At Night We Walk in Circles

24

THE NEWS NEVER MADE IT to our town, though I suspect Jaime must have heard. I imagine it concerned him; I don’t believe he intended for anyone to die, and, if he did, that person was certainly not Mindo. But these things happen, and Jaime was well acquainted with unexpected outcomes. His work had taught him about the occasional necessity of violence and the randomness of the law. When he learned of Nelson’s arrest and the accusation against him, one imagines he might even have smiled. Setting aside for a moment Mindo’s unfortunate demise, from the point of view of Mrs. Anabel’s grieving son, justice had been done.

I left T— in late August, but heard nothing of Nelson’s predicament until a few months later. I wouldn’t say that I’d forgotten him, only that my life went on. I was lucky enough to find work at a magazine that had launched while I was away, a publication that quite miraculously still survives, and where I work even now. There were four of us on staff then (today we are twelve), and at the beginning we did everything: the writing and editing, the layout and design. We were the accountants, which explains why bankruptcy loomed each month; and we were the custodial staff, which explains why the office was in a state of constant disarray. The owners, the impatient but enthusiastic Jara brothers, would come by the office once a month; we’d all pile into their battered old van, and deliver the magazines ourselves. We ended these days at our favorite bar, just a few blocks from the office. I liked the Jaras, liked my coworkers, and this was something I’d never experienced before. We were paid laughable wages, but in exchange were allowed to write whatever we wanted, more or less. Every month we got letters from readers, which we passed around the office like love notes.

On one of these nights after having delivered an issue, the managing editor, Lizzy, brought up the many local scandals I’d missed on “my Andean sabbatical.” That was what she called my time in T—, a phrase made charming by the playful manner in which she offered it to the group. It had become a running joke: when I interviewed for the job I’d only been back in the city a few days, and must have seemed a little out of sorts. Still, I was hired, and often entertained my new friends with the folkloric details of provincial life; they, in turn, pretended to be amazed. I let this playacting go on, because it was obvious to me that we all came from similar backgrounds, that we all had similarly tense relationships with our families, with our cultural inheritance.

“That hometown of yours,” Lizzy or one of the others might say. “What year is it out there?”

Everyone would laugh, including me. Time, we all knew, was a very relative concept.

That evening — it was late October 2001—among the scandals mentioned was the story of a young theater actor who’d murdered his rival in a fit of jealous rage. “The sort of thing that never happens where you’re from,” Lizzy said, waving an open hand to signify the provinces. She went on, others joined in, and together my new friends told the story. They cycled through what details they could remember: the disputed paternity, the actor and painter dueling on a late-night street in the Old City. Some particulars had vanished: my friends had a hard time remembering the name of the theater where the killer had been hiding out, or the plays he’d been in before his arrest. But the pregnant girl, the woman at the center of all this; they remembered her. She was an actress, like her lover; very striking, though she never smiled in photos. She’d appeared in the papers under a number of unflattering captions: “The Ice Woman Cometh” or “Blood Wedding.”

And they recalled her name. It was unforgettable, a name rarely heard in these parts.

“Ixta,” they said as one.

Ixta, I repeated to myself.

Our bar — we considered it ours — was and remains one of the places I feel most at home in the world. There are no surprises and not a thing is out of place. But when I heard the name Ixta, I felt a kind of vertigo. This comfortable setting looked suddenly strange to me. My friends too. What they were saying struck me as so dismaying, so arbitrary, that I wondered for a moment if they were having fun at my expense.

Finally I asked, “Was the actor named Nelson?”

“That’s it,” Lizzy said, grinning. “Nelson!”

That is what sent me on this path. I told them about T—, about my interaction with the murderer, and they didn’t believe me. I insisted, and that evening we decided I should write it all down. I even had his journals! We thought it would become a piece for the magazine, maybe even a cover story. It would’ve been my first.

I went back and looked at the press from the days immediately after Mindo’s death, and saw that it was all true: Nelson’s name and photo had been splashed across the front pages of all the local papers. It was unsettling to see him, this man I’d met so briefly, back in July. I spent many days gathering clippings, making lists of places to visit, people I might want to see. The Olympic appeared in a few television reports I managed to find, described as if it were some sort of criminal hangout; this, I later learned, is what finally drove Patalarga to reunite with his wife, moving home in the dead of night, in the hopes of avoiding any further attentions from the media. In the papers I saw many of the people who would later become my informants. Some, like Mónica or Ixta, did all they could to avoid the cameras; others, like Elías and a few of Nelson’s other friends, took the opposite approach, speaking all too freely, as if they were auditioning for a role.

