The Barbarian Nurseries

by Héctor Tobar

  9

  Go away, go away. In his sleep, Scott flailed at the loose pillow tickling his nose, but in his dream he was pushing Charlotte Harris-Hayasaki away. Her hands were cold and sweaty, they were gripping at his cheeks and eyelids, and he was afraid Maureen would see Charlotte holding him and get the wrong idea, and that a horrible argument would ensue. He was sitting at his desk at work, in a cluttered office lined with stacks of boxes, and Charlotte was standing behind him as he tried to type something on his keyboard, and Maureen was in the next room and might walk in any minute. He felt an apocalyptic dread of his wife’s power to banish him from family and home, and could hear Maureen breathing in the next room as Charlotte moved her hands down to his chest and began unbuttoning his shirt. He wanted to break Charlotte’s grip, but she wouldn’t let him go, and finally he turned to grab his young employee by the shoulders and give her a good strong shove, but when he did this he heard a screaming that brought the fuzzy movie running in his head to an abrupt halt and transported him in an instant to his darkened bedroom and the sound of his daughter’s voice crying from the baby monitor.

  “Wah! Wah! Wah!”

  Maureen, a comforter and a pillow thrown over her head, gave a murmur that sounded like the word “yes” but showed no signs of waking up as Scott stood up from the bed and made his way to the nursery. His wife had built up so much sleep debt that she was immune to Sa-mantha’s screams, and Scott felt a strange combination of sympathy for her and annoyance at the general situation as he walked through the darkened hallways. When they went to bed there was always the hope that this night would be different from the others over the past fifteen months, that this might be the night when their youngest progeny released her grip on their biological clocks, bringing forth a morning in which the California sunlight returned to its normal soothing hues, losing the stark whiteness that had assaulted their eyes since Samantha’s birth. But no, here Scott was again, awake at 2:06 a.m., according to his watch—I fell asleep with my watch on, Jesus. He noticed that he was still wearing his button-down shirt from the workday, though he had managed to get his pajama bottoms on. He reached the nursery and found his daughter, as usual, standing up in her crib with her favorite yellow blanket, looking disoriented and confused, her rust-colored locks in a sweaty disorder. Come to me, my little girl, while I get you your milk. One day soon you’ll be a big girl and this torture will stop.

  While Scott tended to their daughter, waiting in the kitchen for the microwave to warm her milk, Maureen slipped in and out of various episodic dreams, and then into the longest one, whose images would linger in her consciousness after she woke up. Mexican day laborers were tramping about her home, eating her food, sitting on the tables, playing with Samantha. A man with stringy and shiny hair that resembled black hay was trying to take apart her coffee table with the point of his machete, using it like a screwdriver. What are you doing here? Please leave. Please. Dirt encrusted their faces and their fingernails, and they bumped into one another and into the furniture as they walked about the house. They were leaving small piles of red sand on the living room floor and she pleaded with them again, but they answered her in Spanish, or rather in a jumble of words that resembled Spanish: la cosa mosa; la llaga es una plaga; waga, waga, waga. After she woke up, Maureen would think, I’ve never dreamed in Spanish before. The men were filling their mouths with salad greens and big gulps from plastic milk jugs, and she started to look for Scott because maybe he could get them to leave, but she couldn’t find him. She walked into the kitchen, where someone had turned on a garden hose that was spraying water into the air, causing her to run back into another room lined with closet doors, which she opened, looking for her husband in between the brooms and boxes until Samantha’s cries sounded in her dream and she opened her eyes.

  The baby monitor was flashing red lights as it broadcast Samantha’s wailing. The clock on her nightstand said 4:29 a.m. and Scott was snoring almost as loud as Samantha was crying. Thank you, Scott. It would be nice if my husband could get up at one of these middle-of-the-night feedings and tend to the baby and allow me to get a full night’s sleep. When she reached the nursery and saw the empty bottle on the floor she realized that he must have been up earlier. I slept through the baby crying again. It was always a somewhat disturbing realization, that you could sleep through the ambulance-siren blasts of a baby girl.

