A gay story: The Heart is a Poor Judge Ch. 02 In one second, Miguel’s eyes bore into me like those of a shark, and in the next, they flit around at passersby, whom I cannot see, but only feel when they move close behind me. He is analyzing them, taking notes, and this behavior is constant for him. He knows them all by name, I am sure, and most of them, I am also sure, consider him as their personal friend. No one would be capable of truly returning this sentiment to so many, but he is very good at faking it. Because of this, I had always believed on some level that he would be okay, but even so, it was impossible during that first year not to cry at night from worry.
Back before all of that, when he was just twenty years old, Miguel rented a small sunlight-flooded apartment several blocks from the warehouse. Marco had arranged it all. Miguel insists that after everything, after wading neck-deep through what he refers to as a series of bullshit events, he liked where he had landed. Five nights per week in the warehouse, an occasional meeting out in the desert? It wasn’t an unpleasant life, nor was it particularly lonely.
Sometimes Miguel grows bored with me. I would never flatter myself that this isn’t the case. Yes, he’ll say, yes, of course that’s how it was. Obviously. Or he’ll tell me that I shouldn’t be asking, for example, about the weather that day. Embellish that shit. Make it rain, make it sunny and hot as hell-whatever tells the fucking story, right? I always insist that he please try to remember, and he just grins and rolls his eyes.
Today, I round the last corner, trailing my fingers along the thick white rubbery paint masking a cinderblock wall. He is already seated at the table. He lights up when he sees that I have arrived.
I sit down and say, “I heard you are speaking with your mother again. That’s great news.”
Miguel corrects me: “My mom is speaking with me again. I have always left that door open.”
I fold my hands on the table between us. “I’m sorry, that’s what I meant to say. Are you happy about it?”
“There’s a lot of shit left to work through. We might never resolve all of it. But yes, I am happy.”
—
Eddie’s promotion to president of the camp had been premature, a bizarre fluke that was hardly celebrated by anyone due to the circumstances—least of all by Eddie. Indeed, it was likely that each worker involved with the Delta Encampment had been quietly affected, each in his own way. As for Miguel, he had cried unexpectedly one night after receiving a delivery, couched alone in his tiny office at the back of the warehouse, behind the stacks, one week after the fact.
The death of Marco (Big Boss) brought about many changes, not insignificant among them being that Eddie (Boss Man) no longer had time to do the runs himself. Whatever was thought of Whitey and Sid and Dan and the others, none had been deemed appropriate as a replacement driver. It was around that time, Miguel remembered, that the kid started coming around, accompanying Eddie as a runner-in-training. Though it would be a long time before their walls came down, Miguel remembered Gabe’s entrance as a curiously bright spot in a dark time. His face was friendly and comforting, and he was even younger than Miguel himself, which had been a surprise. Something extra had drawn Miguel’s interest, though. There was something familiar about this kid’s presence. At the time, Miguel could not have imagined what it was.
As for that first night, though: What day had it been—a Monday? Almost three weeks ago. Why did that specific night, more than a year after they met, feel like the first of all nights? Probably because, at Eddie’s suggestion, Miguel had broken his long silence. He almost had to laugh now at how pointless it all had been. He liked to think that all that time spent with his mouth shut had made him seem mysterious, but other than that, he couldn’t see any real benefit. It had simply been Big Boss’s way of doing things. Keep the chit-chat to an absolute minimum, he had told him. Say hello, then get to work. No exceptions. It had always felt extreme to Miguel, but he had too much respect for the man to have ever questioned his methods.
What he remembered most vividly was discovering just how seriously the Gabe took it all, reacting to basic conversation, even small-talk as if it were risky behavior. It was clear right away that Eddie hadn’t warned the poor kid. But what the fuck was he so worried about? Their work wasn’t exactly complicated. There was even room for errors here and there. Maybe Gabe’s duties could have been viewed as more hazardous than Miguel’s, but that was up for debate. His route was sanitized; neither of them dealt with any of the risks met by their superiors, and it was likely they never would—at least Miguel was content (and probably bound) to stay where he was. Did this kid have some grand ladder-climbing scheme? It wasn’t like Eddie was going anywhere, not for a long time.
On the second night, Miguel had once again fished Gabe from the car; on the third, Gabe had gotten out on his own, mumbling something about needing to stretch his legs. His face was attractive—there was no question of that, and he had some vague athleticism about him. But he was also very slim, with a small build, which did not normally appeal to Miguel. (Not that it mattered anyway, as it was unlikely Gabe was the sort who would return his interest.)
Also on that third night, he had seen Gabe smile for the first time. There had been a couple of forced expressions before that point, but they weren’t the same: This was a beautiful, broad kind of thing that vanished immediately and would not return for some time. Miguel could tell that Gabe carried real anguish with him. Something in the kid’s eyes told Miguel he had been through his share of tragedy. But then, that smile, breaking through it all like the sun through a storm.
On the fourth night, after performing hundreds of runs without fail, Gabe was gone. It had instead been Eddie and his brand-new Lincoln Navigator, black as death, rolling up through the cloudless night. Eddie, who had not made a single delivery in over a year. In fact, Miguel had become so accustomed to Gabe’s appearances in the squat, dusty red sedan with the pop-up headlights that, at first, an anxious pang leapt through him. But then he recognized the car. Of course it was Eddie—who the fuck else would it be?
He remembered it like this: Eddie waited, looking solemn behind the wheel, as Miguel raised the garage door a little higher than usual. Once he had backed in and Miguel had finished securing the place, Eddie got out and they met behind the car. Eddie’s presence was an overriding one in a number of ways, and Miguel remembered standing back, feeling odd and on edge as his duties were executed for him. The tailgate rose with a quick hiss of the support struts.
“Bad news. It’s all class-A,” Eddie muttered. “Do you want help?”
Miguel had assumed Eddie would explain the situation without being prompted, but then again, it was Eddie. So Miguel finally asked: “Where’s Gabe?”
“Gabe’s mom killed herself, so I am making the delivery in his place.”
What the fuck? Leave it to Eddie to just say it outright like that. Just lay down the words like they were nothing. Miguel’s mind suddenly buzzed, a million questions surfacing at once. He pulled himself together, pretending to assess the load. “I’m sorry to hear that. No, I don’t need help.”
Eddie, acting strange and distraught, seemed relieved to wait beside the car.
Class-A meant top-shelf snow dox, which was miserably heavy, but Miguel hardly noticed as he lifted the packages one by one and organized them on fresh pallets. He wondered how long it would take for Gabe to return to his runs. Would he ever come back?
“You have some exposed product on the back wall. I can see a little bit under the tarp. Do your best to keep it all covered.”
Miguel looked up and realized, alarmed, that Eddie was crying. His cheeks were wet and glistening in the fluorescent lights. His massive frame had slumped entirely against the side of the car. “Okay,” Miguel said, looking away in horror. “I’ll take care of it.” It wasn’t until he had nearly finished emptying the cargo from the SUV, sweating, rushing around, that he worked up nerve to ask. “Eddie, is everything okay?”
