The Destroyers

by Christopher Bollen

  A line of workers in hairnets, with paper mouth masks, latex gloves, and white smocks stood at a conveyer belt covered with pears. The workers split off the stemmed tops and threw the circumcised fruit back on the belt. The pears continued up a ramp and into a large vat, which whirred with loud, pulp-crushing intensity. Tubes ran from the ceiling into its sides, pumping water and coagulates. Another conveyor belt carried fresh glass jars—for a second I was gratified to see that they had arrived from Venezuela—and the mixer’s udders filled them with beige peras purée.

  “This is the North American facility,” the guide told us. “The products made here go directly onto the shelves of the entire southeastern U.S. region.” He had the pride of a middle manager in a far-flung outpost generating goods that would feed the empire. “Please note that we comply with all FDA regulations. As I’m sure you’re aware, Mr. Bledsoe, the upside of a factory in Panama City allows not only for the import of the freshest ingredients but also for expedient shipping.”

  “Plus, the ridiculous tax breaks Kitterin receives from the government,” Marisela said matter-of-factly. Our tour guide moved his eyes from me to Marisela for the first time, sensing an insurgent.

  “Right this way, into the sorting room.” He waved us through two sets of swinging doors and into a chilly warehouse where throngs of white-bibbed workers picked through crates of produce—apples, bananas, kiwi, carrots, peaches—separating the rotten or mushy or weevil-ridden from the fresh. Distinct wheelie bins were marked 1, for top quality, and 2, for castoffs. The sweet scent of decomposition filled the icy, fluorescent air.

  “Many of these fruits are indigenous, which means we process far riper yields than our competitors. We take great care to ensure that our United States consumers receive the very finest ingredients.”

  “What about the rest of the Americas?” Marisela demanded. Her tone was sarcastically rhetorical, the kind of question that cannibalized its answer. “One-fourth of the baby food produced here goes to the Central and South American markets.”

  This time our tour guide did not deign to look at her.

  “There are different regulatory requirements for each district,” he exclaimed. “Kitterin follows them to the letter. As you must be aware, each consumer region exhibits unique tastes, thus the need for separate facilities.”

  “People outside the United States think they are getting the same quality, American quality,” Marisela persisted. “But they’re not, are they? What happens to the reject fruits that these employees are sorting?”

  “We dispose of them,” he replied cautiously. But even I knew from the neutral region of my computer terminal that the North American facility was A and Central and South was B. It wasn’t much of a stretch to speculate that the throwaway fruits were headed to sector B.

  “Could we tour the B facility?” I asked. I figured that would put a stop to Marisela’s outbursts.

  “I’m only authorized to show you this one,” the man said sheepishly. His pride had vanished along with his welcome. “I’m sorry. I thought you were only interested—”

  “What about the pesticides, the synthetic sweeteners and additives, the trace amounts of lead?” Marisela interrupted. “In the past, studies have linked this product to mental impairments. The labels say organic, but even the USDA has found—”

  “Miss,” he stammered. “I was under the impression you were an employee.”

  I was about to apologize when Marisela crossed her arms. “One more question then.”

  “If it’s about the composition of our product, I’m afraid I will have to consult my supervisor.” He stared at me with beseeching eyes, as if his job hung in the balance.

  “It’s not about the food,” she swore. “It’s about the workers. How much are they paid by the hour?”

  “We pay a living wage,” he spat. “We offer dependable jobs in a country that needs them.”

  “What’s your definition of living?” It was Marisela’s tour now. We were merely an audience for her well-rehearsed indictment. “I know for a fact that they make thirteen dollars a day for eleven-hour shifts with only one break and no overtime. I know for a fact that you charge fifty cents to ship them each way on those school buses. I know there is no health care, even with the carcinogens and industrial hazards they’ve been exposed to at this plant.” Marisela’s speech had all of the sincere and unmerited rebellion of a college undergraduate, outrage meted with arrogance.

