The Assimilated Cuban's Guide to Quantum Santeria (13 page)

But then he did something really knife; he opened one of the incubators. All the post-docs huddled around it, so I couldn’t really see. He said, “Ladies and gentleman, this is the reason you are here. The Macrobe Conservation Project is dedicated to saving macrobes from extinction, thereby helping us to preserve the ecosystem we discovered when we first landed on New Hope.” And then he said the whole history of the whole project, how when settlers first came to New Hope they cut down a lot of trees, only they didn’t know the difference between the different kinds of trees, and they didn’t know that they were cutting down brain trees because they didn’t have that name back then. They didn’t know that brain trees were basically trees with brains, and that they had a symbiotic relationship with macrobes, and with the trees getting cut down the macrobes started dying off. Plus a few people had been infected by macrobes, and the macrobes started taking over their brains, and that scared a lot of people, so they started killing macrobes like crazy. And since a macrobe is basically just a big squishy gray-and-green blob of toilet-water, it was really easy to kill them. Dr. Grisget said, “Now they are almost extinct. We are all that’s left to protect them from total annihilation.”

I finally squirmed through the post-docs so I could see inside the incubator. I’d seen glimpses inside them before. Mostly they shaved the cadavers’ heads and had them in those green paper outfits they give you in hospitals that don’t close in the back. But this one was a
woman, and you could tell because she had long curly woman’s hair, and an earring in the ear I could see, and she had a dress on with flowers. Earth flowers.

I wasn’t tall enough to see her face, but I knew the dress was my mom’s. She had the same hair as my mom too. I couldn’t figure out why my dad would take one of my mom’s dresses and put it on a dead lady. My mom would be so mad if she found out.

8.

I wasn’t supposed to call New Hope by myself, because calls from the space station were very expensive. But I didn’t like that my dad had put one of my mom’s dresses on one of the cadavers.

Lance Jr.’s big kikface appeared on the monitor. “You’re in trouble, Randy,” he said. “You’re not supposed to call.”

“You’re in trouble too,” I said back. “You’re not supposed to answer.”

“There’s no one else around to answer. Aunt Lois went out for groceries.”

“Where’s Mom?”

Lance Jr. looked at me totally dunkaballs. “She’s with you, stupid.”

“No she’s not, fragbag. She’s with you.”

“Since when? Is she coming home?”

“She’s always been home. You’re not funny.”

“I’m not trying to be funny, dickhead.” And then he kind of squinted and said, “You haven’t seen Mom?”

And then I saw my mom walk right behind him on the monitor. I pointed behind him and shouted, “See, skratbreath, she’s right there! Liar!”

Lance Jr. turned around, then turned back to the phone. “Man are you dumb. That’s just an asiMom.” He turned around again and said “Come here,” to my mom and my mom walked over in the exact same way an asiMom walks. Then Lance Jr. said “Increase praise.” And my mom put a hand on his head and said, “Sorry, but praise level is already set to maximum.” Lance Jr. kind of shrugged at me and said, “I learn best from positive reinforcement.”

9.

That night during dinner, Dad got a call from Dr. Malloy. “We’re having a little bit of a problem here,” he said, “but it’s nothing we can’t handle, Lance.” My dad said, “I’ll be right over,” and then, when the speaker was off, he said, “This place would fall apart without me.” And then he headed out of the door.

My asiMom cleared the dishes, and my asiBro asked me if I wanted to play a game. I told him to go fragbag himself. He said, “I don’t know what ‘fragbag’ means. Would you like to add the word to my dictionary?” So I told him to go recharge himself instead. And then I watched the clock for exactly five minutes. Then I got up and followed my dad.

You need an I.D. to swipe to get into the Macrobe Lab, so I stopped at Maria Centas’ room and took hers. She was having dinner with the other post-docs in the mess and she never locked her door.

I swiped her card and went in the lab. I crawled on the floor and peeked around incubators to find my dad. The floor was cold and really clean.

Dad was shaking hands with Dr. Malloy. “I know I say this every night,” my dad said, “but thanks.”

Dr. Malloy just gave him a few pats on the back and said, “You take care of yourself, okay? For your sake, and your sons’.” And then he started walking toward me, so I had to duck behind a different incubator and hide there until he left the lab.

