Her loving hands couldn’t touch me, but she tried. “Is your mami where you come from a lot like me?”
My eyes were suddenly underwater. “Not nearly enough.”
Gabi patted my shoulder, like a coach telling his pitcher that he needs one more inning out of that arm.
I nodded to her and said, “Now the student is the master. Tell them what to do, Gabi.”
“Me? But I don’t—”
I cut her off. “Relax, white belt. Just tell the universe what you want. The universe loves us. It wants to help.”
Gabi smiled. Then she nodded and, alive with confidence, she said, “All right, then. Mrs. Sal’s mom, please tell everybody to imagine a giant taco.”
EPILOGUE
(ONE WEEK LATER)
IT HAD BEEN a good second week at school.
Gabi and I got an A-plus-plus-plus on our Everyman play. “An A-plus-plus-plus,” Mrs. Waked explained, “means that you’d be nominated for a Tony Award, but you wouldn’t win, because winning a Tony is all politics and corruption. Being nominated is the real honor. Well done, children!”
She also gave Aventura, who was in her Advanced Theater Workshop class, extra credit for her work on the Death costume. Aventura texted me, Tyty xtra cred! and sent me so many thank-you emojis the whole world ran out of emojis for like ten minutes. I texted back, Wat ty ur the one who did all this work on a Sat. just to help me and Gabi, and she texted back, Yeah sorry if i got a little weird in the hospital if im being honest i did get a little jealous of gabi still friends?
What was she talking about? I had to show the text to American Stepmom to understand what the pants was going on. She, of course, ribbed me for twenty minutes before she made herself useful and helped me write back, Ave ur da coolest of course were still friends IOU a BIG favor name ur price!
Ooh! Aventura replied. BIG favor huh lemme think bout that
Something about her reply made me gulp.
Gladis was absent from school on Monday but was back by Tuesday. She avoided me like I was radioactive. Ah, well. At least she wasn’t spreading rumors about me. It seemed that the kids at Culeco still didn’t know whether to call me a brujo, a mago, or just a boring old magician. But I didn’t care anymore. The mystery would only enhance my mystique.
Yasmany returned to school on Wednesday. He didn’t tell me about his life since I last saw him, and I didn’t think it was my place to ask. If he wanted to tell me, he’d tell me. He was talking to Gabi, though, and she said he was in “a stable living situation for the time being.”
Which was all that mattered, really.
Yasmany seemed to be having more fun at school, too. Instead of picking fights, he concentrated on beating the red zone of the climbing wall, which Mr. Lynott had returned to its previous impossible state. Not impossible for Yasmany, though. He got to the top on Thursday, after just one day of practice. Punk.
The hole in Yasmany’s locker was getting smaller every day. I made sure of it. I’d pass by it on the way to my locker and take a big, calamitous snort. By Friday, the hole was so small, even a really skinny chicken worker would have had trouble fitting through it. Another week or two of deep breaths and it would be gone for good.
Every night that week, Gabi came over to check to see if I was carrying those calamitrons inside of me. Together, we’d sneak off with the entropy sweeper to some private part of the Coral Castle, and she’d scan me head to toe. “Zero calamitrons!” the sweeper always announced. I didn’t know what happened to those calamitrons I was snarfing, but they didn’t seem to be sticking around inside me. So that was good news.
If the news stayed good, once I’d closed the hole at school, I would clean up the Coral Castle and snort up all the calamitrons I’d brought here when I summoned Mami Muerta. Soon, our universe would be calamity-free. And maybe it would stay that way, now that Papi and Dad: The Final Frontier were spending day and night studying a paper called “Virtuous Supermembranation Theory: A Foundational Reimagining of Entropy in an Extramembraneous Multiverse,” which apparently, to their great surprise, they had written. It said so right on the first page, even though they had never seen the paper before an anonymous person had left it on Papi’s pillow one night.
But they liked it. A lot. They said it could be the next big breakthrough in calamity physics.
Finally, it seemed like everything was going according to plan. But the universe has a way of changing your plans. Or maybe it’s not the universe. Maybe it’s just Gabi.
Either way, Gabi definitely changed my plans when she texted me on Sunday night.
Sal! I need to COME OVER right now! Are your parents awake?
