The surprise rain roared on the roof of his mother’s tiny red Metropolitan. Eneas, from the backseat, saw her leaning forward. Her determined chin was over the steering wheel as she strained to see through the thick, rushing, brackish water that overwhelmed the windshield wipers and sealed the car off from the world. Horns blared, but it was impossible to tell if from behind, alongside, or ahead. She drove slowly, jerkily, tapping the brakes and the horn, bracing for impact at any moment. “Santa Maria, Madre de Dios,” his grandmother, sitting next to her, prayed.
The stop and go movements made Eneas want to throw up the spaghetti and spumoni he had just eaten. His mother had treated them to dinner at Leonie’s in Langley Park, Maryland; it was the first time they’d dined out since his father’s disappearance two months ago. Or was it what his mother had said at the restaurant that sickened him? At the end of the meal, she’d announced that she was selling their small brick house on Hannon Street. They would be moving, she said, to a rental complex in Greenbelt, at least until things improved. Without Eneas’s father, a salesman for Fostoria Glassware, they’d have to survive on her meager salary as a salesgirl at Lansburgh’s department store.
“But if we move,” Eneas protested, “how will daddy know where to find us when he comes back?” His mother and grandmother looked at each other, then at him, in silence.
Eneas did not know where his father had gone—in the first week, he had heard them whispering incomprehensible things to each other— “another woman,” “the secretary.” Yet he was sure his dad would return for him, his dad, who always called him, in English, his “best buddy.”
Eneas lay down now sideways on the backseat. He drew his knees in to his chest, crossed his arms, and shut his eyes tight, inhaling the chemical smell of the houndstooth upholstery, which somehow steadied the upset in his tummy. He could no longer tell where they were, how near or far from home. He imagined that they were in a submarine in deep, uncharted seas.
“This is S.S.R.N. Seaview to Dad,” he murmured, as if into a hidden microphone. “Commander Eneas speaking. Please help! We are lost!” Despite the danger, Eneas felt protected and cozy inside the car that was inside the rain that was inside the night that was inside God’s closed fist…
Abruptly, the raging rain diminished, the drumming on the roof perceptibly lighter. Eneas’s heart sank: he wanted the angrier, wilder rain; he wanted an accident, a catastrophe, a flood, a monstrous, deep-sea creature with tentacles—anything to disrupt his mother’s plans.
“Finally!” his mother said as she turned onto Hannon Street. Eneas sat up and saw that her knuckles were white. His grandmother sighed with relief. “Sí, Gracias a Dios!”
Eneas squinted through the quivering, ever-shifting amoebas of rainwater on the windowpane. Their house looked dead in the night, its windows sunken and black. Eneas wondered: Could the house have somehow overheard his mother? Is that what killed it? I am the house, Eneas thought, letting his mouth fall open, slack—that was the door. He rolled his eyeballs upward and back, like dead people he’d seen on TV—those were the windows….
“Don’t make a face!” his mother, who saw him in her rearview mirror, warned. “It’ll get stuck that way forever.”
As they slowed to turn into the driveway, his grandmother spotted a person emerging from the shadowy porch.
“Un hombre!” she gasped.
The headlights revealed a man, standing on their front steps, next to the glistening railing, in a tan raincoat, the collar up, and a drenched slouch hat. Water ran down from the rim of the hat as if from a gutter. In the headlights, the raindrops pelting his hat and shoulders coalesced, outlining him in a silvery aura.
Blinded by the headlights, the man stooped, covering his face with his right arm. Eneas thought he might be crying and trying to hide it. His father had always told him never to let anyone see him cry. The man, still shielding his face, waved with his left hand, perhaps signaling for help. Though he was tall, the man seemed to Eneas somehow broken, defeated. And that raincoat, just like his father’s—
“It’s Daddy!” Eneas shouted.
His grandmother shushed him.
His mother threw the car into reverse and pulled out of the driveway, accelerating up the street with a screech of tires.
“Mamá, stop! Es Papá, he’s come back!”
At Chapman Road she braked and turned in her seat to look at Eneas.
“It isn’t your father, Eneas,” she said, breathing heavily. “That man is much taller.”
Eneas felt a rising panic: It had to be Daddy, come back to make sure they wouldn’t move away.