Eddie no longer wept, but he paused so long before answering that Miguel suspected he wasn’t going to. Finally he said, in his low, flat voice, “Yes, everything is fine.”
“Did you know her?”
Eddie looked down at the floor. “Yes, I knew her.”
By the next night, Eddie had recovered somewhat. He also brought some good news with him. “Gabe will be back in a couple of weeks.”
—
Word of his family’s return to America started as rumor in Miguel’s home, not long before he turned thirteen. Rosa, the younger of his two older sisters, told him he should start saying goodbye to all his friends. She spoke in a vapid tone, twirling her wavy brown hair around her finger like the whole thing meant nothing to her. Rosa’s friendships came and went with the sun and the moon.
Miguel pressed up against his mother’s hip later that afternoon as she washed dishes in the kitchen. He could scarcely more than whisper the words to her. “Are we really going back to America?”
Apparently startled by his inquiry, she demanded where he got such a strange idea from. He told her from Rosa. His mother scowled and said it was a lie.
Miguel had assumed as much, since Rosa was always telling lies. But as he left the kitchen, his mother called after him. “Nothing like that is ever final until your father says it is.”
Miguel stood still in the hot dining room. By this age, he was familiar with his mother’s tendency to contradict herself. Could it be that Rosa was right?
He heard whispers in the coming days, at school and in seminary classes, straight from the mouths of his peers. Miguel’s father, their respected and beloved Bishop, planned to relocate back to the city of his birth. It was the city of Miguel’s birth, too, but that meant little to him. The ward had been his home for almost as long as he could remember. Most of the people of this molecularly-bonded community, occupying their tiny corner of San Justo (itself just a belt loop through which Greater Buenos Aires wound), were like extended family. And Sebastian, his best friend in the world, the only child of his father’s favorite counselor and second-in-command, had been like a brother.
At least, until Sebastian had begun to go through those mystifying, fascinating changes. A sudden, deep voice crackled beneath the fleshy peak of a fresh Adam’s apple. Hairs grew from his chin and under his arms. And as for the jet black hair of his head? A small white patch had suddenly appeared from nowhere, just above his left ear. It stayed put there, a permanent fixture, like the delayed deployment of a birthmark. Miguel’s mother remarked one night that she had never seen anything like it in her whole life—and she didn’t trust it, not one bit.
At the same breakneck pace of his bodily revolution, Sebastian began spouting ideas about the world that Miguel struggled to keep pace with. The boy stood one day in seminary during a lesson about marriage, the precious sacrament, the unification of man and woman. He asked: “What if the person a man wants to marry is also a man? Or what if a woman wants to marry a woman?” The teacher’s eyes grew wide with alarm, and then she continued on as if he had said nothing.
It wasn’t that these recent changes in Sebastian had pushed Miguel away. The two continued to accompany one another everywhere, still sat together at night in the mouth of Miguel’s deep bedroom windowsill, talking endlessly. The truth was, Sebastian seemed like less of a brother to him now because Sebastian had developed a special pull, one that had caught Miguel at the waist and refused to let go. It coerced him to spend more time than ever with his best friend, to sit closer when they were together, to lean in slightly every time the boy smiled. He grew strangely curious to see parts of Sebastian that were normally hidden, taking advantage of rare moments in the school showers or in the changing rooms beside the public pool, blue and green tiles slick beneath their bare feet. His excitement at these opportunities manifested physically—a problem that became increasingly difficult to hide over time. After all, Miguel had begun going through changes of his own.
But one day, it was Miguel who caught Sebastian looking. The boy had paused conspicuously as he prepared to don his short pair of swim trunks.
“Yours is bigger than it used to be,” Sebastian pointed out, “and you also have hair now.” He spoke shamelessly, as if his observations were somehow mundane.
“Yes,” said Miguel, “I know.” He stole a quick glance at Sebastian before tearing his eyes away.
“It’s okay. You can look. It doesn’t bother me.”
Both boys became erect.
As if his shame had finally caught up with him, Sebastian stepped back suddenly, stretching the faded blue nylon over himself. Miguel felt a jarring mix of relief and disappointment as he snugged his own swimsuit up around his waist.
One month after his mother’s rebuttal, Miguel’s father officially announced their return to the Las Sombras, the great American city.
Lucia, the oldest, folded her hands in her lap and said she was not going.
The bishop threw his head back and laughed at her threat. “You will go.”
But that night, she sat at the end of Miguel’s bed, reminding him in a harsh whisper that she would be eighteen by the time they moved, at which point no one could force her. Lucia did not live or speak frivolously the way Rosa did, so Miguel believed her. She demanded that he say nothing about it to their parents, and he agreed, waiting to cry until she left for her own room. His sobs came out low and rough as his voice reluctantly adhered to its new, gravelly depth.
It rained overnight. Miguel stepped alone among the quickly evaporating puddles until he reached the blue bars of the compact supermercado, owned and run by Sebastian’s father the counselor, and above which they both lived. Sebastian hastily joined him down on the street and the boys set off together among the gray concrete houses and scraggly jacaranda trees, bound for school. When Miguel told Sebastian that the move was official, the boy stayed quiet at first.
He finally asked, “How much longer do we have?”
“It will happen after my birthday, so about two months.”
Acres of silence lay between them.
Sebastian cleared his throat as they neared the school grounds. “It will be very difficult to say goodbye. I don’t want to think about it now.”
The intervening month held the date of the Bishop’s annual barbecue, hosted each year in Miguel’s family’s cozy backyard, and the highlight of the year for many members of the ward. Miguel suspected that for some, the gathering warranted far more excitement than the piously structured Christmas party and Easter pageant—though none would ever admit to it. People eagerly planned and coordinated dishes ahead of time, and those who did not cook volunteered to string up lights or supply folding chairs, or contributed whatever else they could scrape together.
When the day finally arrived, Sebastian stayed late at school. Miguel had been instructed to assist Sebastian’s father at the supermercado, as the counselor would be donating four fresh birds, among other items, and still had to carry out his regular shop duties.
When Miguel stepped inside he was met with the usual rush of children half his height. They swarmed the place at this hour, each day of their little lives, sweaty fists stuffed with small coins which they shelled out in return for pieces of candy.
“You can get these children out of my store,” the counselor replied when Miguel asked what he could do to help. “I need peace today.” But then the man rose up out of a giant box of produce. “I have an idea. There are only three birds in the refrigerator. Let’s put the kids to work.”
Miguel followed the counselor down the back hallway of the supermercado, both of them trailed by the noisy herd of children. They stepped out into the rocky yard. Miguel watched the counselor’s dark, stoic form cross over to a small coop and, after some rustling, sling a white hen into the air with both legs caught in his fist. The hen flapped its wings like mad but the counselor was unmoved, calmly locating a length of synthetic orange twine, cinching one end around both its stick legs. He tied the other end around the dipping branch of a jacaranda tree that stood alone in the middle of the yard.
Suspended a few feet above the earth by the twine, the chicken continued a frantic clucking and beating of its wings. The counselor passed back across the yard and told the children to pluck out all its feathers. He knelt down, swiveling his head among their eager faces. “Don’t you dare come bother me until every last feather is gone from this chicken, understand?”
