The Assimilated Cuban's Guide to Quantum Santeria (3 page)

Lazaro’s footage was gorgeous, unbelievably intimate. Jellyfish usually squirt away from lights and cameras as fast as they can, but the aphotic ghost—enormous, tremulous, poisonous, ethereal—let Lazaro swim along with it and gather images that were not only scientifically priceless but commercially lucrative.

It was me he took to the Academy Awards show. When he won the Oscar, the shot cut to me for three seconds. The caption read “Montenegro’s Father.” Not Thomaston, but Montenegro. By this point he’d taken my surname.

“Why do you want to climb Everest?” I asked Lazaro.

“I’m always in the water,” he said. He went over to the fish tank he’d convinced me to get. It was a saltwater tank two meters in diameter specially made for jellyfish: a Kreisel model with a constant flow of water whisking the jellies around like a washing machine. That’s exactly what it looked like: a futuristic upright jellyfish washer.

I looked up from my book. “So now you want to go to the highest point on Earth because … it’s the farthest place from sea level?”

He smiled ruefully. “Something like that.”

“Seems to me like the ocean’s been good to you.”

He turned back to the tank and watched the jellies spin. Sometimes the tank looked to me like a bird’s-eye model of the galaxies. Other times it made me sad, these small, nearly mindless creatures being infinitely jetted around a tiny glass container for my viewing pleasure. They had no comprehension of the forces that governed them. They had no idea their lives were in my hands. And who was I to have dominion over anything?

“It has,” he said finally. “The ocean has been my whole life. But it’s also defined me.” And then, a little softer, he added, “Limited me.”

“Still, Lazaro, Everest is one of the most inhospitable places on Earth. You’re an expert when it comes to deep-sea diving. But on a mountain you’ll be—”

“—like a fish out of water?” he finished.

No mistaking his tone; he was dead-set. So I smiled and turned
back to my book and simply said, “Something like that.”

Dolores stayed the night. We made love. Because I couldn’t keep up with her, she kindly slowed for me.

After, she asked me to be patient. She said Lazaro was alive, but when she told me how she knew, I wouldn’t believe her. But she’d find a way to explain so I would believe, and then I would save Lazaro. I didn’t know what she was talking about, but my mind was aswim, awash, adrift. I let myself be overwhelmed by her. We entangled ourselves in each other and fell asleep.

When I woke I found she had disentangled herself. A note on the pillow said, “Read before burning.” When I opened it, however, there was just a single word. “Bathroom.”

One of Lazaro’s video cameras was pointed at the bathtub. Taped to it was a note that read, “View before burning. Full explanation!”

The tub was full. Next to it was the freezer’s icemaker bucket, emptied, and a box of Instant Ocean, which is what I used to salinate the jellytank water. It was empty too.

In the tub, its blue-white glow refracting through the ice, filling and emptying like a lung, was a fully mature aphotic ghost.

I climbed Everest. More honest: Roger and the Sherpas climbed Everest and hoisted me behind them. They might as well have carried
me up on a palanquin for all the effort I expended.

The search began the day after we arrived at the South Col. The weather was cooperating for now, and forecasts were good. If we were lucky we might get two days.

The cold had sunk an inch down into my body, anesthetizing me, preventing both hope and despair. It was the only reason I could function, this close to knowing. If I failed to find Lazaro, I could try again someday. But if I succeeded, he would be alive or dead. The wave would collapse. I would eject him from his superposition and either bring him back to life, or reify his death.

We searched half a day. I saw many bodies, none of them Lazaro. I wondered briefly if I shouldn’t make it the work of the rest of my life to bring the dead down and present them back to their families. But let’s see if I could succeed on my own mission first.

Roger, with a Rumpelstilskin-like prescience, knew not to pry, but the Sherpas couldn’t comprehend that I couldn’t care less about the stark and ominous wonders Everest offered. So, thinking I was like every other tourist, they kept trying to show me the sights. Two of them were dying to show me the most curious ice formation they’d ever seen.

I perked up. Ice formation? I followed.

It had appeared out of the ground last season, they said. They exhumed it out of the recent snow for me to see. It was the size of a sleeping dog and looked something like hand-blown Italian glass, impossibly whorling and curling into itself, a hyaline nautilus
relentlessly tearing sunlight into rainbows. Deep in its center there seemed to be a dark nucleus, and strange, ciliated veins circuited throughout its interior. Climbing gear radiated from it like an explosion.

“Roger!” I yelled.

Roger came. “We need the cooler,” I said.

He spoke to the Sherpas and they brought the coffin-sized cooler I had had specially made. It borrowed from ice-cream maker technology, had liquid nitrogen lining the metal interior. After I delicately placed the ice formation inside of it, I found I could just close the lid. “Tell them to help me pack it with snow,” I said. Soon every Sherpa who could fit around the cooler was dumping snow and ice into it. When it was full I padlocked the lid.

