Fernando had been so many places after leaving home that he could no longer remember the way back. Of course: home wasn’t there anymore, therefore the way back couldn’t be either. And it wasn’t that home was everywhere now — no, that’s for citizens of the world, those who travel for sport. For those who have never commando-crawled through the frozen mud in China and never run the risk of being devoured by bears in Alaska. It wasn’t that home was everywhere: home wasn’t anywhere.
We’ll get by, Fernando told me over the phone.
My former classmates sent me emails from Rio de Janeiro, having forgotten the mourning period they had imposed on me when I was still among them. How are things in the United States? Are the guys really good-looking, with blond hair and blue eyes? Are you going to go to Disneyland? Are you going to go to Hollywood? Is it true that the kids take guns to school and every now and then go around shooting everyone? Is it true that people only eat hamburgers and pizza and only drink Coca-Cola? Is it true that American girls have really big boobs?
Aditi Ramagiri would ask me: What’s it like in Brazil? Is it true that you live in the middle of the jungle? Is it true that it’s really violent and dangerous, a nation of corrupt politicians and drug dealers? What language do you speak — Brazilian?
I’d ask Aditi Ramagiri: What’s life like in India? Is it true that there’s a river there where people throw their dead and bathe and wash their clothes, all at the same time? Is it true that your family decides who you’re going to marry? What language do you speak — Indian?
We got by. I got by at school, in the first week, trying to act cool. And for some reason the other kids decided to think I was cool.
Rio de Janeiro? Cool! What the heck are you doing here, dude?
I couldn’t say, well, dude, what I’m doing here, what the heck I’m doing here is trying to see if I can find my dad, he’s got to be somewhere, my mom died a year ago and I’m living with her ex-husband who’s my dad on my birth certificate but he isn’t my real dad.
So I’d shrug and keep to myself but the other kids thought I was cool and Aditi Ramagiri, who was popular, thought I was cool and we became friends and she made me see how Jake Moore was a loser.
When I told her just half of my story (the maternal half) her eyes grew genuinely misty and she hugged me and thought I was even cooler. After all, it wasn’t everyone whose life had the dramatic ingredient of having lost their mother at the age of twelve, and it wasn’t every day that you had the opportunity to bring this dramatic ingredient into your life via a friend, without having to experience it first-hand.
Once I went to a debating championship with Aditi. She was on the school debate team and almost every weekend had to participate in these events, in which people had to argue consistently and coherently in favor of something even when they were really against it.
This time it was a private Catholic school in Littleton. I was outside the classroom with Aditi, waiting for her turn. Five kids arrived. An Asian boy and his friend, who wasn’t Asian, sat next to me. In front of me sat an Asian girl with the strangest body shape I had ever seen. She was wide. Not fat, but wide. With a wide face. She was wearing a dress. Next to her was a black girl wearing a metal necklace with a crucifix hanging from it. On the other side was a white girl wearing a metal necklace with a pendant that I couldn’t tell what it was.
Suddenly the Asian girl said OK, I was late to the last round of the debate because I had to use the bathroom! and someone told me there was a bathroom over by the lockers.
And the girl with the crucifix necklace said, there’s a closer one.
And the Asian girl, shouting, said, I know! but they told me to go to the other one! so I went over to the lockers and it was a maze, and finally I found the bathroom! then, after I’d peed, I came out and saw two doors! there were two doors! the door I had come through and another one next to it! and the door I had come through didn’t have a door handle on the inside and the other one was locked! I couldn’t get out!
I wanted to say something. I looked around. But the one who spoke was Aditi.
I hate this school. It’s scary.
Really? Why? We love it! Because we see Jesus everywhere and we’re Catholic.
Well, to begin with, it looks like a kindergarten, and secondly, I keep thinking I’m going to hell, said Aditi.
We don’t necessarily believe in hell.
Look at our necklaces! I’ve got a cross.
I’ve got the Holy Ghost.
I never did get what the Holy Ghost is, said Aditi.
Well, said the white girl. It’s pretty complicated. It’s like this: Jesus, God and the Holy Ghost are the same thing. That is, not even our most knowledgeable thinkers and philosophers can understand it properly.
For example, said her friend. Imagine an elephant with green spots. The elephant is Jesus, the elephant’s soul is God, and the elephant’s spots are the Holy Ghost.
The others laughed. That’s not exactly what we believe in.
A week later I joined the ultimate frisbee team. I had never imagined such a sport even existed, but I discovered I had a surprising talent for it. It was played with one of those discs they used to call frisbees that we can’t call frisbees anymore because some manufacturer registered the name.
How did you end up here, I heard myself asking as Fernando was fixing the toilet.
I had been putting off the question for a month. Four weeks, during which he made phone calls when he got back from work, looked up people he used to know whom he didn’t know anymore, asked questions, moonlighted as a detective. He had hunches, suspected, supposed. And he didn’t uncover anything worthy of note, not a smidgeon of a clue, no bread trail in the forest. Why do people have to cover up their former lives so well?
During those weeks we didn’t speak much: about the past, about the present, about the future. When school started, in mid-August, I began to ask him for help with my homework. He was the available adult.
He would look at the math problems and scratch his head and sigh, and he’d say, I studied math in Portuguese, Vanja.
And I had to translate the problem; I had to help him first so that he could then help me.
The bulky finger of his bulky hand would underline the numbers, and in that domestic setting, sitting next to me at the table with the dirty dishes still in the sink, wearing reading glasses, Fernando seemed like an insect shedding its exoskeleton and revealing a soft, almost fragile interior.
I still didn’t know what subjects I could broach with him. Maybe all subjects. I had twelve hundred pages of questions about my mother, about him and my mother, about my father and my mother, about New Mexico, about the scenes acted out before I was born. I wanted to know why people chopped and changed between lives like that, and changed cities, and changed countries, and took out new citizenships or didn’t take out new citizenships. Why, in this chopping and changing, old loves dropped off the face of the earth, and old loves transubstantiated into friendships dropped off the face of the earth. And why fathers dropped off the face of the earth.
Perhaps there was a tacit agreement between Fernando and me that a little silence was necessary for a while; that we had to be somewhat monastic and observe a kind of non-action. Maybe it was time for me to remodel myself; maybe I too had (must have had) that soft, albino interior that insects have under their exoskeletons. Maybe I needed to take that slimy interior and, after having managed to protect it from other people’s fulminating pity, mould it now into some shape with which I could re-identify.