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The Mexican Flyboy, an excerpt
By Alfredo Véa, Jr.
THOSE TOPLESS TOWERS
In the present time.
She wobbled to the window to close it against the stiff, icy breeze that was blowing in from San Francisco Bay. She cursed herself as she moved. If she had remembered to shut the window last night, she would still be asleep, snug in her warm bed with her baby-to-be curled up happily beneath her ribs. She would still be groping, searching in her sleep for that childhood dream. So many times in the last few years she had almost dreamed it. It was a forgotten dream, but it was there. She was sure of it.
It was there like a word perched eternally on the tip of her tongue, like a vague scent that gives pause again and again—an aroma that almost stirs up feelings that almost exist—like a fragrant breeze faintly recalled by a shiver on the nape of the neck. She had almost dreamed it for years, confusing her nightly disquiet with anxieties about money, confusing her fitful tossing and her abuse of her pillow with red wine or acid indigestion. She had become a stutterer, struggling to enunciate in her sleep—to break the rock-hard shell of a dream impediment. No psychiatrist and no guru had ever been able to help her.
Then one day something amazing happened. In fact, it was the same day her bizarre husband and his peculiar friend installed a new high-current, high-voltage circuit and a bank of battery chargers in the garage. On that very day, her lost dream began to return to her in scattered bits and pieces—a fragment drifting into her mind while she was bathing, another while she was standing in line at the grocery. Then small but blazingly bright little scenes had begun to flutter downward onto her consciousness like solitary flakes of snow.
The light snowfall of recollections seemed to commence when Simon abruptly began skipping dinner and started sleeping in the garage. The blizzard began with full force when he started ignoring all those term papers that were stacking up in his office, when he suddenly locked himself in the basement and began working obsessively on a strange-looking contraption. The eerie whine of an antique oscilloscope and a homemade signal generator down in the garage beneath their bedroom had heralded the return of her childhood dream in brilliant color and sounds that were as vivid as life.
But the sound of singing transformers and clashing frequencies had brought something else, something more than the dulcet dreams she had once had as a girl. Now her nights were filled with indescribable sounds—explosions and whispers, curses and prayers, squalls of tears and torrents of laughter. They were flooded with inexpressible images—too terrible for words, too wonderful for words. Had Simon’s mysterious work in the garage brought these on?
Her eyes scanned the enormous fog bank that had closed in beneath their hillside home. Then her gaze fell downward to the driveway, and she saw him. He was standing alone near the street. He was wearing a light shirt and was shoeless in weather that was close to freezing. His dress shoes were on the roof of the car, and there was a suit bag on top of the trunk. His curly reddish-gray hair was shaking wildly in the snapping, whipping winds. She smiled wistfully. Her own hair was beginning to gray. The twelve-year difference in their ages was becoming less obvious by the day.
“There he is . . . ,” she said to no one, “a Mexican gone mad: Simon Vegas, father-to-be, and completely convinced that he is the last man on earth who should have a daughter.” There he is, she mused—the man she married, and she still knew almost nothing about his life in the years before they met. “Even after ten years of marriage,” she said to the closing window. She laughed a bittersweet laugh. Then she remembered the first time she had ever read his writing. A dozen of his poems had been published in a local magazine, and she had read them over coffee. Those poems were why she had married him.
After five minutes, he was still standing like a statue in the driveway—turned to stone by the nightmarish, tangled workings of his own mind. The doctors had called his condition post-traumatic stress disorder. Elena had studied several books about PTSD and soon realized that with one exception, Simon suffered from every symptom listed: he was super-vigilant and overly protective, of course, but oddly enough, he was never depressed.
Since leaving the military, her husband had manifested every comorbid condition in the books and had taken and rejected every medication and therapy. The bathroom cabinet upstairs was filled with unused bottles of sertraline, paroxetine, and risperidone. “He has every symptom but classical depression,” his current doctor had told her. “It’s weird. He’s quite saddened but never depressed. Never. He freezes up for a few moments each day, then starts moving . . . and he keeps moving. There’s something at his core that keeps him hopeful. It’s amazing, really. It’s no wonder he never takes the medication.”
Elena had always wondered how Simon could not be depressed. In every other way he resembled other men who suffered from melancholia de guerre, shellshock, nostalgia. He was eternally troubled and had endless episodes of anxiety, and he, like many, had become a substance abuser. She laughed to herself. His drug of choice was a 1986 Château Palmer. At $250 a bottle, he had chosen it precisely because he couldn’t afford more than a bottle a month.
After ten years of watching him thrash in his sleep, she had given up on the idea that some clue from his past, some small tidbit from his youth, might miraculously leap forward and explain everything—his opaque past and his dark, impenetrable present. He had never spoken a single word about the war, and after a decade of silence, she had come to the conclusion that he never would.
And there was something else. She had always suspected that his soul had been seriously wounded long before he ever went to Vietnam. Where was his family? Simon had no parents to call on the phone; no sisters or brothers ever sent postcards; no relatives came to dinner. There were no cousins or nephews. There were no boxes of photographs and no stories about childhood.
She reached down and rubbed her huge, distended belly. That statue in the driveway was about to become a daddy. The possibility of it had unsettled her for years. Then, seven months ago—for her own happiness, if not his—she had stopped taking the pill. The clock was ticking—the alarm about to go off. She smiled at the idea of him as a papa. Just a few weeks ago, the impossible, the unimaginable, had happened. Her life—her entire world—had been upended, altered forever.
