The Book of Lost Saints Read online

  Ah.

  You think I shouldn’t speak on or even notice such things.

  I’m beyond considering your judgment, though, lucky for you. I couldn’t give a damn, after all I’ve been through. After whatever I’ve been through.

  The weight of it is with me. It’s an unusual, disconcerting weight, like the chicken in the dream; something is not right.

  And this man, he will help me find out what, even if he doesn’t know it yet.

  So I remain.

  Through the arching backs and frenzied grabs at air, the whole room becomes hot around us, lit with her expanding orgasm, and I remain. Watch, even. Stop. I’m sure you would too. She’s a slight thing, gorgeous in her way, but from what I’ve gathered, one of God’s more mediocre creatures. Perhaps she matches my strange nephew in that way.

  They certainly do click. In the club, they’d faced outward to the bustling world, and each carried the simple and unspoken trust that the other was there, present in that space in between that they’d made. Now, closer than close, their bodies entwined and breath filling the room, their eyes meet and they teeter toward something much bigger than either of them, something that feels very much like an abyss.

  Then her gasps peak. She collapses over him like all her bones suddenly disappeared and a few pumps later he explodes too.

  I remain.

  And here, as they lie there panting, is where the wonder of what’s left unsaid runs out. They have no title, I realize, so in a way, they are nothing. Everything and nothing, but in these moments, as that magic breathlessness fades, there are words that want to be spoken. They linger in the air, garbled, unmanifested. They cloud up the room, complicate the sweet simmer down.

  He’s about to speak; doesn’t. Maybe for the best: The words aren’t coherent for him anyway, not yet, so he’d probably just make a mess of them.

  And anyway, it’s dawn and she’s going to be late, so she disentangles herself and wipes some sweat off and prances toward the shower.

  Ramón waits, breathes, then rises. Sitting on the bed edge, he rubs the sheets over his dick a few times till it feels dryish and then cracks his neck and reaches for his cigarettes, which aren’t there because he quit three days ago. He executes a somewhat ridiculous body roll across the bed, grabs Aliceana’s light blue scrubs, and fumbles with them till her pack falls out, frees a cigarette. Lights it.

  Now, I believe, is when he senses me. Or perhaps all along, but now now now this moment, with the girl showering and the curl of smoke from his lungs, the January day creeping to life through the half-opened blinds, the still groggy glow after a righteous fuck—now my presence eats up just enough of the emptiness in the room to warrant some attention, and he looks sharply up from his abuelo’s easy chair. The sheets drape over one shoulder like he’s about to address the Roman senate and one thick eyebrow rises and the smoke curls up from the cigarette and the day grows a shade brighter, and the shower shushes, but none of it lets loose any clue as to what that feeling is that suddenly crept over him.

  I remain. Perfectly still. Breath bated. A shadow in the shadows. Tingling with a new sense of power, I wait. Wonder. Should I, right now? Is there time? Could I? I feel myself solidify ever so slightly within his gaze, a dizzying thrill.

  Any second the shower will stop shushing and the girl will emerge.

  But for a precious and dangerous moment, I think, to hell with it—al carajo, actually—and I begin. Ramón takes a pull on the smoke and watches the air around him. His eyes scan back and forth; he’s sitting up straight, almost smiling. That almost smile, it’s all I need to know, I decide, and I stop.

  Which is good, because just then Aliceana bursts out of the bathroom, mumbles something passive-aggressive about her cigarettes and him quitting as she pulls on her scrubs and then flits out the door with a quick kiss.

  And still, I remain.

  * * *

  His coffee’s cold and he’s not smoking, but his breath comes out in steamy gasps that roll and then stretch up into the gray sky above the hospital. I hover just behind his head, a passing glint of nothing, a cold flash. Those great big shoulders sag forward just so—not a full slouch, but you know: The ground seems to pull him toward it. And sure, he shows up at work every day, and he has this night gig with the music, but really, he gets by on the bare minimum and that’ll just have to do, for all he cares.

  And that would be all well and good, but I need him. Specifically, I need his internal drive to not be in a constant sputter. I need forward motion.

