I followed the supervisor into her refrigerated office. She gestured at a chair for me to sit. When she hunched over and opened her laptop—wedged between the beige CRT monitor and keyboard—the fan turned toward me and blew on my face like the breath of an ice elemental. If this room belonged to someone else, instead of the woman who ordered me what to do and before whom I had to swallow half of my words, I would have gone upstairs during every break to cool off.
The supervisor settled into her executive chair and began typing on her laptop.
“Everything all right with Héctor, with those misunderstandings?”
That oily bastard had complained to the supervisor when I, instead of remaining silent, replied to one of his attacks. After I threatened him with a screwdriver, he would have more readily gone up to deliver an ultimatum to our boss. Did this woman pretend to be oblivious because she was going to fire me?
I avoided fidgeting in the chair.
“As usual. It’ll remain the same, but I’ll ignore him as much as I can.”
The supervisor, her back straight, was so absorbed in studying my dead eye and my bruised cheekbone that her lips had tightened.
I raised a hand to cover the right side of my face.
“Tomorrow I’ll come with sunglasses. I think I have a pair left. Or I’ll improvise a patch.”
“It must hurt.”
“When I get home, I’m going to press an ice pack against it. I’ve taken more punches.”
I chuckled awkwardly to ease the tension, even as I massaged my fingers and knuckles. The ruin of my eye dared her to call it beautiful, like a corpse grinning at a preacher’s empty platitudes.
“See, Alan, I wanted you to come up here for a specific matter. As you know, we need a coordinator. I’ve always looked to promote experienced operators, people who know how we work and who understand the peculiarities and problems of his co-workers.”
“You offering me the position?”
“Are you interested?”
I was left dumbfounded. Me, as coordinator? I felt like a confused dog expected to fetch a ball when its owner has only pretended to throw it.
The supervisor scooted closer to the desk, propped herself on her elbows, and rested her chin on her fists.
“The pay goes up a bit and you’ll have more responsibility. Besides, you’ll be able to boss around several dozen people.”
When I heard the word “responsibility,” I gripped the armrests. I wanted to swat that word from my mind as if it were a buzzing fly. She might as well have sought my consent so I could be strangled to near unconsciousness every workday, only to be strangled again.
“Have I given any sign that I’m good with people?” I said, on the verge of sounding outraged.
“You’re a smart guy. Just throw yourself into it, and before long it’ll come naturally.”
I restrained myself from clenching my jaw, careful not to let my gaze harden.
“To how many have you offered it, if I may ask?”
“You’re the first.”
“Will you offer it to others?”
“No.”
I looked around as if someone had written the answer on the walls. I turned my palms upward toward the ceiling.
“Why would you consider me?”
“You work with a lower error rate than most. The others slow down production by chatting about the weekend game or gossiping. You’re serious and consistent.”
“I’m serious because I don’t give a fuck about work. I come for the paycheck.”
The supervisor raised an eyebrow and tilted her face as if she were about to reprimand me. She twirled a pen between her fingers.
“You must be a strong person, having participated in horrible scenes—which I’d rather not even imagine—that still haunt you. You show self-knowledge and self-control that are lacking in personnel who rarely think twice before dozing off on the line. That makes you a good candidate. Only one person has shown interest in the position. Someone you know.”
“Héctor.”
“He tried bribing me with Starbucks. He’d love that responsibility… or the power. And I doubt he’d use it wisely. Positions of power are earned by those who understand the difficulties and the weight of those responsibilities.”
My breathing had thickened, and the nausea I’d kept at bay throughout the day was rising again like bubbles surfacing in a swamp. The supervisor wanted to drag me down into a basement and chain me up. I had assumed I worked in the workshop, on this dehumanizing assembly line, just to kill time until a better alternative occurred to me, but the woman was offering to condemn me to die within these walls like an insect in a jar.
“Find someone else.”
“You’re being wasted on that line.”
“I’m wasted anywhere. I don’t want that job.”
Her smile collapsed like a weight held up by worn-out arms. She shifted in her chair, swaying from side to side as the corners of her mouth tightened. She likely believed that her job was to persuade me, and that as long as she kept trying, she’d come up with a way. Was she running this workshop as if starring in a movie? Playing the role of coach for a ragtag team of misfits who, under her leadership, would win the championship.
Among the lines, we were organized into dozens of operators, most with problems worse than mine: deformities, accidents, mental delays. I was a disfigured man who had always been disgusted by life. And this woman had even arranged a birthday party for me. She kept watching over me from her high perch. Sometimes when I hurried down the hallway toward the bathroom, she would materialize to study me.
