03. Charles

Santi stepped out of the shower and threw on an oversized black t-shirt on top of his black sweatpants. He left his clothes on a corner of the bathroom so as not to contaminate the rest of his wardrobe with the scent of fried animal grease that had sunk deep into his work attire. His appetite was only just beginning to return. Many people had often told him it must be nice working in a kitchen, being able to eat throughout the shift. He found that quite the opposite was true. Having to cut into dead meat every week, dealing for hours with the same smells that would impregnate his hair and remain there until he wrung it out with a heavy load of shampoo… the fantasy lost its appeal very quickly.

He stepped outside of the bathroom and walked over to the fridge, which he found almost deserted, except for a half-filled tupperware with some leftover rice which had already been hardening for a couple of days. He had forgotten to pass by the supermarket on the way home, and now there was no way he’d bring himself out again. He transferred the rice, now solidified into a few large chunks, onto a bowl, sprinkled some soy sauce to give it flavour and a little bit of moisture, and left it in a pot at low heat. As he waited he walked over to his bedside table and picked up his phone to find two missed calls and a text, all from his mother.

Call me when you can, please. <3

Santi realized he hadn’t called her in a couple of weeks and figured this was as good a time as any. He plugged in his earphones and clicked on the call button. After a couple of rings, she picked up.

“Hola Ma,” said Santi.

“Hola Santi, how are you?” Her voice was soft and sweet and immediately gave him a sense of peace, as if she were there with a hand running through his hair. As he heard her greet him, he felt a tension on his lower back loosening, despite not having realized that it was there to begin with.

“I’m good, Ma. Just finished work not long ago and I’m eating something before I go to sleep.” He updated her on some small details of his past couple of days, including some people he had met in the building and how his colleague had dropped a pot of boiling water on the ground, burning her foot. He might have to pick up a couple extra shifts to cover for her.

In turn, his mother updated him on a couple of details of her life, friends she’d gone to have dinner with, a funny client she had treated the other day. But throughout the conversation he felt a certain restraint in her voice, as if she were talking about these things to get through them quickly before arriving to her real point.

“Santi,” she cut in eventually, pausing for a beat after calling his name. The following words came out of her mouth slowly, carefully, as if she might cut herself with them if they came out too fast. “I wanted to call you because… well, I saw something on the news.”

Another pause.

Santi felt the spot in his lower back tighten again. Suddenly the room seemed to have less oxygen going around. He waited for her to confirm what he already knew she was talking about.

“Susan shared this article with me.” Her words sounded strained, as if she were trying her best to compose herself and hold back tears. “She recognized it was someone from your school. It’s about Charles. Do you know what I’m talking about, dear?”

A faint smell of burning wafted to him from the kitchen at that moment, but he did not move. Couldn’t move.

A long moment passed, and Santi could feel the tension through the static of the phone line, could feel his mother’s expectation. He took a deep breath.

“One of my friends sent it to me a few days ago.” He paused. “I wanted to tell you about it, but I… I just couldn’t find the words.” On the other side of the line, he heard a single muted sob, evidently one that his mother was trying to hide. He himself felt his vocal chords tighten, felt his teeth start to grind against one another.

“How can this be real?” She asked, no longer trying to hide her sniffs amid audible tears. “Such a lovely young man.” Then, when Santi did not offer a reply, “Are you okay?”

Santi let that question sink in, himself unsure of the answer. “I don’t know, Ma.”

The line remained quiet, save for a couple of strained hiccuping breaths on his mother’s end. He felt as though an icy blanket were enveloping his body, and felt a cold sweat on his sides. Felt his breathing become more laborious.

“I don’t know,” he repeated. “I feel like I’m shielded by the distance, as if being far away can justify my absence, but even if I were there…” He trailed off, imagining himself back home, walking inside a government building alongside people in suits and reporters with cameras slung across their shoulders. “Some of the boys are going to the trial. Told me they’d keep me updated. Even if I were living there, I don’t know if I could bring myself to go... I keep having this image in my head. Seeing him being walked down a hall by two security guards, with cuffs on his wrists. I don’t know if I could do that.”

