The Assimilated Cuban's Guide to Quantum Santeria (7 page)

There was relief in her voice. “That’s what I thought.”

“There are other options.” This was me still being professional and self-sabotaging. “I could show you what your child or children look like in other universes. I could superport them a while into the ClassAgg. Maybe Chase would like to see them. Maybe you would, too.”

She shook her head. Her voice was raw and tender when she said, “It’d be like seeing ghosts. That would break poor Chase’s heart.”

At least she sounded raw and tender. I realized then I had no longer had any idea how to interpret her words. She had become a cypher to me, a placeholder zero of herself. Her words were dialogue from an audition-script: a good actor could play them a million different ways.

Yet I still wanted her. What the fuck was wrong with me?

I was awoken from my reverie by a touch. Karen’s hand had cautiously crawled over to mine, like a crab seeking a mate. I lay very still. She interlaced her fingers with mine. Neither of us said anything for a time.

Eventually, her eyes jumping from star to star, she said, “Chase is coming back to himself. Those months when he first came home, there was nothing left of the man I’d fallen in love with. He was pure rage.”

“He’d lost both his legs.”

“Yeah. Who wouldn’t be angry?” She squeezed my hand a little tighter. “And I thought, ‘Karen, you slutty bitch, this is exactly what
you deserve. You deserve a hateful husband you will treat you like shit for the rest of your life.’”

“No one deserves that.”

She looked at me for a second. Then she turned back to the sky and, rueful, said, “
You
should think that. You have every right to think I deserve every bad thing that could happen to me. What I did do you, Jesús—unforgivable.

“Yet here we are. Not only did you forgive me, but you’ve given Chase his hope back. He feels like he’s living a miracle, thanks to you. You know what he says? He says, ‘I feel like every Chase in the universe is coming together to help me get through this.’”

It was the longest we’d held hands since Chase had returned. “That’s a nice thought,” I said.

“He’s not nearly as angry anymore. He can envision a future. He wants kids now.”

“I can’t give him kids.”

“But you made it possible for him to dream about the future again. You gave him his
vision
back. It’s the greatest gift anyone can give.”

“Glad to help.”

She laughed. “‘Glad to help.’ Really, that’s it? That’s all you want to say?”

“What else should I say?”

She shook her head and smiled. “Always so practical. So understated. You know why I fell for you, Jesús?”

“Yep. Because I’m ‘Spanish.’”

She squeezed my hand, hard, as punishment; I giggled evilly. “Never going to let me live that down, are you?”

“It was pretty racist, m’dear.”

“I know. I mean, now I know. I didn’t realize I was being racist. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. If I’m being really honest,” I said, letting go of her hand so I could roll on my side to face her, “I’m not really all that Puerto Rican. Really, I’m white.”

Now
that
cracked her up. “Jesús, honey, have you looked in a mirror? You are
not
white.”

“I know I look brown. But I’ve forgotten all my Spanish. I have a Ph.D. in Physics from an American university. I have money, a white ex-wife, a white ex-lover, and a Pennsylvania split-level I bought seventeen years ago. I don’t live the life of someone who has to struggle against racism every day. It’s not fair for me to call myself Latino.”

I looked up. The moon pulled a curtain of clouds around itself like a magician, and the field grew a little darker. “Can I be really honest, too?” Karen asked.

“Sure.”

“I
did
fall for you because you’re Spanish. Latino. Whatever. I mean, your name
sounds
super-Latino—Jesús Camacho!—and you have brown skin and kinky hair. But you’re right. I mean, you speak perfect English. Better than me.”

“Better than ‘I.’”

Her laugh ascended to the stars. “See? So yeah, fine, you’re white.
But off-white. I was lonely without Chase, and you were different enough to be exciting. But not
too
different. Just enough.”

Maybe some people in my shoes would’ve been offended by Karen’s words. I wasn’t. Because—again, being totally honest—I thought of myself in exactly the same way: Latino enough to be interesting, but white enough to fit in. Before Karen, I had no idea how much racism I’d internalized.

“You know why I fell for you, Karen?” I asked her.

“Seriously, no idea. I’m an administrative assistant with a high school diploma who eats too many whoopie pies and goes to church mostly for the gossip. You could do a lot better.”

“I fell for you because you’re so honest. Even when it makes you look bad. Everyone else keeps their evil parts hidden. Not you. You share everything you’re thinking: good, bad, ugly, whatever. It’s so refreshing.”

Her face became mannequin hard. She told the moon, “You mean, except for the part where I was lying to you about my husband, and lying to my husband about you.”

What could I say? “Yeah. Except for that.”

I thought I had ruined the moment, but I saw her squint a little; she was thinking, and the thought seemed to amuse her. “You know what I want, Jesús? I want to know how the other Karens did it.”

“Did what?”

She rolled over and got make-out close to my face. “How they managed not to fuck up our relationship. In some universes right now,
there are Karens and Jesúses who are perfectly happy together, even after Chase came back. Every possibility can happen, right? Somehow, some brilliant Karens out there figured out a way to keep seeing you.”

As gently as I could I said, “That sounds impossible.”

“With all the gagillions of universes out there, you’re telling me there isn’t a single Karen in the entire cosmos who figured out how she could keep you
and
Chase?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. But we still only get to live in this universe. And in the here and now, I don’t see how to make that happen.”

