“Who are you?” she said.
Bobby turned around and was glad to see Ringo still there, with the engine running. He ran down the steps and got back in the car.
“I thought that was it,” Bobby said. He tried calling her with Ringo’s cell phone. She didn’t answer. They drove around some more, but Bobby had no idea where to go. BART had stopped running and so without any other choice, he asked Ringo if he would mind driving him downtown, so he could catch the Transbay bus.
“I took it once a few years ago,” said Bobby. “It was all junkies and janitors.”
Ringo puffed out his ruddy cheeks and tapped a beat on his steering wheel. Finally, he offered to let Bobby crash on his couch.
“You’re a soft touch,” Bobby said. “That’s what Nora says whenever she loans me money. She says, ‘Lucky for you, I’m a soft touch.’”
“My wife will be asleep,” Ringo said. “So we have to be quiet.”
They drove somewhere in the vicinity of Eddy and Divisadero and parked in the underground garage of a drab apartment building. “What neighborhood is this?”
“I don’t know. It’s kind ofa non-neighborhood. My wife calls it NoSo.”
“What’s that?”
“North of South.”
“How long have you lived here?”
“Fifteen years.”
When they entered his apartment, Ringo shushed him and went down the hall to change out of his suit. The furniture looked dingy and second-hand, but the walls were resplendent with Beatles memorabilia. Ringo came back out in sweatpants and asked Bobby if he wanted some tea.
“Nora drinks tea,” said Bobby, absently, and walked over to the small strip of linoleum that marked off the kitchen. “Let me see your hands. Hold them out like this.”
Ringo put out his hands, and Bobby grabbed them. “Now these are hands. This is what I’m talking about.”
“What are you talking about?”
“There’s texture here. Strength. Is that from drumming?”
“And guitar. I can play anything, really.” Ringo dropped his head a little. “Jack of all, master of none. As they say.”
“You look like a master to me.”
Bobby grabbed his bag and handed Ringo the prototype. “This is the Man Handle. It gives your hands strength and texture.”
Ringo looked at it and said, “I don’t get it.”
“Right now it’s just some pipe and grip tape. But when you’re sitting around, doing nothing, you squeeze it and roll it in your hands. That’s all. After a while you get calluses.”
Ringo started to roll it in his hands. “Okay. But I still don’t get it.”
“We’re going to market it toward managers and executives, so they don’t feel bad when they shake hands with plumbers and other righteous members of the working class. It puts everybody on equal terms.”
“Why would they feel bad?”
“I don’t know. It’s psychological. Bankers want to be cowboys.” The kettle whistled. Ringo made two cups and brought them over to the couch.
“It sounds dumb when I say it out loud,” said Bobby.
“I don’t think it’s any dumber than half the infomercials I see.”
“Thank you! The bigger the lie, right? Well, the dumber the idea, the more people will buy it. These are standard marketing concepts. What’s your real name, anyway?”
“Alex.”
Bobby picked up his teacup and looked around the room. “Nora missed out. She should be here. Do you think something happened to her?”
“Are you worried?”
Bobby stood up and started to pace back and forth behind the couch.
“She was a fuckup in high school. She went to junior college, and now she makes six figures, easy. Easy.” He sat down on the couch and got back up. “She hasn’t been picking up her phone. I don’t know if I should be worried. I think she’s just mad at me. What part of town is this?”
“We can call the police,” said Ringo. “If that would make you feel better.”
Bobby sat back down. “No. I’m getting worked up over nothing. I had fun tonight. I’ve been talking and talking, but what about you? Are you good? Some of these guys Nora dates, they don’t have any manners. They go on and on and by the end of the night I know everything about them and they don’t know anything about me.” Bobby looked out the window. “What floor are we on?”
“Third floor.”
Ringo moved toward the hallway. He came back with a neatly folded blanket and placed it on the coffee table. “I’m going to bed. Will you be all right out here?”
“Don’t go. There’s probably something on TV.”
