A Scarcity of Condors

by Suanne Laqueur

  “Damn,” Tej said, breathing hard. “I didn’t think this would actually work.”

  “Now I know you’re crazy.”

  Tej slid hands into Jude’s back pockets. “Crazy also serves a certain purpose.”

  Jude planted his palms against the wall. Their eyes held a long moment, shoulders and chests rising and falling in unison. Breathing their way through a decision.

  “Whatever you want to do,” Tej said. “Nothing. Everything. Something. It’s fine. I just want you to be all right.”

  “I think I just want you.”

  Jude woke naked in an empty bed. His watch read a little after seven. An orange, a business card and a note rested on the unoccupied pillow:

  Well, I had ten kinds of fun. Gone to work. Left you a card so you can see I’m a respectable, contributing member of society. The card has some digits on it. If you punch them into your phone, magic things will happen.

  Lock the door behind you. And don’t worry. You’re going to be all right.

  Jude read the card next:

  Timothée Jalil (Tej) Khoury, EMD

  Seattle Fire Department

  The corners of Jude’s mouth pulled down as his eyebrows went up. “A fireman,” he said slowly. His sister would be impressed.

  Except she’s not actually my sister.

  He got dressed, made the bed and, unable to think of anything clever to put in a note, simply left his own card on the pillow.

  It was a bit of a hike back to his neighborhood, but the morning was fresh and the sun sliced valiantly through the city’s perpetual cloud cover. He opted to hoof it home, eating the orange as he went.

  So this is a Walk of Shame.

  Striding along the morning streets, boxers balled-up and stuffed in his jacket pocket, Jude took inventory of body and mind. Instead of empty and disturbed, he felt spectacular. Young. Strapping. Alive. All his upset downgraded into a manageable worry. Tej was right—lust served a certain purpose. Just what the doctor ordered.

  Jesus, what a night.

  Tej was a ruthless lover. Bold. Verbally fearless. Audacious and lusty. Teasing. Lewd. And Jude should’ve hated it. The things Tej whispered and his aggressive sexual drive should’ve repelled him.

  He loved it.

  This isn’t me. I’m not like this.

  Yet walking along, looking at his life story turned inside-out, his history erased, his slate blank…

  Maybe I am, he thought. Maybe this really is me.

  His pace was confident, his chin high. Slap his ass and call him Betty: he got propositioned by a gorgeous punk and he went for it. Seduced from hell to breakfast. Ravished by a smartass power bottom with a foul mouth, an irresistible throat and a surprising soft side in between the bouts of feverish fucking.

  Jude’s eardrums blushed, but an erection yawned and stirred to life in his jeans. Yes? You rang? Is it on? Are we fucking again?

  He chided himself to knock it off, but his heart wasn’t in it. He felt great. And grateful.

  Thanks, kid. Whoever you are.

  His smug mood saw him through the day, but the arrival of Cleon at his apartment that evening quickly deflated his euphoric balloon.

  “Jude, open the goddamn door.”

  All the ambiguity of Jude’s parentage instantly vanished. This was his father, come out looking when Jude’s whereabouts were unknown. This was his father’s fist on wood and his unique tone of voice that could not be disobeyed.

  Jude opened the door.

  “Don’t you ever not answer me when I call or text you,” Cleon shouted.

  Jude blanched, twelve years old and in deep shit.

  “Never again.” Cleon’s finger touched Jude’s chest. “Don’t you ever disappear on your mother and me like that. I don’t care how angry you are, you keep that goddamn phone turned on and if I call, you answer it. Cachai?”

  “Cachai.”

  The finger bore into Jude’s heart. “Never again.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You should be. Now get in the fucking car.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we need to talk about this.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me I was adopted?”

  “You’re not.”

  “You and Mami aren’t my parents.”

  “I know,” Cleon cried through his clenched teeth. “And you’re not adopted either.”

  They stared each other down. Cleon’s eyes were wide and glassy, his unshaven face a pale shade of grey. He looked old. Worse, he looked frail. And he looked like he was feeling.

