The Best American Mystery Stories 2014

Collectors by Daniel Alarcón

FROM The New Yorker

ROGELIO WAS THE YOUNGEST of three, the skinniest, the least talkative. As a boy, he slept in the same room as his brother, Jaime, and his earliest, most profoundly comforting memories were of those late nights, before sleep: the chatter between them, the camaraderie. Then Jaime left for San Jacinto, and shortly afterward, when Rogelio was eight, his father died. In the months after that, Rogelio began skipping school to spend hours walking in the hills above town. He liked to be alone. He gathered bits of wood, and used his father’s tools to carve tiny animals-birds, lizards, that sort of thing-which he kept in a box under his bed. They weren’t particularly lifelike, but they were surprisingly evocative, and, at age twelve, he presented one to a girl he liked, as a gift. With trembling hands and a look of horror on her face, the girl accepted it, and for the next week she avoided his gaze. The other children whispered about him whenever he came near. There was no need to hear the exact words; their meaning was clear enough. The following year, Rogelio quit school officially, and his mother and his sister agreed that there was no practical reason for him to stay in town any longer, so he left to join Jaime in San Jacinto.

Rogelio was small for his age, but tough, good with his hands and his fists. He didn’t have a temper, the way his brother did. Instead he possessed an equanimity that his family found almost disconcerting. He’d been shunned all his life, or that’s how he felt, and he’d grown accustomed to it. He loved his brother, looked up to him, and never worried about whether Jaime loved him in return. He could follow instructions, had decent mechanical intuition, but, unlike most of his classmates, he had not learned to read. Jaime tried to teach him, but soon gave up: the boy kept confusing his letters. More than a decade later, Henry Nuñez, Rogelio’s cellmate in Collectors prison, explained to him that there was a condition called dyslexia. “How about that?” Rogelio said, but his face registered nothing-not regret or shame or even curiosity-as if he were unwilling to contemplate the ways in which his life might have been different if he’d had this information sooner.

For the first couple of years in San Jacinto, he worked on the broken-down trucks that his brother bought on the cheap. Together they would cajole these heaps of rusting metal back to life. Each machine was different, requiring a complex and patient kind of surgery. Parts were swapped out, rescued, jerry-rigged. It was as much invention as repair. When a truck was reborn, they sold it and reinvested the profits, which weren’t much at first, but the brothers were very careful with their money. In a photograph from this time, Rogelio sits on a gigantic truck tire with his shirt off; he is lithe and wiry, and he wears the blank expression of a child who asks no questions and makes no demands of the world. Not a happy boy, but, given his situation, perhaps a wise one.

Eventually Jaime bought his kid brother a motorbike, the kind outfitted with a flatbed of wooden planks in front. This machine became Rogelio’s source of income for the next few years; he rode it around the city, from one market to another, carrying cans of paint, lashed-together bundles of metal pipes, chickens headed for slaughter, crammed into crates stacked so high that he had to lean to one side in order to steer. San Jacinto was growing steadily, but not yet at the torrid pace that would later come to define it; Rogelio knew every corner of the city then, and years later, at Collectors, he would draw a map of it on a wall of the cell that he shared with Henry, using white chalk to trace the streets and the railroad tracks and to label the apartment he’d shared with his brother.

Henry asked him why he’d gone to the trouble.

“Because one day I’ll go back there,” Rogelio said.

In 1980, the year Rogelio turned seventeen, Jaime took him to a brothel near the center of town. It was the first of its kind, and had been built for the hoped-for wave of young, fearless men with money. There were rumors of gold in the hills, and the brothel’s fantastical anteroom paid tribute to those stories: the walls were painted gold, as were the bar and the wooden tables and chairs. In fact, that night even the three prostitutes on display for Rogelio’s choosing had followed the color scheme: one in a gold miniskirt, another in gold lace panties and bra, and the third in a gold negligee. Three little trophies, all smiling coquettishly, hands on their hips. Jaime encouraged Rogelio to pick one, but he couldn’t. Or wouldn’t. The moment stretched on and on, far past what was comfortable, until the girls’ put-on smiles began to fade. And still the boy stood there, immobilized, amazed.

“Oh, fuck it,” Jaime said finally. He pulled a wad of bills from his pocket and paid for all three.