I FINALLY READ Nelson’s journals, the ones Noelia had given me, and after a good deal of encouragement from my colleagues at the magazine, decided to visit Mónica. At the time I had no real sense of Nelson’s guilt or innocence. Just curiosity. It wasn’t difficult to find her, and one evening in November, I knocked on her door. Until that point, I’d been another kind of journalist; she appeared behind her gate, watching me, and I became someone else. She was a slight, tired-looking woman with short hair and a pair of reading glasses twirling in one hand. I was so nervous I could barely explain who I was, or what I wanted.

“I know Nelson,” I blathered finally, and this seemed to get her attention. At the sound of her son’s name, she narrowed her eyes at me, and opened the gate.

We sat in the living room, and while I told her my story, Mónica focused her attention on an origami swan she was making from the tea bag wrapper. When she was done, she placed it on the coffee table with the others, a flock of six or seven, all of them looking in different directions.

“So you met my son in T—,” she said. “Is that all?”

Then I showed her the notebooks, and she almost broke down. She held them for a moment, flipping through the pages quickly, inhaling the scent. After a moment, she shook her head and set them beside her on the sofa.

“What do they say?”

I considered lying, just telling her I hadn’t read them. She gave me a searching look, and I realized the only option was to tell the truth. Of course I’d read them; that’s why I was there.

“They’re about the tour,” I said. “Up until the morning he left to come home.”

She nodded gravely. “Should I read them?”

“Yes,” I said. “They might help.”

By the time I left it was nearly ten o’clock. I gave her the journals (which had always belonged to her, which had never been mine) and promised to visit again.

November passed, the New Year came, and I went to see Mónica again. This time we spoke for many hours. I recorded that conversation. She’d read my magazine. “It isn’t bad,” she said. I told her I was going to write about Nelson’s case, and she gave me her blessing. We looked through the old photo albums, and when I left that day, she lent me some of his journals. We made a list of the people I should talk to; old classmates mostly, a few kids from the neighborhood, but also a couple of names from the Conservatory, classmates who’d come to visit her since the news had broken.

“But I don’t really know who his friends were,” she confessed with a sigh.

“At a certain age, that’s normal.”

She smiled. “Is it? I’m not so sure.” She gave me Francisco’s number in California, and I promised to call him. “And have you spoken with the actors? The gentlemen from Diciembre?”

I’d already planned a visit to the Olympic, and chatted briefly by phone with Henry.

“Good,” Mónica said. “But you should start with Ixta.”

I had tried her twice already and been rejected — but after seeing Mónica, I insisted. The third time I rang her door, Ixta let me in, scowling.

“Again?” she asked. “For the love of God, what’s wrong with you?”

IN APRIL 2002, while the court proceedings were being held up, I went back to T—, following the path that Diciembre had taken the previous year. I spoke with as many people as I could, taking notes, making recordings, and helping them make sense of their memories. I spoke with Cayetano and Melissa, with Tania, and attempted to find the bar in Sihuas where they’d seen all the gold miners, but the authorities had shut it down. I spoke with people who’d seen Diciembre’s performances, and heard a few phrases again and again: “He was such a nice boy!” and “What a show!” In my hometown I managed, with some coaxing, to draw a few people out of their reticence. Nothing having to do with Jaime was ever openly discussed. Whenever anyone asked, I said I was writing a piece for a magazine, and they’d look at me suspiciously. A newspaper, that they would’ve accepted; even a book would’ve made sense. But a magazine?

Who did I think I was?

I went to see Jaime in San Jacinto, intending to pose all the questions I could safely ask. I would not say, for example, “Why did you let your brother take the fall for your drug shipment?” or “Did you send someone to kill Nelson?” or “Who was driving that station wagon the night Mindo was killed?” I had a list of other questions, more innocent-sounding ones, but in the end, it didn’t matter, because he refused to see me at all.

In August 2002, Nelson’s trial got under way, and I attended as many days as I could. I often saw Henry or Patalarga there, sitting in the back, whispering among themselves, and during breaks we’d discuss the proceedings like fans at a sporting event. Our team was losing; that much was clear. I was there when the judge refused to allow the notebooks to be entered into evidence, and decreed that no theory relating Mindo’s death to events in T— was admissible. “Hearsay,” he called it, and Nelson was sunk. I was in the courtroom the day Mindo’s sister called Ixta “a dirty slut” from the witness stand; Mónica sat in the third row with her sister, Astrid, weeping. She appeared in a few of the papers the next morning, under headlines about “a mother’s sadness.”

