Break in Case of Emergency

by Jessica Winter

  Confusingly, Unity, not Star, was the doppelgänger with the giant red star on one bicep and an interlocking gold chain of stars winding around one leg. Given the electrical charge of competition that sparked and hummed between the two young women, Jen wondered if Unity had gotten the tattoos to undermine Star’s chosen name, or if Star had chosen her name to undermine Unity’s tattoos.

  “If it’s hot here in this country, you feel that it’s hot,” Baz Angler was saying. After decades abroad, his strong Australian accent sounded emphatic, well practiced. “You don’t hide from it. The bodily waste that we produce every day, well, if the sewage system breaks down—and things are always breaking down around here, fact of life—there it is, you face it. Out there in the world—in that other world, your world of cities and suburbs and skyscrapers and highways—we literally shield ourselves from ourselves, every minute of every day. All that infrastructure is one big hiding place. Here, that’s not possible. Your five senses are totally engaged. No room for denial. Maybe it’s not always pretty.” He locked eyes meaningfully with Unity as he drove and twisted the machete into the table’s battered surface. “I admit, it’s often very pretty. But it’s always real.”

  “Right, right,” Jen said. Star glared at Jen ferociously. “So, Baz, how do you know Leora?” Jen asked.

  “Yeah, Leora and me, we go way back,” Baz Angler said. Why bake. “We used to have the best conversations. Leora and I used to talk about the power of the speech act—the abracadabra. The practice of making a resolution and then sticking to that vow so closely that saying it makes it so. Imagine being that honest, that true with yourself.”

  “Oh, yeah, like a marriage vow,” Jen said. “ ‘I do’ makes it true.”

  Baz Angler chortled and spun the blade around on its tip. “Yeah, you only have to look at the divorce rates to know how well that works,” he said.

  “Well, it’s like anything else—depends on the resolve of the people making the resolution,” Jen said, rocking slightly in her seat to help convey cheery agreeability.

  “Marriage, monogamy—just more of those truisms where we deny reality, thinking that we’re keeping ourselves safe, hidden from harm, when we overlook the greatest danger of them all, which would be to deny ourselves the right to conjure our own best and brightest reality. Monogamy is a lie. I look at Star. I love Star. I look at Unity. I love Unity. I look at a woman I haven’t met yet. I love that woman I haven’t met yet. What could be more dangerous than denying ourselves love? What could be more harmful than to blind ourselves to life?”

  Baz Angler was carving notches into the table, almost sawing at it.

  “You’re curious about this here beautiful blade, aren’t you?” he asked Jen. “You can’t stop staring at it.”

  “I sure can’t!” Jen said.

  “It belonged to Carlos Manuel de Céspedes,” he said. “I bet you don’t know who Carlos Manuel de Céspedes was, do ya?”

  “He—let’s see, he was the sugar plantation owner in Cuba who freed his slaves, which led to the Cuban wars of independence against Spain?” Jen said. “Did I get that right?”

  “Ho-ho-ho, whoa, we’ve got a live one here,” Baz Angler said, pantomiming a round of applause and rearing around to look at Star, who sucked her teeth and rolled her eyes. “Okay, Ms. Historian,” he said as he turned back to Jen, the blade puncturing and spinning, puncturing and spinning, “in that case, why don’t you tell me about this here beautiful blade?”

  Jen blushed and cushion-laughed. “Oh, now, that I couldn’t help you with.”

  Baz Angler pulsed his head slowly up and down, allowing Jen’s admission of ignorance to hang in the air, to spread and settle. “The criollos had two things in their favor against the peninsulares,” he said after a judicious silence. His tongue danced wantonly around the unfamiliar Spanish l’s and r’s. “One of the things in their favor, of course, was yellow fever. And two was the machete charge.” The blade thunked and spun, thunked and spun.

