Having left the house only a few minutes prior, Alex knows they are on Kimberlina, the two-lane road that leads east toward the freeway. On either side of the road are fields of roses, hiding in the darkness of predawn. He can’t smell them, can only smell wet dirt, but he knows they’re there. That makes him feel better. The roses are familiar to him since forever.

How it is with things unfamiliar, going to Los Angeles makes him nervous. He has seen it only once, through the windows, one December when they drove through and kept driving until arriving to Tangancícuaro, Michoacán. México.

That time he was squished with his brothers Meño and Horacio in the back (little Luis Angel was stuffed between their parents on the front seats) plus all the things crammed into the feet space and piled up around them like they were having a garage sale inside the car: old clothes for cousins, blenders and toasters for the aunts, department store fabric for the grandma, a set of brandy snifters for the grandpa, enough coolers packed with food to survive the three-day drive.

Now in the dusty Cadillac are only Alex and his parents. This trip might be the only time he’s privileged enough to lay out. That is why Alex is lying down on the backseat, trying to smell roses in the dark. He stretches his legs, his jeans rustling against cracked leather. His movements prompt his mother to switch on the yellow ceiling lamp. He closes his eyes and pretends he’s asleep. His mother leaves the lamp on. When he knows she’s turned around, Alex slowly opens his eyes. 

His mother leans forward a bit in the passenger seat, watching the road in front of her. She’s wearing the green silk dress she wears to church. Her eyes are like Alex’s—dark and round and oftentimes sad. She has had the appointment scheduled since three weeks before. The whole time everyone expected something to change maybe, but even if something had changed, Alex knows his mother would not have cancelled. She herself had declared it a miracle to have secured an appointment. She had called, stumbling through conversation, looking for words in English, until finally being connected with someone who would listen.

“Are you sure you know how to get there?” Alex’s mother now says in Spanish. “The city being so vast and divided into parts we’ve never been to.”

Alex’s father has draped the driver’s seat with a blanket so that no grime rubs off on his clothes. He too wears his Sunday best: clean white cowboy shirt, polyester pants, armadillo boots.

“Yes,” he says. “I studied maps.”

Alex can’t see him from where he’s lying and he prefers it that way. His father is serious, has many rules, Alex is always breaking one or another. Seen from a certain point of view, Alex’s entire life has been a series of avoidances: avoiding anything that might lead him into his father’s jurisdiction.

His mother turns off the ceiling lamp. It’s dark again, no light but the kind that gently beams: from headlights of wandering cars, from crowns of lonely light poles, from occasional roadside warnings for tractors.

They merge onto the 99 freeway going south. The Cadillac bumps with new velocity. The black night is invaded by light poles. They are whizzing by on either side. Through the windows, amber colors sweep everything, everything becomes a mirror—the car seats, the ceiling, his mother’s hair.

Then there are billboards. Alex sees his favorite sign: BURGER KING. The thought of biting into a Whopper and sipping on a Coke makes his throat clench. He jolts upright and looks through the back window, wanting to see again the image: gold seeded buns, crisp green lettuce, the juicy brown patty in the middle. But the billboard has its back turned to him now and the sensation of the road moving away gives him vertigo. So he turns around again and sits firmly on the seat’s center. He accepts the hunger in his stomach as if it was a friend.

He skims the dashboard and looks through the windshield into the beyond. He can’t see them now but remembers that after a long stretch of flatland there will be mountains to traverse.

Alex knows he is the reason for their appointment. This fills him with tremendous guilt. He wonders what might transpire in Los Angeles, at the UCLA hospital, with a doctor who speaks Spanish. Will this doctor once and forever solve the mystery of his illness?

◆

The local doctors didn’t speak Spanish. Sometimes the nurses did, but they tended to translate loosely what the doctors would dictate in English. With no correct communication between parents and doctors, little progress could be made regarding the mystery of Alex’s illness.

During the final appointment with a local doctor, Alex sat waiting atop crinkly paper on an examining bed, browsing the wall posters, seeing what the pink insides of people look like, remembering what it was like to have red chicken poxes itching on his face and butt cheeks. Strange apparatuses were on the walls too, but these were less interesting to him: the poky handheld ear inspector, the arm squeezer bag machine, telephone. These things were the same in every room. The colorful posters on the other hand varied. They seemed to want to teach things about crescent-shaped blood cells, sad babies with yellow eyes, spine bones sticking together like Legos.

