Gods Without Men (7 page)

I have now remained two months at San Xavier del Bac, and will this day depart for the Presidio of Tucson, there to wait for your orders, señor. Two small incidents have soured my relationship with Fray Garcés, and it is no longer possible to remain without strife. One of my muleteers had carnal knowledge of a young Indian woman, soliciting her with tortillas and a piece of ribbon. The friar holds me responsible for this, and for the excessive zeal of one of my escorts in flogging a neophyte who stole a piece of leather harness. Fray Garcés blames me for the surliness and unrest provoked among his peers by the fellow’s
demise. Though I placed the offending corporal on guard duty for eight successive days, wearing five leather cuirasses, a serious enough penalty in this summer heat, it did not suffice to mollify the good father, who has the typical arrogance of the Franciscan, feigning humility but alive to any degradation or abrogation of his powers. It is here as it is elsewhere. Every challenge to Franciscan authority is held to be an assault on their holy mission. At the Presidio, the captain complains that Fray Garcés refuses to send his neophytes to them to labor and so soldiers are forced to perform manual tasks, such as working the mill and pressing adobes, contrary to their dignity as Españoles.

I have come to know Fray Garcés very well. A true mendicant friar, he trusts completely in God and derives great joy, if not always a true sense of Christian brotherhood, from his converse with the natives, whom he genuinely appears to love and calls his children. His frustrations are many, and he often likens his work among the Papagos and Pimas to grinding ore in an arrastra to extract silver. He wishes to remain in sole charge of his scattered flock, and shows no interest in expediting the advancement of the status of the Mission to a doctrina. In any case, the realization of this change is impossible to imagine, at least for several years. The natives are incapable of acting in their own best interests, and it will be some time before secularization is appropriate.

In the discharge of their Royal patronage, ardent desire for the prosperity of both Church and State has caused our monarchs to issue many wise pronouncements, not least of which, señor, was your appointment to the exalted office you now hold. The high regard in which I hold the superior person of Your Excellency leads me to believe that you will be sympathetic to my request now to be discharged from my duties and to return to my wife and family in Vera Cruz, which place I have not seen these last nine months. It is my humble desire that Your Excellency may derive benefit from this report. I remain your most obedient servant

Juan Arnulfo de Flores y Rojas, Hidalgo de Vera Cruz

Presidio del Tucson, August 21st, 1778

For a moment Jaz thought he’d disappeared. But there he was by the pool, trailing poor bedraggled Bah behind him, standing like a little sentry over a sleazy-looking guy sacked out on one of the daybeds. Jaz hurried across the courtyard, careful not to slip on the wet tiles. Raj was at his most withdrawn, rocking slightly, his fists balled, his neck twisted around in the painful-looking S that always made him look like he was trying to bury his head in his armpit. The man lolled sideways, one skinny arm thrown out toward an empty tequila bottle that lay on its side on the concrete. He was dressed in tight bright clothes, like the hipster kids you saw cycling round Williamsburg. He seemed to be unconscious. The more Jaz saw, the less he liked: the straggly beard, the tattoo snaking up one side of his neck, the spots of blood on his pants; there was dirt in his hair, a film of it on his skin, as if he’d been rolling about on the ground. Just then he woke up. He looked startled to see the two of them beside him. Jaz tried to put a more neutral expression on his face.

“I’m so sorry. Was he bothering you?”

“Uh, no.” He had an accent. He rubbed his face and sat up straighter. “Just having a kip.” British. Maybe Australian.

“Come on, Raj.” Jaz spoke soothingly. “Mommy’s waiting.”

Raj didn’t move, just rocked a little harder. The guy leaned toward him, showing a mouthful of crooked teeth. “Awright, little man?” Of course Raj didn’t answer. The guy sat back again and looked up, shielding his eyes against the sun. Jaz caught the stink of stale sweat. Was he actually a motel guest? Maybe he’d just wandered in off the highway.

“Shy, your lad.”

Jaz didn’t want to get into the details of Raj’s condition with this character.

“Sure. He can be like that around strangers.”

“Right.”

“OK, son, let’s go. Come with Daddy.”

Raj made it hard. He wouldn’t give Jaz his hand, and when he was picked up he used all his most effective protest tactics, going alternately limp and rigid, squirming in Jaz’s grip like a fish.

“Stop it now. Come with Daddy. Daddy needs you to come along.”

The man watched them struggle. Jaz tried not to feel embarrassed. He’d never got used to this part of being Raj’s dad: the scenes, the way they were always the center of attention. They could never blend in, be a normal family. Lisa was tougher than him, but then of course she had to be: She was around the boy all day without a break. At least Jaz could leave, go to work.

