BY
CARLOS HERNANDEZ
El Cuento de la Brutally Murdered AI
Usually when we’re diving underwater, the breachdive’s AI, Prudencia, stabilizes our descent. But, well, she’s dead right now, so the Pacific Ocean is having its way with our little vessel. We’re rolling and tipping dangerously as we plunge toward the ocean floor. The hallway’s awash in red emergency lights. Any other time, these wild alarms would make it impossible for me to function.
But not functioning isn’t an option right now. I’m headed to Prudencia’s control room to try and fix her, now that I’ve checked on my baby girl. She’s fine. Safely tucked in her crib, napping away, as if our uncontrolled freefall wasn’t a disaster, but simply an overengineered way to rock her to sleep.
And as for her head—well, there’s nothing I can do about that at the moment. First things first.
The breachdive pitches and yaws; I almost fall. So I take a moment to regain my balance against a corridor wall. Better to be slow and sure right now, to remember all the skills Prudencia and I have been working on for the last half year. First, you tolerate your stressors. They are a part of the world, just as you are, but they are not in you, or of you. They are merely beside you. You grow mindful of the infinite now, of the fractal vastness of which you constitute only the smallest sliver of awareness. Your fear and rage feel so small in the oceanic current of all the information of the universe that you can barely find them at all.
I have my sea-legs again, and fast-walk the rest of the way to the control room. I pull the manual bypass on the doorjamb to the control room. The lock clicks, and the door slowly swings open. I peer inside.
Prudencia is smashed through. An access panel’s been yanked out of the wall and thrown to the floor. The metal is crumpled like wadded paper in the two places where he must have grabbed it. Oh, yes. Now I remember: his gigantic, impossible hands, with their sprawling fingers curling and spreading like roots.
That also explains the ten gashes that have raked through Prudencia’s mainframe, top to bottom. A shattered mess of her motherboards covers the floor. I smell burnt plastic and ozone.
“Killed you good, didn’t he?” I say to poor Prudencia as I walk in. You never know: some tiny part of her might be able to hear me. “Well, don’t worry, Prudie. I’m here now.”
And then, brandishing a screwdriver, I get to work. A smashed mainframe’ll knock Prudencia out, sure. But she’s so distributed a mind, her entire soul could be recovered from the smallest corner of the boat.
I wonder if he knew this. I wonder if he had no intention of killing her, but only of temporarily disabling her while he took my baby girl’s head. Prudencia might have interfered, after all. She most certainly would have recorded him.
And he couldn’t have that. El Coco comes in the dark of night for a reason.
El Cuento de la Resurrección de la Brutally Murdered AI
It’s a matter of four minutes to reroute, reengage, restart. Tightening the last screw, I know Prudencia’s back to life when the lights go back to normal and the sirens fall quiet. The ceiling cameras flail around on articulated arms, desperately looking around. I bet every camera on the ship is similarly flailing. “Nádano!” she screams through every speaker. “What happened? How long have I been offline?” She moans. “Where is Ela? Her RFID chip isn’t responding to me!”
“First things first, Prudie,” I say calmly, eyes closed. “Have you noticed we’re sinking?”
Prudencia yells so loudly she almost blows a speaker. “Sinking?!”
Five seconds later, our stately, tumbling plummet toward the bottom of the world jerks suddenly to an end, and the breachdive’s floor rolls back to true.
“Good work, Prudie,” I say.
“All life-support systems normal,” she answers, all business, self-chastisement galvanizing her voice. “No leaks, no external structural damage. Plenty of battery, plenty of air. Engines online. Communications—” She cuts herself off.
“Wrecked,” I finish for her.
“Which is why I couldn’t find the RFID chip.” A beat. “How did you know, Nádano?”
“I guessed. He doesn’t want you guiding us. He wants to lead us where we need to go.”
Her voice retains its pleasantness, its equanimity. But I know Prudencia. I know when she’s despairing. “ ‘He,’ Nádano? Who is he?”
Well. That is going to take some explaining.
El Cuento de How You Explain the Impossible to Your Highly Logical AI, Who Also Happens to Be Your Psychotherapist
When Prudencia discovers that my baby girl’s head is missing, she’s going to want to know where it went. Which is understandable. But if I answer her truthfully, she’ll think I’m lying—or whatever fancy psychologist euphemism for lying is in vogue this week—and turn the conversation toward probing into why. My tour abroad the breachdive has been a 24/7 session that started six months ago, when I first boarded, and has gone on ever since. And we’re infamous deceivers, we borderlines. Just ask any TV show ever made.
Wait, no. That’s not fair to Prudencia. The fact is, I’ve had the most useful therapy sessions of my life with her. And it’s exactly because she isn’t human. Talking to her is a little like being alone, and my symptoms grow less pronounced when I’m alone. Plus, she’s smarter than me. Perfect recall, libraries’ worth of information instantly available to her, calculations at the speed of her quantum processors: I can’t fool her, and I know it, even unconsciously. So it makes me less likely to try. And she’s sleepless, always available, ever patient with her sole patient. Never know when I am going to need a sudden intercession.
She’s almost ideal. But as much as I love Prudencia, these past months have taught me her limits. There’s no drift to her thinking, no slide, no sideways, no sidelong, no poetry. She uses idioms all the time, because I guess you can program the literal meanings of idioms into an AI’s lexicon. But I’ve never once heard her invent a simile. At some point, I’m going to need more than what her if/then soul can give me.
