Bacao

From an early age, Bacao had a faint, but curious suspicion that his world was not quite what it should be. Walking down the street, he would peek into minivans and see mothers coddling cell phones and talking into their children. He would see lips sometimes where eyes should be, and eyes at times on the wrong side of a face. He would grab his mother’s hand only to find it wasn’t a hand at all, only a glove in the shape of one. People he passed saw only straight ahead. Look at me, he would think, and he would dance and shout but they wouldn’t look. When he was crossing the street, only then would the cars stop, and when they didn’t his mother cursed them and they would disappear forever. When he returned home, he would sit in the backyard and watch the trees grow, but they never grew. He’d be there all day and into the night, and besides the occasional leaf that was knocked off a branch by a brief gust of wind, nothing really ever changed. The stars never seemed right either. There were too many or too few, and when he counted them, new ones kept appearing and those he had already accounted for were nowhere to be found. Sometimes the sun and the moon would trade places, sometimes they’d melt into each other for a moment, and sometimes they were gone altogether.

When Bacao removed his eyes and went to sleep, he found himself somewhere else entirely. Vast sand dunes would stretch for miles before him, but there was never a sign of a beach. He took big handfuls of sand and let it pass through his fingers, and he dug big holes, but no matter what he did, within a minute or two he found his surroundings looking very much the same as before. It frustrated Bacao to no end, and he would often bury himself in the sand so he would wake up with a gasp. He would fumble in the darkness for his eyes and when they returned to their sockets he would think, what would I do if these were grapes and not eyes? What would my parents say if I lost them? He was sure they would be upset, so he made sure never to lose his eyes.

His parents were good to him. He knew the rules to follow, although no rulebook had ever been provided. When they were loud, he was quiet. When they smiled, he smiled too. When they asked him a question, he never asked a question in return. This was simple. This was easy. This was life, Bacao told himself, although he couldn’t be sure where he had learned the word: LIFE. From a game maybe, or a movie. No one seemed quite sure what it meant, and he knew better than to ask. Bacao was smart like that, for his age at least.

He learned in school that being smart was good, and being dumb was bad. Being good was good, and being bad was bad. But sometimes another student made a joke, and Bacao laughed, and the student who made the joke was bad, so Bacao thought he must be bad too. Teachers adored Bacao. He was quiet, attentive, and raised his hand when he knew the right answer. The kids liked him because he’d let them cut him in the lunch line, to the dismay of those behind him. Sometimes he’d let so many kids cut in front of him that he’d find himself at the very end of the line, but he never minded. He wasn’t so hungry. His parents fed him well. When kids made fun of him, for his goofy haircut or the way he constantly picked his nose, he would laugh, and they would laugh too. It seemed like a good system.

Classes confused him, not for lack of understanding of the subject, but for a simple lack of understanding. He knew two and two made four, but why they made only four and not “fla” or “baloka!” he couldn’t say. He knew how to say all the letters in the alphabet, and how to combine them into useful words like “blue” or “want” or “pasta,” and he could use these words effectively in a combined structure to communicate a meaning, but he never knew what the words really meant, or how anyone else could figure out his meaning from only these combinations of predetermined sounds. But language worked, and when he told his mom he wanted blue pasta, he would have it shortly after. Math worked too, and if he bought two lunches at two dollars a piece, he found it cost four dollars.

Everything seemed to work in this world, if for no other reason than to make sure everything else would keep working. He knew that his parents worked, and that if they didn’t work then the lights in his house wouldn’t work, the refrigerator wouldn’t work, and then the food would run out and after a while his body wouldn’t work. So his parents had to work so that he could work. And he had to work so that one day when he had a little child of his own, he could work to make sure that little child could work.

When things didn’t work, there were structures in place working to get them working again. On every street he saw repair shops: clock repair shops, auto repair shops, home repair shops, clothing repair shops, mind repair shops, body repair shops, eye repair shops. When someone’s eyes didn’t work, they gave them glasses to help them work, and if the glasses worked so did the eyes. His father’s heart didn’t work as well as it should’ve, so the heart repair shop gave his heart a little helper, called a pacemaker, to make the work a little more bearable. Still Bacao worried what would happen if the helper stopped working, but he thought there must be a pacemaker repair shop as well, for just that purpose.