The next block down, his mother pulled up in front of the Williams’s house to ask to use their telephone. She held her flat purse horizontally over her head and hurried through the rain to their door. The Williams were an older couple. Eneas hated visiting them. They had no little boy to play with and offered him ice-blue candies that numbed his tongue and made it even harder to speak English. His father once gifted the Williamses a pair of delicate Fostoria Trojan-pattern wineglasses in topaz and rose, yet Eneas could tell, his dad didn’t really like the couple, either. Mr. Williams, holding up one of the wineglasses, had said laughingly how he and his wife had worried when they first heard that Cubans were moving to the neighborhood because they had thought that all Cubans were kneegrows. Eneas wasn’t sure what they were talking about, but, though his father had kept smiling, he’d narrowed his eyes at Mr. Williams, like a cowboy on TV about to throw a punch.
His mother returned and they drove back to the house, where a Ford Fairlane police car, like the one Eneas knew from The Andy Griffiths Show, was already waiting, beacon flashing red and blue in the rain. The two policemen who walked up to the Metropolitan wore transparent shower caps fitted over their peaked service caps, and rubber ponchos over their utility belts, which made their bellies look distended. His mother rolled down her window and spoke to them, pointing toward the house. They moved round toward the backyard shining long, black, metal flashlights, revolvers drawn. His mother rolled the window back up, tight.
“Mamá, tell them not to shoot Daddy!”
“Basta!” his grandmother said harshly, the stink of her dentures filling the sealed car. It was the same dreadful voice she used when she scolded him for playing with matches or leaving his Tim-Mee Toy soldiers scattered across the living room carpet. In revenge, he would hide from her, most often in the basement, in the warm narrow space between the furnace and the wall, among the pill bugs and spiders. To remain silent in that snug covert while she called out his name exasperatedly made him so excited, gave him such a feeling of power, that he would defecate into his underwear. Of course! His father must be hiding there now, in that very same spot.
Finding no-one in the backyard, the officers asked to search the inside of the house. Eneas followed them as they looked through every room, even the bathroom. On a glass shelf in the bathroom stood the little frosted crystal bottle with the round cap—his father’s lemony cologne. His father called it “Ger-lane” and had often said that no true Cuban man would ever wear any other scent. Since his father’s disappearance, Eneas had often climbed onto the sink and carefully, timorously, brought down the bottle to inhale his father’s smell. It made his father’s whole body reappear before him, but always, before Eneas could embrace him, he would vanish into empty air.
They went down the stairs to the basement, where there were moldy stacks of the Fostoria company magazine, Creating with Crystal; dozens of open boxes full of damaged Fostoria epergnes and salt-cellars; and, in a corner, gathering dust, his father’s tumbadora. Pyrographed into the drum’s dark brown wooden staves were crisscross patterns suggesting African spears. His mother and grandmother were embarrassed by it, and Eneas could not understand why—he found its rhythms spellbinding and couldn’t wait for his father to teach him how to play. “When you grow a little taller,” his dad had promised. Mabimba, mabomba, mabomba y bombó! his father would chant as he drummed. A niña Tomasa le baja el Changó!
“Look at all this junk,” one of the policemen said to the other, whistling.
They checked the door, which led out to the backyard; it was securely locked. Eneas did not show them the cavity between the wall and the furnace. He was certain that his father was hiding there, dripping with rain. Eneas resisted the urge to look himself, so as not to draw the policemen’s attention. Just stay quiet, Daddy! Eneas prayed within himself. I’ll come back after they’re gone. I’ll carry you piggyback up to the kitchen and feed you hot dogs and Pop Tarts. “I think we should check for fingerprints,” Eneas said, as a diversionary tactic, parroting what he’d heard on Dragnet. Both cops laughed.
Upstairs, they checked the attic, which could only be accessed through a folding ladder in the linen closet. There, in the attic, where his mother had tossed it, now stiff and covered in dust, lay the black drawstring sack in which the family had brought a few basic possessions into exile, including the bottle of “Ger-Lane,” the last one on sale, his father had said, at Casa “Ger-lane” on Paseo del Prado, before the comunistas shut it down. Eneas could not remember the family’s departure: his parents described a hot, crowded, tearful airport; a mob taunting them with cries of gusanos; and swaggering, fat-assed militiamen in green fatigues repeatedly checking their travel permits, as if still hoping to find some technicality to keep them from boarding the plane. Though his parents assured Eneas that he’d been there with them, a mere baby, he refused to believe it—he had been born in this house. Life began in his room, in this country, the greatest in the whole world. He was afraid of that ominous sack, as if its puckered, crinkled mouth could suck him back to Cuba.
