Black Pockets

by George Zebrowski

  “Medical care is expensive,” I told the old man. “You’ll have to earn the money. Do you have any?” It occurred to me that if he had a large enough stash somewhere, I could grab it and leave him here.

  “My money is all gone,” he said softly, and I knew then that I wanted more than money.

  Three weeks later, we opened the act with me saying, “Tonight, for the first time anywhere, Fidel Castro! Deposer of the hated Batista, once a Soviet puppet—and now a zombie!”

  Fidel sat in a chair facing the audience, unable to move, and I wondered how many people would really believe he was Fidel Castro. Would anyone believe that he was a zombie? The visa people had laughed as they stamped his papers, because my brother had put down his true name and profession—Fidel Castro, Zombie. He had become stiffer after leaving Cuba, and required more vitamins and water to keep him going. He never slept. I forced him to take a shower every day, and dressed him in fresh army fatigues. It was no harder than when I took care of my ailing grandfather in his last days.

  “The audience may ask questions,” I announced.

  “Is that all he’s going to do?” a man shouted from the back.

  Fidel’s eyes stared at me as I turned to look at him. “Must I do this, Enrico?” he asked in a strained whisper. I had asked him to try smoking a cigar and blowing rings during the act, but he had been unable to draw any smoke.

  “SeÒor Castro,” an old man said from one of the front tables, “why did you muzzle a free press?”

  Fidel seemed to become even stiffer. The corner of his mouth twitched as he struggled to answer. “What are you?” he asked in a broken voice. “The son of a doctor, lawyer, or shopkeeper? You fled Cuba because your parents feared for their privileges and sought to subvert the revolution.”

  “Answer the question!” the man shouted.

  “You ask,” Fidel continued, “why I failed to help my enemies.”

  “Another question,” I called out, sensing that the audience was warming up to the game. I could feel the old grievances, hatreds, and bigotries still simmering, and suddenly knew that the room would be packed for future shows.

  People seemed to accept the old man as Castro. My grandfather would finally get some justice out of the sonofabitch. My father, a lawyer, wouldn’t have cared much, since he had done well in Miami, and he had never liked my mother’s father. He thought that as a “Fidelista,” my grandfather had only gotten what he deserved.

  “Fidel!” an old man cried out from the back of the room. “You held up such high ideals, and we expected so much from you. How could you have failed us?”

  Fidel tried to rise from his chair, but fell back. “I never betrayed the Cuban people,” he croaked loudly, as if a snake was whispering from his lungs. “Ordinary families had it better from the first day after I threw the American gangsters out of our country. What did it matter if a few of the privileged suffered?”

  “But your own party removed you!” the old man objected. “Don’t deny your own sins by comparing them to others.”

  “Yes,” Fidel continued, “my party gave in to the greed that flowered with Reagan and spread to the Soviets. Real socialist ideals, they realized, would not make them rich. Now the common good will again have to struggle against personal fortunes that will be handed down the generations like a disease.” He raised his hands as if in prayer. “Ah! Who could have imagined that the Soviets themselves would capitulate?”

  “They got tired of paying out charity to you!” a young man at the front called out. ***

  We gave two shows that first day, and every day for the rest of the month. In his off hours, Fidel sat in our hotel suite and watched baseball games. I sat with him, and once in a while, he would say softly, “I was once a good pitcher. I could have been a great one.”

  “Yes,” I said, “and the owners would have exploited you.” He had in fact been a notable right-hander in his teens and twenties, and the Giants had taken an interest in him. They might have signed him if he had not stopped playing the game.

  I sipped my Cuba Libres, and began to feel sorry for the man who had become dictator believing he was serving the cause of justice, convinced that it was the only way to overcome human inertia, and history had made a fool of him. He had supported the failed Soviet coup of 1991.

  After a moment he asked, “When will the doctor come to look at me? We must have enough money by now.”

  “Soon, Fidel, soon,” I said.

  The audiences at the club hurled terrifying questions at him, but he answered each one with great care.

  “Why did you do these cruel things?” a young woman asked him.

  “They were small evils. Generations of Cubans had lived in a whorehouse. The United States never cared about the dishonest, tyrannical regimes that robbed Cuba. It never cared about governments that killed thousands of people and stole vast sums of money. It never cared about Cuba’s poverty, ignorance, unsanitary conditions, its lack of schools, hospitals, and medical services, or its unemployment and racial problems. It never cared. But as soon as a regime with ideals came into power, the United States cared—by strangling us with a blockade for thirty years.”

  “But how did putting political prisoners naked into a bare cell for years help Cuba?” she asked. “How could you do that?”

  “It was only a few,” Fidel replied, pleading with her. “I started in the hills with some of them, and they turned against me. If I had let them go, they would have worked against Cuba.”

  “No!” the woman cried. “Against you!”

  I walked with Fidel every morning on the beach, to keep him from stiffening up completely. He seemed to enjoy the ocean, and often stopped to look toward Cuba, as if he could see it.

