Wanting Something You Can Have

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In his dream sequined women straddle the backs of elephants, asking for help down. Turkey vultures shrug on the roof of his car, watching an old buck weave through curbed trashcans. The birds wait for the buck to wander a bit too far, for its body to find a speeding car, or at the very least, for antlers to catch and spill the lidded feast. In his dream his wife sleeps beside him; across the room his daughter turns in her crib.

________

When Eduardo’s cancer returned his wife took him to live with their daughter in the United States. They packed and sold the house, and their daughter sent pictures of her babies wrapped in Texas flags, signed See You Soon Grandma!

In Venezuela, Eduardo had made rigs and made love to women. He’d made bets on racing dogs. He’d made sandcastles with his daughter under the crosshatched palms and she asked if she could bury him.

From the airplane, his life looked like it must have been small, the peninsula disappearing in minutes. The altitude screwed with his hearing, so he couldn’t understand a thing the stewardess said. He gave up saying Pardon? and said Yes to everything. She brought him a thin steak, a coffee, a pack of crackers. His wife watched the little TV. Eduardo fell asleep with his mouth open and the trash on his tray-table, the stewardesses whispering in the back near the toilet; the warm gulf moving below him like a woman.

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Before he looked like Gandhi, before he was sixty-four and spent most of his days at the oncologist, he had known women. Older women who kept their hair long and wore enormous bras with cups the size of stocking caps. Skinny women, their nipples always hardened with cold. Some of the women just girls, so young they tried to look old, disguised in heels and hose.

One New Year’s Eve, he was dealt a hand of four kings and won a whorehouse. At home his wife, big and demanding as a poorly built mansion, was carrying his daughter, who finally had to be cut out, 10 pounds. When Eduardo got to the hospital he was surprised: he hadn’t expected the baby to be so heavy, to love her as much as he did, her eyebrows little commas.

In the first two years he built two more floors, named the whorehouse The Palace. Enough women to sleep with until you get to heaven. “Just keep building up,” Eduardo said. By the time he was given his diagnosis, the building, originally meant to hide behind the bar out front, was six pink stories.

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Now they move into his daughter’s apartment in Houston where everything is white and the babies spend all their time eating, and his daughter says to his wife, “If Papa leaves his socks everywhere I swear to God I’ll cut holes in the toes.” She wants to say Motherfucker! but then he’d laugh and say, It’s true! It’s true! and anyway she knows she shouldn’t use foul language around the babies.

Now Eduardo makes himself sandwiches and watches gossip television because he likes all of the bat-shit crazy women on there. He vomits and his wife drives him to radiation. American hospitals are cleaner than anywhere he’s ever been in his life. So clean and bright he wonders if they’re trying to prepare him for the afterlife. Not the place where you’re going, his wife laughs. But Eduardo thinks this would be exactly the kind of place he should end up, friendly and sterile, pretending they’re saving your life when really they’re letting you die, fattening the pillows behind your head while your ass is freezing in the paper gown. The metal table shines like one of his girls’ silver teeth. Nowhere on earth has ever been this clean.

His nurse bolts him to the table, wears her storm of hair in a ponytail, and looks like his daughter. “How are you doing today, Mr. Martin...