The Ministry of Special Cases

by Nathan Englander

  Recognizing this reversal, Pato understood why his father never made it all the way. He’d been chasing without enough chase, breaking without enough break. Kaddish hadn’t ever really wanted to follow through.

  Pato lamented this as his burnt hand became his swinging hand, as he made a fist and hit his father right in his brand-new nose. It didn’t fracture—solid work from Mazursky the foundation of that strong bone left as it was.

  Kaddish also had a good thick neck to keep a skull from rocking and a brain from bobbing. He had a sturdy jaw and a tough nose and a cannonball head. Kaddish wasn’t knocked out, only knocked down. He stood up slowly, dizzily, and he went to the mirror and looked in, though with the soot and smoke, and Kaddish a bit bleary from the hit, there was nothing but shadow to see. As Pato waited for the blisters, Kaddish, who had scarcely finished healing from his nose job, waited for his eyes to turn back to black.

  “I’d rather it had been someone else,” Kaddish said. “A scuffle in the playground or a brawl with your gang. Still, I’m glad to take a punch off you and see that you’re not such a pussy after all. It’s a hard world we live in.”

  “We don’t fit together and never have. It’s time that I free you up officially,” Pato said. “Let’s pretend this never happened—that I never happened. We can go our separate ways. I’ll have no father, and you’ll have no son.”

  “You can’t make me dead to you, if that’s what you’re proposing. That’s not how it works.” Kaddish patted Pato gently on the cheek. “You’re not the first son in such a predicament. So I tell you, some things aren’t so easily achieved.”

  “What would you know about having a father?” Pato said. “You have no clue.”

  “That’s what makes me expert on the matter,” Kaddish said. “Without ever having met, without knowing a thing about him, I tell you it’s work to see a father undone.”

  “Always you know better,” Pato said. “If there’s enough hatred, I bet it can be managed. The one thing you taught me is to give it my best.”

  Kaddish said, “Fine,” as if accepting the terms.

  Pato considered taking his book from where it smoldered on the floor. He opened and closed his burnt hand. Then he looked his father in the eye, full of disappointment.

  He did not, in his anger, take keys or wallet, left up on the scalloped shelf. He did not take the jacket, inside out, that he’d pulled off on his way down the hall. He had nothing to protect him against the wind and the rain that hit him outside. Pato held up his hand and sighed, his feet already wet. He pushed on toward Rafa’s. It was his intent never to come home.

  [ Fourteen ]

  THEY SAT TOGETHER IN CLASS at the university. They were in the tiered lecture hall used for social psychology getting their exam grades.

  Names were being called in alphabetical order. Pato was caught in the middle of the alphabet but he was the first of his trio to be summoned to the front. Rafa moved his legs so his friend could slide by.

  Pato felt ridiculous for worrying over his grade. He already knew that only one person in that lecture hall would be given a pass. Insane as it seemed, these were apparently the rules handed down from above. It was another way to intimidate them and an attempt to split their ranks. A whole class full of failures and Pato couldn’t help it. He wanted the decent mark.

  His parents could deny it, but they might as well have strewn rose petals on the street to lead in the junta. This was the kind of government a troubled nation ends up with when quiet is sought at any price. What his parents weren’t yet getting was the difference between terrorism and terrorized. A regime that worried over minutiae was more troubling to Pato than one that hunted and killed its enemies in cold blood. It filled him with a greater dread, the thought of some general worrying over their scores.

  Professor Schuster held her pen to his name on the class list and had a hand splayed across his test. “Mr. Poznan,” she said, and handed him the paper. He’d studied hard for this exam and he’d failed.

  Three failures sat in a café and drank coffees, looking out on a block of university buildings. They compared right answers marked wrong and theorized about who got the lone pass. Pato stirred a shaving of lemon peel into his cup. Flavia watched the birds on the other side of the windows. She thought, if she and Pato and Rafa were sitting outside, she’d toss the birds her crumbs.

  “Crash at my mom’s if you want,” Rafa said, “but it’s the dumbest thing I can think of. You don’t need to look like you’re on the run if you aren’t.”

