The Affliction

by C. Dale Young

  Rosa might not have thought about any of this the way I did or Javier did, but to close a letter with English was akin to abomination to her. And it made Carlitos crazy, despite the fact he also understood this better than almost anyone his mother knew. Everything about Rosa Blanco’s letters made Carlitos angry. Several times per week these letters arrived, and each and every time they were essentially the same. She prayed. She wanted him to admit killing Pedro was an accident. She was suffering. It was as if all he needed to do was read the first paragraph. That was the only part of the letter that changed from letter to letter. One could read a letter from two years ago or the one that would arrive two days later—they would both be essentially the same. And yet, despite this, Carlitos always read the entire thing. No one else wrote to him. He had no one else. The letter was as much a part of his routine as fake-Bill or the daily walk.

  Carlitos did not behave himself at lunch. He often didn’t. He ate, at most, four bites of his sandwich and then started throwing the rest of it across the small dining hall, at which point he was promptly returned to his room. He long ago discovered that this was a surefire way to get sent back to his room. He hated lunch. It was the only meal where he had to sit with the crazies and watch them all try to be normal. He wanted none of it. Breakfast and dinner were always brought to him in his room. And he would bet money that the reason lunch was in the dining area and not dinner had more to do with lack of staffing at dinnertime than anything else. And in this, Carlitos would be one hundred percent correct. At lunchtime, the entire staff was there. And even though Carlitos had no idea exactly how many people worked at the facility, he had somehow figured this out. Carlitos was a clever boy. He was always figuring things out.

  Lunch was the bane of his existence. He had been sitting across from the guy who had raped his sister and then cut out her tongue so she couldn’t tell anyone about it. Carlitos couldn’t understand how anyone could be so stupid as to cut out someone’s tongue with the notion that this could stop them from “talking.” Things like this never worked, not even in the movies or old books. Tongue or no tongue, the truth always came out. Didn’t we know this? Don’t we know it still? When the rapist realized this very fact an hour after cutting out his sister’s tongue, he tied her up and killed her, stabbed her twenty-two times. The lawyers had argued insanity and the Court spared him death for a life in prison. But he couldn’t be placed in prison. Like it had with Carlitos, the Court deemed the rapist mentally unfit to be in prison. The rapist had heard voices, had been instructed to cut his sister’s tongue out, had been instructed to thrust the large butcher knife he found in the kitchen into her chest over and over. One of the guards told another guard that the rapist went so far as to eat the tongue he cut from his sister’s mouth.

  Most of the other patients at the facility didn’t know the whole story about how the incestuous rapist ended up with them, but very little escaped Carlitos. Many assumed he was dumb, and they said unbelievable things within earshot of him, things they would never say in front of other patients. But the rapist was making terrible smacking noises as he ate, which he often did, chewing with his mouth open in a slow and methodical way so that the food could be seen going from solid to less solid states, his large tongue slowly moving the chewed-up food around in his mouth. And Carlitos was convinced the rapist was doing it on purpose to annoy him. Some ham smeared with mustard, pulled from the uneaten portion of his sandwich and thrown across the table, put a quick and clean end to the situation. Carlitos was back in his room within six minutes.

  With the exception of the walk and the lunch, Carlitos spent the majority of his day locked in his room. He had no telephone or television. All he had was an iPad, the gift of a philanthropic organization. The doctor had to approve any downloads of apps for it. No streaming video and, since the Internet connection in the patient areas was limited and controlled, no email either, not that Carlitos had anyone to email. To even download an app, Carlitos had to make an appointment with the doctor’s secretary. What Carlitos was supposed to use the iPad for was to read books. Mostly, he played a game with exploding jewels. At night, he would use an app that showed the night sky and the stars. He would lie on his back in the dark of his room with his iPad raised over his face at arm’s length looking at the constellations. As with the jays and the shadows, he had grown aware of when to expect certain constellations. He knew all of the constellations: Scorpio, Orion the hunter, the Pleiades clustered and buried within Taurus. He had that kind of a mind.

