Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature

Benito Salazar’s Last Creation

The opening scene of Chapter One made Benito Salazar’s cavernous, sixty-year old chest swell. It was a description of the rooftops of Manila that he had lovingly written and Samantha had rendered so beautifully. Lumpy sheets of corrugated metal sprawled like starched pelts drying in the sun; the paint of elegant shingles arched like peeled skin; and the occasional glare of glass which, fogged by city breath, had the intensity of a toothy old man. All of the rooftops marshaled in the metropolitan area that went on for six hundred square kilometers of gray. Broken promises waiting for the messiah with their heads bowed down.

Benito leaned back against the viewing chair in the control balcony as the landscape vanished from the hologram room and was replaced by the environment of a sari-sari store, surrounding his beta-tester, Eduardo, with the honks of a Saturday afternoon traffic jam. Benito could see the placid expression on Eduardo’s face as the young man, who was beginning to sweat very quickly in the simulated heat, waited for the story to begin to him for the thirty-sixth time.

A big man appeared at the far right of the room, dressed in cut-offs and aerial sunglasses, and moved swiftly among the other customers towards Eduardo. The man accosted Eduardo and offered his hand to shake. “Congratulations on getting the job,” came the gravelly voice from the speakers that hung on the four corners of the room.

It was a weak opening line, a little voice told Benito and confirmed the fear that had been haunting him for days. As Eduardo reached over to accept the man’s hand, Benito reached over and pressed the PAUSE button on the little panel next to his chair. The man flickered and froze, his hand in the air, and the honks of the cars faded away. Eduardo spun around to look vacantly at the control balcony and Benito gave an irritated wave of his hand.

“What now?” demanded the female voice behind Benito.

Despite the dim lights in the control balcony, Benito could see the familiar look of young annoyance intensifying across Samantha’s face from where she stood. The computer monitors surrounding her emitted a brightness that brought out the contours of her face.

“Change the first line.” Benito’s mind leaped over the tissue of quotations he had accumulated, running through each of them and finding them inadequate. He struggled for a moment before saying, “Just leave it blank for a while.” He probably needed a drink. He wanted his can of bubbling blackness now. Civilization in a can, he thought and redeemed himself from his earlier lack of wit. “And would you mind getting me a coke, please?”

Samantha looked at him incredulously and he made a show of being occupied with the colors palette. She hesitated for a moment before leaving the control system for the tiny refrigerator by the door.

Samantha was doing her graduate thesis on hologram programming and she wore shades of earth tones and a dash of cologne that smelled like apples to work. Benito had hired her five months ago as an intern to program his storywriting and till now he was still trying to come to terms with her indispensability. Her technical skills were as brilliant as they could possibly be, but he had discovered that Samantha had enough discipline and imagination to write – in fact, an imagination so raw that she herself didn’t notice it. So he kept treating her more flippantly than he should. The most diligent people were those unaware of their own talent; that was how one properly dealt with promising young artists. This was only one of the ways he secretly developed her potential creativity. He planned to reveal her own artistic strain to her and make her his protégé in due time, but at the moment she would have to content herself with taking his cues at the control system.

Samantha banged a can of coke on his desk and he pulled the tab off, filling himself with fizzy caffeine. “Mr. Salazar, if you’re not satisfied with something in Chapter One, we might as well change it now. We have to move on. We can’t keep baiting the reader with an incomplete greenhouse scene for Chapter Two.” She had a voice like burnished steel. “What about starting off with him offering the reader a cigarette or something, no words, and segueing to the meaty parts of the dialogue immediately?”

Benito shook his head. “No, just leave it blank. I haven’t decided yet.” Samantha was about to argue, but he interrupted, “Just do it, please. We’re out of time as it is.”

“And focus,” she retorted as she returned to the control system and opened the dialogue program. Benito watched as she made the necessary changes by looking in his direction and typing loudly for his benefit.

Benito sat in the darkness, imagining the greenhouse in Chapter Two. After a moment’s deliberation, he decided to make an effort to placate her. “All right, let’s open Chapter Two.”

Samantha glanced at him, the shadows playing on her face. Then she pressed a series of buttons and the emitters whined, a sound that had intruded into Benito’s dreams for years. The greenhouse was projected onto the room and filled it with non-descript shrubbery that Benito was still in the process of detailing.