Once Dr. Malloy was gone, I peeked around the incubator to watch my dad again. He had opened one of the incubators, the one with the cadaver that had on my mom’s dress. He just looked at that dead lady for a long time. Then he put his arm under her and kind of propped her up until she almost looked like she was sitting. He moved the hair out of the dead lady’s face and he said, “Hi, Cathy.” My mom’s name is Catherine.

And then he took out the biggest syringe with the longest needle I’ve ever seen in my life and stuck it in the dead lady’s ear. All the way. I almost screamed. It took a long time to push all of the medicine into the dead lady’s brain. When he was done, he put the syringe on the tray and then held the dead lady with both arms, just looking at her and waiting for something to happen.

The dead lady’s head sat up like only her neck had come back to life. Then she opened her eyes, then closed them, then practiced opening and closing them. She opened and closed her mouth next,
in exactly the same way. She stuck out her tongue then sucked it back into her face and moved her eyebrows every crazy way they would go.

My dad took out his pocket recorder. He turned it on and said, “6:44 PM, stimulant administered. Macrobe ‘Catherine’ exhibiting advanced facial movement ability. Cadaver has recovered doll-eye movement, but lacks a blink reflex and is not yet breathing. Macrobe ‘Catherine’ seems on-schedule to fully permeate the medulla in three to five weeks.” Then he turned the recorder off and put it back in his pocket.

And then he hugged the dead lady again. And he kind of rocked her back and forth and he said, “Cathy. Oh Cathy. Why did you leave me Cathy?” And all the while, the dead lady never stopped making all those insane faces.

10.

I snuck out of the Lab and went back to the apartment. I told the asiMom and the asiBro to follow me. The stupid asiBro said “I am not fully recharged yet. Do you want me to stop recharging now?” And I said, “Yes, fragbag!” And so he stopped recharging and followed me.

The three of us went to Engineering. Now the door was locked because of the nailgun thing, but I used Maria Centas’ I.D. and the door opened. “Follow me,” I said, and they followed.

We walked to the space station’s trash compactor. It was huge; it looked like it could crush a planet. I walked them over to it and said, “Get in.”

They climbed in. I couldn’t believe how stupid they were. What did they think was going to happen?

I told them to kneel, and they did, both of them looking up at me like I was the dad. Then I said “Pray,” and they both bowed their heads and folded their hands, and the asiMom asked, “What prayer would you like us to say?” And I said, “Just pray quietly,” so they just pretended to pray quietly. Then the asiBro said “This is a fun game!” and the asiMom said, “Honey, you have to be quiet. We’re praying now.”

I walked over to the compactor’s command console—that’s exactly what it said on the front of it, “Command Console,” like you could control the whole world with it—and hit the big red button. I’d always wanted to.

The compactor came to life and this big slab of steel started to slowly push down on the heads of the asiBots. It kept pushing until I couldn’t see their heads anymore. “Keep praying!” I yelled. Then I heard metal getting smashed and glass breaking and small electric pops and plastic splintering. And then the compactor hit bottom. It stopped there for a moment, and then started to slowly come back up.

I turned to face the door. I’m sure both asiBots had called my dad to tell them they were being destroyed. I was sure he would come running, just like last time. And when he got there I would ask him if that dead lady was really my mom.

You don’t know my name, but if you are Latino, live next to a Latino, or have watched television within the last year, you know my work. My name is Desideria Belén Ayute, and I am the sixty-one-year-old executive producer for
¿A Quién Quieres Matar?
, the reality-TV show where we find fulanos who want to hire a hit man and get them to admit on hidden camera all the filthy details. Oh, it’s a good show. Three years on the air in every Spanish-speaking country on the planet, and still on top—even today, even after all this ugliness. Wait, who am I kidding? Even more now. The show’s reruns are doing better than this season’s crop of telenovelas and variety shows. If only, somehow, Xavier could enjoy all this success with us, life would be perfect. But that’s not life, mi vida. Life and limes are delicious, but sour.

Theoretically,
¿A Quién Quieres Matar?
could run forever. You wouldn’t believe how many people out there are willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars to kill a friend or family member. I’m an old woman, so I can remember a time when, if you wanted to kill someone, you’d go grab your machete and do the job yourself. But this new generation, with their American ways and their American dollars, they don’t want to get their machetes dirty. They’d much rather hire some poor guajiro fresh off the boat and hungry for money to do it for them. And there’s never any shortage of hungry guajiros.