It seems that Jaime had begun to sell more than refurbished vehicles.

When Rogelio was eighteen, he traded in his motorized cart for a small loading van and, shortly after, traded the van for a truck that he brought back to life with his own hands. The first time the reconstructed engine turned over was one of the proudest moments of Rogelio’s life. Each new vehicle expanded his world. Now he was a driver; he ferried a dozen laborers down to the lowlands, men who stood for hours without complaint as the truck bounced along rutted and bumpy roads. Once there, Rogelio discovered a prickly kind of heat he’d never felt before. He liked it, and began volunteering to drive that route whenever it was available.

The following year his brother sent him in the other direction, over the range to the west, and on that trip Rogelio saw the ocean for the first time. It was 1982; he was almost twenty years old. He sat at the edge of the boardwalk in La Julieta as the fancy people of the city strolled by, confident-looking men in blazers and women in bright dresses, boys he took to be his age but who appeared to possess a variety of secrets that Rogelio could only guess at. None so much as glanced in his direction. He wondered if he looked out of place, if they could tell that he was a stranger here, or if they could even see him at all. But when he considered the ocean Rogelio realized how insignificant these concerns were. He was happy, he told Henry later, and in prison he liked to remember the hours he’d spent there, gazing at the sea.

For the next few years Rogelio drove the route to the coast, to the lowlands, and back again, carrying vegetables to the city, raw materials to the mountains, laborers to the jungle. He was a quiet young man, still a boy in some ways, but he was dependable. He began to ferry other packages as well, small, tightly bundled bricks, which he kept under the seat or in a compartment hidden above the wheel well. One or two at first, then dozens. These were delivered separately, to other contacts. Rogelio never opened them to see what was inside (though he knew); he never touched the money (though he assumed that the quantities in play were not insubstantial). He had no qualms about this work. He trusted his brother. He never considered the consequences, not because he was reckless but because what he was doing was normal. Everyone was doing it.

On the last of these trips, Rogelio’s truck was searched at a checkpoint along the Central Highway, 65 kilometers east of the capital. The war was on, and the soldiers were randomly stopping trucks from the mountains to look for weapons and explosives. Rogelio was unlucky. Perhaps if he’d been more astute he could have arranged to pay the soldiers off, but he didn’t. Instead he waited by the side of the road while the men in uniform went through his vehicle with great care. Rogelio had time to consider what was happening, how his life was changing course before his very eyes. Not everyone has this privilege; most of us miss the moment when our destiny shifts. Later he told Henry that he’d felt a strange sort of calm. He considered running into the hills, but the soldiers would have shot him without thinking twice. So instead he admired his truck, which he’d had painted by hand, emerald and blue, with the phrase “My Beautiful San Jacinto” splashed across the top of the windshield in cursive lettering. At least, that’s what he’d been told it said. He recalled thinking, What will happen to the truck? Will it be waiting for me when I get out?

The soldiers found the package, and to protect his brother Rogelio said nothing about its origins. He played dumb, which wasn’t difficult. Everyone-from the soldiers who conducted the search, to the policemen who came to arrest him, to his ferocious interrogators, to the lawyer charged with defending him-saw Rogelio as he assumed they would: as a clueless, ignorant young man from the provinces. All these years, and nothing had changed: he was still invisible.

Henry’s route to Collectors was very different, and it began at the Teatro Olímpico, after the third performance of his controversial play The Idiot President. That morning one of the right-wing papers had declared the play outrageous. “It mocks our authorities and gives succor to the enemy,” the critic wrote. Henry had celebrated. “Maybe now we will sell some tickets,” he’d said to a friend.

But that night, after the show, there were two men in dark suits hanging about. No one paid much attention to them, least of all Henry. Then the theater emptied, the audience dispersed, and one of the men approached. “Are you Henry Nuñez?” he said.

Henry had a leather bag thrown over his shoulder, nothing inside but some dirty clothes and a few annotated scripts.

Who were these idiots, who asked inane questions when the entire theater universe knew he was Henry Nuñez. Who else, exactly, could he be?

They placed their giant hands on Henry. His friend and costar Patalarga emerged from backstage just in time to see what was happening. He tried to stop the men, and when he wouldn’t shut up they knocked him out and locked him in the ticket booth.

