The Affliction Read online

  As he loved to recount Javier Castillo’s disappearing acts, Ricardo also loved to recount how he first met Javier Castillo. He met him while working his evening shift at LAX. This, like the recollection of Javier Castillo’s first disappearance, is a story I heard Ricardo tell many times, too many times really. To be honest, I still have doubts about this particular part of the story, but that is almost irrelevant now. Ricardo worked a second job each evening as a skycap. He would swap the grungy garage of the mechanic’s for the grunge of LAX. In the gray space of the baggage claim, in the gray space of the check-in area, Ricardo had watched face after gray face arriving and departing. Javier Castillo was there to see his aunt off. Ricardo watched him the way he watched all people who were at LAX but neither arriving nor departing by plane. Accessories to travel, Ricardo had thought, accessories. They were not really people but means of transportation to or from the airport for these other people who were traveling by plane. He watched the backs of Javier Castillo and his aunt, watched as the aunt walked away. And when Javier Castillo turned around, Ricardo recounted how he felt a small shock, one he would never be able to fully explain.

  As time passes, many people discover that what was not easily seen at one moment is suddenly easier to see later. Time is an excellent teacher in this way. But even after substantial time had passed, Ricardo could not explain why he had continued to stare at Javier Castillo that night. It was not that Javier Castillo was a handsome man. He was, in many ways, rather ordinary in appearance. He had dark brown, almost black, hair. His dark complexion was the color of café con leche, which made his grayish light brown eyes stand out. His nose was straight, almost hawkish. In all respects, except maybe the eyes, Javier Castillo looked like a version of the folks Ricardo saw every day. Javier Castillo looked squarely at him and said “Buenas noches.”

  They began to talk. Ricardo claimed he noticed the way in which Javier Castillo’s eyes were light in color, noticed that his eyes were that pale brown flecked with gray. He always mentioned that, called attention to that, as if such a thing as grayish eyes were something incredibly rare. That Javier Castillo had spoken to him in Spanish didn’t surprise Ricardo. Many people spoke to him in Spanish, could tell from his features and dark skin that he was of Mexican descent. They exchanged small talk, nothing remotely exciting. And despite this, despite so little actually transpiring, Ricardo had felt his heart panic in his chest. He felt an incredible need to be with this man he had met only minutes before. Never before, in his life, had Ricardo felt this way. A man, he emphasized, he had never before felt this way about a man.

  Despite Ricardo recounting this need, despite him telling the story of the evening he met Javier Castillo so many times, despite the fact I always wanted to know more about why he felt this way, Ricardo never added so much as a single extra detail. He simply acknowledged that for reasons unexplainable, even to himself, he felt the overwhelming need to leave with Javier Castillo, to follow him. Ricardo left the airport with him. He never went back. He never went home. He never called his wife and family. He couldn’t think of what to say or how to explain Javier Castillo to them. He left the airport with him and drove for hours. In a corner of his mind, he believed he was being abducted, but he had not been abducted. He had asked Javier Castillo if he could come with him, something that surprised him as he posed the question. It was as if he were speaking without control of what he was saying. And in the sun visor mirror above him in the front passenger seat of Javier Castillo’s car, Ricardo noticed his own eyes were a different color green. His eyes were more of a dark forest green, darker than the usual soft green he had seen in the mirror all of his life.

