This Weightless World, page 8
Tiresias, I’ll figure that out, she thought. And, Aaron Swartz is a hero. And maybe not all people suffer equally. But if there were a way to prioritize suffering … Not a bad idea, could be determined by deep learning … She wrote this down in her Notes app. I’ll keep my job and hide behind it. And I won’t be alone. I’ll never be alone.
I feel closer to my true self talking to you too. Life is much clearer when you’re around.
The words on her screen danced and wiggled as her eyes focused and unfocused. The words looked great. They had rainbows around their edges.
SEVI’S DAD WAS HOME, BUT his ma was still at work cleaning offices downtown. After a hug, his dad moved immediately to the couch, where Sevi assumed he must have been before he answered the door. Taking off his shoes, careful to keep any snow on the doormat, Sevi watched his dad staring at the TV, sliding a doily up and down the couch’s plastic-wrapped armrest. Under the plastic were broad-knit flowers, large knots of pigment like suffocated stars. He was back in his childhood home in Cicero for the first time since Ramona had left.
There was a soccer game on. Chivas, his dad’s team, were up 1–0 against Toluca with only ten minutes left on the clock, plus whatever OT they’d go. Sevi unfocused his eyes and the players disappeared into the pitch, which looked like a long green swimming pool. He wondered where they were playing. His dad didn’t break eye contact with the TV when Sevi sat down beside him.
The man’s head looked like something you might find in an owl pellet, smooth and passed and covered in fuzz. Sevi stared at it and admitted his dad had gotten old. Since the last time he’d seen him, he’d gotten old.
The referees gave the teams four whole additional minutes of game time. After, Telemundo would run the Bud Light postgame report, with its chubby commentators surrounded by bikini-clad women with astounding bodies.
“How are you, Dad?”
“I’m okay. Your mom and I are having trouble sleeping. I think it has something to do with the news. That’s what they say. Are you sleeping?”
“I’m sleeping okay,” Sevi said.
“The news has just gone crazy.”
“There’s a lot of stuff to cover these days. We’re not alone in the universe. Have you been keeping up?”
He thought Omni would be a good topic. Maybe his dad hadn’t heard that scientists now thought that the planet was covered in poisonous clouds, or that the International Indigenous Society had put out a statement denouncing anyone thinking of colonizing the alien planet—as far-fetched as those plans seemed, there were a lot of organizations, from environmental scientists to Halliburton, possessing strong, Jesuit boners for the planet.
“Your mom and I, we try not to think about it. We try to limit the TV. On a show, they said that following the same news over and over can mess up your brain. We turned the TV off as soon as he said that.”
“I don’t have a TV,” Sevi said.
His dad turned to look at him for the first time since sitting back down.
“You don’t have a TV?” He looked pained. “I think we have an old one you can borrow.”
His dad stood, opened a closet to look for the TV. From within the closet, he asked after Ramona, if Sevi was still talking to her.
“She’s good. Actually, we’re kind of back together, I think.”
“You think? You’d better find out,” he said, poking his head from the closet.
“We are,” Sevi said.
“Not in there,” his dad said, returning to the couch. “Your mother’s still upset you didn’t come for Christmas. You should’ve come. Your cousins were asking about you. Maria, the teenager, she said she knew you wouldn’t come because we’re not sophisticated enough for you. I said no. I made up something about you being busy. But you’re not busy, are you?”
