In Perfect Light
A Novel
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
for Gabriela, who is like the sun
and for her mother, Patricia, who is the sun
What is the way to the place where the light is distributed, or where the east wind is scattered upon the earth?
—JOB 38:24
Contents
Epigraph
Part One
Light and the Sadness of Dreams
Where They Found Him
Timing and Order in the Universe
Grace and Morning Mass
The First Signs of a Storm
Lost Files
Grace
Night
Some Day We’ll All Be Happy
Why He Hated Them
What’s a Boy? What’s a Son?
The World Comes to an End (in One Apocalyptic Moment)
The World Is Born (in One Apocalyptic Moment)
The Order of Things in the Universe
Andrés Segovia. What a Beautiful Name
Irony and Touch
How Everything Comes Back
Studying the Light
Good Things, Bad Things, Good Things
The Angel of God
What’s a Mother?
Dead, You Say?
Grace at Work
Andrés Was Crying
Timing and Order in the Universe
Dave? Grace?
The Light
The Dark
Part Two
Normalcy and Apocalypse
Grace and Morning Mass
Do You Love Me, Mister?
Timing and Order in the Universe
What’s a Mother?
What About the Sky?
Order and Timing in the Universe
There Might Have Been Thunder
Grace at Morning Mass
Shirts and Things That Matter
Still Life of Beauty
Conversations (Because We Live in Our Heads)
Still Life of Freedom
Timing and Order in the Universe
Maybe Everything Would Be All Right
Not This Case, Judge
Grace in the Afternoon
Order and Timing in the Universe
Andrés, You Are That Boy
Mother, Son, Mister, Grace
Until His Heart Bursts into Flames
Timing and Order in the Universe
The Things of This World
Everything but Sleep (in the Middle of the Night)
Part Three
The Silent Love of Countries
Order and Timing in the Universe
Blindness and Books
Learning to Run
Timing and Order in the Universe
The Quiet Before the Storm
Andrés Segovia. That’s a Beautiful Name
Grace and Morning Mass
All the Hovering Angels
Becoming Light
Grace and Morning Mass
No One Can Run from a Fire
Timing and Order in the Universe
Touch
Emancipation—There’s a Word
He Was Happy
Apocalypse: Everything Happens in an Instant (Timing and Order in the Universe)
Grace, Liz, Light, and the Sadness of Dreams
What Are We—Asleep?
No Morning Mass Today
Whatever Gets You Through the Day
Timing and Order in the Universe
Prayer
The Story of Dave
Who Was She Now?
Timing and Order in the Universe
Good Man, Take Me Home
Timing and Order in the Universe
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Praise
Other Books by Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Part One
We reach for light, yet all we grasp is darkness.
—ISAIAH 59:9
Light and the Sadness of Dreams
Standing in the light, they look like salvation itself. Her son’s hair, fine as strands of silk, his eyes as clear as water. Her husband’s face is perfect as the flood of light. They are happy, at play, laughing, talking. The dream is always the same. Always, she is alone, apart, an exiled observer to their movements.
Always, she wakes when she hears them calling her name.
She lies in the darkness and steadies her breathing, trying to soothe herself. She can smell their clean sweat filling the air, sweet as summer rain. She runs her hand across the cool sheets—then waits for the beating of her heart to slow. She thinks of Mister. Always, he was more yours than mine, Sam. She thinks of their last visit, how they both left angry. She can still taste that anger in the back of her tongue, as if the words she had spoken were as solid as a piece of bitter fruit.
She sits up slowly and places her feet on the cool wood floors. She walks toward the French doors and opens them. She breathes in the desert air.
Mister and me, Sam, we’ve lost our way. Sam. So many years he’d been dead. And still she woke uttering his name. A part of her expected him to answer.
Where They Found Him
I would hurt you for the simplest of reasons. That’s what he said with his eyes. The streetlight and the empty city made him feel as if he were in a play. No one had come to watch him except for Dave. “Why’d you bail me out?” He kept his head bowed, his dark hair falling over his eyes.
“You called. I came.”
“I shouldn’t have called.”
“I could throw you back, Andrés.”
“What the fuck. Go ahead.”
“Where’d you learn to be so fucking ungrateful?”
Andrés almost smiled. “Sorry, I’m fresh out of gratitude.”
“Hating me is part of the whole deal—is that it?”
