I was eighteen and asleep in the wee hours when the smell of perfume pierced the fog of my sleep. This wasn’t a subdued scent—not of, say, the ripe mangos wafting in from the tree right outside my window. No, this was far more robust and specific. As if a woman had lingered a tad too long in the mist of her spray, and then planted herself beside my bed.

     I pulled the sheet from my face, peered at the gray darkness: nothing, all still and quiet. But then the smell seemed to move around the foot of my bed to the other side of the room. What nonsense. Clearly, I decided, my mind was playing tricks on me, and I promptly returned to sleep. But over the next several weeks, the scent returned in the same way and always in the dead of night. One time, I went as far as to get up, turn on the overhead light, and confirm to myself that, yes, I was in fact fully awake. Christ, is something actually here? I wondered as I glanced, now wide-eyed, around my room. After a few minutes, the smell faded as quickly as it had arrived. What could explain this? And repeatedly too?

 

My family had recently moved into an expansive, two-story L-shaped house in a tony

neighborhood of Caracas, the capital of Venezuela. This was a vibrant, successful, and proud country, to tell by the way its good-looking citizenry dressed, dined, and carried themselves. Crude oil flowed from the Orinoco Belt, foreign investment continued to pour in, and Venezuelan women featured prominently in the Miss World and Miss Universe pageants.

     My father had risen through the ranks of an international organization based there and had recently been elected by the member country states to his current post of Deputy Permanent Secretary, a prestigious role not only within the entity but on the world diplomatic stage. It was this appointment that had precipitated the move to this house, or Quinta as they are known in Venezuela. Instead of numbers, large houses commonly bear names; ours, Quinta Blanca Luz, was translated as House of White Light. The Quinta was well-appointed, and we employed a cook, a housekeeper, and a gardener. My father’s work provided a driver and a gleaming Mercedes-Benz.

     I took immense pride in my father for his professional success. He had worked hard, all the more notable for a man of color navigating the halls of power and influence in the ecosystem of Latin America and beyond. We had grown up hearing the adage that the Black man had to work twice as hard to get half as far, and he had embodied and modeled his steadfast ethic for his children to great success. I, on the other hand, had little to show for my efforts thus far. Until recently, and save for school vacations, I had spent five years apart from the family, having attended high school in Trinidad—my home country, an hour’s flight away—which was a great emotional sacrifice for us all, but I had left with dismal grades. Having come close to an emotional breakdown toward the end—a mix of academic pressure and internalized homophobia proving too formidable to overcome—my grades had suffered. Dejected, I had come to Caracas a year before and promptly threw myself into studying and retaking some of those courses, the results of which would hopefully facilitate my admission to a university in Europe or North America. After such a prolonged separation, we had at least availed ourselves of reconnecting as a family. But on one level, and from my perspective, a gap of sorts still existed between my father and me.

     Some fathers and sons are each other’s best friends. We certainly weren’t that. Conversely, others experience a tense, maybe even adversarial, dynamic where, for example, two alpha males find it impossible to inhabit the same space. We weren’t that, either. No, ours was a relationship characterized by a solid and high fondness for each other but without the warm confidence bred of, say, clinking beers together on a Friday evening or at a favorite football game. That I was clearly less inclined to team sports than he had been at my age didn’t help matters, and maybe this contributed to an overall profile of a son that was different from what he’d expected. Maybe he was ashamed of my academic failure and the dim prospects that that portended. Or maybe, deep down, he sensed my suppressed homosexuality, an invisible yet stark divide between us that he didn’t want, or know how, to bridge; a lion looking past his slight cub of a son.

     If my father wasn’t on one of his myriad business trips abroad or otherwise engaged, he’d come home during the siesta period, and my mother and I would lunch with him. On one particular day when my mother was running errands, I joined him and we exchanged platitudes. But silence quickly descended—he poring over The Daily Journal, the country’s then-English language newspaper—and I, intent on cutting my time short at the table, eating at a pace. But he noticed me stifling a second yawn.

     “You didn’t sleep enough?” he asked.

     “Five hours, if that much,” I replied, shaking my head.

     “Why so little?”

     I mentioned the repeated encounter with the mysterious odor.

     “What kind of smell?” he asked, lowering the paper.

     “Like a woman’s perfume.”

     My father jerked back from his plate.

