The Assimilated Cuban's Guide to Quantum Santeria (5 page)

At the press conference announcing the Commission’s findings, Cardinal Secretary of State Salvador Bianchi says, “The matter is simple, really: a man who has lost his soul cannot get a new one by means of an eneural.” The always-colorful cardinal adds: “Science can make the legs of a dead frog dance by running electricity through them. But that doesn’t mean dead frogs
like
to dance.”

Angela’s parents are dead. She is an only child. Before she had kids she used to have a lot of friends, but now she has her family. But she can’t talk to her family about this. She can’t talk to Greg.

She turns to Nurse Bonnie. Bonnie works the night shift, so most nights she has plenty of time to talk.

Everyone else is asleep in the Justice house. Angela in the amber darkness of the kitchen, her hand cupped around the phone’s receiver. “Bonnie, I feel like … I feel like I don’t know him anymore.”

“Oh, honey,” says Bonnie. “Of course you know him. He’s still the same Greg.”

“See, that’s just it, Bonnie. I don’t know if he is the same Greg. Some things are the same. Most things. But not everything.”

“Okay,” says Bonnie. “But you’re not the same person you were before the attack either, right?”

“No,” says Angela. She pauses to mourn the person she once was. “No I am not.”

“It’s natural for people to change, Sweetie. That’s just part of life.” “Yeah, okay, but it’s more than that. It’s not that he’s changed. It’s that … what if Greg died the night of the attack?”

The living silence of the phone connection buzzes in Angela’s ear. “I don’t think I follow you,” says Bonnie.

Angela takes a deep breath. “I mean, what if Greg died that night and now the eneural is just pretending to be him? What if it’s just reading Greg’s memories and using his body to impersonate him, but really Greg died almost a year ago, and now I’m living my life and raising my kids with a … a fake Greg? What if he’s all body and no soul?”

There
, thinks Angela. Breathing feels suddenly more satisfying.
I said it
.

Bonnie says nothing for a long time. The kitchen is still monotone brown. Aren’t eyes supposed to adjust to darkness? “Well, honey,” Bonnie finally begins, “let me ask you something. Before the accident, how did you know Greg had a soul?”

Angela wakes up a little. “What do you mean how did I know Greg had a soul?”

“Just what I said. How did you know?”

Angela laughs. “Everybody has a soul, Bonnie.”

“But how did you know? How could you tell there was a soul inside of him?”

Angela switches the phone to her other ear to buy some time. “I don’t know. I could tell, is all. I could feel it.”

“What, exactly? What could you feel?”

Angela shuts her eyes. “When we were in bed and I lay my head on his chest, I could feel the life there. Okay? I could feel his life shooting up my ear canal.” She laughs at herself. “I know that sounds crazy.”

“It doesn’t. Keep going.”

A smile rises from the depths of her body up to her face. “Sometimes when he came home from work I’d be in the kitchen prepping dinner, and he’d sneak up behind me and wrap his arms around my waist and scare the crap out of me. I scare really easy, so it worked every time. And when he would do that, I could feel his soul. I could feel the … mischief inside him. And then it would jump from his body into mine, like electricity, and his mischievous mood would become my mood, so instead of getting mad I’d just start laughing. We stand like that and laugh together, and then I would call him a sonofabitch and tell him to go get cleaned up for dinner. His soul used to make mine laugh, Bonnie. That’s how I knew.”

“And now when you touch him, you don’t feel his soul?”

Angela opens her eyes. Then her mouth falls open. Then she says, “To tell the truth, I don’t really know.”

“You don’t know, Sweetie? Either you can feel his soul inside him
or you can’t, right?”

Angela puts the receiver in her lap for a moment. She raises and drops it two, three times. Finally she presses it to her ear and mouth and, in the smallest voice she has, says: “Bonnie, we don’t really touch anymore.” And instead of sobbing she adds quickly, “I don’t want to touch him.”

The line goes quiet. The kitchen crowds her from all sides. Then Bonnie says, “Angela, hang up the phone. Go hold your husband.”

When Angela gets back to her bedroom she sees Lucy asleep on Greg’s chest. Greg smiles at Angela through the darkness and mouths, “Nightmares.”

“Bullshit,” Angela mouths back. She is smiling patiently.

Greg mouths a sentence too complex to decode without sound. Angela holds up her hands and says, “Wait.” She walks over to his side of the bed and kneels. In her ear Greg whispers: “Do you want me to go put her in her bed?”

Angela shakes her head. This is getting to be a habit with Lucy—they will have to have a talk with her in the morning—but no need to cause a scene now, disturb the whole house. In Greg’s ear, she whispers, “But can you make a little room for me?”

Greg looks at her. Every other time Lucy has come to their room claiming nightmares, she slept between Angela and Greg. Angela liked her there; she found that, with their daughter separating them,
she slept better.