  “These are questions to raise with your department supervisors, not mine.” Our tour ended in the sorting room. The guide switched to demotic Spanish as he shepherded us back to the visitors’ hall. The complimentary “experimental flavors” taste test promised at the start of the tour did not materialize (I was actually curious to sample “Beef Bourguignon Medley”). The guide took me aside, his fingers digging into my arm. “Whatever your animosities, you can only tell them I’ve done my job. I’ve done a good job, haven’t I? You will tell them that?” A security guard escorted us to our car.

  “You didn’t have to attack him,” I said on the drive back.

  “Are you serious?” Marisela jammed the stick shift from first to third gear. “When are you going to open your eyes, Ian? That stuff we’re making, sold with fat, smiling babies on the label, is poison for profit. Have you ever looked into the toxicity levels of a single six-ounce jar of Kitterin baby food? Did you see the workers peeling fruit on the assembly line, the ones missing fingers? Do that first and then tell me to keep my mouth shut.”

  “If you knew those facts already, why the hell did you take an internship at Kitterin?” In her minute of silence I knew the answer. It was the same as the answer to my unspoken follow-up question, Why would you sleep with the vice president’s son?

  “I’m not only studying economics,” she finally said. “I’m also majoring in journalism.”

  I gazed out the window, at the squalls of tin-roofed dwellings and white-haired pigs suckling rain puddles and emerald jungle breaking in snatches through plowed fields that only grew telephone poles. The sky was steel gray, stressing the hinges of sanity. Three years before, I had left college as if high on a slapped-together commencement speech—“make a difference, snub money, change the world.” The whole point of Panama had been to shake off that unviable hallucination. Sitting in the twitching Honda, I resorted to the standard response when faced with the kind of vengeful idealism I’d recently outgrown. I decided Marisela was naïve.

  “I’d like to show you the workers as they board those buses in El Chorrillo,” she said quietly. “Not as you saw them, masked and gloved, but their real faces.”

  “That neighborhood is too dangerous,” I said, both embarrassed and rescued by my caution. “It’s run by gangs.” Neighborhoods like El Chorrillo were bloody news stories protected by a pay wall. You could glean the basic horrors around the edges, but accessing the full information came at a price—and that price was too high for a white American with red hair and an ATM card.

  “I have a friend, Rafael, who could take us. He’s in with the gangs. His brother is a member. No one would touch us if we went with him.”

  We took the viaduct over the brackish olive water, and the New City, a mini Miami of slender, liquid glass, rose against the Pacific storm clouds.

  “The guide was right about one thing,” Marisela said. “We should ask our supervisors those questions. You should ask them to your father.”

  “You can drop me off in the parking lot,” I replied, gripping the door handle to prepare for a quick escape. “No need to come in.”

  My loyalty to Marisela meant that I wouldn’t report her clandestine motives to Kitterin. I would close our relationship on that one last favor. That night, in lieu of porn, I Skyped with my mother.

  “Did you feed me Kitterin baby food when I was little?” I asked her. It was already afternoon in India and she was drowsy with sun.

  “Heavens no,” she said. “I never liked the smell of it. Too sweet. And it wasn’t organic
like it is now. Your father brought home samples, but I dumped them out and made my own. I was ahead of my time in that way.”

  “Did Dad ever mention that the baby food was dangerous? That there were additives or chemicals?”

  Helen yawned and took a sip of tea. “Your father,” she said in her most indignant voice, “was only interested in one thing. And it wasn’t nutrition. He might as well have been selling tires. I wouldn’t be surprised by anything Kitterin did to bolster its bottom line. I think there were lawsuits about insecticides a decade ago, settled out of court, of course. Your father, as they say, was a one-man kingdom. He wasn’t exactly a freedom fighter for the common good.”

  “That doesn’t mean he’s evil, Mom.”

  Even across ten thousand miles, my mother managed one of her victimized, you-know-better looks.

