The Veins of the Ocean

by Patricia Engel

  I went to each cage and opened the latch, reaching in as Mayra once taught me to do. The bird stepped onto my finger, and I pulled my hand out and shook it off into the air.

  I let all eight birds go.

  That night, when she realized what had happened, Mayra called our house to tell Mami. They figured it was me since I was the only one who’d gone out there, but I denied it just like Carlito had always taught me to do.

  Mayra told Mami there was something wrong with me. I was worse than your ordinary fresca and way more chinche than my brother ever was. She said I had no conscience.

  “Calm down, Mayra,” Mami said. “They’re birds. Where else do they belong but in the sky?”

  Mayra and Tío Jaime grew so frustrated by their dog’s behavior, the way she rejected them, that they took her to a vet and had her put down. Carlito was furious. He said they didn’t give the poodle a chance to adapt, that you couldn’t blame her for being upset she got stuck with such shitty humans like Mayra and Jaime. He cried for days and told me he should have done like I did with the birds and smuggled the dog out of there.

  Once, on the phone from prison, one of the rare times Carlito spoke of his death sentence, he mentioned the poodle.

  “They’re going to do that to me. They’re going to euthanize me like a dog.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “I wonder what it will be like,” he continued. “I think about it sometimes. The walk from the cellblock to the death house. I wonder how it will feel when they push the drugs into my veins. You don’t always die right away, you know. They say the whole thing is supposed to take less than ten minutes. But it took one guy an hour to die. His skin started to slide off his body while the poisons fried him. But he wouldn’t die, so they kept having to pump him with more.”

  I remember feeling so sickened by his words that I couldn’t speak.

  “They give you three injections. One to anesthetize you, one to paralyze you, and one to stop your heart. The anesthetic is supposed to keep you from feeling, but nobody knows if it really works because even if you’re still awake and your body can feel pain like you’re on fire, the paralytic keeps you from screaming and crying, until the last drug finally suffocates you and you go into cardiac arrest.”

  “Who told you all this?”

  “A new guard in here. A young guy. He stands outside my door and talks for hours. It’s like they shot him up with truth serum or something. You know what else he says? All the people who go into the chamber with you wear masks. Even the doctor whose job it is to stand over you and make sure you have no pulse left. That’s so nobody outside finds out that in here, they’re paid to be serial killers.”

  “Carlito,” was all I could manage after several moments.

  “I’d rather be shot by a firing squad. I’d rather be gassed or dropped out of an airplane. All those people sitting on the other side of the glass, waiting to watch you die in a chemical experiment, like it’s a fucking magic show. They should save the money and just take me back to the bridge and throw me over. That’s how I was supposed to die anyway.”

  The line started to beep the way it does when a prison call is down to its final seconds.

  “I have to find a way out of here, Reina. I can’t let them kill me.”

  I thought he meant through the appeals process or our petitions for clemency, how plenty of death row folks, especially women, get their sentences lifted and are resentenced to pure life.

  But now I know he meant something else.

  They don’t let me back in the water with the dolphin. Whenever I go to her pen, to get a look at her progress, just like the other staff members often do, Mo comes by and tells me I’m a distraction and to get back to my work minding the park guests. The dolphin is still despondent, nonreactive, ignoring Rachel and all her attempts to entice her with fish or toys, instead remaining by the fence for hours, sometimes so still she’ll roll onto her side only to set herself upright again, until the sun sets and all of us go home.

  They’re consulting with experts at other aquariums to see if they’ve dealt with similarly resistant cases. In the worst-case scenario, she’ll remain alone in a pen indefinitely, subject to more force-feedings, and still the staff maintains this is a better fate than releasing her to the wild. But they’re hopeful she’ll observe how the other dolphins around her have adapted to life in their enclosures, respond to scheduled feedings and human contact, and understand surrender is her means of survival.

  It reminds me of Carlito’s prison days when Dr. Joe told me that even though most inmates fantasize about the day they’ll be released, a lot of them don’t actually want to be freed; they’ve been in the system too long and in some cases, through generations, the claw of the law present from the cradle.

  “Incarceration is contagious,” Joe said. “It becomes a state of mind, and once it penetrates a prisoner’s psyche, it’s very hard to remove. Inmates will become so emotionally destroyed that they will internalize their surroundings and forget about the world outside, and where they came from. They start to believe prison is their natural habitat.”

  “I don’t think prisoners ever forget where they are.”

  “You would be surprised, Reina.”

  “You try living the rest of your days in a cell. See how natural it feels to you.”

  “That’s exactly the point. Isolation is designed to break a person’s consciousness. For some, the only way to endure it is by losing one’s mind.”

  I wake earlier and earlier, dreams pulling me out of sleep. I dream of the Santo Toribio church, of the muralla where I used to hide from my mother and grandmother and slip off to with Universo. It is always night in my dreams and I am always alone.

  I shake awake to find Nesto beside me. In the morning, I’ve gotten into the habit of telling him my dreams, which he says come through Olokun, orisha of the deepest part of the sea, who brings messages from the ancestors.