Xavier Morales was the actor who played the hit man on our show.
We pixilated his face and slowed his voice in post-production so people wouldn’t recognize him on the street. But we were fools to think we could keep his identity a secret. Some Internet idiots with too much time on their hands revealed his identity before the first season was over.

We thought the show was done. But it wasn’t—because even though millions watch our show, billions do not: they watch something else, or don’t watch TV, or whatever. In fact, once his cover was blown, ratings went up, especially with women viewers ages 18 to 30. You know why? Because Xavier was gorgeous. What a guapetón that man was! Beautiful and manly and gentle and powerful and funny and, my God, what a dancer! And though he was Cuban through and through, he was born in the States, which meant that most of the nasty parts of machismo—like the part that thinks it’s perfectly okay to backhand a woman—had been shrunk to nothing, like successfully-treated tumors. But the good parts of machismo—the valor, the tenacity, that almost savage cheeriness that is impervious to neurosis —remained perfectly intact. I had sexual fantasies about that man six days a week at least.

So you can imagine how upset I was when the police called me that morning to tell me he’d committed suicide.

Earlier the previous evening, we had wrapped up shooting our special New York City edition of
¿A Quién Quieres Matar?
It was the weirdest shoot we’d ever had. We were all set up in our rented third-floor apartment in the Bronx to receive our mark of the week, a lanky
Dominican named Tito Angelobronca. Seventeen years old, going on twelve: he slumped in his chair and only spoke to adults when spoken to, and even then only with sullen one-word replies. He wanted Xavier to kill another high school boy named Miguel Fernández for, as far as I could tell, no good reason: he gave half-reasons like girls and neighborhood slights and “that puto’s a punk-ass bitch! He’s got to go, yo!”

So Tito was coming to the apartment to finalize all the details with Xavier, to give him all the information a real hitman might need for the job. And Tito had a special request: he wanted Xavier to make it look like a suicide, and wanted Xavier to leave a note behind that read: “Soy simpático,” which means “I’m likable” and/or “I’m sympathetic.” It was a damned weird thing to write on a forged suicide note. Xavier was going to ask him what that meant when he showed up.

Besides Xavier and the hidden cameras and my crew, in the apartment were a half-dozen of New York’s Finest who, once they had all the evidence they needed, would burst from their hiding places and wrestle Tito’s chicken-bone frame into a chair. Then, if he waived his rights—and they almost always did—Xavier would interview him. And then the police would haul the suspect off, and we’d start breaking down the equipment and heading to our next location: Miami, our bread-and-butter city. There’s never been a hitman in Miami who’s been unemployed for more than twenty minutes.

So there we were, waiting, ready to get the whole dirty business on-camera. Only it wasn’t Tito we saw, courtesy of our hidden cameras, walk into the apartment building. It was an old woman, dressed in
the humiliating motleys of some chain restaurant: Hawaiian bowling shirt, red slacks, black visor, disintegrating sneakers. Her eyes looked as big and black as a horse’s. She was stooped but sure-footed; she climbed the stairs like someone who had ascended Machu Picchu every day of her life. In one hand she carried a brown bag that said “Large Brown Bag” on the side.

We weren’t ready for her, but in the reality-TV biz you learn to adjust fast. While the rest of us hid, Xavier slipped into character: a laconic, efficient sociopath. He dragged a chair in front of the apartment door and sat facing it, waiting for her to knock.

She didn’t. She turned the knob and walked in and didn’t close the door. Her huge eyes were shut into slits; her mouth was pursed; her hands were fists. She looked at Xavier with the combination of derision and fear that we Latinos usually reserve for the Antichrist.

Xavier, smiling like the Antichrist, said, “I think you have the wrong apartment, abuelita.”

She replied in Spanish, but I’ll translate: “This is the right place. One look at you, and I know this is the right place. You’re the assassin. You’re the man Tito wants to hire to kill Miguelito. Well, you won’t be killing anyone today. Tito is not going to hire you. I found out about his plan. I know everything. That’s how I knew to come here. And I have put a stop to it.” She dropped the bag on the floor. “Ten thousand dollars. Consider yourself paid. All I ask is that you leave Tito alone. He will never say anything to anyone about this, and neither will I, may God split me in two with a lightning bolt.”