The Third Hotel Page 7
For a block, there was no one between them. She could see the shapes of his legs moving inside his pants. She wondered if she had become telekinetic, like in Carrie, if her grief was so overwhelming she had acquired the ability to conjure her husband whenever she wished to see him, though if that were true it seemed like she should be able to conjure him right into stillness.
They passed the Meliá Cohiba hotel and the newly reopened American embassy. Outside the embassy the American flag had been raised; Clare could not say that she ever felt particularly happy to see her own flag. They crossed an iron bridge spanning a still river and then she was in a part of the city she had never seen before. They moved up a broad avenida, divided by a green mall. They passed foreign embassies—Italy, Switzerland, Angola—identified by the guard booths outside, occupied by somber men in mirrored glasses. They passed a grand house with a gleaming car in a gated driveway, a life-size plastic Santa standing by the hubcap like a valet. Two shaggy goldens stuck their snouts through the bars, barking as she passed. A park with a round white pantheon, the dome in the process of being consumed by green moss, and massive, ancient banyan trees.
They turned down a street, past a café with a tile patio covered by midnight-blue umbrellas. Avenida Thirty-Two, Avenida Thirty-Six; they were rising and rising. She followed him along one uneven street and around a corner and then along another, the sidewalk crumbling at the edges. There were few pedestrians, so she had to hang back, and from behind a palm tree she watched him stop in front of an aquamarine building surrounded by green chain-link fencing, the entrance shrouded by an overgrown yard. She counted a boat lily and needle palms and yellow hibiscuses and a verdant lime tree. Two rocking chairs stood outside the door, unoccupied and swaying in the warm wind. For a moment, he stood on the sidewalk, holding the paper bag in one hand, as though assessing the mango’s weight, and then he passed through the gate and the yard swallowed him.
A moment later, a light in a room facing an alleyway came on.
The fence was waist-high, low enough for her to jump. In the alley, she flung herself over, landing in a heap in the grass. She kneeled by the window and peered into a simple room with a bed, a small table, a single chair. No sign of a TV. She noticed a black-and-white cat in the corner, and it took her a moment to understand that the cat was not real but a ceramic replica. Above the bed a framed cross-stitch read, in Spanish, God Bless Our Home.
She watched as Richard sat at the table. He smoothed the paper bag into a place mat and used a small knife to peel the mango skin. He ate the fruit in glistening slivers the color of sunshine. When he was finished, he took out a slim book. She couldn’t make out the title, but it was not anything like the thick academic texts he once read. More like a play or a book of poetry. He held this mysterious book with one hand, his left hand; with his right he cupped his elbow. He licked his lips. Every so often he rubbed the toe of his shoe against the floor, in the manner of someone slowly extinguishing a cigarette. She noticed every movement. She was certain she had never noticed him so thoroughly. Radically alert and radically alive and why on earth had she waited so long to pay this kind of attention.
All around she could feel the city darken as night drew in, but she was mesmerized by how the room seemed to grow brighter and brighter. Where was all that light coming from? She should have felt pain in her knees and in her back, but she did not; her body was fused to the earth. She watched him turn page after page, looking for some kind of useful clue, and then she was ashamed to realize she had missed the most obvious clue of all. She dared to let her nose touch the glass. She dared to let her breath fog the pane. She was so close. She felt a boiling in her stomach.
In this room, there was indeed a table with a round face and four solid legs, not so unlike their kitchen table in New Scotland, except here there was only one chair. In their kitchen, there were always two chairs—never three, never five, never zero, never one. Always two. A single chair suggested solitude. There was no expectation of hosting dinners with friends or out-of-town guests or a woman who sometimes spent the night. You were your own company.
In this life, he was alone.
PART 2
MORBID URGES
Another film her husband had been writing about for his book was a French movie about people who simply came back. These returned people had died, funerals had been held in their names, and now they were appearing in the city center, clothed and in fine health. At first, they were divided by age and gender and temporarily housed in airplane hangars. Families had to provide papers and passports and photos to claim their undead. In this movie, there was no blood, no biting and lurching. The undead had the vestiges of their former memories; their body temperatures were five degrees lower; they pretended to sleep at night but they were faking, none of them actually slept. They all looked serene and terrified. A doctor theorized they were stuck in a latent period, still in the process of awakening into a new life, though in the end the doctor concluded this latent period would be unending. Meanwhile, the undead experienced an unspoken and collective realization of their own: suddenly they were driven to leave their families, to roam out into the countryside. They were drawn to underground places, down into sewers and tunnels. In one scene, a man’s undead wife tried to climb a garden wall, in order to escape their home. The man ran out into the yard in his pajamas, his bare feet a luminescent white in the green grass. He shouted her name. She climbed faster. He grabbed hold of her ankle. When she turned to look at him, her expression suggested it was not her undead state that was so strange; rather, it was the state of the living—a state so starved and selfish it was willing to make her a prisoner, if that’s what it took to keep her close—that was the most deranged one of all.
The where was nowhere and maybe the here was nowhere too.
