Stop All the Clocks

An Excerpt from 'Stop All the Clocks'
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Excerpted from Stop All the ClocksReprinted with the permission of the publisher, Arcade Publishing.

“I was raised in South Florida,” Marcos said once Mona had finished. He didn’t offer any sympathy for her or ask follow up questions, which, oddly enough, Mona appreciated. “West Palm Beach. There’s a neighborhood called Parker Ridge, where all the Cubans live. It’s also where the local branch of Alpha 66 is at. Any idea what that is?”

“Devil-worshipping fraternity of freemasons,” Mona guessed.

“Close. It’s an anti-Castro terrorist group. My father was a member. He was one of the first wave of Cuban emigrés to the U.S.—came over here when he was a kid, soon after the revolution. His father, my grandpa, had been a tobacco importer, in bed with the mob, just like anyone else was if they were doing business in Cuba back then.”

Mona could just about see the sinews in Marcos’s face muscles tense up as he began to tell the story. He paused to take a long swig from his flask.

“Papa, like most Cubans in America, was a vicious despiser of all things even vaguely left-wing, to say nothing of Castro. So my adolescent rebellious phase, naturally, was sort of hippie punk, and one day I came home with a Che pin on my backpack, even though I barely knew who he was. Papa clocked me so hard he knocked a tooth out.”

Marcos opened his mouth into a wide, slightly deranged grin and pointed to his left incisor.

“Porcelain,” he said, “but apart from that I didn’t see so much of him. That’s because, as my mom told me, he did ‘volunteer work’ after hours. Which is to say he and the rest of the boys at Alpha 66 were plotting a way to take down Castro. This meant he was constantly in danger, and so were we. My parents had fights about it all the time, but nothing ever changed. We stayed in the same house, and papa stayed out all evening. All the while ma was the staunchest conservative, you know, had the Reagan/Bush signs standing tall on our little lawn, cursed the hippies well into the mid-’80s.

“The more time he spent away, the more paranoid ma got. She thought the news was trying to brainwash us. She thought my teachers were trying to brainwash me. She even thought the music on the radio was trying to brainwash us. Come to think of it, she probably wasn’t all wrong.

“But the point is, one day papa disappeared entirely. No goodbye, no letter, no nothing. I came home every single day from school to see ma crying at the kitchen table. ‘He’ll be back,’ I said, but I doubted it. Then the pictures started showing up in the mail: papa walking down the streets of Miami with a young blonde. Then a picture of him with a brunette. Eventually, wouldn’t you know it, a redhead showed up too. The pictures were from years ago. Someone had been tracking my father and his affairs for a long time. Finally ma had enough, and she went to one of papa’s Alpha 66 buddies. There had been an explosion that year outside a restaurant in Havana where Fidel’s chief of staff was eating—and she knew enough about it to cause problems. So the boys at Alpha 66 eventually gave in, and told her that papa had been assigned to a witness protection program, and he was somewhere unknown out in the Midwest.

“As you can imagine, she didn’t get much easier to live with after that. But somehow she did get even more passionate about her anti-Castroism. She blamed Cuba not only for the world’s political ills, but for papa’s infidelity too. I suppose it was easier than looking at things as they were, and building a new worldview from the ground up.

“Then one night I was raiding the kitchen while ma was watching the 10 o’clock news. And what do you know but Papa’s face suddenly appeared on the screen. My back was to the TV, and I can’t describe how, but somehow even before the anchor read out the story I just knew to turn around. The graphic said ‘Cuban Spy Arrested.’ SWAT team had stormed the little condo he was staying in in Kalamazoo. They interviewed the nineteen-year-old girl he was living with: she said he had told her he was an insurance salesman. Pa was being transferred to federal court in DC for the trial.

