Honesty
by Stanley Delgado
Winner, 2026 Fiction Contest
It began like this. We were drinking wine before the party when Diana said, ‘If I told you I was once possessed by a demon, would you believe me?’
I consider myself open-minded.
I consider myself open-minded.
*
This was on my 56th birthday party. Necessary background details: I have been orthodontist for twenty-three years; my wife at the time, Solymar, Soly, was 54, and she worked in education, grants for STEM supplies and the like; we were together for twenty-two years and had no children; we lived in a three-bedroom sea-side house in Southern California. Diana, 54, gay, single, a longtime friend since our days at UC Berkeley, taught in a doctorate nursing program in the Bay. No children either, what else. Diana and I are first-generation Salvadoran; Soly’s first-gen Guatemalan. Final detail: Soly, Diana, myself—all of our parents and step-parents are dead.
There, that is done with. I have written this to better understand what happened on that night. I think of this as a very long question, the kind a law student would answer, complicated as a clock.
There, that is done with. I have written this to better understand what happened on that night. I think of this as a very long question, the kind a law student would answer, complicated as a clock.
*
I hope I am not expected to describe our house, our clothes, and so on. I was never a visual learner, as they say; even at dental school my teachers despised how I’d mumble textbook descriptions while working. They’d tell me that a tooth is a bone, and a bone is not a word, but a physical object. And me, jokester I was, I’d say describe that again without words, doc. Smoke out of their ears, at that one.
The main thing is we were sat at the dining table drinking good wine before the party: cab sauv, fruity, breezy, not much history; truly a modern Californian. I was telling Soly and Diana about how I had obtained the wine, which I will now describe.
I know a sommelier, a Southerner named Joubert, who had been absent from his post at a renowned Los Angeles hotel for a few months. Once he returned, we met at his office—the wine cellar of the hotel—and before he toured me around the new selections, I asked him where he had been. He gravely said, ‘In Haiti, burying my mother.’
I gave him my condolences, told him I was there for him—just things you say.
He replied, ‘Unless you know Hoodoo, then I don’t think you can help very much.’
I had to ask, of course, what he meant.
Joubert informed me that his mother was in perfect health before she died, according to his auntie Éloise, her caretaker. But after they moved her body, they found old, rusted door nails and cat feces underneath her bed, a sign of Hoodoo, which was not outside of the realm of possibility, since Joubert’s mother owned a large portion of virgin land ready for a cash crop, and there were many vultures, as he put it, circling the sky—Haitian politicos, British businessmen— the Hoodoo witches were merely conduits for a more nefarious force which would in time reveal itself, he was sure.
As Joubert told me this story, his face grew wilder. His crooked teeth, which often gave a comforting impression of humility in his haughty profession, had now seemed mad and brutal. In the end I told him with a nervous smile, ‘Well no, JoJo, I’m not much help in that department.’
He smiled, looking somewhat embarrassed and resigned, as if I had told him his shirt was untucked.
This is what I was talking about when Soly reprimanded me: ‘Why are you smiling like it’s funny?’ she said. ‘Strange things happen all the time.’
And she launched into a story I’d heard so many times that I imagined young actors now monologued it at the top of their lungs at community theatre. The story was that back in Guatemala, Soly’s mother, Ms. Irma, was headed to the coffee plantation in the mountains of Jocotenango for work one morning when she found a man in tattered white clothes lying in a ditch, dying from thirst, begging for water. Ms. Irma ran back home, about two hours away on foot, then fetched a pitcher of water, some bread, and a piece of fruit, but when she came back to the ditch the man in white was gone. Vanished. Ms. Irma had lost about six hours of work by that point, so she went back home. The next morning, she found out every single worker at the plantation had been killed by government troops the day before, shot and beheaded.
Soly, a little drunk, slurred out, ‘I just think of that and think that wow, who knows why things happen how they happen.’
‘I know,’ Diana said, perfectly sober and understanding.
I sighed, wishing I had a smoke.
‘You’re not convinced?’—Diana.
‘Me, I’m open-minded. Things go in here,’ I tapped at the side of my skull, ‘but there they do not stay. In dentistry and medicine things are always changing.’
And then Diana said it: ‘If I told you I was once possessed by a demon, would you believe me?’
I guffawed.
She said, ‘Soly knows the story already, I never told you, though.’
I looked at Soly, who had placed her hands on her chest and looked juicily hurt at the memory.
I reminded Diana that I was open-minded.
She said, ‘You remember my father, right?’
Pay attention, now.
So Diana’s father, Mr. Vicente, a well-paid electrician, used to hit her for certain behavior — listening to hip-hop, cussing out loud, forgetting to fix his dinner plate. She’d be age twelve and her short-shorts would send her father on a rampage like you would not believe. And he was quite the clever villain, too, considering he’d hit her with a Yellow Pages.
‘Yellow Pages?’ I said.
Diana sagely explained: ‘Because it didn’t leave bruises.’
This did not bother Diana. What annoyed her was that he insisted on dragging her to church every Sunday to beg forgiveness, and not his own forgiveness, mind you, but Diana’s.
‘He’d hold his fat hands up and pray loud enough for me to hear: Please please forgive little Diana for behaving in this way.’
Diana, therefore, resorted to confession. Being raised Catholic, it seemed the thing to do. Yet no one believed her. Mr. Vicente hit you? Your father? The electrician?
Once he found out, of course, another Yellow Pages walloping. ‘I used to say I had Larry H. Parker’s number imprinted on my ass,’ Diana joked.
Diana, therefore, at fourteen years old, resorted to stealing money from the collection plate as a means of getting back at everyone. She bought a CD player, new jeans, new shoes—all of it, keep in mind, she couldn’t even enjoy, lest her father see. She kept it all underneath her bed, with their tags, in their boxes, wrapped in plastic.
I said it was like a cartel drug lord with unlaundered millions buried in the Mojave.
Diana laughed, though Soly did not.
Regardless. It was on a Thursday afternoon that Diana saw the thing that would change her life forever. An ouija board in the display case of a pawn shop. She promptly purchased it, and the clerk who rang her up, a Middle Eastern man, eyed her suspiciously and said, ‘This is a game. Not real, not real.’
