The Assimilated Cuban's Guide to Quantum Santeria (20 page)

“I can tell you about your mother,” said Felicio. He stood Sophie up
on shaky legs, spread his arms to steady himself. “You obviously don’t know a thing about her. A hard worker. Smart. A total prude, though. Pretty boring to be around day after day. A lot of times I look a long lunch just to get away from her.

“How dare you speak of my mother like that,” I said.

“Oh, don’t get me wrong. She was a great woman. I wouldn’t have traded her for five beautiful new secretaries. And even before we were killed, I knew that woman was pure courage. She did not fear death. And then, on the fateful day Che came to town, she died for you, her only son. She chose to die to save you, her husband, her brothers. The very definition of bravery.

“Now I, well, I was a different story. I didn’t want to die, I was scared to die, and so I resisted death. I was carried by a bullet out of my body and into the paredón. There I waited, decade after decade, concentrating only on my persistence, raging at the unfairness, refusing to leave life behind. I was too afraid to let my ego go, for if I did, ¿what would happen to me? ¿Hell? ¿Nothingness? I never wanted to find out. I would do anything to live again.

“And that’s the difference. ¿Haven’t you ever wondered why the only spirits the living ever encounter are either wrecked by sorrow or irredeemably wicked? It’s because the ones that are good enough and strong enough would rather die than harm someone else. That’s what it takes in this world. Others die so you can live.”

“Kill him,” said Gustavito. He was still holding on to me; I could feel rage coursing through him, joining with and augmenting my own.

“¿How?” I asked.

“¡I don’t know!” he yelled. “¡But get him out of her!”

“Take Gladys,” said Jesús. I turned to him. His skin was spotless, uniformly dark; he held his knife-wife out to me handle-first. “She will search out Sophie and guide her back to us.”

I took the knife. “Don’t stab her anywhere vital,” said Gustavito. “Whatever wound you make we’ll have to heal.”

I nodded, then, knife-first, I made my way toward Felicio.

“¿What are you doing?” he asked. Amazing: already dead, and he was ready to piss himself. Once a coward, I guess.

He lurched away from me like a rusted tin man; he hadn’t had a chance to learn to use Sophie’s body very well. It was nothing at all to collar him and lay him down face-down on the chair like I was about to spank him.

“¡I’ll kill her!” Felicio yelled. “¡I’ll kill her, I swear!”

“You would have already if you could have. But you couldn’t. And now I am coming for you.”

I sat on Sophie’s back to immobilize Felicio and kissed the knife-blade. “Go get her, Gladys,” I said. Then, wishing I’d never come here but infinitely grateful that I had, and feeling for the first time that I truly understood what Mámi had done for me, what it means to see yourself at the brink of losing everything, not knowing what will happen, yet digging up the courage to make the best move you can, to do the only thing that has a chance of making everything … not okay, not right, but as right as it can be, I put my faith in everything I did not understand about our world and stabbed my wife in the ass.

1.

It arrived all at once the day after the school closed for the Christmas holiday. At first he thought it was some species of unbridled acne: a hard slippery mountain of red flesh, just above the right eyebrow, that culminated in a white tip typical of your garden-variety pimple. But the white tip felt too sharp and hard to be acne; it felt more like the business end of a tooth.

He thought perhaps time would take care of it, but by Christmas the pimple’s base had grown significantly and the white tip extended out by measurable millimeters, defying gravity and, increasingly, identification. His Pre-Med daughter, visiting for the holiday, said in her pre-professional opinion that he should “lance that sucker,” and so he tried to, but quickly discovered that he couldn’t: the pimple was as hard and insensitive as a pebble, and the white tip completely imperturbable. Worst of all, he had felt no pain during the attempted lancing, though he stabbed at it for close to half an hour. It was as if that little lump of acne was no longer a part of his face.

That worried him. But he didn’t want to worry his daughter; Pre-Med is a tough major, after all. He decided to wait until she left—she was going on the 29th to spend New Year’s with his estranged wife—before making a doctor’s appointment.