Dave was like everyone else. He wanted to be loved. He did want to be loved. Andrés almost laughed out loud. He closed his eyes, then opened them. His face was beginning to throb again, and he knew his bruises would be turning black and blue. A brown man turning blue. Like a chameleon. Ha, ha, fucking ha, God, tired, all he wanted to do was sleep, be in bed, dreaming of palo verdes in bloom, the yellow blossoms bursting in the blue sky like firecrackers. He wanted to dream soft hands rubbing his skin. He pictured himself melting beneath those hands, like butter or ice cream or anything else that wasn’t human. He wanted to close his eyes and be somewhere else, Toronto Madrid Paris. He hated all this, his life, the days he lived, the nights he didn’t sleep, arrests, police, questions being shot at him, phone calls to a lawyer he loved and hated and needed and hated and hated and God, and mostly he didn’t want to feel this way, this thing, like the tick-tick of a bomb, like the click of a gun about to shoot a bullet. Like a chronic pain that was so much a part of his life that he almost didn’t call it pain anymore. Maybe it was shame, this thing he felt. Partially, it must have been that. Sure. But it was other things, too. He knew that. And just then he hated himself for calling Dave at three-thirty in the morning. Call anytime. That’s what he’d said. And so he’d called. And there he was, standing in front of him like some goddamned angel conjured up by a desperate prayer.
“I think we should get you to a doctor.”
“Nothing open but ERs—”
“C’mon. Let’s have you looked at.”
“Nothing’s broken.” He didn’t know why he’d said that. It wasn’t true. He lit a cigarette.
“You could at least offer me one of those.”
Andrés tossed him his pack of cigarettes. He watched Dave as he lit one. Manicured hands, no worker in them—but he had his own way of being a man. Not a wo
rker, but another kind of man. He had something, Dave did. Sure. Anyone could see that.
Dave stared at him and shook his head. “God, you look awful. What’d they do to your beautiful face?” He said that so easily. Beautiful face. He could say that to a man or to a woman, and the man and the woman would look up in gratitude. Because he said it as if he was the first human being who’d ever noticed. Maybe that’s why so many people trusted him, because he had something in his voice, because he was well-spoken and had learned to modulate his speech—just so—and somehow, with that calm and controlled voice, he managed to rearrange the chaos of the world in such a way as to make it appear as if there really were a plan. Yeah, the whole fucking world trusted him because he was nice to look at and because he was a gringo, and that still mattered despite what anybody said or wanted to believe, the whole fucking world.
Finally, he decided to look at Dave. Why not lift his head? “I wasn’t as drunk as they said.”
“You told the officer you’d kill him if he touched you.”
He didn’t remember that. Sometimes, when the rage set in, he couldn’t remember. Like alcohol blackouts. He shook his head. But it could have been true. “I don’t like people I don’t know to touch me. So that makes me weird?”
“The officer said you were crying, that you couldn’t stop crying.” He stopped. Waited. As if his statement were a question.
“Yeah, I was crying.” As if admitting it were nothing. Nothing at all. Easy as pie. Easy as biting into a Hershey’s candy bar. Tears. They’re like seeds in a watermelon. Good for spitting out. “And in public, too. Crying in public—now that’s a fucking crime, isn’t it?”
“It’s reasonable for a cop to stop someone on an empty street at two o’clock in the morning, don’t you think?”
“I may be the wrong person to ask. I’m no expert on being reasonable. Isn’t that why I wound up in jail? Isn’t that why I wound up calling you at three-thirty in the glorious fucking morning?—because I’m not reasonable.”
“You couldn’t stop crying.” He had this look on his face, like he wanted to cry, too, cry because the whole thing made him as sad as anything. Dave wasn’t reasonable, either. But that convincing look of empathy—it didn’t go with his Italian suit.
“You look pretty well pressed for three-thirty in the morning.”
“I was at a dinner party. A late one.”
“Dinner party. Never been. Thank your fucking patron saint for cell phones.”
“Yeah, where would I be without one?”
“At a dinner party. A late one.”
They both laughed. Sometimes they did that.
“I was drunk. Didn’t they tell you?” Andrés smiled.
“But not that drunk.”
“No, not that drunk. But drunk. So maybe I’m just a drunk who was crying in my beer.”
“Maybe. But you know something? I don’t think you’re a drunk.”
“How do you figure?”
“I know you, don’t I?”
“I’m not that kid anymore.”
“I represented you in court, didn’t I?”
“Ancient history, vato.”
“I don’t forget that easily.”
“Memory. There’s a beautiful thing.” He didn’t want to think back to that time. He didn’t have the stomach for nostalgia. He didn’t even remember what he’d told him. About himself. About his predicaments. He sometimes told people different things. Not lies exactly—he left things out, sometimes. He let them fill the rest in. Like he was a coloring book.
