WHAT IN THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? seemed like the only rational response to these people who allegedly knew her.
Or: IN A HORROR MOVIE, YOU WOULD BE THE FIRST TO BE KILLED. YOU ARE THAT FUCKING DUMB.
I’m going, she kept hearing herself say. I’m gone.
The festival hotel was the first place Clare searched. She peered inside every conference room and into the face of every person she passed in the lobby and at the laminated badges beating softly against chests. She checked the men’s bathrooms, feigning confusion when apprehended. She checked the theaters in Vedado designated for screenings: La Rampa, Yara, Charlie Chaplin. After Clare saw Richard, the invisible wall between her and Revolución Zombi had come crashing down, for the theater suddenly became the most probable place to find him in all of Havana.
At Cine Charlie Chaplin, she stood in a long line for the afternoon screening and took a seat in the very back. Whenever someone entered or exited, an attendant clicked on a flashlight, illuminating the path. Clare watched people move down the carpeted aisle, pause to select their seats. The film began and still no sign of her husband. She prepared herself to see a lot of blood.
* * *
Richard had been found by a Good Samaritan, on the part of Route 443 she knew as Delaware Avenue, just past Normans Kill and Graceland Cemetery, not far from where the road shot under the highway and became 9W. These details she had learned from the detectives assigned to the case: Detective Hall, a woman with a bleached pixie cut that did not suit her, and Detective Winter, a man who carried a coffee mug with the words DON’T ASK wrapped around the white belly. A crime had been committed, after all—perhaps intentional, perhaps accidental, but a crime nevertheless. The Good Samaritan was a high school chemistry teacher and a part-time EMT. He drove a pine-green station wagon. Unmarried. He had been the person to call 911, to wait with Richard for the ambulance. He said that on the side of the road her husband had been unconscious—not with the world, in his language. Richard did not respond to sound or touch or light. He did not speak. The Good Samaritan attended the funeral, and that was where he told Clare that he had held her husband’s hand.
* * *
When the zombies first arrived, state TV claimed they were dissidents sent by the United States. The United States had interfered in their elections and in the revolution; now they were attempting an invasion. American occupation would not have been without precedent: twice the U.S. military had seized Cuba, once at the end of the Spanish-American War and again after Tomás Estrada Palma’s administration collapsed in 1906, that second occupation summoning the first wave of American tourists, making the recent boom less a new phenomenon than a continuation in the giant loop of history.
There were two women in the film: a prostitute, whose death occurred within the first ten minutes and was treated like a joke, and the hero’s estranged daughter, played by the possibly missing Agata Alonso. The daughter was visiting from Germany, where she lived with her mother. She was an elegant beauty, lithe and damp-eyed, and implied to still be a virgin. Clare herself had simple, pleasant looks—the kind of woman people might call pretty, never beautiful—and was certainly not a virgin but also not having sex all the time. In the average horror movie, she estimated her time of death would arrive approximately halfway through. Revolución Zombi had English subtitles, and Clare was relieved to be able to catch every word.
In Germany, the daughter was a blogger. In the early hours of the zombie plague, she spent her time complaining about the Wi-Fi and reading pirated foreign magazines. The government continued to blame U.S. dissidents until those officials were eaten up by zombies, an indomitable regime toppled in days. Then the hero devised a plan to video the zombie epidemic and smuggle the tape off the island, where it would be replicated and sold to the highest bidders. Their country had lied to them and had no plans to change. Why should they do anything to save it?
The hero’s sidekick cracked a joke that made everyone laugh.
The sigh of the ocean washed through the theater.
The hero approached a stone tunnel blocked by an iron gate. He was in search of his mother, who had recently been made undead. A long shot of his face behind the rusted bars, the moment thick with suspension, and then he pushed the gate open, the hinges creaking, the darkness spreading before him like a body of water. The Terrible Place was near.
The screen flashed. Clare glanced down at her wrist and became aware of an eel sliding around under her skin, just as Yuniel Mata had predicted. She leapt to her feet and rushed from the theater, the attendant’s flashlight bright on her heels.
In the bathroom, she splashed water on her face. She pressed the underside of her wrist, as though she were taking her own pulse; the eel dove under the surface, fleeing her touch. In the mirror her reflection trembled. She pulled her eyelids apart. She poked her hot cheeks. She returned to the theater, but she did not take her seat. She watched the rest of the film standing in the shadows, her back to the door, a woman who could not decide if she was coming or going.
* * *
In order to survive long enough to film the zombie apocalypse and smuggle it off the island and make their fortune, the characters in Revolución Zombi had to keep battling the undead. Eventually the hero’s sidekick was felled by zombies, not long after acquiring a gun that jammed before he could fire, which came as no surprise to Clare. Guns hardly ever worked in horror. They malfunctioned or went missing at critical times. Instead killers used knives and ice picks and axes and hammers and hypodermic needles and chain saws. Weapons that made them get close. At first, the daughter was not allowed to participate in all this killing, but after the hero confronted his undead mother in the tunnel, his tether to the old order was cut. Next thing Agata Alonso was carrying an ax and wearing combat boots and cut-off shorts, a knife sheath strapped to her thigh. She was sexier than she had been before but also less feminine, unlike the dead prostitute, last seen in lingerie and big hair.
