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About five yards from the backseat where I sat, the shoulder of the road swelled like a time-lapse shot of a festering boil. Its dirt half disintegrated. The asphalt on the other half cracked and peeled away like the skin of a rotten orange. The shockwave swept over us shattering the Humvee’s windows, making the vehicle rear up on my side as though slammed by a charge, and a flash of pain tore through the right side of my face, blinding me.

Five minutes after I woke up, I was in the shower lathering shampoo into my hair when I threw up. It splattered the wall and spread around the drain in a star of bile. The running water opened channels in the vomit until the yellowish residue vanished down the pipe. I sat on the ceramic floor under the stream that drummed against my scalp. The discomfort that had kept me from sleeping erupted into something worse, and my mouth tasted of vomit and phlegm.

I dried off and got dressed. Kneeling like a penitent before the toilet bowl, I spent the remaining minutes spitting out strands of saliva.

I drove to the workshop in a heatstroke nightmare. The heat had unraveled my cells, their contents diluted into my blood. I parked amid the chaos of workers maneuvering to slot their vehicles into free spaces, or meeting up with their line-mates. Of the faces crossing my field of vision, I recognized a few, though in civilian clothes they looked more like strangers.

I waited for most of them to head into the locker room. While I fiddled with the raised details of the action-figure-sized bronze horse in my pants pocket, I approached the waste container. Inside, miniature hills and mounds like a landfill rose to the same height they had the previous afternoon. Unseen workers would empty it on Friday. I buried the bronze horse among pieces whose casings were cracked or split.

As I waded through the workshop amid the clatter of machines and the lines waking up, I held back my nausea, but the sickness reverberated through my consciousness like interference on a radio signal. Seated at the line, working at the task that added money to my bank account, between one machine part and the next I sweated out the illness in beads so large they slipped off me. They pooled in wrinkles, tangled in my eyebrows, or flowed to the corners of my eyes, irritating my tear ducts. Breathing through my mouth, I blew droplets that spattered the parts. Water was escaping me like from a piece of fruit abandoned in the sun.

By instinct, my gaze flicked up to the supervisor’s office. She had swiveled her chair toward the window to observe me.

My heart lurched as if I’d just set off an alarm while cracking a safe. That look said I didn’t belong here. I had infiltrated this workshop, convinced myself I deserved to be hired. Hidden among these dozens of workers, I silently begged them not to look at me, hoping my eyes and the tinted lenses of my sunglasses would contain my guilt for every bad decision, every instinctive reaction I’d later regret. A guilt that had haunted me since birth and would follow me till death, my body tensing against its cramps minute by minute. I preferred suffering it myself rather than passing the burden on to others, to the police, to a courtroom, so that the so-called just and humane system could decide how I ought to be punished.

And so I kept getting up early to come to this assembly line. I sacrificed my hours for a hollow, insignificant task, just to keep up an apartment I could never afford to buy. But what else did life offer? How could I be sure some other routine would rescue me from this misery, or from something worse?

The child, his very essence, like a haunted house apparition, tormented me with these waves of foulness. He kept repeating that I had killed him, and that although no one else knew, sooner or later they’d find out.

I wiped my face with a damp palm. My skin stung under my undershirt and the clinging boxers. I tugged the collar of my shirt, twisted around, and pinched at my crotch to get some relief for a few minutes. Hours remained before I could go home. Tomorrow I’d endure another workday, and the day after that as well. Then, after the weekend, five more days. The cycle repeated over and over. Over and over. Over and over. Over and over. The hours ought to collapse faster and faster, breaking the sound barrier, chipping away at the block of time I was born with, time I was forced to trade on this stupid planet. Such was the result of this slavery: it made you wish a drain would flush your life away like piss.

My hands turned the parts over and over between my fingers. I screwed some pieces together, plugged wires into the right holes. But I’d lost all feeling in my arms. I had moved into another body, I faced the world from behind a different pair of sunglasses.

Parts slid into my hands then off to the right, one after another. Once they left us, where did they go? Did they fit under a car’s hood, or into a fridge or a washing machine? Did they become part of something that would satisfy someone who needed it? This workshop existed thanks to charity, giving broken people a purpose so we could believe our lives had value, yet also to keep us under control and out of sight until we died. The work distracted us from the surrounding society, in case we ever got the urge to blow it away with a shotgun.

I asked for a break to take a leak. In the bathroom, I stepped up to a wall-mounted toilet. I’d unzipped, and was taking a deep breath when someone walked in and greeted me. I clenched my teeth. I wanted to tell him to wait outside until I was done. I wanted to wish away his existence.

He moved to a toilet on the adjacent wall. I heard the rasp of his zipper. He spread his legs into an inverted V, and I noticed the ashen-gray folds of his right arm: thick, bulging skin. He glanced over his shoulder and psst’d me. While his stream pattered against the porcelain, he held out a ticket over that shoulder with his free hand.

“One of my buddies dropped out. You interested?”

He was inviting me to a game from the sports he loved to ramble about: soccer, basketball, baseball. The modern worker’s religion.

“I’m sure someone else on the line, or in the workshop, would appreciate it.”

“But I’m offering it to you.”

“I’ve never shown any interest.”

He soured his tone like a customer-service rep forced to remind some idiot for the thirtieth time that electrical devices need to be plugged in.

“You’d like it if you tried.”

I bowed my head and stifled a scoff. I shook off the last drops and zipped up.

“Last chance, pal,” said John—or Joseph. “Eventually people get tired of offering.”

I don’t want you to offer me anything. I want you all to leave me alone.

“That stuff doesn’t matter to me.”

He turned, hiding his face behind a thicket of hair. He clicked his tongue. As he left, he tossed me some variation of Have it your way.

I took a sip of water. While drying my mouth with toilet paper, I opened the door to the hallway. Our supervisor was climbing the stairs to her office, absorbed in the documents tucked in an open folder. The flutter of her blouse covered the butt of her leggings, whose wild pattern might have camouflaged her in a psychedelic hallucination.

I passed by the stairs while shrugging like someone caught in the rain without an umbrella, but I remembered how she’d been watching me like a prison spotlight tracking escapees. I climbed two steps. The staircase—metal, ridged—trembled, and the supervisor turned around. Her lips parted half an inch, her right hand froze in the middle of flipping a page. She took a moment to smile, as though rushing to come up with a response to an unexpected event.

I cleared my throat.

“I’m sorry I was unpleasant last time we spoke. Sometimes the memories come back. It’s hard for me to… accept it’s behind me.”

The supervisor recognized the nature of my reaction: a tormented veteran. She smiled as if inviting me to a barbecue.

“I wouldn’t pretend to know how you feel. But at least you’re out of danger now.”

She wanted me to open up. I was overwhelmed by the swampy humidity of my sweat-soaked clothes, that stale stench. I turned.

“I think that’s all.”

The supervisor stepped down a stair.

“Do they organize any veterans’ groups in this city, or in a nearby one? I imagine you all must be spread around.”

Forcing out the words while I built the context, I said, “I’ve been to groups like that. They’re all basically the same. The support helps and it’s welcome, I suppose, but it doesn’t cut out the tumor, which reacts before you can think.”