Henry was held with little human contact in a mercifully clean though still unpleasant cell. He was questioned about his friends, his plays, his travels around the country, his motives, but it was all strangely lethargic, inefficient, as if the police were too bored to decide his fate. He wasn’t beaten or tortured, which was a great relief, of course; he surely would’ve confessed to anything at the mere threat of such treatment. On the third day, Henry, still thinking, breathing, and living in the mode of a playwright, asked for a pen and some paper in order to jot down notes about his tedious imprisonment, things to remember should he ever want to write about his experience. He was denied, but even then, in his naïveté, he wasn’t worried. Not truly concerned. If he’d been asked, Henry would have said that he expected to be released at any moment. His captivity was so ridiculous to him that he could hardly conceive of it. He just couldn’t understand why anyone would be upset by The Idiot President. Had they seen the play? It wasn’t even any good!

On the fifth or sixth day, when Henry was finally allowed a visitor, his older sister, Marta, appeared at the jail, representing the entire living world outside the small cell that held him-his family, his friends, his supporters. It was a burden that showed clearly on her face. Her eyes were ringed with dark bluish circles, and her skin was sallow. She hadn’t eaten, she reported; in fact, no one in the family had stopped to eat or rest for five days, and they were doing everything they could to get him out. He imagined them all-his large, bickering extended family-coming together to complete this task: it would be easier to put them on shifts and have them dig a tunnel beneath the jail. The image made him smile. Marta was happy to see that Henry hadn’t been abused, and they passed much of the hour talking about plans for after his release. She had two children, a daughter and a son, ages six and four, who’d both made him get-well cards, because they’d been told that their uncle was at the hospital. Henry found this amusing; the fact that the cards had been confiscated at the jail he found maddening. Marta assured him that they’d remember this little anecdote later and laugh about it.

“Why wait?” Henry said.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” his sister answered. But already she was suppressing a grin.

He was referring to a game they’d played as children: spontaneous, forced, meaningless laughter. With diligence, they’d perfected this skill-rolling around cackling, rubbing their bellies like lunatics, before doctor’s appointments or family trips, or on the morning of an exam for which they hadn’t prepared. They’d used it to get out of chores, to be excused from church. Neither recalled the game’s origins, but they’d been punished for it on many occasions and had always feigned innocence. We can’t help it, they’d both said, laughing still, tears pressing from the corners of their eyes, until their behavior had landed them in weekly sessions with a child psychologist. Even so, they were proud that they’d never betrayed each other. At the peak of the game, when Henry was ten and Marta twelve and they were as close as two human beings can be, the two of them had been able to manufacture laughter instantly, hysterical fits that lasted for a quarter of an hour or longer. Henry considered this his first successful dramatic work.

He insisted. “Why not?”

They’d been whispering until then, but now they took deep breaths, like divers preparing for a descent. The cell, it turned out, had good acoustics. The laughter was tentative at first, but soon it was ringing brightly through the jail. Unstoppable, joyful, cathartic. At the end of the block, the guards who heard it had a different interpretation: it was frightening, demonic even. No one had ever laughed in this jail, not like that. One of them rushed to see what was happening, and was surprised to find brother and sister laughing heartily, holding hands, their cheeks glistening.

The hour allotted for the visit had passed.

Leaving the jail, Marta gave a brief statement to the press, which was shown on the television news that evening. Her brother was completely innocent, she said. He was an artist, the finest playwright of his generation, and the authorities had interrupted him and his actors in the legitimate pursuit of their art. Those responsible should be ashamed of what they’d done.

The following day the charges against Henry were announced: he was being held for incitement and terrorism. An investigation was under way. Henry was informed of the accusations that morning by the same guard who’d discovered him and Marta laughing, and who refrained from making the obvious statement about who might be laughing now-a small mercy, which Henry nonetheless appreciated.

He was taken from the jail in the back of a windowless military van, with nothing to look at but the unsmiling face of a soldier, a stern man who did not speak. Henry closed his eyes and tried to follow the van’s twisting path through the city. “We’re going to Collectors, aren’t we?” he asked the soldier, who answered with a nod.

On the morning of April 8, 1986, Henry entered the country’s most infamous prison.

