Jose Fernandez is standing at home plate giving a batting exhibition in a distant province when he collapses. A hush falls over the small stadium. They rush him to the nearest hospital but it is too late. His death is a day of national mourning on the island. The people say he played too hard for too long and simply wore out his heart. His wife Celia hears rumors that the ambulance went to the wrong hospital where the right equipment was missing, but what is to be done?
Castro attends the funeral and the tears and speeches flow for days. When it is over, and after a week and then a month have passed, things are different. Slowly, the special treatment Celia had become accustomed to is taken away. She has to move from her house. She has to leave her job and the new one does not pay as well. She looks to the future and sees that if her son has even a fraction of his father’s gifts, he will be useful to Castro. Ramon will be taken from her and put into a sports academy. He will get the best instruction. He will become a baseball player like his father whether he likes it or not. She will be rewarded. She will get her house back and her job and all that she had become accustomed to. The life she had will be rebuilt. Is that any use of a boy? Her brother Eduardo knows a man with a boat. They make a plan.
When the woman and the boy leave Cuba, Castro calls in the Minister of Sports and tells him to erase Jose Fernandez from all the record books. Take down all the plaques. Destroy the statue in the square of the town where he was born. Obliterate his memory forever.
Ramon met Heavy Weather and some of his friends for lunch that Sunday at a Thai place in Palo Alto off of University. Everybody in Berkeley knew Heavy Weather but no one knew whether he was closer to thirty or fifty. Some said that his parents had been radicals back in the 1960s, that they had been into some very heavy stuff with the Panthers and they had done jail time. Some said that Heavy Weather had made those stories up, that he was just a perpetual grad student in sociology with a wistful longing for the glory days of the past. What no one doubted was his fascination with the aesthetics of protest and street theater as a political art form. When rich bureaucrats met to discuss the World Trade Organization or trade policy or aid to the developing nations, Heavy was there. He had been in Seattle and Washington and Geneva and Doha. He had an innate skill for organization and some very large e-mail lists of like-minded people.
And while no one was really sure whether Heavy Weather was really his name or not, whether it was a moment of ‘60s inspiration from his parents or self-imposed, it was clear that at this stage of his life the first part of his name was ironic—he was more stick-like than stocky. He was six feet tall but couldn’t have weighed more than 165 pounds. Along with his love for protest and street antics, he was obsessed with biking and fitness. He had the gaunt physique of the marathon runner. He didn’t own a car, didn’t know how to drive one, and had no driver’s license. He thought nothing of biking from Berkeley to Palo Alto for lunch. Enjoyed it, actually.
Heavy Weather had heard about the Big Box price markups the night of the earthquake. Someone had told him that Ramon Fernandez had been there, center stage, and Heavy wondered whether it might make some sense for the two of them to join forces. Heavy was always looking for an opportunity to strike a blow against corporate oppression—he immediately saw the value of exploiting Ramon’s high profile.
They spent the first part of lunch debating where to hold the protest. Ramon wanted to hold it at the Big Box Executive Education Center—part of the Stanford Business School—a cedar and glass jewel nestled in the hills on the edge of campus. One of Heavy’s confederates wanted it at Berkeley, where the locals and the large population of sympathetic students could be counted on to swell the crowd. The group argued the pros and cons of each location for over an hour.
Eventually, the tide turned toward Stanford. Big Box was a big enough target that it would be easy to convince students from Berkeley to make the trip across the Bay. The only worry was that the Stanford administration might shut the whole thing down or limit its effectiveness by cordoning off the protesters to a part of campus that would be less telegenic or less effective in mobilizing others into action. After all, Big Box was not going to be happy seeing its investment on the Stanford campus turned against it in a publicity disaster. They would pressure the administration to stop the protest or to at least minimize its impact. The group decided to risk it—go with Stanford but keep the planning for the protest as quiet as possible for as long as possible to minimize the time the administration would have to react.