“Maybe the next group will be the one. You never know what fascinating, wonderful people you might meet. Everyone needs to connect with those who’ve lived through something similar. It’d be worth the drive, even if you had to go to Austin or San Antonio.”

“You’re right.”

When someone bothered me for any random reason, giving them the answer they wanted usually made them forget about me for a while.

The supervisor touched my right arm near the elbow. I stiffened, but she reinforced her smile.

“If you need anything, just tell me, alright?”

I nodded and said goodbye while descending the steps. I was crossing the workshop toward my station on the line when a shudder rippled through me, as though a scorpion had just scurried across my skin.

---

Author’s note: this novella, originally written in Spanish, is contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho, self-published about ten years ago.

Editing this part made me queasy, so good job, me from ten years ago. I had forgotten that whole bit with John/Joseph bothering the protagonist to get him out of his shell. It’s based on a memory that I also exploited for the first years of grief in my novella Motocross Legend, Love of My Life. When you have been burdened with such a terrible memory as mine, and you try to avoid new experiences lest you add ammo to your intrusive thoughts, you get to recycling.

Anyway, in the real-life event, the nasty two years it took to get my programming degree were coming to an end, and a smiley classmate, likely ten years older than me, offered to get together with them for a group dinner or some shit. I refused. He said, “Are you sure? It’s your last chance.” I tasted that condescension; in his mind, I was a shy guy too nervous to hang out with them. No, buddy. Your very presence worsened my day.

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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.

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The horn signaling the hour-and-a-half lunch break blared, and I jolted awake to the sound of my Chevrolet Lumina’s door slamming shut. I’d climbed into an oven that reeked of scorched plastic and molten metal, so I rolled down the window, stuck my head out, and waited until I felt steady enough to drive without passing out.

The morning shift had stripped my nerves raw, compressing a week’s worth of strain into hours. Dazed, I started the engine and put distance between myself and the faces that recognized me—faces that might demand answers.

Through the window, workers from other workshops in red and green smocks slid out of view, alongside highway crews in reflective vests. Broken people stranded in this town, far from home and any semblance of destiny. Jobs that barely paid enough to keep a roof overhead. They endured it all, along with the desert and brain-melting heat, because they had no future, because what mattered in these people had died years ago. Their options narrowed to one or two cliff-edge jobs to cling to, while the world kept spinning.

A sidewalk newspaper rack made me slow, though I drove past. I needed to buy a paper to see if any article mentioned a missing child. Had police visited that dirt road near the oil field? Maybe an alert would announce they were hunting the killer. I’d scrubbed the blood I’d spotted in the dark, adrenaline sharpening my eyes, but must’ve missed stains blended into the dirt—blood the child’s wounds had spat when a tire burst his torso. An ultraviolet flashlight would expose cornflower-blue spills. Cops would collect samples, send them for analysis. Or would they assume someone hit a coyote? Would a cornered note in the paper beg the driver who struck an animal to notify animal control? A coyote dragging a mangled leg, bleeding out as it wandered the desert in a nightmare of pain, though a bullet to the skull would’ve sufficed.

As I drove, I startled awake again, catching myself sliding my left fingers under my sunglasses to rub my eyelid. Sweat pooled, teeth clenched. How had I avoided crashing? And now I worried in advance: when I’d hit the child last night, the day’s papers had already gone to print. Any news would break tomorrow. Maybe right now, at that dirt road cutting through the oil field, four or five patrol cars encircled the spot, forensic cops crouching over clues.

On the way to Wendy’s, I spotted two police cruisers prowling the streets. For minutes one idled ahead of me, garish as a parrot among pigeons. They didn’t know who watched them. If they did, they’d rip me from these people grinding through routines, loving others, enjoying life, pairing off, reproducing. The penal system would digest me, and I’d become a nuisance to dozens of eyes that’d rather drag me to a backlot and shoot me.

In the Wendy’s parking lot, trailer trucks walled off the view. A trucker leaned against his cab while chatting with an old man in a vest studded with flag pins and NRA badges.

After parking, I climbed out and arched my back until it cracked. Against the blue sky, bird silhouettes with splayed wings fluttered like kites caught in a draft. I weaved through dozens of parking spots, dodging cars reversing or hunting spaces. In the single-story building’s windows, jutting above the sea of heads, busts of people carried trays heaped with food. From a candy-red pole, the logo’s pigtailed girl smiled, her red braids perked upright.

Inside, I claimed a table near the back but facing the entrance, close to where the woman usually sat. Waiting in line, I stood behind a group of workers in paint-speckled coveralls. Their chatter made me wish for a mute button to block even the reverberations rattling my skull. They spoke to fill silence, parroting phrases others had recycled, mimicking cadences and accents. Truth and worth depended on majority approval.

At my table, the first bite of burger coated my tongue with ketchup and meat juice as if I’d spent the morning gargling sand. By the third bite, she walked in. I clamped the burger between my chin and tray while tilting my head to fix her in my monocular vision. With each step, her blonde hair floated like a feather. Gold hoops swayed from her earlobes. A gym bag hung from the shoulder opposite me, and she wore a sleeveless Lycra shirt with gray yoga pants. Her tanned skin glowed, freshly showered. In profile, her ass curved like a half-globe, the pants clinging to solid thighs, tracing every contour as if she’d walked in naked.

She veered toward a table at my nine o’clock, trailed by her boyfriend, a man around thirty-five. Most of his ash-blond hair hid under a beige hat. His thick belt buckle glinted under fluorescent lights.

At the table, she set down her bag and exchanged words with him before he joined the line. She shifted her hip, distracted by her phone. When she switched her weight, the pants’ fabric outlined the inverted, rounded M of her vulva.

I swallowed a bite to douse the heat flash surging through me, my heart pounding like a skydiver’s. I wanted to grip her nape and devour her mouth, those flamingo-pink lips. Slide my hands under the Lycra hugging her back, hike it up to knead the taut skin along her spine. Squeeze her ass. We’d stagger like drunk dancers, knocking trays from customers’ hands, until a table jarred us still. I’d rip her clothes off, lay her across the table, and mount her like a baboon.

She settled into her chair, thumb gliding over her phone. Features Photoshopped at birth, that hair, that body—crafted by generations of good genes mating with good genes. Her lips curled into an unconscious smile untouched by grief, untainted by intrusive thoughts.

I nibbled fries, head tilted, hidden behind tinted lenses, stealing these minutes while she shared her break with her boyfriend.

He returned with a tray of soda cups, fries, a burger, and a salad bowl. I glanced down to avoid detection. Couldn’t let him wonder why I always sat this distance, facing her. I timed my glances—deniable if questioned. Sometimes I turned toward windows or the clamoring crowd. If caught staring, I’d claim I was zoning out. But when my gaze trapped her, I savored her image like caviar.

Over lunch, their lips shaped silent syllables. Smiles, coded gestures. She laced fingers with his, plucked invisible hairs from his shirt. At some joke, her laugh pierced the din. Drunk on mirth, she doubled over to rest her chin on his arm before straightening with catlike eyes. Her lower face split into a grin as if handing out thousand-dollar bills.

