Rachel Kushner - Telex From Cuba

Stites came back to Havana a few days after the coup. He came to the Tokio whistling and happy, said he’d met with Batista. “A damn good fellow,” he said. “Used to work for us.”

Rachel K missed Prio, but suspected he might have been relieved to have the presidency stolen from him. He’d put up no fight, chocolate ice cream still frosting the tines of his mustache, a curiously eager tone to his voice, despite his look of alarm. “Lelo here will take you back to the club.” Because this should go unwitnessed. Where do I sign?

A couple of weeks after the coup, she watched from a crack between the closed stage curtains as two of Batista’s security guards entered the Pam-Pam Room and waited by the bar. One was talking to La Paloma, probably trying to get a freebie, testing out his new role as a state security thug. The other glowered, fingering the contours of a gun in his waistband.

Opening notes floated from the piano.

She stood behind the curtains, waiting for her cue.

“Introducing, from Paris!”

If she says she’s from Paris, she’s from Paris, was her sentiment. Being from Paris meant filing her nails to a point and lacquering them in Hemorrhage Red, drinking beer with grenadine, and dressing like a zazou, in painted-on fishnets, short skirts, and stacked wooden heels. Eating mouthfuls of cocaine and douching with champagne. She once heard an actual French girl tell the stage manager that she and Rachel K had worked together “for years” at the Moulin Rouge. It was mysterious and wonderful. Worked together for years at the Moulin Rouge! Maybe we have, Rachel K thought, maybe we have. She believed that people are born every minute of their lives, and what they are in each of those minutes is what they are completely. Zazou, and from Paris, are things she does. Things she is by virtue of doing them. It was a lie whose logic and condition the other dancers understood. Prio, too, understood. Batista didn’t, but he liked her anyway, stupidly suggesting that eventually she’d accept her cubanidad . “Like I know my skin color,” he told her, “and no longer bother with the powder.”

The accompanist began to play an old-fashioned danzón.

“Zazou dancer, Rachel K!”

She stepped out. The blue lights were angled toward her, and in them she could see mostly a screen of curling smoke, and through the smoky screen the men in the front two or three rows. Those in the back didn’t matter — the men near the stage laid down bills, and it was for them that she danced. But tonight there was one in the back who intrigued her. She couldn’t see him but knew he was there, at a table by himself. He’d been coming around ever since Batista took over, maybe a foreign dignitary. The girls were calling him “the German.” The bartender said he was French. He seemed confident, amused, self-contained. Each evening he’d been there, his presence distracted her, like he knew that she knew that he was watching her, while pretending not to, and his gaze colored her every movement. She wanted to talk to him but sensed it wasn’t yet the moment, as if there were a tacit agreement between them that they would continue for some time with this ritual of him watching her and pretending not to. She danced for him, invisible to her in the back of the Pam-Pam Room.

“The president is waiting for you,” the stage manager said as she finished her show. On her way to Batista’s booth she passed near the Frenchman’s table, thinking they would silently communicate once again. But his table was empty. He’d left.

“Who tipped me the black spot?” Everly Lederer asked in her fake pirate’s brogue. It was Silver’s question, from Treasure Island.

Her father kept loading suitcases into the trunk.

“If I’m moving to an island, I need a knife,” she announced, leaning up to the front seat. Her mother said to sit back.

In Treasure Island, when a pirate died, the first thing you did was rifle his sea clothes and locate his knife. An island was full of danger: malaria-infested bogs, disease that would turn your eyes the color of lemon peel, poisonous snakes, and double-crossing pirates like Barbecue. She’d need a knife to cut down branches and make a sleeping lean-to in the woods, to cut open biscuits to eat with fried junk, like Jim Hawkins.

On their way to Miami, they stayed at a motor court in Georgia called the Admiral Benbow. The same name as the inn run by Jim Hawkins and his mother, where Billy Bones died. In Billy Bones’s trunk Jim found the treasure map, and the adventure began. But the Admiral Benbow where they stayed was nothing like the one in Treasure Island. It was crowded with tough-looking southern families, kids cannon-balling into the pool and adults yelling at them or swatting them with newspapers. Everly watched a man and woman who talked in hushed voices, dangling their arms over the second-floor balcony of the motel, smoke drifting from the man’s cigarette in a lazy trail. The man and a woman descended the rickety metal staircase, the woman’s high heels—“pumps,” her mother called them — clicking down the stairs. The man and the woman didn’t say good-bye or even look at each other. They separated and walked off in opposite directions. For a moment Everly thought they would count paces and both turn around and draw like in the movies — the Westerns, that is. But neither the man nor the woman turned around. They weren’t counting paces. They were just walking, the woman in her click-click pumps. Each got into a different car and drove out of the parking lot.

As they were checking out of their room the next the morning, her father said something about the Admiral “Bimbo.” Her older sister, Stevie, laughed loudly. “Admiral Bimbo! Ha-ha!” Stevie liked to be in on the adults’ jokes, even if she had to fake that she’d understood. Their father grabbed her by the elbow and shushed her.

They left their car at the Miami port building, to be loaded on a lower deck, and stood behind a rope waiting for a maharaja to board before the regular people were allowed on the ship. She’d seen a picture of a maharaja in the encyclopedia and was expecting a man in a jeweled turban, shoes with curled-up toes, a chain of decorated elephants following behind him. Though she figured there might not be any elephants.

The maharaja finally appeared, making his way up the gangplank, porters behind him wheeling carts stacked with enormous brass-latched leather trunks. He was a frail, balding man in a dark suit and soft-collared shirt. No curled-up shoes and no elephants. Not even a turban.

What made him a maharaja, she asked her father, if he looked just like a normal businessman, too puny to carry his own luggage? Her father said his bank account. He said the man was in trouble with the government of India, that he’d taken money that wasn’t his. He boarded first with a lot of fuss and ceremony, her father said, but he’d been run out of his country. Her father said the maharaja was on French leave. What did it mean? That he’d sneaked away.

Her mother and father seemed to hate people for being rich, and yet they wanted to be rich themselves. Money was always a problem. That’s why they were going to Cuba, where her father would have a higher salary and be a boss. Her mother said if they had to live in a jungle for George Lederer to get the salary and respect he deserved, well then, they’d live in a jungle.

Everly was keen on the idea of living in a jungle. Why not? But her mother talked about it like it was something they were forcing themselves to do. Her mother said she was tired of living on “slender means,” which made Everly picture well-fitting men’s pants with narrow legs, even after she was told what it meant. If her parents ever did get rich, their old selves would hate their new selves. Though maybe it wouldn’t matter, because they would have forgotten their old selves, erased by their new selves, since self was self and there couldn’t be more than one in a single body.