The Town of Babylon Read online

  Copyright © 2022 by Alejandro Varela

  All rights reserved. Copying or digitizing this book for storage, display, or distribution in any other medium is strictly prohibited.

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, please contact [email protected].

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Astra House

  A Division of Astra Publishing House

  astrahouse.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Varela, Alejandro, 1979- author.

  Title: The town of Babylon : a novel / Alejandro Varela.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Astra House, [2022] |

  Summary: “When his father falls ill, Andrés, a professor of public health, returns to his suburban hometown to tend to his father’s recovery. Reevaluating his rocky marriage in the wake of his husband’s infidelity and with little else to do, he decides to attend his twenty-year high school reunion, where he runs into the long-lost characters of his youth. Jeremy, his first love, is now married with two children after having been incarcerated and recovering from addiction. Paul, who Andrés has long suspected of having killed a man in a homophobic attack, is now an Evangelical minister and father of five. And Simone, Andrés’s best friend, is in a psychiatric institution following a diagnosis of schizophrenia. During this short stay, Andrés confronts these relationships, the death of his brother, and the many sacrifices his parents made to offer him a better life. A novel about the essential nature of community in maintaining one’s own health, The Town of Babylon is an intimate portrait of queer, racial, and class identity, a call to reevaluate the ties of societal bonds and the systems in which they are forged”—Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021043855 (print) | LCCN 2021043856 (ebook) | ISBN 9781662601033 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781662601040 (epub)

  Subjects: LCSH: Homecoming—Fiction. | Class reunions—Fiction. | Communities—Fiction. | LCGFT: Novels.

  Classification: LCC PS3622.A7413 T69 2022 (print) | LCC PS3622.A7413 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021043855

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021043856

  First edition

  Design by Richard Oriolo

  The text is set in Dante Regular.

  The titles are set in Chubb Regular.

  To my parents—Maria, Ernesto, and Miriam—for the running start

  To Matias for the safe landing

  To everyone who does more than they should with less than they deserve

  To those who have never been welcome

  And for all the people who know how to share the damn sidewalk

  CONTENTS

  1. SIDEWALKS

  2. SUBURBS

  3. ITALIAN RESTAURANTS

  4. NUNS

  5. OPEN BAR

  6. HIGH SCHOOL

  7. MOM & DAD

  8. PARKING LOTS

  9. BASEMENTS

  10. BAGELS

  11. HENRY

  12. PEARL JAM

  13. THE NEIGHBORHOOD

  14. LATE-STAGE CAPITALISM

  15. PAUL’S DAD

  16. COUPLES COUNSELING

  17. FRIDAY NIGHTS

  18. SUNDAY MASS

  19. COMMUNITY COLLEGE

  20. MARTYRDOM

  21. THE HOLY SPIRIT

  22. SAINT JOSEPH

  23. MARGARITAS

  24. GETAWAY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  1

  SIDEWALKS

  The alumni newsletter was sitting on my bed atop a small pyramid of neatly folded towels. It had a January postmark, but the glossy pamphlet remained crisp, no doubt due to my mother’s care. On the back, among a scattershot of exclamatory text, it read, “Mark your calendars, Class of ’97! Reunion this July! Check St. Iggy’s Facebook for updates!”

  After mulling it over for a couple days, I visited St. Ignatius’s alumni page this afternoon.

  THE DAY HAS ARRIVED!!! 7 P.M. UNTIL ***WHENEVER***

  (JOE’S RISTORANTE CLOSES AT 11 P.M., BUT DRINKS AT MCCLAIN’S PUB & LOUNGE AFTER!!! LOL. YOLO! RSVP ASAP.)

  I endeavor in life never to be anything more than defensively prejudiced—certainly not haughty—but this sort of unbridled use of capital letters and acronyms should have been omen enough to keep me home.

