The machine parts slid from one worker to another. I caught a sidelong glimpse of how Héctor cast a look in my direction. What was he scheming? Although post lunch break, that man often threatened to nod off out of boredom, today he had donned a pair of earmuffs like those worn by laborers wielding pneumatic hammers, and he bobbed his head to the rhythm of a drum kit’s machine-gun fire. Seated to my right, Christopher, almost as if tending to an epileptic, sent glances my way that I carefully avoided.
I focused on fitting the parts together and connecting the wires, yet Caroline’s voice ricocheted from ear to ear, conveying a coded message that I needed to decipher. As one machine part drifted away on the conveyor belt, I found myself twisting on my stool, scanning the mass of workers for that woman’s unkempt mane. I’d never bothered to find out which line she worked on, or whether the workshop had adopted her as a mascot instead. Perhaps now Caroline was gripping the supervisor by the wrist and guiding her, much like a loyal dog leading its master, toward the black hole of my trunk.
I fixed my gaze on the pieces that stalled before my hands, but in the foggy wasteland of my mind, Caroline’s presence shone like a lighthouse. The secret I should have guarded, private as my own conscience, had been split apart. That woman knew I’d killed a child, and where I hid the evidence. She had become the most important person, even though I would never understand her. She could ruin my life at her whim. And why would she save me—the strange, repulsive man who stashed a child’s corpse in his trunk?
It was only a matter of time before someone else found out. Caroline would eventually expose the secret, or I would overlook some crucial detail, and the police would be called. That domino piece stood upright with dozens more waiting in line to fall. And there I was, still in this workshop, this sweat factory, assembling piece after piece. Some droplets gathered on my face, while others slid down my back, my sides, and my chest, as a hot, stale vapor seeped through the gaps in my shirt. My skin was melting.
How had I ever believed I had the right to show up in this workshop? I’d crashed a meeting of high society. These broken people around me enjoyed their lives, even though they bore injuries and deformities that would have convinced me to shoot myself. They wanted to improve society through the hours of labor they sacrificed. They cherished meeting other broken souls, but I longed to lose them from sight. What else could one expect from a murderer parading his trophy?
While I drove screws into casings and wrestled with wires, while I blinked and squinted to define every contour, I anticipated that the parts between my fingertips would vanish. Their molecules would admit that all effort to maintain a shape was wasted, for sooner or later they’d end up in some dump.
As if wandering through the gallery of a cave in a dream, I found myself trailing my crew out to the patio. Break time had arrived. Guided by Christopher’s back, I ended up in the shade beneath a building’s eave. With numb fingers, I fumbled for the button of my lab coat pocket to extract my pack of cigarettes. I lit one up. By the third drag I confirmed that, whether by ritual or nicotine, smoking still soothed my nerves.
John—or Joseph—was eyeing Christopher’s socks as if scrutinizing a strip of toilet paper dangling from someone’s trousers. Christopher lifted his foot and wiggled it.
“What?”
“Pull them down. No one wears them like that.”
Christopher crouched and bunched his socks up against his shoes. As he straightened his long frame, he laughed cordially.
Héctor’s hands were expertly rolling strands of tobacco into paper—a dexterity he sorely lacked on the line. Gusts of hot air pushed against the gate, eliciting metallic creaks. My aching cheek—throbbing irritably like eczema—along with my dead eye, stifled any conversation the crew might have attempted to conjure in that silence.
A buzzing skimmed along the edge of my left ear as if trying to slip inside to my eardrum. I flinched and shook my free hand near that ear. The insect’s tiny black dot flitted in bursts like an intermittent radar signal, until it vanished from my sight. I crushed the cigarette butt against the dry ground, only for the mosquito’s buzz to return.
My breathing grew heavy. These bugs had survived for millions of years even though their sole purpose was to annoy everyone else. I tensed like a drawn rubber band and tracked the dancing black dot. On instinct, I slapped at my neck, and when I pulled my palms apart, I found the mosquito’s thorax and abdomen shattered, its legs broken as if pressed between two sheets of glass. I flicked it away with a sharp smack. After shaking my head, I rummaged through my pack for another cigarette.
“Your mask’s cracked,” Héctor said.
His cigarette smoldered between the stubby index and middle fingers. He faced me with the intensity of someone who believed his horse would surge ahead and win the race.