Benito reached for his can of coke and tried to look into the dark liquid in the can. The greenhouse scene was unfolding like a massive exercise in mediocrity, and like many previous moments, Benito wanted to stop the program, walk out of the studio, and fall into a sewer manhole. But it had been a bad day when he had written that scene. His moods regarding the project shifted from utter cynicism to blazing idealism and back. On bad days he would be in a temper low enough to persuade himself to delete the file altogether; otherwise he would be pounding on his computer like mad.

Eduardo slowly made his way across the shrubbery, pretending to note the exoticism in the plants that Benito had yet to add. In a minute and a half, Eduardo had reached the other end of the greenhouse and the scene had ended. Samantha turned the lights back on and looked at Benito expectantly.

Benito knew her silent ultimatum. Down the road was a Martin Abueva bookshop that sold holonovels written and programmed by a young man hailed to be the decade’s literary wunderkind. Martin Abueva had never studied storywriting. He was a software engineer who had accidentally discovered a glitch in a holonovel which allowed the program to fragment the narrative uniquely at every run. He turned it into an experiment in literary form that beat Benito’s entry in the national book awards and went ahead to harvest international acclaim. The Philippines was no longer just shaded by coconut trees and insignificance; Martin Abueva had placed the country on the literary map of the world. The Jorge Luis Borges of the Philippines, as he was being fashionably called. Journal essays were being written about him, international critics were fawning, the university course in post-colonialism was deconstructing elitism in literature for all it was worth. Debates had spawned: didn’t the writer of the original holonovel Martin Abueva had taken advantage of deserve more credit? But what was an “author” in the first place? Tourism spiked as researchers flew to the Philippines in a literary fever. For his latest piece, Martin Abueva had invented a new glitch that could make a reader split into two persons and experience the novel “dialogically.”

To Benito, this was nothing short of sacrilege. He was certain that Martin Abueva, who had never gone to writing school, could never know what “dialogic” meant in the first place. Benito believed in formulas. Thirty years ago, as he was receiving his literature degree from the university, the first holonovel was produced and the paper presses began to shut down. He taught at the university, passionately advocating for the fusion of technology and literature among his colleagues, and had written holonovels for years. He was Benito Salazar, one of the walls that aspiring Filipino writers had banged their heads against for twenty years. But the new writers now were making unnecessary complications with their technological amusements and lately Benito had felt that he could not catch up with the excitement of the mass production of hologram experiments. He felt betrayed. When Abuevanism exploded and local Philippine literature began to be translated into twenty-two languages and printed abroad, all of Benito’s three publishers turned their heads toward him, but Benito was adamantly unproductive. The writing world had lost itself in the chaos of system glitches. His publishers abandoned him, except for one faithful friend, and Benito promised him a creation that would have so much soul that it would transcend the gaudy façade of binary numbers gone awry. The deadline was only three months away.

Samantha kept her voice level. “Mr. Salazar, even just one experiment. You know I can play around with the program as well as Abueva can; there’s hardly any difference between ingenuity and luck.” There were two red spots on her cheeks. “Let me do it. Just write something and I’ll turn it into some artistic crap.”

Benito wanted to tell Samantha that it sounded like a fairy tale where he would be mesmerized by a tree with diamond leaves and afterwards find himself turning into stone for staring, but he refrained. “That was a good run,” he replied. “Let’s go back to Chapter One and see what we can do there.”

Samantha reacted with marvelous restraint. Chapter One opened as a read-only and she swore and rebooted. Benito took his can of coke and muttered something about going to the men’s room.

Benito balanced his can of coke on the railing and lit a cigarette. Doreen had always talked incessantly of how she hated the smell of his Winstons. It was worse than the Pasig, she shouted, which was as black as death. That was when they were still married, when divorce was still illegal in the Philippines, and when the Pasig was still a river. Now from the rooftop he could see how the river had disappeared under a blanket of shadows, indistinguishable from the dryland. The shanty colonies were irregular and lolling and intricate, floating upon civilizations of garbage and sediment that jutted above the water. Jags of wood and plastic sheeting shot towards all directions. Roofs of corroded metal sheets damp with oil and particulate shuddered and wire-mesh ran into each other, placing Pasig under a giant tangle of hair. The organic mass of settlements that had replaced the river would judder frequently as currents from the bay came in and made the surrounding dryland sink. Doreen had divorced him a year before Martin Abueva produced his groundbreaking work. She was now living with her brother’s family in Makati. Benito could only imagine what she had told them about living with him for twenty-seven years and being childless.