But when she got home that night, she asked if her mother was there. The planchette moved underneath her fingertips to Yes. Diana asked, Did dad hit you, too? And there the planchette stayed.
I remember at this moment I slowly sipped the wine so I would not have to say anything. Sometimes I envied my patients, wishing I could traverse conversations like them, with a rubber prop and dam in my mouth, and when a person paused to let me feel the weight of their story, I could simply make sounds in the affirmative, which to my ear always sound like “Bar, bar, bar,” like the ancient Greeks would hear when speaking to a foreigner.
Diana said she began speaking with her dead mother’s spirit for about a week, asking her about schoolboy crushes, Heaven’s scenery, and so on, although Diana couldn’t remember any of the specifics now, as if the trauma to come scrubbed her memory clean. Diana remembered she was happy for a while, chit-chatting with her dead mother’s spirit. Until one night when lo and behold she forgot to wash the dishes and Mr. Vicente had her bend over the couch and—yes, with the Yellow Pages once again.
Though that night’s abuse only consisted of a dozen spankings, it was a breaking point for Diana, who was about to turn fifteen in a week. It had been enough; she felt she had outgrown it. She took to the ouija and asked her mom what she should do.
‘And letter by letter she told me: Punish. Him.’
Without a thought Diana went out to the living room, grabbed the Yellow Pages, and with all five pounds of the Pages held high in both of her hands, she stood over a sleeping Mr. Vicente in bed. But then, she saw that his face had transformed into a leering, grinning, frightening tumor. She dropped the book and he woke up with a jump, his face back to normal. She lost consciousness. When she came to, her father was holding her close, crying all over her.
‘He said my eyes had gone black.’
At this point I could feel myself wiping my face clean of judgment. I looked at Soly, whose own eyes were soft with empathy.
Diana came clean to her father, about everything. He threw away the ouija, he sold off her things, and they scrubbed the place clean and had priests come throw holy water around and he never hit her again.
Silence.
The oxygen in the room still felt aware, a bit buzzy. Through the patio door I saw various men in suits coming closer, and I had the worrying thought that they were coming to take Diana away, as if she had said too much. Of course, I realized the men were our friends, and their wives were with them, and I found myself waiting for them to ring the door bell, but I realized that by waiting, I was letting time go on—and on—and I hadn’t said anything to Diana yet.
This was one of the things I wish I could take back. I said, ‘Well, as you know I’m an atheist.’
The look on Diana and Soly’s faces—Diana as if shaken from a dream, and Soly as if I picked my nose at Sunday mass.
‘So you don’t believe me?’ Diana said.
I said, ‘You were an atheist once, too.’
Soly rolled her eyes. ‘That is so not the point.’
‘It’s easier to be an atheist in Berkeley than a Catholic, I can assure you,’ Diana said.
‘How religious are you now?’ I said, a bit more accusatory than I meant.
‘I go to church sometimes. Bake brownies and cookies for Sunday school. The kids call me Ms. Diana. Is that fine with you?’
‘I wish I had your free time,’ I said, my hands underneath the table wringing at the tablecloth, legs jittering up and down, waiting for my friends to ring the doorbell and save me.
‘Nestor, this is not about atheism or not-atheism,’ Soly started.
‘It’s fine,’ Diana said, suddenly affable.
I decided to temper things with humor. I said, ‘Do your eyes still turn black?’
Diana then covered her face and started groaning. She put one hand on the table and started shaking it. She uncovered her face and said, ‘Boo!’
The doorbell rang, and I nearly fell out of my chair.
The main thing is we were sat at the dining table drinking good wine before the party: cab sauv, fruity, breezy, not much history; truly a modern Californian. I was telling Soly and Diana about how I had obtained the wine, which I will now describe.
I know a sommelier, a Southerner named Joubert, who had been absent from his post at a renowned Los Angeles hotel for a few months. Once he returned, we met at his office—the wine cellar of the hotel—and before he toured me around the new selections, I asked him where he had been. He gravely said, ‘In Haiti, burying my mother.’
I gave him my condolences, told him I was there for him—just things you say.
He replied, ‘Unless you know Hoodoo, then I don’t think you can help very much.’
I had to ask, of course, what he meant.
Joubert informed me that his mother was in perfect health before she died, according to his auntie Éloise, her caretaker. But after they moved her body, they found old, rusted door nails and cat feces underneath her bed, a sign of Hoodoo, which was not outside of the realm of possibility, since Joubert’s mother owned a large portion of virgin land ready for a cash crop, and there were many vultures, as he put it, circling the sky—Haitian politicos, British businessmen— the Hoodoo witches were merely conduits for a more nefarious force which would in time reveal itself, he was sure.
As Joubert told me this story, his face grew wilder. His crooked teeth, which often gave a comforting impression of humility in his haughty profession, had now seemed mad and brutal. In the end I told him with a nervous smile, ‘Well no, JoJo, I’m not much help in that department.’
He smiled, looking somewhat embarrassed and resigned, as if I had told him his shirt was untucked.
This is what I was talking about when Soly reprimanded me: ‘Why are you smiling like it’s funny?’ she said. ‘Strange things happen all the time.’
And she launched into a story I’d heard so many times that I imagined young actors now monologued it at the top of their lungs at community theatre. The story was that back in Guatemala, Soly’s mother, Ms. Irma, was headed to the coffee plantation in the mountains of Jocotenango for work one morning when she found a man in tattered white clothes lying in a ditch, dying from thirst, begging for water. Ms. Irma ran back home, about two hours away on foot, then fetched a pitcher of water, some bread, and a piece of fruit, but when she came back to the ditch the man in white was gone. Vanished. Ms. Irma had lost about six hours of work by that point, so she went back home. The next morning, she found out every single worker at the plantation had been killed by government troops the day before, shot and beheaded.
Soly, a little drunk, slurred out, ‘I just think of that and think that wow, who knows why things happen how they happen.’
‘I know,’ Diana said, perfectly sober and understanding.
I sighed, wishing I had a smoke.
‘You’re not convinced?’—Diana.
‘Me, I’m open-minded. Things go in here,’ I tapped at the side of my skull, ‘but there they do not stay. In dentistry and medicine things are always changing.’