The day he was sent to Collectors was the loneliest of his life. Nothing he’d learned previously had any relevance anymore, and each step he took beyond the gate and toward his new home was like walking into a tunnel, away from the light. He was led through the prison complex-a vision of hell in those days, full of half-dead men baring their scarred chests, impervious to the cold. He’d never been more frightened in his life. One man promised to kill him at the first opportunity-that evening, perhaps, if it could be arranged. Another, to fuck him. A third looked at him with the anxious eyes of a man hiding a terrible secret. Two guards led Henry through the complex, men whom he’d previously thought of as his tormentors but who now seemed more like protectors-all that stood between him and this anarchy. Halfway to the block, he realized that they were as nervous as he was, that they, like him, were doing all they could to avoid eye contact with the inmates who surrounded them. At the door to the block, the guards unlocked Henry’s handcuffs and turned to leave.

The playwright looked at them helplessly. “Won’t you stay?” he asked, as if he were inviting them in for a drink.

The two guards wore expressions of surprise. “We can’t,” one of them said in a low voice, embarrassed. They turned and hurried back to the entrance.

An inmate led Henry into the block, where men milled about with no apparent order or discipline. I’m going to die here, he thought. It was an idea that all new inmates contemplated upon first entering the prison. Some of them, of course, were right. Henry was taken to his cell, and didn’t emerge for many days.

When Henry arrived in Collectors, Rogelio had already been waiting more than eighteen months for a hearing in his case. Waiting, that is, for an opportunity to affirm that he was a victim, that he knew nothing about the laws of the country, that he’d never been educated, and could not therefore be held accountable.

Henry’s family had tried to arrange for a private cell, but none were available. He knew that he should be grateful for what he had-many others were in far worse conditions-but under the circumstances he found it difficult to muster much gratitude. For the first few days he hardly stirred. He didn’t register Rogelio’s face, and he knew nothing of his new home, beyond what he’d managed to glean during that initial terrifying walk. Henry was given the top bunk, and for three days he slept long hours, or pretended to sleep, facing the wall. Thinking. Remembering. Trying to disappear. He didn’t eat, but felt no hunger. The night of his arrest had been catalogued in his mind, divided into an infinite series of micro-events: he remembered each flubbed line of the performance, the expressions on the faces of the audience members who’d expected and hoped for better. Could any of those details be shifted slightly-just enough to alter the outcome? Was there a light revision he could make to that evening’s script so that it would not end with him here, in Collectors?

During those three days Rogelio came and went, seemingly uninterested in and unconcerned by Henry’s condition. But by the fourth day Rogelio had had enough. He tapped Henry on the back.

“You’re allowed to get up, you know.”

Henry rolled over.

“You’re alive,” Rogelio said.

That afternoon Henry took his first real walk through the block. He met a few people who would later become friends, or something like friends, and he saw much to remind him of the danger he was in. There were men whose faces seemed congenitally incapable of smiling, men who locked eyes with him and spat on the ground. When he shuddered, they laughed.

Rogelio wasn’t talkative, but he was helpful, and he explained many things that day. According to him, Henry was lucky-it was clear that he wouldn’t have to work (“You’re rich, aren’t you?” Rogelio asked), though almost everyone else inside did. Rogelio repaired old plastic chairs (he shared a workshop on the roof with a few other men) and made pipes out of bent metal scraps, which he sold to the junkies. The junkies were everywhere, a miserable lineup of broken men who roamed the prison offering sex or blood or labor for a fix. Rogelio wasn’t proud of this work, but without it he wouldn’t have survived. His brother sent money only occasionally, enough to cover the cost of the cell and little else. Otherwise he was on his own.

Neither Henry nor Rogelio owned the cell where they slept. It belonged to the boss, Espejo, who made extra money on visiting days by renting it out so that men could be alone with their wives. “Those days will be difficult,” Rogelio warned. Henry would have to be outdoors all day, and in the evening the room would smell different and feel different. He’d know that someone had made love there, and the loneliness would be overwhelming.

Henry nodded, though he couldn’t understand-wouldn’t understand, in fact, until he lived through it himself. There was a lot to learn. There were inmates to steer clear of, and others whom it was dangerous to ignore. There were moments of the day when it was safe to be out, others when it was best to stay inside. The distinction depended not on the time of day but on the mood of the prison, which Henry would have to learn to read if he hoped to survive.

