The Death of Small Creatures (13 page)

In the lobby, five birds-of-paradise yearn upward from a two-foot crystal vase. The marble floors gleam. Ochre walls arch and converge to a vanishing point in the sky. The veranda doors off the lobby are flung open to allow the air to move through. Beyond the doors is the three-tiered water fountain cascading down the middle of the marble steps to a moat that winds around the main building. Beyond the fountain, a wooden boardwalk enclosed in shrubbery leads to the Caribbean. And far away in the ocean, beyond the coral reef, is the rounded disc of the USA, Florida dipping into the ocean like a communion wafer.

In the mornings, Leigh settles into an overstuffed lounge chair and fastidiously studies ocean cartography for the sailing course he started taking back home. “Don't want to get behind,” he says.

Every morning, the waiter from the piano bar brings him a cappuccino on a glass saucer, along with two packets of sugar from sugar plantations that no longer exist. Leigh opens his blue binder and lays a map on the coffee table, charts an imaginary route under a magnifying glass, plots his course carefully in order to avoid collision with underwater rocks that have been deliberately imposed to test his knowledge of the ocean, his judgment of the water's current and depth, the speed at which his vessel must travel in order to reach its destination before nightfall. I want to tell him his time is running out.

Sweetheart, I'm charting my own course.

I bought into
the game.

I bought the bridal magazines, surfed the internet, created a wedding website. I watched reality TV (
A Wedding Story
;
Rich Bride, Poor Bride
;
Wedding Disasters
;
Bridezillas
;
I Do, Let's Eat!
), scoffed at and ridiculed the spoiled brides, scorned the grooms for putting up with such shit, condemned the networks.

My mother bought me a Martha Stewart weddings DVD, and I watched it one hungover Sunday afternoon, determined by the end of it that I had all the faculties required to layer fondant over a three-tiered maple-vanilla wedding cake, and all the tools to create a thousand paper origami doves.

I dog-eared the pages of my favourite wedding gowns and hairstyles, a wide array of beautiful brides: Princess Bride, Damsel-in-distress Bride, Come-hither Bride, Regal Bride, Bitch Bride, Heroine Sheik Bride, Anorexic Bride, Cradle-robbed Bride, Porno Bride and your run-of-the-mill Fairytale Bride.

Which was I?

Chemically-imbalanced Bride? Wino Bride?

We meet the
wedding planner, Sussett, to go over the plans again. I am drunk and sun-stroked, can feel the dampness of my bathing suit bottoms bleeding through my long khaki skirt to the lobby sofa, and my halter bikini top bleeding through my cheap cotton tank top, outlining a distorted version of my ass and tits respectively. I know when I leave, my ass-print will remain.

Sussett drives us around on one of the golf carts to scope out photo locations: the veranda, the fountain, the gazebo and of course, there's always the beach.

“I only ever drive this one time before,” she laughs, and the cart lurches.

“You're a good driver,” I say.

“Oh no,” she says.

“Is it true that Sting is staying here?” I ask.

She looks over her shoulder, smiles and whispers, “Yes, it's true… Can you believe it?”

“Oh my god,” I say, and Leigh rolls his eyes. “I love him!”

She escorts us to a lush courtyard in one of the bungalow complexes. There's a circular cement enclosure filled with water in the middle of this courtyard, and a wooden pail melded to the rim of the enclosure to give the effect of a well. Flowers climb up the pillars. Palm fronds dip down from above, forming a canopy of shade.

“This is beautiful?” she says.

“Oh, yes, amazing,” Leigh and I agree.

I lean over the rim of the well and look in, expecting something deep and cool, but the enclosure is shallow and filled with still water. A rusty pipe runs across the bottom. The concierge for this courtyard joins us, gestures into the well now too: “You like our turtle?” he says, and now I see the turtle emerge from under the pipe. She paddles up quickly, pokes her smooth head through the surface and blinks right at me.

Every morning at
breakfast, they play
The Godfather
music. The muted horn inspires love and murder in the most nostalgic, sexy way.

