Rachel Kushner - Telex From Cuba

Everyone else was asleep. She lay in bed next to Stevie and listened to the wind and waited for lightning to illuminate the cabin like a photographer’s flash. Was lightning white, or was it purple? It looked white but left a residue of purple, like the shapes that floated across the backs of her eyelids when she pressed on them. She counted Mississippi seconds until thunder and got to seven. The lightning was far away, but she couldn’t remember the formula for how far. Their room moved up and down, and their only window was a small, round porthole. She felt like she was in a tin can turned on its side.

When she woke, the ship was calm and there was no sound of rain. The quiet seemed especially so for having followed the stormy night. She could see a thin line of colored light feathering the horizon, a peek of the sun’s red petticoat. The ocean had a dullish shine like something that had been glazed in butter and then chilled in the refrigerator. She pitched herself up against the window to see the water better, looking for some indication that they had passed through that dashed line and into the tropics, but it was hard to know what to look for. After all her daydreaming in front of the globe, peering like a giant over the tiny letters of “Tropic of Cancer,” she was in the place that the globe depicted. And yet the globe seemed more real. A map illustrated relationships among islands and seas and continents. The water she could see from the ship porthole illustrated nothing — just water, with no daisy chains or markers of any kind. She’d read about a woman from Guernsey who threw a bottle into the ocean with a message inside. It floated all the way to Africa and was tossed up on the beach at Dakar. The man who found it wrote to the woman from Guernsey. Upon receiving his letter, she invited him to dinner. The newspaper article didn’t say whether he was planning to attend. It seemed like an awfully long way to go.

The clock read 5:00 A.M. What now?

It was early, but there was nothing to do but get dressed — quietly, or someone would tell her to go back to bed. She put on the new outfit she’d gotten at the Miami Sears, a brown, dotted Swiss dress with a white pinafore. She hated dresses. She wanted to wear denim pants with rolled cuffs and checked Western shirts like Hopalong Cassidy. Her father sometimes called her Tex instead of Everly. He meant to tease her, but she enjoyed the nickname and sometimes thought of herself as Tex, Tex Lederer. It had a ring. She’d once seen real cowboys. They came to an Oak Ridge square dance, government-hired construction people who lived beyond the security fence in Clinton. “Hillbillies,” her mother had called them. They showed up in pointy boots and cowboy hats and Western shirts, the fancy kind with white piping. They got drunk and acted rowdy and started a fight. The hillbillies weren’t invited back, and at the next dance an armed security guard sat by the door. Her mother said they’d only been included to make the dance, with its hay bales and Western band, seem more authentic. “Authenticity,” she’d said, “is not always a good idea.”

At the Sears in Miami, everyone got to pick out something special for Cuba. Her father, a stack of short-sleeved Dacron shirts. Stevie, a white leatherette tambourine bag. And Duffy, a doll called Scribbles that had a blank face and a pack of special colored markers for drawing one onto it. Everly knew immediately what she wanted: a knife from a display case in the camping department. It was the knife she needed for going to an island, like Jim Hawkins would have worn looped onto his belt. But her mother insisted she get a dress. There was a showdown in the children’s department. She wanted a knife, just like Stevie wanted a purse. She didn’t want a stupid dress. Her mother was too tired to fight and struck a deal. They left Sears with the knife, in a brown leather case, and the dotted Swiss dress.

“Everybody up and washed and ready for customs. Everly? Stevie?” her mother called from the adjoining room.

“I’m dressed, Mother,” Everly said.

“Then wake your sisters and remind them to comb their hair. Let me see you.”

Everly stood in the doorway.

“Oh, Everly, can’t you go without the glasses, just for today? They make you look cross-eyed.”

“I am cross-eyed, Mother.”

“But it’s so much more noticeable with those Coke bottles over your eyes. You can see without them, and it won’t kill you. Just until we get through customs.”

Their mother had talked about customs like they’d get tipped the black spot if they weren’t careful. Everly imagined stern men in uniforms with holstered guns, looking them over. If she and her sisters were unkempt, poorly dressed, if their hair wasn’t parted straight, if she felt like Tex instead of Everly and insisted on wearing filthy dungarees and a ratty boy’s shirt, they’d be turned away and have to go back to Oak Ridge. A city of mud and barbed wire, where her father was a low man on the totem pole.

Everly and her sisters pressed up against the passenger rail as the ship readied to dock. A deep, resonant horn sounded, and the ship moved toward the shore, kicking up a thick wake as it slowed. A stone castle towered on one end of the curve of land. On the other end, a massive factory jutted out into the bay, a miniature city of blinking white lights and enormous silver tanks with ladders on their sides. Chimneys emitted orange flames against a plume of black.

“That must be Shell’s new refinery,” her father said.

It looked just like Oak Ridge, big industrial buildings with smokestacks that shot puffs of steam and plumes of smoke. Steam and smoke were different, and she enjoyed observing the difference between them. Steam came off a cup of hot coffee, and Tennessee roads after summer rain. Smoke poured out of Gamble Valley, the Negro neighborhood in Oak Ridge, always on fire, and hovered in the air near K-25, the secret facility where her father worked. Air that was sour if you breathed through your mouth, and poisonous-smelling. K-25 hummed and crackled with electricity. There was a giant magnet somewhere inside the complex of buildings, and people said if you got too close to the fence, the force of the magnet would pull the hobnails out of your shoes and knock you flat on the ground. Everly’s Brownie leader had made the girls all take their shoes off when their troop walked past. They picked through the mud in their socks, single file.

They were getting close to the Havana waterfront, and she could see church spires and three- and four-decker buildings in pale pinks and yellows and blues. The harbor was a cloudy brown, with bits of garbage floating in it, empty bottles and soap bubbles and wood scraps. Cuban boys, thin and shirtless, with smooth chests and skin that was a chocolaty purple, gathered along the dock. One of them, taller than the rest, cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted in English, “Throw down a quarter!”

The ship was getting close enough that she could see the boys’ faces. They waved, smiling as if she and the other American passengers were their personal friends.

“Throw down a quarter!” the tall boy yelled again, louder this time.

Someone threw a coin. It sailed over the deck railing and plunked into the water. The boys cheered, and three of them dived in. They emerged from the dark, oily, and iridescent-skinned water, treading with their arms and legs, bobbing up and down in the water, which rose up in waves and slapped against the dock. Drops of water glinted like stardust in the boys’ kinky hair. They shouted up at the deck, gesturing for more coins. Someone pitched another over the railing. The boys shot toward it. There was a scramble, bodies splashing wildly, right near the ship’s giant propellers, which churned up soft and water-bloated garbage. One of the boys popped through the murk, his face the same dark color as the mush-strewn water, almost indistinguishable if it weren’t for the tinsel of drops glinting in his strange halo of hair. He smiled, and a coin flashed from between his teeth.