Kingdom of the Young

by Edie Meidav

  The boil too much, your homeostasis a difficult act to maintain. You may be losing the battle but will not surrender the war. You cannot get out of the tub and let Plum see you: a frog who cannot exit water turned up by degrees. She is the one doing it to you, like your ex-wife had also, chopping off her hair, what you had once loved, at your last dalliance. Deprive you she would and had. In your current state, could you take young Plum seeing you? No and nugatory, choice clearly Hobson’s. No choice. Just stay. Boil off the skin. Why not. Peeled old chicken. They will find you there, the opposite of WWII gallant soldiers found almost completely preserved in the ice melting off the Italian Alps. Poor consultant, scalded alive on his birthday, cause held tight as the flagpole at Iwo Jima.

  So finally her ballet finishes and she starts to get out. Let her. Let her rise, when little does she know how decisive this moment is, let her parade with that minimus. As if for once magical thinking actually grants you the triumph of match point. Getting out of the tub with her perfection, she knows you watch. Would it be a good idea to say something to show who is in charge? Can’t stand the heat, get out of the fire. Nix on the cliché. Weather too much? Probably better to stay silent, enjoy conquest, eyes manly, consummating the meal, love shack subsiding, an uncanny silence descending at your coup.

  Tugging at her bathing suit, the girl already stands at the chairs, fiddling with a towel, this Plum in profile so you can savor the overthrow. Although of course a person could wonder on which side downfall had fallen? With a delicacy so careful it could wrench, almost beautiful, she shudders away. Away from you, from the rest of the pool, from everyone—doing what, after all? This is what she does: she removes first one and then another glass eye, granting only you the vision of her face. Two gouged slits no monster could envy. Some optician somewhere had crafted hazel. She is slow now, tinkering with a careful white case. Before you exhale, she yanks goggles over all you cannot fathom. After that, the swimming cap. And then stands at the pool’s edge, as ready for her laps as a knife.

  THE BUDDHA OF THE VEDADO

  For seven years in prison every day he had a chair to himself. He had a chair and a desk and even a private room in which he could kick his heels up on a desk. Yuzniel had a friend on the outside falsify a certificate saying that he had been a geography and history teacher so he got to teach classes four times a week, which was hard, being as he was a high school dropout, but he had no problem getting students to come to classes, people liked him, part of his problem being he could get anyone to believe, always made himself ready for anyone. That he got to move around and have some private space meant everything in prison, and when he wanted something, he was diligent, which might have counted for at least half of why I had fallen in love.

  We met as scraggly kids in our neighborhood with its sidewalks torn up by roots, the one where you have state employees working eight hours a day with a machete trimming snatches of grass so that tourists at the fancy hotels facing the seawall boulevard don’t feel they left too much home behind. Even if all the neckless men from Italy or Switzerland trip as they totter out of their hotels, their reward is they get to lean on their mulattas, never technically hired, and we knew what the exchange meant about the demon capitalism: curves on certain girls meant capital to come or capitalism spent.

  It is not hard to fall in love in Cuba but it is equally easy to fall out, like that round-robin salsa only the best male dancers do where they twirl their girls with that bored face of the best salseros, the girls endlessly switching partners, the dance really about the expertise of the men though the girls’ compliance masks greater skill. This may be why we have one of the world’s highest divorce rates and may also have to do with the circulation necessary to any island’s inner flow, the one that makes us depend on that influx of foreign neckless wonders, their loud vacation shirts tenting over their tummies as they eye their disco girls.

  I did not meet my local boy at a disco but instead outside school where those without mothers shouting them home could ride a crumbly plaster wall where we sat stealing time by drinking and pretending to be adults. Yuzniel teased me like a brother whenever I wore eyeliner I had swiped from my older sister but I teased him for wearing the boys’ beige uniform with hems so high because of his lankiness, our pestering meaning we kept full radar on each other afternoons anywhere, in classes, halls, fields. Even if we pretended we were just two people in our group, we knew what the other one thought so no one was shocked when, right before he dropped out, we hooked up.

