Marcelo in the Real World

by Francisco X. Stork

  “Anger can be good,” she says. We stop at an intersection and wait for the white WALK sign to flash. “Anger can help you to do what you need to do. You’ve been doing great at the mailroom. Don’t let the likes of Wendell get you down.”

  “Anger is never good,” I say. “It makes you want to say and do hurtful things to others.”

  The white WALK sign flashes on and we cross the street. Jasmine grabs my arm and pulls me back as a car unexpectedly appears. “If you’re not capable of anger, people will run over you, literally,” she says.

  “The picture of the mountains that you have in front of your desk. Is that Vermont?”

  “That picture is what I see from the front door of my house.”

  “The mountains are so beautiful. Do you need anger in the mountains?”

  I can feel her stop for a fraction of a second before she resumes walking. “No,” she says, “you don’t need anger in the mountains. You need something like it. My dad calls it fight. ‘You gotta have fight, girl,’ is what he says to me. And even in the mountains people still get angry.”

  “At what? Were you ever angry?”

  “I was angry at a horse for the longest time,” she says, laughing.

  “Why?”

  We are walking by the same children’s playground that we saw before, only now it is empty. Jasmine walks in and sits on a swing and I sit on the swing next to her. She begins to swing slightly back and forth, her feet not leaving the ground. “My older brother and a friend of his got it into their heads that they wanted to buy a Kentucky racehorse and bring it to Vermont and make money from renting the horse to stud.” She stops to look at me. “You know what that is?”

  “Yes,” I say, a little embarrassed. I’m embarrassed not at the meaning of the word but at the fact that Jasmine felt it necessary to ask me if I knew what that meant. “At Paterson, I worked after school with the ponies,” I tell her. “I know what ‘stud’ means, both the noun and the verb.”

  She goes on, “Everyone told them not to do it. A thoroughbred racing horse doesn’t belong in Vermont. They need exercise. What’s the horse going to do during the long winters? But James, my brother, and his friend Cody, they don’t listen to anyone. They drive down to Kentucky with a trailer and bring back a two-year-old racehorse. They call him Kickaz, like kick ass, you know.”

  “Kickaz is the horse you got angry at.”

  “Kickaz was always real jittery. James and Cody had to work with him to train him to be calm. One day they were in the cow pastures leading him around with a short rope. Cody was holding the rope and James was walking on the other side when suddenly Kickaz got spooked by something, probably a bee, and he reared sideways and kicked James in the stomach.”

  Jasmine stops swinging. I don’t want to look in her direction. I wait for her to continue speaking.

  “James seemed okay. We took him down to the Medical Center in West Lebanon just to make sure. Nothing showed up on the X-rays or the MRI, but they kept him overnight anyway just for observation, and then that night he fell asleep and just kept on sleeping. When he didn’t wake up a day later, they operated, thinking there must have been some internal bleeding that wasn’t showing up, but they didn’t find anything. He died a couple of days later.

  “Everyone hated that horse. Cody wanted to kill him. I wanted to kill him. Everyone. Only Amos, that’s my father, only Amos said that he wanted to keep the horse. We were all shocked because he was the one that had been the most against James getting it in the first place. ‘It ain’t the horse’s fault,’ Amos said. He put him in the barn with Morgan, our workhorse. ‘Morgan will train him,’ he said. But for the longest time I couldn’t even stand to look at that horse. I swear that horse is probably why I decided to leave Vermont and come to Boston. I couldn’t bear to look at him.”

  “You are still angry at Kickaz?”

  “Naah. You should see him now. He’s as gentle as old Morgan. Amos takes him up in the mountains hunting, Kickaz like a mule, lugging all the gear. In the winter, Amos plows a track around the cow pasture and walks him around a few times each day no matter how cold or snowy it gets. They’re perfect for each other, those two.”

  “Will you return to Vermont?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t want to work at the law firm,” I say.

  “I don’t like working there either. But I do it.”

  “Why?”

  She pushes herself off the swing. “Come with me. I want to show you something.”

