The Assimilated Cuban's Guide to Quantum Santeria (2 page)

My last observation is one also involving the title. What better guide could an assimilated Cuban have than another assimilated Cuban. Hernandez’s family is Cuban, and we get to see the world from a Latino perspective in these stories. The pieces where this is most obvious are some of my favorites in the book. Although I’m accessing these through the filter of a different culture, there is some magic there that
allows me to find myself in them most readily. There is great humor and pathos in these stories. The descriptions of those things I’m unfamiliar with are succinct and illuminating, and I’m never confused as to what’s going on. Perhaps the best of all is the final story of the book that carries the collection’s title. Santeria, which is mentioned in the title and has an important part in the story, is the religion of African slaves brought to Cuba; a mix of Yoruban beliefs and practices blended with some Catholicism and native Caribbean faith. Because these slaves were not permitted to practice their religion outright, they had to veil their saints and holy figures behind those the Catholic Church approved of. In other words, they assimilated themselves and their religion into the new world. This assimilation was not a forsaking of their culture or religion but a way for it to survive and thrive against the horrors and iniquities of slavery. Hernandez’s
Guide
is about how to survive contemporary culture with its incredible scientific advancements and mishaps, its sometimes tenuous relationships, its lack of certainty, its treacherous racial and cultural divides, and through all of it to be able to encompass your past and manage to hold on to who you really are.

An ingenious title for a wonderful collection. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Sometimes when a body dies in Everest’s Death Zone, it doesn’t come down. Too difficult, too much risk for the living. Thing is, it’s so cold up there, bodies don’t rot. They get buried by snow periodically, but the terrific winds of the South Col reliably reveal them: blue, petrified, horned by icicles, still in their climbing gear, always forever ascending. They scandalize the Westerners who paid good money to climb Everest and who don’t especially want to be reminded of how deadly the journey can be. But then their Sherpas usher them past the garden of corpses and, weather permitting, to the top of the world.

I am a Westerner, and I paid good money to climb Everest. But the summit wasn’t my goal. I was going to get my son Lazaro off of that mountain, dead or alive.

Lazaro’s mother, Dolores Thomaston, taught twelfth-grade biology at the same school where I taught AP World History: Bush High, right on the Texas-Mexico border. Lazaro was born of a dalliance between us almost three decades ago.

Dolores had an Australian ebullience and a black sense of humor and a seeming immunity to neurosis that made her irresistible to me. She could have been 25 or 55, and I never found out which. She’d made
a splash in the scientific world a few years before coming to Bush with a paper she co-authored on a deep-sea jellyfish that, interestingly, was immortal. After it reproduced, it returned to a pre-sexual polyp state through a process called cell transdifferentiation, and then become an adult again, and then a polyp, and so on. The layman’s version is this: age meant nothing to that jelly. It only died if something killed it.

Dolores and I spent the summer together. I really believed we were on our way to getting married. That’s why I wasn’t worried when she started talking children. In fact, I was surprised to discover how much the idea of children tickled me. I had no idea how much I wanted to be a father until she put the prospect before me. I’d spent all of my adult life contemplating history, and now, suddenly, I was awash with dreams of the future.

She asked me what I would name the child, so I told her: “Brumhilda.”

“Be serious,” she said.

“I am!”

“Yeah? So what if it’s a boy?”

I kissed her, the first of many that night. And then I said, “Lazaro.”

Dolores didn’t just leave me. She vanished right after we consummated our relationship. She left a note on her pillow that I promptly set fire to in a skillet before reading, then spent the next two decades wishing I hadn’t.

I didn’t know she had died during childbirth, that she had opted for an ocean water-birth. Ocean-birthing. Of all the crazy trends. She never left the water.

I found all of this out from a young man named Lazaro Thomaston when he came to meet me. He was 21, already a man. By then I’d missed my chance to be his father.

An hour since I’d learned I’d been a father for 21 years, Lazaro sat on the couch with me, showing me his portfolio. He worked as an underwater photographer and videographer. “It’s second nature to me, being in the water,” he said. “Really it’s the ocean that raised me.”

“Looks like the ocean did a pretty good job,” I said.

He specialized in ultra-deep dives, descents into the bathyal region, which is the topmost stratum of the ocean’s aphotic zone: lightless, crushing, utterly hostile. There he had recorded a score of species new to science; he’d made his reputation before he could take a legal drink. His images were haunting and minimalist, the engulfing darkness defied only by the weak bioluminescence of the sea life and, of course, him. Off-camera, he shined like a sun, illumining the depths like the first day of creation.

“These are incredible,” I said. “You must he half fish.”

“Got that from Mom,” he said. And turned the page.

Rather than take a leave of absence from work to climb Everest, I retired early. Lost some money that way, but I had more than enough money to get to the summit, get back, and bury my son. After that, the future would take care of itself. Or go fuck itself. Either way.

I was old to climb the world’s tallest mountain, but not as old as some. The ascent from the Southeast ridge is by mountaineering standards fairly straightforward, especially with today’s technology. If you died it was because you were reckless, or bad weather surprised you, or your body gave out and you probably should never have attempted it in the first place.

I was in reasonably good shape, but I needed work—strength-training, flexibility, cardio cardio cardio. And yoga: 60 years old, and I’d never learned to breathe. Guess it was time.

I learned to slow my heart. I learned efficiency, repose, elegance of movement. I learned to require less of everything: food, water, air, joy, meaning. I learned to sit.

I bought more gear than I could possibly use in ten ascents, watched every mountaineering video I could find, moved for a season to Colorado where I took a course on mountain climbing specifically geared toward seniors.

