A Scarcity of Condors

by Suanne Laqueur

  You like that? Jude thought. I sleep with it.

  Alex’s focus was downward, his thumbs busily tapping on his phone. He went still, reading the replies. Then rolled his eyes and shook his head before replying.

  “Who are you texting?” Jude asked.

  “Deane.” A long, troubled sigh, and he put the phone down.

  “Boy trouble?”

  “Are there other kinds of trouble?”

  Jude leaned back in his chair, hands laced behind his head. “Tell her to text me. I’m kind of an expert in boys.”

  The joke fell flat. Alex flicked one shoulder as he finished what was left in his glass.

  “It’s cool she talks to you about it,” Jude said.

  Alex half-smiled. “Yeah.”

  “Is this her first love?”

  “No. No, that was a different kind of trouble.”

  “How so?”

  Alex ran fingertips across his brow. “She met a great guy. A winner. He was terrific in every aspect.”

  “What’s the trouble?”

  “He’s her first cousin.”

  Jude brought the legs of his chair down. “Oh. Had they never met before?”

  Alex began to answer, then sighed again. “Long, complicated story short, no. They’d never met.”

  “I see.”

  “We didn’t treat it like a scandal. It was a shock, but we figured if we lay down a restraining order or something dramatic, they’d only be more compelled to run off together. Or something dramatic. We took a ‘love each other and see what happens’ approach. They loved each other, saying being cousins didn’t make a difference. But after about a year, it did. It resolved itself, but it was heartbreaking to watch.” He gestured at the phone on the table. “She’s moving on but sometimes it rears up and bites her.”

  “And she texts you. That’s awesome. I mean, awesome for her. Sucks for you.”

  Alex blew out his breath and nodded. “Parenthood. It ain’t for sissies.”

  Jude picked a fat blackberry out of his glass and ate it. “You know, I read somewhere once that siblings and close-cousins are actually born hardwired to be attracted. To instinctively see the ideal partner and mate in each other. It’s only being raised in close proximity that disconnects the instinct. Literally rips out the wires and lays down new ones that make the attraction taboo.”

  “Huh.”

  The devil on Jude’s left shoulder prodded him with its pitchfork. “I mean, not for nothing, but if I didn’t know you were my brother, I’d try to get your number.”

  Alex laughed. Sort of. His expression was hurt. Sort of. But then Tej and Val were back at the table, breathless and sweaty and laughing. Slamming another glass of sangria and dragging Alex and Jude out to dance.

  As he rocked and swayed and shimmied in Tej’s enthusiastic grip, Jude felt the collective female gaze downshift to a resigned fascination, while the collective male gaze narrowed in suspicion.

  I was born here, he reminded the world. I’m in my home with my man and what you think won’t make me lose sleep tonight. Pull any shit, my brother’s got my back.

  Turning under Tej’s arm, Jude came face to face with Alex’s gaze. It wasn’t hostile, but it wasn’t quite a look of got-your-back either.

  Well then, suck my dick, Jude thought. Hating himself for it. But unable to keep from checking a strongbox in his heart, making sure his passport was there. Next to his packed bag.

  Unsurprisingly, Alex and Jude were alone at the breakfast buffet the next morning, each ejected from the hotel room by a hungover mate.

  “Think we can get a bloody Mary in a to-go cup?” Jude asked, hitching his chair in and unfolding his napkin.

  Alex gave a tight smile and said nothing.

  “You all right?”

  “Yeah.”

  But he only picked at his food. Surreptitiously glancing sideways at Jude eating. The silence stretched taut and tense. An elephant took a seat and poured itself a cup of coffee.

  Can we just get it over with?

  “You looked kind of offended last night, when I made a crack about getting your number,” Jude said. “It was a joke.”

  Of course, he said it just as Alex took a more enthusiastic bite of his omelet. His eyes bulged as he chewed through a reply. “I know.”

