Carlos

My hand trembled, revolting against me, as I took the phone in my hand. My eyes first commanded my gaze towards the sackcloth bag I had kept under my bed for decades, then to the black pocket notebook on my night table. The book’s cover was worn and wearied, the scratches and ridges on its face like those on my own. I suppose seventy years is always long, but it had been a long seventy years since I had first taken pen to those pages. Yet the first page was still empty except for the nine digits that had already been there on the day the book entered my life. I never wrote on that first page, though all the other pages of the book overflowed with redacted memories, each painful or joyous moment asking the same question, just not in words: do I call now?

I dialed the number slowly. This would be the only time I would ever press that combination of digits and expect to hear a voice on the other side. I was still surprised when the promise I had held for seventy years was fulfilled and I heard a voice on the other line softly, sonorously say:

“Hello, Carlos. How can I help you?”

My voice cracked even though I had practiced this conversation in many years’ worth of dreams.

“I’m sorry…I’ve had this number for so long, I never used it. I was calling…but I guess it’s a silly request because I can’t possibly describe everything to you, but…I didn’t want it to go to waste.”

“Why don’t you tell me how you came by it?”

How? I must have stumbled over my words at first because I was stumbling over my memories. At ninety-four, life seems to stretch out like an impressionist’s painting, a van Gogh; it makes perfect sense when standing far away, but when I try to peer at it closely and pick out the individual memories, I get lost in all the colors. Yet, as I spoke, the confusion passed away, and I felt myself sinking into the waters of the years until I was no longer speaking as an old man reliving his past but as a young one living his present.

I had gone to play basketball with my friends, not because I enjoyed the game (walking to the schoolyard of PS 411 “Elmer Bernstein” in the fifties to shoot a ball with no air through hoops with no net was not my favorite pastime) but because these were the moments when we shared our dreams. Some of those dreams yet unfulfilled would be our dying breaths. To know that of a brother was to know a part of his soul.

When the game ended, I lingered on, resting on a bench and breathing in the autumn air. It was city air, to be sure, but on a brisk day, the wind still had the scent of nature in it. Then I heard the kids.

They were banging away at a Cadillac parked in front of an apartment complex across the street, kicking at it, taking out their amusement and frustration on it. They could not have been more than twelve, but they had rebellion in them already. I recognized myself a decade earlier. I might have left them to it, tired as I was—but it was still somebody’s car.

In those days, I thought myself a good man and dreamed of being a better one—an engineer. To see them destroy that car would have violated both thoughts, so I shooed them off, took their evil eyes and stuck out tongues and laughed.

“Hey, you!”

Now I groaned. So it was going to be one of those days.

A pale man in a suit with glasses, his hair blonde but tousled, his eyes bluer than the sky, ran up to me, waving his right hand wildly. Under his left arm was a manila package, thick with something in it that I was sure he would have said was none of my business.

“What are you doing to my car?”

I had heard that line before.

“Don’t you assume anything,” I said, jaded. “Your car would be trash right now if I hadn’t chased those kids away.”

The man stopped right in front of me and adjusted his glasses. A slight red flush came over his cheeks.

“I shouldn’t have said that,” he said. “What’s your name?”

“I’m not giving you my name,” I replied, ready to turn around.

“No, no, please,” he said, and his tone stopped me. It was more desperate than angry.

“Carlos,” I said.

“Carlos,” he repeated, fiddling with those glasses again. “I believe you.”

I found that hard to believe but believed it anyway.

“Thank you,” he continued. “I…I came here to give this to someone, but I was too late.”

“They left?”

“She died,” he replied. He glanced at the package in his arm. “I wonder…” he muttered. Then he looked up at me, reached into his pocket, and took out a black notebook. With his left hand, he offered me the package he had been carrying.

“This is a gift,” he said. “There are twenty thousand dollars in here.”

I made as if to back away. I wanted nothing to do with drug money. He must have suspected my fears, however, for he shook his head.

“The money was given to me to pass on to a woman of great kindness,” he said. “She saved many a little boy from going astray in this neighborhood—a little Dutch boy among them.” He chuckled. Then he offered me the notebook in his right hand.

