The Assimilated Cuban's Guide to Quantum Santeria Read Online Free PDF Page A

he is back to work. Real estate, a profession he loves like a lover: a rich lover who is scared Greg will leave it, so it showers him with money and expensive delights. His manager tells him as long as he can smile and look handsome, he’ll always have a job with them. Greg tells him about the new casing for his eneural: it’s covered with a wig made from his own hair, fits his skull seamlessly. Clients won’t even know it’s there.
    Two months later, Greg is employee of the month. Not only is he among the office’s top three performers, but the new improved Greg can spool out thirty years of amortization in his head, figure continuously-compounded interest over a decade without a calculator. Uses those tricks to impress buyers.
    Three months after that, Greg slides into third during a company softball game. It’s a close call. They give it to him because nobody can believe he can play softball at all. But it is a legitimate close call. Even if he hadn’t been stabbed in the head and now needed a computer to keep him alive, it could have gone either way.

    Now Greg always eats with a bib. He doesn’t have to anymore. Hejust likes to.
    “It makes sense,” he says to Angela. “Remember what my ties used to look like?”
    He found a good deal online for wholesale lobster bibs. The bibs have a picture of a lobster in a chef hat holding up a platter with a cooked lobster on it. “Aren’t they funny?” says Greg. “Though in truth, the bib-makers are playing off of a lobster stereotype. Lobsters probably don’t go out of their way to eat other lobsters in the wild. It’s just when they’re jammed together in tanks and traps that they start cannibalizing each other.”
    Angela squints at him. It’s not a nice squint. “How do you know that?”
    Greg doesn’t know what he’s done wrong. “I don’t know. I read it somewhere.”
    Somehow she squints even more. “That’s not the sort of thing you used to know.”
    Best to make a joke of it. “That was then, my dear. Now”—and he taps the eneural for emphasis—“I remember everything. Did you know lobsters don’t have a centralized brain? And lobsters can be right- or left-handed. The dominant claw is called a ‘crusher.’ And do you know how to tell a male lobster from a female? Males have these things called gonopeds … hey! Where are you going?”

    Greg Jr. is doing worse in school; Lucy’s about even; Chase drawsnothing but mummies now. But Bobby Entin draws pictures with headlines like “I like to kill Mommy” so nobody at preschool is worried about Chase.
    After reviewing the report cards, Greg says “Let me talk to Junior.”
    It is the last thing Angela wants. But the best she can do is ask “Are you sure?”
    “You know he only opens up when he’s pitching. And no offense, honey, but you can’t catch.” He kisses her on the head—she flinches, he ignores it—then heads out the screen door to the back yard.
    Junior’s arm is shockingly better since Greg last caught for him. Every time the ball lands in Greg’s mitt it buzzes like an alarm clock. Sometime during his absence, someone taught Junior to throw a split-finger.
    “D in math?” asks Greg.
    “So?” says Junior.
    “So Ds are for stupid people. And you’re not stupid.”
    The ball thuds into Greg’s meaty mitt. “I don’t need math.”
    Greg throws a grounder; Junior fields it gracefully. “I do math every day at my job.”
    “No you don’t.”
    “What?”
    “You don’t. Your eneural does it for you.”
    “Ah,” says Greg. “So what does that mean? Instead of learning algebra, you’re going to get an eneural like your old man?”
    “Beats studying.” A little too much action on that split-finger, butGreg backhands it, saves the wild pitch. “Nice one, Dad.”
    “Thanks. Well, we’d better get an eneural in your head soon, or you’ll never pass math. Angela!” Greg yells. “Bring out the big chef knife. I’m going to stab Junior in the