Cubop City Blues

by Pablo Medina

  ¡Pinga! she yelled. ¡Coño! And then she passed out, seeming dead to the husband, who rushed out and got the first doctor he could find, a veterinarian who lived down the block.

  Lye, the vet said. She’s got lye in her system but the fetus is alive. Fetus he called me. I was. That’s what I heard in my mother’s pages. Animals don’t do this, he said, making a scientific observation, which he meant literally but the husband interpreted to mean his wife was lower than an animal and threw a punch at him, missing the vet’s jaw and landing squarely on the wall. He screamed and doubled over holding his right hand.

  Or that, the vet said. Ever the man of science, he checked the husband’s hand for broken bones, and finding none, he wrapped it in gauze, for the placebo effect, and left the house.

  Blindness is a labyrinth. Once you’re in you can’t leave. You walk. You stand. Everywhere is the center. On the other side of the room, across the river and into the trees.

  Mama inserted the plastic bottle into herself and squeezed. I lived. Bleared, blind, born. Went from one labyrinth with walls to another without, birth my sin. She was at the center, waiting for me. She sang boleros only I heard, in the hallways of the new labyrinth. I tried to find a way out, my hands stretched out into the gray fog, reaching for a door. I told stories. Every sentence leading farther in, every word bifurcating, in the center the monster, pawing the bed, spewing fire out of her cunt. She had sex with a young hot bull, she had sex with an ass, she had sex with a toad, a fish, a worm, a beaky bird. She tried to kill me before I was born. She looked back. How do you leave the only thing you’ve known? She bore me. I bore her. We were each other’s sin, each other’s hatred. When she died, she clucked like a sorry hen, then fluttered. When she died I didn’t shed a tear. Not in me, not out of me. I entered another labyrinth, an acid wind cutting through. Lye. Havana was a labyrinth. Cubop City was a labyrinth where all doors lead in or out. I heard the roar of her breathing, the pounding of her heart. No walls. Deeper in I go.

  MELODRAMA

  You are in love. You seek (and find) your lover in all that surrounds you—the pens and pencils that blossom like spiny flowers from the cup on your desk; the faint buzz of the printer in harmony with the hum of the city; that sheet on which your mother embroidered fantails once. If you eat a strawberry, it is the lover’s lips you are biting; if you inadvertently brush against a bare arm on the subway it is your lover’s skin you feel. At dusk it is the lover’s voice you hear coming from the radio and her smell, attar of musk and moss, that wakes you at midnight. Her breath is your breath, her moans your moans. All love is erasure, the bicycle you ride to her neighborhood. Then you realize she’s not there but on the other side of town. Every mirror gives you back a shadow.

  It is not a dream. Beyond the window of your study is a field overlooking the sea; you watch yellow flowers bend with the wind. You’d like to be on one of those sailboats that come and go with amazing grace. From the small cottage on the hill she comes down to you. She wears a stern look like an executioner puts on when coming to meet his victim. You are sitting on the grass with your knees drawn to your chest, the sun warming your body, your mind liberated—momentarily—from duty and ambition. She stands over you and blocks the sun and suddenly a shiver runs through you. You ask her to sit and she refuses, comes straight to the truth. She no longer loves you and is leaving, going home. No, no, you say, we’ll work it out. After your entreaties fail, your strategy changes to feigned anger. You stand, loom over her, and cry out, calling her thankless and duplicitous, a liar, a witch, but the anger is shallow, lacking self-preservation to give it solidity, and soon it turns to weeping. Why? you ask, and the question becomes a demand. Anger again, then the tear floods and sigh tempests. Ah, melodrama!

