Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

  I stared at the sketch for a long time. It scared me. Because there was something true about it.

  I wondered where he’d learned to draw. I was suddenly jealous of him. He could swim, he could draw, he could talk to people. He read poetry and he liked himself. I wondered how that felt, to really like yourself. And I wondered why some people didn’t like themselves and others did. Maybe that’s just the way it was.

  I looked at his drawing, then looked at my chair. That’s when I saw the note he’d left.

  Ari,

  I hope you like the sketch of your chair. I miss you at the pool. The lifeguards are jerks.

  Dante

  After dinner, I picked up the phone and called him.

  “Why did you leave?”

  “You needed to rest.”

  “I’m sorry I fell asleep.”

  Then neither one of us said anything.

  “I liked the sketch,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “Because it looks just like my chair.”

  “Is that the only reason?”

  “It holds something,” I said

  “What?”

  “Emotion.”

  “Tell me,” Dante said.

  “It’s sad. It’s sad and it’s lonely.”

  “Like you,” he said.

  I hated that he saw who I was. “I’m not sad all the time,” I said.

  “I know,” he said.

  “Will you show me the others?”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “For the same reason you can’t tell me about your dreams.”

  Five

  THE FLU DIDN’T SEEM TO WANT TO LET ME GO.

  That night, the dreams came again. My brother. He was on the other side of the river. He was in Juárez and I was in El Paso and we could see each other. And I yelled, “Bernardo, come over!” and he shook his head. And then I thought he didn’t understand, so I yelled at him in Spanish. “Vente pa’aca, Bernardo!” I thought that if I only knew the right words or spoke them in the right language, then he would cross the river. And come home. If only I knew the right words. If only I spoke the right language. And then my dad was there. He and my brother stared at each other and I couldn’t stand the look on their faces, because it seemed like there was the hurt of all the sons and all the fathers of the world. And the hurt was so deep that it was way beyond tears and so their faces were dry. And then the dream changed and my brother and father were gone. I was standing in the same place where my father had been standing, on the Juárez side, and Dante was standing across from me. And he was shirtless and shoeless and I wanted to swim toward him but I couldn’t move. And then he said something to me in English and I couldn’t understand him. And I said something to him in Spanish, and he couldn’t understand me.

  And I was so alone.

  And then all the light was gone and Dante disappeared into the darkness.

  I woke up and I felt lost.

  I didn’t know where I was.

  The fever was back. I thought that maybe nothing would ever be the same. But I knew it was just the fever. I fell asleep again. The sparrows were falling from the sky. And it was me who was killing them.

  Six

  DANTE CAME OVER TO VISIT. I KNEW I WASN’T A LOT of fun. He knew it too. It didn’t seem to matter.

  “Do you want to talk?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Do you want me to go?”

  “No,” I said.

  He read poems to me. I thought about the sparrows falling from the sky. As I listened to Dante’s voice, I wondered what my brother would sound like. I wondered if he’d ever read a poem. My mind was full and crowded—falling sparrows, my brother’s ghost, Dante’s voice.

  Dante finished reading a poem, then went looking for another.

  “Aren’t you afraid of catching what I have?” I said.

  “No.”

  “You’re not afraid?”

  “No.”

  “You’re not afraid of anything.”

  “I’m afraid of lots of things, Ari.”

  I could have asked What? What are you afraid of? I don’t think he would have told me.

  Seven

  THE FEVER WAS GONE.

  But the dreams stayed.

  My father was in them. And my brother. And Dante. In my dreams. And sometimes my mother, too. I had this image stuck in my mind. I was four and I was walking down the street, holding my brother’s hand. I wondered if it was a memory or a dream. Or a hope.

  I lay around and thought about things. All the ordinary problems and mysteries of my life that mattered only to me. Not that thinking about things made me feel better. I decided that my junior year at Austin High School was going to suck. Dante went to Cathedral because they had a swim team. My mom and dad had wanted to send me to school there, but I’d refused. I didn’t want to go to an all-boy Catholic school. I’d insisted to myself and to my parents that all the boys there were rich. My mom argued that they gave scholarships to smart boys. I argued back that I wasn’t smart enough to get a scholarship. My mom argued back that they could afford to send me there. “I hate those boys!” I’d begged my father not to send me there.

  I never said anything to Dante about hating Cathedral boys. He didn’t have to know.

  I thought about my mom’s accusation. “You don’t have any friends.”

  I thought of my chair and how really it was a portrait of me.

  I was a chair. I felt sadder than I’d ever felt.

  I knew I wasn’t a boy anymore. But I still felt like a boy. Sort of. But there were other things I was starting to feel. Man things, I guess. Man loneliness was much bigger than boy loneliness. And I didn’t want to be treated like a boy anymore. I didn’t want to live in my parents’ world and I didn’t have a world of my own. In a strange way, my friendship with Dante had made me feel even more alone.