Why did the boyfriend keep stabbing lettuce leaves between comments, ignoring her? He should’ve hugged her, smothered her with kisses. Maybe he’d grown used to his luck, or only those who lacked it noticed, those who’d burned through relationships expecting doom, unable to forget the darkness festering in human minds. Like a centenarian, I envied teenagers’ ignorance, decades still ahead before they’d learn their consciousnesses would settle among body parts screaming in pain.

When his phone rang and his face turned professional, she fiddled with her own device while chewing. He nodded at the void, stood, and crossed the room. His tucked-shirt belly bulged like a half-inflated balloon. Two diners sidestepped him as he strode like he owned the place.

The guard was gone. I relaxed, spacing burger bites and Nestea sips, fixating on her as she tilted her face to check her skin in a compact’s mirror for barely-there creases. Her hair cascaded over one shoulder, baring the opposite side of her neck, where the sternocleidomastoid muscle strained under the weight.

I ached to caress that tan skin, scratch an itch mid-spine. Her hair would drape my arm. In my mind, she cupped my cheek, slid her palm to my ear. How would foreign skin feel—skin that wanted my touch? The memory of such sensations had eroded, unrecreatable by hours of thought or fantasy.

I snapped from hypnosis to my trash-strewn tray, forty minutes left before returning to the soul-crushing job that bought my hours cheap. I’d hit and killed a child, then hidden him in my trunk. The spark I’d briefly contained faded, replaced by swampy cold, that of a reanimated corpse shuffling through a mausoleum.

What did this woman feel, loved and loving, with her aristocratic grasp of pain? What was it like to wake up wanting to live? Did I crave her to replace her boyfriend, or did I mourn being born unlovable, this lump of broken and disfigured flesh? Beyond fantasy, would I even want a partner? My presence would poison her like radiation, warp her into a light-sucking tumor. People didn’t matter enough to me; any woman would realize it in weeks.

Besides, I knew the drill: inane chats about office drama, friend squabbles that to her would feel apocalyptic. Filling silences lest she think us doomed. Remembering compliments to keep her valued. Endless shopping hours, holding bags, bored enough to stab my corneas. Abandoning movies and books I liked for hers. Curbing opinions to TV-sanctioned takes, lest she deem me negative. The marathon of impressing her and her circle, competing daily with lurking men. Sacrificing solitude, craving it while she recharged socially. Allowing a job to devour my waking hours so I could one day offer her a two-story suburban home. Reproducing, duty-bound to drag innocents into this dying world.

She’d push me to change, then grow bored once I mimicked her desires. Stranded in the desert, oceans and miles apart, I’d endure calls where she’d repeat some new man’s name—how funny he was, how intriguing his opinions. How I shouldn’t mind, because she thought of him as a brother. They’d evict me from the house I’d helped pay for. If I’d stupidly bred, child support would crush me, funding a kid taught to call another man “Dad.”

Better to admire beauties like this Wendy’s goddess from afar. I’d cherish her like a fresco on a crumbling wall of this rotting universe, while others lashed themselves together with barbed wire to avoid being pulled into the dark.

When the boyfriend returned, he planted his phone-hand on the table, speared salad leaves with the other, then jerked his head toward the lot. She smiled, nodded, tucked her compact away. They left shoulder-to-shoulder.

I slumped. I’d see her the following day, until she stopped coming.

Workers shot glances at me, the weirdo with sunglasses and scars under one eye. One muttered to his tablemate. I’d hogged this space too long. Behind the counter, minimum-wage teens wondered how to eject me without triggering an explosion.

I shoveled the remaining fries, then dumped wrappers on the tray and trashed it, freeing the table for those who deserved it.

---

Author’s note: I wrote this novella about ten years ago. It’s contained in my collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.

Today’s song is “Trailer Trash” by Modest Mouse.

• Previous part (3)
• Next part (5)

When I approached the workshop on my Chevrolet Lumina, I pulled over into a gap among the workers’ parked vehicles, but during lunch break and at the end of the workday, dozens of people with limited reasoning would be swarming near my car. What if some shift in their thinking made them curious enough to pry open the trunk? People who died in their own homes ended up discovered after someone forced the door.

Instead, I parked outside the adjacent lot, an abandoned tire store. Far from the other cars but near enough to the shop to discourage any vagrant from stealing it. With my luck, I had to consider those possibilities. I belonged to the same breed as that ranger who got struck by lightning so many times he ended up in a wheelchair, then shot himself, and whose tombstone was split by another lightning bolt.

I closed the car door and walked a few steps ahead. No one was roaming the workshop’s yard. The clamor of machinery streamed out of the two-story building with its corrugated metal walls as though it were suffering indigestion.

A quick glance at my Chevrolet Lumina revealed a dent in the bumper. I wanted to ditch the vehicle or cover it with a tarp. What would anyone who saw it think? They’d know I’d hit something, and by the shape and size of the dent, probably a rock or an animal. Maybe no one would ask, but between machine components on the assembly line, I’d have to invent some story.

I opened the side door to the locker room, put on my smock and gloves, and stepped into the workshop. I was engulfed by an industrial music concert—the pounding and buzzing of assembly machines, the whir of conveyor belts and the cylinders that drove them. The fans, as big as a fifties TV set, spun their blades to a blur so we wouldn’t bake. I wove between groups of operators seated at their lines, heads tucked between their shoulders, backs hunched in purple smocks. Intent as watchmakers.

At the far end of the floor, I spotted my station and my empty stool. As if radar had warned him I’d arrived, Héctor glanced up from the piece he was handling and shot me one of his disdainful looks. I dropped onto the stool with a huff. My fingers took up the part that was coming down the line. The routine shackling me to this job would cancel out all thought, reducing me to a programmed robot.

“Thanks for dumping your parts on us for a while,” Héctor said.

“Any stabbing pains?” asked Christopher, smiling to my right.

“Vomiting,” I said.

“Feeling better?”

“If it happens again, I’ll run for the bathroom.”

“Thanks for the cake yesterday, by the way—because the supervisor threw you a surprise party.”

“I know,” I replied in a curt tone that said I was done talking about my birthday.

The parts rolled along the belt like bar patrons arriving by name. I knew which loose plastic bits fit together and how to connect each cable. This monotony stung like a rash. It didn’t matter who we were nor what we thought.

Opposite me, Héctor had lowered his olive-toned face, glossy black hair dangling in strands as his fingers worked a part. To my right, Christopher stood slack-jawed, arching his back into an inverted C. Did they feel this job demeaned them? Did they even have any dignity left to lose, or were they glad the steady flow of parts kept them occupied?

To fill the orders, we had to switch off our inner worlds, while our humanity peeled away like sand off skin after a day at the beach. We maintained a conspiracy of silence. We pretended this life was worth bearing, and we dreaded anyone’s saying otherwise out loud lest we dropped dead, the way a machine goes dark the moment you yank its power cord.

Over the next two hours, I stacked tension in my shoulders, arms, and hands. Sooner or later some muscle would lock up, rendering me unable to attach the pieces and cables.

When the break came, I shot up and crossed the workshop to the yard. I stepped out into the heat. As I turned toward the fence that separated us from the adjacent lot, a mosquito buzzed my ear, and I swatted at it.