Eventually, a doctor in a white lab coat walked through the door, staring down into a chart. Inside the chart there were no positive test results, no indications of traces of impressions of links to evidence of a bacterial infection or a parasitic agent or a similarly toxic mechanism. There were only descriptions of pain written in shorthand.

“Alejandro, hi. How are you feeling today? Hmm?” the doctor said in English.

Alex cupped his belly, his lower lip jutting out.

“My stomach hurts.”

The doctor pressed: “Alejandro, what’s your favorite food?”

These lines of questioning were familiar to him.

“My name is Alex,” he said. “I like pizza.”

            “If I had some pizza for you, would you eat it?”

“No.”

            “Why not?”

            “Because my stomach hurts.”

His parents sat patiently though not as patiently as they had during their appointment with the previous doctor. Alex’s father in particular doubted that any doctor could help. What he believed in were corrections and the biggest problem was the fact that Alex was missing school. He sat in on the appointment brooding, a denim-clad statue with crusted leather work boots. 

After a brief interview during which his parents said little to the nurse interpreter, the doctor explained the next course of action: a referral to a gastroenterologist—who happened to speak Spanish—at a hospital named UCLA. The doctor explained further: if the President of the United States were to need emergency medical care in Southern California, this is the hospital a helicopter would take him to. Alex sensed a shift in the way these appointments usually went. After several unsuccessful treatment plans, the doctor seemed to imply that this gastroenterologist was the highest doctor in the chain of command. He would have advanced technologies, salient theoretical frameworks, healthy budgets, and otherwise: the means and the methods for treating Alex’s illness. 

After he was done speaking, the doctor exited with an air of authority that seemed to linger in the room. With the bilingual nurse still available to them, Alex’s father asked, “Do you think he should go back to school?” But the decision was left to his parents. They walked out through the waiting room with papers in their hands, Alex’s father fuming about him missing school, his mother reiterating the doctor’s instructions for securing an appointment.

Alex held his mother’s hand and tried to ignore his parents’ bickering. It was the same as always, but he knew one thing was different. Soon, there would be an answer to the question: What’s wrong with Alex?

◆

The gastroenterologist quietly opens the door and enters without speaking, placing his index finger over his lips and winking playfully at Alex’s parents. Alex is standing on a chair and playing with wooden sticks and cotton swabs on the counter. Cotton and wood stick figures are dancing with each other.

“Good morning,” he says in Spanish. “It’s a pleasure.”

Alex stops his playing.

“I’m the doctor. Carlos Cruz.”

He wears an emerald long sleeve button-up, the hems tucked neatly into a pair of dark khakis, creases down the centers of each pant leg. Layers of black and white hair—the same speckled colors as his beard—stand atop his oval face. The plastic frame of his eyeglasses is like the skin of a jaguar.

“How may we help you?” Dr. Cruz says.

Alex’s parents are taken aback. An awkward silence. Normally, the presence of Spanish is enough to stimulate their need for communication. Perhaps they didn’t expect someone as young and animated as the man who now stands before them. Perhaps his Spanish is distinct and they for a moment need to consider possible origins of his tongue, in order to properly speak with him.

“Well,” Alex’s mother finally says. “Let me tell you what you already know from the chart. A long time now—three months—we’ve had this problem of Alex’s stomach hurting. We’ve gone to various doctors and specialists, but nothing. It doesn’t go away.”

She explains everything, describes nights when she holds Alex’s hand as he jiggles and jolts every time the monster inside tries to kick down the walls.

“I imagine it’s been difficult for everyone,” Dr. Cruz says.

“You can’t begin to imagine,” Alex’s father now says. “So difficult.”

The doctor swivels on his feet, then rolls a chair toward Alex and stops. He sits down with his legs spread, straddling the chair’s backrest.

He continues his line of questioning. 

“And what do you say?”

Alex looks up from his cotton and wood stick figures. He narrows his eyes into the doctor’s glasses. There’s a fallen D imprinted on each lens. Clearly different somehow, they’re hanging near the lower rims. Alex supposes that the D is what the doctor looks through when he reads. Having understood this detail, he looks past: the man’s eyes are black holes. Staring into those spaces, Alex feels waves of fear. He suddenly recognizes the doctor as the villain from Dos Mujeres Un Camino, the evening soap opera that inspired him to practice kissing by pressing his lips against the bathroom mirror. Unable to take back the connections in his mind, Alex begins to search for an explanation. He finds one—

This foo is different.

Relieved, he climbs down from the chair and scoots toward his mother.

Dr. Cruz observes him. Then he stands up and says, “Come and lie down, Alex. We’re going to help you.”

