“Yeah,” he said, but he sounded defeated.
“Chochó, tell us a joke,” I said.
“Ain’t nothing funny.”
“Fuck you then,” said Renán, and we were quiet.
I don’t know how long we were there. Every hour or so, a voice would yell that they were bringing new prisoners in, that we should make room. We sat together in one corner, but the iron door never opened. The terrucos were chanting in the prison yard. Occasionally, a loudspeaker announcement would make threats, but these were ignored. The air was hot and dank and hard to breathe. We dozed against the dirty wall. Then a man in a suit came in, carrying a stool and a clipboard. He placed the stool in the center of the cell and sat with his hands on his thighs, leaning forward, looking as if he might fall. His black hair was shiny and slick. He introduced himself as Humboldt and asked for our real names. He scanned the papers on his clipboard and coughed loudly into his closed fist. “There are family members outside, you know,” he said finally. “Family members of a young man who is dead. They’re begging me to let you go so they can kill you themselves. What do you think about that?”
“Let them try,” said Chochó.
“They’ll tear you limb from limb, I promise you this. You want to go out there?”
“We’re not scared,” Renán said. “We have families too.”
He looked at his notes. “Not so far away, eh?”
“My brother,” Renán said, “was in the army.”
“That’s nice,” said Humboldt, smiling. “How did he end up here?”
“He’s innocent.”
“Incredible. How many kills did he have?”
“Seven,” said Renán.
“How many do you have?”
We stared at him, silent.
“Pathetic,” Humboldt said. “I’ll tell you. You have one between the three of you, that is, until I figure out who threw the rock that killed an innocent nine-year-old. Then I’m going to string you up. You want to know what he looked like? You want to know his name?”
We didn’t want to know. Our inquisitor didn’t blink.
I had the sickest, emptiest feeling in my stomach. I strained to feel innocent. I imagined a boy sprawled out, down as if struck by lightning, never having seen it or expected it or imagined it: the flood waters of the lagoon running over him, dead, dead, dead.
“You think you’re neighborhood war heroes, don’t you?”
“We didn’t kill anyone,” I said.
“What happened to your knuckles?”
I hid them between my legs. “I didn’t kill anyone,” I said.
Humboldt softened into something like pity. “Do you know that? Who threw the rock?”
“There was a fight,” Chochó said.
“They came at us,” said Renán.
“I know about the fight, and I know you throw rocks like cowards.”
“That didn’t happen,” Renán said.
“You couldn’t muster the strength to do it with your hands, like a man would.” Humboldt coughed and looked up. “Just like your brother over there. The whore of Pavilion C.”
Was he talking about Lucas?
“He’s a veteran? What’s his name? Your brother? Oh, you didn’t know? No wonder the war goes so well, with faggots carrying guns.”
Renán tried to lunge at Humboldt, but we held him back. Lucas was a killer. He was brave and made of metal.
Humboldt watched impassively from his stool. “Young man,” he said to Renán, “I’ll explain something to you. They put common criminals in uniform and call them soldiers, but it never works out. They’re only cut out for their little neighborhood scuffles. Men like me win wars.”
“Don’t listen to him, Renán. He’s a suit,” Chochó said. “A tool.”
Renán glared.
Humboldt smiled coldly at Chochó. “I like you, fat boy. But you don’t know dick.”
Then he left. “I’m going home to my family,” Humboldt said before the iron door shut behind him. “If you ever want to do the same, you should start talking.”
We were there a night and another day while our families came up with the bribes. I dreamed we were killers, assassins by chaos, murderers without design. Our city was built for dying. The terrucos Lucas fought in the jungle were descending on us. They were in the prison with us, singing their angry songs. We were surrounded. They had their own neighborhoods, places where the cops wouldn’t go without the army, and beyond that, places the army wouldn’t go at all. Bombs exploded in shopping centers, dynamite attacks assaulted the power grid. Terrucos robbed banks and kidnapped judges. Back then it was possible to imagine the war would never end.
