The Death of Small Creatures (12 page)

Five

I'll meet you at Guantanamo (January 2007)

I am flying
over the Caribbean Ocean in my white wedding dress, soaring through the cosmos. My crystal butterfly earrings match the two butterflies I had tattooed into my body in my early twenties, such were the days of peyote and techno bars, ripped jeans and black eyeliner. One tattoo is angled upward above my belly button and the other resides above the protruding knot of my ankle, hovers as warily as an angry dog might hunker down in a sea of ankle-high grass and wait.

These tiny crystal earrings are clinking in my ears.

My dress is perfect for a flight through the tropics; it's strapless with an empire waist and delicate beading along the scalloped bust line. It keeps my torso tight but flows away from my body from the hips downward. This is a flattering style for my voluptuous figure. The sales girl in the dress shop called my gown a chandelier.

I am a chandelier, scalloped at the bust line, soaring above an archipelago of my dreams.

But I'm not dreaming.

Look down there.

The water is clear and lovely, rippling in moonlight. I see the five points of a pink starfish splayed on the ocean floor, and now a sea urchin and two barracudas stalking a school of blue chromis. It's plain to see the beauty beyond the terror. It's plain to see those barracudas are in love.

I tell myself not to be afraid; I will always be free.

I tell myself that freedom exists in spite of the laws of matrimony, foreign policy, Acts of Patriotism, embargos and inter-galactic relations. I tell myself to breathe, to spread my wings Freddy Mercury–style, and fly away.

I pray. I pray. I pray.

In the weeks
leading up to my wedding, things kept breaking. Fluffing my duvet one morning, I unleashed a small bottle of Body Shop vanilla perfume embedded in the folds, propelled it against the framed Monet print above our bed and it shattered the water lilies. Another night, having drunk too much red wine, I pushed open the front porch window, inadvertently punched a hole in the pane. My fist went through the glass effortlessly. I gouged a knuckle, delicately slit the web between two fingers. I stood there bleeding, drunk and frozen, noted the shift in temperature, the sudden onslaught of cold Pacific wind, the salt in the air, dampness, rainwater dripping from the gutter.

I could not tell if I was happy or sad.

Two days before Christmas at Chintz & Company, I lifted a dazzling golden ball from an abalone bowl filled with other golden balls. I held up my globe above the others, admiring its paradoxical simplicity and opulence the way one might admire a world. I beheld it, suspended. It was one of those warm seasonal moments, like lifting a cup of eggnog to your lips or tossing tinsel onto a tree. And then it was gone, slipped from my fingers and smashed to smithereens amongst the other smashed globes in the abalone bowl below. Store clerks came running. All that was left was the curved wire pinched between my thumb and forefinger—an empty hook in the air, useless.

Another night, a wineglass.

And lastly, my engagement ring. Had I ever accepted it with such girlish glee? I glanced down at my hand one day and saw the gap in the row of small diamonds where the last of ten diamonds used to reside, a tiny black cavity. The white gold clasps curved into absence. The sapphire in the middle of the band gleamed conspiracy.

So direct in their manifestation, the signs could not have been more clear and brazen.

I had wavered back and forth a hundred times in a hundred different ways in the weeks prior, sometimes in contempt, sometimes in rage, other times coolly detached:
Leigh, I'm not marrying you… I can't go through with it… I'm not cut out to be a bride…
But as soon as the words had left me, I took them back again:
No, I didn't mean it… I love you more than anything… It's just cold feet.

This is how at six o'clock in the evening, hours before our flight to Cuba and one week before the wedding, I found myself alone in the spare room with the lights out, staring down the dress, peering through the shadows with disdain.

Leigh sat on the front porch, our bags piled around him, running his fingers through his hair, exasperated. The Volvo idled curbside, the steel jaw of the trunk wedged open, waiting.

It was raining sleet.

My dress lay draped over the green wingback, beckoning, as if it had obliterated its former occupant, some flesh and blood creature reduced to negatively charged vapour—a faint electrical impulse, a blue silhouette.

The handsome young
customs officer at the Santa Clara airport lets Leigh through without incident, but he eyeballs me through the plate of glass, studies my passport then surveys me accordingly.

I think of my fist punching through the porch window, Leigh's disgust as I crept into bed next to him that night and conceded another drunken mishap: “I broke the porch window,” and his contemptuous response, “Great. You're drunk. Sleep on the couch.”