  His mother went crazy three years later and ended up in the hospital our leader said brought disgrace to Cuba because it turned out the director ignored workers swiping sheets, medicine, food. It took some busybody American agency snooping to find the crazies dying of starvation and cold middle of the half-century of our revolution that had never stopped. Yuzniel was less ashamed of his mother than our leader was about the hospital. No one held having some crazy genes against anyone in our country, especially not against my boy who behaved like the humble mayor of our zone, always helping even the lowest of the low, one more of the revolutionary slogans we loved to mock. Billboards around us advertised the thoughtful pensamientos of our leader or José Martí or any other of our national heroes and these were our favorite blackboards, the ones we loved to scrawl on, bizarre comments inserted into such holy words so the tang of teenage mischief filled our veins. But really there was no other country for us: we liked to say the people, never its rulers, made the place. You only had to look at all the neckless men who understood our charms, even if we knew our island had basically become some kind of beautifully outfitted jail. Most of the people we knew were in line for some Miami uncle or Boca aunt to send word even if the old-timers liked saying they were diehard fidelistas, humanitarians, comunistas, people pretending revolution stirred their moros y cristianos siempre. But of course people fool themselves staying in a bad situation, liking to tell themselves someone wiser knows what’s best.

  At first I felt sorry for Yuzniel. His mother gone pure crazy and we all knew his older sister had played jinetera, outfitting herself with jangly earrings and tight jeans before finding herself a rich Swiss at the hotel down our street, the one that years later, after the pope came to Havana to lecture our leader about our morality problem, took up policies barring girls like her from even entering the front door alone. Back in her time, things were still open so she got out and ended up in Switzerland, sometimes sending home remissions to her little brother who was being raised by their demented grandfather who used the love-money to have big parties, whooping it up and only occasionally loaning some to Yuzniel whenever his grandson wanted to give someone starter cash.

  Naturally any boy like this might go wild. Yuzniel used to come to school back when he was fourteen with hair in braids tight to his skull, drinking watered-down aguardiente out of a little silver flask with the Che face on it wearing off from exposure to cheap rotgut. Back then Yuzniel was pure edge, not yet the saint he became. It was hard not to be drawn to him and because I was popular with the other girls, I got him and for this my rank went up even more.

  Never give me advice, he told me from the start, that’s one thing, Yanet, I got to listen to my own master, I can’t have anyone above me.

  So when he decided to quit school and imitate Juan Carlos, the guy in his tipped fisherman’s cap, the one we’d seen living it up down the avenue, the one we whispered was selling drugs to foreigners, of course I couldn’t keep myself from telling him he was heading down the wrong path.

  Come on, Yanet, you’re supposed to be different, he said. We were Generation Y and so everyone had Y names, though at first Yuzniel’s mother had wanted to call him Lazaro because his birth had been so difficult. Difficult as opposed to what, I wonder? He was born like we all were, yanked out by forceps a few years before the Special Period which happened when the Soviets pulled their support and our whole island started lacking forceps, clothes, soap, or goods, only rice, beans, and all the sugar yo
u could die for.

  In a way, my Y did what was smart. He didn’t want to go the way of teachers diving into dumpsters to find something usable or the doctors selling lemonade or sewing kids’ shoes on the street. He saw Juan Carlos was up to something else and that something Yuzniel wanted. As I mentioned, he was never anything but enterprising. To stay in the system as it wanted him to stay, hope to be some clerk making at most twenty-five dollars a month and figuring out how to survive by odd jobs on the side, you would have to be dumb. So Yuzniel did what any thinking man would do. At night he started selling small bags to the same tourists in the hotels whose mulattas needed a little extra in order to get it on, just some pot and cocaine, and this despite the daily reflections of our leader in the party paper about the evils of other countries and how we in Cuba were pure and above drugs, this when about half the men you meet on any day before ten in the morning have that little sting of rum or aguardiente on their breath, this despite the way we’re allowed to sip our coffee mindlessly all day to not fall down the pit I started to know the day Yuzniel was caught.

