Said Sayrafiezadeh: Brief Encounters with the Enemy

His trunklike arms came around my shoulders and squeezed me hard, until I felt like a child, even though I was taller than he was. I feared he would lift me off the ground and swing me. Instead, he laid his head against my chest, so that he was the one who seemed transformed into a boy, hugging his father the day before he left for good.

In June, the marines were put on high alert, the temperature reached one hundred degrees, and the bill from the hospital arrived. It was three thousand dollars.

I loaned Roberto two hundred to cover the minimum, and a few days later he called me from the cobbler’s phone to invite me over to his apartment to see his “special surprise.”

“What special surprise is that?” I said, but he refused to tell me. He had to get back to work.

So the following Saturday, which also turned out to be the hottest day of the year so far, I pulled up to his apartment building. It was early evening, but it seemed to be getting hotter, as if the setting sun were drawing nearer. Roberto lived in one of those neighborhoods that were either up-and-coming or on the way out, an equal mix of aluminum siding, college students, and small shops — one of which was the cobbler’s shop, whose awning I now stood beneath, waiting desperately for Roberto to come downstairs and let me in. His doorbell never worked but I had been forbidden by the cobbler to yell up at the window. Instead, I had to arrive at our mutually agreed-upon time and stand on the sidewalk patiently and quietly until Roberto opened the door. If I showed up early, I’d have to wait; if I showed up late, Roberto would have to wait. Today I showed up right on time, but there was no Roberto. Every few minutes, behind the window, the cobbler would rise from his shoe machine and eye me mercilessly, as if he’d never seen me before and suspected I was up to no good. He hated me, and I hated him. He was fat, and he smoked constantly, and he had a thick head of black hair. I had a theory that he colored it with shoe polish. He was Italian or Greek or Armenian — we could never figure out which — and he had been in America for fifty years but could hardly speak English. Even Roberto made fun of him. “ ‘I can no find a-black-a shoelazes …’ ” I’d gotten off to a bad start with him the first time I visited Roberto and screamed up at the window at eleven o’clock in the morning, “ Robbie! ”

“You no come here act like hoodlum,” the cobbler had demanded. “Like nigger.”

“Hey!”

“Hey!”

“That word’s not called for!”

“I call police!”

“Fix the doorbell!”

“I fix you!”

“Fuck off!”

“That word not called for!”

“He’s my window of opportunity,” Roberto had shrieked when I told him what happened. So I went back downstairs, hat in hand, and apologized.

“My customers good customers” was all he said.

Fifteen minutes after I had arrived, Roberto still hadn’t come down to open the door. This wasn’t like him at all, and a subtle unease began to creep over me. I recalled the apple pickers who had been rounded up by the INS in the middle of the night, and I was on the verge of panicking when Roberto appeared from around the corner, carrying a big blue box that said DVD PLAYER. He was grinning freely, despite his nose being covered with bandages that made it look as if he had a small pillow in the middle of his face.

“What’s in the box?” I said, though it was obvious what was in the box.

“Robbie!” said the cobbler, waving. “You buy me DVD player?”

Roberto laughed, and so did the cobbler. The cobbler’s laugh was intended to make me the odd man out.

In his apartment Roberto sat cross-legged on the floor, tearing open the box as if it were Christmas Day. Styrofoam peanuts went everywhere, and when he removed the thin silver DVD player, it gleamed sharply in the evening light. He smiled at it lovingly. I sat on the sofa and fumed, dripping with sweat. His apartment was even hotter than outside. It was one square room with a kitchenette, a saggy sofa bed, and three folding chairs; the bathroom was down the hall and shared with six other tenants. All Roberto’s furniture belonged to the cobbler, and so did the television and dishes. The wall of his kitchenette had been covered meticulously with those pictures of Arnold Schwarzenegger, the most prominent of which was him in a suit and tie with his arms and thighs pressing hard against the fabric. The apartment felt like a boiler room in a sub-subbasement. It even sounded like a boiler room, with the constant low-frequency vibration coming from the cobbler’s shoe machine. Roberto seemed wholly unaffected by the heat. He was always unaffected by the heat. I had never seen him sweat.

“Can’t you open a window?” I asked.

With one gigantic arm, he swung open the window and then got back to fitting inputs into outputs. Immediately a fly came in through the window, but no breeze. I watched the fly settle on a plate and crawl around. Then a second fly came in. Roberto turned on the television to a game show that was nearing its climax. A woman had to pick the right color if she wanted to win fifty thousand dollars. The audience was screaming at her, and she was flustered.

“What will you do with all that money ?” the host asked.

“I–I-I–I don’t know.”

“Pay back the greatest guy,” I answered for her.

“What?” Roberto said. His pillow face swung in my direction.

“Pay back the greatest guy in the whole world,” I said.

He stood up straight. In his small apartment, his size was immense, his camel legs notwithstanding, and as he loomed over me on the couch, I felt a twinge of vulnerability.

“I told you, I’m going to pay you every penny!” he said. His face twitched and the pillow-bandage bobbed, and from his pocket he withdrew a slip of paper on which was printed the company logo of Dr. Scholl’s. Beneath this he had written in very precise handwriting, “I O Dean $200.00.” He had dated it “June 14th” and added his initials, as if it were an official document he was endorsing. The gesture was surprisingly touching, and I felt remorseful, even guilty, as if I were the one who owed money.

Out loud I said, “What the hell am I supposed to do with this? Get it notarized?”

“Motorized?” he asked.

He shrugged. He folded the paper and put it in his pocket and got back to work on the DVD player. The woman was just about to pick the color yellow when the game show was interrupted by breaking news: every branch of the military had been ordered to join the marines on high alert — the navy, the army, the air force, the coast guard, and branches I’d never heard of. There were maps with arrows, and the peninsula was highlighted. The experts were all in agreement; even the experts who used to disagree now agreed. Everything made sense. There was a sexy reporter interviewing soldiers at their base.

“We could be attacked without warning,” she said. “Right here and now.” Her eyes were dewy, her lips were thick. She wore a flak jacket and a helmet from under which flowed long brown hair.

“Do you miss your family?” she asked one of the soldiers.

“Yes, I do, ma’am,” the soldier said.

Roberto came and sat beside me on the sofa.

“But I have to do what I have to do,” the soldier said. He had blond hair, blue eyes, an upturned nose. If not for his twang, he could have been a California surfer. Night-vision goggles were propped on his forehead.

“Are you afraid of dying?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Any day now,” the reporter said, turning to us.

“Any day now,” Roberto repeated. The sentiment seemed poignant. I draped my arm around his enormous shoulders. I was in a forgiving mood.