Richard had once explained that many Final Girls had androgynous names—Laurie, Ripley, Sidney—because to be less feminine than the other women, the ones who stupidly wandered into clammy basements and shadowed alleys and got gruesomely murdered, was crucial to their survival.
So you’re saying to be feminine is to be weak and dumb? she asked.
To survive, it sounded like, the Final Girls had to be willing to transform into the men pursuing them.
Not exactly, he said. More like susceptible.
She had been reading one of his papers in the kitchen. Empty juice glasses. The clock ticking on the wall. The next day she was leaving for Racine, her small black rolling suitcase packed and standing watch in the front hall.
* * *
At the festival hotel, she located the information booth on the terrace and attempted to describe her husband to the woman sitting there.
He is forty years old. He is wearing a linen suit. He is an American.
She could not believe she was discussing him in the present tense.
She took out her cell phone and showed the woman a photo of Richard making marinara sauce in their kitchen. She could picture herself just outside the frame, standing by the stove and testing salt levels by licking pulverized tomatoes from the tip of the spoon. Did a person exist without photographic evidence? Not in this era.
She was aware that she was talking very fast.
The woman held an open umbrella, a small shelter from the sun. She had not seen anyone who fit his description.
Clare knew she had not been speaking clearly, the nuances were getting lost, but to tell the story properly she would have to start in New Scotland, months before. If she were to keep pressing, if this woman were to summon someone from the hotel and if that person were to summon a police officer and if that officer were to ask when her husband had last been seen: nothing she knew in any language could sufficiently describe her situation.
She turned from the booth and walked straight into a congregating tour group, led by a guid
e in a pink visor. The guide raised a white flag and started for the lobby. In Clare’s experience, most tours looked to either the past or the future; this one was invested in the past. In a circular marble hall, the guide drew the group’s attention to an elevator rumored to be haunted. Clare followed them down a wide staircase, to an underground exhibit dedicated to the hotel’s history. The movement of the group was snakelike, she the tip of the tail. The guide pointed to framed photos of movie stars smoking cigars on the terrace and foreign dignitaries and mobsters at the Havana Conference. Next a display on the Cuban Missile Crisis, including a map of the island that illustrated the former locations of the Soviet missiles with large red dots. The guide said that below the hotel lay a system of underground tunnels; they formed a stone circle beneath the outdoor gardens. During the crisis these tunnels had served as a bunker, with periscopes to keep watch on the U.S. Navy ships threatening invasion.
Glass display cases held newspaper headlines and photos of the tunnels. The group shuffled along, but Clare lingered on one photo in particular, a black-and-white image of a stone path leading to an iron gate. A tube of shadow behind the bars and then unending night. She leaned closer. She touched the glass. She severed herself from the group. She put her ear to the case, listened for the sigh of the ocean. She imagined peering through the rusted bars, like the hero had. A camera positioned in the shadows, the lens trained on her face. She wondered what the eye would see and what she would see in what the eye saw. She imagined the suspension transforming into a warm flood of inevitability as the gate swung open and she stepped into whatever new dislocation of reality lay ahead.
* * *
At the Third Hotel, she found a brochure for the National Zoo slipped under her door. She suspected it had come from Isa, who had made special mention of the zoo. When the front desk was quiet, Clare had noticed her reading an astronomy textbook, a trio of planets orbiting across the cover. Isa had pink highlights in her hair. She wore reading glasses with round frames, glasses that looked like they belonged to a much older woman, and T-shirts with sequined designs on the front; she had a beauty mark on her chin. In the mornings, when the front desk was hectic (the phone ringing, the front bell ringing, guests popping over from the breakfast room to inquire about more coffee or sliced papaya), she wedged her cell phone into the center of her bra for safekeeping. Her shoes were made for long hours on her feet, black clogs, the rubber heels worn thin as dimes. The hotel was technically a rambling casa, owned by extended family abroad and managed by Isa’s cousins. Already Clare had observed a German college student delivering small gifts to the front desk: a guava candy one afternoon, a wilted pink carnation the next. Isa had eaten the candy and deposited the flower discreetly in the trash.
In her room, Clare stood by the phone on the bedside table. She pictured calling her mother in Jacksonville Beach, the Bobtails mewling in the background. She listened to the dial tone. She put the phone back down.
I did not see what I saw, she announced to the room.
In the bathroom, she dug cuticle scissors from her toiletries bag. The bedroom walls were a plain white, but the bathroom was printed with bright blue flowers and twisting green vines, the petals molting from the humidity. All day her hair had felt like an excess and undesirable weight. She began to nibble at the ends with the scissors, right where her hair dusted her collarbone. She nibbled up to the edge of making a terrible mess. She put the scissors away, shoving aside a desire to keep going until the white basin had been transformed into the pelt of an animal.