I finished top of the class. My instructor said he’d never seen anyone of any age so motivated. But he also said mountain climbing’s supposed to be fun. Why so grim? Why was I going to climb Everest if not to have one of the greatest experiences of my life?

I told him my son was lost on Everest and that I was going to find him, but of course it’d been months and I hadn’t heard any good news, so he was dead. But I’d be damned if I was going to let my son’s body pose for eternity like a movie prop in Everest’s death zone so that overprivileged jetsetters could get an extra thrill off of him. I was climbing to claim my son’s body—if I could find him, if I could pickaxe his remains free from the mountainside—and bring him home.

But yeah, asshole, I’ll try to have a grand old time all the way up.

Lazaro and I had five good years together, during which time he told me almost nothing about his life prior to our reconnecting. I didn’t take it personally. He wanted to sever himself from his childhood the way a lizard drops its tail to escape a predator. Whatever his past was, Lazaro wanted nothing to do with it.

I didn’t pry. I figured he would tell me when he was ready.

But he never became ready. Instead, he anchored his life to the present, to me. And that happened to be more or less exactly what I wanted. I couldn’t go back and be the father he’d never had growing up, but as consolation prizes go, this was the next best thing.

I’m a historian. I should have known better. Histories never stay severed. Like the tail of a lizard, they grow back.

There was exactly one guide who would attempt something as
stupid as trying to descend Everest with a dead body in tow. He had a Nepalese name but a British accent. To dumb-ass tourists like me he went by Roger.

His main suggestion was that we needed as many Sherpas as I could afford to help search for Lazaro. I could sell all of my extra mountaineering equipment at Base Camp to the rich and underprepared. There’s where I’d get top dollar.

“I was hoping it’d just be you and me,” I told him. “I don’t really want a lot of people around.”

He sighed. “Imagine a needle in a haystack,” he said. “Now douse the haystack with water, and stick it in an industrial freezer until it’s a solid hump of ice. Now remove all the oxygen from the freezer. Now put fifty kilos of equipment on your back. Now go get that needle.”

Point taken. But what would I tell all those Sherpas? How could I instruct them what to look for without them thinking I was crazy?

But truly, what frightened me more was the prospect that they’d actually believe me. The Sherpa brand of Buddhism is animist enough that, when I told them what they were looking for, they might accept it as true. Accept it, and then get the fuck off Everest.

I was leaving for Lukla in four days. My equipment had already left. It was too soon for adrenaline but too late to think of anything else. I sat in my living room and didn’t read and didn’t watch TV and didn’t turn on the lights. My own little bathyal region.

Doorbell. I had ordered a pizza. I opened the door and it was Dolores.

She was 25 now, if that; there was nothing 55 about her. She was dressed for a Texas May: naked as the law allowed. Her body was muscled and sleek, like a gazelle’s. Her hair was a corona. And that smile. That tilt of the head.

“Oh my,” she said. “It’s so good to see you, Enrique.”

She was so composed. She was waiting for me to digest what I was seeing. But there was mischief there too, that evil sense of humor, even at a time like this. It really was her.

When I didn’t speak, she said, “I told you I’d be back one day. So here I am, love. I’m back.”

I didn’t respond, and she watched me for a long time not responding. Her face drained of mirth. “In the note?” she said like a question. “You got my note, right?”

“I burned it on the stove,” I said.

“Ah.” Then she laughed. “Now was that any way to treat me, after what we shared? You wouldn’t even read my explanation?”

“Treat you? You left me, Dolores.”

“And I explained why in the note, love. It was quite necessary. That’s why I left it—so you would understand.”

“You’re the one who needs to understand. Seeing that Dear John on the pillow, it … it ruined me, Dolores. Until Lazaro came into my life I was in ruins.”

She came close, then hooked her arms around my neck, and I
let her. Hers was not the body my body remembered. It fit foreignly against me.

“Have you been working out, love?” she asked, lips puckered puckishly.

“Apparently not as much as you,” I said. And then: “Lazaro. I assume you know?”

“That’s why I’m here, love. To help you. To save him.”

Oh. Oh no. I suddenly felt tired and old. Whatever my own feelings about seeing her again were, I couldn’t let her think her son was still alive, not after he’d been missing for months at the top of Everest. “Dolores, I’m not going to try to rescue Lazaro. I’m going to claim his body. Lazaro is dead.”

“No, love.”

“Dolores, listen—”

“He’s not,” she interrupted. But her expression was not that of a mother in denial; she looked at me pityingly, her mouth sagging with remorse. “There’s so much I need to tell you.”

She always could be a little condescending. And that helped me remember my anger. I broke our embrace. “What the hell makes you think I want to talk to you? You left me, Dolores. I thought we were going to get married. You left without a trace.”

I could see she was about to remind me again that I had burned her note. But instead she metronomed her head to the other shoulder, smiling ruefully. “Do you hate me?”

“I think I do.”

“I can tell you don’t.”

I sighed. “Maybe not yet. I’m still in shock. But I almost certainly will hate you. So let’s talk before the hatred sets in and I refuse to ever speak to you again.”

She came close again and hugged me to her and stood on her toes, allowing our breath to mix between our noses like a storm front. “Later, love,” she said. “First, let’s make up a little.”

Lazaro’s most recent film, “The Aphotic Ghost,” was nominated for an Oscar in short documentary a year ago. It chronicled a new species of jellyfish over 150 cm in diameter, a superpredator by bathepelagaic standards. As it fluttered about the lightless ocean depths, its body took on a vaguely pentangular shape, but with its five points rounded off. It looked almost like an undulating chalk outline, and its blue-white bioluminescence made it positively spectral: thus the name.