A Naked Singularity: A Novel (20 page)

As to the dough, grab a large bowl and throw the dough ingredients in it. Mix them all until the dough is sticky but malleable. Refrigerate for 10 minutes to let the dough set. Cover your work surface with plastic wrap and slap the dough onto it. Cover with another sheet of plastic wrap and roll the dough flat with a rolling pin, using short strokes, until about 1/8 inch thick. Without removing the plastic wrap, and using a cup about 4 inches in diameter, cut out rounds of the dough.

Peel off the top layer of plastic wrap then remove excess dough between the circles and reserve. Using a pastry brush, brush the edges of each round with the beaten egg. Place a teaspoon of the filling on the lower half of each disk. Working on one
empanada
at a time, use the plastic wrap to fold the dough over to create a half-moon shape. Pressing through the plastic wrap, use the edge of the cup to seal the
empanada
. Remove from the plastic wrap and place on a baking sheet. Repeat with the remaining
empanadas
, rerolling the scraps of dough until none remains. Heat many inches of oil in a heavy medium-size pot or in a deep fryer to about 365 degrees (to test use a bit of leftover dough, which should quickly puff and turn gold on contact). Fry four
empanadas
at a time until golden. Remove and drain on a wire rack. Repeat again and again then serve hot.

Do that and you’ll have what we were having. Now please, make sure not to make the dough too thick or you’ll ruin the whole enterprise. Also resist the temptation to substitute healthier alternatives to either the ingredients or the frying process. Do it right. And eat them right too meaning get yourself some lime (never lemon) or maybe a little bottle of Tabasco sauce. Now bite off the corner and add your condiment into the newly formed opening. Repeat this process until you can’t.

On my mother’s orange kitchen counter lay several dozen of the above. Bottles too and other assorted distractions. Now my mother was hugging both of Marcela’s kids simultaneously, calling Mary
Maria
and Timothy some concatenation of phonemes I can’t possibly hope to replicate.

Then she was coming at me. Tiny and round and looking no older than Marcela she squeezed my head and—¡
Ay mi amor
, twenty-four jeers ago! You’re still my little boy. Here eat. I made it especial for you.

Half an empanada sticking out of my face, I walked out of the kitchen and into near-hysterical humanity. The room was so loud that at first I looked for the fight that had erupted, but no, just the usual mayhem from everyone I mentioned before and more. The heavily-made-up women all wore indecent-exposure-short skirts and heels in the smack of winter and looked like they should be elegantly twirling their hands in the vicinity of A New Car. These were mostly my aunts. There was music. Loud enough to interfere with conversation but really discouraging no one and by simply changing the position of your head you could go from one multilogue to the next. A bottle of
aguardiente
the size of an equine thigh lay on the center table with a small bowl of limes.

Everyone was grabbing at me all hugs and smiles—an independent observer would think I had just been released from a POW camp—confirming my age and handing me colorful boxes. Always with a card containing a handwritten message of devotional love. Alana was not there.

There were new people and they were introduced in painfully informal manner. Included was the latest boyfriend for Lorena whose name she repeated incessantly, surely motivated by fear that someone would mistakenly call this sap by a previous, now-defunct name. His name was undoubtedly Barry and he looked about as comfortable as a fourteen-year-old awaiting the result of a home pregnancy test. To my family he was a new toy with freckles that could be dragged from corner to corner and told bizarre stories in irreparably broken English and if things got too hairy and the words escaped, then in
español
and etiquette and viable communication be damned. When he wasn’t being spoken to directly he still served as backdrop.

So there was constant yapping. Lots directed at me but precious little coming from my mouth:

“Mommy, right some people don’t have a place to live?”

—I almost died during the delivery
Dios mío
. The next day they asked me if I had the name yet. I said
casi
because we were getting close to deciding. I kept waiting for them to ask me again but that’s the name they put down.

—¡No drink it fast like this! Forget the salt. All you need is
la lima
(never lemon) for right after.

Television was showing a computer simulation of aggrieved Dom’s final flight. In it he holds on to the can of spray paint all the way down and when he lands he shatters like a hollow porcelain doll. Sponsored by Dell.