  “Okay. Wasn’t sure if you…”

  Alex swallowed his food. His gaze was hard grey. “I have zero problem with you being gay, if that’s what you’re implying.”

  “Not at all.” Feeling foolish, Jude took a bite of bacon, which he didn’t even want. Now the silence swelled like an angry pimple.

  “Look, I’m sorry,” he said.

  Just as Alex said, “Our Uncle Felipe was gay.”

  A beat of silence like a challenge.

  “Really?” Jude said.

  “Really. And I’m bisexual.”

  The elephant slipped away as the brothers stared.

  “Sort of,” Alex said. “Right around the time Deane was having a thing with her cousin, I was having a…thing with my best friend.”

  Jude blinked. “Oh.”

  Alex smiled at his hands. “Just sharing.”

  “Well.” He took a steadying sip of coffee. “How was that walk on the dark side?”

  “Dark.”

  “Does Val know?”

  “Mmhm.” He was still faintly smiling, but Jude’s keen ear heard the perfect pitch of a vulnerable pain.

  So this is a brother laying his heart at your feet.

  And who are you going to be?

  “I’ll listen if you want to talk about it.”

  “Not much to tell. He came into my life. He became an incredible friend to both me and Val. Then he told me he was bi. That I was more to him than a friend. And all at once, to my shock, I realized I felt the same.”

  “You never in your life were attracted to guys?”

  “Never.”

  “Did you…?” Jude turned a hand over in the air.

  “We came close. Then Val busted us and it was a fucking mess.”

  “For real? She caught you?”

  “Red-handed.” Alex closed his eyes against the memory. “It sucked.”

  “The kind of moment when your entire life falls out your asshole?”

  The eyes opened and he laughed. “Oh my God, that’s exactly how it felt.”

  “But you worked it out, obviously. I mean, from where I stand, your marriage looks tight.”

  “We made it back from Crazytown.” Alex took a sip of coffee. “But man, it sucked. I sucked. Not my finest moment at all.”

  “It had to have been all kinds of bewildering.”

  “And violent.” He looked at Jude now, earnest, intent and supplicant. “I had no idea an affair involved that kind of emotional violence. I didn’t know not having an affair was so fucking violent.”

  “Do you still see him?”

  “In person? Rarely. We talk, we’re in touch. Shit, he was the first person I called after I got off the phone with you that night, so… It’s not exactly estrangement but it’s definitely distant.”

  “Gotcha.”

  “He’s living with someone now. Maybe that’ll narrow the distance. Someday.”

  “As far as attraction goes, are you writing it off as a one-time, random thing? Or do you accept this as part of you?”

  Alex didn’t answer for a long time. His mouth twisted, considering and rejecting words before he finally spoke. “It’s hard,” he said. “It’s like a resource that will go untapped because I’m not going to cheat on my wife with anyone. Ever again. On the one hand, there’s a lot of comfort in that resolution. On the other, it’s a source of frustration. My mind thinks what it thinks and my body wants what it wants. By day, I don’t actively think about it too much. But he likes to
show up in my dreams at night and I can’t do anything about that. I wake up rattled and some days it’s hard to reset. It’s just something I have to deal with.”

  “Some choices are simple to make but it doesn’t mean the execution is easy,” Jude said.

  “Mm.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Javier.”

  “¿Es chileno?”

  “Dominicano.”

  “Is it hard to see him with his boyfriend?”

  “It…arouses my curiosity.”

  Jude laughed.

  Alex was blushing. “When we hooked up, neither of us knew what the hell we were doing. Now I’m aware he’s gone down a road I haven’t and he definitely knows what he’s doing. So while I’m curious, I’m also a little intimidated.”

  “He wouldn’t be blindly fooling around this time.”

  “No. So it’s hard to see them, yeah. But Jesus, he’s so happy. He got dealt a shitty hand in life and after everything he’s been through, he deserves this.”

  “Circling back, you really feel like you identify as bisexual now?”