Doreen had always accused him of being married to his work instead of her, and she was right. The beauty of Chapter One could break his heart. Despite the bad days that rained upon him after writing the opening scene, the grandness of his vision was still undisputed. He wanted his gritty, city novel to be a cross-section of the social classes of Manila: the beggar boy wading into the dead streams to fish for empty bottles, the middle class clerk who wanted more than a desk and an apartment, the Muslim provinciano looking for a better life in Catholic Manila, the Chinese-Filipino family who was preparing to return to China for the first time, the gangster dying of bronchitis, the Spanish mestiza on the verge of inheriting her father’s business empire in upstate Makati. Benito lit the last stick in his carton with the dying embers of his cigarette. From what he knew, Martin Abueva was only twenty-six years old. Benito had seen his face on newspapers and on television: it was young and clean-cut, unscarred by the claws of defeat. It was only the beginning for him. From what Benito saw in the interviews, Martin Abueva was shy, his eyes unaccustomed to cameras, a boy surprised at his success but certainly stirred to pursue it. Benito could see the boy’s bookshop five blocks away, against the background of a sunset made achingly beautiful by the pollution hanging over the city.

He looked at his watch and heard a metal creak and a bang behind him. Samantha had come up to find him.

“How was it?” he asked.

Samantha leaned against the railing, sliding some strands of hair behind her ear. She really was a very pretty girl. Not the striking cold beauty of Doreen; without the brightness of the computer monitors, she was warm and comfortable, like a bundle of clothes newly laundered and dried.

“I think I should stop working for you, Mr. Salazar,” she said.

Benito puffed at his cigarette. “What about Eduardo?”

“Eduardo? He’s fine. For him one beta-testing’s the same as the next. For me…look, Mr. Salazar.” She hunched her shoulders over the railing and looked at the Pasig, slowly wringing her hands. “I know it’s not easy for you to come up with material, but I’ve got my degree riding on this one. My defense panelists are expecting some kind of innovative framework from me that they can pretend to understand. I have to deliver, Mr. Salazar.” She turned around to face him. “Believe me, Martin Abueva has made hologram programming a hell of a lot harder for all of us. I mean, what a jerk for doing that.”

“Samantha.” Benito paused to tap some ash from his cigarette. “Samantha, you have so much talent.”

Samantha stared at him. “Mr. Salazar, I don’t think that’s going to work.”

“No, no, nothing like that. You’re extraordinary on the control system. But you should have been a writer.”

“A writer?” In her moment of amazement, Samantha broke into impulsive laughter, as fresh and light as a newly-discovered waterfall. “I just want programs to play with, Mr. Salazar.” Then she realized her mistake and immediately looked contrite, making her seem even more youthful. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have laughed.”

Benito waved his hand, the one with the cigarette.

“Mr. Salazar, you’ve been working in this business nearly your whole life,” she said, looking back at the view of the Pasig. “I saw what it’s like by working with you, and I think it’s incredible how devoted you can be to something so thankless.” There was a silence. Then Samantha made her tone more cheerful. “When do you think Martin Abueva will hop on the plane for the American green card?”

Benito shrugged.

At last Samantha turned to leave. “I’ll tell everyone that you’re looking for an operator for the control system. Don’t worry about it, Mr. Salazar.”

Benito wanted to tell her about his vision, how every character was interconnected with the others, how the novel was supposed to happen only in a day. How marvelous he had thought it could be. Instead he watched her figure open the door and disappear, leaving only a scent of her cologne behind.

He found Eduardo lounging with a coffee in a Dixie cup in the control balcony. “I know,” said Benito when Eduardo began telling him about Samantha. He sat next to the beta-tester and stared at the ceiling.

“She wasn’t exactly angry,” offered Eduardo. “Just a little disappointed.”

“That’s what women usually feel about me in the end.”

Eduardo laughed until coffee came out of his nose and Benito decided never to tell him that he had been slightly in love with Samantha after all.

To make himself feel better, Benito remembered that he couldn’t be the only one dispossessed by Martin Abueva. He thought about the person who had originally written the novel that Martin Abueva had taken advantage of. It was a man; his name had been mentioned a few times in the papers. Benito could not recall it but he remembered that the first emotion he had felt for the original author when he had first heard of Martin Abueva was sympathy.

Benito had never bought the novel. He thought of sending Eduardo to the bookshop to buy him a copy but a heavy feeling in his chest made him decide against it.

Benito grasped the chair’s arms and hauled himself up to stand. “Thanks, Eduardo. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Done?” Eduardo wiped the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand and jumped up and began shutting down the hologram equipment “All right. Good luck writing more stuff.”

