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

“Yeah, we noticed,” the man said.

I pressed my lips thin and took a breath.

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

“You. Hello.”

“I work around here,” I rasped.

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

“What difference does it make?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No one.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Strange last name. Scandinavian?”

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

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

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

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

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

“No bedbugs.”

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

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

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

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

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

The boyfriend shrugged.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Stay away.”

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

“Thanks for your service to the country.”

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

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

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

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

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

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The horn signaled our lunch break. In the locker room, I took off my work coat and gloves. When I collapsed onto the bench, my pants fused with the wood. Behind me, other workers wandered around, chatting and laughing. The rustle of clothes. Lockers slamming shut.

I braced my elbows on my thighs. Was it worth driving to Wendy’s? I’d be surrounded by another crowd, but of strangers who couldn’t care less that I existed. They’d ignore me.

I closed my eyes and painted a composite portrait of all the times I’d spied on that woman. With her face and body, she could strut around naked without anyone finding fault. The memory unleashed my imagination, and in those intervals, I convinced myself I inhabited another body, that I’d been born as a different man—someone a pain-free woman could have loved without shame.

I stepped out into the patio’s parched air. The gazes of some workers, as they held sandwiches or lunchboxes, led me toward Caroline. The flare of her dress spun into a spiral, and before it fell, another twist sent it rippling, offering glimpses of her tanned and scarred legs. Rising onto her tiptoes, she flowed, paused, and flowed again in a drunken ballet. In flashes, her luminous features peeked through her disheveled hair. Caroline grinned like a little girl on Christmas morning, clutching the bronze horse to her sternum with both hands.

I passed by the woman. When I opened my car door to let the inside cool down, the scorching frame burned my fingertips, which pulsed in a red halo.

Caroline had drifted to one side of the workshop, under the watchful eyes of the workers standing in the eave’s shade. She ran her hands over the sculpture’s peaks and curves—its mane captured mid-fling, its ribs, its galloping legs. She crouched beside the fence, set the horse on her thigh, and rooted among blades of grass, faded cans, and cigarette butts, like a lottery winner who buys another ticket minutes after winning.

I got into the car. I closed the door, stirring the hot, stagnant air. I was smiling. My lips went slack, and I glanced around to figure out if anyone had noticed.

I started the engine and drove away from the workshop. For a few minutes there was a prickling in my chest, like I’d scrubbed off part of the sludge that was choking my insides.

I reached the Wendy’s parking lot and, although plenty of spaces were free, I parked between two trucks whose trailers blocked the view like walls. Working the line had convinced me I was rid of the nausea, but when I killed the engine, I had to press my forehead against the steering wheel and take a deep breath. Any wrong movement would make vomit surge up my throat, so I waited a couple of minutes while my tongue sloshed in stale saliva.

The nausea eased. As if to demand my attention, my guts growled. I’d driven to Wendy’s; I might as well exploit the opportunity.

I followed a group entering the restaurant, using them as a screen so nobody would notice I was searching for the woman. As if reflected in a mirror, I imagined myself skulking like a vulture. Hispanics, whites, and blacks—workers and civilians—roamed the Wendy’s in shorts and T-shirts or tank tops. They threaded between tables as if they owned the place, while I had to apologize for existing.

The woman stood out like a diamond tossed in the mud. She’d braided her hair. The table hid her from the waist down, but she wore a corset-like top that fit her like a bra, and in the accentuated cleft of her breasts, perspiration gleamed.

Her boyfriend sat across from her, his back to me. He wore yesterday’s hat and a plaid shirt.

I joined the line at the counter, and as I stood impatiently, I sneaked glances at the empty table I’d occupy three spots from the couple. The people ahead of me waited for trays of burgers, fries, and drinks. Whenever they gestured and talked to each other, whenever they squeezed by behind me on their way to their seats, you could hear the jingling of the chains binding them to one another, to their friends, to their partners, to their families, to their jobs, to their political parties, to their sports teams. In their minds, layer upon layer formed a filter. Water could pass through, but the filter blocked impurities and gold alike; the gold got trapped, congealing with the grime. These civilians thought only what their attachments allowed, and for decades they’d kept themselves from knowing what they barred from their awareness. They’d honed their brains to lie to themselves about their worth and their prospects. That made them better servants of their genes, which existed only to reproduce. The human body was a supernumerary cell grown to obscene proportions. The corrosive, cannibalistic consciousness it spawned hid everything ugly and unpleasant, anything that harmed it, so each individual could march toward a future that would never arrive.

By the time it was my turn to order, my gut had gone cold. I felt enveloped in the viscous atmosphere of a tropical cave thriving with moss and fungi.

I sat at my table and unwrapped my burger. The boyfriend, left cheek propped on his left fist, lifted lettuce leaves to his mouth. His posture suggested that an afternoon of overtime waited at the office. The woman scrolled her phone with a thumb while toying with the end of her braid.

Aside from the blonde goddess, there were more couples scattered around. Some men looked mentally stable, maybe decently employed, but I could usually spot drunks, abusers, and similar losers with worse jobs than mine. They all ended up with a woman on their arm. Did any woman who glanced at me just see a throbbing lump of pus?

Strangers strolled around. They searched for open tables or emptied their trays into the trash. Two workers chattered while smiling instinctively, but when their gazes landed on me, the smiles vanished as though I’d threatened to kill them. They changed direction to avoid passing near me. Even if their conscious minds remained clueless, their subconscious minds understood. That wariness, along with other skills, had helped humankind evolve off the savannah. Their instincts recognized the rotten and kept them away.

