Bird of Paradise

by Raquel Cepeda

  This woman made me long for the tough-as-nails Irish-American chicks I grew up with. At least they were brutally honest with their feelings, regardless of what side of the divide they stood on.

  Many Latino-Americans from all over the city must have been feeling the same way Gigi and I did. One morning on my way to the 1 train, I see a white T-shirt with bold black letters that read, “I’M NOT A TERRORIST, I’M DOMINICAN—on the window of a mom-and-pop clothing store. I start to eavesdrop on conversations and overhear other Latinos recounting stories of being harassed because of how they look, especially when venturing downtown.

  I secretly wished one of those accounts had come from Dad. We’d been, for the most part, civil since Djali was born, but now Dad began to jump on the anti-Arabic bandwagon though he could easily have been mistaken for a Middle Easterner. I was torn. If it wasn’t for Dad and Maria’s intervention, I might have lost my head to an almost crippling battle with postpartum depression, made worse by the fling-cum-forced-relationship I felt stuck in with Monk. Dad stepped in and helped me escape a miserable environment when Djali was still a newborn, despite Alice’s protests to let me fend for myself.

  “You’re never going to lose the weight you gained carrying Djali,” Monk would say. “You’re never going to succeed as a writer.” I was quickly sinking into emotional quicksand. I believed everything Monk said, despite the fact that we didn’t know each other well enough to engage in any kind of psychological war of attrition. I began to think it was true that I was incapable of being a good mother because I never really had one. I believed that I should think about getting a “real job” because I’d surely fail as a writer. I bought all kinds of shit from Monk, a very well-spoken and frustrated rap music producer I suspected had a split personality disorder. Being with him made my insides feel like they were stuffed into a pressure cooker that was my body. Fuck, I thought, I’m becoming Rocío. Just as I began totally imploding, Dad called me. “I will do what I can to help you and the girl,” he said. He couldn’t pronounce Djali’s name correctly until she was almost two. “Please stop your worrying.” So Monk led me, by way of our daughter, back into Dad’s life. Everyone, I suppose, has a purpose.

  And yet, despite his intervention, a greater part of me wants Dad to feel what it’s like to be persecuted for being something he is not. I want him to feel the pain and confusion I did all these years for simply reminding him of what he was, un dominicano.

  * * *

  Maria gave up her apartment and sold everything in it before moving to Florida. Everywhere she looked, Maria was reminded of what she wanted to forget. She never did recover from Casimiro’s betrayal, even after she exacted revenge. The curse Maria delivered with her sharp tongue against Casimiro’s illegitimate child had come to pass. The boy with the most beautiful algae-green eyes I’d ever seen had been spotted talking to himself, como un loco de remate, on the block.

  Blackie followed Maria down to Florida, and eventually, most of the neighbors who used to frequent her apartment for dinner and bochinche also moved away. Many relocated to the South, back home to Santo Domingo, or because they were being priced out of the neighborhood, to the outer boroughs of the city.

  On a particularly humid summer day in 2003, my cell phone rings. I notice Maria’s area code on my caller ID and pick it up. “Hola, Maria,” I say, sitting down on the ledge in front of McDonald’s. “Mira, it’s hot as hell and smells as bad as sweaty balls out here. What’s up, Ma?”

  Maria doesn’t laugh like she usually does when I paint gross mental pictures for her. I can hear her breathing on the other end.

  “Raquel, por favor, come see me,” she says. “I’m dying from the cancer otra vez.”

  I don’t believe her. I just saw Maria a couple months earlier, when she came to visit us for the week. She looked as radiant as she did whenever she came back from vacationing in Santo Domingo. “You don’t look like you’ve been sick or undergone chemo, Ma,” I said to her. Her locks were thick as ever; Djali was kneeling behind her on my bed, using her small fingers as a comb and pretending to braid it. Maria responded, “Well, my cancer went away again because of the treatments, but I’m sure they’ll find something else very soon.” I’ve lost count of how many times she claimed to have cancer, AIDS in certain body parts, and all other sorts of ailments she miraculously bounced back from.