And then Diana said it: ‘If I told you I was once possessed by a demon, would you believe me?’
I guffawed.
She said, ‘Soly knows the story already, I never told you, though.’
I looked at Soly, who had placed her hands on her chest and looked juicily hurt at the memory.
I reminded Diana that I was open-minded.
She said, ‘You remember my father, right?’
Pay attention, now.
So Diana’s father, Mr. Vicente, a well-paid electrician, used to hit her for certain behavior — listening to hip-hop, cussing out loud, forgetting to fix his dinner plate. She’d be age twelve and her short-shorts would send her father on a rampage like you would not believe. And he was quite the clever villain, too, considering he’d hit her with a Yellow Pages.
‘Yellow Pages?’ I said.
Diana sagely explained: ‘Because it didn’t leave bruises.’
This did not bother Diana. What annoyed her was that he insisted on dragging her to church every Sunday to beg forgiveness, and not his own forgiveness, mind you, but Diana’s.
‘He’d hold his fat hands up and pray loud enough for me to hear: Please please forgive little Diana for behaving in this way.’
Diana, therefore, resorted to confession. Being raised Catholic, it seemed the thing to do. Yet no one believed her. Mr. Vicente hit you? Your father? The electrician?
Once he found out, of course, another Yellow Pages walloping. ‘I used to say I had Larry H. Parker’s number imprinted on my ass,’ Diana joked.
Diana, therefore, at fourteen years old, resorted to stealing money from the collection plate as a means of getting back at everyone. She bought a CD player, new jeans, new shoes—all of it, keep in mind, she couldn’t even enjoy, lest her father see. She kept it all underneath her bed, with their tags, in their boxes, wrapped in plastic.
I said it was like a cartel drug lord with unlaundered millions buried in the Mojave.
Diana laughed, though Soly did not.
Regardless. It was on a Thursday afternoon that Diana saw the thing that would change her life forever. An ouija board in the display case of a pawn shop. She promptly purchased it, and the clerk who rang her up, a Middle Eastern man, eyed her suspiciously and said, ‘This is a game. Not real, not real.’
But when she got home that night, she asked if her mother was there. The planchette moved underneath her fingertips to Yes. Diana asked, Did dad hit you, too? And there the planchette stayed.
I remember at this moment I slowly sipped the wine so I would not have to say anything. Sometimes I envied my patients, wishing I could traverse conversations like them, with a rubber prop and dam in my mouth, and when a person paused to let me feel the weight of their story, I could simply make sounds in the affirmative, which to my ear always sound like “Bar, bar, bar,” like the ancient Greeks would hear when speaking to a foreigner.
Diana said she began speaking with her dead mother’s spirit for about a week, asking her about schoolboy crushes, Heaven’s scenery, and so on, although Diana couldn’t remember any of the specifics now, as if the trauma to come scrubbed her memory clean. Diana remembered she was happy for a while, chit-chatting with her dead mother’s spirit. Until one night when lo and behold she forgot to wash the dishes and Mr. Vicente had her bend over the couch and—yes, with the Yellow Pages once again.
Though that night’s abuse only consisted of a dozen spankings, it was a breaking point for Diana, who was about to turn fifteen in a week. It had been enough; she felt she had outgrown it. She took to the ouija and asked her mom what she should do.
‘And letter by letter she told me: Punish. Him.’
Without a thought Diana went out to the living room, grabbed the Yellow Pages, and with all five pounds of the Pages held high in both of her hands, she stood over a sleeping Mr. Vicente in bed. But then, she saw that his face had transformed into a leering, grinning, frightening tumor. She dropped the book and he woke up with a jump, his face back to normal. She lost consciousness. When she came to, her father was holding her close, crying all over her.
‘He said my eyes had gone black.’
At this point I could feel myself wiping my face clean of judgment. I looked at Soly, whose own eyes were soft with empathy.
Diana came clean to her father, about everything. He threw away the ouija, he sold off her things, and they scrubbed the place clean and had priests come throw holy water around and he never hit her again.
Silence.
The oxygen in the room still felt aware, a bit buzzy. Through the patio door I saw various men in suits coming closer, and I had the worrying thought that they were coming to take Diana away, as if she had said too much. Of course, I realized the men were our friends, and their wives were with them, and I found myself waiting for them to ring the door bell, but I realized that by waiting, I was letting time go on—and on—and I hadn’t said anything to Diana yet.
This was one of the things I wish I could take back. I said, ‘Well, as you know I’m an atheist.’
The look on Diana and Soly’s faces—Diana as if shaken from a dream, and Soly as if I picked my nose at Sunday mass.
‘So you don’t believe me?’ Diana said.
I said, ‘You were an atheist once, too.’
Soly rolled her eyes. ‘That is so not the point.’
‘It’s easier to be an atheist in Berkeley than a Catholic, I can assure you,’ Diana said.
‘How religious are you now?’ I said, a bit more accusatory than I meant.
‘I go to church sometimes. Bake brownies and cookies for Sunday school. The kids call me Ms. Diana. Is that fine with you?’
‘I wish I had your free time,’ I said, my hands underneath the table wringing at the tablecloth, legs jittering up and down, waiting for my friends to ring the doorbell and save me.
‘Nestor, this is not about atheism or not-atheism,’ Soly started.
‘It’s fine,’ Diana said, suddenly affable.
I decided to temper things with humor. I said, ‘Do your eyes still turn black?’
Diana then covered her face and started groaning. She put one hand on the table and started shaking it. She uncovered her face and said, ‘Boo!’
The doorbell rang, and I nearly fell out of my chair.
*
Here comes now the second part of this story.
Working long as I have, you make friends that you see once, twice a year—whenever the stars align. Here is a list of the friends who attended this party. Doctors Brian Stendahl and his wife Amanda, Kevin Park and his wife Christine, Josh Nguyen and his husband Michael, Pranjali Hudson and her husband Shaun; administrators Nour Sadeghipour and Sonya Ramirez; professor Kevin Villalobos and his girlfriend Alex; Soly’s friends from work Johann, Srishty, Darla, Josue, and Moromoluwa. We talked about donor dinners, museum memberships, work conferences across state lines, children—at a point it’s all just air coming out of our mouths.
