Crux Read online

  I sobbed. My hyperventilating was uncontrollable. Papi threw open the door in the dark. What’s wrong? he gasped, mouth agape. What’s wrong? What’s wrong? He looked terrified. He threw his arms around me. I could feel his heartbeat reverberate through my body, pounding even harder than mine. His abrupt presence had startled me, but his touch stretched through memories and stirred a sleeping trust. I couldn’t remember the last time my father hugged me. It was so reassuring that my impulse to sob was obliterated, but instead I wept louder, harder, because I wanted him to stay. He rocked me. I tried to memorize the moment—the feel of his sweat-soaked shirt, his familiar odor of cigarette smoke and armpits. I want to leave this place, I said, sobbing. Okay. We’ll leave tomorrow. First thing, I promise. I promise. He rocked me until I fell asleep.

  * * *

  •

  In the morning, the family piled into two vehicles. We arrived at a tiny coastal town called Cuastecomates four hours later. Lush green mountains emitted a croaking toads’ chorus. Cradled between them was a single rustic hotel, Bahía de Cuastecomates. Large boulders jutted from a royal blue sea. Storm clouds coalesced on the horizon. Every molecule in my body ached with fear. The town felt savage. But I told myself to be happy: this was a big improvement from Autlán. Papi asked for two interconnected rooms with “the best ocean view.”

  In our room, Michelle and I opened our sliding-glass balcony door. The sea breeze bathed our faces and transformed my frizzy hair into a tangled tumbleweed.

  Wow, Papi, it’s so cool! Michelle said.

  I walked into the bathroom to change into my bathing suit, then froze. It dawned on me that I couldn’t swim in a pool without creating clouds of blood. I emerged from the bathroom and threw my swimsuit into my suitcase.

  Papi’s eye quivered for an instant.

  What is it? he asked.

  I felt a wave of contempt for myself and said: I just don’t feel like swimming.

  In the room connected to ours, Jeannie had changed into her bikini. She sat cross-legged in bed, staring into a pocket mirror, smearing on plum lipstick. Jeannie was my only blonde cousin. We had once looked very similar. For her quinceañera, I had played the role of young Jeannie in a ceremony that represented her departure from childhood. Puberty had metamorphosed me into a gray-haired monster, while she had become a model, her image featured in swimsuit calendars and on Tijuana billboards. She pressed her eyelashes with a metal tool and applied a globby coat of black mascara.

  Why are you doing that? I asked.

  Why wouldn’t I?

  It’s gonna wash off in the water.

  It’s waterproof.

  Outside, Papi and I sat beneath a shady palapa watching others throw a plastic ball around in the pool. I ordered a virgin piña colada. Papi ordered a Corona. He pulled out his Marlboros and offered me the pack. Want a smoke? he asked.

  I gasped in horror.

  Heh, heh, heh, he said. It’s a joke. He lit a cigarette and took a drag. The bartender brought our drinks. I took a sip of my piña colada and gagged.

  Papi, can you taste this? I think there’s alcohol in it!

  Papi took a sip. He made a sucking sound with his teeth. Jóven, he said. Are you trying to intoxicate my ten-year-old daughter?

  Eleven, I corrected.

  Discúlpeme, the man said, apologizing, and replaced it.

  I stared at the pool, sipping contentedly. I wanted to talk to my father, but I had no idea what to say. My brain sought words where there were none; my thoughts swam in my throat, in my chest, in my stomach. I noticed a shirtless teenage boy in the water. He was brown and muscular, staring back at me with a solicitous smile. How could it be? I was a frizzy-haired eleven-year-old with bad posture and oily, pimply skin, wearing a Taco Bell Chihuahua shirt. He looked seventeen or eighteen—a gorgeous teenage god.

  Jean, a voice said. I turned around: my cousin Jeannie was right behind me. Of course, the beautiful boy had been smiling at her, not me. Her golden hair shimmered despite the lack of sunlight, her clear skin glowed. Why don’t you come in? she asked.

