Learning to Die in Miami

by Carlos Eire

  But the next thing I know—despite my superhuman powers of denial—Tony and I are being driven down Coral Way by a social worker, eastward, toward central Miami. We’re in Coral Gables, the only part of Miami that reminds me of Havana. I’m staring at the giant trees on the median strip of this wide boulevard. Their branches reach over the roadway, making a natural canopy so thick that the sun is denied entrance. Their trunks are a tangled sinewy mass, a jumble of hundreds of smaller trunks all woven together, each shouting out its age, boasting of superior longevity, laughing at me and every other human being. Each and every one of those trees is a mirror image of those ancient ones in the park that was four blocks from my house in Havana, the park where I nearly blew off my hand with a firecracker. I think of my mother holding me close, pressing me to her chest as I clench my fist harder than I ever thought it was possible to clench a fist, telling me everything will be all right. I remember the pain. I don’t hear her voice, but I sense again how it felt to hear it.

  The social worker is droning on and on about something I’d rather not hear, giving us details about the foster home he is taking us to visit.

  Before we know it we’re in a shabby neighborhood that Lou Chait had once described to me as “very, very bad.” We’re just a few blocks from the Orange Bowl, part of which I see for an instant as we turn a corner. We pull up to a tiny, shabby house on a treeless street. The sun beats down on us as it does only in bad neighborhoods, in a foul mood, looking for things to burn and injure, memories to singe. The sunlight screams bloody murder as it hits the faded pale green stucco walls of the house that’s about to become our new home. We go in, through the banged-up front door. It’s my worst nightmare come true. Pure squalor. It makes the Becquer shotgun shack look good. A cramped sun porch wrapped in jalousie windows, sparsely furnished. A small living room, very dark, and an equally small dining room, slightly less dark. The kitchen is one of the circles of hell: Everything in it is scuffed and stained, and the linoleum floor is faded, cracked, and pockmarked. It looks like an unfinished jigsaw puzzle that’s been left out in the rain. The smell is overpowering, and easy to identify. Garbage. Old garbage. The bathroom looks at least a hundred years old: A claw-foot bathtub hovers over a linoleum floor that makes the one in the kitchen look good. I can see dirt under the tub. Lots of it. The toilet might be an ancient Roman relic: The water tank sits above it, and a long rusty pipe runs down the wall. A pull chain with a well-worn wooden handle dangles from the side of the water tank.

  I still don’t know what mold smells like, since I’ve never encountered so much of it all at once, but I hate what I smell, all the same.

  I ignore all the kids who are staring at us, as we make our way through the house. I ignore the woman who’s in charge of this house, even though she’s blabbering about this and that. I do notice, though, that there are about ten kids and only two very small bedrooms for them. The woman who runs the house and her husband—who is invisible—have the largest bedroom all to themselves, a room that’s not included in the tour. I ignore the fact that they’re all Cubans, the people in this house. I ignore the fact that the social worker is Cuban too.

  Tony and I stay close to each other as we tour the house. We say nothing. Nothing at all. And suddenly we’re not there anymore.

  Black out.

  Tony and I are in my bedroom at the Chait house. The door is closed, and we’re both sitting on my bed.

  I hear myself say, “I can’t live there. I can’t live in that house.” I feel myself resisting what’s about to happen, trying to will it away. If I object enough, within myself, then it can’t happen.

  “This can’t be my life,” I tell myself. “No way.” De ninguna manera.

  I hear Tony say, “Stop it. Be quiet. Cállate. That’s where we’re going to live from now on, and that’s that. We can’t do anything about it, so you’d better accept it.”

  I might have been crying, but I’m not sure. Can’t remember much, save for Tony saying again and again, “We’ll be all right.”

  Black out. Pitch black.

  We’re on Coral Way again, in the same damn car with the same accursed Cuban social worker. He’s very young for a grown-up. I notice that this time around. He’s droning on and on about how nice our new home is going to be, how we’ll now be part of one big happy family.