The counselor shot Miguel an empty smile before stepping inside. “Keep an eye on them, will you? Make sure they don’t get any ideas.”
Miguel watched in horror as the children closed in on the bird. He turned away involuntarily as they began pulling the first feathers, and the bird started squawking in an odd way. A surreal feeling washed over him. Everything had happened so quickly…the counselor’s actions had been so deft, so routine, that it all had seemed natural at first. But Miguel’s emotions quickly caught up with him as the torture went on over his shoulder. It wasn’t right—it just couldn’t be—for any living thing to spend so much time in pointless agony. And yet, not only had the counselor allowed it, he had staged the whole thing. Had ordained it.
When Miguel finally turned back, the chicken hung eerily still and silent, breathing madly. Vast bald patches now spanned its body, speckled in blood, slowly rotating, golden eyes wide with fear. It knew death was near. One of the children turned back to face Miguel with a crazed look, a white feather stuck to her dirty brown cheek.
Sebastian arrived suddenly, shouldering past Miguel in the doorway. He took in the scene for an instant before whipping around. “You’re just going to stand here and watch?”
“Your father said it was okay,” Miguel stammered.
Sebastian grabbed up a large pair of pruning shears propped against the outer wall of the supermercado. “My father doesn’t always know what is right.”
For a second, Miguel thought Sebastian was going to cut the chicken down. But instead he snugged the pitted blades around the bird’s neck and squeezed. Its head dislodged immediately and blood streamed so fast and thick from the fresh opening that it splashed onto the legs of the closely gathered children.
Sebastian washed a smear of red from the shears with a garden hose and leaned them back against the wall. Before reentering the supermercado he turned to Miguel and said, “We must give all God’s creatures their dignity, especially in death.”
Miguel felt the sudden urge to pull the boy close, to touch his hair, to run his fingers over that stunning, small white patch of it, but Sebastian went quickly inside.
Miguel followed. He expected Sebastian to return to helping his father (after, perhaps, protesting the handling of the chicken), but instead the boy trudged up to his home above the shop, the wooden staircase squawking noisily underfoot.
“I don’t understand my father,” he lamented as they passed through the kitchen and into his small, messy bedroom. “I don’t agree with him.”
Miguel sat beside him on the bed. “It was a mistake to let them pluck a live chicken.”
“You think so, too?”
“Of course I do.”
Sebastian stared at the floor. “I don’t see things the way other people do. Inside my head, they are wrong about so much. The stuff they teach us…it’s all wrong.”
Miguel wanted to reach out then. He wanted to feel the smooth skin of Sebastian’s neck with the tips of his fingers, to press his ear against the boy’s bare chest and keep it there. He wanted to see his friend again with no clothes…and then?
But he needed to be sure. He looked over. “Remember that question you asked in seminary? About men marrying men?”
“Yes.”
“Why did you ask about that?”
“Because I don’t want to be with women,” Sebastian replied, unfazed. “I want to be with men.”
So, it was that simple. One could just state it. But if Miguel were to repeat the words back to his best friend, would they be true? Was it men whom Miguel wanted to be with, or was it just Sebastian?
Never mind that. What difference did it make? After all, he didn’t have to say the words to get what he wanted. He looked up into Sebastian’s dark eyes, swallowed, smiled a little.
Sebastian cleared his throat. In a timid voice that was not his own he said, “We don’t have a lot of time.”
It didn’t matter whether Sebastian referred to his father, who would soon come pounding up the stairs looking for him, or to the boys’ inevitable parting, now just a month away. The underlying message was clear enough: permission. Permission to act, to touch. Miguel moved into the small space that had separated them and Sebastian met him there, surrounding him with his sweaty limbs, wrestling him onto his back. When Sebastian kissed him, Miguel kissed back with a sort of pent-up ferocity—one whose existence he had not known until that moment. He had never kissed anyone romantically before. He hardly knew what it meant to do so, had always planned to postpone the moment for as many years as possible. But now, it felt like the most natural thing in the world, like putting on a favorite old shirt. Instantly he was hungry for more, ravenous, taking as much as he could get, as if the kiss were oxygen and he had just resurfaced from the turquoise depths of the local pool.
Sebastian began to move his waist against Miguel’s. Miguel liked the feeling and began moving in the same way. That prodigious sensation, which he had experienced for the first time only one year earlier, mounted inside him faster than it ever had before. Alarmed, he realized he would finish in his jeans. He couldn’t stop it. He tried to warn Sebastian, who gave him a helpless look and whispered, “Me, too.”
Once it was over, the two boys lay side by side, sweating, breathing, recovering—and not a second too soon. The stairwell sounded its noisy warning as the counselor stomped up to fetch his son.
Late in the evening, the boys found a private moment to sneak away, up to Miguel’s attic bedroom. Though it was unthinkable during the havoc of the years that followed, Miguel would one day smile at the memory of those few wily minutes and shed a happy tear or two: A rusting, three-bladed ceiling fan wobbled above the twin bed where they sat. Sky-blue ceiling dove in accordance with the sloped roof to meet stunted bookshelves built into the walls. His model planes (fifteen in total) hung from wool string at various altitudes all around the room, endlessly twirling, un-twirling.
“I think about you,” said Sebastian. “You know, when we’re not together.”
“I think about you, too.”
“I don’t know how long I’ll keep thinking about you…after you ago away.”
Miguel hid his face. He would not allow Sebastian to see him cry.
“I feel like I’m going crazy,” said Sebastian. He stood suddenly. “I need to do something. We need to do something.” He looked all around Miguel’s room, as if searching for an idea among the shadowy bookshelves.
“What do you mean?”
“We need to show them,” the boy asserted. “They need to see us.”
Miguel still lay on the bed. He gazed up at his best friend, feeling nothing but intense adoration and attraction. He no longer lagged behind, was no longer trying in desperation to understand. Instead, he ran alongside his companion now, their arms linked. He was fully complicit, so he stood, too. For a moment he forgot everything else. All plausible outcomes to their next action, no matter how horrific, backed away into a fog until they were completely obscured.
All fear left him. “How should we do it?”
Sebastian’s eyes lit up. “We’ll go to that window. We’ll sit at the edge, just like always, and we’ll show them how much we care for each other.”
The pain of knowing they would soon say goodbye had slowly built inside Miguel since he first found out. He needed an outlet now, and this was it. He saw the moment for what it was. He grabbed Sebastian’s hand and towed him to the window, urged him to climb out and scoot toward its edge.
“Up here!” Was it Sebastian or Miguel who shouted down to the innocent families on the lawn? By that point, it didn’t matter. They embraced there in one another’s gangly limbs, sweaty from the hot bedroom, lips parting to make way for tongues.
The reaction was quick and audible. Miguel remembered it in a strange way: Every time the local rollercoaster called Aconcagua first ka-thunked into motion, its centipede of anxious riders gasped and murmured in the exact same manner as the guests below. For one full second, Miguel’s mouth smiled against Sebastian’s at the thrill of it all. Then the shouts, guttural, and mostly from the men in attendance, began shrieking up like angry warplanes from the yard. The two boys fell away from each other, backs against opposing frames of the window. Miguel knew it then: Something was horribly wrong.
