Like Son (13 page)
Those were the facts.
Her poems crumbled to dust.
She was dead.
Take it with a dose of salt.
Salt was what Nathalie and I tasted as her tears fell.
Nahui was alive.
She was every masked soldier who ever bore arms for their land. She was the little girls in their white communion dresses, playing dress-up as virgin angels. She was a punk whore, eyebrows shaved and lips rubied in homage to professional sluts who turned tricks out of Mexican street booths. She was revolution itself.
Nathalie as Nahui said to me: “
Querido
, you and I, we are revolutionaries.”
“Nahui,” I asked, “do you know that the dictionary defines revolution as what happens when a body goes around an orbit and returns to its original position?” I continued: “Makes no difference if that body belongs to a planet, some holy whatever, or me. The same rule even applies to you.”
Silence.
“Think of it this way,” I said, “we’re really just tacky little papier-mâché marionettes. We can do only what the puppeteer allows. Life is a controlled performance. Pennies thrown at you. Gravity keeps you in line. And it always pulls you right back to the same place that made you want to revolt to begin with.” I ended with words I hoped Nathalie would hear again that night in her dreams: “There is absolutely nothing revolutionary about your revolution.”
I said this as much to Nathalie as to Nahui.
And it was true.
Because for all of Nathalie’s wanting and needing everything to be so fantastically hyperbolic and transgressive all the time, for all her perpetual 1920s party attire and zany observations and bizarre take on etiquette, no matter how much she wanted to think she and I and her life entire were some sort of brilliant freak show, I’d come to learn exactly what Nathalie was. She was normal. Just plain ol’ potentially boring N-O-R-M-A-L. Seriously, strip away all the pyrotechnics and you’d find nothing truly revolutionary about Nathalie’s revolution. She wanted a happy home. She wanted a man to love. And she wanted her man to love her. Passionately. Devotedly. She wanted that day in and day out. But, I also knew with absolute certainty, nothing scared Nathalie more than how thoroughly normal she really was.
Consequently, when I think back on our Nahui play-date in my old age, it’ll be Nathalie administering a slap to my face that I’ll remember most. The slap wasn’t hard and it didn’t sting much, but I’ll never forget it. Hot damn and then some, Nahui could be such a bitch. The self-righteous indignation. She was just like the rest of her kind—a spoiled baby idealizing a world of unicorns and rainbows and pink and blue cotton candy for everyone after the General Strike …
Her best martyr routine, Nathalie stared me down. But she, like Nahui, was a most unconvincing saint. And, formalities considered, if anyone was going to play saint, it should have been me. Saint Francis of Assisi, specifically. Poor old blind Saint Francis, crazed, all alone in the middle of the forest, singing his Canticle of the Brother Sun:
… my lord Brother Sun … how beautiful is he, how radiant in all his splendor …
Saint Francis’s feast day. That was the day Nahui kissed my father’s mother at the fountain in Mexico. Nahui stared at the sun. Her eyes burned. She kissed my very pregnant father’s mother. My father kicked. The baby’s name was an obvious choice. And Nahui earned a throne on a grafted branch of my family tree.
Francisco: My father’s name had such a handsome ring to it. But names are disasters waiting to happen. One need give care when choosing names. Just ask my father, he could have told you. He took after Saint Francis in ways no mother would ever wish. And then, when his only child was born, the legacy continued.
Frank. Born Francisca. The three of us: Father, the Son-tobe, and Nahui, the Holiest of Ghosts. A most unusual trinity. I wished I could have been lucky like a nun and had my true name whispered to me by God. But I had no god. And so I was never the beneficiary of such convenient divine intervention. I chose my own name, both in honor of my father and for its function as a verb.
“Verb?
Frank
is an adjective, not a verb,” Nathalie once challenged me when I explained.
In response, I’d told her to go look it up. She did.
Webster’s
, definition 11:
To enable to pass or go freely
.
To live without the curses and consequences that crippled my family before me, to break free of a life I preferred were not mine, to pass without constraint through the world … as a man, a good and decent man—to this I aspired.
“Wish?” Nathalie broke my silent thoughts.
