The Sea of Light (7 page)

*

I brush by the clock’s ticking. Half past one.

The bed is warm, Barbara long and perfectly outlined under the sheet. Normally I would press against her, put my arm around her and rest my face along the back of her neck while she sleeps. Tonight, though, I stay apart. On my back with my eyes shut. I’m still not tired. Ever since then, sleep has become less and less possible. I’ll be beat by morning, will walk through the office corridors like a feverish ghost.

If you want a good troubleshooter or systems analyst, try Phil Delgado, he’s our man, recommend him for anything. He’ll set you up the right way from the beginning, root out whatever’s causing you grief and fix it on the spot. A great guy, Phil is. Terrific professional.

What sort of business are you in? she asked that first time. And I answered, Computers. The wave of the future. Then reached across the restaurant table to take her hand. The fingers were long and slender, nails shone darkly, their gloss reflecting crystal reflecting dark sweet wine by candlelight. She wore silk and her bracelets were from expensive places, heavier than fourteen-carat. I knew that, to have her, the money would count. Success, winning. To be not just good, but the best.

There would be a house, I thought, and children. A very big house. She was everything I wanted, everything I still want, in this land in which I had come to be. Strong eyes, refined clothes, a cream-softened touch that would seek out and discern those with the talent for winning.

*

Twenty-two years ago. Both of us were so young—yet somehow, even then, exactly what we would become. I liked to see our different complexions in the summer, my skin against hers.

What is he?
some friend of hers asked once, when she thought I couldn’t hear,
Not Puerto Rican, is he?

When I saw that all the hair on her body was pale, too, even the hair between her legs, I was shocked, and laughed, and thought about how beautiful our children would be. I worshiped her, worshiped this, her country. Strove with every fiber of my conscious life to be fully American, to obliterate all traces of foreign behavior and appearance. To be pale-skinned, accent-less.

To be white. But there are certain genetic predispositions somewhere in here—latencies that, in the summer, dominate. Browned by sun, I always looked like some kind of
mestizo.
Barbara loved this secretly, though she blushed over it in public.

*

There are other public things she’ll never know about. My trip across America with college buddies, years before I met her, in a rusting Ford with chrome on the sides and torn red vinyl seats. From east to west, across the most exquisite farmland I had ever imagined, between two rivers big enough to be arteries of ocean, across the newest mountain range on the earth, jagged desert peaks eclipsing clouds, cutting into your eyes like spears reflecting unforgivable bleak bright sun, skull deserts, salt basins, rocks layered the yellow of autumn leaves and maroon clay. The engine rumbled us along edges of highway. In Los Angeles, I baked brown on the beach and it did not matter. Once in a while, on the sand, a group of Mexicans would wander by and, with a mixture of relief and shame, I heard and recognized the different cadence of their Spanish words, flirted casually with the dark girls, all the while knowing nothing would ever come of it. Because I was meant, I told myself, for finer things. Whiter things.

With my buddies and our rattling car, beer cans and aspirin and a dwindling amount of cash we traveled back a different way, up along creek beds and piney ridges and shadowed black hills. A land so extraordinary that I promised myself to return one day, and show it to my children.

Which I did. A man of my word. Jack was an infant, Babe six. It was the year she started swimming. I had money by then—it was just starting to swell a savings account—and my beautiful fair American wife, and I had a nice car. We drove into state parks, past bubbling springs and bear cubs, herds of elk, rainbow-colored canyons, through windstorms and summer rain. Emerging into hot sunlight again at a place called the Corn Palace in Mitchell, South Dakota—an auditorium boasting glass display cases filled with information about the winning of the West, its exterior a gaudy architectural extravaganza of gold-tinted domes and spires. Nearby were situated many shops selling postcards and sunglasses and trinkets for tourists, along a wood-railed boardwalk constructed to resemble that of a nineteenth-century frontier town.

