by Tom Epperson
“So you have ten days?” he says. “Until they say they’re going to, um . . . ?” His voice trails off delicately.
“Well, nine days now. But I’m not going to wait till the very last day. I don’t want to push my luck.”
“No. Of course not. Luck. Yes.”
His thumbs keep going and he nods slowly, as if pondering the profound mystery of luck. And then he says, “Have you ever thought about wearing a bulletproof vest?”
“No. Not really.”
“I wear one.”
“Yes. I know.”
Rubén looks surprised. “How do you know?”
“Everyone knows. I mean, you can see it under your shirt. The shape of it.”
“Hm,” he says, frowning down at his shirt.
“Anyway, I don’t think they do much good. They usually shoot you in the head.”
“Yes, you’re probably right. They really don’t do much good,” but then he brightens. “Of course, we’ve all received death threats. The best one I ever got was an engraved invitation to my own funeral. I was very impressed. They put a lot of time and thought into that one.”
“I know what you’re saying, Rubén. But it feels like something has changed in the last few months. It’s like the air has gotten colder. The country feels more dangerous to me. Do you know what I mean?”
Rubén unclasps his hands from his stomach, reclasps them behind his head, and thinks about it.
“I guess I’m just sad, Roberto. I’m losing all my best reporters. They’re either leaving the country, or they’re going into other professions like public relations or advertising, or they’re going to work for shitty papers that pay them more and only expect them to write shit. What happens to a country when there are no real reporters left?”
Since he’s not expecting a response, Roberto gives none. Rubén looks at him with a musing smile.
“So you’re going off to live the good life, hm? In Saint Lucia?”
“Yes, I suppose.”
“You don’t sound very enthusiastic about it.”
“I’m sad too. I feel like I’m deserting the ship.”
“Oh don’t be silly, Roberto, you have to do what’s right for you,” and then he sighs. “Now I have to tell Diana. She’ll be upset. You’ve always been her favorite.”
Diana is Diana Langenberg. She’s the member of the Langenberg family who has taken it as her task to be the paper’s publisher.
“Really? I’m her favorite?”
“Don’t tell me you didn’t know,” Rubén says, and then adds slyly: “Why else do you think you’ve been allowed to be a little prima donna who does whatever he wants?”
Now he picks up his phone.
“I’ll call Irma in accounting, and have her issue you a check.”
* * *
A big blue city bus cuts in front of him, and he honks and hits his brakes. It doesn’t matter where the bus stops are, the buses will bully their way toward the curb any time they see like now a prospective passenger waving at them, sometimes two buses will even compete for the same passenger and fistfights have broken out between drivers because they’re not paid by the hour or the week but according to how many passengers they pick up. This all began a decade ago when the bus system was privatized, with the promise that the entrepreneurial spirit of the individual bus drivers would be unleashed resulting in better and cheaper service for all. Everyone realizes now that was an extremely stupid idea that has turned the city’s once reliable buses into blue blundering traffic-disrupting menaces. Every politician running for office in the city pledges a return to the old sane system but year after year nothing changes because the bus company is making a lot of money and nothing that hurts the people but enriches the rich in this country ever changes.
Another reason he hates the buses is a huge construction project that was undertaken a year and a half ago: certain thoroughfares are being widened so an extra lane dedicated to the buses can be created. The idea is that the buses with their entrepreneurial drivers will be able to zip around the city unimpeded by the traffic; however the whole thing has turned into a nightmarish boondoggle, running far behind schedule and over budget. Drivers, redirected from the torn-up streets, find themselves wandering through hellish mazes that seem to have no end. The mayor of the city was charged last week with taking kickbacks from contractors he had hired for the project, and since he was deemed a flight risk he was tossed into La Picota prison. One might think it a cause for optimism that a high-ranking official is being held accountable for corruption, but in truth this is a story that has been repeated so often it has taken on the form of ceremony: a sacrificial victim is thrown into the volcano to distract and appease the public, while the serious business of plundering the country continues unabated.
His cellphone rings. It’s Iván, calling him back.
“What’s up, Roberto?”
