Do I have two bodies or is my mind capable of broadcasting two different channels simultaneously? Acilde asked himself, his eyes fixed on the small fake-pearl necklace worn by the nurse who was changing his IV. The day’s news was being projected in front of his hospital bed: “During a raid in Villa Mella, after a tip from the leaders of the Pentecostal terrorists, the Servants of the Apocalypse, the Special Police accidentally rounded up one of the suspects in the murder of Esther Escudero, an Africanist religious leader and personal friend of the president, murdered last week during a robbery of her home. The suspect, Acilde Figueroa, who according to her digital footprint was a woman, is now a man, and was found strapped to a bed, unconscious and dehydrated, next to the corpse of Dr. Eric Vitier, who appeared to have suffered respiratory failure hours before. Authorities also found a sea anemone, valued at sixty-five thousand dollars. The specimen has been transferred to a private laboratory, where it is currently receiving specialized care.” Photos of a happy Acilde, Eric, Esther, and Morla that had nothing to do with the news appeared on the screen during the voiceover: Acilde at a birthday party, Eric at his medical school graduation in Cuba, and a selfie of Morla in a yellow Indiana Pacers T-shirt.
A helicopter landed noisily on the roof of the hospital. Outside Acilde’s room, next to the half-open door, the police officer keeping guard swatted away mosquitos with his hand as he watched a baseball game on an old tablet. Acilde walked to the bathroom unassisted. He lifted the hospital robe to look at himself in the mirror, pleased with the results of the drug: the new broadness to his back and thickness to his forearms, the absence of fat from his hips, the sad little sac holding his balls, and a chest so flat it was incapable of nourishing another human being. He thought the late twentieth-century life in Sosúa playing out in his head might be a side effect of the Rainbow Brite. Back in Sosúa, in the little house where the natives revered him, in front of the mirror that hung from a nail over the faucet in the yard, he assured himself, like a midwife with a newborn, that this new body didn’t need anything else. It’s identical, he thought, entranced, as he pinched the nipples and buttocks and opened and closed the mouth of this 1991 version of himself, and said, “I’m hungry,” then ate with his fingers from the cold fish a hopeful Nenuco offered him on a Duralex dish.
Satisfied, he made his way back to the hospital bed. The officer at the door opened it with the formality and efficiency of someone being watched by his superiors. A huge red-haired mulato, in a very red Adidas tracksuit and with a Holy Infant of Atocha medal hanging from his neck on a gold chain, came in with two suited bodyguards. He snapped his fingers to make them leave, then dropped onto the couch.
He bit a nail and spit it out. “So then, you’re the little queer who’s going to save the country?” he asked. Acilde did not respond. He made his way to the bed with effort, embarrassed by the little robe in which the President of the Republic had surprised him. “Esther Escudero was my sister, you little faggot,” he said, closing his fist. He was making Acilde nervous, with his voice like Balaguer’s and face like Malcolm X. “I’m not ordering them to break your ass because I promised her, I swore to her, that no matter what happened we would give you whatever you needed to realize your mission.”
It seemed the entire world, past and present, was expecting something very important from him and, in front of Said Bona, Acilde felt an urgent need to pretend he knew what they were talking about. This man had captured the country’s will for fifteen years and his charisma had the same effect on Acilde as on the masses he had seduced via YouTube videos in which he criticized the government and used Dominican street Spanish. Once in power, Said had declared himself a socialist, signing a bunch of treaties with the Latin American Bolivarian Alliance, which was pursuing its dream of a Great Colombia in each of its totalitarian member states. He imprisoned all the corrupt ex-government bureaucrats with real charges, and used false charges against the leaders of the opposition. He expropriated companies and properties, celebrating his first anniversary in power by changing the party’s colors from purple and yellow to red and black, in honor of Legbá, Elegguá, the African deity who ruled his destiny, Lord of the Four Paths and messenger of the gods, and declaring Dominican voodoo and all its mysteries as the official religion.
But now Said Bona was in a tight spot. After he agreed to warehouse Venezuelan biological weapons in Ocoa, the 2024 seaquake had done away with the base where they’d been kept and dispersed their contents into the Caribbean sea. Entire species had vanished in a matter of weeks. The environmental crisis had spread to the Atlantic.
As he lost support, Said struggled to accuse the United States and the European Union of having fabricated the tsunami with the goal of destabilizing the region.
Acilde intuited that the task they wanted him to take on had something to do with that disaster, which had made Esther Escudero cry during her morning prayers. It was because of that disaster that oceanographers and doctors were streaming into the country and the Caribbean was a dark and putrid stew. Said used his index finger to touch the tip of his huge Dolce & Gabbana glasses and a hologram of Esther Escudero materialized next to the bed. Omicunlé was wearing a white dress with a long and broad skirt, a dark blue turban, and the infinite number of necklaces and bracelets appropriate to her priestly vocation. She looked like what Acilde imagined her ghost would look like. “If you’re seeing this, it means everything’s gone well,” said the ghost, smiling and calm. “Eric initiated you and now you know you are Omo Olokun: the one who knows what lies at the bottom of the sea. Said depends on me, so use the powers you have begun to discover for the good of humanity. Save the sea, Maferefún Olokun, Maferefún Yemayá.” The message over and the ghost gone, Said took off his glasses and discovered his eyes were wet, the very same eyes that had so delighted the women of the nation when, impassioned during the electoral campaign, he’d declared that the children of single mothers were children of the mother country and, as such, his children. “What do you need?” Said asked Acilde, now with respect.