  “I have some’sin you like I going to give you,” Maria struggles to say, “the dark yellow and red scarf I got when Angelito’s father y yo estábamos jodiendo con los Hare Krishna downtown.”

  “Okay, Maria, hold it for me,” I respond. “When I come, you have to tell me the details of how you got entangled with them.”

  Maria laughs, then coughs and sighs. I’ve heard this despondency in her voice before.

  “Yo tengo your magazines on my night table,” she says. “I knew you could do it.”

  “It’s extremely busy up there right now,” I say to her. I started my post as editor in chief of Russell Simmons’ Oneworld magazine at the end of August 2001, and each page we produce is like birthing a litter of children every couple of months. I rarely take time off.

  “I know you’re busy. Do you go to all those countries where that basura is popular?” she asks. “You should put Eddie Santiago or Sergio Vargas in your magazine.”

  “I love them, but this is about hip-hop and its poder a través el mundo entero.”

  “Yes, I hear rapping down here in that reggae the Puerto Ricans sing.”

  “Are you hanging out in the club, Ma?” I joke.

  She struggled to speak. “I may be old, but I’m not dead. Yet.”

  In a few weeks’ time, I thought, she’d be back to her normal mercurial self.

  Maria died weeks later.

  * * *

  Today I recognize 512 only as a relic of its former self. It has lost its soul now that Maria isn’t there to feed her neighbors. And it really doesn’t matter, because the people here have long since started to bolt their doors at night and look down when walking by their vecinos.

  PART II

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Truth, Reconciliation, and Time Machines

  Our heirs, whatever or whoever they may be, will explore space and time to degrees we cannot currently fathom. They will create new melodies in the music of time. There are infinite harmonies to be explored.

  —CLIFFORD PICKOVER, TIME: A TRAVELER’S GUIDE

  “SO, DAD, BACK TO THE MORLOCKS AND ELOI,” I SAY OVER RICE and beans at the Dominican joint in our neighborhood. “This whole ancestral DNA thing is exactly like time traveling.”

  “What?” Dad asks, holding a piece of grilled chicken in his right hand and a glass of Pepsi in the other. “What you’re talking about?” He looks over at Djali, now a freshman in high school, doing math homework when she’s not picking at her plate of rice and beans. Although Djali and I are so close that we can sometimes communicate telepathically, she has no clue what I’m talking about, either. “Tell your mo’tha I already said I would think about it,” Dad says. Djali shrugs. “Just do it, Papa, please,” she says, “unless you want her to keep going.”

  * * *

  There’s no more time to think about it. Just a few months ago, Dad was reclining in a hospital bed, looking as terrified as I did when I was living like a scared animal under his roof. Djali, the conduit responsible for thawing our frostbitten relationship, lay down next to Dad, eating the chips we bought him at the deli. Alice sat on the edge of the bed, talking about everything and nothing, as usual. “I should go get shrimp for the turtle, oh, and my sister called; her husband is better. I spoke to the girls at my old job, and Karena got into an argument on the train, and if I order rice and beans from Mi Pequeña, I can walk to get the shrimp for the turtle down the block and . . .” My husband, Sacha, sat quietly in the large moss-green chair, talking to Dad about the latest television pilot he was producing.

  I looked over at Sacha from the doorway where I was leaning and wondered how ma
ny people had sat in that very chair and watched their own fathers expire like cartons of milk languishing in the back of the fridge. The hospital room was as cold as dead skin, the hallway crowded with lost souls and reeking of illness.

  Dad wouldn’t allow anyone to help him out of the hospital bed. He forced himself up on his elbows, then rolled on his side before lunging up while holding a pillow close to his heart. From his grimace, I could tell he was in excruciating pain. I think Dad wanted to feel the pain, to feel his body cry, an urgent reminder that he was still alive. I pretended not to notice.

