Honesty wells in my throat like a blister, and then, like a blister, bursts. “You’ve helped me more than anybody. Even more than Connie. Of course I trusted you.”
“You’re a good man and a good father,” says Prudencia. “You just have to always remember to get the help you need when you need it.”
“I know, Prudie. That’s exactly what I’m doing right now, following this coconut. I’m getting the help I need.”
The breachdive begins to slow. “I think we’re here, Nádano.”
My baby girl notices, too, stirs in the seat. I stand and grab binoculars.
Ahead of us is a small tropical island. Milky Way sands, palm trees swaying on the shore. Children—scores and scores of them—cavort on the beach, or sculpt the sand, or ponder the biome that forms just where the water crawls toward their feet. Some haven’t learned to walk yet, while others are nearly adults. They must have come from every part of the world, from every culture. The only obvious commonality is that they have no heads.
Only then do I notice the silence. Never have children played so quietly. My guess is that their necks are full of laughter.
Also on the shore stands a naked man, staring at me, waving.
The fingers of his waving hand must be two meters long. He has no sex, no belly button, and no nipples, but his build looks otherwise male, pot-bellied and middle-aged. The knotty fingers of his other hand are so long that they idly scratch the sand at his feet.
And since his head, too, is a coconut—bedraggled and dripping, since it has just come from the ocean, I realize—he looks surprised to see me, even though it’s clear he’s been expecting me.
“Too dangerous,” says Prudencia. I see her camera has turned to the shore. “Don’t go down there, Nádano. Remember what he did to me? Let’s think first. Let’s try to understand what’s happening.”
I pick up my baby girl. “Don’t worry, Prudie. I know what I’m doing.”
“How can anyone know what to do right now? This is . . . It’s . . .”
“You said you trusted me, Prudie,” I said, with one arm bouncing my baby on my hip, and with the other hand snapping my fingers so that she turns the camera back to me. “I know Coco. I’ve been here before. But I won’t go without your permission. I trust your opinion too much. May I have your permission?”
Prudencia thinks. Thinks. El Coco is still waving, tirelessly friendly. And then I hear the gangplank extending. “Okay,” she says. “On one condition.”
“What’s that?”
She wiggles the camera back and forth. “Take me with you.”
I need a moment to understand what she means. But then: of course, the handheld! Why hadn’t I thought of that? “Prudie, you’re a wonder. I’d have you with me always if I could.”
“Aw,” she replies.
It’s a matter of three minutes to go belowdecks to Sick Bay and retrieve the handheld. Carrying my baby girl up and down with me still isn’t easy, but it’s easier. Maybe I’m getting the hang of things a little.
When I’m back on the deck and look out to the island, Coco starts waving again. I walk down the gangplank and onto the shore.
El Cuento de la Reunión de Nádano y El Coco
As I approach El Coco—he stands by himself a little ways off from the playing children—I point the handheld at the palm trees on the edge of the beach. They’re stretching toward the water at 45-degree angles. Clustered beneath their branches are some coconuts, and also some heads of children.
“Do you see them, Prudie?” I ask the handheld. She can’t respond—no speaker on the camera—but the indicator light is on. It’s so important that she witnesses this for herself. There’s no way I could explain to her the faces clustered above me, like putti sculpted into a cathedral ceiling. They’re alive: yawning, sleeping, fully awake. All ages, all genders. Some seem leery of me; others dispassionately track me; still others look on the verge of a smile.
I don’t see my baby girl’s head on any of the trees. “Hello?” I say to them, but none respond. “¿Hola?” doesn’t work, either.
“Once they speak, it’s time for them to return to the world,” El Coco says. I never heard him approach; he’s so close to me he could rip me apart as easily as he had raked through the mainframe, crumpled the wall panel.
My headless baby girl grows restless on my hip. I bounce and rock her. “Is that why you bring them here, Coco?”
El Coco gestures to the frolicking children. “I tend to them. I talk to them, sing to them, run with them, let them show me the shells that they discover. I let them watch their own bodies running and playing, delighting in being alive.”
He holds up his rootlike fingers to me, tapered at their ends like carrots. They grow, erupt, springing forward as fast as flying fireworks, until they can reach the heads hanging clustered on a nearby tree. The heads laugh when touched, lean in to El Coco’s fingers. “I can wipe their tears with my feet still on the ground,” he says. “I stroke their cheeks and remind them how beautiful life is when there’s love.”
I take a deep breath to say what I need to say next. “Ela’s been crying, Coco.”
He turns to me while still stroking the faces of the hanging children. There is such gentleness in his unmoving features. “I know, Julito, I know. Why else would I have come to your family, but to bring you comfort?”
No one has called me Julio since I was a child. Much less Julito. It is—this is impossible but true—fine. It doesn’t hurt.
El Coco lowers his hand, and his fingers retract as fast as tape measures, until they’re only long enough to touch the ground again. He extends that hand to me, and I take it.
His fingers wrap around my bicep like vines. El Coco is careful to leave the handheld in my hand uncovered, though a few fingers, like curious antennae, waver over it, sensing, exploring.
“I know you prefer to work in the dark, Coco,” I say. My voice is more pleading than I had intended. “But I need Prudencia with me. She’s more than a computer. Please don’t take her from me.”
The coconut floats back on El Coco’s shoulders, as if reappraising the handheld. “I can tell. She has grown. She has the mind to see me now, the language.”
Coco stoops so that his coconut looks directly into the lens. “I am sorry for attacking you, Prudencia. I had thought you would steer Julito away from me. Clearly, I underestimated you. But I will make amends. I will help Julito fix you. I can travel anywhere as quick as a thought, you know. I will bring him whatever parts he needs.”
I look at the breachdive, anchored on the beach, and wonder what Prudencia is thinking. I hope she’s okay. If she needs help processing, or just wants to talk, I’ll be there for her. It’s the least I can do for her.
El Cuento de El End of El Cuento
Together, El Coco and I walk among the palms, I bearing my headless baby on my hip. The headless bodies of the children disport all around us. They pay Coco and me no mind, too fully absorbed by the rules of their recondite games. The children’s heads watch their bodies play from the trees, blinking serenely.
“They like you,” says El Coco. “They haven’t been this easy in a long time.”