“You see, it turned out he had been a double agent—he had been relaying Alpha 66’s activities back to Castro and company for going on thirty years. While the story was running, Ma just stared blankly at the screen. I didn’t dare say anything. I wouldn’t have known what to say. Her entire world—every fiber of her angry little being—was based on a lie. I remember the shiver that went down my spine as I realized all of that, in one blinding instant, as I was watching the television flash and flicker, now onto sports, now onto the weather, with the green clouds swirling up the coast. I said to ma, ‘maybe we should watch something else.’ She didn’t respond, just sat frozen in front of the TV.

“I suppose it should count against me that I left the house for the next few days. But I’d been staying with girlfriends or buddies most of the time those days anyway. And, being a kid, and an angry one, I didn’t have much of an idea of how to nurse a broken heart back to health. So I came back to the house at dusk a few days later. And I’ll always remember the lizards. A swarm of them— arranged in what looked like a circle on the screen door. They were perfectly still—so still I almost didn’t notice them until I reached my hand to turn the handle and got a fistful of reptile instead. It was beautiful actually, the pattern of swirling pale green they made over the netting in the dusk light. Beautiful and terrible. And when I came inside and saw ma hanging from the ceiling, her face was almost the same shade of green. She must have been dead 24 hours. Rope tied to the chandelier light’s ceiling fixture. No one had noticed. I guess it would have been another day before the smell would have gotten bad enough. The television was still on. The weather report. And just like before, these greens clouds crawled slowly up the coast.

“I stood there for a moment, watching the light from the television dance across her lifeless face. I sat down on the couch and I stared at her corpse like it was the most natural thing in the world. I didn’t cry or scream: the shock of what I was looking at was too great for that. But then as I was sitting there staring, my mind completely blank from the sheer horror of it, I was flooded by the most inexpressible feeling. It was as though I was filled by kind of dark, damp fire. I looked at her body, I looked at the rope, I looked at the television. None of it was real to me. The fire radiating through me made that much clear to me. It was as though the world was made out of cardboard and I’d just ripped through it. A terrible, terrible elation. I can’t describe it any better than that. But for the first time in my life I knew truly what life and death were, and what freedom was.

“It only lasted a minute. Two at most. Then I snapped out of it and called 911, and a couple of paramedics cut her down. They gave me over to a couple of social workers for the night, but I wouldn’t say shit to them. I never stepped foot in that house again—my uncle took me in until I finished up high school in Orlando. And any time anyone asked me if I wanted to talk about it, I gave them such a stare they probably thought I was going to kill them right where they stood.”

*

“You had a paradoxical reaction,” Mona said, “like how some people faint or go unconscious when they’re overstimulated. You were in a kind of trance.”

Marcos shook his head.

“We’re in a trance most of our lives,” Marcos said, “when we’re going about our day, eating, working, fucking. Well, maybe not when we’re fucking, with any luck. But for those few moments in that apartment in West Palm I was awake.”

By the time he had finished his speech, Mona felt ill, and a thought at the edge of consciousness briefly vexed her: that Marcos’s story had been uncomfortably similar to her own. She reached for Marcos’s flask, but he turned it on its head and shook it to show it was empty.

“It’s getting late. Didn’t you say you had a friend to meet?”

Mona checked the time. It was indeed time for her to see Natalie.

“You’re going to be alright over here?”

“Oh don’t worry,” Marcos said, “about little old me. Here’s my number in case you ever want to rendezvous.”

As she walked over toward the train, Mona hoped against hope that she would see Marcos stir in some way from his seat at the bench—that he would get up and walk over to a bar, or pace back and forth along the rim of the park, or even just itch his leg. But for as long as she was able to keep him in her line of vision, he remained still, sitting perfectly straight, with his hands on his knees, faintly illuminated by the lamplight overhead.

Noah Kumin is the editor of the Mars Review of Books, the world's premier outsider book review, which has published seminal essays from Tao Lin, Sean Thor Conroe, and Magdalene Taylor, among others. He received a BA from the University of Chicago and an MFA in fiction from NYU, where he was advised by the late Martin Amis. He is the author of The Machine War, a philosophical history of computing. His next nonfiction work, The Mystagogues, will examine philosophical hermeticism through the lens of five mysterious twentieth-century writers.