by Achy Obejas
Para Cecilia,
contigo
aquí, allá, y everywhere
Siempre he vivido en Cuba.
—Heberto Padilla, 1968/Lourdes Casal, 1981
Table of Contents
___________________
The Collector
Kimberle
Exile
The Sound Catalog
North/South
The Cola of Oblivion
Waters
Supermán
The Maldives
The Tower of the Antilles
E-book Extra: Excerpt from Ruins
About Achy Obejas
Acknowledgments
Copyright & Credits
About Akashic Books
The Collector
For Humberto Sánchez
1.
What is your name?
He looked at his passport. There was no question it was him in the photo, that was his name on the blue paper and on the visa attached unevenly to the page. On the tarmac, steam rose from the airplane waiting to leave the island.
He turned. Behind him, past the shadows and the glass partition, there were others—without passports, without visas—schools of them beyond the moist and blurry pane.
What is your name? the uniformed guard at the checkpoint asked again. The guard’s eyes darted between the passport and the man, who was still looking over his shoulder at the shimmering aquarium.
The man opened his mouth and pronounced his name with a questioning lilt.
Look at me, said the guard.
But the man was afraid if he took his eyes off what now resembled the quivering lines of a galvanograph, he’d never find that familiar seascape again.
Look at me, said the guard, and this time he stretched his hand and cupped the man’s chin, encouraging him.
He said his name once again, this time with more certainty, but his eyes remained fixed on the watery window. There was a bed of tiny fingers along the lower rim and a charm of eyes above them. Figures fluttered: expanding, pausing, contracting; he could almost feel the bodies moving forward, relaxing, then slowly beginning to spin.
Look at me.
Instead, the man lowered his eyes and the aquarium faded into twilight behind him.
2.
Before the island had visitors, the natives traveled easier on water than on land. The shoreline served only to launch and beach the smooth dugout shells of maca trees they shaped into canoes, each identical except in length.
In spite of this, the islanders were terrible, unambitious mariners who rarely lost sight of the banks. They depended on the indented shoreline to create bays and lagoons to keep them close to home. Sometimes they’d wait for turtles to lay their eggs, then rush to the sand and flip them on their backs. They’d steal the eggs and slaughter the mothers, fashioning the carapace into combs and hooks for fishing. They found their best trawling where the depth of the continental shelf didn’t exceed more than forty fathoms, where the waters were crystalline and warm and they could see the seabed drop to black.
They used bows and arrows, bottom lining, rodding, spearing, seine nets, and fish pots to catch snapper, grouper, garfish, kingfish, lobster, tuna, and shrimp. They had gourds to bail the canoes, to gather rainwater for drinking, and to store their catch. They crafted nose rings, necklaces, and earrings from fish bones and shells and used fish scales to make their bodies sparkle. They had no calendar, no writing system, and kept track of days by counting on their fingers and toes.
3.
The orange nylon wrapped around the man’s ankle like seaweed. When he bent to pick it up, he saw there were still crumbs of cork inside. He tossed the torn vest, then pulled in his line to cast again. It was early and the water was cool in the bay, the sky silvery. In an hour or two he’d be able to see the black dot of the island in the distance.
The man straightened the line. He’d made the rod himself, a three-meter bamboo he’d cut, trimmed, sanded, and hung for nine months. In that time, he’d eaten boiled plantains and stared up at the long vertical cane as if in meditation. When he first took it down, he couldn’t wait to put a line on it. He ran outside to his suburban yard and whipped it from side to side, the bamboo sizzling through the air. Now he wielded it as if he were stringing a bridge to heaven. The rod aimed, the line rose to the sky instead of the bay.
The orange nylon floated back toward him in a bunch; he grabbed it. Then he saw a metal water bottle, its mouth open. An upside-down tennis shoe skimming the surface. A box of saltines. The man remembered his flight, how he’d pasted his face to the double panes of the window and lost count of the dark shapes in the water. Now his eyes followed the line of debris: a magazine, a compass, the jagged edges of a torn foam floater, a Manila rope like an albino snake curling on the sandy bottom.
4.
The first visitors to the islands emerged from a tropical mist on three caravels, each sporting three lateen sails angled against the wind. Each ship ran nearly thirty meters in length and weighed more than ninety tons, dwarfing the native canoes beside them. The glittery islanders stood uneasily on their tiptoes, trying to see beyond the caravels.
Through grunts and signs, the new arrivals and the natives managed to establish some basic communication.
We’ve come a long way, said the visitors.
But how did you get here? asked the islanders, the fish scales on their bodies twinkling like tiny mirrors.
We sailed on these big boats, said the visitors.
What boats? We see no boats, responded the natives, still standing on their tiptoes, their canoes trembling on the waters.
5.
One day, he stumbled on a tiny boat on the shore. He folded it like paper and took it home, setting it in his backyard. The next day, he returned to the same beach and found another craft, this one a long-sided wooden pentagon with slats across it. He dragged it from the water, tied it to the roof of his car, and took it home, placing it next to the paper boat. The day after, he was passing by when he heard a rhythmic thumping and turned off the road, down a dirt path all the way to the water, where he discovered a barge consisting of two long pontoons and a giant metal barrel hitting the rocks with each wave. He pulled it to the shore, then rented a trailer so he could take it home. This one he positioned in the front yard.
