 Her poetry has appeared in all kinds of journals, including Conditions, Revis de Chicano, Rique. She's received an NEA Fellowship in Poetry. I'm so psyched she's here. Please welcome Achio Beja. This story is hot off the presses at 3 p.m. this afternoon. It's called The Maldives. As soon as I was diagnosed with a brain tumor, I knew I wanted to go to the Maldives. My tumor is benign, at least technically, just a little drop of fat. Not cancerous. It's growing about one centimeter a year, which is about the same as the rising sea level in the Maldives. But this coincidence isn't what drew me to these islands. The attraction is what that centimeter a year means to both of us. A darkening. Erasure. For me, everything started just before I left Cuba. I just scored an American visa because my father, who'd left years before on a raft, had filed for me under a family reunification provision of U.S. asylum laws. Not that my father had much interest in being reunited with me. When he lived in Cuba, he never hesitated to tell me I was a punishment from God. I'd ask him, for what? What did you do to deserve me? It must have been pretty bad. But he'd just shake his head and walk away. I'm not gonna confess to you. He'd spit over his shoulder. Years later, all settled in San Francisco with a new Mexican wife and a revved up religious calling that involved marching up and down Market Street and passing out pamphlets urging homosexuals to repent. He decided maybe God would be more convinced of his commitment and sacrifice if he saved his own daughter first. And I was ready to be saved. Not from homosexuality, but from the boredom of Havana. Oh, I know. Most Americans hear Havana, and they think Tropicana and classic cars, parties, and salsa, even though salsa is Puerto Rican. But for a Cuban as common as me, Havana means living with several generations in a crowded three room apartment. In my case, my mother, her boyfriend, my grandmother and her boyfriend, my sister and her boyfriend, my 19-year-old nephew and his boyfriend and his boyfriend's two-year-old son. A job during the day earning worthless pesos, I was security guard at the Museum of Fine Arts, and a job at night earning hard currency. I washed dishes at a fancy family-run tourist-only restaurant, a position I got by marrying, yes, marrying, the owner because Cuban law demands that family business is only higher relatives. My Havana was dirty and teeming and so loud, it sometimes felt like a piercing in my ears. I honestly could not remember the last time I'd been alone for more than it takes to relieve myself. And even then, I wasn't immune to the soundtrack of screaming and clattering so typical of my city. Given my age, 34, and my situation, I'd already been with pretty much everybody I was going to be with in Havana. And given how overcrowded we were at home, I slept in the same bed with my nephew, his boyfriend and their two-year-old, or whether permitting, on a hammock I'd strung up that ran parallel with the clothesline and the tenements back patio. I knew nobody was going to move in with me, even if she loved me, and I wasn't sure I bought enough to the table in spite of my dollar-earning-dishwashing job to be wanted enough to take home. In the few instances when the possibility arose, it was only because the other girls overcrowded home-mirrored mine, but with an additional half-dozen cousins from the provinces. That only left tourists as romantic possibilities, and though my English is fine, nothing calmed my ardor quicker than some American telling me all about the wonders of the revolution as she paid my way into a dollar-only club I would otherwise not be able to afford. In fact, I was celebrating the visa my father had gotten me at precisely one of those clubs, listening to a pretty terrible reggaeton band whose terribleness was underscored by a terrible sound system when I experienced the tumor's first overt symptom. In an instant, the bass just dropped out of the music. It became tinny and thin. Because the sound quality of all of Havana Venues, even the very best ones, is unpredictable, I was sure it couldn't possibly be me. I was with a bunch of Cuban friends, just ordinary folks, and a Canadian who was being hustled by one of those friends. I shrugged an apology her way, and she smiled uncertainly in my direction. When we left a few hours later, my left ear felt waterlogged. A loud argument was taking place as we passed a café and a drunk blared a trumpet at the corner, but they sounded gauzy and far away. Oh, I know that feeling. My ears got waterlogged when I went diving in them all-dives, the Canadian said. Everybody nodded as if they knew the exact coordinates of them all-dives, afraid to seem ignorant in front of the Canadian. But I wondered if it wasn't one of those countries where Cuba had sent medical brigades. I was pretty sure I had seen something in a documentary. Cuban TV is one long parade of documentaries. In any case, I hadn't been diving ever in my whole life, but I did wonder immediately if going underwater meant peaceful solitude of all those schools of fish and shivers of sharks made you feel just as crowded as a city and maybe even a little paranoid. Do