“You’re looking better. How do you feel?” he asked. “Much better,” said Argenis. “Thanks for—” Vantroi didn’t let him finish. “Thanks for nothing, boy. What was I going to do – leave you there shitting yourself in the stairway?” They went down to Vantroi’s place and Argenis couldn’t help listening for Susana’s voice in the apartment that had formerly been his. “She came to see you before she left, but you were asleep,” Vantroi said as he opened the door, showing him the empty red suitcase Susana had left in a corner of the living room. “Do you have anyone here in Cuba?” he asked from the kitchen as he put coffee grounds into the pot.

“No, no one. Just my doctor.” When he said “doctor” Argenis made air quotes. His host closed the coffee pot and, lighting the stove, said, “Boy, that guy’s a creep. We’ll have to find you something – what can you do?”

He could recognize cocaine that had been cut with acetone. Come up with excuses. Sponge off others. Prepare a syringe full of heroin. Shoot up. He could cook rice, rice that was hard and flavorless. He looked at his hands, huge and bony, with yellowed palms, much lighter than the rest of his body. They itched. “Do you have a pencil and paper?” he asked Vantroi. His host opened a kitchen cabinet and pulled out a stub of a Berol Mirado and a piece of manila paper on which someone had written a list of materials that included Wiki-Wiki black dye and baseball caps.

“Stand over there,” he told Vantroi, pointing toward the balcony, so that the tender light of a sky just starting to cloud over would hit his profile. He flipped the page over to use the blank side and his fingers closed around the inch of pencil like the petals of a cayenne flower when night falls. Then he made the graphite dance over the paper almost effortlessly until he had turned his savior’s flesh into a beautiful convergence of dark lines.

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Vantroi’s mother was a huge woman with fists of steel who had exhorted her son to “Be a fag, but not a pussy.” When he came home from school with his first bruise, she hit him with a belt right on the mark and threatened to kill him if he let them hit him again. From then on, he defended himself from the world tooth and nail, sure that if he didn’t the woman would keep her promise. Brígida had died when she was hit by a car during the Special Period, as she was bringing three pounds of ground beef home in her skirt. On the wall of Vantroi’s apartment hung a youthful photo of her dressed in a military uniform in 1962, part of a group who was laughing at a shirtless Che’s jokes, as he carried out voluntary labor with a shovel in his hand. Vantroi had his mother’s smile, and the muscles and honey-colored eyes of his father, a musician from Matanzas who had died before Vantroi turned four.