  “Flavia looks like she’s on the run,” Pato said.

  “A brilliant point,” Rafa said, “except that Flavia is on the run.” He reached for his coffee and knocked his saucer to the floor. The whole room turned and Rafa raised up his hand. “Go back to your business,” he said. “Everything is under control.”

  “I told you even before your father torched them,” Flavia said. “You’re turning into a fanatic. It’s not worth a war over books.”

  “Anyone more extreme than you is a fanatic,” Pato said. “And anyone more conservative, a fascist.”

  “You should go home,” Rafa said.

  “He should go home.” Flavia’s pigeons took off and she followed them skyward. That is why she was the last of the three to stand up and press her palms to the glass.

  The birds dipped together and then scattered again. A horse came into view, moving at a canter. A police officer, helmeted, black-booted, was mounted on its back. It was shocking enough, the sight of him with the university buildings behind. It was made worse, Flavia thought, more incomprehensible, by the way the policeman was leaning over to one side, by the gloved hand he had lowered, by the blond hair it held, spilling over, blowing back. The policeman was dragging off a student by the hair of her head. The student was sometimes running, sometimes falling, as the horse came their way.

  The girl held on to the policeman’s wrist—almost as if she didn’t want him to let go.

  There’s nothing you don’t see when your world is coming apart. Things you’d never assemble, events that before a certain point you couldn’t have imagined imagining. A year before becomes a different life. Now Flavia was looking, now the policeman pulling, now this poor girl was passing the café on the day their exams were returned.

  Flavia looked to Pato and Rafa. She couldn’t believe it even as she was believing. She put her arms around the boys and they responded in kind.

  Rafa searched for their concert tickets. Flavia passed Pato the joint. When Rafa found them, Pato took charge. He held the smoke in and sat on the floor cross-legged, elbows to knees, the roach in one hand and the tickets fanned out in the other. In their poverty there were certain things they made sure they weren’t too poor for. Beyond this, Rafa and Flavia were bankrolling Pato. He’d have to go home, at the very least, to get his stuff.

  “We should get moving,” Rafa said.

  Flavia licked her lips, taking stock. “I’m still not high enough. You better roll another before we go.”

  Rafa did. And he pulled the middle cigarette from a fresh pack, replacing it with the joint.

  “Vamos,” he said, and they were gone.

  The gels slid over the lights and the lights, in endlessly changing colors, washed over the club. They were screaming their heads off, singing themselves hoarse. Everybody there knew the words by heart. They were one with Invisible, up on that stage. When the hall went dark but for a spotlight on Spinetta, the sound of the clapping turned deafening and Rafa put his hands over his ears. Flavia passed Pato the joint. Spinetta sang into the microphone, his face framed by his hair and a silver haze of sweat and spit around him.

  This place was a miracle for Pato. To be both anonymous and make himself heard, it was the one place where the bitterness left his mouth. Pato had tears in his eyes the whole time, from beginning to end.

  Pato and Rafa and Flavia worked their way closer to the stage. The bass put a solid throb into Pato’s head, while the joint took the knot out
of his stomach. Pato passed it to Flavia. As she passed it back, a flashlight’s beam rolled across her face. Flavia pointed to a security guard standing on a corner of the stage. Pato followed that light around the crowd until it settled, and when it did, the flashlight steady, a walkie-talkie came up, and the security officer yelled into it. Pato couldn’t hear, but he could see the man’s thick neck—like his father’s—go taut.

  The music continued, they sang along, but Pato watched the security guards. They came from different directions, men bigger and wider than the other concertgoers, the only ones moving against the grain, splitting up the perfect unity of the crowd. Pato watched until he got a glimpse of the boy that was caught in the flashlight’s beam. Rafa pulled the joint from Pato’s hand. Before Rafa put it to his lips, he screamed into Pato’s ear, “Eyes front. Eyes on Spinetta. We’re having a good time, so sing.”

  Pato wanted to see what happened. He listened to Rafa and looked at the stage. He watched his Spinetta. His hero.