The sounds of shoed feet (never allowed in the house) came thundering up from the first floor stairwell, then the second. It was his father, and the counselor close behind him, the soles of their boots threatening to punch through each wooden step as they rose up through the house.
Miguel’s memory of what happened next would be forever cast in a haze. Perhaps the door had been locked, he later reasoned, because the two men had busted clear through its stop in a dramatic bid to reach them. The men were aggressive, the counselor shoving his son with such force toward the doorway that the boy tripped over a piece of splintered wood and nearly tumbled into the stairwell. The bishop pressed his own son, massive hands acting as vices against Miguel’s small chest, into the back wall. A model plane fell to the floor. Did the two boys’ eyes meet in a final, mournful flash before they were parted? No. Miguel remembered nothing of Sebastian’s face in that moment, but heard a handful of young, exasperated pleas descend toward the main floor.
All further action between Miguel and Sebastian was to be completely severed. A clean cut. The adult members of the ward vowed to help, in any way they could, keep the two boys’ lives separate. Seminary leaders placed them in different classes; neighbors kept an eye on them as they came and went from their homes. Their shared route to school was put under clandestine patrol to ensure they never walked together.
The collaboration was so exhaustive, so effective that the boys hardly tried to sidestep it. Miguel could not guess how his friend dealt with the shock of such an abrupt end. As for himself, he did all he could to avoid eye contact when their paths inevitably crossed. He tried to pretend the boy who he had once known was not there at all. His peers maintained an eerie friendliness, to the extent that he was certain their parents had demanded it, likely threatening harsh punishment should they act otherwise. He was, after all, still the Bishop’s son.
But Miguel could no longer ignore Sebastian when he appeared one night outside his bedroom window, just standing there in the yard far below, two days before the move. How could his friend have known he would still be awake well past midnight, would be stationed alone out on the windowsill they used to share? Sebastian waited faithfully for the full ten minutes it took Miguel to descend silently through his home.
They dove immediately behind the hedges lining the back fence and came to know each other all over again, panting in the cold night.
When it was over, Sebastian said, “I know your sister is planning to stay. I heard her talking about it.”
“I don’t know yet.”
“You should stay with her.”
“I’m not allowed.”
“You can run away, and then live with her once they’re gone.”
“My parents might leave without Lucia, but they will not leave without me.”
Miguel could tell the wheels were spinning out of control in Sebastian’s brain. “Lucia could convince them she will watch over you—”
“Lucia is grown,” interrupted Miguel. “She can do what she wants. It’s different. I’m—we’re not grown up, Sebastian. We have to wait for the things we want in life. Besides, I don’t think this is right. What we’re doing, it’s not a good thing. It’s immoral.”
The boy drew back from Miguel. “In the eyes of your father.”
“No, Sebastian, in the eyes of God.” I didn’t matter whether Miguel believed in those final words or not. He simply wasn’t going to stay in San Justo. He needed his old friend to understand, to leave him alone for good.
They were shivering now. June had ushered in a sudden cold season. Sebastian didn’t speak. He just looked at Miguel for what felt like a very long time. Then he stood slowly and walked through the open gate, out of the yard forever.
When remembering back on that night from a much older vantage, Miguel couldn’t help but be impressed with his younger self. Even by thirteen, he had grasped that his life could be very different one day, if he could just hold on long enough…because deep in the mists of the future lived a smiling adult self who knew unfathomable things, who understood the answers to questions that young Miguel hadn’t even begun to ask. Miguel believed in the promise that future held, and it guided his actions then, just as it would again, countless times in the years to come.
—
Monday, June 28th, 1999
Gabe was due back tonight. Miguel would believe it when he saw it. He moved quickly along an alley route from his apartment, where the fetid breath of a grease dumpster nearly consumed him as he passed. The kid was to be driving a different car now, a large Toyota sedan, brand new, the color of sand. Miguel had asked Eddie if there were any other distinguishing details, and Eddie told him that it was the kind of car that would run you over before you noticed it—exactly the car they should have been using all along.
Miguel was eager for things to return to normal. It wasn’t just the thought of seeing Gabe again; he also felt it would do Eddie some good to reassume his regular post back at camp. Eddie had been moody, a descriptor that Miguel was shocked could ever apply to the hulking Vietnamese man. Some nights he acted cheery, and stranger yet, talkative, helping Miguel move the packages while asking him evaluative questions about his personal life; others, he would sulk around his SUV, or wait impatiently in the driver’s seat, massaging his temple with his index finger. Miguel came to view this behavior as mostly volatile, especially around ten days in, at its peak: Eddie stood frowning in an open expanse of concrete, hands on his hips, and asked, “What the fuck are we doing here, exactly?”
When Miguel asked him to clarify, Eddie had gestured wildly in odd directions around the warehouse, saying, “This, this, just, all of this,” then told Miguel never mind, to forget about it.
None of it was particularly worrying. It was just that Eddie’s confidence truly did hold all of them together. All the guys, especially the encampment laborers, looked to Eddie for his stern reassurance and his conviction. Miguel wondered if he was simply catching Eddie at his worst. It would be just like Boss Man to hold it together at home with his family, and throughout his shifts in the desert, only to fall apart at the very end of it all, safe within the secured walls of the warehouse. Maybe there was even something about Miguel’s presence that put Eddie at ease. He flattered himself that it was probably true.
After a nervous smoke, propped against the concrete post at the edge of the garage door, Miguel watched a beige car approach down the lane and pad softly into the lot. The driver window dropped, and there was Gabe, looking unexpectedly friendly and eager. In the dim light, Miguel noticed coarse black stubble above his lip and under his chin. The kid was growing up.
He said the only thing that came to mind. “How’s the new car?”
Gabe seemed to fumble for a response. “It has an automatic transmission.”
Miguel went inside and raised the garage door while Gabe performed his usual three-point turn. Once Gabe had finished backing into the garage, Miguel was glad to see him stand up out of the car, no groundhog scared back in by its shadow. Miguel flipped on the lights. For the time being, Gabe remained partially barricaded between the door and the car. Miguel reached into the trunk and brought out the first of the packages. He took another glance at Gabe and said, “It’s a lot cleaner than the old one.”
“It won’t stay that way.” Gabe stepped out from the gaping mouth of the car door and closed it.
Miguel continued to appraise the sedan. “Damn. Doesn’t even look like it’s loaded up.”
The kid nodded.
“What happened to the Honda?”
“It’s my personal car now.” He paused. “It belonged to my father.”
Well, that was fucking strange. Anyway, come on, Miguel begged himself, bring up something other than the stupid car. Anything. He cleared his throat and said, “It got old having Eddie around all the time. Glad you’re back.”
“Eddie can be a little intense sometimes.”
“You’re telling me.” Package still in hand, Miguel lingered on the edge of it now: that un-talked-about event, the reason for Gabe’s absence. And somehow, Gabe seemed right there with him, preparing for the dive, so Miguel said, “Anyway, I heard about what happened. I’m so sorry.” Then he asked in Spanish, “Were you close with your mother?”
