The Resurrection of Joan Ashby

by Cherise Wolas

  However, when I stand at my windows with my binoculars pressed to my eyes and the street is empty, and remains empty for hours and hours, it is then I realize I am a prisoner, always dressed in one of the many pairs of pin-striped pajamas I own. When I am surrounded by that silence, when from down below my sisters, Veronica and Helena, are not engaged in a sisterly debate, and my mother is not calling out one thing or another, and my father is not yet home for the night, and when the birds have ceased shuffling between brown branches and tsking when they settle into their nests for the night, and the weather is doing whatever it does, I feel the fear haunting those who love me. Beware! Beware! I always hear everyone thinking, worried that I might suffer a fatal cut and my blood will flow unstaunched until I am emptied out. I will not lie—I worry too.

  I assume that my creating other lives makes sense to you now, my dreams sending me to Medellín, Moscow, Istanbul, and the Galápagos Islands, places where I am someone who is free and adventurous. It’s odd, because as many times as I have been Deo, Abel, Icarus, and Zed, at first, when I land in the same blank space, a tunnel of concrete, wearing my striped pajamas, I am not sure who or where I am. I dust myself off and head toward the white light beckoning in the distance. Sometimes I need only take three steps, sometimes four hundred, sometimes two thousand, until I step out into my new world and look down to see whether I am wearing huarache sandals, fur-lined boots, Turkish slippers, or flip-flops. Even when I say, “Oh, I’m in Colombia or Russia or Turkey or on an island in the Eastern Pacific Ocean,” I need clues to recall my alternate life, clues thrown my way that I heed and roll into my being, until the diverse parts of myself are a united whole. Most of the time, at the start, I don’t even remember my name.

  My high school teacher, nut-sized Mr. Patel, a walnut of a man, once a medical school professor in Mumbai, reduced to teaching high school science in Rhome, came into my mind all at once, and I realized it was because of Kartar. Kartar and Mr. Patel shared the same lyrical intonations, the same nutmeg-hued skin. His son, Rajeev, had been in my class. From Mr. Patel, I learned the intricacies of systems I still have memorized alphabetically: cardiovascular, digestive, endocrine, immune, integumentary, musculoskeletal, nervous, respiratory, reproductive, and urinary; and about their systemic exceptions, diseases that arrested the body’s mechanics. Mr. Patel lectured excitedly on hemophilia, called it “the royal disease.” It was a physical science class, but he talked cheerfully about the stricken royal lineages of the Russians, the British, the Spaniards, the Germans. More than a few times, he uttered his calmly democratic statement: “Being royalty, with its power and riches and unfair advantages, also carries the possibility that your blood might be contaminated. A high birth will not save you, if your blood refuses natural containment within its earthly vessel.”

  So from Kartar to Mr. Patel, who buttered high school science with political theory, to Simon Tabor, a hemophiliac narrator suffering that inherited blood disorder where the body’s natural clotting factor is absent. My mother would say nothing is random; coincidence does not exist, just the right time for forces to unite.

  I reviewed the table of contents again. In “The Travels of Boys,” the stories hinged on the first version of Simon Tabor, the hemophiliac trapped in his room, that began with “Simon Tabor Introduces Himself” and “Simon Tabor Explains All.” In the next four stories, “Furia Returns,” “Abel’s New Game,” “Icarus Dives,” and “Zed’s Scepter,” the teenage hemophiliac was living as one of his imaginary boys in their exotic milieus.

  I dove into the first one, “Furia Returns.”

  My bare feet echo until I am through that tunnel. Then I look around and there is the Museo de Antioquia, and the Uribe Palace of Culture, and so I know I am in the City of Eternal Spring, in Medellín, Colombia. Policía, guns tucked into their holsters, are guarding barricades, looking exhausted, their uniforms sweat-stained, and not at all snappy. It is a thankless job, policing the most dangerous city in the world, run by the infamous drug lord Pablo Escobar. As I walk past, I wonder how many of them are corrupt, are in Pablo’s pockets, his cocaine still fresh up their noses. One cop waves at me, says, “Paleto! Bienvenida a la ciudad!” He’s ironically welcoming me to the city, but I wonder why he’s called me a country bumpkin. I look down and find I am wearing my huarache sandals, and loose linen pants, and when I finger my shirt, it is collarless. I realize I have a hat on my head, and pull off a sombrero vueltiao intricately woven in cream and black. The cop was right; I am in the clothes of a country boy, but I sense I do not come from the rural part. You see, there are always glitches in reality that I must work through.