  We cross the street. Jasmine is standing in front of a glass door but she doesn’t open it. It is as if she is thinking for a moment about whether opening the door is the right thing to do. Then she opens it and beckons me to come in.

  We climb a winding wooden stairway. We pass dozens of wooden doors on our way up. Most of the doors have Chinese characters written on white pieces of paper. “Who works here?” I ask.

  “I work here,” she says, giggling.

  We reach a place where the stairs end and we open the last of the wooden doors. When the door opens and I walk in, we are in a rectangular room only slightly larger than my tree house. “My home away from home,” she says.

  “I thought Jasmine lived in the mailroom.”

  “Ha, ha, very funny.”

  But I didn’t mean it to be funny. Of course Jasmine has to live someplace. It just never occurred to me that she did.

  “This used to be a dorm for medical students attending Tufts,” she explains. “Nowit’s mostly used by immigrants from Cambodia. It is very cheap and very safe. This is the living room, dining room, den, kitchen, and bedroom. The bathroom is through there.” She points at a door at the back of the room.

  On one side against the wall there’s a cot covered with a quilt of multicolored patches. At the head of the cot is a zoo of stuffed animals: a brown bear, a jaguar with black spots, a dog with floppy faded-white ears, a polka-dotted horse, a gray walrus, a tan kangaroo. At the end of the bed, on the side closest to where we stand, occupying all of the space between the bed and the door, is an electric keyboard that I can tell has all eighty-eight keys of a regular piano. Resting on the keys is a pair of padded earphones still connected to the keyboard’s panel. On the other side of the room, opposite the keyboard and the bed, there is a desk, a metal file cabinet, a structure made out of balsa wood that has clothes hanging inside, a window with blue curtains, a stove, and a miniature refrigerator. Every available space on the walls of the room is lined with shelves filled with hundreds of CDs. The only space on the walls that has not been fitted with shelves is the space above the metal file cabinet, over which hangs a white poster. I walk up to it and study it. The poster has white edges. On the top, I read:

  KEITH JARRETT

  THE KÖLN CONCERT

  Below these words I see the black-and-white image of a man playing a piano. His eyes are closed, his head is lowered, and his chin rests on his chest. I immediately recognize the posture of someone in deep prayer. The man is playing the piano, but I am certain he is also remembering.

  Jasmine stands next to me in silence. She seems willing to give me as much time as I need to see what there is to see and to understand what there is to understand. When I finish taking in every detail of the poster, I turn toward the keyboard and press the middle C key softly with my finger. The tension of the key is softer than the tension of the keys in our piano at home. Jasmine reaches over and pulls out the headphone jack from the panel of the keyboard. I touch the key again. The single sound that fills the air is crisp, sharp. It reminds me of a blast of winter air.

  “You play the piano,” I say.

  She takes out a black-cushioned stool from underneath the keyboard, fiddles briefly with the controls on the console, closes the door to the room, and then she plays.

  It is not like any type of music I have ever heard before. It starts off sounding like Bach, but then the notes follow sequences my brain does not anticipate. There are notes and chords that jar with the note
s and chords that precede them, but then a few seconds later what seems dissonant turns out to be part of a basic melody, the original Bach-like melody that has been there all along, hidden but constant. What is different about the music that Jasmine is playing is the rhythm. There is more of it. As if the piano wanted to be a drum or a wild heartbeat or thunder. Jasmine’s left hand strikes a steady beat that sounds like a pumping heart, and then, as if to counteract the regular sound made by the left hand, the right hand lunges into a melody too complex to fully grasp.

  She stops playing and then she opens her eyes and looks at me as if she forgot that I was standing there.

  “This is why I work at the law firm. So that I can come to this little room and do this.”

  It is clear that she has been playing for many, many years. I know because when I was small, Aurora took me down the street to Mrs. Rockwell for piano lessons. But it was no use. I could not read the notes and play at the same time. Nor could I move the left hand and the right hand simultaneously. My mental wiring simply cannot handle the voltage required to play the piano.