So Greg is surprised she wants to be next to him. “Really?” he whispers.

Angela nods. Greg gently scoops up Lucy and moves her to Angela’s side of the bed, then cautiously scoots himself over. Lucy licks her lips but does not wake; her head finds its way back to Greg’s chest and settles in. Angela snuggles up next to Greg; she must lie on her side to keep from falling off the bed.

Angela places her head on Greg’s belly. She is looking at Lucy. Her daughter looks so much like her. Lucy’s mouth is slack; her arm is thrown over Greg’s stomach; she could not be more asleep.

Angela listens to Greg’s chest. She hears blood and breath and even a little digestion. And, from a little higher up, she feels the high-pitched thrum of the eneural. It is an alien presence in Greg’s body. But it is just that, a presence—one voice in the choir of his homeostasis.

Angela takes Greg’s hand and places it on the back of her neck. She can feel the caution in his palm—he is excited, eager, but plays it cool so that she doesn’t get spooked. So like him: caring and boyish and endearing and gentle.
It’s good,
she thinks, her forehead just touching her daughter’s. Sleep is coming quickly now; Angela has time for just one more idea. She sighs and settles in and thinks,
It’s enough
.

I didn’t know Karen was married until her husband Chase was wounded in action—an IED took both his legs at the knee—and was coming home. She couldn’t leave him, not now. She had to break it off with me.

I should have been angry, but all I felt was a vacuous shock. I had no idea how to act, so I tried to imagine what a decent person would say in this situation, and parroted that. “What do you need?”

She didn’t answer for a while. Her kitchen smelled like a Pennsylvania July. The mason jars lining the high shelf broke the morning sunlight into rainbows. Through the window I watched the corn swaying like the crowd at a revival. I was leaning against her counter sipping orange juice; she sat at the table double-clutching her mug and letting her tears fall where they may.

“Chase can’t have children anymore,” she finally told her coffee. “I will never be a mother.”

I thought terrible things. Among the least savage was,
We were planning a family together. You and me. Remember?
But out loud I said, “Right now you need to focus on Chase.”

She looked at me, her smile full of self-loathing. “Do you hate me, Jesús?”

“No,” I said automatically. “You’re human. You made a mistake.”

She cocked her head at me like a confused bloodhound, then laughed through her nose; no sound, just bitter air. “I don’t get you. I don’t get you one bit.”

I swirled my juice. “You want me to yell and scream?”

“I want you to feel something! Jesus Jesús. Do you know what Chase would do to me if he found out I’d been cheating on him all this time?” She was about to sip more coffee, but she stopped suddenly and yelled, “Aren’t Spanish guys supposed to be fiery?”

I stopped leaning, stood straight. I dumped out the rest of my juice in the sink, washed the glass, dried it with the rag, set it oh so carefully in the rack.

“What are you doing?” Karen asked.

I stepped away to admire my work, made a box of my fingers like a cinematographer framing a shot. That glass was perfectly clean. Still looking at it, I said, “Spanish guys come from Spain. I’m Puerto Rican.” And without another word I left.

As I drove to the lab where I work—I’m a physicist with the BES—my thoughts turned to Chase. I felt for him the kind of barrenness only fields of burgeoning corn can inspire.

His service to his country had left him mutilated. He’d suffer for the rest of his life, physically. But worse, there was the secret pain of his wife’s betrayal waiting to reveal itself to him. Maybe someday when he was feeling stronger, maybe when he was starting to feel like
he’d gotten a bit of his life back, Karen would unburden herself and tell him about us. Or maybe one day when she just felt like hurting him.

I had to pull over for a minute to collect myself.

Like everywhere in Pennsylvania this time of year, a cornfield abutted the road. I got out of the car and walked up to the six-foot-high wall of stalks. Took deep breaths.

These fields always remind me of my research. If there are Many Worlds, that means that there are many versions of me out there: an infinite number, maybe. Uniqueness is our most pervasive illusion. I’m just one of many cornstalks in the field.

I pushed a stalk gently, set it swaying. Flexible, but solid. Vibrantly alive. Indistinguishable, yes, from the thousands of others in this field: until you get up close. Then it becomes uniquely itself. The stalk was an embodied history of the little sufferings and triumphs that have allowed it to be here now, mature enough to yield corn. It had goals for the future: surviving, reproducing. And Fate had given it a farmer who has done everything possible to help it flourish.

For now. I started getting lost in the metaphor. That same farmer would soon mow it down, it and all its buddies. This whole field of slightly different stalks would be razed to the dirt. Where was the lesson in that?

There was none; it was just a field of corn. But even if the universe has no use for right and wrong, humans do. My affair with Karen had left me feeling very, very wrong. I needed to make amends.

So, with the stalks of corn as witnesses, I said aloud, “I’m going to help you, Chase.”