Trash in a Ditch, Pt. 13 (Fiction)

[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]

Minutes passed as I fixed my gaze on the machine parts. The universe had shrunk to the view of these objects that entered from the left out of one darkness and departed to the right into another. If I were to lift my head, I would confirm that I was surrounded by human beings—owners of those reeks of tobacco and sweat, of the heavy breathing, the throat-clearings, and the machine-gun drumming of a drum kit leaking from a pair of headphones. I felt suffocated watching them interact, forced to acknowledge their existence, though if they were struck down in an instant, I would simply take a deep breath and relax.

Someone called for a break to pee. Absent-mindedly, I tilted my head and noticed the flash of a purple work coat. Behind me, footsteps passed; another person of the myriad who tainted most spots where I fixed my gaze.

I shuddered. A feverish burning overwhelmed me. I wished I could free myself from having to see any of these people. I wished I had never known their faces and voices. I needed to cleanse myself of the presence of other human beings, a deep scrubbing with brushes, as if in a decontamination chamber.

Over the years, too many years, memories had piled up until one day they would drip from my nostrils in clumps. And why had I exposed myself to such experiences? To end up manipulating these machine parts. Artificial organs to fill some machine. The dignity of any human being deserved a better job than one for which, someday, a robot would be employed. And in exchange for what? I clung to my hovel, a place for which I would say yes to everything and mold myself to my coworkers at the risk of being fired. In what other position would they employ me? I knew how to shoot guns, but they’d require two eyes, and I’d never pass the psychiatric exam again.

If the life of any human being fell below the minimum standard of dignity, what benefit was there in living? And why did I persist, knowing myself useless and resigned to merely anticipating how my skin and flesh would sag, how my body would deteriorate until the brain or the heart finally failed? Why would I wake tomorrow for another round of this? Or of anything, because if they fired me from the workshop, I’d end up in some factory copy. I’d work in another hole, churning out absurd tasks, and in exchange pay the rent for a box with water and electricity, a box I’d forever fear losing. Yet people signed up for this farce at birth, from their very first cry. They struggled to find their niche on this rock that hurtled about a star amid an expanse of icy darkness. Night, night wherever one looked, pierced by pinpricks of light, most dead, perhaps all. What a joke it was, to exist in this universe. A lice infestation on a rock ball cleaving the void. What use was it that we could feel and understand, love and dream? We existed because of a cosmic error, a corrupted block of memory in the universe’s RAM. And so much pain, every day. Pain that piled up and piled up and piled up, never to cease.

A stream of voice crashed against my face and jolted me awake like an alarm. Héctor. The stool opposite on the table creaked as it released his weight.

“I’m stopping the line to piss. That is, as long as no whiner wants to cause trouble. No complaints? Good.”

As his footsteps receded through the workshop, they stood out amid the whir of the conveyor belts like phosphorescent footprints in the darkness.

My face had turned as cold as a corpse’s. When my right fist gripped the handle of the screwdriver, the fibers in the tendons and muscles involved creaked like a taut cable on the verge of snapping. I spun on the stool, offering Christopher my left side, and slid the screwdriver into the right pocket of my trousers. I rose while murmuring some excuse.

I marched down the corridor. My temples pounded, and my vision tinted crimson. I pushed open the bathroom door.

There, the operator with Down syndrome was peeing, leaning against one of the suspended toilets. He was humming. From the closed cubicle came the muffled, machine-gun drumming of a drum kit, and that sound barely masked the noise of a turd plunging into water.

I placed a hand on the operator’s shoulder. When he looked at me, I gestured for him to zip up, then pointed to the door. A firm pat on his shoulder sealed the message. While he continued humming, the man shook off the last droplets, zipped up, and left the bathroom. I closed the door until it clicked shut.

Héctor cleared his throat.

I drew the screwdriver from my pocket and gripped it. I took two strides to the cubicle door, and with an upward thrust, I ran the tip of the screwdriver along the gap, levering the latch. I yanked the door open.

Héctor grumbled in a mixture of a grunt and a surprised exclamation. Covering his crotch with both hands, he tugged sharply at the headphone cable, which promptly tangled around his neck. His thighs, pale in contrast to his face, were covered in black hair, sporting a several-day-old beard. A sight to be ashamed of, as if discovered while playing with dolls.

I brandished the tip of the screwdriver a few inches from his brow, between eyes whose pupils had shrunk, and I spoke in a harsh voice that had never before left my mouth.

“You know how I amused myself during the war? I used to sacrifice dogs even hairier and uglier than you. If you mention me again, you’ll be swallowing your own shit.”

I staggered into the corridor. As boiling, bubbling tar flowed through my innards, my flesh threatened to crack under tectonic movements. If I opened my mouth, from it would burst a scream that would rip through my vocal cords—a torrent of clamor capable of disintegrating the world.

I wanted to kill Héctor. A couple of justifications would suffice, but justified or not, I would kill him simply because I wanted to, because that bastard insisted on bothering me, and I had a right to be left in peace.

I coordinated my legs to obey me on the way back to the workshop. As soon as I entered, the dozens of workers lined up would be alerted as if a werewolf had burst in. They would recognize me as unstable and dangerous, and they would fear the moment I unleashed myself. They’d forbid me from roaming nearby or remaining free.