I was weeping, but no one could tell because everyone’s eyes cry this high up, and anyway tears freeze before they fall. I took several hits from my oxygen tank, then said, “Roger, this is futile. I’ll have to reconcile myself to the fact that Everest will be my son’s final resting place. We’ll have to abandon the search. Gather the men.”

I could see he knew there was more to the story. But all he said to me was, “Right.” Then he told the Sherpas what I said. A few of them looked at me incredulously—the search had hardly begun, and now I was content to leave with just an ice-souvenir?—but the more experienced among them simply started packing up. Americans were generally regarded as the best tippers in the world, even when an Everest ascent failed. Tolerating their strange ways was a small price to pay.

It was my fourth date with Imelda. She was a year older than me. She didn’t dye her hair and was a retired librarian and said if I ever caught her playing Bingo I had her permission to kill her on the spot.

We had met through Back from Heaven, the nonprofit I founded to recover the bodies of those who died on Everest. She had joined me on our latest mission, our most successful to date: three deceased climbers retrieved, identified, and returned to their loved ones. One ascent and she was hooked; she joined the team as a full-time volunteer researcher.

And now we were seeing each other. And things were moving fast. Just four dates in and we were going back to my place.

I unlocked the door, reached around to flip the lights, then gestured gallantly for her to enter. She curtsied and strolled in.

And saw the tanks. I still had the smaller Kreisel with my original smack of jellyfish eternally smacking into each other, but what stopped her midstep was the new tank. It took up the wall, a tremendous bubbling cauldron of cornerless glass. In it, the two most enormous jellyfish she’d ever seen pulsed with slow dignity through the water, their blue-white auras commingling. A third one, still just a polyp, trailed behind them.

“Jesus!” she said. “Wow. Just wow.”

“Do you like it?” I asked, moving behind her, wrapping my arms around her waist.

She leaned against me. “They’re so beautiful.” And then, searching
for a more precise description, “So unearthly.”

“My son’s an underwater filmmaker. He discovered this species of jellyfish.”

She turned to face me, rested her hands on my shoulders. “No!”

“Really. You’ll meet him someday. And I’ll have to show you his masterwork: ‘The Aphotic Ghost.’ He won an Oscar for it.” I directed her attention to the mantle.

She looked, then turned back to me and smiled. “You are just endlessly surprising, Enrique.” Then, turning herself back to the tank, but belting my arms to her body, she said, “So when do I get to meet the Academy-Award-winning filmmaker?”

“It’s going to be awhile, I’m afraid. He’s spending time with his mother right now.”

“Ah. I see. Let me guess. You and she can’t be in the same room together?”

“Not at all. We’re in the same room all the time. And she’ll always have a special place in my heart. It’s just that … well, let’s just say we come from two different worlds.”

“Say no more,” she said, squeezing my arm. She turned back to the larger tank and, after a moment’s contemplation, she pointed at the polyp and said, “The tiny one’s cute. Does it have a name?”

“She does,” I said, pulling Imelda a little closer. “Brumhilda.”

Eight seconds of footage, from a security camera so old it surrounds every object in the picture with rainbows. Man at a gas station robbing the attendant. Pantyhose flattening his nose. Waving a small, mean knife like a snakecharmer’s pungi.

Customer walks in. Good-looking guy, California hair, white as a country club. Has no idea; walks in texting. The robber runs over and slams the knife through the top of his head. In to the hilt.

Someone with the username “venividivicibitches” tries to troll /r/ funny with an animated gif from the security camera that infinitely loops the last few seconds of the attack and ends with the subtitle “lol.” Unsurprisingly, redditors downvote it into obscurity.

Angela in the waiting room with her kids. Greg Jr. is painstakingly choosing his playlist. Lucy is asleep, her Hello Kitty purse wobbling treacherously on the precipice of her knees. Chase is unknotting his shoelaces. He’s only learned to tie them, likes to practice.

This is the end of everything
, thinks Angela. It’s her only thought; it repeats like that animated gif she saw of Greg on Reddit. She has luminous wet patches beneath her eyes, remnants of the tears she obliterated before her children could spot them. Thank God for norun mascara.

An IC nurse is jogging toward them. It’s Bonnie. She is 270 pounds, wears pediatric scrubs covered in cartwheeling pandas. Still a full first down away from the waiting room, she yells, “Ms. Justice!”

Greg Jr. yanks out his earbuds; Chase stops playing with his laces; Lucy opens her eyes instantly. She had been fake-sleeping.

“Greg?” asks Angela.

Bonnie reaches the waiting room. Stops, stoops, grips her thighs for support. Huffs and swallows. “He’s awake,” she manages. “He just opened his eyes.”

Angela forgets she has children. She runs.

“What’s wrong with Daddy’s head?” asks Lucy.

“Shut up, Lucy,” says Greg Jr. He hits her, she starts crying, there is a scene. But it’s Bonnie who must broker a truce. Angela is bedside, watching Greg. Chase, dead-faced, watches Angela.

Angela is so close to Greg’s face she can see his vacant eyes saccade. He smells like he smells when he comes home from work, before his evening shower, after all the colognes and deodorants have died away. His own animal self.