00.14 — Hakim Seeks the Virgin — Chapter 13

CHAPTER 13

Date uncertain · Cuetzalan / Mexico City

The mist erases distances first. Then it begins to erase names.

Isaac missed the shot.

The cue ball barely touched the red and continued toward a cushion with an almost offensive slowness, as though the billiard table obeyed a private physics.

Casey Walsh did not raise his head.

He was drawing.

He had the notebook resting on his knees and kept repeating a line that would not stay where he wanted it. Face, shoulder, emptiness. He began again.

—My problem began when I wanted to become figurative.

Isaac walked around the table.

—I thought your problem was alcohol.

—That works perfectly.

Another shot.

Worse.

Walsh rubbed out what he had just done with his thumb.

—A stain never complains because it does not look like itself. A face does.

Isaac was about to answer, but stopped to look at the drawing.

A child.

Or something beginning to look like a child.

Walsh closed the notebook.

Too late.

—Who is he?

—Nobody.

—All your nobodies look like somebody.

Casey poured himself some rum.

He said no more.

Isaac went back to the billiard table.

For days he had been thinking about a number he could not feel as a number: thirteen billion eight hundred million years. He could repeat it. He could write it down. He could not imagine it.

Between that first instant and that ball motionless on the green cloth, there was room for everything.

That meant nothing either.

Hakim had had too many names.

That was the first problem.

In a manuscript from Antioch he appeared as a boy. In Cairo, as a man who walked over the rooftops at night. One chronicler considered him mad. Another maintained that he spoke to beings nobody else could see. The Druze ended up making him into something he may never have wanted to be.

Then he disappeared.

He did not die.

He disappeared.

The difference eventually mattered more than everything else written about him.

There was no corpse.

There was no tomb.

There was not even a sufficiently boring account of his death for historians to accept.

Tony said that was enough to make a religion.

Casey said it was enough to make a painting.

Isaac did not yet know what was enough to make a memory.

The manuscripts were no help either.

Paris kept one variant.

Oxford another.

In one, Hakim drank water flavored with peach.

In another he pursued astrologers.

In another he went out at night dressed like anyone else to hear what people said about him.

Small contradictions.

Precisely the ones that survive.

The large ones can be corrected.

The small ones get under the skin.

Walsh had begun drawing him without meaning to.

That was what he said.

He wanted to paint his dead son.

The sentence hung in the air and nobody asked anything.

But the child appearing on the paper was not a portrait.

Nor was he exactly Hakim.

There was something worse about him.

He seemed to be waiting for someone to recognize him.

Narumi slept in the groom’s house.

The mist had descended early and from the Sitio the light in her room could barely be made out.

She dreamed of a child beside the swimming pool.

He did nothing.

That was what was unsettling.

Other children in the dream ran around it. They threw themselves into the water. Shouted. Climbed out and went back in.

He stayed underneath.

His eyes open.

Watching them from the bottom.

Narumi wanted to warn them.

Nobody could hear her.

Then the child raised a hand and touched something that was not in the water.

A surface.

The dream changed.

There was a canvas.

His finger passed through it.

Not as someone tears through cloth.

As someone touches water.

The painting rippled.

On the other side there was a woman.

Narumi woke up.

She did not scream.

She lay listening to the frogs.

For several minutes she was certain someone was in the attic.

Then she stopped being certain.

Much worse.

On returning from the funeral, Bernardo wanted to switch on the Dell.

Nobody asked him to.

The computer was still on the long table at the Papins’, where the family used to leave things they did not yet know whether to keep or throw away.

My father had written there for years.

Not only memoirs.

We discovered that later.

Tony brought an extension cord.

—Don’t turn it on yet.

—Why?

—Because he was electrocuted in front of that thing.

—It wasn’t the computer.

—Precisely for that reason.

Bernardo knelt down.

In psychiatry he had learned to approach certain people slowly. Now he used the same caution with a machine.

—What did he call his files?

My mother answered:

—Cascajo.

We looked at one another.

—All of them?

—That’s what he said.

Bernardo switched it on.

The screen flickered.

For an instant the logo appeared.

Then a spark.

The smell of burning.

Black.

Tony disconnected the power.

Nobody said anything.

It was almost comical that a computer could die twice.

The technician arrived the next day.

He took the Dell apart, removed the disks and held them up to the window.

—They’re stuck together.

—Can anything be recovered?

—Not here.

—Where?

The man thought.

—Switzerland.

I do not know why Switzerland sounded like another planet then.

We sent the disks.

We waited.

Meanwhile we did what every family does after a death: we began disputing our versions of the dead man.

My mother remembered one thing.

Tony another.

Bernardo corrected dates.

Alejo did not argue.

I wanted to be anywhere else.

Each of us made our own father.

The message from Switzerland arrived weeks later.

Partial recovery.

That word turned out to be exact.

Partial.

Folders without names.

Photographs split into bands.

Documents that ended halfway through a sentence.

Characters replaced by symbols.

Hundreds of pieces that might once have formed something and now looked like the archaeological remains of a person.

Cascajo.

My father had chosen the name well.

We opened files.

Nothing.

Another.

A list of books.

Another.

Geology.

Another.

An incomplete letter.

Then an isolated line appeared.

It had no date.

There was no paragraph before or after it.

It said:

The Virgin of Tribulation arrived before us.

Tony read over my shoulder.

—What does it mean?

—I thought you knew.

She did not answer.

Bernardo asked us to look for the original file.

It did not exist.

Only that fragment recovered from damaged sectors of the disk.

A sentence without context.

It could have been a note.

A quotation.

The beginning of something else.

Even an error in the recovery program.

That would have been reassuring.

Tony read it again.

Arrived before us.

It did not say “existed.”

It did not say “was there.”

Arrived.

As though it had come from somewhere.

That night I dreamed of Casey’s billiard table.

The cue ball moved on its own.

It passed through a cushion.

Then another.

Every time it should have stopped, it appeared again on the other side.

Casey kept drawing.

—It’s wrong —I told him.

—What?

—The table.

—No.

The ball crossed again.

—Then the ball.

Walsh finally raised his head.

—Not that either.

Behind him stood the child.

I did not know whether he was Hakim.

I did not know whether he was Casey’s son.

I did not know whether he was someone who had not yet been born.

The child put a finger to his lips.

The ball kept rolling.

And before waking I understood that perhaps our mistake had been to believe things returned.

Some did not return.

They had never finished leaving.