It was almost dawn and Sanchez, weary from his night shift, reached the conclusion that wealthy people must smell nice when they die. It was the only explanation for the contempt they showed him. Many passed by him without saying a word, as if he didn’t exist. Those who did speak to him did so with a condescending authority, or as if to fulfill a daily quota of hello’s, goodbye’s, and hollow small talk. Meanwhile, through the silence of many nights, Sanchez would sit at his desk and watch carefully, double check the locks, inspect shadowy corners for intruders real and imagined. His hands were decorated with callouses from when he’d pull open the garage’s gate himself. All so that the residents of the building he protected could feel safe in their luxurious apartments that rose above everything and everybody else. Yet Sanchez understood their distance. Their lives were so incomprehensibly different, what could there be of substance to talk about? They always arrived in luxurious cars; Sanchez biked to work for miles from a town outside of Barranquilla they had probably never heard of. The residents of the building lived enriched by pleasant, conditioned air; Sanchez’s power always failed on the hottest days, when he’d sleep naked wishing that he had something else to shed to endure the oppressive heat and humidity. It would only make sense that their realities would continue to be different in death. In his coffin, Sanchez imagined, he would stink and his decomposing body would be eaten away by time and insects. The building’s residents would gently dissolve into the earth, beautiful orchids would grow out of them, and their corpses, even before morticians prepared them for burial, would smell of roses.
“That’s why they feel so superior,” thought Sanchez. “They know even the way we will rot will be different.”
The only exception was Señor Fuentes, whose eyes sparkled with youthful intrigue despite his advanced age. His hair and beard had lost their original color, but not their sheen. His caramel skin was lined with wrinkles and his body hunched by the persistence of gravity, but he had not lost his exuberance. He and Sanchez quickly realized upon meeting that they were raised in the same barrio. They spoke the same language — that of experience — and though Señor Fuentes was several decades older than Sanchez, they had lived practically the same childhood. Their barrio was one of the few constants in an ever changing city. They ate the same carimañolas from the same corner store where viejos would gather to read papers and listen to radio. They fell in love with the same types of girls, ones with vibrant smiles and curls that bounced while they danced. And they both knew of the quotidian absurdities, of the inexplicable violence, both physical and spiritual. Sanchez felt he and Señor Fuentes were molded from the same clay, kindred souls spoken into existence by the same Caribbean god, because they both left their barrios to make something of themselves. Sanchez made himself into a doorman, a role he was prepared to fulfill till he died. Señor Fuentes made himself rich.
Sanchez’s favorite part of his night shifts were the early mornings that concluded them. This is when Señor Fuentes would often call the front desk and invite him up to the fourteenth floor for a coffee to help him make it through the final stretch of his shift. They shared memories, debated the future, and then Señor Fuentes would pat Sanchez on the knee with his leathery hands.
“Ay hermano. I’m so tired of being slow when life is so fast,” he’d say.
Sanchez thought of those conversations that morning. The pink light of the infant sky made the lobby’s glass doors shimmer, a spectacle that was only for him. He was lost in his morbid thoughts as he watched a man water grass outside a neighboring building. A symphony of birds chirping echoed down from the trees in the park nearby, sporadically interrupted by the desperate yells of a man screaming the names of the fruit he had for sale.
His thoughts were interrupted by none other than Señor Fuentes, who stood in the middle of the lobby perfectly still. He seemed to shimmer along with dawn’s light. It was unusual. Sanchez didn’t remember unlocking the front door with the button he had at his desk. Perhaps, he had unlocked it instinctively while he was deep in thought. It was also strange that Señor Fuentes had not even acknowledged Sanchez’s existence. There was not even a hint of his normally youthful energy. Even stranger still was that Señor Fuentes then walked into the elevator but Sanchez never heard the elevator go up.
Sanchez resisted the temptation to be hurt by his friend’s disregard and was instead worried. He checked the elevator and it worked perfectly. There was nobody inside. This worried Sanchez even more. He grabbed his emergency key and took the elevator to the fourteenth floor. The elevator doors opened to reveal Señor Fuentes’ living room. The apartment wasn’t just on the fourteenth floor. It was the fourteenth floor. And the fourteenth floor wasn’t actually the fourteenth floor. It was the thirteenth floor. The building, though a beacon of development and modernity, could not fully uphold the pretence under which it was constructed. Its builders could not avoid the constraints of superstition. Neither could Señor Fuentes, who never would’ve purchased an apartment on a floor with such an unlucky number.
Sanchez walked into the old man’s home like he had many times before, though this time with hesitation. The smell hit him immediately. A sweet, sickening smell that wouldn’t leave Sanchez’s nostrils for months, no matter how hard he tried to wash it out. It was the smell of rotting flesh, of matter becoming spirit.
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