  “So, I wan’ to say bye, jus’ in case. Just. In. Case,” he labored, walking over toward the doorway. His hospital gown had slipped off his spindly shoulder; it fit him like a Snuggie. His already thin legs looked like stilts poorly supporting their unfortunate wearer. The heat emanating from his body was weirdly assuring. I allowed Dad to lean against me for support. I couldn’t let go and watch him fall to the floor, even though I had often fantasized of revenge, of one day degrading him like he did me.

  “Let me give you a hug. Come on, my daughter,” he continued. “My daughter.” I could count on both hands the times he’d addressed me as his daughter. I couldn’t remember him ever offering to hug me, and the thought sent chills through my body, making the hair on my arms stand on end. Dad had gone under the knife before because of his heart, but this time something felt different. I tried to figure out what I found scarier to grapple with, the potential loss of my dad—despite being unable to stand him for most of my life—or that I found myself giving a shit.

  The afternoon before checking him into the hospital, we were sitting across from each other at our usual table at the Dominican restaurant, having another heated argument.

  “I belief in mass depor’dation,” he blurted out in response to a Telemundo news report blaring from the restaurant’s TV, about yet another Latino getting jumped for no other reason than because he looked Latino, whatever the hell that meant. “Dey shou’ take them all out o’ here.”

  “Do you even understand that dozens of American territories were Mexican not that long ago, or that the border is just an imaginary wall imposed on people who have lived in those territories for centuries, Dad?” I asked.

  “That don’t matter,” he replied, as he usually did right before deciding to tune out of the conversation.

  “Dad,” I tried to reason, “don’t you think it’s hypocritical that Americans, both Black and white, call Mexicans ‘illegal,’ although they were here first?” Don’t you feel any outrage at all for how ‘they,’ who will spill over into the collective ‘us,’ are treated?” I waited for an answer. Dad remained silent for a few seconds and then changed the subject.

  Even though Dad and I argued more often than not, I couldn’t help but feeling moved for him at the hospital. He extended his arms over my shoulders, panting for air as he leaned in to me. In midwheeze, he fixed his lips to kiss me on the cheek. “I love you”—pause—“in case of,” he managed. “Love.” I didn’t recall him ever using that word when it came to me. It sounded almost inappropriate, even foolish, all these years later. Alice, still sitting on the bed, looked down at the floor, and Djali let out an uneasy chuckle because, after all, the display of affection coming from her papa toward me was sort of absurd.

  “Come on,” I whispered, wiping the wetness from my cheek, “that’s gross.” That’s all I could say. As I was leaving, it hit me. In one of those “duh” moments, I realized that in addition to our shared deadpan, sardonic humor, my dad and I possess an awkward sort of love for each other. Maybe we do have a little something in common. We have both dealt with our pasts by not talking about it and, perhaps consequently, have grown equally detached from most of our relatives.

  I’ve been too busy running away from the violence and abandonment that marked a big chunk of my childhood to revisit it. However, as resolved as I was to forget the past, I found myself determined to excavate it. And if Dad didn’t pull through his surgery, then a part of me would die with him. I needed Dad to help me uncover an important part of our family’s history. By using the science of ancestral DNA testing, I’d be able to start piecing together the puzzle of our history that had eluded me all these years: our ancestral origins. All it took was one scrape of his cheek. Where the results would lead me was anybody’s guess.

  Dad was released into our care after his heart surgery. Watching him sleep during the day, I thought of how to broach the subject of ancestry without getting into a fight with him. Every time he awoke from a nap, I tried to bring it up, but since his operation he’d been showing interest in only one topic—time—or, more specifically, time machines. I hadn’t heard this talk in a while, not since he first sprang it on me a couple of years ago. He said the idea had come to him in a dream: building something that “will change and correct the past and save a lot of people.” Time machines had become an outright obsession.

  “Can you jus’ imagine if we could go back in time,” he said one afternoon as he was resting upright against a stack of pillows on our bed. Every time he brought it up, I acted as if it were the first time he’d broached the subject, perking up in my seat.

  “I don’t imagine going back in time at all. I don’t think I can do that again,” I said.

  “I have a dream again las’ night about my machine,” he said. “Imagine if we could go back through history to find and put Hitler in a prison. Everything would be different. All of history.”