you have hydrogen peroxide at home, the Canadian asked? Pour some in your ear. It'll sound like fireworks. Lay on your side and it'll clear up. But it didn't, and I suspect it wouldn't have even if we'd had hydrogen peroxide. In fact, in the next few days, my hearing seemed to fluctuate wildly. Most of the time, it felt like everything was at a great distance, as if everyone was talking to me from the bottom of the sea. My mother told me she thought it was stress, and it seemed a reasonable explanation. After all, I was leaving soon, headed to the great unknown of the United States, and though I wasn't planning on living with my father, technically, I did have to stay with him for a year and a day because he was sponsoring me. I hadn't seen him in more than a decade when he had called out of the blue to say he wanted to save me. My mother said it must all be happening for a reason that had to be kismet. My hearing got no better as I prepped for my trip, but by the time I was ready to go, I must have gotten used to it because I wasn't paying attention to it anymore. Then, as I was getting on the plane, waving at my family, waving at me from the tarmac, my grandmother's boyfriend has a relative who's a high-ranking airport official, so they all got to personally escort me to the plane. I felt a twitching in my left eye. I'd been very sad, especially as I waved at my grandmother, wondering if I'd ever see her again, but I hadn't been able to cry. My right ear seemed to tear, but my left remained stoic. And now this little electrical flash just flaring across my eyeball because, you see, it was in my eyeball. Not on my eyelid, not on my brow, but right there, in my eye, as if my optic nerve had developed a tick. For a few minutes, I saw double and I had a great deal of trouble climbing up the air stairs and finding my seat. Everyone assumed I was too emotional to make sense of boarding, but the twitching didn't go away. At customs in Miami, it got so bad, I was actually asked by an agent if I needed medical attention. I said I didn't, but I was just nervous, which my trembling hands seemed to authenticate. What had me genuinely concerned was my left eye now seemed to have a kind of filter that felt as if someone was constantly opening and shutting a set of blinds. I was supposed to have two hours of rest before I caught my next flight to San Francisco, but assuming it was the prospect of seeing my father that had triggered my state, I quickly pulled out my contact list, the list every Cuban has or who they'd call if they ever got off the island, and asked the passenger for my flight if I could borrow her cell phone to make a call. One of the advantages of my worthless museum security guard job was that I got to meet a lot of foreigners, especially artists. They were usually busy proving their proletariat bonafides to the Cubans who never actually talked to us by making nice with us. That's how I'd gotten to know a video artist named Laura Voss when she had a one-woman show at the museum. During her installation, it frequently been just her and me in the exhibition, through many an afternoon, and I'd proven a good helper and sounding board. Before she left Cuba, she'd given me her number and said to call her if I ever found myself in Miami. This is who again? Laura asked after I'd identified myself. Milba, I said, from the museum in Havana? To my surprise, Laura didn't hesitate once I explained about my father, the avenging Christian, and the way my body had gone into revolt at the thought of seeing him. In about an hour, she was exactly where she said she'd be, at the Starbucks and Terminal D East, just before the security check out. I'd never been so relieved in my life. I honestly don't know what I would have done if she hadn't shown up. The flicker in my eye had sped up in an hour and a minute while I waited. Laura greeted me with a familiar hug that far exceeded our island acquaintance, took my single suitcase and drove me to her home, which turned out to be not a palace on the beach, but a small wooden house in Kendall with a garage that served as her studio. I almost asked her what had happened, that I thought she was a successful artist, but I caught myself. She was driving a 2002 Ford Focus station wagon. By Cuban standards, that's practically a luxury car, and I knew, even in the airport parking lot, where it was surrounded by scores of newer, shinier cars, I could only rightfully picture through my one good eye that I'd probably misjudged her situation. That very night, after settling me into her guest bedroom, Laura gave me a spare laptop, a spare laptop, and set up an account for me on Facebook. She suggested I try to find people I knew in the States. I told her about my contact list, and I said on Facebook, all you need to do is somebody's name, but I didn't need their phone number or address. I sat at the kitchen table long after she went to bed, one hand covering my jittery eye, and the other typing in name after name of people I knew from Cuba who'd been long gone. I was on an old friend's page when I saw some pictures of myself. From the very night, my ear had started giving me trouble. There I was dancing, but you could see