There’s a street off that main Avenida Santa Fe, Junín. Walk down a block or so and there will be a sad old galería to the left – windows mostly shuttered, echoes on the marble floor. It doesn’t seem to faze Gonzalo the cobbler. (The English word is outdated, too quaint. Spanish zapatero is better – the shoe-man.) Cross the threshold of the rent-a-space and it is his territory. Oxfords, dress shoes, heels, and boots litter the floor and perch precariously on the shelves around him, witnesses and testaments of his trade. Gonzalo sits crouched on a stool in the center. Skinny, graying, his leathery skin matching the consistency of the loafer in his hands. He keeps one eye on the shoe and the other on the grainy television propped on a side table. Argentina vs. Uruguay, fútbol.

Gonzalo glances at me warily as I walk in, a tall yanqui, not a regular. It doesn’t take him long to understand why I’m here – I’m standing lopsided with the sole of my boot halfway off. I have hobbled and flapped up miles (kilometers?) of cobblestone streets, or it seems like it. I look ridiculous. You’ll need that fixed, he says, leave it with me.

My plane leaves tonight and all my bags are in storage at the bus station, I explain. It’s a crisis situation.

Stay here, then. It’ll be an hour or so.

I take a seat on a stool he pulls out for me, gingerly removing the shoeshine and leather cleaner and bottles that I, a novice, am at a loss to identify. He keeps working on the loafer. Our silence yanks the announcer’s voice out of the background, tinny but confident. Uruguay scores and Gonzalo swears under his breath. Dismissing the game as unworthy of his further attention, he turns away from the screen and toward me.

You’re not from here, are you. It’s a statement not a question, an inevitable response when I try to roll my r’s. No I’m not, Philadelphia. Gonzalo has a cousin in Chicago. Diego Mansilla, do I know him? No? It’s a big country. Still, you never know. He left in the 90s when the government pegged the peso to the dollar. Changed everything. Cheaper to go to Disney World than to visit relatives down south. The world shrank, you could leave, travel anywhere but he stayed there. Because of a woman, of course, an American. They have three yanqui kids now. Have I met them? No, couldn’t after 2001…

Examining the shoe one last time, Gonzalo sets it on the floor and motions to my boot. I pull it off and hand it to him, sole flapping wanly. I don’t blame him for the disparaging look he gives it. Apparently quality Argentine leather ranges in quality, who knew. Gonzalo grabs an unlabeled brownish bottle from his drawer and begins to coat the boots with its suspicious-smelling contents. Don’t worry, he says, noticing me eye the operation. I know what I’m doing.

Anyway, he continues, couldn’t after 2001. The puta madre government left us with nothing. All these stores were sacked – he gestures to the empty galería stalls around him. Mine too, who knows what they wanted with other people’s shoes but it was the time.
I know something about this, Argentina’s most recent crisis. The government froze its citizens’ bank accounts and people were frantic. They started by sacking supermarkets, but eventually it was a free-for-all. Riots ruled the streets, teenagers carted plasma TVs out of electronics stores, giddy in desperation. Five presidents in a week but Argentines bounced back, they always seem to. Maybe it’s why people seem to live in the present so well here – if the government has the power to nullify all your savings, it’s pointless to plan too far ahead.

Gonzalo keeps talking, telling me about recovering from the crisis, putting his shop back together. He hardly ever looks up at me, concentrating on the repair. I’m listening but wonder whether he cares if I am. He doesn’t seem eager to elicit any response from me, although I’d rather just hear his stories. Maybe that’s all he needs.

As he moves on to shining the boot a customer walks in, the first since I’ve been here. She’s an elderly lady, impeccably dressed, each step she takes small and precise. I’ve seen the type in the Buenos Aires streets. I assume she lives in Recoleta, the old-money barrio, where the embassies are. Gonzalo’s shop straddles Recoleta and Abasto, gritty and colorful and working-class, its borders merging uneasily with the former and only arbitrarily defined if defined at all. The woman ignores me, the half-barefoot teenager on the stool irrelevant to her. The loafers are for her, for her husband rather. She picks them up and inspects them carefully. They’ll measure up, Gonzalo isn’t worried. She makes small talk with the zapatero. What about that fútbol game, my husband wants to kill the whole lot of them. Yes, yes, what a nightmare. The team’s in crisis mode without Messi.

