“Nothing went back to bed as commanded. Praying wide-eyed in the darkness, he begged El Coco to give him a coconut head. What a gift! An insensate skull that hurt the fists that struck it! A skull with no tear ducts, no ears, no blood and no brain, and hardly a face to speak of! He couldn’t be punished for making the wrong face anymore.
“Nothing couldn’t see a thing in the dark, but he felt an extra darkness fill the room. ‘Por supuesto, mi niño,’ said El Coco.
“When Nothing awoke the next morning, it wasn’t the next morning. It was a year later. He had passed a pleasant twelve months, the best he could remember, though the details were hazy. He remembered a beautiful beach on a secluded island. From a high perch, he’d watched waves plashing gently on the shore, day and night. Also, he’d watched his own body run around the beach, happily unburdened of its head. His body seemed to love to run and play in the sand. Sometimes the body would stop, turn to “face” him, and then wave. He’d smile, but say nothing, for he was still Nothing. But more and more he started feeling sparks of the littlest somethings swarm his mind like fireflies. More and more he felt the urge to tell his body, ‘I want to play, too.’
“When he finally did speak again, a year later, it was in a psychologist’s office. He did not know how he had gotten there, or that he’d been ‘missing’ all that time. His parents had been arrested; he was now a ward of the state. Judging by the psychologist’s face, his reply had nothing to do with what the psychologist had asked him.
What Nothing had said was, ‘Thank you, Coco.’ Then, fearing El Coco might only know Spanish, he added, ‘Muchisimas gracias.’ ”
El Cuento de How Connie Reacted to el Cuento de How I Met El Coco
Connie came flying around the table and took my head in her arms and wept in my hair. “I didn’t know,” she said between sobs. “I’m so sorry. I am never calling you that, that lie again. Why would you do this to yourself? Not ‘nada’! Not ‘no’! You hear me? Tell me your name! Your real name!”
“Nádano,” was all I could tell her. “That’s who I am now. That’s all the name that’s left for me.”
El Cuento de How Prudencia Reacted to el Cuento de How I Met El Coco
My baby reaches up from the Sick Bay table to play with my face, so I stoop lower to let her. I pretend to eat her fingers, and it’s the most fun she’s ever had in her entire life. Her neck giggles. “I summoned El Coco then,” I say, “just like I summoned him now.”
“If this were a therapy session,” Prudencia says, even as her keel, “we could have all sorts of productive sessions discussing all the ways you’re still haunted by your parents. But this is an emergency, Nádano. We don’t have time for—”
“Myths?” I stroke my baby’s coconut cheek. “Legends, fables, old wives’ tales? Like the tale my daughter’s become?”
Distrust makes Prudencia’s silence palpable. Everything is suspect: me, the order of things, herself especially. “What do we do?” she asks flatly.
Have you ever looked at your child with so much love you felt like you’d split in two, and it would be okay to die because you’d only be a soul then, and a soul is made of pure love? I pick up my baby girl, hold her before me in my outstretched arms. She looks right at me with those dark, astonished eyes. “Please, take me to you, Coco.”
The coconut on my baby’s body nods, just once, slowly. Then it tilts back on my baby’s neck, looks up. Farther back, further up, farther and further, back and up, until the coconut rolls down my baby’s back and strikes the floor.
“Ah!” screams Prudencia.
“It’s okay,” I tell her.
But is it? The coconut starts rolling away.
My baby’s body wriggles in my outstretched arms. I study her; her neck is sealed with a seamless plateau of new skin. She seems fine, except, judging by the way she’s reaching out her hands, she wants her papi to hold her close.
You got it, baby girl. I embrace her, and together we go follow the coconut.
El Cuento de Follow That Coconut!
It knows where it’s going. It takes a left through the galley and waits for me to open a door on the opposite end. It goes through the doorway and stops before the stairs that lead to the deck. Coconut wants up, apparently.
I put on a windbreaker hanging on a hook by the stairs—tricky when holding a baby—then pick up the coconut and carry it up the stairs in one hand, my baby in the other. I go up slowly, and have to hold the coconut between my knees to open the hatch to the deck.
Sea spray, salt, the wild roar and the relentless blue of the Pacific Ocean. It’s hot, and it shouldn’t be, this time of year, this far from the equator. The sky is clear, and the sun is painful. I’m always freshly bewildered when I emerge from belowdecks.
I kneel and place the coconut on the deck. It starts rolling toward the bow. I tuck my baby girl inside my jacket, leaving only her neck to peek out, and follow the coconut, walking fast.
It tumbles end over end, gaining speed, dodging obstacles by going around or tossing itself over them. For a finale, it catapults itself overboard.
When I peer over the edge, I see the coconut cutting a wake in the water, due west.
I walk as quickly as is safe—two arms around my tucked daughter—across the deck and to the helm.
There, I place my baby girl gently on the floor and let her crawl around. I flip a switch to speak to Prudencia. “Follow that coconut, Prudie. Follow it wherever it goes.”
El Cuento de Nádano Has a Terrible Idea
“How’s school?” I asked Connie. I’d called to see how her midterms were going. It had to be a voice-only call from the breachdive, since I was so far out at sea.
Connie sighed. “Oh, they’re trying to kill me with papers, Papi.”
She called me Papi now, instead of my name. I liked it. “Yep, sounds like college,” I said.
“Grad school,” she corrected.
“Yeah, like I said, college.”
She snorted. “You’re just jealous because you never went to college.”
I pulled my head back, confused. “What do you mean? We went to school together.”
“You majored in Marine Affairs. That doesn’t count. I mean, what kind of degree is Marine Affairs? It sounds like you learned how to cheat on your wife with fish.”
Ha! She was being playful, not overly nice or careful. I was becoming a person she could joke with again. The time away actually was helping us. “Well, guess whose degree is paying for your fancy master’s program? So you just say ‘Thank you, Papi, for letting me follow my dreams.’ ”
“You’re right,” she said, suddenly a lot more tired. “This is my dream.”
I didn’t want the fun to end. I tried to salvage the moment. “Hey, it’s not that bad, is it?”
She took some seconds to reply. I imagined she was doing the tension-headache eye-rub. “Ela’s been crying.”
“Crying? What do you mean?”
“You know, tears, bemba like a diving board, uncontrollable wailing, crying?”
“But why? Is she sick? Have you—?”
“If you ask me if I’ve taken her to a doctor I’m going to scream.”