The Assimilated Cuban's Guide to Quantum Santeria

Introduction

by Jeffrey Ford

The title of this collection, The Assimilated Cuban’s Guide to Quantum Santeria, seemed wonderfully outlandish to me when I first encountered it. To the contrary, though, the book perfectly delivers on that title as if only that title could do it justice. Everything it suggests is here–Science, Faith, Assimilation, Particle Physics, Cuba, contemporary Latino culture in the U.S., and a sensibility that recognizes a vast world beyond. Not only do each of these elements appear within the book, but they appear, very often all at once, in each of the book’s dozen stories. What with all these themes weaving together throughout, Hernandez’s collection gives the effect of seeming greater than the sum of its parts. None of this becomes obtrusive in the reading. The stories are too strong–the narrative drive, the voice, the concision in writing, the smart dialogue, the slyly judicious application of research. They gracefully balance the book’s thematic concerns. As a writer of short stories, I found much to admire in The Guide and as a reader, even more. Following are a few observations that struck my fancy and sparked my imagination.

There are real science fiction stories in this collection. What I mean by real is that the nature of the technology or the aspect of the physical universe that is central to the plot resonates metaphorically with the plight of the character or characters. This is a type of storytelling you don’t encounter much in SF but which makes for the finest stories. Finding that metaphor to bridge the character and technology is often very difficult, so writers don’t bother with it and what you wind up with is an adventure tale. I like a good adventure tale, but I’d rather find a real work of science fiction–the kind written by authors like Ted Chiang. Hernandez includes a number of such stories in The Guide, and the beauty of them is that they don’t traffic in the technologies of past generations–rockets, ray guns, witty robots. The technologies at the core of these stories are extrapolated from cutting edge discoveries in a whole host of fields from neuroscience to the Aphotic Zone. As well, the characters’ issues are contemporary ones we might witness or experience ourselves.

I mentioned earlier that there was a lot I admired about this book. The technique that makes these science fiction stories believable within the context of their fictional worlds is the author’s research. Hernandez has obviously done his homework in that his explanations as to the nature of certain technologies or physical phenomena have a confident clarity to them. They are firmly based in science and so convincingly explained that it’s difficult to tell where the science leaves off and the fiction begins. As a story writer, I love that sleight of hand. It takes a graceful touch to parse out research to the reader–not too much, not too little–so that the result is effective and yet not generally noticed. This goes for the stories in the collection that are also not science fiction. Aspects of history, culture, politics that appear throughout all seem right on, offering no reason to doubt their validity. This serves to draw the reader more fully into the story.

Although Latino characters appear in the early science fiction stories of the collection, you’ll notice that Latino culture, and specifically Cuban and Cuban-American culture become more prevalently the focus of the fiction as you continue through the book. It’s not that this is definitive, because some of the later stories deal with Science as well. These pieces range from the weird to the absurd to the fantastic. What’s wonderful about all of the stories is that Hernandez very economically creates interesting characters, who, even though they don’t always do the right thing for themselves or others, we root for them, we care about them. There’s an emotional core to all of the stories here. Even in the midst of humor or horror, there’s a human connection at play. There’s something for the reader beyond the dazzling science and the enigmatic, beyond the clarity of the writing. These stories always return us to ourselves where we find the connection with a character’s foibles, triumphs, mistakes, loneliness, fear, joy.

It’s clear to see, through the writing, that this connection is at the core of the author’s intent. There are very few instances of structural pyrotechnics. What you get is pretty much all story, all the time. Beginnings, middles, ends. The masterful economy of writing and the undeniable narrative drive pull the reader in and don’t let go. With each of these pieces, it took no more than a paragraph, and often less, to hook me and make me want to find out what happens next. Nothing compares to a classic story structure with clear, descriptive writing. All of these stories, for whatever else is happening in them, no matter amazing scientific concepts or the mysteries of Santeria, concentrate their energy primarily on the character/characters and how they deal with their dilemma(s), their desire to connect, to understand themselves and where they belong. This is where the real power comes from in Hernandez’s fiction.

Going back to the title of the book, which I mention in my opening paragraph, you might wonder where the Quantum aspect can be found. I counted a half dozen instances of the mention of or allusion to some concept from quantum physics (I’m betting there are more)– Schrodinger’s Cat, the multiple universes theory, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, etc. They lurk in the background of the stories and sometimes move forward to affect the outcome of the plot. It’s fitting they should permeate the book in that they hint at probability instead of certainty. All of the stories here continue to give that sense of uncertainty, that impetus to make you read on, until at the very end when the wave collapses and the reader experiences the outcome of the drama. In other words, nothing is predictable to a certainty. How many times do you find fiction that you can say that about?