  Carlitos preferred keeping a journal on his iPad, despite the fact they provided him pencils and notepads. The notepads were never a problem, but the pencils were always tricky. Sometimes, the pencils seemed to elongate before his very eyes into spears and stakes. They would transform into branches in his hand, branches with spikes and thorns and all manner of jagged and pointed things. Transformations: they seemed ever present in Carlitos’ life. The pencils, the way his reflection sometimes morphed so that his face, at times, looked more like his dead brother’s face, the way the air just outside his plexiglass door sometimes shimmered and then darkened and darkened until it was a man watching him, staring at him. What Carlitos could not understand was why these transformations never happened with, say, his toothbrush. The toothbrush always remained a toothbrush. But pencils, well they sat in the corner of the room in their box. He couldn’t use them. He wouldn’t look at them. He would have preferred they took them away altogether.

  Once every few weeks, Carlitos would be summoned to see the doctor. It had been the same doctor for the entire time he had been there. The doctor would ask him questions and then watch for a change of expression. It was almost always the same. “Have you had any dreams, Carlos? Any visions of odd things? Are you keeping your journal?” Carlitos’ face remained unchanged. He would never describe the things he had seen, the transformations, the man who every so often seemed to materialize out of thin air to stare at him through the plexiglass for sometimes as long as twenty minutes before fading away, the man with the grayish-brown eyes who always had what Carlitos felt was the deepest concern etched on his face, the man who never so much as spoke a word to him. Who was this man? Carlitos felt quite certain he had seen the vanishing man when he still lived at home. He felt he had seen him outside Church sometimes when he and his mother and brother were leaving mass. He felt he had seen him just beyond the dusty schoolyard that seemed incapable of growing grass. But Carlitos distrusted his memory. And who could blame him?

  Sometimes, the doctor would ask if he had gotten any interesting news from his mother. Other times he asked whether or not Carlitos wanted to see a priest. For this, and this alone, Carlitos would offer a response. He would slowly rotate his head left to right and back to the left. “No? You still don’t want to see a priest? Your mother always asks if we can let you see a priest. . .” Again, Carlitos twisted his head. And again, the doctor would sigh and jot a few words on the paper in Carlitos’ chart. As he wrote, Carlitos stared at the doctor’s pen. He didn’t do this to see if it would transform into a branch or switch but to decipher what the doctor scribbled in the chart, the chart that had grown larger and larger with time, the one labeled CARLOS DROGÓN BLANCO, No. 0167 in yellow and white plastic tape. That day, the doctor wrote: “Status unchanged. Responds with head nod No. No other response. Remains mute.”

  When Carlitos lined up three jewels of the same kind on his iPad, they would explode and new jewels would fall into the excavated space. If he lined them up like an L, they exploded in a different way. As they exploded, Carlitos felt he could almost make out markings in the background of the screen, small etchings or hieroglyphs. But he could never remember them long enough to string them together, to construct the message he was certain was there behind the jewels. The jewels exploded and the small traces of light then faded away. And then there were new jewels. Father Happy had told Carlitos that every living soul was like a jewel in God’s eyes. And somewhere buried deep within Carlitos, this res
onated each and every time the jewels exploded, though he couldn’t explain this to anyone, much less himself. Beautiful jewel, Father Happy called Carlitos. Beautiful jewel. Carlitos had been ten when he first pulled his t-shirt over his head and pushed his hands into his underwear attempting to get the priest’s attention. He had no words then to explain to himself why he needed the priest’s attention. But there on the screen of the iPad, the only beauty was when row upon row of jewels exploded like fireworks and then twinkled like stars. No priest. Carlitos absolutely did not want to see a priest, any priest.

