The Book of Lost Saints

by Daniel José Older

  “I’m saying,” Ramón retorts to some smirk from Marcos that I didn’t bother listening to, “it’s not like you’re some magician of the pussy yourself, sir.”

  Adina struggles not to spit out her coffee. Ramón turns back to the dishes he was washing.

  “I do alright,” Marcos says. No one’s convinced though. Adina hums to herself, which the boys correctly interpret to mean she’s getting more pussy than both of them combined.

  Marcos puts his elbows on the table and rests his chin on his fist, eyebrows raised. “Alright, then, bushmaster, what’s the big secret?”

  “First of all,” Adina says, closing her laptop and grinning ear to ear. “Patience. Y’all penis packers are in such a damn hurry all the time.”

  Ramón finishes the dishes and swats the dampness from his hands. “We are patient.” He pulls up a chair. Gray spreads through the sky outside. The chorus of birds has started up. “We waited for you to finish your sentence to disagree with you.”

  “Fine. If you don’t want to understand, don’t ask.”

  “No, no, go ’head,” Marcos says, waving his hands defensively. “We’ll shut up.” He punches Ramón’s shoulder. “Shut it, man. Let her finish.”

  “Men”—Adina speaks very slowly; each word comes carefully picked—“tend to be in a fucking hurry.” She looks back and forth at them, waiting for a challenge. “To get to the magic pussy.”

  “I mean,” Marcos starts. Ramón returns the shoulder punch and he shuts up.

  “Especially young men like yourselves. I shouldn’t even have to say this, but if you want to know why I bag so many women, even confirmed signed sealed and delivered straight ones, even born-agains, for Christ’s sake, it’s because I know a thing or two about the P. In fact, I have one of my own. And there’s very few things that pussies have in common, but one of them is this: If you don’t know what the fuck you’re doing with it, it doesn’t like you. Any questions?”

  Ramón and Marcos glance at each other and sip their coffees.

  Adina rolls her eyes, laughs. “Actually, never mind. How was the crowd tonight?”

  “Not great but not terrible,” Ramón says. “But for a freezing nasty night, I ain’t mad.”

  “And Alberto was there,” Marcos adds. Ramón glares at him.

  “Gutierrez? That piece of shit. Why?”

  “Wanted to talk to this guy.” Marcos thumb-points across the table. Adina glares at Ramón. “He doesn’t want to talk about it.”

  “I don’t. I already did, anyway. He said his granddad wants to talk to me.”

  Marcos raises his eyebrows. “You didn’t say that before!”

  “Enrique?” Adina asks.

  “That’s the only one I know of.”

  “Why?”

  “He didn’t say. I wasn’t interested. I don’t want to talk to that old bat.”

  “Probably he wants you to smuggle guns into Cuba or something,” Marcos suggests.

  “No,” Ramón snaps. “Why would he want me of all people? I disrespected his stupid seed more blatantly than anyone has ever dared to that night and I still haven’t paid for it.” Collectively, the three sitting around the table let out a kind of resigned chuckle at the memory of some wild party that had gone awry, a lingering irritation finally expressed by Ramón in the form of a stinging rebuke; Alberto’s shocked face. I don’t know exactly what happened, don’t care much, but they certainly all enjoyed it. “More likely he wants to intimidate me into apologizing or something, because stupid Alberto is too pathetic to ask for it himself.”

  “Or something worse,” Adina says. It’s almost a whisper and she really means it.

  They both look at her. “Like what?” Ramón asks.

  “He has virtually unlimited resources and the local police in his pocket. And he’s wrathful like a scorned storm. And you fucked with his favorite grandkid, as you say. So no, I don’t think he’ll ask you to smuggle arms, since he can get any fulano to do that and already does, and I don’t think he just wants to idly threaten you into apologizing, because that’s pointless, really.”

  “So?”

  “So surely he has some truly dirty work he needs done and since you already know that with a flick of his finger, your life is a fuckpuddle, he doesn’t have to threaten you. Don’t you get it? The threat is implicit in the fact that he wants to meet you. We all know who he is, what that means. So he can be as sweet an old man as he wants to be and you’ll still know he means business.”

