Stay on the Wall

"Don't get up," his father said. "Whatever the sky does tonight, Rafa, you stay sitting."

"Ten past one," said Rafael. "No power since before midnight. And listen to them."

All over Centro Habana the roosters were crowing as if it were six.

"They think it's morning," Ernesto said. "So does half the city. Look at it, Rafa, like a theatre curtain."

It hung low and red over the Straits. Rafael could have read the flight printout in his pocket by it.

"It's a solar storm, Papi. They said on the radio before the power went. Particles."

"My grandmother's grandmother saw this over Matanzas in 1859," Ernesto said. "Her mother told her, and she told my grandmother, and my grandmother told me with a slipper in her hand. If morning comes red in the middle of the night, you stay where you sit until the real one."

"Or what?"

"Or you come back wrong." He shrugged. "She also said mangoes gave you worms. I'm 79 and I pass on what I was given."

"In 1859 miners in the Rocky Mountains got up and made breakfast," Rafael said. "I read it this afternoon. They thought it was dawn."

"And were they all right after?"

"It didn't say."

"There you are," said Ernesto, as though that settled something. "79 years I've waited to see a thing my grandmother saw. I'm not wasting it on particles."

He had climbed up on Rafael's right, and he had said why, as he said it at every table and every funeral: the left ear he had given to a lift shaft in Vedado in 1991, when a cable let go three floors above his head. He had fixed lifts for 30 years after that, he liked to add, in a city that could not keep one running.

"Tell the one about the hand signals," Rafael said.

"You know the hand signals."

"Tell it anyway. It's our last..." He stopped.

Ernesto let that go past him on the deaf side.

Two places down, past the gap where her son had been sitting, a woman in a housecoat was fanning herself and talking to God in a low, reasonable voice. She had introduced herself at midnight as Mirta, along with her blood pressure and her son.

"19," she told Rafael now, leaning across the gap. "All year I get the top of his head."

"Where is he now?"

"Tonight I say, Dayán, sit with your mother and look at the sky, once. He goes to the car for water. We are sitting on the sea."

"He'll be back," Rafael said.

He was back at twenty past one. He sat on his mother's far side, not in the gap, and took her hand.

"Look at this," Mirta said. "Lord, are you seeing this? Dayán, you're holding my hand."

"It's morning, Mami," the boy said.

"It's one in the morning, mijo."

"It's morning. Let's walk."

She laughed, delighted. "He wants to walk. 19 years I ask him to walk with me."

Ernesto had his good ear turned to the boy. Now he looked at the sea.

"You're leaving Thursday," he said.

Rafael's hand went to his pocket. "Who told you?"

"Your sister. She's never learned to use her mouth for anything smaller. I'm not talking about it tonight."

"Papi..."

"You know what a counterweight is?"

"Papi, I know what a counterweight is."

"Big iron block in the back of the shaft. Nobody ever sees it." Ernesto did not turn his head. "Car goes up, it goes down. That's the whole job."

"That's not fair."

"It's not fair, it's physics. I need to piss."

"You just said nobody gets up."

"I said you don't get up. An old man's bladder doesn't read the sky." He was already down off the wall. "I'll go in the doorway of the Pérez building."

"I'll come with you."

"You'll sit." At the kerb he pointed back at him. "Watch my shadow. If it stays on the wall, come and fetch me."

Rafael turned to do it and Mirta caught his sleeve.

"Your father," she whispered. "The old ones know things. What does he say this is?"

"A story his grandmother told him."

"And now he's gone to piss in a doorway in the dark. At 79." She crossed herself with the fan. "My husband did that on Neptuno, God rest him, and found a hole."

"He'll be back," Rafael said.

"Dayán's hand is cold," she said. "In this heat. Is that the light?"

"I don't know."

"My son holds my hand and the man doesn't know." She began to fan the boy instead of herself.

"And he calls me Mami," she said over her shoulder. "Since he was 12 I'm Ma, like a cough."

Ernesto was back inside 10 minutes, and sat down on Rafael's left.

"Coffee," he said. "From the thermos woman on Galiano."

"You're not having yours?"

"Later." His own cup sat in his lap, full. "Drink yours, Rafael."

