Daniel Alarcón - At Night We Walk in Circles

The drizzle was heavy now; they could see it swirling in the light just outside the window. He went on: “Outside, it’s cold; outside, it’s wet. Inside, it’s warm, and inside there’s beer. But inside, there is no fighting. Do you understand?”

He’d given this speech before.

Nelson and Mindo both nodded gravely; then they shook themselves off, gathered their things, and went outside.

NELSON ARRIVEDat the Olympic past two, opening the gate with the key Patalarga had given him. He was soaked and out of breath. Henry and Patalarga had all but finished the bottle of rum, and were lying about the stage, now covered with cushions and blankets, like a pasha’s den.

“You’re back!” Henry said.

“You’re alive!” Patalarga shouted.

He was only joking, but then Nelson stepped into the light. He was bruised and scraped. He peeled off his wet coat, ripped at the sleeve. He slumped onto the stage, gesturing for the rum, and Henry quickly poured him a glass.

“What happened?”

Nelson downed a shot.

The story he told his friends that night is the same as the one he’d later tell police.

He and Mindo stepped out of the Wembley. There was no plan. “We just knew, I guess, that we weren’t done fighting.” They stood for a while beneath the streetlamp just outside the door of the bar, breathing the damp air. From inside the bar, faces pressed up against the window, as if expecting a show.

Mindo swayed. “You’re fucking her?”

Nelson didn’t respond. He didn’t have to.

“I knew it.” Then: “I’m going to kill you.”

According to the old bartender, everyone heard it. “The drunk boy looked very upset.”

Nelson wasn’t rattled. He held his hands out, palms up.

“No you’re not.”

There was no aggression in his voice, no defiance. It was just a statement of fact. He went on: “I shouldn’t have said what I said. I’m sorry.” Nelson gestured toward the Wembley. “They’re all watching. Are you really going to kill me in front of all these people?”

Mindo cupped a hand over his eyes and turned toward the windows of the bar.

“Fine,” he said.

They walked toward the plaza, and at this point there are no other witnesses besides Nelson. The plaza was empty except for a few stray taxis, and the occasional drunk stumbling out of one of the underground bars. The night was cold and uninviting, and they walked as fast as they could manage on the slippery streets. A few blocks on, Mindo started to talk. According to Nelson: “He was upset, but he seemed fatalistic about it all. I wasn’t his rival. He said he knew that. Only Ixta had answers. She’d loved him once, and now she didn’t. I didn’t know what to tell him.”

“It’s the baby I worry about,” Mindo said.

Nelson knew the streets of the Old City. He knew, for example, that at certain hours of night, on the narrower streets, you don’t use the sidewalks. This is common sense. You walk straight down the very center of the road, eyes sharp, scanning for the thief that might pounce from the shadow of a recessed doorway. He and every student at the Conservatory had been robbed at least once. For most, once was all it took; then you learned. Nelson didn’t have to think about it. This was instinct.

They were walking down the center of a narrow street called Garza when their conversation was interrupted by the light tap of a horn. They moved to the sidewalk, still talking, and barely registered the station wagon that rolled by. It pulled over just ahead of them, and two young men got out. A moment later, it took off, disappearing into the fog. Still Nelson and Mindo thought nothing of it. Just ahead, the two men dawdled, and, according to Nelson, “When we passed them, one of them pushed me hard against the wall.” That’s how it began.

Both assailants were young, both snarling, and it wasn’t a holdup — it was an attack. A beat down. Everything happened very fast: Mindo and Nelson and these two violent strangers. No conversation. No demands. No negotiation. Nelson never saw their faces. It was fight or flight.

At the first opportunity, he flew.

“What about Mindo?” Patalarga asked, just as the police would later. “Why didn’t you help Mindo?”

“I don’t know.”

Nelson ran as fast as he could. “I should’ve gone toward the plaza, but at the time I wasn’t thinking. I just wanted to get away.”

One of the attackers was chasing, but Nelson didn’t look back. He ran for three blocks, turned one corner and then another, sprinting until his lungs burned. When he finally stopped he was six or seven blocks from the scene of the attack, standing at the edge of a park he’d never seen before, in a tumbledown section of the Old City known as El Anclado. He saw no one in the deserted streets: not his attackers, not Mindo, not a single person he could ask for help.

“So what did you do?” Patalarga asked.

“I sat for a moment to catch my breath. I figured out where I was, roughly, and then I headed back.”

His destination was the Olympic, where he would be safe, but first he wanted to see about Mindo. He walked quickly, almost frantically. The fog was heavier than before, heavier than he’d ever seen it. When he got to the corner of Garza and Franklin, he peered down the street, to the spot where they’d been jumped.

He saw nothing, and breathed a sigh of relief.

“I was frightened,” he said to Patalarga and Henry. “I didn’t go any closer. I just assumed Mindo had done what I did. I assumed he’d gotten away.”

In fact, he hadn’t. Mindo had crawled into one of the recessed doorways, where he was almost completely hidden. That’s where a passerby found him the next morning, with five knife wounds to his stomach and chest.

THE FOLLOWING MORNINGHenry offered to give Nelson a ride to the Monument District. It was understood that Nelson had to see Ixta, to make sure Mindo was all right, and to apologize for any trouble he might have caused between them. Traffic was unusually light, and though the two friends didn’t talk much, both found it comforting not to ride alone. Neither had slept more than a few hours. They listened to the news on the radio and, in particular, to the tenor of the announcers, which fluctuated unexpectedly between horror and amusement. It was frankly confusing, and perhaps this was the point: bad news was almost indistinguishable from good, or perhaps there was simply no such thing as good news anymore.

“You don’t drive like I thought you would,” Nelson said when they were near their destination. “I somehow expected you’d be more erratic.”

To Henry, this sounded about right. He did almost everything erratically, but behind the wheel, he’d always been possessed with a certain calm. The congested streets of the capital disturbed most drivers, but not him. He had a surprisingly high tolerance for traffic jams. When he was in Collectors, he told Nelson now, he sometimes sat in bed, looking up at the ceiling, and imagined himself behind the wheel of a car, any car, on any city street. He and Rogelio shared this love, in fact: the tranquillity that came only from being alone, at the wheel, that sense of autonomy. He’d first conceived of The Idiot President while driving a tan 1976 Opel hatchback to visit a friend who lived outside the city. In an alternate life, if he’d been a criminal, Henry mused, he would have made a decent wheelman.

“Do you drive?” he asked Nelson now.

The young actor shook his head. He’d never learned. Henry smiled and offered to teach him. After all, Nelson would need to know, if he were to go through with his plans to travel to the United States.