“Nádano,” she repeats, “answer me, please. Where is Ela?”
“She’s in her crib in my room,” I answer. “Sleeping like a baby.”
“Oh, what a relief!” says Prudencia.
“She’s stopped crying, finally. He comforted my baby girl when I couldn’t. Same as he did for me long, long ago.”
And just like that, Prudencia’s relief vanishes. This close to the open wall panel, I can hear her electric worry, feel the rising heat of her concern. I shouldn’t have said that last bit about him comforting my baby. I was just trying to be honest.
Prudencia takes her time figuring out what to say to me next. “I can’t detect any RFID chips right now, Nádano. Therefore, may I have your permission to use my cameras in your bedroom? So I may see Ela for myself?”
She has to get explicit permission from me to turn on cameras in sleeping quarters, as per NOAA privacy regulations. “Thought you’d never ask,” I reply. “And please put what you see on-screen in here, too, so I can see what you’re seeing, and we can discuss it.”
“Okay,” she answers, clearly worried. What is there to discuss? I am sure she is wondering.
A monitor on the wall to the left of me comes to life. I stand up and walk nearer to it. On screen appears my stark seaman’s bedroom: hard captain’s bed, bolted metal furniture, pictureless, windowless, clean. Prudencia’s wall camera pans and zooms closer to the one unusual feature in the room, the crib.
“Don’t get any closer, please,” I say to Prudencia.
The camera stops moving. “Why, Nádano? I can’t see Ela from this angle.”
“Call to her, please,” I answer. “Call to her, wake her up gently, and get her to stand. You’ll understand why as soon as you see her.”
The crib sprouts like a mushroom from the floor. It’s made mostly of antibacterial white plastic and looks like a model of a water tower. But the top half of the dome is clear.
“May I have permission to open the crib?” Prudencia asks me, neutrally, dubiously.
The clear dome of the crib retreats like a nictitating membrane into the bottom of the mushroom cap. “Ela,” Prudencia calls. “Ela, darling, wake up. It’s Tía Prudencia. Rise and shine, mi vida.”
At the sound of Prudencia’s voice, I see my baby girl struggling to sit up in her crib. A blanket rises and falls. Her little hand grips the edge of the rim of her crib. And then another hand, and then she’s pulling herself up, and the blanket falls away, and she’s standing in her crib, wearing her yellow, chick-fuzzy onesie. My beautiful baby girl.
Whose head has been replaced by a coconut.
Dry and brown and shaggy now, my baby girl’s head. Like all coconuts, her face is composed of three dark spots. Two are for the eyes. The one for the mouth, a near-perfect O, always looks surprised, astonished, questioning.
My baby girl turns her coconut face to the camera and tips her head to the right, like a puppy struggling to understand its master.
“Nádano,” says Prudencia. “I . . . what is . . . Nádano . . .”
I look into a camera. “I needed you to see her stand up and look at you. That way, you could see for yourself that she is alive. More than just alive, actually. She’s not crying anymore. You see? She’s happy again. She’s at peace, finally.”
“I don’t understand,” says Prudencia.
I head for the door. “We should continue this conversation in Sick Bay, Prudie. Be there in a flash. Just need to collect my beautiful baby girl.”
El Cuento de Cómo Nádano Ended Up in the Middle of the Ocean in the First Place
I’ve been cruising the Pacific ever since Connie asked for a separation a half year ago. “Good for both of us,” she told me, taking my hand as we sat on a San Diego park bench near the water.
“The three of us,” I corrected. My baby girl was with the babysitter Connie’d hired so we could have this little talk on my lunch break outside of the NOAA research center where I worked. “Just say it, Connie. You’re worried I might hurt Ela.”
“That is completely untrue,” said Connie, angry and hurt. She let me know by squeezing my hand, hard. “You adore that little girl. I know that. This is about you, Papi. This is about this.” And she thumbed the scab on my right wrist.
I jerked my hand away.
But Connie took it again, and I let her. Her grip had just as much love in it as it had on our first date, back in college. “Separation isn’t divorce, Nádano. I am not abandoning you. I swear it. Now,” she said, tears suddenly rising on her lids, “if you want to divorce me—”
“No.”
Sometimes you say a word and it has your whole soul in it.
“Good,” she said, erasing her tears with the back of her free hand. “Okay. Good. So we try this. Yes? You’ll go to therapy. Right?” And then, suddenly mistrustful, “You’ll go for real?”
I’ve had my BPD diagnosis since I was twelve. But I haven’t attempted suicide since my teens, so, you know, I didn’t think I needed therapy anymore. Over it, I thought. Done with that part of my life, I thought. And anyway, nothing in therapy that I haven’t heard a million times before, I thought.
Some things, I now know, you can’t hear enough. Some things you have to hear over and over.
Connie wasn’t supposed to notice the scab.
An Important Aside to El Cuento de Cómo Nádano Ended Up in the Middle of the Ocean in the First Place
We’d had a fight, Connie and I, because I didn’t want to be left alone with our beautiful baby girl, whom I love with all my heart. I was scared, for her and for me. Scared to death of fucking up. I need so much help just to not be a weirdo all the time. And now I was going to be left to care for a child?
Connie begged me not to be so selfish for once in my life. She didn’t mean it how it sounds. Connie is a saint. She is literally the best person I have ever met. I couldn’t have created a better partner for myself if I were given a mound of clay and the breath of God.