  “The peninsulares, they had superior forces, superior resources, the infrastructure, the riches,” he said. The blade went pock pock pock pock against the table to underline each item on the list. “But you know what they didn’t have? They didn’t have that sense of real life. That’s why their bodies betrayed them. That’s why they couldn’t handle hand-to-hand combat, the flesh against flesh, the blade against bone—the intimacy of the real, they couldn’t take it.” The spinning machete slipped partway from Baz Angler’s grasp and sliced a fresh arc into the battered table before he regained a firm grasp on its brilliant green handle. He gazed at it much as he’d gazed at Unity.

  “I can see why it’s so meaningful to you,” Jen said.

  “Got it at auction in Havana years ago,” Baz Angler said. “Don’t think they knew what they had here.”

  “Do you know what you have? I mean, is it verified—do you know for sure that it’s really real?” Jen asked. The Animexa had catapulted the question out of her mouth. Animexa always lowered Jen’s threshold of inhibition, which sometimes had the double-negative effect of rendering Jen mute: Aware that Animexa compromised her ability to judge the appropriateness of any given comment, she often erred on the side of silence.

  “Verified?” Baz asked. “Do I know what I have? I know what I have. It’s in my hand. Here it is.” Pock pock pock.

  “You should take the machete to the guys on Pawn Stars,” Jen said. “Or Antiques Roadshow.” Her time away from full-dose Animexa left her fumbling to find the mute button.

  Baz balanced the blade on his teeth and lifted his palms toward the heavens. “What do we need TV for when we’ve got real life?” he asked, the machete blocking and gagging his consonants.

  “We’ve got TV here,” Star broke in. “He doesn’t let us have it in his house,” she added, pouting, “but we have a satellite hookup out back.”

  “What I can verify,” Baz said over Star, palming the machete again, “is that this here beautiful blade isn’t just a beautiful blade. It’s a message, from Céspedes to me. Maybe he didn’t write the message down. Maybe he didn’t telegraph it to me in 1870 for me to receive here in 2009. But I can interpret the message all the same. I can verify it.”

  “What is the message of the machete?” Jen asked.

  “Who cares,” Unity whined from the couch, not looking up from her toes.

  “Maybe the message is a secret between him and me,” Baz Angler said. His smirk revealed that the pleasure of disclosure couldn’t snuff out the corresponding pleasure of withholding—that he could enjoy them both, if only he silently twirled the machete on the table for just a few more revolutions before he continued.

  “Céspedes was betrayed,” Baz finally said. “Booted. A bloody coup. The Cubans wouldn’t let him leave and wouldn’t give him security. He was a sitting duck for the Spaniards. Never had a chance. His death is a cautionary tale for any leader, any visionary, anybody with balls, and this”—pock pock pock pock—“this is the warning and the salvation.”

  “Darn, I don’t have balls,” Jen said. The Animexa continued to surprise her with its japes and pranks.

  “Anybody can have balls,” Baz said.

  “So I’m conjuring a best and brightest reality in which I have testicles and your machete is a metaphor,” Jen said, laughing. “Cool!”

  “Metaphor—okay, if you want to get fancy-highfalutin about it.”

  “To be honest,” Jen said, “it doesn’t look like a metaphor.”

  “What, this?” Baz asked, waggling the machete. “Makin’ you nervous?”

  Jen sigh-laughed. “A little!” She smiled while raising her furrowed eyebrows to telegraph apologetic anxiety, as if to ask pardon on behalf of her own neuroses for any implied criticism of Angler’s hosting skills.

  “So you see this and you sense—fear? You see a threat?”

  “It’s a machete,” Jen said.

  “That’s just a word,” Baz Angler said. “What is the thing you’re obscuring with langua
ge? What does it consist of? What does it possess? How does it act upon the world?”

  “I mean, yes, it’s threatening,” Jen said.

  “But a threat to what? Your safety? Your flesh? Or just your sense of decorum?”

  “Lunch is ready!” said Ram brightly, emerging from the kitchen with a cooler. “For our trip, I mean. We’ll have it later.”

