Voyager

by Russell Banks

  They were from Dedham, Massachusetts, a Boston suburb, on vacation in Jamaica with their wives, he explained, who were waiting for them back at their hotel in Ocho Rios. They each had a battered paperback copy of The Book of Jamaica that they claimed to be using as a travel guide and had found their way to Accompong by following the trail of the narrator of the novel. They wondered if I’d be willing to autograph their copies of the book.

  Relieved and surprised, I agreed and signed the title page of both books, which made them very happy. The two men read the signature over several times and grinned. “Dolores isn’t gonna believe this!” one of them said. “She said we were nuts coming way out here in the boonies without a guide or anything, except your book.”

  “It’s a novel,” I told them. “You know, fiction. It’s not a guidebook.”

  CODA

  In March 2003, forty-four years too late for the revolution, I finally made my way to Cuba. I even got to meet Fidel Castro. I was there by official invitation to attend the Havana Book Fair, invited because one other American writer, my friend the novelist William Kennedy, and I had agreed to let the Cubans translate and publish our work, even though, thanks to the Helms-Burton Act, we would never receive a penny in royalties. We were assured, however, that our novels would be distributed free to every high school in the country and made available to the general public for the rough equivalent of one American dollar.

  As it turned out, Kennedy and I were able to spend most of our second day in Havana interviewing Castro in his private office. You don’t really “interview” El Commandante; you try to get a question in before he delivers another speech. Although when I asked him if, after forty-four years in power, he regretted anything, he answered quickly and efficiently: “Yes. Two things I regret,” he said. “I thought the revolution would eliminate racism, which it hasn’t. As you can see, everyone in a position of authority looks like me. But we’re learning from you Americans,” he added, “by promoting affirmative action.” Touché. “And second, I never should have trusted the Russians.”

  Around 6 P.M., he said, “You boys must be tired.” Kennedy was edging up on seventy-five, and my Medicare was about to kick in; no one had called us “boys” in half a century. But we were tired—nine hours in close quarters with Fidel Castro is exhausting, and we had been up the night before till 3 A.M. at the dinner he’d hosted for the cadre of visiting writers, all of them, with the exception of me and Kennedy, from the Caribbean and Central and South America. Castro had zeroed in on Kennedy and me, however, the only gringos present at his dinner, ignoring the writers we’d come there to meet. It was a few weeks before the American invasion of Iraq, and Fidel seemed unwilling to believe the Bush administration was crazy enough to do it. We assured him that it was. When Kennedy’s wife, Dana, became ill from the hovering blue cloud of cigar smoke, Castro ended the dinner. As we were leaving, he invited us to interview him alone in his office the next day. Hard to say no. It was the eve of Shock and Awe, the full-scale American invasion of Iraq, with Cuba one of the eight countries on the U.S. State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism, and El Commandante hoped, no doubt, for a puff piece by his left-leaning American literary guests in the New York Times or the Washington Post. Kennedy and I privately agreed that we would not write about our meeting with Fidel Castro, and until now, neither of us has.

  The interview done, Castro called for a map, and a secretary unrolled a huge map of Cuba and spread it across the desk. Castro pointed at the Bahia de Cochinos, the Bay of Pigs. “This is where I go when I am tired,” he said. “It’s a national park now,” he added. He pointed to an unlabeled harbor where he said a secret naval base was located. Tomorrow morning a car would carry us across Cuba to the base, where a boat would be waiting to take us to his personal retreat on a tiny island named Isla de las Rocas, also not on the official map. We were to stay overnight at his guesthouse. He told us to fish. Swim. Rest.

  The Bay of Pigs has been a rigorously protected nature preserve since April 1961, when the Cuban exiles and their CIA trainers and the Miami-based gangsters—colleagues of Joker, my old Boston gangster pal—famously tried and miserably failed to launch the counterrevolution. Now it was the Caribbean as it was before the arrival of Columbus, before the arrival even of the Arawak and Carib native people. Birds literally darkened the sky, and fish seemed to leap willingly into our boat, and there was no sign of human habitation—except for the Cuban naval force escorting me and Bill Kennedy and his wife, Dana, to Castro’s Secret Hideaway. We were aboard one of two small cutters, Russian castoffs fitted with Cold War–era .50-caliber M59 machine guns and manned by ten or twelve young sailors per boat. During the forty-five-minute ride, without baiting our lines, Bill and I managed to haul in nearly fifty fish, often one and two at a time, mostly red snapper, which we were assured would get shared out with the crew. Socialism at sea.

