Raven Tricks Creator

There was a low hum at the beginning of everything, the sound of a universe of stars-in-waiting, running up against one another, being one with one another. Impatience was high.

I was born on a boat that was travelling north, and my parents don’t know whether I was born in the Southern or Northern Hemispheres. The doctor was an equatorial type, he never mentioned the latitude. When asked, they would shrug, sip their coffee, mother would eat a bit of her pie and smile and both my folks would imagine themselves as above the question. Most parents obsess over every detail of a story as significant as the birth of their first and only child, yet my parents were so calm, so focused on other details that they considered more important about that day.

I don’t know one of the most fundamental details of my origin. Instead of guessing, I tend to say I was born in both. I am the first baby who was born in both halves of the Western Hemisphere, my head emerging from between my mother’s legs just as we crossed the equator, my legs following just as we’d firmly crossed into the Tropic of Cancer.

The Tropic of Cancer is a line, to the North of the Equator, where something very special happens. If you stand at the Tropic during Summer Solstice, you can look straight up, at noon, and there is the sun. Imagine that. A straight line, sometime in late-June, Early-July, between the center of the earth, you, and the Sun. High noon.

The Sun did not exist when the Universe was just a dense, small Creature with the immense energy of all the gas giants and neutrinos and pulsars contained within it. There was no individual Earth, or Mars, or Alpha Centauri. The Tropic of Cancer, the equator and the line between you and the sun were all the same line. A tiny bit of Earth and a tiny bit of Orion’s belt mingled with the asteroids, comets, the Sun, the dark energy at the center of everything. The eventual light from every TV screen. It all occupied the same space, when in fact there was no space. Not even the vacuum existed The bits of your last meal, the first lips you kissed, the first shooting star you saw, the dinosaur whose bones powered your last trip to the zoo to see animals that are going extinct. Same.

The Creature that the Universe was, a singular beast waiting to explode, it would never be again.

Not knowing anything about the first few moments of my life, I can only imagine what it’s like to really understand. My peers growing up were so knowledgeable about themselves: they knew who was a Northy and who was a Southy, and the Northies would cut their hair close while the Southies would let it grow and grow. And me, with my lack of knowledge of my identity, I would try a thousand ways to make it work: a mohawk, a mullet, shaved-with-a-rat-tail, bangs-but-no-back. I looked ridiculous, a fact which brought the Northies and the Southies together.

Their unity lasted long enough to agree that I was the property of neither clan. Eventually, they’d get back to hitting each other, calling names, and cursing the wars always started by the scum on the other side. But not before they taunted and teased me, punched me in my face, and called me the nickname that would last me for at least the next 33 years, “Dohno.” Short for “don’t know,” the nickname was the one thing the Northies and the Southies would never dispute.

Dono is our last name. We’re Uruguayan.

As the beast universe grew impatient, the rage built inside. Whatever distinctions can be made now, they could not be made then. Any arguments you’ve ever had, right or wrong, had an energy, but only later on. Nothing was, save the Creature. There was no water, nor even the Hydrogen and Oxygen that form the basis of water, nor even the Protons and Neutrons and Electrons that would form the Hydrogen and Oxygen. There is some dispute as to whether the Quarks, the Ups and such, that would form the basic components of Atoms, existed yet. But that dispute was not around then, when the Creature was sitting, stewing, building up the immense burst of heat that would become the birth of everything, destroying the Creature to create the universe of things. Nothing could save the Creature.

My first job interview was to become a busboy at Marlin, a not-quite-fine diner my parents owned. I wore a suit and tie. My father would be doing the interviewing, as he was the one who would look a potential employee in the eye to know their character. My mother would be coaching me through my interview. She taught me how to tie a tie a year earlier, when I went to my first dance at my school.

I was a sore thumb on a hand without fingers. There was no need for a tie, or the collared shirt I wore, to that dance. As I got out of my father’s sedan and headed toward the doors of Alice L. Schaefer High, now my alma mater, panic filled me. I saw Southy kids’ wild hair falling over T-shirts falling over jeans. I saw Northy kids behind the gym, smoking cigarettes in camouflage pants and tank tops, a look which that year was a sign of coolness among the Northy kids. It was a trend I never understood since, with their buzz cuts, it made them look a bit like Demi Moore in G.I. Jane.

In I walked, my pleated pants swish-swishing as I stepped, my father’s black dress shoes too big for my feet and clunking away with my pace. The sounds I made, and the hair I had carefully pushed into what I thought was a respectable coif, only added injury to the insulting fact that this was not a formal dance event but rather a chance for the more promiscuous Northy kids to show their salacious dances to potential partners.

The Northies were better dancers and more sexually active than the Southy kids, and even the Southy kids acknowledged this, and poked a bit of fun at themselves for their lacking rhythm. Sometimes a Southy kid would trip, or be tripped, and another Southy kid would exclaim “Nice dancing, Todd.” Or a Northy kid would scoff under his breath and say “The official dance of the Southern Hemisphere.” And all the Northy kids would laugh, and fuck each other.

There wasn’t a potential mate for 300 miles who would have been able to overlook how out of place I was, standing alone in the cafeteria where all the tables had been pushed to one side to make way for the grinding. There wasn’t a fuck who’d understand or desire me the way the Northy girls seemed to fall for every Northy boy with a crew cut and army pants. I stood by the tables while the Southy kids occupied the opposite end of the room, laughing at their own attempts to keep a beat, flailing their manes. Between us, Northy kids would pair off for a bit of military-fashioned sex mimicry. I stood by myself, imagining what I’d be doing for the next two hours until my father would return to pick me up. The songs and minutes agonized past, eventually ending in the predictable anthem of every school dance I’d ever attended, “I’ll Make Love To You” by Boyz II Men. The official dance of the Northern Hemisphere.