  While Maureen carried Samantha and tried to soothe her back to sleep with a lullaby, “turban man” and “binocular lady” were running inside Scott’s final dream. He was trying to force his software creations to take a seat in the back of his car, but they were busy running through the fences and climbing the play structure in his backyard, and now Samantha was running after turban man. In his dream Scott began to laugh at their antics, and the laughter shook him out of the dream and into the light of day. “Whoa, that was wild,” Scott said out loud, but there was no one to hear him: Maureen was in the shower and the first light of morning was squeezing through the blinds. As he rose to get dressed, something caught his eye, a series of odd shapes squeezing through the narrow spaces between the blinds: a collection of green tubes and triangles, and some sort of brown cloud. What could it be?

  He pulled open the blinds to a strange apparition that, for a few moments, seemed to be a continuation of one of the dreams he had been having. The succulent garden, lit from behind by the first rays of morning light, pulsated in turquoise. The ocotillo stood proud just a few yards from his window, the exotic barbs of its branches leaving Scott with a nagging sense of dislocation, as if he were standing in a place that was not his bedroom, looking through the window into a backyard that belonged to someone else. He searched his bedroom for the familiar visual clues that indicated this was indeed the same room he had gone to sleep in—the bed with its wooden frame, the faux-vintage windup clock, which actually ran on batteries—then looked back at the succulent garden again. He gawked at the plants a few seconds longer until the phrase his wife had uttered the night before suddenly popped into his head and put everything into its proper place: yes, she had said something about the garden, hadn’t she?

  “Hey,” he said to Maureen a minute or so later, as she stepped back into the bedroom, dressed and with a towel wrapped around her head. “We’ve got a new garden.”

  “Pretty awesome, isn’t it?” Maureen said with a muted cheerfulness that masked her anxiety.

  “Uh, yeah. But it’s huge.”

  “I think there’s twenty or so different species of plants.”

  “Really?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And how did you get all that stuff in here?”

  “The landscapers did it.”

  “Landscapers?”

  “From the nursery.”

  “Didn’t that cost a lot of money?”

  “Yeah, it cost a bit, but we talked about that,” Maureen said, draping the towel over the doorknob, leaving it for Araceli to pick up later.

  “We did?”

  “Yes.”

  Maureen casually walked toward the door. “But we won’t have to work on it anymore,” she said. “In the long run we’ll save money … I have to check on the baby.”

  She left Scott alone in the room with this information, and after a few moments he decided to file it away in the archive of unexpected and unexplainable things that happen to a guy when he gets married: like coming home to discover your new wife has tossed out your old clothes; or suffering her jealousy when, after ten years of marriage, the name of an old girlfriend of yours comes up; or her suddenly insisting one day that you no longer eat red meat, and then a week later coming home to find she has prepared you steak fajitas for dinner. So now we have a desert in our backyard. First she wanted a jungle, now she wants a desert. “In the long run well save money,” she says. Maybe we should dig up the front lawn and make that like the Mojave too. It must have taken a helluva lot of work to get that in here. How much could it cost? He should probably ask her, but was certain the q
uestion would provoke another argument. And it did look pretty, in a gnarly and harsh sort of way, once you got used to it.

  The boys were in the pool and Maureen sat in a chair playing lifeguard, while at the same time making sure Samantha didn’t stray into the desert garden. As she rubbed sunscreen on the back of the baby’s neck, she studied the barrel cactus and told herself not to worry so much about it, even though the ankle-high fence that surrounded it wasn’t a barrier that could keep Samantha away. Already the boys had tossed a ball into the garden, though they were sufficiently put off by the menacing barbs of the plants not to wander inside. Overall, she was pleased with herself for having removed that dying tropical blight from her home and bringing this property back in concert with the desert.

  “Araceli, we have a new garden,” Maureen said with a smile to her employee. “¿Te gusta?“

  Araceli placed a large jug of agua de limón on the squat folding tray next to Maureen and used the glass stirring rod to make the cloud of lemon pulp inside swirl, and then finally looked up at the garden.