She smiled. In the last two months, a few rays of light had broken through the obscurities of her life with him. After years of frustration, she had finally made up her mind to find out who Simon Vegas really was. The time had come to stop asking and start looking. She had begun by snooping—by going through his notebooks in the library. She had pored over reams of his poetry but never found any of his earlier poems. She had read and reread the only book of poems he ever published but could find nothing.
“Even as a poet, he never speaks about himself.” She thought about what she had just said aloud and added, “Of course he does. But he has camouflaged himself with symbol and metaphor.” In his latest poems, her husband had hidden himself in tercets and quatrains—verse that is anything but free. She had examined his wallet and inspected every page of his old passports. She had dug through his boxes of notes from his classes and lectures, all to no avail. After giving up on the obvious, she had turned her attention to the garage. While pretending to clean it, she had moved some of Simon’s wine racks and tools and stumbled upon a dusty old canvas bag. The word BOXEO was stitched in white thread on one side.
Simon had concealed the bag in a dark, musty nook. It had been shoved into a cardboard box and hidden beneath a stack of Scientific American magazines in exactly the same way that other men hid their collections of pornography from their wives. When she finally built up enough courage to open the bag, she somehow sensed the enormity of what might be inside it. Her hands were shaking as she undid the buckles that had sealed it.
Could her husband be a pervert—a closet pedophile? Was he a porn addict? Did this old bag contain the dark secret that he had kept hidden from the world—from his wife? When her fingers found the first book, she shut her eyes, then carefully pulled it from the bag. When she opened her eyes, she fell to her knees and gasped with shock and confusion. Then she began laughing hysterically. In her hands was a fragile, yellowed first edition of Mandrake the Magician. She tenderly turned the cover page and began to read.
It was this very comic book that had explained to her at last the origin, if not the true meaning, of those ridiculous movements that he made every morning in front of the bathroom mirror. She had always wondered why he stood there, wrapped in a bath towel, his eyes narrowed to slits while he pointed all five fingers of his mangled right hand at the looking glass. Now she knew that he had been gesturing hypnotically just like Mandrake.
That morning in the garage, she had also discovered scores of copies of The Phantom and Dr. Strange. It was evident from the condition of the comics that every page had been devoured hundreds, if not thousands, of times over the years. It was also clear that these books had been cherished and protected, first by a small boy, then by a soldier, then by a grown man. She found a jar crammed to the lid with tiny gears and springs. In other boxes she found hundreds of maps and countless ledgers filled with incomprehensible codes— page after page of scribbled and scrawled numbers.
She had laughed out loud at the absurdity of it all. She discovered from these comics that Simon’s mind didn’t always kidnap his soul and drag it back to Vietnam as she had always suspected. Now she understood for the first time that there were other places to which he might be taken. She imagined her husband’s ethereal presence gliding through space on the other side of the galaxy while waging psychic warfare against a lizard-skinned Venusian warlord.
Or he might be in some faraway European capital fighting side by side with the Phantom, projecting his astral Mexican essence against the prodigious synthetic brain of a six-eyed alien menace from the planet Zothrax. After reading a third comic book, she felt a wave of deep sadness traversing her soul. Vietnam was insane, but at least it was real.
One morning just four weeks ago, Elena had called Simon’s good friend Zeke and asked him to come to the house. Ezekiel Zacharias Stein, a private investigator for several attorneys in San Francisco, was a man whose spirit was forever locked in a struggle between Zen archery, Carl Jung, and rabbinical school. After begging him not to reveal anything that she was about to show him, Elena had led him down the wooden stairs and past the wine racks. After several minutes of soul-searching and hesitation, she showed him the secret trove that she had discovered in the garage.
When she pulled the buckles at the top of the bag, a hundred comic books spilled out onto the workbench. Elena had told him about the satchel over the phone, but Zeke had imagined the usual Aquaman, Captain America, or Daredevil comics. To his astonishment, there was not a single flying, acrobatic, muscleman hero in the entire bag of colorful books—only fantastical bearded magicians draped in majestic robes.
She shoved a small table saw to one side, moved a drill press back toward a wall, and showed him a box that had been invisible behind all of the tools. It was jammed with ledgers. She opened one, then two, for him to see. Each one was filled with dizzying sets of numbers. Zeke noticed that many of the ledgers predated the Vietnam War. Finally she showed him a wooden box that had been carefully crammed with folded maps—hundreds of maps, including a few that were of museum quality. When she lifted the box, the bottom fell out, spilling the contents everywhere. She turned on several overhead lights, then stood there, her mouth gaping.
Alfredo Véa, Jr., who grew up in the Buckeye RoadbarrionearPhoenix, Arizona, is aMexican-Yaqui-Filipino-Americanauthor of three previous novels:La Maravilla,The Silver Cloud Café, andGods Go Begging, which theLos Angeles Timesnamed one of the best books of 1999.Drafted into the Army in 1968, his experience in Vietnam plays a pivotal role in The Mexican Flyboy. He works as a criminal defense attorney in San Francisco. The book is available from the publisher, University of Oklahoma Press, local bookstores and the usual online booksellers. Excerpt from Alfredo Véa, The Mexican Flyboy (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016), reprinted by permission of the publisher.