By the time she left and he was ready to make the call, however, the
white tip had grown to the size of something that could no longer be called a tip; it demanded to be classified as a thing unto itself. Gray-white, striated, solid, pointed, he did not have much trouble trying to name it. It was, unmistakably, the beginnings of a horn.

2.

He could not think of a doctor in the world who would not contact the local news and spread the word about the man who had a horn growing out of his forehead. So he did not contact the doctor after all. Instead, he drank a shitload and went to bed, hoping things would be better in the morning.

When he woke up the next morning, thirsty and woozy, he found that the horn had mercilessly shredded his pillow. The poor old pillow, hemorrhaging polyester pillow-guts, looked like Prometheus’s abdomen after Zeus’s eagle had done its daily duty.

At least that’s what the man thought to himself. He was a high school English teacher who always made sure to cover Greek mythology. He knew other people would think him a pretentious prick for drawing that kind of metaphor from his crusty old pillow, so he never made those kinds of comparisons out loud. But in his head he made them all the time.

After one last forlorn look at his massacred pillow, he got up and looked at himself in the mirror. It was bigger: much bigger. Too big to ignore anymore.

He scrambled through every drawer in his bathroom until he
found what he was looking for: a pair of scissors. Once he had them, he assailed the horn with consequences-be-damned gusto. He tried cutting, sawing, poking, digging, and even, out of frustration, hammering until he was spent. He looked at himself, heaving and sweating, in the mirror.

Neither the horn nor even the scissors seemed noticeably impacted by his efforts. He sighed and made himself a Bloody Mary that was almost all alcohol, almost no tomato juice. He called it a “Hail Mary” and thought it pretty clever.

3.

By the next day, the horn had grown enough to begin to curve upward. It now looked, he thought, like one of the diabolical canine teeth of the fearsome Fenris Wolf, the creature so powerful it was destined to eat Norse father-god Odin.

It was New Year’s Eve Day and he had yet to buy champagne. He had thought, before the arrival of his unexpected horn, that he would spend New Year’s at a quiet bar near his apartment, where time-ravaged retirees winced down drinks and told blue jokes and performed minute exegeses of last night’s game. Now, of course, that was out of the question. But alcohol had saved him; it was the only thing, not medicine or drug or advice or therapy or anything else, that had allowed him to endure his separation from his wife. He doubted he would survive New Year’s unless he got so drunk he forgot to die of heartbreak.

So he would have to venture out. But how to cover the horn? It rested too low on his forehead to by hidden by the brim of a hat, but too high to be shielded from sight by wide-brimmed sunglasses. Was there any way for a sane man in this society to reasonably cover his forehead?

He settled on a bandanna. Our man was Mr. Martín Esposito, 51, a balding high school English teacher with the plush-doll physique one expects of a high school English teacher. He no longer owned sneakers, nor jeans, nor even a t-shirt. His bandanna was actually a dishtowel that received a sudden and unexpected promotion. And so our man, in a white long-sleeved shirt and gray dress pants and a belt and black matching shoes and, last of all, a red paisley dishtowel-cumbandanna, sallied forth in search of New Year’s champagne.

4.

As he ran for his car, he felt like every satellite in the sky was trained on him. He fumbled with his keys and used the wrong one twice in a row before finally getting his car door open. He slammed the door shut, took a breath, then looked around the neighborhood. Nobody was out. He took another breath, this time of relief. Probably no one at all had seen him.

The drive was uneventful. He pulled into the parking lot of the liquor store, turned off the car, then checked the bandanna in the rearview mirror. It looked silly, but it remained in place, the horn beneath it only a vague, indeterminate lump that no one would be able
to identify. Solidifying his resolve, he exited the car and entered the liquor store.

He and the owner—a craggy, shaggy man whose other job might have been “Ancient Mariner”—were the only two souls in the store. The owner watched him in a distracted way; he was the only thing moving in the small liquor store besides the flies, which the owner had been watching before he came in and would go back to watching once he left.

He made straight for the champagne, picked out a bottle almost without looking at it, walked toward the cash register, realized he had picked out the most expensive champagne in the store, replaced it on the shelf, picked out something in his price range, and, finally, walked to the register, clutching the bottle like a wrung-necked chicken.

