The Book of Lost Saints

by Daniel José Older

  If Adina registers my presence, she doesn’t show it. Her brain might be too lawyered up to notice. It doesn’t matter though. Maybe it’s more for me than her anyway. The phone call ends and the phone drops to the floor and Adina lets out a wail so earnest, so raw and rending that I feel it too, I feel it deep in me and I wrap tighter around her and together we breathe and breathe and breathe.

  * * *

  At some point during those passing moments, I begin to fade again. That gradual, growing lack, that emptiness, it gnaws at me.

  And part of me wants to just let it; part of me is dizzy with terror.

  It’s so slow and subtle I don’t notice it unless I make the conscious effort to take stock of myself, a little less, a little less. But then it seems to slow and then suddenly there is more again, and more, and then I am whole, with no reason or explanation except the shifting winds of this impossible world.

  “How was work?” Adina asks when Ramón walks in the door.

  If Ramón were paying attention, he’d notice her red eyes and ruffled clothes. He’d realize that even the mild strayaway from her usual immaculate self speaks to an hour plus of crying in a little ball on the floor. Instead he dejackets and plops down at the kitchen table with a sigh and says, “Terrible. Aliceana wants to talk.” Little bunny ears indicate the true terribleness of the word: It means talk in that most profane, overexplaining misunderstandings way.

  “Oh?” Adina starts to sit, reconsiders, then goes to the cabinet and gets the bottle of Havana Club her best friend Miguel brought her back after his trip. “Tell me.”

  “Man, I dunno.” Ramón reaches his long arm to the dish rack behind him and retrieves two glasses. “Things are just okay, you know? Like, they been okay since we met. Fantastic sex, basically from go and, like, we have a really good time together even when we’re not having sex, like playing Halo and talking about work and it’s kinda like we’re really good friends and also have really great sex?”

  Adina pours. “So? Or rather, but?”

  “Well, I was thinking about it today and yesterday, because, you know, she won’t fuck me in the hospital…”

  “Wait, what?” Adina allows a real smile to surface. It’s such a sharp contrast to her seriousness that Ramón just looks at her for a second, maybe finally realizing she has her own shit to deal with. “What?”

  “You alright, Adi?”

  “I’m fine.” Blatant lie. I’m sure Ramón can tell, but he’s not sure how to push her without being pushy, so he just nods. “Why you mad you can’t get any hospital ass?” She passes him his glass.

  “I mean, no, it’s not that I think she owes me hospital ass, it’s just…”

  “You had your hopes up.”

  “Right. Not unreasonable, I think.” He shrugs and throws his hands up.

  “Isn’t it?” she scoffs. “You of all people have seen the nastiness that goes on in that place. Why would you want your uglies bumping amidst all that mess?”

  Ramón gives a noncommittal shrug.

  “And anyway, it’s unprofessional. Maybe she wants to keep her job. And anyway anyway, so what? And anyway anyway anyway, have you asked why?”

  “‘Aliceana, why won’t you put out in the on-call room like all the doctors do on TV?’ No, I haven’t asked.”

  “Well…”

  “Because maybe I kinda sorta don’t wanna know.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I might not like the answer?”

  “That a question?”

  Ramón sighs and swishes his rum around. “I guess?”

  “Here,” Adina says, raising her glass. “Al carajo.”

  Ramón brightens and clinks with her. “Al carajo.”

  They drink and Adina pours another round. “Thing is,” Ramón says, “I think … I think, and don’t tell anyone this, please, but I think I really like her.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “Like, like like.”

  “But … why? I mean, I like her too. She might be my favorite of your little friends.”

  Ramón scowls at her and raises his glass. “To all of our little friends.”

  “Except Kat. I hated that little hussy.”

  “Damn, Adina.”

  “I never told you she hit on me?”

  “No!”

  “Oh. Well, yeah.” She goes to clink, but Ramón pulls his glass back.

  “Did you…?”

  “No! Ramón! Coño…”

  “Well, I mean … You’re you, after all.”

  “Right, I’m me. Loyal before lover, hard as that might be to believe, jackass. No, I did not sleep with stupid Kat.” They clink and gulp back the rum.

