A Naked Singularity: A Novel
Page 80
Feeling good, Wilfred next took on Pat Lawlor two months later in Tucson. Lawlor was 13-1 at the time so he could fight at least a little, while the same could probably no longer be said for Wilfred, who dropped a ten-round decision. (Lawlor continued his non-calendar annus mirabilis in his next fight with a victory over Duran, giving him one of those accomplishments that looks great on paper as long as you don’t look too closely; of course, the victory over Duran was more a product of a shoulder injury as was established many years later when Duran won their rematch on his forty-ninth birthday [Lawlor was then stopped in five of his last six fights to finish with 23 wins and 16 losses].) Wilfred’s plan for a triumphant and lucrative return to the ring had clearly been derailed but still he wouldn’t quit.
Instead, on August 24, 1990, he returned to the ring and added the last victory he would ever earn by winning a ten-round decision against the execrable Sam Wilson. Wilfred heard the announcement of the scores and raised his fists for the last time. The referee came over to raise his right arm and Wilfred smiled that smile once again. People congratulated him and it didn’t feel all that different from Puerto Rico in say ’74 although sixteen years later it maybe did seem harder to do simple things like express a thought clearly or walk a perfectly straight line.
And when the end came it came in his next fight, held in Canada against someone named Scott Papsadora. On September 18, 1990, Wilfred lost a clear ten-round decision to Papsadora then retired for good with a record of 53-8-1. It was over.
Although there was one more nice day. In 1996 Wilfred became just the sixth fighter to be inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in Canastota, New York in his first year of eligibility and although he had already started to have seizures by then he was still strong enough to raise his arms one more time in victory and call his induction the best and most prestigious honor of my career.
But then came the doctors. Later that year, Wilfred slipped into a coma while lying on his bed and was taken to a San Juan hospital. Doctors looked at Wilfred and ran tests on the contents of his skull. They used words like pugilistic dementia and post-traumatic encephalitis, terms that Wilfred, with his junior-high education, would’ve had trouble understanding even were he conscious. They could have just said too much Boxing really even though others had fought more, certainly been hit more, and remained relatively healthy. He could have easily died then, he spent days in critical condition, but he didn’t. Instead he recovered and was released.
Now he needed constant care but this Man, who had let his very blood to earn millions for himself and others, had no money left. Years later, immediately after attending a benefit dinner held in his honor at Tito Puente’s restaurant nightclub in the Bronx, near where he was born, Benitez suffered a stroke and ended up in the intensive care unit of nearby Jacobi Hospital. He again survived but this stroke led to some paralysis and greater speech difficulties.
Today Wilfred lives in Saint Just, Puerto Rico; the barrio where his boxing career began in that makeshift backyard ring. The father who in those days put his arm around his seven-year-old son and showed him what to do is now dead. The wife he had when he was one of the strongest men in the world has abandoned him. He has few friends and fewer fans and his name is rarely mentioned anymore outside his own house.
And in that house Wilfred trembles and shakes and can’t walk so great. His speech has deteriorated greatly and he sometimes can’t say the simplest words. His memory is severely damaged.
He cannot, if alone, find his way home.
He is not, however, alone. Clara Benitez is with him, feeding and cleaning her son, keeping him steady as he stands and whispering in his ear when needed, promising everything will be all right mijo like she did the days Wilfred was her baby and she a far stronger woman.
chapter 32
Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night;
God said, Let Newton be! And all was light.
—Alexander Pope
The morning the blackout lifted and the lights in Times Square were so bright you couldn’t properly see, the first person I saw after I climbed in through the window was my mother looking very tired and sufficiently aged that I quickly tried to mentally calculate her number but realized I lacked even a clue because she guarded that secret zealously. And my face was stinging because it wasn’t just warm inside it was hot with the fireplace blaring and the baseboard’s heat actually visible so that the room seemed almost foggy. I stood in the middle of that steam and looked at them silently until Alana saw me and spoke:
“Casi,” she said. “We assumed you were dead.”
My mother looked at me and smiled, said I was underdressed. She hugged me and I dropped just about all my weight into her as she laughed. Then she went into the kitchen to look for food because I looked espantoso.
I took off my jacket and fell on the sofa. Alana was asking me where I had been and I was rubbing my face and looking up when Mary came into the room and jumped on the sofa.
“Casi, Casi! I have a baby brother!” she said.
“I know baby.”
“And he’s cute and chubby but can’t open his eyes yet.” The sound of her voice after so long was strange but sweet. “Do you want to see him?”
“I do Mary.”
“Good because he’s coooming,” she sang and skipped away.
“The hell?” I said looking at Alana, meaning how did we go from stone silence to that.
“That’s not the half of it either,” she said and before I could ask what she meant Buela and Buelo were coming down the noisy stairs in the deliberate way they did everything. I stood up and walked over to meet them. I gave them hugs and kisses and didn’t want to let go of my grandmother. When they sat down I went to the floor. “Help Alana, I’m being roasted alive in my own juice,” I said and took off a shirt.
