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[Saturday 31 October 2009]
It was evening and Seba was neither in the gym nor the library. This was unusual.
His outfit consisted of a teal tunic, vest, and short-cropped pants. This was also unusual.
Both of these things were Danny’s fault.
As to the first, the older toucan had decided that his Argentine cousin needed to get out for an evening. He did this from time to time, calling his brief interventions “check-ups”; tonight’s was the first of the series to exceed meeting up for a meal. While a portion of Seba appreciated his concern, a much larger portion suspected that he was specifically tasked with monitoring the new college student, uprooted and planted in foreign soil a mere two months ago, in order to assuage their mothers’ worry.
As to the second, the night’s check-up and Seba’s attire were occasioned by a party Danny was hosting to celebrate that odd American holiday called “Halloween.” As Seba fretfully crammed in whatever studying he could before he saw his cousin’s car pull up, he watched his roommates don their various guises to mingle across campus, where throngs of students (he had heard, and did not doubt) sought to cure their sobriety even more vigorously than on most weekends. He closed the blinds when passersby began displaying lewd feathery body language inappropriate for public display.
At least Seba’s outfit was less flashy than his face. Of course, a toucan beak was hard to beat in that department and uncommon, meaning that he’d gotten a few compliments on his “mask” that day.
Danny, standing amid the disaster that was Seba’s roommates’ sense of order, wore a similarly understated, but anachronistic outfit: a scoop-necked, loose-sleeved red shirt. Seba would have reminded Danny that he looked absurd if silliness weren’t one of his cousin’s preferred modes of interaction.
“Ready?” Danny asked, cocking his head and an eyebrow.
“Y… supongo que sí.” […I suppose so.] Seba replied. He invariably reverted to Spanish around family. Despite the campus’s heavy Latino population, English still dominated its conversations, and Seba was glad for whatever respite he could get from unfamiliar words clambering off his tongue. What English he had learned through the dint of self-study in Argentina had proven merely sufficient, and the parts of the language he did not encounter in his classes still washed over him uncomprehended.
“Y bueno! Vámonos!” That was one good thing about Danny: he followed Seba’s lead back into Spanish without prompting, his own accent tinted with his father’s Brazilian drawl.
A little small talk about Seba’s classroom and basketball activities accompanied them out to the waiting car, a script each check-up had come to follow. Danny offered his diagnosis: “Tudo bom, eh?”
Seba nodded and jimmied open the car door. “Tudo bom.” Folding himself into the passenger’s seat, he adjusted it back to accommodate his lanky legs and guided his tailfeathers between the seat and its back. Danny got in on the other side.
The moment he shut the door, Danny donned a conspiratorial smile and turned to face Seba. “Okay, so. When we get to my apartment, I’m going to burst in the door and go ‘Miguel and Tulio!’…”—he spread out his arms and wingfeathers—“…and you’re going to follow me and go, ‘Tulio and Miguel!’…”—he mirrored his previous gesture—“…and then we’re going to act all tough and say, ‘MIGHTY AND POWERFUL GODS!’”
Seba stared at his cousin, who was sporting a wide-eyed grin and flexing behind the steering wheel. Seba’s eyes were wide below a furrowed, bemused brow. After a moment and the prompting of another flex, he verbalized his mental reaction: “Bieeeen…” [Ooookay…]
“Aw, c’mon, tucancito!” Danny said. “It’ll be great! Here, practice with me a bit: MIGUEL AND TULIO!” There were the jazz hands.
Seba got an elbow in his arm. “…eh… TULIO AND MIGUEL!”
“MIGHTY AND POWERFUL GODS!” they both proclaimed. One voice, however, was considerably less enthusiastic than the other.
“Great!” said Danny, twisting the key in the ignition and immediately pulling the car out of the parking spot. “That’ll be great!”
Seba worried about what he was getting into.
Danny seemed to detect this fact and continued: “I guess you don’t have to be there too long if you don’t want to. If you want to come back, I’ll gladly give you a ride.”
“Gracias.” Seba planned to take him up on his offer.