  Despite being huge and a semi-regular drinker, Ramón has no tolerance and he’s getting sauced already. “Thing is, I couldn’t tell you why if you asked. It’s not one moment or another that makes her … likable, to me, I just … it’s something about the way she looks at me, I think. She sees me. I’m babbling.”

  “No, it makes sense,” Adina says, clearly trying not to let it resonate as much as it is. She pours some more and they sip as they speak.

  “I just, even though we rarely speak on deep stuff, she appreciates me in a quiet way. Took me a while to understand, ya know? But I was just starting to see it in the small shit she’d do; wait up for me when I was out late just to say good night and then fall asleep right when I crawled into bed, which used to annoy me until I realized it was her way of having that little second with me and that it actually meant a lot.”

  “I see.”

  “Or the way she catches my glances in the hospital. Like, no, we don’t fuck in the on-call room, but every once in a while I’ll catch her looking at me, and you know, it’s like, better’n fucking in its own kinda way. Know what I mean?”

  Adina nods, looks away.

  “Anyway, I don’t think it’s over over; she probably just wants, I dunno, something or other. But I haven’t done anything to fuck this up, and we’ve been pretty alright, so I don’t see … Bah, I’m not making any sense.”

  “Only barely,” Adina says. “But I’m just saying, if you really truly—”

  Sweat! Ramón’s phone screams, followed by a frantic hip-hop beat. Sweat! He picks it up before the horn section kicks in. Adina looks relieved.

  “Oh, cool,” Ramón says, but it sounds like whatever he just heard is definitively the opposite of cool. He puts down the phone. “Aliceana’s downstairs. I didn’t realize she meant this soon when she said she wanted to talk.”

  “Oh.” Adina frowns. “Cool.”

  “I might be drunk.”

  “Go get ’em, cowboy.”

  * * *

  Aliceana looks somehow beautiful in the hideous lighting of Ramón’s entryway. Or maybe that’s Ramón thinking, not me. She’s wearing a big navy-blue winter jacket. The fur lining the hood makes a fuzzy halo around her pretty, dead-serious face and the neon hallway shine gives those cheeks swirled highlights. She’s also wearing the pilot hat with those silly earflaps that Ramón lent her at work earlier because she forgot hers. It’s either sweet or manipulative, depending on how things play out, but either way, her little face peering out of all that winterwear is hard not to find adorable. Even for me.

  That—that thing that began rising within him back at the hospital yesterday: It hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s gotten bigger than he knows what to do with, but I know it’s there.

  They say each other’s names at the same time. Ramón laughs while he cringes and Aliceana seems to retreat a few inches into her jacket. She’s about to speak but Ramón cuts her off. “Look.” He snaps both his hands out in front of him, palms facing each other like whatever he wants her to look at is all explained within the empty space between them. She looks.

  “I mean, listen: I was just talking about you to Adi. Upstairs. And…”

  “Ramón.”

  “Thing is, I really, really like you. I know I haven’t said it before, and I’m not really exactly sure why. Yo
u just come over after my shows and we have this great sex and play video games and then we catch each other’s eyes at work but there’s a whole other something going on between us that neither of us know how to explain.” He pauses to let his mind catch up with everything he just said.

  “Me, I mean. About the not having the guts. If that was the case, it was me I was referring to. Not you. I don’t know what the thing with you was, maybe you were just waiting for me to go ahead and take things somewhere else, beyond all that just being, just existing but not growing or moving or anything, just being. Which is cool and all, in a Zen kind of way, I guess, but also maybe it’s just that we could do so much more. We could—”

  “Ramón.” Finally, she puts enough authority in her voice to shut him up.

  “Yes?”

  “I came here to…” She pauses and her bottom lip trembles and I know what she’s about to say, even if my inebriated nephew doesn’t. “… to break up.”

  “Oh.”

  “I mean … I … Not that we were a couple exactly anyway, but…”

  “No. I … understand. I think. I’ll just be … leaving now.”

  “Ramón?”