One day, at the courthouse, Nelson’s uncle Ramiro turned around in his seat, and eyed me, frowning. Then his expression softened.

“It’s like you’re always here,” he said, in a tone of amazement. “Don’t you have something else to do?”

I sometimes wondered the same thing. My colleagues at the magazine, the ones who’d encouraged me at first — they wondered too. “Where’s your article?” Lizzy asked me from time to time, and I’d put her off. Eventually she stopped asking.

I was at Nelson’s sentencing in February 2003, a full two years after the auditions that had changed his life. Mindo’s father had passed away by then, but his mother was there, stoic, and unblinking. She barely reacted at all when the judge announced a sentence of fifteen years. The term felt like an eternity to all of us who sided with Nelson, who believed he was incapable of murder, but I could tell that to Mindo’s mother it felt like an insult.

Only fifteen years.

In the gallery’s front row Mónica collapsed into her sister’s arms, and Nelson was taken away again, back to Collectors, with a look on his face of utter bewilderment. He’d lost weight and had an unhealthy pallor. I don’t think he ever understood that this was actually happening, that this was his life now.

IN THE MONTHS that followed, he wrote letters to his mother, which she showed me, very beautiful letters that described his friends, his surroundings, and detailed his concerns. He’d been placed among inmates from the northern districts, as far from the Thousands as possible, for his own safety. There was a very real possibility that someone from Mindo’s old neighborhood might seek to avenge the painter’s death. He described the power structure of the prison, the fearsome men who ran it, who hailed from districts of the city Nelson had never set foot in, but which he now knew intimately. He knew the way these men spoke, what worried them, what motivated them. They were men who demanded respect, and who were prepared to go to war over any perceived insult, no matter how slight. Nelson described the cramped quarters, his melancholy cell mate (whom he called “roommate,” because it sounded “less institutional”); and how quickly a placid day inside could shift and become spectacularly violent. He told his mother about the roving bands of homeless inmates who camped in the rocky field outside his block, and he expressed wonder at their plight. What surprised him the most was that everyone else accepted the situation of these people as normal. There was nowhere to house them, no one wanted them, and so there they were: three hundred shirtless, shoeless men, hungry, drug-addled, dying slowly en masse. The year before Nelson’s arrival, one young addict had climbed up the radio tower (which hadn’t worked in two decades) and hung himself with a gray scarf. When they brought his body down, they left the scarf, and it had stayed there, the prison’s new and unofficial flag. Nelson never knew the man, but could understand him, he said in a letter, not to his mother but to Patalarga — he kept the worst details from her, so as not to add to her worry. He talked about the view from the roof of his block, the open sky, the hillsides dotted every day with new homes. He watched the women carrying water up the hill in plastic buckets, watched them pause to wipe the sweat from their brows. They were very poor, but he envied them.

“By the time I come out, the hillside will be covered,” he wrote to his mother, “and I won’t have anywhere to live.” Sometimes, he confessed to Patalarga, he lost track of who he was. “I stopped playing Rogelio a long time ago, and yet here I am.”

This was the point that most troubled Henry. Some six months after the verdict, he called and asked if I could come see him. Like all former inmates accused of terrorism, he was barred from visiting, and was anxious to know how Nelson was holding up. He and Patalarga had had another falling out since the end of the trial; so that left me.

I felt almost sheepish admitting that I hadn’t gone to Collectors yet.

“But you’ve talked to him.”

I shook my head.

Henry couldn’t hide his disappointment. “I can’t go. What’s your excuse?”

I didn’t have one; or rather, I didn’t have a good one. I wasn’t family. Strictly speaking, I wasn’t even a friend.

He smiled slyly. “Are you scared? Is that it? Do you think something unspeakable will happen to you?”

I’d never been teased by Henry Nuñez before.

“Yes,” I said. “I’m terrified.”

Henry slumped back in his chair. “Well, you’re no fun.”

His apartment was messier than usual, with piles of books on the floor and dirty dishes in the sink. A white dress shirt was draped over one of the plastic chairs in the corner, drying stiffly.

“So what happened here?” I asked.