Gabe was thoughtful for a moment. “My mother and I had a complicated relationship.”
“Is your dad still around?”
Gabe’s hands fidgeted, fingers drumming against the roof of the car. “No, he is not.”
“Oh.”
The kid’s mom was gone, and yet you could hardly tell, looking at him. Normally attuned to subtle changes in other people’s behavior, Miguel could not detect even the slightest shift in Gabe’s. It seemed unnatural, inhuman, not to be different after the death of a parent, no matter their role or lack thereof, whether beloved or loathed.
He fetched a felt-tipped marked from a workbench along the wall, marked the package and brought it all the way to the back, where he dropped it in a canvas bin with some others.
—
Life in America posed so many novelties that Miguel could not properly mourn the loss of Sebastian. Instead it felt like a sadness once-removed: sadness at the frustration of being unable, in his distraction, to conjure tears—sadness because he knew he was supposed to feel it and couldn’t. After several months’ time had passed, Miguel’s head became filled with too many new experiences, and the memory of his best friend, of that entire place where he used to live, faded before it even occurred to him that he must grasp for it.
He had left one giant city for another. Both were vast and unknowable to a young person who had not yet reached the age to explore on his own. The borders of Miguel’s world were still defined by home, neighborhood and school. And yet even by these definitions, his world would soon grow immensely, because Samuel Odin No. 2 was the largest public middle school in the city. It housed a mass of kids more various in appearance and attitude than Miguel had ever encountered back home. Then there was the hapless (and strangely charming) veneer of the structure itself: A stench of burnt eraser permeated the halls, lined with firm green carpet that turned black as squid ink down the center; walls were a hodgepodge of quick fixes slapped over early-1960s construction. Miguel loved everything about it.
His old school had mostly served the children of the ward; few outsiders roamed its halls. But here, Miguel and his new friends from church formed a hopeless minority. Furthermore, Miguel and his peers were growing older and more insightful. Discussion of God (or which was the correct one to believe in, or whether there was really one at all) became a subdued but persistent dialogue, a lunchroom undercurrent, reaching the occasional zenith of sophistication one might expect of a group whose median age was thirteen.
Miguel no longer received discipline for his misstep back in San Justo. Surprisingly, his parents continued to acknowledge the kiss (emotionlessly referred to as The Thing That Happened) partway into October of that year. It would strike Miguel later as a balanced, cerebral approach: Continued punishment would surely perpetuate the enigma of The Thing That Happened—and so would pretending it hadn’t.
Miguel’s father never fell from grace during this period of casual dismissal. His mother slipped only once, when she and Miguel stood alone in the kitchen after dinner one evening. Or maybe it wasn’t a slip, as the blur of her new life began taking shape around her, as her wits were once again fully gathered. Miguel recalled her demeanor, dabbing her hands against a yellow dish towel, staring down at his maturing face (even though he had recently outgrown her), impatient but frighteningly collected. She was about to assume his knowledge of a word whose meaning had only recently distinguished itself from the slurry hurled between students.
“My love,” she begged, voice barely above a whisper and constricting at that final syllable, “please tell me you’re not really gay.”
He answered her quietly but with great conviction, “Of course I’m not.”
She must have believed him then, just as he believed himself, because any outward concern fell immediately into a years-long sleep. Perhaps she was distracted at the time by the pain of losing her oldest daughter. In the end, and with the law on her side, Lucia had not backed down. During their long flight to America, the empty airplane seat presented a tragic void that none of them wanted to be near. The Bishop had filled it with their coats, but it hadn’t helped much.
Miguel’s concern over his sexuality hung back in the shadows for a long time. Primarily he was Miguel, the good Christian. Miguel, man of the people. He would soon learn that, like his father, he was born to lead. Unimpeded by social anxiety except under the most extreme of circumstances, he formed friendships more quickly than he could keep up with them. He joined soccer, where he asserted himself as a mostly-valuable player. His presence put people at ease, made them feel listened-to. And so, when it came time for the associated student body to elect a president, he was encouraged to run.
He had worried at first that a faith-based campaign to lead a decidedly secular group of constituents would be ineffective. This was the case. So he immediately backed away from it and began a more general approach, every bit as honest, in which he told them all, I will figure out what it is you want, and I will spend every waking minute reaching for it. My goal is to get to know you, and then to serve your needs. Miguel met with both the varsity and junior-varsity football teams. He learned to play Magic: The Gathering during his lunch hour with the trench-coats who hung out in the storage hall. That deep gruffness to his voice, which he had once loathed for its gross intermittence, had now fully settled, and he laid it just as thickly upon the Young Men’s Chorus as he did the Young Women’s Soccer League. It wasn’t teenage dissent, but rather Miguel’s campaign principles lifting that first cigarette to his lips after class, as he came to know the grungy (and somewhat feared) kids who roamed the reaches of the schoolyard. Sure, they laughed at him as he choked and coughed his way through it, but with each new jab came another pat on the back. You’re alright, they said, you’re not fucking around.
It never felt like work to Miguel, maybe because the informal aspects of running were already part of his daily practice. People fascinated him, especially new people, and although he remained closest with his friends from church, their experiences were not varied enough to keep him interested. Call it a side effect of his social inclination, or call it the hard-earned fruits of his labor: He was ultimately elected and served an unprecedented two-term stint as official leader of the people. Here was Miguel: prominent politician, important church member, central midfielder and advanced-placement student. His life occurred in a hundred thousand flashes, explicitly clear in the moment, impossible to construe as the months tallied. Later on, he would reflect that it had been for the best, because there had been no time left over to think about himself.
At fifteen, Miguel entered high school, where it became clear that his coveted title would no longer come easily. In fact it would not come at all-not right away, because Miguel was a freshman. Item 9B of Miguel’s cherished, spiral-bound copy of 70th Avenue Public High School Student Council Code of Conduct barred freshmen from running for that highest of offices. This news, delivered courtesy of bold typeface on cheap printer stock, dealt a heavy blow.
The first student council meeting was held under a stained and sagging dropped ceiling at a vast round table: two guided reading tables shoved together, leaving a functionless, doughnut-channeling hole in the middle. As he sat down, Miguel noticed that the boy to his left bore photocopies of an annual schedule, soon to be passed around. It seemed his boy was in the know, so Miguel nudged him with his elbow, accused item 9B with his index finger and asked, “Why is this a rule?”
“It’s just the way things have always been done.” The boy adjusted his glasses, glanced around the table and began counting the copies before him.
Miguel scoffed. “That doesn’t make any sense at all.” He did not mean to sound rude, and the boy apparently hadn’t taken it that way, tossing Miguel a quick smile and a nod to indicate his sympathy.
Having presided over a previous student body was certainly a leg-up, but Miguel quickly learned, through a whirlwind of cross-table introductions, that he shared his distinction among at least three other students, also incoming freshmen from feeder schools.
