Pablo is a man of deepest faith. He says so himself, with the solemn eyes and level voice of the true believer. Would-be chucklers find laughter dying in their throats; they cough and shuffle feet, uneasy with his gaze.
Pablo is a strongly built man. Shoulders broad without a need for exercise and a torso like the trunk of a sturdy tree. His top half balances on legs that are admittedly on the short side but compact and finely muscled like a sprinter’s. They narrow from thigh to calf to beautifully shaped feet and give him a look of poised restlessness, as if at any moment, upon the slightest provocation, those legs could propel Pablo anywhere. They are legs made for a spontaneous man, and so they jar with the grounded austerity of his eyes and face; they were legs much better suited for Pablo’s father.
Sergio had a face to match his body. His eyes and mobile mouth always sparked, either with infectious excitement or naked rage. It was the excitement that Pablo saw most often as a small child; later, it was the rage he grew most familiar with and learned to avoid, deflect, or sometimes, simply, to endure.
Because Sergio extorted his limber legs in a daily dash from racetrack to pool hall to casino to liquor-store-lottery-counter that would have made a true sprinter proud, ignoring the limits of his muscles but pushing the limits of his wallet – and then some. Because after a day of euphoric wins, pinpoints of brilliance against the losses crowded into one drab, smothering mass, Sergio skidded to a stop on his doorstep and the sum total of his day’s balance never failed to show on his face. Because as his dollars dwindled and his creditors doubled, tripled, quadrupled with the obstinacy of cancer cells, so Sergio’s initial stock of good humor was depleted as quickly as his bank account.
The boy, Pablo, learned the schoolyard arts of simple arithmetic later than his peers; for years, the only thing keeping him out of special classes was the effort needed to get him into them. But when he finally did master the art at eight, it was with a single-minded concentration that left no string of digits, however long, impenetrable to his steady calculations. A world blossomed before him, colored in black and white, scented by the tang of metal, defined by the strict spine of the 1, the curves of the 9, the airy openness of the 0 billowing out, out, further than cramped rooms could accommodate and dirty windows could show.
He began to mark his father by numbers: sometimes by the ones Sergio spouted himself, in bitter fury or rarer elation, more frequently by those his mother scrounged from coat pockets and crumpled paper wads. Feeling through this imperfect patchwork of digits strung on tenuous guesswork, Pablo added. He subtracted. He divided and multiplied and balanced. Later, when he was able, he calculated percentages and probabilities and statistics. He worked as a store clerk as soon as he looked old enough to play the part and along with the price of lettuce and the weight of dried beans learned to compute profits and losses and net gains and high-risk ventures. He came to understand a truth that stood firm and irrevocable despite all of Sergio’s promises and boasts. Silently, without ever contradicting his father’s easy confidence, Pablo cemented his own belief.
When Sergio finally turned his anger on himself and put a bullet through his head, Pablo was the one to pat his mother’s hands at the funeral even as debt collectors swarmed through their house, flies milling in lazy circles over a fresh corpse.
“Don’t worry Mama. I have faith.”
And Elena, looking up into the placid brown eyes of her son who had shed his last tear at the age of seven, was somehow comforted.
Elena’s faith was of a different type, one accompanied by candles and prayers, hanging from words that rained from the pulpit. She called it luck when she learned that Sergio had been covered by a generous life insurance policy nullifying almost all his old debts; in the thrall of her greatest religious ecstasies, she sang her praises to God’s will and divine intervention. Pablo, who at fourteen had realized that his mentally shaky father was physically as healthy as a bull, had quietly made a low-risk investment. He put himself through night school.
Pablo is an accountant now. His fine mathematician’s brain perches atop the body he inherited from his father and dictates its movements with iron-clad control. His sprinter’s legs are clad in fine silk-wool blend trousers and his shapely feet in imported Italian leather. His broad shoulders, thanks to that same genetic gift, never slouch from exhaustion even when boxed behind his desk long after the streetlights burn.
