But there had been no stuttering stranger on Wednesday. And Paola left four years ago, taking our two-year-old son to live in the lowland city where she had been born. Dear Martina was gone—the only casualty of an unexplained fire that consumed the laboratory where she’d worked alongside my professional rival and best friend, Dr. Santiago Real.
No, there was only the bistro, our disagreement, the bitter words with which Anyssa left me on the sidewalk, and the book I found on the white linen cloth when I returned to the table to nurse my pride with bad wine.
One Christmas season I drew my
big brother’s name out of the pot.
He was a fisherman; he decorated
his half of the room we shared
in eclectic Field & Stream motif.
Naturally, I shopped a sporting goods
store in search of the perfect gift.
My knowledge of fish and my interest
in fishing began and ended with threading
half of a squirming earthworm onto
a rusty hook and dangling it in the water
weighed down by a soft clump of lead
under a red and white plastic bobber.
(I thought of myself as a purist.)
I knew in the abstract that one could
angle for largemouth bass or smallmouth
bass or brook trout or rainbow trout or
any desired species in creek or lake
or stream, but I had no patience for the art
and science of attracting and catching
anything without a taste for worms.
So I selected a jar of fluorescent
orange roe. I imagined the plump,
squishy balls looked delicious to fish.
I also picked a gorgeous lure, an oval
of convex stainless steel painted in faux
fishy stripes and spots of red enamel,
a beauty to win a fish’s heart.
Note: The prompt for today was to describe someone who was “as close as a blood relative,” though not related. I decided to go in another direction.
Some movement behind Paola: the maître d’ waved a napkin above his head. I glanced across the street, curious who could be watching for the signal. Earlier, I had noticed a police sergeant loitering by the newsstand, flipping the pages of a magazine. Now he stared at me from behind impenetrable sunglasses. When the maître d’ shouted a clipped “Eh!,” the sergeant darted through the traffic on the busy avenue.
When I turned back to remark on this astonishing development, Anyssa or Martina or Paola had vanished, and two waiters struggled to drag the strange herald away from my table.
“I’m sorry you are so afraid, honey, but everything is going to be okay.” My mother kneaded the back of my neck with her right hand. The knuckles of the left one looked white compared to the tan vinyl that covered the steering wheel. We must have been sitting in Dad’s old Plymouth. It was my first day of kindergarten. I remember it like it was yesterday.
I should ask Dad about that old car. What was the model? How long did he drive it? I think he sold it for scrap when I was about eight.
—
I almost couldn’t believe it, but Dad said that …more
I didn’t recognize his face or the strange accent. “I’m sorry. Have we met?”
“If you will allow me only a m-moment, I have information that is vital to your s-s-safety, but we must not—”
“Who are you? Who sent you here?” Martina asked. Her face looked fearful—or was she angry? I’d never seen her so upset in our four months together. She pushed away from the table, turned her head toward the door of the restaurant, and waved two fingers at the maître d’.
“Puh-puh-please, señor, you must b-be very careful. They know all about your new experiment—”
When I opened my eyes again, the spot of light had climbed up the opposite wall. I tried to calculate how long I’d been unconscious—three hours, perhaps? Then I remembered the dream: last Wednesday, lunch with Anyssa—the bistro on Avenida Mistral. We had just ordered a bottle of cheap Chardonnay when a short, balding man stepped out of the sidewalk crowd and approached our table. He clutched a black book against the lapel of his shiny gray suit.
“Señor Vicente, I’m very s-s-sorry to interrupt your meal,” he said. “But I must discuss a matter of g-great importance.”
I awoke and found myself in an unfamiliar gray space, my aching body supine on a smooth concrete floor. Through a squarish opening somewhere above my head, a narrow beam of light illuminated dust motes in the air and allowed me to discern the extent of the room. The floor was about ten feet by ten feet. I pulled myself into a sitting position with my back against the outside wall. Good God! I realized that the room had no door. I searched the space above for some sense of the ceiling but saw only an endless column of darkness.
In addition to the launch of the Fall 2008 50/50 workshop, today also marks the first day of a new project in which I’m participating, called “100 Words.” For the month of September, I’ll be writing an installment of exactly 100 words every day and submitting it to the 100 Words site. When I complete the month, the folks who run 100 Words will publish my contributions on the site. But I don’t want to make my readers wait that long, so I’m going to post them here as I write ’em.
My family was baptized into life in Houston on June 15, 1976—the only time in history that a game at the Astrodome was ever rained out. In the early afternoon, a storm dropped almost 13 inches of water on the city in about three hours. Flooding and traffic were so bad that the players couldn’t make it to the legendary domed stadium, much less the fans. We didn’t know that factoid until much later. The news the next day focused, of course, on the eight lives lost and on the damage to the Texas Medical Center and several of the city’s art museums.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. My story starts earlier in the day, on the last leg of a four-day trip from our previous home in the suburbs of Philadelphia. We’d spent a night each …more
I’ve signed up again for “50/50,” Max Regan’s 50-day online workshop. “Students will receive a writing exercise via e-mail each day and will write at least one page of text a day,” says Max’s introduction to the course. Fifty days, fifty pages—hence the title. For more information about the course, visit Max’s 50/50 blog.
The class provides no mechanism for feedback; its purpose is merely to inspire and stimulate participants to cultivate or expand their every-day writing habit. I’m planning to post my 50/50 output here again, however, so that friends and fellow writers who’ve expressed interest or curiosity about my writing can take a look and give me some comments. [View the archive of my 50/50 pieces from the spring 2008 course.]
If you’ve found your way here, either because I invited you or just by accident, I’d love to know what you think. Please post your feedback as a comment on the posting to which it applies, or if you’d prefer not to make them public, . (Or call me on the phone if your critique is likely to make me cry.)
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