“You still looking for an apartment?”
“Yeah, you know of one?”
“How about mine?”
“Roberto, you’re kidding. I love your apartment. You mean you’re selling it?”
“I’m renting it. Furnished. I want to keep everything as it is.”
“That would be perfect. But where are you going to live? Are you getting a new place?”
Roberto doesn’t want to go into this on the phone. He arranges to meet Iván at his apartment at three this afternoon.
* * *
Iván is lean and wiry, with a shaved head and an emerald in one ear. He was a colleague of Roberto’s at The Hour, where he covered movies and television. He was one of those reporters Rubén was talking about who changed professions; in his case, he was seduced in a somewhat literal way by the TV industry, taking a job with a local station as a producer and quickly embarking on an affair with a cute young production assistant named Peppi. His wife found out about it and reacted in an unexpectedly dire manner: throwing him out of their apartment, filing for divorce, getting a boyfriend who in no time at all was living in the apartment with her. Iván moved back in with his parents, and is sleeping in the bedroom he had as a child. He has a dazed, incredulous air about him, like one who has barely survived a natural calamity that has swept his life away. But when Roberto opens the door for him, he’s wearing a big smile. He looks around the apartment, shaking his head a little.
“I can’t believe my luck, Roberto. What a great place.”
“Thanks.”
Iván rubs his hand along the gleaming blond wood of the dining room table, then walks over to a lamp.
“I’ve always loved this lamp.”
Black metal silhouettes of naked men and women go around the lamp shade.
“Caroline designed it herself, right?”
“Yes.”
Iván is doing nothing wrong, but Roberto doesn’t like the feeling he’s getting as he watches him walking around like he already lives here.
“Can I get you some coffee or something?”
“No thanks, I can’t stay long. The TV business is really crazy.”
“I’ll bet.”
Now Iván turns and looks at Roberto.
“So what’s going on? Why are you moving out?”
Roberto tells him. Iván shakes his head.
“Man, Roberto, I’m really sorry.”
Roberto shrugs. “I always knew this might happen. I just wasn’t expecting it to happen now.”
“My therapist says any big changes in your life are an opportunity for growth. This could be the best thing that ever happened to you. You look skeptical. Listen. Your articles are wonderful, but they’re also very long. I read them, but I’m not sure how many others do.”
“Well, somebody does. That’s why they want to kill me.”
“Do you want to know the future, Roberto? The future is 140 characters. Twitter is the future. Just think of it as a new journalistic form. Like a haiku.”
“Iván, if you’re trying to cheer me up, you’re having the opposite effect.”
&
nbsp; Iván laughs. “Sorry, man. You know me, I was just running my mouth off. So how much will this cost me?”
Caroline, who is a lot more canny about such things than Roberto, has already told him what to ask.
“I was thinking 2,250,000.”
“Hm. I don’t know, Roberto. It’s a nice place but my wife left me with a lot of debts. No one could shop like that woman. It was a sickness with her.”
“Okay. How about 2,000,000?”
Iván grins and holds his hand out and Roberto shakes it.
“You have a deal.”
Now, with his hands on his hips, he surveys the apartment like a triumphant climber who has just attained a mountaintop.
“My therapist told me I should do this.”
“Move into my apartment?”
“Into any apartment. She said as long as I was staying with my parents, I was holding out hope that I would go back to Margot and our lives would be like they were before. She said getting my own place would be my first big step into my new life.”
Roberto knows that Iván, despite his indiscretion with Peppi, was crazy-mad in love with his wife.
“So how are you doing, Iván? Is it getting any easier?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I’m maybe only thinking about her most of the time instead of all the time. You remember that old song? ‘Love Hurts’? Love is just a lie told to make us sad. That song is so true, Roberto. So true.”