The nearest bookshop was five streets away and seven blocks down. To covertly send Eduardo there would have been the final act of cowardice. Benito straightened his shirt and made his way towards the Martin Abueva bookshop.

It was a small, streamlined store that sold Martin Abueva’s publications. Its modesty had always made Benito uncomfortable; there was very little he could find about Martin Abueva to hate. This was the closest he had ever been to Martin Abueva’s shop, and as he entered the air-conditioned room and saw the rows of laminated boxes of holonovels, he was suddenly afraid. This was his world; someone might recognize him and wonder what he, Benito Salazar, could be doing there.

He felt the urge to shout at the ten customers in the room that he was only looking. Quickly he pulled a box from the most prominent shelf and paid at the counter, hoping the clerk was too young to know who he was. There were posters on the walls about Martin Abueva’s next book launch. Martin Abueva himself was away on tour in Australia. Books written about him lined the other shelves.

Benito walked out of the bookshop, a small plastic bag in his hand, and felt grateful for the heavy wave of humidity that seemed to cleanse him of the surreality of the bookshop and throw him back to the dust and noise he was familiar with. He looked at his watch; it was ten past seven. He could not find the courage to return to the studio to cook a dinner accompanied only by Martin Abueva.

He waited until he had reached a small streetside eatery and sat down in relief on one of the tall stools circling a crude bar. He asked for a bottle of coke and pulled the box out of the bag, passing over the ubiquitous praises. The Last Ten Days by Martin Abueva. The man in an apron handed him a glass bottle and uncapped it for him.

Benito couldn’t find the author’s name. The only reference to him was a vague mention that Martin Abueva had previously worked as a hologram programmer for an author. He slid the box back into the bag, feeling that he was now charged by God to search for the author. There was a basketball game on the television and the workers from the construction site nearby hooted and swore. Benito suddenly realized that he was hungry and asked for stew and rice. The man picked up a paper plate and dropped a big cup of rice on it, reaching for the ladle in the steaming pot.

Twenty minutes later, Benito was back in his studio, searching for the publisher of The Last Ten Days on the Internet and following a meandering trail of articles to other websites until he found the author’s name and address. In his elation, he found himself ringing Samantha’s mobile phone.

Samantha sounded as if she had just woken up. “Sorry, Mr. Salazar, I still haven’t found a replacement, but I will soon.”

“Sam, are you at home? I’ve found the author of The Last Ten Days.”

There was a pause of uncertainty. “You’re going to Abueva?”

“No, no, the original author, the one who wrote the story before Abueva.”

Benito heard Samantha shushing someone behind her and the music in the background was turned down. “Why?”

“I…I don’t know.”

Samantha gave a sigh that Benito felt she had been repressing since the day she had begun working with him. “Mr. Salazar, please allow me to be honest. You’re not going to do an exposé on Abueva; you’re not going to make a case against him. All the literature people are already dealing with it. It’s a controversial curiosity, like the Shakespeare thing. I don’t think anyone really cares, Mr. Salazar.”

“No, no.” Benito’s voice rose. “I’m not going to make a case against Abueva. I just want to know who the author is. And what he thinks.”

“Mr. Salazar, just finish your novel.” There was another pause, and her voice returned lower, more mature. “I’m sorry, Mr. Salazar. I’m speaking just as a friend, Mr. Salazar.”

Benito looked out the window, though the crack that was poorly hidden by strips of sticky tape. Doreen had thrown at him the small trophy he had won in a writing contest and it had missed him. The Pasig shimmered in the dark like a fairy town. Benito hung up. Samantha was young, immature in her attempt to be cynical; it was as much as he could expect from her generation, even for one as talented as her. Danilo Gregorio, the true author of the prize-winning The Last Ten Days, lived close to the Pasig.

Benito changed into a freshly-pressed shirt and printed the notes of his grand vision for the novel before stuffing them into a brown envelope. He noticed that he was nervous. He had found where Danilo Gregorio lived in a post in a message board. The topic was the authorship issue and one of the participants claimed to be Danilo Gregorio’s nephew and posted the author’s address to prove it. There had been no picture of the author but Benito imagined him to be an aging bachelor, sharp-tongued and vitriolic, but harmless and helpless, unlike the neighborhood where he lived in solitude. Like a literature teacher. Like him, who found comfort in finding people who understood that every book needed a soul to mean something and be remembered. It would be like stepping into university for the first time again. Benito took with him The Last Ten Days and shut the door, starting to feel a little more than just a bag of bones. He would walk to the Pasig and save on gas.

