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I arrived at the workshop about twenty minutes before the afternoon shift began. I planned to take advantage of those minuets in solitude. I parked in front of the adjacent lot, and as I crossed the yard, I glanced at the group gathered in the shade of the overhang, in case anyone from my team saw me. I went around the workshop on the opposite side, passing behind the backs of people in purple coats. I recognized a few faces I associated with other workstations, but no one who would justify troubling me.

In the bare ground behind the workshop, used as a dumping area, containers and stacks of boxes formed a maze. I hurried to a bend where a stack partially blocked the view of the building and cast a shadow. Seated there, I took shelter in the mild dimness that smelled of dust and rusty iron.

Only two minutes had passed when I heard a female voice pleading. I strained to catch the words, but it was pointless. I was listening to Caroline.

I edged around the stack to peer beyond it. The woman was shuffling her feet by a container packed with discarded parts. Through her disheveled hair, she looked around like someone lost. Her coat’s right pocket was bulging with pieces whose sharp edges poked out, and beneath the coat, the flutter of a sunflower-yellow dress reached to within an inch above her knees. Her tanned legs were crossed by scars. Two cuts gleamed red, as if sometime in the last twenty-four hours she’d torn her skin on a protruding edge. Dangling from her slack right arm was a metal lunch box printed with a brown horse, the sort a preschooler might carry.

Caroline was murmuring entreaties. Minutes earlier, she might have been wandering a field until some dimensional rift transported her to this world, which seemed wrong everywhere she looked, so she was searching for the way back.

Above her reddened eye bags, her corneas had gone glassy. Her head and shoulders shuddered as though coughing, and when the babble shifted into sobs, the woman collapsed onto a wooden spool the size of a coffee table, one that had once held copper cable. Caroline let the lunch box drop, and clutched at her skirt. She broke down crying.

The cracked dam that had held back tons of pain had burst. The woman trembled and whimpered as if no one in the world existed who could hear her, or care. She wandered a charred landscape as the last creature of her species.

Echoes of that crying had reached me in the workshop while I focused on whichever part I was assembling or fixing. A background track to the rolling of conveyor belts and the hum of the air conditioning.

Tears ran down Caroline’s cheeks. They dripped from her chin as her mouth murmured phrases no one would understand, strings of syllables one articulation short of becoming words. I listened as a dog’s owner might listen, suspecting any moment the animal might start speaking.

My cells had frozen over. I waited, an inanimate object among the stacks of boxes and heaps of trash. How much of an adult mind remained in Caroline’s head? What had caused her condition? A severe childhood fever, a brain injury? Was she born broken? The seamless dream in which she flowed most of the time had decayed into a nightmare, and Caroline was confronting the darkness and despair to which the rest of us had grown used, to one degree or another, so we could keep going.

Footsteps approached—a man with the gait of a scrawny gorilla, bald except for a band of hair rising at his temples. His beard crawled down his neck and merged with wirelike hair sprouting from beneath his coat. A pelt covered the backs of his hands, and the hair under his sleeves threatened to burst through the fabric. The man, worried like someone running to a car wreck on the highway, crouched next to Caroline and spoke to her. Her shoulders shook as she whimpered. He brushed a lock of Caroline’s hair behind her ear, put an arm around her shoulders, and kissed her temple. The sleeves of her coat and the ruffle of her skirt were flecked with tears.

* * *

Héctor blew his nose every couple of minutes in a wet, snoring sound that set my nerves on edge; I clenched my jaw to keep them under control. My body had a layer of dried sweat like a film of grease. Though I kept my head down, focusing on my hands and the parts sliding toward me on the conveyor belt, I had a sixth sense that Christopher, on my right, was gesturing and fidgeting. Whenever I gripped a piece, the pressure bothered my fingertips through the gloves. The racket of the machines and the conveyor belts, daily wear on our eardrums, now pricked my skin as if I were rolling around on gravel.

Ten, twenty, thirty fewer seconds remained until the horn blared. I would take off my coat and gloves and flee home to breathe within four walls, where no one would see me nor demand my attention.

My bladder ached, though it was maybe a quarter full. I asked for a break. I slid the part to my right and climbed off the stool just as Christopher leaned in to speak into my ear, like a giraffe sticking its head through a car window.

“Was that a test?” he said.

“What?”

“The two pieces with the wires hooked up wrong. You were expecting me to catch it and fix them.”

“You mean I sent you two that were messed up?”

He gave me a confused look, but in a few seconds one corner of his mouth curled in a smile, as though I’d just admitted to playing a prank on him.

“You never sent me faulty parts before. But I spotted them. So when Héctor’s on my left, if he messes anything up, I’ll fix those too.”

My brain throbbed. I excused myself. Head lowered, eyes half-closed so the path among the work tables barely registered on my glasses, I crossed the workshop. At the entrance of the hallway leading to the bathroom, I peered at the steps that went up to the supervisor’s office. I hurried past the staircase before she could catch me and start asking questions.

I peed. I splashed cold water on my face. When my chest finally eased its anxiety, I confronted the mirror. The beads of water along my cheekbones and jaw gleamed yellow. A face with a dead eye ringed by half a dozen scars—coral-pink cracks where shrapnel had lodged in the bone. A face that should have remained invisible.

After drying myself off with toilet paper, I put on my sunglasses and leaned against the sink. The child’s corpse deformed the back of my mind like a lead ball on a taut sheet. It called from the trunk of the car, a beacon growing louder and louder. The workshop crew would hear it. They’d head out to the yard, gather at the trunk, open it, and discover the rotting body.