  * * *

  Over the last twenty years, these reunions had fleeted through my mind on occasion, the way I might envision a free fall or planes crashing into buildings, which is to say briefly and, at times, with a shudder. I feared, in those moments, the possibility of reviving the past, of slipping irretrievably into its grasp—lamenting, obsessing. Something akin to speaking aloud a long-held secret on the verge of being forgotten. Better left forgotten. In a matter of minutes, all of this will change. Twenty years of abstention, of keeping the past where it belongs, will come to an end.

  To complicate matters, I hadn’t packed anything appropriate to wear. Is there a standard attire for this sort of occasion? How does one dress for their past? More specifically, a past inside of a present-day Italian restaurant established in 1975, and since remodeled four times, once by each new owner—Italian, Italian American, Puerto Rican, and most recently an immigrant from Kerala. The communist state of India, Kerala is arguably the healthiest and happiest region in the subcontinent. A state whose successes never seem to appear amid the popular images of Indian poverty, Indian elephants, Indian river-bathing, and Indian yogis. I know very little about India, but if I hadn’t just mentioned this about Kerala, I’d have been as remiss as everyone else.

  Joe’s, the Italian restaurant, is six unformed, halfway-harrowing blocks from my parents’ home, the home of my youth. Six city blocks aren’t much by way of distance. In the city, every block is a microvillage worthy of recognition. Together, six blocks might constitute an entire neighborhood, possibly two, each with its own abiding culture. Here in the suburbs, however, the block is a nearly inconsequential unit of measurement. Here, all movement is coordinate based: the corner of Main and East 6th or behind the Friendly’s or you know, the old yellow house with the POW flag? Distance is also measured in time: twelve minutes door to door or twenty-five minutes without traffic or I did it in under an hour cuz there were no cops. And there is no minimum distance for traveling by car. No one walks anywhere, at any time—especially if the stretch of land in question is a six-lane commercial corridor flanked by incomplete sidewalks and a coarse layer of crushed gravel whose low, Wild-West plumes of gray dust materialize at each step.

  * * *

  The people in the cars zooming past me, if they have taken notice, assume I’m poor, homeless, high, or here illegally, and likely all of the above. If they’ve given me a closer look—fitted, dark green slacks; summery white linen long-sleeve button-down shirt open somewhat seductively to midsternum; brown skin—they might be confused. They might be telling themselves I’m lost or stranded. In their defense, I am the sole person standing on this narrow ledge of pseudo-sidewalk, which ends in about fifty feet. From here, I move onto a borderless tract of wispy grass that appears to have sprouted from the surrounding dirt or from one of the muddy microlagoons that licks its edges, like hair on a pubescent chin or on a dome of advanced age—the alpha or the omega. These anomalous moments of nature are proof that there was once another landscape tucked beneath this capitalist afterthought.

  Everyone is racing. To or from a mall, I presume. To buy or retu
rn something. To eat, to drink, to bowl, to dance, to watch a movie, or just linger. Doesn’t matter if the mall is a short strip with four or five nearly identical, neon-emblazoned storefronts; a behemoth with multiple entrances, food courts, and endless parking; or a sprawling megaplex, as wide as it is gaudy, moated by acres of parking. Doesn’t matter. Everyone is eager to get there, which is of particular consequence to me because to reach Joe’s, the Italian restaurant, I’ll have to wait on the tip of this islet for a breach in traffic.

  At least it’s summer. At least the dusky sky is a distracting swirl of pinks, oranges, and purples spreading upward from the horizon, as if there were a fire in the distance. A fire that is more or less under control. At least.

  * * *

  It’s almost 8 P.M., and there’s a slow drip from my armpits. If I back out now, no one will be the wiser—I didn’t RSVP. I require only a modicum of temerity and a plan. The route home is simple: turn around, circumnavigate the archipelago of sidewalk islands, cut through one football field–sized parking lot, then camp out at the Applebee’s until my parents have gone to bed. Or I could head straight home now, admit defeat, and sit in front of the television set with my father, who’s probably going to die soon—not today, but sooner than later.