Every weekday morning for four years Jaz had felt guilty. Guilty as he closed the front door and headed for the subway, guilty as he bought his
Times
at the newsstand; it was always such a relief to be away from Raj’s relentless tantrums. Lisa had a shitty deal and he knew it and she knew he knew, and that was the hairline crack in the bowl, the start of their trouble. Before Raj came along they’d been fine. A terrible thing for a father to think about his son, but it was true. Despite the craziness at the firm, the foul-mouthed traders, the pressure from Fenton to sign off on Bachman’s latest apocalyptic scheme, work was an oasis of tranquillity compared to what the child had waiting for him at home—the sinking feeling as he turned the key and called out hello and tried to judge from Lisa’s face and posture just how bad it had been for her that day. When he was born Raj wouldn’t feed. He hated to be picked up. Then, when he started teething, he ground at Lisa’s nipples like an animal. He transformed her. She became a weeping hollow-eyed version of herself, a wan creature in thick socks and sweatpants, her lovely long blond hair plastered to her scalp. This is not my son, Jaz caught himself thinking. My son would not do this to my beautiful wife.

Always the same routine. Putting his laptop bag down, trying to be helpful.
Come on, I’ll do that, give him to me
. Hearing about what new punishment Raj had devised, how unwilling he was to be cuddled or consoled. He’d sit on the impractical white couch where they’d once tried not to spill red wine—the couch now stained by spatters of puréed carrot—and absorb Lisa’s anger, sitting silently as she shouted at him. Because he was there. Because no one else would understand. Then he’d hold her as she cried, smelling her hair, its scent of milk and baby shit and that mysterious authoritarian note of licorice he’d come to hate, the smell of his son.

Raj wasn’t a normal baby. That had been obvious from the start. He didn’t sleep, just lay there in his newly bought crib in his newly painted nursery and screamed, full-throated continuous yelling, primal and fierce. He sounded so outraged at having to inhabit that brightly colored box with its mobiles and plush toys and mural of zoo animals. The worst of it was his refusal to let them calm him. It cut Lisa to the bone.
Jaz, he flinched. I went to hold him and he flinched
. He’d tell her it wasn’t her fault. She was a good mom, a great mom. He’d say those things and stroke her hair and she’d insist it was impossible. How could she be a good mom if her own baby was afraid of her? He didn’t have an answer. He wasn’t used to that, to not having the answer.

The doula told them it happened that way sometimes. Raj would calm down soon enough. All babies were different. All parenting experiences presented unique and rewarding challenges. Jaz didn’t think of Raj as a rewarding challenge. Those inhuman cries, like those of a fox or a cat; the feral horror he exhibited when Jaz brought his face up close. His mother had Punjabi village words for what Raj was, words Jaz forbade her to use in his house.

They wouldn’t sleep for days at a time. They didn’t go outside. By the front door stood a thousand-dollar stroller, unused, plastic wrap still sleeving the handles. All the images they’d had of their new life, walking in Prospect Park bundled up in scarves and hats, holding hands—a proper American family. They’d never even put him in the thing. Jaz extended his leave to a month. His boss sent technicians to install a
VPN in the study: trading screens, a terminal connected to their trading engine. He’d sit upstairs, doing regressions on the latest cluster of datasets, and listen to the chaos downstairs. After two months they demanded he go back to the office. Lisa understood. Raj would be her job. It was a question of earning power. She looked like a ghost.

They got a nanny, of course. She came from an agency, very expensive. A Jamaican church lady called Alice, middle-aged and severe. She gave in her notice after three weeks. Elena was from Puerto Rico, young and curvy. She’d tune the kitchen radio to reggaeton stations and dance in front of the ironing board. Jana was a Slovak student. There was another one, a Dominican who left after a week. None of them lasted. Raj drove them all away.

That was how they lived for the first two years. Jaz had once been overturned white-water rafting. One minute he was clutching a paddle and squinting into the spray, the next he was spinning round underwater. That was what it felt like. The suddenness, the extremity. By the time Raj’s diagnosis came, it wasn’t a surprise. They took him to the pediatrician—a new pediatrician, the third—just before his second birthday. He tried a few simple questions, asked him to point to things, to pretend to make a call on a plastic toy phone. Soon enough Jaz was standing outside the clinic, oblivious to the December wind howling down Lexington Avenue, the Midtown traffic, the people shouldering past on the sidewalk. He was the father of an autistic child. What were the odds? He knew exactly. One in ten thousand in the seventies. Now down to one in a hundred and sixty-six. Jaz made his living building mathematical models to predict and trade on every kind of catastrophe. And now this: an event for which he had no charts, no time series. An entirely unhedged position.

