The Convulsion Factory (18 page)

I can’t imagine how much these people must have grown to hate me. The columnist always gets the last word. The columnist is the embodiment of smug and godless ruin, the Nero who fiddles while Rome burns.

Maybe I was.

I tried to tell myself that the team who showed up at my home one night wasn’t really trying to harm anyone. That their goal was to frighten. Doesn’t killing somebody undermine credibility, even that of extremists? They said they got the idea from a rerun of
Miami Vice
. Too much monitoring? Anything to prove a point, I suppose.

But I’ve given up trying to figure them out. Facts are easier to stick with. They lobbed three gasoline bombs into our home at three different locations. We’d been remodeling, and things were a mess, and the fires spread quickly, joining into one conflagration while the smoke billowed into a dense, caustic cloud.

A wife and two children, I lost them all, and gained a lot of blisters and baked skin that took months to heal. The people who did this, certainly they shut me up. It’s hard to type with your hands swathed in bandages, and I couldn’t keep my head clear long enough to dictate a column. It wasn’t for lack of trying. I’d get a paragraph in, maybe two on a lucid day, and then I’d think I smelled my children, or heard them crying out to me, in absolute faith that I would never fail them.

You haven’t truly known failure until the last thing you’ve taught your children is how fragile and human you really are.

I didn’t decide to leave the country until after the trials and convictions. I attended faithfully, like church, and before the day of the sentencing I schemed obsessively to smuggle a pistol into the courtroom so it was waiting for me. If the judge didn’t come down hard enough to suit me, I could at least rise like an avenger and bring them down in retribution for the three people I had failed most in this world.

I even had my hand on the grip before I began wondering what the experience had turned me into. I’d actually considered this? I’d thought I could go through with it?

Something’s wrong,
I thought.
Something is very wrong and it’s not just me.

South America,
I later thought. It would be another world, someplace to stumble around and lose myself for years while I got my bearings. I could live cheaply down there. Between the insurance, and the money I’d earned from syndication, I might not have to work again for years. I might be human again by then.

Ultimately, though, it wasn’t the struggle with my own murderous impulses that drove me south. It was my neighbor from directly across the street.

The gasoline bombs immediately caught his eye, fires blooming in an upstairs bedroom, the dining room, family room. My neighbor was concerned just enough to make a run for his video camera. Not enough to try to help. He taped everything, even after I was long gone to the hospital in a scream of siren … right up to the moment when they brought out the bagged bodies of my family from the smoldering husk of the house.

He sold the tape to a tabloid show for more than I’d earned my first six years working for the newspapers.

I had a hard time dealing with that.

*

The next day I learned from Pedro that a shopkeeper had been savaged several blocks from my apartment the same night I’d seen whatever it was from my bedroom window. Not all of the body had been recovered. Because of the teeth- and clawmarks, the general assumption was that it never would be.

Everybody who lived in the area, and many beyond, knew about the victim. He operated a
botanica
, filled with fragrant herbs and pictures of saints, with incense and candles, standard trappings of the numerous religions to spring from an African commonality.
Vodoun
,
santeria
,
candomblé
,
macumba
… the same basic gods and beliefs, with variations among their rites. Most knew this man for the sham he was, with faith in nothing more than profit. His trade wasn’t with true believers, but mostly with dabbling kids who wanted something more primal than the Catholicism of their parents and didn’t know any better about him, and with tourists who got a cheap thrill out of burning a candle they could have bought for a fraction elsewhere, but felt sure the expensive one was blessed.

Of course nobody deserved to die in such a ghastly way, but on the streets, one got the feeling he wouldn’t be missed.

“Do you think I should report what I saw?” I asked Pedro that same afternoon. He was eating from a bag of pistachio nuts and his lips were comically red, a right jolly old elf.

“And what was that: an animal, you saw, for a moment in the dark. This much is known already.” Pedro shrugged. “The
policía
, what will they do? They will listen, and they will look very bored, and if feeling lively they will scratch their bellies and their balls.” He shrugged again. “Do as you must. But for me, life is too short to spend it watching hairy men scratch themselves.”

Pedro’s dismissal of the police was as practical as it was fatalistic. They’re no different here than they are throughout much of South America: poorly equipped, underpaid, notoriously corrupt. Paid the equivalent of $200 American per month, they are often the puppets of anyone who puts up enough money.

And I ended up taking Pedro’s advice.

It’s the way of things down here, and I had learned well in my two years living with them. They accept as natural the oddest things, as if a carnivore materializing in the heart of a city of five million, and carrying off pieces of a shopkeeper, is well within the realm of possibilities. They believe in the kinds of magic that come sweeping down on warm winds from the grassy open
pampas
, or ooze in like fog from the jungles, or bubble up in the densest slums. They recognize miracles of both the light and the darkness, because they’ve lived them for so long, keeping spirits and hopes robust even while the occasional dictator has sought to crush protesting throats beneath his boot. It’s not that they’re apathetic to tragedy. They merely reserve their outrage for what truly matters. All else, when said and done, is life in all its richness, simply life.

It’s only in the youngest and dirtiest of the city’s wealth of life that I see no hope, in whom hope has died, if it has lived at all. The street kids are a breed unto themselves, roaming in packs for survival, and clinging tenaciously to one another for a sense of family.

The government said the problem is under control, that only 1500 or so actually sleep on the streets. It seems a whitewash to me, that there must be more, but even if that figure is correct, the government can’t deny that tens of thousands more get nothing out of their homes other than a place to sleep when exhausted. The streets may not be their bed, but are still the only way these kids can survive. Children as young as five shine shoes and sell candy, hire themselves out for odd jobs, steal, and prostitute their bodies. They get by, many of them, on fifty cents a day.

