On My Way to Paradise (3 page)

I watched Tamara for some time, looking for any signs
of the cramping the hormone injections can cause. She wobbled a
great deal and clung to Flaco for support, but it was good for her
to get the exercise. I remembered the antibody packet I’d bought,
so I had her sit on the front porch while I injected the antibodies
into her catheter.

"I have been thinking," I said when I was done, "that
I would like to sell that crystal. Would you happen to have a
receipt for it?"

Tamara looked up at me in surprise, and then burst
out laughing until tears formed in her eyes. Flaco started laughing
too. I felt very foolish for asking about a receipt, but now I knew
for sure she was a thief. Tamara struggled up and went into the
house to rest.

I sat on the porch next to Flaco. He wrapped his arm
around me. "Ah, Angelo, I like you. Promise me you’ll never
change."

I sighed, and wondered what to do. It would be wrong
to sell stolen property, no matter how much I would make from it.
Once again I wished that I had not taken Tamara into my care, and I
wondered if I should send her to the hospital, let the police
arrest her if she was a criminal. "How is she doing?" I asked.

"She slept much in the morning," Flaco said, "and I
made sure she ate a good lunch. After that she spent much time in
your bedroom, hooked up to your dream console. She didn’t like it.
She said it didn’t have enough memory to make a large world seem
solid. Also, she erased all the old worlds you had in it. I hope
you’re not angry."

"No, I never use it," I said truthfully.

"You should get a new one," Flaco said. "I have a
friend who steals only from other thieves. He can get you a nice
one, cheap. And it isn’t as if it will have been stolen from a
Padre."

"No," I said.

Flaco got up, walked into the house, and got some
beer. When he came back, we sat on the porch and drank while the
sun set. Just as it got dark we heard a distant explosion—a deep
booming one—and howler monkeys in the forests on the south side of
the lake began howling in fear.

"Chepo?" I asked, wondering if the socialists were
bombing refugiados on our side of the border. Prime Minister
Montoya had been spewing rhetoric all week—talking about how the
‘Progressive Ideals’ of Nicita Idealist Socialism could never take
firm root while the dogma of the capitalists to the north continued
to pollute his ‘New Society’—all of which simply meant that he was
tired of his people listening to our radio stations or accessing
our dream networks. He had reaffirmed his vow to either absorb or
eradicate all other Latin American nations, so I’d been waiting all
week for a new offensive.

Flaco shook his head, and spat on the ground.
"Guerrilla artillery. Synchronous barrage; they’re trying to blow
up that new Colombian neutron cannon. They’ll do it, too. Those
chimeras have been giving the Colombians hell." Flaco started to
rise, as if to go in the house.

"Wait here for a moment," I told him. "You will see
something strange."

Flaco sat back down and waited. Soon, an old grizzled
spider monkey came walking up the street, away from the jungle
south of the lake, heading north. The monkey was very nervous,
being away from the trees, and he often stopped, raising his head
to look for the perros sarnosos—junkyard dogs that ran loose in the
streets. Flaco saw him and laughed, "Ha! I’ve never seen a spider
monkey leave the jungle like that."

"The fighting and people in the jungle scares them,"
I said. "I see them every night now. Usually there is just one or
two, sometimes bands. They are always heading north."

"Perhaps this old spider monkey is smarter than you
and me. Perhaps he is a sign," Flaco said, reaching down to pick up
a rock. He threw it, hitting the monkey’s chest. "Go on; get up to
Costa Rica where someone can make a good stew of you!"

The monkey lurched back a few meters, clutching his
chest, then ran in a circle, and finally took off as fast as he
could past my home. I felt bad to see the old monkey in pain. "You
did not need to do that," I told Flaco. Flaco was staring at the
ground, angrily, and I knew he was thinking about the threat of the
Colombians to the south and Costa Ricans to the north. It would not
be long until the two countries would invade us, try to force us to
refuse the capitalists access to our canals.

"Ah, piss on him if he can’t take a joke," Flaco
said. Then he laughed and we went into the house.