  “Our trip?” Jen asked.

  “But why do you see a threat?” Baz was asking. “If that’s in fact what you see. Because you could choose to see so many things. You could choose to see history. You could choose to see a practical implement for clearing undergrowth—the very kind used to create the clearing for this very compound where you are sitting right now. You could choose to see it as a simple and reliable tool for any number of agricultural tasks, like cutting sugarcane.”

  “I could choose!” Jen said. “Are we going somewhere?”

  “You are proceeding on a conjecture. A presumption. A hypothesis, at best. In doing so, you believe yourself to be in control of your reality. But in fact, I’m controlling your reality—and what you think is your reality doesn’t account for that. You granted me the right to control your reality the instant you started projecting a false reality onto an inanimate object.”

  “I’m bored,” Unity keened. “Let’s go already.”

  “To be continued,” Baz said. He smiled, Jen thought, like a wolf.

  “Where are we going?” Jen asked.

  “In so many ways, that’s up to you,” Baz Angler said over his shoulder as he loped toward the front door. “When you come face-to-face with reality, with real life, that’s the first step toward conjuring your own reality, your best and brightest reality, which is really what we’re talking about when we’re talking about making a life for ourselves, achieving our dreams, making a difference in this world.”

  “I can see how you and Leora would have hit it off,” Jen said to the retreating figure. She looked at Ram, who gave her a double thumbs-up.

  “We’re going to a desert island!” Ram exclaimed, and Jen put up her hand to return his high-five.

  Furthermost, Farthermore, Everending

  “I think I can get LIFt to pay for this call,” Jen stammered into her hotel-room phone, comforter thrown over her head, her lips numb and trembling.

  “Are you okay?” Jim was asking.

  Jen wriggled beneath a phantom prickling sensation that dotted her entire sheath of skin. “It started out fine,” she said. “It started out fine.”

  “What started?” Jim asked.

  “I followed Baz in Eva’s car to the coast—”

  “Who is Baz?” Jim asked.

  “—and then we were going to take the ferry. We were going to take the ferry to Caye Caulker. From Caye Caulker they said we were going to the quote-unquote ‘island.’ ”

  “Who is ‘they’?” Jim asked.

  “There was a graveyard of golf carts,” Jen said. “I remember this. I passed them driving Eva’s car. There was an empty yellow bus, abandoned by the roadside. There was a tin shack, all on its own, painted orange and blue, with a handwritten sign out front that said SILVER FOX GUEST HOUSE. There were whitish-gray pools of water in the roads. The roads were sandy and uneven. Nowhere for the water on the ground to go. Poofy white-gray clouds shrouding everything.”

  “What is the island?” Jim asked. “Let’s go back to the island.”

  “On the ferry, Ram was having trouble sitting still. Star and Unity were like a big tangle of limbs, all wrapped up in each other, but—resentfully so.”

  “This is Baz’s entourage?” Jim asked. “Where is Eva?”

  “When we reached Caye Caulker, the pier was covered in garbage and missing chunks of wood. There was a big hunk of concrete, half submerged, next to the pier, and it looked like maybe an earlier attempt at a pier. There was broken glass and bottle caps bobbing in the turtle grass. The water was shallow and smelled of garbage. A few tourists were trying to snorkel in it. We all climbed into a small boat with two men who—I didn’t catch their names. As we get in, Baz thumps his chest with both fists and he yells, ‘These sacs are big and clean, thanks to the same air that bears the quetzal’s wings!’ ”

  “I’m suddenly feeling better about this story,” Jim said.

  “There are no life jackets.”

  “Oh,” Jim said.

  “The next thing I remember is—we’re speedboating into a storm cell. The sea is rising under a deep, dark cloud cover. The rain starts. There are buckets of salt water, stinging, flying into the boat and into our faces. The wind is like a knife and the water is zigzagging around it. We are freezing and, for some reason, we are laughing.”