     “What else?”

     “Well . . . it doesn’t make sense, really. It was as if the scent was moving around my bed. As if it were coming off a person. And I felt, or at least I thought I felt, an actual presence in the room.”

     My father’s expression now morphed to one of disbelief, and as his eyes swam around in their sockets, a baby tomato rolled off his fork and onto his plate.

     It turned out that my father had experienced the same wee-hours encounters and had mentioned as such to my mother, who thought it strange, but said no more of it. My corroborating his experience prompted her to invite to the house a “gifted” acquaintance of my mother’s—someone who communed with the spiritual world—on the pretext of tea and a tour. Wherever we lived, my mother cultivated contacts with individuals of this ilk, and this being Latin America, where belief in folklore was rich and prevalent, it wasn’t long before this special guest, Wendy, accepted the invitation.

     Wendy, my mother informed me, was gifted with an otherworldly perception that was triggered by her lighting a candle and staring into its flame, from which, apparently, images took shape.

     Interesting, I thought. My mind immediately conjured up a worst-case scenario. Being closeted, a source of deep turmoil for me, I wondered whether meeting her was risking scrutiny that, were discretion not adequately exercised, could precipitate my exposure to and rejection from my family. Anxiety gripped me. But my mother also emphasized that Wendy came highly recommended and never accepted payment, both which had inspired credibility. A person of this talent, I reasoned, who was routinely granted access to people’s lives and problems, could not enjoy such robust referrals if she didn’t know how to keep her silence.

     On the appointed day, Wendy arrived and we were introduced. My first impression was that she was pleasant and good-natured—she smiled with eyes that warmed me—but I also felt self-conscious. As with my first therapist, I felt that Wendy could see right into my soul and down its corridors which I had carefully concealed from inquiring minds. The previous night, I had stayed up late, surreptitiously reading the latest copy of The Advocate, a monthly gay magazine—my only connection with my community—with its wholesome profiles of gay celebrities and allies as well as its seductive adverts that depicted frolicking men in the pools of gay guesthouses in Key West and Provincetown. I marveled at how happy they looked nestled in each other’s arms and chests, further proof that I should head northward, whether to Europe or North America. Could Wendy see all this imagery in my head?

     Wendy and my mother went off and had their tea. I wasn’t invited, nor did I want to be. The prospect of further exposure to Wendy’s scrutiny did not appeal, though in ordinary circumstances I might have crashed the party. After all, the company of women came easily to me. In this case, I could have started by complimenting her—genuinely so—about some detail of her dress, hair, or shoes that would credibly telegraph my interest in her. My skill stemmed from my ability to further conversation by posing questions, and I could go lowbrow or highbrow, whether it be local happenings or popular culture, the latter being my favorite. Movies? I was, and still am, a cinephile extraordinaire. Current events and celebrities? Vogue and Vanity Fair were subjects of my constant study. British Royal Family? Please. I even knew the names of their tiaras. I’m not even kidding. Contrast that with the company of men, the prospect of which was generally less appealing to me, at least at that young age, unless of course the company was attractive and, above all, interesting.

     Once the ladies had finished, my mother summoned me, and from this point, I assumed the role of co-guide in showing off the house. On reaching the second-floor porch, which looked out over the valley of the city, I felt like a haute couture designer showing off his wares amid the glamour of his atelier. Will you just look at the view! Priceless!

     The three of us had just emerged from a room, when, upon facing the long and empty hallway that ran the length of the house, Wendy visibly stiffened and grimaced.

     “Oh!” she squealed, and shaded her eyes with her hand, as if looking at the sun.

     “Are you okay?” I asked, alarmed.

     My first thought was that she might be having some kind of seizure, but she kept shielding her eyes with one hand, and with the other she kept us at bay.

     “Wendy,” my mother said, “do you need to sit down?”

     My mother and I looked on as Wendy, amid labored breathing, wiped away tears as she stared ahead, again swatting away our offers of help with a shake of her head.

     “There’s an old woman,” she said, “halfway down the corridor . . . and she’s standing in the middle of this light, so bright. I can barely see her.”

     What? I glanced at the long, empty corridor ahead. Nothing. I thought of the Virgin Mary, but that seemed absurd even to consider. Wendy looked away and groped for our hands. We led her into the adjoining study, where she slumped into a chair.