The owner asked “That all today?” and he said, “Yes.” The owner asked “Need any lottery tickets?” and he said, “No thank you.” The owner asked “Got any plans for tonight?” and he pointed to the bottle, and said, “Just that.” And they both let out a one-huff laugh.

Then the owner pointed at the bandanna and asked, “What, you lose a bet or something?”

On cue, the bandanna untied itself and fell onto the counter.

They both stood there looking at each other, the owner’s eyes locked onto the horn, and Martín watching the owner’s reaction. Finally, Martín reached for the bottle, now in a paper bag, and asked, “May I have my champagne now?”

The owner surrendered the champagne, saying as he did, “Your
wife must’ve been screwing around on you for a long time.”

He laughed a little then, mostly in surprise that the owner knew of that old legend. And then he stood still for a minute. And then he began to weep the most earnest tears of his life.

“No,” he said. “Not her. Me. I cheated on her. With a teacher at school. Who wasn’t beautiful or smart or anything. She just showed interest. That’s all it took: interest. That’s how pathetic I am. And for that I ruined everything.”

The owner watched him dispassionately as he cried like Gilgamesh wailing for his lost friend Enkidu; like Isis for Osiris, cut to pieces by his jealous brother Set; like Demeter for Persephone, destined to spend half of every year in Hades with Hades.

Then, knowing no other way to deal with emotion, the owner pulled the bottle of champagne out of the bag and popped the cork. “Let’s you and me drink this,” said the liquor store owner, “and you can tell me all about it.”

5.

He had called his estranged wife’s cell phone, but it was his Pre-Med daughter who picked up.

“Hi, Pápi!” she said with alcohol-fueled cheer. He heard outbursts of laughter and the relentless beat of party music behind her. “Happy New Year!”

“Happy New Year, honey. Why do you have your mom’s cell?”

“She didn’t want to carry it, so I told her I would, so I could call you
later, but now you’ve called me!”

“Right. Well, is your mom around? I wanted to talk to her for a minute.”

“Really? Because you know dad,” and his daughter’s voice became low and conspiratorial, “I think she wants to talk to you too. I think she misses you.”

“Did she say that?”

“Kind of. But it’s more what she’s not saying. She’s been having stomach pains for the last few days. I told her we should go see a doctor, but she said, ‘I think maybe I’m just missing your father a little.’ So see? She misses you. I think things are looking up for you two.”

“Don’t be so sure, honey. Has your mom told you why we’re trying this trial separation?”

“You know, she said people grow apart, and maybe it’s not permanent, and mostly just a big load of shit.”

“She was protecting me. She didn’t want you to hate me. But that’s not fair to her.” He took a breath, imagined Perseus working up the courage to strike, finally, and behead the Medusa. “I cheated on her. With another woman. That’s why we’re separated.”

He let the silence remain until she was ready to talk again. Finally she said, “I thought that’s what happened. If I was with you now, Dad, I would slap you.”

“And I’d deserve it. But for right now I just want to do right by your mom for a change. So could you put her on the line? I have some thing I need to tell her. And something of hers I need to return.”

“Okay, Pápi. You know I love you, right?”

“I know. And I love you. And even though I messed up our marriage, maybe forever, I love your mámi, too.”

“I know. Let me go get her. Happy New Year.”

“Happy New Year, honey.” And as he waited for his estranged wife to get on the line, he fondled, with melancholy and affection, the bone in his hand that just a while ago had protruded from his forehead. It wasn’t a horn after all, once it had run its entire course, there at the liquor store as he drank champagne with the store owner and wept and told him everything: but a human rib, one that was no longer a part of him. The only thing to do was to give it back.

Vocations don’t grant vacations. I’m supposedly on holiday in London when I get an offer no reporter could refuse: to see a unicorn in the wild.

I’m with my friend Samantha, hanging out at a small pub after a long night’s clubbing, still wearing our dance-rumpled party dresses, dying to get out of our heels. Sam’s father Will owns the place and tonight he’s tending bar, so it’s a perfect spot for late-night chips and hair-of-the-dog nightcaps. Plus, most of the clientele are in their 50s. We wouldn’t have to spend all evening judo-throwing chirpsers.