Christopher Hebert - Angels of Detroit

A week after the club, a week before número diez, another meeting with Sergio is scheduled, this time at the Palacio de Bellas Artes. But once again Sergio doesn’t show.

For days, he’s not sure how many, the proprietress is Dobbs’s only company, her hollow, distant voice visiting him clandestinely from the vent above the toilet. The even hollower reverberations ring around the tiled bathroom, singing to him while he hunkers in the shower, trying to keep cool. Sometimes the vent makes her voice rumble like a stadium crowd. She multiplies exponentially. In his delirium, Dobbs imagines applause each time he moves his bowels, cheers when he empties his stomach. He sits on the porcelain for twenty minutes. He sits for an hour. He falls asleep sitting.

He dreams he’s in a grocery store, selecting a box of cornflakes with the help of an old friend. For the first time in days, he wakes up in número diez and he isn’t sweating.

Slowly his head is clearing, his body parts gradually coming back into focus. He is thirteen again, awakening from a long sleep in his hospital bed, his broken leg still in traction. He is alone. It is daytime, or so the clock says, but the summer sky outside his window is inky gray, radiating angry swirls of violet. The wind is louder than the night janitor’s vacuum, and each raindrop lands upon Dobbs’s windowsill like a water balloon. What awoke him, he realizes now, are the emergency broadcast tones and the staticky, officious voice emanating from a radio in some neighboring room. If Dobbs rolls his head all the way to the right, he can see the trees at the edge of the hospital grounds do things he didn’t know trees could do. There is a pine in the distance taller than the hospital itself, and Dobbs watches it bend like a noodle. On the news lately he’s been hearing more and more about violent storms like these, how they once were rare but are becoming ordinary. Dobbs watches each bend and swerve of that one tall pine, high up above all the rest. He’s witnessed such storms before. He’s seen his mother’s car crushed in the driveway by a fallen limb, and yet there’s something about this particular tree that makes Dobbs swell with sadness. He can’t look away. Even through the roaring wind and the pounding rain, he can hear the very moment the trunk — three-quarters of the way to the top — finally snaps. All the green needles arrayed at the canopy, all at once, fall away, hitting the ground with a crack and a thump. Just then a shadow expands upon the wall — someone approaching his open door, and Dobbs closes his eyes, not wanting anyone to see what’s happened to him. He knows he wouldn’t be able to explain. And in the morning, when at last the traction comes down and he’s free to go, the landscape all along the route home is littered with branches and twigs and even entire trees. Silent corpses. The power is down throughout his neighborhood, but all Dobbs can think of are the losses, that new seeds — at least as far as the span of human existence is concerned — will never catch up with what’s been destroyed. The coming end only quickens, Dobbs thinks — it never slows.

His fever subsides, and the next day the proprietress comes upstairs and hands Dobbs a note. He puts on a set of clothes from his backpack, wrinkled but clean-smelling clothes, and he emerges unsteadily from behind the steel door, into the blistering daylight.

§

Sergio meets him that afternoon in a dingy playground in San Pedro el Chico. Sergio is not one of the beautiful people. He is unshaven and wearing the half-apron of a waiter.

“I just quit,” Sergio says in English as they shake hands. Dobbs’s palm feels like a damp sponge.

“Quit what?”

Sergio says, “What’s it look like?”

It looks like there’s been some mistake, is what Dobbs is thinking. Or is he still in bed in número diez, feverishly dreaming?

“I need to find a new direction,” Sergio says.

Dobbs says, “Me too.” He can feel the sweat gathering along his brow.

“I used to live in California,” Sergio says, wandering over toward the swing set. “Right on the bay. I was a waiter there. That’s where I made most of my connections.”

And Dobbs wonders if there’s been some misunderstanding, if he’s mistakenly been led to the kingpin of busboys.

“The nicest people I’ve ever known,” Sergio says, “were the friends I had at that restaurant. We used to go out drinking together, smoke weed together. It was nice.”

They’re walking side by side, and when they reach the teeter-totter, Sergio offers to buy him a beer.

“Sure.”

“Let’s go this way,” Sergio says, turning away from the main road. The cafés, he says, are too expensive.

They head north, past a school. Dobbs’s heels seem reluctant to lift off the sidewalk. Balance is suddenly not something to be taken for granted.

They’re in a residential neighborhood, small concrete boxes with gates and courtyards just off the street. It’s pretty and quiet, but it’s nothing like where the beautiful people live.

“I had a good friend named Sammy,” Sergio says. “He had the most beautiful girlfriend I’d ever seen.”

Sergio is glancing down a side street that appears to Dobbs to offer more of the same.

“His girlfriend wanted me,” Sergio says, “and Sammy knew it, but he didn’t care. He used to let her come over to my place and drink and do whatever. You can’t find people like that here,” he says, pointing to the word CORONA painted on the side of a small store. “I miss my old friends.”

The beer comes in a plastic sack with a straw, to save on the deposit, and Dobbs finds himself holding what looks like a sandwich bag full of frothy urine.

“ Salud ,” Dobbs says, bouncing his bag off Sergio’s.

“Cheers,” says Sergio.

One sip, and Dobbs’s head is swimming.

“Do you have a girlfriend?” Sergio says between slurps.

When Dobbs says no, Sergio asks why not.

“I’ve been focusing on other things.”

“I couldn’t live without my girlfriends,” Sergio says. He tells Dobbs he has two.

“My wife and my son are away in Spain right now visiting her family. I miss her,” Sergio says, “but you can’t expect a man to just sit around and wait.” Sergio works the straw into a fold at the bottom of the bag. “We have to find you a girlfriend.”

Dobbs’s socks are soaked in sweat.

For the next half hour, Sergio tries his best to procure that missing girlfriend. As they walk, he whistles and follows and sometimes even calls out to different women, but nothing seems to work.

“I don’t know what the problem is,” Sergio says.

Dobbs realizes it’s been days since he’s looked in a mirror. If he looks at all like he feels, he must resemble a strand of overcooked spaghetti, the very tip dipped in sauce.

“Did I ever show you pictures of my son?” Sergio says, as if the forty minutes they’ve spent together have somehow stretched into decades.

“I’m pretty sure you haven’t.”

Sergio has four pictures, two of his son and two of his wife. All of them are small and rectangular, like the kind that come from photo booths. Sergio’s son looks to be around twelve, older than Dobbs expected.

“After I got kicked out of the States,” Sergio says, “I worked as a tour guide. I rode around in one of those luxury buses talking about churches and parks and things. I had to say everything twice,” he says, “first in Spanish and then in English. That’s where I met her.”

“Why didn’t you go to Spain with her?” Dobbs says.

“I had to work,” Sergio says.

“When did they leave?”

They’re standing at a curb, and Sergio tosses his empty bag to the ground. Dobbs looks down to see that countless other people have done the same. A gutter lined in tangled, muddy plastic. Dobbs thinks of the floating continents of trash churning out in the Pacific, dolphins and pelicans choking to death on bottle caps and disposable lighters.