  It’s too late though: He’s already out the door and down the block, not running exactly but moving fast, carried along by the waves of Havana Club and too many emotions to keep track of. He’s oblivious to the passing traffic and blinking lights around him, doesn’t hear her call after him, doesn’t care about the fact that he’s only in his T-shirt and work pants and fails entirely to pay any mind to the crisp January air prickling against his bare skin.

  He also doesn’t notice the two men walk up behind him, one with a retractable nightstick. It even takes an added second or two to register when the nightstick cracks against the back of his head. He sees an explosion of whiteness and stumbles a step forward before regaining his footing. Turns around, rubbing his scalp.

  “What just happened?” he asks one of the guys who seem to have appeared out of nowhere.

  I’m in a frenzy, trying and knowing I’ll fail to rally myself to do something useful. I’m just barely there, but there must be some way … I send my everything outward toward my fingertips, just like I did with the photo album, but it all takes time, time I don’t have. Turns out, I didn’t need to though, because my nephew is gigantic and unstoppable all by himself. Also, wasted, which surely helps at this moment. Having absorbed the hit, he just stands there. The men glance back and forth at each other trying to figure out why Ramón hasn’t collapsed and readying their next move.

  “Did something fall on me?” Ramón looks up, then back at the men. I think it’s dawning on him now; he takes a step back, wavers slightly. “Oh. Oh shit.”

  I have a name, dammit! Marisol. Luz Marisol Caridad … Luz Marisol … Coño. The men close in on Ramón and he’s about to turn around again, which is surely not the right move, when a voice calls out. “I said be easy, goddammit! He’s practically my brother!” Alberto hops out of a double-parked car and runs toward them. “The fuck is wrong with you two?”

  The men exchange uneasy glances. “Well, he didn’t drop,” complains one of Alberto’s guys.

  “I don’t give a fuck. We can’t drag him up there all black and blue because you dickheads couldn’t control yourselves. We’re not even supposed to have laid a hand on him at all, and you wanna biff him up for real.”

  “Um…” Ramón ventures. “Can I go now?”

  “No, goddammit!” Alberto growls. “Get in the fucking car.”

  A tense moment passes. Ramón may or may not be weighing his options. Finally he puts up both hands and shrugs. “Don’t have much choice, do I?”

  “A well-thought-out decision,” Alberto sneers. He nods at his guys and they all pile into the car and drive off as I labor to catch up to myself, to everything that’s just happened, to whatever is yet to come.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Mami and Papi.

  They sit on the pink couch and hold each other like they come in a set: jimaguas, the twins. So stern you’d think they’re ancient trees, their feet becoming roots that claw into the ground as the world changes faster and faster around them. It’s been so heavy around here since Isabel “disappeared.” I mean, everyone knows she joined the rebeldes. Always impossible to shut her up, it’s all she talked about right up until she didn’t and then her silence was all we needed to know that something had changed. Even self-absorbed Nilda noticed—now her songs all seem slightly off; the minor key tiptoes a jangly danzón through the empty rooms, its helter-skelter sweeps and swerves sending us all into a quiet stupor.

  I guess I first knew it when she took that smuggled gun out of the chicken carcass. It started as a slow trickle of strange events only I knew about. More bullets. Messages. An army uniform. All passed through our doors and then vanished away to somewhere else, the mountains surely.

  But I never thought she’d leave for real. And if she did, I was sure she’d take me with her. This thing, this revolution, was ours. She had brought me into the fold when she sent me to Gómez’s.

  But then one day she was gone. And everybody knew where.

  Las Colinas sits on the edge of the city, nestled into the beginning of the wilds, el campo, where the little people plot their mischief, where Jorge Sincabeza gets his revenge on unfaithful wives and where the sounds of beautiful, mournful singing accompanies the tambores late into the night. Also, the rebeldes.

  When I look out my bedroom window, past the beat-up old shack and puddles across the street and out toward the mountains, I imagine Isabel out there, dancing to those tambores with the little men and Jorge Sincabeza and whatever other forest ghouls haunt el campo. And of course, Gómez, the butcher, who disappeared at the same time along with Irma Caridad, the lady who runs the library; Manolo Sanpedro, who lives three doors down; and a teacher at my school, Carlito Delgado. All gone, all rebeldes. Heroes, traitors. Whatever.