She held the lit Virgin Mary candle close to my lips. Still rubbing the slight warmth where she’d slapped me, I closed my eyes and concentrated. I’d learned the hard way with the birthday cake my dad made me that I should phrase my wishes carefully. So I thought for a good long minute. And then I opened my eyes and blew out the candle. Nathalie swiped her thumb across her tongue and pinched her fingertips against the candle’s dead wick. Gray sooty flesh, she reached toward me.
“Thou art dust and unto dust thou shall return,” she said, and marked my forehead with her thumbprint.
Her touch was electric. Head to toe I was flame hot lit.
She stood and planted her lips on mine to seal the deal. The intensity of that simple little kiss was indescribable. Everything turned heavy and earnest all of a sudden. To be honest, I got sort of worried. Was Nat taking this repenting thing seriously? Were we supposed to act all saintly now? Maybe we’d crossed some line. Maybe we’d ruined everything.
She saw my concern.
“By the way, you are devilishly handsome in that suit.”
“Thanks.”
Smile shining bright, she winked and took my hand.
“Ever heard the saying,
No rest for the wicked …
”
We were a busy pair.
2 November 2002. Day of the Dead.
N
athalie woke screaming at precisely 8:45 A.M. Her internal clock was set quartz precision accurate, and her guttural, muffled screech was, as usual, both a terrifying shock to the senses and entirely unsurprising. For over a year, more mornings than not, she woke us this way. She and I were spiraling. We were going up in smoke. Insert here any other tasteless disaster metaphors for a strained relationship—adore each other and try as we did, our seventh anniversary looming large, Nathalie and I reeled from unexpected turns.
Six years had passed between us and everything had been almost obscenely good. Seriously. I mean, sure we were imperfect humans and we had our flare-ups and spats and foot-in-mouth moments. But whatever, by and large we were stoked for every free minute we got to spend together. And as for work, even that had been painless enough—random temp shit for me; same plus occasional nanny gigs with old family friends for her. We made ends meet no problem. Rent checks were mailed. Habits formed. Routines were established. And through it all, we remained fucking giddy to be with each other. Tick tock, one year passed. And another. Plus four more. But then we woke one day to find that the fantasy fort we’d built and mortared with repetition had been smashed by a wrecking ball as we slept.
September 11, 2001. The crisp blue sky came tumbling down and yet, somehow, Nat and I slept like babies well past noon. Neither of us had jobs to head off to that day, so we remained asleep and comfy cozy in bed as the southern tip of what was arguably the country’s most important city collapsed less than three miles south of our repose. How we didn’t hear the sirens and helicopters and neighbors’ screams of shock as they watched the news, how we’d dreamed of sugar plum fairies through it all, I’ll never understand. But we did. We slept. Beautifully. Peacefully. And it was a good thing we did, because that would be the last time we’d wake rested for a very long time to come.
I’m ashamed to admit this, but it wasn’t until we’d been awake for a while—when I was in the shower and Nathalie was whipping up some breakfast—that we even realized anything was wrong out in the world. Nathalie had just turned on the television to keep her company as she cooked when she saw. She called for me to come quick, “Frank, hurry, something awful happened!” I ran out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel, expecting to find Nathalie with her hair on fire or a finger cut off. Although the tofu scramble she’d been cooking burned and sat uneaten in the pan for the rest of the day, our immediate reality remained, almost shamefully, unaffected.
Not sure what we should do, what was safe, what might come next, we sat on the floor directly in front of the television and watched the news. Nathalie leaned on my side, she huddled into me. And she shook. She rattled, actually. And sobbed. She cried enough for the both of us. This was her job, I guess, because I couldn’t cry. Tears and emotions were nowhere forthcoming for me. So, Nathalie a bundle of demonstrative emotional response and me a stone statue, together we sat in our opposing states of shock and we took turns cradling what little crumbled gritty brick evidence remained of our bliss heaven fort.
By the day’s end, what to do with the bricks preoccupied Nathalie. She took to throwing them against the walls, out windows, and in my general direction. Quite simply, Nathalie freaked out. She kept saying, a panicked wildness in her voice, “There isn’t enough oxygen. I can feel it. Seriously, I can’t breathe.”
Nathalie kept breathing. And, furthest thing from what I would have anticipated, the next day she said: “St. Paul’s is organizing volunteers. I’m going.”