However, always with friends of our vintage, parents and parenting and parenthood come up as the most exciting topic.
Pranjali Hudson told us about her father taking her to McDonald’s on the morning of 9/11—or rather, the morning during 9/11. The second tower was falling and she and her sisters were eating pancakes hard as polypropylene. ‘Appa made us stay there until everyone finished their breakfast, which must have been at least two hours, my little sisters hated finishing their plates so much.’
We talked about 9/11, other tragedies and crises, global and personal, how it affected our psyches, our grades.
On grades, Kevin Park remembered his SAT tutor, a balding Taiwanese man that Kevin’s mother would drive them to every weekend, from East San Jose all the way to Cupertino. Kevin and a dozen other Asian kids sat on backless stools in the tutor’s garage as he jotted down math and logic problems that grew with complexity each day, each minute, it felt like, which was a wonder since the tutor didn’t use any prepbooks. The tutor, Kevin’s really forgotten his name, kept the garage like a studio apartment, with a small stove, a mini fridge, a cot for a mattress, a dresser.
‘When we got answers wrong he would smile and shake his head. But when we got the answers right, he’d have the sternest look like we were going to steal his job.’
Kevin later learned the tutor had killed his own brother because of a gambling debt, and the tutor moved into the brother’s house, the same one in Cupertino. The tutor, however, haunted as he was, never stepped a foot inside the actual house and preferred to sleep and cook his meals in the garage while digging holes for toilets and bathing in a large clay planter. The brother’s corpse, and this entire story, was only discovered when Kevin was already graduating from UCLA.
‘My mom was the one that called me up and told me. I told her he was always a creep, and she said, But his house was so beautiful!’
We went down the line, serving up anecdotes. When it was my turn I said my favorite line: ‘Alcohol killed my father. Budweiser truck ran him over.’
Everyone laughed.
Sonya said, ‘That’s an old George Lopez bit, isn’t it?’
I smiled.
‘Times like these,’ Soly said, ‘when I look around and see us and we drink and we talk and I just can’t help but think of how far we’ve made it.’ She smiled, then pouted, at all the relevant genocides of the world. ‘I was just telling Nestor and Diana today about my mom’s guardian angel!’
Of course everyone wanted to hear. While Soly told her story, I inspected everyone’s faces, gentle with curiosity, sharp with interest.
Darla, one of Soly’s friends, said, ‘I believe that. My momma used to say, Don’t let the Devil be the gap on your resume when you interview with God.’
I could feel, I don’t know, an odd sense of destiny, as if I discovered pages of a script that our friends were now acting faster than I could read.
‘If I knew how to get the devil out of my resume,’ said Johann with his accent, ‘I am afraid I may be out of a job!’
He had cut his teeth at Northrop Grumman, was the joke.
‘It’s real!’ Soly said. ‘These things happen! Nestor, tell them about Joubert!’
I felt the party’s attention turn my way, a nauseating gravity. I scratched my neck. ‘Well,’ I stumbled. They shouted like kids for a scary story. I told them the episode again, Joubert, his mother, the Hoodoo, the hidden assassins. Everyone looked quite impressed, a feeling that disturbed me, as if Soly had shoved her hand inside of me, puppet-like.
‘Goddamn!’ Brian Stendahl said. ‘I buy that. Shit happens all the time, believe me. My dad told me once about a girl who tried to kill her godmother I think it was, back in ’72, when our people lived in the Appalachians, so you know some shit’s going on there, but so the girl tried lighting her godmother’s hair on fire in the middle of a party. Eight years old and it took two men to hold her down. Didn’t remember a thing afterwards.’
Nour Sadeghipour almost choked trying to say her piece. ‘This is true! My mother once told me a story like this. A boy, who started scratching out his eyes, like this, when they brought him to church. A ritual was held to cleanse him.’
Just as I began to feel overwhelmed, Diana said it, once more, like rehearsal:
‘If I told you all I was once possessed by a demon, would you believe me?’
You could feel the air in the room point to her like a compass obsessing over true north.
A drop of wine made its way down the corner of Diana’s mouth, her cheek, her neck, she dabbed at it with a finger and licked it off. Diana was just as I remembered her: like she was always leaning forward in life, diving in head first to fanfare.
Diana told her story, and everyone’s faces seemed to crack with new emotions heretofore unseen at the party, disgust, amusement, perverted glee. Meanwhile I looked around at the detritus of my birthday. On the floor there were wine spills, bits of cubed cheese, loose arugula from the salad; on the various tables from dining to living room were unfinished plates of salmon, pita bread. I very much wished for a smoke.
When Diana finished the story, everyone looked psychically damaged from it all.
I was drunk, and I couldn’t help myself. I snorted out a laugh. Everyone looked at me.
‘Yes?’ Diana said with a harshness that I hadn’t expected.
Soly reached for my hand, just a touch.
‘No,’ I said. ‘To answer your question, no, I don’t think you were possessed.’
‘Nestor,’ Soly said.
I couldn’t help myself. ‘She wasn’t! You weren’t. I mean, possession is, what, a demonic force inhabiting your body, maneuvering you, yes? But that didn’t happen. Your mom tells you to hit your dad, your mom who… was a demon? the whole time? And you remember everything so well and then throw away the ouija and oh, it all goes back to normal.’
‘But her dad’s face,’ someone said. ‘And her black eyes.’—someone else.
I said, ‘The black eyes, the face. If you buy that. I don’t know—sounds like a nervous breakdown to me.’
Someone started, ‘But what about—’
‘Just because something can’t be explained by you,’ I said, ‘doesn’t mean it can’t be explained at all.’
‘It’s different if you’ve gone through it,’ Soly said.
‘I have!’ I said, wanting to pull the crowd in my favor.
Everyone looked at me, hanging on each word. ‘Well? So? Yes?’ they said.
And now it is time for my story.
I told them about that one night in December when Father came into my room, all two hundred fifty pounds of him, and he stood atop of my mattress, a knife in his hand, and he began scraping off the popcorn ceiling. Great clods of white plaster and asbestos rained down. I, and I must have been eight or nine, I ran to my closet, to hide. Mother shouted at him and dragged him out of the room. She slammed my door closed. Muffled screaming followed by a great quiet. I trembled there in between winter jackets and sweaters the entire night. I fell asleep as the sun rose.
