Transits Page 8

  A sign in the lounge announces a shuttle bus's schedule to and from Havana. Fuck it, I'll go. I can always hang out and have a few drinks and take a taxi back.

  The bus surprises me. A Benz. The cushiony passenger seats—a dozen or so—up on a platform, so you're looking down front at the driver. The AC is on before we get rolling. The air feels, smells, cool and foggy.

  “One stop only, amigas e amigos, an' then, La Habana!”

  I fall asleep about five minutes into the drive, waking when the bus comes to a stop and the tinny Son recording comes on again. The driver gets out to greet the new passengers at another resort.

  Crashing again, my head against the window, I wake up. We're passing a stadium, Estadio-something. No cars in the parking lot. No players in the field. No one in the seats. A huge banner with a black-silhouette image of Che Guevara stares from one end across the empty field.

  I fall back asleep and dream a roaring crowd, sounding like waves. Then one voice getting louder, cutting through the noise. Commanding, demanding attention.

  I jerk awake. Down the aisle, Don the Protestor and a couple neohippie looking friends.

  “They drop you right off at these so-called markets. We'll each pick, say, three or four vendors to talk to, and…”

  Donny Boy catches me staring at him down the aisle. He grins slightly before continuing in Spanish, his friends nodding. Little fuckers.

  The bus arrives at the craft market, very near the water, in Old Havana. I stretch in my seat. Don and his friends leap energetically off the bus.

  I wander the streets to sweat out the booze. At least I can look at the old city with my own eyes, not through a lens.

  Avenue de la Puerta leads me along the harbour, traffic exhaust increasing the heat and turning my feet black. A wide paved path and low wall runs the whole shoreline. A sign says it's called La Malecón. Teenage couples make out and jump off the wall into the water to cool off. I feel like joining them.

  The wall juts up into the grey-stoned fortress. La Cabaña, the sign reads. I sit, leaning against the fortress, and smoke for a while.

  In need of water, I head back inland into the tight avenues of Old Havana. I stop at Calle Cuba and O'Reilly at the Café Paris. I remember someone saying the writer Ernest Hemingway hung out here. I don't read, so it's no big deal to me.

  I get bored listening to a jazz trio, who wear matching purple-and-white striped shirts and white towels draped around their neck.

  After a couple tarry coffees and watching people buy these disgusting looking pork sandwiches on thick bread from a window counter, I wander out of Café Paris into the late afternoon sun.

  Of course, I realize I'm very near where I first ran into Don the Protestor. Fuck, like I summon him, I see Don and his entourage stride toward me. He's talking, as usual. Shooting his mouth off.

  He sees me. That grin. “Oh hello, Steve, is it?”

  “Yeah, Don, right? Well listen Don, go fuck yourself, okay? I'm on vacation now, unlike you telling people how to live.”

  Don's friends look at me sternly. He's told them about me. The shoot.

  “Yes, this is Steve. Who shoots now, asks questions later, isn't that right?”

  Don's persistence, his friends' stance, unnerves me. “I'm too fuckin' hung over for your crap alright?”

  Leaving Don and his gang, feeling their eyes on my back, I walk deeper into Old Havana. I remember once coming in town with Angel and sitting on a wide stairway leading up to some government building… the Capitolio, right. I actually find it on my own. Tourists slowly climb the stairs in the heat. Dogs, dozens of them, beg for food and sleep on the steps and plinths beneath some statues. Mixed up breeds. Sad, clownish faces.

  One keeps begging me, sniffing at my feet. “Go on, ya dumb animal. Go on.” I flick a butt at it.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I think a sheep is coming toward me. But it's a dog with some kind of growth, fungus all over it. I feel like puking.

  I descend and go looking for a park to sit in. Parque Centrale, that's it. Me and Cindy sat there once watching other tourists and local kids getting out of the escuelas, the elementary schools.

  Amazingly, I find Parque Centrale. I sit on a bench and pull out a smoke. Only a few left. Maybe a cigar later.

  Palms and other trees line the park's perimeter. The bench is in the shade. A statue of some guy, Jose Martí, in stone, holds a hand up in a gesture of comfort and reassurance to Cubans, but I feel like it's for me.

  Now I remember the name: same as the airport. Guy did something.

  A group of three uniformed schoolboys—white shirts, blue shorts and bright blue and white kerchiefs knotted around their necks—rush into the park. They stop and pull out what I think are trading card—baseball is huge here of course—but then I think, ‘this is Cuba.' They're trading empty cigarette packs, foreign brands mostly.

  One kid's got a new one. His little hands quickly prune the pack so only the front cover remains. His friends, holding their own packs in a fan, envy him.

  Watching them makes me a little sad. They spot me, turista, smoking. They walk toward me.

  “Where you from?” The kid with the most packs asks.

  I exhale impatiently. “Toronto… Canada.”

  “Si, si, Toronto Bloo Yayz.” The kid nods and smiles. His friends smile too.

  The kid says something in Spanish, pointing at my pack.

  “No, I've still got some,” I say, opening the pack to show him.

  The kid insists. “Can I 'ave?”

