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I had expected the boyfriend’s face to be reddened with anger, but he looked at me as though I’d backed into his car bumper and he was annoyed by the paperwork. Two curving furrows framed his mouth. Horizontal lines split his forehead. His ash-blond hair had hidden the fact he was nearing forty. A diagonal, reddish shaving cut crossed the contour of his prominent jaw.

“Yeah, we noticed,” the man said.

I pressed my lips thin and took a breath.

He pulled his left hand out of his jeans and snapped his thumb and forefinger in front of my nose.

“You. Hello.”

“I work around here,” I rasped.

“You’re not driving miles every day just to drool over my girlfriend? That’s a relief. So you must think we’re idiots, or blind.”

“What difference does it make?”

He narrowed his eyes. He traded a look with his girlfriend, as if asking her whether she believed an idiot like me could exist. He rolled his shoulders while curling his lip into a mocking half-sneer.

“My girlfriend would prefer that you not stare at her.”

He waited for me to defend myself. As a car approached, we stepped aside toward the truck’s cab so the car could pass. I glanced at him and the woman, turned around, and started walking deeper into the parking lot. But he snarled something after me as if I’d walked out on a bar tab, then seized the shoulder of my shirt and tugged me into the space between the two trucks. I staggered, and as I steadied myself, he shoved me in the chest. I stumbled back a few steps. The trailers towered on either side. He closed the gap in two strides, grabbed the collar of my shirt with his left hand, and squeezed. The fabric tightened around the back of my neck.

A tremor ran from his arm into my torso, but I was calm as a Buddhist monk. It was happening to someone else.

“Anyone?” the boyfriend asked while tilting his head at his girlfriend.

She, one hand on her hip, turned toward the sight framed by truck cabs: a sprawling grid of parked cars, their windshields glinting like a chessboard under the sun, asphalt stripes dividing them into obedient lines. Out of sight, an engine revved. A group of people spoke. Her profile alone could have sold on a fashion magazine cover.

“No one.”

When I looked back at the boyfriend, his fist blotted out my vision. The punch snapped my head back, shattering my sunglasses. He jerked my shirt collar to swing my head forward, and smashed another punch into my right cheekbone, bursting it in a flare of pain.

I collapsed onto my back on the asphalt, which singed my skin through the clothes. A wash of brightness overwhelmed me as though the sun had swelled to many times its size. Two humanoid figures blurred around me in a shining cascade. I blinked. Even squinting my left eye to a slit, my cornea felt like it was burning.

“Jesus, Bill,” the woman said. “You just blew out his eye.”

“Look at the scars, honey. It was already that way.”

I propped myself on my elbows. My head hummed like a bell, and a piercing ring echoed in my ears.

Everything dimmed. The boyfriend blotted out the sun, ringed by a downy glow. While rubbing the knuckles of his right hand, he eyed my dead eye as though hitting me was tantamount to killing off an endangered species in a nature reserve.

“You get used to the looks when you’re dating this girl. But I draw the line when someone keeps ogling her even after he’s caught in the act. What would come next? I’ll tell you: nothing.”

After crouching down, he forced me onto my side and rummaged in my back pocket. Before I knew what he was doing, he opened my wallet and slid out the four or five bills, but then shoved them back. He pulled out my driver’s license and inspected it.

“Strange last name. Scandinavian?”

From the next card he drew out, I recognized the back of my veteran’s ID. He alternated between reading it and staring at me.

I frowned. I thought about speaking, but I might have vomited from the effort.

The boyfriend relaxed his shoulders, then tossed my wallet onto the asphalt, beside my hand. When I picked it up, I quickly counted the bills, as best I could in my daze, in case he’d swapped them for counterfeits in some magic trick.

“I’ve driven by those apartments,” he said. “Let me guess: roaches and bedbugs?”

When I probed the throbbing spot beneath my dead eye, a lightning pain shot through that side of my face in a web of inflamed nerves. I ground my teeth.

“No bedbugs.”

“Better. The thought of sleeping on a mattress infested with those things terrifies me. I used to think they were microscopic till I googled it. Can you imagine lifting a mattress and finding hundreds of them?”

I just watched him, blinking to moisten my cornea. The asphalt scorched my elbows.

“In any case,” he said, “I don’t fully blame you for looking at my girl—I do it plenty myself. But it bothers her.”

Then, as if stepping into the ring, the woman loomed on my left like a giant. Beneath her corset top, two vertical channels of taut skin hinted at the columns of her abs. She bent over me. The swelling of her lifted breasts pinched the chain of a pendant with a golden cross at the end.

“It bothers me when a freak stares at me.”

The boyfriend shrugged.

“You’ll have to eat somewhere else, buddy.”

The woman’s face twisted in disgust. My dead eye fascinated her like a hairy spider.

“You might try eating where people like you hang out.”

I pushed myself upright. I brushed the grime from my hands and forearms.

He sighed and looked at her. “That enough?”

She nodded, but after giving me one more glance, she struck a threatening pose and pointed a finger.

“Stay away.”

She turned, and the boyfriend laid a palm on the bronzed skin of her lower back, right above the waistline. While they walked off, he tilted his head my way, touched the brim of his hat, and nodded earnestly.

“Thanks for your service to the country.”

When the truck cab blocked them from sight, my torso felt as though it weighed a ton. I lay there on the blazing asphalt. I could barely keep my good eye open for more than a second before it glazed over. The right side of my face around the cheekbone throbbed with slow, warm pulses as my body focused on knitting torn fibers back together.

What did I think would happen with all this spying on her? Maybe I had just dreaded the day they would stop coming to Wendy’s and I’d have to sit there staring at my burger. Today I had chosen a closer table because I needed some kind of pleasure to offset the morning’s misery. My brain’s chemical balance had me in chains. I’d convinced myself piecemeal. So what if I stared today for a while, or stared more tomorrow? Since I woke up that morning, how many details had slipped by as I squandered myself, hunting for some reason to keep going?

A door opened and a radio announcer launched into the news. Someone threw an exclamation my way. I visualized the effort it would take to stand up, as if I had to heft a grown man’s corpse, but my muscles refused to execute the order. A trucker—his cap striped red, white, and blue—leaned halfway out his cab window.

“You gonna let me back this thing up, or you wanna end up under the wheels?”

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