In a couple minutes Danny navigated the car through the streets of Pasadena to his off-campus apartment. The lights were on and various beaked figures moved in silhouette across the window shades: the party had begun. Apparently, most of the attendees were seniors Danny knew from his own classes at El Alado and players in the intramural sports leagues. All strangers. What had finally convinced Seba that this party might be alright was Danny’s reassurance that alcohol would be absent.
Seba gulped. He was used to performing before crowds of unknowns in his own way: dribbling, passing, scoring. What he wasn’t used to was performing by speaking, much less in a room inundated by English. And much less such a peculiar script. Tulio and Miguel?, he thought. Who are they? And what’s this about gods?
Momentarily lost in his thoughts, a rap on his door called Seba back. Danny had parked the car, gotten out, and come around to his side without him having noticed. With trepidation, Seba pushed open his door and exited. Danny rushed him up the staircase to the second-floor apartment balcony. Poised outside the door and speaking in a whisper, he counted down from three.
Danny jerked the knob and cast the door open on the count of “one.” This was early; it caught Seba unawares and he stumbled into the room, very nearly toppling forward. Surprise and a mental skip caused him to miss his comedic beat, but he still managed to squawk out the words “Tulio and Miguel,” followed by a half-hearted flex and assertion of divinity.
The room erupted into cheers and applause. Within a moment, Danny had slapped Seba on the back with a “bien hecho” [well done] and proceeded to the table of snacks in the open kitchen. The younger toucan gathered himself and stood there, mildly disoriented, as some of the crowd broke away from festivities to surround him. Though he almost a head taller than the tallest of them, he couldn’t help but feel a tad claustrophobic.
“You’re the one who’s actually from El Dorado, right?” some sort of green-headed waterfowl asked. Seba stammered an affirmative while wondering what his hometown had to do with anything. “Cool, man! Welcome to the US!” came as the response. A bluish female corvid complimented him on his costume, to which offered a nod, and another asked if he wasn’t the new recruit for the basketball team. Weirdest still, “Tulio” had apparently stuck. That had become his moniker for the evening. And he didn’t even know who this “Tulio,” as whom he was apparently dressed, was.
After the initial daze of passing greetings had subsided, Seba found himself where the carpet of the living room gave way to the kitchen’s linoleum. Most of the partygoers had congregated in the living room, clustered by Danny on the couch or around the TV, but a handful sampled from the fruit and vegetable platters scattered atop the kitchen table. They were all speaking English which, in the din, Seba found barely intelligible. And besides Danny, he knew not a one. They did not know him. And changing that was very nearly an impossibility. A dozen rehearsed English personal introductions flitted through his head, only to have the unrelenting waves of talk and doubt about points of English grammar and etiquette blow them away like so much winter fog. They all seemed so… false, laughable.
He watched their faces, caught snippets of sentences he could not follow. Words poured out, translated into meaningless rumbles by acoustic interference and an untrained ear. The sinking feeling in his stomach was not pleasant.
Averting his gaze from the inhabitants of the room and remembering that he had skipped dinner in to work, Seba spotted a couple of mangos nestled in a bowl among the food offerings. Not the small, yellow-orange, stringy Argentine sort; these were the green-and-red, fleshy Brazilian ones, rare even in Misiones. Apologizing perfunctorily to a pair of conversants between whom he reached to retrieve the tantalizing fruit, he grabbed the mango and began to rummage about in Danny’s drawers for a knife. Having found one, he ensconced himself in the corner between the refrigerator and the wall, cutting a neat line around the center of the fruit and twisting one end. Half the flesh came off with the skin and, inverting the hollow hemisphere of fruit, he scooped it out with his tongue.
It was delectable. A taste from home. Methodically, he disassembled the rest of the mango. The juice that coated his fingers he scraped off onto his beak. With the fruit came other very recent memories: he could smell the smoky summer air, the asados, the iron petrichor of the red soil…
With the delicious reverie ended, he found himself back in the loud party, washing mango stickiness off his fingers in the sink. In that instant he both knew that he had been at the party only a very short time and that he wanted to leave. This wasn’t his place. These weren’t his people. But he didn’t want to interrupt Danny’s fun, he didn’t exactly know which way to return to campus, and he was wary about wandering among drunks, whom he had always avoided back home. At least in this party, even the loudest were sober.
So he stood in the corner, arms crossed, introspection growing recursive.