Meanwhile Gonzalo is finished with my boot. He hands it back to me and I pull it on. I can make it to the airport in time, I’m sure. He continues to talk with the elderly lady as I hand him fifty pesos. A deal. I pause on my way out, unsure whether to interrupt, give our conversation some sort of closure. Maybe I should but I’ve missed the moment, so I just smile, mouth thank you, and close the door gently as I leave.

Gonzalo glances at me warily as I walk in, a tall yanqui, not a regular. It doesn’t take him long to understand why I’m here – I’m standing lopsided with the sole of my boot halfway off. I have hobbled and flapped up miles (kilometers?) of cobblestone streets, or it seems like it. I look ridiculous. You’ll need that fixed, he says, leave it with me.

My plane leaves tonight and all my bags are in storage at the bus station, I explain. It’s a crisis situation.

Stay here, then. It’ll be an hour or so.

I take a seat on a stool he pulls out for me, gingerly removing the shoeshine and leather cleaner and bottles that I, a novice, am at a loss to identify. He keeps working on the loafer. Our silence yanks the announcer’s voice out of the background, tinny but confident. Uruguay scores and Gonzalo swears under his breath. Dismissing the game as unworthy of his further attention, he turns away from the screen and toward me.

You’re not from here, are you. It’s a statement not a question, an inevitable response if I have to roll my r’s. No I’m not, Philadelphia. Gonzalo has a cousin in Chicago. Diego Mansilla, do I know him? No? It’s a big country. Still, you never know. He left in the 90s when the government pegged the peso to the dollar. Changed everything. Cheaper to go to Disney World than to visit relatives down south. The world shrank, you could leave, travel anywhere but he stayed there. Because of a woman, of course, an American. They have three yanqui kids now. Have I met them? No, couldn’t after 2001…

Examining the shoe one last time, Gonzalo sets it on the floor and motions to my boot. I pull it off and hand it to him, sole flapping wanly. I don’t blame him for the disparaging look he gives it. Apparently quality Argentine leather ranges in quality, who knew. Gonzalo grabs an unlabeled brownish bottle from his drawer and begins to coat the boots with its suspicious-smelling contents. Don’t worry, he says, noticing me eye the operation. I know what I’m doing.

Anyway, he continues, couldn’t after 2001. The puta madre government left us with nothing. All these stores were sacked – he gestures to the empty galería stalls around him. Mine too, who knows what they wanted with other people’s shoes but it was the time.

I know something about this, Argentina’s most recent crisis. The government froze its citizens’ bank accounts and people were frantic. They started by sacking supermarkets, but eventually it was a free-for-all. Riots ruled the streets, teenagers carted plasma TVs out of electronics stores, giddy in desperation. Five presidents in a week but Argentines bounced back, they always seem to. Maybe it’s why people seem to live in the present so well here – if the government has the power to nullify all your savings, it’s pointless to plan too far ahead.

Gonzalo keeps talking, telling me about recovering from the crisis, putting his shop back together. He hardly ever looks up at me, concentrating on the repair. I’m listening but wonder whether he cares if I am. He doesn’t seem eager to elicit any response from me, although I’d rather just hear his stories. Maybe that’s all he needs.

As he moves on to shining the boot a customer walks in, the first since I’ve been here. She’s an elderly lady, impeccably dressed, each step she takes small and precise. I’ve seen the type in the Buenos Aires streets. I assume she lives in Recoleta, the old-money barrio, where the embassies are. Gonzalo’s shop straddles Recoleta and Abasto, gritty and colorful and working-class, its borders merging uneasily with the former and only arbitrarily defined if defined at all. The woman ignores me, the half-barefoot teenager on the stool irrelevant to her. The loafers are for her, for her husband rather. She picks them up and inspects them carefully. They’ll measure up, Gonzalo isn’t worried. She makes small talk with the zapatero. What about that fútbol game, my husband wants to kill the whole lot of them. Yes, yes, what a nightmare. The team’s in crisis mode without Messi.

