Marcelo in the Real World

by Francisco X. Stork

  About one hour has gone by and I think that in another hour I will have completed Wendell’s assignment. What if Arturo asked me to work full-time with Wendell? On the one hand this sorting is more fun than the mindless copying and binding that occupy most of my time in the mailroom. On the other hand I would not like working with Wendell. I like working with Jasmine. I like the way it feels when we work in silence together or when she wordlessly drops a new jazz CD on my desk. It reminds me of the times when Joseph and I would work side by side on paint-by-number pictures.

  In another hour I am done with the assignment. I decide to check the documents I have placed in the “Trash” box to make sure that I have not placed a document there by mistake. Wendell did not ask me to do this, but it only makes sense to do so. We should have one copy of every document that is in there. At the very bottom of the box I find a single brown envelope. I open it. Inside the envelope there is a picture.

  I look at it for only a fraction of a second and immediately put the picture facedown on the desk. I close my eyes but the image of what I saw remains. It is possible to simply put the picture back in the envelope and walk away. I know that if I look at the picture again, the image will affect me like a burn. Yet I have to look. I am drawn to it. It is like the force of the IM when it is most powerful.

  I turn the picture over slowly. I focus on the eyes of the girl. She is my age, maybe a year younger, but it is hard to tell. Her eyes remind me of someone. Eyes that I have seen before. Half of her face is intact but the other side is missing. The skin on the deformed side is withered and scarred, as if the cheek and jaw had been carved away with a dull knife. There is a mouth with lips that end halfway, an ear that seems about to fall off. I take the envelope and place it over the picture so that it covers the bottom part of her face. Those eyes. Her eyes are unaware of what is happening with the rest of her face. It is as if she had yet to look in a mirror. And there is something else in her eyes: a question directed at me.

  “Marcelo, how’s it going?”

  Arturo is behind me. I put the picture back in the envelope as fast as I can. There is not enough air for my lungs in the whole law firm, it seems.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  I turn around and hide the envelope with my body. Arturo is standing in the doorway. How long has he been standing there, and did he see me put the picture away? I am overwhelmed by the sense that I need to hide the picture from him. It is as if I don’t want him to take away from me what the girl made me feel.

  “Well, did you get everything done that Wendell wanted you to do?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wendell asked me if you could work full-time with him for the remainder of the summer. I think it would be great if you did. It will give you a chance to do something more challenging. And—”

  “Jasmine needs me,” I say. I can feel anger rising.

  “And, as I was saying, I think you need to be around a young man like Wendell. You need to have the experience of working with men. You will learn more from him than from Jasmine.”

  “It is not fair.” Even to me this sounds like what a child would say.

  “What is not fair? What is it about working in the mailroom that is so important to you?”

  I realize that there is no reason why it is not fair for me to be moved out of the mailroom. It simply feels unfair all of a sudden. I try to explain as best I can. “It is not fair to take away Jasmine’s help. And it took Marcelo a long time to learn the mailroom work. I work well there. Jasmine and Marcelo work well together. We help each other.”

  “You are raising your voice. I haven’t seen you do that in a very long time. That’s interesting. Anyway, I will get Jasmine the help she wanted to begin with. She’ll be all right.” He comes closer to where I am. I step back, hiding the envelope from his view. “Wendell asked for you. He obviously thinks that you can help him. The work with him will involve more reading, more analysis. It is more intellectual work. You will learn more working with him. That’s what this summer is all about, isn’t it?”

  I want to tell him that the only reason Wendell asked for me is that he wants to use me to get at Jasmine, but I cannot say this. I feel too spent to say anything. All the energy of anger has rushed through me and carried with it all the words. Besides, I know that on my own, without Aurora’s help, there is no changing Arturo’s mind once he determines what is best for me.

  I grip the envelope as hard as I can, and then nod in acceptance of his new command.

  CHAPTER 16

  If the object is to make it through the summer, to simply complete the assignments given to me, why does the picture of the girl unsettle me so much? I did precisely what I was told. Had I not looked in the trash box on my own initiative, I would not have seen the picture and I would not have her eyes burning within me. Why can’t I forget about what I found and move on, count the days left in this job?

  Here, in the dark of my tree house, I try as best I can to understand what happened, what is happening. I saw a picture of a girl who must have been disfigured by the manufacturer of the windshields that Arturo represents. The picture was in the trash box and this could not have been a mistake. There was something about the girl that did not matter, that was not significant to the law firm, to…Arturo? I am reminded of the way Arturo spoke to the man at the gym—like he had secrets he could not speak openly about. What does my father do?

  I have seen autistic kids at Paterson affected by things that do not affect a normal person. Like the time Alexandra refused to speak for weeks after a teacher’s aide accidentally threw away the postcard that fell from Alexandra’s desk. No one could understand Alexandra’s sadness over the postcard except a few other autistic kids. Is that what is happening to me? An overreaction caused by my condition, whatever that is? This that I now feel for the first time—is it simply a symptom, something a normal person would not feel?