  “We’ve excised all of the damaged portions of his large intestine. But his fatty liver and diabetes require care, beginning with a reduction in carbohydrates, salt, beer, and wine,” my father’s doctor explained in the waiting room, nearly three weeks ago. She had a rock climber’s steely frame and the matter-of-fact cadence of a small-town mechanic, which left us believing that everything would be okay for now, but one day, it wouldn’t be.

  “Por favor, vente a casa. He listens to you,” my mother pleaded with me last week. “I tell him something, and he says, ‘We’re all going to die someday,’ but when you say it, he listens.”

  “I can come home this weekend.”

  “In the hospital, he promised me he would try, but he’s already eating papa y arroz y esa carne guisada que le gusta tanto. He sneaks away to el Dominicano. Their portions aren’t for old people. Restaurant food is not healthy. And he’s not supposed to be driving.”

  “Mom—”

  “A few nights ago, tomó vino. There wasn’t much left, but he’s not allowed to have any wine. I can’t do it on my own. I have to go back to work, and my back hurts from helping him out of bed, off the toilet, in and out of the car. The doctor says it could be months until he has his strength again.”

  “Mom, I said yes.”

  “Oh, mi amor! Gracias! You’re so good to us. Will Marco come, too?”

  “No. I told you, he has his work trip.”

  “Oh! I forgot—”

  “It’s fine. It didn’t make sense for me to travel with him. He’ll be busy.”

  After a brief pause and some audible breathing, my mother asked if everything was okay between us.

  “Yeah. Of course.”

  “Well, you know your relationship better than I do,” she said, with an omniscient tenor that was more irksome than comforting.

  * * *

  A small fissure in the traffic continuum opens up. I won’t have to sprint, but neither can I cross the six lanes at my leisure. There’s no median; the friable pavement is pocked with faint, atavistic yellows and whites that suggest it hasn’t been painted in years, lanes barely delineated one from the other, enticing everyone to swerve by omission. I scurry across like a tense squirrel, lacking the blitheness of my youth, when I was one of a small gang who’d bisect these lanes on low-end ten-speeds, mindlessly returning with sharp words and empty threats the vitriol of the horns and hostilities speeding past.

  I’m here.

  The restaurant’s parking lot, an open-air grid of ten by ten, is halfway filled with gargantuan metal boxes, all of them recently washed and buffed, catching the twilight in their veneers. In this town, one’s face to the world is their vehicle. A sleek ride can effectively belie or, at the very least, undercut perceived inadequacies. It can make a shitty life interstitially magnificent. It’s been this way since I can remember. Rims, tinted glass, and speaker systems were the reason my friends had jobs in high school. A few traded respectable Jesuit universities far from here for used sports cars—bribes from their parents, in order to avoid private and out-of-state tuitions. For a high school reunion, a car wash is as essential as a new outfit, a haircut, or weight loss.

  The restaurant, nondescript and industrial in appearance, abuts a paintball arcade, which is next door to a pool supply store, which shares a lot with a window-siding manufacturer, which is across a narrow side street from a tile company, all of them empty and slatted in the same eggshell-colored vinyl. At the end of this bland chain of businesses is the red-marqueed Uncle Billy’s, the electronics store where we’d buy our TVs, VCRs, CD players, refrigerators, microwaves, and washing machines, and where my brother worked as a stock boy in high school, and then a salesman. It’s where he died.

