ID: [email protected]
PASSWORD: *******
WELCOME, Ana Flores. LAST LOGIN, March 15, 2018. DURATION, 12 Minutes 34 Seconds. DESIGNATED INTERLOCUTOR, Canadian American singer and songwriter Alanis Morissette. HOW CAN I HELP YOU TODAY?
I need to see all the alternate versions of my life.
ISN’T IT IRONIC, Ana Flores, THAT CHILI IS TYPICALLY SERVED HOT, NOT CHILLY? PLEASE CONFIRM THAT THIS REQUEST IS NOT FOR PERSONAL USE.
Yes, this request is for my academic research.
OKAY. WOULD YOU LIKE YOUR ALTERNATE TIMELINES RENDERED VISUALLY OR TEXTUALLY?
Visually.
PLEASE PROVIDE A GUIDING QUESTION.
YOU OUGHTA KNOW, THIS WILL TAKE A MINUTE. PLEASE WAIT.
A series of videos appeared, each one sequestered into its own geometric shard on the screen. On each slice of the kaleidoscope, Ana lived out possibilities she hadn’t accessed in her timeline. They were, in essence, short films of what could have been.
Only one showed Ana and her mother in their Echo Park apartment. Felicia’s fingers snaked through the waves of Ana’s long black hair. It was a rare, but not unusual, way Felicia showed loved. More often, her affection manifested in cautious words: drive safe, apply sunscreen, call me when you get there. If the caress was a sign to spend the summer at home, Ana didn’t want to see it.
A dozen other clips starred Ana and Luis, each with minor but distinct deviations from the life they knew. In one, they walked down the Charles River, taking a regular study break, an excuse to hold hands away from their friends. But Luis was beach blond, with a thick but close-cut black beard. He’d gone through a rebellious phase her Luis had not.
The shot would be easy to dismiss as fiction or forgery were it not for the way they held hands. Their pinkies were hooked together, Luis’s loosely tethered to hers, a lazy way of holding hands all their own. Ana assumed no one else shared it, this quirk they loved and laughed about often. But there they were: blond-Luis and other-Ana, acting like it was their own little invention.
Ana pulled away, overwhelmed. Her phone chimed. Luis was walking to the library now. In her rush to power the Defractor down, she scrolled over a shard in the upper right-hand corner of the kaleidoscope. Her lips were locked on a stranger’s. She clicked, and let surprise settle over her.
At the start of the clip, they sat next to each other at her usual table in Leverett Library, both typing furiously. They paused, their timing seemingly choreographed. The unnamed boy extended his slim fingers toward her cheek, turned her face toward his, and leaned in for a kiss. It was brief, but Ana watched her own face break into a smile: natural, contained, but full of joy, the way she imagined she’d look after kissing someone she fiercely cared about. At some point, she and Luis had moved just as easily, earnest in their affection. They’d sat at the same table, tucked in the western corner of the library. Watching herself do the choreography with another man, the motions felt distant, pulled from happier times.
Though he looked a bit like her boyfriend, with the same oblong face and deep-set eyes, the unnamed boy was not Luis. She was really, truly, deeply in love with a man she hadn’t met in this life.
Taking the stairs two at a time, Ana rushed to rid herself of the Defractor. A librarian accepted the machine, and Ana put on her best poker face. A second later, Luis walked through the glass doors and swiped into the library. He smiled at her, and she forced herself to smile back.
“I forgot which dryer was busted and had to run my comforter twice,” Luis said. “I hope your morning was more productive.”
“Yes,” Ana lied. “I made progress. Almost ready for Havana.”
“I can’t wait to be there,” Luis said.
Luis kissed her. His lips were slippery, slathered in a layer of unscented Carmex. An excessive amount. Ana resisted the urge to wipe it off her lips.
“Can you believe Alanis Morissette was our age when she wrote Jagged Little Pill?” she said instead.