I sat on the porch a while and thought. The monkeys
leaving, that was a bad sign, but all my life people had been
seeing bad signs. My own country of Guatemala had been invaded by
Nicaragua, overtaken by a dictator, passed through a revolution,
and ended up where it began, as a free democracy—all in less than
fifty years. I’ve always believed that no matter how bad things
become, they somehow even out eventually. And the problems with the
socialists would be no exception. I went into the house to eat.
Flaco and Tamara had eaten all the fresh fruit and I do not like to
take a meal without it, so we decided to eat at La Arboleda, a
nearby restaurant. I went to get Tamara.

She lay on my bed, with the dream monitor plugged
into the interface socket at the base of her skull and her visor
down. She was curled so that her knees touched her chin, and she
had her hand in her mouth, biting it. Her tightly drawn face hinted
at pain.

"Does she always do this?" I asked.

"Does what?" Flaco said.

"Curl up in the fetal position when she’s hooked to
the console?"

"Feta? Feta?—yes, she always lies like that."

"Don’t touch her," I told him, then ran next door to
Rodrigo DeHoyos’ house to borrow an extra monitor. When I got back,
I put on the monitor and plugged into the viewer’s jack of the
console—

And on the beach the wind was still but a sandpiper
was running, skirting the water’s edge, darting away from the
waves, burying his ebony bill, moving on. Bleached shells of clam,
barnacle, and snail tumbled in the shallows and gleamed like bones
in the sand drifts. Cool air carried the scent of decaying sea
life. A purple sun hung on the horizon and dyed sand, sky, bird,
skin in cellophane shades of red and blue. The amethyst sand cut my
bare feet, and down the beach a red-haired woman in a white dress
fed gulls that screeched and hung in the air, waiting to snap
crumbs she tossed. I stopped and inhaled the air, listened to the
sigh of the breakers, and looked at the colors. After so long with
my prosthetic eyes, seeing the world in variations of only three
primary colors felt like coming home.

I began looking for flaws in her dreamwork. Her world
involved all five senses. I could both smell the sea rime and taste
it—it felt complete. I could see unity in the starkness of the
lines of the jagged stones, the wind-battered birds, and the choppy
waves on the horizon. Scarlets and muted tans nicely varied the
theme color of purple. Her dreamwork was almost professional
quality.

But I turned around and found a warp: on the beach, a
huge black bull lay dead in the water, as if he had washed up from
her subconscious. The horizon, the shoreline, the slope of the
sand—all converged to emphasize this bull. He lay on his side, with
his head toward me and his feet toward the sea. His huge belly was
distended, though it didn’t show signs of rot. His knobby legs
stuck out, stiff with rigor mortis, and his whole body heaved from
moment to moment as waves washed against him, surging against his
belly, making his huge testicles and penis float up against his
body as a wave came in, then stretch out and away as the wave
receded. I focused my attention on the bull and mouthed the word
delete. The monitor flashed a message: You Cannot Edit Dreams While
in the Viewing Mode.

I headed toward the red-haired woman. Her beauty was
the kind one can only be born with—the elegant lines of her chin
were not likely to be the kind a plastique artist would conceive.
Yet her lifeless expression revealed the tragic deadness one sees
behind the eyes of the refugiados, and I wondered why Tamara had
chosen this red-haired woman as an alter ego, and if the emotion
I’d seen in Tamara’s face earlier were some trick of her body she
could not control.

"What do you want?" she asked without turning to look
at me, tossing a piece of bread to a gull.

I did not know what to answer. "I came to tell you
it’s time to eat," I said, looking back at the bull.

"He talks to me," she said, as if confiding a secret.
She didn’t turn, and I realized it was the bull she didn’t want to
see. "Even though he’s dead, he jabbers. He jabbers at me—he says
he wants me to ride his back. But I know that as soon as I do,
he’ll take me away, across the dark water to a place where I do not
wish to go."

I said as if to a child: "Perhaps you should come
with Flaco and me. We’ll have a nice dinner. You’d like that,
wouldn’t you?"

She stiffened, angered by the tone of my voice. "You
go on ahead. I’ll finish up here," she said. She tore a huge chunk
off her loaf of bread and tossed it to a gull. The gull shrieked
and dove, grabbing the bread before it hit the ground. I looked at
the gull, with its battered feathers and shrunken stomach. Its dark
eyes glared, mad with hunger.