Ana wasn’t allowed to visit, he explained, so there was no need to keep up appearances. “Not that I would’ve fooled you anyway.” It seems that on Ana’s last overnight, there’d been a gas leak somewhere in the building. Everyone on the block had been evacuated, and many had slept in the park, including Henry and his daughter. It was a warm night, a neighborly night tinged with the mood of a carnival. But his ex-wife was furious.

“Sleeping outdoors. Must’ve reminded you of the tour.”

Henry shook his head. “It was nice, but no. There’s nothing like being on tour.”

We talked for a while about his plans, went over a few questions I had about the history of Diciembre, and when I was about to leave, I asked why he’d called me. It was odd, given that for each of our previous interviews, I’d had to work to track him down.

Henry looked up, nodding, as if trying to remember. Then: “I’m ready to write that script. The one we were going to do together.”

I gave him a puzzled look. “We?”

“Nelson and I. Our prison story.”

“Your prison story.”

He was energized, almost manic. “A love story. Rogelio’s story. We were going to write it together. A play. We can take it on tour. He said he wanted to help. Now we can. Now I’m ready. Will you ask him?”

“Is this what you and Patalarga fought about?”

Henry frowned and rubbed his neck. “Just ask him,” he said. “Will you ask him?”

IT WAS JANUARY 2004 before I could get the proper permissions to visit Nelson myself. I remember we’d just hit ten thousand subscribers at the magazine, and were celebrating at the offices with an impromptu party. In the middle of it, my letter arrived.

You are granted permission to enter Collectors Prison on this day, at this hour.

I was given an appointment at the ministry building in the Old City to have my fingerprints taken. The celebration became more serious, more sincere. It was as if I’d won an award.

“Maybe we’ll finally see that article,” Lizzy said.

I’d been petitioning for something more than an ordinary visit: I wanted the okay to bring in a microphone and a tape recorder; and given the conditions inside, the authorities were skittish about these kinds of requests. No one wanted a journalist to embarrass them. I think back now and wonder why I insisted, and can only conclude it was a stalling tactic. These things take time, and I knew that. Perhaps I could’ve pushed harder against the sluggish prison bureaucracy, but I didn’t. I was busy, it was true, but I’ll admit that part of me was hesitant to compare my invented version of Nelson with the man himself.

Mónica went to see her son every couple of weeks, a ritual she both looked forward to and dreaded; and she often called me the next day to read me Nelson’s most recent letter over the phone. I’d hear the shuffle of papers through the receiver, she’d clear her throat; I’d make myself comfortable and listen. I liked hearing his words in her voice. When she finished, I’d thank her. I knew these letters were edited, because I’d read the ones he gave Patalarga.

“When are you going to see my boy?” Mónica would ask. “He says he has something to tell you.”

“Soon,” I’d respond.

I finally went to Collectors in March. Nelson was almost twenty-six years old now, and coming up on the third anniversary of his incarceration; an unimaginable length of time, but only a fraction of what he’d been condemned to serve. That was the thought I couldn’t shake as I presented my papers to an unsmiling guard, as I handed my bag over to be searched by another. Fifteen years. My tape recorder was removed from its case, examined by a guard who looked at it curiously, as if considering some obscure tool from another age. Twelve to go. He searched for and eventually found the serial number, which he then compared with the one on the document I’d presented. The numbers matched, and he let out a little sigh of disappointment. Then he checked my microphone, my headphones and cables, and once everything was confirmed to be in order, my arm was stamped, and I was on my way. All of this was accomplished without exchanging a single sentence.

I was patted down at the next gate, and then sent through with a grunt. I stepped out of the primary holding area and into the bright, beating sun. I covered my eyes. Standing between the two gates, neither inside the prison, nor out of it, but in a neutral zone, I stared through the heavy chain-link fence at the inmates of Collectors: young men milling about, looking bored. I would’ve liked to observe them for just a moment, but the next guard hurried me along, and quite suddenly I was inside. The gate closed behind me: just closed, it didn’t slam or make any noise at all. It’s subtle, in fact, the difference between inside and outside.

I looked all around, trying not to seem overwhelmed. There were so many men, but no Nelson.

Then a voice: “It’s really something, isn’t it?”

He’d pushed through the gathered, idle men, and come up from behind. There was a playfulness to his expression that told me this had been deliberate.