  I have a stomachache.

  Oh, I see, she said, with a long, dramatic wink that disturbed my heartbeat. I stole a glance at Papi to see if he had noticed her tactless expression. Jeannie grabbed my hand. Come, I want to talk to you for a second.

  She dragged me away from my father. Michelle told me why you won’t go in the pool. But you know, you won’t bleed if you go swimming. It’s like magic. Water stops periods.

  I don’t know if I believe that.

  Cross my heart. Plus, my dad wants to take us for a ride on the banana boat. Come. Don’t be a party pooper.

  The banana boat was an enormous yellow flotation device towed by a Jet Ski. Papi, Alejandro, Jeannie, Michelle, Alejandro Jr. and I clung to its handlebars as it tore across the sea. It was thrilling at first, like racing on a mythic marine serpent. Saltwater sprayed our faces. The wind turned the fuzz on my head into a slick wet mane. Then the speedboat made a sharp turn and the world flipped upside down. Disoriented, sinking, we scrambled toward the surface, limbs bumping into one another’s. My uncle kicked me in the face with the full force of his two hundred pounds. I gasped and sank, spinning in blackness. An all-powerful arm hauled me out of the sea. I coughed water out of my lungs as Papi lifted me above the surface. Are you okay? he asked, his eyes terrified. The waves rocked us. I couldn’t speak. He held me up, kicking with all the strength of his legs, allowing me to breathe with my head clear of the sea. Let’s go back, he said.

  * * *

  •

  Michelle woke up in the middle of the night. She felt thunder in her body…as if her heart had reproduced while she slept. Multiple hearts resided there, simultaneous beats pounding. I was asleep. She noticed an orange light spilling from a gap under the bathroom door. She tiptoed over and knocked softly, so as not to wake me. Papi, she whispered. No answer. She tapped again. Papi. He opened the door with his mouth agape and his eyes wide with horror. A strange smell wafted out with him. What’s wrong? he gasped. What’s wrong? What’s wrong? She brought his hand to her chest. My heart is beating so fast. I don’t why. Behind him, his crack pipe sat with his toothbrush. The fumes of his crack had intoxicated Michelle.

  * * *

  •

  The next evening, at the outdoor hotel restaurant, black insects the size of beetles buzzed around us. Are those…flies? I asked. Papi nodded. Yes. And they bite. I shivered. My stomach gurgled with hunger. I had ordered a chocolate milk shake what felt like an hour ago. Why was it taking so long? I looked over my shoulder toward the kitchen. Our waiter was dipping his finger into a tall glass of chocolate milk shake. He brought his finger to his tongue, dipped it in again, and tasted once more. He walked over and placed the milk shake in front of me. I gawked in disgust. Close your mouth, Papi said, exhaling smoke from his Marlboro into my face. Or the flies will lay eggs on your tongue. The feel of his cigarette smoke in my lungs provoked in me an unbearable mixture of nostalgia, revulsion and a fear of getting cancer. I found myself lit aflame by an impulse to destroy the cigarette. I plucked it from his lips and threw it with all my strength. I imagined the cigarette reaching the ocean, to be carried away by the frothy green waves to the golden coast of California, where a seagull might pick it up and drop it at my mother’s feet on her way to work, and my mother would pick it up with a frown and shake her head knowingly, understanding the pain I was in, and come rescue me, but instead the cigarette landed with an unsatisfactory plop on the pavement.

  I could see the veins in Papi’s eyes thickening and splitting like rivers of blood. Jeannie put her arm on his shoulder. Cálmate, tío. She’s just looking out for you—she doesn’t want you to get cancer. He took a deep breath and lit another cigarette.

  Our food arrived. I’m not hungry, I said. Papi chewed noisily and gestured with his fork. Don’t eat, then.
Starve. Your sister knows what’s good for her. Michelle was combing her noodles with a fork, disentangling them meticulously, as if determined to get them into a certain arrangement but not by any means conveying a desire to eat them. I was hungry but I didn’t trust any of the food. My father’s fish ogled me with its dead eyeball; Papi pierced it with his fork. I put my forehead on the table and closed my eyes and tried to imagine I was somewhere else…in the arms of the teenage boy from the pool, perhaps. Jeannie had said his name was David. They were friends now.