It was 11:00 p.m. No but cannit wait fer tomorrow, I texted back.
No it CANNOT wait until tomorrow. I am calling a car. I will be there in 20 minutes.
At exactly 11:20 p.m., Gabi’s driver-for-hire parked the car at the curb in front of the Coral Castle. I watched from the living room window as her driver got out of the car and pulled a stroller out of the trunk.
Meanwhile, Gabi climbed out of the backseat. She was definitely trying to make herself as invisible as possible. She had tucked all her hair into a black cap, and wore black jeans and a black T-shirt with writing I couldn’t read yet, since she was carrying Iggy’s car seat in her arms.
Also, Iggy was swaddled in a black blanket. Even the baby was dressed for night ops.
Gabi put Iggy’s car seat in the stroller, then reached into the backseat and pulled out a cat carrier. She waved to the driver as he pulled away. Five seconds later, she was standing at my front door, cat carrier in one hand, pushing the stroller with the other. Her T-shirt read: IF YOU WISH TO MAKE AN APPLE PIE FROM SCRATCH, YOU MUST FIRST INVENT THE UNIVERSE.—CARL SAGAN.
“Good evening, Bruce Lee,” she said as she entered. She just couldn’t go a second without making fun of my pajamas.
“Good evening, Call of Duty,” I replied.
We went inside; I shut the door. I immediately made for Iggy. He looked—amazing. Just like a perfectly healthy baby boy.
Well, to be honest, he looked a little weird. Like, he was barely a month old, right? But he had smart, sharp eyes. Like he knew things. Like he could see into your soul.
But healthy! And that’s all that matters, right? I gave Iggy a pinkie of mine to hold on to and asked Gabi, “So what’s up?”
“We need privacy,” she said. “And the entropy sweeper.”
So we went to an unused bedroom all the way at the end of the hallway. That room didn’t even have carpet. But it had a door, which we closed.
Gabi pushed the stroller to the center of the room and put the cat carrier down next to it.
“You got a cat?” I asked.
“No,” she corrected. “I didn’t get a cat. And none of my many, many dads got a cat. Iggy got a cat.”
“What do you mean?”
“Please allow me to demonstrate. You are going to love this.” She pulled off the hat and fluffed her hair. Then she knelt and opened the cat carrier.
Out came an orange-and-white-striped cat so huge, it looked like a baby hippo dressed up as a cat for Halloween. It jogged over to Gabi and rubbed its face and head all over her knee. It purred like a motor revving.
“Aw,” said Gabi, scritching the cat under its chin, “who’s a good Meow-Dad? Who’s the best Meow-Dad in the multiverse?”
I snickered. “Meow-Dad? Really?”
“That’s just what I call him.” She was still using her sweet, lovey talk-to-cats voice. “His tag says his name is ‘Transub-Dad-tiation.’ I bet ExtraGabi came up with that one after she noticed the Iggys fighting over him.”
“What do you mean, the Iggys fighting over him?”
Meow-Dad suddenly tensed. He zoomed three feet one way, five feet the next, tearing through the room in short bursts and skidding to a stop on the carpetless cement. His eyes were huge and his ears were back, as if he were surrounded by dogs or ghosts or ghost dogs or whatever cats are most afr
aid of.
“Cat zoomies,” said Gabi. “He gets them a lot when I let him out of his carrier.”
“So this is normal?” I’d never owned a cat.
“This? Yeah. But keep watching.”
Meow-Dad kept running around like he was nuts, zigging, zagging, dodging, sprinting, stopping, looking around like he was surrounded by enemies. I was afraid he was going to run smack into a wall and hurt himself.
But instead, with one last freaked-out look, Meow-Dad sprinted toward Iggy and, before I could react, launched himself into the baby stroller. Gabi, by the way, didn’t try to stop him.
We looked inside the stroller. Iggy was happily looking around. And Meow-Dad? Meow-Dad was gone.
I blinked. “Did that cat just—?”
“Jump through my little brother like he’s a wormhole to another universe so he could go hang out with his other Reál family and probably get a second dinner? That would be a yes.”
I was thinking as fast as I could. “And you want to know—”
“If a cat using my brother as a portal to another dimension is leaking calamitrons into our universe, yes.”