  One night, as Carlitos was trying to fall asleep, as he played round after round of Jewels, he saw the shimmer outside his inside door. It was subtle, not quite a flash of light but definitely light almost flickering. There, as so many times before, was the man with the brown skin. Carlitos sat up assuming the man would disappear once he took a different position on the bed. But he was still there standing in the short hallway leading from the outer door to the inner door of his room. He turned on the light and found, to his surprise, that the man was still there staring at him. Carlitos got up from his bed and walked toward the door with the expectation the man would vanish. But he didn’t. Carlitos studied the man, and the man studied Carlitos. The straight nose, the dark skin, the light brown eyes flecked with gray: we know full well this was no apparition. And try as he did, Carlitos could not place where he had seen this man before. Why did he keep dreaming this man into existence outside his inner door, always outside his door and never inside the actual room? The two men stood there staring at each other until Carlitos tired of it and returned to his bed. He continued watching the dark man until, as he always did, he faded away leaving only the short hallway to the outer door in his place.

  Fake-Bill arrived on schedule after a few days’ absence. “Carlos! Get up! You know what time it is.” Carlitos walked to the door and received the acrylic handcuff and the strap. He walked with fake-Bill down the path, around the stone garden and then down the main walk and back. The birds were fairly silent, something that seemed strange. It was as if half or more of the birds had disappeared. And there were no jays around to have bullied the other birds, to scare them off. Carlitos looked all around for the jays. The jays were supposed to be there, practically everywhere, by then. The lone long branch that hung over the walkway, the one that littered the walk in the fall and shadowed it at this time of year, the one that almost without fail would be perch for a bird or two at this hour, was empty. This did not seem right. He followed the branch from the central trunk of the tree out, out, tracing each branch branching into smaller branches, but there wasn’t a single bird in the tree. There was always a bird there at this time of year; Carlitos knew that. He knew that it was not necessarily the same bird, but there was always a bird there. As they approached the door to the wing where Carlitos stayed, fake-Bill announced: “It’s my last day, Carlos. They have been training my replacement, and the doctor will introduce you to him tomorrow, Monday at the latest. I got into med school. Not that you care or anything, but just wanted to tell you.”

  Carlitos stopped and stared at fake-Bill and, for the first time, fake-Bill saw a living man inside Carlitos’ eyes. What fake-Bill expected was anger or rage, but what he saw was something closer to fear or panic. Fake-Bill knew in that moment he would be a great psychiatrist. He knew it as surely as anything. He had cracked the mute who refused to show his cards, the poker player who never gave a thing away with his expression. Fake-Bill was sure of it, sure he had seen panic in Carlitos’ face, his eyes. Yes, he knew he was destined for greatness after all. “So, come on Carlos. Let’s get you back to your room.”

  The following day, after the guy who normally worked weekends showed up and took Carlitos on his walk, after the interminable lunch that he should have ended with a quick throw of food but didn’t, after the letter from his mother and news of a distant relative being sick, he was summoned to the doctor’s office. “Carlos, this is Raúl Sanchez, one of my new assistants. We have assigned him to you, and he will be helping to take care of you from now on. As you know, William has left us for better things.”

  “Carlos, I go by Pedro, so you can call me Pedro.”

  “Mr. Sanchez ... He is the one, remember? He won’t call you anything. He will never utter a word to you.”

  “I know, sir. But I just wanted him to know.”

  “All he ever does is turn his head to say no. And he only does that when you ask him to see a priest. Otherwise, you get nothing from this one.”

  “I understand, sir. I just... Well, I just wanted to say what I would say to any of the other patients.”

  “You will soon see that this kind of thing is a waste of time.”

  “Yes, sir. I am here to learn and improve my skills.”

  Carlitos was escorted back to his room by Raúl-who-was-to-be-called-Pedro. Pedro spoke to him the entire way, something fake-Bill and the others never did. At times, Pedro spoke to him in Spanish to see if that elicited more of a response than English did. But Carlitos didn’t respond. “You know, Carlos, I am here for you. However you want to talk, we can talk. I know you write, so if you want you can write me a letter. Anything you want to do, we can do.” Pedro watched for a response from Carlitos, but there was no response. Once he had deposited Carlitos in his room and locked the door, Pedro started to walk off but turned around and came back to the door. Unlike most assistants who just yelled loudly enough to be heard through the door, through the plexiglass window, Pedro picked up the two-way telephone.