  You go inside the house, walk out, then go inside again. What to do? To do what? Standing at the door to the bedroom, you watch her pack all her white dresses, her blue jeans, her work boots, books, CDs. But how will she get them to the road? You will not give her your car, you will not lend her your wheelbarrow or the donkey cart or the burlap sacks in which once you carried coconuts. All the time she’s been avoiding your sight, and when she finally looks at you, her eyes have no fire in them, only disdain. You try a rational approach. That, too, is flimsy, without the pillars of indifference to secure it: You ask in a kind and measured tone for an explanation. She is almost finished packing and is rifling through the drawers in search of a last article to put into the suitcase. This is her story and she knows it. There is a splotch of red on her neck where yesterday a bee stung her. What kind of bee is it that would change her so irrevocably? Love is a balloon, she says without speaking. At first it is full to bursting with warm air. As the air cools it escapes. In time the balloon deflates and falls to the ground, a despicable flat piece of red latex. But your toes, you cry, your lips, the slope of your belly, and you smoke an imaginary cigarette, have an imaginary drink in a poorly lit bar in an outer borough of Cubop City, where nothing ever happens and one bolero follows the next forever through dusk. Later that night you sit at the edge of the bed and wonder how you will tolerate the emptiness that has taken residence inside the house and sits on your chair speaking a language in reverse. Amardolem, ha!

  MR. HANDLEBAR

  The man with the handlebar mustache appears at the door holding a dead fish, a large brown grouper with bulging milky eyes. He tells Angel the fish is good and fresh, and with that he enters the apartment and sets the fish down on the table. Flap! There is no Amanda this time. Angel takes the grouper to the kitchen and cleans it. Holding the curved scaling knife in his hand, he thinks that if there was a time to get back at his attacker, it is now. If only he lived in the Midwest, Mr. Handlebar would not come to him with a grouper. Angel would not be cleaning it and he’d not be tempted to strike Handlebar with the scaling knife. If this were the Midwest, he’d have brought corn or apples. He wouldn’t have known about groupers, let alone how to catch one.

  The man with the handlebar mustache goes to the refrigerator, takes a beer, and sits at the table. He is eager to befriend Angel and asks about his woman. There is no woman, Angel says. A fulsome necromancer, Handlebar insists. Angel tries to smile but his lips don’t spread, his teeth don’t show.

  What Angel doesn’t say to this man is that he broke up with Amanda just over a year ago. It was nothing in particular. There was arguing and recrimination and broken promises and betrayals. She claimed he was a political brute. He called her a red menace and an antipapist. Just to irk her he went to church, told her it was comforting. She yelled that that was a deal breaker, whatever that meant. You talk to the dead, he tried arguing back. I don’t go around molesting children. Huh? he said. Priests, she said, you know, then locked herself in the bathroom. Some nights it was him watching television or her communicating with her spirits. Then things grew quiet between them. It was the quiet of desolation. The desolation became indifference and the indifference led to Amanda one day walking out. Among her last words to him were, The man with the handlebar mustache will come back into your life. Angel didn’t pay attention. He was a wreck on the shoals of self-pity.

  There he is, drinking Angel’s beer. For a moment he wishes Amanda were back. She would know what to do. He cleans the fish and rubs the outside with mojo until the kitchen is redolent of garlic and lime. He hears Handlebar at the table smacking his lips after each sip of beer. Angel wills away his discomfort and dresses the grouper, stuffs sprigs of rosemary into the gills, covers it with aluminum foil, and puts it in the oven at 325° F. Then he opens a beer and sits across from Handlebar, who is, as is the habit with men of his ilk, twirling his mustache. He smiles, but the hair on his upper lip is so thick that only his two front teeth show, a large, happy rodent.

  Did you try to kill me? Angel asks in a confrontational tone. My former lover, the necromancer and soothsayer in training, claims you did. Did you?

  Handlebar does not change his expr
ession. Instead of answering he takes a sip of his beer, then brings his tongue up and around to lick the foam off his mustache. In the blink of an eye he’s gone from rodent to feline. Long straight hairs grow from his muzzle and his eyes are yellow.

  Did you, Angel asks, knife someone at the corner of Twentieth and Seventh?

  Handlebar blinks slowly. He is still smiling.

  Angel stares at him for a long time. Handlebar stares back, blinking those slow alligator blinks of his. Now he is a reptile with a long green snout and mouth lined with teeth. He could bite off Angel’s head. Angel is growing concerned about the fish in the oven—what use is a burned grouper?—but he’s determined to get an answer. Finally Handlebar speaks.

