Hour Eleven

I count to ninety in the dark before I let myself believe it.

Not ninety seconds — ninety of my grandfather's slow, deliberate breaths, the rhythm he taught me when I was seven and afraid of the lightning over the Malecón. By forty I can hear the Hotel Telégrafo on the corner cough its generator awake, a low animal hum that means the rest of the block is dark, that the breaker in 4A is not the problem, that this is real. By sixty I am naming smells instead of thinking — gardenia from Doña Marta's landing two floors down, the kerosene leak from 2A that the super has been promising to fix since I was in secondary school, the cold pot of my grandfather's coffee on the counter going from bitter to something older than bitter. By eighty I have not yet named what I am afraid of. By ninety, I have to.

The fridge from 1987 has been silent for eleven hours.

Eleven hours. I know because my watch has a luminous dial my mother gave me when I started pharmacy school — a Russian thing, Soviet-era, ugly as a goat, but it glows green in the dark like a small loyal animal. The hands say 9:47. The apagón started at 10:52 this morning, while I was on the balcony pretending to study for a pharmacology practical I have not studied for, and at first I told myself, una hora, dos a lo sumo, the way you tell yourself it will stop raining when you have no umbrella.

On the kitchen table, in the soft green wash of my watch, I can just make out the shape of my grandfather's leather bag. Brown, scuffed, with brass clasps that he polishes on Sundays with a corner of his guayabera. Inside it: a hand-bound formulary in his beautiful sloping hand, a brass measuring scale older than the revolution, and a sealed envelope with my name on it that he thinks I do not know about. Beside the bag, in the small refrigerated pouch he keeps tucked into a sock, is one glass vial of insulin.

I have been guessing at its temperature all afternoon. That is the only honest verb. Guessing.

"¿Mi niña?" His voice from the front room, soft enough not to wake my mother, who has finally collapsed on the sofa after a double shift. "¿Es la hora?"

I check the watch again. Seven minutes.

"Casi, abuelo," I call back, in the dry sideways voice I use when I am afraid. "Un momentico."

Un momentico. A little little moment. As if making the word small can make the problem small.

I pick up the pouch. Through the insulated nylon, the vial does not feel cold. It feels like a thing the room has been allowed to touch. In my head, automatically, the way other people hum: a vial of regular human insulin, stored above eight degrees Celsius for more than — what, six hours? eight? — is a vial whose potency I cannot promise. And una medicina en la que no puedes confiar, my grandfather has said in three different lecture halls and four different kitchens, es peor que ninguna medicina.

A medicine you cannot trust is worse than no medicine at all.

He taught me that sentence the same year he taught me to ride a bicycle. I will not say it back to him tonight.

"Abuelo," I call, keeping my voice from doing anything interesting, "voy abajo un momento. Vuelvo enseguida."

A pause. The creak of the armchair. "¿A dónde, mi niña?"

"A buscar algo en casa de Marta." The lie comes easy. He hears it land.

"Bueno." Another pause. "En chancletas no, mi vida. Ponte los zapatos."

I almost laugh. Eleven hours into an apagón, the city dark as a closed mouth, and the man is worried about my flip-flops on the stairs. I bend and pull on my one good pair of shoes — black, scuffed at the toe, bought used from a woman in Centro Habana two summers ago and saved for exams, weddings, and emergencies. Tonight is the third category. I take the battered aluminum thermos from the shelf above the sink, the one my grandfather used to carry coffee to his lectures, and I hold it against my chest like something that might be alive.

In the doorway I stop. "Abuelo. Si mami se despierta —"

"Le digo que fuiste por una vela."

"Gracias."

"Yaima." His voice does the small thing it does when he is going to say something he means. "No corras."

I run.

The stairwell is a black throat. I take the steps two at a time, one hand on the iron rail my great-grandfather painted green in 1962, the thermos banging against my ribs in a rhythm that is almost the rhythm of my grandfather's breathing exercise and I will not let myself notice that. Fourth floor. Third floor — the gardenia hits me before I see it, that thick wet sweetness Doña Marta keeps alive with rationed water and a stubbornness that has outlived two husbands. From inside 3B a transistor radio is whispering a baseball game, Industriales and someone, the announcer's voice tinny and faithful in the dark. Second floor — a couple arguing about who forgot to buy candles, the woman saying coño, Lázaro, te lo dije and Lázaro saying nothing because what is there to say. First floor. Out.

