Prism - By Rachel Moschell Page 0,66

feel so wrong, spun Alejo’s world upside down.

A half-hour or so went by, and Wara’s even breathing seemed to indicate that she was asleep. A slightly hellish glow filtered into the dark room through the sheer red curtains from a street lamp in the courtyard outside. Alejo closed his eyes but he just couldn’t sleep.

And then there’s my family.

Who he had avoided in anger for years, then dragged into the very path of death.

He kept thinking about his father, and the few words they had had just before the Martirs went to Sacaba to take the bus away from Bolivia. Pablo Martir told Alejo he wanted to speak with him up on the roof again, alone, and Alejo had steeled himself for the conversation. He really hoped his father would understand that there wasn’t much that could be added to what had already been said.

There was nothing Alejo could say that would make it right.

There was nothing his father could say that would make Alejo feel more acutely how badly he had messed up, getting his entire family into this situation.

There was no other solution that Alejo could see to the problem; even if he would walk right back into Coroico and show up at the doorstep of his old house so the Prism could shoot him, the 964 would still be angry, and they could still go after his family. And Wara was still a witness.

Alejo had trudged up the concrete steps to the roof, following the broader form of his father. All these years, he had imagined that his father was still occupied as a pastor, preaching that Jesus saves while letting the world go to hell. Somehow, finding out that he had been directing the only center for children with AIDS in the country, which would now be left without leadership because of Alejo, made Alejo feel even more depressed.

The faded sheets were still drifting lazily on the line in the afternoon breeze on the hostel rooftop. Alejo’s father turned to face his son squarely. “Son, I can’t tell you how sorry I am we can’t have more time together. There is so much more I’d like to talk about, but as you said, now is not the time…” His voice cracked a little, and Alejo felt his shoulders tense. “So much time lost,” Pablo continued, “and now I don’t even know what will happen, what you…” He stopped and sighed, obviously thinking something along the lines of, “…if you are going to continue being a criminal, because that really complicates our relationship.”

“The one thing I want to ask you before we leave, though,” Alejo’s father said after the scowl had faded, “is about what you said before, about Jesus. You said that you have been a Muslim?”

“Yep, I’ve been a Muslim since I was eighteen,” Alejo confirmed dryly, wondering where his father was going with this.

“But you told me that you are no longer a Muslim, that you are a Christian.”

Alejo hesitated, the term Christian still racking him with unpleasant sensations of long sermons with too many amens. People pretending to praise God while peeking to see whose hands were raised the highest. Little boys dead in the grass so that no one would disrupt the worship of God in the church building every Sunday.

Alejo exhaled loudly. “I guess so...Dad. I don’t want to be a Christian like I was taught. I’m sorry. When I read the Bible and saw what Jesus said…it was like I had never heard most of it before. And I wanted that. I want that. It’s him I want, not a religion.”

Pablo sighed deeply, eyes boring into his son’s. Then he actually stepped forward to clasp Alejo’s shoulder, tears in his eyes. “We all need a lot of grace right now,” he said hoarsely.

Pablo Martir let go of his son and turned as if to go, then paused. Without looking back he said, “Noah had Jesus living in him. He would have forgiven you, Alejandro.”

Alejo had shivered, staring at the back of his father’s head as he walked towards the metal door that led back downstairs and disappeared.

Then Noah was a better man that I am, he thought.

Alejo, who usually could sleep like a baby even with a rock for a pillow, finally drifted into a fitful sleep on the soft red couch. He jerked upright at a foreign sound filling the room. A cell phone! Slapping around in the darkness, he got a hold on the metal chain of a