  “Clever bastard.”

  “The power of people knowing you have power means you don’t have to use it.”

  “Until you really, really want to,” Marcos says.

  “Yeah, well.” Ramón has nothing to say to that, he realizes after he’s opened his mouth. He stands up, pours the dregs of his coffee down his throat, and rubs his eyes. “I’m going to bed. Thank you all for that inspiring pep talk about my future.”

  “Any motherfucking time,” Adina says, flipping open her laptop.

  * * *

  The coffee did nothing to Ramón. He’s Cuban, after all, and was probably raised on the stuff, knowing Nilda. The day and a half of work drags him down, every hour another anchor that guides him toward the bed. Maybe he’ll just pass out and that’ll be that; message left unattended to till he wakes later today and then maybe not at all. He lumbers forward, shedding clothes as he goes, collapses like a slow-motion blimp crash onto the mattress. It’s dawn and the light is growing inside the room, so he fumbles a long arm up, grasps the string on the third try, and pulls it just so and lets go. The shade snaps down and the room is dark enough.

  I’m afraid he’s about to pass out, rending all I’ve done pointless, when he rolls back over and makes a face at his nightstand, gathers himself up onto one elbow, leans over it.

  Yes.

  It is the family photo album. Yes. How strange, I’m sure. And open. He sits up a little more, looks around the room. Could it have been Adina? But that’s almost as absurd as it not being her. No, none of it makes sense. And surely he didn’t leave it there himself. Hasn’t looked at the thing in a decade. He clicks on the reading light and runs his fingers along the pages. No, he’s not dreaming.

  The photo album is there, opened because I opened it.

  There’s Abuelo and Abuela, looking young and dignified, serious in that way people used to when they were getting their pictures taken. And there’s Cuba, behind them. Las Colinas, specifically, that outskirts of La Habana, the corner of the house we grew up in and the palm tree that Isabel fell from and shattered her humerus when she was nine. There’s the sidewalk, cracked and filthy. There’s Conchita the dog with the most Cubanest possible name, unreasonably tiny and looking somehow offended, always. There’s Tío Angelo and Miguelito the neighbor nobody liked. And there’s Isabel and Nilda, both smiling, and there, serious as ever and pouting in my quinceañera dress, am I.

  CHAPTER SIX

  He’s going home.

  I knew this would happen. Willed it even. He woke up and shook his head. He wrote down the dream about Isabel from yesterday evening, glancing at the photo album. Then he dressed and shuffled out the door, headphones on. It’ll be the moment that puts all my work to the test, seeing her.

  There are wide swaths of nothing, blanks I don’t think I can fill in by myself. But while the details are murky, I do know the rage. It still swells inside me after all these years, threatens to drown me when I get complacent.

  We swish through the winter streets. I hardly notice.

  A bus across town. Suburbs turn to slums. A brief spin through the towering financial zone. Blessedly brief, because I can barely fight off the killing rage and take in the sudden everything that is a city all at once. I’m like a walking warhead right now, and it takes every bit of my concentration not to let go of the trigger and take this city bus out with all the holy, hungry intensity trying to blow out of me. But other things want my attention, a million molecules, a million different crisscrossin
g lines of communication and chaos. I can see the old man on his way to the clinic get uncomfortable, shift in his seat at the teetering energy. A middle-aged Chinese lady scowls out the window, clutches her ten-year-old son close to her.

  I find my center. Send wave after wave of emptiness against the rising tide. For a few seconds, I don’t know what will happen. I teeter. And then the air eases. We’re leaving the chaos of downtown, turning down a quiet street, with no pulsing electrical currents, no screaming advertisements, no towers. No towers that always watch. I gently let myself shatter, collect the pieces, and slide into a dark corner beneath Ramón’s seat.

  Where I remain.

  I remain until the bus screeches to a halt on Andover and Thirty-Fourth Avenue, a few miles outside of downtown, a neither here-nor-there burb called the Grove that feels queasily familiar. I scowl at the somewhat cared-for lawns and decent two-story houses. Mediocrity and the American dream. A treacherous thing.