* * *
Roberto’s lying on his bed at dusk. About five minutes ago, he came into the bedroom to lie down because he was hit by a sudden crushing fatigue. He didn’t sleep well last night but that’s not the cause of it. Maybe he’s about to fall victim to a virus, or maybe it’s that so much was done today or rather undone. His life in this city is drawing to a close. Iván will usurp his place in the apartment, and his job at the paper will probably simply disappear. All because of a couple of phone calls, of a guy staring at him out of a car window. Maybe it’s all a bluff and no one has any intention of killing him. But he’ll never know, he’s made his choice, he will be with Caroline on her island and will not be shot or blown up or dumped into a river without his head and his dick and his balls.
The blinds are up, and the traffic sounds from Avenue Six drift in. It’s only a block away, but it seems much further, and it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with him. It’s as if he’s no longer a resident of this city but is already a citizen of Saint Lucia. Through the window he can see the outside but with his glasses off, it’s like an abstract color pattern with three different sections: twenty percent brown buildings, twenty percent green mountains, sixty percent faintly glowing sky.
Drowsiness begins to tug at his eyelids. He can’t hear the traffic at all anymore. Fleeting half-formed thoughts blow through his head like wisps of clouds. Once he covered a political rally where the protesters made no noise but in lieu of cheering, waved white handkerchiefs. Their silence had an eerie power. And now he sees the white handkerchiefs, a silent shaking sea of them, extending to the horizon where they fade away . . .
* * *
The phone wakes him up. The window is filled with night. He puts on his glasses and checks the caller ID. It’s Andrés. Roberto says hello.
“Roberto, where are you? We’re all waiting.”
He looks at the clock. It’s a little after nine. He completely forgot that he was supposed to meet Andrés and two more of his friends for a drink at eight.
“Shit, I’m sorry.”
“You’re usually so punctual. What’s going on?”
Andrés is talking loud so he can be heard over the sounds of music and laughter.
“Nothing, I just fell asleep. You’re at Sparks, right?”
“Yes,” says Andrés and then somebody else grabs the phone.
“Hurry, Roberto!” says Franz. “The women are unbelievable tonight.”
“Okay, I’ll be there soon.”
He goes in the bathroom, splashes water on his face, brushes his teeth. He’s not really in the mood to go out, but this is as good a time as any to tell his three best friends that he’s leaving.
* * *
He’s known Andrés the longest. Since they were kids. He’s a history professor at the National University. He’s married to a former girlfriend of Roberto’s, Teresa. He’s prematurely losing his hair. He’s gentle and sweet and wears glasses.
Franz’s grandfather was from Switzerland. He was a maker of chocolate. Now the company he founded exports fine chocolates all over the world. Franz is heir to a large fortune, and works in the family business. He’s blond and blue-eyed with square-jawed regular features. Once he was the judge of a beauty contest, Roberto forgets the name, something like Miss Mango or Miss Pineapple; he picked a girl named Blanca as the winner then married her a month later. She’s one of the least likeable people Roberto has ever met. They have three young children.
Roberto worked with Daniel at The Hour. He was a photographer. He left journalism two years ago, and now takes pictures of jewelry and cars and food and furniture that appear in ads in newspapers and glossy magazines. He’s tall and a little overweight and has an unruly mass of reddish brown hair. He pays no attention to how he dresses, wearing rumpled clothes that always seem to be a little too big or too small. But despite his unimpressive appearance, he has amazing success with women.
Roberto and Andrés met Daniel and Franz during their first year at the National University, and immediately the four became fast friends. Roberto, Franz, and Andrés were all very left wing and active in campus politics, but Daniel couldn’t have cared less about any of that. He was into drinking and chasing girls and Spanish and English literature. His favorite poet was Algernon Swinburne, and when he got drunk he would recite from memory in English whole pages of his poems, howling them out in a horrendous accent. One night he drove Roberto, Andrés, and Franz so crazy that after failing to get him to stop they jumped on him and bore him to the floor, and as he thrashed and fought and continued to shout out Swinburne Roberto forced a wet towel into his mouth—and even then he continued making grunting, poetry-like noises. And thus it was very ironic that the only one of the four of them ever arrested as a subversive was Daniel.