The policemen left puddles and muddy boot prints everywhere. “Nothing, ladies,” one of them said. “Probably just a bum. Or a guy asking for directions—it’s easy to get lost out there in this rain. We’ll patrol the area. Make sure you keep all the doors and windows locked. You sure it was a white male, not a kneegrow? Those people have been causing a lot of trouble across the border in DC.” The policeman tousled Eneas’s hair. “Junior here’s gonna make a swell detective someday.”
As soon as they left, Eneas ran down to the basement.
“Daddy! Papá! Papa Frita! You can come out now! They’re gone! Daddy? Daddy!”
He stared at the empty space in disbelief.
His mother found Eneas, crouched, folded into himself, eyes shut furiously tight, in the narrow nook. From his hair she brushed away cobwebs that made him look like a tiny old man. She carried him upstairs.
That night, his mother and grandmother, still haunted by the man in the rain, did not want to sleep alone in their rooms, nor let Eneas out of their sight. They chose to sleep sitting up, bunched together, under blankets, on the living room sofa, Eneas snug in the middle.
“Who do you think he was, hija?” his grandmother asked. “Should we have helped? After all, the American monjas helped us when we came…”
“We couldn’t take any chances,” his mother said, “two women, alone in the night, with a child. And you know men.”
His grandmother started at every popping floorboard and the occasional shuddering of their old Kenmore refrigerator.
“Este pais frightens me,” Eneas heard her whisper, her breath acrid. “So many criminals, the blacks about to riot, the winters long and dark and cold. I should have stayed in Cuba.”
“Don’t say that. Not in front of the boy,” his mother pleaded. “I want him to grow up to be un buen Americano. He’s our future. Everything depends on him. Now try to sleep. We start packing tomorrow.”
Everything depended on him… How strangely guilty his mother’s words made Eneas feel. He sank under their weight into an exhausted sleep. At some point in the night he woke—or thought he did—and saw, blurry as if through gauze, a man in a hat and raincoat waving at him from outside the living room window. Eneas tried to speak but could move neither his lips nor his limbs. He wanted to rise and tiptoe to the door to let the man in, but he fell irresistibly back into oblivion.
Eneas was always relieved to be safe inside the prison-like apartment, behind the bolted door. In the hallways, he was often beaten up as he returned from school, both by black boys who considered him white, and by white boys who called him a spic. Eneas would simply fall to his knees and absorb the blows. His father had left before teaching him how to fight.
He no longer had his own room but slept on a folding cot outside the kitchen. His grandmother cobbled cheap meals for them, quimbombó, mondongo, yuca y ñame, food hat they had never been poor enough to have to eat in Cuba, until she died of a combination of cervical cancer, homesickness, and fear. She’d been convinced, to her last breath, that she had made a terrible mistake in leaving Cuba. As disconcerting as were the reports that came with each new wave of exiles—executions, starvation, political prisons—she’d say: “I could have lived happily just lying on a sunny bench beside the Malecón. The comunistas wouldn’t have bothered about me.”
Despite their immiseration, his mother bought Eneas one good suit and his own bottle of Guerlain Imperiale; his father’s had shattered during the move. She would douse his white pocket square with the cologne, teaching him to be a caballero. Some Saturdays she took him into the District of Columbia, where they visited the free museums and shared a club sandwich at the luncheon counter of the G.C. Murphy on F Street. How elegant and beautiful his mother looked amid the softly glowing streetlights and classical facades of the city. Eventually, she rose to become manager of an entire Lansburgh’s branch, then of an even more exclusive Woodward & Lothrop’s, and was able to send Eneas to college.
Through the years, as he grew into a tall, not unattractive man, Eneas would often ask his mother about the man in the rain, el hombre en la lluvia.
“He might have been a criminal,” she’d answer, “or Christ himself in disguise.”
“Are you sure it wasn’t dad?”
“I’ve told you a thousand times! No.”
Eneas did not know whom to blame. Perhaps his father had perceived an essential weakness and cowardice in him that had made him disown him. At other times, Eneas blamed his mother’s strong will for frightening his father away. Despite Eneas’s love and gratitude for his mother, a small, dark, secret patch of him resented her, leaving him full of remorse when, in his mid-twenties, she died of a botched heart ablation. The hospital had not even been able to summon a Catholic priest in time. Despite her blind faith in the superiority of American doctors, the surgeon had perforated one of her arteries accidentally, flooding her lungs and kidneys with blood. The surgeon, his mask pushed up to his forehead, tried to explain her death to the shocked and speechless Eneas: “When it comes to blood, kidneys are like greedy hogs.”
