Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe (6 page)

For a moment, we just stood there looking down at the dead bird. “It’s just a little sparrow,” he said. And then he started to cry.

I didn’t know what to do. I just stood there and watched him.

We walked back across the street and sat on his front porch. He tossed his tennis shoes across the street with all his might and anger. He wiped the tears from his face.

“Were you scared?” he asked.

“No.”

“I was.”

“So?”

And then we were quiet again. I hated the quiet. Finally I just asked a stupid question, “Why do birds exist, anyway?”

He looked at me. “You don’t know?”

“I guess I don’t.”

“Birds exist to teach us things about the sky.”

“You believe that?”

“Yes.”

I wanted to tell him not to cry anymore, tell him that what those boys did to that bird didn’t matter. But I knew it
did
matter. It mattered to Dante. And, anyway, it didn’t do any good to tell him not to cry because he needed to cry. That’s the way he was.

And then he finally stopped. He took a deep breath and looked at me. “Will you help me bury the bird?”

“Sure.”

We got a shovel from his father’s garage and walked to the park where the dead bird was lying on the grass. I picked up the bird with the shovel and carried it across the street, into Dante’s backyard. I dug a hole underneath a big oleander.

We put the bird in the hole and buried it.

Neither of us said a word.

Dante was crying again. And I felt mean because I didn’t feel like crying. I didn’t really feel anything for the bird. It was a bird. Maybe the bird didn’t deserve to get shot by some stupid kid whose idea of
fun was shooting at things. But it was still just a bird.

I was harder than Dante. I think I’d tried to hide that hardness from him because I’d wanted him to like me. But now he knew. That I was hard. And maybe that was okay. Maybe he could like the fact that I was hard just as I liked the fact that he
wasn’t
hard.

We both stared at the bird’s grave. “Thanks,” he said.

“Sure,” I said.

I knew he wanted to be alone.

“Hey,” I whispered, “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“We’ll go swimming,” he said.

“Yeah, we’ll go swimming.”

There was a tear running down his cheek. It seemed like a river in the light of the setting sun.

I wondered what it was like, to be the kind of guy that cried over the death of a bird.

I waved bye. He waved bye back.

As I walked home, I thought about birds and the meaning of their existence. Dante had an answer. I didn’t. I didn’t have any idea as to why birds existed. I’d never even asked myself the question.

Dante’s answer made sense to me. If we studied birds, maybe we could learn to be free. I think that’s what he was saying. I had a philosopher’s name. What was
my
answer? Why didn’t I have an answer?

And why was it that some guys had tears in them and some had no tears at all? Different boys lived by different rules.

When I got home, I sat on my front porch.

I watched the sun set.

I felt alone, but not in a bad way. I really liked being alone. Maybe I liked it too much. Maybe my father was like that too.

I thought of Dante and wondered about him.

And it seemed to me that Dante’s face was a map of the world. A world without any darkness.

Wow, a world without darkness. How beautiful was that?

When I was a boy, I used to wake up thinking that the world was ending.

THE MORNING AFTER WE BURIED THE SPARROW, I
woke up on fire with a fever.

My muscles ached, my throat hurt, my head throbbed almost like a heart. I kept staring at my hands, almost believing they belonged to someone else. When I tried to get up, I had no balance, no equilibrium, and the room spun around and around. I tried to take a step, but my legs weren’t strong enough to carry my weight. I fell back on the bed, my clock radio crashing to the floor.

My mother appeared in my room and for some reason she didn’t seem real. “Mom? Mom? Is that you?” I think I was yelling.

She was holding a question in her eyes. “Yes,” she said. She seemed so serious.

“I fell,” I said.

She said something—but I couldn’t translate what she was saying. Everything was so strange and I thought maybe I was dreaming, but her hand on my arm felt like a real touch. “You’re burning up,” she said.

I felt her hands on my face.

I kept wondering where I was, so I asked her. “Where are we?”

She held me for a moment. “Shhh.”