I retraced my steps until I passed the closed bathroom door. My temples pounded. I delved down the corridor as my hand slid along the wall, and I encountered a fire exit I hadn’t known existed. I pushed the heavy door. As I passed through, it closed like the hatch of a submarine.

I emerged into the dump that served as the backyard. I circled a container, placing it between the building and myself, and when I sat against the rough metal, the shadow of a stack of boxes fell over my sneakers and the lower half of my trousers. A hot gust stirred my shirt and brushed my broken cheekbone. I removed my gloves to rub my face with my damp hands, then stowed the gloves in the pockets of my work coat. I dug into the dry earth and patted it down. When I turned my palm, clumps of dirt clung to its wrinkles.

I lay discarded, as insignificant as any of this junk. What would it matter if I died? What would be lost? One less face in that workshop I longed to forget. To avoid awkward questions, the supervisor would claim I’d quit, that I’d landed a job in another city. Inertia kept me alive, assuring me that I’d invest more effort in disappearing than in tolerating known pains, but if I ended up underground or as a dried-out corpse in the desert, nothing of value would have been lost. Nobody cared for me, and with good reason, for I was a broken piece, incapable of performing as expected; the defective article of a factory, destined to be discarded in some container because no sane person would want it.

Even so, over the years I had come to understand one vital truth: every person must discover for themselves what matters and what they truly want. One must peel away the harsh layers imposed by those who know you—the principles instilled in you, the roles assigned to you—otherwise, the mind is reduced to a goldfish swimming in its bowl, doomed to die within glass walls. I guarded that knowledge like a letter entrusted to me, though there was no recipient willing to read it.

A shadow fell over me like a blanket. To my left, two tanned legs rose adorned in the sunlight with pink, diagonal scars, and two wounds sealed with band-aids. A translucent fuzz cloaked the skin like the down on a peach. Amid cascades of unkempt hair, her wide eyes seemed intent on masking curiosity as a dog might. Caroline sat to my right. Sliding her back along the rusted container, she shed flakes of peeling paint until her disheveled hair came to rest against my cheek. She smelled of fur.

I froze and held my breath. Caroline, as if draping a garland, crossed her right arm in front of my neck, slid that hand under the collar of my shirt, and let her fingertips rest on my skin. That touch conveyed a message with a clarity no string of words could ever achieve: I, too, belong to another land I will never visit. I, too, suffer day after day, moment after moment. People either dismiss such suffering, ignore it, or convince themselves it doesn’t matter. They push it away from their minds to avoid having it sour their day. But I know it. For all that it may be worth in this moment, here in the middle of a desert, I know it too.

Caroline pressed herself against me, the edges of the objects bulging from her pocket at my side, and her warmth flowed into me through her fingertips as if I’d plugged in a power cord. A pulsating surge of pain reverberated through me. Acidic capillaries tangled in my bones like climbing plants.

How could a person contain such pain without exploding, without their very cells dissolving? And yet someone like Caroline existed: a creature who wandered the worlds her mind conjured, lost forever. My heart tore apart like rotten fruit. How could this woman possibly keep living? How did she face the world day after day without collapsing, without weeping at every conscious moment?

I would have swept her into my car and driven her to some remote forest, to the mountains, where I’d buy a secluded two-story mansion surrounded by acres upon acres of pasture and fields. Caroline would care for the horses that raced across an enclosed meadow. She’d stroll through the grass as her instincts dictated, and then never wake again.

How could someone incapable of saving himself save her?

Her fingertips slipped away from me, and before my eyes, a few stray, arched hairs drifted upward. Caroline circled the container and walked off. Her footsteps floated on the breeze, accompanied by the sound of some rolling wrapper. The hinges of the fire exit creaked as it swung open, and two seconds later the door closed like a mouth after a yawn.

The tingling subsided, and my body hair relaxed. I would rise and return to my post, enduring the remaining minutes until the horn blared.

I entered the workshop through the fire exit, and had taken only a few steps when I lifted my gaze. The supervisor and Caroline were blocking the corridor, standing by the staircase to the supervisor’s office. Caroline, her back partly turned toward me, nodded as if speaking silently, though any sounds she might have made would have been drowned out by the clamor of the production lines. The supervisor caressed her arm, smiled with genuine warmth, and nodded as if she understood anything.

I stopped. Should I wait until they cleared the way?

Both women turned their faces toward me. I tensed and swallowed hard. Caroline drifted back toward the workshop. I hurried on with my head bowed, and as I passed the supervisor I offered a greeting, but she stepped forward and grabbed my wrist.

“Come here a moment. I need to talk with you.”

She climbed half the steps and then turned like a mother duck ensuring her chick followed. Behind her eyes floated some knowledge she needed me to confront.

I cooled down, feeling damp and sticky. I ascended the stairs at the pace set by the swirling, psychedelic fabric of her attire, like a condemned man trudging to the gallows.

-----

Author’s note: this novella was originally self-published in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in a collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.

Not only I had forgotten about writing this part of the story, but I had forgotten ever having felt such despair. A good reflection of my worst times during my twenties, which were generally terrible. Although things haven’t improved that much apart from my ability to amass money, and health-wise they have even worsened, at least I take each hit far more stoically now. I’ve become a proper man, you could say.