I had killed a child. A child alive until he crossed the path in front of my car, and I’d been driving down that dirt road in the middle of the night because I was sick. People could smell it, that sickness. It oozed from my pores like tar. That’s why I rarely lasted a year in any job: I belonged to a different species. I was a beast dressed as a human.

The boyfriend stood and made his way across the restaurant to the bathroom. This was the highlight of my day, the little bracket of time in which, behind my tinted lenses, I could savor each sight of the woman, unbothered by interruptions.

She toyed with her phone while projecting that flamingo-pink lower lip like a red apple begging to be plucked from its stem. She wrinkled her nose, pressed the middle knuckle against her nostrils and shrugged, her features scrunching as if about to sneeze. She relaxed and rubbed her nose. When she pulled her hand away, she kept the palm facing up while rummaging in her purse. She came up empty. She glanced furtively around. Then, as though grabbing the table to slide her chair back, she wiped her soiled hand on one of the table legs.

I bit my burger just to fill my stomach, but it tasted foul, and every mouthful that sank into my stomach churned my discomfort. I should have stayed back at the workshop, in the locker room. It seemed idiotic that dozens of us came to Wendy’s daily, only to head back to jobs that wasted our hours. How many of these workers were living on pure inertia? Everyone got one shot, and if you’d failed by thirty, you should quit—save yourself from the pain and indignity of the decades of decline ahead. Past that age, humans rotted like overripe fruit, sliding down the chute toward disintegration. Children, teens, and twentysomethings lived out the promised life before they could even appreciate it. Those over thirty existed to raise the next generation and keep it going until it could fend for itself, but I had tricked nature and the odds, and I survived alone. How would I have brought another victim into this farce? Other human refuse found some solace in barren relationships, but I was desperate to escape. I wanted my time to pass with the least possible pain.

Thirty-seven. I should have died in a blaze of glory among explosions and bullet whistles, leaping that low wall to gun down the bearded savages on the other side. I would have emptied my M16 and taken someone out before their AK-47s riddled my torso. I would have avenged the insult my existence inflicted on nature. But I had returned home. My heart kept beating, refusing to ask why it bothered. And another workday waited to bury the certainty of my obsolescence under the roar of machines and conveyor belts.

A wave of sickly cold shuddered through me. I wiped the sweat from my forehead, and when I closed my eyes, images played across the inside of my eyelids. Soldiers in Interceptor body armor carrying M16s advanced around me. Explosions kicked up clouds of dust. Sitting in the passenger seat of a Humvee, I heard that first lieutenant praying from the back seat whenever automatic fire intensified in the distance.

I leaned over the table, took off my sunglasses, and buried my face in my hands while stifling a groan. Every day I avoided new sights; I feared something vile might lodge in my mind and ambush me, day or night, for the rest of my life. Whenever the foulness visited me, I’d tremble, double over, lose my breath. As my mind waded through darkness, those memories detonated like torpedoes, and one day the battered hull would finish flooding and sink to the depths. I needed to erect walls around myself, all while condemning each impulse and decision that let this plague of images, sounds, smells, and tastes infest me.

I put on my sunglasses again and took a deep breath. I wolfed down a handful of fries so their salty taste would wash away the flavor of rot in my mouth.

I had wasted too many years searching for my place in this world of humans whose customs and ideals baffled me. I lacked the disposition and resources to love someone, even though the need remained. A jailer opened a skylight that poured light into my cell and showed a bright landscape, but he only opened it to remind me I’d never set foot on that grass outside. I knew the tar filling humanity. I had to stay on guard, always ready to block and counter each attack. People without those drives or insights could love others, but I recognized the predators and scavengers. Every glued-on smile was a flashy warning of venom, like the gaudy colors of a tropical fish.

Was my obsession with this woman love? It was tough to pin down those impulses. Like a lion, I needed a female who would barely resist. Then, I’d lie down and sleep. I lacked the skill and taste for trickery, the art of persuasion, that might lead a woman to follow me somewhere and undress. I was left with memories of the women who’d entranced me. Maybe those were enough—one gasp of air before diving into the abyss.

No, there was another piece missing. Plenty of the men sharing this break at Wendy’s appreciated their lives even though they had no stable job, although they might be shunned even more than I was, but they believed that the lives they enjoyed, and the futures they imagined, were worth the pain of living them. They were made of different stuff. Eating, dealing with people, small victories at work—those would unleash a chemical storm in their brains, making the effort tolerable. Did they cringe at noise? Did sorrow hurt them less? Did unpredictable people drive them up the wall? Did they despair at the fact everything ends in decay? Did they realize we scurried like fleas on a speck of dust drifting through a cold, black universe—that from a human’s first to last breath is but an atom in a drop in an ocean of time?

My mind rose from its dark chamber. The woman had leaned sideways to stare at me with her lips slightly parted. Two furrows mirrored each other between her eyebrows. Across from her, the boyfriend had an arm hooked over the back of his seat, his gaze lining me up, poised to fire.

I choked down a swell of nausea. My chair scraped backward on the floor as I stood. I gathered my wrappers onto the tray. I slipped outside, passing the cabs of a line of trucks, when a man’s voice, sharp as a blade, called out to me. I stopped and turned around.

The boyfriend had tipped his hat back as if to widen his view. His left hand was buried in that pocket, his right hand swinging in a clenched fist with each step. Two strides from me, he halted. His ballerina-like girlfriend stopped two steps behind.

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

Today’s song is “Creep” by Radiohead (also this live version).

The Deep Dive couple produced a very compelling podcast about this part of the story.

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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.