Pablo is an impressive figure. When he walks through the white-and-chrome lobby of Anderson & Sons, his finely tailored clothes shimmer with something other than the reflected glare of fluorescent lights: threaded through tight 450-per-inch stitches, the supple sheen of success. And yet when heads drawn to his glow look away, something else pulls at the corner of the shifting eye.
Twice a month Pablo cuts through the lobby, shedding gazes like water, with a particular intensity of purpose: he is on his way to the bank. There, shuttered within that vault of a building, it is rather the outside world that feels compressed and closed in by double-thick shatterproof glass, drawn blinds, and mortgage advertisements artfully placed to hide the city streets. The familiar ritual of waiting in line behind velveteen dividers soothes Pablo. The civilized tinkle of classical music and the murmur of transactions slipping through purified, dehumidified, rarified air. A cool impersonal hand meeting his over a signed paycheck. Slow seep of controlled pleasure. Pablo could choose many other methods, most easier than this, to make his deposit, but he enjoys the physicality of direct contact.
And twice a month, steady as clockwork, Pablo also deposits money into Elena’s account. Never has she wanted for anything under his care; her worries disappeared on the day her husband was deposited beneath the ground.
The son is nothing like the good-for-nothing father. Elena repeats this mantra often enough as she strokes Pablo’s clean-shaven face. There is no reason, none at all, that her voice should carry a hint, a smoldering shadowy suggestion, of familiar pity.
Should he ever care to count them, Pablo would invariably organize the stages of his life into neat compartments divided crisply by years, days, hours. 17-42-11 for life under Sergio’s shaky rule. 2-172-14 for work by day, community college by night. 5-183-18 for the Sloan business degree. 11-337-12 at Anderson & Sons (with promotions at 3-20-8, 2-296-16, and 10-0-9). Expecting another one within 0-6-0. Planning to pop the question in 1-29-2. Eye on a vacation home in 6-99 or so.
Pablo is at year-day-hour 38-132-15 of his sum total time when the lamp arrives jumbled amidst cracked paintings, sagging chairs, lopsided vases, silverware, candlesticks, sundry antiques. His eyes sweep and dismiss: the Victorian armchairs valuable once, but their leather upholstery waterstained beyond repair; Persian rugs motheaten through the most delicate threadwork; everything once a treasure now a joke. “Some of these old antiques are great,” the client says, dumping what appears to be the entire contents of her attic before Pablo’s desk, “just something to thank you for your work. I heard you collected things like this.”
Pablo doesn’t collect. He just happens, through a combination of experience, intuition, and the subdued remnants of roaring, ravenous necessity, to attract small windfalls. His senses attuned to something about the potential profit of a rusted motorcycle here, a stalled grandfather clock there. This time, it glimmers from a burnt-orange chunk of metal buried deep in trash. Barely discernable beneath its many welts is the shape of an oil lamp.
There is no master craftsman’s mark on its base. Nothing remarkable about its motley makeup of bronze, copper, and iron. No hidden caches of third-century coins. Completely worthless is the pawnshop’s assessment. “Not even enough space in there to hold much oil,” he sneers.
And yet Pablo keeps it. It sits on his desk, still exuding, beyond all logic, some faint whiff, some gleam, some tingling under-the-fingernails sensation of secret value. He approaches it on intermittent occasions armed variously with a microscope, a magnet, a tome on Middle Eastern art. And, finally, a moistened rag for rubbing.
Dust rises from the lamp for a brief instant and is swallowed in a cloud of blue-grey smoke. A figure wavers inside the thick fog: a viscous jelly-like core beneath a glimmering patina that flickers with restless currents, throwing off the heady scent of wealth. An arm-like appendage unrolls in Pablo’s direction. Slow voice like eroding stone:
“For releasing me from my prison, you may have three wishes.”
Pablo doesn’t drop the lamp. His hands are steady, his suit cool and unstained under the armpits, and his mind already clicking, clicking away: vague recollections of storybooks and movies. Stronger recent memories of articles about hallucination, illusion, and holographic projections. The former brushed away as easily as cobwebs. So Pablo commands,
“Give me proof.”
