Nostradamus Baby
The day came when we had trouble hearing, and Denorah and I got excited, for we’d have more wax to add to our Nostradamus baby. Denorah poured the warmed hydrogen peroxide into my ears, then I did the same for her.
We gave each other time to let it tingle and foam, to shift the wax we both felt squishing inside our heads. Less than an hour later, we balled together our extracted wax to form almost a quarter-inch diameter. Denorah and I held hands, delighted our bodies had created this little miracle. We walked up to our Nostradamus baby resting on the living-room table. We didn’t always have our child out, but it was that time of year, finally, when we could walk right up to our baby and add another bit of wax. Denorah chose to add it this time to the spot just below the head, completing the neck that connected to the oblong body.
As we stood there embracing, we looked down upon our evolving creation, knowing secretly that if we weren’t to have children, then at least we could have our Nostradamus baby to keep us company and to bring us warmth in our future graying years.
From our door came a knock, then cluttered footsteps: it was Andi, Denorah’s older sister, and in a pumpkin-carved voice, she exclaimed, “A-ha! I timed it right.” She held a thermos in her hand and wore bundles of clothes that reeked of various types of smoke: nag champa, cigarettes, smog, and pot. She rummaged in the kitchen and emerged with two cups for us, of what I took to be this tea she constantly sipped from her thermos’s maroon lid.
“You know what I did?” she said. “I marked it down last year. Because, actually, I had marked it down the year before that too. The time you had put out this thing. This project, this little creature of y’all’s. I’m sorry, OK, I’ll respect your baby here. Your child.”
Andi got up, close to our Nostradamus baby, almost even touching noses, and said, “Hi, baby. It’s me, your tía. That’s right, baby, I live just down the block; you can’t miss me. I love your mom and dad here forever.” She sat back down and, as if our Nostradamus baby could no longer hear us, continued: “Look, I’m gonna say something you’re going to hate to hear. But somebody needs to say it: there are children, not very far from here, who have been separated from their parents and live in cages. I know, that sucks, right? You are wondering, Why did Andi have to say this? Everyone knows this is happening. What good does it do her,” she pointed to herself here, “to spell it out, and spoil our fun? So while you’re cozy here this winter, adding nasty earwax to your little creature, remember that.”
Andi walked out and left the three of us alone again, as a family.
The next day was when I’d agreed with Andi to meet up with someone she’d found who needed to get a spy narrative off the ground. I was worn out by spy narratives but had agreed because it couldn’t hurt to make a few extra dollars. So here I was, continuing my streak of unpleasant encounters with Andi. I wondered if thinking this way was helping create these tense situations with her, so I consciously tried to manifest positive feelings within myself, at least for the moment.
The man was middle-aged, wore a Member’s Only jacket, and, in a booth at Settler’s Coffee, he recounted his spy narrative detail by detail as Andi sat at the counter on her own. Spy narratives were among the most demanding to listen to because you had to appear at the edge of your seat the entire time, when in reality it was the same hoopla narrative recycled from old movies. I’d learned that beginner writers had a strange affinity for protagonists with one wooden leg, and this man was no exception.
Afterward, walking together, Andi asked, “Jesus, what do you think it is these people want? To be famous? Do they actually think you’d want to write the stories they have in their heads just because you’re a published writer? Don’t they know you have your own ideas?”
As Andi handed me my cut of the money, I said, “They probably just want somebody to listen to their stories. I’m sure they’ve worn their families out by now.”
“They’d be better suited going to therapy. It probably costs the same. But, hey. It helps us. I know you complain that these people don’t read your books and don’t really care about your career. Bet you never thought that would happen, huh? That as soon as you’d become a published author, you’d get kinda reversed. And people would want to tell you their story instead of reading yours, even pay you good money to listen, way more than the cost of your book. You are lucky, friend. People will talk your ear off and waste your time for absolutely nothing.”
I thanked Andi once again for spotting a market and bringing me on. She threw me the peace sign and crossed the street the opposite way I was heading.
Home early from her vintage shop, Denorah was three hours into boiling the mushroom stock. We shared a small glazed ham with potatoes for dinner, and when the stock was finished, we drank some out of mugs and saved the rest. We came to the conclusion that neither of us had any more wax buildup from our ears to give as offerings to our Nostradamus baby this season. Although we cherished those moments, the time had come to put our Nostradamus baby away in the tiny box that served as our child’s home.