from my expression something was wrong. The Canadian was also in the frame. My friend had tagged her, and I followed the link to her page, where I discovered there was a whole album, 132 pictures total, of her trip to Cuba, including many places I'd never even heard of, like a beach called Maria la Gorda, that had been declared a World Biosphere Reserve by UNESCO. This was a Cuba unknown to me. All parrotfish and blurry hummingbirds, with only the occasional brown arm, helping the Canadian onto a boat, and her and her friends abound to full meal. I scanned her other albums, and saw she was quite the world traveler, swimming along green sea turtles in the Philippines, with moray eels in the Solomon Islands, and walking along what appeared to be a beach at night with blue-white stars scattered in the sand, as if the sky had emptied a constellation on the shore. I wonder if my eye was playing tricks on me. The caption read, Ostracut crustaceans, kind of like bioluminescent phytoplankton, lighting up the shore in Muru Island, in the Maldives. I thought, amazing. I stayed up close to Dawn, searching for more photos of the strange phenomenon, but mostly finding image after image of beaches and beach towns in the Maldives, little storybook villages with an infinite span of blue-green water surrounding them, the sky and endless tender light, nothing look crowded in the Maldives, and even in the capital city of Malay, houses were wreathed by gardens of blue and orange flowers, hammocks everywhere. Best of all, of the approximately 1200 islands that make up the country, and I say approximately because the number of islands depends on the season, only about 200 are inhabited, and only half of those have tourist resorts. Honestly, I couldn't figure out why UNESCO hadn't declared all of the Maldives a World Biosphere Reserve. The next day, I opened my eyes, and everything was in perfect focus, the ceiling fan above Laura's guest bed, the floor print on the duvet, the giant black screen on the wall with its blinking red light. It took me a second to remember where I was. The United States, Miami, the home of someone I barely knew, and then I heard a low bass throbbing through the wall with a knock of Laura's knuckles on the bedroom door. Adelante, I said, and then she came with a tray holding a glass of orange juice, a banana, a stack of pancakes, and a small cup of black coffee with a full head of foam. You won't get service like this every day, she said, but today being your first day in America, I almost said something about America being the entirety of the Western Hemisphere, but gratitude shut me up. Instead, I asked her how to make the picture of the glow in the dark beach in the Maldives, the wallpaper on my new laptop. In truth, Laura Vaz turned out to be an exceptional friend. When I further explained my situation, including that I wouldn't have a green card or a work permit for a year in a day, she got on the phone and found me a job washing dishes at a restaurant owned by some friends of hers who paid me in cash. I wasn't making a ton of money, but enough to buy a bus pass. I was still spending an eternity on buses, go to the movies now and again and buy groceries and creams for my chapped hands. Then Laura said that she was going on a fellowship to London for part of the year and would have to pay someone to house it if I left. So almost immediately, even though I was sending money to my family every month, I even had savings. I did get a cell phone pretty quickly and I did eventually call my father and thank him for getting me out of Cuba. He was furious with me, accused me of using him just to come over, but I made no effort to explain that I'd gotten sick just thinking about living with him. Part of it was that as time had passed and my vision and hearing functioned normally, it was hard to believe my symptoms hadn't been psychosomatic and I just didn't want to give him that kind of power. In spite of having my new cell, I didn't make any other calls. I knew people in Miami and Key West and Tampa, but I actually didn't want to see anyone. I folded up my contact list and put it away. Laura's house was blissfully quiet. All I ever heard were little warblers up in the palm trees and the mailman lifting the letter slot in the afternoon. My bed, which Laura constantly apologized for because it was only a single, felt as long and wide as a luxury liner to me. Initially, I had tried to pay Laura back for her kindness by cooking and cleaning, but she got upset, said she was gaining weight and that she liked to take care of her stuff herself. I was terrified I'd offended her, so I just tried to stay out of her way in the restroom. I watched a lot of TV, especially documentaries, including The Island President about how the Maldives are disappearing due to rising sea levels caused by climate change. The Island President wants the world to learn a lesson from his country's predicament. The Island President wants the world to take responsibility. The situation is so bad, they've even got a sovereign land fund to buy new territory and move once their countries submerged, like Alexandria and the pyramids of Yonaguni in Japan, or like Guanakabibes, an