Things We Lost in the Fire

by Mariana Enriquez

  The boy turned up in a hospital that very same night; they called to tell her while she was patrolling Villa 21, where little girls, twelve-year-old addicts, got into trucks to suck the drivers’ cocks and make enough money for the next fix. He’d been hit by a car while he was high. But he was fine, hadn’t even broken a bone, he was just a little bruised. Paula didn’t go see him; Andrés went to visit. That boy was transferred, too. Paula started to feel like they couldn’t do the job, like the children were slipping right through her fingers.

  The next day a five-year-old girl was brought in. They’d found her in the street with a man and woman who weren’t her parents; she was dirty and very tired. She was going to stay at the shelter until her real parents were found or some other legal decision was made. The girl wasn’t cagey and sullen like most of the children who passed through the home. She laughed at the TV until her belly hurt. She talked a lot, and she told them about the games of make-believe she’d played in the street. She talked about a boy-cat she’d met in the botanical gardens, for example, a boy who lived there among the other animals and who had yellow eyes and could see in the dark. She loved cats and wasn’t afraid of him: he was her friend. The girl also talked about her mother and said she’d lost her. She didn’t know where she lived, only that she got to her house by train. But she couldn’t remember which line it was, and when she described the station she mixed up details of the two largest ones in the city. Paula and her colleagues were sure her family would be found soon.

  The following Friday, Paula was alone on duty at the shelter all night. Miguel hated it when that happened, but she’d promised it was only until they found a replacement—and she wasn’t lying, she didn’t like the night shift either. The only children at the shelter were the friendly little girl and an eight-year-old boy who spoke very little but was well behaved. Paula arrived at ten at night to relieve Andrés. The children were already asleep. Andrés, who’d had a hard time of it that week—he also worked at a night service that patrolled the streets in search of children—invited her to share a beer and smoke a joint. Paula accepted. They turned on the radio, too. Later she was told that it was very loud, that even the neighbors had heard it, but at the time it seemed like the volume was normal and she’d be able to hear the doorbell or the phone or the kids if they woke up. They spent a couple of hours drinking and laughing and chatting, that part she conceded. At the time she didn’t think she was doing anything wrong: she knew it was incorrect, but she felt like they needed to relax after a difficult week. They were two colleagues having a good time.

  She would never forget the look on the supervisor’s face when she came into the kitchen, unplugged the radio with a yank, and yelled: “What the fuck are you doing? What the hell are you motherfuckers doing?” Especially that “you motherfuckers”; it had been so heartfelt, so sincere. Things happened quickly; they had to absorb the information half drunk and high, absolutely guilty. A neighbor had called the supervisor—he had her home number—because he heard a child crying in the shelter. The supervisor thought it was strange because she knew Paula was on duty, as she told the neighbor, but he’d insisted that there was a girl crying and the music was turned up very loud. The part about the music convinced the supervisor, who immediately thought of thieves, of something serious. When she arrived, there was in fact something serious happening, but not what she’d expected. The little girl had simply fallen from her bunk and was crying and wailing on the floor, her ankle broken. The other boy, the silent one, was watching her from his bed but hadn’t gone for help. And the music coming from the kitchen was very loud, as if someone was having a party. When she opened the door, she was surprised and angrier than she’d ever been when she saw Paula and Andrés with two empty beer bottles and a smoldering joint in the ashtray, laughing like idiots while a homeless girl who trusted them was screaming in pain from the floor where she’d been lying for at least half an hour.

  When the legal proceedings began, the supervisor was merciless. She testified and recommended they both be fired. She was an experienced woman, respected; she got them thrown out almost immediately with no right to appeal. What were they going to say? That they were under stress? And the girl, who had lost her mother in the street, and the mute boy they’d found hidden in a train car—what about them? Were they having a good time? Miguel always told her he understood, that they’d been excessive, they’d been exploiting her; he went with her to the hearings and never judged her aloud. But she knew what he was thinking, because it was the only thing anyone could have thought: she deserved to be fired. She deserved contempt. She had acted irresponsibly, like a cynic, like a brute.

  The depression came after she was fired. Unable to get out of bed, unable to sleep or eat or bathe, she cried and cried. A typical depression that had gone too far only once, when she’d mixed pills with alcohol and slept for almost two days straight. But even the psychiatrist recognized that the episode didn’t qualify as a suicide attempt. He didn’t even suggest admitting her. He enlisted Miguel’s help, asked him to keep an eye on when and how much she drank, at least for a while. Miguel did it reluctantly, as if it were a difficult, demanding task. And for him it was, thought Paula. But he was exaggerating; the depression had been intense, but normal. Now she was over it. And he treated her like the crazy woman she had never been, for a different reason: because he’d never forgiven her for abandoning that little girl. He’d never been able to get that image out of his mind: the sobbing in the night, the broken ankle. Or the image of Paula laughing, her mouth reeking of beer. That was why he no longer desired her. Because he’d seen a side of her that was too dark. He didn’t want to have sex with her, he didn’t want to have children with her, he didn’t know what she was capable of. Paula had gone from being a saint—the social worker who specialized in at-risk children, so maternal and selfless—to being a sadistic and cruel public employee who neglected the children while she listened to cumbia and got drunk; she’d become the evil directress of a nightmare orphanage.

