Claire Holroyde - The Effort

His father stood up too quickly and almost fainted. He staggered into the master bedroom. When he emerged hours later, his arms were full of empty containers. Back when the family still had running water, they had filled up their Jacuzzi and every type of makeshift vessel: mugs, glasses, bowls, vases, detergent bottles, both halves of a Chanel sunglasses case, and so on. All but the Jacuzzi were now empty.

Father and son transported the empty vessels to their balcony. Enrico placed his lucky Cruz Azul football club cup in a good spot but didn’t bother to hope. The city would get a centimeter, maybe two, of rain in a month, if they were lucky. The whole exercise was, as his mother said about the defense effort, probably just for show to keep from killing one another.

Enrico whined about his cramping belly because he couldn’t help it. His father added Saint Monica to the receiving end of his prayers, patron saint of disappointing children. When the crying began, Enrico’s father couldn’t take it. He always said it was a woman’s weapon.

“No llores,” he screamed at his son’s tearful begging. “¡Reza!”

Don’t cry, pray!

He tried to hide his own tears and pointed up to the ceiling. Pray! But God wasn’t floating up in the clouds. Enrico knew because he looked with his telescope. His father retreated to the master bedroom and locked the door for good. Enrico tried praying, but it was just a repetition of words. His mind was too free and obsessed over memories of food. Every time he knocked on his parents’ bedroom door, there was either silence or shouting.

In his loneliness and need for distraction, Enrico gravitated to his telescope. He didn’t need its powers of magnification at night. UD3 was now visible to the naked eye. Instead, Enrico lowered his sights from the heavens down to the hell on earth. There he witnessed a man use a machete on another, swinging it like a baseball bat. Enrico ran into the living room in a fit of screaming.

His father opened the bedroom door but didn’t step out. He waited at its threshold for his son’s nonsensical noises to calm into something intelligible.

“We have to help them!” Enrico finally managed.

Tears ran down his cheeks. His hand shook as it pointed to his father’s desk against the bedroom wall. There was a loaded magnum revolver in a locked drawer that he wasn’t supposed to know about. It was too late for one poor, blood-covered pilgrim, but that revolver could save the next.

“We don’t have bullets to spare,” his father said.

“But we have to help them.”

Enrico’s father gripped his son’s arm, tight enough to bruise, and dragged him to the adjoining bathroom. The Jacuzzi tub was nearly empty.

“Save your tears,” his father said, and went back to his prayers.

Enrico crawled under their bed, shivering. He couldn’t shut out the images locked in his head. He said prayers in rapid, jittery bursts. Nothing happened. He listened to his parents pray on the mattress above him. His mother whispered Hail Marys. His father confessed his sins aloud to Saint Jude, patron saint of lost causes. He said the things no one wanted to know, least of all his family.

By morning, Enrico crawled out from under the bed. The walls of his mind were still blood spattered, but he was restless. Enrico returned to the balcony. He looked into his telescope. In the age of the internet, most preadolescents knew more than they should. Enrico had peeked at images of death and pornography. What Mexican boy with a computer hadn’t looked at cartel videos of chainsaw beheadings? But those horrors were recordings. By their very nature, they happened in the past and could be stopped with the click of a button. Enrico never watched to the end—but he did now. After dry heaving over the railing, Enrico’s empty stomach settled. The hours passed. Then days.

It’s amazing what one can get used to. Not only could Enrico watch the carnage over time, he couldn’t tear his sick-curious eyes from it. Enrico watched gangs plunder Tent Town. Some pilgrims fell to their knees to pray and ask for mercy, but it just made the process easier with a sweeping slash to the throat or face. The things they did to the young women were the worst of it. What would happen to Enrico’s beautiful, golden mother if their barricade failed?

Gangs cut away muscle and severed thick limbs to pile onto bedsheets and sleeping bags from Tent Town. They hauled away the meat and left bowels, bones, heads, and shit in the streets. Enrico realized that what his parents always told him as a child was true: there were people like monsters, lurking out in the world, ready to gobble him up if he wasn’t careful.

A new smell mixed with the stench. It reminded Enrico of Saturday mornings when he woke to his mother cooking breakfast. She fixed up bacon and eggs with black beans and salsa, all the while chatting on her cellphone. Do you ever put that damn thing down? his father asked from the breakfast table. But his eyes lifted above a spread of El Universal . He loved to watch her, and she loved to be watched by him.

Enrico knew he shouldn’t lie to himself. Nice lies were still lies. He knew what that breakfast-bacon smell had to be, but it didn’t stop his mouth filling with saliva. At a time when there were no neighbors, no more talk of a defense effort, and no planes in the sky, could he eat people? Was it better to die like the pilgrims and go to heaven, or eat them and live, even if it would damn him for eternity?

There was a blur on the horizon. Enrico ground the heels of his hands into his watery eyes, but the blur remained. Heat distortion? Only when he switched his telescope lens did he see the hordes more clearly: endless streams of people trekking into Mexico City from the south and east. Here were the desperate from all of Central and South America. Enrico couldn’t have comprehended their sheer volume, or just how much the masses of modern Homo sapiens had grown to dominate the planet. There was no room, and yet they kept coming. Gangs couldn’t kill fast enough and were swept under the sea of crazed people and crushed. Bodies piled up, releasing a choking stench. Enrico stopped breathing through his nose, but he could still smell and taste it.

Pilgrims kept climbing on top of one another, pleading for deliverance. Too much , Enrico thought, trying to shake everything out of his head. Too many. Too much… He fainted. When he opened his eyes, with his scraped cheek resting painfully on concrete, Enrico saw a small flash. Four foil-wrapped pieces of chocolate were expertly hidden within the thick latticework of the balcony railing.

Enrico’s mother hid chocolate for him every year on the Feast of the Virgin. He must have missed these pieces. Enrico ripped off the foil and gulped down the chocolate pieces without chewing. He inspected the railing twice over before a realization struck him: he didn’t share. He hadn’t even had the inkling to do so until it was too late. Selfishness was no way to thank the Virgin, whose painted skin was milk chocolate born from both Indigenous peoples and their European conquerors. It was no way to thank his own mother, the woman who couldn’t help spoiling her precocious son with sweets, comic books, kisses, and the latest model of drone.

Enrico knocked on his parents’ bedroom door and waited. It was unlocked. His father was sitting on the edge of his bed with the loaded revolver in one hand. A cloud passed over the setting sun.

“Lo siento,” Enrico whispered to his mother and father.

There was chocolate in the creases of his frown. I am sorry.

His father hid the revolver under sweat-stained sheets. He put a skeleton arm around his son’s skeleton shoulders and leaned in until their foreheads rested on one another. Forgiveness was unnecessary. Enrico was his child. Children were the receivers of unconditional love. Even in a world staring down the nose of a bullet, they were still the means to a future.