The Boy by Lara Santoro Page B

her findings over three days of complete inertia.
    “How can he not know what went on in World War Two. Fifty million people died in World War Two. Fifty million. That’s a shitload of people, Esperanza, a shitload, but we live in an age where the volume of information available is so massive, the stream so deafening, that kids today are separated, mentally and emotionally separated, from what went on last month, forget fifty, sixty years ago. Is it a good separation? I don’t think so. The Second World War defines who I am in a very concrete way: the mass graves, the death marches, the gas chambers, the aerial bombings, the gutting of an entire continent. How can a college kid not know about this shit? What is it that these kids know about? They know how to download a video from YouTube while updating their status on Facebook. They know how to send one hundred text messages a day and disfigure the English language in the process. The rest they know nothing about. Nothing. Zero. It’s as if it never happened.”
    Esperanza sat there looking like she’d been hit with a stun gun.
    “Eee,” she said. “Why do you get all upset? Don’t get so upset.” But the second they got home she gave the boy a tight black smile and said, “Find out what happened in World War Two, hijo. ”
    “Why do I need to find out what happened in World War Two?”
    “Don’t know,” Anna said, kissing him softly on the neck. “Seems like a biggie to me.”
    The Fourth of July came and, with it, an astonishing parade of people reclined, barely awake by the look of it, on their motorcycles. Esperanza added a fourth layer of hair gel and disappeared. In the days that followed, Anna lost track of time, lost track of herself, allowing the boy to wash her hair in the shower, shedding her clothes in favor of his, wearing his jeans, his shirts. He stood in the kitchen while she washed his dishes.
    “I want my shirt back,” he said. Their eyes met.
    “Now?”
    “Now.”
    She turned, undid the first button.
    “Slowly,” the boy said. “I want my shirt back slowly.”

Chapter Seven
    T hey lay in bed, separated by nothing for hours, and there were times when Anna swore she could feel the boundaries of her skin loosen and dissolve, times when she felt his secrets slip under her tongue and rest there. How he slept: on his back, his arms thrown over his head. What moved him: the flight paths of birds—there was one directly over her house, she’d never noticed—the exact spot where the Rio Hondo crashed into the Rio Grande and there gave up its soul with a visible shudder. The way he used his fork and knife, with surgical, suffocating precision, contrasted to the way he held his beer, with a slack wrist. The nearly mechanical steadiness of his young breath. His long, long silences—empty spaces strikingly void of expectation, placid parentheses in which his need for words simply disappeared.
    “Tell me what you’re thinking,” she would ask him.
    “Later.”
    “Tell me something.”
    “Later.”
    In the silence of the house, his mysteries became her own. The childhood dreams he had of becoming an astronaut until he heard David Bowie describe Major Tom’s cold drift into space. The realization, early in high school, that a particle behaved differently if observed or left alone.
    “Where’d you read that?” Anna asked.
    “In every physics book printed since Heisenberg.”
    “Who’s Heisenberg?”
    “The guy who ran the experiment.”
    “What experiment?”
    “An electron coming through an opening either as a particle or as a wave depending if somebody is watching.”
    “You’re making this up.”
    “Why would I make something like this up?”
    “Because you’re a kid. Kids make stuff up.”
    “Yeah?” he said, sliding one finger under her bra strap. “What kind of stuff?”
      
    Late in the morning one day, he let his forearm fall heavily over his eyes and said, “I used to think I had the best father in the world.