  I am your hometown butcher.

  What are you saying? I have no hometown.

  Everyone does. Remember? La Habana, Sabana, Banana. I had sides of beef hanging on the shop windows and calf heads under them. Your mother would come in for boliche or palomilla or picadillo. I was an artist and meat was my medium. My shop smelled of blood and sinew. Better than a rose patch.

  Angel doesn’t remember going to a butcher shop with his mother. How does Handlebar know he’s from Havana? If he is a butcher, why has he brought along a fish? And why doesn’t he speak with an accent?

  Would you like another beer? Angel asks. It’s a chess game he’s playing and Handlebar’s a master.

  Yes, Handlebar says without hesitation.

  Angel gets two beers, checks on the fish, and by the time he returns to the table, Handlebar has turned into an amoeba, transparent and damp, with the handlebar mustache floating in the cytoplasm.

  My ancestors came from passive blubbery, he says. And you, my child, he adds like a priestly protozoan, what is your story?

  I want to know if you tried to kill me.

  I am a master with the knife, says Handlebar. If I’d wanted to kill you, I would know precisely where to strike.

  But you are here, Angel says, sounding shrill.

  Because I am not there.

  Who did it then? Why did you come to my home?

  Handlebar raises his wet, goopy hands and shrugs his shoulders.

  Amanda sent me. She gave me the fish, he says, slurping the beer.

  Angel can see the liquid dissolve into the cytoplasm. He has nothing to say. There’s a wall between him and everything he thought had been real. Nothing in his life has connection to anything else. His life is an Aristotelian failure. Then he smells the fish cooking. At least there is that. Fish appears, is cleaned and dressed, put into the oven, watched over, and after an hour, fish is ready. Progression. Forward movement in time and all the events sequenced. Life should be a recipe. He opens the oven and pulls out the grouper. It is magnificent, golden and crisp on the outside, and when he cuts into it, it lets off a cloud of steam, a sure sign that it has remained moist on the inside. He can smell the ocean coming out of the pan and the earth, too.

  When he goes back to the living room, he sees a moist trail leading to the door. Handlebar has left, without saying good-bye, without even finishing his beer. Angel returns to the kitchen, serves himself a large chunk of the grouper, and spoons pan drippings over it, topping everything with several slices of tomato and onion. He opens a bottle of white wine he’s kept in the refrigerator and sits at the table. Momentarily he forgets about Handlebar and Amanda and the knifing. He begins slowly, tasting every bite. Then, suddenly, he tears large chunks of the flesh with his hands and stuffs them into his mouth. He eats like a barbarian. He eats like tomorrow never comes. It doesn’t.

  WAR OF

  THE WORLDS

  Somehow Angel managed to get it all: the three-bedroom house with flower beds in the back, the sweet wife all smiles and tenderness, two teenage daughters, sunlight gleaming off their auburn hair and eager eyes. They lived in a suburban development at the edge of a forest. Beyond the backyard were tall oaks and pines, a shadowy place where deer sometimes gathered and where he occasionally saw an angry-looking stray dog come out of the shadows to nose around the grass and piss on the flowers. He’d go back there to get away from the family and smoke cigarettes. He came from the heat and sun of the tropics, and he never felt comfortable in the forest, but it was his only escape other than work. The ground was damp and musty and the canopy pressed down on him. Large wolf spiders looked lethal and purple beetles stuck to the underside of leaves, dropping on his shirt as he walked under them. Once he spied an insect that had huge pincers in the back. It rested on a fallen log, and when he poked it with a stick, the thing flew straight at his face. That’s what you get for going into the forest primeval, he said to himself afterward, drinking a whiskey to calm his nerves.

  A few days later as he smoked his cigarettes a safe distance from the woods, he noticed a group of airplanes over the trees. They were propeller types, B-17s and B-24s, flying in battle formation. He called his daughters outside and said, Look, girls, they’re going to war. They ran around the yard yelling, War, war, and his wife, hearing the commotion, came outside and said, What war? He shrugged and smoked more cigarettes.