  “That would be something, Dad,” I said, hoping he wouldn’t work himself up.

  “The government can use my machine to catch all the criminals in the world and, and—”

  “Dad, the government may not be the right set of people to trust with a machine like that.”

  “I don’t care.” He struggled, his voice escalating.

  Djali, consumed with everything but time machines, zoomed past my bedroom, trying not to get swallowed up in Dad’s madness.

  “Eduardo,” Alice said, standing at the door, “please stop with that talk already.”

  “Dah’ling, shut up!” he snapped. “I can say what I want to in my daughter’s house.”

  “Well, if I could go back, I would burn that hideous polar bear coat you and Alice forced me to wear in eighth grade, when you promised me a sheepskin.”

  My father wasn’t amused, and Alice, as usual, frowned with her entire face. “Everytheen to you is a joke. I am going to have the last laugh when I make my time machine.”

  I thought about it. I may have found a way in. I’d invite Dad to take a trip back in time without actually having to go anywhere.

  “Dad, speaking of your time machine, there’s a way we can do that—travel back—without having to build anything or spend too much time looking for the parts to build it.”

  My father’s interest was piqued. I decided to pitch time travel, but my version of it. Like H. G. Wells’s narrator in The Time Machine, we’d be traveling through time and space. However, rather than jumping into the unknown world of the Morlocks and Eloi, we’d be making a direct link to our own history with our own saints and sinners. “And,” I tell Dad, “all it’ll take is a swab and a couple scrapes of the insides of our cheeks to get going.”

  “Let me think about it,” he said. I let it go.

  “Listen, Dad, there is no more time to think about it,” I say, drinking a second cup of café con leche. “How many lunches do I have to buy you to get an answer already?” Dad doesn’t have a clue that I already ordered and received the kits.

  “We’ll see. There are no needles, right?” he asks yet again. I already answered the question several times over the course of a month. Dad grins like he does when he’s either withholding something or satisfied with himself.

  “No, Dad,” I say calmly, “no freaking needles.”

  The science of ancestral DNA is something I’m learning about myself. DNA, an acronym for deoxyribonucleic acid, is the material within us that carries our unique genetic informati
on. Spencer Wells, an Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society, director of its Genographic Project, and a rock star in the field of population genetics, traced the patterns of human migration out of Africa by analyzing the Y chromosome in his documentary Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey, named after the book the film was based on. In it, Wells describes DNA in the most accessible way for a neophyte like me to understand: “Our DNA carries, hidden in its string of four simple letters, a historical document stretching back to the origin of life and the first self-replicating molecules . . .” We human beings “are the end result of over a billion years of evolutionary tinkering, and our genes carry the seams and spot-welds that reveal the story.”

  Based on genetic evidence, every human being on the planet today descends from a single man who lived in Africa about sixty thousand years ago. About ten thousand years later, human beings started migrating in waves out of the continent.

  The first people who left followed a coastal migration route on the south coast of Asia and ended up in Australia. Another band followed a different route that ended up in Central Asia. Once there, Wells and his team learned that about thirty-five to forty thousand years ago, this band of people branched off. Wells found a man living in Kazakhstan today whose direct ancestor lived in Southern Central Asia and begat all Europeans, many Indians, and ultimately, Indigenous-Americans.

  About fifteen thousand years ago, an ancestral group of eastern Russian Chukchi people made a leap across the Bering Strait during the ice age and walked into Alaska. About thirteen thousand years ago, between ten and twenty of these folks found their way into what is now the United States. In only eight hundred years, they peopled both North and South America.

  * * *

  Lucky for me, Bennett Greenspan, the founder and CEO of Family Tree DNA, has the kind of patience I can only dream of possessing. Perhaps more important, he doesn’t tire of talking about genetics in a way that is comprehensible for people like me who don’t subscribe to Popular Science. My ethnic background is intriguing to Bennett because, while his company stores the largest repository of DNA samples in the world, the Latino-American population makes up a relatively small portion.