He had written about city nights in countless scenes. An April night was like a heavy, middle-aged woman perspiring in her attempt to pose as a sultry young lady. The air crawled all over him on its little feet. Benito laughed suddenly, drawing the attention of two girls who quickly walked away. He felt young again, the crisp envelope in his hand bringing him to the time before Doreen, before holograms. He tried to jog, but his knees protested, so he walked briskly under the swathes of cable lines, passing by the hollow-block walls that hid the occasional gliding shadow or the memory of a child bathing.

The stench from the Pasig was growing stronger and the dark figures resting against telephone poles were becoming numerous. Benito removed his watch and slouched, starting to regret that he had not taken the car and had changed his shirt. He looked ahead. The shanty colonies were like a range of sierras lit by single onion lightbulbs. Danilo Gregorio’s house was at the corner of the street, five blocks away from the shanties. It was a modest old bungalow. Benito walked up the stone steps and rang the bell.

A man answered a minute later, his eyebrows pulled up questioningly. He had hair to his shoulders and was dressed in a faded Hawaiian shirt and baggy shorts that went over his knees. He looked at least ten years younger than Benito. There was white above his ears and his face was crinkled with past defeats, but it retained a brightness that came from believing that defeat was only one step away from future glory. “Yes?”

For a moment, Benito thought he had rung the wrong house. “I’m sorry, are you Danilo Gregorio?” he asked, forgetting to mask his surprise. Perhaps the man was the author’s nephew.

“I am,” the man answered, smiling a little uncertainly. “Who’s looking for me?”

Confused, Benito cautiously introduced himself. Danilo Gregorio hastily grasped Benito’s hand with his strong, gnarled one and welcomed him in, reciting the titles of some of Benito’s novels and insisting on being called Danny. Benito automatically sat down on the sofa, slowly becoming aware of how ridiculous he was in his pressed shirt. He quickly checked the address again on the piece of paper he had in his breast pocket. It was the right one.

“How did you find me, Mr. Salazar?” Danilo Gregorio sat on the armchair across Benito and shook his head good-naturedly. “I thought I had hidden myself well enough.”

Maybe, Benito thought desperately, he only looked young. “I wanted ask what you think about Martin Abueva.”

“And The Last Ten Days, right?” Danilo Gregorio looked up and laughed at the ceiling. “It’s simpler than what people would think, really. Martin was my programmer; we were collaborators. I had written the story and he had interpreted it. We were always aware of that.”

Interpreted? Benito stared at him, bewildered. He could not imagine Samantha interpreting his work. The final word was always his.

“Can’t be helped how the publishers packaged it, but look at how many doors it has opened for the Philippines,” Danilo Gregorio was saying. “And I do get credited in the novel itself anyway.”

Benito searched his face, but the man was affable and shrugging and joking about royalties. He was a man who talked with his hands; he was wide and generous with his movements and his legs splayed out lazily over the linoleum. Benito suddenly felt as if he had stepped into a tremendous mistake. This man had conspired with Martin Abueva in breeding those tawdry ornaments that were being called literature. The envelope felt squashed in Benito’s hand.

“Do you still write?” asked Benito, almost fearing the answer.

“A little. Short stories for small independent presses here and there, as a hobby. I inherited the studio from my father; my line of work is more like owning a pizza restaurant at Taft Avenue.” Danilo noticed the holonovel in Benito’s hand. “Is that The Last Ten Days?”

Benito’s eyes fell on the holonovel and it seemed as if he was seeing it for the first time.

“Would you mind me asking what you thought about it?” asked Danilo.

The holonovel box felt very heavy in his hands. Benito traced the title with his eyes and weakly ran his fingers against the smooth edges of plastic. “It’s the first of its kind,” he finally said.

Danilo laughed in relief. “Thank Martin for that. God knows that a rehashed story can get pretty obsolete without that final bit of taking risks with it. I was lucky, getting a smart kid like Martin for a programmer.” He paused. “Talking of which, I’ve been out of touch with the publications lately. You’re working on a masterpiece right now, aren’t you?” Danilo was smiling, his bright eyes inviting Benito to acknowledge the affinity between them as writers. “Secret breakthrough experiment, right? When will we get to read it?”

“I’m sorry, I think I made a mistake,” murmured Benito, standing up and clutching the envelope even tighter.

“What?” The other man immediately rose to help him but Benito waved him away. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Thank you for your time, Danilo.” Benito felt that if he stayed for the next hideous moment the world would reveal to him that he himself was the betrayer. “I’m very sorry for bothering you.” Benito Salazar lurched forward, forcefully giving The Last Ten Days to a protesting Danilo Gregorio.

