Ernesto Quiñonez - San Juan Noir

In the morning my cell phone woke me. It was Javi, the violinist. He asked me how I was feeling and invited me to breakfast. He told me that the flute player had died shortly after arriving to the hospital. While we were talking, I saw Mita jump off the balcony. I lived on the first floor, but it was still dangerous. I dropped my cell phone, ran after her, but couldn’t see her anymore. I went back to the phone and asked Javi if I could come over, because I was feeling really messed up. I got a text from Margarita saying I should call her as soon as possible. I ignored it.

I got to Javi’s apartment in Ciudadela around two in the afternoon. We talked, drank vodka, and ate sushi. He played a piece from a Tchaikovski concerto. Really, before the flute player’s death, we’d only said hi to each other, talked about random things, had a drink. Tragedy often unites loneliness and desire. And yet I was truly captivated by this man’s sadness.

When he finished the piece, I applauded and got undressed. Even at fifty, his expression was still that of a boy with a Christmas present, a gift we gave each other in his bed. We made love tenderly, caressing each other slowly. Oral first, then I let him enter me, the coming and going of his body against mine, the squeak of the bedsprings, our sweat, and his hoarse moans when he came. I didn’t have an orgasm, but I enjoyed it anyway.

“Do you think it’s possible to have a double?” I asked him, naked on the bed, a postcoital purr.

“What are you talking about?”

“About how there’s another version of you in the world, that you can cross paths with that identical person.”

“I get it. I saw it in a movie.”

“Last night I felt like I was making love with my double.”

“That can be remedied, mine has found its second life.”

He put my hand on his hard cock and kissed my neck. After getting wet, I climbed on top of him and tried to think of nothing, riding him hard until I finally had an orgasm and he came between my thighs. He told me softly: “Someday you’re going to fall in love with me.”

I was hypnotized, looking at a photo I saw on a shelf above his desk. It was Beto, but in Spanish military attire, and a woman with a familiar face. “Those are my parents,” he managed to tell me when the intercom started buzzing. Javi answered it, then looked at me, frightened. “It’s my ex-wife, we split up six months ago, she’s furious because the divorce papers came. Please, go down the stairs in the hallway. Forgive me, I love you, I’ll call you.”

I said nothing. I got dressed quickly and went down the stairs. I heard them screaming at each other as I left Javi’s building. I crossed over to Libros Ac and bought a graphic novel. Then I ordered a craft beer and sat down at a little table in front of the window. I saw clothes and some women’s boots falling from Javi’s balcony. I thought I heard a gunshot. Samuel, the bookseller, looked at me with surprise, I stared at him uncomprehendingly and said goodbye.

The seventh time I ran into Mita, it was a few blocks away from there. I was smoking a cigarette, Margarita didn’t answer my calls, Mami neither. Just how you’re sometimes surprised by your own stupidity, it occurred to me to call Javi. His wife answered and said, “Fucking whore! If I find out who you are, I’ll shoot you too.” I sat down right there on Calle Canals and cried inconsolably. Mita stayed close to me; she was nervous, as if wanting me to pay attention to her, for us to get out of there.

I looked up and I saw my other, Angelina, standing in front of me, handing me a handkerchief and a folded piece of paper. She turned around, and as she tried to cross Ponce de León, an AMA bus hit her; I heard the screech of the brakes already on top of her and the crunch of bones. When I stood up, there were two young men in front of me. One grabbed me, held a knife to my throat, and said in my ear, “You look prettier when you’re quiet, bitch. If you move or scream, you die.”

Meanwhile, the other one put his hands in my pockets, took out my cell phone, my wallet, my iPad mini, lowered my zipper, and stuck his hand in. “If I could, I’d eat your pussy right here, and nobody would notice.” I kicked him in the face and his friend cut my throat, hard like a guillotine.

I watched them run down Canals. I fell slowly to the sidewalk; I saw the folded paper flying through the air. I saw her, me, dead, I saw myself dying. Mita licked my forehead, meowed, and I watched her disappear down Calle Canals, across Ponce de León, losing her around the old Telégrafo building. A blank page floated through the air, landing in front of my face. I already felt nothing.

Buen Consejo

They called him Koala because even while executing his victims, he did not appear totally awake. He had a swollen face and belly, and Koala Gutiérrez often spent hours chomping on a little twig, a “chewing stick,” as it’s known in Nigeria. He’d served there, first as a soldier, later as a sergeant in his government’s peacekeeping forces. It wasn’t exactly his government, but the government of the island. His island floated in the middle of the Caribbean. They speak Spanish there, but it’s a territory of the US. And the army is operated by a government separate from but in control of his own, giving it an international presence on this planet. In other words, he left the island as a member of the peacekeeping forces of a country that occupies his own, with the goal of maintaining order in a country that had none. They hadn’t declared war on his country nor on the country that wasn’t his, but were internationally committed to maintaining a false peace. Or something like that.

All of that happened in the eighties. After serving, it was easy for Koala Gutiérrez to obtain more work as a mercenary soldier. He lived in Africa for ten years, fighting in various wars. The one in Sierra Leone was the last — he got sick of it and went back to his homeland.

Koala’s homeland wasn’t really the island. He only ever knew a slice of it before enlisting in the army when he was just eighteen. At that time, Koala was already an immensely fat kid who didn’t mess with anybody and was lethal in a fight. A well-placed punch, a chokehold around the neck, and boom. No enemy was a match for Koala. And in Las Margaritas almost everyone was an enemy.

Koala was from Las Margaritas, an apartment project that the government (of his country? of the other country?) had built to provide shelter for the thousands of starving families living on the edge of Laguna San José. His was like all the other apartments: a square box made of concrete, with one bathroom, two bedrooms, and bars in all windows, where a family of six had to live. His parents were like many other parents, shadows of hunger and rage, who’d left the countryside and come to the city to look for work, finding it occasionally. One afternoon Koala’s father got lost in the labyrinths of little streets, pastures, and trash dumps that surrounded Las Margaritas, and never came back. His mother told him he went north, to that other country. To help out, his mother brought his grandmother from the country to live with them.

Koala could spend incalculable hours sleeping. He ate, slept, and chewed on his little stick — or on a leaf or a plastic straw, anything he could shove in his mouth — and then he’d sleep some more. He was never good in school. He never showed any interest in anything that didn’t require the absolute minimum effort. And in fights. He never initiated any, but he won them all. So when he was old enough, he enlisted in the army. And afterward, he came back. He never had children, no regular lover, not even an irregular one. He never got into sleeping with ex-convicts, the ones who got out of prison and came back to Las Margaritas, after years spent surrounded by men, a new need in their bodies. Not with the sad little whores who sold themselves on the project streets for drugs, either. “This guy only uses what he’s got between his legs to piss,” heckled Chino, a distant cousin, who got him into the business and introduced him to the Boss. “Just like a koala bear. Hanging from his pole all day, snoring away without a care.” Koala stayed silent and stared at him with his dark, round eyes.