The Affliction

by C. Dale Young

  “Blanco? No. I don’t remember a Blanco. Is he one of the farmhands?”

  “No, just someone I met many years ago in California. Never mind.”

  “Actually, I do remember a man named Blanco. Yes, from a very long time ago.”

  “Did you love him, Javi? Did you ...”

  “Go to sleep, papi. I am tired.”

  “But did you ...”

  “Go to sleep, Diego.”

  The moonlight was bright and crisp; it illuminated the sheer curtains by the window, gave them a visible life as they occasionally ballooned out due to the breeze coming in from the sea. I felt quite certain Javier was lying, that he had, in fact, loved the Blanco man, but I left the issue alone. What else could I have done then? Trust me, I have thought about this countless times since that night. Within a short time, I fell asleep. All night, I had strange dreams. In each of them, Ricardo Blanco made an appearance, his green eyes sharp and intense. What happened to Ricardo Blanco? I had gotten up one morning and the grifter was gone. No note. Nothing. He just disappeared. In one of the dreams, Ricardo was lying on the asphalt of the parking lot outside the motel where I had first met him. In another, Ricardo was trying desperately to explain the vanishing man, the man named Javier Castillo. And finally, the dream that woke me: Ricardo stabbing his hands into Javier’s chest repeatedly, the hands sinking into his chest as if they were knives.

  The early sunlight coming over the mountain, the light slowly invading the fields, barely brightened the room. Sitting up in bed, I turned to see that Javier’s naked body was uncovered and the sheets twisted around his calves, the sheets damp with sweat. Javier Castillo’s face was calm, his eyes closed, but his body seemed wrenched and in discomfort. I tried to wake him, but he only mumbled back without opening his eyes. I kept asking him if he were okay, and Javier whispered he was fine, but he did not look fine to me. He didn’t look well at all. He looked sick, sickly, odd. I cannot even explain it well. Javier Castillo was covered in sweat as if he were trying to accomplish a Herculean task. The room brightened and brightened. I could hear the house coming to life, Teresita and Señora Grise downstairs about their work. And then Javier Castillo said it, said it clearly, said: “One more time, one final time.”

  “What are you talking about? Wake up.” I said. “One final time,” Javier Castillo repeated. And without fanfare, without any other warning, I noticed something incredible. I could almost make out the bed beneath Javier Castillo, the bed visible through the very shape of the man I had slept next to for months. And within another few seconds, there was a shadow, then a shimmer, and Javier Castillo was gone, only the bed and twisted sheets remaining where he had been lying. I kept calling the name “Javi” over and over, more and more urgently, but without raising my voice; I did not want to capture the attention of the staff downstairs. After five minutes, I scrambled to my feet and stared at the bed. I called out “Javi” many more times with no difference in outcome. When I realized Javier Castillo was gone, completely gone, I ran from the room and stood in my own room staring at the bed through the open door. The repetition of “Javi” became “Why did I ask him?” became “I am sorry, Javi; please come back.”

  Javier Castillo would never come back. Didn’t we all know he would never come back? Javier Castillo had built a life around disappearing, but what was far more remarkable was the fact he could reappear somewhere else, somewhere he wanted to be. But Javier Castillo did not appear somewhere else. He did not materialize in some distant land, in a bank vault or atop a mountain. He faded away cleanly because that is how his story had to end. For a man who spent his entire life disappearing to spend the last part of his life utterly unable to do so is something you and I will never understand.

  There was no fuss after his death, no visit from the old Governor General now wheelchair-bound. None of the Governor General’s children or relatives demanded to see the will. There were no demands to see Javier Castillo’s body. Neither my sister nor Señora Grise ever questioned my explanation that Javier had died and had requested cremation out at the edge of the orchards, that I had taken his body out there and done what I had been asked to do. Neither of them ever went out to check the site. The lawyers handled all of the transfers. The newly-made Bishop Marquez came by to offer his condolences but never so much as uttered a single question about a burial. It was as if Javier had, like his mother and aunt before him, cast an unshakeable spell over the situation. Everything simply proceeded the way Javier had requested in his papers.

  Months after his death, as I went through his will with the lawyers to finalize the last step of the transfer of assets and property, there was one request buried within a paragraph I would never have noticed. Money was to be sent to a facility in Los Angeles every month for the care of one Carlos Drogón Blanco for as long as he lived. Blanco. As plain as day, in his will no less, a Blanco. Had he loved Ricardo Blanco? Or had he felt some deep guilt about the results of his actions in that one circumstance? I would never know. I did as I was told. And for over a decade I did as the will instructed until, finally, one day I received a note along with the last check I had sent, a note detailing that this younger Blanco had passed away.