  Carlitos stared at him in disbelief but walked over and picked up the phone on his end. “Forgot to say I’ll see you tomorrow for your walk. You know, this phone thing is kind of cool. It’s like a walkie-talkie or something. It reminds me of when I was a kid. I used to connect cans together with a string ...” Carlitos dropped the phone and backed away from the door without ever taking his eyes off of Pedro. He kept asking him to pick up, but Carlitos refused. The new assistant eventually tired of trying and then hung up his end and walked away. The phone inside Carlitos’ room dangled like a small weight on a string. Carlitos wouldn’t hang it up; he wouldn’t even go near it. He stared at it and furrowed his brow. He backed away from it, from the door, until he could feel the side of the bed behind his knees. He sat then and continued to stare at the phone, the receiver in that moment looking like a musical note suspended in air.

  That night, as Carlitos lay in bed holding the iPad up toward the ceiling with both hands, he tried to find Scorpio, which he was convinced he should be able to see at that time of year. He tilted the iPad in every direction looking for it, but it was nowhere to be found. How could this man, named Pedro of all things, show up today? Why was he here? Pedro, his brother’s name. Why now? Why had his brother chosen now to come back? Carlitos could not, for the life of him, find Scorpio. It should be there in its usual location, it should be there at this time of year. He followed the stars, each of the small lines of branching stars that should lead toward Scorpio, and found nothing remotely resembling Scorpio. Someone had stolen it, murdered it. He shifted the iPad above his head in direction after direction for almost an hour before giving up. After what seemed like hours in the dark lying perfectly still, he knew he wasn’t going to fall asleep, and he began playing the jewel game. His dead brother had taken the form of this new assistant, an assistant who wanted to be called by his dead brother’s name. His dead brother had taken human form and wanted to talk on the phone. Surely this was a terrible sign.

  Up until that day, the only way Carlitos had ever seen Pedro was outside in the garden. Pedro chirping the same short staccato notes in sequence; Pedro hopping sideways on a branch tapping-out a kind of Morse code: these were the things to which he had become accustomed. And there in front of him, as a column of jewels exploded and caused an adjacent row to explode as well, Carlitos saw the letter Ρ form and then disappear. He didn’t speak then. He didn’t even try. But he cried. The sounds that escaped his mouth weren’t p
erfect English or even a poor Spanish. They were guttural and dark, as if they were part of a language so old it didn’t yet have syllables. The vocal cords, which up until then had been dried, desiccated, sick with immobility, suddenly worked. Carlitos cried and grunted a string of muted, dull coughs and chokes. And these sounds scared Carlitos, who hadn’t heard his own voice since that afternoon so long ago when he had screamed “Get up! Get up!” He cried, and row after row of jewels kept exploding on his screen, each explosion blurred and streaked by his wet eyes. But he kept playing. Why now? Carlitos choked and sobbed. He shook with fear. And on the screen of his iPad, the jewels continued falling into place, exploding in a panic and falling like stars, like those rare stars you sight on a summer night, the ones you only see when you are alone.

  VIII. The News

  The potted ficus in the corner of Flora Diaz’s kitchen, barely four feet tall and planted in a rust-colored ceramic pot, the one she watered every six days had, for the first time in almost four decades, started showing some yellowing leaves. This had not escaped Flora Diaz’s attention, nor had it escaped Javier Castillo’s attention. He made a point of describing these leaves when he first told me about that particular time in his life. The leaves were yellowing, not browning and falling off to be replaced by new leaves. This ficus had grown large, was one of the only things Flora Diaz brought with her to California when she left the island. She knew that Ficus benjamina, the weeping fig, only offered up yellowing leaves in times of stress, of over-watering or under-watering. And Flora Diaz was quite certain she had not altered the routine she had adopted in caring for this plant. As she studied the ficus, she discovered a whitish patch, discovered that one of the three thinner trunks twisting together to make the substantial trunk had a white ring roughly midway between the soil of the pot and its umbrella of branches. She noted this but could not discern the significance of it, and this bothered her more than she realized.