“What’s with all this attention?” I asked. “This fixation on me… do you do that with everyone?”
The supervisor tapped on the desk with a pen. She sighed.
“A few years ago, there was an operator here who came in drunk. He’d beat his hangovers by drinking even more. And you could see it on his face: the flushed cheeks; the bruised and swollen bags under his eyes; the ashen, sagging skin. I found out that something had happened to his family. If he needed to get drunk, fine. I understood. I tried to help him, to make his stay easier, and I forgave his mistakes as he drank and drank, but I discovered that the atypical number of defective parts our clients complained about was because this man deliberately assembled them wrong. I called him into my office, tried to coax a reason out of him before deciding, and he just laughed… heartily.”
She fell silent as if expecting me to react. I rubbed the left side of my face with my palm.
“Should I laugh too?” I asked wearily.
“Alan, those who suffer yet strive to do things well deserve support. Help. You keep fixing Héctor’s parts. Your co-worker Christopher told me.”
“And Caroline? Who helps her?”
The woman took a deep breath, then lowered her voice.
“Caroline is beyond my reach. Beyond anyone’s.”
“I’m not some project meant to make you feel better. The fact that you try to help me only chains me down.”
She looked at me as if I’d just confessed that I hated desserts, and now she considered me some other species. I was startled by the shrill sound of the horn that marked the end of the shift. Beyond the window, the assembly lines were darkening one by one. I got up instinctively, but the supervisor pointed to the chair.
“A few minutes, please.”
“The horn has sounded.”
The woman leaned on the edge of the desk as if to stand, inadvertently nudging her pen to the floor. She scarcely looked away before fixing her gaze on me, as if keeping me in her office depended on maintaining eye contact.
“You understand you’re in trouble. You came to us, to a sheltered job, because you couldn’t keep all the others. Because maybe here you’d fit in.”
I shook my head, then turned away from her. This woman would force me to rip my guts out through my mouth for her entertainment. I should open the door and leave.
Next to the door hung a dreamcatcher. A woolen thread had been wound around a hoop much like on a spool, and in the gap, someone had interwoven a figure meant to resemble a flower. To me, it resembled a spiderweb. From the hoop hung three feathers dyed in cerulean blue and indigo. Had the woman just bought it, or had I simply never noticed it? I only came up to the office because I was forced, and I focused on scrutinizing every word and facial expression of the supervisor to anticipate problems.
I turned back to the desk. In the corner of a side wall, bordering the window that offered a view of the beams holding up the roof, the woman had mounted a cork board. Among the notes and a calendar were photographs in which the supervisor posed alongside blurry faces who would never know this workshop. A triangular red-and-white pennant from the University of Texas at Austin stood out. On the back of the laptop, a sticker featuring the triangle and the embedded eye of the Illuminati reminded me of a security camera. The supervisor reinforced her smile by baring both rows of white teeth—not to convey courtesy or placate me, but to assure me that even though my presence unsettled her, she was growing impervious to my darkness.
I parted my lips with a click, and my voice came out as if I’d started smoking at the age of ten.
“I came to this workshop to break with the past, perhaps with the implicit hope that this time, against all my experience, it would be different. But I was blind, because nothing has changed. Wherever I go, I run into people and the rotten systems they build. Everything is barren.”
The supervisor dragged her palm down her forearm, head bowed. Her bangs had been severed in a razor-sharp line, a harsh horizontal slash that clashed with the curtained strands framing her jaw. It looked less like a style than a wound. An abrupt amputation. It twisted my stomach, mirroring the disgust I’d seen in strangers when their eyes snagged on my dead one: a violation of symmetry, a thing cut violently out of place.
“I went through such a phase, you know, in adolescence,” she said. “Spiked bracelets, gray or black t-shirts and skirts, heavy eyeshadow like camouflage paint. And when Cobain put a shotgun barrel in his mouth, I thought the world had died with him. But those are just phases. Anguish doesn’t abound in the world as much as the adolescent mind makes it out to be.” She hesitated and avoided my gaze. “Although they didn’t send me off with a rifle to a part of the world where death is trivialized, nor did they force me to kill. That must affect the mind in ways I’ll never understand.”
I took a deep breath to calm my pulse. Just like many other civilians living within the borders that armed men guarded, this woman regarded me as a poor idiot manipulated by a cruel, inhuman system to be sacrificed. But if we all deserted, these civilians, who considered violence a cancer to be excised, would face with blank eyes the horrors that would pounce on them, like someone standing on a beach while a tsunami approaches.