  I am still holding my hat in my hands when I suddenly find myself in an art gallery, and a man says to me, “Deo, mi hijo, explain to our illustrious guests the getup that you are wearing.”

  Oh, yes, right. In the City of Eternal Spring, where cocaine paves the streets, I am Deo Furia, and this man must be my father. My Spanish is rusty at first, but I know hijo means “son.”

  The guests are Americanos, a husband and a wife, who are stupid, or brave, to be in Medellín at this time.

  “Well,” I say, giving them the full force of my smile, “I am dressed like this because it reminds me of our peasant past. The sombrero, loosely translated as ‘turned hat,’ is a Colombian national symbol, handcrafted out of natural palm leaves using a traditional Zenu technique that can depict religious scenes or everyday activities like hunting and fishing. You need not be religioso. You need not be a hunter or fisherman, you need only love and respect the craftsmanship. This one, as you can see, is a geometric rendition. Stunning, is it not?”

  I turn my eyes innocent and say, “Padre, you don’t mean to sell my sombrero, do you? It is a rare one, made for me personally by the old man in the hill shack who creates hats only for those not born on the Ides of March.” My father winks at me.

  He is pleased because the Americanos have not moved from their spot in front of A Woman Who Expects Too Much. It is an enormous and expensive painting by the famous Colombian painter Gómez Días Muñoz, and mi padre would very much like them to purchase it. He is soft-shoe dancing, nearing the bulk of the painted woman in her frilled burnt-tangerine dress, pointing out what the artist was saying with the jeweled bracelets that encircle both of her wrists, her painted nails at the ends of small, childish fingers, the glove in her left hand, the clutch purse in her right. I think she looks like a human cake, with those three chins, the choker nestled against the bounty, her hair like meringue, a tangerine flower affixed behind her left ear. Her eyes are black currants, her brows arched, her lipsticked mouth tight. Ah, but she is all done up and ready for viewing, presenting herself, I think, to someone whose opinion she cares about and may not receive, unsure whether the frills, the long kimono-style sleeves, the sensual color of the dress suits her at all. She is a cake-topper, for sure.

  “Deo,” my father says, “allow Mrs. Warring to inspect your sombrero vueltiao.”

  I hand it over to the Americana, who smiles at me with her small white rodent teeth, the nostrils of her button nose flaring. She is elongated and flat as a board, spared of breasts, hips, any kind of saucy rear. It is hard to imagine that underneath their clothing, Mrs. Warring and A Woman Who Expects Too Much each have nipples, belly buttons, pussies, and haunches. The only thing they share in common: the prerogative of fortune.

  The price of the painting is 361,000,000 COP, or $1 million. I am not sure how I know this because I do not remember seeing the price list for the art my father represents, but I know their images are in a binder on the shiny white desk at the front of the gallery, where a girl with a curtain of bright yellow hair sits with her legs crossed. Her gleaming thighs are sunlit-striped because of the iron bars over the skylight, installed to keep out potential marauders and thieves. But direct sun has found her face, giving her a halo and an angelic vibration, despite lips painted magenta. She nods at me, and I wave back.

  “I will split the cost of s
hipping,” my father says, and the Americano clucks while his wife strokes my hat between her pink palms, something salacious in the way she fingers the brim. The man paws his smooth coral chin for a while, until he catches from the side of his colorless eyes the slight nod of his wife. Then he says, “Yes. The Gómez Días Muñoz and the sombrero.”

  “Lo que una decisión brillante,” my father says, and the tone in his voice opens the vault in my mind.

  I know who my father is. He is Ernesto Furia, once Pablo Escobar’s right-hand man, a step below the king, but with a golden crown of his own. Billions, hundreds of billions, perhaps trillions, who knows what my Colombian father has salted away in the false walls and hidden catacombs beneath our house in Envigado Finca, for I recall, too, that’s where we live.

