The Book of Lost Saints

by Daniel José Older

  Then one day Mami comes home crying, but she’s laughing too, says they’re going to let him go, he’ll be free by the morning, and we all jump up and down, but cautiously, because already the world is such that you never know who’s listening, taking notes, remembering, peeking in windows. Already we muffle our words over the phone and the new Cuban code is emerging, a mishmash of sign language, raised eyebrows, frowns, and double entendres. Already, we are perpetually afraid.

  And Mami’s in the kitchen cooking up the ration dinner later that night when Nilda screams because Agustín’s gray and black and white and standing against a wall on our TV and the voices are yelling ¡Paredón! ¡Paredón! which means they’re going to kill him and everyone comes running and we hear the count, the terrible count and then we all gasp and Mami’s screaming when the guns all go off. But when I open my eyes Tío Agustín is still standing there, looking harrowed and so alone, this tiny, destroyed man and all of Cuba can see the stain of pee or shit or whatever it is gathering along his pant leg. Not blood because he’s still standing, the bullets have torn into the wall all around him and he’s crying. Crying in front of our whole country, all the women he’s ever loved, his mami and papi, us. Everyone.

  They count again and Agustín flies backward as the cracking bursts from our TV; maybe it’s louder this time or maybe it just seems that way, because now Tío Agustín is dead. Except he’s not. He’s still moving, that smudge of gray all mottled and dark on the ground beneath the trickling blood. Someone walks up toward him and the screen goes blank, and then voices are speaking urgently, but I can’t understand them over the sounds of Mami wailing.

  Nilda shushes her, the neighbors will hear, someone will hear, the wailing is loud, so anguished, but there’s no stopping it. Even when Mami finally collapses in the bedroom, the wail doesn’t stop. I hear it in my head all through the rest of the night while we clean up the burnt dinner and then go to bed, and in the darkness I hear the wail, crisp and terrible in the empty night air and endless like the ocean.

  But this is Gómez on the screen now. Another sorrow entirely. I didn’t know him nearly as well, but I liked him better than Agustín, with his quiet certainty. He watched me, not in the creepy way. Watched me like an old oak tree watches the flowers growing around it, bemused and somehow protective. He knew he was putting me in danger, passing those guns on. He knew everyone he touched could be caught, tortured, killed. Revolution asks that its children put not only their own lives on the line, but the lives of all their friends and loved ones as well. It’s a wide, sweeping trap, an ever-yawning crevice in the earth.

  Gómez knew it, and from Isabel’s occasional dispatches about the man’s declining health as he slowly rotted away in the mountains, it tore him apart. Every day might bring news of another capture, another killing, another disaster. And then they won and the win was hollow and the whole circus swirled around one man, and it wasn’t the man Gómez had put all of his loved ones on the line to be ruled by.

  Just like Isabel, Gómez never came out of hiding when the tide turned. He waited up in the mountains, kept a steady suspicious eye at the comings and goings below. Isabel passed him information from her own city hideaway, taking occasional forays into the wilderness; watching, always watching, the two of them, like some heartbroken gargoyles commiserating over the tragic new world they’d midwifed into being.

  When the new revolution swelled to life in the Escambray, Gómez joined immediately, although from what Isabel said, he wasn’t too thrilled with them either. The CIA had gotten involved somehow, sending money and arms, and we hate those yanqui imperialistas as much as we hate these comemierdas in power, Isabel had told me once. We both spat off her balcony, and watched the droplets fall down down down into the streets below.

  And then the government hurled column after column of soldiers into the Escambray, and they caught Gómez and now he’s standing there, in front of the same wall so many others have stood and died before on my television. But he doesn’t look broken. Old and tired, yes, but still fierce and full of life, like he knows I’m watching, knows Isabel is somewhere watching, the whole country is watching, and we’re all fragile and windswept flowers around his great trunk, even the ones who hate him and are yelling Paredón, even the ones pointing their guns at him. He sweeps his gaze back and forth at his killers without a shiver and just before they shoot he yells Me cago en la madre de Fi—and then it’s all crackling rifle fire and he’s gone, a messy pile of nothing on the ground beneath the dripping wall. He knew how to make them get it over with quick.