The boy to his left remained mostly silent and fully seated during all the socializing, but after a few minutes, he stood, cleared his throat, and everyone became quiet. “Right, so, I’m Daniel Lin. I’m a junior, and I was Student Body Vice President last year. Most of you know that Nicholas, last year’s president, is preparing to start his first semester at Rutgers. He will be missed.” A few knowing glances were exchanged at this point. “Mr. Lewis had the flu, so I’ll be leading things today. Any last words before we get started?”
Someone directly across the table from him raised their hand. “Hi Daniel Lin, I’m Meghan Tuttle.” She spoke with the cavalier lilt of someone producing an inside joke—it was obvious they knew each other. “Will you be running for Student Body President this year?”
Miguel felt a warm hand on his shoulder as Daniel Lin leaned coolly to one side. “Of course.”
Elections were to be held in less than a month. Miguel knew that the only sensible course of action would be to get an in with Daniel Lin. After that first meeting, Miguel met him at the door and asked how he could maximize his involvement as a freshman, adding, “I can tell that freshmen mostly get kicked around here. Do they ever even hold office?”
There was that sideways smile again, full of charm, and suddenly Miguel understood how Daniel had secured the title of VP as just a sophomore. “Not usually, no.”
“But we’re technically allowed to run, right? For everything except president?”
They were now alone in the room. Daniel just stood there smiling for a moment, hands in his pockets. “If you want to get more involved, meet me here a day before next week’s meeting. Same time. We’ll chat about my campaign.”
In the days that followed, Miguel could hardly contain his anticipation. He attended church services and activities on Sunday and Wednesday, where his interest was feigned—well enough, he hoped, that his parents wouldn’t notice as he pondered over the various roles he might be asked to play. There was, of course, only one role that would satisfy Miguel, and he felt he stood a good chance of convincing Daniel.
70th High’s bounds were theoretically finite, and the two boys’ eyes met exactly twice between classes that week. Miguel shuddered that they would exchange only quick smiles in these moments—clearly time better spent formulating an unbeatable stratagem. When the moment finally came, after the two got settled under the droopy ceiling, Daniel was candid: “I am in a good position to take top office this year, and I’m not going to stop until I get it. How would you like to help?”
“I would like to be your running mate.”
Daniel burst into laughter. “Sorry, that spot is filled.”
“By who?”
“Meghan Tuttle. We agreed on it a long time ago.” He paused. “Wait…did you actually think VP was on the table?”
Miguel hid both his outrage and his shame. “No, not really. Listen, I will do whatever it takes. If you want to be president, I’ll focus on it every waking minute. I’ve made myself look good before, and I can certainly make you look good now. I assume you’re taking the mass-appeal route, right? I’ll make it happen.” He thought quickly. “I brought a notebook with me. Let’s write down the details of your platform, then come up with some ways to spin it for different crowds. I’ll start talking to people right away.”
They worked for over two hours, bleeding ink into many pages of Miguel’s notebook, outlining speech possibilities, mapping out the myriad cliques, their associated sentiments, and coaxing the often blurry lines which divided them into focus. When it finally came time to leave, Daniel turned to him and said, “This is so much fun, isn’t it?”
Miguel looked him dead in the eyes. “There’s nothing I care about more than this.”
Daniel’s brown eyes stayed trained on him for an extra second. The two stood and began packing up. “Hey, listen,” he said, clearing his throat. “I’ll let you know if anything changes, okay?”
It wasn’t clear to Miguel what this meant—until things did change. Daniel appeared out of nowhere as Miguel exited biology the next morning. “What do you think of Lin-Gonzalez? Has a nice ring to it, right?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Tuttle wants top office, so she’s running her own campaign. I told her no hard feelings. She’ll be more of a challenge than Layton. Keep us on our toes.”
Miguel couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
“I’d rather go with someone I’ve known longer,” Daniel continued. “I’m taking a risk with you.”
“That’s not true,” said Miguel. “I know you think you are, but you’re wrong. I am not a risk.”
And so it became Tuttle-Cushman, Layton-Park and Lin-Gonzalez, all three campaign teams clawing for the fattest slice of approval from the rest of the school. It wasn’t a fair fight. Greg and Kyung-soo were both seniors who were naturally relatable, but they were also lazy. It was Meghan and her running mate who gave Miguel and Daniel a run for their money, but by the eleventh hour, they too had fallen fatally behind. On the night before the school-wide vote, the two boys met up in Daniel’s room, as had become their custom, and realized suddenly that there was nothing left to do.
“Well then. I guess I should be at church.”
Daniel eyed him. “Have your parents been giving you grief?”
“No, but only because I’ve rarely missed.”
“It’s weird to have church on a Wednesday, isn’t it?”
Miguel laughed. “Maybe to you. You don’t go to church at all.”
Daniel smirked, pushing his glasses up the steep bridge of his nose. “I don’t think I would feel welcome in church. Especially in Mormon church.”
Miguel shrugged. “You might be surprised—”
“I don’t think so,” Daniel said. His voice went cold. “There’s something you should know about me. It’s this thing that I’ve struggled with. A secret I’ll have to keep forever. I’ve only told Meghan. No one else. I’m sorry to spring this on you. It’s just that I want you to have one more chance to…I don’t know. After tomorrow, you’re stuck with me.” Daniel Lin, whom Miguel had only ever known as all-business-at-all-times, now bore his entire soul. “Look, if you know what I’m talking about, please just say so.”
“I know what you’re talking about.” Let there be no doubt: Miguel had been consciously hiding himself for some time. He had long known the moment would come for him to emerge, if just a little bit, to someone, somewhere. It could not have occurred before now, and now, looking into Daniel’s dark eyes, he knew it could not wait a second longer. “When you’re the bishop’s son,” he said, “you are obligated to feel welcome in church, or at least pretend that you do, even if you don’t.” He thought for a minute. “Everyone at church acts like it’s the most welcoming place on earth, but it’s not,” he said, then added, “not for people like you and me.”
Miguel remembered the seconds that followed down to each shift in Daniel’s gaze, back and forth from Miguel’s right eye to his left, the lifting of hand to face in a slow arc, an eternity, as Daniel pushed up his glasses once more. Daniel, who was all of a sudden undeniably, irresistibly handsome (but how could Miguel not have noticed this before?), dropped his scrutiny to the crotch of Miguel’s pants. Daniel’s fingers landed on Miguel’s thigh, glided along the denim seam, then stopped an inch short of their mark. Nothing happened. Neither boy summoned the courage to move forward. It was better that way. Daniel’s bedroom was not secure and his doting mother often poked her head in; should they ever be caught, the consequences would be unthinkable.
After the election, the invincible duo was officially awarded the titles they knew had been coming. A party was held in the evening, spilling out of the dingy student council room and halfway down the hall. When it was over, they left together and took the concrete steps down to the 70th Street Station platform. Daniel’s parents were gone, visiting family in Shanghai. Miguel marveled at the unrestricted life of his friend, permitted to live as king, adult at seventeen, completely on his own in a 19th-floor luxury condo. That night would allow Miguel the smallest taste of such a life, and a much larger taste of Daniel, who, after next to no convincing, entered Miguel fully, deeply, between the gray jersey-knit sheets of his twin bed.