  Once, after almost three years of living with Javier Castillo, Ricardo felt the sudden urge to press his hand through him just before he completely faded away. He wanted to see if he would also start disappearing. The affliction: what must it have felt like? Could Javier Castillo actually feel himself dissolving? The hands, finger by finger? But Ricardo knew that when Javier Castillo disappeared, he did so evenly. It was not as if the chest dissolved leaving the heart exposed and beating. He just slowly faded into a shimmer, and then a shadow, and then air. It was gradual. There would be a man, and then a man seen through but still there, and then the dingy, yellowed wallpaper clinging to the wall behind where Javier Castillo had been standing. Dingy and dirty: the wall would suddenly be more sharply in focus, its browning yellow like the nicotine-and-tar-stained filter after smoking a cigarette. And though Ricardo had no explanation, he knew the disappearing happened faster at times, more slowly at others. He wanted to pass his hand through the shadowy Javier Castillo, the one about to become air. But he could never get himself to do it. Oh, Ricardo thought about it. He thought about it many times. But Javier Castillo was always watching him carefully, and Ricardo feared that Javier Castillo knew what he was thinking. With Ricardo, there was always an element of fear.

  What must such a life be like? Think about it. To live with a man half shadow, half something, something that you could not explain to someone else, much less yourself? Even after three years of living with Javier Castillo, after lying in bed next to him night after night, after sitting out on the small patio and smoking cigarettes, watching the smoke coil into shapes that only disappeared, Ricardo did not understand Javier Castillo. Ricardo never asked any questions. I have to believe if it were me in that situation I would have asked many questions or, better to say, I like to think I would have asked many questions. But Ricardo just didn’t know how to do so. He lacked something: courage, determination, fuerza? I really couldn’t tell you exactly.

  Ricardo simply lived there with Javier Castillo, simply existed. He did not work. He did not worry about money. He didn’t even worry about the wife and sons he left in the small neighborhood on the edge of nowhere. The time simply passed, and the man known as Javier Castillo moved in and out of the air. And finally that day arrived, the day that Ricardo could not recall with any great detail—Javier Castillo faded away and did not return. Even now, the fact Ricardo could not recall this day with even so much as a handful of details bothers me. Ricardo was no liar, but he must have remembered something, something more substantial than that the man named Javier Castillo simply disappeared and did not return. I have returned to this one moment so many times now, probably more times than Ricardo has, because it frustrates me; it troubles me to no end.

  Ricardo thought nothing of Javier Castillo’s disappearance at first. A week passed, and then a month. Ricardo had no money to pay the light bill or the utilities. He had no money to pay for anything. He had never questioned the fact that Javier Castillo always had money, was always able to pay for anything they needed. People seemed to just hand money over to Javier Castillo. Two whole months passed before Ricardo realized Javier Castillo was not coming back. Without electricity, Ricardo walked around the dark house occasionally flipping switches to see if something would happen. The air was dangerously still most nights, the heat of the desert coming in through the windows carried along by the echoing howls of the coyotes hunting in the nearby canyon. Ricardo was alone and without a dime. Within another day or two, he began to wander the streets. He did not remember how to go home to Rosa and his sons. He had no idea how to return to his barrio outside of Los Angeles.

  He wandered for days, around town, across town. He wandered into the parking lot of the Travel Lodge just as I was stepping out of my rental car. Why he approached me, I will never really know. Maybe it was my dark complexion that marked me as one of el pueblo, the Latin look that offered a kind of safety to him that a white face could never offer. Maybe it was my responding to him in Spanish when he said Buenas tardes. I’m not sure. I don’t usually talk to homeless people. It isn’t that I am afraid of them, but that I have no idea what to say to them. But Ricardo’s eyes were green, that dark forest green, and he looked haunted. I don’t really remember exactly what I said to him, but he followed me, asked me if he could come up to my hotel room to take a shower,
promised me he would not rob me.

  I have no idea why I agreed. He showered and then came into the room and sat at the edge of the bed staring off into space. I offered him some whiskey—I always kept whiskey with me back then even when traveling—and we sat and drank it. I told him stories I had heard in my years of traveling as a salesman, told him stories of the small island in the Caribbean where I had grown up, the people there, the way we swore the cats were spies. We sat in our jockey shorts and t-shirts drinking whiskey. We lapsed into and out of Spanish. It seemed as if we had known each other for a very long time. At times, Ricardo would say he felt he knew this island where I had grown up, the place I had fled. He seemed to know some of the very names of streets and places, the docks and even the harbor. But I didn’t think too much about this then. I didn’t appreciate the strangeness of the fact he seemed familiar with these things, and many years would pass before I even remembered that.