  I stand there in the middle of the living room feeling so alive with fury and love and heartache, like all the molecules in my brain are sparkling with a different emotion and they’re clacking up against each other, catching fire, exploding. I want to scream, fall to my knees and scream or disappear into catatonia like Mami, curl up and erase myself from the world. But I don’t. I just stand there, watching. Voices blurting out all his crimes and offenses against the revolution, how he collaborated with the yanqui imperialistas and is a traitor, an enemy of Cuba, voices condemning, lying, whipping themselves into a patriotic frenzy as the man’s body is carried away and the cleaners come in to deal with the splatter.

  I don’t hear it.

  I don’t feel it.

  I just know everything’s different now.

  No. Everything has been different for a long time. Now it’s me who’s different. The fury is a burning cloud inside my chest. If I push it down it’ll scald me slowly over years and decades, metastasize into cruel, gangrenous growths.

  If I let it out, I will kill someone. The next person I see. Soldier or saint, I will tear them to pieces. It doesn’t matter that I’m adolescent and barely over a hundred pounds. Or that I’ve never laid hands on someone in my life except Nilda that one time. None of it matters. All that matters is that revolution has tumbled down the mountains and into the city, it has filled our hearts and minds, taken root and grown inside of us and when it overflowed it still wasn’t enough. We’re still yearning for something more, hungry, starved for a feeling beyond all this carefulness—watching our friends and neighbors, family and loved ones shattered across our TV screens. Now it’s inside me too, alive and awake and I will cultivate it gently. I will not suppress it or let it burn out in an unruly torrent. I will grow it, nurture it, learn its secret languages of wires and codes, bombs and pistolas. It is rooted in the emptiness in Isabel’s eyes and Gómez’s guts scattered on the wall and the lines in Papi’s face and my mami’s impossible silences. Rooted in every time I catch myself before I say the wrong thing or mourn someone I love who has become an enemy of the state.

  I will fight.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Ramón rises enraged. I am deep inside him today, perhaps too deep. He pulls a chair up to the desk and writes the dream in sloppy letters that spill across the page, stops only to shake out his cramping fingers and then finishes in a frenzy. Another shard of me gone, another step closer to finding out what became of me.

  When he’s done he looks up. The computer’s still on from last night—the screen saver a spiraling rainbow helix—and Ramón growls at it. They’re watching him. He knows it. His mind wraps around the certainty that every keystroke he makes will be reproduced and stashed away on some server, where that ridiculous little one-named man will browse over it, weighing out Ramón’s allegiances.

  With a flick of his wrist, he wakes up the computer and clicks over to an empty email. I KNOW YOURE WATCHING, he almost types but doesn’t. IM COMING FOR YOU FUCKERS. He doesn’t type that either but it’s emblazoned across his forehead. Alas, it’s also not true and he knows it. He’s not coming for anybody, least of all the mighty Gutierrez family.

  No. He’s going to work. That’s it. Full of a ripening, fiery rage that he can only half understand the source of, a rage he doesn’t know what to do with, he puts on his uniform, grunts a good day at Adina and Corinna snuggling on the couch, and is out the door an
d into the cold New Jersey streets, puffing misty breaths at the sky.

  And it’s an unbelievably slow day. No one to restrain or tussle with. No righteous fuckup to direct his burgeoning anger at. Nothing. It’s probably for the best. Ramón is a gentle giant, self-aware enough to be cautious with his mighty limbs, even when provoked by the direst of insults or in breathless confrontations with PCP-addled fury-mongers. But today, I’m not sure how he would use all that unchanneled rage, some of which is born from my memories.

  At six, a clutch of young white people enters, the anxious entourage of one of their overdosed brethren. They mill about, bobbing their long pale necks and gazing around with careful nonchalance, exchanging hugs that last too long and medically dubious assessments of their friend’s condition culled from hastily browsed websites. But Ramón is exhausted from holding back all day, from trying to name his own sudden emotions and trace their source, and he only halfheartedly waves them off while Derringer looks on, disappointed.

  “You not feeling it, Ramón? Normally you’d relish scattering the hipsters.”

  “I guess not.”

  “Alrighty, then.”

  “Mhm.”

  They stand together for a few minutes, letting the ebb and flow of concerned family members and crackheads swirl around them.