* * *
At Albany Memorial, Richard’s possessions had been returned to her in a clear plastic bag. She had found, among his wristwatch and wallet and keys, a white cardboard box. It was the size of a small gift box, light in her hands. The edges were taped shut. She had brought it home and placed it on the kitchen table. Had he been on his way to see someone? Did the box indeed contain a gift? She sat, stood, circled the table. She felt unable to open it. She could not imagine what might be inside, and this inability to imagine felt damning to her somehow, a lethal failure of understanding. She had brought the box with her to Havana, nested in her backpack. During the flights she had unzipped her bag and peered down at the flat white top, the sealed edges. At the Third Hotel, she had placed it in the safe in her room. She liked the idea of the box living behind a locked door.
After Richard died, Clare had fantasies about figuring out a way to live exclusively on airplanes. For years, she had believed that if she just kept moving she could elude the most painful parts of life, and now she had come under the equally suspect belief that movement could shield her from the most painful part of the most painful part. On her last work trip, she’d vomited through the flight, in the tiny airplane bathroom, even though she had never before been airsick. She became one of the strange things other people saw during their travels—the strangeness they talked about, or didn’t, when they returned home.
She spent around two hundred days on the road every year, though she had not left the country unaccompanied since college (with Richard: Glasgow; Mexico City; Lisbon; with her parents, a budget cruise to Bermuda, which left her hoping to never experience the grotesqueries of cruise travel again). It was not until Havana, however, that she realized professional travel and personal travel were sharply separated by a single fact: one realm contained directives, the other did not. She woke feeling like her brain had grown a layer of wool overnight. She would spend all day trying to cut the wool away and then the moment she fell asleep it came right back. Her hair thinned when she brushed it, matting the plastic teeth. A molar had gone loose in the back of her mouth. Her ability to rely on signage was breaking down. Beyond the borders of the old part of the city, where street names were painted on bright tiles, she had seen street signs written on rocks or on the sides of buildings or she had not been able to locate them at all.
The only directive she could find for herself here was movement, for while movement could lead her in the entirely wrong direction, she could not count on stillness to bring her any closer to the where.
She thought often of those pigeons in Plaza de San Francisco, circling and circling.
On her map, the city was shaped like the head of a dog. Every morning she started on the Malecón, near the Anti-Imperialist Plaza, where a statue of José Martí clutching Elián González overlooked the sparkling sea. The wall prevented her from getting lost, so she would trace that border between land and water all the way down into the old part of the city, with its scrubbed boulevards and elegant stone plazas and souvenir shops selling Che refrigerator magnets. At Plaza de la Catedral, a nativity scene had been arranged on the steps of a grand cathedral with twin bell towers, on a blond bed of straw. She had paid a small fee to enter the church, and learned that one bell had come from Spain, the other from Matanzas. If she was nearby when the bells sounded, she felt like she was being shaken. Plaza de Armas was bordered with stands displaying books for sale, the stands bordered by carriages resting in the shade, the rear hoofs of horses cocked. Each stand offered a variation on the same items: posters for the winter cinema and jazz festivals, novels, books about the revolution, some in laminated jackets, the plastic soft with dust. Persistent vendors tried to sell her on Hemingway.
If you leave a woman, though, you probably ought to shoot her, Hemingway had once written in a letter.
On Dragones, in the high heat of the afternoon, she slipped inside a hotel and, from the edge of a mezzanine bar with potted palms and fleur-de-lis tile, she watched a few minutes of CNN, in the blessed cool of the air-conditioning. On one side of the bar, a temperature-controlled mahogany chest held rows of cigars for sale. At a small table, a woman in a lunatic print ate a salad and sipped a cuba libre through a fluorescent pink straw.
Once she passed the white dome of the capitol and the baroque spires of the national theater, the buildings were pressed tight together and the window grates were being strangled by vines and the sidewalks and streets were trenched a
nd pitted. Doorless entryways. Freestanding facades. Windows with head-size cavities. Through an open door she glimpsed a mammoth crumbling staircase, a decapitated statue rising from a banister, that led to a rooftop restaurant reported to be popular with tourists, ruin reborn as atmosphere. She looked up and saw men in rope harnesses scaling a building under construction. Close to the ocean a mist hung in the air. And then she was back in Vedado, trekking past the Ministry of Labor and Paradiso, the tourism bureau, and the lines outside the Coppelia ice-cream parlor, awaiting scoops of chocolate, pineapple, almond. Down Avenida de Los Presidentes, where she had spotted tourists posing before a statue of Abraham Lincoln. She walked this same avenida late one night and found it transformed, overtaken by young people with Mohawks and wallet chains, like a gathering of nineties anarchists.
The Third Hotel Page 3