by Rita Indiana
The principle objectives are to intercept and interrupt the business associates’ evil industry and to find Papi, which would restore order and peace in the world. To reach these objectives we must first overcome numerous obstacles. The lots at the mall, elevators, roofs, beauty salons, town squares, the caves, the resorts, and everywhere else, all booby-trapped, all crawling with monsters. We must conquer them step by step, word by word. Enemies won’t be the only thing we will meet along the way. There will also be friends to help and give a hand. Listen closely to what they have to say.
1. Gather Information
Whenever you encounter others, stop and listen (see page X). Use the information to determine which path to take. Whenever you meet with someone, you should know where to go from there. Be sure to chat with everyone. The person you shun might turn out to be the one with the clue to victory (no one will teach you the strategies, you’ll have to figure them out on your own).
2. Fight with Enemies
The devil’s on the loose and there are monsters everywhere. You’ll gain the experience you need to deal with them and survive. But as the adventure proceeds, the monsters multiply (or grow more deadly). With each monster you eliminate, you’ll get stronger. Don’t give up on these battles.
THE WORLD
The world is divided into three areas: the street, the home, and everything else. This last may include the countryside, the sky, the bottom of the sea, TV, space (different from the sky), the mountain-castle-tower with one thousand stories, the beach, the Internet, terraces, music, airports, stores, and temples.
1. The Street
This is the outside world. Monsters lurk here. We’ll discuss neighborhood types later. The street is the richest source of information, not just via people, but also via signs, graffiti, flyers.
2. Home
This includes all furnishings, car and airplane interiors, jail cells and hideouts, underground tunnels, public bathrooms, laundromats, cafeterias, restaurants, hospitals, and hotels. Generally speaking, monsters don’t invade the home and when they do, they’re chief monsters in disguise. Homes are riddled with traps, loose ends, abysses, cul-de-sacs, and secret passageways.
3. Everything Else
Many people live in these places. People and monsters. But monsters don’t do much here, and people just do their thing. This is where you must find the objects necessary for victory. To recharge: in case of injury, rest. This is how the best-quality information comes about, and disseminated every which way, it can be perceived by all the senses.
SPECIAL FEATURES
Jigsaw puzzles (see page X)
These are usually found at home, in rooms with a switch. When the switch is turned on, it usually reveals a secret stairway or something like that.
Shortcut (see page X)
Some of the walls in the house are weak and hollow and can be torn down with the help of something like a spoon. Later there will be instructions about which item to use in these cases.
Weapons (see page X)
Some weapons have uses other than attacking enemies. A fork, for example, can help you make your way through the cabin of a plane you’ve just hijacked but it can also bring nourishment to your mouth.
ATTACKS
Since monsters are everywhere, attack them with weapons, with items and magic. Speed is the key to victory. There are many weapons and they’re all very effective, especially pistols, but each monster is vulnerable to a different weapon. I like pistols best. Oh, and axes.
SPELLS
Sleep: This means yawning, which will cause all the other monsters to do the same, and will give you the opportunity to toss a grenade in their mouths.
Sleep 2: To pretend to be sleeping (see page X).
Mute: This spell causes monsters to fall silent, leaving only their lips moving.
Fire: Light any accessible flammable material (curtains are recommended) with a lighter and, best-case scenario, the enemy’s hair (if the enemy has hair).
Ice: Ignore the monsters, pretend to be cool.
NINE
The line grows longer and wider. Every hour, young and old women join in, bringing along their children, their neighbors, their things. The line grows so long, it comes all the way here and I tell Mami I think we should get in before it’s too late. She says that’s not necessary. She doesn’t realize people give her strange looks when she says I’m Papi’s daughter. People look at her and think she’s a fool who believes she’s part of the royal family. Sometimes I think so too. I mean, the day Charles and Lady Di’s wedding was broadcast, I was sure Diana was my mom, my real mom, and that she’d come get me in a carriage.
