Tiempo Perdido

Eryn Vyctorya Mills

        

         “They killed the priest right there!” George insisted, his pale arm jutting behind him. “In my dishroom! There was a well for the old mission and that’s where the curse started!”

         Carlos could hear him over the fans, the drone of the fridges, the splashing of his own hands in the sink, every time George told the tale. The old Swede always found time to tell his tale of the Cursed Old Mission to any customer who would look up from their meal long enough to listen.

         Carlos had not brought his family back to Albuquerque for an old curse so popular with the turistas blancos. His grandparents had worked in the old mission, curled their backs and gnarled their fingers against the crops, burnt their faces by the sun. They never mentioned a curse or murdered priest. When George told the story to his Mexican staff in horribly fractured Spanish, Franco kept his snickering tightly contained and Carlos adopted a leisurely nod and watched the man’s graying bangs bob as the sentences fumbled from between his lips.

         Carlos usually hoped George would just let him clean up and go home. The clock cranked towards nine o’clock; if he was home by ten Anita might still be awake and Eduardo might be working on his homework.

         The café felt cursed, slouching in its pueblo design, crumbling at its adobe corners. George filled the dining room with candles and still it seemed dark and cold. In the hottest of summer days the café shuddered with an immobile chill. Late at night the building groaned and whispered, and often, when everything else had ended, George would stay late and listen to its murmurs. Carlos never knew why.

         Carlos was not a superstitious man. The neighborhood around the old Spanish mission fell into disrepair and the old streets wound around the stacked buildings to defy city planners. Carlos loved the old mission neighborhood where his grandfather had worshiped, his grandmother had tended garden, and his father had played. The old mission whispered to him in his dreams, even as his wife begged him to quit his job. George was not a tyrannical boss, but he expected much from his staff and he wore them thin.

         Carlos missed his son’s football games, but he was proud of Eduardo and never failed to tell him so. Carlos missed the family day at Eduardo’s school; he missed Eduardo’s cousin’s confirmation ceremony. The money paid for living, but Carlos was hounded by the fact that he was not living the life of a happy man.

         After work, when every dish was washed, floors mopped, lights off, doors locked, Carlos stood before the old mission gates and thought of his grandparents. All their work had come to crumbling. His eyes always fell upon the tower and the old rusted bell. No one cared for this old mission; there were so many. Which ones were to be saved? This one was so small, so dark, cursed by only time. Prosperity kept its fingers free from entanglement in the bricks and adobe of the old mission. The mission and its neighbors carried a pall of unearthly soul, out of place from the city, painted the eyes of the people black so they could not see the strangeness, or place their fingers on it. It eluded Carlos every time he searched for it.

         When Carlos got home the only light in the upstairs apartment was the living room lamp. Anita worked as a seamstress at early hours, with only Sundays off. It was the day he spent with his family, until he had to go wash dishes. George forbade Sundays off for Carlos, gave him Monday instead. Carlos relented and woke alone every Monday morning with a heavy heart. His friends asked when he and Anita would have more niños. Anita thought she was too old, too tired, to have another baby. Too much work. He knew it made Anita sad, and less and less she looked at him with kindness in her eyes. Never enough time.

         When Carlos entered the dish room Sunday afternoon, he flung a sigh at the dishes piled in the sinks. He turned on the radio, slid the dial to the Mexican station, and drew hot water from the faucet.

         “Carlos!” George dropped a bus tub filled with sauté pans and ladles by the vegetable sink. “Hola! Necissitas satornes!”

         “Okay, George,” Carlos nodded and started in. He snuck a peek at the dining room just outside the door. Only three tables had customers, and they were transfixed to George’s tale of the cursed priest and the well under the dishroom.

         If the old mission didn’t whisper to him, Carlos would have found another place to keep him wet to the elbows. George had become fierce in his motions, demanding in voice, and easy to irritate.