—¡Nia says forget those antibiotics!
Eso es un
escam from the pharmacy companies. Just mix some shark cartilage with ginseng and drink it in three increasingly larger swallows.

“Where’s Alana?”

“Right that some people live on the street mommy?”

Candles in front of a grainy portrait of the Virgin Mary. The blue and white liquefying into each other. And what’s with the Davincian smile in this version?

—Pray to St. Anthony and you’ll find it right away.

—I don’t know. They said it was a census or somesing. I lied.

“Don’t you fear that we—the cousins—have been screwed up by all this confounded Catholic education with its sisters and fathers, even brothers . . . ghosts and hosts . . . virgins . . . trinities . . . chalices . . . wounds? I mean-they basically paid money they didn’t have so our brains could be washed in lies. Didn’t they?”

—Fulana de tal
says that the police wait outside in the nightclub’s parking lot. When you get in your car they immediately arrest you and take your car. ¿Can they do that?

“Screwed up how? Wouldn’t one of us first have to evince the slightest hint that they received that schooling?”

—Americans love
el hot dog.
I sell them right out of the van.

—¿
Y Alana
?

“Who the hell’s Vince?”

“Right that some people live underground in the subway?”

—Have another
aguardiente.
It’s good for you.

Universal accord that these were the greatest
empanadas
ever ingested.

“Why not put some mustard on the van? I have yellow paint in my garage and I think it would help business.”

“Right that those people don’t have families?”

—¿
Otro aguardiente
?

“Listen to this. Air Security divides dangerous countries into four risk categories: crime, kidnapping, political violence, and wars or insurgencies. Colombia is the only country to appear in all four categories. Doesn’t it border on the significant that our parents come from this place?”

—¿
Americanos
love the mustard?

—¿Lawyers in this country make a lot of money right?

—
Si
.
Mostaza
.

“Mommy what happens to those people when they die? What happens to their bodies? Do they have funerals?”

“I manage them.
Testy Wee Willie Wheeler and the Dissonant Tritones
. They’re going to be big.”

“Jeez Barry how am I supposed to know why she called you Fred?”

—No this is
merengue
. Just swing your hips from side to side to the music.

Fine the kid’s a bit weird but what does happen to these bodies?

“I said she called me Vince. Who’s Fred?”

—Down there the traffic cops give you change when you bribe them. ¡I’m not exaggerating, they’ll go to the store and break a large bill!

—¡Bill’s here!
Pobrecito
, he works so hard.

—
¿
Por qué
do you represent those people?

“Boxing is the only real sport because you know men engaged in it from the very beginning. Somehow I don’t see cavemen taking time off from battling with dinosaurs to swing a stick at a ball.”

—I had to lie to get him in school early because I heard they were only making the Hispanic kids wait until they were five so they would fall behind the Americans. So I lied. I got him shoes with big heels and said he was five, small but five. Those
monjas
didn’t care they just wanted the money.

“For every person I get to join I get $500 dollars! Everybody makes out.”

—After he was sentenced to life in prison the Colombian government allowed him to build his own prison. ¡He put a bowling alley and a movie theatre in it!

“I think if you come to this country you should have to speak American.”

—
Miren este huevon
. (Now this new guy’s the opposite of a hit.)

“Why so quiet cutie? . . . Mary?”

“I heard about that. One day there was a siege during a screening of a digitally restored
Wizard of Oz
and he just walked out.”

“Whattya mean arithmathematically impossible?”

“Is Alana coming?”

—¿Can I borrow the hot dog to pick up my girlfriend tomorrow? She loves tube-shaped beef.

Wilfred Benitez was born on September 12, 1958 in the Bronx, New York.

“The problem with this country is that we coddle our criminals. Everyone is all concerned with their rights and nobody’s worried about the rights of the victims.”

“That’s a beautiful necklace Mary but what are they supposed to be? . . . Mary?”

—He refused to do the pledge of allegiance. I think second grade. ¡I had to go and talk to the nun principal or they were going to kick him out!