  Of course he was the same Javier Castillo I had heard so much about from Ricardo Blanco so many years earlier. He was the very one. A confused man wandering the streets had spoken his name out loud to me so many years ago, told me story after story of this man who could disappear. And, somehow, this very act had set in motion what I cannot help but feel was an elaborate but incomprehensible machine. Trust me, if you can, if you can trust anything I have told you, that I have thought over the entire thing so many times it would be silly to admit the exact number. Ricardo, his family, Leenck, the Diaz sisters, this island in the middle of nowhere, Spain, all of it: I have thought about it all so many times I am convinced it is what made me sick. But what can I tell you? What have I learned? I have learned that we are the Teresitas of this story, the Sister Juan Martíns, the Father Juan Marquezes. We work. We attend to the visible and certain things of this world. We try to make a life out of the solid and the fixed, even when there are flashes of a world most cannot believe exists, do not want to believe exists.

  I have spent most of my adult life tending the Reynolds Estate, running the rum distillery and managing the other lands once held by this difficult family. I have spent my life recounting these stories to myself. These stories have become, more so than keeping the Estate operating, my profession. I would see Javier Castillo many times over the decades after that morning when he faded away in his bed, but in every case it was a trick of memory or, eventually, a trick of a failing mind. Every year, for thirty years, I would sit on the back terrace of the Great House on June 10th and drink rum without a speck of clothing on me. I recite parts of these stories to myself, lest even I forget them. But I won’t make it to June 10th of this year. The doctors all say the same thing: I won’t make it.

  The Reynolds family, the Diaz family, the Castillos, and the unfortunate Blancos: do you understand now why I have had to keep recounting bits of it all? Practice, Javier would say, a kind of practice. Evening after evening now, I sit out on the terrace. And as faithfully as ever, the sea crashing below, the sea crashing against the cliff side, fills the air with whispers, the same ones I heard that afternoon so long ago. Someone else would have thought Javier Castillo himself was one of the people whispering in the air as the sun left the sky, but we know better. We have always known better.

  THE END

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Grateful acknowledgments are made to the editors of the following journals where these stories, sometimes in slightly different versions, originally appeared:

  Asian American Literary Review, Blackbird, Four Way Review, Guernica, The Hopkins Review, Normal School, and Waxwing.

  “The Affliction” was reprinted in The Chamber Four Fiction Anthology, eds. Michael Beeman, Sean Clark, Eric Markowsky, Marcos Velasquez, and Nico Vreeland. (Chamber Four L
LC, 2010).

  As always, I would like to thank my beloved, Jacob Bertrand. I would also like to thank my family and friends for the incredible support they have given me. I specifically want to thank Christopher Castellani and Janet Silver for their encouragement and help. To my medical practice partner, Lisa Boohar, I am beyond grateful for her understanding of the time I have taken to do this work, year in and year out.

  Significant gratitude is owed to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for a fellowship that allowed me the time to bring this collection into being. I owe a debt of gratitude to the Rockefeller Foundation for a Literary Arts Fellowship at the Villa Serbelloni/Bellagio Center, where some of the work in this collection was started. And finally, I would like to thank my editor Martha Rhodes and everyone at Four Way Books for their continued belief in my work.

  Publication of this book was made possible by grants and donations. We are also grateful to those individuals who participated in our 2017 Build a Book Program:

  Anonymous (6), Evan Archer, Sally Ball, Jan Bender-Zanoni, Zeke Berman, Kristina Bicher, Laurel Blossom, Carol Blum, Betsy Bonner, Mary Brancaccio, Lee Briccetti, Deirdre Brill, Anthony Cappo, Carla & Steven Carlson, Caroline Carlson, Stephanie Chang, Tina Chang, Liza Charlesworth, Maxwell Dana, Machi Davis, Marjorie Deninger, Lukas Fauset, Monica Ferrell, Emily Flitter, Jennifer Franklin, Chuck Gillett, Dorothy Goldman, Dr. Lauri Grossman, Naomi Guttman & Jonathan Mead, Steven Haas, Mary Heilner, Hermann Hesse, Deming Holleran, Nathaniel Hutner, Janet Jackson, Christopher Kempf, David Lee, Jen Levitt, Howard Levy, Owen Lewis, Paul Lisicky, Sara London & Dean Albarelli, David Long, Katie Longofono, Cynthia Lowen, Ralph & Mary Ann Lowen, Donna Masini, Louise Mathias, Catherine McArthur, Nathan McClain, Gregory McDonald, Britt Melewski, Kamilah Moon, Carolyn Murdoch, Rebecca & Daniel Okrent, Tracey Orick, Zachary Pace, Gregory Pardlo, Allyson Paty, Marcia & Chris Pelletiere, Taylor Pitts, Eileen Pollack, Barbara Preminger, Kevin Prufer, Vinode Ramgopal, Martha Rhodes, Peter & Jill Schireson, Roni & Richard Schotter, Soraya Shalforoosh, Peggy Shinner, James Snyder & Krista Fragos, Megan Staffel, Alice St. Claire-Long, Robin Taylor, Marjorie & Lew Tesser, Boris Thomas, Judith Thurman, Susan Walton, Martha Webster & Robert Fuentes, Calvin Wei, Abby Wender, Bill Wenthe, Allison Benis White, Elizabeth Whittlesey, Hao Wu, Monica Youn, and Leah Zander.