I climb up on the building’s roof to see if Diana, still wearing her wedding dress, is on her way. I wanna see if her carriage is entering the parking lot and coming to get me and to tell ¡Hola! magazine I’m her real daughter and she’s my real mother. But the only thing I can see down there are the balls of so many heads in line. From up here, I spit a green phlegm that inevitably hits a blonde with a perm in the eye. The line is so thick it’s impossible to tell which way it’s going. Could be forward or back or to the sides. What you see on the street is just a mob of people talking, holding little plastic bags full of plantain chips or corn on the cob, the ditches filling with glasses of foam just like the lines to get into Quisqueya Stadium for a baseball game.
There are huts everywhere, trucks carrying construction materials, Titan Concrete logos on the sides of those steel hulks. Cranes and more cranes turning their brontosaurus heads, kilometric cranes that gulp down mouthfuls of sand at the beach and drop them in little piles to bury people on the shore, though sometimes they also drop them in the right places at construction sites. The only things you can see now are heads and construction materials. Colored blocks one on top of the other, mimicking the wall where they’ll be placed, one on top of the other every which way. Glass for windows, frames for doors, wooden, metal, and plywood doors. Rods for towers, rods for multifamily units, rods for apartment complexes, nails, screws, wooden blocks, hinges, baseboards, PVC, kilometers of wire, and door handles. Rods for schools, for churches, for hospitals, rods leaning, rods in the sun, reddish rods, rods taking a nap.
What you see now are craters, holes bigger than the devil, cuz the higher the tower, the bigger the hole, and the line starts to break and fall into the depths of this abyss. Down there, a bulldozer gathers the bodies and places them next to the rocks and roots the same bulldozer pulled out earlier in the afternoon. The dirt in the holes is orange, red, and the sun strikes the red-dirt balls and crags. The bulldozers are yellow and driven by little Playmobil men whose faces are never seen.
New towers appear every day on the streets, toward the end of the line. At night, trucks unload materials for reinforced concrete, sometimes even on top of the people sleeping here. Then the people fall in the mix and become spontaneous sculptures; there’s the scattered brains of someone who had a load land on their head, in spite of a rope and pulley. And everywhere, there are the bodies of Haitian workers impaled on straight rods cuz they toppled from the building’s fourteenth floor. They throw themselves on purpose, the architects tell the newspaper. They throw themselves on purpose to see, if they live, if we will give them money.
When the projects are finished, the inaugurations are televised. They play a video of Papi from a kickoff years ago; I can always tell cuz whatever he’s wearing has been out of fashion for years now. In front of each project there’s a sign that says Papi Did This. I imagine one of Papi’s associates’ hands signing the checks.
But not all the projects are completed and so there are half apartments, half airports, half malls, half bridges with rods hanging like teeth and pointing at the bottom of the river. The city is now a mock-up on which thousands of pastel or phosphorescent painted two- and three-unit buildings are being raised, each unit with its own balcony, its own ferns and aloes and snake plants in brick-colored pots. Most of the landscape is taken over by the skeletons of hous
es, buildings, towers, and storefronts that, one budget cut ago, surrendered to creeping vines and a post-satanic cult that needed shelter.
The housing is distributed according to the results of urine tests that confirm a relationship to Papi, though the results can be tricked up by drinking Papi’s blood or vinegar or by filling out a thirty-page questionnaire in which the applicant relates all manner of Papi anecdotes, including exact dates and places. In the meantime, there are photo studios and support centers getting rich off the illiterates who come to dictate their stories and have their 2 × 2 picture taken so they can attach it, as required, to the questionnaire. Some centers also clandestinely hand out Papi’s blood—no one knows how they get it—and a few others (more sophisticated) give out little baby-food jars guaranteed to be filled with his urine.
Now there are also lines to confirm blood ties, lines to hand out keys (Tuesdays at 6 p.m.), lines to go into department stores with really good specials where, every now and then, a couple of ladies will start a fight over the last ceiling fan with bell-shaped bulbs. And everywhere—on billboards, at intersections, on electric signs, on the murals on those salty walls along the Malecón—there’s Papi’s face and the colors of the flag, and below him a slogan like a prayer: We’re All Family.
