“Sarita!” he exclaimed, wiping juice from his lips with the tip of his thumb. “You’ve joined me! Good!” As she was about to speak, Miguel turned his whole body in the direction of the improbable horizon. “Do you see what I am seeing, Mamá?” Miguel pointed enthusiastically at the vision of Earth and all her exquisite colors. Sarita caught a glimpse of her son’s bare bottom as the back of his gown fell open. She was tempted to spank him right there, grown man that he was, but he was anxiously calling for her attention.
“Sarita, look!”
From where she now stood, she could see the planet floating beyond the bending branches of the giant tree. It shone bright and clear against a midnight sky, spinning slowly at the edge of the fantasy they occupied.
“La tierra,” she said, sighing. “Where we both belong. It is time to stop this idiocy.”
“Do you see them?” Miguel asked urgently. “All the moving lights?”
Frowning, the old woman peered through the branches again. This was not Earth as she remembered it. As the planet slowly turned, she could see waves of light burning bright, then lifting away and evanescing into space. The lights burned hot in some isolated places, and not in others. But wait . . . no. Some streamed over the entire globe. And even as little sparks rose and dissolved, more waves of light fell onto Earth like liquid dreams.
“Yes! Dreams!” her son exclaimed, as if he had followed her thoughts. “These are the dreams of men and women who change humanity. Small ones, bigger ones, and great, lasting ones. Dreams that begin and end, live, and then die.”
“If they die, where do they go?” she asked, puzzled at the rising and falling of light, much like the bouncing waves of sound displayed on her grandson’s stereo. “And where do they begin?”
“From creation—and back to creation!” he said with a laugh, taking another bite from the apple. “Do you see that bright one?” he marveled. “Wonderful! It feels like George, whose message is still remembered. So gentle a dream . . . do you see it?”
“George . . . ah, yes. He was your student. The very short one?”
“No, he was one of the Beatles, Sarita. And much taller than me.”
Oh, yes. Now she remembered. The Beatles. The sound that had serenaded her to this spot was their sound, their music. She was only now recovering from the throbbing noise in her head.
“Do you see my dream, Sarita?” Miguel shouted. “There! It shines in that area over there! And look! The threads of it are moving, getting brighter . . . everywhere! There! A yellow-gold—no, red-gold there. Wait!”
Sarita let the bag drop from her hands and gripped his shoulder. Miguel swung around to look at her, his face still glowing with joy.
“Your message is alive and growing, yes,” she said. “There it is. We see it.”
“Isn’t it magnificent!” With that Miguel abandoned his apple, tossing it aside. It vanished as soon as it left his hand. He moved to observe the vision of a dreaming humanity more closely, but his mother’s words distracted him, sounding stern and cheerless.
“We need Miguel to keep this dream alive. You are returning to me now,” Sarita said in as strong a voice as her son had ever heard. “It is not your time to die.”
“I’m already dead,” her thirteenth child answered, smiling.
“You are not. The doctors are caring for you. We are praying for you. The ancestors are moving heaven and Earth for you.”
Miguel twisted his face in mock despair, but his eyes still gleamed. “Madre, not the ancestors, please.”
“Your heart is mended now, m’ijo. You have only to take a breath and come back to us. Come back!”
“You’re talking about a heart that’s damaged beyond repair, Sarita. My lungs have failed and my body is collapsing without me.” He looked at her tenderly. “I’m a doctor, too, remember.”
“You are a coward as well! Come back and finish what you began!”
“You know that I’ve given all I can.”
“Have you?”
“Oh! Let me tell you about the sleeping dream I had before I got here!”
“Miguel.”
“I was one of the warriors who guarded Tenochtitlan and the sacred lake. I was—well, of course I wasn’t, but in a way I still am—that warrior. I could feel the fear and the urgency of the moment, the total surrender, and then it seemed that everything became starlight and space.”
“Stop, Miguel! Your world is more than starlight and space. You have a home, and people who love you. More than that, you have me. You are my son, and you must return to me!”
“All of it is starlight and space—this world, that world, this mother and this son.”
“You are not starlight and space. You are—”
“I am exactly that! Look at me!” With that, he disappeared among the twinkling orbs that danced before her eyes. There were only stars now, and the space between.
“Come back!” she shouted.
“Impossible,” he replied, laughing, and she saw him again within the tree that seemed to come and go, straddling another limb, his bare legs swinging as he waved to her. “Stay with me, Mamá.”
His mother’s fear exploded into fury, and in that moment Miguel saw her transformed. The frail old woman who had come to him, wrapped in a shawl and shivering with cold, was an old woman no more. Before him, in the full sun of an eternal moment, stood a young and beautiful woman, naked but for the shawl that fell from her beautiful breasts and shoulders. She scowled at him, her hair caught in the wind that had risen in her anger. A fierce light shone over her, licking at her hair and skin like dragon fire.
“You are mine!” she raged. “How dare you leave! How dare you!”
“I haven’t left you, my beloved,” he replied gently, watching her with intense interest. “But the dream of Miguel is done. Game over.”
“Not done! Not over!” she cried. “You can do much more—and you will do much more!” She turned her angry gaze toward the planet again, and pointed at the glittering lights. “Are you content to see your dream fade—here, right here before your eyes?”
Miguel, recognizing this voice, answered with a smile. “You can’t move me, my love. My journey is endless, but my poor body won’t go another mile.”
“The body will do as you say. It always has! Come away from this place and return to me . . . to us!” In the far distance rose the sounds of his family—brothers and sons, their wives and children—as they chanted in a circle, calling for his return to the physical world. He knew they meant to help. He knew they followed his mother’s will.
“I cannot,” he said simply.
“You are mine!” she shouted.
“I never was.”
Miguel looked into the eyes of his beloved and saw her beauty, her sorrow, and her worth. He heard the pleas of his mother, but could comprehend only the desperate cry of this one—who had been called many things in human storytelling. She represented humanity itself, a vibrant miracle trapped within its own spell. It was she who had lost the memory of paradise. It was she who had cast a shadow across sublime light. As he looked at her, remembering countless others who had said they loved him while they raged against themselves, his voice softened and he reached for her.
“Your temptations are strong—stronger even than your need for me.” The touch of his hand on her bare arm cooled the fire in her eyes, and he began to see his mother, old again, and trembling from