“How do you read it?” he asked.

Rogelio had a difficult time explaining. It involved listening for the collective murmur of the yard, watching the way certain key men-the barometers of violence in the block-were carrying themselves. Small things: Did they have their arms at their sides or crossed in front of them? How widely did they open their mouths when they talked? Could you see their teeth? Were their eyes moving quickly, side to side? Or slowly, as if taking in every last detail?

To Henry it sounded impossible. Rogelio shrugged.

“Remember that most of us here are scared, just like you. When I first came, I didn’t have a cell. If there was trouble, I had nowhere to go.”

They were sitting in a corner of the yard, beneath a dull gray winter sky. The light was thin, and there were no shadows. Henry still didn’t quite grasp how he had got here. Nowhere to go-he understood these words in a way he never could have before. He wrote letters to his sister, cheerful dispatches that didn’t reflect the gloom he felt, or the fear. His letters were performances, stylized and utterly false outtakes of prison life. In fact he was despairing: This is what it means to be trapped. To be frightened, and to be unable to share that fear with a single soul.

“You’ll get it,” Rogelio said. “It just takes time.”

The frenetic daily exchange of goods and services went on about them. Two men waited to have their hair cut, sharing the same day-old newspaper to pass the time. A pair of pants, a couple of sweaters, and T-shirts stolen from some other section of the prison were for sale, hanging on a line strung between the posts of one of the soccer goals. Three junkies slept sitting up, with their backs against the wall, shirtless in the cold. Henry saw these men and felt even colder.

“Where did you sleep back then?” he asked. “Before you had a cell.”

“Under the stairs,” Rogelio said. He laughed. “But look at me now!”

Henry did look.

His new friend had a bright smile and very large brown eyes. His skin was the color of coffee with milk, and he was muscular without being imposing. His clothes were mostly prison-scavenged, items left by departing men, appropriated by Espejo or some other strongman and then sold. Nothing fit him well, but he seemed unbothered by that. He kept his black hair very short, and wore a knit cap most of the time, pulled down low, to stay warm. These dark winter days he even slept with it on. His nose was narrow and turned slightly to the left, and he had a habit of talking softly, with a hand over his mouth, as if sharing a confidence, no matter how mundane an observation he might be making.

As if we were accomplices, Henry thought.

A few weeks later Henry saw a man being kicked to death, or nearly to death, by a mob that formed unexpectedly at the door to Block 12. He and Rogelio stood by, horrified at first, then simply frightened. Then, almost instantaneously, they accepted the logic of the attack: every victim was guilty of something. The chatter: What did he do? Who did he cross? The men watching felt safer. Less helpless. A crowd gathered around the victim, but no one moved to help him.

Visiting days weren’t so bad at first. Henry’s family and friends took turns coming to see him, the ones who could tolerate the filth, the overcrowding, the looks from the junkies. They left depleted and afraid, and most didn’t come back. The hours immediately after the visitors had gone were the most difficult of the week. It required a great collective energy to welcome so many outsiders, to put the best face on what was clearly a terrible situation. Collectors was falling apart; anyone could see that. Damp winters had eaten away at the bricks, and the walls were covered with mold. Every day new men were brought in. They were unchained and set free inside, forced to fight for a place to sleep in the already overcrowded prison. Family day, when women were allowed in, came on alternate Wednesdays and was especially brutal. By the end of the afternoon the inmates were worn out from smiling, from reassuring their wives and children and mothers that they were all right. (Fathers, as a rule, did not visit; most of Henry’s fellow inmates didn’t have fathers.) It wasn’t uncommon for there to be fights on those evenings. As long as no one was killed, it was fine, just something to relieve the tension.

Nine weeks in, Henry felt almost abandoned. On family days he was as alone as Rogelio. Espejo rented out their cell, and in the evening, as they lay on their bunks, they could still feel the warmth of those phantom bodies. Their perfumed scent. It was the only time the stench of the prison dissipated, though in some ways this other smell was worse. It reminded them of everything they were missing. Henry had been unable to persuade any of the women he used to see to visit him, and he didn’t blame them. None of these relationships had meant much to him, though at times his despair was so great that he could concentrate on any one of those women’s faces and convince himself that he’d been in love. As for Rogelio, he was far from home and hadn’t had a visitor, male or female, in months.