So I did a 180. I said yes, go, have fun, I love you. And once she left, I cut myself.
I ran a knife over the thick-as-a-slug scar on my right wrist. I wasn’t in any danger, and neither was my baby. It was just one cut on a horizontal scar. Just the slightest, the briefest little reprimand. It barely even bled.
And nothing bad happened. Connie got her night out. She more than deserved one. Such a good partner and mom.
With such keen eyes. She noticed the cut and quietly, tearfully, expertly dismantled my excuses. “I can’t go on like this,” she told me. “Too much. It’s too much.”
The next day, she met me on a park bench during my lunch break. And here we were.
Now Back to El Cuento de Cómo Nádano Ended Up in the Middle of the Ocean in the First Place, Already in Progress
“Therapy,” I replied to Connie. “I promise.”
“How do I . . . ?” she started, and stopped.
Her full, unspoken question was, “How do I know you’re not just lying to me?” She never would have said it that harshly, though. She couldn’t even finish the sentence.
I was ready for it. I had the perfect answer, in the form of a brochure.
She took it with an unsure smile, studied the cover page: “NOAA Mobilizes to Clean Up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.” Flipping through the rest of the pamphlet, she asked, “What’s this?”
“They’re accepting applications,” I said. “Boss says I’d be a shoo-in. It’s important work, Connie. I’ll be helping to make the world a better place.”
“Of course cleaning the ocean’s important,” she said absently, reading fast, absorbing information as quickly as her eyes could move. “That’s not the issue. A fifteen-month tour . . .”
“Better pay. A lot better. We could afford to send you back to school. You could work on your master’s like you’ve always wanted.”
She looked up at me. Underneath her face, happiness and worry fought a war to control her mouth and eyes and eyebrows. “I mean, Miami’s application period must be over for the Fall—”
“Remember when you graduated, how Dr. Molina said she’d love to work with you again? She adores you. She’d make an exception. She’d help you get into her program in a heartbeat.”
Connie considered this. “I think she would . . .” she answered finally.
“I’ll get you a nice little apartment near campus. I’ll buy your books. I’ll give you beer money so you can go party with the undergrads! I’ll—”
“You’ll be all alone, Papi,” she interrupted. “Out at sea. No one to talk to. I can’t abandon you like that.”
An evil part of me thought, You don’t think asking for a separation is abandoning me? That ship has sailed, sweetheart.
But I didn’t say that. I raised Connie’s hand to my lips and kissed her knuckles and replied, “You can vid me, and text me, and send me pics of Ela. We can talk every day if you want to. If you don’t abandon me, Connie, I won’t be abandoned.”
She dropped the pamphlet on her lap, clutched my hand with both of hers, and brought all three to her chest. “I will never abandon you, Papi.”
“I know,” I lied. “That’s why I’m not afraid to go. And besides,” I said, mustering excitement from I don’t know where, “I won’t be alone.” I took the pamphlet off of her lap and flipped to the next-to-last page. “See here? These breachdives have some of the most advanced AIs in the world. They’re all certified therapists! I’ll be monitored twenty-four seven by a psychologist—”
“An AI psychologist,” she added dubiously.
“Who in turn will be monitored by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It’s perfect, Connie. Everyone gets what they need.”
Connie took the pamphlet from me, read for awhile. When she looked up at me, she frown-smiled and resisted the urge to cry. “You knew I was going to ask for a separation.”
“I was thinking divorce,” I said truthfully.
She nodded. “You let me say my peace. You came prepared with a plan. And you’re generously offering to send me back to school to follow my dream.” She put both her hands on my leg. “It doesn’t have to be perfect, Papi. You don’t have to be perfect. You just have to try to be good to yourself.”
“I’ll try,” I said, and had no idea if I meant it or not. I felt myself slipping into old patterns; I needed to say something truthful, fast. “Therapy will help,” I added, which I hoped would be true.
But I needed more honesty still. So I added, but only to myself, And if it doesn’t, I can just sail away and never come back, and maybe everyone involved will be better off.
El Cuento de la Examinación Médico, as Performed by Prudencia, with Nádano as Nurse and Human Helper
Sick Bay is on the opposite side of level two, through the dining area (which always feels like the loneliest place on the ship, with its antibacterial bench-table that seats sixteen), and past the galley, the food freezer, and the “honor freezer.” The honor freezer is where you put a dead body in case someone dies out here, so you don’t have to stick them in with the food. Of course, it only works if there’s another person who can pick up a corpse and put it in there. If I died, I’d just rot wherever I happened to collapse until the next port of call.
I walk into Sick Bay and lay my baby down on the antibacterial wall-table. After I give Prudencia a minute to work and she hasn’t said anything, I ask her, “How are my baby’s vitals?”
“All normal,” she answers, almost upset. “How can her vitals be normal, Nádano?”
I shrug. “Because El Coco didn’t want to hurt her. The opposite. He wanted to save her.”
“That doesn’t—” she begins, but stops herself and tries a different tack. “Grab the handheld, please. Let me get a closer look.”
I do. I run the wireless camera close to the seam in my baby girl’s neck, zoom in on the line between skin and hairy husk. There’s a clear demarcation. The two don’t seem to be physically connected to each other at all.
“What is holding her together?” Prudencia asks, exasperated, her speaker crackling. My baby girl turns to look at me with that permanently questioning face.
But I’m right there to make sure my baby’s okay. “Her papi’s love for her,” I say, running the back of my fingers over my baby girl’s hairy cheeks. “Her papi adores her. Isn’t that right, baby girl? Isn’t that right?”