That was how Danny found him a couple minutes later when he bounded up to grab a bunch of celery sticks.
“Hey, how’s it going, Seb? You look a little bored,” he said, backing up against the refrigerator and popping the tab on a soda.
“Se va.” He shrugged.
The seamless shift to Spanish. “Oh, claro. Seb-a, no ‘Seb.’”
Seba was confused for a moment. “Oh, no, quería decir que se va la fiesta.” [I wanted to say that the party was running along.]
Danny chuckled. “Ja! Entiendo ya. Y para que lo sepas: a todos les encantan nuestros disfraces. Gracias por ayudarme!” [Ha! I gotcha now. You know, people love the costumes. Thanks for helping me out!]
Seba looked down at what he was wearing. “Y de los disfraces… Quería preguntarte algo de ellos.” [And about the costumes… I wanted to ask you something about them.]
“Decime que querés saber!” [Tell me what you’d like to know!]
“…Quiénes son Tulio y Miguel?” [Who are Tulio and Miguel?]
Danny looked at him with incredulity, pointing back and forth from his tunic to his cousin’s. “Vos… no me digas que no conocés las personajes?” [Wait. You… don’t know who we’re supposed to be?]
“Nop.”
“…The Road to El Dorado?”
“Qué de Eldorado?” [What’s that about Eldorado?] All he could think of was Ruta 12, from Posadas to Puerto Iguazú. But that made no sense.
“Es una película.” [It’s a movie.] He thought a moment. “El Camino hacia El Dorado?”
“Nop. Nunca he escuchado de esa.” [Nope, never heard of it.]
“En serio?”
“…En serio.”
“Salió hace… nueve años. Tenías vos acerca de nueve años. No fuiste al cine?” [It came out… nine years ago. You were around nine. You didn’t go to the theater?]
“No hay cine en Eldorado.” [There’s no theater in Eldorado.]
“…y no la pasaron por la tele?” [They didn’t play it on the TV?]
“Ni tuvimos tele en ese entonces.” [And we didn’t even have a TV back then.]
“Oh.” Danny stood there clutching his forgotten drink, beak agape for a second. “…cuando salió, lo pensamos bien copado, porque tuvimos nosotros parientes que vivían en El Dorado.” […When it came out, we all thought it was pretty neat, because mom told us we had family members in El Dorado.]
Seba gave a snort. “Aunque es bello, los caminos del Eldorado real de Argentina no se construyeron de oro… como los de acá.” [Even though it’s beautiful, the roads of Argentina’s real Eldorado aren’t golden… like the ones here.] He had adapted a line he had rehearsed once that “King of Eldorado” nickname had started to circulate in Argentina’s youth basketball leagues and the jokes arose more frequently. He had habitually ended it with “…like those of heaven.”
Danny issued a nearly inaudible grunt and looked uncomfortable for a moment, evinced by an atypically protracted silence that wasn’t calculated for effect. The waves of noise filled the gap the silence left, and the foot between them seemed to widen.
His composure returned when devised a course change: “Sabés lo que tenés que hacer ahora, no?” [You know what you have to do now, right?]
Seba just raised an eyebrow and suggested, with little hope that his suggestion would accord with Danny’s: “Volver a casa y completar las tareas?” [Go home and finish my homework?]
There was that laugh again. Seba knew in an instant that his plans were even more dashed than he had expected. “Nop! Vos te quedás acá… y te mostramos The Road to El Dorado!” [Nope! You’re staying here and we’re showing you The Road to El Dorado!]
While Seba watched Danny somehow managed to hush the room, announcing the next activity and the reason for it. Delighted smiles spread as people looked to toward Seba, whose stomach sank on cue as everyone’s attention turned to him, and cleared a space for him in the middle of the couch. In the middle of everyone. He could not help but wonder whether people would be watching the movie or watching him watch the movie.
Either way, the next time Danny invited him to a party, he was going to have other plans.
---
Story inspired by the sketch, which is something I've wanted to draw for a long time and finally did during pac's stream on Thursday night.
And I'm really glad I wrote this story! extrapolating the two characters four years into the past really helped me get a better feel for their backgrounds and how they've developed since then. Thanks for the encouragement, guys!
It was evening and Seba was neither in the gym nor the library. This was unusual.
