AMERICAN DISASTER: SUBURBIA

_

Antonio Blanco used to imagine what lay beyond the sea—he built in his mind an island beyond the horizon, imagining a large ship heaving sand into the ocean below, until it laid down a beachy ground. The people in the ship would build a bridge that stretched to the pier—where he sat now—and he would walk across it, with a backpack filled with his clothes… and maybe a fishing rod, so he could fish, just in case he was hungry. The island would be so far that it’d take half a day to reach it, and when he would reach the island, the large ship would sail right into the bridge and destroy it, so nobody else could cross it.

He would be alone, in this little island. No people from school, no Agatha Bates nor her family, nobody. Not even mom. Nothing to do, and nothing to tell him what to do.

And it would be wonderful.

Then he grew up, and Tony moved on to imagining what it would feel like if he’d disappeared.

Sitting on the pier was as close as he could get to disappearing—besides sleeping. Nobody passed here except a few odd souls, returning to their beachside homes, and even then they seemed to never notice that Tony sat there almost every day. He supposed that he’d blended into some permanent part of the pier now, and it was quite a nifty thought. Nobody saw him. Well of course they saw him—but as in, really really cared that he was there. And that was what he wanted. Not to be seen. To be invisible.

Periodically, he’d look back at a little sign that stood at an angle, just where the pier began. It was a bus stop, and the vehicle’s sound that would alert Tony its presence was sometimes lost in the distance, so he had to look back every now and then. Nothing there—for now, anyway. It shouldn’t be too long. The sun had begun to bleed out into the sea, and it was only a matter of time before the bus turned up.

Out of instinct—and out of years’ worth of experience in trying to keep time in his head—he took his blue rucksack and trudged through the pier, watching the water between the gaps of the wood planks. The bus turned up when he’d only walked halfway, but it didn’t matter that he wouldn’t make it. It had never mattered—not in the years he’d spent here almost every day, waiting for it. He’d only used it to keep the time, because he didn’t have a wristwatch. It would turn up at six thirty, and Tony has kept time that way for the last ten years.

The driver noticed him. He didn’t smile. Tony didn’t smile back.

As the bus lurched forward, Tony went the same direction. It would be nice, he thought, if he could take the bus one day. Sometimes he wanted to, just for fun, wondering if he could take a little spare change from the jar under his bed and take the bus, just this one time. And he had this thought every time he watched the bus disappear into the horizon, awkwardly smiling to himself, imagining which side he’d sit on—the one that faced the ocean, or the one that faced the houses.

Then he’d scrunch his nose, and think, why would he want to sit facing the house, knowing Agatha Bates and her family lived there? He’d rather sit where the ocean was instead! But it never mattered, because he never took the bus, and he always walked after sitting for hours at the pier, because he didn’t want to go home.

_

Igrayne Garcia is his mother’s name. Tony remembered sloppily drawing his family tree in grade school. There was him—Antonio Blanco—at the bottom of the paper. Then at the top was his mother’s name. Then he would connect a straight line between both names, and that was that. That was his family tree. And it got him into trouble, because Ms. Clara pulled him aside soon after that and asked why he was messing about.

“That’s my mom,” Tony nodded when she pointed at the name. She looked confused.

“Then wouldn’t she have your last name?”

“Why would she? She has her own name.”

Ms. Clara became more concerned than angry. She looked back at the paper and asked him more questions, but Tony remembered the look of guilt flashing across her face as soon as she prodded him further.

“You know you’re supposed to draw two branches from your name, right? One for your mom, and one from your dad.”

“I don’t have a dad.”

She looked taken aback at this point—but she didn’t seem to know how to stop.

“Of course you do. Everyone has one. You could at least write his name down, right?”

Tony had shook his head—and Ms. Clara looked as if she were about to explode, as if to say, of course you do, you’re just misbehaving! Tony supposed that he’d looked so blank and empty then, that whatever Ms. Clara had to prod next about his father, she’d eventually gathered the fact that Tony simply didn’t know.

“Well—” she continued exasperatedly, “—could you at least write down your mom’s parents? Grandma and grandpa? You know their names, right?”

And truthfully, Tony didn’t know. He still didn’t know now. Ms. Clara looked at his paper in disdain, then said something that would be ingrained into his brain for the rest of his life.

