The Tesseract (12 page)

“Really,” said Corazon. “Interesting…I’d have expected it would be one of the first things to suffer…”

Rosa looked over at her father to see if he was registering
any part of this mysterious conversation, but he wasn’t. “Suffer from what?”

“I notice you have a flower in your hair,” Corazon replied, apparently ignoring the question.

Rosa paused. “I saw it growing near the…”

“Naturally. Do I know him?”

“Know him?”

“Do I know the boy? Or am I going to be surprised like Leesha’s mother this evening?” Corazon leaned forward across the table, and the curl to her mouth became an open smile. “Am I going to be cleaning rice tomorrow afternoon and find a little gossip breeze in my ear, telling me that my daughter has become intimate with her future husband!”

Rosa pulled the flower from her hair with one hand and covered her mouth with the other.

“Is it Mario?”

“No!”

“Gregorio?”

“There’s no boy!”

“Fine, fine. Suddenly you’re wearing a flower, but there’s no boy.” Corazon burst out laughing. “Let me tell you something. As soon as the first one marries, the others all will follow. Within a few months you’ll all be lined up in your best dresses to talk to the padre. It’s always been that way. Of course…” She sniffed delicately. “…I was the first in my
bakada
.”

“There’s no boy.”

“I’ll be waiting for the little breeze…”

“I think you’ll be waiting a long time.”

“I think it’s Mario.”

“If you’re finished eating, I’ll take the plates outside.”

“Soon it will be someone else’s plates!”

Lying awake
, Rosa became aware of her bed. She’d been sleeping on the same wooden boards for the last six years, and boards of similar dimensions for the years before that—but now she was aware of them. They felt small and hard, and they creaked whenever she shifted her position.

Plates, Rosa thought, watching a lizard flicker across the ceiling. Plates, bed…

One wouldn’t change without the other.

“Angel!”
Doming had shouted earlier as Rosa had slipped behind the curtain partition that separated her room from the rest of the house. Rosa had stuck her head back around the curtain, wondering what had made him break his customary silence.

“What?” she mouthed.

“Why did you take that flower out your hair!” he yelled, making Corazon cup her hands over her ears. “It looked very pretty! You put in another one tomorrow!”

“Maybe.”

“Did you say something, angel?”

Rosa held the oil lamp up to her face so Doming could see her lips. “Maybe,” she repeated. “If I see a nice one on the way to school.”

“Keep a look out on the way to school! You might see a nice one!”

“Okay.”

“Good night then, angel!”

“Yes. Good night.”

At a certain point, for a limited time, dead things turn black and pink. People and animals, black where the skin is exposed, and where the black skin flakes or splits, bright pink shines beneath. This is when dead things smell the worst. The stench has an impact and constricts the throat muscles to stop the lungs from taking in any more bad air while also preventing the lungs from letting the bad air out.

Trapped inside Rosa, a sense of death spread from her chest with the speed at which an oil droplet spreads on water. In a second, it had infected her whole body. She took quick steps and held off taking a breath until she was sure that the breath would be fresh. But she misjudged the zone of the stench, and her quick steps only brought her closer to the source. A pig, bloated by the sea, a quarter submerged in the sand, left by the three
A.M.
tide.

“
It must have washed up
during the night,” said Lito. “I saw you walking down the beach. I should have warned you.” One of his hands hovered an inch above her back, ready to
reassure Rosa if she was sick again, too shy for the meantime to go the extra mile. The other held the flower she’d picked and dropped as she stumbled away from the shore, aiming blindly for the tree line. “Look, the flower’s okay. You can put it back.”

Rosa gazed at the patch of ground and splashes of breakfast between her hands. “Keep it,” she said, too disoriented and humiliated to think about what she was saying. “It was for you anyway.”

“The flower was for me?”

“I wore it for you.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” said Rosa, and spat.

Lito hesitated, not sure what to say.