Well, okay, then. I grabbed the entropy sweeper, which was leaning on the wall, and turned it on.
“I’m alive,” it whispered. “Hi, Sal. Hi, Gabi. I’m assuming we’re using our indoor voices again?”
“Yes,” I whispered back.
“May I use my lights to express my joy at being alive again?”
“Yes.”
It rainbowed happily.
“Now,” I said, “will you scan this baby for calamitrons?”
“I already have,” said the entropy sweeper. “I am very good at my job.”
“And?” Gabi asked.
“Zero calamitrons detected!”
Gabi and I both sighed. And then, because a sigh wasn’t relief enough, I said, “Phew, baby.”
Gabi scratched her head. “I don’t get it, Sal. The cat just jumped into another universe. Right through my brother. It should have leaked at least a few calamitrons, right?”
I remembered how the Gladises got switched, calamitron-free. “Maybe. Not necessarily. But usually, yes. In my experience. You know what? I don’t know.” I pushed my hair off my face. “I have, like, no idea.”
“No one does,” said the entropy sweeper. “Science is like that. You finally figure out how something works, and twenty more questions pop up. It’s enough to make me want to go to sleep.” And when I didn’t take the hint: “That means I’d like to be turned off now, thank you.”
As requested, I pulled out the entropy sweeper’s battery.
“Well,” said Gabi, “it could be worse.”
“Now you have a cat,” I agreed.
“I’ve always wanted one. And Meow-Dad is so beautiful and fat! I love him!”
“And your baby brother is okay.”
“Yeah.” She scooped Iggy up in her arms. “There’s no one in the multiverse quite like you, Biggie Iggy.” She turned back to me, fighting to keep her face straight. “That’s going to be his rapper name.”
“It’s perfect,” I said.
What did Gabi hear in my voice? A single sob shot out of her mouth.
“Hey, you okay?” I asked, moving toward her.
She swallowed hard, flexed all the muscles in her face, and said, “Don’t worry, Sal. We’re just getting started. We’re going to figure something out. We didn’t know we could fix Iggy, but then we explored, and—boom!—we found the answer we were looking for. We’re gonna do that for you, too. This, I vow.” She looked at the ceiling and, through action-hero gritted teeth, added, “Watch out, multiverse. Here comes Gabi.”
I blinked six times. It took me that long to figure out what she was talking about. “You mean my mami?”
She nodded, just once. Iggy stared into my soul and—I kid you not—nodded also, just once. Little chacho was scary.
But look. After the week I’d had, my feelings about bringing back Mami were…complicated. Of course, yes, my heart still wanted her back. But a heart is just an unthinking, selfish pump. I didn’t want any calamitrons to come with her. And anyway, StupidSal’s Mami was really nice. Maybe she wouldn’t mind if I relaxed my way over to her universe every once in a while for a visit.
“We’ll see,” I said to Gabi. “We had to be brave for Iggy’s sake. Maybe we should concentrate on being smart for a while.”
“I’m always smart,” said Gabi, cuddling Iggy closer, while smirking at me. “Can’t help it.”
“Oh yeah? Then why’d you let me stamp ‘Gotcha!’ on your right hand?”
Gabi turned to stone. “Oh my God, Salvador Alberto Dorado Vidón, I swear on the president’s butt, if I look at my hand and see the word ‘Gotcha!’ there, I am going to scream so loud this whole universe is going to implode.”
“Then I suggest you don’t look at your hand,” I advised.
She looked. She screamed. Iggy giggled. And, for a few seconds anyway, everything was right with the multiverse.
Acknowledgments
It’s funny how, once you get down to writing a novel, you suddenly realize that you know nothing.
I mean, I am a first-generation Cuban American, so I should know a thing or two about my own experience, right? But here’s the thing: I know exactly one thing. Me. What it’s been like to be a Cuban American Carlos Hernandez. And let me tell you, mi gente, that’s not nearly enough to capture the variety and complexity of my heritage. I needed help.
And that’s my own heritage! Have you ever had to build your own middle school? Have you had to describe the daily life of someone with diabetes? Have you ever seen the inside of a NICU? Have you ever broken the universe?
Yeah, me neither. Not before this novel.
Luckily, I have tons of amazing people in my life who shared their knowledge, their genius, and their lives to help me write a better book. I basically need to spend the rest of my life thanking them.