“The fuck are you talking about?” I retorted.
“Your killer face.”
I clenched my teeth—worsening the pain in my cheek—held the cigarette’s filter between my lips, and drew the lighter’s flame close.
“You see what you want to see.”
“Every time you look at us, you must start imagining hajjis. One day you’ll show up in the workshop with a semi-automatic.”
I inhaled deeply to fill my lungs with smoke, to dissuade myself from launching a counterattack. My mind was like an acne-infested face, every thought scraping against inflamed skin. Controlling myself felt like tugging on the leash of a pitbull with a chronic ear infection, all while a legion of idiots insisted I let it have its head petted.
“What have you gotten yourself into,” Héctor demanded, “that you come back for the afternoon shift with a black eye? Are you trafficking? Are you going to say some stranger beat you up just because?”
I flicked the ash from my cigarette as my toes contracted, the tips bulging. Everyone could see I was boiling with rage. Did this bastard want to die? Was he egging me on so I’d throw a couple of punches, thus giving him a pretext for self-defense? But I would need to stop my fingers and teeth from tearing his face apart like an enraged chimpanzee.
Adrenaline surged through me. I bowed my head and ordered myself to calm down. In the past I could have kept quiet and conceded the point just to be left alone; back then, I’d locked away my reactions like in a windowless house. Now, however, my anxiety and irritation lay bare. Héctor would see in those symptoms a red circle on the chest of some video game boss: a target to shoot until the boss dropped dead.
I dropped the lit cigarette at my feet, crushed it with my heel, and scrubbed it against the ground. When my gaze met Héctor’s, his eyebrows tensed.
“If I displease you,” I said, raising my voice now that I cared for every word to be heard, “then look the other way. Don’t bother me with nonsense.”
Before he could answer, I rounded the corner and slipped back into the workshop. I sat on my stool at the line and lowered my head. As I rolled the corrugated handle of my screwdriver along the conveyor belt, I strained my ear like a cat, waiting for the approaching footsteps.
From behind, Christopher’s heavy steps neared, soon joined by another’s. The stool about ten feet to my right creaked. I waited for someone to activate the line, for the conveyor belt to start moving beneath my hands, when suddenly the megaphone burst to life with a screech of static.
“Alan Kivi, please report to the supervisor’s office.”
The hair on the back of my neck stood up. As I stumbled off my stool, I had to rein myself in from running away. I tiptoed over to peer at the equipment, then shifted aside to reveal the faces of the workers that had remained hidden by the purple backs of those seated in front. Along one of the lines near the changing rooms, I recognized Caroline. Even from the far end of the workshop, I could discern that in her unkempt mane, some strands seemed to arch as if electrified, and her wide, vacant eyes watched her hands as they connected cables.
“Héctor must have gotten lost along the way,” Christopher remarked.
I turned around. The stool opposite mine was empty.
I headed down the corridor while dabbing the cold sweat from my face. A flash of heat blurred my vision. I climbed the stepped metal platform leading to the supervisor’s office, opened the door, and stood beneath the lintel.
Héctor had seated himself with his back to the door, in front of the woman’s desk. Judging by how his hair gleamed under the lamp, he must have soaked it in olive oil to style it.
The supervisor lifted herself from the armchair and leaned against the desk with both hands. After inspecting the ruin of my eye and the battered state of my cheek, she turned to Héctor while pointing at me.
“I do not forgive you for what you did.”
Héctor shifted in his chair and let out an interjection before freezing, torn between disputing the accusation and swearing his innocence.
I closed the door behind me. The air conditioner and a rotating fan chilled the office, making it resemble a refrigerator. I longed to collapse into the empty chair and let the film of sweat on my skin dry.
“Someone else hit me,” I murmured.
The supervisor sank back into her chair. I sat down as, at the edge of my vision, Héctor seethed like a boiling pot of rage.
“Who did that to you?” she asked.
I drew a deep breath and rubbed my face with my hand, careful not to disturb the wound on my cheek.
“It happened outside the workshop. It doesn’t matter.”
“What do you mean ‘it doesn’t matter’? Have you called the police?”
“I suppose you asked me to come up here for something else.”
The supervisor sighed and sized us up with a look that threatened to pin us against the wall.