         At the end of the night, George told Carlos to lock up. George left him the spare key. Carlos knew the routine and nodded compliantly. He unplugged the sinks and dug out bits of food that stopped the water. Red pepper chunks, zucchini slices, soft and squishy, noodles, slips of onion that defied him. He glanced at the clock and thought he might weep. It was nearly midnight. With a long sigh he plunged his hand into the middle sink and dug.

         Something firm and cold and round, like a marble, touched him back. Thinking it a bent spoon he tried to find the rest of it. He pressed his thumb against it; it resisted him like an egg too long boiled. With some effort he finally worked it loose. His hand came out of the swirling muck with a greasy arc.

         It was no spoon, no egg, no marble. The sphere was the diameter of a quarter, opalescent and gleaming in the fluorescent light. He stared at it. It seemed to stare back at him, clean and smooth in his palm, as though it had never touched the gunk he’d dug it from. The iridescent surface shifted and swirled as though considering him as deeply. Carlos’s mind searched for what it could possibly be. He set it on the prep table. The orb dimmed. He stepped away from it languidly. It rolled towards him. He reached for it so that it wouldn’t fall from the table. It brightened, swirled. He gasped and stepped back. It followed him.

         He stepped to the other side of the table. The little ball seemed to watch him, rolled towards him. When it reached the other end of the table, he held his hand above it. The colors quickened, glowed, danced, played light between his fingers, cast a shadow of his hand upon the ceiling.

         The orb leapt into his palm, soft and warm. He grasped it, not even knowing why.

         The orb grew bright, its warmth made his hand tingle. He wrapped his fingers around it, and watched in stunned silence as the light from the orb became so strong it illuminated the flesh of his hand. He turned his hand over and opened his fingers, expecting to be burnt. The orb nestled into his skin, dissolved itself into his flesh before he could drop it. His hand, his wrist, his arm glowed; the light wormed up to his shoulder, soft heat washing across his chest. He mumbled a frantic prayer and steadied himself against the rickety prep table.

         It was gone.

         Carlos shivered and gasped for breath.

         Oh, please, God, what was that?

         Please, God, I want to go home and see my family. Please give me that.

         For some time he stood there, waited for something to happen.

         He set about closing the place up. Finished the sinks, turned off the lights, locked the back door, front door, and started home. He didn’t know what else to do.

         The night was brighter than usual. A few stars shone through the pollution, but the sky bore the tint of evening. He looked for the moon and its light, could not find it. He became distracted by the amount of people wandering the neighborhood. How was it that so many people were out so late? The bars seemed unusually crowded. A few of the shops were still open.

         He felt in no shape to be out and about. He hurried home.

         When he looked up at his apartment window, all the lights were on. Eduardo’s room, the kitchen, the living room: Anita was still up.

         “Oh, please, God,” Carlos prayed out loud. “Please, let my family be all right,” His neighbor, Hector, greeted him cautiously.

         “You okay, amigo?” Hector asked.

         Carlos’s blanched face made no answer as he ran up to his apartment.

         He burst in the door and stopped as though slammed into a wall. Eduardo leaned lazily against the kitchen counter, munching on a burrito. Anita sat in front of the television, braced against her sewing machine, repairing Eduardo’s football jersey. His family stared at him.

         “Papa, what’s wrong?”

         Anita stopped sewing and jumped up from her chair.

         Carlos stood in the doorway. His mouth moved a little; he couldn’t form words.

         Anita came to him and touched his face. He was suddenly struck with how beautiful she was. “Carlos, are you all right?”

         Carlos blinked. “I’m fine. Why are you still up? It’s very late.”

         Eduardo swallowed the last of his burrito and threw the wrapper away. “Papa, it’s only eight-thirty.”

         Carlos muttered, “I just got off work. It’s one in the morning.”

         Anita smiled and relaxed. “The clocks there must be broken. Come, sit down.”

         Carlos pushed his weary bones to the sofa. He grabbed the television remote and flipped through the channels to find something he would recognize, but he hadn’t watched television in a very long time. Anita pressed a cold beer into his hand.