“Is that your wish?”
“Yes.”
Granite-grey eyes blink, lids transparent as a fish’s lowering. And Pablo believes. Some twist, jerking his mind into the proper alignment, and he believes. He looks at the – he can now call it with certainty – genie with an emotion that verges on anger, runs closer to grudging respect for finding the one conceivable solution around his mathematician’s skepticism, and is almost but not permitted to become full glorious, soaring elation. The genie looks back, unfathomable.
“Two wishes remain.”
Pablo is a changed man, at least outwardly. He can still be found behind his desk long after dark, but those hours are off the clock. A strict nine-to-fiver now, visitors who come bearing reports in their hands and questions on their tongues all find themselves waved away without the effort of a glance. The sting of refusal is tempered by amusement, because Pablo’s attention is turned not to spreadsheets but to children’s books. Magic books. Fairy tales. Bright block-toy colors and watercolor illustrations crowding out mountains of numbers to be crunched, shielding him from the insistent flashes of computer screens. Books – some new, many library-owned and marked with small grubby fingerprints – are piled atop, beside, below the mahogany section director’s desk, whose elaborately carved feet can almost be seen curling in distaste.
Pablo doesn’t register the titters and calls of his amused colleagues. Did Sandra remember your juicebox? Hey, don’t stay up past your bedtime! His concentration is absolute; he is, after all, doing research.
Quickly he tires of the soft, bland, language of children’s books. They paint each tale in fuzzy pastel hues, skittering away from crevices where something sharper and more precise might lurk. So come nights, Pablo migrates to a hulking monstrosity of a city library that holds shelf upon shelf of thicker, leather-bound volumes. There are texts and transcriptions and research notes, and fairy tales stripped down to their rawest forms. He reads:
Stories from Russia. Stories from Japan. Stories from China, South Africa, Mexico, Argentina, Iran. Stories – and he hesitates to call them this, for many are little more than bloodbaths with morals – from the wilds of Eastern Europe: Romania, Latvia, Ukraine. Stories pulled from the depths of a bloody, savage, hungry time; stories in whose naked language and swift, unapologetic rewards for the stupid, the greedy, the timid, the slow, he can taste the woodsmoke of a flickering fire just barely pushing back the dark and forcing bodies into a closer huddle. Stories drawn not in words but in the visceral mingling of breaths and human musk, the painting of cruel amusements to distract from the absurdity of real life. And, in the shadows of the time-long-past that looms from these pages, Pablo crouches away from the rapacious reach an even-more-distant time when every raw, unadorned, uncensored and unforgiving word of the stories was true.
Two months Pablo allows it. His is a familiar strategy played on a different field: two months invested, a period of clemency during which any venture must prove it can turn a profit. And this one, by his calculations, doesn’t. Too many risks. Too many tales – different languages, different places, different tongues – all carrying the same warning. Wishes gone wrong, wishers broken but not quite destroyed – always enough life, enough sanity, enough reason left to comprehend despair. Wish granters smiling with lips ungiving as ancient rock.
On the sixty-first day, Pablo returns what books he can, shelving the others where neither hands nor light will touch them. And gingerly, a little regretfully, with only the tips of his fingers, he shuts the lamp away.
He doesn’t call the genie out to tell it of his decision, and this, alone of all his actions, is satisfying.
Pablo pictures it waiting, folded into innumerable blue-grey layers within the timeless forever of the lamp’s closeted dark. Oh, he doesn’t think the genie lied to him, not at all. But to get what one wishes for and to get what one wants – those, the fairy tales tell him in their muddled stream of languages, are quite different.