Years later, Miguel would decide that he had reacted poorly (to be specific: non-strategically) to his parents’ concern. It escalated steadily over the next eighteen months, by which time general complaints were submitted on the regular, on behalf of both parties.
It was lucky that Daniel’s parents travelled frequently, but they still spent more time at home than away, leaving the boys’ private moments in short supply. Sometimes, when the stakes were too high, Miguel and Daniel suspended their intimacy for as long as a few weeks. Neither resented these times of rest all that much. They were extremely protective of their public lives, and both kept frantic, distracting schedules. Miguel carried on with soccer, where he remained a middling but cheerful player, and Daniel showed up to the most important games, proudly airing his support for his prized second-in-command. That was all it needed to mean to anyone else. At least for Miguel, bolting across the field, eyes meeting for an instant with those of his clean-cut companion in the stands, an sense of deep intimacy persisted even when it could not be tangibly expressed.
One evening, as Christmas drew near, Miguel’s father barged into his room and announced, “You don’t have enough friends who are part of the faith.”
“That’s because most of my friends are in student council.”
“You have friends of all kinds,” he corrected. “And I’m okay with that. It’s what you’re good at—good enough to be trying harder with your friends from church. You’re a natural leader, Miguel, and I know exactly where you get that from. There are plenty of ways to put your leadership skills to work at church. Ways that are more worthy…and more righteous.”
“The student body is a completely worthy place to put my leadership skills. At least as worthy as the church.”
“See, right there. That’s the problem. First, it’s all of your absences from church events because of student council. And now, I can hear it in the way you’re speaking. You covet your interest in politics more than you covet your relationship with God.”
Miguel shrugged.
“Miguel,” he demanded, “please tell me I am wrong.”
“Fine, you’re wrong. Whatever you want to hear.”
Flames danced behind the bishop’s corneas. Miguel braced himself in anticipation of his father’s strike, clean across the face and straight back to his childhood, but it never came. Instead arrived his solemn dictation: “This is not a game, Miguel. Your utter servitude to Heavenly Father is not a game. Misconstrue it and you will not be saved.”
“Okay,” said Miguel. “I’m sorry. I will try harder.”
Without another word, his father left the room.
He did try harder, but by that time, no matter how many smiling faces met him at church, the message was loud and clear to Miguel: You are rejected. This clarity arose in part out of the church’s extraordinary obsession with marriage. Everyone talked about it. One of the most beautiful contracts ever to be handed down was constantly under threat, strangled at the filth-covered hands of secular society. Still a few months shy of seventeen, He found himself steeped in the subject, along with other members his age, almost all of whom embraced matrimony as a sort of mysterious miracle (or was it miraculous mystery?) with which they would, with any luck at all, soon engage. For them, it could not happen soon enough. But for Miguel? He was coming quickly to terms with the futility of his own tragic, humiliating attempts at worship, furiously diverting his love and commitment toward an insatiable deity that did not love him back.
One spring evening, three days before his seventeenth birthday, he directed his fury elsewhere. Rosa had since left home to live with Lucia and Lucia’s husband in Argentina. His father stayed late at the church, so Miguel and his mother ate dinner alone. Nothing about it was premeditated; the moment simply arrived, unanticipated, and he recognized it immediately for what it was—time to confess. “Mom,” he said to her, “there is something I need to tell you.”
She set down her knife and fork, chewed for several more seconds, swallowed and then looked at him. “What is it?”
“Daniel and I are in love. We have been together for almost two years. We are sexually active, and we care about each other very much.” There. It was done. He waited grimly for her reaction, for the screaming and shouting, for the tears. But at first, none of that happened.
“What do you want me to do with this?” she asked him quietly.
Miguel hesitated. “I…I don’t know. I’m really suffering over this, Mom. At church.”
“Suffering? To me it sounds like you are not suffering at all. Rather than suffering, which is what we all must do, you are seeking every last bit of the pleasure you desire—in this perverted, disgusting indulgence—and showing no restraint whatsoever. My son, that is not suffering.”
He swallowed painfully. “I thought it would be better to tell you, and not Dad—”
“Why? As if you thought I would not tell him myself?”
“Mom, you can’t. I’m not ready for that.”
Only now did she raise her voice. “You must be out of your mind to think you have a say. Not at this point. There will be no secrets between your father and me—let alone something of this magnitude. What exactly did you think was going to happen?”
Clearly Miguel had not thought it through. “I don’t know. You’re my mom.” His hands shook. “I thought I could trust you.”
Just as tears filled his eyes, so did they flood into his mother’s. “That’s not what this is about. You think you can just do whatever you want? You think your situation is special? Look around you Miguel. We all have our proper roles to fill, and we all must suffer for them.” She got up and began gesturing wildly around the kitchen. “Look at this place. Just look at this…fucking place.” (It was the first and only time Miguel would ever hear his mother swear.) “I am capable of so much more than this. And yet, this is my role. This is my suffering. It is what I am supposed to do. Is that clear to you or not?” She smeared her hands across the front of the refrigerator, sending a dozen magnets, notes and greeting cards tumbling to the floor. “This is what suffering looks like.”
They both cried openly. Miguel scraped together his thoughts, told his mother, “You say you are so capable, but all I see is that you are incapable of changing your shitty life. I feel sad for you.” He left immediately, hurrying down the townhouse steps to the sidewalk. His mother called out his name in two pained bleats before slamming the front door shut.
Without realizing where he was headed, Miguel landed five stations up the line, in the lavish hallway outside of Daniel’s home. Daniel’s mother answered the door, and the boy soon met Miguel out in the hall. Together they went up to the roof and stood at the edge, where the city spread out before them in a thick blanket of lights. Here, Miguel told Daniel everything that had happened.
“Your parents will contact mine,” Daniel said. “My life will be over.”
“I don’t think so. They barely know each other.”
“But you’re not sure about that, are you? Fuck, Miguel, how could you be so careless? All I can do at this point is just hope to God they don’t find out. And of course, you and I can’t keep doing this.”
“Can’t keep doing what?”
“This. All of it. It’s gotten way too risky, and now it could fuck over everything else in our lives. All of our personal goals. Don’t you care about that, even a little?”
“Of course I do. But I care about us, too.”
A look of confusion flashed across Daniel’s face. “There’s nowhere for this to go, understand? I’ll be at Stanford in two months. You knew that. Look, I’m sorry neither of us ever made it clear before now, but we aren’t soulmates. It just wouldn’t make any sense. I have goals in politics. Real-world politics, Miguel. My face sets me back enough as it is. But an openly gay man with this face? I wouldn’t stand a chance.”
Overwhelmed, Miguel blurted out the only thing he could muster: “Your face?”
“This, stupid.” Daniel drew an imaginary circle twice around his features with his index finger. “Not white.”
“Oh, come on. It’s not that big of a deal.”
“Wow. Fucking easy for you to say. You’re as good as white in this city.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means, don’t you dare act like you understand how it is.”
Miguel felt himself becoming hot with panic. A bull lurked in Daniel’s words, and he knew he must now grab it by its horns. “So that’s it, then? It’s that easy for you to end this?”