In the glove compartment of their car was yet another packet from Jaz’s mom, just the same as all the others, on the envelope the shaky handwriting that wasn’t even her own—she couldn’t write in Punjabi or English—and inside a little wrap of kajal and a locket and a letter, written by his aunt Sukhwindermassi. It had all the usual crap in it, pleas for him to bring Raj home to Baltimore, to see an astrologer, to apply the
black soot to Raj’s forehead and put the charm round his neck and find an exorcist to ward off the nazar, the evil eye that had fallen on the child and caused him to lose his mind.

Jaz’s pagal son, so shameful. A problem the family needed to solve, not out of any compassion for the boy, or even love for Jaz, but because of the dishonor it brought on the Matharu name. If the older generation had its way, the kid would be locked up in an attic somewhere, away from prying Punjabi eyes and wagging Punjabi tongues, all those aunties and uncles who knew in their heart of hearts that no good could come of what Jaz had done, the stain he’d put on the family izzat by marrying a white woman.

Of course Lisa understood something of the “cultural differences” (that glib dinner-party phrase) between her upbringing and his own, but she had no idea, not really, of the vast territories he had to straddle to keep both her and his family in his life. His mom and dad were straight out of Jalandhar, betrothed to each other at some improbably early age, their childhoods played out in small villages against a backdrop of wheat and yellow mustard fields. Three days after their wedding his dad set off for America to join Uncle Malkit, who’d made a life in East Baltimore. Together the two cousins worked in a body shop owned by a Pole called Lemansky. In their family legend Mr. Lemansky was a typical white boss, greedy and tyrannical, cheating Malkit and Manmeet out of overtime, mocking their religious observances and their faltering English. Jaz suspected that in reality he was no worse than the next guy, struggling, bemused by the changes in his neighborhood, by the dark-skinned men who were the only ones willing to work for the low wage he could afford to pay. After two years of car parts and engine oil, his dad left to work on a production line assembling power tools. Soon afterward, he sent for Mom, whose first experience of America was in a factory packing candy bars with hundreds of black women. She didn’t mix with them, sticking to her own coven of Punjabis at a corner table in the canteen. Jaz could picture them, their long braids tucked into hygienic hairnets, eating their carefully packed lunches of dal roti and warding off the new world and its kala people with acid remarks and superstition.

This was how you did it. Work hard; keep away from the blacks; remit
money home for weddings, farm equipment, new brick-built houses whose second or even third stories would rise up over the fields to show the neighbors that such and such a family had a son in Amrika or U.K. Wherever in the world you happened to be, in London or New York or Vancouver or Singapore or Baltimore, Maryland—you really lived in Apna Punjab, an international franchise, a mustard field of the mind. All the great cities were just workhouses in which you toiled for dollars, their tall buildings and parks and art galleries less real than the sentimental desi phantasm you pulled round yourself like an electric blanket against the cold.

All the aunties worked at the same place as Jaz’s mom, except the ones who had jobs as cleaners at Johns Hopkins, or were on the line at the condom factory. The uncles drove taxis. By the time Jaz was born, the son his parents had prayed for after two disappointing daughters, the family had moved out to the country, near the Gurdwara, an anonymous storefront with curtains in the window and a hand-lettered sign on the door. This was the center of their social life, a round of shaadis and festivals; dozens of people squeezed into cramped apartments and row houses, sitting on the floor, singing kirtans. White sheets stretched over patterned carpets, garlanded pictures of the gurus in plastic gilt frames. As a small boy wearing a new kurta-pajama, straight out of the box and scratchy on the skin, Jaz never imagined there was any other world. Running his fingers along the crisscross cotton folds on his chest, he’d pick his way through ranks of chanting worshippers into kitchens full of frying smells and forests of silk-clad female legs that could be tugged at to produce henna-patterned hands that reached down to adjust his topknot or give him a morsel of food. A safe bubble for a cherished little boy. As he got older he saw that for all the mithai and cheek pinching, this bubble was also paranoid and fragile and small, sensitive to the slightest touch of the wider world, the appearance of a police officer or even the mailman at the door. His mom would shake her head, pull her dupatta over her face and call for the kids, the English speakers, to find out what the gora in the uniform wanted. Always the suspicion that he was there to take something away from them, some old-country memory of tax collectors, landlord’s thugs.