underwater city off Cuba's western shore, except that no one who is in Cuba actually thinks it's a city, just a bunch of geological anomalies. As soon as Laura left for London, I ended my self-imposed exile in the guest room. I opened every door in the house and danced from room to room. What splendor to open my arms wide and just feel cool, satiny air conditioning on my skin. What extravagance to take a hot 40-minute shower in the morning and a cool hour-long bath at night. I walked around naked and whistled and even did cartwheels in the living room. I thought for sure I'd get lonely at some point, but I didn't. I got plenty of human interaction at the restaurant and on the bus. Every now and again, I'd run into someone I know, and when I evaded their questions, they assumed I was either having a mysterious affair with a rich American or spying for Cuba. They'd write my mother and then she'd write me and I know we both laughed about it. One night at the restaurant, I was loading the dishwasher and singing along to a new song by Caetrese when suddenly somebody turned off the radio. Hey, I said, come on, as I reached for a pair of latex gloves to tackle the pots. But the music didn't come back on. I walked over to the radio and turned up the dial and almost immediately one of the owners swatted my hand away. He was saying something. His mouth was moving and his face showed irritation, and I couldn't hear a thing. I shook my head, but the bubble tightened. Suddenly I could only see him through what appeared to be a fisheye lens. He grabbed me by the shoulder and brought his face close to mine, but I couldn't understand him. Before I knew it, the other owner, a Panamanian guy who had been trying to set me up with his 52-year-old sister since I'd arrived, threw me in his Jeep and drove me to the emergency room at Jackson Memorial Hospital. We were there until dawn, and he stayed with me the whole time, occasionally squeezing my hand and bringing me something to eat and drink. The ER wasn't much different than Ciro Garcia Hospital in Havana, except that the electricity didn't go out the whole time we were there. Otherwise, it was the same defeated faces, the same resignation to whatever fate had just been ordained by a fall or accident or, in my case, the sudden collapse of my senses. They found the tumor when they did an MRI on my brain. It sat dead center of my skull, shaped like a two-inch comma and leaning heavily to the left. It had wrapped itself around my auditory nerve so as to practically strangle it. It was also big enough to damage both cranial nerves four and five, which explained why I had had double vision and couldn't tear up. What they couldn't tell me was why I had hearing loss in both ears. They needed to run more tests. Unless I did something, they said, via notes the Panamanian wrote out both my hearing and vision would slowly deteriorate. They talked about surgery and radiation, experimental medicines and treatments like the CyberKnife and auditory brain implants, all of which I could never afford. The restaurant didn't offer health insurance and I would have been ineligible anyway, waiting for the year and a day when I would have my U.S. residents and my work permit. I wasn't dying and I wouldn't die from this tumor, they told me, it would literally leave me trapped in my own body. After the Panamanian took me home, I sat in Laura's expansive living room and thought about my predicament. My father would tell me this was a punishment from God for all my sins, all the women I'd briefly loved. My mother would tell me it was fate that there are forces in the universe greater than us that we simply must obey. Was there anything to learn for anyone from my situation? Who would take responsibility for me? I got myself a beer and counted my money. I had saved about $8,000. I was considering buying a ticket back to Havana. Knowing with that money, my family could probably take care of me for a very long time. I had no illusions about my condition being relieved in Havana. Certainly, I would get medical attention. I would be visited by doctors, but I knew Cuba simply didn't have the equipment or expertise to help me and I didn't want to have brain surgery in a hospital where the power went off and on without regard to what was happening on the operating table. I opened my laptop to send an email to an acquaintance from the museum who had agreed to relay messages to my mother in case of emergency. And then I saw my wallpaper that blue-white constellation across the coastline in the Maldives and I knew time was of the essence. I might not ever hear the waves slapping the shore, but my vision, at least at that moment, was again as good as a high-power-like lens. When I searched for one-way tickets to Mali, I found they were within my reach. I could probably find a job washing dishes or maybe gardening until my eyes failed. Then I could sail to one of those islands where no one goes and lay myself down in all that phosphorescence. I would sink into the firmament of the Maldives and let the water rise one centimeter at a time, lifting me, guiding me through the silent dark to a new Atlantis. Muchas gracias. At your behers, thank you.