The Weight of Shadows by José Orduña Page B

eating meals and playing a YouTube video that simulates dinner conversation with another human. I’ve gone so far as to set two place settings, one for me and one for the laptop. I serve my food, sit down, and hit play, and for twenty minutes the cleavage and lower face of a young woman with an English accent makes noises and produces brief interjections that make it seem like I’m a charming and intelligent conversationalist. The prerecorded video tells me how great I look, how it looks like I’ve lost weight, how my taste in clothing is perfect. The woman’s voice is soft, eliciting a vaguely sexual tingle in my ears and scalp.
    After about a week of eating meals like this, I decide it would be best to go home.
    Everyone’s asleep at Octavio’s house except the two of us and Cookie, who’s staring out the window at a group of hipsters drinking beer in the park. Earlier that day I’d texted Octavio a picture of a frozen Iowan cornfield from the Megabus.
    My text read, “La soledad es el hecho más profundo de la condición humana.”
    â€œNo mames guey, tan chidas las flores. Salgo a las doce. Doble,” he’d responded.
    He usually works six dobles a week: a lunch shift bussing tables at one restaurant and an evening shift bartending at another because his employers have leverage. They’re well aware that his green card wasn’t issued by USCIS but by some fulano on Twenty-Sixth Street, so his shifts are six hours each. He hits magic number thirty-six on his weekly paychecks, which means part-time. No benefits. No overtime. He gets pissed, but he’s also happy to get hours.
    Reaching the middle of beer four means it’s going to turn into a long night. If we stop before “getting white-girl wasted,” as he likes to say, it’s at beer three. This is four, wehaven’t seen each other since I left for Iowa, and tomorrow is his only day off, so we won’t stop until someone tells us we have to. The wet crack and sizzle of popping beer five brings that warm boozy blanket feeling, and things get loose. Octavio recounts how a woman walked in wearing the tightest dressy pantsuit he’s ever seen.
    â€œCómo le dicen a esa madre?
    â€œCuál?”
    â€œEh. El dedo del camello!”
    He’s just a hair shorter than I am, maybe five foot five, but tonight he gets a couple of inches from his speckled wingtips. He dresses the way my elementary school nuns said a man should: a crease down the legs of his pants, no sneakers, a shirt with a collar, and if it’s cold out, a sweater, sometimes a turtleneck. He does this every day, despite the fact that after his morning or afternoon commute, he’ll get to his first job and change into a uniform. He’ll put his clothes back on for the five-minute drive to his second job, and change into a uniform again.
    He’s not exactly muscular, at least not like the symmetrical bros who pack into gyms to simulate work, carefully examining themselves in the mirror, and deliberately building aesthetic muscles, but when you slap his back it’s hard, and so are his arms, especially the right one. I tried to count how many times he lifted bus pans full of everyone’s dirty dishes one shift but lost count at around a hundred.
    â€œSalud!”
    â€œÃ“rale.”
    He proposes a toast to Profesor Orduña, raising his can, spilling some beer on the floor. Cookie, who’d been wandering around our feet, rushes to lick it up. Octavio reaches out and tugs on my beard. He says he knew I would show up with a beard because I’m a professor now, and professors all around the world have beards. “It’s true,” I tell him. I’ve tried explaining that I’m a lowly teaching assistant, nothing like aprofessor, and that I have this beard because I’m too lazy to shave, and I can’t afford razor cartridges, but he insists.
    â€œProfesor Orduña, cabrón. No