We shook hands. He looked different; better in fact. He’d cut his hair, and this alone changed the tenor of his features. No boyishness left; no whimsy. His face had lost its youthfulness, and it had been replaced by something else, something tougher and more determined. He wore jeans and a clean, light blue T-shirt. Last time I’d seen him at the courthouse, he’d been thin and callow and frightened; there was none of that now. He’d put on weight, had a certain heft to his shoulders.

Nelson was observing me too. “I don’t remember you. I’ve been wondering if I would, but I don’t. Nothing.”

“That’s okay.”

“I just thought you should know.” He pressed his lips tight. “My mother says you were at the trial. I didn’t notice you.”

“You had other things on your mind.”

He smiled cautiously. “She thinks we’ll be friends or something.”

A couple skinny, shirtless men hovered just behind Nelson, eyeing me.

“Seems like you have friends.”

“A man needs them. Is this your first time?”

“It is.”

“So take a look.”

This is what I saw. There were men: ordinary men as you might find on any street, in any neighborhood, tall men, short men, skinny men, fat men, black men, brown men, white men (though only a few of those), tired men, frantic men, old men. They looked like people I’d known, people I’d seen before, only harder, perhaps. But that was only part of the story: together, they were outnumbered by another group, the broken men, and these were legion. They were shirtless and desperate and wilting in the late-summer heat. This was their home, the front of the prison, the public spaces that no one owned. These fallen ones were sinewy and gaunt, covered in scars and the blurry tattooed names of lovers they’d forgotten and who’d forgotten them, men with sunken cheeks, men with dirty hands. They watched me with great intensity, or perhaps I only felt like they were watching; perhaps they were so high they didn’t even notice who I was. An outsider.

“What are you looking for?” Nelson asked.

“Guards,” I said.

Nelson’s laugh was odd in that it did not contain within it an invitation to laugh along. It was dry, cutting.

We went left up the path that rounded the prison’s edge, past the entrances to the odd-numbered blocks. The shirtless pair followed us at a distance. We reached the top of the hill and stopped, facing an alley that led to the even-numbered blocks.

“They call it Main Street,” Nelson said.

It was the width of a bus, and served as both thoroughfare and market: mismatched pairs of plastic sandals, shaving mirrors and old batteries, plastic combs and razors were for sale, displayed on square patches of plastic lying on the ground. Every few steps there was a man slumped against the wall, smoking crack from a tiny metal pipe. Or maybe it only seemed this way; maybe I was so taken aback by the sight of the first addict that in my mind this one helpless man was multiplied, until I saw him everywhere, like a bright light present even with your eyes closed. In any case, I can describe him, and the men just like him, very easily: he had a narrow face dotted with uneven stubble, a receding hairline. He held up the pipe, and when he did, I noticed his thin, almost delicate wrists, his long fingers. He sat on his haunches with his knees bent, and I saw the stained black bottoms of his feet. He flicked the lighter, and curled his toes in anticipation of the high.

Nelson and I both watched him as he struggled with the lighter. He flicked it, a soft breeze blew down Main Street, and the flame went out. He tried again, and then again. Beneath it all, there was an eagerness that was almost childlike. It was impossible not to root for him.

We walked halfway down to Nelson’s block, Number Ten, and I watched through the rusty bars, trying to be invisible, while Nelson explained who I was, and why I was there. He was negotiating with an inmate, so I could pass.

Our two escorts kept their watch.

“Who are they?” I asked.

“They’re protecting you,” Nelson said.

Then we were let inside. All of us.

Men shouted from the third floor to the ground floor, from the second floor to the roof, voices straining to be heard above blasting stereos, above blaring televisions, above a dozen other voices. Noise everywhere. Nelson led me through the tier; following him was like trying to walk in a straight line through a windstorm. I wanted to see everything, remember every detail. I knew, even then, that this was my one chance, that I wouldn’t be coming back. I saw a blackened tube of a fluorescent light dangling by its cord, swaying dangerously above me. I watched how Nelson moved through the space, the way he held himself. He didn’t talk to anyone, and no one spoke to him. I remember thinking, it’s as if he’s not even here.

He told me he’d arranged for a quiet cell, so we could talk. “Terrific,” I said. It was on the second floor. His two friends waited outside while Nelson and I went in, and I quickly discovered it wasn’t actually quiet at all, only quiet in comparison to the cells on the other side of the block, overlooking the yard. I wanted good sound on this interview, but I hadn’t anticipated how difficult that would be in a place like Collectors.