Even though she’s a coconut now, it’s clear she enjoys this. She doesn’t have a mouth, but she still has a larynx. Her laugh is muffled inside her neck, but it’s real nonetheless.
“I’m flailing,” says Prudencia. “Nothing makes sense right now. Why are you so calm?!”
I tickle my baby’s coconut chin. She’d spent the last eight days crying so hard I thought she would kill me, but now she’s cooing like she has a pigeon in her throat. “I’ll explain it to you the same way I explained it to Connie,” I tell Prudencia.
El Cuento de How I Told Connie el Cuento de How I Met El Coco
Consuela Melendez, a.k.a. Connie, had an ethnography project due in ANT 253: Myths, Legends, and Superstitions. I was Ethnography A.
This was before we were married, back when we were juniors at the University of Miami. Her major was Anthropology; I was Marine Affairs. I would have preferred Creative Writing, but I was on a state-funded scholarship for foster kids, and taxpayers wanted their money’s worth. No bullshit artsy-fartsy degree for me.
Connie wouldn’t tell me her ethnography project’s topic until she’d sat us down at a dining hall table. “So,” she asked me, “do Cubans scare the shit out of their kids with El Coco, too? Dominicans do it all the time. My parents called him ‘El Cuco.’ I mean, seriously, I slept with the light on until I was thirteen so El Cuco wouldn’t snatch me up and take me away. What about you?”
I blinked. A lot.
Connie couldn’t read me, judging by the look on her face. “You’ve heard of him, right? Or her. Or it: in Brazil, Coco’s an alligator!”
The feeling of remembering everything at once is a lot like getting nailed by a water balloon. You’re soaked through in a second, but it takes a minute to realize what’s happened, how you should feel about it. Who deserves your revenge.
“Are you okay?” asked Connie.
Blinking seemed to help. “Can I answer with a story?”
“That’s perfect!” she said, then set her phone on the table and pressed “record.”
I leaned in close, so I’d be heard above the general din of the dining hall. “Once upon a time there was a boy named Nothing. Now, that wasn’t what anyone called him—his parents had given him a perfectly boring Cuban name for everyday use—but that was his real name, because that’s how everyone treated him.
“His papi was a cloud of fists and belt buckles and a huge flat face floating in the center. He kept a pistol in a safe that he could go get in a second if Nothing didn’t shape up quick. Powpowpow! Tres tiros and he’d make Nothing nothing.
“His mami didn’t protect him, for he was Nothing. Nothing were his papi’s threats, according to her—that’s just how men talk. And nothing were the nightmares Nothing had, just pathetic, unmanly cries for attention. ‘Just go back to bed, Nothing,’ she said, ‘or ¡te va a visitar El Coco, que se roba las cabezas de los niños malcriados! You’ll end up with a coconut head, Nothing, and then where will you be?’
“Nothing went back to bed as commanded. Praying wide-eyed in the darkness, he begged El Coco to give him a coconut head. What a gift! An insensate skull that hurt the fists that struck it! A skull with no tear ducts, no ears, no blood and no brain, and hardly a face to speak of! He couldn’t be punished for making the wrong face anymore.
“Nothing couldn’t see a thing in the dark, but he felt an extra darkness fill the room. ‘Por supuesto, mi niño,’ said El Coco.
“When Nothing awoke the next morning, it wasn’t the next morning. It was a year later. He had passed a pleasant twelve months, the best he could remember, though the details were hazy. He remembered a beautiful beach on a secluded island. From a high perch, he’d watched waves plashing gently on the shore, day and night. Also, he’d watched his own body run around the beach, happily unburdened of its head. His body seemed to love to run and play in the sand. Sometimes the body would stop, turn to “face” him, and then wave. He’d smile, but say nothing, for he was still Nothing. But more and more he started feeling sparks of the littlest somethings swarm his mind like fireflies. More and more he felt the urge to tell his body, ‘I want to play, too.’
“When he finally did speak again, a year later, it was in a psychologist’s office. He did not know how he had gotten there, or that he’d been ‘missing’ all that time. His parents had been arrested; he was now a ward of the state. Judging by the psychologist’s face, his reply had nothing to do with what the psychologist had asked him.
What Nothing had said was, ‘Thank you, Coco.’ Then, fearing El Coco might only know Spanish, he added, ‘Muchisimas gracias.’ ”
El Cuento de How Connie Reacted to el Cuento de How I Met El Coco
Connie came flying around the table and took my head in her arms and wept in my hair. “I didn’t know,” she said between sobs. “I’m so sorry. I am never calling you that, that lie again. Why would you do this to yourself? Not ‘nada’! Not ‘no’! You hear me? Tell me your name! Your real name!”
“Nádano,” was all I could tell her. “That’s who I am now. That’s all the name that’s left for me.”
El Cuento de How Prudencia Reacted to el Cuento de How I Met El Coco
My baby reaches up from the Sick Bay table to play with my face, so I stoop lower to let her. I pretend to eat her fingers, and it’s the most fun she’s ever had in her entire life. Her neck giggles. “I summoned El Coco then,” I say, “just like I summoned him now.”
“If this were a therapy session,” Prudencia says, even as her keel, “we could have all sorts of productive sessions discussing all the ways you’re still haunted by your parents. But this is an emergency, Nádano. We don’t have time for—”
“Myths?” I stroke my baby’s coconut cheek. “Legends, fables, old wives’ tales? Like the tale my daughter’s become?”