  And the truth is: I’m jealous. I’m sure she’s going through all kinds of impossibilities I can’t even conceive of out there, but she’s part of something huge, the whole world changing, a rupture in history, and I want in.

  At least I did when I was imagining it. But now, now Batista’s men are raining their fists down on our front door and it doesn’t seem so grandiose or romantic; it’s just terrifying. Nilda’s fingers freeze on the piano. Old Cassandra is bawling in the corner and Mami and Papi are both looking like their heads might pop. Papi’s fists are clenched. I can see him go in and out of panic, trying, trying not to let it rule him. He’s a giant and carries fire inside, a walking volcano, and he knows, I know, we all know, if he loses it now it’ll be the end: the end of everything.

  Mami touches his fist and I notice for the first time the veins in her hand are starting to show in that way only old people’s do, like Cassandra. And I think on top of everything else, how sad that this is the first day of being old for Mami.

  Abre la puerta, Papi says, but no one knows who he’s saying it to because his eyes are closed, he’s concentrating so hard on keeping the volcano fire inside.

  ¡Cassandra! Papi bellows, when it’s clear no one’s about to take up the order just for the sake of it. ¡Abre la puerta, coño!

  Cassandra whimpers and makes her slow, arthritic crawl toward the foyer. We hear the door creak open and the soldiers’ demands and then their boots in the hallway and then there they are. There’s three of them and they’re just boys, eighteen at the most and skinny. It would take another two to match Papi’s weight. If he lets loose it’d be over for them, but then soon after it’d be over for us, for Papi especially, so I know he’ll hold back. He loves Jesus Christ, who watches wearily from his cross on the wall, and he loves his family and he loves Cuba and Las Colinas and because of all these things he loves he won’t lose it, I know he won’t.

  Buenas tardes, caballeros, my father begins. ¿Cómo podemos ayudar?

  As if we all didn’t know what they wanted. As if anything was ever a secret. Th
e guy in the middle just has a wisp of a mustache and he sweats, looks slightly off to the side when he demands to know where my sister Isabel is.

  Papi tells them he’d like to know himself and he in fact filed a missing report with the policía municipal just yesterday. Then Wispy says some words that I’m not even allowed to think without getting slapped and I see Mami wrap her newly old hand tighter around Papi’s big meat slab of a hand. I think of Gómez the butcher and the hanging carcasses in his shop and what will happen to all that meat now that he’s run off to join the rebeldes, who will make sure it doesn’t just rot in the hot Havana sun?

  I feel suddenly queasy and I think I might throw up, and how horrible that would be on a day that the Guardia Civil came pounding on our door and Mami became old and Papi had to not be a volcano.

  I’m trying to breathe slowly the way Cassandra told me to do when I don’t want to throw up, when suddenly Papi stands. He’s even taller than usual, and he makes the Guardia Civil guys look like toy soldiers, like he could sweep his arm across the room and knock them all over. And for a second I think maybe he will and I forget I have to throw up, because we’re all just standing there, even the soldiers, staring empty-eyed at the giant monster that is my daddy.

  He doesn’t bellow though. He says Váyanse de mi casa in the quietest, most horrible voice I’ve ever heard; the voice God uses when He’s speaking the magic words that turn whole cities to dust. I don’t care how many guns or tanks I had, I would leave if Papi told me to like that. I think Jesus Christ would too, right at that moment.

  The soldiers walk backward out the door, clutching the pistolas on their belts and frowning. And we’ve won the hour but we’ve lost, we’ve lost, we’ve lost the war, because that was the moment everything changed, and none of us need a crystal ball to know it.

  * * *

  Overwhelmed by fear, alcohol, and emotion, Ramón has managed to fall asleep in the back of Alberto’s SUV on the way to the old man’s house. He wakes up drooling and haunted by another dream I’ve sent him from my childhood. Not the best moment to reach him, I suppose, but I don’t have time to have good timing. Not the way things are going.