  It’s returning to me, the day the CNP, the nacional policia, scooped up my father and a few other high-ranking members of the Escobar crew, while Pablo escaped the clutches of the law, as he always manages to do. When I was allowed to visit my father in prison, he would say, “Mi hijo, cuando salga de la cárcel, quiero estar rodeado de belleza, por el art. No más crimen para mí. And he’s done that: he’s an abogado turned cocaine trafficker turned gallery owner, surrounded by beauty every day now. Colombia is corrupt, violent, and bloody, but my father saw that its most important artists lacked representation by a person with a great eye, business acumen, endless connections, and cash, all of which Ernesto Furia has. Now he flogs their work until it gallops out into the world, on a personal mission to demonstrate that Colombia offers much more than drugs and bullets and all the inocentes muertos.

  Hence Galeria de Furia, a purist’s space with a not-for-sale-centerpiece: Gómez Días Muñoz’s We Pray for the Death of Pablo Escobar. The single painting Ernesto says connects his past to a great day in the future, allows him to joke about previous pain. While my father works with the Americanos to document the transaction, I sidle up to the famous work and take it all in.

  We Pray for the Death of Pablo Escobar is Muñoz’s great painting of hope. In it, the infamous drug lord stands close to a blustery sky, surrounded by the red-clay rooftops of Medellín. On the red-tiled roof of a house in the foreground, his bare feet nearly dance the first steps of a cumbia. His white shirt is unbuttoned and bloodstained. Bullets have pierced his round belly, his neck, there is a direct shot through his forehead. The gun in his left hand is useless, his finger free of the trigger, the barrel aimed at the heavens, but his right hand still is outstretched, fending off the continuing barrage, as if he might prevent the mowing down that has already, in Muñoz’s mind, happened. This painting, I remember, is my birthright. Ernesto Furia has sworn many times that never will Muñoz’s masterpiece belong to anyone not a Furia, and I am the only Furia beyond him.

  Ernesto pumps the man’s hand, kisses the wife on the cheek, and when they walk out of the gallery, he leads me into his office. I see how his soul gleams white these days. From the closet, he retrieves a tan suede jacket. In those few seconds, when the door is ajar, I see stacks of sombrero vueltiaos on the shelves. This hat trick with the Americanos, it was not our first time—

  Then Deo and Ernesto were on the Santa Helena highway in an old silver 911 Porsche Targa with the removable roof long gone, the wing mirrors too, bullet holes pocking the doors, racing the few wispy clouds moving fast through the blue sky. Soon they were entering the gates of a huge house monitored by an impressive number of closed-circuit cameras, calling out to Deo’s mother, Adalina, who emerged like a goddess from the man-made lake, wishing her son congratulations on his last day of school, telling him his girlfriend called to wish him a happy sixteenth birthday.

  In Colombia, I have a girlfriend named Isabel, a nice girl who goes to church on more than just her saint’s day. At first, when her father saw that we liked each other, he refused to let Isabel out of his sight. But my father convinced him that he was completely reformed, a do-gooder now, and that Isabel had nothing to fear, no danger would be visited upon her, if she were allowed to date Ernesto Furia’s son. Everything has worked out well. Isabel is gorgeous, and I am in love for the first time in my life.

  Before I can say, “Gracias, madre,” a funny sound makes me look up. Two blue-green parrots are dancing on a nearby branch, their claws clicking on the wood, their beaks opening and closing, their high-pitched caws chirruping through the air, and I feel myself floating away.

  The other three stories were just as enthralling. In frozen Moscow, Russian Abel breeds dogs free of bark and bite, but capable of furious meowing. Icarus can hold his breath for days, dives deep into the Eastern Pacific Ocean with no need for scuba gear, but loaded down with underwater cameras in order to photograph a colorful eel never before seen by man, brings it up to show his father, the man who discovered the Galápagos Islands. Zed, the son of a Turkish Ottoman pasha, reclaims his father’s throne, rules the city from a palace overlooking the Bosporus Strait. In each, the relationships between those boys and their parents were tightly enmeshed, and all slightly off-kilter.

  When I finished, I looked at the stories listed in the second section, “The Rx of Life,” and from the titles it seemed that Ashby was going to widen the exposure, reveal the truth about the real Simon Tabor. Indeed, I would learn that Simon Tabor was not a hemophiliac at all, was not traipsing around the world in his dreams, but instead, was a real boy confined to his room for a completely different reason. That widening exposure, those revelations, were immediate when I began reading “An Afternoon at the Pool.”