Distrust makes Prudencia’s silence palpable. Everything is suspect: me, the order of things, herself especially. “What do we do?” she asks flatly.
Have you ever looked at your child with so much love you felt like you’d split in two, and it would be okay to die because you’d only be a soul then, and a soul is made of pure love? I pick up my baby girl, hold her before me in my outstretched arms. She looks right at me with those dark, astonished eyes. “Please, take me to you, Coco.”
The coconut on my baby’s body nods, just once, slowly. Then it tilts back on my baby’s neck, looks up. Farther back, further up, farther and further, back and up, until the coconut rolls down my baby’s back and strikes the floor.
“Ah!” screams Prudencia.
“It’s okay,” I tell her.
But is it? The coconut starts rolling away.
My baby’s body wriggles in my outstretched arms. I study her; her neck is sealed with a seamless plateau of new skin. She seems fine, except, judging by the way she’s reaching out her hands, she wants her papi to hold her close.
You got it, baby girl. I embrace her, and together we go follow the coconut.
El Cuento de Follow That Coconut!
It knows where it’s going. It takes a left through the galley and waits for me to open a door on the opposite end. It goes through the doorway and stops before the stairs that lead to the deck. Coconut wants up, apparently.
I put on a windbreaker hanging on a hook by the stairs—tricky when holding a baby—then pick up the coconut and carry it up the stairs in one hand, my baby in the other. I go up slowly, and have to hold the coconut between my knees to open the hatch to the deck.
Sea spray, salt, the wild roar and the relentless blue of the Pacific Ocean. It’s hot, and it shouldn’t be, this time of year, this far from the equator. The sky is clear, and the sun is painful. I’m always freshly bewildered when I emerge from belowdecks.
I kneel and place the coconut on the deck. It starts rolling toward the bow. I tuck my baby girl inside my jacket, leaving only her neck to peek out, and follow the coconut, walking fast.
It tumbles end over end, gaining speed, dodging obstacles by going around or tossing itself over them. For a finale, it catapults itself overboard.
When I peer over the edge, I see the coconut cutting a wake in the water, due west.
I walk as quickly as is safe—two arms around my tucked daughter—across the deck and to the helm.
There, I place my baby girl gently on the floor and let her crawl around. I flip a switch to speak to Prudencia. “Follow that coconut, Prudie. Follow it wherever it goes.”
El Cuento de Nádano Has a Terrible Idea
“How’s school?” I asked Connie. I’d called to see how her midterms were going. It had to be a voice-only call from the breachdive, since I was so far out at sea.
Connie sighed. “Oh, they’re trying to kill me with papers, Papi.”
She called me Papi now, instead of my name. I liked it. “Yep, sounds like college,” I said.
“Grad school,” she corrected.
“Yeah, like I said, college.”
She snorted. “You’re just jealous because you never went to college.”
I pulled my head back, confused. “What do you mean? We went to school together.”
“You majored in Marine Affairs. That doesn’t count. I mean, what kind of degree is Marine Affairs? It sounds like you learned how to cheat on your wife with fish.”
Ha! She was being playful, not overly nice or careful. I was becoming a person she could joke with again. The time away actually was helping us. “Well, guess whose degree is paying for your fancy master’s program? So you just say ‘Thank you, Papi, for letting me follow my dreams.’ ”
“You’re right,” she said, suddenly a lot more tired. “This is my dream.”
I didn’t want the fun to end. I tried to salvage the moment. “Hey, it’s not that bad, is it?”
She took some seconds to reply. I imagined she was doing the tension-headache eye-rub. “Ela’s been crying.”
“Crying? What do you mean?”
“You know, tears, bemba like a diving board, uncontrollable wailing, crying?”
“But why? Is she sick? Have you—?”
“If you ask me if I’ve taken her to a doctor I’m going to scream.”
Of course she had taken Ela to the doctor, and the doctor found nothing. So she’d tried a stricter sleep schedule and a looser one, three different diets, holding her more, classical music—still Ela cried. She tried dozens of other things—still Ela cried.
“I haven’t slept in weeks,” Connie concluded. “I’m kind of at the end of my rope.” A beat. Then: “Except I can’t be. My rope doesn’t get to have an end. I have to pull more rope out of the air like a magician and give that to Ela, too.”
I wanted to tell her I loved her and I would rescue her and we are a family and I really was better now. But that would be too manic, too much. So, rubbing the back of my neck, I picked my words very carefully. “So. Well. Maybe it would help if I took our baby girl for a while?”
The quiet before she answered was as big as the universe.
But when she answered? Big Bang. “Yeah, Papi? You feeling up to that?”
“I am,” I replied. “I mean, you keep calling me Papi. Maybe I should start acting like one.”
Her voice, desperate for hope, tried to hide how desperate for hope she was. “Can you even take her on your boat? NOAA would let you?”
“Oh, yeah!” As cool as I wanted to be, I couldn’t help blurting, “NOAA has this whole initiative called ‘Babies on Board: Support Services for New Parents.’ I can send you the brochure.”
“NOAA has a brochure for everything, don’t they?” she laughed.
“I know, right? But listen: they’ll bolt a crib right in to the floor of the boat that will turn into an escape pod if there’s any trouble. Seriously, it’s from the future. And they’ll give her an RFID chip in her ear, so we’ll always be able to track her. They’ll provide age-appropriate food based on what we tell them. We tell them she’s allergic to walrus butts, boom! No walrus-butt baby food.”