  “Fine.” I take the two remaining cigarettes out, lighting one off the one I have going now and putting the other behind my ear.

  I hand over the pack and the kid goes to work on it. Then he and his friends look up, bewildered expressions erase their smiles.

  “Senor…” One kid points behind me.

  When I turn, Don's face flashes, enraged. The bottle of white rum he brings down on my head fills my eyes with alcohol and glass. I feel a slicing pain in one of them.

  “WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM THESE CHILDREN YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE?!?!”

  The kids take off, as do Don's friends. “You're insane,” I hear—or think I thought one of them say—as they run off.

  Pain arcs over my skull, sparking like a live wire at the back of my head. The warm rush of blood and rum down my face, in my mouth.

  I listen to Don breathing heavy over top of me.

  “Please, no more… please stop,” I gurgle.

  “Yes, stop, exactly. Stop screwing with these peoples' lives.”

  That was Don's advice. And I'm following it. To this day, I haven't been back to Cuba. And I haven't shot a frame of video for Shoot Now, or for anyone, since I got out of the hospital and back to Toronto. Cindy couldn't handle it the one time she saw me after I got back. My one eye is fucked and I got a major scar down one cheek. She looked down a lot while she asked me to sign off on Angel's cut of the film we shot. And to credit him as director.

  I bumped into Shelley, the AD, once too. She's still with Shoot Now. She let it slip that Angel and Cindy are living together now. I told her to chill.

  They were amazing at the hospital though. If you go to Cuba for this, and you're unlucky enough to get sick or bashed in the head by some psychotic guy, keep the Hospital Clinico Quirúgíco Freyre de Andrades in mind, okay? And tell them Steve says hi.

  every other love that is happening to you right now is not this big

  by Stacey May Fowles

  For Thomas

  Another clichéd, long-distance love story told via a collection of disorganized details, frustrating inner monologues and techno-dialogues. Including, for good measure, futile directions for an inevitably jaded reader

  His and Her Prologue:

  Before we begin, let us for a moment think about the rampant cliché of modern love.

  Take note of the precarious nature of this kind of love. The kind of love made immediate by the promise of technology. Love that involves distance, lov
e that involves lies, love that involves the promise of new beginnings, and then involves the bottom of a pint glass.

  When you ask them later, will have a rather detailed and dramatic diatribe on the topic of them meeting. He will ramble on endlessly, if you let him (especially if he is drinking, which sadly is more often than not now).

  He will use words like “destiny” and speak of “plans.” He will remember exactly what was wearing, what she said in what he would later refer to as “her endearing Canadian accent,” and how he plotted to ensure he had the majority of her attentions in the few weeks that followed. He will actually describe her as “the end of his road.”

  will not remember things this way; she will instead blush when you ask her, despite (or perhaps because of) the number of drinks she has had.

  She will relay fuzzy and vague recollections of what she will call “falling quickly” or “getting lost.” She will describe, in pointless detail, how she bought her plane ticket from Toronto to St. Petersburg, booked the time off work from her pointless, ass-grabbing bar job, and never once thought of what it would be like away, instead thinking only of the escape.

  She will bore you. She will talk to you about how she made lists of things to do that she carefully dismembered until the day she left, how these carefully constructed lists littered her apartment, were pinned to her walls and filled the face of her empty fridge until the day the car came and picked her up.

  You will likely want her to speed up her story, caring little for lists and more about love. Everyone wants to hear about love.

  will remember it occurring to her on the first leg of the flight to Russia that she never once considered what her time there would be like, never actually read the guidebook she had purchased and then crossed off one of her many lists. She will tell you that with her face pressed against the window of seat thirty-two A, she finally realized that it was too late to have expectations, that instead it was for the best that she did not, and that she would simply fall out of her reality and see where she landed when she did.

  And when she tells you her story over a couple of martinis, she will recall laughing more than she had ever laughed in her known life, yet will never be able to describe exactly what it was she was laughing at. She will recall the lie—or maybe the truth—they told each other while drinking endless cans of beer in beer gardens over endless hours without sunset, will distinctly remember forgetting her old life until it faded into a pale list of details she would have rather discarded.

  Don't be confused by the disparate nature of their drunken dialogues. The fact that he remembers one thing and she remembers another does not necessarily mean that one of them found more meaning; it just means they came from completely different places, used different maps to travel to the point where they met, where we begin.

  The precarious nature of modern love. Love that involves nausea and euphoria, laughter and lament. Love that involves a Georgian restaurant in a basement in St. Petersburg, Russia.

  Their first dinner together, a meal in a Georgian restaurant in a basement in St. Petersburg, Russia. While they are laughing over a thousand nothings, impossible in-jokes between people who barely know each other, the stern-faced waitress never smiles a single time. Not even once during the entirety of the meal. It becomes a game between them, a game that eventually unites them, trying to get waitresses to crack a grin between courses. This particular waitress doesn't, instead takes the empty plates and counts up the cheque, a cheque he requests and reads for in Russian.