  Instead, here we are again, outside the hospital for yet another non-cigarette break. He puts the mostly empty cup on a trash can lid and wraps his arms around himself for warmth, gazes out at the traffic.

  “Diiiime,” a familiar singsongy voice drawl-whines through his cell phone, and again I convulse with that deep-down soul cringe. I hadn’t even noticed him take it out and flip it open—these things are so small now.

  “Hey, Mami, you called this morning? I was still, uh, sleeping. Everything okay?”

  “Ay, sí, mi amor,” Nilda chirps electronically. “No, no, todo bien aquí, tú sabes.”

  There are things I’m sure I never knew in life that are clear to me. The simple physics of emptiness and the thick lines around it offer up whole libraries of information I never could’ve imagined—histories, both banal and grand, and the flow and sweep of emotions that trail behind each of us in elegant, phosphorescent capes. I understand the great movements of people across oceans, the rise and fall of kings and tyrants. But I cannot fathom what it is about this woman, this woman who was my sister, that calls forth such a rage within me.

  Who knows what can tear two sisters apart in this world? There are so many things, really. I know her voice, can conjure up the lines of her face. I can see the three of us beside each other: Nilda in the middle, Isabel at the far end even though she’s the one I was closer to. Each of us in our bleached white school uniforms with those ridiculous blue bows tied at our necks. But that’s it.

  “Okay, Mami,” Ramón says. “Do you want to have lunch this weekend?”

  Still, I trust myself. Surely there is a good reason.

  “¡Claro que sí!” she says, enthralled, but there’s an edge in her voice. They’ve had this conversation before.

  “Maybe we could grab something from Valentino’s on Clark.” He says this, I realize, knowing it won’t happen, wondering why he bothered trying in the first place.

  “Ay, m’ijo.” Not an answer, but in a way, the only answer he’ll probably ever get.

  “Mami.”

  “Es qué … tú sabes, Ramón. Ay teroristas por allí, y … ay, no sé.”

  “Terrorists? Mami, nine-eleven was three years ago. And nobody cares about suburban Jersey. No terrorist is trying to blow up Benigno’s, I promise.”

  “¡Pero no digas esas cosas, Ramón!” Nilda scolds. “¡Por favor!”

  “It’s just—”

  “Y además tu papá me necesita,” she explains, as if Ramón had just conceded the point and now she’s clinching it with this new bit of info.

  “Papi is a grown man,” Ramón says. “And healthy to boot. I just…” He shakes his head, dangling somewhere between sympathy and utter exasperation. “I worry about you, Mami. I want you to get out. It’s not healthy, you being cooped up all day and night like that.”

  “All that fat and hair and you’re still cold?” Derringer materializes next to him and lights a Marlboro. “That’s, like, such a waste.”

  Ramón glares down at him.

  “¿Qué?” Nilda asks over the phone.

  “Nothing, Mami. Te veo pronto, ¿okay? I’ll come by the house.”

  “Ay, te quiero, mi vida.”

  “Y yo a ti,” Ramón mumbles, still eyeing Derringer. I know that face: It means he’s swallowing a curse-out. Derringer knows it too and he chuckles and then coughs something wet up and swallows it back down.

  “All that rotting ass gunk building up in your lungs
and you’re still alive,” Ramón says. “A medical motherfucking miracle.”

  “Ah, you’re just salty you quit and the rest of us are still having fun.”

  Ramón scowls and tugs on the fur-lined earflaps of his hat. “Have fun dying.”

  “Hey, we’re all dying. Anyway, I saw on your Myspace page that you’re spinning tonight,” Derringer says after another coughing fit.

  Ramón nods. “If Inspector General Jackass lets me off on time I am.”

  “Alright, I’m gonna try and make it this time, big guy.”

  “Shall I put you down as minus one like all the oth—” Ramón doesn’t finish his sentence because a short, naked man in a cape flashes past them and gets hit by a car.

  “The fuck?” Ramón bellows, launching into traffic. He throws his big arms out in either direction, feels more than sees or hears cars pulling to a halt around him. The guy is laughing when Ramón reaches him. His teeth chitter-chatter and he’s sprawled out on the blacktop, writhing and cackling. The cape turns out to be a hospital gown, tied around his neck. It’s one of the telltale bright yellow psych patient ones, and the guy is all tangled in it.