Slowly, fitfully, Eneas recovered, enough to secure, in his late 20’s, a job at Trencherman-Bowles & Hooks, a large Manhattan investment firm, where he administered Myers-Briggs personality tests to potential hires. He had taken the test himself and had known how to appear a good solid ESTJ rather than the INFP he knew he was. ESTJ was what he believed a true American should be, positive and outgoing, whereas his Latin side was pure emotion, inwardness, and irrationality, something to be kept hidden.
At Trencherman, he met Joyce, a sensible blonde who worked in the Public Relations department, and convinced her to marry him. If only his mother had been alive to witness it! How happy she would have been that he had integrated, won the hand of an American woman! Cuba, at last, could be forgotten. But Joyce wanted children badly, and she submitted Eneas to night after night of forced, grinding, copulation. After repeated tests, the doctors found nothing wrong with her, but one look at Eneas’s swollen, purplish, asymmetrical testicles, and the diagnosis was immediate: “Varicocele. Often a sign of sterility.”
After his divorce, Eneas moved to Elizabeth, New Jersey, hoping that the town’s legendary Cuban community could help him heal by restoring his roots. The only apartment he could afford in the wake of his divorce settlement was an efficiency in an old gloomy building that smelled of rotting linoleum and methane. His decrepit stove leaked small amounts of gas, which forced him to leave the kitchen window cracked open even in the dead of winter. On one of the walls hung the outer shell of a disconnected Northern Electric door intercom from the 1920’s. It was a vertical oval with a large round mouth-piece and two buttons like a pair of eyes. It resembled a narrow, long-chinned African mask painted over in white. Sometimes it seemed to Eneas to be staring at him inscrutably. He tried to remove it once, but it was bolted permanently to the wall.
Eneas soon discovered that most of the Cubans, having prospered, had moved back south to Florida, to the tropic warmth and to that tantalizing proximity to the homeland they could never return to, a mere 90 miles away. The many bakeries they had opened in the 1960’s had been sold and now catered to the tastes of newer immigrants. Eneas could not find the simplest croqueta. The Spanish that he heard on his walk to the train every morning had Colombian, Dominican, and Salvadoran inflections.
And so Eneas was elated when at last he met a Cuban-American woman from nearby Union. Niurka was in her late thirties and studying for her GED at a storefront learning center. She was the opposite of the clean and efficient Joyce: indolent and unkempt, Niurka rarely changed her faded jeans or brushed her wild black hair. She reeked of Marlboros, of soiled panties, and of a corticosteroid ointment that she applied to her face against eczema flare-ups. Sometimes the ointment gave her face a mask-like look. At first, Eneas would apply a few drops of Guerlain Imperiale under his nostrils to cover up her odors, but she complained that the cologne triggered her eczema, and when they made love for the first time, he found that her gamey smell aroused him.
Niurka spoke, at best, a broken Spanish, and had no curiosity whatsoever about her Cuban origins, but Eneas liked to lie in bed with her on dark, rainy nights, comforted by her musky warmth. They were safe inside a room that was inside the rain that was inside the night that was inside God’s closed fist…
While Niurka slept, Eneas would sometimes wonder about his father, a sandy-haired man who wore French cologne and sold American glassware but lived to that inner Yoruban rhythm. Eneas had tried several times to locate him, once even employing a detective, but apart from a faint, dubious trace of him in Hornell, New York, it was as if his dad had vanished completely from the face of the earth, or, worse, as if he had never even existed, and Eneas had only dreamed him up. Sometimes he was certain that the man in the rain had been his father. His mother should have stopped…
One night, Eneas imagined that his small, cozy bed was a vessel taking him and Niurka back to Langley Park, which lay further away from Elizabeth in actual miles than Cuba from Florida. Perhaps he could start afresh. “I could try to buy back our old house, mi amor,” he murmured to the softly snoring woman. “You will love it there. We will be happy.” He did not know that Niurka had already fallen in love with a Tunisian immigrant she’d met at the learning center and with whom, some months later, she moved away to Boston.
Without Niurka, all that was left to Eneas’s life was his increasingly monotonous job and his daily commute on the NJ Transit into and out of Manhattan: the lumbering, aging, Arrow III cars had dirty beige walls rounded off at the top like coffins.