  “You invented that music. It came from your head.”

  I see her blush. For a moment, I’m afraid I said something that hurt her feelings.

  “It is unbelievable,” I say. “How do you do that?”

  “You practice and practice and then one day the music is there,” she says. “It’s okay. The music I make is okay. It’s not great. It’s not even close to the kind of music he makes.” She looks in the direction of the poster. She stands up and goes to one of the bookshelves and grabs one of the CDs that are stacked there. “Here, take this.”

  The cover of the CD is the same as the poster on the wall.

  “He is remembering,” I say.

  “Remembering what?”

  “It’s a word I use for praying. Sometimes it’s like waiting for music to come out of the silence.”

  Jasmine takes the CD from my hand and studies it as if to see what I see. Then she puts it back in my hand. She turns and stands in front of me, and when she does that I suddenly feel like laughing.

  “What?” she asks. She looks like a little girl, the way she says this.

  “Nothing,” I mumble.

  “We should go now,” she tells me, still looking at me.

  “Yes,” I say. “Thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “For showing me.”

  That’s all that I can think of saying.

  CHAPTER 15

  I’m at my desk in the mailroom binding documents at optimum speed and waiting for Wendell to call me. He asked Arturo if I could help him and Arturo said yes. According to Wendell, Arturo was very happy. Jasmine is not happy. For one thing, it means that she’ll have to finish binding the documents I promised Martha for this morning.

  “I don’t trust him. He must have something up his sleeve,” she says.

  “What if he’s wearing a short-sleeve shirt?” I say, trying to make her laugh.

  She ignores my joke. She is thinking hard. “Does he know you got lost after your lunch?”

  “No.”

  I want to ask Jasmine why she asked that question, but the phone rings and she picks it up. I hear her speak loudly into the receiver. “One afternoon. That’s it. I need him here tomorrow morning.” It makes me smile to see her so grumpy over losing my help.

  “That was Jerk Junior. He’s waiting for you.”

  Wendell is wearing khaki pants and a crimson polo shirt. I smile to myself because the shirt has short sleeves and so there is no chance for Wendell to hide something up his sleeve, as Jasmine says. He is standing over his desk, casually arranging stacks of manila folders.

  “There you are,” he says when I enter the office. “Am I glad you can help me. Father is too. He’s having a shit-fit because today is the last day to turn over documents to another law firm and I have to be at an orientation meeting for the new squash players. Come over here. I’ll show you what you need to do.”

  Wendell is the same friendly, joking Wendell of before we went to lunch.

  “How’s Jasmine? Is she upset because I pried you loose from her for a few hours?” Wendell asks me.

  “She needs me in the mailroom,” I say.

  “This won’t take you more than one morning at the most. She can live without you for three hours, can’t she?”

  “Yes,” I answer.

  “I have to be at Harvard. I’m the captain of the team. So let’s get to it. What you need to do is really quite simple. This is part of the Vidromek litigation. You know about Vidromek, right? Very importante. If we mess this up, it is kaput.” Wendell draws his hand across his neck as if it were a sword. “The people suing Vidromek are folks who claim they’ve been hurt because the windshields don’t shatter into a million harmless pieces like they’re supposed to. These people are trying to find out whether Mr. Acevedo, the president of the company, knew about the windshield’s danger but went ahead and manufactured them anyway. You with me?”

  “Yes. I think so.”

  “The other side submitted a list of the documents they want from us. Those documents, if we have them, are in these two boxes. I’ve gone through all thirty or so boxes and found what they needed, but I didn’t get a chance to put the documents in order or to take out multiple copies. That will be your job. You need to look at the list they gave us and put the documents in separate piles in accordance with the list. The list is very specific. It’ll say ‘letter from Mr. So-and-So to Mr. So-and-So, dated such-and-such.’ Are you with me so far?”

  “Yes, I am here with you.”