His outfit consisted of a teal tunic, vest, and short-cropped pants. This was also unusual.
Both of these things were Danny’s fault.
As to the first, the older toucan had decided that his Argentine cousin needed to get out for an evening. He did this from time to time, calling his brief interventions “check-ups”; tonight’s was the first of the series to exceed meeting up for a meal. While a portion of Seba appreciated his concern, a much larger portion suspected that he was specifically tasked with monitoring the new college student, uprooted and planted in foreign soil a mere two months ago, in order to assuage their mothers’ worry.
As to the second, the night’s check-up and Seba’s attire were occasioned by a party Danny was hosting to celebrate that odd American holiday called “Halloween.” As Seba fretfully crammed in whatever studying he could before he saw his cousin’s car pull up, he watched his roommates don their various guises to mingle across campus, where throngs of students (he had heard, and did not doubt) sought to cure their sobriety even more vigorously than on most weekends. He closed the blinds when passersby began displaying lewd feathery body language inappropriate for public display.
At least Seba’s outfit was less flashy than his face. Of course, a toucan beak was hard to beat in that department and uncommon, meaning that he’d gotten a few compliments on his “mask” that day.
Danny, standing amid the disaster that was Seba’s roommates’ sense of order, wore a similarly understated, but anachronistic outfit: a scoop-necked, loose-sleeved red shirt. Seba would have reminded Danny that he looked absurd if silliness weren’t one of his cousin’s preferred modes of interaction.
“Ready?” Danny asked, cocking his head and an eyebrow.
“Y… supongo que sí.” […I suppose so.] Seba replied. He invariably reverted to Spanish around family. Despite the campus’s heavy Latino population, English still dominated its conversations, and Seba was glad for whatever respite he could get from unfamiliar words clambering off his tongue. What English he had learned through the dint of self-study in Argentina had proven merely sufficient, and the parts of the language he did not encounter in his classes still washed over him uncomprehended.
“Y bueno! Vámonos!” That was one good thing about Danny: he followed Seba’s lead back into Spanish without prompting, his own accent tinted with his father’s Brazilian drawl.
A little small talk about Seba’s classroom and basketball activities accompanied them out to the waiting car, a script each check-up had come to follow. Danny offered his diagnosis: “Tudo bom, eh?”
Seba nodded and jimmied open the car door. “Tudo bom.” Folding himself into the passenger’s seat, he adjusted it back to accommodate his lanky legs and guided his tailfeathers between the seat and its back. Danny got in on the other side.
The moment he shut the door, Danny donned a conspiratorial smile and turned to face Seba. “Okay, so. When we get to my apartment, I’m going to burst in the door and go ‘Miguel and Tulio!’…”—he spread out his arms and wingfeathers—“…and you’re going to follow me and go, ‘Tulio and Miguel!’…”—he mirrored his previous gesture—“…and then we’re going to act all tough and say, ‘MIGHTY AND POWERFUL GODS!’”
Seba stared at his cousin, who was sporting a wide-eyed grin and flexing behind the steering wheel. Seba’s eyes were wide below a furrowed, bemused brow. After a moment and the prompting of another flex, he verbalized his mental reaction: “Bieeeen…” [Ooookay…]
“Aw, c’mon, tucancito!” Danny said. “It’ll be great! Here, practice with me a bit: MIGUEL AND TULIO!” There were the jazz hands.
Seba got an elbow in his arm. “…eh… TULIO AND MIGUEL!”
“MIGHTY AND POWERFUL GODS!” they both proclaimed. One voice, however, was considerably less enthusiastic than the other.
“Great!” said Danny, twisting the key in the ignition and immediately pulling the car out of the parking spot. “That’ll be great!”
Seba worried about what he was getting into.
Danny seemed to detect this fact and continued: “I guess you don’t have to be there too long if you don’t want to. If you want to come back, I’ll gladly give you a ride.”
“Gracias.” Seba planned to take him up on his offer.
In a couple minutes Danny navigated the car through the streets of Pasadena to his off-campus apartment. The lights were on and various beaked figures moved in silhouette across the window shades: the party had begun. Apparently, most of the attendees were seniors Danny knew from his own classes at El Alado and players in the intramural sports leagues. All strangers. What had finally convinced Seba that this party might be alright was Danny’s reassurance that alcohol would be absent.