Meanwhile Gonzalo is finished with my boot. He hands it back to me and I pull it on. I can make it to the airport in time, I’m sure. He continues to talk with the elderly lady as I hand him fifty pesos. A deal. I pause on my way out, unsure whether to interrupt, give our conversation some sort of closure. Maybe I should but I’ve missed the moment, so I just smile, mouth thank you, and close the door gently as I leave.

That kid, oh man, never appreciated me. He’s so ungrateful after I taught him everything he knows. He acts like he climbed up all by himself. I didn’t coach the guy to think he was better than me, that’s for sure.

I knew that the kid was a fighter since the time I saw him slap away the swimming noodles I would shove in his face while he slept. He got lucky that I chose him. I was the best coach money could buy, and how much did I charge him? Nothing! Granted I stole out of his piggy bank every other weekend, but I spent half of that on cocktail parties I invited him to.

He hung me out to dry, but I’ll gladly say he’s the best fighter I ever met. Maybe I did bring him along too fast, but he got the hang of it eventually. “Remember, Ari, don’t tell anyone you’re twelve or they’ll disqualify us.” The kid had what every coach dreams about: a killer instinct and facial hair that grew very early on in puberty.

“Ari, keep your gloves up!”
“Stop punching me! Why are you at recess?”

Every kid in junior high needs some time to go out and make friends without having his coach whispering pump-up music in his ear, and after that episode I respected the kid’s space. I only talked to him in the classes where he sat by the window.

He was one of those fighters who’s shy out of the ring, but you should have seen him that week when I paid a girl at his school to be his girlfriend. Of course, after that week was over, she left him. When I told Ari, he wouldn’t stop talking about how she was going to tell everyone that I paid her and that now he’d never have a girlfriend. But you know how it is with Ari; it’s always my fault.

You try and try and look what happens. All those times I paid for him to come to the strip club when he was in junior high, and now the kid is twenty-three and won’t even speak to me. Every time I send him corn from the field I used to make him plow he just shakes me off. Every time I find out what his new phone number is, he acts like he doesn’t even know me:

“Kid! When you were in your prime, you coulda taken the title twenty times over. If you just woulda stuck with me!”
“NO! I went to college and now I design book covers. Stop calling. Stop sending grip tape. Stop trying to win me over with hookers. It’s over.”

Maybe I wasn’t the best father. Fine. But my real children didn’t need me that much anyway. One’s a social worker and one’s doing something that doesn’t involve any athletic talent. Point is, Ari was like a son to me. The son I always had but better.

Walter’s in a heavy stew and he knows it, fit to trample daffodils and kick over wet-floor signs. In the shower he can feel it settling over everything in thick sullen spirals, from the dim prenatal glow through the curtain to the doctor’s office stink of antisepsis still clinging to his hair and skin. He scrubs his face tender with the limp brown washcloth, lingering back-and-forth on the ears but it’s no use. His knuckle has stopped oozing blood, thank God, but his whole right hand feels swollen and misshapen. In the vague distance beyond the shower curtain Marie is airing grievances mostly to herself. Making known the advancing hour. He gives himself a leisurely count to thirty before turning off the water.

Walter’s right knee is persistently stiff and he wavers for more than a second before making the final hop-skip over the side of the tub and regaining his balance, toes spilling off the bathmat to touch damp callus to the clammy tile. Drying himself means a long process that he doesn’t quite have the energy to complete, dragging a green paisley towel across his paunch and tired limbs. Dripping and pale he stands like a boxer keen for the fight, weight spread evenly, one arm slack by his side as he studies the hard kernel of molded plastic in his moist palm. A hearing aid’s a strange unnatural thing. Inert and synthetic but cast in weirdly human curves. It’s built to violate sanctities, to thrust into crannies never meant to be filled.

Marie comes bustling through the open door with red nails extended toward her perfume, heels stabbing click-click-click on the bathroom tile. He feels uneasy standing wet and naked next to her full evening gown getup and before he knows why he’s got it hidden tightly under bruised knuckles. She doesn’t notice and he heads for the bedroom. “Going to be late,” she says in half-accusatory singsong between eyeliner strokes. He doesn’t argue.