Before my next appointment downtown at Marl’s Bakery, I’d calculated my finances for the quarter and was surprised I’d saved more than enough money for taxes, all thanks to these little side gigs Andi hooked up. She had me meeting up to five people a week now to listen to their ideas for books they hoped to one day finish. Often, these aspiring writers had a series of books in mind, and this man I was about to meet—Schroeder—had one in the works for a few years now. Schroeder was actually one of our first clients. He’d placed an ad in The Voice for a ghostwriter and Andi replied to it. As a joke, she proposed this idea to Denorah, and though Denorah shot her down, she joked back at me that it was something I’d probably be good at. I agreed, on the sole condition I’d never have to read anyone’s pages, and Andi told me not to worry.
Schroeder had a series he was working through titled The World War $$ Chronicles. His narrative consisted of World War $$—the final war—and how its inception occurred in 1876, with a bet between chemical-snuffing industrialists. The first book chronicled the late nineteenth century and ended in 1901; the second picked up just a few years before that and ended in WWII. Neither was drafted, only copious notes had been written by Schroeder. Then book three, which he was currently mapping out, began with the end of Vietnam and would lead to World War $$. Since his books consisted of such a large cast of characters who came and went, and although Schroeder had never written a page, he was still busy figuring out what would happen in the third book. I’d listen to Schroeder talk about his characters and, in our time allotted, would work through their complications in a manner that also propelled the narrative and passage of time further along.
He couldn’t begin to write even the first sentence of the series, however, until he knew every plot point and detail, and had it jotted down. Schroeder was a meticulous note-taker and he’d filled four five-subject binders with notes about his saga. In the beginning, I met with Schroeder for only an hour, but as we kept developing his narrative, we couldn’t ignore the many complexities; now we were up to two three-hour meetings a week at Marl’s Bakery, where the baristas were probably very sick of us.
When I showed up, I found Andi sitting at a table with no Schroeder around. “Have you heard?” Andi said to me in a whisper. “Something escalated with this one country and now everyone is talking of a new war happening. You know how Schroeder is, he decided to stay home and watch the news. He paid us for the time, though, as the contract I negotiated stipulates,” and she handed me an envelope with my end of the cash.
Feeling an intense rush of freedom, I ordered a six-dollar coffee, and had it in a for-here cup. Andi always seemed fascinated by my personal life as an author and had a habit of probing into my works-in-progress. One time, I asked Denorah if she thought her sister had an unhealthy obsession with both of us making it big somehow, and she replied merely by saying her sister was a schemer; this is what she became as an adult, she explained, how she survived, by figuring out little schemes to make a few extra dollars.
Andi was scrolling through her phone for updates on this possible new war when she suddenly put it away and said, “You’re an immigrant, right? Or, no, what do they call you? A war refugee, that’s right. Maybe that’s the book you should write next, from the perspective of your life as a refugee of war.”
“I oughta, right? There won’t be a dry eye in all of Brooklyn—”
“You’ll sell it for a ton of cash and get loads of attention, no doubt.”
“That’s possible. But even if I do somehow write it, the money wouldn’t be worth it.”
“But it probably will be worth it. You just need to write one of those stories where nothing big happens, but a lot of small, sad things do happen. Things that you overcame and all that.”
“There are already a lot of writers out there doing that. I don’t need to be adding to it too.”
“But then you’ll get a chance to reach readers with the story of your triumph. Maybe even make a complete living as a full-time writer. Not have to meet with people like Schroeder for extra money. I mean, I certainly don’t mind taking a cut, and I’m one to talk…”
“That’s not storytelling to me though. Not what storytelling is about.”
“What does that even mean? Just write your story from where it begins to how you ended up here. You can even make some of it up. What do you call it? Fictionalizing? And give it some super artsy title that also makes you think. I can see just everyone leaving the theater crying after reading this.”
I considered these things Andi said, and for a moment looked around Marl’s. If I was writing this very real life into a story, how would I write it? Maybe an ambulance would pass by, or the light would be just a certain way. I’d relate my struggles to the worker or something cosmic, or possibly just the sea.
“I’m not the kind of person to go around knocking with my sob story,” I said to her, keeping my voice down, “for anybody to just hear. I feel I can reveal more by writing stories in the tradition of hardcore, maybe weird literature, rooted in something old and unknown, and infusing it with my life and where I come from as unintentionally as possible.”
“Yeah, but that’s what people want to read, want to hear: the pain of others, and how they got past that pain. That’s really all people want to talk to you about too—somebody to listen to the painful stories of their painful lives. I mean, you have a literary agent, right? That’s what these people don’t have that you got. Somebody who could just sell your story if you write it.”
“That’s right, I do.”
“And do they know you’re skimping them out like this?”