Barbara and the kids wandered off into some shop. I was tired, and sat on a bench. I leaned back. The sunlight felt good on my closed eyelids. Maybe I dozed briefly, I don’t remember. But something made me open my eyes to the shadow-less boardwalk, the hot white air, sound of a child giggling, then another. I began to make out shapes of blond white children in the light, fat parents holding their hands, the figure of a small boy pointing at me, giggling:
He looks like Uncle Zeke!
A fatherly voice mumbled something back, a hushed drawl. The tiny white finger kept pointing, though—at me, at something to the right of me. So I turned that way.

What sat beside me on the bench seemed, at first, to be human. The skin was a tawny dark leather, the hair long and swept back from the forehead and broad hawkish nose by a full eagle-feathered headdress. The hands in the lap were lifelike, turned up in a kind of supplication. There was a buckskin jacket, worn tanned buckskin moccasins. On second glance, though, it was a thing with no life in it at all—nothing but a stuffed, man-sized doll. A red-lettered placard hung around its neck, settled against the leathery buckskin chest.

TAKE YOUR PICTURE WITH UNCLE ZEKE.

Somewhere, a camera flashed.

There were more children now, more parents. The sun was bright, my eyes tired. I could hardly make them out. Someone laughed. The laughter swelled in my ears, sun in my eyes, until for a second I thought I was enveloped in an indistinguishable, suffocating white mass of flesh, and sweat, and pointing fingers.

He does,
came the boy’s voice.
He looks just like him.

Then I did something I will never understand.

I smiled back at the big indistinguishable mass of white things blinding me, and turned back to Uncle Zeke. His form was clear, his features noble. In that moment, I wished him alive. And put my arm around him. Then kissed his leather cheek.

There was more laughter now, the deep chuckling of adults mingled with the patter of children’s voices. More cameras sounded, clicking, flashing miniature popping explosions. I looked back at them without seeing them, lifted a hand to my face and dropped it in surprise. For some reason, I don’t know why, there were tears in my eyes.

Then someone took my hand. Small fingers, soft flesh. And out of all the obliterating white shapes I saw the darker form of a very young girl. Serious, big wounded eyes. Thick dark hair. Skin honey-brown—flesh of my flesh, the color of me. My oldest child, Babe. Who held my hand in both of hers, gently, urging me away from this white erasing center of things. Saying, Come on Daddy, let’s get out of here. Let’s you and me go home.

Señorita de mi coraz
ó
n,
I said.

Girl of my heart.

She lifted me up by the hand and I followed, rose easily for just that moment into a safe unanchored place that was warm and still and dark, and all my own.

*

I remember, now, how she looked not so long ago: tall, strong, lean and tanned, bubbling competence, winning. What she’d been trained for since childhood. No ordinary-looking girl. A girl meant for special things.

Two weeks after we brought her home from the hospital I happened to step into her room and found her sitting on the floor against the bed, head bent nearly to her knees, face beaten and thin, and she looked up at me with the frightening new hollowness of her eyes and said I’m sorry, Dad, I’m sorry. I am so sorry.

What? I asked desperately, kneeling beside her, what? What are you sorry for? But she wouldn’t answer.

Barbara and I argued that day, bitterly. One of our few true knock-down drag-out fights in all the years together.

Leave her alone,
Barbara said.
Don’t you understand that she wants to be alone?

Alone?
I stormed back.
Alone? Do you think she knows what she wants? Alone in the ocean for fifty-one hours, and you tell me to leave her alone again. What in the name of God is wrong with you?

The argument did not recur. Still, it left a scar. When I think back I’m hard-pressed to come up with another one as bad—not even concerning her parents. No, she and I have always gotten along magnificently. But I wonder, now: Did the sacrifice begin
then,
with that fight?

Even before the visit to Tia Corazón, did I call the Powers without knowing it?

Because somehow—since Angelita—there has been this feeling in the house of a strange new presence, something damaged, enraged, askew.

What nonsense. Outmoded superstition, Delgado. A lapse into the very forms of irrational thought that have enslaved people’s minds for centuries.