I expected to find my trunk forced open, signs someone had wedged in a crowbar. Behind me, the workers were spilling out into the yard talking and laughing, so I avoided looking like I was policing my car—or hiding something. A mass of purple smocks crammed into the limited shady spots under the building’s eaves. The sunlight bathed the world in a piss-yellow glow, while the silhouettes of those sheltering workers looked like charcoal sketches.

Even though my hair was heating up, I needed to recharge. Being around so many people would drain me. I planted myself by the fence marking the yard’s boundary, among dry blades of grass shooting from the cracked earth. I took out my cigarette pack. Across the road, the desert spread flat for miles, but my dead eye made judging distance a struggle. A few roads slashed through that orange-cream land. The sun glittered on truck trailers and car bodies like Morse code. The earth, dust clouds, and tiny vehicles shimmered in the distance. Dozens of oil pumps dotted the dead expanse, getting sparser the farther they were, with no pattern I could decipher—like someone had just chosen random spots to drop those machines, convinced they’d suck out buried treasure. The gunk they drew up had financed half the local industry, and that struck me as a miracle.

The sun was roasting my face, and sweat seeped out as if I were being squeezed dry. Christopher, all lankiness and dragging heels, crossed the yard toward me. I blinked against the sun even through tinted lenses, and a wave of discomfort washed over me. He smiled like a puppy, stopped next to me, fanned himself, and tugged at the collar of his polo—buttoned all the way up—peeking out of his smock.

“It’s really hot out here, right?”

I wanted to say yeah, and if he didn’t like it he should join the workers whose silhouettes blurred in the shade, but I didn’t want to waste the energy. I shrugged and took a drag.

Héctor and John—or Joseph—appeared, heading our way. Their footsteps kicked up dust. Héctor’s gut jiggled with each step, and his thick mane glistened in the sun like a gasoline puddle. Next to him, John—or Joseph—walked with a springy gait, like he was on his way to a party. His torso curved along a crooked spine. The smock covered part of a white shirt that must have cost three times what mine did, and he’d popped its collar frat-boy style. His clothes hid the growths on his left shoulder. Past the rolled-up right sleeve, the arm looked like a botched experiment, covered in clusters and folds of rhinoceros-gray skin.

Up close, Héctor’s smock shoulders were sprinkled with dandruff, as if he’d darted outside in a brief snowstorm and hurried back in. He shot me the second type of look he always reserved for me, as if I were a pitbull whose mood concerned him; he hoped that if I decided to attack, I’d choose someone else’s throat.

Four evolutionary dead ends gathered in a miasma of sweat. Magnets glomming together, little circles of humanity where everyone had to save everyone else from boredom.

I avoided their eyes and focused on inhaling smoke to soothe my aggravation. If only I could flip a switch and go invisible. On breaks, I’d escape to some corner of the yard so no one could pin me down with their gaze, and I’d recharge the energy that these pauses allowed. My assigned coworkers would wonder where that one-eyed bastard had gone off to. Camouflaged like a predator in the jungle, I’d hear every nasty remark about me, each personal reason they found me disagreeable.

Héctor was rolling strands of tobacco in paper. He slid the paper between the stubs of his index and middle fingers, which looked like they’d emerged from the womb minus the first joint.

“Did you see last night’s Mavericks game?” John—or Joseph—said. “That alley-oop from Curry to Nowitzki?”

He looked at the three of us. Christopher, maybe embarrassed, shook his head.

“Seriously?” John—or Joseph—said. “None of you? Bunch of ignoramuses.”

He grinned at us as though he’d had his teeth bleached, but in reality they’d worn down in concave and diagonal shapes, enamel grayed or eroded to transparency. Too often the condition of a person’s teeth reflected the state of their mind.

As if John—or Joseph—had just insulted his entire family, Christopher rattled off teams and scores, plus names, presumably players. John—or Joseph—chimed in with stats and point totals while fidgeting with his right sleeve, that snagged on the lumps and folds of gray skin. Up close, his white shirt had clearly needed ironing for weeks.

The sun had me drenched, and my brain felt as though it were melting. My thoughts, swimming in a grimy fishbowl, barely let me lift the cigarette to my mouth. If something about that car gave me away, would I even notice? Next to that vacant lot, the trunk shone, and a few inches of shade fell across it in a rhomboid pattern. How hot must it be inside?

I wiped my forehead, the sweat sliding down my wrist, and patted my cheeks. I had to stay alert—a slip of a few seconds could haunt me the rest of my life.

Héctor nudged Christopher in the ribs as he watched a group of workers crossing the yard.

“Check it out. I ran into him on my way to the bathroom today, and for the third time he flat-out ignored me. Acted like I was invisible. Must think that used Camry he bought makes him better than us.” He craned his neck as if to shout at the group rounding the workshop corner, but kept the same volume. “Conceited bastard.”

Christopher was writing in the palm of his hand with a pen. Héctor frowned and leaned sideways to see.

“Does it matter that much?”

“I’ll forget if I don’t.”

“Do you remember to look at your hand for what you’re supposed to remember?”

“Sometimes.”

Héctor laughed out of one side of his mouth while the other corner gripped the cigarette.

“How’re you ever going to meet a woman? If you land a date, you’ll forget her name or where you’re meeting. Will you even remember you met her?”

Christopher swallowed, his thick Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. He straightened, slipped the pen into a pocket of his smock, and managed a smile.

“She’ll have to be patient.”

Héctor shook his head while smiling like a boy who pelts rats with rocks and awards himself points for each kill. Christopher, instead of ignoring him or firing back, wiped away his dismay and hung on every word the man uttered, dancing to his tune in a tutu. Then again, that’s what other people were for: to vouch for your existence, even if only by making fun of you.

“By the way,” Héctor said, “I saw the supervisor carrying a bunch of résumés on her clipboard. She’s looking to fill the coordinator job.”

“The last coordinator started as an operator, didn’t he?” said John—or Joseph.

“That’s what I thought. So get used to the idea you’re talking to the next coordinator.”

“You want to be coordinator?” Christopher asked.

Héctor squinted at him and blew a smoke ring.

“If I said you’re talking to the next coordinator, and you’re talking to me, what do you think that means? Do I want the job or not?”

“You want it?”

“The pay’s better, and I’d get to improve the workshop’s routines. I don’t think anyone else has volunteered. I’ll seduce the supervisor—flatter her for a few days, pick up Starbucks on the way. A Caramel Frappuccino. I’ll tell her what I want, and she’ll take it into account.” He shook his head while surveying the oil-pump-strewn plain like a general sizing up his next conquest. “I’ll clean this place up, break people of their idiotic habits. Sleep like a baby.”

As I clamped the cigarette filter between my lips, I turned my sunglasses on Héctor before I could even think to hide my grimace. That man needed to sit on top even of a heap of shit. I wanted a shower—a cold jet of water to rinse away the sweat sliding down my back, chest, and legs, making my underwear stick.

“You don’t find it funny,” Héctor said.

In the distance, my car called me, demanding attention like a child wandering too close to the road.

“I asked you, Cyclops,” Héctor added.

He furrowed his brow, studying my face as if counting each pimple. What was I supposed to answer? Before I could muster the energy to part my chapped lips, Héctor went on.

“Oh, I forgot—no point talking to us.”