  It all happens so fast: Ramón is up the front steps and ringing the doorbell and the door is opening and there’s Nilda. She looks … old. It’s been over thirty years, so, of course, but there’s only hints of the girl she used to be. Of course, of course, but still. All those years of living, all that life, surely she’s done her own work to stave off the clawing regret, and it shows all over her face. Gravity seems to be winning, like her skin wants to roll off and glide away and all she can do to stop it is apply more eyeliner, more rouge, more everything that’s not her in the hopes of keeping each piece more or less in place.

  “Ay, Ramón,” she gasps as if he never ever comes over and she hadn’t spent the last two hours preparing for his visit. She puts her hands all over his face, reaches up to kiss his cheeks, envelops him in her thick perfume cloud until he says, “Ya, Mami, okay, yo también te quiero, pero coño…” and she steps back shrugging and frowning like she’s been accused of something terrible and ushers him inside.

  And I’m left here on the steps with my rage boiling over. There is a thing we say sometimes, a way we are playful with words, because the difference between why and because is just an accent and a space. An accent and a space and that upturned ending that denotes a question. See: ¿Por qué? Porque. And when we’re really on a roll explaining something, it becomes a pivot: This and that and the other, we say, getting more and more excited, the truth and importance of what we’re getting at building, and then: ¿Por qué? Porque this and that and the other and away we go.

  But here I am with just the question. The Why lingers, sears through me; the Because is nowhere to be found. Still, reason or not, the rage remains.

  But I won’t kill her.

  Don’t even know if I could, but I know I won’t try.

  Somewhere inside me there’s an oath not to. I swore it once—I must’ve. Or maybe it’s some weird familial tie. But it is binding and I will abide. Still, the urge persists.

  Of course everything is perfect inside the house: each knickknack placed just so, an entire room of couches and coffee tables not to be touched, only seen and appreciated. And then another room, slightly less just so but still, just so. And here Ramón finds a seat, grudgingly accepts the crackers and guava spread and less grudgingly a cafecito, and when Nilda finally, finally stops fluttering around and twittering on about things even she doesn’t care about, Ramón pulls the photo album out of his satchel and opens it.

  Good man, Ramón.

  Nilda straightens her back. She looks so small in that big pink plush chair. Its vinyl cover amplifies every squirm with a squeal and a groan. Above her, Jesus Christ takes in the world from his miserable perch and a single dollop of blood hangs from his thorny crown, perpetually about to drop. “Ya tú sabes que no sabemos nada de esas cosas.” She shrugs with panache, head shaking. “Pero nada.”

  Deny deny deny until you disappear. This is the strategy. And it’s worked for so long, why stop now? We don’t know nothing. Not a thing. But nothing. That emphatic gusto that is a Cuban’s first language as much as Spanish is. You can see in her eyes she doesn’t believe it. She always trembled, but it’s more pronounced now. She won’t lift that tiny coffee cup because it’ll spill everywhere.

  Where has Isabel gone? I remember asking once, after being stonewalled over and over by our parents. Little Nilda glared down at me firmly, as if by sheer will she could bend the world to be the one she wished it was, one where Isabel hadn’t left and the country wasn’t falling apart around us. Her shaking head became a shrug, and though she said she didn’t know, swore it, what she really meant was How dare you ask? Who are you to demand these answers of me? To make me lie to you?

  “Mami, mira, sé que…” Ramón gives up on his second language with a shake of his head. “I know you don’t know what happened but … I just … I never asked you much about it because you never spoke much about it, and—”

  “I never espoke about it because I don’t know anything about it, m’ijo.” She’s deflecting so hard I’m afraid she might turn inside out. That lipsticked mouth droops all the way down at the edges, and she leans back, crosses her arms as if closing the matter.

  Ramón, who hates it when she interrupts him, has to catch his own flash of anger before he can speak again. “Look, I know it’s hard to talk … about Las Colinas and—”

  “You have no idea, m’ijo.”

  “Mami, por favor,” Ramón growls. “Let me finish.”