  Maybe it was because Dante seemed to make himself fit everywhere he went. And me, I always felt that I didn’t belong anywhere. I didn’t even belong in my own body—especially in my own body. I was changing into someone I didn’t know. The change hurt but I didn’t know why it hurt. And nothing about my own emotions made any sense.

  When I was younger, I’d had this idea that I wanted to keep a journal. I sort of wrote things down in this little leather book I bought, filled with blank pages. But I was never disciplined about the whole thing. The journal turned into a random thing with random thoughts and nothing more.

  When I was in the sixth grade, my parents gave me a baseball glove and a typewriter for my birthday. I was on a team so the glove made sense. But a typewriter? What was it about me that made them think of getting me a typewriter? I pretended to like it. But I wasn’t a good pretender.

  Just because I didn’t talk about things didn’t make me a good actor.

  The funny thing was, I learned how to type. At last, a skill. The baseball thing didn’t work out. I was good enough to make the team. But I hated it. I did it for my father.

  I didn’t know why I was thinking about all these things—except that’s what I always did. I guess I had my own personal television in my brain. I could control whatever I wanted to watch. I could switch the channels anytime I wanted.

  I thought about calling Dante. And then I thought that maybe I wouldn’t call him. I didn’t really feel like talking to anyone. I just felt like talking to myself.

  I got to thinking about my older sisters and how they were so close to each other but so far away from me. I knew it was the age thing. That seemed to matter. To them. And to me. I was born “a little late.” That’s the expression my sisters used. One day, they were talking to each other at the kitchen table and they were talking about me and that’s the expression they used. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard someone say that about me. So I decided to confront my sisters because I just didn’t like being thought of that way. I don’t know, I just sort of lost i
t. I looked at my sister, Cecilia, and said: “You were born a little too early.” I smiled at her and shook my head. “Isn’t that sad? Isn’t that just too fucking sad?”

  My other sister, Sylvia, lectured me. “I hate that word. Don’t talk that way. That’s so disrespectful.”

  Like they respected me. Yeah, sure they did.

  They told my mom I was using language. My mother hated “language.” She looked at me with the look. “The ‘f’ word shows an extreme lack of respect and an extreme lack of imagination. And don’t roll your eyes.”

  But I got in worse trouble for refusing to apologize.

  The good thing was that my sisters never used the expression “born too late” ever again. Not in front of me, anyway.

  I think I was mad because I couldn’t talk to my brother. And I was mad because I couldn’t really talk to my sisters either. It’s not that my sisters didn’t care about me. It’s just that they mostly treated me more like a son than a brother. I didn’t need three mothers. So really, I was alone. And being alone made me want to talk to someone my own age. Someone who understood that using the “f” word wasn’t a measure of my lack of imagination. Sometimes using that word just made me feel free.

  Talking to myself in my journal qualified as talking to someone my own age.

  Sometimes I would write down all the bad words I could think of. It made me feel better. My mother had her rules. For my father: no smoking in the house. And for everyone: no cussing. She didn’t go for that. Even when my father let out a string of interesting words, she looked at him and said, “Take it outside, Jaime. Maybe you can find a dog who’ll appreciate that kind of language.”

  My mom was soft. But she also very strict. I think that’s how she survived. I wasn’t going to get into the whole cussing thing with my mom. So I did most of my cussing in my head.

  And then there was this whole thing with my name. Angel Aristotle Mendoza. I hated the name Angel and I’d never let anybody call me that. Every guy I knew who was named Angel was a real asshole. I didn’t care for Aristotle either. And even though I knew I was named after my grandfather, I also knew I had inherited the name of the world’s most famous philosopher. I hated that. Everyone expected something from me. Something I just couldn’t give.

  So I renamed myself Ari.

  If I switched the letter, my name was Air.

  I thought it might be a great thing to be the air.

  I could be something and nothing at the same time. I could be necessary and also invisible. Everyone would need me and no one would be able to see me.

  Eight

  MY MOM INTERRUPTED MY THOUGHTS—IF THAT’S what they were. “Dante’s on the phone.”

  I walked past the kitchen and noticed my mom was cleaning out all her cabinets. Whatever summer meant, for Mom it meant work.

  I threw myself on the couch in the living room and grabbed the phone.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Hi,” he said. “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing. I’m still not feeling great. My mom’s taking me to the doctor this afternoon.”

  “I was hoping we could go swimming.”

  “Shit,” I said, “I can’t. I just, you know—”

  “Yeah, I know. So you’re just hanging out?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you reading something, Ari?”

  “No. I’m thinking.”

  “About what?”

  “Stuff.”

  “Stuff?”

  “You know, Dante, things.”

  “Like what, Ari?”

  “You know, like how my two sisters and my brother are so much older than me and how that makes me feel.”

