The Alien in My Guest Room: Part 26
“Where Are You From?” — a story in two parts
The last time I published here on Medium, in an attempt to be wry, I subtitled the post, “At least I’m not bored.” As of today, I’d welcome boredom with a wide open door and a bottle of wine.
Last Sunday, Fernando had dinner with a friend from his ESL class. Somewhere around 9:00 pm, he came home while Hermes and I were watching a movie. He quietly retired to his room without calling attention to himself. This is not unusual; that’s his pattern most school nights, when he gets home well after sunset, and Hermes and I have settled in for a post-prandial Netflix & chill.
He managed to avoid me Monday until early evening. When he came in before dinner, his head was lowered and his cap pulled low. “We need to talk,” he said.
Sitting opposite me at the table, he slowly raised his head. His whole face was a strange color, all puffy and blotchy.
“Oh my god, what happened to you?!” I exclaimed.
“I’m sorry, Lilith, I lost the bike.” He had been using the mountain bike Hermes gave me in 1992 for our first anniversary. It had been sitting in the garage, unridden, for years, until Fernando came to live with us.
I was confused. My brain wasn’t making connections between the strange appearance of his face and a lost bicycle. Why would I care about the bike when he looked like that?
He explained: After Sunday dinner with his friend, he was speeding home on a secluded bike path, when he saw a couple of figures ahead in the shadows. He was approaching them fast. Before he had a chance to think, he suddenly lost control. The men had been holding some sort of tripwire on either side of the path. As he fell, a dozen more thugs materialized out the shadows. He struggled to his feet, and someone punched him full in the face while others pulled the bike away. Fernando staggered and went down; he curled into a fetal position, and the men all started kicking him in the head and face.
“What do you want?” he asked in Spanish.
“Todo!” (everything) was the response.
Their boots tore ugly gashes in his scalp, that bled profusely into his eyes. He assured me he tried to fight back, but there were too many of them. A thought flashed through my head: he wants me to know he is a man, not some weakling that just gave up and took a savage pummeling.
They pulled his backpack off him, and grabbed him by the collar to drag him into the shadows under a freeway bridge. There they resumed the beating. He saw a knife blade flash in the dim light. They were speaking English, and Spanish with a Mexican accent. One man asked, “Where are you from?” He answered, “Honduras.” I thought it was an odd question, but it turned out to be important.
A few kicks to the face later, the whole crew ran off with my 28-year-old bike, and his ragged generic backpack that had made the 3000-mile trek north with him. Inside, he only had carried a phone charger. He managed to salvage his wallet and phone, which were in zippered cargo pockets in his pants.
At Fernando’s request, sitting there in the dining room, I searched in his thick, black hair for ragged penny-sized wounds that still bled and oozed. He was clearly still in a sea of pain. I photographed the damage so he could see. He said he was also suffering from a flaming headache. I thought he could use stitches, but he was resistant to the idea of going to urgent care. He still doesn’t have insurance, and anyway, visiting medical professionals is generally an arduous process.
Still, he had just healed from his dramatic bike accident a few short weeks ago, and I was worried he might be re-concussed. I sent an urgent text to Meenakshi, a medical doctor who, in her rare free time, has been active in helping Fernando settle in. (For those who have been following the ongoing drama, she is married to Ben, who partnered with me helping Yenifer out of apparent sexual slavery a week before. What a couple!) We asked her professional opinion: did we need to take Fernando to see a doctor? She asked how he was behaving, whether the wounds were infected, and a host of other questions. Considering his preferences, she advised we clean the injury and apply liberal amounts of antibiotic cream. After that, we were to give him vitamins and fish oil capsules, which (she tells me) can help control the effects of concussion. I gave him Advil for the pain.
After a night of sleep, he woke up still hurting, but looking astonishingly good. The same thing happened after the bike accident. At the risk of repeating myself, the boy has superhuman healing abilities. The head wounds were not infected.
Next problem: he needs a bike to get around. I posted on my Facebook page, summarizing the Sunday night nightmare, and asking if anyone had a bike that he can use. Blessings on my (and his) Virtual Village, the response was overwhelming. Within minutes, my neighbor and dear friend Michaela offered him one she wasn’t using. As comments flooded in from friends across the country, others asked how they could help. If we took all the bikes that were offered, we’d have enough for a Tour-de-France-sized event.
On a related note, we agreed that he would never, ever take the bike path after dark. Up on surface streets, he is at more risk of accidents with cars, but if someone wants to batter him, they’ll have to do it in public, with streetlights and people driving by.
I called Fernando’s lawyer. She ought to know about this, I figured; and besides, they had an appointment the next day at the Honduran consulate to apply for his long-awaited passport. She advised we make a police report, because there is a special visa for immigrant victims of American crimes such as felonious assault or sex trafficking. I perked up hearing about this silver lining. Then she told me that there’s an eight to ten year waiting list for these visas. I wilted again. But still, he can be on multiple simultaneous tracks to a green card. It won’t hurt.
An aside: The consulate appointment was a total disappointment. We had gone through impressive acrobatics to get a notarized permission slip for the passport from his mother in Honduras (he’s a minor there until age 21 and can’t get a passport without parental approval). The consulate had instructed his attorney that a letter from his mother would be acceptable. But when Fernando arrived with the paper in hand, they demanded either a letter from his murderous father as well, or proof that his mother has sole custody of him. Without either of those documents, they wouldn’t even accept the application. This appears to be a dead end in the immigration labyrinth. To be honest, I’m not clear yet on what else we can do. But we haven’t given up.
This story is going long, and there’s much more to recount about the aftermath of the attack. I will continue tomorrow in the next post: The Police Report, in which I reveal the meaning of the question, “Where are you from?”
All names are changed.