The next morning Father woke me up and asked if I had seen what happened last night? The ghost? It was a ghost that took the shape of him, I must’ve seen it, it came inside my room and did that to the ceiling.
Oh, I said, looking up at the smooth spots of the ceiling. Yes.
Mother would try to convince me that he had done that, he said, but she was wrong. Father made it sound like a game: If your mother tells you anything else then call her a liar. Swear to me, Nestor. Swear, or you will not open your Christmas presents.
The requisite ohs and tut-tuts from the party people. Solymar held my hand and Diana rubbed my shoulder in worry.
Father left to work, a poultry processing plant in Huntington Park. At breakfast, Mother asked me what I had seen last night. I told her I saw nothing. She said, Nestor, you can tell me what you saw. Breakfast was scrambled eggs and slimy cactus, I remember. I told her I saw nothing. She insisted again and again, squeezing the small bones of my wrist. She told me it was going to be okay, that it would never happen again, that we were going to be leaving soon, and I’d have a new dad, a better one, it was Carlos, the nice man from her job at the real estate agency I had met at the Christmas party. She asked me if I understood that I could not tell Father. I nodded.
Unknown to me at the time, Father had schizophrenia, which mostly ended with a catatonic daze but sometimes exploded in paranoia. As a kid that was just Father to me— sometimes bored out of his mind, sometimes mad as hell. He had been missing medication to make them last longer, since they were so expensive and he needed the extra money for our Christmas gifts, the Thanksgiving feast, my Halloween costume—Skeletor, if you’re wondering, and Father was proud enough, and mentally ill enough, that he did not ask his family for help and they wanted nothing to do with him. See this. Be on a sinking ship and throw all of your things out into the sea, hoping it will float you along while the gaping hole in the side drinks and drinks in the water.
Mother left for work and I watched TV the entire day, unable to eat anything because of a stomachache. When Father came home, I told him everything. I don’t remember how I said it, Mommy’s going to leave you for Carlos from work because she thinks you broke the ceiling—who knows.
Father laughed and shook his head. Come, he said, look at this. And he pointed to the popcorn ceiling around our house. Do you see the faces? he said. Do you see the spirits? Do you think I would just leave them here, to haunt you and your mother?
Yeah, that night was bad. They fought, shouted for an hour. I looked outside of my window and saw all the neighbors’ faces popping in and out of their curtains, invested in the chisme, their faces lit by Christmas lights. Mother busted into my room and grabbed me by the hand, told me we were leaving. I said what about my stuff, my presents. Father tried hugging me, but Mother yanked me back, and in this slapstick Father’s wedding ring caught against my eyeball. I screamed in pain, and Mother said how dare he hit me. I came to his defense still. It was the ghost, I said, the ghost—nodding my head so Father could see I was on his side. He stood still, mouth slightly parted.
We arrived that night at Carlos’ house in Whittier, a big ranch-style home with fruit trees and a plastic Santa Claus on the roof. Carlos was fatter than Father, with a huge beard. He was a fine guy; divorced, no kids, no pets, he loved Mother and therefore loved me. But that night in the sofa bed I remember Mother told me it was okay to say Father hit me.
But I still told her it was a ghost.
And soon after I developed a fear of them, ghosts. In my new bedroom in Carlos’ house I suddenly had night terrors. I was scared of the dark. I had dreams about cloaked figures scratching my legs, my arms. I couldn’t stand looking up at the popcorn ceiling of that house and seeing the evil faces that haunted me, spirits Father was unable to vanquish. Mother, of course, said, It is that devil you are afraid of, son, that devil!
This lasted years, an entire adolescence of Zoloft. Only when I was older did Mother inform me about Father’s diagnosis. I was, let’s see, sixteen, seventeen? She told me everything. How they met, how his illness manifested, and so on and so on. When I pressed her, asking why she waited so long to tell me, she said she had to tell me now, because now he was dead. Father had been homeless and lived in a tent off the 110 freeway and he had, indeed, been hit by a car. Just like that, my night terrors went away. The shapes in the popcorn ceiling were just pockets of light and shadow. I could sleep again, once more.
I said, ‘But do you get what I’m saying?’
All of my friends and guests seemed like platters of knitted brows and sorry looks.
‘I never knew this,’ Diana said. ‘Soly, did you?’
Soly looked as if she was drowning in thin air, and just as she said, ‘I knew,’ I said, ‘Soly never knew.’
Her face burned as she stared at the floor. ‘I’m sorry,’ I whispered to her, but she backed away, as if the apology made it, whatever it was, worse.
I looked at everyone, sickly enraptured by this car crash. I figured I may as well make my point clear with them. ‘Listen, I was just saying… Diana’s dad, Solymar’s mom, all of these things, they just happen in our lives. They occur. Like the shapes in the ceiling, we choose how to believe them. And either you can stay a little kid and afraid, or you can grow up.’
Diana said, ‘You really think that’s what your story is about, don’t you?’
I did not like what she was implying. I said, ‘Yes. I do. With complete and sincere honesty, I do.’
And I felt a nausea so deep my body coiled tight like a spring and I turned and vomited, away from the crowd, and onto my wife.
Working long as I have, you make friends that you see once, twice a year—whenever the stars align. Here is a list of the friends who attended this party. Doctors Brian Stendahl and his wife Amanda, Kevin Park and his wife Christine, Josh Nguyen and his husband Michael, Pranjali Hudson and her husband Shaun; administrators Nour Sadeghipour and Sonya Ramirez; professor Kevin Villalobos and his girlfriend Alex; Soly’s friends from work Johann, Srishty, Darla, Josue, and Moromoluwa. We talked about donor dinners, museum memberships, work conferences across state lines, children—at a point it’s all just air coming out of our mouths.
However, always with friends of our vintage, parents and parenting and parenthood come up as the most exciting topic.
Pranjali Hudson told us about her father taking her to McDonald’s on the morning of 9/11—or rather, the morning during 9/11. The second tower was falling and she and her sisters were eating pancakes hard as polypropylene. ‘Appa made us stay there until everyone finished their breakfast, which must have been at least two hours, my little sisters hated finishing their plates so much.’
