My grandmother always spoke to me in Spanish, though she knew I preferred English. We don’t choose what we inherit, only what we do with it. That formula was the basis of their wealth, and my father’s, and, much later, mine. From Miami, she and my grandfather turned the remaining second- and third-rank properties in Puerto Rico to the manufacture of O’Gorman Reserve in exile. My grandmother’s brain held the exact formulation of base, yeast, and congener needed to continue to produce our family’s wildly popular rum off-island. It turns out a government can nationalize anything and everything. The revolution divested her of the family’s canefields and distilleries, of the silver, of the servants, even of the aluminum foil. When she cleaned tarnish from the heavy pieces of colonial silver in the house-there was a lot of it, and the servants weren’t allowed to touch any-she used boiling water, baking soda, and aluminum foil. She also had an encyclopedic understanding of which household tasks could be achieved by reaction rather than action. In La Habana, before the revolution, my grandmother’s buñuelos de yuca y malanga and pastelitos de guayaba betrayed the neat and precise method of a born scientist. If I am past my best working-as academic and corporate America seem to believe I am-I can still fill hexes, turn base to gold, and conjure up what would not be here without me. “Hold on,” I whisper, my hands flexing over the keyboard. Our goddess days, filled with crystalline songs of love-in sublimation, in transmutation, in chemical formulation. We pretend these days are like the ones that brought us together. On Zoom we don’t show our years: solid cells turning to sponge invisibly, fractures and leaks that cannot be seen in the mirror of each other’s eyes. Our heads fill with the leaping fancies of remembered magic and unexplored science. Our well-rehearsed fingers coax new pleasure from worn piano keys and old lovers. Words are honey in our mouths, these days.

They are handsome, dark and sweet, and somehow wilder in these years of our third age. Bending the world, but also bending to the world, deep as genuflection. I am on a call with my sisters, watching them migrate their method online. Prepare for aging and the way it flays you back to the first cell.Prepare for losses that rewire the chemistry of the brain.Prepare for science and other species of the supernatural.Prepare for words in Latin and Spanish.In the beginning was the trigger warning: We hunt for the structure of the universe in its ghosts.

Mapped out hr tight