  One morning he stood staring for a quarter of an hour, and I imagined that he was dreaming of the day he had pleaded with the Russians to nuke Washington to prevent the American invasion, or the afternoon he had been in the bunker with the Soviet officer as an American reconnaissance plane flew overhead, and to the horror of the officer had pressed the ground-to-air missile’s launch button himself, bringing down the plane. What had he been hoping for in those days, when it seemed that his regime would be toppled? Had he nurtured visions of blasting North America with nuclear weapons, so that it could be settled one day by Cubans and Central Americans?

  In later years, when relations with the declining Soviets had soured, a Russian restaurant had burned down in Havana, and had been replaced by a Chinese one. It had not helped. The symbolism of the change had not gotten him any more foreign aid.

  Finally, the colon cancer metastasizing throughout his organs panicked him into accepting treatment from his crank doctors. They slowed his life functions, killing the cancer, but the sluggish pace of existence he got in return was full of pain, without will or pleasure. He would creep toward death for another fifty years, they had told him, becoming more and more grotesque in the process.

  Still looking out across the water, he said, “They were small evils, weren’t they? Why do people reproach me with them?”

  I said, “Can you understand that evils must not be compared? All claims for a net good in human history are wrongheaded, even though relative good does come about, sometimes even from revolutions. But it’s this very kind of argument that must be forbidden. There’s a little story that proves the point. Imagine a world where all good is accomplished—but the price is the imprisoning of a small child in a closet, where it is tormented to the edge of death but never allowed to die, while millions benefit. Pragmatists must accept the conclusion that the child’s plight is worth the pain. Believers in the greatest good for the greatest number must insist that it’s a bargain. Only one child! Worse situations have been embraced as better.”

  “One child?” Fidel asked. “If I had killed only one soul, I would have been considered a saint. Yes, that would have been great progress.”

  “No,” I said. “Utilitarian progress is only an accountant’s progress. In such a world th
ere can only be islands where evil is ignored, not overcome. No other age can compare to the darkness that has spilled out of human beings, yet the twentieth century still cherishes the illusion of progress.”

  He turned and faced me. “But that’s only a story,” he said softly. “It proves nothing about the world.”

  “The world’s example,” I answered, “is the same story, but with less elegance in the point. To be practical is to do whatever serves your purpose, whatever your power allows, in fact to do whatever you like. I told you that you wouldn’t understand.”

  “No,” Fidel said. “It is you who does not understand. Practical progress is all we human beings can get. More is not possible. I was better than Batista and the American Mafia, even at my worst. And in this world I did all that was possible. Who had ever given Cuba more?”

  “Then you stand convicted out of your own mouth.”

  A man called me on the phone one evening and said, “You do know that the man in your show is Fidel himself and a genuine zombie?”

  “What do you want?”

  “You’ll have trouble disposing of him. Maybe I can help. I’m a specialist.”

  “And you want to be paid for your services?” I assumed that the man knew the club had made a lot of money from the act.

  “No—my advice is free.”

  “Can you tell me over the phone?”

  “You’ll have to burn him, then cut him in little pieces and bury him. It has to be in Cuba. Keep him the way he is, and he’ll outlast all of us.”

  “Are you a doctor?”

  “I am.”

  “Would you come by and check him for me?”

  “No need—there’s nothing to be done. He’s as near to dead as our biological clocks can measure. Help him let go.”

  I hung up, shaken. Fidel was sitting in his chair, looking out to sea through the picture window as he often did. I stared at the back of his head. He might have been Moses, or King Lear, with all that hair. In his heart, I realized, he might be innocent—even of his own hypocrisy—because he had set himself to change what could not be changed, deluding himself with the relative improvements he had made in Cuba, even though they disappointed him. It was because he had professed so much more that he had to be judged more harshly. Many insisted that he had never had any convictions—that power alone had been his aim. He had bet on the Soviets winning the Cold War and had lost. He had been lucky in having the United States to blame for his failures, or he would have been deposed in his first decade. The Soviets saved him by extracting a promise from Kennedy not to invade, in return for removing their nuclear missiles.

  At seven the next morning, I took his arm and led him out to the beach, and walked at his side as always. After a few minutes, he spoke without looking at me, saying, “There will be no doctor, will there?”

  It was time he knew the truth. “No one can help you.”

  “In that case, when you feel that you have made enough money from me for your grandfather’s suffering, take me back to Cuba, Enrico.” He stopped and looked at me with his sad, bulging eyes, and I knew that I could not refuse him. Besides, his audiences at the club had been getting smaller recently. Many of the older patrons had stopped coming. They had lost interest in confronting some crazed, old impersonator who could not possibly be their old enemy.

  “We’ll finish out the week,” I said.

  That same evening, in the middle of Fidel’s long, meticulous response to a question about corruption and drug-dealing in his regime, a young man stood up at a table in the back of the room, shouted “Death to tyrants!” and fired three shots into Fidel’s chest. As the assassin turned and fled, Fidel simply sat back in his chair and stared into space.

  I got a wheelchair from the wings and rolled it out to him. “Are you hurt?” I asked, ready to help him. There was still a part of me that doubted his condition, that expected him to be mortally wounded.

  “No,” he said, standing up. “At least this one was more direct.”

