OK, so now can you hear me?
OK, that's the title of the story, "Can You Hear Me?"
OK, it really is.
OK.
"Van Garza knew his father was omniscient,
that he could see, among other things, the small square adobe
house near the university where Van lived
with his girlfriend, Darlene.
He could see the prickly pears, tallest trees standing guard,
and the chili pepper Christmas lights
strung around the front window.
Sometimes Van listed the things his father would approve of--
Van's breakfast, even though it was high fat--
after all, fat was not what had killed his dad--
the time Van painted the house so he
could get a month's rent free, the fact
that he had taught himself to play guitar,
and the frequency with which he made love to Darlene.
In death, as in life, his father didn't
want to intimate details, which is
one reason Van had to jam his signals
and banish him from the bedroom and at times,
when Van got really lucky, from the bathroom and the living
room.
There were also, of course, things which triggered
his father's disapproval--
smoking dope, any kind of dope, actually, no matter
how ingested, tequila, which had killed him,
the worries Van had heaped upon the shoulders of his mom
and twin sister Z, and last but certainly not least,
the current scheme with James and Jim B.
Van felt his father's presence most acutely
when he was making himself breakfast.
In the dim natural light of the kitchen while he
let the whites of the eggs sizzle,
their round yolks as yellow as the chicks they would not
become, while he gingerly heated tortillas on the open gas
flame, he felt his father, watching just
over his right shoulder.
He slid the eggs out of the pan onto his plate,
folded his tortillas in quarters,
poured coffee out of the black enamel percolator
they'd used for camping, and stirred in the half and half.
Sometimes he heard his father say his name, Ivan,
which in Spanish is Iván, softly, Ivan.
Sometimes he felt as if he were his father,
as if he were standing over his own right shoulder
watching his hands kind of like when he was the sniper.
There was the gun.
There were the hands right in front of him,
but they weren't his.
There was always a moment of disorientation.
He set the plate of eggs on the round plastic table.
The mid-morning light was sliding down the window.
He rested his forehead against it, warm already.
Next door, they were talking about demons again.
The woman was wearing a T-shirt that said slave.
The man was lying in the dirt, welding his Harley.
Someone in an announcer's voice suggested
demons were at the heart of the insurgency.
In a car up on the next street, a woman was looking for Van.
Maybe she was a cop.
His eggs were getting cold.
He pulled his cell from the pocket of his cargo pants
and opened it, no messages from Z, Izzy, Isabel.
She was in Italy.
She never answered.
Van said her name aloud in Spanish as their father would
have, 'Isabel,' as if that would call her to him.
Z was sitting on a bench high above the small town
of Riomaggiore, the southernmost of the five small towns
of the Cinque Terre.
Below her and beyond, all the way to the coast of Spain,
which she could not see, stretched
the blue, blue Mediterranean.
There was a single red geranium in a pot
on the wall in front of her.
Behind her, two women, possibly lesbian housewives,
she thought, married to men they did not love,
were whispering in Italian.
They sounded furious, but it may have been passion.
Behind them in the school, small children were singing.
Far below, somewhere in the waves,
Z's current, although temporary, Scottish boyfriend
was snorkeling beyond the huge black slabs of slate
that edged the coast.
She had just snapped closed the fancy cell phone that
bounced her mother's voice off of a satellite
somewhere far above the Earth.
Van was short-circuiting again.
His mother was frantic, of course.
Van had been off and on antidepressants, in and out
of rehab so often that frantic had become her mother's default
mode.
No, Z told her, she would not cut her trip short.
'Sorry, can't hear you,' she said.
'Sorry, you're cutting out,' which was true, bad connection.
And now the phone said emergency only.
So much for technology.
How could airwaves be full, as in so saturated,
that not one more voice could come across?
Z didn't get it, but emergency only
post 9/11 made her slightly nervous,
and she was not one to be neurotic.
Neurosis seemed to herself indulgent, narcissistic,
because like a child you put yourself
at the center of the universe, forces conspiring
against you as if you were more than a speck of sand
on a beach of specks.
Giving in to unfounded fear was a sign
of a weak mind, a failure of logic.
This she firmly believed.
Usually, she, Isabel, for instance,
could flip a switch and turn off her own fears as easily as she
could disregard her mother's.
On the other hand, perhaps these fears were not unfounded.
She had been getting strange text messages.
'The world is a lonely planet.'
That was the first one.
She dismissed it as some kind of joke.
Van knew she used Lonely Planet guidebook.
Stoned, he would think it was clever.
It would be his way of saying, call me.
I'm lonely, without ever having to say, call me.
I'm lonely.
But then this morning, simply, 'Z, can you hear me?'
And Z had to wonder, maybe he was in some kind of trouble.
It would explain the rock in the pit of her gut,
the way the hair on her arms had been standing on end,
but she still didn't want to go home.
Spain was there, she told herself,
even though she could not see it.
Benji was swimming, even though she could not see him.
Surely, she did not have to see Van standing in the same room
to know he was OK.
Plus, think about it logically.
He was sending text messages from somewhere this side
of the great divide between the depressed and the living.
When he was really in trouble, they
didn't hear from him at all.
Have some faith, she wanted to tell her mother.
He is 23 years old.
Cut her trip short?
Forget it.
This was her idea of heaven.
Every morning, she woke up next to Benji.
He rubbed her back and breathed softly on her neck.
He thought she was exotic.
'My Mexican-American Barbie doll,' he'd sighed more than
once, which she knew was insulting in its own way,
except he meant it as a compliment because of her long
legs.
Everything he said in that Scottish accent
sounded like a compliment.
His blue eyes nearly unblinking behind wire rimmed glasses,
his red hair, spiky and surprised--
he always looked at her with a kind of wonder
that she had hooked up with him.
Van would never believe that she,
a girl who mooned over Black basketball players, a girl who
found the shaved heads of gangbangers sexy,
would end up with lily-white, wiry, geek-chic Benjamin,
but she liked feeling like a gift.
That alone was worth the interest
she'd have to pay on her damn credit cards.
She opened her sketchbook and quickly,
without effort or thought, outlined the view
in front of her, a quick line for the horizon,
another for the hill like a beached whale off to the north.
The hillside above the town she sketched in more detail,
the terraces, the small farms.
Then for some reason, on the balcony of the tiny restaurant
on the point, right where the Villa dell'Amore begins,
she drew a shadowy group of people.
They were sitting in a circle.
They had cups in their hands."