Pablo’s faith is absolute. But as the most devout find their beliefs tested, he finds his beliefs stretched thin. And in his way, he numbers them, orders them, wrestles them away to be filed as evidence down the years:
One is skinny and small. A slim portfolio in drab grey-green. Misted at the very top by a fine layer of dust, it looks forlorn, sprinkled with melancholy, as if remembering a glorious past era before the mistakes and before the bad choices, when it had been plump and healthy with rising stocks. Hendriksen had called this morning in the ragged grey interlude between night and dawn; Pablo, rolling over for the phone, had glanced at the clock: 4:21. Hendriksen’s torrent of abuse had been slightly dampened by the tinny ring of the international call and the groggy hour, so all that Pablo can remember now is a few snatches of complaint and the ringing final slap: Close my fucking account. And you can be sure I’m warning my buddies off doing business with you, Mister Soto (Pablo closing his eyes against the acid sarcasm of those syllables, this hate so fresh and so old), you and your hive of cold tight-assed money sucking leeches.
Four hours and nine minutes later, Pablo is working from home this Saturday morning and grimly counting up losses. His desk rests three feet away from the one locked cabinet that even Sandra isn’t allowed into. She thinks it holds old oil paintings that can’t be exposed to light; he can picture perfectly the bronzed lines behind wood. He shakes his head, imagines instead:
A million dollars in small change flattening the house. A gift of gold bars appearing not out of insubstantial air, but from a bank vault. An unwelcome visit from the dark-suited, grim-faced men of the SEC – a sudden spike in his stocks so lucky that it requires federal intervention. A different type of visit in the dark of night from desperate hopefuls. Oh, he remembers, memories of tales polished and sharpened by his own hard-earned experience: heroes blindsided by wealth, drunk on the heady taste of luck, and the dull fool’s gold of unearned gains.
He picks up the phone and begins selling.
Two is twisted. Wooden beams plucked and metal molded in fanciful spun-sugar shapes. The house, a low-slung modern two-story of sharp glass and metal edges set so primly within its lines, is distorted almost beyond recognition. Pablo sees in its ruined framework the culmination of years of savings, of overtime hours and extra accounts. More than ten years in the dreaming and getting, it lasted for only 8-322-7. His eyes sting from more than the tropical air, still stirring in uneasy gusts around him. They water with the remembered ache of too many hours and too much small print. He thinks, if only –
Sandra’s voice is weary, but she’s saying all the same, “Well, I guess we should get started. I’ll call up the plumber and electrician – you still have that architect’s card, right?” Pablo smiles at her and says yes.
Three is petty. Lactose intolerance hits him, and at 46-18-7 Pablo finds it hard to change his habits. Yogurt with his cereal in the mornings. Ice cream every Saturday with one eye always on Ellen’s sticky little mouth, one hand to wipe her dripping. Milk to wash down Sandra’s chocolate ganache tart. Pablo swallows hard and keeps a bottle of pills in his briefcase.
Four is the dead puppy they scrape off the street, buried nameless because Ellen had waited months in her quest for the perfect name, was planning to wait months more. Pablo bends down to his daughter’s level, rubs tears and not metal, and talks about doggy heaven. Five is a deal gone to pieces from one missed flight. Six is luggage stolen after a minute’s inattention during a family vacation to France. Seven is the wrenched shoulder that will always ache on rainy days. By eight, Pablo has stopped counting. By eight, the lamp’s luster is fading; he can’t quite remember how the handle looked, what was engraved into the spout, the bone-jarring solidity of the genie’s voice. He no longer needs to remind himself of calamities because he hardly thinks of wishes at all. By eight, Pablo’s beliefs are more solid than bronze. By eight, he thinks his tests are over.