  Fine: what they’d once had was over, then. But she could still do something. She could save the chained-up boy. She was going to save him.

  —

  Miguel didn’t come back that night. The boy didn’t show himself, not even his chain. Paula sat on the terrace looking down at the flagstones. From there she heard her husband leave a message on the machine saying that he was at his mother’s house, would she please call him, they had to talk, but he needed a few days before he could come back. Fine, whatever, thought Paula. It was hot. Elly stayed with her all night long; they slept curled up together on some blankets until the burning morning sun woke them up. Elly wanted water for breakfast, as always, and Paula turned on the tap so she could drink from it; like all cats she loved fresh, running water. Paula almost started crying as she watched her cat, so beautiful, black with her little white feet, sticking out her rough tongue. She loved her more than she loved Miguel, she was sure.

  The boy wasn’t in the yard, but Paula heard the neighbor’s door slam; she ran across the terrace and watched the man, her neighbor, head off toward the avenue. Was he the boy’s father? Or had he enslaved the child?…She didn’t want to think about it too much. She made a demented decision: she would go into the house. She could jump from the terrace into the courtyard. She’d been studying it all night. She’d have to be smart, like a cat: jump onto the dividing wall, and from there onto an old container she could see in the yard—a water heater? something like that, a metal cylinder—and she’d be in. She could call the police from the house once she found the boy.

  Getting into the yard was easy, easier than she’d expected. She had a small, normal thought: that meant it would be easy to rob the neighbor’s house, and her own. She would think about that later, once she’d done what she had to do.

  There were two doors that led from the courtyard into the house: one to the living room, the other to the kitchen. There was no sign of the boy in the courtyard. Not even the chain. There were n
o bowls with food or water, and no dirt; quite the contrary, it stank of disinfectant or bleach: someone had washed the place down. The boy had to be inside, unless the man had taken him somewhere while she and Miguel were fighting, or in the morning after she’d fallen asleep. Stupid, lazy! How could she fall asleep?

  She went into the kitchen, which was dark, and the light wouldn’t turn on. She tried other switches, even one in the courtyard; the house didn’t have electricity. She was afraid. The kitchen stank. At first, the adrenaline had kept her from feeling the full impact of the atrocious stench. But the counter was clean, and so was the table. Paula opened the refrigerator and didn’t find anything strange: mayonnaise, cutlets on a plate, tomatoes. Then she opened the pantry and the smell filled her eyes and made them water, and bitter liquid flooded her throat; her stomach churned desperately and it took a tremendous effort not to throw up. She couldn’t see well, but she didn’t need to; the pantry was full of rotten meat on which the white maggots of putrescence grew and wriggled. The worst was that she couldn’t tell what kind of meat it was: whether it was everyday beef that the man in his madness had left there to rot, or something else. She couldn’t make out any human shapes, but really she couldn’t make out any shape at all. In the half darkness, it seemed like the meat was living its death right there, growing in the pantry like mold. She ran from the kitchen—she couldn’t hold back the nausea any longer—without closing the pantry door. She knew she had to go back, close it, cover her tracks, but she didn’t feel capable. Let whatever had to happen, happen.

  The rest of the house—foyer, two bedrooms—was all very dark. Still, Paula went into what had to be the man’s bedroom. It had no windows. In the shadows she could see that the bed was neatly made and covered with a warm blanket, though it was the middle of summer. The wallpaper had a very subtle design that looked like little signs, an arachnid weave. Paula touched it, and to her surprise she felt the rough paint of the wall. She moved closer and saw that the walls weren’t actually papered: they were covered in writing that left almost no white space, an elegant and even script that she had taken for a filigreed motif. She couldn’t make out any coherent sentences. There were dates: March twentieth, she read; December tenth. And some words: asleep, blue, understanding. She checked her pockets for her lighter, but she didn’t have it. She didn’t want to look for one in the kitchen. She thought that once her eyes got more used to the darkness she could read better, but after waiting a few minutes she felt the sweat run down her back and the pain in her head grow stronger and she was afraid she might faint in that horrible house, that house she never should have entered. If she hadn’t cared about that beautiful child with her broken ankle—oh, the look on that girl’s face when the ambulance took her away, the look of hatred in her eyes; she’d known that Paula was guilty, every bit as evil as the streets—why did she care about that boy she’d glimpsed in the courtyard? A boy who, if he was living with this crazy man, was surely already ruined for good, far beyond any possible recovery or normal life. The compassionate thing to do, if she found him, would be to kill him.

  She went into the living room. Also neat and empty, but there she found the chain on a maroon faux-leather sofa. The living room, which led out to the courtyard, had some light. She ventured to speak.

  “Hello,” she whispered. “Are you there?”