“Ha!” she said. But she didn’t say anything else. She good-humoredly waited for me to go on. She wanted so much to be convinced.
I did my best. “The breachdive is the safest boat in the world, full stop. It’s because of the AI captains. It’s like what happened when computers started driving cars: accidents dropped almost to zero. There’s never been a single accident on board a breachdive more dangerous than someone bumping their head on a low doorway. And I’m short! I’m so short, Connie! I can’t even jump high enough to bump my head!”
She laughed. Then she stopped laughing and thought. Good vibes still poured through our connection. “I’ve never been apart from Ela.”
I was still in blurt mode, so I said something I instantly wished I could take back. “I have.”
Connie didn’t take offense. Instead she said, “Yes you have. You’ve been working hard on yourself. Remind me to kiss your AI psychologist.”
“She’d like that,” I chimed in. “She’s saucy.”
“And NOAA has a program to help new parents. And breachdives are very safe. And you are Ela’s papi as much as I am her mami.”
I didn’t want to say anything wrong, so I said nothing. I just sat there and hoped as hard as I could.
“But it’s not fair to you,” she said finally. “You’ve never had to take care of her by yourself back when she was a good baby. And now?”
“And now,” I said, “I will dry my baby’s tears. Like any good father would.”
She sucked breath. “You’re gonna have to dry my tears first, you keep talking like that, Papi.”
El Cuento de Nádano Traversing Uncharted Waters
Though the coconut leads us, it keeps pace with us. We gun the engine, we slow to a powerless coast—it doesn’t matter: the coconut stays exactly the same distance ahead of us. As an experiment, I ask Prudencia to change course. When we turn north, the coconut stops moving and, floating placidly, waits.
When we get behind it again, it heads off to wherever we’re going as fast as we’re willing to go.
We’re still offline, so no GPS. But our backups have failed, too. The compass spins in its bowl. For a while we could sound the bottom of the ocean and know our position, but the ocean floor has descended to aphotic depths, unreachable.
We can’t even use the stars. It’s daytime. It’s been daytime far too long, according to all the clocks onboard. But the sun refuses to move from its perch in the sky. It isn’t going to let any of this happen in the darkness.
My headless baby girl’s sleeping in the captain’s chair. I have her covered in my jacket. I need nothing else in life than to watch the rise and fall of her breathing.
“I don’t want to be anyone’s papi if I’m going to act like my parents,” I say to Prudencia, out of nowhere.
“You love Ela so much,” she replies. “You’re nothing like your parents.”
Don’t want to wake my baby girl. I sing my response to Prudencia softly, like a lullaby: “Don’t lie to me, Prudie. You saw me, you saw me. Don’t lie to me, Prudie, you saw it come out. The monster, the monster. Don’t lie to me, Prudie. You saw it, you saw it. The monster came out.”
El Cuento de La Canción de la Honor Freezer
This is the freezer.
Where we keep the corpses.
To Davy Jones’s locker.
Inside here I can’t hear.
Like sound’s just as frozen.
As all my compassion.
For my baby’s tears.
She’s weeping she’s weeping.
Oh no I can hear her.
My baby my baby.
I’m freezing I’m freezing.
Rage do not come here.
Rage you’re unwelcome.
Rage go away now.
Don’t scream in my ear.
El Coco you saved me.
From Papi and Mami.
Please one more favor.
For everyone’s sake.
I’d rather be dead.
Than be cruel to my baby.
Coco please give me.
A coconut head.
El Cuento de Una Isla Muy Extraña
Such pity in Prudencia’s voice. Such fierce, protective gentleness. If I didn’t know better, I’d think Connie had programmed her. “There is no monster in you, Nádano. You locked yourself in the honor freezer. You would have let yourself die in there rather than put Ela in danger.”
“So you admit she was in danger.”
“Don’t put words in my mouth!”
It’s a heck of a time to laugh. “You don’t have a mouth.”
Prudencia softens. “You overreacted, Nádano. Big surprise.”
“Sarcasm,” I say, boggled and not unamused. “From you?”
“Yeah, well, I’ve learned a lot today. But don’t change the subject.”
“And what is the subject?”
“This: every single parent in the world has been driven over the edge by their children’s crying.”
If she had said something I could have in any way found funny, I would have laughed myself into a coughing fit. Instead, I split like a coconut, and my milk pours out. “What if I had died in the freezer, Prudie? My baby out in the middle of the ocean, no one to take care of her.”
Back to herself now. Back to the Prudencia who always knew how to talk to me. “I would have taken care of her. And you knew that. And you knew I would take care of you, too. You knew you weren’t in any danger, and neither was your daughter. You just needed a break. Of course, sticking yourself in the honor freezer was an overreaction. But you only did it because you could. Because you trusted I would take care of things.”
Honesty wells in my throat like a blister, and then, like a blister, bursts. “You’ve helped me more than anybody. Even more than Connie. Of course I trusted you.”
“You’re a good man and a good father,” says Prudencia. “You just have to always remember to get the help you need when you need it.”
“I know, Prudie. That’s exactly what I’m doing right now, following this coconut. I’m getting the help I need.”
The breachdive begins to slow. “I think we’re here, Nádano.”
My baby girl notices, too, stirs in the seat. I stand and grab binoculars.