  I have been around kids that suffer at Paterson, at St. Elizabeth’s. It’s like I have walked among them without noticing the pain that must exist beneath their skin. Now I notice the girl in the picture and feel as if I were responsible for her pain.

  I close my eyes and in my mind there appears the portrait of Jesus that Abba kept when she lived with us. In the middle of Jesus’s chest there is a red heart and around the heart there is a crown of thorns. A flame of fire shoots up from the top of the heart. One day Abba saw me looking at the portrait and she said, “That’s Jesus’s heart. It shows how He feels for us.” Then she took the picture down and sat beside me on her bed. “The thorns are His sorrow for all that we suffer, and the flame is His love.”

  Now, here in the dark, the envelope with the picture of the girl on my desk, I understand what it was about that portrait of Jesus that so captivated my attention that all I could do when I entered Abba’s room was stare at it. There was something about the image that was not right, something out of place. The eyes of Jesus were soft with what I took to be the look of love, but the flame in His heart burned with a fire that would scorch you if you touched it. I replace Jesus’s gaze with the eyes of the girl in the picture, and the portrait of Jesus finally makes sense, the eyes at last reflecting the intensity burning in His heart.

  I hear Namu below me whimpering. He knows that I’ve been awake all night, even though I have not moved in my sleeping bag but have stayed still, staring at the stars that pass across the skylight of my tree house. Namu can hear the turmoil in my mind and is offering comfort.

  I search for the IM but can’t find it. Then I try to block out the rushing thoughts by remembering a favorite piece of Scripture, but the remembering is not focused. It has a life of its own and what it presents are lines from different parts of Scriptures, senseless and disconnected, like an inner Tower of Babel.

  Now dawn is breaking. I see the blackness of the night fade slowly. I put on a T-shirt, a pair of shorts, and sneakers. I climb down and touch Namu’s head. “You want to go for a walk?” I as
k him.

  He turns and picks up the leash that is dangling from the roof of his doghouse.

  I let him lead me. He decides to take the steeper path.

  CHAPTER 17

  I am gathering my things from my desk, getting ready to move. The only good thing about getting reassigned to Wendell is that it will be easier for me to go through the Vidromek boxes and gather more information about the girl. I don’t know what I will find out. I am afraid of what I may discover. But last night, or rather early this morning, I decided that I had to follow this uncomfortable need to know more about the girl regardless of where it takes me.

  “Hey.” I hear Jasmine’s voice in the distance. Then she sees me putting my things in a box. “What’s going on?” She sounds worried.

  “I have been assigned to work with Wendell full-time,” I say. I am afraid to look at her.

  “What the…When? How?”

  “Yesterday. After I finished helping Wendell. Arturo decided. He was going to make sure you had help. Maybe Jasmine can still get Belinda.” Then I see amongst my things the list that Jasmine made for me that very first morning, and my eyes well up again.

  “I cannot believe this!” I have never seen Jasmine so upset. “Wait. Stay here. Is your father in yet?”

  “Yes.”

  She walks out of the mailroom determined. She is going to fight for me to work with her. A warm glow fills me.

  Ten minutes later Jasmine is back, a look of dejection on her face. “I guess you’ll be working with Wendell from now on,” she says. She plops down on her chair.

  “What did Arturo say?”

  “You can help me part-time until I find someone else. I’ll work out a schedule with Queen Juliet, don’t worry. This is all very strange. Did anything unusual happen yesterday when you were working on Wendell’s assignment?”

  “No. Yes. Not with Arturo. Something else happened.”

  “What?”

  I think about it for a while and then I take out the picture of the girl. “I found this in the box marked ‘Trash.’”

  She wheels her chair so that it is directly in front of mine and takes the picture from my hand. “Oh.”

  I can tell it is hard for Jasmine to look at the picture.

  “I don’t understand. What does the picture have to do with you being assigned to Wendell?”

  “I need to find out more about the girl in the picture.”

  “You found it in a box marked ‘Trash’?”

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t know who she is?”

  “No.”

  “Wait. We can try to figure out who the girl is later. Right now I have to figure out why I lost my help. Did you ask to work with Wendell?”

  “No. Wendell asked Arturo.”

  “Why?”

  The boat ride. I suddenly remember it. “He wants to help me succeed at the law firm so that I can go to Paterson next year.” I am not sure whether this is a lie or not.

  “Yeah, sure he does.”

  I can barely look at Jasmine’s face. I don’t know if I should tell her about the boat ride—that Wendell thinks he and I have an agreement and that is why he is doing all of this. But Wendell is wrong. There is no agreement between us.

  “I guess I should try to call Belinda. Maybe she’s still available.”

  In Jasmine’s face I see disappointment. How can she be disappointed about losing me and getting Belinda back?

  “Will Jasmine help me find out about the girl in the picture?”

  She looks long and hard at me. The unformulated question on her face is why. Finally, she says, “Let’s talk about it. Meet me here at noon. We’ll go to the cafeteria. We can strategize. I don’t have the slightest idea what’s going on. What a place!”