But eight, eight is different. Eight is pancreatic cancer that shows up on Sandra’s scan as a small dark blight. Because he knows the numbers, Pablo has always insisted upon regular checkups for everyone. Because he knows the numbers, he knows that this disease has bitten deep and fast, sunk too far to let go. The doctor’s words only echo what Pablo knows; he tunes out their drone and scrambles to compile a list of what to know:
Survival rates for cancer. Survival rates in American hospitals. Survival rates for women in the 40-to-50 age group. Effectiveness of chemotherapy treatments combined with surgery. Likelihood of psychological problems among children from single parent homes – no, no, no. His mind whirling, casting too wide a net. Useless information slipping through the holes. Chances of remission if invasive surgery is performed: eight. One in eight? Eight is twice four, four is always bad luck in ancient Chinese fairy tales. His precision unraveling. One number alone holds steady in the maelstrom of his head, and it repeats over and over: 55-259-17. 55-259-17. At 55-259-17 Pablo has entertained wispy thoughts of seeing Elena go, but always a peaceful passage in the night, always in old age and in good time. The idea no more than a glimmer in the distance so far away that it warmed like a spark. But 55-259-17 – 55-259-17 is far too soon for Pablo to consider this.
For only the second time since Pablo began working, he cuts back. Mornings, he takes Sandra to the hospital for her treatments and Ellen to school. Afternoons, he clocks in a few scribbled hours, performs pick-up duty. Evenings, he cooks, cleans, entertains. And nights, late at night when the rest of the house is asleep, he goes back to the library. Pablo is meticulous, precise; his greatest quality, his first supervisor told him, was that his brain was built like a calculator. But this time, this one time, Pablo double checks. He triple checks. He scours the books for something, anything, any scrap of a story that might raise the chances of success by a few precious percentage points.
The numbers, though, are stern and immutable as stone. They are the same that had cemented his doubts all those years ago. The statistics of false hopes and horrible healings freeze his fingers on the cabinet key. He pins his hopes on modern technology instead, on the exacting combination of treatments and bedrest and operations and therapies and pills that yield the highest number.
So when the day of Sandra’s funeral comes, Pablo grieves deeply, inconsolably for the only woman he will ever love. That evening, he bundles Ellen away beside him in the empty half of the bed, kisses her forehead, dries her tears and thanks the darkness for masking his own. In the dead of that night, he retucks sheets tenderly over her splayed limbs, stretches his own –
– and begins to plan ahead. Because the sadness is pounding at his temples with an insistence that will birth the rivulets of many wrinkles, but there is Ellen’s future to consider and to work towards with the tireless perseverance that has always been his specialty. Pablo moves forward, sure and steady, grief tempered by the clarity of his thoughts. Because for Sandra, he is one hundred percent certain, nothing else could have been done.
Nine. Ten. Eleven twelve thirteen fourteen. So fleeting are the moments of temptation that they pass by unmarked. Pablo has his hands full working his 9-to-5 week, spending time with Ellen, making sure that she will beat the odds and succeed like he succeeded. So fifteen is a slap in the face.
Fifteen is a joint. Or maybe fifteen is a bottle, a secondhand Honda, a sweat-slicked hand, a bad friend, a class skipped, a bend missed, a squirrel or rabbit or deer bounding across the road. Truth be told, fifteen is many, many things cross-linked and counter-tied across years, a tangled skein of statistics that makes the mathematician’s neurons fizz with joy. Of course the paramedics who pull the bodies out through crumpled car doors don’t see it that way, nor does the ER doctor on call at 2:37 am who notes Ellen’s dilated pupils, her breath mixed sweet and sour from smoke and beer. Pablo would have tackled the knotty problem, would have explained, but his mind cannot catch up because he is running, running, running. On slim, straight, athlete’s legs that almost – magically – shed the aches and pains of 63-101-4, carry him to his car, to his office, to his cabinet. He cradles the dulled bronze lamp that fills his vision and permits no room for images of zombies, nzambi, jumbie, yurei, the ghosts of possible mistakes. There is only this lamp, this instant, this sentence:
“I wish that Ellen were alive.”
Just like the first time, there is no movement or mystical incantation. Only a blink. Pablo’s heart unclenches, his mouth already full of thanks, when the genie shakes its head.
“It cannot be done.”
Pablo is staring; his neck seems frozen, fingers too; the lamp is falling, he hears it clang, sees the smoke dissipate, cannot seem to look down, but does hear the genie’s final words:
“One wish.”
