We had arrived. Somewhere.

  The lights and lamps in the room had been turned off. On top of the incubator—sealed up tight in this place—seven candles of different sizes burned with yellow-brown light.

  “Open flames in a hospital room?!” asked Gabi, her eyes bugging out of her head.

  “Huh. You don’t seem to be worried about it,” I responded, pointing out to her the other Gabi Reál in the room.

  That Gabi wore rainbow LED barrettes that slowly changed colors, and a shirt that read, NEVER GIVE IN, NEVER GIVE IN, NEVER, NEVER, NEVER, NEVER.—WINSTON CHURCHILL. She had taken over the nightstand in one corner of the room and was writing furiously in her journal.

  Nobody seemed to know we were here. Everyone else sat on the floor in a circle around the incubator, holding hands, praying: Ms. Reál, and a half-dozen Gabi dads, and Papi, and another Sal, the only one with his eyes open, looking pouty and bratty, huffing like he didn’t want to be there.

  And leading them all in prayer was Mami Muerta.

  Not muerta there. Oh no: very much alive. She and Papi sat next to each other, holding hands tightly, deep in concentration. She wore a red-and-white robe that matched the robe on the three-foot doll of Santa Bárbara in her lap. The doll’s black hair flowed past its shoulders, just like Mami’s.

  As I looked around the circle, I saw other religious (and not so religious) stuff. Ms. Reál had a small Virgin Mary statue, the kind with a suction cup on the base so it can be stuck to a car dashboard, in the hand that held Lightning Dad’s. Dada-ist, to Lightning Dad’s left, clutched a rosary in the hand that held on to Cari-Dad’s, and in his lap sat a laughing stone statue that looked African to me but probably, like him, came from the Dominican Republic: big face, big smile, little body, and a bowl for a hat. Grizzly Dad’ums held Cari-Dad’s other hand, and he wore a paper bib that had written on it in red marker: I’LL BELIEVE ANYTHING IF IT MEANS SAVING MY SON. Dad: The Final Frontier sat between Grizzly Dad’ums and the Sal from there, and in her lap a bobblehead of Albert Einstein nodded yes forever. Papi had a coconut in his lap with shells for eyes and a mouth.

  The Sal from there was the only one not participating. He had his cell phone in his lap. His eyes jumped from one face to the next, trying to find someone who agreed with him that sitting in a circle praying for a dying baby was the boringest thing in the world. But everyone else was being respectful. He was the only sandwich.

  A sandwich who wasn’t diabetic.

  He couldn’t be. He’d never act this way in a hospital, right in the middle of a medical emergency, if he had any clue about what being sick all the time was like. Plus, I didn’t see a diabetes bag around, or any bulge in his clothing where his insulin pump might be.

  I had to be sure. I walked over to him. Got real close. Stared in his eyes for a while. He had no idea I was there, breathing on him from another universe.

  Right on cue, StupidSal whined into my face, “Why do I have to pray and Gabi doesn’t? I want to play Murder Fun Five.”

  I really, really, really hated StupidSal.

  “I am praying in my own way,” the Gabi from that place retorted. She kept writing as she spoke. “I am composing a poem to celebrate Ignacio’s recovery, to be read on the day we can finally bring him home. It’s a song of hope and solace that imagines a future time when Ignacio will engage in all the winsome activities and pursuits of a growing boy: soccer, camping, reading about pirates and dinosaurs under a beach umbrella, and, eventually, graduating from college. It’s written in heroic couplets, à la Alexander Pope.”

  “Oh. My. God,” said my Gabi. “Please tell me I am not that extra.”

  ExtraGabi looked up from her journal and looked straight at my Gabi—without seeing her. “Did you hear something?” she asked the room.

  “We are not alone,” said Mami Not-Muerta. She was looking me in the eye. She could see us. “Two spirits are in the room.”

  “Liar,” said StupidSal.

  “Don’t you call your mami a liar,” said Papi, in a tone that told me they fought all the time. That made me feel a little sick.

  StupidSal made an ugly face. “There’s no such thing as ghosts. This is such—” And he said something a lot mor
e vulgar than cacaseca.

  Look, I know that, as a thirteen-year-old, I’m supposed to act all moody and independent and cool and whatever. Except that’s not how I feel. Five years ago, losing Mami scared me—all the way down, and all the way up again. I would do anything to have her back. And I love Papi and American Stepmom so much. And here was StupidSal, treating his parents like garbage, acting like he was six years old.