“You’re not a drunk, that’s not your problem.”
“Maybe you’re wrong.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You’re a lawyer, not a fucking doctor.” There was a hint of a smile on his face—as if he’d amused himself. He put out his cigarette.
“When you were in college—”
“I didn’t go to fucking college.”
The young man could see the surprise in Dave’s face. It was there—then it was gone. “You speak like someone who went to college.”
“Do I?”
“What are you, twenty-six?”
“You going somewhere with this?”
“I’m thirty-seven.”
“We could be brothers.”
“That’s not where I was going. Still, there’s a thought.”
“Except you’re a gringo.”
“And you’re a Mexican.”
“With papers.”
“Yeah, we could be brothers.”
“Yeah. Sure. Get back to your party.”
“It’s over by now.”
“What about your girlfriend?”
“She’s over, too.”
“Yeah?”
“She wants someone simpler. She wants someone to bring home the bacon and take her shopping. She wants someone to wear on her arm like a nice coat everyone will notice. She wants someone whose clients don’t break into Spanish when they get mad. She wants someone who’s the same every day. Me, I never know what I’m going to be like from one day to the next.”
“Don’t lie to yourself. You’re as goddamned predictable as they come.”
“So are you. We could be brothers.”
“Fuck you, Dave.”
“Fuck you, too, Andrés.” He laughed. “You see, that’s why she left me. I like to use that word too much. I’m not respectable.”
“You want to be.”
“No. I don’t think so.”
“Maybe you are too complicated.” The young man laughed. It wasn’t cruel, his laugh. But hard. Like cured cement. Exactly that hard.
Dave watched him laugh.
“So she doesn’t fucking understand the words pro bono, huh?”
“Exactly. Why would I leave a bourgeois party to help a guy like you?”
“Bourgeois. There’s a pretty word. A college word.” The young man laughed. Something softer in his laugh this time. But not all the hardness had left, would never leave. “Well, I don’t understand why you’re here, either.”
“Neither do I.”
“So we’re all on your girlfriend’s side.”
“Some people need to understand everything. They have to connect every damned dot—every damned, fucking one of them. Other people don’t.”
“Which kind are you?”
“Same kind you are.”
“I don’t think so.” Andrés was so tired he was almost becoming soft. “Crawl back to her. The world’s a cold place.”
“Not here, buddy. This is El Paso, Texas. Our winters are hardly winters at all.”
They looked at each other. Like they knew everything about each other. Like that. But what exactly did they know, these strangers who were so familiar and intimate? You fought a war with someone, and you knew them. But you only knew the part that was in the war, the part that knew how to fight. The other part, the pedestrian part that lived in the endless calmness of days, you didn’t know that part.
“Andrés. You need some help. I mean it.”
He didn’t have to say it, could have thought it, could have thought anything he wanted. He had no right. He didn’t have to fucking say it. “No, Dave, I don’t need help. I need a ride home.”
“You telling me the only thing you need in your fucking life is a cab?”
Yeah, that’s what I’m telling you.
Timing and Order in the Universe
It is five-thirty in the morning. Andrés Segovia is in his apartment in Sunset Heights, sleeping fitfully, his fists swinging in the air. Dave Duncan is listening to a woman’s voice on his answering machine, “Don’t call me, Dave. Let’s just let it be….”
As Grace Delgado is waking from her dream, fifty-eight passengers file out of a Greyhound bus at the downtown depot. Thirty of the passengers are just passing through. After a bathroom break and a breakfast burrito, they will reboard and continue on to Phoenix and L.A. Twenty-four of the passengers are greeted by at least one family member. The remaining four pass
engers—all of them men—have no friends or family to greet them. All four have been paroled to El Paso, though they have no previous connections to the city.
As terms of their release, all four men are required to meet with their respective parole officers at least twice a week. They are required to register themselves and their current addresses with the El Paso Police Department.
In the previous eight months, twenty such sex offenders have been released to the border area by parole boards across the country—though none of them had ever called El Paso their home. The men are not acquainted with one another. The fact that they are on the same bus is merely a coincidence.
At forty-one, William Hart is the youngest of them. He walks into the men’s bathroom and shaves, refreshes himself by throwing water on his face. He reapplies some deodorant. He studies himself. Blue eyes, good teeth, nice smile. Still handsome and youthful in that wholesome kind of way that makes people trust him. A few wrinkles beginning to show, but nothing that concerns him. His only imperfection is the small scar above his lip. “Beautiful,” he whispers. Prison didn’t age him, gave him time to think and get in shape. An abundance of time was no reason to waste it.