Twelve by Twelve (22 page)

The customer left with his purchase, and Pam looked back at me and said conspiratorially, “You know I went into Ashboro, you know Ashboro? No, well, you can get there in twenty minutes on the back roads if you ever want to go somewhere more exciting than here, but anyway I went to Belk’s there and got her a prom dress that was $250 for $24.99. Don’t tell her.”

“I promise,” I said.

“And I got the shoes for $19.99. They look like Cinderella slippers on her.” She looked over at Darleen, her pride obvious. “You know a lot of folks think she’s my sister,” she said. “Soon she’ll be off to college. But I’ve still got her. At that prom, she’s going to be a real Ms. America …”

Pam stopped speaking; she was the only one in the Quick-N-Easy still talking. Someone turned the radio up. Something terrible was happening across the state line at a place called Virginia Tech.

THAT EVENING, LEAH CAME OVER
to the 12 × 12, still in her work clothes: a long brown suede skirt and a cream sweater. She got out of her car, her hair falling in a flop over one shoulder, and hugged me, whispering, “How horrible.” We went straight over to José’s, to see how he and Hector were taking it, talking as we walked about the “why” of the Virginia Tech slaying: earlier that day, over the course of several hours, a Virginia Tech student had shot and killed thirtytwo people, wounding scores more, before committing suicide. Part of it must have been plain mental illness, but that couldn’t have been everything. Does our culture sometimes value production over life and alienate people to the point where mental illnesses deepen and going postal becomes routine?

At José’s, an enormous fire blazed in the backyard. The thirteen-year-old Hector, his back to us, was burning garbage. Though the fire burned just fine, Hector threw additional gasoline on it, sending the flames up so high that they singed the treetops and licked his hands and arms.

“Hector!” I called out.

He spun around, equally surprised and self-conscious. Had he been thinking of the kids killed a hundred miles away, across the border in Virginia?

“Quemando basura”
— “Burning garbage” — he finally said,
turning his back to us again. He put the gasoline can down. Leah and I stared into the flames. The fire dwarfed Hector’s small silhouette. No Name Creek rushed by reflecting the flames.

The fire made me think of America’s early pioneers, not Mexicans and Hondurans settling twenty-first-century North Carolina, but the European immigrants who arrived long before José and Hector. As they caravaned through the American heartland, they sometimes lit the prairie on fire to announce they’d found water. A poetic gesture, but also an overly extravagant one that captures something of America’s ethos, where ebullience over one beautiful thing leads to destruction of a greater one.

In the firelight I regarded the rest of José’s property. Not yet a year since he’d cut the red ribbon to his new house — the neighbors and Habitat for Humanity volunteers applauding — and the place was already beginning to suffer from neglect. The back doorknob lay rusting on the porch right where it had fallen off. Several screens were ripped and one window cracked. Bicycles lay rusting outside, and — though José’s prized carpentry shed was immaculate — his tool shed’s roof panels were starting to cave in. Perhaps his carpentry shed was immaculate only because he’d just finished it two months before. It stood sturdy, padlocked, but had not been treated.

“My dad’s inside,” Hector said into the fire, a single military plane zooming overhead. Graciela’s dog rounded the house, looked surprised to see us, and changed course, limping in a slow arc around the fire, and disappeared into the woods. Yellow and white-headed dandelions and other weeds made their way through the mess of a poorly mowed crabgrass lawn.

Inside, José told us, “I sent Hector to burn garbage so he wouldn’t see any more of the terrible news.” There was no place to sit on the messy sofa, so José busily moved aside a jacket, a newspaper, some component parts of furniture he was making. The TV was too loud. Leah’s face scrunched up a bit over the volume and the images of dead
bodies on the campus. Unenthusiastically, José bit into a fish stick. He offered to make us some, but we weren’t hungry and declined.

A reporter interviewed a Virginia Tech professor who’d hid in his office as the students were slain. The journalist asked the professor how the students would deal with all of this the next day, and the professor’s voice caught, as he held back tears.

“Got him,”
Leah whispered, and then: “Christ! This is what I hate about journalism. Everyone at the station was itching for that: someone whose voice would catch dramatically.”