  Heavy frown, fluttering eyes. “I am sorry,” she says, pronouncing it extra carefully, that oh hyperannunciated, and looking like she’s the one who should be accepting an apology, thank you very much. I know that face. Any minute now, she’ll hurl all that trembling denial outward in the form of wrath and this conversation will be over before Ramón can even catch his breath.

  “No, I don’t have any idea what it was like or how hard it is to talk about it. I don’t. But that’s just the point. I want to know, Mami. I … it feels like something’s missing inside of me. A whole part of who we are. And then I was looking through the album and I saw the picture and I just thought. I … don’t know. I mean, they’re, they were family. No?”

  The dreams. Inwardly he flails for words to explain what he’s seen but none of them work.

  “Of course, Ramón querido. But we can’t live in the past. They’re gone. Dead. So why go crazy? I’m sure it killed your abuelos, the grief. First Isabel and then Marisol. And I won’t live my life a victim of someone else’s disappearance. Do you understand? This all happened so so many years ago, Ramón, why are you trying to dig up things now?”

  They keep speaking but everything stopped for me at the mention of my name.

  Marisol. The sun and the sea.

  I have a name. It fortifies me. Luz Marisol Caridad Aragones. A name is also a prayer, the most personal prayer there is. Without even meaning to, I solidify ever so slightly. I’m sure if Nilda were looking at the empty space beside her son instead of rubbing her eyes, she’d see a flicker of flesh. Surely she’d chalk it up to her nerves and go back to trembling and carrying on. Surely.

  But none of that matters.

  Marisol.

  The one-word poem my parents chose for me, and not something plain like Nilda. And then I’m full of sorrow that they’re gone. They’re gone, and somehow I’m sure I never said goodbye.

  I have to get myself together. My emotions have been bettering me all day. I center again and tune back into the conversation. Nilda wants to end it, so she’s drifting deeper into melodrama, threatening Ramón with the passive-aggressive wrath of her tears. “Ramón, I just, I don’t understand…” Voice trembling, eyes wet. And in case he missed her shaking hands, she goes ahead and lifts her tiny cup, sends cascades of sweet black coffee down her fingers onto the plate. “Ay coño,” she snaps. “You see?” There it is. She half stands, but Ramón’s up first, sitting her back down, long-stepping to the kitchen for some paper towels.

  The matter is dropped. And he has to get to work anyway. Ramón retreats, and I with him, both of us
confused but not defeated.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  It’s early afternoon, still gray gray gray from the pavement to the sky and occasional bursts of rain. I’m exhausted and when Ramón goes to work, I take refuge in his room. First I do nothing. I do it carefully though, specifically. Nothingness: such a blessing. Doing nothing is a prayer too, when you do it right, and I make sure each of my impossible, semi-existent cells finds rejuvenation in my stillness. It’s hard, keeping still. Also, I’m Cuban, so even harder. But I have practice, and I settle in after not too long, quiet the torrential arguments blasting through what’s left of my mind (or is my mind what’s left of me?) and the goodness soon takes me over.

  Adina’s home early from work. Her phone call gradually takes shape through my meditation. She’s pacing and it’s a very sad one, the conversation. “No,” she says, again and again, but it’s gentle, not defiant, a tired chorus of defeat. “No. It wasn’t … no. Not like that, certainly. No. Babe, please, listen … no.” I slip in and out of consciousness and the nos weave through my thoughts, sad, loving, and lost.

  Surfacing again, I understand. Adina is a lover. More than a lover: She’s a romantic. A desperate one at that. She’s in love, actively. You can feel it through the wall, all that love. And it’s long-distance and overcomplicated; harder than either thought it would be.

  “Baby, baby, sweetheart, please.” Cooing now, sinking to the floor, fighting tears. I slip under the crack of the door and find the girl curled around herself, looking somewhat ridiculous because she’s still in her fancy lawyer slacks and blazer and frowning from the inside out. I can’t help myself; I wrap around her.

  “Baby, look, listen, just…” Words with no meaning. The girl on the other end is crying too. Now that I have a name I am stronger, I can give more of myself and not risk fading away forever.