My part of the family, the royal family, got an apartment in La Feria neighborhood when they were being handed out. It’s a three-story building in front of the Lotería Nacional: we’re in 3A. At the Lotería Nacional they raffle off a date with Papi every Sunday and then the rest of the week they keep people calm by giving away money, Jet Skis, and electric knives. Every day from nine to five you can hear two voices announcing prizes, one a man’s, one a woman’s. One voice calls out the winning number and the other responds with the prize, which is almost always six hundred and fifty pesos. And we (six hundred and fifty pesos!) are the privileged few (six hundred and fifty pesos!) who don’t need (six hundred and fifty pesos!) a radio to hear them. The speakers (seven hundred and fifty pesos!) can be heard all over the block (six hundred and fifty pesos!) and shake the cups (six hundred and fifty pesos!) Cilí has in her china hutch (third prize!).
They’ve gotten me a little job (six hundred and fifty pesos!) at a flower shop (six hundred and fifty pesos!) which, they say, Papi set up for a country girl who lives in 2D (six hundred and fifty pesos!). I spend all day there spraying white flowers (six hundred and fifty pesos!) with an indigo spray (three thousand five hundred pesos!) while the woman answers the phone and says things like, We have gladiolus that can tell time (main prize!).
My pay at this job includes letting me paint the flowers, which I love, and hanging out in the AC, which the flowers need all day long. They also let me play with the little green bricks they use to keep the flowers standing in the arrangements. I don’t know the name of the material these little bricks are made of but they always have to be wet, and so they keep them in a yellow plastic baby tub to which we add ice water now and again. I do this too. The owner told me one day she’s gonna teach me to make ikebana and that you can earn a living making ikebana, that she knows a woman who supports five kids making ikebana, and I have to ask what the hell that means. The owner’s son spends the entire day in a minivan delivering flowers, and when he comes back at night we have dinner together if Cilí hasn’t called me. Sometimes they invite me to watch a horror movie with them. The other day they screened Santo versus the She-Wolves—she-wolves! The flowers are for births, weddings, lovers, and funerals, but we arrange more flowers for deaths than anything else.
La Feria neighborhood has several names. Some say its real name is Matahambre, or Hungerkiller, but others say Hungerkiller ends three streets away. When there’s mail at Cilí’s, which is almost always just postcards I sent when I visited Papi, I look at the address to see what they put and it almost always says Centro de Los Héroes. Puchy says it’s called that cuz a lot of heroes died here but Milly throws a potato she’s been peeling at him and says, Don’t fill the girl’s head with nonsense. Tía China, who knows more than the twins cuz she’s been going to the Universidad Autónoma for about ten years, tells me the neighborhood’s real name is Feria de la Confraternidad y el Mundo Unido—or, Fraternity and World Unity Market. She says that’s the name Papi gave the neighborhood, and when Papi names something, nothing can change it. She says he bestowed this name cuz, about two blocks from Cilí’s house, there’s a monument in the shape of a little ball representing the earth and this monument is really the center of the world.
I’ve seen that little ball, which is just a cement globe. After four in the afternoon, just as the sun is going down, that’s when the hos (that’s what they call the whores) start hanging around. And after seven, when the sun is completely gone, queens and little fag glue sniffers begin to make their rounds, and then the cops with their billy clubs come to beat whomever doesn’t go around the little earth ball six hundred and fifty times. There’s also a bug-filled fountain that shoots water only on an occasional Sunday. It’s surrounded by very tall poles from which, according to what Puchy tells me, there used to be flags from different countries. People would come by in their cars back when hardly anybody had a car, and they’d circle the fountain and wear white linen. That’s when Milly throws a tube of toothpaste at Puchy’s head.
It’s a few steps from the little ball of the world to our building. The little ball is next to the Lotería Nacional, which is why the queens, the glue-sniffing fags with their jars of glue, and the whores practically live in our lot. Night and day it’s filled with white plastic chairs, with empty Presidente and Bohemia beer bottles scattered about the chair legs. People play dominoes and tell jokes as if they weren’t in line, as if nothing were going on in the shade of those jabilla trees. They’re leafy like almond trees, but their fruit, with a light green rind and a velvety down, is terribly poisonous.