  “Selectively,” Alex said slowly. “Is it lame to need that modifier? I mean, it’s only happened once with one particular guy.”

  “Hey, I give you a ton of credit. Not many straight men I know would be a quarter as open-minded.”

  “It’s good to talk about it. I really don’t have anyone else I can take it to. I mean, I tell Val everything, but under the circumstances…”

  “It can’t be everything.”

  “No. And weirdly, the only other person I think would connect to how I feel is Deane.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she loves her cousin.”

  “Ah,” Jude said slowly. “I see what you mean.”

  “They’ve made their choice not to be together, but you don’t flip a switch and turn it all off, right? It still is what it is and it’s going to be something they struggle with. Not struggle. Live with. Knowing every now and then it’ll show up in a dream or rear up and bite them.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “Still, she’s my baby and this isn’t for her ears.”

  “Only mine.”

  Alex gave him a long slow gaze. “I think if you weren’t my brother, I’d give you my number.”

  Jude pretended to gag. “Sorry, I’ve been re-wired to find you gross.”

  Now the city streets were festooned with red, white and blue for Chile’s Independence Day. Loud, accordion-drenched music beckoned from around corners, along with the tantalizing smoke of a dozen barbecues. Perfectly sober to mildly buzzed to totally soused, the Santiaguinos sang, drank, and turned the rows of sizzling meat skewers called anticucho. Other vendors hawked mushroom and cheese enchiladas, or whipped up fruit juices and even the lethal terremoto concoction of pisco and ice cream.

  After an hour in the jostling, carousing crowds, the Tholets and Pendas found a table outside a café at the edge of a plaza and stopped to rest. Tej, Val and Cleon wandered into a nearby bookstore. Alex crossed his arms and closed his eyes, face tilted up to the sun. A group of people in traditional dress began dancing by the fountain.

  “Look, it’s the cueca,” Penny said.

  Jude watched the paired-up men and women, each holding a white handkerchief. They circled one another with sideways, grapevined steps. When they met, they didn’t touch, didn’t hold hands. They shared ends of the handkerchiefs and exchanged flirtatious glances. A crowd slowly made a ring around them, hands raised by ears, clapping smartly to the beat.

  Jude’s phone pinged an incoming text. He glanced. Did a double take. It was Aiden.

  To what do I owe the pleasure, he thought, smirking as he swiped the screen. He read two sentences, then began scrolling down, confused.

  “Jude, what’s wrong?” Penny said.

  “Nothing.”

  “You look the way you did when you first read your DNA results.”

  He laughed. “Almost as shocking. Aiden just texted me.”

  “Our Aiden?”

  “Aiden your brother?” Alex said.

  Penny bumped Alex’s arm. “You mean brother from another mother?”

  A stab of silence. Alex and Jude looked at each other, then at her.

  “Too soon?” she said.

  Both men gave a simultaneous bray of laughter.

  “Penelope, you bitch,” Jude said, pretending to backhand her.

  “She went there,” Alex said.

  She blushed as they affectionately pummeled and swatted her from both sides.

  “Good lord, this is lengthy,” Jude said, back to scrolling the fat wedge of text. “A whole paragraph. He must’ve been hacked.”

  “Aiden is what you’d call a terse communicator,” Penny said to Alex.

  “What does it say?”

  Jude read it to them.

  Out at a dive bar last night and met a guy who is Mapuche—native Chilean, with a little bit of Rapa Nui in his heritage, too. Real spiritual dude. Long, thin face. Intense stare and a crew cut so he looks like a Moai statue. Anyway, I kind of told him your life story and everything going on. And he told me some cool things about Condors. Their spiritual meaning, that is. I went back to find him tonight so he could tell me again and I could write it down exactly. And weirdly, he was coming to find me for the same reason. He said he had a dream last night and he had a message for you. He asked me to open voice recording on my phone, and the sound file of him talking is attached. I hope—

  Jude stopped reading aloud.

