The Book of Lost Saints

by Daniel José Older

  They told me about Isabel’s jump and I ran. Even though I knew already, I still hoped, that somehow somehow somehow, but no. It’s a bad time to be running through the streets while your insides turn to dust. Always, yes, but especially now that they’re firing the last shots, finishing off the wounded that the tide washed up on the beach at Girón. It’s a bad time to be a thinker or a talker or a human being with a beating heart, a bad time to be relentless. And I am: relentlessly alive, relentlessly feeling. My heart is relentlessly broken and my sadness won’t stop being the sky that won’t stop pushing me down into the sharp gravel.

  This is when I’m supposed to scream, but I can’t. This is the most alone, the most free I’ve felt since before everything went to hell, or maybe ever, but still I can’t let out the rage. Because what if what if what if a hundred thousand what-ifs, a million unforeseen consequences of a billion tiny actions, a gesture, a scoff, the unintended eye-roll causes offense, raises suspicion, and suddenly your family is under siege and they’re waiting outside your door and breathing on the other end of the telephone and smirking at your most sacred memories and then one of us falls and then another, because even to mourn a loved one is an act of rebellion, so whole families get enveloped, suffocate, and die. And so it begins.

  When the part where I can’t breathe or move or see passes, I stand up. I’m wearing one of my pretty dresses, yellow with white lines, and I wish it were pants. My stockings are torn and filthy, my hands cut. I walk, stumbly and chaotic at first, like a newborn deer, but gradually I straighten up and move with purpose. I have no reason to return home. At this rate, I’ll only bring further misery on my family. I head for Padre Sebastián’s.

  * * *

  Ramón is also alone, if you don’t count me. He’s cutting through the streets toward the club, half dazed and somewhere between wrathful and in love; a touch of both. He’s full of things to say and keeps having to pull his mind back. It’s racing ahead minutes and then weeks and months, guessing and imagining, debating. And then his phone blurts out that drumbeat again, and Nilda’s name appears on the screen. We both cringe at the same time.

  Ramón blinks at the phone, weighing a million different tensions, finally answers it.

  “Ay, m’ijo,” comes his mother’s shaking voice.

  Ramón, a clenched fist, seems to loosen slightly. The power of a mother is tremendous. His voice is ice, though: “Yes?”

  “It is impossible to explain,” Nilda moans.

  Ramón stops walking. “You keep saying that, Mami, but all I’ve ever wanted was for you to try. Instead you don’t want to talk about it, you tell me not to bother with it, you change the subject. All I’ve wanted was for you to explain.”

  “¡Pero no se puede!” she yells, and somehow, through the coldness of technology and the frigid night, her rage and anguish reach me. It can’t be done. She’s right. In a way, that yell summarizes my whole predicament. Even with these living memories that inhabit his dreams, he can’t understand what it was like. Not really.

  Ramón tightens his face against both the winter night and his mother’s rebuke. Shakes his head. “But you never tried,” he says, and snaps his phone shut.

  The silence descends; the clack of that phone closing seems to echo through it. He’s never hung up on her before, barely ever chastised her. He shakes away the image of what she must be doing now—bawling, most likely—walks into the club with a curt nod at Cadiz, and finds himself enveloped in a world of sound. Luis—now that I know a little more about my life, I make a mental note to figure out where I knew Luis from; that face is so familiar. Prison, perhaps?—Luis has brought in an acoustic soul group and they’re filling every corner of the place with their luscious melodies and shimmering arpeggios. It’s hard to think straight, the music is so beautiful, and then the woman starts singing—she’s tall with straight black hair and a million tattoos across her bare shoulders and when she opens her mouth the room stops spinning for a minute. Everyone looks up to see where this wondrous noise is coming from. Her voice is deep and raspy, it aches with stories about what might have been. She sings the first little riff, throws back a shot, and smirks into the microphone before letting loose another phrase. People finally look away, return to their dancing, but there’s a new sensuality to everything, we’re all moving in slow motion and people are dancing closer and closer together; the music won’t let their sexual tension stand unacknowledged.