Heavy argued that the location of the campus Big Box building—away from the center of the campus—was actually an opportunity, not a problem. They would gather at the fountain outside Memorial Hall. They could then march to the Big Box building and hold a teach-in there. Heavy loved marches. Always a good way to get the adrenaline flowing. At the Big Box building, they would have some speeches and make some demands for fixing Big Box—an end to corporate oppression, rebates to customers, higher wages for workers, a more sensitive corporate ethos and so on and on and on.
Getting ready for the march would take some work. They would need signs and banners and slogans. They would need to make the signs and banners so that they looked homemade but were still readable for the cameras that would certainly be there. Heavy would get the word out through his e-mail networks. There was much discussion of deconstruction and Western values, of symmetry and asymmetry of patriarchal and matriarchal structures and strictures. But before lunch could segue into dinner, they came to one more crucial decision. Ramon would be the main speaker, not some out-of-towner or big-name activist. Later, they could nail down the date for the protest and work on lining up other speakers.
It was almost four o’clock. Ramon went by Amy’s place and she drove them to Baylands, a nature preserve that bordered the bay, at the end of Embarcadero. Near the entrance to the park was a pond. Amy and Ramon sat on one of the benches rimming the pond and talked. Around them, children and their parents fed the ducks and other birds that came to enjoy the water.
Amy told Ramon about her economics class earlier that afternoon. Her homework assignment was to come up with an example from the world around us that illustrates order that is not the product of deliberate design. As she told Ramon about the class and the homework, she noticed the ducks. She got a kick out of watching the delight of the children. But she didn’t see the hidden order of the ducks and the children and their dance together, even though she and Ramon came often to this spot to unwind.
Somehow, there were always a lot of ducks to greet the children, but not too many. No one sent the ducks of the Bay Area a memo, inviting some this week, others the next. No organization monitored the duck arrivals and departures that assigned just the right number of ducks to this one little pond. Thousands on thousands of ducks in the Bay Area with thousands of square miles to choose from and somehow, just the right number of ducks—a few dozen rather than zero or a few thousand—would show up day after day.
No one ever marveled at how the numbers of children and the numbers of ducks matched so nicely. It wasn’t perfect. Some days fewer children showed up than others. Some days, there were too many ducks fighting, competing for the food, and the children didn’t have as good a time. But without a schedule or a scheduler, it worked remarkably well. But Amy was too focused on Ramon to see the hidden order that was at work around her.
Twenty feet from where Ramon and Amy sat talking, an ant colony bustled in response to the children and the ducks. The ants fanned out in search of crumbs too small for the ducks to notice. But the ants did not search randomly. When one ant discovered a collection of crumbs and returned to the colony, it left a trail of pheromones along the ground that encouraged other ants to take the same trail. So the colony acted intelligently, sending more ants to the spots with more crumbs. But no individual ant, not even the queen, knew this information. Amy did not see the organization of the ant colony.
On the surface of the pond were phyloplankton, too small for the eye to see. Their population fluctuated with the chaos of the temperature and the winds. A storm could flood the pond, keeping away the children for days, killing the ants but bringing in all kinds of nutrients for the life on the surface of the pond and below. The duck population, the ant population, the phyloplankton, the shrimp, the fish, the birds, and everything else created a web of life that responded to the forces of chaos with forces working toward order. The web of life linked the ducks to the shrimp and the shrimp to the zooplankton and the zooplankton to the phyloplankton that floated and drifted helplessly on the surface. The children added another set of strands to the complex web of life around the pond.
Amy was thinking of none of this. She was telling Ramon about Hayek, an economist she had learned about in high school. Hayek was interested in spontaneous order, order that sprung from the complex, unplanned interactions of individuals going about their business. Ramon was listening, but at the same time he was thinking about Amy and how the sun was now low enough to backlight her hair, how blonde her hair was and how beautiful it was in the light.