  Then I think of my mother, who believed it was no good to ponder dreams. “It’s like looking for hairs in your soup,” she’d say. “You’ll never be happy with what you find.”

  Cartagena. Always Cartagena.

  After his sentencing, Carlito made me promise to go back to Cartagena for him, so I could tell him about the colors, the smells, and the sounds, and he could close his eyes and pretend for a moment he’d been there with me.

  “Maybe your dreams are telling you it’s time to go back,” Nesto says.

  “I guess it would be nice to see if it’s as I remember.”

  “Nothing is ever as one remembers it. That’s the point of memory. So you can keep the pictures of your life you want to keep and forget what you need to forget. The only reason to go back is to see the place as it is now, and to see how you feel in it.”

  On our next Sunday phone call, I ask my mother if she’d be interested in going back to Cartagena with me, tell her it’s something Carlito always asked me to do. I hope she thinks there might be something special about taking that kind of journey together, maybe it could give us peace to move forward with, but she says she won’t leave Jerry alone to go on vacation anywhere.

  I tell her she can bring him along though the last thing I want is to travel with the guy, but Mami dismisses me and finally admits Jerry refuses to travel to a country he considers “uncivilized.” Maybe in the future we can all go, she offers, after they’re married.

  “What about you?” I ask Nesto. “Would you go with me?”

  “I would. But I have to go home first.”

  He’s still waiting to hear from the agency if a slot has opened up for him to go as a mula. Mo agreed to give him the days off without pay.

  Mornings my dreams wake us up, Nesto and I don’t go back to sleep. We lie in the cool predawn darkness, listening to the morning birds make their calls, waiting for sunrise to lift away the night.

  On on
e of those mornings, I tell Nesto to come with me out to the dock. Dawn has broken and I know Jojo will be coming around the bend of the canal any moment on his boat. Nesto kicks his feet around the dock impatiently.

  “What are we doing out here, Reina?”

  “Just wait another minute with me.”

  Sure enough, there’s Jojo, turning out of the canal passage. I wave him down and he comes closer to the dock. I ask if he can take both of us out with him. I want Nesto to see what I’ve seen the few mornings I’ve gone out with Jojo.

  Nesto and I sit together on the bench at the back of the boat while Jojo drives out. The morning sky swirls with orange and pink. Jojo calls to us to look to the right and there, just like the first time, a group of dolphins swims against the waves to keep up with the boat. Jojo finally cuts the engine and the water slowly flattens, the dolphins turning over the surface, their backs glowing in the light of dawn.

  Nesto stands up to get a better look and I see his tired face brighten. We watch for a while as the dolphins vanish underwater, reemerging on the other side of the boat, and rushing against each other.

  The sun is higher now, and we know it’s time to go back so we can make it to work on time.

  While Nesto gets his things together to head to work, I lay out the morning grapes for the iguanas, something he always laughs at. There are no iguanas left in Cuba, according to Nesto, because they were all skewered during the Special Period along with the banana rats, squirrels, and just about every other edible species one could catch and slaughter to feed one’s family. Even the zoo population thinned out in those days, pigeons and tortolas picked off park grass, manatees pulled out of canals to feed a whole barrio, and the pasteles sold on street corners were rumored to be packed with vulture and totí meat. But it happened a long time ago. These were things people didn’t talk about over there anymore.

  “Then why do you talk about it over here?” I asked.

  “Because if I don’t tell you, you will never know. And I think it’s important that you do know. It’s part of who I am. I had to eat things I never thought I’d eat too.”

  A pair of red parrots fly over the cottage and land atop a high palm leaning over the roof, birds that might even have come from as far Colombia, before they could be stolen from the rainforest, wrapped in newspapers, stuffed into suitcases, and smuggled out of the country to be sold for thousands in North America: exotic pets turned escapees.

  When Nesto finally comes out of the cottage, keys in hand, to head for the truck, I reach for his arm to stop him on his way and tell him what I’ve had on my mind for days.

  “I think we should let her go.”

  “Let who go?”

  “The new dolphin.”

  He looks at me sideways, his brow high. “Let her go where?”

  “Set her free.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “She’s not trained. She won’t even eat. She hits her head against the fence all day and all night. She knows where she is and what’s outside the pen. She knows the gulf is her home. She wants to get out. We just have to give her the way.”

  “She’s their property, Reina.”

  “She’s nobody’s property. She belongs in the ocean. You know that.”

  He takes a few steps away, turning his face from me to the path that leads to the beach.

  “And how are we supposed to get her out of there? Build her a ladder?”

  “You put that fence up. You know how to take it down.”

  Nesto sighs so long it turns into a whistle.

  “I’m not a citizen yet. I can’t commit crimes. If I got arrested, I’d risk everything.”

  “Just listen,” I say, walking toward him, reaching for his hand so he’ll come back to my side by the porch railing. “During one of your maintenance checks, all you have to do is unscrew the clasps from the fence to the poles. Then, at night we’ll take Lolo’s boat, drive around to the back of the pen, and we’ll dive under and pull it apart so the fence wall falls down and she can swim out.”