Ringo declined with a polite smile and moved into the hallway.
“Have you ever been in a fancy hotel lobby, with all the clocks set to different times around the world?”
Ringo didn’t answer. There seemed to be some invisible force dragging him toward the shadows.
“All of us should hang out sometime,” Bobby called after him.
He watched SportsCenter on mute for a while and then brought a chair to the window. He stared at a street lamp farther down the street. He stared too hard and it flickered. All the street lamps flickered, one by one. Bobby wondered how many units were in the building. He closed his eyes, trying to hear how many. But the place was silent.
Ants were crawling on the tiles above the kitchen sink. He looked through the cabinets, but couldn’t find any snacks. Then he was standing in front of the bathroom mirror, shaving, first his face, and then his head. In college, he used to shave his head before every swim meet. He ran the razor through sticky mounds of Barbasol, giving himself little nicks on the top of the skull. Halfway through he stopped and looked at himself. He suddenly wished he hadn’t told Ringo about the Man Handle. It seemed to break the spell. Tomorrow he’d be back in the sunny East Bay, without any ideas. He wiped his head off and walked down the hall to the bedroom.
The door opened with a squeak, and there was Ringo, sleeping alone on a futon mattress. He was on his side, with his back to the door and a sheet pulled tightly to his chin.
“I can’t sleep,” said Bobby, walking into the room.
Ringo jerked awake. “What are you doing?”
“Scoot over, man,” said Bobby. “I can’t sleep.”
Ringo reached for the bedside lamp, but Bobby jumped on the bed and knocked his hand away. Ringo rolled against the wall, with his back to Bobby. “Don’t,” he said, weakly, covering his head.
Bobby slid toward Ringo and put his arms around him, burying his face in the back of Ringo’s neck. For a long time they didn’t move.
“Let me turn on the light,” said Ringo, finally, slinking down the bed. “Just for a second. Can I do that?”
“I can’t sleep.”
“I have something you can take.”
“Don’t go.”
“I won’t,” he said, and the room filled with light.
Nora woke up right before her alarm went off. Halfway through her shower, she remembered that Dave was in the other room, sleeping peacefully on the couch. Only a few a hours ago, he had announced with a sense of triumph that he couldn’t go through with the act itself. Nora had shrugged and made coffee; then she listened to Dave talk about his family, the heartbreak and joy. “I’d be a fool to throw all that away,” he said. She was impressed. By some miracle he had transformed the most despicable moment of his life into an opportunity to celebrate his own virtue. Now he would return home a better and more loving husband. Nora had fulfilled her role in his personal quest, just not in the way she imagined—this chaste and redemptive version, somehow, was even more hollow—and he thanked her for understanding what he was going through. “I quit,” she said, and for a while he tried meekly to talk her out of it, strongly advising her to wait for the next restructuring, so she could collect severance. Nora, confused, said, “But I thought I was moving to a liaison role with sales.” Dave admitted that he hadn’t totally worked out the specif
ics on that.
Later, in bed, she thought of Bobby swimming the butterfly, the way his head would pop out of the water, in perfect rhythms, and the way he would suck in the air, as if every breath was going to be his last.
It was a bright, gray morning. Nora finished dressing and came out to the front room. Dave had already left. The down comforter she had given him was piled on the floor between the couch and coffee table. She folded it and left for work.
Jill was waiting for her when she got out of the elevator. She was her normal chipper self, having already forgotten the horrible way Nora had treated her yesterday. Nora found this deeply annoying; she had no patience for people who didn’t hold grudges.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m hungover.”
“There’s a funny-looking guy in your office.”
She recognized him from Beatles night at the pub. It was absurd seeing him now, in this context. He wore jeans and a ratty fleece, but the mop-top remained, crowning his pudgy, red face.
“I’m Alex,” he said. “Bobby’s asleep at my place.”
Somehow this made total sense. Alex drove her to his apartment. The car’s ashtray was overflowing, and he used T-shirts for seat covers. “He thinks the world of you,” he said.