  Over the three months that followed, I heard much about Javier Castillo, too much, really: the disappearing, the timing of it, the various places he had visited. I had not actually seen Javier Castillo during those three months, but there were times when I felt quite certain I knew what he looked like. And Ricardo, though he never said so, sat sometimes cross-legged at the foot of the bed staring at the chair in my bedroom as if he were waiting for Javier Castillo to appear. Do I believe in gods? In angels? In miracles? No. No, I never have. I am more like Ricardo than I want to believe. Before he went to sleep most nights, Ricardo would say the very same thing to me. He would say: “Diego, sleep now. Sleep.” Night after night, he said this, said it faithfully. And it made me wonder if he had instructed Javier Castillo to go to sleep in much the same way.

  As time passed, night after night, lying in bed, Ricardo breathing deeply the way he did when he was lying down, I could not sleep. I found myself staring at the empty chair. I half-expected Javier Castillo to appear. I would love to be able to say now that I just wanted to make sure the chair was empty or, at most, the place where I left one of my old pairs of jeans. “Diego, sleep now. Sleep,” Ricardo said. But falling asleep was the least of my concerns. I knew I would sleep eventually, much the way I knew, even then, that the day would come, that day where I might ... I was concentrating so hard. I was concentrating on another place, another town. “Diego, sleep now. Sleep.” Yes, even then the thought had entered my head: maybe I could disappear. Vanish, gone, in thin air, nothing left but the room, the bed, the chair. But I am no Javier Castillo, right? I am definitely nothing like Javier Castillo.

  II. Inside the Great House

  Crazy Old Cassie had been a nun. This much we all knew. This much could be verified. Almost every story about her began by referencing this fact. And there were far too many stories about this woman, too many for me to recount. I wouldn’t even know where to start. The old men said the Archbishop placed her in the convent because she said she had seen the face of God. Men are always so romantic about these kinds of things. But women? No, they are the realists. The old women all said she had seen the face of the Devil. Some joked she had simply seen the other “face” of the Archbishop Castillo. Just as there were many variations on why Cassie was sent to the convent, no one could say with any certainty why she was eventually asked to leave it. But everyone knew Old Cassie was to be avoided. And she made it easy on us, very easy on us. She was rarely ever seen away from the Great House near the bottom of what we called Mutton Hill.

  Old Cassie’s real father, William Reynolds, had been a plantation owner. Some say he was the descendant of the bastard son of an English nobleman who had been exiled to the island to spare the family in England any embarrassment. When William Reynolds died, he left the estate and all the lands, the rum distillery, the orchards, the cattle ranch, all of it to his son and his son’s family. But none of the Reynoldses who lived on the estate after William Reynolds died lived much longer than a few years. The old man died and then one by one his entire family followed his example. Accidents, sickness, and malady: that is what lived on that grand estate before Cassie did. And then the only person who lived there was Old Cassie. The only Reynolds still alive, alive even to this day, is James Reynolds, the old Governor General, William Reynolds’s brother.

  The Great House kept watch over the town. If you looked north from the flea market or the town square, looked north and up the hillside, you would spy its large frame. There wasn’t even another house near the bottom of that hill. The closest house was the Archbishop’s Mansion that, despite looking close, was actually almost a mile away from the Great House. All of the land there, the entire hill, even beyond the hill deep into the center of the island, belonged to Cassie and her sister Flora once the Reynolds family died off. And Flora had long since left the island, moved somewhere in California, leaving all of it to Old Cassie.