  “Calor de familia,” he keeps saying, again and again. We’ll be surrounded by “family warmth,” and that’s the most important thing of all.

  How I wish he’d shut up.

  Those trees on Coral Way suddenly turn into angels. Huge, powerful, muscle-bound angels. Terminators. Demon-slayers of the highest order. Guardian angels thrusting spears and swords into demons, straining with every fiber of their being, driving their weapons into the Enemy with resolve, their muscles rippling, their limbs perfectly poised to harness the power within them and do the utmost damage, their wings as taut and perfectly angled as those of any eagle when it dives in for the kill: the very essence of balance, of equilibrium itself, harnessed for a singular purpose, divine in origin.

  “As long as these trees are here,” I tell myself, “I’ll be all right.”

  Many, many years later, on a gray and rainy day, I’ll see some statues of gilded angels swarming high above a baroque altar in Prague, and they’ll instantly remind me of those trees, and I’ll whisper, “What are you guys doing here, so far from Miami?”

  It’s just a few days before Christmas, and Coral Gables is all decked out for the holiday, full of all the stuff that’s been outlawed in Cuba, where celebrating Christmas is now a crime. I tell myself again and again that I should get into the spirit of the season, but I’m not listening. It’s not sinking in. It can’t. These garlands and lights and Christmas trees and nativity scenes are a hoax. It’s not Christmas. It can’t be. Nothing bad can happen on Christmas, or just before it.

  It doesn’t make sense.

  Images of Christmases past try to invade my mind, but they bounce right off my ramparts, like cannonballs fired from defective artillery. They won’t get in; they can’t get in. Even last Christmas can’t get in, that Christmas when we had to pretend that we weren’t celebrating it, and when there was nothing at all that could pass as a present because all of the stores were empty. Any Christmas past, no matter how rotten, has the power to kill me right now. So my fortress walls are raised and thickened and widened, and the moats around them made deeper and longer, and filled with the purest, strongest acid of all.

  Fade to black.

  I simply accept what happened as inevitable, for years, and I’ll never ask anyone why it happened. I don’t care to know, because I prefer to accept it as inevitable and foreordained. It couldn’t have been any different. It’s a lot like a car wreck: If you replay the scene before the crash, it only makes your scars hurt more, both the ones on your body and those in your mind. The best I can do is to guess, and to do so with one eye closed, and my hands over my face.

  And the guessing always leads me to the same conclusion: Our foster parents had taken us in thinking that we’d be spending only a few months with them, but the fallout from the Cuban Missile Crisis changed everything.

  No one knew now when our mom would be able to leave Cuba.

  A month? Not likely. Ten months? Probably not. Sixteen months? Wishful thinking. Sixteen years? Maybe.

  Would I have put up with me indefinitely if I were my own foster parent? No way. I was damaged merchandise. Very damaged. Would I have put up with Tony? No way, ten times over. The guy was nothing but trouble. Allergies, constant sinus infections, migraines, absolute sloppiness, and a dogged resistance to learning English were only some of his faults. The total list would be way too long. In a small house with two other teenagers, one male and one female, the guy was a constant drag. That abyss he carried around inside of him all the time was like a black hole that sucked in whatever light dared to enter the house. To top it off, he took showers that were about an hour long, and he ate way too many eggs.


  To whom did we really belong? To whom did any of the ten thousand of us who were stranded belong? We were stuck here without our parents, and there was no going back. That was out of the question. Our parents had gambled and lost, but most of them never regretted the wager. Better that their children be alone in the United States than with them in that tropical hell, or somewhere behind the Iron Curtain. That’s the way our parents saw it, and the way most of us kids saw it too. Vaulting over the Iron Curtain and returning to hell was not an option, even if that was where our parents were stuck. We were here for good, we of the silent unseen airlift that hardly anyone noticed.

  I, for one, would have rather killed myself than gone back. I’d even have jumped into a sea full of sharks in a feeding frenzy before I’d set foot again in Cuba. It would have made as much sense for me to choose the Void willingly as to return to Cuba. And I have yet to meet another airlift kid who didn’t feel the same way.