On Friday Eneas arrived at Trencherman-Bowles & Hooks and walked past his colleagues toward his cubicle; most now were young women who seemed to watch him full of some obscure resentment, ready to pounce on his merest lapse or error. At fifty-three, he was conscious of having failed to move up the company ladder. Look at that fat-assed, double-chinned white man, their gazes said, slag of an irresponsible generation that had ruined the economy and doomed the planet. Yet today they seemed to be avoiding his glance with quick, nervous smiles. Eneas shrugged and turned on his computer.
As on most mornings in the last year, Eneas felt a wave of sleepiness, like narcolepsy, the moment he sat down to work. All he wanted to do was lie under several blankets and fall into oblivion. His computer screen seemed to quiver, words blurred. No matter how much he resisted, his eyelids shut, his body went numb. He dozed upright in his chair, waking with a start ten minutes later, hoping that he hadn’t snored or that someone hadn’t peered into his cubicle. He rubbed his eyes and squinted at a stack of personality assessments that he should have read through days ago. It lay within arm’s reach yet felt infinitely far away. Lately, even the simplest task seemed to require enormous energy, he did not know why, except that all tasks seemed suddenly unimportant.
He heard the chime of a new email. Neglecting emails at Trencherman was worse than committing fraud. He opened it. His boss was summoning him to the main conference room, probably wanting an update on those very assessments. He had to improvise some excuse…
Instead, he was downsized and escorted out by a security guard.
It was a day of intense April rain. The company hired an Uber to ferry the shaken Eneas to Penn Station. His face was hot with shame—could everyone see he’d just been fired? A career of decades—over in minutes! His train would not leave for another half-hour. His mind raced: Would he find a new job at his age? How long would his severance pay last? If Joyce finds out, she’ll feel vindicated…
Inside Penn Station, Eneas ducked a panicked pigeon that grazed the heads of commuters as it desperately sought a way out. He inhaled a stench of old grease eructed from the windowless McDonald’s and saw its crew of dazed, suffocating Hispanics taking food orders under fluorescent rods of ultraviolet light. Nearby, a bearded schizophrene declaimed in a booming voice from the Book of Job—hath the rain a father? Eneas flattened himself against a column to avoid a crowd vomiting forth out of an ancient, sewer-like stairwell, elbowing viciously, faces murderous, fanatical, desperate to “be a part of it,” the myth of New York, the myth of America… His heart pounded. He was sweating in his raincoat and plaid-lined, water-repellent hat. If only he could sit down—but there was no place except inside the claustrophobic LIRR waiting room, out of which a ticketless vagrant was being frog-marched by two NYPD cops wearing nitrile gloves…
A barefoot black man stood suddenly before him. “Spare some change?” The man wore nothing but thin elastic leggings that were too small. With his right hand, the man held the front waistband up over his bloated stomach, and extended the left hand to beg. Though Eneas had singles in his wallet, the sight of the man’s extreme human suffering immobilized him, like a divine, blinding, light. The man shrugged, and when he turned away, Eneas saw the seat of the man’s leggings hanging down, exposing sunken buttocks. Spotting a coin on the filthy floor, the man bent over, his anus puckering out at Eneas, a crinkled, supplicating mouth…
Eneas pushed himself off from the column and looked around wildly for salvation. And in that instant, he realized: his only hope was to return to Langley Park, from which he had been exiled so long. He had nothing and no one now to hold him back. Yes! He would revisit the house on Hannon Street. He would ask the current residents to allow him in to see the world of his childhood. That would cure him—he would be born anew! He would relaunch his life. He would resettle; why, with his years of professional experience, he was sure to find a new job—easily! He would never move away again. With new energy, he pushed through the crowds as through thickets of dead leaves, and reached the upper ring of the station, where he purchased an Amtrak ticket to Washington, DC.
Soon after leaving New York, Eneas fell into a deep, exhausted sleep, like a stone at the bottom of a well. Some three hours later, he awoke at Union Station, refreshed. The spacious, sparkling terminus, all white and gold, with its vast, arching, Roman-latticed window, surmounted by an ancient Magneta clock, felt like the gateway to Paradise. But underground, on the Metro to Silver Spring, anxiety constricted his chest again, remembering that he’d been fired and that he was no longer a young man. It struck him that he had become, at last, a true American, for his two greatest terrors were to be homeless or to be condemned to one of the sodomic rape camps of the penal system, fates to which his firing seemed to him to have pushed him closer.