We talked about 9/11, other tragedies and crises, global and personal, how it affected our psyches, our grades.
On grades, Kevin Park remembered his SAT tutor, a balding Taiwanese man that Kevin’s mother would drive them to every weekend, from East San Jose all the way to Cupertino. Kevin and a dozen other Asian kids sat on backless stools in the tutor’s garage as he jotted down math and logic problems that grew with complexity each day, each minute, it felt like, which was a wonder since the tutor didn’t use any prepbooks. The tutor, Kevin’s really forgotten his name, kept the garage like a studio apartment, with a small stove, a mini fridge, a cot for a mattress, a dresser.
‘When we got answers wrong he would smile and shake his head. But when we got the answers right, he’d have the sternest look like we were going to steal his job.’
Kevin later learned the tutor had killed his own brother because of a gambling debt, and the tutor moved into the brother’s house, the same one in Cupertino. The tutor, however, haunted as he was, never stepped a foot inside the actual house and preferred to sleep and cook his meals in the garage while digging holes for toilets and bathing in a large clay planter. The brother’s corpse, and this entire story, was only discovered when Kevin was already graduating from UCLA.
‘My mom was the one that called me up and told me. I told her he was always a creep, and she said, But his house was so beautiful!’
We went down the line, serving up anecdotes. When it was my turn I said my favorite line: ‘Alcohol killed my father. Budweiser truck ran him over.’
Everyone laughed.
Sonya said, ‘That’s an old George Lopez bit, isn’t it?’
I smiled.
‘Times like these,’ Soly said, ‘when I look around and see us and we drink and we talk and I just can’t help but think of how far we’ve made it.’ She smiled, then pouted, at all the relevant genocides of the world. ‘I was just telling Nestor and Diana today about my mom’s guardian angel!’
Of course everyone wanted to hear. While Soly told her story, I inspected everyone’s faces, gentle with curiosity, sharp with interest.
Darla, one of Soly’s friends, said, ‘I believe that. My momma used to say, Don’t let the Devil be the gap on your resume when you interview with God.’
I could feel, I don’t know, an odd sense of destiny, as if I discovered pages of a script that our friends were now acting faster than I could read.
‘If I knew how to get the devil out of my resume,’ said Johann with his accent, ‘I am afraid I may be out of a job!’
He had cut his teeth at Northrop Grumman, was the joke.
‘It’s real!’ Soly said. ‘These things happen! Nestor, tell them about Joubert!’
I felt the party’s attention turn my way, a nauseating gravity. I scratched my neck. ‘Well,’ I stumbled. They shouted like kids for a scary story. I told them the episode again, Joubert, his mother, the Hoodoo, the hidden assassins. Everyone looked quite impressed, a feeling that disturbed me, as if Soly had shoved her hand inside of me, puppet-like.
‘Goddamn!’ Brian Stendahl said. ‘I buy that. Shit happens all the time, believe me. My dad told me once about a girl who tried to kill her godmother I think it was, back in ’72, when our people lived in the Appalachians, so you know some shit’s going on there, but so the girl tried lighting her godmother’s hair on fire in the middle of a party. Eight years old and it took two men to hold her down. Didn’t remember a thing afterwards.’
Nour Sadeghipour almost choked trying to say her piece. ‘This is true! My mother once told me a story like this. A boy, who started scratching out his eyes, like this, when they brought him to church. A ritual was held to cleanse him.’
Just as I began to feel overwhelmed, Diana said it, once more, like rehearsal:
‘If I told you all I was once possessed by a demon, would you believe me?’
You could feel the air in the room point to her like a compass obsessing over true north.
A drop of wine made its way down the corner of Diana’s mouth, her cheek, her neck, she dabbed at it with a finger and licked it off. Diana was just as I remembered her: like she was always leaning forward in life, diving in head first to fanfare.
Diana told her story, and everyone’s faces seemed to crack with new emotions heretofore unseen at the party, disgust, amusement, perverted glee. Meanwhile I looked around at the detritus of my birthday. On the floor there were wine spills, bits of cubed cheese, loose arugula from the salad; on the various tables from dining to living room were unfinished plates of salmon, pita bread. I very much wished for a smoke.
When Diana finished the story, everyone looked psychically damaged from it all.
I was drunk, and I couldn’t help myself. I snorted out a laugh. Everyone looked at me.
‘Yes?’ Diana said with a harshness that I hadn’t expected.
Soly reached for my hand, just a touch.
‘No,’ I said. ‘To answer your question, no, I don’t think you were possessed.’
‘Nestor,’ Soly said.
I couldn’t help myself. ‘She wasn’t! You weren’t. I mean, possession is, what, a demonic force inhabiting your body, maneuvering you, yes? But that didn’t happen. Your mom tells you to hit your dad, your mom who… was a demon? the whole time? And you remember everything so well and then throw away the ouija and oh, it all goes back to normal.’
‘But her dad’s face,’ someone said. ‘And her black eyes.’—someone else.
I said, ‘The black eyes, the face. If you buy that. I don’t know—sounds like a nervous breakdown to me.’
Someone started, ‘But what about—’
‘Just because something can’t be explained by you,’ I said, ‘doesn’t mean it can’t be explained at all.’
‘It’s different if you’ve gone through it,’ Soly said.
‘I have!’ I said, wanting to pull the crowd in my favor.
Everyone looked at me, hanging on each word. ‘Well? So? Yes?’ they said.
And now it is time for my story.
I told them about that one night in December when Father came into my room, all two hundred fifty pounds of him, and he stood atop of my mattress, a knife in his hand, and he began scraping off the popcorn ceiling. Great clods of white plaster and asbestos rained down. I, and I must have been eight or nine, I ran to my closet, to hide. Mother shouted at him and dragged him out of the room. She slammed my door closed. Muffled screaming followed by a great quiet. I trembled there in between winter jackets and sweaters the entire night. I fell asleep as the sun rose.
The next morning Father woke me up and asked if I had seen what happened last night? The ghost? It was a ghost that took the shape of him, I must’ve seen it, it came inside my room and did that to the ceiling.
Oh, I said, looking up at the smooth spots of the ceiling. Yes.