  You have to admire our leader. He had caught wind of the drugs rampant on the island and organized an island-wide sting between four and five in the morning one January which got thousands of dealers thrown into jail. Yuzniel at first was caged up with just dealers but then because of overcrowding they moved him after six months into the prison for rapists and murderers. That first morning he hit on the plan of becoming a history and geography teacher. My only goal is to get out, he told me right after we got married, part of his plan to get us time together, three hours a month of conjugal visits. Of course I made sure not to get pregnant if I had to be alone on the outside. I was working as a shopgirl and I’d come to him wearing the patterned stockings that only nurses and shopgirls get to wear and he would be so happy to see me, his narrow face lit into being more like a big happy dog who wanted to jump all over me even before the guard left us alone to our privacy.

  I brought him whatever he needed, even the false certificate and books to study, I waited, and when he was let out one year early for good behavior as a teacher, who took the bus with him to his brother’s home? We lived there with his brother and wife and their new baby until the lack of privacy just got too hard and I insisted Y open up some packets of the drug money he had hidden away and find us a new apartment, a tricky feat when we are only allowed to trade to the same size apartment and in fact nothing belonged to Yuzniel anymore, even the house of his grandparents had been swallowed by the government given his sister’s total disappearance from the family’s cause. Of course at that time she was suffering, having tried to divorce her neckless Swiss man but the Swiss guy had gotten so angry he had stolen her passport, even her clothes and money, and so for a few years she had been forced to rely on the goodness of the few Cubans she had met in Geneva and despite the tough times was doing her best to get back to Havana.

  While things were looking up for me and Yuzniel. With some financial lubrication, we managed to get ourselves a place not far from his brother and our old-time crumbly wall and because the leader had just lifted the restrictions on people having their own businesses, just a little, or rather the leader’s brother pushed him into it, we all got a break and could open up a little snack shop, hiring some of Yuzniel’s ex-cons to work it, right near the hotel where his sister had bagged her man, just a place for people to get a little coffee and pan con tortilla or croqueta or whatever they liked. And we were getting the hang of the business, bribing the health inspector and electricity inspector and the whole thing was starting to take off.

  I never take anything for granted, he would say in the morning, kissing me. Every time I breathe fresh air, every time I take a sip of water, I realize all I could not have. Then he’d correct himself: What we could not have. Together. You waited, Yanet baby, and I will never forget that, I owe you.

  And I would feel lucky because though I’d spent seven years waiting out what my mother who’d made her own bad choices still scolded me for, calling them seven petals stolen from the flower of my youth, he and I ended up together again and better, my boy swearing he would never touch selling drugs. Now that he knew the bad side of bad, I could breathe easy.

  Which is of course the way things go, right, the point when you relax starts things spilling over. Wherever he was, Yuzniel played mayor, answering this one’s debt, picking up the cell to fix another’s water issue, calmly meeting everyone’s need, which let him survive prison without anyone laying a finger on him, his ring of friends keeping its members protected. Clearly, on the outside, I didn’t offer enough of a ring to protect him. In our building lived the daughter of one of our high school friends and she invented some kind of mad attraction for him, throwing herself at his feet when her own father died. Like a crazy from his mother’s asylum she wanted Yuzniel, a girl not even seventeen, just a light-skinned simpering fool with her bit lower lip and a way of ducking her chin when she looked at him. Of course anyone might have suspected but she just seemed too flimsy, the most forceful thing about her that navel ring and smooth flat belly.

  WOULD YOU RATHER GET A PRICKER IN YOUR HEART OR YOUR HEEL? I saw she had texted him one day, the first moment that made me suspicious.

  Is Lucia texting you about prickers? I said.

  Some kind of word game she likes playing, he said, holding my gaze in the straightforward way that had passed him from jail to parole board to clean man, containing enough sugar to make your average neighborhood vigilante for the defense of the revolution trust in Yuzniel.