  “You get your altruism gene from me. It’s a shame you’ve decided to go against it. To be honest, I never really saw you in an office.” After the divorce, my mother only spoke of my father in the past tense, and Helen Bledsoe was hardly a credible source. Still, in the heavy-lidded darkness, I kept picturing the tapioca-colored slurry leaking from the automatic mixers, marinating with mildly toxic chemicals on overstocked discount shelves, oozing across the mouths and chins of infants in various market-tested, “new-world” regions. “Tiny taste buds, mom approved.” A possibility invaded my brain, rising high like a flame on a wick, gobbling oxygen, or more selfishly, a meaning inside all of the spreadsheets at my cubicle. I reached for my phone at two in the morning and texted Marisela. OKAY.

  Rafael was as lean as a palm tree (I’d discover his nickname as a kid was Flaco, which he despised) and he walked with a pronounced limp along the muddy grounds of the university. Marisela told me it was a birth defect, but his convulsive gait lent him a streetwise severity, the stature of a survivor of an unnamable assault. He wore his navy trousers with shortened cuffs, emphasizing white socks and black dress shoes that I’d later catch him spit polishing. Below his left eye were two tear-shaped cysts that could have been zapped off during a single dermatological visit in New York. He climbed into the passenger seat of Marisela’s car. I sat in the back, invisibly.

  “Do you have enough room?” Rafael asked.

  “Oh, plenty,” I assured him.

  “I can scoot the seat forward.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I’m totally cool.” I wondered if I was playing up the nice American, positioning myself as the selfless exception to that reviled citizenry. Or was I trying to show how misjudged Americans in general were? We’re really a wonderful, generous people who don’t demand additional legroom. We’re totally cool. In either case, there was no hiding the fact that I wanted Rafael to like me.

  Barrio El Chorrillo was in the south of the city, a neighborhood studded intermittently with nineteenth-century Colonials built by Europeans in the decades before the creation of the Canal. Filigreed wrought-iron balconies and wide, French windows still decorated their melancholic facades. A New York visitor like myself would perceive them as exquisite bones, the kind of real estate to invest in and wait until the area slowly gentrified. But there was already a gentry in El Chorrillo, the Red Diamond Gang with its notorious ammunition supply and its ties to the cocaine cartels moving through the Central American corridor and into the Panamanian drug market. Rafael’s older brother, Axel, was a low-level member who had vouched for Rafael, which was the reason I now sat scrunched in Marisela’s backseat. Rain pounded on the car roof and on the empty weed lots and on the dense, knotted electrical wires that spun from window to window in shared circuitry. Sparrows burrowed in the deep bullet holes of brick and concrete. There were no white men roaming the streets, but there was every other color: black, brown, and golden yellow. After the Europeans abandoned the south side of the city, native Panamanians and Caribbean immigrants brought over to work the construction of the Canal claimed it as their home. I was surprised by how clean the sidewalks were. Not a single piece of trash littered the wet asphalt. Calypso music blared from fleeting storefronts, and old men dozed in lawn chairs under the shelter of dripping balconies, and young women in pastel shorts laughed as they jumped puddles and disappeared down alleys with their grocery bags. It was a cheerful scene, far more alive than the New City, like a dream bubbling from a nightmare, and my muscles eased as we passed tables of men tossing dice and slapping down dollars for the yellow tickets of the national lottery.

  “Welcome to El Chorrillo,” Rafael said as he rotated in his seat. “It’s not what you expected, is it? The Kitterin buses leave in ten minutes.”

  Marisela swerved into an available parking spot and cut the engine.

  “We’re getting out?” I asked.

  “Don’t worry,” Rafael chanted. “You’re safe with me.”