  Tony and I were luckier than most: At least we had one uncle in the United States. So what if he was sixty-two years old, underemployed, living in a weird little town in the Midwest, and blessed with one child who needed extra care? He was our father’s brother, our closest kin. Our foster parents were not really responsible for us, and all that they’d done for us was already way beyond any definition of compassion and selflessness. It was a mitzvah brighter than a billion suns, a good deed way beyond measure. The time had come for us to be picked up by Uncle Amado.

  So the Chaits and Rubins tried to send us to Amado, through the same agencies that had brought us to their houses in the first place. Whoever they were. But something went awry, somewhere along the way. Something big.

  Instead of being sent to our uncle, who was living in a hell of his own—trying to settle in godforsaken Bloomington, Illinois, knocking on every church door he could find, begging for used furniture and winter clothing, wondering how in the world he was going to pay heating bills that added up to about half of his income, or how he was supposed to get around in a town that had no public transportation—we were shelved, warehoused, tucked out of sight, call it what you will, in a holding tank.

  We weren’t supposed to stay there too long, in that house full of troubled, battle-scarred boys, gang members who’d already been in trouble with the law. Technically, it wasn’t called a home for juvenile delinquents or an orphanage, but it sure qualified as both.

  But what’s supposed to happen is not always what happens, simply because there’s a much larger and intricately complex plan that’s way beyond our ken, an eternal plan. Parts of it occasionally surface in our dreams and are hard to recognize for what they are, and they are even harder to interpret correctly.

  Tony and I were predestined to end up in that house, and to live in it for a specific number of days, a large number I’ve never bothered to count, simply because it wouldn’t make any difference. What happened had to happen.

  Meddling with the inevitable can only lead to trouble, even if the meddling takes place only in your mind. And the same goes for trying to forget about it, or to erase all memories of it.

  Flash forward, twenty-nine years.

  It’s Christmas morning in Charlottesville, Virginia. The presents under the tree are all perfectly wrapped, perfectly laid out. The tree is nearly perfect too, as symmetrical as one could ever hope for, and it’s loaded with lights and ornaments, none of which are heirlooms. My lovely wife Jane and I have spent hours assembling toys and wrapping packages. It’s taken us nearly all night to do this, and we’ve barely slept.

  This is all for the kids. Not for us. Before they came along, Jane and I never did this.

  The cookies and carrots on the plate near the tree are full of bite marks, and the milk glass is nearly empty. Santa and his reindeer have sampled the snacks left out for them on Christmas Eve, and the evidence is there for the kids to examine.

  We even have a fireplace, damn it, and stockings crammed with goodies hang from the mantel. It’s a Christmas card, for God’s sake. All that’s missing is snow. It’s Virginia, after all, where it rarely snows, but at least there’s frost on the grass.

  Our two kids come down the stairs, dressed in pajamas designed by descendants of the Vikings, purchased from a Hanna Andersson catalog. They’re so little, so perfectly little: three years old and sixteen months old, a boy and a girl. So beautiful, both of them.

  So perfect, they make the Swedish pajamas look better than they did in the catalog.

  I’m ready for them, more than ready. The video camera is rolling. It’s brand-new, just purchased with the money from a teaching prize. It’s 1991, and video cameras still cost a lot. Way too much. Oh, but I don’t care. I’ve blown all the prize money on this camera even though I have three monstrous credit card bills to pay off, all at killer interest rates, and I still have nine more years to go before I’m done paying my student loans.

  I’m not going to let the moment slip away. No way. I’ve been waiting my entire life for this. And someday, these two cherubs will be so happy to see what it was like on this Christmas morning.

  I hate Christmas. Loathe it. It’s the darkest day of the year, something I’d run away from if it were possible. But I can’t deny its pleasures to others, especially my own children. Maybe they’ll have better luck with it than I did. Good God in heaven, I hope they do. It’s my duty to make sure that their story turns out different from mine, that they never lose the magic, and if I try really hard, maybe it will all turn out all right.