“Stop resorting to my wartime experience as if that were a simple explanation for you. I went to war, so that’s why I’m a miserable bastard, right? But I enlisted to die for a decent cause, only to find out it was indecent, and I survived. I was born with the ability to recognize the decay as if a corpse were decomposing right under my nose.”
The supervisor’s neck trembled, and she pretended to wipe away a booger. She spoke in a conciliatory tone one might use with a bear.
“We only live once, putting aside what you might think about reincarnation. One chooses to be happy or miserable. Why would I choose the latter?”
“Is that what you do? You choose to be happy?”
“I could force myself to worry about money that’s never enough, or about quarrels with subordinates, but what would it matter? With the little time we have—and it will be gone before we know it—we must strive to be happy and kind to others. Present a smile to everyone you cross paths with. It truly helps, you know? Frowns and scowls are contagious. Before long, we’d end up with a negative work environment.”
I wandered over to one of the shelves, crammed with accounting books. In the gaps there were miniature plush toys and a few sculptures. I picked up a hand-painted ceramic gondola, flipped it over, and returned it to its place.
I massaged the knots in my neck. Why should I bother arguing with this woman? No combination of words I could muster would make her understand. The supervisor would need to think through my brain. And her smile churned my stomach. How could someone put on a happy face at every problem? She reminded me of the citizens of communist states, who’d never dare to be the first one to stop clapping at their leader. Facing the darkness terrified her. Although she pretended otherwise, she wanted to detach herself. She saw me as a stain that persisted even after countless washings. It tormented her that someone like me existed in her surroundings, but she couldn’t yet justify her revulsion as enough to fire me. The supervisor would only accept those who lied to themselves, who pretended to be happy, who exiled from their minds any reality that unsettled them.
She was a child. A child intent on forcing others to live her fantasy.
I approached the desk and lifted the frame of the photograph that had its back to the visitors. The supervisor uttered a syllable and raised an arm as if to snatch the frame from me, but then she closed her mouth and let that arm rest on her lap. In the photograph, on the left was the woman herself—her hair tied at the nape and wearing a tank top—and on the right was her older sister, the owner of the SUV parked every afternoon outside the workshop. In the center, looming above the women, a man of about fifty wore a hiking hat and had a camera hanging from a strap. He encircled both women with his tanned arms. The three of them had been genetically endowed with smiles that spread along their gums, smiles they would never be ashamed to show.
After I put the frame back, I lowered my gaze to the supervisor, who waited unable to guess what I would say.
“You’re going to die.”
The woman recoiled. She had paled, and her pupils shrunk. Maybe she had dreaded previously that I, with my inner turmoil and avoidance of people, would become one of those freaks who stormed into their workplaces with a machine gun, and now I stood before her as if draped in a black robe and wielding a scythe.
“Excuse me?” she asked in a weak voice.
“You’re going to die, your sister is going to die, and your father—or whoever the man in that photo is—will die. Everyone you know and everyone you’ll never know will die. Anyone you have loved or love or are going to love will die, either that person or you first. In case you plan to perpetuate yourself by having your descendants remember you fondly: every one of those descendants will die. Soon no one will know you existed. If you plan to leave behind any monument to your existence that endures over time, someday this society, or this whole civilization, will collapse, and your work will be lost or burned. If you’re lucky and against all odds our species survives for thousands of years longer, in billions of years the sun will explode. The explosion will fry whatever life remains on Earth. All that ever-changing geography we believe to be immortal will eventually be swallowed up. And if humanity stops killing each other and manages to spread cancerlike among the stars, in the end the universe will cease to exist. The space between atoms will expand until no matter retains its form. In the remaining vast, icy blackness, perhaps some remnant will suggest that the stars once shone, like whatever lasts of a rocket months after it exploded and its smoke cleared. Can you even picture so far ahead? Look around. Do you really think this calm will last? The black tide will catch us. You’ll fear stepping out into the street. Fanatics will blow themselves up amidst crowds, trucks will plow into families enjoying the holidays, and the moronic masses will cry out, How could this happen when we used to smile so much, when we were so kind and supportive and went out of our way for the common good? We must not have sacrificed enough! How could we have known? But knowledge won’t save you: everything ends in pain. You smile because the chemistry of your brain is satisfied by the routine of work and how you distract yourself in your spare time. A stroke of luck for you. In my case, before I geared up to head out of the country to my death, my brain had barely cooperated, and nowadays it even alerts me to bursts of pain in the spots of my face and skull from where shrapnel was extracted. Stop demanding that I be like you. Living in delusion is a vice.”
