Daniel Alarcón - At Night We Walk in Circles

Nelson was silent.

“He’ll send someone after you, won’t he?”

“He has my address. He took my ID. That’s why I’d rather stay here. If that’s okay.”

That first night they slept on the stage of the Olympic, and so high did the ceiling seem to them, it was as if they were camping beneath a dark and infinite sky. They were safe here, they reasoned. They batted around a few ill-considered but pleasing metaphors: the theater was an old galleon adrift on the seas, or a cave hidden deep inside the earth, or a bunker housing two old, grizzled warriors, the last of a once great army, now contemplating certain defeat. They laughed a good deal. They solved the conundrum of Patalarga’s faltering marriage. They remembered Henry in tones usually reserved for a man who’d passed. Nelson couldn’t believe that his two friends weren’t talking. He’d thought of them as an indivisible unit.

Patalarga had too. “He’ll come around,” he said, without really believing it, and Nelson nodded politely.

They talked for hours. Nelson described the terrible morning of Mrs. Anabel’s fall, which, he argued, was the logical end to his time in T—. He didn’t feel guilty, just relieved to be gone.

“Another week there and I might have tripped the old lady myself.”

They both laughed, then fell silent for a spell, until Nelson said, “I never should have gone on tour, you know?”

“That’s what Henry said on the bus ride back.”

“If I’d never left the city, I’d be with Ixta now.”

“I told him that you could never know these things.” Patalarga sighed. “People believe what they want to believe.”

This is a fact.

When Patalarga woke up the next day, Nelson was already gone.

THAT MORNING,in the quiet, empty theater, Patalarga made yet another attempt to reach out to Henry. He told himself then (as he had on every occasion) that he was doing it for his old friend, persisting out of a sense of loyalty, but he later admitted that his motives were more selfish than that. Patalarga wasn’t doing well either. He was only forty, estranged from his wife, sleeping on the stage of an abandoned theater. The starkness of his own situation made it clear that he couldn’t afford to give up on friends like Henry.

Their handful of conversations in the few weeks since the end of the tour had been short and unsatisfying. This occasion would be no different. The phone rang for what seemed like an endless stretch, and Patalarga simply let it. A minute, and then another. He had no real expectations. When Henry finally answered, his “Hello” was forced, just above a whisper; then he apologized, cleared his throat, and tried again. Better this time. Patalarga laughed to himself. Henry was acting. He wouldn’t answer questions, only complete the declarative sentences that Patalarga began for him:

“And you’re doing …?”

“Well.”

“Staying busy with …?”

“Work.”

“Feeling more or less …?”

“At peace.”

They spoke in this manner for no longer than three minutes, during which time Patalarga informed Henry of the news that pertained to them both, that Nelson had come home.

“And this news strikes you as …?”

“Good,” said Henry.

Patalarga sighed. “We’re at the Olympic if you want to come see us.”

Henry said neither yes nor no; and the conversation, as Patalarga recalls, didn’t end so much as slip away: a tiny balloon on a string, sliding through the fingers of a child. In his mind’s eye, Patalarga watched it float up to the sky and vanish. “At a certain point, I realized I wasn’t talking to anyone. I sort of laughed to myself and hung up.”

And afterward, he sat in the dark theater for a moment, trying to will himself to call his wife, to apologize.

AS FOR NELSON,he’d woken before dawn, showered, shaved, and left the Olympic full of hope. He’d slept very little, but once on the streets, felt nothing but energy. The morning traffic was just humming to life, the city’s stubborn refusal to capitulate in the face of another dismal winter’s day. And Nelson — he too would not give up. He too would fight. That pressure in his chest, what he’d been feeling for a week or more, was still there; he’d come to think of it as part of him. He walked in the direction of Ixta’s office, and at around seven, not yet halfway there, stepped into a crowded café. He wasn’t hungry; he only wanted to see up close the men and women who had gathered there. They were, to a person, loud, brash, and rude; and it was precisely their rudeness that reminded him of what he’d missed about the city. He loved them, loved the sound of their laughter, the way they heckled one another. They told vulgar jokes while sipping espresso, shook folded newspapers furiously to underline the validity of their complaints. They cursed politicians, mocked celebrities, grumbled about their families. The place was so busy that no one approached to take Nelson’s order, and so he stood in one corner, content to watch the proceedings in silence. When it became too much, he closed his eyes and just smelled the place: the sharp scent of coffee and steamed milk, fresh bread and sausage. He opened his eyes once more and noted the length of the long wooden bar; the shine of the polished metal banister that led to the upstairs dining room; and the oil paintings on the walls, heroic canvasses composed by artists who’d been dead since his father was just a boy in short pants.

We know Nelson stopped here because it so happened that an uncle of his, Ramiro, married to Mónica’s sister Astrid for two decades, spotted him. He’d been a regular at this particular restaurant since 1984, and by now his morning coffee was the very highlight of his day. He hadn’t seen his nephew in over a year, and the young man was so changed that Ramiro didn’t even recognize him at first. As soon as he did, he made his way over, moved in part by curiosity, in part by familial obligation (Ramiro was nothing if not correct), and gave Nelson an enthusiastic hug. Their brief conversation went as follows:

UNCLE RAMIRO:Nephew!

NELSON:…

UNCLE RAMIRO:What are you doing here? When did you get back?

NELSON:…

UNCLE RAMIRO:How was the tour?

NELSON:…

And so on, for an interminable few minutes. Nelson answered all questions with a blank stare, except one. Ramiro asked, “Where are you going?”

“I’m going to be a father,” Nelson said.

Ramiro smiled generously, with a hint of condescension, as if such a thing were inconceivable.

“That’s wonderful.”

The conversation was over; Nelson’s steadfast gaze made him nervous.

An hour later, Ramiro was on the phone, reporting to his wife that Nelson must be on drugs. He omitted any mention of his nephew’s impending paternity, which he’d simply chosen not to believe. Astrid dutifully passed along Ramiro’s message of concern to her sister, who took the news relatively well. She knew her son wasn’t on drugs, but couldn’t help being concerned nonetheless. Why hadn’t he called to tell her he was home? By midmorning, Mónica had all but given up on the workday. She told her colleagues she didn’t feel well, which was true, and went straight home to wait for her son.

She crossed the city in a cab, thinking of Nelson.

She paid the driver with two bills from her purse, and forgot the change, thinking of Nelson.

She unlocked the door to her empty house, thinking of Nelson.

BY THE TIMEMónica heard from her sister, her son was standing in front of Ixta, in the reception area of a documentary filmmaker’s small but not unpleasant offices, a converted guesthouse attached to his palatial home in the Monument District. Though Ixta doesn’t specifically remember telling Nelson about her job, she assumes she must have. There’s no other way he could’ve found the office, which was hidden on a side street she herself had never heard of until she started working there. This was a new job, just as everything about her life in those days was new: her body, her home, her sense of the future. When I asked Ixta to describe the work, she screwed her face up into a frown.