  This happened over the next few days. At first, whenever they heard the noise of the engines, they rushed outside and marveled that there could be so many planes on this earth. They pointed to their insignia. They waved at them. One of the girls thought she saw a pilot waving back. He has a mustache, she said, and a white bandana flapping in the wind. Angel thought of Errol Flynn and smiled. It was war. His wife bought a big American flag and unfurled it whenever the planes passed over, claiming the boys needed all the support they could get. They flew in V-formation during the day and at night, and the family cheered loudly. Go get ’em, boys. Give ’em hell!

  After two weeks they couldn’t sleep because the engine roar made their sternums rattle; they couldn’t have dinner without the windows trembling and his wife’s ceramic figurines dancing dangerously close to the edge of the mantel. Three fell to the floor and shattered, including a Lladró shepherd girl that had belonged to her Spanish grandmother.

  Angel developed ticks—a continual blinking and involuntary movements of his limbs that kept him from concentrating. From frustration he yelled at his wife, who yelled at his daughters, who yelled at him, the circle broken only during those few hours when the planes weren’t flying. The situation became intolerable. He started spending more time away from home. He sat in his car every night after work, the windows rolled up, the radio off, listening to nothing but the traffic on the interstate whooshing by. He joined some of his coworkers at a local bar where drinks were cheap and didn’t come home until midnight when he knew his wife would be asleep from the effects of booze and sleeping pills.

  Where were those planes going? What retro war had begun and was spreading its poison into his family life? Every morning he woke to his haggard wife, his harping daughters, and that stray dog that came out of the woods. He thought of buying a gun and shooting it. Boom, right between the eyes. Work suddenly became a solace, the bar a sought-after refuge where he could converse about those things he cared about—sports, women, movies—never the war, since none of his friends brought it up. Come to think of it, it seemed as if only his family was afflicted, only his house that had vintage planes flying over it and dread filling up its rooms like thick, impassable mucilage.

  It was at the bar that he met Nancy with the size 11 feet. She wore her blonde hair short and had a long neck exacerbated by a small round face. His friends were arguing about NASCAR racing when he noticed her sitting next to him eating a hot dog. There was a spot of mustard on her cheek. Finally, he took a bar napkin, said, Excuse me, and wiped it off. Instead of telling him off as he expected, she turned red, like paprika, like a bullfighter’s muleta flashing in the bullring. She patted both cheeks nervously, then asked if it was all gone. Yes, he said. Don’t worry. Mustard is like cream cheese. It gets on everything. He bought her a cosmopolita
n. They talked about nothing in particular and that was that. She was there the next night, sitting on the other side of the U-shaped bar eating a burger, no mustard this time. He took his drink and moved next to her and said something stupid like, I like the view better from here. He bought her two cosmopolitans and he had two martinis, dry, straight up with olives, enough drink to loosen them up. She told him about her lousy job at a nonprofit organization. Nonprofits don’t make money, that’s their problem, she said. I’m looking for a career change. He tried not to be sardonic and described his job at the factory assembling scuba oxygen valves.

  It’s a big responsibility, he said. Someone could drown or die from nitrogen narcosis if the valve isn’t calibrated just right. It’s a terrible death; your blood vessels fill with gas and your blood boils. High stress, he emphasized, fishing in his glass for an olive. But after ten years it’s second nature. It sounded like he was boasting but he wasn’t. The truth was that the job kept him out of the house for eight hours a day. He didn’t mention the war, though he was tempted. He could’ve talked to Nancy about anything that night. Instead they discussed politics, and for some reason they got into mercury pollution. He’d ordered fish and chips. Before he knew it, it was midnight. He asked if she was going to be there the following night. She said she was going on a trip.

  Next week, she said. I’ll be here next week.

  She was back the next week but she had changed. She wore new makeup that made her look vampish and a different hairdo, which fell asymmetrically down the left side of her head, and she was wearing a pink turtleneck that disguised her llama neck. From five thirty to eight o’clock they talked. They talked a tide of language, a storm of words. By eight thirty he’d had four drinks, enough to say, I’m attracted to you. She looked at him, eyes flattened by alcohol, and suggested they go to her place. I’ll cook something up, she said.