Bacao often wondered what would happen if he stopped working. He thought it might be nice, for a while, to do nothing at all, to lie peacefully on the ground all day and watch the stars disappear and reappear and watch the trees that never grew grow. But he knew eventually he would get hungry, and he would probably get bored, and boredom he knew was the scariest thing of all. In the dreams he had of the sand dunes, it was not the heat of the sun or the sand, nor the brutal sandstorms, nor the wind that scooped him up off his feet that made him bury himself and wake up. It was boredom. Nothing worked in the desert, as far as he could tell, and everything was dead, so as everything changed, everything stayed exactly the same. And yet every night, without his eyes, he returned, and some sand must have started finding its way into his ears.

Bacao was smaller than your average kid, which is usually pretty small to begin with. His mother always told him he would grow to be big and tall, but he knew better. Nothing grew. He had known this for a long time. Even if by some miracle he woke up one day and found he was another inch taller, another foot taller, another mile taller, it wouldn’t be him that was taller. It would be the new Bacao, the tall Bacao, a Bacao that he could never know, and then the small Bacao would stop working and the tall Bacao would merely take his place. This troubled him, so he constantly was looking over his shoulder for the tall Bacao who might appear at any moment. When his mother saw him do this she’d say, “Stop doing that. You look paranoid,” to which he’d reply, “I am paranoid.” He didn’t know what the word meant, but he figured if he looked it, he must be it.

One day when out on a walk with his mother, he looked behind him. “Stop doing that,” she said, but as she turned around herself she saw there was something standing there, just a few steps behind them. It was an old dog, with one eye, dragging a leash. Around his neck was a heart shaped locket. Bacao reached down to pet it, and it was friendly. His mother looked all around, down the street each way, as far as she could. A dog with a leash must have an owner, anyone knew that. But they were all alone on the sidewalk and though she waited, no one came running after it. Bacao named the dog, Dog, because he thought a word was nothing but a name anyway. They took Dog through the neighborhood, but found no one to claim it, so she let Bacao take his new friend back to the house and took the car to go buy him some food.

Bacao and Dog became inseparable. He couldn’t take him to school but he took him everywhere else. Everyone remarked at how sweet Dog was, how good of a pair they made. Bacao began to learn how one pair replaces another, and his paranoia wasn’t as bad when Dog was around. Dog never worked very hard and Bacao liked that. Bacao’s mother was always walking quickly. “It isn’t good exercise otherwise,” she would say. But when Bacao and Dog went for walks together, they walked slowly, so slowly they sometimes stood still, and all the trees and flowers stood still too to admire the boy and his dog, the dog and his boy. They played games together. They’d chase each other with sticks and Bacao would throw balls far away for no reason other than to watch Dog bring them back. They’d fall asleep together curled up on Bacao’s bed and they’d race across the sand dunes and back again, and buried themselves only when they were too exhausted to stand, and they’d wake up together refreshed and laughing.

When Bacao was at school, he wondered what Dog was doing, and Dog wondered the same of Bacao. This was the only way in which they were separated, for a dog cannot understand what it is to be in school, and what a dog does when home on its own is not for any human to know. But the distance only made them more fond of the time they had together, when they were not a boy and a dog but a single unit, a boy and his dog, a dog and his boy.

And then one day, months later, Dog stopped working. This was the greatest shock to Bacao, who had never known anything to change, and had never seen something stop working entirely. He had woken up next to Dog as usual, but Dog’s one eye was nowhere to be found and he didn’t stir when Bacao tickled his tummy, then scratched his ears, and in a desperate attempt grabbed his tail and pulled. Dog had stopped working, his parents told him, and Bacao felt like he might stop working too. His heart felt different, so he asked his father if he could be brought to the heart repair shop, to which his father didn’t know what to say. His head felt empty and slow, like some gears had gotten jammed, so he asked his mother if they could visit a mind repair shop. She offered him a hug, but said she wasn’t sure if the repair shop was necessary. “These things happen,” she said, “We all stop working eventually.” And so at that moment Bacao decided he would never stop working, never ever, because it was the only thing he could think to do.