“It’s not like that. It’s not about easy or hard. This is just how it has to be. I know it, and I think you know it too. I can’t speak for you, but I have some big plans. I’m not willing to risk it all over romance. Not even close.”
Miguel’s tears returned. “Then you are not who I thought you were.”
In the coming weeks, as Miguel would recall these few, pivotal seconds, he gleaned comfort only from the fact that Daniel had cried as well. “I’m so sorry, Miguel,” came his final words on the matter. “You’re right. I’m not.”
—
“Get up.” The man kicked Miguel’s side, waking him, startling him to his feet. Immediately this figure, still only a shadow, began dusting dry mulch from the side of Miguel’s tattered vinyl jacket. “You’re too young to be sleeping underground like this. What’s wrong with you?”
Miguel just stared at him, bleary eyed, swaying on his legs. The painted stone walls radiated aquamarine and a grimy, caged clock above the platform read 1:40 in the morning. What the fuck was going on? Where had he ended up tonight? An offensive block of Helvetica sharpened on the wall behind the man’s head. Senna-Joyce Station. That’s right. Ejected from the train during a drunken midnight pilgrimage to the water. Fuck, he hadn’t made it very far this time.
The man switched to Spanish. “What language do you speak? My God, you smell terrible. I would like to take you somewhere so you can shower. I can also give you clean clothes—hello?” He banged his fist against Miguel’s scalp. “Any of this getting through?”
Miguel rubbed his eyes and nodded his heavy head.
“Okay. The train is coming. Let’s get on.”
This mustached man was older, shorter than Miguel, and very attractive. Miguel guessed he was Mexican, like his mother. If he was out looking for a good time, maybe it wouldn’t be the worst thing. Maybe it was what Miguel deserved.
“If you can prove you’re worth a damn,” added the man, dragging Miguel toward the warm breath of the train, “I might even have an opportunity for you. We’ll see.”
We’ll see? In Miguel’s world, there was nothing left to see. Every worthwhile stone had been turned over already, each revealing a mottled underside more grotesque than the one before. By this time he was adrift and under total influence, with each coming moment, of whatever rank breeze happened to blow with the most force. But this was not a breeze. It was a whirlwind that plucked him up and pressed him to a cushion-less seat and thrust the car doors along their rusty rails until they were shut tight.
—
“You want any help?” The kid spoke hastily, noisily in order to reach Miguel’s ears at the back of the warehouse.
Miguel returned, unburdened, to confer with Gabe over the roof of the car. “What did you say?”
“I asked if you want any help.”
“That’s what I thought you said.”
The kid looked annoyed. “Eddie says things need to change around here. He says I need to be more involved. I know we’ve got a lot of class-A in the pipeline these days. I was reading about how the density of class-A is twice that of B. And four times the bottom-shelf stuff.” He paused, drew in a breath and said, “Anyway, it’s heavy. I know that now. Do you want help or not?”
Miguel smiled. Apparently the kid had hit the books since their last meeting. He smacked the hood of the car. “What the hell, let’s crank this out.”
Gabe placed his fingers gingerly around the scuffed edges of the first package (a small brown cube, Koreatown-bound) as if it were hot to the touch. Miguel directed him carefully among the pallets, accompanying him to ensure no mistakes were made, explaining where each package belonged and why. Sure, Miguel could have done everything himself in less time, but where the fuck did either of them have to be?
Once they were finished, Gabe closed the trunk for Miguel and then, stern-faced, gripped his hands over the edge of the deck lid to steady himself.
“You okay?”
“I’m fine.”
Miguel felt his heart sinking in his chest for the kid.
“So, what do you do after I leave?”
Miguel shrugged, looked around the place. “Sometimes I tidy up the office, but I probably won’t tonight. Just have to double-check a few things and close up.”
“Okay. Do you want to get out of here?”
Miguel laughed. He couldn’t help it, after such a corny line. “Are you asking me on a date?”
The kid reacted in alarm. “No. What? No, it’s just that I think we should talk. Eddie says we should. I’m not old enough to go to a bar, but I know a few restaurants that are open late.”
“If you want a drink,” Miguel suggested, “there’s this place I know that doesn’t check. Just don’t shave off that stubble on the way over.” Miguel thought the kid might smile again. Nothing.
“Fine, I won’t.”
And so, instead of following the stench-filled alleyways home, Miguel rode along with Gabe. The kid drove like Miguel imagined a cop would: full stops, early signals, heavy but smooth application of the throttle. The car was large inside and smelled like new plastic. Gabe looked even smaller than usual at the wheel, but at least he was confident. Miguel himself had never learned to drive.
After a few minutes of silence, Miguel said, “I don’t speak to my mom. But if she were to pass away, I don’t think I could handle it. There’s no way I could be calm about it.” He paused. “…You know…like you are.”
Gabe just shrugged. “We’re not the same.”
Miguel waited for something more, but nothing came. That was all he had to say? “I know we’re not. Sorry to bring it up again.”
“It’s okay. Like I said, my mom and me, our relationship wasn’t normal. Look, I don’t know how else to say this, but I think she was ready to go.”
The concept was brand-new to Miguel. “I guess.”
Gabe cleared his throat. “I have to accept that.”
“Now that she’s gone…are you alone?”
“Yes, I am alone.”
Miguel looked away. “Well, I’m around.”
Gabe didn’t respond for a long time, finally saying, “I try to spend a lot of time in busy places. The distraction seems to help.”
“Like where?”
“Like The Station. Odin Park, Chinatown—just places like that.”
“Chinatown,” he repeated, turning to Gabe. “Back where you belong?”
Gabe shook his head. “No, that would be Little Saigon.” He coughed. “If that’s the box you’re putting me into.”
“I’m not putting anyone into a box.” But he couldn’t be full Vietnamese. “Are you half?”
“Does it matter?” Gabe shifted uneasily in his seat.
Grooved concrete moaned up through the tires of the car.
“Sorry. No, it doesn’t.”
Miguel spoke up once or twice to offer directions, but otherwise said nothing for the rest of the ride. They parked on an upper floor in a crowded, towering garage in the financial district. Miguel paid the toll. Down on the street, they crossed over radiant asphalt toward the rhythmic white beacon of a walking man. The place, Pub Odessa, was crammed into the bottom floor of a slab-sided bank building on an adjacent corner. “Odinberg’s finest,” he assured Gabe, who only nodded. Miguel drew in one last calming breath of hot night air before pulling open the door.
If he had known the weight of the information he would soon ingest, he might have taken greater pause. The structure of the camp was partly to blame, its workings compartmentalized as they were, its workers so unlikely, given the harsh consequences, to gossip among themselves. Up until this point, Miguel had been mostly satisfied to remain in the shadows, but he would soon wonder why such a mundane detail had been kept from him. He would also feel like he had been blind. How had he not figured it out on his own? He should have seen it, should have sensed, led by his famed intuition, that a promising fragment of his beloved mentor lived on, stood right before him now in full human form, breathing and walking among them all…but that simply wasn’t how Miguel came to know.