  Jude was adept at reading the minuscule gradients within his father’s moods, skilled at recognizing deviations from the norm. What he saw before him was a pendulum swinging too far off course. Cleon was off course. One look and Jude knew Cleon had forgotten his meds for about two days.

  “Papi,” Jude said, a sickening terror creeping through his bones. “What the hell happened when I was born?”

  Cleon shifted his weight onto his cane and the other hand reached, trembling, to press flat against Jude’s cheek. “Querido, I wasn’t there.”

  “I know you weren’t. Goddammit…” Gritting his teeth, Jude turned and walked into the living room. Slowly, so Cleon could follow.

  “Jude, please. Come back to the house with me. Come home so we can talk about this.”

  “Give me a minute, all right? Jesus Christ. I just…” He took several long breaths, looking for something to focus on. Anything. “You need to take your meds.”

  “What are you talking… Oh.” Cleon eased himself into a chair. “Shit.”

  “How many days now?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Since I walked out?”

  “Possibly.”

  “Get back on the wagon, cachai?”

  “Cachai.”

  Each dressing the other down seemed to settle an invisible score, and the room swayed into an uneasy balance. Jude sat on the windowsill, needing to stay distanced. “So, it sounds like I was switched in the hospital,” he said.

  Cleon nodded slowly. “They say to look for the simplest solution first.”

  “Mm.”

  Each rubbed a hand across the lower half of their face. Covering their mouths. Squeezing lips into a cupped palm. An ocean of thoughts roared between Jude’s ears. The room screamed with things unsaid.

  “You’ve been a gift to me all your life,” Cleon said. “Starting from the first time they put you in my arms. You don’t know what—”

  “I know.” Jude’s voice felt like a dull, rusted blade in his mouth. “But how did I get in your arms? How did… Doesn’t this bother you?”

  “Of course it bothers me. Yes. Of course I want to find out what happened to my biological child but right now I need you to know that… Jesus Christ, Jude, you’re my son. You are what’s bothering me right now. The rest is… I don’t know what it is. I’m lost.”

  “Yeah. Me too.”

  Jude had never been at such a loss. Never known this kind of confused, conflicted misery. Even at his lowest point of mourning Feño, even in the exhaustion of being closeted or the terror of being targeted by his community, he’d never faltered in his identity as a Tholet. Never doubted his parents’ blood ran deep in his veins and would sustain him through whatever revulsions developed.

  His fists clenched, desperate to wring out an explanation. Needing someone to blame. An enemy to vanquish.

  “Do you ever feel vengeful?” he heard himself ask.

  “How so?”

  “For what happened to you in the Villa. Everything…” He made a lame gesture at his father’s body. “Do you think about revenge?”

  “Sometimes. It’s a general vindictiveness though. I don’t have a specific person I can arrange a vendetta for. Pinochet’s dead.” Cleon’s s
houlders flicked as he gave a bitter snort. “I admit I would’ve enjoyed shooting him in the gut.”

  “What about Captain Villarroel?”

  Cleon’s eyes narrowed as he drew a deep breath through his nose. Villarroel had been one of his torturers. Adept in both physical and psychological terror. His latter technique involved one bullet in the chamber of a six-shot pistol, pointed at Cleon’s head during interrogation.

  “I guess… If I were told to have at it, full immunity, no consequences…” His fingers lifted off the arm of the chair, folded one at a time into a fist and then relaxed again. “I’d think strenuously about it. Maybe. Sure.”

  “What about for Vancouver.”

  “Do I want revenge on Vancouver?”

  “Let’s say you were an Old Testament god and you could rain down fire and brimstone on a city. Send another flood or a plague.”

  Cleon’s sideways glance was laced with concern. “¿Juleón, qué me estás preguntando, po?”

  Po, along with cachai, was a beloved word Chileans tagged onto the ends of sentences. Or anywhere in the sentence they felt like sticking it. The whitest man on earth could go to Chile armed with only po, cachai and hueón, and he’d be hailed as fluent.