Later that week, he came home with a sloop made of balsa wood that had climbed the shore at high tide. Its skin was smooth as a baby’s. Soon other crafts found a home in and around his yard—canoes and kayaks, floats built out of driftwood, hollowed tree trunks, discarded refrigerators made buoyant with inflated tubes, car chassis with water wings. A green truck with propellers. Inner tubes piled one on top of the other, filling his garage and blocking his driveway. There were dinghies and skiffs on the roof, and in the neighbors’ yards, on homemade trailers in the streets. He sold his bed and slept on a sail he’d strung up like a hammock in his room.
By the time the new year rolled around, he was working three jobs to house the vessels in storage lockers and playgrounds, church parking lots and abandoned rural tracts, in a grassy yard behind a museum, even an airplane hangar. On Saturdays, he took flying lessons so that, eventually, he could reach them before their desolate landing.
6.
He would try to explain. He would come in and sit across from the good citizens. He showed them his check stubs from dishwashing, from dog grooming, told them he got paid in cash to pick tomatoes. He had plans for a tower that would display the crafts and tell their stories. The good citizens had grown used to his pleas. They would listen politely then shake their heads. These are ghost tales, they’d say, phantom rafts. After a while, he’d scrape his chair back, get up, and leave.
7.
In an overgrown and flooded marsh, alligators rested in the shadows of boats. Herons and egrets stepped gingerly through brackish water. Now and again, a transom moaned as it came loose and eased into the muck. Sometimes a new raft—usually made from truck tubes and bedsheets—would float up by itself, then slip away.
One day, just before sunset, the man drove up wearing wading boots and carrying a toolbox. He surveyed the collection in the reservoir. Then he took a hammer and drill and, one by one, undid each and every vessel, piling the planks, stacking the tires, making a heap of the lawn-mower motors, folding the fabrics left to right into triangles, like a flag. A short distance away, a plane began its descent, its white tail vanishing into the horizon.
Kimberle
“I have to be stopped,” Kimberle said. Her breath blurred her words, transmitting a whooshing sound that made me push the phone away. “Well, okay, maybe not have to—I’d say should—but that begs the question of why. I mean, who cares? So maybe what I really mean is I need to be stopped.” Her words slid one into the other, like buttery babies bumping, accumulating at the mouth of a slide in the playground. “Are you listening to me?”
I was, I really was. She was asking me to keep her from killing herself. There was no method chosen yet—it could have been slashing her wrists, or lying down on the train tracks outside of town (later she confessed that would never work, that she’d get up at the first tremor on the rail and run for her life, terrified her feet would get tangled on the slats and her death would be classified as a mere accident—as if she were that careless and common), or just blowing her brains out with a polymer pistol—say, a Glock 19—available at Walmart or at half price from the same cretin who sold her cocaine.
“Hellooooo?”
“I hear you, I hear you,” I finally said. “Where are you?”
I left my VW Golf at home and took a cab to pick her up from some squalid blues bar, the only pale face in the place. The guy at the door—a black man old enough to have been an adolescent during the civil rights era, but raised with the polite deference of the previous generation—didn’t hide his relief when I grabbed my tattooed friend, threw her in her car, and took her home with me.
It was all I could think to do, and it made sense for both of us. Kimberle had been homeless, living out of her car—an antique Toyota Corolla that had had its lights punched out on too many occasions and now traveled unsteadily with huge swathes of duct tape holding up its fender. In all honesty, I was a bit unsteady myself, afflicted with the kind of loneliness that’s felt in the gut like a chronic and never fully realized nausea.
Also, it was fall—a particularly gorgeous time in Indiana, with its spray of colors on every tree, but, in our town, one with a peculiar seasonal peril for college-aged girls. It seemed that about this time every year, there would be a disappearance—someone would fail to show at her dorm or study hall. This would be followed by a flowering of flyers on posts and bulletin boards (never trees) featuring a girl with a simple smile and a reward. Because the girl was always white and pointedly ordinary, there would be a strange familiarity about her: everyone was sure they’d seen her at the Commons or the bookstore, waiting for the campus bus or at the Bluebird the previous weekend.
It may seem perverse to say this, but every year we waited for that disappearance, not in shock or horror, or to look for new clues to apprehend the culprit: we waited in anticipation of relief. Once the psycho got his girl, he seemed pacified, so we listened with a little less urgency to the footsteps behind us in the parking lot, worried less when out running at dawn. Spared, we would look guiltily at those flyers, which would be faded and torn by spring, when a farmer readying his cornfield for planting would discover the girl among the papery remains of the previous year’s harvest.
* * *
When Kimberle moved in with me that November, the annual kill had not yet occurred and I was worried for both of us, her in her car and me in my first-floor one-bedroom, the window open for my cat, Brian Eno, to come and go as she pleased. I had trapped it so it couldn’t be opened more than a few inches, but that meant it was never closed all the way, even in the worst of winter.
