The pin was out. The grenade was live.
But this grenade didn't feel like destruction. It felt like a door.
-e
-e
MARS
My apartment was a system.
This is not a metaphor. My apartment was a literal system, designed and maintained with the same principles I applied to the crease: economy of space, clarity of sight lines, nothing extraneous, nothing unaccounted for.
The living room contained a couch, a coffee table, a turntable, and a shelf of vinyl records organized by genre, then alphabetically by artist, then chronologically by release date. The kitchen contained the equipment necessary to cook the meals in my nutritionist's plan, arranged by frequency of use, with the most-used items in the most accessible positions. The bedroom contained a bed, a nightstand, a lamp. The bathroom contained the minimum.
There were no decorative objects. No art on the walls. No photographs. My mother had noted this during her single visit, a weekend in October during which she had cataloged the emptiness of my apartment with the focused alarm of a woman who believed that a home without photographs was evidence of a spiritual emergency.
"Marcus," she had said, standing in the living room, looking at the blank walls. "Where are the people?"
"I live alone."
"Where are the pictures of the people?"
"On my phone."
"On your phone is not in your home. A phone is a pocket. A home is a statement. Your home says nothing."
"My home says 'efficient.'"
"Your home says 'nobody lives here.' A hotel room says more about its occupant than this apartment."
My mother, Claudia Santos, was not wrong. She was rarely wrong. She was a woman from Belo Horizonte who had married an American musician, raised a son in Miami, taught Portuguese at a community college, and maintained opinions about domestic aesthetics that she delivered with the authority of a person who had been right about everything for fifty-three years and saw no reason to adjust.
She called on Thursdays. This was the schedule. Thursday evenings, after practice, before dinner. The calls lasted between twenty and forty-five minutes depending on the density of the maternal interrogation and whether my father, David Santos, was in the background playing guitar, which he often was, because David Santos existed in a state of permanent musical expression that Claudia had stopped trying to manage approximately thirty years ago.
"Marcus. Voce esta bem?"
"Estou bem, Mae."
"You sound different."
"I sound the same."
"You sound like you're smiling. You don't smile on Thursdays. Thursdays you sound like a man who has played hockey and is tired. Today you sound like something else."
My mother could hear a smile through a phone from 660 miles away. This was not a goalie trait. This was a mother trait. Specifically a Brazilian mother trait, which operated ona sensory bandwidth that exceeded any analytical framework I had developed.
"I've been skating at a rink in Decatur," I said. "In the mornings."
"You always skate in the mornings. This is not new information."
"There is someone else at the rink."
The pause that followed was approximately three seconds, which in Claudia Santos's conversational rhythm was the equivalent of a standing ovation. My mother did not pause. My mother spoke in continuous streams of Portuguese and English that alternated based on the emotional register of the topic, with Portuguese reserved for love, anger, and cooking, and English for practical matters. A three-second pause meant she was recalculating.
"Someone," she said.
"A figure skater."