  Jude was fluent. He grew up knowing by blood, he was a British-Canadian Jew but in spirit, he believed he was Chilean. He belonged to the community of exiles and their first-generation American offspring. Cleon and Penny gave years of their lives to build and better the neighborhood. Jude went with his mother to the airport to welcome Chilean refugees. He didn’t know what the hell it was all about, he just figured it was what people did. And these were his people. He spoke their language, his sentences laced with po, cachai and hueón. He went to their penas, sang their songs, danced their dances and ate their food.

  Then they turned on him. Exiled him.

  “What am I supposed to do now?” he said softly.

  Go looking for my people? Just so they can turn their back on me again when they find out I’m gay?

  No way. I am not breaking my own leg and staging a deliberate coup on my life. Forget it.

  “You’ve been nothing but a gift to me,” Cleon said. “We’ll get to the bottom of this, but know it will never, never change how much I love you.”

  Lips pressed tight, Jude nodded, staring down at his clenched hands.

  “Juleón, you are my son.”

  “I know.” Love for his father pressed against the backs of his eyes while the shadow of an unknown interloper lurked in the vague distance. Another father out there in the world. One who might change how he felt when he discovered who Jude was.

  Jude wanted Cleon. Nobody else.

  I don’t want to be anyone else’s son but yours. I don’t want any other father to love me. I don’t want to know that my name is anything but Juleón Tholet.

  “Querido, come home with me now.”

  Jude went. Because it was what he did. Whenever he had a problem, he went home.

  He wasn’t sure how to handle the problem being home.

  “It’s all broken up,” Penny said.

  “I understand,” Jude said.

  “I don’t remember giving birth, you know this. But I have no concrete memory of how I got to the hospital either. All these years, I said Ysidro and Tatán took me there because I assumed they did. But I couldn’t swear to it.”

  “Tell me what you do remember.”

  “Waking up.” A wry smile. “Throwing up. Everyone telling me to rest. Descanse, señora, you must rest. The baby is fine. He’s sleeping. Just rest now. Falling back under. Waking up. And then finally, they brought you in.”

  Her eyes bright with frustrated tears, her palms opened to the ceiling. “They brought you to me. Swaddled up tight to your chin, that little cap tugged over your eyebrows. They put you down in the bed. Right next to me. ‘Look at him,’ the nurse said. ‘Look how much hair he has. And look, señora, he has dimples. Look. Here he is.’” Her hands fell limp in her lap. “There you were.”

  Jude nodded, unable to speak.

  “Juleón.”

  He nodded harder.

  “You have to believe me.”

  “I believe you,” he said.

  He looked at Cleon, who’d been silent all this time. Silent and helpless because he wasn’t there. He was in the Villa Grimaldi, being beaten with chains, shocked with live wires, forced into Russian roulette games. Thrown into the street and run over. A victim of relentless intransitive verbs. He couldn’t corroborate or confirm Penny’s story. He was off in his own hell, building a secret world in his mind to escape the constant terror and agony. That was his story and Penny couldn’t corroborate it any more than he could hers.

  They survived Chile together, but separately. A parental narrative crafted under torture and duress wasn’t the most reliable, but it was the narrative Jude built his life on. The one he had to trust.

  He’d never, never not trusted his parents.

  “I believe you,” he said again, closing his eyes.

  But I’m not the baby my mother gave birth to.

  I’m not the unborn child my father survived for.

  I am someone else’s hope and dream. My name shouldn’t be Jude. I should not be here.

  None of this belongs to me.

  None of this was meant for me.

  He opened his eyes and looked at the wreckage of his Penny’s face.

  It wasn’t meant for her either.

  “Mami.” He inhaled deep, forcing the air in, stepping beyond his blinding bubble of outraged perspective and attempting to step inside his mother’s.

  Because this was his mother. Fuck the DNA, fuck the percentages. Fuck Italy and Iberia and every other ethnicity attempting to redefine the laws of his life.