  “Direct?” I asked.

  “More so than the CIA’s exploding cigars.”

  I walked him back to his dressing room, sat him down, and opened his shirt to examine his wounds. There was no bleeding as I dug out the bullets from his rubbery chest. I had imagined that his heart rate and breathing were very slow, that he was only an old man with some peculiar condition, but the bullets convinced me of his true state. He could not bleed to death.

  There was a loud knock on the door. I went to it and opened it a crack. A cop in plain clothes was waiting to be let in.

  I said, “The shots missed, but he’s shaken up and can’t see anyone right now.” The cop looked past me, getting a glimpse of Fidel, and seemed convinced.

  I rented a recreational vehicle in Havana and drove it to a small coastal village north of the Sierra Maestra Mountains. My brother flew Fidel in a day later by amphibious aircraft, and I hid him in the RV.

  “This is more than the old bastard deserves,” my brother said before going back to the plane. “What is there here for him anyway?”

  “I don’t know, but whatever it is, he’s going to have it.”

  “Why bother about him?” He had come because he liked to fly his plane, not for old politics, and because I had asked him. Old Fidel had made us a few dollars, but sooner or later, my brother and I both knew, we would have to get free of him.

  The next morning Fidel and I drove into the hills where he had started his revolution and stopped in a small village, beyond which there was no road.

  I looked around at the dusty village. “What will you do here?” I asked, wondering how long he could exist without nutrients of some kind.

  “I will find out how long I can survive.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I must be able to die, sooner or later.”

  As I gazed at his rigid figure sitting next to me, I confronted my own love-hate relationship with revolutions, with changes of any kind, which rarely achieve their ends, because of failings deep within the human heart. Young revolutionaries, if they survive, live to sink into immobility and disappointment with their own kind. The time of just revolutions had ended before I was born.

  “Drive up as high as possible,” Fidel said, as if giving profound advice. “From there I’ll go by myself.” His raspy voice carried the authority of someone who knew where he was going.

  I drove the RV up a winding dirt path, and came to a stop before a grove of trees. Rocky mountainside rose beyond it. Fidel struggled out of the vehicle and stood looking up at the heights. I got out and waited.

  “Defeating Batista,” he said, “was easier than governing Cuba. I had been clever enough to see the battles that I would need to win, but to rule Cuba profitably would have required the friendship of the United States, which I lost because I would not deal with the devil. I went to the devil Washington feared, who professed just ideals. But it’s the devil you know that counts. I didn’t know either devil well enough to benefit Cuba.” He paused, as if overcome with emotion, but as usual his body stifled the show of human feeling, permitting him only words. “There are those,” he continued, “who believe it best to leave things as they are and hope for gradual change, no matter how bad things get. Do you believe, Enrico, that force is never justified?”

  “What will you do here?” I asked.

  He turned and faced me. “You know what must be done, or I will rise again, and no one knows how long I will suffer. Destroy me.”

  “I can’t do it!” I shouted, remembering the doctor’s phone call.

  “Do it for your grandfather, and for me.”

  “No, I won’t... I can’t,” I muttered, appalled by my sudden weakness.

  He turned away and started up toward the grove of trees. I waited until he was nearly out of sight; then curiosity got the better of me and I went in after him. He was staggering among the trees, toward the far side of the grove. I crept after him, realizing that I couldn’t take him back with me. What would I do wi
th him? There was a limit to how long an ex-dictator could be exhibited, even if I could have his condition as a zombie certified.

  I had a vision of two demented scholars from an old horror movie examining Fidel.

  “Zombie?” asked the first scholar of his colleague.

  The other nodded smugly and said, “Zombie.”

  Fidel stumbled out of the grove and threw himself on the slope, lacerating his rubbery flesh on the sharp rocks, but his movements seemed unphysical. He was trying to crawl back into the hill of dreams, into the mocking mirage where every dear ideal cowers, into the hills where he had been a hero, to a wild high place beyond life, from which we take what we need, even though it doesn’t actually exist. The blood pounding in my ears became a roaring fire in my brain as I watched him struggling to tear himself apart.

  “Okay—come back and wait in the grove!” I shouted, retreating.

  I looked back from the grove and saw his stiff figure stumbling down after me. Wind gusted through the trees, but died away as I hurried through to the RV and took out a spade, a can of gasoline, and the machete.

  There are nights when I awaken on the rocky hillside and see his pillar of fire roaring in the green grove. Trapped in an insane animation of a socialist realist mural with Henri Rousseau’s staring beasts, I cut up the charred body while Fidel’s frozen eyes watch me, and bury the pieces all over the grove, insisting to myself that he did some good, some bad, and was a lousy administrator, and that I was probably giving him too much credit for selflessness. What could you expect from an outraged, handsome young man who modeled his speechmaking on Mussolini’s? Maybe it wasn’t his fault. Maybe pragmatism is all we can get. I split the head into four bloodless pieces and bury them far apart. Then I wake sweating between icy sheets. My pillows are stones as I turn over and tunnel back into sleep, and the fire ignites again in the blackness behind my eyes.