  The camera’s rolling, and there’s plenty of blank tape, just itching to be filled with images.

  Jane guides the kids to the sea of presents under the tree. John-Carlos knows what this is all about. He’s seen all this before, twice, but he inspects the scene with suspicion anyway. That’s how he has viewed everything since he first opened his eyes. Grace has seen this bizarre setup only once before in her brief lifetime, but she can’t remember it, of course. She looks totally stunned.

  They open a couple of presents, and react less than perfectly. To be honest, they both look a bit peculiar. They’re acting sluggish, disinterested. They also have a strange look in their eyes, a look I don’t quite recognize. I don’t know if it’s the early morning light, or the colored lights from the Christmas tree, but I could swear they both look a little green around the gills.

  Sure enough, they do.

  Then, in unison, both of them erupt like little volcanoes. Mount St. Helens and Krakatoa, twice over. Projectile vomit, the likes of which I’ve never seen before. I thought I’d seen it all by now, including that one time in church when my kid’s mouth turned into a fire hose, spraying at the poor suckers seated behind us. But this is the biggest blowout ever.

  They throw up all morning long, or so it seems. I didn’t know they had that much in them to expel.

  We’d had Christmas Eve dinner at a friend’s house the night before, and two of his kids were sick. I knew we ran a slight risk of catching whatever was ailing that household, but I never expected this. This must be the fastest-acting bug in recorded history.

  Perfect. Yeah. Sure.

  As the kids recover and the now-well-cleaned presents sit under the Christmas tree, awaiting their perfect little hands, I rewind the tape and erase everything I’ve shot.

  This didn’t happen. No way. It couldn’t. We’ll start over.

  Yeah. This works for me. They’re better. The eruptions have ceased. And look at them go at those presents. Yeah—this is more like it. Now, this is Christmas!

  Later that night, after the kids fall asleep, Jane and I plop down on the couch, exhausted, and prepare to watch the video footage from earlier in the day.

  I rewind all the way to the beginning of the tape and press the play button.

  “What the hell is this?” my lovely wife asks. “Where’s the vomit?”

  “I erased it.”

  “You what?”

  “I wiped it out.”

  “Why?”

  Silence on my par
t.

  “Why?”

  More silence.

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  “Uh . . . I dunno . . . it didn’t seem right to keep it.”

  Silence on Jane’s part, for then. The worst kind of silence, the kind that you know is keeping the lid on a nuclear explosion.

  Then for every Christmas after that and many occasions in between, again and again, up until this very moment, as I’m writing this, nothing but constant, detailed reminders of how truly stupid I was for erasing all of the vomiting.

  Ah, but back then in 1991, on our television screen, the kids are giddily opening their presents, and there’s no vomit anywhere in sight.

  Perfect. Yeah. Sure. As perfect as any lie ever told. As perfect as my Vault of Oblivion. And as perfect as any perfect crime. Yeah. As perfect as anything one can regret for the rest of one’s life, especially every time Christmas rolls around.

  As perfect as dying for the second time in one’s life, at the age of twelve.

  Yeah, just perfect.

  As perfect as finding a huge feather on my deck when I step out the back door, on the morning after I write about the trees on Coral Way. A feather large enough to belong to a heavily muscled angel, a feather that my lovely wife has left there untouched for me to find even though she has no clue about what I’ve just written. A feather that vanishes within the next hour, and is then nowhere to be found.

  Nowhere.

  Eleven

  The mousetraps are snapping away at a fast clip. Just as soon as one goes off, we don’t have to wait very long for the next one.

  Snap. Snap. Snap.

  It’s damn cold in this living room as we huddle around the small electric space heater, which is nestled in the fake fireplace.

  Snap.

  “Otro más!” Another one.

  The mice are dying like the troops at Verdun. We don’t even bother to get up to see what we’ve caught. We took one look at the first one, and that was enough.