We Eat Our Own by Kea Wilson Page A

four of them on the second floor of the house, and between them, they had twelve names.
    Outside the walls, in the world beyond, he was Andres: seventeen and clean-shirted. It was the name his mother called him. It was the name that would be printed on the arrest record, if they found out—when they found out—where he went each day when he left his mother’s house.
    In the Patient’s room, though, he was El Puño: a voice through the floorboards, the smell of garlic and ammunition and metal. The Patient had another name, too, and a life and a family and a post as the cultural attaché from Venezuela, but not while he was there—in the room they had built for him, under the bed, and the trapdoor, and the half meter of perfect darkness.
    â€¢Â â€¢Â â€¢
    On nights when the Patient was brave, he asked El Puño for Bach. He stood as tall as the room allowed him to and raised his arm up over his head, knocked on the underside of the trapdoor as lightly as he could, just like they showed him. Threetimes and a lull. His voice was a hesitant falsetto: Señor, are you up there?
    It was a quiet sound, but still, Andres could feel it in the floor beneath him, hammering through the bone at the center of each heel. He put the butt of the rifle down on the ground and braced himself against it as he kneeled, tucked the edge of the hood under his chin to arrange the eyeholes better. There was a single bright crack between floorboards, and that light was the Patient. He aimed his whisper there.
    Quiet.
    But—
    Andres hesitated, but El Puño stiffened his jaw. Don’t make me tell you again.
    The Patient paused, long enough that Andres had time to picture the man down there. The Patient would be on his feet, not quite standing, his neck craned at a painful angle, eyes up and studying the stripe of dark room between the boards. The room they kept him in was long and squat, two and a half meters by one and a half, not quite tall enough to stand upright. There was a shuffling and a hushed grunt; the Patient gave up, lowered to his knees. He listened as the Patient coughed an apology, addressed to no one, and Andres had to stifle the urge to say It is all right before the little light went out.
    For ten full minutes, Andres knelt in silence in the dark.
    This was how he always felt when it was time to leave the Patient’s room: like a child who’d just watched his mother walk silently into a bedroom and turn the lock. He couldn’t leave the room until the feeling went away, until it wouldn’t show in his face anymore.
    He couldn’t let the compañeros see it on him.
    Because if they did, they would ask him what was wrong. And what would he say? It was because of the Patient’s silence.It was because the Patient never asked where he was; where he had been taken by them. He never screamed or called them bastards, even the time Andres watched El Clavo push his rifle into the back of the Patient’s soft palate and force him to bite down with all his teeth.
    El Clavo had another name, too—Juan Carlos—but the Patient had never tried to ferret it out. The Patient thanked them for the food they brought him. He asked for Bach. He turned off the light when they told him to, and he lay down to wait for the hours to pass.
    Andres wiped his nose with his sleeve and tried to focus on his breathing. In the next room, the compañeros were playing Toruro, yelling that the deck was stacked, there were too many fucking swords.
    He summoned the strength to stand, crossed to the bedroom door and closed it quietly behind him. He yanked off the mask in one motion, sucking at the air, blinking at the light. He waited for the room to come back into focus and for a voice to start in his throat that was not exactly his own.
    â€¢Â â€¢Â â€¢
    He wants the symphony again, El Puño said to the others.
    Two of the compañeros were arguing, El Clavo and Matón. They