I hobbled back down the hallway toward the workshop. A pop song spilled out of the open office door, and there stood the supervisor, stopped five steps above my floor, looking at me. Her lime-green sleeveless top hung loose like a priestess’s tunic, revealing over one collarbone the black strap of an undershirt and that of her bra. The skin of her arms hung slack. Her hair reached her shoulders, but she’d trimmed her bangs right at the hairline, as if one morning she’d gotten sick of them refusing to behave and chopped them off with scissors.

I was already turning toward the workshop when she called my name.

“Feeling better?”

What might she know that would make her ask me that? I’d told her I woke up vomiting. Fool. Any pause in which I hesitated could stir suspicion.

“I’ve stopped throwing up, but the discomfort will take a couple of days to go away.”

Standing a few steps up, she nodded and smiled with straight white teeth on full display like items in a shop window. Most times I looked at her, that grin bared down to the gums distracted me.

“And aside from that, everything okay?” she asked.

“It’s been dragging down my whole week.”

She fiddled with one of the many wristbands stacked on her left arm. The smile loosened as she weighed her words.

“It’s just… you look nervous, like something’s bothering you.”

I braced myself.

“I give that impression?”

“All day, on the line.”

I pictured her perched at the window in her office, gauging my every expression and gesture, like a judge at a gymnastics showcase.

“Is it the dead child in the trunk?” she asked.

A wave of cold rippled through me, and I trembled like I’d overdosed on caffeine. My mind rattled with white noise. Her smile was the smile of a friend. Had I slipped up, or was this my imagination?

As she studied my face, she opened her hands at her sides.

“I know how you handle these problems,” she said. “You bury what’s bad inside, and let it get infected. But with every problem, we’re free to suffer or to smile and face it positively.”

I held my breath. My pulse fluttered, but I kept my features from stiffening.

“It’s so easy to think negative,” she went on, “but we have to work at it. Before anger or fear takes over, we should think about the positive steps that could transform us. Remember: we receive what we transmit.”

“Really?” I asked robotically.

“It’s a science.”

An employee with Down syndrome appeared beside me. I recognized him from seeing the guy on breaks under some awning, eating a sandwich.

“They sent twelve fewer,” he said.

The supervisor’s grin brightened. She leaned toward him and spoke as if talking to a baby.

“You mean twelve fewer parts?”

“Twelve fewer.”

I barely kept myself from digging my nails into my palms. I wanted free of her smile, of her presence. I cleared my throat.

“I need to get back to my line.”

I turned, but she asked me to wait. She came down a few steps, rested a hand on the other guy’s shoulder, and gestured toward the workshop.

“Go back to your station. In a short while, I’ll figure out how to fix it, okay?”

He nodded and slipped behind me. The supervisor lifted her hand as if to touch my arm, but let it drop like she’d realized she almost patted a cactus.

“I’m not trying to pry. You know, I never saw the signs with Norman Reyes.” She stopped. Her smile faltered as she glanced around, like a watchdog worried a censor might overhear. “And since he left, I keep wondering if there were signs for someone who knew how to spot them.”

I’d forgotten the coordinator’s name days after he vanished from the workshop. The next day I read a newspaper piece declaring him dead, with no suspicion of foul play. During a break, half a dozen workers had cornered the supervisor to ask questions. While wearing a smile, she put her palms together at her abdomen and said the coordinator resigned for personal reasons.

I pushed aside the images of that day, then faced the supervisor. Her lips were frozen in a smile, so forced it had become a gesture of sincerity, as if letting that smile fade might tempt the universe to rain fire on her. Did she really believe we didn’t know the coordinator had killed himself? Did I work among such morons that they didn’t realize it? Even so, I still had questions. I’d never learn the answers. Had he shot himself? Drowned? Electrocuted himself? Hanged himself from a doorknob with his belt?

“I can’t wear your skin,” she said, her tone like someone speaking to a dog that won’t drop a bone. “I don’t know what the war left inside you, how it feels to come back to a world where nobody orders you to kill.”

My cheeks went hot, my nostrils flared. I could feel spines sprouting along my backbone. I swept aside the irritation from my voice.

“It doesn’t help me work better, or calm down, knowing someone’s watching my every expression.”

“Do you think I have bad intentions?”

“If my work is fine, like you told me at the last review, then my personal problems concern only me.”

“We’re in this workshop together.”

“We’re not a family. We’re tied together because we need money to survive, and working for a paycheck is a legal way to get it.”

“But if something is weighing on you so much that it darkens your mood, it affects those around you.”

I rubbed my forehead and pushed up my glasses, which had slid down my nose.

“It’s got nothing to do with my job. It’s my own business.”

She looked as though I’d insulted her. Someone else would have rushed to link together apologies.

“I just want to help,” she said.

I bent forward and pressed my palms together like a peace offering.

“Listen, you’re a good person. Okay? There’s your daily reminder. Now, please, I need to get back to the line or I’ll have to swallow remarks about how much time I’m wasting in the bathroom.”

When I reached the line, Christopher looked up.

“Feeling sick again?”

“Diarrhea,” I said. “Explosive.”

---

Author’s note: this novella was originally published in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.

That moment with Caroline crying was inspired by a moment I witnessed back when I was attending a course for disabled people. I was seated on a bench during a break, when a beautiful woman wearing a work coat lurched to the bench opposite me (we were separated by about seven meters or so, though), and started bawling like a child. I could do nothing but stare as if I were witnessing something meaningful. Shortly after, a monkey man went out and the rest of the moment played out like it happened in my story. Never found out what that was all about, nor saw the woman again.