  Aliceana is dancing alone though, swaying through a series of simple, graceful steps in a world of her own. She opens a wide smile when she sees Ramón cutting toward her through the crowd. When he reaches her, their hug is a song unto itself. They hold each other, wrapped in music, and gradually begin rocking back and forth and then dancing in tiny, rhythmic pulses against each other.

  “Are you okay?” she whispers, pulling his ear down close to her lips.

  He looks at her with wide eyes. Nods.

  “Do you want to go somewhere and talk?”

  They kiss then, a kiss that’s born from everything happening around them and the vocalist’s raspy truth and the oncoming adventure. It’s deep—there’s a lot of tongue involved and then it’s interrupted by a feeble tap on Ramón’s shoulder.

  “¡Ay, compadre, geta rúm, como dice la gente!” It’s Tío Pepe of all people, grinning up at Ramón like a proud father.

  Teresa’s behind him, shaking her head and mouthing I’m sorry at Aliceana. “He insisted on coming to find you guys after everything got stupid at dinner. Said it was high time he go out dancing anyway.”

  “May I have this dance?” Pepe pronounces each word with exquisite care and bungles them all anyway.

  Aliceana laughingly obliges.

  At first I don’t notice that something bad is coming. How to describe it? A ripple. There are other spirits here—always, of course, especially with such heartbreaking music playing—but I don’t mingle or pay much mind to them normally. Now, though, the air is frenzied with shaken shrouds dashing every which way. Whispers, gusts of frantic wind, rumors, and shadows. Someone’s coming. Several someones. An attack.

  I leave the lovers, swoop out into the night air. Enrique, of course. He could never let such an insult stand, but there’s so much happening at one time, and I never thought they’d come so quickly. What form of his illness has the old rebel chosen to inflict on us all now? Which trauma will he manifest outward this time? I flicker quickly through the crowd, don’t bother dashing in and out of the pulsing bodies, don’t focus my energy with any caution whatsoever. I’m inundated by an onslaught of tangled insecurities and passions, calm precautions, throbbing desires. Sex. This band really has cast a spell on the room, denim grinds hard against swishing skirts like we’re all back in school and have nowhere else to go but here, deeper, harder against the fabric, fingertips tracing whispers of what could be along tingling spines, sweat-stuck shirts clinging to chests, pushed to the side, barely there at all, bodies offered up to this haunting, pulsing melody, this woman’s rasp an altar.

  I let it flush through me, keep moving.

  Luis knows. He has his own saints and a soldier’s intuition to boot, so he stands stock-still in a side room while his men rush back and forth, preparing for whatever onslaught approaches. He’s blinking, like if he adjusts his eyes just so, he’ll see it—I almost expect him to sniff the air, but instead he shakes his mane of long, gray-black hair and scowls. “Arturo and Blanco, the back. Cali and Monte on either side. Jorge conmigo.” The men nod as he calls their names.

  “What about Cadiz?” someone asks.

  “He’s in front?”

  “Ay.”

  “Leave him there. The man is a wall. If nothing else it’ll force the fuckery to one side or the other.”

  “Want one of us to warn him something’s—”

  “He’ll know,” Luis says. “And even if he doesn’t, he’ll know what to do when it does.”

  He must’ve been in the ejercito at some point, this Luis. This is, a
fter all, just a local turf war over a nightclub, but he’s running things like they’re about to retake the Moncada. “Now go.” He says it quietly, almost to himself, but the men immediately hustle off to their respective positions.

  * * *

  Back on the dance floor, the music has shifted. Static guitar comes thrashing down in great ferocious waves and the drummer sounds like he’s grown an extra set of arms. Beneath it all the bass rumbles an urgent pulse. People throw themselves against each other, throb and churn, a damn ocean of pent-up everything releasing in peals as the music extends itself around us, through us.