  I hope you’re okay. I think about you all the time. I mean it. I wish I could say stuff more easily. I don’t like when things change. I want you to know this changes nothing. You’re my brother and always will be.

  —A

  He looked up, his gaze damp around the edges. “That last part was just for me.” He cleared his throat hard, opened the sound file and set his phone down on the table. He hit play.

  “Hola, Julio, this is… ¿Qué? Po. Juleón. Disculpa. Does he speak Spanish? Of course. Hola, Juleón, po, me llamo Elicura Lienlaf.”

  Three heads bent toward the center of the table, hovering over the crackling line of the WAV file, heads tilted into Elicura’s messy Spanish, punctuated by pos and cachais.

  “El cóndor is the reigning hunter-king of the skies,” he said. “He uses all of his senses to hunt for prey, find a mate, raise young and protect himself. But his keenest, most powerful sense is his vision. His ability to interpret what he sees in the sky is unsurpassed, po, and this visual prowess even spills over into his spiritual life.

  “El cóndor’s divine gift from the universe is interpreting the landscape of his mind, cachai? He looks at images and visions, understands the messages within and translates them into personal power, ultimately shaping his destiny.

  “Part of el cóndor’s gift is knowing how to interpret what he sees to his advantage. He knows the divine purpose of the universe is to follow the path of enlightenment and el cóndor does not settle for anything less. ¿Entiéndeme, hueón? ¿Cachai? He always takes the highest path.

  “Po, your brother told me you were hunted by a condor in your youth. A predator who broke your leg and forced your people out of his territory. Banished you from his sky-sight. I fell asleep last night thinking about your story, and I had an intense dream about two condors fighting in the mountains. I believe it was a message, so I’ll tell you and you do with it what you will, cachai?

  “The boy who hunted you was not a condor. He was no king. He was a pretender to the throne of the skies. An imposter. He had no vision. No gift. No enlightenment and no path.

  “You, Juleón, you are a true condor. Po, you are a king and the sky is before you. You have extremely powerful and interpretive vision. You know your divine path and your purpose. No te conformes con menos. Do not s
ettle for anything less. This is not me telling you, hueón, but el cóndor himself. ¿Cachai? Bueno. Adiós. ¿Aiden, cómo paro esto? Ah, sí, sí—”

  The recording abruptly ended, as did the music from the cueca. Applause echoed in the plaza.

  “Wow,” Jude said.

  From its perch on the heel of her hand, Penny nodded. “I think a shaman just confirmed you were made to go out and get it.”

  Jude barely heard her. He was scrolling backward on his phone, looking over the landscape of his brother’s text. A condor on the hunt, his predator eye homing in on the last line.

  I want you to know this changes nothing. You’re my brother and you always will be.

  His talons delicately picked it out of the sky, interpreting the message within.

  You’re my brother and you always will be.

  Jude glanced up at Alex. All the features inherited from Eduardo and Clementina mirrored back at him. And suddenly, it was there. So simple.

  You’re my brother, he thought, looking at Alex, then at the phone.

  I don’t have to choose between two paths.

  The sky is before me and the sky is vast.

  The sky has room for many true kings, as long as they know their purpose.

  Aiden and Alex are my brothers.

  And always will be.

  The couple who owned the old house in La Reina returned from their trip. They called Jude’s cell and invited the Tholets to come over right away.

  Penny kept a hand tight in Cleon’s elbow as they moved from room to room. Noting new floors. A wall taken out or put up. Whether the layout of the kitchen, the living room, the bedrooms was the same or different.

  Jude followed, detached and sullen, feeling suddenly and weirdly robbed of an experience.

  I was never here. If we came before we took the DNA test, I could’ve claimed an in utero connection. But I have nothing, no history in this place.

  I wasn’t the baby my mother was pregnant with in this house. I wasn’t the baby born on the living room floor.

  I was never here.