Hector came in from the back, his arms soot covered, and slumped onto the couch. José scrambled for the remote to change channels. But Hector saw the bodies. He sighed and started playing video games on a laptop next to Leah as his dad flipped to the telenovela
La Fea Más Bella
.

To lighten the mood, José began talking in Spanish about the lives of the soap stars now on the screen: “That actor is from Mexico, but his parents are Dominican, and the other guy was
born
in Mexico but his parents are from Spain. The female actress, La Fea, her mom was a Mexican beauty queen far prettier than her daughter …”

Eventually I asked Hector in Spanish, “How are your grades?”

“Huh?” He was engrossed in his game, killing chickens with a shotgun and pitchfork.

I repeated the question in English. Still just a blank look. José shifted in his seat and was about to say something when I went on, “Do you get As, Bs, Cs?”

“Cs, Ds,” Hector said, looking back at the soap, frowning, and then back at his screen. “I need more chicken bones. You see” — he showed the screen to Leah — “I’ve got a record now, but I need more bones.”

I slept poorly that night and woke up just after sunrise thinking of Weimar, Germany. I hadn’t thought of it for a long time, but in the
summer I was nineteen, I spent several weeks digging through the former Buchenwald concentration camp garbage dump near Weimar.

It probably wasn’t the wisest choice for a sensitive teenager like me, but I signed up for an East-West peace exchange in which twenty Soviets, Americans, East Germans, and West Germans — it was the summer of 1990; the Berlin Wall had fallen, but the USSR was still a country — got together in the Buchenwald trash heap and dug for personal items to return to the victims’ families, almost fifty years after the Holocaust. If the families were not found, the items would go to a museum in Buchenwald to educate the youth of the newly uniting Germany about the dangers of fascism.

I unearthed prisoners’ spectacles, coins, cups, and belt buckles. Almost none of it could be linked to specific people, so it ended up in the museum, next to the human skin lampshades and light switches made out of mummified thumbs — items that Ilse Koch, the wife of the camp commandant, ordered to be made from gassed Jews. Next to the museum was the oven chamber, with people-sized ovens, where tens of thousands of prisoners were incinerated after being worked, flogged, or shot to death. At night, I collapsed, sometimes in tears, onto a cot in my bedroom: a former SS barracks.

When I got back to Brown to begin my sophomore year, I signed up for Professor Volker Berghahn’s Modern German History course, and I read everything I could on National Socialism. I thought that if I could understand Hitler, and the millions who willingly followed him, on an intellectual level, I might be able to fight similar evils in our world today. During a college recess on Long Island, I once asked my parents over dinner: Didn’t they see the parallels between our society and that of Nazi Germany? The Germans killed Jews, but we were killing the planet with acid rain and global warming. Then it was genocide; now it’s ecocide. Why were we collaborating?

Just five miles up the road from Buchenwald is the town of
Weimar, where, while the ovens burned tens of thousands, life went on as usual with weddings, church on Sundays, and kids going to school. How can we understand and explain such docility at the gateway to the Holocaust? Hitler’s internal policing explains part of it, but there was also a certain amount of denial — there are films of Weimar residents brought to Buchenwald right after the defeat of the Nazis. They were truly shocked and many fainted. After the Virginia Tech slayings, down by No Name Creek, I smelled the light stench of the chicken factories: Was there a similar floating stench from the Buchenwald ovens? Like Weimar’s citizenry during World War Two, we twenty-first-century Americans don’t want to know exactly what kind of animal torture takes place in the factories, nor how undocumented Mexican labor is being exploited, nor, in a larger sense, what kind of effect our overconsuming lifestyles have on the planet.

A big orange sunrise burned right into a No Name Creek that blazed more strongly than I’d ever seen. Down deep, rich lacquer and satin. These deeper lights interacted with surface textures, dimpled, shingled, wavy, calm, and streaky. I looked away from the glare, back toward the 12 × 12 up the hill. The previous day — the day of the Virginia Tech massacre — 171 people died in bombings in Iraq, and in the ten previous days thirty-two Americans had been killed — the same number killed at Virginia Tech. With all this violence at home and abroad, is it any wonder our kids lose themselves in chicken-slaying video games, cheeze, and dragons, and that the number of emotionally disturbed children in America has tripled since the early 1990s? At what point does the blight become too deep?