  Pato sang his heart out.

  They all three had a wonderful time.

  They discussed the merits of the concert afterward. The three of them and a hundred others piled into the closest pizza place to recap, creating a happy and considerable din.

  For Rafa it was simple: With every other outlet of free expression corrupted or co-opted, the musicians were the only ones who managed to tell the truth. Rafa was convinced that rock music survived because the adults didn’t understand a word. It must really sound like noise to them, an indecipherable ruckus.

  “It’s all thought out,” Flavia said. “This and the football stadium—they give us two places to scream and curse and stamp our feet. They’re not stupid,” Flavia said, “they’re evil. They know they have to provide an outlet. Without a valve to release the pressure, this country would explode.”

  “If they knew what we were singing,” Pato said.

  “You think they don’t?” Flavia said.

  “I believe they don’t,” Pato said.

  “I don’t think any group of people has been marched to their graves without a song to keep time.”

  “I’m with Pato,” Rafa said. “If they knew what the words meant, they’d never let it go on. Look at this.” Rafa motioned to all the other concertgoers around them. “This energy could be harnessed.”

  “Apparently not,” Flavia said. The police pulled up outside in force. They’d brought along two regular city buses with the windows blacked out. Some kids ran, most didn’t dare. It was the usual harassment, practically part of the ticket price. Rafa pulled out the nub of their joint, popped it in his mouth, and, with a swig of Coke, washed it down. There was, after all that excitement, total silence but for the sound of shuffling feet as the police began herding everyone in.

  The atmosphere was closer to that of a principal’s office than a police roundup. There was a distinctly disciplinary feel. The stakes were low and the interaction for many of them had become commonplace. Young people congregate. The cops round them up. A fear of God and country is instilled in them before they’re sent home, and then the cycle starts again. Everyone seemed pretty resigned to the routine.

  A strip of tassels hung along the front window of the bus the three of them were forced onto. Photos of Gardel and the Boca Juniors were stuck to the ceiling, and little plastic dogs, the kind whose heads would shake when the bus stopped at a light, were lined up across the dash. Along with the other touches, the name Graciela had been painted in fileteado script on the rearview mirror. There was a photograph of a girl taped next to it: Graciela, Pato presumed.

  There was a sort of nighttime bus-ride ambience that Pato usually loved. But this was not a regular bus. The windows were painted over. And whichever driver was sweet on Graciela and liked to make his little dogs shake at the stoplights—the policeman at the wheel wasn’t him. Before they drove off, another officer climbed on with two plywood boards. He moved the kids out of the front seats and, sliding in one board and then another, he made a temporary wall so that none of them could see where they were headed or get out the front door. Rafa and Flavia and Pato sat together. Rafa had his feet stretched out as always. Flavia leaned her head on Rafa’s chest. Pato sat on the edge of the seat, leaning forward, and was jostled with every bump in the road. This was his first time; it was Rafa’s third. Pato tried to affect the calm—or at least the surrender—he was reading on everyone else. Flavia and Rafa tried to include him in their argument over how many policemen there had been. Pato had nothing to add. He tried to breathe deep and kept craning his neck as if it would otherwise fuse. He really wished he wasn’t stoned.

  They drove around for some time and didn’t seem to be headed anywhere in particular. A police car had used its siren when they’d pulled out from in front of the pizza place. They hadn’t heard it since. Pato wanted to know if Rafa thought they were still in the city. He’d whispered the question. Half a dozen people answered. They thought that they were.

  When the bus finally stopped, nothing happened. An hour later the back door opened for a moment, a head count was taken, and then it closed. An hour after that, it opened again, and everyone was told to pass back their IDs. There were forty of them in that bus, and they all passed back their cards but for Pato, who’d left his wallet and keys and everything else when he’d stormed out of his house three days before. There was a claustrophobic girl who’d begun to lose her wits and, as if it was nothing, she was let outside into the night for a breath of air. Then, on second thought, the officer told her just to be quick about it and go, get lost, run home. The door shut.