They are. He’s still combing down his hair waiting on the Andersons’ patio when Lily answers the doorbell, revealing the old bifocals-and-menopause crowd in full swing. She accepts the proffered cabernet graciously and embraces bubbly Marie but gives Walter the slightest skeptical look that immediately tells him she knows, that everyone must. Lily ushers them through the immaculate den and into the living room.

Ah, now. He ducks and rounds a corner after catching Jane Horovitz’s eyes needling him with silent loathing. Marie elbows his side to let him know he’ll hear about this later and floats out beaming and oblivious to join Jane’s circle. A damned small town. They should have moved years ago, he could have taken the job upstate. Thank God, the good Dr. Horovitz himself doesn’t seem to have been able to make it tonight. That eye must be swelling up pretty good by now. For support Jane has brought along the oldest daughter, home from college in England. Dalia? Dana?

Marie’s bewilderment and Jane’s hostility feed off each other. Walter can’t watch any longer so he visits the bar and then wanders. The Andersons’ is perhaps a nicer house than theirs—smaller but more modern, tasteful, Chopin spilling into the ambience from some other room. He runs through a few iterations of the same tired conversation but navigating these hostile waters only wearies him. This will be the first of many nights he ends up sitting alone very close to the stereo speakers, staring into his drink or leafing through coffee table literature. Martyring himself to save the party.

“You’re the man who beat up my father.”

It’s almost exactly Jane’s voice and Walter’s unthinkingly bracing himself to face the harpy herself, but of course it’s the daughter back from England, standing there plump and blonde and young with her black skirt and martini glass. He resists an absurd urge to get belligerent here, deny everything, explain it all away. “Well, I’m sorry.”

“No don’t be, don’t waste it on me, it’s my mother who wants to call the police right now. All I am is intrigued, I suppose. I expected someone younger.” The words spill out a little fast and she pops an olive in her mouth.

“I hit a doctor. Once. You exaggerate my exploits.”

“What made you do it, Mr. Marshall?”

“Please. Walter.”

“All right, Walter. Call me Deborah.”

“He didn’t say?”

“Daddy has a funny sense of privacy about these things. He wouldn’t even let Mother tell the Andersons why he wasn’t coming.”

She’s not pretty. There’s a bitter wit in Deborah’s expression but she has her father’s too-broad forehead and sad dark circles like third eyelids. He can’t keep his eyes off her. It’s not exactly sexual. Walter decides it’s her voice. He could cast radio plays and run phone sex lines with that smooth precision, that faint affected Britishness.

She’s still here for some reason and at last he works a moist hand into his pocket and fishes out the hearing aid. “It’s not cancer. It’s not even in my ear,” flicking his right earlobe, “it’s in my brain. Some sort of neurodegenerative disorder, I forget the name. He said full deafness in six months and white matter damage before that. Dementia within a year. Vegetative state likely in two. I asked him to stop talking and he wouldn’t. I don’t have a better explanation.”

Odd pauses in her syllables now. It’s clearly her first unscripted line. “Have you told your wife?”

Walter laughs, a raucous bark of more genuine amusement than he’s been able to muster in a while. He sees Marie’s face snap towards him across the room, flushed but at ease. He could swear she flashes him a smile. He smiles back. He feels as if a persistent pain has just winked out without him noticing. The Horovitz girl is tracing the edge of her glass now waiting for Walter to excuse himself and he obliges. He downs his drink and for the first time he manages to work the monster into his ear canal without wanting to vomit. Steps through the open backdoor hands jammed into pockets like an overgrown twelve-year-old and with that jaunt in his step he paces the Andersons’ manicured lawn. It’s a nice night. He thinks he says this aloud but maybe that’s just it magnifying the whisper.