“I don’t think that’s how it works; an agent doesn’t really tell you what to work on.”
“Hold up, who’s your agent? I need to know. ’Cause I’m gonna call them, and tell them their employee here—”
“Client.”
“Your client here is skimping you out on this money-maker, tear-jerking book. And frankly, to the rest of us, like Schroeder, me, or even the bakers and baristas working here in this bakery, scared as shit about what’s going on in this world and the future, this is downright insulting. Because none of us here can probably even spell, or use a comma, or an apostrophe, without having extreme reservations. So cry your sob story on the page, and do it for the rest of us who don’t have that option. Do it for my sister. Or do it for your Nostradamus baby. Your one child.”
On my walk home, with the cash in my coat pocket, I reflected on how I got into this arrangement with Andi, and whether getting involved was affecting Denorah. I dropped by her shop, Little Willows Vintage. Her shift was still going, and when I got there, I said hello to her employee Marka, then crept to the back office. I knocked twice, walked in, and was a bit surprised to find her playing darts.
As if expecting me, Denorah said, “Check this out,” and winked at me. There was a spittoon on the ground she spit into, and in rapid succession launched three yellow darts at a board on the opposite wall about ten feet away. She hit two bull’s-eyes, and the third clipped a piece of the metal that held the corkboard together and bounced off.
Impressed, and not knowing what else to say, I said, “You chew tobacco?”
Denorah laughed and said, “I mean, I don’t really chew tobacco. We just decided to keep this wicked spittoon for the store. Isn’t it cute? So, sure, every once in a while, me and Marka chew it. Isn’t that right, Marka?” she yelled.
“We sometimes chew it,” Marka yelled from the front of the shop, “but only the good shit.”
“Only the good shit. I thought you knew.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe you told me and I just forgot. Or I wasn’t paying attention. I’m always zoned out all the time.”
Denorah’s shift ended, and on our walk, I confessed to her I’d been having weird dreams out of frustration with these gigs with Andi.
“Are they about the 1890s again?” she asked, right before proposing we go to a cafeteria within our budget to talk about our inner lives away from home. “It seems like we never get these moments as a couple anymore, we are either at home or coming to and from work or the market, and it’s hard to break away,” she said.
After ordering our initial drinks and entrées, I told Denorah that she’d guessed correctly, and that I’d been frustrated and having bad dreams, owing to the vision of the 1890s Miss Spencer was working on for her historical romance epic. In Miss Spencer’s story a young Mexican boy falls in love with a young Anglo girl originally from Wyoming. Without even being an expert on Mexican culture or the Southwest, I knew the racial dynamics in her story were gravely wrong. Her protagonists meet at an unlikely ballroom, where Mexicans and Anglos mixed, danced, and celebrated. Plus, everyone spoke modern English, since Miss Spencer was one of the few aspiring writers I met with who actually wrote pages, filled with blatant historical anachronisms that bordered on steampunk. She’d shrug them off and remind me that she was writing fiction—make believe—and that at her age she didn’t have time to get things completely right. All that was important to her was having a finished, printed book. Miss Spencer had changed her title from Brown Raindrops to Unspooled Heart to Orchard of Love, and subsequently she’d put two of them together as Orchard Heart, with the subtitle: An Epic Romance.
After talking about it with Denorah and watching her chuckle throughout, I could see how in the grand scheme of things this was fine. I was getting paid a great hourly wage to listen to stories and wasn’t obligated to read pages—true. But, sometimes, people like Miss Spencer guilted me into reading them, and it was hard to decline, I said to Denorah.
“C’mon,” she said. “How hard can it be? Just kick her ass a little, while telling her what she wants to hear: that her stuff is mind-blowing, and she has great potential. Remember that people always reward potential over a finished product, so just keep it going. People’s unwritten work has potential because it doesn’t exist—you don’t have to face the music of editing and publishing and dealing with a finished manuscript.”
After dinner, Denorah and I agreed she should talk to Andi about Denorah’s picking up some of my gigs. I warned her she might hate it, but I could see how she could actually be good at it, since Denorah attended a graduate creative-writing program herself years back, and was sensitive about disclosing criticism.
Within a few weeks, I went from consulting eight aspiring writers to five, and though the money I brought in took a hit, I really didn’t mind, for it gave me more time to do my own reading and writing. Andi transferred my meetings with Miss Spencer to Denorah, whom I was happy to see very energetic, helping brainstorm Miss Spencer’s sordid vision of the late nineteenth century. Having someone to talk to about this strange way to make money changed things up for me. Denorah and I had plenty of awkward, but ultimately fulfilling, conversations about ageism, and why it was that mostly retired, well-off people wanted their stories told.