He became enamored of a Communist girl named Monica. He went around with her to various meetings and rallies, figuring it was the price he had to pay for getting laid. At one such rally, the protesters were attacked by the police with tear gas and clubs. The protesters began to flee, but many were chased down and handcuffed and thrown into the backs of vans. Monica got away but Daniel didn’t.
They kept him for three weeks before he was finally able to convince them that he wasn’t a Communist but was just some poor horny guy who had fallen for the wrong girl. No doubt Daniel was tortured because they tortured everybody, but after his release he refused to talk about what had happened to him. All he ever had to say about it was: “Captivity is terrible.”
Sparks isn’t too far from Roberto’s apartment, so rather than fight the traffic he walks there. It’s a Friday night, and Sparks is packed. It’s been open about a year, and is one of the hotter clubs in the Pink Zone, an area of a few square blocks where the young and the hip hang out. He looks around. Beautiful girls abound, as Franz said. On a floor painted in rainbow colors, couples dance to recorded techno cumbia music. They’re bathed in scintillating colored lights that have been known to induce seizures in the epileptic. Now he sees his friends, sitting at a corner table near the bar. They’re smiling at him and waving him over. He feels a pang as he walks toward them because they have been such good friends to him and this is probably the last time for at the very least a long time he will be getting together with them like this.
“Guess who was just in here,” says Andrés as Roberto sits down. “The Puppy.”
The Puppy is Pío Landazábal, the youngest son of the country’s previous president. He’s earned his nickname because of his small stature, his soft brown eyes, and his stunning lack of maturity.
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“Oh really?” says Roberto. “I haven’t seen him around lately.”
“He’s been in Europe, I think,” says Franz. “I remember seeing an absurd picture of him on a yacht at the Cannes Film Festival.”
“Why was it absurd?”
“Any picture of the Puppy is inherently absurd.”
“He came in with two women and four bodyguards,” says Andrés. “And he danced with both of the women at the same time.”
“Everyone was laughing at him,” says Franz. “So he got mad and left.”
“Women are disgusting,” says Daniel. “They’ll go with anybody with money.”
A waitress appears and Roberto gets a beer. Andrés and Daniel both drink a lot and will get drunk tonight, but Franz drinks very little. He’s a health nut. He runs many kilometers daily and works out on elaborate exercise machines and strikes torturous yoga poses and eats only plants. He takes a tiny sip of his glass of wine and says to Roberto, “Did you see Landazábal’s latest tweet?” Speaking of the Puppy’s father.
“No, what did he say?”
“Well, you know how Dávila is always saying it’s his job as president to inspire the country and so forth. And Landazábal tweeted that Dávila couldn’t inspire a flea to jump.”
Roberto laughs. “That’s funny. And it’s also true.”
Basilio Landazábal was a retired Army general who ran for president on the promise of restoring honor, honesty, and manly strength to the moral life of the nation. He served two terms and was very popular but since the new president Carlos Dávila took office a year and a half ago Landazábal’s reputation has been taking a lot of hits. So far nothing has been proven against the old general himself, but it’s clear many of his cronies grew ridiculously rich during his presidency. His agriculture minister was recently jailed for sending subsidies meant to help small farmers who were being weaned away from growing coca into secret bank accounts in his own name in Panama, and his cousin, who was head of the country’s top spy agency, the Department of Domestic Security, is awaiting trial for allegedly funding paramilitary death squads. Landazábal, ensconced in his walled estate in the province of Alta Verapaz, seems to be spending all his time seething at the ill treatment he’s getting from his ungrateful country. Somewhat amusingly for such a resolutely old-fashioned man, he’s discovered Twitter, and several times a day like Jove hurling thunderbolts he fires off tweets attacking his enemies. His main target is President Dávila. In the last election, Dávila, a self-styled “centrist,” easily defeated Landazábal’s handpicked candidate, a dull and pompous man whose only apparent virtue was being loyal as a dog to Landazábal. Dávila is young and good-looking and has a beautiful wife who wears the latest styles from Paris and New York and two adorable daughters and went to school in America where he got a master’s degree in economics from Harvard University. He supposedly sleeps only four hours a night so he can have more time to grapple with the country’s impossible problems.