As he works it out again Walter can feel the night sighing back to normal. The hum of the freeway fades with the hoarse cicadas and the tousled willows into a warm mellow summer sound vibrating in his feet and on his skin. He opens his hand and lets the breeze grab at his fingers tracing new circles in the air. He lifts a scuffed loafer and smashes it against the thing on the patio, again, an undignified wild stomping that leaves him off balance and panting, tugging at a chafing collar as his breath returns. He stoops with newly throbbing fingers to gather up the tiny wreckage of the thing. Plastic splinters and bits of wire are spread like a miniature plane crash on the flat warm plain of the Andersons’ terracotta. He wonders if the girl is watching through the doorway.

He walks back inside jacket under his arm and in a single motion casts his handful of junk into the waiting flowerpot and loops an arm around smiling Marie’s waist. She’s still laughing as Walter leads her firmly to the stereo and stoops with her hand still tightly clasped in his. Her eyes are prettier than he often thinks to remember, a sunlight-on-rhododendrons green that she tries to hide sometimes behind sunglass lenses as if embarrassed by the attention.

It’s late. Walter’s stiffest, puffiest finger is on the stereo volume dial and he starts it spinning clockwise at the moment he begins his speech so he can’t be sure where his words turn incomprehensible. But what he’s trying to say is that he has something very important if only she’ll let him explain, that there’s rough patches all around ahead and behind but just now is looking all right. Her smile has become tight-lipped and antiseptic and those green green irises are skating back and forth like skittish insects as she tries to pull away. He forces her fingers over his wounded knuckles in a manic attempt to make her understand. The noise rises like a flood and the evening’s eyes drift magnetically toward the Marshalls, Walter on one knee and standing Marie livid now, and the strains of Brahms swell to fill the house with a thunderous never-heard roar.

—Max Elias Schulman is a staff writer.

It is the early morning. A man, dressed in a suit, walks alone to the bus. His pleasant sense of solitude grows slowly more desolate. He sighs. A researcher, hidden in the tree across the street, observes this sigh through binoculars. He makes a note of it.

-

A woman enters her own bedroom, in her own house. She is, for one moment, alone. Knowing that her family will not even bother to listen, she allows herself to begin sobbing, quietly, still restrained by a sense of propriety she can neither define nor defend.

A researcher, hidden in her dresser, listens carefully. With a precision stopwatch, he measures the time between her sobs.

-

A man, a high-ranking manager, masturbates violently in the single-occupancy handicapped bathroom near his office. As he ejaculates, he screams as if in pain. Afterwards, he weeps openly for several minutes.

A researcher, disguised as a cockroach, notices this turn of events. Later on the man is asked in a survey by a second researcher whether he has ever done such a thing. He lies glibly, smoothly. “Of course not.”

The second researcher looks at him with disappointed eyes.

-

Late at night, a small child sneaks into her own back yard. She pulls off her clothes and steps carefully into the backyard pool, which glows an eerie blue. She floats atop her own reflection, naked in the water, and asks herself what it will be like to be a woman.

No researcher is needed to observe this. It is known already.

-

A man dreams of walking down an endless corridor, pursued only by his shadow. He considers opening one of the doors to either side, but knows that he will find an identical corridor behind it. He knows this because he has dreamed this dream before. He is not afraid, not even of his shadow, which seems to be gaining on him.

When he awakes, he writes this brief description in his dream journal. His dream journal is a researcher. So was the shadow in his dream.

-

Alone, late at night, the head researcher of the study consults and compiles her notes by the light of a solitary desk lamp. The clock ticks by, shaving away seconds of sleep that the head researcher will regret missing. She reaches the end of the compiled notes, and with barely a hesitation, begins to record her own feelings, confronted by these stories. And then her own feelings about recording her feelings.

This is poor experimental procedure. Later, she would be censured. But the bulb of the lamp is another researcher, and its findings prove most useful.

-

A man, sitting on a train, reads this document. The train is full, and its rattle and sway causes his fellow passengers to bump into him. Nevertheless, while reading, he is completely alone. He finds himself intrigued, yet distressed, by the research model described. A single bead of sweat forms unnoticed where his neck meets his jaw, and snakes down to hide itself inside his collar. Then he reaches this passage. Recognizing the format of these vignettes, he slowly turns to look behind himself.

Of course, he sees nothing.

—Louis Evans is co-director of staff writers.