“But we have a ClassAgg! Don’t you see? That thing is a fucking crystal ball! We can search for those universes. Find out how they made it work.” She took my hands. “Jesús, there’s a way! A way we can be together again!”

She was almost crying she was so happy. She wanted so much to be right. And she was, kind of. But when physicists use the word “information,” they mean mass, particles, position in space and time. They don’t mean philosophy and morality. It’s true that we could spy on all the Karens and Chases and Jesúses living their lives across realities, but we couldn’t talk to them or ask them how we should fix our broken lives. The ClassAgg only let us spy on others. It had no opinion on what anything meant.

It was Chase who called me. “Jesús, it’s time, man, it’s time! Her water broke!”

“I’m on my way. What do you need?”

“Nothing man, just get your ass to the hospital! Wahoo!”

I wasn’t family, so they wouldn’t let me in the delivery room, even though Karen and Chase told everyone in the hospital I was more than family. But rules are rules, so Chase came out regularly to update me, and every time he reported, he thanked me for the miracle I’d given Karen and him. He called me his angel. Twice he summoned me into a hug, and each time I locked his wheels so I wouldn’t lose my balance, then stooped over and embraced him until he had finished crying.

At 4:40 AM, Karen and Chase became the proud parents of a healthy 8 lb., 11 oz. boy with ten fingers and ten toes and his whole life ahead of him.

It was hours more before they would let me in to see the baby and the proud parents. When I did finally enter the room, Chase was cradling the sleeping newborn in his lap, while Karen lay on the bed with her eyes closed, looking like a vampire’s most recent meal, black-eyed and enervated.

I whispered from the door, “Hey, happy parents!”

Chase gestured me over; I tiptoed so as not to wake the newborn. “He’s just the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” Chase whispered. Only surface tension held the tears against his eyes; they would fall the next time he blinked. “It’s like he’s made of ‘perfect information,’ right Jesús? Like you gathered all the best ideas from every universe and put it into our child. That’s what you did. There in the ClassAgg,
you made all this possible. It’s a miracle. You gave Karen and me a child of our own.”

“Yeah,” said Karen, “a child of our own.” I looked at her and found she was staring at me. Through her exhausted rictus I could see that same infuriating look of hers. Once again she was waiting for me to betray her.

I knelt next to Chase’s wheelchair and brought my face close to the child’s. The sleeping baby took easy, sonorous breaths. “My God,” I said, and I meant it. It was hard to imagine the universe had any problems at all when it had babies in it breathing so peacefully.

But the truth is, babies are born into a universe of problems. My son’s skin was as brown as mine.

It’s a cool Pacific-coast morning when I pull up to the gate of the American Panda Mission’s campus. Security is tight: two guards cradling M-16s and girdled in kevlar ask me what I am doing here.

“Gabrielle Reál,
San Francisco Squint
?” I say, giving them my best can-you-big-strong-men-help-me? eyes. “I have an appointment with Ken Cooper?”

One guard walkie-talkies in my press credentials. The other stares at me behind reflective sunglasses. Nothing inspires silence quite like a machine gun.

Finally: “O.K., Ms. Reál, just head straight, then take the first right you see. Mr. Cooper will be waiting for you.”

I follow the almost-road to a nondescript warehouse. Outside, park ranger and chief robot-panda operator Kenneth Cooper is waiting for me. Full disclosure: Cooper and I used to date. Which is why you’re stuck with me on this story instead of some boring, legitimate journalist.

Cooper’s been Californiaized. Back when I knew him he was a hypercaffeinated East-coaster working on a Biology M.S. Now he’s California blond, California easy, eternally 26 (he’a actually 37). Flip-flops,
bermudas, a white, barely-buttoned shirt that’s just dying to fall off his body. Not exactly the Ranger Rick ensemble I was hoping to tease him about.

I park and get out; I’m barely on terra firma before Cooper’s bagpiping the air out of me. “So good to see you, Gabby!” he says.

I break off the embrace, but keep ahold of his hands and look him up and down. “Looking good, Mr. Cooper. Remind me: why did we break up again?”

“You were still at Amherst. And I left for California. This job.”

I let go, put a hand on my hip. “Biggest mistake of your life, right?”

He holds out his hand again—wedding ring—and I take it, and we fall into a familiar gait as we stroll to the warehouse, as if we’d been walking hand in hand all these years without the interruptions of time and space and broken hearts.

“Don’t be jealous,” he says. “There’s room enough in my heart for you and pandas.”

The warehouse isn’t as big as it looks from the outside. Straight ahead and against the back wall is mission control, where a half-dozen science-types wear headsets and sit behind terminals, busily prepping for the mission of the day. From this distance it looks like a NASA diorama.

To the left are cubicles, a meeting area, and the supercomputer that does most of the computational heavy lifting for APM. On the
right is a makeshift workshop—benches, spare parts, soldering irons, and a 3D printer big enough to spit out a zamboni. Maybe that’s where they print all their science-types.

And in the center of it all, a gigantic pair of headless panda suits hang from wires in the middle of the room.

I move in for a closer look. The suits are suspended like marionettes from wires that connect to a rig in the ceiling. They’re pretty realistic, both to eye and touch, except that each is about the size of a well-fed triceratops.

“Gabby,” Cooper says, “I’d like you to meet the greatest advancement in panda procreation since sperm meets egg: Avalon and Funicello.”