Yayo's tongue feels heavy and foreign in his mouth, as if a small mouse had climbed in during the night. There's a glass of water on the nightstand, and Yayo fixes his eyes on it until the water turns to a hazy afternoon sky, and the bed and pillow become a santero's black hands, his sweaty fingers wrapped around Yayo's newborn head and body, swaying him back and forth, back and forth, as he dashes madly through an open field. Pressed against the santero's chest, Yayo smells onions, tobacco and pig's blood, and he hears the frantic beating of a heart, and the frantic screams of a woman carried by the wind.
I'm going crazy, Yayo whispers to himself, not knowing that his mind was simply playing back his earliest memory: a few days after his birth, when the santero Cachao climbed through an open window and snatched him from his parent's bedroom while his mother prepared a bath for herself. "It was the dog that saved you," his mother would tell him many years later. "If Luna hadn't barked herself into a frenzy, I would have slid into that tub and you would have been raised by animals." Instead, Mirta ran half-naked into the bedroom, fearing the dog was mauling the boy in a fit of jealousy. What she saw instead was Cachao straddling the window, one leg outside, one leg inside, and Yayo clutched against his chest. Mirta screamed so loud, the world outside fell silent and still, and for a split second, Cachao sat motionless on the sill, like an animal that suddenly finds itself the prey. Mirta lunged towards him, but Cachao was too quick, and the next thing she remembers is running after him through the malanga field, screaming sueltalo! sueltalo!, wearing only her panties, and her bare breasts, large and heavy with milk, bouncing wildly together.
What saved the boy wasn't the dog, but their neighbor Jose, who was packing his horse to go hunting. When he heard the screaming and saw the chase at the other end of the field, Jose grabbed his rifle and started running in their direction. But when he realized he would never get to them in time, he stopped and fired the rifle into the air. A single bullet is all it took for Cachao to give up the boy, setting him down on the hot, dry ground, and he ran to the edge of the field, to where the sugarcane grew, and disappeared forever through the giant stalks.
Mirta found Yayo screaming, his little round face as red as a ripe tomato. She dropped to her knees and picked him up, pressed her cheek against his, and cried uncontrollably for what seemed like an eternity. She then latched Yayo to her breast, and he sucked vigorously for a few minutes, until he fell into a deep sleep that lasted all day and all night.
Yayo won't sleep anymore tonight. He hasn’t slept more than a couple of hours a night since he turned into a ceiba tree in a dream, bursting through the living room floor of the shanty old house in Cuba where he grew up. His trunk and branches tore through the house like a solid tornado, tossing furniture and buckling the walls, and when the devastation was over, the palm-thatched roof was gone, replaced by Yayo’s majestic canopy high above the ground. There were no people in the dream, nothing else living. This was either the beginning or the end of the world. Yayo could feel the air molecules around the tips of his branches electrify, and he screamed in fear, but the sound remained trapped inside him, growing louder and louder as it bounced off his inner trunk. Seconds later, Yayo awoke in a burst of light. 
As he reaches for the water on the nightstand, another thought crosses Yayo's mind: Maybe dying isn't about not waking up one day; it's about staying awake forever.
*****
