And you added, you really did, the idiotic phrase was already buzzing in your head, what you’d lob at that Nuyorican journalist, that it would be “an epic masterpiece, my best book ever.”
But then Jeremy had mentioned that a source of his at Homeland Security—couldn’t reveal the name, confidentiality, and all that—said that reports were circulating about a Homeland Security agent who was gaming the system, he and his wife, so the story went, had hidden away a large group of kids in their home, given them false identities as a way of protecting them from predators, or from being deported. No real evidence that he and his wife even exist, Jeremy observed glumly, an urban legend. You had not responded—or rather, responded by growing quiet, eerily so after your long, earnest diatribe of mere minutes ago.
Because the wheels of your imagination were churning like mad on that plane, the main threads of the novel were already weaving themselves into place, and by the time you arrived at your Amsterdam Avenue apartment you told Cindy in a non-stop dance of words the skeleton of a plot, though not quite uninterrupted, as your wife intervened from time to time, encouraged you, goaded you on, but mainly it was a one- person bravura performance. Two hours, that’s all it took for the story to be mapped out.
You turned that mythical, probably made-up Homeland Security agent that Jeremy had briefly mentioned, into Charlie, a widower with vaguely Latino origins, who brings one of the lost kids home with him on a visit, just to give the little tyke some relief, play baseball or whatever, but this childless, lonely man is so enchanted with the lovable scamp that he can’t bear to part with him. And now, Charlie is hooked. If one, why not two? Why not another one? Why not more? Until he ends up with a house full of mischievous brats, like waifs in Dickens—or John Irving, Cindy had enthusiastically intervened—, former street kids—like you, like you, Arcadio, she said, and you had agreed, yes, yes, like the ones I met and left behind, imagining they made the trek north like I did. And like me and my mates, experts at conning people, playing tricks, looking innocent but dedicated to extricating money from adults, conning them, but this time directed by Charlie, that good-hearted Fagin. Using the funds they scurry back to him to bribe agents so they’ll look the other way, these ever more elaborate scams allow Charlie to accept still more kids and feed and clothe them, cheaper by the dozen, madcap mayhem. Oh, you were happy, laughing like a little lad, as you designed each incident, as happy as Charlie himself, who was brought up in a foster home and never knew his parents and is now taking care of kids as desperate as he once was. Each niño, you informed Cindy—you were still pacing up and down—each niño from a different nation in the hemisphere. Where else than in the United States could representatives of so many Latin American republics gather under a single roof? Orphans, you exclaimed, making a journey like mine so long ago, fleeing from poverty and violence, as resourceful as I used to be. As hesitantly open to what was jubilant and raucous about the land of jazz and opportunity that was adopting them, even if the adoption was fragile and accomplished by a sham parent. Don’t Latinos have a right to something other than misfortune and sob stories and catastrophes?
And over the next seven months you wrote chapter after chapter of your roguish, picaresque novel, full of fun and pratfalls, until the day when you read those first hundred pages to Cindy and you realized, by how she reacted, you realized by how your voice was faltering, you both realized that there was a problem.
Not only that such antics risked becoming monotonous and repetitive, but that these playful adventures entailed no consequences. What was lacking in the novel was some sort of peril, Cindy noted, and agreed with you that it shouldn’t be too dark and dire, but the suspense had to be ratcheted up as to whether Charlie and his brood would be caught and exposed. Someone in the shadows has a scheme to destroy this wonderful family. Or maybe, Cindy suggests, fascists take over the U.S. government and start mass deportations, and you shook your head, that couldn’t happen here, the Democrats might not be perfect on immigration but they would never do anything like that, and as to Republicans, they were toast, Trump could not survive all the court cases and investigations and lawsuits, no, there was a reason why he had abandoned the novel, It Did Happen Here, the threat has to be credible, breathe some verisimilitude. Okay, okay, Cindy conceded, nothing drastic, simply a moment when Charlie and the niños are in danger, then the question arises: who can they turn to?