The supervisor, leaning on the desk and hunched over, slid a trembling hand across her sweat-beaded forehead. She pressed one temple and raised her gaze toward me while a smile tugged at one corner of her mouth as if to emphasize some sarcasm. Then she controlled her voice.
“You’re the one who hides from everyone and every opportunity. You flee from reality.”
She turned in her armchair, offering me her profile, and the fan stirred tufts of hair across her face. She adjusted the neckline of her blouse as if embarrassed.
“Are you satisfied with this life,” I asked, “with being in charge of an insignificant workshop and loads of halfwits?”
She glared at me. Her eyes had glazed over, her cheeks flushed. Her lips trembled like a warrior lifting a heavy shield.
“A bit harsh, don’t you think?”
Her tone revealed that she detested me for having forced her into feeling that way. I waited as she took a deep breath. I would avoid impaling the heart of a person on her knees.
“Tomorrow we’ll talk calmly,” she said. “Think about what you’d prefer to do, and perhaps you’ll discover that you want the promotion.”
I had expected her to fire me. I paced while running a hand over my mouth and chin, until I stopped in front of the shelf with its miniature plush toys and travel mementos. The following day I was supposed to deliver my decision, but I wouldn’t come. I knew it as if a grate had given way under my feet. How could I return and endure another day here? My mind had already begun classifying the moments in this workshop as memories that would both shame and haunt me in the early hours while I tossed and turned in bed. Another segment of my life blurred into scenes I would rather forget. For me, the people associated here would continue working within these walls for the rest of their lives, as permanent as initials carved into the trunk of a tree.
I took in one last image of the supervisor—her, slumped in the armchair with her mouth frozen in a smile of incredulity, waiting for me to speak.
“I’m not coming tomorrow,” I said. “Not tomorrow, nor the day after. Never again.”
The supervisor let out a huff and shook her head, then hardened her voice as if to silence a toddler throwing a tantrum.
“Don’t talk nonsense.”
“Why would that be nonsense?”
“You only have this support.”
“So what?”
She gestured, the contours of her eyes crinkling.
“What will you live on? I know how you get along with people. Even those without your difficulties struggle to get a job in this economy. You’ll end up in the streets, where you could easily get robbed or killed.”
I picked up the ceramic gondola. Some anonymous hand had taken the trouble to paint every detail with a fine brush only for it to end up on a shelf in this office. The supervisor pointed at the gondola as if about to rise, circle the desk, and snatch it from me.
“Don’t break it,” she admonished me. “It’s a keepsake. I care about it.”
I placed the gondola back on the shelf, exactly at the angle the supervisor had set. I walked to the door, but before grasping the handle, I turned back. I took a deep breath as an itch burned in my chest.
“Belonging to the human race makes me feel as if I needed to wipe a layer of filth from my skin. Yet, I’m forced to deal with humans every day. I let them envelop me in their stench, the very stench that emanates from the body I’ve been forced to inhabit.” I spread my arms as if embracing everything around me. “We should never have built these realities, nor allowed ourselves to be locked into these mental traps whose walls narrow day by day, suffocating us. Every system has fallen, and will fall one after another no matter how many times they change disguises. Their collapses will crush thousands, millions of people. I hate to see, hear, feel, or acknowledge any of these things. Don’t you understand what I’m saying? We should have lived in communities of just a couple of hundred people whose faces we recognized, where we’d never have to fear at night that a stranger would break into our home. We built this world. Are we any better off in our minds, where it counts? And I must get involved? I want to do nothing, be nothing. Anything I commit to will fail and add to the pile of decay. I come to the workshop to waste the hours in vain, disconnected from everything to minimize collateral damage. And it doesn’t matter. Someday, soon, I will disappear, and no one will care. For many, that’ll be an improvement. One less bastard on the road. One less hideous face ruining their day, or evoking pity. So if I die of hunger or some bastard kills me, he’ll be correcting the worst mistake of my life: that I ever existed.”
The supervisor buried her face in her palms. Her back rose and fell with deep breaths. When I turned the door handle, she dragged the armchair backward.
“Listen, my mind has gone cloudy. Give yourself a break and tomorrow we’ll talk. You’ll see things more clearly then.”
“No one’s going to tell me what to do.”
I flung the door open, but before leaving I strode over to the dreamcatcher, yanked it from its nail—tearing a strand of wicker—and threw it into the trash. I left slamming the door behind me, then ran down the stairs and along the corridor until I emerged into the hot, piss-yellow light of the yard.
Author’s note: this novella was originally self-published in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.
At times I still feel like I’m trapped in that refrigerated office, arguing with the supervisor.
The Domains of the Emperor Owl 
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