  “The big Mexican girl from yesterday?” Derringer says.

  “Catalina.”

  “That one. They admitted her to psych for an extended stay. Dr. Seymour kinda went in on the paperwork, like he really took it personally or something.”

  “Motherfucker.”

  “Right? If you take something a teenage psych patient does personally, you got bigger problems than a broken nose.”

  “I’m sayin’.”

  “And that guy’s an ass. I woulda broke his nose too.”

  “Mhm.”

  Derringer lights a cigarette and Ramón cringes, his thoughts aswirl. The girl was wrong to lash out, of course, but somehow the thought of her wasting away in the dingy psych ward for who knew how long sat like a poisonous rock in his stomach. The whole terrible system seemed like a setup sometimes: You crack slightly in the face of a world not built for you, and they load you up with medications till you can’t feel anything, then they act surprised when your body and mind rebel and the rebellion is an explosion outward instead of another suicide attempt. And then you’re done: locked away, disappeared, force-fed more meds and trapped in a smiley-faced spiral of How Are You Feeling Today and Let’s Talk About What Happened That Day, and it never fucking ends. It just never fucking ends. The setup didn’t have a single thing to do with healing or getting better or confronting the shit that really made life intolerable. It just shut the whole thing down and hoped the tentacles didn’t slither from under the carpet. Again and again and again.

  “Motherfuck,” Ramón grunts, and heads back inside, where Aliceana is waiting. Her eyebrows tilt upward toward each other and her lips are pursed tightly together like she’s keeping a deluge in. For a few seconds, they just stare at each other. I think Aliceana might have some speech planned, something courageous and loving that could turn Ramón’s whole mood around. Instead, she says in a voice that is almost a whisper: “You’re playing tonight?”

  “I play every Thursday.” Maybe the coolness in his voice snaps him out of it a little, because Ramón then forces a smile and mumbles: “How you been?”

  “Fine.”

  “Cool. You coming tonight?” Struggling not to make it sound too hopeful.

  “Maybe. I dunno.”

  “Okay. Listen, um, I don’t know if you sent me an email or were going to, but um, this is a bad time, in my email right now.”

  “What?”

  “I mean, what I mean is, if you have anything to say to me, email is not the best way to do it. That’s all.”

  “Oh. Understood.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Alright, I’ll see you later, then.”

  “Okay.”

  She disappears into the ER and Ramón growls, pressing his palm into his forehead.

  * * *

  “Ramón!” Luis’s voice is excited over the phone.

  “Why did you text me to call you from the pay phone?”

  “Because you never know who’s listening, man. C’mon. They have a guy reading your email, you think that’s it? Anyway, we have a plan.”

  Ramón rolls his eyes and shifts his weight against the cold. “Oh?”

  “It’s gonna be great. Gonna lure the mothafuckas out and crush them like the Russians did to the Nazis in World War II.”

  “Didn’t they end up burning half the countryside and having their own people massacred in that particular situation?”

  “That’s not the point. It’s a metaphor, man, don’t be so literal.”

  “What’s the plan?”

  “I can’t tell you on the phone.”

  “But…”

  “Listen, you’re playing tonight, right? Come in early, we’ll talk.”

  “I got dinner with my folks but I’ll come by after that.”

  “Great, thanks, chico; te veo pronto.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  It’s just starting to rain when Ramón hears the sirens approaching. It’s not the usual long wail or occasional yelp that the ambulances use when they pull in; this one’s a frantic splattering of sound, machine gun shrieks speckled with sudden resonant blasts. A minute later, Ramón sees why: It’s a police cruiser, not an ambulance, and it’s zooming the wrong way down a one-way street toward where he stands in the ER bay. It screeches around the small roundabout in front of the hospital, nearly clips an absentminded gynecologist who was listening to music on his cigarette break, and barely pulls to a halt before the doors open and two cops jump out.

  “ER!” one of them yells at Ramón. “Where’s the fucking … ER?” The guy’s crying, Ramón realizes as he slides his security card over the laser monitor. The air smells strange, crisp somehow. Another cop comes out of the back and he’s carrying something tiny in a blanket. I catch a glimpse of pale, charred skin, see a little plume of smoke creep out from the folds, and it’s all I need to see.