I walked away from the beach and topped a rise by a
rock where a lone gull sat. On the other side of the rise the dream
ended in a blurred landscape of rolling dunes. I looked back down
at the bull floating in the water and at the woman in the white
dress. She fed the last of the bread to the gulls, and then raised
her hands. A gull dove and tentatively nipped her finger. Drops of
blood splashed from her wound and the gulls cried and dove upon
her, shredding her flesh with their sharp beaks.

The gull beside me cried out, and I looked at it. The
light of the setting sun made its white feathers gleam purple. Its
dark eyes appeared to glare out of a luminous head. It watched me,
cold and prophetic. I jacked out, unwilling to watch the woman be
eaten.

"So, what happened?" Flaco asked as soon as I got the
monitor off.

"Nothing," I said, not wishing to compromise Tamara’s
privacy any further. I pulled her plug from the console,
terminating her self-torture. Tamara straightened and
stretched.

"Is it time to eat?" she asked. She stared at the
floor and would not look at me.

"Yes." Flaco helped her stand. It had begun to rain
outside, so Flaco went to the closet for an umbrella.

 Tamara stared at the floor and said, "Stay out
of my dreams."

"I’m sorry," I said. "You looked as if you were in
pain."

"I only had a headache. You invaded me. You don’t
have that right!"

"You’re my patient," I said. "I’m obligated to care
for you."

Flaco came back with the umbrella, and we walked to
La Arboleda. .

When we got to the restaurant, only a few late eaters
and drunks were there. We all ordered fish dinners. Flaco convinced
Tamara to order a Rum Sunset—a drink his grandfather had invented
that is made of rum and lemon wine, spiced with cinnamon. Flaco
tried to get me to drink one too, but I refused. Flaco bragged that
his family still owned the company that made the lemon wine, and I
pointed out that both his grandfather’s company and his
grandfather’s bad taste were still in the family. Tamara laughed
slightly and stared at the stub on her arm. A drunk staggered to
our table, looked at our drinks, and said, "Ah, a Rum Sunset.
That’s my favorite God damned drink in the world. In fact, it’s the
only good drink!"

"Then you should sit and have a Rum Sunset with the
grandson of the man who invented it!" Flaco said, and he ordered a
Rum Sunset for the drunk.

I was very sorry about this, for the drunk smelled of
sour sweat, and he sat next to me. He fell asleep after guzzling
his drink, but his smell ruined my dinner. We ate and talked; Flaco
told many peculiarly bad jokes, which Tamara laughed at shyly at
first, but later she laughed horrendously at the slightest
provocation. One of my customers that day, a refugiado from
Cartagena, had paid me in mixed foreign coins, so I’d carried a
large bag of coins tied to my belt all day. I opened the bag and
began stacking the coins according to country and denomination.
When Tamara finished her first Rum Sunset, Flaco ordered her
another, then another, and I realized Flaco was trying to get her
drunk, and Tamara must have realized this too, since she excused
herself from the third drink, claiming she had a headache.

Flaco kept drinking and got drunk himself. He told a
long story about how his father did well in the wine business,
until one day when he went to Mass and fell asleep. In a dream, the
statue of the Virgin began weeping. Flaco’s father asked the Virgin
why she wept, and she told him it was because he sold wine when he
should be selling hats to the Indians in the Amazon. Flaco’s father
became convinced he would make a great deal of money selling hats
because, after all, the Virgin Mary had told him to do it. Then he
sailed up the Amazon and was killed by a poisonous toad before he
could sell a single hat. This incident greatly diminished the faith
of everyone in Flaco’s village—so much so that the villagers broke
the offending statue with hammers.

"Sho, what about your family?" Flaco asked Tamara,
his head wobbling back and forth as if it would topple off. She
straightened up, and her face took on a closed look. She hadn’t
drunk much, but she pretended to be out of control so we’d excuse
her bad manners. "Family? Want to know about my family? I’ll tell
you—my father, he was just like Angelo there. He only wanted two
things: order and immortality." I had just finished stacking my
coins in neat little staggered rows, like banana trees. Tamara
lashed out with her stump and knocked all the coins down.