I held his stare drilling into my sunglasses. I took a drag to steady my pulse, to dissolve the image of pressing out my cigarette on his forehead. When I spoke, it was like scraping rust off a pipe.

“Half-truth.”

---

Author’s note: I wrote this novella about ten years ago. It’s contained in my collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.

This part reminded me of dealing with the other disabled folks I met while attending that stupid course and being shown the workshops. Check the first entry of this tale for more details. I don’t miss it one bit. Although I’ve forgotten most of that experience (my neurological configuration is terrible at retaining memories), I’m fairly certain that all the workshop-related people in this story are made out of pieces of those I got to know, either there or at the center for autism. Héctor himself was based on a fella diagnosed with paranoid personality disorder, who kept railing on about autists among many others.

• Previous part (2)

I staggered out of the bedroom while pressing my temple to contain a throbbing headache, and from the dining table I was greeted by the sight of the duffel bag open and gutted, clots of blood around the zipper. T-shirts, pants, and the undergarments of my military uniform lay spread out across the table, rolled into cylinders and secured with elastic bands. Balls of socks. Razor blades and shaving lotion tucked into a plastic ziplock bag.

To distract myself, I opened the balcony door and stepped onto the two-foot ledge that served as a terrace. I leaned against the railing. Delivery vans were stirring the stillness, and a few sleepwalkers were getting into their cars on their way to work. The sky was so clear it seemed clouds existed only in someone’s imagination, so the air would stay mild until daybreak.

I rubbed my face. Before I drove to the workshop, I’d reserve a few measured minutes to breathe in that mix of desert air and traffic fumes.

The stretch of street on my left reminded me of the landscapes the Coyote would paint on a rock wall to catch the Road Runner. Past a winding path between trimmed lawns, a parking lot surrounded a beige, boxlike building housing a Mexican restaurant, and right next door stood a single-story Jack in the Box. Above their roofs rose a tall pillar, like a ruin missing the roof it once supported, showing the Chevron gas station logo. At the end of the road, the cars coming and going looked like grime on an old lens, blurring with the distant silhouettes of trees, one-story buildings, and billboards.

I had gotten to know this view the day I traveled to the city, was guaranteed a job at the workshop, and wandered around until I saw the vacancy sign in front of this apartment block. Such a backdrop convinced me that I lived in a solid world, but for all I knew, those cars and pedestrians that came and went may have vanished from existence as soon as they disappeared from sight. Sure, I’d grown familiar with the stretch leading from my apartment to the workshop, plus a few miles on the outskirts among the oil fields, but the rest of the world could have disappeared, erased into the void between planets.

I took a deep breath and returned to the living room. I dragged the duffel bag into the shower, soaked it under the spray, and scrubbed away the clotted blood. Diluted blood stained the rush of water flowing down the drain. When I was satisfied, I left the soaked bag in the sink. A trace of the stench of urine and excrement lingered in the fibers, woven into them.

I wandered around the living room. What had I left out of place yesterday for the future version of me, the one getting up in the morning, to deal with? The breakfast mug beside a spoon crusted with dried milk. The open box of cornflakes. On the other side of the counter I had stacked the three freezer drawers and the ice tray.

A chill went through my guts. I checked each drawer to see what food would go bad. A few boxes of instant noodles, steaks wrapped in plastic. Fortunately, my paycheck didn’t allow me to stock up on too many supplies. By tonight, after getting home from the workshop, I’d cook whatever my stomach could handle, and toss the rest in the garbage.

I washed the breakfast mug. I brought it along with the box of cereal to the dining table. I fetched cold milk from the fridge. As I poured cornflakes to fill the mug, the sound of that little cascade satisfied me like a dog hearing food rattle in its bowl. I splashed the milk in. Sitting there, lifting the spoon to my mouth, I lost any sense of actually having breakfast, and whenever I snapped out of it, my gaze was glued to the closed freezer door. The fridge’s hum called to me like a prayer echoing in a church. My insides rumbled, the milk tasted bitter. I left the mug by the sink.

Under a lukewarm shower, I braced my hands against the wall and blew away the water running over my mouth. I could call in and say I’d woken up sick. I could fake it. But no, I couldn’t. If any clue on that dirt road led the police to me and the very next day I, someone who never took vacation days, failed to show up at work, that would instantly label me a suspect. To survive until the boy disappeared, I had to stick to my routine. I’d endure the anxiety, the waves of chills threatening to rattle my spine, for the rest of today, Thursday, and Friday. Those forty-eight hours of the weekend were mine. I could travel without making excuses. I’d hide the body in some bushes and close this chapter as if the boy had never crossed paths with my car.

I walked around the bedroom looking for yesterday’s shirt, until I remembered I’d thrown it away. I put on a clean shirt. At the front door, before putting on my sunglasses, I fumbled with my key ring as I pictured what a cop would notice if he came in. Nothing among my small hoard of belongings hinted at a boy, and nobody would show up here for the rest of the week. I’d dodged that bullet. Until the weekend, my apartment would serve as a mausoleum. The boy would lie there, oblivious to the world of traffic and work baking in the sun.

I put on my glasses and headed downstairs. In the heat of dawn, I wanted to tug at my shirt collar to cool off. I took refuge behind the tinted lenses, which blocked other people’s stares the way a one-way mirror does in an interrogation room.

Traffic was still lined with cars and delivery vans. How would my coworkers see me over the course of the split shift? I had to act the same as always: the guy who keeps quiet, stays out on the periphery. But in my mind’s eye I saw myself sitting at my station on the line, hunched over another anonymous metal part, struggling to hide that I’d killed a child. During breaks, I’d hurry around the staircase leading to the supervisor’s office, avoiding her, and duck into the bathroom to take a deep breath. When we all went out to the yard, I’d huddle with the other workers—a colony of elephant seals—in the rectangle of shade under a small roof, to smoke while the sun roasted the tips of my sneakers, and my lungs filled with that superheated air smelling of dirt and metal. And the entire time I’d be anticipating the moment someone discovered the corpse packed away in my freezer.

For these three days, all my energy would be devoted to keeping that shield in place. The rest of the time, I’d be a vegetable.

My mind had dissolved, but suddenly I jolted upright behind the wheel as though my guts had turned to ice. I nearly rammed into the car ahead of me; the line had stopped at the sign before the intersection. I slammed on the brakes, and the tires squealed. Through the rearview mirror of the car ahead, the driver frowned, studying my reflection.

I clutched the steering wheel like I wanted to rip it off in one yank. Three days until the weekend. Yesterday was Monday, not Tuesday.

I grabbed my phone and held it over the wheel while I waited for traffic to move. I followed the line of cars. When I spotted an opening, I sped into a tight turn, arms twisting on the wheel, crossing into the opposite lane. The front right tire mounted the curb. When the car crashed back onto the asphalt, the suspension squeaked, and I jolted in the seat. A delivery van approaching from that lane laid on its horn.

I kept glancing between the road and my phone’s contact list until I found the landlord’s number. I called. It rang once.

“Who’s this?”

The man sounded like he’d barely turned his head toward his phone’s mic.

“This is Alan Kivi. You were coming to check on my apartment this morning, 3F. But I’m working from home and need to focus.”

“You’re not here.”