* * *
The deepest pleasure of the zombie story lies always in its depiction of the break, that exhilarating moment of long-hoped-for upheaval: the fulfillment of a sometimes avowed, sometimes disavowed, desire to see power at last unmade, laid finally to waste and torn limb from limb—and our structures of dominion and domination replaced finally and forever with Utopia, if only for the already dead. —Gerry Canavan. Page twenty-seven, paragraph two, discovered in a black leather notebook while Clare was cleaning out Richard’s home office, the upper right-hand corner lacquered with a brown half circle of coffee.
* * *
In Richard’s office, sitting cross-legged on the floor, she had kept reading about zombies until she found a small manila envelope, her name on the front, her parents’ address in the return field, tucked inside the pages. The envelope held a notebook, small and red. She had opened this little notebook and then closed it just as quickly, feeling like she had been slapped. She dropped both notebooks into a file cabinet drawer and rushed from the office, upsetting a chair, leaving the desk lamp ablaze. A gold triangle shot out the bottom of the door for three days and then the light extinguished itself.
* * *
What if that’s what happened? Clare thought as she wandered the festival hotel. What if he just came back? That afternoon, and the afternoon before, she had crossed the iron bridge into Miramar, where she had observed her husband drinking cafecitos on the café patio, in the shade of a midnight-blue umbrella. He read the newspaper. He did not speak to anyone. Both times, she noticed a diminutive man in a black suit sitting at a table nearby; he had a flaxseed mustache, too heavy for his face. He spoke Spanish with an American accent. Perhaps he was a diplomat, given the volume of embassies in Miramar. After Richard left the café, she’d trailed her husband to the fruit market, where he bought vast quantities of mangoes. She never saw him report to a job or greet another person on the street. In this life, he appeared to be a man of leisure. At exactly two in the afternoon, he disappeared into a hospital by the river for an hour; at nightfall, he drank at a bar overlooking a small park, this one absent of banyan trees. In the back of her guidebook, she had logged the details of every sighting.
She had always imagined herself to be the kind of person who passed unnoticed through airports and hotels, a white woman of middling age and appearance, in tan pantsuits and unfashionable pumps. A luxury, this ability to slip through unseen, and she was putting it to use.
One of the festival theaters, Cine Karl Marx, was in Miramar. When she noticed that Revolución Zombi was showing, she’d felt the theater doors gust open, draw her inside.
On second viewing, it did seem true that the undead could unmake power. They could do what the living could not. There was nothing they could not overthrow. If the citizens had tried to unmake power, they would have been arrested and interrogated and thrown in jail, but there was no arresting these zombies or throwing them in jail. They were free to rage and rage.
Her husband had believed that once the theater went dark and the film began, the viewer was alone—even if they had arrived in the company of others. This solitude was needed to dissolve the logic and laws of the world they had come from, replacing those principles with the logic and laws of the screen; that was how Yuniel Mata’s eels slipped past. In this way you could descend into the theater with a person you knew intimately and then, once the lights returned, find yourself seated next to a stranger.
She stopped at the edge of the hotel terrace, looked out at the churning sea. Behind every death lay a set of questions. To move on was to agree to not disturb these questions, to let them settle with the body under the earth. Yet some questions so thoroughly dismantled the terms of your own life, turning away was gravitationally impossible. So she would not be moving on. She would keep disturbing and disturbing. She imagined herself standing over a grave with a shovel and hacking away at the soil.
Clare glimpsed a woman hurrying down the Malecón, in the direction of the Anti-Imperialist Plaza; even from a distance, she recognized those precise shoulders. She removed her binoculars from her backpack, raised the round lenses to her face. Agata Alonso’s hair was different—short and black this time, with severe bangs, like a twenties film star. She was carrying a round case. Red, Clare observed, and perhaps made of leather. Where could she be going?
* * *
Clare had gotten stuck in an elevator exactly once in her life, in a doll factory in Heltonville, Indiana. The cables malfunctioned, suspending the car between floors. She was with the foreman, who had been explaining the process of making doll heads, when they stalled. Apart from his fascination with doll heads, he had appeared entirely normal.
They had pressed the alarm button and reached emergency services; after that, nothing to do but wait. In an in-flight magazine she’d once read the quietest place on earth was an anechoic chamber in Minnesota. The longest anyone had ever lasted in there was forty-five minutes, and she was certain she would not fare any better.
In the elevator, the silence made her arms itch and she was relieved when the foreman broke it, until he informed her that he had just observed her soul leaving her body. Apparently souls left bodies all the time—what entity didn’t need a break every now and again? He believed this was only a problem if the soul in question lacked a reason to return. He explained that he had seen her soul climb right out of her chest—he stepped forward and pressed a freckled hand against her clavicle—and perch like a gargoyle on her shoulders, and when it was clear that she was utterly oblivious to what was transpiring, well—
The foreman sighed and shrugged, as though the departure of a soul was a terrible shame, but a situation for which there was little recourse. She told him she was under the assumption that souls only left bodies when people died, and he began to laugh and—his tone pivoting to indicate this was among the more idiotic things he’d heard in his life—said, You think that’s what happens when people die? He shook his head and stared up at the ceiling hatch, which opened not long after, the hands of their rescuers reaching down.