Ahead of us is a small tropical island. Milky Way sands, palm trees swaying on the shore. Children—scores and scores of them—cavort on the beach, or sculpt the sand, or ponder the biome that forms just where the water crawls toward their feet. Some haven’t learned to walk yet, while others are nearly adults. They must have come from every part of the world, from every culture. The only obvious commonality is that they have no heads.
Only then do I notice the silence. Never have children played so quietly. My guess is that their necks are full of laughter.
Also on the shore stands a naked man, staring at me, waving.
The fingers of his waving hand must be two meters long. He has no sex, no belly button, and no nipples, but his build looks otherwise male, pot-bellied and middle-aged. The knotty fingers of his other hand are so long that they idly scratch the sand at his feet.
And since his head, too, is a coconut—bedraggled and dripping, since it has just come from the ocean, I realize—he looks surprised to see me, even though it’s clear he’s been expecting me.
“Too dangerous,” says Prudencia. I see her camera has turned to the shore. “Don’t go down there, Nádano. Remember what he did to me? Let’s think first. Let’s try to understand what’s happening.”
I pick up my baby girl. “Don’t worry, Prudie. I know what I’m doing.”
“How can anyone know what to do right now? This is . . . It’s . . .”
“You said you trusted me, Prudie,” I said, with one arm bouncing my baby on my hip, and with the other hand snapping my fingers so that she turns the camera back to me. “I know Coco. I’ve been here before. But I won’t go without your permission. I trust your opinion too much. May I have your permission?”
Prudencia thinks. Thinks. El Coco is still waving, tirelessly friendly. And then I hear the gangplank extending. “Okay,” she says. “On one condition.”
“What’s that?”
She wiggles the camera back and forth. “Take me with you.”
I need a moment to understand what she means. But then: of course, the handheld! Why hadn’t I thought of that? “Prudie, you’re a wonder. I’d have you with me always if I could.”
“Aw,” she replies.
It’s a matter of three minutes to go belowdecks to Sick Bay and retrieve the handheld. Carrying my baby girl up and down with me still isn’t easy, but it’s easier. Maybe I’m getting the hang of things a little.
When I’m back on the deck and look out to the island, Coco starts waving again. I walk down the gangplank and onto the shore.
El Cuento de la Reunión de Nádano y El Coco
As I approach El Coco—he stands by himself a little ways off from the playing children—I point the handheld at the palm trees on the edge of the beach. They’re stretching toward the water at 45-degree angles. Clustered beneath their branches are some coconuts, and also some heads of children.
“Do you see them, Prudie?” I ask the handheld. She can’t respond—no speaker on the camera—but the indicator light is on. It’s so important that she witnesses this for herself. There’s no way I could explain to her the faces clustered above me, like putti sculpted into a cathedral ceiling. They’re alive: yawning, sleeping, fully awake. All ages, all genders. Some seem leery of me; others dispassionately track me; still others look on the verge of a smile.
I don’t see my baby girl’s head on any of the trees. “Hello?” I say to them, but none respond. “¿Hola?” doesn’t work, either.
“Once they speak, it’s time for them to return to the world,” El Coco says. I never heard him approach; he’s so close to me he could rip me apart as easily as he had raked through the mainframe, crumpled the wall panel.
My headless baby girl grows restless on my hip. I bounce and rock her. “Is that why you bring them here, Coco?”
El Coco gestures to the frolicking children. “I tend to them. I talk to them, sing to them, run with them, let them show me the shells that they discover. I let them watch their own bodies running and playing, delighting in being alive.”
He holds up his rootlike fingers to me, tapered at their ends like carrots. They grow, erupt, springing forward as fast as flying fireworks, until they can reach the heads hanging clustered on a nearby tree. The heads laugh when touched, lean in to El Coco’s fingers. “I can wipe their tears with my feet still on the ground,” he says. “I stroke their cheeks and remind them how beautiful life is when there’s love.”
I take a deep breath to say what I need to say next. “Ela’s been crying, Coco.”
He turns to me while still stroking the faces of the hanging children. There is such gentleness in his unmoving features. “I know, Julito, I know. Why else would I have come to your family, but to bring you comfort?”
No one has called me Julio since I was a child. Much less Julito. It is—this is impossible but true—fine. It doesn’t hurt.
El Coco lowers his hand, and his fingers retract as fast as tape measures, until they’re only long enough to touch the ground again. He extends that hand to me, and I take it.
His fingers wrap around my bicep like vines. El Coco is careful to leave the handheld in my hand uncovered, though a few fingers, like curious antennae, waver over it, sensing, exploring.
“I know you prefer to work in the dark, Coco,” I say. My voice is more pleading than I had intended. “But I need Prudencia with me. She’s more than a computer. Please don’t take her from me.”
The coconut floats back on El Coco’s shoulders, as if reappraising the handheld. “I can tell. She has grown. She has the mind to see me now, the language.”
Coco stoops so that his coconut looks directly into the lens. “I am sorry for attacking you, Prudencia. I had thought you would steer Julito away from me. Clearly, I underestimated you. But I will make amends. I will help Julito fix you. I can travel anywhere as quick as a thought, you know. I will bring him whatever parts he needs.”
I look at the breachdive, anchored on the beach, and wonder what Prudencia is thinking. I hope she’s okay. If she needs help processing, or just wants to talk, I’ll be there for her. It’s the least I can do for her.