He rustles the examining bed’s paper with the palm of his hand. He waits, then pats again. The second time, Alex climbs the bed’s steps and sits with his legs dangling over the edge.

The doctor walks over to the black phone stuck to a wall. He presses a number then speaks into the receiver: “My Gloria. Can you come in and help? Yeah. No, right now. Room 112. Okay. Ciao.”

He hangs up and pulls the bed’s extension out from beneath Alex’s legs. Alex leans back and as soon as his head touches the mattress he hears the door open then close just as quickly.

Gloria appears with a surgical mask on the lower half of her face. She pulls a blue sheet off of a cart that had been pushed into a corner. On the cart lie plastic tubes and a bulky machine not unlike the things that had once been used to insert a tube into his rectum. The plastic snake had pumped volumes of a metallic liquid he later violently expelled. The procedure produced ghostly images that showed the black and white contours of his stomach and intestines. Now, it appears that Alex has been delivered to Los Angeles only to repeat a previous nightmare.

Goddang you, disgracefuls.

Alex bats his eyelids and swallows shallow breaths, wanting to erase titanic pressure he feels on head and chest. Gloria positions bright lights over his face. She lifts the hem of his shirt past his belly, motions for Alex’s parents to approach the bed. She pulls her mask down and whispers into their ears. They all appear to agree as Gloria slaps the rubber skin of her gloves against her wrists.

“Mmm,” she says and feels Alex’s stomach. “It hurts right here? How bout here? Mmm. And here?”

Her face is in shadow and Alex can’t see eyes, only gray fuzz surrounded by light. The machine beeps then whirrs. He feels Gloria touch more and then stop. His shoulders shake. His chest heaves.

“Don’t move,” Gloria says.

Alex forces his eyes shut so that not even the high megawatt lightbulbs can peep through the darkness. He hears everyone stop whispering. Nothing moves.

“Whatever evil is in here,” Gloria says. “It’s going to come out right this instant.”

God, please…

Alex feels Gloria’s nose dig into his stomach, the woman’s lips trilling against the fat, tickling him. His parents’ strong fingers sneak under his shirt, poke his armpits and relentless, Alex kicks his little legs. He presses against Gloria’s hair and cackles. His head squirms snakelike and his mouth sings, “Stop! Ahaha! I can’t breathe!”

For a moment, it seems as if Alex has indeed stopped breathing, as if there’s no more air for him to breathe. His neck and facial muscles are frozen, his gaping mouth emits no sounds. Eyes ablaze with light, his expression is stuck in a clownish trance, as if he’s just died and a flash of rigor mortis has captured the silly intensity with which he lived his final heartbeat.

Gloria of the cakey eyelashes, painted eyebrows, finishes tickling, then walks out with the mask back on her face.

After everyone stops laughing, Dr. Cruz reconfigures the bulky machine into the room’s corner. He retrieves the clipboard Gloria left and gives a sheet of paper to Alex’s parents. He explains treatments Alex received and their outcomes: no alleviation of symptoms as of yet. He declares that in his scientific opinion something physiological isn’t wrong and that more testing is unnecessary.

“What do you all think?”

“What about school?” Alex’s mother says. “Should he go back to school?”

“Yes. There’s nothing contagious about him. My prediction is he will start feeling better once he goes back. If he doesn’t, call me. We can talk about other options. I have a feeling this is a case in which a child doesn’t enjoy school, so begins searching for a clever way to avoid it. He seems to have found one with this neverending story about his stomach.”

“You mean he was acting?” Alex’s father now says.

“It’s perfectly normal. We see children do it all the time.”

“I don’t like that.”

“I only need you to sign some papers,” Dr. Cruz says. “In one moment I’ll return.”

The doctor walks to the doorway and through it, singing the lyrics to a ballad from an earlier time in México.

Alex remains on the bed, still slightly giggly, returning to his senses. His parents are there, but they seem distant, lost in their thoughts or perhaps stunned into silence by the doctor’s declarations. 

He looks around. The room is unlike the other rooms. The other rooms were decorated with diagrams of bodies and diseases. The walls in Dr. Cruz’s room are adorned by nature. 

Inside an old wood frame, there’s a painting of an evergreen forest next to a frozen winter pond. Another one shows a red maple leaf. The picture that Alex fixates on is a photograph adhering to the cupboard above the counter where he’d been playing. In it, at the foot of a mountain, a curtain of trees lines the shore of a greenish blue lagoon.

