The Book of Lost Saints

by Daniel José Older

  So I leave him there, squinting happily at his screen. I have a theory to test.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  See, this is what I mean about Aliceana: The apartment is completely bare. There’s a table with a chair, wooden and dull as daytime television. There’s a TV in the living room, a couch—just a couch. In her room: a simple bed, a desk, and a bookcase. No clutter on the desk, not even a knickknack, dammit. One photo: her parents, hugging each other and smiling in the pale winter sunlight outside their house in North Jersey. A stereo takes up one of the shelves of her bookcase with one of those fancy new music-playing devices plugged into it. In her bathroom there are tampons, aspirin, toothpaste, a toothbrush, contact lens solution, a little holder. Shampoo. I’m falling asleep just looking at it.

  She didn’t get to say everything she’d wanted to that night. Ramón ran out quick when things didn’t seem to be going his way and I could see his speech caught her off guard. My stories may not stay and get stagnant, but unspoken words? Emotions left in limbo? Deadly. So after my cursory tour of the empty apartment, I wait. The lighting is nice in here, I’ll say that. The day progresses and the sun sends window-shaped squares of light across the wall and occasional cars pass and occasional neighbors yell back and forth to each other.

  The daylight softens into moody orange and then the door clicks open and Aliceana comes in. She wears no expression as she shrugs off her courier bag and strips out of her long winter jacket, out of her scrubs, and disappears into the shower. She’s a blank to me, and part of me wants to call it quits. Maybe that’s all I needed to know. Maybe I’m looking too hard for something that’s not there. But I wait. It’s what I do, so why not do it some more? Anyway, I’m still curious. She comes out of the bathroom naked with a towel turban wrapped around her head, walks to the stereo, and punches something into the little player of hers and suddenly the whole room is full of sound.

  It’s the slow intro to some club mix. A series of throbbing synthesizers overlap as horns fade in and out and a voice I can only imagine is exalting God in some language hollers out into the immenseness of the music. I hadn’t realized that Aliceana had also set up speakers in the upper corners of her room and in the living room. The sounds pours in from all around and when the beat drops, it rumbles through me, reckless.

  Aliceana pulls on some sweatpants and a sports bra as the song builds. She looks up, face twisted like she can’t place a smell. The phone! I didn’t even hear it beneath all the clamor. She goes tearing across the apartment, displaces pillows, hurls clothes to the side, opens drawers before finally coming up with an apparently rarely used cordless and blipping it on.

  “Hold on! Hold on!” she yells, and then runs back over and offs the stereo and sinks to the floor panting. “Hello?”

  She smiles. “Hey, Mami.” The Tagalog small talk rambles on for a few minutes, Aliceana nodding, agreeing and repeating that she’s fine at least six times. Then she says “Okay,” waits, and then “Hi, Papa.” You can hear her voice change—she leaves each pause longer to give him time to answer, pouting in spite of her forced-cheerful voice. There’s not much coming from the other end; occasional croaked monosyllables that may or may not have anything to do with the simple questions she’s asking. “I love you,” she finally says when everything else seems to fail. “Bye.”

  There’s no reply and eventually her mom gets back on, sends love from both of them, and hangs up. Aliceana sighs and absentmindedly sticks the phone on the second shelf of her bookcase where she’s sure to not be able to find it. She rises, reaches her arms up over her head and arches her back, and then clicks the music back to life.

  I’m so unprepared when Aliceana leaps up into the air and comes down headfirst that I almost, almost, fling into sudden physicality and try to stop her. She lands miraculously in a handstand (and on beat), touches her head down lightly, then sets herself off into a furious spin, kicking her feet out to gain momentum. What I thought was an absurdly plain carpet is actually a mat of some kind, used to facilitate not cracking open your skull during such endeavors.

  You wouldn’t even call it dancing at first, because it just seems like the natural movement of a body in time with the pulsing beat—free of intentionality, decision making, self-consciousness. It is, of course, dancing, but in that blissful, uninhibited way you rarely see outside of people’s private little worlds. The spontaneously choreographed equivalent of a diary entry.

  I have been hasty. Cruel even.