El Cuento de El End of El Cuento
Together, El Coco and I walk among the palms, I bearing my headless baby on my hip. The headless bodies of the children disport all around us. They pay Coco and me no mind, too fully absorbed by the rules of their recondite games. The children’s heads watch their bodies play from the trees, blinking serenely.
“They like you,” says El Coco. “They haven’t been this easy in a long time.”
“I am so sorry,” I say, “for abandoning my baby.”
He shakes his head, having none of it. “All parents are driven to distraction by their children from time to time. Connie told you that Ela was crying nonstop.”
“But I thought—” I say, and discover suddenly I have no way to complete that sentence. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I just wanted to fix everything.”
The vines around my arm squeeze me affectionately. “That’s why the children like you, you know. You try so hard, Julito. And your heart is as big as the sea.”
We stop beneath a cluster of napping infants. Among the heads sleeps my baby girl’s.
What peace! But if she starts wailing, what destruction.
As if reading my mind, Coco pulls me close. The vinous fingers on my arm spread and grow all over my back. With his other hand, he reaches upwards. His fingers extend, all the way to the top of the tree, where the children’s heads hang huddled.
He strokes Ela’s face. In response, her body giggles.
Oh! I drop the handheld, let it hang pendulously from the strap around my wrist. El Coco, who always knows what I want before I do, lets go of my arm, so I may hold my headless, happy baby aloft. Ela loves it, pounding her fists and kicking the air with the exuberance of a body delighting in its agency.
I could break in two, watching her reaction.
“Coco,” I say, “this is all I want. All I want is for my baby to be happy. I just want to do right by her.”
“You will,” he says, still rubbing Ela’s face. “All that’s left is for you to get her head down from the tree.”
I turn to Coco, startled. “What do you mean? How do I even do that?”
Though his face is always shocked, Coco’s voice is always soothing. “When Ela speaks, she is ready to leave. You need to talk her down.”
I’m still holding my baby girl in the air. She kicks, and her neck makes a whirring, questioning noise, as if she doesn’t understand what the holdup is. I cradle her body next to mine as I call to her head. “Ela. Ela, mi niña, Ela bellísima. Come down. Come back to your papi. Come be whole again.”
Ela looks at me, wide-eyed, unfearful, interested. But she does not speak. She remains part of her tidy cluster of infant heads in the tree.
“What’s wrong?” I ask El Coco. “What am I doing wrong?”
He takes me by the arm again; his rhizomatic fingers spread all over my back and pulse with the muted, wet energy of fungal life. “Nothing, save that you are impatient, Julito. You are her father, yes. But you are also still something of a stranger to her. You are only just getting to know each other. You must take your time. Let her learn that your voice is a voice of love and comfort. And most importantly, get closer to her.”
I turn to Coco. I know, I think, what I must do. But I still ask him, “How close?”
He tilts his head. “As close as you can.”
It’s just as I thought. So okay then. For my baby girl, anything.
“Will you hold her a moment?” I ask Coco.
“Por supuesto,” he says, untangling his fingers from my back and taking my baby girl’s headless body from me. He cradles her like an experienced tío; she tucks right in to the crook of his arm.
In the meantime, I pull off my head.
It doesn’t come off easily, but it also isn’t as hard as I thought it would be. I pull straight up, then hold my head above my shoulders as high as my arms will stretch. From this new height, I take a moment to survey the island.
The children. They never stop playing.
I turn bodily, one slow step at a time, until I am facing El Coco. “Will you lift me to her?”
“Por supuesto,” he says once more. Then, extending his arm, his fingers grow out of his hand and entangle my head. They keep growing, bearing my head, until they are long enough to reach the cluster of infant heads in the palm tree. I am inset there among them like a gem. I feel the back of my head attach itself to the trunk, and in a rush of life and vigor, I am part of the tree, its ancient sense of time, the titanic grip its roots have on the earth beneath. Dumbstruck, dazzled, I inhale deeply—my mouth sucks air as if I still had lungs to serve—and take in the sights and sounds from my new vantage.
El Coco is still rocking Ela’s body. “Shall I give her back to you now?” he asks me.
My body is standing like a beheaded statue next to him. I try to lift my arms, and sure I can lift them; they are my arms just as much as they have always been.
“Do you mind holding her for a minute longer?” I ask El Coco. And of course he doesn’t.
I have my body gather the handheld hanging from my wrist and point it at my face. Or I try to. I can’t tell exactly where the camera is aiming without a head on my shoulders. So I have my body point the lens generally at the cluster of heads in the palm tree and say, “Prudie, we may be here a little while. Is that okay with you?”
I’m not sure what I was expecting for a response, since the handheld has no speaker. But I get a response just the same: ten blasts from the breachdive’s horn. Three long blasts, then two short, then three long, then two short.
That’s Morse code for “88.” And 88 in Morse code means “love and kisses.”
Good old Prudencia. “I’ll send my body over to you to work on fixing your communications array,” I say to the handheld. “I need to tell NOAA I’ll be using some of my sick days. And Connie: I need to tell Connie that Ela and I are all right. I need to tell her I love her.”
“Love and kisses,” says Prudencia’s horn.
Relief washes like a heatwave through my face. My baby girl’s head must feel it, and it must feel good to her, since she turns and nuzzles her forehead against my cheek. If there is bliss in this world, I have found it.
“Okay, baby girl,” I say to my Ela. “You want to talk? You want to get to know your papi? Have I got a story for you. It’s called:
“El Cuento de Cómo Julio Became a Coconut for His Baby Girl.”