  Well, there was certainly something exotic about this patch of desert her jefa had purchased. Standing this close to it, Araceli got the sense of being transported to a place of mystery and timelessness even as the boys screamed from the pool a few yards away, and as Maureen sat in her folding chair, sunscreen glistening from her bare legs, a floppy canvas hat protecting her against the sun. But no, Araceli couldn’t say she liked it. There was a certain minimalism to this new garden with its red volcanic rocks and expanses of scarlet and mustard-colored sand filling the space between the plants—Araceli’s aesthetic, however, had always leaned toward the ornate and complex. She remembered her startling first impression of the tropical garden on the day she interviewed for this job at the Torres-Thompson household: she had emerged from the house on a hot day like this one to encounter a jungle of defiant wetness fighting back against daylight. Later she had studied the garden for hundreds of hours while working in the kitchen, laundry, and master bedroom, and from the window of her casita in the back. She liked the way the leaves of the elephant plant caught the slightest breeze, the way the calla lilies changed their shape from early morning to noon, and the movement of the false stream. This new desert garden was a static construction, while the tropical garden was a work of performance art, with Pepe as its star, stepping inside its verdant stage to send streams of water that cascaded over the tops of the plants, catching the sun’s rays and making rainbows.

  “Well, what do you think?” Maureen insisted. “You don’t like it. I can sense you don’t like it.”

  What could Araceli say? She really didn’t possess the words in English to communicate what the tropical garden and this new desert garden made her feel. How did you say in English that something was too still, that you preferred plants that you could feel breathing around you?

  “Me gustaba más como era antes,” she said in Spanish, and then in English, “I like it before … But this is very pretty too, señora. Very pretty, muy bonito. Very different.” Empty words, Araceli thought, but they seemed to be what Maureen wanted to hear.

  “Yes, it is very bonito, isn’t it?” Maureen said with satisfaction. “And muy diferente too.”

  That morning at the headquarters of Elysian Systems, Scott invited his staff out to lunch to celebrate shipping the final version of the CATSS “accountability” program to the government. The corporate guys on the fourth floor had suggested he do these sorts of things, because even a bunch of loner programmers expected the occasional perk. “You take them to a nice place, you blow off half a day of work, and you pick up the tab,” said the executive, as Scott tried not to frown at the paperweight on the executive’s teak desk awarded for “outstanding leadership” by a lumber trade group in the Pacific Northwest. “Then you expense it. You go back to the office and everyone works just a little harder the next few days.”

  They gathered in the nearest chain restaurant that served decent mojitos and margaritas and plodded through two hours talking about sports, video games, celebrities, and other banalities. His programmers were five men and two women, the oldest about five years younger than him. They had bounced around various software companies in search of the place that offered the most pay with the least work expected and they all considered the drudgery of programming at Elysian Systems to be a necessary compromise with their free-spirited, late-hacker ethos. That’s why I hired them: because I saw a little bit of myself in each of them. I wanted to surround myself with me. You could get them going if you talked about open sourcing, and the fences big companies were putting around their code. “There’s all kinds of languages out there, but they’re not accessible,” said Jeremy Zaragoza, who was a thin twenty-eight-year-old of indeterminate ethnicity. “So your average kid in suburbia can’t just open a machine and start playing with the code.” Scott had grown tired of these conversations—he’d been listening to them, in one form or another, for two decades—and he said nothing, and eventually their talk exhausted itself, until their silent gathering was overwhelmed by the sounds of a lacrosse game on the cable television in the bar, as the programmers quietly fingered scattered french fries and rattled glasses of iced tea while the play-by-play man screamed, “Spinning! Shooting! Score!”

  “Hey, my nine-year-old said something really funny the other day,” Mary Dickerson said suddenly, startling everyone to attention. She was a frumpy, raspy-voiced woman and the underling closest in age to her boss.