  On the way out of the mailroom, my arms around the small box with my things, Jasmine stops me for a second. “Here.” She drops a CD into the box. “I got this for you.”

  I know it is not the case, but when I walk out of the mailroom, I feel as if I am leaving on a long, long trip.

  She has pea soup in a Styrofoam cup and I have the tuna sandwich that Aurora made for me. We sit at the farthest table of the cafeteria, behind a pillar, where no one can see us. The cafeteria is located only one floor above us so we can take the stairs if we want to. It is only the second time I’ve been here.

  “So,” Jasmine says after she crumbles a cracker in her soup, “about the girl in the picture.”

  “Tell me.”

  “The girl was hurt by a Vidromek windshield. You know that, right?”

  “The windshield is supposed to shatter into little harmless pieces upon impact.”

  “Right. So the girl was hurt by a windshield and her parents are probably suing Vidromek. That’s how the picture ended up in Wendell’s boxes. You know all about suing and settling a case and all that?”

  “Yes.” I remember the conversation that Arturo had with Mr. Gustafson at the fitness club. “People fight against each other like enemies.”

  “Yeah, that’s about it. The girl’s parents probably hired a lawyer and the lawyer is asking Vidromek for money because they think Vidromek is at fault.”

  “Vidromek made the windshield. They are at fault.”

  “I don’t know all the legal ins and outs, but if it was that simple there’d be a lot of lawyers and mailroom clerks out of work.”

  “But Vidromek made the windshield and the windshield did not break into little pieces like it was supposed to.”

  “Okay, see this soup. I can tell it’s scalding. If, knowing this, I go ahead and slurp it and inflict a first-degree burn on my tongue, can I sue the makers of the soup or the cook? Suppose there was a little crack in the windshield made by a flying rock or something, and the girl’s parents did not fix the crack, and the crack made the windshield lose the glue or whatever it was that makes the windshield break into tiny pieces. That would be a defense that Sandoval & Holmes would use. They would say that it was the girl’s father’s fault because he didn’t fix the tiny crack. There are many others.”

  “Does Jasmine think that happened?”

  “I know the lawyers in the firm are doing all they can to prove that Vidromek is not responsible. Vidromek is being sued by a lot of people over these windshields and the law firm doesn’t want to settle any cases. They’re afraid that settling would be like admitting they are at fault.”

  “They are.”

  “Why do they make this so scalding that it takes ten minutes before a person can eat it? Why not try to get the right temperature so that a person can just sit down and slurp without thinking about it?”

  “It must be difficult to get the right temperature. One that suits everyone,” I volunteer.

  “When you get back to your office, look at the back of the picture. There should be a number there.”

  “There is no number,” I say.

  “You sure?”

  “Yes, I looked to see if it had a number like the other documents in the files.”

  “Maybe someone forgot to put a file number on it.”

  “Would it be thrown away if it had no number?”

  “Not if it seems related to a case. Anyone looking at the picture would know that it had to be connected to a Vidromek case. Nothing is thrown away on purpose, but maybe it was thrown away by accident. But you don’t believe that was the case?”

  “No. Only copies were in the box. I checked. And there were no other envelopes like the one that contained the picture.”

  Jasmine pushes the soup away from her. She grabs her head with both hands. When she speaks, her tone of voice is different. It is a tone of voice one uses when it is not important to be logical. “Why are you so interested in the girl?”

  I notice that my hand is opening and closing automatically. I stop it from doing that. “I felt something,” I say. “I felt something I have never felt before. It was like a fire. Here. And here.” I touch the top of my stomach, where my rib cage ends and then the middle of my ch
est. “It was like I wanted to fight the people who hurt her. But then I realized that might include my father. It was confusing. And…”

  “Go on, tell me. I want to know.”

  “There was the girl herself. Not anger. Something else.”

  “Ahh.”

  “I don’t have a name for it.”

  She is looking at the untouched soup. I feel I need to explain to Jasmine what I felt for the girl, but how can I when I don’t know myself? “It was like a question. Like a question that had to be answered.”

  “What question?”

  “There are no words for it.”

  “But if you could put it into words, what would the question ask?”

  Is there a way to articulate what I feel? It seems like a long time passes before I speak. “I guess it would be something like, ‘How do we go about living when there is so much suffering?’ Does the question make sense? Is it the type of question that is ever asked?”

  I wait for her to answer. After a few seconds she says, “We should go back.”

  “Do you think Arturo ever saw the picture?”

  I can see her hesitating. Then she says, “If it was part of a lawsuit against Vidromek? Yes. Vidromek is the firm’s biggest client. About eighty percent of the firm’s money comes from them. Your father insists on seeing every document related to a Vidromek case.”

  “But an error could have been made—a document could have been received and filed without Arturo seeing it.”

  “Yes, that’s possible.” She looks away and I see her bite the bottom of her lip. “Do you want to talk to him? About the picture?”