  “How old are they, your sisters and brother?”

  “My sisters are twins. They’re not identical, but they look alike. They’re twenty-seven. My mom had them when she was eighteen.”

  “Wow,” he said. “Twenty-seven.”

  “Yeah, wow.”

  “I’m fifteen and I have three nieces and four nephews.”

  “I think that’s really cool, Ari.”

  “Trust me, Dante, it’s not that cool. They don’t even call me Uncle Ari.”

  “So how old is your brother?”

  “He’s twenty-five.”

  “I always wanted a brother.”

  “Yeah, well, I might as well not have one.”

  “Why?”

  “We don’t talk about him. It’s like he’s dead.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s in prison, Dante.” I’d never told anyone about my brother. I’d never said a word about him to another human being. I felt bad for talking about him.

  Dante didn’t say anything.

  “Can we not talk about him?” I said.

  “Why?”

  “It makes me feel bad.”

  “Ari, you didn’t do anything.”

  “I don’t want to talk about him, okay, Dante?”

  “Okay. But you know, Ari, you have this really interesting life.”

  “Not really,” I said.

  “Yes, really,” he said. “At least you have siblings. Me, I only have a mother and a father.”

  “What about cousins?”

  “They don’t like me. They think I’m—well, they think I’m a little different. They’re really Mexican, you know. And I’m sort of, well, what did you call me?”

  “A pocho.”

  “That’s exactly what I am. My Spanish isn’t great.”

  “You can learn it,” I said.

  “Learning it at school is different than learning it at home or on the street. And it’s really hard because most of my cousins are on my mom’s side—and they’re really poor. My mom’s the youngest and she really fought her family so she could go to school. Her father didn’t think a girl should go to college. So my mom said, ‘Screw it, I’m going anyway.’”

  “I can’t picture your mom saying, ‘screw it.’”

  “Well, she probably didn’t say that—but she found a way. She was really smart and she worked her way through college and then she got some kind of fellowship to go to graduate school at Berkeley. And that’s where she met my dad. I was born somewhere in there. They had their studies. My mom was turning herself into a psychologist. My dad was turning himself into an English professor. I mean, my dad’s parents were born in Mexico. They live in a small little house in East LA and they speak no English and own a little restaurant. It’s like my mom and dad created a whole new world for themselves. I live in their new world. But they understand the old world, the world they came from—and I don’t. I don’t belong anywhere. That’s the problem.”

  “You do,” I said. “You belong everywhere you go. That’s just how you are.”

  “You’ve never seen me around my cousins. I feel like a freak.”

  I knew what it was like to feel like that. “I know,” I said. “I feel like a freak too.”

  “Well, at least you’re a real Mexican.”

  “What do I know about Mexico, Dante?”

  The quiet over the phone was strange. “Do you think it will always be this way?”

  “What?”

  “I mean, when do we start feeling like the world belongs to us?”

  I wanted to tell him that the world would never belong to us. “I don’t know,” I said. “Tomorrow.”

  Nine

  I WENT INTO THE KITCHEN AND WATCHED MY MOM AS she cleaned out her cabinets.

  “What were you and Dante talking about?”

  “Stuff.”

  I wanted to ask her about my brother. But I knew I wasn’t going to ask. “He was telling me about his mom and dad, about how they met at graduate school at Berkeley. How he was born there. He said he remembered his parents reading books and studying all the time.”

  My mom smiled. “Just like me and you,” she said.

  “I don’t remember.”

  “I was finishing my bachelor’s degree when your father was at war. It helped me take my mind off things. I wo
rried all the time. My mom and my aunts helped me take care of your sisters and your brother while I went to school and studied. And when your father came back, we had you.” She smiled at me and did that combing-my-hair-with-her-fingers thing.

  “Your father got on with the post office and I kept going to school. I had you and I had school. And your father was safe.”

  “Was it hard?”

  “I was happy. And you were such a good baby. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. We bought this house. It needed work, but it was ours. And I was doing what I had always wanted to do.”

  “You always wanted to be a teacher?”

  “Always. When I was growing up, we didn’t have anything, but my mom understood how much school meant to me. She cried when I told her I was going to marry your father.”

  “She didn’t like him?”

  “No, it wasn’t that. She just wanted me to keep going to school. I promised her that I would. It took me a while but I kept my promise.”

  That was the first time that I really saw my mother as a person. A person who was so much more than just my mother. It was strange to think of her that way. I wanted to ask her about my father, but I didn’t know how. “Was he different? When he came back from the war?”

  “Yes.”

  “How was he different?”

  “There’s a wound somewhere inside of him, Ari.”

  “But what is it? The hurt? What is it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How can you not know, Mom?”

  “Because it’s his. It’s just his, Ari.”

  I understood that she had just accepted my father’s private wound. “Will it ever heal?”

  “I don’t think so.”