“I need to wipe my mouth.” Rosa looked up. Lito was wearing his T-shirt draped over his left shoulder like a towel—the same way he’d worn it yesterday when she’d walked over to inspect his mutant milkfish. “Can I use your shirt? I have to wipe my mouth. I can’t go to school like this.”

Lito frowned. “Um,” he said, still hesitating.

“Is it clean?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll rinse it in the sea afterward.”

“No, I’ll rinse it.”

“So?…”

He handed it to her and at the same time moved a pace to the side so that her back was to him. He was either putting himself out of view or politely letting Rosa dab away the vomit in relative privacy.

She murmured her thanks.

The T-shirt smelled strongly of soap. He must have washed it the night before, which seemed curious, given that this was the shirt he worked in. And the T-shirt was old, frayed on the collar stitching, but as bright and white as it would have been when new.

Rosa finished wiping, then flipped the T-shirt over to take one last deep breath through the clean folds, ridding herself of the pig’s final traces. Then she held it up for Lito to take, and when she’d stood and turned to face him, it was back over his shoulder.

Rosa thought for a moment. “Actually, I want to rinse it for you.”

“I can do it. Won’t you be late for school?”

“No.”

“Well, anyway…”

“Well, anyway, I’m going to rinse it,” said Rosa, making up her mind. “It’s the least I can do.”

He flinched as she reached out. She had known he would.

Lito’s right pectoral muscle
existed; his left one did not. It was absent. With only a thin covering of skin, his rib cage was visible all the way up his chest, until it dipped beneath his collarbone. The absence of the muscle was compounded by an overdeveloped right pectoral and left shoulder. Bluntly concave where it should have been convex, Lito’s torso was deformed.

“It’s a good job you did all your throwing up already,” said Lito with a hopelessly nervous laugh.

Rosa waited before replying. “You look like a bar of chocolate,” she said eventually. “A bar someone took a bite out of. Your ribs are the teeth marks.”

His eyes flicked downward, then at the T-shirt, then downward again.

“You’re embarrassed.”

He nodded.

“You shouldn’t be.” Rosa lifted her hand and gave him a soft nudge on the arm. “It isn’t so bad to be a bar of chocolate.”

It isn’t so bad. Rosa had said the same thing to Raphael, when he was old enough for them to explain what had happened to him and why. It isn’t so bad to be a bar of chocolate.

What she should have added, if she was being truthful, was that it might not be bad but it was hard. Being deformed would make his life harder than it would otherwise have been. And then she should have added that bad, and even good, were irrelevant anyway. Hard was what really mattered.

“
ER
!”

“Yes,” Rosa called back, although it was difficult to think of anything she wanted to do less than watch
ER
, let alone watch it with her mother. “I’m coming.”

“
You missed
the beginning section! Already I’m confused about what’s going on!”

“At the beginning they only show what happened the week before. The announcer says, ‘
previously on ER
.’ Something like that.”

“No.” Corazon waved a finger. “
Previously on ER
comes first,” she said, also using the English. “But then they have an introduction to the new story. Look, the credits have passed now. So you have missed
previously
, and also the introduction.”

“I’m sure we’ll be able to pick it up.”

Drugs and dosages, procedures, relationships between doctors and nurses, short-tempered surgeons—Rosa was impressed every time she watched the hospital program. The writers did their research. The only thing it lacked was a certain kind of detail. Background people. Not much interested in the plot lines, Rosa studied the background people, looking for familiar expressions and postures, and always found them missing. Not the injured—the ghost faces. The almost translucent figures, drifting, hovering, slumped in chairs. Unfocused eyes, lips pulled back in a strangely vague rictus of horror. She couldn’t believe an accident-and-emergency ward existed without them.

And there weren’t many gunshot wounds, but maybe Chicago didn’t have a problem with gangsters.

“Is the little Negro boy going to die?” asked Corazon, ten minutes in.

Rosa made a quick diagnosis, partly based on medical knowledge and partly based on the boy’s role in this week’s story. Broken rib, possible punctured lung, angelic face, abusive father, addict mother in a rehab program. The boy was being cared for by the
guapo
doctor. Or rather, the most
guapo
doctor. “He shouldn’t. Not unless there’s some kind of complication.”