  I took a quiet disposition and made it into not-much-going-on. I’m usually pretty accurate with my assessments, but maybe I’m slipping. Or maybe bias has gotten the best of me, as I said. And, since we’re being honest, Ramón isn’t exactly the great communicator either. Neither of them has said much, and somehow their feelings grew anyway; grew and got hurt. She had plenty of reason to think she was in over her head and want to step out, and I still wonder what she would have said that night if he’d given her the chance.

  Once again, I am fading. Barely there and fading. This was what I came to find out, and here’s my answer. Something in Ramón anchors me. Perhaps it is the blood, perhaps a deeper element, one I’ll never understand. But the fact remains: When I’m away too long, that is when I am weakest. That’s when each second begins to take its toll. This is as far as I’ve been from him. The hospital is only a block away from his apartment. Even there, I feel it in small ways on the days I don’t follow him to work, that gradual fade like the passage of time. But here, across town, I know I won’t be around much longer if I linger.

  I am tethered to my nephew, and without him I will vanish.

  I leave Aliceana to her wild dancing.

  The night suddenly feels impossibly dark and dangerous, and I wonder what I was thinking trying such a reckless experiment. Perhaps it’s our shared blood that fortifies me, and whoever is in charge of these things knew better than to have me attached to Nilda.

  I enter the frosty New Jersey sky as the end of day fades at the horizon. Bland apartment buildings rise around me. I sense memories trying to creep in. Painful ones; not the kind you reminisce over with friends and a swill of rum.

  An empty chair.

  Its emptiness carves something out of me, breaks me.

  No. These are memories that wait for you to be having an off moment and then come settle into your bones, wrap their tentacles around your arteries and veins and creep along toward your heart, poisoning everything they touch.

  But this is my struggle. My memories are my salvation. In their slow unraveling, I become whole again.

  I’m lost. The New Jersey night seems so far away and these shards of memory so close. But without Ramón’s dreams to filter them, it’s hard to make them make sense. The chair is a familiar one—it’s from our kitchen table. Someone should be sitting in it but they’re not. There’s a green cushion on its seat with a slight indentation on it. The wood is old, scuffed. That emptiness keeps carving me up. There are people nearby, but none of them know what I’m feeling, the depths of this loneliness.

  I wonder if I’ll ever come back, so flimsy is this curtain between my two worlds, the past and the present. And again, I am there. And again I am lost.

  Something touches me. Moves me. It’s jolting, a flicker of sharp light inside all my weighty depths. I look up from the empty chair and see the sky. The sky is flecked with dots of white. It pours down on me, numbers beyond comprehension, the whole night, the whole city, everything, steeped in it. The snow has nowhere to be, no memory. I’m wrapped in it, even as it passes through me, slowing slightly. I’m alive in it, even as I’m nothing of the sort. I’m awake, fully, inside the moment, and what I’ve left behind is no less real, still a part of me but far, far away. Snow. Everywhere. And somewhere beyond it, the ongoing footsteps of my nephew’s heart thumping along, guiding me home to him.

  Fading, I hurtle through the snow-speckled sky, back to Ramón.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Isabel.

  No
t her but the empty space where she’s supposed to be. That chair she always would sit in at the kitchen table, the one with the green cushion.

  And maybe that’s the first sign that something’s not right: She’s still not back.

  And even though it’s a brand-new day—just a few fragile months into a new year, since a whole new Cuba began dawning around us—it seems very dim somehow. Mami still sits idly at the piano, tinkling boberías while Papi watches image after image of the bearded men swarming across our capital and it’s not so ecstatic anymore. It’s a little creepy, like we’ve all fallen in love with a beautiful prince but it turns out he’s not a prince at all, not even a person, just a beautiful sack of skin concealing a billion squirming maggots.

  Nilda’s been even more prickly and impossible than usual; I can’t remember the last time she played music. We barely speak these days because nothing is really worth the aggravation of another stupid argument.