The house is empty. Pablo sits down in his office. Pulls out pens, paper, calculator, turns on his computer. And with endless stretches of time rolling out before him (take some time, they had said, and his mouth had tasted too full of copper to say that the only thing he didn’t want was time, time, more time), he tackles the problem. What if. What if. The statistician’s favorite words. What if Sandra hadn’t died. Children from households with two parents perform better in school. What if. Students with test scores in the upper tenth percentile are more likely to enter top-tier institutions. What if. Children whose parents regularly talk to them about drugs and alcohol are less likely to engage in substance abuse. What if. Accidents are much more likely among young drivers with more than three people in the vehicle.
WHAT IF,
his mind screams, and this is a problem that follows him home from work, that does not end when he’s off the clock. WHAT IF is a dull rattling roar that accompanies him everywhere and presses against his skin, bones, teeth, brain, squeezing him empty of all else.
It cannot be done, the genie had said, but what could have been? If Pablo had wished sooner, better, riskier? Wished a room for Ellen in that apartment complex with a pool, so that she wouldn’t have been driving to the beach at two in the morning. Wished the whole damn complex for her and her friends so no one would have had to drive. Wished an acceptance letter from Ellen’s first-choice college so that she would have made better, smarter friends. Wished a higher alcohol tolerance so that she wouldn’t have been the lightweight that he always was. Wished – and his mind reels with the enormity of it all, the writhing mass of possibilities, the world unfolding again in the way that it had when he was eight, but this time the sprawl is reeling and jumbled and unthinkably unknowable – Sandra instantly healed after the first appointment; his lactose intolerance cured and more precious ice cream trip hours to tell Ellen’s chocolate-smeared face everything important about life; that vacation home repaired so they three could have moved to Florida, sunny and balmy and bicycle-sprinkled and safe. Or maybe just a fix-all, a wish over Ellen’s cradle as she slept there, so pink and wrinkled and new when he became a father at 40-40-8 – how had he not noticed before the unfortunate alignment of those numbers? He should have uttered a blessing like those in fairy tales of old, I wish for Ellen luck, intelligence, beauty, wisdom, charm, grace, and a long and happy life.
Pablo’s faith crumbles. Numbers collapsing in their orderly arrangements because the only numbers that he can work with, the only ones that still crowd his head – are these: One. Two. Three. Four. Fivesixseven. Eight. Fifteen. He can’t work. Can’t sleep. And so, for the last time, he rubs the lamp.
“I wish – ” he portions his words out slowly, wanting each one to be just right, “ – for my faith in the world back. No doubts, no dreams. I just want to believe.”
“Your wish is my command,” the genie says. And then it blinks –
After the death of his only daughter, Pablo leaves the house that is now too big for just one. As methodical as always, he moves from room to room, cleaning and sorting. When he reaches his office, he empties most of his desk. He makes a mental note to come back for the paperwork on the shelves. He dumps the contents of the smaller trashcan into the larger one. He reaches a locked cabinet and frowns. He doesn’t remember what’s stored inside, but there is a key in his wallet that fits the lock.
He opens it. Its hinges creak, unfamiliar with use. Pablo’s fingers start to tingle in that old way – but what he finds inside is nothing but a battered, dusty lamp.
“Piece of junk,” he mutters. He tosses it in the trash and moves on.
Pablo is active long into old age, thanks to his healthy constitution. After retirement, he takes up running for a few weeks until his knees, unused to the exertion, complain. After the doctor reads off figures for joint degeneration and surgical complication rates among the elderly, Pablo quits. Instead, he spends his free time teaching a free course at the community center. It’s about statistics, calculations, risks, and how to apply math to real life. People sign up because Pablo is a success story, a man who rose from poverty to become a respected member of the upper-middle class elite. They expect it to be useful, which it is. They expect it to be fun, which it isn’t. Pablo at the podium never cracks a smile. His eyes smolder beneath white bushy brows. His students joke, call him “The Pastor” for the fiery lectures he delivers, his eyes gleaming, his face alight, thundering out each word – gripped, as it were, in the unshakable thrall of a private, inviolate faith.