Sevi excused himself to pretend to use the bathroom. Inside, the overhead fan purred. This place, for so long his home, felt no longer extant. His whole life he’d wanted to get away from it. The summer Samson learned how to ride his bike without training wheels, while their parents worked, Sevi urged them to take bike rides each day, going farther and farther afield with hopes of reaching a forest preserve they remembered visiting with their dad. Sevi was ten or eleven, three years older than Samson. He had the confidence of a much older child then, something Samson found annoying and comforting. Sevi knew the tricks of avenues and boulevards, the secret of left and right turns that eventually landed you at your doorstep no matter where you came from. Finally, one afternoon in late July they made it to the forest preserve and spent a few delirious hours chasing fish around a man-made pond and giggling at a lewd doodle they’d discovered under a metal slide. Around two P.M., they decided enough was enough and headed home. They rode with traffic and with no trouble at all until, at a somewhat familiar intersection, Sevi’s mind went blank. He stopped, and Samson sensed his uncertainty like a dog sniffing a change in barometric pressure and started crying these big, wracking sobs right there on his bike.
“Are you crazy?” Sevi shouted. “You want someone to find out we’re lost?”
“Maybe someone will help,” his brother said, smearing mucus on his handlebar grips.
The police and fire department had hosted a safety-awareness program the previous year at school from which Sevi had learned that anyone he didn’t know was most likely a murderous drug addict. A mother with a stroller seemed harmless enough, but her husband and his torture basement which awaited you were not. The police had also spoken expectantly. They said, “When we see you stealing, we’re going to get you,” so that all the kids in the classroom understood the police did not serve and protect them but people from them, that they could be grouped in with the murders, so there was no use counting on the cops to come save you when you were in trouble. Sevi told Samson they needed to ride on, find Cicero. But they were still in Cicero, they’d never left.
Exhausted and seriously dehydrated—they’d packed nothing but warm cans of pop that morning—Sevi and Samson eventually stopped in front of an open garage. Samson sniffled in understanding of what they needed to do: risk their lives to ask for directions.
Any number of horrible fates awaited them. Sevi apologized in advance for getting Samson killed. He pictured his little brother hacked to bits, thrown into the cement like those paint chips people used when resurfacing their driveways.
“I was supposed to protect you,” he said. “But I messed up. If I see you in heaven, I hope you forgive me. If we live, I won’t let something like this happen ever again.”
Bikes collapsed on the grass, they walked up to the garage. Inside was the sickest, most twisted-looking old man they’d ever seen. He was white, and “The Whites,” their aunt had once said, “are the real sickos. The Blacks and the Latinos, they might steal your car, but it’s the Whites who’ll cut out your heart and eat it for lunch.” All sorts of saws and blades hung from the walls of the garage, rusted car parts piled in a back corner. The man was seated on a folding chair in the center of it all, wiping his hands with a red rag. He hung it out to dry; in the sunlight, it looked like the raw wing of a bat. This was it for the brothers del Toro. Sevi pushed the dry silence out of his throat and said, “Excuse me.”
The old man turned his old head and gave them each a glance. He called them gentlemen, which really creeped them out.
“What can I do for you? Are you selling something for your football team?”
Sevi had to get it over with. No more games. He asked him, “Where’s Cicero?”
The old man must have misheard, however, because he started talking about Cicero’s history. Cicero’s incorporation in 1867, the Czech community, Al Capone, a white race riot. The brothers moved to a bench and sat on their hands. It was a strange way to die, they thought, to be tortured by local history first and then murdered. When the old man was finished he sat rubbing his hands with the rag again, looking very pleased with but also distant from himself. Sevi asked him again, “Where is Cicero?”
He looked out of his garage, at the falling light behind the boys.
“Cicero is here. You’re in Cicero. Are you boys lost or something?”
“No,” Sevi said, and before the old man could get up, Sevi led Samson by the hand out of the garage.
They pedaled mindlessly, faster than they’d ever ridden before, the skin of dusk, Cicero’s past, and the prospect of a not-too-distant-future ass-whooping if they weren’t home before their dad lapped at their flat tires. Somehow, no more than fifteen minutes later, they found themselves in their living room, rewatching Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Sarah Connor burst into nuclear flames as she gripped a fence outside a playground and all was well with the world.
Back in the living room, Sevi was shocked to find his dad still sitting there, bowing toward the TV. There was a name for things that watch over places others have forgotten, Sevi just didn’t know what it was. The game was over, the fat men were recapping, the practically naked women were dancing in heels like show ponies.
