Tentacle

by Rita Indiana

  Of the sixteen shells she threw on the mat, four had fallen with their mouths up. “Iroso,” said Esther, which was the name of the sign on the oracle, then she lifted her face and added the sign’s refrain: “Nobody knows what’s at the bottom of the ocean.” After throwing the shells several more times, she offered her diagnosis. “The sign is iré, which means good luck, all good. Don’t cheat. Don’t talk your business over with anyone, so no one knows what you’re thinking or what you’re going to do. Don’t pass over holes or go into holes, holes in the street or holes in the countryside, because the earth will swallow you up. People like you always have jealous and hypocritical people surrounding you, as though you were a child of traps and falsehoods. You’re friends with your enemy. The saint protects you from disgrace but you have to be careful and avoid prison. You’ll receive inheritances and hidden riches.”

  Like in any good movie, Esther could make Acilde believe anything so long as she had her in front of her. As soon as she was gone, her faith would vanish too, disappearing into that world of betrayals, pacts, and dead scouts. One night, right after finishing her workout, Acilde heard a hum coming from the room where they kept the altar to Yemayá, the goddess of the sea to whom Omicunlé was devoted. Esther was sleeping. Acilde dared to go in. It smelled of incense and flower-scented water, of old fabric and the perfume of the sea held within conch shells. She approached the altar, whose centerpiece was a replica of a Greek jar some three feet tall. Eric liked to kid Esther that someday he’d inherit it; Acilde knew its exorbitant price from her PriceSpy. Depicted on the central band of the jar was an image of a woman holding a boy by the ankle as she goes to submerge him in a pool of water. All over the jar there were offerings and the attributes of the goddess: an old oar, a ship’s wheel, a feathered fan. Esther had told her never to open the jar, that whoever looked inside without being initiated into the sect would go blind, or some other crazy thing like that. But inside, perfectly illuminated and oxygenated by a mechanism adapted to the jar, Acilde saw a live sea anemone. Without putting the lid back, she looked around the bottom border of the jar to find the red eye that responded to the remote control and a small hole where a battery charger would fit perfectly. That’s what the old lady was doing when she “attended” to these saints: monitoring the salt levels in the tank where she kept an illegal and very valuable specimen alive. When Acilde tried to use the PriceSpy on the animal, it just loaded endlessly. It didn’t work very well with black market prices.

  During the tryst that produced Acilde, her father had told her mother he wanted to get to know Dominican beaches. Back then the island was a tourist destination with coasts full of coral, fish, and anemones. She brought her right thumb to the center of her left palm to activate the camera and, flexing her index finger, she photographed the creature, then she flexed her middle finger to send the photo to Morla. She whispered a question to caption the image: “How much would they give us for this?”

  Morla’s response was immediate: “Enough for your Rainbow Brite.”

  Their plan was very simple. When the old lady left on a trip, Morla would find a way to get around the building’s security, disconnect the cameras, take the anemone away in a special container, and leave Acilde tied, gagged, and free of any blame. But when Esther left for a conference on African religions in Brazil, Eric stayed in the house. At first, Acilde thought the witch didn’t trust her, but later she understood the anemone needed special care, which Eric would dispense in her absence. This was confirmed when she saw him spend so many dead hours holed up in the saint’s room.

  On her return, Esther found Eric sick, with diarrhea, the shivers, and a strange discoloring on his arms. She sent him home.

  “He asked for it, that bugger,” she told Acilde. “Don’t take his calls.”

  Despite Omicunlé’s warnings, Acilde visited Eric while he was sick to bring him food and the medicine he prescribed for himself. Eric stayed in his room, where a stink of vomit and liquor reigned. There were days when he was delirious, when he sweated terrible fevers, and when he continually called out to Omicunlé: “Oló! Kun fun me lo mo, oló kun fun.”

  When Acilde returned to Esther’s she told her everything to try to soften her up but all she managed was to get the old lady to curse him even more, calling him a traitor, dirty, a pendejo.

  All the while Morla was sending Acilde desperate texts every day, trying to find out when Esther was leaving the house, when they would carry out their operation, and when, finally, he could get his hands on that anemone. Acilde had stopped answering him.

  Every Thursday afternoon a helicopter would pick Esther up from the roof of the apartment building and take her to the national palace to throw the shells for the president. The consultation usually went on past midnight because the priestess would make the sacrifices and carry out the cleansings the readings recommended on the same day. These absences seemed perfect for Acilde’s original plan, but recently the old lady had said and done things that had convinced her to think better of it.

  Esther had brought her a blue bead necklace from Brazil; it was consecrated to Olokun, the oldest deity in the world, the sea itself.

  “Master of the unknown,” Esther explained when she put it on her. “Wear it always because, even if you don’t believe, it will protect you. One day, you’re going to inherit my house. You won’t understand this now but, in time, you will.”

  Omicunlé would get very serious and Acilde would feel very uncomfortable. She couldn’t help but feel affection for the old woman who took care of her with a tenderness her own family had never shown her. And, if she was going to let her inherit the house, couldn’t she also, perhaps, give her money for the sex change?