To my family, Mami and Papi, Maria, Jesse, and Bárbii, I am the person I am because of you. Thanks for making me me.
Thanks for all the Spanish help, too. The Cubans I know have a pretty unique way of speaking—loud, fast, loving, and fierce, with words no other Spanish speakers use. Pronouncing the ends of words is totally optional, which always makes conversations, shall we say, exciting. With their help, I tried to capture that speech at a few points in the novel, because I love it so much. It’s the accent with which my heart speaks.
When I started conducting research for this novel, I was shocked to discover the rising rates of type-1 and type-2 diabetes among the Latinx populations in the US, including Latinx children. Type “diabetes Latinos” into your favorite search engine and have a read. If you’re as stunned as I was by those statistics, you’ll know at least one reason why I wanted to draw attention to the issue. To Stephanie Shaw, who shared with me her experiences as a mother of a child with diabetes, a thousand thank-yous. As a writer, actor, and director, you knew how to help me think about diabetes both in terms of medical fact and how to portray it in fiction.
While we’re on the subject of medicine, I needed a great deal of information about how newborns get help in hospitals. My source from the inside was D. T. Friedman, who, besides being a physician, advises writers on getting the medical details in their writing right. If I got anything wrong in the hospital scenes, it’s my fault, because D.T. did her best to guide me. Thanks so much!
I consulted with fiber artist and fashion designer Betsie Withey for help in describing Death’s costume (not to mention how it could be put together in the first place). Betsie is so inspiring and hilarious that I added the entire Textile Arts track at Culeco in honor of her and her art. My conversations with her reminded me of how many different types of geniuses there are in the world, and the huge variety of creativity that exists. Thanks for helping me dress up Death, Betsie!
Besides all the good people who helped me get my facts straight on the novel, I had loads of people who
supported the actual writing of it. I’ve been studying how to write most of my life, and my number one lesson for all writers is this: Readers who know how to critique you and inspire you at the same time are worth their weight in saffron (and let me tell you, saffron is expensive!).
I had three readers who, only because they are unbelievably generous, read the entire manuscript and gave me blow-by-blow reactions, responses, and ideas for improving: Chris Kreuter, Julia Rios, and Jessica Wick. My dear friends, how many embarrassing errors and faux pas did you rescue me from? How many sentences did you improve? How many characters did you refine? I owe you each a life debt. Expect regular installments of thank-yous.
I belong to a writers’ group full of literary luminaries: Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman; Liz Duffy Adams and Joel Derfner; and my own beloved Claire. Dear comrades with pens, not only did you read and critique Sal and Gabi, but you provided the camaraderie, hilarity, and friendship that helped to make the long slog of getting words on the page possible. How many days have we spent spread like jacks over Delia and Ellen’s living room floor, joking, critiquing, and raiding Ellen’s stash of sweets and cheeses? The answer is: not enough. More days like those are required!
Delia and Ellen went a step further and invited Claire and me to spend a month—a month, people—with them in Paris—in Paris, people—as a combination writing retreat, honeymoon, and general opportunity to improve one’s soul. Such wonders I saw! Such dinners! But best of all, mes amours, was having a month of flint-and-steel conversations with you about art, life, and the writing of books. It’s a priceless gift you gave me. Thank you.
Like Delia and Ellen, many people helped me to write by providing space and time. As an editor, Erin Underwood has been an absolute champion of my work, and as one of the principal organizers of Boskone, she’s put me on the program for three years running. Similarly, I’m endlessly grateful to the good folks at Readercon, and particularly my point person, Emily Wagner, for helping me grow as a writer by giving me a place at the table. Locally here in NYC, Jim Freund has generously had me several times on his radio show, Hour of the Wolf, and has featured me as a reader at the New York Review of Science Fiction reading series. Kenneth Schneyer invited me to join him and Edward Aubry, Annelisa Aubry-Walton, Anthony Cardno, Jeanne Kramer-Smyth, and Hope Erica on a writing retreat as valuable as it was companionable. To all of you, and to everyone else who has been so kind and encouraging to me as I applied fingers to keyboard, thank you.
Sal and Gabi Break the Universe (A Sal and Gabi Novel) Page 30