Because of the discreet and unspecific way in which Esther had referred to his powers, he understood he had no need to reveal the window to the past that had opened in his mind, nor the clone there whom he maneuvered by remote control. So far, this was his only power, and he wanted to test the reality of the past he’d reached with the anemone he’d once thought of selling for mere cents. “I need a quiet and private place, because these are the Days of Remembering, in which I will recover the memory of my past lives and of my mission,” said Acilde, using the ceremonious language of those who had pulled him from the waters in 1991 and awakening the president’s curiosity for the first time.
They came to an agreement: Acilde would go to jail for a few months to calm down the followers of Esther who were asking for his head. Said would guarantee his stint was pleasant and later, after finding incontrovertible proof of his innocence, would set him free.
Acilde’s cell had a toilet, a sink, an oven, a little fridge, a bed, and a table with an old forty-four-inch monitor connected to a keyboard. On the gray, carpeted floor there was a handprint with orange specks, as though someone had dumped a sardine and rice dish there for a couple of days. He was not allowed a data plan in jail because hackers might be able to detect it and accuse the government of favoring certain prisoners. While there, Acilde rested for most of the day now that the man he’d started to become in Sosúa had started to move at his command. He learned many things about that time and its people and he got a good idea of what was expected of him. A month after he had arrived, Nenuco had already shared with him all he knew: the portal with the anemones, the name of all the animals in the pool in both Spanish and Taíno, recipes for cooking them, the purpose and origin of all of the herbs they grew in the yard, and the nature of the other world that Acilde was from. Acilde let Nenuco fantasize because, if he realized the other world was a prison cell in 2027, he would have put a bullet in his brain.
Yararí had run off with Willito and they’d heard she was pregnant. As soon as he kidnapped her, Willito had her cooking what he fished with a little net at the beach. Nenuco had gone to get her but the girl told him she was never going back to that “damned shack ever again.”
During the day, Acilde would lie in bed with his eyes closed so his other self could run around Sosúa on the back of Nenuco’s motorcycle, asking questions and taking notes of the street and business names, the names of people, with the excuse that he was writing a book. In the darkness of his cell, he would compare these notes on the old computer he had been allowed to have. When he entered the names from his notes in the search engine, he’d get lots of historical information: the success of certain businesses, the misfortune of others, the future criminality of an innocent-seeming young man or the promotion to mayor of an illiterate woman. How lost and obtuse the people of that small town looked now, how sad their small plans and projections, how comedic the desperation of someone who does not yet know a marvelous destiny awaits around the corner.
He had still not been able to confirm his own existence in the historical Sosúa, nor that his double had been there among its people and that, like everybody else, he’d left a mark. To confirm his presence he needed to be someone, he needed a name, he needed papers, and so that very night Nenuco took him to see Stephan, a German who owned a bar and falsified documents for Europeans with dubious pasts who’d retired in Sosúa with the kind of money that wouldn’t even buy a stick of gum back in their own countries.
The bar, two blocks from the beach, was full of elderly tourists, mostly in their seventies, and young mulatos from the neighborhood. They sat around little plywood tables and drank Brugal and Coca-Cola, their attention fixed on the host up on the small concrete stage greeting the audience. He wore a Lycra T-shirt, under which his bulging muscles looked like fluorescent sausages.
“Señoras y señores, signore e signori, ladies and gentlemen, mesdames et messieurs, meine Damen und Herren, willkommen, benvenuti, welcome to tonight’s show at One-Eyed Willy’s, where your dreams come true. Opening this great evening of fun, I introduce you to Sosúa’s very own: El Asco!” And immediately a drag queen appeared on stage who had obviously undergone all kinds of homemade experiments to achieve her womanly curves. The Crisol oil injections had completely deformed her, creating strange bubbles in all the wrong places, and the tight silver muslin dress added a bone-chilling touch to her gray and cadaveric skin. Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” came thundering out of the towers of speakers on either side of the stage, pumping the synthesizers that the electro genius Giorgio Moroder had inaugurated the future with in 1977. Even in Stephan’s office, behind the bar, the song’s chorus could be heard vibrating, rallying the audience that whistled and clapped to El Asco’s deathly sensuality as she mimicked Summers: “looooove.”
“Where did you dig up this doll?” asked the German with a strong accent and then, laughing: “You’re going to do fine: in this country being white is a profession.” Thirty years in the future, Acilde wrote Stephan’s complete name in the search engine and saw how, thanks to the popularity of that little bar and its drag show, he had become a well-known impresario with restaurants all over the north coast. Acilde hadn’t thought about the cost of the fake IDs and he made a mental note, next to the other mental notes of all the other favors Nenuco had done for him, to pay him back the hundred dollars he was now pulling from his pocket to buy the documents. As Stephan took his photo in front of a white sheet hung on the door, he asked Acilde what name he wanted on the papers. In the bar, the song was coming to a close and the audience was clapping wildly. “Giorgio,” said Acilde, and then added the surname his mother had seen on his father’s ID when he’d opened his wallet to pay her: “Giorgio Menicucci.”