  I stuck by Rafael for four blocks, slowing my walking speed to match his limping rhythm. Passersby glared at me or smiled without eye contact, but none stopped us or swore under their breath or crossed the street. In the parking lot of a bombed-out church, seven yellow school buses idled with open doors. We watched as men and women, young and old, stood in line, holding Kitterin IDs and punch cards. The drivers punched holes, and one by one the workers climbed onto the buses, the beaten vehicles shaking with each heavy step. I didn’t know exactly what Marisela expected me to witness, other than ordinary humans free of their work uniforms, happy or bored or sharing gossip. Several mothers hugged their kids good-bye. It was the inverse of American school buses, stay-at-home children seeing their parents off, trying to catch sight of them in the muddy windows. But I imagined their eleven-hour shifts ahead, peeling carrots, C-sectioning pea pods, digging through pineapples and loading them onto the belts. I felt, as I often did, not so much pity for these factory workers, but that I and so many like me had miraculously dodged hard labor like anemic children too fragile for gym class. How do you feel sorry for a rich kid? It was not Helen but Edward Bledsoe who understood.

  “I thought you should see who Kitterin is cheating,” Marisela whispered in English. She curled her finger around a lock of fuchsia. “Lives worth respecting, lives those like your father care nothing about.”

  I offered no defense. Thirteen dollars for eleven hours, one break, no overtime, children running through the streets at night to pick up their exhausted watchers. The buses pulled away in coughs of smog. It wasn’t an extraordinary sight. An old woman leaned her arm against the blasted stone of the church, out of lethargy or nostalgia.

  “The gangs take care of the people here. Keep watch over them. Feed them if they need to. Take them to hospitals.” Rafael shrugged. “The government does nothing. So who is worse?”

  We walked toward the water. Rafael wanted to visit his brother, and for the first time I felt safe enough to stagger behind. Soon the Colonials dissolved, and slices of the fog-smeared Pacific appeared between the slabs of rebar and blackened concrete. I stared ahead, and even from this distance I could make out the container ships and yachts on the horizon waiting at sea for their turn in the locks.

  In another country, the extraordinary sights go unnoticed by the locals. At first I confused him for a pile of clothes—the one heap of refuse in the rain-slick streets. It lay in a contorted clump on the sidewalk, and impulsively I steered toward it. But the muscles in my neck constricted, as if my neck understood before my brain did, and I realized it was a man, his blue shirt stained with brown fluid, blood leaking from the buttons, his thin legs bundled together and his hair matted over his eyes. It was a body, fresh, with the dust of bulleted brick sprinkled over the pooling red. The world went silent, as if even the street sounds were afraid of coming close.

  “Keep walking,” Rafael ordered. He and Marisela were hurrying on. “Don’t stop, not for a second. Let’s go.” I caught up with them, terrified yet fighting the urge to glance back.

  “He must have been a traitor,” Rafael said. Marisela eyed me nervously and took my hand. I couldn’t remember how far we walked before entering a b
uilding through an iron gate. A pinewood addition had been built onto the back of the red brick tenement, a labyrinth of jerry-rigged rooms and decks fitted with scrolls of leftover carpet. Posters of boxing champions and Hollywood Mafia characters covered the hallway walls. Rafael knocked twice on a steel door. A slat opened and then the door. Axel looked younger than Rafael, with a wispy pubescent mustache, and he wore a lime tank top that accentuated his biceps. He glowered at me menacingly, white man on Red Diamond green Astroturf, but Rafael opened his palms and claimed me as a friend. “Good to have someone on the inside.”

  “Cool, cool,” Axel said, nodding. “Want a beer?” Where in another house vases and picture frames would have been set, a glass table by the door held a display of batons, hammers, and billy clubs. I noticed a machine gun tilted in the corner, and the blue light of a computer from a connecting room. The thin leg of a boy sitting just beyond the frame barricaded the door. Axel collected beers from a mini fridge. I passed by him and stepped out onto a slanted second-floor deck. The open courtyard below was decorated for a child’s birthday party. The rain was pulping the paper hats and plates abandoned on the picnic table. A pink banner sagged in the downpour, FELIZ NOVENO CUMPLEAÑOS.

  I practiced breathing. I took deep drags. Marisela touched my shoulder.

  “I’m sorry you saw that,” she said gently. “It’s a violent place. There’s no hiding it.”