The customs officer peers into the depths of my most heinous crimes. My cuts have healed quickly, so cleanly and without remark I want to open them up again, to extend my hand, reveal my gouged knuckle, the slit between the two fingers, whisper, “You see,
señor
?”

Perhaps it's my recent weight gain, the length of my hair, the medication in my blood, but he appears apprehensive. I am, after all, a North American, born into capitalism, wealthy by international standards; I am a terrorist by implication, and it shows.

“Take off your hat,” he instructs.

I comply, haggard and tired, wary of hat head and embittered by the new post-9/11 border interrogations. I want to tell the officer he's right: I am not who I appear to be.

On the other side, a Cuban girl dressed in a stiff white blouse, a sexy black skirt, black embroidered pantyhose and clunky heels waves me through the metal detector. My newly repaired engagement ring sounds off the buzzer. I stand spread-eagle with my hat in hand, bleary-eyed under the fluorescent lights. A warm wind wafts in from an open door across the way. I sense humidity, the swaying of palms, tropical flowers riffling in the grass: ginger lily, orchid, moonlight cactus.

The Cuban girl glides a wand down the length of my body from my head to my toes. She smells sickly sweet, like old makeup or cheap perfume, but the process is erotic also, somehow arousing to be investigated for once by a woman, to be scanned by someone with whom I share a sacred physiology but whose personal and cultural history is so disproportionate to mine she scarcely seems three-dimensional. I cannot penetrate the depths of her. There's so much I don't know.

On the shuttle
from the airport to the resort, our tour guide Eddy talks of when the lights went out in Cuba, the “Special Period,” ten years of electrical shortages, ten years of blackouts. “But now is okay,” he says. “The Cuban people are very proud.”

He tells us about the decline of sugar production and closing of the plants after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 when (with a week's warning) the Cuban government was advised that the promised shipments of crude oil from the Soviet Union would not be arriving. He holds the microphone in one hand and stretches his other hand toward the tinted window, toward a desolate sugar mill far away in a field, its metal dome gleaming in dusk. His knuckles touch the glass as he speaks of sugar and oil, and an entire country's sudden and astounding reversion to a cooperative and agrarian economic system. “No oil means no tractors… no sugar,” he says. “No oil means no cars.”

We pass through a few small towns. The shuttle crams its way through narrow cobblestone streets, around tight corners. We clip curbs. A barefoot man repairing a bicycle under a purple awning looks up at us and smiles. The Spanish colonial facades rise on each side of the shuttle, casting us into shadow. “These buildings were made to be so tall,” says Eddy, “to shield us from the sun.”

I marvel at old cars, plazas, doorways and windows cut (as if with a saw) out of the facades, the spectrum of burlap awnings, and the chipped paint—pink, green and tangerine—everything softening in twilight.

My heart goes out to the people, the women balancing babies on their hips, teenagers smoking cigarettes on street corners.

A bare-chested little girl in pink shorts looks up and smiles at me as the bus halts at a corner; her hair is a mess, knotted, sweaty, her teeth white and gapped.

People cluster at street corners, waiting for their next ride, hitchhiking—an ingenious government-mandated method of public transportation.

I close my eyes and tilt my head against the glass. We are close now.

Has there been a moment somewhere along the way when I have considered getting off that bus, getting off forever—to wander the plazas and dusty streets, to sit on one of those porches smoking a cigarette, to drink wine and lay down with the skinny lost dogs? Has this moment come and gone without my knowing?

A few stars appear: the first above the spire of a church; two brighter stars perpendicular to a giant crab sculpture in one town's central plaza; then into the countryside toward the quays, the black sky is thick with orbs and celestial figures, galaxies, fuzzy clusters, upside-down constellations, systems imposed upon systems.

I doze as Eddy's voice pulls me through darkness, past barren sugar cane fields, and lastly across the causeway in the Caribbean it took hundreds of Cubans twelve years to build, that narrow strip of stone and mortar bridging the mainland to our five-star resort on Cayo Ensenachos.

There's a rumour
circulating that Sting is staying here at the resort.

This morning, I smoke Hollywood Lights and drink wine on the upstairs balcony of our bungalow, imagining that Sting is sitting here with me.

“Can I call you Gordon?” I say.

In the distance, the mosquito truck buzzes by spewing clouds of pesticides into the air. The trees are momentarily shrouded in fog, but the cloud vanishes as quickly as it came and my heart sinks into that old familiar pain.

Be happy
, I think.
You're supposed to be happy
.