“You never know with
ER
! Often there’s a complication! Even in rich American hospitals, with all the latest facilities, the children often die! There are no guarantees with
ER
.” Corazon shivered. “I remember once there was another child, a girl, and she had AIDS. Imagine that.”

Rosa was spared her imagination, to the extent that imagination was required, by the phone ringing. “I’ll get it,” she said, jumping up. “I’ll take it in the kitchen.”

“Let it ring! How can you drag yourself away?”

“It might be work. Maybe an…emergency.”

“Nonsense. You know who it is as well as I do.”

“I’ll check anyway.”

“If you insist. Actually, you’re lucky. I think there’s a commercial break coming up soon, but it won’t last long.”

“Commercial break,” said Rosa, over her shoulder, already out the door. “Right.”

“Hi,” said her husband. “I only called to say I’m in the car. Coming home.”

“Are you over United Nations Avenue yet?”

“Just about to reach it.”

“Well…don’t hang up yet.”

Rosa pictured him. He would have one arm out the driver’s-side window, keeping away the street beggars and vendors with a wave of his cigarette. His other hand would be holding his mobile phone. In the early evening traffic, there would be no need for him to keep a grip on the wheel. He would be creeping the car forward with little pushes of the accelerator.

“Do you have either of your hands on the wheel?”

“Nope…Why do you ask?”

“Wondered. That’s all.”

“Okay.”

For a short while, each listened to the other one’s noise. A ripple of car horns and revved engines for Rosa, and sighs for her husband—just audible above the mobile’s fuzz.

“You all right, Rose?” he said after the third sigh, and added, “Corazon’s driving you crazy,” before she could answer.

“Same old stuff, but for some reason she’s really getting to me tonight. We had an argument. She brought up Sarap, and it got me thinking…”

“You’ve got to ignore her, Rose.”

“I can’t. Especially not at the kids’ bedtime.”

“Raffy can handle it, petal.”

“He shouldn’t have to handle things at that age.”

“He’ll be fine, stem.”

“Stem.” Rosa smiled. “How about thorn?”

“I don’t like thorns, root.”

“I think I’d rather be a thorn than a root.”

“Well, I think your mother got all the thor—” He broke off. “Uh-oh,” he muttered. Then there was a pause. “Oh no. Oh
fuck!
I don’t
believe
it!”

“What?” said Rosa anxiously.

“Two kids! Two fucking street kids! They put…
You little bastards! Sons of fucking whores! Get back here, you little
…”

“What’s happened!”

“Jesus.” There was the click of a car door. “Yep…Yep! They did it all right!”

“Did
what?
”

“I’ve got a flat. They put nails under the tire.” He was interrupted by a sudden series of car-horn blasts. “
I’ve got a flat, you half-breeds! What am I holding you up from? Six whole feet of clear road!
” The car horns continued. “
As soon as I pull over, you’ll really be able to open up! Pedal to the floor!
”

“Honey, calm. Get the car off the road.”

“Those people!”

“I know. Please, just get the car off the road and change the tire.”

“Jesus! I just wanted to get home! I’m ten minutes’ fucking drive away, and now I’m going to be so
late!
”

“I know.”

“I’m going to have to hang up. Jesus! Those fucking street kids!”

“They’re gone. All you can do is change the tire.”

“Yes.”

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

He hung up.

Rosa looked down
the hall and watched the blue TV light glowing through the living room doorway. Then she turned back into the kitchen, flicked on the kettle, and opened the freezer. Quart tub of Magnolia,
halo-halo
.

After calling for the third time, Corazon appeared to resign herself to watching
ER
alone. Rosa felt bad—it could surprise her that whatever else she felt toward her mother, the strongest feeling was love—but not bad enough to move from the kitchen. There would be time to make it up to her later.

So she drank her coffee, scooped at the
halo-halo
ice cream, and ran her eyes over the crossword she had left unfinished during her lunch break.