Seba gulped. He was used to performing before crowds of unknowns in his own way: dribbling, passing, scoring. What he wasn’t used to was performing by speaking, much less in a room inundated by English. And much less such a peculiar script. Tulio and Miguel?, he thought. Who are they? And what’s this about gods?
Momentarily lost in his thoughts, a rap on his door called Seba back. Danny had parked the car, gotten out, and come around to his side without him having noticed. With trepidation, Seba pushed open his door and exited. Danny rushed him up the staircase to the second-floor apartment balcony. Poised outside the door and speaking in a whisper, he counted down from three.
Danny jerked the knob and cast the door open on the count of “one.” This was early; it caught Seba unawares and he stumbled into the room, very nearly toppling forward. Surprise and a mental skip caused him to miss his comedic beat, but he still managed to squawk out the words “Tulio and Miguel,” followed by a half-hearted flex and assertion of divinity.
The room erupted into cheers and applause. Within a moment, Danny had slapped Seba on the back with a “bien hecho” [well done] and proceeded to the table of snacks in the open kitchen. The younger toucan gathered himself and stood there, mildly disoriented, as some of the crowd broke away from festivities to surround him. Though he almost a head taller than the tallest of them, he couldn’t help but feel a tad claustrophobic.
“You’re the one who’s actually from El Dorado, right?” some sort of green-headed waterfowl asked. Seba stammered an affirmative while wondering what his hometown had to do with anything. “Cool, man! Welcome to the US!” came as the response. A bluish female corvid complimented him on his costume, to which offered a nod, and another asked if he wasn’t the new recruit for the basketball team. Weirdest still, “Tulio” had apparently stuck. That had become his moniker for the evening. And he didn’t even know who this “Tulio,” as whom he was apparently dressed, was.
After the initial daze of passing greetings had subsided, Seba found himself where the carpet of the living room gave way to the kitchen’s linoleum. Most of the partygoers had congregated in the living room, clustered by Danny on the couch or around the TV, but a handful sampled from the fruit and vegetable platters scattered atop the kitchen table. They were all speaking English which, in the din, Seba found barely intelligible. And besides Danny, he knew not a one. They did not know him. And changing that was very nearly an impossibility. A dozen rehearsed English personal introductions flitted through his head, only to have the unrelenting waves of talk and doubt about points of English grammar and etiquette blow them away like so much winter fog. They all seemed so… false, laughable.
He watched their faces, caught snippets of sentences he could not follow. Words poured out, translated into meaningless rumbles by acoustic interference and an untrained ear. The sinking feeling in his stomach was not pleasant.
Averting his gaze from the inhabitants of the room and remembering that he had skipped dinner in to work, Seba spotted a couple of mangos nestled in a bowl among the food offerings. Not the small, yellow-orange, stringy Argentine sort; these were the green-and-red, fleshy Brazilian ones, rare even in Misiones. Apologizing perfunctorily to a pair of conversants between whom he reached to retrieve the tantalizing fruit, he grabbed the mango and began to rummage about in Danny’s drawers for a knife. Having found one, he ensconced himself in the corner between the refrigerator and the wall, cutting a neat line around the center of the fruit and twisting one end. Half the flesh came off with the skin and, inverting the hollow hemisphere of fruit, he scooped it out with his tongue.
It was delectable. A taste from home. Methodically, he disassembled the rest of the mango. The juice that coated his fingers he scraped off onto his beak. With the fruit came other very recent memories: he could smell the smoky summer air, the asados, the iron petrichor of the red soil…
With the delicious reverie ended, he found himself back in the loud party, washing mango stickiness off his fingers in the sink. In that instant he both knew that he had been at the party only a very short time and that he wanted to leave. This wasn’t his place. These weren’t his people. But he didn’t want to interrupt Danny’s fun, he didn’t exactly know which way to return to campus, and he was wary about wandering among drunks, whom he had always avoided back home. At least in this party, even the loudest were sober.
So he stood in the corner, arms crossed, introspection growing recursive.
That was how Danny found him a couple minutes later when he bounded up to grab a bunch of celery sticks.