Buela had a list of things Buelo had to do to help my mother get the house ready for the baby. She said that the baby was un regalo de Dios and that it was a miracle that all three—the baby, Marcela, and my mother—were healthy. She gave Buelo more orders and said she gave light to all five of her children in her home in Colombia armed with just a midwife. She talked about how as a young girl she watched her mother do the same, how some lived and were entrusted to her in varying degrees and could be referred to as later adults and how others didn’t so couldn’t. She started crying a little and my mother came in with food that mostly I devoured.
That night Marcela lay on that same sofa, yellow-faced and too tired to move. Beneath her was a red yarn slipcover Buela had sewn by hand. The house was full of those kinds of things. Tons of knick knacks everywhere and all of them covered by or sitting atop hand-sewn, by my mother or Buela, pieces of frilly material. My mother in particular felt she could make anything that consisted of cloth-type material. She bought nothing in that area and so great was her confidence that we knew from experience to lie about the cost of any new clothing she asked us about else she gasp and declare she could’ve made the item for us at a tenth of that then chide us for being wasteful.
Three feet from Marcela, in the same modest bassinet Alana slept in two decades earlier, lay my new nephew. Alana knelt before the oval, absently running her fingers along its border then looking in and gurgling. She looked at Marcela.
“My God,” she said. “Three. You’re like a baby machine. I doubt seriously I could ever have even one. Did it hurt like crazy?”
“Not like Timmy my God. And less than Mary too. By now I guess I’m so loose down there that they just slip right out.”
“That’s far more detail than I need,” I said. “Or want. Or can bear”
“He’s gorgeous Marcela,” Alana said. “I don’t mean cute either like all babies. I mean he’s actually good-looking, like handsome. Who has a handsome infant?”
I went over to see for myself and it was true. The squirt had like this tiny chiseled jaw and everything. I leaned over, put my hand on the back of Marcela’s neck and kissed her on the forehea
d.
“What do you see when you look at him Marcela?” Alana asked. “What do you feel?”
“Love. I feel love.”
“Don’t give me that. What do you feel?”
“That’s what I feel, I’m sorry.”
“What is it though?”
“It’s Love. That thing that takes all these different forms. I feel it strongly when I look at him, the way your body feels cold.”
“Not now it doesn’t, it’s like a sauna in here.”
“Sorry, I made the mistake of telling ma that the baby needs a few days to adjust to the loss of the womb’s warmth.”
“Ah,” Alana said. “It all falls into place.”
“My fault.”
“Love you say, hmm.”
“What?” I said.
“Nothing, just that love is an inarguably good thing it seems.”
“And?”
“Well there didn’t have to be Love you know. Love didn’t have to exist, right Mar?”
“I don’t know if it had to exist or not but I’m not sure it’s all you’re cracking it up to be,” she said.
“Huh?”
“I know this is going to sound weird but this kind of love is almost too intense. It hurts a bit. It feels almost like loss.”
“Well you’ve lost me.”
“What’s so hard to understand Alana?” I said. “This little sucker came out of her very body. What’s Bill for example? Some fat guy she met in a bar?”
Marcela laughed but raised her palm and winced. It hurt to laugh she said and Alana wondered aloud what laughter was anyway.
“I’ve never been in a bar in my life by the way,” Marcela added when the pain had subsided. “And Bill’s not fat either. I mean it Casi, don’t say anything to him about his weight, he’s very sensitive about how fat he’s gotten.”
“Oh man,” said Alana. “I think I know what you mean about the tinge of loss in love and what’s worse I think I can explain it.” She waited for us to ask her to do so but we said nothing and she continued anyway. “It’s not like loss, it is loss. What you’re feeling, and this is neither the time nor place of course, is the actual loss that is the inevitable end of all love, barely discernible but nagging.”
“What? You mean like glimpsing the future?”
“I guess but what does that really mean, the future? What do you think Casi?”
“What do I know?” I said and just then we were interrupted by the gleeful screaming of Mary and Timmy in the other room. “And what’s up with that Marcela? Now she’s talking nonstop? What the hell?”
“That’s what I said, what the heck. Well that’s what I said after I broke down in tears of relief, hugged her, and thanked God.”
“Ask her what Mary’s first words were,” said Alana.
“Huh?”
“Go ahead, ask her.”
“Okay, I’m asking.”
“Well I tell Ma to bring her to the hospital. She says she told Mary in the car that she was going to meet her new brother. Nothing. Anyway they get there. Mary comes into the room and gives me a hug and kiss. Still nothing. Then she walks over to the little glass bassinet where the baby’s sleeping, takes one look at him, smiles and says this is something nice.”
“This is something nice?”
“This is something nice, exactly like that.”
“Okay, and she’s been talking since?”
“More than ever, like nothing ever happened.”
“Tell him the kicker,” said Alana.
“What kicker?”
“Obviously I’m curious but I don’t want to mess with a good thing either so I don’t really say anything at first. Finally this morning I got up the nerve to ask her, you know, why she hadn’t talked in months. Know what she says?”