  “What the hell, jackass?” Derringer demands, panting and irritable from the sudden exertion. The driver hops out of his car, wondering the same thing in a much more colorful way. Then the psych patient is up again and about to make a dash for the park across the street.

  “No you don’t.” Ramón snatches the guy up by the back of the neck and then he and Derringer begin wrastling him toward the ER bay.

  Ramón’s coffee waits on the trash can. I linger over it for a few seconds. I become my breath and let my breath become the breeze, inhabit the empty molecules just within the rim, take in whatever’s left of the flavor. It’s not bad. He got it from the Dominican spot around the corner and they made it right: strong with a swirl of sugar. For a few minutes, as the carnival of body parts and angry curse-outs cavorts past, I just stay, and breathe, and stay. And breathe.

  A sister I want to kill who won’t leave the house. Another who is gone, as gone as me. Vanished and dead, I’m sure. Parents long gone. I am orphaned of family and body alike, this boy-beast my only tether to the world.

  And still I fluctuate between a gathering strength and that creepy fade. Like right now, as the brittle wind sweeps past, it seems to whisk off more of my shadowy self. I am less and less and less and finally, hungry for something I can get a fix on, I swoop around and enter the hospital.

  CHAPTER THREE

  I flush into the stale, cramped exam room as Aliceana stands on her tiptoes to get a good gape at the scratch marks crossing Ramón’s shoulder. “What the hell did that guy do to you?”

  “It’s fine,” Ramón says, but you can tell he doesn’t mind the attention. I move toward him, then breathe and enfold myself within. Ramón, I am surprised to discover, is nervous. This man who can command a crowd with the flick of his wrist for hours on end, he is suddenly somehow undone and doesn’t know why. And neither do I.

  “It’s not fine,” Aliceana chides. “He probably had all kinds of hideous bacteria under those nails.” She climbs up on the stretcher behind him and dabs at a scratch with gloved fingers.

  “Ow! Fuck. Is that the medical term? Hideous bacteria?” He plays it off well; I wouldn’t have known from the outside. But that racing heart, the tiniest shiver of his hand. I don’t know why, what subtle twist in the fabric of this particular day or moment did it—maybe it’s the way she cares for him, that studious attentiveness as she gets all up into his scratch—but something huge and full of light is rising slowly within Ramón. It is terrifying.

  “Yes. When was your last tetanus shot?”

  “Aliceana.”

  “When? If you don’t remember it, we should just—”

  “Aliceana.” Ramón executes an impressive swivel, only scowling a little, and pushes his hips forward. Unable to process his own nervousness, he resorts to something he does understand.

  “¡Ramón!”

  “The door’s closed.”

  “Ramón,” she laughs. She’s considering it though. You can see the memory of this morning’s lovemaking dash across her eyes as her mouth opens slightly, as if to accept his looming kiss. Instead, she puts a finger up and shakes her head. “Someone’ll come in.”

  He scootches back. “First of all, I locked it. Second of all, so?”

  She just looks at him. The look says: You know it, don’t make me say it. It’s never been said, but it’s written all over both of them. Shame and the shame of shame. A double whammy, ricocheting back and forth between them in some cruel echo chamber. The night they first began, she’d run up to him at the club to compliment his DJing. And she didn’t recognize him, he’d realized immediately. It vexed him at first, and then much less so when they’d found themselves naked in each other’s arms a few hours later.

  But then he’d watched her expression when he told her they work together. It was inscrutable actually, but he imagined in it a whole web of crisscrossing concerns. He wasn’t too far off the mark, but none of the concerns were enough for either of them to forgo more sheet-grabbing, so they kept at it and kept quiet, only exchanging brief nods when their paths crossed at the hospital. And Ramón accepted early that his dreams of some telenovela-style storage room sexing were probably fleeting at best.

  Just say it, he almost blurts out. Say you don’t want anyone to know you’re banging security. The words stay in his mouth and get bitter there. He frowns and turns back around on the stretcher. “Last year at Rutgers.”

  “What?”

  “My tetanus shot.”