  “And what was that?” said Scott, who was the only other person at the table with children.

  “Well, I guess he’s been listening to me and his dad talk a lot, because he asked me, ‘Mommy, which is worse: a fool, or an idiot?’ “

  “Good question!”

  “I’ve often wondered that myself!”

  “So what did you tell him?”

  “ ‘Well, Patrick,’ I said, ‘a fool is someone who is aware that they’re stupid, sort of, and doesn’t care. You know, like a court jester. At least that’s how I understand the word “fool.” And an idiot is someone with, how should I say, a medical condition. They just can’t help being stupid. Which one is worse is, I guess, in the eye of the beholder.’ “

  “Good answer!”

  “We aren’t allowed to use the word ‘stupid’ in my household,” Scott said, rolling his eyes.

  “So what did your little boy say?”

  “He said he thought it was worse to be an idiot. And then he went back to playing his Game Boy.”

  Moments later, the check arrived, setting off a round of programmer stretches, sighs, and yawns. By the time the waitress returned with Scott’s credit card in a leather holder, Mary Dickerson was already on her feet and ready to leave.

  “I’m sorry, but the system is rejecting this card,” the waitress said with a no-nonsense directness that contrasted markedly with her cheer-iness when she first took their order more than two hours earlier. She was a tall black woman in her forties, her safari uniform covered midway through her shift with salsa and coffee stains: her suddenly stern demeanor caused the procession of programmers toward the front door to stop.

  “What’s going on, Scott?” Mary Dickerson said, more as a rebuke than a question.

  “Are you sure?” Scott asked the waitress.

  “Yes, honey. I am. Shall we try another one?”

  Scott opened his wallet, quickly surveyed the various plastic representations of creditworthiness and family photographs contained therein, and concluded that rather than taking a chance on a second card, the best course of action would be to make a run to the nearest automated teller machine. He looked at his now-standing employees, who were all staring at him as one does a second-rate substitute teacher in junior high school, and remembered that there was a dispenser of cash about three or four hundred yards away, at the other end of the asphalt lake upon which this restaurant, an armada of automobiles, and a dozen commercial establishments floated. Scott would hop into his car and drive to th
e machine and the round trip would take less than two minutes. “I’ll be right back,” he said to the waitress.

  “What?”

  “Just gotta get some cash.” He could feel the discomfort of his employees’ forced gathering propelling them toward the door. “Sit down. Don’t leave. Please.” Mary Dickerson glared at him with her mouth agape as he rushed out the door.

  When he returned, six minutes and forty-five seconds later according to the timer function on his watch, a Mexican busboy was wiping off the empty table, whistling the melody of a reggaeton song, and all of Scott’s employees were gone except for Charlotte Harris-Hayasaki, who greeted him by the cash register with a sympathetic grin.

  “We all just paid it, split it eight ways,” she said. “Everyone really wanted to go. So I paid your share.”

  Which am I now? Scott wondered. A fool or an idiot?

  Back at the office, it took sixty seconds at his computer terminal for Scott to uncover his wife’s latest credit-card betrayal. At the top of his online statement there was a charge from a company called Desert Landscaping for an astonishing four-figure amount, as much as he would have paid Pepe the gardener for two years of work, if not more. The cactus garden, he could now see, was another obnoxious vanity foisted upon him by his wife, equivalent to three months of their inflated, adjustable-rate mortgage payments, which were the chief obstacle to Scott getting their finances back into the black again, along with the several thousand dollars he spent on private school for his two sons every month. In fact, thanks to his spendthrift wife, they were going to have to struggle to round up the cash to pay for the boys’ “facilities and activities” fee at the start of the next semester. He squeezed his face in a half wince as he scrolled through the page in search of the interest rate he would pay on said credit card. Twenty-six-point-four percent, compounded! There were formulas taught in finance classes that calculated how quickly the “force of interest” could destroy a family with the slow but powerful engine of exponential calculus. Now he scrambled to grab a memo pad, and scratched out a worst-case scenario.