  When the doorbell’s wave sounds again, Acilde is using a broom to sweep away the spiderwebs silently spun every day in the corners of the ceiling. She assumes it’s another Haitian and that the security mechanism will take care of him. But then there’s a knock on the apartment door. Only Eric, who has the code for the downstairs gate, could have come up. Not concerned that Esther might get mad, she runs to open the door, happy Eric is well and sure that with his cleverness he’ll soon charm the priestess again.

  Morla points a pistol at her. Acilde makes a move to defend herself but Morla touches her in the middle of her collarbone, pressing his fingers together to get access to her data plan’s operating system. He activates both eyes, in full-screen mode, to bring up two different videos: in one eye, “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!” and, in the other, “Don’t Stop ’til You Get Enough,” turning both up as loud as possible. Acilde tries to disconnect herself. Morla is too quick for her.

  Blind, she screams: “Madrina, thief!” She rolls herself on the wall until she falls to the ground and feels, after a timid shot from a silenced revolver, the weight of another body falling on the marble floor.

  Morla deactivates the screens. Acilde watches as he finishes off Esther. She watches him wipe off the sweat that runs down his forehead with the back of the hand that holds the gun.

  “You left me hanging, cocksucker, where is the shit?”

  Now that Morla doesn’t need the empathy of his little group of useless friends anymore, the killer’s voice is not the same as the one he used to use at Peri’s house. Acilde leads him to the saints’ room and shows him the giant jar. He opens the cylinder in which he will transport his new merchandise. He’s sleepless, shaking, and off his tits on coke.

  “You should do another line to get yourself together,” Acilde advises him.

  Morla agrees, pulling out a little pink plastic bag with a piece of rock from his pocket. With a single circular motion, Acilde breaks a Lladró dolphin she’s taken from the altar on his head. Morla falls to the side and the gold coins on the design of his shirt are sprinkled with blood and bits of porcelain. Acilde places the anemone in the cylinder and presses the button, activating the oxygen and the temperature the animal needs to survive.

  ‌

  ‌Psychic Goya

&n
bsp; The air conditioning was on full blast, like in all the offices in the city, so the doorknobs, desks, and toilet seats were freezing surfaces. Argenis avoided them as much as he could. Why do they turn the air up like that? Do they want to paralyze us? These were the same questions Argenis, all gooseflesh, had been asking himself for the two years he’d been working at Plusdom, a call center headquartered in an unfinished building on Independencia Avenue. The first and second floors didn’t have windows or doors or floor tiles, and the stairway to the fourth didn’t have a handrail. The employees climbed the stairs very carefully, staying close to the wall whenever they came back from the store with their hands full of Doritos and Cokes. Argenis worked with about twenty other Dominicans whose English was mediocre at best. He pretended to have psychic powers on a phone line that took calls from all over the United States.

  He got off the toilet and pulled up his pants. He plucked a small bag of coke from his pocket. It was hard and he had to jab it a little with a key to break it up; using the same key, he sniffed a line into each nostril. He looked at himself in the medicine cabinet mirror, wiped his nose with his finger and then licked it so as not to let anything go to waste. It was only then that he flushed the toilet, never before, to make sure nobody could calculate the time between the flush and his exit and begin to ask questions.

  “That’s junkie paranoia,” Mirta, his ex-wife, would have said.

  “I hope you drop dead,” he muttered through clenched teeth as he opened the door.

  The office space was divided into gray fiber cubicles. There was a desk in each cubicle, a monitor, a keyboard, and the stupid stuff people put up in those spaces to make them cozier. Diala, the pimply skinny girl who’d jerked him off once on the stairs, had hers lined with photos of REM, Morrissey, and London. Eddy, a fortyish faggot with black dyed hair, had photos of his little nieces at Disneyland. Ezequiel had pictures from his golden days: bent from the weight of three gold chains around his neck, until his mother, finding a half kilo in his closet, bought him a one-way ticket from New Jersey to his grandmother’s house in Capotillo. Axel was a little white schizophrenic and this job was part of his occupational therapy; he had a stuffed Pokemón toy and posters of hyper-pop Japanese bands Argenis had never heard of. Then there was Yeyo, the moneylender, a black girl six feet tall and weighing in at two hundred pounds. He hated the fucking cunt.

  Argenis sat down in his cubicle and stared at the name on the monitor he’d chosen the day he was hired: Psychic Goya. There was a call waiting. He put on his earphones and took it, his eyes fixed on the lower right corner of the screen where a clock marked how many seconds, minutes, or hours he’d managed to keep the caller on the line.

  “Good evening, Psychic Goya speaking, how do you do?” he asked as a bit of bitter coke residue trickled down his throat.

  It was a woman, as was almost always the case. Following Plusdom protocol, he tried to visualize her, white and horrible, in an XXL T-shirt with some kind of promotional logo, bending her Rs and Ts with an accent from some southern backwater of the United States.

  “Would you like a tarot reading today, Katherine?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “Okay, I will pick a card for you.”