         “That Swede will make you loco. I know you love the old mission. You should work there,” Anita told him quietly and held his hand. “Eduardo could teach you more English. There are English classes at the community center.”

         Carlos had tried getting a job at the old mission. Even as a janitor, he would still be there, under its holy walls, but they demanded English, level two or higher, whatever that meant.

         “It was almost one when I left work, I’m sure,” Carlos mumbled. His eyes adhered to the bubbles in the neck of his beer.

         Anita shrugged. “I’m glad you got home early. It must have been slow.”

         Carlos’s head shook quickly. “No, we were busy. The waiters had red faces from running.”

         Eduardo grabbed a can of soda from the fridge, plopped into his mother’s chair and was about to put his feet up beside the sewing machine when Anita suggested, “You should finish your jersey. It’s almost done.”

         Eduardo rolled his eyes and sighed like his father when he bent over the machine and pressed the pedal.

         Carlos watched his son work the machine. How had he been blessed with such a good boy and how much had he missed? The boy was so tall now.

         Anita stroked his hair gently as he drank his beer. He felt silly, unable to speak as he tried to wrap his mind around the events of the night. He was so tired. He felt himself beginning to doze when the news came on. Before he slipped away to bed he kissed his son goodnight. The boy was sixteen and didn’t complain of his father’s kiss. Said how glad he was that his papa had made it home early.

         Carlos fell asleep to the sounds of the evening city, still confused, and eventually woke in the arms of his wife. He made her breakfast, fixed Eduardo’s lunch. Eduardo reminded him of the homecoming game on Friday night. Carlos was guilt-stricken, having already asked George for the night off. George refused; they had a large party that night and couldn’t spare him.

         Three nights passed and Carlos found no orbs. The sinks only gave him their usual fare of desiccated peppers, wet cheese. The weekday nights were slow and Carlos left before George did, meandered casually home by ten. The mystery of that little ball of light kept him sleepless. Anita snored softly beside him while he tried to make sense of George’s endless stories. Nothing earthly made the orb; nothing logical constructed it.

         The next morning, Eduardo reminded him about the football game Friday.

         Carlos asked George again, and as emphatic as ever, George refused. George declared that his own father had never made it to any of his football games and he turned out fine, so Carlos shouldn’t feel guilty.

         It only made Carlos weary and heartsick Friday night. Even as he tried to hurry to get the dishes done and everything mopped, he watched the clock on the wall jig towards midnight. Every time he reached into the bottom of the sink, only muck greeted his fingers.

         George left him to lock up. The clock passed midnight when Carlos finished. His back and arms ached; his feet were soaked and pinched in his shoes. He drained the sinks. He closed up the front of the house, locked the back. Shut off the lights. Exhausted, Carlos sat at a table by the windows, watched the moonlight over the mission and imagined his grandparents when they were young and their backs were strong.

         After some rumination, Carlos realized that the moonlight inside the café was wrong. Wrong color, wrong direction: how could moonlight be behind him? His heart quickened inside his tired chest. White-blue light pulsed from the dishroom door—he jumped for the fire extinguisher in the wait station. He wrenched it from the wall and halted at the threshold of the dishroom.

         The middle sink glowed. Save for Carlos’s frightened, shallow breaths, no sound met his ears. He set down the extinguisher, inched toward the sink. The pulsing light grew faster, bluer. He peered into the sink.

         Two grape-sized orbs stared back at him.

         What would he do with two orbs? He raced into the wait station, grabbed an empty caper jar, a pair of tongs from the kitchen, a sheet of aluminum foil. Gingerly he took one orb with the tongs, slipped it into the jar, then the other. Swiftly and softly he pressed the foil around the rim, tightened it with a rubber band. They both braced themselves against the glass to be near him. Was it because he stayed so late? Because he wanted so badly to be elsewhere?