At Silver Spring, he boarded a bus to Langley Park. Everything, he assured himself, would be better once he arrived…
Everything, of course, had changed: Leonie’s had been gutted; only chunks of jagged wall remained, looming against the overcast sky, like the breached defenses of a conquered city. Lansburgh’s had been turned into a grimy wholesale warehouse for Hispanic and Asian products. Gang members prowled the streets in hoodies; the backs of stop signs were spray-painted with their tags.
Famished, Eneas stopped at a Salvadoran restaurant on University Boulevard, Pupusería de Sibila, which in his childhood had been The Picnic Bowery and had specialized in Southern-style fried chicken. The old waitress—she looked over eighty—seemed frightened when he spoke to her in Spanish. Although it was very good Spanish, she suspected this tall, pale, perspiring gringo in a detective’s trench coat of being from ICE and looked at him skeptically when he explained that he was Cuban—an obvious lie! He told her that he had once lived in Langley Park, long ago, hace muchos, muchos años, but that he was moving back now, for good, and promised to eat here often… His speech sounded slurred, and she was afraid the gringo might also be a little borracho. She warned the rest of the staff, and they hid in the kitchen while he finished his meal. Eneas found it difficult to chew the pupusas, which were dry, as if made of wood.
Walking on along University Boulevard, Eneas entered a store named Campos Elíseos. He remembered that the building had once been the Robert Hall clothier where his father would buy Westerfield business suits. Now an elderly Central American couple sat at the register, utterly silent, stone-like, under a hanging lamp that cast a grayish light. The merchandise consisted of children’s clothing and Catholic school uniforms from the 1960s, unsold stock still in plastic wrappings that had turned opaque and greasy. The fabrics gave off a rancid odor, the perfume of time, of the sadness of things. Atop a table stacked with polyester double-knit pants stood a little boy made of plaster dressed up in a white suit and tie. The outfit, Eneas thought, could serve equally as first communion attire or graveclothes. Eneas imagined the boy in an open coffin, arms crossed over his chest, eyeballs turned upward and back, mouth slack…
Night began to fall. Navigating by sheer memory, Eneas turned right on Riggs Road, a long, steep thoroughfare that soon made him feel winded. He stopped and took deep breaths. He regurgitated the pupusas, an acidic slobber running down his chin. The air smelled of rust and chlorine. Then came the rain, a drizzle at first but intensifying, driving slantwise into his face, practically blinding him. He veered off on Drexel Street, squinting to see, then took a lengthy, winding detour along Lewisdale Drive back up to Chapman Road. At Palinurus Way, he again lost his bearings. Beechwood, Carthage, Amherst, Chaak, Avalon—which one led to Hannon Street? He could not remember. The houses were identical: modest brick starter homes from the middle of the previous century. All looked shabby now and in disrepair, and significantly smaller than what he recalled. Every house had the same sunken, dark windows, the same black door, red bricks the color of blood, house numbers impossible to read, as if the relentless rain were erasing them.
Eneas felt a sharp stab of pain in his chest. His left arm grew numb. The rain that drummed on the crown of his hat sounded like hundreds of tumbadoras speaking all at once. A pair of headlights seared into his eyes. Shielding his face with his right arm—Don’t ever let them see you crying, buddy!—he staggered toward the nearest porch steps and pulled himself up along a wobbly, slippery railing. He knocked at the door with a wet, feeble fist. “Mamá…Papá…Abuela,” he shouted.
As his legs gave way and he slid down against the unyielding door to the pitted, slimy, concrete steps, he knew: They had returned to Cuba and forgotten him. If only he could get to the attic before the police arrived. He had to hurry! The spinning beacon of a patrol car was already flashing, blue and red, through the rain. And now an officer in a bulky poncho was kneeling before him and radioing for an ambulance, but it was too late—Eneas was already unfolding the narrow ladder in the linen closet. He began to climb, rung by rickety rung. Yes, it was still there, covered with dust, the old refugee sack. He ripped open its puckered, crinkled mouth, inserted his head, his whole body, and began clawing his way back, through the fetid darkness, after them.
Alfredo Franco’s work has appeared in Blackbird, failbetter, The MacGuffin, and other journals. He teaches creative writing at Rutgers University. “The Man in the Rain” is for writer Sylvia Schwarz, who helped me with her many priceless insights, critiques, and suggestions.