  The difference between being just plain dumb and being reckless is between doing a dumb thing by accident and doing the same dumb thing with conscious awareness that it may cost you your life. I had done many dumb things over the years, but very few that were truly reckless. I was about to do something truly reckless. Enjoying an al fresco lunch of grilled red snapper and fried plantains and avocado salad on the pier at Castro’s Isla de las Rocas with the Cuban naval captain and his officers wasn’t reckless. Drinking liberally from several bottles of mind-numbing, palate-pleasing, smooth-as-butter Cuban rum wasn’t reckless, either. Neither was following up with a few chilled bottles of ’01 Celler Gramona III Lustros Brut Cava from Spain. Getting as seriously drunk as Hemingway in his prime in the middle of the afternoon on a tiny island a few miles outside the Bay of Pigs wasn’t reckless. Not really. Until the captain asked us if we’d like to go scuba diving for lobster.

  Bill and Dana shook their heads no, they needed a nap, and staggered off for the small guesthouse a few hundred yards beyond Castro’s modest getaway cottage. The steep-roofed cottage faced the open sea and was painted blue, and a string hammock on the deck swung in the offshore breeze. The Caribbean glittered under the unrelenting sunlight. I was drunk. Very drunk. I had scuba dived in shallow water a few times in the Seychelles and on Bequi, but had never shot a speargun before. And I had never dived while drunk. I said, “Capitano, I’m there, man.”

  A half hour later, over forty feet of water so clear you could see the wavering antennae of the dozens of lobsters snoozing on the white sand below, I balanced on the rail of the cutter, wearing only my Calvins and swim fins, and strapped on tanks and a weight belt and hefted the speargun. And stopped. And said to myself: Wait a minute. I have a loving wife and four daughters and a granddaughter, my ninety-year-old mother whom Chase and I take care of, and many dear friends. They are all going to be very pissed off at my memorial service. They won’t feel sorry for me. They’ll say, Russell was drunk. Russell had never dived in forty feet of water before or shot a speargun. Russell was reckless. He deserved to drown.

  On either side of me, four young Cuban sailors were strapping on their tanks and weight belts, and I thought, There’s no way these guys will let me drown. They’ll have to report back to El Commandante that they let the old gringo writer drown in the Bahia de Cochinos. No, Fidel’s sailors will save me from my reckless self. I let go of the gunwale and leaned back and entered the sea, shoulders and backside first, the way I’d seen Lloyd Bridges do it on television.

  I shot three lobsters that afternoon, more or less by accident, and got grinning thumbs-ups from my fellow divers. And then missed two. Then, suddenly exhausted and dizzy, I realized that I was swimming in small circles, lost beneath the sea. Not beneath the sea—I was inside it, afloat in a transparent ether that filled endless space between the firmaments above and below. The other divers had disappeared. I was alone. I was not frightened or confused. I was almost happy. I had moved in widening spirals out from under the long shadow of the boat, and when I looked up now saw only the soft bright light of sky, but I could not
mark where the sea ended and the sky began.

  The boat had abandoned me, or I had abandoned the boat: at that moment I didn’t care which. Below, like the surface of an ancient, airless planet, the white rippled bottom of the bay faded into darkness on all sides and disappeared at the distant horizons. As if enticed to map the planet’s cold, permanently dark side, I tried swimming toward the horizon that happened to face me, but it receded and was swallowed by a farther horizon. Swimming in the opposite direction, it was the same. There was no north, south, east, or west; no up or down, in or out. Without a sun or stars overhead to navigate by, or familiar landmarks below to calculate my place and movement in time and space, I was simultaneously located nowhere and at the exact center of the universe. I was nothing and everything. It terrified me. But there was a strange, almost irresistible, vaguely familiar pull to this awareness, one that I had never felt before. I did not think it then, but I realize now that for a few moments, lost in the Caribbean Sea, I had finally imagined and penetrated the poetic mystery of my mother’s consciousness, her experience of being, and therefore had entered Darlene’s and Christine’s, and in its diminished form, Becky’s, too. For a few precious moments, I was able to grasp the story of my life so far.