  “Ha, ha!” Jim said.

  “It’s like this for a long time. Maybe it was hours. And then we arrive at ‘the island.’ The winds seem to be reaching gale force. The island looks like leftover shards from Bikini Atoll. We huddle under what looks like a bus shelter made of bamboo. Star is saying things like, “I think it might be one degree warmer over here.” Unity is saying things like, “Look, that might be a patch of blue sky coming out.” Ram gets restless and goes out to try to snorkel in the water, which is only ankle-deep. Even far away from shore, it’s only ankle-deep. Ram comes back with a bleeding gouge in his knee. He is laughing and Star and Unity are laughing.”

  “It is funny when you think about it,” Jim said.

  “And Baz says something like, ‘Shallow water so far out means a surge is coming. The pressure is sucking all the water out.’ Then the two men whose names I haven’t caught serve us fish and grilled onions and white bread. The fish still have the heads and eyes attached. We drink lots and lots of rum punch and Belikin beer. I drink two enormous rum punches and don’t feel a thing. Ram has two big rum punches and four beers and doesn’t feel a thing. Ram says, ‘I don’t feel a thing,’ and he laughs and then I laugh, too. We are shivering violently and don’t feel a thing. Star and Unity are chugging from flasks. I don’t know if they feel anything. Later on, Star and Unity disappear for a while on the other side of the bus shelter with Baz, and Ram tries to snorkel again.”

  “Ram has gumption,” Jim said. “Ram should write memos for LIFt.”

  “So then after we enjoy the island for a while, we climb back into the boat. Baz and Star and Unity are back and everyone is laughing. Time starts to get very weird here. I don’t know how long we were on the island. I don’t know how long we were in the boat. There is no sense of time because the storm cover—it wipes away the shadows and you can’t track the movement of the sun. On the way back to Caye Caulker, we are sure that every caye we see is Caulker, but it never is, and then every time it becomes clear that the caye is not Caulker, we laugh more. Caye Caulker is no longer a place—like, we’ve been there, but it doesn’t exist anymore—”

  “Wait, are you still alive?” Jim asked. “At this point in the story?”

  “—it doesn’t exist anymore except as a horizon line, or like an asymptote, and that is funny, and it is progressively funnier. It gets darker and colder and rainier all the time. The wind bawls and the wind gets bigger. The wind has arms and hands.”

  Jim growled in pity and terror.

  “It’s like we’re boating into a cold jet engine. The sea is swelling and dropping, swelling and dropping. The boat lurches veryveryfast over the waves, and then the waves recede in a trough, and the boat lands with a massive thump each time. With every thump, a huge pail of salt water lands splat in our faces. With every thump, I clear six inches of air between the boat seat and my butt.”

  “Did anybody get boinged out of the boat?” Jim asked.

  “Sometimes I think to look around, and everyone in the boat looks like castaways who are resisting rescue. The laughter is getting bigger and more, and it starts to sound like hysteria. Or maybe the hysteria set in before that and we were too hysterical to notice. It only settles down once darkness falls entirely. Then it gets very quiet. We are heading straight into another squ
all. The other cayes and islands around us—they just disappear.”

  “So it’s total darkness now?”

  “We have two hundred meters of visibility at most—it’s probably much less. The red blinking light of Caye Caulker is vanishing and flickering and vanishing again. It keeps falling away behind the palm trees. Our boat has just a tiny port-and-starboard light on it. Maybe no one is seeing us. As we’re moving into the parking zone for boats, a huge luxury yacht looms up out of the darkness. The pilot yells at his copilot and the boat steers hard to the right and lurches up on its side and it nearly tips over. The pilots relax and laugh because they’re so relieved the danger has passed. But then they notice that a dinghy is attached to the yacht, and again, they steer hard, lurch to the right, and laugh. Everyone is laughing again now except me.”

  “Killjoy,” Jim said.