The Book of Lost Saints by Daniel Jose Older

Author:Daniel Jose Older [Older, Daniel José]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Imprint
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

Ramón is also alone, if you don’t count me. He’s cutting through the streets toward the club, half dazed and somewhere between wrathful and in love; a touch of both. He’s full of things to say and keeps having to pull his mind back. It’s racing ahead minutes and then weeks and months, guessing and imagining, debating. And then his phone blurts out that drumbeat again, and Nilda’s name appears on the screen. We both cringe at the same time.

Ramón blinks at the phone, weighing a million different tensions, finally answers it.

“Ay, m’ijo,” comes his mother’s shaking voice.

Ramón, a clenched fist, seems to loosen slightly. The power of a mother is tremendous. His voice is ice, though: “Yes?”

“It is impossible to explain,” Nilda moans.

Ramón stops walking. “You keep saying that, Mami, but all I’ve ever wanted was for you to try. Instead you don’t want to talk about it, you tell me not to bother with it, you change the subject. All I’ve wanted was for you to explain.”

“¡Pero no se puede!” she yells, and somehow, through the coldness of technology and the frigid night, her rage and anguish reach me. It can’t be done. She’s right. In a way, that yell summarizes my whole predicament. Even with these living memories that inhabit his dreams, he can’t understand what it was like. Not really.

Ramón tightens his face against both the winter night and his mother’s rebuke. Shakes his head. “But you never tried,” he says, and snaps his phone shut.

The silence descends; the clack of that phone closing seems to echo through it. He’s never hung up on her before, barely ever chastised her. He shakes away the image of what she must be doing now—bawling, most likely—walks into the club with a curt nod at Cadiz, and finds himself enveloped in a world of sound. Luis—now that I know a little more about my life, I make a mental note to figure out where I knew Luis from; that face is so familiar. Prison, perhaps?—Luis has brought in an acoustic soul group and they’re filling every corner of the place with their luscious melodies and shimmering arpeggios. It’s hard to think straight, the music is so beautiful, and then the woman starts singing—she’s tall with straight black hair and a million tattoos across her bare shoulders and when she opens her mouth the room stops spinning for a minute. Everyone looks up to see where this wondrous noise is coming from. Her voice is deep and raspy, it aches with stories about what might have been. She sings the first little riff, throws back a shot, and smirks into the microphone before letting loose another phrase. People finally look away, return to their dancing, but there’s a new sensuality to everything, we’re all moving in slow motion and people are dancing closer and closer together; the music won’t let their sexual tension stand unacknowledged.

Aliceana is dancing alone though, swaying through a series of simple, graceful steps in a world of her own.

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