“Why’d you take him back to your place?”
He looked at her, as if he didn’t quite understand the question. “He was stuck out here.”
Back at the apartment, Alex warned her that Bobby had tried to shave his head.
“Wonderful,” she said. Alex made tea while Nora went to check on Bobby. When she sat at the edge of the bed, he looked at her with groggy eyes. He smiled and ran a finger along one of his bald streaks. “How do I look?”
“Come on,” she said. “I’ll fix it.”
She brought him into the bathroom. He kneeled in front of the sink, staring at himself, while she quietly shaved his head. He smelled like chlorine. When Nora finished, she sprayed a wad of cream into her hand and ran it through her hair.
“What are you doing?” said Bobby.
Nora didn’t say anything. She just handed him the razor.
CYNTHIA GORNEY
Cuba’s New Now
FROM National Geographic
“I WANT TO SHOW YOU WHERE WE’RE HIDING IT,” Eduardo said.
Bad idea, I said. Someone will notice the foreigner and wreck the plan.
“No, I figured it out,” Eduardo said. “You won’t get out of the car. I’ll drive by, slowly, not so slow that we attract attention. I’ll tell you when to look. Be discreet.”
He had borrowed a friend’s máquina, which means “machine” but is also what Cubans call the old American cars that are ubiquitous in the Havana souvenir postcards. This one was a 1956 Plymouth of a lurid color that I teased him about, but I pulled the passenger door shut gently, the way Cubans always remind you to, out of respect for their máquinas’ advanced age. Now we were driving along the coast, some distance from Havana, into the coastal town where Eduardo and nine other men had paid a guy, in secret, to build a boat sturdy enough to motor them all out of Cuba at once.
“There,” Eduardo said, and slowed the Plymouth. Between two peeling-paint buildings, on the inland side of the street, a narrow alley ended in a windowless structure the size of a one-car garage. “We’ll have to carry it out and wheel it up the alley,” he said. “Then it’s a whole block along this main street, toward that gravel that leads into the water. We’ll wait until after midnight. But navy helicopters patrol offshore.”
He peered into his rearview mirror at the empty street behind him, concentrating, so I shut up. Eduardo is 35, a light-skinned Cuban with short brown hair and a wrestler’s build, and in the months since we first met last winter—he’s a former construction worker but that day was driving a borrowed Korean sedan and trying to earn money as an off-the-books cabdriver—we had taken to yelling good-naturedly and interrupting each other as we drove around La Habana Province, arguing about the New Changing Cuba. He said there was no such thing. I said people insisted there was. I invoked the many reports I was reading, with names like “Change in Post-Fidel Cuba” and “Cuba’s New Resolve.” Eduardo would gaze heavenward in exasperation. I invoked the much vaunted new rules opening up the controlled economy of socialist Cuba—the laws allowing people to buy and sell houses and cars openly, obtain bank loans, and work legally for themselves in a variety of small businesses rather than being obliged to work for the state.
But no. More eye rolling. “All that is for the benefit of these guys,” Eduardo said to me once, and tapped his own shoulder, the discreet Cuban signal for a person with military hardware and inner-circle political pull.
What about Fidel Castro having permanently left the presidency four years ago, formally yielding the office of commander in chief to his more flexible and pragmatic younger brother, Raúl?
“Viva Cuba Libre,” Eduardo muttered, mimicking a revolutionary exhortation we’d seen emblazoned high on an outdoor wall. Long live free Cuba. “Free from both of them,” he said. “That’s when there might be real change.”