It was hard to think while driving. The landlord must already be in my apartment, and he sounded irritated, though not in the way someone would if they’d found a dead child.

“I stepped out for an errand. I’m on my way back.”

“We agreed on this time, a general inspection every Tuesday at 7:45. I have limited time for each unit.”

While he spoke, I parked in the first open spot outside my apartment block, jumped out of the car, and sprinted upstairs. My nostrils flared so I wouldn’t pant into the phone.

“Sorry, but something came up and I have to juggle it from home. My hours are tight too.”

I slid the key in the lock and flung the door open. I stepped inside while pressing my lips together so I didn’t exhale too loudly. My eyes swept over the fridge and the closed freezer, the stack of plastic drawers on the counter, the dirty mug and spoon in the sink, and on the dining table, the cylinders of army uniforms, the socks, and a plastic bag of toiletries. Standing to the right of the doorway, the landlord was facing me. A gaunt man in his forties, crow-black hair streaked with gray, wearing frameless glasses and sharply creased pants.

It reassured me that my sudden entrance startled him, the same way you might surprise someone who’s cleaning a room only to look up and see a stranger standing under the door frame with a hollow grin. I had hoped that the day I rented this place would be the only time I ever saw him. Whenever I moved out, if I survived this apartment, I’d slip a note and the key through his mailbox and vanish.

He tucked his phone away. As if to avert his gaze, he turned to the entryway cabinet, ran a finger over the dulled varnish, and rubbed that fingertip against his thumb.

“You could wipe things down once in a while,” he said. He tapped the cabinet, near a pile of dusty coins and old keys. “To prevent damage, you should gather your coins and stuff in a tray, just like you’d use coasters under your bottles.”

I shut the door behind me while trying to breathe through my nose. Sweat clung to the hair on my forearms in thick drops, and a vibration pounded in my skull, making it hard to think. I stepped between him and the kitchen area like I was absentminded.

“Sorry I didn’t let you know.”

He ventured deeper inside.

“I can inspect while you work. I won’t make a sound.”

“No, I really need to wrap this up before I head to my main job, and I can’t concentrate with someone moving around in the corner of my eye.”

He gave me a once-over. Like dozens of other people, he peered at my sunglasses, maybe thinking I was joking by wearing them indoors, maybe debating whether to ask me to take them off.

“I can’t come back this week.”

“The apartment will survive.”

He craned his neck over my shoulder to look at the stack of drawers on the counter.

“All that food is going to spoil. Is something wrong with your freezer?”

I wanted to grab him by the shirt and toss him out. I’d told him to leave, and he was still getting on my nerves. I worked hour after hour to afford a one-bedroom with a kitchenette carved out of the living room, and I had to put up with someone who wouldn’t go when asked. No privacy, no peace, even in the space I paid for.

“The freezer works. I was just cleaning it out. Really, I need to finish up and get back to the workshop.”

He pulled out his key ring, twirling it around his finger, and then his features twisted as if a sudden jolt hit him. He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and massaged his temple.

“If you wanted to postpone the inspection, why didn’t you let me know?”

“I forgot, that’s all. There’s no mystery. I’m just disorganized. If my head worked better, I doubt we’d have ever met.”

He rubbed that circle on his temple and stared right through me. Maybe he was thinking of fitting my inspection into the rest of his week, or maybe he was waiting for some kind of bribe.

I reached into my back pocket for my wallet. I counted fifty dollars in two twenties and a ten, and held them out. Already I pictured the meals I’d be missing for the next few days.

“For your trouble.”

He glanced at the bills, and through those frameless lenses I watched his pupils widen. He took a step back and raised one hand like I’d just offered him a line of coke.

“No, no. Let’s just forget it. Tuesday next week, can I come then?”

“Same as always.”

“At the same time?”

“If it changes, I’ll let you know.”

He let his gaze slide away. He opened the apartment door, nodded a goodbye, and slipped into the hallway. I rushed over and peered through the peephole just in time to see him heading for the stairwell.

I slumped back against the door. While my pulse calmed, I mustered enough saliva to wet my mouth. My face, my wrists, my back all itched like spiders were scuttling across my skin. If the landlord had suspected I was lying, would I have noticed?

I limped to the bathroom. I tossed the damp duffel bag onto the floor and filled the sink with cold water. I plunged my face in up to my ears. The bubbles from my nose rolled across my cheeks, and the freezing sting dulled.

I pulled off my shirt and used a towel to dry my neck and chest. I scrubbed my armpits. I wanted to sit under the warm shower again, but every passing minute came off my shift at the workshop.

I paced the apartment. What else had I forgotten, which tiny clue would betray me? Today I’d been certain—just as certain as I knew I’d woken up here, just as certain as I’d known where to find a clean shirt—that it was Wednesday. I would have shown up at the workshop like any other Wednesday, until a line of cop cars parked outside and the officers swarmed in to arrest me. While they handcuffed me and pushed my head down into the back seat, I’d wonder how they found out.

I needed to keep a shield even against my own mind, my own impressions. I had to double-check every fact in case this broken brain was trying to sabotage me.

I collapsed onto the moth-eaten wreck of a couch and propped my elbows on my thighs. I’d call work. I remembered the way my supervisor smiled, as if chasing off the darkness of the world, and I heard the echo of her tone with us, the same one she’d use with a baby or a drooling old man. I dialed her number. She picked up.

“I was surprised you weren’t here. Are you okay?”

Instead of faking coughs, degrading myself with that performance, I tried to keep my voice free of anxiety.

“I woke up nauseous, and threw up. I think it’s been coming on for a couple days.”

“That why you disappeared yesterday?”

“When?”

“We got together to celebrate your birthday. A surprise. But you vanished. I called your cell a few times in case you were still around.”

She’d pry some excuse out of me, like I’d asked for a party in my honor.

“I barely use my phone. Whenever I need it, the battery’s dead. Sorry.” I cut her off before she scolded me about my phone habits. “But yes, I’ve been feeling sick for days. I figured I’d rather throw up at home.”

“Too bad,” she said, half-playful, half-scolding. I pictured her pouting her lower lip. “I bought a chocolate-pecan cake. A shame you missed it. Your coworkers devoured it, but at least they’re grateful to you.”

She paused, waiting for me to thank her. Nobody had asked her to plan that ambush. What about me, or my behavior, made her think I wanted her to gather a bunch of people I barely tolerated so they could shine a spotlight on some personal milestone I hadn’t mentioned? In her world, as she looked over her minions from that big window in her office, maybe she saw us all as identical little cogs, each with a slightly different face.

She let ten seconds of silence pass.

“If you need to, stay home. If you feel better in the morning, come in. I’m sure your coworkers can manage one day without you.”

“No, I was calling to say that although I’m running late, I’ll be there soon. Throwing up cleared my head, and I took some medicine.”

“You’re sure?”

“You’ll see me at my station in a little while.”

We said our goodbyes. I hung up, removed my sunglasses, and buried my face in my hands. I stifled a groan. My animal self must have sensed a threat before my rational mind did, and as much as I wanted to shut down, I had to brace for an impending assault. My head was pounding. I stood up and looked at the closed freezer door. The landlord had said he’d be back next week, but could I risk believing him? Maybe I had annoyed him enough that he’d pop in unannounced another morning this week, claiming he had a gap in his schedule. Meanwhile I’d be on the line at the workshop, assembling one piece after another, and during each break I’d dread seeing flashing red-and-blue lights reflected in the windows.