A blue and brown soccer ball with a two hour half-life and a Bic pen’s chewed cap struggling to keep the air in
.

—¿
Otro
?

“How come you’re allowed to lie in court?”

—They killed him because he scored
un autogol
in the World Cup.

“Where do I find this
everyone
?”

Can a family be hyper-functional?

“Time’s Alana getting here?”

—Recently Miguel Lora and Rafael Pineda but before that there was of course
Pambele
. ¡Our
país
has produced many great fighters!

—I know, down there a red traffic light is more like a suggestion.

Baby Jaren seems either unable or unwilling to hold his head in one place. The lumpy hair-speckled mass has no defined position just a wave of probabilities. Finally his eyes lock on an artifactual thirteen-inch Sony Trinitron, complete with requisite logo of supine red, green, and blue ovals and aluminum foil for an antenna, located about five feet away.

“This Wee Willer, why’s he so testy?”

—¡
Ay
he’s so esmart look at the way he stares at the TV!

—Drink this one, it’s nice and cold. You won’t even feel it.

—It’s not just sports either. Don’t forget
Gabo
.

“Any funny stories about representing the scum of the Earth?”

“Oh my God look. He’s reaching for the remote control. How cue!”

And so it went. On and on without even hint of cessation until it somehow abruptly ended. First one or two left because
look at the time
then many followed suit and soon there was just the guest of honor in an empty living room. I had nodded affirmatively to too many liquid offerings and now the room had come off its moorings. It shook and tried to buck me off as I gingerly made my way to the sofa. I dropped onto it face down, remembering a trick I had learned and so keeping constant if tenuous limbic contact with the floor—like a silver screen couple in the code-of-conduct era—to combat the itinerant enclosure. I did this to find I wasn’t really sleepy, just tired and altered. And very both. Then the room was incandescent.

The coupled beams of light were like the previous snow. They appeared from the bottom of the front windows then rose until they were fully
in
the room. When a car door opens there’s that slight suction of air you hear which is soon followed by it’s opposite expulsion just before metal and rubber click and fasten as the same door closes. I fell asleep in the seconds following this noise and dreamt that someone was tapping on the window by the sofa and calling my name.

So I looked at this window and saw an apparition. The raindrop stained window created a second hologramic image of Alana. They stared at me as if all patience. I opened the window and dropped back into the sofa. Then I heard a familiar but now disembodied voice.

“So what of this twenty-fourth B-day? Happy or unhappy?”

“Huh?”

“You miss me?”

“Who are you?”

“You didn’t think I’d fail to show my mug on a day like this did you? More fraternal faith than that one hopes.”

“Whose lights?”

“Derek’s.”

“What’s a Derek?”

“I strongly suspect it will soon prove irrelevant so I won’t bother. But at least he was good enough to drop me here.”

“You staying?”

“No, he’s waiting. This is yours but don’t open it until tomorrow.”

“Is that ticking I hear?”

“So how was it?”

“Fine.”

“Fine? Don’t give me fine. C’mon do
as if I were there
.”

“No way kid I’m barely conscious, too much aguardiente.”

“Water that’s ardent?”

“Right and still coating my esophagus too. Who’s the fucker invented that shit?”

“Nonetheless,
as if I were there
please,” she cupped her hand to her ear, the picture of foregone conclusion, but I motioned that an invisible key was locking my lips. “Please,” she said, this time jutting her lower lip out when she was done.

As if I were there
was a practice nearly as old as we were. Essentially it involved one of us recounting to the other a slice of space-time that person had missed and doing so to the extent that, in the end, the listener would in effect have missed nothing. A simulacrum of corporeal presence. Questions were generally held until the end. Now don’t underestimate the level of detail involved here. The raconteur must season the word-for-word account with plainly irrelevant bits of data like people’s position in the room, facial expressions, and vocal inflections in a way that far eclipses even what you’ve heard to this point. So, because of the jutting lip and despite my compromised state, I did this for Alana with decreasing B.A.C. and increasing lucidity and when I was done she said this: