C4 antho - Chamber Four

~136~ The Chamber Four Fiction Anthology
pointless. What was important was that she was a beautiful
woman, and he had walked out on her. On some days, Ricardo
wondered what she was doing, wondered if his two
sons were being good for their mother. He felt certain they
were not being good. They were boys, and he knew boys at
their age were trouble or about to be trouble. They couldn’t
help it. It was not as if they chose to cause trouble; they just
did. And his wife―she wanted those boys to be good, which
in her eyes meant good in school, good at sports, good at
something. But they would never be good in school. They
would never understand why school was important. They
would never be good at most things. They wanted to be old
enough to drive a truck, to be able to drive to the edge of
town and get high. Ricardo understood this. He had been a
boy like them. He knew what it was like to get stoned and
curse the sky because it was getting dark too quickly. He
knew what it was like to smoke until the dryness in the
desert became the dryness in your throat. He was no Javier
Castillo, and neither were his sons.
Ricardo had watched Javier Castillo disappear many
times. In many ways, he had studied this affliction, timed it.
He visited the library once to look through books on physics.
Sitting in the stacks on the newly installed carpets, the fumes
from them like a tranquilizing gas, he had tried to read them.
None of them had any information on this means of travel,
or none that he could make out from the photos and diagrams.
That Javier Castillo could fade away, find himself
somewhere else, Ricardo was fairly certain. Javier Castillo
had told him how during his teens he had gone to Singapore,
French Polynesia, Egypt. It was then Ricardo really discovered
the extent of Javier Castillo’s affliction. He would go to
other places for a few hours or a few days. He had spent an
entire week in Toronto wandering through Chinatown. Ricardo
knew this but could not believe it. Ricardo felt the