Mother would try to convince me that he had done that, he said, but she was wrong. Father made it sound like a game: If your mother tells you anything else then call her a liar. Swear to me, Nestor. Swear, or you will not open your Christmas presents.
The requisite ohs and tut-tuts from the party people. Solymar held my hand and Diana rubbed my shoulder in worry.
Father left to work, a poultry processing plant in Huntington Park. At breakfast, Mother asked me what I had seen last night. I told her I saw nothing. She said, Nestor, you can tell me what you saw. Breakfast was scrambled eggs and slimy cactus, I remember. I told her I saw nothing. She insisted again and again, squeezing the small bones of my wrist. She told me it was going to be okay, that it would never happen again, that we were going to be leaving soon, and I’d have a new dad, a better one, it was Carlos, the nice man from her job at the real estate agency I had met at the Christmas party. She asked me if I understood that I could not tell Father. I nodded.
Unknown to me at the time, Father had schizophrenia, which mostly ended with a catatonic daze but sometimes exploded in paranoia. As a kid that was just Father to me— sometimes bored out of his mind, sometimes mad as hell. He had been missing medication to make them last longer, since they were so expensive and he needed the extra money for our Christmas gifts, the Thanksgiving feast, my Halloween costume—Skeletor, if you’re wondering, and Father was proud enough, and mentally ill enough, that he did not ask his family for help and they wanted nothing to do with him. See this. Be on a sinking ship and throw all of your things out into the sea, hoping it will float you along while the gaping hole in the side drinks and drinks in the water.
Mother left for work and I watched TV the entire day, unable to eat anything because of a stomachache. When Father came home, I told him everything. I don’t remember how I said it, Mommy’s going to leave you for Carlos from work because she thinks you broke the ceiling—who knows.
Father laughed and shook his head. Come, he said, look at this. And he pointed to the popcorn ceiling around our house. Do you see the faces? he said. Do you see the spirits? Do you think I would just leave them here, to haunt you and your mother?
Yeah, that night was bad. They fought, shouted for an hour. I looked outside of my window and saw all the neighbors’ faces popping in and out of their curtains, invested in the chisme, their faces lit by Christmas lights. Mother busted into my room and grabbed me by the hand, told me we were leaving. I said what about my stuff, my presents. Father tried hugging me, but Mother yanked me back, and in this slapstick Father’s wedding ring caught against my eyeball. I screamed in pain, and Mother said how dare he hit me. I came to his defense still. It was the ghost, I said, the ghost—nodding my head so Father could see I was on his side. He stood still, mouth slightly parted.
We arrived that night at Carlos’ house in Whittier, a big ranch-style home with fruit trees and a plastic Santa Claus on the roof. Carlos was fatter than Father, with a huge beard. He was a fine guy; divorced, no kids, no pets, he loved Mother and therefore loved me. But that night in the sofa bed I remember Mother told me it was okay to say Father hit me.
But I still told her it was a ghost.
And soon after I developed a fear of them, ghosts. In my new bedroom in Carlos’ house I suddenly had night terrors. I was scared of the dark. I had dreams about cloaked figures scratching my legs, my arms. I couldn’t stand looking up at the popcorn ceiling of that house and seeing the evil faces that haunted me, spirits Father was unable to vanquish. Mother, of course, said, It is that devil you are afraid of, son, that devil!
This lasted years, an entire adolescence of Zoloft. Only when I was older did Mother inform me about Father’s diagnosis. I was, let’s see, sixteen, seventeen? She told me everything. How they met, how his illness manifested, and so on and so on. When I pressed her, asking why she waited so long to tell me, she said she had to tell me now, because now he was dead. Father had been homeless and lived in a tent off the 110 freeway and he had, indeed, been hit by a car. Just like that, my night terrors went away. The shapes in the popcorn ceiling were just pockets of light and shadow. I could sleep again, once more.
I said, ‘But do you get what I’m saying?’
All of my friends and guests seemed like platters of knitted brows and sorry looks.
‘I never knew this,’ Diana said. ‘Soly, did you?’
Soly looked as if she was drowning in thin air, and just as she said, ‘I knew,’ I said, ‘Soly never knew.’
Her face burned as she stared at the floor. ‘I’m sorry,’ I whispered to her, but she backed away, as if the apology made it, whatever it was, worse.
I looked at everyone, sickly enraptured by this car crash. I figured I may as well make my point clear with them. ‘Listen, I was just saying… Diana’s dad, Solymar’s mom, all of these things, they just happen in our lives. They occur. Like the shapes in the ceiling, we choose how to believe them. And either you can stay a little kid and afraid, or you can grow up.’
Diana said, ‘You really think that’s what your story is about, don’t you?’
I did not like what she was implying. I said, ‘Yes. I do. With complete and sincere honesty, I do.’
And I felt a nausea so deep my body coiled tight like a spring and I turned and vomited, away from the crowd, and onto my wife.
*
Everyone, quickly and with great humility, got the hell out of there.
Soly left a trail of my vomit leading to the master bathroom. I followed behind but she slammed the door shut and locked it. Here is the transcript:
‘You humiliated me,’ she said.
‘I should have told you about Father, yes,’ I said. ‘But you knew about my step-dad! What does it even matter they’re all dead now.’
‘And how can you not believe my mother was saved? If she had gone to the coffee plantation, I wouldn’t be here!’
‘That’s what this is about? Okay, I believe it, I believe everything.’
‘And if we had kids, what would you even tell them? How would you raise them? Grow up, stop being scared. Everything you think, everything you think about what you think—is wrong.’
‘You know, good thing you don’t have to be mad about this on account of we don’t have kids.’
And Soly went quiet. She turned the shower on, hot as could be, it steamed from under the door.
I went back out and saw Diana was cleaning up my mess. I told her she didn’t have to.
‘Your guests are outside,’ she said. ‘I think they’re waiting to say goodbye to the host.’
I went out and apologized to them, saying things like, ‘I hope we enjoyed the show,’ ‘Come back any time,’ ‘For your consideration, folks.’
When they expressed any worry or sentimentality, I said, ‘Consider it done,’ which I knew wasn’t an appropriate response to something like Is she okay? Are you okay? but it was a response with finality. Back inside Diana knocked on the bathroom door, asking Soly if she needed anything.