  I don’t want to find Ramón. If I get anywhere near him he may pick up my own anxiousness. Then he’ll try to help, end up outside, and get caught up in the mess. And surely they’re coming, in part, for him. No. The boy’s safer here, fully immersed in this writhing sweaty mess. Holding Aliceana close, no doubt, smiling from the inside out. I skirt around the edge of the crowd, pass an old man at the bar and a wallflower in a dapper suit gazing longingly into the muck. Near the door a college girl had one too many apple martinis and her friends are escorting her out. All the grace and wonder they worked so hard for at the beginning of the night is gone and they’re just wobbly flamingos, little girls unsteady in Mommy’s too-big shoes and the dark patches of someone else’s vomit decorating their skirts.

  Luis was right: Cadiz is not only a wall, he’s a wall that knows. His whole body is tensed, eyes narrowed. Some yuppie he wouldn’t let in is whining from behind the velvet rope, but the words just slide off Cadiz’s broad shoulders. “Quiet,” the bouncer says with just enough umph to insinuate grievous bodily harm. The yuppie shuts up.

  There are three of them and they walk around the corner talking and laughing like any group of friends out for a night on the town. But Cadiz and I know better. It’s nothing you could put words to; an edge to their laughter that lets you know it’s forced; an over-assuredness to their stride; one pair of eyes scanning the street a little more than necessary. They cut through the line of party girls and dapper young dudes and get up in Cadiz’s face. They’re wearing too much cologne and their white shirts are unbuttoned just enough to let some chest hair peek out. The guy in the middle is almost as tall as Cadiz and there’s a precision to his movements that speaks of one who aced basic training.

  “How much the cover tonight, pato?”

  Duck. A silly slang for homosexuals. Certainly not used to make friends at this moment.

  Cadiz doesn’t take the bait. “We’re full.”

  “Oh?”

  “Mhm.” Then, without breaking eye contact, the bouncer signals the yuppie who’d been simpering in line that he can go in. I’m impressed—a very advanced level of vete al carajo being expressed and so few words spoken. The guy in the middle was looking for a fight but he wasn’t expecting to get spanked before it even began.

  “So you’re not full?”

  “Now we are.”

  “Motherfucker, I’m not here to play games.”

  “Oh?”

  “You let us in.”

  “Are we going to have a problem?”

  “If you don’t let us in we are.”

  “Okay.”

  Then nothing happens, the two just stare at each other, which again was probably not part of the grand fuck-with-the-bouncer plan.

  “Yo, fuck this bullshit. You don’t let us in, we go in regardless.”

  As the three start looking like they’re gonna pounce, Cadiz taps his ear once and mutters: “Front.”

  “Oh, you need backup, pato? Need your boyfriends to come help your ass?”

  That’s when I notice one of the other guys is texting. He clicks the phone shut and disappears it before I can see what was said, but it doesn’t matter. Somewhere, some other piece is falling into place. Two huge bodies smash against each other and I hear Cadiz grunt as some blows land against his massive shoulders. The other security guys’ll be heading this way, leaving their positions unguarded. Cadiz breaks the other guy’s grasp and with a single, effortless shove sends him flying backward against a car. The alarm wails out into the night. People start backing away from the club. Another one of Enrique’s men snaps open his billy club and swats at Cadiz. That’s when two of the security guys come skidding around the corner from the alleyway. I pitch myself toward them, but what am I going to do?

  And then it doesn’t matter, because smoke is already billowing in thick angry splotches out of the windows of the club.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Even amidst the screams and stamping feet, I can still hear the memory of the bottle smashing a few seconds ago, the sudden reek of kerosene, and then the thrill of the flame bursting out. One second sweet sweet music filled the room. A shattering, a flicked lighter tossed, a roar: Everything changed. Then, from across the club: The same thing again. Smoke billowed out of either side, cascading thick, and then dispersed across over the crowd, exploring every crevice, devastating delicate lungs and tracheas.

  Those first few seconds are all still present. They’re echoing wildly when I enter, a ricocheting cackle through the panicked nightclub. But now, smoke is the air; the world is gray and the terror is complete, just a few moments later. People hurl themselves at the exits, frightening bodies in unchecked, violent motion. Girls in high heels collapse and disappear beneath the fury of escape. Their friends stop to help them and get sucked in too; the crowd is insatiable in its hunger for life. It doesn’t care about sons or daughters, sisters or brothers: It consumes, destroys, carries on in its explosion toward safety, survival its only prayer.