     Was this how poltergeists wore us down? By overwhelming our senses?

     “Here you go,” I said, and brought her a glass of water, which seemed to revive her.

     “She’s harmless though,” she quipped.

     “But how do you know?” I was eager to hear.

     “She’d know,” my mother murmured, to which Wendy nodded as she drained her glass.

     “I don’t know who she is. Just the overall feeling I got, you know, is that she’s harmless,” Wendy said, looking better now.

     “But why is she here?” I pressed, unsatisfied.

     “I don’t know.” She glanced at the closed door at the other end of the study. “What’s that way?” 

     “Just the guest bedroom,” my mother said. “You’re sure you want to continue? Anton can drive you home if you’d like.”

     “Let’s go there,” she said, nodding at the door.

     I was none too pleased at this stage. The quicker this could be over with, the better. But what could I do but follow?

     The guest bedroom occupied one end of the house. Its distinguishing features were its large windows facing the street below: a waterbed—a vestige from our previous home—and a walk-in closet, the only one of its kind in the house. Wendy made straight for the closet, opened its door, and flicked on the light. She frowned. Concerned, I looked on from several steps back.

     “There’s something here,” she said.

     “What do you mean?” I asked. I checked that my route to the nearest exit remained unobstructed.

     The walk-in closet had built-in cabinetry right up to the ceiling. Wendy slid open the cupboard doors at eye level, then pulled open every single drawer, all of which were bare, since we weren’t currently hosting anyone. Unsatisfied, she looked upward to the highest cupboards above our heads.

     “You have a ladder?”

     Inwardly, I sighed. I sensed that nothing good would come of this. Ladder procured, I trudged upward—not that I let my anxiety show. I slid the panel back and peered in.

     “Empty,” I declared. Thank you, Jesus.

     “How about the other side?” 

     I got down, moved the ladder to the right, climbed back up. When I slid open the second panel, I did not like what I saw. Lying at the very back of the storage space was a small, dusty-pink case, the kind women used for personal effects when boarding planes in the ’sixties.

     “What do you see?” Wendy asked from below.

     I stared at it. I’m so not in the mood for this mess.

     “Um . . .” is what I muttered instead.

     Reluctantly, I grabbed the case. I had now made physical contact with this thing—Angels in heaven, protect me—and once I laid it on the bed and pressed its silver buttons, the latches flew open.

     Lying inside was a full length of plaited hair. I kid you not. It was dark brown, secured at both ends with rubber bands, and looked straight out of a horror movie.

     My mother and I glanced at Wendy and then at each other. Clearly, we were out of our league.

     “This is where he gets his power from,” Wendy said.

     “Who . . . who are you talking about?” I stammered.

     “The owner—the owner of this house,” came her answer. I screwed up my face and backed away from the case.

     Once Wendy signaled that there was no reason to further linger, we headed out, though not to the back staircase, from which we had initially emerged, but to the main staircase, which split the house down its center. For some reason, my mother had picked up the pink case, and the sight of her walking toward the staircase unnerved me. What if some poltergeist, upset at having its personal effect removed from its resting place, unleashed its fury at my dear mother and pushed her down the stairs? I took the case from her.

     Halfway down the staircase, I felt myself falter in a split-second hit of dizziness before it faded. I wondered if, like Wendy, I too was experiencing some version of sensory overload. Not long before, after all, Wendy had wavered on her feet and almost succumbed. My eyes fell on the glass panels enclosing the staircase. I suddenly saw myself bearing the brunt of spectral rage, flung face-first through the glass and sustaining injuries that would require plastic surgery at Swiss clinics, with my mother wailing in waiting rooms that her son’s face would never be the same. I gripped the railing.

     How this had all started and quickly migrated into a realm with which I was patently uncomfortable was not lost on me. Wendy had been invited for nothing more than tea but had endured some kind of paranormal experience, when none of us had so much as breathed a word to her about our aromatic encounters. This struck us as sobering and reason enough to make some inquiries. That my father volunteered to take the initiative and investigate, when he was the family skeptic in these matters, spoke volumes.