I went to the bathroom and lifted the duffel bag. Water dripped into the puddle around my feet. I dried the bag off with a hair dryer and set it down, open, a few paces from the freezer. I waited, crouched in front of that closed door, as though some chemical shift in my brain might ready me for what lay inside. As much as I wanted to bury the boy in there and forget him, I had to keep him near, under lock and key, a key I carried in my pocket.

I opened the door and let the cold air wash over me. Part of me wanted to revel in the chill a moment, to clear my head, but inside, among the frosted walls, sat the plastic-wrapped package whitened by ice. Taut plastic forced the body into the shape of a Thanksgiving turkey, folded and compressed, the boy’s back and buttocks bruised purple. The soles of his feet. Around his torso, a band of skin as wide as a tire had turned black with necrosis, and on the back of his head, among thinning hair, a gash revealed a mass of blood and tissue—like an egg cracked open and left to rot.

---

Author’s note: this novella was originally written by someone I have to assume was me, about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.

• Next part (2)

The conveyor belt slid the next metal piece into the field of vision my tinted lenses cast in gray. My gloved hands hooked the cable pins into their holes and verified that no previous operator had ruined the work, while I measured my movements to prevent any later operator from blaming me for holding up the line. I pressed the button that ran the belt. The piece slid off to my right, lurching forward and stopping like a car stuck in traffic.

I rested my gloved fists on the edge of the table. The conveyor belt whirred, its segments blurring past. I already knew the shape of the piece that would stop at the center of my vision a few seconds later.

Seated across from me, Héctor yawned, warping that bray into an announcement that he needed to take a leak. Someone stopped the belt. A metal piece was left stranded halfway between Héctor and me.

The familiar sequence of motions for assembling each piece sedated my mind, dimming it to black, but now my thoughts were stirring awake. How long would Héctor take in the bathroom? Sweat had slimed my forehead and neck, and my underwear clung like a soaked pad, even though the air-conditioning units hanging from the workshop walls droned on tirelessly—our only defense against stewing inside this metal sarcophagus.

Christopher, seated ten feet to my right, stretched his neck to look around at the other crews. The jagged, arched scar on his scalp stood out pink against his brown skin. For the hundredth time, I pictured a surgeon pressing a stapler to Christopher’s skull until it clicked, branding both sides of the seam with jutting, pointed ridges—a zipper of scarred flesh.

“How strange that the coordinator’s absent,” the man said.

John, or Joseph—whatever his name was—ambled behind Christopher to stretch his legs. He rolled the sleeves of his coat up to his elbows, but the right sleeve got stuck on the gray, bulbous growths that deformed that arm. His genes had gotten mixed up, producing enough skin and flesh for three people.

“He quit a couple of months ago.”

Christopher hunched over, frowning as if thinking hurt. He toyed with the raised seam that cut across the side of his head.

“I knew that, right?”

“It’s no big deal.”

Three minutes later, heavy footsteps announced Héctor’s return from the bathroom. He circled the worktable, dropped onto his stool, and pressed the button that got the conveyor belt moving again.

A metal piece halted in front of me, its black cables overlapping and crisscrossing like arm hair. I checked every connection. I unhooked a couple of cables Héctor had misplaced, and fastened them into different slots. One day, they would invent robots to replace us.

Forty-three minutes before the shift ended, the conveyor belt stopped, jamming pieces at intervals between the operators. I waited, slouching, letting my gaze relax on the sections of belt in front of me. The next piece should have arrived by then.

To my right, Christopher glanced over at me, checking if I was the one holding things up, but across from me Héctor had slumped forward, resting his chin on his chest. The black-haired jowl bulged out. He had closed his eyes, opened his mouth, and tangled his gloved fingers in some cables on the piece he’d been working on. His black Queens of the Stone Age T-shirt, printed with a horned hand, had ridden up over his belly, and through the gap between shirt and pants peeked a swarthy fold of flab dotted with bristling hair.

When the horn signaling the end of the workday blared through the workshop, I sprang up and walked around Christopher toward the locker room, but he tapped me on the shoulder.

“See you later.”

I went on with my eyes locked on the locker-room door as workers filed in, opening and closing it behind them. The smell of hot rubber and metal stung my nostrils. What did he mean by “see you later”? Had he made up some plan for after work?

By the time I walked into the locker room, my pulse was shaky. After opening my locker, I took off my coat, folded it, and tossed it inside. I grabbed my pack of cigarettes, pulled one out, and slipped it into my shirt pocket. It was hard not to light up right there, but at least I’d finished another shift, scratched another mark on the wall, and I was about to claim the rest of the day for myself.

An electronic crackle buzzed. Everyone in the locker room turned toward the loudspeaker mounted in the corner.

“Alan Kivi, to the supervisor’s office, please,” a singsong female voice said.

I froze with one glove halfway off. What did she want? What had I done? I tossed the gloves on top of my coat and locked the locker. Coat and gloves put away, locker locked—my excuse to refuse overtime.

Shaking my head, I opened the door from the locker room to the workshop. In the supervisor’s office window, which rose above the shop floor like a second story, the glass blurred the figures of the four people gathered. Even though Christopher’s neck was hunched and his shoulders slumped, he still stood a head and a half taller than the others. The thick, barrel-shaped outline of Héctor fiddled with his phone. The supervisor, her hair down to her shoulders, leaned in close to each worker and touched them. She reached across the desk and lit the candles of a cake with a lighter.

I froze beneath the locker-room doorway. An operator from another team stopped in front of me and gave me a look, wanting to go inside, but before he could say anything, I stepped back. I paced in front of my locker. I fished around one pants pocket until I found my keys, and I fiddled with the cigarette filter in my shirt pocket as if I could sneak a drag.

How had the supervisor found out? If she noted my birth date when she hired me, she would have ambushed me last year to celebrate. In these past few days, she must have pulled my file, run her honey-coated fingers over it, and spotted the day I was born. I shuddered like someone who’s realized, while sitting on a public toilet, there’s a camera filming. Any private detail of my life worked like a tail sprouting from my coccyx for them to grab and hold me in place.

I hurried to the door leading out to the yard. I stepped into the dense, overheated air that smelled of scorched earth and traffic. I was heading for my car alongside the dispersing workers, but Caroline distracted me like a neon sign.

She was standing on tiptoe, bent over into a waste container. When she straightened, she was holding a plastic valve-shaped part with a cracked casing. She turned the piece over in her fingers, her lips moving as though greeting it. Her chestnut hair, tumbling halfway down her back, had frizzed the way it does on a day that threatens a storm. Beneath her bangs and between the strands framing her face, her skin was tanned like someone who labors under the sun. The floral pattern on her white dress had faded. It suggested that in the seventies it had belonged to some collection, only to be abandoned at a flea market. Her pockets bulged with broken machine parts, lost keys, odd stones she salvaged from dumpsters, ditches, landfills. Even from ten yards away, I noticed that horizontal tears had ripped open the dress’s sides and the flare of the skirt, as if Caroline had snagged them on bushes. Her cheeks were puffy and flushed. Her eyes, slanted and alien, glistened wet. Either allergies were hitting her, or she was stockpiling tears for the next time she burst into sobs.