It gets them dead sometimes.

The street kids — grubby urchins whose dark eyes can be sad one moment, shining innocently the next, and turn vicious a moment later — are not just some exotic species to me that I watch from afar. I know many of them fairly well, give them money and bring them food, listen to them imagine their funerals as if fifteen is an impossibly old age they can never attain.

Many nights I’ve shared their company as they huddled in tiny cardboard cities erected in alleyways fetid with garbage and plunged into menace by primal shadows beyond their fire. A good night is when they can grill a dog, mouths watering at the sweet smoke. They stand careful watch for off-duty
policías
, of whom they live in constant fear.

They kill children here, remember.

The army no longer is in charge, but death squads haven’t faded into the past — they’ve merely been co-opted by private enterprise. Swift little beggars and thieves drive away tourists, shopkeepers complain. Bad for business. Some of them pool money and pay the most corrupt
policías
to roam the streets in their off-duty hours, and eradicate the menace. It’s gone on for twenty years, but they used to be discreet about it. No longer. Last year three of them used MAC-10s to gun down eleven kids one bright summer afternoon after a tour bus had been boarded by a gang and its passengers robbed. It was a broad retaliatory strike. The gunmen had no interest in making sure they had the same kids. The bodies were strewn along an entire block of a busy city street that had grown as deserted as a town in an American western movie. I wonder if the rogue
policías
saw themselves as avenging gunslingers.

Over this, the country screamed its outrage. To appease it, the three killers were arrested, tried, and convicted, are now doing thirty years. I have my doubts they’ll walk out alive. The world over, cops in prison make tempting targets. But they were only sacrificial scapegoats, nothing more. Shopkeepers and death squads alike took a lesson from them: no crowds of witnesses, no bodies strewn along the streets. Bad for public relations.

For the street kids, though, business went on just the same.

That, too, was life.

*

Three nights later I was awakened by pounding at my door, a pounding of steady desperation. I slipped on khaki pants and went stumbling for the door before the neighbors suffered, complained. I passed a hallway clock that read nearly 3:00 A.M. I opened the door, immediately had to look down.

I had expected my visitor to be taller.

“Miguel?” I said. “What the hell…?”

It was one of the kids, the lost, who slept on a bed of asphalt. Miguel believes he might be eleven years old, a skinny-limbed boy with a beautiful smile and long black hair that tumbles into his eyes. I’d once forcibly taken him to a doctor and paid for the penicillin that cured his gonorrhea.

“You come with me, okay?” He tugged urgently at my bare arm. “You have medicines, okay? You come now, find your shoes.”

I hurried, throwing things together while quizzing him and getting frustratingly incomplete answers. He could hardly quit dancing around my apartment, impatient to get me moving into the night. The most I could get out of him was that Rafael was hurt. I didn’t even know a Rafael, but I grabbed bandages, disinfectant, a bottle of antibiotics … things I’d scrounged in case the kids needed them. But I was hardly qualified to practice much more than first aid.

We descended into the streets, Miguel leading me along a dark path of alleys and airways, where soon I became aware of everything that might be lying just beyond my limits of vision. I could smell it, sense it, strata of decay and disease. Miguel traveled without hesitation or misstep, picking his way along with the assurance of a cougar on a ridgetop, and he never dropped his hand from my arm. I felt as long as he had hold of me, I would pass with impunity. Probably I’d not have been so lucky two years ago.

I had been robbed one night within a month of moving here, by a pair of twelve-year-olds with knives. They’d have used them if I’d resisted, I’m sure, but perhaps it was because, still in mourning, I assigned so little value to my own life that I could see how terrified they were, knives or not. They took me for maybe forty dollars and a watch I still haven’t replaced. As they were backing away, brandishing their knives to discourage any heroism, I knelt and took off a shoe and peeled out another bill.

“You missed one,” I said. They looked at me as if I’d lost my mind. They took the bill — it was, after all, offered freely — but never was I robbed again. It may only be coincidence … but even I am able to believe in a little magic.

Miguel hurried me along for half an hour, deep into twisting passages and hellish urban bowels, until we arrived at one of those transient settlements of cardboard and packing crates. The moon was a chilly scythe scraping behind the tall silhouette of a tenement, and as Miguel called out with a soft hooting cry of identification, I sensed a quick sinuous movement just beyond us. It flanked us, whipped over and around as if scampering across a mound of garbage, glided down into thicker darkness —

And was gone.

“Down,” Miguel said to me, and for a moment I thought he meant I should drop to hands and knees to enter one of these rude domains. And while I’d have to, it wasn’t what he meant. “Down, to me,” he said. All he wanted was to look me directly in the eye.

He raised his small hands, cupped my face as tenderly and urgently as a doting mother. An eleven-year-old with responsibilities I could never have imagined dealing with at that age.

“You help Rafael, right? Right, Monjito?” It was their name for me, Monjito, roughly meaning ‘Little Monk.’ It was their way of teasing me for living alone.

“I’ll try, Miguel,” I whispered, while from all around us I got the sense of being watched, of life unseen. Small eyes were surely peering from makeshift doorways. “But you haven’t even told me what’s happened to him.”

“You like Rafael. He’s my friend.” Still pressing his tough little hands to my face, Miguel glanced to either side, then leaned closer in. “You live here long enough now, you see strange things. Okay? Not like your old home. You see another strange thing now, maybe. Monjito? I trust you. You never show us to the
policía
, right? I
trust
you.”

I gripped his wrists, thin as broomsticks. “I’d never turn you in. Never worry about that.”