My daughter crawled over to the edge of the bed and hung there, looking me in the eyes as I lay on the floor. Her black hair stood up in places, a wild mane of tangles. She broke into a wide, goofy smile and I closed my eyes.
Imagine, as I did then, time in the form of a narrowing tunnel, pulling your loved ones farther and still farther from you. Distances expanding relentlessly, life reduced to memories of people who have gone away. Imagine the odd and terrible silences, the emptied spaces. Imagine withering in this place alone. See your daughter in a faraway northern nation, with its cold winds and heavy rains, struggling to distinguish you from a slew of blurred sights and sounds and smells. Imagine memory’s illogic has buried you behind the noise of this city’s traffic or the scent of the New Lima’s musty hallways — imagine: people and things I can barely recall, a report by Mayra Solis and somewhere in that forlorn text: her father! Imagine she forgets her Spanish, and all her fears and hopes and loves and dreams are trapped, lost in a vault of foreign sounds.
Sonia said something, and then I could hear the voice of my daughter, but my thoughts were elsewhere, or else they were so precisely there they were underground, boring holes in the earth beneath the city, or floating just above it, tying ribbons to the tallest trees. I stood up slowly. I think Sonia must have recognized the flight I was on because she fell silent. Squinting against the light, she watched me and I watched her.
“What?” she asked.
I am a man of traditions, and because I am that man, I bent down on one knee, again, one final time. Sunlight gathered in the room, a breeze circled and blew the curtains apart. Sonia shook her head — no, no — but I kept on. My daughter had clambered back on the bed and sat, her legs underneath her, watching us as if it were theater. And there were no trumpets or violins or sounds at all. Only quiet. I took the ring from the inside of my jacket. “Sonia,” I said, and played my last card, and so, regret nothing.
a strong dead man
Rafael’s father started to die in March. By summer, it was nearly complete. It came upon him all at once, a summer storm brewed from a cloudless sky, and rendered him — in quick and cold fashion — a ghost, a negative image, weak and formless, a fourth cup from a single bag of tea. Rafael watched in muted horror as a succession of strokes reduced his father ever further. Nearly dust by the end. He learned that life makes us older frantically, that time does not always pass in an even cadence, but sometimes all at once: that we can age — months, years, decades — in a single day, even a single hour.
For Rafael, that hour came on a Sunday in June, the day of his father’s third stroke, just at the end of the school year. He was sixteen. Outside, music swept off Dykman Avenue. A throaty bass from each passing car drifted into his family’s third-floor apartment. Aunts and uncles and cousins had arrived, making all the sounds of grieving: whimpering, crying, whispering, laughing so as not to cry. The curtains were pulled, but through the thin fabric Rafael could make out the brick wall just beyond the window. There was another apartment, another life just beyond that. The room where he sat was dark and hot. Suitcases lay open. The last stroke had come that morning as they were planning to travel home to Santo Domingo. Rafael felt the skin of his thighs sticking to the plastic covers of the sofa cushions. In the next room, his mother slept at the foot of her bed, an unthinking, drugged sleep. His aunts spoke about him and his father as if Rafael could not hear.
“Poor thing. They took him away almost dead. He couldn’t recognize his own wife.”
“Did the boy see it?”
“He was here the whole time. He hasn’t said a word since.”
He hadn’t. Rafael had begun to understand that life bends you, forms you, creates the spaces you fill without hope or interest in the particulars of your plans. He had none. His mother got a sleeping pill after she cried and cried, her eyes and face nearly bursting with red, all tears and sweat, but Rafael was quiet and said nothing and so he got nothing and was not spoken to. This is it, he thought. Life is bending me. His aunt Aida paced nervously in the small room. “Dios mío, it’s hot,” she said. He didn’t answer. She pulled back the curtain, but no light came in.
Whispers. A door. His cousin had come. From the hallway, a voice.
“What happened?” Mario called. The heels of his dress shoes rapped against the wooden floor.
Aida, his mother, hugged her son tightly and told him, “A stroke, papito. They took your uncle to the hospital…” She couldn’t finish. Her breath seemed to run out on her and she was left only with sobs. Mario consoled his mother while she cried. Rafael could tell that Mario’s eyes hadn’t yet adjusted to the peculiar twilight of the apartment; his cousin squinted behind metal frames. I’m here, Rafael thought, on the couch. Can you see me?
From the kitchen, another aunt appeared with a plate of white rice and habichuelas. “Eat, Mario,” she said. Steam rose from the warm plate, but Mario shook his head. Aida pulled away, wiped her eyes with a pink paper napkin.
“And Rafael?” Mario asked. His voice was concerned, but calm. “How is he?” He turned to face his cousin, looking blankly at the wall beyond the window. “Are you all right?”
Rafael shrugged. Mario’s question was warbled and scratchy, like a voice from behind glass. Mario turned back to his mother. “I’ll take him. He should get out of the house. I’ll talk to him.” Aida sighed. The room was full of silences. Mario motioned to Rafael, and he rose quietly. They walked down the long hallway, closing the door softly behind them.
They wandered west on Dykman to the river, to the park where Rafael had seen his only dead body. This was years before, seventh grade, twelve years old and loud, in a pack of friends six deep. They had stared off the pier at 208th Street, three in the afternoon, three-thirty, the bridge to the south, an escape, to the north, the river, green and wide and beautiful. They had gazed across the Hudson, at the wooded bluffs of Jersey, spotted with white mansions peering out among the trees. “Damn, who lives there?” Patrick Ewing, they decided, or someone else rich and famous and young.
Amir saw it first, drifting against the rocks beneath the pier. “Oh shit! Look at that shit!” he yelled. They got down on their knees to see. Rafael, Jaime, Carl, Javier, Eric, and Amir. None would admit they were afraid. Carl lived in Grant down on 125th, but he went to school up in Dykman because his mother worked at the hospital. “He looks like a Spanish nigga,” Carl said.
The body’s skin was brown, a shade or two lighter than the river itself.
The body wore only a pair of black shorts.
The body’s back was rippled with muscles. Rafael thought to himself, That’s a strong dead man, and the idea made him laugh, so he said it aloud. “That’s a strong dead man.”
“Well, somebody must’ve been stronger.”
Amir was the funny one. They laughed, and Rafael felt good. He was new to the school and made friends only by accident: on the walk home, by lockers that faced each other, at desks that sat side by side. Friends had never been easy.
“He’s got a damn plastic bag stuck on his foot.”
“That’s fucked up.”
“That shit ain’t right.”
They stayed at the pier, talking, until the conversation moved away from the body, and soon they were all seated, their legs dangling off the edge. They remembered him only when the Circle Line passed, gliding down the river, a boat full of tourists waving and taking pictures. “You think they can see him?” Rafael asked. His first instinct was to run.