Tentacle by Rita Indiana

Author:Rita Indiana
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: contemporary fiction;literary fiction;gender reassignment;contemporary art;electronic music;failed artist;post-apocalyptic;prophecy;climate change;queer politics;Yoruba;feminist dystopia;environmentalism;Caribbean;poverty;colonialism;Dominican;Dominican Republic;novel;translation;translated fiction;crime;comedy;drama;love story;realism;women’s literary fiction;rite of passage;drugs;Afro-Caribbean religion;santeria;Papi;Junot Díaz;Juan Pablo Villalobos;Rivers Solomon;Julianne Pachico;Yuri Herrera;Carmen Maria Machado
Publisher: And Other Stories Publishing
Published: 2018-09-26T18:51:19+00:00

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Do I have two bodies or is my mind capable of broadcasting two different channels simultaneously? Acilde asked himself, his eyes fixed on the small fake-pearl necklace worn by the nurse who was changing his IV. The day’s news was being projected in front of his hospital bed: “During a raid in Villa Mella, after a tip from the leaders of the Pentecostal terrorists, the Servants of the Apocalypse, the Special Police accidentally rounded up one of the suspects in the murder of Esther Escudero, an Africanist religious leader and personal friend of the president, murdered last week during a robbery of her home. The suspect, Acilde Figueroa, who according to her digital footprint was a woman, is now a man, and was found strapped to a bed, unconscious and dehydrated, next to the corpse of Dr. Eric Vitier, who appeared to have suffered respiratory failure hours before. Authorities also found a sea anemone, valued at sixty-five thousand dollars. The specimen has been transferred to a private laboratory, where it is currently receiving specialized care.” Photos of a happy Acilde, Eric, Esther, and Morla that had nothing to do with the news appeared on the screen during the voiceover: Acilde at a birthday party, Eric at his medical school graduation in Cuba, and a selfie of Morla in a yellow Indiana Pacers T-shirt.

A helicopter landed noisily on the roof of the hospital. Outside Acilde’s room, next to the half-open door, the police officer keeping guard swatted away mosquitos with his hand as he watched a baseball game on an old tablet. Acilde walked to the bathroom unassisted. He lifted the hospital robe to look at himself in the mirror, pleased with the results of the drug: the new broadness to his back and thickness to his forearms, the absence of fat from his hips, the sad little sac holding his balls, and a chest so flat it was incapable of nourishing another human being. He thought the late twentieth-century life in Sosúa playing out in his head might be a side effect of the Rainbow Brite. Back in Sosúa, in the little house where the natives revered him, in front of the mirror that hung from a nail over the faucet in the yard, he assured himself, like a midwife with a newborn, that this new body didn’t need anything else. It’s identical, he thought, entranced, as he pinched the nipples and buttocks and opened and closed the mouth of this 1991 version of himself, and said, “I’m hungry,” then ate with his fingers from the cold fish a hopeful Nenuco offered him on a Duralex dish.

Satisfied, he made his way back to the hospital bed. The officer at the door opened it with the formality and efficiency of someone being watched by his superiors. A huge red-haired mulato, in a very red Adidas tracksuit and with a Holy Infant of Atocha medal hanging from his neck on a gold chain, came in with two suited bodyguards. He snapped his fingers to make them leave, then dropped onto the couch.

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