They were pumped full of adrenaline, the mix of nerves and possibility that makes a traveler’s high so addictive. The air outside the airport smelled of car exhaust, and though the parking lot was filled with mid-century Fords painted in bright greens and oranges, they slipped into a dinky gray four-door sedan. When the driver asked where they were from, Ana said they were both from California, which prompted him to ask if they were siblings. Before Luis had a chance to answer, Ana told the driver they’d met in school. Luis stared out the window, fascinated by a tree with wide glossy leaves and hot-pink flowers shaped like pom-poms. Buildings were painted with the Cuban government’s slogans: Unidad, compromiso y victoria. Hasta la victoria siempre. Luis whispered them to himself. Ana grabbed his hand, squeezed it. He returned the gesture before the landscape outside the window distracted him again.
alecón for just a minute, and looped through a labyrinth of one-way streets ending at their apartment. Luis offered to carry Ana’s backpack to the third-floor walk-up.
“I’m helping because I love you,” he said, smiling. “Not because I don’t think you can manage.”
“Feminism thanks you.”
Once their bags were unpacked, reality set in. They were in a country they’d never been in before, one they’d never imagined visiting. Simply too many obstacles stood in their way: the cost, the embargo, the mountain of bureaucracy required to get a passport, then a visa. Somehow, they’d done it, crossing into a new frontier together. Sunlight flowed in through a set of French windows, warming them up, making their faces glow, another gentle reminder that what they’d built between them was worthwhile.
“I should get to the university,” Ana said.
“You have the whole summer,” said Luis.
“Do you want to come with me?”
“It’d be weird.”
“It’ll be fine.”
“I’ll wait here.”
“Alright,” she said, heading out the door without a kiss.
The relationship had developed quickly, their reliance on one another growing fast and tight, like the strands of ivy on the redbrick buildings that towered all over campus. They constructed their schedules around each other. Luis was only ever a text away. Intimate secrets, shared as pillow talk, glued them together: neither had a relationship with their biological fathers, a civil war loomed in the background of their families’ arrival in the United States, they both felt unequipped and out of place at an institution that valorized wealth. Love formed in opposition to the ugliness and injustice of their lives. It felt freeing, like an act of resistance. But would tethering oneself to a cause, instead of a soul, tempt the thread to snap?
A year passed, and they were still together—mostly happy, mostly stable. You’re my first love, they admitted to each other, and reaffirmed their growing belief that existence was a task best done in a pair. The heat in Luis’s chest felt like love, and though he sometimes worried he could be misjudging his feelings, he chose to trust their relationship, lacking another to compare it to. Ana wouldn’t have invited him to Cuba if she didn’t want him there, which brought a sense of peace that carried them through finals and move-out.
His mother, Elena, had grown accustomed to who’d he become in college—sporadic, ever-changing—but she still asked him whether he was chasing his girlfriend to Cuba. Her voice was light and joking, but the question carried genuine curiosity.
“No,” Luis said. “I got a grant to do thesis research. And who wouldn’t want to see Cuba?”
“I’d love to,” Elena said. Luis regretted his choice of words. They both understood she couldn’t fly wherever she pleased, even if she had the money.
“I’ve been thinking about Neto,” Luis admitted slowly, desperate to change the subject, but also prying open a conversation he’d been stewing over for weeks. The trip had unlocked an old memory. He was young, around seven or eight, which made the memory unreliable, though it felt true. His mother was at work, and his grandmother Esperanza was frying plantains in the kitchen. Esperanza could still talk back then, years from the disease that would devour her brain from the
inside, but she wasn’t paying Luis any attention, which was probably why he ended up snooping through her closet. His stringy elbows knocked a box over, and a handful of envelopes fell out. As he bent over to pick it up, he noticed his great-uncle’s name scrawled on the lid: Neto. Luis pulled out one of the letters, the first line still clear in his mind: I woke up thinking about Cuba.
The memory blurred here, overrun by the shame of being caught. Esperanza yanked the brittle envelopes from his hands and told him never to touch them again. Luis didn’t know why she’d reacted so hotheadedly, so unlike the gentle caretaker he knew. Now, given how the Alzheimer’s had progressed, he’d never be able to ask. All he had was the memory of her, eyes ablaze, clutching the paper close to her chest.
“Abuela used to have a box of his things,” Luis said.
“Your grandmother has a bunch of junk,” Elena said. “Anyway, she never talked about Neto. Better to leave it all alone.”
Somewhere between booking the flight and boarding the plane, Luis rewired the story he told himself. His great-uncle had referenced Cuba, a fact that felt preordained. If Neto had known the world, Luis should too. Ana wasn’t drawing him to Cuba, though it’d be nice to spend the summer with her. It was Neto, calling out from the afterlife, asking that his nephew follow in his path, walk the streets he had, smelling the exhaust and ocean breeze. Luis wanted to see what Neto had seen.