     My mother, on the other hand, was no skeptic. As a child, and unlike my father, she had lived in a rural area in Trinidad, so I grew up hearing her speak of strange experiences that spooked me. Of seeing, for example, a brilliant red light streak across the low sky and flash behind a stand of trees that she swears to this day was The Soucouyant, an old woman of Caribbean folklore who, after shedding her skin at night, travels as a fireball to suck the blood of its victims.

     Or, closer to home, when I was nine, she related the day she returned home as a teenager to realize that her own mother, my grandmother, had been cursed by a woman with whom she’d fallen out.

     “Cursed how?” I remember asking.

     “Her mouth looked just like a bullfrog.”

     “What do you mean?” I asked, incredulous.

     She fixed her gaze on me and spoke slowly, as if the careful pace would help her words penetrate my brain.

     “Her skin was dark and green and glossy, just like a frog. And her mouth was wide and crooked to one side, with the lips all puffy and weird.”

     Horrified, I stared at her. “So what did you do?”

     “We had to have a priest come and bless the house. And some Baptist woman came by and gave her a bush bath and something to drink—I don’t know what.”

     That did it. Privately, I committed to staying as far as possible from any and all such madness, the better to insulate myself from such mischief. For me, there would be no potions, spells, hexes, Tarot cards, incantations, or wax figures, thank you very much. And I didn’t realize that my mother thought the same until, one Christmas, after I’d unwrapped a Ouija board—my eyes widening with wonder for all of five seconds—she swooped down and plucked it straight from my hands, never for it to be seen again.

     All this to say that Mom and I were discussing the current matter at our Quinta with a fervor that only served to bring us closer together.

 

Out of the blue, my father asked if I’d be interested in helping him with a work matter. He was slated to deliver a speech at the United Nations in New York City and wanted the drafts proofread.

     “But don’t you have professionals for that?” I asked, out of genuine curiosity and not to get out of it.

     “Yes, but the firm we’ve been using seems to be in some sort of turmoil, and I need fresh eyes on it.”

     “Sure,” I said. It became, in fact, a paying gig. For weeks, I sat at the outdoor porch and reviewed his speech, marking it up for spelling errors and mistakes in grammar or formatting—of which they were surprisingly more than I’d expected—and sent my edits via the driver, only to get a fresh draft when my father returned home in the evening. It was interesting to see how blocks of thought expanded or shrank, were augmented either by quotes or numbers, different facts, or a dollop of levity. In landscape, it was no different from any narrative with its intent on holding an audience’s attention as it sailed up and down the waves of logic and reason, mainly laying out a case of some suboptimal state and exhorting countries to collective action.

     I didn’t deal with Dad on this for weeks until the very end when, as we were driving somewhere in the back of the Benz, he suddenly expressed his thanks for the help I’d lent, which he emphasized with a gentle squeeze of my shoulder. My father was not a physically demonstrative man, so his tactile touches were few and far between. To this day, I still remember the warmth of his large hand on my lean frame, his intention to convey more than just a word of thanks to his only son.

 

Days later, we were eating lunch together, when my father, having already hinted that his inquiries had turned up something, started with the security company that had guarded the house before we’d rented it.

     “I had to ask them to repeat it. It’s the strangest thing,” he exclaimed. “They said that one evening when two guards were doing a walkthrough of the house, they came across an old woman in a hallway.”

     I let out a small gasp. 

     “They turned a corner, and she was standing right there. And when one of them asked her how she’d gotten in, she disappeared right before their eyes.”

     We fell silent as this sank in.

     “Then what?” pressed my mother.

     “Apparently, the guards turned on every light in the house, called the company for backup, and waited outside. They refused to set foot back on the property ever again. And then I spoke with the realtors who were in charge of finding rental tenants. It turns out that this house has had only one previous occupant before us, and that was the owner who built it. And he had a son who was born blind yet grew to adulthood only to die right here in this very house.”

     My mother and I both gaped at our father, our eyebrows high on our heads.

     “Yeah. And the boy’s mother, the owner’s wife, took care of him until he passed.”

     “So what?” I asked. “The woman who Wendy saw upstairs . . . is that the owner’s wife and the boy’s mother?”

     To which my father could only shrug.

     Bizarre. I could not believe where this had led. We pondered how we could confirm the woman’s identity and uncover any other relevant information.

 

That night, I went to see a local production of Bent, the renowned gay play by Martin Sherman. I had read about it, so when I saw the modest announcement in The Daily Journal, I wasted no time in getting a ticket.