"Did you find your doorway?"

"I found it."

"That's all? No report on the hinges?"

"It was a doorway, Rafael."

Rafael drank, and unfolded the printout on his knee.

"Thursday, eight in the morning," he said. "I've been sick about telling you for two months, because I thought you'd shout."

"Go," Ernesto said.

"That's it?"

"Go. You don't need to worry about me."

"Who carries the water up when the pump's off? Five floors."

"Your sister."

"Last time she carried a bucket up she told the whole building about her back for a month."

"Then she'll tell them," said Ernesto.

"I thought you'd say something about the lifts. You don't leave a car between floors. You don't walk off a job with the doors open."

"You go," said Ernesto. "It's done."

"I'm going to look at it," Rafael said, when he could. "The city. Once, properly." He twisted round, one arm hooked over the wall.

"Tell me what you see," said Ernesto. "My back won't turn."

"Us," Rafael said. "The light's behind everybody, so it throws the whole wall across the road."

"And?"

"A row of shadows sitting on the columns of the arcades, all the way to the Prado. Mirta's, with the fan. Mine."

"Good."

"There's one in the gap. Between me and Mirta, where nobody's sitting."

"It's the light," said Ernesto. "It comes in at an angle."

"And there's one on the other side of me, Papi. With its shoulders up round its ears and its head right over on one side. Like someone listening."

"Turn round and sit properly, Rafael. Drink your coffee."

"I drank it."

"Then sit."

Down the wall, Dayán stood and pulled his mother up.

"My knees, Lord," she said, laughing. "You see what he does to my knees."

"We're going to walk," she called. "Look at him. He wants to walk with me."

"Mirta, sit down."

"It's morning," said Dayán.

They crossed into the dark between the arcades and did not come out.

Rafael looked at the wall.

"Papi," he said. "Her shadow didn't go with her. It's still sitting there with the fan up."

"Sit round properly," said his father.

"It's putting the fan down. It's turning its head to look where she went. Did you see..."

"It's morning, Rafael," his father said, from his left. "Let's walk."

"Papi, where's yours?"

Across the road his own shadow sat with one arm hooked over the wall. Beside it, on his father's side, there was nothing.

On the other side, the listening shadow had turned its good ear toward him.

"You went across the road," Rafael said to it. "You told me to watch you and I didn't watch."

"Rafael," the thing beside him said gently. "Who are you talking to?"

"You didn't need to piss. You went to see where the boy came from."

He told the wall the rest, because there was nobody else to tell. That he had watched a woman fan her son instead. That he had drunk a coffee. That he had told the Thursday flight, and the two months of being sick about it, to something sitting on the wrong side of him, and it had given him the easy answer, the one his father would have made him fight for across a whole kitchen table.

A hand closed round his wrist from the left. Dry, and colder than the stone.

"Come on," it said kindly. "Your sister will be up with the baby. We'll make coffee, and I'll tell her about Thursday for you."

"She knows," Rafael said. "She's the one who told you."

"Then she can help me with the water," it said.

The shadow on the wall lifted one hand, flat, palm down, and pushed it slowly toward the ground. Twice.

"That's the lift signal," Rafael said. "Flat hand, pushing down: hold, don't move the car, somebody's still in the shaft." He was crying now and did not wipe it.

"You taught me that when I was six," he told it. "You want me to leave you there."

The flat hand pushed down again.

"If I come across to you, can I bring you back?"

"Go to him, then," said the thing on his left. "It's only across the road."

The flat hand pushed down, harder.

"How long does the red last, Papi? When it goes out, where do you go?"

Overhead the red was tearing into rags, and every shape on the columns thinned with it.

"Rafael," it said.

"He calls me Rafa."

"Rafa," it said at once, in his father's voice exactly, smoker's catch and all. "It's going dark. Let's walk."

He kept both palms flat on the seawall. The red went out over the harbour, then over Vedado, then over him, and the last thing on the wall to go was a flat hand, pushing down.

Then the wall across the road was dark, and down the Malecón the roosters stopped.

The hand stayed on his wrist.

"Sunrise is after seven," his father's voice said, patient, from the wrong side. "I can wait, Rafa. Can you?"