Technologies of the Self (Driftless Unsolicited Novella Series) by Haris A. Durrani

Author:Haris A. Durrani
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: FIC056000, FIC028080, FIC000000, Modern and contemporary fiction (post c. 1945), FICTION / Science Fiction / Time Travel, FA, FICTION / General, FIC019000, FICTION / Hispanic & Latino, FICTION / Literary
ISBN: 9781942083207
Publisher: Brain Mill Press LLC
Published: 2016-02-17T23:00:00+00:00

My fridge breaks, and Mom drives into Manhattan with a new one. She calls Uncle Tomás to help me move it in. She brings me home-cooked plátanos y arroz con pollo, and we eat as we wait for Uncle Tomás to arrive. “I told him two o’clock,” she says. “He’s always getting confused! I told him two o’clock. I don’t know what his problem is. I keep telling him, when he dies I’m not going to his funeral!” We eat more. She tells me about the woman who lived next door. “You should ask him about that,” she says. “She introduced him to all these bad habits. He was only your age, you know. Twenty, twenty-one. She was maybe twenty-six. She was married and everything.” Veronica was the friend of a cousin from the Dominican Republic. My abuelos had helped her and her newlywed husband find a place in New York.

Uncle Tomás arrives and argues with Mom about the time. “Your mother, boy,” he says, “she’s a pain in the ass, you know that?” He pauses. “But she has a good heart.” We haul the fridge up the stairs, and afterward he sits and breathes like a dog. “I need a smoke,” he says, patting the pack in his breast pocket. “Man I need a smoke.” He leaves for ten minutes then returns to help me lift the fridge the rest of the way.

I ask him about the neighbor. He is motionless for a minute, gears stripping their teeth somewhere behind his skull. Finally his eyebrows jump. “Oh! That one. Uh … uh … Veronica? Veronica. You wanna know about that chick?”

“Yeah,” I say.

“Oh, I’ll tell you about her. She was hot, boy. She was so fucking hot.”

“Did she have anything to do with the Devil?”

He laughs and coughs from his chest. “Shit, boy. What do you think? Everything has to do with that son of a bitch.”

As Uncle Tomás speaks, I remember Mom’s account of how the family landed in Washington Heights at the apartment on 169th Street. First it was 135th in Spanish Harlem, then 175th. And finally they were across from New York Presbyterian perched on the highest floor overlooking Fort Washington Ave. Before they arrived there, they had many neighbors on 135th Street, some of whom I know today. Their Puerto Rican neighbor Carmen, who later moved to the third floor on 169th, still specializes in Dominican cakes, heavy with rich icing and filled with homemade guava jelly. Veronica I don’t know. She was a family friend, and as they had with many families, the Paolis helped her relocate to Manhattan. She had recently married when she moved onto their street. Uncle Tomás tells me he noticed her several times. She was only a few years older but, unlike Tomás, she had grown into her body. Her jaw had set, wide and firm, and she had bleached her hair blond many times. She was blonder even than Tomás, who had by this age shifted naturally into a light shade of brown.

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