I watched as she threw things in a purse for her planned trip down to the site. And what does a person pack for such a trip? Apparently lip gloss, a small bottle of water, and chewing gum are the only sundries needed for an emergencyresponse kit. Nathalie snapped her purse shut, her hands trembling in unison with the length of her arms and up into her shoulders and down into her torso and through her central nervous system to the entirety of her body and mind and voice. My contrasting robotron state had, luckily, at least been programmed to include activation of an empathy chip. I felt a rush of intense need to protect my girl.
“Nat, maybe you shouldn’t go.”
“I’m going.”
“I’ll go with you.”
“No, Frank. I want to go alone.”
And so she did. To be honest, seeing the site was the last thing I wanted to do. So in some ways I was glad she didn’t want me to go. But when she came home later that afternoon, I knew I’d been wrong not to insist I go with her. She’d stopped shaking, but her somber stillness was somehow even more disquieting than the shaking had been. She wouldn’t tell me what she’d seen. She wouldn’t tell me anything. And, really, she didn’t have to. The horrible weight of it all was visible in her eyes.
That was the first night she woke us with one of her hell screeches. Both of us sound asleep, her scream started as something that sounded like a cement mixer stuck in her throat, a gravelly moan, and expanded and deepened into a reverberating bear’s growl. It lasted probably a total of half a minute, but in an instant I was awake in the dark room and every childhood
Exorcist
fear I’d ever had hit me full force. I swear I almost pissed myself I was so scared. And poor Nat, she looked even more spooked than me. It was like she’d heard the tail-end of the scream and hadn’t known where it’d come from.
“Did I do that?”
“Yeah. You okay?”
She was shaking even more than when we’d been sitting in front of the television the day the towers collapsed. Eventually, we sort of fell asleep again. But you should have seen the dark circles under our eyes the next day. It wasn’t pretty. I was relieved when she turned on the radio in the morning and we heard that pedestrian traffic would be restricted south of Canal.
I didn’t ever want Nathalie to go back to that place again.
Yet for months, Nathalie jolted awake in the middle of the night with cold sweats. She stocked up on valerian root and a prescription her doctor gave her but that she never used. I encouraged her to take the pills. I wanted us to sleep. I wanted the haggard look shading her eyes to fade away and the sparkle to come back. I wanted her to be her spasmodic witty self again. But, honestly, more than anything I wanted her angst to mellow out so I wouldn’t feel so goddamned numb in comparison. Because for all her histrionic grief, I was twice as much on autopilot.
I mean, I still tried to be everything Nat could ever want or need. I comforted her. I brought her cups of tea with huge spoonfuls of honey stirred in when she’d wake in the night, and I’d hold her and give her little kisses on the back of her neck and smooth her hair and rock her until she went back to sleep. I tried to keep her days light and upbeat, but inside I felt like a vortex void. I hate to sound so fucking cliché, but I know my emotional reaction, or apparent lack thereof, came about, as paradoxical as it may seem, exactly because I could get through any trauma the world threw—so long as I didn’t have to
feel
. Any fucking moron could tell you it sucked and was totally terrifying to have that much death and destruction so close by. As it was, I was having a hard enough time just being around Nat’s misery.
I started taking Nathalie’s sleeping pills—the prescription ones from the squat little rectangular white bottle that had sat untouched in the kitchen cupboard next to the drinking glasses, the pills that were a creepy shade of pink and reminded me of a Barbie doll or a “flesh-tone” Band-Aid. At first I took half of one maybe every three nights, but soon I was taking two each night and getting the prescription refilled once a month. For at least eight hours each night I sunk into a deadening sleep. And each morning, I woke hazybrained and even more numbed-out than before. This kept me going. What I didn’t realize was that it was becoming difficult for Nathalie to be with someone who refused to feel anything. Because feel she did. Very much.
When the city organized public ceremonies for the one-year commemoration of September 11, Nathalie attended and cried for days after. I don’t know if that’s when she got the idea for the Day of the Dead altar, but it was her idea entirely. Closest I’d ever gotten to a Day of the Dead altar was at Bowers Museum in Santa Ana when my mom dragged me to a fundraising festival the year she was on the Board of Advisors. Untraditional Mexican-descendent jerk that I was, until Nat brought up the idea, I’d never even thought of making an altar for my father. Nathalie, unlike me, was getting wings for sure. She wanted to set up an altar in our apartment for people she didn’t even know. And so, come November 2, we did.