  Until the sailors found me and hauled me back aboard the cutter like a gaffed marlin. That night at the Isla de las Rocas the cook grilled the lobsters over an open fire for me and the Kennedys. “Russell, you are a goddamn idiot,” Bill said. “But the lobsters are grand.”

  PART TWO

  PILGRIM’S REGRESS

  THE RETURN OF THE CHAPEL HILL THREE HUNDRED

  Fourth of July weekend, 1986—Liberty Weekend, it was called—and on Governor’s Island in New York Harbor Ronald Reagan opened a national celebration of the freshly renovated and scrubbed Statue of Liberty, a televised orgy of American self-love designed to leave participants standing tall as Marlboro men and brimming over with enough weepy narcissism for a beer ad. José Feliciano sang the national anthem, Neil Diamond followed with “They’re Coming to America,” Frank Sinatra warbled “The House I Live In,” and Elizabeth Taylor told us how much the statue meant to her. I was in eastern Pennsylvania piloting a rented RV, a beige slab-sided twenty-seven-and-a-half-foot-long Southwind recreational vehicle, a $50,000 condo on wheels. My passengers and I were a gaggle of middle-aging college classmates, heading south on Route 78 as if in flight from the wretched excess taking place in New York Harbor.

  We were on our way to Chapel Hill on this stifling weekend to what the North Carolina papers were already calling a “hippie reunion,” a gathering of one of the scattered tribes from the Woodstock nation. My old friend and classmate Alex McIntire was more responsible for the event than anyone else. It was he who’d called for the reunion—an anti-reunion, actually, for alumni who wanted no reunions and had never been to one, and it was he who’d compiled the nearly eight hundred names and addresses of Chapel Hill outriders from the sixties—all those civil rights workers and antiwar warriors and poets and painters and folkies and rockers and druggies and leftist journalists and hangers-on and god-seekers and sandal-makers and communards and utopians, all those antiestablishmentarians who had passed through Chapel Hill as students, enrolled and non-enrolled, at the University of North Carolina between 1962 and 1970.

  Sometime in the early 1960s, the chancellor and trustees and the administration of the University of North Carolina had decided to transform the place into the Berkeley of the South. To turn a sleepy, if distinguished, southern state university located halfway between Durham and Raleigh into a major, highly competitive, research-oriented institution like Michigan, Chicago, Columbia, and Berkeley, they had to beef up their faculty with old lions and young Turks, seek out graduate students from the hot centers, admit women and blacks, and recruit actively for undergraduates in the top public and private high schools of the North and East.

  In the 1960s, Chapel Hill was the first choice after Harvard, Princeton, and Yale of the graduating classes of Andover and Exeter. Allard Lowenstein was radicalizing the political science department, while Forrest Read, O. B. Hardison Jr., Louis Rubin, and William Harmon made people nervous in the English department. It was like that all over campus and in town, where students and faculty joined CORE and SDS and took beatings and got arrested integrating restaurants and movie theaters and lined up outside the post office every day to protest growing U.S. involvement in Vietnam. The best and the brightest, one might say, and frequently the most radical and often the most creative young men and women coming out of northern schools were heading south to UNC, where they met their southern counterparts, and where both met up with veteran civil rights workers, black and white, and a nascent antiwar movement. By the mid-1960s, Chapel Hill was being excoriated as a hotbed of communism, libidinous excess, facial hair, and racial agitation, condemned most rabidly on WRAL-TV in Raleigh by a newscaster who looked like a sneering woodchuck—a man named Jesse Helms, who flailed Chapel Hill with the passion and rhetoric of a Bible Belt preacher.