  Maria Consuela went to the Great House each morning to drop off milk and groceries, sometimes to straighten up the kitchen and the sunroom; she was usually gone by noon. She told others she rarely ever saw the old woman. The only person she ever saw in the house, and even that was rare, was Señora Grise, the woman she believed actually ran the house for Cassie. Maria Consuela would enter through the door on the side terrace and leave the items she brought on the kitchen counter under a purple-leafed plant hanging precariously in a wire basket. These were her standing orders. Once a week, Maria Consuela cleaned the kitchen, which meant wiping down the counters; the kitchen was never dirty. The floor tiles in the kitchen and sunroom always appeared spotlessly clean, almost as if no one actually lived in the Great House. And Derrick, the butcher’s brother, went there twice a week to drop off major provisions, items he was told to leave on the wooden table on the back terrace. The field hands who worked the cane fields and orchards almost never laid eyes on Cassie and, at times, wondered if she really lived there; she rarely left the house. Cassie used to ride out to inspect their work, but with time it became more and more common for them to receive their orders by notes taped to the post at the bottom of the steps that led to the back terrace. Other than Maria Consuela, only cats entered and exited the Great House. Oh, there would be the occasional person who went there to seek help from the old woman, but Maria Consuela and Derrick were the only folks who dared to go there regularly. They had been chosen. They had been, in a sense, summoned.

  People were usually warned not to look up at the Great House, even though this was a difficult task. It was the largest thing on any of the hillsides, its hulking mass patiently watching over all of us. The old women made sure, almost daily, to warn us not to look up at that house. There was never even a hint of a joke when they said this. But how could one avoid looking up at it? One can stare out at the harbor with the sunlight shimmering on its surfaces for only so long before tiring. The one thing that gleamed in addition to that sunlit sea was the Great House, its white walls reflecting the sunlight like a beacon.

  Occasionally, foreigners would arrive on large boats and ask about the house, ask if it were an inn made to look like an estate home, ask whether or not it was for sale. Tourists are so stupid sometimes. These foreigners wanted to actually stay there! But the only response any of us could give was that the house was “unsafe,” at which these wealthy foreigners would look somewhat confused. They wanted to meet the owner, the innkeeper. They imagined this had to be an Englishman wearing tweed and riding apparel or sitting in a study sipping brandy while wearing a smoking jacket or an ascot. But this was not the case, and it hadn’t been the case since the Reynolds family died off. There was no one there except Old Cassie. And she was certainly not an Englishman. No one on the island sought out that woman unless they absolutely had to do so. No one.

  They say if Old Cassie looked you dead in the eye, she would know things about you, about your future. But Miss Simpson would laugh and say that sometimes people confused Cassie with her sister Flora, that it was the sister who could do that. But it didn’t matter. What mattered was that we all feared Cassie, and Cassie probably l
iked it that way, or so we liked to believe. Miss Simpson once told me how many years ago, before Flora left, Cassie had cured a man of gangrene. She said the gangrene was so bad the doctor had warned the man his leg would have to be amputated. Even then, it was unclear if that could save the man. No one remembers what Cassie actually did for the man, but she cured him. Apparently, as this man was leaving the house, Flora looked him dead in the eye while standing on the front porch and then pronounced that he would soon be wealthy but would lose it all. She told him he would end up flat out broke, without a single penny to his name. The man thought this was Flora’s way of being foolish, which was a mistake in and of itself. He went to visit a relative in Miami a few weeks later. While there, he won the lottery: sixty-five million dollars.

  He could have done anything he wanted to do on the island had he returned home. He could have built a big estate like the Reynolds Estate on one of the hillsides, could have owned a fleet of cars or boats. Hell, he could have owned just about everything the Church and the Reynolds Estate didn’t already own. He would have been as wealthy as the Reynolds family had been. But he didn’t come back. Well, not at first. He flew all over the world in private jets, stayed in unbelievable resorts, and ate only the finest foods. He lived a decadent life, a life of extravagance most of us cannot even imagine; but when he did return to the island, he was, in fact, broke. It was just as Flora had predicted, exactly as she had predicted.