  “This must be killing you,” he said. His voice dragged in slow-motion. The world had gone insane. “I mean, if I’m not… Then what happened to…him? Your real son. What happened to your baby?”

  Penny doubled over weeping, fists in her hair. “You’re my baby,” she said, sobbing. Her voice rose up in a rage. “They almost killed you before you were born and they almost killed you in Vancouver. Twice I almost lost you.”

  “Querida, don’t,” Cleon said, moving stiffly to sit next to her on the couch.

  “I am not losing you again. I am not doing this again. Never again. Not one more thing happening to my family, I cannot take another…”

  Before Jude’s eyes, Penelope Tholet turned inside-out. Flipped the coin of her bright, shiny nature. No longer Penny but Lupita. The She-Wolf screamed into her hands and Jude nearly threw his arms across his face, wanting to shield himself from that horrible, keening howl.

  “No más. Nunca más.”

  For a moment, Jude thought the house would explode under her wrath. Then she slumped against Cleon’s side, weeping through her palms. He wrapped arms around her and planted his chin atop her head, tucking her against his massive chest. The mighty barrel of his torso wobbling above his frail, broken legs. His fierce, dry gaze guarding his wife’s pain. Their bodies creating a raw sculpture not of smooth, polished marble, but jagged black rock hacked from the volcanic spine of the Andes Mountains. Set atop a pedestal of broken bones.

  Jude knelt between their feet, eyes wide and mouth parted in awe as he gazed at the Pietà of his parents.

  From the day he started at Pacific Northwest Ballet, Jude fell and remained passionately in love with his job. Despite the bonanza of gorgeous gay and bisexual men at PNWB, Jude did not date at work. He flirted and ogled and took every guy on the roster for a mental spin, but he kept his hands to himself for two reasons. First, because dancers, ladies and gentlemen, were certifiably crazy. Second and sacrosanct, Jude loved his work too much to inject it with relationship drama. This job was a golden apple that fell into his lap, and it deserved nothing but his pure, u
ndistracted best.

  He was ridiculously distracted today. The company was learning a new ballet, Rakewind, set to Mozart’s Requiem in D Minor. The choreographer had flown out from New Brunswick to stage the work and Jude could not take his eyes off her. More precisely, he couldn’t stop staring at her left leg, where a long scar ran from knee to ankle, just like his. Her hair was dark and wavy, just like his. No dimples, but holy shit, her preternaturally blue eyes were just like his.

  The more he stared, the more absurdly obvious it became.

  She could be his sister.

  His gaze swiveled around the studio. Christ, anyone here could be related to him. When he walked down the street, he could pass a stranger with the same DNA. Highly unlikely, sure, but it could happen. In all his world travels, on any street in any city, he could’ve bumped shoulders with a cousin and not even known it.

  You never knew. How could you know? Someone had to be related to him, why not this dark-haired, blue-eyed, scarred woman? Here she was. And she—

  “Jude?”

  He blinked. All eyes were on him, including the choreographer’s.

  “Come back to me,” she said, smiling.

  Positive she was signaling him, his heart gave the most idiotic lurch in the history of lurches.

  “Can we take it from the Confutatis?” she asked.

  “I’m sorry, I was… Sorry.” His face hot, he began playing. A tightness crept into his throat, which pissed him off. The distraction was justified but this constant verge-of-crying shit was getting ridiculous.

  With an effort, he buckled down and focused through the remainder of rehearsal, then skulked away to his lunch hour, avoiding talking to or even looking at the choreographer.

  A creature of habit, Jude always lunched at the Utter Chaos Café, where his same waitress always held his same table. Typically he went over a score as he ate. Today, he pulled one of his father’s books from his messenger bag—Inheritance of Fear: Women, Children and Human Rights in South America.

  He had copies of all Cleon’s works, dutifully displayed on his bookshelves and skimmed politely. Now his eyes volleyed back and forth through paragraphs and pages, looking for answers to questions he couldn’t even formulate.