  It doesn’t take long for the flames to catch the velvet curtains draped on either side of the stage. They’re ancient, a holdover from the days when this place was a movie theater, all tassels and fanciness, but now flames dance and devour their creases, burst upward in impossible lashes, unabated, unchecked, sinister. It would be so beautiful if not for the guarantee of death and wave after wave of panic sweeping through me, this room, everyone in it.

  I have to find Ramón. There are so many people and they’re moving so fast; it seems impossible. If he dies … I slow myself. Remind myself that I’m already dead. I suppress the living human instinct to rush in time with the panicked masses. I am still. Smoke pours through me, fire is born and reborn on the walls around me. I am still. Beneath me, bones break and a hundred heart rates accelerate. Lungs struggle to inflate against air thick with carbon monoxide and flame. I am still. I will locate my nephew amidst this mess. Feel his beating heart echo through me. I am still.

  Ramón is in the middle.

  He’s cowering, leaning over. He’s holding someone. Someone limp.

  Tío Pepe. Of course.

  I’m no longer still; I’m a lightning bolt. I’m with them, around them, a shield, but not shield enough. Bodies charged with terror still burst and clutter around us. I whip myself in a furious arc in front of Ramón, sweeping some of the black smoke out of his way. The red exit sign shines through to him and he turns to Aliceana, who’s huddled with Teresa, who’s wailing and reaching out to Tío Pepe. Aliceana nods.

  Ramón pushes through the crowd, dragging Pepe along and Aliceana guides Teresa along in his wake. Someone comes barreling out of the darkness and smashes headfirst into Pepe, who grunts and crumples toward the floor. Ramón pulls his uncle up and then lifts him over his shoulder firefighter style. He only takes another step or two before a column of terrified clubbers shoves into him in a fierce blitz toward the exit sign. Ramón nearly topples but holds steady and then pushes forward, through the crowd. Aliceana has one arm on his back and the other wrapped around Teresa. I’m in front, whipping back and forth breathlessly, slicing smoke out of the way, guiding, holding steady. And then the air is fresh and we’re outside in the chilly New Jersey night and Pepe is a barely breathing smudge in Ramón’s big arms, face pallid white and eyes unfocused, lost. There are sirens, bright red lights pulsing against us, throngs of crying people and endless endless reams of smoke ri
sing into the midnight sky.

  * * *

  There’s not much for me to do here. In the cramped back of this ambulance, the paramedics fuss with IVs, monitors, and bandages. The city flies by out the window; the wailing siren blurts out over the ambient city sounds. Ramón sits on the bench, one hand on his uncle’s knee. He tries to stay out of the way as the medics do their thing. The older guy, a tall Haitian with a furrowed brow, grimaces from the captain’s chair. “He’s crashing,” he mutters.

  His partner just nods and starts to move faster, squeezing a sharp plastic tubing attachment into a liter bag of saline. The beeping heart monitor increases to a furious rush and then starts to slow.

  Tío Pepe is not holding on. I don’t know why. He’s hovering just above himself, a murky, confused form in the bright lights, wavering slightly, eyes closed. I can’t save him, can’t do anything when he insists on staying outside himself. Perhaps it is his time, as they say. Either way, I have business to attend to.

  I flit out into the empty sky above the highway, release myself into a state of almost nothingness, and then surge into the night.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Enrique stands perfectly still on a hill surrounded by trees. He holds a rifle in one hand, a half-eaten pear in the other, and has ammo belts slung around his shoulder. The sun is behind him, but I can see he’s smiling as he chews. His face has finally caught up with that big mouth of his. It’s a cruel, playful smile, an exceptional one; it carries secrets. A smile that knows.

  And me? I’m disgusting—a rodent of a girl, covered in the filth of two months with no real bed or place to wash up, exhausted and defeated, grimy and in mourning, still dizzy from the loss of Isabel and full of rage at the pigs that took her from me.