One afternoon, while having lunch with us, Andi told us she’d been attending literary cocktail parties, networking with people, and that she’d recruited other authors to help aspiring writers with their projects. When Denorah asked if she’d recruited anyone we knew, Andi mentioned the name of a popular author who lived in town and whom I’d run into on occasion. He’d written a realist novel about scholars in love over the span of three decades that he’d received accolades for, and had been shortlisted for all the major awards a few years back.
For the remainder of that evening, I wasn’t able to concentrate or think about anything else. Him? Andi had recruited him? A writer who’d brought in a huge advance, extra money from speaking engagements, awards, and possible future book contracts? If he was hard up here in the city, I thought, what were the chances for a writer like me who wrote weird stories?
Inwardly, from that moment on, I was rattled.
I was walking out of Yeyo’s Donuts after meeting with my favorite aspiring writer, Lenore Weaver, whose project was a futuristic love story in a totalitarian tourist trap by a beach. She’d confessed to me that it was a way of writing about a time before her marriage and, of course, her husband’s death, when she’d met a nice brown man and fallen in love with him, which—she emphasized—was even more controversial in those days. Lenore was my favorite because, although her project was obviously problematic, I could see she was only trying to psychologically make peace with this important experience in a way that wouldn’t shock her children and friends if they were to read the work. Because she didn’t particularly care about the sci-fi or speculative element, she’d created this absurd, complex setting by a beach, and outlined scenes that would crack me up all the time. The beach town had an economy based on crystals and unnamed streets with monuments in different corners, so that if you were to give directions, you’d just tell the person what monument on the street was the closest.
This made Lenore the most visionary and original, and though there were a lot of racist tropes within the work, I stuck to meeting with her because I knew the manuscript wouldn’t stand a chance at publication. Denorah said the contrary, however, that these things were exactly the reasons somebody would publish it, and though I knew she’d said this jokingly, I feared more and more she was in the right. Denorah also put together the similarities between Miss Spencer and Lenore’s narratives: they both involved interracial relationships between a brown man and a white woman.
At any rate, I was leaving Yeyo’s Donuts, and there he was, the popular and successful author Andi had recruited, walking down the sidewalk.
He was short—just as short as I remembered him. But perhaps that’s unfair because I’m a tall person. I walked about fifteen paces behind and watched as he listened to something through his AirPods, not looking into shops, perhaps making his way to an appointment with one of Andi’s writers. I stopped to read the paper headlines in the newspaper dispensers, to make sure the writer and I wouldn’t get stuck waiting together at the crosswalk, and when the light turned, he crossed. As much as I wanted to read more than the urgent headlines had to offer, I hurried to not get a red light and fall behind.
When I thought I’d lost sight of him, I spotted his vague outline getting in line at the coffee shop on the corner. For a moment, I considered going in, then realized I’d have to exchange formalities with him if he saw me.
As I walked away, I felt a creative emptiness that took me back to the early days, when you are young and dream of having a body of work but haven’t written a single page you are happy with. Things felt futile now, and glancing once more at newspaper headlines, I could see how nothing could outdo these real-life absurdities, but perhaps living in a society where realism is the reigning literary form renders that society powerless against the absurdism of society itself. Strange stories had helped me give meaning to the painful moments of surviving, and strange stories are the only things I could continue feeding into the machine.
Moments later, when I saw Julia—my friend from Santiago—she couldn’t believe the headlines either, and, happy to run into a fellow writer, who more or less understood her Spanish, she stopped me and said, “Amigo, we should all be getting gas masks. Let’s burn them. Burn them all down. Remember the state is already mobilizing. They’ll have tear gas and shields, but the gas masks make us unstoppable. What is everyone doing, are we just going to take this? Where’s the town square around here, where do people go to mobilize? The capitol? That’s where I’m going. If my friends from back home were all here, forget it, hijo…”
From down the hallway, I could smell the garbanzo stew we’d made the previous evening, and could hear Andi’s voice as if it came through the air vents. The apartment door was cracked open and I walked in to Andi laughing loudly from the kitchen and Denorah stirring the pot. The three of us sat and had the last of the stew after I cut some parsley and cilantro for garnishes.
Andi had enrolled in community college and was in a good mood because some of her credits from years back transferred over. She’d decided to study economics, and was telling us the little things she’d learned from this aspiring-writers racket. Andi pontificated and sometimes said crass things about the cruelties of having creative aspirations, without considering that she’d hurt Denorah’s and my feelings.
