The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,10

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“You’re doing pretty well,” he told his son. “But I really think you should get off now.”

“Okay,” Keenan said, and kept on playing.

Scott looked up and surveyed the books and the toys in the real space around them, the oversized volumes stacked unevenly in pine bookcases purchased in New Mexico, the plastic buckets filled with blocks and miniature cars. Here too he felt the mania of overspending, although in this room much of the excess was of his own doing. How many times had he entered a toy emporium or bookstore with modest intentions, only to leave with a German-designed junior electronics set, or a children’s encyclopedia, or an “innovative” and overpriced block game for Samantha meant to kindle her future recognition of letters and numbers? But for the gradual diminishing of their cash on hand, and the upwardly floating interest rates of credit cards and mortgages, he might now be conspiring to take them to their local high-end toy store, the Wizard’s Closet, where he had purchased toys that satisfied unfulfilled childhood desires, such as the set of miniature and historically accurate Civil War soldiers that at this moment were besieging two dinosaurs in the space underneath the bunk beds. The bookshelves were stacked with multiplication flash cards, a geography quiz set, a do-it-yourself rock polisher, and a box of classical architecture blocks. Scott’s parents had sacrificed to make his life better than theirs; they had saved and done without luxuries: but Scott spent lavishly to ensure the same result for his own children. He remembered the childhood lesson of his father’s hands, with their curling scars three decades old, earned in farm and factory work, hands the father urged the son to inspect more than once, to consider and commune with the suffering that was buried in Scott’s prehistory, unspoken and forgotten before the clean and sweat-free promise of the present and future.

“Dad, Keenan hasn’t quit his game yet,” said Brandon, who had gone back up to his bunk to pick up the book he was reading the night before.

“Keenan, turn off the game, please,” Scott said, in a faraway voice his boys might have found disturbing if they were a few years older and more attuned to adult emotions like reflection and remorse. He had felt this way, also, the night Samantha entered the world, during those three hours he spent overwhelmed by the fear that he and his wife might be tempting fate by having their third child when they were pushing forty. His God, part penny-pinching Protestant and part vengeful Catholic, would wreak a holy retribution against him and his wife for wanting too much and trying for the girl that would give their family a “perfect” balance. But Samantha had entered the world easier than her brothers, after a frantic but short labor, and was a healthy and alert child. No, the reckoning came from the most likely and obvious place: the private spreadsheet disaster of his bad investments. I thought I was being prudent. Everyone told me, “Don’t let your money get left behind, don’t let it sit—that’s stupid. Get in the game.” The absurdity that a six-figure investment in a financial instrument called a “security” could shrink so quickly and definitively into pocket change still did not compute. He worried about the two geniuses in this room, if he was about to set them on a tumultuous journey that would begin with the sale of this home and a move to less spacious quarters. Scott considered the precocious reader sitting on the top bunk, and his younger brother, who appeared to have a preternatural gift for logical challenges, judging by his swift advancement through the levels of this game, and wondered if he might soon be forced to subtract something essential from their lives.

3

The first guests arrived and rang the doorbell ten minutes early, a terribly rude North American habit, in Araceli’s opinion. Rolling her eyes in exasperation, she left a stack of sopes waiting to be garnished with Oaxaca cheese in the kitchen and walked toward the finger that had set off the electric chimes, but stopped when two midget centurions with papier-mâché swords ran past her. Brandon and Keenan raced to the door, holding their helmets atop their heads as they ran, and Araceli listened, unamused, as they stumbled over the lines Maureen had told them to recite: “Friends, Romans, countries …” Keenan began, and then faltered, until Brandon finished with, “Give