  Uncle Billy’s is run by Uncle Ikbir, who gives my parents the same underwhelming 5 percent discount he’s been giving them for the last twenty-odd years. Ikbir has a long, wooly beard and wears a marshmallow-white turban. When he first arrived in this country, he drove a taxi in the city. One night, a coked-out day trader wrote him a five-hundred-dollar check to drive him to the suburbs. Ikbir took notice of how much bigger and greener everything was out here. After dropping the passenger off in his ritzy village, Ikbir got lost and drove twenty miles in the wrong direction, until he happened upon our insignificant town. By then, the sun was coming up, and he could see that the houses were smaller, had ricketier fences, less grass, and were more densely laid out than those he had just seen in the banker’s hamlet, but they remained significantly more spacious and private than the fifty-unit apartment building in the city where Ikbir had been living. Not long after that fateful taxi ride into the suburbs, Ikbir picked up and moved to a nearby town. He brought his wife over from Pakistan some years later. A year after that, Uncle Billy sold him the store. According to my brother, Ikbir recounted this origin story every year as part of his staff pep talk during the holiday season. In the early nineties, Ikbir briefly considered changing the store’s name to Uncle Ikbir’s, but the US had just invaded Iraq because Iraq had invaded Kuwait, and he worried that no one would know the difference between the Middle East and Punjab, and that his name would be bad for business.

  * * *

  If I dawdle outside of Joe’s long enough, someone will walk past and recognize me, and I’ll be forced to go inside. I may do just that: wait until I have no choice.

  This indecisiveness would have amused my brother. Don’t be such a chickenshit, he might have said. He switched from fag to chickenshit after I told him I was gay. This was typical of Henry; when I least expected it, he was a good big brother. In fact, when I told him I was worried about coming out to our parents, he came out to them instead—“to test the waters”—a couple of years before I came out to them. After a week, Henry told them he’d been kidding. “Mom was pissed, but dad thought it was funny,” he later explained.

  My brother was the kind of person who could never muster the courage to ask for a raise or a promotion, who quit several jobs by simply not showing up, who never raised his hand in class, who refused to give simple explanations that would have otherwise extricated him from complicated situations, and who rarely defended himself when it mattered, but he had no problem attending his high school reunion. He didn’t stay in touch with many of the friends he’d had back then, but he longed for those years anyway. At some point after high school, which by all measures he’d detested during the actual living of it, nostalgia became his default emotional state. Until the day he died, he referred to that era, sincerely, as the “good old times.” As if his remembrances were palliative. My theory: the misery of his adulthood was an order of magnitude greater than the misery of his youth, and over time, less miserable somehow transformed into “good old times.” In fact, it rank
led my brother that I didn’t recall our youth more fondly. As if my memories risked contaminating, or in some way invalidating, his.

  “The problem is you think you’re better than everyone,” he said, the month before his heart attack. He’d said it to me dozens of times before, but this time, he was matter-of-fact about it, and he punctuated it with, “And you probably are.”

  Better isn’t a fair or apt description of how I view myself. I don’t think I’m intrinsically better or more important than anyone else, but I admit that I consider myself … something. Correct, maybe. After all, I did the things we were supposed to do. I did my homework. I got good grades. I seldom disobeyed my parents. I applied to college. I got into college. I went to graduate school. I got a job teaching at a university. I put down 25 percent for my small apartment. I don’t own a car. I buy my produce at the farmers market. I speak three languages well, and a few others so-so. I support a nationalized health service, alternatives to incarceration, and a tripling of the minimum wage. I use LED bulbs. I don’t cheat. I avoid high-fructose corn syrup, and I keep plastics out of the dishwasher and refrigerator. I turn the water off while I lather my hands. I consume media created almost exclusively by anyone other than cisgender, able-bodied white men. I apologize when I’m wrong and I try to do better. I vote for the Green Party in the primary and the Democrat in the general election. I wait for my husband to orgasm before I do.

  I don’t, however, consider myself unique or better. I’m doing the bare minimum. And the bare minimum should have been enough, collectively speaking. It was meant to add up. Instead, here we are, in a gas-guzzling wasteland bereft of sidewalks but with a surfeit of old sports cars on cinder blocks tucked beneath blue tarps.

  I might be wrong. About all of it. I often get worked up about these things and later realize that I haven’t left sufficient room for the fullness of humanity or for the consequences of history. It’s my way.