Rachel Kushner - Telex From Cuba

The light above you blinks red, La Mazière had told the soldiers.

The light blinks red. Keep your eye on the blinking light. When it stays red, drop into the black.

He began drifting.

Don’t think about it. Look at the red light.

When it stays red, drop into the black.

Look at the red, and drop in the black.

Drop in the black.

He did.

When he woke the next morning, Castro and his retinue were gone.

They let him go after only five days on account of his migraine headaches, and yet Tip Carrington did not feel free. They were kidnapped, true. But all he and the others had to do, all day long, day after day, was laze in hammocks. Chew horse jerky, which wasn’t half bad. In fact, it was rather delicious. Play chess and smoke cigars. Raúl had announced to them and to the world, via Radio Rebelde, that he’d brought them to the hills so they could contemplate the effects of Batista’s bombs — purchased, Raúl stressed, from the U.S. government and dropped from American planes that refueled at Guantánamo, an American military base.

Raúl gave the kidnappees liquor, which the rebels themselves didn’t touch. And he threw them a Fourth of July pig roast, a regular bash. During the pig roast, a drunk and sunburned George Lederer practiced fast draw with the Cubans, shattering coconuts. After that the Cubans called him “Desperado” and let him wear a holster with a loaded gun.

They were divided into little groups. Carrington was placed with Hubert Mackey and a Mr. LaDue — an agronomist from Preston whom Carrington had known only vaguely before their capture. An armed guard watched them at all times, or at least most of the time: a lovely mulatta with a perfect inverted-heart ass.

Carrington worked on the guard for several days. Because he was a native speaker, and Mackey and this LaDue were nonspeakers, nothing but sí and no, they badgered him to try to negotiate a release. Carrington figured that Mackey and LaDue didn’t really want him to negotiate their release. Displaying some effort was a formality, to confirm that the situation was out of their hands.

He showered the guard with every manner of flirtation he had in his arsenal, mirroring her funny Oriente singing-style Spanish, trying this and that, aloof or pandering.

“What’s she saying?” Mackey would ask. “Tell her we’re willing to speak to the Government Services Administration. The State Department. Tell her we’ll get a letter to Eisenhower, for Christ’s sake.”

“You seem Andalusian to me,” Carrington relayed to the guard, Mackey listening intently to what he assumed was a translation of his message. “Your features, they’re so delicate.”

“Tell her we’ll do what we can to stop the refueling,” Mackey said. “Promise whatever they want, and we’ll deal with it later.”

“Aren’t you overheated in those heavy fatigues?” Carrington translated. “Why don’t we lose these two jerks and take a swim? There’s a stream up here, I’ve seen it on nickel company maps.”

The guard giggled and shook her head.

“What, you don’t swim? I will teach you! I was a lifeguard in college.”

She was finally warming to him just the tiniest bit — enough to give him hope to carry on with his campaign — when one of Raúl’s lieutenants told Carrington they were letting him go.

“You’re a free man,” the lieutenant said.

“Why me?”

“Because of the headaches. Raúl feels it isn’t right to hold an ill man captive.”

Carrington had detected the headache coming on the day they’d been taken. A building and convergence of telltale signs: the tunneling vision, a sensation that ice crystals were forming just inside the top of his skull, then melting painfully away. By the time he and the others were riding into rebel territory, their hands bound with twine, Carrington was succumbing to a full-blown migraine. A species of gloriously awful headache he’d suffered, in times of stress, for most of his life.

No matter. He’d enjoyed the cigars and horse jerky and the heart-shaped ass, even if he’d had to lie still for several days, a damp cloth over his forehead, his vision interrupted by spooling white patterns. The rebels had made him a special comfy headache bed with extra padding and pillows. And the episode itself wasn’t nearly as bad as others he’d endured. Like when he and Blythe and the girls were chased out of Bolivia, the British crackpot who ran the mine threatening to dynamite it clear into the sky so that, he’d declared, “ no one would have it.” As a driver sped them to the airport in Sulaco, Carrington had become convinced he was a monkey yoked from the neck up in a hole cut into the center of a dinner table, Asian men eating from his head with special utensils. A monkey in a table, and yet a woman nagged at him from somewhere nearby: “Welcome to your lousy life. I said it was coming down and you didn’t believe me! Too busy carrying on with some whore—”

He was feeling much better, Carrington told the rebel lieutenant who’d come to announce his freedom. Much better indeed.

“So you can make the trip down the Cristal no problem,” the lieutenant said.

“I suppose so, yes.”

Regret was rising in him, but he couldn’t say wait, I want to remain a hostage, please—

“We’ll send you in a jeep for part of the way. With a guide. You’ll have to walk the rest.”

“Rosa?” Carrington asked, perking up.

“No, no. Rosa stays in camp, guarding the others.”

Two days into captivity, Rosa left them unwatched in order to tend to some emergency.

Mackey and LaDue decided to start a signal fire, hoping someone would see it. Maybe one of Batista’s pilots, in one of the American planes that thundered overhead now and then.

LaDue turned out to be just as incorrigibly square as Mackey. Both of them were industrious Boy Scout types. They’d gotten their fire lit right away, then excitedly run off to collect more brush to keep it going.

“Only green kindling!” Mackey had shouted. “Better for smoke!”

As if being commanded by an alien voice, his own, but so much more gruff and assertive, Carrington had lifted the damp cloth from his eyes, risen from his bedroll, walked over, and dumped dirt on their signal fire. Then he quickly laid down again and replaced the eye cloth.

He was lying still, a sick man, a migraine sufferer, when LaDue returned with a handful of kindling.

“Dern it!” LaDue said. “Dag-dern it! Hubert, our fire is out!”

Carrington heard the brush of a body against leaves on the path. Rosa, returning.

He had been left to walk part of the way down the Cristal, just as the lieutenant had warned him. Scratched by brambles and covered with mosquito bites, he was on a mining road that led straight into Nicaro. The town was below him. Safe, American, twinkling. He could see the yellow glow of nighttime windows, the tiny white lights on the processing plant, the blinking red signals on the smokestacks. The signals were red at night and white in the daytime, blinking to warn planes of their existence. He could feel the mist from the bay on his unshaven face, hear the sound of the smokestacks spewing their thick columns of dust.

Then he was under the oak trees that lined the managers’ row, and the whoosh of dust pushed from the chimneys was louder, the mist wetter. He’d never noticed how odd the oak trees were, there in the middle of a jungle. Someone’s idea of home-away-from-home. Not his. He would have advised something local, algarroba or tamarind. But he hadn’t been in on the construction of Nicaro. That was 1942, and they were living in — he couldn’t recall, exactly. Lima, perhaps.

He could see his own driveway, the Cadillac parked in it, a kind of nudity right there in front of the house, reminding everyone of his troubles, the public accusation that the car was not rightfully his. It wasn’t, but lots of things in Preston and Nicaro didn’t rightfully belong to the people who owned them. The problem was the paper trail he’d left.