In my mind, Kimberle and I reeked of prey. We were both boyish girls, pink and sad. She wore straight blond hair and had features angled to throw artful shadows; mine, by contrast, were soft and vaguely tropical, overwhelmed by a carnival of curls. We both seemed to be in weakened states. Her girlfriend had caught her in flagrante delicto and walked out; depression had swallowed her in the aftermath. She couldn’t concentrate at her restaurant job, mixing up simple orders, barking at the customers, so that it wasn’t long before she found herself at the unemployment office (where her insistence on stepping out to smoke cost her her place in line so many times she finally gave up).
It quickly followed that she went home one rosy dawn and discovered her landlord, aware he had no right to do so but convinced Kimberle (now four months late on her rent) would never get it together to legally contest it, had stacked all her belongings on the sidewalk, where they had been picked over by the students at International House, headquarters for all the third world kids on scholarships that barely covered textbooks. All that was left were a few T-shirts from various political marches (mostly black), books from her old and useless major in Marxist theory (one with a note in red tucked between its pages which read, COMUNISM IS DEAD! which we marveled at for its misspelling), and, to our surprise, her battered iBook (the screen was cracked though it worked fine).
Me, I’d just broken up with my boyfriend—it was my doing, it just felt like we were going nowhere—but I was past the point of righteousness and heavily into doubt. Not about my decision—that, I never questioned—but about whether I’d ever care enough to understand another human being, whether I’d ever figure out how to stay after the initial flush, whether I’d ever get over my absurd sense of self-sufficiency.
* * *
When I brought Kimberle to live with me she hadn’t replaced much of anything and we emptied the Toyota in one trip. I gave her my futon to sleep on in the living room, surrendered a drawer in the dresser, pushed my clothes to one side of the closet, and explained my alphabetized CDs, my work hours at a smokehouse one town over (and that we’d never starve for meat), and my books.
Since Kimberle had never visited me after I’d moved out of my parents’ house—in truth, we were more acquaintances than friends—I was especially emphatic about the books, prized possessions I’d been collecting since I had first earned a paycheck. I pointed out the shelf of first editions, among them Richard Wright’s Native Son, Sapphire’s American Dreams, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, a rare copy of The Cook and the Carpenter, and Langston Hughes and Ben Carruthers’s limited-edition translation of Nicolas Guillén’s Cuba Libre, all encased in Saran Wrap. There were also a handful of nineteenth-century travel books on Cuba, fascinating for their racist assumptions, and a few autographed volumes, including novels by Dennis Cooper, Ana María Shua, and Monique Wittig.
“These never leave the shelf, they never get unwrapped,” I said. “If you wanna read one of them, tell me and I’ll get you a copy.”
“Cool,” she said in a disinterested whisper, pulling off her boots, long, sleek things that suggested she should be carrying a riding crop.
She leaned back on the futon in exhaustion and put her hands behind her head. There was an elegant and casual muscularity to her tattooed limbs, a pliability I would later come to know under entirely different circumstances.
* * *
Kimberle had not been installed in my apartment more than a day or two (crying and sniffling, refusing to eat with the usual determination of the newly heartbroken) when I noticed Native Son was gone, leaving a gaping hole on my shelf. I assumed she’d taken it down to read when I had turned my back. I trotted over to the futon and peeked around and under the pillow. The sheets were neatly folded, the blanket too. Had anyone else been in the apartment except us two? No, not a soul, not even
Brian Eno, who’d been out hunting. I contemplated my dilemma: how to ask a potential suicide if they’re ripping you off.
Sometime the next day—after a restless night of weeping and pillow punching which I could hear in the bedroom, even with the door closed—Kimberle managed to shower and put on a fresh black T, then lumbered into the kitchen. She barely nodded. It seemed that if she’d actually completed the gesture, her head might have been in danger of rolling off.
* * *
I suppose I should have been worried, given the threat of suicide so boldly announced, about Kimberle’s whereabouts when she wasn’t home, or what she was up to when I wasn’t at my apartment. But I wasn’t, I wasn’t worried at all. I didn’t throw out my razors, I didn’t hide the belts, I didn’t turn off the pilot in the oven. It’s not that I didn’t think she was at risk, because I did, I absolutely did. It’s just that when she told me she needed to be stopped, I took it to mean she needed me to shelter her until she recovered, which I assumed would be soon. I thought, in fact, I’d pretty much done my duty as a friend by bringing her home and feeding her a cherry-smoked ham sandwich.
Truth is, I was much more focused on the maniac whose quarry was still bounding out there in the wilderness. I would pull out the local print-only paper every day when I got to the smokehouse and make for the police blotter. I knew, of course, that once the villain committed to the deed, it’d be front-page news, but I held out hope for clues from anticipatory crimes.
Once, there was an incident on a hiking trail—two girls were approached by a white man in his fifties, sallow and scurvied, who tried to grab one of them. The other girl turned out to be a member of the campus tae kwon do team and rapid-kicked his face before he somehow managed to get away. For several days after that, I was on the lookout for any man in his fifties who might come in to the smokehouse looking like tenderized meat. And I avoided all trails, even the carefully landscaped routes between campus buildings.