“Is she even your real mother?”

Even as an eight-year-old, it panged Tony to the core. Was she, really? Well, of course she looked like him—they had the same angular look, slanted at the jaw, the same misery weighing down their eye bags. When this doubt grew larger at the age of thirteen, he quietly ransacked the cabinets at home to find his birth certificate, finding it was his mother’s name written on the paper. She will always, no doubt, be his real mother—but was she ever a real mother, to him?

He always had a roof over his head, that much he was thankful for. He hadn’t died as a child, and she always made sure he was vaccinated and fed… whenever there was food on the table, anyway. He was taken care of when he was sick, and she made sure that he went to school. That being said—he couldn’t remember the last time he was held, nor cuddled. He couldn’t ever remember her being there. He felt like a chick leaving its nest—when Tony knew how to fly, that was it. That was the last time he ever really needed his mother. Whatever happened from then on was in his hands.

She didn’t talk much—and neither did Tony in that aspect, but she would never strike up a conversation. A call of “I’m home” would be echoed back by the apartment’s grey-washed walls. She’d answer if Tony asked her something, of course—”is there any dinner?” would garner the response of “yes” (though mostly “no” as of late). But if Tony asked her anything more, she would not answer. That was what it had always been, and Tony supposed that it would continue to be like so, for a long time.

So, whenever Tony was asked to draw a family tree in grade school from then on, he would make up the names. His mother would be Igrayne Blanco, and his father would be… Antonio Blanco, because Tony couldn’t think of anything else (though it was funny to learn that he was, in fact, named after his father). Then his grandfather would also be Antonio Blanco—both from his mother and father’s side—and he’d filled out his grandmothers randomly with the surname Blanco, not sure how last names worked. By this time, Ms. Clara had let this aspect slide, and by the time he got into high school, no teacher asked anyone to fill out family trees anymore.

Of the initial family tree Tony drew—the one that simply included his name and his mother’s—he took it home, after Ms. Clara’s advice that he should “show” his work to his parents (this was, in fact, to save him from further agony—she’d hung up everyone else’s family tree on the classroom board, and children tended to be more scathingly ruthless than she was). His mother had never looked at it, so Tony kept it under his desk as a keepsake. It was folded so he could fit it in, but every time he discovered it every few months or so, he would simply see his name alone in one side—and he would have to open it up to see that the line connected to his mother’s name.

It would be ten years old by now, yet Tony never plucked the courage to get rid of it.

_

The sun had turned into a small slither by the time Tony faced the door of Number 80, in the 4th floor, Building D, Hyacinth Park. If he turned the rusty handle and stepped a foot inside, he would be at home. Or at least, he would physically be in it.

Home had always felt strange. It managed to be so small and so large at the same time—it felt, always, like stepping onto new property, where everything smelled of paint and emptiness. Despite Summer-by-the-sea’s long-year heat, the walls always felt damp (Tony supposed that was why there was a curious spot of green steadily growing at the corner of the room). Hyacinth Park’s low-income housing ensured that its residents were squeezed into the smallest spaces possible, kitchen haphazardly shoved into the living room. Slapped on the wall was a door that led to a bedroom (which was strangely the same size as the living room). Another door led to a bathroom that conjured claustrophobia.

Tony opened the door now, careful not to ram it into the couch that stopped the door short from opening it to its fullest extent. Every furniture they had were placed against the wall, so there was a strange empty space in the middle of it all. His mother was nowhere in sight—which meant that she was at work.

The emptiness made him feel funny, so he strode across the room and went into his bedroom.

Tony used to share this bedroom with his mother. Then when he turned ten, she started to sleep in the living room, unannounced. The bed, which had occupied them both, now felt absurdly large, even as he continued to grow taller still.

He laid on it now, still strapped to his backpack, breathing out onto the sheets. Every so often, he’d take in the emptiness—the large gap between the end of the bed and the wall, the relative positions of every object to each other, the negative space around the room. He did it now, unmoving, grounding himself into this empty space; but it was endless, and there was nothing to it at the end, except the growing hollowness inside his chest.

Tony slept sometime after, only awoken by the return of his mother. It looked bleak outside and, concluding that the sound of shuffling she made outside the door resembled nothing of dinner being made, he fell asleep again—though this time, with less ease.