If there is in fact a Cuba under serious transformation—and you can find Cubans all over the country engaging now in their own versions of this same debate—Eduardo is a crucial component of it, although not for the reasons you might think. “Dissident” is the right label for a subset of politically vocal Cubans, notably the bloggers whose critical online missives have gained big followings outside the country, but Eduardo is no sort of dissident. He’s not fleeing persecution by the state. He’s just young, energetic, and frustrated, a description that applies to a great many of his countrymen. Ever since he was a teenager in high school, Eduardo told me, it had been evident to him that adulthood in revolutionary Cuba offered exactly nothing by way of personal advancement and material comfort to anybody except the peces gordos. The big fish. (Well, literally translated, the fat fish—the tap-on-the-shoulder parties.) Nothing works here, Eduardo would cry, pounding the steering wheel of whatever car he’d hustled on loan for the day: The economic model is broken, state employees survive on their tiny salaries only by stealing from the jobsite, the national news outlets are an embarrassment of self-censored boosterism, the government makes people crazy by circulating two national currencies at once.
“I love my country,” Eduardo kept saying. “But there is no future for me here.”
Over nine weeks of traveling around Cuba this year and last, I heard this particular sequence of complaints so often, and from so many different kinds of people, that it began to form a kind of collective national lamentation: I love my country and it doesn’t work. There were loyal optimists among the complainers, to be sure, and after a while, whenever I encountered one, I found myself marshaling ammunition to bring Eduardo. I wanted to hear how he’d respond, but when I was being honest with myself, I realized that I also wanted to talk him out of the boat. (Sharks swim in those Cuba-to-Florida waters. The currents are dangerous. There are drownings, people never heard from again.)
Optimist: Roberto Pérez, a shaggy-haired environmental biologist, filled with enthusiasm about the progress of Cuba’s extensive urban agriculture and organic farming projects. Pérez is six years older than Eduardo. Eighty percent of his own high school graduating class, Pérez told me, has left the country. “But things are changing,” he said. “Very fast. And there are so many good things here that people take for granted, because they were born with them. You tell me another place where a kid can grow up so safe, get his vaccinations, get his education, not be involved in gangs or drugs. I can see people crossing the river north from Mexico, to get away from that. But from here? To face the Florida strait? I fail to see it.”
Still no? OK. Optimist: Josué López, exactly Eduardo’s age, just immigrated back to Cuba after six years in Florida and a growing disenchantment with the values of some of his hyper-acquisitive Cuban émigré neighbors in Miami. López and his wife are going into business for themselves, taking advantage of t
he new self-employment laws and new flexibility in agricultural land use, and developing a bed-and-breakfast resort on a few acres they’ve acquired outside Havana. “I’m telling my friends who went to the States,” López told me, in his practiced slangy English, “Dude! If you want to start something, the place to be is Cuba.”
Eduardo would listen, interested, his face sober. He would shake his head. We were arguing in a café one morning, a rooftop spot in the historic part of Havana, and Eduardo grabbed a glass saltshaker from the table. “My whole life, the government has been telling us, Look! I’m giving you this nice full saltshaker!” he said. “But it’s never full.”
This one wasn’t either. A half inch of salt, maybe. Eduardo put the shaker down and told me he had gotten hold of some oars. The men would have to row for a while, before they could risk motor noise that might alert authorities; the departure itself would violate Cuban law, since none of them had a tarjeta blanca, a white card, the government permission required of all citizens before they may leave the country, even temporarily. Cubans hate the tarjeta blanca, and the government subsequently hinted at doing away with it entirely—but on this early spring morning Eduardo hadn’t even applied for one, since he assumed the tarjeta would be denied, as they sometimes are, with no explanation beyond the bland, omnipresent No está autorizado—It is not authorized. Besides, a Cuban applying for a tarjeta blanca is supposed to have a visa from the destination country. Just to secure a spot on the consideration list for a U.S. visa, a Cuban must pay $160 and produce a written invitation from some actual person living in the United States.
Eduardo had neither. I had expected him to solicit help from me, the money or the invite, but he never did; he just blurted out the boat plan one day in the middle of a long, talky car ride, as though he’d been desperate for a non-Cuban confessor, and now here we were staring at a saltshaker and brooding about Eduardo’s son, who was nine and didn’t know his father was going.