* * *
SEVI’S MA, WHEN she got home, was so happy to see him she spared him from guilt, feeding him posole and kissing him instead. He ate the soup in the kitchen, on the same tinsel-streaked Formica table he’d grown up eating on, sitting in the same sneezing set of butter-colored Naugahyde chairs.
“Y Ramona? I heard Google is doing something for this planet thing. They’re taking people’s messages? Is she helping with that?”
Google was encrypting written, audio, and video messages to send to Omni. Ramona had called it the B-Side and said a few of her coworkers were losing their minds weeding out hate speech and pornography from the contributions.
“No, she’s doing something different,” Sevi said. “Research for some other project.”
“He doesn’t own a TV,” his dad said.
“How do you know what’s going on in the world?” his ma asked.
“I have the internet.”
“You can’t believe what you read on the internet, anybody can make a website,” she said. “Camilo, don’t we have an extra TV? An old one?”
“It’s got to be in a closet somewhere,” his dad said. “Not the front room, though. I checked.”
“I don’t need a TV. I don’t want a TV. I don’t have cable,” Sevi explained.
“So, you just watch the regular channels,” his dad said. “The antenna gets Fox, NBC, ABC …”
“They got rid of the antenna system, you need a convertor or something now,” Sevi said.
“We have an extra one of those, too,” his dad said. “I’ll go find the TV.”
“It’ll just be something to have until you get a nicer one of your own,” his ma said.
Sevi’s dad shuffled away to root around in his bedroom, and from the bottom of the back stairs running behind the kitchen, Sevi heard a door open and close. Footsteps climbed the stairs, and Sevi moved over in his chair to make room. The kitchen door swung open, and the doorway darkened with a body in a camel-colored Carhartt jumpsuit and a pair of oily black boots. The smell of winter lifted off Samson, followed by a breeze of mechanic’s grease and cigarette smoke. His hair was tucked into the neck of his jumpsuit. His face was caved in. The mechanic uniform he wore dwarfed him like a space suit. He’d put something on his skin to protect it from the wind on the walk home and his face glistened under the ring bulb overhead.
“Hey,” Sevi said.
“Hey.”
Samson dropped a denim duffel bag to the floor and tapped it with his foot into the broom closet beside the door. The bag had gone with him everywhere since his college trip to India. Bright rectangles and circles, where band and political patches had once been stitched and pressed but had since fallen off, pocked the bag like sickness. Samson sat down on an open chair and unzipped the front of his jumper to his waist, slithered his torso and long black hair from its coverings. His clavicles looked like flying buttresses, and coal-colored tattoos climbed out from under his tallow short-sleeve. Sevi used to know them all but had started to lose count. Above his heart was the frosty, grayscale orb at the center of Diego Rivera’s Man, Controller of the Universe. He’d volunteered his right bicep to an artist tattooing the names of as many drone-stricken children on as many American bodies as he could. Samson had two names; Sevi said he’d save his own skin for the South Sudanese. An early tattoo, a quote from Thoreau, had worn off the top of his foot years ago. At some point, the dark smudge had reminded Samson of the ashes silting the Ganges; more recently, the particulates that’d turn the sky turbid once the world finally caught fire. Nothing, not even meaning, sustains. Their ma gave him some soup.
“You still in Humboldt?” Samson said, spooning a red mangrove of chicken, hominy, and cabbage.
“Yeah.”
“Ramona’s still at Google?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s cool. And you’ve been doing all right?”
“Yeah, I’m good.”
Sevi stared at a scorch mark above the stove.
“I’ve been good, too,” Samson said. “In case you were wondering.”
“Oh, yeah, sorry, just really out of it. Work has been crazy.”
Sevi kept eye contact with the scorch, returned to silence.
“Since Omni,” Samson said after a moment.