  Oh come on, I said, should I ask?

  Look, the girl just lost her father, he said, you want me to turn a blind eye on her just because you’re jealous?

  What, I said, hotels? Or friends’ places?

  Yanet, don’t go crazy too, he said, right when I need you. Jealous about a baby? You and I were just talking about having one ourselves.

  You weren’t ready.

  But we’re talking, right?

  So I was just supposed to swallow this and go about my day, check on accounts, talk to all his smiling ex-cons and not care when of course I was beyond ready to have kids, already in my thirties with no solid person to confide in. The truth was our lives were so entwined I had no person who didn’t think of Yuzniel as a personal savior, our neighborhood’s hero. So I burned all day and on the next told him I wanted to relieve one of the ex-cons, work in the snack shop just to be sure coffee was being served correctly or some other ridiculous story. He took this as he took all my initiatives, calmly, eyeing me, calculating and then saying, as he so often did: You know best, Yanet. Let me know if I can help.

  In the morning, he saw me in my apron in the snack bar while he was supposedly heading off to talk with his prepared-foods supplier in Central Havana, his little red Lada moving out into traffic, little knowing I had asked my cousin, my harelipped beloved cousin who drove a gypsy cab, to follow, a good choice of detective since my cousin’s the rare sort to never be surprised by the faults of humans and is also no gossiper. About a half hour later, my cousin called before swooping back to pick me up, taking me to where he’d found Yuzniel, parked not outside the supplier’s house where the smoke and carts press on you in the center of the city but instead near the breezy green Parque Almendares with its bridge. My cousin and I stopped on the upper rim of the park above where Yuzniel walked below, hands shoved in the back of his low jean pockets just like he used to do when we were sixteen, slumping down toward where they rent boats on the river that flows under the bridge.

  We saw him look around, keen and quick before paying the guy who runs the boats—once, back when we were bad teens, he’d taken me here too. Ten cents to paddle a tin can upriver, nothing too cheap for that girl’s torso I would have recognized anywhere, that flimsy seventeen-year-old leaning on him as she got onto the boat, making it rock before Yuzniel began rowing.

  Well, said my cousin, palms opening wide. Your man’s supplier?

  My cousin has a
one-up over most. What I mean is he knows exactly how people could break and still survive, and so his advice mattered. He weighed potential and disaster before answering. Play it, he said. Because Yuzniel’s crafty, he’ll admit to nothing.

  I waited seven years!

  Maybe that’s your ticket? said my cousin, his wiles greater than I had supposed. He went on: Getting him to confess wouldn’t be hard. But if you want him to stop seeing her—well, you know men.

  This my cousin knew deeply, he the spawn of one of the Italian tourists and a young mother who never used funds sent her from a Milan bank for her son’s lip operation but instead to secure a steadier income source, as she always said, one requiring greater long-term investment in high heels and lipstick.

  It’s awful, I said, I’d be that young too if—but this didn’t make sense so I stopped.

  In the end, my cousin showed mettle, saving the day or showing me what we were made of. He had our neighbor let Yuzniel know I had been detained. (Not technically a lie.) My cousin also sent my Y an unsigned typewritten letter, delivered by a beggar paid exactly fifty cents. In this letter, Yuzniel learned our leader’s morality police had been surveying him. If he wanted to keep his business and apartment licenses, if he wanted to avoid appearing again before the dread bureau of moral affairs which could mean another citation and jail sentence, he’d have to sign a confession admitting to all his recent sins, bad as those of the worst American colonial mercenaries. Knowing truth remains the great revolutionary purgative, if the confession were done in the right spirit of autocritique, the parole board would be confirmed in its faith that Yuzniel had moral fiber enough to continue life as it was: however, his nefarious activities, moral or financial, would have to cease. By ten the next morning, at the front desk of the hotel nearest his snack bar, he should leave his confession in an envelope marked REVOLUTIONARY DOCUMENT. No one else could bring the letter, which, if written in ill faith, would warrant his return to prison.