◆

Over the course of three months, various charts had been filled with documentation, but no one except Alex knew the cause of his illness. Every morning, he had told everyone his stomach hurt, but he had never said why. It might’ve made things better to do so, but Alex didn’t think about this. He only thought about how difficult saying something would be. Even if he had tried, how could he have explained English things in Spanish and Spanish things in English? It wouldn’t’ve made sense. So he hadn’t. He hadn’t told anyone about the day his stomach pains began.

That day had not been his first time in English class, but it would be his last. Up until that day, the books he had read made sense. He enjoyed reading in English. It was weird and exciting. From one of his favorite books, for example, he understood that in English boys played with dogs that weren’t tied up. From another: girls had permission to go anywhere. He didn’t say these things out loud. He didn’t have to. He simply had to read.

That last day of school for Alex, the books the teacher called workbooks arrived to their classroom.

“To help us all learn English,” she had said.

The sleek workbooks were filled with black and white pages called worksheets. On the first worksheet there was a story, but it wasn’t complete. It was called an excerpt. At the end of the excerpt there were questions. Alex and his classmates had to write answers to these questions on a sea of blank lines.

Alex felt sick. He wanted to vomit on the carpet.

“No te preocupes,” his best friend Lencho reassured him. “I’m gonna get the answers from that foo Al.”

Because Al was good at English, Lencho, then Alex, copied. When they got their sheets back that same day, a big bold F was stamped near the top. Al’s answers were wrong. For homework, they had to correct their sheets and bring them back the next day.

After school, Lencho threw his sheet into a trash can and ran home. Alex, on the other hand, held his in his palms. Fat red marks were splattering the paper. He felt a shudder near the top of his abdomen.

The teacher knows we copied? She’s going to tell my parents?

Alex knew what happened when someone did something bad. An entire army of people might punish you. Cops. The Devil. God. The principal. The vice principal. All the farmers who owned all the fields that surrounded the town.

When he got home, he went inside the bathroom and sat on the toilet. Staring at his worksheet, the paper would tremble, and he had to breathe deeply for it to stop. Unable to concentrate, he decided to sit elsewhere. He wiped himself and pulled his pants up, sat on the rim of the tub as if it were a bench.

Finally, he read the instructions. He did what they told him to do. At first it was easy. He simply had to read the excerpt. It was about a boy who jumped into a river. A rope tethered from his waist to a nearby tree was preventing him from being carried away by the current.

Reading wasn’t enough. The instructions wanted Alex to cut out a sentence, then explain something about the sentence. In class, he hadn’t wanted to do that. Alone in the bathroom now, he knew he’d have to dissect the excerpt as the instructions told him to.

He started rereading, holding words on his lips for several seconds. He did this for the entirety of the excerpt: a whole paragraph. Once finished, he repeated the process. After many minutes, he began imagining the scene he read about. He saw that the rope that kept the boy from being carried away was brown and tied to the trunk of an oak tree. The oak tree’s leaves were orange. Its gnarled trunk almost touched the water from where it stood on the embankment. 

The air smelled of wood smoke and the mist that the river spewed up made Alex’s skin tighten and tingle. He wanted to hug the tree for warmth, but its bark was wet and icy.

He could see the boy several feet away in the water. His hair was black and shaggy, like a monkey’s. The boy looked relaxed, as if he were enjoying a game of swimming.

The rope then snapped. The river’s current was forceful. It made the boy begin to drift downriver. Further ahead, he fell into a drop. The water there was a lightning storm; the froth on its surface was white, black, and gray. The boy’s limbs thrashed and then his head sunk. He was dying.

Alex heard knocks on the door.

“Alex.”

His father’s voice boomed.

“Have you finished?”

Alex didn’t know how much time had passed. His worksheet still lay on his lap, bleeding red blotches. He looked up and noticed water drops falling from the sink’s faucet. They were plinking into the drain hole.

“Alex,” his father repeated. “Get out.”

His butt hurt from sitting on the tub’s porcelain, so he got up and stood in front of the toilet. It still smelled. The water was filled with loose brown turds. He quietly dropped the sheet inside. The red ink blurred. The black words of the excerpt faded. Alex’s gray handwriting was erased. He flushed the toilet. After a few seconds, its bowl was clean again.

He opened the door to the hallway. His mother stood in front of him.

“Are you okay?” she said.

He looked at the cracked dirty tiles under his feet. 

“There was blood in my caca,” he said.

She touched his forehead with the back of her hand.

It would not be the last lie he would tell. The following morning and every morning until their appointment in Los Angeles, Alex’s parents believed him when he told them that his stomach hurt. There was something fragile in his eyes that wasn’t there before.