“What?”
“She goes, you told me if I didn’t have something nice to say not to say anything at all.”
“Get out.”
“Swear.”
“ . . .”
“So it was good news all around that day.”
“Serious,” said Alana.
“Although one thing’s for sure, it’ll be a long time before I use a saying around that kid again.”
“Oh and ma’s lumps were nothing either,” Alana said to my still slack jaw.
Then that thing happened where everyone in the room is suddenly uncomfortably quiet and doesn’t know where to look because the person they’re talking about walks in. And beautiful Mary walked confidently with her chin held high, cutting through that silence and into my lap as I began to make out a bizarrely-illustrated book in her little hand.
chapter 33
This epigraph is a lie.
Everything in lower Manhattan looked different, almost unreal, that day—like Vancouver dressed as New York. Truthfully, I was surprised to see that the old buildings and people still existed in any recognizable form since someone like me believes that when they stop going to a place it immediately changes and everyone else stops going as well. And I had planned on never returning but Soldera was going to be sentenced that day and I had to go back and see what would happen.
The cold had remained and even intensified in a way that defied calendars, the changing of the seasons, or any other logic, until finally it seemed everyone would just quit and petrify in their place. Then suddenly, the day before, the sun had reappeared—without warning and at the seemingly last possible moment—to burn off the sky’s gray and warm the air until by the end of the day people could be heard to complain of the heat. And that next day, the first of life’s cruelest month, had been more of the same, with some even wearing shorts in a gesture that seemed more symbolic than anything.
From behind two of these individuals, who wore inexplicable smiles along with their shorts, emerged a solitary black figure taking impatient purposeful strides directly toward me as I stood outside of 111 Centre. I watched his every move, frozen in that spot, as the distance between us shrank rapidly and when he stopped three feet away from me I looked near his face but without focusing.
“I guess you’re pissed,” he said. “I wondered, not an especially long time, what your reaction would be and I suppose I have my answer now.”
I didn’t say anything and even kind of looked away a bit.
“At any rate, this should smooth things over between us,” he said, extending his upturned palm with a gold key in the center.
“Dane!”
“Yeah, who else?”
“I didn’t even recognize you until just now.”
“What are you insane? It hasn’t been that long. I look the same don’t I?”
“The hell you been?”
“Take the key Casi.”
“What is it?”
“A key.”
“To?”
“To a storage locker. You’ll find the address right on the key itself. Inside the locker is the money just waiting for you to go rescue it. It’ll be safe in there for a while but I wouldn’t wait too long. You’ll see I spent some of it, a man’s got to eat, but it’s basically all there.”
“Where’ve you been?”
“Well that’s a long story. Let’s go get breakfast, I’ll tell you all about it.”
“No, I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“I’m going in here about a case.”
“Dressed like that?”
“I’m only going because I want to see what happens, not in any official capacity. I don’t work there anymore.”
“Yeah I heard. So why do you care then?”
“Where’d you go?”
“Look don’t think I abandoned you at a difficult time or anything like that. There’s twenty million or so reasons for you not to think that. Truth is I had to go a little underground for a bit but now I’m back, in the flesh, before your very eyes. Now forget about what’s going on in there and let’s go share a last meal. Many of your questions will be answered there.”
“No I need to see.”
“I guess I won’t be.”
“No you won’t, at least judging from that picture of Assado losing his head.”
“You saw that before going underground huh?”
“Ah Ballena, you should say what you think directly. I suppose The Whale’s still lurking, true, but that’s no longer a concern of mine if it ever was.”
“Why would it be our last meal? You going somewhere? Or just still dying?”
“Going somewhere, going back down. Truth is I only came up here because of the cold. I love the cold. But now it’s getting hot here as well and if it’s going to be hot anyway I might as well be in Florida where I’m more comfortable. Fact is you should come with me. It’s much better down there than here, you are aware of that right?” I motioned like I had to go. “Like I said, go get your money Casi. I took enough to live on for a little while then I’ll do something else to get more you know? Maybe our future paths will cross who knows? You don’t want to come now? Cool. If you change your mind later we can always hook up then. 410? You did the right thing there. It’s all how you define right. That’s the key. Look around you, everyone’s adopting our definition Casi. With every passing moment any given individual is being stripped of significance, either being herded together with a great number of others only to be slaughtered en masse or else being severely isolated, left to fend for itself with only its meager gifts for protection. And make no mistake but that this state of affairs is as it should be. Let us continue to hone and hone the methods by which man hangs his fellow man and be done, once and for all, with any hypocrisy.” He smiled and grabbed my hand by the wrist. He turned my palm up and slapped the key into it then clasped it closed with his two hands. Just then a woman let out a hurtful scream to my left. I looked over and saw that she was actually laughing, bent over at the waist exaggeratedly as a man hugged her from behind and smiled. When I turned back Dane was gone. I moved my head quickly looking everywhere for him but it was as if he’d never appeared at all. I dropped the key into my pocket and went inside.