Soly replied with a flat and polite shout, ‘Just go! I’ll call you!’
Diana quietly surrendered. She came back out and phoned a car service, saying she ought to go back to the hotel, she was flying to Oakland in the morning. I went outside with her to wait for her ride, and I gratefully sparked a smoke. Diana watched me. I offered her one.
‘I quit,’ she said.
‘Soly doesn’t want me smoking in the house. Her dad smoked every day and it was her mom who got cancer, you know.’ I exhaled. ‘Guardian angel wasn’t there for that one.’
‘Jesus,’ Diana said. ‘You’ve made yourself clear.’
I apologized. I asked her why she quit smoking.
‘Tried having a baby, was the thing.’
‘Why?’ I said. ‘In college you never wanted kids.’
‘In college,’ she reiterated.
‘Did you meet someone?’
‘Artificial insemination,’ she said. ‘There were some issues though. I had a miscarriage.’
I told her I was sorry to hear it. ‘You never told us.’
A black sedan turned the corner and came our way.
‘Nestor, this was fifteen years ago,’ she said. ‘Ancient.’
‘Still,’ I said.
She shrugged. ‘To me it was just a confirmation. Motherhood wasn’t in the cards.’
The black sedan pulled up to the curb.
‘That’s rough.’
‘It’s easy,’ she said, ‘you believe what you wanna believe and how you believe it, right?’
I put out my smoke on the sidewalk. I hugged her. I told her I thought she would have made a great mother. We said goodbye and she got inside the car. For a while, the only thing I could see was the dark road ahead of her, lit by the car’s headlights. They made a turn, and they were gone.
I stared back at the house, completely dark save for our bedroom window. I suppose I am getting to my question now. Soly and I are, in present-time, indeed getting divorced. Fifty-six years old and single is not an ideal situation, I will admit, but I still have my work, my patients, my entire practice, with a staff of five that look to me for guidance and support, who depend on the quality of my work, my character, my willingness to remain open-minded and therefore keep my status as a well-learned doctor, and I am not poor, and I do visit Mother and Father’s grave from time to time, and even Carlos’, and lay flowers there, and sometimes weep—yet Soly seems to think my entire life has come out wrong. So wrong, in fact, that it infected her life, her being, quiet as a cancer. I suppose I have to ask: How? Haven’t I accomplished what my parents could only dream of? Haven’t I lived this right? Haven’t I been taught right? Haven’t I done this, any of this, right?
Soly left a trail of my vomit leading to the master bathroom. I followed behind but she slammed the door shut and locked it. Here is the transcript:
‘You humiliated me,’ she said.
‘I should have told you about Father, yes,’ I said. ‘But you knew about my step-dad! What does it even matter they’re all dead now.’
‘And how can you not believe my mother was saved? If she had gone to the coffee plantation, I wouldn’t be here!’
‘That’s what this is about? Okay, I believe it, I believe everything.’
‘And if we had kids, what would you even tell them? How would you raise them? Grow up, stop being scared. Everything you think, everything you think about what you think—is wrong.’
‘You know, good thing you don’t have to be mad about this on account of we don’t have kids.’
And Soly went quiet. She turned the shower on, hot as could be, it steamed from under the door.
I went back out and saw Diana was cleaning up my mess. I told her she didn’t have to.
‘Your guests are outside,’ she said. ‘I think they’re waiting to say goodbye to the host.’
I went out and apologized to them, saying things like, ‘I hope we enjoyed the show,’ ‘Come back any time,’ ‘For your consideration, folks.’
When they expressed any worry or sentimentality, I said, ‘Consider it done,’ which I knew wasn’t an appropriate response to something like Is she okay? Are you okay? but it was a response with finality. Back inside Diana knocked on the bathroom door, asking Soly if she needed anything.
Soly replied with a flat and polite shout, ‘Just go! I’ll call you!’
Diana quietly surrendered. She came back out and phoned a car service, saying she ought to go back to the hotel, she was flying to Oakland in the morning. I went outside with her to wait for her ride, and I gratefully sparked a smoke. Diana watched me. I offered her one.
‘I quit,’ she said.
‘Soly doesn’t want me smoking in the house. Her dad smoked every day and it was her mom who got cancer, you know.’ I exhaled. ‘Guardian angel wasn’t there for that one.’
‘Jesus,’ Diana said. ‘You’ve made yourself clear.’
I apologized. I asked her why she quit smoking.
‘Tried having a baby, was the thing.’
‘Why?’ I said. ‘In college you never wanted kids.’
‘In college,’ she reiterated.
‘Did you meet someone?’
‘Artificial insemination,’ she said. ‘There were some issues though. I had a miscarriage.’
I told her I was sorry to hear it. ‘You never told us.’
A black sedan turned the corner and came our way.
‘Nestor, this was fifteen years ago,’ she said. ‘Ancient.’
‘Still,’ I said.
She shrugged. ‘To me it was just a confirmation. Motherhood wasn’t in the cards.’
The black sedan pulled up to the curb.
‘That’s rough.’
‘It’s easy,’ she said, ‘you believe what you wanna believe and how you believe it, right?’
I put out my smoke on the sidewalk. I hugged her. I told her I thought she would have made a great mother. We said goodbye and she got inside the car. For a while, the only thing I could see was the dark road ahead of her, lit by the car’s headlights. They made a turn, and they were gone.
I stared back at the house, completely dark save for our bedroom window. I suppose I am getting to my question now. Soly and I are, in present-time, indeed getting divorced. Fifty-six years old and single is not an ideal situation, I will admit, but I still have my work, my patients, my entire practice, with a staff of five that look to me for guidance and support, who depend on the quality of my work, my character, my willingness to remain open-minded and therefore keep my status as a well-learned doctor, and I am not poor, and I do visit Mother and Father’s grave from time to time, and even Carlos’, and lay flowers there, and sometimes weep—yet Soly seems to think my entire life has come out wrong. So wrong, in fact, that it infected her life, her being, quiet as a cancer. I suppose I have to ask: How? Haven’t I accomplished what my parents could only dream of? Haven’t I lived this right? Haven’t I been taught right? Haven’t I done this, any of this, right?