  There was an old tarot deck next to the monitor, which came with the desk and on which Franky, who worked the eight to four shift, would draw all sorts of obscenities with a blue Bic.

  The Page of Cups was a card from the minor arcana that Argenis remembered a few things about from his two-hour training with Eddy, the veteran psychic. In the Rider-Waite deck, it was a beautiful card: an androgynous young man in a blue turban and flowered robe contemplates the fish in his cup while in the background, on the horizon, the sea tries to disguise the coming storm with an all-encompassing gray that’s neither calm nor agitated. Franky had drawn several sailboats on the water and covered the page’s hairless chin with a beard. On the upper left-hand corner, he’d drawn a heart traversed by a dagger bleeding straight into the cup. Argenis was surprised there weren’t any hairy dicks, Franky’s specialty.

  Inspired by this memory, he asked, “Is your question about a young man?”

  “Oh my God, you’re amazing,” Katherine responded.

  Katherine sounded like a woman beaten down by piles of dirty dishes and a construction worker husband who showed his affection by not spitting on the rug.

  Argenis dove in: “Is this man not your husband?”

  Katherine screamed. “Oh my God, this is freaky.”

  “Psychic Goya sees all and wants to help you, Katherine. Is your husband home? No?”

  Argenis talked for ten minutes straight about the card with all the eloquence his training as a visual artist allowed, threading the most typical readings of the card with whatever crap crossed his mind.

  “This young man, is he an artistic fellow?”

  “Yes, he likes Metallica and Marilyn Manson.”

  Having reached this stage, Argenis submitted her to his questionnaire about the person represented by the card until Katherine revealed everything about herself: her likes, her IQ, her house, her family, her budget. It was an exercise that burned time like hay on his computer’s corner clock.

  Argenis had come to Plusdom via Yeyo, the moneylender, who’d found him the job when he told her he couldn’t pay back the ten thousand pesos he’d borrowed to divorce Mirta. Since then, Yeyo had controlled his life. She’d managed to get Mike, the gringo supervisor, to deduct half his salary and add it to her paycheck to help pay off his debt. “This is illegal,” Argenis had complained the first time, but he gave up when he realized Mike also owed Yeyo; everybody owed Yeyo something, money or favors, and she knew how to extract interest. Argenis paid off the debt in seven months but almost immediately took out another loan so he could buy coke from Ezequiel, who had gotten back into his old business as soon as he’d landed in Santo Domingo. Argenis began buying half a gram on Wednesdays, because Thursday was his day off, and later, with the excuse of the night shift and the divorce, he justified a gram a day, which made him fall behind on the electric bill, the only one his mother had asked him to help with when he moved back in with her.

  Yeyo was cousins with one of Argenis’ classmates at the School of Fine Arts, where he’d graduated in 1997. Back then, she’d helped with a few of his financial difficulties—money to buy materials, Fabriano paper, oil, and canvas—nothing he couldn’t pay back right away since his father, who worked for the governing party, would send him a monthly allowance Argenis used to pay rent on a studio facing Colón Park, where he’d pick up lost foreign girls who showed up in the Colonial Zone, drunk on Brugal, Haitian pot, and Guns N’ Roses.

  It was there that Argenis would daydream about his future as a visual artist. His talent was unquestionable. He’d won dozens of drawing contests as a child and his professors back in the seventies used to invite him to sit with them in the cafeteria. At the School of Fine Arts, a public institution with a budget even smaller than the local barbershop’s, the professors—for whom there was no art after Picasso—were proud of Argenis’ technical expertise and Catholic themes and predicted a successful and prosperous future for him.

  But when he finished at the School of Fine Arts and got his father to send him to the School of Design at Altos de Chavón, it was a different story. His fluency with perspective and proportion wasn’t worth a dime. His classmates were rich kids with Macs and digital cameras who talked about Fluxus, video art, video action, and contemporary art. They had Hello Kitty backpacks and talked in English and French; it was impossible to tell if they were queer.

  The first week, the new students put on a slide show to show their portfolios. When he saw their collages, photos, and little drawings, Argenis grew haughty at the thought of how much he was going to teach these ignoramuses. He was sure his Renaissance virgins and archangels would dazzle them; he’d used working-class German, Swiss, and Spanish tourists as models for them in his Colonial Zone studio. The next day, during the first ar
t history class, Professor Herman decided to begin with what had happened in the last ten years, the nineties. Marina Abramović, Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami, Santiago Sierra, Damien Hirst, Pipilotti Rist. She explained everything very well, including the price of the works and each artist’s references. Argenis’ blood sugar tanked. He had to excuse himself, walking with blurry eyes to the mini-mart. Where the hell had he been? He felt poor, ignorant, and, above all else, confused. The works he had seen, even if sometimes they’d been made not by the artist but by a toy factory in China, belonged in form and vitality to their time, just as the works of Velázquez and Goya had belonged to theirs. He remembered the squalid cafeteria where he’d spent hours as an alienated young man, listening to painters with black teeth share the secrets of Leonardo, Rembrandt, and Dürer. What utter bullshit.