     I got to the small theater just as the lights were coming down. The production design was modest but the acting was solid, and I was riveted. The play followed Max, a gay man who had to confront the brutality of Nazi persecution. His initial instinct for self-preservation, while not surprising, was shocking relative to the love he had to betray and the form that betrayal had taken. Ultimately, he reversed his thinking when he fell in love again and rediscovered his dignity and defiance.

     It was only when the lights came up that the audience rustled to life and I saw for the first time—with their sparkly jackets, jewelry, and coiffed hairdos—some of the more colorful members of the city’s gay community. It was like looking at exotic birds of paradise and wanting to join the fray in the jungle while lacking the fortitude and shared language to do so.

     The play affected me deeply, and as I drove home I tried to process it. My general reaction was one of awe, of its heart-wrenching depiction, rooted in real-life scenarios, of how my gay brethren were forced to make decisions in the face of extraordinary challenges that laid bare their very essence, which led to freedom, love, failure, or death. For a long time I’d been experiencing a sense of hopelessness from my lack of direction and, by extension, angst over what my future career path would be. To me, this was a healthy sign of ambition and of a desire to do right by my parents’ expectations. But the uncertainty had been taking its toll.

     Bent had highlighted that my concerns were not the gravest of stakes—they certainly weren’t life and death—and I reminded myself that, unlike the characters in the play, I had agency, something I often forgot. In its own way, and despite its dark ending, Bent refuted the notion that I was headed for a tragic end, and it served to remind me that I should trust that my destination would align with my ambitions and efforts. It’s a message that I’ve since carried with me, equal to the recognition that revelations of this nature are a derivative of appreciating art, with its ability to pierce the subconscious when mere affirmations fall short.

     By the time I got home that night, it was past ten. I went up the main staircase and entered a storage area, where I found my mother in her nightgown, putting away, of all things, cleaning supplies. I had intended to bid her good night and head to my room—the play had put me in a pensive mood—but one look at her caused me concern.

     “What’s wrong with your eye?” I asked. Half of one eye was bloodred.

     “I dunno. I was just cleaning something. I must have brushed it with my finger, or maybe it splashed.”

     “What were you using?” 

     When she showed me the bottle and I scanned the label, I read what I thought was some kind of bleaching agent. Suspicion gnawed at me.

     “I think we should go to the clinic and get it checked out.”

     “But it’s so late already.”

     “They’re open twenty-four hours.”

     Finally, she relented, and I drove her the five minutes it took to get there. I had her take in the bottle of cleaning solution when they walked her in to be examined. A half hour and several ocular washes later, she emerged with her eye already looking much better.

     “The doctor,” she said, as we made our way back to the car, “told me that had I waited much longer and left it untreated, I could have lost the eye completely.”

     I was shocked and relieved and grateful for the immediate and right medical help all at once. Disaster averted.

     “Oh, my goodness,” my mother said, and I could tell that she was still marveling at her luck. She touched my wrist. I smiled.

 

The final piece of the puzzle came from Wendy a few days later. Again, and without knowledge of what the family had independently learned from either the security company or the realtors, Wendy called my mother. She opined that the old woman she had seen was deeply “connected” to the house and, more importantly, to someone who had lived there, like “maybe a lost child.” She further said that this old woman was roaming the house in search of the child, not letting herself rest. She was “trapped,” Wendy had said, between the living and the dead.

     A few days later, I returned from running errands to find the house awash with a calming aroma. As instructed by Wendy, my mother was smoking the house with frankincense and myrrh while reciting the Lord’s Prayer. Apparently, this was a common solution when souls that had passed were not at rest.

     Days before, my father had invited me to accompany him to New York City, where he would deliver the speech that I had proofread. I took it as a token of his appreciation for my work. It may not have been Provincetown or Fire Island, but New York City would provide a welcomed glimpse of what life could eventually look like in a liberal city. At the very least, it was a welcome relief and a distraction from my normal state of worry and anxiety.

     As I packed, I could smell the heavy scent, as Mom retraced her steps through the house with the burning herbs. Just as I had asked the heavens so many times for myself, I now offered a silent prayer for the sake of this spirit, that she be freed from her search for those she had lost, find her way to her loved ones, and be finally laid to eternal rest.