“Did you see her?” Henry asked one evening after the visitors had gone, and because Rogelio hadn’t, he began to describe the woman who’d made love with her husband on the lower bunk that day. She was married to an inmate named Jarol, a thief with a sharp sense of humor and arms like tense coils of rope. Henry talked about the woman’s curves, how delicious she’d looked in her dress-not tight, but tight enough. She had long black hair, doe eyes, and fingernails painted pink. She was perfect, he said, and she was: not because of her body or her face but because of the way she’d smiled at her husband, with the hungry look of a woman who wants something and is not ashamed of it. A man could live on a look like that.

Henry said, “She didn’t care who saw.”

He could hear Rogelio breathing. They were quiet for a moment.

“What would you have done to her?” Rogelio asked. His voice was very low, tentative.

This was how it began: with Henry speculating aloud about how he might spend a few minutes alone with a woman in this stifling, degrading space. He had no difficulty imagining the scene, and he could think of no good reason not to share it.

He would have torn off that dress, Henry said, and bent her against the wall, with her palms flat against that stupid map of San Jacinto. He would have pressed hard against her, teased her until she begged him to come in. From the bottom bunk, Rogelio laughed. He would have made her howl, Henry said, made her scream. Cupped her breasts in his hands and squeezed. Is this why you came, woman? Tell me it is!

Already Henry was disappearing into his own words. He had his eyes closed. The walls had begun to vibrate.

“What else?” Rogelio said, his voice stronger now. “Go on. What else would you do?”

When they finished, each on his own bunk that first time, both men laughed. They hadn’t touched, or even made eye contact, but somehow what they’d done was more intimate than that. For a moment the pleasure of each had belonged to the other, and now something dark and joyless had been banished.

A week later Henry gathered up his courage and went to see Espejo, the boss, to propose doing a production of The Idiot President in Block 7. Espejo was a small but well-built man whose lazy grin belied a long history of violence, a man who’d risen far enough from the streets to relax and now controlled the block through sheer force of reputation. If any inmate questioned his authority, he dispensed pointed but very persuasive doses of rage. Mostly, though, he protected his charges-there were fewer than two hundred men in the block, and after nightfall they were in constant danger of being overrun by one of the larger, more ferocious sections of the prison. Espejo directed a small army of warriors tasked with keeping those potential invaders at bay.

Henry was afraid of this man, but he reminded himself that as fellow inmates of Block 7, he and Espejo were on the same side. Espejo’s cell seemed more like a comfortable student apartment, with a squat refrigerator, a black-and-white television, and a coffeemaker plugged into a naked outlet. Espejo kept a photo of himself from his younger days framed above his bed. In the picture he was shirtless, astride a majestic white horse, riding up the steps of a swimming pool toward the camera. A few delighted women stood behind him, long-legged, bronzed, and gleaming in the bright sun. Everything was colorful, saturated with tropical light. A child-Espejo’s son, perhaps-sat on the edge of the diving board, watching the horse maneuver its way out of the water. On the boy’s face was an expression of admiration and wonder, but it was more than that: he was concentrating, watching the scene, watching his father, trying to learn.

Henry wondered what had happened to the boy. Perhaps he’d been shuttled out of the country, or died, or perhaps he was old enough by now to be living in another of the city’s prisons, in a cell much like this one. There was no way of knowing without asking directly, and that was not an option. The photo, like the lives of the men with whom Henry now lived, was both real and startlingly unreal, like a still from Espejo’s dreams.

Rogelio had warned Henry not to stare, so he didn’t.

“A play?” Espejo said when Henry told him his idea.

Henry nodded.

Espejo lay back on his bed, his shoeless feet stretched toward the playwright. “That’s what we get for taking terrorists in the block,” he said, laughing. “We don’t do theater here.”

“I’m not a terrorist,” Henry said.

A long silence followed this clarification, Espejo’s laughter replaced by a glare so intense and penetrating that Henry began to doubt himself-perhaps he was a terrorist, after all. Perhaps he always had been. That was what the authorities were accusing him of, and outside, in the real world, there were people arguing both sides of this very question. His freedom hung in the balance. His future. Henry had to look away, down at the floor of the cell, which Espejo had redone with blue and white linoleum squares, in honor of his favorite soccer club. One of Espejo’s deputies, a thick-chested brute named Aimar, coughed into his fist, and it was only this that seemed to break the tension.