On the first floor there’s a Turk who claims to know Papi from the navy, and he established a grocery and fish market people used to complain about cuz they’d go in to buy a pound of rice or a quart of oil and come out reeking of fish. In the end, the grocery and fish market became just a grocery, cuz nobody likes fish that much anyway. Then the Turk, seeing all those people out in the lot, put up two towering speakers he kept going day and night, competing with the lottery prizes, and blasting all the merengue hits of the moment.
The drains around the building don’t work and are full from the rains, the hurricanes, and the soapy excess from the women who do their laundry on the sidewalks. The water gets thick and green and nasty, a foamy sauce that practically requires a drawbridge to get over. One day I stuck a branch in but when I pulled it out, it was just a string of smoke; the green stew had consumed it like battery acid. I immediately rushed home and got a bottle of Coke so I could fill it with that thick goo and stick it under my bed. First, I showed it to Moise and Zequi (whose real names are Moisés and Ezequiel), two brothers who live in 1A, Pepe’s kids, Leysi’s best friend. They’re evangelicals and so they don’t have priests or nuns. People just come over, usually bearing biblical names. I wish I had a biblical name. I’d like to point to a section of the Bible with my name in it that says I did this or that. Zequi showed me his section and I was very impressed, that is, until Moisés showed me his.
Pepe (whose real name is Esperanza) is always buttering a piece of Pepín bread. She’s almost always sitting with a bag of Pepín bread on her lap and a stick of butter in her hand. She takes a piece of bread and butters it and hands it to Zequi or Moise or their little brother Dundo, the youngest, who’s pretty slow but knows Ecclesiastes from one end to the other and recites it as he plucks little turds from his butt with his thumbnail. All four are illuminated by a gas lamp cuz the transformer on the corner exploded this afternoon and the electric company still hasn’t sent anyone to fix it. The lamplight hits Pepe’s face, which is very dark, with very black eyes, with gray hairs only by her ears. The light also gleams on the metal cups Pepe uses to serve Tang to her kids before the brot
hers and sisters from church come over to sing and clap and play the tambourine, occupying all seven rocking chairs in Pepe’s living room, rocking chairs on which on more than one occasion the Holy Spirit has rocked.
And almost always, between this and that psalm, between this and that song, the pastor speaks in tongues and he and some other brother twist their ankles all the way around like the girl turning her head in The Exorcist. There’s a very slight mist that comes in off the street, a mix of pee and cigarette smoke.
That pee stink comes from Boque Sopa, a drunk who lives under the stairs and pisses everywhere. Boque Sopa (whose real name is Jesús) must be about thirty years old, but he looks older than Cilí. He’s white but he wears an afro and his eyes are red all the time. When he first got here, everybody got together to get him little jobs. They said he could clean the ditches, they told him, or pick up empty beer bottles to sell, or trim the trees, or wash cars, or sweep and mop the stairs. There’s so much you can do, they told him. The neighbors gave Boque Sopa a set of tools, a box for the tools, an orange hoodie with a stripe (phosphorescent, just like the firefighters), a hat, rubber boots, a rake, but Boque Sopa drank it all up that very night. Cuz Boque Sopa can drink anything. It’s a miracle! shouts Boque Sopa when he wakes up naked on the flat cardboard where he sleeps and, once more, everything’s vanished. With his eyes redder than the devil’s, and with the gardening shears still in his hand (he slept gripping them), he climbs up to Cilí’s to see if she’ll give him one of the twins’ jeans or a T-shirt of mine or a small bowl of soup, or whatever. Boque Sopa doesn’t let go of those gardening shears anymore, though the jabilla trees in the park need more of an electric razor, but Boque Sopa makes the effort and hangs from a branch like a monkey, balancing the hand with the shears. The kids throw jabillas and rocks to knock him down. When he comes up asking for water with an empty Carnation milk can he rescued from the trash, Cilí, who’s the only person who ever calls him by name, cuts a little piece of Camay soap to give him. Papi sends us soaps by the box, ditto with deodorants, detergent, and shampoo.
