Read The Assimilated Cuban's Guide to Quantum Santeria for Free Online

coming quickly now; Angela has time for just one more idea. She sighs and settles in and thinks,
It’s enough
.

Entanglements
    I didn’t know Karen was married until her husband Chase was wounded in action—an IED took both his legs at the knee—and was coming home. She couldn’t leave him, not now. She had to break it off with me.
    I should have been angry, but all I felt was a vacuous shock. I had no idea how to act, so I tried to imagine what a decent person would say in this situation, and parroted that. “What do you need?”
    She didn’t answer for a while. Her kitchen smelled like a Pennsylvania July. The mason jars lining the high shelf broke the morning sunlight into rainbows. Through the window I watched the corn swaying like the crowd at a revival. I was leaning against her counter sipping orange juice; she sat at the table double-clutching her mug and letting her tears fall where they may.
    “Chase can’t have children anymore,” she finally told her coffee. “I will never be a mother.”
    I thought terrible things. Among the least savage was,
We were planning a family together. You and me. Remember?
But out loud I said, “Right now you need to focus on Chase.”
    She looked at me, her smile full of self-loathing. “Do you hate me, Jesús?”
    “No,” I said automatically. “You’re human. You made a mistake.”
    She cocked her head at me like a confused bloodhound, then laughed through her nose; no sound, just bitter air. “I don’t get you. I don’t get you one bit.”
    I swirled my juice. “You want me to yell and scream?”
    “I want you to feel something! Jesus Jesús. Do you know what Chase would do to me if he found out I’d been cheating on him all this time?” She was about to sip more coffee, but she stopped suddenly and yelled, “Aren’t Spanish guys supposed to be fiery?”
    I stopped leaning, stood straight. I dumped out the rest of my juice in the sink, washed the glass, dried it with the rag, set it oh so carefully in the rack.
    “What are you doing?” Karen asked.
    I stepped away to admire my work, made a box of my fingers like a cinematographer framing a shot. That glass was perfectly clean. Still looking at it, I said, “Spanish guys come from Spain. I’m Puerto Rican.” And without another word I left.

    As I drove to the lab where I work—I’m a physicist with the BES—my thoughts turned to Chase. I felt for him the kind of barrenness only fields of burgeoning corn can inspire.
    His service to his country had left him mutilated. He’d suffer for the rest of his life, physically. But worse, there was the secret pain of his wife’s betrayal waiting to reveal itself to him. Maybe someday when he was feeling stronger, maybe when he was starting to feel likehe’d gotten a bit of his life back, Karen would unburden herself and tell him about us. Or maybe one day when she just felt like hurting him.
    I had to pull over for a minute to collect myself.
    Like everywhere in Pennsylvania this time of year, a cornfield abutted the road. I got out of the car and walked up to the six-foot-high wall of stalks. Took deep breaths.
    These fields always remind me of my research. If there are Many Worlds, that means that there are many versions of me out there: an infinite number, maybe. Uniqueness is our most pervasive illusion. I’m just one of many cornstalks in the field.
    I pushed a stalk gently, set it swaying. Flexible, but solid. Vibrantly alive. Indistinguishable, yes, from the thousands of others in this field: until you get up close. Then it becomes uniquely itself. The stalk was an embodied history of the little sufferings and triumphs that have allowed it to be here now, mature enough to yield corn. It had goals for the future: surviving, reproducing. And Fate had given it a farmer who has done everything possible to help it flourish.
    For now. I started getting lost in the metaphor. That same farmer would soon mow it down, it and all its buddies. This whole field