“On the first page is a phone number,” he said. “If you dial it, what you ask will be given to you.”

My mind screamed at me that all of this was fishy as hell. But after I had blinked, I saw that I had already taken both without realizing it.

He added, “You can use the money or the call, but not both. If you use the money, then no one will answer the call. There’s nothing wrong with using the money. God knows many have. But I think the call is better. You can only call once, but believe me, I think it’s better.”

My next memory is being in my room with the package and opening the pocket notebook for the first time. In my memories, its cover was as worn that day as it would be seventy years later, even though I know that to be impossible. It was as though the talk with the man had been a dream, except that the package and the notebook had come out of the dream with me back into reality. I hardly needed to open the manila package. I believed him that there were twenty thousand dollars in there. I would count it many times, years later.

For a long time, I knew that I would use the money and not the call. The call might have been a trick, or the number disconnected, and what could any stranger on the other end of the line give me over the phone that would be worth more than twenty thousand dollars? I almost used the money to buy a new home for my folks right then, to get us out of that crappy sixth story apartment, to give us a new life. But my papacito got a new job and we didn’t need to use it. I almost used it to pay my way through grad school, but I worked my way instead.

I almost used it when I married Clara to pay for our honeymoon. I almost used it to put a down payment on our first home. I almost used it when our first son was born and I feared to God that I could not possibly make enough to provide for him, and when our second was born, and our third, and our fourth. I almost used it when I lost my job for the first time, and the second, and the third. I almost used it when I realized that I wanted to teach and that teaching engineering would never make me as much as becoming an engineer, but Clara talked me out of it.

I almost used it a thousand times, but always there was the thought of the call.

I almost made the call when my papacito died and I wept for ten days. I almost made it when I thought no university in the country would ever hire me. I almost made it when Clara turned me down the first time I asked her to be wife, and I almost made it when she accepted me the second time. On our wedding night, I had the phone in my hand to make the call but I didn’t. I almost made the call when I found out I was going to be father and I feared I would never be as good as my papacito had been. I almost made the call when we lost our first son at ten years old and I wept for decades. I almost made the call when they offered me a chaired professorship and when they named that chair after me on my retirement. I almost made the call when my second son won his scholarship, or when my third said he wanted to be a teacher, too, or when the fourth said he wanted to be an artist because that’s what my papacito had loved and never got a chance to do. I almost made it when the church I had been to every Sunday as a child went up in flames. I almost made it when I had been married to Clara for fifty years. I almost made it when she was diagnosed with cancer a year later. I almost made it every day for ten years. I almost made it the day she came home cancer-free and I wanted to shout my thanks to everyone from the doctors to God through that telephone number. I almost made it last year when I became a widower at ninety-three.

But somehow I never did. Sometimes we worked and the money came. Sometimes the neighbors showed up and we ate. Sometimes we cried and laughed and the day passed. Sometimes a thousand other Latinos showed up and rebuilt the church. Sometimes the doctors came through. Sometimes we prayed. Sometimes we talked until we missed the setting and the rising of the sun and there had been no night at all. Sometimes we suffered and that was that.

Now there were no sometimes left.

“I didn’t want it to go to waste,” I repeated. I had finished talking.

“It won’t be wasted. Ask.”

My heart was tight like an overwound watch.

“That’s just it,” I said. “I’m ninety-four and I know I don’t have much time left. Life was good. But I…I wanted to know if there was anything I'd forgotten—to do, or say, or love, to use the money, to call before now, or anything. I just want to make sure I haven't forgotten anything. I know that isn't what this is for, but—”

“You haven’t forgotten anything.”

I let out a deep breath. The sweat on my hands seemed to evaporate in a moment. It was like my soul had taken a deep drink of refreshing lemonade on a sweltering day.

“Thank you,” I said. “Who should I pass on the money to?”

“You’ll know. It was for you to know you never needed it.”

“Do I pass the notebook on, then?” I asked.

“Of course.”

I thought back to the man with the glasses whose face eluded me now, like the details in a life long gone or a dream awakened from.

“Why?” I asked. “Why did it come to me at all?”

“So that you would make this call.”