  “Sometimes you’ll find multiple copies of the same document. We only need to save one. The other copies you can put in this box marked ‘Trash.’ Okay? If there are various documents under the same category, you’ll need to put them in some kind of order, you know, chronological or by author or by recipient. Take item number twenty-five here on the list.” Wendell lifts a sheaf of papers and reads from it. “‘All offers made by Sandoval & Holmes to settle the litigation related to windshields.’ In the boxes, you will see a small number twenty-five written in pencil on all documents that fall under this category. You need to take all those documents and organize them. You’re good at that, aren’t you Marcelo?”

  “Yes. I like to organize things.”

  “That’s why I asked your dad if you could help me. You should have seen him. He was bursting with joy. Vidromek is your father’s biggest and oldest client, so it’s only right that you have a hand in this. You’re the man. This is a little more important and requires more brainpower than what you’re used to doing with Jasmine. You have to make sure you look carefully at every single document in these two boxes. If we tell them that we don’t have something when we do, it’ll be…”

  “Kaput.” I make the same sword-motion with my hand.

  “That’s exactly correct. Up shit creek without a paddle.”

  “Okay,” I say. I wonder if Wendell’s efforts to have me work with him are his way of letting me know that he wants to be friends again.

  “Just leave the boxes here when you finish. Juliet will make a copy of all that we send them tomorrow morning.” Wendell stops talking but he doesn’t leave. Is he waiting for me to say something?

  “Okay,” I say again. “I understand.”

  He steps closer to the edge of the desk. “So, we are on our way to getting you what you want.”

  “Yes.” But I don’t really know what he is talking about.

  “The bond that you and I talked about. I am fulfilling my part. I got you to work with me on an easy assignment. And there will be others like this the rest of the summer. Then we tell your father of your success. Right? That was our agreement.”

  “Yes.” I am confused. What is it that we agreed? Wendell is going too fast for me.

  “Yes? Yes as in yes, you are going to do your part. You are going to ask Jasmine to go on the boat ride. That was the agreement, right? Have you asked her yet?”

>   I’m trying to remember exactly what was said at our lunch. What did I agree to? I am certain I did not agree to ask Jasmine. Did I agree to consider it? Is there any way that I could have even considered it?

  Wendell looks at his watch. “I gotta go. I will take that as a yes. We’ll work out the details later.”

  I stand there looking at the boxes. What happened? Why did I hesitate in telling Wendell I will not help do anything that may harm Jasmine? How could it be that even as I understand Wendell’s views on sex, I am still pulled toward success in my father’s eyes?

  I start to work on the assignment. I want to get it done so that I can return to the mailroom. Aurora told me that when I was little, I would take the daily mail and sort it into different piles. The order of the piles, she said, was hard to figure out. Sometimes it was by the size of envelope, sometimes by the color of the stamp. But there were times when no matter how hard she tried she could not discern my logic. I don’t remember doing that, but I imagine that it must have been hard to find the one unifying element amongst many possible ones. My CDs come to mind. Sometimes I sort them by composer, sometimes by instrument, sometimes by the length of time I’ve owned them. Right now they are sorted in a way that no one in a million years could ever figure out. For the past year I have been sorting them by the music’s predominant emotion: joy, sorrow, longing, loneliness, serenity, anger. The reason no one could ever figure out the categories is that I myself am often at a loss at how a particular CD ended up in the happy category, for example, when it is clear as I listen to it again that the music is anything but happy.

  This is what I’m thinking about as I go about the task of organizing the documents in the list. First I find on the list all the documents that fall under the same category. Then I look for the documents in the boxes and begin to separate them into piles. I do the obvious ones first. All letters written by Mr. Reynaldo Acevedo, President of Vidromek, go in one pile. The documents in that list I arrange in chronological order. All letters written to Mr. Acevedo in another pile. Then there are memos from staff of Vidromek to Mr. Acevedo and memos from Mr. Acevedo to staff. I make another pile of what looks like reports that contain different types of data and then another pile composed of various letters and envelopes addressed to the law firm. Altogether I come up with nine categories of piles.