“Is this okay?” he asked.

I nodded. “It’ll do.”

“I can’t understand why you’re here,” he said as I set up my recorder and microphone. I was checking the levels, and his words came blasting through my headphones. I looked up, startled.

“I’ll explain. Just give me a second.”

He waited. He sat in one of those white plastic lawn chairs, the same kind Henry kept in his dour bachelor’s apartment. Nelson leaned back now. With a nod he gestured toward the block, toward the men roving and shouting just outside the cell door.

“Pick any of them,” he said. “Stick a microphone in their face, and they’ll tell you a story. They’re dying to be heard.”

“You aren’t?”

He shook his head.

“What do you want?”

“I’ve been trying for months to get Ixta to visit me. I want her to bring Nadia. That’s what I want most of all. Why won’t she come?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“I know you don’t. Have you seen the baby?”

I nodded. We lived in the same neighborhood now; it felt cruel to say I saw her all the time. “She’s beautiful.”

“I imagine.”

“And what does she tell you?” I asked.

“Reasonable things. That she wants to move on with her life. That she’s got to look forward and not back.” He frowned. “She doesn’t think I killed Mindo, does she?”

“No one thinks you killed Mindo.”

“The judge does.”

He gave me a sharp, almost defiant smile, as if he were happy to have proven me wrong.

“Will you tell me what happened?” I asked.

He didn’t answer right away, but something in the way he looked at me made me think: Finally, an opening. I was sure of it. He rubbed the top of his head with his palm, bit his thumbnail, and narrowed his eyes. “Everyone in here is innocent, you know? Ask around, they’ll all tell you the same thing.”

I leaned toward him. “Sure. That’s what they say. But you really are.”

“So what?”

I stopped. I wasn’t getting anywhere. Maybe it was time to admit that. “Would it be better if I put this away?” I asked, gesturing at my tape recorder.

Nelson nodded, and I pressed Stop. I peeled off the headphones and the world dropped to its regular volume again.

He smiled. “This is better, isn’t it?”

“Sure,” I said.

“We can just talk now.”

I nodded.

“Can I hold it?”

I gave him the tape recorder, then the microphone. I handed over the headphones too. He left it all in his lap.

“What if I did kill Mindo? Have you thought about that?”

There was something very cold in his voice.

“You didn’t.”

“What if I did? What if I were that kind of person?”

Nelson had been inside for thirty-odd months, studying this very sort of performed aggression. And he was good. He let the questions hang there. I knew it couldn’t be true, but then he shifted his gaze, and part of me wondered why I thought that, why I was so sure. I felt a chill.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s suppose.”

“So what do you think I would do to someone who was outside while I was in here, and had decided he had the right to tell my story? If I were the person capable of killing a man on a dark street?”

I didn’t know what to say.

“Just think,” Nelson said.

I smiled, but now he didn’t smile back, and for a few long moments nothing was said. He’d made his point, and while I mulled it over, he busied himself examining my tape recorder and the microphone. He pressed Record, and pointed the mic in different directions. He snapped his fingers at the working end of the mic, and watched the needle jump.

“It’s not recording yet,” I said. “It’s on pause. If you want to …” I said, and reached for the machine. There was a button he hadn’t pressed. That was all I wanted to show him.

But he pulled the recorder away from me. It was a quick gesture, very slight. “I’ll hold it,” he said.

“I just …”

“You’re fine.”

I could feel myself turning red. I understood what was happening.

“You’re robbing me?”

Nelson gave me a disappointed look. “Is that what you think?”

“Well, I …”

“Let’s just be clear about who’s been robbing whom.”

When I didn’t respond, he stood. He took my tape recorder and the microphone and placed them on the table behind him. I could have tried to grab them, I suppose, but Nelson set his body between me and my equipment, as if daring me to take them back. And I thought about it, I did. We were the same size, neither of us particularly imposing, but my last fight had been in middle school. And now I was in Collectors, which was, for better or worse, his home. His two friends, the ones who were protecting me, stood just outside the cell. As if to underline the point, Nelson pushed the door open, and all the noise from the block came rushing in.

“Do you understand?” he asked.

“I do,” I said. “Thank you for your time.”

I stepped out, and he closed the door behind me.

The two shirtless men had gone, and I found myself in the middle of the block, buried in sound. I had nowhere to go. I was in no hurry. I stood there for a moment, trying to pick out a voice, any voice, from the din.