The low hum of the Creature would become a roar at the first moment. The instant was so brief, but time itself was being created in that massive onslaught of energy ripping nothingness into everythingness. The tremendous excitement, the rage, the nonexistence becoming existence, was ­­­almost too much. There was a second, or maybe it was a millennium, where the Creature fought to regain its singular nothingness, but the fury had been too great, had sat gaining so much pressure that when it erupted, there was nothing but noise, heat, light, energy, motion. It was the beginning of distinction.

My father sat me down in the office, which he had imagined for several years was official and important and made Marlin worth his years of effort, despite its impending bankrupcy. The walls were mostly intact, which as a restaurateur is the low end of achievement. He was not the type of businessman who spent many hours thinking about the construction of his walls, because he was deeply in debt. Fixing a hole in a wall was a luxury, he’d have thought, if he had the time. Most of his hours were spent trying to find odd jobs for which his limited budget would let him pay himself, so he could buy my mother a pie, or me a haircut.

I struggled to find the right way to express who I was in the way I’d been shown to express myself, and it failed because I lacked crucial detail. My mother had instructed me to be proper, though she’d never taught me the word, her body language as she explained propriety made me understand it was a matter of acting like people on TV when they’re asking for soup. The world is your waiter. And my interview to be a busboy was horrible, because I didn’t heed my mothers’ advice.

The beast, silent since eternity, grumbled.

It was the first time I was in my father’s office at Marlin, and he was busy penciling in his books, even though his wife had spent days and days badgering him that soon he’d teach his son how to interview for a job, even though today was that day, the moment of reckoning. Even though he could hardly afford to pay himself, he was going to treat me like it was my career in the making. My father had just three employees, each of whom had taken one or several turns having wages withheld to keep the restaurant open. The place was honestly doomed to fail, as its owners were a mixed couple whose entire history in business ownership lived in a drawer in my father’s dingy office. It was going to be a lesson for us both, she’d tell me before she died.

The beast shook, grumbling louder.

I knocked, he said “Come,” and I came in. He eyed me, in my new dress shoes, his tie, a shirt I would have worn to church, and that I would eventually wear to both of my parents’ funerals. He was a gruff man, whose coffee habit with my mother was a remnant of his drinking habit she’d helped him quit before I was born on a boat. He began the interview almost immediately, without asking me to sit in the broken desk chair opposite his broken desk chair.

My father asked me, his words a finger in my chest, “What are you?”

I had rehearsed with my mother a dozen possible scenarios as to my first question. None of them was this question. But she had told me that interviews were about confidence, that no matter what I had to keep my cool. The heat from the back of the office, behind my father, came from a refrigeration unit that was on the other side of a paper-thin, dilapidated wall. In that moment it felt like it came from him, a direct challenge to my mother’s advice.

She had also explained the error of speaking too quickly, lest I say the wrong thing. So I took my time, and this was immediately irritating to my father and to me, adding to the pageantry of the affair, as my father was the first person to see my face, and as he was a responsible party for my existence. Whatever I was, he made me, in conjunction with a woman who was a few degrees more nurturing than he was. And so rather than thinking up an answer that would impress him, I began to dwell on the relationship we had had up to this point, and I became resentful of the question and the man asking it. I forgot everything my mother had taught me, not just in preparation for the interview but basic things, her corrections to my nervous habits, her polite reminders to end requests with pleasantries. I felt the heat of my father begin to build up on my forehead, just as a bead of sweat had finally hit a tipping point and dropped from my right eye to my jawline. I spoke.

“I am a child of a hard-working man and a loving woman who wants to become a bus boy, not as an ultimate career path but because I want to work and I need experience, and I think this is how I can get it because I know the owners and they have always believed in me.”

My father looked genuinely impressed with me for the first time I can recall. His was an aging, usually frozen face. Many people called him stoic, a word that I would not learn for many years which perfectly described him. To see his usual, expressionless eyes perform what singers might call “smiling” was a feat unto itself. But I hadn’t given him the answer he was looking for.

“I know that, of course,” he said and chuckled. “And in a normal job interview, that would be a great answer. And in a normal interview, you should not expect this question. But let me rephrase: what I mean to say is, are you from the North, or the South?”

I had never, to this point, discussed the particulars of my birth and its complicated impacts on my sense of self. He had seen me exit his car for the school dance wearing his shoes, and had been the first parent to pick up his child when I called him just an hour later, after a Southy kid told me my hair looked like a rabbit was hit by a lawnmower, my inappropriate tie being the blade still sticking from its neck.

“Dad, I… I am both. And I am neither… I mean… You know, you were there, I was born on a boat. The doctor didn’t…”

My father interrupted, “There was no doctor.”

This was the beginning of his revealing truths, after I had spent some 15 years believing lies about the day I was born.

He explained that my parents didn’t want me to grow up with an assigned identity. They both had to deal with the North-South conflicts their entire lives, their relationship was a mixed one and they’d been the butt of jokes. My birth was, they thought, a chance to give me a fresh start.

When I became an adult, I reconciled not understanding my origins with my present self. There was a moment when the beast exploded where the only thing that existed was the infinite potential to change, not even a spectrum of changed-and-unchanged but the blinding, ripping fabric of possibility itself expanding rapidly, in a way it had never been before. As the atoms formed, the tiny bits of myself who was a Northy-or-a-Southy came to be, the water that made my blood boil when they made fun of my hair was formed in the heat of stars coming into being as quickly as the first lips I kissed when I finally overcame my unknowing of where I had been formed when I was simply accepting that I’d been formed in heat in stars. When I was no longer a slave to the spectrum I was supposed to accept, and instead I was a spectrum and it was okay. I was okay being a graph and not a point of data.