  She knew she didn’t need to shout in the house: it was small and utterly silent. She waited, but didn’t hear anything. She went over to a glass-doored library, where she could make out piles of papers. But when she went in she was not only disappointed but also frightened: the papers were bills, electricity, gas, phone, all unpaid and organized chronologically. No one had noticed this? No one knew there was a man living in these conditions in a middle-class neighborhood? There were probably papers of other kinds among the unpaid bills, but Paula had to hurry and she turned to look over the books. They were all big, heavy medical books from the seventies, with satiny pages interspersed with glossy illustrations. The first one she flipped through didn’t have any marks, but the second one did; it was an anatomy book, and on the pages that described the feminine reproductive system someone had used a green ballpoint pen to draw an enormous cock with spikes on the glans, and, in the uterus, a baby with large, glaucous eyes who wasn’t sucking his thumb, he was licking it with a lascivious gesture that made her say aloud: “What is this?” When she heard the key in the front door she threw the book to the floor; she felt a sudden wetness in her underwear and pants and she ran to the courtyard, climbed desperately onto the tank—I’ll fall, I’ll fall, my hands are sweaty, my blood pressure is low—and with fear-induced speed, she made it to her own terrace. She went running down the stairs and locked the courtyard door, though she didn’t think that would stop the man who would surely be coming after her, because he must have heard her, because she had left the door to his fetid pantry open, because she had seen his drawings. What other drawings were there? What did those walls say? And the boy? Was it a boy? Or had it been the man himself? Did he sometimes like to chain himself up in the courtyard? It could be him; with distance and the influence of her own history with children, maybe he had seemed smaller than he really was. A relief, to think that the boy didn’t exist. But the relief didn’t protect her. Maybe the crazy man wasn’t dangerous; maybe he wouldn’t care that she’d broken into his house.

  But Paula didn’t think so. She was remembering things seen out of the corner of her eye. Something on the couch that looked like a wig. Some words on the wall that were in a language she didn’t know, or were in an invented language, or were simply letters grouped senselessly. How all the plants in the yard were dried up, but the earth was damp as if someone kept watering them, as if someone refused to accept the fact that they were dead.

  For the first time, she hated Miguel unequivocally. For leaving her alone, for judging her, for being a coward, for running away at the first real problem. For running to his mommy! She called him. Asshole.

  “He’s not here,” her mother-in-law told her. “Are you all right, dear?”

  “No, I’m shitty.”

  Silence.

  “Call him on his cell phone, darling, you’re going to be fine, don’t you worry.”

  She hung up. Miguel’s cell phone had been turned off for hours. In situations like this she missed her father, a complicated and not very affectionate man, but clear and decisive, a man who would never have gotten scared or angry over such a small thing. She remembered how he had taken care of her mother, driven mad by a brain tumor that eventually killed her. When he’d heard her screams not a muscle in his face had moved, but he hadn’t told her that everything was fine. Because everything wasn’t fine and it was stupid to deny it.

  Like now: something bad was going to happen and it was stupid to deny it.

  She tried to call his phone one more time, but it was still off or out of range. Then she heard Elly, growling in anger and then meowing wildly. The cat’s cries were coming from the bedroom. Paula ran.

  A boy was sitting on the bed with Elly on his lap. He looked at her, and his glaucous eyes were crisscrossed with red veins and his eyelids were gray and greasy like sardines. He stank, too. His stench filled the room. He was bald and so skinny it was amazing he was alive. He was stroking the cat brutally, blindly, with a hand that was too big for his body. His other hand was around Elly’s neck.

  “Let go of her!” screamed Paula.

  It was the boy from the neighbor’s house. He had marks from the chain on his ankle; in some places they were bleeding and in others they oozed with infection. When he heard her voice the boy smiled, and she saw his teeth. They’d been filed into triangular shapes, like arrowheads, or like a saw. The boy brought the cat to his mouth with a lightning-fast motion and clamped the saw into her belly. Elly yowled and Paula saw the agony in her eyes while the boy’s teeth delved farther into her stomach. He buried his face, nose and all, in her guts, he inhaled inside the cat, who died quickly, looking at her
owner with angry and surprised eyes. Paula didn’t run. She didn’t do anything while the boy devoured the animal’s soft parts, until his teeth hit her spine and he tossed the cadaver into a corner.

  “Why?” Paula asked him. “What are you?”

  But the boy didn’t understand her. He stood up on legs of pure bone, his sex disproportionately large, his face covered in blood, in guts and Elly’s silky fur. He seemed to be looking for something on the bed; when he found it, he lifted it up toward the ceiling lamp, as if he wanted Paula to see the object clearly.

  He had her front door keys. The boy made them jangle and he laughed and his laughter was accompanied by a bloody belch. Paula wanted to run, but her legs were heavy as if in a nightmare. Her body refused to turn around; something was holding her there in the bedroom doorway. But she wasn’t dreaming. You don’t feel pain in dreams.

  Under the Black Water

  The cop came in with his head high and proud, his wrists free of cuffs, wearing the ironic smile she knew so well; he oozed impunity and contempt. She’d seen many like him. She had managed to convict far too few.

  “Have a seat, Officer,” she told him.

  The district attorney’s office was on the first floor and her window looked out onto nothing, just a hollow between buildings. She’d been asking for a change in office and jurisdiction for a long time. She hated the darkness of that hundred-year-old building, and hated even more that her cases came from the impoverished slums on the city’s south side, cases where crime was always mixed with hardship.