Calle San Pablo at ten o'clock on a night with no current is a held breath. No streetlamps. No neon. No televisions bluing the windows from inside. Just the orange wash from the Hotel Telégrafo's generator sign on the corner, throwing long shadows of the laurel tree across the broken sidewalk, and the moving white cones of bicycle lamps weaving down the middle of the street because the middle of the street is the only place you can see.

I turn toward Vedado and I walk fast.

The rumor came through Doña Marta this afternoon, who got it from her niece who works at the dry cleaner's, whose cousin's husband knows a woman in the back kitchen of Coppelia — that the morning shipment of ice for the ice cream tanks had not yet been used up, that a back door might open for a person with a thermos and a reasonable face. Coppelia. The cathedral of ice cream. I have not been inside it since I was a child holding my grandfather's hand in a line that wrapped twice around the park, his guayabera fresh and his shoes shined, telling me which flavors were named after which Russian satellites.

Four blocks. Three. Two. By the time I reach the corner of 23 and L my lungs are burning and the thermos is slick in my palm with my own sweat and I am running the calculation again in my head — that even if I get ice now, even if I pack the vial in a wet bandanna and bury it in shaved cold by 10:15, it has already been warm for eleven hours, and the question is not whether it is good but whether it is good enough, and I am twenty-four years old and in my final year of school and I do not know the answer. I should know the answer. By December I will be the person other people ask. Tonight I am still the person running.

I come around the corner of Coppelia's service alley at a sprint and stop so hard I nearly fall.

The loading door is shut. A heavy padlock hangs from the hasp, dull in the orange light. On the step, on an overturned plastic crate, a woman in a stained apron is smoking the last quarter of a cigarette with the patient air of a person who has been telling people no for an hour.

She looks at the thermos in my hand. She does not look at my face. She shakes her head once, small, almost kind.

"Se acabó hace una hora, mi amor. Lo siento."

It finished an hour ago. I am sorry.

I open my mouth. I close it. I am suddenly, ridiculously, aware of my one good pair of shoes on the filthy concrete, and of the fact that I have not eaten since a piece of bread at seven this morning, and of the fact that somewhere four flights up in a chair in the dark my grandfather is counting his own breaths and pretending he is not.

"Gracias," I say. My voice does a small thing I do not like.

The woman nods. She does not waste a second cigarette on me.

I walk back out to Calle 23 with the thermos hanging empty at my side and I stop at the curb because I cannot think of where to take my feet next. The Malecón breeze reaches me from blocks away, salty and indifferent, the sea doing what the sea always does, which is not care. In my head the math runs without me — how many hours the vial has left, how many vials are left in this city tonight, how many pharmacies will open tomorrow if the current does not come back, how many old men in how many fourth-floor walk-ups are sitting in armchairs in the dark waiting for a granddaughter or a grandson or a wife to come home with a small cold thing in a thermos. Hundreds. It has to be hundreds. The number opens in my chest like a door I did not mean to open.

I do not cry. I am not the kind of person who cries on Calle 23 with an empty thermos. I will go home. I will give him half a dose from the suspect vial and I will lie about which vial it was. I will sit in the kitchen until the current returns and then I will study for my practical and in December I will be a pharmacist and none of this will have happened, because that is how I will need it to be.

I lift my head to cross.

That is when I feel him looking.

Across the wide black mouth of 23, leaning in the recessed doorway of a closed barbershop, is a man about my age. Stained mechanic's shirt, sleeves shoved to the elbow. A grease rag hanging from his back pocket like a tail. He is not smoking. He is not on a phone. He is standing very still with a white Styrofoam cooler balanced on one hip, his hand spread flat across the lid like he is holding down a small animal that wants to escape.

Condensation is beading on the lid of the cooler. As I watch, a single drop swells at the bottom corner and falls and hits the sidewalk and joins a small dark patch that has been forming there for, I would guess, the length of a cigarette.

He is looking at me. He has been looking at me, I realize, since I came around the alley. He is not smiling. He is not moving. He is, very obviously, waiting to see what I will do.

The thermos in my hand. The watch on my wrist saying 9:58. The vial four flights up in a sock in a leather bag with brass clasps. My grandfather's voice, soft from the armchair: ¿Mi niña? ¿Es la hora?

A stranger in a doorway with a cooler that is dripping.

I think, very clearly, in my grandfather's voice and in my own at the same time: una medicina en la que no puedes confiar es peor que ninguna medicina. And then I think, also clearly: but ice is ice.

I step off the curb.