  “Let me through!” the cop carrying the kid bellows as he rushes past. Then he’s gone and only the awful smell of burnt flesh is there, insinuating itself into Ramón’s nostrils as he realizes what’s going on.

  Nurses flood into the ER, grabbing supplies, ushering confused family members out of their way. Ramón passes the cop walking away from the trauma room, his eyes watery and bloodshot. Derringer’s voice blurts out over the loudspeakers: “All guests please leave the ER immediately, we have a notification.”

  Ramón clears a small crowd of drunks and enters the trauma room just as Nurse Dolores screams: “Where’s Dr. Nessinger? Did you call a code?”

  “He’s off today,” someone yells from the other side of the room. “And Dr. Barakian is on holiday.”

  “Get the clothes off.”

  “I need an IV, people.”

  “Someone call for cooling fluids.”

  “What about Dr. Seymour?”

  “He’s upstairs, but—”

  “Page him! You page him?”

  “He’s—”

  “What’s going on?” Aliceana appears in the doorway. She sizes up the situation and makes a dash for the bed. The kid is tiny, just what’s left of his skin and bones. I already know there’s nothing to be done. There’s no spirit there, no life. Nothing to save. I think Aliceana knows too, the way she looks down at him, but something else is spelled out across her face too: There are things you know and there are protocols and paperwork and lawsuits and anyway, they have to try. It’s already in motion.

  “Everybody listen to me,” Aliceana says. She says it quietly but it works: People slow their frenzy and turn around. “I’m the only resident here right now and we’re going to do this right. Page who you have to page, get respiratory ready, fine, but first we need this patient on the monitor and we need to start CPR
.”

  Rosalie, a middle-aged Filipina nurse who is notorious for kicking drunks to the curb, puts her hand on the kid’s chest and gingerly pumps up and down. Dolores throws some EKG stickers on those charred little limbs and Aliceana puts an oxygen mask against the child’s face and starts squeezing air into him.

  “Don’t those damn cops know we’re not a burn center?” Dolores grumbles. “Don’t they—”

  “It doesn’t matter right now,” Aliceana says.

  “But we’re not even equipped to—” The anxious braying of the red notification phone cuts her off and for a second everything stops.

  “Someone gonna get that?” Aliceana asks. “My hands are full.”

  An orderly named John with crisply trimmed sideburns and horrendous acne picks it up, nods solemnly, and then turns to the room. “There’s three more coming in.” Groans and gasps. “Two other kids and the grandma.”

  Ramón looks at Aliceana as the rumblings of shock and dissent rise up from the nursing staff. There’s a flash of something in her eyes—fear maybe? But it quickly subsides back to neutral. Then she says, “Get out front, I need you to keep the path clear so there’s no trip up. They’ll be coming in fast.”

  Outside, the cop is smoking a cigarette and trying not to cry.

  Ramón stands beside him for a few seconds, letting the swirl of sadness and fear rise away from him like steam. “What happened?”

  The cop sniffles, wipes his nose. “Fucking electrical fire in a tenement.” He’s still lit up with all the adrenaline, doesn’t even know what to do with his body. “Ol’ lady was home watching the kids, I guess, and it was naptime, so they were all caught unawares. The fire guys pulled that one out and there’s more on the way with EMS. When we got there there was no buses though, and this kid … he’s bad, man. So we just, we ran with him. You can’t stay, you know? You can’t stay. There were so many people. But EMS was coming when we pulled off, so … you know. There’s more on the way.”

  Suddenly it sounds like air raid sirens are going off as urgent wailings sing out from the city around them. They get louder and louder and the cop shifts back and forth on his feet and the rain keeps drizzling onto the sleek streets and steam rises from a manhole and it looks like the steam rising off that tiny charred body. The sirens get louder and then two, three, four ambulances zoom around the corner and into the bay. They pull to shaky, uneven halts and doors are flung open, stretchers pulled out, and then the grim parade marches past: first the grandma, arms flailing while the medics try to keep her oxygen mask on and not get scratched, then the two kids, both older—one unconscious, maybe dead, with a tube coming out of her mouth and black char marks on her cheeks. The other is wailing, skin bright pink and peeling, trembling voice lifting up above the hospital.