Despite the breeze that ruffled the surface of the pond, Ramon’s body temperature rose ever so slightly from talking to Amy and looking at her hair. Not by enough for Ramon to notice even if he had tried, but a perfect thermometer would show that he was slightly warmer than he was when he first arrived. Ramon’s body responded to the increase in temperature by radiating the extra heat into the evening air.
Amy and Ramon rose from the bench and walked to the entrance of the nature preserve nearby. The birders were out tonight with their field glasses and their tripods, but Ramon and Amy didn’t notice them. Ramon and Amy passed through the Nature Center, then walked on a long boardwalk that took them out over the marsh to the edge of the bay. Swallows flitted about them as they walked slowly out over the marsh. At the end of the boardwalk was a small observation deck, a place to sit or stand and watch the shorebirds that seemed to be everywhere, rising and falling from the shallow water where the marsh caresses the bay.
Amy talked about Hayek and the paradox of how order can emerge without anyone being in charge. But deep down she was thinking about her future with Ramon and if it would be able to survive the end of life at school and the roads they were hoping to travel over the next five or ten years.
Amy told Ramon an example that she remembered from her high school class, that there are always enough bagels at the coffee shop on the corner and that you don’t have to call in advance if you decide at the last minute to throw a brunch and it all happens without a bagel czar. Would that make a good example for her homework assignment, Ramon asked. No, she answered. That example was too close to the pencil story Ruth had told the class—how there are always pencils when you show up at the campus bookstore. Ramon asked Amy if something from biology might work. Something from the human body, maybe. There must be lots of self-organizing systems that made the body work so well. Yes, Amy said, the cell, the circulation of the blood, the heart.
At first, Amy didn’t notice the small shadow that floated across the marsh. Ramon didn’t see it either. They were both too engrossed in each other. But suddenly there was a rush of wings, something was happening just beyond their conversation and they both looked up as a hawk swooped down low over the marsh, looking to steal a quick meal from one of the nests in the thick marsh grass. But the marsh birds that were scattered over the water and hidden in the grass—the godwits, the avocets, and the black-necked stilts—saw the shadow. These birds thrive on slowness, taking so long to move forward one agonizingly slow step at a time that you sometimes wonder if they’re really alive. But they reacted to the shadow as if an alarm bell rang announcing all crew to battle stations. An instant flock came to life. The birds rose nearly as one and moved toward the hawk, defending some territory only they knew of. The flock hovered for an instant and then accelerated toward the hawk. The hawk dove and tried to spin free, but the flock, filled with smaller birds, darted after the hawk as if they were a single bird on a mission, to catch the hawk or at least to drive it away. As the shorebirds danced after the hawk, moving this way and that, Ramon smiled and then laughed with the pleasure of it and turned to Amy, pointing to the mass of birds that ebbed and flowed in pursuit of the hawk. The rust-red wings of the godwits glowed in the orange light of the setting sun.
Amy followed the gesture of Ramon’s hand. Ramon Fernandez was incapable of gracelessness. Amy’s body temperature had been on the rise for the last few minutes. Without any conscious effort on her part, the slightest tinge of pink rose to where her cheekbones were closest to the skin, in that perfect curve below the eyes. Her upper lip dampened, glistening ever so lightly in the sunlight holding the remains of the day. As the hawk flew on, and the shorebirds returned to their still life, Ramon’s gaze returned to Amy’s face. Whether it was the change in color or the moistening of her upper lip or some other cause—Ramon could not explain it any more than he could explain the impulse of the shorebirds to defend their young so ably—Ramon took Amy in his arms and kissed her.
The sun was down now. Amy and Ramon went for dinner to a small Cuban place called Tito’s at the border of Palo Alto and Mountain View. There were no pictures of Havana, no pictures of Hemingway, no atmosphere whatsoever. There were only the best black beans in the Bay Area. Ramon and Amy dressed up from their usual sweats and T-shirts to go there. Ramon put on a jacket. Amy wore a long, flowing skirt and a tight sleeveless top with a scooped neck.
