Somewhere Inside Him (The Tower)
A Short Story
The man tapped the clutch and put the car in neutral. Already in that part of the viaduct he could see the long row of cars ahead. He stopped humming. Shit, he first thought, and then said, “what the fuck” out loud. He punched the steering wheel three times. He did that since no one else could hear him complain.
He rested his left foot and let the car continue gliding in inertia, participating in the congestion that stretched along the road, entered the city and was getting lost among the buildings. Someone started talking on the radio tuned to AM, but he turned the volume down to mute.
Still atop the viaduct, he looked through the window on the right and saw beneath him the track where the last detour would have taken him. Without proper security to take shortcuts, caused by the lack of familiarity with the route, he was not able to anticipate a solution to his problem.
By the time he realized it, he was behind a red Escort, a model from the nineties that was no longer made. He tapped the brakes. He heard the impact behind his seat and then on the floor: the baby chair tucked into the gap between the seats. He felt a squeeze in his throat. Looking down, he shook the gear, and then looked forward. That’s when he saw the Escort’s rearview mirror, and the accusing eyes on him.
On a normal day, with the road cleared, that route would take less than twenty minutes. But now he could not even imagine what time he’d get home. He pulled the last cigarette out of his shirt pocket, tapped the filter on the back of his other hand — the one still holding the steering wheel.
Glancing beyond the tall grass on the roadside, he had the feeling that had been there long before he moved in with Virginia and the baby. Before he met her. Before college.
He remembered that he had been amazed by the huge eucalyptus plantation along the road. He hadn’t noticed it at first. It was early in the morning. There was a haze around the forest, which advanced along the trail and narrowing the reach of the view. The scent of the trees had been recorded somewhere inside him. Now there was no plantation, just stacks of overlapping bricks for new allotments.
He lowered the window completely, and the cigarette smoke dissipated. As soon as he engaged the handbrake, the car finally settled. Surrounded by other cars, he stretched out his arm, puffed out his chest, straightened his spine, and dropped the back of his head against the headrest. He started to hum the tune again.
All at once, the rows of poles lit up along the highway as far as one could see. Maybe this is one of the few wonders of living in a city, the lights, he thought. He wanted to be the first to show it to the baby. As soon as the baby could realize the difference, the man wanted to tell him about the light poles, explain how they all lit up at once, how wonderful technology could be.
And if Virginia was around, she would say that it was a magic trick, that the poles were lit because they knew the night was coming, and that people could not see in the dark. She would invent a story like that and make a disapproving face, squinting in his direction once he would contradict her and say it was all about science, about sensors capturing the sunlight.
Virginia would say that he doesn’t see life lightly, and that harms the child’s imagination; the boy would eventually become a bitter man, just like his father, blunted by reality. Then she would bring up the story of moving again. She never wanted to come to this city. It would be better to be near her mother, closer to people who could help her raise the baby, because she spends all day alone, tucked into the apartment and it does not matter if the building is new, if they have just built it, and the condominium…
“Don’t you see the news?” she asked. “They’re interdicting entire buildings from this construction company.” Then the man replied: don’t be dramatic.
He let out a lingering smoke. He felt a nuisance that captured off his contemplation, so the horns grew louder. When he looked, a bike was huge in the rearview mirror, passing by, then disappearing down a driveway. Scrabbling, he pulled his arm inside and dropped the cigarette. He slapped his seat and it rolled to the floor, blinking sparks as it fell.
Son of a bitch, he thought. Then, he repeated it out loud and again listened only to himself. He peered through the gaps beneath the bench, the roughness of powder between his nails. He brought his hand back and sniffed it between his fingers. Inside his head, in the background, was the music that had never stopped being there. The music he had heard earlier, still in the office.
The tiny blue lights on the radio invited him to turn up the volume. But there was no other song. The announcer reported on the congestion: he spoke of the accident ahead, shortly after entering the city, the new city to which he moved with Virginia and the baby. In the news, the voice spoke about the Monte Carlo II building, newly built, which, by its fragile structure, its unstable bases on water springs and fluvial channels, ended up collapsing. That was what was preventing him from entering the city, which caused all that trouble, delaying the meeting with his family.
So far, there were no survivors among the wreckage, said the announcer.
At that moment, it did not pass through the man’s memory that the building he had just moved to was called Monte Carlo II.
He continued to hum the song that, no matter how hard he tried, he refused to forget.