  “Oh. Alright, I guess I’ll just—” A throttle of drumming erupts from Ramón’s belt, cutting off Aliceana. He pulls out his phone, cringing, and flicks it open.

  “Another one of your adoring teenybopper fans?” Aliceana asks.

  Ramón nods. “Who else calls me?” But both Aliceana and I can tell he’s lying. She scowls behind his back. Ramón shrugs and pockets his phone. It’s not a girl though, but someone named Alberto, whom Ramón fervently wants nothing to do with.

  “Alright, rock star, I’ll be back with some antibiotic crap for your naked cape guy gunk scars.”

  “Gracias.”

  “Shut up.”

  * * *

  They came in boats and airplanes, armed with false documents and holy terror and a grinding wariness of what they would find. They came and breathed sigh after sigh of relief, closed their eyes, and put trembling hands to foreheads. They came and settled into these flashy modern digs, cursed at the atrocious weather, renamed streets without English’s sharp consonants, erected bakeries and memorials and three-star restaurants that reminded them just enough of home not to trigger nightmares.

  They came and left behind family members clutching photographs, and promises to send money and frequent letters and powdered milk or vacuum cleaners or whatever was impossible to find that year. They left behind true loves and mistresses and streets pulsing with memories. Each brought along a cord that stretched all the way back to the island and when they slept, each prayed the cord would send along news from home until slowly, each one came to call this place home and the cords wavered beneath the weight of the present tense.

  They came and made Miguelitos and Carlitos and Anitas and Selinitas. And they told the little ones stories, tried to remember as best they could but always came up with folktales; no matter how hard they tried, their stories always felt like lies. They cringed at half-learned Spanish and pan-Asian vegetarian takeout, and then they tried it and didn’t mind so much, and life rumbled along with new updates now flashing across computer screens instead of pulled from weather-worn envelopes smelling of the past.

  They came and made new lives, and me? I got lost in the shuffle. Somewhere in between. Became a part of that great semi-sentient we and disappeared. I don’t know. I’m still piecing it all together.

  But those strands, those many lives, I feel them. They are obviou
s to me, as clear as words scrawled on a notebook page. A place speaks, and maybe to you it’s just the ambient chugalug of everyday life, the buzz of a light fixture, the hum of a power generator, the occasional blurt and sputter of traffic. To me, each place carries stories and they sometimes whisper and sometimes yell.

  People too, of course, just walk around with all their stories hanging around them like so many chattering birds.

  It’s just past sunset and snowing when Ramón gets to his front door. Not the graceful dancing kind of snow, but a soggy drenching mess that sloshes out of the night sky and becomes instant brown crud in the streets. Even I feel it, a shudder that ripples to my source, and I find myself lingering closer to Ramón as if to soak up some of that good flesh-and-blood warmth.

  So alive, this useless boy-man. All his cluttered organs and gushy pumping liquids, all that life! A waste, really. No one who has it knows the true meaning of inhabiting form. We, we watch silently as you lumbering chunks of skin and fat trundle through existence striving for meaning, and we chuckle and moan at the irony of it. But you who inhabit those mortal bags—you guys just don’t get it. Well. Ramón’s face tightens with the uncertain sensation that he’s been defeated before he realized he was playing. His fists clench in his pockets, yes, from the cold, but also from some undescribed frustration that lurks.

  See? Useless.

  He fumbles for his keys, fingers stiff from the cold.

  I could soothe him. But this is not the time, nor is it my purpose. The culmination of all my work and travel is not to brighten some behemoth’s foul mood on a winter night. Even if the behemoth is my nephew. No. Timing is everything. If I get sloppy now, I risk it all.

  The apartment building is dull. White tile hallways and fluorescent lights. Plaster walls. It looks very much like the building next to it, in fact—a semi-suburban pocket of mundane similarity in the shadow of the hospital. He slouches up the stairs and down the hall; the shadows grow across his face as he goes. Key in lock, the familiar squeak of the door, eyebrows raised as he peers inside. The place is dark though; Marcos and Adina are out. Ramón can’t decide if he’s relieved or annoyed. He’s in and naked and in the steaming shower within minutes, gingerly lathering up the long day’s scratch marks.