After dinner, they went north to San Francisco, headed for a club near the waterfront. It wasn’t in the nicest or fanciest part of the waterfront, the part that draws the tourists pretending they’re on a wharf frequented by fishermen. The club where Amy and Ramon went was grittier, filled with people who actually worked on the boats and who hung out there to eat and drink and hear music after a long day of physical labor. The walls could have used a coat of paint. The bathrooms were merely functional. The only decoration over the bar was an old neon Cervesa Cristal sign. The focus was on the music and the dancing that went till one or two o’clock in the morning, even in the middle of the week.
Ramon and Amy should have been studying tonight, but the romance of salsa and mambo drew them northward. Five musicians were wedged into a corner of the club on a platform too small and inconvenient to call a stage. Older men, they played the classic tunes that attracted an older crowd. That alone would have made Amy and Ramon stand out. Ramon wore a fedora he found at a garage sale low on his head as a way of deflecting attention. Bringing Amy ruined that plan. Amy, blonde and close to six feet tall, was hard to ignore as they spun and flashed across the floor.
Ramon was dancing to music that was bred in the bone. Moving to its rhythms came without thought, like a child answering a mother’s smile with one of its own. For Amy, it was an acquired taste. But she could hold her own. The two of them, Ramon and Amy, their bodies already perfect by themselves, looked even better moving together.
The lights were low and even those who recognized Ramon left him alone, giving him an island of peace to savor. Dancing to this music was a tonic of forgetting and remembering, forgetting the stress of tennis and school, remembering hanging out with his mother in their tiny kitchen in Miami, getting dinner ready, the radio always on, his mother humming and singing along. And there was a bit of imagining, too, imagining his father and mother dancing to these old tunes back in Cuba. Ramon could close his eyes, and the music, combined with the nearness of water, took him across the country, beyond the sea, to the island where he was born.
For Amy, it was a chance to get close to a part of Ramon that she only knew from conversation and Ramon’s photographs. She knew something of his journey across the water as a boy, his mother’s courage. She had seen the picture of Ramon, maybe five years old, smiling, wearing a cowboy hat, somewhere on the streets of Havana. A picture of his father, barely older than Ramon was now, wearing a baseball uniform, the bat resting on his shoulder like there was a special groove for it there and he carried it wherever he went. She had seen the picture of Ramon’s father and mother cruising the Malecon, the legendary Havana boulevard by the sea.
But more than that? Ramon didn’t talk much about Cuba unless she pushed him. And she rarely pushed him. She knew he had not been back. She knew Ramon’s mother had not been back and vowed not to return until Castro was gone. Did Ramon have a similar vow? She didn’t know. She only knew that at least for now, he had no plans to return either out of respect for his mother or for reasons of his own. She only knew that nights like this were some way of connecting with his youth, his father, with being Cuban.
What did his Cuban past mean to him? Amy could sense something of an answer on nights like tonight, swaying and sweating with the others out on the dance floor, with people who could have been Ramon’s aunts or uncles, marveling at the dramatic gestures of their hands, the dignity and pride of their heads held high, feeling the same music that was pounding inside them, watching Ramon’s face in the dim light.
Tonight, both of them turned to the music for escape. Ramon forgot about Heavy Weather, about Wimbledon, about his classwork, about what would come after school as his life unfolded. The music coursed through him like a river and he moved to its current with no more effort than the river on its way to the sea.
Amy worked harder than usual to lose herself in the rhythms of the guitars and drums. She kept thinking about this protest Ramon was getting entangled in. Or was he doing most of the entangling? She couldn’t tell yet, but she knew enough about politics and the human heart to know that Ramon was taking a chance that might enhance or harm his image and career down the road. She saw no reason to trust Heavy Weather. She worried that it was a mistake, a mistake for Ramon, maybe a mistake for anyone.
“What’s wrong?” he asked at the end of a song. “You look far away.”
“No, I’m here,” she answered.
She willed herself back into the music, moving in time to the ceaseless rhythm of the drums, moving in perfect union with Ramon, her skirt swirling like a white rose around his grace.