  I couldn’t take it. Not for a second.

  So I marched over to him, plucked his smartphone off his lap, and smashed it on the ground.

  “Yeeee!” StupidSal wailed like a baby. He ran over to his mami’s lap, knocking her Santa Bárbara statue out of the way. Oh yeah, now you want your mami, after disrespecting her the way you did. Stupid, stupid Sal.

  Mami caught StupidSal and held him, but she never took her eyes off me. Everyone else crawled or scooted away from the exploding cell phone, screaming and clutching their statues in fear.

  I held up my hands to signal I was done losing my temper. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Can you hear me?”

  “And me?” asked my Gabi.

  Only Mami could. “I can hear you, espíritus. Tell me, are you espíritus buenos, or malos?”

  “Oh,” said Gabi, glancing at me, “we’re good spirits.”

  “Yeah. We’re totally awesome,” I added.

  Mami scanned us. “Then why do you look like Sal and Gabi? Pretending to be our children seems more like something duendes would do.”

  “One of them looks like me?” asked ExtraGabi. “I wanna see!”

  “What are duendes?” asked my Gabi.

  “They’re like poltergeists,” I answered. Then I turned back to Mami and said, “We’re not duendes. We’re nice.”

  Mami crossed her arms. “Don’t lie to me. You broke Sal’s cell phone.”

  I crossed my arms right back at her. “Yeah, well, maybe Sal should watch his mouth around you.”

  I didn’t mean to sound as angry as I did. And I didn’t mean to appear again. Everyone in the room sucked in their breath together.

  “I heard it!” said ExtraGabi.

  “Him—it’s a him,” said Dada-ist. At some point he’d put his statue down and he now had charcoal and paper in his hands. He started sketching. “Floramaria is right. He looks like Sal.”

  “Make it go away!” StupidSal cried into his mami’s shoulder like a wussy mami’s boy who should just go play in the traffic or something.

  “How did they see you?” my Gabi asked me. She went over to the incubator and tried to pick up the candles. She couldn’t. She put her hands into the flames and felt nothing. She looked back at me, fire jumping through her fingers, completely irritated. “I want them to see me, too! I want to do things! How did you grab the cell phone?”

  “As usual,” I replied, “I have no idea what I’m doing.”

  “Spirits!” Mami almost chanted. She was still patting and cradling StupidSal, but her voice had become as forceful as a priestess’s. “We have called you here to help Ignacio. He is dying. We do not know how much longer he can survive. So, please, if you are kindly spirits, use your otherworldly powers to help him!”

  Gabi and I looked at each other. Then, we peered into the incubator. By the shaky candlelight we saw two Iggys.

  Well, kind of. They didn’t look all the way real. They were superimposed over each other, like the gym wall had been.

  “Holy frijoles,” breathed Gabi. “They want us to save their Iggy, Sal!”

  “I know.”

  “But we can’t save their baby! We can’t even save our baby!”

  “I know!” I took a breath and calmed down. More quietly, I repeated, “I know.” I walked toward Mami a step. “We can’t cure your Ignacio, Mami. We came here looking for help for our Ignacio. He’s dying, too.”

  “Can you see both Iggys, Mrs. Sal’s mami?” Gabi asked. “Look in the incubator. You should see two babies in there.”

  Mami poured cowering StupidSal into Papi’s lap, stood up, and padded on bare feet to the incubator. As her brown face entered the brown globe of light of the candles, she peered in. Her eyes slimmed, then grew startled. “I see them. I see them both.” A tear hung from her eye like a fruit. “Is that Ignacio’s soul? Is it leaving his body?”

  “No!” said Ms. Reál, a denial, a wish. She stood up and walked over to the incubator but couldn’t see what Mami saw, no matter how hard she squinted.

  Papi poured StupidSal on the floor and came over to the incubator, too. “Two babies, you said?” He strained to look. “I only see one.”

  “Relax, mi vida,” Mami told him, a hand, so gentle, on his shoulder. They gazed at each other with the loving looks I remembered them exchanging. “Look less to see more.”

  Both Ms. Reál and Papi half closed their eyes and breathed deeply, trying to find our Iggy lying right on top of theirs.

