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

head.”
    Junior cracks up. “Nuh-uh!”
    “Uh-huh!”
    “Mom won’t let you.”
    “Yeah,” Greg concedes, “you’re probably right. Tell you what. Why don’t I help you with math tonight? It was always my favorite subject.”
    “Can’t.”
    “Why?”
    Greg Jr. taps his head right where an eneural would sit. “Mr. Lopez says we’re not allowed to use calculators.”
    Greg stands up, flips up the catcher’s mask. Junior is laughing the honest, merciless laugh of a fifth-grader.
    Just a joke thinks Greg. He pulls down the mask, crouches, punches his mitt. “You just tell Mr. Lopez that your dad
is
a calculator, and if he has a problem with me helping you with your homework, he can come talk to me. One more pitch, then we go inside to do some math, okay?”
    “Okay,” says Junior, still laughing. Then he gets suddenly serious, sets, checks first base.
    Greg keeps calling for heat, but Junior keeps shaking him off. He likes his new split-finger better.

    Angela reads online that, while some fundamentalist religions accuse eneural developers of playing God, the International Theological Commission of the Catholic Church has come out in support of eneurals. The Commission finds that “As the brain is no more the soul of a person than any other of the body’s organs, prolonging or enhancing its function does no more to ‘create life’ than any other prosthetic.”
    At the press conference announcing the Commission’s findings, Cardinal Secretary of State Salvador Bianchi says, “The matter is simple, really: a man who has lost his soul cannot get a new one by means of an eneural.” The always-colorful cardinal adds: “Science can make the legs of a dead frog dance by running electricity through them. But that doesn’t mean dead frogs
like
to dance.”

    Angela’s parents are dead. She is an only child. Before she had kids she used to have a lot of friends, but now she has her family. But she can’t talk to her family about this. She can’t talk to Greg.
    She turns to Nurse Bonnie. Bonnie works the night shift, so most nights she has plenty of time to talk.
    Everyone else is asleep in the Justice house. Angela in the amber darkness of the kitchen, her hand cupped around the phone’s receiver. “Bonnie, I feel like … I feel like I don’t know him anymore.”
    “Oh, honey,” says Bonnie. “Of course you know him. He’s still the same Greg.”
    “See, that’s just it, Bonnie. I don’t know if he is the same Greg. Some things are the same. Most things. But not everything.”
    “Okay,” says Bonnie. “But you’re not the same person you were before the attack either, right?”
    “No,” says Angela. She pauses to mourn the person she once was. “No I am not.”
    “It’s natural for people to change, Sweetie. That’s just part of life.” “Yeah, okay, but it’s more than that. It’s not that he’s changed. It’s that … what if Greg died the night of the attack?”
    The living silence of the phone connection buzzes in Angela’s ear. “I don’t think I follow you,” says Bonnie.
    Angela takes a deep breath. “I mean, what if Greg died that night and now the eneural is just pretending to be him? What if it’s just reading Greg’s memories and using his body to impersonate him, but really Greg died almost a year ago, and now I’m living my life and raising my kids with a … a fake Greg? What if he’s all body and no soul?”
    There
, thinks Angela. Breathing feels suddenly more satisfying.
I said it
.
    Bonnie says nothing for a long time. The kitchen is still monotone brown. Aren’t eyes supposed to adjust to darkness? “Well, honey,” Bonnie finally begins, “let me ask you something. Before the accident, how did you know Greg had a soul?”
    Angela wakes up a little. “What do you mean how did I know Greg had a soul?”
    “Just what I said. How did you know?”
    Angela laughs. “Everybody has a soul, Bonnie.”
    “But how did you know? How could you tell there was a