“Héctor has complained about you. I want your side of the story. He says you spoke to him disrespectfully.”
Héctor concentrated on his right hand, squeezing the armrest as if he were aboard a spaceship about to take off.
The stench, both from Héctor and me, was overwhelming: rancid sweat steeped in anger and resentment, mixed with a sewer-like fetidity woven into the very stitches of my clothes. The reek of a cesspool filled the atmosphere of incense and women’s perfume, as if one of us had stepped in dog shit.
That sewer odor would be the smell of a rotting corpse. I shuddered. Did the others smell it, too? It had clung to me when I opened the trunk and Caroline tore away the transparent plastic. Would I now have to suspect that everyone recognized that corpse stench, a mark on me as indelible as the odor of my armpits?
“Alan,” the supervisor said.
I parted my lips, but before I could speak, Héctor grunted and shoved me verbally.
“Disrespecting me today has been the last straw. I have the right to feel good here, to work in peace, and this individual is preventing that.” He raised his gruff voice as he pointed at me with his thumb. “He refuses to behave like a human being. He avoids others; when you speak to him, he just stays silent. Move him to another workstation, or fire him.”
I stretched along the backrest and pressed my fingertips against my knees. I fixed my gaze on the supervisor’s eyes to prevent the anger Héctor’s look stirred in me from showing on my face.
The woman tapped the desk with a pen.
“Do you think you’re helping create a pleasant work environment by attacking Alan?”
Héctor flared his nostrils like a bull, and shifted restlessly.
“He started it.”
“Y’all are just too different. Maybe you lack any common ground. But you come here to work, and whatever annoys you about the other, you must ignore it.”
Héctor pursed his lips. Among the tufts of his black beard, small red capillaries emerged. He had frozen as if the slightest movement might make his head pop off and from the gaping void shoot out a column of effervescent rage, as if from a shaken bottle of Coca‑Cola.
The supervisor smiled at me, inviting me to speak.
“What do you think?”
When I tilted my head, my eyes fell on the back of a photograph’s frame on the desk. It probably displayed one of those orders that people like her would hang on a wall: “Smile. Give thanks. Be positive.” Or perhaps a close-up of herself, flashing her white smile like the model in some advertisement.
One misstep, and I would have let slip the words I desperately wanted to say. Even if this woman might excuse a serial killer, she’d still consider me a lost cause, and tomorrow I’d have no income to cover the rent.
“I’m good at ignoring things. I plan to come to the workshop, process my parts, and then go home. If I’m left in peace, I won’t cause any trouble.”
The supervisor rested an elbow on her folder and scratched an eyebrow.
“You know where you work. A stable job is a rare opportunity for people with your peculiarities. The outside world makes your life difficult enough without you fighting amongst yourselves. Focus on common behaviors and shared opinions, or simply ignore each other. I’m sure you can manage that.”
Héctor hurried out of the office first. As if we were competing in a race to the finish line, he bolted down the stairs as fast as his legs, neglected by exercise since high school, would allow.
I maneuvered between the tables with a weary gait. My arms and legs felt heavy, and my stomach churned with the discomfort I’d woken up with that morning. I climbed onto my stool at the work line. Christopher, his tone hinting at a question, addressed me, but all I could hear was the thunder of blood in my ears.
I waited, head bowed, for someone to activate the conveyor belt. I clung to the hope that the repetitive act of assembling or repairing a part would numb my mind, freeing me from intrusive thoughts. But Héctor was looking for a way to attack me. He was the type who thrived on conflict, while I craved hours of uninterrupted solitude. Héctor had cast me as nothing more than a punching bag, a target he could beat without consequence. My isolation made me a target. Although I’d once swallowed his barbs and hostility because he otherwise ignored me, now he would push me until they expelled me from the workshop, just as any organism expels a foreign object lodged in its flesh. I had to push him first.
Less than a year ago, when I first discovered this workshop, I assumed I’d belong among the broken and rejected. But even in such a place, or any gathering of broken people, they would end up treating me as a creature utterly inferior. They would eventually learn that I was camouflaging my true self, that I passed as whole, even though I knew I was a volatile explosive, ready to obliterate this workshop and the surrounding buildings with the slightest jolt.
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.
The Domains of the Emperor Owl 
You must be logged in to post a comment.