He burst out of the house, knees aching from his haste. It was like leaving Martin Abueva’s bookshop. He stood still outside the house, breathing hard, before he began walking away from the Pasig.

Benito went past Martin Abueva’s bookshop, past his home-studio, until he could no longer smell the river. Cars roared down the road. He took his notes slowly from the envelope, his hand marked with age spots, knotted with veins, stark against the white crispness of the paper. He began leafing through the pages gently, reading by the waves of headlights that came and went. Twenty neat paragraphs, each describing the feeling he wanted to present in each chapter. But that was all – feelings. Bursts of emotion on paper. He didn’t have plots or characters upon which he could hang his sentiments. Many times he had wondered how Samantha could manage to translate his words into an image that crystallized the feeling. Art, it was supposed to be called. Art!

Benito fanned himself with his sheaf of paper. He saw in his mind’s eye a young man who had lived in a time and place where a book was just a pound of paper and had changed that. It had been his world. Benito tried to imagine what he looked like now. Sallow-cheeked and sad-eyed, dressed in a boxy pressed shirt, his shoulders hunched, his last, half-fertilized creation hanging on to the favor of a friend humoring the stubbornness of a madman. Voices hooted at him, “Grandpa, Grandpa!” and laughed.

He was walking down the main road now. The skyscrapers seemed to have grown taller and thinner. The city was a creature self-pollinating and self-fertilizing, responding to its inner logic of development, creating new, brightly-lit variants of itself and forcing everyone to gleam just as brightly. Benito stopped by a bent figure covered with a soiled rag who sat on the gravel with a small makeshift box of candies and cigarettes before her feet. She stopped scratching the marks on her leg to sell a pack of cigarettes to Benito. Benito pocketed it and headed for the subway station.

Samantha lived in a cheap apartment near the university. An hour later, Benito was in front of her door, knocking under a small light bulb that flickered faintly in the shadows. She was having a party. The sound of dance music was rippling through the door, electronic drum beats resonating in Benito’s chest, threatening to shatter his rib cage into a pile of bones. He kept knocking until a young woman with dyed hair opened the door. She stared at him curiously, as if looking at a pair of old shoes that she had rediscovered in her wardrobe, then turned around to call a boy’s name. Behind her, in the dim lights, Benito could see that the pulsing crowd was young and strange and outlandish, made of bright colors and polyester, coruscating in a hazy glow.

“Samantha, please,” Benito said to the girl, but she had already disappeared into the glow. He stepped in, pressing his envelope tight against his side, the smell of alcohol cloying in his throat. He could barely see; warm bodies were bearing down on him and other people’s sweat were rubbing against his skin. The music seemed to be turning louder. Everything in the room was moving except for him. He tried to look for the wall, but someone jostled behind him and Benito suddenly lost his balance.

As he fell, his arms flew up and flailed, grasping fistfuls of air. He crumpled against the legs of a young man, who quickly turned around. Benito felt some of the young man’s drink spill on his hair. There was a noise and people began extending their arms to him and he slowly grabbed one and was hoisted to his feet. Samantha was standing before him, dressed in something black and catlike, her eyes wide in bewilderment. Her lipstick was a little smudged and she was wearing a sharp, dramatic perfume he did not recognize.

She took his arm, her hold firm and insistent, and led him through the press of bodies and out of her apartment. She closed the door behind her and the sounds and smells disappeared in the click of the knob.

“Mr. Salazar?”

Benito stood in the dim hallway, his hair damp and his shirt rumpled, as he looked at his protégé. The features of her face seemed perfectly aligned to each other in her frown, like a mosaic carefully arranged by a divine hand.

A heartbeat swelled in him. The envelope had been crushed in the confusion but Benito straightened it and reached out to give it to her. His arm hung in the air, like half of a bridge waiting for the other to come down.

Samantha stared at him, the frown disappearing, and as her eyes dropped to look at the envelope, Benito’s bony fingers took her hand and pressed the envelope against her palm.

“Please,” he said. “The deadline is three months away.”

Benito took a step back. She silently looked at the contents of the envelope, and before comprehension could light her eyes, he turned around, undoing the collar button of his shirt, and began to walk away. The night suddenly felt cool. He heard Samantha call out his name, but he only took out a cigarette from his pocket in reply. The flame from his lighter flickered and died before Benito Salazar disappeared into the darkness of the corridor.