The Tesseract (25 page)

Romario cleared his throat. “Oh,” he said.

“Did I never tell you that before?”

“No.”

“Well, there it is…Anyway, pick me up.”

“You’re coming to dinner?”

“Yes.”

“You are?”

“Yes.”

“Jeez,” said Romario. Then, down the phone line, Alfredo heard the sound of a briefcase clicking shut. “Fredo, stay right where you are. I’ll leave now. I’ll get over to you in about fifteen minutes.”

“Fine.”

“This is great! Silvie will be really pleased, and you’re going to like her friend a lot. She’s just the sort of girl you need to…” Romario paused. “Fredo, you’d better not change your mind on me.”

“I won’t,” said Alfredo. “Call on the car phone when you pull up outside. I’ll come down.”

“Fifteen minutes.”

“Sure,” said Alfredo, and began to put the phone down.

“No, wait!” said a small voice just as the receiver was about to hit its cradle.

Alfredo lifted the receiver again.

“Do something,” said Romario.

“Do something?”

“Uh…you’ve got to make yourself look nice. Have a shower and put on some fresh clothes. Some good clothes. Is fifteen minutes enough time for you to have a shower?”

“I’d have thought so.”

“Then have a shower.”

“All right.”

“Good clothes! A clean shirt!”

“Yes.”

“Fifteen minutes!”

“Yes,” said Alfredo. This time he disconnected the line with a push of his finger.

The armed Filipino outside the kitchen window shouted that Rosa should move her fucking head so he could kill the man behind her.

The Englishman shouted, “
I’m going to die. I’m covered in shit. I fell in a fucking sewer
.”

The Filipino gunman repeated that Rosa had to move her head.

“
I’m going to die in this fucking kitchen, covered in shit
.”

“Move your head!” the gunman shouted a third time.

“I can’t move my head!” Rosa shouted back at him. “Please don’t shoot! You’ve already shot my mother! There are two young children in this house! Please don’t kill them!”

Something indefinable in the gunman’s expression seemed to change. He said, “Your children are not going to be killed.” Then his mouth closed and he didn’t shout at her again.

Rosa blinked. Her mind was working slowly, but her thoughts were clear enough. “
Is it possible for you to shoot over the head of the boy?
” she asked the Englishman quietly.

“
How can I?
” he answered in a half-sob. “
I don’t have any fucking bullets left
.”

“
Then
,” Rosa said, “
in a few moments, unless you let me go, he will kill us both
.”

The man sucked in a sharp lungful of air before replying. During this time, Corazon expelled a loud sigh.

“
Okay
,” he said.

He let Rosa go
. Rosa threw herself to the side. The man stood alone for half a second, arms bunched at his sides, pointlessly tensed in defense. Then he was shot.

Rosa slid to the floor and covered her eyes.

She could hear the Filipino gunman climbing through the window.

“You said my children wouldn’t be killed,” she whispered.

A crunch of glass told her that he had jumped down from the kitchen sink and was in the room.

“Please,” Rosa said.

She uncovered her eyes and saw the gunman standing over the dying Englishman, firing into his head. The gunman fired until his pistol was empty. Each explosion caught her breath like a hiccup. The final shot made her scream.

While Rosa screamed, the gunman reloaded and the Englishman’s blood spread quickly across the floor. She continued to scream until she dimly realized that the gunman was waiting for her to stop.

The scream tapered away.

“That’s your mother,” the gunman said, gesturing with his free hand at Corazon’s body.

Rosa didn’t know how to respond.

“I’m sorry she’s dead,” the man said flatly.

She nodded.

The man nodded back. “Sorry,” he said again, in the same oddly polite, emotionless voice. Then he walked to the sink, hauled himself up, and was gone.

“Lita,”
Rosa called. “Raffy.”

At once, two reassuring wails burst out from the hallway.

“Kids, don’t come into the kitchen. Everything is…Stay in the…”

Stay? The word sounded ridiculous. What for? Stay until she had a chance to clear up the mess, slide Corazon and the shit-covered foreigner out of the way somewhere, mop the floor? What difference would it make?

Rosa sat in the blood and glass, her gaze alternating between the two corpses.

She told herself: Take a minute to think. I should recognize this territory by now. This is an aftermath, and they are familiar to me. I know what to do from here.

She tried again.

“Lita, Raphael, stay where you are.”

Vincente lay beside Totoy on the tarmac. He wasn’t dead; he was thinking.

He had chased a running man and seen what happens when a running man is caught. In the house, he had seen a young boy, about the same age he had been when his father disappeared.
He had seen a sink; plumbed in, a good sink, the kind of sink you get in a good house.

He thought: There should be something here that I am meant to understand.

Vincente thought harder.

Some time ago, Fredo had talked about thinking.

“When you say, ‘I just thought of something,’ what you mean is, ‘I just stopped thinking of something.’ You’ve been having the thought for a while, turning it over in your mind, developing it, without realizing you were doing so. Maybe for days or weeks. Maybe even years.”

Vincente thought: The running man wasn’t my father, the boy wasn’t me, and my memory is so bad that I can’t be sure if I ever had a sink like that or not.

Maybe there is nothing here I am meant to understand.

Maybe there is no meant to understand.

This means something.

Vincente stopped thinking.

A car pulled
into the driveway. Vincente and Totoy sat up, squinting into the bright headlights until the driver switched them off. Both boys recognized him, but he didn’t seem to recognize them. He stared over their heads with a puzzled expression on his face.

Up and down the blossom-lined road, figures stood in lit windows. In one front garden, a man in shorts and a vest held a shotgun, watched from the doorway by his wife. No farther than five blocks away, a police siren rose and fell.

“We’d better go,” said Totoy quietly as the Honda driver ran past.

“Rosa?” yelled the driver. “What the hell is going on?”

“We’d better,” Vincente agreed.

As they hit the street, they heard a woman’s voice behind them and the driver’s sudden gasp of alarm.

“God!” he exclaimed, as if his faith had been punched out of his body.

Totoy looked back over his shoulder and Vincente didn’t.

Some definitions of a tesseract describe it as a hypercube unraveled, and others as the hypercube itself. I chose the version used here only because I happen to prefer it. Similar liberties have been taken with everything presented as fact in this novel.