  And while Mami’s making no discernable melody on the piano keys one day and Papi’s locked in his room and Nilda’s off with her friends, they kill the first man on TV. We know because Cassandra starts screaming and on the television the men are saying Paredón paredón like it’s some kind of game. We run into the room, Mami and I, and Cassandra’s standing there transfixed, her mouth open. There’s a blurry little shape, pale face, little mustache, dark suit, and he’s standing against a wall and the voices are speaking more and more frantically, saying horrible things that he’s supposed to have done, juicing up the audience, I’m sure, trying to make us thirst for his blood—but I can’t distinguish between what they’re saying he did and what’s about to happen; it all just seems like spilled blood to me. And Mami’s getting older by the second, like she can see the future and I think if we stand here any longer she’ll be all hunched over and crinkly like Cassandra. Then the pop-pop-pop sound bursts from the television and the man crumples. He doesn’t fall, he crumples, but his shadow stays upright on the wall behind him and then I realize it’s his blood, not his shadow, his blood and his insides.

  I’m staring at the screen and it’s all just so many gray and black dots and then it re-forms into a man on the ground and he’s moving still. He’s living the last seconds of his life far away from his family and in front of the whole nation. Cassandra collapses into a chair, gasping, and Mami just walks away, mumbling. And Isabel’s nowhere to be found, she’s gone, an empty spot at the table, not there to wake up late at night when I’m feeling broken or terrified, not there to make fun of Nilda for making fun of me. Gone.

  Isabel knew something.

  Mami won’t speak to me, too wrapped in her grief, so I walk out the door, yell something nonsensical because I don’t even bother lying about where I’m going anymore. And it’s one of those warm Cuban afternoons in Las Colinas just after the rain, the sun is close to us: A friend, not some distant space thing, and it paints sparkly light shows across the puddles in the torn-up pavement where the tanks passed through.

  Isabel knew this was coming. It was written all over her face that day: While the rest of the country thundered with bliss, she held back. She’d always been a little reserved, but then, the moment of our greatest collective triumph, as soldiers streamed past and the whole of La Habana poured into the streets around us—for her to be so quiet. She saw something, during those long nights sneaking from building to building, hiding out, and running for her life. Something more than what she told me.

  I have to find her again.

  No one else understands, we’re all too shell-shocked, but Isabel and I shared something that January day and she needs someone she can talk to. Or I need to be talked to. Either way, I have to find her. The need is sudden and certain and it overtakes me. School’s been out for months while the revolution reorganizes itself into a bureaucracy, no one’s checking on anyone except everyone’s checking on everyone. Already, people are careful what they say around each other, you can feel it, something in the air.

  Without realizing where I’m going, I find myself in front of the cathedral and I wander inside. Padre Sebastián, of course. He found her for me once, surely he can do it again. Anyway, he always knows how to make sense of things that don’t, always has that calm Go With God easiness about him. But when I walk into his office, the books are all down from the shelves, the pictures down from the walls, and Padre Sebastián himself is standing on a chair, trying to unscrew the great white Christ on the wall behind his desk.

  Padre Sebastián sighs the word mierda and slumps his shoulders.

  ¿Padre? I say. He turns around and gives me a look so raw and heartbreaking I think I might burst into tears right then and I have no idea why. Then he carefully gets down from the chair and says, No.

  What do you mean, no? I demand. I’m in no mood to be told no. I’m furious, in fact, suddenly in full angry adolescence and that simple word has sent a fire welling up inside of me.

  Padre Sebastián sees it and smiles, puts up two conciliatory hands, palms out and sits. No Padre, he says. He’s not a priest anymore. There are no priests anymore. No church, no religion. No God Almighty, thanks to our brand-new revolution. For a second I think Padre … No. Not-Padre Sebastián might cry, but then he smiles instead. Then he asks me what’s wrong. He looks tired. It’s the first time I’ve seen the man with a five-o’clock shadow and his eyes have bags underneath them.

  I tell him I want to see my sister and he laughs. It’s a hoarse, terrible laugh that says Sebastián is fighting harder than he ever has had to to beat back the bitterness. I frown. My whole body must be frowning, because when he looks up at me he looks startled, stands back up, crosses over to me, and hugs me. At first, I admit it, I think something might be about to happen. Something something. He is, after all, not a priest anymore.

  There’s no more God, no religion, so: no rules. Right? So, break open the gates of hell and let the sinners and saints rejoice as one, no? So, perhaps my afternoon finger grinding had been a prayer all along, and just before God became nothing He saw fit to send me the answer to my prayers, literally. Maybe to make up for all this other horrible shit He’s sent our way.