  “You know they say they won’t swim through anything. They can’t tell it’s an opening.”

  “She will.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just know it.”

  “What if she doesn’t come out? We’ll be wasting our time.”

  “I’ll swim with her. You saw how she was with me in the water. I know she’ll follow me. When she’s out far enough, she’ll know to go the rest of the way alone.”

  Nesto shakes his head at me. “I don’t think so.”

  “Listen, just like you walked across that border in Mexico, that dolphin is going to swim through that gap in the fence.”

  As I say the words, I realize how silly I sound.

  “Estás loca, Reina.”

  “If we don’t get her out of there, either she’ll starve herself or she’ll be tortured into accepting she has to live in that pen forever. That’s no kind of life either.”

  “The other dolphins seem to be doing okay there.”

  “They’ve already been made into zombies.”

  “They don’t try to escape.”

  “Some people are better at being prisoners than others.”

  “They’re not people, Reina.”

  I turn from him. The biggest of the iguanas, with a high ridge extending from its head to its tail, swallows grapes a few feet away.

  “Reina. Did you hear what I said? They’re not people.”

  “Imagine they build a fence around this property we’re sitting on and tell us we can never leave it. Never, for as long as we live, only eating the shitty little food they let us eat after we perform whatever stupid chores they want us to perform. This tiny patch of land has to be the only world we’ll know forever. How would you feel?”

  “I already know a place like that.”

  “Then you know why we need to do this.”

  “Look, we can talk about this later. We’re going to be late for work.”

  When we’re in the truck, before he turns the key in the ignition, I say, “If you don’t help me, I’m going to cut a hole in that fence myself. It will be much harder to do alone. But I’ll do it.”

  He covers his face with his hands, fingers long and cracked with calluses. His body looks especially tired to me that morning.

  I start to feel bad for what I am asking but don’t stop myself.

  “I’ve thought about this for a long time. I’m not going to change my mind.”

  “Reina, por Dios santo. Can you just let this go?”

  “I can’t. She’s not like the rest of them. She knows where she belongs.”

  Later, at work, I see Nesto by the new pen. I’m talking to some visitors by Belle and Bonnet’s enclosure when he passes me, and ducks behind the curtain dividing the new dolphin from the dock. When I finish with the visitors, I go to the other side of the curtain and see him, his eyes fixed on the dolphin, her head still pressed to the fence, while Rachel and some techs sit on the dock nearby with clipboards, discussing new strategies to get her to integrate.

  At night, back at the cottage, Nesto throws himself onto the bed without any dinner. He pulls off his beaded collares and places them on his handkerchief on the bedside table. I climb onto the bed and kneel at his side. He runs his hands on the fabric of my jeans, over my thighs down to my knees, and reaches for my hand.

  “If we get caught, I’ll take the blame for everything,” I tell him. “I’ll say you were just driving the boat and had no idea what I was planning. But we won’t get caught. They don’t have any security cameras out there. They can’t afford it. And we can make it look like an accident, like the fence just came apart.”

  “I did not come to this country to free a dolphin, Reina.”

  “Neither did I.”

  “What about the dolphi
ns in the other pens? And what about all those other parks in these islands? There are dolphins just as miserable as that one everywhere. Letting one go isn’t going to make a difference.”

  “It doesn’t matter. I can’t leave her there. I have to try.”

  “It’s like trying to block the sun with a finger.”

  “Two fingers,” I say. “There are two of us.”

  He closes his eyes and shakes his head. When he opens them, he touches my hair, lightly, as if it’s made of light rather than my messy strands.

  “I’ll help you. But only because you have a debt to pay to Yemayá for your family. You’re going to settle it by returning that dolphin to her waters.”

  “I don’t know about debts, but I know it’s still the right thing to do.”

  “We should wait until it rains. Just before or after a storm. Or even better, during one. So the guard on duty won’t hear the boat coming.”

  “So we’ll do it?” I just want to be sure of what he’s saying.

  “We’ll try, Reina. That’s all I can promise you. We’ll try.”

  I put my arms around him and whisper my thanks into his ear, though it doesn’t seem like enough, not because of what he’s agreed to do, but for what it will mean to me if we are able to pull it off.

  “You’re not scared?” he asks me.

  I shake my head and smile though I feel heaviness in my chest, knowing the real reason I have any courage at all is that I have so little to lose.

  The spring sun flames out later and later, but even on cloudy days when underwater visibility is poor, we go in for a swim. Once out in the blue, Nesto says, there is no way you can refuse it.

  It’s there, while Nesto makes his own offerings to the ocean—watermelon, fruta bomba, or just a banana peel he casts off into the current with a question for Yemayá and Olokun, waiting to see if it floats or sinks—that I make my own petitions to the water, asking for help to guide me through the darkness, find my way through the night tide past the metal fence, so I can clear the way for the dolphin, lead her through the path to her freedom. Most of all, I ask the ocean to keep us all, Nesto, the dolphin, and me, unafraid.