  By then drugs had appeared, the traditional grass and speed, but also LSD, and in enormous quantities. And almost before anyone knew what had happened, there was a full-blown sixties scene on Franklin Street in downtown Chapel Hill, mostly in and around a dim, scruffy New York–style bar and deli called Harry’s where everyone hung out early and late, at the Tempo Room, a grungy basement bar, and in various beat houses scattered across town and old abandoned sharecropper cabins in the rolling Piedmont countryside, where people freaked out at 3 A.M. and put their fists through walls or walked stoned off roofs or argued till dawn about the inevitability of revolution, the politics of Herbert Marcuse and John Lennon, the wisdom of Timothy Leary and Meher Baba. The UNC trustees got their Berkeley of the South, all right, but it wasn’t exactly what they’d bargained for.

  There were six of us in the van so far, with four more to pick up in Virginia. Everyone had heard rumors that there would be hundreds of us descending on Chapel Hill, from up in Michigan and out in Mill Valley, flying in from Hollywood, driving down from Washington and up from Mississippi. But secretly all of us in the van feared that we would turn out to be the only people present at the reunion. Surely everyone else thought the whole idea was silly. We’d seen The Big Chill and The Return of the Secaucus Seven. We knew how we looked.

  We were four men and two women, close friends two decades ago, and in recent years, after extensive side trips, friends again. Flopped across the bed in the stateroom way at the back of the van, in deep sleep since the Verrazano–Narrows Bridge three hours earlier, was Kathy Fehl, who at sixteen had been one of the youngest freshmen at Chapel Hill the same year I, at twenty-four, was one of the oldest. We met in orientation, got bored filling out the Minneapolis Multiphasic Personality Index, and ducked out for a beer at Harry’s, which Kathy, as a precocious, rebellious faculty brat, knew all about. I was a recently married ex-plumber from New Hampshire, a provincial young man preoccupied with his marriage and his growing literary ambitions, and Kathy’s presentation of her pals and CORE associates at Harry’s provided my first exposure to the sixties.

  Twenty years later, I was divorced, remarried, and a working novelist, and Kathy Fehl was an actress and playwright and the founder and artistic director of the Pelican Theater in New York. Tall, rangy, with astonishing blue eyes and a hawklike face, Kathy was a person who worked and thought and spoke and connected in recklessly intense bursts, loud explosions of energy, followed by equally intense periods of recuperative withdrawal—silence, melancholy, sleep, dreams. This morning she was in recuperative mode.

  Sprawled in the passenger’s seat next to me, reminiscing about the year he ran a bar and lived in a Greek cave with Joni Mitchell, was Carey Raditz, a banker in a Panama hat, muscle shirt, and Mexican peasant pants, a trim man with a movie star’s grin, the urgency of an EST trainer, and the good-humored abandon of a beachcomber. Nowadays Carey arranged loans in the Middle East for a major New York bank, but like so many members of ou
r generation, at least fifteen years of his adult life were close to unaccounted for, years he wandered in Africa and Haight-Ashbury and Turkey and the Lower East Side. Joni’s song “Carey” blasted from the deck, and Carey was deconstructing it. The song, of course, was about him.

  Behind me and Carey, seated around a fold-down table as if at a booth in Harry’s in 1966, were Lucius Shepherd and Dave Forster and Dave’s wife, Dale. Lucius was a giant of man who looked more like a retired defensive tackle for the Chicago Bears than a rock singer come in from the cold to write novels set in the jungles of Central America. He’d gone from being all-Florida high school fullback to poet-prodigy at college to kisser-of-the-sky living for months off LSD like Saint Theresa living off the Host to communard up in Michigan, where, with nothing more than a decent sense of rhythm and a pleasing tenor voice, he formed a band. He went on the road, and after enduring the usual highs and lows, touring with Dr. John and other outlaw bands and singers back and forth across the country, going through a split-up with his wife, in his late thirties he finally abandoned all that and switched over to writing fiction with a dark, futuristic, highly political vision of the world.

  Dale Forster, a development officer for the Metropolitan Opera, sat next to Lucius, who was explaining how cocaine is freebased. She did not attend Chapel Hill, was a few years younger than us, and was almost literally along for the ride. She was smart and attractive, regarded us with amused, affectionate tolerance, and asked the right questions, the questions that set us to arguing over what really happened the night the Ku Klux Klan shot up the party at Ed Causey’s house in Carrboro, and who was that kid who kept bringing in kif from Morocco in diplomatic pouches, and who was with Dave Snelling the night he tried to fly on acid.