         He grabbed the jar and darted out the front door. The moon coasted overhead, the streets lay quiet. He went back inside, looked at the clocks. One in the morning. The orbs danced around each other in the jar like terrified moths. They bounced against the foil that kept them imprisoned, puckered it, melted it a little. Carlos set the jar in the middle of the dining room and backed away.

         One orb punched through the foil lid and buried itself in Carlos’s chest. Warm and soothing against his skin, he still felt some fear when it squirmed its way under his flesh. Light wormed through his veins, soothed the ache in his back, and vanished. The other orb did nothing. It sat in the bottom of the jar. Dim, content. Waiting.

         Carlos grabbed the jar and darted out the front door.

         The moon crested above the eastern horizon, cars tore round the sharp corner in front of the mission, a truck honked. Evening twilight graced the tops of Albuquerque apartments. The café was a dark pocket in the street, cold and alone. An elderly couple walked up to the door. The man muttered that it looked open, and why shouldn’t it be? It was Friday.

         Carlos stayed just at the door, watched Sandra greet the couple and ask where they wanted to sit.

         The moment Carlos stepped over the threshold, the café fell silent. The lights went out, the music and the customers vanished. Twice more he went outside, stepped back in. From the sidewalk he watched the waitresses dart around the tables. He knocked boldly on the window when Sandra came near. She didn’t look up; she didn’t hear him.

         The last time he stepped inside he accepted the fact that for the restaurant it was almost two in the morning, and for him, about seven in the evening. He shoved the jar with the spare orb into his jacket pocket, felt it bump against his body as he left.

         Carlos reached the homecoming game at the beginning of the second quarter. He stopped near the bleachers, eyed every player for his son. It took him a moment to realize that Eduardo wasn’t on the field. The high school band struck up the fight song. He wandered down the stands. Passed cheerleaders, passed parents at the refreshment stands. He reached the doors to the gym, and there, on a bench with his ankle blanketed in ice packs, he found Eduardo.

         “Papa, you came!” Eduardo was at once elated, then puzzled. “I thought you couldn’t get the night off.”

         Carlos shrugged. “I came anyway.”

         Eduardo blushed when he pointed at his leg. “Mama’s getting the car.”

         “What happened?”

         “I got tackled.” Eduardo shifted in his padding. “They want to take me to a doctor.”

         Carlos grimaced. “If you need X-rays, we’ll get them.”

         “Papa, we don’t have the money,” Eduardo growled.

         “We’ll figure something out. Does it hurt a lot?”

         “Not now, no. I can still put some weight on it. I’ll be fine,” Eduardo defended.

         A frantic chorus of parental screaming from the stands deafened their conversation. Eduardo’s school scored a touchdown.

         Carlos jumped when Anita’s voice slapped at him from behind.

         “I just tried to call you,” she panted, white knuckles wrapped around her car keys. “How did you get here?”

         Carlos replied, “I walked.”

         Anita turned her attention to her son. “If Papa helps, can you walk?”

         Eduardo nodded and awkwardly gained himself on his good foot. Carlos reached around his son’s shoulders and held him upright.

         “I can’t believe that old Swede gave you the night off,” Anita said as they took careful steps to the car.

         “He changed his mind,” Carlos lied.

         They drove home with a silent radio and sputtering engine, accompanied by the rattle of Anita’s anger that the only aid the school would offer a star player was an icepack. Eduardo contended that he was no star, only a reserve player.

         Carlos said nothing. He kept his fingers in his jacket pocket, smoothing the puckers on the foil. He dared not remove it and check the little orb’s condition. Did it need air? Water? Food? Was it alive? When they reached the apartment Carlos tried to put it out of his mind. Eduardo’s ankle swelled and still Anita wanted to get an X-ray. Eduardo refused, told his mother to stop fretting, insisted that an X-ray cost too much. Carlos slipped into the bathroom and took out the jar. Still the orb bumped and jostled in its confinement. He shoved it back into his pocket.

