My father’s breakdown coincided with the new millennium. When I consider the timing, it seems significant somehow: 1999 turning into 2000, the most momentous calendar crossing in a thousand years. My classmates and I believed the world would end at midnight. We had inherited the paranoid ethos of a culture bracing for “Y2K,” a potential software disaster, which seemed to me to be code for “two thousand Yeerks.” But like mystics who study the Tarot, preadolescents do not contemplate apocalypse literally; they see it as the end of a cycle. We were thrilled—the year 2000 would bring the Future.
Papi heard voices in the walls of the condominium. He made hole after hole after hole in the walls with a hammer. He shoved his fists into the holes, pulled off chunks of plaster, searching for hidden cameras, radio-wave receivers, microphones. He found only the wires of the electrical system. He switched off the power generator, put on a pair of rubber gloves, tore the wires from the walls. He snipped them with wire cutters, one after the other. Still the voices persisted. He fell to his knees and put his ear to the floor. He tore at the wine-colored carpet with his hands, skinning the floor, searching and searching and searching. Suddenly, he smelled a poisonous gas: some kind of nerve agent.
Papi called 9-1-1, saying someone who wanted to kill him had trespassed onto his property. When the police showed up, they found no evidence of foul play except the damage the panting man acknowledged having done himself. The officers asked if he was a tenant, calculating that the aggrieved party was not him but the unlucky owner of the condominium. Papi told them the place belonged to his “wife,” Dr. Del Valle.
My mother got a call from the police. Would you like to press charges, ma’am? an officer asked. She declined. She showed up to survey the damages. The condominium had been torn apart as if by a wild animal. The floor was skinned bare of its carpet, walls punctured, electrical system obliterated. Cigarette ash carpeted everything. The smells of smoke were so pungent Jeannette could hardly breathe. Papi, trembling and terrified, gave her his hypothesis: someone had implanted a microchip in his brain. They were sending voices into his skull. He seemed so genuinely frightened, she wondered if it was true. She searched his head for a scar. She found none. Estás usando drogas de nuevo, she said. He shook his head and begged her to believe him. She offered to drive him to his mother’s house. His eyes widened. My mom’s behind all this, he said. Jeannette lost all doubt. Marco was suffering from drug-induced psychosis. Carolina would never harm her son. He was exhibiting classic symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia. She weighed her options. Marco could no longer stay in the condominium. It was hers, he had destroyed it, she needed to repair it, she was going to sell it. But he had nowhere to go. You’re welcome to stay with me and the girls at the house for a few days, Marco, while you get back on your feet. But I don’t want you doing drugs. I’ll call the police if you do. And no matter what, you can’t go upstairs.
I started writing in an online journal a year after Papi’s breakdown. I wrote an average of a thousand words each evening, documenting banal details of my pubescent existence. It helped alleviate my anxiety about death. I believed recording my experiences would give me a kind of immortality. Unlike writing on paper, which could be ripped up and thrown away, writing into the Internet felt permanent. I could “X” out of my journal and power off the computer, only to find my thoughts again by typing a URL into a browser. I planned to clone my soul into the World Wide Web so that I would never die. But I rarely mentioned my father. Somehow I managed to type a few retrospective paragraphs about Papi’s post-breakdown stay in our house without a single relevant word: I feel like talking about the first time I ever met Stefano….I opened the door and Stefano was all, “Hey, I’m the guy in the back of your house.”…He asked if I wanted to go for a walk…and I was like, “Um, sure, let me just ask my dad.” At the moment he was staying with us. Anyway I asked and he said okay. So I went…and we became friends!
My blog also reveals the onset of self-mutilating tendencies—something I had forgotten. I started digging my nails into my palms and thighs until they bled. I twisted my joints until I felt I was tearing cartilage. The pain made me feel good. My exhaustive accounts of each day actively and unnaturally avoid the subject of my father—not as if I found the topic uninteresting, but as if I found it too awful to mention. There are two notable exceptions:
July 27, 2001: I can’t tell anybody about my dad so I just have to swallow it up and deal with it myself. My mom’s side of the family cares too much about pride and hides problems as if they were shameful, horrible things.
January 19, 2002: I always hurt myself when I’m depressed….Sure, I’ve got problems, but sometimes I think I might be overreacting…other times I think I’m just insane, like my dad. That I’m gonna end up like him.
My mother had sworn me to secrecy about my father. I obeyed, and literally deleted him from my mind. I can’t recall anything about his post-breakdown stay at our house except curled and crisscrossing configurations of elastic ropes around my bedroom doorknob. I recall contemplating them in confusion; I kept pulling them off only to find them there again.
My sister remembers everything. Papi wrapped himself in tinfoil and told us to do the same. He watched the backyard with binoculars, describing stalkers he said were hiding in the bushes. He said they wore camouflage paint on their faces and hats that looked like trees. He marched up and down the stairs with an air rifle, to intimidate them. He grabbed a helium tank from the garage and placed the hose under the door of his bedroom, where he heard someone whispering in the walls. He covered the gap under the door with towels, then let gas spill into the room, to suffocate the government agents inside.
On the third night, Papi crept upstairs. My mother, who had told him he could stay with us so long as he remained downstairs, heard his footsteps. She hadn’t slept since his arrival. She got up and tiptoed to her door. Papi was staring into Michelle’s room, his face contorted in terror. My mother stepped into the hallway. In the calmest, most reassuring voice she could manage, she said: Marco. There’s nobody there. Come, sleep beside me. I’ll stay awake. Nobody is going to harm anyone under my roof. Papi followed my mother into bed. For the first time in years, Marco Antonio lay at Jeannette’s side. His breathing slowed. He slept. Jeannette stayed awake all night. When the sun rose, she called Abuela Carolina. He’s your son, she said. I can’t help him anymore. My grandmother arrived in her golden Lexus with her chin up, designer sunglasses shading her eyes. She took her first son to live with her at her house. My mother told me my father no longer existed. I had to stop talking about him. And then, in synchrony with our silence, Papi vanished.