When I directed a comment to Andi, she brushed off my words, something she’d never done, and I saw Denorah noticed this too, when Andi interrupted her a couple times. Denorah picked at her right eyelashes—a clear sign to me she felt uncomfortable. Finally, Andi said, “It’s awkward, yes, it’s awkward that most of these folks who want their stories told are older. They have the money and their kids are all grown up. The ‘Greatest Generation.’ They had careers and married during one of the greatest economic booms in history. And meanwhile, look at us here. Where even the most celebrated young writers rely on either the, um…, empathy or altruism of the older generation. Or in this case, their vanity. So that the young writers can make enough money just to survive, we have to convince this generation whatever sacrifices they made were worth it, and now that they have the time, they can tell their story—we can help them tell it.”
“That’s a slippery slope though, Andi,” said Denorah.
Hearing this, Andi smiled, sipped the rest of her broth.
“What’s the matter with you?” Denorah said. “You’ve been acting strange since you got here. Are you OK?”
As only one sister could do to another, these words made Andi tear up and turned her face red, as if they triggered something that went back deep into their childhood.
“You guys,” Andi said in a lower voice, “I honestly haven’t been able to hear well the past few days. I can’t go to the doctor and I can’t see the campus nurse, ’cause I’m not full-time yet. I’m scared.”
Denorah shot me a look and immediately I knew: it was getting around to that season again. She stood from her kitchen chair and said, “Hey, Andi,” pretty loudly. “Andi! Tilt your head like this and with your fingers press here, between your jawbone and your ear. Do you feel anything?”
Andi tried and shook her head, disappointed. “I mean, what? Oh, you know. I feel. I think I feel something squishing, oh my god, like there’s a little muddy foot in there.”
I grabbed the bottle of hydrogen peroxide from the medicine cabinet, had it sit in a bowl of warm water, and, ceremonially, Denorah brought out the little box with our Nostradamus baby. Denorah, Andi, and I took turns pouring hydrogen peroxide into our ears while we lay on our sides, and had the utmost patience with one another. I felt the crackle and fizz in my ears, and Andi kept giggling as if tiny fingers were tickling the inside of her skull.
Using paper towels, we cleaned hydrogen peroxide residue from around our ears, necks, and hair. While watching a documentary on the history of potato chips, we waited. I offered Andi a drink, then remembered she’d been clean for a better chunk of the past year; as Denorah shut off the doc, we migrated to the chairs in the living room.
On the table, facing us, was our beloved creation: our Nostradamus baby. Using a tiny flashlight, Denorah took a look in Andi’s right ear. Andi had her head tilted and looked very lovely, with a frightened expression.
Then Denorah said, “Oh my god, oh my god—”
“What, what,” Andi said, trying not to lose her balance on the old wooden chair.
“Andi, just reach into your ear real careful. You have a lot going on in there.”
Slowly, with her half-bitten nails, she pinched into her ear, and seconds later pulled out what looked like a ball of coagulated honey with a tail: the buildup of wax clogging her hearing. The three of us were impressed, and I congratulated Andi. Denorah was the one who produced the least wax, but that made sense because her hearing recently had been excellent. What I produced was relatively minor too, and Denorah suggested it wasn’t the right time for us. Both of Andi’s ears, however, ejected the same impressive amount of wax. It was wonderful to watch those two balls of wax become one, as Andi rolled them together using a circular motion with the palms of her hands.
Before we had biscuits and coffee, we agreed to perform the ceremony through, and I was the first to add my wax to our baby. I did so on the little feet, which, it looked like, the past year had been cruel on; Denorah added hers to the liver area.
When it came to Andi, she said to us, “So, I can just add it wherever?”
Even after we said yes, there was still hesitation in Andi. For a few seconds, watching as she decided, I thought a deep love would emerge from Andi, and she would run off with our baby. I asked myself what I would do; if I was the type of person to chase my sister-in-law down the street for my child.
Andi had her back to me and I didn’t catch her adding the wax to our Nostradamus baby. When she stepped back and all of us gathered around in a circle, our little miracle looked full-bodied, growing, and better than ever, with Andi’s offering giving it a more pronounced head. For the first time, I felt what it must be like to be a proud father. I knew the world was falling apart everywhere. But in this moment—sitting with my family in the living room—I felt a bright future was possible. The struggles of today were all worth it.
“I see now,” Andi said. “I can see all this very clearly now. And I can honestly say that I am a proud tía.”
Denorah and I held hands. Obviously, this meant a lot to us.
The water finished boiling and I had to remind everyone we had no sugar or milk.
“That’s cool,” Andi said, “the less sugar and milk, the better.”