  But I started to feel my patience slipping. “It doesn’t matter if you can see him or not,” I told them, even though probably only Mami would hear me. “We can’t help them.”

  “We came here looking for help,” said Gabi.

  “Our Iggy’s sick, too.”

  “We just want to cure his immunodeficiency disease and let him have a normal life.”

  “We’ve traveled a long, long way.”

  “We have no idea how we got here.”

  “Or why.”

  “But we have to be here for a reason. Right?”

  Mami tilted her head. She walked toward Gabi and me until she was standing right in front of us. “Did you say ‘immunodeficiency disease’?”

  “Yes,” said Gabi. “Why?”

  Mami traded looks with us. “Our Ignacio is suffering from neonatal meningitis. The doctors say it might have been caused by a staph infection.”

  “What?” said Gabi. She ran to the foot of the incubator and picked up Ignacio’s chart, reading fast, flipping through pages.

  The Reáls and StupidSal screamed and backed away from her.

  “Gabi!” I said. “You picked up the chart! You’re doing things!”

  And just like that, the chart fell through her hands and clattered to the floor.

  “Huh,” she said. “It’s like, when we really care about something, we become more real.”

  “Gustavo,” Mami said to Papi, who hadn’t yelled or even flinched, “there are two Ignacios from two different universes occupying the same space. Didn’t you tell me something about your research a few years ago, about how things from two different universes could influence each other?”

  “‘Virtuous supermembranation theory,’” Papi quoted. “Bonita and I got a Tinsley Prize for that paper.” He rubbed his mouth and mustache, thinking. “Bonita, come here, please. I need your help.”

  Dad: The Final Frontier backed into a wall and hugged Einstein. “But I’m scared of ghosts!”

  “They’re good spirits,” Mami said to her gently. “They’re here to help us. They’re going to cure Ignacio.”

  “Mami, don’t tell them that!” I said, not yelled, because I don’t yell. “We can’t help them, or ourselves. Now there are two dying babies in the incubator, and we can’t do anything! It’s not fair!”

  Mami swooped over to me and tried to put her hands on my cheeks. They passed through my head. But she held them there as if she were touching my face. She smiled down at me like the sun and said, “Mijo, there are two babies in the incubator. They’re both sick. But they’re sick in different ways. And now they’re occupying the same space, almost blended together, almost one.”

  “I wish we could give the healthy parts of each of them to the other,” said Gabi.

  “That’s exactly what virtuous remembranation theory proposes,” said Papi. Then he blinked. “Hey! I heard a little girl! She sounded like you, Gabi!”

  ExtraGabi, though maybe a little scared, tiptoed over to the incubator. “Hello, Gabi!” she said, though she clearly couldn’t see either Gabi or me. “I just want you to know you’re really awesome!
You can totally figure this out!”

  “Thank you, Gabi!” said Gabi. “I think you’re awesome, too!”

  “Gabi thinks you’re awesome, too,” Papi told ExtraGabi. That seemed to make her night.

  “I don’t understand what Papi’s theory means,” I said, doing everything I could not to lose my gerbils. But we had to be running out of time. “What do we do?”

  “Beats me,” said Papi. “I just write the theories. I don’t do practice. That’s for engineers.”

  “How did you get here?” Mami asked me. “How did you find us?”

  “We meditated,” Gabi said.

  Mami looked straight at me. She was so beautiful, not because she was beautiful, but because she was my mami, alive, and speaking perfect English like she never had before, and her eyes were full of love for me. “Exactly. You meditated, mijo. You dreamed about what you wanted to happen. You imagined what you wanted the world to be like. You imagined it so hard, you scoured whole universes until you found the answer. And now you’re here, with the power to imagine two very sick little babies healthy again.”

  “You have to connect them,” Papi added, picking up where Mami left off. “One Iggy is sick one way, but the other has a different sickness. You have to imagine that each Iggy is helping the other one. Meditate on connecting them. Like a circuit. Connect them across universes, and they’ll keep each other healthy.”

  “Meditate on connecting them,” said Gabi. “Got it. You got it, Sal?”

  I was breathing hard. I felt confused and lost. I didn’t understand half of what was happening. But meditate on connecting them? That I thought I could handle. “All we can do is relax and try,” I said.

  “I’ll help,” Mami added. “We all will.”

  For a second, I couldn’t speak. Then I swallowed and said, “It was so good to see you.”