         After Anita and Eduardo went to bed Carlos went for a walk. He couldn’t sleep with the thought that George might suspect, although he didn’t know what the man might accuse him of. He came to the back door of the café. He heard dishes rattling, his voice and Franco’s. He glanced around furtively, surrounded by the stench of hot dumpster rot. He took the jar out of his pocket and gasped.

         The orb looked like an old grape left too long in the dark. He tore off the lid and poured the dark little mass into his hand. It was cold and mushy; when he pressed his finger to it the skin split and its wet flesh oozed from his palm and onto the fractured asphalt. It gave a coppery stench. He let it drip and fall to the earth. Why receive two if he could only absorb one at a time?

         He washed his hands in the bathroom of a cantina a block away, had a beer, and went home.

         The next morning, Eduardo’s ankle had swollen badly, the skin stretched and blackened. Carlos helped him downstairs and into the car. Every bump in the road made Eduardo moan as he tried to keep his leg from touching the floor. Anita berated him for not letting her take him to the hospital right away. Her derision lasted only until she left for work. Carlos waited at the clinic while Eduardo was X-rayed. He tried to fill out the paperwork without shaking.

         Carlos was finally called to the examining room where Eduardo leaned back on the table, ambivalent to his situation. The doctor, a volunteer and unhappy by that fact, arrived twenty minutes later.

         “Your son has a bad fracture, Mr. Aquina,” the doctor reported.

         Eduardo translated for his father. “Sorry, doctor, he doesn’t speak English much.”

         The doctor jammed an X-ray of Eduardo’s ankle onto white glass by the door and turned on the light. Carlos blanched. A bone splinter had dug its way into Eduardo’s muscle. Eduardo translated a little of the doctor’s jabber. Carlos understood the rest. There would be surgery, pain medicine, antibiotics, and no more football. The clinic already called a van to take him to the hospital.

         Carlos called Anita with the news. He called the school and tried to tell them in his best English that Eduardo wouldn’t be attending that day. He called George and informed him he would be late.

         As he followed the clinic’s van to the hospital, he realized what the second orb had been for. It chilled him to think he had wasted it when it might have saved his son from his injury.

         After the surgery the hospital gave Eduardo pills that made him vomit instead of soothing the pain, and then sent him home. Eduardo rarely slept soundly, and had no appetite for food.

         Monday night, as Eduardo dozed fitfully on the sofa, Carlos slipped out the door and headed for the café. It was nearly three in the morning and all his bones ached with his collective exhaustion. The night air met his skin briskly but unfelt, his breath tempted fog as he panted. When he reached the restaurant he found the back door unlocked, George’s car parked at an odd angle by the dumpsters. The trunk was open. Carlos glanced in and found a jumble of digging tools inside. He heard a loud crash from inside the restaurant; his head snapped up to make room for his heart in his throat.

         Carlos stepped up to the door cautiously. His shoes ground against the gravel and seemed a cacophony in his ears.

         When he slipped inside he found George on his hands and knees in the dishroom, half the floor ripped open to expose a century of plumbing in a web of copper and PVC. George yelped when Carlos caught his attention.

         “All right, where are they?” George demanded crudely. “What did you do with them?”

         “Qué?” Carlos frowned.

         “Don’t pretend you don’t understand me! Where are they?”

         Carlos shook his head. Light peeked from below the entangled pipes, below dead tree roots, old mouse bones, clods of dirt moist with seepage.

         George seemed near to tears when he stomped towards Carlos. “I know you’ve been using them! Neil saw you at the homecoming game with your son! You were here, working! How many have you used?”

         “Tres,” Carlos admitted softly.

         “You’re lying! They’ve been gone for weeks!” George gnashed, spittle flew from between his teeth.

         The light under the pipes glimmered blue, flickered with purple and orange. For a moment Carlos was mesmerized by it.

         “Damn it, Carlos, I need them!”

         Carlos had no answer.

         George grappled with the front of Carlos’s jacket. Carlos was a stocky, sturdy man, and George was too frightened and frantic to sway him. “Carlos, tell me!”

