Said Sayrafiezadeh - Brief Encounters with the Enemy

“Plenty of people ?” The man I didn’t know snorted. “This here’s the guy”—he turned to Troy and Quincy—“who thinks it’s only going to be a hundred degrees in August.”

At the hospital, the air-conditioning was going full blast and the sweat froze on my skin. It was almost twelve o’clock and I was exhausted and parched. I was also hungry. I went back to blaming Roberto for everything. People with all sorts of ailments came and went in the waiting room, and I thought about how this must be what it’s like when soldiers get back from battle. I wasn’t sure if Roberto had checked in under a false name. He was nervous about not being a citizen and was always going out of his way to cover his tracks. He had no driver’s license, no bank account, no telephone, and his new apartment still had the name of the previous tenant, Cynthia Abernathy, on the mailbox even though she hadn’t lived there for two years. Every so often he’d get a package for her, and he’d tell the delivery guy some elaborate and unnecessary story about how Cynthia was his wife but she was out of town because her mother was dying and he didn’t know when she’d be back but he’d let her know that a package had come for her when he talked to her next but he wasn’t sure when that would be because her mother was dying. It was always the same story. He was positive that the INS was tracking him and the delivery guy was an agent. In the meantime, he’d accumulated several mail-order kitchen gadgets, including an electric egg-beater.

“Don’t you think they’re going to start wondering why your mother-in-law never dies?” I’d ask him.

He never liked this. “You’re going to be penitent one day,” he’d say, dropping in one of those words he’d learned specifically for the SAT. “You’re going to be penitent when they come for me. They’re going to lock me up somewhere, like they did those apple pickers, and you’re never going to hear from me again.”

“I’m looking for Roberto Díaz,” I told the hospital receptionist.

She checked the computer. No, she said, there was no Roberto Díaz listed.

“Then I’m looking for Rob Days,” I said.

No, sorry.

“How about Bob Hays?” I was trying to recall all the various permutations he had used over the years.

No.

“I’m looking for Tyler McCoy,” I said, because this was the name of the main character in his favorite gangster film.

The receptionist punched in Tyler McCoy, and I could tell by the way she slowly struck the keys that she was getting suspicious or impatient. “You sure do have a lot of friends,” she said.

“I sure do,” I said. And Tyler McCoy was in Room 831.

He was asleep when I got there, lying on his back with his mouth wide open like a drowning man trying to suck oxygen. He had bandages running ear to ear, and his nose, always prominent, seemed gigantic under the bandages, as if he had an anvil for a nose. His eyes were swollen, his hair was matted, and a Reader’s Digest rested on his stomach, rising and falling with his haggard breath. Across the room a window faced out onto the roof of an adjacent wing of the hospital. The roof was white, and if you didn’t know it was ninety degrees outside, you could mistake the whiteness for snow.

I pulled up a chair next to his bed and took a seat. He didn’t stir. I thought about turning on the television and then, when he woke, apologizing for having disturbed him. From my vantage point, he looked to be all torso, as if he were lying in bed after having had his legs amputated. This was a result of having spent ten years lifting weights constantly and incorrectly. I’d experienced him straining, screaming, staggering, a terrifying sight to behold as he attempted to hoist more than was humanly possible, and the second the summit was attained, not one second more, he would discard the barbell midair so that it would drop and crash and bounce in explosive vanity. His chest was colossal and so were his shoulders and his arms, and he had a thick blue vein in his neck that was permanently engorged as it piped gallons of blood to his muscles twenty-four hours a day. But his legs were thin, the legs of a teenage girl or an insect, and they looked nonexistent beneath the pale blue hospital sheet. “Why don’t you try doing some cardio every once in a while?” I’d counsel. He either didn’t care or didn’t notice that his proportions bordered on the freakish. His physique had provided him with those coveted manual-labor jobs — mover, deliverer, unloader — and that was how he had survived all these years without any aid or assistance except what he got from me. Businesses needed men like him and were happy to pay him under the table. He’d carried bricks, drywall, bales of hay. “I’ve got a special job for Robbie,” my mother once said. He’d come over for dinner and wound up spending half an hour lugging a tree trunk from our backyard to the curb. She’d given him ten dollars. I’d yelled at her later for what I saw as an example of her condescension, but my father intervened, coming into the living room in his bare feet and no glasses and uttering one of his platitudes, “Every man has to make his own way in this world.”

The way Roberto was making his own way in this world now was through relatively sedentary employment as an assistant to a cobbler who also happened to be his landlord and who cut him a break on the rent in addition to giving him shoes if they were left in the shop past sixty days. Roberto would be turning twenty-five soon, and he’d come up with a fairly reasonable plan that involved learning a trade, saving money, going to college, opening a business, starting a family. The cobbler paid him in cash twice a month, so twice a month he had an enormous roll of money that he liked to caress as if it were a puppy. The roll was generally in fives and tens and added up to no more than a couple hundred dollars, but it made him look and feel rich. “Like Tyler McCoy,” he’d say, and he’d reenact in pitch-perfect detail the scene where Tyler McCoy is trying to get one guy to go in with another guy on the heist that turned out to be a double cross. “Me. You. Now. Together.” When Roberto had satisfied himself with fondling the roll, we would walk to the post office, where he would buy all the money orders he needed to pay all the bills that were under assumed names. We’d wait in a long line of poor people and illegal immigrants and that occasional unfortunate American citizen who had just come in to buy a book of stamps. When we emerged from the post office an hour later, Roberto would be broke.

The mass of flesh suddenly shifted like an animal beneath forest leaves, and his swollen eyes opened. They were bloodshot and bleary, and it took a moment for him to orient himself. “Oh, shit,” he said when he understood who I was and where we were. “You came. My man.” His voice was thick and stuffy like air in a cellar, and I was surprised to hear the slightest trace of the accent he had rid himself of years ago. It could have been an earlier version of him rising from the dead. Oh, shee. You came. My main .

“Of course I came,” I said, wounded, as if I had never contemplated otherwise. And because I knew it would make him happy and endear me to him, I added, “Of course I came, Tyler .”

He grinned, and the bandages pulled tight across his face, and the grin evaporated as he cried out in agony. I stood in alarm, but the pain subsided quickly. He struggled out of bed, throwing the sheet back with determination, bringing both feet to the floor and forcing himself upright so that he could face me.

“This is the best guy,” he said with the utmost sincerity, as if introducing me to an audience. “This is the greatest guy in the whole world.” This was an example of Roberto’s hyperbole.