“Oh, baby,” was all that his mum managed, between sobs. And Santi thought of Charles’ mom, and how she would be sobbing too, in that room full of lawyers, and reporters, all looking at her son, sitting in an orange jumpsuit, his face an impenetrable slab of stone. And as the prosecutor spoke hastily and pointed his finger at Charles, Charles looked back, and made eye contact with Santi, who was frozen in place because he couldn’t feel his legs, and the court room became smaller as everyone gravitated to Charles. His deep dark eyes bore into Santi’s. The whole room was dead quiet, or perhaps it was that Santi could only hear the ringing in his ears, and he felt Charles’ stare digging deeper into him, accusingly. You are not here.

The light in his room began to dim, and darkness started taking over Santi’s vision, and half-blind he bolted out of his studio door and onto the hallway, and he turned instinctively to the next hallway, half running and half stumbling to the exit, to fresh air. In the back of his mind he registered the sound of the white strips of light buzzing above him, harmonizing with the ever louder ringing in his ears, and the lights were so bright that he could hear them too. He turned onto the next hallway, and turned once more, and he pushed through a door but it was still not the exit, but he could not stop, because it could not be far, and it would all be alright when he would sit outside to breathe in the cold winter air. But the hallway kept twisting and turning and he was panting, and every gulp of breath felt emptier than the last like he was sucking it out of a faulty oxygen tank. Something quiet in his mind told him that he took a wrong turn, because he’d never had to walk this much to get outside, so he tried to retrace his steps, but he came back to a hallway that felt even more unfamiliar than the last, so he just continued walking because he needed to keep moving. The bright white lights above him were flickering, but he barely noticed, he simply continued walking, and he took a turn, and he froze in his tracks.

He stopped with his nose just inches away from a set of thick metal bars which obstructed his way. They blocked the width of the hallway, seemingly cemented into the floor and going up past the ceiling. Santi reached out and touched one, which proved to be surprisingly cold, its surface rough. A bit of residual moisture stayed on his fingers after he ran them down the bar. Suddenly the hallway, too, felt cold. It was cool and humid in a way that only basements are, but despite his daze he knew he did not take any stairs. Beyond the bars the hallway appeared to keep going, but the lights did not, so the path disappeared into darkness. Further ahead he heard a faint dripping, drops of water splattering onto the floor at regular intervals. A chill scuttled from the back of his head down to his neck. He knocked his closed fist twice against the metal bar and heard its clang travel down the hall. Perplexed, he turned slowly to find his way back to his hallway, but again stopped, his heart missing a beat.

His way back was also blocked, solid cold bars barricarding the way that he had just come from a second ago. He immediately felt a cold sweat spreading through his body, felt himself jump at the flickering of the lights. Disbelieving, he knocked on these bars too, knocked on several of them. He heard them reverberate as if talking to one another as they flew to places now unaccessible to him. He turned and continued to slam his closed fist onto the bars behind him, feeling a sharp pain in his hand. It became difficult to breathe again, and he felt his vision growing darker around the edges, so he crouched down, gripping the bars tightly, so tightly that they began to become part of his hands. He felt them icy cold on his palms, and they sent needles through his skin, and his eyes were closed too but he could still feel the walls narrowing, closing in on him. The sound of the drops became increasingly loud, as did the electric hum of the building, and the ringing in his ears, and the echoes of a fist clanging upon metal bars which almost – but not fully – managed to mask a whisper that said: You are not here. Santi was on his knees, his sobs the only thing that managed to actually slow down his breathing.

And suddenly there was another sound, much closer and much louder. It was a beeping sound, quick and insistent. Santi was pulled back into himself and saw his phone in his hand with his mom still on the line. He noticed the smell of smoke and looked towards his single-burner stove where a light plume of smoke was floating up from his pot of rice.

“I’ll call you back,” he quickly told his mother as he hung up. Cursing to himself, he turned the stove off and swiftly moved the pot into the sink where he let cold water run over it. He reached for the chair from his desk and, in a manner that now came naturally to him, stood on it to press a button in the all-too-sensitive fire alarm.

The beeping finally stopped and he climbed down from the chair, collapsing all of his weight onto it as he sat. He took a deep breath, and felt a drop of sweat move down his side by his ribs. He looked around his apartment, at the single shelf with a small flowering cactus on it, at his bed, and out the window to the sky that was at that point fully dark.

He felt himself slowly landing back onto his body, and allowed his breathing to slowly regulate. He swallowed, and noticed a faint metallic taste. The palms of his hands were cold.