That night, in Heltonville, she had the impulse to weigh herself in the hotel gym: she had lost three pounds overnight. She was pretty sure the soul was supposed to weigh less than three pounds, that it was perhaps without physical weight, but nevertheless she felt chilled. The next day she was scheduled to return to the factory, but instead she took a derelict drive through the countryside, comforted by the heft of the land.
The foreman had been possessed by a completely different notion of how the spiritual realm operated and he had spoken about it with a confidence that seemed preposterous in the moment, but who could say for sure that he was wrong, that the empty drift that gripped some people at certain moments in life was not in fact due to their souls—perhaps temporarily, perhaps permanently—abandoning their bodies.
No one, that was who.
At the Third Hotel, she called her mother and learned of her father’s new habit of wandering from the house, front door swung open, and getting lost in the neighborhood. Her mother would find him in the middle of the street or stumbling through a backyard, swatting at bushes, dog shit stuck to his heels. A plump male Bobtail had slipped out last week and had not been seen since. Her father had many months ahead, but they would not be good ones.
I hate to think about what’s happened to the cat, her mother said. Torn to bits by wild animals. Run down by a car.
The line went silent. Her mother cleared her throat.
Sorry, she said. I shouldn’t have mentioned the car.
In the dawn of her father’s illness, back when he was cheerfully muddled and easily returned to the center, the anger that had always coursed through her parents’ home had eased. She’d glimpsed them holding hands in the backyard or watching a movie on the sofa, etched in a tenderness rarely witnessed in health. Now that his confusion was no longer gentle, now that it was full of resistance, the high-voltage fury had returned—the fury that had left Clare wanting to feel as little as possible, to press an ice cube against her heart.
At the Seahorse, their marriage had been like a stationary storm hunkered down on an unfortunate slice of coast, battering the land. They’d retired five years ago, moving out of the attached apartment Clare had been raised in and into a ranch-style near Ponte Vedra, but it was too late for them to change. The storm was the only weather system they knew, and systems in general were very hard to shed.
The guests, on the other hand, had been transitory. Clare did not consider the private storms they might be stuck inside, not even when she spotted them moving through the open-air halls with the skittish heaviness of a person being stalked by something inevitable and awful. Stay in motion, she had instructed herself, and escape the storm.
Movement.
On the phone, her mother switched over to Christmas: who would be there, what they would bring. She was too tired to make her famed cloudberry cake this year. All those layers of cream and jam. How Clare’s father had decided that celebrities were being replaced by clones, so best to not watch any movies. How she knew her daughter was in a hard stretch right now. She remembered what it was like when her parents died; sometimes the pain was so splitting she thought she would go blind. It was brutal, the mortality contract. It came for everyone and no one was prepared. How everyone would miss Richard this year. She would not be alone in that missing.
You won’t be alone, her mother repeated, but Clare could not hear her. She had already placed the phone on the bed and walked away.
Later, she woke up on the bathroom floor, as she had started falling asleep in places that were not her bed. On the toilet, in the chair next to the dresser.
She kept the box locked up in the safe.
* * *
That night, Clare dreamed she was living in the future and in this future no one went anywhere anymore. Rather, they traveled—if you could call it that—through holograms that projected the place they desired straight into their homes. The trick, though, was that the hologram not only projected the place but what the traveler wished to experience there—spiritual absolution while rock climbing in the Alps, say. Finally the age-old quest for authenticity had been quelled, for what was this quest but a de
sire to be carried far away from yourself, to escape the borders of your own identity. To lie and have the lie feel real. On the terrace of the festival hotel, the American man had said, Wasn’t she glad they had come when they had? Before this became yet another place that only brought us back to ourselves? This desire to escape one’s country, and one’s countrypeople, was greatest in those who came from empires, which were designed to be inescapable. Citizens could find traces of the empire nearly everywhere they went, and when there was no evidence to be found, they manifested it—for to be a citizen of an empire meant to also be a kind of carrier. With this system of holograms, travel could be initiated at any time, without ever leaving your home. And so, from her bedroom in New Scotland, Clare strolled through the old part of Havana until she happened upon her husband standing outside the Museum of the Revolution.
We are not yet finished with each other, she had told him in the dream.
* * *
In the morning, she set out to visit the sites used for scenes in Revolución Zombi, or at least the ones she had been able to recognize. She took notes in her guidebook. Maybe she really could be a film critic, drafting her piece. Perhaps she would write about the spatial qualities of the film, in relation to urban horror. A city was not meant to be empty—a city devoid of inhabitants was an unwell city, a thing to be feared. A city was to be peopled and but not too peopled—a city overcome (by, say, a zombie horde) was equally fearsome. Yuniel Mata’s film had been the most frightening when the city appeared empty, the unexamined quarters lying in wait, or when it was overrun, when the inhabitants of those hidden quarters rose up and demanded to be counted. She imagined her husband would consider these observations rudimentary, but she had to start somewhere.