EACH DAY, AS I WALKED THE TRACKS
or the creek’s edge, I’d hear my father’s words from his hospital bed,
You’re a man without a country
. The words rang truer every day.

Paul Jr. stopped by the 12 × 12 two days after the Virginia Tech massacre. As we sipped some of Jackie’s rosebud tea outside, we talked about it for a while and then lapsed into silence, staring out at the ever-taller winter wheat and the thickening forest.

Finally Paul said, “We’re at that age where we have to ask ourselves: Am I going to start a family, or remain a bachelor?”

I shifted uncomfortably in my chair. No Name Creek sounded especially loud that morning, flush with the previous day’s showers; it flowed accusingly over its stones.

“I’m not sure I want a family,” Paul continued. “I’m thirty seven. I feel like not having kids is a way of fighting.”

“Fighting what?”

Paul went into a head-tilted, toe-tapping, thinking smile and finally said, “Fighting against … Help me out here,
amigo
.”

I only vaguely glimpsed what Paul was driving at. Then he lit up and said, “It’s when they really get you!”

“They?”

“The advertisers, the marketers, the culture. They kinda-sorta have you when it is the stuff
you
have to have. But they’ve got you by the balls when it’s the stuff your vulnerable
kids
just have to have.”

He squinted toward the woods, as if listening to the creek, and continued: “I’ve got a friend, about forty, who’s got two kids. He says to me, ‘Paul, if you don’t have kids, you’re not in the game.’ Not in the game?
What
game? You go from comparing jobs and salaries to comparing what school your kids got into.”

He talked about how having kids in any society, anywhere in the world, is a way of saying that society is good. Or at least good enough. Worth perpetuating. He wasn’t sure whether he felt ours was.

“But what about you?” he finally said. “Are you going to get married, have kids? What about Leah?”

I looked away from Paul and at the 12 × 12. It stood there staring at me, silently, simply. A fixed point in a swirling universe.

So I told Paul that I had a two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Amaya.

He looked a little startled. After a moment, he shifted position in his chair and said with a kind expression: “Talk to me, my friend. We’ve got time.”

I hesitated. My daughter was in Bolivia, with her mom, and this was the longest I’d been away from her. I thought about her every day, saw her expressions in Allison Thompson’s face, and kissed her photo each night before going to bed. I didn’t like to talk about it. I kept my love for her close to my chest because talking about her was like reopening a wound. Just as I had been repressing my anger toward the three gangs that had attacked me, I’d been repressing a confusion of feelings about my fatherhood. Beyond the wound of physical separation was a sense of failure: I hadn’t lived up to the
ideal my Catholic parents and I had of what a father, a family should look like.

Deeper still, the stakes of a flattening world had gone up exponentially since her birth. What had before been my life’s work was now a question of what kind of world my daughter would inhabit, a world whose future appeared bleaker by the day.

The wind whistled a little in the trees; No Name Creek lowered its voice. I started talking.

MY DAUGHTER,
Amaya Powers Cortez, emerged from her mom’s womb in Bolivia. Amaya (“beloved first daughter” in Quechua and “spirit” in Aymara) took her first breath in a hospital surrounded by palm trees whipping and swaying furiously in an angry
sur
that had blown up from Antarctica, slicing a chill through the tropical heat. One of the four doctors attending my daughter’s birth handed the newborn to her mom, Ingrid, who then passed her to me. I felt the purest love imaginable stir inside, things I had absolutely never felt before.

But I wasn’t to dally. In Bolivia the baby belongs not only to Mommy and Daddy but to a web of extended family. I passed Amaya to Mama Martha, her maternal grandmother, who passed her to Papa Mike. Then she was passed to Tio Eduardo, Tia Alison, and Tia Melissa. Each person kissing her pure white forehead, her red hair, looking into her gray-green eyes — she was a carbon copy of me, looking nothing like any of them, but nobody minded a bit. She was part of
la familia
. We then ate quail eggs and drank champagne, pouring the first few drops onto the floor as a gift to Pachamama, Mother Earth.

My own parents became “Mama Anna” and “Pop Bill,” and despite the initial shock to their values, they played those roles with genuine love and grace. So, essentially, my daughter was born with three mothers and three fathers, and that was just the beginning:
today, I can’t count the number of her Bolivian relatives, and of the many neighbors and friends who love her as much as any relative.