My last observation is one also involving the title. What better guide could an assimilated Cuban have than another assimilated Cuban. Hernandez’s family is Cuban, and we get to see the world from a Latino perspective in these stories. The pieces where this is most obvious are some of my favorites in the book. Although I’m accessing these through the filter of a different culture, there is some magic there that allows me to find myself in them most readily. There is great humor and pathos in these stories. The descriptions of those things I’m unfamiliar with are succinct and illuminating, and I’m never confused as to what’s going on. Perhaps the best of all is the final story of the book that carries the collection’s title. Santeria, which is mentioned in the title and has an important part in the story, is the religion of African slaves brought to Cuba; a mix of Yoruban beliefs and practices blended with some Catholicism and native Caribbean faith. Because these slaves were not permitted to practice their religion outright, they had to veil their saints and holy figures behind those the Catholic Church approved of. In other words, they assimilated themselves and their religion into the new world. This assimilation was not a forsaking of their culture or religion but a way for it to survive and thrive against the horrors and iniquities of slavery. Hernandez’s Guide is about how to survive contemporary culture with its incredible scientific advancements and mishaps, its sometimes tenuous relationships, its lack of certainty, its treacherous racial and cultural divides, and through all of it to be able to encompass your past and manage to hold on to who you really are.

An ingenious title for a wonderful collection. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

The Aphotic Ghost

Mountain

Sometimes when a body dies in Everest’s Death Zone, it doesn’t come down. Too difficult, too much risk for the living. Thing is, it’s so cold up there, bodies don’t rot. They get buried by snow periodically, but the terrific winds of the South Col reliably reveal them: blue, petrified, horned by icicles, still in their climbing gear, always forever ascending. They scandalize the Westerners who paid good money to climb Everest and who don’t especially want to be reminded of how deadly the journey can be. But then their Sherpas usher them past the garden of corpses and, weather permitting, to the top of the world.

I am a Westerner, and I paid good money to climb Everest. But the summit wasn’t my goal. I was going to get my son Lazaro off of that mountain, dead or alive.

Sea-Level

Lazaro’s mother, Dolores Thomaston, taught twelfth-grade biology at the same school where I taught AP World History: Bush High, right on the Texas-Mexico border. Lazaro was born of a dalliance between us almost three decades ago.

Dolores had an Australian ebullience and a black sense of humor and a seeming immunity to neurosis that made her irresistible to me. She could have been 25 or 55, and I never found out which. She’d made a splash in the scientific world a few years before coming to Bush with a paper she co-authored on a deep-sea jellyfish that, interestingly, was immortal. After it reproduced, it returned to a pre-sexual polyp state through a process called cell transdifferentiation, and then become an adult again, and then a polyp, and so on. The layman’s version is this: age meant nothing to that jelly. It only died if something killed it.

Dolores and I spent the summer together. I really believed we were on our way to getting married. That’s why I wasn’t worried when she started talking children. In fact, I was surprised to discover how much the idea of children tickled me. I had no idea how much I wanted to be a father until she put the prospect before me. I’d spent all of my adult life contemplating history, and now, suddenly, I was awash with dreams of the future.

She asked me what I would name the child, so I told her: Brumhilda.

Be serious, she said.

I am!

Yeah? So what if it’s a boy?

I kissed her, the first of many that night. And then I said, Lazaro.

Aphotic Zone

Dolores didn’t just leave me. She vanished right after we consummated our relationship. She left a note on her pillow that I promptly set fire to in a skillet before reading, then spent the next two decades wishing I hadn’t.

I didn’t know she had died during childbirth, that she had opted for an ocean water-birth. Ocean-birthing. Of all the crazy trends. She never left the water.

I found all of this out from a young man named Lazaro Thomaston when he came to meet me. He was 21, already a man. By then I’d missed my chance to be his father.

Sea-Level

An hour since I’d learned I’d been a father for 21 years, Lazaro sat on the couch with me, showing me his portfolio. He worked as an underwater photographer and videographer. It’s second nature to me, being in the water, he said. Really it’s the ocean that raised me.

Looks like the ocean did a pretty good job, I said.

He specialized in ultra-deep dives, descents into the bathyal region, which is the topmost stratum of the ocean’s aphotic zone: lightless, crushing, utterly hostile. There he had recorded a score of species new to science; he’d made his reputation before he could take a legal drink. His images were haunting and minimalist, the engulfing darkness defied only by the weak bioluminescence of the sea life and, of course, him. Off-camera, he shined like a sun, illumining the depths like the first day of creation.

These are incredible, I said. You must he half fish.

Got that from Mom, he said. And turned the page.

Mountain

Rather than take a leave of absence from work to climb Everest, I retired early. Lost some money that way, but I had more than enough money to get to the summit, get back, and bury my son. After that, the future would take care of itself. Or go fuck itself. Either way.

I was old to climb the world’s tallest mountain, but not as old as some. The ascent from the Southeast ridge is by mountaineering standards fairly straightforward, especially with today’s technology. If you died it was because you were reckless, or bad weather surprised you, or your body gave out and you probably should never have attempted it in the first place.

I was in reasonably good shape, but I needed work—strength-training, flexibility, cardio cardio cardio. And yoga: 60 years old, and I’d never learned to breathe. Guess it was time.

I learned to slow my heart. I learned efficiency, repose, elegance of movement. I learned to require less of everything: food, water, air, joy, meaning. I learned to sit.

I bought more gear than I could possibly use in ten ascents, watched every mountaineering video I could find, moved for a season to Colorado where I took a course on mountain climbing specifically geared toward seniors.