The world was so silent. There was a barrier between me and the world, and I thought for a moment that the world had never wanted me and now it was taking the opportunity to get rid of me.

I looked up and saw my mom standing in front of me, holding out two aspirin, a glass of water.

I sat up and reached for the pills and put them in my mouth. When I held the glass, I could see my hands trembling.

She put a thermometer under my tongue.

She studied the time on her watch, then pulled the thermometer out of my mouth.

“A hundred and four,” she said. “We’ve got to break that fever.” She shook her head. “It’s all those germs at the pool.”

The world seemed closer for an instant. “It’s just a cold,” I whispered. But it seemed like someone else was talking.

“I think you have the flu.”

But it’s summer.
The words were on my tongue but I couldn’t say them. I couldn’t stop shivering. She placed another blanket over me.

Everything was spinning but when I closed my eyes, the room was motionless and dark.

And then the dreams came.

Birds were falling from the sky. Sparrows. Millions and millions of sparrows. They were falling like rain and they were hitting me as they fell and I had their blood all over me and I couldn’t find a place to protect myself. Their beaks were breaking my skin like arrows. And Buddy Holly’s plane was falling from the sky and I could hear Waylon Jennings singing “La Bamba.” I could hear Dante
crying—and when I turned around to see where he was, I saw that he was holding Richie Valens’s limp body in his arms. And then the plane came falling down on us. All I saw was the shadow and the earth on fire.

And then the sky disappeared.

I must have been screaming, because my mom and dad were in the room. I was trembling and everything was soaked in my sweat. And then I realized that I was crying and I couldn’t make myself stop.

My dad picked me up and rocked me in the chair. I felt small and weak and I wanted to hold him back but I couldn’t because there wasn’t any strength in my arms, and I wanted to ask him if he had held me like this when I was a boy because I didn’t remember and why didn’t I remember. I started to think that maybe I was still dreaming, but my mother was changing the sheets on my bed so I knew that everything was real. Except me.

I think I was mumbling. My father held me tighter and whispered something, but not even his arms or his whispers could keep me from trembling. My mom dried my sweaty body with a towel and she and my dad changed me into a clean T-shirt and clean underwear. And then I said the strangest thing, “Don’t throw my T-shirt away. Dad gave it to me.” I knew I was crying, but I didn’t know why because I wasn’t the kind of guy who cried, and I thought that maybe it was someone else who was crying.

I could hear my father whisper, “Shhhh. It’s okay.” He laid me back down on the bed and my mother sat next to me and made me drink some water and take more aspirin.

I saw the look on my dad’s face and I knew he was worried. And I was sad that I had made him worry. I wondered if he had really held me and I wanted to tell him that I didn’t hate him, it was just that I didn’t understand him, didn’t understand who he was and I wanted to, I wanted so much to understand. My mother said something to my father in Spanish and he nodded. I was too tired to care about words in any language.

The world was so quiet.

I fell asleep—and the dreams came again. It was raining outside and there was thunder and lightning all around me. And I could see myself as I ran in the rain. I was looking for Dante and I was yelling because he was lost, “Dante! Come back! Come back!” And then I wasn’t looking for Dante anymore, I was looking for my dad and I was yelling for him, “Dad! Dad! Where did you go? Where did you go?”

When I woke again, I was soaked in my own sweat again.

My dad was sitting on my rocking chair, studying me.

My mom walked into the room. She looked at my father—then at me.

“I didn’t mean to scare you.” I couldn’t make myself talk above a whisper.

My mother smiled and I thought she must have been really pretty when she was a girl. She helped me sit up. “
Amor,
you’re soaked. Why don’t you take a nice shower?”

“I had nightmares.”

I leaned my head on her shoulder. I wanted the three of us to stay that way forever.

My dad helped me to the shower. I felt weak and washed out and when the warm water hit my body, I thought of my dreams . . . Dante, my dad. And I wondered what my dad looked like when he was my age. My mother had told me he was beautiful. I wonder if he’d been as beautiful as Dante. And I wondered why I thought that.