  When the last bell of the school year rang on Friday, Simon Tabor rode his bike home, parked it at the side of the house, snapped out his bike pump, retrieved his old wading pool from the garage, and inflated it until the dimmed dinosaurs in the plastic came back to life. The family’s backyard was spacious, bursting with flowers and a real pool with deep water turned nearly white in the sun. If he wanted to, Simon could have stripped down and gone for a swim, but that’s not the experience he was after.

  There was a grassy verge close to the house, and there he set down the blown-up pool. He unfurled the garden hose, turned on the spigot, and waited for it to fill. When forced by his mother to water the roses, Simon did not always remember to wind the hose back up, but now he did, and stowed the contraption next to the brick steps that led to the sheltered veranda.

  He used his key to enter the house and locked the windowed patio doors behind him. His dog came running and Simon leaned over, petted the thick white fur. “Hey, Scooter, you good? You hungry?” In the kitchen, he filled up the dog’s bowl with kibble, gave him fresh water, took a bottle of red Gatorade from the fridge, and left Scooter munching away.

  Simon climbed the wooden staircase to the second floor, hitting each creak deliberately, his hand sliding up the rail. Usually, he took a sharp right turn into his bedroom, the door to which he never left open, but he had this morning, to show his mother he could be neat, an organized human being. He went down the hall instead, past his parents’ bedroom, past the bedrooms formerly inhabited by his older sisters, Phoebe and Rachel, to the very end where a thick rope hung from the ceiling like something left over from an abandoned lynching. He pulled the rope hard and released the hidden ladder to the attic.

  Over the years, he had made many secret trips up there, always hoping to find something more than the leftover rolls of pink insulation, the trunk of old stock quotes that belonged to his father, the box of costumes his sisters had worn for Halloween when they were children, a brown tool chest filled with hammers and nails and the like that no one ever used. He opened the lid and pulled out a screwdriver.

  At the far end of the attic, facing the street, was a diamond-shaped window not meant to be opened. Simon unscrewed the panes and stacked them on the floor. Then he dragged over his father’s trunk, stepped up, and boosted himself out the window, onto the flat roof of his home. He took a long swallow of his Gatorade.

  He had never seen the neighborhood from this height: desert plants instead of gras
sy lawns, front doors painted red, orange, yellow, and green. Their own door, which he could not see, was blue. In the late afternoon heat, trees were drooping in front yards and the houses looked sleepy.

  He had only ever lived in this house, in dry, dusty Bakersfield. His parents and sisters had once lived an entirely different existence before he was born, in a place with snowy blue winters, where they made snowmen in the front yard and played games in front of the fireplace. For some reason, he was thinking of this when he walked across the roof and looked into the backyard. Shanks of sunlight sparked up from the shallow water in his old wading pool, and he remembered playing in it when he was little, Phoebe and Rachel sitting on the grass, dunking him again and again.

  It felt good to be up here alone, above it all, where he could think quietly. What he had told his mother he needed to do. He kicked off his tennis shoes and curled his toes over the roof’s edge. He drank down the rest of the Gatorade and left the bottle on the gravel. To be free and airborne suddenly seemed a wonderful thing to do at the onset of summer, and before giving it any more thought, Simon Tabor leaped out into the pure blue sky, experiencing seconds of marvel and awe before he plummeted down. Later, he would remember nothing but the way the water had sprung up like a waterfall in reverse, how the sun-warmed drops rained down on him. Then he lost consciousness.

  Nathan Felt, the new neighbor from across the street, a man whose belongings had been unpacked the year before, but he had never been seen, watched Simon soaring through the air, and thought, maybe, though it couldn’t be true, that kid could really fly. When he heard the splash, then the implosion when Simon struck the ground, he dialed 911, and ran across the street, through the Tabors’ gate, into their backyard. Simon was half in and half out of the water, the plastic hissing with a leak, and he held Simon’s hand until the ambulance slammed to the curb and burly men raced into the backyard with a red medical box and a gurney. They strapped Simon’s neck into a brace, strapped him to the gurney, yelled out, “Desert Memorial,” then took Simon away, and Nathan Felt waited out front for some member of the family to return.