Sometime in the middle of the night, Renán woke us up. He was sweating and held a piece of the crumbling wall in his hand.
“Look,” he was saying. He ran the sharp edge of it against his forearm, the skin rising in red lines. “I’m going to tell them.”
“Go to sleep,” Chochó said.
There was no talking to Renán. “They can put me in with Lucas,” he whispered. “They can all go to hell.”
I wanted to say something, to offer my friend some part of me, but I didn’t. My eyes shut on their own. I slept because I had to. The damp floor felt almost warm, and then it was morning.
Humboldt came back in to tell us about ourselves: how we were scum and all the slow and painful ways we deserved to die. He was angry and red-faced. “The human rights people expect me to defend this country with one hand tied behind my back!” he yelled. He said we’d be back when we were older, that he’d be there. Renán hadn’t slept. He watched Humboldt, and I knew he was waiting for him to mention Lucas. And I knew if he did, Renán would kill him. Or try to.
But Humboldt seemed to have forgotten Lucas altogether. Somehow, this was even worse. Renán twisted on his haunches. Humboldt rambled on. He spat on the floor and called us names. Then he let us go.
Outside it was sunny, the sky a metallic blue. The earth had baked once again to dust. Our people were waiting for us, our mothers, our fathers, our brothers and sisters. They looked ill. They thought they’d never see us again. They smothered us with kisses and hugs and we pretended we’d never been afraid. And enough time passed for us to forget we had been. Renán took a few weeks off and then went back to see his brother like he had every Sunday for a year. I wrote Lucas a letter and said I was sorry we hadn’t seen him, having been so close. I asked him if he knew Humboldt and which Pavilion he was in. Only four years left, I wrote hopefully, but I scratched that out before I sent it.
I didn’t get a letter back.
The rumor around the neighborhood was that there’d been no dead boy that night. People said our rock had struck and killed a dog — a pure breed. It made sense. Two of our neighborhood dogs were poisoned, and then everything was normal again.
Four months passed and the riot started on a Thursday afternoon, on the terrorist side. It was the beginning of the end of the war. Chairs and tables from the cafeteria were set ablaze in the yard. The terrucos smoked the guards out of the watchtowers and took some administrators hostage. Weapons had been smuggled in. There was a shootout and black smoke and singing. The terrucos were resigned to die. Families gathered outside the University, praying it all ended well. We were there too, learning how to ask God for things we knew we didn’t deserve. The terrucos burned everything they could and we imagined shooting them. They demanded food and water. The delinquents were starving too, the killers and the thieves and Lucas. They joined the rioting and there were more fires and the guards were killed one by one, their bodies tossed from the towers over the walls of the prison. The authorities surrounded the place. The city gathered on the hills to watch, the smoke twisting black knots in the sky. The terrucos hung the flag upside down and wore bandanas over their faces. Whenever anyone moved to retrieve a body, a terruco sniped them from the towers. It was on every television, on every radio and newspaper, and we saw it. We sat in the hills. Renán wore his brother’s medals pinned to his threadbare T-shirt. His mother and father held pictures of Lucas in uniform. They murmured prayers with hands clasped. Poor son of mine, his mother wailed: Was he hungry? Was he fighting? Was he afraid? We waited. We were there when someone, at the very highest level of government, decided that none of it was worth anything. Not the lives of the hostages, not the lives of the terrucos or the rioting thieves, or any of it. The president came on the television to talk about his heavy heart, about the most difficult decision he’d ever had to make. All the hostages were young, he said, and would die for their country. If there were innocents, the president said, it was too late for them now. The moment called for action. There would be no future. And this is how it ended. This is how Lucas died: the helicopters buzzed overhead and the tanks pulled into position. They weren’t going to take the University back. They were going to set it on fire. They began the cataclysm. Renán didn’t turn away. The walls crumbled to ash and the tanks fired cannon shots. There was singing. The bombs fell and we felt the dry mountains shake.