  Or maybe the answer to my prayers was really just the most tightest, most genuine hug I’ve ever gotten from a man that I love in a way I could never explain. I suppose God gives you what you need, not what you want, but still … I’m halfway through all those thoughts when I realize Sebastián is crying, just a little bit. He gets it together before he pulls out of the hug though, wipes his eyes and apologizes and I shrug it off because really, I’m moved to the point of not knowing what to say. Then he says he wants to see Isabel too, that she always knew how to make sense of this terrible world and this world is about as terrible as he’s ever seen, but still—he doesn’t want me to get involved. And it occurs to me that they were pretty good friends somehow, that Sebastián was in deeper with the resistance than I’d realized.

  You do know where she is, don’t you, I say before I can stop myself, and I realize I’m furious.

  He blinks at me and his silence is a yes.

  Then why? I yell, and we both cringe, because no one yells anymore. Not unless they’re at a rally. Yelling, any loud noises, draws attention, and surely, one way or another, you’re breaking one of the new edicts of this freshly born Triumphant Revolution, which is so all powerful that even the tiniest infractions apparently can collapse it, so we all must be so vigilant, which means we all must be as quiet and unobtrusive as possible.

  Why, I say again once it’s clear no one is about to barge through the door. I say it more quietly this time but also more emphatically. Why won’t you tell me where she is?

  I … he starts.

  She’s my sister! A shrill whisper.

  He looks around that half-packed office and scratches his thick black hair. Picks a book out from one of the boxes—Las vidas de los santos—and hands it to me.

  I’ve seen this before. No. I devoured it, more than once. I know exactly where it used to sit on hi
s shelf. It was within grabbing distance of the chair in front of his desk and there are pictures, so when I would be in here waiting for him or wasting time, it’s what I would grab. Half-naked bodies writhe and contort and anguished eyes glare at the heavens. Spears, arrows, swords puncture pale, muscular limbs. Loose cloths barely conceal breasts, penises, butts. They imply, perfectly, they suggest. And I surged through the pages—one of the only books I cared more about the illustrations of than the words—and I imagined and wondered and imagined more. Sometimes with Padre Sebastián’s face.

  Sometimes I’d read the stories as well, but honestly they took too long to get juicy compared to the pictures. Those beautiful, suffering men and women, offering up their agony and those firm, supple bodies as an obscene kind of gift. What kind of God demands such oversexual acrobatics of his acolytes? I wondered. And then I imagined some more.

  But now I have no time for theology or desire, and no interest in Sebastián’s well-meaning sermons, so I hurl the book at him and scream, yes scream: ¡Me cago en los santos, coño! And he jumps out of the way maybe a little too fast, because he ends up crashing into a stack of books and they crash into another and then Sebastián is looking up at me from a pile of tattered Bibles on the floor.

  There is a pause in which I can’t believe what I’ve just said, what I’ve done. And then we both burst out laughing. We’re also crying some by the time we finally stop and I feel terrible but also amazing for the first time in so long, and I’m about to ask him what it is he wanted to tell me about the saints when he brushes himself off, whispers a curse, and tells me to come with him.

  We hop in his old putt-putt car—the church’s actually but Sebastián’s the only one who knows how to drive and anyway, I suppose it belongs to the revolution now, whatever that is.

  We speed through La Habana, along the Malecón and into the old city. There’s soldiers everywhere, everywhere and a group of them flag us down outside the Gran Teatro. Sebastián’s tense, and I wonder why, considering we’re not doing anything wrong, but then I think back on what he’d said earlier and I realize we may very well be carrying some contraband. What if he’s already joined the counterrevolutionaries and so has Isabel and he’s bringing her arms? And is it still called a counterrevolution if the revolution wins? Doesn’t it just become a revolution then? Does it matter? The rebels, or soldiers, or whatever they are keep asking Sebastián the same three questions over and over, who he is, where he’s going, and who I am, and each time they ask it like they’ve caught him in a lie even though he’s said the same thing each time. I’m trying to ignore them, playing games with the impossibilities of language and revolution in my head, but the questions get louder and louder and I can feel them looking at me, their eyes on my bare legs beneath my skirt and I want Sebastián to just speed away even though I know that means they’d kill him, kill us both probably, so instead I just look out the window and wonder if something could be a counter-counterrevolution and what color uniforms they would wear and where they’d hide …