“For you, beautiful
señorita
,” Dunyeski says, “I make best omelette every day.”

Every day I wait in line for Dunyeski to make me an omelette and tell me I'm beautiful, until I learn that the other breakfast cook, Yunyeski, makes even better crepes.

In the dining room, little black birds swoop from the rafters and sing from chandeliers. Their tiny yellow eyes survey the room for scraps, fallen crumbs. Just now, a bird flaps above a crust of bread at the next table over.

“Weather's supposed to be nice tomorrow,” Leigh says. “Should be a perfect day to get married.” He sits over there across from me with his glasses perched down lower on his nose than is necessary, a feigned aristocratic gesture, something to make him look sophisticated, a false pretence. I hate him for it.

“You're such a snob, you know. All your life you've been trying to make up for lost time, from when your father left you when you were a kid. All your life you've been trying to please him.”

The bird's wings shudder with anticipation as it places one foot on the roll and tears away at the crust with its pointy beak. I think about physics, the nature of leverage, the transferability of the laws of the universe, how we are all bound by the same static energy, the same electrical impulses, the same gravity: an ant hoisting a crumb onto its back; a bird's foot bracing a crust; two people making love; a finger on a trigger.

“You're disgusting,” Leigh says, then gets up and leaves me sitting there, alone, stupefied by my appalling behaviour.

I look to the little black bird flapping its wings against the window, trying to get free, a piece of crust in its beak.
Stupid bird
, I think, wanting the animal to transcend, to comprehend at last the impenetrability of glass, to understand the force required to make it through to the world outside. In its flapping wings I see the fine line between love and terror.

Along the seafront
in Havana is a picture of Uncle Sam growling at a stoic Cuban. The caption reads:
Señores Imperialistas ¡No les tenemos absolutamente ningún miedo!

Yet, in Cuban marriages, it's customary for family and friends to pin money to the bride's gown during the marriage dance. This is meant to inspire goodwill and prosperity, but the gesture strikes me as antithetical to a socialist economy—a tad opportunistic, a hair hypocritical. It occurs to me that communism will inevitably fail to uphold its ideology of equality in the same way capitalism will inevitably fail to uphold its ideology of equal opportunity for all. Historically speaking, human greed has always usurped the best intentions of both worlds.

The coolness of crushed mint and ice envelops me, or maybe it's the Effexor reacting with the booze.

I don't understand how this works, how a pill can make you happy, make you better. I worry that this is not making me better, that when they say “better” they mean normal, and that to become normal in a crazy world is to move in entirely the wrong direction.

I worry that it's the rest of the world that's crazy, not me.

I imagine me in my gown covered with convertible Cuban pesos, dancing alone in the gazebo, holding my arms out and embracing an imaginary man.

The first time
I mixed antidepressants with alcohol, my neurons went into overload, fired back and forth at each other, collided in my synapses like projectile missiles from opposing sides of a psycho-pharmaceutical Cold War—the Effexor the opportunistic capitalist promoting contrived versions of happiness, and the booze the reserved communist whose utopian ideology inevitably wanes into a systematic breakdown of social structure.

I shot up in bed at five o'clock that morning. “Leigh?” I said.

And he shot up too, faster than I would have thought. Perhaps he sensed something in my voice. “What's going on?” he said.

My heart was racing. “I'm having a bad reaction to the medication.”

“Tell me what's happening.”

“My heart,” I said. “I don't want to die. Oh my god, I don't want to die.”

“How many did you take?”

“One!”

“Let me take you to the hospital.”

“No,” I said. “Just hold me tight… and don't let go. Don't—ever—let—go.”

I was pronged, an animal skewered between two pitchforks. It took me all day to come down. I was exhausted but wired, pacing around keeled over in order to increase my surface area relative to the earth that was slipping out from under me. I was pitched against the universe: a tuning fork straining to retain the last music of its high-pitched ting; a Y-shaped tree branch dowsing toward some remote reservoir of water I could not divine, but which I was thirsting for desperately.