“Did you write it?”

Henry nodded.

“So name a character after me,” Espejo said.

Henry began to protest.

Espejo frowned. “You think I have no culture? You think I’ve never read a book?”

“No, I…” Henry stopped. It was useless to continue. I’ve already ruined myself, he thought.

They were quiet for a moment.

“Go on,” Espejo said finally, waving an uninterested hand in the direction of the yard. “If you can convince these savages, I have no objection.”

Henry thanked Espejo and left-quickly, before the boss could change his mind.

Everyone wanted to be the president, because the president was the boss. Everyone wanted to be the servant, because, like them, the servant dreamed of murdering the boss. Everyone wanted to be the son, because it was the son who actually got to do the killing in the play. It was this character whose name was changed: he became Espejo.

And indeed, the project sold itself. A week of talking to other inmates, and then the delicate process of auditions. Henry had to write in extra parts to avoid disappointing some of the would-be actors. It was for his own safety-some of these men didn’t take rejection very well. He added a chorus of citizens to comment on the action; ghosts of servants past to stalk across the stage in a fury, wearing costumes fashioned from old bed sheets. He even wrote a few lines for the president’s wife, played with verve by Carmen, the block’s most outspoken transvestite. Things were going well. Even Espejo joined in the enthusiasm. It would be good for their image, he was heard to say.

Rogelio wanted to audition too, but there was a problem.

“I can’t read,” he confessed to Henry. “How can I learn the script?”

Henry smiled. They were lying together on the top bunk, close, naked.

“I can teach you.”

Later he’d remember the look on Rogelio’s face, and the hope implicit in his own offer. Perhaps by saying these words, Henry was already imagining a life outside those walls.

When Rogelio didn’t respond, Henry pressed him. “Who do you want to be?”

Rogelio thought for a moment. “The servant is the one who dies?”

Henry nodded.

“How?”

“He’s stabbed in the back.”

“Well, then,” Rogelio said, “I guess that should be me.”

When the play was performed, three weeks later, Henry paid special attention to that scene. He and Rogelio had worked on the script every night, pacing in their cell, bouncing the servant’s lines back and forth until Rogelio knew them by heart, but he had insisted on practicing the death scene on his own. Out of timidity, Henry thought, but when he saw the performance he realized that he had been wrong. The entire population of Block 7 was watching: hard, fearless men who gasped at the sight of Rogelio staggering. They recognized the look of terror on his face. They’d been that man; they’d killed that man. They watched Rogelio fall in stages, first to his knees, then forward, clutching his chest, as if trying to reach through his body to the imaginary knife wound. Henry and the others, all of them held their breath, waiting, and were rewarded with a final flourish: Rogelio’s right leg twitching. Espejo was the first to stand and applaud. The play wasn’t even over.

Henry was released that November, thinner, older, after a year and a half in prison. He didn’t say to Rogelio, “I’ll wait for you.” Or, “I’ll see you on the outside.” But he thought those things, held them secret but dear, until the day, a few months later, when two of the more volatile sections of Collectors rose up to protest conditions inside. Block 7 had the misfortune of sitting between them, and when the army arrived to put down the revolt, it too was destroyed. Henry heard the news on the radio. The men who had made up the cast of The Idiot President all died in the assault, shot in the head, or killed by shrapnel, or crushed beneath falling concrete walls. More than three hundred inmates from Blocks 6, 7, and 8 were killed, and though Henry wasn’t there, part of him died that day too. He lost Rogelio, his best friend, his lover-a word he had never used, not even to himself. In the days after, he sometimes woke with the taste of Rogelio on his lips. Sometimes he woke to the image of Rogelio lying dead of a knife wound.

Henry mourned, even roused himself enough to participate in a few protests in front of the Ministry of Justice (though he declined to speak when someone handed him the bullhorn), but in truth the tragedy both broke him and spared him the need ever to think about his incarceration again. No one who’d lived through it with him had survived. There was no one to visit, no one with whom to reminisce, no one to meet on the day of his release and drive home, feigning optimism.