  Hey Jean, guess what? Jeannie said. She slid a thin, folded piece of notebook paper across the table. I flattened its creases. It read in Spanish: Dear Jeannie, I have never seen a more beautiful girl in my life. I had to leave the hotel, but when I turn eighteen, I will fly to America to find you. Wait for me. With eternal adoration, David.

  I looked up. Why are you showing this to me?

  The cute boy in the pool, remember? He left it under my door last night. It’s for you.

  If it’s for me, then why is it addressed to you? I asked.

  It’s not addressed to me, silly! He was calling you Jeannie to be lovey-dovey. He told me he was in love with you.

  I hit an internal Pause button and deliberated. I knew what she was saying wasn’t true. But I wanted it to be true. I realized it could be true. All I had to do was succumb to my desire, like when I was a child. When I pressed Play, the flies of Cuastecomates ceased to be hideous. They transformed into fairies, my sister was a friend, my cousin was my muchacha, and my father, who was lighting another cigarette, was a king. I drank deep sips of my delicious chocolate milk shake. But then the vision flickered and turned off. I could no longer supplant reality with my imagination.

  * * *

  •

  We headed to the state of Colima, where Papi thought we would be more comfortable at an all-inclusive hotel at the port of Manzanillo. Gran Festivall was a luxurious water adventure park, with serpentine slides and variously shaped swimming pools. We rented a spacious three-bedroom apartment decorated in festive Mexican colors. The buffet served Mexican food as well as hot dogs and other American junk my sister and I relished. The place was perfect, but every day at sundown, the darkness of my father’s country terrified me as it never failed to do. One night, as the adults drank beers in the living room, I sat paralyzed, listening to the ominous crickets screaming outside. I didn’t feel safe. I asked: How much longer do we have to be here?

  Ten days, Papi said. The prospect made me panic. My face became wet with misery. Michelle avoided eye contact as I wailed. Alejandro’s wife, Rosie, fanned herself with a brochure. Alejandro laughed cartoonishly. Papi looked defeated.

  We went back to the United States a week earlier than planned. I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw my mother: gentle, familiar, ever beautiful. I ran upstairs and threw myself on my queen-size bed. My dependable mother had washed the sheets while I was away. I inhaled the flowery smell of detergent. I had escaped my father. I no longer wanted his approval. He was a scary man—a stranger. The Papi I had known and loved had died in the house at Paradise Hills.

  BRAIN IMPLANT

  My father’s breakdown coincided with the new millennium. When I consider the timing, it seems significant somehow: 1999 turning into 2000, the most momentous calendar crossing in a thousand years. My classmates and I believed the world would end at midnight. We had inherited the paranoid ethos of a culture bracing for “Y2K,” a potential software disaster, which seemed to me to be code for “two thousand Yeerks.” But like mystics who study the Tarot, preadolescents do not contemplate apocalypse literally; they see it as the end of a cycle. We were thrilled—the year 2000 would bring the Future.

  * * *

  •

  Papi heard voices in the walls of the condominium. He made hole after hole after hole in the walls with a hammer. He shoved his fists into the holes, pulled off chunks of plaster, searching for hidden cameras, radio-wave receivers, microphones. He found only the wires of the electrical system. He switched off the power generator, put on a pair of rubber gloves, tore the wires from the walls. He snipped them with wire cutters, one after the other. Still the voices persisted. He fell to his knees and put his ear to the floor. He tore at the wine-colored carpet with his hands, skinning the floor, searching and searching and searching. Suddenly, he smelled a poisonous gas: some kind of nerve agent.