Perhaps his uncle was not actually a factor at all, and the allure of Cuba was completely unrelated to the letters that’d popped into his head, but Luis chose the story he wanted to hear. Neto pulled him here, to Havana. Luis repeated that to himself until it felt real.
The university halls resembled Harvard’s: marble tiles, walls clad with wood from floor to ceiling. Ana was meeting with a professor. One of his graduate students was gossiping with him when Ana arrived. The office was underwhelming, windowless and filled with messy stacks of books, but the professor spoke optimistically about Ana’s project, a reassuring show of faith.
Ana’s research goals were simple: to prove that the diaspora existed before 1980, that Salvadorans shaped the world before the war, before their global displacement. Growing up, only people who’d migrated from El Salvador, like her mother, knew where it was. The country felt unimportant, too small to matter. Of cultural irrelevance. Her research was going to disprove what she’d spent a lifetime believing.
At least that’s what she’d written in a thank-you letter to the donor who’d be funding her travel that summer. The truth was a bit trickier. It was an unnamed Nicaraguan hiding in her home, not a Salvadoran, who’d set her on this path.
Ana had been searching for her own passport when she opened her mother’s out of idle curiosity. Among the back pages, there was a card the size and thickness of a driver’s license. A bearded man’s portrait sat on the left-hand
side. Felicia rushed into the room, feigning casualness, though her eyes immediately darted to Ana’s hands, the passport in one and the ID in another.
Felicia was not one to share a story, of any kind, without a good reason, even with her daughter, the center of her life, but Ana asked anyway.
“Mami. Who is Antonio?”
“He was a stranger who came to my rescue once,” Felicia finally said. “He forgot his ID when he left. I don’t think that was even his real name. All I know is that he was Nicaraguan, and that he told me to stare at the ocean from Havana. It was one of the most beautiful places he’d been.”
“You’ve kept it all these years.”
“I was grateful for his help.”
“What did he save you from?”
“Asking too many questions will get you in trouble, Ana.”
Ana disagreed, but the few sentences her mother uttered were more than she’d ever shared about her life in El Salvador, so she simply pressed the ID card, precious enough for her mother to store, into Felicia’s palm.
When it was time to start narrowing her research topic, Ana thought back to the unnamed man. She imagined all the places the man had gone: San Salvador, Havana, Managua, Mars, the moon. If she could find a trace of him—perhaps his real name—she’d be able to write the kind of thesis that’d propel her into the upper echelons of the ivory tower: a PhD at Yale or Stanford. A stable job would free her. When she could support them both, Ana could shed the guilt that kept her under her mother’s thumb. With the distance, and clearer boundaries, her mother might speak openly. Cuba was closer than the moon, so she proposed a research trip rooted in nothing more than a hunch, a conversation she’d had with her mother in passing, and the loose hope that the Nicaraguan would unspool the horrors that kept Ana and Felicia tied together so tightly.
“Does the university have a Defractor?” Ana asked the professor now.
“Alejandra can show you where it is,” the professor said. The graduate student nodded, and packed up her bag. Ana thanked the professor, and promised to work hard all summer. He smiled, his teeth tiny as Chiclets. Alejandra opened the door for her, then gestured to the right.
ting.”
“I’m glad I’m here.” Ana confessed that she almost hadn’t made it. Predictably, her mother hadn’t wanted Ana to travel internationally. Whenever they got close to anything prickly—her first husband, her immigration to the United States, Ana’s father—her mother retreated into general platitudes about how scary and cruel the world was, as if Ana didn’t see or feel its weight every day. Whether in small ways, as being talked over in lecture, or large, as the migrants being tear-gassed at the border, the world tried crushing her daily.
“Everyone is very excited about this machine,” Alejandra said. “The university got it just last year.”
“Have you used it?”
“No,” Alejandra said. Unlike the overeager American tech sector, Alejandra was skeptical of the technology’s abilities. Their aspirations, she thought, weren’t convincing: Take the guesswork out of life’s difficult choices! Never ask “what if” again! With money to be made, advocates wanted to make it a hot consumer product, ...
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