         Didn’t George see the burgeoning brilliance beneath the floor? He tried not to look at it, lest George realize what drew his attention.

         “If all of them are gone, then the curse—” George sucked at his upper lip where beads of frigid sweat emerged.

         “Qué?” Carlos asked, not out of ignorance, but of soft curiosity.

         George gradually let go of his dishwasher. “You think I’m a fool—but I’m not! This place was built over the old well, right here! These little things were the only thing that kept me going! They vanished! Comprende?”

         Carlos understood.

         He didn’t understand why George didn’t see the light reflecting off the steel surfaces of the sink, the coolers, off the clock, the television.

         “I’ll lose everything, Carlos. I have to have them back!” George begged.

         Carlos didn’t hear him. He was blinded by the eruption of orbs that shot forth from the floor, rattled the silver, shook the ceiling tiles, swung the fluorescent lamps.

         “What?” Now George was curious. He looked frantically around the room. “What?”

         “You no see?” Carlos stammered.

         Hundreds of orbs formed a glowing tornado in the center of the room. Fingers of electricity jumped from them to the sink, the fridge, the light, the clock, with George. Then the Swede saw.

         Carlos trembled, fell to his knees, put his hands together to pray. George hollered, “Those are mine!” and the tornado shocked him again, propelling him against the dish machine. “Carlos!” he hollered against the noise. “You can’t take them away from me!”

         The tornado, reaching up to the ceiling, advanced upon Carlos.

         Remember why you came here tonight, something whispered inside him.

         “Please,” Carlos stammered. “My son is very sick. What do I do? How do I help him?”

         The tornado collapsed into itself, poured its brilliant light into the old buried well, and disappeared.

         “What did you do?” George gasped as he staggered towards Carlos.

         Carlos shakily opened his hands. Between his palms lay a single, patient, radiating orb.

         “Give that to me!” George snarled.

         The orb jumped from Carlos’s palm and shot out the door long before George could reach for it.

         Carlos followed it. It waited for him behind the restaurant; it led him around the corner, along the street, across it, over the little park behind a bank and through the door of his apartment building.

         When it stopped, both he and the orb panted over Eduardo, who lay cold and pale and wheezing. Anita stirred from her praying, inhaled to scream but never let it free.

         “Eduardo, wake up.” Carlos touched his son’s shoulder.

         Anita sniffled. “He won’t. I called the ambulance. What is that?”

         “Lost time, I think.”

         Carlos understood now. There was no curse. Too many souls had worked so long around the old mission without feeling their hearts beat truly as they drew water from the well over the decades, and all that time had to be given back somehow. He would never understand George’s use for them.

         The orb sunk towards Eduardo’s infected leg. Anita reached up to stop it; Carlos grabbed her hand. “It’s okay.”

         The orb slipped under the cast.

         Long seconds ticked before Eduardo drew breath. His entire body stiffened. He inhaled once, filled his lungs with a gasp of the drowning.

         “Eduardo?” Carlos asked timidly, tenderly.

         “Papa?” Eduardo coughed. “My leg doesn’t hurt anymore.”

         Weeks went by before he heard about George. The Swede was in jail, locked up for arson. According to Franco, George had a few too many one night, ripped the place apart. Tore out the walls, broke up all the chairs, peeled up every plank and tile in the floor. He doused the debris with rum and set them afire. The building was so old, so fragile, that when the main gas line ruptured, the place exploded with such force it ripped into the old mission, cracked the adobe, shattered the windows. The old mission had taken such damage that it would be torn down.

         Carlos took his family to Colorado, where Anita had always fostered dreams of living. No more time would be lost.

 

Copyright 2008, Eryn Vyctorya Mills

Cover: "Voyager"

The Voyager Maiden edges toward the waterline as she awaits the setting of her planet's twin.

Copyright 2008, Victoria Zamudio

Victoria Zamudio is a student artist.  This is her first work to appear as a cover for Double-Edged Publishing.