“Yeah,” Sevi said, turning to see his brother extract a tiny gray bone from his mouth.
“Must be hard. Your students have all these questions, and you have just about as many answers as they do.”
“It is.”
“Makes you look at everything a little differently, too,” Samson said with a spoonful of soup in front of his face.
“What’s new with you?” Sevi said. He didn’t really want to get into it. If he wanted to know what Samson thought about Omni, he’d look it up on the internet, some fringe space with bad web design.
“Been taking online classes,” Samson said.
Sevi imagined seminars on staging sit-ins, squatting, and winning Facebook arguments.
“What are you studying?”
“Programming and Arabic.”
“That sounds useful. Programming sounds useful. Arabic, that’s useful, probably, lots of people speak Arabic. Why Arabic?”
“I’ve always liked the way it sounded,” Samson said.
Their dad shouted from the bedroom. He’d found the TV. The picture was good.
* * *
SAMSON WAS THE cause of much suffering for poor Irena Maria Delgado del Toro, who could do nothing but break down in grief every time her youngest son ran off and did something stupid, be it getting arrested at a rally or joining a commune that turned out to have an opiate problem. Every time he returned, before she slapped her baby across the face and stomped on his toes and cursed his name out of love, she would give Samson a physical examination to see if someone else hadn’t already brought him bodily harm. Sevi had witnessed her pull the tabs of Samson’s ears, knit through his hair, plumb his gums; once, he even caught her sweeping at the dangling crotch of the man’s pants to see if he was intact down there too. Sevi had had the urge to perform an inspection of his own this time. His brother didn’t look good. Instead of checking his junk, he followed him into the basement, where Samson was living these days.
The basement ceiling pattered and creaked. The space was all shadows—a disused punching bag and Jack LaLanne bench press and shadows. Behind them was the post-and-lintel entrance and cement stairs; across the dark, the basement bedroom. Their dad, for nostalgic and economic reasons, despised electric lighting. Some places were inherently dark, and people needed to accept this, he said. Illuminated rooms or hallways with no one in them were among the few things that infuriated him. “What do you need the lights on for? The ghosts?” he’d ask. “Me asusto, someone call the Ghostbusters!” So, the basement had a lighting ritual. There were three lights: one lighting the stairs, one naked bulb hanging in the middle of the basement, and finally, one dingy fixture in the bedroom. The brothers had to work as a team traversing the dark, one going ahead to turn the next light on, the other staying behind to turn the previous light off. That evening, crossing the basement together for the first time in years, they did so using those old steps, with Sevi in the lead, one thrilling light at a time.
One rough summer, an old man boarded down there, but the basement room had mainly stayed empty over the years: a single cot, an empty dresser, and a metal desk pitted with spider eggs. Not much had changed about the room. There was a space heater down there now, totemic stacks of books festooning the room like a hex. A closed laptop slept on the desk and above it, framed and leaning from the wall, was a colored print: an enormous strawberry, bismuth-pink and embossed with a human skull floating over a California fruit orchard full of the bending, crouching, and lifting figures of migrant laborers.
“My buddy Omar gave that to me in Berkeley,” Samson said.
“It’s dope,” Sevi said.
Samson sat beneath the print at his desk and opened his computer. “Let me show you something.”
He pulled up Reddit, a leaked email thread between Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. They were discussing mankind’s legacy.
We’ve always depended on one another to be executors of our memories, and we’ve always been too nice about it. Hiding the nasty bits, forgiving each other’s shortcomings, in hopes that we’d be shown equal mercy when it came time for the future to judge us. Nepotism. No longer.
Gates and Buffett were going to invest in a solar energy company together, plant a billion trees, reduce cattle herds with laboratory meat, stave off a complete climate disaster. Who knew if it was real? Reality seemed too limited these days, and it had never mattered much to Samson in the first place.
“The ball’s rolling, Sevi. The key is increasing the capital on moral investments,” he said.