“Hey, how’s it going, Seb? You look a little bored,” he said, backing up against the refrigerator and popping the tab on a soda.
“Se va.” He shrugged.
The seamless shift to Spanish. “Oh, claro. Seb-a, no ‘Seb.’”
Seba was confused for a moment. “Oh, no, quería decir que se va la fiesta.” [I wanted to say that the party was running along.]
Danny chuckled. “Ja! Entiendo ya. Y para que lo sepas: a todos les encantan nuestros disfraces. Gracias por ayudarme!” [Ha! I gotcha now. You know, people love the costumes. Thanks for helping me out!]
Seba looked down at what he was wearing. “Y de los disfraces… Quería preguntarte algo de ellos.” [And about the costumes… I wanted to ask you something about them.]
“Decime que querés saber!” [Tell me what you’d like to know!]
“…Quiénes son Tulio y Miguel?” [Who are Tulio and Miguel?]
Danny looked at him with incredulity, pointing back and forth from his tunic to his cousin’s. “Vos… no me digas que no conocés las personajes?” [Wait. You… don’t know who we’re supposed to be?]
“Nop.”
“…The Road to El Dorado?”
“Qué de Eldorado?” [What’s that about Eldorado?] All he could think of was Ruta 12, from Posadas to Puerto Iguazú. But that made no sense.
“Es una película.” [It’s a movie.] He thought a moment. “El Camino hacia El Dorado?”
“Nop. Nunca he escuchado de esa.” [Nope, never heard of it.]
“En serio?”
“…En serio.”
“Salió hace… nueve años. Tenías vos acerca de nueve años. No fuiste al cine?” [It came out… nine years ago. You were around nine. You didn’t go to the theater?]
“No hay cine en Eldorado.” [There’s no theater in Eldorado.]
“…y no la pasaron por la tele?” [They didn’t play it on the TV?]
“Ni tuvimos tele en ese entonces.” [And we didn’t even have a TV back then.]
“Oh.” Danny stood there clutching his forgotten drink, beak agape for a second. “…cuando salió, lo pensamos bien copado, porque tuvimos nosotros parientes que vivían en El Dorado.” […When it came out, we all thought it was pretty neat, because mom told us we had family members in El Dorado.]
Seba gave a snort. “Aunque es bello, los caminos del Eldorado real de Argentina no se construyeron de oro… como los de acá.” [Even though it’s beautiful, the roads of Argentina’s real Eldorado aren’t golden… like the ones here.] He had adapted a line he had rehearsed once that “King of Eldorado” nickname had started to circulate in Argentina’s youth basketball leagues and the jokes arose more frequently. He had habitually ended it with “…like those of heaven.”
Danny issued a nearly inaudible grunt and looked uncomfortable for a moment, evinced by an atypically protracted silence that wasn’t calculated for effect. The waves of noise filled the gap the silence left, and the foot between them seemed to widen.
His composure returned when devised a course change: “Sabés lo que tenés que hacer ahora, no?” [You know what you have to do now, right?]
Seba just raised an eyebrow and suggested, with little hope that his suggestion would accord with Danny’s: “Volver a casa y completar las tareas?” [Go home and finish my homework?]
There was that laugh again. Seba knew in an instant that his plans were even more dashed than he had expected. “Nop! Vos te quedás acá… y te mostramos The Road to El Dorado!” [Nope! You’re staying here and we’re showing you The Road to El Dorado!]
While Seba watched Danny somehow managed to hush the room, announcing the next activity and the reason for it. Delighted smiles spread as people looked to toward Seba, whose stomach sank on cue as everyone’s attention turned to him, and cleared a space for him in the middle of the couch. In the middle of everyone. He could not help but wonder whether people would be watching the movie or watching him watch the movie.
Either way, the next time Danny invited him to a party, he was going to have other plans.
---
Story inspired by the sketch, which is something I've wanted to draw for a long time and finally did during pac's stream on Thursday night.
And I'm really glad I wrote this story! extrapolating the two characters four years into the past really helped me get a better feel for their backgrounds and how they've developed since then. Thanks for the encouragement, guys!
Category Story / All
Species Avian (Other)
Gender Multiple characters
Size 500 x 528px
File Size 142.1 kB
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