I finished top of the class. My instructor said he’d never seen anyone of any age so motivated. But he also said mountain climbing’s supposed to be fun. Why so grim? Why was I going to climb Everest if not to have one of the greatest experiences of my life?

I told him my son was lost on Everest and that I was going to find him, but of course it’d been months and I hadn’t heard any good news, so he was dead. But I’d be damned if I was going to let my son’s body pose for eternity like a movie prop in Everest’s death zone so that overprivileged jetsetters could get an extra thrill off of him. I was climbing to claim my son’s body—if I could find him, if I could pickaxe his remains free from the mountainside—and bring him home.

But yeah, asshole, I’ll try to have a grand old time all the way up.

Sea-Level

Lazaro and I had five good years together, during which time he told me almost nothing about his life prior to our reconnecting. I didn’t take it personally. He wanted to sever himself from his childhood the way a lizard drops its tail to escape a predator. Whatever his past was, Lazaro wanted nothing to do with it.

I didn’t pry. I figured he would tell me when he was ready.

But he never became ready. Instead, he anchored his life to the present, to me. And that happened to be more or less exactly what I wanted. I couldn’t go back and be the father he’d never had growing up, but as consolation prizes go, this was the next best thing.

I’m a historian. I should have known better. Histories never stay severed. Like the tail of a lizard, they grow back.

Mountain

There was exactly one guide who would attempt something as stupid as trying to descend Everest with a dead body in tow. He had a Nepalese name but a British accent. To dumb-ass tourists like me he went by Roger.

His main suggestion was that we needed as many Sherpas as I could afford to help search for Lazaro. I could sell all of my extra mountaineering equipment at Base Camp to the rich and underprepared. There’s where I’d get top dollar.

I was hoping it’d just be you and me, I told him. I don’t really want a lot of people around.

He sighed. Imagine a needle in a haystack, he said. Now douse the haystack with water, and stick it in an industrial freezer until it’s a solid hump of ice. Now remove all the oxygen from the freezer. Now put fifty kilos of equipment on your back. Now go get that needle.

Point taken. But what would I tell all those Sherpas? How could I instruct them what to look for without them thinking I was crazy?

But truly, what frightened me more was the prospect that they’d actually believe me. The Sherpa brand of Buddhism is animist enough that, when I told them what they were looking for, they might accept it as true. Accept it, and then get the fuck off Everest.

Aphotic Zone

I was leaving for Lukla in four days. My equipment had already left. It was too soon for adrenaline but too late to think of anything else. I sat in my living room and didn’t read and didn’t watch TV and didn’t turn on the lights. My own little bathyal region.

Doorbell. I had ordered a pizza. I opened the door and it was Dolores.

She was 25 now, if that; there was nothing 55 about her. She was dressed for a Texas May: naked as the law allowed. Her body was muscled and sleek, like a gazelle’s. Her hair was a corona. And that smile. That tilt of the head.

Oh my, she said. It’s so good to see you, Enrique.

She was so composed. She was waiting for me to digest what I was seeing. But there was mischief there too, that evil sense of humor, even at a time like this. It really was her.

When I didn’t speak, she said, I told you I’d be back one day. So here I am, love. I’m back.

I didn’t respond, and she watched me for a long time not responding. Her face drained of mirth. In the note? she said like a question. You got my note, right?

I burned it on the stove, I said.

Ah. Then she laughed. Now was that any way to treat me, after what we shared? You wouldn’t even read my explanation?

Treat you? You left me, Dolores.

And I explained why in the note, love. It was quite necessary. That’s why I left it—so you would understand.

You’re the one who needs to understand. Seeing that Dear John on the pillow, it … it ruined me, Dolores. Until Lazaro came into my life I was in ruins.

She came close, then hooked her arms around my neck, and I let her. Hers was not the body my body remembered. It fit foreignly against me.

Have you been working out, love? she asked, lips puckered puckishly.

Apparently not as much as you, I said. And then: Lazaro. I assume you know?

That’s why I’m here, love. To help you. To save him.

Oh. Oh no. I suddenly felt tired and old. Whatever my own feelings about seeing her again were, I couldn’t let her think her son was still alive, not after he’d been missing for months at the top of Everest. Dolores, I’m not going to try to rescue Lazaro. I’m going to claim his body. Lazaro is dead.

No, love.

Dolores, listen—

He’s not, she interrupted. But her expression was not that of a mother in denial; she looked at me pityingly, her mouth sagging with remorse. There’s so much I need to tell you.

She always could be a little condescending. And that helped me remember my anger. I broke our embrace. What the hell makes you think I want to talk to you? You left me, Dolores. I thought we were going to get married. You left without a trace.

I could see she was about to remind me again that I had burned her note. But instead she metronomed her head to the other shoulder, smiling ruefully. Do you hate me?

I think I do.

I can tell you don’t.

I sighed. Maybe not yet. I’m still in shock. But I almost certainly will hate you. So let’s talk before the hatred sets in and I refuse to ever speak to you again.

She came close again and hugged me to her and stood