  Pato was his mother’s son. He knew from his father how to disrespect authority; from his mother he’d learned to fear it. Seeing the girl released further unsettled his shaky calm. They were all in this together until they weren’t.

  “It’s hot,” Pato said.

  “Nothing happens here,” Flavia said, as if he’d actually said what he meant. “They’re local cops. There are too many of us together. Anything that happens through the front entrance is fine.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means if the local cops round us up and arrest us, they’ve pretty much got to account for us too. I mean if we go in through the front door of the police station, we likely come out the same way. It’s the back door you’ve got to be afraid of.”

  Rafa liked conspiracy talk best. He drew a little crowd. “Accidents happen after you’ve been let go. A lot of people are getting run over as they walk out of the station. It’s like living in a cartoon. Pianos constantly dropping on people’s heads.”

  There were affirmations and corroborating stories. True or not, it’s what everyone in that bus believed.

  Pato said, “I don’t feel so good.”

  “The paranoia that smoking reefer may induce is generally aggravated under these types of conditions,” Rafa said. “It has been known to rankle.”

  Flavia kicked Rafa in the shin. “No worries,” she said.

  The door opened, and as with the return of their exam, names were being called in alphabetical order. One by one, A to Z, first Flavia, then Rafa, they were all—but for Pato—handed their IDs by a female officer and let go.

  Rafa and Flavia waited across the street for Pato to come out. Pato waited alone in the bus and looked at the policewoman outside.

  “Out of letters,” she said. “The alphabet’s done.”

  “Forgot my ID,” Pato said.

  Again the door shut.

  The bus moved on, stopped, and the same policewoman let Pato out. He hopped down and the two of them stood face-to-face in front of a small police station that Pato had never seen. The policewoman looked deeply into his eyes. Pato stared at the holes in her ears where, off duty she must hang earrings.

  “Been smoking?” she said.

  “Cigarettes,” Pato said.

  “Eyes mighty bloodshot for cigarettes.”

  “Allergies,” Pato said.

  She turned his face towa
rd the lights on the building’s façade. “It’s dusty in the back of those buses,” she said, and then took him inside.

  An officer at the front desk looked up from a radio he was fiddling with, its front plate removed. There was another officer at a desk in the back. He didn’t even turn as they passed.

  She pulled Pato by his jacket, gave him a little shove into a holding cell, and locked him in.

  Quite naturally, without even noticing, Pato took hold of the bars.

  “Shouldn’t you book me?” Pato said. “Don’t I get to call someone and let them know I’m here?”

  “Usually,” she said. “Except you’ve got no ID. And without your ID you don’t officially exist. It’s kind of hard to process you in that case.”

  “That’s why I need to call home.”

  “That’s why you’ll have to wait until tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Skeleton crew. The proper authorities are back at work in the morning. And then there’s the backlog from the weekend. After that, we can see about finding out who you are.”

  “Then I can go like everyone else?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “That already was. The others have already gone.”

  She started to walk away. Now Pato, again, without thinking, pulled hard and pressed his face between bars.

  “So Monday morning?” he called after her.

  “So who knows?” she said. “Backlogged.” Then, in a gesture so oddly friendly it doubled Pato’s despair, the officer waved good-bye and left him where he was.

  It was already late by then and, dozing a few seconds at a time on the benches, it didn’t feel like long before morning. Someone brought him coffee on a tray. Toward afternoon a policeman on his way to lunch asked Pato for all his money. He took it and brought Pato a candy bar and a Coke. Pato had expected every outcome, from torture to the guillotine, an amalgam of all the horrible stories and rumors and truths they spread among themselves. The only thing he hadn’t planned on was to be fed, more or less, and left alone. After the Coke he felt comfortable enough to fall asleep for real and only woke up when woken by the same female officer, who—as if she’d never spoken to him before—gave him a pad and pencil and told him to write down all his information. In the interim, it seems, he’d slept through the introduction of another person to the cell. A middle-aged man in a suit (very worn) and running shoes (brand new), snored on the other bench. Pato could smell him from where he sat.