  Papi called 9-1-1, saying someone who wanted to kill him had trespassed onto his property. When the police showed up, they found no evidence of foul play except the damage the panting man acknowledged having done himself. The officers asked if he was a tenant, calculating that the aggrieved party was not him but the unlucky owner of the condominium. Papi told them the place belonged to his “wife,” Dr. Del Valle.

  My mother got a call from the police. Would you like to press charges, ma’am? an officer asked. She declined. She showed up to survey the damages. The condominium had been torn apart as if by a wild animal. The floor was skinned bare of its carpet, walls punctured, electrical system obliterated. Cigarette ash carpeted everything. The smells of smoke were so pungent Jeannette could hardly breathe. Papi, trembling and terrified, gave her his hypothesis: someone had implanted a microchip in his brain. They were sending voices into his skull. He seemed so genuinely frightened, she wondered if it was true. She searched his head for a scar. She found none. Estás usando drogas de nuevo, she said. He shook his head and begged her to believe him. She offered to drive him to his mother’s house. His eyes widened. My mom’s behind all this, he said. Jeannette lost all doubt. Marco was suffering from drug-induced psychosis. Carolina would never harm her son. He was exhibiting classic symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia. She weighed her options. Marco could no longer stay in the condominium. It was hers, he had destroyed it, she needed to repair it, she was going to sell it. But he had nowhere to go. You’re welcome to stay with me and the girls at the house for a few days, Marco, while you get back on your feet. But I don’t want you doing drugs. I’ll call the police if you do. And no matter what, you can’t go upstairs.

  * * *

  •

  I started writing in an online journal a year after Papi’s breakdown. I wrote an average of a thousand words each evening, documenting banal details of my pubescent existence. It helped alleviate my anxiety about death. I believed recording my experiences would give me a kind of immortality. Unlike writing on paper, which could be ripped up and thrown away, writing into the Internet felt permanent. I could “X” out of my journal and power off the computer, only to find my thoughts again by typing a URL into a browser. I planned to clone my soul into the World Wide Web so that I would never die. But I rarely mentioned my father. Somehow I managed to type a few retrospective paragraphs about Papi’s post-breakdown stay in our house without a single relevant word: I feel like talking about the first time I ever met Stefano….I opened the door and Stefano was all, “Hey, I’m the guy in the back of your house.”…He asked if I wanted to go for a walk…and I was like, “Um, sure, let me just ask my dad.” At the moment he was staying with us. Anyway I asked and he said okay. So I went…and we became friends!

  My blog also reveals the onset of self-mutilating tendencies—something I had forgotten. I started digging my nails into my palms and thighs until they bled. I twisted my joints until I felt I was tearing cartilage. The pain made me feel good. My exhaustive accounts of each day actively and unnaturally avoid the subject of my father—not as if I found the topic uninteresting, but as if I found it too awful to mention. There are two notable exceptions:

  July 27, 2001: I can’t tell anybody about my dad so I just have to swallow it up and deal with it myself. My mom’s side of the family cares too much about pride and hides problems as if they were shameful, horrible things.

  January 19, 2002: I always hurt myself when I’m depressed….Sure, I’ve got problems, but sometimes I think I might be overreacting…other ti
mes I think I’m just insane, like my dad. That I’m gonna end up like him.

  My mother had sworn me to secrecy about my father. I obeyed, and literally deleted him from my mind. I can’t recall anything about his post-breakdown stay at our house except curled and crisscrossing configurations of elastic ropes around my bedroom doorknob. I recall contemplating them in confusion; I kept pulling them off only to find them there again.

  * * *

  •

  My sister remembers everything. Papi wrapped himself in tinfoil and told us to do the same. He watched the backyard with binoculars, describing stalkers he said were hiding in the bushes. He said they wore camouflage paint on their faces and hats that looked like trees. He marched up and down the stairs with an air rifle, to intimidate them. He grabbed a helium tank from the garage and placed the hose under the door of his bedroom, where he heard someone whispering in the walls. He covered the gap under the door with towels, then let gas spill into the room, to suffocate the government agents inside.