While the sun pounded my forehead as though I’d pressed it against a light bulb, I slowed my pace to keep Caroline in sight through the stream of workers leaving the lot. She might have believed herself invisible, and the way everyone else ignored her only reinforced that notion. Caroline drifted around the waste container as if floating there—a specter that once lived in the house torn down to make room for the workshop. You’d expect a cold breeze to precede her, and I was surprised no one paid attention as they might if a dinosaur appeared out of a primeval jungle.

One of my coworkers—or the supervisor—might come looking for me. I reached my Chevrolet Lumina, but the moment I dropped into the driver’s seat and shut the door, I’d trapped myself in a sauna. A mistake I made every three or four days. I rolled down the window and stuck my head out to breathe while the seat roasted my backside through my pants and underwear. The air inflating my lungs coated their lining with the smell of overheated plastic.

I started the engine amid sputters and a gust of smoke. Once the dashboard lighter heated up, I lit a cigarette, drew on the filter, and blew the smoke out the window into the scorching air. The engine rattled phlegmatically as it accelerated toward the city center. Hanging from the rearview mirror, my vial filled with bits of shrapnel shivered while it spun.

On my left whizzed low-slung shops and single-story offices—white-painted corrugated metal walls that flashed under the sun, forcing me to squint behind my tinted lenses. On my right stretched the flat, orange-tinged desert, dotted with a few scraggly shrubs. Against a heat-warped horizon stood miniature telephone poles. Soon, the hunched silhouettes of oil pumps appeared, nodding like hammers in slow motion, their gears groaning and creaking—a herd of elephants drinking from the cracked earth. The desert’s immensity shrank the buildings, roads, and cars to dusty specks scorched by the sun.

Another year of this boiling air, of these people.

As I reached the city, I waited at a red light for ghosts to cross. A few yards ahead, a child crouched at the curb with a bored expression, pressing the tip of a metal rod against a flattened explosion of entrails and white-and-gray feathers smeared on the pavement.

Traffic thickened. Pedestrians roamed the sidewalks. I drove on to an In-N-Out Burger and joined the line of cars. Lounging against the seat, I smoked while the sunset sun beating through the windshield heated my face and hands.

A group of office workers in white shirts and dress pants walked by on the sidewalk. They followed one another like ducks. They had cloned each other’s hairstyles and that look of fatigue and resignation. A father carried his daughter on his shoulders, held his son’s hand, and used his other hand to grip a bulging bag. Next to him, a woman talked as she pointed to the end of the street. The man’s mouth hung half-open, and his features were weighed down by a week’s worth of exhaustion.

On the adjacent sidewalk, two groups of thirty-somethings ran into each other. Half the men wore Dallas Cowboys shirts or caps. I could have dubbed in real time exactly how they greeted each other and the small talk they exchanged. I could have predicted a split second early how their heads would nod, how wide their smiles would stretch. At some mention of where they were headed, someone in the other group laughed as if at a joke. There was only one group of thirty-somethings in hundreds, maybe thousands of miles around, even if they tried to fool me by changing outfits and bodies.

Did those people see their choices the way I recognized them? Their lives resembled museum galleries. They chose which corridor to walk down or linger in, while I wandered inside a cage. A prisoner locked up for decades in a six-by-eight cell, a person whose name got lost during a staff turnover—none of the new employees had bothered to learn his name or find out when to set him free.

Yet in the faces of those passersby—businessmen, office workers, families, couples—and in the faces reflected in the mirrors of the cars waiting in line for takeout, I recognized exhaustion. They had resigned themselves to the road they ended up on, knowing that if they dared veer onto a different path, they might land in a dead end. Other routines, other partners, other children.

What could anyone want of humanity and the systems that chained them? To deal with other people, to sacrifice their days working—just to start a family, spit out offspring, save for retirement? Those goals satisfied the ghosts around me. But if the emptiness, the desolation, and the lack of meaning in each maneuver to wade through these societies nagged daily like a dislocated joint, what was there left to do?

---

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

Today’s song is Modest Mouse’s “Custom Concern.”

I feel like I need to explain myself for this one. First of all, I had completely forgotten about every single detail of this story so far. It was like reading it for the first time. As I read some parts, I did get some faint recollection of having “seen” them before, but I don’t remember having come up with nor designed those characters. This story was very personal for me, and perhaps that’s why I haven’t revisited it even in my mind, as it closed a period of my life I’d rather forget.

You see, I was diagnosed as autistic when I was 26 years old or so. That came after a few failed jobs that proved I couldn’t work a regular job due to my autism-related peculiarities. So when I got diagnosed, I had hit rock bottom, and I didn’t see myself adjusting to society at all. I lived like a recluse, the pee-in-bottles kind, except for my therapy sessions and the group meetings with other adults on the spectrum (I ended up leaving those group meetings, ironically, because one of the psychs, a thirty-year-old woman, was overtly hitting on me). A local organization offered me to take part in a course to help disabled people rejoin society and get hired.

Because most social workers are apparently retarded themselves (I swear I’ve never met any of them I could respect) and into the whole “everyone is equal” shit, they lumped together people with intellectual, social, and physical disabilities. We had people whose limbs didn’t work right having to be told how to talk with an interviewer in a way that a Down Syndrome fella would comprehend. People with social disabilities such as mine weren’t particularly tolerated either; a few of the disabled there, one diagnosed with paranoia and persecution syndrome or some shit like that, and another with fetal alcohol syndrome due to what a bastard her mother was, kept railing about some autistic guy at their workshop, and how autistic people were this and that. I didn’t interact much with them, but at least I got some sense of satisfaction when we “had” to reveal our disabilities and they realized that the guy whose disability they have kept shitting on every day heard it all.

You see, one of the things that bother me the most about the imposed public perception of disabled people, and I mean from the moderately disabled (among which I include myself; I’m 52% disabled) to the hyper disabled that you only see in such centers, is that social workers and such pests have forced a vision onto society that disabled people are all so resilient and understanding and kind to others because they endure such trauma and discrimination. Well, plenty of the people I met there were fucking bastards. Some real nasty ones too. There are details that I decided not to include in this story because it would seem like I was insulting people with such disabilities, even though it actually happened; for example, a Down Syndrome guy routinely waltzed over to groups, ripped the loudest farts, and casually left. Another guy kept calling everyone a faggot. Someone else seemed to be converting to Islam, and regularly claimed that priests and such ought to be killed. It wasn’t particularly surprising that some of the particularly vulnerable disabled would convert, because the fucking moronic social workers put illegals with a jihadist mindset among genuinely disabled people, under the category of “risk of exclusion,” as if wanting to conquer this country for their religion was a disability. Is it really a wonder that I was regularly enraged?

Anyway, that organization showed me a workshop similar to the one featured in this story, an offered me to work there. But I couldn’t due to the extreme noise, my intestinal issues, and other stuff. I did learn plenty about how they experienced that life, though, and it resulted in this story. Whatever good it did.

Anyway, I dare you to enjoy it if you can.