When I went back to bed, my mom had changed the sheets again. “Your fever’s gone,” she said. She gave me another glass of water. I didn’t want it but I drank all of it. I didn’t know how thirsty I’d been, and I asked her for more water.

My father was still there, sitting on my rocking chair.

We studied each other for a moment as I lay in bed.

“You were looking for me,” he said.

I looked at him.

“In your dream. You were looking for me.”

“I’m always looking for you,” I whispered.

THE NEXT MORNING, WHEN I WOKE, I THOUGHT I HAD
died. I knew it wasn’t true—but the thought was there. Maybe a part of you died when you were sick. I don’t know.

My mom’s solution to my predicament was to make me drink gallons of water—one painful glass at a time.

I finally went on strike and refused to drink anymore. “My bladder’s turned into a water balloon that’s about to explode.”

“That’s good,” she said, “You’re flushing your system out.”

“I’m done flushing,” I said.

The water wasn’t the only thing I had to deal with. I had to deal with her chicken soup. Her chicken soup became my enemy.

The first bowl was incredible. I had never been that hungry. Not ever. She mostly gave me broth.

The soup returned the next day for lunch. That was okay too, because now I got all the chicken and the vegetables in the soup with warm corn tortillas and my mother’s
sopa de arroz
. But the soup came back in the form of an afternoon snack. And for dinner.

I was sick of water and chicken soup. I was sick of being sick. After four days in bed, I finally decided that it was time to move on.

I made an announcement to my mother. “I’m well.”

“You’re not,” my mother said.

“I’m being held hostage.” That’s the first thing I said to my father when he came home from work.

He grinned at me.

“I’m fine now, Dad. I am.”

“You still look a little pale.”

“I need some sun.”

“Give it one more day,” he said. “Then you can go out into the world and cause all the trouble you want.”

“Okay,” I said. “But no more chicken soup.”

“That’s between you and your mother.”

He started to leave my room. He hesitated for a moment. He had his back to me. “Have you had any more bad dreams?”

“I always have bad dreams,” I said.

“Even when you’re not sick?”

“Yeah.”

He stood at my doorway. He turned around and faced me. “Are you always lost?”

“In most of them, yeah.”

“And are you always trying to find me?”

“Mostly I think I’m trying to find me, Dad.” It was strange to talk to him about something real. But it scared me too. I wanted to keep talking, but I didn’t know exactly how to say what I was holding inside me. I looked down at the floor. Then I looked up at him and shrugged like
no big deal
.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry I’m so far away.”

“It’s okay,” I said.

“No,” he said. “No, it’s not.” I think he was going to say something else, but he changed his mind. He turned and walked out of the room.

I kept staring down at the floor. And then I heard my father’s voice in the room again. “I have bad dreams too, Ari.”

I wanted to ask him if his dreams were about the war or about my brother. I wanted to ask him if he woke up as scared as me.

All I did was smile at him. He’d told me something about himself.

I was happy.

I WAS ALLOWED TO WATCH TELEVISION. BUT I DISCOVERED
something about myself. I didn’t really like television. I didn’t like it at all. I switched the TV off and found myself watching my mother as she sat at the kitchen table, looking over some of her old lesson plans.

“Mom?”

She looked up at me. I tried to imagine my mother standing in front of her class. I wondered what the guys thought of her. I wondered how they saw her. I wondered if they liked her. Hated her? Respected her? I wondered if they knew she was a mother. I wondered if that mattered to them.

“What are you thinking?”

“You like teaching?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Even when your students don’t care?”

“I’ll tell you a secret. I’m not responsible for whether my students care or don’t care. That care has to come from them—not me.”

“Where does that leave you?”

“No matter what, Ari, my job is to care.”

“Even when they don’t?”

“Even when they don’t.”

“No matter what?”

“No matter what.”

“Even if you teach kids like me, who think life is boring?”

“That’s the way it is when you’re fifteen.”

“Just a phase,” I said.