  Love that feels foreign.

  is very far from home. is not very far from home. Take note, reader: from where we begin, the mathematics of this suggests that their homes are very far apart. Regardless of this, they are both presently refusing to think about home, avoiding the notion entirely. They are instead collaborating, scheming, creating fiction, creating failure.

  The mathematics of distance is this: he will meet someone else in Moscow and she will meet someone else in Toronto. Let us, before we begin, remember the precarious nature of modern love. Don't be consumed by the pre-destined nature of this ethereal modern love moment. Don't be fooled. He will make love to another woman and she will make love to another man. Despite the pre-ordained, despite his use of the word “destiny” and talk of “fate,” they will betray each other within weeks.

  notices a younger couple seated at a table near them—he is Russian and she is American, both barely out of their teens. The young girl is smiling coyly towards her companion, curling her hair around her finger, and pushing the remainder of her meal around the plate with her fork.

  They will all betray each other within weeks. Beauty will beget bile, and bile will beget that which was born to be broken.

  “, isn't it beautiful?” says, watching the second couple smile with all their saccharine sweetness and sighs.

  “Isn't what beautiful?”

  “The way he's suddenly changing her life, the way she's falling in love. You know that she will go back to the States and tell all of her girlfriends that she met a Russian poet and he changed her life.”

  “No,” says flatly. She will come to learn that he always speaks this flatly, this matter-of-factly.

  “No?”

  So let us, before we begin, think about love.

  “No that's not beautiful because this is beautiful. That—that is nothing more than us for dummies.”

  Her Part One

  The Grand Hotel Europe

  Some thoughts on “home.”

  “There is nothing in the world that can make you feel more at home than actually being at home. This assertion will seem false once you step across the threshold of the Grand Hotel Europe in St. Petersburg. You may be thousands of miles from home, yet will feel as comfortable as if you'd never left.”

  –The Grand Hotel Europe Website

  has a theory.

  Things of any importance have to happen in certain venues, spaces that by their very nature represent transition and change, for better or for worse. Train stations and airports secure an obvious position on this list, as do hospitals and churches, courthouses and funeral homes. Lovers meet, marry, birth, fade and die. Any scene in any film or book of any value involves a venue of this kind of consistent traditional symbolism; a set that will carefully consider the weather and the extras and the poignancy in order to deliver its grand message, however painful or painless.

  And at The Grand Hotel Europe, a venue of transition if there ever were one, something shifts for , something changes in an accidental scene where the fiction and the fantasy become real.

  is the kind of romantic heroine who places immense value in venues, and when her and enter The Grand Hotel Europe merely to exchange some currency in a kiosk on its sprawling first floor, she is struck by the endless filmic symbolism of a place seething with other people's transitions. It speaks to changes, people running from and running to countless things, is littered with women on shopping binges and business men making angry phone calls. It is a place reserved for a feeling of “other,” a place housing belonging for those who cannot belong.

  She fails to mention this realization to as she watches him line up patiently amongst the internationally recruited extras in the scene. She fails completely in conveying that she is suddenly consumed by the need to cry over a loss she had yet to conceive. She does cry, if only momentarily, the notion of a pending severing finally striking her in a place outside the realm of fiction.

  The security guard eyes her sympathetically.

  “Miss, are you alright?” he asks.

  returns from the kiosk, freshly exchanged funds in hand.

  “Let's get a room,” he suggests, hardly joking.

  “Let's get a drink,” she replies.

  As comfortable as if you'd never left
home.

  At The Grand Europe Hotel, at the midpoint of her trip, the very idea of home seems a foreign concept. It has somehow been redefined. Home is the contents of her bag. Home is this hotel. Home is this currency kiosk. Home is this security guard who speaks English. Home is this hotel bar and this twelve-dollar cosmopolitan.

  She left home. She is home. She is going home.

  Between them they drink four drinks at the bar at The Grand Hotel Europe, St. Petersburg. They eat olives and peanuts and while they do they finally talk about things that are real. They talk about past lovers, past broken hearts, past failures. Their fantasy bleeds into their reality seamlessly, without stain, just a perfect blending of what is and what is imagined, until the transition leaves with an electric and tragic feeling of possibility. A feeling that he could be possible in this concept of home.

  As comfortable as if you'd never left home.

  As comfortable as home.

  Home.

  That he, suddenly, in a hotel bar, is home.

  Her Part Two

  The edited, abridged climax. A final scene between them in a St. Petersburg train station, described in 55 words, no more and no less.

  The last thing he gave her: an American quarter in a Russian train station.

  He explained that once flipped it wasn't the head or tail telling your fate, but that feeling of disappointment or elation you got after the telling.

  Regardless, she pleaded the coin was wrong when he left on a train to Moscow.

  Her Part Three

  A small collection of short lists she composes after returning home to Toronto, each revealing the truth and misapprehension connected to the cliché of modern love.

  Things that are true

  1. will never move to Russia, despite the invitation.

  2. did actually (if only for a moment) seriously consider staying in Russia when it was requested in a train station, but it was the anxieties of things left behind, boxes of belongings and a bullshit bar job, that overwhelmed her until her head hurt and her heart broke.