*

It was an out-of-the-ordinary fight, though, not like our little quarrels.

The ones we had about naming each child, for instance—those first two times I lost out, and
Mildred
and
James
were the results. I still don’t like their names, really, but reconciled myself when the nicknames caught on.
Babe. Jack.
Friendly-sounding.

With the next two I stood my ground. My second son would be named Roberto, and there would be no substitute like
Bob
or
Bobby.
Teresa would be Teresa, without the Anglicizing
h
.

I felt better, then.

Which is odd. Since I really don’t mind the subtle corruption of my own name. I even introduce myself to others as Phil. Not Felipe.
Phil Delgado. Hello there, pleased to meet you.

I gaze up at the ceiling. Blank darkness. Remembering hot sunlight, red-stained streets. There were soldiers stationed outside our home. And I asked my father what they wanted.
Nothing, Felipe,
he said.
Go to bed.

But I remember the smell of his sweat, full of helplessness and terror, while we waited. Odd that after all that—the fear that was like a rotting acidic substance dripping through all the organs of our bodies until we felt more dead than alive—we survived. Still, such things change you. You become a different sort of person in your soul, a man less capable of spontaneous thought, action, feeling—a person willing to give up certain things called for by the heart in order to shore up security against the future.

Barbara moves drowsily.

“Phil?”

“Hmmm.”

But she’s sleeping again.

It’s okay, I say. Everything’s okay. I move closer to her on the bed. Turn away from the ceiling, the darkness, bury my face against her neck and, in sleep, she sighs.

Yes everything is okay. We are all, all safe here in this house I’ve bought, with plenty of food in the refrigerator and money in the bank. I have a terrific job, a beautiful wife, four children, two sons, two daughters. Nearly perfect family. Perfect life. And it’s a free country. Why do I hurt inside?

*

Things change. Something happens in an instant to alter the course of your own life, or the life of someone you love—a thing beyond your control. So there is nothing you can do.

What Bart Sager said, There was the matter of Babe and the Hedenmeyer boy. Her inexplicable failures.

There was Angelita.

Then the hospital. Nightmares of her. Of that tortured Kenny living inside machines.

The fight with Barbara. Already, it had begun—sacrifice. The Powers were here, I’d called them, and simply failed to know it.

What did she say, that foul old witch? Shame of my family in Havana as well as in Miami.

Your house disappears like wind.

As soon as Babe began to eat again, I sensed it.

One weekday evening when it seemed as if things were returning to a little normalcy. Barbara went out with friends for the first time in weeks. Jack was at cross-country practice, Roberto banging something together with hammers and nails in the garage, burning incense to obscure the odor of the cigarette he was secretly smoking. Teresa was riveted by the television in the den. And I sat on our living room sofa glancing through a newspaper, sensed shafts of light streaking out into the upstairs hallway from behind the half-opened door of Babe’s room.

I lifted my head to look up. Something rose along the back of my neck with a buzzing, snapping sound so that I broke out in sweat. Saw my house drifting into wind. The center that had held us a family—happy, successful, winning and beautiful and spectacularly American all these years—about to diffuse like fragments of flesh on skeletal bones. And I saw—suddenly, without having words for it, because there are no words in the world for it—that Tia Corazón was right, I had to choose. But before knowing it or being able to stop it I had made my choice—a choice that came before understanding, out of nowhere but a dark place in the primitive past, in my primitive heart—from the wind and the death of Angelita, from the pain of seeing my firstborn child swollen and desiccated in a white hospital bed, her body shriveled to unrecognizable proportions. Something had come to me, offered itself, and without knowing it I’d opened my heart to it, and because of that the unknown thing had planted itself inside my beautiful American family and inside my magnificent, expensive, American showcase house.

I looked up that evening and things became silent for a moment. Then I felt it—I felt it: the ineluctable working of the Powers. Something like insects gnawing the innards of everything I’d lived in and purchased up until now. Silent tremors making almost invisible cracks in the house beams, shingles, concrete.